When Tifa saw a blonde-spiked head sitting on the steps of the train station she thought she was hallucinating.
It couldn't be him, she swore.
He was in SOLDIER-
He had been gone for nearly seven years-
And yet he sat before her.
She blinked once, twice, three times even; she rubbed her eyes until she saw stars for good measure, and when the man still sat on the concrete, still staring at his hands without a glimmer in his eyes, she cleared her throat and mustered her courage.
"Cloud?"
Yes, it was him. He started at his name just as she did at his figure. He was not healthy, she recognised immediately. He was thin - emaciated, even, she thought warily. He had the look of someone who hadn't had a good, hearty meal in, well, years. Even adjusting for the artificial lights of the Midgar station, he was sallow and gaunt.
So he did make it to SOLDIER, she thought idly as her eyes locked with his, an unnatural blue glow in the dim station.
She had to shake her head to rid herself of the building fear in her body. This was Cloud, she insisted. This was her childhood friend, the man she fell in love with and agonized over for seven years.
And he was sick.
She held out her hand and offered him dinner, assuming that to be the least offensive of her potential actions.
She needed to talk to him. She needed to figure out what was wrong with him. He stared through her and his words did not seem like his own, but she did not understand what was wrong, what exactly was different, what exactly happened to him.
Tifa continued to stare at him, her brows furrowed deeply over her eyes as she slid a plate of food across the bar to him. He eyed it for only a second before digging in, barely remembering the fork and knife she slid over next.
Seven years, she thought - it had been over seven years since she'd seen him. She still caught herself freezing in fear when he turned his electrifying eyes onto her, though a bit of the initial shock had worn off and she now could pay attention to his other changes.
Except for the clothes he wore when she met him on the train station, he had nothing. She had to give him some of Barret's clothes to change into, and that was when she saw just how gaunt her friend had become - he had no body fat whatsoever, or else so little it was inconsequential. He moved like his skin was stretched too tight over his bones, which in turn became his most prominent feature as she could count his every rib, could trace the bones in his arms and legs with ease.
She also noted with alarm the scar at the base of his sternum and center of his back where - and she shivered at the mere thought of it - it appeared as though he'd been pierced clean through with a steel blade.
She watched him for several days as she compared him to the SOLDIERs she had met in years past, and she could not hide the worry in her eyes. Zack Fair and Sephiroth both were strong, were filled out just so they exuded an aura of health; the former even held a warmth to his skin and a glimmer in his abnormal eyes that reassured Tifa that not all inside SOLDIER was hopeless.
Cloud, however, was not healthy in any of the ways Zack and Sephiroth were. He was deathly thin and, if she had not known any better, she would have insisted that he had been starved. She could not help but stare at his sallow skin, his yellowing, broken fingernails, his eyes that glowed alarmingly bright against the deathly pallor the rest of his body exhibited.
"You know, I'm relieved you made it back safely," she admitted to him, her mind comparing Cloud of the present day to the Cloud she discovered on the train station's steps.
"What's with you all of a sudden? That job wasn't even tough." He was still pale, still sinewy, but his malnourished body retained an alarming amount of strength and he worked himself to the bone day in and day out to maintain it.
She breathed out a sigh. "I guess not," she told him.
But it was, she didn't tell him, because she knew he would shrug it off and brush it away like it was nothing at all.