He was—sick. He knew that. Had been that way for a while, and someone had taken care of him but now he was blood, blood dried on his face, sword in his hand. Legacy. Live. Couldn't forget.
Fluorescent, flickering light struck the steady kathunk-kathunk of rattling train wheels into an already rattled mind. A voice asked him a question, and his head flopped in its direction, struggling to focus on the outline of a person. When he answered, they only walked away, shaking their head, uncomprehending the guttural sounds.
The next figure to draw his eyes was a soft voice with matching soft eyes in a heart-shaped face, brown draped from her shoulder. Ponytail. The pieces were familiar, he was sure they were parts of someone he knew, he just had to remember—
Tifa.
The name came to his mind, then ventured to his tongue. Tifa. Teefah. Ti-fa, look my way.
She looked. Stopped. And started. "Cloud!"
"Mm. That's right." It felt right. He knew her, so she must know him. Someone had to know him. "I'm Cloud." Tifa's friend, Cloud. Grasping to that thought made it easier to muddle through a Mako-flooded mind and force stilted words through chapped lips.
"Is it really you, Cloud? I never thought I'd find you here," she said, lightly squeezing his left shoulder.
She hadn't thought he'd be here? But this was the city, he should be the one surprised to see her…"Yeah, it's been a while." He'd dragged the sword over miles of dry and parched earth, and even before that…
"What happened to you? You don't look well."
He opened his mouth, and then closed it. There was too much, and not enough words for description. Nothing Tifa could do. "Yeah? It's nothing. I'm okay."
Her lips pursed and so did his, in unconscious mimicry. "How long has it been?" she wondered aloud.
Days and miles, weeks and gunshots, years and flames and Mako reactors and Tifa, Tifa is bleeding and so is—who? "Five years." A wrong answer, because her eyes stopped scanning his face and body, stared into his own eyes. "What is it?"
She shook her head. "It's nothing. You need a place to rest, right? I opened up a bar in sector seven. You can use the spare room for the night."