Tifa Lockhart doesn't do crying.
This is a pretty well established fact among her friends and family; those who know her, know her well enough to know this. Those who question it, soon learn not to.
Tifa's own private philosophy on the subject had long been that crying was just not worth the risk. Too many bad things would, could and had happened; if she started crying, she might not ever stop. And then she could drown in her tears and that would just be far too ironic as yet another bad thing to have happened in her life; her own life stolen by her grief for the lives of those stolen from her.
So Tifa never cried.
In recent years, this also meant that Tifa never played the piano; playing the piano now usually led to crying and that was something she could not afford. You may question that: surely with the Planet saved and the Stigma gone, Tifa could stop fighting, could afford to cry? You'd be wrong. Tifa was still fighting; it was just a much more private war, much more easily hidden.
Tifa was fighting to stay afloat on the sea of Grief that threatened to overwhelm her.
She had responsibilities, a family that looked to her for stability and direction. They needed her. Grief was always there, battering her, trying to trip her unsteady feet, but Tifa couldn't let it win. How were Marlene and Denzel supposed to grow and enjoy the world saved for them if their surrogate mother spent her days lost in Grief's wild and ravaging waters? If Tifa gave even the slightest bit of ground in her war against Grief then she would be in no fit state to demonstrate a life that honoured the sacrifices that had been made…. The price that had been paid…. The day Grief was formed. If Grief won and the sacrifice had been for nought then Tifa would surely go mad; beyond mad.
So Tifa never played the piano.
But as with most absolutes and rules, these both had one simultaneous exception: on That Day, one day in every 365, Tifa would lock herself in her room and she would play the piano. And she would cry.
The first time that That Day had arrived in their makeshift attempt at a normal life, she had tried to keep it together, she had tried to live by her normal standard but it hadn't gone well. She'd ended up drunker than any of her bar patrons had ever been and setting a far worse example for her charges than she'd imagined possible. It had taken several weeks worth of apology and explanation before things resettled.
The following year she tried to be a little more prepared, accepted the fact that she'd need to give herself a little extra leeway to get through the day but that hopefully she'd still resemble a responsible human being by the end of it. Again, she found herself with several weeks of heavy atonement for her failures.
After a few such years, she began to recognise the fact that That Day was always going to be a day when the Grief won. Isolating herself for the day was the only way she could protect what she had to fight so hard for on all the other days.
On That Day, Tifa could almost hear Her voice.
This year was the seventh anniversary. She was prepared, a small stash of food that she probably wouldn't eat sat in the corner to appease Barret and Cloud, but the door was locked, sealing her in to the room where she would allow Grief its one annual day of victory.
Unlike many people, Tifa was out of bed much quicker on her Grief Day than any other. She'd never been an early riser, having always taken comfort in soft warm blankets and sleep. But not today.
Tifa sat straight up, her heart pounding and burning and roaring and freezing. Today was the day when she felt all the things she usually didn't allow herself to feel and to remember the things she usually tried so hard to forget. Like the way She…no, Aerith…Today I can use her name…Aerith… Like the way Aerith would always be awake first, often waking Tifa gently with a soft finger across her cheek or with a chaste morning kiss which, more often than not, wouldn't stay chaste for long. Today, if Tifa lay in the warmth of her bed for too long, she could almost feel the ghosts of those kisses along her skin or the warmth of Aerith's body against hers… It was too much… she couldn't… she just couldn't…..
She rose quickly from the bed, padding across to her small ensuite to splash her face with some cold water; she needed something jarring. She rose from the basin and found her reflection in the cracked mirror above it. She hadn't changed much on the outside, perhaps the first miniscule hint of age forming on her face…something Aerith will never see… She flinched as the thought was quickly accompanied by a shockingly vivid image of her reflection being joined by another's, her precious flower girl come to drape herself elegantly around the fighter's shoulders, a soft kiss being pressed to Tifa's neck from behind…
"Not yet," Tifa choked out as her throat tried to close up with tears already. "Please, not yet."
She spent the morning trying to get through the few small, brainless paperwork tasks she'd left herself for the day; something to keep her occupied but that she'd be able to get done even with her inevitable distraction. It wasn't long, however, before the Grief fought its way past her first line of defence, forcing her to give in to that almost masochistic desire to abandon her task and get out The Box.
She went to her wardrobe, pulling out various rarely used items that conveniently hid The Box where it lived at the back until she could grab it and bring it out, placing it reverently on her bed. It was strange, the mix of emotions that The Box induced in Tifa: longing, excitement, anger, terror…
She swallowed hard as she lifted the lid and was hit by a wall of memories that came to lovingly crush the air from her lungs, leaving her gasping with dread and elation. It was all there. Fragments left of the life she'd held more precious than her own.
Hours passed as Tifa went with a kind of devout obeisance through the small collection of reminders that she had saved, those last physical ties to the love of her life. There were a few materia gems that Aerith had particularly favoured, a pressed and dried Nibelheim rose, the Ribbon…
And then there was The Letter. The Letter was one of the best and worst objects in The Box. This was The Letter that Aerith had left on her pillow the night she had slipped away from Gongaga to the Sleeping Forest. This contained the last words Aerith had ever meant for Tifa.
It said that Aerith wished there was another way. It said that Aerith wished she was strong enough to say goodbye in person. It said that Aerith knew she wouldn't be able to say no to Tifa if the fighter asked her to stay. It said Aerith was sorry.
It said Aerith loved her.
It said Aerith hoped they would be together again in this world one day.
It filled Tifa with raging, rushing, hollow, foaming fury and an incapacitating ache. It marked her indelibly for hopeless, seething, hateful love. It broke her down to the point at which Grief was about to devour her.
It was at this point that Tifa tore herself away from The Box and The Letter and clawed her way towards the piano.
For 364 days in the year, the piano sat and gathered dust. It found occasional use as a table, a spare storage surface, even once as a hiding place when Marlene was small enough to hide actually inside it during a game of hide and seek. Today the piano was for music. Today the piano was Tifa's key to unlocking the emotions she tried to pretend didn't exist during the other 364 days of the year.
She sat down on the worn and slightly rickety stool, its ancient familiarity as soothing as it was painful. Her fingers glided across the ivory keys for a moment, adjusting to their cold solidity before she moved to draw any sound from them.
But soon her fingers found their stride, at first dancing a slow and tentative dance to play the song she had only played six times since she wrote it but knew it by heart as well the seventh time as she had the first. The notes spoke of a girl of twenty two who had given her life to save them all. They sung of her beauty, her wit, her unpredictability and her grace. They did all that music could do to capture the mischief in her smile and the twinkle in her astoundingly beautiful green eyes. They waxed lyrical on the purity of her heart and the intensity of her love, the way she could make Tifa feel more alive than any one person had a right to be and the way Tifa felt more lifeless than any corpse since Aerith's life had been taken from her.
The music poured out, rushing out of the fighter like a scalding river come to destroy her and tease out all her tears. As the melody rose, the hordes of saltwater droplets that Tifa kept at bay all year around broke through and flowed down her face, splashing across the piano's keys like soft percussion. This time, when her mind and soul conjured that longed for feeling of being wrapped in the surprisingly strong arms of the last Cetra, Tifa allowed it. She revelled in her imaginary embrace, almost convinced that the soft whisper of warm breath across the shell of her ear was real and that that half a hint of Aerith's scent she caught in the room was there because her beautiful flower girl was there with her, as real as the day she'd first laid eyes on her in Don Corneo's dungeon.
Night found her gasping and sobbing on the floor, collapsed under the weight of Grief's oppression, unable or unwilling to fight it any more that day or even to hold herself upright as the full fury of her mind's betrayal hit her, sending her reeling with the knowledge that she would now only ever find Aerith in her memory. This year she'd managed to avoid cracking her head on any hard objects as she fell from the piano stool so that was a plus.
"Aerith," the sacred name tumbled passed Tifa's lips amidst a flurry of pain in her chest that threatened to stop her heart. She almost wished it would but had an imaginary earful of scolding reprimand from the ghost of her lover before the thought even finished forming.
No, she told herself sternly. That was the one victory that Grief would never have over her, even on This Day. It was the ultimate in selfish cowardice, wrapped up in the ultimate way to disgrace the memory of the sacrifice Aerith had made for her and for the rest of the world. No.
But still she lay there huddled on the floor and allowed Grief to beat down upon her like the burning sun in a barren desert, salty tears flowing from her in a bubbling river of silver sorrow.
"Listen," she begged. "Can't you hear her? Can't you see she's suffered enough?"
She turned to each of them, imploring the Elders to understand and to act.
"Seven years have passed there and the arrow is still as firmly buried in her heart as it was the first day. This is one of the Heroes of the Planet; we all owe our continued existence to her and yet she's having to go through her life without one half of her soul and with more loss piled behind that than any one person should ever have to bear."
She turned, hoping they'd turn with her, watching and listening as her love took her annual solitary place at the piano and began to play. Aerith felt her chest ache and fill with unbelievable heat as the notes released more of Tifa's locked up emotion, allowing Aerith to move closer to her, to feel each beat of her broken heart, to almost touch her. It was torture to watch her soul mate grieve for her, to watch Tifa living her deadened life as well as she could, and to not be able to speak to her, touch her, tell her she was still there. It was torture but at least she could still see her beautiful lover, could hear her voice, almost smell her… but maybe that was just in Aerith's longing-fuelled imagination…
"Please!" she implored them, her own voice beginning to crack as Tifa's dissolution began. "Please. Between us there was enough power released to fight Meteor; surely we can muster enough to give me back my body? To give me back my life? Please let me try and help her heal! I know she can't without me."
She watched them as they each looked from her to the crying wreck of Tifa Lockhart at her feet to each other and back again. The Cetran Elders of the Lifestream were pretty hard to read.
"Please?"
Tifa woke stiff and sore on the floor under the piano stool, her face tacky with salty remnants of tears. She rolled over onto her back and stared at the ceiling for a blank moment.
Another year…
She took a deep breath, stomping down firmly on any thoughts of the day before, now refusing to acknowledge the ever present ache in her chest. She showered thoroughly as if trying to rid herself of the previous day's weakness and prepared herself to face the day, her tears locked away for the next 364 days.
Little did she know that she'd be sobbing again before the day was out. The tears to come would be of a different sort, however; they would mark the end of her sorrow and the restoration of her life.
A/N: Thanks for reading :) As often happens to me, this story went way beyond my original plan for it...which was literally to just have like a couple of paragraphs... So sorry if the end was a little abrupt - I was trying to rein it back in a little which, if you've ever read any of my other stuff, you know I'm not very good at doing... awkward...Anywho, hope you enjoyed it anyway. Let me know!
Oh, and in case you're not familiar with it, the piano music Tifa is playing is Nobuo Uematso/Seiji Honda's rendition of Aerith's theme, as found here: www . youtube watch?v=4sh9UmS5iQk
Also, sidenote, I'm currently working on a much bigger Aerti project but due to my inability to stick to a plan and my slightly obssessive editing I've decided not to post it until it's finished but, well, watch this space :)