-ever after.
penultima


Cloud and company come together.

Flowergirl dies and Cloud and company mourn.

Cloud and company save the world from Meteor.

Cloud and company (company and maybe Cloud) live happy.

Cloud mysteriously disappears from company's lives.

Cloud apparently had some odd disease.

New threat (guess what? Silver hair and mean mean eyes wrapped in leather with cold sharp blades that tore clean through our lives) appears.

Cloud and company save the world from Reunion.

Cloud is forgiven.

Cloud and company live happily ever after.

Not.

Because no matter what people tell you, wounds don't heal that fast.

Aerith died and went to Cetra heaven. Barret got a hold of a few million barrels of oil and got filthy rich. Cid got a hold of a new ship and zoomed around everywhere. Vincent goes and gloomifies that cave he won't let us come in to and everyone lives happily ever after.

Caith Sith isn't included because he's Reeve, and Reeve hasn't found his happy ending yet, with the World Reeve Organization or something of the like, but might soon.

Yuffie isn't included because while narrating this pointless ramble she won't find peace.

Tifa isn't included because she's still taking care of a sick Marlene and tending to a sick, bruised heart and Mr. Cloudy Spike Muscle-headed Chocobo Strife is still too wounded himself to help her out. It's sad.

Not sad as in heartbreakingly sad or upsettingly sad.

A bit of both maybe, but most of all it's the kind of sad people go tsk-tsk-what-a-shame on. So yeah, tsk-tsk, what a shame.

What a rotten, spiteful, heart-wrecking, rust-bitter, blood-sticky shame.

I pictured Cloud and Tifa as people who would end up as a picture-perfect couple with a nice wedding and Marlene and Denzel starring as The Kids. Pictured them happy and smiling at each other and content with each other and kissing every now and then and just happy simply because they deserve to be.

Fairy tale heroes get fairy tale endings. It's just that Cloud was no prince in shining armor and Tifa wasn't a princess. It would be a whole different thing if they were.(but I can't imagine Cloud who sits and doesn't put his feet on the table or hold cussing contests with Cid Hacking-Lung, Foul-mouth Highsmokewind.)

Cloud was a current delivery man who grew up as a scrawny kid who got kicked out of his village because they thought he pushed Tifa off a cliff and grew up and went into the army and didn't get accepted into SOLDIER and killed General Shampoo-Advertisement-Hair Sephiroth whose last name might be Crescent or Shin-ra or Valentine(shiver) and spent five full years having Mako stuffed down his throat.

Tifa was a bartender who grew up as a kid who made Cloud promise he'd get her out of any pinch, fell off a cliff, challenged Sephiroth and met Cloud again and together they saved the world and then they were happy a little while before Cloud left and then a trio of General advertisement-hair Sephiroth wanna-bes got pulped before Cloud forgave himself. People sort of thought that would be that and Cloud and Tifa could live happily ever after.

Happily ever after.

Ever after.

Ever. After.

I've said it so many times the phrase has lost it's wonderful, fairy tale-ish, giggly girly meaning and has been stripped to its meaningless reality of bunched-up vowels and unvowely letters.