Title: this is (not) revenge
Warnings: mentions of rape and torture
A.N.: This one wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote it. And I wouldn't post it if it weren't for Asuka. Thank you, Asuka, for all the help!
Cloud Strife is thirteen years old when a guesting traveler who claims to be a materia hunter pays a round for everybody at the inn ("why not the kids too? Let's all have a toast!") and somehow drugs his juice. The next day he walks strangely, looks right through everybody and everything, eyes bright and unseeing as though he has a fever.
Tifa Lockheart lives in a cruel village, because those who live at the edge of the world do not survive by being kind. However, she has status, and she has money, and she has beauty, and a protective and influential father, and so she has been sheltered from certain realities of life, as much as possible.
Still, when she looks at the boy next door, she sees that Cloud has been (violated) hurt somehow, and something in her comes roaring to life like embers splashed with moonshine.
Her questions are unsubtle and she's much too clumsy about it all, but she smiles prettily and some adults indulge her, and she eventually gets to the stranger. She has no idea how to act now that she has the culprit. He doesn't seem to realize anything is wrong. Smiles and laughs and tries to tell her interesting stories. He acts so nice, and the fire in her wakes a bit more with each smile, with each word, with each breath. And then she thinks to bring up Cloud, and his mocking smirk, his dismissive words and the satisfaction in his eyes break something inside her.
(the fire is high, so high, it's going to burn everything down)
Tifa Lockheart has always been a sweet girl. She's quiet, and introverted.
She's very unfamiliar with the indignation, the outrage, the rage she feels on another's behalf now. She's unfamiliar with the reassuring way her first hits first a point in his torso (stomach), then, when he falls over, another, on his head (ear). Unfamiliar with the the sound of bones breaking. Unfamiliar with his muffled cries of pain behind the gag. Very unfamiliar with how much these sounds soothe her, with the comforting coldness in her mind, the haze of detachment in front of her eyes; and a very small part of her says, I wonder if this is how Cloud feels right now? and she has to hurt this man again.
When she's done she snaps his neck.
And then she freaks out because she's just stolen Cloud's kill.
A.N.: Like it? Hate it? Please tell me!