The truth is that Tifa envies her, because she is always so confident. She is charming, and sweet, and irreverently respectful or respectfully irreverent or something, and ever, ever so smart, but Tifa doesn't care about any of that. It's her confidence. She shines with it, her words sparkle as they escape her lips, unlike Tifa's words which jam and tumble as she says them, those important words she has to share with Cloud.
You're a fake, she tries to say, but it always comes out as it's nothing, just forget it because he has a particular warm, trusting way of looking at her which is so much at odds with the taciturn dickweed from Nibelheim that he used to be.
You have to tell him someday or he'll be like this forever she thinks to herself, and then she fails anyway and then she watches him messing around with Yuffie or playing with Red or laughing with Cid or teasing Cait or sharing sarcastic cracks with Vincent or fighting with Barret and she wonders, do I really want the real him to come back? Fake Cloud is so much lovelier than Real Cloud. Fake Cloud is strong and brave and bright and easy to get along with. But as for Real Cloud before the well incident, she'd barely registered that he had emotions at all.
And that was where she comes in, because she is ever so confident compared to Tifa. If she knew, she would do something about it. She'd be able to tell him, and she'd be able to tell him in such a way that he wouldn't break under the strain of her words. Tifa's words are big and ugly and heavy and build up in their unnecessariness like the straws on the camel's back, but hers float like silver balloons. Her words dance.
"He's a fake," Tifa says, and she stares. It is quiet here. Tifa can't tell Cloud, because of that way he looks at her. So Tifa can tell her, and she will be the messenger.
"I'm sorry?"
"I…" Tifa says, and blinks hard and stares at her feet. "I didn't say anything."
"Yes, you did," she points out, "you said 'he's a fake.'"
"Yes, but…I didn't – no, I don't mean a thing, I don't mean it, it…"
She laughs. Her laugh sings the same way her words dance. "You're really useless sometimes," she says, and they're clumsy words, but the way she says them with that confidence makes them shine like poetry. "And I think you need to tell me this. I'm not having you back down now."
"But – "
"Tifa," she says. The way she says her name is like nothing else – Tifa feels herself bloom a little. "I'm being serious. And you should be, too."
Tifa stands there, tongue-tied, scraping at her leg with the edge of her boot, uncomfortable.
"It's about Cloud, isn't it?" she prompts, and everything comes out of Tifa's mouth in a tangled angry hysterical sad rush of gibberish-words, a bit like vomiting a dictionary.
"I don't care, he, there, in Nibelheim, and he keeps saying he's alright, and I'm probably the wrong one definitely the wrong one because he can't, there's no way, I – it's him, he's right about this, dreaming or something, it feels like he's going away and away and away and I can't follow and it hurts so much Aeris and it was, it was because in Nibelheim there was another soldier – "
"You don't mean it, do you?" she asks, but she's not asking.
Tifa stumbles on her tongue, and suddenly grabs her, pulling her close in a hug. "Just…I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I can't manage to tell him, I…"
"I know," she says, soft, and so sad. "He's not who he says he is. I know, because he's…"
Tifa looks up. "…He's what?"
"…just like someone I knew once," she says, and she stumbles over that one. It's a bizarre show of weakness, and Tifa feels herself cry. She hadn't thought she had anything left to shed, she thought she'd cried enough, but it was only because she was watching Aeris, wonderful, flawless Aeris, break.