She can admit to not being the most enthused when Cloud decided he was going to open a strange coffin in a dusty basement, that she might've pulled on her gloves with a bit of nervous energy, maybe wondered what the chances were of something good actually being there.
It turned out the chances were neither good nor bad, because the man that came out of there,
There was actually a man in there—
Was fully armed and just about as ornery as they came. Vincent Valentine, apparently, and Tifa wondered with a little bit of detached awe if that was actually his real name. He was an asset to the team, but he had a weight to his presence that unnerved her, even though she'd been dealing with Cloud's brooding all the way across the northern continent.
Sometimes she tired herself out smiling for the lot of them, sometimes she felt like she was smiling with her eyes closed, the only one out of touch enough to be optimistic, and just a minute away from falling into a deep sleep.
She had a feeling Vincent knew something about deep sleeps, and she wanted to ask him if he ever felt like the current world was just too different, if he ever felt like an alien running around trying to erect the old useless skeletons of worlds that didn't exist anymore.
She felt like that.
She felt like she was dreaming sometimes, because just some years ago she'd been picking out the right outfit to meet the solders she was going to guide around the mountains, now she was standing somewhere in Corel with a giant snake's bloody throat in her hand. She wondered what Zangan would think of her.
She needed to wake up.
She never did have to guts to ask him though, and so on a night they had patrol together she just leaned her head on her knees and kept her silence. He was so miserable, she didn't think smiling would even help and so she didn't do that either. She was freed up by the hopelessness of his case, her own reticence to intrude and found in the silence with no one to smile for but herself, that she didn't actually want to smile.
His gloom was as contagious as Aeris' laughter, and Tifa closed her eyes as they sat in front of the fire in the camp. She might've felt his shoulder against her ear, the warm fingers of the fire on her cheeks and neck. She went down into a basement somewhere and opened a coffin full of mountain flowers, and then her mother's body fell out of it when she leaned on it too hard and tipped it over.
The corpse fell exactly to its knees, and then she was opening her eyes, and Aeris was on her knees, a shadow swooping down in dark, half seconds and,
"Tifa." Vincent was pulling her out of the path of these large jaws, coming right at her neck. White teeth, she thought, snapping her head up to see the almost silver trees around them. They were in the forgotten city, she'd forgotten she guessed, because was just a little dead on her feet.
She was ashamed to have been standing there dumbly in the midst of a battle, taken care of, because she could take care of herself. She had for a long while.
That was what she was thinking when she took her hand away from his, sleepily, quickly, because the beasts were on them, all around them and there was really no time to notice that he'd actually said her name, two low swift syllables that made her pause, just long enough for a beast to latch onto her arm.
She kicked it in the side and sent it flying, saliva stringing back from its mouth to fly wetly against her cheek.
"Thanks." She said, and the look in his eye woke her up more than the spit on her face. He knew. He knew she was sleeping.
She needed to wake up, but it seemed the farther they travelled, the more she felt the need to just close her eyes and sleep.
The clumsy world of Cloud's own making shattered not too long after that, and she pushed him around in his wheelchair as he nodded, broken hearted and broken everything. She could barely look at him, but it was enough just listening to the screaming of that one rickety wheel.
She buried her head in his cold lap one night, and his unresponsive eyes bore holes into the back of her head when she asked him if it was her fault, if she should've said something sooner, if things could be different if she had just,
Maybe not laughed at him with her friends when she was twelve, and she can hear their voices too, smell the mountain air on that day she fell and hurt herself.
She felt herself falling, down past a burning town to stand smiling in a camera flash, with a general right beside her. She feels herself turning within a memory to get a look at his face, and she's almost got it, almost got it, and the flash goes off again, but she reels back when she realizes it's just a storm in the camp.
Vincent is her watch buddy again, and she snaps violently awake to see him watching her. She wants to deny what he clearly knows she has been doing again, but she doesn't. She turns and wraps her arms around him even though the chance he'll return it seems totally improbable, and because being strong is exhausting and she just sags into him, this poor man who has enough to worry about without a woman feeling sorry for herself all over him.
She should be embarrassed when she kisses him, but she isn't. When he looks at her, she opens her eyes wide and stands firmly in the moment when she kisses him again, softly, and for a moment doesn't even care if he returns it or not.
She needs to be needed almost as much as she needs to wake up, and assert who she might be now, which might be a women who takes down behemoths along a windy way, patches up her gloves in firelight and wears short skirts just because. This bold caricature of herself makes her press herself into him, and she's a little determined now.
If this is what the world has made her to be, then why not. Her defiance feels good, and she ignores that it is still fueled by the desire to have the old things back.
When he kisses her back, an eternity has passed, but Gaia it's always an eternity when you're awake, and she wonders what he was like before he slept, if he loved or smiled.
She imagined the answer was no to both things, because he didn't smile when his hands, although gentle, laid her down on her back, and slid roughly up the length of her thighs.
Keep your eyes open, he said in a quiet voice, and it seemed that when he kissed her it was not because either of them wanted it, but because it was just something two people did before joining up, and wrapping into each other like Aeris did with her fingers when she knelt to pray.
When he was inside, she muffled the sound of her cry with the heal of her hand, and brought her legs up around his waist, the motion pushing his pants further down his legs, which just then she realized were quite long.
It occurred to her that they were similar for the dilly-dallying they did, similar because they knew what it was like to sleep deeply, but there was something in his eyes a million miles away, and she knew hers were just about the same.
It occurred to her that he wasn't entirely human, and she wasn't entirely woman for the girl she still wished she was, and it felt a little perverse to have her skirt hiked up all the way to her stomach, and his hips moving like that when they were clearly both still sleeping,
Sleeping together, and apart but absolutely inside each other. She felt it coming,
Heard in his quiet rough breaths the sound of the first person she'd ever killed, dying as Barrett had been off planting explosives, and in the fall of his dark hair she remembered the instant the wind blew in Nibelhelm and Sephiroth's hair blew right against the backs of her knees as they stood in front of the camera.
She felt herself arching forward,
Like that snake in Corel, mouth pulled up over teeth, teeth not as sharp as the ones currently on her neck, and she grabbed his hair, thought it was soft like her mother's, and reeled back from the memory, struggled to stay in the present, found they were just making sounds, and she was trembling all over, finding each memory interrupted, each attempt to go under sabotaged by the desperate haste in his hips.
She was trying so hard to keep her eyes open, but everything he did, and that she smelled or saw made her fall into something else.
And then she felt it, in waves. She felt herself say oh, and open her eyes.
And when she did, it was just in time to dodge the powerful fist of a silver haired man in Aeris' church. When the front of her foot connects with his jaw, she realizes that she has never felt more awake.
Author's Note: So I really wanted to get into Tifa here, because I just think she also (like Cloud, but not to such an extreme extent) would find herself in her own head a lot, either for comfort or the things she's lost. This is kind of raw and occurred to me a few days ago, to write this dreamy/sexual little blurb and hopefully get out a little pretension. XD Also, I'm a fan of Tifa/Vincent, and have wanted to write something else for them for a while. I hope it was a fun read. P.s. if you don't know why Cloud is in a wheelchair, [SPOILER] later in the FFVII game Cloud becomes so debilitated by finding out the truth of his identity, he is literally in a wheelchair for a good fifteen minutes of the game. Still one of the creepiest/most depressing moments of FFVII.