Putting this story up here gives me a little pressure to finish it. The intent is to have it play out by the end of this month... we'll see how that goes. This is a very experimental piece, I play around with format and time and space a little, but hopefully it's the readable kind of experimental. This is intended to be post-AC with some changes, namely how Tifa is behaving. There are also going to be some thematic shifts... as you can see this first chapter was rather inspired by a Western. The next chapter might be inspired by something completely different. We'll see where it goes, I guess. And all the poetry bits are done by me, so that's not quotes or anything. You can blame me for that entirely.
Oh, and Elena needs more love.
Happiness was supposed to be:
Three cups of warm sunlight,
The curl of smoke in an empty room,
And probably some laughter.
Happiness was not:
Dying on the cold wet ground,
five inches from confession,
and a few miles from help.
---
Sometimes it hit her at the strangest times. Standing as she was now, a couple steps distance from their rotting ex-President, Elena felt like she had in school. The half-step shadow of someone more calm. Someone that could keep her mouth shut and her heart closed. Standing a couple steps from someone that had almost been a zombie until it had started raining (to think that all they needed was a bath) she realized--
Elena might have been the half-step shadow of her sister, but at least she was alive.
But what were they, standing around as they were like corpses. Holding bombs and waiting on Tseng to stop--no, only she was waiting on Tseng. Something was keeping each of them in escrow (legal arrangements were always fitting metaphors) on moving. Moving anywhere. Moving on. They'd tried to pull the bones from her body and she was standing back here.
Yet she was alive. No, living. That was a better way to say it.
---
"Yo, you there?"
She was staring off into space again, watching the circles that the sunlight made on the table as it passed through her empty green beer bottle. Elena, like most of them, drank because it was a good way to kill the time in between actually working. The job was a lot of fetch and carry these days, hardly the glory and glamour of what it once was. Funny how wicked deeds had more spice to them than rescuing lost people did.
"I'm here. Sorry, just... thinking."
She'd seen movies like this (it was supposed to be a saloon, though and the doors were supposed to swing instead of shut) but Reno was no cowboy and Rude certainly was no sheriff. Tseng didn't fit in that equation because he was Wutain.
"Don't think too much, your face'll get stuck that way." Reno was such an ass sometimes.
She was waiting for a banjo when she walked in, like a desert dust storm riding in before the tease of rain. Elena didn't like to think so dramatically, but when even pain hadn't pulled her out of her deadened stupor people looked for something, anything, just to feel right again. Never mind that she'd never known right from wrong--she'd been raised in pigtails and flexible morality.
It wasn't quite love at first sight--because she had seen her before without the boots and the vest and the hat and the special kind of sway that a woman got when she had settled back into something that was natural--and it wasn't quite love either. But it was a glimpse and a curiosity and that was enough to make her put down the beer.
"I'll be damned." Rude said it best.
She had to wonder there and then how long Rude had been seeing Tifa Lockhart, because that was her and she had the fuzzy memories of a picture with dead people (with their living eyes, that was the only thing that had frightened her before) and that hat. Elena had a uniform that didn't involve black or blue before, clearly Tifa Lockhart had one that didn't involve black and white.
"Someone forgot to do laundry... not complaining, just someone had to say it."
Reno was such an ass sometimes.
---
The thing about slow guitars
Was that the twang vibrated perfectly
With the beating of a heart.
---
Oh she envied the way she walked, like a wrangler circling with a rope, waiting on a herd chocobo to get out of line. Something had changed in the woman, and it was easy to see. Elena couldn't pull in the strays and the lost ones like that (Turks weren't lost, they were misguided, that took some kind of will) but even Tifa wasn't pulling the same tired refrain.
There was little room for pity in that skirt.
Some people would call it irresponsible the way that she played her own brand of hero, guiding people to the stations they'd set up amongst the rubble (they were forever the custodians of a dead city). Tifa's body was strong enough to drag someone if they couldn't walk, and there was the kind of will that they all possessed as hiding somewhere behind the wake of her dark hair. She wondered if it was just the kind of thing that people who chose to remain anonymous in deeds did, or if it was something that mountain air brought out in people.
Strange, the connections she made.
"Elena. Rude just radioed in, he could use some assistance in another sector."
They could all use a little foray, even if it was just dress up, back to their former selves.
---
Torture and pain was never a problem, it was realizing that she was the only one that had lived--or had even been alive to begin with--in the whole ordeal that made her ball up her fists in her bed and want to scream into her pillow.
---
"You're not with the others," she said, amused and not-quite carefree, "I'll bet it gets tiring being with the boys all the time."
Elena's Tifa spoke like she knew things about life, and maybe she did. She was a girl that didn't have an unmarred complexion (cuts and nicks on her legs, bruise-callous on her knuckles, a roadmap) so it was easy to believe that she was relating. After all, terrorism was as ambiguous as guarding the company. Elena had no doubt that both their families would clash again, for reasons that she wasn't wise enough to figure out, but experienced enough to know that they would happen.
For now, they would be like in-laws that stopped trying to be the right ones.
"I needed time. To breathe." (to stop feeling violated by the eyes of dead men and foreign malice)
She smiled slowly, and Elena was reminded that it wasn't polite to stare. "You ever need to talk to a woman, I'm around." There was stunted femininity in that statement, for they had both been cut off in that regard. Only Tifa had cut her knuckles and Elena had cut her hair.
It was like reading a book, looking into her heart-open face. Paperback.
"I'd like that."
---
If everything that was sad was blue
Was an ocean of tears
Why weren't the fish at rock bottom?
---
There was conspiracy afoot in the way they shared jokes over other people's heads, sometimes while shoveling cinder and those other times when Turks were shoveling poisons into themselves. Tifa Lockhart never drank, never even with her eyes. Only water. Elena chalked it up to weapon maintenance (a gunner was merely there to hold the kickback, the gun was the weapon). There was conspiracy in the way she noticed that too.
It was hard to teach Tifa that professionalism was more hard-wired into her than drinking was. Elena had always tripped over her words because she dared to speak them--everyone had always thought her unprofessional over it. Really, talking and talking at great length was the only comfort she allowed herself in the family legacy.
It assured her more than anyone that she was here. Here.
"You thinking?" Soot and ash on her arms and tar on her boots but she never failed to look like she belonged like that. Maybe that was the slums' calling card.
"I guess. It's kind of stupid." This was how women talked. Tifa was also teaching Elena as she deputized her (it helped the process, remembering that everyone was on the same side now).
The only response was a small smile that looked like a fish hook.
---
"You want to know what the new frontier is?"
Sometimes people got the feeling that the beginning wasn't even covering it. "What?"
"I'll show you."