Tifa Lockheart took a few precious seconds out of her relief time to splash some filthy water from a bucket onto her neck and face. What she really wanted was to go swimming. A salty sea breeze was always hovering in the air, reminding her of a promise made at the Gold Saucer before the Temple of the Ancients, before the black materia, before Meteor.

Her head drifted down towards her chest, when she suddenly jerked and blinked to clear her eyes and mind. There wasn't time. There was never time. She let out a breathy sigh, the sigh of a person who had seen and done too much to be worried about the logistics of climbing onto a makeshift bed.

In the end, she twisted her leg and rolled onto the blanket, asleep before she completely stopped. She had a private tent, an extravagance all things considered. Yuffie had been tenting there, also, but with the ninja-girl assigned to mercy runs near Sector Eight and herself leading the first shift Recovery at Sector Four, it was inconvenient and impractical. And, right now, impracticality cost lives.

She hadn't seen Yuffie in over a week, and was almost glad for it.

Despite scaling Gaea's cliff and watching one of their own be cut down before her eyes, Yuffie Kirasagi never, during the entire Sephiroth incident, became the Lady destiny designed. However, the suffering at the Midgar ruins - for it could be called a city no longer - brought that cold maturity to her eyes like nothing else could, and Tifa wanted to cry out for ever wishing her to change. There was no light, no warmth, no joy; there could not be after the months of hell they lived. She even heard Yuffie damning materia to the heavens for the lives it could not save, her bloodied fists pounding the dust as though daring the lifestream to try to take these souls away.

Eight heroes. Eight sectors. Tifa learned early on to take relief in knowing that Sector Seven would not be searched, leaving more men for her Team. Cait Sith remained with Reeve, grim overseer of the entire Recovery and his final penance for heading Shinra's Urban Development, but the others were spread out over the city. An Avalanche was in every aspect of the Recovery, acting with a discipline borne of a lifetime of training.

She had not seen Yuffie in a week, but she had not seen the others in over a month.

When the lifestream began to surround Meteor, no one could be sure what would happen next. Tifa, personally, expected to see trees and flowers and a Midgar clean like it had never been in reality. There was that flash of light (...green eyes... so familiar...) and Meteor was gone, but there were no trees.

And there were no flowers.

Instead of the ideal city, Midgar was aflame, with plates hanging precariously over supports never meant to handle the millennia-old threat, and in the center, the Shinra Building stood as a shattered monument to an extinct empire.

Her hand had gripped the railing of the Highwind hard, and the pain brought her back to the dark reality she shared with her teammates. There was no discussion - little talking, period, even from Barret - only a quiet resolve reflected in the eyes that had so recently reflected Holy's light and some short, barked orders from Cid to land near the devastation.

The chaos was soon brought to some order (...who would ignore a Vincent Valentine or Cloud Strife?), which became organization and method. Hell, Reeve even had a system in place to ferry survivors and mostly recovered patients via the damaged Highwind to Nibelhiem, Mideel, and Gonzaga to rebuild those towns as well as make a database to offer the refugees some hope of reuniting with friends and family. Elena, the impetuous Turk who first offered her magic skills to the Medic tents, was proving invaluable to Reeve by running most of the computerized aspects of the Recovery.

A gray sort of dawn filtered through Tifa's tent, waking her like it had every morning for nine weeks and five days. The light really might have been golden, the shining beams of a fall sunrise, but she didn't really notice (except that brighter light took longer to adjust her eyes to). It could have been purple for all she cared, which was what scared her the most. If there was ever a time for a hero to rescue her... She stretched once and stepped out of her tent, thinking again of salt-water showers and short knights with unkempt blonde hair and blue eyes.

But there was no time for that.