Her hair was grey now. Silver streaks and she'd stubbornly kept it mostly long, despite Yuffie—who age didn't seem to touch, she thought enviously—and her insistance that shorter hair was practical with all the difficulty she would have with her brittle bones. It was that sort of thing that bothered her the most; her bones.
She could sort of understand the sad looks on the old prima ballerina's faces.
Marlene was dancing now, only she was born in a different enough time that her fists and feet were gloved in silk instead of leather and metal. Just a dancer for dancing's sake. The girl still didn't call her Mom, but she appreciated it better that way. With Barret gone, it just didn't sound right. She never wanted to be anything more than simply Tifa.
So supposed it was only right that he should be sitting on her porch after all these years.
"Hi, Tifa."
When she was a younger girl, one that had thought he was the most interesting paradox, she had imagined how this would go. No, they hadn't been out of contact. Not entirely. He'd been around, especially for Denzel. The boy that had his kind of eyes far too young. Denzel was a small time hero himself, now. He'd sat next to her in the front row during Marlene's first debut. And when Tifa's eyes had gotten misty it hadn't been for this man who was sitting on her swing, looking up at the stars like a negative of a picture she'd never had the chance to take.
It was hard not to see who Marlene looked like.
"Hi, Cloud."
He looked a little like Cid had. It made sense, because Cid and Cloud were generational phases of each other. Only Cid was a wiser man in finding out what he was, and what he wanted; he made the move towards and away what consumed him. He and Shera and gone together. Plane crash. Tifa was glad for them, because that was the best way to go for them.
She sat down next to him, feeling the weakness in her bones again. Ostoporosis. Tiny holes that ate into her structure. The inability to dance anymore.
"I had a story I wanted to tell you. But I forgot."
The stubborn square of his jaw reminded her of Barret, and that was the worst part, really. It hadn't been the most perfect of marriages, nothing like that could be. He was still missing Myrna in the corner of his eye when he looked at her, but they had put in enough years together that she always felt something missing when reminded of him. Marlene was the only one who seemed to notice it and would pat her on the hand and tell it was ok.
"Why are you here?"
Twenty years ago she would have been glad for this. But she'd had a full life to this point. She been a mother to someone's child, a wife, and a lover on several occasions. She'd gotten tired of waiting on that one thing her childish heart had thought was the answer. She'd lived. And so had he. So why was he here now?
Some other people, somewhere else must have had this conversation.
"Because I needed to."
"Fat lot of good it does now."
He blinked and laughed. That full kind of laugh that she'd always wished she inspired. And she remembered why she would have followed him to the ends of the earth before. They were in each other's blood like family, all of them. Sometimes that confused her, in ways she'd never understood.
"Took me a long time to notice everything."
"So you want to tell me you love me?"
He shifted his weight and kissed her lightly on the cheek.
"I wanted to say thank you."
She put her head on his shoulder, much like she had when she was young enough to think that love meant everything. He wrapped an arm around her and they sat in silence while the night moved around them. It was humid tonight, but she didn't mind. They weren't grieving anymore; not themselves, not those that had touched them. Because they were touching each other in a more intimate way possible than she'd had in a long time. Cheek to shoulder.
Yes Cloud, that's what I really wanted to hear.