He was gone again, this was not the first time nor would it be the last. She had shed so many tears about his previous departures that she had no more left to spare. Bitterness and ice filled the heart that had once been filled with love. Tifa Lockheart was becoming a sour old hag because of Cloud. He knew that every time he left he killed a piece of her a little more. After a while she had begun to think that he liked killing her. Too many years of her life she had spent pining after the blonde hair boy she knew from childhood. They were supposed to be together, but alas Cloud made sure that he ran away every time Tifa got comfortable with his presence in her home.
She had held him when he cried himself to sleep over Aeris, stroked his brow when he was haunted by nightmares, and fixed his wounds when came stumbling, half dead, to her doorstep. This had to end, she was finally done. Cloud could walk to the bottom of the lake where Aeris' body was laid to rest. She'd gladly send him and any other notion of love there with him. He had killed that part of her just as surely as he laid the deathblow of Sephiroth.
"Are those days really that far gone," she mumbled sitting down in her bar with a bottle before her. It was past closing time and she had just finished cleaning up. Rather than go to her bed alone, Tifa preferred to drink herself to sleep at one of the tables.
"I helped save the world, and this is what I get," she sighed taking a sip from vodka before her. Her mind drifted to her friends. Cid and Shera were happily flying around the world together, Barret and Marlene were living cheerily in Corel, Yuffie was out proving her skills at steal materia and trying to help Wutia regain its pride, Vincent...well who know where Vincent was these days, the Turks and what remained of the old Shinra regime were trying to rebuild the company... Everyone had a project, had someplace that they belonged and something the needed to be doing. Tifa was just on her own in Neibelheim, running a bar just on the outskirts of town. She could not live directly in town, too many bad memories. Not to mention there was no one waiting for her there, all her friends had been killed her original village burned to the ground. All that remained were the lies that Shinra had put in place.
Another drink from her bottle. No one was there to comfort her when she cried, which she rarely did anymore, or when she woke screaming from the nightmares of the past. No one was waiting for her when she came home. Hate and depression were her only companions these days. It was on nights like this one she actually wished that they had not saved the world or at least that Sephiroth would have driven his sword through her in the city of the ancients instead of her.
She rubbed the bags under her eyes and took another drink. Tifa continued to drink until her head rested on the table and her eyes closed. No peaceful smile was found on her lips that night, just a dull line and a few wrinkles that spoke of the joy she had once had in life.