Broken Roses
There are places I'll remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone, and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I've loved them all
But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life, I love you more
-- The Beatles, In My Life
When Yuffie comes through the door of Seventh Heaven she is noisy and flailing and uncoordinated. She has not embraced growing up and refuses to let her age get to her. She's a spark of life in a dead world.
Her exact opposite is standing behind the bar. Tifa, while still beautiful, still gorgeous, still wondrous to behold, is calm, is sad, is obviously old beyond her years. She tends to a little white potted flower and gives it her full attention before turning to the ninja and scolding her for what everyone knows is just what comes naturally to her.
Tifa is wise. She is grace under pressure. She is mourning personified. And Yuffie knows she still hasn't let go; let go of Cloud, let go of Aeris.
Kind, sweet Aeris, dead before her time. Slow, steady Cloud, distant and sad. He may as well be dead for all he interacts with people and speaks aloud. Tifa is mourning both of them and Yuffie wonders if she will ever recover from losing both of her life's loves.
Yuffie smiles and laughs, because that is what she does. She, too, has lost her life's love, but she will never show her disappointment. She is not Tifa, she does not move slowly as if ten years older. She does not scold people for making too much noise. She is Yuffie, ninja extraordinaire, super awesome WRO agent, and she will not let Shelke and Vincent hurt her. She will smile and laugh and no one will know that she is slowly but surely crumbling to dust inside until the day she blows away in the wind.
She feels a certain kinship with Tifa and it's why she keeps coming back here, to this bar. Misery loves company and Yuffie has never met anyone more miserable than Tifa.
When Barret takes the kids away for the weekend it is quiet inside. Tifa closes the bar on autopilot and makes them dinner. She never asks if Yuffie is going to stay, because she knows she will. Yuffie has nowhere else to go. Sometimes on weekends AVALANCHE convenes here and Tifa makes them dinner and Yuffie can't bear to see Shelke and Vincent together and so if no one else notices, Tifa does, because she has to make the dinner and she knows how many place settings to lay out. Tifa knows that Yuffie is hurting, and she will be the least surprised when Yuffie crumbles into oh so much dust.
Yuffie knows that now, here, she can let herself be sad. She knows that the kids aren't here to wonder and neither is Cloud, and she knows that Tifa will never tell a soul. They eat dinner and it is quiet and for a brief moment everything is alright, because Tifa and Yuffie are sharing their misery and everything is okay.
Yuffie can tell that Tifa is sharing her misery too. She can read the lines on her face, that she is trying to be strong for her not-a-family and she is failing miserably. She knows that Tifa knows this. Everything is okay.
Yuffie falls asleep on the couch. Sometime during the night she feels someone moving her and when she wakes up she's asleep on Marlene's bed.
Yuffie can tell when Tifa is thinking of Aeris. For one, she tends the potted flower on her bar, and she touches the pink ribbon a whole lot.
Tifa can tell when Yuffie is thinking about Vincent and Shelke, too. Even though everyone knows there is nothing going on between the two of them – Shelke has a child's body and Vincent finds it repulsive – everyone also knows that she harbors the feelings and memories of the dead Lucrecia and that excites and interests Vincent. The two of them spend hours together, sometimes days, disappearing in tandem and walking back into the Seventh Heaven together as if it were somehow natural. Yuffie thinks about them when she goes quiet. She only does it when no one is around. No one except for Tifa, anyway, who barely counts because she knows.
Yuffie, Tifa knows, tries to forget. She goes out on dates. They all look like Vincent and Tifa thinks that perhaps she isn't trying hard enough.
She understands. All of the dates she went on, before she gave up – they all were like Cloud. Strong, silent, blond.
The day comes when Marlene and Denzel are to go to the special school and then Yuffie and Tifa are alone. It is ten times quieter in the bar and slowly it becomes a home to the same sort of people that Yuffie and Tifa are: lonely, sad, mourning. When Tifa shoos them out at last call Yuffie always wonders if she will be shooed out as well, but it never happens.
Marlene will never come back again. Summers and holidays are spent at Barret's house, and during the school year she lives in a dormitory with other girls. Denzel comes back sometimes, but just as often he goes to stay with Marlene. Both of the women know that the atmosphere is choking here and even though Denzel loves the both of them, he can't stand to be here, in the house of the dead, when he is just beginning his life.
Yuffie moves into Marlene's old bedroom.
Tifa is closing up and she can hear that Yuffie has brought one of her dates home. It happens sometimes, and Tifa can't begrudge the younger woman what little happiness and comfort she can squeeze out of this shitty situation.
She carefully closes up and cleans, being quiet and trying not to disturb the unhappy couple. She goes to bed the same as every other night.
The next morning she is faced with Yuffie's date trying to sneak out of the house before Tifa rises. It is a young woman with dark brown hair. Tifa bids her a good morning quietly as she cleans up.
"Why did you love her so much?"
The question startles Tifa and she notices that Yuffie is looking at the picture of Aeris and almost nothing else.
Tifa's voice is almost rusty from misuse and the roughness of it surprises her. She clears her throat.
"It was impossible not to love Aeris," she says.
"Everyone loved her," Yuffie agrees.
They are quiet for a moment before Tifa continues.
"We were both the same," she says. "Her with Zack, me with Cloud. We both had a hole in our hearts. She was beautiful and unique and fragile."
Tifa's tears begin, the tears she never shed for her beautiful flower girl.
"I wanted to protect her, to keep her safe. I wanted her to grow old and have a house with a flower garden in the front. I wanted to grow old with her."
That night Yuffie closes the bar up and when Tifa wakes she has been transported from the couch to her bed.
Yuffie knows that something has changed. Tifa is more alert, a bit more cheerful. When Cloud comes in for the AVALANCHE dinners she doesn't treat him with silent subservience but genuine friendship. Yuffie knows that the tears she finally shed for Aeris have lifted the burden from the bartender's shoulders and that Tifa can get on with her life now.
Yuffie knows she is alone.
She goes on more dates.
Yuffie's dates, Tifa notices, are meshing. Some of them look like Vincent. Some of them do not. Some of them are girls, some of them are boys. She is going through them at a frenetic pace and Tifa knows she is trying to heal and failing, trying to feel something other than sorrow and hate. She is trying, she knows, to be like Tifa and get better. Tifa wants to comfort her but something holds her back.
Then one day something changes. One day she walks in to find Yuffie alone, for once not on a date, for once not laughing hysterically and over-cheerfully at something someone has said. She is sitting on her bed, and she is crying.
Tifa closes the bar and sits next to Yuffie, draping her arm over her shoulders and letting her cry.
It is exactly one year after Yuffie moved in to Marlene's bedroom when Tifa notices that Yuffie's dates lately have all been women who look like Tifa. It occurs to her one night while Yuffie is out with one of them, and Tifa herself is wiping down the bar and waiting up for them to get back so she can close up for the night.
She finishes cleaning and closes down the bar anyway. Yuffie has a key.
It is a niggling sort of thing, at the back of her mind, but eventually the shinobi insinuates herself so well into Tifa's life that on the one night when she doesn't come home Tifa worries. At four in the morning she wakes up and Yuffie's bed is still made and the door downstairs is still locked. She calls her phone and Yuffie does not answer and Tifa spends the rest of the pre-dawn hours biting her lip nervously and cleaning, wiping down the bar that is already spotless and wearing a groove into the floor with her pacing. When she finally opens the door to go look for her she finds the girl sleeping on the doorstep. She has forgotten her key and Tifa is so relieved that she is okay she forgets to be mad.
When Yuffie wakes up she is her bed and Tifa is lying next to her, her arm draped over her protectively.
It is exactly a year and a half since Yuffie moved into Marlene's bedroom when she stops making dates. Instead she stays at the Seventh Heaven and helps Tifa close up every night. There is a quiet companionship about the two of them, no longer mourning and no longer sad, just quiet and comfortable. If the other members of AVALANCHE notice the difference they say nothing.
It was sort of an accident. Neither Tifa nor Yuffie acknowledged what was growing between them until one night when it exploded in a passionate outpouring that neither of them could have stopped even if they wanted to.
Not that either of them did.
It started with their nightly ritual of locking up and cleaning. They had finished and were doing a final wipe-down of the bar. As one they turned and ran full-on into each other and froze.
Yuffie looked up at Tifa and at that moment she knew and before she could say anything Tifa was kissing her, holding her up because her knees are about to give way, pushing her up against the bar for support.
They find their way upstairs, still kissing, fighting for dominance. Tifa flicks the light out on the way to her bedroom.
In the end Yuffie gives in. She lets Tifa kiss her and she stares at how beautiful the other woman is as she cradles the shinobi in her arms. She feels a wonderful upwelling in her chest and wonders if she is about to burst. Instead she burrows deeper into the older woman's arms, and she feels lovely and protected and cared for and everything she ever wanted, and from the person she least expected it from.
It is exactly two years since Yuffie moved into Marlene's room when Yuffie moves into Tifa's room. She swears to her that she will fill their lives with laughter and fighting and heartbreak and making up and lust and love. Tifa kisses her and tells her to shut up.