from one to the next
by Seimei
...
Light holds his silhouette against the doorway. It isn't the warm glow of the sun, but the hollow sting of the slum streetlamps. How fitting that she should see him again, after so many lost years, and like everything else in her life, he is stagnant. She understands.
She swipes the counter one last time and shoves the dirty rag in her back pocket. The others alternate between gloating and moaning – "I'm starving, Miss Tifa!" or "That'll teach Shinra that we're serious here!" – and she nods accordingly, but he slumps against the wall, arms folded and eyes down.
Inwardly, she goes with him.
...
Tifa sees the ocean beneath her, slipping past the windows in the Highwind. The ship is so high that the ocean bleeds into the sky, like she is staring into a hole that opens up all of the things in which she used to believe.
She can't help it. She entertains an idle memory: as a child, she loved dashing out into the rain, wearing her bright red rain boots – a gift from her mother. The puddles were soft, and her legs itched with water. Her mother laughed at her, with her, then. The longer her gaze lingers below, the dimmer the memory becomes. The glare from the sun hurts her eyes.
Then her mind registers that it's not the sun. It's the end of everything. She lets all of her memories go.
She never expects them to come back to her.
...
When he comes home that night, she is wearing a pale yellow dress that hugs her curves, and her legs run to the floor in long lines of flesh.
"You never wear dresses," he says. He's blushing.
She tosses her hair with a laugh. "Well, thought I'd give it a try. Something new. So…?"
It is her turn to blush. "How do you like it? Should I have gone with a blue one instead?"
He takes a moment to imagine – it is a long moment – but he shakes his head.
"Nah, I've already seen you in blue."
She holds her hands out to him, and he takes her up – up the stairs, behind the door, into the dark beneath the moonlit window. She's alive in the pale.