The Earth is Not an Echo
A/N: For full effect, make sure you've seen Advent Children: Complete.
Cloud was asleep.
Tifa blinked in astonishment and tiptoed closer, peering over the back of the couch. Seventh Heaven didn't have a real living room, just a corner of the big kitchen that was crammed with soft chairs and a red and somewhat dirty floor rug and bookcases made of two-by-fours and cinderblocks. And a long couch which, no matter how inviting and comfortable it was to Denzel, Marlene or Tifa, had never once seemed to tempt Cloud.
Well. First time for everything.
He was even still wearing his clunky boots and his pauldron; his fingertips hung off the edge, and near them on the floor rested his gloves and sunglasses. Replacements for the pair that had been ruined during the whole Reunion thing, when Cloud received the new scar slashing the corner of his brow. Which was now relaxed in a sleep that was almost like the dead.
Inevitably Tifa's eyes darted to his upper arm, her stomach swooping with irrational fear. But it was nothing but a reflex to a reality that was now long gone. Cloud's arm was bare of Geostigma: nothing but clean skin and the pink satin ribbon tied in a bow. A bow that was loosening, the loops almost falling apart.
Tifa had never seen it that way. Cloud, though he had never truly been a SOLDIER, had a SOLDIER's scruples when it came to personal grooming and general cleanliness. He did his own laundry, and polished his boots and many buckles, and folded his socks. He helped her sweep and mop and polish the hardware in the bathrooms. Maybe it was a little sacrilegious, considering; but after spending years trying to hammer the same habits into Denzel, Tifa was rather grateful to Zack Fair for this.
Tifa kind of wished she had known Zack. Anyone that Aerith had loved, anyone that Cloud had loved, had probably been worth knowing. She knew it bothered Cloud when he felt like he was doing Zack-things instead of Cloud-things, but to Tifa it didn't really matter. He was enough of Cloud to be himself, and any of Zack that came through was like a gift, when you thought about it. It meant that he wasn't as lost to this world as he could be. In a way, Zack had become one of the most important parts of the world: the fact was that having the skills of a SOLDIER First Class had enabled Cloud to save the world a couple of times now.
Cloud sighed in his sleep, and Tifa grinned. He looked just like Denzel when he slept: a little boy, the boy she remembered.
It was strange how, standing there in her not-really-a-living room in a bar in a city that was still putting itself back together, just watching her friend sleep, Tifa could feel like she was standing at the center of the universe. All of their thoughts and memories swirling around her: Cloud's, Zack's, her own. The afternoon light coming cleanly through the back window. The deep red of the rug. The sweep of Cloud's eyelashes on his cheeks and the silhouette of his nose against the couch fabric. It was all, every part of it, so heavy and so light that Tifa felt she might cry.
Instead, she reached down and, with the lightest touch she could manage, pulled on the trailing ends of the pink ribbon.
The knot came undone and Cloud's eyes opened at once. He tensed slightly and but then just sucked in a deep breath and let his eyes drift shut. "Tifa?" he said hoarsely, muffled by the cushion.
"Hi, sleepyhead," she teased. "I'm just fixing your ribbon. Don't you dare wake up."
He smiled - an honest-to-God smile, which joined a slowly-increasing hoard of similar expressions in Tifa's heart of hearts. "Okay," he mumbled.
Carefully she tied a new know and a new bow, trying to make it tight enough to last. "There," she said, lifting her hands. But before she could move away, he slit his eyes open and reached up to grasp her wrist.
His hand was warm. She could feel every callus on every finger that braceleted her bones.
"Thank you, Tifa," he said.
She reached down and touched his own wrist: the fine hairs, the faint tan line from his gloves, the warmth, the sense of strength in every part of him.
"You're welcome, Cloud."