She had been stroking his hand for the last five hours. Any minute now, she'd tell herself. He's fine. He's stayed together through worse. Any minute now.
She could hear the buzz of conversation downstairs. Cloud wasn't quiet, either, softly murmuring about Mother, and Her Reunion. She was pretty sure he hadn't blinked once, which was one of the less eerie things she'd seen him do tonight. She quietly reviewed the conversation she'd had with Barret on the way off the airship.
"He's in a bad way," he'd said, and she'd immediately feared the worst. So technically speaking his present state was a pleasant surprise. He was still alive. He hadn't had any relapses of the conditions he still refused to see a psychologist for. He hadn't run off to go die alone in the Wastes.
Cloud hid too much, was the problem. He somehow managed to both trust them implicitly and not trust them at all. Tifa thought that after four years he would have loosened up about it, but if anything he'd gotten worse. They'd been as patient as they could, since having a social life outside of his mother (either one, really) was a new experience for him, but Cloud seemed to be cottoning onto this. Any help offered seemed to make him wary, as though it were a trap.
He would never talk about himself unless very directly prompted either. In fact, the very concept of doing so seemed to send him into a mild panic. She didn't remember much about the boy from Nibelheim she had thought was a bit creepy when she was young, but she was certain he hadn't been like that. Cloud never talked about what had made him that way, either. They weren't sure he knew himself.
She decided to try talking to him again, to see if that prompted anything. She'd run out of conversation at hour three and didn't know if he'd remember she'd been repeating herself over and over again, so she opted for a story instead. A very old one, about a barren woman who made a bargain with the mountain for a child from the fey, and the horrible things it had done to her neighbours in the name of fleeing its mother and repaying its debt to the gods in the earth, until one day she was forced to drive a spear of mage-cast iron through its heart. She'd always been fond of that one when she was little, and had once spent an entire week drawing different kinds of dresses the mother might have worn, and different kinds of spears she would have used to kill the bargain child. It was one of those stories that hadn't quite aged well, in the same way that "cock" used to just mean "rooster" once upon a time. Not that there was anyone left alive that would catch the double-entendre.
Perhaps an old story in Nibeli wasn't the best thing to be reciting to Cloud right now; he barely remembered the language, and had all but lost the stories of the gods. (The proper gods, the ones that stoked the hearth and shaped the black earth around flame, not the twelve they worshipped here around Midgar.) It was just one more bit of culture Shinra had buried that they'd never get back. He probably didn't even remember getting his ears pierced.
Eventually the slitted pupils twitched, and shifted, and he turned to look at her - not in the right way, not in a way a human would ever move, but he couldn't have known that. She gave his hand a squeeze.
"Sorry," he'd said, and was confused for a minute before remembering the fight they'd had over five hours ago. It had likely been minutes from his perspective.
They had talked for awhile, and things had almost felt like they had before, when they'd been travelling. It had been months since they'd had a good spar. Cloud had been giving her casting pointers, and she'd been teaching him hand-to-hand in turn. He was a fast learner. She'd have to see how much he remembered.
Marlene knocking on the door jarred her from her train of thought.
"Are you okay? I heard something loud."
Next to her, Cloud muttered "fuck" in a voice that might have been slightly too loud, and she shot him a look before getting up and opening the door to Marlene.
"We're fine. Is Yuffie still with you?"
"She went downstairs for drinks," said Marlene. Of course she had. It was long past ten. "...Can you come make me a float?"
Tifa considered it for a moment. It was absolutely past her bedtime, but this was a special occasion, and she probably wouldn't get much sleep knowing something was wrong with her family and they were talking about it in the other room. "Yeah, alright."
She said, before turning back to Cloud. "You're okay here, right?"
Cloud nodded - gods, she hated it when he moved after getting like this - and scooted himself off the bed. "Gonna stretch my legs a little, actually. Everything still feels weird."
Marlene led her back downstairs to the kitchen and eagerly dug a notebook out of the bag she'd brought over for her stay. It said "RECEPIES! by Marlene Wallace Ag 8" on it in bright orange highlighter, and Nanaki had brought her pressed lilies from an entire continent away for her to glue to the cover. Tifa hoped one day she'd be able to take Marlene to see live ones.
Marlene flipped the notebook open to a new page and began taking careful notes as Tifa poured her root beer from the tap at the bar, then scooped ice cream into it. She presented it to Marlene, who held up a hand and climbed up on the counter, digging through the spices available until she found the cinnamon, then sprinkled a few liberal shakes into the glass and began to stir it.
"It's a new one I came up with right now," she said proudly. "They make vanilla cinnamon candies, so they should make vanilla cinnamon drinks."
Tifa decided not to clue her into the existence of lattes just yet and nodded as Marlene finished stirring and took a drink. "It sounds really good."
"It tastes good, too," said Marlene, licking a bit of ice cream off of her chin, and Tifa didn't doubt it. They'd had her making hard drinks for them at one point, after all. Tifa had begun teaching her tricks she could do with the cups. "Can you help me make a new one with meat?"
Tifa nodded, then glanced back towards Reeve, who was now discussing the election. "Sure. We can do it upstairs if you promise not to spill your drink."
She led Marlene back up to her room, where she'd been staying for the night, and she briefly considered sleeping arrangements before resolving to deal with it later. If worst came to worst they could all just pile into one or two rooms together. They'd all dealt with worse.
They spread out blankets on the floor, and Marlene upended a box of markers she'd brought with her next to her notebook.
"So, what kind of meat?" asked Tifa.
"Chicken. There's this food cart in the market that has it on a stick, and they cook it so it doesn't even taste like chicken. But not in a bad way. I wanna do something like that."
They spent the next few minutes alternating between discussing ingredients and drawing pictures of kebabs in her notebook, stealing sips out of her root beer float (which was, in fact, delicious). Marlene's stuffed tonberry leered at them from the corner. Tifa tried not to look.
"Where's the green?" said Marlene at one point. "I want to draw the spices."
Tifa felt around for the marker on the blanket, then carefully stood up. "Scooch up for a second," she said, then began to shake out the blanket. After a moment, they heard a quiet clatter, then the sound of something rolling before settling against a hard surface with a click.
"I'll get it!" said Marlene, and began to squeeze herself under the bed. Tifa could hear the sound of her rummaging, and a moment later returned out from under it with a marker and a wooden box.
Marlene began to undo the latch, and Tifa sprung from where she'd been standing, staring blankly at what was happening, and snatched it out of her hands. "Don't touch that!"
It had been the wrong thing to say. Marlene's eyes began to fill with tears, and Tifa quickly knelt by her. "Hey, no, don't - it's fine, it's just..."
"I didn't know," said Marlene, her face beginning to screw up. "I didn't see what's in it, I swear!"
"It's not..." Tifa was staring at the box in her hands. The wood was like ice in her hands, in contrast to how its contents had felt when she'd first discovered it, almost burning hot. Her thoughts quickened.
It was insane. There was nothing this would accomplish, surely. Maybe it wouldn't do anything at all. Maybe...
"Stay here, alright?" she said, and gave Marlene a quick hug before snatching the white materia out of the box and quickly heading downstairs. Cloud said something to her as she passed him, but it barely registered. She left the bar and began walking briskly down the street.
There were four spots she knew would probably work. The little town in Mideel was too far away, as was the Candle. She was never, ever going back to Nibelheim. So that left the old broken down church.
The walk into the ruins was fairly long, and her phone rang twice on the way there. She ignored it - she would call back as soon as this was over and done with.
The inside of the church was still warm, at least compared to the outside. There was still a little spot on the floor that had been cleared of dirt where Cloud had set his bedroll two years ago. Tifa looked at it for a moment, and knelt in the dirt in front of the pool of water.
There was a spot in the dirt, too, that showed signs of disturbance - the spot where she'd buried her medal. Tifa stared at it contemptuously. A medal, of all fucking things.
It was the closest she'd get to being able to bury all those victims of the stigma. Victims she'd killed.
She clutched the materia tightly in her hands and tried desperately to find the knowledge of how to use it that it had placed in her head. As before, it was nigh-impossible. It almost seemed designed so that one couldn't use it.
Tifa still didn't know what the materia was meant to do. She knew what it did, but it was impossible to tell if that was the spell working as intended. What was even more unfathomable was the entity it put her into contact with in order to use it. She sat there, and she reached, and reached, and reached...
The sky was choked with grey. The infected were in the streets, their eyes like Cloud's, empty and inhuman, staring towards the swirling mass of shadowy matter above the city. Loud crashes could be heard, even in the distance. Tifa ran towards the source, dodging the people that cried out for her to help, and the claws of things that sprung out of the earth to rake at her legs. She would help. She would help them all.
The white materia clutched in her hand almost seemed to buzz, and she felt it pulling her through the ruins to a specific spot. She followed, even as the world seemed to shake apart above her head. It was drawing her towards a building - a ratty old church, long since abandoned.
She burst through the doors, looking around for what led her there, and the air in the building seemed to thicken as she caught a flash of something in the pile of dirt towards the front - a luminous green thread, vanishing as soon as it appeared. The Lifestream. It had led her here? The men at Cosmo Canyon two years ago had said it would destroy whatever was a threat to the Planet. There was certainly a threat to the Planet, and it wasn't in some old abandoned church.
She stood in front of the dirt, gripping the white materia as tightly as she could, as though that would make it work more. Something was different about her using it here; the wall she seemed to have to punch through seemed thinner, or perhaps she was just closer to it. She centred herself, trying to not force the memories, to let the spell come to her, and then something caught and pulled her in, and she Saw.
Humans had long since forgotten how to listen to the Planet. They are not meant to speak to it. The consciousness at the centre of the world, of all things, the force that had lent her a spark of itself that would one day be washed back into the fathomless ocean it had sprung from, was vast, and old, and furious. What it knew was years, and depth, and anger; and for the first time, Tifa, a human, saw it all. And it saw her.
She steeled herself against it. Try. She had to try. If Cloud had survived this, so could she.
It spoke to her then, and its voice washed against her, threatening to drown her out. The white materia burned in her hands.
She didn't know if it knew words, but she began to talk anyway.
Jenova is here, she began. The Calamity from the Skies. It came here two thousand years ago, and it's poisoned you and it's poisoned us. We can't fight it ourselves.
It roiled against her. A response would have been nice. She felt herself drifting, and she tried to remember that she was standing in a church in what was left of Midgar, begging for the lives of humanity.
We need help, she told it. Help us. The stigma, it's - it's killing both of us. That's... you need to help. If you won't give me that power, you'll need to use it yourself. Help us.
Silence again. The air around her smelled like burning ozone. Far above her and in the distance, she felt a discharge of magic - an enormous one, if she could feel it this far away. The kind she'd seen combatants let loose on death's door, a blade in their heart, their life dripping out onto the ground.
Her heart sunk into her stomach, and she thought of Cloud, still wasting away, fighting an opponent that was stronger than ever. She thought of her friends, still trying to evacuate the city as things made of black rotting smoke clawed their way into being began ripping apart anyone unfortunate enough to be in the way. She thought of how, even if they won, Cloud would have a month left to live. Perhaps two. That they might have six, or twelve, until they were eventually claimed by the stigma as well. She thought of how this man had died once already, and would continue to manifest again and again as long as there was a single drop of Jenova left. She thought of the decrepit remains of the world and the families they'd fought to preserve. She thought of how there was nothing she could do about any of it.
The materia in her hand began to glow. The spell gradually faded from her mind, until it locked itself behind the wall again. She stood there, defeated. She hadn't managed to cast it after all.
And then the Planet unleashed its fury.
It had been festering there, for almost two thousand years, and had been building more and more over the last hundred. It had built towards the humans draining its life away and the parasite burrowing into its veins. It was two thousand years of pain and anger on an incomprehensible scale. The white materia would summon a force to destroy whatever threat remained to the Planet. Before Holy, there could have been Weapons. And before Weapons, there were the Cetra. The Weapons were dead, and there were no Cetra left alive to shape the will of the Planet, to temper and channel its force. Tifa had reached the Planet, but Tifa was only human.
By the time they'd discovered the damage done, it was far too late to stop it.
Holy burst from the patch of dirt in a torrent. When it arrived in the form of a violent maelstrom that lasted three days, it burned away Jenova with the wrath of the world She and the humans She had infested had rain sank into the sores of anyone unfortunate enough to be caught outside, and the flesh sizzled and disintegrated upon contact. Tifa watched, her clothes drenched, as it carved away at their bodies. One child had a patch on her arm that looked like a particularly bad rug burn. Another was missing a chunk of his forehead and part of his eye, and was unmistakably dead and stigma free. The injured-but-alive took cover inside the buildings, while anyone carried those who couldn't walk inside.
As the storm continued, she began to observe. Some were stepping out into the rain, deliberately. She watched it mangle their bodies. She watched more and more pour out, as it became clearer what the rain did. There were even more on the second day, and more still on the third.
All this she watched in complete silence. She set about moving the bodies somewhere they wouldn't be washed away.
They found Cloud eventually, when the rain finally stopped. He had been lying on the remains of a skyscraper in the ruins, his left arm and chest bloodied from the rain and from the multiple stab wounds all over his body. It had taken him another day to wake up, but he was somehow still alive. He kept looking at his arm and doing something with his mouth that she thought might have been a smile. She thought he was delirious from blood loss at first, until she noticed, exactly, what part of his arm he kept looking at, and what parts of his flesh the rain had removed.
Most people had not been as lucky as Cloud. Most people had had the sores on their faces, rather than their arms.
Tifa did not speak to anyone for a while after that. How could she? What was there to say? Few had recognised her, fortunately enough - she had been drenched. They had aired a televised service a few days later, formally thanking her for the cure. She didn't say a word during that either.
Cloud didn't say much to her during that time, either. Or maybe she didn't remember him saying much. He seemed afraid to, she assumed. Barret had stayed at Seventh Heaven another month, joined at the hip to Marlene, who he frequently checked for sores on her arms. He would often sit by her at the bar. "You did your best," he'd say. "You did the only thing you could do."
That had been the part that hurt the worst. "The only thing you could do".
It seemed that was all she'd ever been able to do.
"Tifa."
Tifa turned to see Nanaki and Barret standing behind her. She looked at them. Barret looked back and saw the white materia in her hands. He looked back up at her face incredulously, and Tifa threw the white materia into the pool in the church in frustration.
"Didn't work anyway," she said, looking away from them.
"What in the world were you -"
"Nothing. Look, I chucked it," she continued, cutting off Nanaki. "I shouldn't have been keeping it under the bed anyway, we should've known Marlene would find it. We're lucky she hasn't gotten to anything else."
"...What were you trying to do?" Nanaki sat down and watched her patiently.
"Something isn't right." She could feel her hands shaking slightly as what she might've almost repeated caught up to her, and she clenched her fists to keep them still. "You know he wouldn't just snap like that. We know something's wrong, and we're all just..."
"You can't fight this one away, Teef," said Barret, sitting down on one of the pews. Tifa sat next to him. "Cloud can handle it in the meantime."
"Sometimes he can't," said Tifa. "He probably wouldn't accept help anyway."
"You ain't his caretaker," said Barret. "And not the world's, either."
"We used to be," she said, and there was an uncomfortable silence for several moments.
"...I am not sure the Planet would know what this is to begin with," said Nanaki. "But thank you for trying."
"No. I know that. I threw it out. We're done here." She stood up, then paused. "...Don't tell Cloud. Alright?"
Nanaki cocked his head to the side. "And what are we supposed to tell him, should he ask?"
"Not this. It'll just make everything worse. You know how he... how we - you know how it'll go."
"He's rubbing off on you," said Barret. "Thought you had more sense than that."
"Let's just go," she said, and strode out the door, leaving the white materia behind, like she should have done in the first place.
She returned back to the bar and found the front room empty. She checked the back and found Cid and Jessie camped out in the back room. Jessie was asleep, but Cid was lying against the couch, smoking a cigarette. Tifa stood in front of him, cleared her throat, and waited.
Cid put out his cigarette. "What the hell kinda bar doesn't allow you to smoke in it?" he growled.
"The kind that I live in," she said. "The whole place is gonna smell now."
"Think I'm entitled to one fuckin' cigarette, lady." He stood up and stretched. "Everyone else went to bed."
"What time is it?"
"'Bout one in the morning. Mind tellin' me what you ran off for?"
"I thought I had a lead," said Tifa uncomfortably.
"...And?"
"And I didn't."
Cid continued to stare at her.
"It was nothing," she said, a bit firmer this time. "I wish it wasn't, but it was."
"This ain't gettin' to you, is it?"
Tifa shrugged. "We've dealt with worse and come out-"
"'Cause if it is that's nobody's business but your own, but you're gonna rip yourself apart trying to pretend everything's fine when it's not. Just look at your boyfriend over there." Tifa shifted uncomfortably at the word boyfriend, and Cid rolled his eyes. "Fuckbuddy, then. Whatever you two are callin' it."
He got up and stretched himself out with a pained grunt. "No shame in admitting you're outta your depth. Shit, we've all been that way for four years."
"...I want to help," she said after a moment. She suddenly felt very tired as the events of the day began to catch up to her.
"Ain't that the fuckin' statement of the year," muttered Cid. "I'm heading out back for a smoke. Your bed's probably full by now. No one likes Cloud's piss-poor excuse for a mattress." Cid disappeared around the corner, and a moment later she heard the screen door swing open and then shut.
Tifa removed her boots, which were still a bit muddy from the church and the half-melted snow slush up north (she'd been there earlier today, hadn't she?), and quietly crept up the stairs. She made a quick stop to her room to change into sleep clothes (which were really just some of Cloud's "civvies" she'd decided were comfortable), stepping over a sleeping Barret on the way over. It seemed nearly everyone had filed into her room. It was slightly larger, which left more space for blankets. A quick headcount indicated Nanaki was the only one missing.
She left a quick peck on Marlene's forehead before leaving. She probably owed her that much.
She checked Cloud's room and found him and Nanaki curled up against one another in his bed. If it could be called a bed, anyway. It was really more of a cot: the mattress was only a few inches thick, and there was a single blanket and a single pillow for comfort. No, that wasn't right - there were two pillows now. One of them was hers. She wasn't sure how she'd missed it before.
She'd have to see about buying him something warmer when he wasn't looking. She knew from experience he wouldn't accept it as a gift. Cloud didn't do gifts. If anyone got him anything, he'd wind up either "paying it back" or "working it off". The actual chair for his desk had been an uphill struggle as it was. They could barely get him to do birthdays, and not just because he didn't quite remember when it was.
Tifa carefully slipped in behind him, since Cloud was already using Nanaki's stomach as a pillow - Tifa shook her head in exasperation - and slipped under the blanket. Cloud jerked awake and twisted around to look at her. He was still using Barret's shirt, it seemed - he was practically swimming in it.
"It's me," she whispered.
Cloud stared uncomprehendingly at her for a moment, then nodded and rolled back over. She wasn't sure if it was because he didn't remember her leaving, or was too tired to know what was going on. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt toward the latter.
She hooked an arm over his shoulders - partially to keep him from jumping out the window again without her knowledge, and partially because she wanted to. He relaxed into her grip, and a moment later she heard his breathing even out.
For a moment, Tifa wondered if he actually needed air.
She scolded herself for considering it. Of course he needed air. You probably couldn't genetically engineer someone to not need air, could you?
Perhaps you could. It was possible to genetically engineer someone to be able to walk through walls, after all.
It would be so much easier to deal with if they just knew what it was they'd spent five years splicing him with. What kind of thing Jenova was, what the world it had come from was like, if it had come from one at all. Cloud had a lot of issues understanding the passage of time - perhaps She experienced it differently? Anything that had been preying on planets for an unfathomably long amount of time would have to. And She would have to be a predator, naturally, because she couldn't think of any bigger predator out there that would eat something that already ate the Lifestream. Maybe there was something lurking out there that ate galaxies, and Jenova was just the space equivalent of a rabbit. She certainly seemed to spread like one.
Sometimes she'd find herself thinking of Her as a disease Cloud had - other times, as a person. When they'd been fighting Her on the ground, they'd thought of it as more of an animal. She wasn't really sure which one was more correct.
On that day four years ago, though; the sky filled with fire, the low roar of something immense entering the atmosphere, of Meteor hanging in the sky, seeming like more of a living entity than a chunk of rock as it began tearing through Midgar to reach the earth below it... she wasn't sure what to think of it then.
The noise it had been making was the worst. She wondered if it was anything like the music Cloud claimed to hear. She'd asked him to hum the tune once, but he'd just shaken his head. "It doesn't have one I can make," he'd said.
She wondered how much time he spent listening to it that they didn't know about. By the time she managed to get to sleep, the sky had already begun to lighten.
A noise roused her from her sleep. When she opened her eyes, the bed was empty. She heard the mumbling, crackling chatter of a poorly-tuned radio. Perhaps Cloud was fixing it? Then she heard a low growling, and she sat up.
Nanaki had backed up against the opposite wall, ears flattened and teeth bared. Across from him was Cloud, who was sitting at his desk wheezing faintly.
She got up from the bed and slowly approached his chair. "Cloud?"
Cloud didn't respond. The distressed look on his face quickly faded away to one of indifference. He looked hollow.
The last time Tifa had seen that look on his face it had been four years ago on the Highwind, when he'd tried to slit Barret's throat.
Then his head tilted towards her and the eyes focused on her, and a new expression appeared that looked wrong on Cloud's face. He seemed inquisitive, in the same dry sort of way one would look at an interesting bug. His arm moved.
Tifa had seen enough, and immediately ripped him from his chair and pinned him to the ground with a loud thud, twisting his good arm behind his back and applying pressure to his throat with her other hand to partially restrict his breathing. No human could match the strength of a Soldier (or something very like one) no matter how strong they were, but Tifa had the element of surprise and, unlike Cloud, eight more years of experience than him from the tuition of a trained professional. She wasn't sure what kind of training the thing using Cloud had, but she'd gone toe to toe with Soldiers before. It would have to do.
She heard Cloud grunt involuntarily as he hit the ground, but he didn't do anything to free himself. She kept contact on him anyway.
Nanaki crept into place beside them, still on edge. "There's something wrong. It shouldn't be here."
She looked sharply at him. "What shouldn't?"
Nanaki just paced anxiously. "...I don't know."
Cloud began to struggle against her then, and she braced herself against him more firmly as Nanaki prepared to pounce if necessary, but then she paused. His movements were all wrong - not a former MP attempting to break himself out of a hammerlock. He didn't even try to blast her off into a wall; it was just uncoordinated thrashing.
"Shh... shh, c'mon, it's okay," she said, doing her best to sound soothing while maintaining the pressure on his neck. "It's okay... wake up." Could he even hear her like this? He'd never been straightforward with her about the whole thing. Might as well try anyway.
By this point the noise from their struggling and Nanaki's growling had gotten attention, and a moment later five more people burst through the door into his room. They stared at her. Tifa stared back. Cloud continued thrashing.
"Don't just stand there," she snapped, as Cloud gave a particularly spirited thrash and she was flung off, prompting Nanaki to pounce on him instead.
It took the combined efforts of Tifa, Barret, and Cid to wrestle him back into the bed. They were probably a bit rougher than they should have been, given he was a bag of broken bones at this point. She'd apologise to him later.
A few moments later, he stopped moving entirely. Tifa very carefully released her grip on his arm, panting heavily, and saw with a brief flash of relief that he quickly pulled it towards himself but made no attempt to leave the bed.
Everyone was quiet for a moment.
Tifa took a deep breath. "...You -"
"I know." He sounded tired. "I remember."
Tifa looked away and turned to the others. Barret let go as well, looking worried. Marlene was now peeking in through the doorway, her eyes wide and her face drawn. Reeve just looked grim.
"That's what that was?" she asked again.
Cloud closed his eyes. "Mm-hm."
"You in any pain?"
"Yep. You gonna break my legs next, too?"
Well, at least he was coherent. Yuffie sat down on the bed next to him and ran a weak healing spell through him. There probably wasn't much point in getting him to take anymore pain pills right now.
Barret stood up. "Marlene and I are gonna have a chat," he said firmly. Tifa nodded. Cloud rolled back over into his pillow, causing Barret to simply shake his head and walk out the door.
"...What time is it?" asked Tifa after a couple minutes of silence.
"A little after eleven," said Reeve. "We would've woken you up, but we thought you'd both appreciate a bit of a lie-in." He sank into Cloud's chair and sighed. "A good thing, in retrospect.
"I wouldn't have let him leave," said Nanaki. "I was watching."
"He could've run off anyway. It's not like you could've barred the door or anything," said Yuffie.
"I shouldn't have slept in," said Tifa curtly. "That's really all there is to it."
"I'm right here," muttered Cloud into his pillow, and everyone went silent again.
Eventually, they all filed out of the room. Tifa got up to leave as well. Closed the bar might be, but she still had dates to check and product to rearrange. Cloud caught her arm on her way to the door.
"I'll just be downstairs. Alright?" she said.
"What if it doesn't stop next time?" he said. "What if I wind up like that again, and it doesn't go away?"
Tifa glanced back at the door. What could she possibly say? She'd long since run out of fodder for lies to keep him stable.
"If I did... you'd kill me, right?"
She turned to look at him sharply. "Cloud -"
"I don't want to wind up like that ever again. I'd already be dead anyway, right?"
"I'm not killing you." He looked away at the anger in her voice, but this wasn't something she'd back off on. "You'd still be alive, and we'd find a way to fix it. But I'm not killing you. You..."
"But if there wasn't anything left to save, then -"
"There would be. And I'd - we would find a way to do it. And you're not convincing me any other way, so you might as well drop it."
How dare you ask me that? was what she also wanted to say, but didn't. How dare you ask me that after everything?
She hoped he knew it anyway. He ought to.
She stood there for a moment, trying to come up with something else for him to reply to.
"...Why don't you come with me downstairs?" was what she came up with eventually. "You can help me check dates, and we can talk."
"Your customers aren't gonna like that I've been around your food," he said flatly.
"They don't..." She hesitated. They would know now, wouldn't they? If Cloud had been outside with no glasses, or if the paramedics had talked about what they could've seen...
"...Fuck 'em," she said eventually, with more confidence than she felt.
Cloud let out a short huff of laughter. "That's bad form. What if somebody heard that?"
"Nobody's gonna hear it."
"Well, I heard it."
"Guess you did. C'mon." She offered a shoulder, and he got to his feet with a pained groan and hobbled his way downstairs. She glanced at his swords lying by the bar and sighed. One thing at a time. At least they weren't in his room.
They spent the next few hours combing through their inventory. She talked to him for a while about the cave she'd spent several days clearing out. He'd asked a few questions every now and then, mostly about what kinds of things she'd punched, but otherwise kept quiet. Yuffie stopped in at one point, and by the time Tifa remembered she was supposed to be yelling at her for skimming thirty gil off a register she had already slipped out the back door again. She eventually got Cloud started chopping vegetables, since he at least knew how to handle a blade. He seemed to enjoy it... probably. It was always hard to tell. She didn't think she'd ever seen him properly smile once.
Come to think of it, she wasn't sure when she'd last smiled either.
