Shade
by TwinEnigma
NB: This is the second chapter in a two chapter update. If you have not read 10, then...
11.
It is a busy night at the Seventh Heaven. There's a title boxing match being broadcast from Plate-side Sector Three and this is the only bar in all of lower Sector Seven that still has a working PHS-Visual link the ShinRa haven't shut off yet. Everyone around knows it, too, and they've packed the place near to capacity.
Tifa, behind the bar, sighs as she eyes Barrett looming by the front door and idly wishes she had two extra arms tonight. Jesse laughs at her misery as she passes by, sailing out of the rear kitchen and into the crowd with a tray of Hot Chocobo Wings and beer balanced flawlessly on her shoulder. Somewhere, behind her, Biggs hits the bell in the window for bar service, signaling an order is up.
It is just another ordinary, busy night, one where they actually are the seat of the community they pretend to be on the surface and not just a front for something much, much bigger than themselves. It's hard to remember sometimes that fighting ShinRa isn't just about taking out the reactors, but also providing the things that the communities struggling under the Plate need to survive. Places people can call their own – safe places – are few and far between down here and, tonight, Seventh Heaven truly is a safe place.
It's an ordinary night and that's precisely why Tifa notices the girl that squeezes through the crowd to the bar. She's young, close to her own age, and she looks dreadfully overwhelmed by everything from the sheer din to the near standing-room crowd. There's a man who offers her a seat, but Old Ben, a regular who sometimes plays cards with Biggs and Wedge, cuts in and lets her take his own, placing himself like a wall between them until the man gets the hint and clears off.
"Why, Ben, I didn't know you were such a big ol' softy," Tifa drawls, approaching and throwing a dishrag over her shoulder.
Old Ben smiles at her, green eyes twinkling, and raises his glass, rolling it and the whiskey inside. "I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about," he remarks in his stupid-fancy Old Midgar accent and deliberately turns away to watch the match.
"What can I get you?" Tifa asks the girl.
She stares at her, blinking as if the question has caught her totally off guard, and Tifa is struck by how green her eyes are – not like Old Ben's, but a really deep green, like the ads for emeralds on the ShinRa Shopping Network. They're striking, actually.
"Drink?" Tifa offers.
"Um, yes," the girl manages, ducking her head to hide her rapidly coloring cheeks. "Please. What he was having."
Tifa raises an eyebrow, doubtful the poor thing has ever had whiskey before, much less neat, and reaches for the speed rack and a glass. She pours and sets it down in front of the girl, watching her as she tentatively sips it, coughs a little, and tries not to wheeze.
"Call it a hunch, but I don't think whiskey's your speed."
The girl's face is about as red as the jacket she's wearing, but she bravely – or stubbornly – holds onto the glass. "It's fine."
Suit yourself, Tifa thinks as the bar service bell rings again.
"Someone just ordered a Hell House!" Jesse shouts gleefully, running past and hitting the door to the kitchen hard. "Extra, extra Loco Weed!"
Wedge cackles loudly from somewhere in the kitchen.
Tifa winces and prays for that poor dumb sonofabitch that decided to test the Seventh Heaven's firepower. Unless, of course, they happen to be a Turk, in which case she hopes they get lost on the way to ShinRa's lovely sub-plate public facilities and drown there.
Some things you don't even wish on a Dorky Face, but, as far as she and everyone else living down here are concerned, the Turks are an exception to that rule.
She makes her way back down the other end of the bar, briskly taking care of business. It's a good night: they'll be able to stretch the profit out well enough for sure. Might even be enough she could talk Cloud around to giving a hand, now he's recovered from that weird fever he'd picked up during his final deployment.
Honestly, everyone'd think the ShinRa would take better care of their prized SOLDIERs but, then again, she knows better than anyone not to think that for even a single second. She's a living witness to just how little the ShinRa cared. Deep in her gut, she knows that they must have known their prized general was cracking. And they still sent him anyway, the bastards.
They don't care about anything but profit. It's a fact. And they're killing people – killing the planet. They nearly killed Cloud, too – if he hadn't run into her when he did, he might not have pulled through that fever.
Cloud saying he'd quit had been some of the best news she'd heard in a long time.
The fight winds down and with it, the din and the customers begin to dwindle away. Barrett turns up the lights for Last Call not long after; it's late and, though Midgar never supposedly sleeps, the last trains will be leaving soon and everyone knows they're less dangerous by far than trying to pass through sub-plate sectors this late on foot.
Tifa comes back around, getting started on collecting the stray glassware and wiping down the bar. The girl's still there, nursing the same glass, and is staring into it like it might answer all her questions if she stares long and hard enough. "How you holding up there?"
Truthfully, the girl doesn't look too good, now that she's got a better look at her. She's got that worn, run-down look about her that Tifa has seen all too much down here. She hasn't got the bruises or the unkempt clothes that sometimes come with it, but she doesn't look like she's slept properly in a good long while.
Poor thing doesn't just look tired – she looks absolutely and completely exhausted.
"It's my boyfriend," the girl says at last, cupping the glass in both hands, and she sounds miserable.
For a moment, Tifa holds her breath and hopes what will come next is not what it so often is down here.
"He's sick. And I thought… I don't know what I thought. I was just so happy to have him back."
Tifa nods, trying not to show her relief.
Now things make a bit more sense: the exhaustion, the general sense of run-down and worn-out. Down here, proper medical care is often lacking and, more often than not, it falls back to loved ones to do the caring-for. With almost everyone being too poor to be able to skip shifts at their jobs, a severe illness could drain the healthier party to the point of breaking.
"Five years," the girl says distantly, "Almost five years he's been missing. He was SOLDIER, you know? And they sent him on some stupid mission to some backwoods, backwater town and then… he was just gone."
She pauses, leaning back and sighing heavily. "Then, all of a sudden, he's here, in Midgar, but…"
This time, the pause comes and Tifa can tell that the girl is struggling to find words to explain.
"He's different," she settles on at last, deliberately placing her hands apart on the bar as if to illustrate a distance. "Something happened to him out there, something bad. It's got him all messed up."
That is where the girl stops to take a drink and it's not a gentle one. She bangs it back, using the gulp of whiskey to pause a moment.
"He thinks he's his CO," she says at last, and it's tinged with the hysteria of someone pushed to the brink of their capacity to cope. "Freakin' Sephiroth."
Tifa blinks and stills, looking at this woman again, this time with a far keener, warier eye. It is not out of the realm of possibility that the Turks could have finally caught on and connected her back to Nibelheim. As a surviving witness to the ShinRa's monumental cock-up, she's more dangerous to them than all of AVALANCHE combined and if they found out she's still alive, there would be nothing they wouldn't do to shut her up. A quick look around the room confirms the lack of the distinctive Turk suits – which means absolutely nothing in the long run –, but now Barrett is tilting his head at her in concern.
She only has to signal and he'll be over here in a heartbeat.
"I just want to shake him and tell him to stop," the girl barrels on, making a futile abortive shaking motion with her hands, "But it won't help. It's Mako poisoning and that means Zack's only chance is Mideel, but I'm not even totally sure how we're going to get out of Midgar."
This time, Tifa actually freezes.
Zack is not a name she's heard in a long, long time, but it's one she knows well within the context of SOLDIER, Sephiroth and five years ago. It's seared in her mind, along with everything that happened in Nibelheim, and the memories of this man, a dead man, spill through her like a rock slide, all in the space of a moment. With them, the gnawing questions she's had since Cloud had reappeared with that sword and starting to do those gestures resurface.
Zack was there five years ago, a sunny contrast to his CO, and he'd kindly tried to assure her as she lay, half-dead, before grimly charging after Sephiroth. She hadn't known him well, not really, or for very long, but she knows who he was: a good, kind, cheerful man, one who faced a monster in the shape of a friend and she'd always assumed died in the process.
Cloud, when he'd showed up with that sword, - Odin, she had wondered if maybe, maybe Zack had somehow survived and taught him, but she's never quite gotten up the courage to ask Cloud the particulars of his sword's provenance or the origin of his new tics.
But if – and that was a big if – Zack truly had survived, gotten out of Nibelheim and away from ShinRa as this girl inferred, then why Midgar? Why this girl?
Wait, that's right: back then, he had mentioned in passing having a girlfriend back home, hadn't he? And 'home' for SOLDIER was Midgar.
What were the odds that of all bars under the Plate that that very same girlfriend would walk into Tifa's?
Very slim. Very slim, indeed.
"Zack - Zack Fair, right?" she prods, fully aware this could be a Turk trap.
The girl bobs her head in the affirmative but now she is staring at Tifa with alert, too-wary eyes, as if she too has just realized that maybe Tifa is not a friend – or possibly a Turk. Turks could be anywhere, after all, and anyone and it was wise to be cautious.
Still, if Zack was alive, it would be worth the risk.
"I was there five years ago," Tifa tells her, "In Nibelheim."
Notes:
Originally, this chapter was in Aerith's point of view, but playing around with it in draft stage, Tifa's POV fit better and Seventh Heaven actually functioning as a real bar radiated Strong Hospitality Industry Vibes, which were relatable tbh.
Old Ben is not the man you are looking for, but fits with the FF tradition of Biggs and Wedge.
Anyway, Tifa knows more than she thinks she knows and oh boy is this gonna be fun.