XI
Tifa swirled a rag around the rim of a pint glass, which was festooned in soapy water.
Business was uneventful. Her regular, a thickset man in faded denims by the name of Cawley, had trudged home not half an hour ago. Bemoaning of his unrequited daily infatuations, Tifa had offered the taxi driver her cursory advice of cleaning up his dependence on alcohol and an early night's rest. In the days of law enforcement beyond volunteer armies and the inane, legal tug-of-war between the WRO and Shinra, she'd been sure there were at least scattered mentions of driving while under the influence of a pulsing hangover. The Seventh Heaven was more like the Seventh Purgatory; a solitary, bare establishment.
Limping in was a swarthy man, his boots beaten against the protesting timber. He was tall and spindly, and while not conventionally intimidating, there was an animalistic glint to his olive eyes as he escorted in a rabble behind him. They edged in, one after another, like a peculiar, grinning shadow that distended and welled up as the corners of Tifa's polite smile began to recede in turn. There was something innately untrustworthy about them, something unnatural.
"Can I help you, gentlemen?" The barmaid staked into Owl's dark expression with a honeyed façade, one which - through all her years of experience wandering the continents of the world together with Cloud and the party - well disguised the thorns beneath this flower. This man exuded unethical squalor.
"Yes." She was a magnificent woman. Shapely and sweet, with enough candour and independence for him to enjoy claiming from her. He relished the prospect of tasting that feminine strength and freedom with his own tongue - perhaps over a barstool in shame, or given the amount of comrades he'd promised entertainment to tonight, he'd have no option but to sprawl her over the floor between them all. His thrawn, leathery fingers could spread her open, disgraced to the core, and a phantom itch tickled against where he'd once have fed down her throat. She was just a woman. She wasn't smart enough to unravel his deceptions. A cluster of warm, slick centres of ecstasy to mount, and fill, and conquer; no more. Owl simpered, "yes, uh... help, yes... is very lost here, okay?"
"All of you?" Tifa canted an eyebrow at their awful transparency. "My, that is a situation. I'm afraid we don't do board and lodge, though."
"Oh, no! No!" Owl exclaimed with vigour, his pitch squealing and high. First they'd have to rob her of her movements and awareness, and restrain her. He searched around the bar, leering hungrily across the homely portraits and certificates that littered the walls, respirations fluttering and excited. He settled upon the only object his simple, lecherous mind could focus on without slithering back to Tifa herself. "No, phone! You can, um, use your phone for us, please?"
"And who would you like me to contact, sir?" asked the barmaid, playing out his ridiculous tale.
So they want me to turn around? Tifa mused to herself. And they're armed, too. Really - it's almost insulting.
"I have a very good friend," Owl urged. He cycled his finger around, "and I shall give you letters of it, if you uh..."
She relented for the sake of curiosity, her cynicism only adding to her strategy. She'd survived the slums in Midgar, and this robbery or assault by a clump of braindead thugs wasn't the first that she'd encountered - it wasn't the first that Tifa had humiliated in utter defeat, either. From a distance, and judging from their cowardly, roundabout method of execution, she assumed that they'd be one smaller weapon lighter within the minute.
"Of course," she beamed affably, following her clientele's instructions.
Their eye contact snapped.
Uncertainty reigned.
The next few seconds were poised upon a knife's salient edge.
Not a blink. Not a breath.
Only the creak of wood, the nod of Owl's head, and the grunt of exertion.
Now.
Tifa whirled upon on one foot, kicking the other with astounding force into an oncoming glass bottle. It shattered upon impact into a galaxy of diamond shards, her arm lifting to shield her eyes from its meteoric allure. There were two men thundering towards her, each wielding torn, lead piping. The first swing towards her was powerful but broad and predictable, under which she slipped with ease. She rooted her hand around the grey shaft in his grip, tautening out his arm as she twisted on her heel and wedged her elbow under his chin. He yelped, staggered back, his teeth gouged into his lip, and Tifa relieved him of his crude baton.
The barmaid parried the second man's oncoming blow, lead pealing out against lead in a shuddering collision. Tifa swatted the bar against his thigh with imperceptible sprightliness. As he buckled down against the sting, she swivelled around and grounded him headlong against the planks, planting him there beneath the mind-rending piston of her left foot. A third attacker was approaching the fray, but Tifa launched the pipe into bruising contact with his midriff. The first man recovered, but he was bewildered and disoriented; prey for her flurrying, iron fists as they blended the bloody kaleidoscope of his vision into black.
The third man stumbled forward, clasping his gut.
Tifa wrenched him up by the roots of his hair, where he strained out in anguish until the rigid chop of her hand crushed his windpipe.
"Shit," Owl hissed. He propped his palms up against the backs of two retreating gang members, jostling and shoving at them. "What are you, pussies? Hold the bitch down, already! I want to make Vincent's pretty friend cry for what he do to me! Hear me, bitch? You'll cry tonight when Owl hurts you!"
"What are you gonna do, you sack-less little faggot? Scissor her?" argued the one to Owl's left, acrid and defensive.
"Yeah, go fuck yourself," the right-hand muscle snorted, shouldering away the eunuch's grasp. "You said this was gonna be easy."
"You are not to go! Fuck you, man," Owl snarled, clawing back onto the two like a persistent disease as they pushed through the thinned crowd. His anger erupted in inchoate sputters, his eyes bloodshot and livid. "You fucking cowards! Fuck!" he cried out, before the one formerly on his right hooked a weathered crown of knuckles into the pervert's face. Owl pitched backwards with a pained, indignant shriek, cradling beneath his sodden nose. The two left him to smoulder, to plot and devise sinister and underhanded methods to punish the young barmaid so that he could vent his gall out on her contused, defiled remains.
"You are to go, actually," Tifa called out above his fuming thoughts. "In fact, insist you all do. We're closing up for the night."
Light, tottering footsteps pattered down through the rear corridor, attracting the bar's attention. Denzel rubbed his socket groggily, wearing an ill-fitted white shirt and loose pyjama pants. The young orphan's eyes widened in disconcertion as the scene unravelled itself, and swiftly both he and his guardian realised the error of his appearance; he was a vulnerability, now a target, in this unscrupulous trespass. Eight fiendish pairs of eyes gaped towards him.
"Tifa?" he looked uneasily towards her for signs of reassurance.
"Go back to bed honey," the barmaid bid firmly, staring towards the interlopers. Her heart was a tempest within her, one which blistered with the lightning of her trained aggression yet sunk, inundated by the downpour of what a single mistake could mean for both herself and Denzel. She was afraid, even if it never once became apparent upon her scorned disposition; she was afraid for everything - but that was the nature of being one who cared, who possessed a conscience.
"What's going on?" Denzel was frozen in place. "Who are these guys?"
"Go to bed, Denzel! Go on, now!" Tifa shouted, prising her gaze away with a fierce lash of emotion. A mother was hellish when invoked, and now that higher stakes were involved, she found herself short of both forbearance and her well-worn humour. In that sliver of opportunity, Owl's withered hand latched around the neck of a spirit bottle suffocated with a plug of fabric, and he patted around his jacket pockets for signs of his lighter's bulge.
Affording himself some time, Owl barked, "seven against one, go! Go get the child! Make him watch!"
"Run, Denzel!" Tifa scooped a barstool around in front of her using the crook of her foot, propelling it out into the path of a fourth man who attempted to vault over the bar and around her impregnable defence. He lurched, kneeing the furniture aside, but hurtled into the counter from his lapse in momentum. Two more confronted her directly, while the final seventh considered the unoccupied bracket of space around by Tifa's left-hand side. "Bolt the door! Hurry!"
At the same time, Denzel skewed around towards the back of the bar, towards his room, towards safety, but a hand hitched around his ankle. "G-get off me!" he stammered, tugging his foot back, the shivers of adrenaline punctuating his every breath. The fingers attached around him were unfeeling, even as he trampled them, clinging with the tenacity of a bramble bush. What did Tifa say? Denzel recalled, incoherent and distressed, what did- the head! The side of the head!
Denzel pounded his free foot against the man's temple, just where he'd been taught. Again and again he struck against it, often scuffing against the scalp from nerves and sheer unpolished error, but ruthlessly enough to where the fingers loosened around his whitened skin. With horror piercing his heart Denzel was helpless against the oncoming shadow of a grown man, who lunged down upon him in a rash and clattering tackle.
"You all are fucking useless," she heard Owl baying in the backdrop. "Fucking, fucking useless! I will piss on your graves, pussies!"
Tifa deflected away a punch with her left forearm, screwing her palm into the fifth man's stomach. The wind ripped up through his choked throat, and delirious, he flattened up against the wall. The sixth man thrust his boot stiffly into the small of Tifa's back, butting her into the fifth, who grappled onto her shoulders with a giddy and waning consciousness. The barmaid drove twin tiger's claws into his collarbone, rupturing it; the marrow collapsed with a violent crack, denting his chest inward. With fistfuls taken of his shirt, she pivoted him around with the ease of hoisting up an infant to soak the welt from the other previously behind her, before casting him, his lungs drowning in blood, across the wood. She whipped her foot into the sixth man's hipbone, and in the ensuing recoil, drilled his skull through the thick plaster of Seventh Heaven. He struggled for a moment, a pall of dust excreted out through the subsidence, before falling limp.
"Denzel...!" Tifa rushed towards the fourth and seventh men, the former of which had crawled over the bar in her absence towards the young boy. The latter brought up his fist to sink into the cowering orphan's cheek, but Tifa was incensed and caught him by the wrist. She snared the joint with sharp, muscular discipline, and locked his arm at a ninety-degree angle. The man winced and moaned with resistant outrage, hauled along like a leashed hound on three legs. Tifa slashed the guillotine of her shin into his jugular, and rasping horribly, he raked at his neck, writhing blue-faced and asphyxiated; a maggot's death. His comrade ambushed her with a vicious left cuff to the side of her head, and a second with his right; Tifa pedalled back in retreat, tinnitus keening stringently.
Behind the skirmish, Denzel gathered his composure, pushing himself up to his knees. At first his thoughts were to barricade himself inside his bedroom, but he couldn't live with himself if these men pulled some trick on Tifa. Cloud wouldn't have let that happened. Cloud would have had the strength to disperse them together with Tifa, instead of trembling away and becoming nothing but a hindrance. He hated himself. Hurriedly, he plucked up one of the lead pipes.
"Hey, why're you fightin' it so bad, sweetheart?" the man manoeuvred through the labyrinth of bodies, calling out in arrogance. "You run a bar all by yourself, you've gotta be stressed to hell 'n' back, right? C'mon, don't be a frigid bitch, now... you deserve it, parading around in those skimpy-ass clothes every day." His tongue darted out, dampening his lips with greed. "You know what you do to guys, don't you, you little fuckin' tease? You know what you're doing!"
"Kicking your greasy asses outta my bar," Tifa countered angrily, "that's what I'm doing!"
"I bet you get all kinds of propositions, don't you?" his eyes glistened with a low, serpentine menace. "Yeah. And they ruffle those feathers of yours just the right way, don't they? You've gotta feel like queen of the whole fucking roost in here. Well, you brought it upon yourself! This was bound to happen, lookin' like-"
Denzel tossed the lead pipe into the back of the man's crown, blood bubbling and festering as a bruise mounted there. The last man blundered towards Tifa, and she shattered his front teeth with a single, wicked blow. She withdrew a bloodstained fist, like a miniature graveyard of enamel, only to cave in the man's forehead against the blunt corner of the Seventh Heaven counter. She resumed callous, wrathful heed of Owl, who had kindled the head of his lighter.
"I say to you," the trafficker growled, haggard with fury, "I say, bitch cry tonight! It was not joke- I... I am to make you cry, I know how! Burn in hell!"
Owl tilted the spirit bottle against the head of the lighter, holding aloft the makeshift torch as it ignited. Rampant, the fire seeped across the cloth as an infection would, rumbling and bountiful. In a twisted, hiccuping bout of hysteria, Owl bowled the lethal cocktail past Tifa. The glass burst asunder in an ungodly conflagration that smothered the décor in torrid, raw limbs of flame. Against the sweltering ash, Tifa's first instinct was to swaddle Denzel from the blast.
"Denzel, get down!" she screamed, one of the bodies' legs kinking up between hers. She tripped, all breath jetted from her lungs as she hit the ground.
The orphan, aghast and glued there in paralysis, watched the tactile, almost organic burning tendrils scaling up towards the bar's liquor cabinet. The Seventh Heaven shivered from the force of the explosion, an enormous skyward blaze that carved through the uppermost floors of the building. Molten timber supports capsized inward, riddling the bar with a toxic deluge of smoke. Tifa rose, shaken and sooty amid the inferno, scouring out signs of life that were no longer there.
"Denzel!" Tifa coughed, hot tears simmering upon her eyes. "Denzel, where are you?! Oh, my god... Denzel!"
There, impaled into the black floor by a splintered board was a charred carcass. Through a lipless, cracked mouth agonised murmurs crept out, drowned out below the ambient rage of the fire. It was a small body; a child's body, which stirred and squirmed in its dying throes like a newborn disturbed in its crib. Although no other would recognise him, Tifa did with an immediate, harrowing swell of horror and grief: it was Denzel, her own adoptive son. Her failure.
No, no, no...
She emerged into the street, the mutilated shadow of her boy cradled in her arms.
No, please; not this - not like this, please...
The upheaval of onlookers meant nothing to her.
The billowing smoke that eclipsed the moonlight meant nothing to her.
His eyes were still so brilliantly blue, unblinking sapphires immersed within coarse charcoal. She loved those eyes. How often she'd brushed aside his scruffy brown fringe and mothered him about showing them off a little more. They'd attract all the girls, she'd remarked to his embarrassment, insistently combing back the hazel locks while he sulked and blushed away. Just do something with that damn mop of yours, already. You're as bad as Cloud.
There was one word she could make out.
One word that brought her to tears.
'Mom'.
One word that broke her.
"Stick with me," Tifa whispered plaintively. A thick sob gathered in her throat, "stick with me, Denzel, come on..."
She stroked back the embers of his hair, like she always did.
You'd break all the girls' hearts, I told you, but I didn't think mine would be among them.
Don't close those eyes, Denzel.
Don't close them, please don't...
