- Fallout -

Tifa dreamt of a city twice destroyed. It hadn't been a particularly beautiful city, and she'd remembered wanting to demolish parts of it herself, those large cylindrical structures that guarded the perimeter. Glowing green as heaven, as healing rain.

And now, it was a wasteland. She stumbled through piles of rubble and garbage. The city had flourished after its first destruction. After the rotting pizza had been no more, a new day emerged from the ashes. A hopeful ring around the edge of despair. The end of the world hadn't really ended.

She'd lived there once, maybe in dreams, though she'd hardly recognize it now. Her feet hit water, and it rushed over her boots cold. She'd reached a ditch in the piles of junk. A flow of rainwater that had somehow become blocked and backed up, flooding. A body floated by. A twisted, mangled awful thing. Not human. It had mandibles and faint feathery wings growing from its back. Tifa recoiled in horror.

The stream was full of them actually. Bodies of dead things. They piled high on one end, the source of the dam. Some were different, more closely resembling human. She reached out and touched the skin of one, but it fell into dust. The whole city was like dust, drifting away in the wind.

Why was she alone in this place? The sun burned low in the sky but she couldn't tell if it was sunrise or sunset. She had no sense of direction anymore. Or time. Time was a fluid meaningless event. Today could be yesterday could be tomorrow. She walked onward, through the dead city. The chattering shadows of her nightmares were gone, scattered about like lifeless rocks. Only she had survived.

She'd survived the destruction before and again and now. What more was there to do? She felt hungry, thirsty, but still she kept walking.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she remembered a man. A lover. A desire to be whole. He was here, wasn't he? In the ruins?

The sun moved higher. The sun moved lower. Where was she going? It didn't matter. The edges of the city were in reach, and after that, she'd just keep going. Leave the desolation behind. Find help maybe. She dreamt on.

She dreamt until she reached the shores of the ocean. The silhouetted city was dark at her back in the distance, and the ocean gleamed black and white at her feet. She knelt and scooped up a handful of sand. It reminded her of skeletons, ground into bits of scratchy tiny pieces.

He was blonde, she remembered. With blue eyes and a terrible secret.

"Cloud…" He didn't seem real. More like a convenient fantasy her brain had cooked up. Being lost in this city for so long can leave one discombobulated. And she'd been dreaming after all. "Cloud…"

The shoreline lapped at her boots. The sun drifted lower. Tifa began crying. Not because she was sad or happy but because she was lost in the deepest darkest sense of the word. Every fiber in her body felt disconnected. Unnatural. Impossible. She shouldn't exist.

She leaned back and stared up at the sky. It was a deep dark blue, and a single star shone above. A promise. The word repeated in her head a dozen times. Her promise. No, his promise.

Then she collapsed.

When she woke she was still dreaming, but it was hours or days later. Time didn't really matter here, she knew. The tide was washing up onto her clothing, bringing freezing cold waters, so she stood and walked onward, leaving a trail of bootprints in the sand. She was remembering more as she walked. His face, his touch, the way he smiled. She remembered a child, maybe two, and she remembered their relationship falling apart. There'd been another man in her life. There'd been joys and sorrows. Yes, she'd had a full life of emotions and events. But her mind kept going back to him.

"Cloud." She held onto the name like an anchor in a storm. It was all slowly coming back. She kept walking.

Eventually she reached the edges of a village, though it seemed mostly devastated. People in long robes moved about aimlessly, hopelessly lost. None of them paid her any attention as she passed, following the shore. They were just as out of sorts as she was, a mirror in the dream.

After the village, she began to feel tired again. And still very thirsty. Then she saw a body washed up on shore.

It was a man near a cavernous edge of the shoreline, lying on his side. Blonde hair was stuck to his face along with bits of debris from the ocean, seaweed and sand. This part of the beach opened into what seemed to be a cave system, though Tifa didn't venture in to confirm. Her eyes were set on the dead man and her heart was racing with a million memories.

She crouched next to him, gently turning him over with one hand, and instantly her mind jolted. It was him. The man in her dreams. Her lover. The one she'd been searching for all this time. Yes, she remembered now. She remembered everything! It flooded like daylight into her head.

"Cloud!"

He was breathing. Somehow, someway, he was alive. The Jenova, she reflected brutally, it must've kept him alive, protected him. They'd woken up in the real world, here. They'd done it. They'd found a way back, though the last thing she could remember was being locked in a cell at the WRO, for her own good Cloud had told her. But now, here he is! They'd beaten the odds.

"Wake up…" She shook him, but he wasn't responding. His pulse and breathing were steady but he simply wasn't waking up. She'd seen something like this before. It looked like Mako poisoning. And his shoulder was a bloody mess. She noticed there were burns all along his exposed skin.

The world clicked harsh and clear around her. She had to get him to safety from the elements before it got dark. It would be too cold and he was soaked. With little regard for herself, she pulled him up into the grassy dunes and looked all around. That village that she'd passed. Surely it couldn't be that far. She'd carry him back, drag him if she had to, and make sure someone there could help.

Now that she had a mission, nothing could stop her. Tensing her muscles, she lifted him up as best she could and trudged towards the village in the distance. It was Kalm. She remembered that now. And the residents were all supposed to be fervent worshippers of Jenova or something, but maybe they'd still be willing to help. It was her only shot.

With a clear path ahead, she pressed on, determined to save him. Again. How many times had she found him half-dead somewhere? No matter. She'd do it again. She'd do it a thousand times, if that's what it took. Because if she'd actually woken up here, in the real world, that meant he'd somehow succeeded in breaking free of the calamity.

It was an invigorating thought, and it kept her going as night tiptoed into the sky. She neared the village. They saw him and seemed to think he was some sort of god. They helped her, too, giving her food and water. She collapsed again hours later, feeling the weight of time and anxiety catching up, though she refused to leave his side. This time she wouldn't let him go. Her thoughts were still swimming with contradicting timelines and multiple instances of conversations and interactions, but it was all settling down gradually into a single immutable path. There'd be time to sift through the remains of her memories later. For now she let out a breath, and curled next to Cloud in the makeshift medical clinic, lying on the bed with him.

Before she could catch herself, she fell backwards into sleep. It was a beautiful, restful state. A great big nothingness with no dreams at all.