Final Fantasy VII and all related names and characters are property of Square.
author's notes: After I uploaded the first part, I read it over again and decided it was too depressing even for me. So I stayed up till four in the morning writing this sequel, which does in fact feature a happy ending, though not without a fair dose of depression. I still think the first part can very well stand on its own, so if you like tragedy, you may take that as the whole thing. Otherwise, here's part two, with as much romance as I could stand to write, (which was not that much...) and I think it's not that bad.
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Rain over Midgar -- part two: just like a postcard rainbow ~ by Amariƫ
I didn't know what to think. Here was one of the Turks, mere months after Meteor, coming to me, of all people, for a favor.
"Please," said Elena, nervously fingering the lapel of her jacket, "we just need you to come, not any of the others. I promise you it's nothing like a trap -- we have no reason to do something like that now. It's very important."
"If you won't tell me what it is, I can't come with you."
She protested, "But I was told not to tell you unless you agreed first."
It might have been a trap, but looking over what was left of my life, I decided I didn't particularly care. So I agreed, and in two days I was standing in an abandoned building on the other side of the continent, wishing it had been a trap after all, or anything but what it was.
There he lay, unconscious in a makeshift hospital room, patched together by the best surgeons the Turks could bribe, with Reno and Rude guarding the door. And for every minute I stood there, another memory surfaced, slowly destroying the sense of closure I had provided for myself.
Running through the rain...
"He said your name once -- it was one of the only things we could make out -- and we did some research and found that you lived in Nibelheim at the same time." Rude held up a photograph of myself at ten, smiling brightly with my arms around a freckled girl and a frowning blond boy in an extremely impractical white outfit.
"That's me! And..." -- I looked up at them. "So what good is that? All my childhood friends are dead. All of them. In one way or another, they've been dead for a long time. Amy and P.J. died when Nibelheim burned down. Mikey was killed by thieves in Sector Five. And Rue... he's been gone for a long time. I haven't seen him since they took him away when I was eleven."
"What are you talkin' about?" grumbled Reno, scowling at me. "Talk sense or I'll talk it for you."
I still would not believe it, not until they took me to see him. They said he'd never woken up, might still die without ever coming back.
So what could I do? I stayed there for a week, helping with things and taking over the cooking from Elena, who didn't know a frying pan from a fajita. It was perhaps the most depressing thing I have ever done; we were all at the service of someone who was not really there. I really did believe that the boy I had known was gone forever; yet I stayed on too. I suppose I had nothing better to do.
At the end of the week, I decided I wanted to go; but before I packed I went in to see him one more time.
"Are you Rue? Or were you ever? I suppose I'll never know now..."
To my astonishment, he mumbled, "I can't come with you... I'm waiting to go away."
The breath caught in my throat. "Will... will you ever come back?"
"I'll come back at Christmas."
"Won't you come now?"
For the first time in ten years, a pair of bright blue eyes looked back up at me; not those which had belonged to the President of Shinra Inc., but Rue's, wondering and alive.
"Just for a little bit..."
Outside the wind blew against the window; I helped him up and together we went out into the rain. We both laughed when he slipped in the puddle, not quite coordinated yet, and had to lean on me the rest of the way across. Elena came running to meet us; she brought Rude's blue suit jacket to go over the hospital gown.
Blue! Just like old times...
All of a sudden I felt giddy and light, for absolutely no reason at all, and I twirled both of them around with me in dizzy circles till we bumped into a wall and stood still for a while for the world to stop spinning around our heads.
"Nice to meet you again," I said. "You may remember me as Tifa Lockheart."
"Princess of Nibelheim?"
"The very same."
I had to stay longer after that, of course. And I did a lot of catching up for ten years; would you believe that my first kiss was at the age of twenty-one? Certainly I'd missed a lot.
But they say you should save things for a rainy day, don't they?
And I shall wear my favorite green dress and my hat with flowers on... and I'll come to see you in the afternoon when you come home from school.
