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It's been a long time since I made a new chapter, large in part because I've been on vacation. But, I must again tell you that basically all the cool stuff is over. Now I'm just finishing the story, though this is not the last chapter.

Anyway, here's chapter 27.

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I found Cid just outside of town. He had is usual cigar stuffed in his mouth, and he was also wearing his usual battle garb/pilot gear. I on the other hand was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Cid took one look at me and the cigar fell out of his mouth. "Hey Cid," I said. He looked me up and down, and said, "#%&! What happened to you, Cloud?" "What do you mean?" I said. "Look at you! Where's your sword? Did your damn fiancé make you stop wearin it?" "Don't talk about Tifa like that," I said narrowing my eyes. "Sheesh, you have changed," he said.

We walked back to Highwind. Cid, ever anxious to make Highwind even better, had added two small engines on either side of the bottom deck. He also added a large rudder like piece of metal on top of the ship. Cid said it was for stability during high speed flight. I got nervous when he said high speed. High speed for me was very different then Cid's version of high speed.

As we boarded, Cid asked, "So what is this all about Cloud? Do you want a bachelor party? Cuz if you do, I know of some damn fine places in Rocket town…" "No," I said. "That's not why I called you here, although a bachelor party doesn't sound like a bad idea. Tifa and I want to get married in Aerieth's old church." "Ok…and how does this involve me?" "Well, first off, I needed a ride there because I need to fix up the place in three weeks so that it's presentable. The other reason, in all honesty, was that…err…I was hoping you were going to help me…"

"Sure, if it means I don't have to buy you two a %$#& wedding gift. I hate buying gifts for people." "Deal," I said.

"However," he said. "I do have one little surprise for you…" "Oh? What's that?" I said. He opened the door and let me into Highwind. "I don't see anything," I said, glancing around. "It's on the bridge," he said. I walked down the bridge and opened the door. There on the bridge was Vincent, Yuffie, and Red XIII. "SURPRISE!" Yuffie yelled. I smiled. "What is this?" I asked to no one in particular. Cid turned to me. "The others decided to all go on Highwind at the same time and just stay in Midgar a few extra weeks. It was convenient for me…this way I'm not some damn chauffer."

I sat down and I talked to Red XIII, Vincent, Yuffie, and Cid (intermittently) about how Vincent and I had managed to pull Tifa back together (Vincent chimed in a few times) and then I talked about how I had proposed. Cid scoffed at me and Yuffie looked at me disappointed. "I know," I said. "I wanted to propose at a more appropriate moment, like at a sunset or on the beach or something. But…the time was right. It felt right when I did it." Red XIII looked at me. "It's good to follow your feelings. Maybe that was the perfect moment and you just don't know it." "True," I responded. "Tifa even said that she would have expected me to propose while at a romantic moment. She said that I totally caught her off-guard, and that she would not have had it any other way." Yuffie suddenly smiled but then looked at the ground. I noticed she was staring at her fingers. 'Poor Yuffie,' I thought. 'It must be though trying to find a guy when they know that you can beat the living &%$ out of them any time you want.'

I then told all of them why I was leaving Tifa to go to Midgar. Vincent agreed to help, and Red XIII also said he would help to the best of his ability. Yuffie didn't say anything at first, but she said that she would help out every once in a while. You can always trust Yuffie to get you out of a bad situation when it means stealing something or killing something. Beyond that, it's difficult to get her to do anything, so this was a welcome surprise.

We arrived at Midgar some hours later and Barrett met us in front of Aerieth's church, just as planned. He agreed to help whole heartedly. I thanked him and then gazed at the project before me. The pink colored paint was chipping off, and all but one of the stained glass windows were broken. There was a huge hole in the roof, and the door hung awkwardly. Several boards on the outside of the church had dry rot and would have to be replaced. Also, there was a ton of rubble around the church itself that would have to be moved someplace else.

And this was only the outside.

Inside, the padding on the chairs were worn and torn. The wood on the chairs also would need a good polishing…but that was about it for them. The floor itself creaked, and all but a few of the boards were bent, warped, or splintered at some point. There was a gigantic hole in the ground where daffodils used to grow but have since died, leaving a dank smell of decay. There was no pew, and the rug that sat where the pew should go no longer had any discernable color. Even after Vincent beat on it for a minute to get rid of the dust, there was no way to tell what the original color was.

"Talk about your fixer-upper…" Barrett said quietly. "I know," I said. "But I have a feeling that this is going to be a lot easier then it looks." "How's that?" Yuffie asked. "I think that Aerieth will probably help out a bit," I responded. Cid looked at me funny. "Cloud, Aerieth's dead, and according to you she refused to be brought back. Is there something you didn't tell us before, or are you going crazy on us?" "Neither," I responded. "At least I hope not neither. But I just think that…oh never mind."

Cid decided that he would take care of the windows and paint. Vincent decided to fix the roof. Red XIII said he would work on the chairs on the inside. Yuffie promised half-heartedly to find a pew and a preacher. Barrett agreed to get rid of the rubble outside the church. And I was left with the flooring and decorations.

And so it began. None of us wasted any time in getting started. I hired several hands to help tear up the floor and lay down new flooring. Barrett rented the biggest freaking tractor I have ever seen, and for days he removed rubble and put it…somewhere. I never asked him where he put it. Just as long as it was out of the way.

Cid bought a ladder and several buckets of pink paint. He hated the color pink, and more then once he tried to convince me to change the color to something like white, but Tifa and I had decided we wanted the place to look exactly as it would have looked when it was first built. So Cid, cursing under his breath, started painting.

Red XIII found it easy to tear out the old cushioning to the chairs, but nearly impossible to reinstall new cushioning. In the end, I had to take time out of my floor work and help him reinstall it myself. Opposable thumbs help a lot, as Red XIII pointed out.

No one heard from Yuffie for almost a week, and then one day she showed up, dragging a huge mahogany pew down the street. She had it tied to herself via a rope around her waist, and she was sweating bricks as she took one painful step at a time. Cid, Barrett and I all ran to help her, and between the four of us we lifted the deceptively heavy pew into the church, right in the center of the stage.

We saw little of Vincent during the week. Sometimes we would hear him hammer away or break something, but usually he was quiet. It was always interesting though to come in the next day and see the entire roof polished inside and out, or to see what improvements he had done to the hole in the roof.

And so a week passed by quicker then I thought it would. On the eighth morning, I woke up to hear someone knocking on the door of my dusty apartment, and opening it I saw Tifa standing there. She was holding a couple of bags in each arm and was breathing heavily, and by looking at her legs I could tell she had been tanning. "Let me help you with those," I said, grabbing the bags. I didn't know what was in them, but I figured I wasn't supposed to know anyway so I didn't look. Instead I just stared at Tifa who had her hands on her knees as she tried to recover her breath. "Tifa, are you okay?" I said, putting down one of the bags so I had a free arm. "Yah…" she said. "It's just…more difficult…to carry things these…days…" She must have been referring to her atrophied muscles. "Well come in and sit down. No need to stand out there," I said.

I led her to a little chair in the corner. I then (after I put down the bags) got her a glass of water and pulled over another chair so I could sit next to her. She thanked me and chugged the whole thing down. Afterwards she finally lifted her head so that she could see my room. She looked at it with a look that said, 'and my fiancé actually lives here?' "Well," I said, "I've been busy cleaning the church. I've had no time to even dust here. All I do here is sleep." She smiled and then looked at me with loving eyes. "I've missed you," she said. "I have too…" I said, kissing her.

After a few minutes I left her on the chair so that I could go take a shower and get dressed and stuff. I emerged from the shower and looked at my long hair. I have never understood why, but even after a shower, it still manages to always stick straight up. I then tried, for the first time in a long time, to comb it down. Each brush stroke only made it seem to stick up even more. I then used gel. It made my hair glossy and hard, and now made my hair stick out in all directions, not just up. I eventually gave up, washed my hair again, and got dressed.

Tifa was waiting for me by the door. She also had changed from her old fighting getup to into a red flowing dress that went down to just above her knees. She smiled when I emerged from the shower in my old battle garb. I looked at her, then myself, and then muttered stupidly, "Uh…should I change?" "No, that's okay." She responded. And so we left, hand in hand, but not before I told her how beautiful she was.

I took her to the church and showed her our progress and it seemed to me that she wasn't pleased. I looked at her and she looked back at me a little disappointed. "What's wrong?" I asked. "Umm…I was just thinking…" she replied slowly. "What?" I asked concerned, especially because I was scared she would say she didn't like what Cid, Red XIII, Barrett, Vincent, Yuffie and I had done. "Who are we going to invite?" she asked. I almost fell over in relief. "Uh…everyone," I replied. "Well," she continued, "there's the gang, and then I have family in Nibelheim, as well as a few of my girl-friends, but who else is there? I mean, that's not a whole lot of people if you think about it." "True," I said, at a loss for words. Neither of us said anything for a moment, but instead we just stared at the church and its lofty pink front and new stained glass windows.

"Everyone," I said finally. She looked at me puzzled. "We'll invite everyone," I said. "But—" she tried to say, but I interrupted her by saying, "Why not?"

She looked long and hard into me. "Even the Turks?" she asked. "Why not?" I replied. "Well, why should we? They've hated us since we first met them." "Why shouldn't we?" I responded. "Ever since they've been out of business they've had no reason to fight us. Remember in the tunnels below the Shrina building? The Turks showed up, but I told them to leave, and they did, because they didn't care any more." "That's just it Cloud, they don't care about us." "But how much more fun would the wedding be if they showed up. If they're nice, then they'll be good company. And if they're mean, well, we can beat the hell out of them one more time for old times' sake. How about it?" Tifa looked at me skeptically but slowly a laugh started in her gut. Eventually it broke and her face smiled. She nodded.

I showed her inside the church and she smiled at the improvements we had made. When she looked at the mahogany pew, she gawked. "How did you get that over here? The thing must way a ton!" she said amazed. "Yuffie dragged it here…" I said. She looked at me amazed. "No joke," I said.

And so that portion of the day ended. Tifa and I talked a little more and she agreed to take charge of the decorations and the invitations, while the rest of us would just work our asses off in the church. I was glad actually. The decorations seemed to me more of a daunting task then the renovation of the church.

That night, I slept on the floor of my apartment, with Tifa on the bed. She was sleeping already, but despite my exhaustion, I couldn't sleep. I stood up and looked outside. All was quiet. I then listened carefully to the activity around my house—only Tifa's breathing was heard. I calmed myself and told myself I was only anxious and uptight. I walked over to Tifa. I kissed her cheek and then stared at her. She seemed perfectly content right then, lost in her dreams, and the more I looked at her the more my heart and mind seemed to relax as well.

It seems silly, but I guess that that was all I needed to sleep that night.

The next day started much the same as the previous, with Tifa and I going out hand in hand and walking around town, until the time was come for us to go to work.

And that day ended much the same as the day before. In truth, all seemed blissfully simple for me for almost the next three weeks.

And then, the night before the wedding came.