Title: Wastelands
By: garlic
Disclaimer: Final Fantasy VII and all affiliated characters belong to Squaresoft. Not me. Please don't sue. I'll never be able to pay back the loan.
Summary: "Cloud had ambled over her way, patently nonchalant and blandly cheery, and asked if she had ever tried a summon materia."
A/N: Another character study (Tifa, because she's all sore about me ignoring her), but this time I'm being much more pretentious. Or trying to, anyways. Set in Junon, a little after Priscilla gives Cloud the Shiva summon and a little before we get to throw him into the air with Mr. Dolphin.
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It was dank and grey in the slums beneath Junon, with its perpetual haze of smoke and smog. Tifa searched upwards, through the layers of rusted metal and machinery, and was reminded dimly of the slums in Midgar. She couldn't help but wonder why Shinra would stack these people one atop the other – and why people stayed instead of moving to the clean open plains of nearby towns.
Cloud had ambled over her way, patently nonchalant and blandly cheery, and asked if she had ever tried a summon materia.
She had not.
He pressed into her hand a small red orb, closing her fingers around it as he looked into her eyes, then through her.
"It's like using regular magic materia," he started, "only more…" a head scratch and shoulder shrug, "…powerful, I guess."
Tifa didn't respond. Cloud struggled for a different tact.
"Um, how do you cast Fire?"
Emphasis on "you," and another shoulder shrug. Tifa frowned slightly, and unconsciously lifted her hand to the warm orb resting in her gauntlet. She imagined fire, she supposed, heat and flame and destruction. When she cast, she could feel her blood warm and her skin heat, felt a rushing burn flow from head to toe singeing nerves along the way, and the aftermath left the tips of her fingers tingling and reddened and the soles of her feet aching and hot.
She answered his question with a shrug of her own.
"I just kind of think of fire – what it looks like, what it feels like."
Cloud nodded, a look of blank tenderness on his face.
"We can work with that. A summoning is almost the same. Just imagine in your mind what you think it'll be like. Concentrate, and the materia'll do the rest."
Tifa looked curiously to her cupped hands, then back up to her impromptu tutor.
"What was it like for you, when you did it the first time?"
That earned Tifa another rather blank look and a small frown. Cloud cocked his head to one side, tension lines appearing between his eyes as he furrowed his brow in thought.
"I don't really remember, it was so long ago…I mean, that was one of the first things we learned in SOLDIER."
He looked up, pensiveness disappearing as a grin replaced it.
"But it was a piece of cake. And a rush! You could do it, no problem."
Tifa managed a smile in response, but couldn't shake off the sudden frisson of unease that curled up her spine. She stared at Cloud, at his bright golden hair and bright smile and even brighter mako eyes, and he suddenly seemed someone not quite a stranger but not quite himself; his words weren't his and echoed from him hollowly like an ill-fitted suit. (Much later, reluctantly shrugging on a Shinra guard uniform - it was three sizes too large and smelled vaguely of the alley behind her bar - she wondered if maybe she misremembered that part of the conversation, because who else could Cloud be but himself?)
Tifa closed her eyes, and briefly wondered if Cloud would be disappointed in her if she wasn't successful, and despite his instructions found herself thinking of Cloud more than the summon. Her mind conjured up one of her first images of him, over a decade old and young and innocent. But her wayward recreation of memories blurred around the edges, losing itself in darkness as flashes of gold and blue, tinted light and dark, passed beneath her eyelids and across her childhood. A slight laugh, bell-clear and high echoed distantly in her ears and suddenly she was swept in a wave of ice and wind and cold.
Tifa's eyes snapped open and astonished, she found herself shivering and alone, surrounded and buried in snow, dwarfed by the cragged summits of Mt. Nibel. Bewildered, Tifa hugged her shaking limbs to herself, biting down hard on her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering. She felt small and helpless, and her bones ached from the cold and the freezing winds and the memory of a broken fall and broken bones and waiting to die in the dark. A playful giggle rose above the howling wind and Tifa whirled, her arms automatically raised to defend herself. Instead of the monsters and wolves she expected a lone woman stood, suspended on strings of air and wind and snow.
She was beautiful.
Tall and buxom, she floated inches off of the ground, uncaring of the biting chill and winds on her bared body. Adorned in gold (and naught much else) – hoops in her ears, laced around her neck, tasseled in her hair, even printed on her ice-tinged skin – she smiled, lips dark and eyes darker. Tifa stood transfixed, numbed by cold and pierced by fear and Shiva, the winds whispered into her ears Shiva lifted one delicate arm and reached to take her. Tifa, scream caught in her throat and limbs frozen only watched as the other woman drew closer and closer and just as those ice-kissed fingers touched her cheek she could feel the chill and cold seep through her bones and blood, spreading and crystallizing in her veins. Her fingers tingled with pinpricks of pain and feeling and the coldness of the snow seeped through the soles of her boots and burned her feet and terrified, Tifa shut her eyes and yanked away.
Only to feel the material of Cloud's shirt rough against her shoulders, his hands steadying her as she almost fell on him in her haste to get away from her.
"Whoa!" He exclaimed in surprise, moving around to grasp her by the shoulders and look her in the face.
Tifa's eyes flew open, casting about wildly on the familiar town under Junon before settling on Cloud. He regarded her with a genuine look of concern, and rubbing her shoulders lightly asked if she was okay.
"It-it really is a bit of a rush…" Tifa managed a shaky smile with an equally shaky excuse. It wouldn't do to look because she was not wasnot absolutelywasnot weak in front of Cloud.
He stared at her for a moment longer, and apparently satisfied, he dropped his hands (a little to her disappointment) and nodded, another too-easy grin appearing a bit too fast and a bit too falsely and if possible, leaving Tifa more unsettled than before.
"Don't worry, you get used to it." He commented cheerfully, and with a buddy pat on the back he had turned and made his way towards Barrett before Tifa could ask the question she didn't have quite yet but wanted the answer to. It took her a few long moments to realize that Cloud had left the Shiva summon with her, and gazing down at her tightly clasped hands she managed to pry her rigid fingers from around the red materia. It gleamed somehow harshly in the dismal grey light of the Junon slums, and rested in the palm of her glove, chilling the worn leather around it. Tifa glanced from it to Cloud and then back, and as she uneasily slipped it into the open space in her gauntlet she heard the whisper of a wind and a laugh tinkle in her ears. Resolutely ignoring it, Tifa set her jaw and started towards the rest of her ragtag team. The cold spot on her hand inched slowly across her skin as she walked, spreading over her body in a cold chill and numbing her limbs with an invisible armor of ice, and she felt somehow unaccountably protected and yet unaccountably vulnerable.
You get used to it.
She never did.