Chapter X :: Éviter

After many attempts, I finally got it, roughly an hour since entering Tifa's dormitory and nearly twelve hours after realizing I hadn't even dreams of hoping to fall asleep again, after my conversation with Red at two in the morning, my voice effectively masked by Barret's snoring; the actual process—reducing myself to an inert, meditative state and staying that way—took around several short minutes, after I'd gotten the hang of everything. It was hard to say how long the real transition lasted—it could have ranged anywhere from five to fifteen minutes, in my opinion. But when I did manage it, at last, I knew it.

I brought my head up, letting my conscience clear slightly before focusing on my surroundings. I blinked as the hospital ceiling fell away, and the sky bloomed and expanded above me; the sun reflected off the mountain faces, casting twin rays on the town and sending any possibly penetrating shadows fleeting. Damn it was hot; it was a crisp, dry heat as opposed to the suffocating humidity of Junon's concrete-infested streets. Nibelheim stretched off before me, rising partly up the mountain slopes and falling back around either side, dissipating to make way for the towering hills, snow-capped despite the temperature. I remained poised just on the edge of my hometown, able to overlook many of the buildings from my vantage point without much movement; I could even catch glimpses of the Shinra Mansion's impressive acreage by squinting and focusing completely past the cream-plastered houses and cobbled streets. I grasped as much as I could, forgetting the memories that swarmed there and fully appreciating its vintage beauty—only once had I taken the time to take in the whole town in its entirety, and even then it never ceased to surprise me how large such a small town could seem, depending on where you were standing. As it was, I stood on the path entering the main square, picketed fences reaching barely to my knees entrapping me on both sides, until I saw, further down to the side, a break in the border. I saw then, from where I watched, my destination.

"You're back." She spoke first, yet didn't turn as I came up behind her, somehow sensing my presence before the sound of my footsteps could be heard. I hadn't a chance to respond before she said, "I didn't think I'd see you again." She sounded as if she herself didn't believe the words.

The cemetery was a small one, overgrown as it was with weeds and unornamented brush—not many in the town knew it existed; after Sephiroth's attack seven years prior, most of the citizens who had been aware of it had either died or escaped to as far as possible. Their replacement townspeople wouldn't have cared for it even if they had known. It was a well-kept secret. There were few tombstones, covered with soft forest moss and scattered plants. They broke away with the fuzzy mold and crumbled in chunks, their inscriptions faded to the point of almost utter illegibility. She stood before one, a smoothed marble slab—relatively recent in comparison to its ancient counterparts—gradually sinking lower into the sandy dirt under our boots. The faint 'Lockhart' was just nearly invisible beneath the greenery, along with the additive message below it: 'Beloved Wife, Mother, and Friend'; had I not visited the place before, while the carvings were still fresh and new, I would not have been able to read them.

And even after all these years, it made me uncomfortable to stand there, looking down at the names of those I couldn't find the heart to mourn; it was a strange sensation, standing amidst the deceased of my hometown, of those who had lived before and after I had been born, knowing there were missing bodies, places where certain people should have been and weren't.

It was unsettling, to say the least, searching for my own mother's marker and finding none.

"Do you miss her?" Tifa's voice carried me away from my thoughts, reading my mind with uncanny ability. I glanced at her. How long was she planning on staying in that spot without moving?

"Of course I do."

"I think about them everyday." She grinned slightly, following my train of thought. "I try to picture Papa's grave, next to my mother's. I wish I knew where they put him." Her tone worried me—it wasn't a though she were hiding something behind the calm; it sounded as if there wasn't anything there at all to hide. "It's kind of scary, if you think about it," she said, "that if you hadn't been there, if…just a bit higher…" she motioned towards her collarbone, her neck, "I wouldn't be here either. My body would be missing, like his." How could I reply to something like that? I would have opted, instead of words, to hug her, but kept my arms at my sides as I drew up beside her.

"Why are you here, Tifa?" I asked, after a moment.

"…I'm sorry about those things I said"—or shouted, or screamed—"I didn't mean them. Not really." She hung her head, in preparation for any amount of consequence I would be about to deliver. I bit my lip, hiding my frustration.

"'Not really'?" My laugh came out dry and fearful. "Eh. It's okay. You were just angry. People do stupid things when they're angry."

She shot me a sideways glance, then shook her head. "It doesn't matter how angry I was, I shouldn't have said what I did." Her voice went quiet, suddenly. "I've been doing that a lot lately, screwing up like that. It's been worrying me. It's never happened before, not that severely. I mean, once or twice, but I could always handle it after that. This—that…it was different." My brow creased under the sun.

"Doing what, Tif?"

"Oh, you know, lashing out at people just because they happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. I said those terrible things and blamed you for my problems just because you happened to be there at that one instant." She shrugged lightly. "I guess I must be PMSing or something."

I want to slap myself—why couldn't I just meet the real Tifa already?

"It never occurred to you I might have deserved it?" I asked. "That maybe some of those things you said just might have been true?" She glanced at me with wide eyes, honestly horrified at the prospect of truth.

"Of course not! I was angry—you said so yourself! I didn't mean any of it…"

"That wasn't the question, whether you meant it or not," I replied a bit testily. "What you said was true, about my leaving and everything; you just brought it out in the open." She turned away from me, actually flustered; her hands fidgeted nervously with stray locks of hair that fell over her shoulders, knuckles like porcelain beads under the heavy sun.

"I didn't mean—"

"No, you didn't!" I shouldn't have yelled at her—I didn't want to—knowing that it couldn't possible have done much good for either of us, in any case, but how much more of this could I take, the aversion to anything that might mean an instability in her strength, when even that was bravado? How much could she lie to me this way?

You need to be stronger than me, or her. Stronger than you ever have been for anyone else…

"I know you didn't, that's not the point! Tifa, why are you doing this? I just want to know—why are you hiding from everyone? Why'd you come here?" She gazed at me, then let her eyes drop to the ground as my aggravation registered. The question settled itself, and the time she spent over it was used not to find the answer, but exactly how to word it. She forced a smile, a startlingly resemblance to something genuine; only her eyes deceived the production that she was content with this circumstance. I cringed inside. If I didn't know any better…

Her bare shoulders lifted, then fell. "I just needed to get away for a little bit. Everything was getting so chaotic, what with you gone and everyone being…well, I figured I needed a break for a while. That's all." I closed my eyes, turning from her; she didn't understand—"taking a break" and suffering an emotional collapse—a stroke—were not the same thing.

"And how long were you planning on staying here?"

The corner of her mouth twitched upwards, playfully. "Not for very long, naturally. I can't just leave Barret and Marlene alone for too long, after all. I'm going to go back soon, really." I wondered if she realize I knew she was lying. "I mean, I have to."

I struggled for several minutes for the words, my searches coming up short considerably. "This isn't fair. It isn't fair for me, or Barret—Marlene most of all. We're all worried about you," I mumbled finally. "Everyone else…they don't know you're here. They think you're dead…" Her beautiful eyes came up from the dirt, staring at me in puzzlement. Her mother's headstone blinked cheerfully with sunlight, and I was forced to squint in order to catch the movement as she brushed the strands from in front of her face, giving a little shrug as she did so.

"They learn to live on. That's what life is about, moving past loss and death and stuff like that." And I found myself wondering whether every word that came from her mouth was a lie; I was beginning to consider fighting her anger again—at least that particular personification had shown real emotion, real anguish and real contempt for the pain she had endured on my account. Those hadn't been such blatant mendacities but mere misconceptions, answers she had provided herself when no one else had been able—if only I had known what was going on at the time, as I did now, it would have been easier for me. This, on the other hand… "That's what I learned I had to do, a long time ago, to move on. After Mama and Papa died, and then you…I had no one. What else is there? I'd be stuck in a hole for the rest of my life, mulling over things I can't change."

"Their deaths don't bother you?" I asked, perturbed.

"Well, not as much as they used to, for sure. I still think about it, of course, but like I said, wishing to change the past isn't going to do anything. It won't bring them back to life. And I didn't have much of a choice in that matter, did I? So I try not to worry about it too much." She paused. "I don't blame you for leaving, Cloud. I can't really, 'cause here I am, doing the same thing. 'Clearing my mind,' right? Like you." That stung; it would have been wonderful to believe her, to remain quiet and a good friend and not dig into her real face, but the guilt that came with the comment was so strong I doubted I couldn't do much else but see it for what it was: a completely viable accusation.

"I'm sorry." It seemed appropriate, even if she refused to understand what I meant.

"I told you not to worry about it. It's in the past, behind us." She stared forward, strategically laying a silence between us before continuing. "I'm just wondering…why you're here. I can't imagine why you bothered coming all this way just to talk to me…"

I stopped.

"Why I bothered?" I began to fumble again, tripping and stumbling over an answer that should have been so blatant it couldn't possibly be expressed in words—shouldn't have needed to be. I found the volume of my voice beginning to rise. "Why I bothered?! Be-because…because I can't just sit around and let you waste away! God, it's visible to anyone who looks at you!" I retorted, thinking of Marlene. "You're dying, Tifa—did you think I was just let you die, just watch my best friend disappear right in front of my face?" The woman beside me said nothing, and I relaxed slightly as the adrenaline sifted from my blood. "Why are you here, Tifa? You never answered my question, not once."

She opened her mouth to reply, gaping like a fish until she found exactly the sufficient words to avoid my query. "Die? I'm not dying, Cloud—I'm happier here than I have been in a long time. It's nice here. Ever since Aeris…" The rest of the sentence decayed in her throat, leaving her open-mouthed, flesh draining of any resisting color; her eyes darted from me to the dirt under her feet, focusing devotedly on the sprouting weeds in shame—the smooth cracks in her guise shone crisp and drastic, unwelcome and gorgeous. I gritted my teeth, not giving the effort to wonder how she had expected me to follow such an evasion; my hands balled themselves into contemptuous fists, and for a second all I really wanted to do was shatter the tombstone in front of us into a thousand untouchable, unmemorable pieces, scatter the 'Wife, Mother, and Friend' where no one would ever need to remember the words.

Her shoulders shook, and as if on cue a sheet of raven, auburn-streaked hair cascaded to shield her face from my view. "What," I asked, peeved, "is with you and mentioning Aeris all the time?" Yet even her emergency barrier was no match for the flush that rose into her skin. "'Aeris' what? My flower girl—I don't understand what you're getting at."

Tifa's lips began to move, and in the first moments I didn't have the peace of mind to realize she was speaking. The syllables were soft and barely audible, the sun's rays suddenly becoming much louder than they ever had been. It was in these seconds the muscles in her shoulders and back loosed, loosened to which her hair was given leave, and I could distinctly recognize the rueful smile at the corners of her mouth. And it was then that I realized the molding and shifting of the scenery around us, a detail I didn't think Tifa had noticed as of yet. I cursed, and her head turned, where at once the fake joy on her lips was obvious. "She's…the Cetra. The last Ancient. Your flower girl," she was saying, mumbling, almost incoherently.

"What? What are you talking about? I don't understand—"

"Your…Cetra…" I made the mistake of blinking, and in an instant she was gone, to be replaced by a white, slick concrete wall. Just behind me, to my right, was a door, and through the framework stood a short, middle-aged woman, gazing at me as if she didn't know where she was.

"Hullo, are you awake? Oh. Hullo." I responded with a nod in her direction, watching the corpse in my hands. The nurse kept talking, at last leaving me with a soulless body and a few departing words relating to keeping awake before slinking off. I kept my place, going over what had happened this encounter in my head—denial; she was in denial. I had broken through and now—disregarding the constant interruptions from the hospital staff—I was wearing on her. What else was there but to keep fighting a losing battle?—she was losing, as I recalled back on our interaction, she would continuing losing until the fact halted any further efforts.

They would need to have her heart monitored soon; her health was degenerating too quickly for anyone to do much about it but watch. I didn't leave immediately as I had the first time—I stared as her chest rise and fall, while listening to the permeating sounds of the comatose enveloping me. How much longer would it take until Tifa could scold me using her voice instead of her conscience? Questions came and went with her breath, following me even as another nurse interrupted my reflections to warn me of the time, shooing me away.

They followed me home, and continued to haunt me in my dreams…

Personally, I think Tifa's completely lost it, but that's just me. Anyways, here's chapter ten (after an stream of computer viruses and having to reformat the settings on my computer). I don't think I've ever gotten this far with anything I've wrote, so it makes me happy. Of course I couldn't have done it without all the support, so thanks!—I'm not as perseverant as Cloud is, and my attention span isn't as long as I would have most people believe. Not only so, but I'm also worried that Cloud's becoming too OOC, and its beginning to bother me… But yeah, next chapter coming soon, I promise!

Raine