Top Guide (In This Town)

Chapter Three

A/N: Shoutout to the anons who left reviews! Thanks bunches! Have more Tifa. ^^

Tifa walked across the town square toward Cloud, standing where her house adjoined his. He'd said, back in Kalm right after they left Midgar with Aerith and the others, that he'd tried to visit her this evening.

She knew that hadn't really happened, because just as he was doing today, he'd been hiding from her then. Had probably waited even to go visit his mother until after she got tired of sitting in the square hoping for a yellow-crested third SOLDIER to magically turn up. But it was nice to see that the fiction had been built on an actual wish to see her, and not just the knowledge that he would have wanted to, if he'd lived up to his lofty goals and been able to impress her.

The thing she regretted most, of all the choices she'd made in her life (out of all the things she'd actually been able to control), was not telling Cloud from the start that there was something wrong with his memories.

She didn't know if some forewarning would have helped them save Aerith or prevent the summoning of Meteor or the awakening of the Weapons, or any of the other catastrophes they'd faced, but at least it would have spared Cloud some anguish, and made it harder for Sephiroth to shatter him with revelation. At the very least it would have meant that when they lost him, it wouldn't have been her fault.

She'd been afraid, that day in Kalm, and not wanting to make everybody else trust Cloud less, and not trusting Cloud completely herself even though she wanted to, so she just…hadn't said anything when it would have made sense, and hadn't been able to bring it up, after. It didn't make any sense as a lie, but she'd known it wasn't the truth because she'd been there and met the SOLDIER who came with Sephiroth, and it hadn't been Cloud.

Unless, of course, she was the one whose memories were wrong. Though since she'd been the one not going into micro-fugues without noticing, and he hadn't remembered anything since supposedly catching up to Sephiroth in Nibelheim's reactor five years before, that hadn't seemed likely.

He'd shared her memory of their promise. He had to be Cloud. She'd needed him to be Cloud.

She hadn't known what to think, so she'd said nothing. It had been the easiest choice, not the right one.

She regretted it, more than not being a friend to Cloud when they were children, more than dragging him along to the City of the Ancients because even if they hadn't helped any she didn't think they'd hurt Aerith by being there when she was murdered, and at least that time she hadn't known she was doing the wrong thing even as she did it.

Of all the things her Cloud had ever needed from her, honesty had always been foremost.

In the present, she walked toward him steadily, and he was so consumed in indecision he failed to notice.

"Hey, Cloud," she said. He jumped to face her; cringed a little in recognition. Found out.

Gaia, he was so young. From this side of twenty-five all teenagers looked pretty young, but it was especially strange when it was Cloud. In some ways he seemed younger now than he had at fourteen with his hair pulled back into a bright yellow tail, bragging about his dreams of greatness on top of the village water tower.

He'd grown, since then. Grown a little less cute. He was only a little smaller now than in the future, just like her—but as a man, he should have had plenty more growing left to do at sixteen.

The thought struck her suddenly of this Cloud growing to adulthood breathing the free air, far from Hojo's clutches, reaching the age of twenty-one whole inches taller than the man she'd known. His height had never seemed to bother him, wasn't something wrong with him, but it had been another thing stolen from him by Hojo and she was fiercely glad to be planning to steal it back.

"Come on," she said, beckoning a little. "Come over to my place. I made cookies."

"But I," he said wretchedly. Didn't seem to have planned any words to come after that.

"It's okay, Cloud. You don't have to have saved the world already at sixteen. Even if you never get to be famous, it's okay. But I want to talk to you privately, okay?"

Cloud trailed after her, baffled but easy as always to pressure into doing things when he felt confused. He had the strongest will in the world once he was sure of something, but if he hadn't settled into a conviction on an issue he'd do what you wanted without much fuss. It was one of the things she found endearing about him, and it was good to know it really was an original Cloud Strife quality.

She got him to take the helmet off once they were inside, checked on the casserole, grabbed the plate of cookies, and in case of dad took him up to her room, where she put the cookies on top of her piano and waved Cloud onto the piano bench. She sat on her bed, facing him. His Shinra helmet was tucked awkwardly against his hip. He had that little dusting of faint freckles across the tops of his cheeks again, or still; the ones that had been faded almost to gone when she met him in Midgar, that she'd watched reappear as they ranged across the Planet and he put Hojo's labs further and further behind and spent time under the sun.

"Have a cookie," she suggested. He obediently reached back and took one, but didn't eat it, just sat there holding it carefully in his hand. "Did you already go see your mom?" she asked.

"Yeah."

For a second it was almost like they really were normal teenagers having a normal awkward visit, in spite of Cloud's uniform, but Tifa didn't let herself get attached to the idea. She pulled one knee up to hook her arms around, and then stared absently around the room (the real room, it was hard to remember that), at her childhood belongings.

"So I'm from the future," she said.

Cloud stopped determinedly not looking at the several inches of thigh she'd just flashed to gape. "What?" he asked, like he hoped he'd heard her wrong.

"I'm really twenty-six, not sixteen. I just woke up here this morning, instead of in the bar I owned in Edge City. Which is a place you've never heard of because we didn't build it until after Midgar fell," she said before he could comment. Though he might not have. It was hard to predict, with Cloud, but he tended to ignore the details and go for the core of a person's statements.

He was squinting at her, that half-worried, half-pugnacious look Cloud got around suspect information. He'd put the cookie down on his knee. "You're pulling my leash," he said.

It was a turn of phrase the Cloud she knew would never have used, too sensitive to anything that made a person sound less than human. "I'm not," she said, and sighed. "Look, Cloud, the future…it was bad."

"How bad?"

"Half the world's population died." That was taking Nibelheim and Weapon and Meteor and Geostigma and Deepground together, but it was really all one long chain of catastrophe. (It probably shouldn't be counting Wutai or Corel or Gongaga or Banora or the Sector Seven plate; those were just Shinra being Shinra, and half of them had already happened in this time.) She definitely had Cloud's attention now. "It started this week. Well, for us it did. Most other places didn't notice anything for about five years."

"What happens?" There was this look on his face—a little pinched, a little anxious, without the deep well of something between resignation and serenity Cloud-in-the-future had had to draw on in the face of trouble. But smooth and open and willing to listen, and teeth gritted like he was getting ready to punch trouble in the face, and everything suddenly seemed just a little easier because she had Cloud.

Tifa let out a breath. "Whooh. What doesn't?" But that wasn't helpful. "First was this mission you're on. Hojo set it up to drive Sephiroth crazy. In a couple of days he's going to kill everyone and set Nibelheim on fire. I caught up with him at the reactor, and he cut me down but I didn't quite die.

"We met up again in five years—I was running a bar in the Midgar slums and blowing up reactors at night, and you'd just escaped from the Science Department and thought you were Zack."

The cookie fell off Cloud's knee and hit the carpet in a spray of crumbs. Not because he'd jerked dramatically or anything, but because knees weren't very flat surfaces, and all it had taken to dislodge it was a shift in the angle of his thigh as his body weight rocked back. He didn't even seem to notice. "I…what?"

That did sound weird, didn't it. Back up. She'd lose Cloud if she made too little sense, she knew that from experience. "Hojo did a lot of experiments on both of you, before you escaped. You got mako poisoning and amnesia from it, and wound up getting some memories that weren't yours to fill in the gaps—I mean, you remembered the right name and hometown, but you got confused about some other things. You thought you were in SOLDIER."

"…oh."

And that—that way he retreated into himself, the shamed tuck to the chin—she knew it, she'd seen it in her Cloud, after the Temple of the Ancients. It was sort of the prelude to the boneless way his head had drooped when she found him again after Sephiroth hollowed him out at the Northern Crater, before the two of them had fallen into the Lifestream and really found him again.

She hadn't expected to see it, this soon. The child Cloud she remembered had never hung his head without defiance in the set of his shoulders and jaw. He'd been planning all that time to someday show them all. She had been to the center of his mind and she knew that more than anything, under the pugnacity and bruised pride, what he'd wanted was to belong.

(That was why it had frustrated her so to watch him pulling away in the face of slow death. He needed his space but he needed his friends just as much.)

Not making it into SOLDIER had really broken his heart. "It made sense to think you were in SOLDIER," she assured him. "You had their uniform on and the mako eyes, by then, and some of Zack's memories of being…" She shrugged. "It was a huge mess, okay? Anyway you joined my terrorist group and a lot of things happened, and we helped stop the Planet being hit by a meteor."

"…ah." If she hadn't known him so well, she probably wouldn't have heard that shade of judgement in his voice, there, the doubt under the soft confusion.

(She had always loved that about Cloud, how soft he grew in his undefended moments, when he forgot to hold his strength up like a shield against the world. Even when she came to understand that it was partly from having been stripped down to the bare essentials of self, all his natural defenses stolen from him as Hojo tried to shatter his mind beyond recognition—it made her want to hold him close and protect him, just like his strength made her want to put her shoulder against his and lean there forever.)

The slant in his eyes, she caught next, like he'd moved on from thinking she was crazy to suspecting her of pranking him. That honestly did make the most sense. We stopped the planet from being hit by a meteor, honestly, that sounded like the kind of thing they might have made up when they were five. If they'd known what a meteor was then. She thought they probably hadn't. Also they'd barely spent any time together when they were five, next-door neighbors or not.

"Cloud," she said. "I'm telling the truth. I can prove it if I have to, I think—I have some information that can be verified—but mostly I just have to ask for your trust."

She smiled, slightly wry. "I talked to Zack Fair—I guess you probably saw me? I didn't tell him about the future, but I'm hoping having some warning will convince him to step in and…help Sephiroth, I guess." She shook her head. "It's a weird thing to hope for, I hate him so much. But I'd rather have him alive and sane than dead and crazy."

Cloud breathed in, parted his lips—paused. "Tifa," he said, and then nothing else.

It was strange, watching Cloud hesitate to speak. When he was younger, when they were kids, he didn't talk often, but when he did it was with a fierce, defiant confidence.

When he was older, in the time when they'd really been friends, his confidence wasn't defiant anymore because it was founded at first on false, and then on real, knowledge of his strength, and on the value of what he fought for—and when he lost that, he would stumble and go quiet. It always felt so wrong, to see him like that.

This, Cloud at sixteen, worn down by failing at his dream, was strangely like the dying, self-blaming Cloud Geostigma had created. Enough that Tifa had to check the urge to shake him and tell him he was so much better than this and they needed him. But he was different, too. So…young.

His mouth firmed up. "Is Sephiroth…really that bad?"

That was strange, too, and Tifa brought her hand down hard on the bed, not in anger but for emphasis.

"He broke, Cloud," she told him firmly, willing him to understand. "He came apart and was crazy and didn't care about anything besides destroying the world, so he and Jenova could rule over its shattered husk. I would say that he stopped even being a person, except he would smirk when he murdered people, or found a new way to hurt you."

Surprise in Cloud's face, and she realized she'd forgotten to mention, taken it so much for granted it hadn't needed saying. "You were the one he hated most," she explained.

If they hadn't known it already, the convoluted plot at the Northern Crater, designed to break Cloud's spirit and force him to be the one who gave Sephiroth his weapon at the climactic moment, when he could have used any of Hojo's completely brainwashed victims for the same purpose at any point after he first hijacked Cloud at the Temple, had made it clear. And the way Cloud had commanded Sephiroth's complete attention when he came back during the Geostigma epidemic confirmed it again. Sephiroth hated Cloud like no one and nothing else.

"Maybe because you'd killed him, or because Hojo tried to make you into one of his clones after that but you never gave in all the way. It was hard to be sure why, just that it was true. Even Aerith and President Shinra, he killed them because they were obstacles, maybe out of spite, but he never tried to kill you until the end, because he wanted to make sure you suffered."

Okay, now Cloud looked scared. Which she guessed was the only sensible response to the idea of the sadistic superpowered ghost of Sephiroth carefully keeping you alive the better to torment you. She sighed, and felt terribly, horribly small, even though she hadn't grown more than an inch after being sixteen for real—she'd lost at least twenty pounds of muscle, though, so it wasn't like it wasn't true.

"I need you, Cloud," she admitted, staring at her bare feet on the counterpane. "To be on my side with this. I didn't want to lie to you, but also…just…it's always been easier saving the world when you were there."

She'd chosen him over saving the world, once. Cloud wasn't her world but he was her home, and if there had been anything she was sure she could do better than anyone else to protect the Planet she'd have gone and done it, but…when they hadn't known if there was any difference they could make, or even any hope for the world at all, as much as it needed any help it could get, she'd preferred to stand by someone she loved and try to pull him out of the dark.

Maybe that was weak. Maybe it was even cowardice. Probably it was both. It had certainly been a decision thick with guilt. But.

But it was who she was. She would always prefer to be someone who would selfishly stand by her loved ones, than that girl who had had no one and nothing left, and thrown herself into a war not caring if she died.

Her hometown existed again now, but it wasn't real to her. The Tifa she was now didn't belong here.

She needed Cloud.

He looked up and met her eyes, and…

It was strange, not seeing that mako shine. But they were Cloud's eyes, still. "Tifa," he said, just a little smile at the corners of his mouth, "of course I'll help."

"Cloud…"

"We made a promise, right?" A little shrug, less exaggerated than the one she'd gotten used to. "I'm not famous or a hero, but…you said that's okay."

"Of course it's okay." She scooted forward, let her feet drop over the edge of the bed to hit the floor as she leaned across the middle of the room to take his hand. "Famous doesn't matter, and you're my hero no matter what."

He'd spent their whole childhood waiting for her to notice him. That wasn't a regret she intended to leave unaddressed.

Cloud offered to help with the part of the plan that happened that night, but she told him the most important thing he could do was stay close to his commanding officers and keep an eye on them, make sure neither of them did anything extreme—especially Zack Fair, since Tifa couldn't predict him from his past behavior, now that she'd thrown a wrench into things with her ominous information.

("What happened to Zack?" Cloud had asked, and she'd barely heard him talk about Fair in the future, really, but she still noticed that he didn't say the name quite the same way—but more like than she might have guessed. Cloud had admired Zack Fair this long ago. Of course, he'd admired Sephiroth, too.

She'd hesitated. "How well do you know him?" she asked.

"I met him…about a year ago? On a mission that went…really, really wrong." Cloud shrugged, trying to act like it didn't matter when even now he obviously felt like Fair had hung the moon. "I've seen him a few times since, every month or two. He's…different from the other SOLDIERs. Doesn't act like the regulars aren't people. And he gets happy to see anybody whose name he knows. Every time."

"…he died protecting you," Tifa said, and hoped it wasn't a mistake. "Not because of you," she added, because she knew how Cloud could get. "But you weren't in any condition to fight, when Shinra caught up. So he hid you, and fought everyone who came. And you survived."

She wished she could tell him more, but that was really all she knew.)

She sent him back to the inn with a packet of cookies to share or not, at his discretion. She didn't know if he liked the rest of his unit enough to want to. Wondered if he would be able to sleep after all she'd told him, especially sharing a bedroom with Sephiroth. Of all the bizarre images. Did Sephiroth take off that coat when he went to bed? Somehow she couldn't help picturing him lying on top of Old Man Hilgrid's quilts as stiff and upright as he used to always be, flying around heckling AVALANCHE.

Sharing a town with Sephiroth would be enough to keep her awake, but she wasn't really planning to sleep tonight anyway.

A/N: Cloud Strife has joined your party.