Disclaimer: Final Fantasy does not belong to me in any way, shape, or form.
Italics represent an event in the past. Everything else takes place in the present.
- Find Me -
- by Ariel32 -
Sunset, in Edge, was nothing less than beautiful.
It was Tifa's favorite time of the day. Golden rays slanted through iron-cast buildings and bathed dull streets in glowing light. Old metal that lay cold beneath normally gray skies warmed under the gentle touch of twilight. Littered alleys became rosy with light, sharp corners of dark brick and rough cement faded into the halo of dusk. Edge was a city of hardened edges, of worn metal, but the seeking fingers of dusk gently pried open stiff shutters and eased out the steady flame of life that burned behind closed curtains. Sunset could make anything look beautiful. But over Edge it settled its majestic rays and lent a blanket of serenity.
The alley that Tifa found herself in was one of many tucked in one of the endless maze of structured buildings in the city; the twilight began to show its very first gleam, the edge of the sun just brushing stern the gray horizon. When the first wave of orange swept into the narrow alleyway, Tifa paused. One black-gloved hand pressed itself flat against gritty of the alley wall as she watched the light dance over the wide cement blocks on either side of her, revealing streaks and dirt.
It stood to reason that this alley appeared to have been barely stepped in for the last two months, at least. It was narrow and crowded, which was one of the reasons why Tifa had picked it. An alley like this one, piled with rubble and only a little more than a brief opening between two buildings, would make it difficult for someone else to track her. Difficult, but by no means impossible.
Especially since the person in question was an ex-Soldier, and Tifa knew only too well what he was capable of.
Turning to slip silently between a mass of crumbling bricks and a patch of what looked like rusty scrap metal, she moved quickly towards the end of the alley. Tifa liked these alleys. Narrow though they were, they were small nooks and crannies that most people overlooked. Tifa liked to think she was someone who didn't overlook them. She liked to think she could know the place she lived in, know the dark corners and the gray shadows. She wasn't someone who was too blind, or too proud, to see something for what it was.
She was almost to the mouth of the alley - she could already hear the faint sounds of traffic, the muffled voices - when there was a footstep somewhere behind her. Tifa didn't bother to glance over her shoulder. Instead, she launched herself out of the alley, into the wide street waiting for her. Dark eyes flew over the queue of people. Three steps took her into the mass of late-afternoon traffic; several more took her darting through crowd. Wind snapped the hair out her face. Tifa waited till she'd rounded the corner before pivoting on her heel to face him.
He was still behind her, of course. Light yellow spikes roused by the wind, piercing blue eyes, the silver gleam of a sword - Tifa whipped sideways just before it slammed into the ground at her feet. Her fist landed in empty air where a black-clad shoulder had been a moment before; she pushed herself off the ground when his sword swept at her knees. Her gaze narrowed as she twisted to the side, intending to bring her foot down on the hilt of his blade. Her kick connected, but not fast enough. He threw her off and she landed a few feet away, readying herself with one hand flat on the ground beside her.
"Go Cloud!" a voice cheered from somewhere behind the blonde; Cloud moved sideways, revealing a pink-cheeked Marlene, whose hair ribbons hung loose in her floppy ponytail. Tifa guessed that she'd probably been clinging to Cloud's back a minute before the fight started. "Get Tifa!"
"Marlene!" Tifa protested, but she didn't have time to catch her breath and say more, because Cloud had started towards her again. This time, she ducked under his arm and to slam her hand into his side. He pulled his sword around in time to block the blow with its hilt.
Three more minutes earned them each several more missed blows. Marlene stood off to the side, eyes bright with excitement, clapping and offering exclamations of support - "Go get her, Cloud!" - "Come on, Cloud!" - while the two of them moved in swift blurs accompanied by the gleam of Cloud's sword. Tifa's heart rose to her throat, beating fast in time with her movements. Moments like this, she remembered that she sometimes loved fighting - loved the dizzy speed and walking the edge. Loved seeing things in flashes and the feel of wind against her face, the risk, the danger, the thrill.
When it happened, she wasn't expecting it, as usual. He sent a swing over her hand and she dropped to her feet before she realized that he'd leaped over her head. By the time she turned to face him, two fingers were resting as lightly butterflies on her shoulder. She raised her gaze to his face. He looked at her, blue eyes steady and intense and soft all at once, like they always were. A brief, fleeting silence.
"You're it," he said.
He was barely out of breath. It wasn't fair. Tifa laughed and sighed all at once. "I hate how you're so good," she told him, but she was smiling, and her eyes were like shining amber, or smooth velvet night. The sun cast its rosy rays into her eyes, lighting up a deep black that one could get lost in. Cloud's hand dropped. His gaze did not.
"Tifa, will you and Cloud teach me how to do stuff like that?" Marlene asked. "Please, Tifa?"
Tifa pulled her eyes away from Cloud's to look at the girl. Marlene stared up at her, small hands tucked beneath her chin in a sweetly pleading gesture. Rose-colored cheeks were smudged with dirt. Tifa put a hand on Marlene's small shoulder, a smile unfurling effortlessly across soft lips.
"Maybe," she said.
"Tifaaaa!"
"Maybe." At Marlene's begging look and the opening of her mouth, Tifa glanced at the blonde ex-Soldier next to her for help. "Cloud, what do you think?"
Cloud looked at Marlene. She stood up straight and smiled hopefully at him. A breath of quiet followed. And then: "Maybe when you're older."
Marlene's eyes widened. "But -"
"I promised you I'd make pie for dessert today if you and Cloud won," Tifa interrupted. She shaded her eyes against the evening sun, considering her words. Her eyes traveled to Marlene again. "What do you think? Should we go home and make some?"
"Yeah!" Marlene's ponytail bobbed up and down excitedly, its long ribbon following the abrupt movement in a flow of pink.
"Okay." Tifa put her hand in Marlene's hair. Her fingers closed around the ribbon and pulled it tighter against Marlene's black hair. "Let's go then. Maybe we can ask your dad tonight what he thinks about teaching you some moves. And if we make enough pie, we can bring some to Denzel when we go visit him tomorrow."
Under the glow of the setting sun they started to make their way to the 7th Heaven, the three of them, Marlene skipping ahead (her newly tightened ribbon starting to come undone again), steps light and cheerful, confident in a childlike assurance that everyone would turn out the way she wanted it to. Tifa watched. Without looking, she felt Cloud fall into step beside her, his boots making little noise against the rough cement.
"It's been a while since we've done something like that," Tifa remarked. She gave him a sideways glance - flickering, teasing; smiling, affectionate. Cloud was studying their shadows in front of them, the sun warm on their backs. When she spoke he raised his sky-blue gaze from the ground.
"Yeah." Cloud watched Marlene's small figure skip before them, her own slender shadow dancing across the ground. Tifa's fingers brushed his lightly.
"She's a genius," Tifa said, nodding towards Marlene. "Isn't she? I mean - tag." Tifa laughed. Her eyes twinkled, but she watched Cloud with full, dark eyes behind a light gaze. Memories flickered in her mind. "Who would've thought of it?"
A cool breeze moved over them, lifting the hem of Tifa's skirt and stirring Cloud's golden spikes. He raised his eyes to the sky. Tifa felt something warm uncurl in her chest and settle into her stomach, watching the small smile tug at his mouth. "You'd be surprised," he said. He kept his gaze the pastel streaks of color in the clouds above them, even as the warmth spread through Tifa, up into her throat.
"Really."
"Yeah." His gaze dropped and locked with hers. "Girls tend to think up crazy stuff like that."
Laughter bubbled up from inside Tifa. She whacked him on the arm. "Only girls, huh?"
"Yup."
Tifa rolled her eyes. "No names?"
This time when Cloud spoke, there was something more behind his words than just words - something like a light shadow of meaning or the wispy film of a cloud that could only be seen when looked at a certain way. "You know who I'm talking about," he said.
She shrugged. But a smile curved up the corners of her mouth. They both knew. And in the glorious twilight that encircled the earth in a ring of endless light, neither of them needed to say.
Tifa loved the sunset because it gilded Edge beautifully. It could soften razor edges and warm the coldest metal.
But there was another reason too. She loved dusk because in the dusty glow that marked the time between the bareness day and muffled blanket of night, she could sometimes catch sight of memories, fleeting between smudges of twilight color. Memories that reminded her of previous sunsets and days gone by.
- -
"I have an idea." Tifa sat with her knees drawn up to her chest. She pulled a shining mass of her dark hair over her shoulder and squinted at the sky, curved clear and blue like the shell of a robin's egg high above Nibelheim. "Maybe we could play tag or something."
Cloud watched her cautiously. The corners of his mouth turned down, showing his wariness. He chaffed the heel of one hand half-heartedly against the shingles that patterned the roof he and Tifa were sitting on. "Tag?"
Tifa flushed a little but, in classic Tifa-style, didn't back down. "It could help...build speed. Increase reaction time. You know."
There was a brief moment of silence. Cloud tried to work his mind around the idea with little success. "We'd probably hurt each other," Cloud pointed out. His light gaze found Tifa's bright one. "We'd -"
"That could kind of be the point." Tifa twisted a strand of hair thoughtfully between slender fingers. Her eyebrows tilted down as she considered. "We could act like we were going to hurt each other, only that would be a distraction...and we really just want to tag one another."
"Two-person tag?" Cloud asked, still unconvinced. He shifted, dragging one foot over the edge of the roof.. Words formed in his mind, arguments that he let fade quickly. He didn't want to discard Tifa's idea. It was just...
"You're right." The girl sighed. Behind her, the sun was starting to sink slowly towards the ground. The sky, still clear but no longer a sharp blue, was being riddled with rose- pink hues. Tifa wrapped her arms around her knees and rested her chin on them. For a moment they sat like that, silent, while the round orb in the sky sank lower and lower, and the sky darkened from pink to purple. Cloud folded his arms over his chest and fixed his eyes on the sunset, unsure what to say or how to break the quiet.
"We should try it someday," Tifa said at last. She lifted her eyebrows to look at Cloud without raising her head from its position on her kneecaps. "I think it'd work. If we got more people, at least."
Cloud stared at her. Then nodded. And Tifa's smile widened to something big enough to fill the sky, bright enough outshine all the stars. Her hand snaked out quickly, catching him off guard as it closed around his own fist.
"Okay?" she said, and her voice as light and musical as the evening breeze.
"Okay."
Her hand squeezed his.