Long Forgotten Past
By: Illusion of the Mirror
Tifa's eyes widened in surprise. W-what? I-I don't understand."
Andrew O'Connor stepped forward and Tifa met his eyes to find a mix of astonishment and sorrow.
"It cannot be…" He knelt before the elderly specter of a woman seated in the wheelchair and placed a hand on her wrist. "Are you sure, Rebecca?" Rebecca nodded slowly and wiped a glistening tear from her translucent cheek with a trembling, bony finger.
Tifa was immensely confused and spun her frantic gaze back towards her comrades only to find that everyone in the room had risen from their seats. A wave of terror washed over her and she turned back to the frightening, blind woman before her. "What are you saying?!" Rebecca's head lolled to the side as though she had drifted into a deep sleep in those few seconds. Tifa locked eyes with Andrew. "What is she saying?!"
The middle-aged man swallowed and rose to his feet slowly. "She…she believes you are…"
"You are the person we've been searching for nearly a century," a sharp, female voice interjected. Tifa took a step back from Rebecca and Andrew, turning towards the voice. Emily Bordeaux stood right next to her with a reverent smile on her lips. "You're the great-granddaughter of Marie Wolfe!"
Tifa took another step backward and put her hands up in front of her. "No…you've got it all wrong. I grew up in Nibelheim…I can't possibly-"
"Well, nobody knows what happened to Marie's newborn daughter," Emily offered excitedly.
Andrew bit his lip as a worrisome look came t his gray eyes. "Yes, and she's the right age."
The others in the room seemed to close in around Tifa as they all spoke eagerly at once.
"Of course, she has Marie's eyes!"
"There is an orphanage outside of Nibelheim…"
"See! Look how she resembles our Emily! They could be sisters!"
Tifa's head spun as she felt more and more claustrophobic by the second. They crowded around her and for some strange reason, Tifa felt a mind-numbing fear envelope her heart and course through her veins. Their faces seemed to distort and Tifa's mind reeled as she tried to back away.
"P-please…" She uttered inaudibly as she futilely attempted to extricate herself from their pawing eyes.
Then she abruptly felt someone at her back and gasped as she felt an arm reach around her and tightly grip her shoulder. "That's enough!" A gruff voice boomed.
Suddenly the room went silent as Barret pulled Tifa off to the side; placing himself between her and the crowd.
"No kidding!" Yuffie piped up from beside him. "Can't you see how terrified she is?!"
"Yeah, you scary sons-a-bitches need to back way the hell off!" Cid shouted as his unlit cigarette bounced on his lip.
Immediately the whole crowd seemed to shy away; looks of shame and shock spreading across their faces. Tifa let out a labored breath and glanced over at Vincent who had a hand reaching into the black leather jacket he was sporting. There was little doubt in Tifa's mind that he was harboring some type of weapon there.
Barret lightly guided Tifa from the stunned throng and towards the door. "I think we'll be goin' now." Cid and Yuffie nodded and started towards the door as well.
"Wait!" Emily stepped forward and gripped the sleeve of Tifa's shirt but was met with a deep, guttural growl from Red XIII, who had positioned himself between the two.
Emily's eyes widened and she immediately released Tifa's clothing. "Please," she pleaded with a sense of urgency. "Forgive us; we were all so agitated that we forgot ourselves."
Red let out another growl and narrowed his incensed eyes. "You have thirty seconds to explain your actions."
Emily stiffened and met Tifa's glossy, frightened eyes. "When Marie her fled home, she ended up in the mountain village settlement of Sráidbhaile. It was there that she gave birth to her daughter, Seraphine. When the Kingsmen invaded the village, both of the children were ushered to safety, but they were separated in all the confusion. Timothy was adopted by a family from the Resistance who had survived the slaughter, but Seraphine was never found."
Emily's eyes brimmed with tears as she desperately addressed Tifa. Please, don't you see?! You are-"
"Time's up," Barret hissed as he heard Tifa whimper beside him. He began to pull her towards the door when Emily suddenly threw herself forward and blockaded the exit with her slight frame.
The utter silence of the room was deafening, and Tifa tensed as Emily's honey-brown eyes reached out to her. "You simply must believe me! You could be the one with the Gift!"
Something inside of Tifa stirred at these words and the lightly nudged Barret's protective grip away.
Vincent stepped forward, towering above Emily, who seemed fragile in comparison. Fire burned in his eyes as he spoke. "I warn you, if you continue to impede our way, you will be moved."
The young woman's bottom lip quivered, but her body tensed as she pressed her palms harder against the door frame. Tifa watched as Emily stood her ground and felt a question poke at the confines of her mind. The Gift…Marie had mentioned that in her journal. What could it mean?
Then a realization hit Tifa like a ton of bricks. The dreams, the voices, the visions; had those been "the Gift" all this time? Tifa's mind snapped back to the council room time and she pushed away from Barret's safeguard. She had to know.
A defiant tear slid from Emily's eye as Tifa slowly sidled up next to Vincent.
"I've seen them; Timothy and Seraphine. I watched them board the ferry. I heard as Kale sent his hounds out to find stragglers." Tifa squeezed her eyes shut as she continued. "I've heard things and seen things, while awake and asleep, which have seemed to be traveling across time itself. Tell me," she said as she opened her eyes. "Is this the Gift you're talking about? Because up until now, I thought I was going completely insane."
Emily's thin arms dropped to her sides; her eyes unblinking and then nodded. "Yes…yes it is."
Tifa inhaled a deep breath, ignoring the urge to flee what was welling up inside of her, and then released the breath slowly with a slight smile. "So then…where do we go from here?"
-- O --
Barret, Cid, Red XIII, Yuffie, Vincent, and Tifa all sat around a polished wooden table in the underground fortress' café. Though the food that had been set in front of them was delectable, Tifa couldn't bring herself to eat more than a few bites. She was far too busy mulling the morning's events over in her mind.
Cid and Yuffie, however, were scarfing down their eggs, bacon, sausage, and toast as fast as humanly possible. Barret, who was seated between the two, looked back and forth before glancing at Red. Red merely shrugged.
"Hey," Cid mumbled through a mouthful of eggs. "Pass me the Tabasco, wouldja, Tif?" Tifa looked up and took a moment to register his request before hastily sliding him the bottle, nearly knocking it over in the process.
Tifa stared down into her steaming plate of breakfast and let out a sigh. The council had wanted to "discuss matters more thoroughly" and decided that in the meantime that ragtag group of fighters should have something to eat. Tifa turned her gaze to Vincent. He sat quietly next to her as he sipped a glass of scotch. As he tipped the vessel to his lips, Tifa caught him glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. Usually this would have caused her to immediately avert her attention elsewhere, but she was really too tired to care.
Vincent lowered his glass and set it on the table; positioning himself so that he was facing her. His crimson eyes bore into her own with some severe emotion she couldn't quite define.
"What? What is it?" She questioned with a nervous smile.
Vincent parted his lips to speak but was abruptly interrupted by Cid's palm slamming onto the table as he lapsed into an extreme coughing fit.
"Damn it, Cid!" Barret bellowed while slapping the pilot's back. "Why doncha use common sense once in a while?"
Cid eased out of his coughing attack and took one last bite of his food. "That Dean guy said that he'd show me around the hanger when I'm done," he announced without looking up.
Barret stopped all movement and then launched into his food. Quickly finishing, he rose from his seat. "Well, c'mon then, Highwind! Let's get a move on!"
Cid gave a crooked smile and then lit up another one of his Chesterfields in answer as they briskly exited from the room.
Red chuckled and then turned to Yuffie. "And what's your story?"
Yuffie looked up with an expression similar to that of a child caught with their hand in the cookie jar after bedtime. "Nothing, I'm just hungry, is all." She narrowed her eyes at him. "Is there anything wrong with that?"
"Not at all," Red answered smugly as he saw Aiden enter the room and start towards their table. "But I do believe your escort is here."
Yuffie glanced over her shoulder and then quickly looked down at her empty plate, blushing furiously. Tifa giggled, grateful for the distraction from her racing thoughts.
"Hey guys," Aiden said boisterously with a small wave. He looked down at Yuffie. "So are you ready for a fun-filled tour of the one and only Resistance underground fortress?"
Yuffie pushed back her chair and stood. "Yeah, let's go!"
The two of them started off and Aiden launched into a speech about the various Resistance outposts in town. Yuffie threw a sneer at Red over her shoulder, sticking her tongue out at him as they exited through a different door then Cid and Barret had.
Red shook his head and smiled to himself. "Oh my…what will we do with her?" He turned and looked from Vincent to Tifa. "So what so you two think we should do?"
Tifa pushed away her barely touched plate of food and set her elbows on the table, leaning her chin in her hands. "Well…we could just aimlessly wander the halls until the council comes looking for us."
She glanced at Vincent, who was looking directly at her as he took another sip of his scotch. "What do you think, Vince?"
Vincent set down his glass with a soft "thunk" and then leaned back in his chair, never breaking his eye contact with Tifa. "Actually, I think someone wishes to speak with you in private," he stated in his usual flat, matter of fact tone.
At first Tifa thought he might be referring to himself and felt a pang of giddiness at the thought of him wanting to be alone with her. But she soon noticed that both he and Red were looking at someone behind her now. She pivoted in her chair to see a slightly anxious Emily Bordeaux standing behind her.
Emily wrung her hands as she nodded to Vincent and Red. "Um, hi. I wanted to talk to you, if you, if I could," she spoke softly to Tifa. Was this the same girl that had stood up so bravely against Vincent half an hour ago?
Tifa didn't know what to expect, but she figured it wouldn't hurt to talk to the girl. She turned to Vincent and Red. "You guys don't mind, do you?"
"Of course not," Red replied with a shake of his mane. Vincent merely gave a slight bow of his head in answer. Tifa decided to take that as an okay.
Geez…what's wrong with just saying, "no, Tifa, not at all?"However, if Vincent was any other way, he wouldn't be…well, Vincent.
Still, Tifa found part of herself wanting them to object.
She turned back to Emily. "So, do we stay in here, or do you want to go somewhere else?"
"Actually," Emily replied. "We can go to my room."
-- O --
"So, I'm really sorry about how we reacted back there in the council room. We must have been pretty freaky looking."
Tifa chuckled nervously as she seated herself on Emily's comfy, green canopy bed. "Well it didn't give me a warm-fuzzy, if that's what you mean."
Emily smiled and seated herself at the other end of the bed and set her hands in her lap. "I can imagine…" She sighed and played with the beaded corner of one of her throw pillows. "It's just that after all these years…the thought of having found the one with the Gift before Darknation, it just kind of made us go all, y'know." She made a twirling motion with her forefinger and whistled.
Tifa leaned back on her palms. "Hey, it's alright, no hard feelings. I guess I can understand why…wait, before Darknation?"
Emily nodded gravely. "Yeah, Darknation would love to get their hands on the one with the Gift."
"Why is that?"
"Well, you said you saw visions, right?" Tifa nodded and Emily continued. "When did that happen? When did it start?"
Tifa put a hand to her head and looked up towards the ceiling. "Oh gosh, I don't know the day…but it was when I fist found this cigar box under the old armoire in the attic. It was full of old journal entries all signed by this woman named Marie Wolfe."
Emily sat forward; her rapt attention on Tifa's every word. "Really? What was it like?"
Tifa scoffed. "Well, terrifying, for one thing. I just heard all these weird noises; like someone recorded sounds from all over the place and played them all at once. Y'know, like whispering voices, footsteps, and other stuff."
"But you didn't see anything?"
"No, not until later," Tifa answered and then looked at Emily with a glint in her eyes. "When we found the secret room in the attic that I assume you were using for storage."
Emily laughed tensely. "Yeah…sorry we didn't tell you or anything but…"
"I get it. No need to explain. Anyway," Tifa picked up a dark, fuzzy stuffed bear and examined it as she spoke. "Yuffie and I were looking around in there when I found this candle with an intricate carving on it." She looked up at Emily in mock-accusation. "The one that you denied ever seeing, by the way."
Emily put up a hand and smiled broadly. "My bad."
"Yeah, so when I looked closer at it, I sort of zoned out and ended up in someone else's body. I was carrying these kids, Timothy and Seraphine, down a mountain as the Kingsmen were chasing me. But I ended up breaking my leg when I fell down the riverbank. I saw the kids get on the ferry and then seemed to come out of my body as these big, huge dogs came down the bank and ripped me, or whoever I was, apart." Tifa sighed and then met Emily's eyes again.
"Wow…I can see why you thought you were going crazy," Emily stated as she rubbed her chin. "That sounds horrifying."
Tifa's sighed as she hugged her newfound plushy friend to herself. "You're telling me."
"Do you mind me asking what the body you were in looked like?"
Tifa thought for a moment. "I didn't get to look at it much, being that I was inside of it most of the time. But she had blonde ringlets, was pretty thin, and had a high voice, almost like she was singing when she spoke."
"So you were Grace Royal, then. Very interesting," Emily looked down into her lap, deep in thought. "It's almost as thought the talisman was showing you the past it's been through. Fascinating!"
Tifa raised an eyebrow so high that Vincent would be proud. "Er, no meaning to be a bother, but could you explain? I'm feeling a little out of the loop, here."
Emily looked up with wide eyes and then laughed to herself. "Sorry, I get that way sometimes. I just stop what I'm doing and launch into thinking mode. Grace was the name of the woman who helped so many of the Resistance escape to Sráidbhaile. She was also the one who took care of Marie's children. She gave her life to save them."
"But what were you saying about the talisman? How could it be showing me anything?"
Emily blinked rapidly and began ripping a small candy wrapper that she had found on the bed into pieces out of nervous energy. "That's part of what the talisman does. It's almost like a video and audio recorder of the things that go on around it. It plays them over and over, but only the one with the Gift can see it, or hear it, as you've done."
"Okay," Tifa said slowly. "But I've never seen the talisman, how could it have…er, communicated with me?"
Emily stopped her absent-minded ripping and brushed her palms off on each other. "It's been hidden." Tifa must have looked as confused as she was because Emily continued. "I melted it into that candle. My family makes them, you know."
Tifa's gasped in realization. "So you were the ones who stole it from Darknation after they stole it from that Warren guy?"
Emily nodded and then giggled girlishly. "An excellent job done by yours truly, if I don't say so myself."
"It was you!?" Tifa gasped.
"Don't act so surprised," Emily said with a sweet smile. "Just because I'm a girl, it doesn't mean I'm not capable of larceny." She laughed again at Tifa's bemused expression. "But it's not like I didn't have some help. Anyway, that's not really that important. We have it now, and Darknation doesn't, that's what matters."
Tifa frowned and bit her lip. "Yeah, but Darknation blamed it on Vincent."
"Sorry about that, but it wasn't our fault he showed up. Darknation would have had no clue who it was if they hadn't been able to blame it on your friend." Emily then folded her knees and laid her chin on them. "I would like to know how they found out we were back. As far as they knew, they had wiped us out."
Tifa looked down at the stuffed animal in her lap and then suddenly remembered a question she had. "You said that Grace took care of Timothy and Seraphine…why? What happened to Marie?"
Emily looked down solemnly. "She fell ill shortly before she left home with Timothy. It was a miracle that she made it through childbirth in the condition she was in when the time came. She died the very next day."
Tifa couldn't help but feel sorrow at this. Strange as it may have seemed, she had felt a sort of bond with this mysterious woman from the past. "I see. Well, that scary old lady said that I was the "lost daughter of the Resistance." What does that mean?"
Emily inhaled deeply and straightened out her thin legs. "The Gift is passed down through the mother. Timothy wouldn't have inherited it from Marie, but Seraphine would have. Since Timothy was adopted by a family who survived the massacre at Sráidbhaile, he grew up knowing of his lineage, but Seraphine was lost to us. She would have grown up without ever knowing about her abilities."
"So if I have the gift," Tifa continued. "That means that my mother did also, and my grandmother." Things were starting to come together for the first time in what seemed to Tifa like an eternity. "I never knew my grandmother…not even her name. Could she have been…?"
"I think so," Emily answered Tifa's rhetorical question absently. "I mean, it makes sense."
Tifa was in awe at this newfound information. She had never known much about her mother, being that she had died when Tifa was only eight. Her father never spoke about her history, so Tifa had never asked. It just hadn't seemed relevant at the time. But now, she wished that she had questioned him.
Unfortunately, now it was too late.
But then there was Timothy. If he had children of his own…Tifa felt a jolt of excitement at the prospect of actually having living family. "Well, what about Timothy, then? That means I'm related to him too."
Emily smiled broadly and sat up on her knees. "He was adopted into the family of Louis and Mildred Bordeaux and ended up marrying their daughter."
Tifa's eyes went wide and Emily's smile became all the more ample. "So I guess that makes us second cousins or something like that." Tifa's brows knitted together and she looked down into her lap again.
"Um…" Emily said nervously. "Did I say something wrong?"
Tifa looked up with slightly misty eyes. "No…it's just that…I thought I didn't have any family left. I'm just so…so happy."
Emily's smile faltered and she leaned forward to fold Tifa into a hug. "Me too, Tifa, me too."
When Emily released Tifa and sat back, Tifa smiled and then exploded into laughter.
"What? What is it?" Emily asked while looking all around to spot the reason for Tifa's outburst.
Tifa calmed herself enough to answer. "C-Cloud! I totally forgot! He must have been surprised!" Tifa lapsed into another bout of giggles as Emily scratched the back of her head.
"Well, he was a little upset that I'd been hiding it from him at first…that is, until he was distracted by all the wonderful toys we have here." Tifa met Emily's eyes and then they both burst into side-splitting laughter.
"I can see it now," Tifa managed to say between guffaws. "You lied to me! I never - Oh look! Really big, shiny guns!"
Emily gave a mock-shocked look and clobbered Tifa with the beaded throw pillow she had been holding. "Hey! That's my boyfriend you're talking about!"
Quickly recovering from the attack, Tifa reached over and grabbed another pillow and began to hit Emily with a barrage of puffy punches. It wasn't long before the sound of wild laugher echoed down the hallway outside the room and feathers that had been liberated from their silky prisons floated freely about the room as two grown women found respite in the fact that they were no longer alone.
-- O --
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