Glimpses of Normalcy
"We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage."
Albert Camus
Ground zero. A foreign ceiling bled into my sight as I blinked, bleary eyed, my eyes crusted over with tears and mascara. Light, far too bright for the mood, filtered in and out through his thick masculine blue curtains. Thick wood, all hard lines and angles, dominated the room. He didn't have any paintings or pottery…not even one measly cheap vase with plastic flowers. Johnny didn't have a decent sense of décor, but he hadn't had a feminine touch from my understanding either. The single relationship he had in the past since Nibelheim had fizzled out into who knows what.
I struggled to pull myself into a sitting position, but my limbs felt as heavy as Johnny's wooden bed, dead and limp, and Johnny, himself wasn't helping much either. He clung onto me as he slept, one arm slung across my breasts and the other wrapped languidly around my waist. With as much delicacy as I could muster, I unraveled myself and picked up my fallen dress. Wrinkled waves and lines of flowers sat against red silk, each rumple a testament to my marital betrayal. Hot tears were running down my face all at once. You're never really aware when you're crying until you're on your hands and knees sobbing your eyes out, well, at least that's the story with me. I eventually pulled myself together and slung my dress over my shoulder and stalked through Johnny's place looking for his bathroom, wiping my eyes free of day old mascara as I went.
At home, the bathroom was the most intimate of my rooms, one of the few places I felt at peace, but in this strange home devoured by Johnny's favored blue, I didn't feel anything except the baser needs of my all too human body. Latent pain coursed through various points along my body: a ring of bruises on my wrists, soreness in my thighs, and my ugly smudgy, swollen face. I assessed the damage in bathroom mirror. There's something incredibly humbling and offsetting about seeing your nude body in the mirror. I have nothing to be ashamed about; I'm in pristine shape, but yet there's that scar that runs from my right shoulder to my left hip, a token of the past, and I whisper my thoughts aloud unknowingly, "Nibelheim."
"What about it, gorgeous?"
I almost jump out of my skin and turn instinctively. Just Johnny. A pair of plaid flannel pants hung lowly on his hips and with hooded eyes, he leaned closer and whispered huskily, "You look beautiful, Tifa."
It's the beginning of something I'll regret, of something that I don't even want to begin, but I'd just be running much like someone else I know, and Nibelheim wells up in my mind again as Johnny's lips brush against mine, our teeth knocking together awkwardly as we're both still so hung over and sluggish from the night before. God, Tifa…how'd you get yourself into this one?
I can hardly manage my own life, my own problems, and Nibelheim keeps popping in my cloudy mind like some unbidden dream, and it's an escape that I just can't bring myself to take because I'm too damn proud for my own good, because I'm Tifa Strife née Lockheart, and I don't run away even when it'll probably be good for me.
Out of the past three years they'd lived in Costa del Sol, since reopening the Seventh Heaven bar, Cloud hadn't missed a day at work, but that day he stood in the kitchen nearly an hour past noon pacing back and forth on the phone with his and Tifa's general practitioner. She'd never come home last night, and a series of mounting erratic behavior had been hard to ignore. She barely ate, slept, or even bothered getting up to come with him to the bar anymore.
"I am holding," Cloud spat in irritation at the robotic voice over the phone, pristine in its politeness; he'd been holding for the last ten damn minutes. Should he have called the police earlier to look for Tifa? This was a new development, sometimes when he'd come back from work late at night, she'd be gone, but she'd always come back. Was it his fault? They hadn't really sat down and talked for ages or spent a quiet night in for quite awhile. Did some punks try to rough her up? No, Tifa could take care of herself. He ran a hand through his hair, pacing back and forth from the stove to the refrigerator all while the doctor's merry little phone jingle played in his ear. He stopped short right in front of the sink, dishwater reflecting his pallid face back up to him, his eyes rimmed red- trophies of his sleepless night.
"How may I help you," the Doctor's secretary, Ms. Jen Smith, answered in her low monotonous tone, and Cloud could almost let out a silent prayer at finally getting someone remotely human on the line.
"Ms. Smith, it's me, Cloud Strife."
"Oh, Mr. Strife!" She traded the low tone for a high-pitched flirty squeal, Cloud sighed. The last thing he needed was hero worship, and he raked his hand through his hair again which was even more untidy than usual, but thankfully the rest of the conversation became quickly far more rudimentary and professional, perhaps it was his grave pitch that he should've thanked, and after three minutes of necessary legal chatter, he was speaking with their doctor.
"Dr. Jones, I've found some pills prescribed to my wife that I feel you could explain," Cloud cut to chase. What was the point of polite bullshitting anyway? He'd already spent the entire night awake, terrified, and now he was pissed. The doctor was all at once obscenely polite and panicked, his voice wobbling on the line.
"Mr. Strife, don't be alarmed at all. Normal procedure, I assure you. Your wife said she's been having some trouble sleeping, and I prescribed her medication for a very short period of time."
"Hm. She never mentioned a sleeping problem to me," but she didn't have to say a word, how many nights had Cloud spent in the last month, feeling her shift and squirm at his side while he feigned sleep.
Then the doctor grew bold, "But, I tried to talk her out of it…urged her to seek some counseling-"
Cloud nearly dropped the phone, but he'd missed the doctor's intimation, Tifa stumbled in the door, her hair tussled, still wearing her clothes from yesterday. He dropped the receiver, forgetting all about the doctor and just stared at Tifa as if he'd never seen her in his life.
Most marriages that start out on those truly fairytale foundations barely last in our era, we're too concerned with our post-Shinra stock market, PHS-lines, dream homes, and careers. Now take two people who live through a series of tragedies, the worse things you can ever imagine happening to a pair of people over and over again…until one day, it all just stops. The two people, they just sit back and wonder how did they survive? How could they possibly find someone else who could even fathom what they've just gone through, and then they turn and look at each other, and both silently decide, "Hey, you'll do."
That was Cloud and me, together and against the world. If you endured having everything you ever loved stripped from you and nearly die a few dozen times, then a thing like infidelity would be a little bump in the road, right? It was never about me sleeping with Johnny that was the beginning of the end, or even the series of contemplations leading up to yesterday night…it was the realization that I didn't love Cloud. I wasn't even sure if I liked him. That awkward little boy with whom I'd grown up had finally matured into a man I no longer recognized.
When I walked through the door, he was on the phone, presumably asking about me with my bottle of pills sitting in the middle of the coffee table, and then suddenly I really would've liked about one or five even though I'd gotten a full night of sleep. I'm not addicted…I'm just dealing with I don't know what in my own way. So let's not discuss that, because right now at this moment you could hear a pin drop in the kitchen. We stood and stared at each other like dazed cattle.
"Tifa," He mustered with an authoritative tone I hadn't heard for years, "Where were you last night?"
"Out," I replied numbly, tugging flowery fabric into place along my body. This dress. It's just too damn wrinkled, and frayed, and torn. I look like a sex crime victim, but then…Cloud knows it too. He repeated his question, but I'm too far off to even think up a lie. A few more moments of silence…then a flurry of movement and shouting, and we edge closer to each other eyes blazing with unspoken accusations. A sob cuts across the open air, a tight little strangled noise, and it's so shocking because it's me that's crying. Cloud stood nonchalant just a few inches away, his arms folded.
"Where did you go? What happened?" The steely grimace he'd worn so well is finally beginning to crumble into something more sympathetic, and this is the Cloud I remember…weak and unsure, and I cling to that memory, to that time when I could put my mind off of the past.
"Did someone hurt you, Tifa? Tell me. I'll murder the bastard," I sob all the harder, clawing at his chest for support, and his hands are on my wrist, the only support keeping me from falling, "Tell me, Tifa. You know you can tell me anything. I'll always protect you. Please just let me in," his soft crooning fades as my thoughts overpower his voice. Honestly, we don't belong together. The last thing my father ever told me before he died was to never ever settle, and that's what Cloud and I did. We settled for this dysfunctional whatever we are.
"Cloud," I murmured, my voice raspy and soft from all the crying but growing in strength with conviction, "We have to talk."
That evening, I sat on the beach alone watching the tide ebb in and out on shore. Sounds from the harbor had begun to die down, and then all that was left was the whistling wind on the sea and the occasional cry of a seagull. A big yellow sun as rich as a runny egg sat against a red sky which further off on the horizon faded into a sickly yellow. A low band of black clouds sat out on the sea, and I wondered how long I could sit out here before I went back to the house and back to Cloud. Even the ocean was devoid of solace when I needed it most. Was it selfish of me? Was it selfish to fall out of love with the planet's greatest hero? Would we get divorced? Could we remain friends? Most importantly of all…what would the press say? I didn't know if I could deal with a scandal out in public like that; staring out in the waves which grew angrier against the shore with each passing second, I wanted nothing more than the ocean to swallow me whole and steal these damning questions from my mind. Love was something you couldn't work at. It was either there or it wasn't. Cloud was attractive in many ways, but I lay beside a stranger each night when I crawled into bed.
Nibelheim.
There it was again. The damning image of a wood smoke from an old iron stove in a wooden cottage welled up in my mind again. Old mountain paths, creeks and streams…I wondered if the trees had begun to grow back on the mountain yet. Tall firs and cedars which had stood for hundreds of years had all slumped over and died when Shinra built the reactor. No, I doubted the trees had grown back. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and I stood wiping sand from my freshly washed jeans and wandered barefoot back to the main road, sandals hanging loosely from my fingertips.
Snap!
Someone had taken a picture, and I looked over to catch a slimy reporter flashing with a thumbs-up and a grin, "You're a natural, Mrs. Strife."
I smiled nastily. For just how much longer would I be Mrs. Strife? That occasion would really give him a reason to snap a picture then. I didn't go home immediately, but settled on a little café for a light dinner. I barely made eye contact with the waiter as I ordered, ignoring all of his flatteries. My hair is beautiful? Really. What a lovely shirt? Yes, that's why I bought it. All of this phoniness, I could barely stand it. I bet if I looked closely enough this salad I'd ordered was really nothing more than little pieces of colored plastic. I examined the contents of the bowl with a critical eye- artificial ranch dressing, wheat and soy substitutes for the boiled eggs and bacon bits; was anything here real? The people too were all moving mounds of plastic, all fake wide smiles and shining eyes masking jealousy and disgust.
We weren't heroes. We'd robbed these people of comfortable lives once the mako reactors had gone down and the only real military presence on the planet had been disbanded; we had to go back to using fossil fuels which were more expensive and dirty and relying on independent militias for protection which were always corrupt. It was the good old bad days all over again. Was anyone thanking us for that? In five more years when everyone had forgotten about Shinra's nastiness, I'd probably get a rock through my window. Or maybe I'd grown too cynical for my own good. Fame will do that to you.
I sipped lightly at a cup of black coffee flavored with amaretto cream and sugar to mask the bitterness; Coffee was probably the last thing I needed right now, but I needed to take my meds with something. The irony. That was probably just a waste of a pill.
On the way home, I passed a stall of tabloids. One in particular caught my eye, some atrocious libel about Vincent Valentine. I blanched in revulsion; some people really had no shame. I'm surprised it wasn't my face up there especially with my strut through town with Johnny last night. You do a little something like save the world, and suddenly your life becomes public knowledge. What you've eaten for lunch, who you're dating, how often you go to the bathroom… It's maddening. I used to envy celebrities, but now I want nothing more than to disappear back into obscurity.
I turned the knob to the front door of the villa. It was dark inside, and Cloud was obviously not around. He was probably at the bar. I made a beeline for our bed not even bothering to undress and flung myself onto the unmade sheets from where Cloud had tossed and turned all night waiting for me the day before. Staring up at all ceiling, a familiar stark white, my heart fell into my throat, and I sniffled fighting back another volley of tears. I refused to cry again; after all, life here really wasn't that terrible. It was just…some unplaced feeling of not belonging. Would my life really have gone that differently if I hadn't met Sephiroth all those years ago? How many was it now altogether…eight? I'm only twenty-three, and I'm in the prime of my life. Why do I feel like an old woman then?
Thunder erupts in the far distant heavens shaking the ground, and then the sound of rain comes, falling everywhere steadily and heavily- a tropical storm melding into the storm already raging in my head.
A/N: This is probably the first author's note that I've written for this story. When I began writing this particular story, I wanted to write something drastically different from what I usually see in this fandom and explore relationships in the context of how well each of the characters know each other and some of the emotional baggage which the characters must be carrying around, specifically Tifa. It always seemed to me that Tifa and Cloud weren't very close at all, especially in Nibelheim before the main storyline, and so I always thought Tifa just having feelings all of the sudden for Cloud might have been some misplaced guilt or sentiment tying to her past rather than just love at first sight after meeting each other again. This story isn't planned to be at all long, and ideally I see about four to five more chapters before it is complete. The action will pick up drastically in the next chapter.