Glimpses of Normalcy

"'The big reason why folks leave a small town,' Rant used to say, 'is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.' Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere. "

Rant, Chuck Palahniuk

Have you ever heard the urban legend about looking into a mirror and seeing a ghost or some nonsense after saying a certain word or phrase? Yes? Well, here's what's even worse. You get up in the middle of the night, half driven mad by some unknown panic, some almost paranoia. You march to the bathroom, the tiles cold underneath your bare feet. Almost falling, you catch the sink, gripping either side with a white-knuckled fear that you can't explain. The dryness of your mouth now unbearable, you trace your sandpaper tongue over parched lips, and then tentatively raise your head inch by painful inch and gaze into the mirror.

There is no ghost, only you.

There's only you and your heart shaped face, half hidden by your own dark, stringy hair, and that's what frightens you most of all because you can't look away from the thing you've become, and you can't help but remember the person you used to be. The real ghost is you, a bad imitation of yourself.

Just look at those dead, glassy eyes, and tell me that I'm lying.

I ran a cloth under the tap and dabbed at my eyes just to keep from seeing myself after I got in from a long night on the mountains. After spending who knows how many long minutes scrubbing the blood and dust from my gloves, body, and boots, this was where the day always went downhill. It was Sunday, and that meant a day to myself in the house. I never hunted on Sunday nights because that was when Vincent worked with Sephiroth.

Father-son bonding time couldn't have been spent more strangely. I'm pretty sure now that it was the only way the two could stand being around each other. Vincent looked at Sephiroth and just saw another reminder of Lucrecia, another failure on his part. When Sephiroth looked at Vincent…well who the hell knows?

The mayor had hastily worked out the same deal with me that he had with Vincent a week after I officially resettled here, and to say the least about it, being an exterminator paid the bills, and that was all. It was really sort of unfulfilling, but it kept my mind off of things. The somewhat unhealthy thrill of mortal danger tends to work small miracles like that.

It sometime after five in the morning, and the sun wasn't up yet over the mountains. The house sat quietly in the way where you could hear an occasional beam creak or groan downstairs in the distance against the symphony of crickets outside, and one by one these noises faded into the background until I could hear only my own beating heart. A pin could've dropped, and it would've clanged like a church bell. If you told me that I was on edge, you wouldn't have been too far off. In the two months or so that I'd been living here, I learned to listen for every little noise echoing somewhere in the deep recesses of my house. Wind against the basement or kitchen windows might not have been just wind.

Sunday was usually a lonely day. I hadn't made an effort to get to know my neighbors or anyone on the new side of Nibelheim. They were all mainly tourists over there, but resident or tourist, I could tell they thought that I was crazy or at the very least, extremely disturbed with the whole divorce and the incident, and they left me alone. It was a godsend of sorts- to be left alone. I hadn't known this sort of anonymity since I first moved to Midgar, and that felt like centuries ago.

Sunday gave me time to think about yesterday night. Vincent came the same time as always to get me, and waiting on him, I slotted my materia, picking through the most useful of my supply. Sometime after ten, there was a light knock at the door, and I opened it. Vincent. The light almost seemed to flit away from his tall form; he stooped in my doorway asking if I was ready. I nodded and followed him along the trail into the mountains.

It'd been that way the whole two months in the Nibelheim. We fought alongside each other in silence, and only ever nodded if we saw each other during the day. I often felt that after confessing Sephiroth's true paternity to me, Vincent felt he didn't know how to approach me anymore, and I certainly didn't know how to talk to him now. It wasn't like we'd ever been great friends anyhow, but it still hurt in a way that he could keep something like this from us for so long.

I could hardly look at him, but on the mountains, fighting for your life simplified everything, and that became monotonous eventually too. Maybe that was how Vincent had felt for months, and I just shook up the status quo for awhile with my sudden arrival. He and Sephiroth worked on opposite sides of the reactor when I worked with Vincent which was everyday now except Sunday. Sephiroth hunted along the impassable trails where even I would've had a difficult time finding my footing let alone fighting. Sometimes, we'd come across him when we'd push far enough into the mountains that night, trailing some stray Nibel wolf pack. Well, those meetings were always extremely awkward.

Then, Vincent had to go and complicate the hell out of things last night as we walked along the bend in the ridge below the old reactor where the shadow of an overhanging cliff had us in almost absolute darkness. After exterminating some of the usual local vermin, I found a small clearing, and we rested among the brush. He passed over a canteen full of fresh, clean water, and I took a deep drink and looked away into what little I could see of the sky.

I used to imagine that the twinkling stars were a million city lights.

"Tifa," he said suddenly.

He was so damn hard to ignore because he spoke so rarely, and I couldn't help but give him my full attention, "Yes?"

"I wanted to thank you for not telling Yuffie about Sephiroth."

I waved him off and smirked wryly, "Well it's as much my secret as yours now, I guess. She'd never forgive either of us."

"I suppose you're right," he retorted dryly, and he grew even more somber, his face half hidden by the dark, "Tifa, what's going on between you and Sephiroth? It can't just be nothing…because while he's accepted me, we almost never talk."

If only I could've choked in that instant, but in a way, I suppose I have to eventually come to terms with this all, and just maybe, I can move on from there and reassume living.

"Well, you're still the very much the Turk you were," I played at joking just to stall for a little longer.

Vincent wasn't in a playful mood, "I've seen him climbing in your kitchen window. He used to never take risks like that; he's never even been to my house, Tifa."

My house, you mean. Whatever.

It seemed that everyone wanted to know more about my turbulent but overall short-lived sex life. Oh, the things people are concerned about nowadays. Dr. Klein studied it from that narrow psychological scope, and she'd tell me how this and that linked to certain areas of childhood, and damn her if she wasn't right. I hadn't received enough hugs as a child, and without a motherly hand in my teenage life, I overcompensated when it came to affection big time. I was also full of pent up frustration and ambition, but we won't go into that. These are things that I prefer to forget because all that psychobabble left me feeling uncomfortable and bare.

The paparazzi rushed after me with the divorce's initial breaking news. They'd tracked down poor Johnny, and his face was in the big papers and magazines for nearly a week. I'll never forget how horrified he looked. He'd thrown a hand over his eyes as if that would hide him away completely from the flashing lights. He called me at his wit's end, screaming that he was moving to Junon away from it all. He told me that he never wanted to see me again, that I'd ruined his life.

Every word was like a sword stabbing me through my chest, reopening my old scar over and over again, and it didn't stop there. Johnny always had one hell of a temper, and he would come around in time. Maybe…

My list of friends just kept growing smaller and smaller.

Here's a tidbit of advice. Stay in your day jobs, enjoy your bland TV dinners, your less-than-perfect loves, and take as many walks in the park as you possibly can- those ordinary things you can never really enjoy when you're me. Never become famous; if you do, bridges burn themselves. Goodbye childhood friends and goodbye peace. Welcome to a life where the walls of your house might as well be made of glass. The best you can hope for after crossing that line, is to seclude yourself into a sort of hermitage only to have your oddest acquaintance ask about your not-really relationship with your worst enemy. Sorry, former worst enemy.

Sometimes, I still forget.

I sighed and sucked in a deep breath. Dawn couldn't come soon enough, when I could crash onto my too firm mattress beyond the point of exhaustion, the sort of tired where you can't even dream, and let the darkness seize my body.

Vincent began to look impatient, tapping his golden gauntlet against the ground beneath him.

"Tifa," his voice was low, full of warning and menace.

Just be patient. This is hard for me too, you know, but of course he doesn't know. No one knows except for me and Sephiroth, and I'm even sure to what extent he remembers. Only, he has that lingering fascination with me that I even I can't understand, but as these things do, this begins with a story that started and abruptly ended eight years ago. I'd start from the beginning and go over the whole thing, but you already know the bulk of it, and I neither want to bore you, nor do I really want to talk about it.

First though, I want to dispel any notions of silly teenage romance that some of you might expect from such a story, and I know Vincent has a tough enough shell not to be too rattled about what I'm going to say. After all, Sephiroth is his illegitimate son. He's no stranger to scandal. When he went back to Midgar, to his life as the world's hero, he didn't promise to steal me out of the village late at night on the last day of the mission. We didn't even promise to write to each other after that night. It was just one of those things that happen as plain, as unromantic, and as everyday as ordering takeout.

I began thinking about the way Nibelheim used to be, before the pretty cobbled stone paths and streets, before street lights, and when the only car in the whole village was a rusty old truck. The Shinra mansion was still a sight of old country grandeur, a big manor left on a forgotten farmland, but the crops had long since slumped over and died. Nibelheim was a place where once you got old enough, you tried to get the hell out of the town as soon as possible. I think I've said all of this before, but just picture a big, old dusty nowhere, years behind the rest of the world, and you'll get my point.

Really, Nibelheim was dying long before Sephiroth had set fire to it. It was a town of the old and the young. The old escaped, succumbing to sickness and age, and those of us too poor to ever dream of anything else which was the category I'd fallen into were stuck here in this nowhere hell.

Shinra killed Nibelheim the day, they built that reactor; no, they killed it when that manor first went up, with that laboratory that weaved on for what seemed to be miles unknowingly beneath all of our feet. In a moonless sky where only starlight lit Nibelheim, it was deep into autumn, nearly winter, and I was halfway to sixteen when they arrived. We'd been complaining of monsters for months from the reactor, and there'd been blackouts. On its last leg for life, Nibelheim had become a cold, dour place to live. The monster attacks cast a gloomy atmosphere over everything, and I couldn't train. Life without training seemed meaningless.

In two weeks, Johnny and a slew of other kids would be leaving for the city, and Cloud was living his dream in Midgar. There would only be me left here, training for who knows what reason since Pa assured me that I'd never see Midgar, and I'd never join SOLDIER.

In the state of mind that my glory years were at an end, I opened my window and crawled down the gutter to the dirt road below. I was such an itty bitty thing then; I doubt that I could repeat that feat now and not end up dragging that metal piping down with me. I don't know why, but I changed out of my gown into that cowgirl getup that I'd bought a little while back.

Ha, the strange things that fuel your life with meaning.

That cowgirl outfit would hold all of the adventures that I'd never have, and when I was in my thirties, a drunken "mayor" like Pa, I'd hang it on my wall with pride and tell my own kids about my wild country adventures as a teen. My glory years lived out on the mountains. It'd be just like an old movie. Back then, I could've resigned myself into accepting what life would hand to me, but it's a saying in Nibelheim that when you go walking about on country lanes, you never know who you might meet along the way.

I dodged the water tower for the plains just outside of Nibelheim, nowhere near the mountain mind you. Even, I wasn't that stupid, no matter how much faith I had in those fists of mine at that point. Just a short stint on the plains, and I'd sit in the dust, undisturbed. With men from SOLDIER in the village, you can bet your lucky stars that every kid was still awake in the village, probably out wandering like me.

To tell you the truth, sometimes, I couldn't stand being the village's perpetual belle of the ball. Sometimes I wanted to be left alone like Cloud, the perpetual outsider. We were honestly very similar, both practically born into single parent homes which were always strapped for cash. We were both ambitious, but where he was shy, I became outgoing. Sometimes, I think he sent me letters to spite me for all those years that I'd overlooked him. Honestly, I hadn't meant to do that. Kids will be kids, and he was on my mind a lot after he left.

I just couldn't fathom how a kid like Cloud made it to the big city while I got left behind.

In the dust, just outside of the village where the plains grew thick, healthy grass maybe just a mile or two more away from village, stood Sephiroth. He turned almost instantly, seeing me stand there in the dust and quirked a brow.

I looked away down towards my feet because I knew exactly what it looked like, but honestly, and I mean this more than I've meant everything in my entire life, I didn't follow him out there. If I'd known he was there, I would've stayed in my house that night, and maybe, just maybe I would've been together enough eight years later to play the celebrity game and live out a more or less stable life with Cloud. You resign yourself to certain fates when the road only travels one way, and my road had suddenly forked.

Another tidbit of advice. You know the saying about the road seldom taken? Yes? No? Well, when you come to that fork in the road, just for me, run down the path trodden by thousands, hell, millions of other people. Some journeys just aren't worth the ride.

Me looking at him, him looking at me, it was a sort of stand-off. It was almost sort of ironic that I was dressed up like a cowgirl. My boots even had spurs. I took a few steps closer to him, unable to speak; my tongue was practically cemented to roof of my throat. Even breathing was hard; I could've suffocated on air, I was so nervous. The only sound was the jingle, jingle of the spurs on my boots, and I stopped short just in front of him.

Just like people voraciously read tabloids about me today, I read the same way about him, about my solemn, noble hero that I'd hoped to emulate in life, but heroes didn't have that trapped sort of look on their faces like caged animals. Heroes didn't look like someone's museum exhibit.

Looking at Sephiroth in that instant was like looking in a mirror. I knew that look, it was what drove me from my house that night onto the plain. He looked so worn down, defeated, and on edge like someone's old chocobo. He sighed, and in his own way gave me a look that screamed, not again.

It was the look that I gave so many boardwalk tourists in Costa del Sol, the look that I gave bar regulars who'd overstayed their welcome. If you ever saw someone so broken down, it'd break your heart. It was the way I felt that night, trapped in a life, on a path that I'd never be able to change. Only…I did.

Me and my need to fix things.

When will I ever learn to be completely callous?

There's a rational explanation for everything. So close to the mountains, he must've felt the call of Jenova, and if it was as Vincent said that the monster was all to blame for everything, then I was lucky enough to walk away unscathed from the mansion at all later on in the night.

I couldn't tear my eyes away from his; I couldn't crawl back into my window, to my rose-tinted world of fairytales and knights in shining armor. As a kid, you're asked to believe in some pretty impossible shit. Your parents reward you believing in things like the Tooth Fairy, only making you all the more complacent with the status quo; they throw all this junk at you and never properly prepare you for the moment your mother may suddenly die or your father becomes an alcoholic. They never tell you your dreams might just roll over and die, that you'll most likely become one of the world's roving nobodies living out your twenty seconds under the sun. They never tell you that your heroes are every bit as miserable as you, that they're every bit as fragile as you.

That shattering glass sound is your innocence decaying, drying up like a wilted Nibel lily.

Sephiroth probably looked at our dusty, little country lives, watching from his inn window during the day, while an early snow made the mountain's trails impassible for just a few extra days extending the village's life for a few more moments under the sun. He saw our little circle of friends and was probably jealous on top of the mounting paranoia and insanity. After all, Genesis and Angeal were both gone, missing in action so said the tabloids; we all knew they were dead.

I threw my arms around him, and he stiffened instantly. You could tell that neither was he used to someone touching him if not to spar or fight to the death nor did he immediately like it.

I needed this one thing in my life to be the way I wanted it. I could go on living as long as he remained a distant almost god rather than this real, tangible person in front of me.

This imperfect, fallible man.

I could accept the fact that someday, I'd lay down my training and become mayor of this windblown, cold hellhole, that'd I gain weight, lose my looks, get old, and marry another village nobody so long as he remained the way he looked on the screen.

He didn't push me away, and for some reason I wasn't too surprised. Clinging to him for real didn't mean that he reciprocated at all at first, and then his hand fell awkwardly on my back, and I glanced up. I wasn't looking at him; I saw the city lights glistening in the sky, growing larger and larger as I stood on the tips of my toes. My breath heated the air and misted against his lips. His heart thudded in sync with mine, and before I was aware of what I was doing, my lips were on his.

It was a desperate sort of thing. The last ditch effort you make to escape the world, believing that some passion-fuelled oblivion will just swallow the both of you up like a mountain trout does a pair of sick, old flies.

I was dragging him towards Shinra's old mansion, and Sephiroth let me drag him. If you ask Johnny, he'll tell you he saw me coming from the inn, hours later. Tell him for me, that he's wrong. The old stale, musty smell of rotten wood and mold was anything but romantic. The mansion was cold, the way the mountains were cold, and everything leaked. There were stray nails to snag your arms and legs against. The place had to be crawling with disease.

I dragged him up that creaky, old flight of stairs, praying that we didn't fall through into the basement or somewhere worse. The big, stained glass window was destroyed, whatever angelic scene that'd been there was painted over with crude, misspelled filth. Like, I said, anything but romantic. In a little off to the side room, there was a stained mattress on the floor, and I tried not to picture the bugs that must've been crawling in the dark on top of it.

I pushed him down on it, and he let me.

For the first time that night, he spoke, "Who are you?"

I shook my head as I settled my weight on top of him, "I don't know. You tell me."

That was how my relationship or whatever you wanted to call it with Sephiroth began and ended only after several day's worth of furtive touches and glances. Dr. Klein called it an unhealthy codependency. I called it escape.

Behind the musty, damp odor of the old manor, I could already smell the smoke of a building fire.

"Is that what you wanted to know, Vincent?" I whispered, chewing the side of mouth, really mauling it.

He sighed and grunted, "Just like Lucrecia."

I'll bet. So did that mean one day, I'd evolve into a big brooding, sometimes monster and sleep in a coffin? As long as I have blood running in my veins, I hope not.

"You should talk to him, Tifa," Vincent said suddenly, "He doesn't understand. Underneath all of that baggage, he has the same needs and impulses we all do, but he needs help."

Don't we all? You're not asking me to play Dr. Klein are you? Country smarts and a little extra book reading didn't make a psychiatrist.

"Who can I help?" I asked bitterly. After all, everything and anyone that I ever touched, I screwed up.

He smiled slightly, "You helped me, Tifa. You help everyone you meet. Aren't you up for one last rodeo?"

I spat blood and massaged my raw cheek from the outside; I wanted to say no but all that came out was, "I'll try, Vincent, I'll try."

Sunday morning, sometime after six, I unscrewed my bathroom mirror and tossed it out of the second story window. Lights came on, and I could already hear my neighbors cussing and opening their doors to peer out onto the street to see what the commotion was about. Instead of going to my room to catch what little sleep I could, I dressed for a cold day, thick, warm skiing pants and jacket and set out for a familiar reactor.

A/N: The inconsistencies with the third chapter and Tifa's story to Vincent are here for a reason. The next chapter will clear this up. :]