Glimpses of Normalcy
"There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn't exist."
Fernando Pessoa
In lieu of baby coos and dirty diapers, I lavished my maternal longings on a half frozen wolf cub that Sephiroth brought home one night several months ago tucked within the crook of his arm. He had come across the floppy grey little thing on one his long hunts that took him near the old reactor but not too near Old Town and New Nibelheim. I learn more and more about him as each day passes. Last spring, he rubbed against some poison sumac on a hunt, and his skin burst into red hives. I laugh when I think of how I had to coat him with that bubblegum pink calamine lotion and bind his hands with surgical tape to keep him from scratching.
With the addition onto our cabin that we finished midsummer, I discovered that he didn't know much about real architecture, and it still leaks when it rains in the corner of our study. Every other month, he patches up the soggy wood with careless globs of plaster and admires his handiwork. I don't have the heart to point out the moss growing through the floorboards. I'd bought a cheap keyboard and played half a melody to give the room some charm as he read every night more than was humanly possible in our steadily growing library. I assumed that he would have liked dusty, thick books on military history, but instead Sephiroth devoured pirate stories and other boyhood adventures. In those intimate moments, I saw the boy that he had been and the man that he might have been. Scars always remain and yellow, deepening with age.
On clear evenings, we watch the stars from the rooftop in real country darkness without saying much. I never have to speak for him to understand me. We have entire conversations in comically raised eyebrows, pursed lips, and wagging fingers. He has a sweet tooth that his enviable SOLDIER's metabolism never shows on his gut. In bed, sometimes he shivers in his sleep. Nothing was perfect, nor would it ever be, and that was fine. He will miss the mother that he had never known, mourn the lost childhood, and grapple with the evil that he has done forever, and I, I will never quite forget the cold steel of his blade as it tore across my torso and cleaved through a lung so near my heart. We keep these thoughts distant somewhere for occasional contemplation. In the canvas of our lives, someone painted a demarcation between then and now. We moved past it.
Just after midnight, we left my home nearly four years ago, and I thought to burn it all down for the briefest second, to make a real end and emerge from the ashes. I changed my mind — better to leave with a knapsack and a last look. I did not leave a note. I sold the house quietly to the common banker who in turn sold it to one of the ski lodges. In a few months, they'd bulldozed it all in and built over everything with artificial hot springs.
We crept through the mountains until we happened on a chasm in the mountainside. It sat like a half-moon carved into grey, sheer stone, and firs haloed unbroken ground. I threw down my meager possessions into the freshly fallen snow, and we set to work like the old pioneers who had first built these mountain towns cabin by cabin. Many months of hammered fingers, sharp nails, and logistic dilemmas gave birth to our little cottage, five misshapen oak rooms of our own. Sephiroth and I, we couldn't have made it without Vincent who'd followed our trail the night that we decided to make our getaway. He ordered half of our supplies and still brought our necessary provisions from the grocery store back in Nibelheim. Vincent had become a changed man, as if he too had come out of his eternal grief. He cut his hair and discarded the gauntlet and cape for the mountain-man's provincial plaid and camouflage.
I will never sacrifice this peace for anything. I could die tomorrow, and I would accept it with grace. No. I am no longer fatalistic but feel an unshakeable ease, an ineffable sense of self-awareness. Now, there is the still air. I breathe in and through blurred vision, wipe my eyes and take Sephiroth's proffered mug of tea. He is warm at my side, the bone of his elbow reassuring in its rigidity. He absentmindedly feeds our shared cub Beau a strip of jerky and lets the pup nip at his fingers. His humanity no longer amazes me. It is simple, normal even if there is such a thing. Sephiroth is simply a man, not my teenage specter. I am nothing but Tifa now, a woman nearing middle-age. This, I think as I take a long sip of warm amber and exhale, is enough.
A/N: Wow, has it really been three years since I first tackled this pairing and this story? Yes, it has. When I first set out to write this story, I wanted to write a sort of Palahniuk-esque stream of consciousness first-person narrative with an unreliable narrator, and it shows, unflatteringly at times. I lost the drive to really finish this story at the time because I've never been a true fan of traditionally romance-heavy stories, and I tried to minimize that element of this fanfic to focus on Tifa's self-healing journey. I always thought that the supporting characters from FFVII were profoundly well adjusted for all of the tragedy that entered their lives…Tifa particularly so as the group's source of constant optimism. I wanted to shake up that dynamic through this story. Sephiroth and Tifa are interesting to pair together as well, and theirs is a nearly impossible romance to make believable. In this story, what binds them together is profoundly unhealthy obsession on Tifa's part for fame and Sephiroth's canonically established instability. Moving that bond into a place of health and healing was an experience, and I just might crack my chops at a future story with these two.