27. Secret

"You're gone, gone, gone away I watched you disappear

All that's left is the ghost of you

Now we're torn, torn, torn apart there's nothing we can do

Just let me go we'll meet again soon

Now wait, wait, wait for me please hang around

I'll see you when I fall asleep."

From Little Talks by Of Monsters and Men

- L.

Tifa was going to find Cloud, if it was the last thing she did.

She knew what the others were thinking. She read it in their eyes, whenever she started speaking about possible leads; maybe Cloud could have gone… maybe the Lifestream… maybe Sephiroth…. They would listen to her but their eyes were strained, pained. She wondered what it was that they were not telling her. Some definite proof that Cloud was dead? But none of them told her and Tifa didn't ask. She thought maybe she was afraid to find out the truth. As far as she knew, she was going to find Cloud, right to the end of the world.

Only it looked like the end of the would might happen sooner rather than later. They helped people when they could, they kept on living on the Highwind and wandered the world aimlessly, but Tifa was always looking for Cloud. Every town they visited, she went around asking about a boy with a spiky blond hair and bright blue eyes. She wasn't sure if he'd still have his sword, but she included that anyway. No one had seen him but one woman at a bar in Sector 6 Plate. It was many years ago, though – she only remembered because a bunch of SOLDIERS had come into the bar that day and the blond boy was the only non-SOLDIER there, an infantryman, looking too small and young to be there. She said she remembered this one SOLDIER hanging out with the boy, a black-haired man who laughed easily. Tifa figured it must have been Zack. It would have been before Nibelheim.

It was Cait Sith who brought up the Lifestream first. It was among the oddities that the world had to deal with after the Incident. Lifestream, which usually remained deep under the earth, were bursting out here and there. It reeked Mako, and many people were dying of Mako poisoning. Considering everything that was going on, though, the news only barely made the paper. Cait Sith was scanning the newspaper and read it out loud, shaking his head. Tifa hadn't thought much of it then, but something about the whole thing kept nagging her. The more she looked for Cloud, the more hopeless she got, but her thoughts kept returning to the Lifestream. Then they heard of a Lifestream burst in a small town called Mideel.

"So you sayin'…" Barret frowned.

"I'm saying it could be Cloud," Tifa said, trying not to hope too much.

She wished that could say that she knew, somehow, that Cloud was in that town. That she was connected to his heart somehow, as cliché and disgustingly sweet that sounded, that she knew because he'd been her world and she just – knew. Like fairytale magic. But the thing was, there was no magic and it was just the adrenaline pumping through her blood from many sleepless nights and burning anxiety making her heart beat faster. Barret was looking at her worriedly now.

"Look, Tifa, I ain't arguing." He leaned forward, squeezing her shoulder. They were gathered around the deck like always. Cid was behind the controls and not saying a word. She could tell he was worried, too. Barret continued.

"But you gotta rest. We'll go when this thing is wrapped up, okay?"

Tifa tried to remember what this thing was, but couldn't.

"I'm fine. I just… feel like it'd be too late, you know?"

"Hey, we want to find Cloud as much as you do," Cid opened his mouth. "It's just… we ain't even sure yet. All we know is that there was a Lifestream burst in Mideel, and a person popped through it."

"I just…" Tifa thought again how she'd like to say that she just knew. Like a gut feeling, like a sixth sense, like the proof of their destiny that she had always been looking for. "I just know," she lied. Everyone was silent for a while.

"How long does it take to go there, ol' man?" Yuffie asked Cid.

"I ain't that old, midget," Cid grunted, chewing on a toothpick. "'Bout two days, maybe."

"Well." Yuffie arched her eyebrows. "You better start gearing up, then!"

Cid looked like he wanted to argue for a second, but then muttered what the hell and plopped himself in the chair that he liked to call the Captain Chair. The engines started whirring.

Tifa looked down at a soft prod at her legs. Nanaki was looking up at her.

"You know, Tifa. I hope we find Cloud. I really do. But even if it is Cloud that came out of the Lifestream…" He paused, didn't finish that sentence, but Tifa nodded.

"I just want to see him again." She said.

She knew, though, that nobody had ever just come back from the Lifestream before. Unprocessed, raw Mako in its purest form ran through the Lifestream. Prolonged exposure to even the purified Mako in the reactors caused poisoning. All kinds of things happened, nothing predictable. Some people laughed themselves to death, some lost sight and smell and speech, some lost their heads altogether.

Tifa imagined what it would be like. To have found Cloud, finally, and find him blind, deaf, ill. What if… what if he didn't recognize her? She just wanted to feel okay again. She was so tired. The Highwind beeped and whirred in her now-familiar pattern, Yuffie excused herself to the bunks, and Tifa found herself drifting into sleep. At the blurry edge between dream and reality, she saw Vincent leaning against the window and somehow that morphed into Cloud's rumpled form, quietly looking at her with his bright blue eyes. She wanted to tell him something but forgot as soon as she opened her mouth and then the days without sleep finally overtook her.

- L.

Tifa had always thought that Nibelheim was a backwater town, but it was a city compared to what she was seeing in Mideel.

It was hard to distinguish between trees and other things. The sun was clear and strong, and it fell on every surface that wasn't hidden by thick canopy of leaves. Houses made of wood were in those shades. Grass was dry and browning. Dirt clouds occasionally swept up. Humid air closed around their throats as soon as they stepped off the Highwind, a little distance away from the village so not to attract unnecessary attention.

"Damn, it's hot here." Barret said, astonished, as he shuffled off his coat. Yuffie drank in the humid, scorched air. "It reminds me of home," she said.

They walked through the tangled mess of trees and to the village. Tifa tried to find a signpost that said Mideel, but couldn't find any. There was a balding old man sitting under a shade, on a stump of wood and fanning himself with a thin book. She walked over to him.

"Excuse me, sir…"

The old man looked up at her. He squinted as if to see through the heat wave, and they twinkled mischievously.

"Ahoy, ain't you a beauty."

Yuffie giggled behind her. Tifa smiled politely.

"So, this is… Mideel?"

"Damn right it is, but who are you? No one comes to our little corner of the world 'cept the people who live here. And not even them, sometimes."

"We, uh…" Tifa faltered, not knowing how to introduce themselves.

"We're anthropologists." Cid said unexpectedly. "Anthropologizing 'bout… small villages, y'know?"

Barret looked at Cid strangely. Cid shrugged.

"Oh, is that so?" The old man quirked up his eyebrows. "Well, that's new… whatcha gonna write about small villages?"

Cid opened his mouth, closed it again.

"Anything, you know. It doesn't… we haven't really decided yet." Tifa said quickly. "Anyway, I heard that there was a Lifestream incident a little while ago?"

Waiting for the man to reply, the short moment as raw sunlight attacked her back and sweat trickled over her face, it was one of the most agonizing moment of her life. Her heart beat faster and faster until she could hear the heartbeats over all the noise in her head – yelling, hoping, praying, crying.

"Well," the old man said slowly. "Yeah, there was."

Tifa's heart almost broke from the intense beating. She was now sure that her body temperature must be higher than the air around her.

Then the man said, squinting and shrugging his shoulder,

"A damn cat popped through it. Why?"

Tifa's heart went silent for a minute. She could feel the heat again, and, damn it was hot. It was too hot. She felt like crying. Because it was so hot, her tears would surely be salty like the ocean.

- L.

"Let's ask the villagers, okay?" Yuffie consoled. Tifa didn't really see the point. She opened her mouth to tell Yuffie, but saw her expression and changed her mind. "Yeah," she said. "I'll go ask."

Tifa turned and walked along the deep green shadows and through the insects singing. The back alley, mostly just a whole lot of dirt and thick leaves dripping and staining the ground, led to some more wooden houses that could have been homes or shops. Most people Tifa saw were elderly. She half-heartedly asked a few about a boy with the blond spikes. Some didn't understand her at all.

"I told the little cat to watch out for her milk."

An old lady smiled at Tifa, her lips parting and the few remaining teeth showing. Tifa smiled back politely. It wasn't an answer to her question at all. Her insides were already scorched raw, from the heat and also something else.

She was feeling strangely detached from herself ever since the old man had told her about the cat. She wanted to remain in that blistering oblivion as long as possible. Maybe forever; because she knew what was waiting beyond it.

A dog approached her and started to sniff. It might have been a handsome dog once, with short black fur smooth like velvet, but it looked weary and charred from the merciless sun. Tifa squatted down in front of the animal. She'd always liked dogs – though, if she had to say, Cloud was more like a cat than a dog. Tifa liked dogs for their consistency.

"What's the matter?" Tifa muttered. "Are you all alone?"

The dog whined. Tifa extended a careful hand, rubbed its head and the dob leaned into the touch.

"You got lost, didn't you?" Tifa kept talking. She thought maybe the dog understood. It started wagging its tail. "Separated from someone you love…? Silly thing."

Behind her, two men were talking. Tifa caught the drift of their conversation.

" … guess it's been about a week now since he washed up here on the shore…"

"I dunno, I say the whole thing feels unlucky."

"It is the end of the world."

"The weirdest thing was his eyes… I've seen blue eyes, but…"

Tifa jumped up so fast that she almost stumbled and fell over the dog. It barked, startled. The two men looked over at her, hearing the bark.

"E… excuse me," Tifa sputtered, words spilling out faster than she could pronounce. "that… that person you were just talking about…?"

"Miss, are you okay?" The first man frowned.

"I'm okay." She managed in a calm enough voice. "So, a man washed up… on the shore, huh?" She asked, casually. The second man nodded. He wasn't as old as the other people she'd seen so far.

"Yeah. A villager found him a little ways down the coast… it was about a week ago, I think?" He directed the last part to his friend. The first man nodded vigorously. Tifa imagined it must have been an exciting thing in a town that rarely had a new day.

"Yes, it was exactly a week ago. Poor kid… he looked like he'd drifted from somewhere pretty far away."

"And this boy… how did he look like?" Tifa asked carefully. The two men exchanged glances.

"He had blond hair. And blue eyes." The first man offered.

"Not too tall… and," the second man considered. "His clothes were all torn up and ragged… but he was carrying a sword."

"Really big, too, huh?" The first man said. The second man nodded.

"Cloud, it must be Cloud." She was muttering before she realized and running before she heard the two men call after her. There was almost no wind, trapped between the humidity, but air crashed into her face as she made her way back to the entrance of the town. There she found everyone else, exactly as she left them. Barret looked startled when he spotted her.

"Tifa! What's wrong?"

"I…" Tifa tried to speak before she caught her breath, but the words leaked away in huffs of short breaths. I found him, I found him.

She never did manage to get those words out of her, but her eyes must have told them everything else. While she was hunched over and gasping, she heard Cid mutter and laugh, Yuffie jumping up, Nanaki asking where? And before Tifa realized that she had been so thrown that she'd forgotten to ask where he was now, Barret was asking the old man by the tree, about a stranger that he'd seen lately – she watched all of this over the noise of her own ragged breathing that sounded exaggerated to her. Her head was spinning fast and then she heard the old man's answer.

"Why, yes, that charming young man… He's now at the clinic."

- L.

She did not understand the doctor's words at first. The words were heard, but disconnected somehow.

Falling apart before they reached her mind. The doctor was a young woman, younger than most people in the village. She wore thin glasses and a whitish gown. She talked of Cloud as if he was not right there, sitting and staring.

But he wasn't.

"Mako poisoning, quite an advanced case." The doctor repeated the words. Tifa still felt numb. There was an old mechanical fan in the room, generating a thin string of artificial wind. The dark green curtain shifted slightly. Cloud's eyes were blue, like always, the Mako tainting it green around the edges. When nobody spoke, or objected to her words, the doctor cleared her throat again.

"It appears this young man's been exposed to a high level of Mako energy for a protracted period of time. He probably has no idea who he is, or where he is right now… he's here, but," but. "Really miles away from us."

The doctor looked sympathetic, even pained, but she did not really understand, Tifa thought. Would it have been easier to find him dead? It was a treacherous thought. She did not have the strength to fight it back. Instead it crawled to the corner of her mind, sat and watched like a cockroach. All the while Cloud sat still, breath slow but steady. His gaze wandered sometimes but it came back to the same thing – the sky beyond the window, through the green curtain. A brilliant blue light.

Tifa touched his shoulder. She was careful. She did not even breathe. Cloud didn't seem to feel it, though. Only blinked up at the sky.

"Damn, that's evil." Cid finally said, breaking the silence that was starting to get too heavy. A fly buzzed against the wrong side of the window, trying to reach the other side. The electric fan stuttered.

"Is he alright, I mean –" Barret ran a hand over his face, suddenly looking exhausted. "Will he heal?"

"I…" the doctor glanced at Tifa. She felt her gaze without seeing it. Tifa wondered what her face might look like. If the emotions were slipping through the cracks or if it was as numb as she felt.

"I can't be sure," the doctor evaded. "Maybe."

"Or maybe not." Yuffie said, narrowing her eyes. "Tell us how it really is." It was a voice she usually reserved for a fight. Tifa imagined Yuffie taking a breath, readying for a battle she thought she'd lose.

"Well as I said, he's got Mako poisoning. I've never seen a case this bad. No normal human could have survived it."

"He's a SOLDIER." Yuffie said. The doctor nodded.

"I guessed as much, from his clothes and – the eyes."

"But," Yuffie said. "But he's a SOLDIER. How can he have Mako poisoning?"

"Even SOLDIERs are humans." the doctor told her simply. "They have limits. What happened to him?"

There was silence. Nobody really knew. A current of uneasiness in that silence, guilt, like it had been them who pushed him into a furious stream of green Mako – Tifa couldn't really blame them for running when they did and saving her life, but she couldn't help but feel a twinge of resentment. Irrational anger, fury without a name.

"We don't really know." Cid settled. "We've been lookin' for him since he's gone missing."

"He must have fallen into the Lifestream." Yuffie said. There was something in her voice, an obstinacy, a prelude of a fight. Her small face contorted in an intense emotion.

"As I said," Cid said slowly. "We don't really know, Yuffie."

"Yes, we do." She protested. "We saw what… how it blew up after and the Lifestream flushing out in all directions. Of course we know. We have known, all this time." Her glance quickly went to Tifa, and then away.

"That's a valid point." Vincent said, as if from a shadow. Yuffie pushed her lips together in a tight line.

"Exactly. Even Vincent agrees. And… and we left him there." It was accusation. Tifa watched, a part of the group but also out of it; an observer. The echo of the resentment she'd felt – she realized that the feeling must be so much stronger for them. They were the ones who had left. The doctor didn't say anything. Nobody said anything for a while.

"Yeah," Barret's voice was a shadow of his usual bark. "Yeah, we did."

Tifa wondered if guilt, regret – if they were lessened when shared by so many. She guessed not. Maybe the collective guilt of many were stronger. Because you could not forget. Because you sacrificed one for many, as if it was a matter of mathematics. Two is bigger than one.

"Don't do this," Tifa heard herself say. She was counting numbers in her head. "There's nothing we could have done, right?" Five years since. Fifteen years since. How many nights? Too many to count. "So let's not blame ourselves like this. It won't help us and… it certainly won't help Cloud."

"You're right, Tifa." Cid nodded. "Beating ourselves over what's already happened… it won't help anythin'." He didn't sound too convinced, though.

Tifa just smiled. Seven songs, six petals, thirty-eight pearls minus one.

But if there was something scarier than Cloud not waking up, it was him waking up, and they all knew it but didn't speak it.

The doctor talked a little more after that, about small towns and city hospitals, cleaner sheets and the heat – it didn't really stay long enough in Tifa's head to make sense. There was one other bed in this clinic. The doctor told them that they could stay until someone really needed the space.

When they were alone, Tifa told them about her decision. They were unquestioningly accepting, and she might have been alarmed for that had she cared. Because it meant the secret she thought she had was not really a secret at all.

"I'll stay, with Cloud. You have work to do."

"Yeah, that's probably best," Barret said. "For Cloud… an' for you. We'll come back again an' check on ya."

"Hang in there, Tifa. Hope he gets better soon." Cid told her. There was a grain of truth there, she thought. If he'd been alive – alive in the way it mattered – there would have been other talks, much more dangerous and painful. They were relieved, at least a little bit, even if they might not admit it to themselves.

Tifa nodded anyway, and thought she smiled. When they had all said their farewells and left, the room was empty. The sound of the electric fan was raw in her ears. Cloud watched the sky turn a shade darker and Tifa watched her friend. She tried to remember when he wasn't – her friend – but it'd been such a long time ago.