Prologue: After the Fall

The sky is hazy and dark when he blinks his eyes open, the whispers of the mountain air quieted to a languid, unsuspecting silence. The only sounds he hears are those that awaken him, the faint rustle of leaves and the distant birdsong that echoes high above.

Cloud groans as he sits up, wincing at the red bands of pain that unfurl all over his body. His chest is tight. His knees and palms smart where they are bloody and scraped. His temples pulse dully as if a slow, relentless drumbeat is echoing from deep within his skull.

But it's the heaviness in his heart that weighs him down as he tries to carefully sit up, taking in the scene around him. Guilt, fear, shock - they sit inside him, bundled into an anvil over his heart. He coughs, trying to orient himself and remember where he is as he looks around.

The jagged, rocky landscape juts up around him on either side, gray knives of stone stabbing into the bleary sky. The bridge stretches on above his head, swaying hauntingly back and forth with its broken foot slabs and severed rope dangling like forgotten dreams. He blinks at it, dazed as the misty memory returns to him, all of the pain in his body suddenly taking on meaning.

Tifa.

He looks around frantically, the urgency of what he's just awoken to claiming him like a fist around his throat. They'd fallen from the bridge. Tifa had come out here, crying, looking for her mother.

Only her mother is dead. There is no bringing the dead back, Cloud knows. But Tifa believed the stories their parents told them, believed that there was a reprieve for those who had been lost to the other side.

He'd tried to stop her, to tell her that her mom was gone.

Looking up at the jagged, split peaks above, he realizes he'd failed.

"Tifa?"

His young voice is quiet and soft, splitting in half as he realizes he doesn't know where she is. His vision is so hazy, he discovers, because tears have filled his eyes.

Bleak moments of frantic searching pass by as Cloud looks back and forth, but it's the sudden blanket of fear and the rush of pain through his limbs that alerts him to Tifa's presence. Crawling forward on his knees, he finds her crumpled and twisted a few feet away on a small slope of rocks. Her face is turned away, hidden by a limp arm, her hair tangled and in disarray, her body eerily still. Cloud pauses as he draws near, his heart clenching with ice-cold fear, unsure if she's even alive.

He struggles to sit up, feeling new shots of pain ricochet through his body. Leaning in close to her, he hesitantly reaches out, touching her hand. Her skin is cool and soft, but as soon as his fingers drift over it, he feels a sudden, unspeakable warmth surge towards him, a feeling that almost burns.

There's a rush of emotions that he cannot explain. They are so intense that he is almost paralyzed by them, his bones shivering in the face of the onslaught. It is pain, confusion, and overwhelming sadness - a grief that is deep and rooted in the loss of something irreplaceable, a void that can never be filled. They bleed through him, but they don't come from within, and Cloud can't figure out how such powerful feelings can seize him so suddenly. He stumbles over the emotions for a moment as they rush through them, and he wonders what he has lost that makes him feel this way.

He glances back at Tifa, his fear that she may be dead or dying forcing his silent tears to shift into stuttering sobs. But staring at her broken form, new foreign emotions slam into him. They are far more subtle than the grief and anguish he'd just felt - they are subtle, like the whisper of a breeze that shifts the course of a mighty river. Cloud just blinks and stares at Tifa as they rush over him, and he realizes that the feelings are not coming from him, but are directedathim - raw and complicated, mixed with longing and uncertainty. It's far too complex for him to fully grasp, but it lingers, filling him with a strange ache. He shivers, wondering where it is coming from and why it is aimed at him.

His tears flow like icy streams along his cheeks, and he slides closer to Tifa, folding her hand inside of the careful grip of his. She is so tiny, even compared to him, and he's small for his age. Maybe it's the way her battered body has drawn into itself after their fall from the bridge, but her slightness of form only makes him feel worse as the pulsating emotions rain over him.

Frightened, alone, and hurt, Cloud crouches close to Tifa, covering her body with his own. He's afraid to move her, afraid that he'll make things worse than he already he has. It's his fault that she is laying her like this, his fault that she fell, his fault that she might die. He was supposed to protect her. All he wanted was for her to be okay.

All he wants is to make the pain go away.

"Tifa… please, wake up. C'mon."

He stays like that, crouched over her, his tears flowing slowly while he softly calls her name. She doesn't stir, but the waves of pain and despair and terrified yearning ebb and flow, leaving Cloud to quiver with the magnitude of it.

His skin is chapped and cold by the time he opens his eyes again and distant sounds of voices reach his ears. They are sharp and clamoring echoes, fearful cries and shouts of horror and disbelief. The blurry shapes in front of him take clear form when he rubs his eyes, the tall and imposing figure of Tifa's father and some of the men from the village.

"Tifa?" Brian Lockhart shouts. Cloud feels his body sway as he's shoved aside, Lockhart's powerful arms scooping under Tifa's frail body. Cloud stares, watching the thick muscles of his forearms flex as he moves, masculine and strong. A real man, one who can protect and save, who can do everything that Cloud cannot. He towers over Cloud like a statue of a god, reigning down all of his judgment upon in him in the piercing, baleful look in his eyes.

"What's the matter with you, Cloud?" he suddenly barks, his eyes red around their ruddy corners, tears lining them. "Why would you bring Tifa here?"

Cloud just stares at him, his mouth hanging open. A thousand words skate across the tip of his tongue, but he is unable to say any of them. All he can do is watch as Tifa is lifted and pulled away from him, the spillover of confusion and yearning tightening around him, his heart thundering louder and louder in his chest.

"What if she dies?"

Those last words land like a stone at his feet, rocking him to his core. Cloud can't even imagine if something like that were to happen. Losing Tifa would be like losing a piece of himself. After his mother, Tifa was the person he held dearest to his heart in this entire village.

He cries harder, sniffling into his sleeve as he watches Brian carry Tifa away, the pit of his stomach now feeling cold and empty. He's left with an unsettling sense of loss and a lingering pain he can't explain, but the suffocating feelings of sadness and pain andneedare drifting away, as if they are threads that are being slowly pulled out of his very soul. Those feelings weren't his, and they vanish, and he's left with nothing but his own, again.

Cloud holds onto the memory of them, the warmth and the conflict they have woven inside of him. But he never speaks of them, and he lets them drift and settle into the sediment of his mind, long buried and repressed.

But deep inside, he knows.

It was her.