two: scenes from the slums
The construction on the north border of Sector 7's wedge was ancient, so old no one could remember the last time it was even worked on, let alone when it was put up. It stood now, between the tarpaper and porous concrete of the nearest housing tract and the rust-mottled fence that marked the boundary of Sector 8, like something caught in a tarpit, a skeletonized dinosaur of orange plastic and black steel rearing out of the earth as though to keep watch over the border. This city was full of guarded borders; the only thing that passed freely was the train. What the intended final product of the site had been, no one could remember either, but that was no surprise to most of them. Memory seemed to be shorter in Midgar, so that its citizens passed traceless through their lives, like children on the beach dragging cardboard behind them to erase their footprints from the sand.
The young woman walking alone through 7 this particular evening -- an anomaly in and of herself -- was convinced that she was an exception to this; she'd had her amnesia already, she firmly maintained, and now all was well-ordered in her mind. It kept her from wondering, at least, since she had to admit that it would matter little these days even if there were things she couldn't remember. What was a past in this city? Just so much extra baggage, and it was better to keep mobile.
Tifa was eighteen by now, and fully healed, the injury she was brought here to have treated long since reduced to just a thin, raised line of white scar. She had been living in Sector 7 for about two years, and wasn't doing badly; her own apartment in a halfway-decent building, a pretty good waitressing job just a twenty-minute walk away. She never bothered taking the train; everyone she knew thought she was crazy, but she just smiled at any who decided to lecture on The Dangers, and eventually they all just gave up. At least Riv and Sal, her employers, never pushed her on the subject -- not after a brawl had kicked up out of nowhere one night, and she'd wound up saving Riv's life and probably the bar itself with a few well-placed hits.
So every day, she passed the construction site on her way to work, watching the lattice of shadows cross her own in the gassy yellow glow of the streetlights. Tonight she looked past it, at the fence it joined ropes of sickly, poisoned fungi in guarding, and thought about boundaries, and freedom. About whether walking alone at the onset of evening (not that day and night, technically speaking, made a lot of difference here) meant you were crazy.
*
"You're crazy."
Johnny is having histrionics again; she thinks this and immediately feels guilty. It's true, though, some part of her mind insists in a defiant mutter. Talking to him is like talking to the overprotective mother that her mother never was.
"What's the point, messing with that stuff?" he demands, gripping the edge of the dingy little table. They're arguing at breakfast again. Or rather, he's arguing, and she's patiently repeating herself. And okay, so it isn't really breakfast. Meals don't have names anymore; one is just like another. "I mean, a couple years of kids' lessons, but..."
"They weren't just kids' lessons," Tifa tells him with long-suffering patience, though she's getting close to snapping now. She hates it when he whines at her. "I got some decent basic training; Zangan knew what he was doing. I already got some stuff myself, and I just want to set it up in the back so I can practice. We're on the ground floor, nobody'll complain. I don't know what you're getting so upset about."
"I'm not upset," Johnny practically explodes, kicking back from the table to fold his arms. Ex-military or not, he still sulks like he did when they were kids. "I just think it's dangerous. I mean, what if something -- swings the wrong way, and -- and breaks your arm, or something?"
Tifa rolls her eyes; she can't help it. "Better a broken arm from a sandbag than dead from a mugger because I was out of shape," she returns smartly. Johnny makes a disgusted noise.
"If you would just -- "
"No, Johnny." She stands up, pushes the chair aside, and leans on the table, patience overstressed; this is getting ridiculous. "You didn't want me to get a job. You don't want me to train. What do you want me to do, cook and clean?" He starts to protest, but she cuts him off. "We're in Midgar, Johnny, not -- " Nibelheim, her mind tries to finish, but she shies away from it without knowing why -- "out in the country somewhere, and I'm not the little woman, okay? I can take care of myself, so will you please stop telling me I can't?"
His stricken expression mollifies her somewhat, and she sits back down, awkwardly. "'M sorry," he mutters, staring at his hands. "I just get worried about you, a lot."
She musters a smile, and takes one of his hands across the table. "Don't," she says.
*
Thinking about Johnny made her sigh, like it always did. Ellis couldn't have known it, but that hadn't been the best place for her to start out her life in the city; he'd been meant to help her recover, to take care of her while she was getting her feet, and she'd wound up taking care of him instead. Johnny had come to Midgar to work a few years back, gotten mixed up with the Shinra army, and had come out changed and haunted, drinking too much and spending a lot of time alone. They'd been something of an item almost from the start, but it hadn't been long before Tifa found she'd been mostly cast into roles of daughter and mother, and sometime longer before she'd realized that she would havet o either go or stay forever. She had made her choice. Loving him or not had not been the question; it was a matter of survival.
She couldn't help thinking of him even now, though, weaving up the twisted alleys that sprung up with the beginnings of shambling buildings, marking the top end of Sector 7. It was hard not to feel responsible for him, and he was still so... helpless. He came into the restaurant sometimes -- just to see her, thankfully, never drunk enough to make trouble. She didn't think he ever would, really. Johnny might have been a little dangerous once with the dream of her as his destined bride, but he was a little too disillusioned now to fight over it. They both were.
*
He still hasn't said anything, and she's afraid to look at him. She's afraid of what she knows she'll see, his staring eyes and his jaw hanging. He'll look ridiculous and sad, and she'll have to fight to keep from being irritated with him again, and she doesn't want that. So she keeps looking at her feet, and the tattered pattern of the tiled floor.
"We've always been friends so far," she says helpfully, trying not to wince at how dumb that sounds. "I mean, it's not that different. I just -- won't live here anymore."
"Why?" he asks -- he doesn't demand. His voice is quiet, and she dares a look up. He's staring down, too. Just that simple question; Johnny's favorite, these days. Why. It really does cover everything.
She shrugs, helplessly. "It's time for me to get out on my own," she says, softly. "I can't stay here forever." He begins to protest that, too, and she hurries to hug him, cutting off whatever he would say. A friendly hug; she can almost feel him resigning himself.
"When are you leaving?" he asks, hopelessly. Probably thinking of the bottle of bad whiskey she knows is under the sink.
"Two days," she tells him, and pointedly does not think of death sentences.
They pull apart slightly, and he pushes his spill of red hair away from his face, barely sighing. He tries to smile, tweaks her chin.
"Gonna miss you," he says, and that's all.
She's proud of him.
*
They'd lived together for just over a year before she left, and that had been almost a year ago. Tonight it seemed very far away, but very clear in retrospect. She missed him sometimes -- in the evenings, when she came home and the apartment was empty, and sometimes first thing in the morning things seemed a little too quiet -- but not often, and she tried not to feel guilty for that too.
Now Tifa topped the last rise in the hillocks of scrap metal, dry refuse and concrete, and spotted the first sign of the restaurant looming over the sprawling shops and domiciles, unable to keep from smiling as she headed toward the haphazard wooden bulk, creaking old sign dangling from ancient but rust-free chains over the slightly listing porch. It was a good place, and a good job; much better than some things she could have gotten, she knew well. There must have been someone or something watching out for her to make it fall into her lap the way it had...
*
The door to Riv's Roadhouse creaks open, which is not an unusual event for two o'clock on a weekend night -- well, morning. Any place serving alcohol and something deep-fried after ten is likely to be patronized until close to dawn in Midgar, and probably require repairs shortly thereafter if it lacks a good bouncer. This is a problem Riv's has never had, however, despite having no such employee; Riv takes care of such matters easily enough on his own. It is, the place's many Sector 7 patrons would say with pride, one of the restaurant's charms. ("Roadhouse" is actually something of an ambitious title, as the nearest thing to a road anywhere in the vicinity is an unusually large cluttered alleyway that passes by out front.)
However, a little more unusual is the figure who ducks in through the door, once it has opened. It is that of a teenage girl, small, pretty, and wearing the unmistakable half-sheepish half-furious look of someone who is utterly exasperated with herself. She steps inside, shutting the door behind her, and casts a glance at the phone behind the bar, then shakes her head vehemently to herself and drops almost defiantly into a booth near the back corner.
Sal, Riv's cook, cashier, unquestionable commanding officer and, incidentally, spouse, notes this performance the same way she notes most everything else: namely, without a great deal of interest. After fifty-odd years wresting a living and a life out of the jaws of the slums, Sal has seen just about everything there is to see in Midgar, and these days she is impressed by none of it. However, in no way does this impede her natural inclination to meddle in these matters whatsoever; just because she's seen it before hardly means it wouldn't be improved by her input. Quite the opposite, in fact. She dumps a tray of onion rings off the fryer and into a basket with a footballer's aim, shoots the basket down the counter (actually just the other half of the bar) to its intended recipient with a pitcher's velocity, wipes her hands on her apron with a rugby player's delicate sense of hygiene, and cuffs the nearby Riv, who is collecting used glasses, lightly on the shoulder of his leather jacket.
"Eh?" Riv inquires, dumping the glasses in the sink.
"Girl in the back," Sal elucidates curtly, dumping another lump of whitish stuff into the pool of grease. "Ask what's up."
The only thing atypical about this conversational exchange is its unusual verbosity. Sal and Riv, true to the pattern set by their names, generally verbalize to one another in sparse and occasionally cryptic monosyllables. It's thought that, when the restaurant is closed, the two of them never bother to speak at all.
On that note, Riv simply nods, and lumbers his way toward the table where the young woman is seated. He and Sal are something of a matched set in many ways; both are large, slablike and massive, with impressive musculature for what is generally considered an advanced age for the slums. They tend to dress alike as well, in studded leathers and denims, and while Sal's hair is still mostly the dark frizz it's been all her life and Riv's is a uniform dull silver beneath his grease-stained baseball cap, there is a certain rocky set to both their faces that sometimes makes them look more like brother and sister than husband and wife. Now Riv maneuvers his own bulk around tables and patrons, snagging the girl's attention as he approaches, and making her look up, considerably sheepish this time.
"Help you?" Riv rumbles, coming to a resolute stop at the edge of her little booth. The girl lets out a guilty little smile, the sort of which Riv has long since identified as standard for someone who expects to shortly be taken to task for something. It's a common enough look here in the slums.
"Maybe," she admits, scrunching nervously at her bangs. "I -- haven't been living here for too long, and I, uh, went out for a walk, and I can't seem to find the right road now..."
Further and occasionally even polysyllabic inquiry reveals the slightly more complete truth that she got fed up with her half-boyfriend, stormed out into the night, and then promptly realized she'd gone too far out and would have to call the guy and face some more of what drove her out in the first place. Riv allows that this, while by the girl's own admittance not too bright, is indeed understandable, and offers to escort her home in the interest of saving face.
Most of this is communicated nonverbally, however. His actual words are: "Huh. You live on the east side? I'll walk you back once we close."
Tifa's only immediate response is to blink, and then she tries another tentative smile, not sure what to make of this or how far to trust it. "Um. Really? I -- "
"Riv?"
The big man turns to face the pale, thin young woman who's been waitressing, now taking off her apron and regarding him with an expression of misery. "Donny called," she explains, pointing back at the phone with her thumb. "The baby. I gotta go." Verbal minimalism is something of an airborne contagion at Riv's.
Riv nods. "You ask Sal?"
"Uh-huh."
"G'luck, Terese."
"Thanks."
She all but tears out of the building, and Riv turns back to his current charge.
"What's your name?"
The girl jumps a little, briefly mesmerized by the Spartan conversation. "Oh, sorry. Tifa."
Riv nods, and extends a hand to shake hers solemnly, if a little ridiculously, proportion-wise. "Riv. 'Course. You ever work a cash register?"
Tifa nods herself, slightly startled. "For a while, yeah."
"Waitress?"
"Not really."
"First time for everything. Want a job?"
Another blink. "Sure. Just tonight, or -- "
"Nah, 's long as you want if you do okay. Not enough people as is."
"When should I start?"
"Now."
All in all, Tifa reflects later, it's a very instructive night for Johnny.
*
Her boots made a booming tattoo on the crooked wooden steps up to the porch, though even that was barely audible under the roar of noise just beyond the batwing doors. It was a big crowd tonight, by the sound of it; she smiled a little bit, wondering which of the regulars were going to be in tonight, and what would happen.
And, shrugging out of her jacket, Tifa walked right into the middle of the night that would change everything.