three: time and avalanches
"You act like you were just born tonight
Face down in a memory but feeling all right
Who does your past belong to today?
You don't say nothing when you're feeling this way..."
--Roseanne Cash"Nothing so moves women as does the possibility of saving a man."
--Octavio Paz
Tifa pushed through the doors of Riv's and walked into the unmistakable aftermath of a fight.
On one side: a pair of Shinra soldiers in grimy blue uniforms, less threatening without the strange cap-masks that made them all faceless when on duty. They were just beginning to settle themselves back at a table in the corner (from which the rest of the patrons had drawn back almost unconsciously; Shinra was a fairly neutral entity down here, but no one exactly welcomed military), and they were muttering and glowering over their shoulders, as though not quite content to give up whatever had brought them to their feet. At the end of a long day's work, Tifa guessed with a feeling half sympathy and half revulsion, and just aching for the brawl that Riv wouldn't allow in his place. A few drinks would most likely settle them down.
On the other side, and the target of their anger, was a man who stood out startlingly from the rest of the restaurant's occupants. He was dark-skinned in a city where even the most dark-complected citizens ended up pale, and big: at least Riv's height if not taller, and built heavier, especially through the arms and shoulders. And in the corner that he had claimed, curled in a rather ill-tempered ball on the floor, was a red-headed and freckled little girl -- just barely a toddler. Tifa thought she couldn't have been more than two years old. If the soldiers looked angry, he was a boiling pit of rage; he returned the glares he received in full force, and dropped his bulk into a chair at his own table, pulling the child up onto his lap. Fortunately for the soldiers, and probably for everyone else, the small, wriggling weight seemed to calm him somewhat.
And in the middle, heading back to the bar in hopes that the situation had been defused, was Riv. Tifa finished taking all this in within the space of a few seconds, and hurried up the twisting path between tables after him, answering hellos from the regulars with all the good cheer she could muster.
She slipped behind the counter to grab an apron from the cupboard over the sink, and turned her back to the room, starting to tie it on as Riv came up to the beer taps beside her. Most nights she didn't bother with an apron unless Sal told her to (which was rare), but when she needed a briefing on situations like this one, it made a good excuse to spend a few extra minutes behind the bar.
"What happened?" she muttered, her voice falling just enough under the din that the guys sitting at the bar couldn't hear her, but Riv could. He plucked a few glasses from a top shelf and started filling them, answering her in kind.
"Big guy. Been here since mid-afternoon. Took after the grunts soon's they showed up."
She nodded slightly, grabbing a tray and efficiently arranging the drinks he'd poured on it. "Is the little girl his? Where are these going?"
Riv shrugged slightly and nodded toward the back. "The soldiers, on the house. Guess she is; dunno. Didn't want to get too close." He looked up at Tifa, briefly, and then returned his attention to pouring drinks. "You shouldn't neither. Guy stinks of trouble. Maybe been making it, maybe been seeing it. Doesn't matter either way. Trouble rubs off."
For a few seconds Tifa just stared at him; from Riv, needless to say, this was the equivalent of a speech. His eyes were on the taps, however, and he seemed to have said all he planned to say, so she just picked up the tray and carried it to the soldiers. They were sitting in silence, just waiting to get the night's drinking started, and she didn't try to make conversation. Just because she followed the rules didn't mean she had to like the guys.
Going back for a second load, she cast another glance at the man sitting in the far corner. Guy stinks of trouble, Riv had said. She understood how that could be -- trouble was a scent you learned to identify fast in the slums, and avoid -- but it also might be that Riv was overreacting. He and Sal were more than a little on the paranoid side about offending Shinra; Tifa still remembered the lecture she had gotten when she had first balked at serving the soldiers who came in. Well -- not that you could really call anything from Riv or Sal a lecture.
You may not like the company, Sal had said, but the people ain't the company. Most of em're just kids needin work, just like you. And no matter how much you don't like the company, you better pretend to like the company, 'relse it might decide it don't like you. You get it?
Yeah, she had gotten it. But she figured this man, holding the cranky little girl on his lap and staring holes in the backs of the two steadily drinking grunts, wouldn't get it at all.
Sudden curiosity seized her, and she found herself studying the newcomer on and off, in between taking orders and carrying drinks and food. His clothing looked worn to the point of threadbare, and frankly so did he, terribly weary for all his anger. He wasn't old, probably just barely in his thirties, but his face was carved with lines that seemed grimed in, as if he'd spent most of his years in rough weather and rougher work. She guessed immediately that he wasn't from Midgar, without even knowing how she knew it; the gray dim of the city just hadn't settled into him yet, in some way she sensed but couldn't define. And she was startled to note -- and even more startled that she hadn't noticed it before -- that the skin tone of his right hand was markedly different from that of his face and neck, and that he didn't seem to use it, just letting it hang stiffly at his side. The arm must be prosthetic.
Just where was he coming from? And from what?
The crowd began to thin out quite a bit around 10, which wasn't entirely unusual; it was a weekday night, after all, and people had to work. The man remained, however, even though his little girl was dozing in his arms -- but now he looked worried, and the same senses that had told Tifa he wasn't from the city now told her he most likely didn't have a place to stay tonight. And Riv was on the verge of kicking him out: the guy hadn't ordered anything in hours, and rules were rules. That decided her, and Tifa caught Sal's eye across the counter, with a Meaningful Look that turned into a nod toward the newcomer's table. Sal barely nodded, and Tifa left her apron on the bar, heading over to the corner to see what she could find out. The two aging bikers had set up an efficient little intelligence network in this shack of a restaurant, she thought with a little smile, and she herself had found a place in it quite seamlessly.
The man looked up at her suspiciously as she approached, and the child woke up at the same time, regarding Tifa with frank and bleary curiosity. She smiled at both of them, leaning one shoulder on the wall.
"She yours?" she repeated her earlier question to Riv, nodding to the girl. Her caretaker nodded slightly, the look of almost painful distrust not leaving his eyes.
"Guess she is for now," he replied warily, sizing Tifa up. His voice was the low rumble of a distant train, and it was marked with traces of some accent she didn't quite recognize -- but which almost seemed familiar. Nothing she'd heard since coming to Midgar, but maybe she recognized it from her childhood... She pushed it aside for now, and looked down at the little girl with a smile, addressing her directly.
"Hi," she said in her best Trustworthy Adult voice, sitting down nonchalantly at the table so that she was closer to eye level. The girl returned her smile slowly, and timidly. "What's your name?"
The child puffed slightly with the undoubtedly rare consideration of being spoken to directly, losing a little of her shyness. "Mar-le-ne," she pronounced with a careful consideration that suggested it was one of precious few words she could say with complete comprehension. Tifa smiled, and saw from the corner of her eye that the big man was relaxing somewhat; it seemed she'd found the right door to his trust.
"I'm Tifa. Nice to meet you, Marlene." She straightened up, and spoke to the man this time: "Nice to meet you too, Mr. -- ?"
"Wallace," the man supplied, probably more readily than he should have -- probably in surprise at being called "mister" anything. "Barret Wallace, miss." He stuck out a huge brown hand -- his left, of course, and he seemed conscious of the awkwardness as she shook it. There was a beat of pause, and then he continued uncomfortably, "I don't got much in the way a money. If your boss wants us gone, I can get gone."
Telling herself she'd make it up to Riv later, Tifa just waved this off with a casual hand. "I saw you were having some problems with those soldiers when I came in," she said instead, neutrally. "What was that about?"
The man -- Barret -- darkened slightly at this, shooting another glower at the still-drinking grunts. "Ain't them I got a problem with," he muttered truculently, however, though his eyes said he could still make it them if they gave him half a reason. "'S who they work for."
Tifa's eyebrows raised, as though she were surprised by this information, which in fact she was not in the slightest. Somehow, you could always tell; or at least, she could. It was part of what had kept her alive this long. "Shinra? Not the best people to have a problem with," she remarked, still in her most neutral tone. Even though, as she knew he would know, her next words were anything but neutral. "I should know."
Mr. Barret Wallace started almost out of his seat, drawing a little sound of reproach from the drowsy Marlene. "You -- " he managed.
She half-smiled, and casually ruffled Marlene's hair; that neither of them objected to this in the least gave her an inward sigh of relief. "Don't tell the world," she confirmed, only half joking.
They talked for more than an hour, and Tifa just blessed the natures of her employers that it wouldn't come out of her paycheck -- as long as she shared what she found out, that was. What she found out was that he was, in fact, not from around Midgar, but from all the way up in Corel; a little mental geography confirmed that she might have heard the accent in Nibelheim (and thinking the name gave her a pang, as always, but it was duller these days, more distant). Beyond this information, however, he seemed highly reluctant to talk about where he'd come from, avoiding the topic by as wide a margin as he could manage, and she was in no way of a mind to press him on the subject. Not wanting to talk about your past was something to which she could definitely relate. With a little prying, she also found out that -- as she had also guessed -- he was without a place for the two of them to stay, and she quite promptly and casually informed him that there was a spare room in her apartment to which they were both more than welcome. Just, you know, until he found a place. The offer won her a look of surprise, followed by one of cynicism.
"You let all the strangers you meet here crash at your place if they ain't got one, miss?" he asked with a kind of sour amusement.
"My name is Tifa," she reminded him patiently, "not 'miss', and no, I don't. Just the ones carrying little kids. How old is she? Two?"
He dropped his eyes to Marlene, who was fast asleep on his lap, and when he spoke again his tone was somewhat abashed. "About two-and-a-half," he admitted. Tifa smiled.
"She needs sleep," she pointed out kindly. "And I've got plenty of room. C'mon; I'll check with Sal and take you to my place. I work 'til three, but I'll be quiet coming in."
He looked at her, with an expression that was wary and curious and haunted all in one. "Why you doin this?" he asked simply.
Tifa just smiled again, as helpless to tell him that as if he'd asked her why the earth spun. "You need help," was all she said, and it was not an answer.
*
She woke up not long after noon -- early, for a work day -- and found Barret wandering uncomfortably around the tiny common room, Marlene napping on the fold-out couch with which she'd presented them. Tifa thought it had probably been a while since either of them had gotten much in the way of sleep. He tried, awkwardly, to thank her; but she just brushed it aside again, with more good humor than anyone should probably have first thing in the morning, and asked him to help make coffee while she produced a rudimentary breakfast. And as they ate standing up in the equally tiny half-kitchen, waiting for Marlene to wake up, he asked unexpectedly if she could help him with something.
"Hate to be askin you another favor, what with all this," he added stiffly, "but I don't know much 'bout this town, and -- "
"It's no problem," she assured him over her shoulder, rooting in the refrigerator for something resembling juice; no coffee for Marlene, after all. "Really. I told you that. What do you need?"
A brief pause. "D'you know anybody who does guns?" he asked.
She turned back toward him slowly, frowning, with an unidentifiable carton in one hand; before speaking, she opened it and sniffed inside, and then wordlessly poured it down the sink. The contents appeared to be largely solid. "Does them how?" she asked at last, running the water as she spoke. "Like selling them, or like working on them, or...?"
"Like grafting one onto an arm," Barret said evenly.
Tifa turned off the water, and looked at the floor for a moment. When she looked back up, her face was without expression -- but there was understanding in her eyes.
"Yeah," she said. "I know a guy. Toast?"
*
Two days later -- Tifa's day off -- the two of them came to a flat that was more of a hovel on the low side of Sector 2. A slim, dark young man opened the door almost immediately after Tifa knocked, and stood blinking owlishly out at them, as if he hadn't seen the outside world in a while. Which she guessed he probably hadn't.
"If you ain't got cash, I ain't doin it. Help you?" he said, all in one breath. Tifa took over swiftly.
"Yeah, I think you can," she said, and produced a small object from her pocket, holding it up and turning it in her fingers so he could see. It was a bullet: old, slightly misshapen, and a little discolored. Received two years past, not ten blocks from where they stood; long kept, and almost forgotten, but not quite.
The young man grinned like a kid at the sight of it, suddenly and brilliantly, and his slightly truculent face transformed; the expression made it clear that he was a kid, really, not much more than twenty. "Aw, man," he breathed, taking a step outward onto the concrete block that served as a stoop. "C'n I see -- ? Fuckin-A. I ain't seen one of these in like, what, year, year and a half." He shook his head, handing the bullet back to Tifa. "How's the old guy doin, anyway?"
Tifa tried to keep her expression even at the question, and as she answered. It almost worked. "He died," she told him matter-of-factly. "Or that's what I heard."
The young man glanced back at her, and sobered abruptly when he saw her face. "Man, that's too bad," he said, tone a little more subdued. It didn't last for long, though; death was too common a visitor in the slums to draw all that much attention. You just had to accept it, and move on. "So what can I do for you? C'min! Man, whatever it is, on the house. That old guy, he was somethin else."
Tifa smiled, wanly, as they made their way inside. "My friend" she gestured to Barret "wants to get something done. He needs a gun. Can you help him?"
The young man flapped a hand in a go-on gesture, striding ahead of them into an off-kilter kind of makeshift workshop. "A gun? Sure, sure! What kind? Shit, that old guy, he was some kind of crazy bastard, right? Always goin off about knowin how to fix people up if you hurt em, and Shinra, and stuff. He sure was some kind of guy, huh?"
Tifa smiled, folding her arms, and watched their benefactor herd an uncertain-looking Barret into the shop. It hurt to smile, a little, but she did it anyway. "Yeah," she said softly. "He sure was."
*
Time passed, as time always does, and the changes marched on. With Tifa pleading his case, Barret got work at Riv's too, working the stockroom and running kegs in place of Riv, who was almost willing to admit it was work that he was getting a little old for. The lightweight, stubby gatling gun attached to the stump of Barret's right arm hindered him in his work little, if at all. He and Marlene never moved out of the apartment, however, though Barret talked about the possibility constantly; things just never aligned properly. By day the three came together to make a strange but charming picture of urban domesticity, and at night Marlene slept while the two adults worked, and Barret and Tifa would come home and talk until dawn in quiet, serious tones about Shinra: what they had seen, what they each knew, and what they thought needed to be done. By the end of the first year, the three were like family.
There were other changes before that first year was out, too, most of them good. New faces started to appear in the restaurant, strangers with that scent hanging on their clothes -- that scent that Riv had called trouble, and Tifa found that she was coming to call revolution. The first of them was a girl around Tifa's age, an engineering dropout from Midgar Tech; she was fresh from a demolition-and-construction summer job in Sector 8, where she had discovered that the abandoned buildings she had been blowing up for the new Shinra overpass were not abandoned at all. Before cutting out on the job and her education (and the school was funded by whom? three guesses), she had thrown bottles of gasoline with lit cloth wicks through the windows of all seven wreckers on the site; they went up "just like fireworks", she said. The girl introduced herself as Jessica, call me Jessie, and she came sporting four different fake IDs licensed to four different fake women. No one ever knew if Jessica was her real name or not, and they never presumed to ask. She was followed within a few months by a former employee of the Shinra Tower mailroom, a charming young man with an infectious grin, and with an earnest, pudgy youth he introduced as his cousin in tow: Biggs and Wedge. Jessie shed her last name upon joining the group, and these two shed their given ones. Names seemed to go the way of pasts when you wanted to disappear, and that was the one thing all of them had in common. They were each looking for a way to drop off the map.
"If you ever want to know what the heart and soul of a company look like from the inside," Biggs told Tifa one night, as they shared a beer out on the front steps of the restaurant, "you go work in the mailroom. You can tell what everybody's doing on every level above you, and they don't bother to hide it 'cause they think you're too busy or too dumb to care what you're looking at. It's the best worm's-eye-view you'll ever get of how a place does business." What this particular worm had seen of the Tower to make him run out without so much as a letter of resignation, pack his bags, grab Wedge and head for the slums as fast as he could find a way down, he would never say; but it had been enough, and Tifa supposed that was enough for her. It had been plenty. The whole group of them had bits missing from their stories, pieces they would never tell, and Tifa supposed that was all right too. Sometimes, it was better not to talk about it. Some things you just didn't have to say.
The three newcomers each settled in almost as soon as they came, finding lodgings nearby and work right in the restaurant. By the end of that eventful first year, Barret had a new assistant in the stockroom, the dishwasher who had been in the back since time immemorial had acquired a slightly clumsy helper, and Tifa had settled behind the counter/bar while Jessie took over her share of waitressing. Riv and Sal were edged back into the position of supervisors, and didn't seem to mind in the least. The group of five spent a lot of time together, and became something of a cohesive body as well as friends; Tifa and Biggs even had a brief, experimental affair of sorts, hardly more than a bump along their friendship, so playful while it lasted and concluded on such good terms that it made the whole fiasco with Johnny look like half-baked melodrama. And in their off hours, the group began to talk, absently, about a meeting place, and though they did not talk about this, there was also a tone that something more than meeting might happen. Under the vague words they traded over the coffee table in Tifa's apartment or in the back room of Biggs's dingy little place, there was the new and growing possibility of action; of not dropping off the face of the earth but instead making their mark on it. Maybe even saving it.
They were good days, simple days, spent together and with rebellion in their minds if not their actions. And later, much later, Tifa began to think that maybe it had been better that way; that it might have been much better if they had never gone beyond that at all. Let the rest of the world take care of itself. They would dwell in possibility, in friendship, in the innocence of talking but not acting. It would have been better, she came to think, if they had just kept their voices down on the hillside, and the avalanche had never started at all.
*
The door to the apartment thumped open, and Tifa burst in with a whirl of palpable energy, color high and eyes shining. "Barret!" she hissed, tiptoeing as fast as she could across the room, to where the big man sat giving her a curious look from the unfolded couch. She had somehow for all her joy retained the presence of mind to remember that Marlene was probably asleep; the toddler usually took a nap in the mid-afternoon, when the adults did little coming and going. Well -- normally, that was. "I got it!" she continued in a breathless whisper, practically bouncing on her feet. "It's mine -- and you have to come see, c'mon, it's -- "
"Wait, wait -- slow down." He got up, though, probably wanting to take the conversation out in the hallway and away from the sleeping child; his voice was pitched at its lowest rumble. "Whatcha talkin about, you got it?"
"The bar!" she crowed -- well, whispered. With a glance over her shoulder at the other room, she pulled him out into the hallway, letting their voices return to normal. "The restaurant. That's why Sal and Riv called me in today -- they've got most of their stuff moved out, and they wanted to tell me... The bar's mine; I said I was hoping to buy it, you remember, I'd been saving, and they just gave it to me!" She seized his hand, that expression of uncharacteristic joy lighting her whole face. Barret couldn't help smiling with her; when she was happy, she just transformed. "They said without me they couldn't have moved out, and I was pretty much running it without them anyway. I can hardly believe it..."
He let himself be herded down the stairs, out of the building, and across the dim afternoon streets to the restaurant, Tifa bubbling about the acquisition all the way as if it were a child she had just given birth to. Riv and Sal had closed down the restaurant a few days before, and had been packing up their sparse personal effects ever since; they had just told their employees that they were "retiring", having finally saved up enough from their business venture to at least move out of the city, and that the former roadhouse would be passed to someone else. Looking at Tifa's face now, Barret wondered if the old couple knew how right their choice had been.
They reached the empty restaurant quickly, and Tifa dragged Barret inside, joy in her eyes as she looked around. Most of Riv and Sal's small personal touches -- pictures, the occasional bumper sticker, and the like -- had been removed, and the place had been wiped clean, ready to become her bar. Her bar, and her own business; not just a business, either, but a home. Gone were the days of the three of them crammed into her tiny one-person apartment; the rooms overhead that Riv and Sal had occupied would be hers as well, and they had both been up there for coffee and what passed for conversation enough times that it would be more than enough room. Far more than enough. A home; a home for all of them.
And maybe more than that --
"And there's something I've got to show you," Tifa added, with a note of mischievous glee. "This is the kicker, Barret -- you're gonna love it." With no further explanation, she headed for the back corner, where Barret saw that the elderly and eternally broken pinball machine had not been removed with everything else; but the threadbare runner of carpet that had cushioned its treads had been, and with it gone he could now see three deep cracks in the floor, running out from the wall and coming together in a rough rectangle around the game's base. He frowned, and looked to Tifa for clarification, but she just beckoned from where she stood by the machine, and grinned at him. "Get over here, quick," she told him. "Stand right there."
He did, and she twisted a dusty knob on the wall that he had never noticed before -- and then the floor sank beneath their feet.
Before he could even draw breath to register surprise or protest, they had hit bottom again, in a large room bare except for dust and themselves. It was about the size of the restaurant itself, but solid concrete, and with a look of long and total disuse.
Tifa turned to look at Barret, and somehow she was grinning even wider. "What do you think?" she asked, with more than a hint of pride.
Gaping, Barret stepped out into the room, taking a long look around. "What -- the hell is it?" he asked finally, unable to think of much more to say. Tifa laughed a little, leaning on the pinball machine.
"It's a bomb shelter," she told him with eyes sparkling. "Sal said a lot of people built them back during the war; the only ones who really had bombs were Shinra, though, but of course nobody knew that. They showed it to me this afternoon; said they'd been thinking I might be able to use it. They're so sweet -- It's lined, and practically soundproof, and I was thinking we could set up a couple rooms down here if we needed to. Or whatever -- but this, it's -- "
"It's perfect," Barret finished, cutting off her string of excited rambling, and smiled when she did. "It's jus' perfect."
She hugged him then, because it was true.
Two weeks later the group had taken full control of the bar, and all of them had moved into either the rooms above it or the room below it. Three weeks later, the bomb shelter had been turned into a kind of group headquarters, with the makings of handbills, handwritten notes, and maps of the city scattered across the floor and the lone table, wires poking out everywhere from Jessie's preliminary efforts to install a computer and a television. And four weeks later, the group was no longer just a group, but had become a movement; and like the reborn bar, it now had a name.
Sometimes avalanches come whether you will or no.
*
Things went on like that for almost another whole year before the last change came; the last, and biggest of them all. The one that would, in time, come to undo all the others.
It started, when it finally did start, with the roar of a distant train.
*
"32nd Street Station, Sector 8, 32nd Street Station, Sector 8. Next stop will be West Depot, Sector 8."
He had noticed something, and it was this: from the window of a train, everything looks dirty. Greasy, somehow, and thinly populated, perhaps part of some dried-up post-apocalyptic world with only a few scattered inhabitants who had all been left either insane or dying. Grimmer. And making Midgar look grimmer was quite an achievement. Maybe it was the yellow-brown plastic glass they used in the windows that leached everything of what beauty and hope it had; or maybe it was just that the world almost unconsciously turned its back side toward train tracks, the buildings showing their graffiti-laced rear walls, the water pushing forward its pollutants, what plants and animals there were displaying only their desperate and feral natures, struggling for every inch of ground. Maybe it was just that neither humans nor nature cared what they showed to some endlessly circling idiot machine, its blind eye leading it forward through the darkness forever, seeing and caring for nothing.
Or maybe it was just that he was tired, and his head hurt, and he couldn't remember where he was going. He supposed that was more likely.
Forgetting where he was going always seemed to happen to him on the train, though there were other places where it was almost as bad; somehow he forgot where he was supposed to get off as soon as he got on, and the best he could do was listen to the stations being called and hope one of them would sound familiar. Sometimes, it worked. Though more often it didn't.
Why did he keep riding the train, then?
Couldn't remember. He rubbed his temples, and watched death and emptiness fly by.
"Next stop, West Depot. West Depot, Sector 8. Ten minutes. West Depot."
The car was almost empty; it the end of a long day, and not much residential was left in Sector 8. It was mostly just him, coming back from this job in 8 that he could barely even remember anymore, and a couple kids of about fifteen or sixteen, wrapped in leather and chains and studs; an elderly bum asleep across a bank of seats with a newspaper over his face, a middle-aged man with a look of inexpressible tiredness who was watching his feet and not moving. Not that he would have had to deal with a chatty neighbor anyway; his sword was slung over the seat beside him, and the rips in his clothes and occasional spot of blood (not his, he didn't think, though he couldn't have said for certain) kind of spoke for themselves. That thought brought a sick half-grin to his face. God, his head hurt. Maybe it was all this white noise.
White noise. The phrase made him shudder without knowing why.
He hated that.
He also hated the fact that he didn't know what his name was. That really didn't seem right, somehow. The few employers he'd found so far in the city had asked him for it, tentatively, and he'd given them each one of two answers. He still didn't know which was the right one. Yes, that was very troubling, in a personal sort of way. You had to know this stuff. A name was important for lots of things. Things, like...
But he cut that thought off, knowing where it would go. Nowhere at all, that was where. There were still some things he did know.
Vaguely, from what he believed was the distance of a few years, he was aware of a memory in the back of his mind, a memory that smelled of fire and blood and steel, which he found that he was afraid to touch on or even approach. But beyond that, his past -- all the years before he had found himself in Midgar and begun groping blindly for work as a mercenary because he felt somehow sure that it was what he was supposed to do -- was a smooth, total and comfortable blank. He was not aware of the absence, however; no more than a man one-eyed since birth would be aware of an absence of perspective.
"West Depot, West Depot, Sector 8. West Depot, Sector 8. Everybody off who's gettin' off, everybody on who's gettin' on. Next stop will be..."
He looked up to the front of the car, and saw that somebody was getting on; a pair of anonymously handsome, well-built young men, looking tired and ready to get home. They were dressed in street clothes, but he recognized the size and shape of the bags they carried just as easily as the way they stood and scanned the car by pure bored reflexes. SOLDIER, probably third or second class, taking the train on a long loop back up to the tower. The one in the lead glanced at him as he passed, and registered a look of surprise as the sword on the seat met those slightly glowing eyes. He kept his own eyes carefully averted, though, and after a heartbeat the SOLDIER just decided, wisely, to ignore him and move on. Good luck, he guessed.
Some luck. Why was he on this train, anyway? Couldn't remember.
Couldn't remember.
He rubbed his head again.
"Next stop will be..."
//white noise and a sound like a rushing wave and//
"Next stop will be..."
Had he heard what the next stop would be? He couldn't remember. How could he ever get off this train if he couldn't remember? How could he ever get where he was going if he couldn't remember? How would he... if he couldn't... couldn't...
Couldn't. Fucking. Remember?
//bursting white noise behind his eyes like radio static and suddenly//
voices. Voices, the voices again, just like before here they came, and his head erupted within the pain like a high drilling whine digging directly through his skull at the top of his spine and into the soft meat under his brain, oh God, God, not again, but
guy looks kinda like one of, with the sword?? where'd he get but it doesn't really matter, looks like trouble anyway gotta learn how to see trouble and walk away when it's not. when you're not getting paid right yeah. can't believe we got the job done finally Heidegger's gonna have a damn
razor. gonna either be the razor or the gun tonight. gun's loud, it'll the neighbors and i shouldn't. but i gotta when i get home i'll just go get it and bang bang that's it. like in the movies. i just can't, it's over. i can't, it's over. i
(and an image of the razor, bright and silver on the rim of a cracked white porcelain bathtub, the sense of long hours of contemplation of this single object and its deadly potential and an overwhelming, overhanging noxious dirt grave of despair)
Tumbling over each other, overlaid and overlapping, the words falling into one another and crashing in a dim cacophony, steadily rising. Pounding at his temples, trying to get out and back to where they came from, so much damn pain, and the voices tearing and tearing and tearing and
told him if he kept fucking with that stuff it was gonna kill him and now he's gonna die but it's not my fault, i kept telling him i thought he would listen to me jeez his arms were picked to shit his face his stupid face it looked like when
(image, strong and suddenly real, of a skeleton tumbling down out of a tangle of wires, maybe somewhere in one of the subterranean sewer pipes, the angle small as if from a child's eye, and then pulled away as if in disgust)
getting so sick of this shit, i mean really, i'm just gonna go home and tell her, this is how
tired. get home, put my feet up
FUCK i forgot to close the valve thing he's gonna fucking kill me fuck fuck fuck
//is it you?//
Breaking in, clean as a radio suddenly turned to a new station, stronger than the rest but no less a cacophony of millions. He realized he was no longer sitting upright, but jolting to one side like a man in the grip of a heart attack, and that, dimly, he could hear himself moan. Then the babble returned, and it was all
that guy all right? kinda falling down in the oh i guess maybe he's drunk yeah gotta be god why don't they ever kick these guys
was a little hairy back at the top, when they came out shooting didn't know how many of them there were, but we oh hey is that guy
hey, is he
I think he's
i wonder if there's a doctor or
//do you hear?//
It broke through again, so sweet and clear and so much worse than all the others, and then he was clutching at his head, his knees were striking the floor, and he could hear the idiot sounds of worry coursing through the minds of all those around him witnessing his plight. If there was a hell, he was barely able to track the thread of his own voice through the tangle of alien thoughts, this was surely what it was like. And then he was gone, and then there was only the cacophony, and that single-but-many voice dispersing the others, now and again, its frequency and volume steadily increasing until he thought it would break him open and he would die, bleeding from the cups of his ears, on this dingy train-car floor.
he
what
help
wonder
where
might
//we are all waiting for you.//
think
is
gotta
//come home.//
maybe
from
//Come home.//
has to
die
//Come home, come home, come home COME HOME COME HOME//
"...Train Graveyard, Sector 7. Train Graveyard, Sector ... sir, are you all right? Sir?"
Falling, falling, forever and ever, falling down through wave on wave of roaring radio static. Cold stars flying somewhere, in a bitter, distant galaxy.
*
Tifa sometimes wished, and fervently, that she owned a watch. It was the one thing she always thought of buying when she needed it, and never thought of when she had money to buy, and sometimes she thought she just ought to brand the idea into her wrist so she wouldn't forget. And now was definitely one of those times. Nothing for it, though, she had to admit, hurrying through the gauntlet of rusty fences and weary guards that sealed off the base of the sector pillar. She just hoped the damn courier would have the brains this time to leave the package with the station guard if she didn't make it in time.
Which, of course, she didn't. She finally set foot in the rubbly dust of the Train Graveyard station just as the evening train was pulling out; there wasn't even enough time to bother breaking into a run. With a muttered curse under her breath, she hiked up the stairs to the platform anyway, and glanced around for the guard... and instead, her eyes caught on what looked like a heap of flesh and fabric, huddled in the corner of the station shed.
It wasn't any such thing, of course; it was a man, sprawled with his back to the wood wall, collapsed facedown over his own knees. At first glance she thought he was old -- terribly old, and dying of it -- but after a moment she realized that the uncertain light and his broken posture had deceived her, and he was actually quite young. Probably about her age. But that wasn't what held her attention, and kept holding it, drawing her eyes to him again and again when she meant to look elsewhere, and nor was it the huge sword dropped apathetically at his side or the blood on his clothes -- although those struck their own indefinite note in her, made her shudder briefly with uncertain fear before pushing it aside. There was something else about him, about the way he looked, something powerful that first held her rigid and then brought her forward a few steps, frowning, in his direction. He looked... he looked...
He looked familiar.
From God-knew-where the station guard had appeared at her elbow, and was vainly trying to attract her attention. She had no idea how long he'd been there, nor did she particularly care. "Finally got that package in you've been waiting for, Miss Lockheart," she distantly heard him say helpfully, and a bit worriedly. "If you can come sign for it, I'll..."
"Hold it for me 'til tomorrow, Reg?" The words came from her mouth before she'd even realized she was going to speak. They sounded like they were coming from a hundred miles away; she'd heard people say that before about times when they were faint or shocked or whatnot, but she was somewhat impressed when it actually happened to her. It really did sound like that.
And then she was hurrying across the station, not even knowing why she was hurrying, holding on to simple blind faith that he was, for all his immobility, alive, and would not be cold and stiff when she reached him.
She was already standing before him, trying to ignore how much worse his condition looked up close, when sudden panic seized her. What am I doing? I don't even know --
"Cloud?" she said then, surprising herself, and it seemed that she did. "Cloud Strife?"
There was a long, long silence -- and then he slowly raised his head. For a single instant, she had a strong and shocking impression of a face that was all staring empty nothing, slack-jawed, with those eyes, glowing, radiating like something diseased and dying that had been too close to the center of a reactor and barely crawled its way back --
Then he was just a young man who looked confused and a little dizzy, squinting up at her against a halo of gaslights.
"Tifa?" he managed. The word was a croak.
And after a few of the months that lay ahead, in the depths of a dark time that she would have known better than to give in to if it weren't for that nasty cheater circumstance, that was what would haunt her; that was what would give her demons of doubt the voices and the life to come taunt her with their constant chant of maybe, maybe, maybe. That what he said first was not an agreement, not a confirmation of his own identity, but her name.
He blinked, swallowed, and tried again. "Cloud, right," he said, more like a question than an answer. His voice sounded murky, and somehow thick, like his tongue was swollen or long-unused. "Yeah, that's me."
"I never thought I would see you here," she said, stupidly. She could have kicked herself for every word. Grimacing slightly, she shook her head and tried again. "Are you all right? No offense, but you look awful. Can you stand up?"
"I -- don't know." He tried it once, and the answer seemed to be no. A sheepish, wan little half-smile crossed his lips, and then he frowned, looking as if he'd just thought of something important. "Um. I'm not, uh, dead, or anything, am I?"
Tifa had to laugh. She just couldn't help it. It was the perfect, completing final touch of lunacy for the whole theater of the absurd. Of course he would ask if he was dead. Why not? "No, it doesn't look that way. So far, at least. C'mon, I'll help you..." She was already wriggling under one of his arms as she said this, pulling her weight against his to draw him to his feet; she noticed, with a strange bemused uneasiness, that he made sure to pick up the sword in his free hand even as he held unsteadily to her shoulder with the other.
"Oh. So... I guess that means you're not either?"
"What? Dead? Nope. Though if you're not careful with that thing, that may change." She tried to smile while looking at the sword. Somehow, it didn't work out right. He looked dully at the hand it was in, as if trying to remember how it got there. She guessed he probably didn't remember picking it up.
"Oh. Uh. Right." He drew back just enough to maneuver the weapon into a collapsed sheath on his back, and then lost his balance; she dove under his arm again just in time to keep him from falling. Cloud looked down at her, and managed to produce another version of that weak almost-smile. To her, it looked like he was trying not to scream. "I guess I -- don't feel real well."
Tifa bit her lip. "Yeah, I got that. Let's get you inside somewhere you can sit down. Think you can walk?"
"Maybe -- " They tried a couple steps, found that with support he could, and she began leading him toward the platform stairs. "Been a long time," he volunteered unexpectedly, halfway down the flight. She found herself smiling, just a little.
"Yeah. It sure has."
"Five years, huh?"
Somehow, just barely, she kept from stopping in her tracks. Such a melodramatic act surely would have pitched both of them right down the rest of the stairs with leftover momentum, but even with that knowledge it was an effort. Because a part of her murmured, Of course, five years, you saved my life, but then the part that knew the truth and understood that that was impossible screamed No, he wasn't there, and you know it, but for that moment she really didn't know anything. Not anything.
"It's been a long time," she said instead of any of this, and now her smile was forced. But he seemed to be wearing out now, losing the strength to talk, and she let it go, walking him carefully across the trainyard toward the pillar.
It's been seven years, Cloud, she thought shakily, and you should know that. I should know that. Seven years, and anything else is a dream in a nightmare that I'm not going to think about --
"Seven years?" she heard him mutter.
This time, she did stop. She couldn't help it.
"Seven, yeah, okay, maybe it was." And then he was silent again.
Did he just -- her mind fumbled furiously. Was that -- She stopped the rat-run forcibly, suddenly finding herself afraid to think.
No. She knew she'd developed a habit of muttering out loud to herself when she was thinking hard, and she was certainly thinking hard now. She must have been thinking that aloud without knowing it, and he must have heard something she'd said, and thought she was correcting him, and answered her. That was all. To believe anything else was -- Well, it was madness.
Maybe the same kind of madness as believing someone had been where she knew he hadn't, five years ago.
She resumed walking, trying to tear her mind away to other things; fortunately, he didn't seem to have even noticed the pause, and furthermore seemed to be retreating down the tunnel of consciousness to a state of half-awareness. That was probably better, really. He must have been through something awful today, and she wasn't even sure she wanted to know what. Just that blurry thickness in his voice gave her chills; he sounded... drunk. No, not drunk -- punch-drunk. He sounded almost exactly like a guy she had once helped from the street to a free clinic, who'd said a mugger had hit him in the head repeatedly with a lead pipe.
His head, steadily dropping for the last few minutes, came up a few inches again. "Not a pipe," he mumbled -- or at least, that was what she thought he had said. Later, she would try to convince herself that she'd been mistaken. "Hit me with voices. And with..."
And then he just trailed off into a sort of low buzzing sound and dropped his head limply on his chest, leaving Tifa to feel cold all over as she half-carried him the rest of the way.
They pushed through the doors of 7th Heaven and up toward the bar, limping along like the lame leading the blind; Cloud wasn't a big man, but he was bigger than Tifa, and getting closer to being dead weight every second. The place was still empty -- and thank God for small favors, Tifa thought -- but it would start to fill soon; the sound of a woman's voice and an acoustic guitar poured tinnily out of the jukebox in the corner, as though warming the bar up for the coming crowd. Biggs, polishing glasses behind the countertop, looked up in surprise at their entrance, and then made a scolding sound.
"Tifa," he admonished with mock severity. "What have we told you about picking up drunks at the station?"
"Can it, Biggs," she said tightly, lurching to the nearest table and easing Cloud into a chair as gently as possible. "This is Cloud. He's an old friend of mine, and he's... he's really sick."
"Well, I wasn't going to let him sell me his vitamin diet anytime soon," Biggs agreed with what was rather maddening good cheer, considering the situation. "I'll get some coffee?"
"Please." She hovered uncertainly behind Cloud for a few moments, wondering if she would need to hold him up if he went sliding out of the chair; but he seemed a little steadier now that he was sitting down, and was even beginning to look up again, blearily. He muttered something unintelligible, and she leaned in closer, grabbing a chair of her own next to him. "What? Sorry -- what was that, Cloud?"
"This your place?" he asked, a little more clearly. She relaxed slightly, and nodded.
"Yeah. Just take it easy for a little bit. We'll..." She sought for words, and found that she couldn't tell him what they would do for him. She didn't know.
But then Biggs brought the coffee, and Cloud drank it first with a grimace and then with a kind of bitter enjoyment, and about halfway down the cup he began to really seem lucid again. Not, she thought vaguely, that he had been lucid before, but still. And everything probably would have been all right then, if Barret hadn't chosen that precise moment to walk in the door.
"Tife, did you get the -- " he began, and then two steps into the doorway he stopped, and just stared. That was when, finally, it snapped into place what he was seeing, and what she herself had seen but not recognized: the clothing Cloud wore was, more or less, a SOLDIER uniform. Stripped of it usual Shinra symbols, but unmistakable all the less.
Well, of course it is, she thought distantly. Didn't he leave to join SOLDIER? How could I forget? Oh God I'm so confused.
One thing at a time --
"Barret," she said with a cool diplomacy that sounded perfectly natural and was anything but. "I'll be there in just a sec, okay? I have to take care of this." Not even giving him a second to protest, she turned back to Cloud, gesturing toward the stairs. "You should probably lie down for a little while," she said quietly. "Come on, I'll take you upstairs. We've got a spare couch." And not giving him time to argue, either, she ducked back under his arm, helping him head for the stairs.
About halfway up, she heard the stunned silence in the bar erupt into what was unmistakably a fit of Barret temper, and the rational, eternally good-humored sounds of Biggs trying to calm him down. Thank God for Biggs. He might be able to hold off the storm until she got back. Cloud also appeared to notice the noise, and a bitter little smirk crossed his lips; he was a lot better now, she noticed, and almost walking by himself.
"Sounds like I'm not the most welcome guest ever," he commented drily. A pause, and then he added uncomfortably, "I -- I can walk. It's okay."
"Maybe, but if you fell down all these stairs I'd just have to carry you back up again," she told him, with all the good cheer she could muster. Which, admittedly, wasn't a whole lot. "Don't worry about Barret, he... he overreacts, a little. Do you have a place you can go back to? I mean... you can stay here if you want, but -- "
He frowned, and shook his head a little. "I don't -- know," he said at last, slowly. "Don't think so." Another awkward pause, and then he concluded, "Thanks." She smiled but did not answer.
At the top of the stairs, Tifa drew back a little, letting him limp on his own; he really was doing much better. She guided him to the couch, and he sat gratefully, pulling the sword off his back. By the time she had fetched him a pillow and a thin throw blanket from the closet, he had already stretched out, looking relieved to be horizontal instead of vertical; she helped him get settled, just a little, and turned to leave.
"Tifa?"
She looked back over her shoulder, frowning. He hadn't changed position, but his eyes were open, looking vaguely in her direction. For that moment, he looked blind.
"Yeah?" she replied, after a heartbeat's pause. He remained silent for a few seconds, and then just shook his head, slowly. His eyes slipped closed.
"Never mind," he said, and his voice began to blur again. "Thanks."
In seconds he was asleep.
Tifa watched him for a moment, and then sighed, squared her shoulders, and went downstairs to face the music.
*
Cloud woke up on a couch he didn't know, and found that his headache was gone. He supposed that was something, at least.
He sat up slowly, rubbing curiously at the back of his head, and took in his surroundings as fully as possible as he pulled the blanket off his knees. A small wood-paneled room, barely four paces in any direction, occupied only by himself, this tattered couch, and a couple battered and mismatched end-tables. Stuck off the far wall, opposite his view, was a stubby, narrow gauntlet he supposed was at least nominally a hallway, turning out of view to the right at the end, where the stairs were. Somewhere, he could hear a clock, counting off the seconds to itself in a thoughtful tone. After a few minutes' consideration, he remembered where he was, and nodded to himself; that accomplished, the rest of the previous day slowly began to come together in his mind, as he moved to the floor for a few cursory stretches. Somehow, his brain always seemed to work better when his body was in motion, and these days he had to admit it could use all the help it could get.
A little more confident of his memory, he followed that sound of ticking to a wall clock in the hallway, which proclaimed the time between two and three. He assumed it was afternoon, without knowing why; it wasn't like he could tell by looking out the window, after all. It just felt that way, that was all. His body and mind felt fuzzy and stiff, the way they did when he'd slept a lot more than usual, and the apartment and the bar below it were quiet. Upon retracing his steps, he found a short note on the table beside the couch, written in a sprawling feminine hand he figured had to be Tifa's: it expressed amusement at his lengthy rest ("going to hibernate on my couch?"), and told him that the bar would be empty until early evening, so he could feel free to go downstairs and get something to eat when he woke up. He put the note down, feeling a weird little smile tug at his lips, an inexplicable expression. He couldn't remember ever having seen her handwriting before. That was funny, wasn't it?
His mind softly suggested that there was something else kind of funny about seeing Tifa again, but he shoved it aside. Not yet. He wasn't going to think about that yet.
As he headed for the stairs, something strange for completely different reasons caught his eye: a poster on the far wall, a slightly tattered paper thing in a dull cheap-print-shop red. He stepped closer, frowning at the large, slightly uneven type. He'd seen that somewhere before, hadn't he? Somewhere.
Mako power destroys the planet -- but hey, it's great business!
A picture of Shinra Tower, grainy and badly scanned, with what was obviously an ink drawing in the foreground: a pipeline burrowing into cracked concrete, spewing up bags marked with $ symbols from under the ground. The drawing was impressively good, actually; it made the photograph look like the unreal part of the picture. And across the bottom, in stark capitals: TRUST SHINRA AND LOSE IT ALL. AVALANCHE DEFENDERS OF THE PLANET
Cloud took a step back, his frown deepening in his forehead. Now that was bizarre. Yes, he had seen the AVALANCHE fliers and graffiti scattered around town, and hadn't thought much of it at the time -- hey, getting yourself killed was your own business, right? But why would Tifa have one of those stupid self-righteous posters up on her wall, of all things?
Good question. But you know the answer, don't you?
Well -- he sure as hell hoped he didn't. And the fervor of that hope also unnerved him, more even than its subject did.
Shaking it off, he headed down into the bar as suggested, poking around and orienting himself in the peculiar clumsy way of anyone left alone in someone else's residence. Bread and cheese were easy enough to find, however, and so was a glass of water; he leaned on the edge of the bar as he ate, not quite wanting to sit down, and took a long look around the room. He was vaguely amazed at how much better he felt, better than he had in... well... as long as he could remember, he thought. His head seemed to have cleared a little. And just in time, maybe.
His eye was caught again as he was finishing his semi-meal, this time by something odd about the dusty old pinball machine standing against one wall. Its treads seemed to stand a little lower than they should, like the floor had begun to sink in that area. The difference was less than an inch, and surely not something that your average bar patron would notice at a casual glance, but Cloud wasn't your average bar patron; he was a man who was getting used to looking for the face behind the mask, to making sure he knew all the exits and entrances of any given room, and who was already beginning to harbor a suspicion or two. With all of that firmly in mind, he slowly, thoughtfully crossed the room to the pinball machine, and walked deliberately around its brightly-painted metallic belly, listening to the creaks in the floor for changes as he stepped.
There. Yes; definitely hollow. The plot, so to speak, thickens.
Lifting the square of carpet that cushioned the machine, he found -- as he had known he would -- cracks in the wood floor planks. He guessed it was probably either a a trap door or something really ridiculous and haunted-mansion like a swivel; there weren't any cracks in the wall, though, so that didn't seem very likely. Probably a basement room. And there was no doubt it was in use; the careful disguise alone seemed to make that clear, and there was no dust under the carpet square.
Well. This was just great, wasn't it?
He had just stood up next to the pinball machine when he heard voices on the porch outside, and then the batwing doors creaked open; turning, he saw Tifa and that big guy from the day before -- Barret? -- pushing through the doorway, laden with bulging paper bags. The cheerful conversation between the two of them trailed off as they entered and saw him, and while Barret's face set into a thunderous scowl immediately, Tifa's brightened a little, and she hurried to reach the bar and set down her load. Something about that friendly, half-shy little smile set off something strange rolling around inside him, something unsteady that he couldn't begin to understand. Something that he instinctively felt -- no, knew -- was very dangerous.
"Glad to see you up," she said a little too casually, standing on tiptoe to dig through the junk in the bag. Barret followed her example silently, and clunked into the kitchen, tromping around the bar like an overgrown sulky kid. Tifa was clearly trying to ignore him. She glanced back over her shoulder at Cloud, and stopped rummaging when she saw him looking at her. He couldn't imagine what his expression looked like. "Is something wrong?"
"You're AVALANCHE, aren't you?" he asked, evenly. "Or running it. Or part of it. Or something." It was her turn to make the interesting expression now. "Based right here in the bar? What the hell are you trying to do?"
Tifa attempted to find her voice. She looked like she'd just taken a blow to the head. Or at least as if she felt that way. "Cloud, I -- what -- "
"I've been looking around. You know you're nuts, right? They'll kill you if they find you. How long have you been doing this?"
"I still don't -- " Tifa fumbled, hopelessly.
"Who wants to know, Shinra?" a deeper voice rumbled; Barret had reappeared in the kitchen doorway, and was advancing on the two of them with that same pitch-dark scowl. Cloud suppressed an eyeroll and held his ground. He hated guys like that, the big ones who threw their weight around, who thought the world revolved around their fists and their shoulders. For some reason, guys like that never failed to piss him off, and always had. Or he thought they had.
"Me," he returned tersely, his flat tone taking on an irritable edge. "And it's ex-Shinra, if you don't mind. I'm freelance, a mercenary. I haven't been in the army for -- a long time."
Barret snorted bitterly, with a tone that said he had heard it all before and had not been impressed, and claimed his own ground behind Tifa's shoulder, folding his arms over his massive chest. "Good for you. Don't make you a hero. How long's it gonna take you to freelance your skinny ass right back to them with the good news?"
This time Cloud did roll his eyes; he couldn't stop himself. "Oh, for God's sake. Look, you idiot, Shinra can keep looking under rocks and up trees for you guys forever for all I care. I was just trying to do an -- " He stopped, caught on that word, and had to think for a few seconds before continuing, ignoring Barret's narrowed eyes and clenched fists as he did. "An old friend a favor and tell her not to get killed for this stupid caped crusaders crap, and I don't remember asking for your -- "
"Can I have a word here, guys?" Tifa's voice cut through, at barfight-breaking pitch, a voice of unquestionable command. Cloud blinked at her; it was a weird thing to hear from that petite (and pretty -- did I just think that?) form, despite the fact that said form now looked ragingly infuriated and had its hard, callused hands on both hips. The intended effect was achieved, however: both men fell abruptly into a mutual sullen silence.
"Thank you. Now both of you cut it out. Barret, stop picking at him. Cloud, you're not helping." She turned abruptly away from the argument, stalking back to her parcel to at least make a pretense at having other things to do as she continued. "You startled us, Cloud, that's all. I don't think you're going to tell anyone." A sarcastic retort nearly found its way out of Cloud's throat, and was bitten back at the last second as he looked at Tifa's stony face. No need to dig himself a grave, either. "If you say you've left Shinra, I believe you; there's more than enough reason, I guess. That's why we're all here, really -- AVALANCHE, I mean. All the reasons there are to stay away from Shinra." She set down a few unidentifiable tins and bottles on the counter, and turned back to look at Cloud, her auburn eyes smoky and defiant. "What you think of what we're doing is your business, just like what we're doing is ours. It may not be a world-class operation, but it's all we've got, and we're going to keep doing it."
"I didn't say -- " Cloud began, in a considerably lower tone, but she held up a hand and stopped him. He had a feeling that hand could stop just about anything or anyone.
"No, I know. I'm just saying, everybody has their own business. I told you you were welcome to stay here, and you still are, just as long as keep that in mind. Is that okay?"
He looked at his feet. He wasn't sure why, exactly, it just seemed like a better proposition than looking at her right now. "Yeah, no problem," he muttered. "What's it to me, anyway?"
Tifa flashed a quick smile -- but he felt sure, especially after that comment, that it was forced, very forced -- and returned to unpacking the last of the transported goods. "Okay," she agreed. "Great. Now can I get a hand moving this stuff to the kitchen?"
She could, and did. Four of them, in fact. Well -- three.
We'll talk about this later, Barret's eyes said to Cloud, along the way behind the counter.
If that's what you want, Cloud's own replied.
Oh, yes, this was going to be swell.
*
But it wasn't that bad; not really. He was still there a week later, if that said anything -- which it probably did -- still crashing on the couch in the weird tangle of rooms that hung over the bar, like a rabbit's warren in reverse. Sometimes Barret pissed him off, but usually he shoved whatever stupid retort he had back behind a disinterested, insulting shrug, and let it go; sometimes Tifa looked him in the eyes and he thought he could remember something momentously important, something earth-shattering that he had forgotten and which he had to tell her right away, but it was always gone by the time he opened his mouth. But that was little stuff, small-time stuff. After the things that had happened to him on the way here, it didn't seem to matter much at all.
Of course, he now couldn't remember precisely what those things were that had happened on the way, but that didn't seem very important either. The important thing was that he hadn't forgotten anything else since coming here; a comparatively small blessing, perhaps, but at this point he was willing to take blessings in any shape they happened to wear. And he now found himself tempted, terribly so, to ascribe his stabilized memory to where he was -- and, more specifically, to the one who had encouraged him to stay here.
Steam rose in billows, obscuring the cracked tile of the bathroom floor and walls; for some reason this side of the apartment was always nearly icebox-cold, and any shower that was hotter than freezing produced enough steam to fill the bathroom, the hallway, and occasionally the rooms next door. Tilting back his head to catch the hot spray full in his face, Cloud thought with a wry smile about how much personality this building had all by itself, enough that it was surprising the place could even hold the minds and thoughts of three residents. Well, four, if you counted him. But you couldn't count him, because he wasn't really a resident. At least, he thought he wasn't. He thought...
Why was he still here?
Well... why not? He had never been able to remember to his satisfaction whether he had a place elsewhere in the city, and even if he did it couldn't have compared to this one. Despite the fact that he hadn't gotten any new jobs, this would be the perfect place to find one when he was ready: a central gathering point, full of people and life. He helped out around the bar when he could, in exchange for shelter, food, and even this readily available shower... Really, it was just that he had no compelling reason to go when placed against his reasons to stay.
Or did he?
Either way, his list of reasons to remain worried him, and it had begun to worry him more every time he repeated it patiently to himself in an effort to calm his increasingly jumpy nerves. It worried him because the version of it he told himself was incomplete, and he could sense the omission as clearly as if it had listed along with the rest. Yes, it was scrawled across the bottom, and written in invisible ink, but it was there and if you held it up to the light, you could see it: Tifa. Nowhere else to go, possible work, room and board... and Tifa. She was a ghostly figure in the gallery of his rationalization, seen only from the corner of the eye. He didn't want to go, because there was something about Tifa, something important, and maybe if he stayed long enough, he would remember what it was.
What about that she's supposed to be dead? Is that important enough for you?
That made him pause, bar of soap in hand, frowning as if an actual voice in the room had asked him the question; he tried to shake it off, and bumped up the hot water tap without thinking about it. No, no, he'd been over that; his memory wasn't the world's most reliable thing ever, and he must be remembering wrong. Or, even if he wasn't... well, he hadn't seen the end of it, had he? She'd still been... alive, hadn't she? He thought so. He wasn't sure. The whole event was hazy in his mind, and it felt like there were pieces missing from it -- or like pieces had been moved around when he wasn't looking, as though his memory were one of those little plastic puzzles made up of sliding tiles. All that came to him when he tried to pursue it was blood, and the smell of smoke, and glowing green eyes like witch-fire. And pain; tearing phantom pain that seemed to come from deep in his gut. That part really didn't make sense, and he couldn't think of anything it could possibly come from, but he supposed it didn't matter. The past was not his problem anymore; it was much too dim and unreal for that. The present was his problem, and it was a big one.
Why was he still here? Tifa. So why was Tifa a reason to stay? God, sometimes his mind felt like a game of Twenty Questions in hell.
Oh, very profound.
But yes, the point was taken. It was more than just that feeling of something important that had been forgotten that kept Tifa in the back of his mind. There was comfort in her presence, in the existence of something that proved he did have a past before this city, this sector, this bar; despite all the things he didn't remember about it, he'd never had to question that he knew her from long ago. That was good, a step in the right direction. And... there was more to it than that, too. There was the fact that he found himself really liking Tifa. He liked her a lot, in fact. Maybe so much that... well...
Yeah. There was the problem. Staring him right in the face, there it was.
He liked Tifa, and that didn't feel like such a good idea. His memory might not have been the best, but still it seemed to him that people he liked had a really bad habit of dying horribly. And with the crap she and her little band of merrie men were up to, she was in enough danger already, even without being cursed. So the logical thing would be to either stop liking her so much, or to get out of here; but he couldn't seem to do the one, and he didn't really want to do the other (as much as he felt weirdly compelled to -- like a little voice kept asking him what was keeping him, why he wasn't on the move). And slowly, he was trapping himself... maybe trapping both of them.
Cloud sighed, and turned off the water, stepping out onto the threadbare little terrycloth rug. With the constant rat-run of his thoughts, it was a miracle he wasn't any more nuts than he was. As he reached for his borrowed towel, however, he thought that that wasn't much of a miracle, as miracles went.
What am I supposed to do? This isn't my business; this isn't my place. I don't know where my place is, but this isn't it. And I don't want to make this my business, because it's business that's going to shoot itself in the foot if it goes on the way it's going. Better to keep people away than to let them in and lose them, right? Better not to give a damn, and get out of here while I still can. While I've got nothing to lose.
Half-dressed, he caught his own eyes in the mirror, and was bothered again by the way they glowed; rather than looking away this time, though, he leaned forward, bracing his hands on the rim of the sink. Studying his face, and the not-quite-right way it seemed to fit together. Trying to read his own mind, as its secrets were as much a mystery to him as to anyone else.
What am I doing here, Tifa? Tell me that if you can. I'm trouble and you're trouble, and as long as I'm around you we're too much trouble for anybody. Tell me what it is I can't remember about you. Tell me what I'm supposed to do. Give you my mind and ask you to fix it? Get out of your life while you still have it? Ask you to kiss it and make it all better? And tell me why it is I keep thinking things like that, like I could remember everything and it would all make sense to me if I could wake up one morning, look over, and see you...
Cloud put a hand over his face, rubbing at his temples. He was tired; agonizing was hard work. Suddenly he just wanted all of this taken out of his hands, to be saved from indecision by the decisiveness of fate.
Oh, the hell with that. Give me just long enough to get myself together, and I'll get out of here. Out of here, out of Midgar; maybe I'll go north, see someplace I've never seen. Doesn't matter where, as long as it's far.
He pulled on a shirt, scruffed apathetically at his already unruly hair, and then glanced at the mirror again, curiously. The man there, his mind murmured just below the level of consciousness, was a total stranger, and surely that couldn't be right.
A couple more days, and I'll just go; I have to, and I know it. I'd just make a worse mess than ever if I stayed, no matter if I tried to help or not. She's got a life here, and she deserves the right to live it; and all I am is a dead man walking.
*
"He's been talking about leaving."
Biggs glanced over his shoulder with an eyebrow raised, closing the cabinet over the sink behind the last load of clean glasses. "Imagine the nerve. Did you chain him to the couch?"
Tifa scowled at him absently from her seat on the bar, gnawing on the callus at the edge of her thumb; it was just one of a whole host of nervous habits that seemed to have crashed in on her over the last week. "I'm serious. I'm really worried about him; you saw him when he came in here. If that happened again..."
They were talking as quietly as possible, because they were talking about Cloud -- another habit that had been born of late. She wasn't entirely sure why it was he seemed to merit these low, intense discussions, as though he were a patient on a cancer ward, but somehow he did. And there had been a lot to be discussed since he'd arrived; that was for damned sure.
Biggs shrugged, blotting his hands on the dishtowel as he came over to lean on the bar next to her. "Another pretty girl would probably take him home. Some guys have all the luck. You mind telling me how long you were planning to keep him here, Tife?"
Tifa turned halfway around on the bar, casting him a suspicious look. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Another shrug. "That the Eagle has landed and the crow is in the nest. I'm not really your man for subterfuge. It's just, the thing is, a little bird told me you weren't in the business of rehabilitating hometown boys who went to Shinra and got their heads fucked."
Tifa bristled. "That's not the same at all, Biggs," she snapped -- trying to ignore the fact that it wouldn't have made her so angry if she hadn't been thinking much the same thing, recently.
Biggs cocked an eyebrow again. "How so, exactly?"
She turned sharply away from him, smouldering with irritation. "It just isn't."
There was a thump behind her that she knew was the sound of Biggs clapping a hand theatrically to his chest; even when he knew she couldn't see her, he couldn't stop hamming. "Oh! Why didn't you say so? It all makes such sense to me now!"
Her nerves frayed to snapping, and Tifa whipped her head back around, giving him the most poisonous death glare she could summon. At the moment, that was saying a lot. "You're not funny," she gritted, biting the words.
Biggs shrugged once more, affably, a patient little half-smile at the corner of his mouth. "No, I'm not," he said humbly. "That become a capital offense when I wasn't looking?"
Irritation surged briefly and then subsided all at once, fading into exhaustion and regret. What was she doing? Biggs was just trying to give her some perspective, that was all; just like he always did. Her temper was getting way too short, and if this kept up...
Sighing, Tifa slid down off the bar, rubbing her temples. "God, Biggs, I'm sorry," she mumbled, eyes closed. "I'm being a monster lately, aren't I?"
"Three-headed," Biggs agreed solemnly. She tried to smile, wanly, and almost made it.
"Sorry. I really am. I'm just... I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do, and it's making me crazy."
She could almost hear Biggs thinking about that, turning it over in his mind; she could definitely hear him get serious all at once. "He's really not okay, huh?" his voice asked over her shoulder. Tifa shook her head, chewing on her lip. "Do you know what's wrong with him?"
"No," she admitted, and blew her bangs off her forehead with another frustrated sigh. "That's the thing; if I did know, I could do something about it. But... I just have this stupid feeling that something's going on here, and it's something I don't understand. And the only thing I can think of to do is just keep him here until I figure it out, but I don't even know if I can figure it out. I don't even... I don't even know why I care so much."
Liar.
Biggs's footsteps preceded him thoughtfully around the bar, bringing him up to stand next to her, facing out into the room. "He's your friend," he dismissed readily enough; if he had the same doubts about her motivations that she did, he wisely kept them to himself. "Well, I don't know what to tell you; I know less about the whole thing than you do. But it seems like maybe, if you gave him enough time to get his act together and think about it himself, the two of you might be able to work it out between you."
Tifa shook her head, lips tight, staring at the floor. "That's just it. I don't have time to give him. If he's thinking about leaving... I need more time, he needs more time, we both need more time, and there just isn't any. And the longer I think about it, the less time there is."
He considered this for a long moment, cupping a hand around his chin; when at last he spoke, his voice was reasonable and thoughtful, all trace of its usual manic good cheer gone. That was one of the things she still loved about Biggs: when he absolutely needed to, he could be brilliant.
"Seems to me," he said reflectively, "that if you don't have enough time... what you ought to do is make some."
Tifa turned her head to look at him, and this time it was she who raised an eyebrow. "How do you suggest I do that?" she asked.
*
The stairs creaked under Cloud as he walked down to the bar, announcing every step down their wooden backs. He would have thought it was too early for anyone else to be up, but when he reached the ground floor he saw Tifa behind the bar, bustling around in the grip of a dozen different chores. She smiled and waved when she saw him in the doorway, as though she'd been expecting him all along, and maybe she had; she presented him with a cup of coffee when he came uncertainly to the bar, and then leaned on the countertop across from him, wearing the same enigmatic little smile.
"'Morning," she said. "Want a job?"
END