heroes
"Cloud? Are you home?"
"Yeah, Mom. I'm in the kitchen."
The sound of the door closing came next, but not right away, and in his mind he saw his mother in the doorway, balancing her big purse and the paper shopping bag with her work uniform in it, bunting the front door shut with her hip. He'd seen it enough times before. He started drying the pile of dishes he'd left on the counter, trying to manage it one-handed.
"Oh, good. I didn't know if you'd be home yet." Stopping off to leave both bags in the hall closet. "How was your day?"
"Fine."
She came in, shrugging out of her threadbare spring coat, nudging one of her sneakers off with the toe of the other. Rachel Strife was very young and very pretty, and today she had her blonde hair up the way Cloud liked, where she swept it all back and twisted it up behind the crown of her head and held it there with a plastic clip. He only saw this out of the corner of his eye, though, because he was trying not to turn his head toward her.
Not that that mattered. "Sweetie? What's the matter with your eye?" He winced, and automatically clapped the washcloth-wrapped pack of frozen peas tighter to his right eye, not looking at her. He'd sat the plate on the counter and was rubbing it with the towel, but it wasn't working very well. The plate kept rocking up and wobbling around. His mother sighed, took plate and towel away from his hand and turned him toward her, and lifted up his cold compress to peer under it. She blurred and swam in the black eye when he opened it, but the other one could see her expression just fine.
"Were you fighting again?" she asked, and let him put the compress back, taking over the towel and the plate instead.
"Mom, I can do that." He reached, but without a lot of feeling. You didn't just grab things out of your mom's hands, and besides, she was managing a lot better than he had been.
"So can I, and I'd rather you tell me what happened." He grimaced, but leaned against the counter next to her, looking at his free hand. His knuckles were swollen, too, and split in a couple places; washing the dishes had made those even redder and angrier. His right hand was worse, though, but holding the ice was numbing it.
"Nothing." His voice was low, and the clinking of plates almost swallowed it. "I fell down. I hit it."
"Uh-huh." She sounded calm, but there was a fine crease at the start of each of her eyebrows. "I bet you did. I bet that Driscoll boy was only too happy to help you fall down, too. Or was it Johnny this time?" His silence must have been telling, because she sighed again and turned back to him, the towel dangling from her hand on her hip. "Cloud, I don't know how many times I have to explain this to you. I don't want you fighting with anyone, but I have to work for Johnny's parents. It was really generous of them to give me the -- "
"Mom, I didn't do it on purpose."
" -- position, and Mrs. Lamonte gives me enough of a fisheye every morning just if my uniform's wrinkled, without her coming over and telling me while I'm stocking the shelves that my son was beating up on her son the night before -- "
"Beating up on him? Mom -- "
"I know." She put her hands over her face, rubbed it, dropped them to her sides again. The dishtowel still hung from one like a flag. "I know, I'm just telling you what she's going to say to me."
"He's like a foot taller than me, for one thing, and he always has about three friends with him because he's too chicken to even take somebody on one on one, and he started it!"
"And you can't just walk away?" She threw the towel down on the counter, in an unconscious metaphor. "Cloud, you're not a little boy anymore. You don't have to let these kids get to you, you're smarter than that. I know you are. You're going to be a grownup in a few more years; are you still going to be going around solving all your problems by hitting people when they say things that bother you?"
He didn't say anything; it seemed more prudent not to. But he bit his tongue inside his mouth and pressed the peas against his eye so tight it started to throb again, and listened to his hateful mental tape recorder playing back the voice of Johnny's slimy little friend, yelling at his back, Hey fag! Your mom turning any tricks tonight, or she take Mondays off? I got two nickels, you think she'd give me a ride?
And it was stupid; of course it was stupid, of course his mother was right. They were kids who'd get Cs in woodshop if it weren't pass/fail. And even stupider, Johnny, calling over his shoulder as they jogged away from where they'd finally knocked him on the ground, pretending they'd won even though he'd given at least as good as he'd gotten and there'd been three of them, all in the high school, Johnny calling back And stay the fuck away from Tifa, Strife!, now that was stupid. Sure, because he did so much going near her in the first place. Still, boys with crushes on pretty, popular girls understand one another in ways that the pretty, popular girls themselves may entirely miss, and Johnny had a lot of backed-up jealousy from everyone else who liked Tifa that he needed to spend on the easiest possible target. Thus, Cloud, the person probably the least likely to be a competitor for Tifa's affections. It could almost be funny.
"I'm going to make dinner," his mom said, finally. She could have kept talking, and he would listen, but by now she probably knew that no further progress would be made. "Have you started your homework?"
"No."
"Well, could you do that, please?"
He went to pick up his backpack from the corner of the kitchen without another word, and started toward the living room side of the tiny house. About halfway there, her voice stopped him again.
"Cloud." He turned back, and saw her leaning on the sink, staring into it. A sudden fit of guilt bit into him, looking at her like that. "I'm sorry," she said, a moment later, and looked up at him. "I'm just... I'm tired. Are you all right? Does your eye hurt much?"
It throbbed and stung like murder every time his eyelid twitched, or he shifted the washcloth, and it was probably going to get worse once he took the ice off it. He made himself smile. "Nah," he said. "It's fine."
She smiled back at him, and pulled out the big soup pot, and he sat down on the split-level steps and started with algebra, since he hated it the most.
---
Rachel Strife was very young, only twenty-eight, in fact, and easily mistaken by a stranger for Cloud's older sister rather than his mother -- that is, if there had been a stranger around, or anyone in the whole town who didn't already know their saga. When she hadn't been much older than Cloud was now -- a thought that chilled him every time it occurred to him, sobered him with the thought that things that happened to him now might be able to mess him up for the whole rest of his life -- she had been deeply in love with a town boy named Andrew Granger, and had proven her love behind the gym after the eighth-grade spring formal. She had told this boy about her missed periods the August before she was to start at the high school he attended, hoping he would be excited, and apparently he had been; apparently he had been so excited he had run all the way to Midgar in his excitement, and in his excitement had forgotten to come back. For a while she had waited and hoped, because town boys mostly went to the city to get jobs and earn money and you needed money to start a family, and then she had waited and hoped because a boy could always have a change of heart, and then when her son was four years old she had gotten a letter from Andrew's roommate in the city saying that he had died, and she had stopped waiting and hoping for good. She had never elaborated to Cloud the manner of his death, but he had a vague, half-real memory of crawling into her bed that night and her hugging him and burying her wet face in his small shoulder and sobbing there, as though he were really the man of the household that she always joked he was, as though he were a grown man who could comfort her somehow, and he had cried too because she was crying and he was frightened, but not really for any other reason. And in fact, as he had gotten older and understood the circumstances more fully, on more than one night he had thought back on his mother's tears and lain awake in his own bed in the room he shared with her, throbbing hot and cold, thinking Serves you right for leaving her. That's what you get. I hope it hurt really bad, because that's what you get.
So she was a whore to the kids at school, and a whore to more than a few of the town's adult residents, not because she was the only girl who'd ever slept with her boyfriend after a dance when she was too young but because she was the only girl whose boyfriend had left her alone with a son to raise, and things just weren't fair like that sometimes. Cloud knew that what the kids said about her they'd gotten from their parents, and he knew that a lot of town men and even more town women who would never see twenty-eight again said she was a wild girl, always had been, ones like that never changed, and if you wanted proof would you just look at the way her son was turning out, always on his own and taking after anyone who looked at him cross-eyed. He knew they said she had taken up with the tribal fellow who drove the supply truck up to the store from Cosmo Canyon, that after he'd finished putting his truckload of toilet paper and canned beans in there the two of them shut themselves up in the storeroom and smoked the tribal fellow's weed and did sex things you couldn't even read about in the gossip magazines. He also knew this was completely stupid, and would be even if it weren't that the guy from the canyon tribes had a wife and three daughters and didn't even drink, let alone grow weed, and that Cloud's mother liked him (maybe even had a little crush on him, although this thought always at once seemed uncharitable and greatly alarmed Cloud in a way that was difficult to identify) because he was unimpressed with small-town accusations of whorishness, and was the only person who would pass more than the time of day with her. She'd told him all this, because most of the time Cloud was the only person she had to talk to, and that was okay because most of the time she was the only person Cloud had to talk to, unless you counted Hey fag, your mom give anybody a b-j this weekend? as really stimulating conversation.
The only real exception was Mrs. Lockheart, Tifa's mom, who had always been pretty friendly with them, at least relatively speaking. She had sent a holly wreath and a card for the Christmas before last, and though Tifa's father hadn't signed the card, both she and Tifa had. He had snuck a look at that card, at Tifa's name printed in her neat but not at all girly handwriting inside it, just about every time he passed where it stood in the kitchen until well into February, when his mom had finally put it away. But this past Christmas Tifa's mom had just gone into the hospital for the first of many times in the last year, and the Lockheart family had been much too busy for cards or wreaths. Cloud's mom had sent a card instead, a get-well card, and Tifa's mom had called some time later to thank her for it, but Tifa still came to school a lot looking tired and sad, and even though Cloud always wanted to say something cheering and comforting to her so badly he hurt all over with it, he never dared try.
---
He went to school in the morning and his mom went to work, and he left way too early, like he did every morning, so that he would pass the Lockhearts' house before Tifa had left, and before the gaggle of friends and hangers-on (mostly boys) who wanted to walk her to school showed up. Looking up at her window on his way past was as much a part of his morning routine as putting on his pants before he left the house, and today, he saw with his heart doing a fast drum solo in his chest, the shade was up, and he could see her close to the window, probably getting her stuff ready for school. He could barely see, really; the angle was bad, and the most he caught was dark hair below the windowsill, and then he was hurrying by so that she wouldn't see him looking. One time, one glorious treasured time, she had, and had paused at the window and smiled and waved, and he had barely been able to make his suddenly leaden hand complete a wave back before realizing with sour embarrassment she couldn't have meant to do that, she must have thought he was someone else, and walking away quickly. Still, he had thought about that one tiny incident at least a hundred times since: her lovely smile, her wave.
She didn't see him today, though, and he passed the lot after the Lockhearts' without running into anyone else, although his heartbeat didn't settle out until he was almost to school. He could only imagine what he would get if anybody caught him lingering there -- if Johnny caught him there. One of them might even tell Tifa, and that thought was so terrifying that most days he left almost an hour before school started, just so he didn't push his luck. It was a nice day to linger on his way, though, clear even though it was cold, and the mountains looked weird and gorgeous in the sunlight. He looked at them most of his way to school, mentally peopling them with heroes in deadly combat with dragons, saving pretty dark-haired girls.
He arrived at school almost a half hour before the first bell, and pulled out a novel from his backpack to keep him company on the steps. It was pretty nice out here before anyone else arrived, and when they did he could see them coming ahead of time, and then pack up and edge around the side of the stairs, mostly out of sight. A while after he made the move, about five minutes before school started, he heard Johnny's voice banging up the stairs behind him, and scowled at no one at the sound of laughter. His eye still hurt today, although the swelling had gone down.
Homeroom was uneventful, and only when he got to second period did he run into a jarring oddity: Tifa was absent from where she usually sat, one row behind and two seats over from Cloud, between two members of her constant vanguard. He looked over a couple times before really making any sense of what he saw, and turned back to the chemistry-related arcana on the blackboard with a furrowed brow. She'd been awake, sitting by the window; why wasn't she in school? He hoped she wasn't sick. It kept bugging him all through class, though, and he ended up not having the slightest idea what the difference was between chemical and physical changes, and barely managing to tune back in in time to write down what the homework was supposed to be. Not that any of that was particularly new.
At lunch he sat alone in a corner of the school's sprawling athletic fields, which petered out into cornfields beyond the fence, and read his book while he ate his sandwich. Somebody in the scratch soccer game that had started up kicked a ball at his head, whether on purpose or by accident, but he ducked it easily, and without giving them the satisfaction of looking up. There was more laughter, horsey and ridiculous, and he glared into his book instead of at them. They were idiots, like his mom said; they weren't even worth it.
Sixth period was English, his favorite, and he'd gotten an A on his essay from last week; he caught eyes with the teacher (at least she seemed to like him all right) and answered her smile. Then spotted one of the other boys doing a glazed-eyed, buck-toothed imitation of it behind her back, and looked at the wall. Still no Tifa; she was probably sick after all. He liked the play they were reading, though, even though most of the other kids hated it. It was interesting, and there were some pretty good swordfights in there.
After school let out he headed up the big dirt road into the mountains, messing around on some of the lower paths, kicking rocks off the edge and watching them fall from a safe distance. Mostly no one bugged him there, and he liked it, even though his mom hated him going up there alone. He found a boulder to sit on, in the sun so it wasn't too cold, and read some more of the play, even reading it out loud in parts for a while and cracking himself up a little when he did the falsetto voices for the women. Then the sun started dipping low, and he packed up and went home. He always came home as late as he went to school early, so that usually Tifa was already home, although most of the time her friends were with her and the experience was less thrilling. This time when he passed the shade was down, though, and her room looked dark. Probably she just wasn't home, but he found himself worrying again.
He dumped his bookbag in the kitchen, put their dirty clothes from the night before into the laundry hamper and cleaned up the bedroom table a little, and did the dishes, but by the time he was done his mom still wasn't home from work, so he hauled out the shoebox from under his bed and sat on the mattress, leafing through all the old and new newspaper cuttings that filled it. They were all about Sephiroth, of course. He kept every item that came through the local paper, and scrounged constantly for copies of the Midgar Times that might have somehow wandered their way to Nibelheim, because those articles were always much bigger and better. When the unauthorized biography had come out he'd read it twice, even though he recognized that most of it was probably made up, and the parts that maybe weren't made up had all been switched around so they made sense in a way real life didn't. Still, it was cool, because Sephiroth was cool. Sephiroth was, in fact, as far as Cloud was concerned, about the coolest person there had ever been, and since he'd been about nine he'd been telling anyone who'd listen (again, his mother, basically) that when he grew up he was going to join SOLDIER.
At first, he had idolized Sephiroth just because he was so strong; if you were Sephiroth you didn't have to deal with kids picking on you on your way home from school, his nine-year-old self had been quite confident. And then, gradually, the shape of the hero-worship had changed, because the more Cloud had gotten older and thought about it in a more sophisticated way, the more it had seemed that that must have been exactly what Sephiroth had had to deal with. After all, he was different, and he had kind of funny-colored hair and eyes, didn't he? (Not that Cloud knew this through any kind of firsthand experience; the newspaper photos were so bad you could really only tell that his hair and eyebrows were pale, and maybe that there was something weird about his eyes if you squinted through the black and white dots.) Maybe when Sephiroth had been a kid he'd been freak instead of fag, and maybe an extra helping of girl because his hair was always so long in the pictures, but it pretty much all came out to the same. And he'd sure shown them, hadn't he? Won the war in Wutai all but single-handedly, beaten that big water-monster that had been their guardian spirit for ages, come back not just a hero but the biggest, most famous hero of his time. Who was the freak or the girl or the fag now? Anyone who'd made fun of Sephiroth when he was a kid must feel like an idiot these days!
And of course the natural thing to do with this thought was to picture himself in the same position: coming home from SOLDIER a hero, with countries won and monsters defeated at his back, everyone who'd called him names when he was thirteen crowding around to get a good look at him now, and shamefaced when they remembered what they'd done. Sometimes in this fantasy he was gracious and forgave them; sometimes he just stared, and at last they slunk away, knowing that they didn't deserve his friendship. But always, always the next part (and the part where he rolled over on his other side in bed, so that if his mother was still awake she wouldn't hear his breathing change) was the part when Tifa came out to greet him, practically running, her long beautiful dark hair streaming behind her, glowing, and told him that he probably didn't even remember her, but she'd lived next door, and she'd read about everything he'd done in the papers. And he turned to her, smiling, totally cool, telling her that of course he remembered her...
Yeah, it was stupid. Just about the stupidest thing anyone had ever heard of, he was sure. But he kept the newspapers anyway, and he read them over and over, sometimes thinking in his own name in place of Sephiroth's, sometimes thinking his name in beside it. And he still fell asleep at night thinking about touching Tifa, holding her, even kissing her, and feeling hot in an uncomfortable but not exactly unpleasant way when he thought about her body pressed up next to his the way it would have to be, her lips being soft and open. He had never actually kissed anybody, and without becoming a hero in the interim it didn't seem likely he ever would, but he had imagined it more times than he could count.
They might make fun of him now, but he was different from the rest of them, he was sure of it. He was better. And one day they would know it, too; and they'd be sorry then.
The door opened, and there was that awkward pause before it closed again, and he glanced up as he stuffed the cuttings back in their box. "Hi, Mom," he called, and slid it back under the bed, tucked safely behind the coverlet. "How was your day?"
"Oh -- fine, honey." She sounded weird, though -- stuffy. Maybe she had a cold. Geez, everybody was getting sick late this year. "Listen, Cloud, could you come here a minute?"
Frowning again, more than a little this time, he went out to the front hallway, where his mother was stuffing her paper bag into the closet, rubbing at her nose. Once he could see her, though, he didn't think she had a cold; her eyes were red, and her face had a shiny, puffy look to it. "Mom, what's wrong?" he asked, coming over to help her get the bag stowed in the closet, to touch her arm. "Are you crying?"
She smiled at him, her lips thin and small. Her hair was up again today, but much of it had come loose; it was windy outside. "I was a bit," she admitted, and took his hands inside hers. They were smaller than his now, and though he wasn't tall, it still surprised him to realize he was almost taller than her. "Cloud, you know that Mrs. Lockheart has been pretty sick lately, right?"
He did, and his stomach sank the minute she said it. Tifa's empty chair in science class.
"Last night she went in to the hospital up the road to have some surgery done, and when they put her under the anesthetic, her heart just failed. She died almost right away. Mr. Lamonte just heard from Mr. Lockheart this afternoon, he just told me before I left." There was another thin tear-trail finding its way from one of her eyes again, and she reclaimed one of her hands to wipe it away. "It was very sudden, there was nothing they really could have done -- "
He hugged her then, because he didn't know what else to do, and she sniffed a little more but didn't really cry on him, not like she had done about his dad. She clutched his shoulders and combed at his hair with her fingers, and kissed the corner of his mouth, once, before standing back and giving him a small red-eyed smile at arm's length. He went to get her a tissue from the bathroom, and she thanked him and wiped her eyes with it, finally starting to take off her coat while she did. "I'm sorry," she said, finally. "She was just a very nice lady, and I just feel so sad for Tifa -- losing your mom at twelve years old. I can't think how horrible that must be." She took a deep breath and hung up her coat, and hugged Cloud's shoulder again, just a little. She seemed very fragile, suddenly, he felt like he should be supporting her, walking her into the kitchen. He couldn't think either; he'd probably go crazy if something happened to his mom. But then she patted his shoulder again and stood on her own. "I guess I should start dinner, anyway. What do you want?"
"I don't know," Cloud said. The change of subject seemed a little dizzying to him, but he trusted his mom's logic. "...Is there any more of the soup? We could make some sandwiches to go with it."
"That sounds fine to me." She headed into the kitchen, pulling the leftovers out of the fridge, putting the soup on the stove to heat, and then she turned to him and finally dropped the bomb: "I got a card before I left the store today. Why don't you pick some flowers out of the garden after dinner and take it over to the Lockhearts'?"
"Sure," Cloud said, through a whole face that felt like it had gone completely numb. She smiled at him, and went back to the soup, and he went back to his bed and very quietly lay down and began praying to be struck by lightning.
He waded through dinner in a fog of terror. He felt badly for Tifa, too, horrible in fact, but go into her house? Talk to her? Who said she was going to want to see him, anyway, especially now? If it had been anyone but his mother who had given him this task he might have dodged it, say he'd go tomorrow and then say he'd forgotten and maybe she could go instead, but it wasn't anyone else, and he didn't dodge things that his own mother had told him to do. Still, once he let himself out of the front door and into the cold evening, Tifa's house seemed to lurch up in front of him in a matter of seconds, and he stood facing his errand like a man condemned to death.
While he did, the door opened, startling him, and a couple of Tifa's friends -- he couldn't even remember their names -- came charging out. They apparently weren't on their own errand to get rid of him, however, to his relief; one of them knocked into him on purpose as they ran past, nearly knocking the makeshift bouquet out of his hands, and smirked over his shoulder, but they were leaving nonetheless, down to the end of the walkway and then back into town. He watched them go, the old familiar sourness turning his stomach as he collected the flowers back together again, and then made himself turn back to the house and square his shoulders. This was the right thing to do and his mother had asked him to, and if Tifa or her father told him they didn't want him anywhere near them right now, or at any other time... well, he'd just leave his card and flowers and go away, then.
He knocked, and Tifa opened the door right away, which startled him too. Her eyes looked dark and puffy, and that made him think too late of his own black eye, how stupid it must look. He swallowed before he said anything, to keep himself from stammering.
"Hi," he said, and said the rest to his feet. It seemed safer that way. "Um, my mom and I, um... we heard about your mom, and... these are for you and your dad." He thrust forward the card and the flowers blindly; he didn't dare look up to see if they had gotten where they were going. Only when they were accepted from his hands did he take the chance.
"Thanks," Tifa said. Actually speaking to him. That was probably a good sign. She was looking at the flowers, and when she saw him looking she turned a quick, weak smile on him. "They're pretty. I'll put them in some water." She hesitated after a few steps, looking at him standing in the doorway, and cleared her throat a little. "...Come in."
He did, and followed her up the stairs for lack of anything else sensible to do. Their house was nice inside; big. There were flowers everywhere downstairs, and a few covered trays of food on the tables and cabinets. All of the flowers were much nicer than his little tangle, real store-bought bouquets, and he winced. Upstairs she went into what must be her room, and he hovered on the threshold, not quite daring to go in, but looking around, all the same. There was an upright piano against one wall, and a poster of a baseball player Cloud didn't recognize stuck up over her bed. The baseball player was squinting off into the distance, looking more like a cowboy at high noon in a movie than like a guy who was just going to play some game for a living. Her window looked much different from the inside.
She picked up a vase, filled it with water from the bathroom, and set it on the windowsill. She put the flowers in it, and he thought, I'll be able to see those from the street. Every day when I go by, until they shrivel up and she throws them out. I'll know I gave them to her. No one else will.
Tifa had turned back to him by then, her arms folded. She looked more tired and more sad than ever. "Thanks for coming," she said. "Do you want... something to eat? We have a ton of food. Everybody just keeps bringing food."
"No, I should... you know, be getting home." She nodded, and flashed that tiny, fast smile at him again. He couldn't look at that. "I'll, I'll see you in school, I guess. I mean, when you come back."
"Yeah. See you."
He escaped into the cool night, breathing it as deeply as he could, staring up at the stars as they came out, as he wandered toward home. He didn't go in just yet, though; he sat on their front step, looking up, not ready to go back inside where it was warm and his mother was waiting to hear how it had gone. He kept looking at the stars, and thinking of Tifa's small, quick, hurt smile. Thinking how a better person, a real hero, would have said something, or done something, to make her not feel like she had to manufacture that hurting smile for his sake, that would have wiped it away and replaced it with a real one. Thinking that a hero would't have run away.
It was because he was out there, though, that twenty minutes or so later he could hear the distant shouting, Tifa's voice and her father's, from inside the Lockhearts' house. It was also because he was out there that he saw the door slam open and shut and Tifa tear out of it, walking so fast it was almost a run, her arms wrapped around her in her jacket, her hair rippling and streaming behind her like it did in his stupid fantasy but not really because now she was crying and angry and alone, and heading for the dirt road. Heading for the mountains.
And it was because he was out there and he'd seen all this that after a minute -- after long enough not to be seen -- he got up off the front step, and followed her.
---
And it was because of all this he found himself finally lying in bed that night, about a million years later, sore and throbbing and dry-eyed, staring at the ceiling but seeing blood on Tifa's temple, her closed eyes, seeing the flashlights and the light from the ambulance, hearing Tifa's dad shouting that it was Cloud's fault, that if Cloud ever came near her again he'd kill him, hearing Johnny say low that he'd kill him anyway; hearing all of this in his head, and really hearing his mother out in the kitchen full-out sobbing now, her head buried in her arms on the table, crying for almost half an hour straight now. And thinking, as he stared dull and steady at the ceiling, that he wouldn't mind a bit if somebody just threw a bomb into the middle of this whole stupid, horrible, miserable town. If the whole thing just burned right to the ground.