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Final Fantasy 7. Tifa Lockhart: Journey to Midgar.	By : Nickamano Category: Final Fantasy VII > General Views: 7306 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: Final Fantasy 7 is created and owned by Squaresoft, now Square-Enix. Nothing here is owned by me. It was created for entertainment purposes, and I am not profiting financially from the creation and online presentation of this story.

Chapter List
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9. Riding North.
It was actually fun riding with Arthur. He was a tremendous flirt, but he wasn’t creepy about it and Tifa felt comfortable sitting alongside him. He regaled her with stories of his youth as a coal miner, the dangers, the near misses, and the tight-knit community and the personal closeness with nature, with nothing but picks and shovels and his bare hands on the rock, he often felt that connection. And his team always gave offerings to the planet, in gratitude for the coal they took out.

They sometimes even found natural chunks of crystallised Materia in the midst of a coal seam, which they tended to leave alone and worked around, it helped that they were a source of natural, though dim, illumination. Of course, that led to conversations about Mako, and Arthur became even more animated then. The two hunched close mock-conspiratorial, and he started to whisper to her that sometimes in the deepest shafts they found a pocket of nothingness, a hole in the rock and within they often witnessed the ethereal blue green-glow of a stream of Mako. He leaned even closer then, his lips up close to Tifa’s ear, she giggling, while he whispered to her that at times when it was quiet, he swore he could hear something coming from that flowing not-quite-liquid, something that almost sounded like a whispered secret through a closed door, the words unaccountable but the emotion there all the same. It creeped some of them out but he had always liked it.

After a pause for lunch, as much to feed greens and water to the Chocobo, and allow Kaori and Tifa to check on progress of the avian’s healing injuries and general state of health. Due to their intelligence, tamed Chocobo were generally considered friends and family, or pets rather than mere work animals so they were well cared for and every effort was made not to overload them. As they got underway again Tifa and the little boy switched places, the women riding up ahead and the man and boy on the smaller wain behind them.

Kaori was also a chatterer but Tifa had always been quiet, a natural listener, attentive and interested. And so Kaori almost immediately offered up the story of how her parents had once been part of the Postal Service of Gaia and once she grew old enough she would join them on their travels around the continent, delivering second class mail (second class being slower yet cheaper as it was delivered by carriage, whereas first class and express were delivered by people on trained racing Chocobo). On those travels she met and fell in love with Kuris who was a young miner in Corel village, and one of the advocates of bringing machines in to work the seams more efficiently, much to his father, Arthur’s, disapproval. Kaori and Kuris fell in love, got married when she was fifteen and he was twenty. And it had been the best thing she had ever done. They tried for eight or nine years to have a child then all of a sudden it happened, when they had all but given up, and Maiki was born.

Only six months ago, Kaori was visiting her parents with Maiki, when she got news about a huge fire in Corel, it had been a raging inferno that had swept through the village and killed nearly everyone. The official word was a gas pocket in one of the mines had gone up and destroyed the town, however there were whispered rumours that it had actually been something to do with the Mako reactor that Shin-Ra had been building there.

The few survivors who had wanted to remain close to their ancestral mountain-homeland, had gathered at the far north, on the edge of the ropeway station entrance to The Gold Saucer and built themselves a shanty town of tents and makeshift buildings from ruins of Corel and any leftovers found in the area. They named the shanty North Corel.

Kaori, her son and father-in-law were travelling back there to meet the occupants, hoping there might be one or two family or friends living there, or at least some relics of an old lifestyle of coal mining that, thanks to Shin-Ra and their Mako reactors, was now defunct. They were hoping to be able to share something of that past with Maiki, to gain some extra connection to his father and help his grandfather relive the lost past.

Tifa sat in silence listening to the woman’s story all the while fighting not to be dragged back to the razing of her own village barely a year ago. She didn’t want to share her own story, it was still too raw, too painful. And yet hearing about the village of Corel, the similarities were startling. Shin-Ra was involved in the utter devastation of a village, and almost all the people had died, and Mako reactor was also somehow involved. She didn’t believe the story about some subterranean gas pocket being responsible any more than Kaori, who’s tone and expression had telegraphed her own rejection of the official Shin-Ra account plainly enough.

Shin-Ra and all who stood for them were not to be trusted. Except for Cloud of course, she would always trust Cloud, SOLDIER First Class or not. And maybe Zack, wherever he was. Zack had always been nice, a little over-protective and a little too easy to fall to the hero-worship of Sephiroth but she had certainly been too hard on him that last time they had spoken. All that grief and rage that she’d dumped onto him, even though he had only tried to save her.

“I hate you! Sephiroth… SOLDIER… Mako reactors… Shin-Ra… I hate you all!”
She couldn’t remember her exact words but she remembered blaming Zack as much as Shin-Ra and Sephiroth, but even as she had lain there dying, with Zack running up the stairs to take on Sephiroth, she remembered regretting those words. And then her thoughts had turned to Cloud and the realisation that he had not appeared to save her. That had been ludicrous. How could he have?!

Abruptly her thoughts of Cloud snapped her back to the dream she had had the previous night in the cabin. It had already seemed like a lifetime ago. And she hadn’t remembered it until just now, with Zangan at the forefront of her mind. However, she had dreamed of herself and Cloud, the night of The Promise again. Sitting side by side on the water tower in the pitch dark, the surrounding village houses nothing more than black silhouettes, with only the light of the stars, the spiral arm of their own galaxy filling the blackness above them. The shooting star, underlining the acceptance of The Promise.
In the dream, Tifa leaned in to seal their agreement with a kiss, Cloud leaning in to meet her, their lips coming together gently at first. Little light touches, then a little harder as the passion grew, lips parting, tongues meeting. Cloud groaned and Tifa felt her heart fluttering.

She knew he wouldn’t try to push his luck like the other boys but she wanted him to, she wanted confirmation that he had feelings for her. So, she blindly reached for the hand that had been resting lightly on top of hers that lay in her lap. And she cupped his palm, lifted it up to her chest and laid it gently on the pronounced curve of one of the already large and yet still growing breasts. Cloud had groaned and squeezed on the orb, not overly gentle or chaste touching like Meiday, though neither like the harsh and zealous squeezing of Wel, just a nice, soft caress that had her heart beating faster and a pleasant tingle in her loins.

Emerging from the memory of the dream, Tifa realised dream-Cloud’s touch was not unlike the way Zangan touched her in reality. She wondered for a moment if that meant something, if her was subconscious connecting the way Cloud and Zangan touched her in such a similar and erotic and loving way meant something? She shook that thought away quickly.

She was heading for the city of Midgar in order to trace Zangan through the only one of his students she could identify. Of course, unless she got lucky and she caught up with him on the way there. And yet Cloud, she assumed, would also be in Midgar. And she felt no doubt that it would be good to see Cloud again, to spend time with him in Midgar. That is, if she would be able to pry him away from SOLDIER training or assignments or whatever he was actually doing day to day. She found herself wondering if he had been told his mother had died.

Tifa remembered Claudia Strife as a very pretty blonde woman, quietly spoken and reserved and even though they were next door neighbours, there had been little more than Hello’s and polite smiles that had ever passed between them. Cloud’s mother had always seemed rather sad. Probably due to the fact that she lost Cloud’s father so early on. Tifa could certainly relate to that in her own way.

She started to think about Cloud, and she pictured herself breaking the news about his mother to him. And Cloud crying in her arms, the two of them embracing, crying together bitterly and yet comforting each other in their mutual grief. She considered the thought of it bringing them together, deepening their bond, their affection. And she could only hope, finally break down the barrier that she had always felt the other villagers had put in place between the two of them.

Kaori seemed to have sensed Tifa’s melancholy as she had stopped talking, letting the teenage girl exist in her own peace for the second leg of the journey.

The journey ended eventually with a little subdued announcement.
“This is it Tifa. This is North Corel.”
Tifa got down off her bench seat and looked around. She was standing on a road that led to nowhere and came from nowhere, just a rough pockmarked patch of tarmac with evidence of an old and mostly faded broken central divider line visible. It disappeared under a train track, which itself disappeared beneath a number of grey-tan canvass tents that were now makeshift housing. There were also a few meagre shops, set out like a miniscule outdoor market. Beyond the market was a partially rusted metal sign post that featured an arrow pointing the way to the ‘Gold Saucer’ in bright blue paint. The shanty ‘entrance’, if that was where Tifa stood, was framed by the trunks of two petrified trees.

There were a few old signs propped up, here and there, mostly around the market. Mostly in the western pictogram language though a few were also written in the eastern phonetic alphabet too. Higher up, to the rear of the shanty was a handmade banner strung up on the higher ground between another couple of petrified trees that named the shanty as North Corel. There were a couple of other buildings to the left on the higher ground, but they were brick and concrete structures that looked to Tifa as far from habitable, in fact one of them had already halfway collapsed in on itself. Turning away from the sad looking existence of the poorest people she had ever witnessed, she looked back at the smiling faces of her travelling companions.
“Thank you all so much for you company and letting me travel with you.” Tifa said politely, a broad smile lighting up her face.

Kaori and Arthur talked over each other to profess their own gratitude of her arriving to saving them from the Spencers, and little Maiki stared up at her from alongside his grandfather, his eyes wide with impressed wonder, his smile wide with preadolescent adoration. And yet the boy couldn’t get a word in.

“The ropeway to Gold Saucer is that way.” Kaori said pointing toward the left. “Best of luck in your journey, Tifa. Take good care of yourself.”
“Yeah, and watch out for perverts! And well, men in general! Turn your back for too long and you’ll have a trial of them chasing after you from here to Midgar!” Arthur added with a gruff laugh.

Tifa laughed herself, blushing slightly and blew him a little kiss. She added a little wave to Maiki and then headed away down the left path.

“Good bye, Miss Heavenly Blessing.” Arthur called after her, thoroughly embarrassing his daughter.

Without looking back, Tifa threw her arm up and gave a final little wave and then she disappeared around the corner, leaving the trio behind in the sad little shanty town called North Corel.
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Final Fantasy 7. Tifa Lockhart: Journey to Midgar.