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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
- 6
- 7
- 8
5. Six Months.

Zangan remained with Tifa in the cabin for the next six months. However, Tifa could tell that it was becoming an increasing struggle for him. She was well aware that he had never been one to remain in the same place for months at a time. And she could detect the urge to move on pulling at him. He appeared to be ignoring that drive relatively well, however Tifa was equally aware that he had a responsibility to his other students. She had no doubt he also cared about them and whose training he was currently disregarding in favour of her.

As time went on, the passing weeks turning into months, she imagined his thoughts and in her mind the cons of him remaining in their idyllic little locale would be beginning to weigh on him more and more. It left Tifa with a slowly building sense of dread and impending loneliness. And yet she knew it would be unfair of her to try and convince him to stay, if and when he decided it was time to move on.

As for Tifa herself, she had physically recovered within a month of the day she had first got up out of bed. She had assured Zangan that the redness surrounding her wound had now completely faded and all that remained was the little vertical scar, now barely the length of the first two knuckles of her index finger.

The scar could have been faded further still, possibly even healed altogether with further uses of Zangan’s Master Level Cure Materia, however Tifa had told him that she wanted to keep the little blemish as a reminder to herself of everything that Shin-Ra and Sephiroth had taken from her.

Delightedly teasing him, and yet open to the potential need for him checking her healing progress, Tifa had repeatedly offered to let him see for himself. However, each time he had refused, saying it wasn’t necessary. Of course, she saw through that, saw the way he blushed so adorably whenever she offered.

She countered his refusals, again part teasing part honest suggestion, stating the fact that he had seen her bare chest plenty of times before. In fact, she realised, when thinking over the time she had spent comatose or feverish in his bed, that he must have seen every inch of her naked body from head to toe, having bathed her numerous times during those six weeks. However, he repeatedly dismissed her offers, saying that he trusted her own judgement on the matter and declared it no longer necessary for him to examine her any longer.

Tifa had been half amused by his stuffy and over-the-top moralising and half upset at his refusals but she didn’t push it out of respect. Besides, he was right, she was recovered. There was no need for him to check. And also, there was the distinct possibility that her own real motivation might well be the flirtatious one, wanting to see his doubtless aghast and embarrassed, and yet impressed facial-expression as she flashed her naked breasts at him.

However, for Tifa, his desire to leave was still a problem. She simply didn’t want him to go. It was lovely to be around him and she enjoyed their time together more and more as the months rolled by.

He was as wise as he was intelligent. Knowledgeable about nature, the world, the forest’s plants and animals, survival skills. He had travelled far and wide and seemed to have seen everything there was to see. He always had amazing stories to tell and she loved to sit on the floor at his feet in front of the fire and listen to the entertaining and animated way he told them. His inner-child seemed to emerge when he told his stories and the inner-child of Zangan excited her just as much as the mentor and tutor did. Both sides of him were fun to be around, but the inner-child Zangan was alluring and exciting, and in some way on a level with her. Whereas the mentor and tutor was above her - the Master, the Teacher, the one with all of knowledge and wisdom. Both skills-wise and spiritually, he represented the peak of the mountain that she was trying to ascend.

Over the months, they slipped into a domestic routine where all the house chores were shared out evenly between them, taking turns and swapping back and forth on a weekly basis. Tifa’s favourite chore turned out to be cooking. She had often cooked for her father and had found a raw natural talent. And now with just Zangan and herself, she delved more deeply into the practice, throwing herself into it and pushing herself to experiment, to trust her taste buds and try out different flavour combinations and presentations.

Zangan had a number of cooking books on his shelves and she poured through them. She recreated every recipe, working out why something tasted better than something else. And then she tore down every recipe to their basic elements, in order to discover the secrets and methodology. Finally, she began to make her own improvements. Zangan was always her taste tester, though in general she knew herself when she had something that was an improvement on the original. And would write down her own recipes in full.

She discovered better mixing techniques, took care with her ingredients and how they were prepared, took care with balanced seasoning and flavour combinations. And soon enough they were both so impressed with Tifa’s meal times that, even though Zangan was a reasonable cook and maintained his share of the duty, they both looked forward to the weeks when Tifa was rostered on to prepare meals. It also forced them both to train extra-long and hard in order to burn off the excesses that her cooking contributed to.

“There’s no doubt, Tifa.”
Zangan said, commenting around a mouthful of a delicious casserole she had ladled onto their plates.
“You could easily forge yourself a successful career path should you want to go into the food business.”
“I feel like that. I feel like I could be good in a kitchen. I think I’d enjoy it.”
“Though there’s no need to make any decisions, there’s all the time in the world to plan what you want to do with your life.”
Tifa’s responding smile slipped a little too quickly. Zangan’s comment had been in almost exact opposition to a statement her father had voiced not long after her fourteenth birthday. It had related to her having to start thinking about what direction she wanted to take in her future. Which career path. Or just getting married and making someone a loving wife.

She had baulked at the idea, not only of having to decide but having to choose between those two options. Her father had always been an old-fashioned sort. However, thinking back on her father in anything less than a positive way made her feel guilty, as though she was betraying his memory.

She sometimes found herself wondering if she was even going through the grieving process. She hadn’t cried much for her father or any of the villagers. Or the village itself. She filled her days with chores and training, so much so that by the time the nights were upon her, she was too tired to do anything but fall straight to sleep --

-- She was sitting on one side of the of the square tower platform that the cylindrical water cistern sat on, in the middle of Nibelheim village’s central square. Her back was to her own house, concealed from its windows by the big cistern, the little aerating turbine as well as its piping and structure, were all between her on its opposite side, all obstructing the possible spying eyes of her father. The water tower was a well-known dating spot for the small number of young people in the village but her father didn’t approve and he would be very angry if he knew his thirteen-year-old daughter was there and even worse, waiting for ‘young master trouble-and-Strife’, as Tifa’s father liked to refer to Cloud. It wasn’t the first time she had been asked to meet a boy at the water tower but it was the first time Cloud had ever asked her.

Waiting in the biting cold of winter, Tifa half turned and took a look at herself in the little polished copper plate screwed into the side of one of the wooden panels that formed the exterior of the water butt. The plate featured a diagram of the basic workings of the water tower, how it was filled by an underground stream. The small turbine up at the top, when activated by its motor, created suction which drew water from the cistern, through the filtered piping and then down to an external valve where people could fill buckets at their leisure. However, it also went onwards to many of the surrounding houses themselves, by pipes submerged under the ground. Tifa looked past the details of the etched illustration and focussed instead on her reflection, her thirteen-year-old self looking back at her. Her carefully brushed black-brown hair hung loose to her shoulder blades. Big, long-lashed brown eyes gazing back at her. Her mother’s pearl-drop earrings, glinting with the few remaining lights of the town’s windows, framed her cold-rosy cheeks. She wore a short length, sleeveless turquoise dress, which she loved deeply. It had been the last thing her mother had seen her wearing and once she had grown out of the original, she had talked her father into having new versions of the same pattern made for her in the next three sizes, just so she could keep the memory alive.

Her self-assessment was interrupted by Cloud’s appearance. Climbing up the tower’s ladder with a speed and dexterity that almost matched hers. He was fourteen, of course but looked very young and rather stunted for his age, very much still a little kid. Though he was already showing a degree of muscle tone and a certain stockiness. Probably from all the fighting he had been doing for the last five or six years.

He had grown surly and insular with many of the townsfolk and almost all of Tifa’s friends, all due to the fact that everyone believed, wrongly - Tifa knew - that he had been directly responsible for her near-death experience. Everyone had blamed him for the near loss of their ‘beloved Miss Lockhart’.

Although, as she had written in her diary before, she had never thought of him as a particularly angry boy. And she had thought of him getting into fights as more likely a way of testing himself. Testing his bravery. And maybe testing his fear of physical pain, and of getting beaten. As though maybe, he was trying to develop a resistance to the fear of defeat.
“Sorry I’m late, Tifa.” He said. “Thanks for meeting with me.”
She smiled up at him and looked him up and down as he took his seat around the other side of the tower platform to her left. She assessed those ubiquitous unruly spikes of blonde hair with the additional pony tail. His hair had always been the same, for as long as she’d known him, utterly unkempt and yet somehow attractive, unruly and uncontrollable and yet still somehow stylish. Tifa smiled, that was Cloud himself, to a T.

Other that his hair and slightly grubby general appearance (did he even wash before dinner?), he was wearing knee-length green cargo shorts, a grey t-shirt and lightweight brown boots. Was all that thin and lightweight clothing to prove how strong he was in the middle of winter? Then again, Tifa wasn’t exactly wearing winter clothing either.

“Its cold up here. Don’t you feel the cold, Cloud?”

“Not really… I wanted to talk to you about something.” He said, getting straight to the point. “Come the spring, I’m leaving town for Midgar.”
“All the boys are leaving town.”
“That’s kind of a surprise. All the boys around here idolise you.”
She saw him blush as he said it but she didn’t react other than to put in a little disgruntled comment.
“Not enough to stay around.”
“But I’m different from them.” He insisted. “I’m not just going to find a job.”
Tifa didn’t look at him, just swung her skinny legs back and forth, feeling the cold and trying not to shiver. So, another one was leaving her.

Apparently, the attempt to hide her shivers didn’t work as Cloud suddenly got up and shuffled over, crossing the distance between them and sliding in close, as if offering his body heat to warm her. His leg, the knobbly knee scraped and marked by dirt and grass stains, pressed up against hers and she found herself appreciating the warmth of him, though she didn’t look up. He stared over at her imploringly.

“I want to join SOLDIER.” He said, all serious intention. “I’m going to be the best there is, just like the murderer.”
“Sephiroth… The great Sephiroth?”
Cloud rose and disappeared for a moment, she heard shuffling and the creaking of the boards behind her.
“Isn’t it hard to Join SOLDIER?” She asked, a little louder so her voice would carry the extra distance.
She felt his presence above her then, on top of the cistern and she wondered for a moment if he was trying to look down her dress as well. Meiday tried that all the time, trying to look down the neck of her top or up her skirt. Meiday was a pervert. Although, at the same time he was funny and he made her laugh often with his antics and his silliness. Which helped her to put up with his perverted drooling, she supposed, despite the embarrassment and feeling of mild discomfort it gave her.

However, she had always assumed Cloud was different. When she caught him watching her, it was always from a distance. And, though unspoken, she felt that there was a kind of closeness between them.

As kids, even though they were next door neighbours, they had never really played together. He was always the loner of the village, always the odd one out. Her father always said it was because Cloud’s father had gone when Cloud was very young and that he didn’t have a male role-model in his life. Though, since her mother had died and the near-death experience in the mountain, something indescribable and yet undoubtedly real had linked the two of them. She assumed that was why he was choosing to tell her his news.
She leaned back and looked up at the stars and could see him on top of the domed lid of the water cistern, though he wasn’t looking down at her at all. He was looking across the night-sky toward the horizon.
“…I probably won’t be able to come back to this town for a while.”
That sudden affirmation inexplicably struck Tifa hard, like a slap across the face. The cold air caught in her windpipe and she had to clear her throat. It sounded like a whimper to her and she tried to conceal it with a faked cough.

“Huh?” Cloud asked, as if he’d misheard something she had said.
“If you make it, will you be in the newspapers?” She asked, hoping her voice was steadier than it sounded to her.
“I’ll try.”
“Hey, let’s make a promise.”
“Ummm… If you get really famous and I’m ever in a bind… you’ll come and save me alright?”

She woke up then, the dream and the memory swimming around insistently in her head. For the first few seconds it had seemed completely real to her and she felt confused and at a loss. She felt as though she was in her own bed in Nibelheim. One wall to her left, the bed pressed up against it under one of her bedroom windows, and with her piano to her right. Though, with the pre-dawn light slipping into the room and illuminating a vague grey world around her, she saw the that wall was much further away and filled with racks of barrels and containers, and there was no piano. Then everything slotted into place as her conscious mind caught up. And she lay there in a heavy funk, thinking about Nibelheim. About her father. About Cloud. And about herself.

The thoughts of Cloud and The Promise, that she had essentially forced onto him back in that winter of ’00, brought back her dream and with it came a fresh realisation of who both Cloud and herself had been three and a half years ago.

The dream memory, illustrated it to her with the clarity of an outsider’s perspective. They had been so young. Only children. Cloud especially, even though he was a year older than her. He had barely looked eleven or twelve back then, certainly not the fourteen he had been. She lay there, realising how completely unrealistic it had been for her to expect him to come running back in time to save her from Sephiroth’s demented mass-murder and the razing of their home village.

How could he even know that she might need to be saved in the first place? Then or at any other time? Is he psychic? And if he had appeared like some fairy-tale Knight in Shining Armour, what would have happened? He would have gone up against Sephiroth alone… Or would he have? Would he stand against his ultimate hero to protect a girl who, at best was a childhood friend, and at worst was someone who had allowed others to make his life a misery by not standing by him? Even if he had stood up to that murderer there was no chance in hell that he could have beaten Sephiroth. He would have died on the end of the murderer’s ‘phallic-compensating’ sword. Just like her father had.

No. There was no blame to be laid at Cloud’s feet. That would be cruel and silly and childish. And she was no longer a child.

There was no way she could have held him to The Promise. The dream had made her see that once and for all. In fact, she was glad he hadn’t arrived like her hero to come and rescue her, because if she had ‘experienced that just once’, she would no doubt be grieving for Cloud too. As it stood, he was out there somewhere. Maybe somewhere in Midgar, probably training. Getting stronger. Growing up.

She wondered then how he would feel having heard about his hero ‘the Great Sephiroth’ having become a mass-murderer? Would they send SOLDIER after him? The Turks, maybe? Cloud himself?

Her early morning mental somersaults were finally broken by Zangan rising. He yawned and stretched, then slipped smoothly from his hammock and descended the ladder that was propped up over the world map.

Tifa realised that she had been lying there, crying silently. And she cuffed away her tears and slid out from beneath the blankets, all the while keeping her back to him.
“Good morning, I’ll make a start on breakfast.” She said.
She kept her back to her friend and mentor all the while, not wanting to explain the red eyes, and hoping he couldn’t tell from the timbre of her voice that she was upset.
- 6
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- 8
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Final Fantasy 7. Tifa Lockhart: Journey to Midgar.