Chapter Text
The village of Nibelheim sat at the foot of Mt. Nibel like something the mountain had exhaled and forgotten—small, cold at the edges, and ringed by pine trees that whispered in languages only children understood. There were perhaps forty families. Everybody knew everybody's business. Everybody's laundry was everybody's concern.
Cloud Strife was seven years old when he decided he did not like other people very much.
He had not always been that way. Or perhaps he had always been that way and simply hadn't found the words for it yet. Either way, the conclusion came one afternoon in the schoolyard when a group of boys knocked the wooden sword from his hands and laughed at the way he flushed—not from shame, he told himself, but from something hotter and angrier than shame. He picked the sword up. He did not cry. He walked home alone through the pine trees and sat on the water tower and watched the sun bleed orange over the mountain, and he thought: I don't need any of them.
He was mostly right.
The exception was Tifa Lockhart.
She had come up the path beneath the water tower that same evening, her dark hair loose from its ribbon, cheeks pink from running. She looked up and shielded her eyes against the dying sun.
"Cloud!" she called.
"Tifa."
Everybody knew Tifa Lockhart. Her father was the most respected man in Nibelheim, the village administrator, a man with a square jaw and careful eyes who kept order the way a good fence keeps weather—quietly, without fuss. Her mother had died two years prior. The whole village had mourned. Tifa had gone very still for a very long time, and then one day she had simply resumed being Tifa: sharp and bright and impossible to look away from, like the sun doing exactly what the sun does.
"Why are you up there?" she asked.
"I like it."
She considered this. Then she found the footholds and climbed up and sat beside him, and they watched the mountain together without speaking, and when it was full dark and the stars came out she said, "I can see my house from here," and he said, "I can see mine," and that was how it started.
After that, Cloud became a fixture of Tifa's days the way a shadow is a fixture—always there, sometimes noticed, never really gone. They walked to school together because their houses were next door. They walked home together because it had never occurred to either of them not to. He waited for her outside the martial arts dojo where Instructor Zangan taught her to move with her whole body, and she waited for him outside the library where he read things she didn't bother with—military histories, geography, accounts of wars fought in places with names he'd trace with his finger on old maps.
The other children noticed.
The boys who had knocked the sword from his hands were the first to say it aloud.
"Strife's got a girlfriend," they sang, and then, because children are small and precise in their cruelties: "And Tifa's too good for the rest of us now."
This last part was aimed at Tifa more than Cloud, and it was not entirely untrue. Tifa had not abandoned the other children—she was not cold, she was incapable of cold—but when there was a choice between playing with the others and sitting with Cloud on the water tower, she chose the water tower. Every time.
The children resented Cloud for this in the way people resent things that are unfair but cannot be argued with. He had done nothing wrong. He had simply, inexplicably, become the person Tifa Lockhart preferred, and that was unforgivable.
He knew they resented him. He did not especially care.
What he cared about: the way Tifa laughed—surprised, full-chested, slightly uncharacteristic for someone people called delicate. The way she smelled like the apple trees behind her house. The way she was the only person who never made him feel strange for being quiet, because she understood that quiet was not the same as absence.
He was eight when he understood he would do anything for her.
He was nine when he understood that anything was not a simple word.
The accident happened in the autumn of his tenth year.
He had grown bold in the comfortable certainty of her company, and bold was a dangerous state for a boy who thought too much of himself and not enough of consequences. He had found a shortcut—or what he believed was a shortcut—through the lower path on Mt. Nibel, past the rickety bridge that the adults all said to stay away from, toward the old reactor that sat up the mountain like a bad tooth. He had told Tifa about it with the breathless excitement of someone who has discovered something genuinely new.
She had followed him because she trusted him.
He had never forgiven himself for that.
The bridge gave way. Not all of it—just a section, just enough. Tifa went down and Cloud went after her, scrambling and catching, lunging over the edge to save her. But he was too late. He lost his footing and fell too, tumbling down the rocky incline right after her.
When it was over, Tifa lay completely still on the ledge below, while Cloud scrambled up with only minor scrapes and bruises. But Tifa didn't move.
She survived, but she was unconscious for weeks, spending those long, terrifying days lost to the world before she finally woke up. After that, it took more weeks of learning to trust her own balance again, with Instructor Zangan coming to her house to help her, and her father sitting with her in the evenings to read to her from books she liked.
Cloud stood outside the fence of the Lockhart house and did not go in.
Not because he wasn't wanted. Tifa had sent word through his mother: tell Cloud to come visit me. His mother had relayed this with her kind face arranged in an expression that said she understood more than she was saying.
He didn't go.
He stood outside the fence for a long time, and what he felt was not guilt alone but something more complicated—a recognition that had arrived too late, a knowledge that had cost too much to acquire: she can be broken. He had not known that before. He had thought of her as something like a fixed point, like the mountain, like the stars. He had not understood that she was made of the same uncertain materials as everything else, and that he—careless, over-eager, too proud of knowing a path she'd never walked—had nearly proved it.
He made a decision, standing outside the fence.
He would be stronger. Enough to protect her properly. Enough that she would never fall because of him again. And when he was strong enough—then, he would come back. Then he could play with her again, walk to school again, sit on the water tower again. But not yet. Not until he was sure.
He was ten years old and he had given himself an impossible standard and was absolutely determined to meet it.
Tifa waited. She sent more messages. He did not go.
What he did, instead, was watch her.
He watched from across the schoolyard, from a different table in the library, from the shadow of the pine trees when she walked home without him. He watched her relearn her balance and then exceed it, return to Zangan's dojo and become something remarkable—fast and certain and precise, her body translated into a language of force that made him ache to witness. He watched her start to bloom, the way girls do around twelve, thirteen, and he watched the boys who had once resented him for her attention now shift their resentment into something more pointed, more interested, more directed at her.
This made him feel things he did not have language for yet.
He got the language at fourteen.
By fourteen, Cloud Strife was no longer a boy in any way that was useful to call himself a boy. He had grown—not as tall as he'd become, but tall enough—and the thing that had happened to his feelings about Tifa had become a full-weather system inside him: vast, complicated, producing phenomena he had not anticipated. He dreamed about her. Not always innocent dreams. He woke from certain dreams with his heart hammering and his face hot and a desperate, confused shame that took weeks to metabolize into something he could coexist with.
He understood it. He was not naive about the mechanics of it. But understanding did not make it simpler.
She was Tifa. She was the girl from the water tower. She was the girl who had trusted him and whom he had nearly killed. She was also—increasingly, undeniably—a girl who had become something that made every room she entered feel different, whose laugh could restructure the architecture of an ordinary afternoon, whose dark eyes when they looked at him (still, sometimes, when he let himself be looked at) carried something he could not read and was afraid to read and thought about constantly.
He wanted, in some clear unembarrassed part of himself that coexisted oddly with the shame: to deserve her. Not just to protect her. To deserve her. To be the kind of man her father would look at and not find wanting.
Brian Lockhart was a fair man. Cloud knew this. He was also a man who had standards for his daughter that Cloud, at fourteen, the fatherless son of Claudia Strife who took in mending and kept a small kitchen garden, did not meet.
Not yet.
He was going to change that.