Archive of Our Own ^beta

Two nights before the Opening Parade of the Revenant Games, Cloud saw Claudia Strife standing behind the bar of Seventh Heaven, between the sink, the stove, and his sleeping wife, heating up an apple fritter.

He’d been out on a delivery. They were constant, leading up to the Games. Vendors had passed his name on to other vendors, who had passed it on to contractors, to handymen, to caterers. In the past month, Cloud had worked twenty-hour days, rising before the sun and returning long after nightfall, ferrying equipment to and from the scattered cities and Edge. Stadium Square needed more reinforcements because nothing built overnight was meant to hold, and that took him to Kalm. The caterers had underestimated just how much a quarter million mouths needed to eat, and that took him to Gongaga.

“Strife Delivery Service, that’s who you’ll want to call. Never heard him say no to anything, he’ll get whatever you want to your doorstep by sundown. Had him transport a live capparwire once just to see if he’d do it.”

And so he was tired, eager to fall into bed, and not ready to see his dead mother behind the bar.

Cloud should have known something was wrong when he’d pulled in. Every window had still been ablaze with light when he’d returned, casting bright diamonds of gold into the streets. He’d killed Fenrir’s engine. The bike had hiccuped itself into silence. Cloud had given the kickstand his boot, tossed his riding goggles over the handlebars, and hurried to duck out of the cold.

It was nearly midnight; the sky with its high moon said so.

The knob of the front door liked to jam. Cloud turned it all the way to let it shut behind him without letting the wind suck it closed behind him with a slam. The inside of Seventh Heaven was warm and smelled distinctly of recently fried food. He stood on the welcome mat, listening for the sound of the shower, and heard none.

Then he turned to strip off his riding gloves and saw the shock of blonde hair at the stove.

Tifa was asleep at the bar, head in her crossed arms, hair falling in a curtain over her face. She’d stayed up waiting for him. For a tense, wild moment, Cloud almost believed that it was Elena, out of uniform, paying an unannounced and astonishingly unwelcome visit. His hand twitched for his shoulder—until he realized she was humming, and recognized the melody.

Cloud stood rooted at the door. Abruptly, he was straddling the chasm of time between being a child with unfathomable grief and an adult who had learned to live with it.

“Mom?”

Claudia Strife did not answer. Indeed, she made no indication that she’d heard him come in at all, continuing with her humming and bustling at the stove. The reheated apple fritter sputtered in the pan as the rhythmic clatter of her kitchen knife to chopping board punctuated the muted silence.

Years had gone by since Cloud had seen things that were simply not there. He set down his sword, crossed the seating area to where Tifa dozed in front of a set of covered plates—she’d been waiting for him to get home—and laid a hand on her arm.

“Tifa.”

Behind her, Claudia slid the fritter onto an empty plate and wiped down the pan. The notes of her humming were discordant and tuneless.

“Tifa, wake up. There’s someone…”

She woke with a startle, and Cloud watched as the silhouette of his mother shivered, then vanished. So did the cast-iron pan, the cutting board, and the plate of apple fritter. The stove was cold and empty.

Tifa blinked at him, rubbing her eyes, and sat up in her barstool.

“Shoot, I fell asleep. What time is it? Are you hungry? Marlene and Barret came by tonight after hours, so there’s leftover—”

She registered the stricken look on his face and ran her hand up his wrist where he was still gripping her. The barstool creaked as she followed his gaze over her head, and turned to stare into the vacant darkness. The light over the stove stayed constant. No hint of Claudia Strife manifested again.

“Cloud?”

“I thought I saw,” he began, then shook his head. He was tired. He’d been catching three or four hours of sleep each night at best before he had to get up again for work. “Never mind.”

Tifa visibly wrestled the urge to press him and asked, “Do you still want to eat?”

“Not really.”

“A single energy bar in the mornings is not enough to keep you going for the hours you’re working. Are you stopping at any cafes on your routes?”

“No.”

She heaved a sigh. Cloud always returned with an empty lunch sack, but she’d figured out early on that he was giving away his food to orphans that he encountered on his deliveries. He’d never said anything, and she’d never stopped packing him lunches, but he noticed she’d started including tiny bags of fresh fruit and dried meat that he knew he didn’t eat.

“Well, there’s pot roast for you in the morning, so at least eat it before you go,” she said. She peered into the fridge. “Oh! And Marlene and I made apple fritters earlier, if that sounds any better.”

Cloud balked. He stood mutely behind the bar, tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, as Tifa slid the leftover pot roast into the fridge.

“Apple fritters sound good.”

“My dependable sugar fiend,” said Tifa, triumphant just to get him to eat. “Go get changed while I heat them up.”

“Cold’s fine,” said Cloud.

“Cold? The glaze is going to be dry.”

“Yeah. Just bring them here.”

Tifa gave him a dubious look, but brought the plate back around, letting herself through the swinging divider to join him on the other side of the bar table. She watched as he lifted one to his mouth and bit into it, chilled, gritty glaze and all, and chewed.

“’S good,” he said through his mouthful of fried dough. He sounded gruffer than he meant to, trying to speak and swallow around a sudden lump in his throat. “Just the way I remember. We used to eat these when we were young.”

“I was craving them. I thought I’d make us some to share.”

There were light purple shadows beneath Tifa’s eyes, and she had the same distinct pallor of someone who wasn’t sleeping enough. Neither of them were particularly good at shuteye, and Cloud had gotten worse after Meteorfall, but the influx of tourism in Edge leading up to the Games had meant jam-packed days for them both. They’d hired extra cooks and help for Seventh Heaven, but it wasn’t enough. Good for business, and the gil was flowing, but her knuckles were dry and split open from her share of glasses and dishes to wash each night. Cloud made a note to himself to pick up a bottle of skin oil for her if he made it back to Gongaga.

“You should have gone to bed,” he said, taking care to swallow so he didn’t spray crumbs in her face.

“I tried.” She shrugged. “I was exhausted, but I couldn’t fall asleep.”

Cloud knew the feeling intimately. Even with her warm body beside him each night, he spent hours with the noise of his brain before he could slip into sleep, and the routes where he had to pull overnight deliveries and stay in seedy motels alone were worse. He often got no sleep at all.

He brought his arm around her head and pulled her in until he could press a kiss to her forehead. Tifa sighed minutely under him, her frame going slack. Cloud held still as she slid down to rest her head on his shoulder. He knew he was neither soft nor comfortable, but Tifa had found ways to love his prickly, uncomfortable heart, and had so found some inexplicable measure of peace any time they touched.

“I’m going to chew now.”

“Okay.”

“My jaw’s going to piston right against your head,” said Cloud, biting off another mouthful of cold fritter. “But as long as you don’t mind.”

“When have I ever minded anything that you do?”

He chewed, his jaw grinding up against Tifa’s skull, as promised. “You should, sometimes.”

“It’s been a long time since I have,” said Tifa.

They sat together in silence. After Cloud finished his fritter, he turned and kissed the top of Tifa’s head. The plate of cold leftovers sat between them.

“Did you get crumbs in my hair?”

Cloud studied her roots. “Hard to say.” She was too close to his face for him to get a good look.

“I haven’t showered yet,” she said.

“I need one too. Dust was awful today.”

Tifa lifted her head. “But you always say my water’s too cold.”

Tifa showered in lukewarm water, always ran hot, never liked wearing a jacket in winter. After Geostigma, Cloud was always chilled, and emerged from every shower pink and red. It amused Tifa endlessly, so he’d do it on purpose sometimes: boil extra so she’d call him one giant, walking blush.

“It is. I’ll stand in it with you anyway.”

Five years after Meteorfall, the World Regenesis Organization announced the Revenant Games and held the inaugural season the year after.

The first Games were held in Junon, where the destruction had been minimal, and thus had needed the least building and reconstruction to be ready. Much of the military stronghold had stayed intact, but the WRO remodeled the fortresses into hollowed stadiums, stripped the Shinra Logos off every visible surface and painted over them with their own crest and the new, shiny logo of the Revenant Games—Meteor and the Planet side-by-side, held in constant orbit of each other.

The Games in the following years were held in Kalm, then East Corel, where Costa Del Sol had appreciated the surge in new business. This year, it was finally Edge’s turn. Cloud hadn’t seen this many people in the streets in ten years. Seventh Heaven had never served so many patrons.

The official messaging claimed that the Revenant Games were intended to rebuild unity and community, to pour resources back into the arts and sports so survivors could be reminded what they had lived for. Dozens of sports were judged and medaled—chocobo racing, G-bike racing, synchronized marching, speed-climbing, sharpshooting—ending after two weeks with a Closing Parade that commemorated the Game’s winners and the anniversary of Meteorfall. It was about friendly competition. It was about keeping the human spirit alive. It was about remembrance.

What it really was to Cloud was a load of bullshit, because it meant people stopped talking about Meteorfall around its anniversary and all the ways Shinra had turned their lives upside down, and instead about the WRO and the Revenant Games. He’d lived in their shadow long enough to know how they worked. One fell, another rose, and all of it stayed the same.

Shinra had stopped pissing in the pies, but he didn’t think they’d ever get their fingers out of them. But life had its constants, and this was Shinra’s.

Reeve did what he could.

The clock was a minute to four AM when Cloud woke. He extricated one arm from his blankets and turned off the alarm before it could bleat and wake Tifa. Cloud had set the volume as low as it would go, but a sharp breath could wake her these days. She deserved sleep even if it escaped him.

He lay on his back for another five blissful minutes. Tifa was sprawled upon him—always fell asleep demanding that he cross her ankle with hers, always woke up halfway climbing into his skin—and her rhythmic breaths marked the passing time. Cloud ran through the deliveries he had to make today. The thought of fighting his way through inner Edge traffic exhausted him before he’d gotten out of bed.

But he did, in the end. Hatefully, but he did.

Tifa rolled into the empty space he left, blankets tangled around her, her sleep shirt ridden all the way up to her neck so that her breasts were exposed. Cloud had pragmatically told her once that it’d make more sense for her to sleep topless, like him, and she’d said something about her bellybutton being exposed when she was vulnerable and unaware, which was totally different from wearing a cropped tank top while awake. He did not question this logic.

He bent down and brushed his sleep-chapped lips over her cheek, red with pillow marks. And, because he could, he ducked lower and kissed her belly, and she made an unthinking noise of protest as he pulled the hem of her sleep shirt—one of his, old and ratty—down again.

“Go back to sleep,” he murmured.

It was too early. And fucking cold. Cloud brushed his teeth shivering, ungreased his eyes with hot water to the face, and hunted through their bedroom for his compression sweater. He’d caved a few years ago and had started wearing black turtlenecks under his biker’s coat. He wasn’t twenty-three years old anymore, and the cold hurt the bones and joints in his arms more than ever.

Then he fastened his hair in pink ribbon—he’d grown it out after Tifa had wondered aloud what he’d look like now, if he wore it long like he had in childhood—and was almost out the door when he remembered. Pot roast.

She’d be so sad if he didn’t finish it.

Cloud rounded back for the bar where all the stools were still stacked, feet in the air in a row of gleaming wooden soldiers, and cracked open the fridge. The light of it fell in a thick shaft down across the floor and alighted upon a little girl crouched behind the counter.

He stared, one gloved hand full of chilled, plastic-wrapped bowl, the other resting on the fridge door handle. He closed it with a snap. The girl remained. She was rubbing her hand on the belly of a cat, its face pinched with sleepy pleasure.

All Cloud could see was the back of her head, but he knew it was Tifa. Tiny, untouched by cruelty, and so familiar the backs of his eyes ached.

But the real Tifa was alive, fine, and still asleep in their bed upstairs with her face probably shoved into the spot in the sheets where Cloud’s armpit had been.

The ground beneath her was smooth, hard-packed dirt. The wooden floors of the bar transitioned seamlessly from polish to dust and soil. Cloud swore he could hear the roar of rushing water—but nothing was awake and moving at this hour.

In the next moment, she vanished, the dirt and cat along with her. Where she’d been was smooth, unmarked hardwood floor.

He stood blinking in the darkness until he ran the risk of being late to his first delivery.

Cloud ate the pot roast cold, because the microwave was loud as a tow truck and about just as ancient. The hour was too early to be hungry, but if he were honest, he didn’t think he knew how to be hungry. The sensation was there, but it was an inconvenient symptom of being alive, and after Zack, after Aerith, after everything, it had felt like a fitting punishment.

But sometimes love was just being well and eating pot roast cold out of the fridge before a workday. It did not have to be so hard. Sometimes it happened in the quiet dark of the morning with no one to witness it.

Cloud washed and left his bowl in the sink rack. Before he left, he set out Tifa’s coffee mug and a sachet of tea. Spiced. They were running low. He’d have to buy more this week.

Inner Edge had the frantic, pulsing energy of a migraine. Cloud pulled into the back lot of a restaurant he’d never seen—the delivery van parked behind him had a fading wrap that read Deedee’s Diner and Grill with a set of dancing kabobs and chilis—and unhooked the fastenings of Fenrir’s tail box.

It opened at his kick. From the back door came what had to be a line cook, if his apron said anything, and his face lit up at the sight of Cloud in their lot.

“Are you Strife Delivery?”

“Yeah. Where do you want this?”

“Is this the order of enriched flour?” The line cook tried to rifle through and inspect the inside of Cloud’s tail box even as he was detaching it from his bike to carry inside. “The head cook is going to have a conniption if we have to tell the Games committee that we’re sending them a shipment of soda bread again.”

“Yeah. ‘Enriched artisan bread flour,’ here on the bag. I went directly to the mill for this, as ordered.”

Cloud must have made some kind of face, because the line cook grimaced with sympathy. “Sorry. I know that’s all the way out on the eastern edge.”

“Work is work. Driving’s what I do. So, where do you want this?”

The line cook led Cloud through the kitchen to their back storeroom. Noise from the front of the restaurant floated through the building. Over the sizzle of grilling meat and frying vegetables came the shouts of orders up. Catches of the line cook’s attempts at small talk reached Cloud’s ears as they made it into the storeroom, though he floated in and out of earshot.

“Here’s fine. We just got rid of flour mites.”

Cloud set down his tail box and began unloading sacks of flour onto the storeroom floor. “I heard the mill had a bad shipment a few months ago.”

“The shortage has been awful. If only the Games weren’t happening in Edge this year, we would have managed, but—well, you can hear,” the cook sighed, gesturing to the swell of chatter. “The amount of tourists we get in a single day, good Gaia. You’re based out of a bar, right? Same deal?”

“Busier than ever.”

“I’ll bet. We need a young delivery driver like you. Old Reg out back worked for Shinra, survived Meteorfall and Geostigma and everything, but he’s not going to survive delivery driving.”

Cloud felt the corner of his mouth lift. “Sounds like Old Reg and I understand each other.”

The line cook gave Cloud a long, considering look, as if he was seeing Cloud properly for the first time during the entirety of their interaction.

Cloud hadn’t removed his goggles, nor did he look the way he had ten years ago, when his face was pasted on every power pole and control box in Midgar. Full of rage, and full of guilt. Vincent, who only ever saw him once a year at best, had said the change in the past decade was stark: Cloud’s face was the same, and yet he could have walked by in the street and been unrecognizable.

“Like moss and rust grown over an old car,” he’d said, which Cloud had never parsed, and had never tried to.

Now, behind the diner, Cloud asked, “Are we good?”

“Yeah,” said the line cook. He looked as though he had more to say, and said none of it. “Thanks, Mr. Strife.”

Old Reg, ex-Shinra survivor of Meteorfall and Geostigma, was asleep in the driver’s seat of the delivery van when Cloud returned to the back lot. He had a cap pulled over his face and his arms crossed over his chest, seat laid back. Cloud lifted the kickstand on Fenrir and swung his leg over the seat cushion.

He frowned, then turned back toward the van. A child sat on the left end of the back bumper, eating a popsicle. It was freezing, and all she wore was a sundress that blew in the wind.

“Hey,” he called. “Hey, you probably shouldn’t be back here.”

She ignored him. Nothing said she’d heard him.

“Hey!”

Only then did he notice that her mouth was moving. She was talking, and though there was space enough on the bumper, nothing sat beside her.

The sensation that Cloud was seeing something that he had no right knowing overcame him. His skin prickled. He turned to check that his tail box was secure, wheeled Fenrir from the back lot without starting the engine, and peeled out from Deedee’s Diner and Grill without looking back.

Central Midgar had lain dormant for the better part of the past decade. Everyone that had survived watched as the Planet reclaimed the hard exoskeleton of the city, rust and vegetation growing through the rubble, like new skin over a wound.

The traffic on the causeway was brutal. Trains simply ran less efficiently on coal and natural gas, which meant more people than ever had turned to their own cars to be on time, and then were late anyway, stuck in gridlock. Cloud turned off early, cutting through torn, abandoned streets. This would be his last chance before the Games began and the crowds in both Edge and outer Midgar swelled like boils.

Okay, I left cold donburi in the fridge for you. Be safe.

Tifa’s text lit the screen of his phone up blue. His earlier text to her—Be home around the same time tonight—had faded. Cloud kept driving.

Most left the remains of the slums well enough alone. Only the very brave and the very stupid ever ventured out here. Explosive blooms of vegetation meant that all manner of fiends had made their home in the slums, and Cloud listened to them chitter as he sped through.

The church stood in its steady grey repose. Cloud parked his bike at the foot of its steps, engine rumbling itself into silence before he dismounted and opened his tail box.

The flowers had sweated and bruised in transit. He’d probably forgive him. She’d probably tell him he’d picked the wrong flowers, because of course she would.

Years had worn away the door hinges, chewing through the metal. The mouth of the church always hung open now, like a jaw slack in sleep, and Cloud let himself in.

It still smelled the same—the raw pungence of water, the pale green sweetness of flowers. The standing pool always rippled, and his boots creaked across the floorboards as he approached the blade toward the back of the church. The wood groaned as he came to a stop, pitiful bouquet wilting in the crook of his elbow.

Moonlight streamed in from the weatherbeaten ceiling, dyeing everything in pale white. Cloud had heard stories that had become urban legends during his travels, of two ghosts who lived here, locked in their eternal wedding. See how the flowers never died, and the light always shone just so.

He knew better. But he liked to believe, too.

The flowers rustled as he set them where the blade met the wood.

Whenever Tifa visited with him, she always knew what to say. Most importantly, she always had the right things to say. Cloud suspected he would not master such talent in this life.

Everyone misses you. The world is always a little darker without you in it. We named a new drink after you at the bar. Marlene is too smart for her own good now, and she reminds me of you. She still calls you Auntie Aerith. Zack, I never truly knew you, but you better be treating her right.

Cloud opened his mouth. Closed it. When he put his palm up to the flat of the buster sword’s blade, the metal was warm.

“I wish…” He let his hand slip away. “I wish you guys could have seen the world you saved.”

The church lay silent as he stood before them a moment longer.

Cloud turned and left.

Music was playing inside Seventh Heaven when he got home, but the bar was dark and empty, the record player mouse-quiet on its table. Cloud stood on the doormat as he had last night, uncomprehending, as he listened.

No tune he recognized, and too resonant to be coming from a living throat. It sounded as though it were playing through the ceiling, in the walls. If Tifa were asleep through this, he’d be amazed, and then he wondered if she could hear it at all. It had been a very long time since Cloud had—well, he’d broken his streak last night, with his mother appearing before him, cooking like she lived here.

Cloud padded upstairs in sock feet. He held the door off its hinges so it wouldn’t creak when he opened it into their room. Tifa was, somehow, asleep, on her stomach and on his side of the bed.

In here, the music was loudest. How was she sleeping through any of it? It wasn’t particularly loud, notes clear and sonorous, but it sounded as if someone were sitting in their bedroom, playing a sonata on a phantom piano.

Well. Piano he could live with. If the music had been one of Marlene’s pop songs, he would have gone and slept in the street.

Cloud returned after he’d washed and eaten, and the tune had changed, almost faded completely. Tifa had flipped onto her back with an arm thrown over her head. When the light of the hallway fell over her face, it threw the shadows under her eyes into sharp relief.

“Cloud?”

The music ceased, and the sudden quiet was almost jarring.

“Shh,” he said, easing himself into bed. His wrists hurt. His back hurt. Everything had started hurting in the last year or two. He’d panicked, initially, sure that his time was up. The degradation had entered a point of no return, his teeth would start falling out, his blood vessels would start bursting, his skin would unravel like bark off a tree. Tifa had just calmly reminded him that he was thirty-one now and should lift boxes with his knees.

“Did you eat?”

“Yeah.” Cloud settled in, and Tifa turned onto her side and stuck her leg between his. “How were you sleeping through all of that?”

“Hm? You’re not that loud.”

“No, not me getting home. The music.”

“What music?”

“Piano music,” said Cloud. “It was so loud, like someone was…”

Tifa was fully awake now, her eyes outlined in silver by the dim light of the streetlamps. Damn, why’d he have to run his mouth? She could stay awake for hours now.

“Never mind.”

“No, what do you mean?” She pillowed her hand under her cheek and scooted closer to him. “You heard music? Coming from where?”

“I couldn’t tell. It stopped before I could investigate. Must’ve just been a neighbor.”

Their closest neighbor at night lived a seven minute walk away.

“Must’ve been,” said Tifa anyway. She knew, she always knew. But she took him in stride in the late night. “Now I’m curious who the virtuoso pianist on our street is.”

“You’d probably be better.”

“I haven’t practiced in a good twenty years, Cloud.”

“We could get you a piano. Used, depending on prices. But we’ll have gil to spare after this Games cycle.”

“You’d never heard me play when we were young.”

“Are you kidding? We lived next door to each other. Pianos are loud. I could always hear when you practiced.”

“But—” Then she caught Cloud’s eyes, on his pillow across hers, and she released the tension in her shoulders. “Okay.”

“Okay, we’ll get a piano?”

“Okay, I’ll let you tell me I was good at it,” she said. “For the first question, we’ll have to move furniture around.”

He hummed in agreement. Cloud laid with eyes closed—years down the line, and they still glowed like neon storefront lights—as Tifa ran her fingertips over his knuckles in thought.

“How were the slums today?”

“Quieter than the causeway, at least. No one in the church. No graffiti to clean up, either. I was in and out fast.”

“One more day and the Games start,” said Tifa. “Tomorrow, since it’s past midnight now. I hope it means everyone is going to be put up in Stadium Square and that you don’t have to work twenty hours anymore.”

“Here’s to hoping.”

The day of the Opening Parade was treated with the same gravitas as the Closing Parade on the anniversary of Meteorfall, which meant that restaurants and stores outside of Stadium Square wouldn’t open until the evening. Cloud looked forward to the slim possibility of getting home for the Seventh Heaven dinner shift.

“You sure you didn’t want tickets this year? With them being right on our doorstep?”

Cloud opened his eyes. Now that they’d adjusted, he could see the soft hill of her shoulder, the sweep of hair that fell over her pillow. He tried withholding a grimace.

“So many of those Games are former SOLDIER training routines,” he said. “Speed-climbing, sharpshooting, distance running. I think I’ve had enough for a lifetime.”

“The G-bike races could have been fun. You get really intense about them.”

“I do not.”

“Yes, you do. ‘Good Gaia, his grip is all wrong, he’s not primed for the drift-turn, oh, that’s going to hurt—’”

“Okay,” Cloud said forcefully, and Tifa laughed. “So I think a champion ought to drive like one. Sue me.”

“I wouldn’t.” She leaned in and kissed him, lingering before she pulled away and yawned. “I’d win.”

The soft roar of wind and smoke woke Cloud what felt like minutes later. Sleep left him, sudden and stinging as a rope burn, and stared at the flicker of red light over their ceiling before his eyes fell upon the window.

Shadows danced across the curtains. The sweet death-smell of burning wood wormed itself into his head.

His stomach lurched. The room was still dark, and he hadn’t been asleep for longer than an hour, but he scrambled out of bed. The curtains rasped when he threw them open—

The street had filled with fire. It licked up the foot of Seventh Heaven like vines seeking sun. He knew how close it had to be to feel the heat on his skin, how each inhale and exhale could fill his lungs with soot. The ash that fell afterwards. He turned, staggering.

“Tifa,” he said, tongue clumsy around sleep. “Tifa, wake up. Tifa, we have to go.”

The fire flickered as she stirred. “What? Cloud, what’s wrong?”

“A fire,” he said, stooping to search for her clothes. “There’s a fire outside, I don’t know how it started, we have to get out of—”

“What fire?”

“It’s—!”

He whirled, arm halfway aloft to point out the window. The glass stared empty, black and uncaring, back.

Tifa stared at him.

“Cloud,” she whispered. “What fire?”

“I just saw,” he said, striding to the window. He peered into the street—maybe someone had just walked by with a torch? Why would they, past two in the morning? “I swear I just saw a fire outside. Our whole room was red, Tifa, the heat was coming through the walls, I could smell the smoke and the ash.” She kept on looking at him, her eyebrows drawing together. “I swear I saw it.”

After a moment, she asked, “Does your head hurt?”

“No,” said Cloud, too roughly. He added, “I’m sorry. It looked just like—well, you know. I wasn’t fully awake. Maybe it was like the sleep paralysis you get sometimes.”

Tifa mercifully did not point out that sleep paralysis necessitated being paralyzed while hallucinating, and not leaping across their bedroom in a panic. Wordlessly, she held her hand out to him.

Cloud crossed their room and got back into bed, where she pulled him into her and did not let go. She did not particularly love choreographed cuddling—after a lifetime of standing tall alone, she didn’t know how to relax into it unless she was asleep—but she hooked her chin over his head and held on tight.

Neither of them slept. Neither of them moved. Cloud rose at his alarm and held Tifa’s face to his, breathing her in before the cold.

By sunset on the last day before the Opening Parade, Cloud was tired enough to pull over and consider a nap. He would be doing no one any favors if he crashed on his way home.

The back lot of Cafe Oasips was big enough—and more importantly, friendly enough—for Cloud to pull into as the gloaming fell over Edge. He had one last delivery and might even make it home before midnight. From here, he could hear the distant strains of the marching band in the stadium, doing dress rehearsal for the Opening Parade.

“Strife Delivery!”

“Drisking,” said Cloud, by way of greeting.

“I don’t think I had a delivery from you today.”

“You don’t. But I hope you don’t mind if I get a minute of shuteye in your lot.”

“Wouldn’t dream of minding. You need a pick-me-up?”

“Long day.”

“Come find me when you wake up. You need my boy out back to make sure you’re up at a certain time?”

Cloud glanced at the purpling sky. “I’m fine.”

Drisking nodded. He was an aging man with wizened hands and Geostigma scars up along his neck. He always wore sweaters, no matter how warm it got, and the illness had left him with a permanent limp. An orphan had started working for him two summers ago.

“I can’t wait to close until tomorrow evening,” said Drisking. “And I don’t want these Games in Edge for another ten years. Tourists like you wouldn’t believe. As if there’s anything to see here.”

Cloud chuckled. “It’s been like that at the bar, too.”

“Tell your wife I said hi. You want some spiced tea to go?”

“Yeah. That’d be nice.”

Drisking gave him a wave and returned to his cafe.

Cloud let down both kickstands on Fenrir and parked it out of the way of the back door, balled up his jacket on his tail box, and kicked his feet up onto Fenrir’s handles. One moment he was looking at the dappled, bruising sky. In the next, he was out.

“Ay! Ay, leave him alone! Don’t you touch him! If you don’t get—”

Cloud awoke to shouting, forgot where he was, and rolled right off the back of his bike. He hit the asphalt with a thud and lay there, winded and confused.

“I said—oh. Huh. Strife! You okay?”

Cloud held up his fist over the back of his seat in weak salute. Right—Cafe Oasips, he was taking a nap. After he peeled himself off the ground, he saw Drisking standing with his arms on his knobbly hips in the back door of his cafe, apron stained with burnt sugar.

Mortifying. “See something exciting?” said Cloud.

“There was someone touching you, Strife! Had their hand on your head. I started shouting at them!”

“Someone touching me?” He cast his gaze around the back lot. No one was with them. “Who?”

“I don’t know. They disappeared right when you woke up. Maybe they ran off.”

Oily fear rose in Cloud’s chest. “What did they look like?”

“There were two of them. They were standing on each side of you, I thought they were looking for trouble. Rough looking guys—both of them had these red bandanas on their heads. One of them was more heavyset, looked like he was laughing at you. I told them to scram!”

Grief drowned the fear in him so quickly that it clattered. Cloud swallowed.

“White and green, right? Their shirts.”

“Yeah, how’d you know? I thought you were asleep.”

He cleared his throat and it did nothing for the lump in it. “Nothing. I might’ve known them once. Could use that coffee now, by the way. Thanks.”

“—cold this season, don’t skimp on the heater. Cloud and I can always send you more funds. Here he is now! He just got home. Do you want to talk to him?”

Seventh Heaven had just closed. The bar was studded with the frosted glasses of half-drunk cocktails. Some tables lay unwaited, though the empty ones had been wiped to gleaming, and Tifa had the bar phone cradled between her shoulder and ear as she carried empty dishes to the sink.

Cloud set down his blade and held out his hand. He, too, held the phone to his ear with the jut of his shoulder as he helped clear out the tables.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Cloud.”

“Denzel.” Cloud paused to hold the phone up properly to his ear, pausing in the middle of the bar floor. He hadn’t even taken his riding gloves off. “Was there something wrong?”

“No. I wanted to ask Tifa about some stuff.”

Cloud knew better than to believe a twenty year old boy had called the bar after hours just to shoot the shit, especially knowing Tifa hadn’t wanted him to move out two years ago, but Cloud once too had been twenty, guarded, and stupid. He wasn’t about to ask. He’d get more out of arguing with the sea.

“Well, it’s good to hear your voice. Is work treating you alright? What’s this I hear about heating?”

Tifa started on the washing as Cloud carried the rest of the dirty glasses to the sink. She tossed him the damp towel, freshly wrung, and he returned to the floor to start wiping down tables. Denzel chattered on his end—about how expensive the heating was, how stingy his roommate could be, how many shifts he was taking on at the Junon ports so he could save up.

“Are you running low on money?” Cloud asked. He caught Tifa’s eye across the bar, and she gave him a grimace. Oh, was he not supposed to ask? Whoops. Every day, he forgot Denzel was no longer ten and the height of Cloud’s bellybutton.

“No. I’m fine, I’m just.” He sighed and mumbled, “Trying to save up to go to school, or something.”

“That’s good. Great, even. What were you thinking about?”

“The WRO’s opened up a new school in Junon. They’ve, uhm, got a good program for Planetary Conservation.”

Cloud paused. He looked upon Seventh Heaven at large, processing the vastness that stood between his childhood and Denzel’s.

“Cloud?”

“Sorry. Yeah, still here.”

“I know it’s stupid—”

“Stupid? Not at all. I know Reeve will be practically chomping at the bit to accept you. The WRO needs students like you. Not more soldiers.”

“Stupid because it’s so expensive, I mean. Even if I do get in, I only have enough for a year, tops. The program lasts three.”

“You worry about studying,” said Cloud. “And you let Tifa and I worry about the gil.”

“Okay.” Denzel didn’t sound convinced, but then again, what twenty-year-old did, about anything. “I’ve—been having dreams about it. So I’ve been working harder than ever. I’ve been able to see it, even.”

“See it?”

“I’ll wake up, and for a moment I’ll be able to see myself at my desk,” he said. “It’s really strange. I thought I’d gotten sick again, or something. Thought I was seeing things like I had back then. But it’s all been so mundane. Marlene being annoying, or smelling food that’s not there. Mostly, it feels like work follows me into my room.”

Cloud thought of the fire, the music. Of Drisking seeing Biggs and Wedge standing over him, laughing.

“You must be exhausted. Try to take it easy in the next two weeks during the Games, kid.”

“Shipments should slow down after the Games start tomorrow,” said Denzel. “At least, I hope.”

But Cloud could not stop thinking, long after he’d hung up, and after they turned off the lights in Seventh Heaven. As he lay beside Tifa in bed, waiting for sleep to find him, his mind wandered back to the street on fire, to the invisible piano in their room. To his mother at the stove.

“What are you thinking about?”

He had his leg hooked around Tifa’s. She had been quiet and unmoving so long that he thought she’d fallen asleep, but she reached through the covers until she found his hand. Cold, as always.

“Do you think,” Cloud started, then trailed off. Tifa waited, running her thumbnail against his. “If a memory can be real—if a memory could wreak havoc, blood, and chaos—can a dream be just as real?”

“Are you worried this is all a dream?”

“I’m worried that a dream could ruin all of this.”

Tifa rolled until she was on her elbows, then ran her hand over his forehead to push the hair out of his eyes. Cloud let his eyes flutter shut at her touch, then opened them again to look up into her shadowed face.

“You’ve been frowning since you got off the phone with Denzel. Did he say something?”

“Not exactly.” Cloud nudged her until she lay back down. She was going to lose all strains of sleep if she stayed up. “Just feel like the Games brought more than just thousands of tourists into town, is all.”

Tifa was not in bed when Cloud woke, again having barely edged out an hour of sleep. Her sheets were cold, and her pillow had risen. She’d been gone for a while.

Panic rose with him as he swung his legs out of bed, groping in the dark for his pants. Only halfway down the stairs did he realize there was a faint hum of music rising through the bar, crackling with feedback. The record player was going downstairs.

Cloud followed it.

A single dim lamp was lit in the sitting area in front of the bar. Tifa sat with her back to him, wearing nothing but her sleep shirt, running her fingertip along the lip of a whiskey tumbler. She turned when she heard his footsteps, her face ashen.

“Hey,” said Cloud. “What’s going on?”

Tifa smiled. It looked broken and awful. Cloud crossed the room as she stood.

“Sorry, did I wake you?” she said.

“No.” He glanced at the empty glass. Tifa seemed utterly, almost unwillingly sober as he folded her into his arms. “Couldn’t sleep, huh?”

She shook her head against his shoulder. “Thought I was drifting off. I listen to your breathing and I start to go under too. But I rolled over, and I saw something.”

Cloud swayed them in place in time to the music. Not quite dancing, but Tifa’s hand was on his shoulder, and his were clasped around her waist. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine that the humble wood of their bar was the gleaming mahogany of a ballroom. He’d never have the coordination for a real one.

“I saw someone standing over our bed.”

“What?” Cloud tried pulling back. “Who? Are they still—”

Tifa shook her head again and latched on. The music lilted on, a dreamy old jazz number full of brass.

“It was Jessie.”

Cloud exhaled.

“Oh.”

“I thought it was sleep paralysis,” said Tifa. “But I’d never fallen asleep. I was awake as could be. I could move. I even sat up. She was holding a beer and taking swigs from it, like she always had. She circled around the bed and came down here…when I followed her, she was gone.”

When Cloud said nothing, letting the words settle around them, Tifa lifted her head.

“Two nights ago, you said you saw someone behind the bar, didn’t you? And the music, and the fire. I was asleep all those times, while you were awake.”

“Yeah,” said Cloud slowly.

“And then just now, before you fell asleep, you asked if dreams could be real.” Her head thudded against his clavicle as she leaned against him. Tifa swayed with him now, stepping in time as Cloud spun them in place here in their secret ballroom, where her dress was his old Cactuar League! shirt. “Can they?”

Real, breathing entities in the waking world, with tangible effects on reality, seen by others around them? Cloud had certainly seen stranger. Still, it was disquieting at best. Actively scary, at worst. How much longer would it be until Tifa rolled over to a curtain of silver hair over her, watching blood spread over her chest?

“Not dreams alone,” said Cloud. “But I think we make them real.”

“Maybe the bar’s haunted.”

“It’s not the bar.” It was them. Neither of them said it aloud.

“What’s happening to us?” Tifa’s voice was so small.

“Everything has happened to us already. But I think it’ll happen to us forever. The aftershocks.”

“It’s been ten years, Cloud. I wish the happening could stop.”

He did too. More than anything, Cloud wished that he could cross the ravine between broken and whole faster than he was now. It had been ten years, and that bridge was so long and dark.

“When we were training,” said Cloud, “back in the days when we were a dozen bunks to a room, I remember the guys would tell ghost stories at night. The same sort of stuff our parents used to tell us in Nibelheim, collected from all over. Some of the stories from the Mount Corel area…” He shook his head. “But, mostly, they weren’t that good. We’d all laugh at them, and then lie in the dark, pretending we weren’t scared. Then one of the guys—I can’t even remember his face anymore—told us a story. We could hear it in his voice, that he believed it.”

“What was it?”

The record played on and on.

“I don’t remember all the details. He told it better than I could. It was what he said at the end that stuck with me. He was from Under Junon, from one of the fishing villages—you remember. All the kids there grow up swimming, but they’re bordered by ocean, and the surf rises at night.”

“I remember it got pitch black out there.”

“Right. He said their parents had stories for that, to keep children away from the night tides. They claimed that mothers who had lost their own children to the tides walked along the surf, looking for living kids to abduct. That the most fearsome one had seaweed for hair and teeth for fingers, that you could hear her wheezing on land, because she only had gills.”

Tifa shifted her head on his shoulder so she could peer up at him. “Sounds like all the stories our parents told us about Mount Nibel.”

“I said the same. But he swore he saw her. Once, but he did. We all told him it had to have been his imagination, but he said others in his village saw her too. Naturally, we all questioned what proof he had.” Cloud paused. They were still swaying in place, just barely. “And he said, ‘I am the proof. Telling you makes all of you the proof, too.’”

Both of them were quiet for a spell. Tifa said, “I think I know what he meant.”

“Because you’re better than I am at understanding people,” said Cloud. She gave one, soft laughing breath. “I want to hear what you think.”

“That if enough people believe something is real, then it’s real.” The record had finally tired itself to its end, and the two of them held each other in static silence. “That it doesn’t matter if something doesn’t exist in its own right, or that it’s gone, so long as enough people believe it’s still here.”

“A ghost,” said Cloud.

“A ghost is just a dream undreamt.”

“And there are hundreds of thousands of people in Edge this month.”

“Yes,” Tifa said softly. “Hundreds of thousands who remember.”

“I guess that doesn’t explain why dreams are manifesting outside our sleeping heads.”

“Why could some people see the very arbiters of Fate?” asked Cloud. He gave a gentle shrug, so as to not jostle her head. “Why do some people’s dreams manifest as real? I don’t think we’re meant to know.”

“People with history.”

“Everyone has history.”

“People who remember,” Tifa went on. “People who have sacrificed too much.”

For a moment, Cloud thought of Old Reg behind the diner, asleep in his delivery truck. Of the girl sitting on the back bumper with a popsicle, speaking to no one. It was easier to think of these things, from the tapestry of someone else’s life, than to revisit the piano, the fire, the apple fritter in a cast iron pan.

Cloud pressed his lips to the top of Tifa’s head. Her eyelashes tickled the dip of his neck where her face was buried. They went on swaying, dancing to a song only they could hear.

The Opening Parade went off without a hitch, from what they saw on TV broadcast. Cloud had two deliveries to complete and was free by the time the bar opened in the evening. Games attendees without tickets to the Opening Parade itself packed into the bar to watch.

The whole thing was a grand spectacle. And it ought to be, for how much Cloud busted ass dragging shit all over the cities in the past several months, making sure all the tailors had fabrics, all the steelworkers had their nuts and bolts, all the caterers had their food. The parade began with setting the ceremonial materia—no longer used outside of ritual purpose—in the heart of the Revenant Games crest, where its teal light suffused the glittering red metal and lit the stadium aglow.

Neither Tifa nor Cloud had any real time to pay attention to the broadcast, though their seasonal hand, Alina, kept pointing out particularly choice bits in all the hullabaloo. Hey, they just said that the child that’s singing is a Geostigma survivor. How’s that for optics? Oh, look at the marching band! My friend’s in it! The sheer number of people in the stadium alone, every time the camera panned over the audience, gave Cloud a tension headache.

“That has to be more athletes than I’ve ever seen competing in the Games,” said Tifa during a lull, wiping her hands on her apron. Two new customers had seated themselves at the bar. She set glittering cocktail glasses in front of them and reached for salt.

Cloud paused to watch. The walkout of each city’s competing athletes had begun, with the parade headed by Cait Sith, leaping and dancing with his megaphone on the back of his moogle.

“Someone needs to tell Reeve he’s having too much fun,” said Cloud, as Cait Sith jumped from his moogle and started doing cartwheels along the path of the parade.

“Let him.”

“It sickens me.”

Cait Sith bellowed into his megaphone. Cloud thought he could hear And now—our champions! over the din of the bar. Tifa laughed at the face he pulled.

“He runs a world organization now. I’m just glad his hobby is piloting a tiny cat android instead of drilling a hole into the center of the Planet.”

Couldn’t argue with that. Cait Sith and the marching band were followed by a formation of chocobos, one of each breed from each competing region, fitted with matching breastplates and greaves. Their riders all carried flags bearing the crest of the Games.

The athletes brought up the rear, and Tifa was right—more than ever were in the parade this year. First to come was Corel, then Cosmo Canyon; just the two of them combined had made up the entirety of the competing body in the first ever Games. At least a hundred people walked with the Corel delegation, waving as the stadium filled with cheers.

After them came Gongaga, and the Northern Crater; Junon, Kalm, Mythril, and Mideel followed. Edge alone had produced what had to be at least three hundred athletes this year, all of them wearing matching jackets with the falling Meteor embroidered on the backs. That felt in dubious taste, but what did Cloud know. He’d only helped to quell the damn thing.

Wutai had sent four athletes in their delegation, with all of them slated to compete in sharpshooting. Written word meant little. Their presence was the closest thing to a true peace treaty since the war had ended.

Tifa’s hand settled at the center of Cloud’s back as the clientele of the bar fell into hushed silence. Reeve stepped up onto the stadium’s center stage as the parade finished its lap. His metallic voice boomed over the speakers.

Cloud glanced at her. She didn’t look away from the TV, her hand on him warm and steadfast as a summer pond. He thought he understood, without her needing to say a word. He reached over the bar and covered her hand with his, and the corner of her mouth lifted.

She nodded at the TV. Pay attention.

These weren’t their Games. This was no longer, even, the same world that they’d once saved. But these were their people—ones who’d never even know their names. Could you have a legacy while you were still alive? Maybe. He’d have to argue it one day, in the Lifestream. And he’d probably lose.

But watching the broadcast of the Revenant Games, Cloud thought he had a fighting chance.

The snow that blanketed her was wrist-deep and brutally cold when Tifa woke, teeth meeting hard as cymbal crashes. Her jaw was sore, her fingertips numb.

She was not often cold. When the two of them went out, Tifa seldom reached for her jacket, and Cloud told her she was always throwing their covers off in the night.

But this? This was bone-gnawing cold.

Snow—snow. Her brain churned. She sat up, the groggy veil of sleep turning reality into soft grey smoke, and watched as a cascade of white powder shook free from her arms. A massive stormcloud floated above their bed—and only their bed. The rest of their room had mostly been spared. Beside her was the white and uncomfortably funereal lump that was Cloud, covers pulled up over his head. All that was visible of him was a single tuft of hair.

“Cloud.”

He didn’t budge, but then Tifa had barely spoken above a whisper. He’d slept, somehow, through her chattering teeth, and the muffled lilt of dissonant piano notes. She ought to wake him, but she didn’t think she could speak for the chattering of her teeth, and slid out of bed to search for clothes to pull on. The snow crunched underfoot.

Cloud’s black sweater was on the ground on his side of the room, and Tifa crouched to pull it on, searching for socks. She swept her hands over the hardwood floor.

Her fingers met the pool of something thick and wet. She grimaced, snatching her hand back, instinctively wiping it along her bare thigh. It left a black, glistening streak against her skin.

The chill in Tifa’s bones abruptly had nothing to do with the snow. She stayed low, crouched on her heels, and stared down at her hands—dark, like she’d thrust them into a vat of hot motor oil. But the metallic rank of it was unmistakable.

Around her cheeks came the white billow of her breath, shaking with her. Their mattress creaked. Tifa turned toward it, unable to tear her eyes away from her hands. They were starting to drip, carving deep red valleys in her forearms.

“Cloud, wake up,” she said. “Cloud.”

But Cloud did not wake. And in the darkness sat someone new on the edge of Tifa’s side of the bed. Snow was settling on them, powdering them like a pastry, turning the long fall of silver hair into glacial melt.

Her joints calcified. All at once, Tifa was thirty, then twenty-two, then fifteen. Her chest seared with bygone pain.

Sephiroth was soundless as he rose, without even the squeak and flex of leather, or the clinking of plates. He wasn’t holding Masamune, and the absence of it rendered him virtually naked, or headless, so natural an extension it was of him. It was worse, to see him without it. At least a blade meant he sought blood. Sephiroth alone—his face lunar and unreadable when he met Tifa’s gaze over Cloud’s sleeping body—was staring down at a long, endless fall.

He reached forward, hand looming over Cloud’s head—

“Wake up! Cloud, wake up!”

Tifa’s blood-smeared hands yanked Cloud from sleep, and he startled so hard that she felt his muscles tense as he flailed for his sword. He tumbled gracelessly toward the floor, catching himself before he could go sprawling with the unerring reflex of a once-SOLDIER.

“What? What happened?”

The snow evaporated, and the blood that Tifa had streaked across her own legs and their blankets vanished. The immediate warmth in their room was suffocating. Tifa gasped for breath, her head spun, she couldn’t get enough air.

“Hey,” said Cloud. He leaned forward until their foreheads pressed together. “Hey.”

He did this when he was there to see it—pulled Tifa’s face close to his, then started drawing deep, lung-filling breaths for her to follow. She did, until their room finally stood still. By the time Cloud got her back in bed, embarrassment started to eat at her.

“Don’t,” he said, the second she opened her mouth. “Don’t be sorry.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to say.” She was absolutely going to say sorry. Cloud gave her a hard, glowing look, which said, Yes the hell I do.

“I know what I was dreaming about.”

“Oh.” She was still wearing his sweater over her sleep shirt and made no move to take it off. “The snow was worse than seeing him.”

Cloud’s hand rested on her waist, his thumb stroking her skin over the waistband of her underwear. He seemed to be wrestling with his words. Tifa waited.

“Maybe I should stay in a motel at night. Just nights,” he added when Tifa tensed. “Just to sleep, and just for the two weeks that the Games will last. Or else neither of us are going to get any shuteye.”

“I’ll manage.” Tifa sat up. “You don’t need to worry! I’ll get used to it. And it’ll just be for two weeks. We could sleep in shifts. And the worst we could see is…”

Was—what? Just Sephiroth, alone? Pain started long before him and ended long after. Sephiroth had just been a single great and wretched climax.

Tifa could run her hand down the length of her past and feel all the shiny scars of surviving. What she dreamt of was no kinder than what Cloud did. Who had he seen those few nights ago, when Tifa had dozed off at the bar, and he’d woken her with ghosts in his eyes? He’d already sworn that their street had been on fire, that there was piano music in the walls. How much longer would it be until it was Tifa’s turn to conjure Sephiroth, alight and blue with mako?

Cloud’s eyes did not leave hers as she eased back into her pillows. His hand had stayed on her waist, thumb resting on the crest of her hip.

“I’ll come back. Every day, to work the dinner rush. Just nights, I promise.”

Tifa looked at him desperately.

“That’s what heroes do,” Cloud said. “They bus your tables.”

She laughed in spite of herself, and Cloud’s eyes slitted with his smile.

“Boxcar Inn in the reconstructed train yard is close by,” she said. “Probably still has a vacancy right now.”

He sighed, victorious and unhappy about it. “I’ll go down and ask in the morning.”

“Maybe I should send along a wine basket so they’ll discount your rate. Give you a room without mice.”

“Mice I can handle. The owner’s weird kids, though.”

“What? Weird how?”

“They’re big into divination, or something.” Cloud gave a great yawn. Tifa fought down the urge to stick her fingers into his mouth. The first time she’d done it, he’d been so affronted he’d bitten her. The second time, he’d liked it and been furious that he had. “I did a linen delivery for them once and the older one dragged me into a smoky room with a bunch of fortune-telling cards. Said I would die on my wedding day, which obviously didn’t happen.”

“Is that why you were so insistent that night on telling me how much you lo—?”

“Good night, Tifa.”

A crowd had gathered outside Seventh Heaven before the bar opened for dinner after the first day of Games. Sharpshooting, if she recalled correctly. The setup and teardown for it was the fastest.

Tifa had never seen the likes of it before—the streets fat and happy with life. Some of the waiting patrons had passed around sticky, dog-eared menus that she’d printed out and laminated once, immediately ran out of, and hadn’t had a chance to update and make more. Denzel had been the one who was good at all that stuff.

“I’ll make more of them,” Cloud said, tying his waist apron on, searching for a towel. “I can get nice paper at the wholesaler for cheap.”

Tifa turned his back to her and redid the ribbon in his hair where it was coming loose. “Cheap? Paper wholesalers are beyond stingy. How do you expect to pull that off?”

“Easy. Flirt.”

“But they’re all run by mean old men.”

“You wouldn’t believe how little that matters.”

She steered him back around and held his cheeks so she could look at him. “My beautiful, evil husband, I hope you wear your tank top when you go.”

“Yeah, I’ll take off my jacket.” He sighed. “Don’t have that many years left to employ this particular method. I need to exploit it as much as I still can.”

“Stop it.”

“A kid called me Uncle during a delivery the other day.”

Tifa didn’t dignify this with a real answer, instead pulling him forward to kiss him, a zing of warmth, brief.

“So you agree,” he said.

“I am grateful,” she corrected. “That either of us have made it to an age where we can be called Uncle or Auntie at all.” They had spent years in punk and girl territory, and they’d both expected to stay that way in all the stories (myths). “And you’re a very handsome uncle.”

He grunted, pensive. Then Cloud kissed her once, too, and leaned over to turn the neon OPEN sign on.

Games replays were being broadcast on the TVs when Seventh Heaven opened, which was when either of them found out the actual results of the day. Predictions for the winners of the upcoming Games flew through the seating area as Alina rushed to take orders. One of the Wutai athletes had taken gold. No surprises there. Junon had taken silver, and in an unexpected upset, a newcomer from Rocket Town had taken bronze.

Cait Sith was doing commentary on all the slow-motion replays at a desk alongside another WRO gamemaker. His crown had been swapped out for a brimmed hat with the Games crest.

“Well, I’ll be. If it isn’t Tifa Lockhart.”

The voice cut through the low roar that filled the bar every night, and Tifa looked up from the beer tap where she was filling two pints with dark draught. The foam built thick and frothy at the rim of the glass.

The man who’d spoken was dark-haired, partially grizzled, with laborer’s hands and a splotch in his eye where Geostigma scarring had left its evidence. His face creased when he smiled. Tifa could just barely place it. She’d seen him somewhere before.

“Welcome to Seventh Heaven,” she said, serving the two beers to the couple at the end of the bar and turning to him. “What can I get you started with?”

“You don’t remember me?”

She studied him hard. He was more familiar in his voice than in his face, but she came up empty.

“I’m so sorry, I don’t. Have we met?”

“They forget you fast,” said the man, laying a hand over his heart. He chuckled. “Emilio. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Good Gaia—Emilio, it’s so good to see you! I’m sorry, I totally didn’t recognize you. How’ve you been? Are you here for the Games?”

He snorted. “Working for the Games, actually. I don’t have that kind of money. But they’ll always need security for their fancy buildings and arenas, so here I am.” Emilio spread his arms wide, gesturing to all of Edge. “Hired on for seasonal work. Imagine my shock when I heard people talking about going to a Seventh Heaven for after-Games dinner and drinks. Here I thought to myself, ‘That’s definitely gotta be owned by someone else.’ Walk in and here you are behind the bar, just like old days.”

“Then, for old days’ sake,” said Tifa, reaching for the martini glasses, “This is on the house.”

He watched her as she mixed the Cosmo Canyon, Alina trotting in and out from behind the bar to pin orders to the kitchen window and pick up hot plates of food to bring back out. From the back came Cloud’s voice as he read off each new tab. The red slashes of hot oil and meat hitting pans cut through the bustle.

“Here you are.” Tifa slid a napkin neatly beneath the glass as she set it before him. “How’s your girlfriend? Or—wife, now?”

Emilio took his time to sip the Cosmo Canyon. “She’s been gone eight years. The Stigma.”

“Oh, Emilio. I’m so sorry.”

“How about you? You ever settle down? I seem to recall you liked breaking hearts, you still doing that?”

“Excuse me?”

“Dunno, thought I’d come round and throw my hat in the ring again. The world’s ended once, figured there was no harm in it.”

Tifa caught the grimace before her face could beat her to it. She slipped her hand from her apron pocket and held it up, the Cloudy Wolf ring catching the low amber lighting.

“Married!” said Emilio. “And I thought you never wanted to be tied down to anyone. Who’s the lucky guy?”

Which was the exact moment Cloud chose to come busting out of the kitchen, shouting, “Alina! I swear if you don’t stop writing ‘fried snot’ for the breaded oyster orders—”

“That’s what they taste like!”

“Cloud,” Tifa called, before he could threaten to tie Alina to the back of Fenrir and drag her through the desert or some similarly overblown punitive measure. “C’mere.”

“No fucking way.” Emilio looked from her, to Cloud who came to a stop beside her, with his arms crossed. “No fucking way. Cloud Strife? The weird kid?”

He barely looked up from the three order receipts in his hand, where Alina had indeed written 2 Fried Snot with a vomiting face on the line item list. “Sir, if you’re unable to conduct yourself with any sort of propriety in this bar, I’m going to have to ask you to—”

“Cloud,” Tifa repeated. “Emilio. From back home.”

Only then did Cloud seem to hear her, gaze landing on Emilio. He kept his expression perfectly composed, though he stepped closer to her than strictly necessary.

Tifa cleared her throat.

“Emilio,” said Cloud after an ugly pause. “Welcome to Seventh Heaven.” He did not offer his hand.

“I can’t believe it.” Emilio was laughing, oblivious or indifferent to Cloud looking like he’d just dropped a hot iron on his foot and had to keep quiet. “Out of all us boys, your weird ass ended up bagging the girl. Didn’t think you had it in you. That your kid?” He nodded at Alina.

Cloud’s eyes swiveled to Alina, her fiery red hair and towering height that neither of their gene pools could have contributed, and looked back to Emilio as if to ask, Are you stupid?

“We don’t have any kids,” Tifa supplied. “At least, none that live here anymore. Cloud, why don’t you go back there and check on how those oysters are frying up?”

“I can help behind the bar. The cooks have got it.”

“I can manage the bar. Go, go on.” She punctuated this with a little push, and Cloud finally obeyed.

Emilio was swilling the single olive in his Cosmo Canyon with a toothpick. “He hasn’t changed a bit.”

“I’d say he’s changed a little.”

“His eyes. Got into SOLDIER in the end, huh? Not like the rest of us bumpkins. No wonder you don’t have any kids. Guess you were right about him all along though, Tifa. I’m glad at least two of us from back then got a happy ending.”

Emilio stayed to order four more drinks. Tifa didn’t have the heart to cut him off, but in the end, she didn’t need to; he put his head down after the fifth neat whiskey and fell asleep. At the end of the night, when she had to shake him awake and tell him that Seventh Heaven was closing, a beautiful woman sat beside him at the bar. Tifa had seen her once, and only once, at the Seventh Heaven that had lain for years now in ruins under Midgar.

When he lifted his head, she vanished.

No wonder you don’t have any kids. As if they’d never considered them, as if they’d never thought about a different world where neither of them had ever made it out of Nibelheim, had gotten married too young, and had made a quiet life in the mountains like the generations of people that came before them.

Shera had asked her, offhandedly, just the one time after she and Cid had had their first child. Is it ever in the cards for you two? Gentle, quiet, because she knew the answer was going to be no. Tifa had shaken her head.

“SOLDIER’s cells,” she’d begun. Shera had nodded and taken Tifa’s hand. “All his time in that lab, he worries that any child of his would…”

That had been his reason, and Tifa would have honored it without needing her own. But she had them, and it was knowing that their child could come into the world healthy and without want for anything, and she and Cloud might die before they grew up. The probability of them both dying so close to each other was vanishingly small. The Planet slept now, peaceful and dreaming, but Tifa could not look into a child’s eyes and tell them she could be there to protect them forever. Tifa knew—horribly—that if and when Cloud left before her, she would never be able to take care of a child that needed her the way they deserved.

But she already had Cloud. They had Denzel and Seventh Heaven and nights in one bed. Emilio couldn’t even have that, and no matter how crude he’d been, her heart hurt for him. Had he ever had a child with his girlfriend that could have been a model? Had they died, too?

Nothing lasted. The children of Nibelheim learned this cruel and young.

Tifa screwed the lid back on the tub of moisturizer as she stood, now, in the steam-filled bathroom after her shower, wet hair dripping down the back of her sleep shirt. She opened the door to let out the humid air. Downstairs, she could hear Cloud zipping up his bag that he’d take to the Boxcar Inn, so he could hit the road of deliveries first thing in the morning.

“Don’t forget to pack the leftover tempura!” she shouted from their bedroom doorway.

“I know,” called Cloud. Of course he didn’t. She heard the fridge open and close.

She was working a palmful of lotion into her sore red knuckles when she heard him tromping back up the stairs. The bathroom mirror remained frosted with condensation, though much of it had pearled and begun dripping. Cloud’s reflection in it was hazy as he let himself in.

“Oh, hello,” she said as Cloud wrapped his arms around her from behind. “You all set?”

“Mhm.” His lips were at her ear, then at her neck. Tifa shivered, but all he did was pull back to sweep her wet hair out of the way, over her shoulder, so he could press his mouth to the nape of her neck. His nose was in the fine, soft hair at the back of her head.

Tifa turned the knob of the dripping faucet all the way to shut. Cloud didn’t release her.

“When you finish up sniffing me,” she started, but Cloud nudged his way toward her cheek, her jaw, as she spoke, nosing at her until she turned into his kiss. She stood in the circle of him, kissing him back in the creak of their settling bar. Her hair dripped icy lines of runoff down her front.

He leaned away when she shivered. Cloud was close enough that Tifa had to pick one of his eyes to look at. In the years past, the acidic mako sheen had faded in his right, though the glow lingered. The spectrum of color gave him the odd look of green meadow touching sky, the bridge of his nose the horizon.

His arms were still around her. Tifa leaned in.

“You’re going to get less sleep,” she warned, rocking forward to kiss him with barely enough contact to count as more than sharing breath. She patted his wrists, bracketed at the base of her ribs. “You still have to drive to the inn.”

“Don’t care,” said Cloud, reeling her back in to kiss.

Tifa laughed. His fingers found her jaw, and she spun in his grip so that her back was pressed to the edge of the bathroom counter. He kissed with the intensity of someone who’d gotten a lot more sleep and worked far fewer hours than he had today, holding her head in the span of his hand. Tifa found the hem of his shirt; he’d gotten dressed to travel already, and she slid her hands up the expanse of his back. He was often warmer there, the plane against which his heart sat. He shuddered as she drew her nails over his spine.

Cloud broke away to lean down and curl his hands at the undersides of her thighs. Tifa braced, then leapt, and Cloud lifted her onto the bathroom counter. The tub of moisturizer made a low plastic thud when she knocked it into the sink.

For a while, all Tifa did was float in the slow, mindless pool of kissing him, her back spared from the uncomfortable dig of the counter, Cloud standing between her spread legs. Him and his perfect mouth. She could feel her breathing start to come ragged and wet, the bathroom filled with the sound of their mouths meeting.

Heat pooled thickly in the spread of her thighs. Cloud could probably feel her through his shirt. He was so sensitive to heat now that he was always cold.

His hand rested at the base of her abdomen, thumb stroking an arc on the skin below her bellybutton. Hovering—just hovering. Eventually, Tifa reached down and pushed it lower.

“I know you said you don’t care about your sleep, but seriously,” she said. Cloud slipped his fingers into the waistband of her underwear, shoulders shaking with his silent laughter. “I care. Thinking about you driving while sleep deprived is like a grater on my nerves.”

“Is that what you think about when we’re doing this?” His hand slipped lower, through her thin thatch of damp curls until his fingers pushed into the wet slick of her. “Of me dying horribly in a bike crash?”

Tifa just barely managed to look annoyed with him until he moved his hand, and she sucked in a breath. It didn’t matter how many times they did this. A few touches and she went to pieces every time.

“I sure hope not.”

Tifa bumped him on the back of his thigh with her heel, and this time his laugh was a quiet two-step beat. He paused to let her shimmy herself to the edge of the counter.

Tifa whimpered as he drew his touch harder, the thin fabric of her underwear forcing his hand against the soft, wet center of her. She steadied herself with a hand to his shoulder, fingers drawing into a fist as he went on. He crooked his fingers in her, rolled them in deep, and watched her moan.

He’d been so focused the first time they’d done it—the first time after the Highwind, when all things were said and done—that Tifa had been torn between her own nerves and relief. And laughter, she’d been so endeared. He’d looked at her every time he moved at all, as if checking a precariously balanced sculpture for collapse, eyes searching and worried and expression halfway to bolting. Tifa had had to take his wrist and start moving his hand for him, or her orgasm would’ve taken another lifetime.

Years on and he had no such hesitation. He pressed the heel of his hand into the swell of her clit and Tifa felt her entire body shudder, bucking into his touch.

“Wait, wait,” she gasped. “Get down.”

Cloud’s eyes were huge and dark as he leaned back, drawing his hand out of her. His fingers glistened with her slick. He drew it down her thigh toward her knee, the trail leaving a chill on her skin as he kissed her.

She shifted as he hooked his fingers in her waistband and pulled the underwear down. Tifa gave it a half-hearted kick, though it got caught on her ankle, and, well, whatever. Cloud was getting on his knees and she wasn’t that concerned.

“Fuck,” she said, when Cloud’s mouth met the hot, desperate spread of her pussy. Her head and shoulders hit and rattled the wall mirror behind her as his thumb pressed into the thick tendon of her thigh, holding her open as he licked. She could hate him for it, the slow delve of his tongue, working around where she ached. Her knee twitched and nearly knocked him in the head when pulled away and pressed a kiss hard into her slick. “Ah—Cloud—”

He flicked his eyes up at her, then back down. He stretched his jaw and swept his tongue hard into her, as he would lick the last strings of honey out of a jar. Tifa’s hand fell to his hair and pulled, anchoring his face to her. He’d have to fix that too, though she imagined Boxcar Inn got all manner of rough looking people in the late hours.

Cloud slowed to press his fingers to her again, slipping them inside without pulling his mouth away. Tifa cried out in earnest, breath ragged, bending her free hand over her shoulder, her head, to clutch uselessly at the mirror. Her nails clicked on the glass. She jerked, grinding tiny, helpless circles into his face, her feet pressed his the crests of his shoulder blades so he couldn’t move—

“Oh, oh, Cloud—”

Tifa shuddered into an orgasm, intense and total and moaning, her head tilted back against the drying mirror as she gasped. Her grip stayed in Cloud’s hair without loosening, her orgasm rendering her weightless, shapeless, and in danger of floating up and through the rafters.

Cloud was breathing hard, his cheek against the dampness of her inner thigh. He stood, unsteady as Tifa felt, when she leaned down to drape her arms around his shoulders. With a slight heave, he hoisted her from the counter, carrying her the short distance from the bathroom to the bed.

“Hey, where’re you going,” she said. He’d lowered her into the blankets, one knee in the mattress.

“Changing.” She’d smeared wet across the front of his sweater. He leaned back down to kiss her, his mouth tasting of her own musk. She’d yanked his hair free of the ribbon, and some of it fell over his shoulder.

“Are you kidding? Let me do you.”

“No need.” He stayed this time, though, and the blush in his face wasn’t fading. “Uhm, I’m good.”

Tifa lay where he’d deposited her, tilted slightly into the uneven distribution of his weight, staring at him. He held still when she reached down, into his pants, his blush deepening into a scarlet burn when her fingers swiped into hot come.

“Oh.”

“Stop.”

“That’s actually so hot,” said Tifa. “I’m impressed.”

“If you don’t stop—”

Tifa looped her hand at the back of his neck and pulled him down to kiss him again. He was in bed with her already, what was another few minutes? She didn’t have the strength in her legs to send him off at the door yet. The quivers were still going, all the way down to her ankles and toes. If she tried standing, she’d probably buckle.

“That was why I was going to change,” said Cloud, sounding strained when he rolled, breaking their kiss. They lay on their sides, facing each other. Him, fully clothed, and Tifa, naked waist down. She’d lost her underwear when he’d picked her up.

The bathroom light lent their room a dull glow.

He was so cute. But also ready for the Planet to swallow him whole, so Tifa dignified him with an answer.

“Awful for sitting on a bike.”

“Exactly.”

They lay together for a few minutes. Tifa knew he had to get going, but was loath to let him go. Cloud seemed to be lost in thought. He’d come to her so quiet and determined tonight, and she wondered if it had anything to do with Emilio’s appearance, his naked shock when he’d seen Cloud’s ring on her finger.

“Maybe I should bring my Queen’s Blood deck,” he said.

She blinked through the haze of post-coitus, still floating. “You—what?”

“If the innkeeper’s weird kids are fans of fortune-telling and divination and cards, they’d probably like Queen’s Blood. I need to reshuffle my deck. I know you hate when I pull out Tonberry King.”

Tifa couldn’t stand for how hard Cloud had made her come. She still felt half tongue-tied. Maybe fifteen minutes had passed at best, and here he was discussing card strategy with her. Not that he was wrong.

“Better for bargaining a lower rate if you get in their good graces, too,” she said.

Another minute more passed. Cloud shut his eyes. She could tell by the hardening of his body that he was gearing himself up to rising and leaving. He opened them again to look at her, this quiet earth-horizon-sky of hers.

“I’ll come back, Tifa,” he murmured. “I’ll always come home.”

He did.

For three days of the Games, Tifa slept uninterrupted sleep, blissfully ignorant to whatever her dreams conjured to haunt the crevices and hallways of Seventh Heaven.

The act of falling asleep without Cloud—without knowing he was coming back—was lonely and miserable. It was always too warm in their bed without him, her pillow unpleasantly hot no matter how many times she flipped it. The silence was too oppressive without his steady breath to pin it back, or his quiet bumps as he shuffled through the motions of getting home. How she’d gone all that time before he’d come home, after he’d been deathly ill, was inconceivable to her now.

But it seemed to be working, and the two of them were getting their much needed shuteye. Cloud’s dark circles remained—and they’d remain for a while, until the season ended—but they stopped deepening when he came around for each night’s dinner shift. And so they would only have to endure it another week, until Edge emptied of all its guests and ghosts.

Then, at the end of the first week of the Games, Tifa picked up a call.

“Really, thank you for takin’ her. I wouldn’t’ve asked if I didn’t see another way. I know Game season’s a shitshow for us all.”

“If you keep apologizing, I’ll actually treat you like a stranger, Barret.”

Behind them, Marlene was lugging a suitcase up the stairs to her old room, which had mostly been converted to overflow storage, though her old bed and desk remained. When she’d moved out to join Barret and start formal schooling on the other side of Edge, it hadn’t felt right to change it entirely.

“Hey, you kept the dolphin lamp!” came Marlene’s shout from upstairs.

“Sure did,” Tifa called up the staircase. “Just put in a new bulb.”

Barret sighed, drawing his hand over his face. He’d been fitted for a new prosthetic recently, one that matched the size of his other hand so that his shorter arm wouldn’t atrophy, and it sported lights that mimicked the flex of real muscle. Tifa still hadn’t gotten used to it.

“I just didn’t see how it’d be safe if it went on,” said Barret. “I can’t get that morning outta my head, Tifa. The look on her face when she woke me up…I know it’s time. I know it is. I told her some, but I haven’t told her all.”

I’d be happy to, Barret, but I have to warn you that—well—Cloud and I have been experiencing the same things. Dreams brought to life. Tangible, breathing things that have been keeping us both up. He’s had to go sleep at an inn this past week because of it.

That’s fine. Whatever it is, it’s fine.

We all knew Sephiroth once. We could all dream of him. I don’t know, do you think Reeve—?

Tifa, I dreamt of Dyne. You remember him. He didn’t even come for me that morning. Gun for an arm, blood on his face, he went to look for my daughter.

The call had gone so silent that Tifa thought Barret had hung up.

Bring her over. Her room’s still here. I’ll keep my room locked.

“She’s old enough to know,” Tifa said gently. “In fact, any older, and you might lose her. She’ll begin to wonder. And then she’ll begin to wonder why you haven’t told her more.”

Grey hairs had begun to appear at Barret’s temples in the past few years. The consequence of time was inescapable for them all, but Tifa knew that it could take another decade more before the events of Meteorfall felt like they were truly behind them. It didn’t help that WRO made a damn spectacle of it every year.

Barret sighed. He put his thick hand to her shoulder and squeezed. “Always setting me back on the right path.”

“It’ll be okay. I promise.”

“You and the punk doing alright, otherwise? Ain’t seen him in a while.”

“He’s good.”

“How about Denzel?”

“Working now. He’s at the Junon ports.”

“Working.” Barret shook his head. “Can’t even imagine what it’ll be like one day when Marlene comes home and tells me she’s got a job.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there. She’s fourteen.”

Barret grumbled about how the youth always thought they knew everything, and Tifa patted him in the center of his back as he went out the door. Marlene ran back downstairs to say goodbye to her father. He raised a hand in farewell before his own bike tore back out of the front lot of Seventh Heaven.

“Alright, kiddo,” said Tifa, closing the door. “The nights here are going to be loud all week. Think you can handle that?”

“I like noise. My dad’s always working in his shop till late, anyway.”

Marlene was almost Tifa’s height now. She beelined for the fridge and popped it open, looking for snacks. In recent years, she’d started wearing her hair long, almost down to her waist, tied back in a half-ponytail with her pink ribbon. Tifa’s eyes would glance past her, and—sometimes—she would mistake her for Aerith.

“I just want to warn you that the same thing that’s happening to your dad is happening to me too.” Tifa wove through the forest of barstool legs and set one down so she could watch Marlene help herself to brunch. “And Cloud. He’s sleeping at Boxcar Inn at night so the two of us stop waking each other up. So if you hear or see anything strange, wake me up, okay? Don’t be scared, but wake me up.”

“Have you and Cloud dreamt of Sephiroth?”

“Yeah.”

Marlene swirled her spoon in a cup of yogurt. “Was it scary?”

“It sucked.”

She nodded. Tifa waited for her to continue, and when she did, she said, “After he woke up, my dad said that the short time we humans were torturing the Planet was her own terrible dream. She woke up after Meteorfall, after we stopped pumping mako and left her alone. Now these dreams we’re having are our penance. ‘Remembrance of a Planet Scorned,’ he was saying.” Marlene rested her elbows on the bar across Tifa.

“And what did you say?”

“‘Okay, whatever Daddy,’” said Marlene. Tifa laughed, and Marlene grimaced. “You agree, don’t you? Everyone from the SOLDIER generation thinks so.”

The SOLDIER generation. A new phrase coined by the fresh upstart yuppies at the WRO, who called themselves the Regeneration. Unprompted, she remembered Cloud’s face the night he’d taken Denzel’s call. The faraway, distant look in his eyes.

“Your dad’s always talked like that. He was worse when you were young. Yes, he was, don’t give me that look. You were just always asleep for it when he got started.”

Marlene wrinkled her nose, scooping up the dregs of her yogurt cup. “Do you think you could ever have a good dream? Are those possible, on a Planet scorned?”

There was a thought. “Couldn’t tell you,” said Tifa. “I don’t make a habit of betting against the world anymore.”

At the start of the next Games week, after five days of sleeping apart, Cloud announced after the dinner shift that his second week at the inn was going to be free of charge.

“No way. There’s no way you flirted your way out of a weeklong hotel bill,” said Tifa, sticking her head out of the bathroom. “Who’d you blackmail?”

“Why do you always think I only have two methods of negotiation?” said Cloud. His voice was muffled, his face obscured by the doors of their closet.

Tifa threw a wet, naked arm up in the air. “Do you generally have others?”

Cloud’s hand rested on the edge of the closet door, and he leaned around it to meet Tifa’s eyes from across their room. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Tifa started grinning.

“I will have you know,” he began, pointing an accusing finger at her.

“Uh-huh, keep going?” Tifa ducked back into the bathroom to wrap her towel around herself, hunting through their room for her sleep shirt. It wasn’t in their sheets where she’d tossed it off herself this morning.

“I’m good at cards,” he finally said. “I beat the innkeeper eighty-six to zero. He said if I could win with any score three times what his score was, he’d cancel my bill.”

She straightened. “Holy shit.”

“Yeah. Saw me playing with his kids in the evenings. The good graces you were talking about, you know.”

“But eighty-six times of zero is still—”

“Nuh-uh. He tried that with me too.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“Said I’d be happy to go again, and if I won again, he owed me free breakfast, too.”

“Ah, and he was smart about not accepting that.” Tifa, with one hand holding her towel closed and the other on the edge of the blankets, gave their covers a violent shake.

“What are you doing?”

“Can’t find my sleep shirt. Can you—?”

One was airborne and sailing towards her before she’d finished. Cloud had tossed her one of his grey shirts that had Queen’s Blood Regionals - Edge embroidered on the breast pocket.

“Sorry, I took it.”

Tifa dropped the towel and pulled the shirt over her head. “You—what?”

“Your sleep shirt. I took it to the inn, and I brought the Cactuar League one back for laundry.”

“You took the Cactuar shirt? I thought I lost it!”

“I put it on my pillow to sleep.” Cloud shut the closet doors, a slight flush in his cheekbones. “It, you know, helps.”

Tifa toweled most of the runoff from her hair and crossed the room, and Cloud opened his arms for her. She hadn’t pulled on any underwear, but hugged him around his middle, smelling the lingering soap on his clothes. (“Wouldn’t it make sense for you to shower at the inn? You’re going to get dusty driving there.” “I think there’s a mouse nest in the drains. I’d drown them.”)

“I miss you,” she said. “Even when you’re right in front of me.”

“One more week.” Cloud kissed her damp forehead. “I always miss you.” And that’s why I’ll always come home, was what he’d said once. It’d been almost eight years, and Tifa could still hear how he’d sounded in the dark.

“You should just check out on the anniversary of Meteorfall.” Tifa let her temple rest on his shoulder. “Deliveries will be slow during Closing Parade, anyway. We’ll just deal with whatever dreams we have that night. Keep the door locked, so Marlene stays safe.”

“Okay,” said Cloud. “Let’s do it.”

All her life, Cloud had been an exceedingly easy person to lose, and an annoyingly difficult person to keep.

The Planet had never known what to do with him. Dispatch him early or keep him alive, before the dice was rerolled and he was set solidly to die. Alone, for that matter. Only Aerith could have made the last decision, hurtling him back out of the Lifestream like an unwelcome guest.

There’d been more blood than Tifa had ever seen when the Turks brought him down from the roof of the building. He was more wound than flesh, and blood gushed in thick, ropey rivulets over the gurney’s edge. Tifa thought she knew blood—she’d seen more blood in a lifetime than she’d ever wanted to see again—but his chest hadn’t been moving, and the emergency responders had worked so slowly. They didn’t even switch on the siren for it to wail as they drove to the closest WRO medical center.

“The streets are filled with emergencies, ma’am,” said the paramedic. “The siren’s not going to do him any good.”

“He’s going to die!”

“I assure you, he’s in the best possible hands right now.”

Cait Sith had been riding along with her, and he’d put one tiny, gloved paw over her knuckles. He’d said nothing, and Tifa pictured it was Reeve beside her.

“If he dies,” Tifa had said, speaking with a calm she had not felt, “I’m taking his body back with me. I’m not leaving him with the WRO. I don’t care what they tell me, he’s not going to lie in their morgue.”

The paramedic at the wheel said nothing. The EMT that was holding an oxygen mask to Cloud’s face had said, “SOLDIER’s bodies belong to the Organization.”

“He’s an ex-SOLDIER. He has a home, and it’s not in the Organization’s labs.”

The EMT had also grimaced and fallen silent, too exhausted to keep arguing with her. There’d been one more EMT who’d been watching Cloud’s vitals, who hadn’t looked up.

“Ma’am, the Stigma on him is so advanced that, even if we were to close every wound on and inside his body this very moment, he would still be living on very short, borrowed time.”

It did not matter. He could not die here, unseen and quiet and intubated, not a hero who had survived and survived again. She couldn’t even hold him. He’d slip away to the touch of plastic being pressed to his nose.

Tifa would not let them take him. She trusted Reeve, but she did not trust anyone else in the WRO any farther than she could spit, and she would not allow them to whisk Cloud’s body away, dissect him like an animal, portion him into petri dishes to regrow like a pet project or whatever they’d done with dead SOLDIERs. She’d stand between all of WRO and his cooling corpse and they’d have to go through her; Reeve would have to look her in the eyes himself and shoot her out of the way, she did not care, a bullet couldn’t be worse than a blade to the chest and a shattered sternum—

“Tifa.” She ignored Cait Sith’s touch, but then he took her arm and shook it. “Tifa, look—”

She had not wanted to, but had done so anyway. Cait Sith had been pointing out the back window of the emergency truck, Edge crawling by in shades of industrial brown and grey. The storm had worsened, but people had spilled into the streets as it came down. Children were dancing.

The street suddenly narrowed and darkened, with the surroundings of the emergency truck drawing into thin, narrow lines of light. Cait Sith’s touch slipped from her arm.

No, no—no, Tifa recognized this, heaving for breath. The slow drag into paralyzed consciousness. It always began the same way, with a dream narrowing around her, the sensation of being pulled into deep water. And Cloud wouldn’t be there to help shake her leg and knock her body back into wakefulness, then hold her face to his until their breathing matched.

Her eyes were gummy when she opened them. Cloud had told her to keep them closed, but she’d always had worse auditory hallucinations, and she couldn’t stand to imagine them with her eyes shut. Air was trapped between her mouth and her lungs, congealed in her throat. The weight on her sternum sat like a booted foot upon her chest—and then that weight gurgled.

Tifa would have jumped if she could. She glanced down, vision swimming, to see Cloud lying on her chest, head pillowed on top of the covers. He was trying to speak and couldn’t for the blood in his mouth, trickling in black rivers into the blankets. Blood spattered his face, made thick mats of his hair. The center of his chest sported a gaping, guttering wound.

“No,” Tifa tried to gasp, and couldn’t. “No, no—”

His arm was black with the Stigma. The more he struggled, the more blood spurted from his wounds, though his eyes seemed to flicker over her face.

“Please—”

There was no room left in her for grief.

Bodies were moving nearby. A shock of red hair, gloved hands. Suits. They turned Cloud with a gentleness that shocked her, though their outlines passed right through the solid warmth of Tifa’s body. Rude heaved Cloud into his arms, his head lolling back unsupported, and the trio of them—Reeve following behind them—let themselves out the door.

“No—Cloud! Put him down! I said, put him down!”

Tifa’s body came unbound, finally, finally, and she pulled herself upright, dizzy and breathless, muscles clumsy from tension. She tried to scramble out of bed, her spotless, bloodless bed, where Cloud had not been dying, where no Turks had carried him away, and buckled when her knees gave way.

“Tifa?”

She hissed through her teeth and shut up. Marlene was here. She’d forgotten, and the dreams had unlocked her door. Tifa sniffled and held back the sticky, delayed tears that had sprung to her eyes. The minutes passed, and the heart-pounding reality of the dream began to leave her.

Marlene’s face appeared in the doorway. “Tifa, what happened?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head and gave Marlene a weak smile. “It’s fine. I’m sorry I woke you.”

“Was it another dream?”

Tifa considered lying, but what good would it do? She was in a heap on the floor of her bedroom and her face was creased with fading panic. When she nodded, Marlene stepped inside.

“Baby, go back to sleep. You have school.”

Marlene said nothing. She padded forward and lowered herself to her knees, then pulled Tifa into her shoulder in a hug.

It felt so pathetic—and so humbling—for a child to be comforting her that all Tifa could manage was to sit in stunned silence. Marlene’s hair was a mess, and it was getting in Tifa’s mouth, but when Marlene spoke, her voice thrummed through Tifa’s head.

“If we’re still here, because we’re the Remembrance of a Planet Scorned like Daddy says,” said Marlene, “then I will be here for you and Cloud and Daddy and Auntie Aerith, and Yuffie, and Uncle Cid. Me and Denzel, you know. Remembrance of Everyone Who Survived. I’m still working on the name.”

Tifa almost burst into fresh tears. She hugged Marlene back, clutching the skirt of her nightgown.

“Good name,” she whispered. “Best name I’ve heard.”

(“Strife Delivery Service, if you have a rush shipment, the surcharge will be two thousand gil—”

“Cloud, you have to come home. Right now.”

“Marlene? It’s not even five in the morning. Is—what happened? Is Tifa okay?”

“She had a bad dream.”

“Oh—are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I didn’t see anything.”

“I’ll be back on the day of the Closing Parade. Edge’ll start emptying out, and these dreams will stop. When I’m there, mine always wake her up. We were getting two, maybe three hours between us.”

“But this is different. I know she has dreams, I hear piano music almost every night. Or people drinking downstairs, those friends of my dad’s from back in the day. It was silent tonight, for almost the entire night, and then all I heard was her falling out of bed and crying.”

“...you really didn’t see anything?”

“No. Her door was already open. And…”

“And?”

“She was shouting your name. ‘Cloud! Put him down!’” Silence. “Cloud?”

“Sorry. Yeah, still here. I’m on my way to the bar now.”)

Two days before the Closing Parade of the Revenant Games, Cloud saw himself sitting at the bar of Seventh Heaven, so slight and small that his feet dangled from the barstool. The soda before him fizzed like the static of a radio, the back of his shirt untucked like a duck’s tail. Alone, and maybe waiting for a girl, unaware of Tifa sleeping on the couch on the opposite side of the bar.

Tifa had dragged a blanket out of bed and brought it downstairs with her. Marlene was nowhere to be seen—she’d said she was going back to bed before he had to get up for school—and Cloud moved slowly so he would wake neither.

No such luck. He set down his sword, turned, and Tifa’s eyes were wide and open upon him.

The figure of himself at the bar dissolved.

“Cloud?”

“What are you doing down here?” he asked, sitting down on the edge of the couch, in the curve of Tifa’s body. He ran his fingers through her hair, her scalp dampened by sweat. “People’ve thrown up on this thing.”

“Just felt like it this morning.” Tifa gave a great yawn. “Why are you here? Don’t you have a ton of deliveries to do before Closing Parade?”

“Yeah. I might miss dinner shift tonight.”

“That’s okay.” Cloud cradled her cheek in his hand, and she leaned into it. “Will you stop by before going to the inn?”

“I checked out today.”

Tifa sat up, the blanket peeling away from her shoulders. “What? Already? But—”

“It’s fine. I’ve survived worse than a little sleep deprivation. If I work through dinner, I can get back early, and then we can sleep in shifts.”

Tifa’s face almost seemed to crumple, but she caught herself before tears welled in her eyes. Cloud took her face in his hands, even though he knew they were cold and probably smelled of riding leather and bike exhaust.

“Marlene told you,” Tifa said. Not a question. “I shouldn’t have woken her. I messed up. I—”

“She’s not a baby anymore.” If Marlene hadn’t called him, he doubted Tifa would have ever confessed any of this to him.

“What’d she say?”

“Not much. She said she didn’t even see anything, just heard you shouting.” Cloud brushed his thumbs over her cheeks, where the seam of the couch’s armrest had left a red, perforated line in her skin. “You don’t have to tell me what it was about.”

Tifa sighed.

“It’s easier to protect each other when we have each other,” Cloud went on. “You know that better than anyone. You spent way too much time beating that lesson into me not to follow it yourself.”

She gave a short, tired laugh. “I’m glad you’ve learned it so well that you’re using it against me now.”

“The student becomes the master,” said Cloud. He kissed her once, then kissed over her eyelid. It was blue in the pale dawn. She tipped forward until her face was squashed into his shoulder, though his jacket was unforgiving and stiff. It kept out the wind, it was not particularly good cuddling material.

“Two days till the end of the Games,” said Tifa. “And another few days before the city empties. I think I can handle that. Guess I’ll—watch late-night TV and Games reruns while you sleep?”

“New Queen’s Blood memoir from Regina Konigin just came out, so I’ll read that during my shift.”

“It’s really too bad you didn’t take full advantage of that entire free week at the hotel.”

“Eh. Owner sent me off with a free breakfast burrito this morning though, so I’ll say it was worth it.”

Tifa did not dream of anything that could scare Cloud in the nights of their turn-based sleeping, and he wondered how much of it was luck, and how much of it was that sleep was easier and more peaceful when he was there.

A decade ago, he would have scoffed at himself. How presumptuous and silly, he would have thought, to believe that his presence offered anything resembling comfort.

Tonight, he looked up from Chapter 5: Road to a Queen Card at the sound of Tifa murmuring in her sleep. Last night, when the smell of Midgar slums started to seep into the room, Cloud had placed his hand in her hair until her shoulders untensed, and the stink abated, until piano music returned.

Now he sat, waiting for the manifestation. There was a chiming of bells, so familiar that he thought he might have fallen asleep himself—but, no, he set down his book and rose from his chair, and he only had five fingers on each hand—and then startled when a child ran across the room, dressed in frilly, frosting white.

It had been years since Marlene had been so tiny. He watched in wonder as she ran toward the wall and disappeared.

This was—

Tifa had her hair done up in a braided bun that day, studded with glinting pearls. Cloud had picked her up in both arms and spun her in a circle as everyone had cheered and shouted. Cid had stuck his fingers between his teeth and whistled so shrilly he could have called the sky down to him like a dog. Tifa had insisted she’d do the bouquet toss right in Cloud’s arms, the train of her dress brilliantly white against all the green.

He watched themselves now, five years younger, alone for their older, real selves in a quiet bedroom, as Tifa reeled her bouquet and tossed it over her head. He’d warned her not to throw all her strength into it, or else she’d toss it to the edge of the world, and she’d tried her best.

That had never explained why it had vanished. Yuffie had leapt for it, Cissnei hadn’t really tried. But between the arc from Tifa’s hand to the ground, the flowers had been there one moment, and then they were gone.

Cloud watched it over again now, the bouquet of reunion flowers sailing out of sight, and the confusion on their faces as he set Tifa down. Every wedding guest would spend the rest of the evening wondering where it had gone. Years down the line, Cid still joked that the bouquet was bound to turn up somewhere, sometime, when they least expected it.

The sound of the bells faded, and Cloud sank back into his chair.

Tonight, he’d let her dream and dream.

Twice as many patrons tried lining up to get into Seventh Heaven on the night of the Closing Parade, the queue growing so long that Alina had to hand out call numbers into the forties. In the end, they opened their doors, dug into storage, and pulled folding tables to set up in the front lot of the bar.

She pushed her way behind the bar and leaned into the window, pasting up five more order tabs on the metal rim. “Eight more fried snots!”

“Alina!”

She flipped Cloud a middle finger and strode back onto the bar floor.

“I am going to—”

“You are going to take these out to the lot tables, off you go,” Tifa said, handing him a tray laden with pint beers. “Careful.”

Fireworks were scheduled to begin in the next quarter hour, marking the end of the Closing Parade. The performances had started an hour ago, with each city presenting their regional dances and songs, though Cloud could hear exactly none of it over the din inside the bar. Tifa had even made sure to wire up their large event speakers for the evening.

“Did Barret say he was coming by later?” asked Cloud. He got back behind the bar with minimal beer stickiness on his hands.

“He said he would. Never did reply when I asked when, though.” Tifa was crouched low, digging through their cabinets for another bottle of rum. “I think Reeve made him attend the Closing Parade.”

“Can’t imagine how that’s going for Reeve.”

“It’s not like we never warned him,” said Tifa. She crooked her head and stretched her arm as far as it would go into the drink cabinet.

“Here, let me grab—”

“Hi, hey, I was hoping I could order?”

Cloud froze. Tifa did too, their eyes meeting once before Cloud glanced over the bar, between the shoulders of two patrons facing their respective friends. A man with black hair had slotted himself between the patrons’ bodies, though neither of them seemed to notice him. He was holding a handful of gil. The bar lights caught his eyes and lit them in blue flame.

Tifa stood so slowly that she could have been a column of rising smoke.

Neither of them were asleep nor dreaming. Cloud straightened beside her.

She found her voice first. “Sure. What’ll it be?”

“One old-fashioned, and one Flower Empress.”

Cloud could not stop staring. He knew he should move, but feared moving would break the vision. He knew he could not be asleep. No one in this bar was, minutes before the fireworks show.

“Zack,” he said, voice hoarse. “What are you doing here?”

Zack grinned. He looked the same as ever—more than ten years younger than Cloud was now, he realized, forever immortal. Cloud looked upon him now and saw a child. It made him heartsick to realize.

“What else?” Zack laughed. “Taking a gander at the world I saved!” He seemed to pause and think. “Well, the world my wife saved, to be honest. She says I get participation credit, though.”

The countdown to the firework show began onscreen, the bar lighting up with the glow of numbers. Tifa had her back to Zack as she busied herself with their drinks, but Cloud thought he could hear the wetness of her breathing. Her shoulders shook.

The bar cheered along with the countdown. How odd it was, to celebrate the anniversary of almost dying with so much fanfare, more than even the turn of a new year. These days, Cloud chose to see it as the anniversary of surviving.

“Are you happy?” Cloud asked.

“You know what they say,” Zack winked, and Cloud, in fact, did not know what they said. “Happy wife, happy life. Hey, Aerith! C’mere, come say hi to—”

The sky split with the eruption of color. Stadium Square sat at the fringe of Edge, but the booms traveled across the distance. The patrons in the front lot started whooping and drunkenly singing.

Zack had turned, his hand outstretched, and in the next moment, he had disappeared. A reunion flower rested on the bar where his arm had been, its sweet smell rising over the tang of liquor and frying oil.

“Cloud? Are you still awake?”

“Yeah.”

Marlene left two days after the Closing Parade, and business had slowed to a crawl in the wake of departing tourists. By the third day post-Games, Cloud had gotten home by midday, early enough to help finish lunch shift. The sudden slowdown of work left him wide awake at night. He lay on his side with a tiny reading light, halfway through Chapter 11: House of Cards.

“I noticed something from the weeks when we were dreaming.”

Cloud pawed at his nightstand and jammed the first thing he found into Regina’s memoir, which happened to be a receipt from Cafe Oasips. “And what’s that?”

“I never tried to run from anything,” said Tifa. She was on her back, her knees bent and tenting their covers, though she turned her head when Cloud tossed to face her. “Not when the dreams were fine, nor when they were awful, not even during the one that Marlene had called you about.” She’d never told him what she’d dreamt of, and he would not ask until she offered. “They happened, and I watched.”

“We’ve done a whole lot of running.”

He hadn’t tried to run the night they’d decided to sleep apart for the Games, either. Sephiroth had appeared to him in the violent gloom, surrounded by his own drowning vortex of energy, but he’d never felt farther. Cloud had watched him as though he’d been behind a wall of thick glass. Present, yet defanged. Only Tifa had suffered the manifestation of him.

“It’s good to rest,” said Tifa.

Cloud hummed as she rolled onto her side and stuck her usual, over-warm foot between his legs. “Even when the bridge is long and endless?” he asked.

“Especially because the bridge is long and endless.” Tifa’s breath fanned cool over his face. “Good night.”

“Good night, Tifa.”

She cracked an eye open. Cloud’s eyes were lanterns in the dark.

“Go to sleep.”

“But I like looking at you.”

“You’ve got plenty of time for that when the sun’s up and you don’t look like a pair of headlights.”

Cloud made a face until she kissed him. Yes, he would. For now, dreamless, they both would sleep.