Tifa slept on and off throughout the night, drifting away and returning like a boat tugging on its anchor. Sometimes she couldn't remember where she was, but she was so weak and heavy and sleepy and warm that it didn't seem to matter. It was like being bodiless, she thought once during a pre-dawn moment of wakefulness, though she could feel the hair plastered to her forehead. It was like being sick with your father down the hall, except she knew this wasn't her house and she had no father anymore. She couldn't remember why she was here, but she remembered that she wasn't in danger. And it was enough to let her justify drifting off again.

Close to morning, she had a dream that someone with fingers like ice was touching her cheek and, in an unconscious struggle to stay sleeping, she tried to shudder away. But they came again on her forehead, like a cold light breaking into warm darkness. She came close to waking then, as her mind came to the brief conclusion that she was sick and someone was tending her. So tired, but she forced her lips open to ask again, "Father?" There had been a time he had sat by her bed, not long after her mother had died, with a bowl of frigid water on his knees and an icy cloth in his hand.

The fingers didn't return and in her dream her father was leaving the room. She wanted to call after him. It felt like it had been so long since she'd seen him last and there was a familiar ache in her chest as he departed, as if he might've been taking the majority of her heart with him. But she couldn't make a sound, and in a few moments she was falling into a deeper sleep.

When she woke again, it was morning and the curtains of the window by the bed had been drawn back to let the sun in. A rectangle of warm light was splashed across the blanket in front of her until brown was almost yellow, and birds were singing somewhere. Wearily, she rubbed gritty eyes and pushed herself up on trembling arms. The earthy smells of sweat and hair, mingled with the scent of freshly laundered sheets, filled her nose and she grimaced as she looked around. She'd had a fever, she realized; that hadn't been a dream. None of it, except for the presence of her father, had been a dream.

The room was small, like a spare chamber converted into a bedroom, with bare, cream-coloured walls and rough, off-white carpeting. To her left, a closet had been built into the corner and she could see straight shadows, the suggestion of clothing, through a crack between the folding doors. To her right stood a night table where sat the long-expired oil lamp. And Tifa couldn't help but wonder if this was Vincent's own bedroom. Nothing said so conclusively, but no one else's room, she thought to herself, would've been so audaciously barren as Vincent's.

Moving slowly, she slipped her legs over the edge of the bed and took an experimental breath. Her lungs still felt blistered and her throat was still raw, but she felt better than she had the night before. And, despite her desperate state of mind, she couldn't deny that there was something inherently pleasing about regaining her health. Ironic, she thought, to feel this way when she'd planned to be dead by now. With a tired, burdened sigh, she pushed a hand into her tangled hair and scratched at her scalp.

The large, open sleeve of the gray t-shirt she was wearing caught her eye and she felt confused for a moment. This wasn't hers. And then she realized Vincent had changed her out of her clothes.

'Of course he would've,' she told herself, ignoring the impulse to picture Vincent -- stoic, uncommunicative Vincent -- pulling her out of her sopping pants and sweater, and then maneuvering her into something dry. 'No one would've left me in wet clothing.' She was still wearing her underwear, though, and she suddenly suspected that Vincent had taken to the task with no more thought for her femininity than Barret would've had; Barret, who was the closest thing she had to a father, and who wouldn't have hesitated for a second to strip her naked if it would've saved her life. For a moment, she felt obliged to Vincent, and then she felt a twinge of grief for her old leader and comrade. Barret had already lost so many people; could she really justify taking herself away, too?

And then she quashed the feelings down. No longer was she going to be responsible for anyone else's happiness. She'd lost her parents, her innocence, her lover, and her bar; her life was in shambles. Didn't she deserve a chance to end her own suffering?

The door to the room was open a crack, and Tifa gingerly got to her feet so that she could peek out into what looked like a living room. No sign of Vincent, and she couldn't hear anyone moving around. Quietly, she opened the door and stepped out.

It wasn't an apartment so much as the story of a house, she thought as she glanced around. Fairly spacious, and still sort of empty despite a bookshelf and a second-hand couch, armchair and coffee-table. No curtains on these windows, she noticed. No standing lamps or potted plants anywhere, and no television. Vincent, Tifa thought again -- maybe it had been nearly three years since she'd last seen him, but it was still very Vincent, even if it wasn't an old, empty, dusty mansion. No personal effects. Just the evidence that *someone* lived here. A shell without a personality. Very Vincent.

She crept into the living room until she could see through an open doorway into the kitchen: a table, two chairs, some predictable appliances. But still no Vincent. And then she stopped to wonder why she was looking for him in the first place. Not to thank him, certainly. Maybe out of some subconscious desire to know 'why', though she supposed it didn't really matter. Not, perhaps, as much as making a hasty departure before he came back. Since he had seen fit to rescue her, she doubted he would simply let her leave again. So now was likely the best chance she'd have to go unnoticed.

The door to the outside world was not locked; beyond it was a landing and a long stairwell leading down to another door. As she stood for a moment with a steadying hand on the door jamb, a breath of cool air whispered over her bare knees and reminded her that she was still in only a t-shirt. She gave a fretful sigh and was just about to go and make a search for her clothes when the door at the bottom of the stairs suddenly opened and a man entered. Startled, she jumped back and nearly slipped from the doorstep. The man glanced up quickly at the movement.

And Tifa's eyes widened as she recognized him.

He was the same, and yet different than she remembered: his hair was still long, though she had the impression it had been cut once and allowed to grow out again; his eyes remained red and he still sported the claw on his left arm, a golden contrast to pale skin. But he no longer wore the bandana or the concealing cape. Comfortably casual, he was dressed in black slacks and a gray v-necked sweater that looked oddly appropriate on him, as if he might never have worn the blue suit of the Turks or come out of a coffin. Tifa supposed after a moment that she shouldn't have been amazed by the changes. It *had* been three years, and that could be a long time to a man forced to start from the beginning. But it was still a shock to see him like this, in the light.

Especially when he had a laundry basket tucked under one arm, hugged against his hip -- a picture so uncharacteristically domestic that, had she been in the mood (and had he been anyone else), she might've felt compelled to chuckle.

He looked faintly surprised to see her there at first. And then there was a small shift in his expression, and here again was the Vincent she remembered: guarded, close-mouthed, and still a little frightening if she let herself admit it. After a second, he turned his eyes from her and started up the stairs. "You shouldn't be up," he said as he approached, and his voice was the same as it had been last evening, as it had been any number of times she'd heard him speak in Avalanche: deep and brusque, like he didn't want to be speaking at all.

Tifa felt a stone drop into her stomach. He was going to make her stay, probably until he felt she was 'well' enough to go. Though she would never be 'well' again and he, of all people, wasn't to be fooled by an act about how everything was 'all right'.

Therefore, she basically had three options, she realized: submit to him, fight him, or run. In her current condition, forgetting the fact that she hadn't trained in months and months, she knew she wouldn't be able to overpower him; and submitting was out of the question. That left only one recourse. Nevermind the fact that she was dressed only in a t-shirt. Nevermind that she had no shoes. She would have to run, and to make it, if she wanted the freedom of choice again.

Desperately, she shut her eyes and, without hesitating, took to her heels down the stairs. She had no plan, no clue about what to do once she was out the door, no idea how she would escape if he pursued her; but she was trying not to think about it. Cloud had always flown by the seat of his pants -- last minutes decisions had sometimes seemed like the only decisions he could make -- and it had worked well enough for him...

Vincent moved as she brushed past him, but whether he was getting out of her way or reaching for her she couldn't tell, and she wasn't about to stop to find out. The bottom was in sight and it wouldn't take much to jump the rest of the way.

At least, normally it wouldn't have taken much; her fighting skills and instincts for defense usually allowed her to do almost anything she pushed her body to do. But not this time. She could feel that something was wrong even as she leapt from the stairs, as if her timing was somehow off, and when she landed it was with most of her weight on her right leg. She quickly tried to compensate, but it was too late. The damage had already been done: a fire had started in her ankle that was almost certainly a sprain. Clenching her teeth, she fell heavily against the door, fighting a sudden bout of nausea.

When Vincent started down after her, she didn't turn to look at him, feeling too foolish to meet his eyes. "Take me to Kalm," she ordered quietly, staring resolutely at a knot in the wood of the door. Her voice only trembled a little.

"You need some ice on that ankle."

She closed her eyes, feeling suddenly almost too weary to speak. "I don't want to be here, Vincent. I want to go home."

"I don't think you want to be there, either." He was standing right behind her now, a familiar, unpredictable stranger who knew too well what she was feeling. Of course she didn't want to be at home; she wanted to be drowned, face down in the water.

"Take me back, right now. I want to go back."

"Your ankle," he reminded her mercilessly.

It was like being a child who doesn't want to go to school, she thought, but who suspects they will be made to go anyway. And it made her angry. Scared and angry. "I don't care about my fucking ankle! I just want to go home!"

Vincent didn't move or make a reply, and Tifa felt her resolve to fight abruptly begin to drain away. She didn't have the strength to stand against his inscrutable will if she'd been reduced to obscenities. How many times had Zangan drilled into her that to lose one's temper was to lose the battle? She sagged in defeat against the door.

And, obviously sensing victory, Vincent stepped up to put her limp right arm over his shoulders and his metal hand around her waist. "Walk," he then said simply, "or be carried."

At least he wasn't going to strip her completely of her dignity. With a tired, resigned sigh she pushed away from the door and began the awkward trip back up the stairs.

Vincent, she noticed, smelled like shampoo and laundry detergent.

        * * *

Once they were in the apartment Vincent managed to maneuver her to the couch, and then he brought her some ice in a plastic bag. Still without meeting his eyes, she took the compress from him and put it against her ankle. It wasn't a bad sprain, she realized as she looked down at the slow swelling. Just enough to keep her hobbling around for a few days, maybe a week at most.

And then she had the mad urge to laugh, or to burst into tears, though she wasn't about to do either. Yesterday, she'd hoped to jump from the bridge and never recover, and now here she was, hunching over her ankle with a bag of ice as if it really mattered whether it healed or not. So long spent fighting, she thought grimly, that staying alive had become an ingrained habit.

Vincent left for a moment, back out the door they'd entered through, and then returned with the laundry basket. Wordlessly, he dropped a pair of pants and a sweater she recognized as her own onto the coffee table beside her. After a second, she put out a hand to touch them; the warm, dryer feel of them seeped into her skin. "You didn't have to do this," she murmured, if only for something to say. Because she was still determined not to say thank you.

And then he pulled her shoes out of the basket and placed them on top of her clothes. Tifa stared at them for a moment in surprise; hadn't she left these on the bridge? She glanced up, half-intending to ask Vincent about them, but now when she would look him in the eye he was turning away. The words died on her lips as he walked into the kitchen. "Are you hungry?"

The question wasn't unusual, or even really unexpected, but something about it caught her off-guard. After a pause she wondered if it was the sheer conventionality of it. They hadn't seen each other or even kept in touch for three years, and the extenuating circumstances of their reunion had so far dashed away all possibility of small talk and social nicities. And now they were host and guest without so much as a 'How are you?'

Not that she knew much about him beyond what he'd told them in the beginning, and those facts weren't exactly conversation starters. 'So, your girlfriend still dead? How's the atonement-thing working out for you? Transformed into anything lately?'

"I don't want to eat. I want to go home."

"Yes, I realize."

From anyone else, she might've expected it to sound sarcastic, but Vincent's voice was so flat she couldn't imagine that he was trying to make a joke. It would've been in very poor taste, she thought, if he had been. "Are you going to take me back, then?"

He was standing motionlessly by one of the chairs, not looking at anything in particular. And Tifa thought she could almost see how her presence might have interrupted a kind of peace he'd achieved here. Was he irritated by her single-mindedness? Was he beginning to wonder himself why he'd brought her here? Because he didn't seem to have any plan beyond holing her away so that she couldn't try to kill herself again.

"Or are you just going to keep me here?" She let some of the bitterness she was feeling seep into her tone.

But Vincent seemed unaffected by her anger as he continued to stare off into a distance only he could see, as if he was considering things that had very little to do with her.

"I told you I knew what I was doing," she tried again. "You had no right to stop me." She was almost proud of how steady and sure she sounded. "This could be considered kidnapping, you know."

He still made no reply, no move even to acknowledge the fact that she was speaking at all. And when he went to leave the apartment again, she wasn't surprised, suddenly reminded of all of the times he'd simply walked away from Cloud and the others when they'd asked him to explain himself.

Maybe he'd changed his clothes; maybe he was no longer sleeping the years away in a coffin; maybe he'd even melted down all his guns. But he was still the impenetrable brick wall she remembered.

And, as he opened the door to the apartment, murmuring something that sounded suspiciously like, "I'll be back in a few moments," before stepping out, she thought about how wrong she'd been yesterday in thinking that things couldn't possibly get any worse.

Back