Tifa spent the rest of the day sitting on Vincent's bed with her foot elevated, staring out of the window. Occasionally, she could hear Vincent wandering around his apartment, and sometimes she was sure he came to stand right outside the crack between door and jamb as if to make sure she hadn't grown wings and flown away.

But she was still earth-bound, if not bound in the earth (in a box, under six feet of dirt). Either way, she was trapped, though she would rather not have been trapped with her thoughts.

She'd learned how to keep from thinking about the happy times, because she'd gotten tired of crying and fighting herself. But now she was thinking again. How many times had she thought about the phone on the wall, or the PHS in a drawer? Barret would've taken her in; Cid, too, probably. Any of them, though she admitted she never would have called Vincent.

But she'd felt so ashamed, and she hadn't wanted to answer any questions. Absurdly afraid that Cloud would find out if she said anything, and then he would be disgusted with her. Then, the bar had started to die when she'd been almost past caring...

The first tears had been like water trickling from a crack in a dam, and then the pressure, months and months of it, had blown the walls open. And now she couldn't stop. Silent tears pulsing down her cheeks as she thought about everything: her mother, who really might as well have been a ghost from the beginning; her father -- she could still remember what his aftershave smelled like; Zangan, who had taught her about pain, and then about strength; Cloud, the underdog boy they'd picked on; Barret, the father with shoulders enough to carry her and Marlene and Jesse and Biggs and Wedge; Cloud, the man with wrong memories, with haunting eyes, with a soft, authoritative kind of voice. Cloud, whose lost anger had called out and laid hold of her heart.

Then Aeris, who could soothe any soul injury with a word, a look, a smile. Cloud, looking at Aeris. Cloud, smiling at Aeris. Cloud, grieving for Aeris.

Cloud, the lover. Cloud, the leaver.

Tifa, the lonely. Tifa, the stagnant. Tifa, the dead, finally letting go toward the water.

But she wasn't dead. She wiped the tears away with the heel of her hand, like she'd been doing every few minutes, but more tears replaced them. More and more. Maybe she'd drown in this room if she cried enough.

Vincent was standing outside the door again. She couldn't hear him, but she knew he was there. She sighed and shifted her shoulders until they cracked. "I'm still here, Vincent. I haven't gone anywhere."

He didn't answer, and in a moment she sensed his departure. Like a shadow, Tifa mused suddenly, practically unnoticed in the back of Avalanche. He'd watched their backs, been their rear-guard without waiting for someone to assign him the position, and he'd very rarely let anything catch them unawares.

Though something about his methods had sometimes bothered her.

She remembered the first time he'd transformed: in a copse of trees, he'd turned, maybe at the sound of a footfall, and had caught a handful of bullets across the chest like a sash of spraying blood. Shinra had been trailing them, of course. And then, before anyone could prepare a healing spell, he'd ripped out of his body and into what he'd named the Galian Beast.

After that, she recalled, she'd begun to suspect that he was deliberately hesitating before reporting pursuit from behind, until the monsters were almost on them. That way, he'd often caught the first assault himself, as if he'd been trying to welcome a fatal blow that never happened. Because it had been impossible after a while to doubt his hearing.

That had frightened her more than the transformations, sometimes: how eager he'd seemed for death.

She'd been very naive.

She didn't sense his presence this time before Vincent opened the door and entered the room with a mug of water in his hand. It surprised her a little that he'd returned, and she watched him without moving until he'd put the mug on the night table. And then she gave into the temptation to know. She had to know.

She reached out a hand and grabbed his sleeve. His eyes immediately found hers, though she couldn't tell if she'd startled him. And then he waited, hunched beside the bed, and she thought she saw one of his eyebrows twitch as if he might ask her what she wanted.

He was more than a shadow. He'd always been more than a shadow. They'd just never known him as anything else.

"Why'd you do it, Vincent? Why'd you save me?"

He flicked his eyes away from her and moved to stand. "No one would have left you in the water."

"But why didn't *you*? You...you know about wanting to die."

He glanced back at her sharply, as if the revelation from her lips had caught him off-guard.

"You know what it's like, to get to that place where you're trapped in pain and you'd do anything to make it stop."

He didn't reply right away, but Tifa thought she saw something flicker across his expression. And then he shook her hand off. "Time opens doors. No one is trapped forever."

She was surprised again, to hear that from Vincent. "Still, it wasn't your responsibility to make sure I lived. I wasn't 'crying out for help', if you're wondering."

"Then what have you been crying for?" His gaze was suddenly very direct, and she felt somewhat taken aback by the change in his tone. He almost sounded offended. "Have you been mourning your failed suicide attempt all of this time? Or..." He leaned in a fraction closer and Tifa thought for a moment that she could see brown flecks in the red of his irises. "...are you crying out of the pain you wish would stop?"

It was a trick. He was trying to trap her with her own words. With a scowl, she looked away from him.

"Because even children know that tears rouse the concern of others." He didn't spend a moment in gloating, but stood quickly and turned toward the door. Before he reached it, however, Tifa felt her anger peak and she sat up from the headboard. "You're just jealous!"

She saw his head come up suddenly and as he stopped walking she felt a thrill of vengeful glee at having gotten a reaction. "You're jealous because you can't die! You just transform when you get hurt, don't you? You're jealous because I can kill myself whenever I want!"

She half-expected him to round on her, to shout and then storm away the way Cloud had every time they'd fought and she'd hit a nerve. But Vincent wasn't Cloud. If she'd been thinking clearly, she might've remembered that Vincent was a dangerous, unstable kind of person, someone it probably wasn't prudent to upset.

But Vincent didn't even seem to be Vincent. If she'd ever known who Vincent really was. He gave a short sigh and simply left the room without a word.

Feeling angry and wretched, Tifa picked up the mug and threw it after him with a frustrated cry of effort. She was almost disappointed when it didn't shatter; it gave a brief crack on the edge of the door before breaking into a couple of pieces and falling to the floor. Stronger than a glass, and the water soaked easily into the carpet.

Nothing ever happened the way it was supposed to.

        * * *

The sun was beginning to set by the time she heard movement again in the apartment. A knock on the front door got Vincent up to answer it, and then he and Lily were speaking quietly together. About her, no doubt, Tifa thought bitterly. Her ankle was aching in a pinched sort of way, but she'd been ignoring it for hours because she couldn't bring herself to ask Vincent for more ice. Despite her anger, she was feeling ashamed of her outburst. If children used tears to show their distress, they used tantrums to get back at the one who showed concern for their tears, but who didn't do everything they wanted. And she was determined to stop letting her temper get the better of her, because she wasn't a child.

She was an adult who'd made a decision. If only Vincent could understand what she'd been through these past months, what shame and isolation she'd endured with no friends (and eventually no employees) and no money to move. Not even a bar to sell because she'd rented the building. In debt and alone and heartbroken...

She...she hadn't wanted to die in the beginning. But her life had gone so wrong, and she'd started to wonder if there was a point in trying to make it better if Cloud wasn't ever going to be in it again. He'd been the driving force behind so many things she'd done, she felt completely hollow without him...

There was a knock at the bedroom door, though it was open a crack. "Hello? Can I come in?"

For a moment, Tifa was tempted to say no. She'd been crying, she hadn't brushed her hair all day, she was still in a t-shirt. Not that it mattered, she supposed, in the end.

"I brought some stuff for your ankle."

But this was Lily, and she doubted the woman cared a fig for her appearance. "Okay."

Lily urged the door open with an elbow and entered without any more preamble, carrying a few things in her hands. "Water," she introduced the cup as she approached the bed. "Anti-inflammatories. A cold pack. And..." She shuffled the things in her grip. "...a tension bandage. I'll just leave them here, all right?" She put the cup down and then dumped the rest unceremoniously on the night table. "And if you get hungry, I made a quiche. Just shout if you want some."

Lily didn't smile or pat the bed in a condescending way before leaving the room. She just met Tifa's eyes and gave a little nod as if they might've finished a business transaction. And when she turned and stopped, noticing something on the floor, she didn't say anything. She just picked up the broken pieces of the mug and walked out, pulling the door behind her until it was sitting ajar. Tifa didn't even have a second to feel renewed shame for throwing it.

The bottle of anti-inflammatories was the first thing she investigated, and she was surprised at how empty it felt. When she opened it, she found only four pills clattering around at the bottom. Not enough, she realized, to overdose. Lily was no dummy. She swallowed two and then lay back, waiting for them to take effect.

Vincent and Lily were talking again. Well, at least Lily was talking, and she thought she could hear Vincent's occasional monosyllabic replies. But she couldn't make out what they were saying. Sometimes, she remembered, it had been like that when they'd halted for the night. She in her tent, half-listening in unwilling silence to a hushed conversation, punctuated now and again by the contagious sound of Aeris' giggle. She'd hated Cloud sometimes for being so goddamn capricious; he'd had so many sides, no one had ever seen all of him at once. And Aeris had always had the best of him.

Lily swore suddenly, like a small explosion. "Okay, but this time..." The rest of her words trailed off quietly.

Tifa felt a flash of curiousity. What were they doing? After a moment of wondering, she convinced herself that she didn't care. But then, as the minutes passed and Lily seemed to get more and more agitated, she eventually found herself wrapping her ankle up with the tension bandage.

She still didn't try to walk on it, but the bandage gave her a little more mobility if only because she knew the injury was stabilized. At the door, she peered out but there was nothing to see in the slowly darkening living room. She licked her lips as she hesitated. And then she opened the door.

They were in the kitchen, sitting across from each other at the table. Lily was hunched over, supporting herself on her elbows as she held a hand of cards in front of her nose. In contrast, Vincent was slouched back in his chair a little, one leg stretched out casually so that his socked foot was only inches from one of Lily's bare ones. He wasn't even looking at the cards he held in metal fingers. Lily looked annoyed.

"Okay, I call and raise you two." She pushed some gil into the middle of the table and then glanced up as Tifa made her way toward the light of the kitchen. "Hungry?"

Tifa hesitated in the doorway before nodding and coming to sit in the closest chair. Vincent, she noticed, didn't look at her. His eyes briefly followed Lily as the woman got up to pull a plate and a fork from the counter, and then he simply stared at a spot in front of him until she returned to put the triangle of quiche in front of Tifa. His expression was blank, but Tifa received an impression of quiet offense. She turned to the food, grateful for the distraction; someone had once told her that it was easier to feel anger than shame, but right now that was bullshit.

Lily sat down again and regained her cards. Before she settled back into the game, however, she searched around in the jacket she'd draped over the back of her chair and eventually came up with a crinkled package of cigarettes. "Do you mind?" she asked Tifa as she prepared to pull one out with her lips.

Tifa shook her head. Lily drew one into her mouth and, after putting the package away, brought out a lighter. In a moment, she was taking a quick drag and blowing the smoke away from the table. Then she passed the cigarette across to Vincent. He accepted it with a nod and took a slow pull before breathing out toward the ceiling. The bitter smell of burning tobacco filled the room.

Tifa watched him, surprised, as he sat up to hand the cigarette back. "So?"

Lily sighed. "Well, let's see them." She put her hand down on the table; two kings, the queen of diamonds, and then the five and the three of spades.

Without so much as blinking, Vincent lowered his hand to reveal three aces, the queen of hearts and the seven of clubs. Three of a kind to a one-pair, Tifa recognized. Lily threw her head back with a frustrated curse. "I thought you were bluffing!"

A corner of Vincent's mouth twitched. "I wasn't."

Lily scowled at him and turned to Tifa. "Never play poker with this man. The devil taught him how to play."

The devil had also taught Barret how to play, Tifa thought. And Barret had taught her. Eventually, Biggs had stopped playing with them altogether because he'd always lost money, and Cid had learned early on to say no when Barret had brought out his cards. She cut off another piece of quiche with her fork and scooped it up.

The pot was cleared away and Lily shuffled. As she went to deal, she asked, "You want to be dealt in?"

Tifa put the forkful in her mouth and chewed. She wasn't here to play games. She wasn't supposed to be here at all. But she'd been sitting alone and miserable all day, and in a few moments the diversion of food would be gone. Maybe it would be all right to occupy herself with something else for a little while. "Okay. I don't have any gil."

"Here, use this." Lily pushed some coins to her across the table and then started dealing.

The game progressed quickly. The bet started at two, as set by Vincent, Lily called, and Tifa raised the bet by two. Vincent called and raised another two. Lily folded. Tifa called and glanced at Vincent over her cards. He was watching her, and he'd sat up a little in his chair. A spark of something, an old kind of competitiveness, flickered in Tifa's mind and she thought back to the nights, years and years ago, when she'd hunched around a table with Barret and Jesse and Wedge, drinking a beer and playing round after round of seven-card-stud. She raised the bet again.

Vincent called without a word and raised yet another two. Tifa met the challenge and experienced a short-lived spurt of pride in the fact that she could still hold her expression so that she gave nothing away. And then she said, "I call your bluff. Show me your hand."

"How do you know he's bluffing?" Lily asked quietly from where she'd been observing the game.

Tifa ignored her for the moment and waited for Vincent to reveal his cards. After a small pause, he lowered them to the table. Nothing. The ten of clubs, two fours, and the six and three of diamonds.

Tifa sat up triumphantly and dropped her cards down next to his: three queens, the seven of hearts and the two of spades. Three of a kind to a one-pair, but this time against him. She'd won. Quickly, she glanced up to see the others' reactions.

Both of them were looking at her, and even Vincent seemed a little surprised. And only as it began to fade from her face did she realized she'd been grinning. She swallowed, suddenly feeling a little sick. "I think maybe I'll go to bed," she said quietly, lowering her eyes and pushing the cards together. As she picked up the small pile, the queen of hearts slipped from her grip and fell to the table. She went to grab it reactively and clashed hands with Vincent so that their fingers were momentarily entwined. Startled, she pulled away and glanced up.

Vincent had also drawn his hand back as if he'd touched something hot and, as they stared at each other, Tifa thought she saw the briefest of frowns flit over his face.

It had been entirely innocuous; the rough bump of skin to skin, the way strangers might do at a buffet when they're reaching for the same entree. But something about it had sent an unexpected flash through her, as if she might've been given a glimpse into his mind. Vincent had touched her earlier, of course, to help her up the stairs, but then they'd both adjusted to the idea of physical proximity toward a goal. Now, it had been thoroughly accidental, and she couldn't help but believe the result would've been the same had they bumped lips instead.

Predictably, Vincent recovered his composure first and, as if to head off any more discomfort, he reached down to pick up the card. And then he handed the deck to Lily.

"Yeah, I should get going." She stubbed her cigarette out on her own plate and gathered up her things. "The quiche is for you two to finish." If she'd noticed the sudden strain in the air, she said nothing about it. She merely stood and nodded at Tifa. "G'night." And then she turned to Vincent. "Night, Vince."

He nodded in return and wordlessly got to his feet as Lily walked to the door. Once she was gone, he went to lock up behind her.

And, while he was busy, Tifa pushed herself from the table and made her awkward way back into the bedroom. She wasn't sure what had just happened, but it made her uneasy just thinking about it.

Last night, the door had been ajar. Tonight, she closed it firmly behind her.

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