It was strange to wake up in Lily's apartment now, Tifa thought; strange to feel comfortable with leaving the bedroom, with wandering around, with making small talk while she ate. Strange, too, not to find herself completely alone in a house that was too big for one. Strange to smile a little.

Strange not to have the memory of nightmares following her into the day, and yet to still have that ache, as if her heart wasn't beating in the right place. Though she was trying not to think, and Lily had a way of keeping her busy enough to smile.

There were no clouds in the sky. The sun peeking through the trees and mountains, bouncing off of the brick houses and sluicing from glinting windows, was a welcome warmth on her back in the chill of the morning; her pale fingers, like long skinny roots in the cool dark dirt of Lily's garden, felt strong and qualified. She'd never tried her hand at gardening before, never had the inclination, but with Lily beside her, both of them on their knees in soil-smudged pants and long, floppy straw hats, she felt as if she might've been daydreaming about it for years. Something cathartic about pulling the weeds away so that the rest of the plants could grow properly, about sprinkling water from a can -- not enough to drown them, just enough to let them drink. Something about maintaining the health of these fragile flowers and vegetables in the early spring so that they might one day provide beauty and nourishment to others.

She couldn't help smiling.

Lily hummed tunelessly as she worked, completely lost in the flow of her hands, moving with a kind of rhythm the plants might've taught her. As the sun continued to climb, she sat up and wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. "Hot work, sometimes," she commented.

Tifa nodded. "But I like it."

"Good." Lily stood with a grunt and a few popping joints. "What say we take a little break?"

This meant she needed a cigarette. Tifa got up from her knees and clapped her hands free of loose dirt.

Lily had two mismatched chairs set up in her back yard. And as they sat down Tifa wondered again as she had the day before if Vincent had ever joined Lily on his knees, plugging away in the soil. She found it hard to picture, though, without feeling the urge to laugh. He didn't seem to cook for himself (she couldn't remember a single time he'd offered to help with any meal three years ago) and he appeared to need nagging about cleaning his half of the house. Gardening would probably be a frivolous activity to him, something not worth his time.

"Thinking about something?"

Tifa turned out of her thoughts and glanced at Lily. "Not really. Or, well... " She interrupted herself with a shrug, feeling a little awkward as if Lily might speculate about her interest. "How long has Vincent lived here?"

Lily put her lighter away and puffed out a mist of smoke. "Almost three years, I guess." She frowned in a moment of reflection and scratched at her nose with a dirty nail. "Shows up one night in the rain, looking every inch an out-of-work mercenary. Some of them had been passing through, but he was looking for a place to live. So I gave him the upstairs." She paused a moment to take another drag and then faintly laughed the smoke out between her lips. "God, he scared the shit out of me. Late at night, had this *gun* on him, and those sharp-looking fingers..."

"And you let him live upstairs?"

Lily lifted her eyebrows in a wan facial shrug, staring out at the back wall of her house as if she couldn't quite believe it either. "My husband was gone; I was lonely. Here was someone who looked like he needed a break. A lot of people lost everything with Midgar, and everyone was worrying about violent, thieving refugees, even months after. Vince looked tired and cold and soaked to the skin, and I thought he'd probably been turned away from everywhere else. So..." This time she shrugged a shoulder. "Gave him the benefit of the doubt. And it wasn't like I didn't have my own gun."

Tifa had a sudden uncomfortable picture of Cloud, somewhere in the rain, looking for someone to take him in. Knocking on doors, feeling suspicious eyes on him from the shadows behind dirty curtains. He'd never said where he was going, what he was trying to do. Find himself, maybe. Find someone else. She would've gone with him if he'd just asked, even if it had slipped them back into the roles of friends. Just to have something left, just to know that he was okay.

Just to avoid that year of hell without him; the dumped obsessive girlfriend, the bitch without a backbone around him because she'd been so afraid of saying something wrong, of making him leave. She'd hated herself around him, hated herself without him. Loved him, hated him, been burned with the desire to break him into pieces like he'd broken her when he'd dropped her; been left wanting him to come back so that she could reject him, hold him so that he never left again.

But he hadn't asked, and it wasn't like she didn't know why.

"Y'okay?"

Tifa swallowed and nodded her head. "It's just, sometimes... I guess I just have trouble...not thinking."

"Yeah. The grieving, when something ends the hard way." She took another pull on her cigarette. "Helps to keep busy, though, and to talk about it if you can."

"That's what you did?"

She knocked some ash off into the grass. "Sort of. Didn't know anyone in Nibelheim, and Vincent and I didn't really talk to each other until..." She frowned a little and adjusted her hat. "Not until the fire, and that was about a year after he came to live upstairs."

Another fire in Nibelheim? "What fire?"

"That old mansion. Arsonists, everyone thought. Just trying to stir up trouble. Vincent was in Kalm at the time, and I guess he got word of it from somewhere. We weren't talking to each other, like I said, not really; but I did keep busy. Probably drove him batty, but he didn't say anything about it. I used to clean his place when he was gone, and I'd leave food in his fridge. Kind of felt like I needed someone to take care of, I guess. Then that fire." She took another draw and breathed out the smoke. "He was trying to call, but I was out watching the firemen scramble around, trying to put the flames out. When I finally answered the phone -- third time he'd tried, he told me later -- he seemed sort of angry, asked me where I'd been. He'd never called before, so I was surprised. I told him about the fire, but he said he already knew. And then I told him everything was fine, the house was far enough away. And then..." She raised her eyebrows and glanced at Tifa. "...he told me just to stay in the house, away from the fire."

Tifa blinked in surprise. "He was worried about you?"

Lily shrugged again. "Maybe. I remember wondering if he'd lost people in his life -- maybe he'd come from Midgar, too. So maybe he'd called expecting another all-encompassing disaster where everyone was dead. Something I didn't know about him then, but he feels kind of responsible for people. A guilty conscience, probably. I imagine it happens with mercenaries, or whatever he was, trying to turn over a new leaf. Still, it surprised me when he came in with you, both of you looking damp and half frozen." And then her mouth twitched into a smile. "Though I wasn't surprised he called last night, just to make sure you were okay."

Tifa guessed that she looked puzzled because Lily went on to say, "Figured he didn't give a damn that far, huh?" She grinned toothily for a second. "He's never brought anybody home before. That's why I kind of wondered if you were ex-lovers. Some special connection or something, once upon a time. But, I suppose comrades in that group Avalanche explains it, too. Why he'd go to all the trouble."

Atoning. Not jealousy, like she'd accused him of. He'd rescued her to atone. It made so much sense, she wondered why it hadn't been obvious.

Maybe because she'd been too caught up in her own pain to think about it. She'd just wanted to cause pain.

Why he'd pay special attention to her because she'd been in Avalanche, though, she had no idea. Three years ago he'd protected them, they'd all looked out for each other, because they'd all had a goal. Now he had no responsibility for her, as she had acidly reminded him only days ago. Why, then...

And suddenly there was a dream following her into the sunlight -- the feel of insubstantial lips, the uneasy look of a man involuntarily attracted, out of place on a face etched in her memory as without emotion. Except for the attenuated moments before he'd transformed. But then, of course, she'd always turned away, too uncomfortable to watch the wrath and agony and horror of it.

Had he always been attracted to her? If he had, he'd done a bang-up job of keeping it under wraps...

"And after that, we talked. He knows about my husband. It helped. He's a good listener." Lily dropped her cigarette into the grass and stepped on it with the ball of her sandal as she stood up. "Well, you want to get back at it? Then I've got to head upstairs."

"Into his apartment?"

"Yeah, just to leave a couple of hints for him. Vacuum cleaner, a few scrubbers, just to give him the idea of what I want him to do. It usually works."

Tifa felt a smile pull at the corners of her mouth. And she resolutely kept it there for a second, even as her mind insisted on remembering one of the few times in the beginning when she'd managed to convince Cloud that a vacuum could be operated just as well by a man.

        * * *

Stepping into Vincent's apartment when she knew he wasn't home was like creeping into a restricted area behind the owner's back. And Tifa almost couldn't help walking cautiously, as if he might hear the footsteps and return suddenly. Banging the lid of a coffin upward at an unlooked-for liberation from solitude.

At least where she was concerned. She felt fairly sure he wouldn't care if Lily went into his apartment ten times a day.

Lily dropped off the cleaning supplies in obvious places -- some in the living room, some in the kitchen, some in the bathroom -- and then she went into the bedroom. After a second, Tifa heard the sound of the closet being opened. Hesitantly, she followed.

She hadn't made the bed yesterday before Lily had ushered her downstairs. The curtains also hadn't been drawn back to let the light in. And somehow she felt as if that should be changed. So, while Lily was busy rummaging around under the hanging shapes of Vincent's clothes, she unfurled the crumpled blankets and opened the room to the sunlight. Much neater, much brighter. A definite improvement.

Eventually, Lily sat up with a breathless sound of success. "Here's the damn thing. Don't know why he doesn't just ask me. Damn stubborn..." She trailed off, turning what looked like a wrinkled black shirt around in her hands. And then she put a hand to the closet door and pulled herself to her feet with a grunt. "Well, okay, that's it. We can go."

They were half way to the door before Tifa asked, "What are you bringing his shirt for?"

Lily pulled it open and showed her where a few of the buttons had been popped off. "He can do stitches, but he can't do buttons. Those metal fingers..." She made her hand claw-like. "...can't hold them properly. So he just throws his clothes that lose buttons into the back of his closet. Where I rescue them later, fix them up, and just slip them back onto hangers. He probably doesn't even notice."

Tifa traced the line of missing buttons with her eyes. Four gone, starting from the collar. "I wonder what happened?" she murmured, her mind already filling in the answer with a picture of him transforming.

She wasn't really expecting a response, but Lily replied, "Might've ripped it in the water, on a branch or something, when he jumped in after you. Who knows? He wouldn't tell me what happened before he carried you up the stairs."

He'd torn the buttons off the night he'd brought her in, and Tifa had the sudden vivid mental image of him being tugged to a halt in the dark water, and then just tearing away from the obstacle in his haste to reach her. And this time, though she still felt some anger, not for being alive but for his presumption, she also felt a little grateful. And this time she didn't immediately quash the feeling down.

Lily spent the afternoon doing her laundry, and then walking to the Nibel market, which Tifa was surprised to find still in operation, though obviously under new management. The first time she'd walked through Nibelheim in three years...and this time Cloud wasn't with her. The Shinra Mansion no longer dominated the skyline to the north -- once an ominous shadow, but like a storm that had already boomed out the last of its thunder and crackled out the last of its lightning, just a memory of a nightmare that had already passed -- and Tifa was glad it had been razed to the ground. If only Cloud were here to see it with her. What would he think to know that the place that had started it all was finally dead?

What had Vincent thought, she suddenly wondered, when word had reached him that it was burning? So much love and hate and bitterness and torture in that place. It was fitting, somehow, that it had been consumed by fire; a place full of demons and memories licked clean by the purifying flames.

That evening, they ate some of the stew she'd helped Lily make the night before, and then Lily went to take a bath. While she was in the bathroom, Tifa explored.

All of the knives were missing, hidden, and Tifa wasn't sure how she felt about it. Grateful that the temptation wasn't out in the open, angry that she was still being controlled, angry that she couldn't just be happy. Lily was wonderful -- keeping her busy, talking to her, feeding her, giving her a warm bed to sleep in. Why couldn't she just forget everything else and be good and appreciative and glad to be alive?

She'd been in the cramped living room already a couple of times, but this time she picked through things and admired the little porcelain dancers on the wall unit and squinted at the scrawl in the corner of a painting. She was opening up a flower-patterned sewing box Lily had on a shelf when the phone in the kitchen rang. At first she was inclined to ignore it, but then she heard Lily swearing and trying to get out of the tub in the bathroom.

"Don't worry, I'll get it," she said as she passed the door before heading into the kitchen.

It was just finishing its third ring when she picked it up. "Hello?"

There was silence on the other end.

She frowned. "Hello?"

"Tifa."

The receiver slipped down toward her chin and she grabbed it before it could fall out of her hand. "Vincent?"

He didn't reply for a number of awkward seconds. "Where's Lily?"

"In...in the bath."

More silence.

Tifa repressed the urge to fidget. "Do you need to talk to her?"

She heard him draw a breath. "No." A pause. "Good night."

"Oh. Good night." And she hung up.

Uncomfortable. Painfully abrupt. 'And why shouldn't he be?' something in her scolded suddenly, even as she was becoming offended. 'You weren't interested in having a conversation with him before, the man who rescued you. The last time you talked to him in the evening, it was to scream and swear because he wouldn't let you kill yourself and wouldn't let you use him for meaningless sexual comfort.'

And then there was no anger. It was slipping away. Nothing there to cushion the shame.

And when Lily got out of the bath a few minutes later, it was to find Tifa in the living room with Vincent's shirt on her lap, looking through the sewing box for some black thread.

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