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zanykingmentality · 11 months

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title: we didn’t get it right, but love we did our best

pairing: tifa lockhart / aerith gainsborough

words: 4.3k words

tags: Major Character Death, Apocalypse, End of the World, mix of modern and canon divergence au, Social Commentary, Angst and Tragedy, Hurt/Comfort, can be read without romance, Past Tifa Lockhart/Cloud Strife

summary:

First, the world ends.

Then, Tifa meets Aerith.

[AO3]

The world ends on a day just like this one. This one, and every day before it.

Tifa is tending her bar. As always. She woke up this morning with a crick in her neck that abates just a bit after some careful massaging. Despite everything, she’s not really a morning person; the sun takes time to seep into her skin. Despite it all, she heads out to run errands at a prompt nine in the morning to get everything set up for Seventh Heaven’s noontime opening.

The thing they don’t tell you, when you try to start something yourself: there is never enough money. Not for the food, for the drinks, for the damn building. Maintenance costs run her out of house and home, into a dingy Stargazer Heights apartment furnished with little else than her bed and a decrepit television set that doesn’t even connect to cable. The room always tastes like static and dust, but Tifa loves it fiercely, because she has no other choice.

This particular morning, she stops by the grocery store to stock up on eggs and canned soup, and a few impulse purchases that she really does believe she’ll eat in the next week—a promise she makes every week and only sometimes follows through on.

(Of course, the irony in this is that there is no week ahead—the time remaining is markedly less than even a day. The soup boils and burns in the fires, and the eggs become soft and yolky, dripping from the fridge.)

After that, she swings by the home decor store to buy new glassware to replace the ones that broke this past month. The store can be described only as the world contained in aisles decorated with pillows reminding one to live, laugh, and love. Harsh, ambient lighting makes the whole store hum an irritating D-sharp. It would be so easy, she does not think, to get lost in these aisles, to be a restless child wandering off, stepping into the between spaces where there is nothing. Oh, there’s the glassware section.

She could easily order the glasses online, but she likes to pick out all her items herself, test their weight in her hands, their smudge resistance, their rigidity. Maybe one of these days she’ll settle for cups made of more plastic than glass, but for now, she’s a stickler for quality, and too much plastic in glassware taints the taste of the drink. She’s been doing this long enough to learn little tricks like that, and hasn’t yet fallen so far as to start sacrificing quality for cost.

She brings everything back home, stows the groceries in the fridge, and lines up the glasses into boxes stuffed with cut-up Styrofoam that she’s accumulated from old packages. Needy fingers make do; she doesn’t always say this, but she believes it, wholeheartedly. The television blares static as she lines up the glasses, humming to herself a tune only she can find in its familiar buzz. Something that sounds vaguely like the opening song of a cartoon she watched when she was little, huddled on the carpet with Cloud and her favorite worn-out stuffed animal. Back then her eyes didn’t burn if they were open for too long, and her hands were always sticky with dirt or sugar.

The glasses are packed up all too quickly, and eleven looms just around the corner. With it comes opening, checking stock, mixing drinks. Another long day, just like the one before it, and the one before that, and the one before that.

That’s okay. Tifa likes what she does. A little bit of happiness in dark times—that’s what she promises, mixing cocktails to take the edge off. So even though it’s tiring, all the upkeep, the obligatory smile, the weird comments from patrons—it’s good work, it’s necessary work, and she does it all to make things just a little brighter, in spite of everything.

Seventh Heaven, on the outside, appears shabby: built mostly out of wood and scrounged-together pieces and located right in the center of the neighborhood, furnished with a big sign Tifa painted herself back when she’d first decided she wanted to be a bar owner and a porch for the people who need a breeze with their booze. She spends the rest of the time until opening polishing the countertop until it shines and reorganizing the lowest shelf of spirits for easy access. The Friday night crowds are the largest, and their drink preferences vary more wildly than on any other night; the shelf is crowded with all sorts of alcohol, chasers, and cocktail ingredients.

Halfway through, Barret—her partner in work, among other things—comes in with his daughter Marlene, who he sets at the bar to play with a stuffed monkey and watch the old sitcom Tifa’s left playing on the TV monitor set up on the wall. Barret then hunches over the bar in the seat next to her, his prosthetic arm thunking heavy on the wooden surface.

“All good?” Tifa asks, turning from the liquor shelf.

“Yeah,” Barret grumbles. “Been tough around town these days. Folks’re gettin’ antsy.”

“And no word from the Shinra rep?”

Barret scoffs. “‘Course not.”

The tragic irony in Barret’s work—and, by extension, Tifa’s work as his consultant-slash-friend—is that he is in many ways the de facto father of their area of the city, but that he is utterly unwilling to play the games of bureaucracy. For the past week, Shinra, the oh-so-godly corporation lording over the city like its own lawless government, has put a pause on all food shipments to the poorer areas of the city, leaving so many people to fend for themselves for food and drink. Sure, it’s driven up business for Seventh Heaven (for now, while people can afford it), and Tifa’s lucky to have Cloud do the legwork in getting supplies when she can afford him, but… well. She hates the hungry look in everyone’s eyes more than anything. The hopelessness.

“Would you get the sign for me, Marlene?” Tifa asks gently, and Marlene nods enthusiastically, happy to have something to do. She jumps down from the barstool and scampers over to the door, where she flips the sign from CLOSED to OPEN. Barret huffs, breathes in heavy and slow, calming the fire in him, as Marlene comes back to his side.

“We’ll be in the back,” Barret says, standing.

“Sure,” Tifa says. Barret makes a lot of the food when he’s not running himself ragged in meetings or distributing resources, and there’s another room back there with a TV and a box of toys for Marlene. A bar is hardly a good place for a child, but the two of them make do.

Barret takes Marlene through the door to the right, and they disappear from sight. Tifa will see them in a bit, once the orders start coming in.

The first customers trickle in—a regular with someone new in tow, a salaryman with a worn briefcase, the woman who always staggers in at opening and stumbles out at closing—and Tifa shuts her brain off, switching into customer service mode. An easy smile on her lips, a bit of sunshine at her fingertips.

The best-worst thing about being the proprietress of a bar with hardly any employees is that Tifa gets neither breaks nor days off. Which she doesn’t really mind, all things considered. A day off means time to think, which means she’ll get in her head about all the things that should be happening that aren’t, or all the things that shouldn’t be happening and are: gasoline-tinged air from permanently whirring machines, mako deficiency in the planet, people with sunken eyes and gaunt cheeks unsure of their next meal. Ash in the air from distant fires, laced with hopelessness. She hates it. She hates all of it.

Cloud comes in around five, after what she assumes is his latest job. He hasn’t told her much about it; hell, he doesn’t tell her much at all if she doesn’t pry, and that was true even while they were dating all those years ago. It’s not all bad, though—he’s just started to look her in the eyes again.

“Hey,” he says, monotone, ignoring all the tables of people staring at him in favor of beelining to the bar. Cloud’s got quite the reputation in these parts—he takes on any odd job for a price, which makes him invaluable. He’s the reason they’re not all dying of starvation, and the reason monsters rarely foray into their sector anymore.

“What’ll it be?” Tifa asks, wearing the smirk she saves specially for him. It’s a habit from all the years they’ve known each other.

“Surprise me.”

“You never like when I do that.” Nevertheless, Tifa turns and plucks out bottles for a new magnum opus.

“I’ve never said that.” She doesn’t have to look to know he’s pouting in that way only he does, half-indignant, half-scowl. Tifa shakes his drink up and pours it: a vaguely pink concoction tinged with lilac extract and citrus, hardened by vodka. This one’s off-menu, one of her experiments. Cloud takes one sip and his nose scrunches up before relaxing hurriedly.

“Not your style?” Tifa asks.

“It’s not that,” he says. She knows him well enough to tell when he’s being polite and when he’s not, so she knows it’s not that he doesn’t like it. It’s that he’s used to eating gruel and protein bars, so anything with flavor can be too much. She knows this, and waits for him to say it. “It’s just… different.”

“Good different or bad different?”

He thinks for a moment, and says, “Good different.”

“I’m glad.” She rests her elbows on the bar and leans over. “How was work?”

“Fine. Today I tracked down someone’s chickens.”

It’s more than she’s gotten out of him in years. Some things do change. “Sounds fun.”

“Eh.” Cloud shrugs and takes another sip of his drink.

“So? Got any plans for the night?”

Cloud scoffs. “No. Do I ever?”

“Sounds about right.”

Another customer calls Tifa’s attention, and she’s back in work mode.

Seven comes and goes, and with it comes the arrival of the rest of their friends: Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge. The three of them crowd around a table and watch as Barret emerges, haggard, from the back, Marlene sitting in the crook of his elbow. The two of them take the remaining seat at the table and cheering breaks out among them.

“Another day down!” Jessie cheers.

“And another day tomorrow!” Wedge adds.

Back at the bar, Cloud sighs. “Are they ever quiet?”

“I’m just surprised you’re still here to see it,” Tifa says. “Usually you’re home by now.”

Cloud scowls. “I don’t know. I got a bad feeling tonight.”

His intuition is usually right, which makes Tifa apprehensive. All those years in the military, she guesses, honing his senses for danger. Not for the first time, she wishes they lived in a world where Cloud had never sacrificed his body for war, and she had never had to run from a burning village.

She shuts that line of thinking down quickly.

“Tifa, baby!” a regular calls out, clearly high on more than drink. Maybe life. Maybe substances. Not Tifa’s business, anyway. “You doin’ anything tonight?”

“Tending the bar, Jimmy,” Tifa replies, “as always.”

“You oughta get out more,” he says. “See the world.”

“Maybe, if I can find the time.”

“Time’s bogus. Where’re you gonna find it if you don’t make it yourself?”

There’s truth there, the kind that makes Tifa uncomfortable. She laughs hollowly, and Cloud glares until Jimmy plops his forehead down on the bartop, spent.

By eleven, the bar’s mostly cleared out—Cloud’s gone home, as have Jessie, Wedge, Barret, and Marlene, leaving Biggs behind—and there are just a few people left, sad or drunk or both. Biggs has replaced Tifa behind the bar, giving her a chance to take a seat at one of the barstools.

“It’s weird,” Biggs says. “I get the feeling tonight is the last time I’ll see anyone.”

“That is weird,” Tifa says.

“I told you.” Biggs crosses his arms over his chest, his leather harness shifting with the movement. Tifa’s never understood why he wears that, but she supposes it does look good.

Tifa closes her eyes, bracing herself against the bartop. Her eyelids feel heavy; they always do this time of night, even though her schedule is such that she stays up this late every night.

It’s in this brief moment of peace that the first explosion sounds. The entire building shudders, down to the earth it’s built into. Tifa lurches forward; Biggs catches her, extending one hand to catch her shoulder before her face hits the wooden counter.

“What was that?” he asks, looking at the door. The patrons who aren’t dead drunk have crowded the windows, staring outside. One of them opens the door.

“I don’t know.” Tifa stands, wobbly, and makes her way to the door.

Outside is chaos. Fire rains down from the sky, taking with it chunks of metal and burning wood. The city is in disarray: on fire, buildings caved in, people running around screaming, searching for shelter where there is none. Their buildings are not built sturdy enough to withstand this kind of carnage. Tifa’s chest feels tight; she can’t breathe.

“Jesus Christ,” Biggs whispers, right behind her. She can practically hear his mind racing a mile a minute—she and Biggs are too similar in too many ways, and their capacity for worry is one such example.

It’s impossible to tell what the source of the destruction is. Where did the burning start? Where do the fires end? No matter where Tifa looks, there’s smoke and ash and flames, and screaming.

“Get down!” Biggs shouts, pulling Tifa down to the wood of the porch as a chunk of burning metal flies over their heads and into the neighboring building.

“What the…” Tifa can only stare for a moment before her entire body starts trembling.

The wind picks up, whirling all around them, spewing ash and dust every which way. There’s no shelter—there’s no running.

“We’ve got to make sure everyone’s okay!” Biggs shouts over the noise, the din of dying.

“Right!” Tifa nods and takes his hand, letting him lead the way, bracing them against the wind. She doesn’t trust her feet to carry her without support, and Biggs is always steadying, even in the worst of circumstances. They shove their way through the mob of people bemoaning their lack of shelter options, since their homes are all made of wood and cheap metals, easily crumbled in natural disasters. Not like the skyscrapers in the center of town, or the Shinra live-in workers’ homes, all hard steel and indestructible titanium. They’re probably fine.

The first house they stop by is Jessie’s; it takes longer than either of them would like, pushing through a multitude of forces. The door is wide open, and two of the theater girls who live there are huddled under the table. Jessie, however, is nowhere to be found, the buildings on either side of her place having crumbled, and the street decorated in ash. Tifa and Biggs exchange concerned looks and continue on.

Next, they find Wedge’s place, now devoid of the cats it usually crawls with. On a normal day, one can hardly reach Wedge’s front door without being assaulted by at least two cats playing guard duty. Today, not only are there none in sight, there is also the marked lack of Wedge himself anywhere, either; when Biggs pounds his fist against the door, there’s no response. Tifa kicks the door down: they find all the lights off and the inside strangely silent.

The last place they look is Stargazer Heights, the apartment building where Tifa and Cloud both live. But…

The entire building is in ruins. The second floor’s caved in, a rusty chunk of steel laying where Tifa’s room used to be, and the doors on the first floor have all flown off their hinges, exposing their crumbling interiors.

Tifa falls to her knees.

“Cloud…” she gasps.

“He’s fine,” Biggs reassures her, a comforting hand on her shoulder. “He’s strong. I’m sure he got out before…”

He swallows, not able to finish the sentence.

It’s not fair. Tifa’s chest burns. There are no answers to what’s happening, no understanding, except that they’re dying because the planet is tired and taking it out on tired people—

“I’m gonna take a closer look,” Biggs says.

“Okay.” Tifa’s voice sounds small and helpless, even to her, the single word snatched away by the wind.

“Be right back.” Biggs dashes off toward the building’s husk.

It’s not fair. That’s the only thing Tifa can think, the sentence running through her head over and over like somehow it contains any answers. It doesn’t. Life isn’t fair and money isn’t fair and the planet isn’t fair. And death isn’t fair.

Then when she looks up, the wind whips a plate of metal encased in flames from its course, careening it toward where Tifa sits, helpless. She could do something about that. She could roll away or kick at it. Anything.

She doesn’t.

There isn’t any fighting a dying planet taking its revenge.

Her eyes open to blank nothingness. White space.

Tifa’s head hurts. Was it all a dream? Did she lose it and down all her stock herself?

But no—something tells her everything is real, and she’s—

White spreads out everywhere, reflecting on itself, creating strange rippling light. There seems to be a floor, but that’s white too, impossible to differentiate from anything else. Tifa’s standing on it; that’s all she knows.

And in front of her sits a girl.

A girl in a red dress, the neck cut low and dancing over her chest, spaghetti straps holding it to her shoulders. The hem is laid out on the floor, fanned out around the girl’s knees, which are folded under her.

The girl’s name is Aerith. Tifa doesn’t know her.

She doesn’t know how she knows that name.

“Hey there,” Aerith says. “You’re here.”

“Do you know me?”

Aerith smiles, bittersweet. “I think so.”

“Oh.” Both of them are quiet for a moment, before Tifa finally asks, “Where are we?”

“That’s a tough question to answer.” Aerith brushes nonexistent dust off her dress, smoothing out its folds. “We’re somewhere in between the planet and the conscious world. Something like that.”

“The planet…” Tifa looks around, like answers will make themselves known, but there is still nothing to be found in any direction. “So it was a natural disaster?”

Aerith cocks her head. She looks like she’s listening to something, closing her eyes and running a hand over the floor. Then, she opens her eyes and says, “Yes and no. The thing is, the planet is like us—with boundaries and needs. And when it’s being killed, well…”

“No one in that town did anything wrong,” Tifa says hotly. She takes a step toward Aerith, who doesn’t even flinch. “It’s those—those jerks at Shinra who—”

“I know,” Aerith says. “I know.”

Frustrated, Tifa lets out a strangled noise and buries her face in her hands. It feels so helpless. She feels so trapped.

“So?” When she finally speaks again, her voice sounds hoarse and damaged. Like something is broken. “Am I dead?”

“Something like it,” Aerith says. “When we die, we return to the planet. The lifestream.”

“Right,” Tifa says bitterly. It’s not that she doesn’t have any appreciation for this spiritual crap; she just thinks she and her friends don’t deserve to die for the wrongdoings of the people at the top, the people who don’t care about anything but their profit margins for this quarter.

“The world is ending,” Aerith says. It surprises Tifa less than it maybe should. “If it helps. No one is making it out alive.”

Tifa grinds her teeth. “It doesn’t help.”

“Sorry.”

“And you? Are you dead, too?”

“I’m an Ancient,” Aerith says, “which means I’m just as much a part of the planet alive as I am dead.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

This is so frustrating. “So I’m dead, but I’m not dead. And everyone I care about is also dead but not dead. And I’m stuck here with… with…”

“With me,” Aerith says. “Not for long. Once the chaos on top stops, we’ll stop being conscious and join the planet for real.”

“That’s horrible,” Tifa informs her.

“I know that.”

“There’s nothing we can do?”

Aerith shakes her head.

All the fight leaves Tifa’s body. Her hands relax, leaving biting crescents in her palms where her nails had dug in too hard. She sits down, swallowing down the promise of tears.

“Hey,” Aerith says, “it’s okay.”

“It’s not,” Tifa replies.

“Okay, you’re right. It’s not. But you’re not alone.”

Tifa takes in a shaky breath. At least she’s not alone, and she knows she’ll go out with dignity because propriety states she will not cry in front of someone she barely knows.

“Why don’t we spend our last moments alive remembering all the good parts?” Aerith suggests.

“The good parts?”

“Yeah!” She scooches closer to Tifa and shifts to cross her legs in front of her, heedless of the social rule that dictates pretty girls in pretty dresses should not sit in such ways. “Like, for example, here’s a happy moment for me. I lived with my mom, and I got to spend a lot of time growing flowers. One time I got so distracted talking to them that I fell asleep, and my mom came to find me. When she woke me up… I’ve never felt as loved as I did then.”

“That’s sweet,” Tifa says.

“I’m sure you’ve got something like that.”

She has to rack her brain a bit, but in the end, the question isn’t as hard as Tifa initially thought. She tells Aerith about climbing to the top of the windmill with Cloud as teenagers and tracing patterns into the stars, creating their own constellations that looked nothing like the names they gave them. It was one of the few things to do in a village situated in the middle of nowhere. Aerith smiles at the story, her eyes never leaving Tifa’s face.

“Tell me another,” Aerith breathes.

So Tifa tells her about the bar. About cleaning up Seventh Heaven, buying the building and fixing it up, what it took to build the perfect atmosphere. Her favorite drinks, her experiments. Her regulars. The way she could watch as the stress smoothed away from their brows for just a few short hours every night. The way she believed herself a bit of sunshine for people in the dark.

“I heard about your bar,” Aerith says.

“You did?”

“The planet tells me a lot of things.” There’s that bittersweet smile on Aerith’s mouth again. “I think the idea was we served similar purposes, in our own ways. Me with my flowers. You with your bar.”

Tifa blinks at her. “The planet told you about me?”

“Tangentially.” Aerith lays her hands in her lap, fidgeting with her thumbs. “I always wanted to visit.”

Tifa’s about to tell her to drop by whenever she wants when she remembers why they’re here in the first place. So, instead, she says, “I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be. I should’ve…” Aerith trails off, and that thought is never finished. She changes gears. “Tell me more about it? About the people. What it looked like. How it worked.”

So Tifa tells her. Everything. About Barret and his knack for sniffing out the right spices, the tiredness that never seemed to dull the warmth in his eyes. Marlene and her stuffed toys, her favorite shows. About Jessie and Biggs and Wedge, a trio unlike any other, who came and went like the wind when their schedules allowed. About Cloud and the scowl he used to hide how he felt.

She tells her about the tables, the glasses. The colors of the drinks. The string lights Tifa hung up for special events, like Jessie’s birthday and Halloween. The arcade machine against the wall and the dartboard in the corner. The regulars who flirted with her, and the regulars who cursed at her. Aerith listens like there has never been anything more interesting, like Tifa’s handing her an in-depth playbook to a successful life.

“Thank you,” Aerith says, when Tifa’s run out of things to talk about, her throat gravelly and hoarse, “for telling me all that.”

“Yeah,” Tifa says. Something unfurls in her chest; something she doesn’t have a name for. “Sure.”

Aerith looks up into the nothingness. “We don’t have much time left.”

“I didn’t get to learn anything about you!” Tifa protests. “That’s not…”

“Tifa,” Aerith says softly, though Tifa can’t remember ever giving her name, “Thanks. For once, you let me know what it’s like to really be human.”

“You are human,” Tifa insists. “You’re just as alive as me. As anyone.”

She doesn’t know why this is so important to her. Why it matters so much that Aerith knows it.

“It means a lot for you to say it,” Aerith says. Static crowds the corners of Tifa’s vision. Is that an indicator of the end? The finality of everything?

“Aerith,” Tifa gasps, desperate. She doesn’t want to die. Why did she spend all this time recounting her life? What did it matter, in the end?

“I think, Tifa,” Aerith says, “in another world, we would’ve been close friends.”

“More than that,” Tifa assures her.

Aerith’s responding smile is dazzling. Perfectly happy, at peace, her eyes glimmering like polished emeralds. “More than that,” she repeats.

The static bleeds everywhere. The whiteness falls away. Aerith throws her arms around Tifa, holding her close.

Around them, the world ends.

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