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Outside the wind grew wilder, but Vincent kept his silent vigil before the window. Dusk was falling. It was difficult to tell at first, given the relentless haze of snow, but the sky was beginning to darken above the jagged mountain peaks. The storm showed no signs of stopping.
That settled it. The metal of his gauntlet clinked against the handle of the heavy iron kettle as he took it from the wood stove. The PHS hadn’t rung, and probably wasn’t even getting a signal at the moment, but it was safe to assume that no visitors would be coming to call on him after all.
Even so, he kept an idle eye on the window as he swapped the teapot on the table for the small coffee press on the shelf. Seeing everyone again would have been pleasant, but they would come ‘round eventually and it hardly mattered when. A New Years gathering hadn’t been his idea in the first place. Most of his previous years had been rung in alone, in a shitty Midgar shoebox with the lights off, watching the ball drop out the condominium window. There were a few he’d spent in bars that he couldn’t quite remember, and a few more in the company of people he’d rather forget. One had been in this town, in the big mansion down the hill, barely visible through the snowy haze…
What did a new year matter to a man out of time, anyway?
While the coffee steeped, Vincent slipped into his boots and took his tattered red cloak down from the hook. It wasn’t much against the cold, but for shutting the gate and taking the lantern in, it would do. As soon as he stepped out the door, the frigid cold stung his eyes, and froze his breath on his lips. Yes, it was no weather to come calling in - but halfway to the gate he spotted someone struggling up the hill towards him. The traveler trudged stubbornly through the knee-deep snow on the ground, the icy wind blowing flurries and forcing back the fur-lined rim of her hood.
Tifa lifted her head into the wind anyway, and waved.
“Vincent! H-hey!”
Vincent’s eyes widened. The flimsiness of his cloak be damned, he rushed out to meet her, and then rushed her back inside the house double-time. Tifa was still shivering as he shut the door behind her. Her teeth chattered and she held her arms across herself, but she stood on the mat and stamped her feet to knock off all the snow before doing anything else. He was privately amused as he leaned across her to hang his cloak up again. Just like Tifa to brave a blizzard and then worry over getting the floor wet. Reckless and thoughtful in equal parts.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said, matter-of-fact though not ungrateful. He hung the lantern on its hook, then went back to the wood stove and the coffee press, pouring it black into the mug he’d meant for himself.
“N-nonsense,” Tifa shivered. “It’s just a little s-snow. I’ve been in lots of Mt Nibel blizzards. Though I g-guess it’s been a while… Oh, thank you.”
With both hands, she took the mug Vincent offered her. Her smile was warm as ever, despite her nose and cheeks bitten red by the cold. The coffee was too weak for her, probably, but she wasn’t complaining - she lifted it immediately to her lips for a big, warming gulp. She sighed into the cup and swept her eyes over the place, while Vincent ducked into the bedroom in search of a blanket.
“It’s nice in here,” Tifa concluded, rather generously in Vincent’s opinion. “Cozy. Though if we had all come at once, I think it might have been a bit of a squeeze. Did… did the bigger ones in town get taken?”
“No,” said Vincent. Tifa was probably worried about her house. On whatever occasions Vincent had to venture into town, he made a point of going by her house and Cloud’s, making sure that they were still empty even if their rightful owners didn’t want them back. But Nibelheim attracted no one, not even with its homes ripe for the taking, left abandoned by the Shinra actors paid to lie to passers-by after Meteorfall. There weren’t many people who wanted to live in a place that shouldn’t exist.
“I don’t need much space,” Vincent added, truthfully. The cabin he’d appropriated wasn’t much. Basic furniture, the necessities. Four rooms - three, really, since the kitchen and living room were only divided by a change in flooring. But it suited him fine. He had what he needed and he liked the view of the town outside the window, and that was good enough.
When he returned to the doorway with a flannel blanket tucked under one arm, Tifa was no longer shivering. She had set down her empty mug - she’d drained it fast - and was finally stripping her outer layer off. Vincent unfolded the blanket and waited until she stepped off the mat to drape it wordlessly around her shoulders. Her cheeks were still red.
“Thank you,” Tifa repeated, and allowed herself to be ushered over to the wood-frame couch. Vincent returned to the kitchen rather than joining her. He still wanted coffee.
“This probably isn’t the best way to spend your New Years Eve,” Vincent said, waving idly at the window. Outside, the wind was still howling.
“Well…” Tifa mused, pulling the blanket tighter around her and sinking into the couch. “It’s kind of like visiting home, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“... No, maybe not,” she admitted. She pinched a strand of hair between her fingers and rolled it, grimacing. “It’s still eerie. They put a piano in my room, they knew about that somehow… It wasn’t the same as my mother’s, but still…”
Not just eerie, but thorough - the hallmark of all of Shinra’s bone-chilling plots, as Vincent intimately knew. Tifa stared at one of his barren walls while she trailed off into her own thoughts. Vincent let the silence swell while he scooped more coffee into the cleaned press pot, let her have the moment. His gauntlet clacked against the kettle again, and the sound of it made him think he ought to speak, before her thoughts trailed too far into fire and ruin.
“How’s Midgar?”
“Recovering!” Tifa answered brightly, pulling herself up immediately. Too quickly. Vincent wondered if he shouldn’t have let the silence sit longer. “Things are improving faster than I thought they would, actually. Marlene’s finally starting to get settled again, and school’s starting up in April. I took her shopping early, she can’t wait. Barret’s working with Reeve a lot these days, you’d be surprised at how they’re getting along. And they’re keeping Cloud busy, which I think is just what he needs. Fetching this and that, clearing monsters out of the slums… They’re still planning to come visit, you know, when the weather is better.”
“And… What about you?” Vincent asked, noticing the omission. “What have you been up to?”
Tifa smiled and shrugged. Holding the blanket around her, she got up from the couch, ill-at-ease just resting, and walked the perimeter of the small space.
“Just helping out where I can.” She paused in front of the window, her fingers drumming against her arm. “Hope you don’t mind that I came alone. They said you wouldn’t mind being alone for New Years, but I figured you might, so...”
The others had been right, of course. Still. “It’s good to see you, Tifa.”
The scent of brewing coffee mixed with the smell of wood smoke and wafted through the cabin. A log cracked and popped. The warm sounds of the fire had finally drowned out the sound of the storm, but Tifa still stood at the window, squinting down the hill into the white.
“When it’s like this outside, you can’t even tell,” she mused, sounding suddenly a little hoarse. “It might not be there at all, just the ruin I expected to find. Or it might be there exactly as it was, and this is just like getting snowed in at a friend’s house when I was a kid…”
The wood floor creaked as she stepped away from the window. Tifa paused at the wood strip that marked the threshold to the kitchen where Vincent was standing, as if she wasn’t sure about crossing it. “Vincent, can I ask you something?”
He pulled out a chair at the table for her, inviting her in. “Of course.”
Tifa stayed right where she was, chewing her bottom lip. “Why’d you decide to stay here?”
Vincent studied her. There was some kind of hope hanging on this question, he could see that much from the way she was looking at him. It gave him pause. While he picked another mug off the shelf, he spent a moment digging for the answer she might be looking for, the one that wasn’t so terribly obvious. Nothing came.
He said simply, “There’s nowhere for me to go.”
“You could’ve come to Midgar with us,” Tifa argued, taking a step forward across the threshold. “You used to live there, didn’t you?”
“That was a long time ago,” Vincent said quietly. “A past life. Look at me.” He held out his arms, raised his gauntlet and flexed his fingers, the cruel metal tips flashing gold in the warm light of the cabin. No matter how well he learned to work around them, their purpose was as clear as their strangeness. A wry smile tugged at his thin lips - an old habit. He always seemed to smile when the topic turned grim. “I don’t belong there. The world has moved on while I’ve been standing still.”
Tifa frowned at him, her shoulders sinking. No, it hadn’t been the answer that she was looking for. Still, she stepped slowly across the threshold and sunk into the chair he had pulled out for her. Vincent pulled out another across from her to join her at the table, and kept talking while he poured his mug.
“It’s not that I mean to stay here. I don’t belong here, either. Or anywhere, except perhaps back in that old coffin. When we were still fighting Meteor, I had always thought that once my work was finished I would return to it and let myself rot once and for all, but…”
But the world had changed even more than he had expected. All those New Years alone in a shoebox. Back then, he never would have imagined himself here, sitting in sanctuary next to the warmth of the fire, across the kitchen table from the warmth of a dear friend.
The way Tifa smiled at him put the fire to shame. “I’m glad you picked out a cabin instead.”
Vincent caught himself smiling again. Maybe he didn’t only smile when it was grim. With the back of his fingers, he nudged the fresh cup of coffee across the table to her.
“Oh… You sure?” Tifa asked, looking down at the mug.
“Mmhmm,” Vincent nodded. He could always make another. “You can’t have enjoyed the last one, you drank it so fast.”
Tifa chuckled like she’d been caught and took the mug, while Vincent propped his elbows up on the table, folding his human hand over his metal one and ruminating behind the both of them. “I suppose Nibelheim is a step out of time, too. Maybe that’s your answer. Sorry there isn’t a better one.”
“... No, I understand,” Tifa said softly. She dropped her eyes to her mug. “Midgar might be recovering, but Seventh Heaven is still gone. Broken and burnt up just like Nibelheim was supposed to be. It’s hard to feel like there’s somewhere I really belong, except for where everyone else is…”
Another silence swelled, and this time, Vincent let it be. Tifa looked up long enough to flash a tight, apologetic smile. It looked like she had been about to say something until she saw him waiting patiently for her across the table. Her eyes dropped back to her hands around the coffee mug. In the space he left for her, Tifa gathered her courage and her sadness together. When she finally lifted her head to look at him again, she wasn’t smiling anymore. A calm sort of determination had come over her instead, one that let her look into the naked truth that she had somehow glimpsed across the table.
“I think maybe I didn’t come here for the New Year just to see you. Maybe I came to see Nibelheim… to see if there was any home left for me, anywhere.” Slowly, her eyes drifted back to the window. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be, Tifa,” Vincent answered softly. “And… Take your time.”
How did one reclaim a home? How, if you’d never felt you had one, and how once you’d had two of them stolen from you? As always, Vincent had no answers, however much he now wanted to share them. He reached his good hand across the table, let the tips of his fingers brush against hers. At least here, he could make space and stillness to look for them, however much the snow piled outside around them.
“I did think about coming back, you know, but I don’t think I could stay here,” Tifa continued. She pulled her eyes away from the window and fixed them on him again, looking a little lighter for the burden she had shared. She slid her hand overtop of his, squeezing it gratefully. “Still, I want to thank you. I feel better knowing that someone real lives here. That you’re watching over it all…” Her knuckles curled against her mouth and she laughed into them. “Though, I think I’d feel even better if you were somewhere I could see you more often!”
“Maybe once you’ve figured out where your new home really is, then,” Vincent said, managing another small smile.
Tifa’s chair scraped against the floor as she stood, collecting the kettle and the coffee press as she went. After dropping the kettle back onto the stove, she pulled another mug down from the shelf and dropped it in front of Vincent, then went to empty out the grounds. The cup he’d given her, she clearly meant to repay.
On the wall clock behind her, the minute hand twitched forward. The moment was still and unassuming, so much so that she hadn’t even noticed it. No drinks or fireworks or flashing lights or revellers singing together in the square. Still, it was the least alone Vincent had ever been when the clock struck midnight.
“Happy New Year, Tifa.”
“Oh!” Tifa turned, her eyes shifting from the clock on the wall back to Vincent. She moved back to the table and raised her empty glass, for lack of anything else. Vincent raised his, too. Tifa laughed, and the kettle started to sing. “Happy New Year, Vincent.”