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Tifa has never known something to be so powerful.
It happens late in the evening. She is walking beside Cloud, sated and deliciously full from their dinner, and feeling beautiful in her dress because he had said that word again as he looked at her. Beautiful.
It is nothing spectacular, this shared evening together. It shouldn’t be, not after everything they’ve been through with each other.
Cloud glances at her with a tiny smirk on his lips, eyes knowing in the way they fall across her face. They linger against her like the press of his mouth against her neck. She can almost feel all the kisses they’ve shared in that one look, the gleam in his eyes bright and decadent. The low light of the street only enhances their color, and she can see every flicker of blue and fleck of iridescent green. They are a clash of land and sea, and he’s drowned her with them before. She thinks he knows what he can do. His smirk says it all.
She tries to match the small turn of his lips, but she can’t quite make it. She is too overwhelmed—the date, his presence, the thrum between them. It hooks her throat, and it is indescribably heavy as it cradles against her skin. Goosebumps form along her arms and legs, and her ankle almost wobbles as they continue their walk.
“Did you have fun?” he asks her as they pass under a streetlight.
It’s a simple question. She wants to say yes but even that truth seems…lackluster.
“I always have fun with you,” she rasps. She swallows against the sudden dryness in her throat. He rewards her with a smile, and the hook on her tightens further until she feels it in her stomach.
Their bodies are close as they make their way past closed boutiques. Their hands brush as they turn a corner. It is a whisper of skin, her knuckle on his thumb, and it happens again and again. Each time is an electric shock, and Tifa thinks she must be out of her mind. She bites the inside of her lip, realizes she is staring at their hands and their brief passes over each other, and looks out toward the other couples along the sidewalk.
It is silly, she thinks. Silly to fervently want something so small as his hand in her own in the public space of the nighttime. She’s never cared for physical touch—affection displayed but only for each other. For the possession of it, showing the world what they are by a simple interlocking of fingers.
It’s silly. She shakes her head at herself, beginning to pull her hand away from him. She’s never wanted it so much before now, before this moment. Cloud doesn’t care, nor does he show, any type of physical affection outside of their home. When they had been saving the world, it had been different. He’d grab her hand to dodge a stream of bullets or a flash of magic. There were bolstering hugs, a press of his palm in the small of her back to ask if she was okay or to remind her to be strong. Even the deepest, most intimate touch in the Lifestream, their souls weaving into one another, was necessary at the time, but it also opened up so much more. It could never be closer than that.
It’s changed, now. There is always an occasional brush of a hand against her arm, a nudge against her shoulder, a palm on her back. Completely unambiguous things that are never preceded by a battle or some action that might risk one of their lives.
Tifa has been perfectly happy with the change until…until now. How it suddenly affects her in this way bothers her. Her mind muddles, and her breathing is almost labored. Dumb, she thinks, as their fingers make another pass. Her stomach twists into an empty knot. Dumb and silly. She does not need his hand to know how much they mean to one another.
Their knuckles knock together.
She’s never needed it.
The backs of their hands remain connected. They swing as they walk. Cloud carefully slips his bare fingers in the spaces of hers, and it is sudden—so sudden and warm. It floods into her throat, and her heart pounds beneath her ribcage.
She stares at their interlocked hands. “We’re in public,” she says, those words the only ones she can find.
Cloud simply smiles, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. The action tugs on her hand and pulls her closer to his side. “Not many people around.”
The warmth moves from her throat into her limbs. She is one blazing ball full of heat and happiness. She thinks, for a moment, she might even rival the sun.
“You’re right,” she breathes.
It is powerful—one of the most powerful things she has ever felt. The old fears, that grief and anxiety, that heart-pounding, bone-shaking despair and hopelessness from days past—all of those things that were once so all-consuming, every single one, is erased under the streetlights and the cracked, cobblestone sidewalks. Under the weight of his hand, this emotion topples all else. She is on the precipice of forever, without any stress for the next day, the next week or year, and this is it.
She loves him.
That’s all she needs.