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“What do you want to play?”
Tifa, three years old, taps the keys as she thinks. The big, beautiful piano is in front of her; she’s sitting on her mother’s lap, watching rapturously as Thea flips through a music book. Tifa can’t read their titles, but she knows the songs as well as the beating of her own heart. “The star one,” Tifa says. “The one that goes—”
“I know the one.” Thea splays her fingers on the keys. Tifa follows along, her fingers tapping soundlessly in the air. “Twinkle, twinkle—”
The piano sits in front of her. It’s far smaller than it had once seemed, but it’s magnificent all the same. Dust coats its surface like snow on a mountain, even and undisturbed—except for the fingerprints on the keys.
“Now,” the instructor says, “what key is this?”
A heatwave is choking the life out of Nibelheim, tempered only by the storm clouds in the sky. A raindrop falls onto her windowsill, shattering the little focus she has; the moment it makes contact, she’s transported back to the worst rainy day she’s ever known, when she’d trailed back into her house to ask for rain boots and found her mother lying face down in the kitchen. The drops grow heavier, taking the heat with them, and Tifa’s hands begin to shake in earnest. The downpour, the gasps, the screams—
“Tifa.”
Blinking, Tifa looks up. The piano is patiently waiting for her; the instructor looks less patient. “It’s—” She struggles to remember where they’d left off. “G?”
“Close,” the instructor acquiesces. “G minor.”
The rain continues to fall. Tifa throws herself into the song, determined to drown it out. But the feeling of smooth ivory beneath her fingers is enough to remind her of her mother—and the notes, and the pedals beneath her feet, and the music sheets, yellowed with age, still bearing the little notes that Thea had written in the margins, marking Tifa’s favourite songs. Her mother’s memory is the very dust Tifa breathes, and there’s simply no escaping something so persistently painful and so heart-wrenchingly beloved.
Tifa broaches the topic with her father every Saturday. She hopes, in vain, that the rye will convince him. It never does.
“I want to quit.”
Her father, deep in his cups, looks up at her and shakes his head. The sheen in his eyes is impossible to miss; it grows thicker every time he looks at her. Dear little Tifa, the very picture of Thea, so much her mother’s daughter and not very much her father’s.
“No.” He lifts the glass to his lips. “You like it, don’t you? You play all the time.”
Tifa hasn’t played the piano solo in months. Only with the instructor. Mrs. Bee is trying to continue her mother’s lessons—but who could ever possibly replace her? Tifa wants to learn from nobody else but Thea, and Thea is dead.
Another week passes. “I want to quit,” Tifa says.
“No.” His eyes are brighter; there’s less in his cup. Still, he persists. “You can’t give up just because it’s hard. Do you want extra tutoring?”
Another instructor can’t solve the issues that make Tifa’s hands shake. She wants to tell him that the grief is too much, that it’s all just too much—but the way he looks at her makes her pause. Hearing the rumble throughout the house is helping him as much as it’s harming her.
Another week passes. “I want to quit,” Tifa says.
“No.” His voice is firmer now. “Do you remember what the doctor said?” he asks, knowing all too well that there is a lot—too much—that Tifa doesn’t remember. Mt. Nibel had robbed her blind. The past still lingers, but the present is much more difficult to grasp. “It might help you with your—”
“Memory,” she mumbles. It wasn’t a guarantee, the doctor said; Tifa remembers that much. But she would do anything to remember what day it is without having to mark the past down on a calendar. “Alright,” she says, rubbing idly at the dent beneath her thick hair. “I’ll keep going.”
Her playing improves. So does her memory. Whether it’s because of the piano or because of time, Tifa can’t say, but the improvement is undeniable; she can play the full length of a song without looking at the sheets. The music is less painful, too, but there’s no joy in it. Only rote and obligation.
The final song she plays in Nibelheim, at the age of sixteen, is a somber melody, not unlike a dirge. The low, rumbling notes sink to the floor, creating a miasma of enduring grief that swirls around her feet. The notes still linger in the air as she leaves the room; they match the morose mood of the SOLDIERs that stand in the village square, waiting for her to lead them up to the reactor in Mt. Nibel.
The song is also a premonition.
Though she won’t realize that for quite some time.
The scavenger’s shop is filled with items from all over Midgar: appliances, houseware, building supplies, clothes and knick-knacks. These sorts of shops are all that exist in Edge at the moment; the scavengers are far too busy rifling through the ruins to organize their findings. Tifa wanders in, looking for a set of dishes, and finds—
“Is that a piano?”
The shopkeeper follows her line of sight. The structure is vaguely piano-shaped, but it’s covered in so many boxes that it could really be anything. “Sure is,” he says proudly. “Scavenged it last week.”
Tifa walks over and lifts a few of the boxes. Every movement reveals a new flaw: chipped wood, scorch marks, deep scratches. The piano might’ve been magnificent once—but not anymore. “Does it work?”
He shrugs. “Not a fuckin’ clue.”
The doorbell rings. The shopkeeper leaves. Tifa lingers, tracing the deep gouges on the cover, before lifting it and hesitantly tapping the keys underneath. The sound that fills the room is jarring, broken, hopelessly out of tune. She leaves it there, barely touched—a shadow of what it once was.
—And she returns the next day.
“So?” The shopkeeper asks. “Does it work?”
Tifa is sitting on the threadbare stool, sorting through a box of fire-scorched sheet music. Everything inside is unbound and out of order; she’ll have to work at it if she wants to assemble anything even remotely resembling a song. “Kind of,” she admits. “It needs repairs.”
“Mmm,” the shopkeeper mutters. “I was hopin’ to sell it for a pretty penny.”
It’s then that Tifa learns about the piano’s great saga: discovered in a dilapidated topside house in Sector 8, it was the only retrievable piece of furniture in the entire structure. The shopkeeper had lobbied a small force to strap it onto his truck, assuming that the piano would fetch a good price—knowing full well, as all of Edge’s residents did, that luxuries were expensive to import in a post-Meteorfall world. Nobody could afford a piano right now, but somebody might scrimp and save to own it in a year’s time.
“Well, you can tell me if it’s worth anythin’,” he grunted, turning back to the front. “Just keep the noise down.”
Day three. It’s a Monday, her day off, and though she has a wealth of things to do—grocery shopping, bar repairs, cleaning—she finds herself back in the scavenger’s shop, armed with an old terry cloth and a bucket of water. The wood has long since lost its sheen, but it glistens regardless, free of dust and grime and the stain of distant, painful memories. Some of its scars will never heal—there isn’t anything Tifa can do about the wood chips—but it’s still beautiful.
The store is silent, save for the rustling at the front. Tifa sits down, her task completed, and stares at the ivory keys. She reaches out to touch one, her fingers lingering an inch from the key, until she hears a familiar sound: the patter of rain, making its own music on a nearby window. It’s a sound that Tifa had scarcely heard when she lived underneath the plate—but in Edge, with its open sky, it’s a welcome sound. A sound of change, of progress, of freedom.
She taps the key. The note lingers with the raindrops, and she can feel it rumbling in her chest. Dust floating in the air, G minor, wet shoes slapping against linoleum tiles, distant screams and sharp, unsteady gasps—
Tifa leaves in a hurry. The storekeeper says something to her, but she can’t hear him; the rumble of thunder drowns out the boom of his voice.
Is it rote? Is it obligation? Is it the call of her past, despite how painful it is? Tifa doesn’t know.
The piano is terribly out of tune. Tifa tries her best to tune it herself, knowing that finding a piano tuner in Edge is a tall order. She lifts the cover, inspects the strings, and finds a screwdriver that works—somewhat—as a tuning lever. By the time she’s done, the notes sound far better than they once did. Not perfect, but better.
Her mother’s piano had been a perfect specimen of an instrument; passed down through Tifa’s family, meticulously cared for, the treasure of a half-dozen generations. This piano is anything but. But when Tifa’s hands finally flow over the keys, tapping out the first few bars of a fire-scorched song, the sound that plays is brilliant, exhilirating, beautiful, despite the odd twangs and off-tune notes—because the fact that it exists at all, despite the horrors it has endured, is what makes it glorious above all others. Perfection isn’t necessary; quality isn’t the be-all-to-end-all; an imperfection is not akin to irreparable ruin. A hastily-repaired instrument can be more beautiful than its perfect sibling, because beauty is not found in a smooth, untouched surface—it is found in resilience, endurance, and a life well lived.
A teardrop falls onto the ivory keys, rolling off and settling in the cracks. Tifa ignores it, sniffling, and finishes the song.
“So,” the shopkeeper drawls. “You wanna buy it?”
Tifa jumps, nearly falling off the bench. She hadn’t heard him approach. “I can’t afford it,” she admits, her smile faltering. A different kind of grief hits her: that somebody else is eventually going to buy this, and all she’ll be left with is humming tunes and tapping notes in the air.
“Ah, well.” he drawls. “Shame.”
“He’s robbin’ us.”
“What do you mean?”
“The fuck do you think I mean? We could buy another bar with that much money!”
“We have enough.”
“I don’t care! We should’ve haggled more!”
A pause. “These things don’t come cheap, Barret.”
“You think I don’t know that?!”
Tifa turns the corner. Cloud and Barret are standing on the scavenger’s shop’s steps, hissing obscenities at each other. Barret lets out a silent “fuck” as he sees her. “What are you doing here?” Tifa asks, eyes wide with surprise.
Barret looks away. “Uh—“
“We’re buying an air conditioner.”
Barret glances back at Cloud. Tifa furrows her brows. Cloud shrugs and points to a half-broken air conditioner in the shop’s window, cleverly placed to entice those suffering from Edge’s suffocating heatwave. “It’s too hot in the bar,” Cloud says. “People are starting to complain.”
Tifa frowns. “Not to me.”
“They’ve been complainin’ to me too,” Barret hastily says. “Ol’ Greg won’t shut the fuck up about it. Probably doesn’t wanna complain to you ‘cause he think you’re pre—”
“So we’re gonna come back tomorrow and buy it,” Cloud interrupts, glancing at Barret. “Right?”
“Yep,” Barret nods. They walk down the short steps, Barret clapping Tifa on the back as he passes her. “See ya.”
Confused, Tifa enters the store. She gives a brief nod to the storekeeper—they have an understanding now—before heading to the back. The piano is waiting for her, and when Tifa plays it, she doesn’t feel pain, or listlessness, or even profound joy—but peace. Calm. Tranquility. Emotions she hasn’t felt since the days she’d known her mother’s embrace.
Eight in the evening comes: closing time. Tifa reluctantly tidies the music sheets and stands up. She hums the tunes, taking them with her as she goes.
The air conditioner is nowhere to be found, of course. But there’s something better waiting for her, nestled between caskets of aging whiskey: the piano.
The bar is empty; Cloud, Barret and Marlene had left early without waking her. She’d felt confused when she’d woken up, and a bit hurt—were they going on an adventure without her?—but now she understands.
With a smile on her face, Tifa sits down and starts to play.
“How I wonder where you are,” Thea sings, her voice trailing off into the warm night. She laughs as Tifa sings with her, adding her own lilt to the end of the song. They sit there for a moment, basking in the summer air, before Tifa asks: “Do you think I can learn to play the piano like you?”
“Not now,” Thea says, taking hold of Tifa’s tiny hands. “But soon. I’ll teach you,” she whispers, “and you’ll be better than me.”
“Better than you?” Tifa looks up at her, eyes wide. “You think so?”
Thea holds her closer, hiding the melancholy of her smile in Tifa’s hair. There’s so much that Thea hasn’t done, that she’ll never do—but Tifa will soar where she has fallen. She knows it. She can feel it in her very soul. Her little girl has nothing but the stars above her. “Yes, my darling,” she whispers, “I do.”