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Tifa woke to the uncanny silence she recognized as the last few moments before dawn. It was a liminal sort of space, a half-lit world perched on the edge of becoming. Wary of disturbing it, she didn’t move right away; perhaps if she closed her eyes again and tried for a few more minutes of sleep, she would wake up in her hotel room at the Gold Saucer instead of a tent in the jungle. But she knew better than to try. There was no slow rise to the surface out here. No easing into wakefulness. She slept like the dead, then not at all.
Tifa cast a glance at the empty bedroll next to hers. She frowned, pulled on a jacket and her boots, and slipped from the tent.
Smoke drifted gently from the remains of their campfire. It had been banked the night before and now she crouched next to it, carefully feeding bits of dried leaves and small twigs to the embers until a flame flickered to life. She had Fire materia equipped to her gloves, but she preferred doing it this way. Once the new log caught, she sat back, hugged her knees to her chest, and counted the breaths until the day truly began.
Cid was the first to emerge from the other tents. He nodded at her as he lit the cigarette waiting between his lips, then staggered away for some privacy. Tifa had a pot of coffee nestled in the coals by the time he returned. Cowboy coffee, he had called it once. Bitter and strong enough to give a Malboro heart palpitations. Even her slums-coffee tongue had balked at the first taste, but she had come to savor it just like she savored everything else about these quiet campfire mornings.
She and Cid sipped their coffee in companionable silence. They were often the first ones awake (not counting Vincent, who never really slept) and she liked that he didn’t press for conversation. The scent of nicotine, coffee, and woodsmoke was familiar to her, comforting in a way she hadn’t expected. One by one her friends emerged from their tents. Barret first, with his coal miner’s schedule so like Cid’s; Cloud next, looking so bleary-eyed that Tifa suspected he was only awake because Cid and Barret had made too much noise leaving the tent the three of them shared. Tifa passed him a cup of coffee which he accepted with a nod and a murmur of thanks. He took a cautious sip, grimaced, then took another more deliberate slug that made him shudder. Tifa half-expected Barret or Cid to tease him for being a coffee snob, but neither seemed to notice. Their gazes kept slipping from the campfire to the jungle surrounding them. Scanning. Waiting. Her hands clenched around her cup.
Vincent appeared a few moments later, seemingly from thin air. They all watched him, expectant, but it wasn’t until he took a seat next to the fire that he spoke.
“That way,” he said, nodding towards the east. “A dozen yards or so.”
Together they turned their heads in the direction he had indicated. She hadn’t gone far, then. Some of the tension drained from the men next to her. Tifa wished she could say the same.
It was Barret’s turn to make breakfast. The rest of them broke down camp while he cooked. The methodical folding, rolling, and packing of their supplies was a welcome but temporary distraction from the restlessness that buzzed in her limbs. What she really needed was to move, but they couldn’t do that until Aerith returned from wherever she had wandered off to.
They didn’t talk about it anymore. No one would dare let the word pass their lips, but they felt it all the same. Obsessed.
Barret’s oatmeal was topped with nuts and raisins, the way he always made it for Marlene. Tifa frowned at the motionless body of Cait Sith while she ate. The food sat in her stomach like a lead brick.
Aerith didn’t return until after they had finished eating and packing. She had dark circles beneath her eyes. Yuffie, uncharacteristically quiet that morning, handed Aerith the bowl of oatmeal they had saved for her, but Aerith pushed it away.
“You need to eat,” Cloud told her, and though his voice was soft, Aerith winced.
“No,” she said. “We’re getting closer. We need to go.”
Tifa wanted to mother her, to tell her that she needed to eat. She wanted to scold her for wasting their carefully rationed food. She wanted to hug her. She wanted to reach out and shake her, to demand that she slow down, for her own sake as well as everyone else’s. More than anything, Tifa wanted to smother the conflicting thoughts in her head, so she stepped over to her friend and held out the staff and the backpack she had packed for her. Aerith took them without a word. She looked feverish. Exhausted. Tifa forced a smile.
“Then let’s go.”
They fell into a single-file line as they walked. Aerith led the way, driven onward by the increasingly frantic energy that had taken hold of her since they learned about the Temple and what awaited them there. Cloud followed close behind, and Tifa took her place in third while the others spread out behind her.
When they first set out from Midgar, Tifa had been captivated by every new town and landscape. There were moments when she would forget about the mission, moments when she would catch a glimpse of something breathtaking and she could pretend she was on a vacation with friends. Costa del Sol had been like that, and Cosmo Canyon. The woodlands, too, had fascinated her — trees so tall she had to crane her neck to see the tops, noisy with birdsong and the creak and crash of branches in the wind. She fell in love with the scent of sap and petrichor, with the crunch of leaves and sticks beneath her feet as they hiked. It made the pack on her back feel lighter, and her heart grew lighter with it.
Her first encounter with a tropical forest had been on their way to Gongaga. She had been intimidated by the dense, damp greenery and the oppressive heat. The birds didn’t sing so much as squawk and shout, and the chirp of insects she had enjoyed in the more temperate woodlands was replaced by an unending screech that remained lodged in her ears for days after they left. But she quickly learned that the jungle had its own joys to share – pops of bright color, fruits so sweet she could still taste them on her tongue. What the birds lacked in musical talent they made up for a thousand times over in the flash of vibrant feathers and elaborate dances. The insects were noisy but they were jewel-bright, too. By the time they moved on, Tifa loved the jungle as much as she loved the other tree-filled places they had been.
The jungle surrounding the Temple was different. It was loud, far louder than Gongaga’s jungle had been, and it stank of decay. The trees were taller than any she’d ever seen, with dark green canopies laced together so tightly that they formed a single, unbroken mass hundreds of feet above them. There were small pockets of beauty — strange flowers with roots that dangled in the open air, plants that contained whole ecosystems in the pools of water that collected between their leaves — but they weren’t enough to banish the feeling that she was back in the Undercity, struggling to survive beneath the Plate. The thick layer of leaves and loamy soil left no trace of their footprints, no indication that they had been there at all. The jungle surrounding the Temple of the Ancients was unconcerned with their presence. Uncaring. The pack on her back grew heavier with every step.
A flash of dappled sunlight reflected off the sword fastened to Cloud’s back and caught Tifa in the eye, startling her from her thoughts. Up ahead, Cloud had moved to Aerith’s side, one of his arms wrapped around her shoulders as if to steady her. Aerith tried to wave him away, shaking her head and muttering something that the jungle snatched away before it could reach Tifa’s ears. Slowing her pace, she watched as Cloud caught Aerith’s hand and held it. Watched as he leaned closer and softly murmured back. The concern was clear as day on his face, his brows furrowed over eyes that still struck Tifa as wrong . The wrong color. The wrong Cloud.
She averted her eyes, feeling like an intruder. Unwilling to move any closer, she shuffled her feet. Turned to check on the rest of the party as they made their way up the hill, but the foliage was too dense for her to see the end of the line. Again, she had the sense that the jungle had swallowed them up. The weight on her back nearly brought her to her knees.
When she was young, before her life had been upended by Shinra and Sephiroth and the continued consequences of her own inaction, Tifa had been the pupil of a great martial arts Master. Her desire to learn had been driven first by the desire to be strong. To protect herself. But Master Zangan had demanded more from her. A great martial artist came not from physical skill, he had said, but from mental and emotional discipline. She was too restless back then, so eager to prove herself that she struggled to focus the way he wanted her to. It took time for her to find the calm he always spoke of. To slip into that meditative state where her restlessness could not follow. Thoughtlessness had not been allowed in his dojo. Her practice had to be deliberate. A wandering mind was more deadly than any enemy she could ever face.
Focus on right now, she told herself. The pack on your back. Your breath. Don’t think about anything else. There’s only you and the next step. One foot in front of the other.
Up ahead, Cloud had somehow convinced Aerith to take a break; while she sat against a tree, he picked his way back down the trail until he reached Tifa’s side. The frown on his face had deepened.
“I don’t know how much farther she can go,” he said, his voice pitched low enough so that only Tifa could hear. “I want to find the Temple as much as she does, but at this rate, she’s going to end up hurting herself.” Cloud shook his head and gave a half-shrug, clearly at a loss. When Tifa didn’t respond, he stepped closer. Mako-green eyes sought hers and his voice pitched lower still. “Hey, you okay?”
It wasn’t fair, she thought, for him to be so concerned about her. It wasn’t fair of him to look at her like that, so open and honest when she couldn’t do the same. I’m fine was perched on her tongue until Cloud’s hand slipped into hers and squeezed. Just once. Just enough to catch her off guard before he returned to Aerith’s side.
Stunned as she was, Tifa didn’t notice that the rest of their party had caught up to them. The press of warm fur against her legs brought her back; Nanaki slipped past, and Barret took his place, dropping his large hand on her shoulder and giving it a squeeze. Yuffie poked her in the side as she skipped by, grinning wildly. Cid sketched her a salute in between prodding Cait Sith along with the butt of his spear. Even Vincent gave her the ghost of a smile. Each gesture left her reeling. Each gesture was a reminder.
One foot in front of the other…
Her friends waited at the top of the hill. The weight on her back still bore her down, but at least she didn’t have to carry it alone.