凶 "Sorry that it took me so long."

[liveandforgive]

🧙 WHO: Cloud & Tifa
⚔️️ WHAT: A long overdue reunion transcending times
🕒 WHEN: The middle of November, as Cloud's just finishing recovering from the magical flu
🗺️ WHERE: Camelot City; closer to Tifa & Aerith's place
⚠️ WARNINGS: None at the moment!

[ When was the last time he took a trip to the city on a whim? No grocery list for the house on the countryside, no training regiment with Gaius or Izuku... After being cooped up the past few days, finally kicking the worst of the enchanted virus hovering around, the outpouring of support from those he knew and even some he never met had reminded him rather vividly how much he'd missed in his time here. Training in isolation...leading a quieter life... If not for what was at stake and the endgoal of being here? It almost felt like he'd found where he wanted to be in life.

Faces come and go, yet he remains still... And while Cloud wasn't kicking himself the way that he used to? He's accepted reality. He's the one who chose the quieter life. But that's not what was needed from someone like him. Yet it wasn't about being a hero either. Beyond fighting for the sake of this world and others, Cloud needed to make a choice while he still had the chance. And whether it was with familiar faces back home, from across the sea of stars, or new ones here and now...

It was time to reconnect.

Despite this, there was no solid plan for today. For all the time he's spent here, crowded streets of Camelot and all, he didn't take much time to really sightsee. Especially on his own... Despite some of the technological advances...in a way? It kind of reminded him of smaller established towns like Kalm in its infrastructure. Eventually, Cloud decides to take a break, leaning against the nearest wall on the corner of an intersection to just watch the world go by. ]

...?

[ These days his thoughts drifted to many; new allies, that special someone waiting for him at the end of the country road...

Or as a middle-aged couple passes him by, hand-in-hand with two young children in tow, his hands clutch his arms a little tighter as he thinks of days that never were. He never had much of a chance before being whisked away to another world. And even if things have changed for the once closed-off swordsman, even though someone had his heart... His love for the family he swore to cherish never waned. They keep walking without incident, a faint yet true smile crossing Cloud's lips as he huffs on the cool autumn air.

He misses them too.

Whether Cloud stays put for a little longer or keeps onward, what he hadn't realized was just how close he was to a piece of that family all along. ]

Comments

omg i'm so sorry for this novel 😓

[starshower]

[It so happens that the corner he's chosen is the same one that leads to the small cul-de-sac where Aerith had chosen to lay down some roots, and where Tifa had taken hers. It's a quaint neighbourhood, the houses cookie-cutter like, but each in their own, unique ways. With how the start of the snow and the autumn frost have started to dust over the once-green trees and flowerbeds, it almost looks like the whole street could have been taken straight out of a snow globe and placed right into the center of Camelot with a special sort of magic. When they found the place, Tifa had said that every big and small detail had felt so very Aerith, and she has a hard time imagining her living elsewhere now. It even puts the slums of Midgar to shame.

Midgar...

Tifa had been trying her best to find ways to build a new sort of life here, that is until The Planet called her back to her fight—their fight. She had a place in Camelot that she could call home, had opened her heart up to another, and had just been out shopping for potential places to open up a bar so that she could stand on her own two feet again. But often times, she would still stumble into daydreams of her life back in Midgar. A simpler one, in many ways. She had a bar, her friends, and for a little while, Cloud... It was all she could have asked for and would have been perfectly content with it were it not for everything else. Shinra, Sephiroth...

It was a life she spent so long living that Tifa had forgotten the snap of the cool, wintery air when it crept into Camelot, after many years of growing used to Midgar's more mild temperatures, in part thanks to the mako that flowed through the city's veins.

Nibelheim's winters were always cold, especially so when the wind would sweep the snow down from the mountains to coat the town in white. The first snowfall was always her favourite. Tifa would run outside after dinner, already rosy-cheeked with anticipation, and she and the rest of the kids would fall into the snow to carve angels beneath the warm lamps that drenched the town in their yellow glow at night, or they would race to see who could build the biggest, most impressive snowman. All the kids, except for one...

Other nights, she would climb the water tower and admire how the stars looked. They were always different in the winter, their glow as crisp as the air that nipped at her nose, bright and beautiful against the splashes of blue and green and black. Those nights, she would peer down at the lit-up windows of a certain boy's house next to hers, wondering whether he had seen them too, or when he would come out and be the one to make snow angels with her.

That very thought occurs to her again as she rounds the corner of her street, a burst of wind brushing past her scarf, forcing her eyes to shut against it, and she bumps into someone, running into them so clumsily that it knocks her back a step or two. Someone she'll, in a moment, wonder if she'd just willed into existence with that memory.

She's hardly recognizable with how high her scarf is pulled up over her face, only the red eyes that peek out over it, wide and apologetic when she blinks them open, giving her away. And then...

It would be an outright lie to say that she hasn't thought about him every single day in the last six months; wondered where he was, how he was doing, whether he was taking care of himself while she worried and fretted over it, or if he was even still here. Every single day since Aerith had broken the news to her, she thought about finding or reaching out to him to at least check in, say hi, tell him that she was here but then she would fall back, her excitement dimming into fear when she realized that maybe there was a reason. Or maybe, she wasn't ready to face him herself in this new world. Not with all the doubts that she harboured the second she found him slumped over at Sector Seven's train station, soaked to the bone in the rain.

So surely, one can imagine her surprise when she recognizes that spiky, chocobo-shaped head of hair instantly. It shorts her brain for a moment as a thousand thoughts assault her so quickly that she can't process a single one of them. Her stomach does a flip, sending her heart leaping into her throat that when she finally speaks, it's as if she's taking a breath for the very first time.

And of course, all she can say, in some stupid, dumbfounded way, is:]

... Cloud?

[As if she isn't sure she's not dreaming.]

i'm more sorry adskfjh

[liveandforgive]

[ Watching his breath on the late autumn air, it's as if fate was playing a convenient yet lighthearted prank when he finally decides to move on. He takes one single step. It's all he has to do as the wind catches the tail of his scarf behind him, opposite of how it forces a certain someone to fix their eyes shut. Then, ]

Ah—

[ Rather than reel a step back himself, his instincts lead to him halfheartedly reaching out. Were this person to start falling over, Cloud would have acted faster to catch them. Instead, like a still in time, he's left with an extended, gloved hand out to the bundled-up woman. Their eyes meet, without so much as a single word. No matter the days, weeks, months...or even years. It was no different from when he first left Nibelheim after that fateful night, beneath a star-kissed sky. She's hardly recognizable with how high her scarf is pulled up over her face; it's true.

To anybody else that wasn't Cloud, whose breath clips at the sight of those eyes. Red eyes that he wouldn't mistake for anyone else's. They're all he needs to know just what's happened. His hand lowers, his scarf lowered just a touch more on instinct as the other passersby mind to themselves. All this time he's spent isolated and figuring out where he wants to go after the journeys he's been on, yet Cloud never forgot. It was going to happen... The last time he reunited with Tifa here, she had been removed from a time that he once knew. But as she finally breathes and manages his name, ]

... Yeah.

[ Tifa was Tifa. She would always be Tifa to him. Whether as a family looking out for Denzel and Marlene, or separated by different paths of fate. His expression isn't one of faux-aloofness or a coolheaded merc smoothly giving someone a flower... ]

Hey.

[ ...but the lightest smile of someone whose seen and learned so much. The real Cloud. It's been a while. ]