After all my years of training as a warrior, after all of the skill, patience, and control I had acquired within those long, strenuous years, you'd think that meeting a friend of a friend's wouldn't be too tough for me. You wouldn't think that I, Tifa Lockhart, martial artist extraordinaire, would be bothered by the mere act of meeting a (hopefully) new friend. Yeah, I didn't think so either at first. I thought it would be nothing when Barret told me he wanted me to meet someone. Boy, was I wrong.

And, boy, was I pissed.

Nothing agitates me more than relapses. I hate them, utterly hate them. I'm not all that fond of my childhood years, or my early teenage years for that matter. So, when I find myself acting like a love-struck teenager every time the pretty girl I'm fawning over walks into the room, it pisses me off like nothing else. True, I'm not that far from my teenage years, only just turned twenty this past month, but still, being brought back to that helpless state of the past isn't something I want to accept without a fight.

Resistance is resentfully recognized as futile, but I fight anyway. Call me stubborn, but I won't give in that easily. I'll go down fighting (or so I hope). And to assist my self-justified resistance, I have a pep-talk. Yeah, that's right, a pep-talk. Most martial artists would just take a moment to calm themselves, meditate into the state of untouchable calm we're all taught to reach, but I quickly found that meditating doesn't block her charms in the very least. So, each morning, I wake up, get dressed, take a deep breath, and tell myself firmly that I wouldn't let her get to me. And each day, I eat my words.

Even when I expect her appearance or know she's near, I can do nothing to prevent my impending regression into adolescence. As soon as I catch her scent in the air or even catch a glimpse of her anywhere within the proximity, immediate or not, attempting to resist reverting to my former self is in vain. It always bears the same result: I am tossed back into my bashful, stammering self, ever the master of subtlety.

Of course, my anger and the resentment I harbor for my incurable condition, which I finally broke down and labeled AIR, understandably titled, completely disappears once it has taken hold. Once I'm under her spell, I think of nothing other than her, nothing other than what it would be like to hold her in my arms or do all of the things I wish I could do. I think nothing of the anger that will return once her presence is gone. I can't. She consumes me, totally and without effort.

That pisses me off too, the fact that she doesn't even try. It's just natural, I suppose. Built automatically into her genetic DNA code, probably. I really don't understand how she could do it, other than that. I've seen women in some of the most suggesting positions and outfits imaginable throughout my life, mostly through training and the flittering jobs within it, and none of them have affected me as she does. They barely registered to me, probably because I found them to be quite repulsive. It must be the innocence that draws me to her, then. Must be. Because that's all she is. Pure and simple.

Aeris: the human persona of innocence.