6. I Want You to Want Me – Letters to Cleo

Tifa chases Cloud. It's a running joke – emphasis on the running part. She chases him from world to world, and when he lands on one for a while she chases him all over it.

He never seems to acknowledge her presence until she's right up in his face. Then he gives her this strange stare, like he's never seen her before, or like he's wondering what she's for. She doesn't care, except when she does. When she doesn't care she flips a careless salute that would've had their commanding officer yelling when they were both still cadets, and then carries on punching Heartless like she has something to prove. When she does care she sits in her Gummi Ship and sobs while the engines warm up.

"Why?" he asks her once after she rescues him from a cluster of red and black things with luminous yellow eyes and hypodermic needles for fingers – the remnants of a hospital the darkness consumed. "Why are you following me?"

She looks for recognition in his eyes; or, failing that, some memory of the man he used to be – no, the fresh-faced boy he was before General Sephiroth got his hands on him. Cloud was once an eager and willing cadet before his greatest hero filled his heart with the darkness that's slowly burning away his ventricles, arteries and veins like sulphuric acid.

"Because I want you to be happy."

"I can't ever be happy until I've faced Sephiroth," he says, eyes shadowing.

"That's why I'm following you."

He doesn't understand. He can't understand. There's no room left in him for love until he realises the light he lost isn't as far away as he thinks. So Tifa keeps chasing him with tenacity of a bulldog with a locked jaw, and doesn't listen when people laugh or Cloud tells her to leave him alone.