XIII. Tifa

Ten hours and five monsters later, Tifa roared through the gates of Costa del Sol on Reno's bike, ignoring the startled flocks of seagulls scattering in all directions and the isolated tourists on the bridge above the town's main entrance, who looked scandalized at the noise she was making. She could apologize, but she was sick of apologizing. It seemed like she had spent her whole life apologizing and now had nothing to show for it, and so she simply gunned the bike through the center of town, screeched to a halt in front of the marina, and twisted the key in the ignition.

Everything fell silent.

The lapping of the waves on the wooden pier seemed abnormally quiet to her ears after hours of deserted highway and the motorcycle's banging. She made a note to tell Reno to get his bike's drive shaft fixed - if she ever saw him again. Her upper left arm stung, the skin half-caked over with dried blood and bits of forming scab from where one of the monsters had raked her with a particularly wicked-looking claw, but she hadn't used a Cure spell on that one. The pain reminded her of why she was here and where she was going. Tifa Lockhart, the AVALANCHE member, the fighter, the martial artist, going back to Edge because she hadn't been needed in Corel after all. She felt a little guilty taking Reno's bike, but he'd left it sitting in the middle of the square after coming back from Nibelheim. Part of her wished she'd stayed and asked him what they had found, but she was glad she'd left, after all, because whatever had happened most likely had not been good.

Rude had been glad to see her, of course. They all had. But even if she had gone to Nibelheim, what could she have done? She was tired of chasing after monsters out of the shadows, tired of following Cloud's voice to end up at locked doors and boarded up houses.

Give me some time, she had told Rude, but she wasn't even sure what that meant.

She bought a ticket for the passenger ship heading back to Junon, put Reno's motorcycle into marina storage, and found a good seat by the window on the mostly empty lower deck. Sometime during the voyage, she fell asleep, waking with a start when the shuddering of the boat signaled the beginning of docking procedures. Junon was a sleepy marine town now, with the old Shinra barracks torn down and replaced with a long stretch of piers and boat repair facilities, dockyards, and passenger terminals. Reclaiming Denzel's bike from the short-term storage locker where she'd stowed it before her trip, she walked the motorcycle through the unfamiliar new city, winding her way to the lift platform that had replaced Shinra's elevator.

The old lower fishing town hadn't changed. Tifa parked her bike by the front of the inn and then headed up some rickety flights of stairs leading to an old weatherbeaten shanty on the second floor. From inside came the sound of voices, the words blurred and indistinct, but very clearly arguing. For a moment she hesitated, then knocked and called, "Priscilla?"

"Who is it?" called a woman's voice from inside, and then she heard a man's voice answer, too low for her to make out the words. "You mind your own business," the female voice said irritably, and the door opened.

The young woman who stood there was golden-haired, green-eyed, half a head shorter than Tifa with an upturned button nose and scowl on her lips that quickly dissolved into a look of surprise and then bloomed into a smile.

"I'm sorry for dropping in unannounced," Tifa said. Priscilla shook her head quickly, holding out her arms and giving Tifa a quick hug.

"Oh, not at all!" She peered around Tifa for a moment before returning her eyes to her face. "Marlene's not with you this time?"

Tifa smiled as Priscilla stepped aside and motioned her into the small, well-lit room. "Marlene was busy, unfortunately. I just returned from Costa del Sol." Priscilla hissed suddenly and it was only then that Tifa remembered her injured arm. "I'm all right," she assured the girl hastily, slipping off her boots and placing them by the door mat. "It was only a small monster."

She was amused as Priscilla shuddered. "Any monster's too large for me," she said, as a man came up beside her with a question in his eyes. This must have been the one Priscilla had been arguing with, but she couldn't see any signs of anger in his face. He looked very calm. "Tifa, this is my husband Munroe. Munroe, Tifa Lockhart."

"Priscilla's told me a lot about you," he said politely, putting out his hand. Tifa shook it. She didn't know that Priscilla had gotten married. Munroe was a big man with a strong, square chin and broad shoulders, dwarfing Priscilla's lithe frame, a bit reminiscent of how she and Rude looked when they were standing together. A wave of homesickness and guilt swept over her, but she pushed it away and said, "I'm staying downstairs at the inn, but I thought I would come see you and let you know I'm in town."

"Oh, Tifa," Priscilla said indignantly, "I keep telling you we have that spare room in the back."

"I don't want to intrude on you-" Tifa began, and the other girl laughed and took Tifa's dirty hands in hers. Priscilla's hands were rough with a sincerity that spoke of the hard life of Junon's fisherfolk.

"Stay," she said, and Tifa knew that an invitation was an invitation in Junon, and one didn't ask twice.

"I'll go collect my things in a minute," she said. The couches in their small living room looked inviting. "May I-"

"Oh!" Priscilla looked flustered. "Please. Sit. I'm forgetting my manners. Would you like something to drink?"

"Water, please," Tifa said. Munroe made it to the couch before her, straightening up a few cushions from beside the wall that looked like they'd been thrown haphazardly at someone. Tifa didn't ask. "Thank you," she told him, and to her discomfort, Munroe's eyes flicked to her face, staring at her intently for several seconds. Tifa was used to being stared at for one thing or another, but men usually stared at other parts of her, and his stare was sharp, somehow unnerving. She cleared her throat.

"You're welcome," he said finally, smiling at her with a smile that did not reach his eyes, and left the room. A moment later, Priscilla returned with a glass of water in hand, and Tifa wondered if she should mention the incident, but decided that it was of no consequence.

Priscilla took a seat on the couch beside her. "So, what news from Midgar?"

Tifa explained the events of the past few days, leaving out the details about Nibelheim as best as she could, focusing on the fact that Denzel was missing. Rude's injuries she put down to a particularly vicious monster on the outskirts of the still-wild territories of North Corel, and Priscilla nodded in sympathy.

"Hopefully it's all a misunderstanding and Denzel's out for work."

"Reeve has a tendency to pounce on the drama," Tifa said, "so I'm hoping. He's always been possessive of Denzel anyway, since Cloud left." She looked down at her hands clasped in her lap, and the movement sent the light sparkling across her left hand, on the ring she wore on her fourth finger. Priscilla noticed.

"Tifa! Are you and Rude-"

She moved one hand to cover the ring. "We're engaged," she said shortly. "It's been...a rough few weeks."

Priscilla touched her shoulder gently. "It'll work out." Her gaze went towards the door leading to the kitchen, and Tifa knew she was thinking of Munroe. She said, "I didn't know you'd gotten married."

The girl flushed. "Six months ago. Granddad had always wanted me to settle down with him - it had been pretty much promised from the time I was in grade school. But Munroe got a job with the Junon Ministry of Security, and he was away a lot." She touched her left hand self-consciously, and Tifa saw that the other girl wore no wedding ring. "The job pays the bills, barely. We didn't have any money for a wedding or a ring, so we just went to the courthouse and signed papers."

"He's good to you?" Tifa said.

Priscilla hesitated just a little too long, and Tifa felt the warning signals start to blink in her head. "I heard you two arguing when I was coming up the stairs," she said. "I had no idea you were engaged...it's been almost a year since I've seen you." Priscilla twisted the hem of her dress in her hands, and Tifa said hastily, "I'm sorry. I don't mean to-"

"It's fine," the girl said in a low voice. "He...he's not around much. This is the first week we've had to ourselves since we got married, really."

"Priscilla-"

"He wants me to get a job."

Tifa blinked. "You do have a job. Or are you not working for the fisherman's guild anymore?"

Priscilla hesitated again, then said roughly, "I am. But he wants me to get a real job."

She felt a flash of anger at the words just as Priscilla said hastily, "But enough about me. I'm just glad Rude's all right."

"He is," Tifa said. Munroe chose that moment to come into the room, and she saw how Priscilla hastily averted her eyes as the big man said, "You'd better let her go get her bags from downstairs."

She had plenty of time to dawdle and think on the walk down to the inn and on the way back. She was wary of Munroe, but that did not mean he was a bad person. A lot of the Junon men, she knew, were like this - authoritative, controlling, in charge. Priscilla's grandfather had been an old man, rather senile though friendly when they'd met, but he was the exception. It was their culture, and Tifa had no right to interfere.

There had been times in the past when she had almost longed for Rude to tell her something like Munroe had told Priscilla. Get up. Get a new job. Move to a new town. Get on with your life. She was, she reflected, constantly telling Rude what to do. But he'd never asked anything of her in return, seemingly content with what little they saw of each other with him being in North Corel and she being in Edge. His demand of her not to go to Nibelheim was the first time in a long time that he had tried to forbid her from doing something, and as usual, she had been angry. But wasn't that what she wanted? A man who would share her life and look out for her?

She thought she could find that in Cloud, but in the end Cloud had just been someone too pained by his own scars to share hers, too.

The back bedroom in Priscilla's house had been laid out for her, the bed turned down and the window opened. Priscilla cooked a nice dinner, and the three of them sat around her kitchen table and reminisced about old times, Munroe chiming in about developments in Junon. She noticed that the two of them still avoided looking at each other, though sometimes Munroe would glance at Priscilla with an odd look in his eyes when he thought she wasn't watching.

They said goodnight and Tifa put some ointment on her arm, checked to make sure the door was locked and the window closed, and went to bed. She fell asleep almost at once, into a dream where she was standing on the edge of a cliff with Rude, looking down into its narrow black depths where something was grinding, with a deep, throbbing sound that sounded eerily like the innards of a Shinra Mako reactor.

"Rude?" she said, and his arms came around her from behind.

"This isn't the time for this," she began, and then she realized his arms were not wrapping around her waist, but going upward, aiming for a tight chokehold around her throat. She opened her mouth to scream-

-and jerked awake, moonlight streaming in through the window, blankets pulled down around her ankles, and a very real pair of large, muscled arms wrapped around her neck, big hands going in for a chokehold.

Tifa did not pause to think. She twisted out of the bed, springing off the mattress with both hands and landing in a hard horse stance on the man's feet. He made an oomphing sound as the balls of her feet thudded into the bones of his toes. His hands went lax. She whipped one leg around and spun to the left, dragging him by one arm, and he cried out in pain as her grip twisted the shoulder joint in its socket.

"Bastard," she muttered, and then yanked upwards. A grisly cracking noise as his shoulder broke. He screamed. A door slammed open, almost masking the sound of a gun being cocked. A less trained fighter would not have noticed, but Tifa heard it. Instinctively, she raised her arms to fighting stance, waiting for her Materia to activate-

-and then realized that the Premium Heart was in her duffel bag, which was currently shoved under the bed.

"Tifa?" came Priscilla's voice. "Munroe?"

Munroe's eyes were twin silver bullets in the moonlight, hard and icy with deadly intent. Time seemed to crawl by as he raised his gun to her eye level, as she desperately calculated how to dive around him and reach the bed, crawl under it, and activate her weapon without being shot full of holes.

The bedroom door opened.

Munroe fired.

Tifa leapt to the side at the same time and the shot went wide, splintering into the bed's headboard. In the doorway, Priscilla's nightgown-clad silhouette screamed. Munroe whirled, pointing the gun at her, and Tifa saw her chance. She pounced forward, catching the man in the groin with a hard front snap kick, then using that momentum to club him in the face and send the gun flying out of his hand as she slid under the bed.

Her duffel was where she'd left it. She fumbled for the zipper as she heard Munroe slowly get to his knees, crawling for his gun, knowing that she'd left her legs exposed while her body was stuck under the low mattress and cursing herself. Zangan would be ashamed, she thought wildly as the zipper finally broke free and revealed her gloves, lying there with the blood of three monsters still caked on them, Materia gleaming dully in the dimness. She slid them on, slinging the bag over her shoulder and pushing off the floor in a cloud of dust.

"Priscilla!" she shouted. "Run!"

Munroe never had a chance. The Premium Heart was liquid lightning in her hands, and she felt the familiar gathering power tingle up and down her arms, throbbing in her chest like swelling heartbeats. When the bolt let loose, she barely heard him scream. She was already pounding out of the house, down the stairs three at a time. Outside there was a familiar roaring sound, and it was only after she'd gotten to the bottom of the stairs that she saw that Priscilla, still in her nightgown, had turned on her motorcycle.

"Munroe!" the girl cried, but Tifa shook her head mutely, vaulted into the seat and pushed the girl up behind her.

"Hold onto me. We're leaving."

"I can't leave him!"

"Yes," Tifa growled, kicking the bike up from the ground and gunning the engine, speeding out of Junon in an angry cough of smoke. "You can."