Disclaimer: Incontestably not mine.

A/N: For Aiko Namika, who request Cloud Strife on his knees. Of course, the first ideas that sprang to mind were kinky, but my kink-writing button refused to work when it came to actually typing something.

And for the record, the bit about crows is true. They do it regularly around my house.

Crow Court

© Scribbler, September 2008.

Even at ten years old, there were things in her life that Tifa regretted.

She stared at the other kids, some with their backs to her, others with their faces to her but not actually looking in her direction. They reminded her of crows when they held court, their shiny black eyes fixed inward and their attention nowhere but the centre of their circle.

Master Zangan taught about various things apart from just fighting. He was a warrior, but underneath that he was a person, and Tifa learned a lot from that lesson alone. She remembered one day, sitting out on the gentler slopes just below some of the more rugged Nibelheim peaks. It had been Spring, when small birds had nestlings and all but killed themselves from the exhaustion of foraging for their young. She'd thrown part of her sandwich to tempt them, when suddenly a large crow had swooped down and grabbed the food, seeming to wink at her with its shiny black eye before taking off again. That was when Master Zangan told her that you never saw a weak or sickly crow, and had asked her why she thought that was.

"Because crows are strong?" she'd offered. "They're big birds, so they can fight off enemies without getting hurt. And strong creatures don't get sick." At seven years old it had seemed like a perfectly reasonable answer.

But Master Zangan had shaken his head. "The reason there are no weak or sickly crows," he'd said severely, "is because they others always try their weakest in a crow court to see if they have the right to survive and take up an area's resources when there are stronger birds that could better use them."

"What's a crow court?"

"It's a collection of crows that make decisions."

"You mean like the town council?"

"Something like that."

"But that's silly. Crows can't have a council."

"It's not really as official as a human court or council, Tifa. It's actually quite a mysterious thing. I'm not sure how they choose who qualifies to be in the court. Maybe it's age, or they have a leader who chooses; or perhaps they have a system we humans can't understand, but a small number of crows form a circle and a 'jailer' crow chases a weakling into the centre. If the head of the circle flies away, the others attack the one on trial and kill it."

"That's horrible!" Tifa had cried, aghast and still young enough to think nature was needlessly cruel.

"That's life. Survival of the fittest, Tifa. It's how the world works. The strong either protect the weak, or get rid of them."

Watching the other Nibelheim kids now, Tifa remembered his words and one of her hands turned into a fist at her side. The strong either protected the weak, or they got rid of them. She was strong. Which would she choose?

Cloud Strife was a weakling. He wasn't sickly, but he'd never fitted in; an outsider who'd come from within and never actually been outside the town. Nibelheim was a traditional place where an unmarried mother still drew scorn, and a fatherless son was frowned on by adults as nothing more than a bastard. People looked away from him, even though he was actually a sweet boy with a gentle heart. It wasn't good enough to rescue him from social propriety – and it wasn't enough to save him from the children of those scornful adults, who saw in him a game they could play endlessly without reprisal.

Tifa wasn't especially close to the other town kids. She wasn't cold, but she didn't need their company to feel good about herself. She liked spending time with Master Zangan, and knew none of her peers – girls or boys – could stand up to her half as well as he could.

She supposed that was why Cloud had been drawn to her. She shunned the company of others, while he was shunned by them. Maybe he thought they had something in common in the way each of them could often be spotted walking their own solitary path.

Except that Tifa was still accepted. She could go back whenever she wanted, play with the kids and call them her friends at the drop of a hat. Cloud couldn't. He'd never be able to, either. Despite that he was still so damn friendly, so eager to befriend her, as though he saw in her something that Tifa herself could barely see.

She was flattered by his attention, even though she knew she shouldn't be hanging around him at all. There was something about Cloud Strife that got under your skin. The moment you took the time to meet his eyes you saw yourself reflected back in them with the beauty he saw in you, but probably wasn't actually there in reality. So while she talked to him and was nice to him when they were alone, Tifa didn't want to jeopardise her situation by letting the others know she'd broken their cardinal rule: never befriend the outsider.

She felt like the jailer crow. They'd found Cloud with her, assumed he was bothering her, and set upon him. They didn't need any more provocation than that. Rabbit season, pheasant season, or deer season – in Nibelheim it was always Cloud season.

And Tifa, who could dive into the circle, stand on her hands and probably break every single one of their jaws with a spinning kick … she stood there and let them hurt him.

Why?

Because she kind of liked Cloud, but she liked her ability to choose better. She liked having the option to say she didn't want to hang with the other kids, and then go to them and have them accept her when she was lonely, or when Master Zangan was out of town. It was selfish and horrible, and some part of her knew that; but Tifa wasn't perfect. She'd never claimed to be, though sometimes she felt like Cloud saw her that way.

She wasn't immune, either.

Cloud was on his knees, his nose bloody and his hair streaked with red from a cut in his scalp. They'd gone really far this time. He looked up, and though Tifa knew she should look away, she couldn't turn her head and found herself meeting his eyes.

"How come you're being nice to me?" Cloud had asked the first time she didn't drive him away or call him names.

"Is it not allowed or something?"

Misleading. Or maybe just cruel. Or maybe … maybe …

Today, only minutes before they were discovered, he'd said, "You're not like the other kids, Tifa."

Now his eyes said something totally different. 'Why are you letting them do this to me?' in the left, and 'It's okay, I understand why' in the right. For a moment it seemed like his eyes were two different colours, or at least two wildly different shades of blue, more dazzling and difficult to look at than the sun in a cloudless Winter sky.

"What're you staring at?" one of the boys demanded, pulling Cloud up by his collar. "Look at me when I'm talking to you." He hit Cloud, and Cloud went down. He had no idea how to roll with a punch, even after receiving so many.

Tifa could have taught him. Tifa knew how to defend herself. She could have taught Cloud how to do the same.

But Tifa wasn't part of this court. She flexed her hands into fists, felt her thigh muscles bunch and her knees soften into a combat stance.

And then she ran away.

"You're not like the other kids, Tifa."

No, thought a traitorous, far too sensitive part of her as she ran – something in her nature that Nibelheim had tried to squash and all but completely succeeded in destroying. She was worse.

Tifa never tried to feed the birds again. When her mother put out scraps and the crows came, she was surprised at her daughter's odd behaviour. Tifa ran outside with a broom to chase them off, and though her mother asked, she refused to explain why when she came back inside.

Fin.