#cloud | ic

    Ever since he came back to Midgar, ever since he agreed to join the first AVALANCHE job--there’s a growing weight on his mind, the more and more he talks to her, and he doesn’t quite understand it; where it comes from, or why it’s there... And, more than just the talking, it’s--the favor she calls in to find him a place to stay, the additional work she puts in just to get him his pay--

   All he can figure is that--if he keeps talking to her, he’ll make sense of it, what that weight is, eventually. Or, maybe, he never would. Either way, he wasn’t going to stop trying; either way, it didn’t negate that they really haven’t, yet, had a chance to just sit down, and... only talk, like she kept asking, had they?

   So, in any case, Cloud softly knocks on the door to her apartment, next door to his own. It’s an hour or so ‘til nightfall, the day’s work is done, but time before the bar opens for the night--and now is when he starts thinking, of all times, about how, particularly, does he want... to talk to her, this time?

   ‘How are--’... ‘It’s been a--’... ‘I just wanted--’... All cycle through his mind, and none of them feel right. So, he takes a moment more.

   ... “Tifa,” He finally ushers out, so creatively, to let her know that it’s him.

   “...

   “About what?” Even-toned, plain, as he turns his shoulders back away, breaking--what he assumed was eye contact.

   “That concierge at that Honeybee Inn;”  Is all Barret need say, probably all he’d get out before the cheeky grin wins his face and Cloud immediately drops his shoulders with an audible sigh--”So what’s this about ‘performing again’--?”

   “If You Value Your Life--”

   ...

   Idly, specifically, when thinking back the events of the Wall Market arena, he recalls that, for the tournament’s finale, he was given the task of fighting a robotic... demon... house?

   ...

   “What the fuck.”