[Fic] "Two Guys and a Girl" part 1 -- Final Fantasy 7 (Mercverse AU)

[edenfalling]

This story is set in icedark_elf's mercverse AU, about ten years before the main 'canon' of the AU (insofar as it can be said to have any canon). The idea bit me yesterday evening just before dinner, and was far too amusing not to write. There will be at least one more part.

So. "Two Guys and a Girl," in which I bend, staple, and otherwise mutilate normal game canon involving visits to Nibelheim, because seriously, what's the point of crack AUs if you can't play around like this?

Edited and extended 2/4/08, to make the beginning of the story play nicely with the ending, and to put in some details that I originally skipped because I thought I was writing a much shorter story.

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Two Guys and a Girl: Part 1
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"You look like life just kicked you in the teeth. Want to talk about it?"

Tifa jerked her head up at the unexpected voice, and then stared blankly at the boy standing in front of her on the road to the old Shinra mansion. He was tall, and probably a couple years older than her, and she had never seen him before in her life. He was also wearing a sword belted around his waist.

Tifa shifted into a loose stance and curled one hand into a fist, just in case. It wasn't smart for a girl to be alone with strangers, especially not once she started getting a figure, and the few hunters who traveled the Nibel mountains were rough and dangerous people. They had to be dangerous, to fight off the wolves, the dragons, and the less identifiable monsters.

The boy smiled and raked a hand through his black, spiky hair. "Don't worry -- I wouldn't fight you! I just thought you looked down, and I don't know anyone around here -- Cloud and I only flew in yesterday -- and I'm already lost and bored out of my mind. I figured I could use a friend and you could probably use someone to talk to, so we'd both come out ahead. I'm Zack Strife. What's your name?"

Tifa scowled. "Why wouldn't you fight me? Because I'm a girl? I can fight better than all the boys in town -- Master Zangan took me as his personal student."

"Zangan? Really?" Zack rocked back on his feet and whistled. "Wow. He's seriously famous, even though he left Midgar ages ago and the Shinra keep trying to make people forget him. So this is where he ended up? Cool. Anyway, I don't think girls are weak or anything -- I just think it's stupid to fight someone when you'd rather be her friend and cheer her up. So, what's your name? I can make one up if you don't tell me -- how about Mini Zangan? Or Bruiser? Maybe Garnet, for your eyes -- you have really pretty eyes, you know, like red wine. Or maybe--"

"Tifa! My name's Tifa Lockheart, and don't you dare call me any of that other stuff." Tifa tried to scowl at Zack some more -- he deserved it for coming up with those horrible names! -- but he was smiling and somehow it was impossible to stay angry.

"Wouldn't dream of it, Miss Lockheart," Zack said, grinning even wider.

"Oh, shut up," Tifa muttered. She took three steps forward, closing the distance between them, and grabbed his hand. "Come on -- you said you were lost. I'll show you around."

"You're the best, Tifa," Zack said earnestly. "I can feel in my heart that this is the beginning of a lifelong friendship."

Tifa whapped him upside the head with her free hand, and yanked him down the road toward Nibelheim proper. "I said shut up, you jerk."

Zack just laughed.

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Normally it took just under an hour to walk every street in town -- Nibelheim wasn't very big, after all -- but Tifa dawdled as much as she could, explaining a little about each family house, the inn, the mine offices, the town hall, the non-denominational temple, and the little shops on High Street. Partly it was just that she kind of liked talking with Zack, partly it was to make sure some of the cattier girls saw her holding hands with a hot guy, and partly it was because she didn't want to go back home.

But eventually they wound up in front of her father's house, with its fancy gateposts and the stupid two-story tower he'd insisted on adding to one corner. He called it a mark of status. Tifa called it stupid. And ugly. And embarrassing.

"This is my dad's house," she told Zack, "and that's all there is to Nibelheim. Do you want to hike up to the mines, or should we go back to the inn?"

Zack looked utterly baffled, before covering with a grin and a wink. "The inn? Why? Do you want me to buy you lunch?"

Tifa scowled at him. "Don't be stupid; you only buy girls lunch when you're on a date. But you didn't come here alone, right? You should tell your family you haven't been killed or kidnapped. Adults flip out if they don't always know where you are, even if you're perfectly capable of taking care of yourself."

"Oh, Cloud doesn't worry unless I'm gone overnight -- he's cool like that. And anyway, we aren't staying at the inn," Zack said, reaching over to tug gently on Tifa's ponytail. "We're staying up at the Shinra mansion -- that's why I was on the path this morning."

"You're staying at the Shinra mansion? Are you crazy? That place is haunted!"

Zack blinked, and then bounced on his toes. "Seriously? That's totally cool! I have to tell Cloud -- hey, you want to come meet him? I bet he'd like you."

Tifa hesitated, torn between residual nerves about the mansion and her desire to spend more time with Zack.

"You could stay for lunch," Zack said, "and maybe even for dinner. I'll talk Cloud into it, and you can call your dad on the PHS and tell him where you are..."

That tipped the balance. A full day away from her father was definitely worth the chance of running into some ghosts.

"Okay, I'll come."

Zack bounced some more. "Really, seriously cool. Hey, does that make this a date?"

"Shut up."

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The Shinra mansion stood a good fifteen minutes' walk outside of town and up the mountain, away from the rutted switchback road that joined Nibelheim to the rest of the world. It was a rambling, brooding sort of building. Once it had been beautiful -- Tifa could see shadows of its past despite the stained and peeling paint, the occasional holes in the roof, and the age-warped timbers -- but now the mansion huddled behind a rusty chain-link fence, as if ashamed to show its face to the world.

"Cloud says there used to be a real stone wall with an iron gate and everything, back when some of the Shinra used this as a hunting lodge," Zack said as he unlatched the gate. "That would've been so much cooler than this."

Tifa pushed the gate shut, but didn't latch it, just in case they had to make a quick exit. "Before I was born, my dad says the Shinra lent the mansion to a group of scientists, and they strung up barbed wire and electrified the fence so touching it was as bad as lightning spells. They were cutting up monsters and breeding them, so they needed something tougher than a stone wall to keep them in. But something went wrong and one of the scientists got eaten, so they stopped the project and nobody's lived here since then." She shivered. "They say that under the full moon, you can see the scientist's ghost walking along the fence with his guts hanging out and his arm bitten off."

"Seriously? I'd kill to see that."

Zack sounded far too excited and not nearly scared enough. Tifa didn't usually get scared of things, but that was because she knew she could fight. There wasn't any way to fight ghosts -- all you could do was run.

Zack kicked open the front door and ushered Tifa into the mansion. "I'm back!" he shouted, waking echoes from the bare walls and startling a sparrow from its nest over a broken window. "And I brought company!" He headed across the room toward a sagging door, unbuckling his sword as he went. "Cloud's probably in the kitchen, fixing the stove. He's kind of obsessive about tea, and he's no good at fire magic so he couldn't heat water this morning. I think I learned about twenty new curses listening to him."

"If he's that angry, maybe I should leave," Tifa said as Zack pulled her through the doorway. She looked around; the kitchen did seem to be a hopeless mess, and whether the stove was theoretically fixed or not, she was pretty sure there was no power running to the mansion. The silent refrigerator lent weight to that thought.

Zack waved his hands airily. "Oh, don't worry! He'll be over that by now. He only really gets angry in the morning, or when-- anyway, even if he hasn't fixed the stove, by now he'll just be sarcastic."

"Your faith in me is touching," a voice said behind them.

Tifa spun, and found herself staring at the most gorgeous man she'd ever seen in her life. Admittedly, thirteen years wasn't a very long life, and most Nibelheim men weren't going to win any beauty contests, but still. He had a heartbreaking face, and thick hair as spiky as Zack's, but golden instead of black, like sunlight reflecting off the mountains. She wanted to sink her hands into it and never let go. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt with the sleeves torn off -- his arms weren't thick, but Tifa could see muscle, like he was a swordsman or a martial artist. She wanted to touch his flawless skin. And she could have happily drowned in his blue eyes.

"Guh," she said. "Um. Uh. I'm Tifa Lockheart! I'm sorry!"

The man leaned against the doorframe and smiled gently. Tifa's heart skipped a beat. "I'm Cloud Strife," he said. "Pleased to meet you, Miss Lockheart. You have my apologies for whatever suffering you've endured in Zack's company."

"Hey!" said Zack.

Tifa kicked him.

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Cloud had apparently spent the morning dealing with the local electric company -- which was really owned by the Shinra, even if the royal family pretended they were above dirtying their hands in commerce -- and picking up a picnic lunch from the inn, which he set on the battered kitchen table. "There's more than enough for three," he said when Tifa made halfhearted noises about leaving. "Zack's a growing boy, after all; sometimes I wonder if I'm feeding a person or a monster. I always bring extra."

"Again, hey!" Zack's protest and hurt puppy-dog eyes were, however, undermined by the way he snatched three sandwiches out of Cloud's bag and tore into the first one.

"You see what I have to deal with?" Cloud said wryly as he chose a sandwich.

Tifa nodded, and tried not to squeak over the way that Cloud was treating her as an equal. He had to be at least nineteen, maybe even twenty-one or twenty-two, but he wasn't looking down on her.

"Told you Cloud's cool," Zack said between mouthfuls. "Hey, Cloud, Tifa says this place is haunted -- did you know that?"

Cloud shook his head. "I've heard a number of stories about this house, but I've never heard about ghosts. Would you be willing to tell us the story, Miss Lockheart?"

Tifa blushed and nodded. "Sure. And you can call me Tifa -- you're Zack's brother, so you don't have to be outsider-formal. Anyway, there are a whole bunch of ghosts that haunt Shinra mansion. Which do you want to hear about?"

"The oldest," Zack said, talking through a mouthful of sandwich.

"Okay." Tifa took a deep breath, took a second to fix the story in her mind, and fell into the storyteller's steady rhythm. "Long and long ago, there was a Lady Shinra whose husband died in the Angels' War. When the Demon Queen was sealed away, she came to Nibelheim to live alone with her son. The boy was everything to her, but as he grew older they started to fight. He wanted to leave and become a soldier like his father. She wanted him to stay, to be a man of peace instead.

"One day, after they'd been arguing, Lady Shinra swore that she'd see her son dead by her own hand before she let him waste his life like his father. Her son swore he'd rather die than stay in Nibelheim another day, and he ran out of the mansion."

"Oh, bad move," Zack murmured.

Cloud slid a hand over Zack's mouth. "Don't interrupt." His eyes were fixed on Tifa's face, an odd hunger lurking in their depths.

Tifa closed her eyes and fell back into the story. "Her son ran out of the mansion. The minute he left, Lady Shinra regretted what she'd said. She prayed for him to come home, and swore she'd apologize and let him go to the lowlands. She waited all morning, all afternoon, and into the evening, but he never came back through the door. She hung out a lantern and waited all night, but he never came back through the door. And the next morning, the townspeople carried her son's dead body up to the gates.

"They say Lady Shinra went white as snow when she saw her son, bloody and broken from falling down a cliff. Without him, she had nothing left. The town women stayed to watch her in her grief, but she slipped away and threw herself out of a window. She died of a broken neck -- the same way her son died. Even the bruises on their bodies were exactly the same.

"Ever since, Lady Shinra's ghost walks through the corridors looking for her son. If she sees any living people, she forces them to leap out of the windows, hoping that their deaths will bring back her son.

"But the dead don't return, and she only makes new ghosts to trail in her footsteps."

There. Not as good as a real storyteller could do it, but not half bad either, judging by the shadow of uneasiness passing over Zack's normally cheerful face. Satisfied, Tifa took a bite of her sandwich. It was chicken salad with tomato and real lettuce, instead of bitter dandelion and plantain -- clearly, Cloud had money to spare if he could afford shipped vegetables instead of local greens.

Zack shook himself. "Creepy. And kind of sad -- it's been, what, two thousand years and she still hasn't figured out that she's not getting anywhere."

"Ghosts are trapped in the past," Cloud said quietly. "They don't learn well."

"Creepy," Zack repeated. Then he leaned forward and splayed his elbows on the table. "Hey, how does she make people jump? Does she cloud your mind? Does she chase you? Or does she, like, drift into your body and possess you?"

Tifa shrugged. "How would I know -- do I look like I jumped out a window and died?"

Zack and Cloud exchanged an odd look. "That... can be hard to tell, sometimes," Cloud said in a slightly choked voice. "In any case, I know that story, though in a somewhat different version -- one without ghosts."

"Really?" Tifa asked. "What's your version?"

Cloud shut his eyes for a long moment, and then sighed. "Lady Shinra lived only for her son. He agreed to stay in Nibelheim until his twenty-fifth birthday, but he was restless and spent most of his time out hunting the monsters spawned in the great war. He was injured on one of his hunts, and the wound seemed fatal. When his mother saw his body, she decided to join him and her husband; she killed herself. She was a noblewoman, so she swallowed poison instead of jumping from a window. Poison was thought to be more dignified."

Cloud's hand tightened on the edge of the table. "The real tragedy is that the son's accident wasn't as serious as everyone had thought. He woke the next day, only to learn that his mother was dead... whereupon he left Nibelheim and never returned."

"Oh," Tifa said. "That must have been terrible for him. When my mother died, I thought the world was ending. I still miss her."

Zack reached across the table to rest one hand on Cloud's arm and lace his fingers through Tifa's.

"It was painful," Cloud agreed. Then he rolled his shoulders and picked up his sandwich again. "He never stopped regretting his mother's death, but over the years he found new people to love, and he had a long and interesting life."

"Very long," Zack said, snickering.

"Don't joke about it, you jerk!" Tifa snapped, and punched him.

Cloud looked forlornly at the stove, at the kettle of cold water, at his empty cup, and at his canister of tea. He sighed.

Tifa fell in love again.

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End of Part 1

Continue to Part 2

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