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skerenTitle: Hero
Fandom: FFVII
Characters: Tifa, Cloud
Words: 566
Summary: Tifa doesn't like what she sees.
He always pretended to be a hero.
She’d noticed that a long time ago, and she’d never really approved.
First, he claimed to be a SOLDIER. She knew it was a lie. Then he turned on them, claimed agony in the face of doing exactly what he wanted to, ripping their little band of rebels apart. Another lie in the sorrow and regret. Finally, he broke and showed memories that all over said ‘look I defeated the bad man,’ and those were a lie too. All he did was make his master stronger.
And those were all just the recent things. The things in the last year before they’d killed Sephiroth, leaving the little false hero to pick his way through a path where he couldn’t constantly prove he was the hero. He hadn’t been a hero when he’d needed to be. He hadn’t saved her father or intervened to keep Sephiroth from killing his mother. He hadn’t helped anything at all in their home, and when he finally came back to visit he hid like a coward.
Because he couldn’t say he was a hero if he was just a normal man now could he? No, so he hid, avoided them instead of warning them. Tossing his comrade aside when he knew a bridge was faulty when he could very well have warned the man and shared a bit of glory for the situation by admitting he knew a better way.
Instead he’d been a coward. Only once she was badly injured and unable to refute him did he show himself, pretending to be that hero as he appeared from practically nowhere to go after the man that had hurt her.
He was a bastard and a liar, and he’d always been that way. She’d tried, once, to see past that when they were children, but it had gotten her hurt. She hadn’t given him the chance again, but still, somehow, it had come full circle and she’d been hurt again.
She’d tried, oh she’d tried to forgive him. Tried to ignore what he’d done, the way he’d just let things go through his fingers until he caught at something that would get him praise. It wasn’t always big praise. No, it was often that selfish bit of something that was helping others to help yourself.
She’d never seen him help someone who didn’t ask him for it. No, he always had to be told ‘they need help’ or ‘help me’ and then suddenly he’d be there, and someone would be there to thank him because they asked. He never helped when there wasn’t some obvious gain, no matter how small, and she tried so hard to overlook it.
Maybe he just needed guidance, maybe he just wanted to not interfere.
But some days... it was hard. She didn’t like his hero complex, his pressing need to have everything just so in all the wrong ways. He was fixated on the dead, and that didn’t help a thing. She commented on it, more than once, but only because she couldn’t say what she wanted to.
“Stop pretending Cloud.”
They were words she would never, could never, say, so they lingered in her heart.
Someday, they would burn through and he’d know how bitter she was over all the little lies, but not today.
It was never today.
Fandom: FFVII
Characters: Tifa, Cloud
Words: 566
Summary: Tifa doesn't like what she sees.
He always pretended to be a hero.
She’d noticed that a long time ago, and she’d never really approved.
First, he claimed to be a SOLDIER. She knew it was a lie. Then he turned on them, claimed agony in the face of doing exactly what he wanted to, ripping their little band of rebels apart. Another lie in the sorrow and regret. Finally, he broke and showed memories that all over said ‘look I defeated the bad man,’ and those were a lie too. All he did was make his master stronger.
And those were all just the recent things. The things in the last year before they’d killed Sephiroth, leaving the little false hero to pick his way through a path where he couldn’t constantly prove he was the hero. He hadn’t been a hero when he’d needed to be. He hadn’t saved her father or intervened to keep Sephiroth from killing his mother. He hadn’t helped anything at all in their home, and when he finally came back to visit he hid like a coward.
Because he couldn’t say he was a hero if he was just a normal man now could he? No, so he hid, avoided them instead of warning them. Tossing his comrade aside when he knew a bridge was faulty when he could very well have warned the man and shared a bit of glory for the situation by admitting he knew a better way.
Instead he’d been a coward. Only once she was badly injured and unable to refute him did he show himself, pretending to be that hero as he appeared from practically nowhere to go after the man that had hurt her.
He was a bastard and a liar, and he’d always been that way. She’d tried, once, to see past that when they were children, but it had gotten her hurt. She hadn’t given him the chance again, but still, somehow, it had come full circle and she’d been hurt again.
She’d tried, oh she’d tried to forgive him. Tried to ignore what he’d done, the way he’d just let things go through his fingers until he caught at something that would get him praise. It wasn’t always big praise. No, it was often that selfish bit of something that was helping others to help yourself.
She’d never seen him help someone who didn’t ask him for it. No, he always had to be told ‘they need help’ or ‘help me’ and then suddenly he’d be there, and someone would be there to thank him because they asked. He never helped when there wasn’t some obvious gain, no matter how small, and she tried so hard to overlook it.
Maybe he just needed guidance, maybe he just wanted to not interfere.
But some days... it was hard. She didn’t like his hero complex, his pressing need to have everything just so in all the wrong ways. He was fixated on the dead, and that didn’t help a thing. She commented on it, more than once, but only because she couldn’t say what she wanted to.
“Stop pretending Cloud.”
They were words she would never, could never, say, so they lingered in her heart.
Someday, they would burn through and he’d know how bitter she was over all the little lies, but not today.
It was never today.