Archive of Our Own

Punisher Mode

The last patron stumbles out of Seventh Heaven’s saloon doors just past midnight, the bell above the frame ringing a soft, tinny note into the hush of the night beyond.  Tifa stands behind the bar with a damp rag in hand and lets the quiet of the now-empty bar settle around her as she heaves out a breath. The bar’s neon lights hum mutedly against the windows, throwing pink and green stripes across the wood floor, the refrigerator ticking behind her with a slow, mechanical pulse.  The air smells faintly of spilled beer and citrus rinds and of the faint smoke that always clings to the seats no matter how many times she scrubs them.

She breathes in and breathes out, feeling the day that she has been carrying sit heavy along the line of her shoulders.

Across the room, Cloud puts down the mop he’s been moving across the floor ever since she announced last call.  It’s his way of motivating patrons to move it along more quickly, especially as the night grows long.  He leans the mop against the wall and walks to the bar, taking his seat in the corner stool again, where the whiskey he’s been nursing all night still waits, his eyes watching her the way he watches everything when he thinks no one is looking.  It is a quiet, unbothered attention that misses nothing, and Tifa, who has spent most of the evening pretending not to feel his gaze, allows herself a single, private smile as she turns away.

She has been working up to this all night, she has to admit.

It is something that she still does not know quite how to say out loud, even after all these years with him, even after all of the soft mornings and the harder ones and the shared bed and the shared life.  When the world has been too much, when the bar has been too loud and the books too tight and the part of her that is supposed to be steady and strong has gone thin and brittle, she still does not know how to say I need you to take it.  She still has never learned the shape of that sentence, of that request.  So she has built another language with him instead, one that is made of glances and small dares and the deliberate misbehaviors that she knows Cloud can read as fluently as any spoken word.

Tifa turns toward the back shelves and pushes up onto the balls of her feet, reaching for the rows of spirits she keeps just out of each grasp.  Her skirt rides up the back of her thighs as she stretches, the hem lifting one slow inch and then another.  She does not need to look to know he’s seen it.  The quality of the silence behind her makes it clear.

She lets her fingers fumble against the lip of a bottle she does not actually need to move and brings herself back down with a small theatrical sigh.

“Long night,” she puffs quietly to no one, to him.

Cloud does not answer.  He never does, not when she pitches it like that.  His silence is its own kind of reply, and Tifa has learned to listen to it the way she listens out for thunder – by the pressure in the room, by the way the goosebumps lift on her arms before she has even registered the shift.

She picks up a clean glass from the drying rack and turns it in her hand, polishing the rim slowly with her rag.  Her thumb drags across the lip, and she looks down into it as if she has found something intensely interesting there.  She lets her grip soften and her wrist tilt just so, and the glass tips out of her fingers.

It hits the floorboards with a bright crack and breaks neatly into three pieces at her feet.

“Oops,” she breathes.

She bends over.  She doesn’t crouch, but bends from the waist, slowly and deliberately, her knees only slightly flexed.  She lets her hair slide forward over one shoulder so that the line of her back is uninterrupted from nape to hip.  She gathers each broken curve of glass with care as if she is doing nothing in particular and as if she hasn’t a care in the world.

Behind her, the stool at the corner scrapes back from the bar, the sound of it landing in her stomach the way a struck match lands in dry grass.

Tifa does not straighten right away. She listens to Cloud’s footfalls across the floor, unhurried and even, the same measured stride he uses when he is walking up to something he intends to handle.  His boots stop a few paces behind her, and she can feel the heat of him, can hear the gentle exhale of his breath and the twist of leather of his gloves.

“Careful, Tifa.”

His voice has gone low.  It’s not loud, but it’s lower than loud.  The kind of loud that sits deep inside the chest before it reaches the ear.

She lets his words travel down the length of her spine before she answers.  His voice could always unwind her in the best ways, and right now, she needs it more than ever. Her thighs press together, and her lashes flutter as she blinks her eyes closed once.  She gathers the last shard of glass in hand and rises with a slowness that is as intentional as it is provocative, intent on letting him watch her rise back up.

Slowly, she turns.

Cloud is closer than she expected.  Close enough that she has to lift her chin to find his eye, and what she finds there is no longer the gentle, slightly distracted blue-green that has been following her as he minded her bar all evening.  His pupils are wider, his mouth set, his hands hanging loosely at his sides in the way that he stands when he is no longer choosing to be polite.

“Sorry,” she murmurs, and the word comes out purposefully unconvincing.  She tilts the glass shards toward him as if presenting evidence.  “Slipped.”

“Did it.”

“Mhm.”

“Three times tonight,” he chides lightly, tilting his head.

Tifa lets her smile out then, slow and small, a smile that lives only between the two of them and only at hours like this.  She steps past him and lets her hip graze the edge of his thigh in passing, the lightest brush of fabric against fabric, and she hears the soft, warning intake of his breath as plainly as a struck bell.

She drops the glass into the bin and then returns behind the bar to rinse her hands clean.  She does not look back at him as she dries them on the towel at her waist, because she does not need to.

She already knows that he has been awakened, can feel him at her back like a storm rolling in.

“I’ll lock up,” she says lightly, her voice teasing in a way that makes her own blood run hot.  “You go on up.”

There is a pause that is not quite an agreement.  Cloud’s eyes burn like blazing blue bulbs in the dimness of the bar, narrowing slightly before she sees the corner of his mouth twitch and turn up slightly.

Then he turns and moves toward the stairs.

The stairs creak in the same three places they have always creaked since they built this new version of an old home a few years ago. Cloud takes them slowly, listening to the bar settle into its nighttime shape below – the fridge, the rain on the awning that started while he watched her bend over a piece of broken glass, the soft clatter of her closing the till.  At the top of the landing, he opens the door to their living quarters and steps through. The latch clicks behind him with that small, domestic sound that it always has, a sound that is more comforting and grounding than he’s ever really admitted out loud.

He stands in the dark hallway for a beat with his hand still on the doorway and exhales.

Tifa has been at it all night.

He knew from early that evening, all the clumsy, pushy attempts to get his attention, dropping things and pushing past him with skin and curves a little too close.  He’s known her too long and too well to mistake any of it, the way her laughter goes up half a step brighter when the bar is running too loud, the way her shoulders carry a particular tightness when she has been carrying too much responsibility for too many hours and does not know how to put it down.  He knows because he watches her the way she has spent her entire life refusing to be watched, even though he dedicated his entire life to perfecting the art of it.

And he knows what she is asking for.

The hard part – the part that has never come naturally to him, that he has had to learn deliberately and is still learning – is to let himself be what she is asking for in moments like these.

His default whenever Tifa goes thin around the edges like this is to fold himself around her, to wrap her up in softness and protection and warmth, to lift everything she’s carrying off her shoulders and pile it onto his.  And sometimes that is exactly what she needs.  But she does not always need that.  She needs something different on other nights, and tonight she has been telling him plainly what kind of night this is.

It is his job to listen to her.

His enhanced hearing hears her soft footsteps on the stairs, hears her humming under her breath, low and pleased with herself.  It is the kind of sound she makes when she knows she has gotten his attention and intends to push for more.

Cloud smirks quietly to himself, shrugging out of his jacket and hanging it on the hook by the door.

She comes through the doorway a moment later, brushing past him without a glance and dropping her keys onto the table from a height that is louder than necessary, the metal clattering against the wood.  She turns to the small open shelving where they keep the linens and stretches onto her toes again, the same stretch from downstairs, and pulls down a folded towel she has no intention of using.  She drops it, and it falls to the floor with a small, calculated thump.

“Oh, dear,” she sighs.

Cloud does not move yet.

She picks the towel up, refolds it badly, and then sets it back on the shelf.  Then she turns back to the table and opens the drawer, pushes its contents around, and closes it harder than the drawer requires. The slam echoes off the walls.

He watches her shoulders, high and tight and waiting.

He crosses the room.

She hears him coming, can tell by the way her hand stills on the edge of the table, but she does not turn.  She holds her place, palms flat to the wood, her hair falling over her cheek. Cloud closes the last of the distance behind her and brings his hands up and lays them over hers.

His palms cover the backs of her fingers entirely, and he presses, gently, until her hands flatten beneath his.  His chest comes to rest against her shoulder blades, but he does not press his hips to her, not yet.  He keeps that small distance because distance is part of what he is doing, part of what he is giving her.

He feels her breath catch under his arms.

“You’ve been asking for this all night,” he says into her hair, “Haven’t you?”

His voice has dropped without him even willing it to.  It happens like a gear setting into place, the same shift he feels before a fight, the same lowering of his center of gravity.  Yet here, with her, it is that feeling’s softer cousin, its inverted mirror.  His shoulders square and his jaw sets, but what rises in him is not aggression.  It is something gentler, steadier, fiercer.

She does not answer out loud.  She tips her head back until it rests against his shoulder, and that small surrender of her neck – the long, pale line of it laid bare under the fall of her ebony hair – does more to him than any words could.

“Tifa.”

He moves one hand from hers to gather her hair to one side, slowly, careful not to snag it.  “I think we need to address your behavior tonight.”

Her breath stutters out, a sound that is not a laugh and not a moan but is somehow both.

This is the part he never skips.  However deep it goes, however far she wants him to take her, this part remains him and he will not let it slip.  He brings his mouth close to her ear and keeps his voice low and even.

“Same words as always,” he murmurs. “Stay if you want me to keep going. Ease if you need me to slow down. Still if you need me to stop, and we stop, no questions. And if you want everything – everything – what’s the word?”

Tifa breathes in, breathes out.  Her voice, when it comes, is small but certain.

“Starshower.”

Cloud smirks. “Good girl.”

The praise lands softly, deliberately.  He feels her shiver against him at it, a fine tremor running the length of her spine into his chest.  “Now?”

“Stay,” she whispers.  Then, her voice lowers, the smallest catch of a smile in it.  “Please, stay.”

He lets the corner of his mouth lift into her hair where she cannot see.

He lets the smile fade, slipping into the other facade of him - the one she has been prying out of him all evening, a version of him she pulled out long ago in some sleepy hour of another hazy, passion-filled night, named under her breath and laughed about behind bright, rose-colored eyes.

Punisher Mode, she had called it that night, half-teasing, and the name had stuck the way private names tend to do.

He straightens behind her, his hand at her hair tightening fractionally into a hold.

“Bedroom,” he says.  “Now.

Their bedroom holds the rain inside its walls with the muted breath of a dim periwinkle sky and the hazy, silver bars of the moon laid across the half-open blinds. Tifa steps inside ahead of him because he has guided her there with a hand at the small of her back, and when he lets her go, she stands at the foot of the mattress, kicking her sneakers to the side.

He closes the door with a click.

“Undress,” Cloud says, the word quiet and soft but leaving no room at the edges.  “Slowly.”

Tifa lifts her hands to the buttons of her blouse, her heart thudding against her ribs.

She has been undressed in front of Cloud Strife a thousand times in a thousand moods, and this should not feel new.  And yet, it does, her heart pounding as the first button slips through its hole.  She hears him exhale once, and the small, audible measure of his attention climbs along every nerve in her body.  She slows her hands, feeling his eyes on her wrists, on the small concession of skin at her throat, on the quiet reveal of her collarbone as she loosens the next button and the next, the blouse falling open down her front.

She pushes it back off her shoulders in the way that he likes, a slow, single roll that lets the fabric whisper down the length of her arms before it pools at her wrists.  She lets it drop.

“Skirt,” he commands.

She unzips it at her hip, and the metal of the zipper sounds enormous in the room.  The skirt slides down, and she steps out of it and folds it once with hands that tremble, laying it on the chair.  She turns to face him then, only in her bra and panties – stretchy, black, plain – and finds standing there with his arms loose at his sides and his eyes traveling her form with the slow appraisal of a man who has all the time in the world.

She reaches behind her for the clasp of her bra.

“Leave it.”

Tifa’s hands stop.

“Leave both,” he says, and somehow his voice has gone even quieter.  “I want them on.”

She nods, a small heat blooming low in her belly.  It is hotter than nakedness would have been, she thinks, because nakedness she has practiced, and this – being kept half-covered while he decides what comes off and when – is not something she has practiced. 

Cloud moves to the bed and sits on its edge, the mattress dipping under him as he rests his hands flat on his thighs.  The moon catches the curve of his shoulder where his shirt has loosened at the neck.

“Come here,” he pats his thigh once.  “Across, baby.”

Swallowing, Tifa walks to him on legs that wobble, and when she reaches him, he steadies her with one warm hand at her hip, helping her down across his lap with a care that surprises her every time, even though it shouldn’t.  She lies herself out like a stretching cat, her ribs along his thighs, her hips at the divide of his knees, her hands braced on the mattress beyond his right leg and her toes touching the floor on the far side.  Her hair spills down and pools on the comforter like a tipped inkwell.  She feels incredibly bare in this position even with the cotton still on her, the small of her back arched up into the air for him.

Cloud’s palm settles at the base of her spine.

His hand is warm.  His hands are always warm, even when the rest of him runs cool.  He smooths up the line of her back beneath the catch of her bra strap, then down again, over the cotton of her panties and down the long muscle of her thigh to her knee.  The touch is not anything yet but the promise of something, and the promise alone has her aching between her thighs and her breath catching at the top of her throat.

“Now?” he asks quietly.

“Stay,” she affirms.

“Tell me if that changes.”

“I will.”

His hand lifts.  The first one is not hard, landing across the cotton at the curve of her right cheek with a flat, contained sound.  The heat of it spreads in a circle outward as soon as his palm leaves her skin.  Tifa gasps, not from pain as the sting is almost nothing, but from the sound of it, the bright, clean fact of it in the quiet room.

His palm returns at once, soothing, drawing slow circles over the spot he just struck.

“Good girl,” Cloud murmurs, his voice dangerous. “Breathe.”

Tifa breathes.

The second one is a touch harder and on the other side.  The third is harder still, and between them his hand returns to gentle her, to rub the warmth in, to remind her hips and thighs that they are held.  He alternates, left, right, low, high, the curve where her thigh meets her bottom, and never twice in the same exact place or faster than her body can follow.  The sound of it fills the room, skin and cotton, skin and cotton.  Her hair slides forward across her face, and she does not push it back.

By the sixth, she is making small, involuntary sounds into the comforter, and by the eighth, her hips have begun to lift to meet his hand without her permission.  By the tenth, she is wet enough that she can feel the fabric clinging.

Cloud stops, his hand resting warm and still over the heat he has made.

“Now?” He asks, even and patient.

She turns her cheek against the comforter so he can hear her.  Her voice comes out hoarse and unguarded in a way it almost never is.

“Starshower,” she whispers.  “Please don’t stop, Cloud.  Please.”

Something in his hand shifts against her skin, a slight press, an answer.

“Okay,” he promises, low.  “Okay, sweetheart.”

The next one lands on the bare strip of her thigh below her panty line, and the shock of skin on skin is so much sharper that she cries out.  His other hand is immediately at the nape of her neck, gathering her hair, anchoring her.

“I’ve got you.”

Smack.  Circle.  Rub.  Smack.  Circle.  Rub.

She loses count somewhere after that.  Her body softens and melts across his lap in a way she has not felt it soften in weeks, the long-held tension at the base of her spine giving up its grip muscle by muscle.  She can feel tears starting up at the corners of her eyes that have nothing to do with pain and everything to do with the simple, astonishing relief of not having to hold herself together for one more minute tonight.

When Cloud finally stills his hand and lets it rest on the hot, pink curve of her, she is breathless and trembling, and the cotton of her panties is soaked through, and she has never in her life felt more loved and cared for.

“Good girl,” he says. “So good.”

She makes a small wrecked noise into the comforter, not even bothering to try to shape it into a word.

Cloud gathers Tifa up off his lap before she can ask to be moved, sliding one arm beneath her shoulders and another under her knees. She folds into his chest with the boneless give of a woman who has, for at least this moment, set down every weight she has been carrying. He holds her there for a count of breaths, her cheek hot against his throat and her pulse beating quick and shallow under his fingers where they cup her ribs.

“With me?” he asks quietly against her hair.

“Mhm.”

“Words, Tifa.”

She swallows.  “With you, Cloud.”

“Good.”

He sets her down carefully on the bed and helps her to her knees there, arranging her with both hands as if she were something he is afraid to leave folded wrong.  Her thighs settle apart on the soft quilt, and her hands rest open on the tops of her thighs, her hair a dark, disarrayed weight down her back.  Her face when she lifts it to him in the moonlight is wide-eyed and pink-cheeked and so entirely beautiful that it stops his breath in his chest for a second too long before he can move past it.

This is the part he never lets himself forget or ignore.

Tifa is trusting him with both her body and the small, private, interior part of her that no one else has ever been allowed to see.  His job for the rest of the night is not to take but to keep – to keep her safe, to keep her seen, to keep his attention on her so completely that no piece of her can fall through and be lost.

He turns to the chair by the door where his jacket hangs, and pulls his gloves out of the inside pocket. The leather is dark and soft from years of use, palms shaped by the grip of a hilt, fingers worn smooth at the knuckles. He works them on slowly, hearing her breath change at the sound of the soft creak as the leather settles over his hands, and when he turns back to her, he sees that her thighs have pressed together a fraction.

He takes his scarf from the hook by the door on his way back.

Cloud slides in front of her with one knee on the bed and lifts her chin with two leather-clad fingers under her jaw gently, not pressing, only asking her to look at him.

“Now?”

“Stay,” Tifa says at once, her eyes huge.  “Stay, Cloud.”

“Hands.”

She lifts her wrists to him without hesitation.

He winds the scarf around them – cotton, soft, well-washed – and ties it in a loose figure-eight that holds her wrists together in front of her body but leaves slack enough that she can twist out of it with one good pull if she ever wants to. He shows her the slack, hooking a gloved finger through the loop and tugging at it once so she sees how it gives.

“If you want to get out, you say still, and I’ll have these off you in two seconds. If your fingers tingle, you say ease. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“Yes, Cloud.”

“Good girl.”

He sets her bound hands gently in her lap and rises and steps behind her.

He starts at her shoulders, and the leather is a different conversation than skin.  It is softer and slower, with a faint warmth from his palm beneath that takes a moment to read through the hide.  Tifa shivers at the first drag of it down the line of her neck as he traces the curve of her shoulder, and he follows the strap of her bra down her back, hooks one gloved finger under it, and lets it snap softly against her skin. He draws long lines down her spine with the tips of his fingers, mapping her, the place where her ribs flare, the dip at the small of her back that is still pink from his earlier attention, the round of her hip.  He keeps his hands from her breasts and from the inside of her thighs, from any of the places his hands would be welcome.

Tifa makes a small sound of protest in the back of her throat.

Cloud smiles into her hair. 

“I’m going to make you beg,” he says, perfectly even. “You know that, don’t you?”

She breathes in, does not answer.

He waits.

“Yes,” Tifa says finally, the word tight.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes… yes, Cloud.”

He rewards her with a slow drag of leather down the front of her throat, over her collarbone, between her breasts above the bra, down the flat of her stomach to the waistband of her panties. He lifts his hand away just before he reaches the place she is straining toward, and she whimpers – actually whimpers – a small, frustrated sound she would never make in any other context.  He feels something in his chest burst fierce and protective at the smallness of it.

He keeps going.

Cloud learns Tifa again in this new vocabulary of held-back touch, brushing his gloved fingertips along the inside of her thighs but never to the seam of her. He cups her jaw and traces her lower lip with his thumb, letting her bite at the leather and pulling his thumb away before she can do more than catch it. He lets the cool weight of his palm rest on her bare belly and slides it up, up, stopping at her ribs. He runs his hands over the cotton of her bra, and her nipples are stiff enough that he can feel them clearly through the leather, and he passes over them with the lightest possible pressure, twice, and then lifts away.

By the time he has been at this for what is probably ten minutes but feels to both of them like an hour, she is shaking in small, fine tremors all up and down her thighs.  Her bound hands have lifted of their own accord toward him, and she has begun to make a low, continuous sound at the back of her throat that is a cross between a moan and a whine.

“Tell me what you want, Tifa.”

She turns her face into his hip where he has stood beside her again.

“Please.”

“Please, what.”

“Please, Cloud. I need you.”

Her voice is broken open. There is no tease or game left in it. There is only the unguarded want of a woman who has spent her entire adult life refusing to ask for things, and who is asking now, and is asking him.

He is going to remember the sound of it for a long time.

“Good girl,” he murmurs. “Lie back for me.”

He guides her down onto the bed with one arm under her shoulders, settling her so her bound hands rest above her head and her hair fans out around her.  He hooks his gloved fingers in the waistband of her soaked panties and draws them slowly down her legs and away.

Climbing on the bed, Cloud kneels between her thighs. He is not teasing anymore; he has decided.

The first slow, certain pass of his gloved thumb over the swollen nub where she wants him most brings a cry up out of her chest that is so raw he feels it land in his sternum.  He watches her face – the line of her throat going long, her eyes squeezing shut and then flying open, her bound hands fisting in her own hair – and he keeps the rhythm exactly there and with exactly that pressure, because he has been paying attention all night and he knows.

She comes apart for him in less than a minute.

He watches her break, the way her back lifts off the rug, the way her thighs clamp around his wrist and then fall open, the long, high shaking sound that empties out of her and leaves her lying limp and shining-eyed and entirely surrendered on their bed under the bars of the moon.

“There,” he says softly, leaning down to press his mouth to the curve of her hip.  “There you are. There’s my good girl.”

He takes the scarf off her wrists with the same patience he used to put it on, working the loose figure-eight loose with his teeth at the knot and then drawing the fabric gently away.  He lifts each of her hands in turn and presses his mouth to the inside of her wrist, feeling her pulse run close and wild to the surface.

He has not stopped looking at her.

She has been looked at by Cloud Strife many times in many hours of many years, but the way he looks at her now, flushed and shaking and undone, is its own particular thing, and she lets her eyes hold his because she could not look away if she wanted to.

He rearranges her again, and she feels the deliberateness of it, his hands at her ankle straightening her leg, his palms easing her thighs apart, his fingers combing her hair out of her face and away from her shoulders and laying it in a long pour above her head on the pillow. Each adjustment lands inside her like another small soft surrender to his endless care and command.

Cloud stands at the foot of the bed and pulls his gloves off, finger by finger.  Tifa watches the leather slide away, watching his bare hands appear out from under it the way you might watch something be revealed for the first time, even though she knows his hands by heart.

His eyes glued to hers, Cloud climbs onto the bed.

His mouth finds the inside of her knee first. He kisses up the long line of her thigh in slow, unhurried turns, and the bare warmth of his lips after the dry cool of leather is so much that she gasps and reaches for him.  She fists them in the sheets instead because she remembers she has not been told yet what she may do with them.

He smiles against her skin, and she can feel it.

“You can hold on,” he murmurs. “Me. My hair. Wherever you need.”

She slides one trembling hand into his hair the moment he says it, and he hums his approval into the soft of her thigh before he brings his mouth, finally, to the place his gloved thumb has already opened.

The first stroke of his tongue across her clit draws a sound out of her she has never heard her own throat make.

Cloud is unhurried. He has decided not to be hurried tonight in anything, and this is no exception. He learns her the way he learned the rest of her, slow, with care, and with that quiet attentiveness that has always been his real language. Every time she rises toward the edge, he pulls back and lays his mouth somewhere kinder until her hips quiet, and then he begins again. He brings her to the brink three times. Four. She loses track. She begs at some point, hearing her own voice chanting, please, Cloud, please, please, and he answers each time in the same low murmur, easy, sweetheart, easy, baby, I’ve got you, princess, I’ve got you. The words wind around her like a held rope, keeping her from falling out of her own body even as he scatters her further across the bed.

When he finally lets her go over, she comes around his mouth with a long, soundless arch of her spine, and he stays there through it, gentling her down until she has to push weakly at his shoulders because she cannot bear the sensation another second.

He rises up over her on his hands and looks down at her with a simper that could kill.

She has not seen him take his shirt off, but it is gone. His chest in the moonlight is pale and crossed with the old silver lines she knows as well as her own heart, and she lifts her hands and lays them flat against the velvety planes of his torso.

His skin is warm and his heart is beating hard.

“Now?” he says, and his voice for the first time tonight has a small, unsteady catch in it.

“Starshower,” Tifa breathes. “Starshower, Cloud, please–”

He shifts, and she hears the rustle of fabric being pushed away.  A moment later she feels him at her entrance, the bare, smooth, blunt heat of him, and then he is looking down into her face with the most focused, careful look she has ever seen.  He eases himself inside her in a single, long, unhurried push that draws a cry up out of her chest and a low groan up out of his.

He stills inside her, dropping his forehead to hers.

“Tifa.”

“I know.”

“Stay with me, baby.”

“I’m here, my love.”

Cloud begins to move, slow and deep, not the quick, urgent rhythm she half-expected after so much edging. His rhythm is steadier, something that takes its time inside her and watches her face for every adjustment, the angle of his hips when she gasps and the slowing of his pace when her eyes flutter, the press of his weight against her when she reaches for more of him. He kisses her between thrusts, her mouth, her jaw, the corner of her eye where a tear has slipped out that she did not even notice. He reaches between them and unhooks her bra at last, drawing it carefully out from between their bodies and dropping it off the edge of the bed, and when his warm, bare chest meets her bare chest, she makes a small, undone sound that she does not try to stop.

His hand finds hers on the pillow, lacing his fingers through hers and pressing her hand down into the cotton above her head. The small held weight of his palm against the back of her hand is, somehow, the thing that finally takes her apart.

“Cloud –”

“I know. I know. Come for me, Tifa. Come on, baby, for me –”

She breaks under him with a long, shaking cry, and he cracks a half-breath behind her, his face buried in the curve of her neck and his whole body going tight and then surrendered against her. For a long, uncountable moment afterward, there is only the hammering of two hearts trying to find each other through the wall of two ribcages and the sound of two breaths refusing to slow. He holds himself above her for one more beat.

Then he gathers her up.

He does it before she has even fully come back to herself, sliding his arm under her shoulders and rolling them so she lies along the length of him with her cheek on his chest and her leg thrown over his thigh. He draws the comforter up over her hips with his free hand and tucks it around her shoulder, his other hand finding the back of her head and holding it there.

She did not realize she was shaking.

“I’ve got you,” Cloud says into her hair, the way he has been saying it all night, the way he has, she realizes now, been saying it in one form or another for years. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you, Tifa.”

Tifa closes her eyes against his sternum and lets herself be held.

After a long while in which he does nothing but hold her against his chest and let his breathing slow and synchronize with hers, Cloud eases himself out from under her with the practiced gentleness of a man who has done this enough times to know the order of operations. He tucks the comforter up around her shoulders before he stands.

He slips into the bathroom and runs the tap until it is warm but not hot, wets a clean washcloth, wrings it out twice so it will not drip, and folds a smaller one in beside it for her face. He pours a glass of water from the pitcher they keep on the sink for exactly this hour of exactly these nights.

He looks at his own face in the mirror and pushes his hair back from his forehead with the heel of his hand.  What he sees is what is always there underneath when he lets himself check, the quiet, slightly tired man who loves Tifa, who has loved her badly and well and through long stretches of his own incoherence, and who is, even now, mostly just relieved to see her safe and happy on the other side of something she needed.

That’s all he really ever needed.

He brings the cloths and the water back to bed.

She has not moved, still curled where he left her, hair across the pillow and one hand tucked up under her chin like a child’s, watching him come back to her with eyes gone very dark and very soft in the moonlight.

“Hey,” he sits on the edge of the bed. “Gonna clean you up. Okay?”

“Mm.”

“Words, Tifa.”

She huffs a small laugh into the pillow. “Yes. Please. Yes.”

Cloud works carefully. The cloth is warm and he is gentle with it, wiping her thighs and the soft inside of her where he was, and when he sees the pink still high on the curve of her bottom from earlier, he presses the cloth against it for a long moment so the warmth can sink in. She makes a small grateful sound, her cheeks matching the pink there with blush. He folds the cloth and sets it on the nightstand, then helps her sit up against the pillows as he hands her the water. He waits while she drinks the whole glass, slowly, the way he has asked her to do it before.

He brushes a damp strand of hair away from her temple with the smaller cloth.

“You okay?” he asks, his voice as soft as he’s ever heard it.

Tifa looks up at him over the rim of the glass. Her mouth, when she lowers the water, is curved into the smallest, most unguarded smile he has ever seen on her.

“Better than okay,” she says.

He climbs back into bed beside her, and she fits herself against him in the same arrangement as before – her cheek to his chest, her ear over his heart, her leg slung across his thigh – and he draws the comforter over both of them and rests his chin on the top of her head.

The rain has stopped at some point, and the room is full of the after-quiet: the small ticks of the building cooling, the roll of tires against wet asphalt, the faint sound of the fridge still going downstairs. More than anything, he listens to her breathing settle.

“Cloud,” she says, after a long time, into his sternum.

“Mm.”

“I love you.”

He closes his eyes. His hand at the small of her back tightens, briefly, and then eases.

Tifa is in his arms, and she has just let him hold all of her, every last piece of her that she usually holds alone.

“I love you too,” he says into her hair. “I love you too, Tifa.”

She curls even closer to him, squeezing her body against his as if they could meld into one being if she tried hard enough.  Cloud holds her tighter, joining her in her efforts.

“Tifa.”

“Mm.”

“Next time you want Punisher Mode,” he says, “just ask.”

Her ruby eyes widen a fraction, and then her mouth makes that same slow, pleased curve it did earlier that night before she nods and presses her face back into his chest.

She is asleep within another minute.

Cloud stays awake a while longer, listening to her, a satisfied look of his own on his face before he closes his eyes and sleeps.