The air atop Mount Hotan might have been the cleanest he'd ever breathed in his life. He inhaled a deep cold lungful of it, closed his eyes just for a moment, listened to the rush of waxed boards over the fresh powder, the tearing sound as the edges cut in on a sharp turn. He'd taken a run or two to get his legs back under him, but now the snowboard strapped to his boots felt like an extension of himself. Like he was born on it, the balance learned alongside walking.

Maybe it was just the pressure differential, but he felt lighter when he was on the mountain. The burdens down below - Sephiroth, Provo, all of that - couldn't reach him up here. When he was on a run, the wind whipping through his hair, the powder spraying up behind him, everything else melted away. For the first time in a long time, there was a brightness in his eyes that bore the youthfulness the world had done its best to take from him ever since he'd left Nibelheim to join the army.

Extreme sports therapy wouldn't fix everything, but it sure as hell went a long way. He never should have doubted Tifa's idea to come here, crowds or not.

Standing now in front of a blown up trail map with ski goggles resting on his forehead, Cloud studied the colored lines snaking down the topographic image of the mountain, mentally crossing off the ones they'd already conquered. He pointed at a numbered black diamond and turned to Tifa.

"This one's got jumps," he said with an involuntary enthusiasm that his teenage self would have found deeply uncool. Especially in front of Tifa. "You wanna give it a shot?"

The jumps, he'd reassure his teenage self, would give him the chance to redeem himself. That was where the coolness happened.


Tifa Lockhart