I'll quote my old comment about Cait from a thread recently:

I don't like Cait Sith because I just don't think it makes any sense at all. So it's meant to be a talking cat on a robot moggle right? Why doesn't that seem strange to anybody? About Red XIII they are all like "OMG, IT SPEAKS!" but when face to face with Cait, nobody batters an eye lid. Also why did Reeves use a robot cat..... to control a robot moggle anyway? I'd have much preferred it if Cait Sith looked human but was actually an android.

Lastly how did he manage to get away using Cait without anybody else in Shinra noticing? I understand at first it was part of Shinra's plot to use Cait as a spy, but that plan should have finished at the Temple of the Ancients. How he was allowed to continue to use it without them knowing was remarkable. At one point Reeves manages to have two simultaneous conversations with Scarlet & Heidnegger and Cloud and co. And then after he is arrested by Shinra he STILL manages to control Cait! Crazy.

Now Tifa does explain why she held the secrets from Cloud in the life stream. She says she found him, or what he thought was him, at the Sector 7 train station and took him back to her bar (this being shortly after Zack's exit from the game). She goes on to say that Cloud kept talking about stuff he shouldn't have known (the Nibel incident- Tifa thinks he shouldn't have known that due to him not being there), but felt that if she told him the truth it would destroy him.

I can't remember the exact words she used, but given Cloud's extremely fragile nature I think it's fair to say her casually saying "What? You were never at Nibel, liar!" would have screwed him up. Indeed at the Whirlwind maze that is exactly what happens. Sephiroth tells Mr. Strife that he was never at Nibel, but Cloud shrugs this off. It's when Tifa reveals the truth that he really breaks down and willingly becomes a puppet to Jenova.

Several times during the game Tifa makes the choice to withhold the information to Cloud out of fear of what the truth will do to him. Play the Nibel flashback again and you can see signs of this "Did you go into my house Cloud?" which at first seems like her being embarrassed that Cloud enters becomes her quizzing him on the events on the 2nd playthrough and that is even truer with her final question: "Cloud how badly hurt was I?" after Sephiroth attacked her.

Also when she's not probing Cloud on questions during his retelling of that incident she is notably quiet ".........." which I reckon is her going ".......how does he know all this stuff? Who the hell is thus guy if it's not Cloud?" At Junon too she decided to change the subject when Cloud questions why him and Tifa never met up during the incident.

I think she was looking out for Cloud the whole game and indeed it was her who always believed the Cloud she was with was the same boy she knew all those years ago, even when he himself doubted it.


As for your second point, that is harder to explain. They were obviously next door neighbours and Cloud had a big crush on her for a while. They weren't that close, but obviously knew each other their whole lives and maybe during the well incident Tifa realised that Cloud liked her and perhaps she did too?