and my heart is steel
Everyone else stopped dead when they saw President Shinra slumped at his behemoth of a desk with a sword sticking straight up from his back, but Tifa went closer. She had to see for herself, and she'd grown out of stopping dead in the face of death five years ago.
The sword was even longer than it looked from further away—it had been driven through the back of his neck, his throat, and on through the brushed-steel surface of the desk and out the other side to end with the tip buried in the top of one fat thigh. The corpse was very fresh, fresher than the blood trail they'd followed this far—Shinra's blood was still dripping, though his heart had obviously stopped well before AVALANCHE arrived. And.
And Tifa knew that sword.
She wasn't paying her full attention as Cloud confirmed it. It bothered her a little, how much the body didn't. Shinra revolted her slightly less in death than he had in life. "Only Sephiroth can use that sword," Cloud said, and Tifa remembered the weight of it in her hand. But Sephiroth had taken it away from her and struck her down with it without her ever landing a blow, and she would have been better off going at him barehanded and not returning to him the weapon he'd cast aside, even if it had looked like opportunity, so maybe Cloud was right. Her mouth tasted of blood, though she hadn't bitten her tongue. Maybe it was just the smell in the air.
Then Palmer popped out and confirmed that a man, a legend, who was supposed to be dead had reappeared after five years and talked about stopping Shinra's twisted goals, and Tifa could taste only ashes.
If they had to be indebted to Sephiroth for killing their enemy and letting them out of their cells, if it turned out he and AVALANCHE had the same goals…well. She'd live with it. She'd endure it, for the sake of the Planet. Sephiroth might have killed her personal world, but the world as a whole was larger than that. She'd make herself work with him, if she had to. For the world, and so she could watch him for another betrayal.
If he'd repented, maybe she could even forgive him someday, if he was prepared to fight with them, if he was truly sorry. But she wanted to put off thinking of that, and was grateful when Cloud insisted to Barrett that he knew Sephiroth well enough to be sure that his goals were nothing like saving the Planet. (Even if she wanted to ask how Cloud knew any such thing, he hadn't been there when Sephiroth turned on Nibelheim, and no one had expected him to lose his mind like that. Had they? Had the Shinra sent him to Nibelheim to break, on purpose, in order to protect themselves?) Even more grateful when the rotors of a helicopter started up and Barrett realized the younger Shinra was in residence.
Before they ran outside she gave the dead man a last look—wanting, a little, to pull the murder weapon free and take it with her, as if studying it long enough would yield up Sephiroth's secrets. That was stupid, though. It had done her little enough good the first time, and puzzling out secrets wasn't her job. It had been Jessie's. She thought it might be Aerith's, now. Tifa held the line and swung her fists, and that was usually enough—it hadn't kept the Plate from falling, any more than it had saved Nibelheim, but neither would the damned sword.
She didn't even know what a sword like that was called, just 'long' and 'Wutaian' and 'Sephiroth's.' Knowledge was power, she knew that, but it had never been her kind of power.
She hated Shinra, would like to see it blown to smoking shards and was willing to see anyone standing up to defend it dead if it was her battle-path they stood in, but she didn't care about it the same way Barrett did, couldn't talk about its higher-ups like personal acquaintances who'd wronged her, hadn't recognized any of the Department heads at the meeting they'd eavesdropped on, hadn't recognized the Vice-President's name just now, though she supposed she might as well learn it.
The mustachioed corpse remained nameless to her, though, and she preferred it that way.
She was sick to death of knowing the names of the dead.
A/N: During their second, illicit visit to the President's office, it's Tifa of all people who, after Palmer repeats what he heard, asks if Sephiroth is 'trying to protect the Promised Land from Shinra.' Tifa is, at this point in the story, the only person present who has already sworn formal vendetta against Sephiroth personally, so that's not a casual choice of words.
She says a lot of weird, contradictory things over the course of the game, some of them because she was keeping secrets from Cloud and some because of bad writing, and possibly some just because she's weird, but this one had interesting possibilities.