Disclaimer: Epically not mine.

A/N: This is something of a special project, as it started life as a three-chapter fic called 'Triangle', written several years ago, around the time I first got into FFVII and was fascinated by the connections between Zack, Aerith and Cloud. That original fic can still be found on FFN, but the idea itself has since grown into substantially more. Though it still focuses a lot on Cloud, Zack and Aerith, the scope has widened to include most, if not all, of the cast, including some secondary characters such as the Turks. Though I haven't quite finished, it currently stands at 318 pages and spans most of the timeline. All I ask is that you please give it a chance to make sense and it will.

Also, this fic is extra special to me because it is my 400th here on FFN.

A Triangle of Many Sides

© Scribbler, 2011

Prologue: Leader

2000 B.G.

Elfé leaned heavily on her staff, trying to ignore the ache in her bones. It felt like the marrow had been sucked right out of them, pulled from under her fingernails and through her pores. Everything hurt, from her toenails to her scalp. Even her skin felt like it had been peeled off and reattached wrong. Two things kept her on her feet, pretending she was fine: her people looking to her for guidance and the fact that, if she could feel her aches and pains, she was still alive. Others hadn't been so lucky. If she showed weakness now it would be spitting on their sacrifice.

The battle had been hard. In all their long history there had never been another like it. Not even the civil war, when Cetra fought Cetra about whether to settle or keep to life as nomads. Cetra were peaceful. They always preferred solving a problem without violence.

The civil war had been millennia ago. Most of the Old Magic from that time had now been lost. Elfé and her people had thinner blood than their ancestors, the power in them fragile in comparison. They weren't as weak as their genetic cousins, the humans, but that wasn't really a comfort. Humans were blind and deaf to anything beyond their five physical senses; insensate to the natural rhythms of the Planet without signs from nature to guide them. Most were greedy to the point of cruelty and couldn't see the patterns of life around them if they jumped up and bit them.

If the Cetra had been stronger, they wouldn't have lost so many of their number to JENOVA's virus. Fewer of Elfé's friends would have morphed into monsters and gone rampaging through the rest. The leaders from ancient times would have known what to do. They wouldn't have been driven to desperation and heresy like Elfé.

Cetra magic wasn't meant to be used for fighting. It went against everything they held dear. Yet she had forced her people to do it anyway.

Had it been worth it? JENOVA was gone. That was good. Yet so many of her people had died to make that happen. Victory was a human value. Nature didn't care about victory; it cared about keeping the balance of life, death, magic and everything in between. What was victory worth when you couldn't share it with your friends and family? Already the survivors were talking, wondering if there hadn't been another way.

Guilt gnawed on Elfé like hungry wolves around sickly prey. She was so tired. All the same, she couldn't afford to weaken. She was leader. Leaders had to be strong so the rest could be weak. Leaders had to shoulder everybody's grief except their own. The leader had to be practical when all she really wanted was to mourn the friends whose lives she had spent like blowing puffs of smoke in a rainstorm. Someone had to take command during the battle and of the plan beforehand. She'd done those two. Now to take care of the third: the aftermath. This should have been the easy part. JENOVA was gone. The virus was gone. They were alive.

It wasn't easy at all. A survivor came towards her. Elfé straightened. Her bones shrieked and her head spun, but she met his eyes until he looked away.

"Elfé, we need to find shelter." His voice was a croak from chanting shielding spells for hours while JENOVA fought to break their lines. Elfé recognised him as part of the third wave. JENOVA nearly got to that line. None of the first wave had made it, and at least half of the second were gone.

"How are the wounded?" she asked.

"They'll live. For now."

More deaths to add to her conscience. Bitterness spiked in Elfé. She hoped bad things happened to the humans whose knee-jerk fear of the virus had made them kill all the Cetra they could find, not just the infected. If the scattered Cetra tribes' numbers had been stronger when they banded together to go after JENOVA, maybe their losses wouldn't be so devastating now. Maybe the added strength would have compensated for their weakened magic and the rest wouldn't have had to work so hard to contain and then seal the demon. Even as Elfé faced off against JENOVA in the final sealing, she had been aware of collapsing figures around her. From the corner of her eyes she had seen their fleeing souls, and afterwards seen the crumpled corpses around the Protective Circle. Perhaps if there had been more of them, someone else would have been leader. She wouldn't have had to grasp the nettle nobody else wanted to touch. She wouldn't have gathered what was left of their people, disparate tribes still mourning their dead, and bullied them into what they'd all privately thought would be suicide.

She'd felt the minds of the dying. She would never forget that. It scraped along under her skin; a prickly knowledge she would never shake off. She would never feel clean again after what she had done to them.

She was the leader, so of course she'd volunteered to be the hub for the magic their Protective Circle gathered right out of the Planet's core. It had been a dangerous, last-ditch attempt to defeat JENOVA. Lifestream wasn't meant to be pulled out into the open that way, let alone used so unnaturally. Cetra magic usually just skimmed the surface so the balance wasn't disturbed. As a rebellious teenager, Elfé had delved too deep into that raw power and nearly fried her mind. This time they'd gone even deeper, yanking out bits of energy like plaiting a lasso from uprooted grass and using it to rope a bucking horse.

Elfé just hoped Gaia could forgive them. Something of a vain hope, since she couldn't even forgive herself. As the hub, she had channelled most of the energy the Cetra brought up and had directed it at JENOVA. Elfé should have died, or at least her brain should've after so much trauma. Instead, it had been sharpened to a lethal point as the magic scoured her from the inside out. Everyone involved had passed through her mind like grain pouring from one bag into another, beautiful and fresh … and then gone.

Until the day she did finally die, Elfé knew she would have no peace. She had led them all to that. People. Individuals. She wasn't a warmonger who saw things in terms of numbers and acceptable losses. Cetra weren't meant to fight. She had forced the issue, and them. She hadn't seen any other way. It had been her idea, and her drive that made it reality.

Was there even a place in the Promised Land for someone like her? Humans were the warlike ones. Their attachment to territory made them aggressive. The Cetra were supposed to be more enlightened, but when it came down to it, Elfé had acted like a human. She had made the tough choices nobody else wanted to make. Now the disaster had been averted, she was left to wonder whether those choices had really been hers to make at all.

"Elfé?"

She blinked back to the present. "Uh, send scouts. Find the least tired and send them out on a rota. Look at the mountain range, not the wasteland. We'll need somewhere we can defend in a pinch."

As if any of them were actually capable of fighting anymore. A gaggle of humans armed with feathers could have decimated the Cetra right now, much less ones with clubs or blades.

The man nodded and moved away. Elfé waited until he was gone before sighing and letting her fingers grip her staff so tight her knuckles blanched. A wave of pain washed over and through her. Her teeth clenched. She waited for it to pass.

She moved away from the others, to the crest of the hill where the least injured had been working since sun-up. It was nearly sundown now. She crested the rise and half-skidded a few feet down the mud on the other side before she could stop herself. Her knees nearly buckled, and not from exhaustion.

"Gaia forgive me ..." she gasped.

Her eyes stung. She was the leader – the first to unite so many tribes in hundreds of years – and leaders had to be strong.

But she'd never asked to be leader. It was just necessity when humans left only five of her tribe alive and JENOVA infected four of them. She had lost her husband to that creature. She should have felt vindicated. She had avenged him. Instead, all she felt was tired and miserable, as if the Cetra had been defeated.

"I only did what I thought was right." Her eyes filled with tears as she surveyed rows upon rows of freshly turned dirt. Like all living things, Cetra returned to the Planet when they died. Life grew from death just like death followed life. "I only did what seemed right."

A mother cried beside a tiny grave. A man tenderly stroked a pile of mud that covered someone he loved. All around her, people grieved. Elfé's new senses caught their feelings like magical spiderwebs.

"I was wrong," she whispered. "We're too few. How can we survive now? I made a mistake. We should have done like the humans and hidden. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry …"

Was this the end of the Cetra?

The ground beneath Elfé seemed to pulse. She closed her eyes, green lights flickering behind her lids. Slowly her shoulders eased. The lines around her mouth relaxed. Voices no ear could hear gave her a message from the souls rejoining the Lifestream. A sense of peace suffused her. She suddenly remembered her father pulling her back when her foolishness nearly killed her, and how he had stroked her hair until she stopped trembling. When she thought of her stupidity back then, she never remembered that part.

When she reopened her eyes they were the same shade of green they had always been. To an observer, she had just blinked a bit longer than usual. Yet some of the grief-inspired dullness had been erased, making them seem brighter.

Her belly prickled.

"I see," she murmured. "Not an end. Just another beginning."

Something like that, replied a voice as old as time itself. Now stop apologising and get on with living the life you fought for. What was the point of fighting for it if you're just going to waste it moping?

Months later, as she held the baby that had outlived her husband before it was even born, Elfé thought back to that moment at the edge of the battlefield. She looked down at the crown of her baby's head, remembering all the lives that had been spent to make a world where babies could be born safely, away from the shadow of JENOVA. It had been worth it after all. She had made the right decision to end the threat before it cost them everything.

She didn't know the threat wasn't gone at all, or that JENOVA and the conflict with her really had cost the Cetra everything after all.

.