A/N: This is part of the The Wretched series of fics, but not a continuation in any way. They are not required reading in order to understand this one, but you can find the other fics on my page, for alternate timelines with the same basic time travel set up.

Of course it wasn't that easy. Tifa hadn't really believed it would be.

Time travel itself was difficult, the mechanisms behind it fiendishly complex, and the price of turning back time higher than she could ever articulate.

But the plan itself was so very simple. She stepped out of a burning dead end future and into a misty Nibelheim morning twenty years in the past. She pushed past a painfully young Zack and Cloud, descended the stairs of the Shinra mansion into the basement, reached out to a monster who wasn't one yet, and offered him a chance to turn back.

"It doesn't work." Sephiroth said, his eyes clouded. "Jenova's plans… the Promised Land."

"No. You failed." He had come close, perilously close more than once, but in the end he achieved nothing more than dragging them all down with him. She stood proud as his only survivor, but that wasn't enough. That wasn't a victory.

He furrowed his brow and lowered his head. His skin was pale and shiny with perspiration, and his eyes bloodshot after days of reading in the yellow light. He stood in the centre of the library and looked utterly alone. Once she might have felt pity for him, or maybe some kind of closure at the scene. She hadn't felt much of anything in so long.

He shook his head. "Why? What went wrong?"

"We stopped you."

His gaze rose to hers. It wasn't clouded anymore. "Did you?" His eyes narrowed.

And she realised her mistake.

He launched forward, she rolled back and activated her Exit materia. The cold steel of a sword flashed just as darkness enveloped her, and she fell back onto grass under the late day sun. The edge of her jacket was sliced open and blood trickled down her waist.

She rolled to her feet, pushing a hand against the injury, but keeping her eyes pinned to the Shinra Mansion.

The ground trembled. She took a couple of steps backwards. A sharp whine split the air, and she turned and started to run. The mansion exploded. The heat wave rolled over her, stinging her skin. She kept going.

So much for Plan A.

She hadn't really believed it would work anyway.

Nibelheim burned. She didn't try to stop it, how could she? She couldn't kill him, and if he found her he would kill her and it would all be for nothing. She stood in the woods on the mountain slope and watched the pillar of smoke rise, her hands balling into fists. Red light dyed the night sky.

Hatred sat heavy in her stomach. It ached in her bones and lingered in her muscles, tightening her tendons and sharpening her senses. Decades old and so bone deep she couldn't remember not hating him anymore. Somehow it seemed as though Nibelheim had always been burning.

She had given him a chance. More than he deserved, but she had offered it nonetheless. She wasn't sure if she would have accepted such an easy solution if he had accepted it. Not after so long. She didn't want to fight him, but it felt right. He didn't deserve to just walk away.

The smoke billowed still but the waves of heat grew lesser. She walked back to the town.

She kept a hand to her injury as she walked and mentally tallied what she had to do. She could face him on her own, but she had the advantage of hindsight. He knew about her now, so the element of surprise was wasted, but he didn't know any details.

She left the tree cover. The town was gone.

She hadn't seen it like this last time, she hadn't been there to pick through the ruins afterwards. A kind of nostalgic regret hit her. Burned wood crumbled under her shoes. Her eyes and lungs stung from the smoke. She kept walking, undeterred.

Her nightmares had featured burning houses and charred bodies for so long it had lost its sting.

She climbed the mountain. The sun rose behind her, and its first rays lit upon a body at the foot of the reactor.

A girl in a cowgirl costume.

She stopped. It was the first thing in the past that had really shocked her. She had tallied the cost to herself before making the plunge: inconsequential. It needed to be done and there was nothing left for her to go back to, nothing not worth sacrificing.

The girl in front of her was so young. Her eyes were still open, unseeing.

She looked up at the reactor. She walked around the body.

Sephiroth should have fallen into the Reactor's reservoir by now. Hojo would be there in a day to pick over the survivors, she would get Zack and Cloud out and miles away from Nibelheim by then. She plunged into the dimly lit interior of the reactor. The two men lay bleeding and unconscious on the stairs, and above them Jenova hung in her smashed tank: a body without a head. There was no sign of Sephiroth.

She checked on the two of them, and then stood and straightened her back. Tifa marched up the stairs to the specimen platform. Jenova didn't watch her, she couldn't. Still she felt observed and hated. She stretched out her hand and called on her fire materia.

A fireball engulfed the body, the remaining Mako in the tank ignited and the glass base shattered from the heat. A scream that wasn't on any audible frequency pierced the air, shaking the walls and reverberating through Tifa's skull. She hoped wherever Sephiroth was, he could feel it.

A gunshot rang out.

She fell forwards. Her shoulder burned. She tried to turn over but a boot landed on her upper back and blinding pain shot through her.

"Don't move," Tseng's voice called from above.

Her thoughts raced. She jerked her other elbow and knocked his leg out from under him. Pain screamed down her side but she rolled and leapt up anyway. Of course the Turks would be first on the scene, she should have known better. Not everybody died in the fire, not even in her timeline, the other survivors-

Tseng cracked her across the temple with the butt of his gun.

"Who is she?"

Her eyes wouldn't open. Words swam through a thick haze before her mind made sense of them.

"One of the villagers. What do you want done with her?"

"Hn. She destroyed the specimen." She knew that voice, she disliked it. Her head swam trying to place it. "Bring her with the other two."

It was Hojo's voice.

Only for a split second did she exist in a place where she was surprised to hear the voice of a man who had been dead for over a decade. She was lifted up and put onto something soft. In parting from the cold steel pressed against her face she remembered that she had been lying on the floor of a reactor, the same as Cloud and Zack. Enough of her mind reasserted itself that she knew what that meant. When and where she was, and why.

Sephiroth was alive.

Her head swam as she was carted into blinding light. Hojo gave orders that slowly lost coherence in her mind. It didn't matter.

Sephiroth was alive. He would escape the lifestream in four years. Everything else fell into the haze of irrelevance, as the interiors of her mind focused solely inward to turn over the problem that mattered.

She moved in and out of consciousness. The ceiling of the Shinra mansion's basement drifted into focus until a lab tech moved too quickly and her eyes wandered again, unable to focus on anything. Great flurries of activity and loud noises would come and go. It went on so long she distantly realised it had to have been artificially induced. She'd fought Tseng and been shot before. This wasn't right.

Her throat was sore from screaming. Distantly she acknowledged that it must have been her who had been making all the noise. She didn't want to think about it. It didn't matter. This wasn't what she was here for.

"Early signs of successful conversion," Hojo muttered, leaning over her and staring through his narrow glasses.

"Conversion…" she slurred. She blinked.

He wasn't there anymore. He was on the other side of the room yelling at a lab tech.

"No, simpleton, you can't harvest cells from clones, they're dead ends. It needs to be an asymptomatic carrier. A primary source."

She blinked and the lights had dimmed. The techs were all gone. Her arms stung with needle points and incisions she didn't remember getting. She clenched her teeth. Her mouth felt disgusting.

She rolled her head enough to look sideways. Hojo was leaning back on a chair with his arms crossed, watching her with a disinterested frown. The green light of two Mako tanks cast him in a spectral light. She distantly knew that Cloud and Zack were in those tanks.

"We must have more J cells," he said, almost helplessly. "If you don't convert properly, I'll dig the ones I planted into you straight back out again."

For the first time since the reactor she could make him out properly. It struck her in the ghastly lighting and odd angle, that he had the same profile as his son. He looked down wearing a pensive frown.

"You can't have a reunion with nothing to reunite," he muttered.

A wave of cold passed over her. The professor left, turning off the lights. She shivered, and then shook with full body convulsions. The haze that had insulated her mind was coming apart into useless shreds.

Dread filled her, heavy and choking. She understood what was happening to her. After so many years of avoiding any contamination, never so much as a bruise of geostigma, finally they had caught her.

Indignation drowned out her dread. She had resisted this for decades. She had stood up to Sephiroth alone more times than anyone but Cloud could boast, and she had survived every single one of his games. Anger consumed the indignation. She refused to fall.

Strapped to an operating table in the dark, she dreamed.

Nibelheim was burning. It always was in her dreams. The flames spread throughout the world, this one and the one she had left behind. She didn't know which world had burned first, or if it even mattered. She walked through it, vainly searching and coughing on smoke.

Finally, in the heart of the flames she saw him.

Sephiroth stood, unmoved by the flames licking at him, staring back at her. That was odd. He was always walking away from the destruction in her dreams, utterly above the fallen bodies and content with horror in his wake. He watched her, unblinking.

She looked down. The fire materia was in her hands.

The flames ate at her, crawling up her legs. It was a sweet relief, it burned so very hot, it almost reached a sublime cold. She wanted to fall into it, to be wholly consumed.

No. No, she didn't. She refused ti be consumed. She looked up at Sephiroth again, defiant and furious. He watched back coolly.

The fire licked up her body for all her resistance, feeding on her, burning hotter and hotter. There was no more materia anymore, no spectators, no crumbling world, just her and the fire. It was infinite in strength but she was so angry she didn't care. Her body collapsed to ash but still she endured. She was formless, nothing but a burning ball of spirit energy, stripped bare by the heat. She stared back into the heart of the flames, unmoved.

The dream collapsed.

She opened her eyes on an operating table. A pair of eyes deep inside of her opened too.

A/N: Thanks for reading! Any feedback is welcome.

Next Time: An Escape And A Reunion.