Chapter Seven: Toxicity Threshold
Cloud looked on numbly while Cid Highwind took a long drag off his cigarette and puffed out three white smoke rings. The old pilot held it up, gave a disappointed grunt, and extinguished it on the table in front of him. Maybe it just wasn't the same without a solid, living body. The usual brain chemistry that went with the nicotine fix was probably missing in action. "Well numbskulls," he wearily announced, "The way things are shaping up, I'd say it looks like we're all good and fucked."
"Grossness," Yuffie complained, wrinkling up her nose and ignoring Cid's morbid proclamation. Hopping to her feet, she moved over a few tables to get away from the smoke and stench.
The space Tifa's mind had carved out for them was an exact replica of Seventh Heaven, along with the few blocks of Edge that had surrounded it. It was not short on comforts—they could eat, play games, drink, smoke, bathe, and even sleep for what little it was worth. Sometimes, it was too easy for all of them to pretend that Tifa was just prepping something tasty back in the kitchen; that she'd be joining them soon, and that life would carry on as it had been. Cloud wanted more than anything for their shared fantasy to be real. Even though they were only disembodied spirits, she still saw so closely to anything they needed. She still took care of them, while on the outside, as had often happened in their previous lives, she was faltering at looking after herself.
Claiming Yuffie's former seat near Cid, he agreed, "It's not looking so great. Back when Barret showed up, I thought that Sephiroth was just using him to try to corner Tifa, but between what happened with the Goddess and now Vincent, there's got to be more to this…"
"Yeah, I thought that fucker was just after Tifa for that Minerva chick, too," Cid supplied.
At that, Genesis and Zack pulled up seats on either side of Cloud.
"Tifa reclaimed the defeated Goddess' energy as her own, not knowing what it would do to her. Even so, that's a monstrous and impressive feat by anyone's measure. Have you ever wondered how Jenova came to exist such as it did?" Genesis injected.
"I would rather not, but…it is like he's trying to make her into something like him," Cloud admitted, somewhat startled at the idea. He'd have to chew on that one for a while. "But why? He was after her for Minerva to begin with. What changed? That energy is still there."
"As long as I knew him, Sephiroth always had kind of a thing for fixating on anything that really hit a nerve. Even before Nibelheim, Cloud. And look at how long he harassed you. After Tifa got along so well with that Eden kid, and then made off with the Goddess, this isn't exactly surprising," Zack opined.
"Perhaps Sephiroth-ascendant is not content to rise alone. It's only convenient that she was once yours, Cloud. Obsessive spite and passion are close bedfellows in him," Genesis suggested.
Cloud stared blankly at Genesis for a moment, aghast at what he seemed to be insinuating, and then shook his head, replying, "Sounds pretty far-fetched to me. The Sephiroth I know only cares about his end game. He'll never succeed either way. Not with Tifa. She'd sooner die fighting him."
"Yeah…have you noticed how many times that should have happened to her already?" Zack pointed out.
Cloud grimaced; it was true. Tifa had survived the ends of three worlds, crashing down onto two worlds, an attempted execution that seemingly turned into an attempted murder, attempts on her life by corrupted versions of Barret and Vincent, and merging with the spirit energy of the third planet. To say that it seemed like someone was intentionally preserving her, even after Minerva was no longer in the picture, was no exaggeration.
He sighed in resignation, hoping to shelve the topic, but before Cloud could say anything else, Yuffie jumped up and interrupted, "Whoa. Just whoa. Are you saying that Sephiroth has some kind of creepy thing for Tifa because she played too nice with his larva-kid form or something?"
"It's but a theory. His true intent for her remains to be seen," Genesis answered her, "but I submit that it would be a first for him. It's not as if you didn't 'play nice' with Eden as well, but here you are with the rest of us."
"This is totally insane," Yuffie groaned, and sank down on in a chair opposite from where she'd sat before, cradling her head in her hands. "Eden did get really attached to Tifa, though…this is so messed up."
"Look, it doesn't matter," Zack said, hidden exasperation rearing its head. "It doesn't matter why he does what he does. Going over what he wants or doesn't is nothing but a distraction from our real mission. All that matters is that we help Tifa get to the Promised Land ASAP, and then from there we take him down once and for all."
"Shit, I don't know about any of that," Cid started, lighting up again. "What I want to know is how we help Tifa in the meantime. How do we keep the rat bastard from stepping into her head whenever he likes, just for starters?"
"Yeah, and how do we keep him from pushing us to the back of her mind every time he talks to her?" Cloud added. "She's starting to feel like we're just running for cover and leaving her alone because we can't help. It's seriously hurting her ability to fight back."
They couldn't hear or see Sephiroth when he showed up in Tifa's mind; his presence manifested like a poltergeist. Every door and window in the bar would slam shut and lock. The room itself would compress and crowd tables and chairs together, while tremors shook bottles and glasses down from their cupboards and shelves, shattering some of them. Outside, he caused a literal eclipse, a perfect black sphere phasing into existence and gliding to overlay the pseudo-daylight which the heart of Tifa's consciousness provided, casting the entire place in an eerie sort of dusk.
Out of context, Cloud had once briefly considered that it was a breath-taking sight to behold. But only out of context. In reality, it stood not only as a symbol of a violent mental incursion, but as a reminder that slowly but surely, Sephiroth was succeeding in wearing her down. Her light used to expand and burst outward around the sphere into awe-inspiring ruby flames, resisting her visitor's dark presence. However, the more time passed, the less dramatic that display was becoming. She needed their help, and soon. Their questions of how to do that; of how to make themselves more available to her hung heavy and unanswered in the air. Their strength had always been in encouraging her; in bolstering her spirit against the extreme stress she had to endure for their sake—at this point, possibly for the sake of all life in the universe at large. But Sephiroth was making sure that his voice was the one most prominent.
After a long, dour silence, Genesis concluded, "We're impotent as we are now. Aerith and Nanaki are out studying the Lifestreams. I will go find them and see what information might be gleaned."
There was a giant gorge encircling the outskirts of the Edge-clone that Tifa's mind had concocted to shelter her friends' souls. It was a relatively new development, created to act as a protective barrier, bottomless and too wide to cross safely. On the other side, an endless wasteland of spirit energy flowed and mingled. Amidst it all, a long, plaited rope of Lifestream that used to be Minerva stood tall and twisting. Occasionally, pieces of the braid would loosen and snake down to ensnare and merge with anything else Tifa had taken in. Since her unfortunate run-in with Vincent and Chaos, that rope had tripled in size. Worse, the onslaught of new energy had sheared off huge slabs of the canyon walls, which then formed tiny bridges between the two sides of the chasm.
Aerith sat pensively on the cliff's edge, and Nanaki lay nearby. She gazed deeply into the other side, listening closely. The mess of Gaia's ruined soul and all the other things that had mistaken Tifa's presence for home made it difficult to zero in on anything coming from Tifa's own consciousness, but it was still there, alive and brilliant.
"Can you make anything out?" Nanaki asked.
"Too many things," Aerith half-complained, "but she keeps repeating that she has no control. She's been saying that to herself for a long time—even before Amyntas—but it's so much worse now."
Nanaki squinted his eyes and looked up at the sun-like light hanging over the other side of the canyon; Tifa's soul. "She'll rally. Tifa is strong," he insisted.
"She is…" Aerith trailed off, her face pained. Even for her, honest optimism was becoming something of a struggle. "In a way, she's stronger than she's ever been. After Sephiroth got to Minerva, Tifa tried to save her, but it was too late. Instead, she's gained a kind of new power, but—" Aerith cut herself off, daring not to define what kind of profane capabilities Tifa had picked up.
Nervously licking a paw, Nanaki lowered his head and finished for her, "No control."
Aerith nodded once. She could tell that the whole story was too difficult for him to tell, too. "The first time she tried to use it, it overwhelmed her."
"She took in an entire world because she felt responsible for it. We were lucky it was one so small and young. If something like this happens again, I fear we won't survive," he stated, glancing down into the abyss.
"Suppose we expelled what's left of the Goddess," Genesis' voice interrupted their fearful conversation as he approached from behind.
Aerith turned, grateful to hear from him. All she and Nanaki had learned hadn't amounted to any kind of a plan. It was encouraging that anyone was trying to come up with something that looked like an idea. They had to start somewhere. "How would we do that?" she questioned.
"Technically, that's all on Tifa. We would attempt to assist her in doing so," he explained. "Because it started when she recalled Minerva's spirit, dumping it should halt the evolution she's suffering, and prevent any further calamities at her hands."
Nanaki cocked his head to one side and growled slightly in frustration. "This idea has its own problems. If she expels Minerva's energy, she'll become stationary, and Sephiroth might yet claim it."
"That part's not a problem, really," Aerith replied. "Sephiroth took all of Amyntas. He doesn't need Gaia's remains. I don't think he even wants it anymore, because…" Again, she trailed off.
Genesis regarded her with a hard glare for her incomplete thought and continued, "No; forgive me. Nanaki is right. Call it a matter of principle, but he would surely take it, if only to portray the complete futility of denying or fighting him. But as you say, it's moot. The real danger is that she'd also lose the mantle of Omega, be left trapped in one place, and would probably not be able to contain us any longer. Perhaps we ought to focus on helping her reject anything but the Goddess instead…"
A shadow passed over the land suddenly, and the trio looked skyward to see a shining black disc overtaking the light. It moved slowly—hesitant, even—which was unusual. When it was finally completely positioned over Tifa's luminescence, the land quaked. Aerith, Genesis, and Nanaki all scrambled away from the cliff's edge and crouched low to keep balance. A few more large rock slabs broke away from the walls, some falling endlessly, while others formed more bridges. Once the shaking had finally stopped, the light expanded as always, but this time in huge, verdant, rippling aurora arcs rather than flames. The Lifestreams on the other side of the gorge halted their movement as if time had stopped, and every slab of stone bridging the divide crumbled away.
"Tifa's protecting us," Nanaki said.
"At what cost, I wonder?" Genesis queried.
Aerith didn't speak right away, entranced with the light-show playing out overhead. When she did, her voice came out strained and sickly—"No…he's not concerned with us. Not yet. He's using his own spirit energy, preparing her…"
Tifa came to this time floating in space, her materia cocoon in orbit of a gas giant. She did not remember what had happened after she'd invited the primordial world's energy to merge with her. All she could recall was that she had, that her friends had all tried to warn her against it a split second too late, and that she sorely regretted it. Remorse dangled heavy in the pit of her stomach like a lead weight, nauseating her. It was made all the worse when wracking her brain for alternatives produced nothing viable. There were no solutions; only the bare certainty that Sephiroth had sent Vincent and Chaos, as he'd sent Barret, to provoke exactly this outcome—that she'd do as he did, and as Jenova had done. Recalling just how powerful, how exhilarated she'd felt before realizing what was really happening triggered her gag reflex, and she pressed a hand to her mouth.
"I'm a planet murderer now," kept swimming around in the forefront her mind, biting with sharp, carnivorous teeth into everything she believed good and decent about herself.
Half frantic, she drifted closer to one of the more transparent walls for a clearer view and peered out. There, also orbiting the huge, purple and white streaked giant, was a medium sized moon covered in a fading atmosphere of smoke and ash. It had not been a full-fledged planet after all, which might have been why it hadn't produced any Weapons to defend itself. It was just a small rock in comparison to a normal world; a place where maybe a stray, transient drop of life had taken root. And as far as she could see, there were no civilized ruins. Either Chaos' undoing had totally vaporized anything that might have been there, or she hadn't killed anything intelligent or sentient. Tifa hoped in the latter with all her might, and it was just barely enough to quiet her inner accuser. Just enough to take a deep breath and bask in the mercy that was reasonable doubt.
Still, somehow, the trembling that had gripped her body would not subside, and her guts churned in protest. It occurred to Tifa that she was in fact feeling a little sick. A hot flash passed over her, and cold sweat dripped down from her forehead, stinging when it met her eyes. Sweat! She was sweating, and she felt positively awful! A few painful stabs in her lower abdomen made her laugh softly to herself while she doubled over. She was still herself, still human, and still the same Tifa Lockhart that she'd always been, and would always be. Her eyes swam in her head, and her vision bleared, but she smiled all the same, enraptured in a manic rush of hope. Hope—that was still a thing!
Her blissful expression erupted into a projectile stream; vomit that free-floated into a putrid bubble across her gravity-free shell and pushed her backward to the opposite wall. Tifa clung to it, letting every bare skin surface stick to the cold materia. Her heart was hammering against her sternum, and she couldn't catch her breath. As rapidly as she was deteriorating, perhaps it was too early to celebrate. She had to survive this illness first, whatever it was. She could hardly pin down her thoughts to think about it; they were zipping by like golden chocobos hopped up on illicit greens, but she finally managed to force her symptoms together into one coherent, recognizable picture.
"Oh no, no," she huffed. "Mako poisoning." She closed her eyes and swallowed hard, cringing at the bile taste. Of course she had Mako poisoning; she'd just absorbed a moon's worth! "Overdose" was a probably a gentle word for what was happening from a medical perspective. She was still elated to discover that she was subject to some human vulnerabilities, but of all ways to figure that out, this had to be one of the most torturous possible. Maybe, just maybe, if she could manage to sleep it off, she could skip over the part with all the weird hallucinations and disembodied, harassing voices.
A small eternity seemed to pass with her right cheek pressed to the wall, hanging on for dear life and praying that mental clarity would not abandon her. Her fever, however, did not care for her patience or her will to think straight. It danced over every neuron, sparking anxiety to life anew, exhuming dread for what might become of her. Without thinking about it, "Help…" passed through her lips while her eyes rolled back into her head. Uttering that one word all but crushed her soul. No one was going to help her. Her friends were dead and contained within her personal limbo for them, and there wasn't much of a chance that a friendly stranger might cross paths with her here. Tifa was alone; she would either make it through this, or she would die.
To add to her malaise, the walls around her began to evaporate before her eyes, swirling and fading into space like water steam. She was still pressed up against something solid, but her egg was disintegrating into nothing. She felt like she might fall through the concave floor and descend forever, lost, forgotten, and unmade. Considering all she'd been through, the idea of fading away like that was almost relieving, but facing it as a reality was fast proving unbearable. Her will to live on was still there, still urging her to keep breathing and moving, even if it had to mean learning how all over again.
Then, there was contact. A smaller hand grabbed onto three of her fingers, giving them a light squeeze.
Tifa forced her eyes to focus as much as she could, trying to make out who'd shown up to this dangerous, crumbling place.
"Hello Tifa," Eden greeted her, his tone soft.
On cue, red hot static flared between her temples, and she opened her mouth to scream.
Eden placed one of his pointer fingers over her lips, instantly paralyzing her. "Why are you so afraid? You called for help, and now someone is here for you."
"What are you doing to me?" she projected as acidly as she could pull off in silent thought. As her anger flared, she considered demanding that he show his true face, but immediately thought better of it.
"As of yet, nothing. That will change eventually, but all I've done is to set choices before you, and you've done with them as you wished," he replied, his mouth upturned into a half-smirk.
Despondency overwhelmed her heart. He had plans for her yet; still more torment on the horizon. "Sephiroth," she called him out by his true name, "why is it not enough that you've won? I have nothing for you. Just…let me go. Destroy me if you have to. Let this end."
Eden frowned, but opted not to justify her near-suicidal plea, instead gazing out at the smoldering moon. "Don't worry. You'll understand soon, Tifa," he said, sounding almost forlorn.
In the blink of an eye, Eden vanished, and Sephiroth stood in his place. While he'd chosen to appear human, double halos of golden light hovered behind him, the uppermost intersected with a half-ring, like crowns signifying his oneness with and sway over the Lifestreams he'd taken. Multicolored sparks and flecks of rogue, disjointed spirit energy darted around his around his tall form like fireflies, giving him the appearance of a bio-luminescent aura. He had transcended the life cycle, instead taking ownership of it one world at a time.
Now unfrozen, every muscle in Tifa's body contracted, straining against the horrible reality before her. Nevertheless, she still managed to choke out, "There's nothing left to understand. I'm worth nothing to you. End this."
The space around him shimmered as he stepped out of phase, and then back in again, invasively close to her. Lightly pressing his left pointer and middle fingers against the skin where he'd run her through, he quietly retorted, "Enough. 'Nothing' does not survive this, nor does it meld with a small world in its wake."
Tifa clenched her teeth and drove her back against the wall as hard as she could. Her fever was spiking, and Sephiroth's nearness made every hair on her body stand on end. She closed her eyes against the dizziness, against the heat, and against his touch and piercing glare. "No…I didn't want it," she panted out. "It was an accident and it's killing me anyway. It's over."
"Open your eyes, Tifa," he commanded, slipping his right hand behind her head and cupping the base of her skull. "It's not time for your surrender yet."
She shuddered but complied. Fierce, slit-eyed cyan locked gazes with her, and the urge to scream returned, but she choked it back. In her head and radiating down her spine from where he held her, she felt something throbbing. For an instant, she was taken back to when she'd first sensed the moon's pulse. But this one's rhythm was out of sync with hers, instead filling in the spaces her weak, thready heartbeat left with steadiness and strength. This—this was it, wasn't it? He was going to consume her soul along with those she carried after all! She'd been entertaining fanciful thoughts of simply dispersing into the emptiness of space, peaceful at last and never to care again. Instead, she was going to be twisted up inside him, enslaved, imprisoned, or dissolved along with billions of others, eternally damned. Tifa tried to rip her eyes away from his, but she was locked in place, mesmerized in horror like a rodent under the influence of a snake's bite.
"Don't fear; I won't bring you to total ruin," he countered her panic, finally releasing her, "and you will not join with me like the others, Tifa. Now wake up. You know what you have to do."
A sharp crash, like a peal of thunder, jerked Tifa awake, and she inhaled sharply. Her eyes darted around her Omega shell, confirming that her surroundings were in fact solid, shielding her from the vacuum outside. Across the room, the former contents of her stomach still floated and wobbled, at once disgusting and strangely comforting. She pushed away from the wall, quickly swiping at her midsection and the back of her neck. They were intact, and as far as she could tell, unmarked. But the cloth her hands passed over was different from the rags she'd manufactured earlier. Glancing down at her body, she recognized the last clothes she'd worn back on Gaia—leather vest, shorts, and duster—clean and completely unmarred. She even had her shoes back, but as if they were brand new.
"How…?" she uttered. There was something about the power of Jenova she remembered from before Meteorfall, and how part of that was being able to change one's appearance, and to an extent, the substance of things. That was probably not too far from the truth for her, if she had to guess. Not that she wanted to—it was a warped, discomfiting issue that made her question the very nature of her being and who she even was anymore. She'd had enough of that over the past couple of days.
As for the Mako poisoning, it was gone, but she wasn't merely symptom free. It was as if the whole ordeal hadn't happened at all. Her face and back weren't sticky with old sweat. Her mouth didn't taste like vomit, and her hair was soft and clean, like she'd just taken a shower and blow-dried it. For the first time in what felt like forever, she was physically comfortable. That is, if she discounted the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach that came from understanding how she'd been healed.
She closed her eyes in frustration, and she could still picture his boring into her, could still feel his energy pulsing into her veins and overriding her nervous system, expunging the sickness and saving her life. Her mouth turned dry, and she spoke the name, quietly, a forbidden thing, a question-"Sephiroth?" A swarm of confused, nigh-perverse emotions flooded her senses. No doubt he had some fairly nasty ulterior motives for helping her, but the change versus literally every other encounter she'd had with the man was so radical it left her reeling.
And exactly what did he think she knew she had to do? Move on to another world and wipe it out too? No, she wouldn't do anything like that. Never again. She would find a way to control herself, and then start seriously looking for ways to defeat him. The time for trying to find a new place to lay low and live a normal life had come and gone, if it had ever been at all. The universe was a big place, and Vincent had made a good point before she was forced to fight him—another civilization might be able to handle Sephiroth. Somewhere out there, there had to be a technologically advanced race who had mastered space travel, who might have the tools to get a better technical understanding of how Sephiroth's power worked, and how to neutralize it. After all, unethical science was what had created him in the first place. She just needed to look for them and let them know what was happening. A people dedicated to science and logic, like Cid was, wouldn't be as inclined to treat her as the Amyntasi Cetra had, would they? She had only to hope.
A mental image of Cid lighting up a celebratory cigar played out in her mind, encouraging her. "That's our Tifa. To hell with this rat-race to the Promised Land. It's probably just a pretty black hole anyway. Go find us a way to take that motherfucker apart one goddamn atom at a time."
Tifa smiled inwardly and nodded. "No getting off this train we're on, right? Right."