Chapter Eight: Unspoken Covenant
Sephiroth withdrew from Tifa's mind and extricated the part of himself he'd projected into her ailing body. Exhaling softly, he considered this new metaphysical union he'd wrought between them, contemplating the implications. He'd once intended to avenge himself of her, as she'd stolen away with their Planet's consciousness, making his dominion over the souls of Gaia incomplete. Not so long ago, Tifa's fate had been that her spirit should crumble in his hands into fine, particulate matter until only the fact that she was in his grasp at all kept anything of who'd she'd been together in one piece. And she'd have been aware of this, tormented and plagued with a madness that would have played only around the fringes of her mind, but never truly set in. That had been her future until Amyntas. Until he'd mortally wounded her to provoke the Goddess' appearance.
After he'd cut down Gaia's core, Tifa had managed to retrieve that consciousness' remains. That she'd been able to exert such control over so great a life-force, barely having healed from his strike, had caught him off guard, compelling him to reevaluate his intentions. He'd perceived that comprehension of what she'd done eluded her—that in dominating their Planet's defeated self, she had set foot on his Mother's path. Fight it or deny it as she might, her humanity was irrevocably forfeit, and an arduous evolutionary journey lay ahead. For that, Sephiroth had chosen not to pursue her when she'd fled from him the second time. He'd merely bid her rest until she was ready to follow him, and follow she eventually would, whether out of vengeance or need. The notion that she'd betrayed him by-proxy because of her former bond with his scion, and the consequent wrath it had fomented had abated, quenched in the knowledge of what lay ahead for her. In their stead, a curious note of wonderment had budded; something more akin to his sentiments prior to her little error, but sharper.
Using the gateway into her mind that Gaia had left wide open to him, he'd sensed it when Tifa had foundered, weak and unconscious, onto a small primitive rock light years from Amyntas. He'd reveled in her shock when for the first time, she'd restored her strength by melding with part of another world's Lifestream. Such a small thing—merely the essence of a beast—but it had been enough to let her understand what was happening. Tifa had finally grasped the nature of her transformation, the name 'Jenova' gracing the turbulence of her thoughts while she'd wrestled with the choices before her. She'd accepted very quickly that whether she changed was beyond her control yet agonized over what she ought to do with those changes. Expectedly, she'd vowed that she'd never repeat his Mother's deeds; that she'd never become a world-destroyer, while grasping at straws for ways she might still conceive of herself as human.
Witnessing Tifa's struggle had pulled at something familiar deep within Sephiroth. Old memories of his own enlightenment and even of his youth stirred—those parts of himself he'd once sacrificed to maintain an existence within the Lifestream, but which had returned when their Planet's true Omega had been defeated, rendering it defenseless. He remembered those vile makonoid pods inside the Nibelheim reactor, and the devastating collapse of every delusion he'd been force-fed since birth about who or what he was supposed to be and do, and for whom. He recalled the sleepless travail he'd endured for a week, pacing a dark basement lab's floor, memorizing every last one of its perverse industrial secrets. The fear and disgust of believing that he was little more than yet another ShinRa-engineered monster, followed fast on its heels by the sweet epiphany that he was meant for something far greater than what those small, inconsequential minds had dreamt up for him. Carefully tracing again all those intersecting threads that had borne out the truth of his being, he'd concluded that this was essentially where Tifa was now. His next act towards her would be a gift, he'd decided; a painful, empowering kindness to guide her into accepting that truth quicker than what had been permitted for him back then.
To start, he'd simply revealed to her a glimpse of the road ahead: In due time, all the life within her would become one with her, including her fallen friends. Intentionally, he'd not revealed how to control the power that recovering Gaia's dead soul had bestowed upon her, knowing that she'd never allow herself to blossom into her full potential if he did. Instead, he'd urged her to abandon fear that no longer suited her. Then, he'd summoned up the memories of another of her old companions that he'd felled, merged him again with the creature Chaos, and projected them onto the small moon she'd been wandering so aimlessly. She'd find purpose in meeting them once more.
Although he'd imbued them with a drive to fight her, what she'd ultimately done with their presence had been entirely up to her…
Interrupting his ruminations, Sephiroth returned to the task from which he'd broken, dropping a mountain onto the blue sphere waiting miles below him. It pierced deeply into an oceanic trench upon impact, radiating tsunamis that consumed entire continents and flooded towering metropolises under their crushing weight. The few places spared the deluge quaked violently, prompting fiery super-volcanic eruptions so expansive that anything that didn't drown choked or burned up in their pyroclastic flows. Flailing against the apocalypse he'd brought upon it, the world woke its defenders, and he descended, sword in hand to have at them. Hovering over a central point at sea, just beneath the ash-laden clouds, he waited for the Weapons to converge on him. Waited for them to deploy their energy beams and flaming showers, eject their monstrous projectiles, and cast whatever magics they'd been storing up throughout the millennia. At last, when he was surrounded by their concurrent volleys, he reflected them, hurtling everything they'd aimed at him back in a psychokinetic tidal wave. Before they could strike again, he willed hundreds of tiny holes into the fabric of the surrounding space and threaded himself through them like a needle, blinking in and out of phase in rapid succession, severing limbs, decapitating monstrous heads, and bisecting gem-studded carapaces. When he'd finished, all at once, each of the Weapons confessed their demises in guttural moans, sinking in clean-cut pieces back into the depths from where they'd arisen.
Rising in their stead from far beneath the surface, Sephiroth spotted the final Weapon, long ropes of Lifestream already feeding into it from cracks in the ocean floor. He levitated in place until its crest rose high enough to meet the soles of his feet. There, he closed his eyes and locked onto the life flooding into the Omega. A rapid throb rang in his ears, the sound like a man on the run, desperate to escape the predator hunting him, yet knowing he was only delaying his inevitable demise. Good. Despite the show it had put on with its Weapons—there had been twelve of them—this world didn't have too much fight left in it. Lifting one hand heavenward, palm up, Sephiroth redirected and pulled the stream to himself.
The Omega tremored violently beneath him, destabilizing when the spirit energy within it surged upward, unable to resist his call. All around, the tendrils still gathering now swirled together in a cone, like an upside-down waterspout, each spark of life urgently swimming to the peak. The velocity of their spin tore and chipped away at the Weapon's exterior. From within and without, the onslaught rapidly hit critical mass, and it collapsed, crumbling into the sea like its predecessors. Defeated, the planet's collective consciousness also dispersed into the whirlwind, and all the world relinquished any life that remained.
Sephiroth paused again as the sight of Tifa doing almost exactly this replayed before him. Until now, he'd captured worlds swiftly, as he'd done with Amyntas, not offering them the vain opportunity to fight him. But there was something fascinating—perhaps only an idle curiosity—in how she'd accomplished it, taking not just the spirit energy, but also surveying the death that had given it to her, laying eyes on all she'd destroyed. The image of her there, basking in the raw power, her body aglow with her own vitality and will—he would see her do this again, if only for the sight of it. Pressing both hands into the streams encircling him, he drew them inward, compressing them into that same minuscule spark he'd witnessed submitting to Tifa. It hovered just in front of him for a moment before darting in through his chest, as if to offer one last ounce of defiance; not because it made any difference, but just to show that it could. So resolute to the very last, it too was reminiscent of her… Altogether, this world had entertained him; reminded him of a pleasure in fighting he'd nearly forgotten.
When the time came for Tifa to take her next world, it wouldn't poison her again; he'd seen to that. In aiding her recovery to ensure she survived her first one, he'd done more than simply impose upon her mind. The fear she'd felt, the terror that he'd only come to meld with her while she was helpless to resist him was not entirely without cause. In that moment, he'd entwined their souls once again, lending her his strength as he had when he'd possessed her to eliminate Genesis and Yuffie. This time, rather than force her to act, he'd left behind a mark—a promise and a reminder—that she'd discover later. He no longer desired to break her mind so much as he'd once planned, but she was still to bear witness to the completion of his ascent and beyond. That was the task for which he'd chosen her. Yet, it was a fool's errand to pretend she'd be convinced by any conventional means to cooperate. He'd afflicted her well beyond that point. When he'd first manifested to her as his child remnant to stay her panic, he'd found that her fury had defeated all but a scintilla of the tenderness that 'Eden' might have once inspired. Even now, knowing that her life had been renewed at his hands, she was already plotting new angles on how she might destroy him. However, the magnitude of her ire was still useful. With it, he'd continue to guide her along Jenova's path until she saw no other solution to her dilemma but to seek him out. Perhaps until that path's power itself seduced her, abolishing entirely her absurd delusion of being 'nothing' in his sight.
Until, as it just had upon her awakening, his name found its way onto her lips again and again, half-whispered in awe and tinged with unbidden longing. Naturally, she'd dismissed it as the neurochemical aftermath of what should have been a lethal Mako overdose a hundred times over; a treasonous, invasive notion she dared not consider at length.
Sephiroth grunted slightly to himself at that, a barely contained smirk playing at the corners of his mouth.
To anyone who knew what it had once been, Amyntas' rubble was like a mass grave that had been robbed of its bodies. Nothing was left of the vibrant world but a miniature asteroid field. Tifa steeled her nerves while carefully navigating through the rocks. She forced herself not to look too closely at their details, not wanting to consider how this one chunk had been someone's home, or how that one had been the spot where she'd first crashed down onto the world. She didn't want to think about how the last place she'd been received with warmth and care had been so cruelly obliterated, and how that humble little family had died because of her before that. She wasn't here for memories or more overwhelming reminders of what she was up against; she knew well enough, as much as she tried to avoid thinking about him. Sadly, this was just the first place she could come up with to search for a hypothetically advanced people. If they existed in this stellar neighborhood, she figured that they might have picked up on Amyntas' untimely destruction and come to investigate. Admittedly, it was serious gamble; it was entirely possible she could search half the universe if time allowed and still find nothing. All she had to go on was a hunch that it wouldn't turn out that way, but so far, things weren't quite playing out as she'd hoped.
Further and further in she drifted, scanning the horizon for anything that stuck out—spacecraft, probes, robots—anything that wasn't just more leftover detritus of the mighty world's fall. What was supposed to have been a mighty world, anyway. Somberly, she wondered if things would have actually turned out differently if they'd taken her warnings to heart, or if that would have only prolonged the inevitable. True, they had been arrogant and prejudiced, but what effect would have any moral shift had against having the whole of another planet's dead husk dropped on them? What difference would have a day or two of preparation made? If she was honest with herself, Tifa knew that nothing would have changed, least of all how this world had ended. In the same spirit, she acknowledged at last that coming to Amyntas hadn't been her choice. Maybe her presence had visited an awful fate on a few people indirectly, but she'd done all in her power to avoid hurting anyone. Gaia had been largely her fault, and the moon she'd taken was mostly the result of her own desperate recklessness. But where Amyntas was concerned, Tifa finally accepted that her hands were clean. The worst she could say was that she'd tried to save them and had failed. It was strange, how powerful admitting her own impotence was in this case. How freeing.
Tifa released a loud, exaggerated groan to break the tense silence, diverting from her mournful thoughts. This was the first time she'd roamed the expanse of space while awake for the whole trip, although "roaming" wasn't exactly the right word. Once she knew where she wanted to go, either she or her shell—she wasn't sure of which—opened up a rift that made going from where she'd been back to Amyntas' former orbit about as strenuous as walking into a different room. On every other occasion, she'd been so exhausted or emotionally shocked that she'd fallen into something like a hyper-sleep state. That she hadn't been this time, especially after what she'd done, how deathly ill she'd become as a result, and how she'd recovered, was profoundly disturbing. "I'm alive. That's all that really counts. It doesn't have to matter how," she consoled herself aloud, if only for the noise.
Listening to so much nothing—no people, no machinery, or even the sounds of nature—frustrated her to no end. It was the very definition of a deafening silence, enough to make her feel like she needed a reminder that she wasn't just a brain floating in a jar that had mistakenly been jettisoned into the void. She could see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. She was present in body, even if partial sensory deprivation was something with which she had to contend. "I'm here, I'm solid, I'm alive, and I'm definitely not going crazy," she announced, lightly punching the materia wall with each assertion.
A tiny, glinting light in her right periphery made her snap her head just then, and she gasped. There was nothing when she looked, though—just more and more slow-rotating debris.
"Might want to rethink that last part, Tifa," she scolded herself.
Dead silence settled in over her again. She chose that moment to take note of how, apart from Cid's encouragement for her new plan, Cloud and the others had been suspiciously quiet since, well…since her health had miraculously improved. Tifa swiped nervously at the back of her head and neck for the umpteenth time, but like all the other times she'd checked, found nothing. She didn't even quite know what she expected to find. Geostigma, a rash, or something ridiculous like horns or some other horrid growth, maybe? In a way, it was infuriating that she kept coming up empty-handed, because she couldn't shake the feeling that there was something lurking, in her or on her or just nearby somehow. Sephiroth had to have done something to her aside from merely relieving her of the Mako poisoning, but figuring out what was proving maddeningly impossible. At least he hadn't used her to kill anyone this time. Tifa recoiled at those memories, but in retrospect, what had happened with Genesis and Yuffie had also been beyond her control. She had too much going on to keep blaming herself, and she knew that Sephiroth fed on that kind of thing. If a someone had broken into Seventh Heaven and killed a person with a broken beer bottle they'd swiped from the trash, the fact that she owned the place and had sold the beer wouldn't make her the murderer. This was a lot like that.
"Hey, does anyone in there have any ideas? I could use a hand," she vocalized, desperate for a distraction and hoping that one of her friends would get the hint. Hoping that Sephiroth hadn't done anything to them to lock them away.
"Sorry Tifa. Zack and Cid are kind of having it out," Yuffie replied. "Zack wants us to high-tail it to the Promised Land like we're being run down, but Cid likes your new plan better."
Tifa allowed herself a sigh of relief. She'd imagined so many much worse scenarios for why they were keeping to themselves this time. "Great. Literal infighting," she commented wryly.
An equally annoyed Cloud broke in, "Unstoppable force meets immovable object, Tifa. Don't ask which is which, though. Not sure why they're wasting their time when it's up to you in the end."
"Maybe you should try to break it up?" she suggested.
"…Not interested," he answered after a long pause. "I'll just let them wear themselves down. They'll get there eventually. I hope."
"Anyway, what do you think we should do?" Yuffie asked.
"I'm going to look for a little while. Amyntas was supposed to be the closest planet to the universe's Promised Land, so I'll try to stay near here," Tifa explained, stopping to take in her surroundings. All she could make out through the shell were the world's ruins and its sun. "Although, to be honest, I'm not so sure how to get there either."
"It's very close," Aerith offered, "but it's not like you can just walk in. It's not on the same level of existence. Cetra can project themselves and others there in dreams, but not even we can get there physically. You have to be an Omega carrying a world's living consciousness to its rebirth, or…"
"Or what?" Tifa pressed.
"You have to be powerful enough to force your way in," she confessed. "I don't think anyone's ever tried to do that, though."
Realization crept up on her, and Tifa's blood curdled. "Aerith, just how powerful are we talking about? And why didn't you tell me before?"
"Too powerful. You were carrying Minerva before. I've watched what's left of her since then, and it's not enough. You're not really her 'Omega' anymore, and I just couldn't…" Aerith answered, and Tifa felt her choke up and retreat, distraught.
"Tifa, you can't be thinking about trying to—" Cloud started.
"I'm not, I promise," she interrupted him, "but that means we definitely can't go there now."
"Sooo…guys, I'll just go let Cid know he's won," Yuffie awkwardly excused herself and receded as well.
"One atom at a time," Tifa echoed Cid's earlier words, clenching her fists at her sides, but she sensed Cloud pulling inward, and imagined him bowing his head slightly to one side like he often did when he was unsure or frightened.
"I really hope that's possible with a 'god'," he murmured.
"Don't call him that. Don't give him that, okay Cloud?" she gently rebuked him. "Gods need believers. I'm not letting him have us. As long as he's still made up of things that can be measured, we can find a way to take them apart, no matter what he does or how he chooses to appear."
"…Okay. We'll do what we can," Cloud agreed and slipped back into her subconscious.
No longer listening inwardly, Tifa felt herself flush and hesitate, embarrassed and confused. Where was this bout of confidence coming from? How did she so suddenly find her way to forgiving herself? Not that she didn't need it or welcome it, but logically, she should be just as terrified and weighed down as everyone else if not more so, but she wasn't. Not anymore. She knew what needed to be done, and she knew she was going to do everything in her power to accomplish it. It was as if she'd finally developed a resistance to the fear. She was done with it; over it. She was done with letting her friends cower in a small corner of her mind with no guarantee she could pull herself together enough to take any meaningful steps. Protecting them, protecting the universe so that it could keep existing as it was, and defeating Sephiroth were all that meant anything. She was on a mission now—a crusade—and even if she lost? She'd make damn sure she died smiling, without surrender, so that one little part of his victory would forever be incomplete.
The more she thought on it, the lighter and stronger she felt. It occurred to her that it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that she'd finally snapped and might come crashing down from this high with the next bad turn. For right now though, Tifa decided she'd cling to this rogue surge of hope that had overtaken her, reigniting her determination like a holy fire in the pit of her stomach and crackling at every nerve ending. She was going to choose to believe she could do it; that it was what she was meant to do. Everything in her gut was telling her to push onward. Hell might be the path, but that didn't mean it was the destination. That had to mean something; it had to be more than just wishful thinking.
Momentarily dampening her happy delirium with a start, she heard a sharp click against the wall behind her, like a hailstone that had hit a window. Cautiously, she floated over to investigate the spot. As if the cosmos itself had answered her resolve, a small, silver globe with five antennae had affixed itself to her vessel with a tiny, plunger-shaped foot. While she inspected it, two of the antennae started blinking red and blue lights, and she looked up just in time to see three more of the little balls emerge from behind one of the larger asteroids. They propelled their way over with tiny emissions from small creases along their backsides and mimicked the first one, each finding a secure landing point and latching onto the materia. Taking a step back to get a wider view of the asteroid where they'd been hiding, Tifa saw them springing up in large clusters now, glistening together in the sunlight like an awesome burst of interstellar fireworks.
"Probes!" she exclaimed breathlessly, clasping her hands together.
They came raining down on her, falling into a mechanized orbit and coating nearly every inch available outside until they'd blocked out the sun and stars, replacing them with alternating blinks of red and blue that gave her cocoon's walls an almost molten appearance.
A tiny pinch of apprehension surfaced in her thoughts because of all the unknowns, but this was exactly what she'd been hoping to find here. It was worth the risk. With any luck, these little devices were sending transmissions out to whom or whatever had sent them. With even more luck, the probes would turn out to be just a tiny sample of their creators' technological prowess, and they would be willing to hear her out. Realistically, they almost had to; the machines surrounding her seemed like they had been actively collecting samples until they'd found something more interesting. If the right people had a chance to look at that evidence seriously, the existential threat that Sephiroth posed to everyone would have to be plain as day.
Tifa was more than eager to be able to hit back, and if everything fell into place as she hoped it would, the battlefield could soon be evened out for her to do just that.