A/N: This chapter contains elements of body horror and torture.
Chapter Twelve: Savior
"Am I the same as all these monsters? You saw it! All of them…were humans…"
—Sephiroth
Tifa, Aron and Nessia hugged the wall, barely tucked inside the dim, narrow alleyway bordering the unit that housed the officer's club. Although he'd decided their next move, Kalle had opted to stay behind to contact Defense station for back up and begin documenting what remained of Della. Around the corner, the main walkway was devoid of traffic and eerily quiet. Only a few signs were lit up, dotting the street with inconsistent glowing splotches, but all the doors were closed. No one was open for business.
"Where is everyone?" Tifa whispered.
"Protocol," Nessia grunted. "If the med ward picked up something nasty, they have the authority to issue limited lockdown orders to keep it from spreading."
Aron scoffed, "Yeah, about that-I still can't reach them to confirm."
She inched forward to get a closer look. "I don't like it either. After what happened to the Lieutenant and what she said about The Egg's victims, we need to be prepared for hostiles. Whatever this thing is, it's not just a killer—it's rewiring people." She glanced at up Tifa. "Unless you have combat experience, you should get back to the club and wait this out with Ruri."
Tifa shrugged off her concern. "No, I can fight. Just hand to hand, but it's not like it hasn't already touched me."
"Speaking of, how long has your arm been like this?" she pressed, snatching up her wrist to inspect it.
A wave of icy dread passed over Tifa and she flinched. "I…think it's a reaction to whatever this bracelet is made of. The thing that grabbed me didn't help, but it's been a little raw for a while now."
"You should have told us right away," Nessia huffed, dropping her hand and smearing the weepy residue from her own onto her pants leg. She dug deep into a pocket and extracted a white bundle. "Once this situation clears, we'll need have it checked. In the meantime, here. Wrap it up."
Silently, Tifa accepted the gauze roll and did as instructed. She focused on the unraveling rounds, avoiding the Admiral's inquisitive stare. Her idea to keep from touching anyone until she knew more had already fallen through, but she was still too freshly numb from Della's passing to react. If she was playing host to the disease that had killed her, she was about to find out for sure. Probably starting with her right hand, Nessia would break out in those same grotesque, tentacle-sprouting sores. All she could do right now was fight for everyone and hope not.
"And you're not feeling off at all?" Aron double-checked.
"It's just a rash," she insisted, shaking her head. Letting them know that she suspected differently wouldn't change anything.
"Then I'd say we're about as close to an 'all clear' as we can get. Time to go for a walk."
Nessia took point, and they turned the corner, still clinging to the wall.
Impulsively, Tifa lifted her eyes to look out through the ceiling. Unlike when she'd first passed this way with Della, there were no bright streaks racing off in every direction. There was only the inky, empty blackness of space with its twinkling perforations where the station's lights didn't cast a glare. A green, shimmering wave appeared before the window while she looked on—a thin, luminescent curtain hung up on the wrong side and billowing in a wind that couldn't exist. Tifa blinked once, startled, searching and straining for the aurora ripple, but it was gone.
A blanket of tired, anesthetic heaviness fell over her in its place.
Something squeezed her hand then, tugging lightly at the edge of her wrapping. The voice she'd been expecting and dreading wafted quietly into her ear-"What will you do…"
Her breath caught in her throat and her eyes darted down. She flexed her fingers. Nothing.
"…when these humans betray you?" The pressure around her palm released.
"Contacts at one o'clock," Nessia rasped, jarring her out of her haze.
Tifa crouched down slightly to regain her bearings and craned her head.
Two monsters plodded forward, each on six muscular legs woven together of familiar, tight sinewy ropes. Their bulky front and back legs still resembled the human limbs on hands and knees they'd once been, and an extra set of curved, clawed appendages had sprouted from their ribcages. Splattered blood stained their torsos where they'd burst out. Clusters of wiry tendrils danced on their backs, sweeping about. Neither had a mouth or ears that she could see. Shocks of black hair ran from the crowns of their heads down their backs, and their faces were each set with a circle of eight oval-shaped, gleaming red eyes. Eyes that looked too much like the ones that had greeted her in the mirror that morning.
"Maybe those things on its back are antennae," Aron postulated, clearing his throat. "It's a clear shot. Admiral?"
"How many more are going to come crawling out if you take it? About three hundred survivors, a hundred med staff, bystanders—no, hold," Nessia replied.
"We're not going to try and fight our way there?" Tifa asked.
"Just the three of us? Nope," Aron answered. "I want to mow them down and be done with it, but Santri's right. Too risky we'd be overrun. Best to double back to the bar and barricade ourselves in until Defense forces get here."
Tifa straightened and glared back up at the skylight. She couldn't do that. She couldn't stand by and let things get even worse. "You should…but not me."
"What do you mean, 'not you'?" Aron retorted.
She ignored him and took off, sprinting toward the transformants that had only hours ago been the same people she'd tried to help—people whose lives were gone because she'd gotten too close. Because she'd come here at all. Everything was too hot—every nerve in her body, her thoughts in of themselves—and she could barely feel or hear her own footfalls.
How was she supposed to have known? She should have known. She knew enough about Jenova's history that putting two and two together should have been simple. Applying it to herself had just been too hard. She'd checked in mentally on occasion to poke at the terrifying parallels, but it had been easier—sanity-preserving—to keep on insisting that it had little to do with her. Or at least that the similarities had to be limited because she meant well. After all, the ancient terror that ShinRa had called Jenova had been a malevolent trickster, driving its hospitable hosts insane and turning them—turning them into monsters by exposure to a virus.
She knew now that a coy nod at the truth was never going to be enough. Intentions meant nothing here.
The abominations spotted her and charged. Their gait was an awkward half-skitter, half-galloping motion that stretched their formerly human limbs like putty in unnatural directions, flopping and bouncing instead of breaking while they picked up speed. A strange sort of man-behemoth-insect amalgam, they were exactly the kind of perverse monstrosities she'd have expected to emerge from ShinRa's old experiments, infused with Jenova's cells.
Now it was her genes that had done this, adorning their missing faces with copies of her eyes and growing mangled, knotted patches of her hair.
Tifa leapt the final few yards and latched onto the tentacles undulating at their backs, twisting them around her arms. Spinning in a half circle, she used the momentum to hoist the monsters up and hurl them across the walkway, then ran after them.
They hurtled aloft far enough to crash headlong into the second story of the opposite side and crumpled to the ground sideways. Scrambling and kicking for purchase, they clambered up onto their hind feet and stood back to back. Shared tentacles punctured and intersected their spines, worming up their necks just under the ropy dermal layers. Yellowish ichor seeped and sloshed between the two halves, rapidly solidifying into a gelatinous spinal membrane that conjoined them into one form. What had been their heads drooped down and turned, each serving as bulbous eyestalks that immediately trained on Tifa.
Gunfire rang out from behind her.
Sturdier on its four humanoid legs, the enlarged creature convulsed with each hit but didn't topple.
"Tifa, get the hell out of there!" Nessia roared, unloading her pistol. Aron was firing alongside her, still holding their old position.
Tifa cast a doleful glance back over her shoulder and waved them off. "I'm sorry," she murmured, closing the distance between her and her stunned target, slowing to a walk. The air between it and her was charged, magnetic. Her skin grew hotter, prickling with each step. Her eyes burned. "Everything I touch anymore…will everything turn into something like this?"
Who or what good was she, when all her efforts inevitably turned so ruinous? How was she supposed to stop Sephiroth and save this last bastion of humanity—much less the universe at large—when she could scarcely keep from killing them herself?
But there was one thing she could do. One thing to make this mess a little easier to clean up, if it did all really start with her. She thrust her fist into the putrid sac that bound the creature, and warm jelly-sludge coated her forearm, pulsating and churning. A rancid odor like rotten meat spilled out from the wound with the slop that fell to the pavement. She gagged but continued pushing in, feeling up its insides for lines of energy connecting her to it, seeking out a way to control it while hoping she'd find nothing.
Disturbingly, it didn't move to defend itself. It only stared, eyestalks curved in and blinking slow, letting her root around in its innards like a busted thief submitting to a search.
And there it was-behind her eyes, she could see and feel the presence of every infected person. They were on their way here, hundreds of them, following a scent—no, a different trail. A compulsion or a directive instinct, wrapped around what little was left of their brains, driving them to gather here. The same tiny, invisible psychic threads also ran backward and across the street—back to where Aron and Nessia were still huddled, screaming for her to stop, run, and take cover; slinging obscenities for whatever the hell she thought she was doing. They both had it—the Admiral more aggressively, but the clock was starting to wind down for the Commander too. In about five, maybe six hours...
Tifa released a shaky breath, understanding. A desperate, half-howled whimper squeezed its way up from the back of her throat, and she yanked on the neural leashes, summoning the infected horde to herself—"Faster, come faster."
Her wrist throbbed. She extracted it from the monster and flicked away the residue. Stringy, viscous bits clung to her bandages. Tifa unraveled the soaked, slimy gauze, and cast it aside. Beneath, a sharp crack had formed in the bangle's metallic surface. Giving it a push to slide it off, it crumbled as though made of nothing better than unfired, brittle clay. Not a marvel of advanced science; just an old, decayed accessory. She wondered if it had been defective from the start, or if maybe she'd overloaded it. Not that it made a difference now.
Turning back to the monster, she pulled each of its eye-heads down in rapid succession, snapping the necks. Where she gripped the second one, the sensation of spirit energy leaving its body in favor of hers tingled in her hands. Before it was done, the distant echo of another soul's thoughts played through her mind, a horrified reverberation of the last thing they remembered before succumbing to the change—
"…someone take it…I can't breathe…"
Tifa released the body, and it toppled over sideways, bouncing once, its skin having turned into the same stiff, elastic material as Della's. What being around her had done to these people was slow, torturous, and perverse. What she had done to them—she had done this, and she had to end it. Staring down the walkway, she saw the rest already approaching, tightly packed in beside and behind one another, leaving almost no space between the structures on either side. They varied in shape and size, but each bore the same features—tentacle-bound bodies sprouting clawed limbs, sporting red eyes and dark patches of hair.
Numbly, she gravitated to the center of the street and fell to her knees. A leaden weight pressed down on her chest. Tears glided down her cheeks. She imagined she was a detonator to the mutated mass before her, leads stretched from her being and tied into theirs. What would they do to her if she simply let them reach her? Would they find a way to devour her somehow? Might they try to merge with her, returning to the source of what had changed them, sparks of personality hoping they could become themselves again if only they could give the sickness back? Was that what those afflicted with Reunion felt—the barest shred of homesickness for their former selves woven into the strings by which they'd be led?
By which she would lead them.
She stifled a sob with one hand and sent out a singular command.
The monsters turned on one another, mauling each other like feral bears, talons ripping deep into softer underbelly flesh and piercing skulls with fatal gouges. Others stood on their hind human legs and fought as if they were still women and men, throwing slaps and punches and ripping away body parts with their bare hands, detaching arms and weaponizing serrated claws into daggers and spiked flails. They whipped themselves into a silent frenzy, devolving into a gory, self-destructing blender, eviscerating one another while a growing blood puddle leaked out from underneath them. They slipped and skidded in the slime and trampled one another underfoot.
Slowly, blue-green mist interspersed with glistening lights rose to hover above the piling discord. It coalesced and swirled together into a whirlpool that wobbled in Tifa's direction.
Out here, disconnected from any planet, she knew this little fragment of Lifestream was homeless. She reached her arms out the same way she would offer a hug to a lost, frightened child, and it rushed into her, running inside to hide from the horrors where they'd been entrapped. Cries and shrieks filled her ears, souls struggling to come down from the shock of how they'd died. Reeling and moaning, they demanded explanations and decried their disembodied state until she felt them caught up into the knot of Gaia's leftovers.
Tifa stayed down, wincing and holding herself. She rocked slightly, trying to calm her own mortified revulsion for what she'd just done. She eyed her lightened wrist. Her rash had already cleared. That meant she couldn't rejoin Aron and Nessia; without the bangle, she was no doubt radioactive again, drawing life from anything that came near. Her gaze wandered to her periphery to look for them and immediately returned to the ground.
Nessia lay dead only a few yards away, arms sprawled forward toward Tifa as if she'd fallen in a sprint. She wasn't wounded and hadn't changed yet.
Something unlatched and clicked behind her. Cold metal pressed against the back of her head.
"Don't move," Aron ground out. He was crying.
A half hour had passed when Defense's soldiers finally emerged from the terminal in a stomping, clattering rush of boots, hazmat gear, and weaponry. Tifa released the mental freeze she'd placed on Aron while a small group disarmed and pried the near-catatonic man away from her, murmuring curses about a "total fucking collapse of command". She'd chosen not to fight him physically, using his burgeoning infection to hold him at bay instead; the bloody scene surrounding her was already too much to explain. While they hauled him away, she heard a single shot echo from back toward the officer's club. Moments later, Admiral Luthi Nia emerged with a small entourage of his men, also geared for the hazards, marching out with Kalle's body in tow on a stretcher. He was red and splotchy, and the half- cauterized hole in his temple leaked a mix of blood and thick pus.
Tifa waited, still planted on her knees with her head hung low, hiding her face behind her hair. She needed them to see that she hadn't meant for any of this to happen. They had to know that she'd have run off or openly fought them if she had. But they didn't—they couldn't, could they? The math wasn't complicated. Two of their Admirals were dead, one of their Commanders was on his way out, and there was a self-gutted heap of remains set before her. Meanwhile, she was healthy and relatively untouched. That, and she'd have to be outlandishly naïve to think there wasn't any footage of what she'd done. Maybe they'd already seen it.
Nearby, Nia was giving orders—cold and mercilessly logical. "Shoot and incinerate anything that's mutated. If you find survivors, send them out to the evac array for testing. If they fail, terminate on site. If they pass, set them up with one week of quarantine here, and another month of observation at Research station."
"Sir, what about her?" a nameless mask gestured at Tifa.
Nia paced a few casual steps, stopping to tower over her. He nudged Tifa's knees blithely with the side of one boot, as if prodding a corpse. "I want to figure out what this one is. She may have been human, but she was never one of ours. Gather a team and perform a contained sub-terminal stress test, and I mean sub-terminal. We need to extract as much information as possible. She's probably a fucking gopher for that other one out there."
"…Central outlawed the sub-terminal test fifty years ago, Sir."
"We weren't dealing with anything capable of single-handedly crippling one of our stations fifty years ago, Sergeant. We're under attack and fighting blind," Nia hissed. "I'll inform Central of our progress once we have adequate results to show for it."
At that, Tifa sprang to her feet and ran. She'd search out an exit and leave, hopefully luring Sephiroth with her. There was nothing else she could do now. She wasn't going to try to talk Nia down—his mind had been made up about her from the start.
Barely ten seconds out, she heard a dull snap and changed course to avert what she thought was another gunshot. Instead, a heavy, chain-linked web descended over her head. Arms flailing to disentangle herself, she continued to speed ahead, but she couldn't lose it. It clung to her, not merely suppressing her energy, but sapping her. She crumbled to one knee, heaving as weakness overtook her. Her pulse pounded in her head and neck. She could barely focus her eyes, her muscles trembled, and her joints ached as though her weight had tripled.
Three figures wordlessly encroached on her. One pulled back the mesh just enough to expose and fetter her ankles. Another continued to lift it, while the third jerked her arms behind her back and cuffed them. When it was fully removed, they locked a collar around her neck and grabbed her by the crooks of her arms, forcing her to stand. The only reprieve was that the bindings' effect wasn't as strong as the net, allowing her to shamble along when they pushed her to walk.
They marched her down the hallways of the terminal where she'd first arrived on board the Passage, and onto a another ship. Its corridors had all the same turns and the layout of rooms was almost identical. A worthless, weary idea that they probably used the same schematic for many of their crafts drifted through her mind while she tried to keep calm. She could tell where they were leading her—back to a containment chamber, minus the cart because everyone was suited up.
Presumably, they would throw her in there, leave her, and then someone would be along to grill her or make accusatory guesses that she herself couldn't answer. But that was assuming Nia's forces followed anything resembling the same rules as Santri's had. She no longer hoped for patience, and the malice in his orders to test her was unmistakable.
When they entered the room, the hand gripping her arms tightened.
Tifa lifted her eyes, and her mouth fell agape.
The tank was wide open, a prison cell in a prison cell. Everything had turned into what she'd tried to tell herself it wouldn't be—exactly as she feared. She thrashed as much as she was able, knowing what came next, but Nia's men held her fast. The last of her strength was leaving her, the bonds dulling what little was left until all she could do was let her feet drag, resisting every step.
Unmoved, they pulled her along the rest of the way, shoved her into the glass tube, and proceeded to chain her to the inside. They lifted her still-bound arms over her head and fastened her hands to a loop in the ceiling. A wide, metallic belt strip found its way around her midriff, affixed to the sides of the tank by coiled bars. A similar band looped around the crown of her head, digging into her temples.
Outside, Nia's staff hurried about, twisting hoses and feeding wires into a plate that ran along the tank's backside.
While her panicked gaze darted from one person to the next, a deep, painful incision worked its way above her belly in an open space left where the strip fastened closed. A guttural, agonized screech ripped through her chest; she could hardly recoil from the scalpel's bite.
Indifferent, the faceless technician who'd made the cut slipped a flat panel of sensors into the bleeding wound. Activating, it generated blistering heat that cauterized the cut and sealed the device beneath her skin.
Trying to stifle her groans, she grit her teeth so hard her gums throbbed.
No one paused to stare. No one hesitated; no one questioned why they were doing this to her or even if it was too much.
Impersonal and cruel, they continued to torment her, driving long needles up her arms and legs, tearing through muscle, piercing arteries, and lodging them deep into marrow. Each insertion made her twitch, pulsing cold fire down her limbs into every nerve ending and tracing brutal, aching fault-lines in their wake. Hot, red viscous trails dribbled down her forearms and calves. Her stomach boiled over in nausea, and bile rose to the back of her throat, filling her mouth with vile salt. She could smell herself through the room's sterile chemistry now—musty with sweat and coppery, scorched blood.
Broken and repulsive.
A soldier slammed the tank's hatch shut and went to work on its locks. A slow trickle of clear fluid, too thick to be water, started dribbling down over her head.
Amidst the blinding anguish, Tifa's thoughts raced. They were killing her, using her. They were dragging out the throes so that they could study her before she gave out. Using the very tools that had first allowed her to walk freely among them, they were manipulating what they'd learned about her to hurt her in ways she'd only ever witnessed second hand. In ways that not even nature seemed capable of harming her. It was no longer about their own safety. They were weakening and torturing her for curiosity. Had it truly been about inoculating or protecting themselves, they could have taken samples and kept her locked away like they had in the beginning. After everything she'd done, she would have welcomed it. But this—this was punitive and worse, all so they could pretend they had control.
"Stop," Tifa forced out a gasp at last, feeling one of the sensors burrow deeper. "It doesn't matter…I don't...He's still coming."
A few masks glanced at one another incredulously and returned to their work, bundling wires and flipping switches.
So that's how it was. She didn't rate attempting to bargain. Her prison was nearing completion, and what it would do to her was all she was worth to them.
She reached inward for her friends. "Cloud, Aerith, Yuffie…" She listened for them; for their ideas about how to get out or just the comfort of their voices. She needed a distraction from her brutalized shell. Now more than ever, she needed them.
But there came no reply. All she could sense was an awful tension clamping down tighter around her head. She couldn't tell if it was her own strain or if the band was constricting as part of the test, but it was as if her own soul had locked down against her.
The last few remaining men exited the room, securing the door behind them.
She tried again—"Cid, Nananki, Zack…Genesis…?"
Nothing stirred. No one answered.
Tifa's eyes flickered open, and she hissed at the rising liquids lapping at the jagged incision in her stomach. At some point, she had fallen unconscious. Probably the pain had knocked her out, just as much as it had awakened her. She peered out through the glass.
Someone new was in the room.
A tall, spindly man in a lab coat with black hair pulled back into a ponytail was tending to another person on the bed. Or rather, subjecting them to a softer version of what she was now enduring. Needles ran up into bed-ridden person's calves, and small, dark stains dotted the sheets. Her breathing slowed a little as she watched the other's toes curl into distressed balls. The man looming over them gave a callous waving gesture, put off by his subject's uncooperative convulsions.
With his back still turned, he moved off to one side enough to reveal the rest of the person on the bed—a boy, maybe a teenager, with glazed teal eyes and platinum hair that fell just past his shoulders. Wired in a cocoon of sensors and other myriad devices, he trained his eyes on her.
Trembling inside, Tifa met his gaze. She knew what she was seeing—who the kid was, and who the man was supposed to be. They couldn't be real, of course, but that didn't stop her heart from sinking into her stomach in disgust. For a split second, she forgot her own predicament. "Don't try to tell me this gives us something in common," she thought, although she couldn't entirely dismiss it.
Small, drifting lights burst from the bed, and the illusion of both Hojo and the younger Sephiroth scattered with them. A terrible, oppressive stillness reigned in their stead.
Her own agony suddenly returned in a surge of tiny, horrid stabs and fiery, raking streaks that coursed up and down her spine and limbs. She finally allowed herself a conscious half-scream and hung her head. It was as close to a relaxed position she could manage. If she was lucky, she'd black out again. She wanted to—anything that would pass the time until the end.
"Does it not? They are traitors, Tifa."
She roused, lifting her head back up. "Hm?"
"If you call for me, I will release you."
"No," she bit out, choking back her desperation. Humanity here might torture and kill her, but at least they maybe knew how to deal with him, so it didn't matter. None of it mattered. It wasn't perfect, but she'd accomplished as much as she could.
But she did feel betrayed. Terribly so. She'd come here looking for help.
"They wish to maintain you at the brink of death, to use as they did my Mother."
Tifa squinted hard, fighting off the vertigo to assess her surroundings. The tank, the restraints, the very term, 'sub-terminal'—it all fit Sephiroth's description. She hated it. She hated that he was right, and she hated the people who had put her here too, if she was being honest. Nia and his men had backed her into such an untenable, degrading corner. How could she not be angry? "But I'm not your mother. I shouldn't be anything," she croaked, defiant all the same.
"No, you are not. And yet, what you are is…" he trailed off in a mild tone, the closest to uncertainty she'd ever heard from him.
"What I am?" she echoed back, caustic laughter edging into her voice.
He didn't answer.
She searched her mind again for her companions. And again, it was like trying to peer through a thick, unrelenting fog on a dark night. An unbearable ache squeezed her heart, and she felt like she might burst. They were there, but in what state, she could only guess. Were they okay? Had Gaia taken them while she was weak and unable to will them to remain separate? Bloody tears and sweat trickled down her face, and she started to hyperventilate. Why, why was her life-long nemesis once more the only one who could help her? If she hadn't been convinced of Nia's malevolence on its own, she would have suspected he'd engineered it this way.
Too exhausted to think on it any further, his name weaseled its way into her next breath, "Sephiroth…"
As soon as she'd spoken, he materialized in the room, a glowing black and silver blob through the growing condensation on the tank's glass and her own heavy, film-coated eyes. Tifa's first thought was that he'd already been there, waiting to move. The second was that she'd made an awful mistake—probably a matter of fact. But when her fear of the man failed to make her heart palpitate, or her body tremor, or her throat constrict, or to produce any kind of reaction at all, she knew that she'd reached a precipice—desperate for a life-raft in whatever form it came. The violations wrought against her in the past hours had drained her beyond acknowledging anything that wasn't the bitterness metastasizing in her heart, old enmity not excluded. All she could do was watch his slow, purposeful stride as he advanced on her tank.
He stopped a foot short of her prison and touched the glass with the tips of his fingers. He lingered there, two glowing sea-green lights staring her down, head cocked to one side as if in contemplation.
Tifa glared back with what scant willpower she had left. "Whatever you're planning, just get it over with," she broadcasted. "It's not like I can stop you."
His palm flattened against the surface in response, and the glass disintegrated into its constituent sand, hissing while it fell and mingled with the slimy liquid flowing out.
Clearer now, she expected to see his face twisted into its telltale sadistic smirk. She braced herself for a mad tirade about whatever he believed was her true purpose in the universe. Instead, his expression resolved into that same unnerving, serene grimace she'd encountered in her dream—the one that had the gall to suggest something bordering on empathy. It was only his eyes, narrowed and gleaming with self-righteous fury, that hinted at his barely contained wrath, and Tifa guessed it wasn't for her. But for this station, and its inhabitants?
"How long will you continue to spare thoughts for those traitors?" he retorted and pressed a hand to her stomach where the sensor panel bulged from beneath her skin—the most grueling, sadistic wound Nia's techs had inflicted.
Too weak to lurch away from him, Tifa tightly pursed her lips to suppress a shriek. A fresh flash of pain jolted through her, and then her arms fell free. Every torturous implement they'd inserted into her body or used to restrain her slipped out, off and away, reduced to dust. Warm, bloody rivulets followed, dribbling down her fingers, abdomen, legs, and pooling between her toes. Her knees trembled and gave out. Stumbling backward, she caught herself and slid down the wall.
Sephiroth knelt before her, settling at eye-level, leaving only inches between them. His mouth was set in a hard grimace and his eyes wandered her face, calculating.
For once, he seemed genuinely indecisive, Tifa mused. Maybe he'd finally make some mistakes. "They know how to kill you now," she baited him.
"Do they, Tifa?" Vicious amusement permeated his voice; any trace of hesitation melted away. "Can you still place hope in that, knowing how they'd squander it?"
Livid frustration coursed through her—at him, at everything—but she was lost for words. She looked away. There was no right answer.
Leaning forward, Sephiroth palmed the cheek she'd turned and quietly intoned, "Finish becoming what you are, puppet-master, and come find me."
And then he was gone.
Privately, she'd hoped that he'd devise another backward reason to justify healing her again, but he hadn't. He'd left her on this cold, metal floor, full of holes and barely clinging to consciousness. Tifa felt miserably foolish. It was Sephiroth—of course he'd offered help only to pull the rug out from beneath her at the last minute. It was just another of his wretched, self-titillating mind games. She was alone. Freed from the worst of it, but alone. She had to figure the rest of the way out herself.
"Hey Tifa, something's very not okay in here!" Yuffie called out.
There was no time to celebrate hearing from her friends. She already felt it. She forced herself to sit up, hairs on end for the energy building around her— inside her. The massive, knotted rope of Lifestream that had been Gaia was contracting inward. Sensing her imminent demise, her own life force was drawing it near. Her eyes darted about, surveying the room for a substitute. There was nothing to siphon. Her body was trying to heal itself, but the only available source was the very thing she'd kept as divorced from her own consciousness as possible.
Panicked, Tifa repelled it, and every puncture and incision bled anew. She squirmed and wept, trying in vain to keep quiet.
"Hey, what the fuck is up with that?" Cid interrupted her strangled cries.
"I'd keep away," Cloud warned. "Something's different. I don't want to be too close…"
"But it may also be dangerous not to investigate," Nanaki countered.
"Just Red and I, then. The rest of ya'll can stick around here and hold down the fort."
With strength she didn't possess, Tifa kicked and writhed. Her breathing came in deep, gurgling draws. Clutching her head, she curled up into a fetal ball, chanting to herself, "No, no…don't make me…"
For a moment, there was a calm, and she could see clearly into the landscape of her mind and the place she'd constructed for her friends. She hovered just barely above the massive twister of spirit energy, looking out over a small, mimicked piece of Edge. Two ant-sized figures were drawing near—Cid and Nanaki. She drowsily wondered if they could see her up here.
The walls of the cyclone grew up around her, a shimmering curtain of green and white veiling all else from view. Tifa bowed her head as though in prayer. When this had happened before, it had been consciously, in the waking world. Absorbing the Lifestreams had given them a new home in her psyche, but she'd done all she could to keep from truly melding with them; to keep all those fractured bits of consciousness separate from her own soul. But if she concentrated, she could feel her body fading still. If she didn't merge with them now, she was going to die.
Tifa forced her view to return to the outside world—to the harsh lights, rotating camera-eyes, and the obliterated leftovers of her prison. She was still bleeding out; it wasn't stopping. She strained to listen for anyone nearby but could make nothing out but ventilated hums and distant, grinding machinery. "I could just lay here; close my eyes. I'll sleep, and I just won't wake up," she heard her own voice droning in her head. "I won't know about anything that happens after. It's okay. I did everything I could, didn't I?"
An acidic, fierce rage stirred in the pit of her gut, defying her. She recalled the humiliating, searing pain of being bound, hung, and sliced open like a filleted fish. Nothing she'd done deserved that kind of cruelty. Nia's hateful condescension at her interview, and Aron's gun pressed to the back of her head came next. She'd done her best to help them. She'd wanted humanity to live, and it wasn't her fault their tech had failed. Nia's excitement over all the Mako they'd collected from Sephiroth resounded again—his sick glee over that same old exchange of precious life for industrial convenience.
"You know what you have to do," Sephiroth's words crept up from the back of her mind.
Her eyes popped wide open, struck by a dreadful epiphany.
If she died here, they would use her just as surely as they'd use whatever they'd draw from him. They would use her friends, they would use Minerva's remains—everything she loved or cared for might be reduced to little more than some cold, flickering lightbulb in an unkempt restroom somewhere. She could still preserve her friends. They would still be separate in her mind, but as for everything else living in her, she had to…she had to…
Inside once more, she pulled the circling layers of Lifestream around her like a blanket. A chorus of chirping, growling, and chittering filled her ears—fragmented lives that had once been—but it did not join with her. Although nothing remembered itself individually, so much of it still carried a vague recollection of having lived, of having been something more than just this flow. It still had a will—or many wills—of its own. She recalled what Aerith had told her about having to take a soul over and tear it apart to meld with it. She had to destroy the old consciousness so that the life would be subject to her mind alone—to force its rebirth as part of herself, rather than a new, independent form.
Just like Sephiroth, but she wasn't aiming to become some kind of contrived deity. That's not what she would be if it wasn't what she made of it. She was only doing this to keep it out of the wrong hands, not to dominate or rule over it. Someday, somehow, she'd find a way to make it right and restore the spirit energy to a natural cycle of death and rebirth. Until then, she had to do the unthinkable.
She had to save it.
Tifa stopped resisting what her body was already trying to do, and let it happen. All at once, the energy converged upon her, unbound and frayed. She felt like she was expanding, floating. Bizarre pieces of ideas and perspectives she'd never entertained before, knowledge plundered from its original keepers, flooded her mind because they were no more. Curiosity devolved into a fervent hunger, a deep pit opening wide for every flavor of thought and emotion. It was intoxicating and damning and interminable—far too much for one person to be, but now it was all her, along with that tormented, unquenchable thirst. More, more—she needed to know, to see, feel, taste; to become endless, to throw open every locked door and expose every secret. She was reaching-grasping-clawing at something…higher.
A blip of memory—Sephiroth, taunting her and her friends with his plans at the Temple of the Ancients—pierced through the unholy ecstasy-"A 'God' to rule over every soul."
Cid and Nanaki's faces passed before her confounded and terrified—and then gone.
Tifa wailed, coming to, already wanting to forget everything. A violent shockwave burst out from her, shredding the walls of the containment chamber and tearing a wide gash into the station's hull. Shields fell into place to stand in for the loss of solid matter, and sirens blared. She sat up on her knees, covering her mouth.
"Nanaki? Cid? Please…"
She couldn't hear them. Their presence was completely missing, but she could feel the five others, gawking at her in wild disbelief.
"Tifa, you…you have them now," Aerith replied. She sounded flat and dumbfounded. "They're with…they're…you."