Chapter Thirteen: Destroyer
Shaking inside, Tifa rose. She braced her back and the palms of her hands against the nearest wall for balance while she scoured herself for injuries. Arms, legs, stomach—all were whole, albeit sticky and scaled over with coagulated blood and chemistry. The needles' punctures, the burns, and carved out skin had all healed—she would live.
She would live, hollow and aching and brimming with a power that wasn't meant for her.
She'd live because she'd killed—annihilated—two dear friends, and taking their lives had made her powerful. She'd erased them, she drilled it into herself, slamming a fist backward into the wall, leaving a dent. Her final memory of their faces lashed out at her. She took hold of it and replayed it on purpose, watching Nanaki and Cid grow more bewildered with each pass. She deserved this, to be reminded. She deserved to hurt. There was no way to rationalize it; no way to absolve herself.
Standing there, a wafting oily scent distracted her. A rugged, out of place thrill surged through her, the pull of gravity against her feet, while fuselage gently buzzed and shuddered around her with the friction of a half-remembered takeoff—not her memory, but remembered nonetheless. She heard spinning airship fans—the sequential function of the engine's inlet, compressor, combustion chamber, turbine, and exhaust materialized, and she understood them. A foreign gut instinct told her to double-check her navigation and altimeter to be sure of her cruising speed.
"No," she hiccuped, pushing back against the foreign expertise and fragmented memories. She understood how the Highwind worked now, and the Shera too. And the old Shinra 26 rocket. And the Tiny Bronco. Volumes of aeronautical science flipped open and simply spilled into her, and she assimilated it as though it had always been there. "I don't…I can't know any of this," she begged herself.
Cid's world retreated.
Tifa's eyes watered, and she stared ahead impassively into a full-mooned, starlit night. The chilly nighttime desert air raised gooseflesh on her arms, and so she sat, hugging herself and dangling her legs over the edge of the highest plateau. Tanned leather, burning sandalwood, and smoke from the Cosmo Candle bonfire filled her nose. These, she could know. She'd visited Cosmo Canyon a few times.
But then the fire split into torches and blazing arrows darting in every which direction. Mothers and their cubs ran for their lives, trampling over one another. The Gi tribe broke through from the caves below in force, bedecked in spiked armor and warpaint, biting and snarling. At last, there was Seto, making a mad dash through the invaders, baiting them back underground.
Why did he leave? It was dangerous. Why did he run, rather than stay and fight? Why—she knew why. Nanaki had learned the truth alongside everyone else and had made his peace, but his ages-old bereavement stung her anew.
It reminded her. It hurt her.
"Papa," she wept, because through the flames, she was inexplicably back home in Nibelheim, young and terrified. Everything burned. Her home, her neighbors. Secret play areas down back alleyways, and old childhood friends. Her too. She burned inside alive and the embers had never fully cooled. Angry, so violently angry. Enough for her to pluck up his murderer's sword, a weapon that should have been too much for her—too much for anyone but him, said the legend—but it wasn't. Enough to run into the Mako reactor, up the stairs past the thrumming pods, intent on impaling him on it herself and—
A small, faltered breath passed her lips.
Startled, she blinked.
Come to think of it, had she been breathing or blinking at all, these past several minutes? Did she have to do either? She held her breath, expecting pressure to build around her diaphragm so that she'd be forced to suck in a gasp. She waited, studying the glass shards scattered about the floor. And waited.
Her lungs ignored her, wholly disinterested.
She inhaled anyway, a deep draught, because it was normal. Because she always had. Turning slowly, she glanced at her contorted reflection in the chamber's shattered window. Her eyes glistened back at her, full of unwept tears and glaring carmine fire. Her skin had paled, not deathly or weak, but it swam with an odd sort of fading, silvery iridescence.
"I'm still…" she mouthed. Still absorbing the energy. Still making it part of herself.
She was not still human.
Exhaustion nagged at her heart. Where was the sense in fighting it anymore? Time had won this battle. Physically at least, she was whatever her journey had made of her. For that, an untold wealth of experience awaited her to acknowledge it as her own, confined behind a fragile mental veneer forged only from her refusal to look.
"Please, not yet," she told herself. Now was not the right time to inspect those ill-gotten gains, adamant as they seemed to introduce themselves.
The station was in trouble. Out there in the void, Sephiroth was waiting.
He'd told her to go to him once she'd 'finished becoming'. He'd known what was going to happen and had assisted her just enough to ensure it did.
So she'd become a little more like him, but why?
"Sephiroth," she spat, eying her hands and hoping that repeating his name would summon enough rage to ease her self-revulsion.
Instead, the familiar dread of facing down a dilemma too big for her clenched her stomach. She wanted to cry. She wished someone, anyone would hold her; tell her that she was going to be fine and that what she'd done had been the only reasonable choice left. Even though it had been anything but that. There had been no reasonable choices. Heavy-laden with ancient power, she felt like an abandoned child, infinitesimal and absolutely lost.
But sticking around in this mangled place and waiting for nothing wouldn't work, tempting as it was. Wandering out into the hallway and exiting back into the terminal—what could she do there? The station was in chaos. She was in chaos. "The siphons," she choked out. "It's okay, it's okay, I can do…something…"
Tifa scanned the room, nodding to herself when she found what she'd been hoping to find: a small basin squeezed into a corner behind where the tank had stood. She moved by inches at first, old logic expecting her knees to buckle and legs to fail her. One timid foot in front of the next gave the lie away, and she darted for the sink, frantically twisting the knobs until one of them produced water. It was icy cold, and there was nothing to dry off with, but she didn't care. She grasped at the precious, crisp trickle and splashed her arms, scraping away the bloody crust. Her torso and legs came next—grab, splash, slap, scrub—again and again until she was sopping wet, and most of the torture grime had dripped to the floor or soaked into her clothes.
She wrinkled her nose at the fetid, coppery stench that still clung to her, but without a fresh change of clothes, there was nothing she could do.
That is, nothing she was eager to do.
She winced, frustrated with how easily she fell back into telling herself knee-jerk fibs, and more so that she felt the need to deceive herself in the first place. It had to stop. Somehow, she had to make herself stop. She'd been gradually transforming in one sense or another from the moment she'd departed from Gaia's scorched shell. Pretending she hadn't only ever made matters worse.
There was a solution to her unclean predicament, courtesy of those changes—one that didn't involve slowly drenching herself or chafing her skin with her bare hands.
In the aftermath of the Mako poisoning she'd suffered before coming here, she'd simply awoken refreshed. If she'd been able to mend her appearance and composition then, there was no reason why she couldn't do it now. Blinking, annoyed that she'd already forgotten to again, the materials covering her body reformed, remade by will. What saturated them had come from her, so they morphed as she instructed.
She recalled that Sephiroth had triggered that ability in her first, mutating rags she'd fashioned from her Amyntasi prison garb into her old clothes. Although she'd benefitted at the time, her skin crawled in renewed awareness that he'd again forced her hand.
"I am showing you. Come."
"Tifa…was there really no other way?" Cloud chided her miserably, speaking up for Cid and Nanaki for the first time since she'd come to.
Tifa glanced sideways. Cloud could not hear Sephiroth. Neither could she—as before, it was just a loud, voiceless thought, imposed from without. Just as well. Right now, she needed to handle Sephiroth and her friends separately. She needed to hear them both clearly. Cloud and the others only wanted her to fight and rail against him, and she wanted that too—she did—but he knew things. "I can't beat him without knowing more," she whispered and shook her head as though trying to drain water from her ears.
She was talking out loud to no one too much. Hopefully it was a good enough sign for her sanity that she at least recognized it.
"The siphons…" she uttered again. She needed to find her way to the station's control room. What they would do to the worlds of Lifestream Sephiroth embodied was ghoulish, but if he wasn't stopped here, there might not be another chance. He would be that much closer to deciding the fate of all creation. "A god," she murmured. Truly. What else was she supposed to call that kind of potency and knowledge amassed in one person? Now that she had an inside look at what that power could do and what it meant to meld with it, no other word seemed to fit.
"I thought gods needed believers," Cloud persisted.
Tifa froze. "That's what I'm trying to prevent, Cloud. I'm trying."
A heavy, bone-deep sigh replied, "I know."
He was tired. They were all tired.
Gently dismissing Cloud to the back of her mind, she climbed out the gash she'd torn in the wall. As programmed, the alarms had fallen silent once the corridor had pressurized and no more oxygen was leaking. She didn't know how she knew that. The environment itself had a signal that she could hear, and—and she remembered the souls she'd invited in before her arrest. It was because of them. She knew what they knew. Biting her lower lip, she leaned forward and peered out the shielded hull breach to search the still, dark space outside. A few lights from Defense's cruisers flickered off to the right, but nothing else. "Where are you?" she mumbled.
"I am here. Keep moving." More silent impressions.
The back of her head throbbed, and Tifa lifted her eyes from the cleft just in time to see the deserted passage ahead of her distort into a rippling tear. Contracting, its gravitational well dragged her in before she could think to evade. She stumbled forward through it, and a cold, prickling electrostatic charge shoved her out the opposite side.
Behind her, the portal snapped shut. Suddenly, she was no longer in the ship, but halfway down the station's primary walkway.
The pile of monster corpses remained, hidden beneath a white drape and cordoned off with a bright blue shield. A few sparse hazmat-suited soldiers milled about, cleaning, marking, or inspecting every surface with tactical precision. The edges of doorways, windowsills, the backsides of shop signs, drainage grates—they weren't leaving anything to chance.
"Don't see me. You can't see me," she softly chanted, forging ahead in small, careful steps. "You're too busy. There's nothing else to worry about." She hadn't known that she knew it would work until the words left her mouth. The information leaked up past her wavering resistance, introducing itself as her own idea. It was hers, technically.
Anything Jenova could have done—all of it was at her disposal. She could make most people perceive whatever she wanted them to. Just this once, Tifa allowed herself to feel relieved; it meant she wouldn't have to harm anyone to reach her destination.
With that ounce of acceptance, the dam burst. Secrets she'd been keeping from herself concerning how she worked as an organism unraveled. Unabridged comprehension inundated her mind, and she covered her mouth to suppress a pained moan.
The virus she'd spread? That was a defense mechanism. Restraining her life-draining radiation had unleashed the sickness. The radiation itself had been a constant outreach for sustenance that she hadn't known how to turn off until now. Before taking another step, she reeled in the invisible sapping field, dissolving it. The effort proved no more complicated than relaxing a muscle, once she allowed for its existence.
Had she known sooner, had she carefully explored these changes rather than running scared from them—but no, it was too late for that. If later came, she could lose herself in sorrow over how foolish she'd been then. She had work to do.
The station's layout signaled to her, an interplay of memories from the souls she'd integrated and whatever genetic residue that lingered from the outbreak. Tifa paused for a moment, carefully studying the mental map. Down a level from the command area where she'd first met with the Admirals, she'd find the control center. There, she could activate the siphons.
"It wasn't supposed to end up like this!" a wilting, detached part of her mind shrieked. Refusing to become Jenova-like was supposed to have been about staying on the side of right. It should have helped her save everyone, but her pretense had only made her toxic and brought the threat of Sephiroth and their imminent end much closer.
"I can't change it now," she scolded that petulant inner voice, shoving each new grievance as far down as she could.
A hot, prickling sensation pressed down on the top of her head then, and she glared up at the skylight. Blankets of aquamarine and green flowed over it so that it looked more akin to a shallow, sun-lit ocean than deep space. He was watching her. She just stared. "What are you doing?" she breathed and then grimaced.
Something was wrong with her. With how she was thinking of herself.
What if she had died in a way, writhing back there on the lab's floor? She apparently didn't need to breathe anymore, or not very much; she only blinked expressively, and an eerie calm had settled over her, severing the past hours' madness into a separate, quarantined sense of being.
Maybe she was finally cracking. Did it count if she was aware of it? Whatever the truth, she'd just endured catastrophic transformation, and she could only process so many of the implications at once.
She was alive enough to worry about it. That would have to do.
"More than alive. Soon, you will see..."
The diversion broke Tifa's hold on the soldiers.
Almost instantly, they turned on her. They scrambled for their weapons, and in a repeat performance of when they'd first entrapped her, fired off suppressant nets.
Tifa quickly refocused and stood her ground. At the last nanosecond, when they were inches from her lifted forehead, she offered her assailants a subtle nod.
Snubbing the laws of physics with prejudice, the chained mesh sheets snapped flat in mid-air and flipped back over at speed, lighting on the soldiers instead. Under the oppressive weight they fell, knees crumpling and palms splaying so that they lay prostrate before her while she strode past.
"Accidents happen. You're tired," she told them. She didn't spare them another glance. The past hours had doused her in hot resentment; if she did, she'd be tempted to do much worse.
Oh, what she was capable of now, she sourly considered. If she'd wanted to, she could have dropped everyone along this strip with an idea. Or she might have raised the rotting monster heap up into duplicates of herself to take the soldiers on, one on one, all at once. They'd treated her like one, so why not give them a little better justification after the fact?
"That's…not," she started to argue, but couldn't finish the retort. All she knew was that going that far bothered her. It was supposed to bother her more.
All the same, she hated what they had done to her and what it had ultimately precipitated—what it had done to people she'd loved. They were more to blame than Sephiroth himself. Ironically, he'd merely been an opportunist this time around. Even if she'd managed to escape without calling him, nothing would have changed.
Nanaki and Cid would still be gone.
Tifa's fury deflated.
Because she'd done that. Not these people. Not Sephiroth. They'd cornered her, but the deed itself had been hers alone. Death had been an option for once, and she'd been too cowardly to take it. Just because the choices were all wrong didn't mean they hadn't been there.
Onward she walked until she reached the chrome façade at the end of the road. At her suggestion, the door swung and politely held itself open, and Tifa passed through the entrance. Quiet and untouched, the dim, blue-lit hall was exactly as she'd last seen it. The locked doors on either side, she discerned, were all entrances to different levels or decks of the station's control facility.
Claws scratched on the other side of one of the first doors. A harsh slam shook the hinges, and then more clawing. It seemed a few of her transformants were left over from where people had turned in restricted areas.
Tifa pressed a hand and an ear to the surface, feeling out the same mental leash she'd encountered before.
A frightened, tiny droplet of life responded on the opposite side, squirming to escape its tortured form. Desperate to get to her, it body-slammed the door a second time.
She pulled on the tendril of its spirit ever so gently, and it gave, slipping out from underneath the door and into her. She didn't try to separate it. There was no point. Time would only defeat her again, and she could hardly fathom merging with a whole world's worth a second time. Better just to take the pieces as they came. Stray spirit energy was easier for her to protect this way, purified of life's horrors and locked away as part of herself.
That last thought made her stop in her tracks. "Purified?"
It was true that wiping the energy free of its memories eliminated any past pains, but she needed to respect there was more to it than that. She knew better. There was a personality and happy times that meant something too.
But more often than not, when she weighed one side against the other? Tifa shook her head. Now wasn't the time.
Dead, the carcass fell with a conclusive thump, and Tifa pushed the door open, shoving it out of her path.
Like the conference room above, control's front was a gigantic interactive viewing port. Backed into corners and huddled under desks, she spotted a few younger technicians looking up at her through bloodshot eyes. For the moment, Tifa ignored them and marched down from one tier to the next, examining the siphon cannons as she drew nearer.
Translucent, diamond-shaped tanks affixed to the bottoms of large, satellite-dish bowls by a knotted network of tubes and pipes hovered at various points along the station's curved length. A secondary row had been set up a little further out. Three of the tanks she could see—each about double the size of the old-sky-scraper sized towers in Midgar— were nearly full of muddled blackish-green and red.
Tifa frowned. During the split second he'd popped in, they'd captured a substantial amount of negative Lifestream, but Sephiroth hadn't had any trouble manifesting when they'd locked her away. Scanning ahead, she silently counted the reactors. There were about a hundred of them—better than she expected. She wondered if they'd taken her more seriously than she'd originally believed, or if they'd rushed to fill the gap after Sephiroth's initial attack. Stirring in the back of her mind informed her that it was a bit of both. Either way, they'd honestly been preparing to cripple an enemy capable of wiping out planets.
"We need to turn them on. All of them," she announced.
Two of the techs—a brother and sister, she detected through familial waves of anxiety—sitting under the nearest table exchanged a cautious look and crawled out to flank her.
"Uh…We can't really do that," the woman standing to her right answered.
"You're saying you need orders to save yourselves?" Tifa asked pointedly.
"No, no. They're…they're all on, just not operational. We're not getting any power to charge them. Something big tore out of the carrier docked at the terminal over there. A beam or something. It took down our remote power source, tore half of the tanks up," her brother explained.
Tifa's eyes widened slightly when she saw which ship he'd singled out—it was exactly where she'd been imprisoned. When she'd joined with her piece of Gaia to safeguard the Lifestream from their reactors, she'd completely disarmed the station.
No wonder Sephiroth had found it so damn funny when she'd tried to goad him. He'd weaponized her change against the very people she was trying to protect. He'd experienced it enough times himself that he had to have known she was going to discharge afterward.
She seethed, half-panicked. "You knew."
"I did. But that was not me," he countered. "Destroying reactors, Tifa? You targeted what you've despised from the beginning."
Turning to face the tiers, she saw everyone curled into fetal balls or clinging to table legs, staring up at her with covered mouths or diverting their eyes altogether. In a shiny, mirror-surfaced bauble on one of the desks, she caught a glimpse of what was scaring them: Her eyes were bursting with fierce, bloody light, and her skin appeared fluid in places, its opalescence renewed in the energy from the monster she'd taken upon entering.
To these already-terrified people, she looked the part of a hellish demon; something far worse than what she'd killed. Unlike the beast, she spoke and had motives, and ever since she'd shown up, things had taken one phenomenally bad turn after the next for everyone. To top it all off, she'd consumed their friends' souls when her rogue biology had irrevocably mutilated them. What were they supposed to think?
She clenched an aggravated fist at her side and envisioned a more human face, how she used to look. Obediently, her skin solidified, and her eyes dimmed. Soon she'd leave, but first—
"I want all of this to stop too," she pled.
No one budged. Their distrust pelted her in torrents.
A shrill voice wept from a corner of the uppermost tier, "Why are you even here? Just go away!"
"What exactly do you want from us?" a dry, boyish crack demanded.
"Does anyone know a quick way to restore the power?" Tifa urged, trying to reason through their rising hysteria.
Without context, a vision of some random machinery affixed to the outer hull popped into her head.
The two standing beside her shuffled their feet. "The supply conduit we were using for the cannons is over there," the female tech pointed out.
Outside, most of the way down the length of the station, an odd-shaped lump of a diagonal structure poked out. Spinning chunks and splinters hovered, expanding outward like a slow-motion explosion over the surface her shockwave had sheered smooth and flat.
The tech continued, "It…it needs too many parts replaced. That will…we would need to requisition for supplies and manpower from Central. They don't know about...any, any of this. Admiral Nia suspended normal reporting procedures, and—"
"And mutiny still never occurred to anyone," Tifa complained.
"Your hope is misplaced."
She let out a deliberate sigh in response and tried to ignore him, but the very mention of hope—she couldn't very well misplace something she'd apparently never had, could she? Something he'd taken away no less.
"I'll redefine it."
On the floor, most of the technicians had crept out of their hiding places to huddle close together. Unspeaking, the two who'd been brave enough to assist her departed from her side, retreating between the desks.
Tifa stepped back up to the port, away from the eyes trained upon her; away from their vigil for whatever awful act they imagined she might pull next and gazed out at the stars. She tricked herself into believing for a moment that she'd only just now been set down in this spot, dropped from her normal life with no explanation. Nothing had transpired between the two points—one minute, she was in her bar back on Gaia serving up beers and doubles on a busy Saturday night; the next, she was here. Just a visitor, a tourist who'd stopped by to see the sights.
She inhaled. The spell broke. It was only her second breath since setting foot in the control room.
The people behind her cried out all the more in barely suppressed sobs.
She didn't bother checking her reflection again. Whether or not she'd caused their alarm, she couldn't help them. She could hardly help herself without tearing path of destruction along the way.
Jolting Tifa from her reverie, the console lights and window interfaces abruptly jerked and crackled. Chasing lines of static interference and pixelated, artifacting clusters scrolled across the monitors. Desk units vibrated, emitting a rapid-fire clicking sound. Overhead, lights buzzed and flickered. A rhythmic, low hum played over speakers and comms, rising and falling.
By force of normal habits, Tifa ducked for cover. On the floor, she scurried over to the tight-knit group and knelt in front of them, still facing the window, watching. Any second now, she knew he would show up to gloat over humanity's failed capacity to stop him. Then he'd destroy the station. Or maybe he'd leave after announcing his too-predictable intentions to eradicate their worlds.
For a long moment, none of that happened. There was nothing but the malfunctioning machinery, whirring and flashing error logs when they could process anything.
Sniffles, hiccups, and whimpers gradually eased into silence, replaced by shallow, sleepy breaths. Then, one by one, grasping hands jutted from behind her on either side, reaching out toward empty space. Raised forearms, palms, and fingertips bled teal strands. Languid, it twisted and floated past like burning incense smoke.
In her periphery, the group nodded off as one, slouching and dropping, spirits forfeit.
The streams phased through the window, churning together into a vortex of green light, gathering at a nexus among the Mako reactors.
A rotating white ring materialized and illuminated the heart of the spiral, magnifying its centripetal force. Small globes pushed out from the center, rising above the ring to peel apart and rotate into interlocking, luminescent wheels.
Tifa abandoned the group, crawling down on her hands and knees. At the far end of this lowest tier, she'd spotted an exit. If she couldn't use the reactors, all that was left for her was to leave. Maybe she'd succeed in drawing Sephiroth away; maybe not, but she couldn't stay and watch another one of his omnicides play out. She'd be less complicit if she wasn't here—he'd do this without her around, because she was sure that was somehow part of the point.
Why else would he have bided his time like this, provoking and frightening those around her while taunting her over how she wasn't really one of them anymore?
Worse, however, was how easy it had been for him. Fear always made a mess, but humanity's go-to option when pushed was to turn and bow unfailingly to the cruelest among them for illusory protection. So long as they could swipe at something, they didn't care what was really going on. Now, they were going to pay a wickedly disproportionate price.
Tifa wanted out. That's all that mattered—getting out. She could think about it some more when everything around her wasn't dying or turning into something unnatural.
"They are unworthy of you."
Blinding light flared, bathing the room in sheen of white—or its intensity should have been blinding, but her eyes tolerated it. Glancing behind her, she watched as the control staff disintegrated to dust and gave up their last wisps of life.
She could feel Sephiroth's gaze all but burning into the back of her head now, confirming her suspicion that there was no hiding here. Still, she continued scrambling along the floor until her hands clutched the doorknob, and she slipped through, raising back up to a crouch.
The exit had led to a small, garage-like auxiliary docking bay, its wide vehicle gate open but shielded—probably a private entrance for the command area. Its walls were built at an angle that obstructed the killing shadow-flare enough that it only came through as a dim glow or in small slices. Here, the atmosphere held its breath, dead silent and perfectly still. The relatively smaller space told lies about being safer, inspiring more impossible thoughts of simply hunkering down and waiting it out.
All she had to do was step out and fly away, she thought, and her stint terrorizing last of humanity would be over.
Peering around the corner, her insides bottomed out in frigid mortal terror. She was too late.
Sephiroth had already emerged, transfigured into an entity like what they'd fought in the northern crater years ago. His metamorphosis was more complete this time, and several times over. His upper torso was bared, and his feet poked out from beneath an emerald veil of coalescent energy. Six giant, gradated wings sprouted from his back, crowned at his shoulders by two ruby-violet ones made of a smooth, polished chitin, studded along their lengths with sapphire nodes. Countless golden light-wheels spun about his head in a wide arc, and two and a half larger haloes hovered behind him.
He locked eyes with her.
Tifa couldn't peel hers away. He'd never intended to let her flee, she numbly realized. Not this time. If she was going to run, it should have been when he'd first struck. It should have been when he'd invaded her dreams, dripping with malicious pride that she'd discovered a human population.
Withering and mesmerized, she simply stared back. Though otherwise paralyzed, a lingering speck of her defiance silently dared him to drag her out if he wanted her to bear witness to his next mass murder that badly.
Amused, silent laughter filled her head.
Her feet departed the floor, and her body fell limp as she levitated out into the vacuum. A tiny, leftover inner voice screamed warnings about oxygen and the cold, but those didn't figure anymore, did they? Like him, she differed from life or death. She could probably kill anything she touched, but at the same time, she'd become a sort of self-constructed ark, preserving the very essence of what made life alive.
The distance between them rapidly closed, shrouding her in his radiance. He caught her by her shoulders and turned her to face the station and the endless expanse beyond it.
Green haze crept out from the station's every crevice, and from some of the docked fleet, condensing into liquid trails that streaked into the wheels and orbs rotating over them. She turned her head aside, but nothing could shield her. Everyone here—Sephiroth was draining every person she'd left alive with no more than a thought. She could shut her eyes, but she'd still know.
Grasping her hand, Sephiroth entwined their left fingers and raised their arms together in a simple swiping gesture. His energy—a molten shock that somehow left her unscathed—pulsed into her wrist and down through her palm. Across the horizon, space split open to reveal all four planets—the total abode of humanity and the unstable world they'd abandoned centuries ago.
Leaning into her, he purred, "Do you want to know them, Tifa?"
She trembled, both at his proposal and proximity. Coherent thought escaped her. Tears leaked out from the corners of her eyes in sudden recollection of how afraid she'd been to ask Della for that very thing; how undeserving she'd judged herself at the time. "Tell me."
"Eleuthia, Ananke, Phanes," he named off the inhabited planets, guiding her hand in his to motion to each one.
Heavy droplets fell from her face. She'd expected them to appear sparsely lived in, for the terraforming to be obvious, but it wasn't. Each globe was teaming with vibrant shades of blue, green, and violet. There weren't any oceans, but large clusters of lakes freckled their sprawling landmasses, most surrounded by miles of thick forest. Storm systems inched over their atmospheres, thunderheads bubbling up and occasionally winking with bursts of lightning. Strings of electricity attached highways to sparkling cities. They weren't just alive—they were thriving.
Sephiroth lightly touched the back of her head. "You sought to save them, and they rewarded you with betrayal," he reminded her.
White-hot anger surged into the back of her throat, devouring her moment of wistful contemplation. She wanted him to be wrong, but he wasn't. She wished she could spit in his face and call him a liar, but he hadn't exaggerated or twisted the truth. Not at all. There was no need. Humanity had betrayed her so completely that even the argument she was still one of them in spirit had stretched too thin to hold. She'd tried to help them, begged for them to hear her out as she had with the Amyntasi, and the only ones who might have acted died. In their stead, as always, the worst of their elements had fast-risen to power. Voices of reason were so few and far between, her tentative welcome had turned into captivity and torment in a matter of hours.
She pried her hand loose from his—he released her—and balled both of hers into white-knuckled fists.
"Let me leave," she protested, her voice ringing out with a bizarre echo. "I did what I could, but now I just want to go…"
"You hate them."
Tifa flushed, tightly pursing her lips. That—that was also not untrue. She wouldn't let him hear it, but it was exactly why she wanted to run, to get away from here so that she'd have nothing to do with condemning those beautiful worlds. So she wouldn't have to risk looking back on how it felt to watch people die and not care. Or looking back and feeling devastated by how much she still did. Her hands weren't clean, but she could at least try to keep them from getting worse. She needed time to think about everything. Time to look away.
Sephiroth let out a low laugh, or something like one. Even through the softer tones he was using with her, the surrounding space vibrated as though pulled taut each time he spoke. "Don't worry, I know. Stop torturing yourself. Words aren't the only way—"
"Do whatever you want!" she cut in, whipping around to interrupt his abuse of her first overture to Cloud, and Della's last consolation. "Destroy them like everything else you touch! I can't stop you, but leave my memories out of it…Leave me out of it."
Denying her, the precious little space between them contracted to nothing. His arms constricted around her, pinning her arms to her sides. He pressed his forehead against hers, and his eyes bored through her. His wings folded around them, hiding her from the horrors outside and cocooning her in with the horror they belonged to.
"And yet, my touch has sustained you," he whispered, trailing the tips of his fingers down the column of her spine to the small of her back.
A strangled gasp escaped from between Tifa's teeth. Why was he acting like this, touching and embracing her as though they shared some warped, unspoken intimacy? The only bond between them was the one he'd subversively planted, and it was anything but shared.
"I never wanted you to," she bit out, struggling for whatever it wasn't worth.
They were at war. She'd been using him against himself, she decided, not calling on him for reprieve. He could see into her mind; he had to know—so, why?
"Perhaps not, but I will continue to show you," Sephiroth replied, clutching her closer still.
So close, she felt like she was inhaling pure life. The combined, harmonious thunder of millions of hearts pounding inside him reverberated through her—a planet's dissolved spirit magnetized in his will, drawn to its mirror image in her. It ruthlessly stripped away her agony, her repulsion and left her grappling with a raw longing she couldn't—wouldn't name. Part of her too large to ignore wanted nothing more than to give in, forget who either of them were, and dive as deep into that sensation as she could go.
"What you have done, what you have become…"
A fresh round of tears spilled down her face, a perverse sense of joy blossoming from sadness and terror. It was too much. He was undoing her. She couldn't think straight.
He unfurled his wings to their full breadth, and the space overhead and behind him departed to reveal the Amyntasi asteroid field.
His lips ghosted along the shell of her ear with an offer, "Tifa…Shall I burn these traitors for you?"
A/N:
Greek primordial deities for planet names:
Eleuthia: Goddess of childbirth
Ananke: Personification of inevitability, compulsion, and necessity.
Phanes: The creator that Zeus is said to have consumed whole to gain supremacy over the universe