Chapter 15: Intervention

Tifa walked inside herself; inside a mindscape that she'd allowed to become radically altered. She walked inside and away from the mangled, scattered flotsam of human civilization, along the violated canyon that had once protected her friends from Gaia's hungry leftovers. The flat, rust-colored desert plains on either side were now abandoned, devoid of floating lights or rip-tide energy streams. All of it was her now; she'd become one with it, and the first step to managing this new nature, she'd decided, was to survey the what it had done to her up close.

And to check on her friends. She missed them but dreaded what she was certain to be a confrontation. Tifa did not expect them to understand, or if they did, she didn't dare think they wouldn't be deeply disappointed in her.

What she had done was…

Tifa stopped, letting her gaze fall down the blackened gorge. What was the right way to describe what she'd done? She could decry Sephiroth for manipulating her into it, but what had been her alternatives? How could she have allowed humanity to go on after what they'd done? The only choice left was whether she or Sephiroth ended them—there was no way out— and at least she could honestly say she wanted to care for the life. Eventually, hopefully, she could set things right.

Sephiroth only wanted to use it to rise into his idea of a higher state of existence.

A higher existence: Was that what she was now? She'd refused the definition for herself, but something immense and unspeakable had changed within her when she'd merged with the last of the human worlds. More so than when she'd melded with Gaia.

A god; a goddess: What were those words supposed to mean, and what gave anyone the right to begin to guess? Where was the line that marked the difference between a monster and the divine? Were they simply symbolic of amassed power, authority, and responsibility? For herself, Tifa believed in at least the very latter. Cosmic responsibility had in fact been foisted upon her long before she'd started walking a parallel to Jenova. It had fallen to her to carry and protect the lives of many worlds, and to defend their primal source.

It sounded ridiculously mythological. Eons from now, on a young planet far away, would a little tribe of its first intelligent creatures gather around their elders to hear their creation story? Would they revere her as a goddess who'd birthed their world from many others and delivered a legion of souls? The thought felt utterly obscene. She wasn't delivering anyone; just the stuff that people had once been made of.

By that time, she would probably be gone, if 'by then' ever arrived. In another future, every soul, every droplet of life submitted to Sephiroth, who had become all in all. That is, except for her. If Sephiroth came out on top, a life she no longer wanted was assured, and only her life, to linger at his side. She didn't want to guess what sort of torment he'd subject her to if the chips fell his way. Why else would he want her around if not for revenge without end?

But if she won, the Promised Land would be safe, and an end guaranteed. She'd deposit all she'd taken back where it came from, and if at all possible, disperse.

That was the catch, no matter what happened: Because she was so like Jenova, there was no guaranteed death. Maybe she could split her essence into millions of nanoparticles and cast them afar into the depths of space, but in due time, the ages themselves would piece her back together. Her demise could only be temporary, and her substance was chock-full of stolen memory to guide itself back. In a manner of speaking, she was functionally immortal.

Immortal, vastly powerful, vengeful, and duty-bound: Those were all accurate descriptions of what she'd become.

And, to top it off, relentlessly stalked by the one who'd encouraged her to turn into this, to be like him. Tifa remembered the feather light-brush of Sephiroth's lips on her forehead, his hand on her neck, declaring his own divinity to her. She remembered the energy that had passed between them; the perspective he'd shown her. Tifa rubbed her arms where he'd touched her and felt…she didn't know.

"I should feel revolted," she scolded herself, but what she ought to feel and what she did weren't quite as aligned as she wanted them to be.

A sick thrill was the fairest way to describe it. She despised him, she reminded herself, but that did nothing to prevent her from tilting her head back, palm pressed against her throat, replaying that particular moment in her mind. "What do I believe?" Tifa breathed, staring up at the nothing-sky of her subconscious. It was an overcast, hazy thing, like what late afternoon back on Gaia might have been when rain threatened.

If she was a goddess, could she command it to rain here? Inside her own head, that probably wouldn't count as any sort of miracle; no more than using her imagination. Also, for all the knowledge and power she now supposedly possessed, none of it was enough to bring back Cid and Nanaki. No matter how hard she searched herself, she'd failed to find the slightest remaining spark of their conscious selves. Only pools of knowledge, very specific to each of them, remained. Nor was time her purview—she could tear open small holes in the fabric of space to get around, but she knew of no way to go back and correct the plethora of wrong moves that had led her to this point.

She was not omnipotent; neither was Sephiroth. They were both abominations still; nameless things that were better off far away from anything that could breathe. Not that she wanted to be genuinely divine, but it might have opened some doors.

Peering a little closer, she saw that her sky wasn't entirely rainclouds. Dark energy veins had roped themselves around the 'sun' that represented the core of her soul.

Sephiroth thought he'd deceived her into absorbing it, but she'd known. The second it had entered, she'd felt the difference. It was consuming and oppressive like him, like his hair falling over her shoulders, his wings entrapping her, and the profanity of their fingers entwining while somehow his sword burst through her chest. She'd chosen to take a risk with it. She could have filtered it out or set it aside, but she'd already become something vile anyway—he'd murdered her own humanity—so there was no loss in accepting a part of him if she could use it as a means to an end. If she kept tabs on it, it might unveil some much-needed secrets about both of them.

But, oh how it ached. Where she'd expected raging malice and scheming vindictiveness, she'd instead found the horrific, death-defying, unfulfilled longing of a man who understood that a great part of what he sought bordered on impossible. Someone who was nonetheless unwilling to accept it and would do whatever it took to change the order of things and make a way.

Someone who knew he was making headway in changing that order, and so much of that yearning had come to point itself at her, willing that she should watch him, see him, know him, want him.

Tifa left off from monitoring the dark energy. It was at best demoralizing to consider that, in the midst of the endless terror he was raining down across the cosmos, she'd become such a central focus for him. She'd have to return to investigate it again later. Nothing had changed; she'd long since recognized that Sephiroth was obsessed with her. This just confirmed, up close and personal, what his behavior had already told her. It was nothing new, nothing to get any more out of sorts about than she already was.

But by the stars did it hurt, experiencing it for herself. She pushed it aside as much as it would allow her, but it wasn't a fragment of detached spirit energy or like her friends, who she could simply silence when the need arose. It was part of her conscious self now. Still, she insisted it was not genuinely her. It could never be. She needed to treat it as a prisoner. She needed to avoid sympathizing with it too much, because the moment she did, the moment she lost track of that critical line where she ended and Sephiroth began, any fight she might put up against him would be over without exchanging a single blow.

Tifa looked up from the gulch and marched gradually onward. Straight ahead lay the piece of Edge she'd dreamt up for her friends, accompanied with the looming sensation of being a small child in deep, deep trouble. She didn't have to be here. Keeping secrets from them was unwise, but she didn't have to explain anything to anyone if she didn't want to. It was her head and her decisions to make, as cold as that sounded. They just happened to live here, and their survival depended on her—she didn't have to give away anything if it didn't suit her.

She wondered what she'd do if all they could offer her was the contempt she deserved. The decisions were hers alone, but she was at a total loss, and not only for how she was supposed to stop Sephiroth.

Her problem was that the only reason she had left for wanting to stop him was that it was him. She couldn't say for sure whether he was truly in the wrong anymore; not after what she'd seen. No, she reminded herself for the umpteenth time, she didn't want to hoard the universe's life to herself. She was not like Sephiroth, but if any language-wielding race she ran into were just replays of Amyntas, Gaia, and the others? Maybe the whole thing did need a hard reboot.

Tifa reconsidered Sephiroth's plans for herself. He was gathering power to enter the Promised Land and possess it—become it, as he had with so many planets. If successful, he'd become the source of everything, and his ascension would be complete. The source of all things, with all its knowledge; interminable.

What if…what if she could enter it, and coax it to start over on its own instead? That, she believed, would eliminate everything. Every living planet, every space-faring soul, including Sephiroth and herself, would be recalled to its origin. The conscious Promised Land only needed beat him to the punch, and the rightful cycle of life would begin anew.

She would finally perish. Her past agony, humanity's mistakes, all the gross machinations that had made Sephiroth, and those that had caused him to flip, would be erased. Forgotten forever. Even he would finally rest with no chance of return.

Drawing nearer to the replicated town, Tifa grew confident that this was the way. Probably the only way left to them. Any hope of saving the universe as it existed was gone—they needed to focus on preserving its heart.

"Tifa!" Zack exclaimed when she slipped in through Seventh Heaven's front door. "You're…in here. With us."

Cloud, Yuffie, and Genesis gathered with him to meet her. Aerith remained seated at a window seat in the back, arms crossed and tight-lipped, averting her eyes.

"What happened out there?" Cloud asked.

"Yeah, it went completely pitch black! We couldn't see or hear anything. I didn't think it was possible to stub my toes anymore, but I did," Yuffie nervously, playfully elaborated.

"And it's changed. Dramatically," Genesis pointedly supplied the obvious.

"Tell us what you did, Tifa," Aerith spoke at last. There was a cold, sharp edge to her voice she'd rarely employed in life. "Tell us how…you took Sephiroth's word for everything and went along with whatever he told you to do."

"Aerith?" Zack protested, but Tifa waved him off.

She approached the back corner, stopping several feet shy of her friend. "She's right. Aerith, you're right. Because of me, there are no more humans. I took them…but please try to understand, if I hadn't, it would have been him! I didn't know what else to do…"

Aerith stood and shook her head, rejecting her. "You know, while everyone else was blind, I saw everything. Because you're the planet now, Tifa. You. The Cetra listen to the planet, remember? We speak to the planet…" She paced closer until she stood inches from her face, staring her down. "But it's really funny…I don't have anything left to say to her."

Yuffie, Cloud, and Zack visibly winced. Genesis leaned back against a post with crossed legs and one brow raised.

Aerith brushed past Tifa and strode out of the bar, slamming the door behind her.

"What happened," Cloud repeated, a gravelly tremor in his tone.

So she filled them in. About what Sephiroth had revealed to her, and about why she'd come to believe there was no other recourse. Tifa apologized and groveled for what she'd done, all the while defending it as something for which she still couldn't conceive of another solution. She was careful to leave off the parts about the drunken ecstasy that had overcome her around Sephiroth because of Gaia's other half, or how she'd willingly merged with part of his soul.

"…That does sound worse than Shinra," Yuffie sympathized, but couldn't look her in the eye. "All of those people…"

"I'm still not clear on something," Zack said. "You really think he'd let you grab those worlds out from under him just like that if they were important to his mission?"

Tifa hesitated. Zack had pinpointed the weakest point of her reasoning: Up until it was much too late, she'd convinced herself that humanity was the end-all, be-all of disrupting Sephiroth's goals—the very key to keeping him from the Promised Land. She'd let herself believe that once there wasn't anyone who looked like old friends and family, if he'd been the one to claim them, that was the end. Realistically, she'd been holding onto the one last whimpering prayer she'd held out for returning to anything close to a normal life. Deep down, that was the loss that she'd been counting as total defeat.

But the death of humanity was nothing but the death of humanity. The rest of the stars and the galaxies remained, blissfully unaware of the forces that hunted them.

Ironically, what Sephiroth's vision had taught her when he'd shown her all those other species should have been enough to dispel the idea that humans were necessary. But in the end, they'd had proven too predatory anyway, so what difference did it make? Stopping humanity and stopping Sephiroth—getting so unbearably close to him and who he was and why he was—were all in the same vein.

It was all about saving life either way. That goal had never changed.

Anxious, she clasped her hands together. "I just…I can't say it's not right anymore. Not entirely. Maybe everything does need to start over."

Yuffie's eyes nearly bulged out of her head. "What!"

Cloud's mouth hung slightly ajar, and a near-gagging sound escaped from the back of his throat before he could choke up a reply, "Tifa…What does that mean for you? What about the rest of us?"

Genesis let out a cynical chuckle as he pushed off from his support beam. "Though she is you, something of my pact with the Goddess remains. I too have seen the truth: It's plain that Sephiroth wants you at his side. You're inconsequential to his grand design, yet he can hardly grant you an inch to breathe when he draws near." Passing her to join Cloud, glaring down his nose at her, he finished, "How many times he might have killed you; instead he whispers lurid promises in your ear like a would-be lover. He's seducing you with your own sorrow…and it's working."

Tifa's face flushed hot. Vivid, accusatory memories of being cradled in a cocoon of wings and arms fueled her humiliation. The way Sephiroth had held her after she'd borne witness to humanity's crimes; the way she'd clung to him and called for him while pretending she wasn't. And it had been obvious—crystal clear—that it was exactly what he desired of her.

She'd done it because, at least in those moments, she wanted the same.

"I'm not giving in to anything," she insisted.

Cloud scowled. "Tifa," he started, but then, "I don't know. I'd say you're not yourself right now, but with everything that's happened…I can't say…"

"But she is herself," Genesis countered. "She is who she's always been, if not what. Secretive, uncertain, and desperate for control—for everyone's good, I'm sure. You know this more than anyone, Cloud. Remind me: How long did she let you believe in a false past?"

"That was different," Cloud retorted.

"I fail to see it," Genesis shot back.

"You can't be serious about this!" Yuffie cried. "I mean, think of how big the universe is, and you've only met humans and the Amyntasi. You can't let everything go because you're afraid they're all bad."

"If it's all you're looking for, that's all you'll find," Zack added.

Genesis continued, "Yes, there is an inevitable perversion in every thinking race; mayhap in every living creature, but that is not all. Should you choose to follow Sephiroth or his path, you will be judging that it's all that matters."

Tifa turned her back to everyone, overwhelmed, and the onslaught of chatter stopped. Atrocious honesty poured out of her; she couldn't stop herself—"Anything that's good goes away. It dies. It fails. I'm tired of thinking about everything I can't have," she admitted. "I'm selfish…always have been, I think. I don't…want to watch it anymore. None of this should have been my problem. I hate all of it." She cast a significant look over her shoulder. "And no matter who's been there, no matter what they've meant…I think I've really always been alone."

Before her friends could react, her confession forced her back to consciousness as though from a nightmare.

Friends. The very word now left a terrible lump in her throat.

Where had all that come from? Was it how she truly felt? It was, she decided. Of course she wanted to be there for anyone who needed her. She wanted to be useful, and there was nothing insincere in her love or care for Cloud and the others. She'd never had any doubts there, and had rested assured, at least until now, they'd reciprocated. But…except for a short period just before Cloud had died, she'd still felt cut off. There was an invisible barrier she couldn't move past. The fragility of things, stacked upon years of unforgiving regret, made it all too difficult to embrace.

And it was Sephiroth, years ago in Nibelheim who'd broken her to be that way, and regardless of how many times she'd pulled herself together, she'd kept breaking along those same, reliable cracks.

Aerith, she was sure, hated her by now, and she deserved it. She'd betrayed her more than anyone. Yuffie was reeling, not wanting to believe the worst of her. The depth of her duplicity was beginning to occur to Cloud, but he was doing his best to think she was just having a hard time. Considering how Sephiroth had used him in the past, she expected no less.

But she knew what she was doing. No one was controlling her.

Zack and Genesis were less affected, but they'd never really known her back on Gaia. It was a little harder for them to feel like she'd stabbed them in the back—they only knew her because the end of the world had dropped them in her head.

Around her, space was space, dark and heavy, and in her local vicinity, still. Gone was the old materia shell she'd once inhabited in the shape of Gaia's old Omega. A private, transparent energy shield surrounded her in its place, deflecting any debris careening past.

While she'd been inside herself, she'd roamed away from humanity's wreckage. Where, she didn't know, and for now, didn't care. When she was up to it, she'd consult the fields of knowledge she'd assimilated for some idea of where to go next.

One last time, she thought.

For her friends' sake, she'd make one final effort before moving on to her last resort. She'd find one more species, a well-developed civilization that looked nothing like humanity. In a way, it was back to square one with her original idea: Find people out there strong and organized enough to take down Sephiroth. Unfortunately, that would naturally lead her astray of any pacifistic types she probably needed to witness for her own sanity, if they even existed. But her absence would also protect them.

Her helpers didn't have to be perfect—just relatively decent. A people who didn't hand over the reins of power to their worst elements when they were afraid, for starters. There would always be a few heartless souls, but most important was that those ones didn't speak for everyone so fluently. No more Shinras. No more Mako reactors. No more genocides. Maybe a race who'd fought a few rough interstellar wars because they were attacked first, and had grown advanced along the way, but who'd learned to cherish life all the more through the loss.

Was that really so much to ask?

Tifa cried, because she knew how unlikely it was to find any group that fit such a specific bill. Asking anyone for sustained goodness over the long haul, even well short of utopia, was just not possible. Even if she found someone who should be acceptable, she was so alone and eaten up with anger that she knew she was bound to blow every slight out of proportion. She knew she couldn't be trusted to be a fair judge. She didn't want to be a judge at all, but she had to. She owed it to Cloud, Aerith, Yuffie, and everyone else she'd ever failed to give it at least one last hopeless go.

And then, when it all came crumbling down around her again, without another word to anyone, she'd fly away to the Promised Land. The time for debating would be over. She could enter now; she had the life and power of more than one Omega at her disposal to grant her passage. But her last efforts had to be earnest and honest. No matter how sure she was of the outcome, she'd do whatever she could for her friends. Anything less would only solidify that she'd truly turned on them.

The deep ache that was neither her nor hers stirred at her despairing thoughts. That man, that entity who'd so thoroughly earned her hatred—she was starting to wonder if there might be some value in speaking with him after all. No one understood betrayal quite like he did. No one had seen more of the universe, and though he'd likely try to mislead her, she still might be able to extrapolate more evidence of who and what was out there, and what it was all really worth.

No, she was not looking for his sympathy, and she was not relating to his past suffering, for all that it now resembled hers. This was still war between them, and this was another way to use him against himself. If he'd grown fond of her in the course of delivering his torments, that was none of her concern. His feelings were meaningless to her, she persisted.

The lead in the pit of her stomach weighed down heavier, and she continued weeping.

She did want someone who could understand; someone who would tell her that was she was doing was right. Someone her mental wall couldn't block out.

Just not him. Not Sephiroth, who'd done nothing but rob her of anyone or anything of consequence to her; who'd poked holes in her psyche and had manipulated her into seeing the universe through eyes too much like his own. (And now that she'd experienced that view, she strongly suspected there was no returning from it. It demanded to be true, in one form or another. It was already slowly dragging her down.)

Wracked with violent sobs, Tifa glanced aside, startled when she felt a cold hand squeeze her arm.

No one was there.