"It can't be you, it can't be you!!" she hollered, doubling over on her knees in that spot, her hands over her head, fingers threading through the thick dark hair. "Not Yuffie, Oh Ifrit, not Yuffie..." she moaned.

Vincent just stood silent, watching her blankly. Such a reaction was expected, certainly, but what was he supposed to do about it? Try to explain himself? Impossible, she would never understand. He would just have to leave... before he did the same to her. He was still trying to get his mind around the concept that Yuffie, the youngest, liveliest member of their old party was still and dead at his feet at his fault. He was unused to the lucidity when he killed, and would always just accept the recent death as an indisputable fact that came sure as the sunrise he woke to. But something about Yuffie's spirit seemed to want to cling to life, at least in his mind. He figured it was in her nature... to be contradictory and stubborn.

In fact, there was a good chance that Tifa would kill him before he could get out the door. If he could help it, he wouldn't fight. He wanted to die, in a way... anything was better than this. Yet he knew somewhere in the back of his mind that it wouldn't happen that way. Chaos would not let it. He was doomed to live, and that was his curse. The women he killed along the way were just tally marks under his list of sins and nothing more.

"Why did it have to be you, Vincent?" the woman looked up again, her well-formed, olive-colored face now red and puffy, stray hairs sticking to tearstained cheeks. "Why is it you?"

"Tifa..." he said, voice a deep, slithering monster, corrupting with unreal softness as it came from his mouth. It made her shiver and lurch forward again, hands over her eyes. She didn't want to see it... she didn't want to see that black oily beast he'd become.

The vision was back. Probably due to trauma, probably, she thought. She saw, where Vincent stood, a slim and tall demonic figure, charcoal-colored, burned by the fire of Yuffie's love. She could see it, in thin orangey lines, still coursing through his veins. The red eyes stared unblinkingly out, locked on her, and the wings filled the room with their overwhelming darkness. In it, she could see reflected her own light, all alone and flickering. She was, her color was, white, with a soft yellowish tinge, and the demon licked its lips when he saw it.

She shuddered and lay her head against the wall. Her ribs ached from the sharp sobs she took, a knife cutting into her gut with every breath. Her neck was sore, her face stung all over from the salt, and her hands were shaking so violently, she wouldn't have been able to even hold a drinking glass to calm it, let alone get up right now, go over to the bar, and prepare for herself the alcohol. She just pressed herself up against the wall and wept.

Vincent came closer. He felt the urge already boiling deep in his belly, and it made him nauseous. He really did have to get out of here. His mind was reeling. He could feel chunks of it breaking off and floating away. He was losing himself in his insatiable, inhuman desire, and there was nothing he could do. He'd told himself before it was only necessary, but the necessity had become not just that, but a lust as well. Yuffie's love was strong and true, but fleeting... he could tell by its taste, by the quality of its burn within him, searing him white-hot from the inside. He'd had this kind before, it wouldn't last long. He had to get out of here.

But not without redeeming himself in the eyes of Tifa first. But wait, hadn't he only just said that was impossible? Why would he want to anyway? Looking down at the distraught woman, he knew only one thing: the single, solid, unchangeable fact in his spinning and shifting world was that Tifa was his friend... and he at least owed her an explanation.

"Tifa..." he said again, even deeper, but this time more genuine and demanding. He needed her attention.

With a flinch, as if struck, she looked up and managed to stifle a whimper as he came nearer.

The gunman squatted beside her, and lay a consoling hand on her shoulder, which she surprisingly let stay. The blood on his claw was staining her shirt, but she didn't care... something told her it wouldn't matter for long anyway.

A flash again, though of blinding white and that same orange. Just outlines and warmth, and she could still somehow tell: he was not trying to hurt her. He would not try. He only wanted the best.

When things returned, she took a real close look at Vincent's face. She saw true remorse there, hidden behind the scattered and broken red irises of his eyes. They were fractured into too many small pieces to be easily put together again, and the wall no longer protected the surface. In the gold-orange lines that were tearing their way through that soft muscle, she could easily glimpse the inner workings of his soul.

Briefly, Tifa wondered if she was insane, or if it was just Vincent. She thought for sure it was her... between semi-prophetic hallucinations and all the stress she'd been under lately, she must have finally cracked. But then... perhaps it was both of them. Vincent, though he seemed it outwardly, had never been the most stable person among the party. Sure, she commended him on his strong will and fortitude any day, but a human could only survive as themselves for so long with four other personalities overshadowing their own in their head all the time. A life of being tormented by demons couldn't be healthy for one's mental state.

So perhaps it was just Vincent. As much as she didn't want to believe it, as she wanted to resign the visions to PTSD, or alcoholism, or insomnia, or stress or something, she could not. Something deep down in her heart was telling her that what she was seeing was the truth. The pure, and bitter truth.

And she didn't want it. Was Vincent really a demon? As in, Vincent, not the things within him. Before the two had been separate and distinct, but now they had merged into one... what could it be? What could have happened? Had it been... had his final sentence come with the slaying of his old friend? She looked over to the girl, but nothing of her remained but a blackened skeleton, and she had to look away.

Meeting Vincent's eyes, she knew. Yuffie's death had been the key turning in the lock. Now he was caged, chained into his fate. His destiny was laid out before him, and he was dragging the weight of guilt, sorrow, and insanity all along the road with him.

"Tifa, please allow me to..." he started, though he choked, his voice catching strangely when Tifa looked at him. Her eyes were perfectly placid and calm. Her crying had stopped, breathing had evened. There was a long silence before she spoke, her voice unwavering:

"Go on, Vincent." she said, "Perhaps we should... get somewhere less..." she cast a stray look over his shoulder to Yuffie.

He winced, and nodded, standing up. He didn't bother to offer her a hand up, because she'd already stood and started swaying off toward the livingroom. Vincent remained in his place, stricken silent and still for a moment as he watched her. He thought she was beautiful then, turned away from him, her long hair wafting along as she went, the blood running down her right shoulder and bare arm. Yuffie's blood that he had put there, his mark on her.

It wasn't long before they were both seated on the couch. Tifa's posture was straight and erect, her hands folded in her lap and she stared out across the room, like a militaryman at attention. Vincent, on the other hand, lounged on the other side of the sofa. He'd cleaned the blood off his claw, and it lay across the backrest, tapping it gently.

"It's Chaos." he said to her, "He needs to be suppressed."

"And tearing hearts out does that?"

He winced at her bitter comment, piercing like an arrow through his heart, if he still had one. He figured he didn't... whatever weight sat in his chest was borrowed, not his own, shriveled, and by now half-dead, choking on foreign blood. "It does... sometimes..." he said warily. How to explain such an alien concept? "It's a fact that the only part of a human that survives their death in a worldly manner is love." he began... "It's how Lucrecia remained, crystallized in her cave, waiting for me. It's why Aeris watches over us all still. That kind of power is... immeasurable when harnessed. You know the protomateria, no, Tifa?" he asked, quirking his head to one side.

She nodded slowly, still not tearing her eyes away from the opposite wall, and he sighed.

"Lucrecia's original manifestation of her affections." he said darkly, touching a human hand to his chest, and stroking it lightly over the fabric of the shirt. "I came back to her after Omega was defeated because Chaos was trying to exploit his new free reign. No longer a subordinate to a greater lifeform, he had only me to break through to get to the world. I... couldn't let that..." his words became blockier, harder to say, and the woman nodded again.

She understood. It was what she always did, the only thing she could do for any of her friends was understand. Cloud, Aeris, Yuffie, now Vincent, even, had all poured their hearts out into Tifa's, and she thought maybe that the four frameworks of secrets preserved within her were what was filling her to the bursting point after all.

"I came back to her, and drained the last of her energy away." Vincent continued, soft. "Then I had to find more, somehow." a hand raised up, lay on his forehead, and tugged at the front of his hair as if trying to rip it out. "So I came here, to Edge. I had hoped... to find someone else, other than Lucrecia. I had hoped to move on." as he came to a broken halt in his sentence, his entire body fell... hand dropped out of his hair, but the fingers got stuck and tangled and so his arm just hung there, suspended in front of his face. His shoulders bent, the middle of his back sagged, and he looked so... old. Of course, by now Vincent was pushing seventy, though he didn't seem it on the outside. Tifa had never known anything like this, even if it only lasted for a moment, the once proud and strong man became something this frail and lost.

"Since then it's been back and forth... girl to girl... I'm not proud of what I did." he looked up, the desperation in his eyes so bright and blinding Tifa had to look away because it hurt. He was so alone... and so wanting not to be. "I... stayed away from Avalanche, from you because..." he at last turned his terrible eyes away down the hall where they'd come from. Tifa too moved her gaze to look at it. Something there was suppressed and silent, a cloud of dingy grey hanging like a curtain over the defiled spot, hiding it from the eyes of the world. She wondered if Vincent could see it too.

"Why did you have to kill them?" she demanded. Vincent looked down.

"Because staying with me saps their power dry... their very life force. Did you not notice how Yuffie had been... weakening as of late?" he looked up with sad eyes.

Tifa's brow creased, "...I did." she consented, folding her arms and looking down at the ground, "...but why is that a reason to kill her?" her fire of interest was not much more than a fading spark now. She was weary... so weary... of loss, and love, and confusion and the whole futility of it. Every time any member of their group seemed to at last find peace, something always came along and upset it all again.

"It was out of mercy, Tifa." he said harshly, "Would you rather she, or any of the others wither away slowly, die in agony mere husks of what they were before? I may be far gone, but a part of me is still human." he spat, pain wracking every syllable of speech "I could not simply sit by and watch that."

"I... I know..." the woman answered, holding her stomach like she would be sick, and bending over forward. "But... the hearts..."

"To sustain me." he finished off. "Every human's heart is an energy source... and just like any energy on this earth, it solidifies into a jewel very similar to my protomateria... Lucrecia's heart. They contain all of what is left for their owners to give, and I had to take them to tide me over. To make sure Chaos would not have been let out before I could find... another adequate... supplier."

Tifa pressed her lips together in disgust, like a fussy child trying to resist eating some unwanted food. "Vincent..." she whimpered sympathetically, reaching a hand out to touch him, but he recoiled away, and her arm dropped back to her side. Oh, she wanted to comfort him, to be there for him, to end it for him, to make sure that everything was allright and that Vincent, poor, beloved Vincent would finally find some long-deserved rest from his cruel fate.

But how could she do that? Yuffie's death had... sealed the broken man she used to know away underneath the terrible darkness she'd seen before. How could she reach him now? How could she prove to him he still had a heart beneath it all? How could she unlock the chains that held it in?

Lockheart... it came in two beats, paired together, and faded away in the silence after. Her answer, straight from the open air, but she didn't question it. Because it was her.

She opened her eyes, wide and truth-seeing, but today she saw nothing. Nothing but... plain old Vincent sitting there before her.

Could she salvage his crumbling heart by opening up hers?

Because she saw no heart in that demon in the door. As much as she wanted to deny it, Vincent didn't have one left. He had half, perhaps, a while ago... the other piece broken off by carelessness and Lucrecia, and Yuffie had half once, her missing piece was buried with Reno.

And she saw when, weeks ago, the two had lain in eachother's arms and put their heart-halves together, in love, in one. That whole had gone to the girl, for a time. Harbored and nurtured, and she saw, just now, as Vincent recollected it. Saw the way he held it up, Yuffie's very soul, and squeezed it dry like a piece of fruit, sucking up the juice that came out, taking it in. And the others he had squandered were the same, to merely fill his veins, and then they were gone. It seemed a foolish, roundabout way to achieve his needed task, but she didn't know why she could see that now... how this made sense to her.

"What you need, Vincent..." she realized her voice was sounding out, looking up with a sad smile, and laying a hand softly on her chest. "...is not the energy from the source, but the source itself. One that is fresh, and full, not strained by overuse. Harvested live, not from a body that has already begun to wilt. If you reap the living rose from the dead branch, it will not last a day... but if the flower is plucked from a thriving bush, it will keep."

He did not like the smile on her lips. He shuddered at the hopeless but decided look in her half-lidded eyes. He didn't know what it was, but he felt much more comfortable with Tifa turned away, the fire of anger kindled in her heart, rather than with this soft glow of compassion... and pity.

And then she did the unthinkable. Tilting her head back with a sigh, shaking her hair loose, delicious from its ponytail, pink fingernails dug in to the white skin just over her heart...

"No, Tifa, don't!!" he lunged, but it was already far too late.

With a squish, and a gentle trickle of blood down her arm, Tifa's hand sunk into her chest, and closed around something deep inside. She gasped, and through her own fighter's strength, slid her hand back out, revealing its treasured prize...

Clasped between darkened bloody fingertips was a gleaming yellow orb, and its light in the small room was a rival to the sun. A shuddering, gasping, cut-off breath wracked Tifa's trembling frame, and she held out the shining gem to him, while weakly falling back.

"Tifa! Tifaa!!" he bent over her, a hand on either side of her face, holding it up. "No, no, no... you can't! Why? How could you?!"

She merely smiled... and from the cracks at the corners of her mouth spilled a little bit of blood, dark and thick. Her red-stained lips inaudibly choked out the words "I love you", and he became aware of a pressure on his chest...

Looking down, he saw her arm, muscles flexed, determinedly forcing the jewel into him. The pain was unimaginable, like nothing he'd ever felt before, and he screamed... a horrible, twisted yell, his demon clawing hungrily from the inside out, reaching to envelop the object and the light. He felt it like a cold lump of steel lodged into him, like a bullet the size of the woman's hand.

Beneath the gunman, Tifa lay, her strength dwindling and her arm limply falling down. Her eyes shut, and Vincent's breath came quick. He looked down, and the body of the woman beneath him was pale and still, and her flesh was cold.

xxx

Author's Ending Note Thingy: It's long, it took me three days to write, and damnit, I was having SO much trouble at the end. It's supposed to be dramatic, I didn't want it to fizzle out, but I was having so much trouble with descriptions. Anyway... I hope the end is up to par with the rest of the chapter/story, please review.

P.S. there is an epilogue coming, and a sequel! But the sequel will take time.