#sephtifa

It had grown silent, and suddenly dark. Holy's glaring light, the Lifestream's brilliant green, sweeping flow, and even Meteor's fiery approach had dulled somehow. "Cloud?" she called. "Barret? Nanaki?"

No one answered.

The anxious chill she'd felt turned frigid. Her regrets and misgivings for the future found themselves mercilessly sidetracked. Rising to her knees, Tifa grasped the edge of the window she'd been gazing out. A dark, liquid haze had overtaken the combating magical forces, veiling their terrible lightshow with something even more ominous.

"Everyone…" a word pounded in her head, a command from nowhere.

"Yuffie? Cid?" she yelled this time.

"…everything…all finished…" Another utterance pulsed through her whole body.

Tifa shuddered. No, that was impossible. "It can't…Vincent? Cait?"

And then, she booked. She ran out of the bridge, scrambled through the machinery room. She threw open the operation room to find it just as vacant. Even the single gold chocobo they'd carted along (and terrorized when the Highwind came crashing into the crater) in the small, onboard stable was missing.

That left only the deck. In slower, but still-urgent strides, Tifa approached the door. They had to be out there, trying to get a better look at what was going on. Maybe she'd gotten a little too lost in her thoughts to notice. It would have been nice if someone had told her, but she couldn't really blame anyone. They had to be just as confused.

Sliding it to one side, her shoulders sagged. It too was empty. The ship was miraculously still aloft, but she was the only one left aboard.

Time had seemingly stopped dead in its tracks. Chains of Lifestream stood on end from their fissures, unmoving like plastic seaweed in a fish tank. Holy--whatever wasn't covered in the black mist--appeared as a sheet of crystal suspended in the nighttime sky, while Meteor was a flaming moon with a suspiciously close orbit.

Tifa stepped up to the guardrail, planted her hands on the bar, and lowered her head in defeat. It…it was always going to come to this, wasn't it? After the night she and Cloud had shared together under the Highwind, waiting for everyone to return to them--or not--with their own reasons to fight for the planet, something else had taken hold in her. An uneasiness she wasn't familiar with, or the personification of that unease. Whatever it was, it felt like something with its own ideas; not really a part of herself. It hadn't taken her long to figure out that what Shinra's scientists had put in him that had allowed Sephiroth to control him was now in her as well. She'd hidden it so well from Cloud, Barret, and the others, though. She'd told herself it didn't matter. Her mind simply needed to remain strong enough--that was the trick, according to Cloud--to go fight Sephiroth and defeat him, or die trying. Once that was over, the whole thing would be a moot point.

And she had held on so well too, down through the crater's treacherous paths, and even as they'd fought Sephiroth's monstrous and self-aggrandized forms. Her will had remained her own.

But Sephiroth had been watching her, specifically, the whole time. She could feel him, smug and accusatory of her silence, playing around the edges of her mind, reminding her that he knew his foot was in her door, and that he was there to stay. That she'd serve her purpose--his purpose--yet. When the last wisps of spirit energy that had been him had dispersed, Tifa truly believed she was off the hook. Cloud had won his fight, physically and mentally, against the man, and it would be good enough for her as well. He was fighting for both of them anyway, right?

She felt foolish: Cloud was free; she was not. In retrospect, she'd hidden behind him, or her need to protect him the whole time, too afraid that her new predicament might drag him back down. There was no way she could bring herself to unload when he'd only just pieced himself back together.

And now?

"Now it ends with you, Tifa," Sephiroth intoned triumphantly, materializing from the twisted, smoky fingers of dark matter that had started to descend from the blackened sky overhead.

She'd played her part, acting as an antenna for what should have been a dead man's will; becoming a convenient last-minute kill-switch for if his plans went awry. How much of her desperation had been her own? How much of it was his influence? Her reasons were her own, at least. She had to take credit for that. Credit that, at the last minute, even surrounded by friends in aftermath of a hard-won victory and far too much sacrifice, she'd managed to succumb to similar conclusions about the world that Sephiroth had--some of the same ones that had guided his twisted crusade for godhood.

What did that say about her? Was it really just the Jenova cells, or had her own traitorous mind made her so useful to Sephiroth as well?

"So it does," she bit out and looked away. Away from him, and up at his Meteor through stinging eyes, which hung obscene and garish over Midgar, slowly pressing fractures into the frozen Holy spell. Tifa wondered if he'd hurry it along now that he had her cornered, or if he'd simply stand here and watch it come down like a personal sunset. "What did you do with my friends?"

"I am them. They are me."

A bitter hiccup of a laugh escaped Tifa's throat. "You're not half of one of them."

"If that is how you wish to delude your last moments, I will not prevent you."

"…Then why am I still here?"

Sephiroth smirked and waved one hand slightly, directing the black energy to weave through Holy's cracks, causing them to widen and spread. A sound like a growling behemoth miles away filled the air as Meteor resumed its now barely-impeded descent.