raisedbymoogles (raisedbymoogles) wrote in areyougame, @ 2008-10-06 10:55:00 |
|
|||
Current mood: | cranky |
Entry tags: | *final fantasy vii, *kingdom hearts, author: raisedbymoogles |
In The River of Time and Darkness (Final Fantasy 7, Sephiroth, Cloud and Tifa)
Title: In The River of Time and Darkness
Author/Artist: raisedbymoogles
Rating: G
Warnings: none.
Word count: 1785
Prompt: Kingdom Hearts, Sephiroth, Cloud, and Tifa: Trust/acceptance - If he's your darkness, then that also means that you're his light.
Summary: A strange encounter with Sephiroth leads Tifa to a new insight.
A/N: No porn, sorry.
Tifa learned a long time ago that to find Cloud, one simply followed Sephiroth. The vengeful blond would follow his darkness, one way or the other, and Sephiroth would occasionally (adhering to an obscure timetable of his own design that probably boiled down to "when he felt like it") pause in one spot long enough to let Cloud catch up. Then Tifa would get to see him, cheer him on or even help fight Sephiroth when he let her, patch him up afterwards and try to engage him in conversation before he went haring off again.
"Honest to Holy," Tifa said to Sephiroth once, "I am this close to duct-taping the man to a wall or something, so he'll stick around for more than two minutes." Sephiroth gave her a brief, commiserating smile, which was actually quite generous of him considering she was trying to kick him in the face. He gave her another smile as he disappeared into a dark portal.
Their encounters were like that: weirdly cordial and all too brief.
Tifa couldn't use dark portals - though people whispered that the power of darkness was easy to get for yourself, if you didn't mind risking your heart - but she could get a sense of where they led, if she got close enough to look through before they closed. ("Princess of Heart," Aeris teased her, which made Tifa roll her eyes because Aeris was the Princess out of all the survivors of their world if anybody was.) Her last glimpse guided her to Disney Castle itself, where a bit of a misunderstanding sent her fleeing into the underbowels of the castle where she found a door and slipped through before she noticed that its edges were laced with dark fire.
There seemed to be no color in this world, and humes were clearly a minority, but the few stares she got didn't bother Tifa any. Of more import was the faint clamor she could hear coming from the direction of - so a friendly sign told her - the river. Ah, yes, she thought with a wry toss of her hair. To find Cloud, follow Sephiroth. To find Sephiroth, follow the screaming.
Sephiroth looked so natural in this monochrome world that it was a few moments before Tifa realized there was anything wrong with him. He flew over the silver river in increasingly ragged circles, dipping and swerving and occasionally divebombing the water only to pull up before a single feather got wet, much to the delight of the crowd.
Heart in her throat, Tifa pushed through the crowd to the bank of the river. She thought she recognized the pattern of his flight from watching him fight with Cloud, but - there was something wrong. An erraticness to the way he flew, his frozen silence save for the flutter of his wings against his cloak. The river itself, Tifa wondered. Why is he attacking the river? Sephiroth was mad, it was true, but had always been a slow-burning insanity, not this break from reality. Heart in her throat, Tifa waded out into the river until the current splashed around her knees. It was warmer than she expected, and - she blinked - a pool of shifting colors was spreading out in front of her, just under Sephiroth's circling fraction.
A flood of Heartless - that Tifa knew, had seen for herself. They'd come from nowhere, shortly after Sephiroth came to Nibelheim. That was the beginning of the nightmare. Darkness - spilling forth from Mount Nibel to overtake the planet in a matter of days. And at the center, a silver figure clutching gold as the darkness ate him alive from within-
Tifa stumbled, the current and the visions overcoming her at last, and fell to her hands and knees as the water crashed over her back - hot and cold and dark and alone and -
Something hit her from the side, hitching her straight up out of the water. She regained her balance in midair, spun and landed on her feet at the river bank out of the water's reach. Still shedding droplets of the Timeless River, she leapt back as Sephiroth dove in to attack again, his sword driving a furrow where she'd been.
"Did you enjoy the show?" the man asked, and though his voice was cool and mocking as it always was, there was a broken laugh behind the words that chilled Tifa's spine.
"Sephiroth," Tifa said slowly. "How did you become Cloud's darkness?"
For a moment Sephiroth actually faltered, wings giving a jerky thrash like a dove caught in the claws of a hawk. Then he attacked again, and Tifa had to jump to avoid his sword. She leapt again as he drove in, never still, never letting her get her bearings. Strange, Tifa realized, in the part of herself that kept itself back from the deadly dance. He's never actually tried to kill me before.
He was trying now. Desperate, Tifa led him back toward the river, hoping that the waters would have the same effect on him they'd had before, but the man had never been one to be easily distracted even before he went mad. He pushed her out onto the dock, lined with small boats that rocked in the deceptively-smooth current, and Tifa retreated back and back until the only place left to go was a rickety dinghy that creaked as she stepped onto it. Sephiroth followed, on foot though his wings strained against the wind, and Tifa ducked his swing and slammed shoulder-first into his knees, hoping to unbalance him. With that ridiculously long sword of his, if you could manage it it was best to get in close. Tifa rarely managed it.
Sephiroth shouted in astonishment, swept his wings to keep his balance - and the whole dinghy pitched over, dumping them both unceremoniously into the river.
Instantly Tifa was choking on darkness, blind, tumbling, losing herself in the visions of the Timeless River. Desperate, she flung her hands out into the black, toward the tiniest impression of gold in front of her, and touched supple leather. Grimacing, she clasped her catch to her.
When the natives pulled them out, Tifa was hanging onto Sephiroth tighter than her own consciousness, and they had to pry her off so they could pump the water out of her lungs. Sephiroth, they said, was harder: curled in on himself, stiff and still, they had thought he was dead until he sent two of them flying with a snap of his wing. Tifa herself only opened her eyes to a scatter of feathers as Sephiroth ripped open a portal and fled.
*
"Cloud, how did Sephiroth become your darkness?"
Having lost Sephiroth's trail, Tifa had returned to Radiant Garden to recover and start again. While Aeris still had her on enforced bed rest, Sephiroth returned to the tower he'd claimed as his own, and like clockwork Cloud had reappeared too.
"I don't remember," Cloud said tensely. His single leathery wing contracted, folding in on itself as if meaning to hide. Tifa shook her head and placed a hand on his back, not quite touching the wing but - there, close and warm, if he wanted her to be.
"I've been thinking a lot lately," she confessed, "and I'm wondering if he isn't as bound to you as you are to him."
Cloud jerked, wing flapping once, though he didn't turn to look at her. "What do you mean?"
"Well - if he's your darkness, doesn't that mean you're his light?"
*
She left Cloud alone after that, knowing he'd need time to work that through on his own. Sometimes she resented him not letting her in - she was working as hard as he was, harder if one considered she was never augmented - but in the end, she was involved in this because she'd chosen to be. Cloud had never had a choice. Neither, she was beginning to think, had Sephiroth.
She spent her time on the rooftops, watching Sephiroth's tower from a distance. She told herself that it was so that the minute he emerged, she'd know, but there was a strange sense of expectation in the air that she didn't know what to make of. She kept her vigil, constant and lonely, eyes riveted on the twisted tower as though she could see even the barest flicker of a feather.
When it was Cloud who broke the stillness between the three of them, it came as a complete surprise.
Tifa caught up with him halfway to the Bastion, red-faced from running. "You're going to face him," she declared, arms akimbo, she and her shadow taking up the whole walkway. "And you were going without me, you jerk."
"I can't involve you," Cloud said, face turned into his scarf. "It's too dang-"
"Finish that thought," Tifa interrupted, "and I swear to Odin I will kick your ass."
Cloud seemed to weigh the pros and cons of defying Tifa's righteous wrath. Finally he shrugged. "I'd rather face Sephiroth with my manhood intact." That made Tifa laugh, and even Cloud managed a half-hidden smile as he let her chase him down the road.
*
Sephiroth was waiting for them at his balcony, spreading his wings for Cloud, tightening them closer when Tifa appeared behind him. "Wait," she called when the dark General made to disappear into his tower again. "Sephiroth."
Shoulder turned to her, Sephiroth paused, waiting for her to speak. With a touch to Cloud's arm, she stepped forward.
"You're searching too, aren't you?" Tifa asked, a little wistful. "Searching for your light. Just like Cloud. ...Just like me."
"Whatever light I may have had," Sephiroth answered, tilting his chin up, "was lost long ago along with my heart."
"You didn't lose it," Tifa smiled. "You did something clever. You gave it away. Then the Darkness couldn't take it no matter what it did to you."
She held out her hand, and slowly Sephiroth turned back to her, eyes slitted half-closed as if against sudden sunlight. Perhaps it was the glow of light off Cloud's hair as he moved to stand by Tifa's side, one hand on her shoulder. "I'll make you a deal," he called out. "I'll embrace my darkness if you embrace your light."
He wouldn't come down to them even then, shifting against the stone wall like a nervous hawk, but he allowed them to climb the tower and come to him, and even allowed Cloud to touch his hand. It was just the barest brush of fingers, the briefest shining contact, before Sephiroth fled them again, leaving his track of feathers and dark fire.
It was enough, for now.