It was so easy.

That was what stuck with Tifa afterwards, when she stepped out of the mansion into the grey Nibelheim afternoon, blinking after days in the dark basement. Two steps behind a dull-eyed Sephiroth. It had been so easy.

Misuse of Time Materia, pushing past a painfully young Zack to get into the mansion, then just talking. Days of it. She answered every question Sephiroth could think of, about himself, his mother, his father, Jenova, Shinra. She gave him nothing but the uncomfortable and unsatisfying truth.

"Why should I believe you?" he asked, bags under his eyes and his skin pale from the days underground.

"I will never lie to you," she replied. "I promise you that." She didn't have the energy for soothing untruths anymore.

That wasn't enough for him, so she woke up Vincent and he corroborated.

Of course, Sephiroth wanted to know who she was too and how she could possibly know these things. Why did she look so much like the mountain guide, why was she there telling all these things to him? What did she want? She told him that too.

She had expected to find some kind of healing in looking Sephiroth in the eye, two days before he would have burned Nibelheim to the ground, and telling him it didn't work. Jenova never got to sail the cosmos and all he could buy himself was a slow death in the life-stream. The self-righteous anger died in his eyes. She just felt tired.

She looked over the uneven rooftops of Nibelheim village. Smoke rose from chimneys in trailing wayward columns and the remains of the heavy dew the night before still darkened patches tiles.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"I… have to leave Shinra." He hung his head. "No. I'm going to dismantle Shinra. This is not… acceptable business practise."

Somewhere down in the village children shrieked and chased after a soccer ball. Just one conversation and… that was it. The world kept on turning.

"Good," she said. And it was. Planet, it stung.

Sephiroth looked at her. "What will you do?"

She sucked in a breath and shook her head.

"I wish you well, Sephiroth. I do," she said, and she almost meant it. She walked away.

Sephiroth did exactly as he said he would. He went back to Shinra, sat in front of the board and told them Shinra would no longer exist. They laughed, more out of startled confusion than humour, and then they stopped laughing. He didn't hurt any of them, much as he wanted to. Hojo had the gall to look at him with a wounded expression, as he ordered the lot of them to be imprisoned and the company broken up.

He had wondered how much of SOLDIER would follow him against the president's orders. The answer was a little disappointing. Why had he done as he was told for so long?

Brick by arduous brick he tore it all down. Years of power hoarding, much of which he himself had facilitated, slowly undone and redistributed. There were attempts to stop him. They didn't last very long.

Regional authorities who had sat in defanged silence for decades stepped forward to help, to claim their slice of the pie. He didn't care who was on top so long as it wasn't Shinra. Or himself, for that matter. Unfortunately, there was no way to force change without being heavily involved every step of the way. Genesis crawled back out of the woodwork with great claims of reconciliation and forgiveness.

Sephiroth thought about the pile of dead cells rotting in the Nibelheim reactor. Its lilting lies had soured.

By pure chance, he found the time traveller again.

He was walking through a Junon food festival, waiting to intercept the Turks. They were still vainly trying to smuggle resources out to Rufus, acting like Shinra still ran the world and nothing had changed. Like their lives weren't all collapsing in polite slow motion. He wished he'd sent Zack out to do it, but the boy's loyalties were… complicated, these days.

It ended in a tense stand-off, empty threats, and the eventual hand over of everything they had. Midway through a terse conversation with Tseng he caught sight of long black hair behind one of the stalls. She was watching with pursed lips, one of very few civilians unphased by the appearance of so many famously dangerous people.

The side street was deserted by the time the Turks cleared out. Forgotten plastic cups rolled in the evening breeze, collecting in the gutters in and catching on clumps of stained napkins.

Tifa stood behind a sponsored stall, wearing an apron and a cap with a logo on it, her arms crossed.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

Was she following him? Unlikely. It would be a poor cover for someone following a mobile target. She looked like she'd been there for hours.

"Working," she replied tersely. "What are you doing?"

"The same."

She looked different out under the sky of a late evening than she did under the stagnant lights of a basement. The vicious edge of determination was missing from her gaze, or perhaps it just lost impact under a cap decorated with cartoon tonberries declaring Marvin's kitchen knives the sharpest in town.

"Can I get you a drink?" she asked after the silence had stretched too long.

It was ridiculous that she was even here, indistinguishable from any other normal worker.

"I'll have… whatever you're serving." He approached the stall.

She got to work, twisting the taps on tubs of punch and scooping chopped fruit. Her strong, scarred hands moved confidently through motions she had repeated hundreds of times that night alone. She carried herself like a combatant. Armoured gloves peeked out of her back pocket. Nothing remained of the timidity and false confidence of the young mountain guide.

Stiffly she pushed a paper cup stuffed with mint and fruit in front of him.

"That'll be three gil, please."

He reached for his wallet, committing to the absurd mundanity of it.

"I have 2.95."

She sighed.

The expected transaction completed, they stared each other down from opposite sides of the stall.

"You'd get better work if you moved to Midgar," he said.

"What do you want?" She crossed her arms again.

"I have questions."

"Alright. Ask."

He reached for something to ask. "The dissolution of Shinra, in your time. How did that work?"

She shook her head. "Nothing like this. Midgar was gone. And the whole world had a common enemy to unite against and blame Shinra for. Even if the city had survived… people were too angry."

People were angry. A very impersonal way of putting it, he thought, looking at the way her fingers tightened against her upper arms.

Shinra's executives looked at him with such vitriol. There was a deeper, more intimate hatred in her eyes. She knew all the havoc he was causing was nothing compared to what he could have done. Even Genesis didn't grasp the height of the cliff he had been teetering on, the terror he would have unleashed.

He looked into her eyes and found a kind of solace in the depths of hatred he saw there.

"You turned back time for this?" he drawled, gesturing at the stall, the dirty street.

"I gave up my future to get you back yours," she said, pulling herself up to her full height. "What else do you want?"

"You didn't do it for me. You hate me." He leaned forward and had the satisfaction of watching her stiffen. "You bought your town's future… at the price of mine."

Her eyes narrowed. Slowly she reached back for her gloves.

He smiled. He'd done nothing but play nice for weeks. He summoned his sword.

She had obviously fought him before, he thought, amid an explosion of shattering wooden supports and bursting tubs of punch. She was good. But no competition.

He looked down at her along his blade. She was breathing heavily, her back to a wall and her jaw clenched. He shook his head, confused. He had assumed she had the means to kill him if he hadn't seen reason.

She was only ever armed with words. Betting on the truth, against every lie he ever told himself.

"You said you beat me, in that future," he demanded. He too was angry.

"Not alone," she hissed. "I never faced you alone and won."

"You came back alone."

Her throated bobbed as she swallowed. Pools of red alcohol drained into the gutters at her feet.

"You still have your future, Sephiroth."

He went back to his work, shaken by the encounter. It lingered with him as he disbanded the army, as the western continent split itself up into some dozen-odd city-states. Some set up elections, others had powerful old family lines who simply assumed control. He gave them all control over their own Mako reactors and soon they were minting their own currencies and setting up borders. Costa del Sol annexed Corel in a bloody invasion. The recently founded Gold Saucer hired a bunch of newly unemployed Shinra MPs to take it back.

Sephiroth missed the stability of a world he took no responsibility for. He missed Angeal and Genesis and the little lies they maintained between them.

Genesis and Zack were on his side and technically helping, but he didn't trust either of them. He wasn't sure they understood why he was doing this. Some days he wasn't either.

He thought of Tifa's suddenly achingly sad expression when she looked up at him from the wrong end of Masamune, telling him he still had a future.

He tracked her down again. She was working in a bar this time, still in Junon. It surprised him, there was a distinctly Midgarian lilt to her mountain-country accent.

She was near dead on her feet at the tail end of what must have been a long night. He watched a cantankerous bar manager give her instructions on locking up and then leave her alone with the last few patrons of the night. Junon was suffering an increasing drinking problem, as were all Shinra founded cities in a post-Shinra world.

She poured him a bourbon because they were pretending he was here for the refreshments.

"How's destroying Shinra going?" she asked, dry as a bone.

"I imagined those who took its place would be better," he replied. He examined the light refracting through the amber liquid, then glanced up at her. "I don't know why. I've never had any faith in humanity."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "If you want me to punch you again, you'll have to wait until I've taken table three their drinks."

He smiled despite himself and took a sip. Table three held the only other remaining patrons: a group of stubbornly, desperately positive middle-aged women searching for reasons to justify their optimism at the bottom of every tequila shot. Tifa brought them a round of waters and their bill.

His bourbon was quite nice. Angeal would have informed him it was peaty.

It was just the two of them left by the time she came back to the bar, pulling up the grates under the beer taps and cleaning them out.

"Did you imprison Reeve?" she asked, not looking up from her task.

"He's under house arrest, in return for his ongoing co-operation. He's digging up the solar and wind power technology Shinra systematically buried."

She nodded along. "Wind turbines along the Midgar cliffs can power the city easily so long as you can stop ahrimans from nesting in them."

"We were intending to use solar power," he said.

"Not enough sunlight gets through the smog for it."

He frowned. "We haven't had that problem."

She paused in her work. "Maybe it was pollution kicked up by the meteor."

He wanted to ask how that other version of him had summoned such a large meteor in the first place. Just out of curiosity, because he couldn't figure it out. No comet materia came even close, mastered or otherwise. She continued washing down the bar mats with her lips pursed and her shoulders slightly hunched. What he assumed was her customer service face was fading away in place of the staunchly determined and unafraid expression she usually gave him. He wondered if it was reserved for him.

"You're an environmentalist," he said idly.

"Practically a requirement for joining Avalanche."

He sat up straighter. "You're an eco-terrorist?"

"We weren't like the earlier avalanche, um, Elfie and her group? We weren't working with Fuhito or anyone like that."

"Did you blow up reactors?" he drawled.

She snapped off the tap.

"Yes." She lifted her chin, daring him to criticise.

"So self-righteous," he said with a cutting smile.

"I never levelled a city," she said, leaning forward on the bar.

His smile dropped. "Neither have I."

"But you're curious, aren't you?" she spat. "You want to know how he did it."

His hand tightened around the glass. "Do you even know?"

"Yes, I do." She straightened. "And?"

He looked at her through narrowed eyes. The tension in her frame, how her hands resolutely didn't reach back for her gloves. Banked up furry in her eyes held back by fraying restraint.

"You're afraid… I might change my mind."

"What do you want from me?" she demanded. "Why are you here? You want to see how close you can push me to breaking? If you can outdo your other self and-" she sucked in a breath and retreated back into herself. "You can't. You won't."

He watched, still sitting quietly, holding a half-empty drink.

"I am sorry," he offered, eventually. "For what he-"

"Don't." She cut her reddened eyes at him. "You can't apologise for something someone else did."

"But you can hate me for it?"

Her gaze lowered. "I'm trying not to."

"You promised never to lie to me," he drawled.

"You're right. I promised." She leaned her against the bar with a sigh, giving him her back and staring at the floor. "I should forgive you. I shouldn't even be angry at you, it wasn't you, it wasn't even your fault. You did everything right."

"And yet?"

"I hate you because you're all I have left." She lowered her head and looked at him over her shoulder. "I don't want to let go of hating you."

He took a slow sip of his drink, emptying the glass. "If not for you… I could have slaughtered Shinra in a day and felt no regret. I could have destroyed this planet."

"You could have tried."

He scoffed. "You would not have come all this way to prevent something that already failed."

"You did fail. Again and again. We always stopped you, no matter the cost." She turned back to him, arms braced against the bar. "You kept trying, kept losing, but you didn't stop. Long after you knew you weren't going to win, you kept trying. You drove the planet to a slow death just because you couldn't have it."

She looked down at him. "Is that what you call a victory? Is that good enough for you, destroying yourself so long as it means taking your enemy with you too?"

"Why not?" he asked, his voice low. "It's good enough for you apparently."

"I'm not…" She blinked in surprise. "That's not what this is."

"Isn't it? Isn't that what your whole mission was, sacrificing yourself to neutralise me?"

"No, it wasn't." She hunched her shoulders.

"Then why are you here? Provoking me?" he asked, provoking her. He stood and she instinctively reached back to her gloves. He raised an eyebrow at her. "Do you need me to give you a reason to attack me, Tifa?"

She seethed for a moment, her lips pursed and her hand wavering.

Then she let out a breath with a light laugh and she shook her head.

"No. I'm not Cloud. Thanks all the same."

His browed lowered at that. "Strife? What does he have to do with this?"

Her eyes widened. She punched him.

It was a better fight than the first, for all her clear exhaustion.

She looked so plainly irritated with him by the time he slammed her against a table by the throat that he couldn't resist a laugh. She kicked him in the face for it. He probably deserved it.

Lance Corporal Strife wasn't very interesting. Whatever he had become evidently wouldn't come to pass anymore. Sephiroth could see no benefit to going after him now.

Tifa looked at him with more suspicion than normal the next time he tracked her down. Apparently waiting for whatever terrible fate he might visit upon her childhood friend. He watched sidelong as she picked up a rowdy patron and carried him to the door. She was in her thirties now, same as him, she had turned back the clock well over a decade. Strife may well have been more than a friend to her over the years.

She'd come back alone.

He felt a quiet and enduring vindication at that. She alone had come back for him.

Life marched on. Tifa lost her job for getting into a fight with a patron on-premises, for which he took no responsibility as she threw the first punch. Kalm seceded from Midgar and then changed its mind two months later.

The next time he found her she had somehow turned unemployment into a managerial role at a different hole in the wall pub. Whenever he felt like perhaps he had been too generous with humanity after all, he would find his way down to her. She never turned him away or offered him any comforting half-truths.

He wandered down the street her pub was on one chilly spring morning, not expecting to find her out and about. It looked different during the day. The grey ocean visible far below and a brisk morning wind blowing up to meet them. Decorative trees dotted the sidewalk and to his surprise, there was a row of school children lined up out the front.

Tifa and a couple of other women were handing out steaming bowls of food to children and then sending them off to wait by the nearby bus stop.

"Remember to bring the spoon back tomorrow," Tifa said, kneeling down in front of a tiny child wearing a worn-out Ultros backpack that was more grey duct-tape than its original purple canvas. She smiled at the little girl, her ruby eyes bright and lively.

She looked utterly different from the unforgiving spectre of a failed future that he was accustomed to. Nothing like the angry woman he had turned her into.

She caught sight of him before he could make an about-face and exit the situation.

"What's wrong?" she asked quietly once close enough. "I don't normally see you in the mornings."

"Nothing. I just happened to be going this way," he lied.

"Oh." She nodded slowly. "Okay."

"Did you have a family before?" he asked.

Her expression shuttered. He cursed his own lack of tact.

"Yes. No," she said in quick succession. She blinked several times. He felt bad at attacking her with this without warning and outside the known battlegrounds of an empty late-night bar. "They weren't mine, but… they were family."

"I see."

She looked away, out over the ocean. One of the children called to her from the line. She looked back with a strained smile and waved.

"He didn't kill them, before you ask," she said. "Well, actually he did, Denzel died in the third wave of geostigma and Marlene faded away when he figured out how to turn Mako into its gaseous form and hollowed out anyone who breathed it in."

He held back a wince. He didn't know what geostigma referred to, but airborne Mako poisoning? What a horrible way to die. A horrible way to lose someone. A child.

She sucked a breath and then let it out in a slow hiss. "Why aren't I attacking you?"

"Because I promised not to do that."

"Did you?" she asked, her eyebrow raised.

He hadn't before. He decided he would now. "Yes," he said. "I am promising you that."

Her brow lowered as she studied him for a moment.

"Good." She said, finally, with a definitive nod. "Come on." She walked briskly back to the row of trestle tables and he followed. "Tie your hair up, it'll get in the porridge."

"Wait," he said, a ladle suddenly pushed into his hands.

"A scoop each for a small bowl, one and a half for the large. Then hand them over to Barb for some fruit."

A surly boy on the other side of the table held out a cardboard bowl in front of him with both hands.

Sephiroth glared at Tifa. She rewarded him with an angelic smile from the far end of the production line. He wanted his avenging time traveller back.

They still fought when the mood hit. Generally, they didn't come to blows inside the pub anymore, she had concerns about property damage. It wasn't always over unspeakable crimes against humanity either, sometimes she'd make eye contact with him after the eighteenth person in a row ordered a strawberry daiquiri and he'd know that she would very much appreciate an opportunity to punch him later.

They were more akin to spars now than actual fights, on all but the direst nights. Sometimes he wouldn't draw his sword and return her unarmed blows with his own. The tension changed.

She always got in a couple more hits than he expected and that left him both charged and sated.

Vincent reappeared from where even he had fled to and crashed one of their quieter nights together. Sephiroth had complicated feelings about the man, but they were nothing next to Tifa, who would forget on occasion that it wasn't the Vincent she knew. Then she would clam up into a wounded ball of regret, leaving the two men to carry the conversation.

On a night when he felt very optimistic about the healing state of the world Sephiroth brought Genesis down to the bar and regretted every second of it.

The man had apparently received his miraculous full recovery alongside a spiritual revelation at the foot of a statue of the goddess. That was all well and good, but the years of betrayal and abandonment still stood between them, and accusations spat in the Nibelheim reactor hung heavy in the air.

Tifa appeared at an opportune moment with a fire extinguisher and threw them both out.

But they were trying. They were all trying, and even if it was at a faltering pace, things improved.

She didn't look at him with such burning hatred anymore. It was still there, he just had to dig deeper for it, and found he enjoyed the layers of herself she buried it with just as much.

Somewhere along the way blows they dealt each other turned to exploring touches turned to grasping handholds. He had no idea how touch starved he was until he was holding her. She buried her hands in his hair, so close to his throat, while his fingers worked bruises into her hips. He traced a familiar scar across her chest. It was old and well healed. Wine red eyes looked up at him, hooded and intense.

He woke to her crying. He rolled over and held her close until she fell back asleep.

She had come back for him. He would never forget that.

It probably shouldn't have been so easy.

Tifa sat on the step of the little bar, enjoying the sunshine. The gil was beginning to stabilise again. Tomorrow she would sell the various treasures and materia she'd tracked down before settling in Junon. Combined with what she'd saved up in the last year she was going to buy the bar. The owner had accepted her lowball offer without even haggling.

She remembered it being much more difficult when she set up Seventh Heaven the first time. She remembered a lot of things being more difficult.

A tremendous yawn split her face. She would have to tell Sephiroth not to come over on Sunday nights, not if he was going to keep her up so late. She wanted to blush and be embarrassed at the assumption that it was an ongoing thing. She hunched up her shoulders and could barely summon up doubt.

They hadn't looked it in the eye, the thing between them, let alone acknowledged it out loud. It was just there. Reliably.

One of the ladies from that morning's breakfast kitchen tooted her horn as she drove past. Tifa waved. It was the highlight of every weekday, feeding the kids. Not least of all because none of them looked back at their parents with fear that maybe if they lost sight of them they would never see them again. When they asked things like 'where's my mum gone?' the answers were typically 'to fetch the car'. They were just hungry. And she had food. It was… nice, for it to be so simple.

Her phone rang.

"Tifa speaking," she said, squinting out over the ocean.

"I have a formal event on soon," Sephiroth said, with no preamble. "I may require… a plus one."

She put a hand over her eyes to block out the sun.

"It's on the 28th if you are free."

"How formal are we talking?" she asked, to avoid the question itself.

"Black tie."

She bit her lip. Of course, he would just come out and ask. Staring down the matter and refusing to dodge. She did pick up on the tentative manner in which he posed the question though.

"Anyone I know going to be there?"

"Do you know the emperor of Wutai?" he asked dryly.

"Oh, yes, is Yuffie going to be there?"

He paused for a long moment. "I hope not."

She squinted up at the sun and received a black spot in the middle of her vision as a reward.

"I've got to think about it. I'll call you back?"

"Alright."

"Bye," she said, and they hung up.

It wasn't that she didn't know exactly what she'd gotten herself into. They were both adults, and she had made her choices willing and with her eyes open.

She huffed a breath and rested her chin on her knuckles.

He was a possessive man whereas she, if she was being honest with herself, quite liked to be needed. He wasn't exactly nice, he was sharp and ruthless. But when she jabbed him he jabbed back and he never ran from her.

They still raged at each other when the mood took a turn. Still spat blunt and hurtful provocations. There were days when black moods took him and she was the woman who had stood between him and whatever absolution Jenova promised. There were days when she felt the scar on her chest and could think only of those who hadn't survived him. Sometimes she remembered she hated him.

Sometimes it was while he was pining her to bed, tearing gasps from her lips. He knew. She saw how he savoured her rage when she bared it to him.

In a quiet little corner of her mind she could admit that even on their worst nights, she tremendously enjoyed his company. She didn't know when that had happened.

She did know, with alarming confidence, that if she called Sephiroth he would pick up the phone.

Her shoulders hunched and she hung her head. That wasn't fair. You couldn't compare one person's reaction to trauma to another's. At the end of the day, she had to manage her own trauma as well.

She thought, approaching the conclusion ever so tentatively, that she might be alright with it. She didn't know if she was allowed to be, and she despised herself a little for it.

She preferred having to convince herself that she was unhappy instead of the other way around. It was refreshing.

The sun was shining. The ocean didn't stink of pollution anymore, Shinra was defanged and Mako production was down sixty percent. The tree on the corner was in full bloom. Someone had grafted a fruit-bearing branch onto it, a joyous rebellion against the Shinra's barren aesthetic. There were ripe tangerines on its branches and rotting into its soil patch.

It could be worse.

She looked down at the contact on her phone, complete with a photo she had taken herself. He had been mid-conversation with Vincent and looked profoundly confused. She smiled at the sight.

She called him back and told him she would be there.

It really was so easy. She embraced it.