No More Heroes - Tifa, Sephiroth - R
Title: No More Heroes
Rating: R
Fandom; Pairing: FFVII; Tifa/Sephiroth
Word Count: 1840
Disclaimer: Full disclaimer in my profile. I don't own the story or characters. They belong to Nomura and are brought to us by Square Enix
Summary: Tifa fights her childhood hero and brings a mix of hatred, attraction, fear, jealousy, bitterness, and disappointment to the surface.
Note: I really just wanted to have Tifa and Sephiroth kick the crap out of each other. I like them and I think their antagonism is fascinating and under-explored. THIS IS REALLY VIOLENT.
Ice cracked under her boots. Tight black leggings kept her legs warm, but limber under her short skirt. She had a nice thick jacket on with a big, fluffy collar she could really bury her frozen cheeks in.
It was a big area, but one they all knew well, so it had made a bit of sense to split up when they realized that Cloud was none of the places they expected him to be.
Tifa sighed. She’d been stuck at the base of the cliff and it was boring and cold, too cold to be nice and familiar, just frozen cold. She was worried so deeply she was barely holding down food and now she was so cold she couldn’t feel her nose. She sighed again and leaned back against the expansive stone wall. It was just a moment of respite.
She opened her eyes and glanced to each side just to make sure she hadn’t fallen asleep and there was a flash of black there in the corner. Black. Unnatural, impossible black.
Her fingers were numb as she tore open her supply pouch and dug out the proper materia, equipping and casting it as quickly as she could. The world sped by in a blur of hot electric blue. She stretched her left hand up and out, throwing her right foot up until she was running up the cliffside and reaching, reaching. Her hand caught on something, but her body kept moving. She held and the haste wore off quickly, but she felt the great weight attached to her handhold.
She hit the ground, released, and rolled. There was ice in her hair, but, after she’d flung it out of the way, she felt both terrified and vindicated to be face to face with the tip of the Masamune. Abject terror clenched her stomach, but she lunged down underneath the swing of the unimaginably long, folded steel blade.
She didn’t know how she could possibly disarm him, but she realized quickly that she was playing a desperate ducking, sliding, leaping game of dodge with a blade longer than she was tall that could slice her in two without a thought.
It wasn’t much of an option, but she slid forward with her arms propelling her forward and her legs out. The tail of his leather coat slapped down hard against her calves and her pelvis was dangerously close to the toes of his boots, but she focused on pulling herself up from the center of her core and wrapping her hands around one knee. It was about level with her eye, disturbingly enough, and though she couldn’t see it she could feel it twist and give underneath at least two layers of leather.
There wasn’t even a gasp or a curse as his leg gave out and his twisted knee fell into her sternum.
“How could you even have gotten this close?” he asked her. His hands were empty then, apparently a nine foot long sword wasn’t much for close combat.
She would have told him, “This is how I fight.” But hands as broad as the length of her neck closed around her throat and stole her voice away.
“How?” he asked again, as if Tifa could possibly reply.
She kicked him in the back, kicked and kicked and kicked-dolphin kicks, straight up and scissoring right into the space between his shoulders. She felt his hands twitch with every kick and finally, she pried him off.
He only grabbed her by one struggling arm and hoisted himself up on one leg. It was effortless for him to fling her up from under him and over his shoulder. Her shoulder gave out under the strain, a pop almost as explosive as the one his knee had given a moment earlier under her hands.
He turned to face her as she stood, popping her shoulder back into place as she readjusted his kneecap.
“Pathetic,” he told her. “You’ve absolutely no stamina. Not a worthy opponent at all. Funny how he tolerates you at all.”
She bared her teeth and lunged at him. He caught her as if he’d expected it, and he probably had, but the flesh of his face was still soft as anyone’s might be under her fists. There was blood, though it was dark and it made her hands tingle. It came from his nose and his eyes and his lips.
The he shoved her into the cliff’s rough, unforgiving surface and sliced through her jacket. Her breath was gone again and when his hands came around her neck again she knew he wasn’t strangling her. One hand crept up to the top of her skull and she pulled her legs up fast. He was going to snap her neck, oh gods no, no, no, he was going to snap. Her. Neck.
She kicked him in the stomach, the chest, anywhere she could reach. Somehow she kicked him in the throat and as he backed off she kicked him in the jaw as she fell, folded in half, her back being sliced to hell on the rocks.
Sephiroth looked about as brutalized as she felt. She slithered out between his legs and kicked him into the cliff face first before he could turn about. When he did turn, he looked furious, crazed, and confused. His face was terribly disfigured by dark blood. Something about that made her heart swell, her strength flooded her, no it more than flooded her. He was between her and the cliff and he wasn’t going to go anywhere but down, because the power had flooded into her and she could take him down to the ice with a swift kick to the side of the skull.
She backed up, making it look like she was retreating, he hunched down and braced his hands like claws, his teeth white and sharp between the streaks of blood coming from his gums. She tilted down and arched her body into a flip, a spring, her boots going for his face and she felt him grabbing her by the ankles, but it was too late because they were both going down. As they fell it was completely by accident if she might have kicked him in the teeth as well.
Sephiroth only managed to toss her across his own body and while it made her feel small and pathetic, she just scrambled up and was face to face with the whole bloody wreck she’d made. She pulled back for a punch and he snatched her by the wrist. He squeezed and squeezed until she was shutting her eyes against the grinding pain of it.
But it wasn’t so bad that she couldn’t get a good uppercut in when he was too busy torturing her to notice. As she felt the bones of his jaw give under her fist, she also felt her wrist twist and the bones of her forearm snap too close to her hand.
That made her scream and that, in turn, made him laugh. She was easy to toss away then, easy to kick while she was down-right in the ribs. The sword was back, raised high above her chest.
“Hel no,” she hissed, her sore back laying against the sharp ice.
Her legs went between his, quick as anything, one on the outside and one on the inside. Then she kicked then together, fast. His leg didn’t just go out, no, it was his left knee-the one he favored and the one she’d already twisted the kneecap on. This time the knee, or the bone beneath it, caved and his leg gave out much more mangled than the simple dislocation she’d done before.
The smallest noise of shock and terrible pain would echo in Tifa’s ears until the team came and found her, a gash between her ribs leaking onto the ice where the masamune had come down, a sudden unexpected crutch. Sephiroth had just… evaporated. Feathers and smoke and licks of unnatural black, but she still saw the after image of his face, the eyes wide and strangely human against his blood-smeared face.
Eventually, when she was so cold there was snot frozen to her cheek, Tifa staggered to her feet.
“What was that?” she wondered aloud. But there was no answer except the wind.
Barrett found Cloud eventually, unconscious and cold, with a thin layer of… something frozen over him. He didn’t remember anything and Tifa had healed her wrist up on her own as best she could.
“I’m fine,” she reassured Vincent when he saw her wincing and holding her side.
“I smell blood on you,” he whispered. “Blood and death.”
She stared up at him with big wide eyes, the bottom of her stomach fallen out like a spooked child.
“I’m fine,” she insisted, tightening her brows together and clenching the hand below her tender, healing wrist.
But it would have been a lie to say she hadn’t thought about it since. She braced her wrist against the hard labor of bartending and training with Cloud and child rearing. Then she’d curl up under her plaid quilt for the night and she’d dream about everything. She’d dream about the feel of his leathers under her cold finger tips and the give of bone and tendon under that. She dreamed of the softness, the give in his face as it burst open under her fists. There was pain too and apathy, cruelty, and surprise-more emotions than she thought he was capable of, and Tifa just kept turning them over and over again in her head.
Stone cold and fucking crazy, that was pretty much all she thought he was capable of doing. Two modes, an on switch for the madness and, without it, nothing. That’s what she imagined anyway.
Just to be certain, she snuck up to Cloud’s office-cum-bedroom and sat on his sagging cot bed and dug through his files. There were pictures there, worn and yellowing, and they all had the same distant, blank face. It only gave her more things to consider, not things she wanted to consider though, so she just put everything back where it had come from and went back to work.
Work would settle her. The city would ground her. There was some good to be done here in other people’s lives, and her silly worries about the emotional depth of a dead, psychopathic space alien super soldier, those just faded into the background noise, drowned out.
“Another sour, ma’am.”
“Tifa, can I get a scooter? Slade has one and he says that they’re really cheap right now”
“A mojito for me and a house draft for the strong and silent one, yo.”
“Is Cloud in?”
“I know it’s a lot of ask, but we’d be able to pay you back in a few months, Ms. Tifa.”
“Some of the other kids were picking the flowers in the church, Tifa, and they said that… They said that…”
“You know he’ll be back. We have to be prepared.”
Rating: R
Fandom; Pairing: FFVII; Tifa/Sephiroth
Word Count: 1840
Disclaimer: Full disclaimer in my profile. I don't own the story or characters. They belong to Nomura and are brought to us by Square Enix
Summary: Tifa fights her childhood hero and brings a mix of hatred, attraction, fear, jealousy, bitterness, and disappointment to the surface.
Note: I really just wanted to have Tifa and Sephiroth kick the crap out of each other. I like them and I think their antagonism is fascinating and under-explored. THIS IS REALLY VIOLENT.
Ice cracked under her boots. Tight black leggings kept her legs warm, but limber under her short skirt. She had a nice thick jacket on with a big, fluffy collar she could really bury her frozen cheeks in.
It was a big area, but one they all knew well, so it had made a bit of sense to split up when they realized that Cloud was none of the places they expected him to be.
Tifa sighed. She’d been stuck at the base of the cliff and it was boring and cold, too cold to be nice and familiar, just frozen cold. She was worried so deeply she was barely holding down food and now she was so cold she couldn’t feel her nose. She sighed again and leaned back against the expansive stone wall. It was just a moment of respite.
She opened her eyes and glanced to each side just to make sure she hadn’t fallen asleep and there was a flash of black there in the corner. Black. Unnatural, impossible black.
Her fingers were numb as she tore open her supply pouch and dug out the proper materia, equipping and casting it as quickly as she could. The world sped by in a blur of hot electric blue. She stretched her left hand up and out, throwing her right foot up until she was running up the cliffside and reaching, reaching. Her hand caught on something, but her body kept moving. She held and the haste wore off quickly, but she felt the great weight attached to her handhold.
She hit the ground, released, and rolled. There was ice in her hair, but, after she’d flung it out of the way, she felt both terrified and vindicated to be face to face with the tip of the Masamune. Abject terror clenched her stomach, but she lunged down underneath the swing of the unimaginably long, folded steel blade.
She didn’t know how she could possibly disarm him, but she realized quickly that she was playing a desperate ducking, sliding, leaping game of dodge with a blade longer than she was tall that could slice her in two without a thought.
It wasn’t much of an option, but she slid forward with her arms propelling her forward and her legs out. The tail of his leather coat slapped down hard against her calves and her pelvis was dangerously close to the toes of his boots, but she focused on pulling herself up from the center of her core and wrapping her hands around one knee. It was about level with her eye, disturbingly enough, and though she couldn’t see it she could feel it twist and give underneath at least two layers of leather.
There wasn’t even a gasp or a curse as his leg gave out and his twisted knee fell into her sternum.
“How could you even have gotten this close?” he asked her. His hands were empty then, apparently a nine foot long sword wasn’t much for close combat.
She would have told him, “This is how I fight.” But hands as broad as the length of her neck closed around her throat and stole her voice away.
“How?” he asked again, as if Tifa could possibly reply.
She kicked him in the back, kicked and kicked and kicked-dolphin kicks, straight up and scissoring right into the space between his shoulders. She felt his hands twitch with every kick and finally, she pried him off.
He only grabbed her by one struggling arm and hoisted himself up on one leg. It was effortless for him to fling her up from under him and over his shoulder. Her shoulder gave out under the strain, a pop almost as explosive as the one his knee had given a moment earlier under her hands.
He turned to face her as she stood, popping her shoulder back into place as she readjusted his kneecap.
“Pathetic,” he told her. “You’ve absolutely no stamina. Not a worthy opponent at all. Funny how he tolerates you at all.”
She bared her teeth and lunged at him. He caught her as if he’d expected it, and he probably had, but the flesh of his face was still soft as anyone’s might be under her fists. There was blood, though it was dark and it made her hands tingle. It came from his nose and his eyes and his lips.
The he shoved her into the cliff’s rough, unforgiving surface and sliced through her jacket. Her breath was gone again and when his hands came around her neck again she knew he wasn’t strangling her. One hand crept up to the top of her skull and she pulled her legs up fast. He was going to snap her neck, oh gods no, no, no, he was going to snap. Her. Neck.
She kicked him in the stomach, the chest, anywhere she could reach. Somehow she kicked him in the throat and as he backed off she kicked him in the jaw as she fell, folded in half, her back being sliced to hell on the rocks.
Sephiroth looked about as brutalized as she felt. She slithered out between his legs and kicked him into the cliff face first before he could turn about. When he did turn, he looked furious, crazed, and confused. His face was terribly disfigured by dark blood. Something about that made her heart swell, her strength flooded her, no it more than flooded her. He was between her and the cliff and he wasn’t going to go anywhere but down, because the power had flooded into her and she could take him down to the ice with a swift kick to the side of the skull.
She backed up, making it look like she was retreating, he hunched down and braced his hands like claws, his teeth white and sharp between the streaks of blood coming from his gums. She tilted down and arched her body into a flip, a spring, her boots going for his face and she felt him grabbing her by the ankles, but it was too late because they were both going down. As they fell it was completely by accident if she might have kicked him in the teeth as well.
Sephiroth only managed to toss her across his own body and while it made her feel small and pathetic, she just scrambled up and was face to face with the whole bloody wreck she’d made. She pulled back for a punch and he snatched her by the wrist. He squeezed and squeezed until she was shutting her eyes against the grinding pain of it.
But it wasn’t so bad that she couldn’t get a good uppercut in when he was too busy torturing her to notice. As she felt the bones of his jaw give under her fist, she also felt her wrist twist and the bones of her forearm snap too close to her hand.
That made her scream and that, in turn, made him laugh. She was easy to toss away then, easy to kick while she was down-right in the ribs. The sword was back, raised high above her chest.
“Hel no,” she hissed, her sore back laying against the sharp ice.
Her legs went between his, quick as anything, one on the outside and one on the inside. Then she kicked then together, fast. His leg didn’t just go out, no, it was his left knee-the one he favored and the one she’d already twisted the kneecap on. This time the knee, or the bone beneath it, caved and his leg gave out much more mangled than the simple dislocation she’d done before.
The smallest noise of shock and terrible pain would echo in Tifa’s ears until the team came and found her, a gash between her ribs leaking onto the ice where the masamune had come down, a sudden unexpected crutch. Sephiroth had just… evaporated. Feathers and smoke and licks of unnatural black, but she still saw the after image of his face, the eyes wide and strangely human against his blood-smeared face.
Eventually, when she was so cold there was snot frozen to her cheek, Tifa staggered to her feet.
“What was that?” she wondered aloud. But there was no answer except the wind.
Barrett found Cloud eventually, unconscious and cold, with a thin layer of… something frozen over him. He didn’t remember anything and Tifa had healed her wrist up on her own as best she could.
“I’m fine,” she reassured Vincent when he saw her wincing and holding her side.
“I smell blood on you,” he whispered. “Blood and death.”
She stared up at him with big wide eyes, the bottom of her stomach fallen out like a spooked child.
“I’m fine,” she insisted, tightening her brows together and clenching the hand below her tender, healing wrist.
But it would have been a lie to say she hadn’t thought about it since. She braced her wrist against the hard labor of bartending and training with Cloud and child rearing. Then she’d curl up under her plaid quilt for the night and she’d dream about everything. She’d dream about the feel of his leathers under her cold finger tips and the give of bone and tendon under that. She dreamed of the softness, the give in his face as it burst open under her fists. There was pain too and apathy, cruelty, and surprise-more emotions than she thought he was capable of, and Tifa just kept turning them over and over again in her head.
Stone cold and fucking crazy, that was pretty much all she thought he was capable of doing. Two modes, an on switch for the madness and, without it, nothing. That’s what she imagined anyway.
Just to be certain, she snuck up to Cloud’s office-cum-bedroom and sat on his sagging cot bed and dug through his files. There were pictures there, worn and yellowing, and they all had the same distant, blank face. It only gave her more things to consider, not things she wanted to consider though, so she just put everything back where it had come from and went back to work.
Work would settle her. The city would ground her. There was some good to be done here in other people’s lives, and her silly worries about the emotional depth of a dead, psychopathic space alien super soldier, those just faded into the background noise, drowned out.
“Another sour, ma’am.”
“Tifa, can I get a scooter? Slade has one and he says that they’re really cheap right now”
“A mojito for me and a house draft for the strong and silent one, yo.”
“Is Cloud in?”
“I know it’s a lot of ask, but we’d be able to pay you back in a few months, Ms. Tifa.”
“Some of the other kids were picking the flowers in the church, Tifa, and they said that… They said that…”
“You know he’ll be back. We have to be prepared.”