Chapter Text
Tifa is always running. They have always been running. Running toward something, running away, it didn’t seem to matter.
When the rangers first came to their settlement, it had been peaceful. They made an agreement with the tribe, creating borders that would not extend into different communities. They would not encroach. It had never been meant to be a malevolent ending on either side.
Then Tifa’s mother died.
Run, my darling, her mother would tell her. Run. Let mama do her duty.
Run. Always running.
When her mother died, Tifa’s world became one moment. She saw the katana slash into her mother’s sternum, the blood pouring out of her in thick, dark, garnet rivulets. It sliced into her with a vicious fury, the crack of bone as loud as a rumble of thunder across the prairie land.
Tifa hadn’t run that day. She didn’t want to. There was an ugly feeling coalescing inside of her, deep and unintentional and unprecedented. A burgeoning instinct that told her to stay. She hadn’t known what it was at the time.
Her mother spun her Gi around her, white and brilliant like the glare of a mid afternoon sun. It reflected off her like a blanket of snow, blinding and beautiful, made up of love and care and protection and strength. All of the most important things—all of the strongest things.
Her mother’s Gi was the most powerful thing Tifa knew to exist. It made the earth rumble and the wind sing. It caressed her in a blanket full of compassion.
White Gi was the one everyone strove for. It was the rarest of its kind.
When Tifa saw the sword, blazing a path toward her mother, she knew it would be parried. It was going to be struck and shatter like china against marble. It was going to break, and the man was going to break with it.
But it didn’t. It cut through her mother like a heated knife through butter. Easily dispatched. Easily gone, sucking her soul from her body and out of the world.
He mother choked, but she never cried.
Tifa screamed. She felt the panic build. She felt the rush of the disbelief, the incapability to understand. The fading light of her mother hit her eyes and she knew what was happening, she knew it and she couldn’t know it and she couldn’t believe in it because her mother was everything.
The Gi curled up inside her, solidifying into rocks. Tifa’s fists clenched. She stared at the man with the sword, twisting it out of her mother. She stared and screamed, so long and so loudly. The rocks unfurled inside of her, caressing her bones and covering her like a vine on a trellis, thick and unrelenting and parasitic. She felt so much hate, so much how dare you, so much—so much despair.
That’s what she’ll call it later. Despair.
The blackened Gi, like soot and smoke, like debris from a forest fire, like the rotten tang of charred flesh, sizzled out of her like a bullet. It cut through the man in a dozen perforations. It marked him. It twisted up inside of him. His skin began to sink. His bones turned brittle. His hair fell out of his head like grasses ripped from the fields. He fell to the ground in a pile of bones, a husk no longer to see the light of the world.
His soul had been taken. His soul was gone.
Just like her mother’s. Just like her own.