Disclaimer: I don't own anything from the Final Fantasy franchise, especially not Dissidia and FFVII. But everything not associated with such (original plot, original characters, original author rants, etc.) does belong to me.

This is the final chapter of Phobic! I promise I didn't plan it around seven chapters, it just worked out that way. Thank you so much for reading and reviewing throughout Sephiroth's journey, please enjoy the destination!

~greyrondo

Chapter Seven: Self-Forged Destiny

Hellfire scorches my throat. The last time I depended upon fire, I was able to walk amongst it without being burned. I ruled its every whim. Here, the fire rules me. I am not in control. There is a higher power at work, the one I must call my god, and it is by his will that I am here now, standing before his empty throne.

The throne is empty, but I am not alone. A guard kneels at the empty throne's right hand.

"Garland," I say lightly. In that moment, I understand. Garland did not free himself from the constraints of his servitude. He merely offered his sword to another king, and a harsher rule.

"I need to speak with Chaos," I state. I don't enjoy being toyed with like this.

"Someone like you cannot see…him," Garland informs me with his voice set like stone. "You turned your back on your life and cut the ties. You drew rivers of blood, and condemned all your deeds to rust."

"Who are you to say who can and cannot speak with Chaos?"

"Fight me. Prove you are alive enough to risk dying," he responds as he rises to his feet.

My blank expression is my agreement. But when I step forward, vertigo and panic seize me and I very nearly fall. The pumice beneath my feet is gone. I stand at the verge of air with a hollowed-out floor rooting my feet, and where there was Chaos' empty throne I now see skyscrapers, pillars of slate and silver ashes and tempered steel.

In just this flash of cognition, I know where I am. Midgar. But this is different: there is a sky. These aren't my memories.

A familiar voice speaks to me. I turn my head and Rufus Shinra in his wheelchair enters my vision, but then I blink. My eyes smart at the return of the stinging ash and blinding red.

"The right hand knoweth not what the left hand doeth," the Emperor says with relish as he peers up at me from the identical position in which I found Garland. Almost identical, that is. He kneels on the throne's left, and his expression is not one of servitude.

"Where is Garland?"

"Don't think of Garland. Don't think about Chaos. You answer to me now," he laughs.

I sigh impatiently. "I don't have time to deal with your delusions of grandeur."

He recoils as if I had just struck him. "My delusions of grandeur?" he tells me accusingly. "You don't understand a single thing that's going on, even after all those hints that little brat slipped to you?"

My eyes narrow. "Why don't you tell me…"

"No," he states simply and rises to his feet in one mercury motion, liquidly brandishes his barbed staff. "No. I've decided that I will not let this happen. I will defeat you at your own game. Only one of us can carry on, and I refuse to let it be you—"

An orb of light forms. Just as I settle into a guard, the cold light of the mid-afternoon sky seizes me again. The orb of light does not disappear, but instead transfers to the end of my arm, cupped in my hand. Only that hand is not mine. It's the hand of the person who fell off the motorcycle.

Time skips, and I'm falling. But there is something, a black box, falling faster than I am. Not even the rushing ground is important enough for me to tear my eyes away from it.

That's impossible. Mother…?

The red world snaps back, and it is the Cloud of Darkness that I crane my head upwards to see. She hovers over the throne like a guillotine waiting to drop. First Garland, and then the Emperor. Now it's her. What is Chaos doing to me?

"My son," she calls down to me. Her voice is twisted inside of itself; she is mocking me. "You are different, yes. You're better. And fate has chosen you. The Promised Land…"

I'm angry now. "Don't talk as if you're—"

"Mother?"

The smells of smog and asphalt assault me here in this unfamiliar street as I cradle that broken black box in my hands. I close my eyes for unexplained grief.

"Don't you miss the light?"

Angeal?

My hands are empty except for my sword. I have dropped my stance. I gaze at the empty throne, and wonder where his voice came from.

"You know what it feels like to be the only one of your kind," I hear him say. Only it's not Angeal; it's Golbez. He appears from behind the throne. "Don't let that loneliness use you."

What does he want? What does he stand to benefit from being so charitable? I don't need his kindness. I have myself; that is all I need. I know what Chaos is doing: he is testing me. Only one of us can inherit Chaos' power. It was my dream to travel the worlds with that planet as my chariot. That dream only included me.

I wonder if Golbez is on guard. He must know what is coming.

My sword pierces even Golbez's armor with ease. I stab him through the heart. It's a noble death.

As he falls, his armor subtly transforms into Exdeath. I try to withdraw my blade, only to find that some force keeps it trapped in Exdeath's armor. So I push it deeper, until the hilt is only a foot away from Exdeath's face and I am looking down at his empty eyes.

"When did it happen? When were you changed? It didn't happen immediately, did it," Exdeath taunts me. "Do you know what your name means? You are the tree of life. Of course you know; it was in one of those notebooks. I didn't change after the first shadow, or the second. I endured a torrent of darkness until my branches finally snapped."

"We aren't the same," I insist hopelessly. My voice pales now in comparison to the boldness that faced Garland. That weakness satisfies Exdeath; my sword is free.

I pull it loose and rearticulate myself into an offensive fighting stance. I don't want to hear anymore of this. I want to speak with Chaos. With simply myself and my sword, I have no need to listen to anything but the answers I will demand from him. No need to hesitate. No need to falter.

The red world pales into an early sunset. My sword is gone, replaced by that black box. My head swims; my world is shattered but I don't know why. I have lost something, be it faith, or—

"What did it feel like, learning that your life was a total lie?" Kefka cackles as he leaps down from his perch atop the empty throne. That vision of a gentle sunset is burned from my eyes. "I mean, you must've had friends and stuff, right? Before that, I mean. Can't really see the good of having friends after… well… you know. It must have been bloody, the aftermath. How many innocents did you slaughter?"

I consider adding him to the head count. But before I make the decision, he makes another contribution to the one-sided conversation.

"And here's the real question: did it really make you feel any better?"

"What about you?" I demand from him. My anger simmers cold; I want to break him before I kill him. "Is life so much more valuable to you?"

He howls with laughter. "Are you joking? I'm with you on this: the average human on the street is a worthless waste of space. They're only good for something once they're in the past tense, if you know what I mean."

"…that's what I thought."

He stares at me in delight. "Oh, I get it. I know how you work. You see, you can still evoke a shade of the person you used to be, unlike me. You remember the good old days of 'morals' and 'kinship' and all that nonsense. And when you're the bad guy, you get to use that knowledge against anyone who gets in your way. Well, let me tell you something: that only works on people who care what others think about them, be it other people, or their god—"

Kefka drowns himself in mad laughter and flickers out of focus. Suddenly the laughter is mine as it poisons the evening air, and I see him. The one I've been waiting for.

Cloud.

"Save yourself," a woman whispers in my ear. Cloud is gone.

"Ultimecia?" I wonder aloud and turn.

She smiles apologetically. "Sorry to pull you away. But you need to focus on the here and now. The time will come soon when you must make a decision. The right decision… for both of us," she adds, and stands before me. "Survival of the fittest doesn't necessarily pertain to the beast with the biggest claws, after all," she chuckles.

"…what do you want?"

"Well, that depends on what you want. Do you have faith in Chaos? You should. With Chaos' help, you can become stronger. No, strongest. And you will never have to fear death ever again—"

"I don't think fearing death is his problem, Ultimecia. I think he runs after it. Why would he bother to actively seek out Cloud if he genuinely disregarded Cloud's abilities?"

Ultimecia turned around, a pinched expression of displeasure on her face, and she disappears. At the foot of Chaos' empty throne, Kuja lies with his arm draped over the seat to keep himself upright.

'I am Sephiroth's death wish', Kuja had said to me when we first met. Now he looked at me with a grave expression on his face.

"Look at me, Sephiroth. I'm a freak. And so are you. Question: who's to blame for that?"

I have a question of my own. "What did the Emperor mean when he said that you had been trying to tell me something? I think now is as good of a time as any. I have a meeting with Chaos that you're interfering with."

He sighs heavily. "Answer my question."

"Our respective creators," I snap.

He looks at me and laughs. "'Our respective creators'?" he repeats in disbelief. "Sephiroth, let me try and spell this out for you: our god doesn't like us. He makes our lives as pathetic as possible and then convinces us that our creators are to blame, but really, it's him. We amuse him, and in return he uses us until he's through with us."

"Just because you don't like the idea of a god being more powerful than you doesn't mean that—"

"Sephiroth, it's not about the power. Don't you get it? Come on, Icarus, fly towards the sun and see if you can't keep the wax from melting. It's about once, just once, being able to have a say in our lives. Look at you. Chaos didn't even care enough about you to give you a full set of wings. A one-winged angel, flying your lopsided path up to heaven and never reaching your destination."

"I mean," he continues, "I'm his dark messenger, his angel of death. Chaos hand-picked me from birth to do what you eventually stumbled upon, and I didn't even get wings. I'm not going anywhere near heaven. But still, we got a better deal than Jecht. What kind of god gets up in the morning and looks at all the people he's made and thinks to himself, 'well, aren't you lot adorable. Since your lives are going so well, why don't I introduce this concept I like to call 'Sin' and see how you manage?'"

"Angry, aren't you?"

"Yes, I'm angry! Don't you go around acting like you're better than me—it wasn't compassion that made you burn down that town, Sephiroth."

"If you're so angry, then why are you here?"

And Kuja laughs. "Because I know how to beat our god. Right after I bid you adieu, I'm going to have a nice heart-to-heart skirmish with my brother, and I'm going to die. Better on my own terms than waiting for it."

"Genesis…"

The red world and the sunset cease to distinguish themselves. They battle for my attention; a flash of steel from the sunset catches my eye, along with the glint of Cloud's unnatural irises, eyes that we share. There he is again. What is happening here?

Then the red world shudders in my peripheral vision. There is someone at my back.

The sunset strikes my blade as I leap up for an attack fueled by desperation rather than sense. Even I am hardly surprised when Cloud fends me off. I have found him. I do not question the circumstances, not yet.

And yet I'm pulled away to the smell of cinders. A rough hand grips my arm just below my armor and shoves me forward through the flames. I whip around and I see Jecht's face just as I fall backwards onto Chaos' throne.

I'm falling now through the sunset. I'm falling on my own terms rather than waiting. But it isn't me. A name lingers on the tip of my tongue that sounds like Kuja but isn't, and I finally understand.

I am not the life I left behind. I am not my dream of conquest, I am not my assurance that fate chose me. I am not my loneliness, I am not my transformation. I am not the shell that my innocence left behind. I am not shameless self-preservation, and I am not my despair-fueled wrath. I am not even my defiance.

Sitting on Chaos' throne, Jecht is not the only one who looks at me. Before me stand the nine distillations of everything that kept me trapped in the Lifestream for all this time, given ephemeral names. Garland, the Emperor, the Cloud of Darkness, Golbez, Exdeath, Kefka, Ultimecia, Kuja, and Jecht.

They do not define me, but without them, I have nothing to separate me from Chaos. With Chaos, I could be perfect. I could have everything I want.

They are my imperfections, but without them, I return to what Shinra wanted me to be. A perfect, soulless weapon.

The red world fades. I am bathed in sunset, and yet it is my blade that I hold in my hands. I smile at the deep blue eyes afraid to meet my gaze.

I stand in the ruins of Midgar, and I know that this world is real. Not like the one that I had been trapped in for so long.

"Good to see you… Cloud."

"Sephiroth," he calls to me from behind the sword that I suppose now truly belongs to him. This battle belongs to him, now, too.

"Sephiroth," he says again. "What do you want?"

THE END