[It's a difficult trek through, and the number of times that Tifa almost loses her footing as she trips over another body is too high to keep count. Not that she's been keeping track. Her eyes have been focused on the lindwurm ahead, watching as it crushes another with its hands and tosses the lifeless body aside as if it were nothing at all before it's turning its bright red eyes to her.

Before Eustace is turning his red eyes to her...

She can't even stand there and try to convince herself that she isn't afraid as he charges at her. She's not even sure she wishes to. For once, maybe for the first time in as long as Tifa can remember, she instead tries to take hold of her worst fears...

She recalls how heavy that sword felt in her hands all those years ago, and still, she picked it up and carried onward anyway. She walked through those doors into the reactor and faced Sephiroth herself... and for a moment, the smell of mako replaces that of the smoke in her head. Instead of the lindwurm's roars, she hears the whirr of the reactor and the sound of her boots hitting the steel floor.

When he's within reach, Tifa is forced to duck and roll out of the way, narrowly dodging him to dive into a heap of the bodies and ignoring the haunting and morbid way they topple and fall over one another. Fire burns away at them as the flames spread, and her skin is turning black from the ash and smoke that's billowing into the air and almost suffocating her.

But she tries to see through it for him as she climbs back to her feet, kicking more of the heavy, dead limbs aside to give herself some space to stand and move. It isn't much, but it's something, and the hotter the fire burns, the more it gives her.

Before he can come back around at her again, she shouts over the crackling flames.]

Eustace, this is just a dream. All of this? She gestures to the room. It's not real. It's just the nightmare playing tricks on you...!

...It's me...

[The real Tifa. His Tifa.]