Hello, everyone. Slightly darker story, and in Lucia's perspective this time. I know that she might be out of character, and for that, I apologize. It's just that this idea hit me a long time ago and I felt that I couldn't let it go to waste. A lot of people have been complaining about how vapid Lucia was as a character but I beg to differ. Just as how Games are created from man's imagination, I believe that it is up to us to see what we see in a character. For example, someone might see Dante as a badass. But it could very well be that others could see Dante as a cheesy pimp. (I have heard this said before and I'd like to note that I was NOT the one who said it)

Anyway, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that I feel that people are wrong about Lucia. There's a lot more to her than people think. There are a lot of key issues that could be explored within her character, and one of the key themes I'm exploring is what COULD have happened had Lucia been highly resentful of the fact that she was a "defect".

I hope I don't get flamed for this, but if I do, I do. What else is there to be done?

Anyway, read, review but most of all enjoy.

Shadowed Memories

When I first asked Matier why it was that I felt so empty, I knew even before the question had fully formed that she would frown at me, look at me almost pityingly before shaking her head.

'No Lucia,' she said. 'I can't help you, child.' Yeah right, as if she was ever much help to me anyway. 'This is something you have to figure out by yourself.' Just like how I found out by accident that I was created by Arius. 'I don't have the answers, child. I can't help you.'

I remember thinking to myself that she had never been much of a help really, not in my time anyway, after the age of Sparda. She had always been sitting on her fat ass, smiling toothlessly at nothing in particular, trying to be helpful or by saying dumb things that never really had any bearing on anything that was being discussed at the time. More often than not, she acted like a crazy old bat.

As I grew older, I found myself hating her.

Imagine that, me hating the one I called Mother.

Like I could call her such a thing anyway.

Arius was right about some things you know, like how Matier was simply using me all this time. I remember that even as I was growing up, Matier didn't actually regard me with any love. She would not give me a kiss on the forehead, she would not tell me bedtime stories, like other mothers. She wouldn't even make me breakfast in the mornings.

'She'll learn to grow stronger this way,' she would say.

Even while I was a child, Matier would talk condescendingly towards me, talking slowly and repeating herself over and over again, as though I hadn't understood of heard her the first time. I didn't realize it then, but I realize it now, that she was talking to me as though I was mentally incapable.

A defect.

Even she didn't brand me as anything other than a mistake.

I also hadn't liked it for another reason, again one that I had only recently understood why.

It was downright humiliating.

While Dante was on our island, things hadn't got much better. She would continue to treat me in the same way, as though I wasn't good enough, as though I was incapable of remembering a simple task.

'Go and get the Arcana my dear,' she'd rattle at me. 'I think it's in the ruin?'

'Really?' I had asked the first time.

'Yes. I think it is in the ruins.'

'Right…'

It was only a few days later, after I had met the son of Sparda, that she decided that I needed reminding again.

'I believe it is in the ruin.'

'I know!' I told her impatiently, with a bite of anger to my voice. Of course, she blocked that out, she blocked out anything that she didn't really want to hear. She'd never listen to anything else that was said to her, it was like she was living in her own little world of make-believe, where things happened as she wanted them to happen, and if something unexpected happened, she would simply do her utmost to forget.

After I had found out by accident about my true identity, Matier had tried to comfort me, as though finally understanding that this was something important, something that merited some form of affection.

'You are my daughter,' she had told me. 'These are the ties that are much stronger than blood.'

I had wanted desperately to believe her, but at the end of the Argosax episode, the words had kept bouncing around my head.

'These are the ties that are much stronger than blood.'

Lies. All lies.

I have no past, I have no memories, and if I have any, they are all lying in shadow, too deep, too long ago for me to remember.

I am not Lucia. I was not born of the humans. I was created, but was a defect. I am a monster, not their protector.

I am Chi.

You can try and dress me however you want, you can make up my face however you wish, but it changes nothing. You can change my name, turn it into something else.

But what I am inside, is what will always remain, and cannot ever be changed.