Summary: Vincent goes back to clean up the Shinra mansion.
A/N: Warning, I'm not sure if this is really accurate game-wise. If it's not let me know (or don't)... honestly I don't remember the exact part of Vincent's conversation with Lucrecia, and I didn't play/watch/etc. Dirge of Cerberus or any of the prequels really... I'm not sure about the child being Vincent's although I think I remember that from the game.
A Party of Monsters
He isn't sure why he's here, except that he'd ended up downstairs, to look at the equipment Hojo left behind, see if there's anything salvageable or dangerous or useful. Not that he has any use for stuff like that, but…
Hearing Cloud describe Sephiroth down there, pacing, going mad with more and more and more truths coming to the surface. He looks through the papers now, and he can kind of see it:
"A person, a thing, a created object."
"…The mother was clearly much more powerful than previously anticipated…"
"A kind of psychosis, encouraged over time, specifically the inability or lack of access to base human emotions, explains much of the older stories…"
And so on, ad nauseum. Vincent isn't one to make himself sick with someone else's nightmares, he had enough of his own. And these aren't really his. No, he'd slept away whatever responsibility he might have had. Hojo's lab holds for him only the more mundane horrors of scalpels and toxins and blinding, stupefying pain. There's really nothing life-altering here except in the sense that Vincent has slept away everyone and everything he knew, and woke up in a way reborn, brand new.
He finds it kind of funny that there's no mention of the mother (the real mother) here. Or the father for that matter. Or any evidence that Sephiroth was, in fact, human at one point. He supposes it must have been beside the point, like saying Vincent had been a Turk as well as Lucrecia's lover. Meaningless, no need to record it.
(he had been a Turk, really, for years before he'd ever heard of Lucrecia Crescent, and it was perhaps demeaning to the organization that had made something worthwhile out of him that these years went largely unacknowledged now for the sake of a woman he'd dated for a few months, fucked a couple of times, and was dumped by)
Instead there are observations by Hojo, and Hojo's various assistants (so many assistants one had to wonder how depraved the human race was when all these fucks came out of the woodwork). Boring, worthless stuff. He'd packed it into boxes and locked it in his old room with the coffins largely because Vincent has a thing for organizing and this was one of his few outlets.
He doesn't have an apartment yet. Mostly he bunks on the Highwind, or takes to an inn, or sleeps on a sofa at Shinra when it gets to that point. Some days he stays all night at the Seventh Heaven, somewhere between taking up Tifa on her offer of a bed or a bedroll and taking a couple of chairs and a blanket downstairs. At the bar he'd sweep up the place every once in a while, maybe cook for Marlene if no one was around. On the ship the crew were so scared of Cid they kept the place sparkling. At Shinra he makes god-awful coffee for Tseng, and keeps his empty useless office neat, and resists the urge to take a brush to Reno's head and a scrub to his office, across the hall.
A kind of nomadic, disjointed life. It doesn't suite him really, Vincent had always sort of wanted a nice, neat apartment. Maybe a house some day. A fucking picket fence. Now he walks around with his belongings in his pockets and his gun constantly at the ready.
He keeps telling himself he'd settle to something soon. He would. The Turks want him (Rufus needs muscle and brains most of all), Cloud has some kind of job lined up, fuck, Cid would take him flying just for the company. Not bad options, honestly.
He'd looked into apartments and… well, before, he'd had a bachelor's place that was sort of in his budget. When he met Lucrecia Vincent had taken a coat of paint to the place, and tried to neaten it up, make it presentable. The kind of place that said, "normal, got-it-together guy" rather than "half-homeless nutjob liable to die in the line of duty". And now he can't remember which he'd liked best.
And it's so easy not to settle to anything. Everyone sort of expects it of him. It would be strange if he suddenly had an address someone could reliably find him at even thirty percent of the time. So he'd come here, to tie up all his loose ends, as much as he could.
And. Stops. Not really sure why. The laboratory is packed up, musky-smelling but largely neat. His coffin is put trimly to the side, all the equipment switched off, the broken stuff in garbage bags, the rest in boxes. Locked up.
Cloud would come by sometime and look at him accusatorily for messing with shared memories of that room. Even fuzzy, disjointed, possibly-not-his memories. But it was better in the end, to put everything away and be finished with it. Go through everything, look at it, and then be done.
And he'd been heading home, wherever that turned out to be. Back to the Highwind which would pick him up out of somewhere past the mountains, easier landing, Cid had said. And then off to wherever they happened to be heading, and eventually to Midgar to finally take the Turk job and a place to live and maybe a change of wardrobe (Vincent is dreading, a little, putting that uniform on again – he'd gotten so used to his all-concealing cloak. A suite and tie could never replace it).
And he'd been heading home, and, here he is. Upstairs in the mansion's living quarters.
A child's room. Generic and half-ruined with age. Puzzles, cubes, toy soldiers, fucking tubs of Lego. A clipboard tacked to the wall by the door and filled in neatly with all new kinds of nightmares. On the walls, things that might have been drawings, once, unrecognisable with age and the rain that had come in through the open window over the years. A kind of horrible fascination makes him peer into the closet, find dusty shirts half the length of his arm, shoes as big as his hand. A little wooden sword leaning against the little wooden bed.
Cleaning up the places of his worst degradation, reading observations of his own debasement, dehumanization, systematic torture, and he hadn't felt a thing. It had happened a long time ago, to a different person. The Vincent now isn't human enough to be pitied. Even finding the notes in regards to someone who might have been Cloud, whom, sure, he cared about, and it had sickened him but that was it. Cloud is fine and Vincent doesn't feel too protective of him. He'd gone through all the Jenova project research. Experiments in the womb. Outside it, later. Even the ones that hinted at Lucrecia's complicity. Her willingness in this. And sure, that had broken his perfect image of her, but that image had been cracked from the beginning. He'd never really managed to imagine anyone as truly perfect.
And here he is, surprised to feel his eyes begin to fill with tears.
Vincent isn't one to make himself sick with someone else's nightmares. There is always enough of that if he feels in need of some psychological abuse. He still has Hojo's voice permanently stuck in the back of his mind if he really wants to listen.
And these things, little simple things that he'd never had himself as a child. He'd grown up in a Midgar slum and never imagined that he was missing anything. But.
He wants them, suddenly. Badly. Scrub the room clean like the lab downstairs. Put everything away into neat containers. Straighten the bed sheets. Replace the old cloths with new ones, bright colors, little sneakers instead of these dress shoes fit only for stuffy dinner parties. The ache, sudden and physical and deep, unexpectedly deep.
It wouldn't make a difference. He could re-make this room. Clean it up. Replace the windows, new cloths, new sheets, new fucking everything. But it wouldn't put colors back into those pictures on the walls and the toys, new and expensive, the best he could buy, would always sit neatly in their shiny plastic containers. It would never make any difference.
He suddenly wants company. Desperately so. Red, mostly, but anyone would do. Cloud, who always gets so strange here in this mansion. Cid with his fucking cigar smoke everywhere. Tifa, maybe, with her useless calming influence. Tseng with his superiority. Even Reno who'd tease him and laugh and whose accent he hated. He'd have given a whole lot to hear some living person's voice.
Vincent takes a breath, another. Sits, finally, heavily, on the bed and puts his head in his hands. Whole lifetimes flow by behind his eyes, imperfect, sure, because everything he's ever imagined, everything he's ever touched has been imperfect. But real, heartfelt in a way the other torture hadn't been. Schooling, teaching, guns and swords and fucking math, reading and writing. Birthdays and holidays in Costa Del Sol. Temper tantrums (he'd had temper tantrums, unbelievable ones, in his youth), and arguments and teenage anxiety, more personal than a junior partner's itch before that first Turk job. Going to college, Vincent had always had romantic notions of college. And him, not human, even, but at least working hard to put it all together, and he could be a father. He doesn't look that fucking weird. Put on a suit and tie and cut his hair and hide the scars and wear gloves and contact lenses and buy a sensible car with airbags. He could quit the Turks (it makes him laugh) and take low-profile bodyguarding jobs. Less money maybe but safe and mostly stationary.
Not perfect, but god, how tempting.
And he'd felt, in the back of his mind, that Lucrecia even, yes even she horrified him. She hadn't been perfect, not even close. It had been a grain of ugliness in there somewhere that made losing her, letting go of the very memory of her less painful. He'd pulled through Hojo. He'd become stronger. It was alright.
There were a lot of things Vincent would never be able to have. This is only one of them. He wipes a hand across his face and it comes away wet. God, his body is breaking apart at the edges, but even this is familiar.
The uncontrollable flow of bodily fluids.
And he'd never mourned much for Sephiroth. Not like Cloud, who'd known him, or something like him. Never really had a reason. Vincent doesn't need anymore guilt. He can feel guilt sliding off of him, unabsorbed, like rain off the protective covering of his coat.
This isn't guilt he's feeling. This isn't even love, really. A distant, deep affection that he'd never felt before for this nameless child he's never met, never even heard of or read about. This isn't Sephiroth, really, because Vincent has never truly connected him to that child he'd tried to protect and lost. Oh, he said it easily enough before he'd ever met the great General. But being faced with him, seeing nothing of Lucrecia or himself or even Hojo, honestly. An inhuman being, and yes, he truly was Jenova's son.
But here, finally, he had seen a trace of that child he'd lost. Little cloths slipped over hair that might have been shorter, perhaps. Combed down like Lucrecia's, or unmanageable like his own? Eyes not yet Mako-bright. What color had they been before? A child like any other, except that it was his, someone who belonged to Vincent, who should have been Vincent's. More than Lucrecia had ever been, because she'd made it damn clear that she was never to be owned. Finally, he didn't even care if it was really Hojo's, but only to be able to touch those little hands, put bright toys in them. Cute cloths, sweets, all those things that had once seemed over-indulgent. To pick up a tiny body and hold it close and feel a human life.
His son. More real than ever and so. Fucking. Unreachable.
Cloud meets him on the steps outside and stops, blue eyes wide with surprise and misunderstanding. Later, he would go down to the lab and get angry and say how could Vincent just pack it all away? What right did he have?
But right now he only, with that unreliable Cloud maturity, takes Vincent's arm and leads him out into the sunshine and the relative normality of the outside world.
The touch of a real human being is calming. Warmth, unusually welcome to the point where Vincent feels himself practically clinging to it.
At the same time a sickening feeling in his other, metal hand; a small weight, a sense of heat against his side, and little phantom hands around his neck, ready to strangle him.
He'd never be really rid of it, he knows. He holds Cloud's very real arm all the tighter for it.