Lucrecia fluffed out her pillow one last time

IV: Flies in the Night

Outside, a howling storm whirled. Not a storm of wind and rain but a storm of flames and thick hot smoke. Flies ransacked the village of Nibelheim, their spiny wings beating in a mass exodus from the hills, terrified of the licking orange flames that seemed to laugh maniacally at them in forewarning, forming their own gray cloud alongside columns of smoke.

Vincent stepped out of the mansion and saw the people scattering like ants, scampering about frantically. He stopped one man who held a bucket of water in his ash-streaked arms.
"What's happening?"

"Mona...monastery... burning...fire...so... far...hills...need water...far...buckets! More...bucke-"

Vincent's head turned sharply to the side, upwards towards the hills frothing with thick gray smoke, dark eyes breathing in and exhaling painfully the devastation that radiated from the mountain.

"Get a hold of yourself," he said solemnly to the gasping man. "Tell me exactly what's happening."

The man panted, opened his mouth to speak, and found that someone else had already take his place in narrating.

"It's a fire," the voice sneered. "A bully, blazing fire. Oh, such a pity, this fire is. That monastery will never be recovered."

Vincent didn't need to turn around. He could already tell by the ringing imperial voice, that tone that implied that it had the exclusive right to step all over you, turn around, and step all over you again. He clenched his fist until he could hear his knuckles cracking with the strain. "Hojo."
The professor sighed, hands behind his back, pacing to and fro with no apparent effort whatsoever to aid the panicking villagers. The blinding light from the unmerciful sun glinted off his spectacles as he shook his head back and forth in a mockery of mourning. "So old, too. So ancient and historical...mythical, I guess you could say. Most of the stuff in that place you won't even be able to replace. In fact," he chortled. "None of it." Hojo turned on his polished leather heel. "Every tapestry, relic, icon, they'll be ruined." He raised an eyebrow. "Every rosary."

If Vincent wasn't Vincent, if Vincent wasn't a Turk, he would've sunken to his knees and put his head in his hands, cried and prayed just like the multifold number of monks now wailed, prostrated in the middle of the Nibelheim square, writhing with their misery. But Vincent was still Vincent and he stood there in his dark overcoat in the dead heat of the merrily scorching sun tall and stoic and silent.

"That poor, poor Goddess Love," crooned Hojo with a snicker creeping in the back of his throat. "All burnt and charred to a crisp in her fiery, fiery tomb." He gave up trying to hide his disdain for the monks and their subject of worship, let it fly out into the air like a cat thrown out of a window. "Im...imagine," he said through his bubbling, scornful laughter. "A Goddess of miracles and she can't even save her own bloody temple. Uh-heh. Uhehehehe." He used the toe of his dress shoes to scratch out tally marks into the dirty of the Shinra Mansion courtyard. Vincent looked down.

Science- 1. Love- 0.

"You should know," said the whispering voice that came suddenly and unexpectedly close behind Vincent's shoulder and into his ear. "Never. Ever. To mess with Shinra Science Corp. You do not mess with our experiments, our scientists, and you especially never stand in the way of what I, Hojo, want." Vincent could feel the terrifyingly frigid pressure of Hojo's presence pressing up against his back. The shorter man's smooth white hand, effeminate and obviously unfamiliar to work, slowly slid down Vincent's arm and placed something firmly into the Turk's large palm, folded his fingers over it. "You never interfere with anything I want...or you will pay," said the voice, silken and serpentine, breath cold and feathery on Vincent's neck.

Then Hojo was already at the door of the mansion, cackling "Fight on, workers of the world!" to the bedraggled townspeople before disappearing, laughing, inside.

Vincent opened his hand and looked at what he held.
It was a book of used matches.

When dusk came, Lucrecia had just finished her work for that day. Casting an approving eye out at the evening's weather, she dubbed it "Perfect", and so, trading her lab coat for an equally spotless white leather overcoat, proceeded to step outside for a walk. Having trapped herself in the isolated buzzing of the lab all day, she was oblivious to the drama that the town had encountered that day, and so therefore was completely caught off guard when a monk, half his face melted away, attached to her leg in one of quieter areas of the town.

"It's you..." he hissed at her, arms clutching her frantically shaking leg.

"Please, sir" she said, voice tight. "Let go."

"It's her!" the monk yelled, and instantly, the streets arose and walked in unison, rows and rows of monks with dark robes thrown over their bodies and heads.

"It is her," they repeated.

Lucrecia regretted having walked so far from the mansion. Slowly, monk still in tow, she backed away. Her voice was sharp and professional, but a waver in it belayed her secretly mounting anxiety. "Please...leave me alone or I'll inform the authorities."

"We have waited for you," said the monk who was clinging to her, his scalded and blistered eye swollen shut. "We have waited for you for very long and now you have come for us, in our time of greatest need."

Lucrecia shook her head, side to side, quicker and quicker, her fear coming out not in her still, serene expression, but in her ragged breath. "No, you've mistaken me for someone else. I'm sorry. Please, let me go now," she said, voice lowering as she looked about her for help, desperately.
All she saw were the monks in the robes.
"We have no home, Goddess," said the monk. "You sent fires in the form of a disbeliever, a man of the laboratories, and he destroyed us. You are here to rejuvenate us. You are here to bring us new hope. This..." He let go of her leg and stood up. "This is the reunion!"

Lucrecia, her leg free, was now backing away rapidly. She would have run yet...the intrigue...these monks...their strange midnight ceremonies... what was it that Vincent had said about their Goddess? Something... beyond? "I'm not your Goddess," she said. "I'm not anyone. I'm just a, a... scientist."
"We know the prophecies," came the dark voice from another monk in the back, as his companions intoned "Yes, yes."
"We know the prophecies," he repeated. "A woman in the coat of a disbeliever, as the companion of the one who brings destruction, shall come unto us and she shall be the charge of the Goddess. She will be the right hand of the Goddess and she will bring to us the true body of the Goddess."
Lucrecia's brow furrowed, her expression darkened and deepened, and suddenly she let out a laugh. "Oh, you mean the Jenova specimen? I'm sorry to disappoint you all. That's just the frozen remains of an ancient species of mammal. It's no Goddess. We've done tests. It's quite positively organic."
"The prophecies," they insisted, ignoring her. "You will bring us the body of the Goddess and her perfection shall be marred and so you, the right hand, shall bring forth a new perfection in the form of a child."

"A child, a child, a child," the hiss echoed from monk to monk, from hooded figure to hooded figure, corridor to corridor. "And the child shall be perfect," the chant continued, all of them in unison, now, for they all knew the words by heart. "And the child shall be our salvation. And the child, with the Goddess controlling his perfection, shall bring us all down to the Promised Land where we shall never burn or suffer again, and where we will know what perfection is ourselves."

"And all of us," said the monk who had been holding on to her leg, "All of us who had touched the child will be blessed with eternal perfection."

Lucrecia's lips fell open wordlessly. Then she blinked, and she realized that all this time, the monks had been circling her, enveloping her, trapping her. And the hypnotizing beat of their words faded away, and with terror, she realized there was something inherently stupid and strange in all of this. "Let us touch the mother of Perfection," they said to her, and she smacked away their prying hands as all of them struggled to palm her stomach.

"Leave me alone," she said. "Leave me alone!" she shrieked. "I don't know you! I don't know any of you! Leave me alone!"

She ran all the way back to the mansion, to her office, shut the door tightly, and did not come out.

Standing outside of the mansion as if incapable of setting foot beyond the gates, the crowd of monks chanted. "The reunion is coming."

Flash.

"Why do you do this, Tseng?" the girl had asked him, brown hair framing her delicate face as green eyes blinked without accusation.

"Do what?" had asked the young Turk in his crisp blue suit, sunglasses holding back long black hair.

"This," said Aeris, head in his lap as he ran his fingers through her hair, soothed by the serenity that hovered about her.

Oh, he had been young, he had been in his first prime, and inexperienced and he had believed in things that he knew, now, did not exist.

"What?" he asked again, sadly. He wasn't sure what he was doing. He wasn't doing what he wanted to be doing, which was whisking this poor innocent angel away to a paradise in the sun, nor was he doing what he was supposed to be doing, which was supervising her while Hojo stuck her in a tube and poked syringes into her.

"This," repeated Aeris, and a tear dropped from her eye.

"I can't do anything else," he said softly, and suddenly he felt so very old, and suddenly she felt like a small, small child in his arms.

Oh, she had been younger, she had yet to become a true woman, and she was inexperienced and would always, always believe in the beautiful things that Tseng knew, bitterly, did not exist.

"You can, though," she breathed to him, believing in him, even though, far back then, he still did not believe in himself. "I know you can."

"You don't know me," he said quietly, taking his gun out of its holster. Both of them knew what came next. "You don't know me at all."

Aeris sat up and combed the tangles out of her hair, looked at him, and now they were both crying. Silently, she took the walkie talkie out of his coat pocket and handed it to him, eyes pleading. "I do know, though, Tseng. You're just hiding it. I know you...I love you...and...you know me...You...you lo..." Her voice halted and her tears fell and mingled with the dew on the flowers that grew from the church floor.

"You don't love me," said Tseng, putting on his sunglasses and the sneer that came with it. "You don't love me because you don't know me. You've got the wrong guy. You made a mistake, miss. I have no idea who you are." He picked up the walkie talkie and his jacket in one strong arm, a sobbing, limp Aeris in the other arm. "Rude," he said into the crackle of the walkie talkie over a flower girl's pained cries. "Get the car. I've found the girl..."

Unflash.

Somewhere in the dark of her office, Lucrecia pondered perfection and saw in her mind's eye a child she could shape flawlessly with her hands.

Somewhere in the dark of his lab, Hojo pondered perfection and saw in a blue tank a creature so complex and brilliant it could bring him unbearable glory.

Somewhere in the dark of his psyche, Vincent pondered perfection and saw a clean, gleaming white light that could wash him of all the grime he had built up around him all his life....and her name was Love. And her name was Salvation. And her name was...

Lucrecia.

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(irony: I was listening to 'light my fire' by the Doors while writing this and didn't notice 'til I finished.)