Interlude 1: The Nightmare's Beginning

"First, never let it be denied that I loved Lucrecia. If I hadn't I would never have gone to the lengths—and depths—that I did. Sometimes, in the years that followed, when I was racked with endless dreams and a guilt that was never far behind, I wished I hadn't loved her. I wished her presence hadn't come into my life and shaken it into an entirely different shape. I wished she hadn't meant more to me than anything I'd known—more than my own life, by the end. But these were the desperate wishes of a desperate man, in the darkest hours known to a human soul. I loved her, in truth. I always loved her. Even as she broke my heart.

"I think, now with the distance of so many years, that the winter I spent with her was the best time of my life. It was a brief space of time, in retrospect, but back then it seemed to stretch from that moment until the end of the world. Two months, give or take, from the day I met her to the day we climbed Mount Nibel. Winter comes early to the mountains; it was three more months from the day we climbed Mount Nibel to the Shinra winter ball.

"And, after that, spring came all too soon. Four months from the ball until the day she broke my heart.

"And nine months after that was the beginning of the end."



"But all of that was far ahead of me, that winter. I knew only that moment and the wonder and promise it held. I'd never known anything so honest, so pure, as what I had with Lucrecia. I've known nothing like it since. It came into my dark life like a meteor, unexpected, brilliant, and devastating.

"I expected a routine assignment in another dreary backwater, days filled with haughty Shinra bureaucrats and nights filled with books and solitude. I didn't mind assignments like that, to be honest. They were a respite from more active duty in Midgar, from the kinds of assignments I both excelled in and despised. Nibelheim seemed like one of those assignments. It seemed quiet. It seemed uneventful. It was not.

"Even when I first became aware of Lucrecia, I never expected what eventually happened. I took little notice of her when I read the briefing files before the trip. Gast and Hojo—the highest-ranking scientists in Shinra—and two top-ranking students to assist them. Typical enough for an elite Shinra project. Three Turks were assigned to assure their continued privacy and safety in Nibelheim, a small, out-of-the-way town, well-suited for covert operations. Also routine.

"I read about the JENOVA Project during the trip to Nibelheim, or at least all I could glean from the files Shinra had given me. They were company explanations, for the most part, not the original scientific papers. It seemed like an intriguing and disturbing concept. Even the name of the project had that same inspiring, yet chilling aura. Jenova. New God.

"And yet, even the Project did not expect what it eventually birthed…"



"I first became intrigued with Lucrecia—'intrigued' is the best word for that beginning state, some early point on the road that led to infatuation, devotion and eventually, after I lost her, to obsession—after I had my first late shift covering Dr. Gast. He was working alone in his study, and to pass the time, since I seemed interested, he told me a little about the Project. He said that one of the students, Lucrecia Gainsborough, a specialist in cells, seemed very close to a major breakthrough. He suggested I read some of the papers she'd written on the work leading up to the Project. He even lent me his copies of the papers, a very generous act; I was, after all, nothing but a Turk, a mindless bodyguard.

"Over the next three nights I read her work. Afterward, I found myself going back to the personnel files with a new interest. Lucrecia Gainsborough, born in Midgar, just short of twenty-three years old—only two weeks older than myself, in fact. Graduate student at the Academy. Specialist in genetics and cellular biology. Employee of the Research Department of Shinra Inc.

"I'd read all of that before. Now I wanted to know more.

"So I questioned the other Turks, and the Shinra Mansion housekeeper, who told me of Lucrecia's fondness for the greenhouse…"



"That winter, as I've said, was the best time of my normally dreary life, though it was that autumn when I first started to become desperately infatuated. That autumn, after I began to get to know her, I would take any chance I got to speak to her, and then worry afterwards that I'd made a fool of myself. Even during the dispatch to Corel—those insane two days that, in the end, changed so much—I traveled back to Nibelheim just to see her, heartsick and broken, craving her presence more than I ever had before. I expected her company would calm me. I didn't expect to tell her why I'd been sent to Corel. I didn't expect her to forgive me for it.

"I never expected it to affect me so much, but it did. I changed under her influence. I'd never been a sentimental person. I still don't consider myself so. But somehow, without even meaning to, she slipped past my thickest defenses. Just by being what she was—intelligent and beautiful, caring and flawed, everything I always wanted, though I didn't realize it until then—just by being herself, Lucrecia made me human. To this day, no one else has ever had that effect on me. My soul is a locked room that only she knew how to enter. Only one other person even came remotely close, but, like Lucrecia, I lost him in the end to the one creature I despised most out of all of creation.

"Sometimes, now, I find it hard to believe the way I felt around her. It seems impossible that the hopelessly romantic, anti-heroic young man who lived so enthusiastically for his beloved was actually me. But I was a different man then, even beyond Lucrecia's influence. Many very long, very dark years lie between Valentine the Turk and Valentine the monster. I was changed by the emptiness of those years, and by the devastating events that caused the emptiness. When I lost the only two people I'd ever truly cared for, from no other reasons than ambition and greed—when I saw how truly evil humanity can become—I lost faith in the world. I lost interest. In a way I lost part of my soul. Because of that loss, as well as the warped body that reflects it, I no longer consider myself a part of the human race. I am no longer Lucrecia's Vincent. I know no other way to explain it.

"But this was before that, as well… time flows so strangely now that I have no way to mark it. That winter, then. After we climbed Mount Nibel and I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I loved her more than anything I'd ever known. Although, in those days, that didn't narrow it down much. To my knowledge I'd never loved anything, except abstract ideas: Truth. Beauty. Solitude.

"Forgiveness…

"And now, her. In Lucrecia, I truly loved a human being for the first time in my life, and probably for the last time. After Mount Nibel she became the brightest light in my life, and, I still believe, I was somehow the brightest light in hers. I still don't know why she loved me, cold-blooded killer that I am. And I will never understand why she was convinced that she was unworthy of me.

"But in that brief stretch of time, those three months in heaven, we didn't think about that. We were content to bask in each other's company, learning all we could about each other. I still don't know what she saw in me. But for the moment I was content to know that she saw anything at all, that she was interested in me no matter what the reason. Lucrecia loved me, when no one else would. That was all I needed to be happy, for the first and last time in my life.

"At the end of the three months came the Shinra winter ball. I'd asked her to accompany me as soon as I got the invitation, a small ice-blue envelope delivered to my room in the Nibelheim inn.

"Ice-blue…but the color I associate most with that ball is crimson…"