Part 3: Lost/Found
3-1. Voice of Dissent
The first month passed, and Lucrecia acted outwardly as if everything were the same. She went through the motions of work and leisure, though she studied the Project notes at night--the secret Project notes of the hidden room, not those intended for the boardrooms of Midgar. She read obsessively of the Jenova mice, of their short, tortured lives. She read this in her spare time, and more histories of the Ancients. All else was work and waiting.
Vincent slid through her life like a shadow, praying against signs of change. He slept in her room sometimes, and his embrace was tight and almost despairing. He spoke less often to her than he once had, though his few words were touched with hope. If the procedure hadn't taken, he reasoned, she could still back out. But even as he told her this, in his eyes lurked the wary hurt of the betrayed.
One day Lucrecia prepared the test herself, in the hidden room, while Hojo worked in the main lab. She knew the result before it came back. She'd always known it would be positive.
She reported the results, and the Mako treatments began the next day.
After the veiled menace of their last meeting in the room, Hojo's professional calm was a shock. He was waiting in the room when she arrived, a clipboard clasped to his thin chest. He nodded at her, almost solemnly, and motioned to the chair. "Have a seat, my dear," he murmured, and the offhanded endearment now seemed like less like a threat than a strange sort of tribute.
The chair still stood in the locked laboratory, a dark wedge in the bleached white room, and from then on, Lucrecia always remembered that odd creak of the plastic surface against her skin. But what burned into her mind that day in May was not the darkness of the vinyl, or the dead white of the walls.
It was green…
Hojo retreated to the far end of the room and returned with an armful of apparatus, which he quietly set up by her elbow. A steel stand held up a small silver bag, stamped with the warning insignia of Mako radiation. From the bottom of the bag snaked a length of surgical tubing, and to the end of it, as she watched, he fitted a sterile silver needle.
"Fifty percent Mako and saline," Hojo said quietly, as if reciting a prayer. "And a forty percent suspension of Jenova cells."
Already? Lucrecia thought hopelessly, though she had read the procedures before countless times. For best results, the treatments should be started as soon as possible… And most of the treated mice—the mothers—lived, according to the notes. Most of them lived.
For once, Lucrecia hoped that Hojo had told the truth.
The scientist loosened a clamp at the bottom of the silver bag, and slowly, eerily, a thread of glowing green flowed down the length of the tubing. Lucrecia stared at the dull green glow, captivated by a mixture of fascination and fear. Mako. The stuff of life itself, the Ancients said… sucked out and bottled up and stamped with Shinra's seal. Bottled heaven, is what it is… heaven or hell. It all depends…
When the fluid approached the end of the tube, Hojo tightened a second clamp above the needle, arresting its path. He stepped back for a moment, almost reverently, the needle balanced carefully between his fingers. Lucrecia reached out and cupped her hand around the thread of Mako, watching the faded light it reflected onto her skin.
She cleared her throat. "You're sure this is only half and half?"
Hojo nodded. "Positive. I wouldn't jeopardize the life of the Project so soon, would I?"
"The life of the Project?" Lucrecia looked up at him critically. He avoided her gaze, focusing on the splinter of silver in his hand. For a moment he looked almost embarrassed, like a child caught telling fibs by a suspicious mother. Embarrassed… and, of all things, young. It struck her then for the first time how young Hojo really was. She'd always thought of him as an old man, assumed he'd worked for Shinra longer than she'd been in school. Yet now, as he hesitated, finally silent and caught off guard, she realized that without his usual overbearing attitude, his thin face seemed less old than she expected. Not much older than me, really…twenty-five, twenty-seven? Probably graduated the Academy just before I got in… my God, how could that be? He's so… so bitter, so used. What in the world happened to him? I wouldn't want that life…
What am I thinking? Stop. Just stop. Think of what this man has said, think of what he's done! He brought it all onto himself, don't fool yourself. He chose to be this heartless bastard, and he deserves every minute of his long, bitter life.
But…this is all he knows, I guess. At this age… I thought he might have been kinder as a young man, or something, but that can't be it. This is how he is as a young man; he's never been otherwise.
But if so…what will he be like in twenty years?…
"Yes, the life of the Project, and… well, yours, of course," Hojo muttered. "Shall we continue?"
Lucrecia let go of the tube of Mako. "All right." She drew a deep breath and laid her arm back down on the black vinyl. "Go ahead."
Afterward she returned to the main lab for a few hours. She had some work to do, routine tasks that, now, meant very little. The Midgar contingent still expected results, though, as did Dr. Gast. And she needed something to fill the time, hour by hour, week by endless week. So, although the true future of the JENOVA Project slept deep within her body, Lucrecia opened her old notebook and consulted the most recent round of tests. Hojo remained seated at his desk—his official desk—and bent low over masses of paperwork, throwing suspicious, almost nervous glances at her when he thought she wouldn't notice. She itched to rid herself of his presence, after the last half-hour, lying perfectly still while the green thread of energy—clouded faintly by the experimental cells—flowed through the hypodermic needle into her blood. Hojo had pretended not to watch it, but he could not look away; nor could he dull the spark of triumph in his dark eyes. Lucrecia longed to escape him, for a while. She knew that the beginning of the treatments meant that she would not be able to avoid him for long. But now, for a while, she wished to be alone, to think, to grow accustomed to this new strangeness in her body.
And strange it was; even as she looked over the photographs of the test results, her vision began to swim. She blinked, wiped her glasses futilely with lens-cleaning tissue, and finally resorted to rubbing her temples as if to stave off a headache.
Hojo looked up, predictably. "Is something wrong?"
Lucrecia swallowed. "No, I'm all right." The room whirled drunkenly around her, and she grabbed the edge of the table to keep from falling. A chair scraped across the stone floor, and a moment later she felt Hojo's grip on her shoulders, steadying her from behind.
"This is normal," he said in a quiet tone which he probably meant to sound comforting, but succeeded only in making her shiver. Normal? How can any of this be normal? "For the first few days after exposure, at any rate. You should probably go home. Get some rest."
"No…" she whispered, unable to voice the whole thought.
No, and be alone, I can't stand to be alone
—always—
now.
A fragment of a thought had shot through her mind, like an echo, faint and garbled. A wave of sickness rolled slowly through her body, and she slid off the chair, crumpling against Hojo's knees; he was too weak to keep her from falling. Lucrecia braced herself against the reeling sickness, praying that she wouldn't throw up, or faint here on the flagstones at the feet of this monster.
Just let me get through this and I'll never complain again…just let me get up…
"Lucrecia!" The voice was so achingly familiar that her heart started to race a moment before her lips formed the word, almost soundlessly.
"Vincent…"
Hojo seized her shoulders and pulled her to her feet as the Turk banged the door shut behind him. "Lucrecia, you were supposed to meet me at twelve; where were you?"
"Nowhere…here," she answered vaguely, fumbling to catch the edge of the table and steady herself. Hojo's grip tightened on her shoulders, and even in her confusion she recognized it as a warning. She pulled out of his grasp and managed to move away a few steps. "I'm sorry, I didn't realize the time."
"It's two-thirty! —And why were you on the floor?"
"She fell," Hojo answered shortly. "Shouldn't you be on duty?"
Vincent's voice chilled sharply. Lucrecia could not look at him, could barely raise her eyes from the floor for fear of bringing on a fresh wave of dizziness. "I wasn't speaking to you, Doctor. And incidentally, I'm stationed in the Mansion today. Lucrecia and I were supposed to meet for lunch in the greenhouse," he added, his anger touched with a hint of challenge.
—ha. Him, not—
Lucrecia pressed her hands to her forehead, trying not to show her fear. The strange thought was gone, absorbed into the dizzying swirl in her mind. She dimly heard the two men continue talking, but it took all of her concentration to command her watery muscles to stay solid, to keep her swaying body upright. Their sharp voices cut through the haze, oblivious to her difficulty.
Vincent demanded, "Is that what you're doing? Experimenting on the baby, on Lucrecia's baby?"
"Don't be so sentimental, boy. Besides, the thing's half mine."
A cold shudder passed through Vincent's body, and his face hardened. His eyes were dark steel, staring down the scientist's impassive stone glare. "You don't know that."
"Believe it if you wish, Turk, but the truth will come out soon enough."
"What would you know about truth?" spat the Turk.
Hojo's hands tensed into fists at his sides, but he did not move. "Don't tempt me. I can have you sent back to Midgar before you knew what was happening. You'd never see her again."
Vincent seemed about to speak, but stopped, frustrated. His left hand scratched the back of his head, and as it dropped Hojo's eyes riveted on it. The scientist spoke again, his voice low and tense. "What this Project does is no business of yours, Turk. You'd be well advised to stay out of it."
A level calm had returned to Vincent's voice, more steady than Hojo's poisoned murmur. "Lives are at stake, Hojo. You could hurt them, both of them. If there's any humanity in you at all, you'll realize what you're doing."
The scientist's fury exploded again in a harsh shout. "I realize perfectly what I'm doing, Turk! You have no idea what I'm doing! How could you know? What the hell do you know, you gorilla, you walking firearm? A machine could do what you do, and twice as well! How dare you pretend to understand a mind of my caliber!"
"You think you're a better human being because of your position." It was an observation, not a question.
Hojo made a strangled, guttural sound in his throat. "I am better than you, you muscleheaded oaf, and you'll damn well remember that if you know what's good for you!"
"You don't understand," Vincent said quietly. "You can't do this. No one can, in good conscience. How can you play with others' lives like this? It's not ethical and it's not proper procedure. I do know that much."
The scientist scoffed. "You know nothing. Nothing. How could you possibly grasp what we stand for? How could you know what it is to follow a goal, a real goal, Turk, something greater than individuals, greater than Shinra's damned rules, greater than life itself? What you know is gut reaction and brute force. We know…" Hojo paused for breath for a moment, as if he'd forgotten his train of thought. "Lucrecia and I know what this Project means. To us, to the Corporation, to the entire Planet. We understand what it means to dedicate ourselves to an ideal, to a goal. What have you ever done, Turk, except crack poor fools' heads open? What would you know about dedication, about devotion? What could you possibly know?"
Vincent was silent. Lucrecia finally raised her eyes from the floor; he was watching her, his face set into a cold, logical mask, his eyes burning with disappointment and hurt. "I understand it," he said, almost too softly to be heard, without looking away from Lucrecia. "I understand more than you'll ever know."
Hojo turned, following the Turk's gaze. "Well?" he barked. "What do you have to say about all of this? The boy wants to hear; so tell him. What will you do?"
Lucrecia froze, and the sickness in her body and mind lurched along with a new surge of fear. The two men faced her, one in white, one in dark blue. Both waited silently for her answer.
No… no, don't make me do this, she pleaded. Vincent, you have to understand, please… it's not forever, he won't have me forever, just a little while… and at the end I'll be more than I ever was, better than I am now, just be patient with me, please… just trust me, love, you have to…
…Hojo, you bastard, if you ever had a shred of decency in you, don't make me say this in front of him… he doesn't deserve this, he doesn't deserve any of this…
She remembered the cold white of the hidden room, the colder scratch of his voice, the silver flash of the needle with its slow green drip. The room spun slowly around her, but she held her place steadily. I have to do this. I have to. It's too late now to stop, Vincent, you have to understand that. I have to finish this thing I've started…
—trapped—
Lucrecia closed her eyes, willing away the ragged voice in her head, willing away the cold sting of Hojo's stare and the deep pain in Vincent's eyes. "I will do this," she said quietly, evenly. "I have to."
She saw Vincent's head drop and reached out for him, but it was not enough to keep her from falling. A greenish darkness slid over her like a wave, and dragged her in too deep to see any more.
