Chapter 1: Genesis
"And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." Genesis 3:15
She was burning up.
The fever was a live thing, crawling under her skin, tearing through her veins, pulsing behind her eyes. No matter how she lay, the fever was always pounding through her head, throbbing through every cell in her body as if it were trying to grow, to expand beyond the boundaries of her flesh. Sweat plastered long tendrils of chestnut hair to her face, each laboring breath that she sucked in pulling tickling strands across her lips, and each gasping breath that she let out hot and dry and always tasting of it.
I hate you, I hate you, you horrible THING! You can't have him I won't let you he's mine and I won't let you touch him!
My husband, my lover, my son...my husband, my lover, my son...
It, Jenova, her husband's one true passion and love, the creature to which her son had been sacrificed. She had always refused to refer to the alien as "she" or "her" or "Jenova." It was always "it" or "the specimen"...something impersonal and inferior...some small, meaningless way in which she denied the creature's place in their lives. Their lives...which had once been their shared life, their partnership, their marriage...until the specimen had been found. And oh how excited they had been. Passion and fervor had coursed in their veins as the fever now ravaged through hers. Sleepless nights, endless days, all spent in pursuit of the creature that had waited, had bided its time, sleeping away the years until its day should come anew. Logical experiments carried out with the utmost precision and care, new ideas coming upon them in crazy floods and lightning strikes of inspiration and intuition, theories and suppositions and pure wonder at the treasure chest of knowledge this alien symbolized for them.
Pandora's box.
Lucrecia moaned as a sudden, shivering chill grasped her body, the fever-dreams of her past disappearing from her mind's eye like a mist burned away by the sun. Her spine arched against the pain and she rolled onto her back, the back of her head supporting her upper body over the icy floor she lay upon, hands clenched into tight fists...mute and helpless gesture of defiance. But there was no fighting the fever, the pain...it. There had been a child in her womb, and that child had been the magnet to which the cells and mako were drawn to...but the child was gone and the cells were preying upon her body now, ravenous and cruel. The cells were a sentient, starving army bent on taking over her body, seeking destruction rather than domination, for it had no further use for this discarded husk. Lucrecia had served her purpose.
The spasm passed for the moment, and the woman seemed to crumple bonelessly against the frozen ground, her sweat-drenched hair freezing to the ice on which she lay. How long? How long had she been lying there, lost and lonely in this barren, ice-bound cave?
A cave...a cave! God I'm so tired, I just want to die, let me die let me sleep let me rest. A cave, a cave...waterfall and rocks and icy cold...so cold...just let me rest a while, sleep a while, just let me die. I'm so tired, so tired of this pain, this horrible pain...let me die don't let that thing do this to me let me die...
She dragged her aching feet across the uneven terrain, days past caring about the wear on her shoes, no longer feeling the blisters form and rise and burst on her feet, not even able to remember anymore where she was running to. South? South of Nibelheim...but the river blocked her way...follow the river, follow the river...day after pain-filled day. One shoe jarred against a rock and the woman crashed to her hands and knees, sharp pebbles and grit tearing at her soft skin, the dry ground underneath drinking greedily at the blood offering thus produced. A soft cry of pain wrenched its way out of her throat, muffled and subdued out of habit...swallow the pain, swallow it down like the medicines, like the potions, like the serums. Don't cry out loud, don't let out any complaints, any doubts, and don't throw up any food either, because you're eating for two, now.
But she wasn't...not anymore. Her belly no longer swelled out before her, and the missing weight now unbalanced her as much as the bulk of the child had a month ago. The tattered fabric of her lab coat fell smooth and straight down her stomach, hiding the sloppy stitches - it didn't need to be pretty, she was going to die anyway, he had said - and the hideous, unnatural scar tissue that grew thicker with each passing day. Hazy blue and glaring purple ropes of tissue that pushed and strained at the dead black stitches imbedded in her body...alien flesh that was creeping over her, taking her over, changing her, replacing her, eating her away...
Lucrecia sobbed aloud, for there was no one to hide her pain from any longer. One bloodied hand remained trembling on the rocky soil, supporting her as she sat and sobbed and slowly continued on her journey towards Becoming something different, something else. The thick, leather-bound book and monstrous pistol she'd been cradling - as if they were her missing child - has spilled onto the ground before her, and she reached out her free hand towards them. The only items she'd carried away with her...the only two items she'd kept hidden, kept secret, kept away from her husband...not counting the pain and doubt and fear, of course. The book she'd discovered and read and stolen and hidden...unable to believe that it was her husband's...unwilling to believe that he had thought up such a horrific experiment, much less carried it out against her lover. And the gun...the pistol, the weapon, the elegant and deadly steel. A gift, and what a gift. An instrument of death for the man who symbolized the final, fatal wound in her marriage. A present to be opened and who knew what use it might be put to?
Come find me, Vincent...come find me, please. He said you were dead but I saw...I saw the instruments, the blood, the chemicals and syringes and God oh God all that blood. The gurney where I'd given birth and even more blood than what I'd spilled, the sutures, the blood-soaked gauze, the IVs and the specimens and the blood, all that blood, all of your blood, Vincent. You're alive, you're alive, I know you are...he wouldn't go through all of that horror that experimenting that creation and then let you die...
Her body still one writhing, pulsing scream of pain, Lucrecia had pushed herself off of the bloodstained cot that had been put together upstairs in the mansion, barely hearing the crash of the frame against the floor over the roar of her blood in her ears. The pain that centered itself in her womb was no match for the anguish of her triple-betrayal. Her husband, her lover, her son...she'd given all of herself to each in turn and had received only loneliness for love, abandonment for adoration, and death for devotion. Trembling from all her hurts, and faltering with each step, yet somehow she'd managed to wrap a coat around her shivering frame, slip shoes onto her feet, and take away with her one of her husband's secrets and one of her own.
She no longer had a son, but she still had her life, despite all predictions that morning would find her body cold and stiff on the cot. She would run, she would hide, she would bide her time as patiently as that thing in the glorified fish tank that her husband worshipped. And someday she would reclaim her son but for now...run, hide, and wait. She no longer had a lover, but she knew, she knew that he was yet alive somewhere. She would take the gun she'd secretly commissioned for him and find him and give it to him and who knew what then? Perhaps a bullet for her husband. Her husband, the husband who had used her and left her to die without a backwards glance as he stole her son away and left her to listen to her lover's screams drift up from the basement as she lay sobbing on the cot, bound to the sticky canvas as much by the drugs in her bloodstream as by the pain in her heart.
Her husband...who'd written in proud detail all of the inhuman triumphs of his mind and talented hands. The ultimate experiment in revenge, oh what a dedicated scientist, what a triumphant genius this husband of hers. Tearing her unhealed wounds with every step, she'd made her trip down the wooden spiral of stairs, dripping blood and tears all the way down to her own level of hell. And for her pains, for her trip fueled by desperation and despair and a vague hope that she might at least die by his side...she had found only evidence, and no body. No Vincent, no Turk, no lover...only her lover's blood everywhere and the proof of her husband's madness scattered every which way across the nightmarish laboratory and the book which had been her husband's most recent brainchild.
And oh how she'd hated. At that moment the hate had risen up in her just like love and need had overflowed in the past. It had consumed her every fiber in one raging burst of flame and for that moment she had stood up straight and tall and terrible, the pain forgotten, the wounds forgotten, with only one thought in her mind and one goal in her life and one passion in her heart...to hate. But the moment had passed, the hastily-stitched cuts in her body seeping blood and unnamable fluids and searing hot pain. The moment had passed and she'd bent nearly double, hugging her arms across her deflated stomach as if the pain were a bubble that she could hold back, hold down, hold in. Dizzy with blood loss and exhaustion and a strangeness in her body that she couldn't define, she flung out one arm towards a table, suddenly certain that she would black out then and there, crashing forward to crack open her skull on the stone floor. Dead woman...no, discarded incubator, no longer functional now that it was no longer needed...piddling detail that they would find it in the basement rather than on the cot upstairs. Either way, done deal...sweep it up with the rest of the shattered remains of her life.
No!
So she'd slapped one arm down onto the nearby table, knocking beakers and jars and trays full of scalpels onto the floor in a symphony of crashes that trailed off into small tinklings of broken glass. One hand on the table, one hand still clutching her throbbing, leaking, unfamiliar stomach...and head hanging down like a dog's underneath a pounding sun, breath coming in small, gasping sobs and eyes staring fixedly at the floor because she didn't have the mental resources at the moment to look around. Shattered jars reflected lamplight back at her, their once-carefully preserved contents spilled out in puddles of noxious liquid, gracefully floating forms now grotesquely weighted down by gravity and age. Specimens and failed experiments, pieces and parts and pathetic remnants now lay together on the floor amidst their broken prisons, they themselves tattered and torn and falling to pieces.
Like her life. This was her life. She was a glass jar and they'd put a specimen inside of her...but now the specimen was gone and so they'd simply thrown the jar to the floor because they were done with her, they didn't need her anymore, she'd become useless. The dizziness and the threat of fainting faded slightly, and Lucrecia reached down towards the floor and picked up one of the curved, glinting pieces with one hand. This was what they'd done to her. A small spark of anger flared up again, and pale fingers clenched convulsively around the glass shard in her hands. The pain that shot up her hand to her elbow startled her, as if she'd thought that her capacity for pain had been reached long ago, and she opened her fingers to let the now-bloodied glass slip back to the floor to shatter yet again into smaller, more slender pieces. Brilliant diamond daggers...no more than three inches long, some of them even smaller...but oh so deadly if they were applied correctly. This was her life. This was her. They'd thrown the jar to the floor because they didn't need it anymore but she wasn't done with them. She was a discarded container and now she wasn't...she was broken and useless but sharp and deadly and she hated and she would cut him, cut it, she would cut them deep.
And then her eyes fell upon the book on the table.
Oh this terrible book, this God-awful book, my Vincent, come find me, come find me, please. I wasn't there for you and you weren't there for me but I know, I know what he did to you. It's here, it's in here every sick detail and every demonic hope that he had for his experiments, everything he hoped to do to you. Regeneration and deconstruction and transformation, oh my God was I ever in love was he ever human? Come find me, Vincent, come find me, please so I can show you, so you can know, so maybe you can fight this thing, this THING he's put inside you like I couldn't fight what was inside me.
And the thing that was inside of her was now on the outside of her as well. She could no longer pretend that the fact that she was still alive was a mercy from God, or a medical miracle...the miracle belonged to the Goddess in the Glass. And the stigmata that marked her was the bruise-colored flesh that roped along her body, tendrils and vines and fingers that crept over her skin and claimed her as captured territory. She had crawled her way up out of the basement with the book in her hands, dragged her body out of the mansion with the gun lying against the book in her arms, and then she'd walked and fallen and crawled and stumbled on day after day, night after night. She had cried and dreamed and kept walking and walking...and then the fever had begun to burn in her body. Some scientist, some biologist, some doctor...she hadn't even thought of bringing any healing potions with her despite all her injuries, her wounds. She was a scientist, a biologist, a doctor...she could handle the sight of wounds and stitches and infected flesh. But when she'd clawed away her clothing to look for the red, swollen scars and burning skin of an infection what she'd seen had made her scream. She'd run away from the mansion but the monster had come with her.
A cave...a cave!
She was so tired, God, how tired. She'd traveled for so many miles, for so many days, only to discover that she'd killed herself the day she'd let him inject those cells into her body. For the experiment, for the baby, for everything they could learn, they could create, they could do. For him...for he who had used her as a specimen jar and then thrown her to the ground to shatter. And she no longer felt sharp and deadly and glittering bright...she was just so tired, she just wanted to rest, to sleep, to die. For even if she could strike out...how to strike out at the cancerous entity growing in her own body?
Lucrecia gave a small, broken whimper as she stared with glassy, blind eyes across the icy floor to the glowing entrance of the cavern, seeing visions of herself in her fever-fogged mind. She had stumbled inside, the fever beginning to light up her entire body, and had collapsed here in the back on her way towards the strange, glittering altar that had seemed to beckon to her. The book...the book and the gun had been so heavy, so very heavy, but somehow she'd stubbornly clung to the idea that it would be...wrong, somehow, to simply place them on the ground. And so when she'd spied the ice-bound dais...hazy logic had spurred her shaking legs towards the icy table. But she hadn't reached it. Five feet away from her goal her limbs had finally given one last tremble and collapsed. And since then...feverish visions, nightmares that haunted her sleep, stark moments of lucidity like cold water thrown over her gasping mind. How long? How long had she been lying there?
Her mind struggled with the question and the concept it symbolized. Time...there was time, she knew it, had known it once, and was sure it still existed. But how long had she been lying there? This was the question her mind returned to every time she drifted up out of a dream, a vision, a nightmare. And no answers ever came...there was only snatches of memories marking time long past, and a fleeting remembrance of the light at the mouth of the cavern dimming and fading and blazing bright again. Morning and evenings that passed by the cave's entrance as time stood still within for the deadly, dying glass shard that Hojo had thrown away.
I'm dying. I'm dying. He took my baby and left me the monster and I'm that glass jar lying broken on the floor and I'm dying. I'm going to die here alone in this cave on this floor with this fever burning me up and those cells eating my body and that THING's voice in my head. Oh God I'm so tired so hot I'm burning I'm dying...
Flat on her back in the middle of her cold blue cave, Lucrecia slipped away once more into her nightmares.
