This fic is dedicated to Jhaylin.

"Do you believe in God, Mr. Valentine?"

Vincent rolls onto his side and coughs blood through gritted teeth. His entire body shakes. Agony melts through his chest. The bullet has missed his heart, but it is of little consequence. The Turk's heart is already broken. And the pain is too much for any human being to bear.

Hojo is not a sadist. He is merely merciless, and sees the world through sterile laboratory spectacles. He also knows how to hate. One of the very few emotions he will ever experience, and it was taught to him – taught to Hojo, world-renowned scientist and professor – by Vincent Valentine, a thug.

Jealousy he has always known. Mako green eyes had forever followed the late Professor Gast, craving his brilliance, his status and his spark. He had solved that problem with destruction, sacrificing the essence of his profession to excel in it, losing his sanity and his limits all at once. There is nothing Hojo cannot do. He distributes life itself, he sires the messianic, he performs miracles.

He is envious.

Beautiful Mr. Valentine. Calm, mysterious, polite Mr. Valentine with tragedy and heartbreak written into his very name. Dashing and silent, with his accursed soulful eyes. The master of machismo, turning guns and murder, a legacy of sin, into grace and beauty. And she fell in love with him.

Lucrecia fell so hard she almost matched his devotion. They were obsessed with the sight of one another. Hojo wanted his laboratory assistant back. He wanted something he could not build or break or feel, but he wanted it, all the more because it was incomprehensible. He was reduced to watching – of all people – a Turk, deny him that chance.

"He is an assassin, Lucrecia! You cannot marry a killer!"

But she had given him a look. A pitiful look. He did not hear her next words; they were lost in the endless hatred exploding in his mind.

"But I love him."

So he blackmailed her. She married him, and not the Turk. Hojo thought he had won, but he was too intelligent not to see that she still loved another man. Vincent refused to abandon her despite her betrayal, Lucrecia had an affair, and Hojo learnt hatred. When a child grew inside his wife that could not belong to him – because everything about Hojo was sterilized – he made of her a living experiment.

Vincent watched, tormented, as Lucrecia was stuck with needles, cut apart and sewn together, transplanted and fused and tested. Science, he told her, is not worth this. He did not realise that Lucrecia cared nothing for science anymore. She suffered for Vincent, who was never to know of the axe Hojo held above his head.

The experiment killed Lucrecia. Sephiroth killed his own mother simply by being born. Vincent wept over her body until his own men dragged him away, and the Shin-Ra claimed their equipment, for analysing, and at those words the last loving piece of the Turk died inside. He tore down the mansion stairs to confront Hojo, confront him with tears and fury, and the scientist shot him.

"Do you believe in God, I said, Mr. Valentine?"

Hojo seizes a fistful of hair and snarls at the face he could not compete with.

"A man like you. You must, you must believe in God."

Vincent spits blood at him. Hojo drops him and reaches again for the gun, but there is no fight left in the other man. He is bleeding and dying, for love.

"Monster, Hojo. You monster."

The professor laughs. It is a mark of true genius to be branded as such. He laughs at the pathetic excuse for glory on his laboratory floor, and he laughs through the hate. Vincent makes a poor hero. He cries. He does not even attempt to kill his conqueror.

"You think you can die with her? See… heaven, with her? You can't. I'll not let you die, Vincent, not ever. And if you do ever see her again, I promise you, you'll be the one she hates."

Vincent Valentine stared, until the tranquillizer turned the world to darkness. He stared at Hojo, at the room, at nothing in particular, because all he saw was her face. Blankly, emptily, failing to make sense of the words of a madman, struggling to breathe through the mental cage he was trapped inside without Lucrecia, feeling beneath the pain and despair… still, invincible, love.