Once a Man
Chapter 12: The End
You may ask yourself why I put Vincent where I did. On the surface it looks morbid to put him in a coffin and seal him in a crypt. It was actually the perfect place to put him-the Ancient's city aside. Few people go traipsing around crypts opening coffins –the failure seems to be the exception, but he apparently had some prodding from a sick little note that I suspect Gast left- so I felt that he'd be left in peace till he recovered. The coffin had two purposes. First, it would blend neatly into the crypt, so there was even less chance of him being disturbed. Second, it was the perfect size for him to sleep in, allowing him enough room for those long legs of his, but small enough to protect him from him accidentally hurting himself from rolling, thrashing, or convulsing as the medicine worked through his unconscious body. Even the lid and sides were perfect since it kept him from falling and having unpleasant guests like lice, ticks, spiders, mice, rats or other little beasties dropping in for a quick hello and a bite to eat. I also added a few improvements that normal coffins don't have, such as thick foam rubber padding for comfort; a filtered ventilation system that would not only keep him breathing clean air, but would also occasionally run a cleaning routine to keep him from waking up with years of sloughed off skin, hair, and bodily excretions caked around him; a heating cooling system that monitored his skin surface temperature to maintain the optimal level of comfort, and a complete monitoring system that would instantly alert me if his vital signs changed.
I was proud of my accomplishment.
It took a few weeks for the designers and engineers completed the construction, so I busied myself with preparations for his eventual waking. I refused to think about how he might wake up as nothing more than an animal in human form. I only thought about how one day he would wake up healthy, sane, and, in my wildest of fantasies, back to normal.
Veld came to say goodbye. He arrived with the coffin, looking grim as he walked into my lab. He'd always been a slyly humorous man, dangerous, but still snarkily funny. Now he looked much the same as he did the last time I saw him. The only differences being a few lines in his face and the amount of gray in his hair. He had a few boxes in his arms that he set down on a nearby table.
"Hojo." His voice had changed from the sardonic, amused tones he'd used before into a level, dead, professional tone that became his trademark.
I tried to summon a smile to greet him, but it came out all wrong, so I gave it up. "Veld."
"It didn't work?" He glanced over to Vincent's room.
I'd sedated Vincent again so he was curled on the floor in a sad bundle of sharply protrubent bones. I had dragged another mattress down for him to sleep on, but somehow he kept shifting off and ending up on the concrete with little more than a blanket snagged around one pale foot.
Veld walked over and squatted down to look at his friend. "He doesn't look good."
I painfully got up and hobbled over to him. Vincent had shattered my pelvis in one of his more violent moments before I sedated him. I'd spent two weeks in traction and had just graduated to walking around without a cane. I never lost the limp. It was just one more memento of that lovely time.
"That's why I'm stopping." I leaned against the barred door.
If you're wondering why our conversation was so titillating, it was because there really was little we wanted to say to each other. Vincent and I weren't the only ones to be hurt by Gast's and Lucrecia's plans. I never asked Vincent about Veld. I knew they were partners. I knew that if Vincent had an assignment that was classified as high risk, he would refuse to go without Veld as his back up. Veld was the one Vincent trusted, relied on, and confided in and Veld had never once failed him. I could guess that they might have been lovers at one time. What had happened to change that, I don't know. I never, when Vincent and I finally settled down into couplehood, felt threatened by Veld's presence in our lives. Vincent's death, resurrection, and illness had taken a huge toll on both of us and I was perfectly aware that something was dying in Veld as we looked at Vincent's broken form.
"Got something for him." Veld turned away and headed back to the boxes he'd brought in.
I limped slowly back to my seat as he opened the box and held up what looked to be like a metal weapon.
You've seen it, so I won't coyly dance around it. It's that gauntlet he wears everywhere.
I really hope he isn't sleeping with it still. Vincent is a rather restless sleeper and the bedding he'd shred with that thing must be what keeps him so poor he can't afford new clothes.
He brought it over to me and set it down. "Battle glove." He nodded to it then nodded to Vincent. "He designed it for close combat."
I picked it up. It was surprisingly light and, I found much to my and my finger's surprise, sharp. "He designed it? He never liked knives."
Veld shrugged. "It's a good secondary weapon." He tapped the plates. "Armor for protection and blades for defense."
It clattered in my hands as I turned it over.
"It's his." Veld turned away to get the second box. "Who knows what he'll wake up to. It'll give him something…just in case."
Just in case he wasn't there. Just in case I wasn't there. Just in case he woke up and found himself in the hands of enemies. I was guessing he'd wake up in twenty years. Would either Veld or I be alive? What would the world look like in twenty years? Gordo and his generals were starting to make threatening sounds from Wutai. Would Gordo try to "liberate" the Planet? Would Vincent wake up to face Wutaian soldiers with guns, or maybe something worse? Turks have never been well loved in Wutai.
I never could have guessed that he'd be woken up by a group of terrorists, would be promptly hauled off to shoot me, and hunt down and kill his own son.
I nodded and he handed me the second box. It was much smaller than the first. When I opened it I found a file and stacks of pictures. I smiled as I saw the top ones were of Sephiroth looking plump and happy. In one, he was sitting on the floor with a small stuffed elfadunk clutched in one hand and grinning toothlessly at the camera, his white hair a soft halo around his head. Vincent would have these too. I'd write a note explaining them and put them in the air tight trunk I'd acquired with some of his things.
"Keep going." Veld scooped everything out of the box and put them down on the table in front of me.
I flipped past the first pictures.
I wish I hadn't.
In a mad, unreal, irrational way, I sometimes think that if I never flipped past those first happy, smiling pictures, Sephiroth would have grown up to be a happy, smiling man. He'd have grown up in a nice foster home filled with toys. He'd have gone to school, made friends, played sports, dated a nice girl, gotten married. He'd have worked in a nice job, had kids, come home to hugs and cries of welcome. He'd have retired, had grandkids, moved to Mideel.
Jenova.
A tiny, possessed Sephiroth snarled at me from the later pictures. Sephiroth grinning a bloody grin with the body of a dead rat in his toddler fist greeted me. Sephiroth frozen in the middle of attacking a woman who was sprawled half out of the picture. One picture after another of violence no child under two years old should even think of. Sephiroth destroying an overstuffed chair by ripping it apart with his hands. Sephiroth with a nimbus of power in one small fist as his baby face twisted with insane delight.
The folder was filled with reports backing up the pictures' story.
"His foster parents can't handle him." Veld glanced around the lab. "They're sending him back."
I nodded. What could I do? I'd cried and screamed all I could in the last few months. There was nothing left. I had to go home and try to save my son. I wasn't stupid enough to build any new dreams around him. It was my duty to him and to Vincent.
"I'll take over when I get back to Midgar." I put the things back in the box.
Veld nodded and walked out.
Over the years, our relationship deteriorated. When Vincent was with us, we were friends. Maybe not the best of friends, we were both too busy with our jobs to socialize much, but still friends. After he was gone, we rarely spoke to each other and then only about business. We avoided meeting, and barely looked at each other if we were in the same room. By the time Veld left, we quite simply hated the thought of each other. Too much pain. Too many memories. It was easier to hate each other than to irritate all the unhealed wounds we carried around.
I set the coffin up in the crypt and put the chest with Vincent's things in there too. It took me awhile to test the various systems. Even when they all tested fine, I still found things to linger over. I had to make last minute adjustments to the medicine. I sent for Vincent's lunar harp, books on the Ancients, and pictures that he'd kept on his desk. I then fussed about his clothes, worried more about what he'd wake up to find and sent Quicksilver out to a gunsmith to be thoroughly cleaned and tested. I sent for extra ammunition. I got the crypt door reinforced then recovered with the original material so it would blend in, just in case some enterprising Wutaian soldier tried to liberate Nibelheim's crypts. I put more pictures in the chest of the happy Sephiroth. I put in extra clothes, food packs that were designed for long term storage, even more ammunition, maps, materia, thousands of gil and some jewels, personal items, notes I'd gleaned from Lucrecia's experiments, and anything else I could vaguely conceive of as being of use to him in the future.
Finally, I had to let go.
I carefully washed and dressed Vincent, smoothing his hair back and dressing him in his father's clothes. I did consider putting him in one of his uniforms, but I thought it safer to put him in clothes that no one would recognize as a uniform of any sort. Putting the battle glove on was a bit of a challenge, but I finally got it in place. I had to have a couple of the Turks help me put him in the coffin –Veld stayed up stairs methodically drinking himself into a brief coma- then made a few last minute adjustments (wrapping the edge of his cloak around the claws of the glove to protect him from accidentally hurting himself, positioning Quicksilver so it would be under his hand if he needed it, adjusting the foam rubber pillow so his neck would have proper support, and making sure the inside latch would release) then I closed the lid.
It was over.
It would be nearly thirty years before I knew what would happen.
I almost stayed in Nibelheim. I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay close to Vincent, to protect him, to make sure no one disturbed him, to wait. But I needed to get back to Midgar. Sephiroth needed me. Still, I nearly stayed, just in case.
In case of what, I never specified. Over the years I've had litteraly thousands of nightmares about all sorts of horrors befalling Vincent: floods, fire, monsters, earthquakes, rampaging rats, malfunctions in the coffin's systems, kidnapping by various groups of people. When Veld turned traitor, I nearly clawed my way up the walls of my lab one night when it occurred to me that Veld knew where Vincent was and was now probably under the control of that nutcase Fuhito, who had pretentions of being a scientist. Even at my most insane, I wasn't that bad.
Right?
I was back in Midgar the next day.
The day after that, Sephiroth was back in my care. I still didn't trust myself to care for him, so I did the best I could. I hired staff to…
"Hey, Vincent! You find anything?" Yuffie's voice called down the stairs.
Vincent looked up, closing the diary he'd been reading. "Some papers."
"Okay, I'll tell the others. Cid's yelling something about weather patterns and stuff so come on." Yuffie called back.
Vincent looked around the small dingy room. It had once been a bedroom, Hojo's bedroom. It was small, cheap, and was strewn with old newspapers. A few old clothes were still laying in half open drawers in the dresser. A pair of dusty shoes peeked out from the sagging, metal frame of a bed that was covered in a thin blanket and threadbare sheets.
"Vince! Move your ass!" Cid shouted from outside. "Storm coming."
Vincent glanced one more time around the room. A fitting ending for Hojo, stuck in a filthy, hovel in the back of the worst section of Junon. He could imagine the insane man huddled on the rickety bed and its thin mattress, jerking nervously at sounds, worrying that someone was hunting him. He'd have been alone, frightened, fatigued but too nervous to get rest. The arrogant, sadistic bastard that had hurt Lucrecia, had driven Sephiroth insane, and had performed atrocities on him had been brought down to the level of a sniveling, cringing wreck. No more pristine white lab coats, no more twisted smirks, not even a lab rat to torture, just a scared, beaten man. The image of it was almost as rewarding as the despair in Hojo's eyes when he'd shot him on the scaffolding of the cannon.
He looked down at the diary he held, his mouth twisting slightly in disgust. He should tell the others about it. There were clearly places in it that indicated that Hojo had not just survived as a computer program, but was alive and well. However, the things it said…
He gave a small snort.
Him in love with Hojo? Hardly. Rambling delusions, that's all they were.
And Veld? He'd met the man. He'd been far from attracted and Veld had hardly behaved like a long lost friend and lover.
Lucrecia had been his first and only love.
How could anyone write such…such…vile atrocities about her. Hadn't she saved him? Hadn't she proven her love and goodness during the Omega incident?
Lies.
Sephiroth…his son?
No. Lucrecia would have told him…
No. They were lies.
But seductive ones…
The wry humor. The pain. The demented logic.
If this diary was ever read by someone who didn't know the truth…
Vincent turned out of the room and stalked down the hall, tucking the diary into the folds of his cloak, hiding it.
He would keep it. Hide it. No on needed to know. He'd point out other evidence to prove Hojo was alive and still roving the Planet. The diary was his. No one needed to ever read those terrible lies about Lucrecia and Professor Gast. It was better off in his possession. He'd study it. If it had any important information, he'd find a way to pass it along without letting anyone see the original copy or its full contents.
Even if it contained nothing but lies, the dairy was his.
FINI
AN: I'm going to end it now. Thank you for reading this. I'm already working on Now a Monster and will be posting the first chapter soon. I really was having trouble enjoying writing the last few chapters of this. As you can see, I've tried to stay in cannon as much as I possibly could. I twisted a few things here and there to fit the story line, but I hope not too severely. However, staying in cannon made me write pure tragedy, which I don't love. I just couldn't realistically make Hojo think or say snippy, sarcastic comments when talking about Vincent degenerating and becoming feral. The next story will bring back the other Hojo since it will be post Dirge of Cerberus and I don't have to follow cannon anymore. Please review and tell me what you think of the story overall. I really appreciate constructive feedback.