“I don’t want to still be hurt by this. Damn it.” It was ridiculous, really. I’d just found out that Sephiroth was alive, however nominally, and using my work to complete Jenova’s goals, and here I was thinking about the Turk.
Did I even have a right to still think of him that way? I’d had my revenge. I’d locked him away for all those years. I’d taken pieces of his humanity like trophies to hang on the wall. Lucrecia said she loved me before she died.
I’d won. In every way that matter, in every way that could be calculated, I’d won.
So why did I hate myself so thoroughly? And why did looking at him hurt so much?
His hair was long, but his face was the same. Of course it was, I’d seen to that. Part of my plan, eternal beloved, and I wondered what the hell I’d been thinking.
I hadn’t been thinking, of course. I prided myself on rational logic, but I failed at it again and again. Wanting him to suffer was all well and good, but apparently I hadn’t been paying close enough attention when I left the mansion the second time. Someone had found him. Probably that stupid game of mine.
And then he’d been there, staring at me.
And with the failure, of all people.
The universe was laughing. Sephiroth was laughing.
She was probably laughing too.
It sunk in that they way I felt about Vincent hadn’t changed in thirty years. I’d more than paid him back for trying… not even succeeding, merely trying to take Lucrecia from me. I’d tortured him, humiliated him, destroyed his life.
Damn it, I won.
I still hated him so very much.
He’d barely looked at me there, in the crater. I hated him for that, too.
He was busy running around on his little mission now, but he wouldn’t be able to stay away from me, I knew that. When I last shut the door on him, he was swearing revenge in Lucrecia’s name. Even if he was on his crusade now, with his terrorist friends, he would come eventually. Before the world ended, or as it did.
I couldn’t wait.
