The door was clearly held shut from the outside. Pushing had only served to exhaust Hojo and he was quickly getting frustrated. He stepped back from the door and tried to think.
Can’t get too tired, if I get too tired I’ll go back to sleep. Can’t go back to sleep. They’ll come back and lock me in again. Need to get out before he comes back or brings someone with him.
The dragon could do it, he thought, but I can’t– and then his gaze fell on the stolen rifle in the corner, stacked with a few things he’d hidden in the lab that Lucrecia had never managed to find.
Can’t hurt to try it, he thought. If I’m right, the dragon breaks down the door. If I’m wrong, I kill myself. He’d never wanted to be wrong so badly in his life.
He picked up the rifle and tried to point it at his chest or his stomach, but he couldn’t reach the trigger at that distance. He frowned and inspected the end of the barrel, then wiped it on his formerly-white coat before putting it in his mouth. It tasted disgusting and he gagged, but forced himself to relax. It stayed. He reached for the trigger, just barely within his arm’s reach, and fired.
The bullet ripped through his brain, a thoroughly unpleasant sensation he hadn’t felt since Vincent left. He thought it strange that he could feel it at all, since the brain wasn’t supposed to have nerves in it. The back of his skull shattered and pushed through the skin above it, leaving Hojo with the curious sensation of a breeze blowing over the back of his head as rational thought began to escape him.
Meanwhile, Vincent returned from lunch with a fresh coffee and a full stomach, and was facing the afternoon in unusually good spirits. That feeling lasted exactly as long as it took him to enter his office and close the door behind him as he noticed Veld standing next to his desk with a stack of paper.
“We’ve confirmed the rumor that your son is a homo, sir,” Veld said as Vincent entered the office. Vincent had been careful this time, however, and his mouth was dry.
“Good to know my employees are so devoted to Shinra’s security and my son’s sexual preferences. So how did you confirm this for sure, sending Cyr after him?” Feeling safe now, Vincent raised his coffee to his lips.
“No, apparently he referred to the boy your wife has doped up in a tank down there as his boyfriend,” Veld answered, and Vincent spit coffee anyway.
“You know, I’m just going to stop coming in to work,” Vincent grumbled, throwing his coffee in the trash and reaching for a tissue.
“Apparently two technicians, a researcher and a secretary all heard him yell,” the brunette Turk continued, pretending to read from the report . In truth, he was using it to hide his smirk. “Then your son had to be escorted from the building by security and, oh yes, your wife may have broken the law by lying to security personnel. We’re still investigating that last one, but it looks likely.”
“You’re enjoying this!” Vincent accused.
“Doesn’t change the truth,” the other man said, tossing the report on his superior’s desk and no longer bothering to hide his grin. “There are allegations she’s performing questionable experiments, too.”
“That’s ridiculous. I want this investigation dropped immediately, it’s a waste of time and money,” Vincent ordered, dropping the report in the trash.
“I can’t do that, Vin. I already reported the goings-on to the President. He thinks it’s best if I oversee this investigation personally. Worried you might be a bit too… emotionally involved.” Veld leaned across the desk. “Of course, you’re always emotional, aren’t you?”
“I really hate you sometimes,” Vincent said, laying his head on the desk.
“Oh, do you?” Veld asked, leaning further over and whispering in his ear. “Even when I have you all tied up?” He reached under Vincent’s collar and pulled on his tie, twisting it around in a smooth motion until he had the long of it in his hand to grip. He tugged Vincent’s head up.
“I’m not in the mood right now.”
“You’re never in the mood, sir,” Veld walked slowly around the desk, not letting go of the tie, “but I think it best if you stay occupied for the duration of this investigation.” He let his other hand drop into Vincent’s crotch and play with the zipper on his pants.
“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to stay occupied,” Vincent answered, his breath growing short, “but as soon as we’re done I’m going to see Shinra.”
“That’s fine with me,” Veld answered.
Outside, Tseng nodded to Reno and Anna beside him. “Veld has him distracted. Let’s go.”
They hurried downstairs and out, in the direction of the Valentines’ apartment.
“Gast! Professor!” Sephiroth was banging on the door of the small house in sector eight, but there was no answer for a long time. Finally the inside door swung open and Aeris looked up at him distrustfully from behind the screen.
“What do you want?” she glared.
“I need to talk to Gast. It’s important,” he snapped at her.
“Daddy’s busy. He’s talking to Mom. You can see him later.”
“… Aeris, your mother’s dead.”
“Well, duh.” She crossed her arms. “I guess you can come in and wait.” She reached up to unlock the door. Sephiroth stepped into the kitchen and looked around. He took a seat. Aeris stayed standing, glaring at him.
Sephiroth figured he might as well be polite. “So what does your father do to… um… talk to your mother?”
“He goes out in the garden and he talks to her,” Aeris answered, obviously exasperated.
Conversation didn’t seem to be helping much, so Sephiroth let it drop and sat in silence. After a few minutes, Aeris, obviously bored, sat across from him.
“So what’d you come about?” she asked. “You feel upset.”
“How would you know what I feel?” he looked up at her, surprised.
“Am I wrong?”
“Well, no. You caught me off-guard. I’m pretty confused right now.”
“Is it because Zack broke up with you?” Aeris smiled was just a little too mean for his comfort.
“He told you about that?” Sephiroth briefly considered letting Zack stay in the tank, but broken up or not, he knew he couldn’t do that to any man in his unit, let alone to a friend. “Actually, that’s the least of my worries right now. Zack’s in trouble much worse than breaking up with me.”
Aeris narrowed her eyes. “Is he?”
“He’s sealed in a tank up in the Science Department. I think my mother is experimenting on him.” He wasn’t sure why he was confessing this to the teenager, but there was something about her. It wasn’t comforting, not precisely, but it made him open up in a way he wasn’t used to.
“Experimenting on him?” Aeris repeated. Sephiroth nodded. “I’ll go get Daddy.”
“Oh, now that your boyfriend is in danger, he can be interrupted?” He muttered as she ran out the door. She hesitated after he said it, but didn’t say anything, and he couldn’t be sure that she’d heard him.
When Gast came in a few minutes later, wearing an old shirt and pants muddy at the knees, he was already agitated.
“Did Aeris already tell you?” Sephiroth asked.
“Tell me what?” Gast answered, surprised.
“About Zack?”
“No. Should she have?”
Sephiroth frowned. “No, I just thought, you seemed upset, so…”
“Oh, no. No, sorry, I upset about something I heard from my wife. What’s happened to Zachary? He seems like such a nice boy,” Gast rambled, getting himself a drink and sitting down next to Sephiroth.
“He’s in my mother’s lab, in a tank,” he said plainly.
“What?”
“He said he had to go see Mrs. Valentine today,” Aeris offered. “Something about some monster he fought a long time ago.”
“When I went in to tell my mother about Hojo, she had him in a tank in the back of the lab. I wasn’t supposed to see him there. I don’t think she expected me to be back yet. She wouldn’t say what she’d done to him, she just kept insisting he’d attacked her and she’d shot him and put him in the tank to save his life.”
“To tell your mother about Hojo?” Gast questioned.
“Oh, er, yes. I just got back from Nibelheim,” Sephiroth swallowed. He’d been hoping to gloss over that part.
“And what happened to Hojo?”
“He…” Sephiroth hesitated, then took a deep breath and decided to get it over with. “He got ahold of the key to the room he was locked in.”
“And who had the key when this happened?” Gast asked, frowning.
“I did.”
“And where was Hojo last time you checked?”
“I barricaded him in behind the secret door. It should take him a while to get out of there, at least.”
Gast just shook his head. “Why didn’t you wait? Or tell me? I could have gone with you, we could have helped him.”
Sephiroth looked down at the table. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was upset about… things.” He looked over at Aeris, who had left the kitchen and was now playing with the small television in the living room.
“– unknown what happened in the town of Nibelheim, but townspeople said they were attacked by a large dragon.”
“That was fast,” Sephiroth sighed. He supposed he should be more upset, but at this point he was just expecting the worst.
“Dragon? Hojo? You’re kidding.”
Sephiroth simply looked at him.
“You’re not kidding.” Gast sighed. “Aeris, get me the phone. I need to call the President.”
“Well, at least if he was telling the truth, I’m part Wutaian.”
Gast looked at him as Aeris came in and handed him a phone. “Remind me again why that’s a good thing?”
“Now I have the option of committing seppuku.”
“Sephiroth, ritual suicide isn’t– wait, telling you the truth about what?”
“He told me he’s my father. That my mother was pregnant before she married Vincent.”
“And you believed him?” Gast asked, nearly dropping the phone.
Sephiroth stood up. “I didn’t want to! I didn’t believe him at first, but Mother got so strange and defensive when I asked about it that it just… it makes me wonder.”
Gast started to say something, but got distracted by the phone. “Yes, I need to talk to Andrew Shinra. I’m sure he’s busy, he always is. No, I will not hold. This is Gast Faremiss and I need to talk to him about Professor Lucrecia Valentine right away. Yes, about Lucrecia– Andrew? Well, that was fast.”
“What is it, Gast?”
“It’s about Lucrecia. I’ve been informed that she’s doing unauthorized human experimentation in the lab.”
“Is she?” Andrew asked as he doodled stick figures of the Turks along the bottom of Veld’s preliminary report about the lab incident. “That’s a pretty serious charge to level, Gast. What makes you sure?”
“Her son is in my kitchen right now telling me about it. The young man he saw in there is a friend of his.”
“Well, that does put a new light on this,” Andrew said. He leaned back in his leather chair and put his feet up. “I just got done reading Lucrecia’s statement on the situation. She, apparently, says that Sephiroth and the boy were fighting, and she was attacked.”
“Does she? Well, what do you think of that?” Gast leaned over the counter, remembering why he hated calling the President so very much. Politics had always bored him. Really, it was a miracle he’d lasted at Shinra as long as he had.
“I don’t think anything yet. That’s why I have Turks,” Andrew told him. “I’ll let them know you called. They may want to talk to you.”
“Andrew, with all due respect, Vincent has never listened to any–”
“Oh, Vincent won’t be handling this case,” interrupted Andrew. “He’s, ah, been relieved of leadership for the duration of the investigation. Rest assured it’s being taken care of.” Gast started to say something else, but Andrew snapped the phone shut.
He pressed the intercom button. “Tell Lucrecia I need to see her first thing Monday morning,” he told his secretary. “I want to give her all weekend to come up with a really good excuse.”
When Hojo came back to himself, he first recognized the rose garden behind the mansion. It was thoroughly overgrown, but he knew the pink blossoms weren’t native to this region. He’d had them imported for Lucrecia.
He rolled over on his back. The sky above him was blue. He hadn’t seen a sky in decades, and it was a perfect shade of blue, as if it was waiting for him, as if… Well, it wasn’t quite a perfect blue. There was some sort of dark cloud at the edge of his field of vision. It was low and quite black and there was some sort of smell in the air he couldn’t put his finger on.
Hojo sat up and looked at the smouldering hole in the side of the mansion. That would account for the clouds. He stood, wiping the dirt from his clothes. It was fascinating, really, that they somehow remained, or were replaced, after he transformed. He would have to look into that.
The smoke was thinning and he could see no open flames, so he stepped inside to retrieve his papers and Sephiroth’s rifle. Leaving for the walk into town, Hojo noted that he could see all of Nibelheim in some detail. This was good, as he’d long ago lost his glasses.
“The fresh air must be good for me,” he spoke out loud to himself as he tried to pull his ridiculously long hair out of the way. “I’m surprisingly lucid. Or maybe blowing a hole in my head clears my thoughts. This will require further study.” He started walking. He knew it would take days to reach Costa del Sol.
He had grown up in Midgar. Heading for it felt like going home.
Sephiroth spent the weekend avoiding home, reading notebooks with Gast or talking to Aeris. They’d made peace as they worried about Zack.
Lucrecia spent it at home, trying to clean up the mess some errant burglar had made as he trashed her apartment. He’d taken the obvious valuables, missed most of the hidden ones, but made an utter mess of her office. Papers were strewn everywhere. An hour on the phone with the police seemed to do no good, so she made her frustrations known to Vincent loudly, all weekend long.
On Sunday night, he told her he would shoot her if she didn’t shut up. She walked out, then.
Mondays had always made Vincent nervous, and this Monday was worse than most. His nerves were shot before he even got into the office, having listened to Lucrecia go on all weekend about whether this or that other thing was missing from the apartment and then fought with her on Sunday. Sometimes he almost wished he’d been the one who got to sleep through a decade uninterrupted. Even a night would be a pleasant change.
He looked carefully inside his office and, seeing no sign of Veld, stepped inside with a sigh. He turned to shut the door and found himself face to face with Veld, who’d been behind him. Vincent jumped and spilled his coffee all over himself.
“Oh for the love of… Veld! You’ve got to stop wasting my coffee,” Vincent grumbled.
“Sorry. I just couldn’t wait to see you today.”
“Slow weekend?” Vincent asked, laughing.
“Something like that,” Veld said, grinning wickedly and loosening his tie.
Vincent backed up until he knocked into his desk. “Hey, don’t you think it’s a little early for this?”
“Not at all,” Veld answered. “Now let’s get you out of those wet, stained clothes.”
“Valentine is occupied,” Tseng said simply into his phone.
Upstairs, Andrew Shinra nodded and closed the phone as Lucrecia stepped into his office. “Lucrecia. I’ve been hearing some disturbing things about your work.”
“Look, you told me you wanted results, Andrew,” she said, skipping the niceties. “I’m getting you results. You can’t have it both ways.”
“I can’t? Gast seemed to manage brilliance without locking people in tubes.”
“Locking people– what?” Lucrecia asked.
“I got the report, Lucrecia.” Andrew leaned back. “Even I have lines I won’t cross.”
She snerked. “You won’t allow experiments on people?”
“Not without the proper paperwork. Lucrecia, I need to know what’s going on in this company. That’s what I do. That’s why I’m the boss. If I have to send the Turks sneaking around to tell me what my employees are doing, I can’t send them to do something useful.”
“Oh, come on. You know as well as I do that it would be weeks before you got around to that kind of permission.”
“Lucrecia, you’re done. I want you out of the building immediately.”
“No! No, you can’t do this!” she screamed.
“I just did.” He reached for the intercom.
“Andrew, don’t!”
By the time she heard Veld’s voice on the intercom, she was already running for the stairwell. She was hoping she could get down as far as the labs and then pick up what she needed and jump into the elevator before anyone noticed they needed to stop her. She slammed into the firedoor to the 67th floor and stepped into the Science Department.
“Pepper, are those Jenova shots prepared yet?” Lucrecia called down the hall.
“Almost, Lucrecia!” Pepper answered. “I haven’t finished reading the notebook yet, there’s still more after the formula.”
“There’s no time, Pepper. Pack them for transport,” she ordered, stepping inside. She looked disheavled, her hair loose, her lab coat unbuttoned. She was upset about something, too.
“Is there anything I can do?” he asked, turning to her.
She glared. “Yes. Pack the damn things up, I don’t have all day.”
Pepper didn’t like the way she spoke, but considering how busy she’d been, it was probably understandable. He slipped caps and stoppers onto the needles and packed them into an emergency medical kit.
“How do they work?” Lucrecia asked.
“I haven’t gotten that far,” he said, not bothering to hide the annoyance in his voice, “but it appears that what Hojo called the ‘reunion’ effect will take place naturally. The first person exposed becomes the host or the queen, to go back to the insect metaphor. The others are worker bees.”
“Don’t get testy with me, Pepper. I could walk back up there and destroy your career any time I liked,” she threatened, then her voice and her face softened, and she kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you for this. I won’t forget you.”
She took the box and hurried down the hall, the fire escape door slamming shut behind her minutes before the elevator door opened. He heard a great many footsteps and, panicking, slipped back into his workroom.
Turks spilled out into the department’s lobby, a tie-less Veld at the lead. “Everyone on the floor, ladies and gentlemen, and I don’t want to see so much as a test tube flinch! This is a Shinra security operation!” There was a scuffle as everyone laid down, and then silence hung over the department.
Veld turned to the Turks who had followed him in. “You got the briefing, go for the paperwork. I don’t think we’re going to find Lucrecia hiding in here.”
“Are– are you looking for Professor Lucrecia, sir?” one of the techs on the floor asked.
“Among other things. You want to help?” Veld asked, cocking an eyebrow at the young woman.
“Of course, sir! I’m just asking because Vincent’s usually the Turk we see.”
“Vincent’s tied up at the moment,” Rod interjected, and he and Reno snickered.
“Do you know where Lucrecia is?”
“Not sure, sir, but I saw her in the back. I think I heard the fire door.”
Veld frowned. “Rod, Anna, down the stairs. Reno, clear the back rooms, make sure she isn’t still there. Rude, I want you and Cyr waiting in the lobby before she gets there. I’ll finish up in here. Move.” The navy blue suits scattered through the lab.
He turned back to the young woman. “Stand up. What’s your name?”
“Irena, sir.”
“Irena, hm? You know that if you’re lying, I’ll kill you, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Drop the sir.”
“Yes, s… sure, I can do that.”
“So who else is here?”
“That’s not in this room? Just Pepper, I think.”
“And where’s Pepper?”
Pepper was staring at the needle. It was intimidating. To be administered, the altered mako required a large-gauge needle. Combined with the size of the dosage itself, it made for a truly intimidating shot. Even to a doctor, it was a big needle.
He swallowed hard. He’d already given himself the preperatory shots and was waiting for his head to clear before he finished.
They had come. Once he’d thought Lu would hold them off, but Lu had also turned on him, using his work and pushing him aside. Now she was gone, President Shinra had called her up and she’d run away. He’d heard her secretary talking about Turks almost coming to blows, and he could guess what that fight had been over.
Whether it would be Lucrecia who decided that he knew too much or Shinra, he didn’t know, but he knew it would happen soon enough. He had promises to keep and experiments to finish before he died. He needed to be ready. Times were desperate.
You know what they say about desperate times.
Pepper tried not to think about every lurid story he’d heard about Professor Hojo, both in school and from Lucrecia. He’d done everything he could to make the experiment safe, down to choosing the smallest and least-intimidating looking summon listed in the materia chart. The process had been done twice now, and he’d participated in one. This was as safe as it was ever likely to be. He pressed the needle against the vein in his elbow.
Someone was outside banging their way down the hall, some Turk thug or other. Pepper knew he didn’t have much time. He took a deep breath and pushed the needle in, turning his face away. It was bad form for a scientist, he knew, but he couldn’t bring himself to look.
It hurt as it entered his vein, trailing a sensation like electrical shock down into his fingers and back up his arm, and Pepper was suddenly quite sure that he was going to die.
Someone was knocking on the door. Pepper was not panicked, only disappointed, as the buzzing feeling reached past his shoulder and into his heart. The knob turned, but before anyone could come in, Pepper felt himself twitch and the world went dark.
“What the fuck is that?” Reno shouted as the small blue animal darted past him and into the hall. It dashed into the front of the lab toward the elevators, but Irena dropped to her knees and caught it. It scratched at her, but she pulled it close.
“Pepper?” she whispered. It calmed.
Reno nearly ran her over as he dashed out of the back rooms after it.
“What is that?” Veld demanded.
Irena tried to remember what the name on the requisition form had been. “Carbunkle. He’s part of one of our projects.”
Veld eyed the small blue creature. “Which project?”
“The Break Limits one. He’s a summon.”
“Hmm.” He shook his head and turned away. “I need some papers. You folks are going to get them for me. Wherever Lucrecia is, the other Turks will find her.”
Lucrecia was, at that moment, reaching the bottom of the stairwell. She could hear the Turks advancing behind her, but she refused to panic. She pushed open the door to the main lobby, setting off the fire alarm, and then slipped out the side door.
As she hurried to Sephiroth’s apartment with her box from the lab, she wondered where her husband was.
Upstairs, in the Turks’ office, Vincent was tied to his desk with his tie around his hands and someone else’s around his ankles. “Veld?” he called out, sheepishly. “Veld, this isn’t funny anymore.”
