Categories > Games > Final Fantasy 7
Corrosive
2 ReviewsSo what if Vincent was a little bit faster on the draw?
Once upon a time, a girl ran away from the circus to go to school. It's funny how sometimes things happen in the reverse of what you expect. She liked animals and she liked science and so she found herself in the biology department, where she fell under the sway of an enchanted prince, the golden boy of the department.
It was not happily ever after. They dated and broke up half a dozen times in two years. During their last argument, she threatened to report him to the department heads for sleeping with a student. He slapped her and she stormed out, but she never did tell anyone. He gave her an A in the class.
When she was looking for an internship with Shinra two years later, she was surprised to find him on the interview board. After a wink and a nod, she was not surprised that she got the call back. They picked up where they'd left off and, though he never hit her again, their screaming matches sometimes ran late into the night. His work also ran into the night... and slowly began creeping into her time with him.
She was well and truly bored by the time the new Turk waltzed into the science department, and somewhere between the snogging and the shouting, she decided that this dark, handsome new prince might be just what she needed to spice up her story. He was available, both in terms of time and of emotion, in a way that her scientist-prince simply never was. She drifted back to the scientist several times, but always ran into the Turk's waiting arms during the rough patches.
The rough patches were getting rougher.
When the dark prince showed her the box and the ring and promised happily ever after, she told him yes without hesitating. She decided to go tell the scientist right away, maybe to make him jealous, maybe to make him understand it was over for good. Even she wasn't quite sure, but she smiled as understanding and anger dawned in his dark brown eyes.
He raged at her. That was predictable.
He drew a gun. That was not.
Her quick-witted, quick-fingered, quick-thinking Turk drew his own gun and did what instincts and training had taught him to do. He shot his rival, the scientist-prince, and she began screaming before the ringing had died in her ears. Blood splattered on the floor. The fairy tale was shattered.
**
"Oh my god, Vincent! What the hell did you do?"
"I shot the man who pulled a gun on you. I told you I wouldn't let anyone threaten you."
Lucrecia smacked him in the arm. "I didn't think you meant that literally! That's just a thing guys are supposed to /say/. You can't just go around shooting people!"
"I can, actually," he said with a shrug. "That's one of the fringe benefits of being a Turk."
"Help me get him up on the table," she said, her arms hooked through his armpits as she tried to hoist the body up. Her dress and coat were quickly becoming soaked in blood, but she wasn't worried about that right now.
"Maybe I should just shoot him again. In the head this time."
"You may not. Shoot. My boss. Okay, Vincent? We have to fix this before Gast finds out."
"Fix it? Lucrecia, there's probably a hole the size of a five-gil piece through his lungs," he insisted, exasperated.
"So we have to work fast. Now so help me god, if you do not pick him up and put him on the table, I will give you back your ring and never speak to you again." Vincent did as he was told, then, unceremoniously dropping the scientist on the table.
Lucrecia unconsciously smoothed out her dress and stared at the blood that came away on her hands. She shook her head and forced herself to focus. She checked him over quickly. "No pulse, no breath. I need to get him stabilized. Vincent, I need you to do CPR on him while I prep for surgery."
"What?"
"You do know how to do CPR, don't you?"
"Yes, but--" he sputtered, "I expected to be kissing you today, not him!"
"And then you shot him. Suck it up and lock lips, Vincent." Lucrecia sliced the front of Hojo's shirt open and prepared to intubate. She was able to restore a heartbeat and carefully give him anesthetic as she prepared for surgery.
Opening him up and removing the bullet were easy enough, textbook procedures. After that, Lucrecia found herself at a bit of a loss. The lung was damaged and collapsed. She excised the most damaged part of the organ, but it didn't help.
"... I just realized I have no idea what I'm doing in here, Vincent," she finally admitted after an hour and a half of surgery. She closed his chest and stitched the skin shut. Exhausted, she rested her weight on the side of the table. "I'm going to have to do something drastic."
"More than the major chest surgery?" Vincent asked.
"Hojo was lobbying to get a human specimen for the Break Limits Project. It's supposed to provide for tremendous regenerative capabilities as well as... um, other effects. He didn't really go into the details, but he had the raw materials all prepped." Lucrecia fished in Hojo's pocket for his keys and hunted inside a metal cabinet, pulling out a smaller box and opening it.
"Looks like he's going to finally get even closer to his work," she said with a small smile on her lips that made Vincent nervous. He was starting to think Lucrecia was more than a match for him.
"This is definitely because you want to help him, right?" Vincent clarified. "Not some twisted desire for revenge? Because I could still shoot him."
"If you kill him, Vincent, my career is over. Gast was never terribly fond of me anyway, he'd love an excuse to fire me. But if I can carry this project off on my own, Shinra won't let him fire me!"
He was definitely nervous now. "This isn't about Hojo anymore, is it?" Lucrecia was pulling the IV out of his elbow and wiping it down.
"Help me strap him down. Judging by the last test subject, this isn't going to be pretty." She didn't much like the way Vincent was looking at her, as if she'd suddenly offered him cute, fuzzy kittens for dinner. If the man wanted to kill Hojo that much, why was he worrying about this?
Lucrecia turned the tape recorder on as Vincent tightened the last strap. "Now administering first dosage, SOLDIER-standard mako portion. Subject is currently sufferent from a damaged lung due to puncture wound and is breathing with assistance." She pressed the first needle into Hojo's skin and the faintly glowing liquid disappeared into his veins. Vincent flinched sympathetically.
Checking the clock, Lucrecia made a note on paper and waited for the first signs of reaction. After several minutes, the scientist began to pull on his restraints and gasp for air. With his wounded lung, he was quickly coughing and spitting up blood. Lucrecia started to reach for him and hesitated. She could do nothing now that she'd set this in motion, nothing but follow through and narrate for the benefit of science.
"First reaction at ten minutes in. Rapid breathing with difficulty, likely due to wounded lung. Now administering second compound, regressed sample materia B." This one was red and from a considerably larger needle. Vincent grimaced.
"We believe the Ancients used materia to capture or control nature spirits and elementals," Lucrecia explained for his benefit as she inserted the second needle. "This produced materia of a bloody red color. This is one such materia, forcibly reduced to liquid form."
"What was the first shot for? The SOLDIER one?"
"Oh, it's just the shot all SOLDIER candidates get. Hojo theorized that it would make the body more receptive." Suddenly Vincent had a newfound respect for his rivals in SOLDIER.
"Now what?"
"Now we wait and see if Hojo was right."
For the first hour, Lucrecia simply watched Hojo sleep. His breathing gradually became less labored and more regular. The surgical incisions on his chest knit shut, leaving thin, almost shiny scars. She meticulously noted and photographed the changes.
Finally she checked her watch. "He's been stable for two hours now, Vincent, I think we can... Vincent?" He was asleep in a chair, his head laying on edge of the lab counter. She smiled at him and pulled a blanket from the cabinet to drape over him.
She heard a low, deep noise behind her. Lucrecia stood up and turned back to Hojo.
"Subject is... he's /growling,/" she said, confused. She wondered if she'd skimmed over something important in Hojo's notes. "What kind of nature spirit did Hojo use?"
Hojo began to writhe in the restraints, pulling on them. She soon realized something more disturbing was happening in front of her. She stepped closer, hoping to find the problem. His eyes snapped open, red and faintly luminous. Lucrecia jumped back, swallowing hard.
She forced herself to narrate to keep from screaming. "His fingers are elongating, the nails growing into claws. His body as a whole is shifting... the skin is hardening into a shiny, almost... scaly surface. . And there's, yes, oh god, that's a tail. His teeth, his face... That's... a dragon? He's turning into a dragon?"
The dragon on the table -- she had difficulty thinking of it as Hojo now -- pulled harder on restraints that were now ill-sized for its body. One leather cuff snapped and the dragon reared forward, clawing at Lucrecia.
"Vincent!" she screamed. She heard a crack behind her, then gunshots. The dragon screamed.
"Lucrecia! Get down!" Vincent ordered as he reloaded. She did as she was told and more shots followed. The monster collapsed back against the table and, when Lucrecia finally dared to look up, there was only Hojo there. He was bleeding, naked, and his left arm looked badly damaged. It was almost pathetic, she thought.
Even as she watched, the pair of bullet wounds in his chest knit shut into neat little scars. His arm was torn, chunks appearing to be missing out of it, and it was bent, well, wrong. The skin was pulling together over twisted muscles.
Hojo's eyes opened again, still red, but this time there was intelligence behind them.
"Lu... What the hell..." he shook his head. "What happened to my arm?"
"It's broken."
"That does explain the massive, stabbing pain, yes. Where are my glasses? Why am I tied down?"
His attitude infuriated Lucrecia. "You pulled a gun on me. Why do you think you're tied down?"
"Your dear Turk, perhaps?"
"Good guess." She realized the tape recorder was still running and quickly clicked the record button off.
He looked at his twisted arm, which was quickly sewing itself together as best it could. "What the hell did you do to me?"
"I instated the Break Limits Project," she said, smiling. "On you."
"You did what? You bitch, that wasn't ready," he snapped, trying to reach for her with his useless arm.
She laughed at him. "Still violent, Hojo? Don't you ever learn?"
He growled. She squeaked and jumped back. "Don't you learn, Lucrecia? Taunting a specimen? Starting a project without a clear hypothesis? Maybe I should have made you study more and fuck me less." Vincent came up behind her with his gun trained on Hojo and grabbed the scientist's free arm, holding it to the table.
"This isn't going to work. I see that now, I guess I'm not really surprised. There was one thing I did pay attention to, though." Lucrecia bent over, digging into another cabinet.
"And what was that?"
"How to put down a dangerous specimen." She loaded the tranquilizer serum into the needle and smiled as she approached him. "Now, shall I tell Gast you decided to try the experiment on yourself? I think that will make a very believable story."
Hojo glared but didn't resist anymore. He knew a losing battle when he was in it, but he also knew the Break Limits Project and its goals far better than she did. He could be patient.
After he was asleep, she and Vincent carefully sealed him away in the spare basement room and practiced their story for Gast. It went over without a hitch and she and Vincent were recalled from Nibelheim. She edited her notes and published as if she'd observed him experimenting on himself. She dreamed of Hojo sometimes, nightmares that left her to wake screaming, but she assured herself that he'd been locked away safely. She was the toast of the academic scene, happily married, and now raising her son. Her new project was moving along quickly. But something kept drawing her to the mansion, to the basement, to that door.
She couldn't stop thinking about him.
Maybe it was just that she always wanted what she didn't have.
"Mom! Are you down there?"
She turned and started back toward the stairs. "Don't come down here, the stairs are weak. I'll come to you, Sephiroth."
It was not happily ever after. They dated and broke up half a dozen times in two years. During their last argument, she threatened to report him to the department heads for sleeping with a student. He slapped her and she stormed out, but she never did tell anyone. He gave her an A in the class.
When she was looking for an internship with Shinra two years later, she was surprised to find him on the interview board. After a wink and a nod, she was not surprised that she got the call back. They picked up where they'd left off and, though he never hit her again, their screaming matches sometimes ran late into the night. His work also ran into the night... and slowly began creeping into her time with him.
She was well and truly bored by the time the new Turk waltzed into the science department, and somewhere between the snogging and the shouting, she decided that this dark, handsome new prince might be just what she needed to spice up her story. He was available, both in terms of time and of emotion, in a way that her scientist-prince simply never was. She drifted back to the scientist several times, but always ran into the Turk's waiting arms during the rough patches.
The rough patches were getting rougher.
When the dark prince showed her the box and the ring and promised happily ever after, she told him yes without hesitating. She decided to go tell the scientist right away, maybe to make him jealous, maybe to make him understand it was over for good. Even she wasn't quite sure, but she smiled as understanding and anger dawned in his dark brown eyes.
He raged at her. That was predictable.
He drew a gun. That was not.
Her quick-witted, quick-fingered, quick-thinking Turk drew his own gun and did what instincts and training had taught him to do. He shot his rival, the scientist-prince, and she began screaming before the ringing had died in her ears. Blood splattered on the floor. The fairy tale was shattered.
**
"Oh my god, Vincent! What the hell did you do?"
"I shot the man who pulled a gun on you. I told you I wouldn't let anyone threaten you."
Lucrecia smacked him in the arm. "I didn't think you meant that literally! That's just a thing guys are supposed to /say/. You can't just go around shooting people!"
"I can, actually," he said with a shrug. "That's one of the fringe benefits of being a Turk."
"Help me get him up on the table," she said, her arms hooked through his armpits as she tried to hoist the body up. Her dress and coat were quickly becoming soaked in blood, but she wasn't worried about that right now.
"Maybe I should just shoot him again. In the head this time."
"You may not. Shoot. My boss. Okay, Vincent? We have to fix this before Gast finds out."
"Fix it? Lucrecia, there's probably a hole the size of a five-gil piece through his lungs," he insisted, exasperated.
"So we have to work fast. Now so help me god, if you do not pick him up and put him on the table, I will give you back your ring and never speak to you again." Vincent did as he was told, then, unceremoniously dropping the scientist on the table.
Lucrecia unconsciously smoothed out her dress and stared at the blood that came away on her hands. She shook her head and forced herself to focus. She checked him over quickly. "No pulse, no breath. I need to get him stabilized. Vincent, I need you to do CPR on him while I prep for surgery."
"What?"
"You do know how to do CPR, don't you?"
"Yes, but--" he sputtered, "I expected to be kissing you today, not him!"
"And then you shot him. Suck it up and lock lips, Vincent." Lucrecia sliced the front of Hojo's shirt open and prepared to intubate. She was able to restore a heartbeat and carefully give him anesthetic as she prepared for surgery.
Opening him up and removing the bullet were easy enough, textbook procedures. After that, Lucrecia found herself at a bit of a loss. The lung was damaged and collapsed. She excised the most damaged part of the organ, but it didn't help.
"... I just realized I have no idea what I'm doing in here, Vincent," she finally admitted after an hour and a half of surgery. She closed his chest and stitched the skin shut. Exhausted, she rested her weight on the side of the table. "I'm going to have to do something drastic."
"More than the major chest surgery?" Vincent asked.
"Hojo was lobbying to get a human specimen for the Break Limits Project. It's supposed to provide for tremendous regenerative capabilities as well as... um, other effects. He didn't really go into the details, but he had the raw materials all prepped." Lucrecia fished in Hojo's pocket for his keys and hunted inside a metal cabinet, pulling out a smaller box and opening it.
"Looks like he's going to finally get even closer to his work," she said with a small smile on her lips that made Vincent nervous. He was starting to think Lucrecia was more than a match for him.
"This is definitely because you want to help him, right?" Vincent clarified. "Not some twisted desire for revenge? Because I could still shoot him."
"If you kill him, Vincent, my career is over. Gast was never terribly fond of me anyway, he'd love an excuse to fire me. But if I can carry this project off on my own, Shinra won't let him fire me!"
He was definitely nervous now. "This isn't about Hojo anymore, is it?" Lucrecia was pulling the IV out of his elbow and wiping it down.
"Help me strap him down. Judging by the last test subject, this isn't going to be pretty." She didn't much like the way Vincent was looking at her, as if she'd suddenly offered him cute, fuzzy kittens for dinner. If the man wanted to kill Hojo that much, why was he worrying about this?
Lucrecia turned the tape recorder on as Vincent tightened the last strap. "Now administering first dosage, SOLDIER-standard mako portion. Subject is currently sufferent from a damaged lung due to puncture wound and is breathing with assistance." She pressed the first needle into Hojo's skin and the faintly glowing liquid disappeared into his veins. Vincent flinched sympathetically.
Checking the clock, Lucrecia made a note on paper and waited for the first signs of reaction. After several minutes, the scientist began to pull on his restraints and gasp for air. With his wounded lung, he was quickly coughing and spitting up blood. Lucrecia started to reach for him and hesitated. She could do nothing now that she'd set this in motion, nothing but follow through and narrate for the benefit of science.
"First reaction at ten minutes in. Rapid breathing with difficulty, likely due to wounded lung. Now administering second compound, regressed sample materia B." This one was red and from a considerably larger needle. Vincent grimaced.
"We believe the Ancients used materia to capture or control nature spirits and elementals," Lucrecia explained for his benefit as she inserted the second needle. "This produced materia of a bloody red color. This is one such materia, forcibly reduced to liquid form."
"What was the first shot for? The SOLDIER one?"
"Oh, it's just the shot all SOLDIER candidates get. Hojo theorized that it would make the body more receptive." Suddenly Vincent had a newfound respect for his rivals in SOLDIER.
"Now what?"
"Now we wait and see if Hojo was right."
For the first hour, Lucrecia simply watched Hojo sleep. His breathing gradually became less labored and more regular. The surgical incisions on his chest knit shut, leaving thin, almost shiny scars. She meticulously noted and photographed the changes.
Finally she checked her watch. "He's been stable for two hours now, Vincent, I think we can... Vincent?" He was asleep in a chair, his head laying on edge of the lab counter. She smiled at him and pulled a blanket from the cabinet to drape over him.
She heard a low, deep noise behind her. Lucrecia stood up and turned back to Hojo.
"Subject is... he's /growling,/" she said, confused. She wondered if she'd skimmed over something important in Hojo's notes. "What kind of nature spirit did Hojo use?"
Hojo began to writhe in the restraints, pulling on them. She soon realized something more disturbing was happening in front of her. She stepped closer, hoping to find the problem. His eyes snapped open, red and faintly luminous. Lucrecia jumped back, swallowing hard.
She forced herself to narrate to keep from screaming. "His fingers are elongating, the nails growing into claws. His body as a whole is shifting... the skin is hardening into a shiny, almost... scaly surface. . And there's, yes, oh god, that's a tail. His teeth, his face... That's... a dragon? He's turning into a dragon?"
The dragon on the table -- she had difficulty thinking of it as Hojo now -- pulled harder on restraints that were now ill-sized for its body. One leather cuff snapped and the dragon reared forward, clawing at Lucrecia.
"Vincent!" she screamed. She heard a crack behind her, then gunshots. The dragon screamed.
"Lucrecia! Get down!" Vincent ordered as he reloaded. She did as she was told and more shots followed. The monster collapsed back against the table and, when Lucrecia finally dared to look up, there was only Hojo there. He was bleeding, naked, and his left arm looked badly damaged. It was almost pathetic, she thought.
Even as she watched, the pair of bullet wounds in his chest knit shut into neat little scars. His arm was torn, chunks appearing to be missing out of it, and it was bent, well, wrong. The skin was pulling together over twisted muscles.
Hojo's eyes opened again, still red, but this time there was intelligence behind them.
"Lu... What the hell..." he shook his head. "What happened to my arm?"
"It's broken."
"That does explain the massive, stabbing pain, yes. Where are my glasses? Why am I tied down?"
His attitude infuriated Lucrecia. "You pulled a gun on me. Why do you think you're tied down?"
"Your dear Turk, perhaps?"
"Good guess." She realized the tape recorder was still running and quickly clicked the record button off.
He looked at his twisted arm, which was quickly sewing itself together as best it could. "What the hell did you do to me?"
"I instated the Break Limits Project," she said, smiling. "On you."
"You did what? You bitch, that wasn't ready," he snapped, trying to reach for her with his useless arm.
She laughed at him. "Still violent, Hojo? Don't you ever learn?"
He growled. She squeaked and jumped back. "Don't you learn, Lucrecia? Taunting a specimen? Starting a project without a clear hypothesis? Maybe I should have made you study more and fuck me less." Vincent came up behind her with his gun trained on Hojo and grabbed the scientist's free arm, holding it to the table.
"This isn't going to work. I see that now, I guess I'm not really surprised. There was one thing I did pay attention to, though." Lucrecia bent over, digging into another cabinet.
"And what was that?"
"How to put down a dangerous specimen." She loaded the tranquilizer serum into the needle and smiled as she approached him. "Now, shall I tell Gast you decided to try the experiment on yourself? I think that will make a very believable story."
Hojo glared but didn't resist anymore. He knew a losing battle when he was in it, but he also knew the Break Limits Project and its goals far better than she did. He could be patient.
After he was asleep, she and Vincent carefully sealed him away in the spare basement room and practiced their story for Gast. It went over without a hitch and she and Vincent were recalled from Nibelheim. She edited her notes and published as if she'd observed him experimenting on himself. She dreamed of Hojo sometimes, nightmares that left her to wake screaming, but she assured herself that he'd been locked away safely. She was the toast of the academic scene, happily married, and now raising her son. Her new project was moving along quickly. But something kept drawing her to the mansion, to the basement, to that door.
She couldn't stop thinking about him.
Maybe it was just that she always wanted what she didn't have.
"Mom! Are you down there?"
She turned and started back toward the stairs. "Don't come down here, the stairs are weak. I'll come to you, Sephiroth."
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