Bullet for my Valentine
Lucrecia Crescent was a woman filled with nothing but regret. Her entire life was one failure after another; one lashing of guilt after another, and another, and another….
At the age of twenty she had been so excited to be accepted onto Doctor Valentine’s Chaos and Omega project. Lucrecia had to leave behind her new home in Junon and return to Nibelhiem, the town of her birth, but it was worth it in the end. She’d never dreamed the things that she would learn working under Doctor Valentine.
Then tragedy struck. Not even four years after they’d started the project and unearthed the eventual birthplace of Chaos was the entire program struck down. They’d accidentally awakened the unholy being and in the subsequent damages and deaths that followed that accident Shinra washed their hands of the Chaos Project. Lucrecia found herself shunted from one scientist to the next until she was twenty-five and Hojo took an interest in her.
At first she hadn’t minded, Hojo was a rather sweet young man; socially awkward, and a bit cold, but undeniably sweet. He’d bring her flowers and chocolates and wines and they’d discuss scientific theories with each other. Not once had the twenty-five year old scientist belittled her theories on Omega and Chaos like many of the others had. Grimiore had been the only other scientist before Hojo to treat her thesis as a possibility!
When she was twenty-six President Raul Shinra began construction on Midgar. Word reached all the way to the Nibelhiem Labs, located in Raul’s original mansion and there was even a tiny little celebration. Little by little over the next two years Hojo began to grow obsessed with the entity Professor Gast had unearthed a little over six years previous. When Lucrecia was twenty-seven Raul Shinra okayed research into what would quickly become known as the JENOVA Project.
The entity was visited almost frequently by both Lucrecia and Hojo from then on. Lucrecia never quite liked traveling to the Reactor on Mount Nibel and often voiced her concerns over the dangerous trek. She wasn’t sure what it was that unnerved her so—be it possible attacks on monsters or the entity itself—but Hojo and the company took her concerns into consideration and they sent out a young promising man from the Department of Administrative Research, better known internally as the Turks.
“Vincent Valentine, reporting for duty ma’am. I’ve been assigned to your protection.”
It was the first time she’d ever laid eyes on Grimiore’s infamous Vincent and it was like a blow to her gut. All of Lucrecia’s will power had been forced to help her stand tall through the shock. She had never thought—had never even fantasized—that infamous Vincent actually worked for Shinra. Yet here he stood before her, completely professional and completely unaware that she was just as good as his father’s murderer.
She hadn’t pulled the trigger to kill Grimiore so to speak—and everyone told her it wasn’t her fault—but she was disinclined to agree. The psychologist that Hojo had forced her to see once, back when she first met him, had called it survivor’s guilt. Lucrecia called it her failure.
She had given infamous Vincent a wide and fake smile and an overly cheerful greeting with her name; ignored how her heart thumped painfully and loudly against her rib cage, or how her eyes burned. Lucrecia squeezed her eyes shut to hide the tears that wanted to fall. Infamous Vincent hadn’t outright blamed her or made any indication that he hated her for being the cause behind his father’s death. It was almost as if he didn’t know, but Lucrecia knew that infamous Vincent knew the truth the minute she’d introduced herself. He was a part of the Turks, after all, so how could he not know?
What she hadn’t realized then but that first chance meeting began the careful unraveling of Lucrecia’s many, many barriers. It had started small, with the unburied crush that Doctor Valentine had nurtured in her for his infamous Vincent. Vincent’s gentleness, his kindness and thoughtfulness furthered that crush until soon she found herself in Nibelhiem on a date, or in the gardens beneath a tree, or even in Vincent’s bed….
Then she became pregnant and all her fears came crashing back. Lucrecia learned that Vincent hadn’t known what had happened to Grimiore. He hadn’t known that she worked under the man—that she’d killed him. It tore her up, twisted and shredded her insides in a furious way. All she could see and think was that oh god, he can see the real me now, he knows—he hates me! He has to!
Lucrecia ran. She never told Vincent about the pregnancy and she folded into Hojo’s arms. Hojo cared for her, he treated her kindly like he had all those years ago, and despite how wrong he felt now—how much her gut screamed at her to run Lucrecia accepted him with open arms.
Things progressed quickly after that—or her perception of reality took a drastic shift until she could only remember what happened in snippets. There were key moments where her life began to crumble, quicker and quicker until she felt like she had no control over anything anymore.
Lucrecia married Hojo.
Hojo shot Vincent.
She wanted to die. She tried to die, but Hojo and JENOVA refused to let her. The mako and the cells of the entity healed the wounds on her wrists long before they could even kill her. She broke down, lost her will to survive. Hojo easily snapped her out of the funk by presenting Vincent’s decaying not-quite-a-corpse to her. A failed experiment, he said. Perhaps she could find use for it?
Vincent, reduced to an it; the anger burned like a fire in her veins, but there was a spark of hope. Perhaps with mako and Chaos she could revive him, save him, and perhaps she could recover something she utterly destroyed. Lucrecia worked tirelessly. She gave birth amidst her research and data collecting to find a feasible way to save Vincent, although she could hardly remember the entire ordeal. Lucrecia remembered Hojo refused to let her even so much as hold her son. She had given up the rights to the babe, he told her, and kept his gaze steadily away from her face and her tears even as she pounded and demanded things from him.
Slowly the young doctor began to wonder where sweet, awkward, Hojo had gone and when he’d been replaced by this monstrosity. She couldn’t fathom how, where, or even when he turned into this possessive monster. Perhaps she ruined more than just two people with her stay here, Lucrecia figured, and then buried herself in her attempts to save Vincent. She needed to succeed, to make things right, and then the day of the miracle happened. She worked through the procedure, applied the mako to reanimate the decaying tissue. She watched as the clock reversed before her very eyes—it was a success.
Vincent survived.