Lucrecia - 1998
Lucrecia was pulled from sleep as if by a tether drawing taut. She sat up in the dark, trying to recall what the dream had been, if there had been a dream. Had something woken her? Beside her, Ifalna slumbered on undisturbed.
Lucrecia stretched her arms over her head, but the feeling remained. She tried to place it. It didn't linger from a dream, but from a memory. She remembered this feeling.
She stilled, and then swung herself out of bed. She threw on a shirt and pants and padded out into the hallway barefoot. From their door, she could see the inn's front desk: no one there this early in the morning.
She knocked on Sephiroth and Aeris's door. There was no answer. She opened it.
And then she was back in the bedroom, her hand on Ifalna's shoulder. "They're gone."
"What?" Ifalna asked blearily. "Who's gone?"
"The children. Aeris and Sephiroth, they aren't in their room."
Ifalna sat up slowly, uneasy but uncertain. "What time is it?"
"Too early. It..." Lucrecia dug her fingers into the fabric of her shirt. "I know this feeling. This is how it feels when we're apart. He's left the canyon."
"...do you know which way he's gone?"
Did she? "I... I don't know. Maybe if I don't think about it."
"We'll ask around," said Ifalna. "Someone must have seen them."
Ifalna dressed, and Lucrecia found her shoes. They looked again into the other bedroom, searching for a note, anything. The beds were neatly made, and none of their belongings left behind. Ifalna said that that was a good sign: it meant that they had gone on their own, rather than being taken.
Something inside Lucrecia said that might not be a good thing, but she couldn't explain it, so she didn't voice it.
The gatekeeper on the night watch hadn't seen them, but directed them to where they could find the man on the previous shift. Sleepily, he told them that Aeris and Sephiroth had left late the prior evening, in the company of a trucker who drove at night to avoid the heat of the day. He was headed for Nibelheim.
Nibelheim.
Ifalna took her arm, and Lucrecia didn't realize she'd been guided anywhere until she felt a bench behind her legs. She sat down.
"Tell me," said Ifalna. "It... There's no way they could reach it, is there?"
Lucrecia stared at her without comprehension. Her thoughts had caught on the village, on the static view of the water tower out her window, day after day. Wanting to scream for the people she saw walking past and knowing they'd never make it past Vincent.
Vincent, who never left the basement.
"The reactor," Ifalna clarified, gentle but urgent. "Surely access is restricted."
"...no," Lucrecia said. "I mean, yes. They can't get inside without Shinra ID. Sephiroth... may still have one from the last time we checked in on Shinra. But he won't have the code for Jenova. Her chamber is secured. I... Even I don't have the code, anymore."
Ifalna let out a shaky breath. "Good," she said.
"We still need to go after them. If Jenova is still being stored there..." She knew Jenova was still stored there. "There will be some kind of monitoring. It was only on a local circuit when we worked there, but that was 20 years ago."
Ifalna dropped onto the bench beside her. "They... We've always taught them to be careful. And Sephiroth's illusions fool cameras, too."
"...he should know to be careful," Lucrecia agreed, but it didn't ease either of their worries.
There were no more trucks headed north, but they found chocobos to rent. Faster than walking, slower than driving. The children would have a full day in Nibelheim before they could catch up, and Lucrecia could only hope they took their time. Anyone would tell them that Mt. Nibel was a difficult climb, and they ought to have a guide. That might delay them.
They spent the morning hours winding their way through the canyon gorge, and when at last they turned north, the tether in her chest eased ever-so-slightly. They were going the right way. Closing the distance.
Lucrecia would have pressed on through the night, and she could tell Ifalna wanted to, too, but chocobos tired and Cetra tired, and the ferry had stopped running by the time they reached it anyway. They camped outside the adjacent storehouse and made their way across in the morning.
They reached Nibelheim late in the afternoon. Lucrecia could no longer feel the tether, but she must have tensed at the sight of the gate, because her chocobo came to a stop well short of it.
Ifalna dismounted and came back to her. "Come on," she said gently, though an edge of worry remained in her voice. "We'll find them soon."
She let Ifalna lead her chocobo through the gate and into the village. Almost nothing about it had changed. The water tower stood fast, and Lucrecia was struck by the urge to burn it to the ground, just so something would change.
Ifalna wanted to ask at the inn first, a sensible notion, but Lucrecia couldn't bring herself to go inside. She dismounted, finally, and waited outside with the chocobos. A passing villager cast her a curious glance, and Lucrecia realized she didn't recognize him. Twenty years had changed the people who walked past the windows of the inn. If nothing else, they had aged.
"Excuse me," she called after the stranger.
Between him and the old innkeeper, they confirmed that Sephiroth and Aeris had checked into the inn the previous day, and a few of the villagers had seen them go up to what they called 'the old Shinra mansion.' The villagers seemed curious enough about the unusual pair that Ifalna agreed they probably would have noticed had they come back out of the mansion.
Lucrecia should have thought to prepare herself for a return. She didn't know where her mind had been on the journey, full of dread and nothing else.
The gate creaked as they pushed it open. They left the chocobos in the yard. The front door was unlocked, and despite the new strength in her cells, it didn't feel any lighter to Lucrecia as she pushed it open. The light inside was wan and oppressive, the lamps out and the windows unwashed.
"Let me try!" Aeris's voice echoed from somewhere upstairs, drawing her attention before the mansion's weight pushed her down into her memories. Ifalna caught her eye.
She just made out Sephiroth's voice in reply: "Quiet. I can't hear it if you're talking."
"This way," Lucrecia murmured, moving for the staircase. They passed the tall windows, and she glanced out the grimy panes into the back yard where, in her dreams, Gast had let Sephiroth play beneath the pines. He probably didn't remember.
The greenhouse lay straight ahead. Most of the plants were dead brown husks, set to crumble at the slightest touch, but a broken window and a leaky roof had enabled a few of them to survive. One had thrived, its vines spilling over and reaching across the floor as if engaged in an agonizingly slow escape.
But the voices had come from the room beside it.
Sephiroth and Aeris must have heard their approaching footsteps, because they stood facing the doorway when Lucrecia and Ifalna found them, Sephiroth's back to the large safe that squatted against the far wall.
"Mom?" said Aeris. "W-what are you doing here!"
"What do you think we're doing here?" Ifalna countered. "Did you think you could leave without saying a word and we wouldn't worry?"
"What? We left a note."
Lucrecia exchanged glances with Ifalna. "What note?" she asked.
Aeris looked to Sephiroth. "Didn't you leave the note?"
"You said you were doing it," said Sephiroth.
Aeris opened her mouth, then closed it again. Lucrecia laughed in spite of herself, in spite of where they were. Ifalna relaxed, too.
"So you meant to tell us?" Ifalna asked.
"Well..." Aeris toed the floor with her boot.
Sephiroth said, "The note was meant to say... that we had gone back to Gongaga."
"You never would've let me come here," Aeris added preemptively.
"With good reason," said Ifalna. "This is a Shinra town. This mansion is owned by Shinra. There's a laboratory right under our feet."
"We know," said Sephiroth. "We found that already."
Lucrecia frowned in confusion. "Then... what are you doing up here?" Hadn't he come here wanting to know more about the Project?
"We were hoping to find something about the reactor security protocols," Sephiroth explained. "There doesn't seem to be anything in the main lab, but we haven't been able to get into the locked room. We came back up to search for the key."
"Locked room?" Lucrecia repeated without comprehension.
"In the passage leading up to the lab."
"...oh, that." Lucrecia shook her head dismissively. "The basement passages were originally carved out for a family catacomb, but only the house's original owners are interred there."
"Interred," Aeris repeated, blanching. "You mean there's dead bodies in there?"
"President Shinra's great aunt and uncle, I believe. The rest of the space was outfitted for the lab, but there wasn't any reason to disturb them."
"So it has nothing to do with Shinra," Sephiroth concluded.
"Not the Company, no," Lucrecia confirmed.
Sephiroth nodded. "I guess it doesn't matter. Since you're here... You know the way to the reactor."
Lucrecia froze.
Ifalna interjected, "You can't think we're going to take you there."
"Why not?"
"To a reactor? They may have abandoned the lab, but that reactor is still active."
"That isn't the reason," Sephiroth stated, and Ifalna fell silent, her lips pressing into a frown. Lucrecia wrung her hands. Beneath his gaze, her eyes dropped to the floor.
"Ever since you told me what Jenova was..." Sephiroth went on. "You're both terrified of her, and she's a part of me. I need to see her for myself. I need to know, and... I need to prove to you that I'm not like that."
"We know you aren't like that," Lucrecia insisted.
"Then why are you afraid for me to see Jenova?"
"You're nothing like it," Ifalna reaffirmed. "But that thing... the Crisis... it massacred my ancestors. It's not something to underestimate."
"She's locked up, isn't she?" said Sephiroth. "We escaped Shinra, but she never has."
Lucrecia shook her head. "That doesn't mean she's powerless. We did awful things here, and I know... I don't mean to excuse it, but I wonder, sometimes, if she didn't influence us. Did she make us see what we wanted to see? We spent years researching her and never had the slightest inkling she wasn't a Cetra."
"What are you afraid she'd influence me to do?"
"I don't know," said Lucrecia. It was a formless, nameless dread. If she tried to analyze it, she wondered if it was only the memories dredged up by being here. The feeling that everything was closing in around her, that she had put herself on a path she could not escape.
On another level, she knew it was more than that.
"I'm just... afraid," she said.
"...that's why we didn't want to put you through this, Aunt Lu," Aeris said gently. "We know there are a lot of bad memories for you in Nibelheim. But if we're all together, I don't think there's anything to be scared of."
"We know what we came for," added Sephiroth. "We'll take a look, and then we'll go home."
"Home?"
"To Gongaga."
Lucrecia inhaled softly. A few months, and he already thought of it that way, or wanted to. The only place he'd ever called 'home' before was their first, by the river. When they'd left it, they'd taken that certainty away from him.
If he called Gongaga home, then he wanted to go back to it. He wanted to keep it. Nibelheim wouldn't hold him.
Lucrecia glanced at Ifalna, who still looked uneasy.
"...you know I could do this without you," Sephiroth said. "I meant to. But since you're here, I'm asking."
Ifalna closed her eyes in resignation. "...if you're going to go, then I'd rather you didn't do it alone."
"He wouldn't have been alone," Aeris protested.
"Aeris..."
Aeris planted her fists on her hips. "Don't you dare say I can't go. You'll have to lock me up to keep me from going."
Lucrecia exchanged glances with Ifalna.
"Together, then," Ifalna decided. "All of us."
Lucrecia glanced out the window at the failing light. "Tomorrow," she added. "It's too late to start the climb now."
Ifalna coaxed her into the inn, but Lucrecia couldn't sleep. Rather than keep Ifalna up with her tossing and turning, Lucrecia padded barefoot out into the hall, a freedom she'd been forbidden during her stay here. Vincent would have been stationed at the door, and prevented it.
The hallway was empty.
What had made him leave his vigil, at last? She pressed close to the window looking out into the pines, but the wall surrounding the mansion's yard was just out of view. He couldn't have seen anything from here. She had shut him out of her world, and she had effectively shut him out of whatever Gast and Hojo had done in that mansion without her.
Lucrecia was glad to leave the limbo of that hallway in the morning, but her relief was short-lived. Mt. Nibel loomed over the town, its peaks stark against a pale sky. They looked wrong, different from what she remembered, but accurate to how she felt. As the path carried them past the first leg of the climb, Lucrecia realized it was because nothing grew here anymore.
Slopes that had once been softened with brush now dropped sheer into rocky depths. Ancient muscle memory kept her feet on the path, but she found herself staring down.
Ifalna touched her shoulder. "Are you all right?" she murmured.
"The official record is that this is where Vincent died," Lucrecia answered, never looking up. "They probably never even bothered to look."
"...but they wouldn't have found him here."
Lucrecia shook her head slowly. "I never knew what Hojo did with his body. He's not a strong man, I... don't think he could have even dragged him out of the basement."
The thought slowly pulled her gaze up from the crevasse. If Vincent's body had never left the basement...
"...you think he locked him in the crypt?" Ifalna whispered.
"We never went in there. Gast would never have looked. But..." Lucrecia threw a glance over her shoulder at Sephiroth and Aeris, who followed a few paces behind. Aeris was chattering to him about something, but he seemed distracted. He met Lucrecia's gaze, and she turned her attention forward.
"...they shouldn't see that," she concluded.
Ifalna reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze. "We'll look together. You and I. Do you know where the key is?"
Lucrecia shook her head. "But it might be in the safe, with the deed to the house." Sephiroth had been looking in the right place for it, even if it wouldn't have led him to his goal.
Could it lead her to one of hers?
She tried not to imagine what his body might look like after 20 years of decay. Had he been placed somewhere or simply left on the floor? Had that smear of blood extended towards the crypt without her ever thinking it?
She looked at the peaks of Nibel and tried to limit her thoughts to a clean skeleton, all signs of life or the man he'd been long since gone. No matter how he looked, that would be the reality of it, after all.
What else had she never seen for what it was?
The main door into the reactor opened at the touch of Sephiroth's stolen key card, though part of Lucrecia had hoped it wouldn't. Unexpectedly, something in her eased as she passed through the door, another tether she'd never been aware of finally going slack. She felt light, moving was easy, as long as it was forward. She led the way deeper into the reactor, trusting Sephiroth to keep them hidden.
Across the Mako pit, the door opened into the lab, and she stopped to stare.
"What is it?" Ifalna asked.
"This is..."
The room had been gutted, nothing remaining from her memory but the staircase leading up to Jenova's chamber. A tiered scaffold had taken the place of desks laden with equipment, empty of anything but a few winding cables.
"We did most of our analysis at the mansion, but all the equipment for collecting and storing samples... I don't know why he would remove it, he wouldn't just stop working with Jenova."
"It kind of looks like they're setting it up for something else," Aeris observed. She leaned her head to the side, following the path of one of the cables beneath the scaffolding.
"Refitting for a new lab?" Sephiroth wondered.
Ifalna lingered uneasily by the door. "If they're in the middle of something, then they won't be gone for long."
Lucrecia wanted to reassure her with something rational, something about Shinra procedure and how hard it was to transport equipment up this mountain. The shortest route was too narrow even for chocobos.
A voice interrupted her before she could say any of it.
« Lucrecia... You've come at last. And you've brought me a gift. »
Her head swam with familiarity, the certainty one could have within a dream of having known for years a person who never existed. She knew this voice. She couldn't name it or place it but she'd known it for years.
« Don't you remember me? »
She realized she had frozen looking at Ifalna, and Ifalna stared back at her in apprehension. Lucrecia quickly glanced at Sephiroth, who was looking at the door.
Jenova's door.
"She's just through there, isn't she?" he asked.
"I can't open it," Lucrecia blurted. "It was protocol to cycle the code every month. I don't know it." She couldn't have opened the door, even if Jenova wanted her to.
« That's all right. You've done your part. »
Sephiroth glanced at her, a furrow in his brow saying he'd caught something in her tone. "It's not like a cell," he said, half a question. "She's... contained in there, right?"
"Yes, in a tank. And she'll stay there."
Sephiroth's gaze returned to the door. "I only wanted to look."
Aeris was looking between the two of them uncertainly. "Do you... feel something?" she asked.
« Don't you? »
Lucrecia started. "What?"
"Mom said you wouldn't be able to feel it," Aeris went on. "The way the reactor... digs into the Planet. It's... bad, here."
Sephiroth shook his head slowly. "No. It doesn't feel like that at all. It's... familiar. Like a dream I can't remember."
"...what do you mean by that?" asked Ifalna.
"I know she's in there," he said. "It's almost like... the way you describe talking to the Planet. There aren't any words, just impressions. If I could just get in there, maybe I could make them out."
"That's what she wants," Lucrecia whispered. "She wants us to open the door."
Ifalna finally moved, her steps echoing faintly as she climbed the staircase to join Sephiroth, who stood halfway up it. She put her hand on his arm. "It was all my ancestors could do to contain the Crisis. They weren't able to kill it. We can't do anything that risks releasing that scourge again."
« There are only two of them. Would you call destroying them a scourge? »
"So we just leave her like this, forever?" asked Sephiroth.
"You keep calling it 'she,'" Ifalna noted. "The Crisis isn't a she, it's an it."
« Is there something more dangerous in being a woman? I expect you would know. »
"She's not just a thing, though."
Lucrecia shut her eyes, as if that would drown it out. She remembered, vividly, the first time that she had seen Jenova. A Shinra team had come ahead of them, taking the longer route up the mountain with trucks to set up the lab and install Jenova inside of it. Gast had been so excited to show them.
A strangely beautiful face. If it weren't for the mottled skin and the deformities of her body, she might have looked like she was sleeping. Lucrecia remembered her sleeping, eyes closed, lips quirked almost into a smile, as if she were a person to whom smiling came easily.
Simultaneously, now, she remembered Jenova's bright pink gaze lancing out at her from the depths of the tank. Watching when she wasn't looking? She was looking now.
Everything else went dark.