“I feel as though I’ve been here before.”

With no small amount of reticence evident on her face, Yuffie regarded Vincent as they stood just outside the entrance to the small town of Nibelheim. He stood ramrod-straight, hand resting uneasily on the butt of his gun, as he stared intently past all the buildings in the town. His gaze was fixed on the looming, gloomy edifice of the Shin-Ra mansion.

“You have been,” Yuffie said quietly. “You’ve spent most of your life here.”

Vincent swept around to ask her, “Doing what? What was my profession? Where did I live? How did I support myself? Did I have a family?”

Not wanting to proceed but knowing that this was her idea and she was bound to it at this point, Yuffie pointed to the mansion. “All your answers are in there.”

He followed the direction of her finger and returned his gaze to the building, then sighed and started to walk forward into the town. Without thinking about it, Yuffie reached forward and grabbed Vincent by the cloak, stopping him in his tracks. “What’s the matter?” he demanded.

“I want…” Yuffie started, then trailed off, not sure how to put her thoughts into words. She raised her head and found his eyes, simultaneously so beautiful and terrible. She could read the concern in them. Even though he stood on the brink of what could change his life as he knew it, he was still worried for her.

“No matter what happens or what you remember, I want you to promise me something,” Yuffie told him.

“What?”

“Even if you change completely and don’t feel anything for me anymore, I don’t want you to stop looking at me,” she said, feeling stupid even as the words left her mouth. “That way I can think back to these last few days and remember them.”

Vincent frowned and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “I’m not going to stop having feelings for you,” he told her. “If I feel this way about you even without a memory or a past, how could I feel differently if I regain those things?”

“I can’t explain it without showing you what’s inside that mansion,” Yuffie said. “But just promise, okay? I’m not used to asking for favors.”

His expression softened and he pulled her into a brief, gentle embrace. “I promise,” he said.

“Good!” Yuffie exclaimed, forcing herself to brighten up now that she had what she wanted, even if it was fleeting and might ultimately prove useless. “Let’s go, then!”

They proceeded through the town. People looked up from their daily tasks and stared at the strangers, both of whom they recognized as members of AVALANCHE but did not know personally. Vincent felt their eyes on him and had to work to keep his gaze on the mansion until Yuffie took his hand and gave it a comforting squeeze.

The gates to the Shin-Ra mansion were rusted and looked quite worse for the wear. Yuffie knew for a fact that Vincent hadn’t been here since the Deepground Crisis, and she doubted that anyone bothered to maintain the building. When the right gate refused to open, Vincent gave it a solid yank and pulled it straight off of its hinges. He let it clatter to the ground and swept on through towards the front door, heedless of the fact that now almost everyone in Nibelheim had gathered a good distance away to watch the two of them make their entrance. Yuffie looked at the discarded gate and gave the left one an experimental tug. It didn’t budge, and she wondered if Vincent realized just how strong he really was.

Vincent hesitated at the front doors of the mansion, feeling bombarded with a sense of familiarity. It was almost the same level as the sense he got when he looked at Yuffie. Could he have lived in this decrepit mansion? How long had it been since he had inhabited it? If he was rich enough to own such a place, why could he not afford staff? For that matter, why had he ended up staggering half-dead, with nothing but the clothes on his back, across continents to find Yuffie? Could he have been attacked?

He threw open the doors and stepped inside.

It was dim and musty and did not have the feeling of a place that had been lived in. He heard skittering somewhere nearby and knew that there had to be vermin and monsters lurking within. What kind of place was this?

“How could I have spent most of my life here?” he asked, somewhat dismayed.

“You spent it… sleeping,” Yuffie said.

Vincent turned and looked at her outlined in the doorway, looking sad and very small. “What?”

“You spent about thirty years in some kind of hibernation,” Yuffie explained. “There’s a secret passage that I’ll show you that leads to the basement of this mansion. You were asleep there when we found you.”

“Why… why was I asleep?” Vincent asked. “Who did that to me?”

She looked like her heart was breaking, but she forced herself to speak anyway. “You did, Vincent.”

Vincent couldn’t wrap his mind around it. What kind of past did he have? “Show me,” he said. “Please.”

Yuffie took him by the hand and led him up the winding staircase to the second floor. They kicked up dust as they moved and the steps creaked beneath their feet. On the second floor Yuffie brushed past the huge windows set into the back wall of the mansion and kept going, while Vincent stared at the mansion’s rear yard, an overgrown mass of weeds and shrubs through which ran a small stream. They moved through a bedroom and came to a seemingly blank wall made from roughly-hewn bricks of grey stone. Without even having to search for it, Yuffie pressed a particular brick in and the wall slid aside, revealing a descending spiral staircase.

Darkness seemed to spill out of the opening like blood from a wound, though Vincent assumed it was just a feeling of tension that made him think that. He found he was only half-right when he thought to look down at his feet and see pitch-black gouts of what looked like mist swirling around them. Unnerved, he gave a small kick at the fog, which parted like any ordinary gas but lingered afterwards.

“This is where I slept?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Yuffie said. Rather than unnerved or tense, she merely looked sad. Vincent started forward, but she caught him and pulled him into a kiss, to which he relented after but a moment’s surprise. There was a metallic tang in her mouth, and when he drew away from her he saw twin streaks of water running down her face. He pulled back, embarrassed, but Yuffie moved with him. “No worries,” she said briskly, wiping at her face. “I’m just a little on edge, that’s all. The anticipation.”

“Of course,” Vincent said, turning to look at the oozing blackness of the staircase.

“The anticipation.”

--

Their descent into the basement of the mansion was brief. Yuffie conjured a small, twinkling ball of flame with a Fire materia she had on hand, which cast enough light for them to see by. Still, the light did not extend far, and the darkness seemed to eat and worry at its edges, as though it wanted to attack the two of them.

They got to the bottom of the staircase and were presented with a long tunnel. At least, Vincent assumed it was long; it was impossible to see through the inky blackness past the globe of light Yuffie was generating, something that he suspected he would ordinarily have no problem doing.

“It doesn’t feel right down here,” he said. “This darkness doesn’t seem natural.”

“It’s not,” Yuffie said. “I didn’t expect it to be like this. Something’s wrong.”

They proceeded cautiously down the tunnel, which seemed impossibly long in the pitch blackness that surrounded them. Yuffie felt along the wall even with the light, needing a sense of solidity to keep her going in the right direction. Suddenly her hand fell upon metal rather than stone, and there it was: the door.

“What’s this?” Vincent asked, looking at the door.

“Where you slept,” Yuffie said. She tested the doorknob and found it locked. “You mind opening it for me?”

Vincent also tested the doorknob, then gave a sudden, sharp heave and ripped it right out of its metal housing. The door swung slowly open as though of its own accord, and the both of them peered inside.

It was a largish room, hewn out of the living rock, with several wooden, broken coffins scattered about in the rear, which was just barely visible. The two of them quickly forgot about those coffins, though, because a large, black-lacquered coffin with a cross engraved on its face lay in the center of the room, and the darkness was literally seeping out of it.

“This is where I slept?” Vincent asked, unnerved.

“This mist was never here before,” Yuffie said, alarmed. “Vincent, how long has it been since you’ve been back here?” She only remembered the futility of asking the question after it had been voiced, and she winced. “Sorry.”

“Forget it.” Vincent cautiously stepped into the room and prodded the coffin with one of his boots. Nothing happened; the mist continued to seep from under the lid and dead silence reigned.

He moved to open it and Yuffie quickly stepped in front of him, shaking her head. “Bad idea. Not just opening that, but all of this. Coming here was a bad idea. What was I thinking?” She laughed nervously. “We should just head back up to the surface and forget we ever came here. How about it, Vincent?”

“I need to know, Yuffie.” Vincent gently moved her aside. “Whatever’s going on here must have some connection to why I lost my memory. We need to figure out what it is so I can regain my past.”

Yuffie’s expression crumpled momentarily before she gave a small shudder and was calm again. “You’re right, Vincent. We can’t ignore this.” She turned to look at the coffin, the Fire materia clutched in her hand. “We can’t pretend that everything is fine and never come back. That’d just be closing our eyes to the truth.” Circling to the other side of the coffin, she put her free hand on its lid. “We’ll do it together.”

Vincent nodded and he also put his hand on the coffin’s lid. They gazed at one another for a long moment; then they gave a great heave and sent the lid flying.

Pure darkness boiled out of the coffin like an impossibly thick swarm of angry insects. It was completely soundless, but it filled the entire room and Yuffie felt it wash over and around her before wrapping itself about them like a suffocating blanket. The Fire materia she was holding stopped glowing and the ball of flame she was conjuring died out instantly. She gave a yell, muffled by the darkness, and lunged for Vincent, trying to grab his hand.

Something caught her and she could see again, but it was not Vincent. Yuffie blinked a strange griminess out of her eyes and looked at the hand she was holding, followed it up the arm to the face, and gasped.

Professor Hojo sneered at her. “My, my. That’s quite a reaction. Shouldn’t you be pleased to see a familiar face?”

Yuffie realized that the darkness was gone, they were still in the same room… but Vincent was missing, all the coffins were stacked neatly in a corner and not smashed or broken up, and where Vincent had been, Hojo stood. “You’re supposed to be dead,” she said, wrenching her hand out of his grasp and darting back. “How are you here? What have you done with Vincent?”

“I’ll deal with your questions one at a time,” Hojo drawled in that particularly infuriating manner of his. “Professor Hojo is indeed dead, that is true. I am not him. I’m a sort of simulacrum, fashioned from bits and pieces of Vincent’s mind. After all,” and here he paused to give her a truly wicked grin, “I did know him very well… inside and out, you might say.”

“Sick bastard!” Yuffie snarled and went for her shuriken. Her hand grasped at empty air and it took her a second, as well as looking over her shoulder to see that it wasn’t strapped to her back, to realize that it was indeed gone. She whipped her head back around to look at Hojo and was immediately blinded by a powerful light. A sense of vertigo hit her and she realized she was looking up at the light and was lying on a cold, hard metal table. When she tried to move she found her wrists and ankles had been strapped in place.

“I’m here,” Hojo continued as though no change of scenery had taken place, “because memories have power.” Yuffie could tell that he was circling the table, pacing as he talked, but couldn’t see for the light in her eyes, which she had to squeeze shut to avoid being blinded. “Hojo is dead, but I am here, and I can assure you that I am quite real. Simulacrum is a bit of a misleading term.” She heard a rustling sound and found that he had moved the light out of her eyes.

She opened them to find that they had moved into the anterior room of the basement. Bookshelves surrounded the table she was strapped to, and Hojo leered down at her from where he stood beside the table. “Tell me, Yuffie, do you know precisely what I did to Vincent when I had him on this table?”

“He never told me,” Yuffie replied, pulling at her restraints and finding them too secure and too tight to slip out of. “I just know that you did horrible things to him. You changed him, made him not human any longer. He hates you, you know.”

Hojo laughed so hard he had to stagger away from the table and clutch at his gut. “Of COURSE he hates me!” he cried gleefully. “What about me is not despicable, not utterly contemptible and worthy of disdain? I am a disgusting shell of a human being, without moral compunctions or remorse!” He moved back over to the table and lazily ran his eyes up and down Yuffie’s body. “Ruthless, you might say.”

Yuffie suppressed a shudder. This had to be some kind of illusion, something conjured up by the strange darkness, but everything felt too horribly real to her. Hojo stopped looking at her and began pacing again, continuing. “What I achieved on this table was beyond your comprehension. ‘If God did not exist, we would have to create him.’” He whirled and put his face very close to hers. He smelled like disinfectant and Yuffie could see a vein in his forehead throbbing.

“I did that on this table. I created a man capable of attaining godhood. Immortal, nigh indestructible. My foolish assistant Lucrecia instilled him with the power of Chaos and other, lesser beings of the dark followed.”

He pulled away and started pacing again, stopping with his back to her. “It was an experiment I could never replicate again. Oh, yes, there was Sephiroth, there were the Deepground lot, there was Genesis and there were all the other SOLDIER fools. All of them had potential, in their ways, but I never could replicate what I did with Vincent. He was different, he was unique.” Hojo turned around and there was a mad gleam in his eye that matched the reflection of the light in the blade of the scalpel he now held. “Did you ever see the scars I left on him? Quite extraordinary, some of them.”

Yuffie’s mouth was dry and she felt her stomach do a flip at the sight of the surgical implement. “Why tell me this?” she rasped.

“Memories inform, don’t they?” Hojo replied. He slowly walked towards her, twirling the scalpel casually between his fingers. “When Vincent finally cleansed himself of Chaos and its ilk, emptied out his mind, they returned to the Lifestream where they belonged. But what if they had never been meant to return there?” He drew abreast of the table and stopped, looking down at Yuffie and still twirling the scalpel. “If you liberate something that was never meant to be set free, where does it go to nest?”

Yuffie bit back a hiss as Hojo traced a crimson line across her stomach with his blade. “That blood was never supposed to leave your body,” he observed clinically. “If you lose too much of it, you will cease to be who you are now, loosely speaking. Of course, by that I mean you will die, but death is just a detail.” This time Yuffie couldn’t stop herself from whimpering as he carved another line into her, perpendicularly to the one he cut last and decidedly deeper. “After all, who knows what lies beyond the death of oneself?” Hojo continued. “The incisions are made, the process of exploration can begin, but nothing can take me to where you have gone unless I myself go there.”

“But… you’re… dead,” Yuffie got out through gritted teeth.

“Hojo is dead, not me,” Hojo laughed. “I’m the memory, the Hojo that was in Vincent’s mind. Or were you not able to surmise what it was that was permeating this place?”

“Vincent’s… memories?” Yuffie whispered.

“Vincent HIMSELF!” Hojo roared triumphantly. “Everything that was Vincent Valentine is here, except for the shell that I modified so many years ago that is stumbling around with a life of its own, wondering why it is that you love it!” He gave another long, wheezing cackle and wiped at his brow. “You said yourself that I made Vincent not human. I should say more than human, myself, but as I said, details! Who needs them?” He snapped his fingers and Yuffie heard the door behind her open.

A moment later, she stepped into view. Yuffie blinked and stared uncomprehendingly at herself, dressed in a surgeon’s outfit and wearing a blank, hypnotized look on her face. “What…?”

“He had an image of you in his mind as well as one of Hojo,” Hojo laughed. “But in this place, this environment, what memory but I should rise to take control? The rest are subordinate to me!” He motioned at Yuffie’s double, who reached down below Yuffie’s level of vision and came back up with a clear, plastic mask.

It became clear what was happening a moment before the other Yuffie pressed the mask up against Yuffie’s face and held it there, despite Yuffie’s efforts to worm away and keep it off of her. There was a hissing sound and the edges of her vision began to get blurry. “I may not have moral compunctions,” she faintly heard Hojo say, “but I am at the least courteous on occasion, and it will make our work much easier if we can finish our incisions and dissect you without your struggling. Goodbye…”

The world grew hazy and Yuffie felt herself swirling down into blackness. She lost feeling in her limbs first, then her torso, and then she felt nothing at all except a tingling in her lips.

The tingling persisted and she focused on it, trying to grab onto it as a drowning man might grab at a proffered lifeline. She concentrated on it as hard as she could and slowly became aware that the tingling was the feeling of air rushing past her lips in great heaves.

A pressure formed in her chest and faded, then came back twice as hard and faded again, then the tingling resumed. Yuffie realized that she felt as though she was suffocating and tried to breathe, but instead starting coughing violently before she could suck in any air.

She blearily opened her eyes and saw Vincent’s concerned face above hers, outlined by a blue sky overhead. A cool breeze whispered past the both of them and Yuffie became aware that she was flat on her back in grass, and Vincent had been giving her mouth-to-mouth.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he said, his voice betraying just the tiniest tremor of adrenalin. He pulled her close to him and she clutched at his cloak, taking comfort in the solidity of his body. “When that darkness boiled out of the coffin, your eyes just rolled up into your head and you fainted. I didn’t seem to be affected and there was nothing else in there that I could feel, so I grabbed you and got you out here as quickly as I could. Then I realized you weren’t breathing, and…”

He trailed off as Yuffie shakily took his face in her hands and kissed him. “I’m all right,” she said after she withdrew, clutching at him again. “It’s just…”

“What?” Vincent asked.

Yuffie gave him a small, brave smile that concealed the fear roiling inside her. “We may have more problems jogging your memory than we thought.”