The Lifestream was a fascinating place, full of green light and a sense of being both nothing and everything all at once. It was a single consciousness that everything was born from and everything would return to.

This process took longer for some than it did for others and three spirits that knew this well stood together, patiently waiting for their chance to rejoin the Lifestream.

“It was a failure.” One of the spirits said, it was male and its voice was low and sounded faintly disappointed.

“Was it?” This one was also male; the voice was a greasy sounding tenor. He spoke silkily as if he knew something the other did not. “I think it was successful.”

“That all depends on the objective.” Female this time, a soft alto.

“The objective was to make a Cetra.” The first again.

“That was your objective, not mine.”

“You always had your own objectives, didn’t you Hojo?”

“Of course, you knew I did. Besides, I thought you’d realize that we could not have possibly made a Cetra using Jenova cells.”

“Jenova…” The woman reached out, taking Hojo’s hand and entwining their fingers. He gently squeezed her hand. No matter what anyone said about him she knew, that even in his madness, he had loved her.

“That’s over now.” There was a moment of silence, each waiting for something, anything to happen that would prove Hojo wrong.

When it didn’t come, the first spirit continued. “How do you see it as a success? We didn’t make a Cetra, we made a monster.”

“Sephiroth surpassed all human limitations. Wasn’t that what we were working for?”

“Lucrecia, you’ve forgotten…”

“No, Dr. Gast. It was Shinra’s ambition to create a Cetra, not our own. You’re the only one who has forgotten that.”

“Then what was our purpose in the experiment?”

Hojo smiled at him, a rather frightening thing. He just couldn’t understand why a nice girl like Lucrecia had chained herself to this madman. “We wanted to create a superhuman. It wasn’t necessary for it to be a Cetra, so long as it was superior. Don’t you remember?”

“No, I always wanted to create a Cetra.”

Lucrecia smiled at him, a warm smile. “Is that why you quit when you met Ifalna?”

Gast looked down, there was nothing he could say to that. “The project then, was a success. Ultimately, we still failed.”

“How do you mean?”

For a moment, Hojo just looked at the woman by his side. He smiled at her, a real smile, the one he had shown before the madness, before the experiments, before his obsession with Jenova. “I think he means morally. True, we created a superior human but in doing so, we paid a price. You and I lost our child…and each other. I sacrificed my humanity and the sanity I had left to serve Jenova. The world was nearly destroyed because we played god.”

It was rare to see Hojo like this, without the almost tangible aura of superiority and lacking the look of cold intelligence combined with madness in his eyes. He looked more human to Lucrecia and Gast in that moment than the day he and Lucrecia had become scientists at Shinra. Even more rare was the look of pain in his eyes that showed that he remembered everything he had done in his madness and was trying to deal with the guilt.

Despite popular belief, Hojo had been quite normal when he had first gotten the job at Shinra. No one pretended that he had not been losing his sanity before Jenova but the Calamity from the Sky had sped up the process, pushing Hojo to the point he would have been at in another ten or fifteen years had things been left to themselves.

Lucrecia tightened her grip on his hand, bringing him back from his thoughts. Trying to lighten the situation she said, “And of course you were the only one that got any recognition.”

Gast frowned lightly. “The Shinra gave him credit because he was the only one they knew was alive. AVALANCHE blamed him because of Vincent.”

“Valentine always was a moron.”

Vincent had been her friend at first but towards the end he had become obsessed and she had been terribly frightened of him. So frightened that she had spent many of her days in Nibelheim trying to avoid him. None the less, she would defend him. “He blamed you because of what you did to him.”

“He blamed me because we were together. He martyred you, Lucrecia. To him you were a goddess, an angel that could do no wrong. So naturally when the goddess did something that might be wrong he blamed it on the person closest to her…me.”

“Hojo is right. He refused to believe me when I told him that using you in the experiment was your own idea claiming that Hojo had forced you into it.”

Lucrecia bowed her head, saddened as she was she could not deny the truth she had known since the day they had told Vincent about the experiment.

And there was nothing left to be said between the three.

Gast turned to leave. He would look for his wife and daughter. Lucrecia turned to Hojo, freeing her hand and gently wrapping her arms around his waist. She buried her face in the crook of his neck. Slowly, as if unsure, he put one arm around her shoulders.

“I love you.” She whispered against his neck.

He stared off in to space and when she was sure he wouldn’t respond, he murmured a nearly inaudible “And I you.”

End

Author’s Note: Thanks to IrisDedrick for pointing them out, I have fixed the mistakes.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any of the characters mentioned in this story.