midnightdiddle

A ficlet for

x_saturnine. Vague Hojo/Cloud, vague Hojo/Sephiroth, vague Hojo/Jenova, vague Hojo/Lucrecia. Really, though, it's all Hojo/Hojo, 'cause Hojo is so stuck on himself.

Vaguely creepy, vaguely insane, vaguely tragic. Mostly Hojo, though, being Hojo. Which, ya'know, is what Hojo does best. XD

Beauty is something that Hojo has never been able to capture. He finds it strange, elusive, and he tries to catch it with his hands, but he never can. It’s always close to him, a hairsbreadth away, and every time he tries to close a fist around it, to make it something solid, it slips away.

Beauty is Lucrecia, full of her bitter-eyed idealism and tight-lipped guilt. Lucrecia is always beautiful. Hojo knows that he is anything but beautiful. He’s never deluded himself to think that he could ever match anyone in much of anything. But when he sees Lucrecia, pale skin and cold eyes, he thinks he might have a chance to catch something between his fingers.

In the end, Sephiroth is as beautiful as his mothers. He has Lucrecia’s face, Jenova’s power. Hojo watches Sephiroth’s growth in charts and papers, lines sketching up up up, and words dragging on on on. In the end, Sephiroth is as beautiful as both his mothers, and he’s just as elusive.

Sephiroth slips through Hojo’s fingers, just as Lucrecia did before him. Hojo listens to mako reactor, the clinks of machinery pulling life to the surface, and he stares down at the Lifestream, twisting and coiling at the bottom of the shaft.

x

Nibelheim is cold in the winter. Snow blows through what’s left of the village, burnt timbers leaning at odd angles, piles of bricks fire-scorched and crumbling.

The basement of Shinra Mansion is damp, melted snow trickling down the inside walls. Hojo pulls his coat closer around himself, ignoring the green mako stains on the sleeves. His toes feel numb, and his fingers are slowly losing their feeling. He’s thinking of moving part of his lab to Midgar for the winter, because it would certainly be more comfortable.

However much he thinks of it, though, he’s sure he never will. Nibelheim is where he first caught Lucrecia, where Sephiorth was born. Nibelheim is also where Lucrecia finally left him, and where Sephiroth fell through Hojo’s hands. The irony’s not lost on him, so he cups his hands, blood-slick, around his mouth and breathes on them for warmth.

When he closes his mouth again, tongue tip touching the roof of his mouth, the blood tastes coppery-bitter.

x

There are seventeen test subjects still alive.

Two of them are from the Nibelheim Mako Reactor crisis. Seven are Soldiers who fell behind during the evacuation of what was left of Nibelheim. Four are those villagers Sephiroth left behind. Three are experiments shipped from Midgar. One is a former associate.

Jenova cells aren’t kind to humans. There is always screaming in the basement, and the rooms that house the patients smell of piss and vomit and blood. It all comes together, into the back of Hojo’s throat, and when he tastes it, he thinks that this must be the scent and taste of fear.

Some of the test subjects are more lucid than others. A few are still able to curse at him. Most, though, are more or less catatonic. It’s a disappointment to him, to walk into the room each day, to find one subject or another dead, floating bloated in the mako tubes.

It takes time, but he nearly perfects the cell injection. The right mixture of Jenova cells and liquid mako, and he can keep most of the subjects alive, if not conscious. In time, he learns how to vary the injections in order to vary his results. Fewer subjects die, and those that do, he brings back to life. The blood on the tables becomes less red, becomes more transparent, and Hojo thinks he might have found something close to beauty.

x

One of the subjects still dreams. Hojo watches the tube at night because Hojo can’t understand how something barely alive can still dream. The subject’s eyelids flutter, and at times Hojo can see a hint of the subject’s eyes when the eyelids open enough. The color of the eyes is washed out by the mako in the tube, but Hojo can see the subject’s mouth move, distorting the liquid mako, sending little ripples and bubbles through the tube.

The subject doesn’t scream anymore. Instead, it cries and pleads in fever-dreams, clawing at the pinprick marks on its arms. At times, Hojo stands near the table, watching the test subject moan over and over, mother, mother, my mother.

When his assistants tattoo the remaining test subjects, Hojo leaves out the test subject who dreams. After all, he’s sure this subject will be dead soon.

x

The years pass in a flurry of seasons, and Hojo begins to feel old. It has been years since Lucrecia left him, and years since Gast left him, and years since Sephiroth left him. Hojo feels the years in aches and pains, an exhaustion that roots deep in his bones. He takes to spending his days in the rooms above the basement, going over his old notes, making corrections.

Each year, the basement feels colder, and each year, Hojo spends less time watching the test subjects. Somehow, they all linger on, but none of them are showing any progress. It’s like watching a room full of disappointment; each of the test subjects was, at some point, perfect, but now they’re all the same. They’re all mediocre.

Hojo doesn’t have time to wait for perfection. He’s growing old, and the years are growing shorter. He begins looking for new ways, and leaves for Midgar. President Shinra complains about costs and appearances, but Shinra is a fool. Hojo drops words about the Ancients, the Promised Land, and a new laboratory is constructed inside ShinRa Tower.

He forgets about Nibelheim, everything there becoming little more than a set of files in the back of his office. After all, there had been nothing there for him, and Hojo is not a patient man.

x

He hears about the accident at Shinra Mansion through memos and incident reports. Two of the test subjects escape during the winter, and Hojo watches their progress across the continents with tired interest. The Shinra conscript soldiers catch up to the experiments on a rise outside Midgar, and Hojo arrives to claim the remains a few hours after the confrontation.

There’s only one body, tattooed with a seven, and Hojo has it returned to his lab in ShinRa Tower. There are still uses for it, and Hojo learned how to conquer death years ago.

He goes through the old reports, trying to discover which subject it was that disappeared, because there aren’t any reports of any missing subjects other than the body recovered. It’s late at night when he finds the notes on the untattooed subject, and when Hojo realizes that the subject that used to dream-- when Hojo realizes that it’s still alive, after all these years, Hojo can’t help but be impressed.

x

The Jenova cells are brutal on Hojo’s body. At times, he can’t feel anything but pain, and at times, his mind becomes nothing but a mess. There are voices in his head, screaming for attention, and Hojo wonders if this is why all his previous experiments had screamed so loud.

Hojo screams, too. Late at night, when ShinRa Tower is empty, he screams his throat raw because that’s the only way he can have a moment’s rest. His notes don’t make sense anymore, and he feels an overwhelming anger at the world, because the world continues turning, and time keeps passing, and Hojo keeps dying, a little more at a time.

He increases the doses of Jenova cells, then begins injections of liquid mako. His body becomes more brittle, and his mind screams louder, and at times Hojo thinks he can hear Jenova’s voice, and Lucrecia’s voice. Sometimes, he even thinks he can hear Sephiroth’s voice, and he wants to be able to reach out, catch the voices in his hands, clench his fists until the voices become flesh and blood, bruised in his grip.

x

ShinRa Tower is half-destroyed by Sephiroth, and half-destroyed by the Avalanche group. Jenova’s body is dragged the front door, and Hojo watches the security films again and again. This Sephiroth looks almost perfect. He has Lucrecia’s face, Jenova’s power, and Hojo wonders which clone it was that metamorphosed into this powerhouse of a god.

Shinra Mansion is mostly empty, and Hojo has the remaining experiments set loose. He has no need for them, because there is a Sephiroth standing on top of the world again, cold and solid.

There is someone following Sephiroth, though, always a half-step behind Sephiroth’s shadow. Hojo watches from his office, and the face that stares back at him through the security cameras looks familiar. It’s not until Hojo is listening to Jenova’s voice murmur in his head, son, son, my son, that he realizes it’s the subject that dreamed.

He touches his head to cold steel, voices in his head screaming and crying, and he wonders how everything fell so out of his control. He feels time racing on, whipping wind against his face, and so he injects himself with Jenova and mako, pieces of Sephiroth and Lucrecia, and he tries to regain any control left, because he refuses to give up his success to an experiment deemed failure.

x

The end comes in a flash of mako dreams and ocean fog. Hojo listens to Jenova scream and Lucrecia croon, and the taste of metal is thick in his mouth, like human fear. He hates these humans who stand behind his failed experiment, these humans who oppose him and his will.

His failure stands in the ocean fog, eyelids fluttering, and at times Hojo can see its eyes, and through the fog the eyes look blue. It’s wrong, because Sephiroth’s eyes were green, and so its eyes should be green, too. It’s all wrong, and once a failure means always a failure, and Hojo never was beautiful.

But the failure is beautiful, and Hojo wants it, wants to catch it in his hands, twist his fingers around its neck, because Hojo has always wanted beauty. The failure doesn’t belong to him, though. It belongs to humans, just like Sephiroth always belonged to Jenova, and Lucrecia always belonged to the Turks.

Nothing belongs to Hojo, and Hojo doesn’t belong to anyone, and in his mako dreams he drinks the world down, liquid green and solid blue, and it’s beautiful.

x

In the end, Hojo doesn’t die. Hojo can conquer death, and he conquers it with his own soul. He sinks into the Planet, and he lives there, perfect Jenova-disease slinking through the Lifestream.

In the end, Hojo becomes a god.