Blood & Sympathy (FFVII: Vincent x OC)

Ch79 - Solitude

Beaten. Bruised. A bloody lip. The taste of blood. Her own blood. It soaked her tongue. Bitter and metallic. She spat it out on the metallic floor. It was cold. She felt cold. She was dressed in a grey gown. Her feet. Bruised and bloody. Cuts and new scars. Wounds that needed to be treated and they weren't. She sought all the comfort from the cold. Cold metal that stood beneath her. Cold metal behind her. Her back. Bloody and wounded, pressing against the metal behind her.

Her cell. All metal. No way out. She felt exhausted. She was exhausted. Another day of torture had gone by. Another day in hell. Jocasta's head rolled on the side. She looked at the wall on the side. She had scratched the days with her own nails. She was counting them. Counting down how long she'd been there. Wishing that every second would be her last.

Hojo.

Hojo was alive. More than alive. He was something else. He said Hester had uploaded his fragment data on the network. He was everywhere now. She didn't know where she was. She just knew there had been months. Months of pain. She hadn't seen the sun's light. She hadn't felt the breeze on her skin. She hadn't known anything but chains around her hands. Cuffs that pierced the existing scars around her wrists.

Chains kept her feet together, as she let her head roll back on the cold metallic wall and she closed her eyes, trying to ignore the pain on her hands, her back, her feet. The cuts, the burns, the bruises. Hojo was right back at it. Experimenting. On her. Again. He said she had Omega inside of her. He said he needed to extract the demon out of her somehow. She chuckled bitterly. There was no way out of there. She could do nothing but stay there and wait, dreading the next day. Hoping that Hojo would do something that would kill her and that'd be the end of it.

She wondered where Vincent was. She was worried. She was worried because she wasn't with him. She was worried because he too must be having a hard time. But she didn't want him to save her. She knew that the team would be searching for her, but she didn't want them to find them. She didn't want Hojo to get their hands on them. She didn't want Hojo to get his hands on Vincent. Not again.

She could tell Hojo was doing a pretty bad job on how to extract Omega from inside of her. Whatever that thing was, it didn't want to get out, because if it wanted, it would have already.

She groaned. She didn't care. She had gotten used to the voices inside her head. She had gotten used to bearing a demon inside her body. It wouldn't react now. Now that she could use its powers to escape. It just wouldn't, and she didn't know why.

But its voices were still loud into her mind. It kept torturing her as if Hojo's lancets weren't enough. And the high voltages of electricity that he hit her with, left with new burn marks. New scars. The way he dug his lancets into her skin and cut pieces of herself that he examined. No. It wasn't him. It was the machines that he was using through the ones and zeros. He was into all of these machines. He said that he'd be everywhere once Shinra restored the network.

Great. That'd be great. She laughed and she didn't know why. This man's actions almost doomed the world, yet he was still there destroying, and destroying, and corrupting, and messing with people in his labs. He was still there commanding this place.

Jocasta didn't know much. She just knew that she was being dragged, and cuffed and experimented on and that was it. Nothing more. He wouldn't stop until he got what he wanted and she had no idea what that was. She had never taken the time to read Lucrecia's Thesis, but she knew that Hojo had. It was Lucrecia's Thesis that he used now to destroy. How quaint? Using his lovely wife's Thesis to inflict all that pain to her sister and all the other poor souls that she heard screams coming from every single day. And the wounds, the bruises, the burns, the cuts, the bleeding. He'd done something to her. Something that blocked her self-healing and she couldn't tell what.