Blood & Sympathy (FFVII: Vincent x OC)

Ch60 - Moving On

2 Years Later

Dizzy. She felt dizzy as she slipped her gaze all around the amphitheater. One of the many of Edge's Shinra University. She had to make a living somehow. And now that there were no fights to be fought and no wars to be finished, she dove back into her work. Work. Sweet, sweet science. It kept her mind off things. It kept her focused.

Once upon a time, she loathed science, but then she realized, it wasn't science that was dangerous. The ways of using it were dangerous. It wasn't science's fault what she had become. It was the people. The false use of it. Hojo. The old man was gone but his voice was still loud and clear in her mind. It didn't matter anymore. She had gotten used to it. She had gotten used to the screams. Her screams. The painful memories.

Her demon used all it could to mess with her mind. Manipulate her to its will. It didn't matter anymore. It's been two years. Two, lonely, painful, torturous years. Jocasta never got the chance to let go of the cane. She still had to use it should she walk.

The black wooden stick was tight in her hand as she pressed half her weight onto it. She walked limply towards the desk that stood on the other side of the room. The students were silent. There was never much noise in the amphitheater. Not after Meteorfall.

Meteorfall. It had fucked it all up ever since it happened. They called it the chosen day. She never got why they called it thus. The world hadn't ended that day. She just knew she wished she died when Cloud stabbed her. She wouldn't have gone through the pain. But she had brought Sephiroth back. The only thing I've ever done right.

Sephiroth. It was funny to think of how once sworn enemies were friends now. That's right. Cloud and Sephiroth had opened a Delivery Service. One in Edge, based in Seventh Heaven, Tifa's bar, and one in Mideel. Hester still had to work there. She was making a research on something in the labs of the clinic. She wouldn't tell her what she had been researching. Jocasta had tried her best to be a good mother for Hester. But there wasn't much left to do. Hester was a twenty-eight-year-old, successful scientist. Her childhood days were over.

Jocasta's heels banged against the wooden floor of the large amphitheater that was filled with about five hundred students. But there was silence. They made no sound. It made sense that most of them would be somehow traumatized after everything that happened with Meteor. With the amounts of Lifestream that burst from the ground. From the energy of the Mako Cannon that caused Midgar to collapse. Some students were lucky, some others were not. Maybe that's why there was this deafening silence in a room filled with five hundred people. What happened two years ago, had left everybody scarred. Everybody had lost something. Somebody.

And now there was another damnation cast upon them by fate. Geostigma. The University had been researching tirelessly for a cure. But there was no cure. They couldn't hope to find a cure if they didn't know what that thing was. Jocasta had a hunch. She led a team of students in the research. A couple of volunteers, suffering by Geostigma, had offered to help. It was JENOVA.

Alien cells infested their bodies. Their immune systems tried to fight them off by creating antibodies but the problem was, that the antibodies were never effective enough. That thing was alien, it was foreign and unfamiliar for both T cells and B cells to recognize and destroy. Which meant, that the defense mechanism of a human organism -the immune system- was useless when it came to JENOVA cells. But still the immune system tried to fight them off, resulting in destroying its own tissue. Septicaemia. A blood disease. She had encountered that before, on Lucrecia, but this time the tissue rotted and she didn't know why. This time, the JENOVA cells were killing. In Lucrecia's case, they weren't letting her die no matter how many times she tried.