"Hojo"
Audrey
sordidstory@yahoo.com

Hojo.

I sit at this table of buttons and knobs, and smile softly to myself. As I sit, you all sit at your own desk of buttons and knobs and curse at me, hate me, judge me by images that tell no story except that which you choose to make up yourself. You see only Vincent the hero, the romantic, Lucrecia the victim, and of course...me.....Hojo. The villain.

Of course I am incapable of love, I'm evil. What else could explain the fact that I stole away Vincent's love, married her when he loved her most, took her and drained her life.

For this is what you see....a man proposing, a woman running to my arms, and he, like the hero, taking it silently.

I can be silent too, you know.

And I was silent for so long. Every day, as he prowled the mansion in his dark Turk suit, with his beautiful, accursedly beautiful face. That pale pale skin, those dark, dark eyes. Oh, how I loved and hated those eyes. I loved them because I loved him, and I hated them for the same reason. For how can Shinra's top scientist be in love with a man, and a lowly Turk, at that. No, I was the great and powerful Hojo, the authority, the big boss who finally, finally had the power to not be called a wimp, a sissy as I had for all those years of my life.

And then he came along, and he wiped away everything with those soulful dark eyes and that face I just wanted to reach out and touch. But no, Vincent fell in love with that weak, shallow woman Lucrecia, who cared for nothing in the world but her career, her social status. And I, I had to sit there and watch them with constantly mounting pain as he mooned over her as he should only moon over me. For I loved him, yes, now I'll admit it, I loved him more than life itself, and I hated him for not loving me, and her even more for being loved by him and not seeing the beauty of those eyes.

Because when that day he went up to her and asked for her hand, she saw only his scruffy Turk clothes, and the marriage to a soldier, and the loss of her chance as a high-class girl, and she ran away.

Think about it, now, being me. Think about how you would feel if you saw your love's heart breaking before you to bleed upon the snow. I took the vengeance for him, then me. I asked her to marry me. And she said yes.

I knew she would, of course. Me. Professor Hojo. Shinra's number one. Her passage into cocktail parties and corporate meetings. Of course.

And she would do anything for that, even when I stuck her full of Jenova with a smile on my face every time, no matter how much Vincent silently wept. Every time that needle pierced her flesh, I whispered softly to myself: This is for me Vincent, because you better feel how I feel, better hurt, better scream how I scream, with this constant, constant pain. And the restraint that it takes to keep from crying out. This is for you, Vincent, because she hurt you so bad, and she's making me hurt you so bad, she deserves to die, to have her life sucked out, that b*tch, that whore.

I forgot about the baby. And when he was born, I wanted nothing of him. He was his mother all over again with that disgustingly imperious face, so bright, so alight with his infancy. I wanted nothing of light.

I only wanted him.

So then. She died. And you all mourned her death, you stupid, stupid fools. You all cried with Vincent, because he had lost his love, and you never thought, well poor Hojo, he never even had his love. You never pitied me when I cried, just Vincent because, like me, you were taken in by those eyes, that silence...that deadly silent strength.

He tried to kill me. Vincent, my love, my one and only, you tried to kill me. So I shot you first, and strapped you down to the table, and because I could not bear to kill you, yet could not bear to lose you, made you so that never again would anyone be able to love you...except, perhaps, me. And those eyes, I filled them with red, with blood, never to haunt again. Never again.

Now you were a monster like me.

And still, you all pity him.

I stuffed him in a coffin, and Vincent, you don't know, but I cried the whole time, burying my love by my own, trying to kill you, yet keeping you young, and alive, because maybe one day you'd wake up and realize you loved me.

Such foolish dreams, I had.

And now you're here, and you tell me that I should have slept instead, but you don't know that all these years I have been sleeping, living a lie, in a senseless, insane, nerveless coma, driven maniacal by the guilt that I had killed the one I loved. Insanity is a sleep in itself, a numbing, constant blur. We're not that different Vincent, you and I. Except that your love by now is really dead.

And mine is here, with me, right now, staring at me with accusing eyes I myself stained red.

So now you all out there know the story.

Maybe now someone will mourn my death.