Lament

the tragic end

The ordeal was far from over; Lucrecia's pregnancy marked the beginning of the disastrous period that would begin to chip away at her will to live. She would continually experience pain from the Jenova cells within her body, and hallucinations of her son's future deeds ravaged her condition. One day, she fainted in a hallway.

Vincent had been watching over her from afar all this time, frustrated that he couldn't do anything about her suffering. However, her latest fainting spell was the final straw. He confronted Hojo again, and was immediately shot in the stomach.

As a laughing Hojo stood over his victim's prone body, Lucrecia walked in, horrified. When Hojo wouldn't answer her frightened queries, she looked down at Vincent himself. He attempted to say her name in his dying breath as he met her eyes -- it was the same look Grimoire had before he passed away. An overwhelmed Lucrecia could only back away in shock. Vincent had lost his life, and it was all because of her. It is then that we find out why Lucrecia could never escape her past: Vincent's eyes looked exactly like his father's.

Hojo took Vincent's corpse and used it for his experiments. Vincent was revived, but at a cost. Upon waking up, he saw the Galian Beast's claws through bleary eyes. He screamed in agony at his altered body. He was no longer human.

However, this did not stop the decay of flesh, and Hojo abandoned his 'specimen'. Lucrecia, tortured by the fact that she had inadvertently caused the death of both father and son, took it upon herself to find a way to save Vincent. In her desperation, she dug into her old thesis on Chaos and Omega. Hojo caught her looking at her files and mocked her attempts:

Hojo: I see. Another experiment? You're using this fine specimen to...
Lucrecia: No! You're wrong! You're wrong! You're wrong! I...! Experiment?

Lucrecia protested tearfully, insisting that she only wanted to save Vincent, but paused during her tirade. For a moment, she questioned herself. Perhaps Hojo was right? Maybe, deep down, she only cared about proving her precious thesis? Once again, an old conflict had come back to haunt her.

"Born of the Lifestream. Bringing all together. Stopping the imminent decay of tissue. But instead...born was... the chaos that took him... away from me."

Eventually, Lucrecia was able to stop the decomposition by injecting G Substance -- the substance of Chaos itself -- into Vincent's body. In doing so, Vincent momentarily morphed into the Chaos beast. She screamed in fright, yelling fruitlessly at him to stop. Just then, the Protomateria appeared beside her in a bright flash of light. She found that by putting this in Vincent's chest, she could allow him some control over Chaos. Even so, she felt guilty at making Vincent even less human. She had accomplished her goal -- but at what price? She was greatly devastated and emotionally injured by all she had done to the person who had only wished to love and protect her. Yet, she clung to the one remaining hope in her life: the child she carried in her womb.

But that hope was shattered when Hojo did not allow her even one chance to hold her baby. The loss of both Vincent and Sephiroth was too much for her to handle; at that point, Lucrecia broke. She no longer had the will to live; everyone she cared about was gone, and as she likely believed, due to her own actions. Grimoire and Vincent were killed due to her mistakes, and she couldn't even be a mother to her son. With no more hope in her life, Lucrecia decided to remove herself from the world. She tried to commit suicide, but the Jenova cells within her body kept her alive. Thwarted, she came up with another plan.

Before she left, she stored her memories in the form of data, uploading it to the World Network. She hoped that in the future, this information might aid Vincent. She then departed for the cave behind the waterfall -- the very cave she first visited with Grimoire -- and encased herself within the Mako Crystals.

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