Midgar High School

Understanding

I don't understand, and I hate it. I've always understood--everything from the allusions Mom would make to her highschool life, the glint in her eye that would darken whenever she mentioned meeting Dad, to the hungry look Dad would always give Nurse Lucrecia whenever she was over.

Nothing was lost to me--not a single motion, a single blink of the eye. I knew everything.

Or so I thought.

Apparently I was wrong. I understood so much, but that understanding overwhelmed me and destroyed any hope I might have had of understanding the truth.

Mom, Dad, that house, that life...It all makes sense, but I don't understand at all.

I know I'm like Sephiroth, but not the same. Where they made him strong they made me smart--maybe smarter than anyone else alive.

Understanding that is frightening. The realization that I am brilliant enough to figure out everything with only a dozen words to work from, but only because they made me this way, is painful.

"You're brilliant, sweetheart. I guess we made you right." Mom said that, only a couple months ago. I thought she was joking, being facetious...

I look in the mirror and I wonder who the real Shera was, what the child they killed with their enhancements and experiments was like. What she would have been like.

Was she smart, did she understand everything and nothing at all? Or was she mentally handicapped, a mess of crosswired synapses?

Was she pretty? Did she have these same blue eyes and baby-soft hair that I do? Or was she plain like Mom, with her mousy brown hair and eyes of dull grey?

Who was she, this Shera-that-should-have-been? This girl who died before she was even born?

I slap one hand against the glass and it stings. This is my body, not hers; my pain and my emotions.

My body, my mind.

My carefully-engineered mind.

Was she nice? Did she like Dungeons and Dragons? Did she play Magic?

My long-lost sister, my long-lost self. I never met her, but I wish she were here now. She was supposed to be here, not me. She should have been and I should not.

This should be her body, but it's not. She never even got to feel it before they killed her.

"There is no room for imperfection." Dad said that when I was little. "You have to be everything. You're the only one who can."

My parents value knowledge and intelligence above all else--even their own child. They destroyed her life, her future, in their quest to hoard more intelligence, to steal more wisdom.

I am not their daughter, I know that now. If anything I'm the Hojos'--their one and only daughter. All the rest are sons. Cloud, Biggs, Sephiroth...

My long-lost brothers. I bet they've never even wondered about the people they should have been--they were built for power, not for intelligence.

...And just like that I understand.

I am their intelligence, their strategist, the choreographer of the dance of war Shinra wants us to step.

Cloud and Biggs are in the second line, Sephiroth in the lead. He is the crowd's focus--with that hair and those eyes, with that undeniable beauty.

He is the General, they are Lieutenants, and I am the Adviser, the planner of their battles. I can see everything because I understand so easily, so quickly. I see every spray of blood and broken limb, hear every battlecry and scream of pain as steel flashes through flesh.

All I can do is watch. Watch, and plan the next attack. Always on the offensive, always pushing the enemy back. Proving we're better, better even than the best--

All I can do is raise my hand in class and hope I get called on. I have to share it, this knowledge, or it will eat me alive. I've always known this--if I don't tell anyone something horrible will happen to everyone. Because a battle that it waged without an Adviser is doomed to fail.

And yet...in spite of all I understand, I still have questions.

Mom, Dad, why did you do this?

But I already know the answer--I've known it all along.

"There is no room for imperfection."

"We made you right."

I...I don't want to think anymore.