Heroes
"While it cannot be denied that Professor Emeritus Harrison Chandler's tenure at Midgar University was nothing short of remarkable – as was his acclaimed manuscript on post-Meteor history, Fallen – it is likewise undeniable that his personal opinions on sexual orientation are also prominently featured in his works. Factually accurate and profoundly insightful into the worlds of the bygone and politics as they are, the element of homophobia cannot be easily ignored when perusing said academician's publications."
Professor Masato Kabe, Faculty of Political Science, National University of Wutai.
xxx
Selena Alvarez was always the aggressive one, and Professor Rhames had never really minded that in the classroom. That was evidenced by the fact that she was being granted the honour of speaking during the final lecture of the semester, alongside two of her peers who had been considered as outstanding by said lecturer. 'Rhames' Trio' typically consisted of the three brightest students in the class, although some years, it was said, the eccentric professor had actually nominated several odd-balls into the exclusive three.
As she stepped up to the lecturer's podium, the projector's beam flickered slightly in the dimly-illuminated classroom, eventually bringing the image of a bald, haggard-looking woman into focus on the whiteboard. The woman in the picture was clearly ill, but there was a twinkle in her eyes which suggested that somehow, she had not been hoping for sympathy when that photograph was taken.
"My heroine," started Selena, "is Doctor Emma Jones. She was one of Director Reeve Tuesti's closer associates during the final days of the World Regenesis Organisation, and was also instrumental in the discovery of Geostigma-beta, as well as its cure."
Sweeping her gaze over the hundreds of students in the lecture hall, she continued, "But we all know that, as all decent history students should. What some of you may not know is that she herself was killed by Geostigma-beta. This in itself is highly ironic given that she discovered the cure, wouldn't you say?
"… the simple fact is, Doctor Jones was allergic to the therapy which treated the disease. And yet, she insisted on continuing to personally treat her patients. Everyone who lived through those days knew that Geostigma-beta was easily overcome by a body's own immune system, and that repeated exposure was the only sure way to contract a chronic form of the disease."
Selena paused for a moment, and cast a glance towards Professor Rhames. The elderly lady nodded slightly, and she entered into the closing paragraph of her speech.
"Doctor Jones stated that she knew of her allergy to the treatment, and yet she persisted in her efforts to put an end to the epidemic. This selfless woman proved that even those who swore an oath to do no harm and help others could sometimes place their own lives before those of others, and that maybe, just maybe, there was some of humanity's inner light during those dark days.
"And that is why I call her my heroine."
Applause broke out among the gathered students, even as the lights came on. Professor Rhames held up a hand for silence, and within seconds, the hall was quiet.
The venerable professor's reputation was legendary – she had lived through Meteor Fall, Geostigma, and Geostigma-beta, after all. And despite being over ninety years old, she was as lively as some of her students.
"Very good, Selena," she said, her voice clear and confident. "Now, if Mister Shen would be so kind as to take the stage for the final speech?"
xxx
Midgar University was a lively institution, whose boisterous nature was often remarked on by the faculty of other institutes of higher education, and envied by students who could only gawk from afar at the outrageous antics of the people pursuing a tertiary education at Midgar. It was practically the party central of the academic world, and yet it managed to churn out a respectable volume of publications and quality graduates on a yearly basis, which did admittedly bewilder some academicians.
Needless to say, it was extremely odd to find a silent area on-campus in said university – even the library was groovier than most would think, what with classical music playing to motivate students and faculty alike, with an indoor garden smack in the middle of it, said to have been there since before the university opened the doors to its hallowed halls.
On the matter of hallowed halls, few remembered that Midgar University's foundations were actually rooted on scared ground – long ago, a church had stood where the university currently was located, and the entire institute had been built around the flower garden which thrived in the church. It had been a gesture of the enlightenment which the university was aimed at bringing to Midgar's youth, what with the flowers having being cultivated by the legendary Aerith Gainsborough herself.
However, entire corridors went silent the day the big news was heard. Students and faculty members alike wondered if someone had finally done the impossible, and their wonder was hardly misplaced.
One of her students had made it, indeed.
And Professor Rhames was retiring after sixty-eight years' tenure as the faculty head for history.
xxx
"My hero," Carlson Elliott said in his deep voice, "is First President Carmen Rooney. She was not only the Mother of Democracy, as you would recall from elementary school history. She was also the first person to campaign aggressively for women's rights in almost all areas, be they politics or even science.
"Remember also how she brought back the fear of GOD into mankind after the disasters of Meteor, Geostigma, and Geostigma-beta. She gave us sight when we were blinded by tragedy and fear, and led us back towards the guiding beacon of civilization – God."
He leaned on the podium, even as the late President Rooney's image was projected up above him. She seemed to be fixing her steely-eyed glare on all who were gathered there, as if to remind them that it was through her efforts that Rufus ShinRa and Reeve Tuesti's collective grip over Midgar had been shattered for the betterment of all. It had been her life's work which had given Midgar's citizens someone to find solace in, and she had died of cancer just a few months prior to the end of her first and only term as President, assured that she had done the people of Midgar a power of good.
Scattered applause was heard when he finished his speech with a bow and the religious gesture which had been Carmen Rooney's campaign signature, and Professor Rhames nodded to Selena Alvarez, the second student to qualify for Rhames' Trio in the Class of 2083.
The lights were dimmed as Selena took to the stage, and Carmen Rooney's image disappeared in a burst of multicoloured, kaleidoscopic light.
xxx
You didn't elect to take Advanced History under Professor Rhames; you got an offer letter from her if your grades were good enough. Most of the students she chose were top-class students, and not all of them were history majors. Of those surprise offers, so to speak, Gabora Gyula the biology major and Alexandar Schumacher the music major had proven to be notably extraordinary, and that was agreed to be the probable reason why Rhames' apparently strange habits were tolerated by the administration of Midgar University.
When asked why she did what she did, Rhames usually gave a consistently mysterious answer. Many of her colleagues and students had debated the reply's true meaning or meanings, but few could come to a satisfactory conclusion as to what she really intended them to make of it.
"Herodotus once said that history is an account of man's actions and the reasons for those actions, which is a fair definition," she would say, staring off into the distance as though she was considering a particularly profound idea. "But while he remembers the reason behind the man and the actions, he forgets the faces behind the reason. And of course, when you forget the faces, you forget the reason, which then leaves you with an action of unknown cause. It's all a chicken-and-egg scenario really, but if you recall the faces of history, and put faces to names, the circle turns into solid space."
The question most asked was, just whose faces was she referring to? Maybe it was those of the people who changed the course of history, and maybe it was those of the people which made them do so to begin with.
Professor Rhames never bothered clarifying herself on that bit. All she would ever say was that she would retire when she finally found a student who was capable of remembering the faces.
xxx
Ian Shen was a lanky, bespectacled chemistry major who had made it into Professor Rhames' Advanced History class. Looking at him, though, one would be hard-pressed to imagine him being capable of anything other than academic excellence, though – he wore his hair and clothes the way a typical geek would, and was practically blind without his glasses on. Books were his only companions as far as his peers knew, although his dormitory roommate claimed that for a geek, he was unusual in the sense that he consistently slept au naturel.
"My name is Ian Shen," he began, his voice quiet as it tended to be. Most of his peers sat up and took notice of his words this time, though – clearly his speech was something to be respected and held in awe, since well, Professor Rhames had chosen him to close her lecture series for the semester.
He just stood there at the lecturer's podium for a long while, staring at the sheet of paper which had his speech written on it. The people in the hall – all save for the learned professor herself - leaned forward, holding their collective breath and wondering just who had managed to gain Shen's respect.
After a few minutes of tense silence, Professor Rhames stood up and slowly made her way towards the stage. She took her time getting up the steps, and walked across the stage to the podium where one of her star students stood, motionless and mute. When she finally reached his side, she placed a hand on his shoulder, and turned to face their audience.
"Let it be known that on this day, Thursday, the eighth of May 2083, I, Professor Rhames, am tendering my resignation," she said.
The shock lasted for a few seconds, and her descent from the stage was accompanied by a veritable tidal wave of hushed whispers and confused facial expressions. She took her seat, and held up her hand for silence once more. All gathered there must have realized that it would be the last time she did so, and they dutifully went silent.
In the pin-drop silence of Lecture Hall 1-B, Ian Shen's voice was heard once again, possessing an air of authority no one, not even Professor Rhames, had heard in it before.
"My name is Ian Shen, and my hero is Cloud Strife."
xxx
The speeches for Rhames' Trio were all vetted by the professor herself.
All students she had named as eligible candidates would submit a written text at least two paragraphs long to her, and she would then pick the best three after considering other factors such as grades, attitude, and even their backgrounds. The topic of the written speeches was carefully selected from a list of eighteen topics which she prepared over the course of the semester, custom-written to fit the class' profile.
Rhames always said that a person was never to forget their roots even if the roots were severed. After all, that was why she had become a professor of history to begin with.
Few knew that the paper containing Shen's speech on the podium that day was not the original manuscript he had written, but rather, a photocopied document which Professor Rhames had hand-delivered to him along with a sealed, confidential letter.
And what of the original essay he submitted? No one knew that ultimately, it had been tucked behind a framed photograph which she kept in a wooden chest under her bed, creased and stained with tears.
xxx
"President Rooney was good for Midgar, and that is the truth," Shen said, adjusting his glasses as he folded up his speech and pocketed it. "But what she did was unforgivable, in a sense.
"When Professor Rhames asked us to write our speeches, she told us to write about our hero. But of course, that was nearly impossible for me. Everyone here probably knows what happened during my freshman year, right?"
Images of blood, broken bones, and shattered spectacles flashed through the minds of some of the students in the lecture hall. The temperature seemed to drop by ten degrees in the blink of an eye, and an atmosphere almost resembling horrified fascination spread throughout the hall.
Shen continued, looking strangely absent. "Well, but that's all old news, anyway. The only thing I truly lost after that incident was the ability to play the oboe, since my left hand… let's just say the nerves in it got a little messed up.
"What my hero lost, however, was much more significant than that. He lost his identity, loved and lost, and finally was himself lost in the annals of history."
He exhaled, and ran a hand through his hair – almost everyone noticed that it was his battered, deformed left hand. Some even felt queasy as they watched his bring the hand down to drum his fingers on the podium, since the damage inflicted on it had left it looking more like a grotesque crustacean's claw than a human hand.
"Few copies of history books that existed before Meteor still exist, and fewer still were written until after President Rooney had stabilized our economy. Naturally, that meant that bigots such as Harrison Chandler had a free reign over academia, which of course led to most of you being completely brainwashed with his ideals."
The audience was rendered mute by his deadpan slap to their faces. They had been caught off-balance, and were completely unsure as to where Shen was going with his speech. Professor Rhames sat motionless, her eyes focused on the young man which she had selected for her course by virtue thanks to an offhand comment he had made in the cafeteria, unknowingly within her earshot.
"Chandler was a notorious homophobe, and so he deleted various homosexual, bisexual, and transgender historical figures from his accounts of the past," Shen went on, ignoring the variety of responses he had elicited. "Notable examples include Rufus ShinRa himself, various members of the Turks, several Wutaian lords, and of course… the most famous of them all."
Shen drew in a deep breath, and when he said the next two names, they almost sounded like the whisper of a tree's leaves rustling in a breeze. "Zack Fair and Cloud Strife. And since Chandler's texts constitute nearly ninety-five percent of all available historical reference materials, almost everyone thinks he was a prophet who spoke the truth, and that the remaining five percent were mere figments of peoples' imaginations."
"Stop it!" cried a voice from the audience, but Shen merely shrugged, and went back to his speech.
"Oh, we all know the stories, don't we? How SOLDIER was rife with immoral acts and how sins of the flesh were rampant among ShinRa's finest. How Cloud Strife befriended Zack Fair, a First Class SOLDIER who pitied the little lost boy from Nibelheim. How they ended up sleeping together, and how Cloud got tangled in the mess that was Sephiroth, JENOVA, and whatnot.
"And so… I regard him as my hero for three reasons," Shen said, his voice barely audible, even though he was using the microphone.
"Cloud Strife… lost the man he loved, and moved on. He was made to live a lie, and was cursed with having fleeting love once again, which Sephiroth ended when he killed Aerith Gainsborough. That is the first reason."
Tears were trickling down Shen's cheeks as he squeezed his eyes shut and stopped speaking for a moment.
"My hero, Cloud, learned the hard way that a hero's ultimate fate is to die on their own. Tifa Lockhart said in her excellent autobiography that when he committed suicide shortly before Geostigma-beta emerged, he left her a note expressing his loneliness and regret over having chosen the hero's path. He wrote about how he could never answer the question of whether he would have done it, had he known the pain he would go through over the next two decades. In the end, he was human, and yet he had managed all that he had done with the other seven saviours of Gaia. That is the second reason."
With a sigh, Shen took off his glasses, and wiped his eyes with his right sleeve. "And as for the final reason…
"Some say suicide is the coward's way out of problems. But frankly, I see the death of Cloud Strife as an example of the human condition at its very best. He had lived his life, and finally decided to leave this world the way he had achieved immortality as a legend; on his own, and of his own free will."
He stepped back from the podium, and belatedly, the projector beamed the image that was supposed to have accompanied his speech onto the whiteboard. It showed two spiky-haired men – nearly identical save for their heights and hair colours – sitting on a log, smiling for the camera. Cloud and Zack had never known that that picture would eventually be the sole surviving reminder of their relationship, but Tifa had preserved it, and so it was.
And so they smiled, on the whiteboard, as though they hadn't any cares in the world. Maybe by the time Shen stepped off the stage and broke down into a sobbing wreck, they didn't.
For one moment in time, two faces frozen in time, for all that remained of time, seemed to beam as the audience rose to their feet and gave Ian Shen a standing ovation.
xxx
Dear Ian,
You did well.
Thanks to you, they will be remembered, always.
And thanks to you, this old lady can finally rest in peace, knowing that what's wrong has finally been put right.
All the best,
Marlene Rhames nee Wallace
END