Note: All characters, places, ect. belong to Square Enix.

Scarlet Plague
By Zero9grl

I was messed up from the start.

I wouldn't be surprised if the first thing the doctor did right after I was born was sit down with my parents and have a talk about my "condition". I can just picture it: him in one of those white, sterile coats, maybe with thick rimmed glasses because the stereotypical doctor always has glasses to help make them seem a different species of human, higher, further from the rest of us. He'd thank my parents for taking the time to talk with him. And then he'd say he had to be frank with them.

"Your baby girl is not right in the head," he'd tell them and they'd clutch at each other, pull close in that comfort seeking, insipiently needy way characteristic of the homo sapien. Quietly, fearfully, they'd ask if she was retarded, a frightening thought indeed that their baby girl might not be all there, might be special, that she'd be one of those children who could never really be a part of society, would always be a burden, her future after their deaths a painstaking matter of uncertainty.

"No, no," the doctor would assure them, "She's quite intelligent," and they'd breath a small sigh of relief because their child wasn't going to be one of those they'd have to constantly ask, "What are we going to do with you, honey," because of course something simply would have to be done about her "condition". No though, she was a smart baby girl; so what was the problem they'd ask, a little confused, but happy too, certain it couldn't be anything too bad. Maybe she was one of those babies that used more than a small portion of their brain and were infant geniuses.

"Well," the doctor would say, not wanting to tell them, but having to, because that's his job and he can't really not tell them, if only to cover himself from possible future lawsuits like those doctors who choose genders for babies born with both reproductive organs without ever telling the parents that they aren't really sure if their child is a boy or a girl, so they just figured what the hell and flipped a coin, have to deal with. "Well," he'd say and there'd be a pause where my parents would be very curious, but relieved too because their baby wasn't one of the special ones where people termed them special, but really meant drooling stupid. "She's evil," he'd inform them solemnly, "I'm sorry," not that it was any of his fault, no, entirely all theirs because that was their genes, their egg and sperm, and well, their family just royally fucked up somewhere along the way, darn the damn luck.

It would seem like some bizarre joke, one of those that was supposed to be uproariously hilarious, but was actually just stupid and should never ever have been voiced, it made the IQ of the person telling it drop twenty points, it was that bad. Maybe they'd laugh a bit, give faint chuckles, a little giggle. And then my mom would stop, would think back to the long, agonizing nine months of maternity where she had bizarre cravings, like raw meat and eggs, the meat extra bloody and the eggs maybe, might have been, once upon time could have become, little baby birds that went cheep-cheep. She'd remember constant kicking, killing contractions, a vicious labor. And she'd place a hand on my dad's arm and give him this Look and he'd stop laughing too. Because they knew. Knew sure as hell existed and that heaven was something no one in Midgar could ever attain that it was true. True as rain. True as Sin.

Not that they ever told me about this. It didn't take a genius to figure it out that I was missing a few wires in my circuiting though and I was inherently smarter than most people, my dad working in urban development, my mom a former environmental researcher. When I watched the other kids in preschool pick their noses and piss their training pants, I'd get this feeling that I didn't really have a name for until first grade when the teachers bandied it about behind our backs. Little Tommy was disgusting, he dripped snot constantly. Cute Jane was disgusting, always digging for the wax in her ears. That's what I felt: disgust. These were my playmates, these sniveling, whining, barely-able-to-pronounce-their-own-names brats?

Maybe I had some sort of superiority complex right from the beginning, but it wasn't as if I wasn't completely justified. While the toddlers shit themselves trying to figure out which damn hole the fucking square would just fit into, I was formulating a dissertation on why my next-door-neighbor's nickname for me of "little cutie", no matter how affectionately meant, was derogatory towards my sex and should be grounds for a restraining order. While I was never able to take the matter to court, I did manage to cause him to unintentionally maim the nearby priest's kitten in what looked like an intentional act and nobody likes a man who maims kittens, especially ones belonging to holy men. No one ever knew and he left after a scant two months of enduring the label "animal abuser". It wasn't that no one abused animals, but damn, this was an old, holy senior citizen's kitten. A person can't just go around offending God's public servants like that because who knows when God won't get it through His head to set their house on fire with a wayward bolt of lightning and no one wants to be around when He seeks divine retribution on them. The government just arrests people for offenses, maybe repossesses everything, they don't set things on fire.

When I started in middle school my "condition" became even more apparent. The pre-teens pretending to be true teenagers, already trying to hold their liquor and pass cigarettes around the circle in the bathroom, trying to figure out how this thing called sex that all the real teenagers were supposed to be doing worked because damn, they couldn't be second rate teenagers, they were twelve and thirteen, they needed to have the whole, sordid experience of high school now so that they'd look really cool when they actually were in high school. They tried to play up to society's images and "break all the rules cuz' that wuz cool", intentionally made themselves dumber by the nanosecond because no one wanted to actually be something when they left school, that just wasn't cool. They grew stupid and I delved into how to not break the laws, but make them my bitch, so that whatever I did was right according to them and all the little policemen and politicians and everyone from the mayor to whatever hobo I chose to punch for kicks could only glare and shake their head. The law was my bitch, my little whore, stood at my side in every instance, so that I could have fucking burned the school with all the little morons in it down, danced on its ashes and shot a few pedestrians just to get myself off and it wouldn't have mattered because I was legally in my right.

I told my mom I was going to be a lawyer, help all the little, unfortunate slum people with their problems. The government didn't address the poor, didn't acknowledge the people of the slums, intentionally kept them underneath the plate out of sight so that no one had to be disturbed by their squalor. I told her this needed to be righted, that this needed justice. I told her that I'd save these people from the government's uncaring grace.

And then I'd laugh once she turned away, thinking me a saint in the making, her little girl Saint Scarlet, defender of the down trodden people, laugh at the knowledge of all the things I could do in the slums and no one, no one would give one single damn because who cared about the poor who were probably all doing drugs and prostituting themselves, couldn't be bothered to make their lazy asses hold jobs. To the unforgiving public being poor was a choice, it wasn't an inescapable state of being. People twisted this to their perverted little kinks all the time, from serial murderers to brothels to the black market. And I was not right in the head, no sir, not right, not right at all, because I knew just what I could do with the slums, turn them into my own little kingdom and have everything, more than the fucking mayor ever got, that's for sure.

Then high school came, the big one, the last four years of childhood. They were supposed to be constructive years, help you get your foot in the door of adulthood. Most of my generation, I shiver and twitch to say peers, spent that time as much of how they spent middle school: in a downward spiral of drugs, sex and this misguided idea that they were being individuals and not this huddled, puny, pathetic, easily manipulated mob of future dead beats and consumers. I had stepped into the adult world at the age of four when I learned the messed up state of my head, just another day playing in the backyard of a normal upper plate home of Midgar when some stray dog wouldn't play with me, wouldn't go along with the little game of pet shop I was trying to institute, tried to bite me with his rabies—and I lost it, grabbed the umbrella mom always left out for when it rained and the laundry was still drying on her quaint little line that she used for fun despite the fact we were fucking rich, had a damn dryer, because it made her feel like one of those moms with the perfect lives on TV in the old, black and white shows.

I took the umbrella and I beat the scruffy, so thin his bones were showing, mangy dog until his body was mangled and blood finally burst from his corpse to paint my face and stain my pink dress with the butterflies and flowers stitched on it. That was my first experience with more blood than what came out when I skinned my knees and hands or pulled that one tooth out for the tooth fairy so I could get some cash for candy, the thing my mom used to use to sedate me when I was two and far too much for her to handle, running up and down the halls, writing numbers on the walls, two plus two equals four and apples with worms are bad to eat so throw them in the trash because they'll make you sick. I knew what death was, listened to the morbid news channel going on and on about brutalizing murders and beatings every night while my dad waited to see what gossip they had to say about the company he worked for, good or bad, the anchor's talk telling the mood of his boss the next day.

I secretly hid the body and the umbrella in a dumpster and no one ever knew. My mom thought someone stole the umbrella, all those angst infested preteens running around, needing to steal anything to sell to get their fix on some drug or another, all the good stuff already pinched by the teenagers.

I knew then I had the power over life and death and I grew up. No more make believe pretty, pretty princess, no more dolls and bows in my hair. I could take life away, just like God; why nag my parents for a pony called Sugar Blossom when I could touch things in certain ways until they gave themselves to me, gave me anything I asked for, I didn't even have to demand, they just wanted me to stop touching them that much. Maybe I did use more of my brain than most people, but nobody ever said what part, they never pointed out it was the sick part, the diseased part, the part where my parents genes had fucked up thoroughly, that somewhere along the way cytosine and guanine, thymine and adenine had not hooked up right in my DNA structure, but maybe switched partners for a lark, decided they needed some space and to meet new nucleotide bases, have a breather in this whole molecular relationship.

In high school my generation acted like articulate babies, the worst kind of infant, the kind you can't secretly drown because they'll make noise and someone will know and tell before you can drown them too. In high school I learned the name of my enemy in the battle I planned to wage for Midgar's slums, maybe Midgar as a whole if I felt like it, because really, if I was going to go through all the trouble, why only take half a city when I could have a whole city right there. I believed I'd stop at a city though because people are whiny bitches and who wants to have to deal with a whole world of whiny bitches. No, better to just stick with the city with the easier population control, things right at my fingertips; little Tommy that was so disgusting in preschool gets too uppity and I can just touch someone and they'll take him out into the alley and shoot him, shut his petulant mouth forever and maybe his kids too if he has any kids, because they might be like him, whiny and bitchy little drug addicts. People often grew up to be like their parents or their family, the phrase bad blood wasn't entirely ridiculous. I was the exception, the one whose personality was completely irrational with sweet, charity giving parents like mine. Or maybe that's not true, maybe it came from my dad because he worked for the enemy and the enemy was no better than me, no less right than me, the president probably had to do crack to reach my level of sickness though, where I just ran entirely on me, Scarlet produced plague. My dad worked for the enemy. The enemy named ShinRa Electric Company.

It wasn't until years later, fresh out of college, degraded by the educational system, that I began working for ShinRa. In some ways I was still a child, albeit a very sadistic and intelligent child. I still had delusions, delusions of overthrowing ShinRa or maybe just taking the President's place because I could be second to none in the power hierarchy of this squalid, debased city that sucked the husk of the planet dry and killed the life that could have been, might once have become, like those little possible chicks my mother ate during my development, cheep-cheep, my future children, dear and beloved, born from scarlet flesh and the life of this ailing planet. The people I met at ShinRa Electric Company, particularly the Vice President, a petulant child every bit as intelligent and twisted as myself, or maybe not, because there was a raisin of hope for him created in his dimness when I betrayed him, revealed to his dear daddy our plans to overthrow the old man, placed all blame on his own son. The revolutionary plans we talked together were the words of children, little, powerless people who would never be anything, anything at all in the upper ranks.

I'll admit that one kiss we shared was sweet, sweet and loving, full of sticky sugar that pulled at my emotions and sought to bind me to his side. It could have been, we might have become, the new face of the celebrity mommy and daddy, a ray of publicity sunshine in the vile conglomerate that is Midgar, a large scale city built and owned from top to bottom by ShinRa Electric Company. Thank my tortured genetics or whatever fuck up that ensued down my family line resulting in me that my sense of self-preservation outlasted our puppy game of love and paltry thoughts of revolution.

Rufus sent away to Junon, a promotion to head of the weapons department for myself; I know he's already finely detailed all his vengeful plans for me when he his day to lead this company comes. Maybe he'll kill me. No, worse, he'd demote me to a mere secretary again, reduced to taking his phone calls and being his sexy afternoon fuck when paperwork became a little too tedious. It makes me laugh, the way the wheels of this city turn. Midgar, these are your children, finely processed into the purest product of your seed. Let them be the death of you.