Cissnei stared at the stranger in the mirror who stared back with sullen titan eyes and bony cheeks protruding awkwardly from her skinny frame. Her hair was a swirling mass of tangled fury, fuzzed like something the cat coughed up. With sticks thin hands she caressed her skin-crusted lips and attempted a faint smile, she could never believe that a thing like her had reached the process they called 'womanhood.'
She recalled that cursed morning when she woke up, head swirling and bed ridden with stomach pains. Struggling, she screamed for a doctor while horrified by a bloodied stain which spread out between her legs. At first she thought karma has returned to condemn her for all the bad things she did, and the bad things she was forced to do or eventually will be doing. But it was with a calm, passive face did the summoned practitioner inform her that she was undergoing a special transformation. A 'defective condition', he addressed the term smoothly, it was something that would plague her monthly for the rest of her life until her youth drains out into an old woman confined by a wheelchair. Only, he added, only if she ever lived pass adulthood.
"No need to worry, just take some pills. You're only thirteen yes?" The practitioner had forced out a smile. Cissnei had recognized that kind of smile. It was one which she saw way too often when her fellow Turks told families of war victims that their conscripted son was jumping and alive, while their bodies were actually left to rot in the outskirts of Midgar. This was their way of a warrior's burial. No flowers, no coffins, just plain desert earth that chewed the flesh to dust.
"Take good care with this. It's nothing to be afraid of," the man's face beamed with a coating of plastic warmth. More smiles that screamed lies.
He scribbled across loose notes while she sat, posed with a formidable grimace and flabbergasted by every word he mutters to himself."Take them after every meal, three times a day." His glasses perched loosely on his stubby nose as he scribbled, constantly pushing its bridge upwards to stop them from slipping. "Patient, Female… Age thirteen… Cause of pain...Oh Silly reason really."
The doctor carefully unwrapped a mint green lozenge and swallowed hard, "Poor thing, we doctors can't do anything about your, how we put it? Oh right! 'Hem, 'Condition', I meant. Look at that frown. It's just a natural process. You'll live." He said lightly.
The casual sarcasm in his voice told her everything. No Turks ever complained about their weaknesses, at least not directly. It was a stupid idea in the first place to see a doctor but since the books on biology she read barely helped, it was a choice she had been hesitant to make and now she remembered why.
"A young female Turk, ha that will work out lovely. They are now running out of willing men to do the job I see. It's truly a waste destroying a woman's beauty with war and violence" the doctor said shaking his head, he cleared his throat with an ahem, picked up his white coat and medical papers and hastily shoved his equipment all into one big suitcase. "That will be it for now, send for me next time if problems persists. Goodbye and good luck!" With that he departed, leaving behind a prescription of pain killers which she immediately scrunched up and tossed into the nearest bin. She could hear him echoing in the corridor, his quite regrettable voice bouncing off its cold, iron walls, "surely a waste… so youn-ong. So much lost potential…"
She was a Turk and Turks feared no pain. It doesn't help with the fact she was also a girl growing into a woman. 'I just need to toughen myself up,' she reprimanded herself, 'The Turks are supposed to be the toughest of Shinra.' They were monsters that can clean up blood splatters of their own victims without a single feeling of guilt. You can't really call that tough can you? Maybe "strong" is the more suitable word.
At least she has to be strong enough to survive Shinra.
Later as Cissnei noticed, there was something weary in the way Veld looked at her after hearing about her 'defect'. Sometimes when they were training and she screwed up, landing herself in the pond like a drowned chicken that kicked and splashed helplessly to get out, Veld never once scolded her; an amazing restrain for a Moustache Pete. Maybe he sympathized with her defect, or had just given up all hopes on her, knowing her physical weakness was an impossible condition to overcome.
Yet as Cissnei looked into the mirror, her reflection printed a hollow image in her brain. Turning and twisting in her white lingerie, she noted down each bruise and scar reaped from training. Her body was riddled with permanents, here and there and sometimes a fresh graze popped up from nowhere without her even knowing. This was the kind of body she inhabits. She was nothing but a tool used by her company and can be easily discarded if they pleased. She was a Turk. And she better lived up to it.
Back in the quietness of her room, Cissnei pondered what it is like to have a plump but curvy body with ripe, luscious lips and pearly white skin. But that thought lasted only for the briefest of seconds before she trampled it out of her mind. What could baby-face or Cutie-pie do for her in Shinra? Turks were renowned for their fists, not their façades of ashen skin and dull eyes of something dead. And she was a Turk who had those, silly, haunting eyes.
Really, in spite of everything thrown at her, Cissnei knew she must strive somehow in this dog-eat-dog world. Sometimes she wished she was never her among the rubbles of her parents' scorched house, never rescued from a collapsing roof and never, never, ever got the way of the Turks beaten into her bones. If only Veld had left her in that god damned orphanage!
The image of Veld with outstretched hands singled out from her folded memories. His face as stern as always, but his eyes read "Welcome". The stitches on his left cheek spasmed as he spoke almost with a commanding aura, "You are now reborn into the Shinra Corporation, as Cissnei, forget your past, this is your future." You are now one of us, a dog of Shinra. A Turk.
Her teeth clenched, those detached, lusterless eyes caught the stranger's gaze once more through her reflection. She numbed herself by murmuring under her breath again and again like a hypnotizing charm, "I am Cissnei, a Turk. I am Cissnei, a Turk, I am Cissnei…"
After all, if she wasn't, there ain't anybody else she could be.