Deliberate Damage
Morning felt like it came all too soon for Auryn, especially since he woke to the presence of someone who wasn't Kariya. He tensed and searched out the door to Kariya's room, only to see Tseng give him an absent wave as he passed through the room and out into the living room, a bag on his arm.
Auryn had to just stare after him in shock at that, wondering what the man was doing and what was going on. Normally, Kariya would have woken him in time for breakfast, but...
Noises he associated with kitchen sounds reached him, so he sighed and pushed himself to a sitting position. Looking down at himself, he wondered what Kariya and the others thought of him sleeping in his clothes, rather than the night clothes they had gotten for him. It had become a habit after the number of times he'd been attacked and forced to run in the middle of the night to hopefully avoid capture and torture. At least if he was wearing normal clothes when he ran, no one would really notice him and wouldn't have anything to report to people like the Turks.
But was Tseng really cooking for him? Really? Tseng? Cooking?
After another moment, he got up to change and tend his needs, then made his way into the living room so he could look over at the kitchen. Yes, Tseng was cooking, some sort of Wutain noodle dish, by the looks of it.
He stayed at the door to his room for several minutes, just watching the man warily, then finally got up his courage to comment, "I didn't know you could cook."
"Most don't," Tseng agreed. "I don't even think Verdot or Vincent know. The only ones I've ever cooked for are Aeris and Ansha."
"...And now me," Auryn finished, voice flat.
Tseng looked over his shoulder at him to ask in reply, "Why shouldn't I?"
"If you don't share that skill with others, why are you with me?"
"I choose who I share it with. There's no other reason."
The Wutain turned back to the stove as Auryn sighed, then gave his head a shake. "But why me?"
"Because you need something to separate the 'me' you knew previously from who I really am, and this was the most likely thing I could think of to start giving you points of separation between us. Also, if you had already been aware of this, I'd have been ready to just give up—whoever had you would then have been so privy to all our personal lives that there would have been no way to counter them," Tseng told him.
With a sigh, Auryn rubbed his head and asked, "And what do you think the Lifestream is privy to?"
"What does the Lifestream have to do with this?" Tseng frowned, still focused on the meal.
"Do you think there are things the Lifestream doesn't know about our lives? Maybe that's a question you should ask Aeris, too," the blond told him. "Because she'll tell you the Lifestream knows everything, and only chooses not to share most of it unless someone asks her."
"Aeris wouldn't tell any personal information without a very good reason."
"The Lifestream is a 'her'. Hasn't Aeris ever told you that?"
For a long time, Tseng was quiet while he worked, then he huffed a small chuckle and said, "You must be feeling at least a little more relaxed around me to argue the point so intently." The words would have made Auryn blush if he'd been capable of achieving such a thing by that point. However, he wasn't due to no longer having actual blood to bring that color to his cheeks—they only felt hot when he would have been blushing. "Aeris and I have never particularly discussed the Lifestream's gender or what it knows, as I was under the impression that only she—well, her people—can hear it."
"...You don't really know much about genetics, do you?" Auryn asked tiredly, moving over to the table to sit. Before the Wutain could answer, he asked, "So Kariya just let you take over making breakfast for me today?"
"Very early this morning, he was called to do a mission Vincent truly feels only he will be able to do—or likely Anki, but Anki would be more likely to decline on principle," Tseng replied. "He'll most likely be away for today and tomorrow, so I've mainly been left in charge of you. Your doctor's appointment is tomorrow afternoon. Verde and Ansha will be by as well today, Ansha partially to work on this side of the door she's trying to put in and Verde only for a visit. Donnel may visit, too."
Auryn could have said a lot about someone being 'left in charge' of him, but it wasn't worth arguing over and possibly causing another round of torture over not needing a keeper. He knew they all kept saying they wouldn't hurt him, but so had the others in the past, their other selves in those other dimensions—yet things had pretty much never gone well in those, they had never kept their word. As such, the argument wasn't worth having. He also had learned that people's terminology was completely screwed up in ways most of them didn't know, only because of habit. Trying to tell them the implications of what they were saying was foolish and usually just got them more angry...Like how people who were told they should correct their spelling would begin writing (or typing) with many more very deliberate spelling errors.
As a result, he just sighed.
"If you don't like something I said, you should tell me," Tseng said dryly over his shoulder.
"Why? It's not worth fighting over and won't change anything anyway."
"You make a lot of assumptions like that."
"And haven't found an exception yet."
"Really? Not even once?"
At that, Auryn couldn't answer, because there had been some who had upheld it, they had just been very rare. He was reacting to the common behaviors he had witnessed, not to the rare alternate options which had also happened.
Normally, the person he was talking to at the time something like that came up would push him to give an answer or gloat over being right that some hadn't tortured him. However, Tseng had still said absolutely nothing about it by the time he put the meal on the table for the two of them. He waited while Auryn eyed the food suspiciously for a minute before deciding it hadn't been—tampered with—and when Auryn took the first mouthful was also when the Wutain did. Nothing was wrong with the food, despite it having been in Tseng's hands before reaching him.
"Did I ever kill you by poisoning your food?" Tseng asked in something like mild amusement.
Shaking his head, Auryn replied so softly Tseng almost didn't hear him, "There were other things you put in my food and drinks which were a lot worse than a poison which would have killed me."
For a moment, the Wutain eyed him sadly, then gave a small sigh and said, "The more I hear about those other versions of me, the more I have to wonder about how hard they worked to vilify me in particular. They made me into your worst torturer—other than maybe the scientists—didn't they?"
"...They did," the blond agreed with another small sigh. "A couple were sort of...just neutral to me, I guess. There was...one version of you...I mean, besides the first one...who tried to help me, take care of me. The stone on his head was Summon Materia red, but he never showed or told me what that meant."
Tseng blinked, then blinked again. "There was nothing 'different' about my actions or abilities, even though it was red?" Again, Auryn shook his head, and Tseng gave a small smile. "That's something they don't know, then, even though it really wouldn't have been hard to find out. All they would have needed to do was pay attention to 'rumors' and ask questions in Wutai."
A sudden memory of Kunzel caused him to give a faint smile as he replied, "People who are either paranoid or bent on revenge rarely do what's practical."
The older man blinked and said, "You're quoting Second Class Kunzel Tarins."
"Yes." There was no point in him trying to hide that.
"How well did you know him?"
"Reasonably. He's one of the few who was apparently thinking logically enough in every scenario to decide torture wouldn't get him anywhere, and neither would hatred or suspicion."
"That sounds like the way Kunzel intrinsically reacts to everything, yes."
"...Did you ever think he has a point?"
"If only the world was such a simple place."
"It only isn't because you're making it complicated when it's not."
Silence fell as Tseng stared at him in shock for a minute before finally sighing and shaking his head. He said nothing further as they finished eating, then asked, "What things in here did you want to see if I could find a replacement for?"
Auryn obediently showed him the Wutain-style things he would have liked his own version of, and Tseng wrote them down in a small notebook he'd apparently brought with him. It didn't take them very long to make the trek, then Tseng sat in the living room and took some time to think about the things on the list as he made notes by each one. Not being able to deal with any more of Tseng's company right then, Auryn hid in his room and curled up in bed with one of the books he'd borrowed from Kariya. For awhile, nothing further happened, until Tseng's PHS rang, and soon after, he passed through Auryn's room to get to Kariya's apartment.
Not long after, Verde stepped into the room with a smile, followed by an intent Donnel and Tseng, then by Ansha, whom the Wutain led through the bedroom and into the living room as she carted a fair-sized engineer's toolkit with her. She gave him a smile and wave on the way through, but didn't stop there. Donnel sat beside Auryn on the bed and just peered at him for a few long moments before slowly giving his head a shake.
"Saying nothing won't help," the red haired young man stated simply. The words made Verde blink and Auryn give a small sigh.
"I'm doomed if I do and damned if I don't," the younger blond replied.
As Verde opened his mouth with a small, confused frown, Donnel gave a faint, wry smile and told him, "I used to think of it like that, in exactly those terms, too. I'm telling you, as someone who used to be in that same head-space, that you need to force yourself to speak to these people, no matter how much your instincts scream at you to say nothing. You won't break free of what was done to you if you don't—you'll be letting your pain and fear—and them by extension—control you."
"...Doesn't Ve—rdot do that to you, too?" Auryn asked softly.
"You mean order me to tell him things?" Donnel asked. When the younger blond nodded, Donnel gave a small, smirk-like smile. "I'm a very carefully crafted double spy which both Vincent and Verdot are aware of and play off one another rather frequently. I agreed to cultivate or keep certain of my old behaviors to best fill the role while letting both sides force me not to reveal certain data to the other. Of course, when one side wants something to become known to the other—I'm the way for them to set up joint operations without anyone commonly knowing that fact."
Auryn gave a small frown and said, "But that first day, in the Lady's office..."
"My perpetual bad reaction to forcibly being given orders, you mean?" Donnel asked curiously. The younger man gave a slight nod, so he explained, "Activating an automatic hypnosis which modifies one's memory is never pleasant, and depending on how much my memory is being modified by a particular order, I may actually become violently ill. I know, by my reaction, that I was told to forget, change, or add something to my memory, but I can't tell you a damned thing about what the change was."
"...And you actually agreed to do something like that while you were in your right mind?" Verde asked with a look almost like he was constipated.
"Yes," Donnel agreed, turning to look at the older Turk in amusement. "It was me or Tseng because we were both saved by both Verdot and Vincent—technically, we could have chosen either or neither of them. I had the basic behaviors they could play on already while Tseng didn't, so it was just easier for me to be cultivated for it while Tseng was still at the Academy. And I preferred I be the one to take the position, rather than having them try to train Tseng to it—he wouldn't be who he is now if he had."
"...Is that why they took longer to allocate you to one side or the other?" Verde asked with a sudden realization. At Donnel's nod, he held a hand to his face and muttered, "They set us up themselves, the fucking morons..."
"They gave us some way to bypass the division," Donnel replied dryly.
The two just stared at one another for a few minutes while Auryn tried to temper the headache Donnel's words had brought on.
"You really are morons for not just working together..." he sighed at last. The other two men both stared at him in surprise, but he rolled onto his side and ignored them, so they traded looks and headed out into the living room to see how Ansha and Tseng were doing.
Most of the rest of the day was 'busy' (there were almost always people there) without it directly relating to him. The following day was similar until Ansha and Tseng took him down to Lucrecia's office in the city for his appointment. When he first walked in, she mainly just did a general check-up, and only after she'd taken the notes on changes to his general health did she sit down with him to have a serious discussion. She also had a very thick sheaf of notes in her lap as she faced him with clear worry and sadness in her gaze.
"All right, so now we can go over everything I've found," she told him. "First, I've got your first try of metal and mineral supplements for you, and we'll see how things go for awhile. From there, everything else becomes genetic in some form or another. Should I start with the thing creating the most problems for you in your day-to-day living?"
"...You mean my emotional instability?" he asked tentatively, picking at the hem of the cloth over his lap.
"Yes," she agreed. He gave a small nod, so she said, "I'm aware that there was a time when scientists played around with genetic splicing of human and animal DNA, but all of Shinra's scientists stopped bothering once they had a more versatile genetic source in a being called Jenova. Apparently, your captors decided to play with more of that animal-human splicing in you, and you have the distinctive traits of both feline and bird genetics. Normally, those two don't go together—other than in monsters built that way from the start—creating issues in adaption between the mammal and bird species. The main type of cat you were based on looks to be a small cat which lives in rugged climates and likes to swim, and the bird seems to belong to the crane family. As much of a problem as those are, the one doing it also had the gall to use female genetics—the cat especially shows that way, and your body can't tell if it's supposed to be a human, a cat, a bird, a male, or a female. All at once."
She paused as he just stared at her with wide eyes. "What that means for you is that you have very sturdy but light bones and many double-jointed body parts which no human would normally have double-jointed. You'd be able to fit through any space your head can fit through and turn your limbs in directions other humans can't. What I need to do is to try to bring those various genetics into some sort of agreement with one another, which will require genetic therapy and most likely the introduction of some small portion of Griffin genetics to 'teach' your existing genes how to meld and work together. I'm still determining how to meld your male and female aspects, as that's more difficult than balancing the alternate genetics themselves. Following so far?"
"Yeah...Some asshole decided it would be a hoot to splice female animal genetics into me, resulting in my body not knowing which way is up," Auryn replied, pulling a disgusted face. Lucrecia had to give a little chuckle at the phrasing, but then he went on with, "Do you think there's anything in the Shapeshift Materia which would help fix that—male versus female problem?"
"...Why do you know about it?" the woman asked in surprise.
"One of the scientists had one, and the Emperor of Wutai has one," the blond said, staring down at his knees. He wasn't going to tell them he had one in his 'arsenal', nor was he going to say he'd found out the hard way that Tseng also had one. (1)
Maybe if he were to use his own Shapeshift Materia on himself to make himself a woman, Tsengs in other dimensions may not react so badly to him meeting Aeris...?
The realization of that particular idea annoyed him—he should have been able to come up with it long ago! Why hadn't he...?
For a moment, the doctor was quiet, but then she said, "Very well. In that case, there's the possibility the Materia might help, assuming we can find and use a copy to test things. Otherwise, I'll have to work out an appropriate hormone therapy once we've done what we can for your animal genetics, and everything else that's wrong. Speaking of other things that are wrong, you have literal cellular damage which somehow resulted from your having been struck by physical weapons. That means many of your cells have permanent partial damage, and I'll most likely have to work out a way to re-grow the cells without that damage. The other option would be to use J-cells, or Jenova's cells, in a very small quantity to revitalize the cells with that type of damage. Would you be willing to undergo such a procedure?"
For a moment, the blond sixteen-year-old tensed and froze, then gasped out, "Not a chance are you putting that parasite's genes in me while she's still aware!" His eyes then went wide and afraid as he curled into a ball, expecting blows for such a refusal. Still, the one thing he'd somehow always been able to avoid was having Jenova's cells put into him, and he really didn't want that now.
He flinched as a hand touched his head, remembering heavy, painful hands striking him there, but then slowly realized he felt no pain and the hand was just gently resting on the side of his head, above his ear. He flashed back that time to the very first dimension, when Rude had been a father figure to him and had often rested a hand on his head to ground and calm him. The polar opposites of the two memories brought tears to his eyes and he began crying quietly before he could stop himself. Damned those scientists for screwing with his genetics and hormones, and damned all the people he'd cared about so much for turning around and torturing him!
When the tears calmed, Lucrecia told him gently, "If you're not comfortable with that, I won't use her cells to work with your genes. It's not necessary—it would have made things easier, but there are other ways to accomplish the same results. I take it that means I don't need to explain what Jenova is or the good and bad of having her cells?"
"No. I probably know more about Jenova than you do," Auryn answered tiredly, just staying in the position he was in, effectively laying on the tops of his own thighs while doubled over on the examining table.
With a small sigh, the woman told him, "Then we'll move on to the next thing I found of note. This one is more problematic to others around you than to yourself, because apparently there is some sort of—addition to your genetics which I've never personally seen before. The one thing I've heard multiple times from the people around you is that they feel 'compelled' to share very personal information with you. I can track everything else except that, so my assumption is that the added unusual gene acts as a prompt to cause others to over-share, essentially allowing you to gather data you never would be privy to otherwise. I currently have no way to do anything about it other than to warn people to pay attention to what they're saying when talking with you."
Auryn just sighed at the words. Really? They were going to blame people sharing things with him on his genetics? Mind you, he really had no idea 'how' Minerva was trying to make things go in his best interests, and maybe that genetic modification was one of Minerva's attempts to help him?
"Well, that leads us to the next set of things," Lucrecia said after a few moments of silence.
Wait, there was more?
"I'm calling it a 'set' because there seems to be some sort of tie-in from one to the next, even though there are obvious indications the two scientists involved were both working, almost alternately, on this set. From what I can tell, they were trying to do things like enhance your senses, make you more resistant to damage, give you new abilities, and enhance the ones you have. However, most of those have had some sort of negative impact on you due to either them not having worked out well or having interacted poorly with existing experiments in that line. Oddly enough, none of them have interacted poorly with the other experiments I've noted, but they were a great deal more likely to create a problem elsewhere if a certain enhancement had already been given in some way.
"For example, your cat genetics have enhanced your reflexes beyond human limits, so when one of the scientists tried to further enhance your reflexes, it ended up making your skin much more sensitive to touch than it would usually be—nerve hypersensitivity—and the only reason you aren't living in agony is because the Mako in your body is undoing the damage as fast as it happens. Your basic genetics show as what I associate with genius-level mental abilities, but one of them tried to enhance your mental abilities further, and instead created blockages in your nervous system and synapse stimulation," the woman explained.
Auryn lifted his head and looked at her in confusion as he asked, "Are you saying they made me stupider instead of smarter?"
"They didn't affect your existing intelligence or knowledge," Lucrecia told him calmly. "They made it more difficult for you to process new data and to transmit orders from your mind to the rest of your body."
"...Oh...Then...maybe that's why it took me so long to come up with solutions to some things when I'd normally have gotten them much sooner," Auryn muttered, putting his head back down.
"Possibly," the Doctor agreed. "The complete list includes modification to your five senses, the noted attempt at damage reduction, reflexes, and mental ability, resistance to illness and disease, and abstract mental ability—the last two of which seem to have been the only ones which mostly worked correctly. The second last had a few glitches and have been behind a number of incidences where you felt you couldn't eat or became ill while doing so. The last—would normally apply to your creative aspect, things like appreciation or ability for music, art, poetry, and other similar things. I would encourage you to test yourself in those aspects of the world to see if any of them happens to be accessible to you now when it wasn't before."
"...Why should I do that?" the blond asked in confusion, not lifting his head. He was a scientist, not a foolish, whimsical artist!
"It would be a way for you to express your feelings without necessarily having to resort to panic—or other emotional—attacks," she answered simply. "Regardless, all the rest of the items I've indicated are problematic for what damage they've done in place of what they should have done, and I'm going to be working out more genetic therapy for those once the immediate emotional imbalance is dealt with."
For a minute, Auryn was silent, then he sighed. "So...how soon are any of these therapies you want to do going to start?"
"Not immediately. You have a few weeks before worrying about it," Lucrecia replied in mild amusement. "I need the time to work out the best place to start, as well as my method. So far, I'm anticipating either something painless or something I can sedate you for so you won't feel it, but I'm still working on that. In the latter case, though, you'll be asleep for a long time—probably a few days—because I won't be able to stop and start in this situation."
"Oh." The blond paused, then asked hopefully, "Can I go now?" He still didn't like hospitals or doctors. After what Hojo and Fuhito had done to him, he probably never would.
With a small, amused chuckle, the woman agreed. "Yes, we're done now. I'm going to get in touch with you later to let you know when our next meeting will be."
"...Thanks."
She then left the room so he could get dressed again, and he was soon on his way back to the Shinra building with Tseng and Ansha.
Notes:
(1) Some of you might remember Eden and Godo discussing the Shapeshift Materia in Salvation's Hands and/or Fates of Worlds. At the time, I noted there now being four copies of Shapeshift, and how Fuhito, Godo, and Eden had three of them, but never stated who has the fourth, just asked readers to guess. No one did (or if they did, they didn't say so), so now, I'm clarifying that Tseng has the final Shapeshift Materia. In all dimensions. Period.
