After a busy moving in period, followed by a tumultuous first week of school, things eventually settled into a holding pattern.
I had martial arts training of some sort five days a week. For three days a week, it was fairly intensive, with the other two days being lighter sessions to keep me limber without causing too much strain. For the remaining two days a week, my body was to rest without engaging in anything physically challenging at all. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday of each school week, I met Master Liu, the hand to hand instructor, Master Irino, the traditional weapons instructor, and Sergeant Jamison, the modern weapons instructor. Each of them had two and a half hours with me. I only spent half a day in school on those days, so they didn't have to accommodate an afterschool-only schedule. I was a weapon first and foremost, and these lessons mattered a lot more than building papier-mache models of Midgar or delivering speeches about the life cycle of cats.
The continued viability of swords and other traditional arms in an age that had firearms and bombs was thanks to the existence of materia, as well as the fact that most weapons were used to defend against monsters, and not other human combatants. Therefore, Master Irino also doubled up every other Wednesday and taught me about using materia with my weapons.
Out of all the things I learned to wield I liked the katana and the ōdachi the most, because they were cool and I was a weeb. I enjoyed the broadsword, a solid, hefty weight in my hands. The massive dragonkiller class swords, of which the Buster Sword was one example, suited me less, because I was a lithe kid, and even with mini cast on it, the huge blade Master Irino gave me to try was too much for my childish build. As a small child, I did not have the reach I one day would grow into, and thus though I learned sword katas, I most often used daggers, throwing knives, and guns. I was also growing proficient with the staff and shuriken. I was pretty good with sniper rifles too, though Shinra wasn't going to waste my future modifications on sniping.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I did an hour of hand to hand and swordplay each, to keep up the practice. The rest of the afternoon was for other kinds of specialised lessons that came and went, ranging from Wutaian languages (I was quite good at these and tested out quickly, on account of being born fluent in Chinese and Japanese) to crash courses in military tactics. Those were sprinkled in relatively infrequently, once I had conquered the languages - I was still too young for most instructors, and they didn't like working with me. I was also far enough out from deployment that Hojo preferred to keep my schedule free and to keep me around in Science, undergoing more tests so he could make micro-adjustments to his plans for my modification. Therefore, I spent most of my Tuesdays and Thursdays lounging around in Science, reading a book or doing craft projects while I listened to music or an audiobook. I eventually got Hojo to approve music lessons. Fresh interns were given the much despised job of babysitting me after that. My cacophonous instrument practice lead to a spare secure holding cell being filled with my various instruments - secure cells were generally soundproofed, and I could be locked in until "he got it out of his system" and stopped "making that unholy racket". I didn't watch much television - too much Shinra propaganda, ugh. Sometimes I got called in to be scanned or measured or to have samples taken from me, but most of the time I just hung around, a general nuisance, from 3-6pm, and then ate dinner at the cafeteria and went home unless otherwise required.
I didn't see Yuuki much. He usually stayed in one of the nicer cells when he was healthy, and in a sterile room full of medical machinery when he wasn't. The fortnightly Reunion tests we used to have in Nibelheim was replaced with a monthly schedule.
I did see his spare, empty bodies with increasing regularity though. Hojo stopped hiding the truth from me, and now could be more blatant about testing the Reunion instinct between my body and the empty Yuuki bodies. It was increasingly difficult to act the same in front of Yuuki after seeing those, but I persevered.
On Saturdays and Sundays, I was absolutely free. Shinra only nominally believed in days off, but anyone senior enough to work on me was senior enough to not have to come in on weekends. Veld sometimes took me for trips to the city, whether back to the University library or out on field trips to various locations to get me used to Midgar. The destinations were strategic - he was familiarising me with the city sector by sector, and pointing out potential escape routes and safe houses, were I to be in danger. But mostly I spent my weekends alone in my big empty house.
My schedule was pack to the gills three days a week, relatively lax for two, and totally empty for the weekends. On top a school workload that was laughable at best, that added up to a respectable amount of personal time. All my downtime was spent in my new meditation room. I meditated regularly. My teachers approved of the habit, and Hojo saw it as me taking initiative to try expand my psychic abilities, now that I knew Yuuki was my clone and therefore ostensibly I ought to have the same abilities.
Every day, at the crack of dawn, I would awaken, fully rested. A perpetual oversleeper in my previous life, I now was a morning person. I would wake, do my morning stretches and exercises, then shower. After that, I spent the hour and a half between 6:30 and 8am meditating in the spare room on the ground floor. I never actually used the wooden fish I eventually found though. It turned out that just hitting it didn't actually help concentration, and that they were used by monks to keep rhythm while chanting sutras. Oops.
Initial attempts yielded very little result. I was too afraid of Jenova. But as I spent more and more time practicing, I grew closer and closer to that state of relaxed emptiness that I'd accidentally achieved on a beach in Costa Del Sol.
The first sign of success was the black nothingness behind my closed eyelids fading into a pale green. My heartbeat would seem to grow louder, surrounding me totally. Then, Jenova's voice would come, followed closely by Lucrecia's.
Reunion. Reunion. Reunion. Reunion. Reunion. She never said anything else. Lucrecia was always whispering of Sephiroth and Vincent. Alas, I supposed Vincent hadn't gone to see her yet.
That was the easiest part. Once I learned how to do it consciously, I wouldn't even have to try very hard to touch my mind against theirs. What was difficult was reaching out for anything else.
I found it easiest to touch Angeal and Genesis, who had the next greatest J cell concentration. Their childish minds would be occupied with everyday childish thoughts - happenings at school, petty arguments, small childish concerns that reflected greater issues within their lives.
I didn't dare touch Yuuki. I could find him, almost as easily as I could hear Jenova and Lucrecia. But if I took him over and he became my puppet, Hojo and Tachibana would know. And I could not afford that.
So after I could find Angeal and Genesis regularly, I started working on reaching those implanted with inert Jenova cells, like the SOLDIERs. Their minds came to me not as clear voices, but as vague impressions and emotions. Touching Angeal's mind felt like reaching through a layer of gauze. Reaching for the minds of the SOLDIERs in the Shinra Building was like reaching through a layer of tar.
But I managed it, eventually.
By the time that Hojo's request to move me up to high school was granted, I was six years old, as tall as an average nine year old, and capable of planting thoughts within the minds of unwary SOLDIER Thirds. Daniel Towers, the SOLDIER Third who was currently assigned to beating the shit out of me every Friday in the name of education, would arrive with huge purple bags under his eyes to our weekly sessions if I focused a bit and sent him the most horrible and sadistic images my mind could conjure on Thursday nights. As a science specimen, I had a lot of real life inspiration to work from.
After that success, I redoubled my efforts at meditation. Hojo and the rest of the Science Department had absolutely minuscule amounts of J cells within them, thanks to proper lab procedure and a lack of intentional injections. But most of them worked with J cells day in and day out, and had frequent contact with specimens saturated in the stuff. Contamination was inevitable.
Another year came and went. Yuuki went through two more bodies. I was seven and a half, and already shoulder height compared to some of the shorter women in Science, when they weren't wearing heels or platform shoes. 135cms, to be precise - it was in the 95th percentile for my age, and about the average height of a ten year old. I managed to make Towers freeze for a second while he walked away from sparring, and therefore caused him to trip and fall on his face. I ingratiated myself with the Turks through Veld, and sat in on some of their training regarding psychology and psychological torture. For the week of my eighth birthday, I treated myself by subtly controlling Shrove and making him unusually clumsy at every single one of our thrice weekly dinners in the Science cafeteria. He spilt juice on his front, choked on a bite of shepherd's pie, and coughed wrong and ejected hot stew from his nostril. I did giggle, but manfully did not fall to the ground howling and cackling.
When I was permanently withdrawn from school in order to prepare for my upcoming modifications, I was probably fully capable of puppeteering a SOLDIER Third like how Sephiroth had once puppetted Cloud. It wasn't exactly an ethically or morally sound power to exercise, but I managed to justify it to myself with the reasoning that I never actually subsumed anyone's will - mostly I implanted dreams and nightmares, and limited my control of conscious individuals to brief moments.
I had made no friends at school, and in fact had socialised very little. I followed instructions, but spent every possible moment halfway into a meditative trance. My obsession with honing my power had consumed every moment of my life that I was no obligated to be putting on a show for the people around me, and spacing out in class was prime practice time. The rationale of putting me in school to socialise me had totally failed.
There was a brief delay between me being pulled out of school and the start of my procedures. In fact, the delay pushed the timeline back by several months. The joy I took from making Hojo trip down a flight of stairs was unethical and sadistic. I couldn't deny that no matter how much I rationalised it as trying to push back the start of my mako enhancements. I volunteered to push his wheelchair whenever I could too, just so I could accidentally jostle his broken leg as often as possible. It wasn't nearly enough revenge, but it was sweet nonetheless.
A/N: I was kind of unsure about having a timeskip like this, but I'm eager to move the timeline forwards - idk, let me know what you think.