A/N: Hey! This chapter is just Sephiroth getting surgically modified. Just a heads up, there's some potentially upsetting stuff - surgery, IVs, some pain, a brief scene of needles to the eyeballs, etc. Feel free to skip if it you need to. It's not graphic and it never crosses into being gratuitous torture, but the whole thing is essentially a long list of the stuff being done to babyroth. Poor kid.
I woke up as the first ray of dawn broke through my spacious window. I climbed out of bed, trudged into the bathroom, and took a long and luxurious shower. I washed my face and shampooed my hair, but conspicuously did not apply either moisturiser or conditioner. I used a flat iron to make sure my hair was extra straight and my bangs extra gravity defying. Studying myself in the mirror, I memorised the exact washed out shade of my pale grey blue eyes. I would probably be saying goodbye to them today.
I flipped my hair, and true to Crisis Core rumour, a scent of roses and vanilla emanated from my silky strands. The complex undertones of the other twelve scents were a sublime interplay that created a harmonious whole while occasionally hinting at the individual. I shrugged and hoped that the perfuming agents in my shampoo wouldn't do anything weird when they came into contact with mako. I dressed myself in a chocobo yellow T-shirt, neon orange basketball shorts, and a very respectable lime green suit jacket. I even put on the moogle patterned bow tie that had been part of my school's choir uniform, out of respect for the momentousness of this very important day.
Skipping my usual morning routine, I shouldered my backpack - still the same fat chocobo, stuffed full with a change of underwear and travel sized bottles of my toiletries instead loans from the library this time, and stepped into a pair of dazzling blue sequined tennis shoes and out the door.
I waved good morning to my neighbour, who was just leaving for his brief walk to the coffee shop around the corner. I jogged over to the Shinra Building at a speed that any non-enhanced person would call a dead sprint. I waved hi to Samantha and Jason, the day-shift receptionists. Then I sprinted for the ground floor bathrooms and let myself in with a flash of my employee key card, and spent the next twenty minutes very disgustingly. A before bed cup of bowel cleansing solution had been the last thing I'd ingested - and in fact the same solution had been all I'd been permitted in the last 24 hours. You did not want to know how it came out on the other end. Suffice to say, I was glad that I had superhuman muscle control, or I wouldn't have made it to the bathroom safely.
I maintained that it was purely psychological torture meant to pay me back for every barb and jibe I'd ever delivered to an adult with a smile on my face, every ambiguously filial comment I'd tormented Hojo with, and, most of all, every hour of trumpet practice I'd inflicted on a hapless intern. Hojo had just stuck Cloud in a mako tank, uniform and all, and he'd turned out fine. Sure, he'd been catatonic for a year and had all kinds of memory problems, but he managed to be a compelling protagonist, in the end.
I hobbled out of the bathroom, grey-faced and woozy, and stumbled into the elevator. I spent the ride up to the science floor staring at my reflection in the polished metal surface of the panel with all the buttons on it. I wondered if I'd feel different. I was already barely human. I was long past the point of latching on to ideas of humanity and inhumanity, of course, but the question still bothered me.
The question stopped bothering me when I stumbled off the elevator and found Hojo waiting for me by the door with a gurney and a gaggle of assistants.
"Oh come on," I complained. "I can walk!"
"Just get on, Sephiroth," Hojo said, annoyed. I was twenty minutes behind schedule, on account of the bathroom break I'd taken just before coming up. Oops.
I hopped on and sat on the gurney, refusing to lie down. Miele, Hojo's current least favourite underling, wheeled it along as Hojo lead our little procession to a mako infusion room, like the ones where SOLDIERs received their procedures. This one, however, had been converted from a lab room two weeks ago, and likely would only ever produce one SOLDIER. It also had a great deal of non-standard equipment - regular mako infusion rooms had a tank, an examination bed, and one of those little side tables on wheels that nurses prepped injections on, and not much else. Someone had moved a whole MRI machine in here, just to save me a two minute walk down the hallway and back.
"Get changed," Hojo instructed. He handed me a hospital gown. I stripped off then and there and donned the gown, shameless. Body modesty wasn't one of my privileges.
I crumpled up my eyesore of an outfit and lobbed it in the vague direction of the intern holding a camera. She yelped and caught the tangled mass of clothes, saved from dropping her camera only by the grace of the camera strap around her neck.
"Don't antagonise the interns," Hojo snapped at me. "Stay still."
Someone lifted up the back of my paper gown. The familiar sensation of an alcohol soaked cotton ball glided over a notch high on my back, followed soon after by the stab of a needle going inside my spine. Hojo withdrew the needle and discarded it, then someone put a tiny band-aid over the injection site.
"We're on a schedule, boy. No time to dilly-dally. Get in the MRI, we need one more scan."
I climbed off the gurney and laid down the table that would go into the big machine. It was presumably a regular MRI, but I had yet to explode inside it despite the multitudes of trackers and monitors within my body. I valiantly did not point out again how useless the gurney was. Hojo was probably just excited for his big day. My big day. Whatever.
I lied there in the whirring tube, staying very still and thinking about what I wanted to eat for dinner. My empty stomach gave a gurgle. I was finally tall enough to cook at the counter without a step stool again. I would make myself some jazzed up instant noodles the way my mother used to do them, poaching an egg and some leafy greens into the soup. That was always a nice treat for an upset tummy. Or maybe I would have egg drop soup. Or even just plain old oatmeal with a dash of honey and milk. My mouth watered at the thought. I was so hungry I could eat an elephant. I was so hungry I'd eat a Jenova tentacle if it were covered in sauce and grilled up on a barbecue first. The whirring and flashing of the machine around me was easy enough to ignore with all the practice I've had throughout my life as a lab rat, but I was a growing boy. Eventually, the tingling numbness of the regional anaesthesia overtook all sensation below my neck, and I stopped feeling the burn of hunger. That didn't mean I couldn't complain about it though.
"I'm hungry," I whined as the MRI tube spat me out. I was helped out and lead to the operation table.
"You may eat after the procedure," Hojo said. "That is, if you still wish to. SOLDIERs generally experience mild to severe nausea, and Subject Y indicated the course of treatment planned for you is particularly difficult to stomach."
I groaned. "But I'm hungry," I said. Hojo made a noise of irritation.
"Take your gown off and get on the table, the sooner we start the sooner you can eat."
I brightened and clambered onto the cold metal of the "operating table", tearing off my gown as I went. I was pretty sure Hojo had just repurposed a dissection table - the gently sloped surface and the drainage hole near my feet was very distinctive. I made a face and lied down. It was icy cold. I suppose he didn't really need a real operating table for this, and anyway when you were a mad scientist with as high a body count as Hojo, it was probably more efficient to do your experiments on dissecting tables. Certainly it would be more cost effective.
"Hands," Hojo ordered. I held out my hands. An assistant came at the left one with a catheter needle, while Hojo attached one of those clippy oximeters to my right thumb. I gave Hojo a thumbs up, wriggling the oximeter and making the cable jiggle. He grimaced.
"Can I have a pillow?" I complained. "My head hurts."
"There are no pillows in the room," Hojo said.
"Make Miele go get a cushion or something," I whined. Hojo gave me the evil eye.
"Miele, go get Subject S a cushion or something," Hojo said wearily. "Now stay still and shut up, Sephiroth."
I bent my legs and crossed them, studying the ceiling of the room. It was made up of those corporate ceiling tiles with the repeating patterns of little holes in them. Someone put a cap and face mask on Hojo while he broke out a pair of sterile gloves from their sealed packaging, and put them on over his regular latex gloves.
Assistants were scrubbing up in the background, changing into clean fresh lab coats and putting on masks and gloves. I very politely did not inform them that this was horrible hygienic procedure, and that just changing a lab coat wasn't going to be create a sterile operating environment. Maybe they were just trying not to get blood and mako on their formal lab coats.
Someone attached sticky pads to my chest, linked to the heart monitor. An assistant pulled my hair up and scrunched it into a bun at the top of my head. It was difficult to tell the scientists apart, as all of them were in masks and caps and lab coats, but Hojo's glasses distinguished him. The intern with the camera snapped pictures at a furious pace as an assistant handed Hojo a prepared syringe and another assistant swabbed a patch of skin on the back of my arm. Hojo stabbed the needle in and gave me a tiny subdermal injection of approximately three drops of the pre-prepared mako solution. He pulled the syringe out and discarded it in the sharps container.
"Twelve minutes, set the timer," he instructed one of the anonymous assistants. Other assistants continued with their work - One drew on my body in permanent marker, consulting a chart and double-checking with Hojo. Another assistant swapped out the plain glucose solution attached to my catheter for one of the seven pre-prepared bags of fluid. They were attached to one of those fancy IV monitoring machines that automatically changed the flow rate of your IV solution. I'd bet anything that theyweren't in general use yet - it was still the year 1988, after all, and most people outside of Midgar thought of computers as having vacuum tubes.
Miele returned with a cushion for my head before the twelve minutes were up, and I settled my head on it, satisfied.
Hojo looked down at me, made inscrutable by everything covering his face.
"Are you sure you want to be conscious for this, Sephiroth?" Hojo's uncharacteristic concern made me feel funny.
"Yes, Professor Hojo," I said. "I want to see my transformation. I want to experience all of it."
"You won't be able to feel anything except pain," Hojo pointed out. "And the sedation will put you in a semi-conscious state. Is that really what you want?"
"Yes, Doctor," I said, smiling. "Haven't you ever wanted to see your own insides? It'll be a fun learning experience."
Hojo didn't know how to respond to that, I suppose, because he just gave the go ahead for the assistant near my IV to start the sedation. Someone catheterised me downstairs too.
There were screens absolutely everywhere in the room. Some of them showed my vitals, other camera feeds trained on me. Some of them were dark, not fired up yet. I could see almost all of them from my position, lying on the table.
The lull of sedation settled over me, a light haziness that slowed my thoughts but didn't put me to sleep. I watched as Hojo checked the bump the test injection on my arm, then announced that the test was positive. The assistants immediately burst into motion.
Another bag of IV fluid was added to my IV line, this one glowing ominous green. The mako somehow burned through my veins even though I was anaesthetised. I let out a gasp of pain.
Hojo stuffed something small into my right hand.
"Press this button if the mako hurts too much and you think you can't stop yourself from moving, and I will knock you out," he said. "And Sephiroth. I'm proud of you."
I looked at him, my brain sluggish.
"You're a terrible dad," I replied, smiling.
"I know, my boy. I know. But I am a great scientist, and that is all you need from me." He touched me tenderly on the cheek with the back of a gloved hand. That glove was supposed to be sterile. Ugh.
"Do you think Lucrecia liked working on Vincent?" I mumbled vaguely as he moved away, my tongue too thick in my mouth, uncooperative. It was probably for the best that he hadn't heard the question.
I watched on the screen above my face as Hojo opened up my belly along the pre-drawn lines. I felt nothing when he did it, the anaesthesia doing its work. He replaced one of my kidneys and a big chunk of my liver with equivalents grown from pure Jenova cells, which had been pre-saturated in mako. It was delicate work that took hours, but once he finished implanting the organs a localised Cure and Esuna instantly took care of the healing and of any possible rejection. The seven bags of IV fluid were down to one last bag of the sedative and half a bag of the mako.
While he had me open, he took the opportunity to inject doses of specially calibrated mako and J cells into my major organs. Then he closed up my gut and someone cast another Cure spell.
The thing about mako was that anaesthesia didn't stop you from feeling it at all. I hadn't felt a single twinge of pain as Hojo rooted around in me and cut out bits of me, but the mako I could feel clear as day. The shots of mako burned like icy fire against the general background of low grad agony from the IV, and the only reason why I wasn't shaking and seizing from the pain was the sedation, which made my body heavy and recalcitrant. I felt like I was being dissolved in acid, or possibly being eaten alive by fire ants. I watched the green of the mako diffuse into my red flesh with fascination and no small amount of terror. I could have woken up after a nice nap and not witnessed all of this, but if I couldn't refuse, if I couldn't control what was being done to my body, then at least I could witness it and know as much about what was being done to me as possible. I thought of Vincent again, stuffed full of demons and implanted with the protomateria while he slept, then waking up a stranger to himself. That had to be more monstrous than the literal demons inside him. And it had been the woman he loved who did it to him too. I only had to content with Hojo. Then again, I had to contend with Hojo.
"We are halfway there," Hojo said. "Turn up the flow rate of his mako infusion. I want that bag finished within the next fifteen minutes."
Hojo opened up my chest over the heart, cutting through the muscle between the ribs so that he could insert a metal tube through the opening. One of the dark screens over my head flickered to life. There was a camera inside that metal tube, and I watched as it inched forwards to the steady, writhing organ that was my heart. If Hojo wanted, he could rip it out of my chest, and I wouldn't even be able to beg properly for my life as I was right now.
Instead, he operated the tiny surgical instruments inside the metal tube with something that looked like a very complex toy car controller, in order to graft on slivers of bluish purple Jenova flesh. One of the instruments inside the tube must have had a materia attached, because he also somehow manage to cast teeny-tiny localised Cures onto the grafting sites.
Once he retracted the metal tube and an assistant cast a full Curaga on me, Hojo's part in the procedure was complete.
More mako was brought over in tiny IV bags, these ones glowing much brighter than the first few bags. Hojo directed his assistants as he took off his mask and cap, and threw away his bloody gloves. I twitched and shuddered weakly against the agony as the green liquid flowed into me. As the concentration of mako ramped up with each successive dose, I whited out from the pain, which I hadn't thought you could do while being both anaesthetised and sedated. I came to after a few minutes, to the sound of Hojo's voice. Everything burned.
"Tachibana, stop hovering by the doorway. This is an important operation, not a circus act."
I struggled to turn my face. A hand stopped me before I could do more than twitch.
Tachibana appeared over me, standing by my head. She carried Yuuki on her hip. Yuuki looked down at me, fingers in his mouth.
"See," Tachibana cooed to Yuuki. "Sephy is getting his shots too, darling."
"Set Subject Y down over there," Hojo pointed at the gurney near the door. "And anaesthetise him."
"W-what…?" I tried to say.
"Don't worry, Sephiroth, you can watch Subject Y's procedures through the recordings once we're done," Hojo said.
Someone took out the catheter in my arm once all the mako was gone. An Esuna was cast on me, and immediately a throb of pain overtook the places where Hojo had cut me open. He'd healed them, of course, but they were still tender. I received another Curaga, and the tenderness faded completely. Still woozy, I struggled to sit up. The surgical wounds were now mostly healed, but the mako still blazed white hot through my veins. I watched as Hojo and Tachibana grafted my discarded kidney and chunk of liverinside Yuuki.
"Is it going to stabilise him?" I rasped out to a nearby assistant. I thought it might have been Ansel.
"That is the hypothesis," Ansel replied. "But we'll just have to wait and see, won't we?"
The ease with which people in this world performed organ transplants was more horrifying to me than the body modification I had just endured. I suppose you could be fast and efficient about it, if you didn't have to care about how much trauma you were doing when you opened someone up, and you didn't have to think about rejection and healing and infections and most common complications. Magic was such bullshit.
I sat there on the table, swaying gently on the spot as I watched Hojo and Tachibana work. After Yuuki was all closed up again, I felt steady enough to clamber down from the table and try to stand. My knees were weak, but they held.
"Ansel, take him to the shower and prepare him for his other procedures," Hojo said, taking off his disposable apron and washing his hands.
I blinked unsteadily at Hojo. Oh. That was right. I was only halfway through. I was walked over to the shower stall in the corner of the room and had all the blood and sweat and saline wash and mako and various gunk washed off me. Ansel soaped me up with a strong astringent soap that left my skin dried out, but thankfully didn't do more than rinse my hair, as it had stayed clean and out of the way. I was sat down on a chair with some mysterious machine attached to it at eye height. My arms, torso, neck and forehead were tightly restrained, and I blinked furiously before I permitted Ansel to put in those horrifying contraptions that forcibly held your eyelids open.
Hojo sauntered over and came at me with two syringes full of glowing green mako. "Nothing very interesting to look at after this, m'boy," he chortled. "Ansel, give him the eye drops."
Ansel applied the anaesthetising eyedrops to my eyeballs, and numbness set in very soon after.
"Don't move!" Hojo reminded, a big old smile on his stupid amoral face. He was really in the swing of things, treating me like one of his toys and letting the sadism show. Gone were the pinched look of scientific stress from the much more strenuous procedures he'd just finished and the perpetual frown caused by the weird as shit relationship dynamic he chose to have with his offspring. He looked like a younger man, lit up with joy and truly in his element. I resolved to be extra antagonistic to him after this.
Hojo came at my right eye first. The anaesthesia meant I did not feel the prick of the needle. Hojo depressed the syringe swiftly and pulled out the needle before the mako even started burning. The right half of my vision immediately went fuzzy greenish-white, and I was effectively half-blinded. Hojo repeated the process with the other eye. I was then totally blind, and so just sat there unresisting as Hojo strapped a mask to my face. A fine aerosolised mist started pumping through the mask, and thanks to the airtight seal, I was forced to breathe it in. It was yet more mako. I coughed and retched, but there was nothing for my stomach to eject, and all the coughing just made me breathe the mako in faster. My lungs felt like they were being stabbed with a thousand needles, and my throat had gone totally numb. I faintly detected the sensation of blood dripping out of one of my nostrils. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't not breathe. I couldn't wriggle out of my bindings, and I couldn't shake my head far enough to dislodge the mask or to break the seal. A steel cap descended over my head, though I only knew what it was because I'd seen it earlier. The machine in front of my eyes fired up with a loud whirr. Jolts of electricity pricked at me in particular spots on my skull, while a flash of colour turned the fuzzy whiteness of my vision into pins-and-needles static. I choked down a scream of terror. I was sure that I was crying, but my forcibly held open eyelids made my corneas feel dry and tight. I rolled my eyes around desperately, trying to blink and not able to.
"Relax," Hojo instructed. He sounded like he was in a good mood. I had often witnessed this kind of cheerfulness showing itself when he induced the same animal terror I was experiencing in his other test subjects. I supposed I was long overdue for my turn at it. Hojo patted me on the head. "Everything is proceeding quite smoothly, Subject S. No need for concern. Your constant need for control is only causing you distress, there's nothing you can do. Just sit there and relax."
"Y-Yes, doctor," I gasped through the burning in my lungs. I was surprised I could still speak. The hand on my head stilled and pulled away.
"How much time left?" Hojo wanted to know.
"Fifteen minutes for the mask, professor," Ansel answered.
"Give him some eyedrops then," Hojo said. "I don't pay you to stand around like an idiot."
The dryness in my eyes eased for a short while after Ansel applied the eyedrops as instructed. I was too busy twitching futilely in my bonds and keening from pain to appreciate it. Each gasp of the aerosolised mako seemed to awaken all the other injections of mako within my body, and rather than disparate spots of pain, my whole body was one throbbing, screaming nerve. I was glad no one had removed the urinary catheter.
"Hold still," Ansel said, as he pressed something against my ear canal. I forced myself to be still. Bizarrely enough, he then proceeded to clean out my ears, first with a suction tube, then by flushing then with a saline solution, before sucking the water back out with the suction tube again. Afterwards, he inserted a different kind of metal nozzle into my ears, and filled my ear cavity with some kind of gel. I wasn't surprised when it too started burning in agony. Oh, I'd forgotten I'd read about this part of the procedure. It had seemed so harmless, compared to the rest. All sound seemed to come to me as if underwater, but thankfully I could still hear somewhat.
As I sat there, hot tears leaking from my blinded eyes, whimpering pathetically and determined to not break down begging and screaming as I desperately wanted to, the chair I was in reclined with a motorised whirr, forcing me to lie down. Someone changed the urine bag attached to my catheter. Soon after, I was subject to burning mako going up orifices that weren't meant to have things enter them. The catheter's valve was closed once my bladder was filled, and someone hooked me up to a colonic, followed by a regular enema which I was instructed to retain. Somewhere in the middle of all that, the mask over my face had been removed. A tube was later shoved into my mouth, and I didn't even have the wherewithal to retch when it extended past my throat and into my esophagus. I'm not sure if it stopped in my stomach or went all the way down to my small intestine. Either way, it whirred as it pumped something cool and liquid into my body, then slowly started to retract. I gagged as it came up, coating my oesophagus with a even layer of mako the consistency of hair gel. The nozzle was removed from my mouth and a a straw pressed to my lips.
"Drink," Hojo instructed. I sucked blindly on the straw. It tasted like a sugary electrolyte solution that someone had blended razorblades into. I took a few sips until my throat felt marginally better, and turned my head away. "No, you must finish it," Hojo reprimanded sharply. Making a face, I opened my mouth for the straw and sucked all of it down in one go. I immediately regretted it as it burned a white hot hole in my belly and made me want to gag.
"Keep it down," Hojo reminded me. "You know what must be done."
If I threw it up, he'd just make me drink more. That had been part of the meticulous seventy two page plan. I had agreed to it. I had agreed to all of it. The organ transplants. The colonic. The ear cleaning. The orally ingested electrolyte and mako solution. I suppose I had been coerced - I had no choice after all, no more than Yuuki or the animals in the cages. But I had read the full document, and made notes, and asked Hojo clarifying questions, and then requested that he modify the procedure so I could be awake for all of it. I had wanted the power the procedure would give me, and I had wanted to know what was being done to me. For Angeal and Genesis' sakes in case of degradation, if nothing else.
I was regretting the request to remain awake. I had been afraid to wake up again in a stranger's body, in flesh that wasn't supposed to be my flesh. But the agony scraping me hollow inside alienated me from my body efficiently enough. I wanted to tell Hojo to put me under, but opening my mouth bore too great a risk of vomiting, so I swallowed it all down and gritted my teeth instead. I was very very distantly aware of a faint prickling in the sweaty centres of my palms that must have been my nails drawing blood. I'd left the little alert button Hojo gave me on the dissection table.
After an eternity, I was allowed to eject the mako from my lower orifices. After that, a bucket was placed in my hands, and I was told that I could vomit into it if I still felt the urge. I very much did, and the electrolyte solution burned coming back up. I tried aiming, but I was uncertain if I got it all in the bucket. After that, someone suctioned out the gel in my ear canals.
I was directed back to the shower in the corner, where I stood leaning against the wall, shivering as I was blasted clean again with lukewarm water. It felt too hot and too cold all at once and the meagre water pressure felt like it was leaving bruises behind.
Still mostly blind and half deaf but now at least able to blink freely, I followed docilely as someone guided me away from the shower. I was pushed to stand on a smooth metal surface, which whirred as it raised me up. Oh, I must be standing on the little elevator that would let me climb down into the mako tank from the opening at the top. The lid of the mako tank opened with a soft thud, and I could hear the quiet slosh and gurgle of the liquid inside.
"Twelve hours," Hojo said. "Try get some sleep."
Then he pushed me in, and the thick viscous embrace of the mako swallowed me up whole.
It burned.
The mako burned everywhere it touched me. As I was naked, this meant that every inch of me was in immense pain. I held my breath for as long as I could, but eventually I had to breathe. I scrabbled against the glass in panic, nails scraping against the smooth surface and finding no purchase. The mako solution in these tanks were specially formulated so that you could "breathe" it if it filled your lungs. That meant that when I inhaled at last, my weak willed lungs giving way to the instinct for breath, what entered my body in the place of sweet life-giving air was more pure acidic fire. As I coughed and choked and gasped, more and more mako entered my body. Eventually, I was so saturated in it that it no longer felt like a foreign substance was burning its way into my lungs, but rather simply that my lungs had been replaced by an angry furnace. I didn't so much calm down as I tired myself out. I hadn't eaten in more than a day. I was still recovering from hours of surgery and pain. I was still blind and half deaf. Everything hurt, and I was still being pickled and brined in yet more agony. I tried to scream, but the liquid mako muffled it into a faint burble. I tried not to think about the liquid in my lungs, but I could hardly stop breathing. I thrashed and twitched and cried, all to no avail. The faint sound of machinery and surgical equipment being put away filtered through the mako and the glass. Hojo was saying something to Tachibana. I could almost make out the words. The white-green of my vision dimmed. A door clanged.
Silence.
I was left in the darkness, silent except for the hum and burble of the mako tank, shivering and alone.
The power would be almost worth it.
A/N: Hey uh so yeah I tried to make this not too explicit while still trying to explore how deeply Hojo messes with Seph's body. Please lemme know if anything is more upsetting than what the rating/my warning in the notes at the start of the chapter lead you to expect so I can modify them accordingly.
I wrote a one shot what if scenario where this Sephiroth meeting a time travelling canon AC!Cloud but idk how to post it - should I have it as a chapter in this fic or post it separately as a different fic? It's already on AO3 now, it's called Hydrochloric Mushrooms and I guess you can read it there while I figure out how to post it on FFN. It has some Gremlin!Sephiroth being his funny weird kid self, and some cathartic stabbing of Hojo's cold corpse. It's not 100% pure humour, but it was cathartic to write after this chapter and it might be cathartic for you to read too.