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49. Elena: Mourner

Elena always resented her sister. She loved her, but she also hated her in that way younger siblings hated older brothers and sisters they were compared to. Why can't you be more like your sister? or Your sister never did that! or Can't you follow your sister's example for once? As kids it had been irritating, especially since her sister spent her childhood not really knowing how to be a child. She was too serious and staid, but that appealed to their father, since he had no idea how to deal with children who acted like children.

When they got older and her hormones kicked it, his obvious preference had made Elena want to stamp her feet and scream. It only got worse when her sister moved out but left her ghost behind, so whenever he looked at his youngest daughter their father still superimposed his eldest. For a man who excelled at military strategy, he failed at this most basic of mental manoeuvres.

"I'm not her!" Elena yelled at him once. "Can't you just accept that instead of constantly trying to make me like her? Can't you accept me for who I am?"

It was a shame, really. With no mother in the picture, and a sister so much older than herself, it had always been Elena and her father. It should have made them closer, but instead it drove a wedge between them. He spent longer and longer hours at the Military Academy, and she went home each day pretending she didn't care that it was cold cereal for dinner again.

For a long time she tried to be as unlike her sister as she could. She flunked all her subjects at school, drank, smoked, and rebelled in typically teenage fashion. She worked to be as opposite as she could, even though it was exhausting and the taste of alcohol made her feel sick from the first mouthful. It hurt that the only time her father noticed her was when she got her very own juvenile record for joyriding with a classmate who broke into their teacher's car. Even then it was only to apologise to the teacher and force her to apologise too.

Eventually she quit the smoking and drinking because it screwed up her head and she was tired of waking up feeling worse than when she went to sleep. Her father didn't notice that turnaround, either.

She started to work hard, thinking maybe if she outstripped her sister she'd finally get some respect in her own right. It was galling that the only way she could define herself in her father's eyes was by setting herself up to be compared with someone else. Were other families like that? Did other girls work in bars to pay for private tuition and to prove they could be around lots of alcohol without getting smashed? Did other girls get into the Shinra Military Academy, a highly male institution, not to advance the cause for feminism, but to showcase their skills in a place their fathers couldn't ignore them?

He still managed it, though. Even five Elite Emblems and official status as a child prodigy didn't make her stand out as her own person in his eyes.

"Your sister got six," he said at Elena's graduation. She wanted to hit him, but settled for stalking away without a word so she didn't embarrass herself in front of all the Shinra bigwigs who had come to the ceremony to scout for new employees.

Her sister was there too, of course; dressed in her impeccable suit, looking coiffed and perfect as usual. Elena managed to avoid her for most of the day. There was a hairy moment at the punchbowl, when President Shinra blocked her path and she clumsily tripped over the tablecloth, spilling punch all over him as she hustled away from the approaching blonde bullet, but mostly it was easy to mingle and keep at least a dozen people between them at all times.

"Oof! Excuse me!" she apologised for the millionth time when she bumped into someone because she was busy scanning the room instead of watching where she was going. She looked up into a pair of dark eyes that looked as though the word 'inscrutable' had been coined for their owner's personal usage. Likewise 'mysterious', 'intelligent' and 'drop dead gorgeous'.

"Elena, yes?" the man said, not acknowledging her clumsiness.

"Um …"

"An impressive success rate today. You must be very proud."

For some reason she got the feeling this wasn't meant as just the tedious statement it would have been from anyone else. Nothing that came out of this guy's mouth would have sounded tedious, at least not to her, based on the little thrill that had gone through her when he said her name. His exotic looks seemed out of place amidst the officers and bureaucrats who had attended the graduation ceremony.

Then she registered his suit – identical to the ones worn by President Shinra's bodyguards – and her heart sank.

"My sister got six Elite Emblems," she replied dispiritedly. Of course, he'd already know that.

The man raised one dark eyebrow at her. "Do you always critique your performance based on others'?"

"Might as well. Everybody else seems to." It was a childish and self-pitying thing to say, on today of all days, but she was tired and fed up, and it just slipped out.

He paused a moment before replying – just long enough for Elena to start to feel uncomfortable and unwanted, like she was supposed to have picked up on the signal to leave but missed it. Big change there.

"It's a narrow mind that judges by a yardstick created by others instead of by the person being judged."

Elena stared at him. Was that as complimentary as it sounded, or had she misunderstood his meaning? She was so unused to praise she had trouble recognising it these days.

A flash of blonde over his shoulder caught her attention. "E-Excuse me," she muttered, backing away. "I have to be somewhere ..." The blonde bob was headed their way like a scud missile. She couldn't stay and talk to her sister. She couldn't. "... else."

His eyes barely flicked away from her, but she knew he'd clocked what was going on. He nodded, hands clasped behind his back. "You have a lot of potential, Elena. It will be interesting to see how it develops."

Okay, no way she could misinterpret that. The dizzy little thrill lasted until she was lost in the crowd again and couldn't see anything but redheads and brunettes.

In the end, however, her sister cornered her in the one place no drop dead gorgeous man could protect her: the Ladies'. Elena saw her approaching in the mirror. She bit her tongue, anticipating a condescending line or some drivel about finally showing commitment to her studies. Her sister had never approved of her waywardness. She probably believed that some kind of short, sharp shock had knocked some sense into Elena, rather than Elena just choosing to turn her life around because she wanted to. Elena braced herself.

Instead, her sister said, "I am sorry."

Elena was confused. "What? What the hell for?" It felt good to cuss, even if only mildly. Her sister was so bloody formal and proper all the time. She'd probably had the stick inserted up her butt at birth.

"For Father. It's wrong of him to keep comparing you to me. I told him to stop when I heard what he was saying."

"I bet that went down well." Elena covered her shock with snippiness. She'd resisted talking to her sister for years, especially about that. There had never seemed any point. She'd just assumed her sister felt the same way – that Elena could never measure up because she was so bloody perfect.Even when Elena got mixed up with the Ravens she'd steered clear of talking to her about it. Their father was a topic fenced off by a tall hedge of thorns. That was on fire. And studded with mines.

"Father was …" her sister hesitated. "He was very Father about it."

Elena shrugged and inadvertently dipped the sleeves of her expensive new shirt into the grimy water. Father, not Dad. Mother, not Mom. Sometimes she really didn't feel like she was related to this strangely well-mannered woman. Superficially they were nearly identical, except for their eye-colour and, oh yeah, their personalities. "Yeah, well, you cast a pretty big shadow."

Her sister went silent for a long moment, before saying, "So does Mother."

Those three words told Elena a lot about her sister – far more than years of hearing their father singing her praises, or the vague memories of living with her when she was still only a little kid. Just as she was constantly weighed against her sister's achievements, so her sister was judged by how she compared with their dead mother. It seemed their father just couldn't accept anyone for who they were. He was always reaching for a yardstick shaped like someone else, regardless of how it affected people.

"It's a narrow mind that judges by a yardstick created by others instead of by the person being judged."

In that moment, hunched defensively over a sink in a public bathroom, Elena felt a sort of … almost kinship with her sister. It was an odd and fluttery sensation, as if she'd swallowed a cocoon that had turned into a moth in her gut. She grunted something inarticulate, which her sister took to mean more than it did. She excused herself, leaving Elena alone with her thoughts.

When she finally emerged it was to discover both her sister and the exotic man had been called away on some kind of emergency.

"She said to tell you she'd make reservations at your favourite restaurant next time she has leave," said Elena's martial arts sensei. "And … let me see if I've got this right… I wrote it down word-for-word like she asked … ah, here we go. 'It's time to talk properly, for once'. Does that mean anything to you?"

Elena nodded, and hoped her jumpy tummy didn't mean someone had spiked the punch. For the first time in forever, the stirrings of hope ignited in her.

She never saw her sister again.

The news, when it came, was a blur. Elena had never seen her father cry before. He was a stern man; the kind who believed in 'cruel to be kind' and 'toughening up' under pressure. He still wore his medals to make himself feel important, and to remind himself of what it meant to be a 'real man' back in a time 'when men were men'.

Yet when Elena came home from the bar one night to see a man in a suit leaving their home, and found her father hunched over the kitchen table, she realised another important truth that she'd first come across in that bathroom mirror. Human is human, no matter what the package, and to be human is to be frail in some way. Nobody was perfect. It was your imperfections and how you dealt with them, not your successes, that made you who you were and decided your worth.

Elena learned a lot from her family, though it took her years to realise it. From her mother she learned how to leave a mark on the world so she'd never be forgotten. From her father she learned that bottling up your feelings was the worst thing you could do, and if you cared about someone you shouldn't disguise it, because you'd only regret it afterwards. And from her sister she learned a number of things. Firstly, how to access her own inner drive to succeed. Secondly, to never follow in someone else's footsteps, but to carve your own path in the world.

Thirdly, to not go AWOL and leave everyone thinking you were a traitor who'd died selling Shinra secrets to their enemies.

Her sister was many things, but a traitor was not one of them.

"I will become a Turk someday," Elena swore. She'd already made that vow before, after the Ravens, but when she heard the whispers of 'double agent' and 'turncoat' she added the promise: "And I'll find out what really happened to you. I'll prove to everyone you're not a traitor. I'll get into the Turks so I can get at those records and prove you were innocent. I'll get to the truth."

She wasn't one for standing on hillsides making vows to the stars and sun and moon. She was, however, the kind to make sure the Head of the Turks was aware of what a brilliant addition she'd be to his team, even though they hadn't been recruiting any new Turks in a while. Elena didn't care about that. She'd make them want her and her skills, even if she had to camp out on his doorstep and juggle revolvers at him on his way to work each morning.

Elena only had one photo of her sister, and she kept it tucked away where she could look at it to remind herself what she was striving for. She never even entertained the thought her sister could have been a deserter or traitor. Eventually, it was that conviction, more than her skills, which made the man called Tseng notice her.

"I'll clear your name someday," Elena told the picture of two little girls, so naive and different from the women they'd become. The taller one – more a teenager than a girl, really – had eyes like ice-chips and blonde hair already cut in her distinguishing bob. The other girl was barely more than a toddler; brown-eyed, pig-tailed, holding an ice-cream her sister had just bought for her and laughing like she didn't have a care in the world.

She had found the photo in the back of her sister's yearbook from when she graduated from the Military Academy. Elena didn't remember the picture being taken. That hurt more than anything.

She refused to cry. When she was a good enough Turk, with a high enough security level to uncover the truth, and she could finally lay her sister's spirit to rest, then she'd let herself cry for what had been lost. Not before.

Even so, she bent her head and lightly brushed her lips over the photo, the way she'd never done in real life, when it might have counted for something.

"I'm sorry, Helena."