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"Devotion"a Final Fantasy VII fan fiction
by Sarah the Boring
Final Fantasy, names, characters, et cetera copyright Square Soft, Inc. The story itself is the property of the author.
Prologue: Lurking in the Darkness
He had always hated the sound of his own name.
It had a rasping, hissing sound; spoken by the lazy, slurring tongues of his slum-dwelling kin, it dropped one of its syllables and became a rattling cough. Horace. Hor'ss. It was most often screamed--the idiots never spoke, they always yelled--and this also added to the layers of banality and ugliness around the word.
But over time he grew to ignore it. It was, after all, just a word. It signified nothing.
Most likely it was due to the frame of reference in which he learned it. The rabble from which he had been born was loud and grim, though, he admitted once to himself, not necessarily stupid. However, long years of mind-numbing monotony and hardship had sunk their intelligence into a bitter state of suspension, a coma of uncaring scorn.
But he learned differently, and that was what saved him. He picked up their bitterness, their scorn, their resentment and greed, but he kept his intelligence alive. He kept that very much alive.
Everything else died, more or less. It was not necessary.
It was not difficult to get away from them, not with his intelligence and planning. Eighty-five percent of it was work, studying and memorizing, easy things that filled up the endless yawn of time from fall to spring. Fifteen percent was planning, a few cheated tests, a few falsified applications. Once he had the satisfaction of actually taking on a project, during his last year of graduate school--aside from the project on which he wrote his thesis, that was interesting but ultimately unsatisfying. He took on a better project than that.
There was an insolent fool in the department, also a fourth-year student, some rich brat with perfect everything, it seemed--perfect test scores, perfect looks, perfect ethics, perfect life. It wasn't hard to bring him down, really. All it took was a few months of observation, finding the man's weak spots--and then a few suggestions, rumors, lies... and enough time for the fool to crumble into a neurotic wreck.
Simple.
The real work of his life began only after he'd published that faintly controversial yet unmistakably brilliant thesis and almost ascended to his rightful position. All that stood between him and the peak of his scientific career for those long years was the famous Dr. Gast, venerable, wise, and damnably ethical. The man was also highly intelligent, Horace admitted. And for this reason only he served under Gast's command for years with little dissent.
His reputation was made during Gast's years, though. As vice-chair of the Research Department it was his duty to review many of the underlings' projects and paperwork, and he quickly instated himself as a tyrant and skilled crusher of spirits. The grad students and younger scientists walked in fear of him, always a delight to see, but they also nervously--at least he thought it was nervously--mocked him as well. Though, out of these mockeries, he plucked his new name.
It was something as mundane as paperwork, really, that started it. He reviewed the underlings' proposals and applications critically, and signed each one with only one comment, passing or failing the young hopefuls: Accepted, Horace Jones. Denied, Horace Jones. His handwriting, dark, scrawled, and nearly illegible, became a favorite jest among the underlings. They could read only enough to get the idea: A~~~~, Ho~~~ Jo~~~. D~~~~, Ho~~~ Jo~~~. They started calling him that behind his back, the only part of his signature that they could read. "Another denied from Hojo." They thought it was secret, but he knew. He knew everything. He liked the name, actually, with a perverse kind of pride: short, yet powerful, he thought. It was an unhuman name, unique, un-prosaic, family-less, meaningless.
Hojo.