For Honor or Glory

Deserve Better

Chapter 39 

Alex felt a little bad that she had not told Sephiroth the whole truth when she had asked for his blood, but she hadn't been lying either. She really was looking for a way to mitigate the possibility of mutation in their cells, along with whatever connection they had with Jenova. Plus, she had hated that he had even thought to call himself a specimen. Every time she thought about it, it pissed her off all over again. Hojo deserved to fry for that alone.

At least she could use the sample from him to compare to the other three she already had and easily identify the DNA they each shared with him. It did not take her more than a week to identify all the strands of Jenova's cells within Angeal, Genesis, and herself. There was no guarantee there were not more in Sephiroth that were not present in them, but at least it was a start.

Between the three of them, she was able to identify that at least eighteen percent of Sephiroth's cellular makeup came from Jenova. The thought made her shudder. It was no wonder he had such a hard time. She even noted that more than four percent of the DNA Genesis shared with her and Angeal was also Jenova's. That meant that her mother's cells were really little more than carriers. Had she found that information out a month ago, she probably would have been ecstatic. Now, it only caused a dull ache.

What shocked her the most was that out of the three of them from Project G, she had more Jenova cells than the two males. She had expected to have a nearly equal amount as Angeal since they had shared a womb. It was only about a percent and a half more than her brother, so not much, but it was odd. Not that it mattered in the end. Her goal was still to find a way to nullify it.

To do that, she had to start with cells that would be considered more stable. She knew that Jenova tainted cells were not precisely docile—if that was even the word. There was no telling how far the alien could reach if she felt someone was tampering. Instead, she would start with the donors that were involved with her actual research. If she could remove the genetic mutations and perhaps add back in a healthy RNA chain or even figure out what the chain should have looked like before and try to change it, then maybe she could carry that method over to her own cells and on to the others. It would not be easy, but she couldn't give up.

So that was what she spent her time on over the next couple of months. She threw herself into her work more thoroughly than she had before she became a professor. Angeal worried about her, but he couldn't convince her to stop. Instead, he often brought her meals in the evening when he wasn't off on missions.

Genesis finally stopped trying to corner her, but she was torn at the outcome. It twisted her heart in a vise the first time she happened to walk by one of her coworkers and caught snippets of a conversation about how he had just gone through another new girl. Apparently, he was changing them like they were accessories.

The two women shut up as soon as they saw her, but she didn't say anything to them. It wasn't her business. She had made herself clear, and he was moving on. It was what she wanted, right? She knew it was, even though she was dying inside.

At least she had chess and Sephiroth to keep her sane on Fridays. Though, after she heard that conversation, she was glad she had a few days before she would have to face anyone. Her brother was away on a mission, and it was a Wednesday, so she could go bury herself in work and try to forget that she ever had a heart in the first place.

That evening, she started with the same samples that she had been working on for the last few days. She had been able to replace part of the protein chain in the RNA, but it kept falling apart for some reason. It was incredibly frustrating that she could not figure out why. Was it some sort of binding that she had yet to see, or was it the fact that once she broke the chain, the human RNA was simply not strong enough to withstand her tampering?