Don't Play with Fire (Turks FF7)

28) My Life

SO THIS CHAPPIE WILL BE A LITTLE DIFFERENT. KAT LEARNED THE 'LAST PIECE OF THE PUZZLE' FOR HER LIFE AND NOW WE GET TO HAVE A LITTLE MEMORY CHAPPIE KIND OF. REMEMBER THOSE? FUN...

I was brought into the world by Taavi and Jonathan McGee on February 29, 1972. They named me Annabelle Taavi, my grandmother's (who I never got to meet) and my mother's names put together. I already had an older brother named Mike, who was four at the time. Tseng had advised my mother not to marry Jonathan, but she did anyway. He was only thirteen at the time, but already his distrust was growing toward his older sister's boyfriend. They were six years apart. Out of bitterness, he refused to have anything to do with us.

At the age of three, I started hearing things. Voices, all from the same person, but all holding different emotions. One was angry while another would be reassuring. One would yell and scream and another would hiss demonically. It scared me. So I screamed, every time I heard them. If I screamed, I couldn't hear them. My mother and Mike would freak out every time I did something like that and I would get put in the corner or spanked.

One time, Mike locked me in the closet, in the dark, and didn't let me out. The voices... They started making me listen to blood curdling screams, the pained cries of people being tortured, the cracks of lightning and rolls of thunder seeming so real, so close to me. I screamed his name so loudly, crying for anyone. I was only three. I didn't understand what pain or death really were. I didn't want this... Thing in me to keep calling me its child. I wanted my mother, but she was grocery shopping that day, leaving me alone with my mean older sibling.

I couldn't breathe, I was hyperventilating, I didn't know what was going on. It was scary. When she got home, she let me out, but it was too late to save my young innocence. I'd witnessed visions of my family, dead on the ground, blood soaking the carpet so much that the house flooded and I'd drowned. I didn't understand, I just thought I knew what death felt like... And it was terrifying.

"I don't want to die, Mommy," I whispered, clinging to her shirt. She frowned and held me closer.

"Anna, you're not going to die. Who told you such a thing?"

"A whisper," I replied. I didn't know what else to call it. She wrote it off as Mike being more of a troublemaker than before and grounded him. Meanwhile, my father was at the Shinra building, trying to fight insanity and create a cure to his mistake at the same time.

Three years later, my parents continuously caught me talking to myself. At least, that's what it looked like on the outside. I wanted to know more about the things Jenova had shown me, the images. What are flowers? How bad does a gun hurt when it gets you? Why does Shinra want to hurt my Daddy? I didn't know I was asking aloud, I didn't know how to keep it in anymore. It was too hard, too much of a thing to ask a small child to do, to ask her to grow up so soon. But that's what was happening. The voices were bringing me peace and knowledge that year, and though I couldn't get past my fear that they'd turn again, I would have conversations and learn about the world, learn about history, about thinking itself.

"Daddy, where am I going?" I asked one afternoon. We'd gotten in his small car and started driving five minutes ago. I couldn't help but wiggle to try and see over the front seats.

"We're going to see Professor Hojo."

"Is he a scientist?"

"Yes."

He'd pulled me into that lab and screamed at Hojo, yelling at the man. I wondered why adults had to be so mean to each other, why they couldn't be friends like they always told the kids to be. Why did it always have to be one person's way and not the other's too? What was so wrong with sharing and taking turns? I never wanted to grow up, I didn't want to have to be like the adults that fought and worked and forgot what their mothers taught them. I didn't want to worry about everything or have this thing Mommy called stress.