"That's interesting," she said, voice saying the opposite. "I always assumed you had designed me as a woman so I could do that on my own."
Hojo gave a faint, disdainful sniff. "Those are mere knockoffs. Cheaply done as a batch. They're fine in tanks."
Doctor Kanzaki's eyebrow twitched. He didn't contradict his boss, though. "Also it wasn't worth taking you off-duty for nine months when we can grow them in a tank in the first place," he added, which Sephiroth knew meant Hojo had denied the requisition for use of her womb.
Not that he owned it to rent out or not, or the rest of her, but Hojo always seemed to have trouble remembering that.
Her owner was Shinra, inc.
She watched the children through the glass. She didn't like it, that they would use her genes without asking, even though it was nothing new. She wasn't sure what to do about it. Lodge a protest? Shinra would ignore it, or at best assume she wanted legal ownership of her genes and to receive compensation, and she didn't. Legally no cell of her body, no hair she shed in the shower even belonged to her in the first place.
The children didn't belong to her, either. They should have, perhaps, but they didn't.
"It's a good thing anyway," Kanzaki was saying with a little greasy laugh. "The only good point of a pregnancy is what happens at the very start of it."
Sephiroth stared him down until he fell silent and turned back to the control panels and their glowing lights, uneasy.
She hadn't slept with the fathers, and yet here they were, merged together.
Perhaps she ought to ask them what they thought of the situation. She knew she ought to feel something, but all she could name of the odd little tangle in her chest was confusion. She honestly did not know how to react; but she didn't want not to react at all, either. There were things she ought to do about this.
She'd have gone to Zack first but he was on assignment. She thought she'd ask Jon Galevik instead. He was getting married next month. He had to have thought some about children -- the usual type, anyway, the ones that happened in normal families. Maybe between the two of them they could cobble a reasonable reaction to lab-grown clones.