Endnote 1

by demonegg

1– A love story for the young, the stupid, and the professionally deranged.

A/N: When I wrote this, I envisioned a great web of snippets pasted to a wall, each with arrows crisscrossing back and forth to other sections of the story. It was stunning. However, given the architectural limitations of ffnet, I had to devise some sort of cohesive linear structure to this piece; hence, the endnotes. Each section will have a number in parentheses. Please read those as you would a superscript number in a textbook, hinting towards a footnote at the bottom of the page. The next section will follow a train of thought from that previous note.

Once again, I don't own FFVII or any of the various literary and cinematic media referenced here, particularly the poems by Basho, Ryokan, and Layman P'ang, the line from John Gardner's Grendel, and the various quotations from The Godfather.

Thanks for reading.

---

(0)

When the mood is shot and his clothes are thoroughly distressed or de-stressed and smeared with sweat and lipstick stains and the slippery satisfaction of a good screw, he never steals out the window like the thousands of his brothers shamed by winsome arms. If he met them hanging from a back window, shoeless, half-way shirtless–he might tell it to them straight, somewhere along the lines of man up and quit being a fucking pussy. Perhaps he'd light a cigarette and smoke it casually while they grew increasingly frantic due to his carefully careless observation. On this issue he doesn't think there should be the matter of escape, or rather, of choice; for him it's the front door or nothing. He wants everyone to know just who was responsible for the bronchial gymnastics that kept her moaning and screaming his name until she was delirious and hoarse from proclaiming it from the proverbial rooftops. In the otherwise still of the night, no tongue unsolicited and no street unseduced seems as good a philosophy as any. The first people to know fall into an alarming pattern: the steady boyfriend; the lackluster husband; the nosy gossip next door with her ear pressed to the wall and eyelids fluttering closed, once, twice–but who's counting?; the button-nosed co-ed two floors down who spends the margins between assigned pages wishing she was the one two floors up, and might be in a few weeks once the fervor dies down and it's time to build it up again in the neighborhood. Reputation, press, quick burn through energy and time; duty.

He doesn't worry too much about repercussions, and if he does, it's never more than cursory–a week or two max of steering clear of a certain building when he can't be half-assed to deal with the emotional bullshit of his occasional (or occasionally frequent) hobby. He sports an EMR at his side and a bona fide license to kill granted him by the most powerful people in the world. It doesn't even faze him when the husband's got a good two hundred pounds of muscle on him and a rap sheet a mile long and enough liquor in him to make him think that taking on a Turk is a real solid idea–even when, he's got to admit, the enraged husband's knuckles feel like hell when they smash a rib or two or draw a thick slab of blood between his lips. He smirks, the cut splitting fiercer, and feels the metal baton at his side charging up in steady reassurance before his fist breaks forward for contact.

There's the usual ass-stomping, a–

knuckle-sandwich/baton-projectile/you sonuvabitch you stay away from my wife/hey asswipe your shoe's untied/Annie get my gun/why gonna blow a load (look honey he missed me)/Shut up asshole (a piss-poor punch)/right back atcha (a punch better than the other dude's with a swing up and out until there's electric adrenaline coursing through his muscles)

–a really sound thrashing later, and Reno steps over a crumpled heap of a man. Lightly wiping his hand on his pants or tapping his EMR against his shoulder, he sneers at the curious crack of a door to the next apartment, but winks as he passes. The lurid photo op flash of an eyeglass glints, as a startled, flushed body shuffles away from the door, throws it shut, and heaves the lock into place. Against the opaque walls and newly sealed halls, the expression fades from his face to something remarkably businesslike. But history remembers the bad guy, and he wants to make doubly sure no one dares cross him. A hard stare, a contemptuous curl of his lip, the accidental slip of his weapon into visibility (Oh darn it, fiddle-dee-dee, silly ol' me, leaving the house with my EMR/gun/harbinger of swift and painful death–and in my best suit, too!) usually does the trick. He's already given the old bitches enough of something to talk about.

His calling card lingers heavily in the air through semi-atmospheric moans–or the thunder of headboards smacking against the wall, the crackle of chairs scraping against the door, and the voltaic tremors of flesh; but mostly it's left in the whispered rumors and spirited screams of a first-name-only transaction.

Yeah, he's that Reno, and he really is that good.

As he saunters into the night, he feels strangely like whistling, if only to interrupt the rhythmic hush of the streets. He tamps the urge and instead settles for the smooth slide of a drink down his throat. Under the low lamplight of a know-nothing bar, no one counts when the sting of one drink pushes liquor levels into something closer to five (ten). After all, who in their right mind would dare question a Turk with more notches on his EMR than he's got on his bedpost? (1)

X-X-X-X

(1)

"She hates you, you know."

"Uh-huh."

"She's been telling everyone."

"Mmhmm."

"There are some interesting things written about you on all the fan sites."

"Sing it, sister."

"One's sworn off men for life."

"You go, girl."

Cissnei leaned against his desk, her arms crossed and her expression blasé. "I'm curious. Do you ever actually talk to the girls, or do you just play sexual musical chairs (2)?"

Reno leaned back in his chair, propping his feet up on the desk, and adopted a sugared accent. "Honey, let me tell you somethin'. Them girls, they're like-they're like a meter. The two gil special will getcha a ten minute park an' ride."

"You-you-YOU ASSHOLE!"

Before he could even turn around, a coffee cup was turned uproariously over his head, and the contents splashed and exploded over his skull. He blinked once, then twice, while splotches of brown teetered on the upper lip of his vision, ran along his cheekbones, and drenched his hair into a soggy red tide pool. Behind him he could hear the steady percussion of stilettos as they marched to the ladies' room.

"Blond, brunette, or redhead?" he intoned.

"Blondish brown," Cissnei replied.

"Tall?"

"Yeah."

"Tuesday," Reno muttered under his breath. "Let me guess. She wasn't even the online bitch you were talking about."

"The one I saw was a redhead."

"Gonna have to be more specific than that." He ignored her rolled eyes and proceeded to inspect what was once his perfectly acceptable two-day old shirt. The coffee stains stretched down his collar and bloomed across the left flank of his chest. Cissnei was still sitting on his desk, snickering. Reno sneered at her. "Did you really have to sacrifice a perfectly good shirt to teach me a lesson?"

She shrugged and grabbed an unopened file folder from the far corner of his desk, before crossing her arms across her chest. "If she'd been smart, she'd have used hot coffee."

Mimicking her stance, Reno leaned back in his chair. "No one ever told you some like it hot?" When Cissnei hummed her distaste at his response, his mouth wedged into a smirk, and the volume of his voice kicked up a notch. "If you can take the heat, go tap the bitch back in the kitchen."

A sudden hand in his face shoved his head away, and Cissnei scoffed, "I get it. You're sick."

"You're hormonal." He took one more look at his shirt, and the barest frown pinched the corners of his mouth. "Every goddamn last one of you. Like fucking lemmings."

X-X-X-X

(2)

So: this is how he does it, yo, a b# rhapsody for the G-Maestro.

Introducing, The Duet.

Hit it–

Right. Let's start out by saying it's all about the contralto couture–that is, i.e., a girl walks into a bar.

Then you got the standard staccato prereqs: long hair, high heels, short shirt. Short-er skirt.

(Quarter-noted: tight. And accented: everythang's tight. )

During the intermezzo, she prowls like a ginger gypsy toward an empty table. Bangles on her wrist chime with each step. There she sits. Perches. Waits.

Her fingers drum an empty rhythm as she kills time. She's seen him before. She suspects he's a regular. She knows he'll come tonight.

But hold it–part II coming up, so let's take it down to the enharmonic interval in base: a man walks into that bar.

Not a bit lah-de-dah, what with the deceptive cadence in accented fourths. Longish red hair. Wild spikes, tied back. Crumpled dress shirt. Unbuttoned coat. (Un)buttoned pants.

In a slur, loose, smooth, he rolls through the crowd: yo, wassup; hey, how's it hangin'; a nod here, a smirk there; stare 'em down: cigarette's lit so who gives a fuck?

Pared down to two whole notes? He's hungry.

Rrrrrrppppp–

No, scratch that. The rhythm's off and the beat is whack. Let's swing it again with a looser verse, hit it with style, give it some smack:

Lopin, he so dope.
Another drag from his smoke.
A hole in his wallet, he burnin them c-notes.
Like a hyena, he's stalkin his prey.
Whatchu say, you pray?
He can think of a better way
To use that mouth –
Say–what's the word on the route,
You wanna head south?

Young man, oh dear, you best watch that rhyme.
If your Momma could hear. You've done crossed the line.
But he pulls up his belt and marches in time.
It's not like he'd kill you if it weren't for the dime.
Price on his head, SOLD!–to the Man.
Should've held out for more. Now you're two-for-one damned.
Downright gangsta with a gun; the whole fucking suit is a sham.
Dry clean only, ka-ching! Blood on his hands.

But he's takin the hit, all he's got is his own shit.
Betchya don't even give a flippin bit about this shit.
If you catch his riff as we drift stiff-dicked right through the shift-
In sands
That buried the scroll of souls we sold and all the manifold
Photos of the man
Buyin you lipstick.
Did you even care for that dipshit?
Who couldn't stand to be a man or a hand
That would keep you comin back. When you stick–
Around, the fucker reneges.
Adios, So long, Catch ya on the flip side, babe!
Leavin you alone, paddlin the dregs,
Knee-high to slummin: Crotch Grab, meet Legs.

Cuz despite all you know, you still feel that heat,
Say spice's right for workin and primin that meat.
Off come the gloves.
We ain't talkin bout love.

While you tenderize to fantasize about a rise; Ooh, baby, is that your size?

Cuz all you're lookin for here is some dick with a rhyme.
Well, jack that bra up n come up n see me some time.

Coda:

In the spirit of true rhapsodic invention, he relishes the element of surprise. Yep, bet you never saw this coming.

In short, his back is turned. She? Snubbed.

He commandeers a stool at the bar and orders up a whiskey–put it on his tab, dollface. There, he takes a long, smooth drink, aware only that a trilling un-rest in his gut drains away when he focuses upon it. An isolated sensation, packed and sealed like a box of sweet sixteenth notes, or a bunch of lily-livered letters wrapped up for somebody else. He reads the telltale sweet nothings in a single swirl of his glass and matches them with his own longing stare into deep amber and ice. In his head he hears static. Visually, he's rendered like a picture lost among pixels and dots. But let's call it a moment: Oh baby, baby, just where you been all my life?

Behind him there's a huff and a puff and a door swings shut. But what if–just ruminating aloud here–later that night, the vultures find a surgically precise slaughter, while a woman, sitting at home, alone, smears the shadows down her cheeks and disses someone else's priorities?

An abstract coincidence?

Let's scat on that, wild cat (3). That's a question best left for real cool minds in the know about the hush-hush so-and-so and such-and-such on a Friday the Thirteenth, which, in the end, is the whole rhyme and reason they call it the blues.

Instead, let's call it a reprise:

A man walks into a bar. After a slide into the seat and a half spin to face the counter, he slaps his hand on the wood and bellows, "Yo, bartender! The usual!" A woman eyes him from three seats away. He nods, smirks, but swivels around to meet a fresh glass of whiskey. There's nothing more for him here. Maybe later, two doors down in her apartment, she'll call him something pretty close to magical and he'll call her Later, babe–but not now. The first time you see a girl, you just know.

X-X-X-X

(3)

A man lies in the doorway, bleeding (standard procedure, of course) from a deep fracture that may have forced a few bones perpendicular or askew (creative deviation). A woman sobs in the background, and he sighs at the general much-ado over mixing business with pleasure this go-around. She's babbling like a loon and screaming anything but his name, and the guy's looking at him like he's a psycho. This ain't love and it sure as hell ain't jealousy. The guy was mostly soused and no real threat, and who bludgeons the husband over a one-time tryst? Physical needs the forsaken can forgive a man for, but karma, dude, karma; think of your own karma.

Just who the fuck do you take him for?

You know his name and that he's a Turk–that's right, Reno of the Turks (4) –he was here last week, fifth floor, or was it the sixth? no mind, you've heard of him, of course you have–and get a goddamn clue, will you? This isn't about you. He does what and who he wants when he wants–if you're lady luck, you'll be next on his list, moaning and screaming all the way, maybe heading for divorce court or an emotional breakdown (fuck it all, he hates it when they cling), but alive, capisce?

When there's blood from duty and a paycheck and a cranial contusion, and it's wrangled from a strange silence pulsing across the floor–

Let's try again. Sound effects are for the movies, for dropped silverware and rustling bed sheets and the croak of cicadas on a hot summer day right before they keel over and the reel flips off.

In the old-fashioned darkness of the theater, stale as a grave with not a soul in sight, a lone man enters. Then, there's you.

–Capisce.

X-X-X-X

(4)

The name. The godforsaken last name. There's always one or two that wants to know.

The cute ones try to beat it out of him with the bat of their eyelashes. Or they harangue him with pet names and pillow talk while they dapple their painted nails over his chest in some sort of intimate farce. The really dumb coozes try to guess, and drugged on pheromones, they're all too poetic about it.

Reno Robespierre Sinclair or some shit like that. Because rhymes and mass murderers are sexy and they're only living the way they do because they're secretly dying inside to make a baby and change diapers and that urge translates into a different kind of fundamentally biological psychosis, and he smirks because they really have no fucking idea.

Occasionally, he tries to make up a new name in his head, between taking one last drag on his cigarette and locating his shirt or a zipper (or sometimes his goggles) and wiping the lipstick from his neck or the blood from his lip. The tang of iron–his own or someone else's–usually centers him, and he drops the whole charade and saunters out. He's got a name, what the fuck he'd need two for? Just going by the first makes him more intractable, more indefinable. No name in the papers, no birth, no death, just the stale smack of tobacco ashes and the haze of her perfume.

Almost like he's invincible to life and death, he decides, and he figures that's a pretty good thing to be, set like a pause between parentheses. At some point he even adds it to his code of ethics (5): first-name basis only, no talk, no strings attached, no repeat business. No who, what, where, when, why. Just good mindless fucking and a whiff of a memory.

But maybe later, with his head on his desk and his awareness slipping into the indeterminable space between work and rest, his nose will burrow into his jacket, sniff day-old vanilla or honey intermixed with a certain nondescript, but completely classified putrefaction–the usual real top secret, hush-hush stuff– and esoteric questions will arise, unwanted and unanswered. Just whose mind is it that smells? he'll wonder. Or maybe: what is it that's doing the smelling? Who? What? What the hell does it all mean? The questions will spin him round until, under their dizzying spell, he finally falls asleep atop unfinished reports and fill-in-the-blank mission transcripts, resigning himself to the fact that for now, the answer must not be worth knowing.

(And yet even now in his dreams, a definite something reeks.)

X-X-X-X

(5)

He's got this rule, see? (6)

Or technically, it's more of a set of ethics– a maxim, if you will. At times it's a koan. Either way it's something he lives by, and it's something that's kept him alive and off the streets on more than one occasion.

Yeah, philosophically, he's one deep shit.

Anyway, it goes something like this: it doesn't matter how good the screw, it's never gonna fit the same hole twice.

Think about it.

Harder.

He smirks.

Well, no shit you thought it'd be something else. But you can't really expect him to sit cross-legged on a Nibel mountaintop, salivating over his daily three grains of enriched enlightenment, with his loins girded and balls chopped off, austere and starving and celibate. Well, whattaya know, that's three strikes against him, right there. His rule stands.

But just for the proverbial shits-n-giggles, here's another riddle for you to consider:

Nameless and formless,
He leaves birth-and-death.

We can even mix it up.

(Named and formed,
He leaves only unclaimed birth certificates to cash in on death.)

Or maybe a better one is, Find your gold and sit on it. His life expectancy's pretty compact anyway. An average male's seventy-five years into thirty-three, thirty-five if he's lucky. Roughly forty-five percent. Not bad for a Turk.

X-X-X-X

(6)

He considered breaking the rule once. Not seriously, given that he'd never been with her before and doubts it'll ever happen now with all that excess baggage of a blond drip that's always in-and-out somewhere and the two kids and the whole one big fuckin' happy family schtick she prides herself on; but he realizes that he would've been headed that way had things been different. He might've even stayed to sober up on morning coffee, if only they both could've lost the dead weights and got on with it without the tmeses interjected into their names and titles. Tifa-Steady who she blows-Lockhart, and Reno-Oh my god, yes! More! (Gasp!)-Reno. Both are wordy and cumbersome and far too exhausting, and they would've needed to drop them like they were hot.

If only there had been a button for that, too. (7) All he'd had was the keypad on his phone. He didn't ask for a number. Turks just knew these things, though he wished it was hers he was calling instead of an uncooperative, recalcitrant delivery boy's business line. After dialing and waiting for six rings until there was a click, he found his mouth had gotten antsy and yammered away at the sound of her greeting.

"Hey, remember me, yo?"

Yeah, she'd said pleasantly, though he later realized it must've been a really slow day with her answering Strife's phone. The weird, breathy conversation that followed was refreshingly spiced with small talk and the whir of chopper blades, though he had been a bit surprised that neither party implied anything about those buttons pushed or makeshift bombs rigged–why couldn't they battle with scathing condemnation over timers in reactors or tallies in papers or notches on belts?; but he'd spouted names and contact info and a cheeky line and halfway expected her to hang up the phone at the first 'yo,' but she'd laughed and the edges of her words lifted with her smile–not wholly perfunctory–and said, Of course I remember you.

And he for a moment forgot that he hadn't even screwed her into next Tuesday.

X-X-X-X

(7)

Once or twice a year he thinks back to that time a few years ago after the first Pres had croaked (shishkebabbed, specifically, tragically) and the new one had them monitoring Sephiroth and Strife. Those evenings he finds himself unconsciously cotton-mouthed. His regular hangouts do nothing to satiate this strange thirst inside him. Details swell up and simmer into strange and fantastic pictures. A swipe of his fingers across a bar may bring to mind the serrated static of the carpet in the room the hour they found the body, or the way that on lazy mornings he would play knife games with a sharpened pencil at his desk–events that occurred on different days, at different times, under different (or no) orders, and thus are separate and, in his mind, wholly unworthy of the same train of thought, despite the distinct morbid curiosity of each. The smile of a fellow barfly makes him think either of the biting cold air up by the helipad, or the adrenaline rush as a regime changed and new objectives whirled about, but loyalties remained unperturbed. The scent of Elena's lunch he swiped from the fridge, stuck in his pocket, and only now remembers to eat, transpires through simple day-old take-out into a big to-do that a madman was loose and a boss had died on a day in which the headwinds had been particularly strong (even Tseng's expression had slipped when he stepped from the building into the onslaught) and things had changed. If his situation was precarious then, the whole thing's utterly off-kilter now. A good Turk doesn't reminisce for anybody. It's duty first, Turks second (though these two get mixed around and jumbled as all for one and one for all and all for ShinRa), and everything else falls by the wayside.

To simplify: Never look back. Never, ever. Duty first.

Or: ShinRa reigns supreme.

(The confluence of unwritten rules on this common point is plain common sense.)

Sometimes he wonders if he ever dreams of that time a few years ago, if that's the way he processes life. Or maybe he doesn't dream and reality bifurcates into shit he's made up in broad daylight just so he can make up some sense to go with it, too. He hasn't quite gotten the hang of it, other than he's a one-man war zone and it was just a job. Unscrupulous and downright dirty, but nothing personal. The other Turks would've done the same. Even Strife and company had a fair share of blood on their hands, and theirs were just jobs, too. And the few damn SOLDIERs that weren't antisocial and batshit crazy left how many army widows, civilian casualties, and abandoned children. But no, his gets the bad press and all he did was hit a button with the same insouciance as waiting for an elevator. Bet they don't even care that Rude rigged it; and all the goddamn orphans.

It's fucking politics is what it is.

He wakes with a twitch to click his lighter, a dry burn in his throat, and scorch marks through his thread count; and lighting up another, he thinks he should probably lay off the cigs. It's a running joke through the office that he'll die of emphysema (after hours, and sometimes mid-afternoon, they change it to cirrhosis).

It's funny because they're spot on with his coughing up blood; the punch line's in the years.

Years lead to rubble and age to decay, and Reno wonders what would've happened if they hadn't tried to stop AVALANCHE. If, before Sephiroth, the riffraff had succeeded in shutting down all mako production and supply, if the hospitals had gone black and off-line, if the slums had been pitched into total chaos with turmoil and rapes and riots and mothers and babies ess-oh-ell. End of civilization, would that have been better? Maybe that's what Strife was after. World in shambles, life in shambles, everything ground up nuttier than peanut butter. There was normalcy and order to ShinRa, a constant presence you could work if you wanted, but now they've gone and changed the name of the game. You've got people and organizations like the WRO who're all about rebuilding. What about it? We're just genetic microcosms wasting space in a great mandala. Hamsters stuck in a cage, running on a wheel to nowhere. Cycling from birth to death, rise to fall, and he for one time only with a button in his hands to make it stop–

A single moment in time passed, and everyone clamors to get back on that wheel. If, for only a night, just his name, as breathless as a prayer that vows exculpation in its release from someone's lips, what's the harm in that? Where's his redemption?

No more there than in new cities with new names and new streets and new lives that think, 'By golly, this time we're going to get it right. Spread the news. Build a monument to it.'

He'll build his own memory of it tonight, from ashes and cigarette butts that heap and crumble as he lies alone in bed. At midnight lights will flicker on in the streets and a woman's here-and-there cry (8) will deep-throat the silence and choke on it.

Put that in your papers, he thinks.

A baby's born in the old ghetto.

X-X-X-X

(8)

The other thing they love to do, the dumb ones, is analyze him. Why he never calls them back. Why he never leaves his number. Why they sit at home pining on the phone with their girlfriends about how yes, they knew his reputation, but they really thought he was going to be different this time. Melodramatic sigh, less dramatic tears. Their enigmatic theories (9) swirl around him like he's caught in a dark whirlwind night in which the chopper blades stall to a tailspin, and he's left to watch with wide, glassy eyes as each little wispy detail drops like feathers, leaves, and standard-issue screws into his drink. His mother never loved him, says one, a periodical authority on such matters of the heart; maybe he was always a punk kid, one of those tragic charity cases, born with an EMR in his hand–they always recruit guys like that for the military (it's called the Turks, bitch) and men like that never grow up; or, how he spent the longest month of his life one night in a bar in Costa del Sol and now he can't commit. He's afraid of intimacy. He's emotionally constipated. His father abandoned him and his mother and he's never had a positive male role model in his life. He doesn't have a serious bone in his body. He's gay (then they all laugh, As if! He probably lost his virginity in utero, and he's far too good at what he does, and honey, you know the boy can't dress). Or his favorite: Forget him, he's an asshole. Waiter! Two more margaritas and a sex on the beach!

The snow falls steadily outside, the first glimpse of winter through the blinds just beyond his table in the corner, though the city seems unusually stifling this time of year. Even the flurries wither and expire on the sidewalk. The world is tired. Must be all that traipsing after the remnants he did. He's worn out and maybe he's bored. As he leans in, his breath fogs the glass and condenses on the rim, ponderous and thick in this place where he too always orders his drinks on the rocks.

X-X-X-X

(9)

A General Hypothesis:

Born on the sordid city streets in the dog days of July and wrapped in the shirt of a man unknown to his mother, a threadbare old woman of nineteen with crow's feet like a benediction upon that which she set her well-traveled gaze, Reno prophetically slurred his first words and learned how to lift candy from the corner convenience store before he could ride a bike. At the age of eleven, he was driving (though perhaps a bit recklessly given the vexing tardiness of one promised growth spurt and the consolatory presence of blocks on his feet), and also exhibited exceptional mechanical aptitude and above average intelligence. As an aside to this remark, teachers noted that he seemed bored in his classes and craved attention that he probably never received at home; many also claimed to believe that if his attitude improved, they could promote him to the next grade level in hopes that the challenge would mitigate his perpetual ennui and keep him from falling in with the wrong crowd.

He was the wrong crowd.

He wore his pants slung low and his uniform shirt crumpled and untucked. Not even the imminent threats of a ruler to his knuckles could keep him from making cracks at the principals, social workers, and local nuns who felt it was their civic or penitential duty to teach him some manners. Detention failed to deter him from daring other ruffians to aim gil at the gym teacher's crack when he demonstrated knee bends and toe touches. Suspension in itself was its own reward.

At the age of thirteen he lost his virginity to a bottle of Wild Chocobo and a top-heavy high-schooler named 'Cindy,' both these concurrent events occurring non-currently in the neon-tinted afterglow of an anonymous corner store. She wore a red tank top and denim mini with strategic holes near the back pockets, baiting her next catch. Half drunk, she'd talked dirty, and half sober, he'd talked right back. She'd thought he'd been a Senior from the car he'd so badassedly borrowed and from the cool as a cucumber way he handled his drink; and he, too young to be shaving save for the principle of the act, thought she was dumb.

Perhaps he saw her a few times after that, perhaps not. On this point the motives become muddled. One might conjecture that he saw her obvious inattentiveness and disregard of blatant detail as a point of disdain, and given his thirst for a challenge, moved on to greater sexual pursuits. Speed rapidly became the name of his game, so as to displace disadvantages foisted upon him by his socioeconomic status. A fundamental longing stirred inside him, and he yearned to stake claim upon trophies reserved for those privileged men who dared exert dominance over their environment and their peers. Honed to frightening precision, his powers of observation and deduction became lethal weapons in his hunt for game. A meeting of eyes on the street and the swing of a honeyed gait by his locker could inform him of the following traits: availability, experience, athletic and sexual stamina, athletic and sexual prowess, probable genital health, ill-formed (or extra) appendages, mental stability, moral lassitude, fetishes, tax bracket, sixth period class, if her mother knew she was out at this time of day or night, if her mother cared (and thus said mother's coincidental cougar status), if she was a crier or a talker, and perhaps most importantly given the skill of most of his female peers and that damnably persistent socioeconomic status, what she ate for breakfast and did she have more.

He catalogued statistics for hair color, height, weight, cup size, and performance, but after the rather disappointing Cindy, never bothered with names. He settled for street slang and gender-neutral nicknames. For his own person, he eschewed his genetic and biological heritage through the ritualistic dyeing of his hair, procurement of various vulgar tattoos, and the assumption of a one-name calling card. New diversions and greater tiers of depravity were aspired to: sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, three packs a day, thievery, tomfoolery, cat-and-mouse games with the cops, street brawls, legerdemain, swindling, hustling, pimping, hoodwinking, mass-circulated conspiracies that induced widespread panic and riots, bootlegging, racketeering, prank calls, gum under desks, graffiti on desks, and absenteeism at school, church, and the voting polls. It was his running a successful racket on various contraband at the age of fourteen, and his inventive handling of several top-notch bone thugs-n-former wrestlers-n-gunslingers-n-gangstas that first caught the eye of ShinRa. They approached him the way one closes in on a stray dog: cautious and unassuming, with rewards clearly presented and the leash hidden behind their backs.

Given his almost sociopathic distrust of authority, coupled with his uncanny ability to sniff out trouble and spurn restraint, we must assume this pivotal decision in his life was dictated by his proclivity for tackling or creating challenges and a subconscious need for order (or funds to fuel his dangerous addictions). He joined after a suitable waiting period to drum up interest. The physical and mental fortitude required for his new career has stimulated him enough to keep him loyal; however, this establishment fully expects that at some point the subject will sell out his own mother.

Correction:

He was a scraggly, scrawny, malnourished child of the system–no friends, a total loser with all the ladies, in and out of foster homes since he'd been swaddled in oversized diapers–but who had exceptional resilience and academic aptitude, and who –given the proper training and the guidance of one street-smart mentor (let's call him, 'Bravo Romeo')–gained fifty pounds of muscle to bulk up from pale and emaciated to lean and lanky. B. Romeo sharpened this dweeb's antisocial tendencies into a formidable rapier of scathing wit and slicing sarcasm, creating an truculent air of mystique and intrigue around this young scholar. Suddenly, he was swamped with offers from people of all ages and social strata looking to bask in each glance he begrudgingly spared their way. The scars of his childhood ran deep, though, and he always kept others at arm's length and assumed an over-the-top, battle-worn, and shell-shocked personality to mask his internal pain and shield himself against preemptive retaliations. Perhaps his joining the premiere security force in the world was a means of ensuring his own safety and general don't-fuck-with-me-ness.

Addendum:

He'd been born a country boy, dreaming of the stars while bemoaning that certain something to prove. When ShinRa waltzed into his podunk town with dazzling recruitment posters and a truckload of highfalutin promises, he packed his bags and kissed his mom goodbye, all in hopes of impressing the girl next door with tales of his heroics and his name in the papers.

However, our story ends in tragedy when calamity ensued at the common bane of the local nine-to-fivers, due to a single misunderstood, unstable employee asserting his unreasonable rights all up in everyone's face, and who, when his requests were denied, became a ruthless killing machine with no care for anyone but himself, besides a certain fondness for his late mother. Then our young hero, luckily alive, turned on his onetime ambitions and sought after the elusive good time as the way to oblivion. His disillusionment turned him into an assassin, rather blood shorn for blood torn, a means to an end. He fought and killed in memory of his childhood love, and for idols lost and enemies gained, and for the transformation and subjugation of the I for the ego–a false and dastardly personality complex.

Conclusion:

Because he'd had nothing better to do and all the secretaries already had his name and were itching for his number (and last name and contact information and any juicy tidbits they could get about his favorite music, movies, food, and position), and old man ShinRa thought he spied a kindred spirit in him, and what the hell, it wasn't like he had any big plans for his day (10); that's how he joined the Turks.

X-X-X-X

(10)

The rigorous training schedule became second nature. Up by five, late by fifteen, weapons debriefing, ass kicking, observation, case studies, flight simulations, fight simulations, torture simulations, suspect psychology, sparring, psych evals, suit fitting, desk assignment, team-building exercises–and that was just in the very beginning. ShinRa moved fast, with laser precision and a bird's eye view, then they threw you out into the field and called it practice and watched to see if and how and when you slipped up and how you handled it and if you came back alive.

They've got a saying round here, If the suit fits...(11)

X-X-X-X

(11)

Where do they get this shit about changing him? He's not gonna break out into song and dance because some bimbo thinks she can affect him with the gravity of her ten-second love. Not all redheads are little orphan Annie, and the only music he makes is the steady percussion of his lighter against his thumb and the harmonic whistles and moans that punctuate his daily routine. He only dances to dodge bullets fired wildly, though justifiably. (12)

Think about it.

He'll never change.

X-X-X-X

(12)

In a dark alley between homes, a silent statue broke its marble; in his hand was a gun; two shots were fired in rapid succession; a shadow fell dead, then another from up high a second later. Reno looked at Tseng, looked at the gun, looked back at Tseng and muttered, "Show-off," then kicked open the nearest door and whacked his EMR at a third body lying in wait behind a counter. The room was an unholy mess, splashes and splotches everywhere, like an abstract painting from which rose a dark face, keen eyes, and a well-trimmed mustache in contrast to Reno's disheveled insouciance. The man wore a white coat and wielded a ten-inch knife and a sawed-off gun, almost reminding Reno of his Boss, and he laughed at the notion. More was less and less was more–all things in moderation, two weapons was just overkill–and Reno wondered why no one saw that, as he threw a punch and dodged a serrated jab. He kneed the guy in the back and wrestled the gun away, dropping the cartridges in a fluid move and lobbing the weapon into the ashbin with poetic grace. The other man was breathing heavily now, sweat drenching his coveralls. Reno smirked. He threw in his two-cents' worth and a liberal spattering of curses to liven up the scene. Stuff intended to make his enemy want it. Flip the odds. Gamble. There was always a fog of deceit shrouding jobs like these in which neither party fully knew what to expect. They fought with masks in place (though enough of Reno's jibes pegged the other man for just a butcher), and it was a curious thing for him to note why in scenes like these death never showed his face. Just weird, ya know? Things flew over a table and through the air; muscles sliced through the tension for fist and foot to meet face, jaw, and how d'you do, stomach–wham! (he wasn't a scrapper, but with his training he was no slouch); knives left scars, but scars added mystique, whereas burns were stigmatizing and with just the right pressure at just the right point, currents could be lethal. At the precise moment, the clock chimed a wooden cuckoo, but the joke was a real shocker–

Zap, zing, bada-bing, bada-boom.

–and a door opened to reveal a group of thugs involved in only their poker game. They looked up and saw red. Blood, hair.

It was a scene entirely operatic, the way in a split second everything changed.

Tables were upset, jars of viscera shivered into a thousand pieces against a wall. Bullets grazed; others near-missed, peppered the ramparts, and charged home. Electricity crackled in the air, and an arm twisted behind a thug's back granted Reno the perfect opportunity to emerge from cover behind a table and deflect the steady volley.

Now in most circumstances, he needed no weapon greater than a nightstick and the lethal precision of his own body. But during most of those times, he wasn't being jumped by twenty thugs, each the size of a small transport vehicle. He struck out with his EMR, and the gun was jolted from one henchman's hand, while a kick sent the guy face flat into another's groin. The human shield before Reno jerked with each spongy impact from a barrage of furniture, body parts, and bullets; a tendon snapping launched an elbow into his gut, and he doubled over for an instant. He reached for a spare table leg to give him greater leverage. Stretching over an upturned cupboard to knock open one head sent another guy's jaw back into his own throat. An eyeball swung loose, and he batted it away. A bullet lodged in his thigh. Fucking A, did that hurt. He sidled up against a counter, yanking the shirt off a bloody body and jerry-rigging a makeshift tourniquet before reentering the fray. Blood dripped into his eyes and he wiped them clear. His forehead throbbed. He didn't remember that happening.

They attacked him from all sides. Someone was screaming. The report of glass was shrieking. A white cat out of nowhere was hissing, dodging feet for a safe haven. In the background a clock chimed again and he wondered just how long they'd been fighting. He grabbed a folding chair and twisted himself back and forth at the waist to take out a few chins. He paused only so his fist could meet another's face or his foot another's stomach. He kicked up higher, his shoe rebounding off a neck, and the chair slammed down over three thugs. He landed, reassessed, then jabbed his elbow back before an arcing awry spin of his EMR forced him to back-kick over two bodies to break for the front room.

The men yelled crude insults and even baser plans to their cronies. Go round the back, take out his sides, fry the ShinRa muthafucka. His EMR charged, Reno used it to stun one guy blocking his route to the door.

Meanwhile, another plunged at him with a nail bat and something that looked remarkably like a hack saw. Two others came at him with axes yanked off the walls when their guns had been zapped away. He deflected their blows with the length of his EMR until his knee met their guts. The axes flipped up and he dodged one. Catching the other, he tomahawked it at the first spot of moving flesh he spied. It missed; lodged in a wall. He cursed. The intended target gave a crooked smile. He was missing half his teeth and clearly intended to return the favor by juggling tables and chairs and the kitchen sink Reno's way. Reno spat a string of new curses, then a few more as a chunky leg was a near miss, then again when a faucet socked him in the stomach. He shook it off and nailed someone upside the head with his fist and practically pummeled another with his elbow.

Like he said, damn operatic. It could almost be called beautiful the way he wielded his EMR like a katana, aiming for pressure points.

Behind him someone was reloading, but the tattoo of the gun was throttled when it was jolted from a fat hand. A fist sent the guy prostrate into someone else behind him. Ribs were cracked and you could smell the innards leaking like piss on the floor. Reno kicked away, turned, and swept the last goon blocking his exit, but the next thing he knew he'd lost his footing on a slick of blood and the split second was enough for someone to clothesline him with a chair.

When he finally shook off the pain and came to, he was staring straight into a backlit grin, and he realized they'd set him face-up on one of those tables, two guys pinning his arms and another wrenching down his legs. The stench of the room was so pervasive that, coupled with the reality of his situation, it kept him from slipping back out of consciousness. But only barely. Blood, booze and drugs, piss and sweat, and he wondered if it was all from him. He heard the clock again, this time not a bird whistle, and it fazed him that he didn't catch it before. It was so obvious. Either that, or that hit had knocked something loose and he was losing his mind.

Then, at the exact stroke of twelve, everything grew quiet.

No one talked.

No one breathed.

No one moved when the man in the white apron emerged from the first room, adjusting thick black spectacles on his nose.

In his hand he held a tool too small to be meant for anything but sheer pain, and the light from that one blade seemed to drip acerate beams to points all over Reno's face. His cheekbones, jawline, and nose were marked, while the man greedily smacked his mouth. "Well, well, I've always wondered what"–here his tongue jutted past his bloated lips once more– "enhancements they make to Turks. He'll fetch a pretty price."

Each lisping consonant sent wattles of spit across Reno's face, and he sneered. "Always knew there was something fuckin' wack about being an organ donor," he spat, before his head snapped sideways. The butcher peeled his palm away from his skin, then petted his cheek the way one stroked a baby's. It wasn't everyday they had a Turk on the table. Reno couldn't hear anything but the tremulous breathing of the men in the room, almost salivating over the prospect of new blood. In his haze, he knew they'd also gotten Tseng, or these tools would've been sticking out from pressure points all over a roomful of bodies.

There was the running of water in the background, a tinkling of metal, and he knew they were preparing for the carve. Acid light from a single bulb oscillated back and forth upon the new blood stains on the ceiling and the old smattering of particulate that could as easily have been beef or pork as human. The guy probably was an actual butcher by trade, at least as a front, before harvesting humans on the side. Men like these, the ones who delighted in intricate torture, they always had an inherent cowardly streak; usually, they were intellectually manipulative and slightly perverse. Nothing but fear disguised as brains and a foolproof plan, at least until their bigger, dumber cronies realized that no one had their backs and that without their participation on the front line, the whole thing crumbled.

The butcher reached under the kitchen sink and ferreted out some acetone that passed as vodka. He took a long drink before grinning cruelly and pressing his face closer and closer towards his next victim. His fetid breath made Reno nauseous, and already half unconscious, he mentioned it. Piss-drunk bile and fish guts. This earned him another slap to the face and a snide remark that he was going to carve Reno up like the pig he was, and he'd start with that pretty face because after all he was just a butcher, and the man guttered the folds of his throat with an eerie laugh, and the next thing Reno knew, he'd sliced a pair of incisions deep enough to reach bone. Reno hissed and tried to hold back obscenities, though it was the worst fucking pain he'd ever felt in his life, and when the man grinned with smug satisfaction and everyone else's eyes drooped half-lidded in ecstasy over the tingling scent of blood, Reno took the split second to bust free and steal that point of pride from the butcher and make him choke on it. A mercy killing, through the throat, slit to bleed out the fastest–but still it was only a matter of survival.

The rest was a hurricane blur. (13)

In the end, Reno shed his coat, grabbed the vodka bottle, and left a gas leak and twenty-one bodies on the ground. Officially, he reported that he'd been in the area for a smoke.

A few years down the road when the incident's been unofficially declassified, Reno tosses back a few beers at one of his favorite digs and tells a captive audience the story of how he got his scars. A painted young thing clinging to his jacket asks if it's true; she bats her eyelashes, did he really fight twenty men all by himself? That's so–her fingers trail down his chest–amazing.

He makes a dismissive hand gesture and takes a few more swigs, calling for another round with a languorous look of self-satisfaction. Then he pointedly stares at his audience, curling his lip up ever-so-slightly and skittering his eyes back and forth so fast between them that they all know they're stupid for wondering; then he states the obvious.

They're tatts.

X-X-X-X

(13)

Being a Turk means staying on the job time and time again even when communication is down and empires have collapsed and he doesn't know what has happened to the closest people he can maybe call his friends. What unspeakable, classified things do Turks see (14) when everything is on the line? He wonders if anyone under the plate thought of his name when their lives flashed before their eyes in those few final moments. He had pushed the button and known quite a few women there, after all.

X-X-X-X

(14)

The woman curls the flimsy sheath around her more firmly, while the local law enforcement nod understandingly, easily used to playing the sympathetic card for the public while writing 'Case Closed' on the report. Ever obeisant to standard procedure and saving face, they pick up clues and comfort the grieving widow with ramrod precision, a Turk's EMR unseen but easily felt at their backs. The grunts state the obvious, "Your husband's dead, ma'am." And she nods blankly, that's obviously true.

It's obvious from the blood stains on her ankles and the neighborhood gossips flanking the block in constricting orbits to take a closer peek, and it's even more obvious from the ShinRa-issued body bag mass-produced in Junon for a few gil a pop. It's obvious from the fact that her husband is dead because she was caught in the act and her first thought upon seeing him whacked was that she needed to hide her shame–quick! she shrieked, where's her bra?

The panties were torn, but she rustled up a nightgown Reno didn't remember, plus a terrycloth bath robe and slippers, as if she were preparing to bathe in the blood. She fell to her knees, checked the temperature of the running liquid, and screamed, "You monster!" with an eureka gusto.

(A-tisket, a-tasket, she cracks it cuz she lacks it.)

The detectives call it a wrap and leave the scene. Case closed, nailed shut, and buried, may it rest in peace.

However, let there be one caveat to the distressed heir (be forewarned, O Lady of the Night!): future analysis will expose all flaws in its scathing tractor beam. It will remember the lipstick left on his glass after she slipped her arm over his to see if his drink was any good; it will show her slinkiest sequined dress wrinkled and hanging from a lamp shade, despite the great care with which she took to pick it out earlier that evening; it will point out the run in her thigh-high that she snagged against an exposed chair tack, all so she could spread her legs a little wider.

People in certain circles might call it karma.

After all, he's not a murderer, in spite of what this undertaker thinks. (15)

X-X-X-X

(15)

Or is it that he's just one sick fuck? He flies like he fucks–at high speeds and half-asleep at the wheel, but he does his job damn well. But–tsk, tsk–the prognosis is grim. You've only got a few more years to live, go out and make the best of it, son. Tidy up your affairs, make a name for yourself, but take it easy on the aerobic diversions and social pressures. Your liver qi is deficient, and let's look at your tongue–oh my! crack down the center, your heart's a ticking time bomb. Lovesickness (16) claims another victim. (Get it?) But you gave it your best shot, son. ShinRa thanks you for your service.

(Roll with it, nice and easy, the techs say as they wheel you out the door. You know you're fucked, man. Royally fucked.)

(Capisce.)

X-X-X-X

(16)

Strife's file at the office has gotten thicker. Death and subsequent resurrection will do that to a guy. Reno naturally wasn't at the church that day–he was still on the job and technically wasn't invited, but he'd heard about it. And he sees it now in the way she smiles whenever he visits the bar on his night's off. He rarely can convince himself to go there after a job anymore–a real shame, considering she serves up some pretty mean drinks–but to go there fresh off work means he can't relax and the atmosphere is all wrong and he stalks out in a shitty mood and still not plastered, though not for lack of trying.

(A ShinRa shrink, pausing in her evaluation, lowers the glasses on the bridge of her nose and taps her pencil on her notepad, supplying, Perhaps subconsciously you feel guilty over the unfortunate circumstances of her children and the fact that everyone there's an orphan because of ShinRa. Let's explore that, shall we?–unless you'd rather speak of your daddy issues.

Reno replies that he didn't wake up this early to listen to her compartmentalize him with her crackpot theories, but since he's already here and paying her, he can think of a few better uses for the couch. Let's explore those mack daddy issues, capisce?)

Or maybe it's that she smiles so welcomingly when he saunters in and cracks jokes with Rude and flirts (mildly) with her. And don't it beat all that he should be happy she's forgiven him, but when his eyes slide to the blond guy who's glaring less than amused in the corner and who's bound to be overcompensating for something with a sword that size, Reno knows she's forgiven him, the Turks, and ShinRa because she needed Strife to forgive himself. She practices what she preaches and reaps the rewards of it with that easy smile once again. Strife's Law, Theorem, and Reason in her book, and Reno's an adjunct corollary. A footnote. The wholly marginal. Still, booze is booze and he'll take what he can get.

The moment he plops on the stool, she sets his favorite drink in front of him without prompting. A straight whiskey with two cubes of ice. It's a simple constant that she recalls about him, a single line on his rap sheet twenty thousand miles high, filled with the truth of things he's said and the lies someone wishes he hadn't done. For all his talking, he's never really told anyone any of it. It's the ghosted look behind her smile that suggests that he doesn't need to. She knows, and she remembers, and still she brings him his favorite drink and tells him to put out his light, without ever commenting on his waning lifeline.

"Sure thing, babe," he grins after one more drag. He cocks his eyebrows suggestively. "Anythin' for you."

She rolls her eyes and turns away. At this point he's glad he's not a dreamer or he'd be a goner.

He halts her once he's finished this glass and preemptively orders a martini. She gives him another appraising look but withholds commentary, as is customary but far too often not the case in other dives. A real professional bartender through and through, he thinks, and he suggests they all drink to that (to her). But the martini's dry and even with the good shit he insists upon, it smells like a combination of aerosol and paint thinner. He wonders why he ordered it in the first place. But before he can even think he should've stuck with the usual, whiskey never did him no wrong, she's before him with a fresh glass like a shield against something neither can define. When it's drained, his last defense is down, and he begins to dread the coming dawn for the soporific silence he never can shake because he's an assassin and survival (17) dictates he always sleep alone.

He looks at the empty glass, once golden and full, but now a fragile shell, reminding him of something so similar to the autumn trees of his youth, expiring minute by minute, even as he caught one flame-tipped leaf in his hand. What a concentrated spectrum of color in a moment's blaze of light that'd been. What an experience: the cold on his tongue, the powdered dryness of the wind, and all the while the rococo of leaves kept falling. From the time he was three years old till the day he dies, he'll always think that in some ways it's the nicest thing he's ever seen, especially now after so much lumbering from drink to drink, always sick and tired of shooting the breeze.

The buzz kicks in gently at that near-empty bar. By this time he's lost count of how many drinks he's had, or how many times Strife's hand has inched towards his weapon, but neither threat is enough to get him wasted. Neither ever is. The fluorescent lights whisper overhead, lambent bulbs chalking up everything in shadows and dust.

X-X-X-X

(17)

Q: What do you call a dead Turk?

A: Off (18)-duty.

X-X-X-X

(18)

Notes to the ShinRa clean-up crew (19): Left the body. Took the beer.

X-X-X-X

(19)

That Reno, he's a risk-taker. I like the way he thinks. It's a gamble the way he lives, a roll of the dice. Never static. Sometimes you come up with a higher number, sometimes you bust, and on others you get double sixes, but in this game, as long as you don't cash out, you're still in and the play is on and it's your move. I always say you can trust a guy like that. It's the ones who're too afraid to play the game you have to look out for. It's better to be without strings attached, with nothing to tie you down, with no higher aspiration than being free as the wind, blowing through a few skirts–and hell, that's why he's a copter pilot, he thinks, when he lies down to sleep. Co-pilots are there for safety, and you trust them with your life, but each of you have to be able to fly ship alone. Maybe that's why sleeping around means something abstract to him, as he never stays till morning and never bothers with an excuse; maybe that's why in his bed, on his own sheets that never get washed unless he hires a desperate, geriatric, overweight immigrant to do them for him–and even she can't tolerate him for that long–he's always falling asleep alone. Sure, it's still snowing and things have frosted over into a neverwonderland (20) where children carve angels in snow banks spiked with nails and smack, and couples thank the gods they're alive; logically, a person should join their ranks, but he's got heat to spare and an excess of thread count, and he debates whether the ShinRa shrink he met for that one time only would attribute his distinctly spartan sleeping arrangements to his home life, his intimacy issues, his latent, unacknowledged fear of being shot in the dark, or the simple fact that it's been three years and that night in Costa had been magical and still the asshole never called her back.

X-X-X-X

(20)

You stupid bitch. All he did was pull the trigger. (21) You and your hubby, you loaded, cocked, and aimed. You. He got the kickback. You don't even have to see anything of the world sparking at the end of your barrel. You just pick up another brick and slide it into place and hope it fits in this new life you're constructing with foundations, walls, and bedrooms built for two–or what do you think, honey, should we add one more for guests, or connect it to your cute little mausoleum out back, will it match the Doric columns? Will we have enough room for both of us? Let's build up.–Go ahead. Like he cares. He has no place now. Where can he live in a world like this? Look at you. Just fucking look at you. All the bricks you've hoarded up for a stairway to heaven, and you can't even think of all the goddamn orphans.

X-X-X-X

(21)

He's an asshole. He did what he did and he's a stupid fucking asshole for it and fucking deal with it already (22), will you?

X-X-X-X

(22)

He likes being in the Turks. Dress code's less complicated than a SOLDIER's, the missions and pay are better, and there's none of the ass grabbing of the grunt ranks. The Pres isn't too keen on it, and Tseng's too uptight. With Rude you can figure that a guy wearing shades twenty-four/seven, even in the darkest, dankest, most disgusting alleys that were under the plate, is more of a looker than someone willing to cop a feel, and 'Lena doesn't even have an ass. She's completely unqualified to notice someone else's.

As for Reno, the only asses he grabs are fresh with a certain feminine grace and ripe for the picking. Secretaries are particularly hot and bothered, at least from nine to five, with him like the sub-tropic trade winds off Junon, blowing by their desks indiscriminately, shuffling through blonds, brunettes, redheads, and the dye jobs with a lazy heated smile. An equal opportunist for anyone between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five; isn't true love made of the stuff without qualifications and quantification, as not even he knows the body count?

No point to knowing it, except perhaps that wouldn't Pops be proud?–no, not at all, he wouldn't get it; he'd miss the whole point of the story.

Yes, once again there's another point to this digression, Shrinkwrap. Let's think about this for a minute.

Okay, he'll grant you that obviously there isn't a distinctly profound purpose to his rambling recollections, not on the surface, but closer inspection with fine-tooth combs, microscopes, telescopes, lasers, graphs, charts, and the ilk reveals four possibilities that drive his behavior to near irrational levels:

1) Turks rule, SOLDIERs drool.

2) A parable: To catch a feather between your fingers, you must open your palm, let it come to you. To grasp at it midflight is to disturb the delicate air currents and thrust it away. Slight deviation in highly sensitive initial conditions results in exponential bifurcation and deviation from the original function. Waves are made. Things are done that cannot be undone. World erupts into chaos (theory).

A remedy: Divine indifference. (23) Infinite patience brings immediate results. The universe will have no choice but to roll belly-up at your feet.

A moral of the story: A good roll in the sack.

3) Alcohol-induced delirium. Also: lung cancer, liver cancer, emphysema, cirrhosis, syphilis, crabs, limpdick, etc.

4) Heeeey, babe, what's your sign?

X-X-X-X

(23)

He crashes through the barroom door, frothing at the mouth with words that he knows will both earn him a rise, and be easily ignored. What he says in this state of inebriation at this time of night matters very little. It's trite for the most part, yet the nonsense causes a reaction, a condensing of forces, a mirage coming down with a nasty case of gravity. Which is it here then, at this point of nothingness reacting to nothingness? Do those words have a life of their own; are they energy or form or something neither and in between?

As he slouches on the only available stool, ignoring the subtle leeward shift of glassware and bodies, a careless click against his lighter singes the skin around his thumb. In a moment he reacts, curses, shakes his hand free, and drops his cigarette to fizz out on the counter. No one pays him any mind, but he wonders if that's true. Perhaps their method of paying mind was not to react, and by not reacting, they reacted. He wonders if that chain of actions –click, sizzle, shit!, silence–has any denomination inherent in and of itself, or if it's a meaningless play choreographed by his perceptions. If he had seen differently, would they have have acted accordingly, or was he stuck, forever doomed by the holier-than-thou crowd to be so indistinctly good and so indefinably evil? (24)

Perhaps somewhere in the malodorous wafting and drifting of his thoughts, he believes the world needs people like Sephiroth. Maybe they need the murderers, the thieves, the jack-offs, and the wackjobs to blame, so their perceptions won't change and they won't have to live with themselves as part of that localized, specific evil. Everyone can still be better than the other guy, everyone can define their good by the evil the other man embodies, and the sodden smudges they catch in the countertop's reflection won't be anything but a fantasy, a distant relative easily ignored. Too knotted and gnarled, wooden and dark, he supposes, to look much like anyone.

After the briefest of moments, squinting harder at his grainy oaken reflection in the tabletop sheen, he shakes his focus away, clings to the sensation of condensation on his glass: the cold pinpricks on his fingertips and the icy slides down his knuckles. He decides he doesn't want to know what he sees lurking beyond that image; a swallow dismisses it but too late: the impression sticks and stains the sheets of memory masked inside his head. What a shame it's such a sobering thought to ponder.

At one a.m. the night is still young. Is he that shellacked and glossed to everyone else, too?

X-X-X-X

(24)

They say she watches over everybody. Traditionally, she's shown in full battle regalia, with an all-seeing owl commanding her arm or hovering inches overhead, always watching, always ready, always still. (25)

The goddess Minerva, with plaques and prayers proclaiming paeans like,

Patron of wisdom and war.

or

Standing for truth and justice.
May we too be battle-tested and on-guard.

or

With love for the Loveless.

Etc., etc., etc., and on and on and on.

The world adores her, seeks her aid through humble supplication and the occasional ultimate sacrifice, wherein she strikes them down with a lance from her spear. Balance is kept: chaos maintained, and order restored. Through her iron will over good and evil, she is both feared and revered in people's daily remembrance of their devotions, though they are too scared to speak her name. She is simply the Goddess, the one in control, all glory, hallelujah to her.

At the other end of the spectrum, alone in a sea of probable enemies and possible targets, the Turk also refrains from saying her name, but only because he sees her for what she truly is: Goddess Divine and cold, heartless bitch.

After all, in many ways they are exactly the same. Both stand at the point of good and evil, being both, being neither, being nothing, and yet they are. Sodden, he's looked at his own ligneous reflection and seen the truth. He's got the right to call it as he sees it.

Yet she is immortal and impenetrable (in every sense of the word), while he's gotten his clock cleaned by a whole slew of madmen too often in these changing times. No balance there, other than separately, sovereignly, they've both gone as far as they can go; neither can change what they are or the roles they fill, and in that sense they've both bottomed out. With his playing the pimp to her well warded virginity, both are deadlocked by what they cannot escape, and neither is ever sated. If he ever meets her, maybe he'll buy her a drink or two: a gin and tonic, a whiskey on the rocks. A dry martini, a Bloody Mary. They'll down each like a shot and sit, heads tilted back, sucking the final scant drops and stinging vapors from the glass until only the imprints of their mouths and fingertips remain. What a condemnation. Evidence, evidence everywhere, nor any drop to drink. Where's the karma in that?

X-X-X-X

(25)

How long does that stupid owl hover in one spot over her shoulder? He imagines the process from arm to air to be something akin to teleportation. No happy medium, either chained to his guardian, or free and still. He wonders, too, about the omniscience of the keeper of the planet. Full of wisdom and martial precision, but could she beat the half-truths of a Turk? In his place, would she covet someone else's dumb apples, someone else's prize, and is that why she rules Gaia, where the owls fly silent, picking off prey with all-seeing eyes; where, as if by some miracle, they all want what they don't have? (26)

X-X-X-X

(26)

A sick sense of numinal humor (27) dictated that he found her with the love of her life, bedded in a bunch of flowers blooming in a church. One arm was curled protectively into her side, her other extended, and he tsked harshly.

Rude stood silently next to him, while Reno jabbed Strife's boot with his own. Both were out cold: Tifa from bruises both visible and not, and Strife because he was leaking all over the place like a busted radiator. The dude was one sick dumbass. Every fourth, fifth, and seventh pew was decimated; columns had crumbled like grains of sand; skid marks whelped deep gullies in the soft earth where flowers once flourished; a bedroll hid what should've been floorboard. He reiterated: Strife was a moron, leaving a bar for this shit.

Or maybe he was doing something right, what did a drunk know?

Now he'd stepped on the flowers once before, and in a strange sense of déjà vu, there were again bruised petals and too much testosterone swarming around one girl, but a Turk's was always channeled into his duty, and his job was to track Strife and make sure he didn't do anything dumb. Reno had no loyalty to the girl. His pathway and hers weren't supposed to T-bone here. She was a civilian casualty, a liability with relatively minor wounds, and in the grand scheme of things, didn't matter all that much. Still, she was a pretty face, and it was a shame to let something like that go untreated. A few potions, materia, divine intervention–whatever Rude had on hand–and everything would be hunky-dory.

He carried her–well, it was Strife first but that fucker was heavy and he'd have been damned if he was going to let Rude get away with all of a fully usable spine, copping a feel, and a good view. Then he made a few calls on his PHS. Maybe he rounded the block to harass the locals or press a few sketchy fucks for information. Lighting up another smoke, he scoped the scene for guys that more or less looked like him–like trouble–but dumber, reeking of booze and smoke and despair, and skipping the showers often enough to deem the phrase 'getting lucky' as something more than literal–and for the record, dumb enough to be intimidated into talking. They puffed up and out and spoke real slow and cool to shutter the stutter, but their trigger fingers twitched with each tap Reno made on his EMR, as if they were one word away from getting fried. Little did they know, the interrogation itself was mainly obeisance to a meaningless gesture. He'd seen enough here. Tire tracks and footprints large and small littered the area, and a few windows were cracked over an open courtyard–a scene all but perfect for recon and reunions. What was the going phrase? Taking the kiddies out for a regular picnic in the park. Code words and sightings of triplicate trouble had been floating around ShinRa for days, and it didn't take a genius to put two and two together and figure out where to look first, though they'd still had to clue in the hero later on. Reno had called for surveillance with the finest technology ShinRa had to offer, the world at his fingertips from twenty thousand miles away, which would've been pretty damn handy, he figured, the last few times he'd had to chase someone across a planet. But guys like this were predictable in their obsession about everything scientifically ancient and relatively deceased, whereas Fair had been like chasing a genetically enhanced ferret through a maze built by medicated wombats and filled with packing peanuts. Love was the reason Tseng had supplied, whereas Reno had scoffed and replied, "Lemmings."

Still, he'd followed orders and flown across the globe on more than one occasion, his eyes owl-wide from all the coffee and from being so sober it hurt.

He'd blamed Cissnei and her hormones for that, and Tseng and his fondness for florid billet-doux and origami lilies, but didn't he always?

Either way, within the hour he'd found those kids and then some, mostly orphans, considering none too many were riled up about their being missing. He'd kept her little makeshift world intact, and even saved that pansy stick-up-the-ass she was probably dating. The only thing he didn't do that day was tuck her in, muttering something all the while to no one in particular about playing it a little too close to home field.

X-X-X-X

(27)

Notes from A Divine Comedy, Scene 1:

(A room, midday. Light filters through the blinds to bar everything in strict geometric symmetry. In the center of the room, a man sits. We cannot see his face for the long white cloak obscuring him from view, but we notice the shadows have grown amorphous and woolen along his garments. He appears to be bound to a wheelchair, though we cannot discern the extent of his handicap. He commands the room with the curious air of one not accustomed to weakness: his head tucked downwards, but coiled, as calculating and abstruse as the strike of a viper. We know he has not been crippled ab initio, but we cannot determine the magnitude of his injuries.)

MAN

I hear the plight of my children and call them to me. Come, children, come, and tell me your sorrows.

(Enter a pair of pitiable street urchins.)

CHILDREN

(A boy in rags bows and clasps the man's hand.) Godfather!

(A girl in a tattered dress adorned with pearls of great price touches the hem of his cloak.) Godfather!

(Both children appear to be distraught with tears. The man smiles sharply.)

GODFATHER

(Petting them on the head.) There, there. I know your troubles. I can see them in your eyes. (He speaks to the shadows.) Bring him to me. We'll make him an offer he can't refuse.

(Shadows slime under the door leading offstage. Where they go and what they accomplish we cannot see. The children appear to be comforted by their absence, and the girl starts humming and pretending to pick flowers.

Suddenly, the walls shake. The door flings open with a great burst of wind that outlines the silhouette of a man. He seems to be an embodiment of darkness, until he shakes his limbs and hurls the shadows to their master's feet. A large sword glints over his shoulder. The children cry out in great joy.)

CHILDREN

Hero! You've come to save us once again!

HERO

What do you want? (Brushing off the clawing hands of the children, he turns to the Godfather.) I met some of your goons out there.

GODFATHER

My goons? My dear once-upon-a-time hero, you may have saved the world, but you are not wise in its ways. In two years my family has become completely legitimate. We are not in the business of goons. Things are shaded and shadowed far more delicately now. You must be thinking of my father.

HERO

Whoever. They were nasty. Total villain tropes who wanted something but wouldn't tell me what it was or who they worked for. Tried to take my head. (He grinds his hand against his hair, then realizes what he's doing and fluffs the unusual spiked coif back into proper form and scowls.)

CHILDREN

(Dancing.) The head! The head! It's off with her head!

HERO

(Turns to the children. Starts salivating, interested.) You know who it was?

GODFATHER

Who? You tell me.

(An owl flies in, perches on the bust of Minerva over the chamber door, and ogles the hero. Each eye widens then shrinks, alternately, until the bird settles, ruffles its feathers, and emits a bored hoot.)

OWL

Whoo?

HERO

(Blinking stupidly.) You too? Who?

OWL

Whooo?

HERO

Shut up.

OWL

Cuckoo.

GODFATHER

Hush. Both. I do not have time for nonsense on this day of reuniting with old barely-acquaintances. (To the hero.) You say they wanted something. Did they mention anything of particular importance?

HERO

(Sulkily.) They talked smack about my mother.

CHILDREN

(Dancing in wild, bacchanal rhythms.) Yo momma so fat, when she sat down, she took out half a continent.

(The hero looks taken aback, perhaps guilty. He grows redder by the second.)

CHILDREN

(Laughing.) Yo momma so fat that it's a competitive sport to snowboard along her crack.

HERO

(Now burning, enraged, reaching for his weapon.) Oh, will you shut up!

OWL

Who. Whoo.

GODFATHER

(Pats the arm of a child who looks deceptively chagrined.) Now, now, there's no need for violence. Let's be rational. They talked about your mother, but you've said before the girl you live with is a surrogate. Perhaps it's her they want.

CHILDREN

Mama Mia! Butta she make-ah the best knuckle sandwiches in town.

HERO

(Gasps.) Not her. She's the best. (Daydreaming, he whispers to himself; sighs.)

GODFATHER

Ah, a classic case of ti amo, amore mio.

OWL

Whoo.

HERO

(Nods.) But she's already suffered so much.

GODFATHER

(Appraises the hero.) Hm, figaros.

HERO

We have communication issues, you see. We don't talk. There are too many things left unsaid.

CHILDREN

(Now hurling themselves bodily against every wall.) A clue! A clue!

GODFATHER

Indeed. This information is grave, but–

CHILDREN

(Covered with bruises.) Here's the spread. They don't talk in bed. The hero's a bit dead–dead in the head!

GODFATHER

Stai zitto, mi bambini! (The children hush and cower in a corner at the flagrantly foreign anger.) Now I cannot help you with the woman. But I will tell you what we're going to do about the–how do you hero types normally phrase it?– nut jobs.

(The children whimper. A distraught woman appears in the doorframe and points at their now black and blue bodies.)

WAILING WOMAN

Heavens, dear me, oh my, watch your language, please, sir. (The woman sighs, crocodile tears flowing free, while she cocks a menacing finger their way. Eliciting no reaction, she leaves, slithering into the shadows with only a matriarchal admonition.) Think of the children.

CHILDREN

(Scooching closer.) We'll be quiet. We'll listen. It's a trap. Shh. The plot thickens.

GODFATHER

Generations will remember a battle of epic proportions. Good versus evil. Light versus dark. To be versus not to be. The Baddest Men on the Planet v. Holyfield.

HERO

Say wha?

GODFATHER

(With a pointed look, mutters under his breath.) You do not even address me as 'Godfather' when you complain so stupidly. (He shakes his head, then proceeds to speak normally.) We whack them. A job this size will require reinforcements.

(He claps his hands. Smoke fills the room, and the shadow of a man appears. He seems to be made of fire. His hair dances like flames, and smoke spews from his mouth when he opens it to speak.)

Meet the Deviant.

DEVIANT

(Smokily.) Yo.

CHILDREN

(Coughing.) Bro!

DEVIANT

(Squinting through the haze.) Do I know you?

CHILDREN

(Hacking.) Do I know you?

OWL

(Mostly forgotten by now.) Whoo?

(Sizing up the Deviant, the hero squares his shoulders and puffs out his chest, slouching once he realizes that he's inches deficient in several key areas.)

HERO

(Speaks petulantly.) He doesn't look so tough. Do we really need him? I've got a whole team.

DEVIANT

Consolation overcompensation.

GODFATHER

(To the Deviant.) Quiet. (To the hero.) He used to be a demolition expert, but now he's our go-to take-out guy. (Lunch materializes from the smoke: a tray filled with a vibrant array of canopic jars. The Godfather lifts the lid to one and inhales.) He's the best. Only dropped one plate his entire life. (He holds out his hand.) Cannoli?

HERO

(The crust is flaky thin. He chews thoughtfully.)

So why do we need him?

GODFATHER

We don't. He's mostly filler and fodder for the general populace, but–

HERO

(Takes triumphant stance and smiles gleefully.) Score one for the A-team. (He chuckles and points at the Deviant.) Fangirl fodder.

GODFATHER

–he's got some good connections with Fate.

DEVIANT

(Suddenly grows twenty feet in height.) You were sayin'?

CHILDREN

(Whispering.) Ohyoushouldnveouttuavedundat. He's tight with Fate. He's gonna whack you in the labonza. He's a-gunna droppa de plate on yous.

HERO

(Confused, probably pissing pants.) But he said you were filler. (Growing increasingly frantic.) Fodder. No real substance!

DEVIANT

Kettle black. (Kicks the pot.)

(Offstage: Hero lands somewhere in a bush. Dusting himself off, he doesn't look both ways before he crosses the road (jokes abound as to why) and gets run over in a tragic bicycling accident. In fodder terms, he gets recalled. In filler terms, he gets dropped. The reunion's halted. Booze and tears flow, and the Deviant deigns to comfort the ladylove left behind because how can he hate a guy who, if you recall, saved the world? (In the future reality: twice. Mostly semantics.) Also noted: the Deviant looks dashing in funeral black.)

CHILDREN

(Pointing at the now empty bush.) He...he's dead! The hero's dead! Shucks! Rats! Goddamn! (Their eyes shift about nervously, before they kick their hysterics up a notch.) O woe! Woe is me! Woe is we!

WAILING WOMAN

(Reappears, clasping her hands together.) Oh, see!–just look at what you've done. I warned you. You can't say I didn't. Mother always knows best. (She glares accusingly. Her eyes burn, and her hair winds and sidewinds about her, making her a distinctly reptilian thing to behold. Her hand pistols forward and she points at each person in turn.) Now won't somebody please think of the children? (28)

OWL

(Alights on a branch.) Whoo who? Woe! Woe!

(The woman turns her inexorable condemnation to the bird. Aiming, she blows a small puff of air from her mouth, flicks her wrist, and the owl drops. The children also go silent.)

GODFATHER

(Comes forward, walking, miraculously, in an impeccably tailored suit. He surveys the scene, then holds out his hand, covered in an indistinct sauce.) Cannoli?

(Shrink: Does this story really have a point?

Owl: Whoo knows? Cuckoo.)

X-X-X-X

(28)

Everything had a way of happening too late. Another plate had fallen, albeit a smaller, merely symbolic one, from an enraged Bahamut overhead. People filled the streets–men, women, young and old–hiding behind trash cans, ducking into smashed store fronts, fleeing and grappling, knocking over the weak kneeling prostrate before some shadow-mouthed dog on this eve of the second apocalypse (29); grannies praying for salvation, if not for them, they're old and have lived their lives, but think of the children, in the Goddess' name, amen; and Reno ran for his life. But he paused mid-frantic-escape to grab a brainless kid who tried to dig for someone else's gold when he was trying to save her life because when things were on the line and he had a job to do but it turned south and he should've burned those motherfucking orders he got, it was all he could do not to think of the orphans.

Not that the history books would mention anything but the pillars crumbled and columns toppled and the cloud of ruin that smothered the city in a resounding amen. An anticlimactic end to a barely-begun birth. What a fucking joke. Things are always so silent at the end of the world.

X-X-X-X

(29)

The moon filled a strange sort of void in the sky after Meteor. People would stand outside their homes, shacks, or tents in the refugee camps, gazing heavenward like they'd never seen the sky so dark and were trying to impress its fathomlessness onto their own limited minds. For some in the slums, it might've been true. The Sector 7 incident and a near apocalypse opened up the world to a lot more people. On a somewhat grassy plain outside Junon, Reno and Rude took a few moments to spread out and relax. Reno was sprawled on a patch of green, while Rude stood nearby, mindful of the potential of unprofessional grass stains on his suit. They'd piloted the helicopter to the first open area outside the city to wait for the president to finish making the rounds of local camps and government offices. He was primarily offering consolations and reparations, while testing support among the living elite. The ShinRa Electric Company was no more, but that did not make the president without power. The WRO's success depended largely on his backing. They needed to provide people with a cause: with jobs and homes and hope; for that they needed an image and funds. ShinRa had plenty to spare of each. That it resecured the president's own prestige was survival of the fittest as far as Reno was concerned. A matter of being resourceful, the same way Reno and Rude had landed the chopper here in the middle of nowhere after Sapphire WEAPON took out the nearest helipad.

With his arms wedged behind his head, Reno felt strangely reticent. Perhaps it was the great silence outside the city, or the moment's peace from their jobs, or the way everything had fallen back into order for him and Rude; or maybe it was that without the perpetual web of smoke that surrounded him, he could finally see clearly; but whatever it was that night, looking straight into the soul of the universe had him openly thinking things he'd never admitted to before.

He plucked a long blade of grass and started chewing on the ends. The stars stretched on forever. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands, yet the night was dark, and nothing could change that, whereas in the middle of Gaia, very little seemed to stay the same. Reno exhaled, measured and slow.

"What d'you think they see out there?"

Rude grunted. He didn't know. It was possible he didn't even know what Reno was talking about.

"Y'know what I think? I think they look out from their little crappy moon homes at all the pretty constellations, and they see the exact same goddamn thing we do." Reno propped himself up on one elbow and turned to look at his partner, who had lifted an eyebrow over the rim of his shades. Reno smirked, but he continued with his point. "I don't think it makes any difference to them whether we're here and they're there, or whatever pictures they make up to connect the dots. They've got their own problems to deal with and we got ours. And then they'll go out on their front porch or take a ride on their flying whatever-cycles and look up at us like we're the brightest thing in the sky and think how nice the stars look tonight."

Rude made a strange sound in his throat. "Flashy."

Reno grinned around his bit of straw. "Yeah, man. Real flashy."

"Except we're not the brightest. We're not on a star."

"Well, hell, dude, we're close enough, they'll never tell. It's the principle of the thing anyways. A billion years from now they're gonna look here and make up poems and stories an' shit about our star and the constellation we're in and how we're the biggest, baddest thing in the sky." He collapsed his elbows and returned, recumbent, to the grass. "Almost makes you think."

A siren sounded from the city behind them, but neither paid it any due mind. The electric grid was shot as it was, security systems were on the brink, and since Meteor, most everything had been going haywire on a global scale. A full recovery could take a lifetime or two.

"Ya know I bet if it weren't for Jenova," Reno started (he seemed to have no problem holding a mostly one-sided conversation tonight), "nobody up there'd even give a shit 'bout us."

This did earn him another grunt out of Rude. "Does anyone?"

"Eh. Wanna bet your little AVALANCHE girlfriend'd say different?" Reno laughed almost bitterly. How stupid did you have to be to think the planet cared? Here they were, stuck in one of the few half-alive fields outside of Junon, wasting time because men, by building, had destroyed what they had been handed, and then been handed that which destroyed what they had built. The diametric condemnation was palpable. "Must be nice believin' shit like that. Saving the planet, destiny, stars on your side, mappin' out your future. I mean, think about it. The whole idea's pretty dumb. Stars are dead by the time we notice 'em and wish on 'em like they've got some power over us. All we've got is some light, and a gazillion years from now, that light'll still be there and someone else far away'll see it and say it means something completely different. But the meanings don't matter–there's never anythin' there. Just an illusion, 'cept for that light that's still the realest fucking thing you've ever seen." Reno blinked, and something like a slow smile crept across his face. "It's almost like time's frozen, y'know? All our rap sheets to the stars, they just burn 'em up. All that evidence, all that history turned into light. It's nothin'. Immaculate immortal. Like livin' forever."

Rude finally broke his rigid stance and sat, carefully, on a patch of grass. The sunglasses came off, and he looked up. It was a gesture that spoke volumes more than if he'd shot his partner a disbelieving look, and Reno knew that in that moment he understood, too. "Would you reallywant to live that long?"

They both realized: What kind of stupid question was that? (30)

"Live," Reno scoffed, exhaling a thin breath that fogged and coiled like smoke. "Nah, yo, I don't want to live forever. Unless you're actually immortal, it's too much trouble. It's why the stars got it so good, they ain't alive."

"You said it yourself–stars die, too. Even they can't escape it."

Rude had a point. Perhaps it was so existential that it was a moot point, or perhaps it was the only point. Who cared? In a way it reminded Reno of the old ShinRa Space Program that had more or less been a pipedream to a much earlier grave. People had called it shooting for the stars back then; Reno had appreciated the unbidden connotation.

His gaze held a heavy, lidded look as his breath fogged again, and he compacted a phantom butt against the ground. A useless, harmless habit.

"Yeah, man, but think about it. They burn so bright."

X-X-X-X

(30)

If you think you don't understand this then you probably do so shut up about it and quit asking for further explanation.

He has none but that which is straitjacketed in his words, minimal and futile and already wrapped up, though barely his own anymore.

Then again, if you think that by the above logic you get him, you probably don't. (31)

The answer lies in not thinking.

He's more of an experience. A riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma holstered in a uniform and rolled like you smoke it.

X-X-X-X

(31)

Reno tramples flowers. Strife falls into them. A perverse tendency towards amensalism on both counts, and yet people like Strife just don't get it.

Maybe no one really understands why Reno risks his life every day for his job. (32) Why he can't tuck in his shirt, but will take orders and toe the line for one guy in a white suit and another in black who never cracks a smile.

Strife considers pain, guilt, and judgment as his own personal motives. He assumes Reno reflects on power, order, apathy, boredom. He thinks the Turk is a nut. Borderline crazy and borderline evil. How can he not be a bit of both at ShinRa? How can a hero be different? In fact, Strife thinks, it's probably the same sixth sense that forces him to run that leads Reno to drink.

Reno's always said that Strife was a moron.

X-X-X-X

(32)

What a job–the easiest in the world. Push a few papers, push a few people's buttons. A thousand, ten, who cares? Between trundling and lurching from one position on the globe to another, from driving hard on top to riding cruise-control on bottom, he stayed to fight that one day the plate crashed because he had to. Someone needed to provide the dinner and the show, the two-for-the-price of-one deal. So his number got picked, big deal. Even for AVALANCHE it was the grand game of good v. evil, we v. them, planet v. ShinRa, revenge v. greed.

To him, what does it matter, other than he fought, and to this day a finger, cracked when he caught a punch wrong, still aches. A slight tremor is all that is visible, but he feels it like an aftershock. A phantom wound. Despite what you may think, he doesn't read too much into it. It's not his trigger finger, and his body is already littered with scars from shrapnel, from bullets, from some drunk ass with a knife when he was too wasted to remember anything but his apartment in a whirl of color as he passed out on the floor.

If he hadn't fought, if there weren't pricks to kick against, if the duality dissolved, where would they all be? AVALANCHE wouldn't think themselves sent by ye gods, and Sephiroth, dead or alive, wouldn't be Public Enemy #1. Jenova never would've come, and Reno would be lost somewhere in the void. But in this plane nothing is peaceful, and peace is nothing (nothingness). People feed on the dead and the dramatic.

ShinRa simply did it on a colossal scale.

This life and these deaths, maybe they were wrong, but the way he sees it, he was helping keep the balance. What would some distant philosopher say?–that in some sense he was the savior of the world and he had very little choice in the matter. Hate him all you want, your feelings are merely a fragment of your own self projecting upon something inherently meaningless. Death, though poeticized and feared, gives us all a reason for living through its interpretation. It is merely a role, a mask, that something tangible for the indefinite and prenascent.

He'll give you an example. You can put your hand into the blood and feel it ooze between your fingers. You can watch it on a movie screen and clench your side when a guy gets shot in the stomach. You can count his broken ribs.

He may down a pint when one's poking through and someone's got to give him a stint to bite on when they set it back right. His chest may hurt like a bitch, but he feels it, it's there. You feel it too.

Stop feeling nothing good and nothing bad and you're between the dichotomy. You're dead. You're nothing yourself. You're not even a name.

Perhaps drinking's the closest thing to obliviousness and peace he's found that leaves him still feeling and people shouting at him one way or another. Coming off that–that sensually aware, sensory-deprived state–that's the hangover (33), that's the crash. Then how are you supposed to deal with all the shit you've done? How do you live up to being something more? What choice do you have? Peace/Turmoil, Love/Hate, Life/Death. Dichotomy. Lemmings–everybody's a lemming.

Everyone jumps off that cliff. He simply facilitates the process, pushes a few thousand down before him. Their names end up in the papers, and some get screen time. Most get a gravestone, and for a second in history, they're verging on immortal.

And then you look at their best bud standing over the plot with tears that won't fall from his eyes and both fists clenched, and he's wanting real bad to take it all back, everything he's ever said and done, but he's too impotent to do anything but say their names and feel the words burning through his blood.

That remembrance–that's immortality. He'll never forget.

(But when he slams back ten warm beers, still donning his best suit, he does. That's the conundrum. Like language without meaning or a book without words, the contradiction is fundamental. A Turk realizes this more than anybody. Immortality doesn't last forever.)

X-X-X-X

(33)

No world to save today. Officially everyone's back at work though we never got a day off. Rude's by the window finishing up the last of the reports. All typeset bullshit. Numbers and figures and testimonials. If we wrote it in blood on human hide would that make it more substantial? Harder to file. At the water cooler Elena jab-jab-jabbering. Yes of course that cinnabun makes you look fat. No I won't shut up. Moo. Moooo. Tseng hates cinnamon. Favors the spices of his homeland. Wasabi. Ginger. Pickled plum. I tried it once. Wasabi. Never again. It was at an inn in Wutai. Women in blue kimonos who bowed and balanced clay bowls on a low table. Pale cushions on the floor. Tiny little pieces of everything like for a miniature tea party. No one warned me that the green stuff was nasty lethal. Table may have flipped. Obscene gestures may have been made with chopsticks. Things may have burned. Desecration of certain persons and artifacts may have caused a hush-hush international incident. Or maybe not. Who knows? Everything's always classified even the nonclassified shit. Labels. Brrrrrp-click! Filed away. I remember Tseng had a headache that day. Says cinnamon gives him one too. Elena snags his share of breakfast only to moan later that all those calories have gone to her head. So that's what you're calling saddlebags nowadays. And you complain that us guys think with what's between our legs. No you shut up. My head hurts now. I'm sobering up by the minute. I think we all live merged with a migraine though I wonder if we know it. In that case drinks all around. Why's all the whiskey gone? (34) Oops no sake Tseng. And Elena doesn't need the carbs. Moomoomoo. Sweet I'll take your share. No sweat. With a body like this dahlin' I've got plenty of room.

X-X-X-X

(34)

Tseng sat with textbook posture at his desk, the first and largest of four in the Turk's wing. A manila folder lay open, its contents exposed, though still as precisely positioned as the cut of his suit. He closed it with a pair of immaculate fingers, pushing it towards the two men in front of him.

"I expect a full report on my desk Monday morning." Tseng was, by nature, laconic.

The tall, tanned man remained standing at full attention, unmoving, waiting for either further elaboration or to be dismissed to review the data. He was your model subordinate: he kept his questions for suspects and his opinions to himself. Most who crossed his path found his stone-cold expression terrifying.

His partner, however, was another matter. Smirking, the lanky redhead casually reached across his crossed knees and plucked the debriefing from the desk, while at the same time taking another bite of a pastry he'd swiped on the way in. Without expression, Tseng watched as, unmindful of icing smears, Reno flipped through the documents: various maps, statistics, lists of items moved, descriptions, profiles, cost analyses, etc.

If it weren't for a slight movement that flashed across his face, Reno would've seemed bored with the ordeal. "In five years the death techs got nothin'?" he muttered between swallows.

"We've reason to believe their base is in Sector 7," Tseng said dryly.

Reno closed the folder and tossed it back towards his boss. Papers scattered, and if Tseng was peeved at having to reshuffled them, he attended to it with the same equanimity of his daily routine. The standing man, to his credit, didn't roll his eyes, at least not without his sunglasses firmly in place, which, by all accounts, they were.

"So the old man's finally decided to call in the bomb squad, eh?" Reno drawled. Then he leaned forward towards the desk, a predatory smile on his face. "Permission to keep it low-key?"

"Reno." Tseng's voice was stern. "You and Rude know what to do."

Reno slumped back in the chair, inhaling deeply while he rubbed his hands against his shirt, then stood. "Sure thing, Boss." He tapped his nightstick against his leg, a solemn promise to his word. Nodding, he looked to his partner. "Come on, Rude. Let's go find ourselves some pretty colors (35)."

X-X-X-X

(35)

In his desk, the third drawer from the top, he keeps a book, shuffled between classified slips with giant gaps of whitespace on them where words and names and end-of-mission reports ought to be. Black leather–smelling, he whiffs old tanner and the stiff permeability of age–and flipping through it, he reads blank pages, long overdue for their story. Their notches. Their tick marks. Their headcounts.

He snaps the spine shut, steals it still empty into the drawer, and decides he'll bequeath it to Rude, since both the whole wide world of statistics and the sharks at the Saucer are banking on Reno biting it first from a certain chronic cirrho-emphysema. Rude would probably be the only person who'd understand it and why it's blank and not make a big to-do over the gesture or assume that he's just too cowardly to tell his side. On second thought, there's nothing in there that Rude doesn't already know, so he'll send it to a girl who hands out the next hangover and makes a living on binges. She can realize who it's from, and what a who-who-whooo he is, while he flies with monotone obituaries on the wind. They won't even need names there, or a drippy boyfriend who's got the stars on his side, not when Reno's got fireworks and charm–or flash and implicit kitsch. But the colors, man. Think of all them beautiful colors, and she'll smile her soft smile while he rots away and breathes his last so silently that it's all he can do from his coordinates on the cusp of life's margins to mouth, Of course I remember you.

In a moment as much an opening as a closure, the life streaming before his eyes will fall into neatly ordered couplets. He'll be at that hollow space in time, where everything will be so chill that he'll let it float through him, like a melismatic groove set to someone else's interpretation. The words won't rhyme, they never do, but easy come, easy go, and he'll ride the lyrics to the end.

Where beauty is, then there is ugliness;
where right is, also there is wrong.
Knowledge and ignorance are interdependent;
delusion and enlightenment condition each other.
Since olden times it has been so.
How could it be otherwise now?
Wanting to get rid of one and grab the other
is merely realizing a scene of stupidity.
Even if you speak of the wonder of it all,
how do you deal with each thing changing?

A bit old-fashioned, maybe, but whoever said enlightenment came easy and cheap, more so with this price of remembering so inherently deep? (or does he only want things to jibe in this final plunge for glory?) –but goddammit, man, what really sucks about it is that all during this beautiful requiem, you're knocking back one after another, and the moment the sultry lounge singer slides into the final measure, you call out all easy-like over the din,

Yo, bartender–hit me again. (0)