Author's notes: I wrote this as a gift for the lovely Heather Cat. She's secretly the person who introduced me to fandom (though I was the one who let her and FF7 meet so perhaps we're equal there). She's the one who taught me that Turks are interesting people and that a smirk can mean more than a smile. So this is a throw back to older days and to the things that don't change.
It's been way too long since Reno and I sat down to have a good conversation. If you want to place him anywhere, I imagine that he's sitting inside, smoking a cigarette and sipping a whiskey on the rocks while the rain falls in sheets outside.
This is for you, Heather Cat. Everyone else, enjoy.
Thunder
It seems strange to say it now but it never used to rain under the Plate in Midgar. I used to live there, you know, a long time ago.
It's weird now that I think about it because we can get some crazy storms in the city. We're so close to the ocean, ya know? You'd never realize it down in the Slums though. There isn't even a night down there. The whole under-district is lit with these huge, constant, pale fluorescent lights that Shinra has hooked up under the bottom of the Plate. That dim light's a constant. You just get used to the times never changing. It's why we all squint so damn much when we go up top.
The rain though, that was something else. The slums are noisy like you wouldn't believe – too many fucking people in one spot all the gods-damned time. It's more like an insect colony than anything else – always buzzing and moving and churning. It makes your stomach sick just to look at it.
There are a few good spots though, if you know where to look for them. I was from Sector 2, just south of the 5th parallel fusion line. Over in the 9th district, just a little past water vein 34, there used to be an old scrap yard. All the old space was used up and there weren't any good flats nearby so nobody squatted there. It was just a bunch of old junk piled together. I'd go there, sometimes, because even then people could make me feel so gods damned claustrophobic.
That spot though, it was just far enough away from everything else. If you went there and you listened real closely when it was raining up on the Plate, you could just barely hear the thunder. The first time that I heard it I was twelve years old. I was so fucking scared – I thought that the whole place was going to come down or something. It took me a minute to figure out what it was. Weird to think about storm clouds and rainwater on top of you when your whole world is light by 1000 watt fluorescents.
A deep, distant, roaring rumble. That's what thunder was.
The first time that I ever saw rain was on a mission for Shinra. I'd hardly even seen the sky before then and rain was like a whole other fucking thing. There are sprinkler systems set under the Plate that go off if a big enough chuck of a Sector is burning but seeing water fall and seeing rain fall isn't nearly the same thing, trust me on that.
And holy fuck the thunder. A huge, ground-shaking, earth-shattered clap. And lightning, gods, fucking lightning; that was probably the best part. Tseng told me about how it's the lightning that makes the thunder, about how all that electricity doesn't actually make a sound until moments later. I was still the rookie kid who squinted too much back then. Shit I thought that lightning was something to fucking see.
So 'Lena calls me crazy when I run out into a rainstorm every now and then. She tells me it's dangerous and that I'll catch a cold and all sorts of stupid 'Lena-type things. The part that she can't understand, that she could never understand, is that for sixteen years of my life all I ever heard was distant thunder – never got to feel rain, never got to see lightning. So I can't explain to her why I need to be out there in the storm.
I just do.