A Brief, Semi-Poignant Explanation:

This is a one-shot about Reeve, as he is characterized in my epic (albeit unfinished) fic, Invisible Preachers. It could be considered a prequel of sorts, certainly the events here are alluded to elsewhere. Anyway, it takes place thirteen years before the events of the game. Reeve's a spry twenty-three years old, and the plate above Midgar hasn't been built yet. As promised in the summary, this features appearances by a younger Rude and Tseng.

Still Human

The phone was ringing, and a voice inside Alexander Reeve's mind was pleading with him to hang up before the familiar voice of his mother answered. Twenty three years old, and he was still terrified of disappointing his parents. And why shouldn't he be? After all, his life had been nothing but a string of successes. Top student and star athlete at his high school, physics major with a minor in engineering at the prestigious Mideel University, he was perpetually wrapped in the pride forced upon him by others. He often felt like a thousand people's egos personified in one man. Those that knew him told everyone they knew him, and those who didn't were stricken with envy. Those that surrounded him under guise of friend or enemy took his pride for their own, often leaving him with none left for himself. After all, underneath the acclaim and prestige there was a person like any other, subject to the human condition and prone to the inevitability of human failings.

So Reeve found himself listening to the ringing phone, his sudden bout of failings running repeatedly through his mind. At long last, he heard his mother's distant voice on the other end of the line. Distant in terms of the miles that separated his hometown of Mideel and his current home at the Shinra Headquarters in Midgar, and distant in terms of his mother living in a perpetual daydream.

"Hello?" his mother asked dreamily.

"Uh... hi Mom," Reeve said, rather dumbly. He hadn't given any thought as to how he would start this conversation.

"Is that you Alex?" his mother asked, a vague hint of surprise registering in her drifting tone.

"Yeah Mom, it's me," Reeve said, and sighed. "I've got some pretty bad news..."

His mother sounded like she was about to say something else, but she was cut off by a harsh voice in the background demanding to know who was on the phone.

"It's Alex..." Reeve heard his mother say, before there was a sudden scuffle and a new voice exploded into his ears with all the subtlety of a train wreck.

"Alex? What the hell is going on with you!?" his father shouted. Reeve winced at the sudden anger coming his way. His father's voice sounded particularly gruff in contrast with his mother's.

"So, I guess you know..." Reeve said softly, a little relieved that he didn't have to explain, but gritting his teeth for what he knew would come next.

"Know!? Of course I know you damn ingrate!" his father shouted. "It's been all over the news! What am I supposed to tell everyone who looks up to this family 'cause of you, huh?"

"I just couldn't do it..." Reeve stammered in a vague effort to explain himself.

"Couldn't do what? Your job? That's what a man's supposed to do, boy!"

Reeve bit his tongue and let that comment slide. He was used to his father telling him that a man is supposed to do his job, and he had since disregarded the irony of hearing that from someone who had been unemployed for as long as Reeve could remember.

"Do you really know what my job is?"

"Course I do! You're a Turk, boy! And you're famous! So when you slip up like this, it comes back here and makes this family look bad!"

Reeve mentally translated that as meaning it came back and made his father's self-proclaim heroic reputation suffer.

"But do you really know what Turks do?" Reeve asked. "They kill people..."

"I'm sure they deserve it!"

Reeve sighed. "But how do I really know that?"

"If President Shinra says they deserve it, then they deserve it, boy! I've seen him on the TV, he's a good man! You let him down, you let me down, you let the whole fucking world down, boy!"

A thousand retorts died on Reeve's lips. He wanted to scream at his father, to let him know all the filth that was on Victor Shinra's hands, but in the end, all he could do was mumble an apology and hope that conversation would end.

"And what's this I hear about you and your wife splitting?" his father demanded.

Reeve covered his face with his free hand. "How do you know about that?" he asked feebly.

"It's on the news! Boy, when you go and fuck things up, you sure go all out, don't you!?"

"Can you put mom back on?" Reeve asked, closing his eyes and cursing himself for making this phone call in the first place.

"No! She doesn't know how to deal with things like this. That's the man's job!"

"And a man's got to do his job, right?" Reeve sighed, unable to keep the pent up bitterness from seeping into his voice.

"Good to know I got though to you on that. Too bad you only remember it when it's convenient for you!"

Reeve tasted a salty tang in his mouth as he bit down on his bottom lip hard enough to draw blood. "I really have to go," he said.

"I'm not finished with you yet, boy!" his father shouted, but Reeve lowered the phone, his heart starting to race as he summoned the nerve to hang up. With a deep breath, he did the impossible and cut his father off.

Jumping up from the bench where he had been sitting, he threw the silent phone against the wall, causing a miniature explosion of plastic and circuitry.

"You don't know what it's like!" Reeve shouted, his voice shaking. "You don't know..." he trailed off, sinking back down to his seat on the hard bench that sat in the middle of the room.

He was sitting in the Turk's locker room, a small gray block of space in the vast Shinra Headquarters. A row of lockers sat behind him, a line of hanging crisp blue blazers on his right. Everything seemed terribly quiet now that his father's shouting was silenced. The vaguely irritating hum of the halogen light above his head was the only sound to distract him from his own thoughts.

He had only been a Turk for six months. He would probably go down in the books as the worst Turk in the history of the company. Only two short days ago, he had been at the top of his game. He was the mechanically talented Turk, an assassin of machinery more than people.

He was sent out on a routine assignment with two of his fellow Turks: Hoshi Tan, their leader, and Terria Lawsley, the woman with the contradicting fiery red hair and calm green eyes that he had fallen in love with. Why he had fallen for her, he was never really able to figure out. She was a beautiful woman, to be sure, but she was also very cold at times, terribly manipulative, and very unfeeling towards those looking down the barrel of her gun. The old opposites attract axiom certainly seemed to have kicked in with Reeve, and was now proving to be just another burden on his shoulders.

The assignment had been simple. Disable a small group of Wutain terrorists that were planning to set off a bomb in one of Shinra's media outlets. The news in Midgar was filled with anti-Wutain propaganda as Victor Shinra's feud with Wutai continued to escalate. Reeve's job was to get past the locks, which had been surprisingly sophisticated for a small time terrorist group, and then disable and dismantle the bombs so other groups wouldn't be able to get their hands on them while Terria and Hoshi took care of any members of the group that tried to stop him. In and out in ten minutes. It sounded like just another day's work.

Once inside, Reeve has holstered his gun to set to work on the task at hand. Terria and Hoshi seemed to have everything under control. As usual, Reeve did his best to ignore the shouts and shots as he concentrated on his work. However, Terria and Hoshi were split up, as their enemy had more members than the intelligence had indicated. Hoshi had been close to Reeve when one man sneaked up behind him and pressed a rifle into the back of his head. Hoshi had shouted for Reeve to do something, as Terria was too far away. Reeve knew the drill. In theory, he had practiced it a thousand times. Jump up, gun out, one shot right between the eyes. A Turk had to abandon all self-doubt and move quicker then lightning. He jumped up, drew his weapon, and froze, trigger finger shaking and sweat beading on his forehead.

Hoshi stared in utter astonishment as Reeve turned to stone. There was a gunshot, but it hadn't come from him. The man behind Hoshi collapsed, and Terria stepped out of the shadows, blazer torn and blood streaming from a gash on her left cheek.

"What the hell were you doing?"

That was all she said.

He knew it was over. His career and his marriage ended at that moment. He had been warned that Terria was marrying him because of the prestige a Turk couple would bring, but he hadn't wanted to admit to the truth in those warnings. But the next day, when she told him she wanted a divorce, he knew it was true. He was about to get kicked out of the Turks. Why would she want to be with him now?

He flinched at the sound of the locker room door opening, bringing him crashing back down into present.

Hoshi Tan walked in looking at Reeve with the familiar sneer that was always pasted across his face. He was a short, thin native of the port city of Junon. Though he was of Wutain ancestry, he had never once visited the Western nation, and lacked the subtlety of speech and grace of movement that Reeve had noticed in many other Wutains he had met in his life.

"Well, it's official!" Hoshi exclaimed, sounding a little too happy for Reeve's liking. "You're outta here!"

"You don't seem very torn up about it," Reeve said softly, unable to look Hoshi in the eye.

"Torn up about it? You almost got me killed, Reeve! In the old days, when I served under Vincent Valentine, the company probably would have had you executed! Or at the very least, exiled! Certainly not offered some new job..."

"Wait..." Reeve interrupted, looking up earnestly. "New job?"

Hoshi shrugged. "The higher-ups are planning to build a city above the city, like the Junon Fortress. Word is, they're looking at you to design it. There's talk of making you an executive."

A bit of the weight soared from Reeve's mind, and he sat up a little straighter. That sounded like a promotion! A terribly bittersweet one, but a promotion nonetheless. To a job he actually wanted! He slumped back down again when he realized that no new job was going to regain Terria's respect, assuming he ever really had it in the first place.

Hoshi snorted. "Hell, I thought you were going to smile there for a second. Cheer up kid! You've been a godawful Turk, but you've got some good luck in you. Valentine wouldn't have put up with the likes of you though," he said, as he turned to leave Reeve alone.

Reeve rolled his eyes after Hoshi left. The man could never seem to go ten minutes without dropping Valentine's name in the conversation. He wanted to make sure that everyone knew he had been trained by the legendary Vincent Valentine.

Feeling slightly better, with at least enough energy to stand up and leave the dank locker room, Reeve rose to his feet. Glancing over at the shattered phone, he wished he hadn't broken it so he could call his father and throw his anger right back at him as he furiously announced his promotion. Of course, he knew he would never actually be able to do that. Nerves of steel weren't part of his nature. That was why it was inevitable to fail abysmally at being a Turk.

Stepping outside the locker room, he was greeted the only two faces that he would have welcomed at that moment. The two Turks who hadn't accompanied him on his last mission, Tseng Toshika and Rude Hazzero, were waiting for him in the luxurious Turk Lounge.

Tseng stood up when Reeve entered the room. "I suppose you've been through some difficult days," he said.

Unlike Hoshi, Tseng certainly fit the Wutain generalization of grace and subtlety. Tseng had been the one to warn Reeve of what he was getting into by marrying Terria. Rude, as always, had sat by in silent agreement.

Rude had always been a bit mysterious. In the sixth months Reeve had worked with him, he could count to number of times he had seen the man without his sunglasses on one hand. It always seemed like Rude was hiding something. What that was, Reeve couldn't begin to guess.

"Come on," Tseng said, nodding towards the door. "Let's go. I'll buy you a drink."

Reeve nodded gratefully, and the three of them left the lounge and the Shinra Headquarters to head down to their usual hangout a few blocks away. Conversation en route turned towards Reeve's apparent new position within the company.

"I've be hearing for a while now that the President wants a city built above Midgar," Tseng said. "It's my understanding that he wants something that would absolutely dwarf our fortress in Junon."

"See, that's playing to my strengths," Reeve said. He was certainly more comfortable with machines and blueprints that he was with people, especially when those people were pleading for their lives. He was always able to relax a little around Tseng, though. Tseng had a completely non- judgmental air about him. It could just be a façade, a Turkish ploy to get people to reveal their secrets, but Reeve doubted it. He was a fairly good judge of people, if he weren't he wouldn't have even lasted the six months he did. Unfortunately, Terria had ducked under his instinctive radar...

Talk turned to lighter matters as they entered the bar. It was a small, fairly unremarkable establishment that had made its reputation in being a 'Turk Hangout'. People would go there to rub shoulders with the infamous Turks, and so business thrived. The bartender brought them over their usual drinks. Scotch on the rocks for Tseng, a beer for Rude, and a small tumbler of straight vodka for Reeve. Reeve raised the glass to his lips and grimaced slightly as the burning liquid ran down his throat.

"I suppose Hoshi gave you a little pep talk?" Tseng asked, a faint but sly smile on his face. "How many times did he mention Vincent Valentine?"

Reeve laughed for the first time since the mission. "Only twice. He's getting better. Did you finally say something to him about that?"

Tseng shook his head, causing his long hair to hang down in front of his face. He raised his hand, signaling the bartender to bring them another round before he brushed the straying hair aside. "Maybe you should be the one to tell him how foolish he sounds..." he said, turning towards Rude.

Rude raised an eyebrow. "Why's that?"

Reeve grinned. "Well, hearing you speak up might actually shock him into listening!"

Rude scowled at him.

"Have another beer, Rude," Tseng offered. "You look unhappier then Reeve, and he's the one we're tying to cheer up."

"Keep on drinking Rude," Reeve added. "Hearing you belt out some of those old Junon fisherman's song would be a nice end to this awful day."

"I still don't believe you when you bring that up," Rude pointed out.

"Believe us?" Tseng said with a quiet chuckle. "We've only told you about that one night in your singing career. There have been others."

"Others...?" Rude asked, with a distinct tone that said he didn't really want to hear the stories.

"You know, one of these nights, we're going to have to get you on tape," Reeve laughed, as Tseng signaled for another round.

Some time passed while the three men engaged in their usual 'drinking until they forget that they're Turks' ritual. After the jokes at Rude's expense grew a little tiresome, the conversation faded away.

"You should be the leader of the Turks," Reeve blurted towards Tseng after a moment's silence.

Tseng laughed, but quickly grew dead serious. "I doubt they'll ever make me the leader of the Turks."

"Why not?" Reeve asked, voice slurring slightly. "You'd do a better job than that idiot Hoshi..."

"I know too much," Tseng admitted. "I have a strange knack for picking up on things. I don't think they'd want me in a position of any more power than one I have now... unless they get really desperate."

Reeve nodded. It was true that Tseng had an almost supernatural tendency to gather information on people. The Shinra Executives might well see that as a threat.

"That, and..." Tseng continued hesitantly, staring at his empty glass. "I'm still human."

"What?"

"I'm still human. I feel it when someone dies by my hand. But you feel it even more than me, don't you?"

"I..." Reeve began, unable to immediately wrap his inebriated mind around what Tseng was saying.

"You couldn't even pull the trigger. I'm jealous.. You're getting away from this. And I'm about to pull some poor kid out of the slums to replace you, and he's got no idea what he's getting himself into... How many Turks actually die of natural causes?"

"Have... have there been any?" Reeve asked, stunned by the sudden weight of the conversation.

Tseng shook his head, not even bothering to push his hair back when it hung down in front of his face.

"Who's the kid?"

Tseng shrugged. "He's a natural. I can just tell. Natural born killer, but still... still human. His name's Reno... something."

Reeve nodded and was filled with sudden pity towards this kid that he had never met, who was suddenly going to be thrust into the life of a Turk. It really did seem like there was no way out, except for Reeve himself. Hoshi had been right about one thing. He did have some kind of luck in him.

Tseng stood up and took a deep breath, trying to regain his bearings though the drunken haze. Rude had fallen asleep with his head down on the table, and Tseng shook him by the shoulder to wake him up.

"Mmm...?" Rude mumbled.

"Get up," Tseng said. "I'll help you get home."

"I'm not gonna sing..." Rude muttered as Tseng hoisted him to his feet. The life of a Turk. Drunken nights and hung over mornings rounding off a day of killing so another man could line his pockets.

Tseng staggered out of the bar supporting most of Rude's weight, not an easy task considering Rude was several inches taller and probably sixty pounds heavier than him. After a moment Reeve could hear Rude's deep voice echoing down the street as he forgot his mumbled vow not to break into song.

Reeve sat there for a moment, allowing the thought of Tseng trying to retain some form of dignity while half-dragging Rude down the street to cheer him a little after that heavy conversation.

He eventually stood up and followed the two of them out the door, though they were long gone when he stepped outside. Walking down the street, unable to keep to a straight line, he began dreaming of Midgar in it's full glory. The Midgar that would be his child. After all, his own father saw him as nothing more than a name to improve his own reputation back in Mideel, and his mother lived in another world. A few years back, Reeve had found the Valium in her purse, but he had never confronted her about it. And now that his wife was divorcing him out of sheer contempt, kids of his own didn't seem a likely possibility in the near future. But really, what had he expected? A normal life? A normal life was an impossibility. It always had been. He hadn't been born into a normal life, and he never had the means to build one for himself. Fate is the only thing in existence that can truly be simultaneously harsh and kind.

He stopped walking and found himself right in the middle of the street, which was fortunately devoid of traffic, staring at the seemingly endless rows of buildings on either side of him.

"I'll take care of you Midgar..." he said. "And if anything happens to you, I don't think I'll ever forgive myself..."

"Hey!" a stranger called from the sidewalk. "Who the hell're you talkin' to?"

Reeve looked over at him and sighed. "No one."

Author's Pointless Monologue: With that little slice of Reeve's life, I announce my triumphant return to I know I completely abandoned Invisible Preachers, but I have a reason: I got sick of it. (I didn't say it was a good reason) I needed some time away from it. Also, in retrospect, I don't like it very much. So I'm going to begin re-writing it. This little Reeve-oriented one shot was just a warm up to get me interested again. Let's face it, I wasn't putting much effort into Invisible Preachers. But after getting over 200 reviews, to my complete surprise, I think I can probably do better for those people that were/are reading it. So consider the version that is posted now as the first draft. Once I have a few chapters written/rewritten I'm going to just delete most of the chapters already up and start replacing them. I don't want to just delete the whole story and start over, because it seems like a waste to erase all those people who took the time to review.

I'm still happy that Creed broke up. Our arms ain't wide open anymore, Scott. Hear that silence? It's because Jim Morrison isn't spinning in his grave anymore.