Author's Note: I've not written for a while, and feel oh so very rusty. I have been on a bit of a FFVII fic-reading kick, however, and it seems to have set this plot bunny running.
The Usual Disclaimer: I take no credit for the invention of any of the characters, or the setting, and most of the story owes a debt not only to Square but also to the many, many other fans who have put their creative minds to work within the setting.
Were they good for business at the bar, or bad for business at the bar? The Turks had never quite decided, and fortunately Tifa hadn't either which is why they were still tolerated as customers at Seventh Heaven. Not welcomed, exactly, but at least they were served, and nobody would bother them. The former Avalanche member made sure the rules applied to everyone alike, friend and former foe. Nobody hassled anyone for what they may or may not have done, once upon a time. Not in her bar.
It worked both ways, of course. The Turks didn't arrest or assassinate anybody while in the building, and in return they could be reasonably certain that no swords, spears, bullets or throwing-stars would be directed their way. Nobody was actually happy about them being there, but everyone got a quiet drink- which was probably the best anybody could expect. On the plus side the bar was the safest drinking establishment in Edge, because it took suicidal overconfidence to start a fight in the favoured watering-hole of the Planet's most dangerous people.
Reno pushed open the door from the street now, letting his shoulder do the work. It kept his hands free. Old habits. More ingrained habits sent his eyes flicking about the interior of the bar as Rude and Elena filed in behind him. He picked up on Tifa's sigh as she set a clean glass down on the bar-top and reached for another, but it wasn't the Turks she was watching, it was the stairs at the back. The redhead glanced that way just in time to see a smallish figure vanishing up them, feet stomping as though they could leave dents, resentful fury an almost visible stormcloud colouring the air.
Denzel was the one to watch, Reno thought to himself, squashing a sigh of his own and sliding onto a barstool while offering Tifa his best grin. Denzel was the biggest threat to this grudging truce, this untrusting and wary alliance of circumstance that the two groups had reached. For some reason, the kid hated his guts. Him, personally; not just Shinra, not just the Turks. Thing was, it could never be just either of them, because when it involved one Turk it involved all of them, and when it involved Denzel it involved all of Them.
"Guess he still ain't happy with us," Reno said as Tifa passed him his usual, canting his head in the direction of the stairs.
Tifa gave him a glare that told him he was an insensitive idiot. "He lost his parents," she snapped, and then ignored him in favour of serving the other Turks.
Rude's quiet murmur of thanks earned the ghost of a smile that Reno thought would probably give his partner more of a buzz than the beer. The redhead eyed the man beside him, but Rude had something- or rather, someone- more interesting to look at. Elena picked up Reno's clueless look of question instead, and shrugged her own back at him in response. Well, hell. Can't even go question the kid. Probably be seen as opening up hostilities again or something.
At least with Denzel gone the atmosphere was peaceful enough to almost enjoy the chance of a drink. Reno listened to Elena's prattling about the latest Shinra-issue pistols with half an ear, and with half his remaining attention he watched Rude, who was watching Tifa while pretending not to, displaying a Turk's subtlety. Word was that Lockheart was with Strife, but Reno had seen those two together and he had a pretty good idea that was no more than sibling affection and Strife preferred to bat for the other team. Reno-logic determined that Tifa was, therefore, available and, therefore, Rude had a chance and, therefore, that he, Reno, had a duty not to send this tenuous peace all to Hell. That, and Heaven was pretty much the only place in town where you could get peace and quiet and alcohol at the same time without also doing irreparable damage to either your stomach-lining or your pocket.
You could always tell when Cid Highwind entered a room. The smell preceded him wherever he went, announcing his arrival with the odour cocktail of cigarette smoke, fuel fumes and grease. The pilot-engineer's arrival at the bar coincided with the end of the bar's unofficial daytime smoking ban. By now, his appearance had become the unofficial announcement for that end, on the days when Cid was in town. Before long the room was filled with a haze that was subtle on the eyes and anything but subtle on Reno's lungs.
"I'm going to get some fresh air," he muttered to Rude, trying not to wheeze, not waiting for Rude's answering nod of understanding. He held his breath as he slithered off his stool and slipped quietly outside, only giving in to the urge to cough when the cold night air hit his face and the swinging back door clunked closed behind him. After thirty seconds of painful hacking he persuaded his lungs that they'd rather stay inside his ribcage than expelling themselves onto the dirty concrete, and he leaned against the wall to remember how to breathe and to wait until the stars stopped sparkling in his vision.
It was, he reflected, the ideal opportunity for an enemy to creep up on him, catching him when his guard was... not at maximum efficiency. Not down, never down completely, or he wouldn't have heard the soft sound of the safety-catch right behind him. "Can't we talk about this?" he drawled, sounding lazily disinterested and turning with what seemed to be an equal lack of energy. The deceptiveness of that appearance would have become obvious less than an eyeblink later, but even as he planned his attack he saw who it was who had a pistol aimed at him. Aimed somewhere that could kill him eventually, but not right away.
"Center of the chest, kid," he suggested. "Heart's not so far to the left as people think. Solar plexus, yeah?" He saw uncertainty creeping across the boy's face, not enough yet to override his hatred, but it was a start, a chance, and Reno was a master at taking chances. "Straighten your arm. Those things kick like a Chocobo. You'll break your wrist holding it like that. Ya checked the ammo, right? Blue cartridges, not the red ones. Red ones ain't made for the older models like that one. Too high-powered, yeah? Blow the barrel open."
Reno saw the doubt take root and flourish in the boy's expression. He could have disarmed the kid in that moment. Anyone but Denzel and he would have done. This was political though, and a hell of a lot more sensitive than Rufus and Yuffie's current strategic dance about Wutai's relations with Shinra. "Red, right? Good thing ya didn't pull the trigger. Coulda taken your own hand off." When Denzel had lowered the weapon with hands that shook even more than they had to start with, and he had let Reno slowly reach over and click the safety back on, only then did the redhead sneak the question in, oh-so-offhanded. "Why d'ya want to kill me anyway?"
"Son of a bitch!" Denzel flung himself at the redhead, wielding the pistol as a club. Reno smacked the hand away on pure instinct, into the wall, the antique weapon dropping from the boy's momentarily numbed fingers. The Turk's conscious mind took command with a scant fraction of a second in which to stop him from ending the boy's life with the too-well-practised wrench of the head that would snap the child's neck. With retaliation denied him by circumstance, Reno was at a loss as to alternatives, reduced to defending himself as best he could against punches, kicks, scratches and bites. Without the gun there was nothing Denzel could do that would seriously hurt him but, fucking ow, a knee hitting him right there still hurt!
The flames of Denzel's fury brought their own destruction, burning out swiftly as the result of their very intensity. Reno was pretty sure Denzel would rather anyone else was there to hang onto him when rage turned to impotent tears. It just happened that Reno was the only warm body in the vicinity, and Denzel wasn't thinking clearly. "Talking's supposed to be good, yeah?" Reno couldn't even be sure the kid was hearing him, but he was still clueless as to what this was all about, and he probably wasn't going to get a better moment to ask than this, with Denzel tired and confused and defenceless. "Supposed to make you feel better and shit," he added, rambling on amiably, playing the harmless act that had fooled far more experienced men than this young orphan. "Tell me all about it. Tell me what I did." Because, kid, right now I have no idea.
"You killed them." Denzel pushed weakly at Reno's chest, but without enough determination that Reno thought he should let go just yet. Killed them. Reno thought back to Tifa's words. Denzel's parents. They'd died when Sector Seven was dropped, on President Shinra's orders...
Dammit.
The Turk pulled Denzel with him until he had his back to the wall, and slid down it to sit on the filthy alley ground, the boy still tucked, miserably resentful, in his arms.
"I held out as long as I could, kid." Fuck. Reno had thought he was okay with this, but it was difficult keeping his voice steady. "But hey, bright side? If I'd succeeded you wouldn't have Tifa and Cloud around now, right?"
"Bastard!" Denzel shoved at him again, and showered him with a few more insults that a kid that age shouldn't know. Then he stopped, and gave Reno a puzzled-yet-shrewd look which, for the first time, gave Reno reason to lend credence to Reeve's assertion that Denzel was going to be someone who would be going places, in the future. "What are you talking about?" he demanded. "'If I'd succeeded'? You pushed the button! You blew up the pillar!"
Reno could only give Denzel a blank stare for a moment, and then some piece of the mental jigsaw-puzzle shook itself loose from the space it had been slotted into, and fitted itself in somewhere else entirely, and the Turk had to laugh, which did nothing to endear him any further to the angry and bewildered boy currently sharing alley-floor-space with him. "Me? How? I was out by the pillar! You can't self-destruct an entire section from one little outlying bank of monit..." he stopped. What had he said, back in those desperate moments when he'd been doing his damnedest to figure out any way he could of neutralizing Avalanche before the President carried out his crazy plan?
The laugh died in his throat and he slumped back against the wall. "You can't... couldn't trigger the self-destruct from the pillar monitoring stations, kid," he said, making his voice blank, switching off his emotions. He knew, now, why Denzel was so upset. The only way to fix it and stop it from breaking the peace the Planet so desperately needed was to break open his own old wounds, and he couldn't let himself feel anything or he'd never get through it. "Listen carefully, yeah. It was the President's idea to drop the plate. The old one, Rufus' papa. Top secret. Wouldn't even tell Shinra staff. Nobody disobeyed orders, yeah? People 'disappeared' if they did that 'n' ended up with specimen numbers instead of names."
Denzel wriggled as though he had some sort of objection, but he held his tongue and kept listening and Reno's estimation of the boy went up another notch.
"The Boss- my boss, I mean, Tseng- persuaded him that if the Turks could take out Avalanche first, there wasn't any reason to drop the plate. So his his best operative-" the Turk pointed to himself with a thumb- "was sent to take care of it. Nobody would disobey the President, of course. So there wasn't any plan that if Avalanche couldn't be... neutralised they wouldn't be kept busy while Shinra personnel weren't evacuated to avoid a top secret threat that nobody had been told about."
Reno studied Denzel's face for a reaction, watching realisation slowly awakening. The Turk's lips narrowed. Button? Oh. That button. The one that let the thankfully now-Ex-President watch him have his ass handed to him. "All the button did was activate the cameras on the monitoring station so the President could watch. I tried like hell to beat them, so everything wouldn't go ti... wrong, but it was three against one." Emotion was threatening to get through. Reno throttled it without mercy. "And he set the charges off before I could get clear, the c..." he stopped before he could add to Denzel's already overly extensive vocabulary. "Highwind thinks I can't stand to be in the room with him 'cause I hate him. It's 'cause the damage the rubble dust did to my lungs means I can't stand to be around cigarette smoke for long. Don't tell him, okay? I'd rather be a heartless bastard than an asthmatic weakling."
Denzel had slumped, anger all spent, and the boy's body-language so closely reflected the things Reno wasn't letting himself feel that his iron control wavered. "For what it's worth, kid, I'm sorry I couldn't spin things out longer." He had to stop and clear his throat. "Crazy fucker was impatient enough he'd probably have gone and set the self-destruct off anyway, no matter what I did. Bastard." Reno hadn't lost any relatives or close friends, but there'd been people he'd known who hadn't made it out. There were people who never would have made it out even with time, because the Turks couldn't do anything that would get back to the President, and that meant only telling those who could be trusted to keep their mouths shut afterwards. Kid doesn't need to know that, though.
Reno prodded Denzel gently on the shoulder, angling his head to get a better look at the boy's face. "You gonna be okay, kid?"
"Was that the truth?" Denzel demanded suddenly. "About the red cartridges?"
Fuck, the boy's sharp. "'Course not." Reno shrugged and grinned, although the expression failed to achieve its usual lazy arrogance. He managed to stop himself from adding any further, smart-assed, comment, which would probably have surprised anyone who knew of his apparent inability to keep his mouth shut.
"Why should I believe you now?" Denzel asked, quite steadily and reasonably, and Reno made a mental note to somehow arrange circumstances so that Rufus just happened to meet the kid, because he wanted to know what Denzel could achieve with that sort of guiding hand.
Reno sketched a shrug in answer to Denzel's question. "I can't give you proof or anything. Not like we haven't done a lot of shit and told a lot of lies. We've got to rebuild and crap, not carry on fighting, right? If we start telling people we didn't do all the shit they think we did, and that it wasn't all the Turks it was some other branch of the company, that it wasn't all Rufus it was his old man, blah, blah, all that's gonna happen is people thinking we're trying to wriggle out of taking the blame, and it's all gonna turn ugly, and that ain't going to help anyone. We figured we just had to suck it up and get on with things."
Denzel digested it all with a thoughtful frown. "You're okay with people hating you for things you didn't do?"
Reno shrugged again. "We're used to people hating us," he said, and meant it. It was an occupational hazard for Turks. "It's no big deal." Usually, he added in the privacy of his own thoughts.
"I don't hate you, Mr Reno sir," Denzel declared, and someone had taught him, properly, how to be formal and polite and solemnly sincere because the way he said it wasn't the sort of thing that could be picked up in a five-minute lesson. Shinra parents, Reno reminded himself.
"Thanks, kid." He tried to be offhand- because if he wasn't he'd embarrass himself, and because he was Reno- and he almost succeeded. "You'd better scoot back inside before anyone wonders where you are and finds you fraternizing with the not-quite-enemy."
"They think I'm in bed," Denzel answered, and to Reno's mild relief he disentangled himself from the Turk's legs, recovered the pistol and slipped furtively inside through the back door. It left Reno feeling that the meeting was somehow incomplete. It also failed to remove the sensation that someone was outside apart from himself.
"C'mon over, the ground's comfy," he drawled. He shifted his leg just so, apparently still half-sprawled against the wall while also giving him the leverage he would need to jump to his feet. He didn't relax any when Cloud Strife emerged from the shadows to stand looking down at him with folded arms.
"Tifa's been trying to find a way to ban smoking without losing customers," Cloud said quietly.
"Fuck you." Reno tipped his head back to rest against the slabby grey block wall.
"I should have thought of that, about the button." Cloud continued as though he hadn't heard the defensive anger in the Turk's voice. "It would have been pretty stupid to put the activation for a self-destruct system anywhere where the person activating the self-destruct would get caught by it. Tifa could never have disarmed it from there, could she?"
"Never even thought you'd think I set it off," Reno admits. "I'd forgotten I'd even said anything. Only remembered when Denzel got talking. Hey. Strife?"
Cloud looked a question. Damn, the man wasn't quite on Rude's level when it came to silent communication, but he made Reno glad of the practice.
"Denzel's got a gun. Not sure if he'd ever hit what he was trying to point it at. Thought you should know. Heh. You've all been thinking it was me killed Sector Seven, all by myself." The tilt of Reno's head and the slight upswing of his voice at the end almost made it a question, and Cloud treated it as such by answering with a slight nod. "So..." Reno was still watching Cloud with his head angled, nothing more than curiosity in his voice. "Why the fuck did you even let me in the door?"
"Everyone gets a second chance." Cloud gave a tiny but firm little nod, and Reno couldn't read his expression, except to say what it wasn't: not angry, not pitying. "There's a table near the window that opens. There'd be room for the three of you." There wasn't time for Reno to come up with an answer. The blond didn't even look back as he unfolded his arms and headed through the back door, almost as silently as he had arrived.
"Huh. Second chances come with good beer." Reno wasn't arguing with that, and the concrete was hard, and he could stand the smoke long enough for another drink. He stood, and went back inside.