Author's Note: Ah, another story but one of which I'll actually continue! I have several chapters written already. I'd really like it if someone volunteered to be a beta but I can't force that one anyone. Anyway, enjoy and review please. Even if it's just a smily face so I know you liked it (or a flame to know you hated it XD). I'd like three reviews before I update.
The Fading Skyline
Chapter I: Bargaining Chips
"Look, you already know I'm not telling you jack shit, so why don't you skip over the part where you try to psyche me out with the details and get it over with already?"
They were in a room usually left abandoned. Nothing more than a plain room with gray walls and a select few pieces of matching monotone furniture clustered in the center of the room. A metal table, two metal chairs on opposite sides and a florescent light that flickered rather quickly. Tseng considered his words for a moment and rested his arms over the table, placing one hand over the other.
"And just what would you like to get over?" he asked calmly of the person sitting across from him. A young woman, perhaps in her early twenties at appearance, with dark, russet skin and angry chocolate eyes stared back at him. Her tangled light brown hair clung to the sweat and blood that her matted her face, all evidence of the company' cruelty. Angry black and blue bruises adorned a face masked with a scowl of the utmost loathing, matching marks going down her arm that had been bound to the chair. She couldn't have met him more than fifteen minutes ago but he was already sure that the woman from Costa del Sol hatred him with a passion. That was understandable. Shin Ra had jut raided her home with countless infantry men and a handful of Second Class SOLCDIERS, the only one he knew by name being Zack Fair. But she should consider herself lucky. Tseng had been there and because of his careful eye; the woman was now here instead of left as one of the discarded bodies now littering the Costan shoreline.
"The bullshit," she answered in a voice of false calmness. Tseng could see that her jaw was clenched either in concentration to avoid the pain swarming her body or in rage. "Tell me how the Company plans on disposing of me."
"Your punishment, you mean," Tseng clarified emotionlessly. He briefly closed his eyes and opened them in time to see her nod faintly. "Would you like me to remind you of why you are here miss?" he asked softly.
"Didn't your men already do that?" she asked, gesturing to her beaten body with her head.
Tseng sighed. "Those were not my men."
"Then who were they?"
"Two SOLDIER operatives—friends of the ones you took down." He noticed the female smile wryly to herself. Was she amused with the fact that she had managed to kill two Second Class SOLDIERs?
"Best friends, then," she muttered with a bittersweet laugh Tseng couldn't say if it were true or not but he was certain her swollen right eye was caused more out of spite than the standard procedure for someone who was non-compliant in an interrogation. "Care to let me in on the method of my disposal,señor?"
"Your charges then," he said sympathetically and opened a thin folder that had been placed in front of him prior to the session. He pushed it over to her for her to read. She took a glance at it and laughed before wincing in pain.
"I'm not so familiar with you language," she said. It was a clear lie if she could speak so fluently outside her native Costan tongue. "Read it to me." When her anger had dissolved into an annoyed arrogance, Tseng couldn't tell but it seemed odd to suddenly gain confidence at the prospect of being executed.
"Very well then." Still not quite believing her, Tseng took the folder back and turned it around so that he could read it. "Miss Delgado, you are being charged with the following; illegal possession and distribution of illegal substances, illegal possession of firearms and war-crafts, general assistance towards rebel forces in Wutai via providing arms and armed forces to said group, and, conclusively, the murder of two Second Class SOLDIERs. Do— Miss Delgado?" As he finished reading off the small report about the raid, she had dropped her head. Her knotted and tangled brown locks covered her face and she was shaking slightly now. Crying? Now? "Miss Delgado?"
"Ha, ha. You know, I thought it would have been more than that," she chuckled grimly. "Not charging me for all of my men's actions?"
"Shin Ra acknowledges that your gang, Los Angelitos, was run by a man the area knew as 'Jefe'. We suspected you were also involved with the headship of the group, as the two of you were romantically involved. Given your current circumstances, I wouldn't recommend confirming that suspicion, miss."
"And why is that… whoever the hell you are?"
The Wutaiin man almost twitched at the lack of respect she had towards him. "Tseng," he corrected. "And at the given prospect the Company is considering, I'd advisor you to refrain from further incriminating yourself."
"Tseng…." It wasn't a question. She was merely trying the name out. Looking up, she met his eyes for the first time since he had entered the small grayscale room. "You also seem like a good person, Tseng," she began after looking him over for a few moments. "Let me guess…. They sent the one good soul in the entire deranged company to deal with me, right?" He said nothing. "I'm not incompetent," she continued, "But if you think that just because your SOLDIERs have beaten the crap out of me several times within the past twenty-four hours, I'm going to be of any use to you or bow down to you, you've got another thing coming."
The mission had been fairly simply. Nothing out of the ordinary for SOLDIER, other than the fact that the sheer number of men assigned to it seemed a bit excessive to Second Class Zack Fair. He, as well as a few of his pristine comrades, had been assigned to lead a raid against a gang that seemed to have been stepping on Shin-Ra's toes lately. Los Angelitos, they were called, a Costan gang that had once been a frequent customer of the company back in the days of Shin-Ra Manufacturing Works. Because of this, Zack believed that was how the company initially found out about the full extent of the gang's activities, deciding then to kiss up to Los Angelitos rather than make an enemy. It was ironic though, because as soon as Shin-Ra discovered how the Lifestream and Mako could be harvested for energy, they dropped the gang like a sack of potatoes.
At the time, Zack was too excited about the fact that he was one of the men in charge of the mission to think for too long about how Shin-Ra had gained evidence to prove that the gang from Costa Del Sol was assisting Wutai in the war. But he didn't question his orders, never did. It wasn't his job to bother with the reasoning of the higher-ups and he was so close to making First Class everything else seemed trivial on his mind. So….
If he was an aspiring SOLDIER, why was he the one who had to watch some little girl they had found on the beach of Costa Del Sol?
Running a hand through his raven hair, he muttered, "Let's try this one more time," as he turned around and walked back to the little girl. She had darker skin than anyone native to Midgar, much like a bald Turk he had seen a few weeks ago wearing sunglasses even as he entered Shin-Ra Headquarters, golden hazel eyes and straight black hair pulled into two high ponytails, or at least, they would have had it not been for the rough handling the girl had received in her transportation to Midgar from Costa del Sol. She was clinging tightly onto a plushie of an armored Chocobo, shaking in fear, her alarmed eyes darting around the large hall of the 59th floor.
Her biggest fascination and freight came from the silver elevators in the building. When she had been passed off to Zack from an infantry man he watched her practically run off the elevator as if it were about to fall down the very next second, quickly colliding into the side of his hip bone. She yelped and looked up at him, sizing him up as something to be feared before turning tail and rushing to the elevators once more just as the doors close with the infantry man inside them. She pounded at the metal doors, shouting something in Costan he couldn't understand before trying to pry them open with her own delicate fingers. It was as if she had never seen an elevator before.
Not thinking this was possible, Zack had pulled her back away from them before the doors did open and she accidently pounded on the groin of some very important member of the Shin-Ra Electric Power Company's hierarchy. It was then when he had initially tried to talk to her, chuckling and telling her calmly that the elevators were not something to be fear. She merely furrowed her eyebrows and frowned, repeating the phrase, "No comprendo," over and over again as he tried to speak. Soon it became clear that she did not understand the Midgar dialect and probably only spoke Costan. So Zack dug around his pockets for a small, hand-held guide to Costan he had been given just before the raid against Costa Del Sol was carried out and walked to the other side of the floor, reading and practicing some assorted pharse under his breath. So far, the most important things he had learned was that the Costan word me stood for 'I' and was pronounced as "meh" rather than the Midgarian word, me. That, and when there were two L's in a word, it was pronounced like a 'y' or a 'j' for people with strong accents.
Walking back to her now, Zack tapped the little girl's shoulder and smiled. She turned around slowly, bringing her plush up to her face to hide from him. He held his large hands out pacifistically. "Easy, easy now. I'm not going to hurt you," he said soothingly before looking back in his book for how to introduce himself. "Me… me llamo es Zack. Cómo te llamas?"
The girl sniffled from what Zack guess was either a cold she was getting over, or still being stuffed up from crying during her transportation. "Hola Zack." She spoke softly. "Soy Marisol."
"Huh." Zack wasn't sure what 'soy' meant so he flipped through his little book until he found it. "Tú es Marisol?" he asked, double checking that was her name. Marisol nodded. Grinning he ruffled her black hair that matched his own. "Bienvenido a Shin-Ra, Marisol."
Marisol's eyes widened. "Shin-Ra?" The very word seemed to terrify her. "No! ¡Yo no puedo estar aquí! ¡Shin-Ra es los tipos malos! Quieren dolernos." This by far more Costan than Zack could understand. His reading and skimming couldn't keep up with what she was saying, let alone be able to figure out how any of these words were spelt. At one point, she paused and gasped. A new thought seemed to have struck her and she tugged at his clothes, repeating another foreign phrase in a panicked tone. The only word he could make out was Mami. That was easy enough. Mami, mommy, mama… clearly she was worrying about something her mother either said or did about her mother herself.
"Calm down, Marisol. I don't understand. Who's your mother?"
"Hell no."
"I'm afraid you don't have much of a choice in the matter, miss." Tseng made sure to catch the young Costan woman's eye. "The executives have made it clear that if you, Myria Delgado, don't wish to be executed by the Shin-Ra Electric Company than you are to sign this agreement—"
"I'm not joining you're fucked up company!" Myria shouted. "And I don't believe you either."
Tseng reached for his PHS cellphone, ready to make the call. If she wasn't willing to lie her compliance and cooperation down for the Company to use as it chose by entering her into their ranks, so be it. "So you would rather face your execution?"
Myria, still confined to the chair, ceased her struggling that had begun at the mention of possibly joining Shin-Ra. She sighed and closed her eyes. "I…. No. But I'm not joining you to bail me out of it."
"I'm afraid that's your only option," Tseng informed her. "You see, if I leave the phone call my superiors are expecting and announce that you are not willing to follow this agreement, as soon as I leave this room, the two guards standing outside will come in and shoot you."
An annoyed groan escaped the lips of the three-year-old female. Still holding tight to her armored Chocobo plush, Saint, Marisol shook her head in dismay. The man standing in front of her…. There was no way to put her feelings for him lightly. "You're an idiot!" she half-shouted at him in Costan. As soon as she did, the man who had introduced himself as Zack began to flip through that small book that seemed to be the root of all their conversational problems. As he repeated, 'Tonto, tonto, what does that mean?', she couldn't help but giggle. He was only proving her point.
For some strange reason, he seemed to have the idea that Jefe was her father. That was completely wrong. Jefe was the man who kept everyone in Costa Del Sol safe, until the raid a day or so ago. He was the leader of the 'Little Angels', and yes, even Marisol knew of the gang and their rivals. The gang kept the good Costans safe and punished the bad Costans who would hurt others. Jefe was in charge, and Myria was his second-in-command—they were living together after all, it only made sense. So why Zack seemed obsessed about her being Jefe's daughter was mystery. He didn't even seem to understand it when she had explained that even thought she lived with Jefe and Myria, she wasn't their daughter. Her mother had been Myria's best friend until she died two years ago and Myria was kind enough to take her in and raise her, despite her young age.
"I told you," Marisol repeated with a huff in Costan, "Myria is my mami. But Jefe is her boyfriend. Not my father." But Zack didn't seem to catch any of this. He was still consulting his book. He was mouthing something under his breath and then stopped.
"It's not nice to call people stupid," he told her in a broken and terrible attempt at speaking Costan.
"I didn't call you stupid~," she teased. "I said you were an idiot, mister."
"You're sure then?" Tseng asked, flipping open his PHS. Myria didn't say anything. "Very well then…." From across the room, Myria watched him punch in a number he seemed to know by heart and let out a heavy sigh. Her body ached all over for the beating she had received during her interrogation in attempts from the two SOLDIERs to get her to talk. She of course said nothing to them. Quite literally too if one excluded her cries of pain when they seemed to merit that she made a decent punching bag. Not a word about Los Angelitos or their intentions, not a word about any deliveries or activities she had performed with the gang, not a word about her relationship with Jefe and definitely not a word about Marisol. She couldn't afford to let the Company gain that kind of leverage over her. If they found out she had a daughter, adopted or not, they would know that they could twist her any which way they desired because if she did otherwise, there was no doubt in her mind that they would harm the girl. Or worse.
"Understood, Veld. I'll carry the orders out right away." Closing the phone, Tseng looked back at her and stood up. "Any last words, miss?" he asked, slipping the PHS into a breast pocket.
"… …. You better not be messing with me…."
"Costan" (coughspanishcough) volcab in this chapter: Jefe= boss
Tonto=Idiot, stupid, moron(ic)
Mami= Mommy
Los Angelitos= the little Angels