Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Circle
I gotta circle back
Touch something near
Find out which way to go
To get on out of here
I lost my thread
And I've lost some time
But it takes a lot of ground
For me to change my mind—John Hiatt—Circle Back
It really was the best place in Midgar to get egg rolls.
You could keep your upper plate, white tablecloth, lacquered chopstick restaurants with their steamed towels. Reno knew where to go for good fried grub that slid down his throat easily, the morning after way too much booze and way too many regrets. He'd go home with the smell of fish and grease in his hair, probably with paper wrappers from boiled sausages stuck to the bottom of his shoes. It was an occupational hazard of visiting the market. Mah-kit, he corrected himself. Gods, how long had it taken to rid himself of that accent? He still slipped into it when drunk. It was a favorite way to make Rude pinch his forehead.
He had avoided this place for years. It hit way too close to home. Literally. He was born here, as well as he could remember. More accurately, he grew up here, running the alleys and streets, picking pockets and eating food-stall castoffs to survive and generally fulfilling his destiny as a juvenile delinquent. He'd been quite good at it, actually. But today he'd broken a lifelong tradition and paid for his food, sitting on one of the public benches to enjoy it. Well, not enjoy it, really. More, brood somewhere different.
He'd come here to stop thinking about Cloud, which explained perfectly why he was sitting on a market bench, eating greasy egg rolls with a hangover, in a part of town he'd avoided for almost two decades, thinking about Cloud. He'd come here out of uniform too, in an attempt to look non-Turk and therefore inconspicuous in a crowd of what was most likely petty thieves, fugitives, and prostitutes. He twirled his bright red ponytail in disgust. Yeah, I blend, all right. Fuck me to tears.
It had been worth a try, anyway. This morning, anything had. This morning, waking up to an empty bed, filled with self loathing over the night before, he could not stay home.
The bed still smelled like Cloud.
Not that he had stuck around to sniff it, or anything. Not much, anyway. But really, he should probably be finding another coping mechanism besides looking for someone to sell him booze in a lower plate mah-kit at ten in the morning. Which took him all of five minutes; it was horrid swill but it went pretty well with his third egg roll and made him feel a little more disgusted with himself, which was his intention if he were to be honest. And the second beer tasted pretty much like the first. Hell, maybe he'd stay the night here. His old room might still be open; the bedbugs wouldn't mind the company. It was a better plan than he'd come up with the night before, anyway, he and Cloud drunk off their asses. Not that it was anything unusual. It happened. That's what friends did, they went out drinking. And then sometimes, those friends staggered back to one friend's place to watch tv. No problem. Sometimes, though, one of those friends has been in love with the other friend for years, even through years when they were enemies, and things come creeping out of the whiskey soaked woodwork and…
Fucking Gaia. What in seven hells made him think he stood a chance? He wondered if three beers before noon would land him in ShinRa's substance abuse program. Hell, he wondered if ShinRa had a substance abuse program. Or if they had a home for hopeless idiots. Now that was something he qualified for. Maybe Rude could drop him off, like one of those anonymous baby drop-offs for abandoned infants at the hospitals.
He sighed. He might as well sign his death warrant now. He wiped the grease from his fingers and started the long walk toward town, toward Seventh Heaven.
He sat down at the bar and ordered a whiskey. Cloud must not have said anything because Tifa treated him as normal, which was to say, with an expression that said she really should up the exterminator schedule. Cloud came out of the office and down the stairs, sitting on the bar stool next to him. He smiled.
What the fuck? Did he just miss something?
"Reno."
Reno stared as though he'd just spoken some foreign language of the ancients.
"What's wrong?"
Reno was dumbfounded. "What's fucking wrong? You can't just leave with no word, no nothing, and sit down here and smile like nothing's changed."
"Since when has something changed?"
"SINCE I WOKE UP THIS MORNING WITH MY DICK IN YOUR MOUTH!"
The bar was suddenly, utterly silent. Tifa's eyebrows climbed into her hair. Cloud made great work of swallowing his beer and led Reno over to a table.
"Well. Ah. Now that the whole bar knows…I'm sorry. I didn't think anything had changed in our friendship; I still don't. But about this morning, I had a day's worth of deliveries to do and I didn't want to come here, start the day, and go off to do professional business smelling like, well, last night. I went home to take a shower and change."
"You could have left a note. I mean, we were both pretty drunk when last night…happened. I didn't know how you felt about it. The bed was empty when I woke up the second time and I thought maybe…" Gods. He sounded like a lovestruck chit of a girl.
"Reno, that's what the blow job was for. You'd have preferred a note?"
He resisted the urge to slap his own forehead. "Fuck. Fuck. I am an idiot."
"Possibly. But you're right; I should have left a note. I'm sorry. You smell like a fried fish basket. Where have you been?"
"I went to the market where I grew up. I've been drinking home brew and eating egg rolls all day."
"So, thinking you were abandoned, you went off to a slum to sulk? Gods, we sleep together once and you start acting like me." Reno laughed, then wondered how long they had been holding hands on the table and how many people had noticed.
He sniffled and told himself it was allergies. "Um. What are you doing tonight? You wanna out for something besides eggrolls and cheap beer? Maybe pizza?"
"Let's order in. We have more catching up to do. Now, let's go back up to the bar and hold up on the personal revelations till we get back to your place, ok?" He ran a hand through Reno's smelly hair and the circle was complete.