Author's Note: A sixth anniversary present to myself. Hello, self. Hello. Congratulations. Thank you.

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He's Still Heavy

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"Hey."

"Nngh?"

"Have you ever wondered what it would be like to bleed to death?"

Rude cracked open an eye. He was quite possibly in hell – that is, he momentarily found himself in what he would consider the absolute worst situation for anyone on the face of the Planet to actually be in. He loved Reno; he really did. Sometimes he thought that he loved him more than anyone else. . .then he wondered if anyone else actually loved him. But it all came back to the idea that he really didn't mind the guy.

But Reno had been infused with Mako. Through this process he'd decided that he could no longer differentiate between room temperature and anything else. That and he was apparently immune to cancer, so said the medical staff at ShinRa. Rude's infusion had just made his hair fall out and left his vocal chords ridiculously sore, which explained why he barely said anything. Superhuman abilities? Bullshit. It'd just turned him into a mute. He wondered if the Mako ever did anything beneficial to anyone – well, Tseng had gotten off pretty well with dropping eighty pounds in the chamber and picking up the hearing of a goddamn cat, but Elena had gotten moodswings, wilted black skin around her ankles, and a weak trigger finger on her left hand. She'd had to relearn before she could be put into the field. But Rude felt like hell, because he couldn't scream at the redhead anymore, which had proved to be a valu –

"Hey, dipshit; you gonna answer me?"

Reno did not feel cold.

He did not mind the stakeout deployments to Icicle Inn.

Rude did.

"No; never."

Reno was smoking cigarettes to the halfway point and throwing them away. He'd realized a few months ago that his mag-rod actually had a smoker setting, and since then had become very wasteful with his tobacco. 'Hey, watch this!' 'Hey, watch this!' 'Hey, watch this!' No one watched anymore; it had become a sort of reflex for the redhead. "Hey, watch this!" Rude grunted again, keeping an eye on the ski slope. "You're no fun. Anyway, I kind of wonder what it'd be like. I mean, with how we are and all, and how often we've bled. Would you get to a point where you knew the tank was low, or would you just walk around with this hole in your stomach for a few days and drop when you least expected it? I think it's interesting."

"That's nice."

It had become more and more apparent to the both of them exactly why Tseng told them they reminded him of an old married couple. Rude had said that this was a cliché, and that Tseng should really brush up on his creativity. Reno had helped himself to a few drinks at this point in the conversation and had tried to kiss the big, bald man. A minute or so later, Rude asked his Wutain captain how often old married men threw old married women out two-storey windows. Tseng had given him "that look" and rushed downstairs.

"You know you look ridiculous, right?" Reno puffed around his smoke.

Rude was wearing two coats, boots, and everything else that made this bearable. He glowered in the other's direction, not failing to note the light jacket and a pair of headphones that he'd decided to use as earmuffs. But Reno's gaze was on his head; and Rudolph Hurst understood the humor in his wearing a stocking cap. He just didn't acknowledge it himself. His upbringing said that he was above laughing at someone's appearance – and certainly not his own. Granted he occasionally slugged Tseng in the chest when his horrid sense of fashion caught up with him before a meeting, but –

"So angry. Like a big tall, dark, and. . .angry man."

Rude almost shot him. A snowboarder whizzed by their tree, though, not seeing them at all in the white coats, upsetting the concentration of both.

Rude didn't actually know why Reno was there. This was a one-person job, really. Take a gun, go to Icicle Inn, and get rid of Person B. Elena had an amazing memory and had noted over drinks one night that she could glance at a mission brief, take in three key words and whose handwriting it was, and know exactly what needed to be done. Rufus had been there that night with his briefcase, and her bragging checked out. But this was one of those. A standard shoot-to-kill mission with basically one form to fill out upon completion, and Rude was more than capable.

"Why're you here?"

"It speaks!" Reno threw up his hands, eyes wide, cigarette dangling off the edge of his bottom lip. "It speaks, it's coherent, and it even asks questions!"

"Reno."

The normally-disheveled man grinned and put his hands down. Rude couldn't help but smirk a bit. Had it been anyone else, he would've just ignored them and perhaps blamed some later, unfortunate accident on the crooked sight of his gun, but again, he did love the dipshit.

"Haven't you noticed that I come to all the Icicle Inn missions?" Rude had, but he'd never acknowledged it aloud. Again, he'd kind of assumed that Reno was trying to rub it in that he could stand subzero temperatures and everyone around him just wanted to throw him on the fire. But now he looked kind of serious, so Rude took to listening for a moment. "Well, I ain't got a lot of childhood to back me up, y'know? I'm from Mideel, my mother had green eyes, and that's about as much as I remember – except this place. I remember we used to vacation up here. I can't remember shit about my family except that we had a cabin across from the main ski lodge, and I remember my brother strapping on a snowboard every coupla months when we made it this way. I dunno. I guess it's nice to know that we used to be normal at some point, right? I don't know if you've got much before the age of twenty, but I like to hold onto what's there, and. . .well. You know? It's important to me to come up here and see it all?"

The bald man was stunned. He'd never really heard Reno get sentimental – wondered if it was within his scope of ability, even – and. . .well, it was nice to hear. It was like the redhead was trusting him with something absolutely huge and precious. Sometimes in this line of work he lost himself in the barrel of a gun and in the bottom of a glass, and –

"I'm flippin' you shit, man. Wutain girls come up here – hot, look great in ski jackets, and I know what they're sayin' but they don't know what I'm sayin'." Reno was grinning and preparing to light another cigarette.

fwip.

A shot knocked the smoke out of his mouth and caught a passing skier in the back of the head, causing him to drop like a feather pillow. Rude ground his teeth and set to work, moving over to collect the body and let Reno collect his wits. He pressed the button on his pager that let Tseng in the lodge know that he was ready to go back, not liking how hard it was to maneuver a fresh, ski-wearing corpse, and moved to grab the tree boughs he'd decided to use to cover the –

"Hold. The fuck. On." Reno's teeth were clenched, by the sound of that statement, but he hadn't actually been able to scare Rude since. . .well, that incident with the window. The redhead looked furious, but it kind of bounced off his partner. "That body. That. Fucking. Body. Is not leaving a trail of blood." There was a pause. "How. The fuck?"

Now Rude grinned, patting his holster. "Hotbullets. Wound-sealing."

The redhead had already lit another cigarette, and he drug on it angrily. "And they give you the fun gun why?"

He looked like he was giving it serious thought for a moment. Two words were all he needed, though. He pointed toward himself, pushing his thumb into his coat. "Responsible," he muttered. Then he pointed at Reno. "Idiot."

Reno huffed.

Family or no, he fucking hated this guy.