Something We Won't Name
Reno Spiegel
2017
"Is your favorite color different than when you were a kid?"
"God, stop."
"What did you want to be when you grew up?"
"God, just shut your mouth."
"If you had to live without either ears or thumbs, which would you pick?"
"You're a fucking idiot."
It's hot out, and she stops walking to take a long pull out of the canteen.
"When's the last time you took a shit outside?"
There she goes. She spits her water all over the dirt and starts coughing, beating her fists against her thighs and leaving little salmon-pink bursts that fade away as fast as they got there. I almost feel bad, but not bad enough to feel bad. Y'know.
She's shouting some mix of godddd and fuckkk. I take the canteen, the only one we have since she lost the other trying to bean me in the head with it outside the woods, and open the cap for a victory swig. I'd be more worried if I hadn't hidden the keys from her.
"Dammit," she gasps. "What did you say?"
I put the lid back on and swing my axe out at another small tree. Whooosh, crash. Hell yeah, mythril.
"I said when's the last time you took a shit outside. Just curious."
She takes the chance to sit down and rub at her calves, scratched up so bad they look like she tweezed all her leg hair out. I told her that wearing shorts was a stupid idea and she told me I was a stupid idea and locked me out of the van for an hour at the petrol station. I finally smashed the back window and while we were fighting I turned the radio to her least favorite station and snapped the knob off.
I have some regrets about that.
We've been hacking down shrubs for a few hours now, and the sun's about as overhead as it can get. She's sweating hard—part from the humidity and part because it's been fucking steamy since Meteor. I'm not, but that's because Mako injections make you stop sweating. Don't ask me why. It's something weird that no one can or will name, which is kind of the case for everything at this point. There's probably something else worse going on in my body because of it, but it's also kind of nice to not have to sweat. So, y'know, life expectancy blah blah win-win.
I realize I'm missing her answer and have to ask her again: "What?"
She rolls her eyes and stands up, brushing dirt off her coat. I don't know why she wore that either, but pick your battles or something. "I said, 'What's wrong with you?'"
"Hungry," I say, ducking her half-hearted swing. "I mean, I dunno. Shit I don't know about you."
She crouches down and flings her weird saucer-blade thing at cluster of trees. They all lift up slightly and set back down next to where they were, falling in a bundle. It's beautiful, but I won't tell her that. "There's plenty you don't know about me, Turkey," she says, catching the disc and tucking it away.
"For one, that's a dumb nickname anymore. Two, let's start here then."
"Where?"
"Just tell me the last time you shit outside."
She rolls her eyes again and drains the canteen.
We're a few kilometers outside Gongaga, or whatever Gongaga's going to be. After Meteor, Reeve—benevolent beautification yahoo he is—sat down to figure out what needed to be fixed and how fast. We did Midgar in the first five years, moving everyone to what used to be the Slums and turning the Plate into a giant, rotating sun screen. In a few years we're going to raise it a couple hundred meters and bulk it up into a shield in case…well.
When Reeve released the proposal at a press conference, someone asked how he was going to pay for it. He'd pointed at Rude, his new vice something or other, who leaned forward and said, "Our entire economic structure went up in flames. Big flames. That's not even a question anymore."
The whole room applauded.
Rude's strangely good at pacifying people, even if he does look like an alopecic bear.
Once gil was off the table or on the table or whatever, the Plate project was easy. Workers wanted to work. People wanted to populate. After a major, Planet-wide calamity, the line between boredom and desperation is hazy enough that everyone wanted something to focus on that wasn't their own shit. As for moving everyone around and into the Slums, class structure goes mostly out the window when you're all nearly sucked into the sky or set on fire by a megalomanic warlock.
We'd took a few years with Junon next, one project at a time, literally scrapping the military vehicles for steel beams and getting the water figured out. Did you know you could purify that harbor? I fucking didn't. Reeve. Asshole.
Costa was weirdly untouched, and after that the workforce was strong enough to split. Highwind and Wallace took half of it to start building a new oasis between Corel and Rocket Town—"Somethin' with a fuckin' space program," one of them said on the news, but it could have been either of them—and with the promise of a huge retirement bonus because we're not chumps, the Turks took the rest of it south. Cosmo seceded and did its own thing, so we basically pillaged Gold Saucer for everything fancy and got to work.
She looks over and I realize I've been drawing a bald bear in the dirt with my axe. I smudge it out with my toe and knock out another tree, pushing it so it doesn't fall on us. There's another crew not far away, setting a controlled burn along the path, and we're making decent progress. Still, it's a long and warm day to spend it all—
"Clearing brush," she whines. "God, I'm supposed to be a princess and I'm clearing a forest with your stupid ass."
I roll my eyes at her. Godo's still in Wutai and Wutai's doing as fine as ever, what with having things like "traditions" and "a history" and "the good sense not to take blood money from Reeve." Whatever.
"You didn't have to come," I tell her, testing another trunk with my foot. It takes two swipes and then it's down, another close behind.
She makes a face. "What, and leave you out here to drop a tree on your neck?" I get cocky and full-force kick out at a sapling. It's surprisingly rooted and I end up on my back. "You're so bad at this."
"Am not."
"Are, too."
"Am not."
"Are, t—ughfuck." She sprints off, dust and leaves flying up behind her heels. She's surprisingly nimble, even in that huge coat, something I always forget about her. This time I follow her and we settle into a rhythm: her slightly ahead of me, cleaving trunks at the base, me coming along behind to push falling trees away with the side of the axe, making a path.
"Legs!" I yell at her. She whips a branch over her shoulder and almost catches me in the eye. "Who was your best friend when you were a kid?"
She sighs so hard I can hear it.
I've been thinking about my brother a lot lately.
When we were kids, he had this dirt bike. I don't even know where he got it, but he took four years to get it all put together, taught himself how to drill and weld and not blow up the fucking garage. By the end, I don't even know if he wanted the bike as much as he wanted to prove he could do it. He'd sit there for hours after class, sorting bolts and lifting things and hitting himself in the thumbs with ratchets. I didn't touch it, but I used to sit and watch him, picking up as much as I could from everything he muttered.
Anyway, once it was done, he was a goddamn terror. He'd ride up and down the roads in Mideel, banking it off curbs, buzzing carts, generally bugging the shit out of everyone else in town. Mideel's a quiet town and no one knew what to do. It got brought up at town meetings. People wrote in to the newspaper. Eventually they told him he couldn't ride it in the city anymore and Ma said to sell it for scrap or she'd gum the lock to the shop.
The only thing Mideelans love more than quiet, though, is each other. The old woman who owned the butcher shop and barely said anything was also the town scrapper—and the day she came to pick it up she told my brother to get in the truck so he could help her unload it later. He came home and said she'd given him a job trapping chocobos, and a few times a week from then on, he'd hop in her truck bed and head out toward the coast.
One night I woke up and he was standing next to the bed, holding out a pair of gloves. We went downstairs and got into the old woman's truck and she drove us out into the woods, pulling off the cart path into a little clearing. Up against a tree was my brother's bike, in even better shape than it had been when he'd apparently not had it junked. She killed the engine in the truck and got out with a wheezy laugh. I looked around and saw a few more bikes tucked away, hidden except where the headlights caught them.
Ol' butcher lady really, really liked motorcycles.
She taught us both to ride and that's where I got the bug, spending midnights in the woods ripping between trees with my brother and his not-boss. We'd race, we'd scare up animals, we'd see who could cut the tightest circle around the biggest trees. We didn't even talk much, just rode around laughing and being shits, all three of us. Ma never knew, because you can get just as roughed up trapping chocobos as you can crashing into a ravine.
The first time they let me on a ShinRa bike, Rude and I were outside Coral on a "recon" mission. Recon is what ShinRa says when they don't want you to bring anything back but want to get away with something. The mark took off into the desert and I jerked off the road after him, spitting sand up a dune until I was close enough to jump ship, land in the truck bed, and smash the back window. By the time Rude caught up to us—running, of course, the goddamn lunatic—I had the glove box empty and the bike running again.
The next day they put my name on the office door.
I tried to pry it off and nail it over Tseng's, but h—
She shrieks my name and I roll under a tipping log that still hits my heels. She's already spun around and jogging back toward me, her little disc-thing snapping back to her belt, that weird, familial face of scared and irritated taking her over.
I'm on the ground and she drops next to me, hand floating, not sure if she should reach out or not.
She's noticed it.
The way I've been staring out windows lately. How I keep trailing off mid-sentence. I notice it, too, but I can't seem to stop it. Every once in a while the little tape in my brain hitches on something and won't untangle fast enough and she has to cover for me, pushing me out of my chair yelling, "Drunk ass," and taking over the rest of the meeting while I dunk my head in the bathroom sink.
Did you know that, before Meteor, only one SOLDIER recruit had ever lived to 35?
I'm 37 soon and a few times a month I wake up with everything tinged green.
"Reno."
She's saying my name again and holding my hand, and we're back in the woods. The sun's still hanging up there like something no one is willing to name but she's stopped sweating. There's gravel stuck to her shins and if I could look at her straight on I'm not sure what would be there.
We sit for a few minutes until my eyes are focused again and she helps me up, and then I realize where we are.
"Why are you sm—"
Before she can ask, I'm off, running now and catching my elbow on things. She's behind me, I can tell, my ears are still good. She yells out a few times and then stops, just carrying along behind me. Every once in a while I'll flip a rock up with my foot and it catches her in the stomach and she shouts at me, but we keep going farther into the woods.
We break into a clearing and both skid to a stop.
Ahead of us, in dirt I know was scraped flat by the backside of a plow, are dozens of intersecting lines making a handful of rectangles, all of them different but a few hundred feet wide. To the right, a path leading off into the trees, carved not quite a meter down. I walk that way but she stays where she is, face scrunching up, trying to figure out what's going on.
The sun's finally starting to roll the other way, down toward the treeline far above us, and the noise of the machines tearing up what's left of Gongaga is barely a noise at all unless your ears are pumping Mako like mine.
"What the goddamn hell is this?" she finally says, and reality snaps back into place.
I step out of the little ditch and into one of the rectangles, lying down in the middle of it and raising my head. I look like a moron but so does she, standing in this humid-ass jungle in a down coat and tiny shorts, bruised and scratched to high hell. She looks tired—not a day-tired but a life-tired, a tired neither of us are willing to name but we both know we don't have to.
I wave and she walks over, lays down next to me with her head on my arm. I feel the muscles in her shoulders relax a bit as she raises her arm to block out the sun and I point past it, right above it. "If you want it," I say, "I figure this can be our goddamn hell skylight."
The noise of a truck kicking to life drifts over us on the wind. Someone laughs, someone else shouts goodbye, the engine drifts farther and farther away.