there is always something
there to remind me
ffvii, the turks (hints of tseng/elena,
reno/rude, tseng/rufus), pg. SPOILERS FOR advent children.
Square-Enix owns.
--
It takes a while for Elena to learn that nobody dies if they're still working for Shinra.
Reno gets the shit beaten out of him and she gets hired, but he's back soon, walking and bitching to Rude like she assumes he always did and he looks at her funny, just to make her feel unwelcome, she guesses, but this is okay. They have drinks after work and discuss the one time Rude had to get bones replaced, and she wonders how tough these guys seem to be but how the world is much, much tougher than them.
Sephiroth's sword goes through her boss and it's then she loses hope, at least for a moment, when they get him to the hospital wing and he just lies there for days and days. She attempts to revenge him, his "death" which isn't a death clinically, not just yet, and fails, and then decides it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Everything's going down.
The Turks fight Avalanche for the last time and escape. It's all going down. They have drinks at the bar and the Meteor is coming down on them and none of it matters. She thinks maybe it's time Reno and Rude came out of the closet and she attempts to talk to them about it but alcohol gets the best of her.
When the end of the world comes, and goes, she's sleeping under the bar table, her uniform sticky the next morning.
"Get up, you lazy bitch," Reno snarls in that voice she always did find annoying, "we have work to go to."
Work after the End of All Ends. Shinra, what a company to work at, she thinks and straightens her jacket.
Two days later she meets Rufus Shinra, who's alive, because you can never die while being employed by the Shinra Inc. Not if you're big enough, important enough. Which is why Tseng is still hooked up to wires, kept alive artificially, because Rufus Shinra doesn't give up on his employees that easily.
"He's going to pull through," he tells himself as he sits in his wheelchair by the bed and Elena just looks at him.
"Why are you here?" he then asks her, and she's embarrassed, mumbling something about having no assignments to attend to.
"So make up some," he snaps at her and she leaves, closes the door and breaks down crying outside it. She wonders if anyone knows that Tseng asked her out moments before the attack, wonders if it would matter, wonders if anyone would care.
When he finally wakes up, Tseng doesn't remember his own name, so everybody calls him Shion, a name he picked out for himself.
"We should tell him," Elena says to Shinra at some point, head bowed down but still defying, "about his past, about everything."
"He's my guy, Elena. That's why he pulled through. Because I needed him alive. I don't need him to remember. What he needs to remember, I'll tell him. You do your job, and don't ever tell me how to do mine again."
Rufus Shinra stares out of the window as he does a lot nowadays. Elena apologises and leaves, and works alongside Shion, who looks like Tseng, but isn't Tseng at all.
Maybe she's not worth remembering after all, she thinks. But you don't die as long as you work for Shinra, so there's no way out.