Synopsis: Several months after the fall of Meteor, Rude, Reno and Tseng are dispatched to Mount Nibel to erase all evidence of the Shinra experiments sealed in the reactor. But post-Crisis guilt causes tensions that threaten to divide the Turk trio, and danger lurks in the dark of the reactor.
The Repair Men
1
A row of chairs lines the wall of the chopper's hold, and Rude's perched on one with his gloved hands resting on his knees. These seats are uncomfortable as hell. They don't fit the curve of his back, make him sit all rigid, like a machine. His knees are stiff from sitting so long, his neck is sore, and he's tired of the straps constricting his chest. The headset cupping his ears muffles the cardiac drumming of the rotors and the engine's mosquito whine, but he's tired of those too. It's been a long flight. He'll be glad when they land and he can sink his feet into some dirt, breathe the mountain air.
He knows they're close because he's watched the landscape change through a small square window in the hatch on the opposite wall. The green plains have risen to stony peaks that pierce the underside of the cloud bank they're flying under. Rude stretches his neck and vertebrae click at the base of his skull. Not far now.
In the cockpit seats are Reno and Tseng. Reno's slumped in the pilot's chair with his legs sprawled out and one hand draped over the steering stick. Tseng sits co-pilot with his chin propped on his palm, staring out the windscreen.
Rude's mind slips back to the briefing earlier that morning. The three of them had stood on the balcony of the lodge at Healen. Their breath steamed up as it left their mouths. Dawn was soaking up the valley from the horizon like peach juice. All the birds were shouting their morning chorus, and only a few of Tseng's words surfaced from the clamour. "Mount Nibel reactor". "Research samples". "Must be disposed of". "Company's reputation". All Rude needed to know. He cared more about what the birds were saying, anyway.
2
Reno pushes the chopper through the air. He's got to concentrate; these aren't easy conditions he's flying in. The air in the mountains is thick and wet, and the varying air pressure in the valleys makes the barometer swing all over the place. Then there are the white shreds of cloud shrouding the mountains. If he doesn't stay sharp, they could wind up a smoking wreck on the side of some cliff.
That'd be kind of ironic, he thinks, mouth twisting into a bitter smile. The three of them killed in an accident after the crisis, as the danger fades and the world starts piecing itself back together. After all the crazy shit they've made it through. They'd probably deserve it, though.
Crap, concentrate! He hauls his mind off all that stuff. They're too close to the valley floor. He checks a couple of gauges, pulls back on the steering stick to take them up a little.
"Yo," he says into the headset. "Much further?"
Tseng lifts his head off his hand and turns to look at Reno.
"No," he says. "We're almost there." The headset adds a static hiss to his voice.
"Good. I'm sick of these damn clouds."
No one else says anything. It's been like this the whole trip. Like he's driving them all to a funeral, or something.
Weaving the chopper through these cramped mountain valleys kind of reminds him of navigating the tower blocks of Midgar. Now that was flying. He remembers chasing a vanload of Crescent Unit agents through the city one night, Rude leaning out of the side hatch and emptying his pistol into the van's tyres. The bald man's suit had fluttered in the wind, the tie streaming out from his neck. Smears of city light zipped past the cockpit like shooting stars.
"Land there." Tseng's voice crackles in his ear, and Reno realises that his thoughts have run off again. He looks over at the Director and sees him pointing to a shallow basin in a mountain on their left.
"You got it." He swings the chopper down towards it.
3
As they arc in closer to the mountain, the clouds pull apart and Tseng sees the reactor for the first time in a long while, sprouting from the shingle like a tumour. It's uglier than he remembers; its form now seems more bulbous than sleek, and the alpine weather has stripped the metal of its lustre. But what strikes him most is how insignificant it looks from the air. It's completely dwarfed by the ranges around it.
Reno's landing is clumsy, dumping them on a patch of flat ground with the reactor looming perhaps thirty metres away. There is a metallic clunk, Tseng's teeth bash together and Rude grunts from the back. Reno does not seem to have noticed. His flying has been sloppy today, but Tseng has not commented on it. He has noticed that since the move to Healen, Reno and Rude don't seem to care much about what they are doing. To take any pride in their work. Take the briefing that morning: neither of them had listened to a word he'd said. But what was the point in disciplining them? It wouldn't solve the problem. He has to find a way to make them care again. A reason.
As the beat of the rotors slows and the engine's whine trails off, Tseng gets up and walks, stooping, to the back of the chopper. He picks up the sports bag and the toolbox off the floor. Rude has already opened the side hatch and jumped down, and Tseng follows him out. The tools clatter and the gravel makes a wet crunch as his shoes hit it. When the cold mountain air enters his lungs, they seem to shrivel up.
He looks back and sees that Reno is still sprawled in the pilot's chair, staring out the windscreen.
"Reno," he says. "Let's go."
The redhead looks around and then pushes himself up off the seat, slouches over to the exit and drops down to join them on the ground. Rude reaches up to shut the hatch and they set off together towards the reactor. The only sound is the rolling grind of their feet on the shingle. Tseng can feel the cold leaking into his suit through the sleeves and neck.
After they have climbed the stairs to the entrance he drops the sports bag onto the metal deck and squats to open it. He'd packed it that morning. Its contents: three pairs of standard-issue blue overalls, three pairs of plastic safety goggles, three head lamps, and three pairs of gloves made from rough grey leather. He passes one of each item up to Reno and Rude, saying, "Put these on. It's possible this will be messy."
They turn away to shed their suits and clamber into the overalls. Tseng has to smother a smile when he faces his colleagues again. With the toolbox on the ground between them, they look like two of the most incongruous repair men he has ever seen. He takes a moment to think about that. In a sense, repairing things is their job now. But it is not the reactor they are trying to fix.
4
The air inside is stale and it's cold and dark. Rude can hear water dripping onto metal somewhere. He takes off his glasses and pockets them. The smell of rust crawls into his nostrils. He switches on his head lamp and its light runs over a big iron cavern filled with a tangle of ladders and platforms, pipes and pieces of machinery.
The others come in behind him and flick on their torches. Then the three of them head down a long flight of stairs. Dropping deeper and deeper into the bowels of the reactor. The clatter of their shoes on the metal steps echoes in the gloom.
Just as Rude's starting to wonder how far down the damn thing can go, they come out into a room full of pods. Bad memories from their last visit push at his brain. He tries to ignore them, focuses on the room's current contents.
The pods are about as tall as he is. They're egg-shaped, with little round windows on the front, and are stacked up on tiers to the back of the room. When he looks up to see how far back they go, his head lamp washes over an arched door with six ominous letters above it. A shiver runs down his back like someone's dropped an ice cube in his collar. Shit, what is he? There's nothing to be scared of in here. Not any more.
A clunk from behind. He spins around. Tseng's got the toolbox open on the ground. He takes out a couple of crowbars, passes one to Rude.
Reno has stepped up to examine one of the pods. He wipes the window with his sleeve, peers in, recoils with his lip twisted in disgust.
"The hell are these?" he asks Tseng. "Monsters?" His head lamp glares into the Director's face.
Tseng brings a hand up to shield his eyes, shakes his head. "Monster is a subjective term. The company calls – called – these makonoids. They're humans that have been exposed to extremely heavy doses of mako over a prolonged period of time. Early products of experiments within the SOLDIER programme."
"And what exactly are we supposed to do with them?" Reno asks.
It dawns on Rude that his partner must have paid even less attention to the briefing than he did.
"Our orders are to dispose of them. This is exactly the kind of evidence the company's enemies will use against it, in future. To lay the blame for the calamity on Shinra. We have to ensure nobody ever finds out about the experiments."
The redhead shrugs but he doesn't look happy. Watching Reno's brow drop to a frown, Rude knows what this is really about. Sector Seven. They've never talked about it, but he knows it's been bugging his partner, chewing out his brain. Most obvious is the drinking. Of course, Reno's always hit the booze hard, but there's no relish to it now. Slams his shots like they're medicine. And when he's drunk he just kind of sits there, looking around like he's lost.
Rude's getting sick of the brooding, the moping. You've just got to push that stuff down, stop thinking about it. Eventually, it goes away. Reno's not the only one who's had to do shit he's not proud of.
The redhead's staring into the tank again. He taps his knuckles on the window. "They're all dead?"
"That's correct," Tseng replies. "When exposed to high doses of mako, the body comes to depend on it for survival. Mako addiction in its most extreme form. Once the reactor stopped functioning…" He ends his sentence with a shrug, crosses the room to hand Reno a crowbar. "Let's get to work."
5
Reno stands there watching as Tseng and Rude get to it, jamming their crowbars into the crack where the pod door attaches and throwing their weight against them. His own crowbar dangles from his hand. Why the hell are they the ones doing this? Manual labour, is all it is. A monkey could do it.
Sighing, he shoves his crowbar into the pod's door. Might as well get on with it. More of Shinra's dirty work.
The dead guy in the tank glares out at him. Reno doesn't care what Tseng says, the thing is a monster. Look at it! Those twisted ridges of flesh. And it doesn't even have lips. Pretty freaky, man.
The thing that really scares him about it, though, is that it used to be a person. Is that what the company does? Takes people and turns them into monsters? He realises he's brought a hand up to his cheek. Skin's still smooth.
A kind of metallic groan echoes around the room, and Reno jumps. The circle of light from his head lamp flicks to where the noise came from. On the tier above him, Tseng's cranked a pod open, and the stagnant mako is gushing out into a pool on the floor. Smells to Reno kind of like blood. The Director pulls the door right off and it crashes to the ground. When the freak flops out onto him, he catches it, slings it over his shoulder, and carries it down the steps to dump on the bottom level. Its flesh makes a kind of rubbery smack as it hits the metal, and Tseng's left with a shadow of tank-slime on his overalls.
"How's this for dirty work, sir?" Reno calls down, grinning. It's kind of satisfying to see the Boss with some muck on him for once. But Tseng just shrugs and heads back up the stairs. Not quite the reaction Reno was hoping for. He sets his shoulder against the crowbar and starts to push.
6
Like proper tradesmen, they break for lunch. Tseng leads them up through the dark maze of stairs and catwalks and pipes until they emerge into the light and the fresh, cold air.
A breeze has picked up and it is chasing off the low cloud, so the tops of some of the mountains are visible. Like folds of slate-grey cloth hanging from the sky. The rocky slopes are completely unchanged from the last time he was here, as though the calamitous events of the past few years have simply washed off them.
Tseng knows he is different from the others because he doesn't regret anything he has done. He made his peace with all of that a long time ago. Instead, it's the things he failed to do that haunt him. Three failures, in no particular order: Losing Aerith. Losing Rufus. Losing Zack Fair. All of them rare moments when his duties as a Turk aligned with his duties as a friend. All of them rare moments where he fucked it all up. He'll regret those failures until the day he dies, but that's just part of the weight he must carry as Director. On occasion, though, he wonders if he's cursed to ably serve scum like the Shinra Executive while letting down his friends at every turn.
What about these friends, then? They're sitting on the floor of the chopper's hold, eating sandwiches Rude has produced from somewhere. Reno is smoking a cigarette. Has he already let them down, failed to carve out a niche for them in the new world? Failed to give them a reason to keep going?
Reno is fishing limp slices of tomato from out of his sandwich and dropping them onto the helicopter's floor. His face wears the same expression of distaste it wore when he had been carrying makonoids back in the reactor, the nose curled up, the top teeth bared.
"Shit, man," he says to Rude. "I can't believe you put tomatoes in my sandwich. You know I hate tomatoes. Bread goes all soggy."
"Make your own damn sandwiches."
"Maybe I will."
Silence. Tseng takes a bite of his lunch. The bread is soggy. Then Reno takes a deep drag on his cigarette, exhales smoke and says,
"Maybe we shouldn't be doing this." He's looking at Tseng.
The Director is glad. It's time they had this conversation. "Doing what?" he asks. Although he's perfectly aware of what Reno is talking about.
"You know. What we're doing here. Getting rid of those – those things, in there. What I'm saying is, maybe we shouldn't be trying to cover up what the company did. Because we did some awful stuff." Reno pauses, runs his tongue around his lips before continuing. "I mean, the world was nearly obliterated! Don't people deserve to know who the obliterators were?"
Tseng pushes a hand over his tied-back hair. "Reno," he says, "I'm not going to make you help us if you don't want to. But allow me to explain how I think about it. For the past fifty years, the world has been shaped by the company. Shinra is therefore the organisation that best understands how everything fits together. It can rebuild the world because it knows how it was built in the first place. What other organisation has the funds, the networks to facilitate recovery? The world needs Shinra if it is to get better. To heal itself."
"But it was us who caused the damage in the first place," Reno says, sucking on his cigarette.
"That's correct," Tseng tells him. "But we've learned. The President has learned. We can build a better world, but people have to trust us if we are to do it. If they find out about things like these makonoids, they'll never allow us to help them."
"But what if we have to make them let us help? What if we have to kill thousands and thousands more?"
They're getting to the heart of it now. Tseng can feel the tension buzzing under his skin. "I can't answer that," he says. "I don't know. But if you ask anyone in Edge, or Kalm, or Mideel, all they will want is for things to get back to normal. They crave normality. They want their comfortable lives back. And it was Shinra who gave them that comfort. They might not realise or admit it, but it's Shinra they want back."
At this point Rude pushes himself to his feet, stalks over to the hatch and hits the release button. His big shoulders are hunched up by his neck and his fists are clenched. "Let's just get it done," he says, before dropping to the ground and heading for the reactor.
Tseng looks at Reno. The redhead is frowning, clearly unsatisfied, but he swallows whatever protest he was about to vocalise. He stubs his cigarette out on the floor, then gets up and slouches after Rude. Tseng chalks up another failure.
He gathers the drooping pile of tomato bits from the floor. The slices are slimy in his fingers. He drops them into the sandwich bag and then he heads off after the others.
7
Rude's boots chomp on the gravel as he strides over to the reactor. He's sick of the talking. Reno's bitching, Tseng's preaching. All bullshit. You don't talk about these things. All that does is make you remember. You just keep pushing them down, until you forget.
He's mostly pissed off because all this talk about guilt and responsibility and the company is making him think of Ezra and Ezra is not something he wants to think about. When he thinks about Ezra he thinks about his big mouth, and all the times Rude and his other brothers had to put the hurt on some poor kid it had pissed off. He thinks about how Ezra had always been their mother's favourite, even though he slunk off every time she asked him to help with the chores. About how he got wilder and wilder as he grew up, and broke their mother's heart when he fell in with one of the Wall Market gangs. How Rude had shot him dead one night in the train graveyard, without even knowing it until he walked up to retrieve the stolen blueprints. Recognised the features of the apple-cheeked, impish boy who'd been his younger brother, lengthened and hollowed out in the face of the man he'd just killed. When he thinks about Ezra like this, he wants to wail on something until his knuckles are slick with blood.
Nothing to pummel down in the reactor, though. Just these ugly fuckers to bust out of the tanks. Rude sets to it with a new ferocity, shunting at the crowbar with his shoulder again and again until the door pops off and the mako juice runs over his feet. He can feel a bruise rising in the meat of his upper arm. Feels good. He hauls the makonoid down the steps and dumps it on the pile, which is getting pretty big now. Can't be many left.
Afterwards, he told himself he'd killed his brother to make the world a better place. What was good for the company was good for everyone. More than that. His new family, the Turks, had needed him to do it. Maybe didn't make so much sense when you examined it closely, but it was enough to let him push the whole event down, forget about it. But now the company was in ruins, the world worse off than it had been in a long time. Which meant Ezra had died for no reason at all. And what kind of family would make you do something like that for no reason?
He stares at the pile of dead experiments. A tangle of orange and blue limbs, bumpy skin all glossy with tank-slime under the white light of his head lamp. He wonders if they'd had families before the company took them away and made them monsters. If the families had mourned them after they'd gone.
8
Of course, it's Reno who gets the one that's still kicking. It's the last pod. Tseng and Rude are just standing around, silent, waiting for him to finish so they can all get the hell out of there. Bastards could at least be giving him a hand. He's hauling at the crowbar, shaking it around, trying to get the door to loosen up. Mind already on the first drink he'll mix when he gets home. Finally there's the satisfying sucking noise of the seal releasing, like a sloppy kiss, and the door clatters to the ground. Stagnant mako gushes out, but Reno's boots are already soaked with it so he doesn't jump out of the way, just watches it wash over them again. He waits for the thump of the monster hitting the floor. It doesn't come. He looks up and sees it standing there. A muscle in the thing's face twitches. One of its hands whips up and closes around his throat.
Suddenly Reno can't breathe. He grabs at one of the monster's fingers, pulls it back, hears, feels it snap, but the grip doesn't loosen. He starts kicking at its legs. Rude appears in the light behind the thing, crowbar in hand, and swings at it, once, twice, three times before it even notices. Then Reno's hurled to the floor, bruisingly, and slides on his back until he slams into the railing.
The freak's swiping at Rude with its claws and the bald Turk backs off, blocking with the crowbar. Reno staggers to his feet, shakes his head clear, dashes over and hauls back on its arms so his partner can sock it good in the gut a few times with his crowbar. Its rubbery muscles writhe in his hold like eels. Then he's thrown off and the thing leaps into the pipes overhead. He scrambles up again and stands next to Rude, panting. Rude flicks him a grin, and he can feel the corners of his own mouth tugging up too. His blood's churning through his veins, thumping in his ears.
Tseng appears beside them, a pistol gleaming in his hand. The three of them scan the pipes up above, torchlight washing over a tangle of steel. Where the hell is it?
Behind them, of course. There's a thump as it lands and then Tseng's sprawling on the ground. Rude brings his crowbar down on the monster's head, and while it's dazed Reno throws himself at it, wraps his arms around its waist and falls on top of it onto the tier below. Rude's boots drop to the floor beside them and he bashes at its face with a wet, meaty, smacking sound. Tseng's yelling, "Get clear," so they dive off to opposite sides, and his gun barrel flashes six times from the level above and the thing jerks around on the ground. The small room flattens the noise of the gunshots. When the monster stops spazzing out they know it's dead.
Reno's sprawled out on his arse, panting. Tseng leans on the rail of the upper level. Rude's standing over the freak, still gripping the damn crowbar. "Shit," Reno says, looking from one to the other. It seems like about all that can be said.
There's about thirty seconds of silence while they all recover their breath. Then Reno clambers to his feet, grabs the dead makonoid by its armpits, and drags it down to the pile.
"I think we've earned another break," Tseng says. He turns and heads for the exit.
Reno wipes his gloves on his overalls and follows the Boss up the stairs again. He feels completely focused. Nothing like a near-death experience to clean up his head.
As they troop up to the surface, it occurs to Reno that they've probably just done a good deed. If the monster had somehow got out and made it down to the village – well, a small town like Nibelheim could only sustain so many Incidents. Wouldn't have looked good for the company either.
The thing was, he'd never seen himself as a bad guy until Sector Seven. Sure, he'd done some bad things in his time, but who hadn't? He'd even helped save the world, once. But there was this moment, when he'd been swapping bruises with Lockhart beside the plate controls, where he spotted the hate in her eyes and though, She thinks I'm the villain. And he just couldn't stand it, so he'd beat it out of there, fast as he could. It wasn't until after the dust had settled over the ruins of the plate that he realised what he'd done was just straight up evil. His view of himself had changed, mutated. As if that wasn't enough, they'd gone on to nearly destroy the world.
The result of it all was, everything Tseng and the President were saying about "recovering", "healing", all sounded pretty damn empty to him. Because everyone knows bad guys don't rebuild stuff. They just bring it crashing down.
9
They emerge again, squinting, into sunlight and clean air. The sky is scattered with fraying patches of blue. Tseng lowers himself onto the deck and rests his back against the warm metal of the reactor wall. He pulls off his gloves and runs a hand over his hair, scanning for loose strands. Reno flops down beside him and Rude squats next to the redhead. The three of them gaze across at the craggy rock formations that coat the mountains on the other side of the valley like scales.
Reno says, "Nice shooting in there, sir."
A smile breaks through Tseng's lips. "I think I had the easy part," he says. Silence settles over them for a few moments. Then Reno says:
"Yo, this is probably going to sound dumb, but...are we the bad guys?"
Tseng is unsure how to approach the question. For a long time now he has understood good and bad as arbitrary, relative labels. Words without any concrete meaning. Whether they are the "bad guys" depends entirely on who is being asked. He's about to explain as much to Reno when Rude says,
"No. We're not the bad guys. We're just people who have done some bad shit, y'know? It's not the same."
"It's not?"
Rude shrugs. "Wasn't us who decided what needed to be done. We just did it, y'know? If we hadn't, someone else would have. Any chump can press a button."
Reno leans back against the wall, obviously processing, his brows folded in thought.
"Don't forget," Rude continues, "Strife's gang killed a lot of people too. Might've been Shinra people, but they still had families." As he speaks he takes off his glasses and wipes them on his overalls. Reno nods his head slowly.
"That's correct," Tseng says. "But I don't think it matters who we were. It's who we are now that's important. And look at us. We're repair men. We're fixing the world. It doesn't matter whose fault the Meteor was, or the extraction of mako energy. What matters is who repairs the damage caused by those things. And that's us. The President. Shinra."
Rude asks, "But why are we fixing it? What's our motivation? That's what I need to know. I need a reason."
Tseng takes a moment to consider the question, running one thumb over the knuckles of the other. The skin of his hands is still smooth, clean, creamy white.
"I can't tell you," he says. "I think each of us needs to decide that for themselves. Atonement, perhaps."
Rude shrugs, pushing up his bottom lip. He stares up at something through his dark glasses. The clouds. Or perhaps the reactor towering over them all.
Reno suddenly says, "How about for each other? I mean, you guys, Laney, and the President – you're pretty much all I've got. I'll do it so when we're all old and wrinkly and cramped around our little card table it'll be light, and warm, and everyone will have enough to eat. And we can lean back in our chairs and say, 'You know, we did all right'."
An empty, uncomfortable silence follows. Reno is sitting with his legs splayed out to either side in front of him, and he stares at his feet for a while before saying, "Oh man, that sounded corny as hell."
Rude says, "Bad guys don't say that kind of shit."
Then they're all laughing. Tseng listens to Reno's dirty snigger, Rude's bass chuckle and his own laugh mix and tumble up into the sky.
10
They enjoy the sunlight for another few minutes, and then Tseng gets to his feet. He walks over to the chopper, climbs inside, and emerges moments later with a can of gasoline sloshing around in one hand. He walks across the gravel and climbs the steps up to the reactor.
For the last time they delve into the murky depths of the machine. As Rude's feet drum on the steps, he thinks about his family. He hasn't spoken to any of them since Ezra died. Couldn't face it. He's not even sure they'd recognise him, with his shaved head, his suit, his glasses. But a couple of times since the Meteor, on Sundays when everyone gathers at his mother's house for dinner, his feet have lead him to her shack on the outskirts of Edge. He sits outside the bar across the road and watches them eat, laugh, chat, be happy together. He wonders if they ever talk about him, guess at what he's doing with himself. Doesn't seem likely. His brothers have kids of their own now. Rude doesn't think he'll ever meet them.
As Reno moves through the ladders, steps and catwalks, he's not thinking about Sector Seven. Instead his mind's wandered onto memories of shifting everyone out of Midgar, with the Meteor looming in the sky above them, huge, bloated, more oppressive than the plate had ever been. Pulling some scrawny kid out of the rubble, chalked all over with brick dust so his face was just a pair of wet eyes. Reno had set him on his feet, saying, "You'll be okay, kid". Boy's face lit up with this gap-toothed grin that had made him feel warm all over. He sure as hell hadn't felt like a villain then.
When they get down to the pod room, Tseng unscrews the cap of the gasoline can and empties the petrol over the pile of dead makonoids. Then he pulls a materia from his pocket, pushes his mind into it and shoots a ball of flame at the corpses. Fire washes over all the tangled limbs and snarling faces, and the room fills with shifting orange light, a sizzling sound, a smell like cooking fish. He watches the glow of the flames flicker on the faces of his colleagues, and feels relieved. Because he knows he hasn't let them down.
A/N: Part of my aim with this story was to experiment with writing from different narrative perspectives. The style was supposed to change depending on whether Reno, Rude or Tseng was telling the story. Did it work? Did the characters' personalities come through in their narration? I would love some criticism on this (or any!) aspect of the fic if anyone has the time. Thanks for reading!