Thoughts of a Turk

by RinoaTifa

Reno looks back through his life thus far and answers many of the key questions about his livelyhood through first person narrative.

"Thoughts of a Turk"

Disclaimer: I do not own Reno, or any of the related names/places. They are all from the game Final Fantasy VII and are the sole property of Square Enix.

People ask me a lot of questions, doing what I do. That doesn't always mean that I give them the answer.

The question I probably get asked the most is a pretty obvious one, for me at least. I get asked it by everyone: my bosses who hire me to kick the crap out of people, my co-workers who help me kick the crap out of the people and, hell, even the people who I am kicking the crap out of ask me sometimes.

The question usually goes like this: What's with the scars?

Okay, it doesn't seem quite the most obvious question. I mean, everyone has scars, right, but not many people's are as conspicuous as mine. So, yeah, when you have a scar on either side of your face people tend to ask about it.

My earliest memory is of when I was six. I remember running to the top of the stairs as quietly as possible since it was way past my bedtime and peering down over the banisters with inquisitive eyes.

Dad was home. I thought that mum'd be happy about that – she'd been crying on and off all night and I'd hoped that when he got home everything would have been better again.

One word: naïve.

Mum opened the door and there was dad, swaying slightly, on the doorstep. Mum yelled at him with words I was too innocent to have heard before and he spoke to her back in slurred tones. She told him to leave, get out, that she didn't want him to come near us anymore.

He just laughed.

But mum persisted, stood her ground. She told him that she'd call the "goddamn Police" if he didn't get off her "fucking doorstep and out of her fucking life."

Then dad got angry. I remember hearing a slamming sound and then my mother's screams. I couldn't see far enough over the banister rail to know exactly what was happening and besides I don't think I wanted to.

Red blotches stained the pale cream wallpaper of our hallway and my mum kept on screaming. I sat down and covered my face with my hands, crying quietly, afraid that he might find me next. Even so young, I had no delusions as to what he was doing to my mum.

After that, the few memories of my early childhood that have remained through years of wallowing in alcohol are mostly of the same: Mum crying, dad coming home late, mum yelling, dad hurting her. Mum cried a lot back then and eventually she even stopped yelling at him for coming home late. She just took it.

It went on like that for years and me, I just ignored it. He'd never laid a finger on me and I was worried that if I tried something he'd start to hurt me, too. I even started to convince myself that mum was all the terrible, horrible things dad called her. That made the problem much easier to ignore.

But then when I was twelve it suddenly got much worse.

Before, it'd been his fists and that'd still been enough to make her bleed. Then one day he came home from the pub, pissed out of his brains, with a pipe. A steel pipe.

The screams were horrific. I knew that there was no way I could stand for this anymore.

I crept down the stairs and into the kitchen. Mum lay on the table, bloodied and broken whilst dad stood next to her, pure indifference on his face. A look I'm sad to say I later inherited.

"Stop it!" I screamed at him as he raised the pipe to hit her again. "For God's sake, stop it!"

Dad turned to face me, more than a little out of it. His eyes were blood-shot and bleary and his breath came out in little rasps. "Go back to your room, Reno."

I swallowed, knowing with a terrifying certainty what he would do to me if I said no. But I said it anyway. He blinked, then told me again to go to my room only this time he screamed it. I told him to leave mum alone. I challenged him to do his worst. He did.

I remember what I said to him, after I felt the kitchen knife's cold steel burn twice against my flesh and the blood was gushing freely down my cheeks. I remember the exact words spoken slowly and steadily, letting my defiance sink in: "Fuck you."

A sudden clarity came into dad's glazed eyes. "You little shit," he hissed, a terrible anger bubbling out of him like lava out of a volcano, even worse than the indifference.

He threw the pipe away, deeming me unworthy of its sting and punched me hard.

The blow lifted me off my feet and sent me spinning across the room. I was completely dazed, my vision blurred and the last thing I heard before blacking out was mum screaming at dad.

It didn't take me long to wake up again. Even at twelve, I was pretty damn resilient. Dad was gone. Mum was crying again as she started to mop me up as I was far too shaken to do it myself. The amount of blood I'd lost was making me feel light-headed and my face throbbed from the black bruise me right eye was now sporting.

"Oh, Reno," mum kept saying between sobs. "I'm so sorry."

Apparently she wasn't too sorry. Not two weeks later I came home from pretending to be at school to find her lying in a pool of her own sick after purposefully taking an overdose. She died in Hospital not long later.

Heh. I've never told anyone that story before, no matter how many people ask. I don't know exactly why I lie about it. It's not like I'm ashamed of what I did for my mum – I'm proud of these scars because they represent quite possibly the only selfless deed I've ever performed. I don't blame her for what she did; I blame myself for not sticking up for her before. Maybe it's just my dad that I'm ashamed of.

Whatever the reason, whenever someone asks I always say the same thing: Seventeen, in a bar, had too much to drink and got into a fight. Seems plausible enough, especially for people who know me well.

Which leads me onto my next FAQ (frequently asked question) – alcohol. I'm well known for my love affair with alcohol. Got me through a lot of tough times, it has.

But people still ask: Why the hell do you drink so much? Go out all night then spend the next morning hurling into the toilet bowl as your body rejects the poison you've forced into it?

I'll tell you why.

People die. That's a fact of life. But when you're the one who's just pulled the trigger, completely ending some poor bastard's life it's suddenly gets a whole lot harder to just think that they'd have died eventually anyway.

The worst thing is when they start to cry. When they kneel down before you and beg for their worthless lives. Not because it touches me or makes me feel guilty or anything. Believe me, I wouldn't have got where I am today by being that easily won over. Just because it makes you wonder how the dumb sod made it this far through life being such a wuss.

But even if you had all the training, mind and body, that means that you can use any weapon to kill anyone at a moments notice without feeling anything, it doesn't make it easy. Anyone who tells you being a Turk is fun and easy is a fucking liar.

Because it eats at you. What you're doing slowly begins to eat away at your soul and not even the strongest nerves can withstand that forever.

And that's why so many Turks turn to alcohol. We drink, we forget that little voice in our heads, that little flip of the stomach, the slow realisation that the person you've just murdered could well have a family waiting for him to come home. That's not the only cover we use of course – we all hide behind masks. Some are as simple as Rude's, which is a silent reflection or Elena's who takes each day as it comes, convincing herself that everything'll be alright as long as she follows orders. Or even Tseng's quiet indifference.

For me, it's all just about the drink.

There are a few hours when you're pissed out of your head, staggering down the street or hurling into a dustbin when you're not the person who kills people and you don't have to face the trivial problems of shame or remorse. Hell, you can't even remember what planet you live on let alone feel guilty about what you do for a living.

And believe me, and I'm saying this with the utmost sincerity, when you do what I do there is no greater bliss than being unable to remember that. Not being able to remember anything you've done.

Hey, you see how good it feels to know that you've killed literally hundreds of people and you haven't even hit thirty.

It's worth the cost, it's worth the throwing up, it's worth the injuries and fights you don't mean to get yourself into and it's even worth that splitting, throbbing headache that greets you in the morning. Because for that short time, I'm not Reno of the Turks. I'm not anyone.

I don't have a name, or an address or a telephone number and I don't have any sense of direction or clear idea of what the hell I'm doing. But I don't have the guilt either.

So that's why I do it. But I've never touched drugs though. It's not like I haven't had the opportunity – it's come up plenty of times – I've just never wanted to.

Whenever someone offered me any drug in any form I'd suddenly get that picture of my mum, dead on the floor, her ruby-red hair the same shade as my own splayed out and swamped with the mess that she lay in.

There's a lot of stuff about me people don't know. Most of them just see the cold-hearted killer or the flirtatious fun-loving boozer because that's all I'll let them see. They don't understand the way my mind works or why I make certain decisions in my life, the main one being becoming a Turk in the first place.

But one of the big things people just don't get about me is why when I'm not pissed in the gutter or out on "business" I spend my free time with hookers. Y'know.

I don't mean to boast but I'm not a bad-looking guy. Girls like the bad guy image and my flame-red hair is nothing short of distinctive. Hell, even the badass scars help my pulling power. And yet instead of picking up some girl in a bar I usually chose to go out and pick one up from a street corner, lobbing a hefty sum her way.

Why? Well, it's weird. I just feel like I can relate to those girls, in a way. Most of them do what they do not because they enjoy it or particularly like the cash. They do it as means of survival, as a way of making it in the world. It's just a job to them.

That's exactly how I see being a Turk. It's nothing personal; it's nothing I feel particularly strongly about. It's just what I do and I do it because I'm good at it and if people are willing to pay me to do what I'm good at so be it. I'm not going to complain, am I?

I know I've said this before, but it's damn hard being a Turk even though it's a lot better than living on the streets. Like I said, it eats at you and even if you can blast out the voices with alcohol when you're conscious, there's nothing to stop them when you're asleep.

I have a lot of nightmares. Of course, I don't tell people that – can you imagine the damage it would do to my street cred? "Hey, Reno of the Turks is coming after me." "Nah, don't worry about him, he has nightmares the big wuss."

I'd be fired so fast I could blink and miss it!

Try telling that to my subconscious, though. Every other night – not including the nights I'm out stone cold from a heavy night's binge – I have these dreams and they never end happily, let me tell you.

Most of them I can't remember much of. Just a lot of dark shapes and running figures. Screams, too, I remember hearing screaming. But they all leave me with this same overwhelming feeling of terror and anxiety.

There are two, though, two that I have a lot.

In the first, I'm thirteen years old again. My mum had just killed herself and I'd run away. No way was I gonna stay with dad after this. The second I found her I was out that door and hadn't looked back since.

We'd lived in Sector 7, me mum and dad. Ironic, really, that I was the one to later destroy it. Sometimes I wonder if dad was there at the time, or any of the kids I grew up with. I have nightmares about that too.

Anyway, I'd lived in Sector 7 all my life but after I left I decided to move lower down to the filthier, worse-off neighbourhoods. There weren't a lot of things I was scared of even then but my dad was definitely one of them so I'd decided to put as much distance between him and me as possible. Eventually I settled on Sector 3 as my new turf or "shit city" as it was called by the locals.

In my dream, as I said I'm a kid again hanging out with my old gang – Gazza, Speed and Gun Shot. I won't go into how they got their nicknames – none of those stories are particularly nice. So it's just a normal day for us. What we thought of as sunlight filters down as usual, we're loafing about on the street when we should be in school as usual and as usual we're completely covered in mud and various other unpleasant bits and pieces (think about the city's name).

Then there's this shout from Gazza and we all start pegging it. It's not clear who we're running from at this point but I think it's the police. Every now and then they'd come out in a sudden attempt to purge the lower city of street urchins like us.

So we're running pretty God damn fast. Cops were serious trouble; you got caught by them and you weren't seen again. There were a lot of not very nice stories about what happened to kids who got caught by the coppers.

But then for some reason I turn round and it's not the police anymore. It's my dad. And my stomach does this weird flippy thing and I run faster than I've ever run before but now I'm alone, the others have buggered off to save their own skin and left me to it. So I turn back round to try and go even faster but it's a dead end in front of me and at the end holding the biggest gun I've ever seen is… Tseng.

The thirteen year old me screams and ducks and then I hear gunshots and dad falls to the fall, covered in blood. Tseng reaches down and holds his hand out to me and it's like he's offering me this whole new, amazing life away from the streets and the gangs. A whole new world. I reach up to take his out-stretched hand but I feel something pulling me back. It's dad, tugging at my shirt and I'm falling back and…

And then I wake up. Weird, huh? Some psychiatrist guy'll probably tell you that it's a sign of my deep emotional scarring or some shit like that but personally I just think it's my psyche screwing with me. My mind's pretty messed up like that.

The other dream is even more messed up. I wouldn't call it a nightmare but it still freaks me out big time.

I'm in the Slums again only this time I'm not living there and I'm not a kid. I'm not anything; I'm just… there. I have no physical being.

I'm at this window, right, looking into a house. And in this house a woman is sitting on a sofa and she's crying inconsolably. Seriously sobbing her eyes out. There's someone else in there too but it's hard to see because my non-existent breath keeps fogging up the window.

Then it clears and I can see in. The other figure has their back to me but it's definitely a woman. You can tell by the figure. She looks familiar but at first I can't place her.

She's dressed in pink with this little red jacket on and this long brown hair. Even though I'm so far away I can see this big red stain that's spread through the material of her dress around the stomach and I just know that it's blood. And I know that the other woman can't see her and I know that the girl standing before me is dead.

Suddenly, she seems to realise I'm there and she turns, staring straight at me with these big green eyes. The blood's even more obvious from this side and she raises her hands self-consciously, covering the mark.

I know her. She's the last Centra, the Ancient I've been trying for years to abduct. And now she's dead and she's looking at me and I don't know what to do.

And then the most amazing thing happens. She smiles at me. She actually smiles at me the person who is at least partially responsible for her death even if they didn't deliver the blow themselves.

And that smile is the most fascinating mixture of expressions I have ever seen. There's this deep, profound sadness there, the same sadness that's in her eyes and I notice her glance over at the crying woman who I now realise must be her stepmother or something because her real mother's long dead.

But there's understanding there too. She knows why she had to die and she knows why I harassed her and attacked her so many times. She's happy, too, I can see that. Her work is done and she's succeeded and now she can finally be free.

She forgives me for what I've done. For everything I've done.

That dream can last anything from seconds to hours but it always leaves me with a feeling of such guilt and remorse I nearly scream. And y'know what the weird thing about that is? I'm not even the one who killed her.

There's probably a lot of deep and philosophical meaning in that, too but I don't want to hear it. I don't think that you can sum the human mind up with some general rules and guidelines. Everyone's different and we all think different things and that makes it almost impossible to pick every individual's mind apart. Who can be an expert in something that's different every time?

So yeah I have these dreams and no I don't read anything into them. I don't see them as a sign from God, or some calling to change the way I live my life. They're just dreams.

Now, of course, there's the final million gil question that I've been asked so many times by so many people: Why are you a Turk?

Why, if it gives you scars and drives you to alcohol and makes you feel like you can relate to hookers and gives you the scariest, most gut-wrenching nightmares that make most horror movies look like Bambi, do you do it?

Sometimes I ask myself the same thing and every time I give myself a different answer. But eventually when it boils down to it that's the easiest question yet.

The answer is simple: That's my job. I was born a Turk and I'll die a Turk. That's just the way it is.