For fun and not profit. Characters are the property of Square Enix.
My Old Friend
It was always the same. The guy with the sedan always ended up with a passenger. Reno's solution to this was simple: ditch the sedan. After all, no one else in ShinRa had one. Rufus had a private helicopter, Reno himself had a piece of shit Duster with a bipolar transmission and no air conditioner, Elena had a convertible so small that she had to borrow a car when she went shoe shopping, and Tseng drove a two seater coupe.
Rude drove a sedan.
And so, for the meeting at the Junon base, Tseng pulled him aside as they were leaving. "Rude, I hope you don't mind, but as we are meeting with the WRO and all of them have left already…"
Of course they had.
"Vincent Valentine doesn't have a car."
Of course he didn't.
"Would you mind giving him a ride?"
Of course he wouldn't.
Not that he even knew the man. Their interactions to date included one firearms seminar, which Rude failed miserably, and a polite 'excuse me' in a hallway. Rude was sure it was his imagination but he was sure the flicker in the gunman's eyes could have been translated into "Oh yeah, you're the bald guy that can't shoot for fuck all, aren't you?"
Then again, it could have been paranoia. By the time he got to his car, Valentine was removing his shoe covers. He put them in the back seat when Rude unlocked the car, and pulled his cloak in after him before shutting the door with a practiced ease. Rude wondered how many times he'd shut car doors on it before he learned to do that. "Thank you for the ride. I ended up being the odd man out this morning. Actually I hoped to be left behind; I loathe Junon, but Tseng was helpful enough to find a ride for me." His tone, and the gentle way he laid emphasis on some words but not others, was just subtle enough to suggest he didn't appreciate the help without giving away anything concrete.
They were of a mind on that, it wasn't Rude's favorite city either. "It's no problem."
"No, you won't be washing the smell of dead fish out of your hair for an hour tonight."
Rude barked a laugh before he could stop himself. "No, I won't. You could always cut it."
"No, I did that once. There is ample photographic evidence that it was a bad idea."
Rude thought of the pictures he had seen of the young Turk, in a layered bob that was very stylish for the era, but hardly flattering to his face or build. Having nothing delicate to say in return, he fell silent. But glancing over as he pulled out onto the highway, he saw that his lack of response had not fooled his companion. Even though it was covered by the cowl of his cape, Rude knew he was smiling.
It was two hours of driving, more if someone else did it but Rude liked a heavy foot. However, he also liked his passenger, an unexpected development. They shared a dry sense of humor, a dislike for small talk, and Vincent found himself telling stories about his own days with the Turks without bitterness or sadness.
"…and so, it was fine until Veld smelled the coffee on us. We had no idea it would travel that far, we thought if we just put the grounds in our mouths like chewing tobacco, we'd get away with it. But he was furious for breaking stealth protocol and told us to spit it out or swallow it."
"What did you do?"
"We hadn't had coffee for two weeks, Rude, we swallowed it. We had no idea that large amounts of caffeine, introduced to the digestive system all at once, act as a laxative. Dorn and I spent the rest of the mission desperately looking for trees in the surrounding countryside. Veld was…unsympathetic. And that was my first mission to Kalm. And my first lesson in the practical application of herbal pharmaceuticals."
"I'm pretty sure Veld knew the effects, he just wanted you to suffer the consequences."
"What is sad is that I still love coffee. Do you think we can stop for some?"
"We're making good time." Rude hated to stop once he was on the road.
The sound of sulking—and how the man could sulk so oppressively without making a single noise defied all logic—filled the car. Within ten minutes Rude found himself pulling over for coffee. Vincent was nice enough to get him one too, though, so he counted it even.
The morning had been a colossal waste of time, and he found himself staring curiously at Vincent. No longer such a conundrum, Rude found himself close to considering him a friend. Or, at least as close as one could after only two hours.
They were just so damned alike. At the moment, Vincent occupied the seat on the other side of the corner table, tracing little designs into his notepad with his gauntlet and then poking them out with his flesh hand.
He was bored too, obviously. Rude dozed for a moment and jolted awake when a brass foot kicked his ankle under the table. He glared. Vincent smirked, invisibly again, but somehow they had developed the ability to understand each other through cloak collars and sunglasses. The topic of the day was apparently customer service. What the fuck? They were ShinRa, they didn't have customers, they had subjects. As for the WRO, everybody loved those bastards because they were saving the planet anyway.
Colossal. Waste. Of. Time.
A wheel made entirely of paper and coffee stirrers rolled over to him and stopped at the edge of his own notepad. He looked up to Vincent's completely impassive face; by all signs, the gunman was utterly riveted to the details of keeping customers happy through attentive body language.
He grabbed the paper wheel and stuffed it in his pocket as the meeting leader broke for lunch.
Rude preferred to eat alone, and so had chosen an outdoor bench to take his lunch. The forced socialization of meetings made him claustrophobic, and the 'team building' exercises just made it worse. Back home, they each had their teams and in his opinion, which no one ever asked, they worked together just fine without being built in stupid, forced exercises. There was a silent movement of air beside him Vincent sat down on the bench with his boxed, meeting lunch and unbuckled his cloak. "Hard as hells to eat in this thing."
Strange, Vincent's company did not seem like an intrusion. He had talked and laughed more in the car with this man than he had with anyone, in years. "Why do you wear it?"
"It is an extension of Chaos, wings to be exact. And a convenient hiding place. Oh gods, will Elena never stop prattling on about her cookies?"
Rude felt some need to defend his fellow Turk. "Well, for a trained assassin, she is surprisingly domestic."
"I realize that, it's just that thirty years ago, 'cookie' was rather course slang for a woman's…oh hells…"
"Don't be a prude, Vincent. Just say it."
"Bits, all right? A woman's bits." He picked at the stale crust on his sandwich.
"….oh." There really wasn't much to say back to that. "She is kind of proud of her cookies."
Vincent took in the flat tone, the way Rude was looking blankly across the courtyard. "What?"
"She likes to get out a lot. She calls it being serially monogamous. Damned brief episodes, if so. We've stopped naming them, it just gets confusing."
"It's going to be a long afternoon, Rude. If we have to keep straight faces, anyway."
"And Reno keeps talking about how much he likes her cookies, too."
"This may be none of my business, but Reno does not strike me as the cookie type." He took another bite of his sandwich.
"Not exactly. He's a little busy chasing Strife's pretzel at the moment."
"I cannot believe you just said that…oh gods…" Vincent finally managed to swallow his sandwich before choking on it. "What is wrong with us? Cracking tacky sex jokes like fourteen year olds."
"I had fun when I was fourteen."
"I was just going into the academy. I think I was having fun too, come to think of it."
"Done?" Rude motioned at the pile of trash.
"Yes, though I think I'll skip the cookie. Had rather enough of those for one lifetime."
They shared another conspiratorial smile and Vincent replaced his cloak, and they trudged back into the meeting room. At the door, Vincent stopped Rude. "What you said about Reno, being after Cloud…were you serious?"
Rude nodded. "I hope I wasn't indiscreet."
"No, it's all right, it's just that it's mutual, to say the least, and I hear about it daily. Reno is, and I quote, 'so beautiful it should be illegal'. I could scream. It is steel-bending sexual frustration and it's not even mine."
The two men leaned on opposite sides of the door, gazing at each other in shared misery. Reno approached, cookie in hand, and asked "What has you two so engrossed, yo? The team building exercise this afternoon?"
"No," Vincent deadpanned. "Pretzels. Soft ones." He continued into the conference room with a flourish of his cloak, leaving Rude sputtering in the doorway and no way to hide it, wondering if he should at least invest in a scarf.
Each of them had a job, which they drew on cards at random. They were supposed to evacuate a disaster area and communicate their positions by charades, because of the fictional "noise" of the area of operations. Rude's was "gunner" and he pantomimed a finger pistol. Vincent groaned aloud.
Okay, so that hallway incident wasn't just paranoia. Then, Vincent's was "cook." Cloud, who was on the other team, collapsed in laughter when he finally figured out what the badly signaled frying eggs were supposed to be. "Excuse me, vertically challenged one?"
"You never cook. You ate ketchup after Meteor, until takeout was available again."
"Crackers. I put it on crackers. Rude can shoot something for us, and we will all die of starvation."
"Ain't that the truth," Reno snarked from the corner.
"Now, the exercise is not to discredit each other, especially to the other team!" the facilitator chirped. Rude hated chirpy people. He wondered if he could shoot her. Cloud drew a card. "Driver," it said, and he turned an air-wheel in his hand. Reeve fell off his chair. "I will not discredit, but I will get out of the car."
"Cookie?" Elena asked.
"I quit. Please tell me Reno is still pilot so we can fly out of here." Tseng grabbed a cookie off the plate in the center of the table, and Vincent ran for the bathroom.
Outside, Reno lit a cigarette. "I think we are the first crew to fail a team building exercise. She actually threw us out."
"Well, if we are waiting on Rude to shoot supper and Vincent to cook it, and Strife to drive us to the restaurant as backup, it's best we stop now." Even Tseng didn't look put out with them. "And anything is better than that rubber meat they put on the sandwiches at lunch. Vincent, did you really eat ketchup after Meteor?"
"Yuffie stole the hot sauce out of the ready meals. I was desperate." He lay back on the hood of Rude's car, perfectly relaxed.
"Why does no one eat chocobo? It's not like there aren't enough of them," Elena wondered aloud.
"Well Laney, I asked an old street vendor that when I was a kid, and you know what he told me?" Reno snuffed his cigarette against a brick. "He said you put a cement block and a chocobo leg in the oven at the same time. The block will get done faster and taste better. Well, being a street kid and more importantly, being a curious little bastard, I tried to cook a piece of one, one night over a fire. Be damned if he wasn't right, that shit never did get done and tasted like leather. So, I guessing they might grind it up for pet food or something, but chocobo is nasty, yo."
"We tried it as well, out in the field. Ended up eating slugs." Vincent played with a blade of grass between the fingers of his gauntlet.
"Grossssssssssssss!" Elena yelled.
"Let's drive back to town and get some real food."
"Seems to me we work as a team just fine, yo."
Rude couldn't have agreed more, and was just backing out of the parking spot when Elena knocked on the window. "You two take some cookies back. I had extra and they're still warm and moist. You know how fast they dry out when they get old."
"Thanks, Laney."
"Thank you Elena."
They made it two quiet miles down the road before Rude pulled off to the side and both men got out of the car, folding up on the hood in weeping, sobbing, uncontrollable laughter before they could safely go on.
"Oh, Rude, I can't…oh gods…no…"
"I need a minute."
"I know. It's not just the cookies. Well, it is the cookies, especially when Tseng was the only one who ate the last batch, gods how long was it before she figured out…no. Never mind. I lost it when Cloud pulled the driver card. Once, we were in the desert, with Avalanche and my hand to Gaia, he was backing up Barret's jeep. And there was nothing. NOTHING. Just one pole holding up some camo net. And Cid turns to me and says 'Even he can't fuck this up" and about that time we hear this clank noise and be damned if, out of the entire North Corel desert, Cloud Strife hadn't backed into a two inch metal pipe. Cid and I both fell out of the jeep laughing."
"There are people who say you never laugh."
"People say you never talk."
They lay back on the hood again, looking up at the sky. Vincent took a shaky breath and wiped tears out of his eyes. Rude looked over at him and nudged his brass shoe cover. "Want a drink?"
"How fast can you get us back?"
"Hour and a half if we don't do rest stops."
Vincent ducked back into the conference center, and came back out with a fresh cup of coffee. "Let's go. There's this place that has an excellent red blend I like, we can meet the others at Seventh later." He pulled his cloak in after him and slammed the door, fastening his seatbelt as Rude put the car into drive and pulled back onto the highway.
Things were never quite the same again.