For Scarr C, to whom I recently proposed the idea of marriage and by whom I will probably be rejected because of silly things like the idea of being a number of continents away.
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SANDBOX
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"Do you ever get bored?"
She looked up at him. She'd been down on her haunches, drawing ornate floral patterns in the garden sand. Godo seemed to like them – it was one of the few things she did that he did like – and she needed to keep her hands busy, so she resorted to digging in the dirt.
He was sitting propped against the garden wall, legs out in front of him, one dress shoe untied – Reno, that is; not Godo. She was always telling him to tie that damn shoe. He would flail his arms at his foot and say it was too far away, and that was about as far as he ever got. She thought it was infuriating, but she was still half-afraid he would kick her in the jaw if she tried to do it for him.
Then, of course, he'd blame it on a spasm.
Reno was spending a lot of time in Wutai lately, for one reason or another. He alternated between claiming "business" and "great fucking liquor," both of which were probably a little true. Yuffie had seen Rude wandering around town, which led her to suspect business – then again, she'd been seeing Rude wandering around town, which led her to suspect great fucking liquor.
"Is that why you're here?" she asked, brushing sand onto her shorts and dropping onto her ankles. "Because you're bored?"
He squinted into the sky. "I interrogated people for a decade and a half," he said. "I ended up killing most of 'em. You don't get to dodge my questions."
"I trained to be a ninja for eighteen years," she rebuked. "I get to dodge whatever the hell I want." She pitched some sand at him and didn't seem to notice. She was hardly surprised. "Are you bored?" she tried again.
"I," he started, then he paused to smoke, shift, and look her way. "I embody bored. I've been bored for years; I think they told me it was medical at some point. I've been doing the same job for years, the same little trips over and over again. I've been everywhere on the Planet, had a drink of everything I've been offered, been married, stayed widowed. Shit, I've killed people – like, a lotta people. There aren't many places to go after that. But I mean, I'm not restless, so it's not like really being bored; not the way you're bored."
"You think I'm bored."
"You think you're bored. You're drawing little squiggles in the dirt."
She puffed. "Godo likes my little squ –"
"You think you're bored," he repeated. "You're doing things because Godo likes them. I'm sorry, but you're bored."
Wutai afternoons were one of Yuffie's favorite places to be, even if they weren't a place per se. The sun wasn't too hot, and if it was, she could just remember the rivers running through her town and it felt a little cooler. Godo had had the garden shaded at one point, but she could still see the sky from under the mesh canopy; Da Chao smiled brightest in those few hours between lunch and dinner, and after that the sky would rapidly start changing toward nighttime. There was something about the noise of tourism, too, even for part of the royal family; she liked hearing thousands of people being nice to each other because if they didn't, their weekends might fall apart. It was a ruse sometimes, she knew, but if she just thought about how happy everyone was, for whatever reason, it made her grin when she needed to.
They even made Reno a little more tolerable, though if she was going to be honest about it, she didn't have that hard of a time dealing with him. He was brash and rude. He was unclean and his eyes and feet wandered around a lot. But she was a lot of the same person – it had been the reason she hadn't had a lot of play dates when she was a child.
"We're kind of a play date, aren't we, Reno?" she asked the wall behind him, digging her toes into the sand.
He didn't answer for a second, and she met his very puzzled eyes. "Your head's a fucked up piece of property, isn't it?"
"It's better than being bored," she said, sticking her tongue out.
Reno made a noise and stubbed out his cigarette without conviction, slipping the filter into his pocket. He opened his pack for another.
"Gimme one."
Now it was his turn to meet her eyes, perched above her crooked-over body and outstretched arm. Her fingers were tiny, but he knew enough about her to know that small didn't mean weak in this case. They were probably tiny, he thought, because it made it easier to rip someone's throat out and break into houses. "You're kidding," he accused. "You don't smoke."
She grinned. "I've never smoked in front of you. There is a difference."
Reno tossed her a smoke and his lighter, watching to see if he could call her bluff, but she lit it, dragged it, and gave the lighter back like a professional. He made another noise and lit his own, sliding farther down the wall and taking in the sky through the canopy. "You're bored," he insisted again.
She blew a few smoke rings and it ruffled him, because he could never do them. It figured she'd be able to, though. "Sometimes," she said quietly, "I get bored. Other times I think I'll never be bored again. It's not that bad. Life's boredom, isn't it? Don't we live to get comfortable and get jobs and be bored day in and day out and die and be praised for being bored?" She rolled onto the ground, propping her head up on her arm. "Fuck that; I'd rather get an award for running really, really, really fast."
"There are perks to being slow about it," he said. She was surprised by his insight, and asked him how he had thoughts about the meaning of life when it seemed like he didn't have a lot of thoughts at all. "There are perks," he repeated after shooting her a mild look, "to being slow about it."
"Why're you here, Turkey?" she asked, rolling onto her back. She was getting restless again, in all sorts of different ways.
"I don't know the meaning of life," he said. "I just think about it."
She snorted and smiled. "No, you jerk. Why are you here? In Wutai?"
Reno was momentarily taken with the sky, and she had to knock on his shoe and ask him again. He looked at her face for a minute or so, letting a bit of his smoke burn away, and asked, "What are you doing next Tuesday?"
"Tuuuuesday," she said thoughtfully, kicking her feet in big circles through the air. "Tuesday is prayer day in the pagoda, but past that, no plans. Are you asking me on a daaaate?"
"I'm asking you to marry me."
His tone stopped them both. It was too serious for either one's comfort, but he'd forgotten how to tense up at some point over the last decade. She pulled herself into a sitting position and tried to examine his head for damage; all she could see was dirt under his fingernails. "You're asking me to what?"
"To marry me. You're bored," he said definitely, and then: "We're bored. You should marry me."
"You think we should get married because we're bored?"
"I actually think we should get married because Wutai puts you to death for infidelity, and if we get married, eventually you're going to find out that you have these. . .needs." He blinked a few times. "Needs and legs. You've got legs, too."
"You're insufferable."
"You're high-class and you're using big words."
She huffed and rolled the cigarette between two fingers, back and forth. "What makes Prince Charming himself start getting all weird about life and love and marrying people, hmm? What are you doing here, Reno – in Wutai?"
"Look," he said, louder than before, startling her as he stood and brushed the sand from his slacks. "I'm here because you're not doing much with yourself and we want a pretty face on the new roster for the Turks, and I'm sure as hell not supposed to be telling you that. I'm supposed to march in here, give you fancy shit like mastered Materia –"
"Which I would take."
"Like mastered Materia," he repeated, starting to pace. "I'm supposed to wine and dine until you think I'm a big shot and then say, "Shit, isn't this great? Don't you think we're great? Do you know what else would be great? Let's get married – oh, but I'm a Turk and Turks can't marry unless it's to other Turks – but what if you were a Turk; wouldn't that be great?" And here I am because I figured you wouldn't be around, you'd be off flipping off the fucking trees or something, and I could just drink myself into a couple blackouts and go back to Junon and shrug it off. But no."
"Reno," she said, her tone measured. She'd tossed her cigarette over the garden wall a while ago. "Are you, like, in love with me or something?"
He found the sky again and she saw that at the right angle, there were bags under his eyes and his hair was a different color at the roots. A shock of grey was folded under his bangs, and she didn't think it was an accident. "Look, I wear the same shoes every day of the year. I don't have kids and I sure as fuck don't want kids, and I tried being a husband and apparently that didn't work either." She thought she heard a strain in his voice, but it went away when he went on: "I think you'd make a good Turk but gods do I ever know why you wouldn't wanna be a Turk, but the more I sit in this fucking town the more I realize that I'm bored – I'm so goddamn bored. And I've been bored for ten, fifteen years now, being a Turk, and before that I was just bored doing something else, but now my name's got something attached to it, at least a big fucking bank account, and right now it looks like I'm as likely to get mowed down by a truck and then I'll just stop. The whole thing, the whole me, is just gonna stop someday, and goddammit, that pisses me off."
She listened to the sound of the rivers again, and the cackle of the old woman outside the general store. She'd gotten to know Reno a bit in the past few weeks, but not this Reno.
"Someone," he said, "should at least get all my gil, otherwise they're gonna use it to start another war."
She watched him and he sat down again, but wouldn't look her in the face. "I don't exactly play well with others. Even Rude's gonna go away sooner or later, probably marry himself off to 'lena like she wants, then it's just me and some rookies and I get to be bored doing that. That bugs me, too. Everybody else has got something going, something that's gonna get 'em outta the company sooner or later, but I'm just chasing my tail because I don't know what else to do."
She had spent a lot of time with him lately, she reflected, and knew when he was getting serious. His Mideelan drawl came back just slightly; his words got a little shorter; he went back to a point in his life before all this protection, physical or otherwise.
"Shit, the suit's yours if you want it, and you probably don't. But if you're just gonna sit here and wait to doodle in the dirt, at least come to Midgar and keep me company or something. Come make it interesting, or at least throw me a funeral when the truck mows me down."
She was still listening to her town while she listened to him. The few thousand people, the gongs that roused her for breakfast every morning, the trees she had been flipping off of a few days ago, the small bit of family she had here that understood her enough to let her go when she needed to go. She was going to rule this place someday, but by the looks of things, that wouldn't be any time soon. Godo was still wrestling foreign leaders for patches of land. And Reno had a point; what was she supposed to do until Godo kicked the bucket – stand by and wait? It seemed like that was the royal plan for her, and she wasn't loving the sound of it all of a sudden.
As impossible as it was, Reno was making a lot of sense – but she'd been taking her time and he was making for the door at this point, slinging his pack over one shoulder.
"Wait," she said, and he turned around, bags still hanging under his eyes, grey still under his red. He was twirling another cigarette between his fingers, and she wondered how many other people had seen him this defeated, this rushed. "I know you're an insufferable ass, and I know the rest of ShinRa sure isn't any better. But I'm bored here and I'm gonna come with you because I miss that crummy city, and if I do that I may as well make some dough from it, so sign me up for a suit."
There was a pause.
"Seriously."
"I can't," he said suddenly, and she believed him. "I forgot. There's some conflict of interest thing – you're the heir to Wutai, we're ShinRa. There's some whole political thing to it; I don't know what it is, but we can't hire royal bloodline, I just rem –"
"So fuck the conflict of interest," she said. "Let's get hitched. Then they have to make me a Turk, right? It's that or an arranged marriage here, and really, that's gross. At least you've got balls."
The silence was even longer this time. There was something so detached about the way they were going about it, this small show of affection for each other, and yet it was as close as they were ever going to get to admitting it, and they both knew it. She was still fiddling with grains of sand between her fingers, cocking her head to one side. He was stopped by the door, standing like a statue the way he'd been taught in the SOLDIER barracks. There were no birds to chirp since Meteor had come and gone, but if there had been, it seemed like they might've paused to watch, too.
"You're serious," he said, and it was the first time she'd seen him surprised. "You're settling for a Turk."
"Well, kind of, if it even counts." And then she was Yuffie again. "Besides, it's better than being bored, and like you said, I'm getting goddamn bored."
She drew herself up and started swinging her legs around again, flailing her arms in some childlike ballet.
He gave her one last chance, and the truest one of all.
"Godo's gonna shoot you."
She grinned, not missing a beat. "I know. Like I said, I was getting bored."