Author's Notes: OMG, I wrote something! Yes, uh... because there is a sad lack of Reffie out there, I wrote this for the hell of it. Shout-out to Ealinesse (go read her stuff!) kthxbai!
Royal FlushThe room exemplified a prison cell so much that symbolism hid its face and wept for shame. The walls, large rectangular blocks, were once plastered white; they now were covered by the same grey filth that seemed to hang in the air here. The standard excuse for a living space was on the right: a cot, a toilet, a sink, a miniscule window, and a not particularly good-smelling convict, all behind a set of depressingly sturdy iron bars. To the left, below a single flickering light bulb dangling from a splintery wire, was one wooden table, one droning radio, two bored individuals, and fifty-two cards.
The first guard, a slight woman, paused in her shuffling of the cards to glance at the prisoner over her shoulder. Still asleep. She gave a deep sigh, and, considering the aforementioned grey filth, instantly regretted it.
"Oh Gawd," she coughed, wincing. The other figure lifted a slender scarlet eyebrow. "Grossness..."
"Just cut the deck, Yuff." Yuffie flicked her eyes toward the speaker and, with an exaggerated roll of them, complied with his wishes.
"Sure thing, your Majesty." Reno smirked as he picked up his hand.
"Thank you, peasant."
He was too busy studying his hand to know for sure, but he had the distinct impression that his temporary partner had just either made a childish face or a rather rude gesture in his direction. Hmm. Two pair and the Queen of Clubs. Not a bad hand at all. Preparing his best poker face, he looked up over his cards at Yuffie. She was scowling at her hand, muttering darkly. He had to bite his lip to keep his composure.
Yuffie Kisaragi was ridiculously bad at poker.
It was sad, really. They'd played about seven hands, and each one Yuffie had lost miserably. If he'd had any semblance of mercy in his heart, he would have suggested they play a different game -Go Fish had been Yuffie's predictable request. ("But I'm good at it!") But Reno, as the world knew well, was a merciless, heartless bastard. And this particular bastard liked playing poker almost as much as he liked winning at it.
Unfortunately, amongst his usual close-knit but limited set of friends, either activity was a rarity for him. He could remember a time when many an evening was spent in a seedy bar in Midgar or Junon, hunched over a table with Tseng and Rude. He had always liked poker, but compared to the other two Turks, he had always... How shall we put this elegantly?
Sucked. Yeah, sucked works great here.
It was that very suckage that had lead to his downfall from poker-dom. Time and time again, his bluffs would be called. He hadn't been sure what had always given them away until Rude had informed him that his eyebrow always twitched slightly. Of course, that didn't really help matters any. Just how the hell was he supposed to control an involuntary response? And now that he was aware of it, the scarlet-haired Turk was unable to do anything to stop it short of slamming his hand against his temple... Which he often reflexively did, much to the amusement of his partners, which of course only added insult to injury, and Reno had never been a particularly gracious loser in the first place, and...
By the time Elena joined the team, it hadn't taken her long to learn just not to ask about poker night.
But despite the oversized blue suit which she wore like a tent, Yuffie Kisaragi was not a Turk. Not in Reno's book, anyway. Then again, one of her more annoying qualities was that he was unable to put his finger on what, exactly, she was. He'd start with a basic aspect of her person -the fact she was, technically, a princess, for example. Now, with things like "princess", certain things are expected, and certain others are, well, just not. Even after it had been well established that the heiress to the Kisaragi Dynasty was not the type to prance about in purple evening gowns while reciting poetry, just about the last thing he, or anyone else, had expected her to do was sign up to work with Shinra -and for a five-year contract, at that. He'd asked her once, casually, what the flying fuck had possessed her to make the extremely bizarre career choice. Immediately, the young ninja had launched into a passionate speech about "self-betterment" and needing to "expand her horizons," because she was going to be the"freaking Empress," and that Shinra was the "ideal location," due to its "prominence in world trade," and that, furthermore, although he was "far too idiotic to realize it," the Turks were the "perfect organization due to the social-martial relationship within the position" and blah blah blah blah blah...
Well, it had been a weird-as-hell response, but Reno really couldn't mark it off as total bullshit, as Yuffie had at least, apparently, had some kind of incentive to increase her vocabulary substantially over the past four years. But for some reason that was obnoxiously difficult to explain, Reno found himself curious as to whether she had expressed her true motives. So, a few weeks later, he asked her again -only this time when Yuffie had, by his judgment, a tad too much blood in her alcohol system.
"Oh, I dunno," she'd replied vaguely, with a dismissive wave of her hand. "I just kinda felt like it or whatever."
Priceless. Still, he doubted she'd just make such a choice... just like that. Or would she? It was, he mentally reiterated, one of Kisaragi's most annoying qualities, being unpredictable.
And oddly, it was the one that made her most endearing. Or at least, he quickly amended, tolerable.
In any event, Yuffie was not a Turk, in his less-than-humble opinion. Much more importantly, she was not Tseng, nor was she Rude, which meant he was finally able to play his favorite card game again on a semi-regular basis. He watched her out of the corner of his eye as she chewed on her lip indecisively, and grinned despite himself. To Yuffie, he was a freaking poker god. And He knew He was about to hear a plea from the mortal.
"Look, Reno," her plaintive argument began. Reno quickly forced the smile from his face. "Can't I just, um, maybe put these cards back?" The older Turk found Yuffie's expression centered around a nervous, blindingly white grin. He scoffed.
"Oh c'mon, brat. At least try to fool me into thinking you have a good hand." Yuffie narrowed her eyes and again opened her mouth, but he quickly raised a hand to silence her. "That is, after all... the point of poker," he drawled expertly, his eyes closing and his lips curling into the slightest but smuggest of smirks as the statement rolled off of them. He waited for Yuffie's comeback. However, after a moment of nothing but an instrumental intro to a song on the radio, it became apparent that no such reply was forthcoming, and thus it was with a slight twinge of apprehension that Reno opened an unnaturally blue eye.
And swore.
"Fuck, Yuffie!"
It was precisely at this moment that one Mr. Quentin A. Schneeberg, better known as the suave-but-rather-obviously-not-quite-suave-enough bank robber "Blood Fury", chose to open his beady little eyes. Should he have chosen to tilt his head slightly to the left on his pillow, he would have seen all 5'3" of Grade A Ninja balanced like a seesaw over the card table on one set of knuckles. Her head was positioned dangerously close to the cards of her companion, said redhead wearing an expression that managed to somehow be disturbed, incredulous, and pissed off all at once. Reno was in a balancing act of his own, his weight precariously rocked back on the two hind legs of his chair, eager to keep himself (and his hand) as far away from the deranged Wutaian as possible. However, Mr. Schneeberg had a rather nasty headache (which he'd received courtesy of a female officer, none-too-amused by his usage of the term "D-cuffs"), so he instead promptly shut his eyes and resumed slumber.
It was probably for the best.
Aside from the continued radio-drone (well, more of a high-pitched whine at this point), a moment of silence followed; eventually it was broken by a soft, nervous giggle. Meanwhile, Reno's eyebrow had traveled halfway up his forehead.
Slowly, with as much tact as she could hope to muster, Yuffie lowered herself back into her chair, sliding her cards (which she had carefully placed face-down) toward her. A slight thump as Reno's chair resumed quadruped status. But it was then that his brain was overpowered by asinine lyrics, and he could not keep an incredulous ear from the radio:
"I am the eggman! They are the eggmen! I am the wal-"
Click.
Yuffie sat with her hand still pointing the dial to "off" for a moment, her lip curled in disgust as she stared at the offending appliance. Anything impish about her had vanished, although Reno couldn't help (nor did he really try to help) smirking a little as he easily pictured her as more of a perturbed gremlin.
He swore he saw her twitch slightly as she said, "I hate that freaking song." He blinked, and his smirk turned into a Cheshire-like grin as she tossed five gil into the pot.
Several minutes later, Reno found himself enjoying what was certainly their most interesting hand of the morning. Although, he thought with a glint in his eyes, she could really do with raising more than one gil at a time. Apparently, Yuffie had taken him up on his invitation to at least attempt to bluff, but of course, like all other aspects of the game, she was rather bad at it. His eyes sparkled with mirth as he watched hers, darting back and forth, squirrel-like, as she proceeded with her ante.
A slow grin again crept across his features.
"Um, Reno?"
You sure have been smiling a lot lately, Reno...
"Hey, Turkey!" Reno forced his eyes back into his skull and not so much looked at as actually saw Yuffie, drumming long, slender fingers irately on the tabletop. "It's your ante. Or have you realized that you really wanna fold?" She was, he could tell, attempting to look confident -and suddenly doing a halfway decent job at it, he noted.
"Y've gotta try harder than that, kid," he sighed with an overly solemn shake of his head.
"Hey, never underestimate the power of suggestion. Now ya gonna ante or what?"
Reno smiled, faintly, and Yuffie's ninja senses were screaming that it was probably not for any reason she would be particularly pleased about. He took a large fistful of coins, and she watched as his thumb shelled them out of a calloused hand, one by one. The man's smile grew until it was as blatant as his burning hair, a full-fledged predatory beam.
Yuffie could only gawk for a moment. Reno had just put down one hundred gil! Not that it was a lot in the real world, but seeing as their max bet so far had been about ten... That was more than the poker-gil she'd set aside. With a sigh, she reached into her wallet and pulled out a 100-gil note. The ninja-turned-Turk stared at it mournfully.
"Aww, c'mon Yuffles. Don't quit now," he chided in a baby-voice. Without missing a beat, Yuffie chucked a nickel at him, and smiled in satisfaction as it bounced off of his nose and into the pot.
"Raise you five then," she chirped merrily as she slapped the bill down next to the pile. "And," she continued, glancing at her watch, "if I win, you're buying lunch."
Reno laughed. "Babe, if you win, I'll buy lunch for the fucking week." She arched an ebony eyebrow.
"Shake on it?"
"Boy Scout's honor," he replied, giving a mock-salute with one hand and gripping hers firmly with the other. He noticed she was shaking... "OK, what the hell's so funny?" he demanded, suddenly knowing the answer just before the question had flown from his lips.
"Haha... Boy Scout..."
He grumbled lowly as he groped in his breast pocket for a cigarette, then allowed it to hang loosely from his lips as he searched for a lighter. However, by the time his fingers had closed around said lighter, said cigarette lay in the grasp of unsaid ninja master.
"That'll kill ya, y'know."
"I'm not the one who should be worrying about being dead," he replied levelly through gritted teeth.
"Eheheheh..."
Another silence ensued for a few, precious, brief seconds, broken this time only by the clinking of gil as it was added to the pile. Of course, with Yuffie Kisaragi around, silence could only last for so long.
"Hey Reno?"
"What?" he growled.
"Were you ever a Boy Scout?" Of all the pointless... Still, he answered.
"Yeah..." A memory that had not crossed his consciousness for more than fifteen years suddenly leapt forth. "I got kicked out though." Yuffie's curiosity overpowered her urge to laugh again at imagining Reno in the little blue uniform, and instead settled for a small grin.
"It doesn't surprise me -what didja do, set the bathroom on fire?" Reno matched Yuffie's expression with a wry smirk of his own.
"Insubordination."
"In Boy Scouts?!" Reno shook his head as he dumped two-hundred-and-fifty-six gil into the increasingly large pile at the table's center. He wondered just how high their bets were going to go. He knew neither of them could possibly be that confident about their hand; in fact, if he had been playing anyone but Yuffie, he would have folded a long time ago. He wasn't sure if it was because he knew she couldn't possibly have a good hand, or if it was because he refused to surrender to her. They were both stubborn like that; he had a feeling that he was going to have to end this hand soon, or it would go on forever. Then again, they both seemed to be enjoying keeping it going for no real reason...
"I can imagine that, you know." The redhead blinked.
"Imagine what?" Yuffie's grin widened.
"Imagine a little pint-sized Reno sticking out his tongue at his scoutmaster... maybe flipping him off or something." She tucked a strand of dark brown hair behind an ear and sniggered before continuing. "Aaah, you must've been so precious, Turkey."
"Just shove it," he muttered as he rubbed at his left cheek absently.
"You know, you always do that."
"Do what?"
"Rub at those scars when you get nervous," she replied with a grin.
"I am not nervous," he spat. He felt himself twitching as elfin giggling reached his ears and about three hundred gil reached the pot. He'd been right; he was going to end this hand. "You're bluffing, brat." He slammed his hand face-up on the tabletop. Yuffie furrowed her brows and slowly revealed hers. Reno could only stare as she flipped the cards over, one by one.
7, 7, 7. Queen, Queen. Full house. He faintly registered Yuffie's crow of triumph, but all that mattered was the deafening roar of gil against gil as it slid across the table away from him. He'd lost. To Yuffie. She hadn't been bluffing after all -he'd been had! What the hell had he been so confident about, anyway? The fact she'd been easy to read for the first seven hands? And, so, when she'd seemed so worried at first about her hand... And had only done a good job of looking confident when he suggested she bluff...
"Oi, Turks." A large man in a warden's outfit had appeared in the doorway. "Yer good ta go fer lunch. We'll take it from here."
It struck him, suddenly, that maybe everything she did did not depend on him.
"Thanks," Yuffie smiled, collecting both her coat and her massive pile of gil. Reno muttered slightly, gathering the cards and stuffing them haphazardly back into the pack as he stood up beside her. Oh, she was unpredictable all right...
"Ready to go?" she chirped, after somehow managing to cram all of the gil into her various pockets. Reno flashed a five-star smile, slinging an arm about her shoulders as they headed out the door.
"I'm starting to wonder..." he said as the door closed behind them, leaving Mr. Schneeberg alone with Mr. Burly Warden Man.
"You're being awfully friendly," Yuffie said brightly as they rounded a corner. He smiled right at her, pleasantly. Suddenly, she ducked out of his embrace and shoved him lightly against a wall. "But you're still buying lunch this week..."
Dammit.
fin