A quick note about timelines: this is set somewhere before Crisis Core and the main game. Certain aspects of canon outside of the main game are accepted and used, while some are discarded or ignored (Elena's origins, for example). Some of this is stylistic; some of this is because aspects of the compilation make no fucking sense. I guess this technically makes this an AU?
Warning for somewhat graphic depictions of violence and vague references to sex in this chapter. It's the Turks, so hopefully nobody is too taken aback.
A special thank you to Licoriceallsorts on AO3, who I sincerely hope actually likes licorice, the superior chewy candy. Your kind words encouraged me a great deal!
On Fanfiction dot Net, I'm having a really, really hard time with formatting, and I hate it.
Elena's mouth was a thin line when Reno handed her a helmet. They were standing in the parking garage under HQ on the first level, where stark, burning sun leaked in in slatted stripes. They were in the shade, but Elena was looking out over the visible rooftops stretched out below Shinra, looking at the splatters of green roof gardens and dollops of black water tanks. They were standing next to their departmental parking spots, Reno squinting at her like a cat anticipating getting sprayed with water and not caring.
"You know I hate riding in the city."
"Just because the cops know you by name, baby. You probably have more tickets pending than I do." She quirked an eyebrow. Reno grinned and shrugged. "Okay, maybe more?"
"My dad always gets me off," she said airily in that way she knew Reno hated.
"You should talk to a psychiatrist about that, bud, that's out of my depth."
"Oh, my, GOD-" Elena's voice rose with each word, crackling with rage on the last.
When Tseng came down to the garage later that day, he found a blood splatter next to the beater car they use for under-Plate pickups. He spent a good minute staring at it before he decided it was probably Reno's. The new dent in the fender confirmed it- there were a few fluorescent hairs caught in the seam of the metal from where it got patched the last time it got shot up. There was a tacky drip of blood next to the hair, too, cooking slowly into the metal in the shimmering sun.
Tseng paced around it a little more, looking the thing over, before snatching the hairs out but leaving the sticky drop of blood. Looked better that way, he decided, sliding into the driver's seat and starting the car. It roared to life unwillingly, giving a faint whine as it settled into an idle. Tseng gave the dirty dashboard a light pat.
Elena was getting even better at her disguise ops. He'd have to commend her.
"Didn't have to do me that hard, 'Lena." Reno had been a big baby the whole day and Elena was about ready to strangle him. Lovingly.
"You asked for it, Reno. And you know I'm all about giving people what they want." He smiled at her sweetly and fondly when she said that. Caught in the flood of some unnamable emotion very close to horror, Elena shoved his gil aside and handed the counter girl her card.
"Hey, I said I'd pay." He licked at his iced custard mildly, eyebrow quirking up. Elena found herself thinking back to her daily 'liar lessons' with Tseng before sliding back further, to her step-mother (number one) giving her an open look of pity when she caught Elena (age eight) trying on her mother's wedding dress. "I can pay."
"I wanted to," she said, flicking her hair and neatly writing in a tip to the cashier girl before taking her own custard and walking out onto the street, leaving Reno to snag her card.
"Well," Reno slunk up to her side, and if Elena focused she could feel his fingers deftly sliding her card back into her pocket, but only barely, "I guess you gotta' give yourself what you want now and then too."
They licked at their cones in silence while waiting for the walk signal to switch from a puffing bomb. When light flickered they started to cross, blending in with all the other lunchtime salaryfolk flooding the streets. Elena eyed some jewelry thoughtfully, made a face at a pair of shoes, and contemplated tackling a man wearing a tie she needed for Rude. She settled for snapping a picture with her phone from a distance and sending it out to her college clique's group chat. One of them would know the designer, probably personally. Planet knows they had more time to waste than her these days.
They'd been walking in silence for a long while by the time she noticed it. Elena sighed softly, curled her lip thoughtfully, looked over at Reno from the corner of her eye. Cautiously.
He was focused on his custard entirely, cracking the cone in a methodical, calculated manner that seemed at odds with how he presented himself. Lies, Elena, knew: Reno was as tactical and ordered as Tseng, but in an entirely different way.
A store door jingled open behind them, sending a wash of cool air conditioning to touch their ankles like a desperate ghost. "Is your head okay?" She asked, finally, and hastily looked down to her own cone to make sure the custard wasn't melting all over her hand.
"It's fine, 'Lena. You healed it up just fine." Reno gave her a sideways look, like a dog who'd been kicked while eating handfed treats one time too many. He shifted the parcel they'd gotten in his hands. The plain brown paper crinkled a little. They started down a small side street, Reno sliding into his usual slouch.
"I can't give you a brain aneurysm the week before your big joint mission with Tseng," Elena said by way of explanation. It sounded like a bad lie to her ears, and clearly Reno felt the same, because he snorted and cracked the tip of his cone between his teeth. The dog had gotten the bone, seemed like.
"He say it was gonna' be a week before? I don't know about that. Still haven't gotten a letter back."
"What, a letter like a letter letter?" Elena had to wonder what Reno's handwriting was like. She assumed bad, but she'd made a lot of stupid assumptions about Reno that he'd been more than happy to break for her. Usually in the most humiliating way possible.
"Yeah," Reno groused, and for a second she thought it was about it being a real honest-to-Planet paper letter with ink and glue, but nope: "Honestly, 'Lena, I kind of thought you of all people wouldn't get weird about it being a physical letter. Your family puts out all kinds of letters."
"Those are for parties, though." Elena nibbled on the end of her cone, turning left into an even smaller alley. "They're literally just to show off. And they get them done by the printers."
Reno gave her a doubtful look, his eyes cat-slit narrow again. "Hang on, I've seen those things, they've got fucking signatures in there."
"They print those too, Reno!" Elena turned on her heel and slammed the point of her cone into the eye socket of the man who had been creeping up on her. He screamed, clawing at her, but she grabbed at his throat and pulled the gun at his side out of its holster, shooting him in the thigh, then the chest. Reno was dealing with another person, a mountain of a guy with a huge puff of hair resembling a cactus. He slapped the guy across the face with his still-charging mag-rod, jammed it into the staggering man's throat, and fought the man's spasms in order to keep the rod in place. The guy started to steam, foam erupting from his mouth.
"One, roof!" Elena turned her gaze upwards, saw somebody aiming for her, and fired the taken gun. "Nice one," Reno said as the main on the roof slumped down, half his head missing.
"Ifrit," Elena looked down at the stolen gun. "I'm keeping this thing. It has some real fucking punch." Its owner, lying in a rapidly-growing pool of his own blood, watched them with terrified, wide eyes. Well- Elena corrected herself- a terrified, wide eye.
Reno removed his mag-rod from his would-be assasin, pulling out his own gun to shoot the guy once between the eyes. "You wanna' question your guy or call it closed?"
"Please," he choked out, reaching up a shaking hand to her pantsuit. "Please, I gotta'- I got a family, my wife, she's gonna'…"
He was crying, shaking, dying. Elena gestured to the package Reno was carrying.
"Was it about that?" The man nodded as much as he could.
"Damn dude, you should be counting your lucky stars. She could have shot you a whole bunch a'other places." Reno leered at the guy. He looked too terrified for the leer to take effect, which dampened Reno's mood a little.
"Tell your boss we have it. That's the end of it." Elena felt powerful like this, which was, she supposed, the normal response to literally having somebody's life in your hands. "If you cross us again, you're going to find yourself missing a few more eyes." She didn't even care that she was going to have to use the special Shinra dry cleaner to clean up all this blood from her suit. Not right now, anyway.
"Uh," said Reno, holding up two fingers and folding down one. "He's only got one, baby."
Elena cast a dismissive Cure on the man, just enough to prevent his immediate, looming death, tucked her new gun away, and walked over to where the body on the roof was dangling. She started climbing up on a trash can to reach it.
"He said he had a wife, didn't he?"
Reno whistled in response. The guy on the ground started sobbing.
"Mission successful," Elena said with a cool sternness, at the same time Reno tossed the now-grubby package onto Rude's desk. It had taken some time to dispose of the bodies- couldn't just leave those for cops or MPs to find, it was bad form. Reno had soothed Elena's raging temper a little by promising to get Tseng to approve the dry cleaning as a business expense.
"Hm," Rude said, peeling open the side of the package to look in. "Robotics parts?"
"Some kind of old project developed by Gast, I guess." Reno sat down on Rude's desk. Elena shuffled in place, warring with herself. Rude lifted the flap of the package towards her, and she tried not to look too eager as she leaned in to peer into the darkness.
"Is that a… metal spine?" She fished it out with two fingers, gingerly, and dangled it in front of her like it was raw meat. Reno took the package and started peeling out other parts. They all looked reasonably familiar. Rude made an appreciative face, which consisted of a smooth eyebrow raise and then an equally smooth eyebrow lowering. "It's pretty small. Long though."
"Looks like. Cat sized?" They all looked down at the parts for a moment, puzzled silence filling the air. Rude reached out and arranged the parts on his desk in a configuration that did, indeed, look like some kind of robot cat skeleton, albeit one that seemed to be missing an important majority of its parts.
"I sure hope it was worth murdering two people," Elena said, and wondered what on earth she'd been thinking with that cone maneuver. It made her shimmy a little inside in discomfort. Her father had told her she was making a life-altering choice, joining the Turks, that it was going to take her and chew up what was inside and leave her something else entirely, like an intact shell over pulped meat. Something bloody wearing his daughter's skin, he'd said, and Elena remembered mocking him about that, asking if he was planning on a larger-scale body-snatcher invasion any time soon. Mostly, she agreed with him, though she wasn't about to admit it. Her feelings on it were just… considerably more positive.
This morning, the way she'd half-blinded a man and killed another without even thinking, was…. Maybe not one of those times? She didn't know. She had made a choice, anyway, and she couldn't change it now. Nobody left the Turks because they felt a little wiggly inside from a morning of murder and torture. Or, more accurately: nobody left alive.
She supposed she should have felt afraid, knowing that she was in deep. Instead, all she felt was a sense of comfort. She was entangled, but that entanglement came with closeness, with a sense of camaraderie. A sense, in a particular manner, of intimacy, whether she liked it or not. She liked it.
"Eh," Reno said. "They'd have killed us. Speaking of which, damn, that wife threat was so smooth." Elena smiled lightly in response, felt bad about it, didn't. "He's going to be pissing on his own leg for years about that one. Fuck, I might even be!"
"Wife threat?" Rude chimed in, already pulling a foam-lined box from one of his desk drawers. He must have been prepared. Reno started enthusiastically relaying their 'dramatic battle,' leaving Elena to look at the parts once more. Her phone buzzed, and she realized the girls must have figured out the tie.
Turning her attention elsewhere, Elena wandered off, leaving Reno to regale Rude with their exploits as loudly and with as much embellishment as he could. She flicked her phone into her small breast pocket, planning to examine what her girls had brought her.
She flicked a glance back in the doorway, taking a mental snapshot as she went: Rude flexing his eyebrows with appropriate awe as each new development in the story came to light. His hands, beautiful and long-fingered, at odds with his fighting style, delicately placing each component in the foam-lined box just so. The tip of an immaculately shined shoe visible from under his desk, just under the dark wood.
Reno, frozen in a laugh, teeth bared, eyes bright, hands reaching out wildly as if to strangle a monster in front of him. His ponytail slinking around his shoulder, under his lapel and out again like a snake made of molten glass. His body turned to Rude, his shoes scuffed, his jacket askew, his dress shirt unbuttoned, his tie missing. A shot of light against his chest, lined up like a sniper laser. His eyes tracking Elena, a subtle flick of green that nobody else notices.
He looked sad, Elena thought as she pulled the door shut. But, maybe he always had, and she'd just never put the word to it before.
Maybe they were all sad.
Her phone buzzed again, and she flicked her fingers to it. Tseng nodded to Elena, approaching down the hall from his office. Almost guiltily, she flicked her fingers away from her breast pocket.
"Elena," he said, and she felt the little swoop in her stomach that she sincerely hoped he would never, ever know about. She might have needed lessons on how to convince people of facts, but lying about how she felt was different. She'd been lying to men about her feelings since long before she could put words to the why of it.
"Sir," she replied cheerily, "Mission accomplished. Rude is boxing up the parts now."
Tseng nodded at her gracefully, touching her elbow unthinkingly as he slid by her to go into the main room his Turks all shared as an office-cum-den. He did things like that, touching elbows to go around, bracing shoulders to pass behind. Reno said it was to make people think he always announced his movements. Rude said he'd probably worked in a kitchen in college.
"I presumed," he said, pausing in the doorway, and Elena felt painfully, horrifyingly pleased by how good his assumption of success felt. "Heading out, I take it?"
"Yes, sir. Unless there's anything else today…?" She smiled, felt pious even as she hoped, very sincerely, that the answer was no. Tseng was devastatingly handsome and a powerful presence and upsettingly attractive to her in ways she didn't always enjoy.
Right now she didn't give a Zolom's ass. She wanted wine and a shower and to send for a disturbingly large amount of Wutaian food that would prompt her usual place to send up two sets of chopsticks instead of one. Her frankly mundane daddy issues could be unpacked another day, probably with Reno over some new bitter ale from Gongaga.
"No need," he said, flicking his head in a quick shake.
"Sir," Elena said, gratefully, and stepped away to gather her things, to gather her mind, before she descended back into the mess of people getting off work in Midgar below the tower.
Forget two sets of chopsticks. She was going to aim for three.
" 'Lo?"
"Hey 'Lena," said Reno into her ear, and Elena stared fixedly at the ceiling.
"Are you drunk?"
"No," Reno said, drunkenly.
"Why are you calling me?"
"Wanna' come over and watch the version of Loveless where everybody is a naked dude?" Elena was actually somewhat tempted. Her Thundr date, picked like a doll from a catalog, peeked up at her from between her legs. He was cute, with big blue eyes and floppy blonde bangs. He looked nothing like anybody she worked with, which was the main draw if she was honest.
"I'm a little busy right now." Her date gave her what he probably thought was a devilish grin and went back to work on her. He'd been trying to give her oral, but it felt more like he was rummaging through a sale bin of old records.
"Not too busy to open the phone," Creaked Reno into her ear, and she snorted.
"Open? What the fuck, do you think I have a flip phone?"
"Who is that?" groused her date, pulling away from his bargain basement motions.
"Coworker," Elena said, and when he gave her a slanty, irritated look at odds with his squeaky-clean aesthetic, she added, "a friend."
"He wanna come over too?" Reno mumbled, a sound not at odds with his normally somewhat-disheveled aesthetic.
"No," said Elena, pushing the guy's head away from her crotch. "We're done here."
"Hey, wait," said her date, at the same time Elena said, "I fed you, you owe me."
"Damn, 'Lena," Reno purred into her ear. "Normally that's his line."
"I know. That's why I buy dinner."
Another triple order of Wutaian later (Southern style this time, all burning spice and brined seafood), Reno was pillowed on Elena's shoulder, being lulled to sleep by Poppy Stop seducing the Prince of the Western Ice. Elena had seen a lot of versions of Loveless, but this one was probably her favorite. It wasn't just because it was hilarious, or because it was hot. It wasn't even because it was Reno's only copy, though that helped.
She remembered the first night she got the news that she'd been accepted into the Turks as a trainee. Reno and Rude had dragged her out to go bar hopping, catching her in the middle of a phone call with her father. Considering they'd been having a screaming match, the interruption had been… well, initially, okay, unwelcome. Reno had snatched her phone away and hung up on her father, and Rude had wrapped a big, solid arm around her shoulder and steered her out of the parking lot.
'You're a Turk now, Elena. Like, okay, a baby Turk, but a Turk.' Rude had agreed with a nod while Reno made a weird, tongue-sticking-out snarl at her. 'Daddy's got no jurisdiction here.'
So they went out, and they got. Drunk? No. Hammered? Not really. Completely, totally, utterly destroyed?
No, none of that. They went out and Reno and Rude taught her how to drink without drinking. Lesson number one, they said, and Elena found herself so wrapped up in it that she didn't even realize she'd forgotten about anything until it was 3am and she was beating the shit out of some guy who had tried to roofie Reno. Lesson number two, Rude had said, and Reno slunk out of an alley splattered in blood with suspicious silence dogging at his heels.
By the time they got around to collapsing on Reno's weird squashy couch that night, Elena had climbed up to lesson fifteen. They had all piled up together, showering one by one, and then they settled on that weird-ass couch and watched a porno with a plot. Elena, still shivering with the latent shock of what they'd gotten up to that night, was put between Rude and Reno. They'd fallen asleep that way, rolled into work together the next day, left work that day bickering about where to go for dinner.
Elena combed her hand through Reno's hair. He stirred, looked at her bleary-eyed. There were a lot of empty beer bottles lined up on his kitchen counter, and only a few of them were from Elena's efforts.
"Tseng told us about your mom."
"Hn," he said, and though he didn't move, she could tell he was instantly, immediately awake.
"Why didn't you say anything?"
Reno was silent. Elena struggled to stay silent herself. Lesson number fifty-three: let the other person talk first.
"… Felt shitty," he finally admitted, turning so that his lips were millimeters from her neck. She could feel the heat, the wet of his breath. "With your mom, and with Rude."
Rude had a lot of extended family, but no father, no mother. She'd killed herself, that was all Elena knew. It was all Reno knew, or so he said, but even that was almost too much to know. Elena's father was on stepmother seven and her mother and father were locked in an eternal legal battle over their various finances. Elena saw her mother sometimes. She saw some of her various stepmothers more and had a better time when she did.
"That doesn't make any sense," Elena said to him. He stayed silent, but she felt his arms slide up slowly, like he was nervous on their squashy couch with their favorite porno with a plot, filled up with takeout and half-asleep on her shoulder. He locked his arms around her waist and tucked his face into the hollow of her neck. Everything was slow, slow, like he'd been hit with a weak status and was trying to work through it. She held still.
"Nothing makes sense," Reno said to the soft skin of her neck. He was whispering.
"Reno," Elena said, petting him some more. "Nothing has to make sense. Some things are just fucking shitty."
He chuckled once into her hair, then again. The laugh grew inside of him until he was sliding to the floor, boneless, belly heaving with rocking, sobbing laughter.
"Goddamn, 'Lena." She prodded him with a foot, making a face like he was dog shit. He grinned at her, all teeth and relief. "Teach me some of your fucking lessons, girl."
"I can't," she said soberly, and hastened on when his expression slid back into seriousness for a second, "your hair is just plain the wrong shade for your complexion, and I can't move on until we fix that big fucking mess." He gave her a warm, satiated look. "Let's call Rude over and start the movie over. There's still a shitton of food here."
"Okay," Reno said, and promptly fell asleep on the floor.
Reno sat up with a little snuffle. Elena had put a pillow under his head and a blanket over him sometime in the night, which was nice of her. He'd gotten all weird on her last night, too much to drink and not enough water, and she'd put a blanket over his ass. What a girl.
He picked up a random carton from the edge of his coffee table and started eating without checking what was inside. His eyes roved around the apartment, taking stock.
Elena was asleep on the couch, hair messy but pretty that way. She hadn't cleaned her makeup off before she went to sleep, so it was a little smeary. She'd probably bitch when she woke up, but he couldn't bring himself to mind. He was used to her steady low-grade irritation, found it comforting at certain points. She was the kind of woman he always figured he'd look at from a distance but never touch, if he was honest, but here she was, up close and personal. She was tidy and well-put-together, always-on and bleedingly wealthy and a big fucking contradiction. He felt bad for her dates most of the time, though usually for a different reason each time. Wasn't too easy to measure up to the complete ideal of Tseng, he figured.
Chewing thoughtfully on a water mandrake sliver from his mystery container, Reno stood and wandered over to look down at the street. The postman was out, meandering from building to building, the red pom-pom on his hat bobbling as he shoved rolls of paper into increasingly smaller mail slots. Poor bastard was probably delivering a ratio of something like a million sale flyers to one personal letter. Chomping contentedly on a shrimp, Reno reflected on the futility of delivering things nobody wanted, sent from people who didn't care if they got there. There was something in the futility of it that cheered him, and he watched the mailman do his rounds with a renewed level of interest.
The mailman stopped in front of his building, looked up, looked down, and started to rummage in his mail bag. Reno sighed, realizing he was going to have to actually recycle the flyers instead of chucking them into the trash like he normally did. If Elena saw him trash paper she would never let him forget it. Sometimes her being a pain in the ass was actually a pain in the ass. Rude usually just grabbed the papers and recycled them himself when he was here, fixing Reno with a stern stare that he could feel even through his sunglasses. If he-
"Hey," Reno said, forgetting that it was so early it was still velvet-dark, forgetting that Elena was a light sleeper, forgetting that he was eating seafood that had been sitting at room temperature for hours and hours. "Hey!"
Elena stirred on the couch, snarling, but Reno was already out the door, sprinting down the stairs, flight after flight until he was bursting out the front door, heedless of how loud he was. The mailman didn't even bat an eye at a disheveled dude in tiny boxers bursting out of an old, sketchy-ass apartment building. He was clearly an old hand at delivering mail in Midgar.
"Letter for the top floor," the guy said, and resolutely shoved a brown-paper envelope into Reno's mailbox slot.
Unbelievable. Un-be-fucking-lievable. He had to go back up and get his mailbox key.
"Couldn't you have just handed it to me?" Reno shouted after him, frustrated.
"Nope," said the guy, his pom-pom bobbling away.
"Fuck you too," Reno called back with no heat, and the mailman flicked him a double-bird without looking back, already walking up the steps of the next building.
Reno stomped up the stairs, this time not caring who heard him for an entirely different reason, and snatched the mailbox key from its hook. Elena glared death at him as she gummed at a leftover egg roll, her hair sticking up in back like she was thinking about trying out for SOLDIER.
"Shut up," one of his neighbors shouted on the third floor, and Reno kicked the door as he went by hard enough that it bounced open. He heard somebody run to pull the door shut, then start a low, terse scold. He caught the word 'Turk' and smiled to himself as he slid down the bannister. It wasn't a nice smile, not by anybody else's standards and not by his.
The way his hands shook took him by surprise as he opened his box. The letter sat there, the corners of the envelope fluffy from being handled. Home-made paper, he guessed. He remembered making it, if he strained himself. Drawing it out of his mailbox like it was a mastered materia, Reno gave a full-body shudder, then another one, and another. He couldn't look at the thing. He couldn't read it, couldn't even look at the address to see if it was his mom's handwriting or somebody else's.
He shut his box, padded back up to his apartment, and called Tseng.
"Reno," he said, sounding sleepy, his voice pitched low and intimate. Reno flung the letter at Elena like it was a water balloon. She caught it and squinted, confused, at the return address. "What's wrong?"
Reno abruptly realized he didn't know if Tseng had a partner, if he had somebody lying in bed next to him. He'd never thought about it before, but the sweet burr of sleep in his boss' voice coupled with the quiet 'shf' of shifting cotton sheets made him wonder. He cast a look at Elena, who seemed to have figured out what was going on and was opening the letter.
"I- sorry, am I-"
"It's fine," Tseng said, and if he strained Reno could hear the faint creak of wooden floors. He imagined Tseng standing barefoot in the morning chill, hair loose, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "What is it?"
"The letter came," Reno said, and saying it made him feel dizzy like touching that familiar coarse paper hadn't. It made it real.
"What does it say?"
"Good question. 'Lena, what does it say?"
"Uh," Elena said, unfolding a sheaf of more brown paper. She started to flip through the pages and Reno caught a glimpse of page after page of cramped handwriting. "I'll… get back to you on that."
"Elena's there?" Tseng didn't sound surprised, but he also didn't ask frivolous questions.
"Yeah," Reno said, and realized his teeth were chattering.
"Come here," Tseng rumbled. Reno heard a door creaking open over the phone. "We can all go over it together and see what we can find out from it."
"Okay," said Reno, fighting to keep the chatter in his jaw from creeping into that one word. "Okay." He scrubbed at his face. "Tseng, man, it's four am."
"I know." The man on the other end of the phone sounded wry, fond, and very, very tired. "Come here."
They moved quickly. Elena was motivated to tidy up fast by the prospect of seeing Tseng before he'd changed out of his pajamas. Reno read the letter while she did her thing in his cracked bathroom mirror.
As they left, he kicked the third floor apartment door open again. Nobody came to yell at him. He wished they had.