14
Wednesday, October 20th, 11:09am – Tifa's Seventh Heaven, Sector Seven
She awoke in the dusty crypt, fluttering her lids excessively in an attempt to acknowledge her surroundings, letting the dirty floorboards, the moth-eaten lace veil over the window and the lifeless ceiling-fan know she was a stranger in their presence. The dull pain in her head had disappeared a while ago, melting into the forgotten like a dream in the morning.
She sat up and stared at the shafts of street lamp light pouring in through the window, tinted by dirt and grime to an insufferably ugly brown. It played over holes in floral wallpaper thirty years past its sell by date and drenched the dull brass that formed a somewhat familiar set of scales, reflecting over one plate in favour of the other. It was a funny looking object, completely devoid of any aesthetic charm, with what appeared to be hieroglyphic inscriptions printed over the base.
She stood and inched closer, fearful that the two brass cherubs lying over the arms of the scales would somehow come to life and attack her. There was something about them, something she could not put her finger on that sent a shiver through her spine. It may have been the ethereal force that applied itself over the right plate, depressing it below the other to create a state of imbalance, or the sly little grin spread across the cheeks of the cherub on the left.
No longer able to look at the object, she kicked it over, toppling it and raising more dust as it collapsed to the ground with an immense thud.
A chain reaction of events began soon thereafter with the sound of a kettle whistling, squeezing its way through the cracks in the door concealed by splintered lime paint.
She stared at the door like a newborn gazing up at its mother and walked closer to it. Two steps forward. One step back.
The man in the hallway had just cleared his throat, his footsteps increasing in volume as he stopped by her door and gently knocked.
She couldn't believe something as trivial as the smell of her favourite coffee could relinquish her status as the stranger. It really said something about the spare rooms of her bar.
Loose change had become a luxury over the past few months but she still knew she had to do something about the back and upper rooms of the Seventh Heaven. It was a scary thought but, if she did not act accordingly, the one thing that kept her sanity in check could eventually become the source of her overpowering desire to escape.
Freedom sounded blissful; to be back home in the mountains with her friends and family. But freedom also came at a price. She had new friends, new family in the people of the Slums. She could not walk away from them without the guilt festering away in her gut like a disease. It would eat her alive.
Bliss aside, freedom was the last thing she needed.
She hurried towards the door and opened it a fraction, staring at the suit emerging from the shadows with two steam-belching mugs and a worried expression. Opening the door fully, she granted him access, trying not to look too embarrassed in the process.
"I found your key in your purse. I hope you don't mind."
She closed the door and dropped back onto her mattress, wrapping her arms around her legs and resting her chin on her knees.
"To be honest, I think I would have preferred it if you broke in."
"I'm sorry," he said, handing her a mug, waiting patiently for her to reluctantly accept his peace offering. "I knew taking you to my place would be strange so I brought you here instead. After standing outside with you draped over the cinder blocks for fifteen minutes, I knew I had to get you inside and I thought taking the keys out of your purse would have been the lesser of two evils."
"Don't sweat it," she said, taking a cautious sip of her coffee. "How long was I out?"
"About an hour or so. I had my doubts about taking you to the hospital but when I heard that thud," he said, pointing to the scales, "I got the feeling you'd woken up. I came over to investigate but didn't want to do so empty-handed."
"Quite the gentleman," she said.
"So, I made an extra cup of coffee and prayed that the thud wasn't related to you collapsing."
She smiled and took another sip, this time letting the strong flavour of the coffee dance over her tongue rather than worrying about what he may have put in it.
"Milk, no sugar. Just the way I like it."
He nodded along.
"Me, too."
They sat together, almost enjoying the silence as they nursed their coffees under the comforting veil of darkness. He had become nothing but a silhouette by the window, a cardboard cut-out that emitted a cute little slurping noise when he took a sip, and in all honesty, even though she would hate to admit it, she felt safer in his presence. Possibly even happy.
"So, does this happen often?"
She let a puzzled expression form over her face, not fully aware of his motives for asking the question. The way he had stopped mid-speech in the cafe, his eyes converging to the sugar bowl to focus on something other than her sudden onset of shock should have been enough for them both to realise he had put his foot in his mouth. Something was telling her now that he was either pretending to be an idiot for her sake or that he had genuinely repressed a mere hour-old memory to preserve his sanity.
"First time," she responded, after a long pause. "Well, there was this one time when I was fourteen. I collapsed when I saw Russo Valentini stepping out of his tour bus with a kiss blown my way. He could have been aiming at the other six hundred screaming girls behind me but I didn't care. As far as I was concerned that kiss was just for me.
"Man, I was such a loser."
"I'm sure everybody can look back at their past and find something cringe-worthy that they'd rather forget. I mean, when–"
"So, are we just gonna act like this whole thing never happened?" she interjected, setting the mug on the floor and standing up.
"Probably," he replied, straining to find justification. "I tend to bury my head in the sand when it comes to personal problems."
"In that case, I think I need something a little stronger than coffee. You hang tight," she said, halting by the door as he shuffled off the windowsill and grasped her arm.
"But," he continued, "right now I don't even see a problem. You and I are just... friends, right? It's as simple as that."
Contradictorily, the simple matter of fact was that nothing ever was as simple as that, leaving her with the complex task of finding a way to believe him.
A lonely women with abandonment issues on one side of the enemy line staring at an emotionally obscure man, falling for every woman that shows him the slightest shred of affection, can really be nothing more than friends?
Not in this lifetime, honey.
"I could still use a drink."
"At eleven thirty in the morning?"
She looked back at her arm, subsequently obtaining freedom from his grip, and whispered, "You are in no position to lecture me on what's right or wrong. If I want to kill off a few of my brain cells one sip at a time then I will, regardless of whether it's eleven thirty in the morning or eleven thirty at night."
She pushed open the door and rushed to the bar, feeling his shadow stalk her through the darkness as he followed silently, trying to formulate a new plan to prevent her from falling over the dangerous precipice that he had failed to miss on more than one occasion. It would have been easier if he wasn't so terrible with words. And she was right. After downing a bottle of brown liquid, the name of which still eluded him, earlier this morning, he had no right to judge her.
And so, thinking ever silently, he found a stool splashed with artificial light and watched her fill a glass with red wine.
Taking a soothing gulp, she met his stare, upset that the shame had gotten to her.
"Look, I appreciate you bringing me back safely but I think this whole thing was a gigantic mistake. I'm sure I can look after myself now so it would be best if you just left."
He needed something to grab onto to stop the growing currents of mistrust from carrying him downstream away from her bar and out of her life forever. She needed somebody at this moment in time to usurp the alcohol in its position as a comforter and he'd be damned if he was going to let it be anyone but himself.
He barely thought before he said, "You know, Jake wasn't always so quiet..."
She soon found herself pouring him a glass of wine, nudging it in his direction as she said, "Keep talking."
"He was always so joyous, so exuberant and inquisitive. There never was a dull moment."
She smiled along with him.
"So, what happened?"
The micro-torrents in his glass became the perfect object to fix his gaze upon. He couldn't look her in the eye, especially now that she had clambered into his head.
"It all started a few years ago. I was a pretty new recruit at the time, still learning the tricks of the trade and cramming morally distressing images into head-space that was already overfilling. I had to be strong and hollow out my mind."
"What does that mean?" she asked.
"It means that if I am emotionless I have nothing to convert into psychosis or paranoia, both of which are apparently just occupational hazards for the mentally weak."
"How sweet."
"Tell me about it," he agreed. "As a junior Turk I thought I'd be clever about things and take a side step away from all the gung-ho, loudmouthed, trigger-happy employees that reeked of juvenility. Then I soon realised that staying close to them would form an emotional contrast that would make me easily detectable as a possible candidate for future promotions. So I stuck with the agents scoring high body counts, kept my mouth shut and got the job done. I spent fifteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day at HQ; working on reports, editing mission slideshows, buffing the senior agents boots; anything to get myself noticed. I'd spend the majority of my day as the perfect soldier to come home, ignore my family and throw up in the toilet before passing out from exhaustion.
"In all the following years I never stopped once to see my son take his first steps or watch him play Joseph at the school nativity or be there when he hit his first home-run. And... I lied to him every day. He thought I was a cop, a superhero fighting crime when he saw me strap on my guns and leave his side, travelling through the dirty veins of the city, searching for victims of corruption and politics to exterminate.
"In all that time... I didn't even kiss him goodnight. I always told myself that seeing his face would make me weak or make me daydream when I should stay focussed on the task at hand. God, I was such an idiot." Swirling the dark liquid in his glass, he inhaled the mellifluous scents in preparation for the heavy gulp, diving into the glass and resurfacing memories. "When I was younger, I always thought coming home would be the highlight of my day. Of course, my expectation seems a little obvious when I say it now but it's amazing how quickly my safe haven had evolved into the last place I'd rather be. And I suppose that occurred right when Monica and I had begun to fall out with one another. She was getting sick of my emotional indifference; this thick skin I had developed.
"Our mutual love continued to disintegrate for the next few months before she decided to move out, taking Jake with her. She and I both knew we didn't have the energy to go through a messy divorce and kept things nice and simple. I could visit him whenever I wanted as long as I wiped my shoes on her doormat before entering her house and brought Jake home before ten. It was a sweet enough deal."
"But those kinds of deals tend to turn sour pretty quickly, right?" she guessed, her elbows on the counter, arms propping her chin.
"You could say that. She never became more stringent with the visitation rights – in fact it was sort of the opposite. She started to bring him to my house, knowing fully well that I didn't have the time to take care of him."
"And she didn't know you were a Turk?"
"Not at the time. The very first time she and I met romantically coincided with the time I was ordered to murder her, but... I got too close to her."
"So what did she do to deserve death?"
"It was all a matter of wrong place, wrong time. I mean, gunshots firing off in the slums are pretty common, but witnessing them and living to tell the tale is incredibly rare, especially if the person on the right side of the gun is Rufus Shinra.
"Apparently, Rufus had made a little deal with his father. If he made it through military school without any blemishes or the slightest of marks on his name then he would obtain power over one hundred percent of the company. If he couldn't fulfil his part of the deal then he'd be sharing his father's legacy with five others to hold his hand and make sure he would never do anything stupid again.
"I don't know the rest of the story, but I'm assuming she saw something she wasn't supposed to see and he was afraid she'd spill the beans and ruin his future forever more."
She mumbled: a faint sound of understanding, urging him to carry on.
"So," he continued, "armed with nothing more than a handgun and my less than perfect way with words, I found her working in a cafe in the slums. Trying not to get flummoxed by her funny accent and that gorgeous smile, I somehow persuaded her to leave the room full of witnesses and took her back to my car where I drove and she talked – a lot. The funny thing was that I started to talk, too. She was the first person in a long time that I felt I could have a real conversation with. And I didn't just talk with her. I lost myself with her.
"From then on I just couldn't let her go. I've tried to tell myself that I wanted to keep her alive because of the inherent good within me but I know my motives are totally selfish, as they always seem to be. Hate me if you want, but I needed her...you know, I don't even think I can explain it properly. When I decided to come clean I didn't want her to think I was some kind of monster, so I was a little economical with the truth and told her I was an agent working with an unknown, anti-Shinra, vigilante organisation sent to protect her. She stayed close to me twenty-four-seven. It was a little awkward at first but we both soon found it to be the easiest thing in the world."
"From that description," she articulated, breathing heavily, "you sound perfect together. What happened?"
"Time happened. It has this frustrating ability to change people."
"Everyone changes over time, Rude."
"But most people change for the better. At least I'd like to think that I have." He shook the cobwebs clear off his mind. "Anyway, a while after our breakup I thought things would get better but they just got worse. I can remember coming home, finding a note in shaky handwriting and Jake routing through my cupboards looking for cookies, barely missing the loaded guns and the loose-capped bottles of anti-depressants. All I could do was smile and pinch myself for forgetting to buy padlocks on the way home. I didn't pick up the phone or rush straight to Monica's house to give her an earful – I just kept my mouth shut. It was what I did best and what I had gotten used to doing.
"She started to abuse my generosity very quickly and dropped him off on my doorstep a couple of days later after she became too involved in the courtship ritual with some other man. I can't blame her for enjoying affection and attention though.
"On any other day I would have zipped my lips and cancelled my plans, but this day was special. After my failed attempt to kill Monica I had to regain the respect of my superiors that I had worked so hard to earn in the junior ranks. I was given another hit; a photographer that had snapped a few pictures of a Shinra employee on the very top of the corporate ladder with a very cheap prostitute in the red light district of the slums."
"What did you do?"
"I stooped down to Monica's level and dumped Jake on one of my colleagues. After paying my dues - murdering drug dealers and low level scum that posed minor threats to Shinra - I was finally given the opportunity to prove my worth and go after bigger game.
"My final briefing was given by a man named Heidegger. He said he would overlook the operation to see how I handled the situation. If I did well, he would make everything official. I'd be a part of the elite, a team of three handpicked Turks that dealt with presidential affairs. It was a dream opportunity.
"By the time we'd gotten in my car I'd already forgotten about Jake. Nothing short of mentioning his name would have snapped me out of my trance. I was ready. I was bloodthirsty.
"We'd laid the photographer some bait on the plate, leaked some false information to his newsroom about some shady deals flying back and forth between Shinra's men and the Wutaian government, and caught him relatively easily. After pulling him out of the trunk, I dragged him through the interrogation chambers back at HQ, tied him to a chair and punched him around to test his pain threshold.
"Heidegger took a seat in the shadows of the chamber, his cigar glowing in the darkness as he sucked on it. He enjoyed watching him suffer. If I couldn't get any information out of him I was ordered to stuff a rag in his mouth, tilt the chair back and pour gasoline down his nostrils. When I stopped and yanked out the rag, the black vomit erupted from his mouth like a volcano. He shrieked like a slaughtered pig. It was disgusting. I was starting to feel sick myself. I was starting to tremble. But, I knew my superior was behind me.
"There was an unnerving silence after the photographer gave us all the answers we wanted. Heidegger stood and patted my shoulder. I was ready to fall to my knees and scream myself into unconsciousness. The silence was killing me, slicing me open as I stood above the half dead photographer, gasoline coursing through his veins.
"The silence. It enveloped me, constricting, squeezing the life out of me. But it was bliss compared to the next thing I heard... 'Daddy?'
"Oh, my God," Tifa whimpered.
"I'd left Jake with one of my colleagues working security at the Shinra building. They must have been in the CCTV screening room when he saw me enter the building and wriggled out of the agent's grasp to find me. Over-excited, he'd managed to dodge security checkpoints and employees that didn't even acknowledge his presence until he stopped by the unlocked interrogation chambers. He saw me beat the photographer. He heard me curse him and his family. He watched me pour gasoline down his nostrils until he vomited, his head banging against the back of the wall until the blood dribbled to the floor and mixed with spilt diesel.
"My legs stiffened. My heart stopped beating. I was beginning to sink into the concrete floor without any struggle. The look in his eyes... those eyes... they broke my heart.
"I wasn't even facing Heidegger when I saw the smile creep up over his lips. His grasp on my shoulder tightened as he pulled me closer and whispered a few inaudible words in my ear. It was my final test.
Kill the man in front of your boy and you're in.
He knocked over his drink as he clutched his face and began to sob. Tifa rushed to other side of the bar and draped her arm over his back, just managing to catch his words amidst deep inhalations.
"I did it. I rammed the cigar down the man's throat and torched him from the inside like the fucking heartless monster I am... I... I told Jake I was sorry... I told him I loved him... but none of it mattered. He didn't hate me - he was scared of me. Petrified.
"As soon as I took a step towards him he bolted out of the room," Rude whispered, lifting his head off the bar and inhaling deeply. "The police found him huddling under a few newspapers in a bus shelter, alone and cold, unable to cry, unable to move, unable to speak."
"Rude..."
It was all she could say. There were no words to console him and no emotion to inflict conviction. She could do nothing more than hope human contact would keep him relatively sane. Perhaps her hands would keep him warm. He just had to know he wasn't alone.
"Daddy. It was the last word he ever said. It's the last word I think he'll ever consider using to describe his relationship with me. Do we call that irony?"
"Look, Rude, I think you should lie down for a while. I've got some–"
"No that's OK, Tifa," he interjected, finding a pair of shades in his breast pocket to hide behind as he stood up clumsily and searched for the artificial lights behind a door. "I've... I've said enough. I think I just need to be alone right now."
He stopped as she held his arm.
"For what it's worth, I don't think you're a monster at all. Sure you've done some bad things, we all do when we're blinded by the prospect of success; it's human nature. But the remorse is there," she said, tapping his chest. "You say all of your motives are always selfish, but you did it all for Jake. His future depended on your success whether he loved you or hated you or was terrified to death of you. You sacrificed your happiness to prolong his, even if both of you don't know it yet. You obviously went about it the wrong way, but trust me, you had good intentions."
"Thank you–"
She placed her finger over his lips.
"There is good in you. I can feel it."
She leaned closer to peck his cheek, intentionally side-stepping to softly catch his lips.
Pushing him back before his passion refuelled, she cleared her throat.
"Uh, you better go. I'll see you around, Rude," she said, walking back to the bar to settle a score with the wine bottle.
She waited for his footsteps to mingle with the pedestrian traffic before she wrapped her lips around the neck of the bottle and numbed all sense of guilt from her system.
Life is unfair... complicated and unfair.
She began to unscrew another bottle before the bells and buzzers of the arcade machine grabbed her nerves in shock. The machine lifted to the first floor along with a familiar looking eavesdropper.
"Oh my God, Barret, you almost gave me a heart attack."
"I saw the Turk's boots walkin' away from the window downstairs. He was here?"
"How long have you been down there?"
"Long enough. You gonna answer me or not?"
"I fainted on the plate, I don't know what happened and it's nothing so don't ask. He brought be back down here and we got to talking. I'm learning a lot about him."
"Really," he said, staring at the smudged lipstick on an empty wine glass. "I assume you're stickin' to the plan. You think he's fallin' for it?"
She took a long pause before mustering up the courage to crack open the second bottle and splash a few drops into a fresh glass. Staring into the liquid she saw Jake's sweet little face. She would give anything to hear him talk, anything to have a conversation with the wonderful young child.
"Tifa, you listenin'? I said, do you think that bald Shinra scumbag is fallin' for our plan?"
"Hook, line and sinker," she whispered, wiping a tear from her eye.
Hook, line and sinker.
A/N
Cliffhanger! I hate them, don't you?
Anyway, first of all I want to apologise for taking so damn long to squeeze this chapter out. It was about as easy as squeezing a watermelon out of my colon, trust me. But here it is in a rather raw form.
So what did we learn? Well, we have pretty much endured a long diatribe based on Rude's history. Juicy. Plus, we learned that Tifa has not been as honest with Rude as we all would have liked, which seems a little strange but, after fourteen chapters and about eighty thousand words, finally explains the story's cryptic summary ("...she is actually more of a vulture than they are." What? Oh, now I get it!). Yes folks, I've been leading up to this moment from day one. Reno lies to Tifa - Tifa loves Reno. Tifa lies to Rude - Rude loves Tifa. Yes, my head is hurting, too.
Anyway, this kind of leads me up to my second point, and this second point makes me a real bastard. Now, this only really applies to the two or three people that read this story (or possibly just one - hi Ambivalent Amanda!), but the story is taking a brief hiatus. The reason? Well, exams are approaching and I'm coming to the end of my second year of University which means if I want to apply for the masters degree instead of continuing with the bachelors degree I have to get a first in all my exams. There are ten exams. Ten hard exams. That means I have to dedicate all my time to studying and come back to writing in the summer, but let's face it, you guys are used to long updates by now. Right?
Until next time folks, adios.
aardy.
Edit: 08/04/09 - I had some stuff here explaining Rude's OOC tendency to talk his ass off in this chapter but I'll save all my notes on this until the end of the story. I really feel like this is sub-par, and I will probably edit through this dialogue to make it neater. Until then.