CHAPTER 20: WE CAN'T ALL BE HEROES
In which Reno reflects on the events at Icicle Inn, Mozo makes an unnerving suggestion, and Tseng worries about the future

"So then what happened?" Skeeter asked Reno.

It was the evening of the following day, that hour when the drinks-after-work crowd crossed paths with the drinks-before-showtime crowd. The Goblins Bar was bursting at the seams, customers spilling out onto the sidewalk with glasses in their hands, but even so the manager had cleared the Turks' favourite table for them. The boys and girls in the blue serge suits liked to sit in the snug at the back of the saloon bar, close to the fireplace, where the dark red carpet, the lacquered wood paneling, and the soft lamplight combined to create an atmosphere of womblike cosiness. By longstanding Turk tradition, the last man in from a mission stood everyone else the first round, and tonight that man was Reno. The helicopter from Icicle Inn had landed on the rooftop pad less than two hours ago. Zack had immediately gone to report to Lazard. Stretcher-bearers had carried Knox to the infirmary on the 34th floor, where the doctors had examined his fractured skull and assured an anxious Tseng that he would make a full recovery, though his left cheek would be badly scarred. Meanwhile the Chief had debriefed Reno and sent him to write his report. That job done, Reno's colleagues had borne him away to the Goblins, to celebrate his safe return from out of the frozen jaws of AVALANCHE.

"After the Chief told you to follow Zack Fair," Cavour prompted. "What happened then?"

Pared of embellishments and interruptions, the tale Reno told them went as follows: Taking the short cut over the hills, he'd arrived at the AVALANCHE base to find it deserted, except for a few Grand Horns ambling aimlessly along the corridors. Avoiding them, he'd made his way to the capsule room – the room where, the day before, he and Knox had freed Essai and Sebastian from the giant test-tubes in which they'd been trapped. Reno didn't expect to find them in the capsule room a second time. In fact, he'd assumed they were dead. But when he walked in, there they were, floating in two transparent cylinders of black slime. Had they been abandoned in haste when AVALANCHE fled? Or were the tanks booby-trapped as a parting gift? Reno wasn't taking any chances. Withdrawing to the cover of the doorway, he used his gun to shoot the locks on the capsules. The lids flew open, the slime gushed out, and the two SOLDIERS flopped onto the floor like fish tipped out of a fish tank. Reno knelt down beside them to see if they were still breathing. He was bending over, pressing an ear to one of their hearts, when they attacked him.

They didn't recognize him. They didn't know their own names. Their faces had changed, too; had become blandly identical. Which one had been Essai, and which one Sebastian, Reno couldn't tell. They had lost the ability to speak. All that remained of the men they had once been were the second class uniforms they wore.

After a hard struggle, Reno managed to break free and ran for the doorway, intending to shoot them from a safe distance. At that moment Zack burst in. Stay back, he called to Reno, I don't want anyone to get hurt.

Essai and Sebastian – or, to be accurate, the things now living inside Essai and Sebastian's skins – made a lunge for Zack. They're monsters, Reno warned him. They'll kill you.

No, they aren't! They won't! Zack shouted back.

He began to call their names over and over, gently, as if he were trying to wake up a child. Sebastian. Essai. My friends. It's me, Zack. It's OK, Essai. I'm here now, Sebastian. It's OK.

And they woke up, and knew him, and thanked him, and lay down and died.

"We lost them?" exclaimed Rosalind. "Both of them?"

"But they were SOLDIERs!" said Skeeter disbelievingly. It had long been an article of faith in Shinra that the only thing capable of killing a SOLDIER was another SOLDIER.

Mozo put his hand over his eyes.

All of the Turks sitting around the table had known Essai and Sebastian. Some of them had been on missions with the two dead men. They'd eaten meals together round campfires, crawled through Midgar's sewers, hiked across rope-bridges in the far south-west; they'd ridden chocobos with them through the Grasslands, or won money from them at cards, or traded good-natured boasts and insults … And all that time, while Essai and Sebastian were getting on with the business of living, this terrible end had been lying in wait for them, coming closer day by day…

"They're better off dead," said Reno, sounding as serious as anyone had ever heard him be. "Whatever process it is they got going on in those tubes, I don't think it can be reversed. Zack tried, and it killed them. They were dead the moment AVALANCHE got their hands on them."

"That's something worth bearing in mind," said Mozo, "For all of us."

Each of the Turks sat in silence for a moment, considering Mozo's words.

It would have been impossible to do their job for any length of time and remain ignorant of what was meant by a fate worse than death. Tseng had instructed them in how to avoid such a fate; he had shown them where to put the gun against their own heads, the correct spot and angle to ensure that the shot was clean, painless, and final. But which of them had ever dreamt that such desperate measures might one day be required? To get killed in the line of duty – that was one thing. Each of them was prepared for that. To be pushed into the kind of corner where your best option was to put a bullet through your own brain, that was…. Well, it was what Turks did to the enemies of Shinra. Now, with Essai and Sebastian, AVALANCHE had turned the tables. And Mozo seemed to be suggesting that the same fate could befall any of them, if they weren't careful.

It was the first time anyone had even hinted at the possibility that AVALANCHE might be too strong for Shinra.

"But why are they doing this? What do they want? That's what we still don't know," said Rosalind.

"Death to the Shinra," Reno mocked.

Rosalind frowned at him. "Genesis I understood, sort of. The Wuteng, I can see why they hate us. But what have we ever done to these people in AVALANCHE?"

Aviva slammed her fist on the table, startling everyone. "They're just evil! They like to hurt people! They want to take this company down and destroy all the progress we've made, and they don't care how many innocent people they kill! We can't let them win! Come on, guys, cut it out with the long faces. You're looking like a bunch of losers."

"She's right," Rude added, his gaze moving slowly around the table.

Those two words were the first he had spoken all evening. Aviva shot him a look of warm gratitude.

Hmm, thought Reno.

These last few weeks, since the catastrophe of Chelsey, Rude had been talking less and less, to the point where Reno had begun to fear he might stop speaking altogether. It made a kind of sense, when you thought about it. What was there to say, after all?

The spying bitch had said she loved him, and then she'd turned around and walked out of his life. What must that feel like, to be loved by somebody who'd set out to use you? To hold onto her only as long as she didn't love you, and then have her run out on you when she did? Reno couldn't imagine: he'd never stuck around with anyone long enough to be loved or dumped. Was it good or bad to know that she was still walking around in the world somewhere, breathing the same air as you, feeling the same sun on her face? Reno liked to think of Cissnei that way sometimes, when he was lying up on the roof watching the night clouds boil and wondering if, wherever she was, she too was gazing up into the sky and thinking…

But who would she be thinking of? Who was she lonely for?

"… It's just not possible," Cavour was protesting. "Shinra's megalithic. How big can AVALANCHE be?"

"They don't need to be big if they have the technology, and from the sounds of it, they do," said Mozo.

"But where do they get their funding?" Cavour persisted. "Wutai, maybe?"

"Wutai haven't got the money to pay for their own reconstruction," put in Rosalind.

"The reactor building program is supposed to stimulate the Wuteng economy," Mozo pointed out. "But it's possible the money's being siphoned off. A little creative accounting works wonders. We should be looking into that. In the meantime, they just hold out their hands for our aid. Nice little earner, eh? Get paid for losing a war. Hey, Reno, are you asleep? I'm getting another round in. Feed the kitty."

"Same again," said Reno. He handed the money to Mozo, pushed his chair back and stood up. "I need to take a leak. "

.

Up on the 48th floor, Tseng paced restlessly, unable to settle himself to any useful occupation. He and the Commander had been reading through Reno's report, such as it was, when a phone call had come through summoning Veld to the penthouse. "Looks like this is it," said Veld, getting to his feet. Tseng had opened his mouth to ask to come with him, but Veld forestalled the question. "No. You'd better wait here."

It seemed to Tseng that he was destined, in every crisis of his life, to be alone. Ten years ago he had been pacing this same empty office in just this way, watching the hands of the clock as they moved slowly from second to second, each tick breaking a silence that felt infinite, as he waited for Veld to return from the brink of disaster.

How could the President hold Veld to blame for what had happened up North? Heidegger and Scarlet were equally responsible, if not more so; they'd poured their poison in the Old Man's ear, turning him against the Commander. What had they done to help solve the problem? Nothing – which meant, of course, that they'd avoided the taint of failure.

Yet the mission to the Northern Continent hadn't been a complete disaster. AVALANCHE had managed to pull out safely, true, but they'd lost their base and all their equipment, which was no small setback. Their activities would be curtailed for some time to come, time the Turks could use to track down their new hiding place. Reno had also managed to bring back a sample of the slime used to create the black Ravens. Hojo's scientists had already run an initial analysis, and the results had confirmed that the substance was mostly unrefined mako, contaminated by some as yet unidentified agent. This was more or less what Tseng had guessed. Essai and Sebastian had been hollowed out, pithed, their selves almost erased. Immersion in pure mako alone could not do this, not in such a short time. It enhanced a man's strength and speed and senses, but it did not strip him of his humanity, his soul.

Even in the ugliest throes of his transformation, Angeal had remained true to himself, and had claimed the right to freedom of choice, though the only choice left to him, by then, was the manner of his death.

Even when he was a monster, Angeal had still been a man.

One could argue the distinctions further, Tseng reflected. One could say that Hollander, like most scientists, hadn't really known what he was doing. Working from a base of imperfectly understood information and wrong assumptions, his experiments had been, at worst, committed out of curiosity, the desire to see what would happen if Cell X were injected here and Cell Y implanted there. At best, one could even claim that his actions had been motivated by a perverted desire to advance the human cause.

But would someone like Zack be able to grasp these distinctions? To him, the evil that befell Essai and Sebastian must have seemed like Angeal's fate all over again. It hadn't escaped Tseng's notice that this time around Zack had refused to fight. He'd even spared the lives of the guard hounds. Some men did reach a saturation point, when they were no longer able to bear the weight of another death on their conscience. Tseng hoped, for Zack's sake, that he would not turn out to be one of these. Such men had no future in SOLDIER.

Life, individual life, was not important. No Turk would have done what Zack did. Turks did not indulge their feelings at the expense of the mission. Hadn't he, Tseng, once abandoned his own Commander to what he'd thought was certain death, in order to fulfill his duty? Every time he looked into Veld's face and saw the scars left by that day's action - the scars Veld wore with such pride - Tseng was reminded that he had found the strength to obey, against every instinct of his heart's prompting. He had been well trained, indeed.

Yet Veld himself had broken the commandments that day -

Tseng's phone rang. "Sir?" he answered.

"It's as we feared," said Veld. "Call the others and get them back up here. I don't want them to hear it from anyone but me."

.

The men's toilets in the Goblins Bar seems as good a place as any to take a look in the mirror. So go on, Reno, why don't you?

Be honest. There've been times, this last year, when you thought you were the man. Weren't there? Those heroics in Junon. Saving the little kitty. Staring death in the face on the runaway elevator and blowing it off with a laugh.

Look at your badass self. Look, can't you?

That story you told them back there. Who was the hero? Not you, Reno, no matter how you slice it. You just did your job.

Zack's the man.

You still don't like him. So whose problem is that?

Hey, but we are what we are, yo. Can't do anything about it – got to play the hand we're dealt, and all. You're good at what you do, damn good. Sephiroth himself said it. Even the Boss has to admit it. So why should you care that Zack's the hero? Aren't you the one who's supposed to take nothing seriously?

That face in the mirror's coming a little too sharply into focus. Time for another drink now, don't you think, Reno?

Rude was waiting for him outside the bathroom door. His tawny face looked more solemn than usual. "What's up?" asked Reno, taking the cigarette from behind his ear and lighting it.

"Tseng called. He wants us back at the office. The others have gone ahead."

"What's happened?"

"He wouldn't say."

"But it's bad, you think?"

Rude nodded.

"Shit." Reno took a long, deep drag, exhaled slowly, then threw the cigarette to the ground and crushed it under his heel. "Like we need any more crap right now. All right, partner. Let's go."