Summer Blue

Summer stapled Midgar underneath in the humid slum sectors: the heat stagnant and an odor of a million bodies fleeing to plastic, delusional fans. Children began finding the air thick enough for entertainment and chunks of pollution came with the periodic breezes; the entire scene was so unthinkable there was comic relief in all the measures the pizza's population took in attempting to maintain cool.

Somehow -- in his peek of adolescence and quite puzzled with the world itself -- Reno found himself in a desolate desert of sorts (or what could have resulted as a junkyard for the best of his knowledge) ten miles back into the nearest metallic-scraps home. His ankles and complexion felt gritted with sand and his eyes vermilion little nerves. But he had to walk out of the car, watch it rock on its suspension and lift fingers at the man about to shout at his direction.

He slammed the car-door when Rude reached for his arm with the glare alone to strangle him. Once he had done this before and the door flew off, with the screech of rust, and they had to leave it there. Some hours later someone had stolen it to cook on, and it indicated a mobile to leech or walking wielding kilos of gil and weapons.

Reno couldn't recall /ever/ enduring such temperatures.

"Get back in the car."

He especially could not, for the life of him, remember how they wound up into a quarrel nevertheless in the middle of an unknown Sector. Rational thoughts aside, his mouth felt like a cave of cotton and he would give anything to take his mind off the fact /his/ cigarettes were in the glove- compartment. The cigarettes imprinted with his oily fingers, his brand, and if he'd a working pen the name RENO would read in bold letters across it.

... And purchasing smokes was not so practical for things required gil. It was gil he could not obtain easily and the gil which had ruined their lives the summer of flipping burgers and losing their jobs for the sake of unimpaired necks. Midgar had fallen deep in such economic crisis that not even multi-talented Reno could find an occupation unless he were to spin a purse at the curb streets -- and he would just as soon kiss than annihilate his customers.

"Fuck you," Reno suggested.

Rude rode alongside going for no more than 5 miles per hour, leaning an elbow out the window but retrieving soon for the aluminum burned under his skin. A child whose garments were like floor-rags began chasing behind the car with a stick, finding hysteria in the situation; Reno gritted his teeth, prepared to attack whatever nearest him.

The residents of Midgar had such warped realities of life that each morning Reno had been taught to appreciate the meals he'd the nerve to steal, and friends were stepping-stones to grace over as much as possible. Sex also had its regulations, ones the redhead had prepared himself, for from experience people became very emotional and clingy after you'd had sex with them; he'd considered wearing a plaque across his chest: 'This is not love -- this is me doing you a favor, this is me crawling out my skin, this is me showing you I like you, this is me never wanting to be alone.'

Through the desperate sound of the engine, "C'mon, just get back in the car and I'll forget you're being an asshole."

"Oo! That's so /generous/ of you, Rude," Reno spat as a hopeful statement of his feelings.

He felt the ground cooking the rubber sneakers and the inside of his pockets resulted in sweaty hands, which in all would keep them moist enough to refrain chipping as had occurred with the flesh on other parts of his body. Even though it was so hot and experience had proof he'd an inclination for stupidity, he had to walk out: dramatic necessities and such. The other man had not been silent for his pleas were due to the thought of welfare, and the care of others was an aspect Reno less welcomed but despised.

It was convenient enough, silence made him nervous.

"I said get in the car," It began to bounce for the further down they trailed the less paved the streets became. They had spent a large fraction of the summer underneath the uneven suspension of un-stuffed second-hand cars; underneath one another, too, but that was besides the point.

"I heard you."

But the car came to a sudden stop, and Reno noted this ten paces ahead when he could no longer hear the engine storming; a person possessing true treacherous character, or just a hot head after some arguments he couldn't recollect the beginning of, would have taken it as a hint of relief, but Reno needed the persistency. It was staring behind his shoulders and seeing Rude slam the wheel and open the cardoor with such infuriated movements that it, indeed, flew off.

"Fuck, I don't know why I bother!" He shouted with exasperation, "Reno, you broke another car, asshole."

And it was the summer, the compilation of all he realized was childish. Rude fetched the cigarettes and several other pieces and began walking toward no destination; everything so habitual, into its own routine.

"Yeah, whatever."

Everything in track.