A/N: MBC is Midgar Broadcasting Company, JBC is Junon, and SBS is Shinra Broadcasting System. Or whatever the S stands for in CBS.
When Rude came downstairs, Elena was curled at one end of the couch, and Reno slumped at the other with a bag of chips next to him on the couch. Rude suspected they were both asleep, but Reno opened his eyes. "Better?" he asked, almost as terse as his friend.
"Guess so. They have anything new on TV?" Rude began emptying the grocery bags, and Reno thought he saw disapproval over the quantity of potato chips.
"That was all they had. Everyone's buying food. There's nothing new... oh, there's this Avalanche special, guess you haven't seen that."
"You guys shut up," Elena grumbled drowsily.
"'Lena, there's beds if you want quiet."
"Just leave me alone," she said, and pulled a throw pillow over her head. Reno rattled the bag of chips, and she tossed the pillow at him, stood, and stomped upstairs.
"So she's doing okay," Rude observed.
"Yeah, guess so."
"Avalanche special?"
"Yeah. They're being real careful not to say anything one way or another about mako politics. You just missed the Tifa part. They're on Strife now, what a thrill, huh?"
The big man just grunted, opened the refrigerator. "Hey, you got milk."
"Yeah, and cornflakes. So you don't have to live entirely off salt."
"They sold out of food, but the liquor stores are still fine?" he said skeptically.
"Surprised me too, but maybe it's taking people a while to realize they don't want to face this sober."
"Did you actually get her clothes?"
"She got some shirt to sleep in. Socks and panties and shit. I guess she's happy. Should have gone to get underwear for us too, but I didn't think of it, and besides, I don't know you that well."
"Doesn't much matter. It won't be too long anyway."
"Okay, here's Tifa again."
"Christ, Reno, turn that off!"
"What? I thought you were hot for her."
He turned away. "Don't need to see her in the gas chamber." Again. He'd gone to his favorite bar in Junon, where no one bothered him if he wanted to drink alone, only to see the very fact he was trying to escape, live on TV. It wasn't just his feelings for her at work. He'd felt some regret for the Ancient, once he'd learned of her fate, and would probably have had similar pangs for any of the others; he'd been tracking them so long he felt he knew them. That the dark-haired girl had to go first was just an added twist of the knife. He hadn't been able to watch as she struggled, had almost felt his reserve crack as he requested they turn off the TV. The one or two other patrons had ignored him. Then someone had gasped "Holy shit, she's out," and he'd looked up, stunned and disbelieving, as she unlocked the cuff on her left wrist.
"Didn't you see it the first time? Pretty damn good escape artist."
He only grunted in reply.
It was easy, with the shutters closed and the TV never turned off, to forget about time. To just sit, dozing occasionally, silently watching the news anchors grow steadily more pale and disheveled, to comment only on the varying graphics. Reno preferred the flashy "Planet Under Attack" graphic MBC used, while Rude and Elena voted in favor of the more subdued "World in Crisis" logo that both SBS and JBC adopted. They carried the day; MBC eventually adopted it as well.
The monotony was broken, nearly twelve hours after their arrival at the lounge, when Julian Mayhew of MBC faltered during his stentorian warning that no other information was available regarding Avalanche's plans. "Whatever their goal in... in..." he trailed off, staring directly at the camera with a fixed, frightened expression on his face, and then his bland, even features crumpled and he broke down in tears on camera. "Whoa," Reno muttered, the only sound as they all watched, fascinated. Mayhew's co-anchor, Barbara Jenkins, stared at him with naked panic on her heavily made-up face for a moment, before she turned to the camera with a brittle smile and said "Let's go now to our correspondent in the North, Kimberly?"
Kimberly turned out to be a parka-clad, startled-looking redhead, evidently not expecting to be on the air so soon, and the group sat through her segment – all old information, delivered in an uncertain stammer and indicating that while Avalanche supporters plainly believed they had some remedy to Meteor, there was no evidence to support these claims – only in hopes of a return to the anchors. Sadly, Mayhew did not appear in front of the camera again, even when they returned to Jenkins. "Bet he's in a straitjacket right now," Reno commented.
"I don't remember that girl being their correspondent in the north before," Elena said, as if personally affronted by the change. "It used to be some guy with a mustache."
"Maybe he had a breakdown too," Rude suggested.
They were still discussing this possibility, in desultory fashion, when the phone rang again, startling them all. "Turks, Rude here," the tall man answered, having recovered first and located it; Reno had left it on the bar. He listened for a long moment. "Got it. See you." He closed the phone, set it down, and rubbed his face wearily. "Reeve's on his way here, about two hours out of town."
"How's Avalanche doing?" Reno asked.
"Maybe four hours away from... it. Sephiroth or whatever."
"How can they tell?" Elena asked.
"Cait has some pretty sophisticated instruments, Elena," Reno assured her.
"Like....?" She recognized the lofty tone he'd taken, which he usually used to conceal his own ignorance.
"Like I don't remember the names of 'em."
"Then how do you know they can measure depth?"
Rude left them to bicker, walking heavily upstairs to sleep again.
He hadn't slept well, however, and he was awake and firmly installed on the couch once more by the time Reeve arrived. Elena had finally stumbled upstairs; Reno sprawled at the other end of the couch, seemingly half asleep. He stood as the door opened, reaching inside his jacket for the gun.
Reeve had a day's growth of stubble around his goatee, his suit was wrinkled, his tie loosened and askew, and his eyes were red, likelier from lack of sleep than from tears. Rude smoothed his own rumpled suit and inclined his head. "Sir."
The words roused Reno, who stood, nodded to the executive, and did something that caused his back to make obscene popping noises though he'd deny it was stretching. "You bring your stuff?" he asked.
Reeve held up one suitcase. "All Cait's equipment is out in the trunk. Where should I set up?"
"Elena's upstairs. Guess we should've cleared out the office," Rude said. "Reno, you get that. I'll bring in the equipment."
While Reno did his best, which mostly involved transporting everything into a tall metal supply cabinet and when it filled stacking things near it, the process of cleaning out the office and setting up the electronics took a few hours, and roused the two Turks out of the near-stupor they'd been living in since arriving in Kalm. It seemed to bring Reeve to life, too – he joked with both of them, turned explanations of what plugged in where into reminiscence about creating the first Cait Sith, and generally behaved like someone who wasn't waiting for the world to end.
At some point Elena awakened. They could hear her rummaging around in the kitchen, and then she appeared, in shirtsleeves and with her tie loosened and dangling, holding her coffee in both hands. She leaned in the doorway, her back against the lintel, and watched them for a moment until Reeve surfaced and beamed at her. "They said you were here," he said happily. "I was starting to doubt them."
"No, I'm here," she said, smiling blearily back at him, and she brought the coffee to her lips, then thought better of it. "You guys need any help?"
Reeve considered. "Go ahead and finish your coffee."
"That's gonna take a while," she informed him, and it did – she barely even touched it for half an hour, then gulped it down as they were setting up the first of the monitors, set the empty mug aside, and joined them. "Isn't there kind of a rush?" she asked.
"They're stopping for the night before they go in. Gives me time to get Cait ready."
"Um, excuse me?" Reno said, watching as Elena industriously began undoing much of what he'd accomplished.
"You had those all crossed, Reno. Reeve, you didn't catch that, so maybe you should get some sleep too."
"No, I just wasn't paying attention. I have my second wind." When she raised her head to look at him, he repeated, defensively, "I do!"
"Okay," she and Rude both agreed mildly. "There's coffee on in the kitchen," she added. Reno was the one to extricate himself from the jumble of boxes around his feet and the tangle of wires at waist height and head out of the room. "So where are they right now?" she asked.
"Near the bottom of the crater," he said. "They stopped for the night about three or four hours ago. I've had them on audio only while I was in the car – Cait's on autopilot." The monitors flickered to black-and-white life. One showed rocks, cave wall, and an eerie glow near the bottom of the screen. The other two, from slightly varying angles, displayed a grouping of three tents, a small fire at a central point between the three, scattered luggage, and on one monitor, a large, white plush arm.
"Um," Elena said.
"The mog just waves his arms around randomly when he's on standby. I could never figure out how to eliminate that," Reeve explained. The arm receded from view.
"So one of those is the mog's eyes and one is the cat's?"
Reeve nodded. "The other one's in the mog's back," he said, as Reno returned with two mugs of coffee.
Reeve reached out immediately, and Reno handed him one of the mugs. "Black," he added, and the executive just nodded again, took a cautious drink.
"What I want to know is why they're called mogs," Rude said.
"Elena, did you make this?" Reeve asked.
"'Sokay, I needed some hair on my chest," Reno said.
"I like my coffee strong! Rude, it was a copyright thing."
"No one's going to fault you on weak coffee, Elena," Reeve said. "Yeah, it was a copyright case. Have you ever seen those old Mocha the Moogle cartoons?"
"Heard of 'em. So what's a moogle?"
"Just a nonsense word. You know how kids' things are. So this was back when Shinra was diversifying – they bought a fast-food chain, and created Mogs as as mascot. No little pompoms on top of the head, but that's really about the only difference. They won the lawsuit, though. Probably shouldn't have, but they did." He took another drink of the coffee. "No need for a nap now," he added.
"Oh, shut up," Elena said.
They'd turned the cluttered office into their new headquarters in place of the couch. Rude ate his cereal standing up there, Elena let three mugs of coffee grow cool before she drank them and left brown rings on the monitor tops. Reno lounged in the spare desk chair and left crumbs of potato chips everywhere. Finally some activity showed on the two monitors, drawing everyone's attention. Tifa, who apparently slept in an oversized tee-shirt and boxer shorts, emerged from her tent, yawned, and stretched.
"Too bad she don't sleep in the buff, huh?" Reno said, patting Rude's shoulder. Rude shrugged his hand off irritably.
"So are they getting ready to move?"
"Not immediately. She's an early riser." They watched her pour water from a canteen into a pot, drop a materia into it. "Heating it for tea," he explained. "Listen, I better get around to being Cait. It feels kind of creepy lurking around watching her when she thinks I'm not."
There was grumbling, and shuffling, and plenty of hesitation at the door, as he put on his headset and typed in a few commands. Eventually, though, watching him at the computer turned dull, and they dispersed – Rude vanished upstairs, Reno returned to the couch, and Elena wandered, restless. She watched Rude shave his head for a moment, went into the bedroom and stretched out. She'd thought the coffee would keep her awake, but left alone in the quiet she found she didn't want to think any more than she wanted to watch the news or watch Reeve say "Attack!" over and over in Cait's voice. She rolled over onto her side, pulled her knees to her chest.
"Where's 'Lena?" Reno asked, when Rude rejoined him downstairs later.
"Asleep. She's sleeping better than the rest of us put together."
"People do that when they're depressed," Reno said. He'd been hugging a couch cushion, and while he seemed ready to put it aside, he eventually decided against it. "Shit. This is..." Rude sank onto the couch next to him. "I can't believe this is how the world's ending. I figured I'd... you know, you find out you have one day to live, you go find yourself a beautiful woman or drink yourself into a stupor. Maybe do some rioting and looting. Fuck consequences."
"Still not too late for that," Rude said.
"Well, yeah, but... shit. This is how my life's gonna end?" The redhead's voice sounded suspiciously thick. Rude didn't look his direction so he wouldn't have to see his old friend wiping his eyes surreptitiously. "Wouldn't have figured it'd be like this. I mean, what the hell did I do with my life?" There was a definite quaver. Rude had never been so fascinated with a television in his life. Nothing could have torn his eyes away.
"I always kind of wanted to get married, have a family," Rude said to the screen. "Just as well I didn't."
"Fuck, yeah. Can you imagine watching your kids go through this? It's rough enough just the three of us."
"Four."
"Three. Reeve's in denial. Lucky bastard." Silence, except for a muted sound that couldn't possibly have been a sniff, and then, a moment later, the voice Reeve used for Cait Sith, elevated but indistinct.
"Might be easier with kids," Rude mused. "Have to be strong for 'em, couldn't just fall apart."
"Like you're falling apart," the redhead scoffed, sounding more like his usual self.
"Could. Any second now."
"You do that, we'll all collapse," Reno said. After a moment, he turned to face his partner, puffy eyes and all. "We need you, you big bald freak."
There was a ghost of a smile on the tall man's face. "Thanks."
