The Turks Christmas Special : Ten Drunks A-Drinking
---
"Rude?"
Silence was natural.
"It's three in the morning, Rude."
He cocked a brow.
". . .What took you so long?"
"Traffic."
Reno peered around him to the giant SUV he drove, then lifted his own eyebrow. "You liar. You and I both know that you could flatten something with that beast."
Rude shrugged and invited himself in, closing the door after himself. As was usual for these visits, Reno had his chairside lamp on, but something was out of place. Reno had kind of hoped Rude wouldn't notice the fact he'd just gotten back out of bed, nor the snowboard propped up behind the door. But he knew Rude had a sixth sense about things and was very systematic; he had been ever since he'd joined the Turks.
If he'd been a dog, Rude would have been sniffing the air as he glanced around. He walked slowly over to Reno's chair, picked up the remote control, and checked the volume on the stereo. He looked at Reno's side table. He turned in a half circle, met Reno's eyes, and walked back over to him.
"Reno. Your volume is on four. It's usually on eleven. There are only three cigarette butts in your ashtray, and for fuck's sake, you forgot to tie your hair back."
The redhead had known him for years, and he was still amazing. But it had only taken so long for him to pick up on the big man's talents. He smirked and said, "Rude, there's lipstick on your collar. If I'm not mistaken, it's Leather Jacket Red. Given the fact your horn is blaring, I'd guess that Scarlet's in the back of your car wearing her slut suit. Am I right?"
The bald man cracked a grin. "You ready to go?"
"Flipsies?"
"Bet your ass."
"Let's do it." Without leaving a note for the ninja sleeping in his bed, Reno turned off the TV, grabbed his club outfit that he'd change into, and walked out the door.
---
There was something profound that separated Scarlet from most of the women Reno was acquainted with, and taking that into account, it certainly wasn't that she slept with him on a regular basis. Some might say it was her more-than-slightly enticing way of dressing, but Reno didn't think that was anything special, unless special was a word that now meant better access.
No, he decided, it was probably her strip club fascination.
His first week on the job, there had been a party for everyone who worked on the fiftieth floor and above, just because that's how you were ranked in ShinRa. The party had been dull because of the no-alcohol-or-drugs-in-building restriction, and he and Rude had been standing outside smoking cigarettes that violated that rule. They had just gotten on the topic of whose keys they wouldn't mind pulling out of the salad bowl when Scarlet, designated driver Tseng in tow, had burst out through the doors spouting about Heideggar groping her too often.
Her blue eyes had alit on the two of them and her lips curled up. "Hey, get in the car. We're leaving."
They hadn't, in their narcotics daze, expected that she would drive them to the local strip club. At first they'd thought it was Tseng's idea, but he'd later said that she'd been passing the idea around the party and had finally decided just to drag him out with her. It was the first night Scarlet had ended up at Reno's apartment; their first taste of the self-accepted whore in the red dress.
. . .No, Reno thought, that wasn't quite it either.
It was definitely the fact that Scarlet had made it a point to make her way onto the stage unannounced that night, and every night since then.
He mentioned this to Rude and the bald man agreed. This was in no way saying she didn't put on an impressive show, let alone do it for fun and free, but they both had to admit it was more than a little odd that she wanted to do it at all. With all the rumors of her sleeping her way to the top -- she had neither denied nor accepted these -- of the company, Elena even thought she might want to keep up a professional face.
But this did make it a lot easier to accept, after trudging through knee-deep snow and zipping up his jacket, Reno was greeted from the back seat by the weapons specialist in a two-piece outfit that didn't even deserve the last word.
Reeve certainly didn't put out paperwork on this shit, just because, Reno had guessed for more than a few years, he was an asexual man with nothing worth compensating for.
As was habit, Reno's annoyance level went up as they drove. Rude quickly had to dismantle the radio, as the redhead kept tapping the knob to a level that was nowhere near street legal. "You don't know how much fucking work it is for me to put that back in!" Scarlet yelled each time, and every time Reno asked why she didn't just teach Rude how to manage his own car, she gave that he-doesn't-learn-well speech, Rude would yell, and they'd all end up in a mock-fight over nothing at all.
By now there was no charge at the door for anyone coming in with Scarlet the Starlet -- "See?" Reno'd said to a drinking buddy who had accompanied them one time. "She's here all the time." -- and so they just walked inside with waves at Butchie, the bouncer. What his name lacked in intimidation, his body picked up, but Reno could still drink him under the table.
Hell, Reno could drink anyone under the table.
Rude had been to nearly every strip club on the Planet, what with the fact his job had him travelling a lot but at the same time gave him a lot of time off, and he classified Flipsies somewhere in the mid-level of taste. Scarlet was probably the best looking girl that took to the stage -- not like there were any other real lookers besides the bartenders and waitresses -- but the decor made up for that. The lights were dim, but not irritatingly so, the music selection was decent, and their hardwood tables with leather booths were high quality.
The best was -- or had been -- the gold-bearing Midas Touch in Midgar's richest section, and the worst was probably in Kalm. Many couldn't believe that Kalm had a strip club, which was the thing; it was deep in the mine shafts.
The routine picked up as they got inside.
Scarlet just gave them that wave she did each Tuesday they came in and wove through the tables, small-talking the regulars until she got to the bookie. Of course her space was already reserved, but she would still pretend she had to fight to get it. As soon as she had reserved her space and signed herself in, she went to the dressing rooms to see if there were any new girls she could terrorize. With a "kya ha ha," she disappeared from the main floor.
Rude went straight to the bar, for his own reasons. He came here every Tuesday to see Leila, the bartender who'd agreed to go out with him once, this Winter Day. She was mildly attractive, admittedly, but Reno wouldn't have touched her just because blue hair wasn't his kind of thing and anyone with over fifteen facial piercing bothered him. That and they hated each other. Ordering a whisky sour, Rude's night of conversing with the girl whose face appeared to be a magnet began.
Reno's night was probably much more well known about these parts. Upon passing the bar, both his challengers for the night and his self-proclaimed fanclub swarmed around him. The others were either distracted by the show, didn't give a damn, or were debating whether or not to throw things at the man who had invaded their turf. He always took up the largest challenge first, just because it weeded out the wimps.
Within half an hour, Reno had downed four Lines at the request of the three usuals that came just to try and unseat him and one new kid who didn't make it through the second wave. The way a Line worked was this: four shots of Flipsies hardest liquor, three of the next hardest, two of the next, and one of the last. If you were still sitting by that tenth shot, you got free drinks for a week.
Not surprisingly, Reno had volunteered this. It was just a good thing Flipsies had gone with it.
Scarlet, Rude, and he did this every Tuesday. They had brought others back when it wasn't such a routine, but nothing had flown quite as well as it had when it was just the trio. They never stayed together anyway, so Reno thought the word routine was kind of a fucked up way to put it, but while halfway through his fifth Line, "fucked up" sounded like a pretty fascinating state to be in and he almost faltered in his shooting rhythm to ponder that.
'I wonder if cats can feel fucked up?' was the thought going through his mind when his current challenger pitched to the side and landed on his neck in a squinting, vomiting mess. When his friends cleared him up, the redhead was looking decidedly confused at the floorboards and wondering why cat food could taste so goddamned good to the human tongue yet wasn't on any restaurant menus. As the current stripper left the stage and Scarlet was announced as coming up, his mood had changed and he was giggling foolishly over the connection between cats and a certain strip club item.
He cast a glance to the bar and saw Magnet Woman was unoccupied by anyone but Rude -- the drunks all knew Scarlet was not one to miss -- and the two were locked deep in conversation. "Probably something about how much fuckin' polarity's in their ears," he mumbled, certifiably hammered by now. After sitting around hammered for a bit, a few more drinks would put him at smashed, which entailed raising his voice over the din and asking for obscure foods. A good two beers past smashed was plastered, when Rude and Scarlet had to tow him away from the at least three fights he would start and toss him on his porch. The words 'tipsy' and 'inebriated' were not states Reno was consciously in.
"I ain' got no drinkin' prob'm," the redhead had slurred at Tseng one night in the dark caverns beyond plastered. "Err'body else's jus' got a sobriety prob'm."
'That Rude is a character,' Reno's brain told him. 'He's the one with the sense; he's never told you to stop with the booze or the smokes. But that Yuffie. . .wowee. . .she does watch your ass an awful lot, though.'
His mind ventured over to the sparkles coming from the stage as the lights went down lower, his friend was introduced, and the old men got riled up. He watched the sparkles twirl and jump and slide and skip until half were draped over one man's ears and the other half landed in another's lap, and then he tried to find something else to occupy himself with. He decided to go to the bar for three reasons. One, there was nothing on the stage now that he hadn't seen, felt, and done else with. Two, he needed a few drinks to get smashed and call his night well-spent. And three, fucking with Rude's social life was his favorite pasttime.
Rude dated, and he enjoyed doing so. He'd found a few girls he'd gotten relatively serious with, but he was apparently too quiet. Understandable, said anyone including Rude himself. But the bald man wasn't about to be loud just to get a girlfriend.
Reno covered that.
He often sprang up on very nice dates and embarrassed the hell out of his best friend. It had become an understanding now, and was warned far in advance to anyone dating Rude that Reno could pop into the diner, knock red wine onto a white shirt, break a chair over the waiter's hip, and run out like nobody's business while screaming, "THE BALD GUY'S GOT A GUN!!" And it was the same thing as his silence; if a woman couldn't handle that, she certainly couldn't handle living in the house Reno frequented moreso than his own.
Leila was well aware of this by now and liked to get him away from her as quickly as possible. As said, they weren't the best of friends.
"Oh, hi, Reno. I see you forgot your safety helmet again." Rude had the nerve to grin at that, which didn't sit right with Reno at all. He was one of those best friends who thought he was entitled to his property, and said property included his mag-rod, cigarettes, Rude, and a few choice women.
Reno did not give up easily. "What's that? Sorry, I can't hear you over all that rattling; twist the thing in your nose, wouldja? I think the muffler's coming loose or something." He grinned widely -- in that hammered-aiming-for-smashed way -- at the way he face faulted when she tossed his usual bottle of brandy at him.
She tossed her hair over her shoulders, turning back to the bald man. "Reno, you really need to get on that plan again. I know you're skeptical, but the alphabet's actually very easy the way they do it on those tapes."
"Har dee fuckin' har," he growled, kicking back a respectable amount of liquor. "Hey, Rude, if you venture south and find what looks like a surgically-implanted beartrap, don't say I didn't warn you." When no witty retort came from her dropped jaw, he knocked down another dosage of brandy and walked back toward the stage. He paused and cocked his head to the side. "Huh," he murmured. "When'd she start the flaming baton shit?"
He did a double-take, then looked at the man standing next to him. "You say somethin' to me?"
"What?" The other was a bit liquored-up -- Reno didn't think he'd ever been in that state -- and more distracted than not.
Reno sniffed the air, for some unknown reason. No one cared, though; the starlet had just been tossed a beverage, and she wasn't drinking it. "Did you just tell me I shoulda left a note?"
"The hell you talkin' 'bout?" He trailed off and began migrating toward the stage.
The redhead looked for a culprit. He found none whose eyes weren't reflecting a perfectly good bloody mary going to waste in the rays of a spotlight. He glanced at the bottle of brandy in his hand and gave it a mission-control-we-have-smashed smirk. "Quick fuckin' with me, eh, buddy?"
Scarlet went on about her job for as long as she was allowed. Time had been kind of smearing together in a brilliant clash of flesh and booze and neon lights for Reno since he'd sneaked a drink out of a glass that was spiked with something definitely illegal. It probably wouldn't have done too much damage if he'd been somewhere in the hammered range, but he'd been more than a little plastered when he did it. Whatever else had been in that glass hadn't helped his condition.
So it was probably a good thing when his female companion, tucking her night's collections away in a large fur coat she'd been given by one of the onlookers, decided to stop when she passed by him. After all, Reno didn't sit in the corner and carry on conversations with pilfered urinal soaps every night, and when he did, it was time to get him home.
Rude reluctantly was pried away from the bar to help carry their friend out, after his emotional goodbye to the little pink disc. "At least we know his hands are sanitized," Scarlet cackled, but the bald man was less than pleased about being forced away from his nice seat at the club at 4:30 in the morning because she couldn't drive a stick. And they certainly had no radio, so he was forced to listen to her babble about the tips she'd made and how she kept repeating Reno would be fine in the morning.
Deciding he couldn't take another ten minutes of it, Rude dropped them both off at Reno's, fished the keys out of his pocket, and left in a hurry. He didn't want to be around when Reno was far past plastered, hallucinating, and Scarlet was feeling persuasive.
---
Author's Note: xD You don't know how fun it was to write that, trust me.