"Reno..."
"Reno."
"RENO!"
Shaking himself awake with a start, Reno was for a brief moment unsure of where he was. The dull electric glow of the ceiling light cast a sickly illumination around the sparse office, highlighting boxes that had never been opened. The desk he had his booted feet propped on was similarly bare, and the filing cabinets were open and empty. He shifted the sunglasses from over his eyes, sliding them up to rest on the shock of red bangs that hung rakishly in his face. He pushed them off his forehead completely and rubbed at unnaturally bright eyes that glowed with Mako luminescence.
"God, I hate this shit..."
An office. A goddamned office job. He didn't know whether to laugh or smack Reeve upside the head and ask him what the hell he had been thinking. What had he been thinking? A Turk wasn't your average employee. Putting one in an office was like inviting a rabid dog to sleep in your room. He wasn't ready to admit that since the fall of ShinRa there really hadn't been any call for having an elite group of assassins in one's employment, but he, Reno, sitting in his own personal office at the beck and call of someone who pretended to be a magical cat? He supposed things could be worse. One day they might even expect him to wear something more...
He plucked at the rumpled blue suit that had never seen the cleaners more than once a month. It was missing the two uppermost buttons and smelled strongly of alcohol. Fishing around in the breast pocket produced a similarly wrinkled pack of smokes, which he lit with a level 1 Fire casting. One of the nearby boxes also caught fire and he watched it blaze merrily. At least Reeve hadn't managed to install a fire detector in every office yet. He stared as the small fire consumed the tape along the edges, melting the plastic into a misshapen burnt knot. The fire moved eagerly down the edges of the box, leaving scorched tracks in its wake. Even when the flames began to threaten other boxes, he found it hard to move. He simply watched. It was hard to get worked up about anything of late.
If you don't get your act together, Reno, you're going to have to find another occupation.
"I did, Tseng. And then you died, and the planet blew up. Well, almost blew up. And here I am sitting in a room that's supposed to be my new 'occupation'. The Turks just aren't right without you here."
The emptiness of the room served well enough for an answer that he knew would never come. Not from Tseng anyway. Reeve was a nice enough guy. He had a lot to do since the founding of Neo-ShinRa, with him at the helm. A lot of the world needed rebuilding since meteor all but crashed. He often wondered whether this was the outcome Cloud and his group had expected when they saved the planet. The world may have survived, but civilization as Midgar had known it, was on its deathbed. And he, Rude, Elena, and Reeve had been the only ones left to bury the corpse.