(For disclaimer, refer to chapter 1)
Chapter 14: Two faces have I
Reeve sat behind his handcrafted mahogany desk in his penthouse apartment, a victim of insomnia. Absentmindedly, he shuffled a deck of tarot cards as he pondered the current turn of events.
"Am I doing the right thing?" he asked the Cait Sith robot sitting deactivated on his desk. The cat sat there with his false smile silently. "I'm on the right side, aren't I?" After a moment of thinking he asked another question. "Is there a right side?"
He had personally signed the condolence letters to the families of those killed in AVALANCHE's reactors bombings. He could have assigned the task to one his many underlings but he handled ever letter himself. He thought he owed the survivors them that much. Somewhere on his desk, he still had the list of names. He set the tarots down and flipped though the papers he had brought home with him. The casualty reports were here somewhere.
It was a different paper that caught his attention, however. A detailed report of the environmental concerns of the city. Despite whatever else they may do and think, AVALANCHE was right about this. Shinra was killing the Planet and it was dying a little faster everyday.
The problem he faced was that neither side was completely right, nor where they wrong and if they both continued to go about things they way there were headed, it would only lead to more innocents caught in the crossfire. That's why he had to stop his friends and turn them in. Reeve stopped completely as the thought stuck in his mind.
Friends? Did he really consider them friends? What did they think of him? He shook the thoughts away. It didn't matter in the end. They were a very interesting bunch at least and for a while they did treated him as a friend. But were they the kind of people he wanted as friends? A small band of terrorists; a deserter from SOLDIER, two escaped lab experiments, a self proclaimed master thief, to name a few.
Then there was the man who called himself Vincent Valentine.
The man that claimed to be a former Turk. Not just any Turk. Reeve, out of curiosity, had read Vincent's file. It had been a thick one filled with accolades, awards, and accommodations. It also made frequent references to his reputation for both cruelty and efficiency, not to mention his pride over his record setting body count. There was a psychological profile that listed him as being completely immoral, egotistical, and mentally unstable but the report, who had been filed by a much younger Hojo was the only trace of a medical record he could find on the man.
Thinking about some of the things Vincent had done made him ill as the reports had been written in rather graphic detail. He prayed that the caped man he knew wasn't the real Vincent Valentine.
True the man in the cape was too young, but he didn't seem it. His eyes looked very …heavy? Old? Weary? Reeve wasn't quite sure, there was something there but it was like quicksilver. You couldn't place you finger on it no matter how hard you'd try. It would keep eluding you, slipping out of you grasp at the very touch. Vincent or the man calling himself that had a story that he simply wasn't telling.
A loud ringing broke the silence and Reeve's contemplations. Quickly he looked around to find it's source. Buried under the papers was the PHS he had taken from his team. His team? He didn't have time to get into that again. Quickly he raced for the remote controls he had for Cait and threw the switches activating only the most rudimentary of it's functions. Reeve placed the voice transmitter to his mouth so his words would be translated into the tone and voice of his cat companion.
Cait Sith Picked up the PHS with jerky motions.
"Hey it's your gil. Talk to me." he answered in Cait Sith's voice.
"Hey Sith, this is Tifa. How's everything?"
"Good good. We ran into a little problem. Well the rest of the gang kinda did, not me though."
"Nothing too serious I hope."
"I'm all hunky dory. The rest of the team is resting up right now," he paused. "Listen, we might be gone a bit longer than expected. Just stay there and give everybody my best."
"Oh." Tifa was silent for a moment. "Actually that what I was hoping you'd have heard. Cloud ran off with Aeris tagging along and I can't raise either of them on the line. I was hoping you'd heard from them."
"Well you know how Cloud gets. If he's off doing something, everything else will just have to wait. Of course he could just be out of range," he kindly suggested.
"Maybe. But something tells me that's not it. I know you're one who's supposed to be the fortune teller but I really have the feeling that something's…I don't know. I guess I'm just being silly." Tifa finally closed her own statement.
"I'm sure they can take care of themselves." Cait said.
"Well, I guess. … yeah…anyways, if anything happens or your hear from them, give me a buzz."
"Not a problem, little lady."
"Catch you later." Tifa clicked her PHS and hung up.
"Yeah, catch you later," Reeve said to no one. He clicked the buttons to run Cait Sith's AI programs. He had considered holding a conversation with it, but it had been designed to reflect the optimistic side of his own personality and the last thing he needed was to hear him tell himself to cheer up.
Reeve grinned.
"Sheeesh. Sitting alone talking to a robot cat. I'm getting as bad as the rest of the crew, ain't I?" he directed towards the robot.
Again his thoughts came back to the Turk. There was something completely wrong when you compared the records to the man himself. Unfortunately enough, when it came down to it, there were only a few men would really be able to confirm or deny the claims he made about his own identity.
Rufus, of course, had access to all the records. Asking him would only result in a strong chastising for meddling in other people's business.
Heideggar held all the Turks records. However he could be quite a paranoid and was madly obsessive over what was he considered his.
Tseng would have access but Reeve would often go months without seeing or evening hear anybody talk about him.
That left Hojo.
God help him, when Hojo was the lesser of the evils, everything had truly gone to shit.
Reeve petted Cait Sith and then placed his hand cautiously on top of the tarot deck with the intention of flipping the top card.
He sat alone in the lap of luxury with no one but a mechanical cat for company. He took his hand off and retired to his king sized bed. It would be a long time before he went to sleep however.
If he had bothered to turn the card over, he would have been greeted by the Fool card.
Coming Next Chapter: Bad Buisness Man
