Aloha hou kakou! Mahalo big to everyone who has kept up with this story in the last week. As I've spent the last four years working sporadically on it, it does mean a lot to me to know that a few of you are reading it. That's awesome!
Again, I've split some chapters in order to keep the flow going. I think that I'll keep them split like this; I'm not fond of the way I chaptered it originally.
I'm also not fond of the flashback-within-a-flashback scene in this section, which has Reno remembering a time when he remembered something. :/ I find it clumsy and confusing, and I think it needs some re-working.
There's also something else I want to point up about this chapter, and it's my handling of ShinRa's destruction of Sector Seven from the game--specifically the involvement of Reno and Tseng. (That would be the flashback within a flashback part.) First, let me say that I'm totally one of these canon nazis who hates when fic writers diddle with the original storyline unless it's an AU fic (and I'm not always fond of those--they have to be real good to get me interested.) I write fanfic because I liked the original, not because I felt I needed to fix mistakes or because I wanted things to be different. Yet in this scene, I found myself adding my own spin on things to such an extent that it seems like I wimped out on the characterization of Reno and Tseng. I want to love these characters, and I do love them, the way I love the other characters. The writers of the game asked us to keep enjoying Reno and Tseng after they destroyed an entire city, and I totally did keep enjoying them.
But, when writing about the event, I felt I had to justify my excusing them, and maybe that was wrong of me. I wrote this section before 9/11, and for a while I considered going back and changing it. Then 9/11 came around, and, when I picked this fic up again, I realized I couldn't change it: I had to keep them not entirely at fault. I did a huge Bad Writer Thing and excused the characters for their actions.
Pretty silly, maybe, but in the end I left it like that. In the context of the story (because the theme will come up again, and again, and again,) maybe it's not so bad. But that's not for me to judge, so without any further babbling, here is part three.
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Reno had told Elena and Rude that he was going to his room alone. He didn't know where Sephiroth was, and he had begun to think he'd imagined the entire last few days. He'd run away from Sephiroth, which was not an act of cowardice by his reasoning, merely what any sane person who wanted to continue living would have done. Actually he hadn't run away so much as he had slipped quietly out of Midgar after Sephiroth had told him "I'll see you again," and left his house. But, he had found the two remaining Turks....
He had found the two remaining Turks, Reno thought to himself, as he sat down heavily on the bed at the Inn. He ran his hand over his face sleepily, then leaned back and reached out to the small bag he had taken with him. He withdrew the ElectroMag rod and looked it over. He flicked it on, and it hummed quietly to life.
He had found the two remaining Turks.
And he had handed them right over to Sephiroth, who would surely have had the skill and the means to follow him anywhere.
Of course, Sephiroth claimed that he meant them no harm, provided they didn't try to harm him. He just wanted their help. But on reflection, the idea of Sephiroth needing help was just as plainly ridiculous as the idea of Sephiroth NOT hurting someone. Sephiroth had been born--no, created--specifically to kill. And in that respect, he was perfect.
Reno felt his rational thoughts twist, muddle, and turn in on themselves once more. Everything suddenly looked oddly green, a color that was familiar to him.
What the hell had he been thinking? Sephiroth had told him to jump and he had asked how high. Now Sephiroth had all of the Turks together and would likely kill them all, for whatever bullshit reason his sick, Hojo-twisted mind would make up. Reno had handed Rude and Elena right over to him just as surely and easily as Cloud had handed the black materia to him.
Reno placed the EMr directly over his heart and turned it to the highest setting. He had less than a second to wonder why the hell he was doing it, and to remember, with no small amount of horror, that he had done such things in the recent past as well.
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"No," Elena said, as Reno disappeared into the hallway at the Inn. She was trembling. Goddamnit, she needed to stop trembling and think clearly. Unless Reno had finally lost his last shred of sanity and was just wildly hallucinating or making things up, Sephiroth was probably somewhere in Costa Del Sol. "No, I don't think we should leave him alone."
Rude didn't answer, but peered nervously down the hall.
"Rude, do you believe him?"
"Yeah," he said quietly. "Yeah, I think that one of them is out there."
"One of them?" Elena asked. "What do you m--"
"It's obvious," Rude said. "Sephiroth's dead. It's a clone."
Elena was startled enough to stop shaking. There had been so few clones since the outlawing of human cloning that she'd very nearly forgotten about them. And she had never expected to see another Sephiroth.
A clone. She could handle a clone.
"Rude," she said, breaking the silence once more, "I think we should stay with him. You know Reno better than I do, but..."
"He ain't right," Rude finished.
Elena nodded and looked toward the hallway. Without looking back at Rude, she walked toward Reno's door and knocked on it. There was no answer, and she knew immediately, in her bones, and with her well trained instinct, that something was wrong. There was silence from beyond his door, but she had learned to recognize "right" silences and "wrong" ones. This was wrong.
"Reno!" she called.
She didn't expect an answer, but before she had a chance to listen for one, Rude was moving her aside and shoving the door open with all his weight behind it.
"Shit," Elena whispered when the door flew open. Even Rude was too stunned to act immediately.
Reno lay sprawled face down on the floor, twitching slightly. The ElectroMag rod was buzzing on the floor next to him.
Rude kicked it away and turned Reno onto his back. He stuck his fingers on Reno's neck, felt for a pulse, and sighed. "Still there," he said.
"Materia," Elena said softly, fear rising in her chest and nearly choking her voice. "Do you have any materia? Restore, or...Revive?"
Rude's dark skin had gone ashen and he shook his head. "You?" he asked.
"Haven't been able to afford it for over a year," she said. "Oh no, Rude." Panic made her feel weak and desperate. It had happened once before, when they had found Tseng and not had the means to save him. She didn't know if she could relive that.
"Reno!" Rude hollered, and slapped him across the face. Reno twitched slightly but didn't open his eyes.
"Crap!" Elena said. "Rude, you don't have to beat the hell out of him...."
She trailed off as she noticed that Rude had gone an even more impossible shade of pale, and wasn't looking at Reno anymore. She followed his gaze to the open doorway and felt the blood rush from her brain to her extremities, sending her mind into a dizzy spiral. She found that her mouth was suddenly too dry for her to even cry out.
"Move," Sephiroth ordered in a businesslike tone.
It's a clone, she told herself. And a clone wouldn't have the training or the power that the original had had. She could handle it.
But Elena had seen clones before, and they had rarely looked so... So inhabited, her mind whispered to her. If it was just a clone, why was his presence making her hair want to stand on end as he approached her?
Rude was the first to stand up, and, though obviously terrified and feeling the same thing she was feeling, he resolutely stood in front of Reno. He pulled his gun out of his jacket and prepared to fire it.
Sephiroth almost frowned for a second, then gave an amused sort of smirk. It seemed that he was about to laugh, but instead he waved his hand as if he was pushing something out of his way.
She realized a second later that it was exactly what he had been doing, though not even touching them, as both she and Rude were sent sprawling backwards and away from Reno. She saw Rude's gun fly from his hand and land across the room. She tried to get back up, but found she was too weak to move.
The full horror of what was happening settled in her heart. A clone couldn't have done that. It was Sephiroth; she could feel him. She could feel his tremendous power and it was like a tsunami turning her over. She was terrified, but strangely fascinated. He was simply awesome in his force.
She watched, unable to look away, as he went down on one knee beside Reno, who had become alarmingly still. He looked up and made eye contact with her, and she felt choking fear to her core.
"Do you know what happened?"
It took her a second to realize that he was talking to her. He was asking her, presumably, about Reno, as if he wasn't responsible for it. All she could do was shake her head.
Sephiroth picked up the EMr lying by Reno and frowned as he turned it off. "Was someone in here with him?" he asked her, as he placed his hand over Reno's chest.
Elena found her voice, and she used it to scream, "Don't touch him!" She found she was repulsed by the idea of Sephiroth laying hands on Reno, or on anyone for that matter.
She saw a fleeting moment of surprise on his face, before it turned into a patronizing look that told her exactly what he thought of her orders.
Elena struggled to free herself from whatever grip he had on her, until she saw the cool green aura flowing from his hand.
After a few seconds, Reno took a long breath.
Sephiroth looked passively at Reno for a moment, his face showing no expression other than one of mild interest. He could have been looking at stock quotes. Then he strode calmly over to where Rude's gun had fallen and picked it up.
Elena had never seen Rude cringe, but he did so when Sephiroth approached him with the gun. Rude slowly opened his eyes when no shot rang out. Sephiroth stood above him, holding the gun by the barrel and offering the handle to Rude. Rude took it very slowly and let it dangle limply from his hand as Sephiroth turned his back on both of them and quietly left the room.
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"Reno! Reno! Reno!"
The voice was very small, but growing louder. It was distant, but growing closer.
He was afraid to open his eyes, because he somehow knew that when he did, people would be hovering over him, and there was almost nothing as bad as waking up with people hovering over you when you didn't know where you were, or why you were there. He knew this from experience.
He let his eyes open a crack and saw Elena looking down at him. Now what? he asked himself. Had he dreamed the entire episode with Sephiroth? Had he dreamed the entire last few years? Had he, in fact, dreamed Meteor and Avalanche?
Possibly, but he trusted the one thing that he awoke realizing every single morning since he was twenty: he was a Turk. No matter what had ever happened before, ranging from taking a short nap to being almost killed in battle, that was the one thing that he had never, ever forgotten upon waking.
As of just then, it was one of the only things of which he was positive, aside from the fact that Elena was with him, and Rude as well, and they were also Turks.
Oh yes. And Tseng was dead. It was always the next memory to return, and with it came a pang of guilt, swift and hard.
"Are you all right?" she was asking him.
He licked his lips and tried to rid himself of the coppery taste that was in his dry mouth. "Oh, I'm just ducky, thanks."
"What happened?"
Reno thought that one over. He'd been hoping that Elena would be able to clue him in on that subject, just as she had four years ago when he'd woken up in the ShinRa infirmary. Only that time, Elena had been crying. He let his eyes close again and slipped restlessly into the past.
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The rookie sat beside his bed, crying. It was irritating and he wished she would leave. Why the hell did she have to sit there and watch him be in pain? It was goddamn humiliating. More so because he had no idea why he was in a hospital bed watching the syrupy Mako drip from a squishy bag into a clear tube which he assumed was connected to a needle, which he assumed was connected to him.
"Go away," he muttered to Elena. "I wanna be alone."
Elena blew her nose. "I need to talk to you," she said.
"No, you need to go away."
He heard her take a steadying breath. "Rude asked me to come," she said.
He turned his head and looked at her, trying to discern if she was telling the truth. It was no secret in ShinRa that Rude was his best friend, whom he trusted more than anyone.
Elena nodded, though he had not even voiced his doubts. "He wanted me to stay with you...talk to you while he was away."
"What the hell for?" he snapped. Did Rude think he was such a weakling that he couldn't tend his injuries--wherever the hell they had come from--by himself?
"Well..." Elena looked startled, and for some strange reason unbeknownst to him, scandalized. "Well because of what you...of what happened to you," she said.
She was going to say "because of what you did," Reno thought. He stared at the ceiling. God, how he hated to admit to her that he had no idea what he had done, or what had happened to him. "Well?!" he finally snapped.
"Well," Elena said, wiping her tears away, "Rude says that you didn't realize exactly what you were doing when you, you know. He thinks the drug made you...I don't know, unreasonable or something."
Reno thought hard, trying to bring back the last thing he remembered. He remembered going for the Mako treatment, as they usually did right before an important and dangerous mission. He remembered a worried looking lab technician strapping his arm down, and then drawing Mako out of a vial.
"Why can't we just drink it?" he had asked. "I feel like a goddamn druggie."
"Well you don't look like one," the tech had said. "The Mako immediately seals up any puncture marks you'd get from normal IV treatments. And if you took it orally, it would burn your stomach lining out."
"Shut up, I know that," Reno said. And he did know it, he just liked to complain about it. It was stupid and he'd always thought so. He was a good enough fighter without Mako. On the other hand, he thought, he had to admit, it was somewhat slightly helpful...sometimes, ha ha...that he was able to take bullets and wounds from other weapons and remain standing while the Mako healed him from the inside out. He had been warned that it wouldn't work in the most extreme cases of battle, but was good for most injuries.
"Just a little prick with a needle," the tech said.
"Yeah, so are the rest of you dummies."
The tech either didn't hear the insult or decided not to acknowledge it as he jabbed the needle into Reno's vein. Reno impatiently drummed his fingers while the Mako made its way into his system and made his arm burn slightly.
He looked down and noticed that the technician had removed the tube of the syringe, but had left the needle in his arm like a catheter, with a rubber cap on the tube that led out. He was filling another syringe with an opaque liquid.
Reno twisted his arm in the strap. "What the hell are you..."
With a panicked look, the tech had already jabbed the needle through the rubber cap and injected the murky fluid into him. Reno reached out with his free hand and grabbed him by the throat. "What the hell was that, you bitch?" he growled.
The man's eyes were wide with terror as Reno pulled him closer to his face. "Painkiller," he croaked out, trying to pry Reno's fingers from around his throat.
"Painkiller? You think you can just shoot people full of drugs without asking them first? Who told you to...Who gave you the order...?"
He'd wanted to continue, but the man's face was blurred around the edges, as if a child had colored him outside the lines. He let his free hand fall from around the technician's neck. He felt as if some invisible hand was trying to push his head forward, and he couldn't sit straight in the chair.
"ShinRa..." the man wheezed, stumbling backwards. "ShinRa's orders, Hojo's idea."
Suddenly everything snapped back into sharp focus. Reno was able to look up. He began to see everything in fine, contrasted detail. He looked at the technician, who was still gasping for breath. Reno could read fear in his eyes, and something else. Guilt. Contrition. He remembered being aware of all those things.
It was beautiful.
Tseng had seemingly floated into the lab. He looked hyper-real in his dark suit that contrasted so sharply with his pale skin. His black eyes looked as focused as Reno's felt, and there was a glowing Mako sheen over them as he grinned at Reno, and he was perfectly predatory. Reno had never seen Tseng look so predatory before.
It was glorious.
"I'm here to give you your orders," Tseng said, and his voice was clear and crisply edged.
It was absolutely, maliciously wonderful.
Reno had remembered those things as he lay in the hospital after that mission, and he'd remembered what his orders had been.
In the weeks to come, most people would know that Reno of the Turks was laid up in the infirmary after the destruction of the support pillar over Sector Seven. But, most people had thought that it had to do with the glaringly deep slash down his front that had been made by Cloud Strife's weapon. In fact, that had healed quickly, due in large to extensive Mako treatments. Only very few people had known what was really keeping him in there, and Tseng, Rude and Elena were among them.
Tseng had come to grips a lot quicker than Reno had. But Tseng hadn't pushed the button.
Rude had come to visit him often, and during one of those visits, over a game of cards, had suggested leaving the Turks.
"No one leaves the Turks," Reno had said bitterly.
"Vincent Valentine..."
"Vincent Valentine is a ghost story. He's dead."
Rude looked as devastated as Reno had felt. "The Turks weren't meant to be puppets," he said softly. "I just can't believe what they did to you and Tseng."
Rude had been serious about leaving, just running and trying to survive without ShinRa. He hadn't approached Tseng about it, and he hadn't told Elena, because it was becoming obvious to Rude that Elena would go wherever Tseng went.
But before he'd had the chance to make any plans at all, old man ShinRa had been killed, and his young son with his silkysoft, deadlylow voice had promised never to play the Turks in that way again. "Drugs are dangerous," he'd told Reno in his smoothly controlled monotone. "They muddle your mind. I want my Turks to be aware of what they're doing at all times."
"My Turks," Reno could remember thinking. Always, always, the Turks had belonged to ShinRa in one way or another; always they were The Turks, one entity instead of three different people, like some kind of deadly courtesan to the royal family. No, not puppets, Reno had thought back then. Just one three-way whore.
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In a dark hotel room in Costa Del Sol, ten years after the destruction of Sector Seven, Reno slept fitfully as Elena stared out the window, watching for a man in a black cloak. Rude silently watched the television with the sound down.
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"I'm a...I'm a little hesitant to commit to this idea," the crackly voice said over the telephone.
"Well it's a little too late, Bradburn, you already saw Reeve, right?"
"Yes I did," he answered. "He seemed hesitant as well. I'm not convinced that he actually had enough to do with the Turks that he'd be able to locate them. And if he does, I just don't..." He hesitated and seemed to rethink what he was going to say before going on. "I just don't see them going for it."
The other voice chuckled bad-naturedly. "You don't know the Turks the way I do."
"I don't, but..."
"Let me tell you something about the Turks, Bradburn. The Turks are a group of highly skilled, highly trained, highly paid whores. They might be the best thinkers and the best fighters on the Planet, with very few exceptions, but if you dangle enough gil and power in front of them, they'll roll over for you. Especially Reno."
"Pathologically warped," Bradburn said in a reedy voice.
"Is that what Reeve said? Well, Reeve had a point. Reno was the one who crushed Sector Seven. Well, he pushed the button, anyway. Possibly the most difficult to buy might be Elena. But Rude will go along with anything Reno wants to do, Elena will follow if they both do it, and Reno will do anything that involves gil or power. So put it in Reeve's head to make Reno the new leader."
"But I don't know if..."
"I have their first mission lined up," the sharp voice on the other end said, cutting him off. "They'll like it. It's destructive."
