Author's Note: A revised yet unpolished piece I wrote around this time last year. I felt like tying up some loose ends, and here it is. ( Unfortunately without MS Word right now; I apologize for the formatting errors. )

Take a Seat

Three chairs rung in a small table in the executive Turk room. At times, they sat for weeks and collected dust, and at other times they were being used every three minutes, making up for their idle periods. Treaties had been signed, arguments had been waged, even love had been confessed in the chairs.

The table itself had innumerable coffee stains and rings from beer cans on it, puffing up like irritated rashes. If one could pass the smell of sanitary napkins and air freshener, they would smell the imbedded cigarette smoke. So many suggestions had been passed that four signatures were faintly imbedded in the places where each Turk took his or her respective seat; papers bringing in a fourth member, papers agreeing to be let go, papers saying that no, they didn't want a cremation.

But maybe the most extraordinary thing was the stem in the vase as a centerpiece. There was no rose – at least, not any more. It had been there when they had all been given the job, aside from Elena. A pink, frayed strand of yarn held a card on it that said "Welcome to ShinRa," but it had suffered fading, a complete loss of the golden in the letters, and a few burns.

But the stem, with its thorns and dirty, ceramic, green vase, stayed. It had become an entity to them, really, a private joke among three friends. "Hey, Tseng," Reno would say, and then start some argument for the irritation value. They would bicker on for quite a while, and sometimes lose focus on the original intent.

Eventually, Rude's large hand would go into the air, a kind of ultimate law, he would smirk ever so slightly, and he would say, "Let's ask the stem."

"I remember," Rude said, speaking lower than usual, "my first day here. He'd told me that I would have to take off my sunglasses for a moment. I almost hit him then, maybe to blind him, but then he handed me a pair that had the ShinRa emblem right here." He pointed to the faded symbol near his ear. "No tape on it like my other ones, both lenses uncracked. . .only take 'em off to sleep." She heard his voice and didn't know whether he wanted to laugh or cry; but she did know he was too strong to do either.

The chairs themselves were nothing special. Just large armchairs, leather-bound and being slowly worn out by what Reno called the eight cheeks.

Rude's was in rickety shape, what with the missing piece. A few months back, he had come in late at night, mad about a failed date, and kicked it so hard that it flew out the other side of the chair and broke the window. For days, Rude had shifted back and forth, trying to get comfortable with the insecurities of a three-legged chair, making squeaking sounds with every rock and dull thuds when it tipped onto the unprotected corner. This kept on until Reno had gotten irritated with the thunks of Rude rocking back and forth. Furiously, he'd shoved a dictionary under it, which had happened to be the exact size needed, and it had never moved. They'd even nailed it on.

Of course, Tseng had been very picky about his chair, and it was so nicely kept that a few people per month would ask if it was a new addition. He did his best to check it in the morning, after lunch, and before he left every day. If someone asked what he was doing, he said in a joking manner that someday it would be his son's chair and he wanted the kid to have at least one hand-me-down in mint condition. They all knew he would never have children, but the other three subconsciously began checking his chair for him if he wasn't around.

Reno's seat was met with the "Hey, when are you junking that thing?" comments, but he didn't seem to care. He'd taken to picking at things when he quit smoking, and had torn more than a few holes in it. Streaks from wiped cigarette ashes gave it a kind of haunted house appearance, and there was a spring poking out the side.

Elena's was probably second in line. She kept it clean, sure, but not with the obsessive fixation that lay subtly in Tseng's lemon polish and "moisty naps." She did her best to come in daily and dust it off, mend up any holes in that impassive way, and then leave to do her business once again. She was always pacing when they were in here, so the seat itself looked brand new.

But they all knew the symbolism of the chairs.

"I remember when he told me your great Legend of the Stem story. I thought you were an idiot, but then I got to know you lot. Tseng, the father. Rude, the quiet uncle. Reno, the drunken cousin who ruins pictures." She smiled, thinking of her photo album at home and knowing it would take some explaining to her daughter when she was old enough. "Me, the troublesome little sister. But there's more than that, right? I mean, we're all best friends despite what we do to each other."

"Yeah, Laney. Just like that; friends 'til the end." Rude smirked.

She looked out the window and sighed, tracing a pattern in the frost. The war with Sephiroth was over; AVALANCHE was out of the picture; they'd been laid off and sent with their chairs to a company-provided house as sympathy. Three levels, giant rooms, just gargantuan in all. But there was still an emptiness in each of them, sort of like there was still something they needed to do.

"You know what I mean, Rude," she said, looking at the ring on her finger. It was the average wedding band for the average bride; gold, simple, and with only four letters engraved inside, where only she knew they could be found: RD+ES.

The bald man nodded silently. "Yeah, I know. Friends 'til the end, just with some twists and turns in the middle. Like the two of you. . .and him."

He followed her gaze out the window, across a field and just beyond their picket fence. Without knowing where it was, the burial plot was almost nonexistant in the winter snowfall, but they had committed it to memory and even Elena could walk out to it with her eyes closed. A baby monitor went off and he felt her shoulders droop before slipping out from under his paw of a hand, not looking away from the sight.

There was a man in a blue suit out there, standing in a circle of cleared ground and waist-deep in a hole. Despite the frozen ground, despite the bleeding blisters on his hands, Reno dug on, ignoring that his fingers were sticking to the blade of the shovel and ripping his skin off bit by bit. The grave had been dug the past spring, but the Wutain men in charge of it had deemed his second request unacceptable. He'd let it go for a while, but it had eaten at him until yesterday afternoon, when he had started digging and not come inside since. He'd watched the sun come up not an hour ago, only to be replaced with another day of snow.

His cheeks were frozen, and if not from the cold itself then from the small collections of ice at the corners of his eyes, products of standing next to the grave for a bit too long and loving his friend a bit too much to keep from crying. But he would be damned if he took a break and didn't get this done today.

To the side of the hole he was digging at the moment, there sat a leather chair with a small cover of snowflakes.

Rude still watched, knowing he was out there to fill in more holes than anyone else would ever understand.