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Blood Tears
He was an enigma. That really was the only way to describe him. At first glance,people couldn't even believe he was a Turk. Granted, he had the uniform, but... unlike his fellow Turks, he didn't hold himself with that professional attitude. Instead, his white dress shirt was untucked, omitting buttoning the top two or three buttons. No tie would be worn, and his jacket was always unzipped. He rarely stood at attention, opting instead for a casual slouch. Always irreverent to authority ---except when it came to orders.
It was why he was kept on the team, despite his lax attitude toward everything else. His loyalty to being a member of the Turks. To his orders and his job. And he rarely failed. Even as a rookie, he had taken each mission seriously, and had risked life and limb to complete them, sometimes barely making it out of situations by the skin of his teeth.
It was how he'd managed to earn those two streaks - one beneath each eye, just along the cheekbone. Now it was a joke, and if anyone asked him, he'd laugh and say that those marks were why he now wore his goggles on top of his head when they weren't needed. But his partners always knew differently. They knew the truth.
Reno had joined ShinRa at fourteen, emerging from the slums of Midgar and eager to earn enough pay to move his family out from the polluted, dirty and rather dangerous city. At sixteen, he was promoted to the Turks, deemed to smart (and too much of a smart ass) to stay in SOLDIER and merely be a grunt.
The training for Turks was brutal. He was drilled in every weapon he knew, taught not only how to swim, but how to hold his breath for minutes on end. By the time he had finished being "trained" (tortured, he swore), he could withstand most of the elements beyond the limits of most humans, could withstand quite a bit of pain, could move faster, had learned critical thinking skills that would make most people dizzy, had learned most forms of hand-to-hand combat and was quite proficient in them, and to top it off, he'd mastered the weapons he'd been "good" at in SOLDIER, and now had learned the basics of most other weapons.
He'd been good with a stick and a sword, too - and that fact hadn't passed by the notice of his higher-ups. Within a few weeks, he'd been called into the main office and handed a long, slender metal rod with rubber grips and a small, sliding button. It was his first contact with what would turn out to be his signature weapon - the Electro-Magnetic Rod.
It had been Reno who discovered the Pyramid attack the rod was capable of. And it was Reno who had perfected exactly how high to slide that button to accomplish certain ... results. He'd mastered it in a matter of a year, surprising his supervisors.
Perhaps his drive to learn more about what it could do came from the unfortunate events that lead to those marks beneath his eyes. They were tattoos now, but... they hadn't started that way.
He'd been in the Turks for about two months by that point, out of training and happily taking missions, trying his best to accomplish everything they set out in front of him. He'd been partnered with a man named Rude, who was only a handful of years older than Reno, and was uncommonly quiet. At first, the silence bothered Reno. Even to this day, he'd do anything to break it. Joking. Asking far too personal questions. Gossiping.
They were assigned to take out one of Don Corneo's adversaries, considering ShinRa had worked a deal out with the Don, and this came as part-and-parcel with such deals. Heh. The dirty work behind dirty deals, Reno figured.
The mission was supposed to be quick. No intelligence had come in to indicate that anything about it was out of the ordinary, and because of this no one thought it unwise to send in a rookie with one of the younger operatives. Honestly, even some of the more experienced Turks might have gotten tripped up the way Rude and Reno had.
They'd traveled into the slums beneath the plate, to sector 2, where the target operated out of, and only when they got out did Reno feel the tingle of nervousness course through him. Rookie nerves, he'd heard the older Turks call it. They split up once they'd arrived at the building their target used, Reno heading around back, while Rude headed to one of the sides. It seemed like the perfect plan. Storm in from two directions, take out the few people they knew would still be inside, and kill the Boss. Simple. Easy.
But something went wrong.
Unknown to them, someone inside of ShinRa had snitched to their target, and as a consequence, their target was prepared. There had been a flurry of movement, followed by a sharp blow to the back of Reno's head... and the next thing he knew, he was gagged and bound beside his mission partner, glancing wildly around him. It was the first time any mission he'd been sent on even came close to failing. And oh, had this one failed. Reno watched as Rude was taken into another room, and tough the young Turk was naive, he was not stupid. He knew what they would do to his partner, and thrashed in his bonds, trying to get out so he might get to Rude and get them out of there. It did not work.
By the time Reno saw Rude again, neither of them looked at all presentable. Reno couldn't count the lacerations upon Rude's skin, his uniform removed from the waist up. His arms and fingers looked like a patchwork of bruises, and there was blood smeared over his face, obviously from a broken nose.
Reno wasn't all that great, himself. They had started by bruising his hands, lashing his arms and cutting into his stomach with a small knife. Tiny cuts that stung more than they ached. When that did not bring a tear to his eyes or a cry from his lips, they broke one of his ribs. Two, probably. Reno had felt it as well as heard it when the snapping occurred inside his chest as weight was pressed upon his midsection. It was only then that he screamed...only then that tears leaked from his eyes. But his captor only chuckled. "You are far too young for this," he mocked, leaning over the newest Turks member with a malicious gleam in his eyes. "It's almost a shame... and I can -almost- feel pity for you..." And when he leaned over further, the knife was raised, letting the blade fall deeply upon each of Reno's cheeks, just along the cheekbone. Tears mixed in with the blood that welled from the wounds, streaking down his face in some grotesque mockery of the Turk's true weeping.
It was only a few hours later that Reno had found his chance to escape. The bonds had loosened from his twisting and pulling at them over time, and he managed to wriggle his fingers back out of them while his guard drifted off to sleep. His feet were undone with some pain - his ribs were broken, after all - and he slid away silently to find Rude, using the very knife that had cut him to slice the throat of the man who was supposed to watch him. Too easy. He undid the bindings on Rude, then together they located their weapons, killed their target as planned, and hurried back to headquarters to report in.
Their wounds were healed quickly, but Reno was left with a faint scar on either cheek, running just beneath his eyes. A subtle reminder of his first failure. Too subtle.
He glared at his reflection in the mirror four days after they'd returned, standing in the medical facility they'd been housed in until they recovered. Too slight to really -see-... to do the job he wanted those scars to do. Upon being released later that day, he found himself heading for the nearest tattoo parlor, passing over the money earned on that particular mission.
The pain of getting the tattoo was far more intense than when the actual cuts had been made on his face, but when it was over and the mirror was passed to him, he couldn't stop the sad, knowing smile from flicking up the corners of his mouth. Across his cheekbones were two thin, triangular marks in nearly the same shade he dyed his hair, curving beneath each eye. His failure. He would never forget now - as he looked in the mirror each morning and evening - of what happened when he failed in his mission. He would never forget the day he shed blood tears.