Good evening, readers. Or morning, afternoon… it's evening now, 'kay? Because I said it was.
Well, we're nearing the end of the big stretch here, huh? One more chapter to go after this one and BTILW will conclude at an even 30. Funny how that works out, right? Wrong – I totally planned it to have 30 chapters. Totally.
Not lying at all.
Also, for those of you who wish to follow me through the abyss (and stare not too long into it, lest it stare back into you), I'll be pimpi – er, announcing my next little fanfiction project in Chapter XXX's autornote. Once more unto the breach, dear friends! Chapter XXIX.
Reno gazed out the window of his hospital bed, the daylight streaming through it in bright rays that cast his bed and attire into a white glow. After Seiryū had taken his leave – directly after gouging Rufus for all he could – Godo had seen them all taken to the hospital.
The staff had all insisted they stay for today, so they could be kept under observation in case any anomalies showed up on the scans, but everything was going well so far. They'd fixed all of them up with some liberal application of Cure magic, and now Reno was coping with his visitor, the only member of their party who hadn't suffered so much as a scratch against Souta.
"Where does it hurt?" Yuffie clucked.
Affecting a pouting frown, Reno replied, "Here, here, and here," indicating his left arm, his stomach, and his left temple. None of them really hurt, but all of them had, like hell, for quite a while before he'd gotten patched up.
Rude and Makoto observed from beds across the room as Yuffie giggled and kissed the spots Reno indicated. "Feel better now?"
"Uh-huh," Reno sighed, settling a bit more into his bed.
"Disgust rises from deep within me," Makoto commented to Rude. "Do they always behave like this?"
Rude shot the Shinsengumi leader a look that eloquently sent a no-duh message. "You ought to see them when they're alone."
"But that would mean they weren't alone, wouldn't it?" Rei asked with a laugh, clear like crystal water, while she sat by Makoto's bedside. The bald Turk shrugged at this and resumed tapping his fingers against the handle of his umbrella, which leaned against his bed.
Karsk also chuckled from where he lay in the bed adjacent to Reno's. He was the only one of the four ex-Shin-Ra to have suffered any injury that required inspection – being brained by a flying handlebar, regardless of whether or not the damage had been healed by a water-god, merited a trip to the hospital. Jobs was not in this room; he was still in intensive care. His frag grenade had probably crippled Souta enough for them to win the day if Yuffie hadn't been able to summon Seiryū and had simply had to fight him, but it had also hurt the ex-Turk badly.
"Do you wanna watch some tee-vee?" Yuffie asked Reno playfully.
"Uh-huh. But I'm just too tired to reach the remote…"
Makoto ungraciously blew a raspberry. "Watching you two is making me physically ill. Stop playing grab-ass and behave for once, would you?"
Quickly interceding, Rei explained, "Makoto's still grumpy from getting his poor little ass handed to him so thoroughly. You'll have to forgive him."
Nobody laughed at that. Souta's betrayal still weighed heavily on all of them. There was a funeral scheduled for the end of the week, but it was something that none of them looked forward to.
Wordlessly, Yuffie grabbed the remote and flipped on the television in the room, turning up its volume to smother the silence that had sprang up.
"…Godo has officially declared former Shin-Ra commander, Sub-General Karsk, and all of his men to be a governmentally sanctioned and funded national security unit, hereafter to be known as the Wusheng. Lord Godo had this to say about the appointment…"
"The sly old man back-dated the papers of approval to the day before yesterday," Karsk interjected, loudly enough to be heard over the television. "Our entire operation, therefore, was always government-approved – it just wasn't government-approved at the time it was carried out."
Reno cocked an eyebrow. "Isn't back-dating stuff like that illegal?"
"There's a new provision for it," Makoto replied dryly.
"Let me guess. Seiryū?"
"According to Kosuke, Seiryū wrote it into the national constitution before proceeding to set your boss up."
"It's a good thing we don't get more visits from water-gods," Karsk said. "If we let him, Seiryū would probably start running the country all by himself if he wanted to. For a divine being, he certainly has his prideful foibles."
"Careful, Karsk, you might mysteriously drown if you keep that up," Yuffie snorted.
"Talk about a theocracy," Rude murmured.
"No kidding," Reno agreed, stretching a bit. "I gotta say, partner, that I'm glad we live in a society where people are a little more down-to-earth."
The door chose that moment to bang open and make a terrific sound as it slammed its doorknob into the wall, making everyone half-jump out of their skin. When they saw who was coming in, Reno, Rude, and Yuffie all swore at the same time.
"Hey, kids!" Cid barked. "I was jes' in town and heard you was recently on the ass end of an asswhooping. Any truth?"
"God, kill me now," Yuffie breathed, then quickly added, "Not really."
"What are you doing here, Highwind?" Reno demanded. "I thought you were over at the WRO headquarters."
The old pilot barked a harsh laugh. "So disappointed t'see me, red? I'm hurt, I really am. What I'm doin' here is actin' as ferry captain for some of these characters. They were real worried when they heard you got yer ass handed to ya by some old Wutainese guy."
Unsurprisingly, Rufus stepped through the door after Cid, but immediately following him were Tseng, Elena, and all the rest of AVALANCHE.
"Yuffie, dear," Reno whispered hoarsely. "I'm dying. See if you can chuck me out the window."
"You keep yer ass in bed," Barret roared at him. "I didn't travel however many goddamned miles this place is from Mideel so you could screw things up, Reno."
"Seconded," Tifa said brightly, taking Cloud by the hand and moving to Reno's bed. "How've you been? I hear you're quite the celebrity nowadays."
"Nowadays?" the redhead asked, feigning shock. "I been famous for a lot longer than just recently, honey. You know you were crushing on me years before you met Spikey here."
"Nice to see you too, Reno," Cloud said with a quiet smile. "I think he's doing pretty well, Tifa."
"And who are your fellow bedridden companions?" Red XIII asked after he affectionately licked Yuffie's hand. "I think they bear introduction."
Rude took the opportunity. "Guy next to me is Makoto and his girlfriend's Rei. Next to Reno is Sub-General Karsk."
"Priv'ledged," Cid said as he shook their hands in turn. "Say, Karsk, don't I know you from somewhere?"
"Assuming that you're the Cid Highwind that I used to hear about, you might know me from the briefing I gave the hundred and eighty-first air corps unit during the war. If I recall correctly, you were the lead pilot of that particularly notorious squadron."
"Hot damn, that was a long time ago," the old pilot laughed. "But it's good to see you again, Sub-General. What the hell ever happened to ya? Just as well you stayed here. I figure we probably woulda done you in if you'd kept working for Shin-Ra."
"Hey, Vincent!" Yuffie shouted from Reno's bedside. "Say something, why don't ya, you big jerk!"
Reno looked at the red-coated ex-Turk and waved languorously. "Nice to see you, Valentine. Hope Cid didn't have to fly all over the place to find your ass."
"He was easy enough to locate," Reeve laughed genially. "Just as we were about to depart to look for him and pick up everyone else, he showed up at the WRO headquarters asking for a ride."
Vincent raised his right hand in a mock salute to Reno and Rude, then turned and swept out of the room.
"The nerve of that guy," Yuffie huffed. "I dunno how Paine put up with him."
"Probably the same way Tifa puts up with me," Cloud replied softly, "or how you put up with Reno."
"It's a method lost to humankind, I think," Elena said with a small smile, giving Tseng's hand a squeeze. Rufus rolled his eyes and gave Reno a not-quite smile.
"When do y'all check out of this place?" Cid asked. "We're going out to dinner, on me, and everyone's invited!"
"We're leaving now," Reno immediately said. "Screw extended observation, I'm hungry. Rude?"
"Agreed," the bald Turk said, swinging himself out of bed. "Let's pick up our clothes and go."
A heart monitor beeped steadily in the white room, keeping a watchful electronic eye on the pulse of its patient. He lay alone in the room, having demanded quite vigorously his exclusive privacy and backed his request with a lot of money.
"Getting too old for this, Deman?"
Jobs snorted as best he could when there was a drip in his nose. "Don't patronize me, Vincent. Immortals would do well not to remind mortals of their, to risk sounding like a broken record, mortality."
The red-cloaked gunman swept into the room and closed the door quietly behind him. "How long has it been, Deman? Decades?"
"Assuredly. Last I heard of you, you'd had a fatal accident while guarding Dr. Lucrecia Crescent."
"Lucrecia."
Jobs blinked. "What?"
"It's pronounced Lew-cret-sia. Not Lew-crie-cia."
Another half-snort. "Ridiculous. That's women for you, Vincent. Can't properly pronounce their own names." Instead of disagreeing, Vincent merely inclined his head and allowed the ghost of a smile to manifest on his face. Jobs looked bad, very bad; he was all burnt up and down his front side, most of his hair gone. The explosion had probably taken years off of his life, as well.
Jobs saw Vincent's gaze resting on him and said, "Don't cry for me, Vincent – not that killers can cry, as we well know, but you'll pardon the colloquialism. I'm not at my best right now."
"Of course." There was a long silence as the two of them dredged up recollections of the few missions they'd gone on together and how good a team they'd been. "What do you intend to do now, Deman? From what you told me in the letter you sent me, you were going against your employer and might not make it through – and you swore that you'd retire if you did."
"I did, didn't I?" Jobs sighed. "And I suppose I also told you to hold me to that. Force me to retire even if you have to do it at gunpoint."
"You did."
"Well, then, I suppose there's not much left for us to say, is there? I have a house in Icicle Inn that I can retire to. I won't be a bother or threat to anyone up there."
Vincent delicately gave Jobs a pat on the shoulder, mindful of the fact that doing it too hard would hurt like hell for the man. "I'm glad to hear it. It's time you settled down, Deman. Perhaps you'll meet someone and have some children."
Managing a laugh, Jobs replied, "Unlikely, Vincent. After all the fighting I've been through, I very much doubt I'm shooting live rounds anymore. No, 'tis the life of a bachelor for Deman Jobs, and I suspect it always will be."
Swirling his cloak about him, Vincent opened the door to leave. "I thought so, too, once," he said, pausing in the doorway. "Then I found my ideal."
And he stepped out.
The ex-Turk looked up at the ceiling and chuckled. "His ideal, hmm?" Perhaps his privacy could make a bit of room in his brain-attic for a new ideal. A family, or at least good acquaintances. A name that he could keep, and not shed every time he saw someone he knew and relocated. A stable, happy life.
Looking forward to a brighter future at last, Deman Jobs sighed contentedly and resolved to be gone by the next morning.
Obviously, the Scarlet Monastery was out of the question, as what was left of it was being turned into a public garden, so unsalvageable was the building. Therefore the party elected to head to the Drunken Fisher King, to eat sushi and drink until the two jokes that Rude knew were stand-up-grade funny.
They were all seated in a gigantic booth in the indoor part of the bar, and stories were being exchanged just as fast as the jug of saké at the table. Reno leaned into the leather as Yuffie made herself comfortable against his side, eating fish eggs and generally acting content.
"It's pretty amazing," she murmured at length.
Reno looked at her, the conversation of the rest of the group lost to him for the moment. "What is?"
"I can remember a time when I hated your guts, Reno. Thought you were a stuck-up asshole that made Cloud look genial. And now we're lovers, and our groups have all sort of come together into one big family." She looked up at him and ran her fingers along his jaw. "I wanna say it's ironic, but that's not really the right word."
"No, it's not," Reno agreed. "I think the word is 'good,' in this case. Let's face it, we're a hundred percent perfect for one another, and two-odd years ago you'd have happily put your boomerang-shuriken through my face. I like the way things have turned out." He motioned at the rest of the gathering. Even Vincent had come along, explaining that he'd stepped out to meet an old friend. Now the red-cloaked gunman was having a drinking contest with Rude, the two of them knocking back shot after shot without any visible effects.
"I think that one, you're right, and two, Rude's screwed," Yuffie sighed happily.
"Don't count on it, kiddo," Cid said. He was seated next to her, and was happily puffing away on a cigarette in clear violation of the no-smoking sign in the bar. When one of the waiters had come to try to get him to stop it, Cid had grinned at the young man, happily put the cigarette out all up and down the front of the waiter's uniform, and lit himself another. Needless to say, he hadn't been bothered again. "I know Valentine. Say whatever you want about him bein' different an' all that, but Rude's got a shot – no pun intended. Valentine can take gunshots to the chest, but he can't hold his liquor."
"And how would you know this?" Reno asked.
"I spiked the punch at a party about a year ago. You two weren't there. Valentine had a couple cups of it and was staggering around for the entire thing afterwards."
Reno laughed heartily at that image, made even funnier by the alcohol in his system. He decided to encourage the feeling by taking another shot. "Good stuff."
A serious expression overtaking her features, Yuffie abruptly said, "Reno, did you believe Souta?"
The redhead blinked. "Say wha?"
"All his stuff on systems. Propagating it, viral information, all that. I hate to say it, but a lot of it made sense to me, y'know. Like if I start singing a song, it could get stuck in your head. It's a pain in the ass, but it's just information, right? Well, didn't I technically give it to you, like a virus? Could Souta be right?"
Reno shrugged. "Honestly, babe, I'm no philosopher, no matter what the press says about me ever since that speech I made to the Council. I think Souta's ideas had merit, just like any idea has – except the stupid ones, but you know I don't count them. I been on crowd control enough times to know mob mentality, and it fits right in with what he said. You tell a mob to storm a government building, they'll probably damn well do it. On the other hand, if you tell them to go bake cookies, they'll damn well do that, too. You want to talk about virulent information, talk to a mob, I say.
"But in the end, and this is also from personal experience, a mob's just a bunch of people. When you smack someone across the face with your prod to break things up, you're smacking someone, not a part of a larger whole. Souta's plan probably could've worked if he'd been around to make sure it went off without a hitch. Collapse the government and make people have to work to achieve their own order, and they'll think they figured it out for themselves and never want to let go of it. It's mob mentality he was using, Yuffie. Problem is that he never accounted for the guy whose shit you ruin – the individual.
"If we're gonna follow Souta's metaphor of ideals being viruses, I say everyone's got a different immune system. Some of us fight off junk better than others – whether it's just genetic, or because we've fought it off before, or we just move too damn fast for it to ever really affect us. Some people fight off virulent ideals better than others, whether they were raised to, or because they've dealt with other virulent ideals in the past, or they're too caught up in their own lives to bother absorbing anything new. Some people whose immune systems just happened to be good enough – us – resisted Souta's virus, and invented the cure; namely, having a water-god turn him into squishy paste on the temple floor. I always liked home remedies."
"So you think people are more powerful than mobs?" Yuffie asked.
"Look at everyone at this table," Reno replied. Cloud and Makoto were locked in conversation, their hands weaving through the air, describing aerial maneuvers that they used in combat, while Tifa and Rei, seated next to their respective significant others, also conversed, probably on more feminine subjects. Red XIII and Cid were talking with Karsk, while Rude and Vincent stalwartly continued their drinking contest. Barret and Reeve were discussing oil prospecting and its advantages for the WRO, while Rufus, Tseng, and Elena were deep in conversation about consolidating Shin-Ra's resources for the big WRO transfer. "We got a lot of good people here. All of 'em would be more'n willing to fight Souta with us – but all of 'em would also be willing to help Souta if the government was actually corrupt. Ideals are powerful, alright, but they're only powerful because the people who have them give them that power. A mob just happens when you have a bunch of people with ideals. So, short version, yeah, individuals are more important than mobs, or even ideals themselves – 'cause everything starts with an individual, after all." His gaze unfocusing slightly as though looking at something far away, Reno added, "Souta didn't believe in the individual, just his systems. Look where he is now."
Yuffie grinned and pulled Reno's face to hers for a kiss. "Well, speaking from one individual to another, I have to say that knowing a guy like you really makes me lean towards your side of the argument."
They kissed again and called for another round of saké for the table.
