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20. Naifu – Houseguest

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"Wow." Naifu looked around her and whistled. "Who knew an old guy could have such a cool pad."

"Hey! Less of the 'old guy' stuff." Legend reached around to press a hand to the small of his back. He straightened up with an audible crack that made her wince.

"You're totally going to have arthritis when you're older."

"If we get to be any older," Rod sniped, coming through the door behind her. "Nice place. Try any of that bomb-the-shit-out-of-the-area again before I'm out of range and I'll shove every one of those decorative baubles up your ass."

Legend rolled his eyes. "Just because you couldn't keep hold of a target, don't take your bad mood out on me."

Rod glared. "I kept hold of him. That was the problem – I kept hold right up to the point he pulled a weapon on me."

The Turks had scouted the potential SOLDIER candidate while he was in Midgar and issued an 'invitation' he could refuse, but lost him when he declined by leaving town. Things being what they were at the moment, Tseng had dispatched a team to recover him. The SOLDIER programme was running low on participants and refilling their ranks had become a priority for the Turks. Tseng had sent a team all the way out to the Costa del Sol to fetch this candidate back. They had confronted him on the shore, only for things to go south. As if secretly leaving town wasn't a big enough hint to Shinra that, actually, he didn't want to get injected with mako and go fight monsters for them, the guy had compounded his message by attempting to blow away their current employees with a bazooka. Where he had gotten a bazooka was one of the many questions surrounding his case. Only some quick thinking and Legend's aim had saved Rod from becoming a messy corpse.

"It would've looked really bad if some random civilian could evade the Turks on their home turf and then take out four of them on his own," Legend said as they limped through the door. "Mind the carpet."

"Who the fuck chooses white carpets and pale wood flooring?" Rod grumbled.

"You reckon he was working alone?" Kakutou, the last part of their team, asked. There were rumours about a faction devoted to rescuing people whom Shinra had chosen for SOLDIER and smuggling them away from Midgar. Kakutou had broken the candidate's jaw and arm like fine china after he tried to blow Rod's head off and Legend's explosives made sure the bazooka would never again be useable. Until the guy's jaw was wired or healed by the other Shinra goons who had arrived, that guy wasn't answering anyone's questions.

It would be the four Turks' job to question him. Until then they had retreated to lick the wounds they would deny getting if anyone ever asked. Just to prevent anyone being stupid enough to ask, they had retreated to the beach-house Legend still called home even though he had been living in Midgar for a while now.

"I dunno. He didn't strike me as a great brainiac, so maybe someone else did the thinking to get him out of Midgar without us seeing," Legend replied. He sank onto a tasteful wraparound sofa and propping his shoes on the coffee table. It was smoked glass and looked expensive. Everything in the room was stylish and looked like it cost a lot. "We'll find out in the morning, I guess."

"I never figured you living in a place like this," Naifu said, still enraptured with the décor. It was all so elegant. Legend had always seemed like a man more at home with a beer and a babe on either arm. All this luxury was surprising.

He snorted. "Did you think I spent all that time in the doghouse eating microwave dinners and watching TV?" he asked, referring to the time he had been 'put on leave' after refusing to follow orders. His skills were too valuable for Shinra to just cut him loose, or so Veld had argued. As a result Legend had been confined to his house here and left to moulder until the company needed him again. Apparently he had spent the time more productively than they'd thought.

"I just never thought interior design would be your thing." Naifu bounced on an armchair, felt down the side of the cushion and yanked on the lever there. The footrest shot out and the whole thing leaned back. She grinned. "Now this is more like it. It's even already pointed at the tube." She flicked an imaginary remote control at the expansive TV screen. "Pfft! Pfft! Your viewing wish is my command, mistress. Hey, I could get used to this."

Kakutou frowned. He was always so serious. He was a little younger than Legend, but came across as much older and had an almost fatherly attitude to the younger Turks. It was weird for someone whose martial arts could do severe damage. To hear him, you thought 'paternal'. To watch him punch and kick you thought 'dangerous'. To look at him just standing there you thought 'cop' – unsurprising, since he had been a detective before becoming a Turk. He wore all three masks on rotation. Naifu sometimes wondered how he reconciled the different ethics that had to be inside his head, but only sometimes. Whatever any of them had been before, they were Turks now, and that was what mattered.

"We should get cleaned up," Kakutou said in his gravelly voice. "Naifu, you go first."

"Aw, but I wanna poke into everything and make a nuisance of myself."

He frowned again. She would have been irritated, except that was how Kakutou acted with all the female Turks – even Youhei. If his expertise with martial arts didn't piss her off enough, that made the bad-tempered woman truly cranky. Her arguments with Kakutou, and his refusal to argue back, were well-known and always attracted an audience – with Reno taking bets whenever he could get away with it. Naifu had lost gil to his little scam before, but with Reno there was no point looking for reimbursement. You knew what you were getting into when he and money appeared in the same sentence.

"Legend, how many bathrooms do you have here?" Kakutou asked.

Naifu protested. "I wouldn't take that long!"

"You're a girl," Rod exhaled noisily. He was a good partner, Naifu had learned, but a lousy conversationalist.

"Girls don't automatically take longer in the shower!" Naifu continued to protest.

"It's not about that," Kakutou said. "It's about privacy."

Naifu paused. There wasn't much she could say to that. "Oh." She was so unused to anyone giving her special treatment for being a girl, this threw her off balance.

"Two bathrooms," Legend replied easily, like it meant nothing to him. "One upstairs, one downstairs, or there's the swimming pool if you're really desperate to wash off.

"You have a pool?" Naifu echoed.

"He had to get the beach bunnies to stay in their bikinis somehow," Rod muttered.

Legend gave him the finger before adjusting his eye-patch. A reddened ring, stained with black dust from the explosion, showed where it had cut into his cheek over time. Naifu wondered what the patch was made of and what it would feel like to touch. Then she wondered why she wanted to know something so icky. To distract herself, she rocked back in her recliner, drawing her knees to her forehead, and used the momentum of the rock to somersault to her feet.

"Can't you do anything without making a song and dance about it?" Rod complained.

"I call the bathroom with the biggest bathtub," she declared, ignoring him. "It's been a long time since I had a good, hot soak. It's always five-minute showers in itsy-bitsy cubicles when we clean up at Shinra." It didn't have to be, but privacy meant sacrificing time. She always made sure she was alone when she stripped off. Always.

"Upstairs bathroom for you," Legend said. "Unless you want the pool."

She raised an eyebrow at him, ignoring the slight tightness in her stomach at the thought of putting on a bathing costume. She wasn't bothered about being the only girl amongst three men, but the thought of revealing so much flesh. She never let anyone see her naked. Even in the females-only showers she waited for the other Turks to leave, then ran in and out of a cubicle so fast there was no chance of anyone accidentally walking in and seeing her. The curious looks would have taken her back too far, even if they never asked the associated questions.

"Puh-lease. I don't do swimming pools, especially ones you probably only installed to get women to show you their goodies. I don't even want to think what might've happened in there, thankyouverymuch."

"Hey," Legend protested. "I changed the water."

"Ewwwww!"

He raised his own eyebrow, but shrugged. "Your loss. Temperature controlled and full of healing salts and shit like that. Swimming in it's the best thing to work out the kinks when you're sore from a hard day's work."

"Pass. I'm gonna go investigate this bathroom and see if it has gold faucets and quilted toilet paper. Who knew you were such a homebody?"

"My cleaning woman."

"That is so sexist! Why couldn't you have a cleaning man?"

"The maid outfit would look too gross."

An image of hairy legs and fishnets filled Naifu's mind. She shuddered. "That is just sick and wrong."

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To Be Continued …

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Side-flings, Homages and Downright Rip-offs

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Kakutou had broken the candidate's jaw and arm like fine china after he tried to blow Rod's head off and Legend's explosives made sure the bazooka would never again be useable.

- Kakutou is Japanese for 'fist fight'.