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46. Richie: Helper

"Y'know, sometimes I just can't believe you. You come off as this completely untouchable ice-queen who'd bust the balls of anyone you caught breaking the rules, and then you pull a stunt like this." Richie draped himself over the back of the chair, watching numbers and complicated computer code scroll past. "How are you even reading all that? Are you getting mako injections on the side or something?"

"Shut up." Helena's voice was typically flat. If he wasn't her partner she probably would have shot him already.

"But I'm boooored." Richie dropped his face into the crook of his arm. Then he lifted it again. He hadn't washed his suit and it stank. Sometimes it was great rebelling against his rich-boy upbringing, but sometimes not. Personal hygiene was definitely becoming an issue. If he'd been partnered with anyone but Helena they probably would have told him so already.

He frowned in thought. Well, maybe not Rude. That guy was probably the only Turk who said less than Helena. If Rude were ever partnered up with Helena the only communication would be grunts and the occasional ellipse. Freaky-deaky, as far as Richie was concerned. To prevent that travesty against conversation, Rude had ended up with Reno as his default partner on most missions, and Helena had landed herself chatterbox Richie and his nunchaku. One chatterbox and one silent sentinel. It was a tried and tested combo – although privately Richie thought he and Helena were streets ahead of their teammates.

We even match more than Reno and Rude, he thought idly, comparing his blond hair with Helena's. More than once, with his sinuous figure and Helena's lack of curves, they'd been mistaken for each other – usually in a fight. Those who knew them knew better, but when bullets were flying and everything was chaos, their physical similarity had helped them confuse their opponents and stay alive. It had been a handy trick on several Shinra-authorised missions.

Unlike this one, which was most definitely not authorised.

"You done yet?"

Helena didn't reply.

Richie wondered whether all this effort was worth it. Working off the clock, not getting paid (a major problem since Mummy and Daddy disowned him, declared him dead to them, and signed over his inheritance to his sister, who actually looked less like him than Helena, which was all sorts of bizarre, and where was he? Oh yeah), and breaking into a Shinra facility … all for what?

That, my friends, is the million-gil question.

Helena had tried to leave him behind on this – even gone so far as to sneak out of her apartment because she knew he suspected she was up to something and was lying in wait outside. Too bad for her Richie was more than just a pretty face. Too bad for most of the debutantes he'd bedded too, before he ran away to Midgar the way most kids run away to the circus. He still didn't regret that; just as he didn't regret tailing Helena and following her in.

"You know, if it hadn't been for me, you'd still be flummoxed by security." Richie grinned. There was a lot to be said for growing up in protected compounds where security was always top of the range and interesting stuff to do was almost nil. Keeping one step ahead of the latest innovations had been his hobby since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. "You could at least let me know what you're looking for."

"Shut up," Helena said again. If it hadn't been for the timbre of her voice, he could've sworn it was her daddy talking.

Richie had met the old guy only once and disliked him immensely. The man was as buttoned up as the collar on a military dress uniform and twice as stuffy, like he was on parade all the damn time. No wonder Helena came out of the Military Academy with the emotional range of an orthopaedic shoe. Except where her baby sister was concerned, of course. Richie smiled. He liked the brat just for ticking Helena off so much and proving there were actual emotions under her serious exterior.

The terminal beeped once. Helena's eyes widened briefly. For anyone else that would have been a volley of cursing.

"What?" Richie demanded. "What is it?"

She shut it down and stood. "We have to go."

"Aw, already? I was thinking about sprucing up this place a bit. A few ornaments, some new light fixtures, perhaps a water feature: it could be a tasteful getaway for the creative mind, instead of screaming 'bowels of industrial cesspit'. Honestly, you couldn't connect to the system aboveground?"

"Now," Helena said as if she hadn't heard him. She grabbed his shoulder and dragged him a few steps before he started running on his own.

"They caught onto you?"

"I was detected."

Mistress of understatement, as usual. Whatever Helena said, Richie had learned to maximise the actual severity to the power of ten. "Oh, bollocks."

The invective was well-deserved. They made it out, but just barely. Their Turk training was pushed to its limit in sneakiness. Their ability to remain undetectable in person and untraceable online, too. Helena was a good hacker. Richie trusted her to mask her presence in the Shinra system if she was poking about in places she wasn't supposed to go. If it was somewhere Turks didn't get access to, she was involved with some really serious shit. The trick now, however, was to hide themselves in real time as well, especially when people with guns were mobilised and sent after their skinny arses.

By the time they hit the streets below the Plate again Helena's pristine suit was in much the same condition as Richie's unwashed one. With her hair slightly mussed they really did look like twins, save for their wildly different facial expressions.

"Wow!" Richie crowed, grinning like a loon. "What a rush! When you break the rules, girl, you break the rules."

Helena could have been carved from granite. "Go home." She started to walk away.

"What? No way!" Richie dashed after her. "Whatever you're doing, I'm now in it up to my neck. The least you can do is fill me in." He paused. Blinked. Stuck out his tongue. "On the details, I mean. Nothing else. Because, seriously, you and me? Not gonna happen." Not that Helena was unattractive or anything, with that blonde bob and blue eyes, not to mention that whole disciplinarian thing she had going on … he imagined her with a whip and thigh-high stiletto boots ...

Damn it, what was he talking about again?

Helena stepped around him. She had to practically leap over a pile of garbage to do it. When he moved to block her way his foot landed in a half-empty takeout box. "Ew, gross. Now see what you made me do?"

"Go home." Helena had a hand resting on the PDA in her jacket pocket and an even harder than usual look in her eyes.

With a speed that would have startled a striking snake and given lightning a nasty shock, Richie grabbed the PDA, bounded up a nearby fire escape and waved it over the edge as though he would throw it to the ground. "Start talking, Hels, or it goes bye-bye."

Helena didn't even bother to pause. She just drew her revolver and pointed it. He heard the click of the safety and hastily reassessed his options.

"Jeez Louise, sorry. I forgot you hate being called Hels, but does it really merit shooting me?"

"Give that back."

"Man, what piddled in your cocktail? Are you really Helena, or some kind of pod person? Because the Helena I've been working with for the past few years not only wouldn't be pointing her gun at me unless there was a damn good reason for it, but wouldn't even be out here in Sector Eight, in the wee hours, having broken into a guarded Shinra facility to steal files or corrupt data or whatever." He sighed as if there wasn't a bullet being targeted at his forehead. "Seriously, Hels, what's up?"

Her eyes narrowed. "I've told you not to call me that."

"Talk to me. Something's up. I want to help. I am helping. Play fair, girl."

For a second her eyes were nothing but slits. Then she holstered her weapon. You could barely see the bulge of it under her tailored suit jacket. "Since when do Turks play fair?"

Richie grinned, vaulted over the edge of the fire escape and landed lightly in front of her. He held out the PDA for her to take. "Since the other players are Turks. The rest of the world can go screw itself as long as we're okay, right?"

Shockingly, Helena didn't answer straight away. Her eyes dropped and she stuffed the PDA into another pocket on the inside of her jacket this time. Richie wondered just how much a woman could hide on her person that way. The girls he'd known before becoming a Turk had all kept it to a minimum. Some hadn't even bothered with underwear!

"Oh boy, you really are in trouble, aren't you?"

She shot him The Look.

"Don't try that with me, Little Miss Sunshine. You so don't have the moral high ground right now."

"Do we ever?"

He thought about that. "Sometimes. But not you, and not right now. Not until you start playing straight with me."

He'd always known it was a possibility – all Turks knew that they may have to take out allies someday if those allies turned on them – but he'd never thought it would be another Turk. He'd have eaten his own nose, snot and all, before even considering by-the-book Helena could turn rogue. He had his doubts about Cissnei, since she'd been 'deep undercover', as Tseng put it, for years with no word Richie had ever heard about. He supposed whatever mission she had was between her and the boss, and Tseng knew what he was doing. Helena, on the other hand, was definitely not working on Tseng's say-so, and that worried Richie. As in, a lot. Nunchaku versus revolver: who would win?

"Have you turned?"

Helena hesitated. Richie's blood froze.

"No."

He breathed a sigh of relief. "But Tseng doesn't know what you're up to?"

"Plausible deniability." Helena gave Riche a variation of The Look, this one more assessing. It had taken her a long time to accept him as a colleague of equal standing. His behaviour didn't help, but his conduct in the field went a long way towards convincing her, and his loyalty to the Turks clichéd it during the AVALANCHE crisis. You had to prove yourself to Helena, but once you had her respect you made damn sure you never lost it. She was a dependable, if taciturn ally, but a deadly enemy. "If he doesn't know he can't be blamed."

"Heidegger will still try. He'll say Tseng can't keep his people under control."

"Heidegger is an idiot."

Richie stared at Helena. Then he threw back his head and laughed. "Bloody hell! You're just full of surprises today." He gave her his most winsome smile. "So who's the lucky fellah?"

Helena's scowl could have been used to peel barnacles from the hulls of old oil tankers.

Richie was having none of it. "You're denying you're doing all this for a guy?"

Her scowl deepened. Richie felt like checking to make sure his hair wasn't beginning to smoulder.

"All right, all right, I won't ask his name. But I'm guessing you've been funnelling him information on the sly, and tonight you found out something big." He shoved his hands in his pockets with the laissez-faire posture of a public schoolboy. His foppish hairstyle completed the look: unthreatening, vaguely pretty in an effeminate way, the kind of guy who looked more likely to drink strawberry daiquiris in an upscale bar than break kneecaps for information. "Explain it to me, Hels. Explain to me how that isn't betraying the Turks' confidence and trust."

"He is someone within Shinra. And he has no intention of using the information for anything that would harm the company." As ever, Helena's formal language made her sound ever so slightly aristocratic. You'd never guess her family was born on the bottom rung and worked their way up to respect with a series of dazzling military careers.

"He told you that?" Richie shook his head. "And I thought you weren't that naïve."

"I have not told him anything. I have simply listened to his concerns and begun my own investigation."

That made a difference. Richie trusted Helena's word implicitly. If she said she hadn't passed on any information, he believed her. "But you're going to tell him what you found out tonight?"

"I do not know how much of what I discovered is true." She glanced at the palms of her hands, which Richie couldn't understand. She balled them into fists and lowered her arms to her sides. "If it is, then it would be … most harmful."

"To the company?"

"To begin with."

Richie's left eyebrow sprang for his hairline of its own accord. "Sounds serious."

"It is."

"What do you intend to do about it?"

"Investigate further."

"Naturally. I wouldn't have expected any less from you. Will this involve more B n' E? That's breaking and entering in layman's terms."

"I understand the vernacular."

Sometimes it was actually quite weird how the chips had fallen; their attitudes mismatching their backgrounds, and the pair of them different in so many unforeseen ways. Helena was so much poorer, but so much more polite than him. Or than he'd been, he reminded himself, thinking of his sister's swollen trust fund.

"You didn't answer my question."

"Perhaps." Helena hesitated. "But not in Midgar."

"Where?"

She fixed him with an assessing eye. "Nibelheim."

Richie covered his shock pretty well. Everyone knew that name, though they very rarely spoke it. The humiliation of the Nibelheim Incident had hit Shinra hard, and they'd hushed the story quickly, with the implication that anyone who tried to resurrect it would face serious consequences. There were rumours that a reporter and photographer who had attempted it went missing 'while on location' and had never been seen again. Even Tseng was sparing with his details, though every Turk worth their salt knew the official story was bogus. Nevertheless, that whole business was strictly off limits and not to be talked of even amongst themselves.

Richie sighed and linked his arms behind his head. Then he unlinked them with all due haste. Whew, weren't people meant to be immune to the smell of their own BO? "I have some vacation time saved. And I don't think you've ever had a vacation since you started working. I'm sure Tseng won't mind me taking mine now. He might even be glad, after the Noodle Incident." He grinned at the memory. He'd never seen Reno look impressed before that, or as pissed. He'd sworn vengeance, so maybe now was exactly the right time for Richie to absent himself from Midgar. "So what's our first move?"

You could have cut yourself on Helena's sharp look. "Our?"

"Of course. What, you thought I was bull-shitting before? I'm your partner, sweetheart. Partners don't let their partners go off half-cocked into situations they may not be able to handle alone if aforementioned situations are really as big as you're implying this one is." He pulled a face. "And partners don't let their partners use unintentional innuendoes or hideously long and rambling sentences all the time, either."

Helena stared at him. Then she bowed – the height of manners he'd done his best to forget since leaving his parents' mansion and the life they'd had planned for him. "Thank you."

Richie waved her off. "No biggie."

But it was a biggie, as both of them were soon to discover to their cost.