Momentum

By DarkAngel

Disclaimer: Reno, Elena and ever'thing else aten't mine. Shin-Ra – er, I mean, Square-Enix owns it all.

Dedication: This goes to Violent Angel Girl, one of the best damned friends I've got in real life. It's partly, no… entirely her fault I got hooked on the FFVII in the first place. 8) I've been promising her an unbirthday fic for over two years now. Thank you for being patient with me. I hope you find this to your liking, and I hope most fervently that I don't end up a shrunken head mounted to your wall.

It wasn't as if he'd signed up to be a killer.

There was no recruiting centre anywhere where people queued up and signed the dotted line under a paper which read "Release form for one soul Small Print: You'll never need it again."

Becoming a Turk sort of just happened to you. You fell into it, like a really expensive coke habit. And like the expensive habit, once you'd started, you couldn't stop, and pretty soon you'd gone too far, racked up too many debts –

Well, that was the way it went in Reno's experience, anyway. Oh sure, there were naïve people like 'Laney who – and here Reno grinned, a cynical working of muscles that on anyone else would have been a smile, but on Reno merely looked like a be-toothed sign along the lines of 'Do not feed the Bandersnatch' – volunteered, but in any case she'd learned her lessons pretty fast.

And speaking of perky little blondes who learned fast…

There was an elbow in his ribs. Reno twitched, the way an Elfadunk might if bothered by flies.

The elbow got a bit more insistent, and now there was a mosquito whine –

"…to me, Reno?"

He raised one vivid eyebrow. "What?"

Elena sighed, exasperated. "Our target just left the building. He's getting in his car."

Reno squinted through the window and reached a hand for the keys in the ignition. Ignoring Elena's snort – about time, it said – he moved the car from out between two other vehicles wedged into the thin strip of street. They followed the red vehicle – crushed cherry red, crimson red, blood red – Reno singsonged the litany that had suddenly bubbled its way into the front of his head, humming – into the main circus of East Miracle Way.

East Miracle Way. That was a funny name for a street, Reno thought, the song flickering out of his head, like radio distortion, only to be replaced by big flashing song-and-dance lights that scrolled the name of the street in capitals – EAST MIRACLE WAY – into his head. All the streets in Edge had those kinds of names. Find The Way Street. Angel Junction. Well, that was no surprise. Edge needed all the cheer it could get after that big burning rock from outer space, the stigma, the unearthed cyber soldiers. Reno could understand that. Some people dealt with the messes of life by naming their streets after hopeful, whimsical things. Reno personally stood one hundred percent behind the whisky and beer method. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

If it ain't broke…

They were passing by the monument to Meteor now, a big grey satellite disc of twisted steel and corroded despair. Shin-Ra had been responsible for that. He glanced at the rookie – ah, but she wasn't a rookie anymore. When the hell had that happened? There'd been a time when she was young and earnest and a bit flabby around the mouth, but really it was endearing in its own way…

Oh she was still young and earnest, but she didn't talk so much anymore the way she used to, about everything and nothing and Reno suspected she'd done it because the sound of her own voice reassured her that things were real and they were happening and she wasn't crazy, fuck no it was everybody else that was crazy, they were the only ones holding this insane world together at the cost of their own sanity. Now her eyes were just that slightest bit harder and her actions a little more graceful and smooth. It was a loss, really. He'd like that fumbling part of her. She'd reminded him of her sister back then. In the end, they'd both become what the Shin-Ra hired the Turks to be. It was the same with him.

If it ain't broke…

Now their mark was stopping outside a grey office building, looking furtively around before ducking inside. Reno glanced over at Elena, who nodded. They got out of the car.

There was a set of wooden stairs and a window at the landing. The sky was that kind of white-grey where the sun almost broke through but not quite. If Reno were a more fanciful person, he would have likened it to a gossamer curtain veiling and diffusing the light; he was too busy trying to move up so the stairs didn't creak.

They made their way up the stairs, a one-step, a two-step and then they were in front of the door, flanking it on either side, 'Laney looking at him for confirmation before he lifted his foot and gave the door a jarring of a lifetime, splinters flying every which way and it was beautiful, it was poetry in slow motion –

And suddenly it wasn't, because the mark had a gun in his hand and was aiming right at him – no – at her. Reno yelled out and threw Elena back with his arm, heard her scream and if she pitched any higher she would break fucking chandeliers with that voice –

BANG! Glass was breaking and the room was going dark because there was no light except the red, lots of red illuminated by the pretty sparkles of broken glass. Reno thought he hadn't seen anything this pretty in such a long time and then the world was tilting and Elena was breaking glass and bone and then their target was crumpling to the floor, red mingling on red. Crushed red, crimson red, fire engine red, engines blaring in his head…

He could hear Elena babbling now, bubbling full of words like she had been that first day when she'd been so nervous and eager to be accepted, be one of them. To be a killer, Reno thought, except she hadn't signed up for that. None of them had.

"I've called the paramedics, Reno. You're going to be all right," she said, her words coming out of her with force. Forced determination. Forced cheer. Aw, fuck, he hated it when she looked at him like that, like everything was her fault when and like the sky was falling when clearly it wasn't as big a problem as she thought it was and the sky would still be up there tomorrow. Reno blinked up the sky through the haze filling his vision. Yep, the sky would still be there tomorrow, with that – and Reno giggled breathlessly – gossamer curtain behind which the sun would peep coyly down on them before disappearing again, the harlot.

She was going at his shirt as if she wanted to just lay him down and do him right there on the floor of the apartment building beside the corpse. Well, he was already lying down. Again he giggled, ignoring the trills of pain zithering up and down his body, sending alternate waves of heat and cold, as if he were on the best acid trip of his life. He made some comment along the lines of "Elena, you kinky bitch" but she didn't look offended, no she looked worried, biting her lip and looking like she was trying her damndest not to cry. Ferfuckssake 'Laney, grow up. You're a Turk. But he couldn't get the words out.

And now there were beats reverberating in Reno's head, a jangle of rhythm and vibes. Boom-thud-thud-boom with a bassline and drums going rat-a-tat-tat-dhoom. Spots were dancing congas in front of his eyes and the sky was gone, replaced now by a dull ceiling with sooty stains and Reno frowned, because he could have sworn the sun had been there a while ago. All there was now was encroaching black at the corners and it was another while before he realized he couldn't feel pain anymore. Goddamn, whatever he could say about Elena, he had to hand it to her: she'd done a great job patching him up. See? There was nothing to worry about.

He wanted to tell her that she was doing great, she was doing a bang-up job. Couldn't have done it better myself, he wanted to say, only he couldn't because his throat was shut down, as if someone had turned off a valve in there and he was left only grunting and coughing up salt and red and blood. Dimly now he knew he was dying and that he only had seconds, maybe a few minutes if he was lucky, and he wanted to take Elena's hand and tell her that they may not have signed up for any of this, but the risks were written right out there. No, they hadn't signed up for any of this. It had all just happened to them.

And Reno, closing his eyes, let his mind linger on that thought. Elena's voice was a dim murmur again; the mosquito had settled and the Elfadunk rolled over in the mud. He hadn't really signed up for this, either, he thought. It just sort of happened to you, like a really expensive coke habit, and then, before you knew it ---

Author's Notes: I'm going to thoroughly caned, scourged and torn limb-from-limb by angry Reno fangirls, and most especially by Violent Angel Girl, who probably didn't see this coming. I defend myself only by stating that a) I wrote this as a stream-of-consciousness piece and therefore wrote this in one huge gasp – I just let the fic take me where it would, ending and all, and b) who says Reno's dead? Maybe the paramedics got to him in time. Maybe Elena found some way to keep him going long enough. I mean, look at Tseng. Slashed and thought to have been crushed in the Temple of the Ancients and then fit as a fiddle in Advent Children! Well, until the silver-haired brothers three got their hands on him, but that's a different can of noodles.

Anyway, this is one of my first experiments in stream-of-consciousness writing. So yeah, the sentences are supposed to run like that. The imagery in Reno's head is supposed to be kind of loopy. I'm thinking this is a good one-shot fic, and can happily walk away from it without expanding it any more. Let me know if you think otherwise, although I can't promise I won't take another couple of years to bang out a sequel/prequel/next chapter. I'm notoriously slow unless I have a harpy-muse savaging my ass. D: