Author's Note: So what a shocker this has been so far! I know you are all DYING to know why Elena left Reno. I'm happy to say that you WILL find out why in this chapter. I really enjoyed seeing your various ideas of why though. =) Oddly enough, I don't have much to say right now....weird, huh? LOL. Anyway, I'm sure you'd rather read the chapter!!! So go on...it's sitting there waiting for you...remember to review! Kthxbai! Got some LOL-cat speak goin' on there. =)

Rude stepped out of the elevator, steaming coffee mug in hand. As he walked the short distance down the hall to his office, he passed Elena's office door. It was open, just as she usually left it when she was in. Rude stopped walking and glanced at his watch. It was about fifteen minutes before work technically started. This was the time he usually arrived, and the time Elena had at one time usually arrived at as well. When she'd started dating Reno, who was notoriously late, they had sort of evened each other out and both normally arrived together at eight AM on the dot. Yet here Elena was, fifteen minutes early, head bent over a sheaf of papers on her desk, right hand clutching a pen and the other clutching a cup of coffee.

"Good morning," Rude greeted the girl as he walked past receiving nothing more than a muttered 'Morning' in return. Strange. Rude shrugged it off. Weren't people allowed to be grumpy ever once in awhile?

Rude noticed that the area was surprisingly quiet…suspiciously quiet for an area that Reno frequented. He must be planning something. Narrowing his eyes, Rude continued on his way warily, reminding himself to be extra cautious until he figured out what it was Reno was up to that was keeping him so quiet.

Thirty minutes passed in similar silence, the Turks filling out the never-ending and oh-so-tedious paperwork in their offices. Rude grabbed the file of newly filled out paperwork and left his comfy chair to check in with Tseng and see if there was anything other than desk-work to be done that day. It was when he stepped into the hall that he discovered what was keeping Reno quiet. The reason no Reno-related noise had been heard in the area surrounding their offices was because Reno had not been there. This fact became glaringly obvious to Rude as soon as he saw the redhead exit the elevator down the hall. Many other things quickly became obvious to Rude as the other man trudged closer. Reno was terribly hung-over. His blood-red hair was a mess, not unusual, but even a mess by Reno's standards. Similarly, his black Turk uniform suit looked like he hadn't taken it off all night.

Reno tried to walk past Rude without a commotion, but Rude was not the kind of man you could avoid. Rude grabbed the skinny redhead's shoulder and forced Reno to face him. The man's aquamarine eyes were dark and blood-shot while his light skin had a particularly pale hue. He looked like he hadn't slept at all.

"Who died?" Rude questioned, his joking tone masking his strong curiosity and concern.

"Me, I wish," Reno muttered, shrugging Rude's grasp off his shoulder and walking on towards his office. Rude watched him go in surprise. It had been a long time since he'd seen Reno so upset about something. From the look of him, Reno had been completely smashed the night before. It had been awhile since he'd gotten that drunk too. Something had happened. Rude set his jaw and tossed the file of paperwork back into his office, marching determinedly after his friend. Reno was like his brother and Rude was not going to stand there and watch him be miserable without trying to figure out what was wrong.

"Just leave me alone, dammit!" Reno mumbled for the tenth time, his head buried in his arms on his desk. Rude sat calmly in a chair as he had for the past twenty minutes. He had declared he wasn't going anywhere until Reno told him what was wrong. Reno had never been one to talk about his problems, and Rude was prepared to sit there as long as it took. As it turned out, he didn't have to wait much longer.

"She left," Reno said simply, choking on the words, his face still hidden by his arms.

"Elena?" Rude was surprised. He'd guessed they'd had some kind of fight since they'd come in at different times, but he didn't think it had been that serious. Reno and Elena hadn't had any real arguments that Rude knew of in the entire time they'd been together. And now they'd suddenly broken up?

"What other girl is there?" Reno questioned with strained sarcasm.

"Why?"

"Ya think I'd still be here if I knew the answer to that?" Reno lifted his head to fix his agonized gaze on his friend, "I'd be off doin' whatever the hell it took to fix it!"

"So what part of you thought getting drunk would be a good way to fix this mysterious problem?" Rude asked, his voice innocent enough, but his disapproval clear in the words.

"Don't go there, Rude," Reno warned, dropping his head again, "It makes it hurt less."

Reno was extremely wounded. That much Rude could tell simply from the fact that the redhead had admitted to feeling emotional pain. Reno was far from being an open person. He despised talking about himself, especially if it involved any of his bad habits.

"You should talk to her," Rude advised, knowing how Reno would feel about that suggestion.

"Yeah right, like she's going to talk to me now," Reno muttered, "You know how she feels about my…methods of handling stress." It was true. Elena had always looked disapprovingly on Reno's tendency to solve every problem by heavily drinking. She was the one person Reno would really talk to about anything without being forced and because of this he'd spent far less time drinking his worries away and more time talking to Elena about them. Obviously he couldn't talk to her about this problem, and thus Reno had fallen back on his old habits and he had fallen hard.

Rude had nothing more to say, and so he quietly left the room, a frown on his face as he wondered why Elena had broken up with Reno.

Reno remained huddled over his desk, his head throbbing painfully but his heart aching more. He was tired, confused, and hurt. He'd spent the entire night, or the part of it where his head was clear enough to think at least, racking his brain for where he had gone wrong, what he had done to make Elena leave. He hadn't come up with anything, and he still had no ideas. Whatever she's upset about, I probably only made it worse. He felt horribly guilty for getting so drunk. He'd been desperate to make the pain go away. Reno was already feeling the need to do something to stop his heart from aching and the darkening thoughts from filling his head.

"I love you, Elena!" Reno whispered to himself, "Don't you love me?" She'd told him she had so many times…why had that changed?

"Rude, I feel it only fair to warn you that Elena is rather moody today," Tseng commented quietly as he passed the other man in the hall. Rude shook his head.

"It's bigger than that, Tseng. They broke up."

"What?!" Tseng's voice rose with his surprise, but the man quickly dropped it to a whisper again, "You'd better come into my office." Once the door was safely and silently closed behind them, Rude spoke.

"It's true, I just got Reno to tell me. He's got one hell of a hangover," Rude added darkly.

"But I don't understand…why?" Tseng paced slowly, the frown he always wore when trying to unravel a mystery appearing on his forehead.

"Reno said she didn't say," Rude shrugged, "She just left." There was silence for several minutes before Tseng sat down at his desk and looked at Rude very seriously.

"Brace yourself. I fear we are in for a very trying future," the dark-haired man said grimly.

Elena muttered curses under her breath as she impatiently struggled with the somewhat tricky lock on her office door. Glowering darkly at the ground beneath her feet, Elena made her way out of the Shinra headquarters building. She had purposefully stayed late to avoid running into her co-workers on the way out. She especially didn't want to see Reno. Damn the idiot, why'd he have to drink so much? There was no way Tseng and Rude could have failed to notice something was up because of it. Although she had been as discreet as possible, she had the feeling they knew. Elena felt a bit bad for her harsh judgment on Reno's actions. He was extremely upset, but so was she. Reno just didn't handle things like stress, anger, or depression as well as many people did.

Breaking up with Reno had not been an easy choice. She'd debated about it internally for weeks, all the while straining to hide her confusion from the redhead. It hadn't been hard, he'd never noticed anything was wrong until the day before. Elena's already reddened eyes grew moist as she remembered it. She had made her choice while he was gone on a mission that day. She hadn't really made a plan for how to tell him. It had just happened. She'd lost count, but Elena was sure she'd cried for several hours straight the night before.

The girl was jerked quickly back to reality as she found herself in front of Reno's apartment. Her eyes widening, she realized she'd been heading there out of habit, instead of to her home. With a sigh of relief, she swiftly altered her course and walked as fast as she could until she was safely within her own apartment.

Later that night, as she lay in bed feeling oddly alone, Elena struggled to fall asleep. It's not that she wasn't tired, she was exhausted from the emotional stress but her thoughts swirled so violently through her head that she suspected it might explode. She wondered what Reno was doing. Probably drinking. She felt disgusted and sorry for him at the same time. It was such an awful habit he had, drowning anything that bothered him in liquor. He wasn't an alcoholic, he just didn't know any other way to cope. Elena knew she had been his other way to cope. She had been able to get him to talk about things to her instead of simply knocking himself out so he didn't have to think about it. She knew it was her fault he was back to his old habits, and she felt guilty. Elena was frustrated that she hadn't been able to come up with a better way to break up with the man. What she'd done was sudden and harsh, and hadn't helped the painfulness of the situation. She felt bad for hurting Reno at all. She knew his life so far hadn't exactly been the greatest and she personally felt he'd been through more than anyone should ever have to go through. Elena knew him, she knew she'd hurt him where he was most susceptible to hurt. He'd loved and trusted her and she felt like she had betrayed him. Reno could take one hell of a beating any day. As he himself liked to say, he was harder to kill than a cockroach. It was the emotional blows that hurt him, and she'd basically stabbed him through the heart.

What bothered Elena most though, and caused the tears to start dripping down her cheeks, was not the fact that she'd hurt him, or made him fall back on his old bad habits, but why she'd done it. Elena hadn't told Reno why she left him, even though that was the one thing he had asked her the previous night. Reno hadn't actually done anything to deserve what she did to him. It was her own fears that had prompted her. Her own weaknesses that had made her break up with Reno. Elena was afraid that he would leave her. The man had a reputation for quickly loosing interest in women and moving on. True, he'd been with her for what must have been a record time. That could mean something. At the same time, it could mean that his loss of interest could have happened any day. He does seem upset though…Elena was hopelessly confused. Would he have left her? Did her breaking it off herself make the pain any better than having him leave her? Had it been a mistake? Had she just ruined her chances with the love of her life?

Her stubborn personality made it difficult for her to admit she may have made a mistake. There was no easy way for her to fix it now anyway. She couldn't exactly go up to Reno and tell him she'd caused him all that pain because she suspected he may leave her at some point and would he please take her back. Elena eventually fell into a troubled sleep, a frown still upon her face as her hopelessly befuddled thoughts clouded her confused mind.

Reno's aquamarine eyes stared unfalteringly at the empty fogged-glass vodka bottle laying on it's side on the table next to the couch. The room was dark, only half-lit by the glow coming from the light on in the kitchen that spilled into the living room. Why turn a light on when you could see in the dark? He'd rather be in darkness anyway. It seemed fitting. Besides, although he stared Reno saw nothing. He watched as the image of Elena storming away from him replayed endlessly in his mind. She's beautiful, Reno thought despite all the horror that moment had for him. Slumped on the couch with a half-empty bottle of tequila and a glass, Reno blinked and rubbed his eyes with a sigh, attempting to banish the haunting image. The glass in his hand was just for show, he hadn't used it since the third glass. Reno knew he'd drink the whole bottle anyway.

Looking around the empty room, all Reno could see was things that reminded him of Elena. She was everywhere, all throughout his entire apartment.

"Gotta get outta here," Reno muttered to himself, setting the tequila bottle down with a slightly shaky hand and standing up slowly. Running his fingers through his hair, Reno left the memory-filled apartment, slamming the door behind him.

Reno walked into Seventh Heaven, wondering vaguely why he'd chosen that particular bar. Maybe I just feel like pissin' somebody off. His presence certainly would anger Cloud Strife, if the blonde man was actually in at the time, a rare-enough occurrence. The cozy bar was far from full, but busy enough for his entrance not to draw much attention. As luck would have it, at least one of the bar's inhabitants was very interested in Reno's arrival.

"What do you want?" Cloud demanded, crossing his arms over his chest and stepping in front of the Turk with frown.

"I just wanna drink, Chocobo-head, so chill out and back off," Reno glared at the man standing in front of him. He was not in a good mood and the two had never gotten along. Cloud didn't move and fight probably would have ensued if a woman's voice had not broken through the mounting tension.

"Leave him alone, Cloud. He's here as a customer," Tifa stated firmly, watching them from behind the bar where she was washing a glass. She watched with an eyebrow slightly raised in warning and a concealed smile on her face as Cloud returned to his corner of the room where he watched all the bar's occupants with a suspicious eye.

"Don't cause any trouble," Cloud warned almost sulkily.

"Sorry about that," Tifa smiled as Reno took a seat at the bar, "Cloud can be overly protective sometimes. What can I get for you?"

"I don't care, as long as it's strong," Reno answered truthfully, leaning his head in his hand. Tifa raised her eyebrows.

"Looks like you've already had a few," she commented, nonetheless reaching for a short glass and looking over the liquor for something to give him. Reno responded with a slight huff. "So do you want to tell me what's bothering you?" She leaned on the counter in front of him and pushed the full glass towards him.

"What makes you think somethin's botherin' me?" Reno avoided the question and took a gulp of whatever she had served him and smiled mirthlessly. It was indeed strong. "And won't your little guard dog over there get upset if you talk to me?"

"Cloud? Yeah, he might, but I can do whatever I want," Tifa answered, "And I think something's bothering you because you only come in here when something is."

"Good enough reasoning."

"If you're going to tell me, tell me while you can still form a coherent sentence."

"I ain't gonna tell ya," Reno looked up at the woman standing across from him, "Keep 'em comin' and just keep whatever's left over." Reno tossed an amount of gil onto the table, paying her in advance since he knew he'd end up too drunk to do it later.

"That's what I like about you," Tifa commented, giving up on getting him to talk and picking up the money, "You always make sure you pay." Reno didn't answer. He simply focused on trying to drown his pain as quickly as possible.

Author's Note: So we have some AVALANCHE presence now...thought I should try writing some of the other FF people for once. Now I'm quite interested to see the reviews after this chapter, so do please leave one for me! The button is right there, it's so easy! =) Thanks!!! I don't know if I will update on Friday or not...it depends on how much I write between now and then. Thanks so much for reading and reviewing like I know you will! COOKIES FOR ALL WHO REVIEW! =)