Author's Note: This chapter comes with a huge thanks and dedication to Jess Angel, who has been one of my favorite co-authors and companions over the years, and her barrage of reviews to remind me that I promised a number of us that I would finish this.

Also a thanks to Tini, who probably doesn't frequent this site anymore. A few years ago he let me borrow her 'verse from Northern Lights, which I would argue is the quintessential piece of Turk fanfiction in history, and I've borrowed it just slightly again. Hopefully she doesn't mind, wherever she's gone to.

WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS

BY RENO SPIEGEL

- - - - -

She'd stopped crying. She knew she couldn't afford to spend the time on it. She had to be a Turk again, and that meant that her problem was supposed to be over now – her threat had been taken care of, and whatever the damage, it would be assessed when the task itself was over.

Her insides turned – sacrificing the need to be human for the need to be professional.

Elena wobbled to her feet. Her legs refused to support her, her knees buckled again, and she tore whatever part of her suit pants were around them when she hit the ground. Once again she felt the gun again.

"Not. Fucking with you."

She heard razors in his voice. It was the same tone he'd used when President ShinRa had been killed and Palmer had suggested it was their fault for not being more alert that evening. "Security was tight as it could have been," the bald man had said between clenched teeth. "AVALANCHE. The building. Sephiroth. We did what we could." Palmer's shoulder had been bruised from where Rude had clapped it. They'd hit the bar that weekend, damn near emptied it, and Rude had still gone out for a run that night.

Her legs found their strength again. She stood, still barely coming to his neck, and tried to assemble some sort of composure. She tried to look anywhere but into those balls that used to be eyes, but he clearly wasn't going to let that happen. The barrel was at her chin, tipping her head up to face him.

"His name was Johnny," her old friend said, looking deadly. "You never met him. He almost died when we dropped the Sector Seven plate. Killed a lot of his friends. He's dead now, and you're not. End of the game."

She almost said thank you, but it wasn't exactly the situation for it. Her head was swimming and she barely knew left from right, let alone good conduct from bad. Then she saw it: he wasn't looking at her. As many missions as they'd gone on together, she could tell that his head wasn't aimed quite the same way it used to be, and neither one of them had budged in height. "You're blind," she said, venturing.

"You sound just like my doctor," he snarled.

She felt a pang of guilt, all things considered. "What happened?"

"Johnny tried to shoot me a few times. I shot him. It happens. End of that game, too."

"No," she corrected, "I meant, what happened to –"

He knocked her head back with the barrel of her gun and she cried out. Part of her front tooth flew out of her mouth and she almost dropped to the ground again. Blind or not, he knew where everything was, and there was no question about that.

"Blind," he repeated. "Not deaf. Nor dumb. Doesn't matter. You got your letter?"

Her hands began to shake as she looked him up and down. Not only was he still huge, but he was still in perfect shape, and out of his breast pocket stuck the tip of a black arrow on a white business card. Certainly he'd been able to guess what it was all about. He could've told their paper from anyone's. ShinRa used special paper, manufactured right in the building – "People like to forge documents, pretend they're sending these dangerous little packages from one department to another," Heideggar had wheezed over the copier one day, her training day, "and we like to send folks like the Turks to the return addresses. Assessing the situation, as it were."

"Y – yes," she stammered, the hiss making her gums throb.

Rude sighed heavily. "Don't be shy. You're here because you got your letter. No reason to be shy now." He grinned, something new for him. "Besides, not like I saw anything."

Tears stung her eyes instantly. She almost couldn't see. The memory was the freshest wound she had outside of her teeth, and it hurt like hell. "Fuck you," she whispered.

Rude put his gun into its holster at his hip, a holster she hadn't seen before. He opened and dropped his suit coat, tossing it far enough away to suggest he wouldn't need it for a while. He kept what used to be his eyes fixed vaguely on her, and it was more unsettling than threatening. She didn't explore how much he could discern, though, because he clearly wasn't having any crack and fun and games today. "I got in again," he said. "Not the Turks. Someone else. Local, no gil involved officially – we're like town security, but no one hired us. Win-win. Enforce the law, and you rise above it. Remember?" She didn't say anything. "Jack-offs, though. Stole our look. Suits. I think Reno started us, but I never asked. I've been in for eleven years. Place to sleep, food to eat, same old same."

"What do they call you?" She didn't have her gun anymore, and her hand still wasn't in the best of shape. Mako had helped them heal themselves faster – bruises were almost nonexistent in their best of days – but it had been a while.

"Jackals," he spat.

He would, Elena thought. The Jackals had been Reno's dream street gang. As proud as he'd been of being from Mideel, he liked to fabricate his past to strangers a lot of the time, and a morose confession to Elena at one point had revealed that he still harbored his childhood dreams of having grown up on the streets. "My sister, she would've been in on it. Maybe she'd've died at some point, given me some great reason to join the grimy cause we're in, whatever the fuck it is." Only once had he confided any of this in Elena, one night that a few too many drinks had been had and a bit too much trust had been found inside the both of them. The next morning she'd thought she'd been out the door before he was awake, but he called from the apartment balcony that her buttons were mismatched, and they'd never spoken of it again.

"Fuck," Rude growled. "Are you daydreaming? Where've you been for twenty years?"

Elena, too, slipped off her jacket as she spoke. "Alone," she admitted. There were too many dynamics to this whole situation. Tseng. Reno. Rude himself, and the Jackals he was playing with. Johnny. The rape. The fact that she didn't have any time to really regain herself. The old man in the boat, living a life of such harmony and rhythm. "I – I moved back home," she stammered. "Back to Junon. My family's all gone, but. I've been living off what ShinRa gave us."

"You got out."

"I got out."

Rude, once one of her best friends with one of the calmest demeanors, had been abrasive throughout the entire encounter, but hearing that she'd stopped her ways crossed some line in his head. Tearing the holster from his side, his gun all sparks and jangles as it slid down the alley, the bald man's hand looped around the back of her neck, throwing her to the ground. "Coward," he shouted. "You goddamn woman, you goddamn soft woman. Turks don't quit. Tseng didn't quit. He's still giving us orders, whether we like it or not, and you just stopped?"

Her defenses went into effect. Suddenly he wasn't Rude anymore – he was a colossus, poised to fall and crush her. He didn't have a name, like none of her hits had had names, really. Everyone was just a reason, a method, a resolution, and a retrospect. And this man, this huge bald man in just a vest and a pair of slacks, with a tie and two misshapen, almond-shaped eyes, was just an everyone at this point. She clenched her toes, felt something shift beneath her foot in her dress shoe, and kicked her former companion's thigh with all her might.

The blade protruding from the toe of her shoe caught him squarely, sent him grunting and gasping – more in surprise than in pain – stumbling against the hard rock wall of the alley. He misjudged the distance, his elbow slipped and skinned itself, his head bounced hard against the same wall that might have been his salvation, and his neck bent the wrong way to press itself against the stone.

She hadn't needed to hear the snap, but she did.

Rudolph Hurst, ex-Turk, her savior of ten minutes ago, lay dead in the alley.

Elena sat panting on the ground. Scuffles must've been nothing too new to Mideel, really, because no one had shown up the entire time she'd been there. She looked first at the new body in the area, then down to the pile of garbage that no doubt held Johnny. She didn't know how many guns were in the alley – two, three maybe – or who would come by to clean it up, but she knew she needed to leave before someone did.

Elena stood once again, spitting blood, and gathered her things. Her coat made her feel safer, like it still gave her some sort of authority, even though they'd been disbanded and she was far from home.

Enforce the law, and you rise above it.

Was this what Tseng had wanted? One of his best comrades to stumble, break his neck, and never get up again? There was no honor in it. There was no challenge, nothing brave – he'd gone blind at some point, his hand missed the brick, and he'd broken his head open. He'd knocked his own head so hard against the wall that his neck broke. Was that a Turk's death? Did she have that to look forward to – someday she'd go out to get groceries, trip over a candy bin, and never stand up again? Did SOLDIER training amount to that? Did helping take Sephiroth down train her against human clumsiness? If not, had it been worth it at all?

Elena couldn't stand it, whether it was what had just happened or her own thoughts.

She walked over to Rude's body, doing him the little respect she could in closing his eyes. She wouldn't do the same for Johnny – she hoped somewhere in his pupils was some sense of regret, and she hoped that it would get photographed, put on the front page news so everyone understood why nothing else could have been done for him. She would have shot him again, but it was no use and part of her knew that.

Her fingers shakily found the business card shakily in her pocket and removed it, turned it over, away from the black arrow. On the back were four blue ribbons, taped in place by Tseng once this generation of Turks had been chosen. Gently prying one off the back, she knelt in front of her former friend – former, she thought, but I don't know if it was because of him or because we had to part someday – and reached out for his hand. It still felt normal, like it had the last time she'd shaken it.

She stopped thinking of Rude as Rude; instead, she focused on her new mantra: reason, method, resolution, retrospect. Reason, method, resolution, retrospect.

Elena took the limp index finger and tied the ribbon around it. This had been one of the conditions of the contract. When someone else was gone, they were to use these ribbons to mark them as Turks – "We're motherfucking Turks," Reno had howled in the office when one day their conversation had migrated to this stipulation. "They're gonna know who we are." The local authorities would take the bodies and give them over to ShinRa for proper burial. They couldn't risk losing anything, like identities, fingerprints, or dental records. The entire team had to be literally vaporized.

Reason, method, resolution, retrospect.

Elena tore out of the alley, almost flinging the chainlink gate into a boy on a bicycle, still riding back and forth without a care in the world. His friends shouted something at her, something like bitch or watch out. Her foot slid on the loose dirt, something like an apology, and she heard the click of her knife with each step she took, coat flying behind her, hair disheveled, knowing that she had to get into a building and into a room and into her own private space.

She didn't register when she made it to the inn, nor when she got her room. She did register the gouges she made in the wooden staircase as she stepped up to the third floor, again that knife coming out just below her toe, that knife that was sticky with blood and rough with gravel, that knife that had unbalanced the colossus and let her tie a ribbon around its finger, like a reminder to take medicine or something.

Between the door and the bathroom, she left a trail of suit, weapon, and dirt from her shoes. She'd retracted the blade when she'd taken the right one off, manually, by pressing the button on the bottom of the heel, and it thudded into place like the colossus when it hit the ground.

She didn't bother with the cold water, scalded herself to get rid of all of it, scrubbing off Johnny and the boy on the bike and the old man in the water and the colossus – Rude – her comrade – her friend –

Her mantra faltered. She ripped the shower curtain from its rod, the shower pelting her body, red marks blossoming from not only the water, but from anxiety, the furious rubbing that turned into scratching at her own body like she was trying to separate it from the rest of herself. She couldn't think of her three R's, her repetition, what thing she'd found to give her a sense of purpose in all this.

She found words she didn't want, let alone need, like fear, regret, even betrayal.

She found the bottom of the shower.

She found the strength to curl into a ball, clench her teeth, and hope that it would drown more than the sound of her body twisting and turning around the ring of the tub.