Author's Note: I've been squirreling away pieces of poetry and fiction for almost a decade, assuming that someday I'll publish and sell copies of a book with them in it. And yeah, I've been excited about writing a lot of those. But here I am, worked up and goddamn charged about the very act of writing this story, which can't really be used for anything except the pure entertainment of myself and others. I haven't felt that since I put together Hellmasker in the summer of 2002.

I imagine that this is the euphoria that relapsing alcoholics feel – just without the suffering.

WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS

BY RENO SPIEGEL

- - - - -

Elena awoke just after eight the next morning, but forced herself to stay in bed for a few more hours, eyes closed, thinking in a way that was just short of praying. She didn't know exactly why, but there was still something comforting about the notion of a higher power, as many of them as had failed her up to this point. Holy hadn't worked, the Cetra hadn't really been cast in a favorable light inside ShinRa, Tseng was. . .well, Tseng hadn't done much for her either. Still, now she found some sort of purpose in the beckoning of Reno, a purpose that let her take up the clothes she'd sent him, trash her blue suit, straighten the room before she left, and step outside into the brisk morning.

Even an ex-Turk in her mid-forties could appreciate the weather.

That thought alone made her physically stop and survey the area. She hadn't thought about her age in a long time, even before setting out to dissolve the Turks by any means necessary. Especially during this trip, though, she occasionally forgot that she wasn't twenty-six and still able to dodge bullets by jumping out of windows. She truly felt like her body was eighteen years younger, infused with Mako and in its prime. When she thought about it, though – how long it had really been since they'd worn the suits full time –, she realized that Rude must have been in his fifties, that Reno wasn't far behind, that Johnny had to be around their age by looks alone…

What would the AVALANCHE members be doing these days? Highwind – who she'd always found some fondness for – must have been pushing seventy, but he was probably still up in the air pushing other things. She'd heard that Barrett Wallace also hadn't settled down at all, but had become an attorney instead of continuing his life as a terrorist and was widely known as one of the loudest voices in a courtroom. She knew that Nanaki had taken over Cosmo Canyon after Bugenhagen's death, and that Godo was still kicking in Wutai and hadn't given it over to his daughter, but those were the only names she could put futures to. The others must have been doing something – it would have been all over the news, even as minimally as she followed it, if they'd died – but they must have been completely different people. Had they had children? Did they still talk?

What happened to glory, twenty years later?

As if she'd looked at the other side of a scale, the children on the bikes whizzed past her and broke her from her gaze at the sidewalk across the path. She started walking into the other part of town. A closer inspection of the white box revealed a return address scrawled on the border of the back, and she didn't peg Reno as a person to lie to his comrades, former or otherwise, so she figured she could find him if she tried hard enough.

Age was funny, she thought. For all intensive purposes it didn't matter a bit, because there was no inherent change to be found from one year to the next, but not seeing someone in a number of years was like hearing that she or he was just on the other side of a door – everyone was going to open it, because there was inherent curiosity in the unexplored.

Elena didn't date go near The Breaking Day again. She knew that no one would call her out for anything, but she certainly couldn't walk past that alley again. Her stomach twisted itself, and she stopped thinking about it instantly. She'd always prided herself on the control she had over her thoughts. If she didn't want to think about something, she just didn't. She did stop for breakfast somewhere else, though, because she hadn't had a real meal in a while. It was so good to her out-of-practice tongue that she tipped well beyond what was necessary, remembering with some rue that it wasn't her gil she was spending anyway.

She recited the address to her waiter, and once he told her roughly where to go, she began the inevitable walk, feeling like she was facing the gallows.

Reno's place was much more humble than she would have ever imagined. He had the upper apartment, much like she herself had near the bay in Junon, but there was nothing garish attached to the house, nothing flamboyantly Reno to announce his presence to the town. The only thing she saw that signaled any life at all was a cat perched between the window and the curtain, but when she crept closer, she saw that it was stuffed. Perhaps it was a ruse to make other residents think that a normal family lived there – or maybe he was just into stuffed cats these days.

Elena almost grinned at the dry humor that crept back into her thoughts, like Reno's property radiated it.

She couldn't stay lighthearted too long, though, and she knew it. Not wanting to postpone the inevitable – or maybe she just didn't want him to be too prepared – she pulled her gun from the waistband of the sweatpants she'd been given and approached the door.

There wasn't even a chance to knock before he answered. He caught her by the wrist and wrenched her elbow against the door frame, knocking the gun out of her hand. She remembered how thin his fingers were and then he used them to wrench her to the ground. She felt pressure come down on her left ankle – she'd always known that telling him she'd sprained it in school would come back to bite her in the ass someday.

She didn't move. It wasn't a time for moving. It was a time for some serious reflection on both their parts. When he finally took pressure off her ankle, she rolled to her back and looked into his eyes. He looked so much older than she'd expected.

"We died," she said.

"I know," he replied. "I sent flowers, just like I promised."

She scowled. "He fucking hated flowers."

He grinned. "I know. Isn't it great?"

"Have you changed at all?" she snarled, finding a bit of Rude creeping into her voice. "We're here to kill each other and you're still cracking jokes?"

Suddenly his eyes hardened and he tapped his foot, extending an identical blade to the one she'd killed her other companion with. He wagged it in the air in front of her, and she found herself flinching away from it. "I figured," he said quietly, "that it was better than gutting you on the front porch, but we both know the deal – if I have to do that, they'll take the body off and won't even touch the doorbell." He had a dagger in his belt, too, and he was taking no pains to hide it. Out of the business or not, he kept himself armed. "Now do you want a drink, or should we go straight to blowing each other away?"

Her silence spoke for her.

Reno turned and walked back into the house, nudging her gun with the shoe without the knife on it. She picked it up as she, too, crossed the threshold into the living room and closed the door behind her. She could hear him now, explaining the meeting to a curious neighbor – "Oh, that?" he'd laugh. "Just a cousin and I roughhousing it. Thanks for checkin', though. You want some scotch?" – and she wondered why she didn't shoot him in the spine as his disappeared into his white kitchen.

The whole apartment was uncharacteristic of what she'd imagined him having, but in retrospect it occurred to her that she hadn't ever really thought of what Reno's housing might look like. They'd never had a get-together at his place because he'd always seemed to be between company-assigned housing, disputing with tenants in this building and that, supposedly lighting fires that led to a few too many complaints to the superintendants. Tseng had had a small house that had been in his family for years – "The corporate part," he'd explained, "not the Wutain nationalist part." – that was completely fitting for dinner parties, and Rude actually lived in a mansion that was reputed to be cursed. When he'd signed the papers, he'd just muttered, "What? My hair gonna fall out?" and they had been childishly amused.

Reno's apartment, though, looked like it might hold a small family led by a very old couple. The shades were drawn behind the stuffed cat, the carpet was well-kept, shag, brown. The couch was probably a few decades old, but had also been taken care of, and the television was probably always fixed on the news station it was now, but muted, with subtitles and tickers telling the stories. Nothing new was scrolling by, at least as far as she could tell. There was nothing on the walls, an ashtray and burning cigarette on a low coffee table, and a hallway that probably led to a bathroom and bedroom. It was almost barren in terms of clutter – he had a few books, some spare electronics, a clock on a small table against a wall, and an umbrella stand with two umbrellas, a hiking stick, and his mag-rod. She was almost amused to see that he'd kept it.

"Here."

She jumped at the sound of his voice – which she reasoned was understandable – and barely caught the bag of ice he tossed at her from the doorway to the kitchen. He had two beers in his hand and had already started on his own, more subtle proof of some sort of endless faith in her. He was willing to start inebriating himself even now.

Still, he had the knife drawn out of his shoe.

They kept distance from each other as they sat on the couch and she opened her own can, nursing her wrist atop the bag of ice held on her knee. She had plenty of time to look at her former companion in the low lamp light, notice the lines in his face that were inevitable in age but still so unexpected for someone that had seemed unfazed by the concept of getting older. His cheek scars almost blended in with his wrinkles, exaggerated, she supposed, by years of stressful day after stressful day. Though he'd laughed a lot, he'd also considered a lot of things, and they were much heavier. He sat today in a muscle shirt, and she could tell that he still lifted weights as religiously as he had when they worked together. His left leg, though, wavered slightly back and forth, and he seemed to have neither control nor consideration to spend on it.

"What happened to your leg?" she had to ask, breaking the still.

He turned and his eyes looked like those of an old bloodhound, drooped and defeated. He still had a grin for her, though. "Somebody cut my Achilles one night. Hid under my car. I hopped in and backed over her. I mean, fuck knows I don't notice anymore, so that's a point for me, but I think she won the fight in the end." He held her gaze for a few more seconds. "You've aged well, Rookie."

"You haven't. You look like hell."

"Well, y'know, I'd hate to break character." He cracked another smile, took a swig of his beer, and turned his eyes back toward the television. "The anchors've all changed since the sound went out. I don't even know what they sound like, but it's like we've been best friends for years."

No matter what he said, it was still interesting, and she'd always admired and resented him for that. The more she thought about it, most of his characteristics seemed to have that pattern – she loved them at the same time she hated them. "Do you ever miss people?"

"Hah," he barked. "You do know the score." He meant that it was obvious that none of them had been able to socialize since ShinRa had been done with their services. "Naw, I don't miss 'em too much. I see other people from around here, and that's all somebody from Mideel needs – their own people. Other than that, I say fuck 'em." He drank again, like it was a sort of punctuation to his thoughts.

There was a heavy silence.

"Rude went blind," she blurted, unable to help herself. She'd wanted to not bother with catching up; she would've rather just gotten this over with. But she was watching his leg move back and forth and the way he was rolling the bottom of the can up and down his forearm, the other crossed over it, leaving a small trail of condensation from the back of his hand halfway to his elbow.

Reno grunted. "I heard. 'doesn't surprise me at all. He started injecting Mako after they let us go. It gave him a hell of a kick, but after a decade or so, bumping up the doses, it starts t'kick back. Rude's terrified of doctors, too. Wouldn't've seen one if you'd dragged him." He paused, his eyes straying. "Was, anyway." He turned them on her. "You knew he went blind, though, and here you sit. I take it he's over?"

"Yeah," she said, tensing, "he's over." Reno had always described people and jobs like games, saying that someone was over once they'd been really dealt with.

He was out as much as he could be – but only that far.

"Good," the redhead replied with a nod. "Procedure's procedure. Besides, he got fuckin' weird. I thought the Jackals'd calm him down, but I guess nothing really could." Reno faded in and out of a drawl from time to time, something he'd picked up on the roster of the Turks. He had to go undercover, and when he did, he always tried to emulate that street life he'd desired as a child. The problem was that he ended up undercover so often that his very way of speaking had morphed into a hybrid of Mideel and a mock-Corel dialect. The one time AVALANCHE and ShinRa had met post-Sephiroth – which was a disaster on its own, as could have been expected – Barrett Wallace had nearly knocked his head off, assuming he was being mocked.

Reno's leg was moving a little more than it had been, and Elena ventured a sort of guess: "What really happened to your leg, Reno?"

She only got the twitch of his lips as an answer, and she drank a bit more.

"You ask a lotta questions," he said after a moment, still watching the television. He was rubbing his thigh now, too. "What happened to you, though? Where'd you go for eighteen years? Fall off the Planet at all, forget all your friends?" He said the last word with a bit of mockery, like the idea of them being friends was something he was still mulling around in his head. When she didn't say anything, he mumbled, "Yeah, sorry."

"'sokay," she said, matching his tone. "I moved back home, back to Junon. I got myself an apartment and kind of started over. I just never got to that whole "meeting people" part." She took another swallow. "I got fewer and fewer birthday cards every year, and when they stopped coming, I decided I'd wait for something to happen. Twelve years later, here I am." She tried on a smirk of her own. "We come back together to kill each other and end up drinking beer, watching the news on mute. Y'know. Like friends."

Suddenly he said, "You were always nice to me. Y'know? I mean, I was always a dick, and you were a bitch for a couple months, but you never really hated any of us, and I think I appreciated it. Shit, I guess it was nice to have somebody that wasn't shooting at us and wasn't pissy because she kept getting shot at. Y'know. Like a friend or something."

She suddenly wished he'd kept sending birthday cards, and that the first piece of mail connecting them hadn't had a white business card with a black arrow in it. She even kind of missed the one night they'd shared, telling each other what they'd really wanted in life. Daringly, she reached out a hand and laid it on his forearm, hoping for some sort of tenderness and human touch before the inevitable. Calm or not, she had a feeling that it weighed on them just the same, and it suddenly felt almost physically heavy.

"'shame," he said, standing, his eyes still on the television.

She tried to ask him what was a shame, but she couldn't find the words. She couldn't really find any words in her muddled mind, and was suddenly sure that she was going to stay a night, feel that last connection before morning, and that maybe they would do it over breakfast. It would be a nice breakfast, she figured, if he still cooked the way he always had. She could tell he was the type to keep one of those expanding tables around, with the leaves that you put in the middle when company came over. She wondered if he would let her make some coffee, but she knew it was too much of a risk, too much of a fantasy that if she put words to it, it would crumble apart. Instead, she lay down where he had been sitting, closed her eyes, thought about the morning they would share, and let the strain of her journey lull her to sleep.

The bag of ice shifted quietly to the carpet.

Reno silently turned back toward her, reaching down and taking the beer can from her limp hand after checking the wrist for a pulse. He didn't find anything he hadn't expected to. It was still, and all he could hear was the wheezing of his nostril that never seemed to clear over the quiet hum of the television set. A bird hit the window, and the sound echoed much farther than just the walls of his empty apartment.

He took the can to the kitchen and stood at the counter for a long time, looking at the mix of saliva and carbonation on the rim before pouring the last of the drink into the drain. He washed it down with warm tap water.

Elena Simms finally rested the way she deserved to.

Author's Note: My favorite stories are ones that catch even their authors off guard – considering the willingness of most authors to talk about just how much they knew about what they were going to do with their work, this leaves me with a lot of my favorite stories being my own. This one, though, probably takes the cake, and I couldn't be happier.

One more chapter to tie things up, and I think I'll call it a day. Thank you for sticking it out with me thus far, and I hope to see you on the next page.

This chapter is dedicated to Sufjan Stevens, who can make me sob like a baby. If you caught the reference, we should get tea sometime.