Before Crisis: The Beginning
By DarkAngel
Disclaimer: It doesn't belong to me.
Chapter 30: The Beginning (Durman)
When Durman had been a little boy growing up, he'd wanted to be a policeman. To him, the uniformed men had represented justice, a commodity that the young boy discovered all too soon was sorely lacking in the world they lived in.
His family had been wholly supportive of his ambition, and when he was 15, he attended a junior training camp run by his local force. He had attended every single one until he'd graduated from school and was ready to join the big boys doing the real thing. While he hadn't been the top of his class, he'd stood out anyway. He was the big guy with the loud voice and heart as big as a Behemoth's belly. Everything about him was big. They'd called him Mr. Big, a nickname he'd laughed about.
He'd risen up through the ranks of the force, and eventually he'd left the main force to become a detective. While he missed the patrolling and the late nights with his comrades, he jumped at the chance to make an even bigger difference in the world around him. Instead of the petty thugs and burglars he'd been used to catching, he was looking at something on an entirely different level: drug cartels and international mafias.
It was while he was working on one of those cases that he first met them. People in black suits. They'd been watching him, they said. They'd kept tabs on him and his track record, and they wanted him.
"Who are you?" he asked. They'd simply told him to ask around.
What he'd found both horrified and disgusted him. Sanctioned criminals. That was the best way he could think of to describe them. They worked for one of the world's biggest companies, Shin-Ra. On the surface, their job was to conduct investigations in much the same way that he did and scout for candidates of SOLDIER. The reality was far more complex and disturbing.
Their first duty was to the company and its reputation. If something threatened to compromise the company, then they were authorized to any use means to quell that threat. Assassination. Hostage-taking. Murder. And a whole host of other things besides. And then there was the so-called scouting of SOLDIER candidates. He quickly discovered that not everybody entered that elite group of Shin-Ra because they wanted to. Kidnappings. Threats. Brainwashing.
It would be a cold day in hell before he joined their ranks.
Ten months and eleven days to the day he'd first been approached, hell froze over.
It was supposed to be a simple investigation. A shipment of illegal weapons making their way from Wutai into the port. There had been a lot of attacks lately in the suburbs outside of Costa del Sol proper. It was bad for tourism, the chief had said. More to the point, it was bad because it was bad. This was Durman's take on the whole sad story.
What had gone down exactly, Durman didn't know even to this day. All he'd known was that he'd been part of the raid on the place, and next thing he knew his name was being shouted for censure. Red carpet, out of the force, "you'll never work for any enforcement agency ever again", legal charges – the ludicrous list went on. He was actually spending his night in a holding cell.
And then they were there again. Devils with a deal.
"You do realize what will happen if you keep refusing, don't you?" The man in question looked at him, his voice pitying. "Look, the fact of the matter is, they set you up for a fall."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Durman replied, his jaw set out in a stubborn line.
"I mean, your chief sold you down the river." The words came bluntly, without compassion.
Durman's eyes widened. What was this guy talking about? The chief would never do that. Not to one of his own. The force would never condone something like this…
"Let me draw you a picture, big guy. From everything I hear you're Mr. Justice himself." The man's mouth twisted up, as though he thought this was the funniest thing in the world. "Well, justice taken to its extremes upsets the balance of things, you see? So that weapons shipment? They were old confiscated weapons, a good number of which you were responsible for bringing in, big guy. They were planted there nice and easy to convince you that what was happening was an honest to goodness illegal shipment. And those traffickers were specially hired. What it looks like is that you attacked guiltless shipping company staffers – cuffed 'em, threw the book at 'em, and look where it got you." The amusement had never left the man's voice. "Whew. It's a nice piece of work, if you don't mind my saying."
No. This just couldn't be true. But then why wasn't anyone from the force coming to his aid? Why hadn't the chief come to take him out of here?
The man crossed his arms and made a satisfied sound. "Looks like you're finally catching on. Look, this can all be as water under the bridge. And let's face it, you're not going to work anywhere else with your tarnished record. So? How about it?"
"But why would they do this to me?" Durman demanded. "I put my whole damn life into this!"
"True, true. But maybe you invested a little too much in the wrong place." The man sighed. "Look, I'm sorry about what's happened, but that's the way it is." He paused. "You know, a guy once told me that your sense of justice differs depending on what you're fighting for."
Durman looked at him. The man elaborated.
"Say there's a guy who didn't get any kind of break when he was growing up. The 'system' –" the man made quotes with his fingers, "failed him. Big time. If he hadn't been picked up by, let's say for the sake of anonymity, Corporation X, he would have probably spent the rest of his life in the slums of Midgar dealing drugs or human trafficking. You've seen tons of cases like it before, right?" The man grinned lopsidedly. "So Corporation X picks this guy up, cleans him off, educates him. Gives him a place to call home and for the first time in his life this kid knows pride and belonging.
'Course there are those folks who say Corporation X is full of ambitious, greedy bastards who only bring misery and misfortune to everything they touch. But they've also saved not a few lives. To those people they saved, Corporation X is justice, not the system."
Durman's mouth quirked. "Is this your life story?"
The man wasn't about to be baited. "Maybe. Maybe not. I'm not really here to sell biographies or autobiographies." He leaned back against the cell wall. "So what do you say? I'm not going to spend the whole day knocking against brick walls, you know."
And that was how Durman became a Turk. Maybe Shin-Ra's turks were devils in suits. But he figured that if he could save people this way, then he'd gladly partner with the devil, time and again, to do it.
Author's Notes: Oh ho. Oh ho ho. We're finally introducing more characters. This one was the Martial Artist dude. I'm not entirely sure I'll be introducing the two extra characters that got added on much later (Nunchaku and Throwing Knife). I mean, they should have been there near the beginning of the story, but they weren't, and I'd feel kind of weird adding them in. =.=
Anyway, next up is Cyr (Grappler).