Chapter 13: What I was Fighting For
Cloud placed Bee gently on his bike, securing her in front of him with his legs before taking off for the nearest hospital. He called Tifa on the way, letting her know the situation and asking her to call Reeve and let him know as well. She agreed and then quickly told him that she would meet him at the hospital once the phone-call was made and to take care of Bee. He didn't need to be told twice.
The doctors took Bee away, rushing her down the hall on a white stretcher once Cloud had reached the hospital, and Cloud sat patiently in the waiting room. Bee needed more blood, and fast, but otherwise she would be fine, the doctors told him, repeating what he already knew. Yet he sat in the waiting room anxiously, trying to remind himself that he had done the healing, he had seen her wounds mend right before his eyes. It figured that the one person who could have healed a wound like that completely, restoring blood cells and erasing even the scars, was the one who needed the healing.
Tifa came soon after Bee had been taken away, Marlene, Denzel, and Shelke on her heels. Yuffie came five minutes later, tears falling from her wide eyes. Tifa informed the group that Tseng would be sending Elena over to act as body guard to Bee, in case more of the Wutain men came looking for her. When Yuffie asked why Reno wasn't doing it, Cloud told her that Reno was busy interrogating the man they had captured. Yuffie reluctantly accepted the answer, knowing Cloud was hiding something. The subject was not broached again. Tifa also informed them that she had asked Reeve to let Toby know about what happened to his sister, but also said to not let Toby come and visit. Bee would contact her brother again when she was ready, and not before.
They waited for almost an hour before a doctor came out to them all, looking over a clipboard with a few papers on it. She smiled at them all and announced, "She's doing just fine. She's awake and wishes to see you all."
The doctor had never seen a group of people stand so fast and rush so quickly out of the waiting room in her entire career. She barely had time to tell them the room Bee had been placed in, they had all left the room so quickly. They all squeezed themselves into her room, and were surprised to find her sitting up, and smiling broadly at them.
"The doctor said I had visitors," she said cheerfully, "She said a man with spiky chocobo hair had brought me in, and that he and his friends were waiting for me. I said 'Yup, spiky chocobo head and big boobs are with me,' and I think I embarrassed her." The room was quiet, and Bee frowned, having thought that her joke was funny. "What? Wasn't that funny? I thought it was..."
"You just made a joke about my boobs," Tifa said confoundedly. "You never make jokes about my boobs."
"Aw, I knew I should have thought about that harder," Bee said forlornly.
"No!" Tifa quickly protested, "That was funny. It just... Reno's had a great effect on you, hasn't he?"
"Well yeah!" Bee answered happily. She looked around at everyone and noticed that he wasn't there and she frowned again. "Where is he? I thought he would have been here..."
"He left to help with the interrogation of one of the men who attacked you," Cloud answered her, his tone neutral. He honestly didn't know if Reno would be coming to see her or not, and he didn't want to admit that to her.
Her face fell, but only for a second. "Okay, then I will have to thank him later. But I can thank you now, Cloud. If you hadn't gotten there so quickly, I could have bled to death."
"No," Cloud disagreed, "Reno would have taken care of you."
Bee looked down at her hands which were placed delicately on her lap and she gave a small smile. "Yeah. I guess he would have."
"How are you feeling now though?" Yuffie asked kindly, moving to sit on Bee's bed beside her.
"Tired," Bee admitted, "and my back feels kinda weird. It doesn't hurt... It's like it's stiff or something."
"You've never had healing magic cast on a serious injury before," Tifa said with a small laugh, "Despite how much you cast it. That's normal, you'll feel better after some sleep."
"We can come visit you after you've awoken," Shelke suggested. Bee smiled at her and nodded.
"Yeah, that sounds good. I'll call you," she said, motioning to her phone which was resting on a table next to her bed.
"Elena is coming to guard your room," Tifa told her as everyone stood, and Marlene and Denzel went and hugged Bee. "We don't know if there are more of those men. We will call Reeve and see what he wants to do with the Turks and your protection."
"Okay," Bee said, lying back onto her bed. She gave a yawn, earning a chuckle from her friends, and she watched as they all filed out of her room one by one. Her last thought before she drifted off to sleep was that she couldn't wait to thank Reno for protecting her, and let him know that she still wanted to go mountain climbing.
Bee didn't know how long she slept for, but when she finally woke up again, it was dark outside her bedside window. When she turned, she noticed the the woman Turk, Elena, was sitting in the arm chair across from the door. She looked up from the book she was reading when she noticed Bee moving.
"You're awake," she greeted in a polite tone, "You've been sleeping for some time now."
"Did you sleep?" was Bee's first question, earning herself a laugh from the Turk.
"You'd think you'd be more focused on your own well-being," Elena teased gently, "You really are just as Reno said you were."
"Reno?" Bee asked, perking up now. She sat herself upright, moving the pillows behind her so that they cushioned her back. She could barely feel the pain anymore. "He talked about me?"
Elena could not bring herself to tell Bee that Reno had sent Elena instead of going himself, and had only given the basic outline of Bee's personality in the Turk's file on Bee. She and the other Turks were well aware of the amount of time that Reno had been spending with the girl, and how much he had grown to care for her. It was no secret that Reno had developed real feelings for Bee. But Elena watched as Reno broke, right in front of her, determined to never place Bee in danger again, believing it was because of him that she was lying in a hospital bed at that very moment.
"He... he has," Elena told her, feeling her heart ache when Bee's face lit up at that. It wasn't a complete lie. Reno had spoken of her in the past, an off-hand remark before the meeting, a joke about her overachieving when they asked how she was progressing. Thankfully, Bee changed the subject all on her own.
"Did you find anything out from that man?" the girl asked, remembering that Cloud had told her the Turks were interrogating the Wutain with the sword. She turned and grabbed her phone, flipping it open and pressing down on the buttons in order to send a text to Tifa that she was awake and feeling better. She flipped the phone back, leaving it in her lap instead of the table, and then looked back to Elena expectantly.
"Yes, we did," Elena answered with a nod, "They were the only two stationed here. They've been spying on your shop for a week now. You said yourself at the meeting that you are basically the only potion shop in Edge. It wasn't hard for them to find you. I think they would have found you even if we hadn't been careless and lead them straight there in the first place..." She trailed off, her face scrunched in anger at her own failure.
"You had a lot of other things going on," Bee said dismissively, shaking her head, "I don't blame you for this at all. There was no other way to save Mr. Shinra. It was good that Reno remembered me."
Tell that to him, Elena thought dryly, though she refused to say it aloud. Instead, she said, "Either way, they were the only two here. However, now that they are both gone, the Wutai rebels will eventually notice their absence and may send more to try and kill you before you can complete enough antidotes to help with the WRO. Therefore, a Turk, Cloud, or Yuffie, will be stationed at your house at all times, and will act as a body guard during your routine visits in Edge."
"Oh," Bee answered, processing Elena's words. She didn't really like the thought of having someone watching over her at all hours of the day, and then even throughout the night. Trying to find a silver lining she asked, "Well, Reno will come too, right? We can still eat dinner together and watch movies like we normally do?"
Elena paused, not having realized the extent to which Reno and Bee spent their time together. She had no idea that they were doing thing such as having dinner together, let alone watching movies together.
"You've... become very attached to Reno, haven't you?" Elena asked, placing her book on the arm of the chair she was sitting in, and scooting forward to get a closer look at Bee's face. The girl's hair was a mess from her ordeal and from sleeping for almost a whole day, and her eyes were a bit dull as she was still recovering from blood-loss. But she gave off a lively air that had not been present at the meeting back at headquarters. Just what had Reno done to her in only three weeks?
"He's my friend," Bee replied, as if it were obvious, "I'm attached to all of my friends."
"Well, Reno doesn't really have many friends. Let alone female friends. He generally just has females that he sleeps with..." Elena admitted, looking up at the ceiling as she tried to remember a single friend that Reno had mentioned outside of Rude. None came to mind, except for Bee.
"Ah, I know..."
Elena looked back at Bee, noticing that the girl had gone very red, and refused to meet her eyes. Realization dawned on Elena. She had been wondering how they knew each other from the very get go.
"You and Reno... You slept together, didn't you?" Elena asked bluntly. This only caused Bee to turn even more red, and to splutter out a yes. "He left the next morning, didn't he? He's never been one for more than a one night stand."
"He did leave, and I know that," Bee said sullenly, "I wasn't proud of myself. I was drunk, I didn't know what I was doing. I never meant for Reno to happen. I'm so glad that we became friends, he means a lot to me, but that night... It still..."
"I understand," Elena told her kindly, moving forward to place a hand on Bee's foot, the closest part of Bee that she could reach. Bee smiled sheepishly at her and nodded a thanks.
"You think he'll ever change?" Bee asked suddenly. She tried sitting up straighter, stretching her back in the process. She sighed in content when the muscles around her recently closed wounds unwound and loosened, allowing Bee to get more comfortable.
"You mean do I think Reno will ever go for more than a one night stand?" Elena clarified. Bee nodded and Elena thought about it for a minute. She crossed her legs, and leant forward, leaning on the arm of the chair that didn't have her book on it. "I don't think that Reno will ever stay the next morning until he finally falls in love. When he sleeps with the girl that he loves, he will break his one night stands."
"I guess that makes sense..." Bee agreed slowly, thinking it over. "I just can't see Reno falling in love. He's too committed to his job to have room for anything else."
"He made time for you," Elena pointed out, sitting back in her chair, satisfied with her answer earlier.
Bee looked at Elena and noticed that the Turk was watching her with careful and calculating eyes. Bee unconsciously clenched her hands together in her lap. Her breath caught in her throat for a second and she thought back to just before she had passed out in front of the monument. How she had watched Reno walk away from her to take on her attackers. How much of a hero he looked to her at that moment, so unlike a Turk. How she had wanted desperately to run to his side, take all the blows for him so that he wouldn't be hurt. How much he had changed her life in such a short time. And finally, how she wanted to tell him that she was falling in love with him, slowly, but definitely. She had forgotten all about that thought, and was surprised to find that she was calm. She didn't disagree with the thought, didn't pass it off as a delusional thought because she was woozy. She had meant it.
Elena was right. Reno did make time for Bee. Reno made a lot of time for her, more time than she thought he would.
"You are in love with Reno," Elena determined calmly.
"I am," Bee admitted quietly, looking away from Elena now and gazing down at her hands, still clenched in her lap.
"I'm sorry," Elena offered sadly.
"Me too," Bee choked out. She watched as the tears dripped from her chin and dripped onto her hands, not even bothering to wipe them away.
Elena watched silently, knowing that Bee had realized that her love would never be returned. Reno would always first and foremost be a Turk, and that the best he had to offer to Bee was friendship. Bee admitted to herself what she knew all along; Reno would always be just out of her reach, slipping through her fingers like sand. She could hold the sand with two hands, covet the cool feeling against her palms, but one wrong move and it all slipped easily away, reduced to thousands of pieces that she never really knew were all there anyway. Just when she thought she had him fully, she realized that she never really had him at all, and she never would. He was too much for her to hold all at once, she could never know him fully. There would always be parts of him that she would never know, secrets he kept hidden from her, both for her benefit and for his. She realized she was too innocent for him, too naïve in the real ways of the world. Her times in the slums had hardened her, but she knew if she were faced with the things that her friends and the Turks faced on a normal basis, she would crumble.
Had she been fooling herself all this time, thinking that she could fit into Reno's world so easily? That she could remain by his side, even after her work for the WRO was finished? Once the conflict in Wutai was done, Reno would not be around as much. Right now, the Turks mission was her, to watch over her progress. They sent Elena to watch over her like it was no big hassle because it really wasn't. She was their objective the whole time. How could Bee have assumed that she would always be able to see Reno, always be able to maintain a solid friendship with him? She didn't even really know him. She knew the Reno that he was when he was with her, but not the Reno that he was during work. She had ignored it, ignored the fact that he was a Turk, never poking too much into that part of his life because she loved the Reno that she had right in front of her. So selfish, she concluded, to assume that he would hang on to her forever.
"He isn't coming, is he?" she asked Elena, wiping at her tears. She seemed to be doing a lot of that lately, and she was extremely embarrassed that she was doing it in front of Elena, a Turk that she had never talked to before.
"I don't think so, no," Elena told her reluctantly.
Bee only nodded in silent acknowledgement of Elena's answer, and then laid back down, moving her pillows down with her. She cried for a long time, thinking over and over again how stupid she was, and wondering how she had gotten where she was. How had she let herself fall for a Turk, and let her relationship with her brother crumble so badly, and let her life become so monotonous? She found no answer, not on the back of her eyelids, not from Elena, and not on the ceiling. And even nowhere from within herself.
A day earlier, Reno had found himself escorting the Wutain with the sword down the long halls of the WRO building's thirtieth floor, the designated floor for the Turks and Rufus Shinra. And by escort, Reno really meant that he was dragging the Wutain down the hall, the man's feet scraping the tiles below his feet, kicking and thrashing against Reno's hold and the shackles that bound his hand, but to no avail. Reno was a man on a mission, completely determined, and nobody was going to stand in his way. Personnel moved out of his way, terrified at the cold look in his eyes, and the inhumane way he dragged his captive behind him. Everyone had always been wary of the Turks in their building, but Reno had always been more approachable than Rufus or Tseng. He joked easily with the janitors or the soldiers, flirted mercilessly with the secretaries. But this was a Reno possessed, and Shiva help anyone that tried to stop him.
Tseng was the only one to have the nerve, and really the authority, to place a hand on Reno's shoulder and stop him. They had just reached the interrogation room, and Reno had thrown the Wutain into the lone chair of the room, shackling his feet to the bottom of the chair, and then his wrists to the arms. He fought back the whole time, even when Reno bashed him over the head with his EMR, drawing blood on contact. He was relentless in his attempts to escaped, a trait that most Wutains shared.
"Reno," Tseng barked, finally getting his subordinated attention, "We will discuss interrogation procedures outside."
"What's there to discuss? I'm getting the information out of him, any means necessary," Reno protested, earning himself a glare from his Chief. "Fine."
The four Turks left the room, closing and locking the door on their way out. Rufus was waiting for them on the other side of the one-sided window, looking at their captive with great interest. He listened in on the Turk's conversation in silence, remaining obstinately aloof.
"I don't think you should be in the room for this, Reno," Tseng told his fellow Turk sternly. Elena and Rude watched Reno for his reaction, prepared to hold him back if the need arose.
"What?!" Reno seethed, "Are you kidding me, Chief? This is my man! My interrogation! If anyone should do it, I should be the one! He's part of the group that wants her dead! This is my responsibility!"
Elena refrained from making a comment about how Reno never wanted responsibility, and listened to Tseng instead. "You are too angered to be able to do this interrogation without the chance of killing him first. You are in no way emotionally stable enough to be handling this right now."
"I'm fine! I want this information more than all of you, there's no way I'm letting you take this from me!" Reno argued back, taking a half-step towards Tseng and waving at hand at him.
"Reno, my case in point right there," Tseng bit back, motioning at Reno's outburst.
Reno was about to argue back, when Rufus spoke up, still looking through the window.
"Let him do it, Tseng," he told his head Turk, "A person very important to our mission was injured today. I cannot ever have that happen again. Let him send a message to the rebel group that we will not tolerate such attacks in the future. And besides," Rufus turned away from the widow, looking at Reno now, "That person also happens to be very important to him as well."
The Turks stood in stunned silence for just a heartbeat before Reno sprang into action again, thanking Rufus briefly before almost sprinting back into the interrogation room. The remaining Turks and Rufus stayed outside, all four gathering at the window to watch Reno in his work.
"When someone that you love is hurt, either emotionally or physically, there is nothing that will stop you from getting revenge on that person," Rufus told Tseng, answering Tseng's unspoken question. Rufus glanced at Elena quickly, knowing that she was thinking of her sister. "So, I would hate to have to shoot Reno for attacking you in order to get what he wants. He's a good Turk, and Shiva knows we don't have any to spare."
Even Tseng managed to smirk at his comment, and watch Reno with a lighter conscience.
Reno, meanwhile, had stalked over to lean against the side wall, directly across from the Wutain. He was swinging his EMR in his hand, lazily and without effort, the leather strap circling his wrist smoothly. He caught it every other swing, whipping it back in the other direction and then repeating the whole process. The Wutain watched him with stoic eyes, giving nothing away.
"I already know who sent you," Reno informed the man, "And you already told me why you came here. So, why don't you just tell me how many more of you there are so we can get this over with, huh? Won't have to rough you up or anything." It was a lie. Reno knew it, Rufus knew it, and the Turks knew it, but they were all hoping the Wutain didn't.
"I would die before I told you," the man spat at him, rocking himself in his chair, lifting the feet off the ground a bit before it slammed back down with a loud crack.
In normal situations, Tseng did the interrogating. He was the best at it, always managing to keep his composure. He usually cracked a person within a few minutes, whispering unspeakable things into the person's ears, and then breaking their necks quickly once they had spilled the information. Rude often went when Tseng could not. He was big, quiet, and intimidating. Sometimes, he used violence, slapping the person around a bit before they told him what he wanted to hear. Once he had his information, he too snapped their necks, leaving them dead before he left the room. Elena only ever did the interrogating when it was a woman, or maybe a teenager. They felt safer with her, often telling her things because they assumed she wouldn't harm them. They were always wrong, and they always wound up with a bullet hole in their head when she was finished with them.
Reno almost never interrogated. He hated it, found it to be boring. Where was the excitement in getting information from someone? But on the rare occasion that he did, he often pulled a chair into the room and sat across from his victim, ignoring them completely. Sometimes he brought magazines in, other times he cleaned his gun, or fine tuned his EMR. And it drove the other person crazy. Thoughts of what he was going to do to them rang through their heads, ideas and methods of torture driving them insane. They waited, and waited, and waited, slowly becoming more and more disturbed in their ideas of how he was going to get them to give him information. Eventually, the would crack, screaming at Reno the information he needed, begging him to just leave them be. It was a slow and torturous process, and was usually only used on younger people. Reno would stand, thank his victim, and then shock them right over the heart with his EMR, killing them instantly.
But this situation called for none of those methods, especially not Reno's normal one. This one called for as much pain as Reno could inflict on that man as possible.
"That's the wrong answer, pal," he sneered, cracking the Wutain over the hand with his EMR, breaking a few fingers and definitely the hand itself in the process. He howled in pain, rocking his chair back and forth again. "I can do this all night. You pissed me off something bad, you got that? I have no problem breaking every bone in your body if that's what this is gonna take. In fact, I'd probably enjoy that. So, go ahead, don't give me what I need. That is fiiiine by me."
"Death first," the man said, his teeth grit in pain.
"Not gonna happen." Another whack, and the Wutain's second hand was broken. This time when he rocked his chair back, Reno moved to hold it down. "You're gonna break the chair."
"We will defeat you! Shinra will finally end!"
Another crack, this time breaking some ribs.
"Wutai is precious to you, isn't it?" Reno asked suddenly, moving away from the man. He looked up at Reno, blood spilling out of his mouth having been coughed up from his lungs. "You would do anything to protect it, even die for it, is that right? Well, I have something like that too, you understand? Something that I would give my life to protect. That I would sit here in your position and get beat on, and still never give anything away because that something is worth more than any pain inflicted on me. And if Wutai was threatened, and you were in my position, you wouldn't leave this room until I gave you all the information you needed. Isn't that right?"
"What is your point, Turk?" He pronounced the title with disdain, staring up at Reno with defiant eyes.
"Well your partner threw shuriken into my something's back earlier today. And I watched as she bled in my arms, watched as her face showed pain. And it was your buddy that gave her that pain. I got news for you, your partner is dead now because of what he did to her. So what do you think I'm gonna do to you in order to protect her further?" Reno asked, leaning down closer to the man and giving him the fiercest grin that he could manage, and he was rewarded with the most satisfying look in a victim's eyes that you can receive as an interrogator. He saw fear.
Five minutes later saw Reno leaving the room, the smell of charred flesh following him out the door. Elena covered her nose, still not used to the smell, and looked away from the window, meeting Reno's eyes. He seemed dead to her, and for the first time in her life, she felt sorry for him. Deeply, truly sorry for the man who had seemed unbreakable to her.
"There are no more in Edge," Reno told them, "He said they would send more when their intelligence messages stopped being received. They've been watching her for a week, waiting for the right moment."
"We will have to post a guard on her at all times," Tseng mused, "Would you like to volunteer?"
"No," he surprised them all by saying. He gave no explanation and instead turned to walk away from them, heading for the office he never used, to sit at the desk he never sat at. He wanted to get away from them, away from the people who saw her only as a tool to be used to help their stupid armies. Away from the people who knew that he saw her as so much more than that. Away from the people who would never understand what he felt when he saw her blood gushing from her back.
He had expected one of them to follow. He had not expected it to be Elena. It hadn't taken her long to pick the lock on his office door, it weren't a very good one anyway. She found him sitting in his swivel office chair, his feet on the desk. There were no papers on it; Rude always wrote the reports for him as they were almost always sent on mission together. When they weren't, Tseng usually just pretended that he had received a report from Reno because reading reports from Reno always gave him a headache. The walls were bare too, only a few books lined his bookshelves. Elena wasn't surprised. Even before Reno had met Bee, he had liked to spend most of his time away from his office. He said it was unhealthy sitting in there when he never had anything to do in there anyway.
She sat in the only other chair in the room, probably in there for Rude, and observed his face, the way he avoided looking at her, how empty his eyes seemed to be. He just sat, staring into space, and Elena let him. Turks were never very good talkers, but Elena knew that if he wanted to talk, he would. She had someone she wanted to protect too, and she knew what it felt like to have that person ripped away from her. She knew it all too well. She had gone through it already with her sister. So she sat, and let him decide when he wanted to talk, and what he wanted to say.
"Do you think hearts can die?" he asked her after a while, "And I don't mean like literally because I've zapped one too many hearts to know that they can. I mean, can they stop... stop feeling? Because I thought I stopped a long time ago when I got this job. I stopped feeling sorry for all the people I killed, stopped feeling sorry for who I was before, stopped feeling sorry for every life I ruined. I stopped feeling attached because there was no point. I kept an upbeat attitude because without that in this job, you go crazy, I know I've seen it. But I wouldn't say I felt happy. This job is a lot better when you stop feeling emotions and start pretending. So I thought my heart died."
"Obviously you were wrong," Elena told him, seeing where he was going with his outburst.
"Yeah, guess I was," he agreed, though his voice did not seem to want to agree, "Tseng told me that it wasn't wrong to want to be with her, that I was lucky. That I should 'protect and cherish her.' And I tried, I really did, because honestly, being around her was the only time I ever let myself feel human again. And I haven't felt human in a long time, like really alive. Sure, a nice kill gives me a great jolt, but it wasn't the same as being with her. But... Tseng was wrong! He was so wrong."
"Just because she got hurt one time doesn't mean you can't be her friend. She was an actual threat to the rebels, she would have been targeted even if she wasn't involved with you," Elena assured him, trying to convince him that he was wrong in any way possible, "She was lucky you were there to stop them."
"No! That's just it!" he yelled back, standing up from his chair, his feet slamming on the ground and his office chair bouncing off of the tile and then landing on the side. Elena watched calmly as he continued, "She wouldn't have gotten hurt at all if I had never been in her life in the first place! If I had never brought Rufus to her! If I had never..." He stopped just short of saying, If I had never slept with her.
"So you're going to run away at the first sign of trouble?" Elena prodded him, disapproval on her face, "She gets hurt in something that she involved herself in voluntarily, and you run away? Instead of staying and protecting her like a real friend would, you're going to distance yourself from her? Reno, none of this is your fault."
"It's all completely my fault!" he announced, still yelling. Elena wondered if Tseng or Rude would come rushing into the room because of the yelling. She doubted it. They knew why Reno was so upset. And they planned to stay clear of him. "She's so innocent, so good. A good person. How could I have gone on, bringing blood into her life? Every relationship like this ends badly, it's just basic knowledge of a Turk, one of the first things you learn. You learn to kill and not care, and then you learn to not care for anything else either. Your heart dies. I thought... I thought that if I stayed around her, she would bring it back, she would make me normal again! Give me a life besides the Turks. That was so stupid, there is no life besides the Turks, I knew that, but she made me forget. So stupid. I just corrupted her, killed her innocence, ruined her! What was I thinking?"
"You're being pathetic, Reno," she surprised him by saying sharply. He turned to look at her, his rage stunted for the moment. "You obviously care for her so much, it's disgusting. You are running away. You know what happened when my sister was exiled? When I thought I would never see her again?"
"No," Reno admitted. He had never known where the exiled Turks went, or how they had really made their way back to Midgar, or even where they disappeared to again afterwards. He assumed they had cut all ties, that Elena and her sister never talked.
"Did you never hear about why Tseng decided to hire me?" she asked dubiously.
"No, did you ever hear about why I was hired?" he retorted. Turks didn't ask questions about that sort of thing.
"You highjacked one of Shinra's helicopters, and it took Tseng and Veld over two months to find you. When they finally did, you managed to beat a whole unit of Heidegger's grunts before Veld caught you at gunpoint," Elena answered, unimpressed. Reno stared at her, wondering how it was she knew that, but she continued, "I was hired because I showed exceptional skills at hacking, and never getting caught. My sister and I had maintained a private correspondence after she was exiled, and we were never detected, even by Tseng. He didn't know until my interview. Had I been caught, I would have been executed along with my sister. I risked my life to keep in touch with her, and in return she risked her own. And do you know why? Because my sister was the only good thing in my life, and I was the only good thing in her life, and our lives were worth less than losing each other. We knew that if we lost each other, we would lose everything that mattered in life. I would lose what I was fighting for. Everyone needs something to fight for, even you, Reno."
"I fight because it's my job. Always have. What more reason do I need?" He was angry again, looming over Elena, trying to intimidate her into seeing his way and he knew it wasn't working and he didn't care.
"Because if that's all you fight for, then you're just empty inside," she responded, still calm in the face of his anger.
"Well, like I said, my heart died when I took this job, so I'm already empty," he argued back, heading for the door now, finished dealing with Elena, "And I'm not going to let hers die too. She's too good for that."
He slammed the door behind him, rattling the chair that was still laying on the ground. Elena stood and righted the chair again, easily slipping it back into place by the desk, and mused on how ironic it was that those two obviously different objects worked so well with each other, but could never acknowledge it. They did not feel.
A/N: I really don't think Elena gets enough credit sometimes, especially not in the game. She obviously wouldn't be hired as a Turk is she wasn't good enough for the position. I enjoy writing her because I feel that we didn't see a lot of her in the game, so there is a lot of leeway in writing her character. She was barely in Advent Children, and the most we see of her is in On the Way to a Smile: In the Case of Shinra. So, I think fanfiction authors have a lot of input on how they write her. Let me know what you think of my version of her! You will see a lot more of the other Turks now, especially Tseng. Keep in mind, as it is easy to forget this, Bee and Tseng have known each other since Bee was a child! That will factor in later on.
Also, I've slowed down in writing this story, I am at chapter 20 right now. I just got a job and two girls have quit since I was hired (not because of me, I swear!) and now there is only four of us where I work, two of which are the manager and assistant manager. Therefore, my hours have picked up substantially and I may not be able to update as much. I will update once a week, it's just a matter of when at this point. If I get to chapter 15 and have not finished writing chapter 20, I will have to take a week break to write at least two more chapters, but this story will continue, so do not worry!