CHAPTER FOUR: DEATH IS PART OF THE PROCESS
[in which Reno and Rude discuss mortality, we learn how Knox escaped death, and Reno plans his own funeral]
It was past midnight when Reno returned from Costa del Sol. In the sunken lounge on the 48th floor he found Rude asleep on one of the grey couches. The little cat was keeping him company, curled up by his feet as neat and tight as the knot in Tseng's tie. Something about the cat – its warmth, its homeliness – put a lump in Reno's throat. He stretched himself out on the opposite couch, arms folded behind his head. Only then did he realize that, behind the sunglasses, Rude's eyes were wide open, staring out the window.
"Hey, Rude." He pitched his voice low.
"Hey, Reno. How was Costa?"
On the other side of the vast panes of glass the clouds seethed, forming and reforming in monstrous shapes drenched with the colours of corruption, rotten green, bruise purple, mouldy grey.
"Sunny," said Reno.
The little cat opened its eyes and yawned so wide that Reno could see the ridges on the roof of its mouth. It made a performance of stretching: first one paw, then the other, followed by an arching of its back and a fluffing of its tail, as if it were warming up for some big action. Then it curled around and fell sleep again, purring loudly.
The Turks were no strangers to loss. Just over a year ago their rookie, Marr, had been killed by Genesis in Banora, along with the one of the guys from the Mideel branch office. They'd hardly had a chance to get to know him. The year before that, Odilie had been captured by the Engetsu in the marine caves. Her captors had sent her home over a period of weeks, piece by rotting piece. And the year before that, Lou had been lost in the mission Charlie sabotaged…
But those deaths could be set to the account of known hostile agents, enemies whose names and faces were carved into each Turk's memory against the day when they would even the score. Natalya's death was different. It had come to her namelessly out of the darkness, giving no reason, and its agents had vanished into shadows, leaving no clue.
"Anyone else around?" asked Reno. "Where's Ciss?"
"She's gone north with Tseng to see if they can find… anything. Information. Apparently Nats was interviewing a candidate just before she was killed. And they'll bring her body back. If there's anything left to find." Rude paused. "I let Knox and Mozo know. Moe'll be back tomorrow. Knox came straight up from Junon. But he's gone home to his family. He said Barbara's taking it really hard. She's known Nats for years. And Roz… I think she went to see her sister. How's the Chief?"
"Silent. Furious. When he finds whoever's responsible, it isn't going to be pretty."
"The Legend know anything?"
Reno's lip curled contemptuously. "Like he cares. Beach all day, babes all night, booze on tap; he's like, don't bug me, man. I can't believe I ever looked up to that guy."
"He and Natalya used to have a thing going, Rosalind told me."
"What?" said Reno, astonished. "Nats and Charlie? Seriously? It must have been a while back."
"Before our time. Apparently some of the old rogue union guys from Corel stole classified documents from the mansion at Nibelheim and were trying to sell them to Wutai. She and the Legend were sent after them. He was supposed to go in and retrieve the documents and she was covering his back. But she messed up, and it was her or the mission, and he chose her. We never did get the documents."
"The Chief must've skinned them alive."
"You said it. And then he banished them to opposite ends of the planet for six months, Roz says."
"Is that why Tseng got promoted over her?"
Rude shook his head. "She wouldn't have been any good at his job. She's too… empathetic."
"And too hot," added Reno. "For an old lady."
Rude chuckled. "I always thought it was the Chief who was sweet on her. I thought that was why he gave her all the safe missions."
"Nah, he wouldn't do that. You know he loves us all equally."
Where did it spring from, the laughter that burst out of them then? Loud, cackling, ugly sound… It woke the little cat, who hissed and fled under the sofa. Rude and Reno laughed until their sides ached and the tears burned in their eyes.
"Oh God – it's not funny – " gasped Reno, pressing a fist to his chest. "Oh, shit. Shit, Nats. Why'd they kill her? Why her? Of all of us?" The laughter in his face had twisted into anger. "Safe mission be damned. No such fucking thing, is there? You know what, Rude? I bet she let her guard down. She was always doing that. She probably stopped to help them change a tire or something and they blew a hole in her. Fuck it. Fuck it – "
"I know – "
"And fuck fucking Charlie for not giving a shit. I wish now I'd punched his fucking face in, smug git. I can't get my head around it. Can you? I can't believe we won't see her again. I can't believe she won't walk in tomorrow with that brown paper bag of those cookies she keeps bringing us, like she's our mum, or something. God, what's a woman like that even doing in the Turks in the first place? I mean, look at me, you know: what the hell else could I do? But Nats, man – she should have married some nice ordinary joe and gone to live in the boondocks, farming chocobos and baking cookies for her dozen kids. It's just shit."
Out of breath, he fell silent. The energy of his anger was already ebbing from him.
No loss stayed fresh for long. Grief waxed and waned and faded. Life would go on. Reno knew this; every Turk knew it; they had lived through it before, and they would do so again, next month or next year, until the day the bullets that bore their own names found them….
Rude said, "Nats would have been bored with an ordinary joe. And she hated chocobos. Remember the time we were crossing the desert south of Corel?"
"And she kept falling off."
"And every time she fell, it tried to sit on her. I'm not a bloody egg! Remember?"
"She sure didn't have a way with birds," Reno chuckled.
"She was a city girl at heart. She loved Midgar. She loved this job. I bet if you could ask her now, she'd still say it was worth it."
Reno leaned back into the sofa cushions, closing his eyes. Rude was right, as always. Turk or chocobo farmer, Shinra executive or Wuteng shopkeeper, everybody ended up dead in the end. Even the Chief would die one day; even that legendary jerk, Charlie. At least while Natalya was alive, she'd lived. Weren't they all in this job for the same reason?
For a while, neither of them felt like saying anything else. They lay and listened to the sounds of the Shinra Building at night: the hum of the reactors, the buzz of the lights, the gurgling of pipes, the occasional rattle of the elevator, and the soft, steady whirr of the ventilation system. The cat came out from under the sofa and jumped up by Rude's feet; though he frowned at it and curled back his feet a little, he allowed it to stay. It lay with its paws tucked under its white chest, watching them both through half-closed eyes.
Reno broke the silence. "So, you planning to sleep here, Rude, or what? You going to go home?"
"No. My place feels kind of… empty."
"I know what you mean," said Reno. "Mine too."
"It's late, anyway. I'll just stay here and do some thinking. I don't feel like sleeping."
"Yeah, me neither." Reno's foot had begun to jiggle restlessly. "So….mind if I keep you company?"
"As long as you don't talk."
They lay on their sofas and watched the clouds boil, and Reno smoked a cigarette or two, and each thought their own thoughts about life and death and work and loss and friendship, and those thoughts were not so different. They had known each other for almost six years now, which was a big chunk of your life when you were only twenty-one. After a while Rude went and got two beers from the fridge in the kitchen. They drank them in companionable silence.
Eventually, the night ended, and a new day began.
.
Death, like everything else in Shinra, followed a certain protocol. The Board's commiserations to Commander Veld were duly noted in the minutes of the morning's meeting, as was President Shinra's insistence that the party or parties responsible for such an insult to the company's authority should be found, and punished, as swiftly as possible.
Later, Lazard and Reeve visited Veld in his office to say how sorry they were, and to ask if there was anything they could do.
In the afternoon HR sent round the announcement via email: killed in the line of duty.
Tseng arrived at sunset, by helicopter, with Natalya's body in a bag. Reno and Knox carried the body down to the mortuary on the dispensary floor. Tseng went to his office, to begin filling out the paperwork necessary for the funeral, while Rude climbed into the helicopter and flew back to Icicle Inn, to help Cissnei hunt for the perpetrators.
In the white-tiled company mortuary, Knox and Reno laid the bag with its stiff contents on a stainless steel table. Knox unzipped the bag a little way, enough to see her face, framed by the softness of her thick dark hair. Her skin was bluish-white, her flesh absolutely cold. Death had made of her face the usual optical illusion: in one instant it looked like the Natalya they remembered, fast asleep; the next moment it became a stranger's face, all trace of Natalya erased.
Looking into the face of a dead colleague was the closest Reno ever came to being convinced of the existence of souls. These were Natalya's features, but this was not Natalya. Something had fled. But where? Up to the stars? Into the mako, as the hippies and tree-huggers wanted everyone to believe? Where did the flame go when he snuffed a match with two wet fingers? Nowhere. It just went out.
Knox stroked her hair and touched her cheek. Then he zipped the bag closed.
Eighteen years they'd worked together.
Reno said to Knox, "Want to go get pissed?" and somewhat to his surprise, Knox said, "Yeah."
With Natalya's death, Knox, at thirty-five, was now the oldest of the head office Turks. He was a tall man, with dark hair and fair skin; the severity of his scarred features was softened by a pair of rimless glasses, and occasionally by a smile. He came originally from Gongaga, and like all good backwoods boys from the deep south he was an accomplished swordsman. SOLDIER had wooed him at one time, but his loyalty belonged entirely to Veld, who had plucked him from sentence of death in his home town in order to make him a Turk. His story, as far as Reno knew it, went like this: when he was seventeen years old, a friend of his had been kidnapped by an organized crime ring operating out of Gongaga. Sword on back, Knox had forded rivers and crossed deserts to find the cave where his friend was being held; he had then killed every last member of the gang, including the boss, thus calling down on his own head the fury of Gongaga's mayor, who had been growing fat on the gang's backhanders for years.
Commander Veld had happened to be in Gongaga at the time, sorting out a problem that was standing in the way of Shinra's plans to build a reactor there. The Shinra Electric Company had been smaller in those days; its name did not yet inspire that necessary degree of fear in those who might seek to oppose or exploit it, and the Mayor of Gongaga was greedy. Veld quietly removed him, and returned to Midgar with Knox tucked under his wing.
You'd expect, thought Reno, that Knox might resent seeing Tseng get promoted over him, given that the Boss was younger by a good ten years. But Tseng lived and breathed Shinra. If he had any kind of a private life, Reno hadn't been able to sniff it out. Knox was married; he was the only Turk with a family, and whenever he was in Midgar he clocked off religiously at the appointed hour, rushing home to be with his wife and two small sons. Decent guy. Different kind of world. Reno couldn't really imagine what Knox's home life must be like.
So he was surprised when Knox agreed to risk the wrath of Barbara and go drinking. From the start the plan was to get legless. They went down to the Turks' usual haunt, the Goblins Bar, across from Les Marroniers on the corner of Loveless Avenue, and put away one pint after another of draught Zolom Triple XXX. They played pool and cribbage, and talked about anything but death – the new girls on reception, the idiocies of HR, the latest prototypes coming out of Scarlett's workshops. By midnight they were seeing double, miscounting the points and dropping their cards. Knox's tongue sounded too large for his mouth when he stood up and declared, "Gotta go home now." Reno tried to convince him he should call Barbara to tell her he had to work all night, and then come back to Reno's place to sleep it off, but Knox would not be persuaded. On wobbly legs he staggered away in the direction of the train station.
Reno set off for home, but, unable to walk a straight line, eventually found himself standing outside the Shinra building. All the lights were blazing. Its brightness and warmth welcomed him in. A security guard sat at the front desk; a cleaning lady with an industrial-sized hoover was vacuuming the red-carpeted stairs. Holding on tight to the banister, Reno hauled himself up to the mezzanine, fell into the elevator, and collapsed gratefully onto its floor…
Someone was slapping his cheek. He struggled to raise his eyelids, but they were so heavy. Two hands, one warm, one cold, both equally strong, lifted him to his feet.
"For God's sake, Reno. Passed out in the elevator. What next?"
At the sound of that harsh, gravelly voice, a grin plastered itself across Reno's face. Commander Veld had found him. Now the Chief would take care of everything, just like he always did.
Veld guided his young Turk down a corridor. Through the beery fog that engulfed it, Reno's brain registered that they were on the 66th floor. He was led into Veld's office, and through to another room with a bed. The Chief was famously so dedicated to his work that he had made his home in the Shinra building; Reno had never heard of him living anywhere else. He told Reno to lie down, took off his boots, held the wastepaper bin for him while Reno threw up, covered him with a blanket, and went to get him a glass of water. Reno took a long sip, savouring the coolness in his mouth, and swallowed.
"Go to sleep now," said Veld.
Obediently Reno put his head down on the pillow. Veld got up to go, stretching out a hand for the light switch. "Hey, Chief," Reno murmured drowsily.
"What?"
"When I die, I want you to take my ashes up in the helicopter and scatter them into the wind. Right over Midgar. OK?"
"If you like. Now sleep." Veld turned down the switch. A soft darkness fell.
Author's note
This is the end of Part I: Reno and the Cat. Part Two is called 'Hard Things and Soft Things'.
The title 'Death is Part of the Process' is borrowed from an early 1980s TV drama about the battle against apartheid in South Africa. Its relevance to the world of FFVII will be explained in Part 6.