Chapter 1: Well, I know what I've been told, you gotta work to feed the soul, but I can't do this all on my own. No, I know, I'm no Superman.
AN: This story will be borrowing some visual elements from the remake (Reno's tattoos) and possibly some bits of characterization or side quests to add more flavor/depth, but at the end of the day this is still going to be an AU based on the original game without any of the remake's plot twists being present.
Reeve Tuesti was one of the seven richest men on the Planet. Countless people envied the wealth and power that came with his position as the head of Shinra's Urban Development Department. Reeve Tuesti envied those countless people, because they were blissfully ignorant of how the world truly worked.
Those people could insist to themselves that life was, if not fair, at least sane. That people like Reeve (who had so much money that he could hire someone to think of ludicrous metaphors for exactly what he could do with it) were so financially blessed because they'd been born smarter or worked harder than everyone else.
Reeve knew better, and it was that knowledge which made him dread moments like this. Even the fact that it was happening late in the day so that a more sensible person could simply go home once the horrific event had concluded didn't help.
It was time for the Shinra '07 third quarter review.
Like every quarterly review for over five years straight Reeve was the last person to arrive and quietly took a seat at the large conference table. He tried not to look at the woman who was seated to his right, and he especially tried not to look to the man seated on his left.
He also tried not to look at either of the two people who were seated across from him. He tried not to think about the man who saw the people of this city not as customers but enemy combatants. He tried not to think about the man who now was the head of a 'department' which existed only on paper. He tried to imagine that the meeting was already over and he could just go back to his desk.
Alas, before the meeting could even officially start, one of his coworkers gleefully rose to their feet, unable to contain their joy.
"Good news everyone!" Announced Professor Simon Hojo, his joyful tones somehow even more off putting than the detached and unconcerned air he would normally approach office politics with.
"Project Second Silver has finally had a major success! After years of dismal failures, I'd like to present to you my latest scientific triumph, Kadaj!" Hojo boasted as he tapped a few keys into his seat's terminal.
Moments later a monitor in front of every department head flared to life. It revealed the image of a young man who looked to be in his late teens wearing a black outfit. He had silver hair that was cut short in the back but in front was long enough to dangle across his face. His green eyes seemed to glow with a strange inner light, and as the camera drew closer their pupils suddenly contracted into vertical slits. The moment that this change took place Hojo paused the video.
"What exactly are we looking at?" Blustered Heidegger as he gazed at his screen almost as intently as Kadaj was gazing into the camera recording him.
"While I'll admit that the Investigation Sector of the General Affairs Department has kept me more than amply supplied with test subjects, even my brilliance was stymied at every turn as I attempted to discover a way to elevate their bodies to the heights of our lamentably fallen General Sephiroth. Eventually I realized that such greatness could simply not be thrust upon those who never came close to being worthy of it. Instead, I decided to simply start from scratch and build a receptacle for Sephiroth's genes that had been designed with them in mind from the very start." Hojo explained.
"If you started from scratch then why are we looking at a young man rather than a baby?" Scarlet pointed out the obvious contradiction.
"You are familiar with the ability of Jenova cells to replicate at a far quicker pace than human ones are you not, my dear? While Sephiroth was undoubtedly second only to the invention of the mako reactor in helping the Shinra Electric Power Company achieve greatness, I will be the first to admit he had his flaws. I think we can all agree that he spent the entire first decade of his life contributing practically nothing of value to our organization." Hojo scoffed dismissively.
Reeve had to resist the urge to wince, it was an urge he'd gotten impossibly good at resisting, because these quarterly review meetings never failed to give him more chances to practice.
"Human reproduction is such an unnecessarily protracted and messy affair. When it came to Kadaj's creation I was able to take advantage of Jenova cell's astounding reproductive rate in order to induce artificial aging. My newest creation is only a few months old, and yet already physically capable of being deployed to the field." Shinra's top scientist boasted.
"At the moment all I see is a pretty silver haired toy. Can you prove to me that he has what it takes to be a soldier and not just a SOLDIER?" Heidegger demanded.
Hojo's face fell slightly and he returned his attention to the terminal in front of him.
"Gentlemen, while I may seem to work miracles, I must remind you I'm a scientist, not a magician and certainly not some kind of daycare matron. That is why I've handed the task of raising Kadaj over to some of my subordinates, though of course only after providing them with ample instructions for how best to go about it." Hojo insisted as he tapped a few more keys.
The video resumed, zooming out to once again show Kadaj's entire face, and a female voice could be heard speaking.
"How are you feeling today, Kadaj?" It asked in the sort of sweet sing-song voice that women tended to favor when addressing young children.
Kadaj smiled.
If Reeve had been a man less practiced at hiding his feelings he would have jerked backwards in shock. Thanks to the overly clinical terms that Hojo favored, Reeve had allowed himself to be lulled into thinking of Kadaj as just a younger, smaller Sephiroth.
Though Reeve had been far from the closest confidant of Shinra's most famous general, it was impossible for him to imagine Sephiroth ever smiling with the sort of relaxed innocent air that Kadaj now displayed.
"I feel great!" The young man beamed, his teeth almost as bright as his hair.
"That's good because you're going to be taking a test today..." The female voice said.
The smile vanished in an instant.
"What kind of test? What happens if I fail?" Kadaj's tone wasn't exactly sullen or plaintive, but it was wary, the vocal equivalent of a wild animal pacing at the edge of a campfire wondering if it should risk coming any closer.
"There's no way to fail this test. In fact, it is more like a game; I say a word and then you say the first word it makes you think of. To start with, light…?"
"Bulb."
"On?"
"Off."
"Mako?"
"Power."
"Shinra?"
"Power."
"Power?"
"Protects."
"Family?"
"Reunion."
"Sword?"
"Shiny."
"Gun?"
"Loud."
"Cat?"
"Kitty! No wait, purr!"
At this point in the back and forth Hojo stopped the video.
"Really? That is what you expect to be the next Sephiroth?" For some reason the head of Shinra's Public Safety Department was unimpressed.
Hojo pushed more buttons and the video shifted to a new scene.
This clip depicted the young man armed with one of the most bizarre weapons Reeve had ever seen; it was like someone had decided to attach two sword blades parallel to each other on the same hilt.
Kadaj was walking into what seemed to be some kind of combat arena and waiting for him were several of Shinra's most recent robotic creations. Kadaj had seemed more nervous at the prospect of a test in the previous video clip then he did at the sight of a dozen or so machines designed for the express purpose of ending human life.
The fight started with Kadaj manifesting lightning without use of any visible materia, and ended with him burying both of his weapon's blades into the barrel of a "First Ray" laser defense turret. A moment later the device exploded magnificently, somehow leaving Kadaj improbably unmarred by shrapnel.
"I would like to think his combat capabilities speak for themselves." Hojo smirked, before taking a moment to remove his glasses and clean them with an air of nonchalance that suggested he might as well be the room's sole occupant.
"So he knows how to break Scarlet's fancy toys. There's more to warfare than skill with a blade or magic, you know! Is he willing to grind our foes into dust, to burn each and every single one of them to a pile of ashes?" Heidegger pressed.
In an instant the glasses were back on Hojo's face, but they weren't quite dark enough to keep Reeve from noticing the fact that the scientist's eyes were shifting about considerably more than they normally did.
"As a weapon Kadaj is still rather incomplete, I'm afraid. His aggression levels towards living beings are regrettably minimal, but I'm certain this problem can be fixed with the right conditioning or chemical cocktail.
Luckily, I was able to tailor his upbringing to take advantage of the strange way that Jenova cells seem to resonate with one another even in entirely different test subjects. It took no effort at all to convince him that his 'brother' Sephiroth was Shinra's greatest hero, and thus he simply MUST be equally heroic.
I must admit, while Project Second Silver has had its ups and downs, now that we are actually making real progress Sephiroth is proving to be even more useful to us as a martyr than he ever did while alive." Hojo concluded.
So at the moment Simon Hojo considered the fact that his newest superpowered child soldier just wasn't homicidal enough to be a major defect, lovely. Reeve wished he had a way to just turn his brain off and completely disengage from this conversation, but he hadn't gotten where he was in life without having a memory that if anything only made events seem to get clearer and more focused when he thought back on them.
"What is your plan if things go wrong with Kadaj?" Reeve asked, while in the back of his mind somehow suspecting it was more a matter of "when" than "if", all things considered.
"The wonderful thing about science is that once you succeed, your results are so easy to replicate. I've already created additional Kadaj-line Second Silver specimens and have them germinating in artificial wombs as we speak." Hojo noted confidently.
"How long before we can unleash him on Avalanche?" President Shinra finally joined the conversation.
"Let's just say that I'm sure that Kadaj will find a way to help Shinra truly ring in the new year..." Cackled Hojo, drawing a "Gya haah hah hah" from Heidegger and a no less enthusiastic "Kya hah hah" from Scarlet.
XXX XXX XXX
Everything beyond that particular discovery was normal enough for a Shinra quarterly review meeting (which meant it would qualify as "profoundly terrifying" in just about any other context) and soon Reeve was headed back to his office.
The sad thing was how coldly "logical", almost inevitable it all was. Shinra had never shied away from the idea of fielding child soldiers. It still thoroughly escaped Reeve why exactly the wealthiest organization on the face of the Planet should feel the need to employ "soldiers" who hadn't even reached fifteen years of age. The logic behind such a decision thoroughly escaped Reeve… and even more horrifying… it had worked.
Not in the simple sense that Shinra had been able to grind down its foes through sheer attrition. No, "sensible", "mature" men like General Heidegger hadn't won the Wutain War, it'd been won by a bunch of… children.
Children like General Sephiroth who would be all of twenty seven years old if he was still alive today… a thought that somehow made Reeve Tuesti (who was only thirty five years old himself) feel like he was so ancient he might as well crumble to dust then and there.
Reeve made it back to the sanctuary of his office, closed the door and looked out the window. From this high up in Shinra HQ he looked out on a sea of over a million gently shining lights, each and every single one of them drawing power from the city's mako reactors.
The Shinra Electric Power Company was a drug dealer, and their narcotic of choice was the impossibly cheap to produce and "clean" energy provided by mako power. It had turned the entire Planet into a culture of addicts, and himself just one more pusher.
It was at times like these that Reeve was glad there was at least one person in the building whom he could hold an honest conversation with.
He sat down at his desk, and pressed a button to activate the intra-building communication system. A moment later there was a mechanical tone telling him his call had been received.
"Shinra Electric Power Company General Affairs Auditing Department..." Answered someone in the sort of sweet sing-song voice that men used when they want to annoy their conversation partner.
"I made a mistake on my latest expense report and overcharged the company. I'd like a chance to get my paperwork in order." Reeve replied.
"We're sending our most dedicated agent up to you right now." The voice promised.
There were hardworking people in the world like Reeve who refused to simply surrender no matter how impossible a task they were confronted with.
There were lazy people in the world who never accomplished anything.
There were people who shared both traits in equal measure.
Reeve had only met one person on the entire Planet in whom the two traits had somehow become inverted, and a dedication to doing as little as possible resulted in tremendous accomplishments.
That was why he'd barely had time to finish figuring out how to properly shuffle the numbers in his department's budget (by simply giving himself a 5% pay cut he was able to make sure that none of his employees would be downsized despite the fact that President Shinra had decided to cut Urban Development's funding… again….) before his guest arrived.
"Shinra Electric Power Company General Affairs Auditing Department, we know what you did last summer!" Proudly declared a red-haired man who was wearing an unkempt blue suit which had been left unbuttoned down just past his pectorals.
His spiky red hair and bangs were further accented by a pair of red tattoos leading out from under his eyes and up to his forehead, upon which a pair of thick aviator goggles rested.
The man known only as Reno had wormed his way into Shinra's power structure then burrowed in still deeper with the sort of dedication and complete disregard for the structure involved that one typically only saw from termites. Reeve had once tried to figure out who exactly was responsible for hiring Reno, and had discovered that somehow at least five different people (one of whom had since been fired while another was simply dead) were involved in a complex shell game of blame shifting, with each believing someone else had made the final call.
Reeve had learned absolutely nothing of value about how exactly Reno had joined Shinra from that attempt… and absolutely everything there was to know about Reno himself as a person.
"Mr. Tuesti, it is entirely too late and you are entirely too sober to be working." Reno insisted after taking a moment to examine the head of Shinra's Urban Development Department.
Reeve couldn't help but agree, chiefly because he knew that he was never going to get any serious work done after a quarterly meeting, they always left him helplessly traumatized. For that matter if he measured his performance only by the mission statement of the Urban Development Department ("We will improve our customers' quality of life") Reeve had actually "out-lazied" Reno!
Because what he was doing these days wasn't improving peoples' lives, it was ending them.
So far as Reeve could determine President Shinra and the other department heads had decided that his job was to murder as few people as possible with the large number of primed grenades they kept tossing to him.
That was what Reeve's "job" amounted to: murder by numbers, financial homicide, or, if he was feeling charitable with himself, fiscal manslaughter.
Here someone was going to die to a curable disease because a hospital had been closed down, there some drunkard was going to drive off the side of a road because the crash barriers hadn't been replaced recently, and he couldn't forget that elsewhere someone was inevitably going to die when an unrepaired bridge collapsed, either onto their head or under their tires.
Reeve Tuesti was the only man on the face of the Planet who could make a convincing case for having killed more people than General Sephiroth…
It was a testament to how good he was at his job that Urban Development hadn't become a "paper department" the way that Shinra's Space Program had. Evidently President Shinra liked how amazing Reeve was at keeping Midgar's people from rising up in a murderous mob against the company that never stopped trying to discover new ways to make their lives just a little bit worse.
There was nothing that Reeve dreaded more than the inevitable day when President Shinra complimented him with something along the lines of "Well done you son of a bitch, you could almost make me believe you actually cared about our customers!" because he somehow knew it was coming.
For the moment though, rather than continuing to decide which poor soul would next have to shed blood rather than even risk the possibility of Shinra seeing red in their budget, Reeve opened up a small compartment in his desk, pulling out a bottle and four glasses.
He filled all four of the glasses and Reno eagerly snatched three of them, managing to hold one in either hand while enfolding the third in the crook of his left elbow.
"Reno, why does the Planet hate me?" Reeve wondered as he began to drain his own glass.
"Mr. Tuesti, anyone who thinks the Planet cares about them in particular is on an ego trip. The bitch hates all of us, what you gonna do?" Reno answered without hesitation.
Reeve had no logical counterargument. For that matter, if Reno knew the things that Reeve did, he would probably agree that the Planet had every right to hate humanity.
"We're going to drink." Was the only answer Reeve could give.
"That kind of split-second brilliant decision-making is exactly why you get paid the gallons of gil Mr. Tuesti!" Reno insisted, contorting his body in unnatural ways to refill his glasses without needing to put them down first.
This was what Reeve wanted; in times of mad kings and crazed tyrants the court jester was the only man who was allowed to speak the truth, and thus the only man who a dangerous truth could be spoken to.
"Reno, this isn't going to work." Reeve sighed.
"Not if you're taking that long to empty a single glass. Come on Mr. Tuesti, there's no 'I' in 'Team' but there is a 'U' and an 'R' in 'drunk', so who are we to second guess the wisdom of the ancients?" Reno encouraged him.
Reeve pounded down his second glass of the expensive liquor and gazed out at the flickering lights of Midgar.
"We're all stuck in a rut, doing the exact same thing we've been doing ever since the Wutain War ended. Heidegger wants a new war to fight, so his heavy handed action's create more support for Avalanche than they suppress, Scarlet creates some new slightly bigger gun, Hojo still thinks Sephiroth is all that matters, Palmer … still attends meetings…. all while I bail water 'out' of an already sunk ship.
Shinra Electric Power Company is a lumbering dinosaur that has outgrown all its natural predators and is now lazily using its massive bulk to crush anything it doesn't like. Well we all know how that ended though, don't we? One day we're gonna look up and see a gigantic meteor headed straight for us… and all the money we've made won't make one damn lick of difference." Reeve sighed.
"I've heard worse reasons to drink, here's to the meteor, a swift and painless death is still better than some people get!" Reno vowed in a voice which was far too cheerful for Reeve's liking.
Not that it kept Reeve from clinking glasses with the most intelligent man in all of Shinra HQ, because the two of them were the only ones smart enough to realize what completely hopeless idiots they actually were.
XXX XXX XXX
Somewhere in the Lifestream a black glove twitched.
[End Chapter One.]
AN: My portrayal of Reeve is based on the exact same principle that was used to portray Police Commissioner Gordon in the recent Harley Quinn animated series (and to a lesser degree Michael Bluth of Arrested Development), exploring the psychological impact of a character being the only sane and rational person in their workplace, and how that would inevitably drive them just as crazy as everyone else they have to interact with, but in a distinctly different way.
My portrayal of Reno is the more or less fairly standard comic exaggeration of the source material.
My portrayal of Kadaj is…. going to go in some interesting directions.
Also to be clear, the "logical" head-cannon reason for why in the remake the Turks are seen meeting in the "General Affairs Auditing Department" is because the Turks have several different possible meeting rooms set up throughout Shinra HQ, all of which has painfully mundane titles, and then they more or less randomly rotate which one they are actually meeting in as a security precaution.
However since Final Fantasy VII is a cyberpunk dystopia we must be honest with ourselves and face the possibility that Shinra really has become so bloated and profitable that no one cares that on those days when Tseng calls in sick (or is recovering from bullet/sword wounds) Reno is in charge of the auditing department for a company that probably accounts for roughly 60% of the entire Planet's GDP.
If you're interested how this story lines up with the timeline, well according to the current FFVII timeline, the game starts on December 9th so this third quarter review meeting is happening a little later than normal, you got me.
Finally I'd like take a moment and thank The_Story_Maker whose own awesome and dramatic Aerith/Sephiroth piece "Epiphany" helped finally inspire me to write FFVII fiction again, and Fenrir4Life who not only helped edit this story but also gave a few (make that a lot of) suggestions.