raspberryturk | Room 429, Monday Evening

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Room 429, Monday Evening

Reno was going to sit on his bed and eye his cellphone. Dojima was right, really. If he couldn't understand the concept of giving people time, he should at least call Rude and tell him that he wasn't five anymore, and all reports for the time being would be typed up in a semi-sane manner.

And that would be why he was eying his phone.

He wasn't, however, reaching for it.

It was just fine where it was sitting. He could call Rude up any time, take the heat for getting him in crap with Tseng or whatever, and maybe he'd have things sorted out a little better by then. There were, after all, a lot of things to sort through.

Yeah. Yeah, he didn't have to pick up the phone after all. Save Rude the trouble. The big guy would appreciate it later.

[ooc: The door is open a crack, and the post is totally open for invasion from random persons. Oooooo.]

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"Oh, that's much better," she chirped. "I'm glad you're also a sociopath who enjoys mass killing."

"That isn't it!" His hands were going to stay in his pockets, because if they left, she would see them shaking, and no, no, there was no way he was going to let her see him lose it, here. Wasn't going to happen. Last time she caught him losing it was the time that started all of this. "They weren't Al Bhed, Rikku! It wasn't about Yevon or the Guado or whatever. They took everything, dammit! AVALANCHE took fucking everything and were going to take more and-"

He choked on it. Shook his head. When he spoke next, the fight was gone all over again.

"Wasn't just about the fact that they only left three of us. But that's most of it. Not the same. You're right."

Three of them left. Rikku stared for a few seconds, wrapping her head around what he was suggesting.

"The Turks," she breathed. "The ones that ... never came home. They did that?"

There had been more of them once, this group of his, and then something terrible happened to most of them, and she was resisting the urge to reach out to him.

"We ... shouldn't be arguing here," she said quickly. "The hallway. This has to be ... you know."

He nodded. He could do that, could manage a nod. Toward the door. Into his room? Closed doors. This was a good conversation for behind closed doors. Yelling about it all in the hallways...

Not so good.

Closed doors, please?

Words weren't so terribly cooperative at the moment, so he hoped that the nod would get the point across, there.

Rikku nodded, and then seeing him suddenly ... fragile, almost hesitant, she reached forward and opened the door herself.

"C'mon," she said softly, stepping through and holding it open. "Not out there, zoto."

Another breath, and another nod, and a couple of steps, and look at that, he was inside his room, standing inside and taking another breath, reaching for the door to close it behind them.

Presto. Closed door.

"Yeah. So."

Now that the hallway was on the other side of the door, he really had no idea what he was supposed to say.

Rikku took a deep breath. "That doesn't ... I mean, you can't ..."

Exhale. Think. Try to. Do not hug him. Still a mass-murderer. Okay, then.

"Sit," she said, nodding to his bed. She seated herself cross-legged on the floor. "Talk."

"Right." He made his way across the room, took a seat on the edge of his bed, and took a breath. "It's... a long story. Probably won't make me look any better when I'm done, or whatever. Wouldn't be tellin' it just to improve my image, yo. It'd be... Maybe you'd know where my brain was, is all. You sure you wanna hear this?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "Are you sure you want to tell it? It's not gonna ..."

Rikku bit her lip. "There's no ... 'oh, hey, that's why you did it.' I'm not gonna suddenly ..."

"I know. Wouldn't want you to. But... I dunno." He gave a small nod and took a breath. "Used to be an okay job. I mean, the stuff we did was never clean, but we never thought it'd get as bad as it did. We got a new kid one day, and it was that first-run of Sector Eight thing that the Turks do as a first assignment. Anyhow, this kid gets in shit with this terrorist group we ain't never heard of. They just crawled outta the freakin' woodwork and tried to blow up Midgar. We stopped 'em, but it kept gettin' worse from there."

He shrugged his shoulders, looking at the floor somewhere by her feet.

"They blew up reactors all over the place, brainwashed SOLDIERs and turned 'em against us. It's like everything that went wrong, there they were, for years on freakin' end. Turns out they were tryin' to save the planet, stop ShinRa from usin' the Mako from the Lifestream for electricity or whatever. They were gonna call this freakin' summon whose sole purpose was to kill all life on the planet's face. Just, hey, huge-ass summon, everyone dies, world is saved."

He took a breath. Okay. The rest was.

He didn't want to get to the rest. The rest sucked.

Edited 2008-04-08 04:08 (UTC)

If all life were to end in Spira, all suffering would end. Don't you see?

Rikku shook her head. "People like that are crazy," she said. "They'll save the world by destroying it. You can't argue with them. You just have to take them out, as quickly as possible."

And hope they stayed dead. That bit, they had failed at.

"We tried. One of us came up with this idea, get to the summon before they did. Call the thing- just a part of it. Not at full strength or whatever, I dunno how that works. Fight through it and the AVALANCHE psychos and save the world." He lifted a shoulder in a bit of a shrug. "Tseng, Rude, and I were off takin' care of somethin' else. ShinRa was tryin' to kill the whole freakin' lot of us for goin' against orders, and when it was all over with, the only ones who came back were me, Tseng, and Rude. No word from the others, nothin'. Just gone, zoto. We hoped maybe AVALANCHE was gone with 'em, at least."

Rikku hugged her knees, watching him carefully.

"You went against orders?" she asked softly. "In ... doing the Summon-thing? Did they succeed? Did you ever even ..."

All of them, gone, and Shinra after them?

He didn't take his eyes from that place on the floor.

"The boss at the time, Verdot, tried to leave the Turks. Wanted to be with his daughter. There... there ain't no leavin' the Turks. We all said no. That's why President Shinra wanted us dead. Whole freakin' group of us just became his biggest liability. So, Rude and Tseng and me, we weren't with the rest of the Turks because we were helping Verdot fake his own death. Like hell we were gonna kill our boss. He was the only thing that kept us from dyin' all those years he was in charge of the Turks."

He swallowed and then licked his lips. They were getting dry. "So our names got cleared, and the others just... never came back. World didn't end. There were three of us left to appreciate that, zoto."

"He couldn't ... leave?" Rikku stared. "I mean, not even the boss? He ... your president just ..."

The entire group!?

"But they were ..." She swallowed past a lump. "Your family."

Reno glanced up at that, to look her in the eyes as he nodded.

Damn, was he tired.

His eyes drifted back to the floor and he shrugged his shoudlers.

"Things weren't even quiet for long, zoto. Not long after, AVALANCHE is at it again. So they all died for nothin'. Great news. They attack the Number 1 and Number 5 reactors, and that leaves all of ShinRa freakin' out. The Turks didn't get 'em. Leaves us freakin' out. We ... They didn't..."

He swallowed.

"Somehow, the President gets a lead, they're in Sector Seven."

"How does he know?" she asked gently. "Were people ... hurt, when the reactors went? Why do that? That's ..."

"That doesn't make it okay," she said, her voice strained.

"When a reactor goes, it's not just a little spark and everything's good," Reno mumbled. "Whole thing goes down, and everyone in it. And that ain't an excuse, I know. Was just so..."

Reno took a breath and shrugged again.

"ShinRa had an informant in the slums. Don Corneo, but he was a pervert and a liability and I dunno how they got him to talk, but he did. Squealed like a freakin' pig, so AVALANCHE knew we were comin' for 'em. There wasn't time to weed 'em out, we lose 'em again and we might lose 'em forever, and the next time we see 'em, it could be Tseng I lose, or Rude, and I was so fuckin' tired of all of it... Boss said 'drop it.' And if droppin' it could have ended it... I mean, shit, chances were I woulda been caught under, too, but.. worth it, or not. But it was our one chance to get 'em."

"No, it wasn't," she said, slamming her hand down on the carpet. "Your one chance? Your only chance!? If you didn't drop the plate they were going to run away and never come back? Wouldn't that have been good, anyway, if they did run away and never come back? What about setting traps in the reactors, for the next time they hit? What about taking that army you said Shinra had and hunting through sector seven with guns? What about marching into sector seven and saying you'll drop the plate unless they cough up members of Avalanche? What about any number of things that are bad ideas but still better than dropping the plate!?"

"It took damn near all of us to get to that point," Reno replied, and now he was going to raise his voice, because suddenly her yelling made him want to yell and nothing made sense anymore. "They were all dead, Rikku! Dead, and there were so many more of them and I'm not strong enough! I can't call out SOLDIER, that's up to that President who wanted us all dead in the first place, and I can't fuckin' fight them, I can't do it! And for all the plans you just threw at me, you think I could'a come up with any one of 'em? You think I could'a got my shit together enough to say, 'you know what, I got a better idea?' Let 'em go, all the better for us? Okay, great, but what if they ran away and we couldn't find 'em again, and the next thing you know, we got Zirconiade out and about again, tryin' to destroy everything again and we can't handle that, and there were traps in the fuckin' reactors! And every attempt to go after them with guns meant someone else died, and nobody in the freakin' slums would've been any help and I can't think of these things!"

He had a hand to his forehead, now, and his eyes were shut tightly, and he couldn't breathe.

"I don't think. I don't think. I'm just. I don't know. I can't think."

"Someone could have told him!" Rikku said. Yelling was awful and twisting her stomach into knots but it felt better than pretending she was okay with this, okay with -- "You killed them! That's not okay! Just because it would have been hard to do it the other way, that doesn't make it right! Go get Avalanche, they killed your family, fine! Bomb them and don't look back! But you took out how many people to get them!? You don't get to say, well, shit happens. The Guado, they were looking for one fucking person and they killed all my friends! Because it doesn't matter! Just the Al Bhed and just the slums and you did that, so you don't get to just pretend it didn't happen, now!"

"What am I supposed to do to make it better, Rikku?" He was quiet again, and his eyes were on the floor again, and there weren't tears stinging at his eyes. He was imagining those. "I can't lift the plate and wave people out from under it. I can't find your home and bring it back. I don't get to pretend it didn't happen. So what am I supposed to do? Because I got no fuckin' clue."

"I don't know, either," she said sharply. "But saying it wasn't your fault, it was your only choice? That's bullshit, and you know it. I get that you wanted to take Avalanche down. If someone hurt Yunie, I'd rip their arms off. But that doesn't make what you did okay. I don't have a magic button to make it okay, either. To go, here, it didn't happen, and now I won't see that any more and we can ..."

Be together again. Great. Like that didn't sound childish, right about now.

"Wasn't my only choice. Was just the only one I could see at the time." He caught the slip. He had a feeling that she wouldn't want him to press the subject. "And I'm gonna own that choice, because... it's all that I can see right now that I can do. I dunno, zoto. Been hidin' from it since it happened. And that doesn't work, either."

"Of course not," she said. "You really thought you could just drink that one off?"

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