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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"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?"

Maybe if he just grabbed at his face and pulled it off, then his eyes would stop burning and he'd be able to breathe again. Maybe. But then he wouldn't have a face. And. That would be stupid. Because faces were important.

Yeah.

"Knew I couldn't drink it away. Just... Maybe I could've stopped feelin', and that didn't work, so if I drank harder, I could feel less, or just stop movin' and then I could breathe, or it'd be gone for the night and it never was, never is. 'S always right there. And. I. Can't. Can't..."

He wasn't sure which part of that had made it impossible to choke back that pit in his chest, but he had to take a moment to not speak at all, or else he was going to crack, and cracking didn't work, crying didn't help. It hurt. It hurt so damn much, and letting himself hurt for it was selfish and stupid and wouldn't change anything and...

She watched for a long moment, so many emotions all tangled together. Making her head spin. Smashing her into little bits.

She stood up, carefully, still considering all of it. She wasn't okay with this. She wasn't.

She sat down next to him, on the bed, and placed one hand on his back.

He was going to be fine. He was going to pull it together and they could continue talking or arguing or whatever the hell it was that they were doing, and it would be okay, because he wasn't going to have a fucking breakdown there on his bed.

Except then her hand was on his back and he couldn't breathe all over again and it felt like his eyes were on fire and the only way to breathe was to cry.

Her heart was breaking; she should know that feeling by now. Like an old familiar friend.

She slipped her other arm around him and pressed her face against the back of his jacket.

She couldn't say "it's okay." It wasn't. It might never be.

But she could sit here, just for now, while it wasn't.

It took a while, a few minutes of forever, for him to catch his breath again and stop shaking, for him to pull himself together enough that he wasn't choking on his own breath and getting snot on his sleeves and for him to stop feeling like an idiot for breaking down at all.

And part of him wanted to keep crying, because maybe if he didn't stop crying, she might stay there.

But he wasn't crying, now, he was breathing, and everything had turned into a pressure inside of his head and made all of it a little more numb, and if he didn't say anything while he sat there and breathed, maybe she wouldn't go, anyhow.

It didn't make sense, but when did sense have anything to do with any of it?

She sat there, calmly, waiting. The choking sobs faded, and all that was left was Reno, breathing deeply. But no less wrapped in his own pain and guilt and whatever else was swimming through his brain.

She couldn't figure out what to say first.

"You didn't ... grow up there, did you?" she asked, her arms still around him. "Sector seven."

He grew up under the plate. He'd said so himself.

He gave his head a little shake, no, and he took another breath, and words would be joining them shortly. Another breath.

"Nah. Not under Seven, zoto. Been there enough, I guess. I mean, before the Turks. You do a lot of runnin' around, down there, just to find what you gotta have to get by. I mean, it's all the same crap, just with different names and buildings. Kinda runs together. You live under one, you live under 'em all. They all got the same scum tryin' to pick you up or mug you for money for food or drugs-"

Deep breath.

"Don't really matter which sector I was from. It was all 'down there.'"

Slums kid. She didn't remember much from her weekend as a three-year-old, but even her hyperactive dim self had noticed there was something strange. He guarded food like someone was going to snatch it away from him.

"Is that why you joined the Turks?" she asked. "It wasn't down there."

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