Reno of the Turks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
raspberryturk) wrote2008-12-18 03:20 am
raspberryturk) wrote2008-12-18 03:20 am
Entry tags:
Room 429, Late, Late Wednesday Night
With the window cracked open slightly to let the tobacco smoke drift outside, it felt almost suspiciously like a winter in Midgar, under the plate. Or, at least, the chill did, seeping into the room in little wisps and breezes, prompting Reno to actually close his shirt the entire way, for once. The freshness in the cool air was still strange to him, even though he'd arrived on the island nearly a year ago. Some things just never felt natural, not when you'd lived without them your entire life.
It had to be getting cold again by now, back in Edge. People who'd lived their own lives through in cozy, heated homes would be starting to brace themselves for the long haul, spending their winters the way the less fortunate used to, back when being from the plate or being from the slums actually meant something.
Now, it was all just words, mashed together and torn apart and stuffed into makeshift housing built out of the ruins on the edge of a dead city. The water wasn't clean, the sky was never blue, and nothing grew in the dirt.
The last length of ash fell from his forgotten cigarette onto the windowsill, and with a sigh, Reno made his way over to his bed. He'd be lying if he said he didn't feel responsible for the state things were in back home. He'd be lying if he said he didn't feel somehow as though he was running away, just by remaining here on the island while there was still cleanup work to be done back on Gaia.
Which was why he went through great pains to not say anything about how he felt at all.
But sometimes... Sometimes he had to wonder, would a life without that guilt on his shoulders be better for everyone? No Turks. No Turks meant no Sector Seven, no blood on his hands. They made him who he was, but there were moments when he despised that person. Moments when he mourned just as much for the kid he used to be as he did for the thousands of lives that he'd stolen away.
He shut his eyes, falling backward onto the bed, letting the familiarity in the chill of the December air lull him to sleep. He'd succumb to the dreams, tonight. Maybe the screams would ease off some if he kept the window open.
As far back as he could remember, he'd fought with those drafts. There were always cracks in the walls, doors that refused to sit properly on their hinges, gaping holes in the roof which would have been a problem were it not for the giant steel pizza-pan overhead; the Midgar plates. Sure, the upper half of Midgar kept out the rain and the snow, but that just meant the kid had to pretend he knew what either looked like. He'd imagine them now and again, remembering pictures in discarded magazines, images in newspaper insulation, peering through the cracks in the walls. The rain, he knew, was wet. Water droplets. Easy.
It was always the snow that he'd had problems picturing. The photographs always showed huge white fields, so bright that they threatened to blind. And it fell from the sky, in flakes of some sort. Like dust, he would think.
He knew dust, well enough. There had never been any shortage of that in the slums, either.
But how it fell always managed to trip him up.
From the sky, they'd tell him. And he'd nod, pretending those words meant something to him. Pretending they made perfect sense.
The boy had never seen the sky.
It was one of those days, again. The sort where the only way to ignore the cold drafts of winter was to grab whatever clothing would fit, layer up, and just leave the house to take the brunt of it. It was easier to pretend your fingers weren't numb with the chill when your nose and toes were well on their way to catching up, after all.
Today was a quieter day than usual in the slums of Sector Five. Topside, the kid had heard, there was a yearly celebration going on. Topside, there were lights, and there was snow, and there was, of all things, a tree. It was something that the ShinRa company did each year for those living above. Give the people living in the upper-city some green, give them some happy music, give them some lights, and maybe the production in the mako reactors would go up. Maybe the ShinRa employees, lucky, plate-dwelling bastards that they were, would forget for a little while that they were living in a city of steel and glass, and even though they got the sky, they would forget that they never did get to see the sun.
He envied them all for that sky and for that tree. Envied them and hated them.
That was why, when the young Wutai man in the black suit came up to him that day, proper and tidy, with his polished shoes and his slicked-back black hair, and he offered the kid a job working for the ShinRa company taking orders and doing jobs for the President himself, the boy had found himself with a difficult decision set before him. He wanted to see that sky. Wanted to see the tree in the snow, with all the fancy little blinking lights. And this man was offering to show it to him. He wanted to be able to buy his own food. Wanted to be able to sit in his room with the window wide-fucking-open and the heat set to high so he didn't feel so much as a chill, even in the middle of winter.
But he hated ShinRa.
He spat right in that man's face. I ain't some kinda gods-damned charity case, yoto. Go back to lickin' your president's boots. I don't need you.
It had been the most difficult winter yet. ShinRa's war against Wutai meant that food and supplies were constantly being rerouted to the troops who were away from home, and the slums got the short end of the stick more often than not. There wasn't exactly a plethora of options when it came to being a street kid trying to scratch out a life for himself under the plate. The boy had fallen in with a gang of hungry little punk kids like himself. Stealing enough food and gil to get by was easier when there were other kids to take the fall with you, after all. And when they got older, it wasn't just gil and food they would steal.
By the time he had outgrown the ragged band of slum brats, he was up to his armpits in the drug trade, making and selling just enough to keep himself fed, but keeping his head down. The bigger names down on the underside, the dealers and the Dons, would always take it so fucking personally when they learned there was some punk kid invading on their turf, taking their customers away from them. The kid had no desire to feel a bullet between his eyes just because he was the one with the superior product on the street. Sell enough to get fed, never enough to get rich. That was the trick to it. That right there was the secret to staying alive in the slums.
By the time he was fourteen, his desire for just one more hit outweighed his desire to keep himself fed on a regular basis.
By the time he was fifteen, he didn't know his own face when he looked in a mirror.
And then everything had gone to hell. Some terrorist group called AVALANCHE had been antagonizing ShinRa, blowing up reactors and taking out the citizens. But that didn't matter to the boy. ShinRa's problems weren't his. He'd sit back and laugh at them, lost in the haze and the high and the knowledge that he'd avoided that bullshit years ago, when the man in the black suit had come to talk to him. The worse things got topside, the more he'd laugh. Let the terrorists come, he'd reason, it isn't like anything that happens up there affects us down here. I'd spit in his face again, if he came a second time.
The screaming woke him up, one night. He could hear the twisting of metal from his makeshift bed in Sector Five. The floor shook and the ceiling cracked and he damn near had a heart attack. He didn't even know what it was until he tried to hit up one of his favorite drinking joints later that night. He wouldn't be going to the Seventh Heaven bar that night. Sector Seven was gone.
Meteor had been worse. He never even got to see the giant rock in the sky that everyone kept talking about, speaking in hushed whispers as though it would come down on top of them the very moment somebody spoke loud enough for it to hear. He'd look up, and he'd see the same thing he had seen every day of his life when he looked up. He'd see the bottom of the plate, with a huge chunk sheared away just two sectors over that let him see the bottoms of the buildings above.
But never any sky. Never any giant rock. He wasn't all that interested, anyhow.
He really didn't know what hit him until Midgar itself came down, and the lifestream had come up out of the friggin' ground. While everything fell down around him, his entire body felt like it was on fire, being torn apart, and he looked at his hands to see black pus creeping through his skin, and it filled his eyes, his mouth, his brain--
Reno shot awake in his bed, the chill from the window hitting him square in the face, shockingly cold at the beads of sweat on his brow.
He was shivering.
There was a chittering sound and a rattling across the room, and Reno made his way out of his bed, pulling the window shut in one hard, desperate motion, before walking over to scoop the ferret out of his cage. And then, Mako cradled snugly under one arm, he made his way up to the roof.
It was easier to ignore the staggering chill on his face when he was cold all over, after all.
He stood there, for what must have been a solid hour, before pulling out his PHS, taking a deep breath, and dialing Tseng.
It rang. It rang again. And before it could ring a third time, a somewhat tired, stiff sounding voice on the other end answered. It was the middle of the night. It had better be good, Reno.
"Yo, Tseng. I... don't think I ever did thank you. For givin' me the sky."
[Just taking advantage of the Wonderful Life random event with one of my own, here. Establishy goodness is good and establishy, yo. But OOC is awesome. Because it is. La!]
It had to be getting cold again by now, back in Edge. People who'd lived their own lives through in cozy, heated homes would be starting to brace themselves for the long haul, spending their winters the way the less fortunate used to, back when being from the plate or being from the slums actually meant something.
Now, it was all just words, mashed together and torn apart and stuffed into makeshift housing built out of the ruins on the edge of a dead city. The water wasn't clean, the sky was never blue, and nothing grew in the dirt.
The last length of ash fell from his forgotten cigarette onto the windowsill, and with a sigh, Reno made his way over to his bed. He'd be lying if he said he didn't feel responsible for the state things were in back home. He'd be lying if he said he didn't feel somehow as though he was running away, just by remaining here on the island while there was still cleanup work to be done back on Gaia.
Which was why he went through great pains to not say anything about how he felt at all.
But sometimes... Sometimes he had to wonder, would a life without that guilt on his shoulders be better for everyone? No Turks. No Turks meant no Sector Seven, no blood on his hands. They made him who he was, but there were moments when he despised that person. Moments when he mourned just as much for the kid he used to be as he did for the thousands of lives that he'd stolen away.
He shut his eyes, falling backward onto the bed, letting the familiarity in the chill of the December air lull him to sleep. He'd succumb to the dreams, tonight. Maybe the screams would ease off some if he kept the window open.
As far back as he could remember, he'd fought with those drafts. There were always cracks in the walls, doors that refused to sit properly on their hinges, gaping holes in the roof which would have been a problem were it not for the giant steel pizza-pan overhead; the Midgar plates. Sure, the upper half of Midgar kept out the rain and the snow, but that just meant the kid had to pretend he knew what either looked like. He'd imagine them now and again, remembering pictures in discarded magazines, images in newspaper insulation, peering through the cracks in the walls. The rain, he knew, was wet. Water droplets. Easy.
It was always the snow that he'd had problems picturing. The photographs always showed huge white fields, so bright that they threatened to blind. And it fell from the sky, in flakes of some sort. Like dust, he would think.
He knew dust, well enough. There had never been any shortage of that in the slums, either.
But how it fell always managed to trip him up.
From the sky, they'd tell him. And he'd nod, pretending those words meant something to him. Pretending they made perfect sense.
The boy had never seen the sky.
It was one of those days, again. The sort where the only way to ignore the cold drafts of winter was to grab whatever clothing would fit, layer up, and just leave the house to take the brunt of it. It was easier to pretend your fingers weren't numb with the chill when your nose and toes were well on their way to catching up, after all.
Today was a quieter day than usual in the slums of Sector Five. Topside, the kid had heard, there was a yearly celebration going on. Topside, there were lights, and there was snow, and there was, of all things, a tree. It was something that the ShinRa company did each year for those living above. Give the people living in the upper-city some green, give them some happy music, give them some lights, and maybe the production in the mako reactors would go up. Maybe the ShinRa employees, lucky, plate-dwelling bastards that they were, would forget for a little while that they were living in a city of steel and glass, and even though they got the sky, they would forget that they never did get to see the sun.
He envied them all for that sky and for that tree. Envied them and hated them.
That was why, when the young Wutai man in the black suit came up to him that day, proper and tidy, with his polished shoes and his slicked-back black hair, and he offered the kid a job working for the ShinRa company taking orders and doing jobs for the President himself, the boy had found himself with a difficult decision set before him. He wanted to see that sky. Wanted to see the tree in the snow, with all the fancy little blinking lights. And this man was offering to show it to him. He wanted to be able to buy his own food. Wanted to be able to sit in his room with the window wide-fucking-open and the heat set to high so he didn't feel so much as a chill, even in the middle of winter.
But he hated ShinRa.
He spat right in that man's face. I ain't some kinda gods-damned charity case, yoto. Go back to lickin' your president's boots. I don't need you.
It had been the most difficult winter yet. ShinRa's war against Wutai meant that food and supplies were constantly being rerouted to the troops who were away from home, and the slums got the short end of the stick more often than not. There wasn't exactly a plethora of options when it came to being a street kid trying to scratch out a life for himself under the plate. The boy had fallen in with a gang of hungry little punk kids like himself. Stealing enough food and gil to get by was easier when there were other kids to take the fall with you, after all. And when they got older, it wasn't just gil and food they would steal.
By the time he had outgrown the ragged band of slum brats, he was up to his armpits in the drug trade, making and selling just enough to keep himself fed, but keeping his head down. The bigger names down on the underside, the dealers and the Dons, would always take it so fucking personally when they learned there was some punk kid invading on their turf, taking their customers away from them. The kid had no desire to feel a bullet between his eyes just because he was the one with the superior product on the street. Sell enough to get fed, never enough to get rich. That was the trick to it. That right there was the secret to staying alive in the slums.
By the time he was fourteen, his desire for just one more hit outweighed his desire to keep himself fed on a regular basis.
By the time he was fifteen, he didn't know his own face when he looked in a mirror.
And then everything had gone to hell. Some terrorist group called AVALANCHE had been antagonizing ShinRa, blowing up reactors and taking out the citizens. But that didn't matter to the boy. ShinRa's problems weren't his. He'd sit back and laugh at them, lost in the haze and the high and the knowledge that he'd avoided that bullshit years ago, when the man in the black suit had come to talk to him. The worse things got topside, the more he'd laugh. Let the terrorists come, he'd reason, it isn't like anything that happens up there affects us down here. I'd spit in his face again, if he came a second time.
The screaming woke him up, one night. He could hear the twisting of metal from his makeshift bed in Sector Five. The floor shook and the ceiling cracked and he damn near had a heart attack. He didn't even know what it was until he tried to hit up one of his favorite drinking joints later that night. He wouldn't be going to the Seventh Heaven bar that night. Sector Seven was gone.
Meteor had been worse. He never even got to see the giant rock in the sky that everyone kept talking about, speaking in hushed whispers as though it would come down on top of them the very moment somebody spoke loud enough for it to hear. He'd look up, and he'd see the same thing he had seen every day of his life when he looked up. He'd see the bottom of the plate, with a huge chunk sheared away just two sectors over that let him see the bottoms of the buildings above.
But never any sky. Never any giant rock. He wasn't all that interested, anyhow.
He really didn't know what hit him until Midgar itself came down, and the lifestream had come up out of the friggin' ground. While everything fell down around him, his entire body felt like it was on fire, being torn apart, and he looked at his hands to see black pus creeping through his skin, and it filled his eyes, his mouth, his brain--
Reno shot awake in his bed, the chill from the window hitting him square in the face, shockingly cold at the beads of sweat on his brow.
He was shivering.
There was a chittering sound and a rattling across the room, and Reno made his way out of his bed, pulling the window shut in one hard, desperate motion, before walking over to scoop the ferret out of his cage. And then, Mako cradled snugly under one arm, he made his way up to the roof.
It was easier to ignore the staggering chill on his face when he was cold all over, after all.
He stood there, for what must have been a solid hour, before pulling out his PHS, taking a deep breath, and dialing Tseng.
It rang. It rang again. And before it could ring a third time, a somewhat tired, stiff sounding voice on the other end answered. It was the middle of the night. It had better be good, Reno.
"Yo, Tseng. I... don't think I ever did thank you. For givin' me the sky."
[Just taking advantage of the Wonderful Life random event with one of my own, here. Establishy goodness is good and establishy, yo. But OOC is awesome. Because it is. La!]