raspberryturk | Edge, Friday Afternoon

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Edge, Friday Afternoon

Distress calls from Rookies, left, right, and center. That was what Reno came home to, after over a week without phone reception out in the wastes. And now it was the countdown, before one Rookie would get here, with Ifrit only knew what kind of trauma fresh in her head.

Pick up the phone. Dial numbers. He had well over an hour, between the time Ino's portal would arrive to pick her up, and the time it would actually make it into Edge, after all.

"The boss sends me on one mission in the middle of nowhere, Mako, an' the whole universe goes to Hell without me, zoto."

[NFB for distance, as usual. Open for anyone who needs a Reno call or who wants to give one, all calls will sit chronologically before a certain Ninja visitor, yo.]

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Elena was in her room. Needed to go out drinking. The drinking didn't help as much as it should.

When the phone rang, she scooped it up without even looking at the number.

"Yeah?"

That was almost hello.

That was about as close to a hello as Reno had been expecting, really.

"Rookie." That was almost hello, too. "Got your message, yo."

Elena ran a hand through her hair, sitting up straighter without consciously realizing it.

"My message was painfully short on details," she said. "I should have clarified. I'm fine. I didn't mean to upset anyone."

Reporting in. She barely kept herself from calling him sir.

... Reno would probably piss himself laughing if she tried that.

Reno would laugh so hard he'd forget to breathe if she tried that, yes.

"You're fine, huh?" A beat. "You always sound this professional when a former co-worker calls you on the phone to see how you're doin' then?"

"I'm ..."

Damn. He had her, there.

"I thought you were calling in a semi-official capacity," she lied. "And I think I got you in trouble with Tseng. Unintentionally. Again. So if you want to bitch me out for that, you have the right."

"Tseng can go fuck himself. If I'm in shit for not knowin' somethin', he should stop sendin' me to the wastes for weeks on end, yo."

Because having no connection to the outside world made getting a hold of current events into a bit of a challenge.

"What happened, Rookie?"

"Nothing," she said, shaking her head. "It was just a fucked-up bout of narcolepsy with some mystical dimensional weirdness going on. Body stays here, mind goes over there. Got to play in a little wasteland that makes Edge look like Costa del Sol. Got my ass kicked for being stupid. Deposited back home, without a scratch to show for it. My counterpart wasn't half so lucky. That'll teach civilians to recruit blindly."

That was ... certainly coherent, right there.

Oooookay then.

Reno exhaled a breath he'd been holding. Okay. Elena was fine. Some other Elena, not so much. But that other Elena wasn't his Elena, and so he had no reason to be upset over that. People died. Fact of life.

"How you been holdin' up since?"

There was a pause, while Elena tried to lie to herself. Or him. Maybe both.

"Not so great," she said. "I try not to sleep. When I do, I see that fucking place again. I drink, and it doesn't help. I was supposed to help them. Instead, I got her killed. What kind of fucking Turk am I?"

"The kind who's still breathin'," Reno replied, cooly. "That's the best kind. It don't matter who goes down just so long as you don't. That's the job."

It was... cold. Clinical. Maybe a little too much so.

But that was what it was to be a Turk, right there.

"She was a Turk, too," Elena said. "That's what's driving me crazy. We see bad shit all the time. I've had my ass kicked plenty of times before. But my mistake means she's dead, and I'm back here safe and sound like nothing happened. She's the one paying for it."

Welcome to my life, Rookie.

"Maybe after all she went through over there, she earned the vacation time, zoto. Severance package from the Turks sucks, sure, but I hear you get some pretty wicked rest when you retire."

And now he'd slipped right into the black humor portion of the conversation, yes.

He sighed.

"What if it was the other way around? What if it was you, there, in whatever fresh hell you got sent to, an' she crossed over an you wound up dead for it?"

She had to take a few seconds to consider that. Her, struggling in that nightmare world; some other Elena called in for rescue duty.

"I don't know," she said honestly. "I'd either be pissed as hell that some moron took the wheel and drove us into a tree, or ... resigned, I guess. Like I'd figure it must have been my time, one way or the other. Maybe a little of both. Maybe the Lifestream makes you too Zen to give a fuck."

It was a fairly effective retirement package. No worries about being called back into active duty, or hunted down like a dog.

"I wouldn't know," Reno noted. "Came damn close to findin' out, way too many times. Early retirement is just another workplace hazard with the Turks. You come to accept that, too."

It kind of sucked when you finally came around to accepting it as fact. But there it was. You join the Turks, you croak way too soon.

"That's the second time now," she noted, idly. "Where I closed my eyes and thought for sure that that was it. Not just, 'the mission's gone bad, I wonder if we're gonna get out of this alive,' but -- fade to black, and when the world comes back into focus, you're confused that it's still there."

She didn't have to tell him when the first time had been. Or ask if he knew what she meant. They were Turks. They'd all walked that line one time or another.

Edited 2009-08-08 00:01 (UTC)

"You don't get used to that part," Reno noted, sighing a little.

Wow. The rookie was having a rough time of it.

"You need anything?"

Elena shook her head. "No, I'm okay."

She had all of her limbs; that qualified as okay. Close enough, all things considered.

Well, maybe not entirely.

"Any advice?" she asked, uncertainly. "For when the liquor doesn't help and sex doesn't seem inviting, either?"

Those were her two favorite distractions, and they were failing her.

"Forgive yourself."

Coming from the guy who had brought down Sector Seven, that was the best advice he could possibly come up with. Liquor and sex hadn't done any good for that one.

"Make up for it."

Elena smiled, softly.

"We're jumping straight to the advanced classes, huh?"

Forgive herself. Make up for it.

Take in the sky.

"Here's where I'd be sendin' you to Caritas on a Wednesday night, but my favorite bartender ain't workin' there no more," Reno mused. "She was a damn good teacher, when it came to that kinda thing."

He craned his head back, thinking it over.

"It hurts. So keep goin'. You think you can't last ten minutes like that, last five. Or one."

"Have you managed it?" she asked. "Forgiving yourself, making up for it?"

There wasn't much of a road-map to go with that. But if you needed someone to hold your hand and walk you through it, then you weren't really doing it yourself anyway.

"I can't never make up for what I did," Reno replied.

You just don't atone for mass-murder.

"But I think I'm breathin' easier right now, knowin' that I'm tryin'. It's too damn easy to get caught up in runnin' in one place, feelin' sorry for yourself. I been there, too."

"No feeling sorry for myself," she said as if she was taking down notes. She was tempted, for that matter. "I've been working on my tan. I'm not sure if that counts as making up for anything, though."

Sorry, Reno just had to chuckle a little, at that.

"There's gotta be somethin' around there you can busy yourself with, yo. I'm pretty sure tannin' don't cut it." He leaned his head back, thinking on it. "Fandom's got them reserves groups. Three of 'em now, ain't it? Could keep busy with that. Or send me seeds an' dirt. I got everyone else sendin' that stuff, too, but you can't have too much dirt in a place like Edge."

Here was where he was sadly tempted to start rambling about agriculture. What the hell, the end of the world had turned him into a farmer.

"Dirt from other places don't need Lifestream to make plants grow. Or maybe it's the plants from other places that don't need Lifestream to grow in the dirt. How frickin' kickass is that?"

Reno needed a straw hat and coveralls.

"You want dirt?" Elena laughed. "I've been sending booze and porn. I didn't think to make it a trifecta with dirt. What kind of plants? Anything edible?"

She stretched out on her bed, watching the ceiling. "I stopped by the reserves-group," she said. "I don't know. I think I've had enough of the military to last me a lifetime. I don't want to go back to drills and salutes."

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