raspberryturk | MHA #1, Monday Afternoon

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MHA #1, Monday Afternoon

After a certain conversation after class today, Reno had hurried home, a frown on his lips and a million haphazard thoughts ricocheting around inside his skull that weren't amounting to much more than a whole lot of "Oh, crap."

Things were going to need re-thinking. Lots and lots of serious re-thinking. Now they weren't just trying to steer fate, the Turks were trying to Do The Right Thing in the process.

Now, all Reno had to do was... well... inform the other Turk who had anything to do with this.

And that was why he was picking up his phone and dialing. Shit shit shit.

[Contents of phone call and conversation are NFB, that there was a phone call and that Elena came over for work things is totally cool, though. For the blonde Rookie! No, not that one. Or that one. Or that one. Or... that one, either. Dammit, she knows who she is.]

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Elena, for her part, was hanging out in her alcove and painting her toenails. A nice deep plum color. Then she was going to go to the beach, later, and work on her tan.

Okay, Elena didn't tan very much. Too many years under a plate. Stupid plate.

So she was really going to lay out and burn in ways that would clash with her plum toenail polish. The heck with it.

Oooh, Reno's ringtone!

"No, I will not lend you money for booze," she said cheerfully.

"Fortunately," Reno said, dryly, "I got a job, an' I'm more than capable of buyin' my own booze, yo."

He was. He was setting out the obligatory stash of rum for the squirrels that he'd promised in class for not reporting on his conversation with Ino at just that very moment.

"We got issues, zoto."

Shit. Reno sounded grouchy. She was going to blow on her toes to make them dry faster and try not to worry.

"Big ones?" she asked. "Is Tseng okay? And Rude?"

"Nah, they're fine, so far as I know," Reno said, aiming for dismissive and managing to reach a different level of grouchy entirely. "This is timeline shit."

Oh, shit, he knew about Rosalind. She should have expected it. Of course Rosalind would talk to him eventually. How could she not? And she'd been so careful with Zack, and not messing up the timeline, and now this. Her just throwing out information like it was confetti.

Rosalind was her fucking sister. He didn't get to tell her off for trying to save her sister.

She wished she believed that.

The long, awkward silence finally ended with a very, very forced, "......... Oh." And, when Elena realized that was probably insufficient, a hastily-added, "Oh, uh ... really?"

"Yeah, really," Reno sighed, setting out the last of his rum and closing the door behind him. "That ain't a huge surprise, is it? With so much goin' on around here, it was a matter of time before it came back to us, yo."

Shit, Elena was more upset about this Zack mess than he was.

"H-have you told Tseng?" she asked. She didn't know how else to interpret 'us.' Oh, no, she was going to get fired. "I didn't ... I didn't mean to ... I'm not going to say I'm sorry. I don't care. I'm not sorry."

Oh fucking hell she was probably fired. And going to get bitched out by all of them. Did she have to turn her suit in? What did she have if she wasn't a Turk? Fuck fucking fuck.

And there was where Reno's eyes widened a bit.

"I ain't told Tseng yet, no," he replied, first and foremost, to get that out of the way. "You're the one that spilled the beans? Shit, Elena, I knew you had a mouth on you back when, but-"

He bit his tongue, hard. Okay. Deep breath. In. Out. Don't yell at the Rookie.

"Can you come here so we can have this talk face to face?"

It was a shame that just dropping the phone into the ocean wouldn't make this phone call go away, or make Reno forget he knew anything, or make people not yell at her.

She couldn't. She absolutely couldn't. She ...

"Do I have to?" she asked, in a very small voice.

"Would I be tellin' you to come over if I didn't think you had to?"

So far as he was concerned, he had a point, here.

Seriously, she's the one who blabbed? Rookie.

Fucking hell. Called onto the carpet to be bitched out for being the blabbermouth Rookie. Just like old times.

She tried to say something, couldn't, and instead hung the phone up. Reno would understand. Or maybe he'd just be pissed. Did it matter?

Elena sat with her hands over her eyes for a long minute, trying to keep tears from coming. Sister: dead. Mom: dead. Job: gone.

Okay. Enough feeling sorry for herself. Elena ran a hand through her hair -- which was a mess -- and pulled shoes on -- thus ruining the plum-colored nail polish.

And then, to Reno's apartment, to get lectured and fired. He was right. This should happen face-to-face.

This was going to be bad. She could tell from the messy pile of empty rum bottles outside his door. It was a wonder that Reno hadn't been evicted. Tseng had threatened it a few times, when they lived on-site.

So this was Reno's door. Look at that, a door! She should stare at it and hope it would magically disappear.

No chance Reno wouldn't be home, was there? This was a very tentative knock.

Look, if she knocked softly and he didn't hear her, that wasn't her fault. Right?

Unfortunately for Elena, Reno had been hovering at that door, waiting for that knock, and had been about to start talking himself into hunting her down, but...

The door was open in an instant, and there was a very down-to-business redheaded Turk standing just inside.

"In. Now."

Elena nodded, swallowing past a lump in her throat. She walked past him and towards a particularly lived-in couch. She was going to keep her chin high and be cold and detached. She was --

"I'm n-not sorry."

Oh, fuck. She was going to start talking.

"I'm not. I know I shouldn't have but I didn't mean to. I didn't run up to her and tell her. I didn't want her to know. But she asked t-too many questions, like, 'when did you talk to me last?' and she saw right through all my excuses, no matter how hard I tried, because she's my sister and I know, I know we're Turks and the emotions aren't supposed to matter and the job comes first but she's my sister, Reno! That fucking means something and I can't just lie to her face! She called me a little idiot and kissed the top of my head and I lost it, I just started crying, fine, that's unprofessional, lecture me all you want, but she put it together and I couldn't throw her off. I tried. I made up some story about an ugly fight but she didn't buy it, and maybe I'm glad she didn't because fuck the Turks, Reno, she's my sister! She has a right to know! It was my f-fucking fault and she has a right to know and if you're going to fire me for that then you go right fucking ahead because I love her and I'm not sorry at all, even if I fucked the timeline and the whole world's going to end, because she's my sister and sh---"

This particularly passionate (and tearful) outburst was interrupted by a thump on the side of her knee. Which was, when she looked down, an orange-and-white cat, sitting on the couch, headbutting her leg.

She stared at it (him? her?) like she had never seen a cat before.

"When did you get a cat?"

And would said cat mind being scooped up? Head-butts were friendly greetings, and she could use a furball right about now.

"June," Reno replied, easily. Somewhere in the middle of Elena's outburst, he'd started to breathe again.

Thank Ramuh.

"An' that's all well an' good," he added a moment later, making certain that the door was closed and locked behind himself. "'Cause I was talkin' about Zack."

He rummaged around in his pocket for a moment, and dug out his cigarettes and lighter.

Oh, brother.

The cat of unspecified gender and name was now sniffing Elena's face. Friendly little thing. Amazing what a cat could do for your nerves.

"... What?" she asked, glancing up at him. No real energy to it. She seemed to have lost hers in that outburst. "What happened to Zack?"

She might as well get the rest out of the way.

"Rosalind knows," she said. "Not the specifics, but she knows. I didn't tell you or Tseng because I thought it'd go badly. And ... and because I almost felt like it wasn't your business, I guess."

Reno outranked her, and Tseng was the Director, but Rosalind was family, and that made this a personal matter and they could both fuck off. Even if they were both family, too, in their own way.

Petey was of a very unspecified gender, indeed. Reno had once made up a whole song-and-dance number about how he'd been fixed.

"You know," Reno noted, taking a deep drag from his cigarette and exhaling lazily before walking across the room to flop over into a chair, "I ain't pissed off at you over Rosalind, Elena. Shit, she asked me to train her, even. I got her up at the asscrack of dawn, shootin' at me on the beach every day, yo."

And from there was his training with Ghanima. Reno had very busy, training-filled mornings, nowadays. It kept him from getting too antsy.

"I know she knows."

Elena settled onto Reno's couch, wriggly cat on her lap. Cats were awesome. She should have brought Rookie.

"I want to change it," she said, almost defiantly. Inviting him to object. "I don't care about the timeline any more. It was wrong and it shouldn't have happened."

And she couldn't lose her sister again.

"Which is why I offered to train her in the first place," Reno replied, lightly. "You think bein' trained up by me after all the trainin' I got from Ghanima ain't gonna make a difference?"

Here came the ferret, to investigate what the cat was into.

Also, Mako had a sock. It was his sock and he loved it and would Elena like the sock?

"Hi, Mako," Elena grinned, leaning down to take the sock that the super adorable weird little weasel thing offered her. And then to pull it a few inches away, and then back to him again. Who wanted to play keep-away? Get it! Get the sock!

Petey did not seem to mind sharing her. Petey probably had yet to notice.

"So you're with me on this? We save her?"

It was hugely important. She had to be sure.

"What happened with Zack?"

"We save Rosalind," Reno replied, and then he frowned. This was going to be a several-packs-of-smokes conversation, he could feel it in his bones. "According to the Little Blonde Rookie Network," which was Ino, "Zack knows way more about his future than we thought he knew, zoto."

"He didn't hear it from me," Elena said easily. He wasn't fighting her on Rosalind. They could save her. They could save Amelia and another little Elena would have her big sister back. (Suddenly, Elena was irrationally jealous of the other version of herself.)

That meant she probably wasn't in trouble, or fired, or whatever else they'd been yelling at each other about. Between that and playing keep-away with the ferret, she was hitting 'mellow' fairly quickly.

"Maybe the timeline is stupid."

"Ain't stupid," Reno replied with a small quirk of his lips. "It's just fucked."

Which was apparently not going to change from this point on.

"I told Ino that if she needed any help savin' his Midgar, they got it. I don't think they know about Zack yet, but..."

Well. It was almost bound to come up sooner or later, at this rate.

"I'm in," Elena said. "Whatever they need. It's not ... right. We change it. That's the point of being here, isn't it? We change things and ..."

She was being illogical, and emotional, and she should probably try to be calm and rational about this. But she didn't want to.

"Zack doesn't deserve that," she said. "And neither does she. And she's here and ... I don't want it to happen again. I don't think I care about anything else. I can't sit back and watch, this time."

That there? That was the thoughtful, painful silence of Reno, coupled with the musty aroma of tobacco smoke and the joyous honking of a ferret who had managed to successfully share his sock.

"Ain't our world," he reasoned, almost absently. "How the hell are we to know that we can't save it, right? Things are already different, if Zack knows shit he shouldn't, yo. So... we do it. We do whatever the fuck we can. We do the job."

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