by K.A. Rose
-----
Flash Fourth
Where they were was jungle and where they were headed
was jungle, and after that, the wasteland. This was what Cho Hakkai said
from the start and never permitted the younger soldiers to think differently.
Where they were going was hell.
They would sail and they would march and they would
follow the river down until the river met an end, and that would be Houtou.
A twisted crag clawed out of the earth, where the sun never shined, but
the clouds never released their rain.
Tseng had heard stories about it as a child. Saw
it in a thin watercolor in his mother's faded picture-book, with the caligraphic
lines so elegantly curled and fanned to describe heaps of shattered bones.
It was a fairy tale. The older kind.
Gyuumaoh was the Bull God, that stampeded the earth
and razed it with fire from his nostrils, terrorizing the humans and youkai
for slaying his consort, however many centuries ago. Not that Tseng had
ever read a story about the bitch, that part always seemed a bit too tedious
for sashayed pictograms to get into, but apparently she must've been what
Reno would've called supa fine, for the bull god to go rampaging for hundreds
of years in heartbreak. Unless it was just the look of the thing. Or an
excuse. Tseng knew men that raged on principle like that, or did, before
T.U.R.K.S. sacked them for incompetence.
Ah, remember Bullet Tooth Tony...
Tseng asked Genjo Sanzo what they'd do when they
got to Houtou and the priest hadn't answered, just thumbed his cigarette
and idly scratched the monkey behind his ear.
The boy was a child maybe twelve, fourteen at most,
still with his baby fat on him though that didn't slow him up at all. He
was tan and dirty and his hair was more a collection of knots than anything
else, and he hid the diadem most often with an olive green UC cap. His
entire outfit was hand-me-down Godo Youth fatigues, a stolen pistol holstered
to his thigh, and he wore a distant look in his eyes no kid should have.
He also had a tail, that only Reno had been stupid
enough the comment on. He still had a black eye.
Zack and the bullshit brave were keeping pace from
the shore. Until they got another PBR in most of the men were going to
be jogging, but Boat's pace was slow, so it was bearable. Sephiroth was
on the boat to discuss with Cho-san at the helm. Tseng was there because
he was Tseng. Reno was there because it was impossible to get rid of him,
and at this point it seemed better to keep him near the hanyou and in Tseng's
sight than it was out there with the S.O.L.D.I.E.R.s where he might get
bored and wander off in search of mangoes.
Tseng got a call this morning from Veld asking why
he hadn't reported in. Tseng said something about a bad signal, but lying
and he never got along when it was around Veld. So he ponied up and admitted
he'd forgotten.
Just so exciting down there in the bush, Veld had
suggested gently.
Rufus, he was, was in his office, and did Tseng
want to speak with him?
"You know you're the only one in this whole building
he likes to talks to."
Rufus Shinra was fourteen and intelligent. Like
any fourteen-year-old intelligent boy, he thought he had figured out the
world, and needed someone to share this profound enlightened wisdom with.
Tseng usually played things polite and asked, yes, how is your tutoring
going, are you going out at all, have you take up any new hobbies, how
about that Palmer's daughter, don't you think she's cute?
"Blech," Rufus said.
My sentiments exactly, Tseng thought.
"Put Mister Veld back on, would you? Or, no, wait,"
he changed his mind, sighting that fluff of flyaway red up by the forward
.50s. "Is Rude there?"
Rudolfo de la Cal Fernández Esperanto Delgado
Galván Sanz was, to Tseng's knowledge, the only person living that
could get a kid like Reno to sober up. This was largely because Rude had
the kind of composure to make anything sober up, even tequila. It worked
best when he was staring at you, but there was no end to the praises you
could sing about his pregnant I-am-humoring-you-until-you-shut-the-hell-up
phone silences. It was the kind of asskicking the boy needed.
Anyway, he liked talking to Rude.
"Hallo? Hello? Yo? .... Senpai!"
"Ah. Look at him go," Cho Hakkai observed from the
helm. "You know we don't see that kind of youth aboard this boat much anymore."
Tseng met his gaze. Kitsune-slitted, pleasant like
old-man hanami, mild like he was appreciating something quietly perfect.
But then he looked down at the kid. The monkey boy,
crouched at the priest's side by the rail.
"A few months ago he was stealing fruit from the
Bodhisattva's sacred peach trees," Cho recalled, in nostalgia far more
distant than seemed appropriate, like he was talking about something whole
lifetimes far gone.
Tseng stared at that pistol strapped to the kid's
leg and the bruises under his eyes. Staring at nothing, a million miles
away.
He'd seen kids like that. But they were kids as
in 18, 19. Not kids as in boys. As in children.
Reno was still on the phone with Rude, leaning on
his arms on the starboard rail. Ass in the air and half-sleeve business-casual
shirt hanging open over his bare and freckled skin. Saying, oh, damn, man,
how could you let a piece like that go? Shee-it. I told you you was a dumbshit
with women when I'm not around. Hey, how come you never text me? Sure it's
emergency business! I'm sick to fuck of this place!
"About another two weeks," Cho-san told Tseng from
the canopy. "If we're clever we may even live, you know."
"That kid," Sanzo muttered, still distracted. "Where
do you pick your people up?"
"That one? He's a boxer," Tseng told him. "Back
in the world they set him up in cages with cattle prods and he fought men
to the death."
"Ussou!" Reno cried into the cell. "Hountou
ni?!"
"...What the hell kind of slang is your guy teaching
him?"
"He sounds like a schoolgirl," the priest sighed.
"If it is any consolation."
Below the deck, Sephiroth tended to his katana with
a whetstone, while Sha Gojyo sat across leaned back against the hull and
listened to Reno's excited pacing overhead.
After a while he noticed the general's eyes on him
and looked over. He grinned toothily in answer to the man's wry smirk.
"You know," he said in Wutai-go, because Sephiroth
could make sense of him that way, "you're the only guy here who's not trying
to stop me. Why is that?"
"Why is he such an interest to you?"
Gojyo's laugh was like a clucking sound. He leaned
forward, hand on his knees and the other knotted in a length of hair. "C'mon,
you're a smart guy. You know what this color means for fucks like him an'
me."
"If we're playing these games, I might ask you tell
me what this color means," Sephiroth returned, brushing back a lock of
his own. "Why should I know your legends if you don't know mine?"
The hanyou shrugged. "So, go on. What's the poison?"
The smile on Sephiroth's lips faded out. Flickered
a little, awkward, but vanished again. "They... say those with this hair
are marked as favored by the gods."
When Gojyo laughed this time, it rattled in his
chest. He let go of his hair and shook it back. "Ah, see. That's already
the big difference 'tween you an' me."
"So you and that boy, you're alike in your abandonment.
Is that it?"
Pause.
"I guess you could say that."
"Sha-san, we're men of war. All of us have been
abandoned by god already."
Cheers.
"Then you'd say it'd make sense, then, that him
and me, we'd find each other 'cause of war." Gojyo grinned, lounged back
again on the narrow little bench. "Well, shit. At least something redeeming
before this life fucks me over.
"Hey, you wanna talk bonding, Goku was askin' 'bout
you earlier."
"Goku, the child?"
"He ain't a child, man."
"What did he want to know?"
"He was askin' if you could show 'im a thing or
two. Friendly match, like."
It was Sephiroth that barked a laugh this time.
He set the bent old katana aside. Rattled as it touched the bench. "I'm
not in the habit of taking proteges."
"Why not?"
"Why, it's because I'm going to live forever."
"Heh. That sorta attitude's gonna get you fucked,
man."
And the radio was crackling, "Eighty-six, forty-four,
nineteen, ready, lima-bravo-juliett, repeat."
The explosion shorted Reno's call, and the water
shuddered into thick loping waves that made Boat sway and squeal with the
upset. Reno clapped the phone shut in disappointment and tossed it back
to his captain.
"What are they bombing?" Son Goku wondered from
the deck. The sound had stirred him. "It happens all the time."
"Villages," said Genjo Sanzo. "Rice patties. Cabins
they take to be bunkers. Whatever they damn well please."
Tseng stared at the water. The exchange had been
in Wutai-go. Which he was going to insist he didn't know until it suited
him.
It was true Sephiroth had left their interpreter
with the lieutenants of the main platoon, but the pilgrims' Norse was usually
sufficient enough that they hadn't needed one yet anyway. So it might've
been an effort to call Tseng's bluff, or it might've been to be a prick
with him, or it might just be that Sephiroth was being practical. Tseng
didn't figure the last one, though.
After the second explosion from upriver, Gojyo and
Sephiroth emerged from below-deck, the general with his sword tucked into
the loop of his belt. The boy Goku rose immediately when he saw him. And
then tipped, stumbling on his numb foot.
For some reason, Sephiroth laughed.
It wasn't a totally alien sound. But it usually
had a lot more black sarcasm to it.
Of course, the hanyou's attention was elsewhere,
and Reno, who'd joined Tseng by his side on the port rail, loosened in
the shoulders and started to grin like an idiot and goddammit, he was blushing
again.
It didn't take much to tip him. Actually, it was
lucky the kid was leaning off the side anyway, or else Tseng would have
had a much harder and more obvious time of it.
As it was, Tseng peered over the port side at his
subordinate thrashing and gasping in the muck of the Utai and said, well,
aren't you a klutz. Go dry off on shore with Hartzell and Glosse.
"You bastard, sir!"
Tseng was aware the priest was staring at him with
strange new respect. Tseng wasn't sure if he appreciated it or not.
For the next few days, Tseng embraced any opportunity
to keep Reno as far away from Sha-san as possible. It meant extra walking.
And extra dealing with Major Glosse. But in all, it felt like a decent
trade-off to all the mooning.
They fought. Hell yes, they fought, the priest wasn't
kidding about the assassins. Under Sephiroth's directive they laid covering
fire, blazed first into new tracks of the river to disarm the traps they
could find and duck the others. Tseng held his kid back when the swarm
went into the fray and they watched absently the captain and the major
made their strange ballet of two-ton steel and machine gun fire. And Tseng
made a point that, you know, S.O.L.D.I.E.R. was an offshoot of T.U.R.K.S.
to begin with. Before they just took Turks like him and Reno on loan to
do the dirtiest shit for war and glory.
Well, maybe not Reno. Hell knew what Reno ought
to be doing right now, but it sure as hell wasn't here.
"Conway, get those headphones off. Pay attention."
"Pay attention to what?" the boy shot back. "The
grass? The water line? The major's ass?"
Tseng laughed, "You would stare at his ass,
you little faggot."
"I'm not a queer, sir."
In the real world, the back of Tseng's brain reminded,
Veld could have his badge for indecent conduct. The him a week ago might've
been just as abhored by the words coming out of his mouth. He'd always
been hard on the punk but it had never descended into out and out vulgarity.
On the other hand, Reno had never been some guy's
bitch-in-waiting before. Maybe Rude's, but that was different. That was
totally straight and professional. Sha wasn't anyone's senpai, he was just
a big bad wolf staring so the kid's spine melted and he squirmed for an
unscratchable itch, made aware of every part of his body until Tseng beside
him was noticing it too. The line of his jaw, the curve of lips, smooth
pale chest and hard wiry muscle, a just-a-bit-too-feminine waist. Tseng
would wake in his tent in the early morning hours hearing Reno gasp into
his bedroll liner while his hand moved rhythmically beneath the cover and
Tseng wanted anything to say enough, e-fucking-nough, to tear the
wet sleeping bag off the boy's body and straddle his knees and finish him
off himself, hold him at the edge and growl in the kid's ear that he was
goddamn well going to stop, his ass belonged to the Company, his ass belonged
to him, and no half-breed beast was going to eyefuck him like a
blonde little cunt if he wanted to live to see another Midgar sunrise.
These were not thoughts easily shared with Commander
Veld. Usually he got as far as saying Reno was getting distracted and then
reminded himself that so was he. So he shut up.
He hated this fucking place.
Beside him, Reno moved. Tseng caught him by the
netting and held him back.
"You're not going to the boat."
"Why the hell not?" Reno demanded.
"Because I said. Now calm yourself or I'm
gonna make you."
"You're the one freaking out about shit all the
time! Gojyo's just a cool guy."
Right. "Yeah," said Tseng, "he's cool to fuck you.
Not on this mission, kid."
Around them, the fronds of the trees moved.
They spun and fired their standard-issues before
the wutes had time to drop. A nice pile of youkai beserkers flopping in
the muddles at their feet.
"Shit, man," Reno hissed when nothing was moving
anymore. "This is getting me mondo bad."
"...Don't say mondo," Tseng grumbled, massaging
the side of his face.
They convened at a clearing, a former forest razed
by previous ShinRa troops as a base-camp and abandoned when the company's
movements took them too far to hold it. There were homebrew bombs in the
foxholes, which no one learned until one of the privates hopped in and
subsequently lost most of his left side.
Some things Restore materia just doesn't help.
They patched him up as well as they could and sent
him downriver with the Angel, where they could hit an MSO port if they
ran light and fast and, yes, major, you can stay there. Please. The rest
of the men saw to dismantling the death traps so they had a place to sleep.
Sanzo and his disciples disembarked at the bank
and Boat turned back into his dragon shape, fluttering off to go perch
in some trees. They claimed some of the foxholes furthest out on the clearing
and pitched their tents as overhangs, and Sanzo the Unsociable disappeared
while his companions milled about for something to do.
Goku began shadowing the nearest soldier, starting
with a shrimp of a private and working his way up from there, until he
was trailing Zack like a puppy across the camp. Zack, being the ever-loving
bastard he was, forgot about the whole arm-breaking incident and fed the
kid some of his rations until Sephiroth ordered him to stop.
After which, the monkey followed Sephiroth instead.
Cho-san helped the boys poke at a cooking fire until
the downpour started, and when that happen most everyone retreated back
into their mudpits. Zack mentioned something briefly on wondering whether
pumpkin was all right, to which the general answered that he hoped not,
and then stole away inside his tent to do something to keep the captain's
body temperature up.
Reno got one last look at the other firebrand across
the camp before Tseng dragged him inside. The kid hoped Tseng wasn't too
good at reading glances, or he'd wash the boy's mouth out with soap.
The rain swelled the river and doused out life,
and in a small huddle under a rain tarp the heads of the little half-cocked
alliance agreed they were stalled until things abated. This meant, too,
that Hazel Glosse was stuck downriver with the MSO until they caught up,
but no one seemed too worried except for Zack.
"Relax. He's a first-class," Sephiroth said, tucking
the tarp further over his head so that water wouldn't pour onto their maps.
"He's got mineral you'd never dream of."
"He's also got the forward-thinking ability of a
hummingbird. You know he's 'sposed to be saving his pay for his parents
back east. You shoulda sent me into port instead, general."
"Ease up there, captain. The itch will get you soon
enough."
"The rains should recede by tomorrow afternoon,"
Cho told the assembled, ever on track. "But we don't wish to navigate by
night."
"We will move out as soon as we're able," Sanzo
insisted. He squeezed the cherry off the tip of his cigarette. "Our supplies
are low. We'll need to hit that station soon anyway."
"A ShinRa dock won't take you," said Sephiroth.
"We'll manage. There are always ways. Come to it,"
the priest added, in Tseng's direction. "How is it you're able to step
anywhere, looking like that?"
"You're very direct, aren't you, Lord Sanzo."
"Are you lowlands by any chance? You have the skin
for it. We passed their plantations a few months back..."
"I haven't been to Wutai before in my life, lord,"
Tseng said sourly.
Sanzo puffed the last of the smoke from his lungs.
"Came here at a nice time, didn't you."
When the meeting broke and Tseng returned to the
T.U.R.K.S. tent, Reno was gone.
He'd say later that it was to go forage for firewood.
This would be a damn lie and they would both know it.
That goddamn punk.
It was midafternoon when he'd split for the trees,
the rain still beating down the camp and washing everything bone-clean.
It drained a little under the jungle canopy, came down in fine trickles
spotted by the ineffective sunlight, that turned everything a deep saturated
green of leaves and bowing trees.
Stabs of stalks in rich yellow danced across the
forest tableau like fortune-teller sticks, dotted with clusters of vibrant
blue flowers. Purple orchids, slithering white insects. And in that there
was him, a painter's daub of true palette red, a firebrand streak
shimmering and melting in the downpour.
He flashed in and out of sight among the leaves,
and Reno raced after, leaping over log and brush. Pushing through and ducking
and climbing and panting as the chase wore on, and that single dash of
red threatened to disappear forever, neck-deep in alien blue woods.
At the mouth of some abandoned cave they found each
other, Gojyo perched on a fallen log hanging to the vines overhead that
the muscles of his bare arms stood out in supple, perfect relief. He grinned
down at the boy, the wildflower image of himself, wet and stripped down
to his trousers in the shuddering rain but not turning, and not retreating
now at all.
He leaned in close, nearly nose to nose, and smelled
the soap off him, the foreign sweat. No fear.
But Reno's heart was still racing in his throat
and it thundered loud in stillness. As the rain crashed on wood and stone,
and it cascaded through their hair, so that it shone in that exact ruby
quality of blood.
Sha Gojyo admired the boy's face, that he hadn't
seen this close until now. The curves of the marks around his eyes, the
faint freckles on his nose, the catlike accent of his lips. His hair like
a halfbreed's hair, that painful livid red. And his eyes...
Gojyo stopped.
Reno shook with the cold and watched the hanyou's
expression, the sudden confusion daring to become worry.
"What is it?"
"Your eyes," Gojyo began, in that stoppered, difficult
Norse. "They're not..."
He didn't finish. Either because he didn't know
the word or didn't want to, and somehow it felt like the second one.
The heartbeat thudded louder and painful in Reno's
ears.
"What's wrong?" he asked, and pleading, just a little.
"...Nothing," said the hanyou, and kissed him.
It was a rush like the wind had been knocked out
of him, and Reno felt his chest swelling and his body pressing against
the older man's, and his arms around his back, digging into soft tender
skin. Groping at the curve of his ass through his pants and then going
for the fly, the sound of his zipper lost under the shatter of rain and
the blood in his ears and that unsteadying lurch when Gojyo slid from being
at his shoulder to kneeling at his waist, hands stroking at shaking inner
thighs and going shhh, baby. Peeling back the foreskin and closing
mouth around the tip and oh god! Reno cried. Ohgodohgod--
He's been with women, girls really, fucked them
all until they couldn't walk but that had been a lifetime ago and nothing
had ever felt like this, nothing had come close He was a shaking virgin
in the hanyou's hands, running fingers through his hair. Those bleeding
strands.
Falling, knees giving, Gojyo easing him gentle as
a baby onto the ground, the wet bare stone, tugged his pants free of his
pale bony legs and pressing his back flat with a broad, hot palm, burning
calluses scraping and marking where they touched and god, please, finish
me, I need it.
You done this before?
N-no.
Here, Gojyo said, and slid his rough hand down the
underside of Reno's thighs, and lifted them.
After, lying on the stone while the rain slowed
to a drip outside their cave, Gojyo ran his thick fingers through Reno's
hair, half-dried and feathery, combing it like an older brother would.
Although he wasn't sure how well that fit now.
Maybe that general-guy hadn't stopped him because
he'd seen Gojyo was barking up the wrong tree.
Hell. He'd gone his whole life thinking he was the
only fucker in thousands of miles that had to deal with this mark of taboo.
There had been one other, one, a girl, and she was fuckin' dead. Died for
him, actually.
And then he sees this boy and thinks, what are the
odds? Maybe the bitch-goddess of mercy likes me after all.
Except...
"You thinkin'?" the kid said up to him. Smaller
now, it felt, something almost fragile, all bones and angles and too much
baby fat. Too young, really.
Gojyo shook his head.
"Your hair," he said, struggling with the language.
"Always this color?"
"Yeah. Yeah, always. Is it weird?"
"...It numbah-ten. Men with this color. This..."
He touched a handful of his own strands. "They call it taboo. Bad luck."
Reno thought of this. Stared at his hands. And then
sat up, naked and cross-legged, leaned forward on his hands with a beaming
smile, saying, "Fuck them. It's beautiful."
Gojyo grinned, too amused for words. He pulled the
kid back down again.
The rain had stopped when Reno returned to the tent,
muddy in just trousers and no shoes, lips red with kissing and no way to
hide it.
Tseng was there, awake despite the hour and the
general's promise of an easily disembark. He was staring at the light of
the kerosene lantern, and didn't look up when the corporal entered.
"Aren't you going to say something?" Reno asked,
when he couldn't take the silence anymore.
His captain glanced up at him once, cold dagger
of a look, and then away. Then he took the balled-up rain-pancho from his
side and threw it harder than necessary into Reno's arms. And then his
helmet, and a flashlight, and said, "You drew firewatch. Have fun."
"What?" Reno complained. "I'm not a soldier. We're
not even part of this stupid mission."
"Lie down with dogs, you should expect fleas," said
Tseng, turning the lantern down low to go to sleep.
Cho-san approached him the next day on the boat,
while Tseng was watching to make sure his quarantined little subordinate
didn't break the ranks on the shore. The white mage leaned against the
portside rail, smiled in a way Tseng was beginning to think was meaningless,
and said, "Even the gods do not manage the affairs of men past their caring,
Tseng-san."
He said it in Wutai-go. Tseng glanced once and away
and glared at the shore again.
"I said I don't speak..."
"That was a look of understanding on your face,
Tseng-san... Tseng," the healer repeated conversationally, still in his
native tongue, removing his monacle to wipe it on the fold of his tunic.
"I know that name. A clan up by Do Chaung Yi, the villages up there. I
used to tutor their daughters. They would be your cousins, then."
"I've never met them," Tseng said coldly, finally
relenting into the old language.
Hakkai shrugged, replacing the eyepiece. "Would
you like to?"
"No."
"Just as well. They're all dead. We passed their
lands by the Chaung Sim Valley and found them blasted, just burnt sticks
of buildings, dead earth. All gone."
Tseng watched him. Halfway between fury and hurt,
and on top of that bewilderment, and shame that he should care at all.
He bit his tongue. Ducked his head. Stared at the
water, growled, "What's your issue with me, Cho-san?"
"I have no issue," he declared brightly, leaving
the rail. "I'm just here to steer the boat."
-----