by K.A. Rose
Final Fantasy VII characters et cetera copyright © Squaresoft (Square Enix) 1997-2005. Used without permission, for non-profit fan appreciation.
Short seinen ai (Rude/Reno) set between the end of the game and the movie, say a year or so post-game. Rated R:LS (Restricted to ages 17 and up for language and some sexual content). Meandering Benioff/Oates style. Please don't hurt me.
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After the first blow-over, things started winding back to normal. Things did that. People sucked at being in crisis, and if over thataway happened to be something they could sort of call an authority figure, hey, maybe it'd be cool to support it.
There wasn't a lot of ruling going on. Actually, it was the fucking middle ages. But feudalism worked here and there and the whole knight schtick wasn't so bad, really, once you got used to a few things.
Like, your pay? Turns into more of a vague concept than some actual reality. So you better get used to rationing your everything for a few years before they get the regular taxation thing going again. The trials of the public servant, yeah?
And you get used to other things. Like not caring so much what's in that glass the bartender just plunked down on the table, because it's booze and if it takes away your synapses that's all that really matters. And your clothes, maybe you don't care about your clothes so much, wash them a little less, 'cause water's not always guaranteed out of that tap in the ruins of your apartment, and when it is, you can't always trust it won't be full of piss and dogshit.
You try to be presentable, because you've got a job still, and the boss, yeah, he takes care of you. And maybe after a while in struggling it gets better. The money's coming a little more, because the boss, he's getting used to hiding under his curtain wrapped up in a shell, and he's not the miser so much now that he can't enjoy anything, and he's found his daddy's cash accounts down in del Sol.
So like maybe you wash your clothes now and then now. And maybe you can wash your face too, and your hair, and look better for a change. And get drunk off of the good stuff and high off the even better shit and your day job's much like it used to be again.
Then say you get some decent wages again. And yeah, it's like a tenth what you used to make, but it feels huge and, better than that, it feels regular. So you splurge a bit. You know. Get something good. Something you figure sort of validates all this.
Rude doesn't look up till Reno's at the door saying "Hey!", standing there with a big grin and his cheeks flushed from the cold. He's not dressed for the winter, never is, never had a reason to be back in the days when you'd always be sure the heater was gonna work. They're all taking a piss time adapting.
Reno's smile drops when Rude grunts and goes back to his book. It's a technical manual, hydraulics, everyone's got to expand a bit, but if anything fits Rude worse than his nose in a book thick as his head, Reno's never seen it. He's got a pretty big head, for one thing.
"Aren't you gonna say something?" Reno asks anyway, because his endorphins haven't quit yet and he hates the interruption of his little euphoria.
So, okay. He can't actually expect Rude to jump up and freak. Apocalypse didn't make Rude freak. But Reno'd hoped for something...
Rude glances him up and down again. Movement is just a flicker hidden by the shades. "What?" he asks.
Which, in his vocabulary, means anything up to and including "So you banged that secretary from the eighth floor?" and so isn't really all that helpful.
Reno gives up and makes it easier for him. He points.
"...Yes?" Rude tries, after a moment.
"Dude, hello! I got it for you! You, metal-man, my buddy and inspiration!"
Rude's brow knits, eyes behind the glasses scrutinizing the little steel stud in his partner's ear, red from cold and infection and a whole hell of a lot of pride.
"You didn't have it before?" he says finally.
Reno's hand drops. Actually, his whole body sinks. "Come on, man!"
Rude shrugs. It's an all-purpose shrug, good for all ages and occasions, and totally dead of application here. Reno's dropping his whine before he begins anyway, but if he hadn't, that would've done it.
The big-ass talon in Rude's left lobe is swaying. So are a few of the hoops. Of course, the guy's totally jaded to the whole piercing thing, why wouldn't he be? Some days Reno's not sure Rude's even got a good count of them all (eleven) or why he has some of them (special fights, bits of sin like scars, one Reno knows he's responsible for but the rest are sort of vague, just like the marks on his own skin). It's just kind of a Thing.
Whatever, he's over it. There's calls anyway. Still work to do, still things to keep busy with. There's life, and wages to draw in, one way or another. 'Cause, you know, eating is cool to be able to do now and then.
It's not that they're uncomfortable. The remnants of ShinRa aren't, really, under the boss's care. Because Boss really does take care these days, now that he needs someone to feed him, change him, read him his reports because the doctors say his eyesight will be back any day now but he still can't see a thing. But the money that you get, it doesn't stretch that far even when you think it does. And everyone with ability now seems to be taking care of three that don't.
One time on a run Reno ran into a kid, barely a teen. The kid had seen the suit and figured him some rich man's eldest and tried to mug him, and when Reno had the kid pinned to a wall with his baton raised, threads of electricity curling in the half inch between metal and temple, the boy had begged to be let go, please let him live, mister, please, he's got a sister that's sick with that new cancer, the one they talk about on the radio. Both parents dead of shrapnel from Meteor. Uncle and cousins lost when the sector plate fell...
Reno had let him go and watched him on the pavement, mumbled something into his shirt collar about how it must suck to be a teenager with everything the way it was. The kid didn't say anything. He did pick up the gil Reno tossed to his feet.
Reeve, that secretary, whatever he was these days, he kept trying to set up charities, relief units, some sort of city police force, hospitals. None of it was working very well. You couldn't make it go wide. It just ended like that: brief little incidents in alleyways, as your wallet got lighter and lighter, and soon you were scraping ones for freeze-dried dinner every night and sorta wondering why.
It might be a good thing that bank statements didn't exist anymore. It'd get annoying to read.
It snows that night, again. Winter never existed back when the reactors were around to burn up the sky. Now people are talking about climate changes, about ice ages, polar caps expanding and eating up the earth. Talking about how the Planet's trying to kill them all off, humans, pollutants, parasites that threatened its life. Cosmo Canyon's loud with theories about an end-cycle to human life, the winding down, the dwindling out. That's what the cancer is, they say, that's Geostigma, Star Scar. The Planet's poisoning us all.
It's thick, clumping snow, down here on the plate. The water pipes will melt a lot of it and there'll be waterfalls streaming down in every street way, icy walls in front of every door. The snow will stick around their shoes and their glasses will frost up, and maybe Reno will have the sense to button up his shirt a little more, if he can't manage anything else.
"What's tonight? It's equinox, isn't it?"
"Don't know."
When the sun's set it gets worse, and everything's a blue haze, sickly street lights burning in an amplified glow, in the mist and fog and constant swirling snow. Their breath clouds in front of them and Rude's ears are about as red as Reno's hair, red as the slashes on his cheeks. Reno says he should've gotten Rude a hat. Rude grunts and says something about dinner at the secretary's. Elena will be there, Tseng too probably, maybe Highwind. Heard he was in town.
He'd heard from Tseng that Highwind wears a red ribbon around his wrist.
They'd seen as much, when they'd caught a few of the others in passing. Lockhart has one, probably Strife too, Valentine. Reeve wears his pinned to his jacket, and has them tied around each of his little dolls.
It shouldn't be something to feel jealous of. The Turks, what are left of them, they have their own way of commemorating what happened. And anyway, it was a different sort of deal, right? They were just doing it as a job. All of them were just...
When it hits Reno, it feels like a shot. Gunshot stabbing through his left side, an explosion of burning cold pain, spraying in the air. He's even ducking and turning, clutching at the wound before he finds the snow melting on his fingers, and there's that barely-teen little punk hiding behind a fort of garbage pins, laughing.
"Hey! You little bastard!"
There's another volley, fisted tight balls of snow pelting him hard on the chest, to the throat. He starts a counterattack, clawing up bits of white in numbing palms, until Rude tugs at his shoulder for a retreat, and they both end up slipping. So they fall, blinding cold seeped up through their clothes, and the laughter's split and multiplied as the kid's friends come out and start their next assault. Hard punches and stabs of ice, and even Rude is laughing, Rude, at the insanity of it all, the whole ridiculousness of this, of everything. And that makes Reno laugh, because how surreal is it, that it all has to break down like this, in the muddy ruins of a city, when they should all by right be dead.
They don't make it to the secretary's dinner. Tseng's reproving the next day but they tried to, honest they did. They make it to Rude's apartment up by the ridge of the plate divide, dry off and shower with water that is probably sort of clean. But they get distracted warming up with a couple shots, and soon it's more than just a couple, and they're playing cards across Rude's dirty kitchen table instead.
At one point Rude pinches Reno's earlobe between thumb and forefinger and asks where his stud went, didn't he just have it? And Reno starts to curse, figuring he lost it somewhere in the snow, and damn it, but that job cost so much, the hole's gonna heal up before he even gets going--
Rude goes to the bathroom, comes out showing him a handful of sixteen-gauges he pulled from the medicine cabinet. He asks which one he wants, with that all-purpose shrug. Good for all ages and occasions.
Reno looks at them with eyebrows raised. "...You'd better clean them first," he says eventually.
"You don't take care of it anyway," Rude notes, pointing to the swollen lobe. "Get better about that. It makes you look like an idiot."
He does clean it. He also sets the hoop in for him, fastening it snug in place and rough fingers only once brushing the sensitized skin, before they go back to shuffling the cards.
There's a few more drinks. Not many. It only takes so much for cards to start looking really boring. And it is equinox, after all. Practically an anniversary.
Anyway, they're still here, aren't they? They're still here. That's
got to mean something, right? Has to. Because they shouldn't be.
"Rude, your bed sucks."
"Save up and buy me a new one."
"Fuck you, I will. Watch me."
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finished at: 01:38, 19 September, 2005.
No Midgardian civil servants were harmed in the making of this fanfic.