*Twelve Months Ago*
"You don't scare us... you ain't nothin'!"
A single red eyebrow arched pointedly over a blood shot green eye, which glimmered from a mix of inebriation and mako treatments. A little further down the pale face, in the land of close shaved stubble and a pointed chin, a small smirk stretched into existence. Reno had been looking for a good fight for a long time, and although he couldn't pretend that this one had found him- billiards players were so touchy when you would pick up the eight ball and start tossing it to yourself, especially when they were playing for money- he was surprised at how promising things were starting to look.
The Ferrari Union was composed of five men who could never afford such a car even if they pooled their respective salaries over the next decade, but that didn't stop them from bearing the gangs initials in massive print on the back of their beer stained leather jackets. While none of them seemed to be particularly formative on their own- Reno could briefly make out the outline of a gun under one of their jackets, but it appeared to be tucked so far back that he could easily put the man out on his back before he got it out, let alone cocked- they did make an impressive group, a quintet of drunken biker wannabes with long hair and, Reno surmised, short dicks.
"Nothing?" Came a scathing reply a little from Reno's left, heated more by indignation than alcohol. Elena never had been much of a drinker, and even when she had agreed to go to the Last Call bar with her colleagues in arms she had made it quite clear that Irish Coffee was going to be the limit on her alcohol consumption for the night. Even though she was speaking with a tongue unaffected by booze, Reno promptly began to dread whatever sentence would come next spewing from the mouth of the blonde woman. Nothing could ruin a book back alley brawl like the prattling of a rookie. "Do you even know who you're dealing with?"
Inwardly, Reno smiled, though his face remained locked in its painting of angry amusement. That hadn't been half bad, and if only they could take care of the irritated squeak that seemed to tail Elena like a heroin addiction they might just get her trained up to talk trash yet. Of course, that would mostly be left in his own lap, as Rude wasn't much for any sort of talking and their fearless leader simply couldn't get the correct blend of arrogance and insults going. Amateurs, Reno cursed mentally, would be the death of him.
"Let's see," the soberest of the gang members began, holding out one hand as if to start ticking off some bullet points, but then trailing off as he stared at his fingers. Despite the fact that he was standing much steadier than his friends, it was clear that he too wouldn't take much harm from getting some food in him, and quick. "Blue suits... pretty eyes... and hanging around in the pissed soaked lower plates of Midgar like rats trying to swim to shore after their ship sank. You're the Turks."
Oh goody, Reno muttered to himself, our reputation precedes us. Maybe next time we should send some business cards ahead in case those boy scouts Strife had instated as the Midgar police force happened to be in the area, the only thing they probably didn't have in their search for the former Shin-Ra task force being a phone number and address. The way the man had so easily identified the group had added a sense of urgency to the impending brawl that Reno didn't like, a calling for thoroughness that would take away from the fun of the whole thing. If anything could suck the soul out of a good fight, it was having to perform according to certain standards.
"So you know who we are," Reno snarled, surprised at how slurred his own voice was starting to come across. So what that he had been drinking so much the last few weeks he could tell you what most of the city looked like through wet brown glass, he wasn't used to his tolerance level letting him down like this. "But you're still standing here, and your jeans are still dry." His eyes fell upon one of the men in the back, who looked so tanked that Reno would be surprised if he even knew that he was no longer standing in the bar, "Well, at least most of them are."
"We ain't afraid of no has beens," said the biggest man, who appeared to be propping up the wasted soul in the back of the group, "especially not a group of micks, guttah trash and niggahs."
Reno casually reached behind him, searching under his jacket, and felt his hands wrap around the cool rubber tipped handle of his EMR. Before he could ask which name in the list was supposed to apply to him, and silence whoever opened their mouth to answer first with a burst of electricity, he felt Rude begin to surge forward beside him. Though he knew ethnic slurs bounced off his friend like rubber bullets, Reno was also fully aware of how Rude responded to any sort of degrading comment towards his fiancee, and briefly felt a spark of pity deep down in his gut. It was vanquished quickly, but the fact that he had felt it at all left the red haired Turk wondering exactly what he had been drinking- and for how long.
Watching the bald Turk advance, the big man slid out from under the dangling arm of his fellow gang member, leaving the man to stumble weakly against the brick wall of the bar for support as biggy surged forward, fire in his eyes. To Reno's surprise, Rude didn't just take the man off his feet with a simple palm strike to the throat, but instead kept walking until the two stood nose to nose, respective muscles rippling under very different attire. The big man leaned close and muttered something in Rude's ear in an attempted whisper, but amplification, one of the many side effects of a good night's drinking, allowed Reno to hear every word. "You punks got fired, broke, and taken out by a bunch of government boys. The upper plate made yah soft."
Reeling just a bit from the phrase 'government boys', Reno took a few long strides forward until he stood side by side with his friend, drawing all the members of the gang who were still able to walk straight forward until they encircled the two Turks in a half circle. Reno fished for a response, realizing quite early that an explanation that 'Avalanche was only running Midgar affairs because everyone else who really cared to was dead' wouldn't cut it. "Let's just say we were in a slump," he said simply, "and besides... those 'government boys' of yours. They had one big advantage that you don't. They never had to face all of us."
Driven both by his employee's words and an urge to get the talking portion of the evening over with, Tseng Chet appeared from the shadows of the alley with a click of highly polished black shoes. He hadn't sought concealment, but darkness seemed to find him like a stray puppy that would follow you around. The members of FU looked the pale man over thoroughly now that the sole light bulb in the alley illuminated his presence, but did not seem overly impressed, particularly the big man who seemed to be attempting to do the impossible in making Rude back away. "Oh, a chink, too. Beautiful. I guess we know why the Shins kept you around as long at they did... 'Turks' is a nice way of saying affirmative action."
There was a slight jingle, almost too quiet to hear, as a long stream of linked chains slid from the clenched hand of Tseng and dangled down towards the ground, a small razor blade cinched at the end, shining in the weak lighting. For a brief moment, every eye was on it, and then the big man barked out a hoarse laughed, ragged from a smoking habit that existed since age seven. "Oh, look... he has a toy."
Remy Windgrace, owner of the Last Call bar, lost a lot of business that night, when most of even his most dedicated alcoholics felt like going for a walk as the high pitched screams rose to a level they overcame even the blaring music from the jukebox. He thought about it as he closed up a good two hours early in effort to save heating money, and decided that maybe it would be best if he didn't go out back and complain.
***
Reno woke up with a sharp pain in his side and a pounding head ache in his skull. He figured out he'd been in a hell of a fight the previous night even before the memories flooded his mind, considering a right hook featuring a golden ring was one of the few things in the world that could cause him to rise in such a state. Other people would probably blame the almost lethal amount of alcohol he'd ingested, both before, after, and during the brawl, but he knew better than that. He hadn't had a hangover since he was ten and decided to race God in a contest to see what would be finished off first- himself, or the towering bottle of Vodka he had gotten his hands on. He wasn't sure why, but secretly entertained the thought that maybe that part of his mind had simply given up and committed suicide.
The stabbing sensation in his left rib cage, however, he could do something about. With a mild groan, he laid his palm out across the dark maple wood he was laying on, and used it to roll off the desk he had passed out on- and more importantly, the jagged Shin-Ra paperweight which had somehow survived from the companies fall until now. Sickened by the blatant survival in the face of the odds, Reno considered smashing the instrument into pieces, but quickly let the idea pass as he heard a throat clear loudly and disapprovingly from above him.
Blinking in surprise, Reno gazed up at the sitting figure of Tseng Chet, who had apparently made it to his desk early despite the obvious handicap of having a sleeping Turk on top of it. He had been using some of the open space to do paperwork on, and was now spreading it out liberally to fill the body shaped opening Reno's exit had left on the top of the desk. "You know," Tseng said, and the red haired Turk just knew that he was dying to cluck his tongue like some disapproving mother, "if you're going to be sleeping at the office, then maybe you could at least clock in on time."
"...we don't have a clock," Reno said wearily, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. The simple pressure stung them horribly, and he idly realized he had left his contacts in untouched for upwards of three days. That, he mused as he reached into his back pocket and produced a black pack of cigarettes and quickly produced a cancer stick from its depths, was terribly unhealthy. He lit the small white cylinder with the half empty Bic lighter he had lifted off of one of the sprawled gang members the night before, but for some reason it tasted like death in his mouth. Maybe he should give that new liquid a try, that water stuff would probably do wonders for his condition. "Besides, I had a long night."
"I'm well aware," Tseng said primly, gazing at him through narrowed eyes, "I happened to be there. I suppose I can over look the incident, however, considering the whole ordeal was a business venture."
With no response readily available, Reno snorted and took another drag on his cigarette. It was better this time, and he quickly admonished himself for his near blasphemous thought of imbibing a non-alcoholic beverage. He turned away from Tseng with a simple roll of his eyes, but was frozen as his boss caught the gesture and barked out a very uncharacteristic, emotional word. "What??"
Well, this had to happen sooner or later, Reno reasoned. He had been waiting for it to happen for some time, but rather thought the morning after such an entertaining show as the one they had put on last night wouldn't be the time or the place for this to happen. Oh well, he groaned in his head, lets do this properly. Maybe he'll do me the favor of gunning me down before I have to see it through to the ending.
He whirled, his eyes blazing, his jaw working as if it couldn't wait to begin the speel he had played over in his head time and time again. All the reason and logic, all the facts and lists of defeat, the big painfully tragic equation that could have only one answer- the Turks were dead in the water, sitting ducks, kites that had just lost all their tailwind. Instead, in his typical fashion, he found himself reducing the entire conversation to two words. "Fuck you!"
Tseng rose slowly, but there was no mistaking the flush that had darkened his cheeks. Though Reno had always been willing- hell, proud- to admit that he worked for a man with shark eyes, even the usually dead black pools were alive with anger as Tseng convulsively tightened his hands into fists, apparently wishing he had his hands on what Reno called 'his little lucky charms bracelet' right now. "Excuse me?" he hissed, though Reno was quite sure he had heard him loud and clear. He voiced something to that effect.
"You heard me! A business venture? A business venture? A fucking business venture!?" Reno's voice rose sharply with each repetition of the phrase, until he was literally screaming at the top of his lungs as Tseng stood less then five feet away. "What kind of deluded, arrogant asshole are you? A business venture? We got in a *fight* Tseng. Do you really think rolling a couple of fat bikers is going to regain any of the credibility we lost when our founder company *fell down around our fucking heads*? I did harder shit than that when I was a Jackal, and we were a group of mal-nourished pissants!"
To the credit of Tseng, he didn't react right away. To the discredit of Tseng, at least in Reno's eyes, when he did react it wasn't with a violent attack that left the two of them clawing feebly at each other from separate stretchers. Instead, the man he had once called his mentor spoke in a quiet, downcast, broken voice, the tone of a man who has lost everything in his life but his illusions and was having even them ripped away from him. "And what," he said slowly, "do you suppose we do instead?"
"I suppose," Reno said with venomous pause, spitting each syllable out like hacked up tar from his well coated lungs, "that you should shove this up your ass. All of this. Your desk, your business ventures, and your fucking blue suit. Do you remember what you told me when I put it on? Do you?"
Tseng's eyes gleamed once as the memory struck him, then went out, dying like wind swept candles. "I told you the only way you'd get to take it off was if you rotted out of it."
"Well," Reno said, practically hissing his words, "consider that done. Everything I signed up to work for is gone. Money. Respect. Fear. We're jokes, Tseng. And you're the biggest joke of us all."
And then he was gone, in a whirl wind of hatred and self loathing, storming out the office door. He ran into Elena halfway down the hall that lead to the offices exit, having to physically restrain himself from simply throwing her against the wall and using her like a toy, before tossing her down into the dirt. The thought sickened him, but for some reason, she sickened him more, and he sickened himself most of all. He marched past her and was gone before she could ask what that strange look he had given her could have possibly meant.
"You don't scare us... you ain't nothin'!"
A single red eyebrow arched pointedly over a blood shot green eye, which glimmered from a mix of inebriation and mako treatments. A little further down the pale face, in the land of close shaved stubble and a pointed chin, a small smirk stretched into existence. Reno had been looking for a good fight for a long time, and although he couldn't pretend that this one had found him- billiards players were so touchy when you would pick up the eight ball and start tossing it to yourself, especially when they were playing for money- he was surprised at how promising things were starting to look.
The Ferrari Union was composed of five men who could never afford such a car even if they pooled their respective salaries over the next decade, but that didn't stop them from bearing the gangs initials in massive print on the back of their beer stained leather jackets. While none of them seemed to be particularly formative on their own- Reno could briefly make out the outline of a gun under one of their jackets, but it appeared to be tucked so far back that he could easily put the man out on his back before he got it out, let alone cocked- they did make an impressive group, a quintet of drunken biker wannabes with long hair and, Reno surmised, short dicks.
"Nothing?" Came a scathing reply a little from Reno's left, heated more by indignation than alcohol. Elena never had been much of a drinker, and even when she had agreed to go to the Last Call bar with her colleagues in arms she had made it quite clear that Irish Coffee was going to be the limit on her alcohol consumption for the night. Even though she was speaking with a tongue unaffected by booze, Reno promptly began to dread whatever sentence would come next spewing from the mouth of the blonde woman. Nothing could ruin a book back alley brawl like the prattling of a rookie. "Do you even know who you're dealing with?"
Inwardly, Reno smiled, though his face remained locked in its painting of angry amusement. That hadn't been half bad, and if only they could take care of the irritated squeak that seemed to tail Elena like a heroin addiction they might just get her trained up to talk trash yet. Of course, that would mostly be left in his own lap, as Rude wasn't much for any sort of talking and their fearless leader simply couldn't get the correct blend of arrogance and insults going. Amateurs, Reno cursed mentally, would be the death of him.
"Let's see," the soberest of the gang members began, holding out one hand as if to start ticking off some bullet points, but then trailing off as he stared at his fingers. Despite the fact that he was standing much steadier than his friends, it was clear that he too wouldn't take much harm from getting some food in him, and quick. "Blue suits... pretty eyes... and hanging around in the pissed soaked lower plates of Midgar like rats trying to swim to shore after their ship sank. You're the Turks."
Oh goody, Reno muttered to himself, our reputation precedes us. Maybe next time we should send some business cards ahead in case those boy scouts Strife had instated as the Midgar police force happened to be in the area, the only thing they probably didn't have in their search for the former Shin-Ra task force being a phone number and address. The way the man had so easily identified the group had added a sense of urgency to the impending brawl that Reno didn't like, a calling for thoroughness that would take away from the fun of the whole thing. If anything could suck the soul out of a good fight, it was having to perform according to certain standards.
"So you know who we are," Reno snarled, surprised at how slurred his own voice was starting to come across. So what that he had been drinking so much the last few weeks he could tell you what most of the city looked like through wet brown glass, he wasn't used to his tolerance level letting him down like this. "But you're still standing here, and your jeans are still dry." His eyes fell upon one of the men in the back, who looked so tanked that Reno would be surprised if he even knew that he was no longer standing in the bar, "Well, at least most of them are."
"We ain't afraid of no has beens," said the biggest man, who appeared to be propping up the wasted soul in the back of the group, "especially not a group of micks, guttah trash and niggahs."
Reno casually reached behind him, searching under his jacket, and felt his hands wrap around the cool rubber tipped handle of his EMR. Before he could ask which name in the list was supposed to apply to him, and silence whoever opened their mouth to answer first with a burst of electricity, he felt Rude begin to surge forward beside him. Though he knew ethnic slurs bounced off his friend like rubber bullets, Reno was also fully aware of how Rude responded to any sort of degrading comment towards his fiancee, and briefly felt a spark of pity deep down in his gut. It was vanquished quickly, but the fact that he had felt it at all left the red haired Turk wondering exactly what he had been drinking- and for how long.
Watching the bald Turk advance, the big man slid out from under the dangling arm of his fellow gang member, leaving the man to stumble weakly against the brick wall of the bar for support as biggy surged forward, fire in his eyes. To Reno's surprise, Rude didn't just take the man off his feet with a simple palm strike to the throat, but instead kept walking until the two stood nose to nose, respective muscles rippling under very different attire. The big man leaned close and muttered something in Rude's ear in an attempted whisper, but amplification, one of the many side effects of a good night's drinking, allowed Reno to hear every word. "You punks got fired, broke, and taken out by a bunch of government boys. The upper plate made yah soft."
Reeling just a bit from the phrase 'government boys', Reno took a few long strides forward until he stood side by side with his friend, drawing all the members of the gang who were still able to walk straight forward until they encircled the two Turks in a half circle. Reno fished for a response, realizing quite early that an explanation that 'Avalanche was only running Midgar affairs because everyone else who really cared to was dead' wouldn't cut it. "Let's just say we were in a slump," he said simply, "and besides... those 'government boys' of yours. They had one big advantage that you don't. They never had to face all of us."
Driven both by his employee's words and an urge to get the talking portion of the evening over with, Tseng Chet appeared from the shadows of the alley with a click of highly polished black shoes. He hadn't sought concealment, but darkness seemed to find him like a stray puppy that would follow you around. The members of FU looked the pale man over thoroughly now that the sole light bulb in the alley illuminated his presence, but did not seem overly impressed, particularly the big man who seemed to be attempting to do the impossible in making Rude back away. "Oh, a chink, too. Beautiful. I guess we know why the Shins kept you around as long at they did... 'Turks' is a nice way of saying affirmative action."
There was a slight jingle, almost too quiet to hear, as a long stream of linked chains slid from the clenched hand of Tseng and dangled down towards the ground, a small razor blade cinched at the end, shining in the weak lighting. For a brief moment, every eye was on it, and then the big man barked out a hoarse laughed, ragged from a smoking habit that existed since age seven. "Oh, look... he has a toy."
Remy Windgrace, owner of the Last Call bar, lost a lot of business that night, when most of even his most dedicated alcoholics felt like going for a walk as the high pitched screams rose to a level they overcame even the blaring music from the jukebox. He thought about it as he closed up a good two hours early in effort to save heating money, and decided that maybe it would be best if he didn't go out back and complain.
***
Reno woke up with a sharp pain in his side and a pounding head ache in his skull. He figured out he'd been in a hell of a fight the previous night even before the memories flooded his mind, considering a right hook featuring a golden ring was one of the few things in the world that could cause him to rise in such a state. Other people would probably blame the almost lethal amount of alcohol he'd ingested, both before, after, and during the brawl, but he knew better than that. He hadn't had a hangover since he was ten and decided to race God in a contest to see what would be finished off first- himself, or the towering bottle of Vodka he had gotten his hands on. He wasn't sure why, but secretly entertained the thought that maybe that part of his mind had simply given up and committed suicide.
The stabbing sensation in his left rib cage, however, he could do something about. With a mild groan, he laid his palm out across the dark maple wood he was laying on, and used it to roll off the desk he had passed out on- and more importantly, the jagged Shin-Ra paperweight which had somehow survived from the companies fall until now. Sickened by the blatant survival in the face of the odds, Reno considered smashing the instrument into pieces, but quickly let the idea pass as he heard a throat clear loudly and disapprovingly from above him.
Blinking in surprise, Reno gazed up at the sitting figure of Tseng Chet, who had apparently made it to his desk early despite the obvious handicap of having a sleeping Turk on top of it. He had been using some of the open space to do paperwork on, and was now spreading it out liberally to fill the body shaped opening Reno's exit had left on the top of the desk. "You know," Tseng said, and the red haired Turk just knew that he was dying to cluck his tongue like some disapproving mother, "if you're going to be sleeping at the office, then maybe you could at least clock in on time."
"...we don't have a clock," Reno said wearily, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. The simple pressure stung them horribly, and he idly realized he had left his contacts in untouched for upwards of three days. That, he mused as he reached into his back pocket and produced a black pack of cigarettes and quickly produced a cancer stick from its depths, was terribly unhealthy. He lit the small white cylinder with the half empty Bic lighter he had lifted off of one of the sprawled gang members the night before, but for some reason it tasted like death in his mouth. Maybe he should give that new liquid a try, that water stuff would probably do wonders for his condition. "Besides, I had a long night."
"I'm well aware," Tseng said primly, gazing at him through narrowed eyes, "I happened to be there. I suppose I can over look the incident, however, considering the whole ordeal was a business venture."
With no response readily available, Reno snorted and took another drag on his cigarette. It was better this time, and he quickly admonished himself for his near blasphemous thought of imbibing a non-alcoholic beverage. He turned away from Tseng with a simple roll of his eyes, but was frozen as his boss caught the gesture and barked out a very uncharacteristic, emotional word. "What??"
Well, this had to happen sooner or later, Reno reasoned. He had been waiting for it to happen for some time, but rather thought the morning after such an entertaining show as the one they had put on last night wouldn't be the time or the place for this to happen. Oh well, he groaned in his head, lets do this properly. Maybe he'll do me the favor of gunning me down before I have to see it through to the ending.
He whirled, his eyes blazing, his jaw working as if it couldn't wait to begin the speel he had played over in his head time and time again. All the reason and logic, all the facts and lists of defeat, the big painfully tragic equation that could have only one answer- the Turks were dead in the water, sitting ducks, kites that had just lost all their tailwind. Instead, in his typical fashion, he found himself reducing the entire conversation to two words. "Fuck you!"
Tseng rose slowly, but there was no mistaking the flush that had darkened his cheeks. Though Reno had always been willing- hell, proud- to admit that he worked for a man with shark eyes, even the usually dead black pools were alive with anger as Tseng convulsively tightened his hands into fists, apparently wishing he had his hands on what Reno called 'his little lucky charms bracelet' right now. "Excuse me?" he hissed, though Reno was quite sure he had heard him loud and clear. He voiced something to that effect.
"You heard me! A business venture? A business venture? A fucking business venture!?" Reno's voice rose sharply with each repetition of the phrase, until he was literally screaming at the top of his lungs as Tseng stood less then five feet away. "What kind of deluded, arrogant asshole are you? A business venture? We got in a *fight* Tseng. Do you really think rolling a couple of fat bikers is going to regain any of the credibility we lost when our founder company *fell down around our fucking heads*? I did harder shit than that when I was a Jackal, and we were a group of mal-nourished pissants!"
To the credit of Tseng, he didn't react right away. To the discredit of Tseng, at least in Reno's eyes, when he did react it wasn't with a violent attack that left the two of them clawing feebly at each other from separate stretchers. Instead, the man he had once called his mentor spoke in a quiet, downcast, broken voice, the tone of a man who has lost everything in his life but his illusions and was having even them ripped away from him. "And what," he said slowly, "do you suppose we do instead?"
"I suppose," Reno said with venomous pause, spitting each syllable out like hacked up tar from his well coated lungs, "that you should shove this up your ass. All of this. Your desk, your business ventures, and your fucking blue suit. Do you remember what you told me when I put it on? Do you?"
Tseng's eyes gleamed once as the memory struck him, then went out, dying like wind swept candles. "I told you the only way you'd get to take it off was if you rotted out of it."
"Well," Reno said, practically hissing his words, "consider that done. Everything I signed up to work for is gone. Money. Respect. Fear. We're jokes, Tseng. And you're the biggest joke of us all."
And then he was gone, in a whirl wind of hatred and self loathing, storming out the office door. He ran into Elena halfway down the hall that lead to the offices exit, having to physically restrain himself from simply throwing her against the wall and using her like a toy, before tossing her down into the dirt. The thought sickened him, but for some reason, she sickened him more, and he sickened himself most of all. He marched past her and was gone before she could ask what that strange look he had given her could have possibly meant.