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Stars were a tricky thing when you had lived under the plate for your entire life. The first time that Reno had ever seen them, he thought of tiny white lights fitted into a giant black ceiling. He knew the explanation for the natural sky, but he could never quite shake the feeling that it didn't extend far above the surface of the Planet, and if you went up far enough, you'd simply hit something solid and fall right back down.
Stars were taken for granted when you lived above the plate. When Reno started living there himself, walking around on the upper plate felt as if he were standing on top of a sky that covered hell, the partitions of his childhood under his feet. But the stink of poverty encased by the metal shell was nothing compared to the terrifying, unrestricted winds that blew across oceans and mountains and green wide open spaces, a world that extended into places that Reno's mind couldn't have conjured up even as a day dream.
The most disconcerting part of the night sky was that it moved.
When Reno started living in the Shinra building, buried underneath the fall of a new blue suit and an attempt to hide his initial wonder, he began to draw on the window of the room he lived in with black thick marker, circled the stars he could see out of the glass. They seemed to fade in and out of being like a gossamer shroud hiding something far away, something distant of which he wasn't fond, something unsure. The sky wasn't made of metal here, and it shifted dizzily.
Nights would go by, and he'd look at the marks he'd made on the glass, the circles he'd drawn around the brightest stars he could see. Most had escaped and had gone their ways, and his alignment would no longer make sense.
Rude had given the doodles and circles a strange look one day, standing in Reno's living quarters with a pint of whiskey in one hand and a pack of cigarettes in the other; one outstretched to Reno as a favor, the other a sociable part of their daily lives that Reno never got sick of.
"You're going to ruin the glass," he had said, a hint of curiosity playing in his voice. But he never asked questions. Reno liked that about him.
It's tricky when
you feel someone
has done
something on your behalf
The first time that Rude had saved his life, it was a drop in the well. Reno's induction into the Turks had taught him well enough what to expect, but he'd never had to depend on someone else before. Having a partner as a permanent fixture was not something he had anticipated; Reno had expected to be casually paired with whomever was available, maybe paired more frequently if you worked well together. Like the shifting sky, people simply represented dots that connected when necessary, colliding in space, joining randomly when practical.
But Rude...Rude stayed in those circles he drew, like a nearby sun that only shifted position as much as Reno spun out of control. Having people as fixtures in his life was much harder than keeping track of the ones that left, or the ones that circled him in tenuous spirals, dipping in and out and up and down, distant presences that hovered.
He eventually stopped seeing the sky as a series of small, faceted jewels, and the stars began to look like holes--a scant vision into a different blinding world, shining through to his side, like looking at pinpricks on the wrong side of a heavy curtain in the dark.
It's slippery when
your sense of justice
murmurs underneath
Rude was a quiet killer. When they first met, Reno had wondered where the perfect stillness came from. Simplicity: the twist of a neck, the breaking of bone, the clutch and swipe through sinew with concentrated fingers that exerted the exact amount of pressure to tear. Rude knew the human body better than a prostitute, and all of its pathetic calls and pleas and fluids.
Most people thought he was quiet because he was remorseless, a perfect machine that never deviated from his assignment. Some thought that he might be unable to deviate from the tasks of his chosen profession at all, even if he had he wanted to.
But Reno knew Rude better than that. He knew he knew Rude better than anyone else, and came to trust in the knowledge eventually. You could only spend so much time with another person every day, for years, drinking and killing and living, before you accepted that it was for keeps.
The almost funny fact of the matter was that Rude wasn't stoic at all. He wasn't having mental breakdowns or losses of faith that he had to hide.
This stone cold bastard is...shy. Reno had figured that one out even before he came to trust the other man. He was good at reading people. Always had been, though he didn't know why exactly. And he realized that, although Rude wasn't shy with bullets, he was with words.
Reno had been a fast-talking, flirtatious, convincing thug before he ever joined the Turks, and he still was. Rude, on the other hand, rarely talked to anyone unnecessarily, especially women. Reno eventually realized that it was probably because he didn't know what to say. Armed with a mouth that spit words like every one might be his last, even Reno had to admit, it was hard to start a real conversation with someone (not his forté anyway) when the first answer to "how was your day?" was, "the kill didn't go as planned."
And then when Rude met her, he slipped into a different skin that Reno had never seen; but it was a true one, not fabricated, not a front. Reno didn't know what to do with it, and he didn't like it. He didn't like moving parts, not where Rude was concerned.
And is asking you:
How am I going to make it right?
He was good at reading people, and sometimes, he wished he wasn't. He often found out inconvenient things. Rude was never one to deny the truth, whether it was an inconvenience or not, but Reno had never expected his partner's duplicity. He watched Rude disappear into a place full of crashing stars, and realized that his decision to speak was nothing but a shout into a vast vacuum.
Don't say another word. The words were as clean as sheared cloth, not a thing that Rude didn't already know. For once in his life, he shut his mouth.
With a palm full of stars
I throw them like dice
repeatedly
Home was an inconvenience to the displaced--a dangerous, uncertain concept that nudged complacence toward a sharp drop into pain. Nevertheless, the word had rolled off of Reno's tongue more times than he cared to count, every time with an acetic flourish. But that night there were other things to do, to see: home found without a house, home found in an empty room with windows smudged in black ink, home found in cigarettes and worry, home found too late. He had often heard it said that people were fated to one another.
Once in Sector 3, before Shinra and the sky, Reno had his palm read. He had been drunk, and it had been late, and he had been alone. The palmreader was old and strung out on something, and they had been in a pipe with a rickety table covered by a dirty checkered cloth. He had been feeling philosophical, and a brush with a good amount of sector-brewed brand alcohol had left him hallucinating about a future that didn't exist.
He hated the flickering sector lights far above him. He saw patterns of shadow and slats of green light that seemed to make a grid that was somehow meaningful. Pathways made of light and dark that repeated, not random, not unexpected, just waiting to be understood and analyzed. Fate.
Drunk off of his own paranoid thoughts and booze, he had sat down inside the pipe, the smell of Mako burning in his nose, and held out his palm.
Unsurprisingly, the palmreader saw nothing, just said: that'll be three gil. And Reno had looked at his own hand, seen several distinct lines, lines that led places he couldn't begin to guess at, lines that maybe led nowhere, lines that were like arcs of piping and metal welds that held his small miserable encapsulated world together.
He dropped the gil on the table and his fists clenched. They stayed like that for a long time.
On the table
repeat - repeatedly
I shake them like dice
The ground was cold and wet when Rude's hand pushed him down, after he had offered, and new snow caked itself about his knees in little mounds of white dust.
"You sentimentalist."
The metallic clink, the scrape of leather through a buckle, was one of the loudest things he had ever heard. The belt hung slack, parted, and when he unzipped him, Rude sighed, something conflicted there. Snow settled into Reno's hair and melted.
He could hear Rude make a "tch" sound, mouth forming around the wrong name as Reno swallowed the first thrust. He dug brutally short nails into his palms until he could feel the skin giving way, then let them go again, and his fingers spread out in a burst into the cold, dark air. A flurry of movement, sounds inside of a universe that burst open and then disintegrated in Rude's first and last moan.
Reno struggled to stand, his legs shaky and his knees numb from kneeling on frozen ground. He moved and slouched against a wall, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, spit, then pushed his hair out of his face, and--
and throw them on the table
repeatedly
repeatedly
until the desired constellation appears
They stood looking out over the dark square, other people gathered nearby and clutching open-palmed hands that closed together, and Reno curled his fingers around his cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke into the wintry air.
The tiny white lights lit up in one big burst, and palms were clapping together. He took off the scarf he was wearing under his coat.
"What the hell are we doing out on a cold and snowy night like this?"
He pushed the scarf into Rude's hands.
"Let's go home."
The lazy flakes swirled around them and sparkled in the dark; Reno dropped his head and the cigarette flared red.
How am I going to make it right?
And you hear: how am I going to make it right?