One last generation, and someday they'll all be gone.
[And so ShinRa goes the way of Allag, and mayhap that's for the best. Or mayhap it goes the way of Garlemald, built by a monster and used as a machine for great and terrible ends, yet claimed back by the very citizens who they themselves were victims of it.
Garlemald has her pride, Jullus had roared. He never would've thought he'd find himself filled with pride at the sound of a Garlean war cry, himself, and yet there he was.]
You're on a first-name basis with the head of the company.
[It's a little bit a question, and yet not enough of one that it needn't necessarily be answered any further than it is.]
[ it's a pivot, and it makes Reno grin a little, audible in his tone when he answers. ]
I'm insubordinate. [ and he takes great pride in it, evidently! ] Nah—I call him "sir" in front of people, but... President Shinra was his daddy. Y'know?
[ so "Rufus" it is. just to differentiate him from the monster of a man who made him. ]
[ this is much more event ground. while Reno doesn't exactly mind telling Thancred about his job, about the things ShinRa did, every story is one step closer to Thancred finding out the truth of who Reno is, and that's an inevitability he'd like to postpone for as long as possible. ]
I'd have to take the reins and delve a bit into more of the politics of Eitherys to do it, but aye. The short answer is, one of my comrades had a firm disagreement with his father recently, and showed the old man up and then some.
[He lets that sit a beat, to stew over.]
I'll give you the long answer as well, if you want it.
[Oh. Hmm. That's — Reno affecting a Sharlayan accent is...unexpectedly...hoo boy. Now that's a thought to save for a rainy day, or at least the shower.]
I've mentioned a bit about Sharlayan, and the man who brought me to be educated there, its founding families and all that. The boy in question is that man's grandson. His father, Louisoix's son, is a member of Sharlayan's ruling body, the Forum — one hundred serving representatives who cast votes to decide the nation's policies.
[He pauses a minute, thinking over how to go about this.]
I recall I've also mentioned that Sharlayan is staunchly isolationist, and exercises a policy of strict nonintervention. Louisoix never agreed with that; his son, however, espouses it. I reckon you can guess where this all might be going, mm?
[ post about it on the "reasons I'm hot for bae today" blog Thancred
Reno does recall both of these facts, from what he sort of fondly recalls as The Joyride Night—in the sense that Reno had happily ridden two separate joysticks. ]
I remember, yeah. I'm guessin' the grandson ain't exactly trying to follow in dear old dad's footsteps? Maybe he takes after your Louisoix in that way?
Mmhmm. And they had good reason to clash about it quite recently. Said father has spent the better part of his life and career making ready preparations to save the inhabitants of the star from certain doom — or at least, the ones willing to cooperate with Sharlayan. The ones who wouldn't cause trouble. The ones who could be persuaded to accept what the Forum saw as the only choice.
[But, he thinks — this doesn't sound so different, really, from what Reno himself described, a maniac flying about the universe, landing on planets, bringing them to ruin. It's not the same, not by a longshot, but it's an eerie analogy nevertheless.]
Imagine a "planetkiller" like your Sephiroth wanted to become. The Forum knew something like that was coming for us, and that it was only a matter of time until it reached us. So they made preparations, and with the help of some rather unusual allies, constructed a vessel that could spirit most all of the life on the star away from it before the planetkiller reached us. In effect, we would turn tail and run. Lifeboat as much as we could away, and leave the rest to oblivion.
[He goes quiet a minute. It's a different sort of quiet than his pauses before.]
...Ryne would've — she would've been among the latter. The oblivion.
[ the good of the many and the good of the few. Reno is too familiar with the calculations that go into the decision of how many dead is collateral damage, acceptable risk. those decisions are made by men at desks far away from the lives they'll end—they never have to look the condemned in the face before they die.
nor had Reno, not really. numbers on a screen. a body count on the news. the thought of it makes him nauseated. ]
We all did. But Alphinaud — his father had disowned him and his sister over their differences. Claimed he was doing it for their sakes, despite refusing to listen to their feelings. So standing up to him wasn't just a matter of winning the moral debate, for Alphinaud — it was about being heard by his own father. As if what we were doing wasn't reckless and strenuous enough already.
[He'll be after your seat on the Forum next, Estinien had taunted the old man, and gods know Alphinaud has earned it by now. Not just by hereditary right or scholarly aptitude — he's been out in the real world, gone from thinking he was clever enough to save it to watching it all fail catastrophically before his eyes to walking the long slow path to really do it, one painful step at a time.]
We convinced them — he convinced them — to gamble with all our lives, instead of going through with the completion of their plan. To use their resources not for escape but to go out and confront the planetkiller ourselves, before it reached us. We must've sounded right mad...but there's something to it, I suppose. The thought that we'd all stand united in success or in failure, rather than partitioning off what we could and abandoning the rest.
[ there have been a few moments so far in which Reno has been made keenly aware of just how good Thancred is, how strong. how likely he is to throw himself into the line of fire for the sake of those who can't fight for themselves. maybe he doesn't see it, himself, but Reno does: the fierce warm glow of him, his determination and passion and desire to do what's right, no matter the cost.
illuminated from behind, light comes through the cracks. Reno thinks of that fragile moment on the gala dance floor, when he'd looked up into Thancred's face and felt the lure of temptation to crush this decliate thing growing between them before it had a chance to crush him first.
he should have done it. it would have been kinder. just the thought of how badly it will hurt Thancred to find out who, to find out what Reno really is (and he's under no delusions, here; Thancred will find out, eventually) aches enough that Reno has to pull the phone away from his face to exhale a sharp breath. he should have done it.
but Reno is selfish, and he cares about Thancred more than he knows how to put words to, so after no more than a second's pause he brings the phone back to his face and says, ] So you went up into space to fight your Jenova before she had a chance to land?
[ his incredulity isn't false, either. what in the hells were they thinking? ]
[I've died twice and had my soul removed once was one of the sentences that started this whole thing between them; in a way, he almost doesn't want to circle back to it now, for all that it's immediately pertinent. Difficult to delve deep into how something can be a suicide mission in which they all died and yet they all walked away, and not wind up making the conversation all the worse for it.
It makes him think, briefly, of the Northern Crater — of the way Reno's voice had gone tight when recounting how two of his comrades had stayed behind while he escaped, lost to necessity and the outcome that had to happen. That's not so far off from what happened at Ultima Thule, really. Better, perhaps, not to make him relive it all again.]
It wasn't one of our most sound ideas, I'll admit. Not that we had many to choose from.
[He lies still, just breathing, listening to the sound of Reno's voice. It's not the first time this conversation that he's wished they were together. It is the first that he's wished it for his own sake, instead of for Reno's.]
I thought it might have come for your Gaia, back when we were first comparing notes. That your Jenova was my Jenova, somehow.
[ even though Thancred doesn't mention it, Reno's thinking about it, about that sentence he'd read in Thancred's two truths and a lie post and how unbelievable he'd found it at the time. not so, any longer. now he has no trouble imagining Thancred letting himself die multiple times in the service of the greater good and, somehow, despite it all, finding his way back to life in the end.
for a moment they both fall quiet, just listening to each other breathe on the other end of the line. for all that it's just a moment of silence, it feels toe-curlingly intimate. Reno wishes he were there. ]
I'm glad you made it. [ is what he says eventually, a little more softly than he means to.
after another second, then, ] I remember that, when I first mentioned the calamity. Do you think it's the same still?
[And he finds himself thinking, briefly, fleetingly, of Papalymo — gods, how long has it been since he last thought of Papalymo? — and how impossible a thing it is to leave when one of your number intends to stand and fight, and how he'd had to drag their friend the Warrior bodily onto the airship because they wouldn't have left on their own...
They're alike, he and Reno. The ones who can see the writing on the wall, sometimes. It's never easy, but they do it. It's their job, to do it.]
Was our calamity something to do with Jenova, you mean? No, I'm certain it wasn't. Not if ShinRa worked out how to extract something from her and put it into people. The only influence ours had on people was —
[He stops. Thinks. How best to articulate the horror?]
— it prevented them from entering the Lifestream, upon their demise. Obliterated them, so there was nothing left to pass on at all. You would know, if this were that.
[ Reno's thoughts have drifted so far from the Northern Crater, to Jenova and the SOLDIER program and the collateral damage from the Sector 7 plate, that for a second Thancred's words—I know it wasn't an easy decision—stick like a knife in Reno's chest.
but he means the mission, doesn't he? the trip up north that left the Turks two men short and plus one alien head, the one where he'd taken the controls and pulled the bird up and assumed that the last he'd ever see of Tseng and Elena was their corpses on some cold foreign ground.
and that aches too, but in a different way, because it was an easy decision. when it was between the men and the mission, the mission always came first. ]
Fuck. [ Reno exhales a low curse at that. Jenova the calamity had been many things, but incapable of entering the Lifestream wasn't one of them. rather famously, in fact. ] How the fuck did you fight a creature that can obliterate people?
[Such a simple thing, unmaking men. In the blinking of an eye, he was gone.]
...Not very successfully, I suppose.
[He lifts a hand, flexing his fingers, watching tendons move and muscles shift beneath the faintly scarred skin. His hand. His flesh. All still there, all in one piece, put back together after oblivion. He closes his eyes and thinks of the chill wind on the planetarium patio, of brick chafing the inside of his forearm, of white-hot sensation flashing behind his eyes over and over again — Reno behind him, inside him, solid, real.
Still here. Back from the dead. Alive.]
Save for a dear friend, who always seems capable of pulling off the impossible right when we all need it most. If there's one thing I regret about it all...
[Just one thing, Thancred? Just one?]
It's that I couldn't do more to help. That they had to do so much of it alone.
[ not very successfully, I suppose, says Thancred.
and Reno—he's a fool but he's not an idiot. he can read between those lines as clear as day, the implications of such a simple sentence: that they hadn't come out entirely unscathed after all. maybe it had been Thancred, even. he thinks about the casual, almost offhand way Thancred had mentioned dying twice. he thinks that Thancred would probably do it a third time if he were asked, if he thought it necessary.
the horror of it sinks its claws into Reno. he lifts a hand and covers his eyes and says, ] Hey.
[ he says, ] What are you doing right now?
[ he says, ] Come over?
[ this the opposite of destruction, Reno thinks, but he really doesn't have it in him to do anything else. ]
[He's supposed to handle things like this on his own. He and Y'shtola had never talked about it, in the short span that she'd been around — but then, they've never been good at talking to each other about matters of tempestuous personal feelings, have they. He's not told Ryne. Maybe he doesn't want — maybe it's better that she doesn't know. It's behind him, anyway. He can bundle it up and put it away, and keep walking.
He's supposed to walk away from people when he feels like this, not toward them. Take his warring emotions and go far afield with them until he's cut them out or shut them up or both. It doesn't usually come to someone saying come here, come to me.
It takes him a humiliatingly long time before two and two come together and it occurs to him that their positions might have perfectly reversed from where they'd been before, that right now maybe it's Reno lying alone and thinking I wish I were there, I don't want you to be alone, I wish there were aught I could do only about the frigid nothingness of space instead of the icy hell of the Northern Crater.
Reno might be saying, I don't want you to be alone with this.
...Him?]
Mm, all right.
[Does he deserve that?]
I'll bring something? I go right past the Thavnairian curry place on the way.
[ the silence stretches on just a little too long to be natural, and for a moment Reno almost thinks Thancred is going to say no. it almost wouldn't surprise him—it's a big ask, to take something like this and bring it here to Reno instead of walking the ticking time bomb out into the wilderness to reduce collateral damage. Reno braces himself to hear it, and to then be unusually graceful about the rejection.
but a rejection isn't what comes. it's not enthusiastic agreement—but it's still agreement, and Reno will take the wins where he can get them, considering. ]
I don't know what Thavnairian means, [ Reno says, still with his hand covering his eyes, ] but yeah, that sounds real good.
[ another brief pause, and then Reno drops his hand from his face and smiles wryly up at the ceiling. ]
You'll like it. Reminiscent of Wutai, but a little different — still spicy, though.
[Later, sometime in the future, maybe in the dead of night and maybe when they're curled up together and maybe when it's all settled enough that there isn't much on his mind but how content he is in that singular quiet moment, he'll think to himself how natural it was to say you'll like it, and know it was true, because he knows what Reno likes. Because that's something he can predict now, effortlessly, and be right.
It'll really be something to think about.
It'll be a problem for a future Thancred.]
Let myself in, as opposed to every other time when I've...what, knocked?
[It gets a laugh out of him, at least, and that's worth its weight in gil right now.]
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no subject
[And so ShinRa goes the way of Allag, and mayhap that's for the best. Or mayhap it goes the way of Garlemald, built by a monster and used as a machine for great and terrible ends, yet claimed back by the very citizens who they themselves were victims of it.
Garlemald has her pride, Jullus had roared. He never would've thought he'd find himself filled with pride at the sound of a Garlean war cry, himself, and yet there he was.]
You're on a first-name basis with the head of the company.
[It's a little bit a question, and yet not enough of one that it needn't necessarily be answered any further than it is.]
no subject
I'm insubordinate. [ and he takes great pride in it, evidently! ] Nah—I call him "sir" in front of people, but... President Shinra was his daddy. Y'know?
[ so "Rufus" it is. just to differentiate him from the monster of a man who made him. ]
no subject
[A beat passes.]
It's rather fun, watching the upstart son change his father's legacy, isn't it?
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[ this is much more event ground. while Reno doesn't exactly mind telling Thancred about his job, about the things ShinRa did, every story is one step closer to Thancred finding out the truth of who Reno is, and that's an inevitability he'd like to postpone for as long as possible. ]
You know something about it?
no subject
[He lets that sit a beat, to stew over.]
I'll give you the long answer as well, if you want it.
no subject
no subject
I've mentioned a bit about Sharlayan, and the man who brought me to be educated there, its founding families and all that. The boy in question is that man's grandson. His father, Louisoix's son, is a member of Sharlayan's ruling body, the Forum — one hundred serving representatives who cast votes to decide the nation's policies.
[He pauses a minute, thinking over how to go about this.]
I recall I've also mentioned that Sharlayan is staunchly isolationist, and exercises a policy of strict nonintervention. Louisoix never agreed with that; his son, however, espouses it. I reckon you can guess where this all might be going, mm?
no subject
Reno does recall both of these facts, from what he sort of fondly recalls as The Joyride Night—in the sense that Reno had happily ridden two separate joysticks. ]
I remember, yeah. I'm guessin' the grandson ain't exactly trying to follow in dear old dad's footsteps? Maybe he takes after your Louisoix in that way?
no subject
[But, he thinks — this doesn't sound so different, really, from what Reno himself described, a maniac flying about the universe, landing on planets, bringing them to ruin. It's not the same, not by a longshot, but it's an eerie analogy nevertheless.]
Imagine a "planetkiller" like your Sephiroth wanted to become. The Forum knew something like that was coming for us, and that it was only a matter of time until it reached us. So they made preparations, and with the help of some rather unusual allies, constructed a vessel that could spirit most all of the life on the star away from it before the planetkiller reached us. In effect, we would turn tail and run. Lifeboat as much as we could away, and leave the rest to oblivion.
[He goes quiet a minute. It's a different sort of quiet than his pauses before.]
...Ryne would've — she would've been among the latter. The oblivion.
no subject
nor had Reno, not really. numbers on a screen. a body count on the news. the thought of it makes him nauseated. ]
Did he put a stop to it?
no subject
[He'll be after your seat on the Forum next, Estinien had taunted the old man, and gods know Alphinaud has earned it by now. Not just by hereditary right or scholarly aptitude — he's been out in the real world, gone from thinking he was clever enough to save it to watching it all fail catastrophically before his eyes to walking the long slow path to really do it, one painful step at a time.]
We convinced them — he convinced them — to gamble with all our lives, instead of going through with the completion of their plan. To use their resources not for escape but to go out and confront the planetkiller ourselves, before it reached us. We must've sounded right mad...but there's something to it, I suppose. The thought that we'd all stand united in success or in failure, rather than partitioning off what we could and abandoning the rest.
no subject
illuminated from behind, light comes through the cracks. Reno thinks of that fragile moment on the gala dance floor, when he'd looked up into Thancred's face and felt the lure of temptation to crush this decliate thing growing between them before it had a chance to crush him first.
he should have done it. it would have been kinder. just the thought of how badly it will hurt Thancred to find out who, to find out what Reno really is (and he's under no delusions, here; Thancred will find out, eventually) aches enough that Reno has to pull the phone away from his face to exhale a sharp breath. he should have done it.
but Reno is selfish, and he cares about Thancred more than he knows how to put words to, so after no more than a second's pause he brings the phone back to his face and says, ] So you went up into space to fight your Jenova before she had a chance to land?
[ his incredulity isn't false, either. what in the hells were they thinking? ]
That sounds like a suicide mission.
no subject
It makes him think, briefly, of the Northern Crater — of the way Reno's voice had gone tight when recounting how two of his comrades had stayed behind while he escaped, lost to necessity and the outcome that had to happen. That's not so far off from what happened at Ultima Thule, really. Better, perhaps, not to make him relive it all again.]
It wasn't one of our most sound ideas, I'll admit. Not that we had many to choose from.
[He lies still, just breathing, listening to the sound of Reno's voice. It's not the first time this conversation that he's wished they were together. It is the first that he's wished it for his own sake, instead of for Reno's.]
I thought it might have come for your Gaia, back when we were first comparing notes. That your Jenova was my Jenova, somehow.
no subject
for a moment they both fall quiet, just listening to each other breathe on the other end of the line. for all that it's just a moment of silence, it feels toe-curlingly intimate. Reno wishes he were there. ]
I'm glad you made it. [ is what he says eventually, a little more softly than he means to.
after another second, then, ] I remember that, when I first mentioned the calamity. Do you think it's the same still?
no subject
[And he finds himself thinking, briefly, fleetingly, of Papalymo — gods, how long has it been since he last thought of Papalymo? — and how impossible a thing it is to leave when one of your number intends to stand and fight, and how he'd had to drag their friend the Warrior bodily onto the airship because they wouldn't have left on their own...
They're alike, he and Reno. The ones who can see the writing on the wall, sometimes. It's never easy, but they do it. It's their job, to do it.]
Was our calamity something to do with Jenova, you mean? No, I'm certain it wasn't. Not if ShinRa worked out how to extract something from her and put it into people. The only influence ours had on people was —
[He stops. Thinks. How best to articulate the horror?]
— it prevented them from entering the Lifestream, upon their demise. Obliterated them, so there was nothing left to pass on at all. You would know, if this were that.
no subject
but he means the mission, doesn't he? the trip up north that left the Turks two men short and plus one alien head, the one where he'd taken the controls and pulled the bird up and assumed that the last he'd ever see of Tseng and Elena was their corpses on some cold foreign ground.
and that aches too, but in a different way, because it was an easy decision. when it was between the men and the mission, the mission always came first. ]
Fuck. [ Reno exhales a low curse at that. Jenova the calamity had been many things, but incapable of entering the Lifestream wasn't one of them. rather famously, in fact. ] How the fuck did you fight a creature that can obliterate people?
no subject
...Not very successfully, I suppose.
[He lifts a hand, flexing his fingers, watching tendons move and muscles shift beneath the faintly scarred skin. His hand. His flesh. All still there, all in one piece, put back together after oblivion. He closes his eyes and thinks of the chill wind on the planetarium patio, of brick chafing the inside of his forearm, of white-hot sensation flashing behind his eyes over and over again — Reno behind him, inside him, solid, real.
Still here. Back from the dead. Alive.]
Save for a dear friend, who always seems capable of pulling off the impossible right when we all need it most. If there's one thing I regret about it all...
[Just one thing, Thancred? Just one?]
It's that I couldn't do more to help. That they had to do so much of it alone.
no subject
and Reno—he's a fool but he's not an idiot. he can read between those lines as clear as day, the implications of such a simple sentence: that they hadn't come out entirely unscathed after all. maybe it had been Thancred, even. he thinks about the casual, almost offhand way Thancred had mentioned dying twice. he thinks that Thancred would probably do it a third time if he were asked, if he thought it necessary.
the horror of it sinks its claws into Reno. he lifts a hand and covers his eyes and says, ] Hey.
[ he says, ] What are you doing right now?
[ he says, ] Come over?
[ this the opposite of destruction, Reno thinks, but he really doesn't have it in him to do anything else. ]
no subject
He's supposed to walk away from people when he feels like this, not toward them. Take his warring emotions and go far afield with them until he's cut them out or shut them up or both. It doesn't usually come to someone saying come here, come to me.
It takes him a humiliatingly long time before two and two come together and it occurs to him that their positions might have perfectly reversed from where they'd been before, that right now maybe it's Reno lying alone and thinking I wish I were there, I don't want you to be alone, I wish there were aught I could do only about the frigid nothingness of space instead of the icy hell of the Northern Crater.
Reno might be saying, I don't want you to be alone with this.
...Him?]
Mm, all right.
[Does he deserve that?]
I'll bring something? I go right past the Thavnairian curry place on the way.
[Does it matter?]
no subject
but a rejection isn't what comes. it's not enthusiastic agreement—but it's still agreement, and Reno will take the wins where he can get them, considering. ]
I don't know what Thavnairian means, [ Reno says, still with his hand covering his eyes, ] but yeah, that sounds real good.
[ another brief pause, and then Reno drops his hand from his face and smiles wryly up at the ceiling. ]
Let yourself in.
no subject
[Later, sometime in the future, maybe in the dead of night and maybe when they're curled up together and maybe when it's all settled enough that there isn't much on his mind but how content he is in that singular quiet moment, he'll think to himself how natural it was to say you'll like it, and know it was true, because he knows what Reno likes. Because that's something he can predict now, effortlessly, and be right.
It'll really be something to think about.
It'll be a problem for a future Thancred.]
Let myself in, as opposed to every other time when I've...what, knocked?
[It gets a laugh out of him, at least, and that's worth its weight in gil right now.]
All right. I'll be there soon.