pistols were far more common. Well, common in existence, if not in form. To compare the Mako and Desert
Eagle .45s to the bird shot filled starter pistols that some of the make shift hoods had would be a crime, but
the fact is that almost every man and women within seeing distance was packing some sort of heat. This did
very little to soothe Reno’s already jarred nerves, knowing that anyone around them could be the people
responsible for nabbing his sister.
Rude seemed a good deal calmer, but inside he was screaming. He liked to reason that the less he actually
talked, the faster he could work inside his head. Granted, even with the added speed his thoughts weren’t
going anywhere good. He didn’t care how many people there were, they shouldn’t have been able to take
out both Tseng and Elena without the use of guns, even if they had been trained up a little. This whole thing
rang of professional interest, which was only good when those interests lead to them gaining vast amounts of
cash in a relatively short time span.
“So who are we coming to meet?” he asked suddenly, as they passed a particularly unpleasant looking alley
that featured a local hooker performing the service for which she had been paid. Hookers always made Rude
particularly nervous, especially considering the way he’d had to grow up in a whole house of them. If Reno
had drug him out here at this ungodly hour for a mind-clearing fuck, he swore to god he would knock him
out and leave him in the part of town with the touchy feely pick pockets.
“Joey Vercetti,” Reno answered quickly, causing Rude to raise a pair of thin eyebrows up above his
sunglasses. The Vercetti’s were a well known family back in Wutai, mainly because they were the only
underground group that managed to exist in the almost entirely ninja cultured continent. With all the time
Reno had been spending in Wutai lately, it wasn’t exactly surprising he’d made some new contacts, but Rude
had to figure that the Kisargi girl would be more than a little pissed about it.
In a blinding flash of the obvious, Rude realized he’d just pin pointed the exact reason Reno had probably
made the contact in the first place.
Vercetti was a relatively small man, but he contained the super ball quality, that little edge of explosive
unpredictability packed into a tiny frame that caused people to take a few steps back whenever they came
upon him. Reno and Rude didn’t have time for intimidation, and they didn’t have time to feign it out of
respect.
“Did you find out?” Reno asked simply, not even throwing in a slight head nod for greeting. Vercetti opened
his mouth to answer, then paused, as if unsure what to say- or unsure whether he wanted to be there when
Reno heard it.
“I’m sorry about your sister...” he tried as a way to start, but Reno cut him off with a sharp wave of his
hand.
“So am I,” he said icily, his eyes glittering, “so did you find out?”
Seeing there was no way he was going to be able to walk delicately around this, Joey shrugged, and pulled a
slip of paper out from inside his coat. With the air of a student being forced to read his latest essay in front
of the entire school, he began, in rushed and almost strangled tones.
“Things have been going to hell lately,” he said, “everything is in an uproar. Its almost like someone has
been purposely fucking with the underground, you understand? I keep getting flares of information,
indications of really big news, and then I never hear anything on the subject again. Sometimes the informant
is still around, but something always gets to him, something always shuts him up before he can give a follow
up report. Someone is being very, very thorough.”
Rude almost expected Reno to cut the man up again, and tell him to hurry things along, but to his surprised
his crimson haired colleague was silent and passive as he listened, taking in the information like a sponge.
With another quick breath, Vercetti continued, “I just want you to know how difficult it was to obtain this
information, considering all of my information taps keep getting shut off or shot down. And considering that
*I* am an information tap at the moment, I hope you keep such thoughts in consideration if you ever happen
to be captured, tortured, or put in any situation where anything resembling my name might be mentioned.”
This time, Reno did react, but before he could bark out an angry comment Vercetti quickly rushed on,
sensing the barely concealed rage within his employer. “The word is that the company behind almost all of
this is new, its called Helixon. A merger company, it took the entire city by surprise when they joined up...
I’m not sure which two joined, but one of them did energy work, and the other was a biological testing
center.”
Reno stared for a moment, his eyes wide but blank, the pit that always seemed to be nestled in his gut
suddenly going stone cold and rising up into his throat. Helixon. He knew more about the company than
Vercetti ever would, the Turks had been doing errand work for them for the last year- putting things into
position, zoning ordinances, taking care of unwilling employees... and even before they’d made their official
claim to exist, the company had secured an iron grip on Midgar. An iron grip the Turks had helped apply.
“Are you sure?” he asked slowly, quietly.
“I’m never sure,” Joey said with a quick, jerky shrug, “but that’s the best bet you’re going to get. They’ve
been doing more damage in the last week than I think you guys have done, ever. No offense, of course...” he
added that last part quickly, as Rude began to bristle from his stoic position.
“And rumor has it... they’re using mako again.”
Reno closed his eyes, inwardly groaning. Of course they were using mako again. Its the only thing that a
biology company and an energy industry could ever have in common need. It was the reason they’d been
taking hits out on ever construction and zoning government worker in existence. And it was the reason
they’d taken Rory, and Gabriel... because the Turks knew about it, and they needed them to keep their
mouths shut. At least until their grip tightened just a little more.
“Here,” Reno said through grit teeth, holding out a roll of bills that Joey eagerly took. His informant paused
for a moment, as if expecting another order or a parting comment, but he got neither, and after a few
prolonged moments of hesitation he darted away, disappearing into the fog and the darkness. The two Turks
waited until he was long out of sight, and then turned to face each other.
“We should have known about this.” Reno said simply, angrily, his voice strained with the resistance against
screaming. “We should have guessed that they wouldn’t leave anything to chance... we knew they were
smarter than the others, we *knew* it, and we still didn’t-”
“-they aren’t smart, they’re careful.” Rude interrupted, putting a hand on his friends shoulder. “Smart would
have been paying us extra to keep quiet. Taking two of our own is about as stupid as it gets.”
“Stupid?” Reno growled. “Stupid would be if we could do anything about it! But these people can’t be taken
down, or blown up, or exposed... they’re seeped all through the city like a fucking nervous system. We set
that up, remember?”
“I remember.” Rude said simply. “I remember that system isn’t perfect, too. Joey just proved that by giving
us the name. So now we follow protocol, and we go to our highest ranking loyal source, and see what they
can do.”
Reno paused for a moment, until it occurred to him exactly who Rude was referring to. And then he
groaned.
Yuffie.
A ‘loyal contact’ was a cute way of putting it, too, but it solved Reno’s dilemma of having no idea what to
call her. In his mind, he would always be the brat, but that didn’t really work in public settings, did it? Was
she his colleague? An associate? A really, really energetic fuck? Or his girlfriend, his lover, his mate?
Sometimes he had to wonder whether or not he even liked her, which was almost pathetic considering they
had been seeing each other on and off for the last twenty four months.
“Why would she know anything about it?” Reno asked, responding with Rude’s unasked question with a
more verbalized one of his own. “There’s no way in hell they went to Wutai to set up a Mako Reactor...
Shin Ra didn’t even have the balls to do that, and they had them everywhere else on the planet.”
“While Helixon hasn’t set anything up outside of Midgar, I know,” Rude answered, “but that isn’t what I
meant. Despite her current pagoda obligations, Yuffie is a materia hunter. She would be the first one to
notice if they were popping up more frequently in any area.”
Profoundly trumped of any excuse not to do so, Reno rolled his eyes and pulled out his cell phone, quickly
dialing the ninja’s number. To a mixed reaction from the Turk, the phone simply rang on with no response,
and by the time it had hit ring number eight he hung up, and gave Rude a shrug. “She isn’t there,” he said
simply, “she must have left her phone lying around.”
“Does that sound like her?” Rude asked.
Thinking about it, Reno had to admit that it didn’t. “Why?” he asked, sudden and unwanted alarm creeping
into his voice, “what’s on your mind?”
“Call Godo,” Rude answered. “Ask where she is.”
Finally catching Rude’s hidden meaning, that Yuffie herself might have been caught up in this sudden
maelstrom of underground activity, Reno had to steady his fingers to dial the next number right. He wasn’t
calling Godo- it would have been pointless, the Wutai overlord wouldn’t have given him the time of day if he
was on fire and Reno was holding an extinguisher. Instead, he called the next best thing, the only contact he
had into the Pagoda besides Yuffie herself- Shake.
“He-hello?” the voice on the other end was shaken and expectant, and Reno stared at the phone in surprise
for a few moments before answering back. The Shake he was used to talking to was made of stone, or at the
very least a highly compacted mud lump, but right now it was like trying to deal with water.
“Shake?” he asked, unsure whether he had even dialed the right number.
“Reno... oh.” Shake sounded disappointed in finding the red haired Turk on the other end of the line, if not
all out crestfallen. “What do you need?”
Ignoring the question, Reno pressed in on Shake’s surprising mood. “What’s going on?” he asked, dread
setting on him as he made the connection between his doubts about Yuffie and Shake’s tone. The answer he
received confirmed his worried suspicions, and almost sent him reeling in the center of the street.
“Its Ms. Kisargi,” Shake’s almost tearful sounding reply came, “she was killed in Costa Del Sol. An
explosion. A-”
Reno idly dropped the phone to the pavement, and the sounds of Shake’s pained explanations continued to
waft up, garbled, through the air. Rude shot Reno a questioning look, but Reno simply shook his head. “Go
back to Tseng and Elena,” he said quickly, “I’m going to go to Helixon and look stuff up.”
Rude blinked. “Reno, what did-”
“Go back to Tseng and Elena.” Reno interrupted.
“Reno-”
“Go. Ill get back to you later.”
***
When Rory woke up, it took her an unusually long amount of time to realize she wasn’t dreaming. She
couldn’t really be blamed by this, as her returning consciousness came paired with a whole lot of darkness,
pierced by the gleam of violently green eyes. When her eyes finally adjusted to the lack of light, she saw an
entire form to go with the eyes, that seemed to match with them perfectly. Tall, lanky, and absolutely
radiating with the impression that it contained far more muscle than was ever meant to be fit in such a fragile
looking frame.
His name was Gabriel. And he was shackled to the wall.
There was a surprisingly long pause between the time Rory noticed that and the time she noticed that she
was bound up in the exact same way. Something was wrong with her, she wasn’t thinking straight, things
weren’t clicking as fast or as clearly as they were supposed to be... even the corners of her vision were hazy.
So it was that Gabriel’s features were blurred as he smiled at her, weakly, and rolled his eyes upwards
towards their binds.
“We have really got to stop waking up like this,” he said in jest, but his voice held none of its usual mirth.
This was probably caused, or at least aided by, a nasty looking gash that split his bottom lip open, and made
it almost impossible for him to smirk. When Rory didn’t answer, although clearly awake, he got even more
serious. “Hey...” he whispered, his pitch rising, “Rory? Aurora??”
Aurora. No one called her that anymore, Rory recalled with disappointment, though she wasn’t so adamant
about it as she had been. The name had seemed to lose its appeal as she grew up, and realized that the stars
and the sky, as pretty as they could be, were absolutely meaningless to real life. Like a fairy tale, she
guessed, she had just grown out of the Heavens.
“Rory!?”
Gabriel might have been the last one to still call her by her real name, but that was more because other
people weren’t than anything else. He tried so hard, she thought, so incredibly hard to be anything but
normal. Probably because deep down, on the deepest level, in his DNA and his genes, he was completely
different. Its entirely understandable for him to want to act that out to some level, even if it had lead to their
break up.
They’d tried dating a few times, until they’d given up on the concept altogether when their dinners and
movies simply ended in falling asleep on the couch, or when any attempt at even the basest romanticism, like
holding hands, would turn to demonstrations of the newest pressure point they had managed to coax out of
the older Turks, the real Turks. The spark simply wasn’t there, and though she couldn’t guarantee it, Rory
had to believe they were better friends because of it.
“Huh?” she asked suddenly and far too loudly, though she had no idea why she had spoken at all. It wasn’t
really in response to anything Gabriel had said, she hadn’t been listening anyway, but he seemed to take it as
one, and she saw him noticeably brighten with relief, so she decided to let him go on the assumption.
“I think,” he reasoned, “that you have a concussion. You got hit pretty hard in the head.”
“I...” Rory stopped, looking around. “Where?”
“I don’t know,” Gabriel admitted, joining her in scoping their surroundings. The shackles the jutted out of
the wall and attached to their wrists seemed entirely out of place, as the wall they came from was plain and
white washed, just part of what seemed to be a very ordinary room. There was carpeting beneath their feet,
and a window off to their left, that had been covered in cardboard and duct tape. Not to most efficient way
of blocking an escape, but it would do the trick on stopping any curious gazes.
“Hey. Not so much talking.”
The two jerked, more from surprise than from fear, for the voice that had cut in from their left hadn’t been
loud or threatening, simply sudden. They turned to gaze at its source, only to see a man of roughly thirty
standing in the doorway leading to the room. He fumbled with the wall for a minute before finding the wall
switch and flipping it up, momentarily blinding the two captured adolescents. Rory stared at him blankly,
until her eyes trailed down to the gun holstered at his waist, with a spot of blood on the holster.
The sudden recollection hit her like a bullet train, almost sending her back into unconsciousness with the
crushing invasion of her mind- a movie, compacted into a seconds flash, and hooked up behind her eyes.
They’d been typing... they were always typing, it seemed, Reno liked to keep them off of field work
whenever it was possible. Rory herself for obvious reasons, and Gabriel for only slightly less obvious ones-
she was and always would be his little sister, and Gabriel would be able to keep her company and stop her
from playing the over protective card on Reno every time he held her back. So it was they’d become the
Turks first secretaries, and they’d been typing when their door had been shot off its hinges.
Gabriel had gone for his gun, but he’d only gotten half way before he had a shotgun pointed at his head. This
didn’t stop him from screaming out a blue streak of curses, however, to tip off Tseng and Elena, and Rory
had tensed up as she prepared to see her friends head blown back into the wall. But the man had simply
hefted his gun and brought it crashing down on his head, silencing his cries and dropping him to the floor.
More men rushed in, wearing strange crimson uniforms. They’d almost ignored her, but the last one through
had caught her eye, and pulled out his hand gun when she tried to run. She expected to soon be the proud
owner of a few new orifices, but instead of shooting her, the man had simply smacked the butt of the pistol
upside her temple, and sending her into star seeing darkness.
It was the same man, but he was out of his uniform now. And he seemed a good deal more calm than the
screaming, wild eyed invader who had knocked her out cold when she could just hope was a few hours ago.
“Did you hear me?” he asked, but not with the usual viciousness of a captor, but instead simply quizzisism.
Rory and Gabriel both nodded, and he nodded back. “Good. Ill go get you some food and stuff, as long as
you don’t get too loud.”
With her own eyes adjusting to the light, Rory gazed into the mans, and had a sudden insight into why he
was acting so subdued and calm despite the situation which implied neither. He was stoned out of his mind.
Either Gabriel noticed it too, or simply decided to go for boldness, Rory never knew. He asked the question
that’s almost never asked, and is certainly never answered, in any situation slightly resembling this one.
“What the hell do you want with us?”
Understandably, the man seemed stunned by the question, but threw Rory into complete confusion as he
answered it without any further pause. “You’re collateral. They don’t want your partners getting involved in
the silencings that are going on, so were supposed to keep you until its over.”
“Keep us? Why not kill us?” Gabriel pressed further, his second sentence prompting Rory to go into a
sudden violent image of kicking him several times in the head until he shut up, but once again, the man
simply answered with no detectable lie.
“Because they want to hire you, probable. After, I mean,” the man paused, looking confused, and them
seemingly remembered the food and water. He turned and walked out the door. Rory and Gabriel shot each
other bewildered looks, the unasked question obvious between them...
...who the fuck is ‘they’?