Reno

So you shed a few tears, get shot in the head so that the blood comes gurgling in a delicate line out of your mouth. Is it really worth some bitter salt water to die?

So, there’s this huge red ball overhead, and I’m not crying. I know I’m going to die. There’s simply no point; unlike the citizens of Midgar who find the need to cower onto the ground and pound the pavement madly with broken fists.

And broken hearts.

Hell. What is there to live for now anyways? The Turks. Gone. Shinra? Some kid president who’s younger than me? I’m only 24, and I still feel so old. So you’re probably going to ask next why I don’t just take out my electromag rod and shock myself to death. You really wanna know?

Because it’s the spineless way out. And I sure as hell ain’t one to be spineless. Or to show a weakness. Yeah, some have thrown themselves off of abandoned buildings or took a borrowed gun to their head.

It’s like Wall Market is one big abstract paint splatter. Only it’s not art supplies this time; it’s blood.

Heh. Makes me almost laugh. People crying about their own demise that they brought about.

Avalanche. Trying to save the world. Empty optimism makes me sick. Optimism in general makes me sick, because it’s all empty and worthless.

I remember the first time the Turks wanted me. I was just some kid on the streets of Midgar...back before they built the upper plate. Back then, you could still see the sky. But it was always a dingy brown colour that hurt my eyes.

Then the plate took place. Shinra...they promised us all that we would live on the top of it since the city had gotten so polluted. And we believed them.

We fucking believed them.

And look. Now. Look up.

If the sky was made of steel, maybe the world would be less cold. But down here, in the depths of hell, fires don’t engulf us.

Only frosty demeanors and icicles forming on long dead faces, are what make up our hell. But I’m not one of ‘us’ any longer.

I joined Shinra. What else could I do? Back then, and now, no one thought about honor, or hope. Those are topics left to the wealthy, and the wealthy at that point in life are so vacant inside that they just don’t care anymore.

So, trade my life for cold hard cash you bastards. Every time we’d go on a mission to the slums, I’d remember...

I’d remember lying on the pavement.

Alone. Bleeding.

And cold. I think I remember that the best, because although I had a fever, I was always so cold. Maybe I was because I was just so numb, or maybe it was my internal state coming into the physical world like a crying ghost.

I’d remember people kicking me; kicking me out of their God damned way so that they could pass, unhindered. So that they didn’t have to look at the garbage of what they had created.

I was that garbage. I was that refuse, deposited by the poor and wealthy, lying, cold on streets of broken promises and dusty, forgotten passion.

People expect some big, melodramatic story from the pretty boy that grew up in the slums.

Did I turn tricks? Was I a drug addict? No. I didn’t have the luxury of such escapes.

I’d been approached, but you need money for drugs, and I never had any. I’d been approached, but you need a pretty face for prostitution, and those scars would never heal. And although I tried it once, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I got the shit beaten out of me, and then left for dead. I stood on a street corner, and smiled like a stillborn child, dead. But I wanted money.

It didn’t even occur to me then to try to escape the madness. That’s how small my world was. To you, sure, it may seem like an idiotic endeavor to just survive. But, things are always easier said than done.

So, I tried to sell myself. And I was left, bleeding, on a street corner since the others didn’t take too nicely to me.

So I was this 19 year old kid, lying unconscious on the freezing pavement.

I remember being picked up, and I thought I was dreaming.
I remember being put into a car, and I thought I was dreaming.
I remember lying on a hard bed, and I thought I was dreaming.
I remember white hot injections of mako, and an ugly shell of a man with a bony face and black greasy hair, and then I knew...
I wasn’t dreaming.
I woke up.

Did I say I joined the Turks? No, sorry to break your dreams, but that’s the truth.

I was an experiment. Picked up for an experiment by only God knows who.

A year.

I was injected, probed and gawked at for a year. And when they were done with the sniveling little boy from Sector Three, they threw me away.

Well, they threw away my soul. They ravaged, tortured and then burned anything that was left of it to begin with, and then threw me, senseless, into the Turks.

So, that’s how my brilliant career began you see. What, why are you looking at me like that?

You expected some tragic story of love and death? Sure, I knew my parents. For as long as the bastards bothered to stay around.

Hell, maybe I killed them long ago. Fate is an odd thing. It seems to twist me even more than I already have been.

Fate gave me these scars, these glowing mako eyes, and these hands that have killed more people than you have ever even met. Fate, has given me grief. Life, has given me sorrow.

And my parents gave me nothing.

So, why do I go on living. I couldn’t answer you. I suppose I never committed suicide simply due to the fact that I had faith, that one day, fate would finally bear some mercy.

Fate would finally let me die.