tampered | Log - complete

Log - complete

When; Sept 24th
Rating; PG-13 - blood
Characters; Cloud and Reno
Summary; During the 'Out Damn Spot' curse day, Cloud goes to talk to Reno about the past.
Log;

He wasn't sure why he was doing this. Cloud stopped just outside of Reno's door, dripping blood onto the floor as he looked down and thought through this impulse. Reno asked for him over the Network and that said a lot for what the redheaded Turk was feeling at that moment. Decision made, Cloud nodded - blood flicking across the door jam - and entered the apartment. From the state Reno sounded in, and from what he knew of the Turk, Cloud knew where to head.

He rapped lightly on the door jam so Reno wouldn't be surprised, and waited.

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There was a sudden flailing in the bathtub as Reno tried to sit up straight and accidentally pulled the shower curtain down on top of him. The blood was making things slippery- not that he was taking a bath, but he'd rather have it drip down the drain than over the carpet.

Claws of Doom jumped off the toilet seat and ran behind the trash can, startled.

When he got the curtain off him, Reno gave a weak smile, leaning over the edge. "Hey, Cloud. You look like you took a dip in a vat of dye."

A faint smile was there on his face as Cloud watched the flailing. He glanced over at the cat behind the trash can and crouched down, holding out his hand to Claws.

"Hey, Reno." He shrugged, looking over at the redhead. "It looks like you're trying to drown in a lake."

The smile faded. "Yeah, well, I never wanted to swim. He's going to bite ya if you try anything, by the way."

Honestly, Reno never had wanted to push the button, but... loyalty overrode everything. He remembered trying not to think of much of anything before and after that incident, but the sound had stayed with him.

"I gotta ask, Cloud, why'd you come over? You coulda just said 'deal' and walked off."

"I've heard drowning isn't an easy death."

Cloud sat back, resting his arms on his knees and looking worse for wear, the blood smeared in his hair and along the side of his face looking older, darker than the rest. It wasn't blood he personally shed, but it was a part of his guilt just like the stainned ribbon wrapped around his arm.

"Zack's trying to cheer me up and he's really not going to. And he doesn't know about Midgar. What we did there."

The plate falling had been something in a long string of bad moves by both parties. Cloud often wondered if some of those people had lived trapped until monsters and the elements got to them. It was one of the many reasons he didn't sleep very much at night.

"I'd be surprised if he cheered himself out of a barn right now..." The turk plopped back down low in the bathtub, feeling more stable like that than sitting up. The blood dripped off him- running in to his eyes, and soaking his clothing.

"Midgar's a tricky subject... I can get the logic of what happened, but when you hear that sound of the city tearin' itself apart, it's a different story." Reno paused, clenching a fist. "It was like yesterday for me, y'know."

"It's Zack," Cloud said, as if it explained it all. It did to him, knowing now that often the former SOLDIER's laughter disguised a lot of pain. He didn't know as much back then, but he was so young and so naive at that time.

He leaned his head back, looking up at the ceiling, the blood making tracks along his pale skin. "I know. I've had a few years to lessen the blow, but still..." He slumped, back against the wall and wrapped his arms around his legs, drawing them up to his chest.

"Who's to say that I don't deserve some of the blame?"

The blood stained turk shifted and leaned out of the tub to stare at Cloud for a moment. "That's true. If you people hadn't blown up the reactors, we wouldn't have popped the plate - what the hell was going through your crazy minds, anyway? - but I get the feeling you didn't mean just Midgar."

He was dripping blood over the edge, but ignored it for the moment, more interested in seeing Cloud's reaction.

Claws mewed once and padded out from behind the toilet, took a sniff at Cloud, wrinkled his nose and dashed out of the bathroom.

"So do I get the preview or the director's cut?"

(ooc: omfg I got a new laptop. It's freaking sweet.)

Cloud wasn't really looking at Reno. That wasn't surprising considering the way he was studying the floor, his face pulling into a frown. What were they thinking? Well, Cloud wasn't. That was the problem.

"The reactors were Barret's baby. He thought it would stop some of the drain on the Planet."

He jerked at the mention of something more than Midgar, his fingers tensing.

"I barely gave Zack a preview..." Cloud sighed and stretched out, head back and legs before him. "How many people were lost from Meteor Fall, Reno? How many died after from Holy's retribution?"

"You're asking the wrong guy." Reno huffed, sinking back into the tub so he was laying inside it completely, with his knees in the air. "We didn't even get a chance to start counting when I ended up here. I remember a lot of bodies in the street. After so many, ya stop trying to look at them to see if ya recognize any."

Reno pillowed his head in his arms, closing his eyes. The blood flow was almost bearable like this, it felt like a shower, if you ignored the smell of copper.

"Are ya asking as a prelude to somethin', or are ya just stalling? Cut me some slack, Cloud. I'm human, too."

"...There were a lot more after, I do know that."

One of the nice things about being stuck out in the middle of nowhere, senses still raw from diving after Sephiroth was that he did not see the initial aftermath of Meteor and Holy hitting each other. He wasn't there for the first couple of hours. But he did remember how the bodies looked when they finally made it there, and he did think that those lives couple have been saved if he just did not give in so fast.

"Sephiroth was able to manipulate me for a while." He wasn't sure how much the Turk about it. "I gave him the key to summon Meteor in the first place."

"So, basically, you're saying you gave him the Black Materia?" Reno frowned, trying to digest that little tidbit of information. It had been a hectic time, and he had heard several different stories, the only thing he had been sure was that Sephiroth had gotten it in the end. "And you guys didn't want Shin-Ra to get it? I gotta say, Cloud, that's a big irony there."

"Sephiroth was manipulating Jenova cells there. He was using pieces of her to make copies of himself that I ended up fighting."

Cloud said it like it should be common knowledge. He knew, the rest of AVALANCHE knew, there was no reason why the Turks didn't know. Although, he should have thought differently with Reno coming from an earlier time.

"I have Jenova cells inside of me, though they've been rendered dormant now. All he needed to do was turn those cells against me and puppet me."

A hand flopped over the edge of the tub, looking quite gruesome and almost like something of a staple of horror movies. "Yeah, I know. Did you know I was at Nibelheim shortly after it burned?"

"...You were with the clean-up?"

Cloud didn't even blink at the flopping hand. He fought in wars and flopping hands were actually not as scary as monsters bleeding guts as they tried trampling over a downed party member. But knowing that Reno was there didn't phaze him as much as it would have a few years ago.

"And Reeve rebuilt it. So?"

"Yeah, I was, but that was one of the few times we refused orders. All of us, not just one." Let him think about the implications of that, knowing what the turks did. "But I got a point in saying that..."

Thinking about it never got easier as time went on, the carnage had been... massive, and knowing it had been the actions of one madman had given Reno a shiver when he arrived on the scene.

"Cloud, didn't you even think that the stupid thing might have been safer with us?"

The hand spread, palm up, dripping a few drops of blood in the process. "Yeah, sure, we work for Shin-Ra, but I'm sure ya noticed we don't always follow what Shin-Ra wants. I ain't gonna repeat this, but just keep it in mind... We're the Turks." Reno's disembodied voice took on a tone that was confident, as if he'd repeated this over and over before in the past. "We protect the company, keep its secrets, and complete the mission no matter what."

There was a slight pause, and the hand disappeared back over the edge.

"Sometimes it means we gotta protect the company from itself. Nobody listened to us, so we did what we had to. If it meant preventing Meteor, any one of us would have taken the materia and disappeared."

"I didn't remember it at the time, Reno. All I knew was a ShinRa trying to get power."

Cloud shook his head, a blood splatter falling around him as he did so. Pushing dripping spikes back, he closed his eyes.

"In the end, I was just a frighten kid with no memories trying to do something right. It cost the whole planet, but sometimes, I wonder if it would hav eturned out better if you did have the Black Materia."

Reno shrugged, not remembering Cloud couldn't see it. "I don't know. We never know those kinda things. I try not to think about stuff like that." He gave a grim, bitter laugh. "It'd make things too depressing."

"Aerith would probably smack me if I talked like this around her," Cloud replied, sighing as he shook his head. Dead or not, she always was able to reach out to him in little ways - like finding a field full of her flowers, or the waters that cured so many people of the stigmata.

"I guess we better stick to less depressing things then."

"Yeah... so what's it like in the future?" There was a small sloshing sound as Reno uncovered the drain to let the blood collecting in the tub out, then went right back to where he was. "Or are ya not allowed to tell me?"

"Hectic. Still people trying to destroy the world over ShinRa secrets. I got a new bike."

Cloud shrugged and looked down at the pool of blood forming around him.

"I don't know if you will remember anything I say when you go back."

There was silence for a time from the tub. He... wouldn't remember anything? That disturbed Reno, way more than anything else he'd learned while he was here. His memories made him what he was, he didn't want to lose them. Not when he was finding things out about himself he didn't know before.

He was a turk, but he knew those things were important.

"I wont remember? ...what the hell is the point?"

"From what people told me - it'll feel like a very bad dream."

He didn't like it either. Cloud chewed on his lower lip, not liking the idea of losing a memory when his whole life since the experiments had been spent trying to restore those memories. But he couldn't let it get him down. Not when he would go back to their friends in Edge.

"I wish I knew, Reno."

There was a small flurry of activity from the bathtub- it was really slippery from all of the blood inside it, but Reno managed to get to a kneeling position and glanced down at the blood surrounding him.

"There's no reason to be here if we got to lose all those memories we made here when we go back. I ain't gonna let that happen to me. I lost too much to lose those too. You got that, Cloud? You don't forget me either. We got a good thing here."

He looked up at the Turk and chuckled. The man was a mess - and Cloud suspected he was in just as bad as a state as Reno - but it felt okay to force out something like that.

"I've got that. I won't forget."

"Yeah. Because if you do? I'm going to kick your ass." Reno said, sitting back on his heels with a satisfied smirk, folding his arms. "And I mean my foot is going up your ass. Gonna be kinda painful."

"You probably would do that, won't you?"

Cloud didn't even have to say it, but it wa easy to slip out of the topic they were talking about and into a light banter. Was it a friendship? Or just maybe they were old soldiers from the battle field, relaxing.

"Just as long as you get past my fist, you mean."

"Nah, you'd have my other foot to contend with, soldier boy." The turk gave him a very sleezy smirk, and shifted so his legs were dangling out of the tub. "Your fist hurts, you know. It's like a load of bricks coming at ya."

"But I still have another fist, red," Cloud said, arching an eyebrow. He looked down at his hands, flexed his fingers and shook his head. "They are not bricks."

"They look like it right now." Reno snickered at the nickname- every time anyone ever chose one, it was always Red... sometimes he wondered what would happen if he died his hair blue. "Some time we gotta have a sparring match, Chocobo." If Cloud could do it, so could he.

He looked down at his hands and held them up in a gesture for peace, a small smile cracking his face.

"I guess you got me, tails." Cloud sighed at the nickname, ruffling his currently red and drooping spikes. "We do."

"Yeah yeah, call my people and have 'em set up an appointment..." He wondered briefly how easy it'd been to go from pretty serious to smiling like that, maybe it meant something was seriously wrong with the both of them. "We'll do lunch."

It felt good to laugh and joke again, no matter the circumstances.

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