#kunsel.

Zack clearly struggles to bite back a series of strongly-felt suggestions he might have for Kunsel while listening to his line of reasoning. If Kunsel can affiliate himself with the WRO then they can’t be all bad, the rational part of him reasons. The irrational part of him is more keen on convincing him that they can’t be all good, either.

There’s a bit there that doesn’t totally rub him the wrong way, though. WRO adjacent. He can work with that.

“Heh.” Rubbing his hand across the back of his neck, Zack has enough sense to look abashed. Not the first time they’ve had to meet halfway on their agree to disagrees. 

“Okay,” he exhales with emphasis. If it were anyone else, Zack would have already ditched this junkyard the moment he found his legs. “‘Kay…” 

The repetition helps with psyching himself up, or so he likes to believe. 

It is as public as a public venue can be -- more or less. Not precisely the highest class of bars, End of the Line resides in the sliver between the transit station and the corkscrew tunnel vehicle access, and serves grounders who may need to wait for the train until last call as much as it serves Plate-dwellers looking for a taste of the underbelly without the grime of Wall Market.

It may as well be a speakeasy lifted from fifty years ago and deposited three hundred meters above the ground. Nicotine-stained brick and amber lights, wrought iron cup-stools, plush leather benches worn to a patina, a dark hardwood bar, real wood and brass in an age of synthetics, all paint a picture of run-down opulence.

And then there's the karaoke setup. Kunsel descends to whistles, the odd catcall, a tossed-crumpled gil note (with a phone number, it looks like), and then jeers as he cedes the stage and the microphone to an unsteady salaryman who is ruddy-faced and eager for the next song. Must be a regular. It's early yet as these places go and the crowd isn't that large.

Kunsel is mostly out of regs, not that over-knee boots and fitted trousers are terribly uncommon. The hug of long-sleeved mesh and angle-patterned dark fabric draw attention away from the lambent gleam of eyes in the dark. Not to say he did not bring the other half of his uniform--it's within sight in the clear-paneled gun cabinet behind the bar. Swords and coat, right next to someone's shotgun. Maybe the barkeep's. Maybe not.

Playing by the rules and all.

Kunsel helps himself to a perch on a stool right nearby with an air of sprezzatura he may not feel at the eerily familiar face.

"Oof. Why are you looking at me in that tone of voice?" He manages wry as he orders something strong and citrus-forward. Maybe he'll even get to finish it. "Was it that bad?"

A Turk outside of uniform is still a Turk. Balto has eschewed the usual suit jacket and white shirt for a satin, navy blue shirt buttoned up to his collarbone and white slacks, but he is not here without purpose. That delineation between profession and personal does not exist for him anymore. The higher you climb, the older you get, the smaller the view out that window becomes. 

SOLDIER First Class, Kunsel. Newly promoted. Not his usual type, but that hardly matters. 

Balto keeps his head bowed, providing his undivided attention as his companion’s rich baritenor shares space with the warmth from old-fashioned, power hungry incandescents and exposed brickwork walls. 

He's already nursing a drink by the time Kunsel snakes his way back through the rounded tables with their glossy, vinyl black marble finish. The ball of ice in his glass bobs on its amber bed as he sets it down and leans against the bartop on one elbow with his body angled towards Kunsel.

"You could benefit from vocal training." There's something resembling a grin on his face, more in his eyes than the line of his mouth as he meets Kunsel’s gaze over the top of his glasses. "It wasn't bad, objectively speaking."

Good enough to impress the crowd, although the reception of most any performance always improves with a pretty face.  

“I can’t complain anyway.” If not for a direct invitation to attend, he’d be sitting out in the cold on the rooftop right about now, half-asleep with a headset on. Good to know the brutal honesty approach isn’t a total wash. “So, why the change of heart?”

Balto breaks eye contact briefly to glance at the bartender as she slides an eye wateringly bright, orange cocktail across the way.

“Sector Eight Cocktail.” She looks between the two men beneath a fringe of brown bangs, guessing at their association perhaps, before the curiosity drowns somewhere in the need to address the demands of the bar’s other patrons. Attractive in the conventional sense, despite the fake lashes and dramatic winged liner. Balto catches her attention before she can turn away by wiggling his fingers ‘hello.’ 

A small piece of freedom; a strange kind, one he never knew possible. Freedom from expectations, assumptions, and lingering suspicions. Empathy. Remnants of an old regime, still hanging on desperately for power and control over this Planet, its lifeforce, and the lives of its inhabitants.

That’s what they are. Remnants.

Two pairs of eyes, glittered with a spark of mako, stare up at the night sky together. Brilliant, burning, bright balls of gas look back at them from hundreds of thousands of light years away. The same sky of his childhood, a sky free from the light pollution that pervades concrete jungles. 

When was the last time I really looked at the sky?

A clink of metal gauntlets striking glass and gliding fingers drawing new lines through a blanket of condensation. His hand wraps around the proffered bottle and the dark amber liquid inside sloshes around as he tips the mouth of the bottle against his lips and stymies a grimace at the fuzzy-hot trail a single gulp leaves in the column of his throat.

Cloud rolls over onto his side and feels the compacted dirt underneath pushing back against a jutted, bony hip even through the woolen warps and wefts of his own mat. 

The profile of Kunsel’s face is silhouetted by a warm firelight. If he stares long enough, letting his vision blur into a scattering of oranges, yellows, and ambient red dust in the air, Cloud can see a trio of golden halos over Kunsel’s shock of auburn brown hair. 

There’s a blank spot, fathomless, in the corner of his mind that arrests him with some emotion begging to be named when he looks at that face and the burnished, flame-glint of the well-worn helmet sitting besides Kunsel. 

Something. Someone. Missing, gone. 

continued from x --

Kunsel’s words are like skipped stones lost in the lake. Zack barely hears them, a revel of memories and homesickness bursting forth with each step into a torrential downpour that turns the world into one big, gray, blurry smear.

Most missions, even the stringent ones, have a buffer period.

When the day’s unpacking is done, when logistical problems are identified and solutioned with the butting of so many heads, and tired feet seek warm beds. A sliver of time in which to make the most of anything or nothing before the real work begins.

Who knows when an opportunity like this will come again?

Flashes of lightning, rain, rain rain, real rain. Not the terrible acid rain that pours down on Midgar, stripping paints, nibbling away metals, slowly disintegrating various organic odds and ends like swiss cheese. Their surroundings are pervasive humidity and a warm dampness, moss-covered trees, intricate networks of vines, fungi ladders, and pitcher plants awaiting their prey.

Lost and drowned in the rumbling roar of rain and thunder, coqui coqui! The chirping calls of hundreds of little frogs hiding under broad leaves and dead logs.

Smells, sounds, and sights that remind him of home. A place he’s locked away from his heart; a closed chapter in the book of his life. Memory is a powerful thing, bearing even the most neglected emotions to surface.

 A touch that is not rain-- contact against his shoulder; solid flesh and bone. Surprise finds Zack in the form of a half-formed grin, a brief widening of sky-blue eyes, and topped off with the sound of an easy laugh immediately swallowed by the inclement weather. 

Zack bumps him back and knocks their heads together like a pair of coconuts. “Hey, your ass is out here too!”

People don’t just disappear.

He shouldn’t feel thankful for the distraction, but he is. Everything is slipping away from him. Careening out of control with no chance of recovery, that’s how it feels. Like the moon pulling the tides. Like sand slipping between his fingers. Or maybe the word is ‘overwhelming.’ A torrent of too much. Relentless; a raging current. Wondering what happened to the light at the end of the tunnel. 

As if he has the words to describe the quagmire that life has been for the past four years.

Does he look like a fucking poet?

Zack digs in his heels, shoulders against a deathball of concrete and rebar and throws his full weight into it with a grunt-hiss between clenched teeth. The missing chunk of building moves, slowly, begrudgingly at first, and then teeters off a few feet all at once thanks to the miracle of geometry.

“Hey, I’ll help with the heavy lifting and you guys point me to the heavy stuff,” Zack says with a smile that doesn’t fully light up his face, that feels more like tired obligation than reassurance. But he smiles anyway, angles his head towards the next area and rests a hand firmly on the drywall dust-covered shoulder of a weary rescue worker. “No stone unturned, we got this.”

He’s standing a couple days out from nothing short of a disaster. Maybe even less time has passed than that. An entire plate, dropped onto the heads of thousands of people. Eco-terrorists, they said. AVALANCHE. Wutaian sympathizers. Presently, he doesn’t really care about the why. 

Tunnel vision can be a form of avoidance. Not that there's anyone left to chastise him about bad habits. 

An objective to fulfill, survivors to find, obstacles to clear. His reasons might be wrong, selfish even, but the end result is the same. Help people now, the ones who truly need it, solve all the other problems later. 

Even if they were his own.

Maybe Shinra will show up at some point to do their jobs. Until then, the residents must make do with a lone ex-SOLDIER.

@steeleidolon

Time, the passing of it between major events and the disruptions they have wrought, affords them some level of safety they would not have otherwise had. Time, plus whatever magical properties are wrapped up around the bunker that render them immune to shifting timelines until the moment they step back out into the smoggy haze of Midgar’s underside. Glancing one last time at the date printed on the corner, Zack folds up the newspaper in his hands and tucks it under his arm as they half-jog up the steps to HQ. 

No news is good news never applies when Shinra is at its center. A cursory glance through the editorial columns, the overseas war, classifieds, and entertainment sections provide no insight as to Kalm’s eventual fate. March 21st, almost a year to the date. Best not to advertise what happened at all and let the Turks work quietly like they usually do. The company motto, of sorts.

“1999…Didn’t The Matrix come out that year? This year. Whatever. We caught it in theaters and re-watched in the dorms only to find out that Shinra’s censorship team completely fucked with the theatrical release, right?”

Chatter between two helmeted SOLDIERs as they pass the threshold of glass doors lining the front entrance, filling the air with their complaints about the latest and greatest sci-fi flicks, is mundane, all of it. No suits turn their heads, PubSec admires and reviles from afar without criticality, other SOLDIERs have places to be, orders to fulfill and training to attend. 

They blend right in.

Contingencies have been prepared for worst case scenarios. Their bikes have been hidden under a sheet of tarp by one of the many chain link gates that feed into the nearby corporate housing districts. Within sprinting distance, should they suddenly be discovered. 

The higher up they go, the more creative they will have to be to get groundside. One benefit of their years past shenanigans while on leave– intimate knowledge of the Tower’s various maintenance access tunnels and vents provide escape routes aplenty within arms reach. Useful when avoiding the ire of their superiors and friends, necessary now that they cannot afford their progress arrested. With enough false confidence and elaborate obfuscation between them, Zack is optimistic they won’t have to go that far. 

The sound of their boots striking the perfectly polished floors, ambient chatter from other employees, the smell of cheap coffee left to sit too long in its pot, even the damn leafy planters next to the benches. There are so many memories in these halls, so many things that have remained unchanged in his mind’s eye against the backdrop of the past that they now traverse. It takes measurable effort not to stop and linger to stare in disbelief. 

Using two fingers, Zack taps against the side of Kunsel’s shellmet with a laugh as they make their way past the information desk, around an arguing group of analysts, and up to the elevator. Purposeful, despite the whimsical ease of their conversation.  

“Okay. But. Wanna know my first thought the first time you took the helmet off?” Zack knows he looks absolutely goofy with the shameless grin he now wears, toothy and glittering beneath the open portion of his helmet while they wait for the elevator doors to open. They can be forthcoming here, now. As much as they want.

Today's date is significant, even if Zack has not done or said anything outwardly to acknowledge it beyond what their friends already have planned for the night outing. Not yet, at least.

It always starts with an idea.

His ideas are never fully formed from the get go, taking on shape as time and circumstance guide him towards the right moment.

Okay, he isn’t not so much waiting for a nebulous ‘right moment’ in this case considering he’s had the date highlighted on his calendar app for practically as long as they’ve known each other, but that’s the general gist of it.

In the rare moments where Kunsel was occupied but Zack was not; that had been the time to conduct his research in secrecy. Saving gil was the easy part in all this. His drawings may have been a bit crude, his attempts at a description may have been eyebrow raising, but he was earnest and persistent no matter how many parlors turned him away.

Last week, and not a moment too soon, he finally found someone willing to sit down with him long enough to put together a general picture of what earrings he needed to get.

--

The Clandestine Rabbit had seen many an odd client in Haley’s many years working here, but never one with such an unusually simple, albeit particular request. He’d been going about it all the wrong way, of course. She could not tell from a drawing alone what sort of piercings a person might have worn. No matter how detailed or passionately of a description of ear scarring Zack could deliver after visuals failed, it took her several minutes of talking the young man down to convince him that he needed to rethink his approach to his little problem. Coaxing out the story behind the giftee in question put them on the right track.

“You said he’s from Cosmo?” Haley asked, seeking final confirmation with eye contact as she tucked a choppy lock of black hair behind her ear and reached up above her head to pull a navy binder labeled ‘Excerpts from Intersection of Anthropology and Jewelry’ in silver by a felt-tipped marker off a black, spray-painted bookshelf plastered on all sides with all sorts of stickers and decals. Tracking from left to right as she scans the contents, Haley flipped through a few plastic-sleeved scans in the binder before leaning down and pushing it across the glossy, faux marble coffee table. “Personally, if you guys are as close as you say you are, I don’t think he’ll care if they’re not exactly the same as the ones he used to have.”

Zack’s nose scrunched minutely at the advice, but the way his lips twisted to one side showed he was giving her suggestion serious thought. Looking down at the black and white spread of photos and illustrations of peoples from Cosmo Canyon, Zack traced his fingers lightly over the image of a woven mat and the items arranged on top of it. A small clay bowl held precious stones and metals that have been shaped into wearable jewelry. Dried plant stems and delicate, angle-point needles, carved from various natural materials like wood or possibly bone, are laid adjacent.

"Yeah...okay," Zack decided, looking clear-eyed and resolute. "Can I book an appointment for two on the twentieth sometime in the evening? I can put down a deposit and everything. And…If you have similar ones like these–" he pointed to a few simple designs charted out on a magnified view of the pictured bowls' contents "-- I'd love to purchase them for my friend."

--

Since then, the week passed by at what felt like an agonizing pace.

Essai and Sebastian have a self-satisfied, knowing look about them as Zack casually posits an evening walk over to check out Sector One's Night Market after dinner. Where the Clandestine Rabbit is conveniently situated against the backdrop of colorful and ephemeral canopies, of course. The crowd parts around them like a moving river as they discuss their plans.

"Sorry, Zack. Seb and I are accounted for for the rest of tonight. We've got service tech duty in the garage in the morning so we need to go wrestle Roche for the toolkits. You and Kunsel have fun though!" Essai reaches over to playfully ruffle Zack's hair before he turns to drag Sebastian off down the street with him. No chance given for Zack to even get a word in edgewise, though he does glower at his friends’ backsides with a stuck out tongue as they go. Well, that’s fine. It probably works out better this way.

They start off in the opposite direction under a sea of neon lights. Zack stretches out his arms, then crosses them behind his head as he steps out in front of Kunsel and keeps pace in reverse with an easy grin.

"Okay, okay. But I've been thinking. I wanted to get both ears pierced."

Planet, does he look nervous? Why does he feel so nervous? He's been planning this for ages.

Maybe it's too obvious what he's planning.

No backing out now.