Work Text:
It was midnight at the end of the world, and the sky was lit up with holy fire.
“Shit, it’s not holding. Jump!”
The wreckage of the Shinra Building creaked around them, twenty million tons of steel bending and flexing under a howling firestorm gale. Rude took a few steps back on the crumbling ledge to get a running start, managing to catch air a split-second before the floor gave way. Reno’s arms, outstretched, braced him as he landed, wrapping tight around his partner’s shoulders as the inertia of Rude’s fall knocked them both against a half-melted support beam.
There was light coming in from all sides now, not just the blood-red flames of the ignited atmosphere but a watery, green-white light rising up from below.
“What is that?” Reno asked, peering at the shimmering phosphorescence, stripes of aquamarine light like silvery fish under harsh sunlight. “Fuck, am I just straight-up hallucinating now?”
“Must be the mako reservoirs,” said Rude, ignoring the tug of intuition in the back of his mind that said this was something else, something that reminded him of a church in the slums. “If the lower floors are flooded we gotta find another way down.”
Reno flashed a grin, but his eyes were gray. 40 floors through a collapsing building would wear the devil-may-care facade off anyone. “Enough excitement for you yet?”
“Not yet.”
This was probably the direst situation of their lives. Many orders of magnitude worse than anything either of them could’ve imagined, and yet, Rude’s heart wasn’t even pounding that hard in his chest. In some ways the worst was already over -- once you accepted you were going to die, the rest was just a matter of logistics.
Reno’s heart was hammering hard enough for both of them. Rude could feel it clearly against his ribs, as the building heaved again around them and boiling hot dust blasted their skin.
“Hey. Partner,” Reno said, fingers still white-knuckled where they grasped Rude’s jacket sleeves. “I know what I said, but what if we just called it here?”
They could if they wanted to. Just huddle in this broken corner of former office space on the 22nd floor, wrapped in each other’s arms while the world fell down around them. Not a very heroic way to go out, but then, they weren’t heroes.
Rude looked down at his partner, still pressed against his chest. Bits of plaster and debris clung to his ruby-red hair, darkening to dried-blood brown at the roots where his natural color had grown in. His face was thinner than usual, pinched to the point of emaciated, dark hollows under his eyes, cupid’s bow lips pressed into a hard, white line.
“No,” Rude said. If they were going to die, he wanted to die with Reno smiling, his face lit up like a kid holding a shiny new rocket launcher. Anything less was a tragedy. “Let’s keep moving.”
They found a reinforced cable among the guts spilling from a disemboweled wall and took it down as far as they could. From there they scrabbled over half-collapsed floors and busted pipes, over mountains of soaked and charred paperwork, the remains of desks and printers and crushed glass.
Reno yelped, and Rude snapped his head around, expecting to see his partner teetering on the ledge of another unexpected cavernous drop. Reno was doing all that -- arms windmilling and everything -- but the real thing that had caught him by surprise was the column of blue-white light unfurling from the floor plating like an ethereal bloom, waving and swaying back and forth in an extremely not-light-like way.
Suddenly there were lots of them sprouting up through the floors, waving like sea grass in an invisible current as they rose and rose, punching through the sagging ceiling above them as though it wasn’t even there.
“Holy shit,” Reno said, as Rude hauled him back from the ledge onto firm(er) ground, close to one of the bigger pillars (arms? tentacles?) of light rising through the floor. Still in his partner’s arms, Reno stuck out a hand and watched, marveling, as one of the smaller tendrils weaved through the gaps between his fingers, never making contact with his skin. “You know what this is?”
They’d seen raw mako before, in processing plants and natural springs, but Rude couldn’t recall ever seeing it do anything like this. The threads of the Lifestream spiraled and twisted weightlessly as they rose through the broken steel girders and sunken floors, climbing vine-like along the walls of the Shinra Building. Where two lines met, they glowed even brighter, multiplying and joining together until finally the air in front of them was an impassable web of blue-green light.
All this time, Rude thought, shielding his eyes as the brilliance started to exceed his sunglasses’ ability to dampen it. All this time, this thing was right beneath our feet.
This was the planet with its ribcage cracked open, its beating heart exposed to the open air, the lifeblood of an incomprehensibly vast organism welling to the surface to clot a wound. He’d had no idea.
“Aerith,” Rude said, the sound escaping like harsh smoke from his lungs, singeing his throat as it went. Beside him, Reno nodded.
She’d been right all along.
“How do we get past it?”
“How the hell should I know?” Reno snapped.
“You’re the one with experience.”
“Yeah, in a tank. I’m not walking through that.”
They backtracked, taking a set of steel ducts two floors up and shimmying sideways through the open chasm of what was once the Accounting department until they reached a door to the emergency stairwell they could pry open without tools. The Lifestream was here too, but not as dense, lazy wisps of light curling in loose corkscrews in the air. At first Rude and Reno ducked and crouched to avoid them, but after several floors, they realized they needn’t have bothered: just as it had done with Reno’s fingers, the Lifestream reflexively avoided them, its tendrils veering aside whenever the Turks came too close.
“Whaddya suppose it means, if we can’t touch it?”
“Don’t know,” Rude said. There was that doubt again, hanging in the back of his mind, but he didn’t dare voice it: What if it’s rejected us? “I’m not in any hurry to find out.”
Reno and Rude were barely past the 10th floor when the whole building lurched around them again, a sickening crunch of metal and cement as the exterior walls groaned in their foundations, threatening to buckle inward. It didn’t even feel like a storm out there anymore, just a great, sucking force -- Meteor’s gravity well whipping the scorched air into a vacuum, with the Shinra Building as its locus. Rude felt it in his lungs, the icy grasping fingers in his chest as the air started to thin.
“Let’s make tracks, partner,” said Reno, as he stifled a wheeze. Streaks of sweat cut pale lines through the layers of grime covering his face. “Shit’s only gonna get worse.”
They kept descending. But this close to the base of the tower, the Lifestream was multiplying, waving bands of light as big as a person winding together until they created swaying columns of light, countless spidery threads encircling their trunks like delicate spun sugar. These bigger tentacles were too slow to always drift out of the way when the Turks got too close. Their own movements weren’t too sprightly either: Rude’s head pounded, not the frantic fluttering of prey animal panic but the slow thudding of his body shutting down bit by bit, oxygen-starved lungs wailing for help that wasn’t going to arrive.
He lost his footing on a loose drift of rubble and jerked to a halt, arm yanked taut with his hand in a sharp-nailed grip. Rude looked up. Around his gloves, Reno’s fingers were scraped and torn, the knuckles dark gnarled creases of blood and filth.
“Stay with me, man,” Reno pleaded.
Rude grunted in answer, for once not for lack of words, but because he couldn’t spare the air for it. If he could just lie down for a second… but they were so close…
The building rocked again with an ear-splitting groan. This time, when it buckled, part of the emergency stairwell went with it. Rude was aware of getting flung back against the rail, of dull pain spreading up and down his spine as his head tipped and his body spun. He saw the flood of light coming up from below, the roiling blue-white waves like the surface of an alien sun.
“Rude!” Reno cried, as his partner’s hand ripped from his grip. A flash of his terrified face in the swirling dark, right before the light swallowed Rude’s whole awareness.
There was no impact, no broken surface tension. It swarmed around his body, poured itself into his struggling lungs, between the seams of his eyelids. Murmurs like rushing water in his ears, drifting on the cusp of comprehension.
Rude tried to breathe, but his airways and veins were filled with molten lead, his brain was fraying at the edges. Weightless, sinking, thoughts separating like boiling fat in Hymir’s cauldron.
It’s all right.
You’re home now.
He felt so warm. Like basking in perfect afternoon sunlight, or being bundled up in the world’s coziest blanket, cradled in the arms of, of…
There now, said a voice that Rude felt more than heard, gentle and soothing like a soft caress through his hair. He hadn't had hair longer than a couple centimeters in more than a decade. No need to fight anymore, the touch whispered. Everyone’s together now. They’re all here with you, love.
His mother, his uncles, his grandparents. Even the ones he had never known, the ones that had died before he was born. They all reached for him in that total embrace…
But… no. Someone was missing. Rude fought against the warm fugue, tried to wrench himself free. But it was swallowing him now, pulling him down, deeper…
“Rude!!”
It shouldn’t have been possible to see anything, he should’ve been blinded, his eyes should’ve been eaten away, but they opened all the same. He saw a hand, bloody and worn, its fingerless glove frayed at its edges, reaching for him.
There was no hesitation, no thought. Rude reached back.
And as their fingers met--
The bang of a rusty screen door against its frame, slammed shut behind him as he stormed down the steps. His mother sprinting out after him. ‘Sweetie, wait! Please talk to me!’ The sting of salt and bleached-white sand on a scraped-open cheek, churning ocean waves, the press of bodies, sweat and piss and fear. The wriggling blood-colored mess in the sink after his first mako bath, ‘You’re out, Number Eleven.’
All that Reno was and had been came rushing through Rude like a flood, beating down the levees in his brain.
Wall Market, hot stage lights, drag dad’s crooked bitten-down nails catching on skin as he pulled the binder tight. Cigar smoke, sticky floors, a broken face full of glass. Don Corneo’s leering grin. Bare feet slapping against the oozing ancient brick, something cloven-hoofed and hungry right at his heels. Tseng’s rain-frizzed hair against a silvered sky, ‘I’ve picked up something interesting.’
Rude would have turned away from it all if he could. It wasn’t right, he wasn’t entitled to any of this. But they were seeping into each other now, his soul laid as bare as Reno’s was, every private shame and sharp sting of regret naked for inspection. He saw himself through Reno’s eyes, stern or angry or embarrassed, all their arguments and fights, their stupid boyish roughhousing when they thought no one was looking. Every look, every touch, every punch, every kiss. Their memories gathered around them like two tiny creatures huddling for warmth amidst the storm.
Scarlet pointing with one needle-sharp red lacquered nail, calling for their heads.The groan of the plate as the last support clamps gave way and the screams rose up from below. All those people --
‘After everything we’ve taken from the planet, we were due to give something back.’
But they hadn't given it anything, not of themselves. How much would it take to clear the debt? Tseng's life? Rufus's? Their own?
(It’s all right. You’re home now.)
Rude surprised himself by responding: No.
Reno, as usual, was more eloquent: Yeah, fuck that noise.
They could stay here if they wanted. Until the currents washed away their sins, until their minds dissolved into the cosmic soup. But it wouldn’t help them gain any absolution back there, where they were still needed, where the boss and Tseng and the rookie were waiting for them.
The hand around Rude’s slowly began to regain its shape, its contours. It gripped him tight, squeezing until Rude’s knuckles remembered they existed and began to creak, blood and muscle and nerves finding their proper place again out of the churning waves of particles. He squeezed back.
Air hit his lungs like an open-palm slap. Rude gasped, ragged, salty grimy tears streaming down his face as his eyes snapped open.
He was lying half-curled in Reno’s lap, both of them collapsed into a soggy heap, his partner’s trembling arms still locked tight around his shoulders. Above them, the sky was a canopy of fire opal, fingers of iridescent red and blue showing through the shifting, shimmering brilliance as the Lifestream continued to grow, encircling the Shinra Building like the world’s most expensive solstice tree. The tempest had gone, replaced with a soothing breeze, fresh cool air of the sort never breathed in Midgar since it got its name.
Rude touched Reno’s arm weakly, still gulping breath. “You came after me.”
“Duh,” Reno shot back, still shaking, filthy wet tangles of hair falling over his face. He sniffled, which Rude chose to overlook for the moment. “You fuckin’ amateur, falling right in like that… Almost got me worried for a sec…”
Rude would’ve chuckled, if he thought he could do so without breaking into a prolonged cough.
Overhead, there came a muffled boom and a faraway tinkling of glass, as the windows blew out on the 66th floor. A plume of oily gray-black smoke swirled around the building for a moment, gold and purple sparks sputtering violently like an upended fireworks cart.
“There goes the kit,” Reno said glumly.
“Damn.”
It didn’t even make for a good show. Within seconds, the smoke was swallowed up by the Lifestream, still gathering around the tower as more and more of the waving tendrils joined their brethren, weaving together in a complex loom of light.
Reno scanned their surroundings. Rude guessed by the warm plate metal beneath them that they were on the visitors’ terrace outside the main entrance, and wondered dimly whether the Lifestream had deposited them here or Reno had dragged his unconscious body all this way. The trembling in his arms was more exhaustion than terror.
“It’s everywhere,” Reno muttered, not to anyone in particular. Around the horizon they could still see small pockets of the real night sky, but it was getting crowded out by the second, streams of light bursting from the ground like overeager sprouts. “Kinda pretty, huh?”
He was drenched, wet hair plastered to the sides of his face and his throat, his ponytail tie having slipped free at some point and his long hair draped over his shoulders in sticky tangles. The Lifestream had washed some of the blood and grime from his face, but he still looked ashen, more crust than man. Rude supposed he wasn’t faring much better.
But his eyes -- his eyes were the same color as the sky. There was a soul-deep contentment in Reno's expression, like all the rough barbs and thorns around his heart had been worn smooth.
“Reno,” Rude said.
At the sound of his name, Reno finally tore his gaze away from the sky and looked over at his partner, a soft, easy smile on his lips.
“Yeah, partner?” he said.
They’d had eight years together. A good run, by any standard. And six of those had been spent as something more than friends, less than lovers. Now here they were at the end of the world -- or the beginning of the next one, who even knew anymore -- just two helpless specks lost in a whirlpool, the size and scale of which had always been way beyond their imagining and far above their pay grade.
Rude took his partner’s hand, slipping his fingers between Reno’s and lacing them tight. If he was going to say the words, he had to say them now.
“Reno,” Rude repeated, his brow furrowing. He wished his last pair of glasses hadn’t gotten lost somewhere in the fall.
Reno snorted, his smile splitting into a loose grin. “Yeah, Rude?”
“Do you, uh… Would you…”
I don’t know if there’s going to be a tomorrow, but if there is, I want to spend it with you. I want to spend every tomorrow with you. I want to tell you that your eyes are the color of the planet’s soul, that nothing in this life burns as bright as you do. I want us to earn our deaths, so that when we go, we’ll go together with eyes open.
“Let’s get married,” Rude blurted out finally.
At first, Reno didn’t appear to even react. He blinked. Twice. Then, slowly, the words began to settle and take root in his head, and his smile widened, goofy and deliriously happy.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“Like, no bullshit, the house and the picket fence and the golden retriever? Everything?”
“That what you want?” Rude asked cautiously.
“No! Well, maybe the dog,” Reno admitted. The Shinra Building dormitories had a strict no-pets policy. “I want a big fucking wedding though.”
That’d be a hell of a sight. And also, to a naturally shy individual like Rude, completely mortifying.
“Let’s survive the end of the world first,” he suggested.
“Yeah, you know, those prophecies never mention how long this shit actually takes, huh,” Reno said, casting his gaze back toward the sky. He shielded his eyes with a hand, apparently determined to go to the hereafter never once using his goggles for their intended purpose. “Whatcha think it’s doing up there, making friends?”
Rude shrugged. Something was itching in the back of his mind. Call it an instinct or whatever you wanted, but it was telling him to hurry and wrap this up.
Stiffly, Rude eased himself out of his partner’s arms and picked himself up off the ground, a cramping knot of pain unfurling across his back as he did so. He groaned and pushed through it, then helped Reno to his feet as well.
“You better not say ‘let’s beat it to the slums,’” Reno said, wobbling a bit. That either of them could manage to stay upright after the descent they had just had was nothing short of miraculous. But then, there seemed to be a fire sale on miracles tonight. “Dunno about you, but I’m done hiding in places that smell like shit today.”
“Reno,” Rude admonished.
“What? Fine,” Reno relented, spreading his arms. “If the world’s still here tomorrow, and we don’t wake up with five different kinds of cancer from swimming in radioactive planet juice, I promise I’ll try being less of a shit human being. That’s what we agreed on, right? So yeah. Scout’s honor.”
There were so many things Rude could take issue with in those statements, not the least of which being that it felt somehow disrespectful to call a collective consciousness made up of trillions of souls “radioactive planet juice.” Especially right after they’d been inside it. But Rude only sighed, his mouth crooking into a wry smile.
He cupped Reno’s face in his hands, and -- never mind that they were soaked and filthy; that their lips were cracked and bleeding; that the sky (or a very large building) might still fall on their heads at any moment -- drew him into a kiss.
It was the kind of kiss people liked to wax poetic about. The kind that made teens swoon and sensible adults write off as an unrealistic fantasy. A kiss for lovers. Partners. Maybe it was soppy and sentimental, but Rude had been accused of worse.
And he couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere, a certain flower girl was giving him the thumbs-up.
Far above their heads, the Lifestream flared with sudden intensity, a silent hum filling the static-charged air like a lightbulb about to burst. It bleached the sky a silvery white, blotting out the moon and stars.
Rude and Reno, being fairly preoccupied, did not notice.
END