Promptback
Prompt responses go here; more will be added as I keep typing! May not get to everyone by tonight; am sort of dead in the head. I'm just writing and posting, so if there are any glaringly bad errors in anything, I apologise. xD
Reno, for ununoriginal. Prompt: you're amazing, i'm attracted, but i'm terribly distracted. 634 words.
Reno: you're amazing, i'm attracted, but i'm terribly distracted.
The entire recruitment drive hadn't impressed Reno. He understood the rationale, as Veld liked to put it: they needed to expand, move beyond simple thuggery, indulge in the privilege of numbers, etcetera, etcetera. Whatever the case: one day it was just him and Rude and Tseng and the boss, and the next there were orphans they were picking up and teaching to suckle from no breast other than Shinra's milky bosom. Great idea; not so great execution. Kids you brought up to be killers ended up being a bit weird in the head: they wanted rules for everything because they grew up according to parameters and the religion of Administrative Research. The new kids didn't know when to break the bones; only how to break them. End result: watered down blood.
'Stop traumatising the new recruits,' Veld had said to him - very mildly - one morning. The way things had gone the night before (one simple surveillance mission and his rookie partner'd lost Reno before Reno'd really even began trying; it was pathetic how dumb they were on the streets), Reno hadn't been surprised that the boss wanted to cuff him for the abuse, but he hadn't been repentant, either.
Theory of evolution. Eventually the weak ones would die off, and for all the schooling and lessons in espionage and whatever else it was that Shinra's boy and girls were given - they just weren't as real as they should be. Reno'd fought to grow up in the sector slums, and Rude had gone through a few rough patches himself before falling into a black suit and black tie. Veld, for all that he was a Kalm-born rural bumpkin, had twisted more than his fair share of arms to get where he was today.
Turks were born, not bred. Breeding didn't work - or, that was what Reno wanted to believe. There was always an exception, and that exception was Tseng.
Reno didn't get it; not that he gave it much thought, but it didn't sit right under his skin. No one who grew up as a Turk should be as capable as Tseng had come to be. No one really knew when Veld'd picked Tseng up, or even where, but Reno'd been around long enough to watch Tseng go from a man who hesitated during a rough interrogation to a natural bastard who didn't think twice about breaking all the goddamned rules - and bones - if it meant that he got what he wanted.
Tseng wasn't street - he was anything but street in his starched shirt and pressed jackets and too-neat hair - but Tseng made himself part of the street landscape: never trying to blend in, but never acting out of place, always present, always there. When Reno went off duty and ended up in one of those bars down in Sector Seven's slums, Tseng could - and would - find him, haul him back up Plate-side, give him his missions and proxy-reprimands from Veld, send him on his way. Might as well have rapped him on the knuckles and said down boy, roll over, play dead.
But every time Tseng did it, it felt like the first time in Reno's life that he wanted to follow someone Plate-born, high-society, civilised; it always felt like the first time he wanted to trail along, collared to a leash someone else was holding.
'Why do you never wear your tie?' the rookie from before had asked him meekly, trailing a few steps behind Reno as they wound their way back to HQ. 'Tseng always comes down hard on the recruits, even though we're on the field and Veld's not around.'
'Huh,' Reno'd huffed, shrugging. His open-collared shirt shifted easily against skin. 'A man has to keep some of his freedom, kid.'
For logistika_nyx, Tseng and initiation procedures into the Department of Administrative Research. 836 words.
Tseng, initiation procedures into the Dept. of Administrative Research.
Initiations were unusually cruel, but not unnecessarily so. Administrative Research was more than just a fanciful name for tailored men in tailored clothing; it was a dirty job, a downright filthy job, and you weren't allowed to enjoy it anymore than you were allowed to hate it. It wasn't a lifestyle, it was a life, and once you stepped in through that door there was no going back. Call them gravediggers, or graverobbers; thugs, or thieves, or murderers, or bullies, or assassins, or spies; liars and manipulators, bastards and bitches and motherfuckers: it never mattered to them, and it shouldn't matter to the fourteen-fifteen-sixteen year old child fresh minted from however many years of training that Veld'd put into him.
'I think we've wasted enough time,' Veld said when the elevator doors hissed open to the sixty-eight floor of Shinra, and that was when Tseng knew that everything was different, everything was changed, and that the kids gloves were coming off and that the tie around his neck was no going to be guiding leash anymore: now, now hangman's noose.
Being a Turk was being whatever the Company wanted you to be, and there were any number of things that you had to accommodate that meant leaving your conscience, your morality, and even a part of yourself at the door before coming to work each day. Man would go insane without the detachment, and so it was with detachment that Veld watched Tseng being roughhoused in the training room, men almost twice as old and definitely thrice as experienced as him holding no punches and leaving plenty of bruises. They'd take time to heal; the question was whether Tseng would recover himself fast enough to avoid getting more.
It was a detached eye that watched Tseng getting ambushed after his shower in the common changing area; already limping from his beating, he had his head thrust into a toiletbowl and flushed until he was retching water and bile, the men around him giving crude advise that the only use for long hair was to give others more to grab hold of. They sheared his hair off with a pair of office scissors, making it jagged and as uncivilised as they purported an Wutai boy to be.
It went on, and never seemed to end. It could have been - and was - anything from physical assault to sexual advances, psychological humiliation to fearplay to issues of discipline: anything that could push Tseng farther, to try his faultlines and to see where he would snap. Every fortnight, Tseng cut his hair again, so as to make sure they had less to grab hold of. It only made them smug, and Veld kept his face blank, though Tseng sensed some kind of disappointment there.
One day they pushed him far enough that he broke, and smashed his fist into the nose of a Turk who had been there long enough that there were jokes about him hitting forty (no Turk lived that long). Blood got everywhere, and Tseng thought he should have been disturbed about how good that had felt, only that he wasn't disturbed - only satisfied. He didn't do anything else, just walked away, and found that he could not care less about the issues of respect or seniority or how right it was to leave a man bleeding behind you.
Then Tseng realised that no one was going to save him, and that Veld couldn't care - that Veld honestly could not physically allow himself to care - about the bruises and the humiliation: about anyone's bruises and humiliation: not Tseng's, and not any other Turk's. The only bruises you should care about were your own; you did what you could for everyone else around you, but at the end of the day a charitable Turk was a dead Turk, and dead men are useless men.
He stopped cutting his hair that week. They stopped trying to shove his face into the walls the week after. And the week after that, the man whose nose he'd broken saved Tseng's life by taking a bullet to the shoulder for him. The enemies in the halls became brothers in arms; men who would bleed for him as readily as they'd bled him out.
'It's taken you long enough,' Veld said when the last of Tseng's naivety was finally wiped from the younger man's face. The Director shuffled a few files around, and then threw a manila folder onto the table. 'Now it's your turn.'
Tseng glanced down: the folder was just open enough for him to see a profile, a shock of red hair and eyes that had a spirit that needed to be broken before it be allowed to burn. 'Am I supposed to initiate him, sir?' he asked.
'Bring him into the fold,' Veld said, and Tseng went off, and found the new recruit, and shoved him up against the wall before: exactly where a Turk always was, exactly where a Turk should always be.
Reno, for ununoriginal. Prompt: you're amazing, i'm attracted, but i'm terribly distracted. 634 words.
Reno: you're amazing, i'm attracted, but i'm terribly distracted.
The entire recruitment drive hadn't impressed Reno. He understood the rationale, as Veld liked to put it: they needed to expand, move beyond simple thuggery, indulge in the privilege of numbers, etcetera, etcetera. Whatever the case: one day it was just him and Rude and Tseng and the boss, and the next there were orphans they were picking up and teaching to suckle from no breast other than Shinra's milky bosom. Great idea; not so great execution. Kids you brought up to be killers ended up being a bit weird in the head: they wanted rules for everything because they grew up according to parameters and the religion of Administrative Research. The new kids didn't know when to break the bones; only how to break them. End result: watered down blood.
'Stop traumatising the new recruits,' Veld had said to him - very mildly - one morning. The way things had gone the night before (one simple surveillance mission and his rookie partner'd lost Reno before Reno'd really even began trying; it was pathetic how dumb they were on the streets), Reno hadn't been surprised that the boss wanted to cuff him for the abuse, but he hadn't been repentant, either.
Theory of evolution. Eventually the weak ones would die off, and for all the schooling and lessons in espionage and whatever else it was that Shinra's boy and girls were given - they just weren't as real as they should be. Reno'd fought to grow up in the sector slums, and Rude had gone through a few rough patches himself before falling into a black suit and black tie. Veld, for all that he was a Kalm-born rural bumpkin, had twisted more than his fair share of arms to get where he was today.
Turks were born, not bred. Breeding didn't work - or, that was what Reno wanted to believe. There was always an exception, and that exception was Tseng.
Reno didn't get it; not that he gave it much thought, but it didn't sit right under his skin. No one who grew up as a Turk should be as capable as Tseng had come to be. No one really knew when Veld'd picked Tseng up, or even where, but Reno'd been around long enough to watch Tseng go from a man who hesitated during a rough interrogation to a natural bastard who didn't think twice about breaking all the goddamned rules - and bones - if it meant that he got what he wanted.
Tseng wasn't street - he was anything but street in his starched shirt and pressed jackets and too-neat hair - but Tseng made himself part of the street landscape: never trying to blend in, but never acting out of place, always present, always there. When Reno went off duty and ended up in one of those bars down in Sector Seven's slums, Tseng could - and would - find him, haul him back up Plate-side, give him his missions and proxy-reprimands from Veld, send him on his way. Might as well have rapped him on the knuckles and said down boy, roll over, play dead.
But every time Tseng did it, it felt like the first time in Reno's life that he wanted to follow someone Plate-born, high-society, civilised; it always felt like the first time he wanted to trail along, collared to a leash someone else was holding.
'Why do you never wear your tie?' the rookie from before had asked him meekly, trailing a few steps behind Reno as they wound their way back to HQ. 'Tseng always comes down hard on the recruits, even though we're on the field and Veld's not around.'
'Huh,' Reno'd huffed, shrugging. His open-collared shirt shifted easily against skin. 'A man has to keep some of his freedom, kid.'
For logistika_nyx, Tseng and initiation procedures into the Department of Administrative Research. 836 words.
Tseng, initiation procedures into the Dept. of Administrative Research.
Initiations were unusually cruel, but not unnecessarily so. Administrative Research was more than just a fanciful name for tailored men in tailored clothing; it was a dirty job, a downright filthy job, and you weren't allowed to enjoy it anymore than you were allowed to hate it. It wasn't a lifestyle, it was a life, and once you stepped in through that door there was no going back. Call them gravediggers, or graverobbers; thugs, or thieves, or murderers, or bullies, or assassins, or spies; liars and manipulators, bastards and bitches and motherfuckers: it never mattered to them, and it shouldn't matter to the fourteen-fifteen-sixteen year old child fresh minted from however many years of training that Veld'd put into him.
'I think we've wasted enough time,' Veld said when the elevator doors hissed open to the sixty-eight floor of Shinra, and that was when Tseng knew that everything was different, everything was changed, and that the kids gloves were coming off and that the tie around his neck was no going to be guiding leash anymore: now, now hangman's noose.
Being a Turk was being whatever the Company wanted you to be, and there were any number of things that you had to accommodate that meant leaving your conscience, your morality, and even a part of yourself at the door before coming to work each day. Man would go insane without the detachment, and so it was with detachment that Veld watched Tseng being roughhoused in the training room, men almost twice as old and definitely thrice as experienced as him holding no punches and leaving plenty of bruises. They'd take time to heal; the question was whether Tseng would recover himself fast enough to avoid getting more.
It was a detached eye that watched Tseng getting ambushed after his shower in the common changing area; already limping from his beating, he had his head thrust into a toiletbowl and flushed until he was retching water and bile, the men around him giving crude advise that the only use for long hair was to give others more to grab hold of. They sheared his hair off with a pair of office scissors, making it jagged and as uncivilised as they purported an Wutai boy to be.
It went on, and never seemed to end. It could have been - and was - anything from physical assault to sexual advances, psychological humiliation to fearplay to issues of discipline: anything that could push Tseng farther, to try his faultlines and to see where he would snap. Every fortnight, Tseng cut his hair again, so as to make sure they had less to grab hold of. It only made them smug, and Veld kept his face blank, though Tseng sensed some kind of disappointment there.
One day they pushed him far enough that he broke, and smashed his fist into the nose of a Turk who had been there long enough that there were jokes about him hitting forty (no Turk lived that long). Blood got everywhere, and Tseng thought he should have been disturbed about how good that had felt, only that he wasn't disturbed - only satisfied. He didn't do anything else, just walked away, and found that he could not care less about the issues of respect or seniority or how right it was to leave a man bleeding behind you.
Then Tseng realised that no one was going to save him, and that Veld couldn't care - that Veld honestly could not physically allow himself to care - about the bruises and the humiliation: about anyone's bruises and humiliation: not Tseng's, and not any other Turk's. The only bruises you should care about were your own; you did what you could for everyone else around you, but at the end of the day a charitable Turk was a dead Turk, and dead men are useless men.
He stopped cutting his hair that week. They stopped trying to shove his face into the walls the week after. And the week after that, the man whose nose he'd broken saved Tseng's life by taking a bullet to the shoulder for him. The enemies in the halls became brothers in arms; men who would bleed for him as readily as they'd bled him out.
'It's taken you long enough,' Veld said when the last of Tseng's naivety was finally wiped from the younger man's face. The Director shuffled a few files around, and then threw a manila folder onto the table. 'Now it's your turn.'
Tseng glanced down: the folder was just open enough for him to see a profile, a shock of red hair and eyes that had a spirit that needed to be broken before it be allowed to burn. 'Am I supposed to initiate him, sir?' he asked.
'Bring him into the fold,' Veld said, and Tseng went off, and found the new recruit, and shoved him up against the wall before: exactly where a Turk always was, exactly where a Turk should always be.