PROMPTBACK: Wings (Balthier, Reno) and Rookie (Elena+Tseng, Elena+Reno other Turks)
Sat down today and threshed out a couple of the prompts from a few days ago. RL kicked me in the face for a while, so response this time is a bit slow. D: ♥ to everyone, and obabscribbler I swear I will wrench that Cissnei/Zack thing from the depths of my brain eventually! For now:
Wings: Balthier/Reno for ununoriginal (probably not what you were asking for, sorry!) None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
794 words, because my brain doesn't seem to understand the concept of "drabble".
Right, so it's the slums. It's not far from what the generic lowtown usually looks like: dirty, overpopulated, rife with all sorts of underlife. Balthier's had three put a mark on him since the moment he stepped over the invisible boundary line (there's always one of those, isn't there, the line between rich and poor). One of them is a boy nine years old, and Balthier almost pities him enough to want to drop a few gil by accident; but there's nothing worse to a slum child than pity from above. Balthier won't try to change the way the world turns.
Take the Strahl alone, this time. I'll meet you when I am done with my business.
Dear Fran. Always so polite about when Balthier's very mortal impatience begins to bother her; so off she's gone, probably to find her wits again before their next rendezvous. It's not a bad partnership. Balthier isn't against free wings with which to fly solo with every once in a while.
The second mark's given up; good on him. Balthier has very little patience when it comes to these industrial type places; Archadian blood may water, but never bleed dry. And Midgar is, as far as he can tell, industrial to its very core. Functionality and very limited finesse. Slum-side peasantry and - what did they call it here? - Plate-side hedonists. In that sense, exactly like home. He could practically feel his skin crawling with the hypocrisy.
The third one's not being very intelligent. He pretends to trip - a clumsy affair - but Balthier's a chivalrous man. He catches the would-be thief before he can barrel into the Archadian.
'Watch out,' Balthier says politely, raising his eyebrows in challenge. It irritates the man more than anything else; the pickpocket darts away empty-handed immediately after Balthier lets go.
Good to know that thieves are thieves no matter where one is in the world. Piracy is still more dignified.
Brushing off his sleeves, Balthier makes to turn back uptown. He's only here for a stopover - refueling and some adjustments to the Strahl before he tries the Western Continent. After fifteen days of solid travel on a very solid ship bunk, he's looking forward to slightly better accommodations than what's on offer down here.
Wait --
'Not bad, for an outsider.'
Balthier didn't see this one earlier: the newcomer, entering stage right via convenient shady alleyway, is a redhead in a suit. Trouble, then; the judges back home wore the same uniform, and Balthier's become very good at sniffing out rats. 'Thank you,' he says, and makes to move away. The faster the better.
The redhead follows, his walk a swagger of the confident. 'What's the rush, buddy? You don't look like you've been here half a day.'
Balthier hasn't, and he'll bet that this man knows exactly how long he actually has been in Midgar. 'No rush,' Balthier replies, acknowledging that this is one game he'll have to play to get out of. 'But I'm looking for a quiet night and no trouble.'
'You're a smart man,' the redhead grins. 'So, why the long flight from Archades? Not everyday we get your sort just wandering in. A fortnight's flying and a bad incident with the engines around Kalm. Enjoy the chocobos while you were there?'
Balthier really didn't run from home only to end up in some twisted mirror copy of it. He sighs. 'What do you want, sir?'
'The name's Reno,' the redhead offers, probably out of goodwill. He's tapping a rod against his shoulder which looks like anything but, though. 'And I'm just your friendly intelligence gathering service for tonight.'
'You're with,' Balthier tries out the name, 'Shinra?'
'Smart man,' Reno grins. They reach the train station, and Reno buys the tickets without being asked - or asking, for that matter. Balthier wonders how all of this is going to end; wonders why the corporate monopoly in this place is even paying attention to him to begin with. 'I'll take you topside. Sector 8. Nice place, with nifty security cameras so that we can watch you while you sleep.' The redhead passes him the ticket. 'No hard feelings.'
'Does everyone passing through here get such generous treatment?' Balthier asks wryly, taking the ticket. 'I'm flattered, but I--'
'Don't decline,' Reno cuts in. 'That'd be rude, don'tcha think?'
Gambit and checkmate in one easy step. Balthier can't help but admire the efficiency of Shinra's little set up. 'My regards to your boss,' he says. 'To what do I owe the pleasure of such scrutiny?'
'You've got wings,' Reno drawls, as if he's very used to this job of pinning people into corners and watching them as they squirm. 'And we like to watch where people fly.'
-----
Rookie: Elena and the Turks, for aikonamika. Fitting into the job is hard for everyone; it's particularly hard when you keep wondering if they're looking down on you because you're a girl. It's even harder when you have a crush on your superior officer.
1595 words, and have I ever mentioned that I have real issues when it comes to drabbles? Warnings for language and a few almost-not-quite NSFW scenes.
The first day she got onto the job, the world still revolved around the right axes. She didn't ask questions of what she was, only who, and that was easily answered by: Elena, aged 18, blonde, female, Turk.
The last two, it seemed, weren't compatible. Turks, by definition, seemed to defy categorisation: the first day on the job involved wondering why no one had last names, why no one seemed to care, why no one seemed anything more than mildly apathetic. That she was a girl in a team so full of guys and girls who didn't care --
She was young; that was her excuse. Young enough to spend the first few months trying to be both at the same time: should she be slightly more protected because she wasn't like Rude or Reno? Should she have to be completely tough and unbreakable, because she shouldn't allow herself to be patronised? Was admiring Tseng's razor-edged brutality and calm rationality even permissible?
It was a bad idea to try: they called her rookie after her fifth failed attempt at getting her mission reports filed properly, they called her silly every time she tried to come to the defence of other Turks, and didn't give her time of day when she tried to point out that she, Elena, she was human. She deserved more than the dirt off other people's shoes - they didn't seem to care.
'Get off your ass, yo,' Reno said to her when he hauled her onto a Shinra helicopter, her blood sliding down his hands sickly warm. He sounded bored. She passed out too soon after that to get angry, but there was enough time in the space between pain and blackness to feel insulted.
The third month on the job, she threw out all the things that she thought made her weak; that essentially meant stripping her gender off of herself as brutally and as efficiency as she knew how. Shoes and clothes and amenities and half an hour baths; long hair and flattering underwear; neatly kept nails, polite language. Shit damn fuck it all: respect was more important than feminine equality.
She strode into the office and badmouthed Reno the moment he tried to give her a hard time; then she went to the range and emptied out a cartridge worth of high-calibre ammo into a practice target, breathing hard and furious. Reno just shot her a bemused smile when she went back upstairs; the next day she ran a nine minute mile and broke a man's arm as if other people's reactions would cure her own curious, inevitable paranoia.
Tseng was the problem. Who was she kidding? Tseng was always going to be a problem. By the time she was welcomed into the fold, Tseng was already heading operations with the sure handed confidence of a man a lot older than his ambiguous twenties. It didn't matter what he did (kill, bribe, torture): he was everything Elena looked out for in a man. Quiet, capable, apparently unflappable.
How the hell was she going to even pretend to be a genderless, conscience-lacking operative when her goddamned biological clock ticked every second she was around her own boss?
Tseng must've known about her crush, because there was no way a man like that let anything slide under the radar. But the only things he said to her were instructions pertaining to the latest mission; Tseng seemed to be a proponent of absolute magnanimity.
It was only later that she realised that his was merely a policy of absolute equality.
Capability could always be undermined by a lack of self-confidence. Elena didn't realise that until half a year had passed: Shinra was a game. Play by their rules, otherwise you'd always be an outsider.
'Hurry up,' Reno said, pulling her through the doors of their safe houses in Sector 4, the both of them high on adrenaline. They'd destroyed a small weapons cache that the company suspected belonged to AVALANCHE - Elena shot the man who had been dealing them illegally in the forehead, then Reno set the timer to thirty seconds less than was safe, and they ran for their fucking lives as the world exploded out into hellfire around them.
She still had the aftershock ringing in her ears when Reno pushed her up against the door, his hands large on her small shoulders. 'That's what we put you through months and months of training for,' he said, his words fast and his mouth too close to her ear. 'Because you're so damned good when you take no shit and buckle down to it. Open your eyes, c'mon,' he said, and he kissed her and she pushed him away but he pushed back, and said, 'c'mon, you can't be that blind.'
There were so many things that she could say to him, things like I'm not that sort of girl or we're not going to do it just because we're both high or I don't like you in that way, but suddenly all of those were completely pointless questions to ask: she didn't like Reno in any sort of romantic way - did that matter? She didn't see herself as a slut - why on earth should she? And she was as high as he was - so why not?
Instead, she said, 'Do you have anything on you?'
And he said, with a sharp smile, 'About fuckin' time.'
And she could have spun him around and taken the dominant role to show him exactly how strong she was, to show him exactly how she was not weak - but the only ones who do that are the ones who have a point, so she said instead, 'Who showed you this?'
And he said, 'Heh, guess,' and right then it hit her, hit her so damned hard that she was the one to push back against him with a short moan.
'Tseng?' she asked, picturing it in her head.
'No,' Reno laughed, 'Cissnei.'
The day after that mission she stopped cropping her hair every time it grew past her shoulders or into her face, she stopped walking past the girly stores that caught her interest, she also stopped trying to push herself to use the big guns and run the unattainable six minute mile.
When her hair grew out to the point where she could keep a fringe and wear it pinned, Tseng stopped to speak to her during one of his rare visits to the communal coffee machine, and said, 'You're settling in, then?'
'Yes, sir,' she said, and looked him in the eye. She paused, and then asked, 'Are you free later tonight?'
He raised an eyebrow, and she smiled, but refused to elaborate. Tseng chuckled. 'I prefer not to mix business with pleasure, Elena.'
'But,' she pointed out, passing him a sugar and not blushing when their fingers brushed, 'Turks are never really either one or the other, are they, sir?'
Tseng smiled. 'True,' he murmured, 'very true.'
'And you can't tell me the others haven't asked you this before,' she said, because underneath it all Elena really did think that Tseng was one of the most attractive and unbearably fair men in Midgar.
'Rarely so politely, no,' Tseng replied, taking a sip of his coffee and watching her carefully, as if to size her up, as if he still wasn't sure if she was sure. 'And almost never when we're not on a mission.'
'Sir,' she said, politely. 'It's just a matter of doing what you want and need to stay sane in this job, isn't it? It doesn't matter who you are. We're Turks.'
Not really men or women or old or young, just Turks.
Tseng finished his coffee, and threw the cup away while she waited for his response. It still took effort not to squirm; but at least this time Elena knew that Tseng was taking his time because he was deliberating the situation, not because he was being cruel, or because he didn't care. 'Very well,' he said, and they were sweet words to hear.
That night he let her pull his tie down from the base of his throat, the fucking hottest thing she had ever had the privilege of doing.
It took Elena a while to notice, though, that they'd stopped calling her rookie long before any of this.
-----
Also, a repost of the shoes-and-FFVII-people tidbit from the comments in the previous post:
Shoe fetish, nay!
Elena: Being a woman and a Turk, according to some sources, is a mutually exclusive thing. This pisses Elena off, but only for the first few months of confusion -- once she got over the internal argument of whether she could be one while being the other while being the disgraced rookie while being apparently less competent than anyone/everyone else, the roundhouse conclusion that Turks don't care solved mostly everything else for her. Outside of the flats that she wore for work - and those were Shinra make, and a good make, too - she was game for anything else: on her days off, it felt good to pull on a pair of strapped sandals and walk leisurely through the better Sectors. Sometimes she'd head into the shops and blow some of her incredibly overinflated pay check on a pair of designer heels, the curve of the sole a perfect slide against the arch of her feet, and the ones who said that heels paralysed were merely the ones who'd never known how to wear them well.
Tseng: Not a cosmetic man, but you paid attention to detail when you worked for Shinra. The job was 90% capability and 10% appearance-versus-reality: you had to be good at what you did, and then you had to make what you did look better than what the actual nuts-and-bolts action made it up to be. Ergo the suit, which was always pressed and drycleaned, and ergo the shoes, which were leather and laced and expensive as hell. But they let him walk quiet as a ghost, and he could stand in them for hours on end. When they had to be replaced by sturdier boots for rougher areas, even then what peeked out from underneath the black slacks looked sophisticated, deceptively so.
It was almost enjoyable, sometimes, to go out to the shop which Veld had introduced to him years and years ago, and to watch the man take down the measurements and watching the process of the craftsman cutting the leather; like everything else, shoes had to be made to fit.
Zack: Sneakers. He didn't understand the prejudice against them, but maybe this was because he hung around people like Lazard and Sephiroth and Angeal too much. Not exactly the sort of company Zack'd usually keep in a normal environment, but hey, those guys weren't horrible people, they just had very bizarre ideas of what was comfortable and what wasn't. If Sephiroth wanted to strut around half-naked all the time, that was his gig. Lazard had wing-tips and lace-ups and oxfords and god, probably more shoes than most women. Zack? Give him a worn down pair of sneakers brown with dirt and let them run the streets. No blisters, no pain, no problem.
Doubleplus: flist meme! Well, not really, but for serious - I don't know you guys half as well as I should. I barely know which country most of you guys are in. *g* So:
i. Where are you from? (eg: Earth?)
ii. What do you do? (eg: professional paint dryer?)
iii. What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow Which fandoms do you sail ships for?
iv. Poker or blackjack? (because this is rly, rly important)
v. Ask me a question (eg: "how many legs do you have?")
So if you're new to the flist (and even if you aren't), or if you've been reading but not saying anything, STAB THE COMMENT BUTTON AND SAY HELLO. No one will bite!
AND TRUTH: MORE PEOPLE NEED TO JOIN this_program. 8D
Wings: Balthier/Reno for ununoriginal (probably not what you were asking for, sorry!) None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
794 words, because my brain doesn't seem to understand the concept of "drabble".
Right, so it's the slums. It's not far from what the generic lowtown usually looks like: dirty, overpopulated, rife with all sorts of underlife. Balthier's had three put a mark on him since the moment he stepped over the invisible boundary line (there's always one of those, isn't there, the line between rich and poor). One of them is a boy nine years old, and Balthier almost pities him enough to want to drop a few gil by accident; but there's nothing worse to a slum child than pity from above. Balthier won't try to change the way the world turns.
Take the Strahl alone, this time. I'll meet you when I am done with my business.
Dear Fran. Always so polite about when Balthier's very mortal impatience begins to bother her; so off she's gone, probably to find her wits again before their next rendezvous. It's not a bad partnership. Balthier isn't against free wings with which to fly solo with every once in a while.
The second mark's given up; good on him. Balthier has very little patience when it comes to these industrial type places; Archadian blood may water, but never bleed dry. And Midgar is, as far as he can tell, industrial to its very core. Functionality and very limited finesse. Slum-side peasantry and - what did they call it here? - Plate-side hedonists. In that sense, exactly like home. He could practically feel his skin crawling with the hypocrisy.
The third one's not being very intelligent. He pretends to trip - a clumsy affair - but Balthier's a chivalrous man. He catches the would-be thief before he can barrel into the Archadian.
'Watch out,' Balthier says politely, raising his eyebrows in challenge. It irritates the man more than anything else; the pickpocket darts away empty-handed immediately after Balthier lets go.
Good to know that thieves are thieves no matter where one is in the world. Piracy is still more dignified.
Brushing off his sleeves, Balthier makes to turn back uptown. He's only here for a stopover - refueling and some adjustments to the Strahl before he tries the Western Continent. After fifteen days of solid travel on a very solid ship bunk, he's looking forward to slightly better accommodations than what's on offer down here.
Wait --
'Not bad, for an outsider.'
Balthier didn't see this one earlier: the newcomer, entering stage right via convenient shady alleyway, is a redhead in a suit. Trouble, then; the judges back home wore the same uniform, and Balthier's become very good at sniffing out rats. 'Thank you,' he says, and makes to move away. The faster the better.
The redhead follows, his walk a swagger of the confident. 'What's the rush, buddy? You don't look like you've been here half a day.'
Balthier hasn't, and he'll bet that this man knows exactly how long he actually has been in Midgar. 'No rush,' Balthier replies, acknowledging that this is one game he'll have to play to get out of. 'But I'm looking for a quiet night and no trouble.'
'You're a smart man,' the redhead grins. 'So, why the long flight from Archades? Not everyday we get your sort just wandering in. A fortnight's flying and a bad incident with the engines around Kalm. Enjoy the chocobos while you were there?'
Balthier really didn't run from home only to end up in some twisted mirror copy of it. He sighs. 'What do you want, sir?'
'The name's Reno,' the redhead offers, probably out of goodwill. He's tapping a rod against his shoulder which looks like anything but, though. 'And I'm just your friendly intelligence gathering service for tonight.'
'You're with,' Balthier tries out the name, 'Shinra?'
'Smart man,' Reno grins. They reach the train station, and Reno buys the tickets without being asked - or asking, for that matter. Balthier wonders how all of this is going to end; wonders why the corporate monopoly in this place is even paying attention to him to begin with. 'I'll take you topside. Sector 8. Nice place, with nifty security cameras so that we can watch you while you sleep.' The redhead passes him the ticket. 'No hard feelings.'
'Does everyone passing through here get such generous treatment?' Balthier asks wryly, taking the ticket. 'I'm flattered, but I--'
'Don't decline,' Reno cuts in. 'That'd be rude, don'tcha think?'
Gambit and checkmate in one easy step. Balthier can't help but admire the efficiency of Shinra's little set up. 'My regards to your boss,' he says. 'To what do I owe the pleasure of such scrutiny?'
'You've got wings,' Reno drawls, as if he's very used to this job of pinning people into corners and watching them as they squirm. 'And we like to watch where people fly.'
-----
Rookie: Elena and the Turks, for aikonamika. Fitting into the job is hard for everyone; it's particularly hard when you keep wondering if they're looking down on you because you're a girl. It's even harder when you have a crush on your superior officer.
1595 words, and have I ever mentioned that I have real issues when it comes to drabbles? Warnings for language and a few almost-not-quite NSFW scenes.
The first day she got onto the job, the world still revolved around the right axes. She didn't ask questions of what she was, only who, and that was easily answered by: Elena, aged 18, blonde, female, Turk.
The last two, it seemed, weren't compatible. Turks, by definition, seemed to defy categorisation: the first day on the job involved wondering why no one had last names, why no one seemed to care, why no one seemed anything more than mildly apathetic. That she was a girl in a team so full of guys and girls who didn't care --
She was young; that was her excuse. Young enough to spend the first few months trying to be both at the same time: should she be slightly more protected because she wasn't like Rude or Reno? Should she have to be completely tough and unbreakable, because she shouldn't allow herself to be patronised? Was admiring Tseng's razor-edged brutality and calm rationality even permissible?
It was a bad idea to try: they called her rookie after her fifth failed attempt at getting her mission reports filed properly, they called her silly every time she tried to come to the defence of other Turks, and didn't give her time of day when she tried to point out that she, Elena, she was human. She deserved more than the dirt off other people's shoes - they didn't seem to care.
'Get off your ass, yo,' Reno said to her when he hauled her onto a Shinra helicopter, her blood sliding down his hands sickly warm. He sounded bored. She passed out too soon after that to get angry, but there was enough time in the space between pain and blackness to feel insulted.
The third month on the job, she threw out all the things that she thought made her weak; that essentially meant stripping her gender off of herself as brutally and as efficiency as she knew how. Shoes and clothes and amenities and half an hour baths; long hair and flattering underwear; neatly kept nails, polite language. Shit damn fuck it all: respect was more important than feminine equality.
She strode into the office and badmouthed Reno the moment he tried to give her a hard time; then she went to the range and emptied out a cartridge worth of high-calibre ammo into a practice target, breathing hard and furious. Reno just shot her a bemused smile when she went back upstairs; the next day she ran a nine minute mile and broke a man's arm as if other people's reactions would cure her own curious, inevitable paranoia.
Tseng was the problem. Who was she kidding? Tseng was always going to be a problem. By the time she was welcomed into the fold, Tseng was already heading operations with the sure handed confidence of a man a lot older than his ambiguous twenties. It didn't matter what he did (kill, bribe, torture): he was everything Elena looked out for in a man. Quiet, capable, apparently unflappable.
How the hell was she going to even pretend to be a genderless, conscience-lacking operative when her goddamned biological clock ticked every second she was around her own boss?
Tseng must've known about her crush, because there was no way a man like that let anything slide under the radar. But the only things he said to her were instructions pertaining to the latest mission; Tseng seemed to be a proponent of absolute magnanimity.
It was only later that she realised that his was merely a policy of absolute equality.
Capability could always be undermined by a lack of self-confidence. Elena didn't realise that until half a year had passed: Shinra was a game. Play by their rules, otherwise you'd always be an outsider.
'Hurry up,' Reno said, pulling her through the doors of their safe houses in Sector 4, the both of them high on adrenaline. They'd destroyed a small weapons cache that the company suspected belonged to AVALANCHE - Elena shot the man who had been dealing them illegally in the forehead, then Reno set the timer to thirty seconds less than was safe, and they ran for their fucking lives as the world exploded out into hellfire around them.
She still had the aftershock ringing in her ears when Reno pushed her up against the door, his hands large on her small shoulders. 'That's what we put you through months and months of training for,' he said, his words fast and his mouth too close to her ear. 'Because you're so damned good when you take no shit and buckle down to it. Open your eyes, c'mon,' he said, and he kissed her and she pushed him away but he pushed back, and said, 'c'mon, you can't be that blind.'
There were so many things that she could say to him, things like I'm not that sort of girl or we're not going to do it just because we're both high or I don't like you in that way, but suddenly all of those were completely pointless questions to ask: she didn't like Reno in any sort of romantic way - did that matter? She didn't see herself as a slut - why on earth should she? And she was as high as he was - so why not?
Instead, she said, 'Do you have anything on you?'
And he said, with a sharp smile, 'About fuckin' time.'
And she could have spun him around and taken the dominant role to show him exactly how strong she was, to show him exactly how she was not weak - but the only ones who do that are the ones who have a point, so she said instead, 'Who showed you this?'
And he said, 'Heh, guess,' and right then it hit her, hit her so damned hard that she was the one to push back against him with a short moan.
'Tseng?' she asked, picturing it in her head.
'No,' Reno laughed, 'Cissnei.'
The day after that mission she stopped cropping her hair every time it grew past her shoulders or into her face, she stopped walking past the girly stores that caught her interest, she also stopped trying to push herself to use the big guns and run the unattainable six minute mile.
When her hair grew out to the point where she could keep a fringe and wear it pinned, Tseng stopped to speak to her during one of his rare visits to the communal coffee machine, and said, 'You're settling in, then?'
'Yes, sir,' she said, and looked him in the eye. She paused, and then asked, 'Are you free later tonight?'
He raised an eyebrow, and she smiled, but refused to elaborate. Tseng chuckled. 'I prefer not to mix business with pleasure, Elena.'
'But,' she pointed out, passing him a sugar and not blushing when their fingers brushed, 'Turks are never really either one or the other, are they, sir?'
Tseng smiled. 'True,' he murmured, 'very true.'
'And you can't tell me the others haven't asked you this before,' she said, because underneath it all Elena really did think that Tseng was one of the most attractive and unbearably fair men in Midgar.
'Rarely so politely, no,' Tseng replied, taking a sip of his coffee and watching her carefully, as if to size her up, as if he still wasn't sure if she was sure. 'And almost never when we're not on a mission.'
'Sir,' she said, politely. 'It's just a matter of doing what you want and need to stay sane in this job, isn't it? It doesn't matter who you are. We're Turks.'
Not really men or women or old or young, just Turks.
Tseng finished his coffee, and threw the cup away while she waited for his response. It still took effort not to squirm; but at least this time Elena knew that Tseng was taking his time because he was deliberating the situation, not because he was being cruel, or because he didn't care. 'Very well,' he said, and they were sweet words to hear.
That night he let her pull his tie down from the base of his throat, the fucking hottest thing she had ever had the privilege of doing.
It took Elena a while to notice, though, that they'd stopped calling her rookie long before any of this.
-----
Also, a repost of the shoes-and-FFVII-people tidbit from the comments in the previous post:
Shoe fetish, nay!
Elena: Being a woman and a Turk, according to some sources, is a mutually exclusive thing. This pisses Elena off, but only for the first few months of confusion -- once she got over the internal argument of whether she could be one while being the other while being the disgraced rookie while being apparently less competent than anyone/everyone else, the roundhouse conclusion that Turks don't care solved mostly everything else for her. Outside of the flats that she wore for work - and those were Shinra make, and a good make, too - she was game for anything else: on her days off, it felt good to pull on a pair of strapped sandals and walk leisurely through the better Sectors. Sometimes she'd head into the shops and blow some of her incredibly overinflated pay check on a pair of designer heels, the curve of the sole a perfect slide against the arch of her feet, and the ones who said that heels paralysed were merely the ones who'd never known how to wear them well.
Tseng: Not a cosmetic man, but you paid attention to detail when you worked for Shinra. The job was 90% capability and 10% appearance-versus-reality: you had to be good at what you did, and then you had to make what you did look better than what the actual nuts-and-bolts action made it up to be. Ergo the suit, which was always pressed and drycleaned, and ergo the shoes, which were leather and laced and expensive as hell. But they let him walk quiet as a ghost, and he could stand in them for hours on end. When they had to be replaced by sturdier boots for rougher areas, even then what peeked out from underneath the black slacks looked sophisticated, deceptively so.
It was almost enjoyable, sometimes, to go out to the shop which Veld had introduced to him years and years ago, and to watch the man take down the measurements and watching the process of the craftsman cutting the leather; like everything else, shoes had to be made to fit.
Zack: Sneakers. He didn't understand the prejudice against them, but maybe this was because he hung around people like Lazard and Sephiroth and Angeal too much. Not exactly the sort of company Zack'd usually keep in a normal environment, but hey, those guys weren't horrible people, they just had very bizarre ideas of what was comfortable and what wasn't. If Sephiroth wanted to strut around half-naked all the time, that was his gig. Lazard had wing-tips and lace-ups and oxfords and god, probably more shoes than most women. Zack? Give him a worn down pair of sneakers brown with dirt and let them run the streets. No blisters, no pain, no problem.
Doubleplus: flist meme! Well, not really, but for serious - I don't know you guys half as well as I should. I barely know which country most of you guys are in. *g* So:
i. Where are you from? (eg: Earth?)
ii. What do you do? (eg: professional paint dryer?)
iii. What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow Which fandoms do you sail ships for?
iv. Poker or blackjack? (because this is rly, rly important)
v. Ask me a question (eg: "how many legs do you have?")
So if you're new to the flist (and even if you aren't), or if you've been reading but not saying anything, STAB THE COMMENT BUTTON AND SAY HELLO. No one will bite!
AND TRUTH: MORE PEOPLE NEED TO JOIN this_program. 8D