Chapter Text
Soft sighs. Soft lips. Soft skin. Things he used to enjoy. Things that took his mind far away from all the bullshit, for a little while. Soft sighs broke the quiet of his shitty little apartment, the darkness of the living room interrupted by wide strips of neon red that filtered in through the blinds. Soft lips against his, trailing down his jaw, seeking places on his neck that should have made him twitch and shiver. Lips that tasted like strawberry lip gloss and the tequila he’d bought her at the bar. Soft skin under his fingers, the give of her thighs beneath her skirt, thighs that straddled his lap where he sat on his worn-out leather couch.
But they did nothing for him. It wasn’t just the few too many drinks he’d had, because he had a few too many drinks every night and now that was just a normal amount of drinks. Reno tried to force himself through the motions, hoping escape would come. But it didn’t. The sighs grated and the lips made his skin crawl and the softness of her thighs no longer felt like an invitation to someplace else. He turned his head away from where she was trying to kiss him again, her attempts a little sloppy anyways.
“Hey, I think maybe you should just go.” His voice sounded strange to his own ears. Rough with the whiskey but it was the hollowness that felt too loud.
The woman, a pretty blonde whose name he hadn’t bothered to learn – or if he had, he hadn’t bothered to remember – froze for a moment. And then she leaned back, a confused sort of expression already on the way to indignant settling in.
“Excuse me?” she choked out. It sounded like she’d never heard the word ‘no’ before. Probably because she hadn’t.
Reno kept his head turned, but his gaze flicked to her, that bored sort of disinterest he’d perfected in the shift of his brows. He slid his hands out from beneath her skirt, letting them fall to the couch instead as if that should help her get the point. “Pretty sure you heard me, sweetheart.”
The moment her ego took the hit was clear on her face, like a bullet piercing glass. A sharp sort of scorn slipped over the flash of hurt rejection in her eyes. Reno thought he remembered them being brown, but everything was either dark or blood red in here. She pushed back off of his lap, wobbling on her heels for a moment, smoothing her skirt back down with angry little motions.
“Fine. Saves me the regret in the morning, asshole.” Her voice was pure acid, dripping from her pretty lips. Reno welcomed the feeling, at least it burned on the way down to that empty hole inside him.
She turned to snatch her purse up from among the mess of empty bottles and lowball glasses cluttered on his coffee table, stomping like a child as she hurried out of the living room and down the short hallway toward the front door. The thought that she was kind of drunk and he probably should make sure she gets home okay flickered through his head, but it didn’t translate to any action. Besides, it’s not like she’d want his company at this point, he rationalized. Though really, he just didn’t care enough.
That’s how he felt about most things these days.
The failed hookup gave him a vicious ‘fuck you’ in parting before she wrenched the door open and slammed it shut behind her, making a few framed photos he’d hung up in the hallway rattle. Probably, the new neighbors with the baby that cried all day would be complaining about that. He didn’t feel bad about it though, wasn’t his fault they chose to make their own lives hell. And then chose to take that out on everyone around them.
Quiet settled into his apartment again, and in it a little voice in his head noted dryly that he should give more of a shit. It was his job to care about people, after all. Or at least act like he did. More than that, he didn’t deserve to feel apathetic. Hadn’t earned it. But no matter how many years stretched between then and now, the weight of his debt, the accumulated sins following him like a trail of blood never seemed to get any smaller. So what was the point?
Reno wiped the taste of her from his mouth with the back of a hand and watched as the wash of red staining the living room clicked over into a cool, electric blue. The huge neon sign the light came from was close enough to the windows that he could clearly hear the hum of it, the fizzy clink as the tubes shifted from one color to the other. Back and forth, back and forth all night. He leaned forward to pick up a couple of the bottles on the coffee table, finding one that wasn’t quite empty and sinking back against the couch with it, taking a long swig. Lukewarm, probably been there a couple days. Tasted stale and like the grime and regret that he’d let just lay heavy over everything in his life. But he was drunk, and he didn’t care. At least, not as much.
He hadn’t noticed his fingers slipping into the pocket of his suit jacket, but as he finished his next sip, he looked down to find his phone in his hand. A couple notifications were there from one of the other security force members, he wasn’t sure which. Reno had them all listed as ‘Work Bullshit’ and then 1 through however many there were now. Sometimes he worked with them enough that he ended up learning their actual names. Like 3 was Shinji, his captain. 5 was Emir from the medical examiner’s office. Reno didn’t put people’s names in his phone anymore, though. It hurt too much when those names stopped popping up.
Something like grief twisted in his chest at that thought, echoed in that empty part of him like yelling for help in an empty parking garage. And in his drunkenness and self-loathing he chased the feeling. Opened his recent calls and started scrolling through it. For a while it was just in and out from Work Bullshit numbers, some spam calls, a few hookups. But as he went back, Rude’s name appeared more and more frequently. Outgoing calls to him, unanswered, over and over again. Very infrequently a short call the other man had picked up, nothing over ten minutes. The last one of those was months ago. He had to scroll back almost a year to find the last time he tried to call Tseng, and probably a hell of a lot farther than that to an instance where his old boss actually answered.
Reno swiped the call list away, pulling up his texts instead out of pure masochism. Rude’s convo was relatively fresh, because he’d sent him the usual ‘hey’ about a week ago when he was too drunk to remember it. The message history was a lot of ‘hey’s, read but not responded to. The hurt in his chest sank its claws in deeper just like he’d wanted, and he took another swig of the stale beer.
The phone’s screen went dark as he clicked it off and tossed it toward the other end of the ratty, worn down leather cushions, leaning his head back against the top edge of the couch, staring at the glowing blue lines painting the cracked ceiling as he pressed his lips together a little too tight. He knew he shouldn’t take it personally, Rude had a life. He had a family now, a wife and their little girl. What was her name? Reno searched his alcohol soaked memory, but couldn’t seem to find it. But he remembered how early on he’d been so excited for his former partner. Rude had met his now wife right after that whole mess with those Sephiroth clones or whatever they were, gotten married a year later and popped their kid out shortly after that. He remembered that was about the same time Elena had… her problems. Mental break, the doctors had said. And Tseng had moved with her to Costa del Sol to see if the slower pace of life helped. Said it was his responsibility, and he was probably right. Instead of the happy future he’d envisioned, that had kind of been the end of everything Reno had known. As if to drive the point home, Rufus suggested it was a good time to call an end to active duty for the Administrative Research Department, and suddenly Reno had found himself no longer a Turk at all.
He just hadn’t completely realized at the time that also meant he was going to slowly lose the only family he ever really knew. Ever wanted. Maybe he should have known. Maybe he’d just desperately hoped they’d all stay in that place, that time together, when each other was all they had.
There was a stinging in his eyes, and Reno blinked at it, pressed the heel of his palm against one eye socket until the feeling faded back into that empty thing in him that seemed to eat everything these days. The sign outside his window clicked back to red.
Reno pushed himself abruptly to his feet, unsteady for a moment as the booze in his system made the world spin a little. He shoved the near-empty beer bottle back onto the messy coffee table in a complaint of clinking glass and then stumbled to his bedroom. Didn’t bother to take any clothes off, just collapsed onto the unmade sheets. He curled around that ball of tangled hurt and loneliness and guilt in his chest, the broken pieces of whatever had been left of his heart, hating it and yet still savoring it while it lasted all the same. Because these days, he seemed to only be able to feel anything when he drank. And the rest of the time everything was just a dull, neverending, hollow grey.