"It's been a while since we did this, huh?"

"Yeah."

I can't deny that. It's been, what, six years? A lot of things are a long, long time ago these days.

"Too long."

I let him have it.

"There's something severely cracked in your head, isn't there?"

Reno is dangling himself over the side of the ShinRa Building, feet slightly secure over the railing, doing sit-ups roughly, oh, thirty stories up. It's unnerving, but I know he'll be okay.

"C'mon, Sephirotten! You should give it a try!"

"No." Crazy fucker.

It's a little odd, I'm sure. Sephiroth, Meteor summoner, enemy of the world, Mister Badass Extraordinaire, having a not only normal but sort of amusing conversation with an immature ex-assassin with fire-red hair and more of a love for scotch that for his own mother.

But hey, before I went all psychofuck and tried to kill the Planet, I was honestly a pretty decent guy.

Reno pulls himself back onto the balcony and grins one of his grins, patting down his jacket, presumably for some smokes. I point downward and hope he understands that they slipped out of his pocket a few minutes ago. Reno Drannor, Turk, and the only man I know who could possibly lose cigarettes out of an inside suit pocket and keep the sunglasses stuck in his hair.

He slides those over his eyes and retrieves a cigarette from his sock, offering it to me. I decline.

"So how's the wife?" he asks.

He's in a mood he likes to call his chop-busting mood. "Still nonexistent."

It's amazing, the Lifestream. It's just like the Planet is in life, but. . .happier. I guess I figured I would know that, what with all the experimentation with alternate dimensions, Materia, and recreational drugs in my teens, but it's all a big surprise after all. ShinRa still exists up here, as do Midgar, Junon, the towns, the canyons, a happier Fort Condor. . . The company does nice work this time around – it doesn't actually do any work at all, but at least it's not how it was.

"Ah, that's gotta be a bitch."

Reno has been doing well, anyway. He and I chose to continue our service to the company in death – perhaps just because Tseng and Rude would've been far too bored without the two of us around. I don't know if Rude knows how to get bored, but just maybe. Tseng and I have always had something like an intimate relationship – just with a lot more intimacy than relationship – in terms of being able to talk to each other about most anything.

"Yeah," I mutter. "And yours?"

He turns around, leans backward over the balcony, and calls upward. A familiar wrist swings into view for a moment, he briefly clasps a hand, and then he looks back at me with that same dumb smile. "She's doing well."

I've spent hours convincing myself not to imagine what else Yuffie's learned from him.

We decided that the Lifestream is not a place for grudges or quarrels, so AVALANCHE and ShinRa met once in this world's Kalm and sorted out all of our differences. We've all died, by the way. It's a little amusing, but I won't go into it. Anyway, it took a while for me to work myself into the difference-sorting, but what's a terrorist group full of activists going to do? Not understand human rights and redemption? Please.

"Speaking of bitches, though," he exhales, and I know he's still disappointed that he can't make the smoke different colors at will, "whatever happened between you and the Cetra? Is she still pissed about the whole thing?"

I'd just been thinking about her not long ago, actually. The Lifestream is a brilliant emerald green, absolutely everything in it is, and I was thinking of her eyes.

She and I crossed paths on her way to a council meeting. We met gazes and immediately knew that if we didn't talk then, we never would, so I followed her off the streets and into a field behind a row of buildings. She sat down in the grass and I waited for her to talk, because I knew she wouldn't want the first words to come from my mouth. When she was ready, all she said was, "I can't."

"You can't what?"

"I can't. . .get along with you." Well, I had kind of offed her. I had to ask, though, why she sounded so apologetic. "Harrison," she said, and I winced. No one knew that name. Sephiroth had been intimidating and I'd taken it on; anyone who knew that name was either dead or would never recognize me, but I guessed that the council had omniscience. "I want to get along with you, really I do. I've got no problem with you, but it's the council. We're a race of forgivers. But until we piece together the whole thing and know why you did what you did" – okay, so maybe they weren't omniscient, but they could've, I don't know, asked me – "we're asked to keep our distance so we can judge and research objectively."

"Protocol."

I was dead and the word still disgusted me.

She stood up and brushed herself off, still wearing one of those pink dresses we'd last seen her in. Then she reached out, too my face into her hands, and actually kissed me. Shit knows why. But when she pulled away, she smiled, patted my shoulder, told me she'd be in touch, and went on her way.

It's strange, but in that moment, I thought of Cloud and I'll be damned if I didn't get it.

But Reno's looking at me now, an eyebrow cocked, and I reach down to pull a smoke out of his sock. Reno Drannor, Turk, a – gods help me – friend of mine, and the only man I know who would die and still prefer protocol to passion.

We all have our vices, I suppose.

As he lights one of mine for me, I take a drag and mutter, "Yeah. She's a little pissed."