Author's Note: So here’s my return to. . .well, here. After a long while and a bit of a challenge between myself and Sabriel41, I’ve come back with a new chapter to Strange Bedfellows – and hopefully not the last. A special shout-out goes to a long-time reader and reviewer, illist, who’s ( probably unknowingly ) helped me keep writing and not let me give this up yet. Thank you, whoever you are. xD Chapter title to Goo Goo Dolls, because they’re still awesome.

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Strange Bedfellows: Broadway

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At 10:00 AM, Rufus stood in front of a full-length mirror, taking himself in. Although he was instinctively vain, what with the glad-handing he'd been getting all his life due to his relations, it was all gone at this point. Instead of looking at himself as Pretty Boy Rufy, as one of his roommates in college had always called him -- roommate and college were loose terms, as he'd gone to school on company property and did nothing but sleep in his dorm between classes and work -- he was looking at himself in an entirely new way.

Today, and for a long while afterward, he would have to gauge himself instead as President Rufus ShinRa.

For a long while, standing where he was now with a tailor at his elbow, he'd tried to do it on his own. But I know what I have to do, he thought sadly. I have to see myself as someone my father would either approve or disapprove of.

He was fairly certain that the tailor's arm, holding a measuring tape up for the past five minutes, was wavering more each second, and so he decided he was ready with a nod of the head. Rufus turned and took in the white suit coat, almost identical to the last, and the rest of the suit it came with. He could almost feel the building under him thunder with almost seven-hundred employees, and for the first time, he really thought of them as his.

"Julia," he called, and the woman turned, a few pins stuck in her mouth. He had one last question, and whether or not he really wanted to hear the answer, it was one he would have to ask. Remembering every day of preparation leading up to this, he took a breath, seemed to try and make himself taller, and asked, "Would he be proud?"

Julia had been a close personal friend of Rufus' for quite some time. When he'd been twelve years old and still over-protected, she'd been his 'babysitter' for a few months before his mother's jealousy of her had taken hold and she'd been fired on-spot. He'd learned quite a bit about himself in those few months, though; things he felt he probably shouldn't mention to anyone. Secretly, he'd kept contact with her, and as soon as he'd been given the office and the power, his first proposition as Vice President was to hire her back into her position as a tailor. His father had agreed, and it was the only time he and the boy had done anything behind his mother's back, right up to the day she died.

The black-haired, slightly aging woman set down her things, took the pins out of her mouth, and went over to the new president to straighten his lapels. "There's no doubt in my mind."

Elsewhere in the building, it was much less casual.

Tseng was taking so many phone calls that once he switched over to another line, informed Reno to fuck off and stop messing with his head, and was met with a very unhappy response from one of the parade sponsors. This resulted in two more, one to an equally displeased parade coordinator and another to Reeve, who quickly muttered, "I'll send flowers," and helpfully hung up.

His redheaded subordinate was happily ignoring all real work and spraying soda through a straw at anyone who walked into their offices. The time between these visits was passed by half-heartedly doing paperwork and going for the occasional smoke break.

It was, admittedly, more work than he had done in a long time, but the Wutain man still craned his neck and yelled out the door, "Don't you have anything helpful you could do, Reno?!" He wasn’t sure whether he was impressed or frightened that he was replied to with an awestruck “. . .Yes,” but Reno left the office a few minutes later nonetheless.

Rude, who had taken it upon himself quite some time ago to keep tabs on his fellow Turks, was at the door a moment later. “Aren’t you afraid of where he’s going, Boss?”

He shrugged and took a sip of coffee, having momentarily used the wonderful technology of the Junon building to have his calls held for the next five minutes. “Rude, as Reno’s best friends, you and I are completely aware that if he does anything too destructive, he’ll never pin the blame on us; his ego is far too large to let us take credit for his work.” He stood and excused himself to the restroom.

The bald man shrugged once he was gone, took a quick look at something on his desk, and retreated to his own. It was an empty office for the moment, what with Elena having been called off – much to everyone’s surprise – on some “last minute business,” and he basked in that for as long as it lasted before his phone rang.

Reno’s phone also rang shortly afterward, and before he could greet his friend, he was met with a snappy, “Tseng pissed off a sponsor. We need a filler float. Reeve said it’s your fault. Go,” followed by the usual click. He tried to take a drag off his cigarette and ended up stabbing himself in the eye with the filter – ever since his arm had gotten banged up in the pillar incident, his hand-eye coordination had been flickering between eagle eye and quadriplegic.

He checked his watch. He double-checked the time on the big digital display over the cafeteria counter, because he couldn’t read analog; the watch had come with the suit and made a good mirror. He quickly cancelled his rather large order, ran out the doors, skidded to a halt in the middle of the hallway. He ran down it, leapt over an oncoming lunch cart, and launched himself into a closing elevator. When he realized everyone was too busy with the parade to have seen that, he remembered why he was in a rush. Floor nineteen. I need the first. He reached out for the button and saw that some prick had pressed them all.

And he was positive it had been Elena.

The irony of it was that it had been Rufus, boredly walking by a panel in his office and setting off all the buttons on every elevator in the building. Had he seen Reno, he would have stopped that particular one out of a sudden urge to be nice to his Turks, but he’d gotten distracted by the door opening. He looked over and smiled. “Perfect.”

Reno threw himself from the elevator about five minutes later, opting to take the stairs down from the tenth floor – a secretary had caught him and stopped him on the thirteenth, having forgotten her reading glasses and needing someone to read a birthday card for her – and when he’d finally reached the lobby, it was to a blocked door. A political activist, he’d come to find out later, had driven her truck through the building’s front door and refused to move it until Rufus agreed not to move into the presidential spot.

He ran across the lobby and opened the door of the truck, ignoring the gun in his face. “My name’s Reno, and if I have anything to say about it, that’s close enough and they’d never make me president.” He threw her out of her seat in the moment of confusion and drove it right back out of the lobby as the SOLDIERs took her away.

Eighteen minutes and a few phone calls later, Reno felt much better. He’d arranged a float for the parade and rerouted a few phone numbers out of boredom. He looked at his watch and realized that the parade wasn’t for a few hours yet – he wouldn’t have worried about it, but he’d gotten wrangled into the position of Presidential Float Driver. It was a job kind of like mopping the bathroom in Godo’s pagoda. It was an honor, and a position of status, but there was still someone with a finger up your ass for his own amusement.

To make himself feel better, Reno drove himself to the nearest casino.

For one, the term casino didn’t mean much in Junon. With Gold Saucer on the face of the Planet, no one even tried to compete with the prestige of the place, so no one else had opened a legitimate casino. Also, it was more fun for Junon dwellers to open illegal businesses in the hundreds of apartments overlooking the sea, so if you walked into the right building you could get into a high-stakes poker game without too much hassle.

He liked it that way. Reno was an excellent poker player for a number of reasons. First and most obvious of those reasons was that he could keep a straight face in any situation – he was a Turk, and that was a given. Second, he had that habit of making the other people at the table feel like they could trust him, which was the last thing they should’ve been doing. Third, he went into the games with his coat unbuttoned, his hair down, and his sunglasses in his pocket.

Straight and simple, he went into the games looking like a man who didn’t have a lot. If a person didn’t know his face, it made it even sweeter. But the fact of the matter was that Reno had all the gil in the world behind him, and he knew it.

“I’m a good poker player,” he’d once said to Reeve while raking a hefty ten thousand in chips across the table one night, “because I don’t give a shit.”

He didn’t. Reno couldn’t have cared less if he won or lost a hand, and that made him win most of them. Whether sitting on a hand full of aces or six cards that couldn’t have earned gil if they were paid to do it, the redhead didn’t really care one way or the other if he left with stuffed pockets or missing his shirt. The company was his bank; they would reimburse him for any amount, no questions asked.

Reno walked into a room that held three scarred men all wearing the same color shirts. He knew it was a gang match and they would take the skin off his bones if he sat down long enough, but instead of letting it worry him, he gave them an awkward smile and dug into his pockets. “Well, the wife’s gonna kill me for it, but there’s a truck outside and that’s all I’ve got.” He threw the keys on the table and pulled up a milk crate.

Needless to say, the wife didn’t kill him for it – mainly because it wasn’t her truck at all. Instead, she was having the time of her life. She was yelling at complete strangers and getting paid for it.

Scarlet was riding a forklift around a vacated aircraft hangar near where the parade would begin, getting the floats checked out and into their proper order. Rufus’ float dwarfed the rest of them on a gigantic scale, donned with red ShinRa banners that a person could probably identify from the sea. Underneath, it wasn’t much to look at: a deactivated Mako tank with an elevated platform attached to the top and a framework covered in plywood around it.

Not too far beyond that, the weapons specialist came upon a wide open space with six men sitting in the middle, playing cards, not seeming to notice the float construction going on around them. They were dressed as respectably as six homeless men could be dressed. Whether they were actually homeless or not, Scarlet had her doubts, but she thought she would give them the benefits. They didn’t even look up when she buzzed into view and stared at them for a few moments.

“Hey!” she shouted. One of the men looked up and adjusted his hat toward her. Behind him she noticed two large rolls of paper and a set of paintbrushes. “What the hell are you doing? Where’s your float?”

Instead of responding, the man pulled out a picture and looked between it and Scarlet a few times. Then he shrugged and chewed on something that was already in his mouth. He wasn’t the most sophisticated man. “We’re on orders from the boss, lady.” He motioned to the rolls of paper. “That’s our float.”

“Lady?” Scarlet smelled that something was up. She checked her clipboard. “This is supposed to be the float for the credit card company. And unless I’m getting real old, you aren’t a credit card company. And whose boss? Rufus?”

“The boss,” he said, and after a pause, he went back to his game.

Scarlet was losing her patience. These certainly weren’t friends of Rufus’. Rufus didn’t have friends and everyone knew it. He didn’t have time to meet people. And if they were hiring trash like this for important events like these, she needed to have a talk with the blonde boy anyway. “Excuse me,” she called, and the stranger looked back over. “I can’t let you march, walk, or drive in this parade if you don’t tell me what you’re doing here right now.”

The man stood and walked toward her. The other five kept on with their card game, like nothing was going on around them, let alone involving them. Their leader handed over a photograph of Scarlet, far past drunk at a bar, and a letter with handwriting that she recognized immediately. “He says that if I see that lady, tell her I’m here on the boss’ orders. That’s it.” He walked away again and sat down with his friends, leaving her the note and the picture. He felt like that was the wisest thing to do.

She could have said many things, as was the case more often than not when you were working with people like this. Instead, after reading over the note two or three times, she just grinned and pocketed it. “Welcome to the parade,” she said with a wave, and drove down the line to start complaining at the drycleaners again.

Reeve was also driving somewhere in Junon. He’d lost track of where he’d been, but he always knew where he was; the man seemed to have a compass lodged in his brain. Reno had given him that mental image, right before saying that he might’ve maybe just kind of crashed the Turk helicopter, but it was a complete accident, he promised, he’d just been flying out over the Wutai airfields, which airfields, Reno, oh, you know, the ones where they’ve got all the shiny machines, oh, those airfields, the restricted airfields, yeah, but he hadn’t meant to, so it was okay, right, thanks. He’d bought Reeve a few drinks that night and their friendship had repaired itself as much as it ever would.

Again, Reeve was on the phone.

This time it was a pleasure call, and he was gleefully ignoring any other calls that tried to interrupt. Nothing had come from anyone at work, though, so he figured that was alright. Instead, Melissa had called him out of nowhere to ask a few questions about the president-to-be, and he decided that this was much more interesting.

“He’s a good kid,” said the Urban Development manager, taking a right. “He’s got a hot head and bad ideas once in a while, but he really means well. His father was hell on the city and he told me just last night that he won’t turn into him. Hell, maybe he’ll even get rid of Corneo or something.”

Melissa was quiet. The conversation had been a little heavy and tense since it had begun. “Emerson, all you’re talking is nonsense to me, y’know.” Melissa had been born and bred in Icicle Inn, and after the split, she’d retreated back there to be with her parents for a few years. She kept up with the big city news as little as possible – ‘depressing,’ she’d always said when Reeve had tried to tell her about something at work. “I just wondered, what with how long you’ve been working there and everything – well, I wondered if you might’ve taken the spot instead. I never knew the president had a son.”

“Rufus? Oh, he’s been working a lot harder than I have. I mean, he hasn’t been doing it nearly as long, but. . .” Reeve trailed off. The idea of taking over ShinRa had never even crossed his mind, but now she had him thinking. There were people higher on the ladder than he was, of course, but they were military strategists and probably loved their jobs too much to give them up. He was the only one with true business, management, and foreign negotiation skills, so in a sense, he would be a logical choice for the presidency. Well, Hojo had his share of business skills, but anyone that put him into power would start fearing for his or her own life rather quickly – for a number of reasons. The thought of moving into that kind of position actually shook him up. “No, no way, Mel. There’s no way I could do that. I’d have to deal with Heideggar. Palmer. Hojo. Oh, gods, Hojo,” he laughed. “Yeah, there’s no way I could take over. Imagine. Me, working over Professor Hojo.”

“Those names mean nothing to me, Emerson.”

Melissa meant well, he knew, but she was very serious and honest, and sometimes that bothered him. A heavy silence fell and he noticed how quiet the engine of the car was. “Well, listen,” he heard her sigh on the other end of the line, “I’d love to talk some more, but it’s a big day for you and I’ve got some things to do around the house, too, y’know?”

“Yeah. I guess I should be heading back anyway.”

“Alright.” He could hear her smile, but he wished she would have been there for the inauguration. “Listen, it’s been great to talk. If you’re ever in the area, give me a call, okay?”

He promised that he would, though he knew that she would find herself too busy for a meeting, and the conversation ended on its own. They hadn’t spoken in months, and every silence between them was a little longer than the last. Sooner or later, he knew they’d stop talking altogether, and he wasn’t sure how okay with that he was. As much as he tried to shut himself up with work and keep his eyes on the incoming papers, he missed her in the off time. Her indifference to his job was the most upsetting, he thought; he was doing so well and she would have nothing of it. She’d been an activist during the war, though, before they’d met, and he couldn’t possibly expect her to stay with someone that worked in the very business she abhorred so much. Of course, that only made him wonder what would happen if he just qu –

His phone rang and he answered immediately when he saw it was Tseng. “Yeah, Reeve, hi. I’m supposed to be escorting Rufus to the parade right now so he can meet with the VIP seat holders, but something’s come up and I can’t make it to the parade. Do you think you could. . .?”

“Yeah, sure,” the older man said, thankful for the interruption. He assessed where he was. “Call him back and tell him I’ll be there in ten minutes, no more, okay?”

Tseng said he would, and with a click, Reeve was back where he had been before. He turned the car around sharply, ignoring the minivan he nearly hit, and started the drive back toward ShinRa’s current headquarters. A few seconds after that, his phone rang again; one of the sponsors needed his advice on something or other.

Reeve smiled, thinking that ShinRa might fall down without him.

This wasn’t the day for that, though, and he knew it when the parade started exactly on time. Reno found himself as bored as he might ever get, alone in a tank that he couldn’t even play with, surrounded by trumpets blaring, people shouting, and knowing that Rufus ShinRa was right on top of him. He debated gunning it, but remembered that despite all the advances they’d made since the war, tanks were tanks and he wouldn’t really be going that much faster than he already was.

He hated the job.

There was no radio, he couldn’t hear the announcements being made outside, Rude wasn’t even allowed to ride with him because he was busy with security, Scarlet had been too busy to acknowledge him all day, the rookie had gone missing – well, he didn’t really care about that – Tseng had been too distant to mess with, and he’d lost a perfectly good truck to a rigged game of poker. He had a feeling that one of those men had had a gun under the table, though, and decided not to mention that if one person in the game had three aces, the person next to him certainly couldn’t have a pair.

Reno thought about pulling the steering wheel wildly from side to side, but remembered how little room he already had on either side and decided not to risk crushing a few spectators. He hit the steering wheel lightly, tapping a beat to keep himself entertained, then stopped. He narrowed his eyes and suddenly moved his head to the right, barely missing the throwing star that lodged itself in the thick glass window in front of him.

“How the fuck did you get in here?” he had time to ask. He knew he couldn’t just abandon the parade, for the sake of the public, and jammed his mag-rod between the seat and the pedal so the tank would keep an easy, straight path. The lights were low, but he had the benefit of Mako to see the samurai standing at the foot of the hatch ladder, ready to take his head off if he had the chance.

This one, too, tried to make a speech. “You, as a Turk, have wronged my people in the past, and for that I’ve come to take –“

Reno fired a shot, but it hit the breastplate of the samurai with a metallic clang. Apparently Godo had stepped up his defense since Rude had gotten that one over the balcony – or maybe this one was from a different unit – or –

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” the redhead barked, whether to his new opponent or himself. He kicked the one of the knives out of its ankle holster at the Wutain, not too upset when it was brushed away like a fly, and slid the other into his hand. This one was far more familiar to his grip. The samurai seemed incredulous ( he was wearing a mask, of course, but he took a step back when he saw that Reno intended to come at his full-length sword with a seven-inch switchblade. “What, you don’t think that I can pull this off? I’ve been killin’ people with this since I was on the streets.”

The samurai didn’t move. “This is a sword made of the finest steel in Wutai, blessed by high priestess Yushi, sharpened with a diamond from Da-Chao, soaked in the waters of the most holy point in the river that flows through the empire. It’s never been used before, sharp enough to split a man’s hair in half, and –“

The struggle was short. Reno did take a pretty good slice to the leg, but this was his knife, his company’s tank, and his town, so he’d be damned before he let some Wute take it. He only had to take his mad-rod off the pedal once, for the final blow, and the float stopped briefly before he was back in his seat, bandaging his leg with a nearby kit while driving as calmly as ever. The parade was over shortly after the rusty smell of blood started to get to him, and he climbed out of the tank with a little hassle.

Rufus was on his case immediately. The redhead focused his thoughts on the rookie, standing nor far behind in a dress. She’d obviously been riding on the float with Rufus as some kind of eye candy, and Reno had to admit that she didn’t look bad. When the blonde boy had finally stopped complaining about the stop of the float and how they’d almost been run into, Reno told him to check the tank out for himself and hobbled over to Reeve.

“How the fuck did he get into the tank, Reeve?” he hissed. He was genuinely upset that such a security failure had occurred, and frankly, it was nice to see Reno taking something seriously, as annoying as it was at the same time. “If anyone else had been driving, do you know what would’ve happened? Kidnapping, that’s what. Kidnapping and probably assassination. What the hell happened?”

Reeve was rubbing his temples. He hadn’t seen the mess for himself, but it didn’t take too many guesses to know what had gone on inside that tank. “I know, Reno, I know. And I’m sorry. But these are the royal guards of Wutai, Reno; certainly –“

“Certainly my dick!” the other shouted. “We’re ShinRa, Incorporated! We’ve got the tightest security in the world and suddenly there’s a samurai on the presidential float on inauguration day! I mean, seriously, what the shit, Reeve?”

“What do you want me to do, Reno?” The other man was helpless. “Blow up Wutai, is that it? What the hell are you getting at?”

Reno paused to let the idea run through his head. He certainly would’ve had fun blowing up the port town, but there were more serious matters at hand. “Think about it, Reeve. A Wutai elite gets into the presidential float on inauguration day. Waltzes right in here and tries to pull off at least one assassination. Doesn’t that sound a little suspicious to you?” Reeve took a minute to catch on, but when he did, he tried to protest. “No, Reeve, don’t.” Reno pulled him closer and whispered, “Check into the fuckin’ rookie. Something’s up.” He walked away as quickly as possible, lighting a cigarette as he did.

As if Tseng didn’t have enough to worry about when Reeve relayed that message, his phone was suddenly bombarded that night with dozens of flower and pizza orders. When he got back to his desk, he saw black-and-white photographs that some spectators had taken laid out on it. Six men in the parade carried two banners with Tseng’s personal number on them, one disguised as a floral company and one as a pizza place.

He as going to raise hell in the morning.