Author's note: Like the previous ficlet, this was written to a time limit, though I revised this one a bit afterwards.

The Suit

In the years since Meteor, I lost a lot. Almost everything.

So it's a surprise when I find it at the bottom of the box, underneath a stack of blankets; the pants are worn at the cuffs and knees, the jacket in tatters, the tie long since lost, but I still have it. The first suit I bought when I joined the Turks. I remember being all excited and scared to death, and not admitting it to myself because it seemed so unprofessional, and having to check the internet to figure out how to fix the tie, and Reno still adjusted it when I got it to work. Weirdly enough, he was really good at that - tied it perfectly.

It was the one I was wearing the day we went on our last order, though I didn't plan it that way, or realize it till later. Avalanche had reentered Midgar, and we were supposed to kill them, but Shinra was crumbling and the world was about to end, and we'd spent so much time watching them and fighting them and trying to think like they thought so we could get where they were going before they got there, it almost felt like killing people we knew. I guess they felt the same; they didn't want to fight. And neither did Reno and Rude. So we kind of stood there a bit, and then moved on, both groups, almost at once. Then the Kisaragi kid looked back and kind of waved at me, and I sort of waved back, and Cait Sith - Reeve - caught me at it and the cat did this little hopping dance, and I stifled a giggle and turned around, embarrassed and kind of happy all at once, and relieved and sort of let down, because, well, now what?

So that was the suit I wore as we got out of Midgar, and there's the mended tear on the leg where I cut myself on some sharp garbage or something. I remember worrying about tetanus half the way to Kalm, before remembering the world was going to end and I'd die of that well before I could die of lockjaw. And anyway it turned out I was fine, which I know because we lived through the end of the world and came out the other side.

I guess it was sort of anticlimactic, but we were still thinking "Now what?" and we stuck together because what else could we do, really? We ended up in Junon, because Rude knew some people there, but it was all gangs and we were in the Turks because we didn't like life in the Midgar slums, so why live through the apocalypse just to go back to that, only now without air conditioning?

So when we got word Reeve was in Cosmo Canyon, I said we should go, and the guys sort of shrugged, and we pulled all kinds of strings - when I was younger I had no idea pulling strings meant "holding guns to heads" - until we got on a boat out of there, and it took us like half a year to get to Cosmo Canyon and we nearly died several times, or at least I felt like we were going to when we hit all Gongaga in the middle of summer, but eventually we made it.

There was work in Cosmo. Not the kind we were used to, but our resumes didn't matter anymore. Farming, artisan work, things like that - Rude's a really great blacksmith. I've been wearing homespun cotton for the last ten years, and I can't remember when I last saw seams so straight. It's like a relic from an ancient civilization, like it should be in a glass case in a museum, and when will we ever see those again? It's hard to imagine I ever lived that other life.

The blouse got torn up for bandages somewhere along the way. I wish I could remember what happened to the tie.