22: Blown Kiss [hee hee hoo hoo]
Technically, they ought to be enemies.
Technically, both of them ought to be dead. Long dead, officially, though undercurrents in the current ShinRa zeitgeist have them marked for extermination. Funnier still that the most dangerous beings are clocked as 'dead' before the company ever comes close. Ambitious and arrogant, that.
Of course, there is still time for both things to become true at some point in the none-too-distant future.
The spiky-haired trooper was at one point a trusted collaborator for the Turks, dragged along on missions where they required infantry support and extra firepower. Tangential connections there seem like a lifetime ago. They might as well be, fuzzy around the edges and colored sepia.
He was handy with a blade back then too. A little more skilled than your run-of-the-mill PubSec grunt. A little mouthier too. A little defiant, standing in the way of executing a compromised Science asset. Rayleigh, was it?
Things change and they stay the same.
Freyja is far too close to the striking range of that slab of metal Strife calls a sword. One that belonged to someone else. Two someone elses. And he's running with AVALANCHE now.
She's been caught hanging about - literally, upside down, from her rafter-bound grapnel line - reaching to abscond with something pertinent to her own devices. The manila folder disappears into her buckled jacket, but that leaves a hand free.
"Hey soldier boy," she sing-songs, head tilting, long tail of hair swinging like a pendulum she ought to secure. Her grip on the grapnel reverses, thumb on the trigger.
Its click she disguises with a noisy SMOOCH to her own palm, the kiss blown as she reels herself up to a (hopeful) escape.
"Try not to die out there~"