Kunsel takes the space Balto yields with the baring of his throat, breaking eye contact for proximity. His lips hover a hair’s breadth away from the juncture of earlobe and jaw, where alcohol-warmth and body heat sublimate into the cold of Midgar night. It is entirely possible that he can hear the hammer of adrenaline-pulse beneath the city’s constant thrum, just as much as the volatile elements of products, sweat, life-musk, more, reach his senses.
For all that an observer might see the beginnings of a drunken tryst scant steps away from the back-alley entrance of a barely better-than-seedy bar, there is no physical contact between them. None at all, until Balto bridges the gap, skirting a palm over mesh, over metal, over corded strength.
Kunsel’s heart is a steady metronome, just a beat above resting. Controlled. Yet despite his control, his mouth still forms the final words of the report he should not have been able to access: ‘No body could be recovered at the scene.’
For all his sheer command of physicality, his fingertips still press into the facade brick above Balto’s shoulder. The smog-stained facing cracks, fissures revealing the fired red underneath, sure as any gunshot.
No violence thunders down. He listens. Breathes. Processes.
“Why are you doing this?” Almost subvocal, spoken there so close to the jugular, laden with the unspoken. What’s the catch? Because there must be one. He cannot trust that this is not some sort of test, a deliberate cruelty. Still, he does not deny his disbelief.
Right jacket pocket, he says, this swordsman from Gongaga with his facial scar and his dark hair in a knife-twist of irony, and Kunsel holds his poise for a few more tense seconds.
And then he seals his doom, perhaps, slipping directly into the noose the dogsbodies need to remove his inconvenience from the equation. Dire days indeed when denial of death–when it fits the pattern of deception written like a bloody screed plain to anyone with a spine–might itself warrant erasure.
Almost tender, the way he brushes his knuckles against Balto’s collar, plying the jacket open with gloved fingertips and brick dust, to retrieve the body-warmed steel. Such a small token, such a titanic weight.
There, a gap of breathing room, a return of eye contact, and he brings the tag, a tag matching one left behind, one he already wears, up to his nose. This one is more weathered. Chemical traces, scant but present, skin and blood, tend to collect in the ridge curl of stamped metal at the edges. It is a message. Difficult to fake. If there was no body, there would have been no tags.
This is not proof of life. This is proof of lies he already knew to be lies. And he knows, he knows, Balto risks consequences absconding with such evidence if his actions were unsanctioned.
The vibrant mako limning his irises still reveals lingering imperfections - hazel, calico flecks of blue and amber struck molten, not unlike the silent judgment of the Turks overseer.
Hope exists in the gaps between. Hope is gold. Malleable. Even crushed, it still exists, no matter how tarnished.
There is still hope amid the quiet fury and electric question in his gaze.
Silhouettes paint a different picture from afar. Nothing so uncommon hidden in Midgar's many alleyways. Narrow passages used to keep secrets between gaps, refuse tucked away and out of sight, waiting to be picked out between the city's teeth. Does truth only become irrefutable when evidence of it is as solid and real as bones beneath flesh? Does truth only reveal itself if you break it open by force and grab the beating heart of it in your hand? Excising truth might be an exercise in control or a demonstration of pure, unadulterated violence.
Fingers flexed, stretchy fabric pulled into a fist, his reaction is entirely involuntary. An awareness of mortality. Crumbled brick powders the shoulder of his jacket, and Balto finds his eyes drawn to it. Kunsel’s pulse, unchanged, beats steadily against his curled fingers; this inward-outward contrast of control and chaos stretches out into an unbearably long silence. Balto waits, breath drawn and held, to see which side the coin lands on.
There. A tipping point. Steel catches light in the darkness, imperfect and worn as the tags may be.
Twist of fate or leap of faith or somewhere in-between, Balto has chosen to make the most of this assignment. To prepare his own contingencies while monsters begin to stir in their den. Call it survival instinct, a desire to live, a suspicion of terrible things to come. Given hope, given something to protect, it is possible to become anything.
Traitor. Monster. Ally. Enemy.
The lines blur because they do not matter.
“Not out of the goodness of my heart, that’s for sure.” Zack Fair is not the first. Certainly not the last. The Company has buried so many and those left behind are only allowed to wonder. To hold nothing more than a piece of paper in their hands that purports the truth. Little shards of it, pushed into their palms like glass.
Balto does not wither under Kunsel’s gaze. Vital. Fierce.
Like staring into the heart of a reactor.
They look compromising with hardly any space between them in this dirty little alleyway. They are compromised. Errant, discombobulated. There is no returning from that. He remembers, at some point, to release the grip of his hand while his heart continues to rattle in his chest. Balto no longer stumbles over his syllables, no longer feels his nerves dulled. “You seem like the sort of man to keep your promises. I need a backdoor.”
“...Not just for me.” Balto pauses long enough for the press of a question to form while he deliberates and weighs his odds. This could take months. Years. “For the Turks. For all of us.”
Safety is not the absence of a threat. It is the presence of connection. They have both chosen those they would call theirs. Not for the first time, Balto bares his teeth through the bars of the cage. He is human, unenhanced, but his eyes are not clouded.
“The Company does not own me. I can promise you that.”
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