Adult-FanFiction.org : Final Fantasy

The Reaper	By : crystalwind Category: Final Fantasy VII > Yaoi - Male/Male Views: 676 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Final Fantasy VII, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 10
- 11
- 12
Warnings: Reno sneaks around, and kicks Sephiroth in the balls. Little bit of language.

Chapter Nine - Blacklisted

"Loud. Arrogant. Intelligent… possibly brilliant. Most likely too smart for his own good. Doesn't rattle easily, and his intelligence and arrogance combined make it likely that we will not be able to control him. Blacklist advised."
"Showy, likes to make an Entrance. Cocky and over-confident, and pays too close attention to everything for comfort. Possibility of using blackmail or treason as a means to climb the ladder. Uncontrollable. Blacklist advised."
"Conceited little bastard… No sense of respect or timeliness. No regard for authority. Loose cannon. Blacklist advised."
"Over-confident, rude. Likely to break quickly under pressure. Blacklist advised."

Reno quickly learned that he was not well-liked by most of the Turks, and he was barely tolerated (at best) by the other Trainees. Most of the Turks used him as a handy target for verbal abuse. The rest largely ignored him. The Trainees took their cues from their Turk instructors, and barraged him with insults at every opportunity, cold-shouldering him when he simply laughed at their insults. He ignored them in turn, and to all outward appearances, being on the "Training Center Shit List" didn't bother him in the least.
On the inside, the constant insults ate at him, degrading his morale and self-esteem at an exponential rate. He hadn't been well-liked by everyone in the slums. Many people had downright hated him, and plenty had tried to kill him. He hadn't been friendless, however, and he had been comfortable enough in his surroundings to truly not care about what his enemies thought of him. Here, he was out of his depth. He had lived in the static half-light of the slums his entire life, and living on the Upper Plate was a culture shock to him. The sunlight hurt his eyes and burned his skin. The rain and wind confused him, and he was laughed at when he asked what the stars were made out of. The clean streets and Perfect People, with their plastic surgery faces and their designer clothes that reeked of money, baffled and angered him all at once. The people in the slums were, for the most part, born there, and had no chance at any other life. These people were born into the sun, into their money, and treated those in the slums as though they were worthless, as though they didn't work, didn't need, didn't feel. Treated them as though they were nothing. The people around Reno, Turks and Trainees alike, made sure to treat him like that every second of every day. Outwardly, he smirked and laughed it off. Inwardly, he cried.
He spent his first two weeks at the Training Center struggling to keep his feet under him, to get his bearings in the new world he'd found himself in. The constant hate and abuse threatened to wash him away, and the new life and technology he was faced with only added insult to the injury. He didn't even know how to turn on a computer.
Two weeks, three days, and countless humiliating lessons in learning later, he could work a computer better than 95 percent of the other trainees, and had found the key to all the knowledge he desired. The library.
He found the library late one night, wandering the grounds after curfew. After the first week, he had begun sneaking out at night to memorize the layout of the Training Center, turning it into a game to avoid the various sentries and night watchmen scattered about. He hadn't found many places of interest yet, although he did now know the location of every bathroom and broom closet in the main area of the Training Center. When he found the squat grey building tucked away in the maze of storage units and supply buildings, he hadn't expected anything spectacular. The uniform supply building, if he was lucky. The sight of books, lining walls and shelves from floor to ceiling, made him stare, awestruck. It was several minutes before he realized he was standing in the open doorway with his mouth hanging open, and he stepped inside.
The library held the answers to nearly every question he had, and the answers to many questions he hadn't even thought of yet. He wandered the shelves, tracing a finger down the spines of books, the scent of ink and leather lulling him, calling him. History. Mathematics. Linguistics. Art. The library housed books on every subject he could think of. All he had to do now to learn was to read. The first book he pulled off a shelf and opened was a book titled Clouds.

The discovery of the library marked a turning point in Reno's life. He was no longer restricted to knowledge taught in classes, nor to the pace the classes were taught at. He no longer had to ask questions that everyone else already knew the answer to. He no longer had to wonder at things in silence, for fear of looking like a fool if he asked. He absorbed what he read like a sponge, memorizing the words instantaneously, and it wasn't long before the taunts about his stupidity disappeared.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of the library, however, was the discovery of the maps.
The maps were locked away in a dusty chest in the corner of the library. Reno had stumbled across the chest one night during a search for the meaning of pi, and he hadn't been able to resist picking the lock. Pi was forgotten in the face of what he found. Maps. Maps of the Training Center, dated only three months prior to his arrival. He had already found old archives within the library that told him the old layout of the center, but those archives were decades old, and were of no real use to him. These maps, however, were new enough to tell him everything. The first item on the map to spark his interest was a small room called Development.

When Reno went looking for the room called Development, he was expecting to find some high-tech lab full of all kinds of new weaponry. What he was not expecting was an old room crowded with strange-looking electronics, with an even stranger-looking man seated at a rickety desk in the middle.
The man was dressed in a Turk uniform, the dark jacket contrasting sharply with his pale, albino skin. The jacket was tattered and faded, coated with enough dust to suggest that its wearer hadn't ventured out of this room for quite some time. The man's glasses were thick enough to magnify his eyes to three times their natural size, and Reno had to resist a strong urge to flee when he found himself faced with pale blue eyes the size of saucers. What was the guy doing here at 0200, anyway?
The albino stared at Reno for a while; Reno stared back. After several moments of this, a dry, quiet voice broke the silence. "My name is Whisper. Your hair is very bright. Would you like some tea?" Whisper was the first new friend Reno made in nearly a month of being at the Training Center.

From that night on, Reno made a point to visit Whisper at least every other night, always bringing with him a book or some topic for the two of them to discuss. Whisper had been in the Turks for seven years, and had been in charge of the Development section for nearly the entire time. His unique genius with electronics made him particularly suited towards developing new communications, radar, and medical equipment, which was primarily what Development was for. His albinism, quiet-yet-eccentric attitude, and that same genius made him particularly ill-suited towards working with people, and he had spent most of the past seven years alone, working odd hours simply because he could, and had nothing better to do with his time. The arrival of a new Trainee, intelligent and thirsting for knowledge, excited him, and he found himself engaging in long discussions and debated on anything from the philosophy of the (supposedly) extinct Cetra to the physics behind the creation of a White Dwarf.
Reno, for his part, was happy to find that he wasn't the only outcast living in the Training Center, and relished the opportunity to talk to someone who didn't treat him like a lower-class idiot, even if Whisper really was a lot smarter than him. It was a match made in heaven, and it wasn't long before the two of them couldn't really recall a time when they hadn't been meeting at 0200 for tea and a debate.

Reno's discovery of Whisper and the Development building was followed closely by his discovery of the uniform supply building.
Five weeks after the start of Training Group 713, an unidentified Trooper walked the halls of the Soldier Training Center, whistling to himself and looking about with bright eyes. Anyone passing by assumed he was newly-promoted, and smiled at what they thought was an eagerness to be at his new job. They would have been horrified had they known that a 5-week Turk Trainee was sauntering through the halls of their Training Center as though he owned the place, wearing a stolen uniform and using a fake ID to get through the gates. As it was, Reno's casual gallivanting came to a fairly sudden halt.
Leather, silver buckles, and creamy skin were all he had time to register before he walked face-first into what he could only describe as a solid wall of muscle, knocking him backwards to land on his ass. He shook his head, clearing it, and his gaze settled on a pair of leather boots, eyes narrowing as he surged to his feet.
"Hey, watch where the fuck you're going, asshole!" Dead silence reigned in the hallway, and a pair of cool green eyes, with pupils slitted like a cat's, gazed down at him in amusement. Reno was vaguely aware of the fact that he had rounded the corner into an office waiting room of some kind, that several people (including Dot-head, Sunglass-guy, and Kitten) were occupying it, and that they were all staring at him with some degree of horror on their faces. He ignored it all, of course, in favor of glaring at his silver-haired nemesis, who he had quickly nicknamed Gargantuan. Gargantuan gave a smirk fit to put one of Reno's to shame, and spoke.
"You are not one of my Troopers."
Reno rolled his eyes. "Look, Gargantuan, I don't know who the fuck you think you are, but I'm pretty sure you just knocked my ass to the ground, and most people would consider that a pretty sound reason for apologizing. Of course, maybe they just don't teach you freaks how to say 'sorry' in Giant-More-Brawn-Than-Brains Land." Gasps sounded throughout the room, and Reno had a brief moment to regret insulting someone twice his size with eyes that looked like fucking cat's eyes, for fuck's sake! before he found himself fending off a barrage of attacks so fast that he was reasonably sure Gargantuan had ten arms that he'd been hiding under his leather coat.
He fought furiously for a solid five minutes, which equated to approximately seven days in Reno-time, and was long enough for Gargantuan to grow increasingly curious and somewhat agitated over the fact that his red-headed nemesis wasn't on the ground bleeding yet. Then, with a quick dip of his body and vicious snap of his leg, he did what any self-respecting man would do in such a fight: he kicked Gargantuan in the groin and fled before the man could recover and chase him. A leap, twist, and bruised ribcage later, and Reno had hauled himself up into a conveniently-located air duct, reasonably sure that Gargantuan was too big to follow him through the ventilation system.
Left behind in the waiting room, hunched over wide-eyed, Reno's opponent laughed, shaking his head before turning to Tseng. "I assume that was that brat Reno you were telling me about the other day?"
Tseng had the grace to look mortified as he replied, fighting the urge to rush over and offer up some Cure materia. "Yes, General. My apologies… he doesn't know who everyone is, and I'm sure he wouldn't have…" He sighed. "Well, he probably would have insulted you more had he known who you were. I'm sorry."
Sephiroth laughed again, straightening and brushing a stray strand of hair back into place. "Fascinating child. I suppose I'll have to take you up on your offer to instruct Monday's hand-to-hand class; I don't believe I've ever seen a non-Soldier capable of sustaining a fight with me for that long." More to the point, he hadn't seen anyone who wasn't a Soldier, First Class sustain a fight for that long, and he wouldn't pass up any chance to have a rematch. Tseng sighed, suspecting that Reno was going to wind up hospitalized for kicking the General in the crotch.
"Very well, I'll inform the usual instructors."

A/N: Hahaha, Reno is in for a surprise when he shows up to his next hand-to-hand class smirk Sorry for the short chapter, it's really late and I don't feel up to typing more tonight.
Also sorry about the space between updates. I've moved back into my dorm, and life is going to be pretty hectic from here on out, so updates probably won't be as frequent as they were at the start of the summer.
- 10
- 11
- 12
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

The Reaper