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Shifter	By : crystalwind Category: Final Fantasy VII > Yaoi - Male/Male Views: 553 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Final Fantasy VII or Kingdom Hearts, nor any of the characters from them. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Shifter
- 2-Ch. 1 - Breeder
- 1
- 2
Warnings: Surprisingly, nothing…

Prologue – Strays

Year 256
Two pairs of bright eyes stared out at the bustling streets of Traverse Town. Their owners, huddled together in the rain, were mostly overlooked, hidden as they were amidst a jumble of empty crates. Shivering, cold, and hungry, the pair of fox kits didn’t stir from their hiding place until late in the day, when dusk began to fall and the streets slowly emptied, leaving them alone in the silence.

For weeks, the kits scavenged the streets of Traverse Town. They survived by eating scraps found in alleys and by drinking rain water collected in puddles, never seeking food by day for fear of being seen and caught. The Seekers had disappeared after killing their mother, but there was never any telling when a Sweep might move through the town, gathering up every stray Shifter and either slaughtering them for being “sub-human” or selling them into captivity. The Seekers wouldn’t care that the two kits were merely children, too young to have even made their first Shift into human form yet; it hadn’t saved their siblings, and it wouldn’t save them.

Three Months Later…
Dawn broke slowly over the town, the sun’s first rays slowly burning off a light fog that had enveloped the streets during the pre-dawn hours. Barely hidden by the disappearing haze, the fox kits scrambled fearfully towards their latest hiding place; they had stayed out too long in the night, and a squad of Seekers was moving through the town. Shouts rang out behind them, heralding the approach of the team, conducting a cleverly-timed Sweep. They were getting closer.
Panicking, the kits picked up the pace in their mad dash towards safety. Their usual spot was too far away; they would have to find cover elsewhere, and quickly – they didn’t have much time before the Sweep caught up with them.
The first opportunity to hide actually came in the form of two separate locations: a set of rotting wooden stairs that led into an abandoned café, and a crack in the wall of the same building, just wide enough for a kit to squeeze into and just deep enough to be heavily shadowed. The crack was by far the better hiding place of the two; the steps were rotted to the point that there were many gaps in them, and they couldn’t have been considered a hiding place at all were it not for the last remnants of mist that still clung to the streets.
Skidding to a quick halt, the smaller of the two kits forcibly shoved his larger brother into the crack, snapping at his heels when he hesitated and tried to move towards the steps; there wasn’t time to argue about who would take the inferior hiding spot. Casting one last frightened glance down the street, the smaller kit leaped for the safety of the steps, taking cover just in time.
The group of men that rounded the corner looked no different than the hundreds of people who roamed Traverse Town’s streets by day. They wore normal clothes, were mostly clean-shaven, and didn’t have haircuts any stranger than anyone else’s (although that admittedly wasn’t saying much). What marked them as different was the cold, calculating gleam in every one of their eyes. These men were here to take lives – be it by murder or by slavery – and that fact didn’t particularly bother them, so long as they got paid.
They walked quickly down the street, their casual air belying their rapid pace. They had seen a fox wandering the streets, and every one of them knew how rare a fox Shifter was, and what kind of money a kit would bring at the Breeder’s Market. None of them intended to let their quarry escape.
Their eyes scanned from side to side, missing nothing in their relentless search. When one of them spotted a crack in the wall of a building, just large enough for a small animal to hide in, they all zeroed in on it like bloodhounds. Under the stairs, the smaller kit shook with fear, blue eyes gleaming in the dim light. The Seekers never once glanced at his hiding place, so intent were they on the hole in the wall. If they got too much closer, not even the dim light and heavy shadows would keep his brother hidden from them.
The Seekers fanned out as they approached, ensuring that if the kit was hiding in the wall, it would not be able to escape. One of them neared the wooden steps, and the kit’s trembling stilled, his eyes darting between the man and the wall. Only a few more steps, and his brother would be discovered; the hole was supposed to have been the better hiding spot!
The man stopped at the corner of the steps and began to crouch down to peer into the hole. The kit under the steps acted without thinking, desperate to protect his brother. Acting as though the man’s approach had frightened him into fleeing, he shot out from under the steps with a loud yelp, dancing briefly around the man’s feet before shooting off down the street and away from the café, all eyes immediately riveted on him. He ran as fast as he could, hoping to draw them away from his brother and into the nearby market, which was just opening for the day and where he would hopefully be able to lose them. He wasn’t counting on one of them carrying a cast net.
The weighted net settled over him like a blanket and he quickly became tangled, crashing to the ground. If he’d had more time, he probably would have been able to detangle himself and wiggle out from under it, but its purpose was to detain him, not capture him, and it worked admirably. The Seekers were on him in a moment, scooping him up net and all. He wriggled and thrashed futilely, and they laughed as they carried him away, uncaring of his fear and amused by his laughable attempts at escape. They walked back the way they’d come, passing by the café without even giving it a glance. His squirming had wound up with him tucked under the arm of the man carrying him, nose poking out of the net and ears squashed flat by the nylon cords. He was facing backwards, however, and the last thing he saw before being hauled around the corner was his brother’s face peeking out of the hole, ears drooping and green eyes gleaming with despair. Then he was gone.

A/N:
I usually picture Reno as being the older of the two, but I always picture Axel as being taller anyway. Don’t know why…
Fox kits usually have blue eyes when they’re very young, and then they turn brown as they get older. Shifters can have whatever color eyes I feel like them having :p
People were probably expecting the next installation of Fallen, or the first part of Rude’s story, but I’ve been wanting to start Shifter off for a while now… I do have an outline for Rude’s prologue, but thus far putting it into paragraph form hasn’t been working out very well :p And I haven’t really even looked at starting Axel’s first chapter in Fallen… Right now I only have a vague storyline for his childhood, so that might take longer than expected to churn out.
The year in this story has nothing to do with anything… I just made one up so that it’ll be easier to understand the continuity of the chapters.
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- 2
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