Final Fantasy characters, et cetera, © and ™ Square Co., LTD., aka Square Enix, 1987-2006. Xenogears characters, et cetera, © and ™ Square Co., LTD., 1998. Kingdom Hearts elements © and ™ Square Enix and Disney Interactive/Buena Vista Games, 2002-2006. "Mickey Mouse Club March" © Walt Disney Music Company, 1995-1983. Used without permission for nonprofit fan appreciation.

This is a quasi-prequel piece to accompany my Kingdom Hearts fanfiction Driftwood. It contains the backstory of Reno and his Chaser companions up to roughly the time of their entry as AU characters in Driftwood. It can be read as a standalone AU as well.

Rated R:LS, meaning it is rated Restricted (ages 17 and up) for coarse language and sexual content. Rude/Reno. Irvine/Reno. Fei/Elly. Other minor pairings. Crossdressing, gender-bending, underaged sex.

Enjoy.

She kneels down beside him in the slurching alley water and she slides the visor from her eyes, that he can see them, light green rimmed with a thick dark band.

She moves a hand, gloved and covered by strange amber metal, and he shrinks away, holding his brother's body in his shaking, bloody arms. But his brother is heavy, and his legs are weak, and the green eyed woman's arms are very strong.

"Here. It's okay."

The other two are taller, thinner, almost wraith-like, and she speaks tersely to them while holding onto his wrist at her side, and Reno sees Lae's body face-down in the alley and he starts to run, but the woman holds fast to him and says, "Someone will be by for that later."

That's the last time he sees him. Drifting away in the flood.

Midgar here! Balamb here! Wutai! Ivalice! Shevat!

Nice and orderly! Don't shove! Tell the clerk your full name and answer any questions you may be asked! Ruguo ning bu lijie, qing xiang womende yuyan xiangdao qingqiu yuanzhu!

They had disbursed him a canvas uniform when the boat gates had lifted, and he clings to it, standing in his rags, face just a stream of tears, confused and blind and suffocating and they left Lae! they left him in the mud! what am I doing here I have to go back Lae! Over here kid, Midgar right? Over here, stand in line, tell the nice man your name.

"Reno Conway."

Age?

"I don't know."

He looks twelve. Put twelve.

Any family?

"My broth--"

And then the world dissolves and the noise around him becomes a storm and he cries again.

The man says something to an attendant and the attendant leaves and comes back with a woman, more a girl, tall and thin with a white nun's habit, a jeweled cross around her neck.

Take him to trauma ward, says the man at the desk. Some fucker tore this one out by the branches.

She bends to be level with him, and the cross dangles and catches the light. She smiles. It's not the smile of the woman in the alley at all.

Reno? I want you to come with me, all right?

"No." He doesn't want to go anywhere. He doesn't want to go with anyone. He wants to go home. He wants to--

Her name is Elhaym, as he learns later, and right now she slaps him across the cheek.

Be a big boy, she says, fingers in his hair. Don't you see, there's nowhere to go back to now. From now on this is your home.

At the trauma ward everyone cries, everyone screams, everyone has nightmares. Here the medics are hollowed out shades of people, white casks moving bed to bed. Green healing light hums at the edge of their fingers and their words are a rota of programmed comfort, and the lights never go out.

Someone comes by to take his history, where were you staying, who took care of you? Reno asks what happened to his home. The nurses say that everything will be explained at the orientation. For now, he needs to tell them all he can.

Where did he get the marks on his cheek?

"My mother."

Where is your mother now?

"Lae said they took her away."

Lae is your sister?

"My brother."

Was he with you when the Heartless came?

"He-- He was trying to protect me. It was coming after me and-- he--"

Elhaym sends the others away and tells them to try tomorrow. She holds Reno's hand until the drugs reach his heart and the nightmares snare him too.

Eight days and the ward says he's well enough to go. Arrivals are still coming in so they send him through the line again, put him in a group, kids and young teens, the oldest of them scarcely sixteen and the youngest not even ten.

One boy, fourteen, chunky with a fat head shaved bare, Rudolfo. He came from Midgar too, the sector three slums. He's quiet and hates to be around Reno, little wet-eyed Reno, and he sizes him up and the first thing he asks is, "How many did you kill?" with some thick Soleil accent.

"What?"

"You wouldn't be here if you hadn't killed someone." He killed twelve, with his bare hands, he says. That's why he's here. That's what they do, he heard it from the older kids: they take the ones that can fight. So who did Reno kill?

Reno remembers the knife and the shade's hollow yellow eyes and Lae's body in his arms and he says "No one."

He didn't kill anyone.

They wear the uniforms and they file into classrooms, auditoriums, hundreds of kids. They listen as the soldiers explain what happened to their worlds. The soldiers say what the kids are expected to do now. You are given a chance, they say: this is a life you would not otherwise have had.

Not one of the kids walks out.

They tell the kids that there are procedures. There are steps. They will be trained, taught how to be soldiers, how to fight, how to outsmart, how to survive. There is a religion, and it will be their religion, the religion of the Chasers: the belief in the Door to the Light, and the Bringer of the Key. The Keymaster may be anyone, and may appear at any time, when crisis threatens the worlds. The children will learn everything they need to know.

Rudolfo lets Reno sit beside him as the soldiers talk and lets him hide behind him when older kids frighten him in the halls, and he wakes him from the nightmares. Reno repays him by giving him a nickname, the first one he's ever known.

The others in the squad besides Rude are all scared kids just the same as them. Elena Saratine is a child and Beatrix de la Croissouix is less of an adult than she thinks she is and in between them is Xian Tseng, the group leader because no one else wants to be, and he takes orders maturely and dutifully and knows how to handle everyone. Terra Branford is quiet like Rude and Biggs Darklighter and Wedge Antilles are loud, and need help with everything, and Irvine Kinneas spends his time searching the halls for friends that aren't there.

The soldiers divide the kids up according to their groups and set them training. First the body, then the mind, the soldiers say. They run them hard and reward them generously and after a while, like with dogs, it seems to them that the treatment is right.

Elhaym still visits Reno to ask how he's doing. Out of her habit he sees she has red hair much the same as his, and she asks, gently while holding his hand and squeezing the syringe of ether into his vein, if he knew he had a sponsor? Someone high up, talking to Captain Garamonde. Sort of an older woman, with blonde hair and pistachio eyes.

Pistachio. Reno decides that's a good color for them.

The Chasers have lessons, and Reno sits with Elena and the much younger kids to learn reading and writing. He sits with Rude to learn math. He trains with Rude and Irvine and runs with Tseng. About the only thing he's good at, running.

It takes him a while because he isn't used to this, this structure. His life up to this point was made of only one person, no such thing as school, no such thing as work, concerns only going so far as to cook for his brother and sew and wash his clothes, and lie beside him when he went to sleep at night, because Lae said it reminded him that he was doing right by their mother, at the end of it all.

There is no Lae and there is no right, just a day routine of exercise and training and school and labor and food and rest and fitful, awful sleep. Long after the other kids in the trauma ward have begun to move on, Reno still has nightmares, and Elhaym still comes to visit him. Rude and the others are frightened and never ask, but after a while each one of them understands, the way they eventually understand everything there is to know about each others' stories.

Four months in there is a ceremony like first communion. The cadets dress in tunics with the royal emblem and line up into ranks in the great marble hall of the King, all the little soldiers, and one by one the cadets step forward and kneel and recite the pledge.

I pledge to protect the Kingdom and its Territories, to uphold the Code of the Chasers and the Charter of the Allied Worlds. I pledge to honor my senior officers, to give myself bravely to the cause and offer my life at any moment in their service. I pledge loyalty to the Throne of Disney, my King and Savior.

The cadets must bow low and the King rests his hand upon their foreheads and says, Rise, young Chaser, and they return to the ranks, blushing and proud as though four months ago they weren't screaming and begging to be anywhere but here.

Like dogs. Good little dogs. Feed it and shelter it and reward it when it's good and punish it when it's bad and soon you will have a pet. Many, many pets.

That evening they eat in the Great Hall, between the King and Queen and their court. Most of the cadets are too nervous to eat and the courtesans' coddling does nothing for it, and deep down the soldiers are sure that the court don't really expect anything else.

This is the last time the children see topside before their graduation. Chasers are a secret meant for the bowels of the castle and they must be neither seen nor heard, for the less the King and his court have to think about their existence the easier the guilt on their minds.

Activities are the good part, or at least the least miserable part. The teaching soldiers encourage the cadets to take up clubs and sports for their off days, to build community, to have hobbies. It's mandatory to have fun, or otherwise there are quotas not being met. But some of the clubs really are fun, and it takes you out of the dungeons for a few days each month, and that's all the rationale most need.

Reno tries to convince Rude to join the Scouts with him. Outdoors! he says. Mountain climbing and fire-building and camping! But Rude won't have it. He's gotten fit since the training started and now he enjoys it and wants to join the weightlifting club, go on the wrestling team. Reno resigns to skip some of the Scouts trips to stay with Rude in the base and watch him wrestle, and cheers him on.

Reno is the first smile Rude makes in thirteen months.

Irvine is friendly with Reno as well, because the two are similar enough to like each other without being similar enough to hate each other. Irvine is a few years older in his face and a thousand years older in his eyes and he thinks he hides it better than he does. He likes Scouts more than Reno does and drags him out on some weekends even when Reno wants to stay to hang out with Rude, and they march up the hills together singing with the mouse pack, Who's the leader of this club that's made for you and me? M - I - C, K - E - Y, M - O - U - S - E!, and are the first to pitch their tents and build their fires and the last to fall asleep, watching stars that they're never allowed to see.

Irvine is older, and has more experience, so he doesn't take his lessons with Reno. He ascends through the training programs and makes it to his specialization the same time Beatrix does. Which annoys her, because she has a year on him. Irvine smiles and teases her the way he teases all girls, in a way that isn't really teasing but flirting, something he grows more overt with as he gets older.

One night Irvine comes back to the barracks with a glow to his skin and everyone knows what happened. The boys are full of questions but the girls object until they start throwing things and the sergeants shout for lights-out before Irvine can do anything except grin smugly.

The only thing they do know is who it isn't, because Beatrix and Terra would never let a guy close and Elena has barely hit puberty, and Irvine's decorum might lack a lot of things but everyone knows he has standards.

The glow happens again and everyone is envious. Then it stops being special because more of the kids are finding it out, more cadets are finding a way to sneak out of training or lessons or clubs, what rooms are deserted when. Some of the older kids even have passes to go up into the town on weekends, and the boys especially know where to go to find someone.

Reno is a blushing thirteen-year-old, no longer scared of his own shadow but still terrified of the dark, and other people are a closed-off world, another island across an ocean he really doesn't want to brave. His exploration before joining the Chasers was limited to what his brother taught him. What his brother helped him with. Reno mentions this once nonchalantly when the topic comes up in the barracks and he has counselors hounding him for a week before he convinces them someone was spreading nasty rumors. No one mentions it again in the squad and Reno learns for the first time what a dirty secret is.

Close to his fourteenth birthday Reno goes with Irvine on a hike with the Scouts, and they pick a spot close to the river to pitch their tent and fish and swim until the chiefs call everyone around for dinner at the main fire pit. It's hot, sticky summer heat in this world so after dinner most of the boys wash off again in the river and go to sleep in their shorts, and Reno lies next to Irvine in their tent and one way or another the talk comes around to Reno asking what it's like with a girl, and Irvine says, well, you've done it with your hand, right?

Irvine wasn't there the day Reno said the thing about Lae.

Yeah, Reno says.

It's like that, but like a thousand times better. It's wet. And it's so much hotter than your skin...

Reno flushes listening to Irvine talk about it. The older boy's voice is low and they're close enough that Reno feels the tickle of Irvine's breath on his nose when he talks, and it's warmer than the air.

Before he knows it, he's hard. Irvine's hard too, remembering the girls. They realize what they're doing and Irvine stops, laughing, and Reno blushes harder and drags his blanket over his head.

Hey, Irvine says, voice still lofty but coming down. Hey, don't be like that.

But Irvine is seventeen and has forgotten what it's like to be small and confused and has never known what it's like to be Reno, and they don't speak again till morning.

Training intensifies in the second year of internment. The kids are running faster, farther, longer, and with fewer rests between. They climb higher, they shoot farther, they hit harder. They learn the fundamentals of a dozen different forms of martial arts and study weapons, armor, electronics, communication, their first magic. Classes extend into the study of secondary and tertiary languages, code forms, linguistics, higher mathematics, the fundamentals of astronomy, cosmology, astrophysics. The teachers monitor the students' scores and adjust their courseload based on what their strengths are. Rude is taken out of maths and given more time for boxing; Irvine returns to his senior concentration with sharp-shooting; Reno learns bojutsu and is forced out of computer programming and chemistry.

He's also drafted as a maiko, as is any boy with enough estrogen in his system and has a feminine enough appearance to pull it off. They teach the boys separately from the girls at first so that no one laughs and when they integrate the classes the boys are so indistinguishable from women that members of their own platoon don't recognize them when dressed and painted like little china dolls. Reno is made to grow his hair long, something that embarrasses him more than anything and he keeps it braided and hidden under his collar whenever he can, and only looses it in the barracks and to show Elhaym, who still visits and who Reno resembles more every day.

Now that he's older he's starting to see how beautiful Elhaym is. The others see this from clear across the room and laugh, and Biggs wonders aloud whether Reno wants to sleep with her or be her.

Elena likes Elhaym too and deliberately performs better in Curatives so that she'll be drafted as a cleric. Everyone despairs at this, because they see even then who they'll be stuck with as their white mage for the rest of their lives.

Focusing on his studies makes Reno sleep better at night but the dreams still come at him, monsters in a thousand, million shapes tearing him apart and he wakes up with Rude pushing him into the mattress, hand over his mouth that Reno's screams don't disturb the others' sleep. Rude has adapted to hear Reno crying in his dreams and to wake to help him before it gets too bad.

In waking hours no one can attach the Reno that screams at night terrors to the strong, lithe little boy who smirks and makes girls giggle and blush. He parrots Irvine and the other older boys and fills in the gaps from what he learns from the maiko classes and finds that girls like a boy who acts like a bit of a girl. He succeeds in kissing a few of them and making out with one, but they're too shy to go further or maybe he is, and he rubs off alone in the barracks instead.

One night after a late class of shuriken dances, Reno trots through the empty marble corridors with his skirts bunched up in his hands and his sandals clapping loudly on the stone, cheered by the instructor's compliments still echoing in his head, and he's too excited to even think of sleeping or the five-mile run before breakfast tomorrow, he has to go see Elhaym now. He hasn't seen her in forever and he misses her, and he's certain that she'll be delighted to see him, done up so beautifully with his long red hair braided in intricate flower-like folds and knots. She'll be so happy to see him.

But the lights are off when he reaches the ward, and when he looks inside, he finds it empty, all the beds made and untouched, and no one in the office. He frowns to himself and thinks perhaps she took the night off, but then he hears movement from behind one of the curtains and he edges closer to see, moving silently like the senior geisha have taught him, finding a gap in the drapes to peer through.

Elhaym is on her back on the bed, nurse's smock unbuttoned and pushed aside exposing her breasts to the air, wet and reddened nipples, her neck arched and strained and her hair damp under the habit, and there is a man pushing himself into her, tan-skinned, brown ponytailed hair curling over his shoulder and she whispers his name, Fei, Fei, hugging him close with her long soft arms and her long curved legs, Fei, oh.

Something burning and sick coils in his stomach and Reno runs away.

He runs, and doesn't care how loud his sandals are on the stone, runs until the halls aren't familiar and his erection burns under his robes and he has to stop, gripping the wall for balance and he breathes heavily, eyes watering or tearing up, he can't tell.

He remembers her swollen breasts and the way her mouth moved when she moaned and his hand dives beneath the folds of his dress, pushes the cloth aside that the cold air hits his skin and he pants, stroking himself, unable to stop, knees shaking and balance failing and he slides down the wall onto the floor, hair falling down around his shoulders, legs spread and robes open, trembling and gasping sharply and convulsing, choking down a cry in the empty hall.

The next evening, after running, push-ups, breakfast, astrophysics, bojutsu, rifles, lunch, up-current swimming, dinner, and cards, Reno comes up to Rude as the squad is dressing down in the barracks and hands him a pair of scissors.

The day after, when Reno shows up for maiko training, the elder geisha take one look at his hair and cast him out of the classroom.

He keeps the dress at the bottom of his trunk and refuses visits from Elhaym from then on. He finds a girlfriend, a plain unremarkable girl named Jesse, who asks little and puts up with too much. The first time they do it is her first time too and if she's disappointed she doesn't say, just smiles up at him and pets his uneven hair and plaits the long part into braids with her rough fingers. He tells her to stop.

Jesse doesn't stay long. None of them do. He doesn't want them to.

The next time the cadets file into the marble hall of the King is the day they graduate. Now when they bow before their Lord, they do it on one knee, and they recite a new pledge, longer, wearing amber-colored armor with the royal crest across their chestplates, and the King stands before them and knights them each in turn, with the golden shaft of the Keyblade.

That evening is a royally endorsed celebration. All new Chasers are given permission to go into the town for the night, provided they return by dawn to vacate their bunks. The new soldiers, all teenagers, are rowdy like they are rarely permitted to be, running amok like the children they were never allowed to be.

Rude and Reno play-spar in the halls en route to the surface and Rude runs Reno up the walls until the firecat is hanging from the light fixtures and people start shouting. The lights break and take the wiring with it and the entire hallway goes pitch dark and when the elder Chasers come by with light spells in their hands, they don't even have to ask.

"We'll bring you back some souvenirs," Elena promises. Irvine does her one better and promises beer, waving as Reno and Rude get dragged away, or rather Reno is dragged away and Rude is politely asked to come quietly.

Captain Cyan Garamonde is irate. They had just seen him, somber in his dress regalia in the King's throne hall, and now stripped down to his normal fatigues he looks older and acts nastier, shaking his finger at them, you should know better, you're soldiers now, you're adults, and at the end he dismisses them on a warning. And revokes their passes, saying they can spend their night how they like inside the base, but god's wrath and hellfire if they step one foot out on the surface.

Reno, fifteen and hostile, demands to know why he doesn't give them latrine duty for a month, if he's in the mood for cruel and unusual punishment. Rude yanks his ponytail to get him to shut up, but he doesn't have to, since Garamonde's glare does the work for him.

But he doesn't do anything. The grounding's punishment enough and if they were behaving properly they'd see it as the disgrace it is, Garamonde says, and then he kicks them out of his office.

They wander the halls, the old ones they know, kicking at the stone and cursing at how desolate the place is, all the younger cadets away on a Scouts retreat or in lockdown for the night, even the instructors gone. The heating is shut down on their floor because no one's here to use it and it feels like a mausoleum, for the first time a reminder that they're miles underground in a dungeon the world would like to forget exists, and all alone, with nothing to do.

Rude says he doesn't mind. Reno contends that he ought to, that there's real goddamn food up there, and real goddamn chicks, and Juliet company is shipping out on their first operation next Wednesday and between now and then is all orientation and gearing up so when else are they going to have some down time?

Rude shrugs, and says maybe it doesn't matter, and Reno diminishes and says, yeah, you're right, and they've got each other to hang out with, so there's something anyway.

They go back to the barracks and before they know it they're reminiscing, hadn't realized till then just how much memory was bound up in these ugly walls. The first night when Elena wet her bed and Biggs laughed on accident and Elena threw her shoe at his head, from clear across the room, and it hit him right between the eyes and no one gave Elena any shit for the whole first week. Or when the boys got together and ambushed Tseng in his bunk and chopped off his ponytail and ran around the room with it whooping like Indians with a scalp. Or when Biggs got his Early Galactic History scores back ranked in the 99th percentile and everyone swore he'd either cheated or the computer had gone cheese-error up, and it was actually neither, they'd just actually mailed him Wedge's scores by mistake.

Rude remembers the haircut he gave Reno and Reno remembers the piercings he gave Rude, and as happens sometime when friends are alone and bored out of their skulls the discussion veers into areas neither would normally touch upon, and then Reno is digging his old maiko robes out of his trunk. Rude's never seen him wear them, and says it like a dare, and Reno's bad with dares.

They don't fit him now as well as they did. He's grown a lot, built too much muscle. But Rude says they look good on him and the way he says it makes Reno all right with the idea, that it isn't embarrassing, that he doesn't have to be ashamed, and that it doesn't make him less than what he is.

The robes do nothing against the cold so he doesn't say in them long. He undresses and folds them back up and away and tugs the jumpsuit on again. The new uniform they were all handed that morning, the one with their names printed above the breast and their official ranks on the left sleeves. It'll go under their armor, the intelligent nanite hard-gummi shape armor they were each given with their unique ident encoded to each, the clothes that will become their second skin.

No more Scouts, no more clubs. Wednesday is their first operation and after that will be an entire life of the same.

It isn't that they regret. Looking back requires you've got somewhere to look back to, and Midgar and everything that life contained is gone. Their families are gone, their homes are gone. You learn to carry home on your shoulders and take your family where you can find it.

For some reason they find themselves sharing a bed that night. They lie together, face to face, eyes level as they haven't been for years now, huddled close like the blood brothers they rather wish they'd been, prepared to share secrets except they don't have any left. So Reno tells old ones, retreads them, and he starts to doze against Rude's shoulder, talking about girls and that bastard Irvine, laughing and waving at them like that when they were getting dragged off by their asses, they'd get him back tomorrow, wouldn't they?

Rude says, you know you used to cry?

What? No I didn't. Shut up.

You cried. All the time, like a bitch. You gave everyone a headache.

Shut up.

It's true.

Reno thinks about this, Rude's fingers playing with the end of his ponytail, and he says, Thanks-- for, you know, not making a thing of it.

Yeah.

Rude watches him as he drifts off, more on top of than beside him, the way he always instinctively reaches out to hold onto something, the brother that he lost and, maybe, the sister that he never got. He's pathetic but they're all pathetic, they're all broken and stitched back together sideways, bleeding at the seams, and kids besides.

There is a time when Reno has just begun to fall asleep and the dreams haven't started yet, where his face is peaceful. Rude's memorized it by now, has memorized the boy's entire body, knows his pulse like his own. And is it guts or shyness that he waits until Reno is nearly out to let his hands explore, Rude doesn't really know.

He tugs the zipper of Reno's jump suit down to where it stops below the navel. Reno squirms, murmurs, Rude, what are you...? But his body warms to the touch and he reacts so fast, so readily, hardening in Rude's grasp, twisting, arching off the bed, gasping so loud that his voice cracks and his throat hurts and he feels it coming and Rude--!

He breathes, his body tingling, and Rude's fingers still tracing along his shallow stomach, and he blinks at the ceiling and goes, Okay.

Okay.

Decides it right there, firmly. Lifts Rude's hand away and rolls over, between Rude's legs, pulls the zipper down and slides the jumpsuit off Rude's shoulders and the boxers off his hips. Licks his lips, and goes down.

It isn't until after that they kiss.

First platoon to the left! Second and third follow on the flank! Fourth platoon, get your asses up to the line, move!

This is not a scenario.

This is not a practice run, this is not an exercise, this is not a test. This is live ammunition, these are real mortars, real artillery, grenades. This is a real heart in your chest pounding till it bursts. These are your knuckles bone-white gripped around your gun, or your sword or your staff, this is real ether shaking between your fingers, these are real people screaming and this is real blood.

The Chaser ships come in fast and low on the draft and the water flies up as spray all around them, falls like wedding rice, rains on the soldiers' armor and taps hard on their helmets and they breathe hard and wet until their eyes burn. The major yells to the captains yell to the lieutenants yell to the sergeants and by then the grunts already know, off the boats four by four, hit the surf and dive, shore, two here and three there, aim and shoot, short controlled bursts, Fira and Thundara, no lower, don't go higher unless you need the crit, you better goddamn well of locked your target.

Where they are is a place called Destiny Islands.

It's an archipelago maybe twelve islands strong, freckled with tertiary land and spits and hills and rocks etched by the waves. On a normal night its sky must be so clear you can see right into the highest strata, see the baby stars still kicking off their stellar diapers. But now the sky is dark, and the shadows are large.

This was not the mission that Juliet company was bound for, but it was the one that swallowed them up.

Still Wednesday morning. The not-morning, the deepest darkness of the night before dawn seems possible, and maybe now it isn't.

Tseng the fresh new sergeant stands at the head of the boat. He's more scared than he wants his squad to know but there's no hiding it now, they're hitting the surf strong, the beach is coming up fast.

He looks to his men. These scared kids just like him, the oldest scarcely nineteen and the youngest not even thirteen, little brave killdolls now. Don't mind the eyes, don't mind the fear, they're soldiers: a word that's prayer and banner, and leaves no argument. They're here because they can't turn away.

"Hey sarge," says Reno, lifting his visor that they can see each other eye to smirking eye. "What're we waiting for?"

What do we wait for?

You fight and you live and you know nothing separates you from the ones that die except pure luck of the draw.

It breaks down in his head. He can't tell for certain what goes where and what are experiences and what are confessions. He can't remember Lae's face but he remembers his hand, or maybe it's Elhaym's hand. Or Jesse's or any of the girls'.

It's not Rude's. He doesn't need to remember Rude, because Rude is a fact. Rude is here. Rude stays and Reno wants him to.

He can't remember Lae's face but he remembers the diamonds on his cheeks, remembers because he's sure they're there, sure they'll still be there when Reno returns everything to how it was.

So you do look back. And you don't. And you do. He explains it to Elhaym the last time they meet, before she's reassigned and before he's ready to say all he needs to, and instead shares the only things he knows he's learned. You do regret, and you don't, and you do. You don't hope and you hope so hard it fills your lungs with blood and you cry your ghost. You don't believe in God, but you do, but you can't, but they make you, and there is no such thing as the individual soldier. Soldiers are an idea. Soldiers are an agenda. They're tools to be wielded, and it's not for them to ask.

Elhaym asks if he believes in love, but doesn't, but does.

Reno is a fifteen year old boy and has no problem with philosophy and all sorts of problems with the word "love," and he doesn't manage to answer.

He helps drag the wounded to the boats. Bodies, so many bodies, too many to count. And all of them too heavy, but no excuse now to not be strong enough to carry them.

Rude's skin is so handsome with the bunk light turned down low. New bunks, new quarters, two soldiers to a room instead of sixty and Reno finally gets to look at him as long as he likes in the off hours, no one can say a thing.

He's Rude's biggest fan. He goes to all his competitions and watches him from the bunk in the mornings, see that ever-growing city of tattoos twist and shift along his back, the ripples of muscle.

Rude asks, why the hell did you ever say yes?

And maybe he means to this and maybe he means the thing with Irvine at the lake, maybe he means the girls and maybe he means the maiko classes, maybe he means that day on the docks when he, yes, he could have run away, if he really tried to. He could have found somewhere else to go.

Reno mumbles an I-dunno. Fascinated by the sink and shaving, pretending that he needs to shave, fine colorless moss, it makes him happy to even do it, it makes him happy that Rude's an audience for it. He wants a waking life more vivid than the nightmares, he wants to be art, just a little. He wants to be a thing of motion.

And he finds, in wonder and surprise, far before the horror, how close his hair is to the color of fresh blood.

Someone else's blood.

He presses the ice cube to his ear lobe and watches Rude sterilize the needle, tiny flame budding from the tip of his finger, and he says again, Uh, hey buddy?

No. No chickening out.

The cold numbs the skin so much that Reno barely feels the needle drive itself through. He grunts, closes his eyes while Rude's rough fingers run like a cat's tongue over his ear, pushing the new silver stud into place and, hey, look, you barely even bled.

Rude's kisses are hot and the air feels like it bubbles in Reno's lungs, almost makes him choke, like taking in water. He wraps his arms around him and draws them closer, chest to chest, feels Rude's heartbeat thud against his ribs. What a fascinating sound.

Reno's interested in hearts, and where they go. The research on the Heartless is still so new and the Nobodies even newer.

He wants to find a Nobody that looks like him and kill it.

You wish and you don't wish and you have to wish and you can't wish.

But he wants to god to remember Lae's face.

Another cracked-open world, split down the middle. Its heart like an infested apple core, the little worms of darkness squirming and eating through its center, carving it out from within.

First section, Echo platoon, Juliet company, Third battalion patrols broken, shattered streets to look for survivors, any at all. But the Chasers had gotten to this one late and the Heartless had been thorough, and there aren't even many corpses to count up. It's a dead and poisoned place, and soon it will collapse. Another Midgar. Another Galbadia. Another Wutai, another Alexandria, another Vector.

They find her in the shadows, crouched in the corner of the wreckage of a house. Maybe her house. She thrashes and screams when they get close, mad and feral, and it's clear from the blood on her hands and the blackened kitchen knife in the fold of her apron that she had been fighting the shadows, and that she had been winning. The impossibility every Chaser was told to look for. The impossibility, actually, that three women Chasers had seen when they found Reno in a muddy ghetto alley, four years ago.

Rude manages to pick her up and quiet her, he's oddly good with kids like that, and they start to take her away from the house. Slung over his shoulder, the girl sees something in the far corner, and she starts to cry again, kicking her feet and begging unintelligibly, grabbing at the air like she could pull the corpse out of space and hold it in her arms like a doll.

"Hey, hey, it's okay," Reno says, and he's bad with kids, but he tries. "Don't worry. You'll be okay. Forget it.

"Someone will be by for it later."

finished at: 21:00, 02 July, 2006.

No androgynous boys were harmed in the making of this fanfic.

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