Title: Playing Favorites, Ch. 2
Summary: All these questions Cloud doesn't know how to answer.
Warnings: Cloud/Reno slash.
A/N: More to come. Promise.
*****
Cloud woke slowly the next morning. Since he was facing the clock, he could see that it was hardly eight. Deciding that he could sleep in a little, he closed his eyes again and drifted for a brief time.
He had forgotten however, to reckon with the children.
There was no particular rhyme or reason to their morning visits; a whole month could pass before they burst through the door.
Still, he had a whole hour to doze before the door banged open and two small blurs sped through the opening to leap onto his bed.
Cloud grunted as Marlene and Denzel landed rather heavily on top of him. There was a brief flurry of activity as they created their separate nests in his comforter, and immediately started babbling at him.
“Good morning, good morning, good morning!”
“You sleep too much!”
“Tifa’s making pancakes if you come down soon!”
“With real butter!”
“Is that red-haired guy your boyfriend now?”
...What?
Cloud sat up and looked suspiciously at Marlene, who had posed the question. “Excuse me?”
“Daddy called last night, and we told him that you were out on a date, and he said that if two people go out on a date than that makes the other person your girlfriend.” Marlene frowned a little. “But the red-haired guy is a guy, so doesn’t that mean he’s you boyfriend?”
That peculiar defensiveness rose up in him again. “I -- Reno and I aren’t -- we’re just not!”
Marlene was too used to Cloud’s taciturn ways to be offended. “Then why did you go on a date with him?”
Cloud stopped trying to explain. It was obviously too complicated a subject for a child to understand.
“Pancakes?” he said instead, looking at Denzel, who nodded eagerly.
He shooed the children out, and got out of bed to get dressed. He looked in the mirror and realized he was blushing.
----------------------------
Unfortunately, breakfast did not prove to be peaceful. When Cloud made it downstairs, Marlene was babbling at Tifa about Reno, and how he was now Cloud’s Significant Other.
Cloud found that extremely offensive.
“It was just a date!” he wailed.
“Don’t yell this early in the morning,” Tifa said, and smacked him over the head with a spatula.
He sulked for a while after that.
But Tifa brought it up again later. “How did it go, anyway?” she asked.
He pushed a cut up pancake piece around his plate. “It was fine.”
“He didn’t--?”
“No. Nothing like that. It was fine,” he said again.
For some reason, he didn’t want to tell her that Reno was clever, that Reno was funny. That the red-head had made him smile twice, and once, nearly laugh out loud.
“Do you like him?”
“I like him just fine.”
“No, I mean --”
“Are you going to marry him?” Denzel asked, which made Cloud’s introspective mood evaporate very quickly.
Since everyone seemed determined to twist the story around so that it had him pining for the Turk, Cloud decided that the best solution was to retreat to the garage, and give Fenrir a tune-up. (Because he was not pining for Reno. He was not! He didn’t pine for anyone! Except for that one time. With Zack. And then there had been Aeris. But that didn’t really count, did it?)
Feeling very out-of-sorts with himself, the blonde sat his ass down in front of the motorcycle after breakfast and set to work.
----------------------------
Reno didn’t come back to the bar that Sunday night; he didn’t have the time, because he was leaving for a mission. A potentially deadly one, if the gossip on the street was to be believed.
Near midnight, Cloud took the rooftops of Edge.
It was a nice way to wile away the hours of the night; leaping from roof top to roof top, the created wind tugging at his hair. He wasn’t very surprised though, when Tifa called his phone asking him what he was doing at this time of night. He couldn’t answer at the time, since he was too busy somersaulting over a misplaced clothesline. And once he listened to her message, it seemed too much trouble to call her back; so he sent her a text instead, saying that he was out for a walk.
Yeah. A walk.
Somehow, he ended up near the Shinra building. On sudden impulse, he edited his trajectory so that he headed towards it. Sprinting up the side, he wondered suddenly what Reno was doing at this time of night. Idle curiosity.
He caught the edge of the roof with one hand before he ran out of wall. Getting himself up and over the edge was a simple matter of pulling, and he landed lightly in an animal-like crouch -- knees bent, weight on his gloved hands, and head forward with the same air of a cat with its ears pricked.
A helicopter was being prepped in front of him. Cloud quietly sought cover behind emptied crates that were all leaking excelsior at their seams, and waited. He tensed slightly when Rufus emerged from a stairwell, Tseng close behind.
Focused as he was on the President, he barely noticed the shuffling behind him.
“What’cha doin’, babe?”
There wasn’t any real thought-process involved in what Cloud did next. It was pure reflex; he reached out with one hand and dragged Reno down next to him until their heads were hardly two inches apart.
“Ain’t this a bit fast?” Reno asked weakly. Cloud hushed him, straining his ears to hear what was being said. And then, a favorable wind blew Rufus’ voice to his ears.
“...and find it quick. We need to get a lid on this. For everyone’s good.”
“And Reno?”
“Let him keep going. If we can make Strife more malleable, so much for the better.”
The hand still wrapped around Reno’s bicep began tightening noticeably. “It ain’t like that,” the Turk hissed. “It ain’t!”
“Tell me later,” Cloud growled. “Unless you’re going on this one?”
As Reno shook his head, the wind blew more easterly, and any further conversation was swept away by the breeze.
Still keeping a firm grip on Reno’s arm, Cloud silently slid off the rooftop.
----------------------------
“Man, come on! You know this won’t work on me!”
“Shut up,” Cloud replied, with more fierceness than he had intended.
Swaying upside in the wind, Reno heaved a sigh. The bungee cords around his ankles being all that were keeping him from falling to his death, he was being rather nonchalant.
“Come on, babe, I told you --”
“Stop calling me ‘babe’ and answer my goddamn question!”
“Look, the whole idea of asking you out was mine, okay? And it wasn’t for Shinra, and it wasn’t for blackmail or nothin’. Just thought we could have some fun, because, shit, you need more fun in your life than any other guy I know.”
“I’ll pretend to believe that for argument’s sake. What was Rufus talking about, then?”
“It’s not what you’re thinking.”
“What am I thinking, Reno?”
“Why should I tell you when you already know? Look, we just need your help with some detective work if Elena and Rude’s mission doesn’t work out, okay?”
“Detective work for what?”
“I can’t tell you. Not yet, anyway.” Reno sighed again. “If all goes well, you’ll never have to know, and the human race will be all the safer with it.”
Cloud examined him with that blank stare. He doubted he’d get much more out of the other man; classified was classified and misplaced or not, Reno’s loyalty to Shinra was something that couldn’t be gainsaid.
The blonde stood and began to untie the stolen bungee cords from around the buttress. The stone of Aeris’ church was warm underneath his bare feet. He wondered if that meant she approved of what he was doing.
“If it’s any help,” Reno said as the ropes started to fall away. “Rufus wanted me to try and use you. But I told him to go to hell, seeing as how you and I are private. And that if he wanted your help, he’d get it a lot better with honesty than with trying to force you.”
Cloud had paused in undoing his knots when Reno had first started talking, and now he stood quietly, thinking. The icy ball in his chest that Rufus had unwittingly created was melting a little.
He bent and picked up his shoes, and started to walk away.
“Hey!” Reno wailed. “That ain’t fair, don’t leave me!”
“Get yourself out,” Cloud called back.