Disclaimer: Not mine. If they were, the CGI sex scenes would be awesome.

Hobbled

And after all the violence and double talk
There's just a song in the trouble and the strife
You do the walk, you do the walk of life—Dire Straits, Walk of Life

Day 1

Reno rolled over in bed. Or, more accurately, tried to roll over in bed, around a full leg brace, a wave of agony, and the surfacing memories of why he had the first two.

The mission. The "routine" mission. Just a trot down to a waterfront warehouse to pick up a couple targets, they should be back by lunch! Well fuck that. Not only had he not gotten lunch on time, he hadn't gotten out of surgery until nearly supper. And then supper had turned out to be jello and broth and a cup of the worst tea he'd ever drunk.

Then Cloud had shown him where the little painkiller button was, and he'd stopped bitching.

Fuck that bastard anyway. Not Cloud, who was an angel and brought him good tea and even sneaked in a pizza, though he'd thrown that up later. No, the "target" who had thrown him off a roof and into, of all things, a boat full of skis which were being stored for tactical use by ShinRa. He figured that only he could have missed an entire body of water to land in a boat of skis and rip his knee nearly in two.

Nothing like being an overachiever.

"Do you want more painkillers?"

"Fuck, yeah. I mean, please." It would do, really, to suck up more. He swallowed two in one gulp. They were the size of his fingernail.

"How are you feeling?"

It was an idiot question, but Cloud was so damn gorgeous he'd forgive him. "Hurts, yo." Plus, the pills made him itch, and kept him from getting a boner, and he suspected that once he felt a little better he'd be bored as fuck. Or not-fuck, as the case was. His own lame joke made him giggle.

"What's so funny?"

"Stoned." He looked at his fingers. They were fascinating and his body had an odd, weightless feel to it.

"Go to sleep." Cloud ran his fingers though his thick red bangs. "I'll bring you supper when you wake up."

"Love you too." He tried to pout, but suddenly everything was so damn comfortable and Cloud kissed him and the softness of the bed swallowed him whole, and he slept.

He woke to an angry bladder, and overblown pride. Something in him simply would not allow him to pee in a container in front of Cloud no matter how many times the swordsman had seen his penis, no matter how many times he had seen it up close and personal, not to put too fine a point on things. A man had his dignity, after all. He grabbed his crutches and hauled himself out of bed.

And fell directly back into it. The Bladder of Hells howled in pain. "Fuck Fuck almighty Hells!"

"You all right, babe?"

"Fine!" And he was! Except, he wasn't. He was in agony and about to piss himself.

Cloud loomed over him. "I don't believe you. Call it experience. What's wrong?"

"I have to pee and I can't get up, okay?"

"Why don't you just use a jug or something?"

"Fuck all, just help me to the bathroom?" Finally Cloud helped him up onto his crutches and into the bathroom where he emptied his bladder for what felt like a half hour. Fuck, was it the size of a swimming pool? He didn't even try to hold back a sob of relief. He blessed the toilet and any deities involved, throwing in a few extras for good measure. Gods, it felt good to pee. Pee pee pee pee pee. He actually broke a sweat. Once he was done, he leaned his head against the wall. "Can I have a beer?" A beer sounded really good right now, all frosty and foamy and refreshing.

"You'll just have to pee again."

"Never mind. Going back to bed. More painkillers?"

Cloud was there to meet him with two white pills and an unfamiliar glass of foul tasting purple juice. He grimaced.

"Prune juice. It's for the pills. Trust me."

"I don't like you anymore." But soon he was asleep and had forgotten all about it. He could have slept in a bookshelf. He just didn't care anymore.

Day four

Reno sat in the tub, amazed that water didn't present some kind of post traumatic issue for him. His right leg hung pitifully out of the tub at some unnatural angle, like a broken crane. He managed to get the rest of his body soaped and rinsed. But his hair, shampooed and conditioned, was a two-man job. "Cloud!"

"Hang on a sec!"

"I need rinsing!"

"Can you wait for a commercial?" Cloud shouted over the sound of the television.

The indignity. He wedged himself strategically where he could reach the shower massage.

Oh, the days that home improvement gadget had seen. Who knew the Planet's Hero was so...ticklish? Distracted by the distinctly pornographic memory, Reno slipped on his single foot and fell back into the tub, the detachable shower head twisting on its hose and falling down to smack him square in the forehead.

Fucking balls.

"What was that? Are you all right? I told you I'd just be a minute!"

"No, you said at the commercial! How was I supposed to know how long that was? I need to be rinsed!"

"Can you wait till I change the sheets? Oh never mind, I'll put you in a chair. Gods almighty, I'm going to start taking your drugs."

"You make me sound like the laundry, something you just put in a chair. And help yourself to the drugs, I'm tired of shitting rocks, yo."

"The laundry complains less and I told you to take fiber with narcotics!" He drained the tub with a few more slams than absolutely necessary, and rinsed out Reno's hair, the process bringing the two lovers' faces very close together. They glared like two bulls before a fight until first Reno, then Cloud leaned in and touched their foreheads to each other, suddenly aware of just how idiotic they sounded.

Reno laughed, conditioner sticking his hair to his forehead and making him look distinctly less contrite than his voice sounded. "I'm sorry. I'm just not used to feeling so, yanno, useless."

"Yeah, me too I guess. Most of the time when you're hurt, you either sleep it off or I can fix it."

"Love you anyway." He leaned up for a kiss, then another.

"Love you too." The romance of the moment was broken when Cloud dropped the shower head and drenched them both with rapidly cooling water. "Shit, let me get your hair clean and get you back to bed."

"Like the sound of that last part. Well, I will as soon as you get me out of the cold water." It took both of them to pivot one crippled Turk in a full leg brace onto the edge of the tub, gravity being what it was. Once it was done and Reno was standing, the appeal of the situation became obvious.

He was naked. Cloud was in track pants and nothing else, and was rubbing his naked body with a towel, the action making his arm and back muscles ripple a bit especially when he bent at just the right angle...

Nice. Yo. "So babe, I got you all wet. Maybe you should take those pants off."

Cloud looked up at the obvious leer and grinned. "I take it you ditched the pain pills."

"Told you, didn't like the side effects. Now, carry me back to bed and help me figure out how to have sex around this damn contraption."

He limped back to bed under his own power and the plans for changing the sheets were soon forgotten under soft moans and sighs and...

"Ow, shit. No, don't roll that way, it puts pressure on my knee."

"Reno, if we roll the other way we'll roll right off the bed and you'll break your other leg."

"Hold on, I have an idea. Hand me a pillow." He placed a pillow under the crook of his knee to take off the pressure. "Okay now two more." He tucked them under the side of his leg to keep him from rolling. "There. Now I'm not going anywhere."

"You can't move."

"No, not really. I'm at your mercy, Strife. Do as you will." He stretched his hands over his head and gave a naughty little wiggle. Cloud slipped off the elastic pants and crawled gingerly over Reno's hips, then leaned up and kissed him slowly and passionately.

Reno moaned low in his throat. It was a new experience for him. Between the brace and the pillows, he really was nearly immobile and any attempt to sit up pulled uncomfortably at his stitches. So he lay still, his damp skin cooling under the bedroom fan as Cloud stroked and kissed and ground down on him with increasing enthusiasm.

It was unbelievably erotic.

Cloud leaned over a little and began to rub their erections together and he saw stars, wanted to tell him to slow down or stop or let him get some grip on his shattering control but it all just felt too damn good, so he just continued to lay there and let Cloud do what he wanted to him. He shut his eyes and thrust up into the heat of it, biting his lips on a groan.

He felt it pooling in him, knew he could come from just this. "Babe…" he whispered a half-hearted warning as the first sweet pinpricks of pleasure worked through his abdomen. Cloud stopped just long enough to prepare himself and to rub lube onto Reno's aching arousal, with contact too gentle to bring any satisfaction, before lowering himself oh so slowly onto him.

Reno risked opening his eyes. Hell, he didn't give himself thirty seconds without visual input, Cloud was so blissfully tight but he looked anyway and he was beautiful, always so beautiful. He reached out to touch him, making little circles around the head with his thumb. Cloud hissed in pleasure. He tried to push up into him but it hurt his leg and he groaned in frustration. Cloud took the hint and leaned over him, thrusting down hard, harder until they both climaxed, Reno arching his head back into the pillows as the pleasure coursed through his body over, and over, until he was spent.

When he came back to himself, Cloud was cleaning him with a warm cloth. "Figured you weren't up to getting back in the tub," he joked.

"Right about that." His skin was still a little hypersensitive and the washcloth tickled.

"How do you feel?"

"Awesome. Endorphins are a natural pain killer. We should do that again."

"I'll set up a dosage schedule." Cloud gave an impish little smile, and kissed him, and he was asleep within minutes.

Week two

"You know I suck at driving anything except motorcycles, right?" Cloud looked up from the ignition of Reno's car with some apprehension.

"That I know well. But as this is my right leg, I can't exactly drive myself and work is too far to make on crutches. It's fine. Good thing about owning a shit car is if you wreck it, nobody will notice."

Cloud turned the key to no avail. "Maybe you should call Rude."

"Nah. He's already at work, and besides, there's a trick to it. You have to pull the key out just a little and angle it down. That's it." The car roared to life in a smelly fog. Cloud coughed and glared at Reno.

"You know, you make enough money to afford a real car."

"That I hardly ever drive. Now put it in reverse and let's go."

Cloud put the car in gear and, after a few jumpy false starts, it squealed backward and came to a sudden halt in a crash of metal and concrete. Reno hobbled out and surveyed remains of his car wrapped around the concrete garage pillar, then weighed his options between riding in the still technically drivable car with Cloud Strife at the wheel, and...

"I'll call Rude. I can't wait to tell him why I'm late to work this time."

Week four

Desk duty was hard.

Not only was he stuck doing the hated paperwork, but the sight of his coworkers headed out on missions without him was even worse.

Rude now routinely picked him up on his way to work. The huge black sedan might look like a granny car but it was easy to get in and out of with a cane and leg brace, so Reno didn't complain.

Much.

At least it beat road trips with Rude. The bald Turk was infamous for never pulling over, no matter how badly anyone in the car had to pee, eat, vomit, or whatever. When Rude drove, "making good time" was all that mattered. Thank Gaia, the ShinRa building was only six blocks away so that Reno didn't have to catheter himself to get to work every morning.

There was a bright side, at least.

And, once at work and the reports filed, Elena usually brought him lunch. When he was done for the day, he'd go down to the lab and bug the crap out of her, which she took in good graces. Eventually she put him to work and he found the analytical nature of labwork enjoyable. She joked about making him her lab assistant. Then, one day, she sent him down to the basement to retrieve some cold cases from the archives.

He looked at the rows upon rows of boxes of files; he had died and gone to heaven. He slipped the three files she had requested, and another five that looked interesting, into the messenger bag slung around his shoulder and took them back to his desk to read.

It became an everyday occurrence. The archive was more interesting than television and more convenient than the library, and it was his reward for the tedium of paperwork and consolation for his not being out in the field. He pulled extras for Elena and they made a game of comparing them. He collected pictures out of them for his wall; any that involved Tseng or Vincent, he made sure ended up in the hands of the subject. Though he was pretty sure the look Vincent gave him for a picture of his skinny, nerdy bad-hair self was not a grateful one.

His inner geek was happy, even if the rest of him wasn't.

Week six

"Good afternoon, Reno. I'm Curry, your physical therapist. How are you feeling today?"

"Not bad, except for the knee." In truth, he was a bit apprehensive. Curry, and who named a kid that anyway, had to be all of eighteen years old. He knew he had been an idiot at that age and was pretty sure she was too. Hair the color of cotton thread was pulled back into a short pony tail at the nape of her neck and she was thin, maybe a hundred and ten pounds? Her voice had the sweet sing-song tone of the utterly clueless.

He felt doomed.

"Let's go over here to the first table and I'll go over your chart with you." He hobbled over to where she had nodded, her cute little pony tail bobbing along behind her. "It says here you fell into a boat full of skis and tore your medial cruciate ligament?" He really wished people would forget about the ski part, damn it. "Surgical reattachment went well, that's good." She sat down next to him on the padded table; she smelled like some kind of floral soap. He could see her as someone's kid sister. "Well, let's get you stretched out."

He couldn't help it. Part of Reno's brain would never escape the gutter, and he snorted. She looked up from her notes, confused. "Sorry. It's just…never mind." She made a kind of "hmmm" noise in the back of her throat as she took Reno's leg and pulled it over the other one.

"Does this hurt?"

"No." Not too much. Sort of.

"Be honest. I don't want to overstretch and cause damage. You should feel a stretch but no pain."

"I get that a lot," he snickered. Curry sighed.

"All right, turn over on your stomach."

It was going to be a long session if he had to keep his mouth shut around this chick.

Finally after an hour of exercises and balance routines that were at such embarrassingly low weights that he kept making sure no one he knew was in line of sight, she led him back to the table and brought out a machine that made him wonder if ShinRa had shut down the old labs after all. It had wires and electrodes and knobs, and Curry had in her hands the biggest syringe he had ever seen in his young life.

"I don't think so."

"It's not going in you."

"Now that, I have definitely heard before, and you're right."

He was sure he was Miss Curry's first gay and even more sure he was her first Turk, because there was no one iota of awe for his rank in here eyes as she injected the medication into an adhesive foam bandage, and began to poke at his knee with merciless fingers. She handed him the bandage. "Would you pull the backing off that for me? I don't want to move my hand and lose your spot."

"What?" He could not have heard her right.

"I said, I don't want to lose your spot."

Reno lay back on the table and howled with laughter. "I should introduce you to Cloud. He doesn't seem to have that problem."

"Okayyyyy…at any rate, do you have issues with electricity?"

"Um, no. Love it, yo."

"Well try not to love it too much. This should take about ten minutes."

Ten minutes. He poked at the electrodes on his knee and remembered what it was like to be healthy and take walking for granted. It was depressing. Fortunately, he was distracted by a spiky blond head making its way through the torture machines toward his table. "Almost done?' He gave an encouraging squeeze to Reno's hand.

"Yes, and my sweet little therapist keeps making comments about finding my spot and stretching me out and promising me that she isn't going to stick things in me. I've kept my responses to a minimum because I swear, she doesn't have a clue."

"I'm impressed. Restraint is not exactly your middle name."

"I don't have a middle name."

"My point exactly." They grinned at each other. "Well, the stitches are gone, you have a brace that bends, you're back on light duty. I think you're going to live, Reno of the Turks."

"Just when convalescence was making me horny."

Cloud rolled his eyes. "Sushi sound good for when you're done here? Or do you have to go right back to work?"

"Nope. Light duty means I can leave for the day. Sushi and beer."

"I'll wait outside. See you when you're done." A quick kiss, and he was gone. He looked up to see Curry's face pink in dawning comprehension.

Poor thing.

Later that evening he lay piled up in bed, a beer on the nightstand and his laptop propped up on a portable desk. His work email was long done and he was entertaining himself by looking up random, obscure facts from the stack of cold cases that he had slipped out of the archives that morning.

"Hey, Cloud, did you know that Old Man Shinra had the husband of one of his secretaries wiretapped because the dude came after him drunk with a cast iron skillet?"

Cloud poked his head out of the bathroom, foaming at the mouth around a toothbrush. "Why did he attack the president? Not that people didn't have a million reasons."

"He thought his wife was getting some presidential favors, apparently."

"Should have gone after the wife for having shitty taste in boyfriends." Cloud rinsed and spit, and made his way to the bed. "Okay, enough of your file habit, make room for me."

Reno stacked up the folders and the laptop and returned them all to his work bag. He turned off the light and curled up around his boyfriend, giving a little sigh of contentment.

"I'm glad you're better. It was scary, when they took you out of the ambulance, even if I had advance warning from Rude that you weren't as bad off as you looked."

"Me too. Not used to being knocked down like this. Fucking sucks." They lay together for a while, content in the warmth of the bed. "Sorry I scared you. But, I promise to not make you come after Rufus with a frying pan, at least."

"Well, that's something. Love you."

"Love you too babe." He brought Cloud's hand up and kissed the knuckles, and as he drifted off to sleep Reno reflected that bum knee aside, things were pretty damn good.

A/N: Getting over a knee injury. Yes, I project onto characters, a lot.

A college friend actually did fall into a boat full of skis owned by the Coast Guard and hurt her back badly enough to take early retirement. I figured only Reno could do that. Hence, this fic.

If you've ever been on lortabs for more than two days, you feel Reno's pain.

The conversation with the physical therapist was lifted, nearly word for word, from my first session with my PT. I was crying with laughter and the poor clueless girl had no idea what was so funny.

I once worked in an archive. The old court cases were fascinating, better than soap operas, if one is nosy. The frying pan incident was adapted from a divorce case from the 1800s.