Sometime later that week, after every night in Sephiroth's arms, I went out into the city on a mission with Reno. When I told my lover about it, he was livid.

"What would possess them to send out an untried, untrained, incapable trainee?" he shouted from the bedroom as I cooked dinner. The question stung, since I actually wasn't half bad.

I turned to him as he stormed in and sat on the kitchen counter with a huff. "Well if I'm so very terrible at my job, then they're just trying to get rid of me, I guess."

He glared at me and moved over to the oven. He shoved me aside into the counter and went on with the meal. I sighed and went back to the front door, leaving quietly. Just as I stepped out of the door, I felt cold arms surround me and pull me back inside. "Just promise that you won't do anything reckless."

I nodded and he let me go. I went down the hall to Tseng's office. Sephiroth was extremely volatile and a little violent, and I wasn't sure how much of that was due to mako treatments and how much was due to his personality. Tseng was very small in his chair in his office, gazing out of the window with some sort of implacable expression. He cleared his throat and the Wutaian turned to me with a scowl.

"Your mission is special, Cloud. Reno will assist you, but you and he are going undercover completely unaided. You are infiltrating the slums and investigating recent disappearances of grunts going in to flush out any last bits of rebellion. It is simply to investigate, not to take them out. Not yet. We'll send in groups of Turks and SOLDIERs to take them out after you find them. Reno is waiting in the garage."

I went down to the garage and Reno was there with a motorcycle. He was wearing ragged, bloodstained jeans and a gray, similarly stained and tattered sweatshirt with black boots and dark, triangle sunglasses. He looked good in a slum rat type of way. He handed me a set of dirty, grimy clothes and tan combat boots. I cocked my head and he tapped his foot impatiently. I glanced around the private Turk garage and no one was around, so I shrugged and changed. They fit snuggly. I got some dark worn jeans with grease and blood stains, a thin duster with tears all over it, and some baggies of dirt and grime. We spread the dirt over us, especially our skin and hair. I strapped my handgun to my leg, letting it be in plain view. Reno had a shotgun strapped to the side of the bike, and a gun on each leg. He got on the bike and I got on behind him. We drove out by way of an underground tunnel. It led out of Midgar so we could enter unsuspected. After about an hour of driving, we came out into the plains a few miles from the entrance to the city.

Reno killed the engine and turned to me. "I know Tseng told you what the mission was. What he didn't tell you was that we would have to pose as lovers." I frowned, nodding. "It's risky, where we're going, so we need to be very careful. We might have to kiss and such, but only to help the cover." I nodded again, making him frown. "You're cool with all this? Makes life easier." He sighed and flexed his jaw a bit. "Now, our first thing is ta get ya ta talk like yas from the slums. I gots it easy, I used ta live there, an I know the ins and the outs a the place. Used ta be a junkie and a prostitute, but that was 7, an we goin ta Wall Market."

I was surprised to hear that Reno had a past like that, but I supposed that it wasn't uncommon for Turks to have come from those types of backgrounds. I was the exception. I sighed and shrugged. "I'm not sure I can be convincing. Do I have to talk like that?" Reno thought for a while, but then he shook his head.

"Ya came in from the mountains. That's where AVALANCHE came from. Ya can say that yas from Nibelheim and fed up with the scientists there. Maybe that one hurt ya or somethin." He fiddled a bit while he looked into the distance away from Midgar. "Ya, one a them raped ya when ya was a kid. That works as well as anythin. Oh, one molested ya Ma and then raped ya, and she killed herself afta. Ya want revenge."

I nodded and filed the story away. I doubted it was fully enough to support going against Shinra, but it was good enough to get us through the mission.

We saddled back up and drove toward the city.

It was odd entering the Sector 6 slums. I hadn't seen this particular sector before, and I realized why. I had no need to associate with drug dealers or overly made up prostitutes. I didn't meet anyone's eyes so that I could stay the traumatized mountain boy. It wasn't all that much of an act. I was a raped, traumatized mountain boy. I just had to let it show.

We drove steadily all the way to a small city of bustling businesses. One building at the front was quite clearly a motel, based on the neon sign. A man stood out front calling to passerby that it was the perfect love nest. Reno killed the bike and brought it around to the garage to chain it roughly to a loop in the ground. It didn't seem too extreme based on the way people were ogling it. He took the shotgun off and they gulped. We went up to the door and we were leered at by the man out front, who Reno ignored as he led me inside. He wrapped an arm around me protectively and went up to the front desk.

"Yo, me and him, we're getting a room for a while." The woman glanced between us and took in our ragged appearance. She focused in on me and I turned my face into Reno's side. I heard her titter and mutter about how sad I looked.

"Number 24 upstairs. How long you gonna be here?" I noticed her accent was slight.

"Don't know. Probly a while." He started walking away from her and I shuffled along beneath his protective arm. We were lucky I was so short, because it made the whole act easier. We got to the stairs and climbed them unsteadily. Once we got into the room, he let me go and I took in my surroundings. It wasn't bad at all, just as good as the inn in Nibelheim, but in a different style. It had a window in the far wall, and a bathroom connected to the wall next to the huge bed. Everything was in reds and gold, and the curtains were open to let in the neon lights from the buildings outside. I went over and drew the curtains closed so that we could be in privacy. Reno was fumbling in his pockets and brought out a small phone.

He put it on the nightstand and started undressing. "Get some sleep, we gonna need it tonight."

I undressed and got in the bed next to him and closed my eyes for yet another restless sleep.

Zack was trapped in a pod filled with green liquid. That was the only thing I was certain of. Otherwise, everything was indistinct. I felt pain in my abdomen, but I couldn't move. I wanted to see what was happening, but my limbs felt too heavy to shift, too weighted down. Zack was watching me sadly. I wasn't sure why. He was nude, but that didn't make an impression on me. It felt normal. He stared in my eyes with teary ones of his own. It gave me strength for some reason, and I lifted my head to look down at myself. I caught sight of hands with scalpels and little tools and blood. Lots of blood. The thing was, it wasn't coming as fast as it should. It was sluggish, showing that I had been bleeding out for a long time. I looked up a bit to see men in lab coats attached to the hands with the tools, shining lights down onto my stomach. I started breathing hard and tearing up. One man looked at me with a leering grin and I felt pain in my whole body. I screamed and screamed, tearing my already raw throat, thrashing wildly. They tried to restrain me, but it wasn't working. I broke free of the straps holding me down and ripped away from everything attached to me, IV drips, heart monitors, everything. I spotted Zack in his tube and took the rolling lab table I had been on. I swung it through the air, with my muscles- smaller than they had been in the past- bulging and veins protruding beneath my skin grotesquely. It smashed through the glass of the pod and I kept swinging it to throw it at the scientists in the room. I felt my wounds closing and I ripped off the metal that was around Zack's wrists. He collapsed into my arms and I ran haphazardly like a crazed animal. I dodged bullets and ripped people apart limb from limb. Eventually, my body weakened, and I sank to my knees near a stairwell. Zack pulled away and picked me up and started running up the stairs followed by soldiers just as everything went black.

I woke up with a jolt in a cold sweat. Reno was leaning up on his elbows and looking at me curiously. "What did ya dream about?"

I shook my head. "Nothing really."

Reno looked at me strangely before shrugging and getting out of bed. "It's time ta start the search. Get dressed."

We threw on the clothes and headed out of the motel and he looked around briefly. He started off into the inner city.

I should be getting more chapters in the next week or so. Review to make me write faster!