Author's Notes: Was at a friend's house listening to music and watching House when this inspired me. Tangent much?
Theme: When?
Innocent
Forced to guess, Reeve would probably have to say he hadn't been well and truly innocent since he was about thirteen. Before he'd found alcohol and the streets. Before he'd found women, before he'd found men. But, more than that, before they had found him. Morality was more of a word and innocence some faint memory to them after all. And he was, for all intents and purposes, one of them.
They weren't who his poor parents would have wanted him around. Honestly, he couldn't blame them. Reeve really didn't want to be around them either, but it was more for their safety than for his. He wasn't a kid anymore, wasn't safe, wasn't worthy of being their son. No, Reeve was one of the worst. He was Shin-Ra's assassin. Reeve was Turk. One of the worst of them, and by being so one of the best. By kidnapping, by stealing, by cutting the throats of children and wives to get their fathers and husbands to cooperate. These days he went so far as to always have a gun at his side in his own home, and lacking that, a butterfly knife. It was the lifestyle. Had been for twenty-some years. Wasn't about to change either.
That didn't stop him from recognizing true innocence though., Especially not when it looked him in the face. Not when she looked him in the face. A girl of seven, who wasn't even flinching away from the gun he had at her temple. There was no fear in her eyes either, just pity. Maybe some sorrow, but for him, not for her. Children seemed to be more understanding after all, especially the innocent ones.
Inside, for the first time in many, many years, Reeve mourned the loss of his own innocence as he pulled the trigger. Sometimes he wished someone had been kind enough to do the same to him before he found the blood of someone as innocent as this on his hands.