He's not really sure what to make of the new girl in the outer office – and he's especially not sure what to make of her and Zack's apparent allegiance.

She's competent, that's for sure, and she does her job with an air of calm professionalism Sephiroth finds rather reassuring. But behind the professional facade, there seems to be a great deal more - for someone like the mask Ren Wolfe presents on the surface would never sink to conspiring with Zackary Fair.

What really worries him is that fact that they don't seem to communicate on anything vaguely resembling a normal level. Zack comes up with the most spurious excuses, and before Sephiroth knows it he's being chivvied out of his office as Ren smiles goodbye from behind her desk, and he just knows a whole conversation has flown past his head in a matter of seconds, without a single word being spoken.

The idea of his secretary and Zackary Fair communicating on the same level is more than a little disconcerting.

But he appreciates that the girl - woman, really - doesn't look at him with the same wide-eyed look Lauren gave him every time he spoke. Instead she listens intently, gives her input if asks, and is blunt without being impolite. She deals with the things which he doesn't need to, and the amount of paperwork that urgently has-to-have-his-signature-or-the-world-was-going-to-end seems to have been cut by half. She's tidy and organised, and seems to have an almost eclectic memory, and he finds himself falling into an easy, quiet routine, with occasional bursts of disturbance as Zack crashes through his door every couple of days.

So when, a month or so after she started working for him, Ren is absent for the morning due to her mako booster, he's a little surprised by how her absence makes things feel unbalanced. But remembering how he feels after his yearly injection, he leaves a mug of the special herbal tea Zack had found a few years previously on her desk, and if she's pale and a little shaky when she returns, he doesn't say anything.

And when he returns from his own annual booster a few months later to find Zack ensconced on the sofa with a cup clutched between shaking hands, and another waiting on his desk while Ren taps quietly away on her computer, Sephiroth thinks he would quite like to keep this secretary.

Well, this is all I got done while I was away on holiday XD. I hope everyone's still in character, and Ren hasn't morphed into her evil Mary-Sue twin yet. I've got parts of the next couple of chapters, and then ideas for Cloud's arrival, but summers almost over and school coming up, and I have done none of my summer homework ^^.

I'm dead. Soooo dead.

- Yaku