This was incredibly fun to write. Thank you for the prompt~.

Prompt: Paperclips from VendettaSmiles

"Elena," Reno began in the most serious tone he could muster. This sentence was usually followed by something useless, inconsequential or world devastating. Elena braced herself for the worst, asking if she could manage the Turk's office supply room was the worst decision she had made in her life."I am out of paperclips."

Elena blinked, trying to reconcile her image of Reno with one who cared about office supplies (beyond using them as puppets or toys) and failed. "What?" She asked, trying to make some sense of this. Maybe she had misheard.

"I am," Reno spoke slowly as if to a small child, "out of paperclips." Elena blinked again. Then she did the one thing she promised Tseng she would never do.

"Why do you need paperclips?" Never ever ask Reno why he did anything unless you were prepared for the consequences. Tseng had made an executive decision and preemptively banned Elena from asking it, not that it worked. The look Reno was giving her wasn't exactly giving her confidence either.

"You want to be a Turk and you don't what a paperclip is for?" Neither did the tone of his voice. She drew herself up, ready to defend herself. "Besides keeping papers together," he said as though it was the most obvious thing in the world, which took the wind right out of her sails. She visibly deflated.

Reno eyed her for a moment, looking torn between being amused and disappointed at this. As if on cue, Rude walked in and started rifling through the supply cabinet Elena was supposed to be guarding. Reno smirked, eyes cutting to Elena's before he turned to his partner. Elena winced, knowing that she was never going to hear the end of any of this.

"Hey Rude," Reno greeted. "Would you like to explain to Elena what Turks do with paperclips?" Rude turned, a pack of staples in his hand. Because of his sunglasses, neither of them could tell which one of them he was looking at, but Elena could feel him judging her. Reno grinned the entire time it took Rude to respond, waiting for it.

Rude shook his head, obviously not willing to get into the middle of this. Holding up one hand, he walked up, flipping both of them the bird as the door shut behind him. Reno watched him go, still smirking like he was the cat who had ate one canary and was about to eat the other.

"Rude uses them to build bombs," Reno said in a conspiratory tone, acting like he had imparted some great wisdom upon her. "Tseng uses them as lockpicks, 'cause every lock in the building is shit, except the ones that require keycards" he added, like she didn't already know that and hadn't witnessed them breaking into other offices several times.

"Let's see, what else," he continued, because obviously he wasn't done rubbing Elena's lack of creativity in her face. "Reeve sometimes uses them as replacement parts for his robots, just until he can find something that works together. You don't even want to know what Sephiroth uses them for." As he said that, he shuddered, as if just the thought was terrifying.

"They're more useful than you think Elena," with that, he finished lecturing her and started eying her again. "Which is why I am out of them," he said, bringing it back around. He stared at her expectantly, waiting for her to retrieve the box for him.

"And what do you use them for?" she asked instead, certain that this was it. This was where the nonsense began and Reno went off on some tangent about wars between inanimate objects or googly eyes or elaborate traps that made Tseng facepalm. He would stop being this person she didn't know that cared about office supplies and their uses and go back to normal. He looked at her like she was the most disappointing thing he'd seen all day.

"For keeping papers together," he said, rolling his eyes skyward. He pulled a sheaf of paper she previously hadn't noticed from beneath his arm, flapping them in her face. She stared at them, trying to make sense of it. She knew Reno did do paperwork, after all she'd heard Tseng yelling at him because his handwriting was so hard to read.

"Tseng revoked my stapler privileges," Reno added, misinterpreting the look she was giving him. He shrugged, looking a little put out. "You staple a couple people together and you never hear the end of it."

Blinking a little, Elena reached into her desk and pulled out the box of paperclips Tseng had told her to hide. Suddenly it all made sense. And yet didn't.

Like most things involving Reno.

[Rule #14: Always carry a paperclip.]

Thank you so much for reading, if you have any thoughts you'd like to share, kindly leave a review~.

I am accepting prompts for this fic [Nothing above R or involving bodily fluids please]. So feel free to request anything you'd like to see from me in the future.