jaded_grin | Episode 23

Happy Monday! Okay, straight out, I'd like to put out a few authors that I find amazing. If you have the time to read their work, please do so, it is all very good!

First:

zilldk , who hasn't really posted work before--I can't imagine why, it is amazing! So if you can spare a second, please show your support of newly posting writers and leave some love! About Cloud is fan-freakin'-tastic!

Second:

superkalifragi has been posting for some time and has quite a few very interesting and amazing pieces of work out right now. Her style is very sharp and her plotlines are superb. She writes some of the best AU I've ever read and her smut is delicious! You can find all of her work at her journal and posted to the larger FFVII Yaoi comms.

And last but never least, my doll

etrix --while Etrix needs no introduction, I cannot talk about amazing writers without dragging this particular author in! Mad World, all of her one-shots, EVERYTHING is fantastic and well worth both a read and a bookmark!

And actually, the grand majority of people who bother to read my soap are also fantastic writers, so if you see a comment from someone, click their username and go check them out! Maybe you'll find wonderful ReTi like

f_mystic writes, or some steamy Zackiroth by

sussurous ! We're all lucky to be linked with such imaginative and amazing writers, and I just wanted to take the time to say thank you to you all for all of your great work! THANK YOU!

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“Who was that?” Kadaj asked, coming back into the bedroom from Reno’s lavish bathroom as the man tossed down his phone in disgust. He bristled to see his lover lounging back against that Wutain strumpet, but he managed to keep his temper under control—just a few moments earlier they’d been disturbed into rising for a message someone had sent Reno, along with some kind of magazine. Kadaj hadn’t seen what it was and Reno had merely looked at it and promptly pitched it down the laundry chute out of his reach.

“A Mister Fucking ShinRa,” Mei Li purred, stroking Reno’s hair. She’d washed her face already and looked older than Kadaj had first thought she was, but she was still shockingly beautiful.

“Mei Li,” Reno murmured, tipping his head to look at her. “How about you go start a bath for us, huh?”

Her smile was all dimpling innocence as she purred, “I live to serve.”

Kadaj crossed his arms over his chest and glowered while they untangled from one another and Mei Li sauntered off to the bathroom, her loose hair falling in liquid black waves to her round ass.

“C’mere,” Reno called to him, shifting to sit up because his back still hurt him. He winced and breathed, “Fuck, that bitch is rough…”

“It’s your own fault, you fool,” Kadaj snapped, refusing the order. “You let her drug you!”

“Hey,” Reno said, his voice sharp and impatient. “Shut it—I’m in no fucking mood this morning.”

“Looks like you were in a fucking mood last night,” Kadaj hissed, getting riled about it again.

“Kadaj, don’t push it,” Reno warned, and took another deep drag off of his cigarette. “Now get over here.”

Sulking, Kadaj clambered onto the bed and curled up in Reno’s open arms, refusing to be appeased even by the warmth of the man’s embrace.

“Look, I met Mei Li a long time ago when I first started dealing with Tseng,” he explained. “Way before I even knew about you. So I guess you could say that she’s got dibs.”

Kadaj snorted a derisive laugh but said nothing.

“You gotta understand, baby—there ain’t hardly anybody like her, and I need her,” Reno lowly said, pressing gentle kisses to Kadaj’s cheek while he so thoroughly crushed his aching heart. “I need what she is, Kadaj. That’s the only thing that really does it for me…”

“So when you’re fucking me it’s just, what, something to tide you over?” Kadaj hissed, furious tears springing into his eyes.

“No, not even close,” Reno said, and he was getting angry again, irritated. “I brought you here, didn’t I? Put you dead center in my life and let you run out everyone you found a threat, right? I put up with your fucking temper and your tantrums and everything else, don’t I? You think I’d do that for just anybody, Kadaj? Huh? Sometimes people say things they really don’t mean, so in my book it’s better just to fucking show it.”

Kadaj quieted in his arms, thoughtful. For years he’d tried to pry those words from Reno’s lips—the words that would assure him that he was the only one, the best one, the most beloved…and here Reno was telling him that he didn’t say those words, he simply showed them.

“Do you love her?” he softly asked, risking Reno’s temper again.

The man sighed heavily at his back and leaned over to smash his cigarette out before he whispered, “No…it’s not like that for us. It’s just good times…”

“Reno,” Mei Li called, all curves and cock in the bathroom doorway. It really was quite a compelling combination, even Kadaj would admit that. And the sex last night had been very good, despite how little Kadaj liked her. “The bath is ready.”

“Come on,” Reno said, and tipped Kadaj’s head back for a kiss. He grinned down at the troubled teenager and asked, “Don’t you think I would’ve gotten rid of you by now if I didn’t give a shit? Burning down the place around me and you call me the fucking psycho!”

Kadaj laughed and swung fluidly to his feet, arching an eyebrow at his older lover and saying, “You know you adore every second of it.”

Reno’s grin widened and he wearily sighed, “You’re right about that, you fucking crazy cunt.”

Kadaj reached for his hand and Reno took it, letting himself be led to the bathroom where the deep, monstrous tub awaited full of hot water.

Mei Li moved up to his other side and Reno smirked.

For right now, he was the luckiest man in the world…

“Hello?”

“Elena,” Rufus said, still shaking with his anger.

“Rufus?” she asked, shocked. “Wha—it’s like nine in the morning! Why are you calling me?”

“Hey, remember how I said that I could get you in with Reno?” he asked, cutting straight to the point.

“Yeah…” she slowly answered, cautious.

“Well, you can wait on my word, but it’s going to happen, my dear,” he assured her, and smiled with dark delight. “He thinks he’s so untouchable, so powerful, but I’m going to prove him wrong…”

“Rufus,” Elena said, and started to sound worried. “Reno is your friend, don’t talk like that. Look, if you’re thinking of tricking him, I won’t—”

“Oh yes you will!” Rufus snarled. “You’ve been so hot for him that you can’t see anything else, Elena, so don’t give me bullshit like you’ve suddenly developed morals! You’re a whore, remember? And you want to fuck your boss, who doesn’t do whores! You’ll keep your fucking mouth shut and come when I call you, or you’ll miss your only chance to finally tag the only piece of ass you’ve ever wanted!”

There was a long silence from the other end before Elena finally, softly said, “I’ll come when you call me, Rufus.”

He let out a long, pent-up breath and sighed, “Good. Well, that’s settled then. I can’t give you a definite time right now, but it’ll be soon. Like within the month.”

She was quite again for a moment before she said, “Good. I’ll be waiting.”

“I’m sure you will,” Rufus gloated, and hung up on her, his cruel smile still firmly in place.

While he wouldn’t come out and ever admit to being the author of Reno’s planned catastrophe, Rufus would certainly enjoy the enraged disbelief that was sure to follow Reno waking up next to one of his own whores. And so what if Elena caught a beating for it? She wasn’t his problem, she was Reno’s problem, and he’d deal with her as he saw fit. But, oh how he would enjoy hearing Reno lament that it had happened, knowing all along that he himself had arranged it.

“I’m Rufus ShinRa,” he reminded his absent friend, and winked at himself in one of his suite’s many mirrors. “You don’t talk to me like I’m some wayward child.”

“Rufus, child, who on earth are you talking to?”

Stunned, Rufus stared at his own wide, shocked eyes in the mirror before they shifted to an identical pair quizzically taking him in.

“Mother?!” he gasped, and spun around in a flurry of surprise.

Genesis sat down at his vanity to comb out his wet hair and glanced around for his cell phone, checking the time.

“It’s near noon, Yuffie!” he called, figuring she couldn’t hear him over the roar of his shower anyway. He went to his nightstand and gathered up his wallet and keys, smiling a little to remember Reeve—so indignant and bereft of speech—slamming his door twice to convey how angry he was. “Silly man…”

He absently flicked through his remaining Gil and then counted it again, frowning. When the shower turned off, he called, “Yuffie? Didn’t you say that Reeve is as poor as dirt?”

“Yeah!” she said, and cracked the bathroom door to let a roll of steam out. “He only eats once a day, it’s all he can afford.”

“Hm,” Genesis sighed, and counted again, but there was no denying it—Reeve had taken just a 20 Gil note, as he’d asked for. Whenever Yuffie hit Genesis up for 20, she usually took closer to 200, and he was so used to that kind of thing that he’d assumed that Reeve—being a starving artist—would naturally take every single bit of Gil in his wallet. His smile softened a little and he laughed, thinking again of Reeve’s outrage.

“What’s so funny?” Yuffie asked, emerging with a towel around her head and another around her boyish body.

“Oh, just Reeve,” Genesis sighed, and plopped down at his vanity again to put his face-cream on. “You know that man only took a 20? Nearly 500 Gil in my wallet and he only takes barely enough for a cab!”

“He’s a good man,” Yuffie said, casting around for her clothing. “Can I borrow a pair of pants?”

“Closet,” Genesis told her. “It’s just so funny…I can’t remember when I’ve last met a man so…nice!”

Yuffie flung her arms around his neck from behind and looked at him in the mirror, wryly saying, “That’s because people like you and me just run them off, Genesis. Reeve is a nice man, he’s a good man—and we’re not good people.”

Genesis frowned a little, knowing she was right but still defending with, “We could change! Couldn’t we?”

“And give up all this?!” Yuffie crowed, and tore away with a laugh to finish dressing.

Genesis meditatively finished rubbing his face-cream in, his smile gentle when he once more sighed, “So nice…”

Zack was busy fixing the back stoop to the kitchen in Reno’s huge house when he saw a bulky, dangerous-looking bull of a man coming down the alley towards him.

Immediately on the alert, he dropped both arms loosely at his sides and tried to appear as unthreatening as possible. The tall, broad, and heavily muscled, dark man didn’t even twitch, he just moved towards Zack with the nimble grace of a dancer and lolled to a stop, huge and intimidating in those mirrored sunglasses and that dark, severe suit.

“Can I help you?” Zack asked, swiping at his sweating brow. Even this early in the day it was starting to get hot, especially in the back alleys where the plate below vented a never-ending roil of steam.

“You work for Reno, yes?” the man asked, Zack thought in a rather dazed way that hearing an earthquake speak would sound about the same. Straightening to his full height to show he wasn’t intimidated, the younger man smiled a little and answered, “Yeah, that’s right. I’m his handyman.”

Zack wasn’t too familiar with the world beyond Gongaga—Midgar was the largest city he’d ever been to—but he immediately recognized the man’s guttural accent as being foreign, and his sheer size put the smaller man on his guard.

“I wish to make you a business proposal,” the man lowly said.

Zack drew back a bit but gave him an easy smile, saying, “Mister, you don’t even know my name, so how can you want to make a business proposal? There’s a girl at the desk who deals with appointments—”

“Zachary Isaiah Fair, twenty-two years old, former member of the elite guardsmen of Gongaga also known as the Brotherhood of C—”

“What do you want me to do?” Zack whispered, interrupting the unexpected recitation of his own life facts.

The man smiled at him but it wasn’t happy, wasn’t friendly, and Zack was afraid that he’d just found the kind of trouble that made Kadaj look like an angel…

“Your father said I should come visit you,” Scarlet said, standing in the doorway as if she expected to be turned away.

“Mother, how did you get in here?” Rufus demanded, flushing with dull embarrassment.

“I knocked,” Scarlet said, and smiled at him.

“Wait, father sent you here?” Rufus asked, overwhelmed by all the weirdness. He made no move to embrace her or to greet her; he just flopped into one of his plush chairs and put a hand to his aching forehead. “I didn’t think you two were speaking.”

“We weren’t,” Scarlet said, and since she wasn’t outright thrown from his rooms, she took a seat across from him. “He met me for dinner last night. He wanted to speak to me about some private issues.”

Rufus gave her a withering look and snidely asked, “And what on earth would he be talking to you about?”

Scarlet gave him a tight smile and said, “You know, Rufus, I have never understood why you despised me so much.”

“Oh, I don’t know mother,” he snapped. “Maybe it was because you left me here with that fat old fart and didn’t even glance back on your way o—”

“You know that isn’t true,” Scarlet said, and the sharp, hard edge to her voice shut him up as quickly as it ever had when he was a boy. “I fought with everything I had to take you with me, Rufus—I spent every dime I had on lawyers so I could be with my only son but when it came time for you to talk with the judge, you told him you wanted to be with your father.”

Rufus blushed, only now remembering how it had gone down.

“That was a long time ago,” he muttered, wishing she would shut up.

Scarlet settled back with a sigh and asked, “How much did he give you to say that, Rufus?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he complained, because he’d sold his mother’s love for a week off of school and the promise of a car when he turned sixteen—that had been all it had taken for Ronald ShinRa to bribe his son to stay with him. “You couldn’t have kept me anyway, Mother. You were dirt poor by then.”

Scarlet sighed and reminded him, “Money doesn’t make people happy, Rufus. Your father is a prime example of that.”

“And what are you doing in my house anyway?” Rufus asked, changing the subject.

“Ronald said that you haven’t been coming in to work,” Scarlet said, and Rufus squirmed under her hard gaze. “And I wanted to meet your wife.”

Rufus’s eyes widened so far that they threatened to pop from his head.

“My…no, Mother! Absolutely not!” he cried, and tried to reassert his waning authority by pounding his fist against the chair arm. “I do not discuss my wife!”

“Rufus,” a soft voice at the door called, laughter floating in its purring, sultry depths. “Don’t say things like that, darling—people will think you’re ashamed of me!”

“You are a very jealous little boy.”

Kadaj ignored Mei Li, dressing in silence.

Reno had lounged in the bath with them for awhile before he’d had to shower in earnest and take off for parts unknown, leaving Kadaj with the woman he was pretty sure he despised.

“You are lucky that he loves you so much,” she went on, apparently quite comfortable in Reno’s room. Much to Kadaj’s irritation, a man with a trunk had appeared and Mei Li had imperiously informed him that she would be staying indefinitely.

Kadaj had promptly decided that she would not.

Mei Li drifted over to him and trailed a talon-like fingernail up his spine when he bent over to lace his boot.

“But you are not as in love with him as you would like him to believe…”

Kadaj straightened and rounded on her, hissing, “Listen, baby, there’s only room for one alpha bitch in Reno’s house and that bitch is me—I don’t care if you’ve topped him since the birth of Minerva, Reno and his life and his house and his everything are all mine and you are not welcome here!”

She smirked up at him, her lids lowering a little over her dark eyes, unmoved by his declaration.

“If you love him so, little Kadaj,” she purred. “Then why would you take a lover?”

Kadaj blinked at her, stunned, and then he realized that there was no way she could know about what had happened with Tseng.

Which meant that she was talking about someone else.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” he murmured, and gave her a haughty smirk.

Mei Li smiled at him, tipping her head down to give him a coy, innocent look.

“There is no reason that we cannot be friends,” she said, and her voice rose to that little-girl, cutesy one that Reno seemed to find so stimulating.

“You’re Reno’s kink,” he reminded. “Not mine.”

He shoved away and pulled his shirt on before he strapped on the souba and left her there.

“Where are you going?” she laughed, calling after him, amused by his fury.

Kadaj stopped at the door and smirked at her, hissing, “Oh, just to see my lover.”

“Ugh! What?!” Genesis snarled, glaring at whomever it was who had the balls to interrupt his meditation.

“Delivery for you, Sir,” his assistant stammered, and Genesis unfolded from his lotus position to snatch the envelope away from him, giving him a nasty-nice smile that made the boy scurry off for safety.

Fuming, he tore the seal off of it and stared down in bewilderment at an assortment of change and crumpled bills around which was wrapped a piece of paper torn off of a notepad from that cheap hotel Reeve was staying at.

“Mister Rhapsodos, here is your money back and I cannot tell you enough how sorry I am that we met,” he read aloud, his blue eyes scanning the scrawled note. “Please take care of Yuffie, Respectfully, Reeve Tuesti.”

He dumped the envelope’s contents out on his desk and counted it, smiling when he found it all there to the cent.

“Oh, Reeve Tuesti,” he laughed, shaking his head and sighing. “Yuffie is right, you are a nice man.”

He reread the note again, his smile deepening when he saw the part about Reeve being sorry they had met.

“You won’t be, I think,” he softly said, and tucked the note and money away in a drawer, already planning how he could arrange an accidental run in with the nervous, adorable, and nice young painter.

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

ldyavalon.livejournal.com

*huggles the Kadaj some more* I really want to see him kick Mei Li's ass :P

And poor, poor Reeve, he has no idea what he has gotten into *falls off chair giggling*

From:

Otherwise known as the journal of Jaded Grin

Episode 23

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