raspberryturk | Room 429, Monday Evening

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Room 429, Monday Evening

Reno was going to sit on his bed and eye his cellphone. Dojima was right, really. If he couldn't understand the concept of giving people time, he should at least call Rude and tell him that he wasn't five anymore, and all reports for the time being would be typed up in a semi-sane manner.

And that would be why he was eying his phone.

He wasn't, however, reaching for it.

It was just fine where it was sitting. He could call Rude up any time, take the heat for getting him in crap with Tseng or whatever, and maybe he'd have things sorted out a little better by then. There were, after all, a lot of things to sort through.

Yeah. Yeah, he didn't have to pick up the phone after all. Save Rude the trouble. The big guy would appreciate it later.

[ooc: The door is open a crack, and the post is totally open for invasion from random persons. Oooooo.]

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Reno lifted a shoulder slightly and shook his head.

"All I knew was that you'd been married, man. And that was from that party in Mexico." He offered a bit of a smile. "It's the kind of stuff that's easier to just not mention at all, ain't it?"

Romeo frowned a little at the bedspread. He'd hoped he'd at least mentioned the Montague thing; that would make things easier. "Sometimes I like talking about her," he confessed. "But the complicated part, the things around it, those tend to make people look at me oddly. Not talking about it is easier."

"I would tell you, though, if you care."

"I'm all ears, if you're willin' to share," Reno replied.

It was the least he could do. Really, this was Romeo. They had a posse. Having someone around to talk to was one of the perks of the group.

"At home, my family and another both have too much money, and too much power, and hands not terribly clean," he began. "I started carrying a gun when I was 13, perhaps, though I always pretended I was above the fighting." He glanced up to check Reno's face.

"Last summer ... there was this girl. I was rather desperately in love with her. She was desperately in love with only God, or so she claimed -- in any event, she broke my heart. To stop me whining about it, my friends dragged me to a party. Which is where my wife comes into it, as I met her there."

Reno listened, watching Romeo intently. He didn't find anything particularly odd with the notion of violent, rich families. He'd had a fair bit of experience with one back home, himself.

"As good a place to meet a girl as any," was what he said when he finally did comment.

"Better than many," Romeo nodded. "So we crash this party, and she's there, and she's wonderful and we spend the whole night following each other around. And then as I'm leaving her nurse tells me she's the daughter of my enemies."

"So of course," he continued, Romeo logic not always having much in common with that on Earth, "I climbed over her fence to try to see her again. And we decided to get married, so we could be together without our families having a say. The wedding was the next day."

This pause was just for breath, really.

Reno's eyebrows lifted slightly at that, but not because of how sudden it all seemed. For all Reno knew, people fell in love and got married the next day all the time, somewhere out there. His own experience in that true love stuff had mostly involved ignoring it or gossiping about it with his partner. His expression only shifted because he was trying to sort it all out in his head.

"Was it a good wedding?"

What else do you say, really?

"It's the only one I've ever been in," Romeo answered, considering. He hadn't really thought about it as an experience he could evaluate. "But yes. Somehow she got a white dress and flowers, and the choir was rehearsing so we had music. The priest who married us had been my tutor since I was very young." He frowned. "And then right after the wedding, I got drawn into a fight I didn't want with her cousin. Tybalt. He was an idiot."

"I tried to get out of it, but my best friend decided if I would not fight, he would. Her cousin killed him, trying to kill me."

The next part came out softly and in a rush. "So I had to go after Tybalt."

"Shit," Reno breathed, his mind already working over what might have happened from there. Turf war between two families, and the kids just got married, that would have been a great way to make it either clean up very quick, or get real, real dirty, real fast.

"Did she understand? I mean... the guy tried to kill you. Killed your friend. You can't just leave that alone."

Family was family.

Reno was trying not to frown too deeply.

"I think she did," Romeo answered, agreeing with Reno's assessment. "The law came. I had until sunrise to get out of town -- if it wasn't for my last name and my father being there, I would have been executed."

"But that gave us our wedding night, and we pretended the rest of the world didn't exist as long as we could. And then I had to leave, and ..." He traced on the knee of his pants with a finger. "Her parents still didn't know of the wedding; they were trying to marry her off to someone else. My priest had a plan to get her to me, I've had it explained to me but I still don't understand how it was meant to work ~~because, seriously, Friar Laurence was a tool~~."

"The plan went askew, I heard she was dead, and ... this is where the 'bullet in the brain' plan comes in. I came back to Verona to try to see her, even if she was dead."

The 'trying not to frown too deeply' plan was a complete failure, and Reno knew it.

"The priest's plan involved killing her?" There was something missing in that equation, but Reno was pretty sure it would make sense in a moment. Perhaps. Maybe. Hopefully. "Shit," he repeated.

He was very eloquent that way.

"I think she was only supposed to fake her own death?" Romeo frowned. "Friar Laurence never explained it well to me."

"Anyhow, I tried to kill myself at the side of her funeral bier, and I failed -- as you may have noticed -- and she awoke and shot herself, thinking me dead." He shuddered involuntarily at this part. "I saw her -- alive -- for just a second, before I was out. When I awoke, she was gone for good."

"A few months passed. Then I got sent here."

Reno nodded faintly, sitting there quietly for a moment before closing his eyes and taking a deep breath.

"Man." A beat. "Man, I'm sorry." He looked up again. "This place, uh. It seems to be the place to go when you need a new startin' point, don't it?"

"Thank you. It was a while ago," Romeo said, finally looking up from the bedspread. "It is. The oddest thing for me is that this place almost is starting to feel like home. I never thought anywhere else could."

"I hear that," Reno admitted, glancing around his room. "Weird how this place starts to grow on you, ain't it? Like the people who end up here are the ones who need it the most, or somethin', yo."

He smiled a bit, rubbing the back of his head. "Or maybe I'm just crazy."

"It's as if it is for young people who have lost the trick of being young, to remind us we have choices," Romeo agreed slowly. "Though I do sometimes think Juliet would have appreciated this more than I did, at least at first."

"Maybe that's the other thing about this place. You gotta let it grow on you, before you figure out that it's the closest thing to home you got anymore." Reno gave a bit of a shrug of his shoulder. "I'm gonna miss this place, if I ever gotta go, I think."

"If it wasn't for you and Yurika and Rikku, I'd still never think of this as home." Of this Romeo was certain.

"You have to be here until we graduate," he returned. "Yurika told me about your bet, and I intend to see it paid out."

Reno grinned a bit at that.

"Two other things this place is good for," he stated. "Gatherin' up a posse, and makin' stupid bets that are gonna get me into so much shit."

Romeo turned pinkish from laughter. "But you must show the entire school the glory of the ... whatever that thing is called," he shared. "It'll be especially worth it if I get to introduce you to my father, after."

"The chocobo, man. The chocobo." Reno stuck his tongue out, and then cracked up into a fit of laughter as well. "I bet your old man'll love that! 'This is Reno, the guy with the drunk bird on his ass.' Real great example of the kind of upstanding individuals you'll meet when goin' to high school in Virginia, yo."

"Chocobo," Romeo repeated. "It sounds like a candy."

"Exactly, and he's the one who decided I needed to go across the country," he said, a bit peevishly. "Which is nothing next to going to another world, but still."

"It's a long haul, if the maps I been lookin' at are any indication," Reno agreed with a shrug. "Goin' across the causeway, it's not really real far from here to Edge by chopper. Can get there in a few hours, yo. So maybe goin' to another world isn't such a huge trip in comparison after all."

"I don't understand how that could work," Romeo admitted. "But a couple hours is about right."

Reno shrugged and shook his head.

"I don't pretend to understand this place, I just go to school here, yoto."

Room 429, Monday Evening

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