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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"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."

"If you did understand it, I'd think something was very wrong with you," Romeo answered. "This place makes no sense."

"The boss told me this was some kinda multidimensional hub. Thing. Like that's supposed to explain it all." Reno chuckled. "Whatever it is, it's still high school, in the end."

"Still high school. At least here the girls are in our classes," Romeo shrugged, then, curious, asked, "Did you go to school at all, back home?"

Reno almost laughed a little at that.

"Not really," he admitted, shrugging his shoulders. "There's a buncha basic crap they teach you before you become a Turk, but there wasn't really a school to go to, for some people. Maybe the people up top got more in the way of education, yo. I just learned what I had to to get in and get by. They drill it into you good, when they want you workin' for 'em."

"At least that means you only have to do the school thing for a year and a half," Romeo said, mostly to give his mouth something to do while his brain processed. Then, with a more serious look, he added, "It sounds like a harsh way to grow up."

"Might've been. Maybe that's why I jumped at the first chance I got to get outta that hole." It took Reno a moment of tilting his head and figuring before he spoke again. "Probably the only opportunity I ever would've got to see the sun, zoto. You gotta take that kinda chance when it's right there in front of you, right?"

"I might have as well," Romeo nodded. "I'd do a lot, if it meant seeing the sun."

"You hear about it a lot, under the plate," Reno mused. "But never really know what you're missing. Plenty of people lived their whole lives down there not knowin' what the sky looked like."

He laughed a little. "Not like the sky looked much better from up top. Sky here's a lot easier to look at, yo."

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Room 429, Monday Evening

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