raspberryturk | Room 429, Monday Afternoon

Romeo had also survived the end of the world and physics class (and thank God that was just playing pool, he could do that on half a brain and no sleep), and Romeo should have just gone to his room, collapsed, and worked on learning not to think.

And he would. Just as soon as he checked on Reno. He had barely gotten a chance to say two words to him in Edge, and he knew things couldn't have been easy.

He tapped on the door.

"Yo." It was a flat yo compared to the norm, but it was, indeed, a yo. At least it was accompanied by a rather more energetic honk from the ferret in Reno's lap. "C'mon in, door's open."

It was. A little. Hey.

"Yo," Romeo agreed as he stepped into the room, and he was starting to see the benefit of talking the way Reno did when one was exhausted; it saved syllables.

"I just wanted to see how ... after ..." Sentences, Montague. "Are you all right?"

He held out his fingers for the ferret to sniff. At least Mako was okay.

Mako was doing awesome. Things had been all quiet and weird for a few days, but now people were back and even giving him attention.

He attempted to chew on Romeo's fingers while Reno worked on a response.

"S' been a long weekend," he decided, finally. "Running around, worryin' about people, blowin' up. Maybe quittin' my job, and I didn't even think I could do that. Long."

A pause, and he looked up at Romeo, as much concern in his expression as he could manage, given how tired he was. "You?"

Edited 2008-10-06 18:28 (UTC)

Mako's nips were a welcome distraction; Romeo tried to wrestle the ferret as he thought about his response. "All right," he said, meaning, not in danger just now. "I didn't blow up, but it was still a long weekend."

He raised an eyebrow. "You quit your job?"

"I'm not sure," Reno admitted. "I don't think I did. Or maybe I did. Tseng came to talk to me this morning. Said things had to change. And then Rufus and I had it out, and if I was any more awake I would'a thrown him into a wall or somethin', and I'm still sittin' here talkin', so it didn't go as bad as it could've."

That was to say, in spite of the weekend, Reno was still breathing.

"Sorry you guys had to get involved."

Romeo shook his head. "It was nothing." It wasn't, but he would have done a lot more for Reno.

He didn't know he was going to ask his next question until it was out of his mouth. "Do you mind that we came?"

"Scared the ever lovin' shit outta me, when you three showed up," came the confession before Reno could check his tongue. "I dunno. World's endin', probably not gonna get out of it alive, and then..."

Oh, crap. He was getting all... sentimental, or whatever.

"Aside from Rude, I can't think of anyone I'd want by me through that more'n the posse. You're family. I mean that. Just, I didn't like that it meant you were all in that danger, too, zoto. Would'a been safe for you, here."

"I wouldn't have gotten to fight a dragon if we hadn't come," Romeo shrugged, reaching for his cigarettes and offering the pack to Reno. "We were fine. Safer than you were."

A beat.

"Rikku perhaps might have mentioned there could be dragons before we left."

"Bahamut was kind of a surprise," Reno admitted with a bit of a wry grin. "Usually the monsters that hit up the borders of Edge are smaller. Kinda less with the big blue fireballs and eatin' people whole... thing."

He shrugged, turning his gaze back to Mako and wrestling the ferret onto his back, ignoring the sharp pricks of little teeth in his fingers.

"They always get bigger and nastier the closer you get to the end of everything. Should'a seen the bugger that blew up the ShinRa tower a couple of years back."

Or, for that matter, the giant rock in the sky at about the same time.

Romeo frowned a little, pulling his legs in. "We were that close to the end," he said flatly, letting himself feel it for the first time. "That's new for me, though not for you?"

"Went through it a few times in about as many months," Reno agreed, ticking off on his fingers as he listed it all. "SOLDIERs gone bad, a summon, the WEAPONS and Meteor, Sephiroth. Holy brought Geostigma, which wasn't the end of the world, but it wasn't exactly pretty, either. You'd think you'd get used to it or somethin', but you kinda never do."

There was a pause, while he mulled it all over, and then he shook his head.

"Less people died this time. Gaia sucks."

"I think," Romeo decided, as he fiddled with his lighter, "I need to take you to Verona someday. It'll be a fucking vacation for you."

"Do you think things will be better now, at least for a bit?"

"Sand, sun, seaside? Yeah, I think I could live with a trip to Verona," Reno agreed, eying Romeo's smokes and regretting not making a grab for them when they were offered. "Always hard to say if things are better or not, you know? You think you got it all covered, and then the fuckers come back from the dead anyhow, so much for that."

The good guys never came back for round two. How freaking unfair was that?

"And no one there wants to kill you for your last name," Romeo said, nodding slightly to Reno and to the cigarettes. He could help himself if he wanted.

"Did you, um ..." Okay, this was a weird question, very possibly the weirdest of Romeo's life. "Were you dead when the helicopter....?"

Reno was more than happy to extract his fingers from the ferret's mouth to take a cigarette for himself. Needed it more than he'd figured.

"Helps when you don't have a last name." And then his eyebrows furrowed and he shrugged a little. "Probably should'a been. Thought I was gonna be. Bombs goin' off that close, and buried under concrete and all that, kinda a shock to wake up from that to your girlfriend and your boss shovin' somethin' that tastes worse than malboro drool down your throat."

He took a deep breath, and then cast the same sort of longing look to Romeo's lighter before making a reach for it.

"Green rain."

Romeo always was willing to help prevent a nic fit in a friend, especially one who had just saved the world. He handed over the lighter without a word.

"Green rain," he echoed, a little helplessly. "It ... I could feel it easing all the pain in my shoulder. It must have kept you alive."

He looked up so his eyes could meet Reno's. "It was brave to try."

"Wasn't doin' it to be brave," Reno admitted, fumbling with the lighter, the cigarette between his lips, running on Ghanima's coffee and Romeo's smokes and weird little ferret noises. "Nothin' else was workin', and maybe it wouldn't save the world or anything, but maybe it'd buy Cloud some time. Time's important."

"You thought you would die and you did it," Romeo said, hugging his knees with one arm, stroking Mako with the free hand. "That's brave."

"And we did save the world."

Which ... freaked him out, something probably written on his face.

"Yeah," Reno replied, nodding a little. "World's safe."

He shut his eyes and willed himself to breathe for a moment, deep drags from the cigarette, and slow, deliberate exhales.

"You and Doji, though. You're holdin' up alright? I mean... It was bad. Bad by my standards, and I been doin' this shit every year of my life worth mentionin'. You probably never even saw a dragon before, nevermind killed one."

Romeo snorted. "I saw a lion in the zoo," he shared. "A bear, once, from the car while we were camping. Not a dragon, no."

He shrugged. "We'll be all right. We weren't buried in concrete."

"Bein' buried ain't so bad," Reno stated, letting Mako resume gnawing on the hand that wasn't reserved for flicking ash off his smoke. "It's wakin' up afterward that sucks."

"I'd rather not have to learn firsthand about either," Romeo grimaced, poking a little at Mako to make him honk.

It was a cheerful sound, and he needed that.

"I almost died once," he said, almost offhand. "It took me a long time to feel right again."

"But... you do now, right?" Honking ferrets were excellent at lifting moods. Reno was gonna have to poke and tease Mako to make him honk some more. "I mean... Whatever it was? You're doin' better now."

Reno hoped. Maybe their field trip had busted Romeo up more than the guy cared to let on. Reno hoped not.

"I'm fine," Romeo said quickly. "I wanted to see if you were. Or if you wanted to ... talk. Or anything."

"It was a long time ago."

Edited 2008-10-07 01:34 (UTC)

Reno settled back, took another deep pull from his cigarette, and nodded slightly.

"I'll live," he decided. "Kinda a fan of livin'." He tickled Mako's tummy, earning another honk, before looking at Romeo, falling silent, waiting for him to continue.

Right. He should have known to expect a follow-up question. Romeo got very interested in the intricacies of lighting another smoke as he put words together. "I fell apart when I thought Juliet was dead," he finally said. "There were a lot of things I did that I don't like to think about. And I drank poison. Not the same thing at all, but I know what it is not to care if you live or die."

"It's good to hear you aren't there, though." Right? Right. Because if Reno was there, they had even bigger problems.

Reno was now thoughtfully frowning, forgetting, for the most part, that the ferret was now chewing little messy holes in his fingertips again.

"Yeah. I'm not there, right now." He paused for a moment. "Glad you're not. Glad I'm not. Glad we're not."

Another pause.

"Was there once, too." Since they were throwing these things out there, now. "I mean... At a point where it was too much. Didn't drink poison. But... close enough, anyhow."

"It's an awful place to be." Which could probably be taken for granted but was worth saying, anyhow. "Awful."

"What did you do?" Romeo asked, tentatively. "I don't recommend poison. Things went black and I was in the hospital a week while they got my liver working again."

Reno fell very quiet for a moment. Still wasn't so great with picking at certain old scars.

"I told you about the plate. Didn't tell you I took a running leap off the platform without lookin' to see if there was anything there to catch me."

Clearly, he had been caught.

"They put me on leave. Hired Elena to fill the empty slot."

Romeo paled. "I almost want to apologize for asking," he said, giving Mako a pat by way of making it up to his master. "What caught you, in the end?"

Reno shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. "Turns out, Tseng's the kinda reliable guy who's there with a chopper just in time to catch you on your way down."

He poked at the ferret some more- Mako was getting enough attention to make up for the whole weekend- and looked up at Romeo again.

"Wouldn't do it again, though. Not worth it."

Edited 2008-10-07 02:51 (UTC)

"I could see that in Tseng," Romeo said, nodding. Tseng had struck him as scary, but good at his job. "But still. Alive is better, even if fortune favored us both."

He bit his lip, not sure how to ask this next question (as if he could come up with something more awkward. "So ... you still work for him, but ... would you still do anything he asked?" Since that seemed to be worrying Rikku, and all.

If there was something Reno was learning about life aside from being a Turk, it was that there was always something more awkward.

"I don't think I would do anything. I mean... when Rufus called me into his office, he was talkin' about startin' the company up again, rebuildin' his empire with his loyal Turks at his side."

Deep breath.

"I told him I wanted to come back here. Told him the only reason we were stickin' it out as his Turks was because we knew he was gonna kick off soon anyhow." Another deep breath. "He essentially called me his property. I mean. I am. Was. Something. I don't think I wanna be, anymore."

He wasn't sure what it was that he wanted.

And Romeo's heart broke just a little bit. "You aren't property," he said, fiercely. "Not anybody's but your own. If you want to keep the job, keep it because it's yours, not because you're his."

"I think the secret of this place is that we don't have to go home."

Reno smiled something of a rueful smile, reaching to drop the butt of his cigarette into a glass of liquor that had probably been sitting on his nightstand for the better part of a week.

"Until we graduate, zoto."

"I've been thinking about that," Romeo said, gesturing emphatically. This was a thing that required emphatic gestures. "We don't need to go home, we just need to leave the island. There's a world -- many worlds. There must be other jobs for you and me and Dojima."

Not that he thought she would take one, but he still planned to try a sales pitch about the concept a few more times.

"Other jobs?" Reno was chewing on that, now. Really stopping to run the notion through his head, wondering if there might actually be something to it. "Other jobs, on other worlds."

And then he was smiling, lifting up the ferret to drape the little guy over his shoulder like some kind of sausage-shaped furry epaulet, prone to honking and the occasional bout of chewing on Reno's earring.

"What kind of jobs? What sorta world?"

"Any world where no one wants to shoot at me would be my choice. But jobs, that's where I get stuck," Romeo admitted.

"I need to talk to Yurika. If she would let me I would follow her home, and ..." he frowned. "Work in a shop? Teach? I wasn't raised to earn money, I've no idea how to do that." Though he had the arrogance of the rich that said, somehow, he always would.

"Of course, if she could get out of her job that's another equation, but I've little hope of that one."

"The money's in doin' the junk nobody else wants to do," Reno said, shrugging faintly. "S' why Turks got paid so damn much. You get a dirty job, and money won't never be an issue."

He grimaced a little, realizing how that must have sounded. Here, Romeo, why don't you become a filthy murdering freak like me. The pay's great!

"Doin' anything. You know."

Not the greatest of amendments, but at least it was one.

"I know," Romeo grimaced. "I think I'll try and stay with clean jobs. It would be a first for the Montagues, after all."

Not that Ted Montague got his hands dirty. That's what he had staff for.

"Do you know what else you would want to do?"

"...Else?"

Reno might have deflated a little at that.

"Never gave it any thought. I'm good at what I do. It's kinda all I know, you know? I mean, I could take chunks of it from here or there. Could pilot or service choppers somewhere, maybe. Or do... detective junk. But I think people expect someone who looks more- uh- more professional than I do?"

He shook his head.

"Don't think doin' just any one thing would be what I'm good for, yo."

"A flying detective?" Romeo was being silly, he knew it. He turned to give Reno a more serious look.

"I think you could pass if you wanted to," he decided. "Especially if you lost the hair again, or were in a world like mine where people weren't so dull and gray all the time."

"But that doesn't mean you have to choose any one thing, or not right now."

"Yeah, no reason to choose now." Reno almost flopped backward against the bed, but the startled chitter in his ear when he shifted his weight to do so made him think better of it.

"Got a whole, what? Semester and a half? Maybe the summer, too, before I gotta know what I'm doin', anyhow? I'll figure it out. We'll all figure it out. It'll get figured."

"It will. And there's no need to get it perfect at first. We have lifetimes," Romeo said, hoping he was right.

"More than we expected, isn't it?"

"What, lifetimes?" Reno's smile was a very, very tired one, now. The weekend was hitting him in the face like the billboard he'd been thrown into yesterday. "Wasn't expectin' to make it this far, man. If we get lifetimes? I'll take 'em."

Room 429, Monday Afternoon

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