raspberryturk | Room 429, Post-Radio

Reno nodded, thoughtfully.

"A lot like the ANBU then, yeah. Little less ninja. Same idea. One employer, though. The Turks weren't mercenaries, they were glorified bodyguards and bloodied-up errand boys. And girls. Equal opportunity, zoto."

And there went another toe. One more to go. Stupid fake rhinos and their relatively toeless feet. "You do the job. No matter what. Because you're a Turk."

She nodded. "Just so," Ino echoed. "Do the job no matter what it is. ANBU isn't for everyone though, so they recruit their own people from the regular ranks. It's seldom that someone volunteers for ANBU, yeah?"

"Turks are all recruited, too, but at least we got a say, up front, if we wanted to join. It's leavin' that's more tricky, yo." Reno severed the last of Smoochy's toes, pocketed the knife again, and grinned up at Ino.

"I vote we put 'em in his mouth before givin' the mess of it to Professor Durden, yo. There's somethin' extra special about makin' the rhino eat his own toes."

"That's revolting," she said, amused. "Let's do that. What ought we cut off next?"

"Leaving's not so hard, in ANBU," Ino admitted. "Hokage-sama doesn't want more dead shinobi than happen in the line of duty. So if people say 'I gotta get out or I'm going to snap and not get sane again...' they get out."

Sane, admittedly, was more loosely defined in Konoha than it was most other places.

"Only way to leave the Turks up until real recent-like was in a body-bag," Reno mused, hauling himself to his feet to inspect the costume with a critical eye. "We lost a lotta damn good Turks in the past few years, zoto."

He stretched his arms and gave a shake of his head.

"I got the first cut on this sonofabitch, I think it's your turn, yo."

"Body-bags are more common for ANBU," she conceded, twirling in place while she dug out her cards. "People aren't always real good at knowing when to get out and then, wham, life over."

Ino slipped a single card from the deck and, with hardly a second's worth of concentration--she'd worked at it until she could--sent chakra into the card. With an practiced twist of her wrist she sent it flying at Smoochy. "It didn't need that ear, right?"

As the ear slowly toppled to the ground, the card sticking out of the tree.

Reno eyed the playing card appreciatively, and then turned to grin back at Ino.

"No, really, you gotta teach me how to do that, zoto."

It was pretty kickass, after all. And would come in very handy if ever a poker game went bad.

"Do it again?"

"Do you meditate?" Ino asked, while snagging another card with practiced ease and adding chakra to it. "Because it helps with learning this."

And fwip and the other ear toppled off Smoochy's head.

"I'm tryin' to get better at it," Reno confessed, stepping forward to gather the ears and stick them in the pile with the toes. "Ghanima told me I better work on it, too. So, I'm thinkin' about headin' into Wellspring sometime, maybe. Hittin' up Cable or someone there to see if they got any pointers, too."

Because, wow, was Reno ever not the meditation sort.

She grinned. "Wellspring's a good place," Ino told him while tugging out another card and debating what to hit next. "Which, really now, you ought to know. There's meditation that can be done while moving too, if you'd rather that, it's not all just sitting there, like a lump."

...

"It ain't?"

This was news to Reno, who was now toying idly with his bottle of butane.

Ino grinned. "It ain't," she promised. "Meditation's a pretty broad term, really."

A beat.

"Feel like setting him on fire?"

Reno was now grinning again.

"Hell, yeah! I say we take that horn first, zoto. That shade of yellow's startin' to make my head hurt."

Cap off! Butane open! Woooo!

"So, tell me, how broad is the term, then?"

Ino just laughed. "I'm not fond of it myself," she admitted. "Burn it good."

She tucked her cards back in her pocket. "The key to meditation is the ability to focus enough on what you're doing that you're able to close out all other distractions and wind up doing whatever almost on auto-pilot. It's why sitting and breathing is the most commonly accepted form of it--it's hard to get more basic than that, right? But the key is in making sure whatever you're doing is repetitious, monotonous, and rather simple. You don't want to be trying anything too difficult."

Reno was halfway through dumping the bottle of butane on Smoochy's horn when he stopped, righted the bottle again, and kind of stared at Ino.

"You're kiddin'," he said, flatly. "The whole point of meditatin' is to bore yourself to autopilot?"

She'd never heard it put quite that way, no.

"Not exactly," she said, giggling. "Though that's what happens the first few times you try it. Once you've learned to manage that, it becomes a way of dealing with your thoughts, and reaching your center. Your center is..."

Ino shrugged. "It's important. It's, like, while you're there the whole world is better grounded? Your issues, and problems and stuff don't seem so important 'cause your emotions aren't all caught up in them? It's a good mental place to find if you're upset."

Reno mused on that for a moment while he capped what was left of his butane and pocketed it again.

"Know what mental place I go to when I'm upset?" It wasn't really a question. Reno was very good at keeping a conversational sort of tone. Especially while he was in the process of destroying things. He pulled out his lighter and waved it about, a grin on his face again. "Right here, zoto."

"Funny," she said dryly, taking a step back from Smoochy for safety reasons. "But, seriously, that? You can use that as a focus so it's really all up in your head."

Reno snorted as he tucked his lighter back into his pocket, taking another long drag from his cigarette and thoughtfully inspecting the butt of it for a moment.

"Senseless destruction of sickeningly cute things is meditation," Reno mused. And then he was laughing as he flicked the glowing stub of it toward Smoochy's horn.

And up it went!

"Daaamn. That's satisfying."

It was incredibly and utterly girly of her to clap her hands together and bouncy in place at the fire.

Nevertheless, that was what she was doing. And laughing.

"Beautiful," she crowed. "A total improvement over what it was before."

"I vote we make some kinda ritual outta this," Reno chuckled. "A monthly weird-ass cute thing burning. Could be therapeutic, zoto."

He squatted down in front of the rhino, still grinning. "Burning's a good look on you, Smoochy."

"A very good look," she agreed, tilting her head at it consideringly. "And monthly burning ritual implies that we're going out and buying these things and do you really want anyone to see you buying something like that?"

Seriously?

Reno glanced up at Ino.

...

"Point taken. Okay, so we just burn shit like this when we can get our mitts on it by questionable means, zoto." He looked back at Smoochy, supervising the burning process. They only wanted to burn the horn, after all. The rest still had to be recognizable as Smoochy, if they were going to proudly present it to the professor.

"Perfect," she decided. "Clearly that means we're going to have to start paying more attention to who has the most cutesy stuff, but that's way better than buying it."

Ino glanced at him. "I think it's just about charred the poor horn to death enough, yeah? What say we stab it a whole bunch of times?"

"I can live with that," Reno agreed, kicking the costume over to kick dirt over the thing's face until the flames died off. "Stabbin' really makes an impression, yo." A pause. "And it's almost as satisfyin' as burnin' the ugly purple mofo, too, yo."

He kicked another clump of dirt at it for good measure.

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