raspberryturk | Edge, Tuesday Afternoon

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Edge, Tuesday Afternoon

"Back to work, back to work."

Work for Reno, it should be noted, mostly consisted of him putting his feet on his desk and pretending to be busy. There were reports to be filed. He didn't wanna. That required effort.

Taking jobs that involved him chasing down monsters or beating terrorists to a messy pulp or, dare he say it, the jobs that required making hits? That wasn't work. That was play.

Reno? Reno was working. So hard at work. Staring at paper. Paperwork would be less boring if maybe it came in crossword format. Or word search. Or if it was written out in code that replaced each letter of the alphabet with a different picture of a naked chick. If it did that, maybe it wouldn't be so much work!

Yes, he was totally spending his time hard at work trying to will the phone to ring with his brain. Ugh, work.

[For phonecalls, of course. Reno is, as usual, boooored.]

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"I diiiiiid," Reno practically crooned. "Steak! Steak. Damn, Rookie, I'm keepin' you."

He was. Her and her steak.

"You'll be happy to know that the neighbourhood kids appreciated the bouncy balls and those springy thingies, too."

"We looooove steak!" Dinah was a meat-and-anything girl herself. "Yay! And yeah, slinkies! I figured they'd be fun for you, but I'm glad you're neighbors are getting even more out of them." She flopped down on her bed and asked, "Are you coming to Parent's Weekend or Homecoming? Do you even know yet?"

"I heard about Parent's Weekend," Reno shared. This was because he had been intercepting Tseng's mail so that he wouldn't learn about that particular school function, yes. "But I don't think I'll be able to go. Just took some time offa work recently, to go visit the girl, yo. But Homecoming? I am gonna be all over Homecoming, yo."

Oh, he so would. What with the Home and the Coming and the not being in Edge thing.

"Yaaay!" Dinah cheered, reconciled to no Reno-now with the promise of Reno-soon. "Dancing and partying and yay! How's Rikku anyway? How was stuff when you went to visit her?"

"She ain't doin' bad, I don't think. There was some work to do in Spira that I think was kinda throwin' her off, but she's doin' better now."

She better be doing better, or else Reno was going to march back there to kiss her until her lips fell off, or she was feeling awesome. Whichever came first.

"Partying, huh?"

"It's been too quiet here. Aside from Karla's girl-kissy party--" Which, she wasn't going to call it that to her face. "There hasn't been enough full-out celebrating. Or invasions. You watch, something will happen before you get here, and we'll need the break." Dinah bounced up, and grinned a little. "We had Zack's birthday party last week. Oh! And, um. I kinda have a guy now. Maybe." She twirled.

"There were girls kissin' and I missed it? You better have gotten pictures," Reno said, in a rare moment of demonstrating that he did, indeed, have his priorities straight.

Mmmmm, girls kissing.

"An' you got a guy, huh? Let him know that you got a trained killer watchin' your back in case he gets it in his head to hurt you, okay?"

What? He was overprotective of his rookies. It was a thing.

He was... totally not going to touch that Zack thing with a ten-foot pole. One year older meant one year closer to dead. Which kinda sucked.

"Maaaaybe a few," Dinah said ~~pending permission of parties puckering up~~. "You'll see when you come visit! And he's not a trained killer-- well." She paused. "He fights monsters? Back at his home? Called lurkers. They kind of look like a cross between a gorilla and a frog." Dinah tilted her head. "Maybe it's too soon to say for sure, though. It was just one kiss? But. It was really nice." She'd gotten enough used to the idea that she wasn't bibbling it at a high-speed whisper now, though. "His name's Jak. Just Jak. From Sandover. Oh! And a giant robot!"

There was Reno's head, kinda twitching a little as he tried to piece that together.

"I mean, I'm the trained killer. An' you kissed him and a giant robot?"

Look, it had been a long day at work.

Dinah ~~and her mun~~ might've had a little too much caffiene today.

"Right! I knew that." Dinah turned red, then grinned. "And no! Just him! He took out a giant robot, though." She paused, then the rest settled into her brain and she had to say, "Awwww. You'd threaten him for me! That's so nice! And violent! But nice!"

"I'm nicely violent!" And yes, Reno sounded entirely too proud of himself, at that!

"And pfft, who ain't taken out a giant robot, nowadays? That ain't all that big a deal, yo."

It was entirely possible that Reno's world was kinda really, really weird.

"Seriously?" Dinah was staring at the phone now, and demanding, "Why didn't I hear this story? How did you do it?"

"Bah, it's easy, yo. Robots an' electricity don't get along so well. Buggers up their circuits and junk. And in Midgar? Craploads of big robots. There was this day when all of ShinRa's security droids went friggin' insane, and we had to beat 'em down through all of Sector Eight."

Reno missed Sector Eight. And beating up robots. And such.

"Good times, Rookie. Good times."

"Dude," Dinah said mournfully, and taking mental notes on how to deal with giant robots if they ever came to New Gotham. Or Fandom. "I kinda think that's how Jak did it too, yellow eco, it's this energy stuff they have there-- anyway. I'm training and training and it's been almost a month and the only invasion we have to worry about it parents this weekend. Oh, and the little blue guys who were stealing underwear." She paused. "Not mine!"

"Blue guys stealin' underwear."

Reno needed a moment.

"Damn, sometimes I think I'm gonna go nuts if I don't get back to Fandom sometime soon. An' then someone says somethin' like that, and I wonder why the hell I miss it!"

And yes, he was laughing as he said that.

"You love it," Dinah accused him, grinning. "Plus you missed maple syrup rain... How are things going there? Aside from slinkies and superballs? Did you ever get those water treatment thingies to work?"

"They work," Reno assured her. "I mean, I drank outta one of 'em, and I ain't dead yet. But then, I grew up on slum water, so that probably ain't any indication either."

He laughed a little, shaking his head.

"Had a few folks in the streets set up some of 'em, an' wrote a letter to the head of the WRO tellin' him he ought to be doin' the same. Last I saw, there were some decent ones poppin' up here an' there, too."

"Awesome," Dinah said, pleased. "I'm glad, I know big ones can't be easy to make. But maybe that'll help people out." She grinned and bounced on her bed. "How're the beans doing? Still yellow?" She snickered. "And hey! Would you want an ice cream maker? Do you guys have milk?"

"Sure we have milk!"

Don't ask Reno what in the world they milked to get the milk. It was entirely possible that cows didn't exist on Gaia.

"We got ice, too, when I can keep the freezer runnin'. And the beans are fiiiine. I been takin' 'em down to the kids below. I got a few regulars down on the street. Kinda got half a mind to just invite 'em to move in, but that wouldn't be safe for 'em, either."

"Then I'll send you the fixings," Dinah decided, since hey, kids who liked superballs would probably like ice cream as well as Reno. "They could make enchiladas? Maybe some tortillas or something." Which was Dinah's idea of how you ate beans, as part of the spiciest Mexican food you could make. "Why wouldn't it be safe? Structurally, or something else, and why are you there then?" she asked, worried.

"Oh, no, the building is fine, Rookie. That ain't it." Reno sighed, shifting his weight a little and looking at the ceiling. "People get the idea that a Turk is gettin' soft on the neighbourhood kids, though, they're gonna do what it takes to get to the Turk."

"Oh." Dinah processed that, then said, "Oh." Not safe for the kids. Right. "Gotcha." A moment of silence, then a bit more soberly, "Anyone thinking you're a good target lately? I really hope not."

"Nobody we ain't been able to deal with," Reno replied dismissively, snorting a bit somewhere in that statement. "It ain't nothin' new. Someone gets wind of the guys in suits who used to work for ShinRa, tries somethin' dumb, an' a few hours later we're handin' 'em off gift-wrapped to the WRO so they can figure out what to do with 'em without any real legal system set up."

A pause.

"Shit, do we ever need some kinda prison system."

"The WRO, they're the ones taking care of people mostly, right?" Dinah checked, trying to remember. She was quiet a minute, thinking about prisons. "They're always a pain. Keep people out, keep people in..." She sighed, remembering Al Hawke. "Too bad you can't put an ankle bracelet and a tracker on them. I'm guessing that wouldn't be enough."

"It ain't never enough. But right now, we are the law. Us and the WRO. World Regenesis Organization. They're rebuildin'. Kinda got the beginnings of an army happenin' there, but their progress is slow. They're hirin' kids offa the streets, just so long as they're old enough to hold a gun. That ain't an army. That's a buncha people who threw away their pride because they were hungry."

Reno could relate. But at least he found something to be proud of in the Turks when he'd done it.

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