raspberryturk | Office Hours, Thursday

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Office Hours, Thursday

Reno... really didn't have anything better to do today but come and hang out in his office, no.

Okay, sure, so there was the mother of all freaking bouquets on his desk, courtesy of his smart-assed co-teacher. And the flowers were starting to go a little...

Uh. Soggy, Reno supposed, was a good word for it.

So he was here today, up to his elbows in rotting flowers, with his nose wrinkled as he picked out all the valuable little nick-nacks from inside of it.

Pearls? Seriously?

The one upside, anyhow, was that Reno could sell some of this crap off and send the money back to Edge or Junon or something. This monster could totally go a long way, back home. Not that he suspected for an instant that maybe something like that was what Genesis had in mind...

[Open door, open office! Since I remembered that Reno actually has one of these things, today!]

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So was Anakin when you got past the billion layers of Jedi clothing.

...not that he was inviting you to.

Anyway!

"Much to their sorrow, normally, once I find them," Anakin said with a little grin.

[HIT POST COMMENT, SELF. GOD.]

"Someone's gotta stick their necks out for the rookies," Reno noted, smirking. "Shit, gettin' stuck in that wasteland last year was damn near a field trip, until things got messy at the end..."

Reno had thought that the Capital Wasteland had been kind of homey.

Reno had issues.

"Ben shut like a sarlaac when I asked about it," Anakin said.

Reno considered that one for a moment.

"I don't know exactly what he saw, all the time in there," he offered. "That last leg of the journey came up with some pretty... rough shit to throw at everyone. But I ain't above talkin' about the rough stuff, if family's worried or somethin' and wants at least the skeleton of an explanation, yo."

But the wastelands themselves? Reno got to beat shit up. It had been awesome.

"A skeleton would be good," Anakin admitted. "Getting Ben to talk when he doesn't want to is an effort in futility."

Reno nodded, mulling about for a moment on where to start. Might as well pick up with the parts he knew.

"Most of it wasn't so bad," he offered, because that was a nice starting point. "The wastelands were messy, but it wasn't some kinda friggin' horror story backdrop until we got to the vaults... like this big friggin' bomb shelter thing that looked like it used to house hundreds... nah, I'd say probably thousands of people, yo."

Even Reno didn't look particularly thrilled, talking about this part. There were things about the Capital Wastelands that rang eerily familiar with Gaia. And for as much as he loved what was outside, the inside was close-to-home in all of the wrong ways.

Anakin pursed his lips. "Jedi are pretty sensitive to the feel of a room, and Ben is notable even among them."

"Shit." The corner of Reno's mouth twitched. Damn, that place had been rough enough for people who weren't sensitives. Poor kid.

"The air in there was drugged," he explained. "Some kinda hallucinogen. Looks like the place was populated by people thinkin' that they were protectin' themselves from whatever destroyed the place outside, an' what they were steppin' into was... I dunno specifics. Some kinda sick social experiment? What happens when you force psycho-whatever into a bunch'a people and lock 'em away for decades? There were survivors. They weren't doin' too good. Neither were we."

Anakin winced despite himself. "Poor kid. No wonder he didn't talk about it. Well, aside from that being his default setting."

"Seems like there ain't nobody in this neck of the woods that really likes talkin'," Reno agreed, frowning a bit more. "It was messin' all of us up pretty bad, some of the shit we saw, some of the shit we thought we saw. And most of us weren't sensitive to that kinda thing. He was takin' it pretty rough, for a bit there."

"What happened?" Anakin asked, then shook his head. "Sorry. It's kind of sad I have to ask other people about my own relatives."

Reno shrugged. Hey, he was used to dishing on others when the grown-ups asked. That had been a good chunk of the job description, as a Turk back home, after all.

"You're worried. Kid was scared. Makes sense, yo. I think what he found out about the place hit him pretty hard. The air got worse, deeper you went in, and when I found him, he was backed against a wall, eyes closed, kinda huggin' his gun."

This was presented in a very matter-of-fact tone. The sort that suggested that Reno thought that it was a miracle that he hadn't been, too. But then, Reno didn't tend to try to relax, so much as he sort of slipped into a dangerous sort of fury, and snapped out of it when the job was over.

Anakin looked stricken, but only for a second and then his normal expression snapped back into place.

"So you talked him down?" he guessed.

"More like up," Reno replied, shrugging again. "It wasn't far to go from there. Just had to get him on his feet and remind him that it was mostly the bad air. The rest was him, yo. He's a tough kid."

"He is," Anakin agreed. "I just wish he hadn't turned into a tough kid when he was 14."

"That's the dream, ain't it?" Reno sighed, pacing around for a bit, now. "Kids bein' kids. I have yet to actually see somethin' so crazy, yo."

"I get one in class every now and again. They're the ones who freak out when I ask what they'd kill to protect. Most students here take that as a matter of course," Anakin replied.

Reno smirked a bit. Ah, he remembered that lesson. It had been an easy enough question to answer.

Killing was kind of second-nature to him.

"I guess they'd be the same ones that thought they'd be able to trust their government to save 'em if a giant rock came hurtlin' down from the sky to end all life on The Planet," Reno noted. "The civilians are always so..."

He cycled through several words in his head, from 'cute' to 'sheeplike.'

"Gullible."

Good enough.

"I was thinking 'sheeplike'," Anakin offered.

Oh, Reno liked Anakin.

"That was my second choice," he admitted. "Like it'd hurt 'em to think a little on their own, now an' then. Life's so easy when there's someone sittin' at the top, watchin' over their flock, just so long as they trot around like good little peons an' do as they're told."

... Because Turks were totally nothing like that. Ever.

And each Jedi was their very own unique and special snowflake. It's true!

"And Force forbid they stick their neck out for anyone else, either," Anakin added bitterly.

"Yeah, the nerve of 'em," Reno replied. It was somewhere between a snort and a sigh. "Don't get me wrong. Anarchy ain't been all that hot, either. But it'd be nice if there was some kinda middle friggin' ground, yo."

"I tried to have this conversation with my first wife," Anakin said. "She was a galactic Senator who just couldn't see the system we had was broken."

Though the government that replaced it--Evil and a Little Insane Repressive Totalitarian Regime--hadn't really worked out either.

"Well, if she was Senator, she kinda... was the system, wasn't she? Part of it, at least," Reno noted, though perhaps a touch carefully. He had no idea where Anakin had stood with his first wife. Marriages were always so... so damn touchy.

He didn't get 'em. He was pretty cure he didn't want to get 'em.

"People got problems, sometimes, seein' the cracks in whatever foundation it is they got dug in under themselves, zoto."

Anakin smiled wryly. "Jedi too."

Office Hours, Thursday

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