502, Monday Evening

[withoutverona]

After class and a nice, long "pillow playdate" with Yurika, Romeo was finally back in his room for the first time since Friday morning.

He downloaded the radio podcasts and listened to them as he unpacked his suitcase, frowning a little. He wished even more that had been home to try to help, somehow. Yurika had been right that he wouldn't know what to do against a spirit, but he could have tried.

[OOC: Door open.]

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[raspberryturk]

After Reno's flight session with Murdock, he was tempted to crawl up the stairs to his own room, find his way to his bed, flop over, and pretend he'd fallen into a coma until Wednesday.

A second thought had him overshoot his room by an entire floor. He'd really rather check to see if Romeo was back, anyhow. He'd sleep when he was dead. He needed someone to ramble at.

"Knock-knock," he said, peering through the doorway. "Anyone home?"

[withoutverona]

"I am," came a voice from under the bed on Romeo's side of the room.

A second later, Romeo emerged, only dust bunnies clinging to his t-shirt. "Unpacking ..." he half-explained as he brushed himself off, clearly pleased by the visit. "Good evening. Are you well? I listened to radio, but I've talked to no one, not really."

[raspberryturk]

"Yeah, well, as good as you can expect, after facin' off against a god down in hell," Reno replied, and yes, that was a smirk on his lips. It was entirely possible that Reno was slightly insane. "Few burns. Unexpected haircut. Crazy weekend, man. How was- Uh. That place you were at?"

[withoutverona]

"Your ponytail," Romeo said, stepping to the side to check Reno's hair. "Did it die nobly, at least? I cannot conceive of fighting a god."

He shrugged in response to the question. "Tokyo? Loud and bright and crowded and we spent most of the time trying to stay drunk and avoiding Yurika's parents. But it was excellent distraction."

[raspberryturk]

Reno shrugged back and grinned.

"Never been held up by my hair with a flaming hand gripped to it. And nobody got left behind, yo. I think it was a damn good way to go." A pause. A grin. "Sounds kinda like Midgar used to be. Hell of a place. But hey, distractions are good, right?"

[withoutverona]

"He picked you up by it?" Romeo said, impressed. "Jesu, you're lucky not to have lost more hair yet." Or, you know, a whole bunch of skin and blood. "Did you get in any blows?"

"Distractions were about the best we could do," he shrugged again. "I think you would like Tokyo. I did, even if it was not the best circumstances. Maybe the island will go there when it's bored of monkeys."

[raspberryturk]

"Spent a couple of minutes beatin' on him with my stun baton," Reno mused. "Therapy or somethin', didn't hurt him any, though."

He was kind of lucky to not be dead, really.

"Maybe I'm gonna have to visit the place sometime," he mused. "Tokyo. Not hell. Had my fill of Tartarus."

[withoutverona]

"You'd likely have to be a god to hurt a god," Romeo decided. "If it was therapeutic for you and annoyed him at all, that's something. And you made it out, even if all of your hair did not, which is more."

"I'm not planning on going to Hell until after I die," he added, then, with a slight grin: "Though it would be comfort that, from now on, if anyone tells you to go to Hell, you can say you've been."

[raspberryturk]

"Been there, done that, got the- well. There wasn't a t-shirt. But shouldn't be hard findin' somethin' like that on the internet, right?"

The internet was crazy like that.

"Still kinda weird. Somethin' huge like that, and everyone made it back alive. A little burned, sure, but, you know. Here."

[withoutverona]

"Shouldn't be. Did I ever show you the one I got for myself that says 'Sinner'?" Romeo wondered aloud.

He thought about Reno's observation. At home he'd seen so many people die for stupid reasons, in fights against much weaker opponents. A battle against a god with no casualties, that was freaky. "It is strange. This might sound mad, but ... can people die here? Do they, at least?"

[raspberryturk]

"Don't remember seein' it, but then again, I got thrown around like a ragdoll yesterday, too. Might've knocked a couple screws loose or something." Reno gave his shoulders another shrug. And then he chewed on the rest.

"That's the thing, man. Since we got here, there hasn't been anyone dead, anywhere, has there? No funerals, memorials, not even a freaking announcement tellin' us about casualties. Stone angels eat people, they all come back. The god of the underworld tries to take over, nobody dies and people manage to hurt him. I ain't never seen nothin' like it before."

[withoutverona]

He pulled the shirt in question from a dresser drawer and tossed it at Reno. "It was part of a shipment at the store, and I figured I earned it." Not that the shirt was important, but it gave him time to think about the rest of it.

"No deaths we heard of. Was Hades killed, even?" he ventured. "Not only no funerals, but church is usually empty, no proper priest save Karal, it's ..." He couldn't think of a word besides weird.

"My best friend at home fell to a piece of glass," he said finally. "If one of the odd things about this island is things like that don't happen here, it cannot be bad, can it?"

[raspberryturk]

Reno inspected the shirt only halfheartedly, his mind on the conversation at hand far more than it was on the novelty of a piece of clothing.

"Even Hades was sent off alive, I think," Reno bit at his lip for a moment, then shrugged a shoulder. "Dyin' is just a part of livin'. I mean, I go home, back to doin' what I do, and I'll do it well until somethin' gets the better of me. That's how it works. And here, there's just... Nothin'. Everyone's a fighter, and we all get reasons to fight, and then we sit down and drink freaking lemonade after like it was nothin'." He tossed the shirt back to Romeo. "Kinda gets to the point where graduating is somethin' to worry about, because you can't stay behind. Might lose that security. And when you stop callin' your girlfriend four months later, she'll know you're dead, and that's life, too."

Reno and Rikku had been involved in a pretty intense conversation last night, apparently.

...

"Sorry 'bout your friend, man. At least bein' here is better than livin' with all the dying all the time, right?"

[withoutverona]

"Long time ago," Romeo said, and it was, Mercutio's loss feeling like it had happened longer ago than the 11 (15, counting Paris) months that had truly passed. Feeling like it was in another life altogether.

"And I go home and wait for someone to shoot me to serve some ancient feud," he said quietly. "Or I follow Yurika like a puppy until she tires of me, and then to Verona. If there were a way to stay here for longer than this next year..."

"Dying is a part of living." He was firm on that; he no longer feared death. "Maybe this is all a holiday -- our taste of heaven before we go to hell? It is better, even if odd."

[raspberryturk]

"Pretty bad, ain't it?" Reno looked up at the ceiling, sorting out what was going through his head. "When you come to a place like this, and you're thinkin' it's gonna be hell. And by the time you know you gotta go back, it turns out home was hell all along after all?"

[withoutverona]

Romeo sighed and shoved his hair back. "It has been heaven for me as well as hell, though," he admitted.

"I might not get shot. I might turn into my father instead." It was clear Romeo viewed this as a toss-up. "You couldn't go home with Rikku?"

[raspberryturk]

Reno lifted a shoulder at that.

"I could," he replied. "I mean... ain't nothin' keeping me out of Spira, except that I got more than my share of debts to pay back on Gaia. Helped pull the place apart. Now I'm just tryin' to put it back together. Isn't really home anymore, but I'd be a coward to just walk away and let it rot without tryin'."

[withoutverona]

Romeo gave Reno a long look. He was brave. "Do you ever worry," he asked deliberately, "that you would only make things worse?"

[raspberryturk]

Reno's eyes fell from the ceiling and settled on Romeo for a moment. A brief moment, before finding their way to the floor.

"Been makin' things worse since I took the job," he said, after another moment still. "Worse, at this point, just means dead. And I ain't gonna be the one to kill it."

[withoutverona]

Ouch.

"That was not about you," Romeo told the ceiling. "It was me, it's what I worry about. There's some peace now, or I haven't heard differently, and I fear my being there again will push things back toward a brink."

"You won't kill your home."

[raspberryturk]

Reno looked up again, frowning thoughtfully.

"You ever think that maybe you don't have to go back, either?"

[withoutverona]

"Only every day," Romeo sighed, drawing his legs to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. "And then I ask myself where I would go instead, and the answer is nowhere in particular, and ... I'd rather be a Montague in Verona, and take all that on, then go be no one somewhere else." He had to admit to that.

"I took a whole workshop on college. It sounds such a waste." Which wasn't quite as random a tangent as it sounded.

[raspberryturk]

"I didn't bother with the workshop. I ain't gonna go to college. High school was a fluke," Reno offered. "I... I get that. That wantin' to be someone thing. Sometimes, what you are is all you got. Worth givin' up the rest for, right?"

[withoutverona]

"I don't even know what the rest is," Romeo told what was evidently a fascinating splotch on the carpet. "I've no great drive for a profession, and Yurika ... I know she will go home, and I see no place for me in Japan, even if she were to ask. They don't even allow guns there."

This was possibly more important to Romeo than it would have been to most people.

"So. May as well be who I am, and hope to do some small good with it."

[raspberryturk]

Reno nodded.

And it was a pretty damn firm nod, all things considered.

"You don't got nothin' if you don't got who you are," he agreed. "Hang onto it, man. When the world falls apart around you, at least you'll still have your name."