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]

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."

[withoutverona]

"Funny," Romeo said. "Not funny, really. But I was once so eager to be some other name, and now it feels like the last thing I could drop. I am who I am, may as well call myself by it."

[raspberryturk]

Reno's lips quirked into the faintest of smiles at that.

"There's an interesting way to look at it," he mused. "I couldn't keep my name when I joined the Turks. Don't really miss it, but that ain't who I am anymore, anyhow. Guess we're stuck for it now, Romeo. We are who we are, yo."

[withoutverona]

Romeo looked distinctly curious. "Why 'Reno'?" he had to ask, figuring if Reno wanted to offer his real name he could, but it wasn't something to pry into. "Though we are who we are, at the end, and I'd be much the same if I started calling myself Bob Smith."

Maybe not.

"I'd not need to spell it as often."

[raspberryturk]

"Why not Reno?" There was a bit of a grin on Reno's lips, now. "S'just a bunch'a letters where I'm from. There ain't no Nevada on Gaia. It was kinda... I dunno. Came with the turf. New suit, new name, new job, new life."

A pause.

"And last names are real easy to spell when you don't even got one," he added.

[withoutverona]

"You were Reno when you were six," Romeo pointed out. "Had they given you the suit already?" He wouldn't put it past them, from what Reno had told him.

"I don't think I could get by on one name unless I wanted to become a pop singer, that's one of the tragedies of being from this Earth."

[raspberryturk]

"You sayin' I should look into headin' up a boy band?" Reno smirked and shook his head. "I was older than that when I joined the Turks, but not by much, yo. ShinRa's got a tendency to grab 'em while they're young. Someone I used to work with was raised by 'em entirely, yo."

[withoutverona]

"It might be your ticket to fortune and riches," Romeo suggested, then shook his head.

"I was asking because of that weekend when we were all children. You didn't demand to be called whatever your name was, then. But I didn't demand to be put on the first plane back to California, so that may not be much to go by."

[raspberryturk]

"I was still me," Reno mused. "I was just me at five, or whatever. I mean, there's a lotta stuff that I would'a done at that age that I didn't do."

Such as stealing food, hiding from every adult that walked by, and doing a great deal of staring up and wondering where all that sky came from.

"Fandom's a real weird place, ain't it?" Yes, he was rather stuck on that point.

[withoutverona]

Romeo gave him a dry look. "You've noticed," he said. "But home is weird, too, mine or yours or whoever's. Perhaps any place is weird if you get to know it, just Fandom makes the weird more obvious.

[raspberryturk]

Reno shrugged his shoulders and grinned faintly.

"Well, between the total lack of a mortality rate and people turnin' into ponies an' shit, I think it's safe to say that somehow, Fandom managed to turn the weird from home into some kinda sub-par sorta weird."

A pause.

"I kinda like it, I think."