It's a love story

As a bit of an apology for going through with three-minute dates the day before, Romeo had prepared a vat of fruit salad for the rabbit who had once been and would hopefully one day again be his girlfriend, and she happily munched it as he flicked on his laptop to check his email.

Most of it was of little enough interest, but there was one ( message from his father )

Romeo reread it a few times, considering his options and wondering if a rabbit might be welcome, before typing out a reply to the effect that he would come on Wednesday were it at all possible. He had no great love for Montague Holdings, but he knew he was being offered more than a job. He was being offered forgiveness.

[OOC: Establishy, but feel free to bother him if you don't mind SP.]

"Romeo!" Abram rushed hither and yon, peeking into one room on the Montague estate and then the other. "Young lord? Show yourself, your father wants a word with you. Oh, Romeo!"

Hearing a note of panic in the servant's voice, Romeo unfolded himself from a nook between two bookcases. "I am here," he said. "But, quiet. I do still live banished."

"I know," Abram hissed. "That, I believe, is what your father wishes to discuss –" He broke off and nodded his head at the entering Ted Montague. "-Good day, Sir."

"Hello Abram, hello my son," the once-affable man said. He had grown thin and weary in these last months, losing much of his gray hair. "Romeo, I had word from the governor's office this morn. They wish to know where you have gone, and make sure that you not secreted in our family's holdings." This was accompanied by a dry look. "I have held you here in my loneliness at your mother's passing, and in hopes Capulet's good heart would keep you free, but –"

"He has no good heart," Romeo interjected. "For Juliet was the best of his heart, and she is gone, and would I were too!"

"None of your whinging, none of that," his father said wearily. "You must leave, or you shall have your Juliet, and so shall I, but little else shall any others of the Montague house have." He presented Romeo with a slender envelope. "There is a plane ticket, to Virginia, where you will attend a great school. Go there. Learn something. I will talk to the law, and someday perhaps Verona Beach will be safe for you again."

"But –" Romeo started to protest, to swear that he would lose his life before he lost Verona again, before noting the look in his father's eye. It was not one that brooked argument, and, since he had tried suicide, Romeo was far less eager to actually attempt it again.

He let himself consider the offer: While leaving Verona again would feel like losing a piece of himself, the last of his wife, he had to admit there was little to keep him there. Mercutio was gone, and none of the others had stood by him; he had never felt so lonely. And while Romeo Montague craved his aloneness, being lonely was far less pleasant.

"I shall go, Father," he assented. Still sullenly.

"Excellent, excellent, I knew you were a reasonable boy!" Ted exulted. "Abram, pack his things, and he shall leave this day!"

And so it was.