intraspective | A Secluded Area of the Preserve, Wednesday Evening

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A Secluded Area of the Preserve, Wednesday Evening

When Reno had said they could go out for tea, Ino had kinda figured he'd meant some place like the Perk, or even Caritas if 'tea' meant 'booze' (and knowing Reno, she'd guessed that it might've meant that).

So when she'd wound up in the preserve with him, Ino absolutely, positively, had to be a brat:

"Don't think the trees serve tea, yo."

[For Reno, yoto!]

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She couldn't figure out what that was supposed to mean. Was he changing the subject?

Ino nodded a tiny bit and kept her silence.

"There's been... more'n one time I thought Tseng was dead," he continued as he settled back slightly against a nearby tree. "So... Fell on me to get the job done. Always does. I fuckin' hate it."

Which wasn't the point of the story, no.

"Thing is, first time, there was no damn way to go back an' do nothin' about it. Second time, Tseng," he left Elena out. It didn't seem right to talk about her brutal torture to someone who had been a classmate. Tseng was less personal, somehow, less of an intrusion, "was left at the bottom of the Northern Cave. You know about the crater, right?"

He was still going somewhere with this, yes. But this was Reno. He digressed. Frequently.

She nodded, tucking her feet up under her and closing her eyes.

Yes, she knew. Not much, but she knew.

"Left it down to just me an' Rude at the time," he said, shrugging. "I had to pull outta the crater without lookin' back, because the fucksticks that grabbed him were still down there. Three of 'em, shootin' him down at once. Shootin' Tseng down, zoto. Tells you what we were dealin' with, right?"

Reno's eyebrows furrowed as he thought back on it all, on how it felt to pull the chopper out of there like nobody's business, because he had that stupid head shoved in there with him. Because there was nowhere to touch down with the chopper and going back in there would have been suicide and then Elena screamed and their radio lines were cut...

"Had to go back to Rude. An' it was on my head to make the next call. Me, yo. Tryin' to protect the President an' maybe if I was real friggin' lucky, the guy I called for help would pull his head outta his ass long enough to get involved so the world wouldn't end. Again. An' the whole damn time, all I wanted was to go back down into that fuckin' cave, bring Rude along, an' see if we could find the Director's body, yo. And from there, we'd bust in the faces of the fucks who did it, right there on their own home turf, knowin' we'd die tryin'."

Reno shrugged.

"But if we did that, we wouldn't be Turks. Not me. Not even Rude. Even if that was all the Turks had left. When it was all done an' over with... We walked away from Rufus. Took away what made us Turks anyhow. An' I think to this day, even if it was Tseng's idea, it was my fault."

Sharing and caring time with Reno, Ino. Enjoy.

Her lips trembled slightly.

"You did what needed to be done," she said softly. "And then... turn around and walk away from the reason why."

"Yeah. Yeah, that's what we did."

A pause, and then a wince.

"Interestin' bit of trivia," Reno offered, turning his eyes toward the sky. "It was an ex-Turk who ended up savin' his life, yo. Someone ShinRa fucked over a lifetime ago. But once a Turk, always a Turk. Even when there ain't no Turks left to speak of."

She fidgeted. Fussed with her hair.

"But what's a team member without a team?"

Reno shrugged faintly.

"Depends on the person," he offered. "I'm a teacher, apparently."

She let out a sigh that sounded miserable.

"I'm Zack's girlfriend."

Reno's Rookie.

Nothing that gave her a direction.

"Sounds to me like you need some kinda displacement activity," observed the Turk. "You ain't got one thing, so you got this void, an' need to fill it with somethin' that feels just as important. And the boyfriend is all nice an' good, but it ain't accomplishin' much but you two bein' all squishy at one another, yo."

And giving Reno heart attacks when he heard radio broadcasts about them. But that was something different entirely.

Totally different, yes.

"I..." Ino closed her eyes. She was not going to wibble all over him. "Zack said I can go with him to--kill monsters. Which will help but it's not..."

A job?

"Not somethin' you can take with you an' wear as an identity, too," Reno offered.

Yeah. 'Fandom High Teaching Staff' really didn't have the same ring to it as 'Department of Administrative Research.' Reno could appreciate that there was a difference.

"Do you think that's weird?" she asked quietly. "Most people don't seem to need that."

But if you'd been born and raised in a culture that had it, or had nothing else but it...

"I need it," Reno replied, shrugging. "I ain't gonna be the one to call it weird if it is, yoto."

"Reno," she asked, "what do you do when there's nothing to--stand on?"

Damn, she asked all the difficult questions, didn't she? He wasn't complaining, of course, and he certainly wouldn't refuse her an answer, but things like this seemed like they were about two inches above his grasp, sometimes.

"When there's nothin' to stand on, I find out what the hell I need in order to build a floor," he decided, shrugging. "This time last year, it was beans."

She chewed her lip--it was going to ache tomorrow at this rate.

"I don't got anything like that but--"

Gaia. Figuring it out.

Ino shook her head.

"You got foundations," Reno replied, twitching a little smile her way. "Trick is gonna be figurin' out what to build on 'em, that's all."

He had faith that she could manage as much.

"My foundations always wind up built of quicksand," she muttered.

"Quicksand's just mud," Reno pointed out. "Try a boat, instead."

No, he wasn't going to let her blow his metaphor up in his face, damn it.

"You ain't stupid, Ino. Make it work."

"Stupid don't have much to do with it." Ino tilted her head back. "I know I ain't stupid. Don't change the fact that I feel like I don't got ground to stand on."

Unless she was with Zack, in which case the world was peculiarly stable, just for her.

That would be a ragged sigh, coming from the redhead. He thunked his head backward against the tree once for good measure, and then he was looking her way again.

"You feel like you wanna keep yourself tied to Konoha now that things ain't so shit-hot there?"

"I don't know," she said helplessly. "I love Konoha but I--I don't know which way is up any more."

Where was 'home'?

"You got anywhere in the universe at your fingertips from here. More than that even, Ino," Reno noted, offering her a twitch of a smile. "I chewed on Spira, on Tokyo an' Verona, before I left school. Shit, I was offered a job with the American Secret Service, once. Just because I headed back to Edge before comin' here don't mean there weren't options. I'm thinkin' you ain't much different, once it all boils down. Trick is findin' out where you wanna go, and then makin' a place for yourself from there, zoto."

“Trick is being useful,” she disagreed. “And that ain’t no trick.”

Did that make sense? To her it did, in a roundabout way.

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