intraspective | Apartment Above the Boards, Tuesday Morning

The hound collapsed and faded, leaving a scattering of gil and a potion on the ground. Reno turned and stalked away, leaving both behind. A few moments later, some of the braver folks who lived nearby came out to pick through the dirt for the pocket change, anything they could use to feed themselves with later.

He turned down an alleyway. Vanished from sight for a moment.

"Took care of that thing Zack needed fast."

She glanced up at him, unsurprised he'd made it to the roof.

“I lied,” she said blandly.

"No shit," Reno replied, his expression flat. His eyes half-lidded, hair loose around his shoulders. "Now what are you gonna do?"

Ino tucked one leg under herself casually.

“I were thinkin’ I’d come remind you I were a pain in the ass,” Ino said, without a change in expression. “Since you seem to need remindin’ and all ‘bout my continued existence."

She wasn’t as fast as he was, and he was already battle alert and dangerous, but it took no effort to smudge his mind for half a second.

And in that half a second her hair yanked sharply at his feet, as she twisted to kick him in the stomach—and off the roof.

Since he wanted to feel something and all.

Reno's mind sort of re-aligned itself somewhere between the roof and a pile of wooden crates down below. There was an ache in his guts that hadn't been there a moment before, and another half-second to react before he went crashing through rotting wood and rusty nails to end up laying in a somewhat unceremonious heap at the bottom of it all.

He was standing again a moment later, glowering up at Ino from the street, ignoring the ache of it all.

"Cute."

He was running right back up to join her, and this time he was doing it directly up the side of the wall.

She grinned down at him, all cool, sharp-edged arrogance and rising recklessness.

"Always," she said, as her hair whipped out around her, her Crystal Cross glittering in the dim light of the slums.

Ino didn't try to stop him from getting up on the roof--that would defeat the purpose--but she spun through the air in a backflip, putting a bit more room between them, chakra keeping her feet from slipping on the uneven roof.

Not that Reno had any illusions about the safety of the roof that they'd parked themselves on. Down here, a person could go crashing through at just a wrong step, after all.

Wasn't stopping him from charging at her, stun baton held out to his side, footsteps impressively steady even as he swayed in his stride. There seemed to be little in the way of strategy, just a need to run and swing and feel.

And wasn't that going to be a surprise for any poor fuckers who lived below them?

She didn't bother to move, just braced herself, instead, to catch his EMR on her Crystal Cross. He was stronger than her (faster, better) but Ino wasns't bad herself.

Besides, she cheated outrageously, her hair having wound itself into twin braids that lashed out at him savagely. Being chakra infused, they hit like a pile of bricks, rather than hair.

And Reno, who was fully capable of avoiding that attack, took it full on, letting that hair smash into him. Good. Hit him harder. Only made him stronger, after all.

Maybe he needed that.

Maybe he was reaching out with his empty hand to grab one of those braids before she could pull it back yet.

And maybe he was going to just keep running.

Edited 2018-04-26 00:30 (UTC)

Maybe he needed to have his head beaten in? Ino would gladly do that for him right now.

This fight wasn't just for him after all.

She'd needed it too.

Off he went with her hair and, rather than resist, Ino moved with him for a few steps and then leapt into the air. He could try and toss her, drag her down, or he could let her land.

She wondered which he'd pick.

That was the hell of it, wasn't it? Even Reno wasn't sure what he'd pick right now until he was doing it, snarling, letting go of her hair, and swinging his baton up with a yell to cast...

Pyramid, apparently. Huh. He hadn't busted that one out in a while.

Oh, hell no. She wasn't getting stuck in that. Quick as a flash, Ino disappeared in a puff of smoke and leaves, leaving behind a log to get stuck in Reno's spell.

She landed, crouched, on a support beam and, smiling, cast her own spell.

Maybe some gravity would get through to him.

Well, shit. That was one way to carve the fight out of him in an explosion of dark. Just rip it clean away.

Reno spun on his heel, lip curled back as he turned to face her.

He swayed. Not that it was even occurring to him to regret not trying to keep from getting hit back there. Not much was occurring to him at this point, honestly. Just that he was being toyed with, now, and he fucking hated being anyone's toy.

He was running at her again. Except, just a split second before he entered her range, he blurred, and then was gone.

Oh fuck.

Fuck.

There was no time to dodge--she wasn't sure which direction he was coming from anyway--and the only thing she could do was brace herself.

Probably for the best, because he wasn't coming at her with a magical attack. He wasn't even coming at her with his EMR.

He was just fucking appearing right beside her, yelling bloody murder and tackling her into the damn roof.

Or possibly through it. At this point, Reno was well beyond caring.

Definitely through the roof, with an impact that was softened only by the fact that everything down in the slums was half-rotted at best.

Ino screamed--not in pain, but in outrage--as her hair flailed for a hold and found nothing as the roof collapsed around them.

She was poorly positioned for using any of her weapons.

She did the only thing she could do.

She bit him. Hard.

And that earned an answering snarl as Reno brought his arm back, hand open, poised to just come down and slap her right across her face. He corrected at the last moment, but it wasn't like the alternative, smacking her across the ear hard enough to do some serious fuckery with her eardrum, was much better.

It was, at the very less, more calculated and slightly less vindictive. And it beat just biting her back.

Oh, yes, absolutely. Sure.

Her head reeled as everything swirled, going too quiet and too loud all at once, something seriously wrong, even as her hands scrambled for his eyes.

He wanted to play dirty? He could do that after she'd poked sharply at his eyes.

He leaned his head back far enough that reaching his eyes would be difficult unless her arms grew another several inches, but she was perfectly welcome to stick her fingers up his nose or something. She wouldn't even be the first person to do that.

Well. Maybe the first in this particular situation.

It wasn't even as though he was the first one to play dirty, considering she'd fucked with his head in order to start this fight. It was the last scrap of his self-control that kept his hand from closing around her throat while she went for his eyes.

Instead, he was going to punch her in the tit.

Look, it was right there. They were apparently biting and going for the eyes now. He was doing it.

She wouldn't have started the fight in the first place if he hadn't made her come to Gaia because the fucking moron had told her he'd suicide trying to get revenge if she'd died.

It was totally all his fault.

Gasping--that hit had hurt--Ino jerked her knee up savagely. Hoping it hit his stomach. Or his groin.

Reno had kind of figured that next one was coming. An eye for an eye, tit for... tat? It had been the next retaliation that made sense, anyway.

Whatthefuckever. He managed to shift to the side enough that the knee mostly caught his inner thigh, which was, if nothing else, still enough to make him hiss between his teeth. A quick mental inventory was giving him multiple places he was bleeding from that he hadn't been after throwing down with the Hound, including a bloody ring in the shape of her teeth along his right forearm. There were dogs barking a full block away. Stale dust was settling around them, and he had fucking nails in his backside that were going to be great fun to pull out later.

He could think of five ways without even trying that would end this in a way that meant she was never going to get up again. Not all of them involved death. He spat out a gob of blood to the floor beside her head.

And then he brought his arm back again, bringing it down in a blur of motion that ended with him pressing his finger against the end of her nose.

"Beep."

He didn't want to kill her. And in the heat of the moment, he couldn't think of much else to do that didn't involve doing just that.

Ino didn't want to catalogue her injuries. She was bleeding, she was bruised, her splinters had splinters and there were nails where nails should never be. Her chest ached, her head was still reeling--

And then he beeped her nose.

Ino couldn't help it. She burst out laughing.

Reno stayed there, one arm pinning her to the floor, just remembering how to breathe for a few seconds.

And then she laughed, and he found himself so... so fucking relieved and exhausted, he just sort of slumped forward, letting the falls and the gravity and all the damage he'd taken before catch up to him, pressing his face into her shoulder and starting to laugh, too.

Mostly laugh.

He was going to try to pass it off as a laugh.

Fuck, he was crying.

Now that she was laughing, she couldn't stop. It just bubbled out of her, because if she wasn't laughing, she was going to follow his lead and cry and she--shit, he was crying, and she knew better than to call attention to it, but he was.

Ino was still giggling, slightly hysterically, when Fandom's foibles struck her and her voice went up as she went... well.

Wee.

A small girl, maybe four, maybe younger, and still giggling, though she was very confused.

There was laughing in his ear, hysterical laughter to accent his own... messy fucking sobbing apparently, which he didn't ever want to admit he was doing in the first place. And that was fine. Whatever they had fallen into, he could handle that, they could both sort of just pretend it never happened later, it would be fine.

Except then, all of a sudden, there was much less of Ino than there had been a moment before, and Reno found himself braced with a sudden panic that she was gone before the continued giggling caught up with him.

He pushed himself up to look down at her, and his eyes went a little bit wider.

"..."

Well, fuck. Okay then.

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