intraspective | Apartment Above the Boards, Tuesday Morning

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.

Ino, being much smaller and squirmier, squiggled out from under him, though all the way over-sized clothes made it harder than it should have been.

She blinked at him, big-eyed and curious, but not frightened or concerned at all.

"Where are we?" she asked.

In Wutaian.

Ah, shit, Wutaian. He knew just enough of it to insult people thoroughly on the other side of the planet, to ask where the bathroom was, and to order himself another drink; all very important tools to have at one's disposal while drinking oneself stupid after murdering an eighth of Midgar's population in a matter of about three minutes or so.

So he sort of picked out the 'where' part of that, and his brain tried to tick through the rest and how to answer while he brought an arm up and swiped a bloody sleeve across his eyes to get tears - fuck tears - out of the way of his vision.

This didn't make his face any less bloody, but... whatever.

"Midgar, yo."

There we go. A question hopefully properly answered.

"Midgar," she repeated.

She didn't know it, but it didn't feel--it felt like home. If that made sense for a place she didn't think she knew.

Ino studied the blood on the man's face.

"You're hurt?"

Reno kind of balked at that one. Those were words he didn't know well, but the way she was looking at him, looking at what was probably a bloody streak across his face...

He sighed, brushing a hand across his cheek and then moving it in front of his face so that he could study his bloodied fingertips. Right.

"I fell."

Yeah, that was all. Sure.

She squinted at him, small face confused, as she tried to work out what that meant.

Nope.

She didn't know that word. She got the 'I' bit, though, and thought he was probably agreeing with her.

"Daddy says ouchies should be fixed 'less they're from training."

Ino tried to stand, but got tangled in the too-large suit and flopped back down on her bum. She wanted to pout, but wound up giggling a bit instead. It was funny.

Yeah, Reno had no friggin' clue what any of that meant. He frowned at her thoughtfully, but decided against just immediately calling Tseng for a rescue. He could handle this.

Besides, there was no way in hell he was going to face the funsize edition of his boss until he'd dealt with the bite-size edition of his Rookie. And cleaned up a little. He offered her a (slightly bloody) smile, and then contemplated her whole ensemble. Yeah, the belt wasn't going to do any good, here. It didn't have notches that small. He'd contemplate that problem while peeling off her jacket and rolling up her shirt sleeves to practically her armpits. Then he held up a finger for a moment, a sort of wordless 'bear with me' before undoing her tie and reaching to thread that through her belt loops instead. Tied that off. Helped her stand. Rolled up her pant legs, and tied her jacket sleeves around her shoulders so she was wearing it like a cape...

Nothing to be done for her shoes, though. It wasn't like those shrank either, after all.

He just sort of spread his hands at her in question, giving a "Hmm?" asking if that was an improvement for the time being.

Ino endured the manhandling with the air of someone used to not being given much choice in what she was wearing.

But he did make it a lot easier for her to move in what she was wearing, so really, why would she complain? She did grab the edges of her 'cape' and give them a bit of a flap, though, because... cape.

Capes were fun.

"Thank you," she said, stumbling over the words a bit.

Ah, shit, that was cute. Where the hell did she get any right to be that friggin' cute so soon after they had been kicking one anothers' asses anyway?

"Frig," Reno muttered under his breath, before adding a slightly louder, "Yeah, you're welcome."

And then, with no real idea of what else to do in this situation, he held out his hand for her to take. Sector Seven was big and fraught with monsters. Not all of them were animals, either.

Ino took that hand trustingly, unquestioningly, smiling up at him.

Then she started chattering, because Ino had always liked to talk.

"Why's it smell so funny here? Why is is so dark? Are we inside someone's house?

She was pretty sure that was a broken table over there, and in the shadows she thought maybe there were chairs. It was all very intriguing.

But she was safe. Because he was there with her. So Ino didn't worry about anything.

Reno... had no freaking clue what she was going on about, so he just kind of offered her a wry smile, looked down at her as he straightened up again - he was going to have to get Rude to yank those friggin' nails before he healed up - and nodded toward the door.

Yeah, they needed to get out of here. A cute kid in oversized clothes chattering in Wutai wouldn't catch much attention in the slums, but once they got topside things could get interesting.

That was okay, she was totally willing to toddle towards the door--made a bit clumsier than normal thanks to the ill-fitting clothes.

Ino didn't really need answers.

But she was still going to keep up a running commentary on everything she saw. Maybe if she asked enough questions, he'd have answers?

Yeah, not answers, so much. Every now and again Reno caught enough of what she was saying to be able to nod or shake his head, but that was about the best she was going to get out of him. He led her through the streets toward the train station, people kind of stopping to gape... mostly at the bloodied-up Turk. They weren't unheard of down here, but they didn't tend to look quite so roughed-up.

It probably said something about Ino herself, and her world, that his being roughed up wasn't worth much of a comment to her.

It wasn't like her Daddy came home bloody all the time, but it had happened, and he'd still picked her up and hugged and kissed her and acted normal, so Ino didn't see the point in… all the staring.

Eventually it penetrated her cheerful monologue about everything around her to the point where she tugged on his hand and pointed at one of the gaping people.

"Why?"

Yeah, she knew that word.

Of course she knew that word. Reno almost laughed as he led her down the stairs to the train platform. It figured, didn't it?

"Blood," he explained, gesturing to the still bleeding bite mark on his arm. "Civilians," he added, gesturing to the person she was pointing at. He wasn't sure if there was a way to really mime that one out, so he just sort of shrugged and let that one stand as it was.

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