Apartment Above the Boards, Tuesday Morning

[intraspective]

Like Zack, Ino hadn't slept much after they'd sent Kueng home. There was a lot to think about and--in her case--a lot to read, look at, and watch. Tseng, Kueng's Tseng, had come through for her with every little bit of information he could scrape up that might change the future.

She'd wanted to go through it herself, first, before sending off copies to both the Tseng in her timeline (even in her head, she wasn't sure about calling him 'her' Tseng) and to Reno, with an email explaining what this information was and how she'd gotten it.

Then she settled in to review the information again.

Maybe it was morbid to watch herself die, but the fact she went out laughing, made her smile.

[Late post is late, but open, sure~]

Comments

[raspberryturk]

Okay, that was more like it. Reno shot a grin to her over his shoulder, but only after getting a bit of a wince off of his expression as she jostled more than a few wounds that still had detritus lodged in them. He winked at her.

And then they were running. They were running impressively fast.

[intraspective]

And Ino?

All Ino could do was hold on tight and shriek with glee.

This was the best!

[raspberryturk]

And Reno was... well, laughing, really, though it was a faintly unhinged laugh, something manic and a little too tired. He turned down one alley, carried her right up a wall, started skipping entire streets by just leaping from rooftop to rooftop.

Yeah, if she wanted him to run, Reno could run.

But odds were he was going to keel over and maybe just die once he got to the HQ and got Rude or someone to watch her for a bit.

At the very least, he'd change his clothes and shower. Fuck.

[intraspective]

Rude would surely be thrilled to be nominated babysitter to a pint-sized Ino, definitely, right?

Ino leaned in close, her arms around his neck, and kept laughing as they moved from rooftop to rooftop, like Daddy sometimes did at home, though all the buildings looked so very different here.

"Faster!"

[raspberryturk]

Oh, Rude would be thrilled!

Ha, he knew that word! He kicked it up another notch, pushing himself as fast as he could possibly go without dipping into the tricks that Ghanima had taught him. Hell yes, he was going to give her a good ride.

Unfortunately, going faster meant getting to the ShinRa building sooner, but hey, he could still keep it interesting. Scale the outside of the building, find a way to break in. Management would thank him for it. They didn't want him getting blood all over their sparkly lobby anyway, and the stairs would bore the snot outta the kid, so...

[intraspective]

And the very last thing Ino was right now was bored.

She was clinging like a burr to him, and peering back over her shoulder, still laughing, high and happy, without even the slightest hint of apprehension at all.

Fear? Puh-lease, Ino did not know fear at this age.

[raspberryturk]

Reno made it up the first ten, then twenty floors, up to the first plateau, pausing once he found a ledge to hang out on, glancing back to grin at her. He could try to find a doorway in from here, or he could keep going, head in through the Turks' entrance by the helicopter pad, which would get him closer to his room, where he could get some clean clothes and--

"Reno."

...

Busted. Reno winced.

"Hey, Tseng. What brings you to this floor?"

"Bloody people scaling the side of the building tends to attract attention."

[intraspective]

"Why are we stopping?" Ino asked, confused, and peering over Reno's shoulder with big blue eyes. "Are we where we were heading? Is there another train? Who is that?"

Ino leaned back to look up (and up) the side of the building and tugged at Reno's shoulder.

"Can we keep going up?"

[ponytailedturk]

"I would prefer if you went up from the inside of the building instead," Tseng said dryly, looking at the child.

... The...

He squinted a bit.

"Reno, why are you carrying a child up the side of the tallest building in the world?"

"Ahahaha..."

[intraspective]

She could have been any small, blonde and blue-eyed child.

Except her eyes lacked pupils.

Ino sighed, resting her chin on Reno's shoulder as she looked at the other man.

"But that won't be as fast," she said earnestly.

[ponytailedturk]

"It'll be fast enough." Tseng looked at the girl thoughtfully. Small. Blonde. Blue-eyed.

Wutaian.

"... Iris?"

"Ino these days, yo."

[intraspective]

Oh, hey, she heard her name!

She giggled.

"Yamanaka Ino," she said cheerfully. "That's me."

See? She'd known he'd known her.

"If we're not running more, can I get down?"

[ponytailedturk]

Tseng reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose.

"That island," he muttered, and then looked at Reno. "Set her down. For the love of the gods, clean yourself up. I don't know if I want to ask what happened to either of you. I expect a report by the morning."

Reno shrugged and then crouched a bit to let Ino slide down onto the platform.

Tseng continued looking at her.

...

"Are you hungry?"

He had no idea what to do with children. Feeding them seemed like a good start. It wasn't like anybody else here spoke Wutaian.

[intraspective]

There was a zero percent chance that report was really going to enlighten him.

Ino got down and... well, she didn't go far from Reno. She wasn't nervous, but Reno had been laughing and this man wasn't.

(But she knew him too, somehow.)

Ino craned her head to look up at him, then at Reno, then back at him.

"Yes," she admitted. "But adventures make up for it."

[ponytailedturk]

"And what adventures has Reno been taking you on?"

There was also a non-zero chance that Tseng was going to murder Reno before he could get a potion into himself, at this rate.

[intraspective]

And Ino was too little to realize this was more of an interrogation than a kindly meant question.

She beamed up at him, unrepentant in her over-sized, dirty, and rolled up clothing. "We were in a dirty place! With no roof and everything broken and then there was a train and a bunch of civilians who stared and then we got off and we ran and ran and ran up the building!"

[ponytailedturk]

"That does sound like quite the adventure."

Tseng looked at Reno in silence for a moment. Reno looked awkwardly back, having no idea what they were saying, at this point.

"Let's head inside. Get you something to eat. And then you can tell me more about the dirty place and the train while Reno cleans up." And then, slipping effortlessly out of Wutai, "Because Reno will go get cleaned up."

[intraspective]

She glanced between the two of them, then focused on Reno.

"Okay?"

Not that Reno knew what Tseng had told her to do, but Ino was still going to check with him first.

[raspberryturk]

Well, Baby Tseng was not Reno's first choice for babysitting.

He wasn't even Reno's fifth choice. Sure, he had the language thing going for him, but...

Baby Tseng.

Reno sighed. He could guess what the rest of Tseng had said was about.

"Yeah," he replied, giving her a little nod. "Okay."

Just gave him that much more reason to find Rude and get patched up faster.

[intraspective]

She beamed at him, patted his leg in support, and then toddled over to Tseng.

"Why is the sky green? Is it green because you don't have any plants around? Are they up in the sky instead? How do people water them if they're way up there?"

[ponytailedturk]

Uh.

Tseng looked at Reno, who just shrugged and ambled into the building, damn him, and then back down at Iris. Ino. Right.

"There aren't plants here or up there. The sky is green because of the reactor, and we're in the middle of a desert."

Also because of the reactor.

[intraspective]

Ino considered that gravely.

"What's a reactor?"

It was a good question!

"Are we in Suna? I thought we were in Midgar."

That was the only desert place Ino knew.

[ponytailedturk]

Tseng was realizing as Reno vanished from sight that he was completely out of his depth, now.

"Midgar is in a desert. There's no Suna here."

That was easier than trying to explain a reactor to a four year old, wasn't it?

[intraspective]

Ino tried to figure that one out. It… didn't quite make sense.

"Then where am I?"

All deserts were in Suna. Honestly, Tseng.

Lucky for him, she had a short attention span.

"Can you run up buildings too?" she asked hopefully.

[ponytailedturk]

Tseng was beginning to get the feeling that this smaller version of Iris was going to find him distinctly disappointing.

"I cannot." Hell, he wasn't entirely certain the Reno that did belong here could. That other one... that strange, older, more petulant one... could do things that didn't entirely make sense. "I can, however, use a door. Follow me."