intraspective | Apartment Above the Boards, Tuesday Morning

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Apartment Above the Boards, Tuesday Morning

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~]

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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."

"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.

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!"

"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."

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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?

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.

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."

When she wasn't tiny, Ino could run up buildings too.

She followed him obediently, while asking, "Does that mean you're a civilian? Ninja can all run up walls."

Reno was a ninja, as far as Ino was concerned. He did ninja things.

Well, Ino wasn't from this planet. She could read minds, too. Tseng tended to exclude her from most of his ideas of 'normal.'

"I'm no ninja, but I'm no civilian," he replied, opening the door and gesturing for her to head inside. "I'm a Turk. Here, that's a job to take pride in."

Or to fear.

She wandered inside, looking curiously at the walls, and crouching for a moment to pat the floor, since she could and Tseng wasn't being very entertaining.

"What's a Turk? Is it like a ninja? Civilians aren't as important, Daddy says."

So she was going to judge a lot of he was a civilian.

Tseng watched her idly as he shut the door behind them. What was so interesting about the floor?

"Turks do what needs to be done, regardless of whether civilians believe it's the right thing to do."

It, like almost everything else around here, was made of things they didn't use in Konoha.

It felt funny. She patted it again, then patted the wall to see if it felt the same.

"What's that mean?"

Tseng watched her quietly for a moment.

"We fight. We kill. We kidnap. We sabotage," he said, simply. And then he began to walk down the hallway, assuming she would follow once he passed her by.

She didn't, right at first, absorbed in the wall, but after a few moments, the patter of feet behind him said that yes, yes she was following.

"How are you not a ninja, then?"

Yeah, none of any of that bothered her one whit.

Tseng paused, glancing over his shoulder at her.

"What do ninja do?"

It was occurring to him that 'ninja,' where Iris came from, might have had different implications than it had in Wutai. If only slightly.

He'd paused and she took the chance to scurry forward until she was level with him. Ino contemplated his pant leg, before reaching out for it, since he hadn't offered her his hand like Reno had.

"Ninja do lotsa things," she said, staring up at him. Did he want a list? He looked like a list sort of teacher. "They protect the village and go on the missions that the Hokage sends them on and they kill and spy and defend and scout and capture and fight and intr--intera--question people and torture, which Daddy says means to hurt 'em bad so they tell things."

"Interrogate."

Tseng glanced down at the little hand that was now holding on to the fabric of his slacks.

.... Right.

"It would seem we have a different word for somebody who does very much the same thing."

"So you are a ninja!" Ino said triumphantly, beaming up at him.

Her hand, like the rest of her, wasn't particularly clean at this point.

Sorry not sorry, Tseng.

Yeah, that was blood in his pants, then. Reno's blood, most likely. Tseng stared at her hand, and then sighed faintly.

"I suppose I am."

Maybe he could get Rosalind to give her a bath. She was her rookie, after all. And Rosalind seemed to have some experience with children.

Honestly it had about a fifty percent chance of being Ino's own blood, from before she'd gone wee.

She beamed. "Are we going to get food now?"

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