fandomhighdorms | Salle, Wednesday Midday

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Salle, Wednesday Midday

Romeo wasn't sure why Reno even wanted to speak to him, or if he felt like speaking to Reno in turn. His best friend's words from Sunday tangled with his own and sat like a knot in his stomach, and if Reno were to try to kill him with the rod, he would not blame him.

But they'd made a plan, and so Romeo was there in the Salle. Waiting and, somehow, almost hopeful.

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It took every bit of Romeo's effort to stand erect by then, and his right arm was threatening to revolt and break clean off his body. "I think it might be a good idea to take a break before my arm falls clean off," he answered. "Are you well?"

"Been worse," Reno replied, reaching into his pocket and pulling out the Materia that he'd removed from the baton before their session. "You get used to it after enough of it, yo. I mean, the bein' sore an' bruised an' junk. After a while, it's kinda just the same old."

He prodded at his ribs, where Romeo had smacked him the first time.

"For the record, I ain't gonna let you do that again. You're swingin' almost hard enough to really make it count now, zoto."

"So give me another shot," Romeo said, a friendly tone in his voice. "Let me see if next time I'll be able to swing so hard it more than counts."

From the way he was slumping back against the wall, though "next time" might be a long way away. "Although I think I was happier before I tried to get used to this."

"She worth it?" It was a pretty neutral question, and he turned his gaze somewhere toward the floor. "I mean, it's gonna be miserable feelin' no matter how you cut it. But you ain't really doin' this for you, are you?"

Romeo glanced up to the lights in the gym. "It never hurts to become a better fighter," he said, and his tone on that was almost sullen, but the sullenness rapidly faded. "No. It's not just for me."

Reno gave Romeo a wry kind of smile, at that.

"Hurts a lot to be better, man. You do things when you get too good, stuff you can't take back. They expect you to. So you try an' drink it out again, and that don't work, either."

He pursed his lips, and then dropped his eyes to the floor.

"I'm gonna keep teachin' you, then. I mean, for you an' her both. I dunno if you're gonna get a second chance, but if this is what can make or break it, I'm gonna help. You're family. Just know it to have it an' then keep it at arm's length until you need it, though, okay?"

"Maybe the trick, then, is to get just good enough to protect oneself, without being so good that anyone else cares," Romeo suggested.

He hesitated. "You still think me worthy of her, then?"

"Get as good as you want, just don't let it show," Reno offered instead. "You don't know how tough the other guy's gonna be. Do just barely as much as you gotta as long as you can, and that way they won't see it comin' when the next guy thinks he's tougher."

That was the easy question to answer. The next one took a moment of winding down. Inspecting his Materia for scratches that were never there.

"You know, I've seen a lotta people hurtin' real hard in my life, man. I made a lotta people hurt. Watched a city fall down and watched people dig their parents an' brothers an' kids outta the wreckage while they were dyin' of the stigma themselves. But I ain't never seen someone hurt the way Doji was hurtin' when I went to talk to her on Saturday, yoto. She wasn't hittin' her knees in grief or nothin', but that's because she had an audience and you an' I both know it."

His Pyramid Materia needed polishing. He would rub it on his sleeve for a minute. Yeah.

"I think you were a drunk dipshit who did somethin' real stupid, and yeah, that pissed me off. But you wanna know why I was really yellin' at you Sunday? It's 'cause you mean that much to her, more'n Midgar meant to the survivors. And I don't think you had any clue how bad you really did hurt her, zoto. Was thinkin' I could show you, just I sucked at it. Can't think of a better pair."

Oh. Romeo sagged against the wall at that, patting his pocket for the cigarettes that weren't there anyhow. "She didn't show that to me," he feebly explained. "It was the audience, as you said. We ... I thought we were on our way to mending things. And then you were talking of breaking my nose and ..."

He huffed out a long breath. "I knew I shouldn't have said what I said."

"Which is why you said it," Reno agreed, reaching into his pocket and pulling out his own smokes. "Because it was true an' you wanted to make it sting."

He held the package toward Romeo. Quitting was for quitters anyhow.

Romeo hesitated, but accepted a smoke. He knew quitting again would be harder, but he wasn't relapsing, it was just one cigarette.

He raised an eyebrow to ask for the lighter.

"I was being so low," he admitted.

"I had you cornered," Reno replied, tossing Romeo his lighter. "And it was true. I did bad shit."

He wasn't really pardoning it, here. But he could kinda see where the words might have come from.

Romeo lit his cigarette and gestured expansively with it. It felt good to have a cigarette to gesture with, again. "And I do know something about consequences," he said. Not defensively: It was just something Reno seemed as though he might have forgotten.

"You do." Reno took a deep drag from his own smoke as he slipped his Materia back into place in his baton. "We both said some pretty hard shit there, didn't we?"

"We did," Romeo acknowledged.

He still thought Reno had, if not started things, made the much worse by referring to Angela the way he had, but ... well. There had been what even Romeo had to admit were extenuating circumstances.

"Might we call it forgotten?"

Not forgiven. Not vanished. Just ... moved past, elided for the moment.

Reno looked at Romeo evenly for a minute. Just... thinking on it.

"I knew the consequences of what I was doin', too," he said at length. Just to get that out there. "Did it anyhow."

That was maybe the one reason, higher than any other, that compelled him to want to return to Gaia after graduation.

"If you can deal with that one way or the other, we can call it whatever you wanna call it, yoto."

That was the kind of statement that took thinking on, and Romeo was glad he had a cigarette to fill up what would otherwise have been the fiddly bits.

He wasn't okay with it, truthfully. An eye for an eye, he knew that, and violence was easy to him, but there was a span between justice and what Reno had done, and bridging it stretched his imagination.

But he could, would try to understand.

"I'll deal with that, if you'll deal with that sometimes I forget how to think."

That seemed fair enough.

"That, I can do." Reno inhaled some more smoke, holding it in for a minute and shutting his eyes. "Thinkin' is hard anyhow. To hell with it."

"Amen," Romeo agreed. "Though I think I need to think a little bit more, from now on, just to stay alive and unbloodied."

"So we work on findin' you a balance," Reno replied in a breath of words and smoke. "I want you workin' with that baton on a regular basis, zoto. You do it enough, and your arm won't hate you no more. When your Materia gets here, that don't mean you ease up with the baton itself. It means we spend twice as much time workin' with it."

He grinned, the cigarette clamped between his teeth. "You are gonna be so sick of me by the end of the semester, man. You got no idea."

Romeo flashed a genuine grin. "When's our next session, then?"

"How long you figure it'll take for you to get your arm movin' again?"

Romeo shrugged, lifted the arm experimentally.

"Friday?" he tried.

That would give him time to practice a little on his own, too.

"Friday, huh?" He tilted his head, thinking that over for a moment before picking his cigarette from the corner of his mouth, dropping it on the floor, and stepping on it. "Your Thursday evening free?"

Romeo didn't think he was going to be that nice, did he?

Romeo liked to live in hope, but he wouldn't back down.

"I can make it so," he said. "I'll see you Thursday, then."

He might even be unwed again by then.

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