towerofanimus | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Characters: Reno, open
Setting: 2-12. day after takeover plot
Format: Either
Summary: Cuteness! Fluff! Cuddles!
Warnings: Cuteness, fluff and cuddles?

24 hours after the takeover plot
Waking up with that sleep paralysis was starting to annoy him. Not to mention the visual ghosts he saw at the corner of his eyes, but thankfully he shut them. It took an eternity to move again, and when he did he sighed, rolled over, and went back to sleep. Maybe he'd forget about it in the morning.

Later, that morning.
The light woke him up. There was light. Wait. Did that mean the power was back on? Quickly, he sat up and looked around in confusion, half expecting retrieval units to burst into the room and drag him off.

Blinking, the thought occurred to him that if they were going to... he wouldn't have woken up back in his bed.

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While the scene at the pre-break in meeting had certainly contributed, Xion on the whole had always placed so much of herself in her friendships. Without her friends, things were harder. There was no other way of putting it. It was why she could be perfectly willing to bear nightmares for her friends' sake, yet fall to pieces at Axel's disappearance.

At Reno's words, Xion opened her mouth to insist that of course they were worried about him. Why wouldn't they be? But as he turned the question back on her, she closed it again, ducking her head and not meeting his eyes.

She doesn't want to lie, but she's... not ready to talk about it yet. "Don't worry about it," she mumbled finally, "You just got back."

It was, Shion was not one to allow his friends to go into danger without him even though he knew he wasn't that much use during moments of danger. He still never wanted them hurt, letting Reno go alone had been hard, harder still learning he had died. Even if it had always been inevitable... He was angry that he couldn't have helped, even though what Reno had said was true.

He glanced at Xion, he knew she didn't want to talk about it but there was no point in keeping it from Reno, he would just press them until they told the truth. "Vanitas," he told him, red eyes blazing with anger though some of it was aimed at himself for letting Xion get hurt.

Flopping back on the bed, Reno sighed. "And you told me not to worry? What makes ya think you can worry about me, but I can't? That just ain't fair."

He would have to deal with this later on, when he was feeling better. "You guys have got to tell me what happened while I was out. How long have I been out, what's goin' on with the lights? Any nutribars left in my closet?"

Well... She wasn't going to win this argument and she knew it. Mostly because he was right, really, though a part of her cried that he'd only just gotten back and shouldn't need to worry about things like this already.

"Sorry" she said quietly, looking down.

She could answer some of his other questions at least, though, "It's only been a day or two, and the lights came on yesterday morning. We waiting to see if everything was going to be okay, until..." She glanced at Shion and swallowed uncomfortably, "Until we found out what happened."

Part of why she's so relieved and happy he's back.

Shion reached out to take Xion's hand, he nodded at her words. "The tower is swarming with red collared workers... but the power is back and apparantly there is oatmeal in the cafeteria..." He hadn't been very far because he hadn't wanted to leave Xion alone but he had spoken to a few people. "I can go get you both some!" Xion would be okay if Reno was with her and they both needed to rest.

" Nah... unless you guys want any. I'd rather eat the nutribars right now, but I'm not that hungry." There were many reasons why Reno wanted them to stick together right then, not the least of which was Vanitas.

"Sounds like we need to lay low today." Pillowing his head under his arms, gave them both a look. "Just relax guys. I'll take care of everything later."

Xion blinked. Not that she could really blame him for skipping on an opportunity for more oatmeal, but the assertion that they needed to lay low... Stay in hiding, basically. Something about it struck her as off, especially the part of her that would have figured it had something to do with Vanitas.

After a moment, it struck her. He'd been the one who told her to stand up to him if need be, to not let her fear of him dictate her reactions, to head him off. Not that... she thought he was afraid now, per se, but... just overall what had Reno more cautious (she assumed) was something much different than Vanitas.

"What do you mean?" she asked, "Is it... something to do with what happened?"

Shion was worried as well, though since Reno had been killed, as had the others it was obvious their plan to take the control room had failed...

"What happened? Why do we have to stay low? What did they do?"

Frowning at his two overly suspicious trainees, Reno just shook his head. "Shiva's tits, can't a guy take a day off? I just got nerfed and brought back by aggro admins and you guys jump around like I'm tryin' to steal the Shinra 28. You guys are way too serious for your age, y'know. Relax, let loose a little. You," he pointed at Xion, "lay down and rest. We're takin' a vacation. No 'buts.' Us Turks don't work on vacations."

Most of what Reno said went straight over Xion's head - "nerfed"? "aggro"? "Shinra"? - but she got the jist of what he was trying to say. And the first thing she very nearly said was how on her last day off she spent the entire day training. And she can only assume that was what Reno was trying to do - give them a day, or multiple days off, remembering how Axel had talked about how the kids in Twilight Town got summer vacation.

Instead, she merely contented herself with, "I thought we could do whatever we wanted on our days off." There was an odd sort of quiver at the corners of her mouth, as some strange part of her wanted to smile for a moment, for some reason.

Not waiting for a reply, she backed up towards Shion's bed and sat down, not quite wanting to just... lay down yet.

Shion on the other hand looked even more confused, he had the same language issues as Xion and more besides... "Vacation?" He said the word like it was one he hadn't heard before. But from the rest of the conversation he got what it meant. A day off...

The only days off Shion knew where the Holy Day where the last few years he had considered himself lucky that because his mum ran a bakery, a business that could do well on such a day where no one else worked, they got a special license to work that day, and didn't have to take part in the festivities...

He glanced at Xion and then back at Reno, the suspicion clearing a little but still...

Slapping a hand to his forehead, he groaned as if he were in pain. "You... two..."

For one mad, brief moment, he considered getting into the homebrewed vodka and giving them each a glass, or enough to get them slightly tipsy enough to relax.

"Ok. Vacations are days which you don't have to work, or do anything you don't want to. Where I come from, that usually means something fun, like going out to a bar, a night on the town, going to a party. I play card games with Rude sometimes. You guys wanna play a game?

Xion blinked. Again, a lot of the concepts were over her head - never having been to a bar and not knowing what a "night on the town" even was. Parties, she'd experienced here in the Tower, at least.

Games were another thing she'd... never really had the chance to do before. Though she knew what they were, vaguely. Luxord had liked to play card games, though he used to complain how after Castle Oblivion there just weren't enough people.

Still, after a long moment, she nods, cautiously, "Okay."

Shion was blinking just as confusedly, he had only been to the parties in the tower but he had no idea what a night on the town was, or a bar... Games... he had played the video games here that Reno had taught him, and as a child he had played games sometimes... But mostly they were thought of as wastes of times, they had to study.

But he nodded as well, happy to learn new things.

"All right..." Hmm, how to teach them.

After a moment's thought, he nodded and sat up. "Shion, you got any paper and pencil? Xion, check my closet, see if I got any nutribars after all. We're gonna need something to play with."

Poker was a good game to teach them. Sometimes games seemed to be the best way to learn something that was difficult to explain outright. The understand of something was worth more than words.

"Take the paper and cut it into a bunch of squares." He knew Shion would probably be able to do a better job at getting them all pretty even than he would. "Then label a set two, through ten. Draw a moogle next to the numbers."

Xion gave him a look.

"I thought I was supposed to be lying down," she said. If either Reno or Shion were paying careful attention, they might realize that there was the tiniest of smiles on her face, and a faintly teasing note in her voice.

Despite this protest, she got slowly to her feet once more, wincing as she rose, before crossing the room to his closet to dig through it looking for the nutribars.

Shion grinned at Xion and went into his trunk to find the paper and pens he had borrowed from the study room. His medical kit had a pair of scissors and he started cutting squares as directed.

He blinked again, "What's a moogle?"

"Earth doesn't have moogles?" Facepalming again, Reno signed and took a pen and a piece of paper and did a small sketch of a moogle. Then he started on another drawing, this time of a bird with a large beak, a small creature with glowing eyes and wearing a cloak, and a little figure that looked like a cross between a man and a cactus.

"There." Reno gave Shion the drawing and took some more papers to make some cards. "Tonberry's kinda hard, I'll do him."

[At Shion's question, Xion's head jerks up in realization. She pauses in her nutribar search to glance back at Reno, surprise evident in her expression]

You have moogles in your world, Reno? [As she pauses to think about it though...] And... you don't? Huh... [She looks back forward and down] I guess I never really thought about it...

[And suddenly she's not sure which is weirder, worlds that had Moogles like hers did or ones that didn't...

Shaking her head, she continues her search until she spots what she'd looking for - a few nutribars. She picks them up, turning back to face both Reno and Shion.]

I found them.

No we don't... I've never heard of them so we probably didn't even before... [Many many species were extinct now but Moogles were definitely not something he had heard of, and looking at the drawing it wasn't a case of an animal called something different. He glanced at Xion] Your world had them too?

[He begins slowly copying the drawing, his own wasn't as good but he managed to copy the lines okay.] Is that alright?

"Yeah, that's fine." Glancing at Shion's drawing, he mused that maybe teaching the kids about the fun things in life may be the toughest job he faced yet. Meanwhile, he was scribbling out a suite of tonberry cards pretty quickly.

He wasn't that great of an artist, but he could get things looking... sort of all right. It helped when they had to identify somebody at times.

"I kinda guessed when I talked with Axel your world was similar to mine," he answered Xion, shuffling the tonberries into a small stack. "We have similar magic enough he taught me to cast Cure. I tried Fire but... never got the hang, and-" he had disappeared from the Tower before the lessons could go, but he wasn't about to remind Xion of that, though it was probably too late. "Huh, it isn't that easy mastering how to use materia in the beginning, it felt too weird without it."

Xion nodded at Shion's question, "Yeah, we do. A lot of them sell things in my world, like shopkeepers. At least... the one I knew did."

And yeah... she could guess what Reno had been about to say.

"I could probably try to show you, once our vacation's over," she offered quietly as she turned around, nutri-bars in hand. "I can use magic. Axel's best with fire, but..." She shook her head "I lost my Keyblade once, and magic was the only way I could fight, so I'm pretty good at it." Not that fighting alone had been what the Organization really cared about so far as she was concerned, though that was another story entirely.

Shion had never heard of moogles and was surprised that Reno and Xion's worlds were the same, though he supposed with all the different worlds there apparently were, including some that had the same people... finding two different than his but similar to each other was not that surprising.

He continued drawing through their conversation about magic, something else his world didn't have and he didn't understand, though he believed in it now; he had seen it after all. It was still strange.

"Yeah, I'm trying to learn more magic. I'd appreciate that, kiddo." Reno gave Shion a glance over, and handed him a finished suit to put in a pile. "Shion should learn, too. In fact, if you know a lot of spells, Xion... I might get ya to teach the others, too. Materia could get lost if someone dies."

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... wow I accidentally slipped into action previous tag of mine orz

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