towerofanimus | Everything that kills me makes me feel alive

Entry tags:

Everything that kills me makes me feel alive

Characters: Reno and Shion, and any roomies or anyone that wants to witness a destructive mental breakdown or get involved and/or punched
Setting: Starting off in Room 1-04, otherwise see prompts- prompts will be posted as comments
Format: 1 inch margins
Summary: Shion catches Reno up to speed on the Tower about certain reveals- let's just call the rest temporary insanity. There will be wall punching
Warnings: this isn't going to be pretty

He honestly hadn't wanted to do this, but the lack of clothing for both him and Shion had left little choice. It was degrading. It was humiliating. It was something he kinda sucked at.

Reno sat on his bed with legs folded up underneath him, wearing his makeshift black bandanas to cover his face, long ago replacing the sheet he'd been using. Spread out in front of him was some black cloth he was carefully hand stitching together. It'd be a shirt when he was done, expect for the part it was taking forever. He didn't want to hang out too long in the workshop, or really, anywhere else in the Tower right then, and he was worse with the machines.

By this rate, he'd have this shirt done by December, if he was lucky. Shion had said he wanted to stop by and talk with him, too, and while not totally secure, it was easier here than dealing with randomly wandering monsters.

Reno frowned at the cloth just before he misjudged the distance between his finger and the needle.

"Ouch! Shiva's tits..."

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Between floor a hundred and now Shion had gotten reinforcements. Alright he had gotten Xion and after babbling out the whole situation in between panicked tears they had come here, to wait.

He couldn't have gotten further yet, not even running.

Xion knew more about how long it took to go up and down the Tower's stairs than she ever cared to know. Up more than down, but regardless... She'd set the corridor up here. She'd never lingered on this floor for too long - she'd gotten a bad feeling the last time she had. But it's one major asset for the moment was that she knew - from the punishment the hacking group had gotten - that this was a floor monsters avoided. And monsters were the last thing they needed to deal with right now.

Now, there was nothing to do but wait, standing firmly with her eyes on the stairs, her mouth pulled together in a tight grimace.

The footsteps was the first sign he'd reached Floor 45, faint thump-thumps. Going almost 60 floors had started to wear even him down. It'd been a while since he had gone this far down a staircase- and he really didn't remember this many floors being in the Tower...

Instead, he paced himself, one floor at a time until he came into view, winding down 44 steadily. There was a lot for them to answer for.

Shion waited until he was near the bottom of the staircase, where he and Xion stood and then darted forwards, leg and arm reaching out to tackle him. Fingers finding pressure points.

As plans went it was not the greatest, but hopefully if they got him to stay still he would listen to them.

Xion darted forward with Shion, doing her best to just pin him enough to let Shion actually disable him, so to speak. He was better at that kind of finesse than she was. If his methods didn't work then... well, Reno had taught her a lot of ways to get a guy to drop.

And if that didn't work, there was always that Bind spell Aqua had taught her, though it would take her a second to get her Keyblade out.

Too focused on the staircase, trying to get down without stepping in a trap, he didn't notice the two until they were coming at him. Bodies impacted his side, and Reno went flying to the ground, tumbling over a few stairs before his momentum stopped. He was too shocked to offer resistance right away, but he let out a yelp when he landed with both of them on top.

"GET OFF!"

"No." There were still tears in Shion's eyes as he pinned Reno, breathing, trying to stay in the present and not get knocked back to the last time he had overpowered his mentor.

Xion was here this time, nothing bad would happen. Reno would come out of this alive. "Not until you calm down and listen."

Xion's words, meanwhile, were much louder, desperate and upset and the tiniest bit angry. Shion hadn't managed to babble all of what they'd argued about the last time, but she'd heard enough to get the general idea. And what she'd heard had upset her a great deal, even made her angry.

"Reno, stop it!" she cried, helping Shion hold him down, "This isn't going to do anything! This isn't going to help anyone!"

"Let go!" He repeated, struggling to get free while not actually hurt them. "I'm going to go down there and fucking kill them!"
Even in that moment, he couldn't care that the administrators were also responsible for keeping them alive- or whatever it was that they were. It didn't seem quite as important as stopping them completely.

Inside, he was blaming them for everything that happened. From the second the universe ceased to exist; all the death on his world. He had seen it every time he had gone home. Felt it every time he thought about it. Nothing remained. A giant emptiness that only grew whenever he dared look through the view finders. He was not a Cetra, and not even a particularly sensitive human, but even he could still feel the absence of every other living thing on his world.

Regardless, he had always thought they were still somehow alive, even when he feared the worst. Dax had said so. It had been the only thing keeping him going, aside from-

But it was a lie.

He was so tired of lies.

Slowly, he stopped struggling and lay still, glaring at the two with his jaw clenched and huffing air through his nose.

"Let. Me. Go. They've got this coming."

"No you're not." Shion shifted, to make sure he really couldn't move and glared back. "You're going to listen to us, and calm down because if not you are going to get yourself killed. And you won't like what happens if you die too much." His eyes glinted angrily, if Reno was this angry at this revelation how would he act if he started losing memories.

"You told us never to burst in without knowing all the information. We have information, information that Xion got herself tortured to find out. So you listen."

Xion glared right back, her mouth set in a determined grimace. She knew full well how stupid it was to go after the admins half-cocked. Not only because of how hard it was to get down there.

At Shion's words though, Reno might notice her stiffen on top of him turning to the other boy with eyes wide and shocked and vaguely horrified.

"H-how... how did you know..." she stammered. But no. This... this wasn't the time for this. This wasn't the time to get caught up in what had happened and people finding out about it. This was about telling Reno what had happened and making sure he had all the information. She swallowed.

"He's right. You don't know what you're up against. We barely do ourselves, and if you just go running down there trying to kill them like this you'll die before you even get down there." Her words were harsh and blunt, but he didn't jump down the elevator shaft. He wasn't there when the glamour went down. He didn't see what happened when Yu had landed a hit on Jason and when she'd tried.

"Die! Nobody can die here. This isn't about information! This is-" His body stilled when they finished, and he stared at them; a hard, piercing look that was as much sizing them up as it was to determine if they were lying to him. But that didn't make any sense, the kids didn't lie... even so, doubt still whispered its ugly little nothings.

"Tortured... what did you two do?!"

Shion glared back, tears in his eyes but completely honest. "What you taught us." He glanced at Xion, reassuringly. Because of course he had known, he was her best friend and could tell when things had gone horribly wrong.

"There are things worse than death and they can do those to you. So you aren't going down there."

As Reno stopped struggling, Xion pushed herself up and back, curling up and wrapping her arms around her knees.

"We needed supplies. Real ones," she told him, her voice almost detached, "The stuff they have up here is all this... filmy stuff. It wouldn't work for what we needed it for. So we went down to the admin levels to try and get it.

She swallowed again. "Jason caught us. Some of my friends and I distracted him and we all split up. Jason turned off the glamour and came after us. We... we saw what he looks like under it. But without our powers and his floors sealed off to keep us from escaping... we couldn't..." We couldn't get out.

She trailed off, a distant expression on her face as she looked at nothing. It took a moment before she blinked very hard and seemed to come out of it, her eyes fixed on Reno again.

"That's how we know." Or at least part of it.

Edited 2013-09-13 23:18 (UTC)

Slowly, he sat up, pushing off whatever resistance they still offered. Jason wasn't really a surprise when she mentioned him, but... what he really looked like? At this point, he didn't even want to consider what that could mean.

"Then..." he hesitated, his eyes narrowing slightly, "what's the point? If we can't do anything, what the fucking hell is the point?!" With that, he threw his EMR down the stairs forcefully, and a plate in the handle shattered, spilling wires where it landed. He didn't even look sorry, just glared down at the remains of his weapon. It wasn't real.

"It's the same shit, over and over."

Shion let himself be pushed off, though he kept his hands free, ready to tackle Reno again if he tried anything.

Like throwing his weapon down the stairs, Shion reached out to grab Reno's hands before he could break anything else. "We are trying to do things, but just barging in blindly is not going to do anything because it is stupid. Everyone learned that the hard way, we have to be smart about it."

Xion's arms unwrap from around her legs and push themselves into the ground forcefully.

"The point is that we can do things now," she snapped, almost angrily. She didn't know how to handle this. She didn't like this side of Reno, one she'd only really seen in flashes - if at all - up until now. If she were in a better state she'd be more able to try to reach out, be comforting. But she wasn't.

"The point is that we now actually know that we're making progress. That we're learning things and doing things. Jason brainwashed a bunch of us in April, and made people report what their friends had been doing. Why would he do that if what we were doing wasn't an actual threat?"

And suddenly she just seemed to sag, all of her energy going out of her in a moment. "We can't do anything to them now but that can change, but only if we keep going. We can't give up."

Something was flickering at her in the corner of her eye. A sense of wrongness about the room. Something was off. In her experience that meant it was probably time to move. She pushed herself to her feet, trying to ignore how the angles in the corner of the room that she could see were wrong wrong wrong.

"We should go somewhere safer."

Being closer to the staircase than she, the effect wasn't quite as noticeable- at first. The feeling began to go. Something was really off and it was making his head dizzy.

He stood up, calming down for the fist time, but still frowning. What else could he say? They had effectively deflated his motivation to do damage while he could. The shields came up, cutting off his inner feelings again. This time, feeling a little too tight, like there was pressure underneath his false calm.

"On the staircase." It was an order.

Shion noticed it too, while Xion was talking. Everything about this room was wrong anyways, and he only ever managed to keep himself calm enough to be here by reminding himself it was all an illusion. He nodded at Xion's words and was glad for the shift in tone of Reno's voice. He was back, at least a little bit. He nodded and moved towards the staircase, frowning.

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Everything that kills me makes me feel alive

Floor 44

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