[ the first thing Reno did, after the golden door spit him back out into the darkness of his own apartment, was stumble into the kitchen and throw up in the sink.
the second thing he did, after his stomach was empty and he'd caught his breath, was pull out his phone.
what the fuck is the protocol in a situation like this? maybe Reno was the only one who had suffered the—what was that, even? a dream? a hallucination? a vision?—and any text he sends to Thancred would seem like the ramblings of a crazy person. or maybe—somehow an even worse scenario—Thancred had the same vision Reno did, and any text Reno sends him would be unwelcome.
but fuck. fuck, the pain of the loss is so sharp and so real, his gut still twisting with it. the weight of the despair is still so heavy. Reno can't just say nothing.
what he ends up sending is straightforward: ] tell me you're okay
[ Thancred doesn't have to say anything else. maybe it's better if he doesn't. but Reno needs to know he's alive, somewhere in this godsforsaken hellhole of a city. ]
[Thancred's door doesn't even have the decency to release him back to his own apartment — although, on second gander, maybe that's not such a bad thing. It means Ryne won't see him looking the way he does when he tumbles out, like a phantom from her worst nightmares, as volatile and haunted as he'd been back in the years they'd traveled together on the First when her eyes were bluer than blue and her hair the spun gold of someone else.
It's ironic, though. He tumbles out onto a street somewhere in the city — blessedly not raining, but the skies are an active threat of it — and for a second all he can think to do is walk, walk until he catches his bearings, and wouldn't it be funny if he walked until he saw a familiar window and he —
Gods. Gods.
I get—night terrors, sometimes. Nightmares. Tonight it was worse than usual.
And now look what he did. Now look what he's wrought, as though Reno's nights weren't bad enough already. As though he didn't already hate it when something he did or something he implicated or even something he didn't do put that feral snarling smile back on Reno's face, the one that —
A bullet to the brain, squish! Or a button under the plate, squish, fifty thousand dead and that's all on me.
Fifty thousand dead is such a specific number. Specific like someone counted. Specific like someone knew the population of the people who would've been under that structure when it fell and still —
And still —
Reno used to look at him like he was waiting for something. Sometimes he still does. Reno curls up in the corner of a couch and makes himself small and says things like this can't be for me when it's kindness he's shown and he'd always thought, always thought it'd been something else, something bad or something rough but not fifty thousand families already committed to whatever scraps of a life they could manage to scrape out until the very sky fell and —
And he remembers how it feels, the moment before the roof comes crashing down. He'd had only a few yalms of it to wait. They'd had a plate as high as the sky. They'd had just enough time to see it falling and understand what it was.
It's not a question of forgiveness.
He's not even within a thousand malms of beginning to touch a notion as thorny as forgiveness.
It's just — it's just all of it. The truth of all of it.
Glory be to Garlemald.
He doesn't have to see the aftermath to know what it looks like, the agony and the cruelty and the heartbreak of a nation that sacrificed its own.]
juts col d
[Oh. His hands are shaking. Maybe he's just cold.]
[ it's in that small question that Reno understands exactly the magnitude of what's happened here. he has lived his entire life in this city afraid that one day it would come to this very revelation. Reno knew he was on borrowed time, that the fact of his monstrosity would inevitably come to light, but he had pushed that knowledge into a little box and locked it away, out of sight and out of mind so he could pretend to be normal.
but it's out there, now. Thancred saw it all. Thancred gave his life for Reno—his metaphorical life, maybe, but still his life—and what did Reno do in return? killed him. dropped the fucking Sector 7 plate on him and smashed him like a bug under the proverbial shoe. and still Thancred came back, right there at the end. still he put his hand to Reno's face and said I would rather love—
how can Reno live with himself knowing he's allowed Thancred to make this mistake?
he's not okay. he doesn't think he'll ever be okay again. but the idea of allowing Thancred to care feels like swallowing broken glass. Reno should have crushed this in his hands at the gala all those weeks ago, should never have allowed this beautiful fragile thing to bloom knowing that one day it would crash down around them. ]
no. I will be
[ he always is. he has no choice but to be. the luxury of not being okay is reserved for those who deserve love, who deserve gentleness and kindness and tenderness. Reno deserves none of those things. Reno doesn't even deserve to die.
after a very long pause he adds, ] I'm sorry.
[ he is very good at sweeping up the pieces. ]
be safe. take care of yourself
[ it's a big city. plenty of places to hide. Reno turns off his phone and bites down on his wrist to muffle the noise of anguish that wants to leave. ]
[He doesn't go home. It's better that he doesn't. He does message Ryne and tells her his plans to be away for a few days, citing to wanting to snoop around the university campus some more. It'll just be easier, he tells her, to grab a quick nap and a bite to eat in one of the empty apartments close to the grounds, rather than going back and forth every day. It's not much of an excuse, and he doesn't try very hard to make it an impenetrable one, but she doesn't ask. Possibly she knows it's better if she doesn't.
It's not that he's outright avoiding people or trying to make himself hard to be found. It's more just that he needs a structure that isn't to be found anywhere else in the city — he doesn't want to talk, he doesn't want to discuss, he doesn't want Y'shtola's nagging voice in his head reminding him that he's doing it again. He just wants to do something that makes sense. He just wants to do something that isn't thinking about what happens to a body when a hundred thousand tonze of superheated steel falls on it.
The first day it rains. He goes for a run and regrets it, comes back wet as a dog only to remember that he doesn't have a change of clothes.
(He let Reno keep his shirt, after that night he stayed over. Likely he's still got it.)
The second day he knows better. He remembers the clothes. He showers after he works out. He's lying on his back on the borrowed apartment mattress staring up at the ceiling (waiting for it to fall) when his stomach gnaws and he remembers that he didn't eat.
(Reno always has leftovers in his fridge. It never takes more than a tenth-bell to heat them up.)
The third day it's clearer again. He goes for a run in clothes suited for it. He picks up something to eat on the way back. The sky gets dark early but there's still plenty of light left in the warm, if impersonal, apartment and he doesn't quite know what to do with himself.
(Reno would be on the couch with him. Better under his arm than drunk on gin at the club, or worse, in the gutter.)
Three days is too many. His muscles ache with how hard he's pushed them, trying to forget. Trying to feel something. Trying to exhaust himself too much to feel anything at all.
(Reno does the same thing. Or maybe it's the opposite. Overdoes it just to feel, or to stop feeling, or both.)
It never goes away. The slaughter at the Waking Sands is still on his hands. The ones who died at the Praetorium, the victims of Ultima Weapon — his hands. His body, his soul, taken. Used. His fault. His burden. There is no measuring which is "worse". It's all worse. It's all death.
(Why is he acting as though if he just waits long enough, it will somehow go away?)
I'm sorry, Reno said. He looks at that text at least twenty times a day. And the more he looks at it, the less it sounds like an apology and the more it just sounds like...]
reno
[...the truth?]
turn your phone on
[It is the world's most pointless text on earth. No one ever said he was great at this.]
[ when the anguish fades, what's left is the smoking wreckage. Reno sits on the kitchen floor for a while, slowly unpicking the threads that hold his mind into his physical body; when he finally gets to his feet again it's dark and he's utterly dissociated. he cleans up the sink. he changes his clothes. he looks in the mirror and doesn't recognize who he sees. inside him is a bottomless hollow pit. he is the bottomless hollow pit.
he goes to work. he puts on a smile like a mask (a mask atop a mask atop a—) and makes drinks and cracks jokes and comes home. he sits on the couch and puts on a movie and doesn't watch a second of it.
he doesn't sleep.
the second day he cleans the refrigerator because he can't stomach the thought of eating and he's never liked leftovers older than a day or two. or is it two or three days now? it feels like both a long time and no time at all. he cleans it out with bleach and doesn't wear gloves because he likes the way his skin burns when he's done, his knuckles cracked and dry.
he goes to work. he tries to put on a smile like a mask (a mask atop a mask atop a mask atop a mask—) and makes drinks and cracks jokes and comes home. he sits on the couch and doesn't put on anything because he wouldn't watch a second of it anyway.
he doesn't sleep.
there's no work, the third day. there's no cleaning to do, because the kitchen is the only part of his house that ever felt anything like home (a home is where you go to be loved) and he emptied that out already. the hollow pit inside him is starting to fill with something Reno doesn't want to think about, something he doesn't deserve to feel—sorrow or guilt, or anger, or devastation, or something like that, something that you only get to feel if you're a person who deserves it, and he's not a person and he doesn't deserve it.
so instead of going to work, he throws the window sash wide open and sits in it, legs dangling out into the cold air. it's cold. Reno doesn't really notice. he chainsmokes, gaze on the clouds, thinking about terminal velocity. thinking about the promise not to jump that he made to Rufus—to Thancred—the promise to live instead of just survive.
he wonders if it's too late to take that promise back.
3. i don't know how you got sucked into all that but it was. i told you about our version of you-know-who from up north in the snow. that was it. and what happened, what you saw, happened to me — in a sense. that was the second time i died. so it's my fault, not yours. that happened because of me. i'm the one who should be saying i'm sorry. i wish i had before now. i shouldn't have waited so long.
for what it's worth i don't think you're ignoring me
i think you don't want to turn your phone on and see that there's naught there or that there is something there but it's something you can't bear to see
i suppose you'll be surprised when you do finally lay eyes on this
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text ; @thundaga - backdated to 1/6
the second thing he did, after his stomach was empty and he'd caught his breath, was pull out his phone.
what the fuck is the protocol in a situation like this? maybe Reno was the only one who had suffered the—what was that, even? a dream? a hallucination? a vision?—and any text he sends to Thancred would seem like the ramblings of a crazy person. or maybe—somehow an even worse scenario—Thancred had the same vision Reno did, and any text Reno sends him would be unwelcome.
but fuck. fuck, the pain of the loss is so sharp and so real, his gut still twisting with it. the weight of the despair is still so heavy. Reno can't just say nothing.
what he ends up sending is straightforward: ] tell me you're okay
[ Thancred doesn't have to say anything else. maybe it's better if he doesn't. but Reno needs to know he's alive, somewhere in this godsforsaken hellhole of a city. ]
no subject
It's ironic, though. He tumbles out onto a street somewhere in the city — blessedly not raining, but the skies are an active threat of it — and for a second all he can think to do is walk, walk until he catches his bearings, and wouldn't it be funny if he walked until he saw a familiar window and he —
Gods. Gods.
And now look what he did. Now look what he's wrought, as though Reno's nights weren't bad enough already. As though he didn't already hate it when something he did or something he implicated or even something he didn't do put that feral snarling smile back on Reno's face, the one that —
Fifty thousand dead is such a specific number. Specific like someone counted. Specific like someone knew the population of the people who would've been under that structure when it fell and still —
And still —
Reno used to look at him like he was waiting for something. Sometimes he still does. Reno curls up in the corner of a couch and makes himself small and says things like this can't be for me when it's kindness he's shown and he'd always thought, always thought it'd been something else, something bad or something rough but not fifty thousand families already committed to whatever scraps of a life they could manage to scrape out until the very sky fell and —
And he remembers how it feels, the moment before the roof comes crashing down. He'd had only a few yalms of it to wait. They'd had a plate as high as the sky. They'd had just enough time to see it falling and understand what it was.
It's not a question of forgiveness.
He's not even within a thousand malms of beginning to touch a notion as thorny as forgiveness.
It's just — it's just all of it. The truth of all of it.
He doesn't have to see the aftermath to know what it looks like, the agony and the cruelty and the heartbreak of a nation that sacrificed its own.]
juts col d
[Oh. His hands are shaking. Maybe he's just cold.]
are yuo
okay?
no subject
but it's out there, now. Thancred saw it all. Thancred gave his life for Reno—his metaphorical life, maybe, but still his life—and what did Reno do in return? killed him. dropped the fucking Sector 7 plate on him and smashed him like a bug under the proverbial shoe. and still Thancred came back, right there at the end. still he put his hand to Reno's face and said I would rather love—
how can Reno live with himself knowing he's allowed Thancred to make this mistake?
he's not okay. he doesn't think he'll ever be okay again. but the idea of allowing Thancred to care feels like swallowing broken glass. Reno should have crushed this in his hands at the gala all those weeks ago, should never have allowed this beautiful fragile thing to bloom knowing that one day it would crash down around them. ]
no. I will be
[ he always is. he has no choice but to be. the luxury of not being okay is reserved for those who deserve love, who deserve gentleness and kindness and tenderness. Reno deserves none of those things. Reno doesn't even deserve to die.
after a very long pause he adds, ] I'm sorry.
[ he is very good at sweeping up the pieces. ]
be safe. take care of yourself
[ it's a big city. plenty of places to hide. Reno turns off his phone and bites down on his wrist to muffle the noise of anguish that wants to leave. ]
no subject
It's not that he's outright avoiding people or trying to make himself hard to be found. It's more just that he needs a structure that isn't to be found anywhere else in the city — he doesn't want to talk, he doesn't want to discuss, he doesn't want Y'shtola's nagging voice in his head reminding him that he's doing it again. He just wants to do something that makes sense. He just wants to do something that isn't thinking about what happens to a body when a hundred thousand tonze of superheated steel falls on it.
The first day it rains. He goes for a run and regrets it, comes back wet as a dog only to remember that he doesn't have a change of clothes.
(He let Reno keep his shirt, after that night he stayed over. Likely he's still got it.)
The second day he knows better. He remembers the clothes. He showers after he works out. He's lying on his back on the borrowed apartment mattress staring up at the ceiling (waiting for it to fall) when his stomach gnaws and he remembers that he didn't eat.
(Reno always has leftovers in his fridge. It never takes more than a tenth-bell to heat them up.)
The third day it's clearer again. He goes for a run in clothes suited for it. He picks up something to eat on the way back. The sky gets dark early but there's still plenty of light left in the warm, if impersonal, apartment and he doesn't quite know what to do with himself.
(Reno would be on the couch with him. Better under his arm than drunk on gin at the club, or worse, in the gutter.)
Three days is too many. His muscles ache with how hard he's pushed them, trying to forget. Trying to feel something. Trying to exhaust himself too much to feel anything at all.
(Reno does the same thing. Or maybe it's the opposite. Overdoes it just to feel, or to stop feeling, or both.)
It never goes away. The slaughter at the Waking Sands is still on his hands. The ones who died at the Praetorium, the victims of Ultima Weapon — his hands. His body, his soul, taken. Used. His fault. His burden. There is no measuring which is "worse". It's all worse. It's all death.
(Why is he acting as though if he just waits long enough, it will somehow go away?)
I'm sorry, Reno said. He looks at that text at least twenty times a day. And the more he looks at it, the less it sounds like an apology and the more it just sounds like...]
reno
[...the truth?]
turn your phone on
[It is the world's most pointless text on earth. No one ever said he was great at this.]
no subject
he goes to work. he puts on a smile like a mask (a mask atop a mask atop a—) and makes drinks and cracks jokes and comes home. he sits on the couch and puts on a movie and doesn't watch a second of it.
he doesn't sleep.
the second day he cleans the refrigerator because he can't stomach the thought of eating and he's never liked leftovers older than a day or two. or is it two or three days now? it feels like both a long time and no time at all. he cleans it out with bleach and doesn't wear gloves because he likes the way his skin burns when he's done, his knuckles cracked and dry.
he goes to work. he tries to put on a smile like a mask (a mask atop a mask atop a mask atop a mask—) and makes drinks and cracks jokes and comes home. he sits on the couch and doesn't put on anything because he wouldn't watch a second of it anyway.
he doesn't sleep.
there's no work, the third day. there's no cleaning to do, because the kitchen is the only part of his house that ever felt anything like home (a home is where you go to be loved) and he emptied that out already. the hollow pit inside him is starting to fill with something Reno doesn't want to think about, something he doesn't deserve to feel—sorrow or guilt, or anger, or devastation, or something like that, something that you only get to feel if you're a person who deserves it, and he's not a person and he doesn't deserve it.
so instead of going to work, he throws the window sash wide open and sits in it, legs dangling out into the cold air. it's cold. Reno doesn't really notice. he chainsmokes, gaze on the clouds, thinking about terminal velocity. thinking about the promise not to jump that he made to Rufus—to Thancred—the promise to live instead of just survive.
he wonders if it's too late to take that promise back.
he does not turn his phone on. ]
1/wouldn't you like to know
turn on your phone
no subject
no subject
well this is going to be a bit pathetic for you to come back to isn't it
no subject
1. my hair is brown
2. my name is louisoix leveilleur
3. i don't know how you got sucked into all that but it was. i told you about our version of you-know-who from up north in the snow. that was it. and what happened, what you saw, happened to me — in a sense. that was the second time i died. so it's my fault, not yours. that happened because of me. i'm the one who should be saying i'm sorry. i wish i had before now. i shouldn't have waited so long.
no subject
no subject
every time i got too close
every time i didn't push
is this what you were thinking of?
no subject
tis late
no subject
i think you don't want to turn your phone on and see that there's naught there
or that there is something there but it's something you can't bear to see
i suppose you'll be surprised when you do finally lay eyes on this
mayhap we'll have a laugh about it
no subject
i tried t
i suppose it doesn't matter what i tried to do
no one gives out trophies for trying hard
no subject
you don't have to tell me you're all right
you don't have to be all right
just be anything
no subject
do you remember it?
with the petals of all the different colors
it's called an elpis bloom
it only grows where hope survives
don't forget that it grew for you
& finito