fandomtownies | Atlas Gym, Thursday Afternoon

Reno needed to vent. He needed to vent and smash things and bust in teeth, especially after yesterday's conversation in Raving Royals class.

He also needed to not get his ass hauled off the island and back to ShinRa, so he had decided to make do with whatever catharsis the gym could afford him. Best not to beat up the locals. He'd had a heavy bag in mind, really, or running laps...

But he couldn't help but notice that he wasn't the only one there.

He drew in a breath, steeled himself for the worst, and walked over to Ghanima.

"Didn't mean to turn your class into a three-ring circus yesterday," he said. Conversationally. Totally at ease, here, nothing to see, move along.

Ghanima finished tying her hair into a ponytail before looking over at Reno, a small smirk playing about her lips as she carefully set out her practice blades. "I was not aware that baiting the lions was still a circus event in this era," she said blandly. "I should endeavor to brush up on my history, perhaps."

The blades caught his eye for a moment, and Reno had to struggle to pull his gaze off of them.

Damn, he was itching for a good fight.

"Wasn't Alice's fault," he firmly stated, once he managed to get his eyes back on Ghanima. "She was just talkin'. About the... subject matter or whatever. I took it personally. My bad, yo."

He was going to stand by that until he sorted out... whatever the hell that had been. If he could. Maybe letting it slip the class before that he was what he was hadn't been the wisest move.

Ghanima pretended not to notice how Reno was watching her equipment as she idly picked up her crysknife, running her fingers along the flat of the blade as she checked for any damage from the damp weather. Things from Dune and water often did not go well together.

"The fact remains that both of you got rather invested in the discussion, Reno," she said finally, turning the knife to balance it in her hand. "While I approve of my students pushing boundaries, I draw the line at pushing each other to the wolves. I find it unhygienic, not to mention a tad distracting."

"Might've just been a misunderstanding or whatever. I dunno." He eyed the knives again. Damn. "Plannin' on sortin' it out. Won't happen again."

He hoped. Maybe. Or something.

The slight quirk of her eyebrow was all the warning Ghanima gave before she moved, vanishing only to reappear directly behind him, flat of her blade laying gently next to his cheek.

"Do not lie to me," she said coldly, withdrawing the knife. "It will, and it should, because that is why the class is there, to challenge the preconceived notions of every single one of you about the balance of power. Everyone. Including Miss Liddell."

Reno's own eyebrow twitched upward, but that was the only movement he dared to make.

Wasn't the first time a blade had been pulled on him. Wouldn't be the last. Unless it was. But he was doubtful that it would get used on him here and now. He doubted the faculty was in the habit of hacking apart their students.

His shoulders were still rigid as all hell, though.

"Okay. Will happen again, then." A pause. "How did you do that?"

Ghanima would never harm a student, which was why it had been the flat of the blade. She stepped back to give him room to breathe, resheathing the crysknife with the rasp of bone-on-metal as she walked back to her original spot in the room.

"Did you think I taught this class from a purely academic standpoint?" Ghani asked, amused. "If the subject was clear-cut, black and white, I would not bother myself with it. I have never had the time or patience for absolutes. I expect you all to yell and fight and get well and truly angry with each other, but I expect you will endeavor to understand the why behind it all."

"As to how I did that," she looked at his eyes sharply. "My eyes are as blue as yours. How do you think I did it?" No, he probably was not a user of the spice, but she would not be surprised if they were similar.

Reno tried not to be too blatantly obvious how relieved he was, idly straightening out his jacket as though he almost actually cared for a moment that he looked, more or less, like a total slob.

Nervous habit.

"Mako?" A pause, and then he shook his head a little. "Somethin'... kinda like it? Pullin' it from somewhere else, or...?" His brain was not exactly firmly based in the sciences, here. Thinking on this stuff too hard was better left to the science-types. He could hurt himself. "That was freakin' awesome, whatever it was."

"Mako?" Ghanima shook her head. "It is called prana-bindu training," she said, "A trained adept has full control over each muscle in her body, and from there it leads into a martial art we call the Weirding Way. The basic tenant is that your mind affects your reality. If you can picture it, you can do it."

"Of course, since it is a Bene Gesserit discipline, almost all of us have undergone the spice trance, and have a high addiction to melange. I don't suppose your Mako smells like cinnamon?" she asked idly, contemplating her options. She doubted she had misjudged Reno, so...

With a feral grin, Ghanima flicked her wrists and launched the training disks into the air. "I promise not to let them bite you. Too much," she said, throwing him an extra blade as she picked up her worm-hooks. "Now, why don't we talk about why you were going to rip young Miss Liddell's throat out?"

Reno caught the blade effortlessly, studying it for only a moment before looking up at the disks. Flying sawblades.

Cool.

"Mako's more like... life itself, I guess. My world's got somethin' called the LifeStream in it, where life comes from an' goes to." He altered his stance, but only slightly. If he was going to be attacked by sawblades from hell, he was going to be comfortable while doing it. "No cinnamon, nah."

Deep breath. Eyes on the disks. Ready for anything. He wasn't worried about bleeding a little. That just kept things interesting, made him feel more alive. He could handle that. Needed it some, maybe.

Everything was so much more vibrant when they all started to move.

"The talk we had was about what I do from the moment she started speakin'," deep breath. Focus. Dodge. The blades were quick, but he was quick, too. Block with the knife- he was so unused to knives- just keep moving. "Accused me of makin' flimsy excuses for pickin' the side I did. Took whatever it was that she faced and made me one of them. The kid don't even know me."

Edited 2008-05-29 18:09 (UTC)

"Won't she be pleased to be working for me, then," she said smoothly, keeping one eye on him as she let her awareness spread out around her, sliding to the side to neatly avoid one disk hell-bent on giving her a haircut. "We say the spice is life, but I don't think we mean it in the same way you do. Our universe is based on it; commerce, travel, medicine, religion, but we could survive without it. It wouldn't be pleasant, but we could."

One disk whirled towards her knee, and Ghanima deflected it with a hook. "We also all pick sides, as unpleasant as the task may be. There is always going to be someone who disagrees with your choice, but that's the beauty of an infinite universe."

"Can't please everyone," Reno agreed, doing a somewhat more dangerous approximation of the limbo as a disk attempted to reorganize his torso.

"Just when you think you got it figured out, someone else is gonna show up with a freakin' bomb and-" Another disk grazed by his arm, digging deep enough to leave a thin streak of red and a neat slice in his clothing. It went more or less ignored. "-try to blow up everything you got goin' good. You get used to it, zoto. It's the daily grind, or whatever."

She supposed she shouldn't be surprised at his lack of comment about the injury, but Ghanima moved slightly closer to him. Still enough room to maneuver, but close enough to intercept anything deadly.

"While I am the last to encourage acceptance of the 'daily grind'," she said, dodging, "There is a vast range between eternal drudgery and continual revolution. It is possible to find a balance and live with it."

"Yeah," Reno laughed, though it was strained, really. Almost a huff, if anything else. He managed to knock a more determined blade out of the air, and took a moment to silently gloat inside his own head before turning to face the next, moving deftly out of the way before he could get bitten a second time. "Sometimes, all you gotta do is wait for the end of the world, and everything changes real damn quick."

"Anyone can make a choice when faced with the end of their world," she said sharply, sending one spinning wheel to thud into a punching bag. "The harder part is having the will to stand by your decision after Ragnarök has passed. It's too easy to let yourself become lax in the aftermath, rather than continue along the path."

"It's been pickin' up the pieces since Midgar fell," he hissed, mostly from the sting in his arm as he reached to block another blade. "There ain't no time to get lazy, since. Lazy means it keeps fallin' apart, and that ain't good for anyone, us or them."

It helped that "us" was pretty much nothing, at the moment.

Ghanima snarled and lunged, one target coming a little too close for comfort as she was distracted by covertly checking his wound.

"Perhaps that's one point I shall be sure to bring up in class," she said dryly. "That to be part of a revolt, to bring down an established ruler, you are not only going against everything you have been taught, you are not just standing up for good, or rebelling against the one Chosen by your gods, but you are making a deliberate choice to stick around and pick up the pieces, to rebuild and make it better."

"I could name a lotta people who could'a used that lecture," Reno mused, back to that cocksure stance of his that pretty much screamed he didn't care if he was cut again. Bring it. He'd block, and if he didn't, whatever. "Maybe mention that even if it ain't good you're standin' up for in the end, everyone's gotta live with the aftermath. Better damn well stick around to put it back together. Get over the rest of it. Ain't no time for it."

Building again on the edge of the ruins.

"Who says survival isn't a cause of good?" she asked, flicking the strands of hair that were escaping her ponytail back out of her eyes. "I'm rather partial to my own survival, and I would not be alive if I was willing to let every would-be revolutionary begin with my head. Not all regime change has to come through violence."

Although judging by the way she was wielding her hooks, the assassins could certainly try.

"Too many people got issues with movin' forward and gettin' on with fixin' things to be able to get over what was done, yo."

He shrugged one shoulder, dodging to the side to avoid a blade to the face. He was fond of his face. That would have sucked. "Don't really blame 'em much. But it ain't really makin' anything better, either."

He waited for the disk to about-face before stepping backward and kicking it from underneath. Kicking was fun.

Edited 2008-05-30 07:46 (UTC)

"Careful," she warned as she parried two that rushed her from the left. "Those will cut through both shoes and bone if you kick the blade wrong." Experience? Ghanima would never do something so reckless.

Fine, she had been six, and in a snit. Not that she would ever tell a student.

"No, that attitude does not make things 'better'," Ghanima agreed. "While being resolved to remember the past is the best way to prevent it from being repeated, there is a difference between forgiveness and forgetting."

"One would think that cooperation and understanding in the aftermath might yield better results for the future than ascribing bitterness and blame," she mused, moving in that way she had done earlier to avoid a potentially nasty disc to the back. "A toxic atmosphere can easily poison what little hope a future has."

"Then I won't kick the blade wrong," Reno replied, as if it was so simple. Maybe it was. Maybe he still didn't give a damn. That was what potions were for, and he'd been smacked around by nastier blades before. "We been stickin' to the background, mostly, since everything came fallin' down. Better to do what we can without announcin' it. Bein' mostly responsible for a city gettin' crushed kinda means that workin' in the forefront ain't really the brightest PR move, yo."

He paused, then, stopping to mull that over just long enough that he only narrowly avoided diving out of the way of a pair that were coming at him from either side.

He was talking too much, wasn't he? The heck...

Won't kick the blade wrong, indeed. Ghanima snorted slightly in amusement. "Good." Maybe it was that simple as that sometimes.

"The point is, Reno, you're doing something about it." Her blades clanged off the spinning discs in a staccato rhythm and she laughed breathlessly. "You're not sitting in a corner, going 'woe is me', nor are you trying to shift blame to someone else."

"There are those who walk the world in human-shape, but are animals. Were you to stand here and defend all the choices you made as acceptable, you would be no better than them. That is where the difference lies, whether Miss Liddell understands that or not."

He'd met enough of those animals in his lifetime. Lost enough good Turks to them, seasoned ones and rookies alike.

He'd been one himself, for a while. Now there were moments when he wasn't so sure.

"I still gotta talk to her, I think," he said, more a decision than a thought. "Gotta sort it out, figure out if there's some way to... I dunno. Put things right. Don't know her so well, but I worry about the kid. Somethin' rubbed her wrong, that's obvious." His own blade glanced off of another attempt at finishing the job on his arm, and he found himself grinning. There was a rhythm to fighting, the same went with flying blade-saws as it did with monsters and men. It felt comfortable to be falling back into it. No freaking wonder he'd been so antsy lately. He'd come to Fandom and had taken a pause from being a freakin' Turk.

Another clash of blade-on-blade, and he actually laughed a little, himself.

"Hell, even if she can't understand it, at least I tried. I got her back around here even if she don't want the backup. S' how this rookie thing works."

Had he said rookie? He'd meant newbie, of course.

"I will also be speaking with her later today," Ghanima said casually, sending another blade to its final resting place in a wall, "but I do encourage you to try and work out an understanding together. Even making an effort to speak with her should help with her adjustment to Fandom."

"We can be quite overwhelming, sometimes."

"Tell me about it." He straightened up and looked around. They had to be running out of blades by n-

He spun on his heel and smacked another disc out of the air with the knife she'd let him use, and he was making no effort in the least to hide the grin on his face.

"Place has a funny way of makin' you lose your step when you ain't lookin'. Sometimes, it takes a bit of help to get on your feet again, yo."

Edited 2008-05-30 18:12 (UTC)

Ghanima grinned widely as the last one fell to Reno's knife with a clatter, whirring sadly as it skittered across the floor.

"Not bad, for a beginner."

Reno looked at the disc on the floor for a moment, and then smirked up at Ghanima.

"Who you callin' a beginner?"

Just because she could kick his ass with a case of Haste-from-Hell didn't mean he was a beginner.

Really.

Ghanima laughed and started collecting the beaten weapons, pressing a small button in the center of each to deactivate it. "I have unrealistic expectations of my sparring partners sometimes."

"Talented beginner, then," she teased. "Not bad at all, especially for a boy. Were you a female in my universe, I'm sure the Order would have snapped you like a rather tasty morsel by now."

"Hey, talented, I can live with, yo." You don't make it to second-in-command of the Turks by being bad at it, after all.

Most people didn't tend to live that long, actually.

"There, uh... Any chance we can do that again, sometime? Didn't realize until just right now how much I miss gettin' the workout, yo. 'M startin' to get rusty, and that ain't no good at all."

"I take it you aren't in the 'punching' class, then?" she asked. "Far be it from me to deny anyone training time. I've also been slacking off a bit since arriving, so I'm sure we can find a time for both of us to work. It shall be motivational, knowing there is someone else waiting."

Only training three or four times a week counted as slacking for Ghanima, and it chafed at her badly. She really ought to invite Faith out to play more often.

"Next time, you pick the weapon."

"It's a damn shame I only got one ElectroMag-Rod," Reno mused, a smirk playing on his lips.

He felt bloody naked without his stun baton, dammit.

"I would've taken that punchin' class, but that would've meant droppin' one of my others, and that just didn't seem to be an option, yo."

Besides, he was pretty sure Deadpool didn't like him. Something about being a minion dater, and all.

Atlas Gym, Thursday Afternoon

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