capeandcowllogs | goddamnloli: he is the trigger (of a gun) and she is the heap (of dead bodies)

Entry tags:

goddamnloli: he is the trigger (of a gun) and she is the heap (of dead bodies)

WHO: Ruka and Bruno
WHERE: Moonybase's roof??
WHEN: Sometime Tuesday??
WARNINGS: Pubescent teen girl angst-rage and a grown man sitting there taking it like a bitch.
SUMMARY: Ruka is still mad at Bruno for like, even existing. And now yet another one of her closest friends has been ported out, and Bruno inadvertently walks in on her pity party! HELLO CONVENIENT TARGET FOR IRRATIONAL RAGE?
FORMAT: yes

It would have been hard not to pick up on the mood around the house these past two days, even for Bruno. There was something distinctive about the hole in day-to-day life that a port-out always left.

Bruno hadn't actually known Yuugi all that well; partly because the realization that he was the Mutou Yuugi had left Bruno kind of intimidated, and partly because he had been a fairly quiet kind of guy anyway. But he had been close to Ruka, Bruno knew. And so, as much as Bruno had been obliging to stay out of her way these past couple weeks, he couldn't just slink out of the house and avoid her. Not today.

Although... he was starting to wonder where Ruka actually was. He was pretty sure he hadn't noticed her leave the house today, but she didn't seem to be anywhere inside it either. (Bruno was already getting pretty used to how sensitively he could focus his hearing if he was paying attention, and the way he could catalogue and profile every member of the household by the sound that their footfalls made on each of Moonybase's various flooring materials. Ruka may be light and quiet, but she was also extremely distinct.)

After a while he started to actually get a little worried, and so-- not without feeling a little bit guilty for it-- he hacked into the GPS location of her comm. Which showed that she was... about three and a half meters above the attic floor of the house? Huh?

... And about two minutes later, Bruno was quietly stepping out the frame of the gable window in Blue's old attic bedroom in order to lean around and peek up out onto the roof.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The roof was thankfully clear of snow for the time being, but still very cold, and liable to ice over any time — it was not the safest place to be, and even less so when a person wasn't much caring to be cautious.

Seated a ways away from the window through which Bruno was even now making his gangling climb was the girl in question. Huddled in coat against the cold, Ruka was a practically shapeless lump of red and green on the roof, like something discarded from Christmas. She wasn't facing Bruno—she wasn't facing much of anything, chin sunken behind her knees, arms wrapped around her legs.

She didn't shake for tears, and made no noise for crying, but the air was heavy with more than the cold; if she heard Bruno coming out, she was doing her best to ignore him.

It didn't take being able to feel the precise temperature of the shingles under his fingertips to within a tenth of a degree to know that this roof could be covered in a hair-thin sheen of ice within minutes if the air temperature decided to fall just right. Bruno knew immediately that this was not the greatest place to be hanging out right now.

It also took him no time at all to catch sight of Ruka, but he didn't call out to her right away. The image of her curled up out here, away from the entire world, looking so much worse that she even had in the days leading up to when Bruno talked to her... it pressed a thorn into him somewhere deep.

But he couldn't be sure if she had heard him or not, so he knew he had to speak first. "H-hey..." he started, "are you alright?"

... Okay, not the greatest question right now. "Um... do you need any help getting back inside, or....?"

Ruka didn't visibly react to his words, from where Bruno stood. Her fingers may have tightened on her legs, and with her back to him she could let her expression tighten in a wince, but her shoulders remained where they were, and she made no effort to turn his way.

"No," she called, voice almost as cold as her face against the winter. "I won't."

Her being frigid at him was no kind of surprise at this point, even if it still stung a bit. Bruno had long since figured out that he must have screwed up a lot worse than he thought he had. But whether she wanted him around or not, he didn't want her falling off the house and breaking her neck, and he figured that that trumped her objections for at least a couple minutes.

"C'mon, it's dangerous up here right now," he said, putting on noticeably more of a concerned-adult than a concerned-friend tone, for her sake. "I don't want you to get hurt."

"I'm not going to get hurt," she shot back, turning her head to one side. It was enough that Bruno could catch the edge of her face, and a sway of pigtail, but still unable to see her expression. She was still upset with him; she was upset with a lot of people, many of whom didn't deserve it, but acknowledging it wasn't yet enough to exorcise those feelings from her heart. Especially not with Bruno, who was actually someone in control of the actions that hurt her now. "You could try to push me off, and nothing would happen to me."

It was never Ruka herself who got hurt, anyway. It was everyone else.

Bruno was already partway through the process of surreptitiously climbing up onto the roof himself when the second half of her back-bite came, and he very nearly slipped a bit himself.

"Push you?? What're you..." But he trailed off when it occurred to her what she might mean. Right, those shields she made. He'd seen her suspend things in them before -- Lupin as a werewolf, for one. She must be figuring that she could put one up to stop herself if she started slipping.

After that momentary pause, though, he just sighed under his breath and continued to pull himself up out of the window. The air temperature had already dropped by several fractions of a degree just while he'd been out here, and he wasn't really keen on staking her life on whether she'd be able to form a shield in just the right space in the second or so she would have to do it in if she fell.

"There's got to be a better place than this," he called over, doing a pretty good job of keeping the very slight note of exasperation out of his voice.

At another time, she might have apologized for implying that Bruno would have any reason to push her off a building, but she wasn't in the mood to make him feel better. The sighs and his tone of voice weren't endearing her to the interruption, either. Huddling tighter upon herself, she turned her head back to gaze over the neighborhood.

"What do you want, Bruno?" she asked, level and unfriendly. "Because if you're just coming out here to criticize me, you might as well go back inside."

"I'm not," he said a bit wearily, but this time more at himself than at her.

He settled himself on a nearby bend in the roof while still a goodly distance from her, but close enough that he didn't need to raise his voice. "I just don't want you to slip or catch a cold or anything," he went on. "I'm sure Lupin doesn't want you to either."

Ruka glanced a little to the side at the sudden closeness of his voice, huffing a little under her breath and leaning harder on her knees. It was as though by forming a tighter ball, she would feel less vulnerable, less open to what he had to say. She didn't want to talk to anyone right now, and least of all Bruno. It was why she'd come out here in the first place; no one would be able to just knock on her door or pop a head in to check on her.

"I already said I won't."

If she happened to glance far enough around to catch a glimpse of him, she might have caught him looking away in turn to stare passively down into the yard.

"... I know," he answered eventually, starting to sound more resigned. But he didn't move from his spot.

It certainly wasn't for lack of thinking about it. She pretty obviously didn't want to talk to him. But it... just didn't feel right to him to just scoot straight back down inside and leave her alone again up here, either. His hands clenched a little tighter on the join in the roof and he continued to dodge any hint of her gaze while he argued back and forth to himself internally about it.

She didn't bother looking; she didn't bother responding, either. She didn't want to talk to him, so she wasn't going to. If she gave it a chance, some reasonable part of Ruka would ask her that in losing so many people dear to her, was it really smart of her to push away a friend that was still around? It would point out that Bruno probably had a perfectly good explanation for why he'd disappeared so suddenly, and Ruka would probably forgive him if she knew what that was.

Instead, Ruka kept her attention turned away from Bruno, saying nothing. Why should she? He was the one intruding.

He was, and he knew it.

After a minute or two Bruno finally, reluctantly, made his way down to the window again and climbed back inside.

... And about a minute after that, if Ruka was listening, she might had heard the soft swoosh of the back door to the house opening, and then someone stepping quietly out into the yard.

They lived in a quiet neighborhood — as quiet as one could be in this City, at any rate. There hadn't been any cars for a few minutes, and it was much too cold for anyone to be out doing mundane yard work. Ruka had been listening for Bruno trying to come back through the window, but the opening of a door was just as much of a sign.

He wasn't going to let this drop, was he?

She was already angry with Bruno, and so each thing he did just seemed to compound it. Ruka didn't like him speaking for other people to make his point, or treating her like a child that couldn't be trusted to know what she was or wasn't capable of when he couldn't even be depended on to keep his word. Of the two of them, he was the one who needed the supervision and the worry, not her.

Fine, she thought. If he won't believe what I say, then—

With tight caution, Ruka uncurled her legs, edging her way slowly down the incline the roof. Satisfied with the distance to the ledge, she pushed her way to her feet. It was difficult to keep her balance on the cold roof, but it wouldn't be necessary for long.

She waited.

Bruno had already figured out on some level that she'd probably just get mad at him again if she caught him out here. But... he couldn't just sit on his hands and turn his back on her. Maybe that really would be the best thing for him to do right now, but he just couldn't make himself do it.

Because when it came right down to it, he did trust her to look out for herself in most situations, and he did realize that he wasn't her father and he couldn't just tell her what and what not to do. But the more he had the knowledge ground into his heart that he'd hurt her with what he'd said and done back then, and that there was no easy way to undo it, the more and more he felt like it was his bound duty to protect her. From anything and everything that he could, remote possibility or no. He didn't know what else to do with himself.

He'd opened the door and slipped out as quietly as he could manage, and picked his way around the side of the house even more quietly. He was headed for a particular spot that he'd identified after studying the topography of the roof and solving for all possible line-of-sight vectors. He would be able to see her, but she was very unlikely to spot him.

Or that would have been true, if he hadn't rounded the corner of the house just to see her standing in a different spot entirely, balanced precariously near the edge, wearing an expression of spiteful determination.

It only took a fraction of a second for his own face to turn to sheer panic. "RUKA!!"

Edited 2011-03-26 16:40 (UTC)

Alright, so maybe this was a little overly dramatic. And maybe completely unnecessary. The tone of his voice was enough to make Ruka flinch with guilt, a quick tightening of her face and a spasm in her fingers, before she curled the latter into a fist. But it was getting harder for Ruka to want to choose the reasonable paths. Being the good and understanding and cheerful one didn't make it hurt less when people upset her, and it didn't prevent the people she cared about from leaving her when she needed them most.

Bruno deserved whatever fear gripped his heart.

With an exhale to relax her shoulders, Ruka closed her eyes, turned on the ball of her shoe, and let herself fall — arms held close to her chest, even as the one had already begun to burn.

And then she collided with the driveway, bones shattering and blood spilling out all over—

No?

No. Darn

Rather, after only a second, a second and a half of free fall, the ever-familiar red light emerged from her body, a translucent, perfect sphere. Gravity had no bearing within or without, so long as she controlled it, and it was simply for Ruka to turn mid-air and to guide the bubble to the ground, as slow as an elevator and soft as a feather.

By the time her feet touched the ground, her arms were crossed over her chest with no small measure of annoyance, expression tight and unhappy. The bubble, however, didn't disappear.

At top speed one second was far more time than Bruno needed to dash the length of the yard, and he didn't waste a moment of it. So by the time Ruka's fall was aborted by her bubble of light, Bruno was already standing in the exact spot that her fall would have taken her, crouched tense and prepared as he looked straight up — and then blinked in surprise.

He slowly stepped back a couple of feet to let her touch down, and by the time she did he was just standing there slack-shouldered and smiling gently with relief down at her. It would probably occur to him later to be upset with her for doing something pointless and selfish like that, but right now he was just glad that she hadn't been hurt once again because of his carelessness.

Angry and annoyed as she was, the reaction she got from Bruno wasn't what she expected. More than that, it wasn't what she wanted, either. She had practically threatened to kill herself, and he was smiling? Sure, she didn't get hurt, and that was part of the point, but that wasn't the point. He was supposed to be upset, or worried, or frustrated — some echo of the feelings she had when he would disappear like that without a word, making her think he'd gotten himself hurt, or killed, or ported out. But instead he just... looked relieved.

With a huff, Ruka let the shield fall and turned on her heel, storming back toward the house.

If her plan was to make Bruno consciously feel what Ruka had felt when he disappeared, then there were a couple of flaws that plan. First of all, the fact that Bruno was a dude, and a dude with practically nil experience with upset teen-aged girls at that, and it would take a lot more hints to get him to read quite that far into what she was trying to tell him with all this. And second, that Bruno felt fundamentally culpable for (and, to some extent, deserving of) everything that Ruka did push him away or avoid him.

The smile began to fade again when she turned around and stormed away, even though he'd more or less been expecting precisely that. He figured things would probably just settle back now into their set routine of Bruno obliging to orbit quietly around the periphery of Ruka's life, and Ruka never inviting him to come in any closer.

... And then he realized just how much he hated the thought of going back to that.

"H...hey, Ruka!" he called to her receding back, and his voice made it clear that he was metaphorically standing with his hat in his hands, "I just... want to say one thing."

Edited 2011-04-03 11:53 (UTC)

Her hand was nearly to the doorknob. Part of her was tempted to continue on as if she hadn't heard him, to slam the door behind her and then, she didn't know, go sulk in Rua's old segment of the basement, or grab her skateboard and leave until well past dark — anything to get away from the mood Bruno put her in now, and the atmosphere clinging to the house.

But while Ruka was many things, she was not cruel. Stubborn, yes, and perfectly willing to hold a grudge long after it would have been forgiven by other parties, but not so heartless as to keep running away from someone making a plea such as that.

She turned, though only slightly; her feet remained mostly fixed, one sliding only so as not to strain her. Her hand fell upon the door, but her face was pointed toward Bruno, expression still tight.

At this point, Bruno wouldn't have been at all surprised if she had just continued inside and shut the door on him, but he was glad that she didn't. Especially since what he was about to say was something that should have been said a long time ago.

"Whenever... whenever you're ready to ask, I'm ready to tell you," he said, looking right into her eyes. "About why I was gone for so long back then, and... and about everything. I won't keep anything hidden from you." Not anymore, he thought.

Her hand clenched on the doorknob, and Ruka's eyes flicked down to the ground when he finished speaking. A great tumble of emotions rolled down her cold throat and into her stomach, but none were the sort she could act upon.

She simply shook her head. "You idiot," she said, annoyed and yet, somehow, amused. "Do you really think that's why I'm upset?"

And Bruno just... blinked stupidly at her. And then opened his mouth and shut it again, equally stupidly. "I... dunno?" he said at last, being perfectly sincere but also wondering desperately if that was the 'right' answer or not.

Sure, a big part of the reason he wanted to explain everything to her was that he thought it might get her closer to forgiving him. But he also thought it was disingenuous of him to keep something like this from someone he thought of as so close a friend; it wasn't fair of him to just assume that she'd hold what he was against him, even if she still didn't like him for what he'd done. Even Yuusei had been confidently encouraging him to come clean.

So he just stood there staring apologetically at her and looking utterly out of his depth.

Edited 2011-04-03 12:37 (UTC)

For a moment, Ruka made no move or sound, holding pose. She inhaled, a slow, drawn expanding off her small chest, and eventually exhaled. The hot breath formed a small cloud in the cold, but it was more than simply air; that tumble of frustration, aggravation and annoyance, every black shred of feeling that had been clinging to her esophagus and ribs was blown out. Her shoulders seemed to sag, and she shook her head once again.

"I don't care about any of that," she started — then, immediately, shook her head. "I mean, I do, but I don't expect you to tell me everything." It was a perfectly honest statement, without malice or petulance; Ruka had long since become accustomed to people, even her friends, refusing to talk to her about their more personal issues simply because of her age.

"It's just... why did you wait so long to say anything?" If she were one for expressive gestures, Ruka might have held her hands up in some empty grasp; as they were, the one stayed still on the door, the other hanging limp at her side. "You know how often people here get sent home. You don't... you can't even imagine how many people I've lost, can you?" Miles Edgeworth and Yuugi were the freshest wounds, both coming after Bruno's disappearance and reappearance, but the string through the past two years was practically endless for Ruka.

If no one else, Bruno at least knew about her brother.

Her free hand curled into a small fist, her body doing its best to keep her pose steady. "Then you go and pull something like that, what am I supposed to think?"

"I-I..."

He was wearing that expression again, like every word was a needle pressing into his skin. He knew how it felt to lose people too (Victor, Yuusei, Franziska...) but she was right, she had been here a lot longer than he had.

But...

Bruno's gaze dropped shamefully to the ground. He ran a gentle hand absentmindedly over a line down the center of his chest — over a wound that a normal person would have had gauzed and bandaged, but instead all that lay under his t-shirt was a long strip of electrical tape.

"For a while," he said softly, "I thought that it would be better for everyone that way. Thinking that I'd been ported out."

Edited 2011-04-03 13:43 (UTC)

YES HI I SAY THINGS THAT DON'T MAKE SENSE SOMETIMES

LOVELY THINGS

oh no wonder I lost this I forgot to put my character tag on it.

... yeah that'd do it :| THIS IS WHY I USE GMAIL LABELS

I do too BUT IT DOESN'T HELP WHEN I ACCIDENTALLY ARCHIVE EVERYTHING...

THIS IS WHY I ARCHIVE NOTHING. EVER. ಠ_ಠ

but then I can never find anything! I don't DELETE things...

NO. CONSTANT VIGILANCE.

*SCREAMS*

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why yes i am comboing in a log wanna fight about it

why yes ma'am i believe i would like to punch you in the face

but you got two tags for the price of one how can you argue with these savings?

... wait are you saying that i'm being charged for this

how else do you expect me to afford paid accounts?

you make a compelling argument

*sobs onto accounts*

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SCREAMS

sobs onto accounts