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WHO: Rua and Ruka
WHERE: Jeopardy
WHEN: March 13th
WHAT: Rua's back! He's not happy about the gap.
WARNINGS: None.

'I thought it was gonna be easier.'

That was the thought that came to Rua's mind as he went to bed. It was a night in August, a lot like the last few nights had been. He'd been back in the city for about four months now - no, not back, his brain suddenly reminded him. And not the city. The city was gone. He swallowed quietly. He really hated getting on this train of thought right before he went to bed. It had been...fine at first. He'd been able to sleep just fine. Just the feeling of being back in a normal bed in a (relatively) normal place with no encroaching danger had been enough for him to sleep peacefully. But eventually, it had started. Dreams that woke him with a start or trains of thought that just didn't let him drift off in the first place. Back in the city (there he went, thinkin' about it again), Ruka had made fun of him for how much he slept. It sure didn't feel like that was the case anymore.

He hadn't spoken to Ruka about it. He didn't know if she noticed. If she did, she hadn't said anything. There was...a lot he hadn't spoken to Ruka about. Not only all that stuff from the city that he'd promised, promised himself he'd talk to her about...now there was whole new stuff. Like that...clone...echo...thingy that had happened, where he'd run into a Ruka that didn't wear her eyepatch and had a serious thing about oversharing. And more recently...that. Shimmer. Bubble. Thing. Rua had avoided it. Ruka had vanished into it. In retrospect, he wished he'd just gone in there with her so they could've at least dealt with whatever it was together. Instead, he hadn't seen her until after it was over and he'd had to come and basically carry her home...one more adventure and probably a fresh batch of scars that he couldn't find a way to talk to her about.

He'd really thought it would've been easier. He thought if they could just get out of the city, there'd be all the time they needed to figure everything out. To get back to how they were before.

'Maybe tomorrow...' He thought as his eyes slid shut and, at least for the moment, he started to drift off. 'Maybe...I'll figure something out...'

---

"....oh, COME THE EFF ON!"

So he was, understandably, a little frazzled when he woke up back at the Porter in Heropa instead of his house in De Chima. He smacked his hands on his face when he got the blah blah blah, welcome to buttville, Hero speech for what he sweared to God, was like, the fourth time.

"Yeah. I got it."

---

At least this time, he knew how to contact her without having to use his arm.

To: 🌙︎
From: Rua
please tell me I haven't been gone for half a year.

Yeah, it was way less dramatic than the last couple times he'd arrived, but he really, really wasn't feeling up to the dramatic dragon-mark-tug-until-we-find-each-other-dramatic-reunion thing this time. Last time, he'd cried. This time he just wanted to smack his head against a wall a few times.

This definitely wasn't making things any easier.

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Ruka has a lot on her plate. She has, for that matter, a lot of plates: she's buried herself in concerns about Jeopardy, following the news on the new Elixer release and whatever nightmare that's going to be, on community-building events at the Web Mistress's Church, on the vibe in town from the people who work at the Nuclear Plant, at what she's gleaned from Kanaya's observations and her own suspicions; she's worried about Yusei, as impassible the obstacle of a single block seems to be to her; she's worried about Kanaya, and Cassandra, and the work they're doing; she's worried about the other Cassandra, and Jaime, and the stress of their League and all that goes with it. She's worried about Jaime for a million other things besides.

She was worried about what was going on, and what was going to happen, and was doing her best to keep her attention on those things. Keep herself focused on the world that existed around her, and how she could help preserve it — as ever, trying to keep herself from falling too quickly into maudlin thoughts about the past. If she kept herself facing forward, then she could ignore the monuments built of her regrets in the weeks, months, and years behind her.

With her attention turned this way, the chime of her communicator for a new message did not seem to hail anything monumental. With Maxwell gone, her inbox mostly alternated between messages from Khaji Da and from Jaime; so rare are interruptions in that chain that Ruka did not usually check who the message was from before opening it. It was only when the message didn't make sense that she glanced at the sender, and promptly fumbled and dropped her communicator to the floor. She dropped herself out of her computer chair in pursuit, knocking it back in graceless speed, snatching up the communicator with a familiar tremor. Without thought for what this meant or what to say, Ruka hit call.

Even with the long seconds to wait while the signal connected, all she could manage was simple, and strained:

"Rua? Rua, is that you?"

Edited 2019-03-13 22:49 (UTC)

Rua blinked when instead of the sound of a text message, he heard his ringer (in the default ring tone - ugh, he had to change that ASAP). He stared at it long enough for a couple rings to go by, before he swallowed, put his finger on the screen and swiped to answer.

He was quiet for a second when she spoke, then nodded, then realized she couldn't see him nodding.

"Yeah. Y...yeah. It's me." He let out a sigh. "I'm in Heropa. I just. Came out of the porter." He scratched his head with his free hand. "I. I guess she. Pulled me out for a while." He grimaced, and because he couldn't think of anything else to say, he added a small, "Sorry."

Her breath came out in a slow, audible exhale, something like a sigh; she couldn't see him, but he sounded the same as he did in her memories, and nightmares, and that was enough. She was going to get a bruise for how tightly she held the device to her ear for listening.

"Yeah," she murmured, her voice softened. "She's done that to me, too. Nothing from—" Even with Rua, she couldn't call it going home. "... That is, just a jump forward, right?"

Rua blinked a second. He was able to figure out what she meant from context. It was weird to think about, but he put himself to it.

"Uhhhh. Lemme. Think..." He scratched his head and closed his eyes and thought about it. He was pretty sure he'd just gone to bed in De Chima and woken up in Heropa. It'd been a long time since he'd been home (but not as long as, y'know, the person he was talking to), so he had to think about it for a sec to try and pick out the last thing he remembered.

"Yusei beatin' Jack...us all drivin' off...gettin' on the plane..." He mumbled into the receiver. He then nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, that's it. I don't remember anything new, so. Yeah. S'just a jump, I guess." He let out a sigh. He remembered Ruka talking about this before. "You said she yo-yoed you before, I guess she wanted to get me too," he grumbled. "This is so stupid and weird. I just went to bed and woke up and it feels like everything's. Hit fast forward without me." He scowled at nothing in particular. "Is this how people who get into comas feel?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

Stupid and weird was a good way to put it; she'd only lost time twice, and only on this side of destruction, but both times had left her with a sense of temporal vertigo — a discomfort with the season, and the lengths of days, and distance from the few people who knew her at all. It had taken her a long time, this second time, to find her footing again; she didn't think it had ever been stable in the one before.

For him, a poor night's sleep. For her, seven months — seven months of crawling out from the rubble of disaster, only to remain in its shadow. Her speech wasn't as shaken and unsteady as he'd remember, in those scant weeks after that disaster in De Chima, but closer to her usual self. It didn't feel much easier, though.

"... Do you wanna go get breakfast?" The question felt too casual, for what this was. The weight remained in tone, in the hesitant way she asked, soft and quiet and not quite certain this was real, but what else was she supposed to do? She wasn't Kanaya. "I have to change into real clothes, first, but it shouldn't take me more than thirty minutes, to 'port over. That okay?"

He noticed the difference. The shakiness in her voice that had been there, as far as he knew it, yesterday, wasn't there and she sounded closer to normal. He wasn't sure what to make of that. Some part of him thought it meant she'd already taken what had happened in De Chima and locked it up, throwing it in the vault with everything else he couldn't figure out how to get at. Was that better or worse than it being a fresh wound? At least in that case he might've been able to get her to talk about it - but he couldn't force himself to talk to her any which way, so maybe it didn't matter at all, in the end.

It took him a second to register the question. He blinked a couple times.

"Uh." He shifted his arm and grabbed the folder he'd gotten at the porter. "S'fine, I can port over to De Chima and meet you there," he said. "But I think I'm housed somewhere else, now, it says--" He squinted. "What the hell is Jeopardy?"

"Nevada." It was an easy question to answer, so it came naturally; the long hours she spent over the years explaining everything else about these stupid dimensions made it easy to slip back into that sort of mood, even with Rua; it wasn't personal, so it wasn't a problem. It became easier to get her bearings: get herself up, and move about her room, gathering her things. "It sucks. I moved there a couple months ago — January." So, literally a couple of months. "They might have put you with me, this time."

There was one room left in the house, as far as Ruka knew; she sat on the edge of her bed, setting her comm to speaker phone — unwilling to cut the conversation.

"What number? I'm in one"

"..." Rua looked at the number. And it made him pause for a second. He blinked a couple of times, just long enough that Ruka might start to anticipate his answer.

"I'm in four," he eventually said. Four. As in...not one. As in a different place from Ruka. He scratched his head. "Huh." His first instinct was, well, it wasn't like it mattered that much that they'd been put in different houses. One of them'd probably move into the other's house pretty soon, right? He didn't think about it any more than that.

"Can you get to this place by porter?" He asked. If it was where he was living, not much point in waiting to go there, right?

So, not her house. It didn't feel like relief, but it didn't feel like disappointment, either. At the most, they'd only be across the street from one another, but if they hadn't assigned that fifth room, then Rua could move in with her, or she could pack up her things again and move into that house. That one wasn't full either, was it? She didn't know who all lived around here, but—

"... oh."

— but she knew one.

Fuck. This was. This was something, right? This could be bad. This could be good, but it was more likely to be bad, right? It was already such a weird thing, but that was with Ruka, and she was used to being forgotten, and being left behind, but that wasn't the same for Rua, was it? And he was younger, anyway. He wasn't a child anymore, but it wasn't like he'd been mutilated and forced to change his style and presentation and everything else just to get by. But that wasn't a promise, either.

The silence went for too long; shaking her head, the words followed in a rush.

"Yeah, there's a porter. But—" This was too much to explain over the phone. And there was no way she could bring Rua to Jeopardy without letting him know what kind of place this was, nevermind who lived here. "—there's stuff you need to know before you get here. Okay? Please, just wait for me."

And, there — some of that quick, familiar strain.

Rua blinked a couple times as nothing came over the speaker. It was a good thing the silence came before she mentioned the porter, because otherwise he might've just taken the quiet as a go-ahead to head back to the porter and just go to this place right now. As it was, he only got a couple steps before that "but-" came through and he stopped. By the time she was saying she needed to tell him stuff before he went there, he was already trying to hold back a groan - "stuff you needed to know" teleported pretty cleanly to "crazy porter shit" or something. He picked up the strain in her voice and before he knew it, there was a dryness in her throat. The same dryness that always came up when he thought about....one thing. In particular. He shook his head a little. He had one question he couldn't wait to ask. When he asked, his voice went quiet, like he was afraid of the question and the answer.

"...does it have something to do with Vulcanus?"

"... No."

It wasn't the thing she was worried about, but the name was enough to slow her reaction. It wasn't Vulcanus, in the literal sense, but the bigger picture — the bigger danger — that was close to the mark, wasn't it?

She hadn't the strength to tell him what she'd learned in De Chima; he was gone before Jeopardy arrived. He was gone before she learned from Quatre what the bombings were for — something that had ripped her apart when it'd happened, months before he arrived. There were too many pieces, and Ruka had spent so much time fractured along her own hurts that Rua — he didn't have any of them, did he?

But it was like she'd told Jaime — Rua always came back to people missing, time missing, carrying his own confusion and hurt into time long removed from the creation of those wounds. To dredge up the details of everything else, of things that he didn't know but would hurt him to learn, it only seemed like she'd be twisting the knife. But this...

She finished lacing her shoes, shaking her head.

"No, it's not Vulcanus. It's not even, all, that kind of stuff. I'm making it sound like a crisis, aren't I? It's not."

The audio swapped off of speaker to headset. It wasn't a lie; it wasn't a crisis. If they were lucky, it wouldn't become one. And if they weren't lucky, then... she'd do anything in her power to prevent it.

She shoved her keys into her pocket, closing and bolting her door behind her, taking the steps down two at a time.

"It's just, some of it's complicated. And stupid."

He released a breath he didn't know he'd been holding when she said it wasn't Vulcanus. Or the OTO. Or whoever they were calling themselves. He hated that he was giving these people so much control over him by being so...afraid of them. He couldn't help it. For the moment, he tried to just. Be glad that they weren't what Ruka was talking about. So it was just garden variety dumb stuff, not world-endy dumb stuff. That was fine. He was pretty sure he could handle that.

"Okay. Okay. I'll chill out here in Heropa," he said. "Is there, uh. Anywhere particular y'want me to wait?"

"It's Heropa, isn't it? Everything's either fried fish or bacon-stuffed pancakes." In other words: nothing Ruka would willingly eat, even if she were paid for it. "You pick. Just, text me an address, so I know where to find you."

But for all the distance, there are some pieces of familiarity that are easy to find again. The little, harmless banter, pushing over things that don't matter — that much snaps into place like magnets do. It's familiar.

When she gets to the door, she has a parting ready on her tongue — see you soon, — but it dies in her throat, and she hesitates at the threshold, one hand on her comm and the other hovering over the doorknob. She inhales, and holds it.

"... It's good to hear your voice again, Rua."

And despite everything, that brings a little smile to his face. He felt bad for leaving his sister alone for the last several months. He felt worse for all the things he still hadn't figured out how to talk to her about. He didn't think he was gonna get to much of that today. But despite that, the fondness and familiarity in her voice felt...pretty good.

"Yeah...you too," he said softly. Even though for him it had only been a day since he'd last heard her, in a way, it felt like more than that. He was quiet for a moment.

"...The Breakfast Satellite. "Our Sausage-Wrapped UFO Shortstack is out of this world!" Rua blinked for a couple seconds after reading the sign. Then very shortly after that, "Okay, I picked a place, I'm texting you the address."

Of course, she thought, seeing the name of the place pop up on her navigation map; it has to be something like this.

With the phone connection cut, Ruka could finally let out a breath she'd held tight in her chest, neither stress nor relief but some strange combination of the two. She always missed Rua when he was gone, and she loved him dearly, but this world was a poor place to exist; danger remained, and always would. Once someone existed here, they could be hurt here, and of course she was afraid of something else happening to Rua. She was afraid of the hurt he still carried, that neither were keen to mention.

When Rua was last here, Jaime had tried to give her a new way to focus it. Nobody had a choice who was here, or who wasn't, so if nothing else, wouldn't Rua at least be glad to be here with his sister, too? Even with her hurts and her distances and the million little damages she'd taken over the lonely years? And maybe that was true. Maybe this time, for real this time, she could be someone worth calling 'sister' out of more than obligate resignation.

Maybe.

The trip to Heropa was as short and as eternally long as ever: she took the bike to Jeopardy's Porter, and wheeled it through with her (look, it's small, it's fine), and took the route into Heropa at maybe a little higher speed than strictly necessary. Or legal. It's fine. Whatever.

Helmets left with the bike, she made her way into the diner — spotting Rua in an instant, as always the most familiar face in the room. She siddled up next to his booth, leaning on the partition with her arms crossed.

"What'd you order?"

Smooth.

Rua tilted his head up - he had been looking down at his phone, so he only noticed she'd arrived when she spoke. He stared at her for a second. It'd been months for her, but only a night for him. But these...reunions still always felt kind of strange, even if from his perspective, they should've felt incredibly short.

Still though. He tried to act casual.

"Oh, y'know. Just some wheat toast and fruit. Trying to keep it health-"

The waitress approached and set a plate down in front of him. It was a shortstack of pancakes, but each pancake was wrapped around a sausage and had what appeared to be hashbrown filling. Rua looked at the pancakes. Then at Rua. He opened his mouth to say something.

"And here's that extra side of bacon you asked for, hun," the waitress said, setting a plate with a couple strips of bacon on it. She affectionately tousled his hair and went on her way. Rua's mouth hung open for a second as he tried to come up with an explanation.

"...I haven't eaten anything in like eight months, okay. I need protein."

Yeah. That sounded good. He took a bite of his bacon.

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