rakuen | Battle! [day four morning!]

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Battle! [day four morning!]

Suzaku Kururugi vs. Zoro Roronoa
Weapons: Shoryu and Elizabeθ Buckley
Location: Gym
Time of day: Morning

He had lost, lost to Gino and therefore lost Huashi. Gino had refused to transfer her back, which seemed to infuriate the girl no end and meant that Suzaku had to try and win her back off Gino as well as Nunnally.

But getting back Nunnally was the main aim, before Gino got desperate or bored and used her weapon. A lot of people would get hurt if he did and as the days went on Suzaku was getting more and more worried.

To add to his worries Lelouch was still adamant about fighting Gino, despite the fact that Suzaku hadn't been able to beat the taller (and now older) knight. Still Suzaku shook the thoughts out of his head and concentrated on the here and now. He needed to try and win another weapon, though if he used Theta's weapon it meant he could fight unarmed.

But he would still feel better if he had another weapon as well, to fall back on and that meant attempting to beat this man, Zoro. He waited silently for him to appear.

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She snapped her head to the side, eyes closed as she listened to Zoro's decision. She took a deep breath, and was about to say more when he bellowed at her. She stumbled backwards, barely managing to keep her balance. She snarled at him, teeth gritted and her face screwed up in an angry expression. "I couldn't have done anything! Didn't you see it? My weapon is a joke!"

It was so painful to admit something like that. She'd always been the best. What would father say if he could see her weapon? Would he stop calling her his son? She couldn't show weakness now, only anger. Couldn't let them see the part of her that really was just a weak woman, that wanted to run back to Suzaku and cry. He'd accepted her so easily, and that meant so much to her.

She turned to look at the boy that had just come running up, at first just surprised, but quickly forcing outrage onto her face before she got caught being too weak. "I'm not afraid," she snapped. "I'm not afraid of anything." But how obvious was it that she was lying? Zoro seemed outright nasty, and she doubted he would accept her as what she was.

Unyielding, Zoro didn't back down for a second, even when Theta began to bare her teeth at him. Instead, he stepped up even closer until their faces were merely inches away, and there he squinted his eyes at her intensely, radiating heat.

"Your Weapon's only a joke if you let it be one," he replied shortly. He paused then, continuing his sharp gaze for a moment longer, then turned and stepped away.

Looking down at Romeo, he placed his hand on the boy's thick hair and ruffled it a little. "This kid?" he continued, speaking to Theta yet keeping his back to her. "His Weapon is a broom."

His head turned slightly, looking at Theta from over his thick shoulder. "A broom. But I just beat someone with it the other day, and they weren't weak."

"Sure, I had a suitable Weapon today, but you think it's just because of me that I won? It doesn't work that way here!" he suddenly said, raising his voice for the end of his sentence.

Turning towards Theta again, he stepped towards her again, fiercely glaring at her like some scolding teacher. "Weapons here, they're not just some hellogram," he continued, accidentally pronouncing the unfamiliar word incorrectly. "It's the person we're partnered with. Just like any good real sword, Weapons have a soul - the stronger the person, the stronger their Weapon. Doesn't matter what shape it takes."

Suddenly, he pointed towards Romeo. "This kid...well, he's a total chicken, but he wants to help his friends, so he makes himself stronger for it."

Throwing his arms up, as if to admit some symbolic defeat, Zoro started to back away again. "But if you want to give up and let your Weapon stay weak, fine - be a joke. I won't release you, though."

Romeo didn't even flinch when Zoro ruffled his hair, even though he thought the man was going to be mad at him for interupting. This was more because he would not show weakness in front of the swordsman who was teaching him then in any trust that the swordsman wouldn't hurt him. After all if Zoro wanted to hurt him he would, and Romeo wouldn't be able to get away.

He kept quiet though, turning to grin again at Theta, trying to reasure her it was alright because really Zoro was not as scary as he first seemed.

Romeo's chearful smile faded a little when Zoro told the girl that he was a chicken. He had tried so hard to be brave, especially around Zoro and to hear that his teacher still thought he was a coward made him sad. He would have to try harder! Do something to prove to mister Zoro that he was brave!

When Zoro had finished speaking, almost giving up on the girl Romeo piped up, "Mister Zoro can make you become stronger miss! We will protect you don't worry!"

Theta continued to glower and all but hiss as Zoro went on, though she did look over at Romeo more critically when he was pointed out. She gritted her teeth, though she wasn't up to meeting anyone's eyes, she growled out, "Perhaps it will get stronger with a few upgrades. At least you can use a broom like a staff. What is it you intend to do with those, roll them under someone's feet?"

She looked even more critically at Romeo when he spoke up again. "It's not 'miss', it's 'sir'," she corrected, but her heart was hardly in her words. She turned and started to stalk off, or at least as best as one could stalk with a limp. She didn't want to deal with this, didn't want to deal with these people. Maybe she could ask Sherlock to challenge Zoro, he'd be strong enough to beat him surely.

She didn't want to think that it was a weakness in her heart that made her weapon useless. She'd had to face so much already, she refused to accept that it was a flaw in herself that kept it from being useful. No matter what was in her heart, it wouldn't change the fact that her weapon was just a useless weight in someone's pocket. Unless the topic was clockworks, the strength of one's spirit just couldn't affect the real world.

Or could it? She didn't know anything about these 'holograms' or how they worked. Maybe she ought to start working on taking things apart to find out how they worked. That would be a wonderful idea, she figured, but it could be time-consuming. Either way, standing around talking to these people wasn't going to help her any, so she had every intention of clearing the area before they got her upset enough that her façade cracked.

With the duel complete and ownership transferred from Player to Player, Zoro could've simply ordered Theta to hold her ground - well, he could've issued the order, at least - but despite his disapproving look, he said nothing to her as she walked away.

Instead, he turned to Romeo; he didn't smile, as was usual, but he seemed to be pleased to see him.

"It'll be fine," he said firmly, watching as Theta left the gym floor.

He said so, anyway, but Zoro knew he couldn't continue to indulge this person so long as she was his Weapon. A firm believer in matters of duty and responsibility, Zoro had to do what was truly best for his Weapons, however brief his time as a Player was, but he also had to have their loyalty, and this kind of attitude was unacceptable.

Whether she liked it or not, Zoro would be using Theta in his next fight. Hopefully, he could earn her trust by proving himself, or their relationship through the rest of the week would be a rocky one.

Suzaku had stood quiet and forgotten during the exchange, he didn't mind; after all he had lost. But he had not wanted to leave Theta when she was obviously distressed about being lost to Zoro. When she stormed out he followed her, half nodding half bowing at Zoro as he left the room.

"Theta wait..." He hurried to catch up with her, "I'm really sorry, but I'm sure Zoro is alright once you get to know him..." After all, the kid who had turned up was one of Sora's friends and Sora would not stand for any of her friends to be partnered by anyone who might hurt them in any way.

Edited 2011-04-20 20:27 (UTC)

Theta was quickly losing her composure, and her anger was giving way to tears. She tightened her free hand into a fist, and reached up to rub the back of her hand across her cheeks, trusting in the many magnifiers of her glasses to hide her eyes. She looked at Suzaku, not sure what to even say to him, but then the words started tumbling out haphazardly, not nearly as eloquent as she was used to for her lack of planning.

"I never should have agreed to this fight. Fighting him unarmed was a stupid thing to do, you should have known better! How could you lose to someone like him? I don't want to be his weapon, I wanted to be yours!" She'd not really had friends as a child, so finding someone she got along with so quickly, who had accepted her without another word, had been something amazing. She barely knew Suzaku, but she already knew that he was someone she wanted to like.

But that wanting to like him was stinging now, and Theta didn't want to deal with that sting. So she did what came naturally to her in such a situation--she lashed out. "Just go away. There's nothing else you can do here, there's nothing else I can do here, so it seems that's the end of that."

Suzaku knew she was upset but was still a little surprised at the anger that came from her. He deserved it, of course. She had trusted him and he had failed her. He looked at his feet and said nothing, of course he would go away if thats what she wanted. As usual when faced with situations like this Suzaku's posture became very formal, like he was a soldier being chatstised by a superior.

"I'm sorry, sir," he said again and then, as being told to go away was like a dissmissel he turned and left feeling horrid. What had he done? Theta was right, it was a stupid thing to do. Stupid decisions that's what Kallen said, and Suzaku agreed. Stupid decisions and hurting yet someone else.

He left quickly and silently, leaving Theta alone. For about all of three seconds.

Romeo looked between mister Zoro and the new girl who was being so rude. She had said that she wasn't scared but she was acting scared. At least she was acting scared in the way that Nikita would, or some of the Black Brothers. Acting all big to prove they wern't scared when really they were the most scared of all.

As she stormed out Romeo had an idea. He didn't want her to leave, because he didn't want her to not be friends with Zoro. That wasn't right because they had to work together and if they were friends then it was team work. Like the Black Brothers, like him and Alfredo. They could do anything together!

"I'll be right back boss!" He ran off after Theta, he would keep his promise and come right back no matter what happened with Theta.

But if she didn't like them, if she wanted to not be on there team and Zoro was adament that she was his weapon. Well Zoro owned her weapon, and that meant that she would be just that, owned. Just like Rossi had owned him, and the God of Death before Rossi. That would make Zoro like those bosses, like Alfredo's boss...

Even though Theta was an adult and not a child, it was still the same because here the rules were different. But he had vowed to Alfredo, he had vowed to Alfredo as he was dying that he would help create a world were all children were free and no one was owned.

If Theta was their friend, and wanted to work with them and help them win fights then it was different and so Romeo was going to show her that they only wanted to help her!

His enthusiastic grin faded a little as he rounded the corner to hear the last bit of the exchange with the man who was Sora's friend. "That wasn't very nice m...sir!" He said, remembering that she had asked him to call him that. He didn't understand why but she was an adult so he would do as she asked.

"I'm sure he tried his best, mister Zoro was just stronger!"

A little uncertain, Zoro looked down quizzically at Romeo. Before he could respond, though, the eager boy was already off, leaving Zoro all alone to quietly shrug his shoulders.

Still, so long as he was at the gym, he could get in a bit of time to train while the others worked out the 'discussion' aspect of their problems; he had his own intentions on how to ultimately deal with things, and those would come in time. For the now, Zoro left the open floor and adjourned to a small, private and wide-windowed room adjacent to where the action had taken place - when the others were done, they could spot him inside.

Romeo had her quite figured out, but Theta wasn't about to admit that she was bluffing. That defeated the whole purpose of it. She sneered when he said her words weren't nice. Yes, he had her well figured out, down to the blindingly obvious parts. She turned to face him, but her sneer was obviously hastily pasted over something much more human, much weaker.

"Of course it wasn't nice. He made a bad decision." Just like she wanted him to think he'd made a bad decision by coming to talk to her. She didn't want company, didn't want to be reassured that everything was all right. She wanted to not belong to someone like what little she'd seen of Zoro. Of course, it wasn't really fair to judge him by just a few minutes, but she didn't care about what was fair and what wasn't.

Still, Romeo had her attention for catching himself and obediently calling her sir. She appreciated that, though she wasn't ready to back down. "He shouldn't have fought someone stronger with that much of a disadvantage. I didn't want to be lost!"

"But he tried his best sir, and anyways this way you get to meet more poeple and make more friends! Mister Zoro is really nice!"

He was still a little confused, because he had thought this person was a woman but you said sir to men. So maybe he was like Nikita, after all Romeo had known Nikita for weeks before Alfredo told him that she was really a girl. But that didn't really matter, what matters was that he had been rude to that other man.

But Romeo understood that he was frightened and didn't know them. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an apple, it was a little grubby and a little bruised but it was still definatly edible. It was his last one, he had to go pick some more but he handed it to Theta after rubbing it on his shirt to clean it. "Here sir, eat this and you will feel better!"

"We'll see how nice he really is soon enough, surely," she huffed. She didn't want to find out the hard way that not everyone was as open as Suzaku had been, and Zoro seemed exactly the type to do something nasty to her if he didn't approve of her gender identity. Perhaps she was reading too much into it, but Theta preferred to be careful when it came to this matter. True enough, it would have been safer still to hide her gender identity, to bow her head down and try to blend in, but the thought of doing such just made her absolutely sick.

She blinked in surprise, though, when she was presented with an apple. She reached out to take it, completely stunned by his approach. Then again, from his word choices she was guessing that he was lower class, and she'd heard that getting fresh food was nigh impossible for them. Was this, then, something he'd gotten from the cafeteria as an extra special treat? It wasn't as if it would be difficult for him to get another while he was here, so turning it down would probably be a cruel snub.

"It's a fine apple, thank you." Again, her words were a bit hollow, this time simply for the fact that she was speaking while highly distracted with surprise. "I'm not really hungry right now, but I'll save it for tonight," she mused, tucking it carefully into her pocket. "How nice do you think Zoro is? Will he believe his eyes or his ears?"

Romeo was glad that the apple was taken and smiled slightly as the man seemed to calm down a little. Romeo was glad, he wasn't used to dealing with adults like this but his experiance of adults here at this school was that a lot of them were just as confused and frightened as children. They wern't automatically cruel to him, and since he had been here a long time now he was beginning to realise that a lot of them were just the same as kids he had known back in Milano.

At the mans question Romeo blinked, not quite understanding what he meant. "He's really nice sir, even though he is sometimes scary!"

He had no idea what he meant by the second part, "Both... I think... he told me that a swordsman has to trust all his senses, what you see and hear and smell and... is that what you mean sir?"

She sighed, shaking her head. "That's not quite it. But I suppose there's nothing for it, and I have to face him eventually..." She didn't want to. She wanted to run off and hide in her room, to avoid having to do this at all. That wasn't how she did things, though, so she stood a little straighter and moved to head back in.

"We'll see how accepting he is, but if things go badly..." If things went badly... Actually, she knew someone who was stronger than Suzaku, who had won despite being essentially unarmed. She'd face Zoro, but if things didn't go well, she'd just ask Sherlock to challenge him for her. For that matter, even if things only went passably well, she was certain that things would go much better if she was a weapon for someone she really rather liked and who shared her dorm room besides.

At any rate, it was a plan, and so she finally felt up to giving Romeo a bit of a smile as she headed back towards where Zoro was. "Are you coming as well..?"

Romeo was really confused but he nodded, "Of course I'm coming sir, I promised mister Zoro I'd be right back!" He had and Romeo always kept his promises.

He was still not sure why this man did not want to be on there team. He knew mister Zoro sometimes seemed a little scary; Romeo had been terrified when he first met him, but this man didn't seem to even want to give them a chance! "It will be alright sir! Anyways like miss Sora always says, we all have to work together to get out of here, we're not really enemies. We're all in this together, so being on our team is just like being on mister... Suzaku's team," he said, remembering the name of miss Sora's friend.

They were almost at the gym now and Romeo hoped this boy was not going to be all angry again, "Oh I'm Romeo sir! What's your name?"

Again with people acting like this place was a terrible travesty that needed broken free from! Theta had to struggle to not snort derisively at the idea. It was only a school, and she distinctly remembered agreeing to, er, something. Surely it was her enrolment, and the terms surrounding that had to be one of the memories she'd lost.

Those memories, though... That was a more difficult topic, and one she was inclined to agree with the general consensus about. She'd finally gotten the full story from Grenn, and she was far from pleased. Not that she'd let on at the time. No, she'd been thinking about it since, and she didn't like it one bit. Grenn had called it something like 'pieces of our personalities', or whatever the direct quote was. Theta couldn't be bothered to recall it exactly. 'Pieces of our personalities' sounded about right. Was that what they were on about with wanting to break free of the school?

She held firm on her idea that simply graduating would be more than enough to free up the remaining memories. Yes, she thought that perhaps completing her coursework and winning a round as a player might just unlock everything. When she graduated, she would come home with prestige, she was certain. Though it was troublesome not having a clockworking workshop to work in. Surely she needed to keep up her skills. The last thing she wanted was to get rusty as an ergaleomancer simply for the sake of the other skills this school would be teaching. ...Though it was a very, very welcome break from the judgemental cruelty of her classmates back home.

Romeo's introduction startled her back out of the thought-tangent his words had sent her on, and she blinked in surprise, turning her attention back to him. "Elizabeθ Buckley. ...And it's 'Miss Buckley' when you say my name. I'm male and female, so there's a bit of word juggling." It felt strange to announce that so directly. Strange but good... He'd taken to calling her sir, how would he take to this? Belatedly, she remembered her manners. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Romeo." She paused, offering him her free hand to shake.

Romeo blinked. She was male and female? Well he had never heard of that... But that only meant that people wern't like that in Italy; because Doctor Casella had never mentioned it and he knew everything. But that didn't mean it wasn't like that in different countries, or different worlds like Miss Sora said people here came from.

But he could remember that, saying sir when speaking to him but saying "miss" before her name. "Alright miss Buckley!" He grinned at her, "It's nice to meet you too," it was strange being called mister anything, as he was only a kid and being called by a name was good enough for him, especially since Elizabeθ had two names and had asked him to call her by the second. That meant that she was a nobleman or the equivalent in her world.

It was also strange to shake hands with an adult, but a lot of adults here expected it of him. He liked that; it made him feel grown up.

"Let's go and talk to mister Zoro then, sir!" He started to lead the way with another smile.

She nodded and moved to follow him, letting him head on ahead. That and her leg hurt. Walking so fast hadn't really been a good idea, but she'd really wanted to get away after seeing Suzaku lose.

Romeo didn't seem like a bad person. Lower class, obviously, but... Who knew, apparently they did have their charms. He was being good to her, and it felt nice to have someone work so hard to get her to smile. This was how people were supposed to treat her.

"All right, all right. I'm coming." That didn't mean she was any less wary about all of this. She didn't like the way Zoro came across, it made her thoroughly nervous.

((Moving to another thread - this one's getting too squished!))

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Battle! [day four morning!]

Suzaku Kururugi vs. Zoro Roronoa

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