Ryan had only been coming over to see if O-Ren was around, partly just to say hello, mostly out of boredom. He hadn't been counting on any actual excitement, though. Dashing over as he saw her fall, he was fast enough to catch O-Ren, mostly by getting knocked to the ground himself.
"You tried," observed O-Ren, already tucking the picture away into the bag with the petals. "Arigato." She pulled herself up off the ground, offering him a hand. "Are you okay?"
"Fine," Ryan said, nodding as he took O-Ren's hand, pushing himself to his feet. "Thanks. Are you okay?" She was the one who'd done most of the falling, after all.
"It's not the worst fall I've ever taken," O-Ren said, and brushed herself clean. "Besides, you made a good landing mat." Her hands might have been a little shaky, but it had nothing to do with the fall.
"Well, I'm glad I could be helpful," he said dryly, dusting himself off. He'd taken worse falls, too, most caused by someone with far more intent. Frowning, he tipped his head to the side, looking at what she carried. "What were you doing up there?"
"I was clipping a branch to take back to my old house, and I saw...." She trailed off, looking over a the picture and where it lay on the ground. "Something that shouldn't have been there."
Ryan followed her gaze, debating whether or not he should touch it or ask. It lasted barely a second, and then he was stepping over to pick it up and offer it back to her, careful not to look. It wasn't his to see unless she wanted him to. "This place does that a lot," he said. Not to him yet, but he'd seen it before. "Something of yours?"
"You can look," O-Ren said, after a couple of long seconds of thinking about it. "It's... from when I was very young. I was just surprised." She didn't feel as gutted as she might have another time.
So Ryan looked, taking it in for a long moment before he glanced back up. "This your mom?" he asked. It seemed the most logical possibility. "And you." She looked so tiny, but happy, as happy as he'd seen her, at least without the island's influence.
O-Ren nodded. "She was a very happy person, most of the time. Sometimes I worry about how sad it would make her, to see that I'm... this way." She shrugged. Flat.
He shook his head, handing the photo back. "I don't know," he said, "I think she'd be pretty happy just that you've got people looking out for you." He missed his own mother, but he knew she would have been proud of him here; she always was.
It took him a moment to catch on. He nodded when he did, hands slipping into his pockets. "The ones that took you home," he said. "Yeah, I -- I, uh, heard about that." He'd had one of his own, but it seemed like his time in Newport had been far more peaceful and uneventful than what some others had been through. "How was it back there?"
"Someone leaked that I killed off a major mob boss and I fought for my life," O-Ren said, as nonchalantly as possibly. "Arya was there. I couldn't have done it without her."
For several long seconds, Ryan just stared at her. Then he scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed. "Well, lucky she was there," he said. He was still stuck on the part where O-Ren had been fighting for her life. It wasn't like he hadn't known she'd come from a dangerous place and been all wrapped up in things like that, but it was still hard to think of sometimes. "Shit. That's..." What would have happened to her here if something had hurt her there?
"At least in my dreams, they're all dead now," O-Ren said. "Even Bill." That still stung her, how she'd worked for the man in another future and not known.
"That," he said slowly, "could have gone better."
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O-Ren shifted her weight from foot to foot, a little anxiously. "Did you know I had one of those dreams, this summer?"
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