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Entry tags:

#9

Passengers: Travis and Misty
Location: the Gym
Date: Mar 13th
Summary: Temp-temp gym day
Warnings: none yet but it's Travis, there will be curse words

Travis shows up to the gym's door early. Needlessly early. Part of it feels like not having anything else exciting to do, and another part of it feels like he's accidentally given himself some sort of Pavlovian training. Iht's like how e used to have an automatic cat feeder for Jeane, and she'd gotten so used to the routine that six o'clock would come around and she'd be flinging herself across the room waiting for it, rolling around in front of it. Desperate for the food drop. He'd had the thing for three fucking weeks! It took three fucking years to wean her off it, get her to stop waiting for a specific time on the clock! How does a creature with no concept of time learn that shit!

Now he's the cat. At the tail end of his month with William, he's sitting at the gym door like an animal, waiting for that sweet, sweet dopamine hit from lifting a bunch of heavy shit, and pounding it out on the treadmill.

Travis cranes his neck to peer down the hall. She's not there. Of course she's not. He's here obscenely early. He sighs at himself, letting his head fall back against the wall.

With William pretty much done, now there's gonna be the new chick. He's curious to see what she'll wear. The airy shawls and big 'ol boots he'd glimpsed didn't look fit for anything but drifting around Coachella. He can teach her, he figures. Teaching other people gym shit isn't hard, but it does feel like being on the bunny hills after winning an Olympic medal. Okay, maybe not an Olympic medal. Travis is not catch-and-jerking close to 500 lbs. He probably never will, given that shit is a young man's game. But even if he's ancient at 34, he's put what, a decade into the gym? That's no small amount of time. You can do a lot of things in a decade. What experience does she have? Nothing? What if she isn't into it at all? What if she says nah, fuck it, let's go to the library instead? She looks smart. Maybe she's one of those sexy academic types.

When he finally sees her coming, he gets his ass up off the floor. He rolls his shoulders and settles quite comfortably in a posture he knows is cool. He decides to resist the urge to introduce himself too much: she probably knows. Even if he hadn't made a spectacle of himself with the commissary buy, William crosses his 'i's and dots his 't's. Hell, he does it so much he's earned himself a mission.

He settles on:

"You ever lifted before?"

It comes out a little over-eager anyway. Oh well.

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We're assassins feels like a stupid answer, but the question throws him for a little loop, kiddie-coaster style. There are people out there who only understand killing as it's spoken about on the evening news, and there are people who have lived it. This chick has killed and she doesn't get it?

"It's not a sport." A thread of intensity comes through, taut like wire. "It's real. It's proof you lived. If you just shake hands and walk away, you never had a stake."

Edited 2022-03-14 21:32 (UTC)

"Just trying to figure out what's the most apt word," she says, her tone leaning apologetic. "I get the stakes of it being that real, that clear cut, it's just throwing me that there's stuff like rankings and that you can decide to let people go lick their wounds if you want to."

Death as proof of living, to her, is something altogether more animal. No pleasure to be found, no sentiment— a matter of eating or not eating, continuing to live past the moment of attack or not. She doesn't want to prematurely decide there's an element of conquest here if there isn't; so she's going slow.

"It isn't part of the....expected life cycle of this kind of thing then, that people are going to be at you until you're dead?"

Or maybe it's solely the crossfire that's soured it.

"There's the way I do it and then there's the business," he replies.

The line between the two feels like a wild scribble in his head, a tangled mess with no start or finish he can make sense of, even years later. He sets down the weights, thoroughly distracted.

"So it was all run by this association. They managed everything. The assassins, their hits, the money."

Cleaning up the messes.

"If you're at the top of their ranks, you make them big bucks, and you get the best fights. You're a prize dog for big-ticket fights. They don't care if some newcomer ambushes you on the toilet on some random Tuesday. New guy's their new dog."

A nod. More or less, she's following along fine. She doesn't quite feel her question is answered, but the more background is filled out, the better.

"Don't know that I want to imagine the kind of people just in it to be a prize dog," She says, brow furrowing. These people hardly sound loyal, and if fights are arranged — again, she comes back to sport. And sport isn't real, not the way he sounds like he's wanting.

"Really hard up for money, or really into that chick? Or— are real fights with people trained for them that hard to come by?"

Travis catches himself wondering if she's doubting what he's saying. Few people have asked for details –– why would they, twisted shit that it is? –– and assassin gets about as many guffaws as it does sober looks and turned backs. It doesn't bug him. It's reality. But this chick seems to want to know more anyway.

He wonders if he's just digging himself a deeper hole.

Travis paces a little, slouched.

"I was completely broke," he says. That's not much of an admission either; he's almost always broke. "The chick's gorgeous. I'm still crazy about her. And the fights... fuck. I feel like I've tasted enough that anything less just wouldn't do it for me. You ever felt that about anything?"

Edited 2022-03-15 03:59 (UTC)

Her lifting slows as she considers his question, eyes dropping to the floor.

"I don't know," she finally answers. "I'm not sure anything's ever been that satisfying. Stuff these places—" Unwilling to set down her weights she instead rolls her head to indicate the Peregrine, but really the whole concept of the fleet, "—put us through, maybe, but there's nothing that's supposed to come close to it."

Hmm.

"People are supposed to feel that satisfaction," he replies, firm. "Tens of thousands of years ago, people fought to live, and that spark never went away. It's in our nature. What do you mean, this place does that?"

She doubts cavemen were spending time and energy killing each other for satisfaction, but hasn't figured out how she'd like to articulate that before he's asked a question.

Her head shakes. "Nothing like that. I don't mean murder, just, like, 'experiences nowhere else can come close to replicating'. William tell you about Breaches?"

"Oh, yeah," he said. "Pirates and prison trains and alien abductions, and magic desert guys and a bakery. You were in some bat opera too, yeah? It was some counter-culture thing."

He can imagine they're intense. William sounded low-key crazy talking about them, though in a way Travis could get. He's played video games and forgotten his ass was parked on a couch, so how couldn't living it get overwhelming?

And then:

"Coming back to reality must be a real bitch, though."

She barks a laugh and manages shortly afterward, "Oh, it sucks. Those were satisfying. Even the awful ones, they feel complete when you're out of the bubble and looking back on it as a whole picture, at least the majority of the time."

She still has no idea what the deal was in SanFran, with the aliens. But it's fine.

"Everything out here is too messy."

Travis smiles in turn, completely unguarded, and he sits down on another bench. It's a knees-apart, slouched-shoulders sort of sit. No decorum here.

"It is, but if you found a life you liked in one of them and lived it full-time, it'd get messy too," he considers. "You'd have time to notice all the bullshit."

The way you clip through the flowers, the way everyone has their little routines and will go back to them the minute you vanish, but this time it's real and it's drudgery and it's last minute errands and phone calls to return and bills to pay. High points are only good contained, and he's not sure he's ever known one world he'd want to disappear into forever.

"Maybe," she concedes with little fight. The weights have slowed, and she's on the cusp of pausing them for sake of the conversation. "There's more foundation to them, usually. More purpose, and I think I could handle everyday messy with that in the mix."

"What do you do in your real life that's so boring?"

Maybe a little rude in its delivery, but hey, he does plumbing and mows lawns to pay the bills sometimes. There's nothing more boring than that.

It feels time to pause. The weights are lowered carefully to the floor, and while she's short of sweating she pulls her hair aside to air out her neck.

"It's not that it's boring, necessarily. I'm not so spoiled for all this crazy that I can look around at the space jail and think I'm over it, it's more...well, excitement's not the name of the game. You feel out the cycles of stuff wherever you are, but there's running in them because you're into it or headed somewhere, and there's doing it because there's nothing else to do."

"Really?" he says. It's not disbelief, not exactly –– it's the thought that he's enjoyed bookending sleeping late and lifting with trying to cut Satan's throat. Hell, jacking that ATV had been enough of an adrenaline rush to make the boredom of solitary bearable. "Can't claim I've ever had much of anywhere to go, but I can find something to do like no one's business. What would you do if you could? Just do breach after breach?"

"I'd like it, but I don't think I'm far enough gone to actually think it'd be good for me." However fun it is, it's less so without the opportunity to step back and reflect on them, dissect from the distance and try to break it down into relevant patterns or signs.

She shrugs. "Just kind of waiting for the right thing to click into place. I'll know when it does, and then I can go for it wholeheartedly. Until then it's just trying to make sure there's as much room for it to drop in as possible."

Maybe not that far gone, he thinks, but apparently out of the driveway. Up some sort of road. He gives little thought to whether it's good or not –– just that there's a thing she wants and she'd be willing to reach for it. So many people settle for the first mundane thing that falls into their laps.

"You gonna vanish into a breach?" he asks. "Or see yourself doing something in a breach, and make it happen for you in the real world? That might get a little fuckin' tricky if you want to be a bat person, but a baker..."

He shrugs.

"I figure option B, yeah. Something's eventually gonna feel right that'll translate okay to the outside. Or, with the variety of people we're gonna meet, places we'll see, maybe I'll hear about something worth the attention. That feels right."

At the end of the day it has to be applicable to the real world over a breach, but there's more than one route it could take to her. Or she to it.

Rolling her shoulders, she grabs the weights again.

"But you've pretty much got it."

"Cool," he says, genuinely pleased with his own ability to figure it out. He loves a good mystery, but there's something exhausting about people who look into the middle distance and blow off questions. Enough of that at home, maybe.

Travis gets up just long enough to get a set of dumbbells for himself, and he sits back down to do bicep curls.

"What's the closest you've gotten?"

"I liked being a bat person," she answers, more easily than she'd have expected. "Art and flying and stuff, but I don't think I liked the world very much." Too narrow, whether she ever managed to personally leave or not. She's not intentionally thinking of breaches alone, but they are the closest she's come.

"My first breach, probably? Too many layers to it to break down quickly, but it was going pretty good for me by the end. Had brothers, had a very good cat, a very sweet grim reaper, and it was looking like I was going to get to go home— someplace with magic and genies and talking snakes, stuff like that."

Even now, she sounds fond. Even on the outside, coming down from that reality, everything seemed simpler.

"Good time."

"Nothing stopping you from getting a cat to tide you over until you meet the Reaper. Magic and genies, you can just live by Disneyland," he suggests. And then, irreverently: "That or do a shit ton of peyote or ayahuasca."

Not everyone has a dream as easy to fulfill as killing, after all.

"Tried peyote in a breach too," she says with a grin, and not disapprovingly.

"Appreciate the suggestions, though. Figure these boats are a little too dangerous to keep pets on, but I'm thinking it'll be a nice first step."

A lull, long enough to focus on the weights before continuing.

"Anything like that for you, before you landed on killing people?"

He returns that grin. Yeah, he can see it, hippie girl like her. There's droves of them in California, like packs of feral chihuahuas out for avocado bowls. Dumping chia seeds in everything. Not every day you'd meet one on a space ship, though. This place ain't very VSCO, and all.

"Nah," he says. "Most of the shit I'd want to do just isn't a thing. Mecha pilot, ghostbuster, dinosaur handler. Even if this place gave me a door, who knows if I could take it.”

"I'm sure somewhere there's ghosts that desperately need busting." Surely they've seen weirder, and will continue to. "That all sounds big and comfortable, and this place runs you through big and colorful all the time. Might not set you up perfect, but it's a lot of food for thought."

Travis's smile stays fixed on his face as he lets himself be carried away by the mental image of getting out of this place and fucking off to skip from planet to planet on adventures. Maybe some sort of jurassic Rambo on a Monday, living in a jungle and gunning down dinosaurs, and then sending ghosts straight to the fires of hell on Wednesday, and then blowing up star systems in aerial combat in a mech by Friday.

But the longer he sits with the idea, the more his smile feels like a grimace.

"Yeah, maybe," he says. And, as an offered excuse: "My wife would kill me. The real one, not the..."

A vague shrug.

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