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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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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.

Her imagined version of events is decidedly more gentle, which perhaps contributes to her looking somewhat saddened at that reply. Given her limited observations of marriages, however, it isn't surprising.

"Why would she do that?"

She'll leave any foam recreations be, for now.

Because chicks are like that comes to mind, but saying that to a nice girl seems like bonehead move even beyond him; instead he has to fumble for something both not as shitty and non-revealing. He'd never cut it as a spy.

"She'd find that kind of thing fun for about ten minutes," he says. "Then she'd realize she can't book facials on Dino-Planet, and I'd have to leave her behind, so..."

A little tah-dah gesture, with dumbbells and all.

"She wouldn't let you chase something fun alone? Not even, like, part time?"

In this hypothetical he has the myriad opportunities a stay on a Barge can afford, so she doesn't feel like she's stretching much to imagine a scenario in which he can easily make it home when he cares to.

And it seems sad, to think a spouse wouldn't want their partner doing something as fun as working with dinosaurs.

"Maybe part time, if the money's good," he concedes. "And she's pretty into me being a killer."

And frankly, so is he.

"Into the work, or the money?"

Because that's an intriguing criteria to meet, she'd wager. Dinosaur contact beats murdering for challenge and or sport by a wide margin. She's reached another pause, weights lowered to the ground as she regards him curiously and stretches her arms to either side.

"Both," he says. It feels like conceding something to admit that Sylvia probably wanders when there isn't enough money on the table, but he's casual enough about explaining: "She got me into this. She sets up most of my fights."

"Does she do any, herself?" There's no trap in the question; no wide gulf in perception between answers, but it's not an unimportant aspect of the whole.

It's playing into the sport angle in her head. Despite the implicitly casual bar-approach background he'd mentioned earlier she's envisioning something more like an agent, but something based in mutual aptitude for the hands-on aspects of his — lifestyle? career? — wouldn't be a shock.

"Nah, she's got people to do that for her," he replies, easily. No need to mention how easily she steps behind an automatic; they've had their disagreements over that. The real weapon is anyone who would kill for her, anyway. "She's crazy for it, though. Lights her right up."

No Juliet, to be sure. Nodding, Misty drops her gaze to her weights, hums.

"Sorry it's working out like that then, I guess. Seems to get complicated fast with couples."

Travis has never had too much pride to be pitied, and maybe that’s a good thing, with the reactions he gets. But something about a sorry makes him wonder if he’s giving off the wrong impression. Or worse, that he’s giving off an impression that’s entirely on-track.

He’s not stupid. He knows how beyond the realm of normal they are.

“So I won’t be a ghost dinosaur wrangler in space,” he shrugs. “Apparently marriage is about sacrifice. If that’s mine, who gives a shit? Could do a lot worse than two people who see each other for who they really are.”

"Sure, yeah. I'm not knocking that part. It's nice when big personalities can find each other. Just, I don't know."

A shrug. The complexities of relationships do extend to observations, even.

"Bummer to not be able to chase what's fun and fulfilling."

“I’ll find something else,” he says, like this something else isn’t drinking beer in the Texas wilderness as he browses eBay for vintage consoles, and a millionth replay of Hotline Miami. “You’re single, yeah?”

"Yeah," she replies easily, picking up her weights again. No more pauses, she decides, it's harder to pick up when she lets herself come to a complete stop. "Out of my depth, I get that, it's just funny it shakes out like that for people."

“You ever been in love?”

That’s casual. A totally normal thing to ask someone you’ve just met.

She laughs, because even though it passes her standards it definitely isn't, and shakes her head.

"Nope."

There's clearly more to come, so she doesn't bother reaching for anything to fluff it up.

"Okay, so the only universal thing about being in love is that it'll make you do crazy shit," he tells her. Just thinking about this gets him amped, a little showy about it. "Completely batshit things that no one on the outside is gonna get. Fighting ghosts and space battles are nothing compared to a whiff of her hair. Everyone thinks that's bullshit until it happens to them. Then they're in deep, deep waters."

"No, I get that," she says, smiling through it if only because it is something endearing that he describes. "I just mean it's a bummer that the crazy shit is being stuck in someplace you couldn't do something you'd have wanted to otherwise."

It sounds a little more like illness, a little closer to a sinkhole, every time.

It's eerie.

“I’ll figure it out,” he assures her. “And she’s from Europe, they all love to travel. She used to call me from Ibiza and Monaco and shit. We’ll still go places.”

"Good."

She doesn't know him well enough to press it further. His life, and compared to murdering people for fun it hardly seems the most pressing thing to tackle.

"Just hoping it's fun for you, I guess."

Travis thinks about being the sort of person who goes clubbing in some swanky European club and buys a sparkling water for twelve dollars (or whatever the conversion is from euros), and all he can do is look at Misty with an increasingly blank expression.

And then he shrugs.

“Heavy shit for a first meeting, but it’s got a nice flow,” he says. And then, wry: “We should fight sometime.”

She laughs, or maybe she's so focused on the increasingly-less-comfortable weight that what emits registers more as a genial pant.

"I hardly think I'd be any competition! On-and-off as my stuff's been, against somebody who's been doing this full time."

Not impossible he'd find use in it (small weights, more reps), but she can't imagine it's likely. "You ask everyone that, or has heavy shit won something over?"

True, she’s hardly got the bite of the spitfires itching to kill him within minutes of meeting, but he never underestimates girls, to say nothing of women. He’s heard enough lithe teenagers with charms on their backpacks call for his blood to know better. Women who wouldn’t die until he said she‘d won, even with his sword stuck right through her, his edge of his sword grip flush with her gut. And Speed Buster would have killed him if he hesitated for an old woman, right?

Misty says she fights, even if she isn’t a regular. That’s enough.

“I think if you had any bloodlust in you, you’d be good at it,” he says. Thirst is a good motivator. “And nah, there’s usually a mood. You walk into a place, you lock eyes, you exchange a few words, but you already know someone’s getting powerwashed off the concrete within hours. Some wardens here, they don’t get that. They decide you’re a time bomb they gotta diffuse.”

Before she can give any more thought to skill, Misty's caught on the metric. Kneejerk associations with bloodlust are something dangerous and random, too close to cruelty for comfort and too seemingly indicative of something off, something untrustworthy. Something dishonorable. Recognizing that association, she can acknowledge she won't be able to self-assess for it without bias. She doesn't think she possesses it, or at least no more than anyone who's witnessed any injustice, but his matter-of-factness inspires some willingness to mull on it.

Of course, considering it at any length means she's dead silent well after he's finished speaking. Realizing this, she clears her throat and lifts her gaze from where it had settled on the floor.

"Sorry to hear that," she says, of that simplistic read of him. Or maybe they're just wary. Likely not a call she should make without more conversation with those wardens in question, who she decides not to ask him to name. Instead she presses on regarding the fight itself — which is good, she decides. She won't seem avoidant.

"There rules to this kind of thing, when it's just keeping from getting rusty? Does it have to be to the death, do we get to yield, that kind of thing?"

Because as much as she'd like to be sporting, she isn't about to lay down and die for it.

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in some ways the most deluded tag i'll ever write

POURS ONE OUT

Re: POURS ONE OUT

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