#9

[rank1]

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.

Comments

[rank1]

“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?”

[shadowsran]

"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."

[rank1]

“You ever been in love?”

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

[shadowsran]

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.

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

[rank1]

"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."

POURS ONE OUT

[shadowsran]

"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.

Re: POURS ONE OUT

[rank1]

“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.”

[shadowsran]

"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."

[rank1]

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.”

[shadowsran]

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?"

[rank1]

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.”

[shadowsran]

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.

[rank1]

Her silence feels damning, a little sliver of the same pie Grace had served up when he’d overstepped on questions. Was it the power washing comment? The casual chatter around death? He doesn’t know.

He’s not sure if it matters.

“Whatever rules you want,” he replies. “You wanna tap out when you know you’ve lost, tap out. I’m not gonna kill someone who isn’t serious about killing me.”

[shadowsran]

"Good. I'd rather not, you know. Bad habit for wardens to get into anyway." Even if the policy regarding it ends up being something differing from one ship to the next, it's a good one. However willing he may seem about it.

She nods once to herself, and hums.

"I could go for it as long as nobody ends up dead, yeah. Nobody dies and we can tap out when we know it's not going to turn around for us, that sounds doable. I'm gonna be useless after this, probably," her head inclines, indicating the weights, "But I can get back to you tomorrow maybe. William gone for this yet?"

[rank1]

"When I first got here, I challenged him," he replies. "But he wasn't up for it. Me, I'm always up for it, so let me know when."

Might have been a more impressive start to his run here, though, if he'd killed his way through the wardens. Sometimes he wonders about it, imagines working his ways through the levels of the ship, leaving a trail of bloodshed. No Lucifer to stop him.

"Are you guys even allowed to kill us?"

[shadowsran]

Her head shakes. "Not, like, for fun. We can do self defense though. Or— I mean, I'm assuming that's still the case, not impossible there's tweaks about this place I haven't heart about yet. But I'd assume that's still the rule of thumb."

[rank1]

"So if someone's wilding out in someone else's direction, and you get involved, is that still self-defense if you kill 'em?"

Pure curiosity.

[shadowsran]

"I'm gonna say probably? I'm sure there's some algorithm somewhere that spells out the difference between a nonlethal threat and a lethal one and how we're supposed to spot the difference, but nobody ever told me."

He's fixed with a warning gaze of middling intensity regardless.

"Don't start anything trying to feel out the difference. I'm sure people have tried, and it didn't get 'em anywhere."

[rank1]

"Getting people demoted doesn't light my fires," he replies, though he makes no particular promise either. He's hardly a schemer, but if it happens, it happens. Still, her intensity catches him. "Would suck for you though, huh? Would you be afraid to fuck up on a call like that?"

[shadowsran]

A single-shoulder shrug is her initial answer.

"If I thought I had to, I wouldn't feel bad. Ending up demoted over it, I don't know- isn't like I'd be losing much, and I think if the possibility would really spook people that bad they don't need to be here."

She's dead regardless. It'd sting to be sure, she'd get her sulk in, but it's a risk that comes with the job. It's heat she can take.

[rank1]

He raises his eyebrows momentarily, his gaze sharp behind his aviators. Okay, maybe she’s got more spunk than he thought.

“Rolling with the punches,” he remarks. “I think most people would be scared shitless. Having nothing is about the worst you can get.”

[shadowsran]

"I think maybe that's been working in my favor all this time. I'm not waiting on anything out there, and nothing out there's waiting on me. Could be here one year or ten or die tomorrow and there'd have to be plenty of worse places to be."

Of course it relies heavily on her buying into it being real in the first place, and she's frightened often for others, any inmate with something to get home to who could disappear any day. But left to herself, she can afford to wait the process out.

And she'd prefer that the system be honest. She needs that now.

"If that was a call I made I'd have made it for a reason. I could ride that out."

[rank1]

"You seem like an outlier for wardens then," he replies. "Most of them don't seem like they've ever wanted for anything. William was a fucking CEO. Lucifer is the prince of darkness."

It feels easy to imagine a hard life for her: having nothing, having no one, having had to kill, clothes that look thrifted.

[shadowsran]

"William and Loki started out as inmates," she's quick to point out. Of course Loki was a prince on top of that, but she feels some impulse to defend them. "I don't know anyone else here all that well, so I can't speak to who's spoiled, but every warden's got to want something bad enough they're here voluntarily."

[rank1]

Loki having been an inmate feels like a surprise, even if it isn’t actually one: the guy had been so good at preening for the camera that it feels hard to imagine him ever struggling. That is spoiled, isn’t it?

“Anyone can come up with something they’d get,” he replies. “But good people don’t usually come from fucked up places.”