breakin a sweat, C

Just another, average morning for Nico. Picking locks, escaping derelict buildings, trailing shady characters—shady characters that happened to be her roommates—circumventing their plans to lose her tail, and eventually ambushing them from a narrow alleyway in the slums of a city she’d only just moved to. Yep. Just another average morning. And all of this before she’d gotten dressed, no less! Soft, white fabric enveloped her from her waist upwards in a warm, sweatery embrace, and only perhaps a foot more down from there was afforded the cover of rather childishly printed shorts. Almost as if she did not notice her state of undress, however, the puerile mercenary clung casually to the weary pit fighter she had, as of late, found herself rooming with.

“Eventually,” she said, pressing her cheek to his leg and looking up with a smile. “When we get wherever you’re going, I guess.”

Most things, like the opinions of others, never really bothered her anymore—at least, not in a way she’d ever let on. Squeezing his calf in a make-shift hug, she let a laugh bubble through and settled against his foot for the ride. People stared, people laughed, people ran when Dusk scowled, and all Nico did was smile. The sun was shining on her face, she was finally getting her way, and she had a cat-shaped backpack of sweets and other such necessities: what more could she ask for?

Friends. Family. Peace of Mind. You know. Normal things, remarked that snide voice at the back of her head, making her stomach squirm uncomfortably.

A huff of air blew the thought away like a cloud as she returned to watching the way that the dying sun glinted off the asphalt or fell among the crumbling buildings like broken glass from their windows. Despite her weight, which wasn’t that much, Dusk was making quite good time, she thought, city blocks ticking by with every few minutes of the clock until he dragged her into another dank alley. She was just beginning to wonder if any of the streets in this city actually lead anywhere or if they were all dead ends when a shape like hot coals seared against her eyes so bright that she had to shut them.

When she opened them, the light had dimmed to a sickly yellow oozing out onto the green plastic bags and tarnished trashcans. A large, hulking form of a man impeded its path and theirs, but when he fixed his gaze on her and quirked a brow, she merely blinked and smiled sweetly. Almost as if he wasn’t sure if she were real, the man looked to Dusk for affirmation; no expression crossed his face, but he stood aside to allow them passage into the amalgamation of sweat, blood, booze, and shouts emanating from the portal he guarded.

“Why?” she echoed, tilting her head in such a way that her cotton candy hair rubbed against her carriage’s leg.

She paused. Why did she want to come so badly? A shrug rolled naturally across her shoulders before she had even given the question much serious thought. Many of her decisions were made on pure impulse, and maybe this was just another half-baked plan contrived so that she wouldn’t be alone. Maybe she wanted to see more of Dusk’s life and why he was the way he was; she lived in his room more often than she lived in hers, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t curious about what he did to come home all beat and bloody and swollen to hell and back. Maybe she just liked violence—she certainly worked around it enough. Maybe she didn’t know.

“Because I wanted to,” she finally answered, no more of an answer forthcoming as she released his leg on an outward swing and rolled into a sitting position against a nearby locker.

Cherry petal eyes immediately settled on the smirk etched onto her companions face, darting away as soon as they brushed against the glass-shard curve. Without much further ceremony, she stood up and craned her neck around to peer at the dingy grey locker room. Dried stains of what could have been any number (or combination) of bodily fluids spackled the walls and floor, and a few suspiciously rusty locker corners were dinged in pretty hard. The lights overhead flickered and gave off an annoying buzzing, and she recalled from the narrow hallways outside, where one person couldn’t maneuver around the stench of human vice enough to feel anything less than suffocated, that most of the rest of the naked, ugly yellow bulbs didn’t work.

“’Kay,” came the chirp at last, and she turned away to amble off into the umbrage of the linoleum floors and moldy bricks.

Without the sable grumpasaurus who frequented this dive, Nico looked en more out of place. Pale pink bed head and the occasional small yawn painted her childish figure horribly out of context in the narrow, threatening halls. She moved easily enough, at least, tiptoeing barefoot around discarded needles and abandoned filth in the crevices between wall and floor, and it wasn’t long before she had, by some means, acquired footwear. Disappearing down a stairwell, when she emerged, a pair of slightly used combat boots in charcoal lack hugged her slender legs up to her calves.

A few more submersions into the labyrinthine club’s underbelly followed, each with additions or subtractions to her outfit, until, by the time she had followed the primal cries into the building’s heart of darkness, she was fully dressed. Still strangely noticeable in her black dress and ribbon-bound hair, she found as she exposed herself to the teeming mass of testosterone in the fight chamber, but it wasn’t too bad. Most of the men were too busy to notice her or make a pass as she wiggled through them, too focused on the recent loser being carted out in a pulpy mass of blood and flesh to notice the young woman scaling the industrial walls in acrobatic feats until she sat perched on one of the rafters. Hardly even bothering to secure herself so high above the all-too-human world below her, Dusk’s stray cat leaned forward from her seat to watch the fight from afar. She thought, just maybe, she could see a familiar mop of black hair striding out into the cage…

Beneath her feet, the heavy iron girder rumbled with the roar of the crowd below, the ring of the bell rising all the way through the roof of her mouth with a sharp, metallic tang. The bang of their feet, the collision of bodies, every impact was a steady drumbeat thrumming in sync with her pulse. She could feel the rush of her blood in her ears as every artery welcomed the adrenaline with open arms, but the adrenergic agonists she’d ingested in lieu of breakfast had her veins humming a melody of tranquility above the riot underfoot.

With almost disturbing acuity, she cocked her head to the side and tuned in to the symphony of blows in the orchestra pit in the room’s center. Dusk was amazing, punch after punch after kick after strike landing flawlessly with hardly a knuckle grazing the charcoal hair whipping about his face. Nico shivered at the intensity in his gaze but leaned forward nonetheless, sickeningly enthralled by the opera she watched. It was a catharsis, she presumed—all of these people crammed in this room like they crammed in their suits and their cars and their offices, unable to lash out but more than willing to place bets on the people who could and who would. Functionalism at its finest, and beautiful at its worst.

“Quelle belle bête,” she murmured under her breath as the bell chimed again, an eerie hush falling over the arena as if it had been the call of a hypnotist’s snapping fingers.

When Dusk looked up to the rafters, she had relocated herself to one nearer to him and was watching him quietly, intensely. By now, the men had begun to notice her and whistle up to the open skirt wandering above them, but they were of little consequence, and she dropped down onto the blood splattered mat as nonchalantly as if it were a bed of flowers. Bête indeed, this man was an animal, wild and unbroken, but she was ever the kitten to his feral lion, approaching him without fear and swiping her hand briefly over a single cut over his left pectoral.

“You overcompensate for your left blindspot and throw your punches wide,” she observed. “Try to pull them in tighter.” Looking up at him, though, with that bright and childish smile, she didn’t look like she should sound like she knew what she was talking about. “You’re amazing!”