by Robin Banks
“So the priority here is to protect Alya?”
“Yeah. What did you think it was?”
“And the priority in that bar was to protect Quinn?”
“Yes.”
“Gods. Are you serious?”
“What’s the problem?”
“You’re asking me? You don’t see it?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose and rubs it. “Ok. Tell you what: I have an idea. Come to the cargo bay for some training. You can tell Alya you got whacked then.”
“She’ll know I’m lying when she looks at my cut. It feels half healed.”
“She can’t without taking your dressing off, which would make it open up again if it was fresh this morning. Just tell her to leave it alone.”
“She won’t listen.”
“Then tell her more loudly. Come on. I want to show you something.”
I follow him out to the cargo bay. It seems less work than arguing and a training injury would make a better excuse. Alya can get quite shrill when she’s pissed off.
When we get there, he smiles at me. “We’re not going to do anything special. I’m just going to do my thing and you can do yours, ok? Just take it really slow, and when I tell you to stop, stop as you are.”
We mess about for a bit. It’s more of the same, more of him kicking my ass. I can’t stop it any better in slow motion, not without cheating and speeding up, and that seems pointless. The only difference is that this time every so often he tells me to stop and look at what I’m doing. After a few times we’ve done that, he nods and backs off.
“Did you notice anything?”
“Nah. I don’t know what I’m looking at. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“How much of an asshole can I be before you tell me to fuck off?”
“Try it and see, I guess.”
“I can look at the way you fight and I can make some deductions about you. Hell, I can’t stop myself doing that: for me it’s like reading someone’s face. It happens automatically. I know that I may be wrong, because there are often many ways of getting to the same point, but sometimes I just have to go with the information I have. If I’m wrong you can tell me, or just ignore me. Ok?”
“Sure.”
“You’re as tall as me. That makes you considerably taller than the average person. Because you’re in proportion, it gives you greater reach. Greater leverage too, if you learnt to use it. And you’re stronger than me.”
“Yeah, right. That’s why you can climb all along the ceiling and I can’t even get up there.”
“First off, you never tried, and second, I have less weight to lift. My body might be more suited to some tasks but you outmass me, and the bulk of you is muscle. You look like you built it doing solid work, too. Most guys your age I worked with built themselves up at the gym, focusing on the workouts that make them look and feel strong. Most of them had massive strength gaps because parts of them were undertrained. You look like you built yourself doing hard work with good posture, and whoever supervised you looked after you so you built yourself up progressively and didn’t end up a bundle of old injuries like me. Though I might be crossing the line between seeing and knowing here, because I know you worked with Kolya, and I know how he works. Here’s more of what I see: you’ve not been taking care of yourself for a while, and your health is declining. You tire out more easily than you’re used to. From what I’ve seen of your lifestyle so far, I’m not surprised.”
“You don’t know my life.”
“No. I barely know you, but I’ve seen you work past exhaustion more often than anyone else. You don’t sleep enough, you don’t eat properly, you don’t exercise. The only reason you’re still functional is that, body-wise, what you started out with is so good that it’s compensating for it. If I lived like you for any length of time I’d be a corpse.”
“What’s any of that got to do with my fighting?”
“Anything that prevents you using your body effectively will influence your fighting. More than that, building a self-defense system over a lifestyle that harms you doesn’t make a great deal of sense. But this is a giant tangent, and not where I was trying to go. My point was that you’re taller and stronger than the average person and you move better, but none of that comes across in the way you fight. And this is where I cross firmly into what I think, not what I see.
“I could be full of shit, but I think you learnt to fight when you were young, and you haven’t really fought since. No, actually that’s not right: you never learnt to fight at all, not in the sense of willingly squaring off to an equal opponent, or even tussling for fun. You learnt to defend yourself against much stronger opponents when you were young, and then you stopped having to do that and haven’t readjusted your body image. You’re big and strong but you fight like someone small and weak. You piss away all the advantages your body gives you.”
“I said I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“That’s not it, though. You know exactly what you’re doing. You’re doing what has worked for you. The more wound up you get, the more you fall back onto what you know. That largely involves doing nothing until you have a chance to really put the boot in. You take very few strikes, but every one of them is designed to maim or kill. You don’t do anything that would only hurt, and that makes sense if you expect it not to hurt enough. Slightly hurting a stronger opponent would only piss them off and make it worse for you in the long run. You also don’t really try to block; not actively, anyway. You let things come at you, passively minimize damage as much as you can, wait for the right opening, and then you go for the kill. It’s a valid strategy for a person with a completely different body. It doesn’t put your advantages to good use.”
“Alright. So I gotta remember that I’m bigger?”
“Yeah, but that’s only a part of it. Your mentality is even more important. When you fight, you’re not thinking about winning. You’re not thinking about scoring points, coming up on top, or teaching anyone a lesson: you’re just trying to survive. But you’ve also accepted going in that whatever they’re trying to do to you is probably going to happen regardless of what you do. You don’t believe you have a real chance at influencing the outcome. If there’s no hope, not fighting back is a way of minimizing damage, because it means you’ll only take the damage they wanted to inflict in the first place. Fighting back would mean taking all that damage, plus the damage it took for them to get you there, plus anything they feel like adding as punishment for you daring to defy them.”
He’s starting to creep the shit out of me, but I’ll be damned if I let him see that. “You just said I strike to maim or kill.”
“Yes, but only under two circumstances: if they’ve given you an unmissable opening or if you’re going to die anyway. Both make sense strategically. In the first case there’s a good chance that it might work, so it’s worth trying despite the risk. In the second, who cares? If you’re going to go down, you might as well take them with you. They’re very good strategies, in their place.”
“So what’s your problem?”
“This isn’t their place. They’re not particularly suited to a guy of your size, shape, and potential.”
“Potential? You just said I was a crap fighter.”
“No. You’re not a fighter at all: you’re a killer. That’s one of the problems. You have no middle gears. At some point you might find yourself in a situation where they’re essential. More than that, you act like you can’t fight for shit and you won’t even try, right up to the point when you take someone out. That can work in an assault because it gives you the element of surprise, but it won’t discourage people from trying to pick on you in the first place. They won’t pick on you a second time, for sure, because you’ll fuck them up, but there may not be a need for the first incident to happen either. Learning to fight and learning to advertise that you can fight may stop you getting your head whacked into hard objects.”
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“This is what this is all about? The fact that I got my ass kicked?”
“No. That’s a tiny part of the problem. The real problem is that you don’t try to protect yourself. You don’t think you can, so you don’t bother trying. Everything you do is out of hopelessness or to protect others. You threw yourself at those three guys to protect Quinn, even though you thought you were in for a pasting, or worse. That kind of situation can get really bad really quickly. You know that as well as I do.”
“It could have gotten really bad for Quinn, too. Do you have any idea what those guys could have done to her?”
“I sure do. Precisely the same that they might have done to you. But two trained fighters against three random jackasses may have had a chance. One alone, not so much. You assumed you were going to lose, and you were going to get your ass… Let’s not go there. And you threw yourself in the path of it all to spare Quinn. That’s crossing the line between heroism and suicidal ideation.”
There’s a fucking knot in my throat now. I’m worried that if I try to speak it will all come out sounding like this is bothering me. I don’t want that. I want him to stop talking, stop looking at me, stop thinking about me. I want him to cut this right out and forget all about it, but I can’t make him do that, so there’s no fucking point in trying.
That’s when it all hits me. Dude’s an asshole, but he’s dead right. I can’t win so I don’t try. And he’s not finished talking yet.
“You also expected Quinn to bail out on you.”
“I didn’t! I just thought she’d be sensible. Salvage what she could.”
“You thought she’d save herself and leave you to get fucked up. You didn’t trust her to have your back.”
“Why should I? I hardly know her. And she kinda sucks at fighting, too.”
“She sucks in training. She’s terrified of hurting people by accident. However, she has absolutely no compunction about hurting people on purpose, provided that they deserve it.”
“I didn’t know that!”
“You didn’t ask. More importantly, you instinctively made her vulnerability your responsibility, even though you hardly know her.”
“What else was I going to do? Let her get a pasting?”
“That’s what you expected her to do to you, isn’t it? Your connection to her was strong enough that protecting her was your duty, but you didn’t expect her to do anything to protect you. Why the double standards? Are you not worth defending, not worth the loyalty of your people?”
My eyes are fucking burning and so is the air coming into my lungs. Either he doesn’t notice or he doesn’t care, because he carries on talking.
“You did the same with Alya. You immediately jumped to protect her feelings without any consideration for yours. You didn’t even consider the impact of your actions on your relationship. That is not only self-damaging, but myopic. You didn’t consider how much your relationship is worth to her, how much losing her good opinion of you could hurt her.”
I manage to croak, “What good opinion?”
He shakes his head at me. “How many years have you known her? And you honestly believe she’s the sort to choose your company if she didn’t care for you? That she could care for you without liking and respecting you first? Why do you think she keeps you around?”
I want to tell him that she feels sorry for me, that she got herself stuck with me and now can’t get unstuck, that her fucked-up sense of responsibility won’t let her get herself rid of me, but I can’t. If I open my mouth right now all that’s gonna come out is a wail, and that’s not gonna happen. So I keep my trap shut, and still he won’t shut up.
“Luke, I don’t want to change the fact that you fight for those you care about. I’d admire that in you even if it hadn’t saved my partner’s skin, which it has. You could have bailed on Quinn, and I don’t want to think what might have happened. Those weapons she carries are single-use. Your courage, or dedication, or whatever the fuck makes you take action is not my problem. My problem is that you defend other people when you won’t defend yourself and you don’t expect them to defend you. That’s fucked up.”
He’s staring at me, clearly expecting me to say something, and I fucking can’t. I can’t and I won’t and everything is a fucking mess inside my head and out, and I want to go home so bad that it makes me want to cry, but that’s not fucking happening, not the crying and not the going home, so I just stay still and quiet even though everything inside me is getting pummeled by a swirling vortex of crap, until he shakes himself off and starts tidying up after us. When he’s finished, instead of fucking off as I’d hoped he would he just sits himself down against the wall, looking like he’s happy to wait forever for my response. This at least is something I can handle: I’m shit at most things, but I can stonewall like a pro.
We’re still sitting there when Alya swoops in.
“Godsdammit, kid, I’ve been looking for you everywhere! Isn’t it a bit early to be training?” She spots my dressing and her eyes widen. “What the hell happened to your face?”
“Got whacked, skin split. Not a big deal. It’s just a little cut.”
“Let me take a look.” I try and move my head out of her reach, so she barks at me. “Now!”
She starts prodding and poking all around my temple. She’s not gentle about it. It’s a good thing. It gives me an excuse to cringe. I’m cringing at all the crap Asher threw at me, but they don’t need to know that.
“That’s damn close to your eye. Did you get it cleaned up properly? Do you want me to have a look?”
“Nah, it’s alright. Quinn fixed it. All you Academy folk get the same med training, don’t you? And I don’t want it to start bleeding again.”
She shakes her head. “Alright. But if it starts to hurt worse, or feels hot, or your eye starts to give you any problems, you tell me, ok? And I want you to take it easy until it’s healed up. It’d be a damn shame if it scars.”
“We wouldn’t want my career as a threedee star to go up in flames.”
She shakes her head at me. “Yeah. That’s what it’s all about. Kid, I don’t know about you. Just take it easy, ok? I don’t know what the hell you’re doing training so early in the day, anyway. You don’t normally get fully operational until lunchtime. Have you even had breakfast yet?”
I want to say that I’m alright, that I’m not hungry, but I feel Asher’s eyes on me. Godsdammit.
“I could eat. You cooking?”
“So this wasn’t a light whack: you’re clearly concussed. You really want to eat my cooking?”
“Kinda. I mean, the food sucks, don’t get me wrong, but the fact that you’re cooking it doesn’t. You haven’t cooked for me in ages. I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.”
Her eyes get kinda watery.
“You could have the best of both worlds: I could get Raj to cook.”
“What, so the food would be actually edible?”
“You’re being unfair. I can’t whack you when you’re already dented.”
I take it easy for the rest of the day. I’m not really in the mood to do much else. Walking the streets with a dressing on my face would make me stick out way too much and I have nowhere I wanna go. Anyway, when I pay attention to it my head actually hurts. I’m not sure why that comes as a surprise: it’s not the first time I’ve got whacked and it’s never been pleasant. Maybe it’s just weird that I’m noticing it because I’m so used to blocking shit out.
My head hurts. I’m really tired. My body feels about half functional, like an engine running on a low-grade fuel and with no lubrication. It’s moving, but barely, and everything is too much effort. Everything is draining. I don’t know how long I’ve felt like that. I can’t remember it becoming the norm, but it is: I can’t remember feeling any other way.
We leave the station that evening. Getting to a more reasonable g-force should be more of a relief, should perk me up some, but it doesn’t. When I hit my bunk at night instead of going to sleep I find myself
replaying Asher’s little speech. I don’t think I’ll forget it in a hurry. I just hope he does.
14. Quinn
I didn’t think it was physically possible for the little lord to get any more irritating than he has been, but he keeps exceeding my expectations. He’s learnt a new trick: instead of acting as if he was above it all, he’s dragging himself around as if he could barely support his own weight. He withers. He wilts. He droops. He does it all so prettily – how else could he do anything? – and so effectively that I am starting to believe that he missed his calling: his facility with numbers notwithstanding, he should be an actor. He could only ever play one part, that of the Suffering Hero, but he could play it to perfection. It doesn’t seem to take him any effort to stay in character, either. Unless I put a spanner in the works, that is.
Every now and then I get so fed up at the way he’s carrying on that I can’t stop myself from sniping at him. It used to take me a few goes to snap him out of his stupor, but with a couple of days’ practice I can now do it on the first try more often than not. I say just the right thing – or the wrong thing, depending on the point of view – and he explodes at me, suddenly perfectly capable of finding more than enough energy to interact with the world. It’s happening so often that it’s becoming a thing, a two-person skit we keep replaying. I mumble a couple of words and he screams back twenty.
The really surprising thing isn’t that it’s happening; it’s that it’s only happening between the two of us. Nobody else is taking any steps whatsoever to challenge Luke’s behavior. Asher isn’t getting involved at all, which is perfectly normal for him but irks me. Alya and Raj are even more irksome because they seem determined to humor Luke’s whims. They are treating his attitude as if it required tolerance and understanding rather than a stern talking-to. If they call his name three times and he doesn’t answer, apparently too lost in whatever morose revelry he’s weaving, they’ll call him a fourth time and ask him if he’s ok. Meanwhile, all I have to do is walk into the room and he’s immediately alert. The contrast is staggering, yet they seem to overlook it.
