Repairs and Reunions

[ComradeCharlie]

((Yes, zomg and another post!))

"Ghosts..." Kat responded, dipping her head forward a little, one of her braids falling down alongside her face and she brushed it away with a quick flick of her hand. Tha's wha' you get fer bein' idle, Grey. Ya start believin' in ghosts. She knew perfectly well that he didn't mean actual ghosts of the see-through spectre variety, but she felt her point was still valid. Grey had had too much time on his hands to just think and wallow on the past.

She herself, had kept busy ever since she'd been discharged and deemed fit for fight, going back to Eavesdown to throw herself into the turmoil of the underground and back into the pits. She'd kept busy, too busy to think about the past and when she did, booze and the occasional use of drugs helped. But now she was here, sitting in front of Grey and the past came rushing back, punching her in the gut in a way that she almost felt it physically.

She closed her eyes and raised a hand to pinch the bridge of her nose, drawing in a couple of deep breaths. Here was a link to the past that she'd sworn she never wanted to see again, sitting next to her, reminding her of what she had been missing over the past year. Grey had been right, back at the docks. She belonged in the Black. Or if not the Black, then as a soldier, but there was no longer a war going on, and fighting in the pits were a poor substitute for fighting a war. "So, you got a plan fer gettin' tha' hopeless cause flyin' 'gain?"

[Raius Vaiethaen]

"Not my fucking fault," Grey said with a helpless grin as the limo pulled up to the event. "The Temple was good for me in some ways. The hours of meditation, however, were not. At all." Sitting there for sometimes an hour or more at a time, remembering - reliving. Replaying the events through his mind. But in his memories, he saw them not through his own eyes but from the eyes of a non-existent observer watching the action. A million things he wished he could change, but never could.

The door opened, spilling in light to penetrate the somber mood of the limo. Grey was genuinely surprised to find that there was a red carpet on the ground. "Pretty sure I could fix half my ship for the money they spent on the hotel and getting us here..." he muttered under his breath as he stepped out. Immediately, he could hear people whispering amongst themselves. Nobody pointed outright, but it wasn't hard to tell - their eyes bore into him. He was a figure straight out of a half-cred Cortex vid dressed like that.

"You're gonna win this thing, and then I'm gonna rob you for the winnings and hire a mechanic," he said to Kat, wearing a big fake grin for the crowd. Time to play it up, play the crowd. Everyone else might be here to fight, but I'm just here for entertainment. Give the people a show, and see what comes.

[ComradeCharlie]

"And here I thought meditation was all about thinking of nothin'," Kat said, as if reading his mind, although all she did was extract information from his tone of voice and the expression on his face. It was infectious in a way, and she couldn't help think of the last time she'd seen him. She pushed the memory away with a forceful effort of will and clenched her teeth together, the muscles in her jaw working furiously.

When the limo pulled over and stopped, and the door opened, she grabbed her duffel and followed Grey out onto the red carpet, ducking her head a little as she looked sideways at him. "What the rutt is this circus, Grey?" she asked, ignoring his joke about robbing her of her winnings. She glanced around, spotted cameras in the crowd and wished she had worn something with a hood. "D'you know wha' this'll do to my rep if it goes out on the Cortex?"

[Raius Vaiethaen]

"Sorry, Kat. Thought you knew when the offer came in, this ain't exactly a pit fight. If the rich are funding it, it's bound to be a circus." And a circus it was. This wasn't no Persephone fight between rugged Spacers beating into each other. It was an event, sponsored by some higher-up societal types, with fighters coming by invitation chosen for their styles and abilities to get the best out of the show, so to speak. Boxers, wrestlers, streetfighters, and various martial artists were gathered here. Some of them had fought in the pits before. Some were professional fighters. Others, Grey had never seen before.

The fighting area was a lesson in irony. They had taken a fairly posh venue and deliberately turned it into a low-lit dingy arena to simulate the dirtiness of a low-down fight. Except it looked like the low-down fight scenes out of a high-budget blockbuster, which was all that these people knew of such things. Either way, it was laughable. And it looked as though that small crowd gathered outside were pretty much the extent of the spectators as well. There couldn't have been more than a hundred of them, max. So while it wasn't an illegal pit fight, it wasn't exactly a safe thing either. Good to know. They expected blood, maybe at least one serious injury like a paralysis - or death.

Grey felt pretty sure of himself. Having spent the last while at the Temple, back in serious training, helped for that. But he never felt truly endangered going into fights, whether it was a gunfight or a brawl. The adrenaline was there, sure, and the fear of staring death in the face - but never along the path did it really register in his mind that he might lose, that he might die. Or maybe it was because he expected to die and fought as if he already were. Either way.

Some oiled-up and scantily clad woman - or girl, rather, by the look of her age - directed him to his 'corner'. Not that he had anyone with him. No matter. He sat down, knowing that fighters traditionally stayed on their feet the whole time before a fight. If he was going to be waiting for the preamble and the matchups to be announced, he'd rather be sitting for it.

[ComradeCharlie]

"I'm not stupid, Grey," Kat said and glowered at the man, trying her best to ignore the shouts and yells from the crowd and photographers lining the carpet. "I'm rutting well aware that this is a more or less staged fight, but I wasn't expecting a gorram media event." She gave a look at the other fighters as she and Grey came inside, picking out a couple of faces she had met in person and a few others she had seen on the Cortex. "Wonder how many others were hustled into this piece of go-se show..."

Once separated from Grey, she sniffed in through her nose, smelling adrenaline and sweat, but no blood. Nothing in this place suggested that blood had ever been spilled here prior to the fights to come and she sneered at the girl who led her to a place where she could wait, while getting ready for her first match. "What a gorram joke," she mumbled to herself as she sat, dumping her duffel at her feet, then shrugged out of her t-shirt, trousers and boots, stuffing it all into the bag.

For a moment, as her fingers brushed over a hard surface inside the lining of the bag, she considered bringing one of her blades into the ring, just to show these bastards what they had really come from. But she figured it would probably get her arrested and thrown in jail if she actually killed someone tonight, so she left the blades where they were and flagged down a kid who wore some kind of costume to show that he was part of the staff. "You lose this," she said and shoved the duffel into his arms, "'n I'll hunt ya down 'n kill ya myself. Dong ma?"

[Raius Vaiethaen]

There was a bit of commotion from one of the corners, which gave Kat at least some answer to her first question. One of the other fights - a professional boxer if Grey remembered correctly - was refusing to fight. Probably for similar reasons that Kat was outraged. He shrugged; he doubted a straight-up welterweight boxer would've lasted long in this mix, anyway. Not that the people gathered here were chosen to be equal in their abilities.

Soon after the crowds settled into place and a short introduction and welcoming speech was made, the preliminary fights were underway. For his first fight, he was matched up against a 6'4" monster who, according to his introduction, used to be a close-combat trainer for the Alliance Marines. Which was all fine and well, except that he seemed to be very unsure about how to handle a man who just stood there, waiting for the attack. So Grey got the upper hand for the first few strikes by waiting to be attacked and then leveraging his superior snap-strike speed to give him a couple wake-up calls.

That seemed to serve as a warm-up and the two began to fight in earnest quickly enough, circling each other and looking for vulnerabilities. Fists, feet, elbows, and knees flew furiously about the combat ring. In the end, it was Grey's unconventional fighting style that won him the edge to put the man down. Victor, yelled the announcer. The girl came up again and helped him back to his corner and started to towel him off, but he ended up just taking it and brushing her away. Circus indeed.

The rest of the fights were mostly a blur. The second one was easier than the first, only lasting twenty minutes with Grey delivering an opportune uppercut straight to the guy's jaw that laid him out flat and had the crowd roaring. The third fight was where he went down, half-strangled by a 275-pound grappler who clenched onto him hard and beat his brains in. Even after he came back into consciousness (he had blacked out in a vicious hold) he felt woozy and was bleeding in places he didn't even know he'd been hit.

"It's all on you now," he murmured to Kat with a conspiratorial wink as he was led away from his corner into a spectating position. As the matchups worked out, he would've been fighting Kat had he won that last fight. He settled down into his seat which had a girl on either side of it to tend to his injuries to watch the remainder of the fights. After all, he had an interest to protect in all this - he'd placed a tidy sum on Kat to win. Through a third party, of course.