goneawayworld | Being Alone

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Being Alone

Who: South and anyone who encounters her
What: South trying to avoid everyone and her problems at once, and failing
Where: Various places on the Rig
When: Several days after South and York's arrivals
Warnings/Notes: None up front

South’s not really used to being alone, not really. Growing up with a twin you can’t shake for trying does that to a person, she supposes. As much as she resents it, resents him, it’s… a difficult adjustment, to make, one made infinitely harder by her lack of anywhere else to turn.

Turns out pissing off everyone you know from home is a poor choice, who’d’ve thunk it, huh?

Dealing with things in a healthy manner isn’t one of South’s strong suits, so rather than doing so she decides the best course of action is to simply avoid anywhere she might encounter her brother or get into another fight with Washington (he’s more than capable of handing her ass to her on a silver platter and she’s getting tired of it, if she’s honest) or have to deal with York (who’s just a pain in the ass, really).

For days, rather than get involved in anything festive or going out of her way to get to know the other New Hires, South spends her time in a few places:

a) On the Top Deck, which she finds supremely uncomfortable thanks to the daytime heat, but it also means most people won’t appear to bother her, so she considers it a fair trade. Sat near the edge, she sits and watches the fucked-up world outside and finds that it is possible to miss home, even when home sucks too.

Of course, it’s not a fool proof plan. When someone does come by and join her, she sighs to herself, but comments, “Weird fucking view, huh?”

b) In the Training Area, where she spends all of her time whaling on punching bags, lifting weights, running, or beating up training droids violently enough to break a couple. She could request her equipment but she’s not training to train, she’s there to exert restless energy and rage without directing it at the poor fucks around her. Easier to focus on the feeling of punching something than on your emotional turmoil!

The sound of someone coming up behind her makes her pivot, fist raised— but she holds back and huffs, instead, rolling her shoulders as her arm falls. “Watch it. Unless you wanna get hit, stay the fuck back.”

c) She wanders the gardens, the once, because even South sometimes needs somewhere relatively quiet to go. She’s not looking for anyone; quite the opposite, really, she just wants to get away from everything else for a while.

Unfortunately for her, she’s not the only one. Fortunately for whoever else she encounters, she’s at her least combative down here and simply says, “Kinda nice in here. Don’t remember the last time I saw so many fuckin’ plants.”

d) The Mess, is one of the few times she can’t get around communing with the group, but even during their shifts there the she tries her best to keep to herself by sitting as close to alone as she physically can. Perched at the ends of tables, not looking anyone in the eye, but occasionally glancing up at the sound of familiar voices before setting her gaze firmly back on her plate.

When someone sits nearby, she rolls her eyes and swallows her mouthful of food. “There’s other open seats, y’know.”

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South rolls her eyes and scowls, falling instinctively into a loose defensive stance to mirror his. What a ball of fucking sunshine this guy sounds like (not that she can talk).

"I don't 'flail'. I was talking about you fucking coming up behind me," she says, a little bit breathless. She's clearly been in here a while, sweat sticking her hair to her forehead. "May as well be looking to get fucking punched, doing that."

South's not exactly the paranoid type, usually, but she'd had more people than usual out for her ass since she got here and, well, she didn't exactly get to the recommended amount of time off after the concussion from her last fight. She's more on edge than usual.

Brand shrugs one shoulder. "I've been training with people like you since I could walk. If I got punched in that fucking situation, I'd need more practice anyway."

He nods toward the bag she'd been working over, but doesn't look away from her, because he's not a fucking idiot.

"You want to keep whaling on that or do you want to go a few rounds with something that'll hit back?"

He's trying to be friendly right now, since he and Rune have to work with these people. It's a pain in the ass.

Since he could—? Nope. Not today. Not touching that with a ten foot pole. Not even to see if he's serious or exaggerating.

She eyes Brand. His reactions leave no doubt that he knows how to fight, whenever or wherever he learned. And, if he's not talking out of his ass, he might even be capable of keeping up with her, which would be... helpful. The droids are unsatisfying and her normal training partner—

Well. He's not down here.

"Sure," she says, stretching her arms and wiping her hair from her face. "Hopefully you're not all talk."

"That much I can promise you," Brand replies dryly. He steps aside and pivots, gesturing in the direction of an empty sparring ring.

"Any guidelines you want to lay down to start?" he asks, since he doubts very much that she was trained as a Companion and therefore who knows what the hell her usual rules for sparring matches are.

South wipes her hair out of her face and moves over to the sparring ring, re-wrapping her hands as she talks.

"Other than basic tap-out and trying not to actually fuckin' kill each other, nah, nothing on my end. Used to going all-out, figure you tend to know when someone's lost," she says with a shrug. Freelancer never exactly encouraged holding back and following the rules, the Director had a thing about how the enemy never would, so why should his agents? That and, "Normally I'd be sparring with my— with someone who knows my limits, but I can more than handle whatever."

Brand snorts.

"My usual partner made himself scarce after our first round today," he says. He's riding Rune harder than usual, but Rune doesn't have access to his sigils here. He needs to focus more on the physical end of things. Brand will chase him down again after this; getting an idea of what he can expect from the other people here is useful enough to permit Rune to think he's escaped.

South raises a brow slightly, finishing off her wraps and falling into stance, idly bouncing on the balls of her feet.

"Got someone from home around too, huh," she says, not even a really a question. She jerks her head a little, inviting him to come at her if he's ready.

She and North haven't sparred so much as once since she got here, and she hates how she misses that. No one challenges her in quite the same way as the guy who knows her moves just as well as she does, but she's down here avoiding him, so... whatever. She doesn't need him.

"Yeah," Brand says, and then because she's clearly less in the mood to talk than she is to spar, he kicks things off with a few punches. She's significantly taller than him, but the difference between a tall fighter and a short fighter just comes down to training. Plus, he's been sparring with Mayan on and off since he was a teenager, and Mayan is over four hundred years old and taller than her.

A flash of a grin crosses South's face as she dodges the first strike. That's more like it. It's easy to fall into the rhythm of a fight.

South's been getting into brawls since she was a preteen, and the same resourceful, scrappy style she grew up with is still present beneath the training and experience she so clearly has.

She dodges less than she blocks, and she blocks less than she retaliates. What Brand will learn quickly is that South's a fighter who thrives on momentum, she is constantly moving, every kick, punch and strike at the end of a burst of motion, taking advantage of her size and strength to hit hard, chain together blows.

It's effective, when it works, but it's also a style that relies on missing as little as possible. Missing wastes momentum, wastes energy, and leaves her wide open for her opponent.

Not so much of a problem, when you're fighting as part of a pair, but on her own it's an exploitable weakness.

One of the great things about fighting is that it grounds Brand in the present. He can't worry over what might happen in the future or what's already happened in the past because someone's trying to hit him and he has to keep them from doing that. It's clarifying, simplifying; consequences and victories are near-immediate rather than long-term. Sparring has the added benefit of being minimal in the genuine threat department, which means he can experiment to see what is and isn't effective.

Like he'd told South, he's been training to fight since he could walk and it wasn't something he'd done under protest. Violence comes as easily to him as breathing, a natural skill honed and controlled for his own uses. He's fast and precise and he's not above a dirty shot. He fights like he's trying to hold her attention, whether or not his blow lands properly. The most noticeable thing about him as the match goes on is that he fights like a barrier: nothing is going to get past him. He parries and sometimes he straight up takes a hit, but he doesn't do much dodging. It's like there's something behind him that he's trying to defend at all costs.

It's been a while since someone besides another Freelancer has given her a run for her money.

"Guess you aren't all talk," she quips once, whilst recovering from a good hit, taking the chance to observe that distinctive, human-barrier like way he moves around her attacks. She'd made her own mistake, making a strike she couldn't follow up on her own.

Brand has the skill to not just keep her on her toes but to take rounds, to make her get creative. South expects to find it frustrating—because that's what every other fight has been since she got here, frustrating. Only, it isn't, it's... challenging, but in the way any good sparring match is supposed to be. Not boring, like the bots, not enraging, like the very real fights with York and Wash.

No, it's just a damn good fight. Good enough to actually get some of her restless energy out.

Used to long, grueling training sessions, South can fight for a while without letting up, but she's also been down here for a long time before Brand approached and still riding the tail-end of that concussion, so before long she starts gets worn down a lot sooner than she'd like. It doesn't stop her outright, and she fights better than most would even as the wear sets in, but it's there.

It's been awhile since Brand has sparred with someone on his level. He's been kicking Rune's ass and teaching the kids for the most part; Corinne would be a good partner in the future but she was still getting used to her newly-rejuvenated body. So somebody new who can keep up means that he gets a challenge without needing to handicap himself, and it's real fucking nice.

Brand figures he could go another few rounds, but his partner's beginning to flag and the point of this was to get a work-out, not to pummel someone into exhaustion. He steps back, still keeping an eye out for another swing, and opens his mouth for the first time since they started throwing hands.

"Good fight."

South takes a step back of her own, breathing slightly ragged from the exertion, and wipes her hair back from her face again. She could say she's not done yet, keep pushing, but unlike certain people at the Project, she knows when to stop. Sometimes, at least.

"Damn good fight," she agrees, falling out of stance. "Been a long time since someone made it interesting. You do a lot of protective detail or something? Fuckin' nothing gets past you."

She's not a naturally curious person, and the question isn't exactly a curious question. She's talking shop, not even looking right at him as she starts unwrapping her hands.

Brand starts stretching, checking for anything that hurts more than it ought to.

"You could say that," he says dryly. "Or you could say I've spent my life trying to keep one fucking idiot alive in spite of his own best efforts."

For all that the words seem like they ought to be annoyed (and they are, to a degree), there's also no mistaking the deep affection in them. It's the kind of affection that turns into annoyance because the only other option is a bone-deep terror of losing that person. Rune drives Brand fucking crazy, but he's also his boy and the center around which Brand's universe spins. He doesn't know how Corinne survived the loss of her Kevan, but he's almost certain that he couldn't survive the loss of Rune.

"...sibling?"

The word slips out before South consciously decides to say it and she immediately wishes it hadn't, that she could somehow pull it back from the air. It says more about her than any answer would say about Brand and she cringes, balling the first roll of removed wraps up tight in her fist.

The tone in his voice hits close to home, is all, if a little to the left. Maybe if she hadn't been so goddamn worn out she'd have held her tongue. As it is all she can do is cough and pretend that she meant to ask that, hope that why that's her first thought isn't obvious. Or at least that Brand doesn't give enough of a fuck to care why in the first place.

Brand snorts and shakes his head. His biological siblings are strangers to him, and they'd only met and adopted Max this year. A Companion bond is different from the bond between siblings, which is good because otherwise it would be really fucking creepy the way scions and their Companions regularly get married.

He doesn't explain any of that, though. "Nah," he says instead. "Not like that. He's my partner."

Which isn't much of an explanation either, but explaining Companions to a human from a world where they don't have them would be a pain in the ass.

She isn't sure if him answering 'yes' would have been better or worse, what she does know is its an effort not to cringe again. Yep, that definitely said more about her than him, regardless of how little Brand cares himself.

"Right, partner," she says, not daring to actually make any assumptions about the word choice because she is not looking to further embed her foot in her mouth. Partner can mean a lot of things and they all cover what Brand described well enough. "Sorry. That was a fuckin' leap of logic on my end."

Brand raises an eyebrow as she tries to verbally back-pedal, then sighs and rolls his eyes. It's a very impressive eye-roll, makes use of forehead wrinkles and everything.

"I'm not gonna ask," he says. "I wasn't kidding about not being a talker. Your business is your business unless it becomes my problem, and you don't want it to be my problem because I solve those by yelling and hitting things."

He's already committed to emotional labor for himself and Rune, he's not taking on anyone else's shit.

South immediately seems to relax, shoulders dropping from a tense line and her fist loosening around the crumpled roll of wraps. She starts unwrapping her other hand, at last.

She even snickers, a little, at his self-described method of problem solving. That’s familiar in a way that isn’t intensely awkward.

“Thank fuck. Some people get so fuckin’ nosy,” she says, because in her experience, that’s been true more often than it hasn’t. It only ever gets worse when the fact she’s a twin actually makes it out of her mouth, or out of North’s.

Guess the silver lining to them not talking is he probably isn’t running around introducing her to everyone as ‘my sister’. A flash of a frown goes over her face at the thought but then it’s gone.

"I'm only nosy if I'm getting paid for it," Brand says, though he can't help but be amused that a bald "I don't care" is what it took to get her to calm the fuck down.

"I assume you don't want to discuss what I saw in your fighting style either," he adds, because if she's not talking about siblings or whatever she's not talking about she certainly doesn't want to discuss that it's obvious she's used to fighting with a partner. "So I'll stick with "good fight, we should do it again sometime"."

She rolls her eyes idly, not even directed at Brand so much as at herself; she's almost certain she knows exactly what he picked up on, she felt hyperaware of every time she made a move that relied on North's follow-up, so she's more than grateful he's not the type to push that shit.

She needs to work on it, and sparring with someone that isn't North is an opportunity to do just that.

So she nods. "Hit me up if you need someone to go a few rounds with, I'm rarely not in the mood for a good fight. Name's South, by the way."

"Brand," Brand answers, because there's no reason to keep his name a secret. "I'm also always in the mood to throw down with someone who knows what they're doing, so at least we can fucking entertain each other."

South snorts, "Yeah, nice to know there's someone around that's actually a fun fuckin' challenge to trade blows with."

She stretches and groans, really wishing she could go and shower after how long she's been down here. As it is, the best she can do is head back to her room and change, which'll probably lead to crashing for a while.

"Alright, well, I've been at this shit for hours, so I'm gonna go... pass out, or something, christ." She scrubs her hand over her face. "So, y'know, until next time."

"Next time," Brand agrees, waving her off. Time to go play Hide-and-Seek with Rune so he can drag his ass back to the mats.

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Being Alone

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