Yeah, and the only powers I got myself help with stealth. But I did spend all my time sparring with a guy who’s been sparring since he was like, literally 3, so…
[ She’s not in the least bit joking. Brand was her best friend there, she’d still call him a best friend now to herself if not aloud, and he’d been training since he was 3. He really kept her on her toes. ]
So guess I might surprise us yet.
[ When her own stance shifts, most people wouldn’t notice—there’s still an affectation of casualness on the surface, but if you know what to look for there’s subtle signs of the shift, of coiling tighter, ready to move. Wash has seen her fight enough in the past he should he should notice, some things never change. It’s the subtle precursor to what always happens when you fight South: she strikes first. ]
[ there is a familiarity to the way she moves, and he recognizes the way she gathers herself, coiled tight just under the surface -- but there's differences, too. subtle, and he might not be able to describe or pin them down if he's asked, but she has changed and learned.
but some things don't. there's a certain impatience to that energy, and wash can see that too. south is definitely a strike first kind of gal, and wash is -- not. he always been more cautious, adaptive. when he's had the chance to recon and survey, he does like being able to make the first move, but otherwise, time to consider, time to react. south has the leg up on him here as far as he's concerned, because she's seen this other-version-of-himself and how he fights, but wash hasn't seen what she can do now. he wants to see. ]
I bet you will.
[ another little smirk, bordering on the edge of a grin. there's a definite challenge in there, and he nods. ]
[ There's a glint in South's eye and the twist of a smirk on her lips and then, knowing damn well it's predictable but not caring, she rises to that challenge and comes at him with a tight swing of a fist.
South's style has always been about using her height and weight to her advantage, about using the momentum of every strike to carry her through to the next, to put as much force into every hit as she can. In a fight she is constantly moving, every kick, punch and strike at the end of a burst of motion. That's not changed, not at all. The strength behind that fist is as true as ever, and she intends to follow through on the momentum of closing the distance to chain hits. So long as she keeps moving and doesn't let Wash get her on the ground, doesn't let him disrupt her momentum too much? Maybe she stands a shot.
She's clearly been keeping up with her training, she's clearly learned some things, but there's one thing that may stand out as they get into it—she no longer fights like she's expecting back-up. That was always the thing about the twins, they spent so much of their lives fighting together that they could read each other's intentions in a fight with minimal words, they could always rely on the other to be there to back them up in a real fight. It ingrained habits, left her with weaknesses in a one-on-one match.
That tendency seems to have changed, and with North only being gone from the city for a few weeks, it's clear that's not why. ]
[ wash has never been as much of a raw powerhouse as most of the other freelancers. carolina could overpower him easily without even trying, and south isn't far behind. what that means is that wash has had a lot of practice learning how to find other ways to keep up with these goddamn giants. maine especially was always ready to kick his ass for another spar, and wash had gotten his ass beat again and again and again until he got better at learning to leverage his own advantages. he's not that much faster than them -- it was always resourcefulness, adaptability. a level of caution and observation that the other freelancers simply didn't need to rely on as much as he did, a skill that he's only refined over the years, and gotten a boost to ever since epsilon fucked up his memory into a shattered but functionally perfect machine.
she has incredible momentum just powering at him like that, and he's forced to go with it for a while letting her dictate the pace. He keeps up with it -- she does land a shot or two, especially at first, when it's just raw power powering through into him. but he's not really trying to fight back, she might notice -- he's watching. relearning. observing. keeping up enough with her blows and taking shots where he gets the openings, but he's not trying to make them for himself, not yet. it's an uncanny skill he has, something she might notice, how over the course of the fight he seems to go from being a little behind to being able to read and preempt her movements with surprising accuracy. she definitely always was reliant on backup, but he notices, too, that that's not really the case here. she's on her own, now. they both are.
at some point, though, with the right opening, he seizes on it. not just taking a shot where he can take it, but taking that shot and pushing it into more, seizing that moment and sliding into any weakness or blind spot she might tend to have in an attempt to disrupt her momentum, bowl her off balance, throw her to the ground. ]
[ It is truly fucking uncanny the way he starts to adapt and react as time goes on—in a funny kind of way, it almost reminds her of how it was whenever she was sparring against North, not alongside him, the way he always knew what she'd do before she did it. But that was because they'd been together their whole lives, this— this is just Wash, watching and learning, figuring her out as they go. It's impressive.
There's one weakness that's there for the exploiting, perfect for the purpose of getting her off her feet: a fucked up knee, an old wound that's been healed for years, now, but never really got the medical treatment it needed. A sniper round through the joint that barely didn't shatter it, that the twins treated on the run from the Project with nothing but field medkits and shitty attempts at physical therapy that never really got it back up to full strength. It doesn't affect her most days, hell, it doesn't even always cause a problem in a fight, but it's not impossible to see. It's certainly not impossible to take advantage of once you know it's there, especially when South goes for a high kick and leaves all of her weight on it.
One well-placed kick and it'll give out, and the problem with being so damned tall is you sure hit the ground hard when you do go down. She hits the ground with a loud grunt and an equally rough curse. ]
Fuckin'— shit.
[ But she's rolling over to push herself back up to her feet before she's even finished speaking, the way her knee throbs be damned. It's not like they didn't train to get back up after worse and throw themselves back into a fight. ]
[ wash had gotten the sense that she was favoring one leg more than the other. he wasn't sure why, an injury at some point, maybe, but he doesn't hesitate to use any opening he can get. she buckles from it, and it's even more effective than he thought it'd be. something to ask about later, but right now in the moment, its just a weakness to be exploited.
she recovers smoothly, starting to push herself upright, but wash is already there. her momentum has been disrupted, and he intends to prevent her from getting it back -- that is how she would win, here, getting back into rhythm, forcing him to meet her where she can simply overpower him. he doesn't hesitate to go for her leg again, to try and sweep it out from under her. this is a spar between equals, and he's not about to go easy on her. if she's injured, then it's something she should be accounting for. all's fair.
he's going to try and keep her down, disrupting any attempt at recovery, and if he sees an opportunity for it he'll grapple her down in an attempt to pin her. there's a good chance she could overpower him if she manages to regain enough ground, but he's gotten so much better at reading how she moves in a short amount of time. ]
[ She should've put more time into figuring out how to compensate for that damn knee injury after Trilla got her on the ground with it without even aiming for a weakness—she should've, but she didn't. Maybe because everything with North had been so messy at the time and then he was gone, and focusing on the knee would've made her think about things she didn't want to think about or— something. That's her excuse.
But excuses don't matter in the middle of a fight, and Wash is back on her before she can even really finish the thought, or react. She knows, now, to compensate for the leg, to try and stop him getting at it, and it works at first. She doesn't get her momentum back but she blocks and dodges and tries to get past his defences to land a blow, disrupt his own kind of momentum so she can get her rhythm back, but fuck if he isn't reading her like a book.
It's inevitable that the leg gives out again. It was already throbbing from the first strike, twisted or jarred or whatever the impact did, and the next time he goes for it he bowls her legs out from under her. She could recover, even gets her good leg half back under her, but if he goes for the grapple—
Well, she'll decide that she's at least taking him down with her, not letting him merely follow her down and follow through. She'll grab at his shirt to try and drag him down in a much less controlled way, or at the very least give her purchase to try and throw him off once her back hits the floor. ]
[ wash knows he can't beat her if he lets her pull him into a full grapple, not if he lets it last too long, not if he doesn't immediately pin her within the first moments. if they'd gone into this armed, wash would've more definitively tried to end it by now, a knife to her throat or otherwise -- but like this. inevitably he's going to have go in for a grapple, and it's either he manages to end that cleanly or she's likely going to end up throwing him off completely.
he goes for it. the next time he manages to get at that leg, he follows her down. the aim is to try and get her on her front, pin her down, grab an arm or something and just get to the point where he can use as much of his own weight and as much as he can to keep her in place. but of course she doesn't make it easy, and he's dragged down -- there's not enough room for him to maneuver out of the way no matter how well he reads it.
wash does his best to keep control the whole time. south is stronger, could absolutely overpower him, but he's holding his own as much as he can as he does his best to pin her fully -- but if south is able to hold him off for long enough, she'll probably start getting the upper hand, instead. ]
[ It’s not exactly as quick and direct as she prefers to be, but if nothing else grappling like this lets her use her full strength to her advantage—if she can keep him from getting any limbs immobilised or getting her onto her front for long enough, then maybe she can turn this around.
There’s certainly no grace to it, but grace has never been South’s thing anyway. Some moves she’d try in a real fight, a fight where the limits on playing dirty are higher, she’d probably headbutt him—break his nose or something, that’s usually pretty damn distracting. But that’s too much damage for a spar like this and so instead she just has to try and use all her weight, all her strength, to get him on his back.
And she has to time it right. Push when his weight is the most unevenly distributed and— there, she picks a moment and shoves, throws her weight into rolling them over. The risk is almost overdoing it, putting enough momentum into it that he could flip them right back by keeping it going, and then she’s close to fucked.
She’s not sure she could jump to her feet fast enough even given an opening, now; not from her back, she’d have to roll, push herself up from her front, and that’d be a hell of an opening for Wash, instead. ]
[ it's an opening, and wash will take it. learning to survive around people who are much, much stronger than him 101: using their sheer momentum against them. it's still difficult, her weight and her strength just bowling him over, it's enough to wind him slightly when he's rolled over. but he doesn't let her stop that roll with him on his back. it keeps going, rolling them over yet again.
this time when south starts to land on the ground, he again tries to pin her. he's trying to force her down on her front, attempting to lock down at least one of her arms, he drives his knee against her injured leg just for the advantage he knows that will give him. not the most honorable, but a vulnerability is a vulnerability. if this were a real fight he'd be doing quite a lot worse, but now the aim of the game is just to try and immobilize her enough that she's forced to yield and tap out.
if he can manage it. he's putting all of his strength and focus into this, entirely aware that if south manages to get him off again, everything will swing right back in her favor. ]
[ He gets his knee against her leg and she hisses—it doesn't hurt that bad but it does hurt, and the thing is South would do exactly the same if the circumstances were flipped, so there's nothing to hold against him. He gets his knee against hers and her arm twisted up against her back and her own size works against her, this time, because her own weight is hard to push out from under his. Ah, goddammit.
Oh, she certainly tries, because South doesn't give up easy— but nope, not happening, he's got her. Close fucking thing, in the end, but he's got her. ]
Ugh— alright, alright, you win.
[ It's not real annoyance, just— South being South, and she taps out with her other hand. ]
[ once south actually taps out, he relaxes -- and there's a distinct change, that focus in his expression giving away to more visible fatigue. he closes his eyes briefly on an exhale, tension ebbing out of his muscles, and he moves back, shifting his weight back onto his shins. ]
It wasn't exactly as one-sided as ass-kicking would imply. [ close fought, hard won. a few more slips and south could've easily had it, and decisively, too. instead of pushing himself up to his feet, he opts to move next to her instead, offering an arm to pull her upright, there's a bit of a grin drawn across his lips -- satisfaction from a solid fight. ] You nearly had me, a couple times.
[ he has gotten a lot better over the years, though with her experience with his alternate self on the rig, south no doubt had a sense of that already. south's improved since what he last remembers, too. it wasn't that often he got to see her fight alone, but that was always a weak point for her. not quite the case anymore. ]
[ She rolls over and takes the arm to get upright, rolling her eyes at the look on his face but honestly no less close to grinning herself. That was a damn good fight, it’s always nice when you don’t have to hold back too much. The rush of adrenaline always helps to make her feel a little more alive. ]
Nearly. You still got my ass on the floor, twice; that’s close enough to an ass-kicking.
[ She stretches out that dodgy leg and rubs at the joint with one hand. It’ll be fine, she knows what stretches and so on helps with it when it’s stiff, but it’s definitely still throbbing right now. ]
[ he won't deny that he's pleased with himself. south could've kicked his ass several times over back in the day, any of them could. he knows he's gotten better, but carolina still beat his ass regularly. unreachable as always. it's nice to have a different measure of how far he's come.
he pushes himself up, just enough to grab that bottle of alcohol he brought with him. not that he would encourage drinking after a spar, hydration and all that, but there's a lot of exceptions here, and he settles in next to her again, watching as she kneads at that leg. ]
You could still get the better of me. [ he gestures with a nod toward her leg. ] Bad leg, huh?
[ She snorts and gives him a lighthearted ‘no shit’ look. ]
Like you didn’t notice. Yeah, uh— knee’s all kinds of fucked. I mean, it’s not like it’s fuckin’ unusable, y’know, most of the time I hardly think about it, but…
[ She trails off, gazing off away from Wash with her expression going a little distant as she thinks about if she wants to explain where the injury comes from. As she thinks back to the day it happened. It was a shitty fucking day for everyone, the break-out, break-in, whatever you wanna call it. The day Tex, York and North acted on what CT started.
It’s been years, now, even for her; a couple on the run, another since she got yanked from their home universe. It should feel more distant than it does, but sometimes that day still feels like a fresh barb in her mind, despite everything that’s changed, despite the things she knows now, despite the fact she did much worse than North did before she finally got better. She sighs, and rolls up the leg of her sweats to show the gnarly scarring around the joint. ]
North shot me, the day everything went to hell. Right through the fuckin’ knee. Didn’t shatter my damn kneecap, luckily, but…
[ he noticed, but he doesn't know what its from, okay. he does want to know.
wash starts to say something to that effect, but -- south's gaze trails off, and a certain quiet comes into her eyes, and he knows not to. he just watches her, ready to offer that she doesn't need to talk about it if she doesn't want to, but then she's showing him the scar, and ah. he doesn't wince at the sign of it, but a grimness settles on his expression, and he looks back up at her when she starts talking again.
ah. north. and -- that day. the break-in. everything wash knows about the break in is in second-hand stories, flashes and impressions that are vividly remembered but just flashes, in the end. the alarms blaring, the sounds of distant gunfire, yelling, people rushing up and down the halls. he wanted to do something, wanted to at least get up and see, but. he had other things to worry about, at the time, his vision swimming in front of him, realities bleeding into each other before his very eyes. ]
Still. That's a pretty bad shot. Would've fucked you up for a while.
[ and it was from north. he can put together some of what happened there, though the gap between then and finding north dead so long after is a little stranger. he doesn't want to ask about it, though south can talk more if she wants, or just change tracks if she wants. ]
Sure did. [ she rolls the material back down, brings her other knee up to prop her chin on ] We were on the run, y’know, so it’s not like we could go to a fuckin’— med centre or something. Did it allll ourselves.
[ Even though he was the one that shot her, he fussed over her like he always did; his overprotectiveness was always annoying, but she’d never seen so clear a demonstration of the hypocrisy in it as she did then. The way he took care of her. The way he helped her do their shitty, makeshift attempt at physio to get her back to as close to full strength as possible. (“Fuck, North, that fucking hurts—” “I know, I know. But we have to do this or you’ll never get full a full range of motion back in this leg.” Yeah, and whose fucking fault was that?)
It helped, she supposes. She’d be worse off without that help. But she wouldn’t have needed that help at all if he hadn’t shot her, but is she even allowed to feel angry about that when later on she basically killed him? North deflected her anger with exactly that reasoning, not long before he vanished. ]
He always said he thought it was his only option. To get me to go with him. Might be right. I was trying to blow Texas up with a missile pod, but he didn’t— he didn’t even try to explain. Just put up his shield and— I dunno.
[ Uggggh. Talking is weird. And yet it all spills out anyway. ]
[ wash is a good listener, to his credit. he just watches her, attentive, quiet, lets her say as much as she wants. he doesn't know what exactly went down, but he can make some educated guesses around what he's hearing, based on what he saw. south going after tex, and her brother stepping in. no talking, just gunfire. maybe he did see it as the best way -- if he's honest, south never struck wash as someone who might want to listen to reason when she's angry, when she's driven -- but still. that'll have some effects that aren't physical.
though maybe he shouldn't be thinking that much about north shooting his own sister, given that wash himself kind of did a lot worse than "intentionally injure for the sake of incapacitating". ]
Missile pod probably wasn't enough, was it? [ wryly, quietly. ] None of us were ever that great at communicating, I guess.
[ some better than others, but that doesn't say that much. he was never that close to north or south in freelancer, not enough to ever see any cracks in their relationship, save what he might have heard from connie or the others. but he was a lot more naive back then, in general. ]
I just got bits and pieces what went down, all through various filters. I figured -- hoped, maybe -- that you two had made it out together somewhere.
She dodged every goddamn missile. [ a shake of her head and a quiet snort ] How the fuck any of us didn’t realise what was really going on with her sooner…
[ Hell, she didn’t know what Texas was until the rig. North never told her the whole story whilst they were on the run. ]
And, well, you weren’t wrong, s’just that he had to carry me out and didn’t exactly ask if I wanted to go with him.
…probably would’ve gone with him anyway, that’s what fuckin’ gets me. The whole time we were on the run, I kept telling myself I could leave. Fuck off into the night whilst he was asleep. Get away, away from the Project, away from him.
[ She sighs. Her voice gets quieter. ]
But I could never do it.
[ Ducky called the twins codependent. York on the rig pointed out how they’d spent the whole lives together and didn’t know how to be without the other. Neither were wrong. Her whole life was shaped by being a twin, being one of a set. It was always Andrew and Anja, then North and South. She could never leave him behind, not until... ]
S’all pretty fuckin’ cheap to say, I know. Considering— y’know.
[ how didn't they realize, indeed. a secret buried deep and yet present in everything the moment you know what to look for, winding throughout every thing about the project and everything that they were put through. thank god for connie. the information would've come out eventually in other ways ( like wash himself, given how much of it was involuntarily shoved into his mind and memory ), but. it does occur to him that south might not know as much about the nature of what went down as he does, depending on what she's learned over the years, but -- they can talk about that later, maybe. right now , this is more pressing.
her voice kind of trails off, and wash just offers a quiet nod. considering, yeah. the way he found them. south alive and maybe not-quite-well but north definitively not, and -- everything that happened after. he closes his eyes for a moment. ]
How much did you want to get away from him?
[ gentle, prompting. he isn't talking about his death at all, just about what she'd referred to earlier -- wanting to get away, telling herself she would, but. ]
[ She loves her brother, and losing him again hurts like nothing else will ever truly hurt. She’d do anything, now, to have him back, but back then… it was more complicated. ]
I— [ she groans, rubs her face ] I wanted to be free of him for years. It was always the twins, I was always just his sister. I hated that. I never hated him, but I hated— how people saw us.
[ She’d never have been able to articulate this a few months ago. The time on the rig let her figure all this out, conversations with North, York, Brand. Experiences, like the sitcom land making her ‘character’ an only child and how wrong that felt. ]
But I could never… I could never do it. He never let me, at first; he followed me into the damn military, he followed me into the helljumpers, and I was— used to it. Used to having him there, cleaning up my messes, being someone I could always fuckin’ rely on even though he was a pain in the ass.
Project just… made it all worse. On purpose. [ she sneers, sounding truly disgusted ] Stupid experiment. Stupid AI bullshit.
[ always the twins. wash himself was hardly an exception to that, after all. even after asking, and even given everything else they've already said, it's still a surprise to him to hear all of this come tumbling out -- stranger still to remember that he's asking because he wants to hear it, to help however he can, even if the only way is just to listen. they've made pretty good progress, apparently. carolina would be proud, if she was still around. maybe.
north was always -- caring. protective. that was the thing everyone knew about him, that was the reason why he was assigned his ai. he could see that, south enlisting to get away from him only for him to inevitably follow her even into the ODSTs.
he shifts slightly where he's sat next to her. ]
Fuck the project.
[ that sure is something they can all agree on no matter what. even saying it so casually, there's a certain level of vitriol and venom in his tone just under the surface that's unmistakable. and it ebbs from him just as quickly, nudging her lightly with his elbow. ]
Could never do what, though? [ he shifts again, scooting back a little bit so he can lean his back against the nearby concrete wall, tipping his head back against it. ] Could never make yourself leave, or -- could never find independence outside of him?
'Cause I'd say you're doing alright for yourself, in the latter.
[ The little nudge seems to both surprise her and not, a flash of tensing muscles before she just relaxes. She’s always been the kind to nudge, kick, punch, sling arms around friends, or she used to be. It takes longer, these days. ]
Both, I guess. I dunno. I— fuck, I don’t feel like I’m doing alright. Barely feel like a fucking— [ she sighs, rests her head on her knee with her gaze off to the side ] Barely feel like a person sometimes.
[ She feels like a shadow that somehow got left behind when the person casting it left. She feels like a hollow shell, empty because she built who she is around not being like her brother and doesn’t know how to define herself independent of that. Three decades where who you were was dependent on being who people didn’t want her to be.
God, she never even told North this. She told the York on the rig about how she didn’t know who she was on her own, but never her brother himself. This feels— weird, though it’s not entirely a bad weird. ]
[ wash notes that tension -- he won't take it personally. honestly, he'd probably react the same way if south had nudged him a little without him being prepared for it first. he just -- isn't sure what to do here, in multiple ways. over the years he's learned, by necessity, to be kind of a care taker, to be good at helping people through stuff and talking things out, but this is south, and that makes it stranger for many, many reasons.
he knows how important it is to listen, at least. especially with that sigh, the tone of her voice, and those specific words: barely feeling like a person. that's not something said lightly, and just from everything about her body language and her voice, he knows how much of a weight that has to be. he's quiet, for a few moments. ]
I remember how you used to fight. They always drilled you together, too, but whenever I saw you on your own -- I know that was always a thing for you. Got used to relying on always having someone there. [ a slight shrug. ] I didn't get any of that, from our spar just now.
[ it feels a little strange trying to give her assurances when he feels like he still doesn't know her all that well at all. it'd be easy to give empty platitudes, but wash doesn't want to do that, and that's one concrete observation he can give. another silence, this one a little longer, he stays leaned back against the wall, watching her. ]
I know it's really not the same, but. I think I can relate.
[ it's an offer, gentle, subtle. she's sharing a lot and talking about herself and how she feels and he can tell it's -- more than she would normally say. if she wants to go on talking, he'll keep listening and hearing her out, but if she wants to take that offer, wash can just talk about himself for a bit, instead. ]
…thanks. Worked on that with Brand—that friend I mentioned. Pushed me until I started adjusting. Guess that’s something.
[ Not a lot, but she appreciates what he’s trying to do. It did take a long time, a lot of sparring sessions, but that was how she and Brand spent most of their time together. Sparring. He understood what it was like to have someone that you spent your whole life with, how messy emotions around that could be. He had a lot less conflicting feelings about it, he had no urge to run, but it still let him understand.
She feels heavy, and when she lifts her head again she looks at him sidelong. ]
…‘cause of the whole— [ she nods vaguely at his head, she’s not sure if that’s more or less tactful than saying Epsilon outright ] —thing? Or—?
[ She’ll take the breather. This is all so— tricky, really. ]
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[ South snorts a laugh. ]
Yeah, and the only powers I got myself help with stealth. But I did spend all my time sparring with a guy who’s been sparring since he was like, literally 3, so…
[ She’s not in the least bit joking. Brand was her best friend there, she’d still call him a best friend now to herself if not aloud, and he’d been training since he was 3. He really kept her on her toes. ]
So guess I might surprise us yet.
[ When her own stance shifts, most people wouldn’t notice—there’s still an affectation of casualness on the surface, but if you know what to look for there’s subtle signs of the shift, of coiling tighter, ready to move. Wash has seen her fight enough in the past he should he should notice, some things never change. It’s the subtle precursor to what always happens when you fight South: she strikes first. ]
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but some things don't. there's a certain impatience to that energy, and wash can see that too. south is definitely a strike first kind of gal, and wash is -- not. he always been more cautious, adaptive. when he's had the chance to recon and survey, he does like being able to make the first move, but otherwise, time to consider, time to react. south has the leg up on him here as far as he's concerned, because she's seen this other-version-of-himself and how he fights, but wash hasn't seen what she can do now. he wants to see. ]
I bet you will.
[ another little smirk, bordering on the edge of a grin. there's a definite challenge in there, and he nods. ]
Come on.
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[ There's a glint in South's eye and the twist of a smirk on her lips and then, knowing damn well it's predictable but not caring, she rises to that challenge and comes at him with a tight swing of a fist.
South's style has always been about using her height and weight to her advantage, about using the momentum of every strike to carry her through to the next, to put as much force into every hit as she can. In a fight she is constantly moving, every kick, punch and strike at the end of a burst of motion. That's not changed, not at all. The strength behind that fist is as true as ever, and she intends to follow through on the momentum of closing the distance to chain hits. So long as she keeps moving and doesn't let Wash get her on the ground, doesn't let him disrupt her momentum too much? Maybe she stands a shot.
She's clearly been keeping up with her training, she's clearly learned some things, but there's one thing that may stand out as they get into it—she no longer fights like she's expecting back-up. That was always the thing about the twins, they spent so much of their lives fighting together that they could read each other's intentions in a fight with minimal words, they could always rely on the other to be there to back them up in a real fight. It ingrained habits, left her with weaknesses in a one-on-one match.
That tendency seems to have changed, and with North only being gone from the city for a few weeks, it's clear that's not why. ]
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she has incredible momentum just powering at him like that, and he's forced to go with it for a while letting her dictate the pace. He keeps up with it -- she does land a shot or two, especially at first, when it's just raw power powering through into him. but he's not really trying to fight back, she might notice -- he's watching. relearning. observing. keeping up enough with her blows and taking shots where he gets the openings, but he's not trying to make them for himself, not yet. it's an uncanny skill he has, something she might notice, how over the course of the fight he seems to go from being a little behind to being able to read and preempt her movements with surprising accuracy. she definitely always was reliant on backup, but he notices, too, that that's not really the case here. she's on her own, now. they both are.
at some point, though, with the right opening, he seizes on it. not just taking a shot where he can take it, but taking that shot and pushing it into more, seizing that moment and sliding into any weakness or blind spot she might tend to have in an attempt to disrupt her momentum, bowl her off balance, throw her to the ground. ]
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[ It is truly fucking uncanny the way he starts to adapt and react as time goes on—in a funny kind of way, it almost reminds her of how it was whenever she was sparring against North, not alongside him, the way he always knew what she'd do before she did it. But that was because they'd been together their whole lives, this— this is just Wash, watching and learning, figuring her out as they go. It's impressive.
There's one weakness that's there for the exploiting, perfect for the purpose of getting her off her feet: a fucked up knee, an old wound that's been healed for years, now, but never really got the medical treatment it needed. A sniper round through the joint that barely didn't shatter it, that the twins treated on the run from the Project with nothing but field medkits and shitty attempts at physical therapy that never really got it back up to full strength. It doesn't affect her most days, hell, it doesn't even always cause a problem in a fight, but it's not impossible to see. It's certainly not impossible to take advantage of once you know it's there, especially when South goes for a high kick and leaves all of her weight on it.
One well-placed kick and it'll give out, and the problem with being so damned tall is you sure hit the ground hard when you do go down. She hits the ground with a loud grunt and an equally rough curse. ]
Fuckin'— shit.
[ But she's rolling over to push herself back up to her feet before she's even finished speaking, the way her knee throbs be damned. It's not like they didn't train to get back up after worse and throw themselves back into a fight. ]
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she recovers smoothly, starting to push herself upright, but wash is already there. her momentum has been disrupted, and he intends to prevent her from getting it back -- that is how she would win, here, getting back into rhythm, forcing him to meet her where she can simply overpower him. he doesn't hesitate to go for her leg again, to try and sweep it out from under her. this is a spar between equals, and he's not about to go easy on her. if she's injured, then it's something she should be accounting for. all's fair.
he's going to try and keep her down, disrupting any attempt at recovery, and if he sees an opportunity for it he'll grapple her down in an attempt to pin her. there's a good chance she could overpower him if she manages to regain enough ground, but he's gotten so much better at reading how she moves in a short amount of time. ]
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[ She should've put more time into figuring out how to compensate for that damn knee injury after Trilla got her on the ground with it without even aiming for a weakness—she should've, but she didn't. Maybe because everything with North had been so messy at the time and then he was gone, and focusing on the knee would've made her think about things she didn't want to think about or— something. That's her excuse.
But excuses don't matter in the middle of a fight, and Wash is back on her before she can even really finish the thought, or react. She knows, now, to compensate for the leg, to try and stop him getting at it, and it works at first. She doesn't get her momentum back but she blocks and dodges and tries to get past his defences to land a blow, disrupt his own kind of momentum so she can get her rhythm back, but fuck if he isn't reading her like a book.
It's inevitable that the leg gives out again. It was already throbbing from the first strike, twisted or jarred or whatever the impact did, and the next time he goes for it he bowls her legs out from under her. She could recover, even gets her good leg half back under her, but if he goes for the grapple—
Well, she'll decide that she's at least taking him down with her, not letting him merely follow her down and follow through. She'll grab at his shirt to try and drag him down in a much less controlled way, or at the very least give her purchase to try and throw him off once her back hits the floor. ]
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he goes for it. the next time he manages to get at that leg, he follows her down. the aim is to try and get her on her front, pin her down, grab an arm or something and just get to the point where he can use as much of his own weight and as much as he can to keep her in place. but of course she doesn't make it easy, and he's dragged down -- there's not enough room for him to maneuver out of the way no matter how well he reads it.
wash does his best to keep control the whole time. south is stronger, could absolutely overpower him, but he's holding his own as much as he can as he does his best to pin her fully -- but if south is able to hold him off for long enough, she'll probably start getting the upper hand, instead. ]
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[ It’s not exactly as quick and direct as she prefers to be, but if nothing else grappling like this lets her use her full strength to her advantage—if she can keep him from getting any limbs immobilised or getting her onto her front for long enough, then maybe she can turn this around.
There’s certainly no grace to it, but grace has never been South’s thing anyway. Some moves she’d try in a real fight, a fight where the limits on playing dirty are higher, she’d probably headbutt him—break his nose or something, that’s usually pretty damn distracting. But that’s too much damage for a spar like this and so instead she just has to try and use all her weight, all her strength, to get him on his back.
And she has to time it right. Push when his weight is the most unevenly distributed and— there, she picks a moment and shoves, throws her weight into rolling them over. The risk is almost overdoing it, putting enough momentum into it that he could flip them right back by keeping it going, and then she’s close to fucked.
She’s not sure she could jump to her feet fast enough even given an opening, now; not from her back, she’d have to roll, push herself up from her front, and that’d be a hell of an opening for Wash, instead. ]
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this time when south starts to land on the ground, he again tries to pin her. he's trying to force her down on her front, attempting to lock down at least one of her arms, he drives his knee against her injured leg just for the advantage he knows that will give him. not the most honorable, but a vulnerability is a vulnerability. if this were a real fight he'd be doing quite a lot worse, but now the aim of the game is just to try and immobilize her enough that she's forced to yield and tap out.
if he can manage it. he's putting all of his strength and focus into this, entirely aware that if south manages to get him off again, everything will swing right back in her favor. ]
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[ He gets his knee against her leg and she hisses—it doesn't hurt that bad but it does hurt, and the thing is South would do exactly the same if the circumstances were flipped, so there's nothing to hold against him. He gets his knee against hers and her arm twisted up against her back and her own size works against her, this time, because her own weight is hard to push out from under his. Ah, goddammit.
Oh, she certainly tries, because South doesn't give up easy— but nope, not happening, he's got her. Close fucking thing, in the end, but he's got her. ]
Ugh— alright, alright, you win.
[ It's not real annoyance, just— South being South, and she taps out with her other hand. ]
Told you you could kick my ass.
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It wasn't exactly as one-sided as ass-kicking would imply. [ close fought, hard won. a few more slips and south could've easily had it, and decisively, too. instead of pushing himself up to his feet, he opts to move next to her instead, offering an arm to pull her upright, there's a bit of a grin drawn across his lips -- satisfaction from a solid fight. ] You nearly had me, a couple times.
[ he has gotten a lot better over the years, though with her experience with his alternate self on the rig, south no doubt had a sense of that already. south's improved since what he last remembers, too. it wasn't that often he got to see her fight alone, but that was always a weak point for her. not quite the case anymore. ]
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[ She rolls over and takes the arm to get upright, rolling her eyes at the look on his face but honestly no less close to grinning herself. That was a damn good fight, it’s always nice when you don’t have to hold back too much. The rush of adrenaline always helps to make her feel a little more alive. ]
Nearly. You still got my ass on the floor, twice; that’s close enough to an ass-kicking.
[ She stretches out that dodgy leg and rubs at the joint with one hand. It’ll be fine, she knows what stretches and so on helps with it when it’s stiff, but it’s definitely still throbbing right now. ]
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he pushes himself up, just enough to grab that bottle of alcohol he brought with him. not that he would encourage drinking after a spar, hydration and all that, but there's a lot of exceptions here, and he settles in next to her again, watching as she kneads at that leg. ]
You could still get the better of me. [ he gestures with a nod toward her leg. ] Bad leg, huh?
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[ She snorts and gives him a lighthearted ‘no shit’ look. ]
Like you didn’t notice. Yeah, uh— knee’s all kinds of fucked. I mean, it’s not like it’s fuckin’ unusable, y’know, most of the time I hardly think about it, but…
[ She trails off, gazing off away from Wash with her expression going a little distant as she thinks about if she wants to explain where the injury comes from. As she thinks back to the day it happened. It was a shitty fucking day for everyone, the break-out, break-in, whatever you wanna call it. The day Tex, York and North acted on what CT started.
It’s been years, now, even for her; a couple on the run, another since she got yanked from their home universe. It should feel more distant than it does, but sometimes that day still feels like a fresh barb in her mind, despite everything that’s changed, despite the things she knows now, despite the fact she did much worse than North did before she finally got better. She sighs, and rolls up the leg of her sweats to show the gnarly scarring around the joint. ]
North shot me, the day everything went to hell. Right through the fuckin’ knee. Didn’t shatter my damn kneecap, luckily, but…
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wash starts to say something to that effect, but -- south's gaze trails off, and a certain quiet comes into her eyes, and he knows not to. he just watches her, ready to offer that she doesn't need to talk about it if she doesn't want to, but then she's showing him the scar, and ah. he doesn't wince at the sign of it, but a grimness settles on his expression, and he looks back up at her when she starts talking again.
ah. north. and -- that day. the break-in. everything wash knows about the break in is in second-hand stories, flashes and impressions that are vividly remembered but just flashes, in the end. the alarms blaring, the sounds of distant gunfire, yelling, people rushing up and down the halls. he wanted to do something, wanted to at least get up and see, but. he had other things to worry about, at the time, his vision swimming in front of him, realities bleeding into each other before his very eyes. ]
Still. That's a pretty bad shot. Would've fucked you up for a while.
[ and it was from north. he can put together some of what happened there, though the gap between then and finding north dead so long after is a little stranger. he doesn't want to ask about it, though south can talk more if she wants, or just change tracks if she wants. ]
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Sure did. [ she rolls the material back down, brings her other knee up to prop her chin on ] We were on the run, y’know, so it’s not like we could go to a fuckin’— med centre or something. Did it allll ourselves.
[ Even though he was the one that shot her, he fussed over her like he always did; his overprotectiveness was always annoying, but she’d never seen so clear a demonstration of the hypocrisy in it as she did then. The way he took care of her. The way he helped her do their shitty, makeshift attempt at physio to get her back to as close to full strength as possible. (“Fuck, North, that fucking hurts—” “I know, I know. But we have to do this or you’ll never get full a full range of motion back in this leg.” Yeah, and whose fucking fault was that?)
It helped, she supposes. She’d be worse off without that help. But she wouldn’t have needed that help at all if he hadn’t shot her, but is she even allowed to feel angry about that when later on she basically killed him? North deflected her anger with exactly that reasoning, not long before he vanished. ]
He always said he thought it was his only option. To get me to go with him. Might be right. I was trying to blow Texas up with a missile pod, but he didn’t— he didn’t even try to explain. Just put up his shield and— I dunno.
[ Uggggh. Talking is weird. And yet it all spills out anyway. ]
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though maybe he shouldn't be thinking that much about north shooting his own sister, given that wash himself kind of did a lot worse than "intentionally injure for the sake of incapacitating". ]
Missile pod probably wasn't enough, was it? [ wryly, quietly. ] None of us were ever that great at communicating, I guess.
[ some better than others, but that doesn't say that much. he was never that close to north or south in freelancer, not enough to ever see any cracks in their relationship, save what he might have heard from connie or the others. but he was a lot more naive back then, in general. ]
I just got bits and pieces what went down, all through various filters. I figured -- hoped, maybe -- that you two had made it out together somewhere.
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She dodged every goddamn missile. [ a shake of her head and a quiet snort ] How the fuck any of us didn’t realise what was really going on with her sooner…
[ Hell, she didn’t know what Texas was until the rig. North never told her the whole story whilst they were on the run. ]
And, well, you weren’t wrong, s’just that he had to carry me out and didn’t exactly ask if I wanted to go with him.
…probably would’ve gone with him anyway, that’s what fuckin’ gets me. The whole time we were on the run, I kept telling myself I could leave. Fuck off into the night whilst he was asleep. Get away, away from the Project, away from him.
[ She sighs. Her voice gets quieter. ]
But I could never do it.
[ Ducky called the twins codependent. York on the rig pointed out how they’d spent the whole lives together and didn’t know how to be without the other. Neither were wrong. Her whole life was shaped by being a twin, being one of a set. It was always Andrew and Anja, then North and South. She could never leave him behind, not until... ]
S’all pretty fuckin’ cheap to say, I know. Considering— y’know.
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her voice kind of trails off, and wash just offers a quiet nod. considering, yeah. the way he found them. south alive and maybe not-quite-well but north definitively not, and -- everything that happened after. he closes his eyes for a moment. ]
How much did you want to get away from him?
[ gentle, prompting. he isn't talking about his death at all, just about what she'd referred to earlier -- wanting to get away, telling herself she would, but. ]
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…more than anything.
[ She loves her brother, and losing him again hurts like nothing else will ever truly hurt. She’d do anything, now, to have him back, but back then… it was more complicated. ]
I— [ she groans, rubs her face ] I wanted to be free of him for years. It was always the twins, I was always just his sister. I hated that. I never hated him, but I hated— how people saw us.
[ She’d never have been able to articulate this a few months ago. The time on the rig let her figure all this out, conversations with North, York, Brand. Experiences, like the sitcom land making her ‘character’ an only child and how wrong that felt. ]
But I could never… I could never do it. He never let me, at first; he followed me into the damn military, he followed me into the helljumpers, and I was— used to it. Used to having him there, cleaning up my messes, being someone I could always fuckin’ rely on even though he was a pain in the ass.
Project just… made it all worse. On purpose. [ she sneers, sounding truly disgusted ] Stupid experiment. Stupid AI bullshit.
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north was always -- caring. protective. that was the thing everyone knew about him, that was the reason why he was assigned his ai. he could see that, south enlisting to get away from him only for him to inevitably follow her even into the ODSTs.
he shifts slightly where he's sat next to her. ]
Fuck the project.
[ that sure is something they can all agree on no matter what. even saying it so casually, there's a certain level of vitriol and venom in his tone just under the surface that's unmistakable. and it ebbs from him just as quickly, nudging her lightly with his elbow. ]
Could never do what, though? [ he shifts again, scooting back a little bit so he can lean his back against the nearby concrete wall, tipping his head back against it. ] Could never make yourself leave, or -- could never find independence outside of him?
'Cause I'd say you're doing alright for yourself, in the latter.
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Yeah. Fuck the Project.
[ The little nudge seems to both surprise her and not, a flash of tensing muscles before she just relaxes. She’s always been the kind to nudge, kick, punch, sling arms around friends, or she used to be. It takes longer, these days. ]
Both, I guess. I dunno. I— fuck, I don’t feel like I’m doing alright. Barely feel like a fucking— [ she sighs, rests her head on her knee with her gaze off to the side ] Barely feel like a person sometimes.
[ She feels like a shadow that somehow got left behind when the person casting it left. She feels like a hollow shell, empty because she built who she is around not being like her brother and doesn’t know how to define herself independent of that. Three decades where who you were was dependent on being who people didn’t want her to be.
God, she never even told North this. She told the York on the rig about how she didn’t know who she was on her own, but never her brother himself. This feels— weird, though it’s not entirely a bad weird. ]
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he knows how important it is to listen, at least. especially with that sigh, the tone of her voice, and those specific words: barely feeling like a person. that's not something said lightly, and just from everything about her body language and her voice, he knows how much of a weight that has to be. he's quiet, for a few moments. ]
I remember how you used to fight. They always drilled you together, too, but whenever I saw you on your own -- I know that was always a thing for you. Got used to relying on always having someone there. [ a slight shrug. ] I didn't get any of that, from our spar just now.
[ it feels a little strange trying to give her assurances when he feels like he still doesn't know her all that well at all. it'd be easy to give empty platitudes, but wash doesn't want to do that, and that's one concrete observation he can give. another silence, this one a little longer, he stays leaned back against the wall, watching her. ]
I know it's really not the same, but. I think I can relate.
[ it's an offer, gentle, subtle. she's sharing a lot and talking about herself and how she feels and he can tell it's -- more than she would normally say. if she wants to go on talking, he'll keep listening and hearing her out, but if she wants to take that offer, wash can just talk about himself for a bit, instead. ]
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…thanks. Worked on that with Brand—that friend I mentioned. Pushed me until I started adjusting. Guess that’s something.
[ Not a lot, but she appreciates what he’s trying to do. It did take a long time, a lot of sparring sessions, but that was how she and Brand spent most of their time together. Sparring. He understood what it was like to have someone that you spent your whole life with, how messy emotions around that could be. He had a lot less conflicting feelings about it, he had no urge to run, but it still let him understand.
She feels heavy, and when she lifts her head again she looks at him sidelong. ]
…‘cause of the whole— [ she nods vaguely at his head, she’s not sure if that’s more or less tactful than saying Epsilon outright ] —thing? Or—?
[ She’ll take the breather. This is all so— tricky, really. ]
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not me saying i wanted to finish this cleanly and then PROMPTLY FORGETTING
Relatable