systemcritical | oo2. closed.

CHARACTERS ▶ Bill Cage and "Anna Matveyevna"
LOCATION ▶ The next best thing to a dive bar.
SUMMARY ▶ When you've recovered from your injuries and all of your friends are gone and you don't have a job anymore, you should probably continue down this path.
WARNINGS ▶ Bar room violence.

[ Eyewitnesses will tell it like this later: Cage started it.

It doesn't matter to him currently. Starting isn't as important as finishing. The Irkallan immigrant had been rude first, but no one really noticed that, but they did notice the way glasses and bottles toppled off the table when Cage kicked the edge of it hard into the pirate's gut. He isn't even angry, just drunk. Usually, this isn't how he is, when he's drunk.

No one knows that here, though. The Irkallan has a knife, which raises the stakes exponentially, and the first time Cage picks up a glass bottle and tries to smash it into a weapon for himself, it breaks too deeply to be of use, so he flings glass at the man's face and tackles him like a tiny, determined bull. Someone all but picks him up and off, with the intent of tossing him aside, but he comes back, close to breaking the pirate's wrist. The knife dropping with a clatter, a brief dance of clumsy boots trying to kick it away or block the efforts thereof.

The hour is early, and there aren't a lot of people in attendance. This place is almost like a recognisably earth-like building, save for the severe lack of windows, a business not cut close to the rock and so constructed out of sheet metal and cement. There's an overhang that some previously peaceful drinkers and diners are using, now, to peer over. Most of the faces aren't ZDG, but some are. If the bar could be called anything, though, it would be called Off Duty.

His elbow cuts upwards and almost breaks the front teeth of his assailant, or. His victim. Others are threatening to join in, and Cage cuts himself loose of the latest tangle to better assess what he's dealing with, personality and identity both seeming to have left him utterly, a coldness replacing it. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

( anna didn't see what started the fight. she didn't see the fight start, per se; that there is one is how she discovers that the first officer she'd found professionally unobjectionable aboard the nidhoggr is drinking in the same bar that she's been making herself at home in, or was. before he started trying to fight everything moving in his vicinity. she remembers the nidhoggr going down, at olympus-- she doesn't know what happened, after that.

well. this is happening.

this is rapidly escalating. she is very measured, when she sets her glass down, and considers the overhang, and the pipes running along its underside. the distances involved. the potential gap between what she remembers knowing how to do, what she's retaught her muscles to respond to, and acting on impulse outside of the controlled environment of a training gym. the likelihood that he or anyone else will be grateful for her interference.

it's all very quick, once she moves; from the ground to the edge of the table and up, catching a pipe, swinging like a gymnast and not letting go, knee around his neck as she lets her body slack above the waist and her grip hold firm - the dead weight of her and the vice of her thighs pulling him unexpectedly backwards.

she isn't really dressed for this. if nothing else, is anyone going to punch a man who can't see through his assailant's skirts? )

[ Cage doesn't all the way remember what happened after that. He'd been laid up for a while, listening to Seoraj speak, exchanging leaner words with Metzger -- only once -- and never seeing Rita at all. Physiotherapy, medicated teas, nightmares about metal things with metal tentacles, and the news that his ship had its back so broken that they'd sold it.

There are parts of him still healing.

And now he can't see for the fabric in his face and the strong clamp of muscles around his neck. He is deeply confused for the time it takes for his hands to splay and quest around before gripping onto firm thighs, digging in his fingers. He hears someone bark a laugh, and someone else echo it, and it doesn't make him much less determined to punch things.

The one he lays on the outer of her thigh with the side of his fist will probably leave a bruise. ]

( it probably will.

realising as much pisses her off as she was not, a moment ago, really, which-- that is what it is. she's growing more accustomed to the physical limitations of reality, but there's something she still can't help but find obscurely offensive about the way it lingers on her, makes her feel clumsy and small and weak in a way that is immediately contradicted by her thighs clenching around his neck, gripping the pipe so she can lift a little and swing with the ultimate goal of jerking him off-balance, loosening her hands to follow him down--

if she can just get him onto the ground without actually breaking his neck.

this will be fine. )

[ He's very drunk, and strong thighs are clamping on either side of his neck, vertebrae feeling on the verge of creaking if not snapping, and the lights of the bar are a blurry haze through skirt fabric, and so it takes Cage longer than it should to figure out how she must be holding on to the piping overhead, and that if he can drag her down before she can

do that

never mind.

There is a strained grunt from him as her weight suddenly bears down on his shoulders, off-balance and tipping him in the swing of her momentum. His feet are out from under him in time for knees to smart painful against the hard ground, a hand flung out blindly. ]

( the delicately feminine flutter of her skirts above him is incongruous with the press of her elbow to the back of his neck, her knee in his ribs, the weight of her bearing down like a cat's paw in its heavy indifference to upon what it lands. )

Mr Cage.

( he may or may not remember her well enough to place her voice, her manner; it doesn't matter. the purpose of this is not reintroduction - she doesn't think that if he did recall her, it would be of any particular value, presently. she doesn't envision herself remembered well, barring a not unpleasant evening spent in the company of johanna mason and several beers. )

You disgrace yourself. You are not idiot, I think. I wish to hurt you less than these people also.

( her scrupulous honesty in failing to deny any desire to hurt him, presently, is both because she thinks pretending to be entirely unmoved by his stroppy carry on will give him something unconvincing to batter against and also because she would like to smack his head into the floor and give him a bruise to match hers where it will be seen and she would like him to hear in her voice her willingness to do so if pushed.

push, go ahead, she tires of being polite always--

he can fight someone, and she can hit him, and also be sure he isn't fighting someone who will maim him or call a superior officer to inform them on his behaviour. everyone wins. )

[ He really can't argue with whether or not he's disgracing himself. He's had a long three years of being on his best behaviour (FOR A GIVEN DEFINITION OF THE TERM) and now he's stomach down on the floor having managed to locate a goddamn dive bar in kumbaya land, trying to fight some pirates. And now he's got a ren faire sitting on him. Her diction is precise where her English is not.

So is her elbow. ]

From where I'm standing [ and he's aware of the irony ] you all look about the same to me.

[ His hand suddenly grabs back, blindly, unfussed with what it might locate -- a wrist, ideally, but he'll settle for some shirt, or hair, or any other leverage he can use to start flipping her off of him. ]

( there is a tense moment before he lunges which is anna reining in the immediate urge to slam his obnoxiously ungrateful head into the ground and drag him, concussed, out of here by his ankle in lieu of the attempt she had been trying to make of pinning him down and talking some sense into him. all look the same--

but there's no time for stiff-backed outrage when she's obliged to roll with his flailing efforts to leverage her off him, flinching momentarily when her back hits the ground - hard - and determinedly getting a knee over his shoulder in the process to keep him within reach. )

For fuck's sake,

( is probably clear enough to him by dint of inflection, even if he doesn't speak the language. )

[ It sure is clear enough, and he knows enough Russian to make it out even if it was not. He grunts as her leg comes down on his shoulder mid-getting to his knees.

Zion is a fairly progressive society, but probably no one in this bar is really going to let him engage in fisticuffs with a lady, specifically one who terminated the fight. The bleary look he manages to fix on her, recognition plain, isn't one of a man who very much wants to hurt her besides.

Maybe he can be content in rolling her just the once.

A more spiritual than physical exhaustion bows his shoulders, the one loose hand he has available waving vague in the air. He casts a look back towards the Irkallan -- who has by now retrieved his knife, but doesn't seem immediately ready to use it. ]

I'll get the check.

( anna doesn't immediately release her grip -

but she does, eventually, swinging her knee away with a brief sound of disgust that could be a reaction to so many things but definitely isn't disappointment, because she didn't want to fight him. mostly. except for a few moments there when she did, badly, and perhaps she isn't entirely proud of that.

she decides to get up off the floor of this dive bar in a city where so many people go barefoot so regularly a good deal faster, pushing herself only a little bit awkwardly to her feet and not, purely through sheer force of will, wincing even once. the set of her jaw when she levels with him isn't- aggressive, per se.

but she says, )

I will walk you where you are going,

( with a glint that says she is willing for this to mean following him from a short distance if he's going to be difficult about it.

he obviously can't be left unsupervised right now, that's been made clear. )

oo2. closed.

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