fandomhighdorms | the gym ; tuesday afternoon

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the gym ; tuesday afternoon

It was possibly too soon to be in the gym, doing anything that might put unnecessary stress on his leg and arm but Flick didn't care. He'd spent a week doing nothing at all that might aggravate injuries and that was enough for him. He'd had a successful night last night and had been able to stash a good chunk of money away for things he'd need in the future. He'd ignored Mandel's email for another day while he figured out what to say and how to say it.

He took a few minutes to stretch, something he didn't typically do, just to loosen up muscles that might have tightened up with inactivity. His arm ached briefly but otherwise, that felt fine. His leg still wasn't great but he didn't need his leg to punch and that's all he intended to do for the moment.

He was going bare knuckles again, slamming flesh against padding and enjoying the satisfying sound he made when his fists connected with the heavy bag. Mr. Wilson might have beaten him but he wasn't broken. They needed another strategy if they wanted to teach him a lesson. Physical pain wasn't something that he minded all that much. It was a familiar burden, something he'd lived with for years.

Mandel would need to find a better way to teach him a lesson because all he'd learned was that Mandel kept a lot of goons on his payroll and that he was dumb enough to think a beating was going to make him fall in line. It was laughable.

Flick focused on the heavy bag and ignoring the steadily growing ache in his arm and the continued throbbing in his leg. He'd deal with that later.

[Open place, open post. Talk to Flick or use the gym for your own means.]

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After class, Isabelle had talked to Jace on the phone for a bit, to relay Alec's continued panther plight to him, and to get some of Hodge's worries about their training in return. Of course, they were both training just fine and enough on their own, but isabelle still felt an obligation to come down to the gym after the call.

She was so going to go get a nice big coffee after she was done, though.

"Oh, how surprising," she noted with a distinct lack of surprise as she came in, a few knives in hand. "I knew you wouldn't stay away for long."

Edited 2013-10-29 16:59 (UTC)

Flick didn't look over at the sound of her voice. It was familiar enough by now that he knew who it was so he didn't feel the need to stop his rhythm to acknowledge her.

Plus, he figured his arm would start throbbing if he let himself relax and he didn't want that either.

"Sounds like you're calling me predictable," he said once he'd driven a fist into the bag several times. "I'll have to work on that. Shake up my schedule a bit."

"Or you can continue not to care," Isabelle retorted, already heading for the salle. Some poor dummy was about to get stabbed. "Because it doesn't matter."

"Good suggestion," he remarked, stepping back from the heavy bag and slanting a glance over at her. "Probably keep on doing that."

He would have done that anyway. Of course.

"Who needs to care about something as stupid as that anyway?" Not him. He spared her another glance before circling around the bag and getting a feel for how his body was handling this.

Isabelle wasn't really sparing him any glances. She'd stuck her knives in her belt and was bringing one of the training dummies to the center of her designated training area.

"No one," she said, deciding she liked where the dummy was. "Because it's pointless."

She was such a sunny person. Flick snickered quietly and pushed the heel of his palm against the front of his shoulder. The pain was a dull ache, radiating out from underneath his skin. He breathed in and out and went back to ignoring it.

Flick braced the heavy bag, stilling it with an arm and closed his eyes. He let himself picture Jude, his mother, his father and used that to dull the pain.

And then he opened his eyes and slammed the fist of his injured arm into the heavy bag, letting the vibrations rattle up his arm and spread out over his collar bones. He kept going, fast and hard and brutal.

Isabelle was actually a very sunny person! At least on the surface. Just not when she was focusing on what she was doing.

She could hear him pounding the bag – being aware of her surroundings was a part of her training – but she felt no need to watch. She knew what punching looked like. So, she pulled her knives out and attacked the doll. Her movements were swift and graceful, and she didn't make much noise. Just the dull thuds of the blades hitting the dummy, and her heeled boots against the floor.

The anger that had he'd suddenly brought up to use as a shield against his injuries started to fade away and his pace lessened and slowed until he was jabbing at the bag sharply but nothing as harshly as he'd been doing before.

He didn't really care if she watched or not. He wasn't putting on a show for her or anyone. But, that wasn't going to stop him from watching her do what she was doing. He wasn't big on weapons, never had been, so it was almost interesting to watch someone who knew how to handle them as well as she apparently did.

Sometimes, he thought maybe he should pick up a weapon (and he'd had that thought a few times after the beating he'd taken) but he always found a reason not to do it. They just seemed clunky to him.

They weren't clunky when you knew how to use them, and Isabelle obviously did. Two daggers with long blades, obviously comfortable in her hands, and not just like she'd trained with them a lot but like she'd used them a lot. Which she had, even though the whip was generally her weapon of choice.

Had that dummy been a demon, it would've gotten sliced and stabbed up pretty good. And okay, it still was. Being a dummy just made it so that it wouldn't fold in on itself and disappear through dimensions once she'd be done with it.

That poor, defenseless dummy. His dummy family was going to be in mourning after she was done with. There'd definitely be no open casket funeral there.

Flick smirked at her obvious skill because there was definitely skill there. He didn't think he'd ever doubted that. Mandel would just love her. He wasn't ever going to find out anything about her but still. The thought was true.

Flick pulled his eyes away from her for a moment and he braced the heavy bag to still it. For a second, he contemplated trying to use his leg for some high knee strikes to see how it'd do. He put some weight on said leg, winced briefly but delivered the knee strikes anyway.

Taking the weight off his leg was immediately a relief but driving said leg into solid object didn't feel great. But, he did it a few times, visualizing the gut and aiming for spots where he knew ribs would break.

Isabelle glanced over, though only after she'd pretty successfully cut the dummy's throat open with a slash that seemed to involve her whole body being in movement. She didn't do things stiffly or half-assed.

But now she was looking over. "That looks like it should hurt." Since she was pretty sure his leg was still not great.

It did. It really, really did but he was an expert at blocking the pain out, at least for a few moments. He finished up with the strikes and stepped backwards, putting weight on his leg gingerly.

"It's fine," he said, brushing it off and leaning down to rub at his knee, massaging the muscles there for just a second or two. "It's gonna hurt whoever I use it on but I'll be fine. Break some ribs, puncture a lung, and watch the other person fail at breathing."

He'd done something like that to Ivan, just because he had the ability, and couldn't deny that he'd felt powerful.

Isabelle leaned against the training dummy, resting her arm on its shoulder like a familiar friend.

"Still looks like it hurts," she replied, shrugging her free shoulder. "Expecting to break many ribs in the near future?"

"Mm." Flick stood up and glanced over at her. "Probably."

He wished he would have been lying but no, it was probably going to happen. The Wolves were still in control back home and they weren't just going to roll over.

"Amongst other things I'll probably have to break," he added, rubbing his forehead with his shirt. "All in a day's work."

"Well." She shrugged again. "Good luck with that? Try not to break too many of your own bones?"

Not that she really cared. She was just sort of curious about and baffled by whatever it was he was doing off the island.

"That sounded incredibly sincere," Flick replied because it hadn't. At all. Again, he didn't care but he was amused. "I'm really touched."

He tapped a hand over his heart and forced a warm smile onto his face that disappeared fairly quickly. "I'll be careful. I know how to take a beating. Military school."

He'd told her brother so he figured that he could tell other people since he'd let it out in the open already. "Lots of training."

And it wasn't like Isabelle cared enough to go spreading this knowledge around. Mundie military things seemed so pointless to her when she lived in a world where te threat came from another dimension.

"They teach you to take a beatin there?" she asked, half joking.

"They teach a lot of things there," Flick said vaguely, reaching to still the heavy bag again. It gave him some time to catch his breath and to let his leg run ache a little and get it out of its system.

"Perfect place for a teenage boy without any direction," he recited, rolling his eyes. He was pretty sure he'd heard his father say that at one point. He'd had direction. The only person who'd noticed was Jude and he was dead now.

Flick gripped the bag harder and his jaw tightened.

Isabelle pulled away from the dummy again, and flipped one knife around in her hand, then the other. "Learning pointless things? I doubt it."

And this from someone whose entire life could be seen as a form of military school. In some aspects of it, anyway.

"Guess it depends on your idea of pointless," he replied after a moment. "Pacifists are going to see it as pointless."

He held up a peace sign and rolled his eyes. "Peace, love and understanding, after all. But no. My takeaways were how to hurt people in the most painful ways possible."

Maybe not the point of military school but when you built up all that anger inside you, that's what you wanted to know and that's what he'd carried with him.

"I'm not a pacifist." She was pretty sure they didn't even exist among Shadowhunters. If they did, it wasn't long before they abandoned the Clave. "It still looks pointless to me. But it's probably my upbringing."

Which was a rare concession on her part to actually acknowledging she didn't understand mundanes because things were different for her, rather than mundies just being that stupid.

"I'm not a pacifist either," Flick said, shrugging a shoulder and pushing the bag away from him. When it swung back, he gave it a weak jab just to do something with his hands.

"But they're out there, lurking and just waiting to give you a brochure on how you too can love the Earth and all the peoples in it!" It should be said that his tone had pitched higher on purpose.

He shook his head. "Nothing ever gets done with inaction."

"Nothing much seems to get done with mundane action, either."

That's what it usually looked like, anyway. There was always a war on somewhere. Isabelle eyed her dummy, idly sizing it up, comparing it to one demon or another in her head.

"Maybe not but it gives the average person the illusion that something is being done," he remarked with a shrug. "They don't know any better so they sit and stare at their television sits and eat microwaveable food and be happy."

That was how it seemed to him. "You want something done, you do it yourself. Involving other people...never a good idea."

Jude had died. His mother had died. Lucas had died. Felix had died. Joi...well, he'd cut ties to prevent that.

"The world can burn for all I care." He'd hear it from Jude for that. "I've got other things to deal with."

"The world won't burn under my watch," Isabelle said. It was the only thing she had to deal with. Her life's purpose, even. Still, it sounded like just another idle comment, one some people might even mistake for a joke.

She started walking away from the dummy. Time for target practice.

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