Training For Two (closed)

Erika woke up in the morning feeling light and clear-headed, the events of the night filling up in her mind like a cool, summer shower. She hanged out in the Initiates dorm all day, reading, but she hardly ate as she waited for the afternoon to come. And it was finally time. After she changed in a black tank and a pair of used sport shorts, and got into trainers, she went for the training rooms. She still got her visor on, and she walked awkwardly around the stundents going to train as well.

She chose to wait for Ash in one of the empty training rooms, looking wonderously at the racks of weapons and practice dummies. She was nervous, anxious about Ash's first impression on her. He probably thought her a freak, and with, and with a bad impression that she didn't know how to fight, of God... Why did she ask him to go training, she never fought!

Erika sighted and sat down on the floor, tapping the ground with her fingers. She gased intently at the door, as if she could burn a hole through it and look outside for Ash, but it was impossible. She bit the inside of her lip as she got up and walked towards the racks of weaponry, passing her fingers absently over a pair a punjabi knives, her fingers slipping over the lean curve of the flat side of the blade. She yanked the from the rack and fastened them into her belt.

Nice...

Waking up in the morning, Ash almost entirely forgot the events of the previous evening. Had they been real? It wasn't like a dream, nothing like that happened in his dreams, but it was strange enough Ash wasn't one hundred percent sure it had happened. But he had fallen asleep on the lounge couch and woken up in his dorm, so there had to have been a way he had gotten to his dorm from the lounge and those memories were the only ones he could come up with to explain it.

So he spent his day thinking about Erika. He had rearranged his entire schedule to figure out how to fit in some training around four. He had spaced out an hour for it, but he wasn't sure how long Erika had wanted to train. Just doing this was going against much of what Ash believed. Order, organization, logical scheduling. He had just popped in a training session after a study session and before dinner. Sure, eating was reasonable after working out, but a shower was more reasonable but he didn't have time for that.

As he walked toward the gym after a full day of thinking and worrying, he also thought and worried about Erika. Was she his friend? Were they simply still acquaintances? Did she want something else? Ash wasn't sure if he could do something else, he had barely ever managed to find a girl interesting, and he had never found a girl attractive or fun to be around. Despite being seventeen, these thoughts were still new to him and he wasn't sure if he would be able to handle it.

Walking into the training room, hands in the pockets of his basketball shorts, shoulders sagged low in confusion under his t-shirt, he glanced up at Erika, ready to say hi but froze in place when he saw what she was messing with. It took him a second to get himself back before opening his mouth again to speak. "Hey. Um, nice...knives."

Erika froze as she heard the door open, hoping it wasn't Ash, to see her taking the knives, but it obviously was him. She froze with the hand just above her belt, her teeth gritted in horror about what should she say next. She had to say something, that was for sure, but what? He body tensed as she thinked of the consequences that a bad answer would bring, and she found herself hoping against logic that this would solve itslef, poof away and dissapear without anything to remember the momen by, like a fasle memory from childhood, a really weird one that you can't stop believing it had happened, even if it obviously had.

She turned towards him shyly, undecided about her response to his words. Her hand caught the collar of her tank as she looked away just a bit from his face, feeling the warmness of blushing creeping over her. "Ah... wel... I haven't fought before, and training my gift here is impossible so... I just thought they were... pretty she finished in a whisper, realizing how odd finding a knife pretty might be. They were deadly weapons, but the curve of the blade just caught Erika's eye in the whole stack of weapons, which was indeed unusual.

"Well, thought we could... don't know... train or something. I haven't before, so I'm weak but... I want to learn." she said afterwards. She always wanted to learn more, but now it seemed like learning wanted to take a new level and give itself a new meaning, or was she just running madly into a wall that seemed an exit to her heart?

Ash wasn't entirely sure how he felt about walking into the training room to find Erika, someone he had just met, with two knives on her belt. Sure, she could have just been weighing them in, but he wasn't sure about training with weapons. Ash rarely trained hand to hand, despite a desperate need to. But he wasn't sure if it was intimidating, scary, or strange to see the small girl with two knives, as if she owned them. Which he was sure she didn't because there was a blank spot on the rack just opposite her.

Instead of saying hi she gave him an explanation for the knives. Which, he supposed, was partly what he had been looking for but also not. Ash wasn't sure how to go about this. It was awkward and weird, he had been really trained or spent this long with any one person. "Uh, that's alright. Though, I don't know what other kind of training to do, since I haven't really trained with anything other than my gift." He said, shrugging as he said it, not sure where to look so he looked at her ear, close enough to look like he was looking at her but far enough to not actually be looking at her.

Ash was thinking. What could they train with if neither of them knew how to fight? Ash wasn't weak, he was physically better off than a lot of kids his age. Back home he had worked a ranch as a summer job. It had paid well and allowed his body to build up muscle and endurance. But his mind knew only work and study but not fighting and battle. "Uh, maybe.... Um.... Well...I don't know." Ash said, pausing as he tried harder to think of what to do.

Erika felt awkward as he assured her it was okay, and she brushed a locknof pale blonde hair from her face, feeling numb and itching at the same time, like a broken clockwork toy that rabbled and sent sparks with each screetching movement. She wondered if he could hear her breath or the hammering of her heart in her chest. She hoped not, or he would have been deaf afterwards.

"For what I know, there's hand-to-hand and with weapons so... which would you pick?" she asked him, hoping he would give her an answer as she bit her lower lip and took a few tentative steps towards him.

It was a bit strange, the way this was playing out, but Ash watched Erika's actions carefully without looking like he was wary. Which he was, but he knew it would offend her to know that. And he knew there was nothing to be wary of, she was just a small girl that he had met the other day. So why did he feel weirder around her than he did around other girls. Maybe it was the weird situation they were in, because Ash had never stood in one of the training rooms with a girl. Though he rarely stood in the training rooms at all.

"Uh, well, I wouldn't know which weapon to start with, so I guess hand-to-hand." Ash said with a shrug, wary of how this would turn out. He didn't want to hit a girl, especially one so much smaller than him.

Erika nodded as he suggested hand-to-hand, and readied her position as she had seen. Yes, she had read books on fighting, although she doubted she hadn't read books on everything since she was two, the age in which she learned to read, the age in which her parents knew she was gifted. The girl looked up at him, waiting for Ash to ready himself, or tell her he was ready, or anything at all. Her body pulsed through the wish to fight, a wish she had had only when she read, like the wish to do an awfully scary thing because you see people say it's cool.

She breathed out and relaxed her muscles before tensing up again like a spring. "Ready?" she asked him at last, feeling small and suddenly like she didn't stand a chance before Ash.

Wait, was she serious? Ash panicked, not entirely sure how he was supposed to react to this. She was preparing for an actual fight or whatever. Weren't they called sparring matches? Whatever it was, it would require him to hit a small girl that had openly admitted to having never trained before. Despite his lack of skill at this as well, Ash doubted this was a good idea and held up both of his hands, as if it surrender.

"Wait a second. How about we use the dummies, or something? Neither of us know what we're doing and we could easily get hurt. We should practice in something that won't get injured." He suggested. Even if she had read a bunch of books about this, Ash knew he had as well, it still wasn't a good idea to try it. They had no experience and hurting someone was not what Ash wanted to do right now. Perhaps never.

Erika opened her eyes with surprise, looking flustered at what he said and lowered her hands. She felt exactly dumb enough to not want to run even if she did. Now the only thing left was to fall while going towards the dummy... Huh, maybe that'll happen, no-one can tell, but please please please let it not happen! She bit her lower lip awkwardly and passed her palm over her visor.

"I'm sorry I'm so... dumb..." she whispered and she trailed her feet towards a dummy, looking fearfully at it, as if it could fight her back. She readied herself for battle just as she did before, and gave the dummy a hit in the chest, her leg going like an arrow to it's chest. She thought she felt a little better, and she turned towards Ash with a shy smile. "Now you try." she suggested, stepping away from the dummy.

It flustered Ash just as much to speak out against her. He didn't want to offend her, but she was jumping a little too far ahead. This was something new to the both of them, so Ash wasn't surprised she jumped as far ahead as she had, but there were logical thinking steps to this kind of situation. People completely new to fighting? Often didn't start with fighting another person, let alone another person new to fighting.

Ash flinched when she said dumb. "You're not dumb. We're both just not sure what we're doing." He responded as level-y as he could, glancing at his watch to find the time he had allotted for this diminishing faster than he had expected. Alright, so she seemed to grasp this idea. She seemed a little better at implementing an attack than he was sure he would be. Standing before the dummy, awkwardly attempting a stance, he recalled things he had read. Girls swung with their whole torso because they didn't have the arm strength for a proper punch, but what if he did that? Not only did he already have a decent amount of arm strength, but putting his full body into the punch might have a bigger effect. So he tried it. There was no way to tell if it hurt more or if it was the same as any old punch. Or weaker. But it felt nice to actually try punching something. He turned and gestured for Erika to try something else.

"T-thanks..."the girl managed to mutter back to him, shifting her glace from the dummy back to him. Erika's eyes seemed to grow a darker green as she saw Ash, with the corner of her eye, look at the watch. He was in a hurry, he didn't want to be there, he didn't want to offend her by refusing, all of these variables spun in her head as she saw him prepare to hit the dummy. She instantly became a little strained as she saw him force, and she thanked God Ash had suggested they better practice on a dummy first.

As he stepped her back and he let her have a go again, she took a few steps back from the dummy and launched herself at it, sending punch after punch in it's torso, it one exact spot, sweat running down from her forehead onto her face, gleaming under the greenish glass of her visor. After a few seconds of punching through the dummy, she drew back, breathing hard from the effort. "If it would have been a human, they wouldn't have felt a thing..." she concluded in a dissappointed whisper.

Ash hadn't meant to be rude by looking at his watch, he had just told her she wasn't dumb. But he was worried he wouldn't have time to accomplish everything he wanted to. He rarely hung out with people, so he never had to fit it into his schedule. He always just happened to run into people and then he would have to rearrange his schedule once the time was wasted. But this wasn't a waste of time. He needed to figure out how to fit in training anyway, it was going to be important.

But it was just a habit for him to check his watch and make sure he was on track. He watched her punch the dummy, trying to figure out what he was going to do when she was finished. Maybe they should see if they could find another dummy so they didn't go back and forth. Then again, sweat had begun to bead on her forehead, so Ash figured it was okay to take breaks from time to time. "You don't know that. Plus, we're here to train anyway, right?" He pointed out as he stepped forward. Thinking fast he tried an uppercut to the dummies chin. He had seen moves like that in documentaries before.

Erika nodded slightly at what he said next. He was encouraging her? God, he was. Erika's head was exploding but she fought to keep it clear, to think. It was good think, that he cared about her, but why was she freaking out that much? She couldn't tell, it was just that warm feeling in her stomach that everything was going to be alright. Everything. Which made her kinda freak out too, since she was used to being the little smarty-pants who only felt safe near her mom or books. Yep, books too.

She stepped back and watched his upper-cut the dummy, her keen eyes studying his movement, the way he hit it making her jump once again. She scratched the back of her neck awkwardly, wishing for something to break the moment. They were just punching a dummy, which made her feel kind of annoyed, since they point of this meeting was for her to befriend his. Which didn't seem to advance quickly.

"What house are you in?" she suddenly asked him, feeling the need to make conversation. Yes, the harmless question about the house, a question that seemed so little, thought it revealed so much of the answerer. Perfect. As usual.

It was only right to be encouraging. Ash didn't think it would be very kind of him to let her talk herself down like that. He felt that feeling a little too often and preferred that other people not feel it. Sometimes he thought about himself as useless and worthless, but Erika didn't deserve that feeling. She was pretty cool, so helping her see that it was just practice she needed was only right, in Ash's mind. However, as he punched and fought the dummy, he figured he wasn't very good at this whole thing. Even after telling her that practice made improvement, the Spring threw mental punches at himself.

After punching the dummy, he took another step back to allow her to hit it as well. This was getting nowhere and was, frankly, awkward and something they could have easily done on their own. What were they even doing? It felt really unproductive, but Ash didn't say anything and just kept going. When they were done, then he could do other things. That would be more useful.

Then she asked a question. Ash wasn't necessarily expecting it, but it wasn't weird in any way. "Spring." He responded. "What house are you in?" He hadn't seen her around the Spring dorms, but he could easily have been just not paying attention.

Erika watched Ash fight the dummy with her keen emerald eyes until she felt like her heart was slamming into her chest, bringing her back into reality. The stiffened all over, her hand freezing half way to her visor and  that was it. She watched some more, until she felt a little bit too pained by the whole picture. Ash fighting someone made her feel scared. Unsure if she did the right thing calling him here, to train how to fight.

"Umm, well... actually, I'm still an Initiate..." she whispered awkwardly. At least the question brought her back to reality and he had stopped punching the dummy, too. But the idea of his having to fight it again scared her.

So she pulled out a knife and slashed the dummy in half.

She dropped the knife, her hand shaking, her other hand fisted  besides her.