(no subject)
The night is warm, almost oppressively so, and Ellen is early. She slips silently into the appointed place with her hands pushed down deep into the pockets of a sweartshirt far too warm for the evening dark. The air outside smells fishily and of exhaust, and the sawdust, sweaty smell inside the warehouse is almost pleasant following it. She bows her head as she whips off her hooded sweatshirt. Her skin is a pale flash, the black tank top beneath more skin than Ellen has shown the world in quite some time. Lean and tall as she folds her white arms beneath the swell of her breast, she chews on the insides of her cheeks, her expression otherwise one of solemn gravity on the edge of grimness.
Sabretooth is there. It seems like he rarely leaves the warehouse lately. The tattered, stinking leather of the coat that he refuses to give up is draped over the back of a metal folding chair. He is dressed much the same as ellen, a black tanktop that uncovers the powerful musculature of his shoulders and arms. As Ellen stands, Creed paces. "So?" he asks her without preamble.
"So," Ellen replies. Clipping out the word singly in a clear, sharp voice, she lifts her chin and looks up at Creed. Her shoulders set as she pulls her arms from their fold again, hands curling into loose fists at her sides. Her eyes are bright, on the edge of an odd wildness with her intensity. From this, and from the general energized-vital scent to her, Valkyrie reveals herself keyed up.
There is no more hesitation. Creed pounces like a wild animal, lunging at Ellen with his fists swinging rapidly. They are not full force blows, but a series of jabs thrown with intentions of knocking her off balance and burning off his own energy. Victor, of all the people who show up on these nights, is bizarrely the least out to hurt anyone.
Taken by surprise by the suddenness of his leap, Ellen fights back out of a cold rush of shock and fury. A creature of grace, quick on her feet, the limits of her combat experience serve to her detriment in the ring, such as it is. She cries out with a wordless snarl at the strike of a jab, and pounds back at him with the full force of her strength, the muscles of her lean body taut. She is heedless of any threat to her own body or his, taking their mutual immortality -- to a degree -- as read.
The fight drags on this way - with Sabretooth harrying the Valkyrie with blows of bruising force, forcing her to defend herself and to earn some of the experience that she lacks. His fists hit her and it is far from a painless affair, but he never goes for the kill. "You'll get better at it. Practice. Trainin' yer instincts to react," he tells her between flurries.
Her single-word response is not that informative. "React," she says, almost hoarsely. She grunts with the impact of another of his blows and tries to duck away from this one, block that one. Her motion is fluid and continual, and if her learning process as a fighter is fairly slow, she certainly keeps hurling herself into it without regard for the bruises she'd be earning if she weren't totally a cheater.
"That's the shit," Creed snarls when one of his blows is redirected into missing, leaving his face momentarily open for her to take a shot, should she be quick enough to follow up. For all of his raging and violence, he is capable of being a patient teacher. Especially when it benefits him.
Striking quickly is pretty much what Valkyrie has going for her; her strongest suit! She leaps for the opening, smashing into him with the sharp hook of a blow. "Enh!" Sweating lightly and breathing quickly, her concentration is wholly intense, completely engaged in this expenditure of energy.
The crunch of knuckles against the much bigger mutant's nose probably brings a strange kind of satisfaction. There is a momentary gush of blood and the crunching his cheating repairing the cartilidge to be heard. "Fuck. See? Openings. It's all about taking advantage of the chance you can get on someone like me. Yer gettin' it."
Shaking out her hand as she withdraws, Ellen stares at him and licks her teeth, breath escaping in a long hiss. "The master I serve," she says, in a thin, tight voice, "is fighting entropy with a pack of fools." She wipes sweat from her upper lip on the crook of her bare right arm.
Sabretooth pauses to look at Ellen after that. "No shit? So does that make your master a fool?" There is a little grin that flashes, showing the tips of his fangs. He is being deliberately inflammatory.
Ellen throws back her head and laughs. The sound from the depths of her gut is cold and hard, as though its shadows have more to do with madness than with humor. Then she hurls herself at Creed, fists flying and eyes wild.
Creed seeks only to provoke her into further violence. The barrage of her fists backs him up until he can find an opening. Once he has it, he steps back from her, grabbing her wrist and using it to fling her face-first into the sawdust beneath their feet. "He's a fuckin' saint then? Among the fools to deliver them?"
The skin of her palms ripped by the scrape of her impact, Ellen also spits blood from elsewhere as she pushes herself back up to all fours. "He is a man." Her voice is thick, her pale gaze narrowed up at him through dust and sweat.
"If he's a man, he's fuckin' weak. Men are frail, worthless, short-lived things. They ain't like you and me." Sabretooth circles, his posture hunkering lower and his clawed hands carefully curled into fists. His upper lip keeps curling up in little snarls, showing that his taunting is stirring himself up as well.
Ellen's rise is slow, as though she can attain a more threatening aspect with the retention of dignity. Drawing erect in a slow, turning pivot, she never ceases tracking him with her gaze. "Neither saint nor demon. He is a warrior. A leader." Though the language of his circling is clearly that of a predator, she is too used to being the serpent to let herself become prey. She growls, "Never weak," and lunges at Creed again with a shriek of rage she might have stolen from a banshee.
The fight begins again. This time, Victor is not holding back so hard. He is swinging hard enough to leave a woman without Ellen's abilities in pain for a long time to come. His fists pound against her stomach and her ribs, but he is far from unscathed. He comes away from the clash momentarily to wipe blood away from one of his eyes after her knuckles broke the skin open at his orbital. "Fuck. Now /that's/ what I wanted," he snarls at her.
The pain Ellen is in is ... considerable. She stands awkwardly for a moment, breathing hard and ragged before she crashes to one knee. "Good," she manages with a thin snort. Blood trickling from the corner of her mouth, her smile flickers across her expression before being eaten up by a wince. "Bastard," she says hoarsely, feeling at a shard of rib that has pierced her skin and bitten into the fabric of her tank top. She coughs, spits more blood, and closes her eyes, working her cells back around into working order with the full force of her concentration.
Sabretooth paces away as Ellen knits her body back into the proper order. He does not do anything so much as look at her aggressively while she is distracted. "Got yer heart fuckin' pounding when I started shit-talking the old man though, didn't it? Doesn't it feel good to let that kind of rage wash over ya?"
Through a haze of distraction, Ellen observes with slitted eyes, "My anger is not difficult to find."
"It's powerful," Sabretooth says, his reverence for the power of the emotion showing clear.
"Perhaps so." Ellen closes her eyes again, and grits her teeth as she forces her bones to regenerate in the correct configuration.
Creed waits through the sounds of her body's bones unbreaking. It is something that he himself is rather used to hearing. "Nothin' in the world feels better than just letting it go." The cut above his eye has closed, but there is a fetching streak of blood in his blonde hair to show it was there.
The blood remains on Ellen's skin, her lips, her clothing. More drained after the healing process than after the fight, she pushes herself slowly back up to her feet and wipes her mouth. "Where is that beer?"
With a toss of his head over to the red cooler. "Over there. Have at it," he invites her. Sabretooth paces away from the makeshift ring, flexing his fingers a few times. His energy level is much higher than it was when they began. "So what's Erik doing?" he asks, abruptly.
It takes Ellen a moment to respond, both because the question jars her -- casual first names, what! -- and because its answer still baffles her. She takes a bottle from the cooler and listens to the faint hiss as she opens it. "He is in outer space."
Creed blurts out a loud laugh at hearing that. "What?!" If the question jarred Ellen, the answer is a hell of a good counter.
Taking a sedate swallow from her bottle, Ellen twitches her shoulders in a slight shrug. "Outer space," she repeats. "It has been in the papers and the like."
"I need to buy a fuckin' paper," Sabretooth decides. He shakes his head, claws raking back through his hair. The right side of it is clumped a little by his blood. "That's what you meant about fighting entropy. What? The old man is going to stop that fuckin' asteroid?"
"That is the idea." Ellen rubs at an eye with the first two fingers of her right hand, cooled by the glass of the beer bottle, and exhales in a low sigh.
"So. Ragnarok's shit off by the master yer following. How's that settling in yer head?" Sabretooth asks, tilting his head and looking at Ellen with genuine curiosity showing on his face. It can, believe it or not, express things other than anger and contempt and arrogance.
"I do not know the cycle," Ellen replies, with a flicker of her fingers. "I am no seer, no prescient. If this is Ragnarok, the final battle will rage and the universe will die and begin anew. There is no fighting Ragnarok, no preventing the cycle." She tips the bottle's mouth against her own for a long swallow, and concludes roughly, "But I think there are too many battles yet fought for this to be all. I think the sun shall be undevoured a while longer."
Victor walks over to pluck a beer up himself. The cap of the bottle of flicked aside easily. "Well. Then here's to hopin' my next century's as fun as the first," he says, laughing harshly as he raises his bottle to Ellen before downing it's contents in one go.
Ellen lifts her bottle to him in silence, accepting the toast without offering one of her own. Her expression slightly troubled as she takes another swallow, she licks her lips as she sets it down. Taking a deep breath as she rolls her shoulders, she looks back up at Creed and says quietly, "Before the others arrive, another go?"
"Another go," he agrees, before simply throwing the empty bottle aside and marching back toward the circle. "Now let that rage get in there. Don't hold back. Think of this like crushing an enemy, someone worthy of it. Just forget about the fact that you can kill 'em with yer power," he coaches before their next round begins.
Bowing her head for a moment silent while she schools herself to a state like readiness, when Ellen looks up again it is with the barest shadow of a smile. Without a word, she advances on the circle as well to rejoin the fray.
An early matchup at the fight club.