strangetrip | [GP] training day

Current Location: fitness center

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[GP] training day

There was a trope that in prison there wasn't much to do except work out or read. As colorful as Madonna Inn might be, it was still a prison. And look, somebody had put together a library.

Put fifty some people, many of them military, adventurers, vigilantes, or superheroes of one stripe or another, in a prison with none of the urgent missions or near-death experiences they were used to, the fitness center was going to be a popular place. Maybe almost as popular as the bar.

... Probably not quite that popular.

There were free weights and weight machines, treadmills and ellipticals, yoga mats and exercise balls. A room set aside for classes, if someone decided to lead. A large square had been taped over an area of the floor off to one side as a make-shift sparring space. Sports equipment had been brought back from Bonesville for those who preferred more organized games. And those who had been stuck here longest remembered there hadn't always been a salmon ladder.

In other words, something for just about everybody. And you could usually find someone in there if you were looking for a spotter, workout buddy, sparring partner, friendly competition too.

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"Hell yeah," Kitty agreed, beaming and at the same time battling the impulse to rush across the space between them to hug Maya. She didn't think they were close enough for that yet, or maybe after that spar, they were.

"Any time you want. Dance would be fun, too."

"Isn't that what we just did?" Maya grinned. After that spar, she felt like Kitty would know what she meant. And hopefully hear the agreement to dancing in the future too. She thought again about the first fight with Daredevil, and how they'd passed it off to the kids who saw them, as a playground repeat of her play. Her play that had been, in its way, preparation for finding the man she believed had killed her father.

Maybe she'd tell Kitty the story, sometime.

Kitty grinned right back at her, hearing things said and unsaid. That was the great thing about getting physical like this with someone: you learned a lot about them in visceral ways the brain couldn't get in the way of.

"Feel like hitting the sauna?" It would be good to bake out some of the soreness before it set in, plus they could talk.

"Yes." Strange's place had been lacking in certain amenities, and as much as Maya hated being stuck here, she could appreciate the things she'd missed while they were in hiding. After a work out like that especially.

"Talking in words will be easier too," following from the talking with their bodies they had just done. Bodies said a lot, always had to Maya. But lip reading in the middle of a fight could be tricky.

"Sometimes I wonder if that's why I learn so many languages," Kitty said, half to herself as she collected her gear, but enunciated clearly enough that she was sure Maya could read. "Looking for ways to express in words what bodies and numbers say more precisely."

Because some things, even things there were plenty of words for, weren't easy to speak. From the conversation they'd just had, though, Kitty thought Maya probably understood a lot of those things already.

All physical movement was language. It was the first language Maya had learned, and how she had learned all the others she knew. "We need the other languages, because most people don't know how to read bodies and movement." Retard. She had seen that word over and over on people's lips, in their eyes, their actions. Long before she knew what it meant, or the rest of them figured out that it wasn't her.

As she spoke, she gathered her own things, confident Kitty wouldn't try to talk over her and would wait until she had Maya's gaze again before speaking. She'd been obviously careful so far to make sure Maya could see her lips when she spoke.

And Kitty did wait for Maya to stand again and join her before she replied. When she did, she said, "Dance and fighting, and quantum mechanics for that matter, are all about the translation of solid matter into energy and movement. A big part of learning was helping me ease the dissonance of having such an ambiguous relationship with physicality."

Which, having said it, she realized maybe she hadn't needed to. Then again, it wasn't a thing she tried to share with many people. It was worth putting it into words for her own sake.

Edited 2018-03-18 04:03 (UTC)

"An ambiguous relationship with physicality?" Maya repeated. "Because of your phasing, you mean?" Enough members of her team – and people she ended up facing in a fight – had powers, she accepted it as normal, but it was still a different experience than her own. That was one of the things she and Clint had in common.

They walked together toward the saunas. "It probably isn't a surprise we didn't get a lot of time to talk about powers and learning to deal with them, the times I was working with other people. I'm curious."

Edited 2018-03-22 05:14 (UTC)

Kitty issued a murmur of agreement before she realized Maya wouldn't hear it, and then said aloud, "Yes," to the clarification and, "It would be easier to show you some of it."

She gestured ahead of them to the sauna. "In the privacy of the sauna if you don't mind. It's not a secret that I have abilities, but I'd prefer not to show them off to the public at large."

Maya had been talking about more generally having powers, since as far as she knew, she wasn't technically powered, just a talented normal human. Like Clint and his ability to hit a target. But if Kitty was willing to show her, she understood not wanting to do it so publicly.

She nodded her understanding, and as they got to sauna added, "The only actual mutant I worked with was Logan, and, well... he's Logan."

"Mr. Voted Least Likely to Share a Feeling Ever," Kitty agreed, lips twitching in a grin. "Unless it's 'Grouchy'." Oscar-style.

Kitty set all her stuff on a chair, grabbed a towel, and quickly traded her clothes for the towel. When she opened the door of the sauna to let them both in, the heat of it hit her like a wall of baked sand. It took a moment to catch her breath.

Once she did, she stepped inside and settled on a higher bench, waiting for Maya to come in and close the door.

The sauna wasn't the Chief's tipi, but stepping into the wall of heat took Maya's breath in a way that was familiar enough to niggle at the back of her mind. Twice as much in the quiet once she closed the door behind them.

She stretched out on a bench, head toward Kitty. "In my case, I think he maxed out his sharing allotment the night we met," she said, picking up their conversation and twining it with the direction of her thoughts.

"Then it's probably lucky you didn't have to spend a lot more time with him. He doesn't get less angsty on closer acquaintance." Logan was always a safe topic and target. Even the people who loved him, like her and Rogue and Jean, hated him about half the time.

"But he helped me a lot when I was younger. He even gave me on of his broken claws to use as a blade." She wasn't sure how, exactly, to segue back to her powers and learning to use them, but the heat felt good, it made her tone quieter and lazier and she figured they'd get there when they got there.

"I was on a vision quest," Maya explained. "Hadn't had anything to eat or drink for going on four days, middle of the night, massive thunderstorm, and there he was, suddenly lit up by a flash of lightning." He'd helped her too, that night, and was gone before she could tell him so. That had had to wait until their paths crossed again, and a quiet moment in the Secret Avengers temporary headquarters. "I thought he was a spirit guide. I'm still not sure he wasn't. In a way."

"Why are mentors and spirit guides always grumpy?" Kitty's tone was light and the question almost playful. "It's like they think we wouldn't listen if they just talked sense."

Jean and Storm hadn't always been grumpy, and neither had the Professor, but she didn't think she'd call them spirit guides, really. Kurt, though, Kurt had been...not grumpy, just morose a lot of the time. He still fit the profile.

"If he helped you, I'm glad he found you." That was more serious, because Kitty knew how hard their lives could be without friends and guidance.

"Grumpy, cryptic, or both." The Chief had been good at cryptic.

"Personally I prefer using stories, art, and dance, but I guess those can be cryptic too."

Which led them neatly back to the subject of dance, physics, and Kitty's powers, and she nodded both acknowledgment and appreciation. When she knew that Maya was watching her, Kitty phased, seemingly dissolving through the bench and out of the sauna.

A few moments later, she rapped firmly on the door, hard enough she hoped to make vibrations Maya could detect, and then phased back through it. "When I was thirteen, I fell through my bed into the kitchen. It was years before I didn't phase accidentally if I got overwhelmed."

Maya watched as Kitty faded into the bench, and then waited. On the bench the way she was, she felt a faint buzz she recognized as a sharp rap going through wood, and then Kitty was coming through the closed door. That was really cool.

"Just what a teenager wants. It's not like they ever get overwhelmed by life or anything. Even without powers."

"Right?" Laughing a little, Kitty settled onto her bench again. "The only good news is that my clothes always phased with me. It's actually how we thought to see if I could phase other things, and then other people."

She rolled down onto the bench on her stomach and rested her head on her forearms. "Then there was the time I got stuck in phased form for so many months that they thought I was going to dissipate all together."

"How did you eat?" Maybe it was being so comfortable with Kitty, like they'd said everything they needed to say to know each other, that made the words come out before Maya thought to say them or not. She waved her hand. "Not that it matters or was your point.

"Sometimes I'm glad I don't have powers, on top of all the other ways I'm 'different'. Not when alien symbiotes are taking over New York, or there's a secret Skrull invasion, obviously. But when it means one less thing to have to learn to control, I'm not going to complain."

"I didn't," Kitty answered the first question because in a funny way, it was actually her point. "I wasn't conscious, either. They had to create a stasis field to put me in until they could figure out how to bring me back."

She'd been so confused, she remembered. How much time had past, what had happened, why was she like this? "It's pretty terrifying for some of us, for sure. For me, what helped was what I was saying before about physics and dance and fighting. The more I learned about how energy changes forms, the more I understood me."

Her expression grew pensive then and she asked, "What was it like that for you? Learning music and dance and fighting because at some level sound is movement?"

"Echo was the name of a play I did," Maya began, knowing it didn't seem like an answer to Kitty's question, but it was a beginning to one. "Then some kids saw me and Daredevil in the middle of a fight, so they, and later the newspapers, thought we were doing a playground performance of it. It was the papers that first called me Echo."

Unlike 'Indians', Echo was appropriate. "It fits, though. When I was little, my father used to tell me stories, making shadow puppets with his hands. They always started out as shadows, but as the stories developed they seemed real. I'm like that with the things I've learned. What I can do, I start out as an echo of the teacher, but as I make it my own, it becomes real.

"Music was maybe the first clue I had. The first time I watched someone play piano, I was fascinated. I went up and put my hand on the piano, and I could feel the vibrations. I couldn't see the movement of the wood, but I could watch his hands, and then I echoed them perfectly, and I could feel the tension and vibration as I played. It was like the whole world opened up then."

Kitty had no trouble imagining the frustration and alienation of Maya's world before she found ways to communicate. Even if she couldn't inhabit the emotional space, Maya's storytelling made it real and present for her.

For awhile, Kitty was quiet. Quiet to her own ears, in that she didn't speak or make deliberate sounds. But she reached out toward Maya, palm up, like a child making an offer of pattycakes, but the movement wasn't impulsive or earnest or playful. It came almost as the end of a piece of choreography, graceful and eloquent -- like touching the surface of a mirror.

She didn't know how Maya would respond, but at the same time, she felt the way this section of the dance ended, before merging to the next, and she wondered if Maya could too.

Maya and Kitty had talked before, as they were talking now, but they'd created shared language with their dance in the form of sparring. And it was that language that Kitty used now, reaching out. Like the shadow puppets. Like a mirror. And Maya, was that mirror, that echo, her hand coming up a reflection of Kitty's until their palms touched in a feather light brush of contact.

When Maya's palm touched hers, Kitty held the pose, held her breath.

One beat, two, three, almost a fourth--

Before the fourth beat finished, her hand passed through Maya's flexing down to curl her fingers gently around Maya's wrist.

Re: Kitty & Maya

st_oryinsilence - 2018-04-16 20:35 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Kitty & Maya

st_alksthroughwalls - 2018-04-27 02:26 (UTC) - Expand

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