WHEN: The last Fight Club
WHERE: The after fight club drinking establishment of choice that night
WHAT: Drinks, fight club talk, home world discussions
WARNINGS: Language
STATUS: COMPLETE
The first few months of fight club Sara had stayed away from. She’d told herself several reasons for this choice. One, many of the participants were people who technically reported to her, and she didn’t want to make it awkward. Two, the local government who helped support the Defense Department look down on it if the head of the department was fighting for fun. Three, fight club was more violent and intense than just sparring or training, and she didn’t want to sink into bad habits while she had been missing home, Ava, and her team.
Eventually, she realized that was all shit. Well, maybe not the last one, but she had started to move on and found herself in a better place mentally. She’d met Julia, who ended up leaving just as fast as she came into Sara’s life, which was no one’s fault. So now Sara was fighting because it was something to focus on, and a way to work out aggression that somehow didn’t seem as unhealthy as she had originally planned. Perhaps because her original loss had been much greater.
Tonight’s fight club had come and gone, and she felt good at the end, despite a few cuts and bruises that were starting to form. After the fighting came the drinking, which was just as fun in its own way.
After a quick shower and change, Sara had returned to the after ‘party’ and had quickly secured a drink. She was navigating the crowd of people with no particular target in mind. Maybe Nyx was here somewhere again, the twins were definitely here somewhere. She was scanning for a familiar face, when she paused on one she’d never really talked to before but Sara was well aware of who she was from some pretty entertaining network posts and her involvement with the dinosaurs. She’d been involved, and she’d been hurt. “Hey,” she said coming to a stop and backpedalling a step. “Gideon.” she said carefully, waiting for any sign that she was wrong, but Sara was sure she wasn’t. “How was the fights?”
Gideon looked up from the bar menu that had offered no answer to the mystery of whatever pork rinds were, her ever-present pair of large black sunglasses doing a piss-poor job of hiding what looked to be an aggressively-developing shiner. “Sara Lance, Boss Empress.” She smiled, revealing a swelling lip that she apparently didn’t give a shit about. “Fun as ever. I thought I’d gotten one over whatsisname in the last one, but then ended up ass over tits. Nothing like the adrenaline rush.”
She kicked out a bar stool for the other woman and gestured to it. “Sit down, and I’ll buy you one. Barkeep?” She made a gesture and like magic, a pint appeared in front of Sara. “That wallop you managed the last round. His grandkids’ll feel that.”
As a rule, Gideon was friendly. Even when she wanted to kill you, she usually still could banter, and as luck would have it, she genuinely liked Sara. The woman could fight, first of all, which went a long way in Gideon’s estimations, and she wasn’t an asshole even though she outranked half of Vallo. Gideon, who sometimes felt like she had a masters degree in dealing with assholes, appreciated that quality in a person.
“Boss Empress.” she mused, “As long as I don’t have to wear an actual crown.” Because she wasn’t here for that level of inconvenient fashion. She grinned at Gideon’s description of her fights and waved her hand in dismissal. “Nah, you were awesome. There are so many insanely talented fighters with the Outlanders, everyone is a goddamn badass. Half the time I think these fights come down to luck.” Sure, there were some people who did have more skills, but it was a near thing.
Sara dropped down into the offered stool without hesitation and threw back her first drink with ease. “If you insist,” she said cheerfully. Sara did not turn down drinks. “It wasn’t that good, he was still fighting after. But that takedown you had in the first round? Amazing. Such artwork.”
There was always an awareness that she outranked so many people, even just at the fights. There was also an awareness that she was replaceable. She had to be, in a place like this. She already had her own replacement picked out. It was a delicate balance, managing the teams and not pissing off half the people who joined. “So are the sunglasses just to hide the bruise that they’re not actually hiding?”
Gideon grinned her way through a big gulp of her beer as Sara did her favorite thing - compliment her. She was a shit-talker, sure, but the good natured kind who didn’t sulk much if she lost; as far as she was concerned, Fight Club was a fun way to blow off steam and maybe learn a thing or two. There wasn’t as much pressure here for her to win everything given that she no longer really represented the Honor and Glory and Blah Blah Blah of the Ninth House.
At Sara’s question, she tucked her finger behind her ear and flipped her sunglasses up for a half-second, exposing her light bronze eyes (and her shiner). “I mean, let’s face it, I’ve got to look cool,” she joked, then with a wave of her hand added: “Nah, I wear ‘em all the time, usually. This planet’s loads brighter than the one I’m from. We didn’t get the sun at all on the Ninth - everything carbon-based but the people was shipped in from nicer areas of the galaxy. All of this?” Gideon gestured at the dimly-lit pub, “way way way too bright. Hurts my eyes. I’m hoping it’ll get better with time, but if not…”
She pulled off finger guns that either looked awesome or awkward, no in between. “What of you, then? What’s the wildest thing that’s different about here than home? Trust you were some kind of legendary knight flitting around rescuing the helpless.”
Whatever her answer was she was not expecting it to be that. “Wait, no sun? Like at all? How can you even survive that?” Didn’t people need the sun to survive? Gideon’s answer only brought up so many more questions.
Yep, definitely a shiner. She nodded approvingly at the growing bruise, it had been well earned. “You didn’t get the sun? Like...at all? And that’s livable?” Somewhere in her head, she was sure that didn’t make any sense, but you also had to consider that rules from Sara’s world didn’t necessarily translate over to other worlds. It made some things annoyingly frustrating, but at least she was always hearing something new?
“Only sort of on the legendary knight part. For a day or so. I’m a time traveller. I have a team, and we keep track of time and prevent people from massively screwing the timeline up, or fix it when it needs it.” Was she going to mention the fact that she and her team had screwed it up a few times? Definitley not.
It was hard to think of the weirdest thing, everything she saw wasn’t that far of a reach. “It’s hard to know what classifies as the strangest. We have- or had- multiple universes, so people sharing faces and travelling between them isn’t new to me. We have magic and other races that aren’t human, it’s just that the human race doesn’t really know about most of them, except alien.” But dragons, warlocks, gods, and monsters? Less common. She was fine with it staying that way. “There hasn’t been anything so ridiculous here that I can’t see it happening at home as well.” Even the geese and bunnies, sadly.
“You know of the Ninth, at least in theory,” Gideon said cheerily. “People from the planet Earth call it ummm…” she rattled her brain until she came up with something: “Pluto. Farthest off from the sun, and a real bitch to get out to via a spaceship unless you’ve got a total pisser of a thruster. Sun’s not all that important. We can’t grow shit, of course, but we’ve got nutritional bars and whatnot to live off of, and the Ninth isn’t really big on… celebratory feasting or imbibing too much alcohol.”
Gideon theatrically raised her beer to toast to the stupid, sodding tomb nuns of the Ninth, may they forever rot in the darkness, and returned her attention to Sara, leaning back in her barstool after taking a nice sip of her drink. “A time traveler, eh. Gonna ask you a real dumb question, so try not to think less of me for it: How do you know what’s right and what’s wrong in a timeline?” Seemed kind of a large decision to Gideon, the kind of decision you wanted level-headed people who weren’t asshoels to make. Sara was fine, sure, she’d trust Sara to keep the timeline happy and well-fed like a dozy pet, but other people? Nah. Wild.
“Pluto? You live on Pluto?” How the hell was that even possible for humans? Assuming Gideon was human. “I take it that means there’s no aliens in your world? Because there’s a chance humans moving to Pluto in my world might be considered an invasion.” Protein bars, to celebration, no alcohol? “Pluto kind of sounds like hell.” there was probably some area in hell that was very similar to Pluto.
“Good question.” she said, taking a drink. “I don’t. Short answer is, our ship has an Artificial Intelligence that keeps track of time, and can detect when someone something is changing, or something is about to cause a change, and how it will change. And the ship comes from an organization that has been monitoring the timeline for...I don’t know, a really long ass time.” They were destroyed anyway, those assholes weren’t important.
Gideon shrugged, her home more of a source of irritation than anything. “I don’t guess we do have any kind of alien,” she said, “but we’re loyal to the planet where we’re born - they all stand for different aspects of the Emperor’s undying love, blah blah. It’s ass,” she concluded, and flashed Sara a grin. “The Ninth is very much like hell, so I’m glad I’m painting an accurate picture.”
As Sara explained her time travel know-how, Gideon mused on the concept of Artificial Intelligence. “Rather lucky that your AI isn’t evil, like how they nearly always are in films and things,” she remarked. “We mostly use constructs - reanimated skeletons - to get the grunt stuff done. There are AIs in the ships and whatnot, but nothing too powerful or all-knowing. That’d make the Emperor jealous, I suppose,” she said in what was intended to be an eye-rolling joke, and sipped some of the foam off the top of her drink. “Do you like what you do? Or is it more of a… sacred duty thing?”
“So you have one emperor that rules all planets? Sounds like the Hunger Games on crack.” she said flatly with a grimace. That was far too much power for one person to have, as far as Sara was concerned.
“Trust me- we’ve experienced that. Our AI- Gideon, actually, is it’s name-” she grinned, “has been hacked before. It sucked.” The more she heard about this Emperor, the more Sara was convinced it probably deserved a slap to the face. “It knows a lot, but it doesn’t have access to much outside of the ship. So it’s not like Gideon could turn nukes onto the world. It would need help to be able to hack anyone too powerful.”
Sara shrugged as she finished off her drink. “I love it, but it’s not a sacred duty thing. I don’t really have the skill set to do anything other than the super-hero, or vigilante gig. I’m bored out of my mind if I try to do anything else anyway.” Regular nine-to-five, customer service, gig work. It wasn’t for her. “What about you? Yours sounds sort of...sacred?”
Gideon, who had only a dim interest in politics and even less of an interest in talking about the Emperor, just smiled a mean little smile before tossing her head back to laugh in delight at the name of Sara’s AI. It was a welcome distraction from the truth, which was that the Emperor was apparently and horribly her father, a truth that she had yet to come to terms with and was mostly just incredibly grossed out by. What would be the point of talking about such a thing, anyhow, particularly when she was enjoying shooting the shit with Sara?
“Are you serious,” she said between inelegant snorts of laughter. “Its name is Gideon? HA. First time I’ve ever been associated with intelligence at all, artificial or otherwise. Tombs, what a universe.”
At Sara’s question, Gideon scrunched her nose in amusement. “Sacred. I guess,” she answered, in a tone one reserved for the most technical of agreements. “I mean, some take it as a sacred duty, blah blah, but you have to know, I was a fake from the start. My necromancer’s original cavalier was about as useful as jelly on a sword just like-- across the board, a completely unamusing fuck up and not a fighter - so she bargained with me to pose as her cavalier as a way for me to get off-planet, since she’d caught me in my twenty-third escape attempt the night before.” She shrugged, waved a hand, still smirking. “So yeah, less religious, more opportunistic. There’s a lot of weird cultish types on the Ninth, however - we’d probably be creepy black-wearing villains in your ‘verse, reanimating the dead and all that.” She made ‘spooky fingers’ Sara’s way, and gave her a sly little nudge under the table with her boot.
“Seriously, you can meet her sometime.” Sara offered with a shrug. “For an AI Gideon is very sassy way too much of the time.” You know you AI had personality when you had to tell it to stop teasing you at least once a week.
Sara had to smile at the spooky fingers as she returned the foot nudge, “Those sound like the people that I used to work for, though the raising the dead thing happened only once or twice.” Her being one of those times. “And they were the bad guys, so probably. The black dress was definitely the aesthetic of the League.” Thank god she was away from that mess.
“So how about I buy the next round and we discuss the finer points of the championship fight tonight?”
“Sara Lance, a secret weapon of the bad guys, but ultimately redeemed for the good guys,” Gideon drawled, batting her lashes. “What a story that sounds like. I do love a good redemption arc.”
Not that she actually thought Sara had probably done anything all that awful, although who knows, maybe that was a foolish assumption. Gideon had a tendency to be all in or all out for people, and those she liked she often had difficulty believing them of being capable of any real wrong.
“As for the next round, all yours.” The Ninth Cavalier leaned back in her barstool, settling in for the conversation, sunglasses reflecting the dim bar light. “I’ll start with critiques: Wynonna Earp could step on me and I’d thank her for it. Tombs. Even when she’s messy she’s deadly and I love it. Love to know where she learned to punch like that.”
Gideon was closer to the truth than she knew. The past few years had definitely been a journey to redemption. Sara had no idea if she had actually achieved it, but she had made peace with who she was. That was definitely a story for a different day though, so she just smiled knowingly and shrugged. “Who doesn’t love a good redemption arc?”
When Gideon accepted her offer, Sara flagged down the bartender and signalled for two more drinks to head their way, while she shook her head with a grin. “Wynonna Earp is a pain in my ass. If she wasn’t damn good at her job I would have thrown her in the brig by now. If that was something I could do.” Which, sometimes sadly, it wasn’t. Plus, as an added bonus, she was stupidly attractive. “If you find out where she learned to punch like that, tell me. But I thought you were starting with critiques, not pointing out how attractive someone is.”
Either way the conversation went was good by her, really.