Who: Gamora and Kitty What: practice self-defense Where: in the gym When: a week or 2 ago Warnings: none
Rolling her shoulders in an easy stretch, Gamora waited for Kitty in the gym. She spun the hilt of her sword, before releasing the blade and moving into a warmup, the first sword drill she ever learned at age 7. She lunged and parried, moving through the drill at an easy pace, feeling loose and limber.
Hearing a sound behind her, she retracted the blade with a metallic snap as she turned. “Hey…”
Kitty was a bit intimidated by Gamora, but she knew that the woman was well equipped to teach her some self defense. When she arrived at the gym to meet her, she paused in the doorway and watched her working with the sword. In some ways, it looked a lot like when Kitty did ballet and that made her feel a bit more confident about her ability to learn to fight.
“Hi, sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt you,” she said. “You can finish.”
“No, come on in, it’s just something I do to get grounded sometimes. Swords will come later, I think.” Gamora slid the hilt of Godslayer into her belt. “So let's talk about goals. What do you need to defend against and how far are you willing to go to do it?”
She paused. “I looked up Terran self-defense videos to see what might be a good starting point, since my training was… unorthodox? They were very focused on what Peter affectionately calls a ‘sac tap.’ This is effective in many situations,but if you want to learn it, you're gonna need to get someone with male genitalia in the room as a test subject. I didn't even ask mine, he’s not over the last time yet.”
It was difficult for Kitty to say for certain what she needed to protect against since she didn’t really know who her enemies were. Maybe she should have talked to Pete before this, he’d probably have better advice for her about where to focus her learning.
“Uh, I guess primarily I want to make sure that no one can kidnap me again,” she said. “I don’t want to end up back on Genosha.”
She wondered if Pete would volunteer to help with her self defense lessons. It couldn’t hurt to ask.
“Okay, we can work with that. Let's start with landing a punch. You want to get comfortable in a defensive stance, that means whichever hand is dominant, the other foot is in front like this and you back foot should be at an angle to keep you more steady.” She demonstrated. “You want to practice this a lot, like when you're just standing around, do that you fall into it naturally when you need it.”
She moved then nearer to the punching bag. “Let's start with the bag this time, next time maybe we’ll find a barfight for practice.” Gamora smiles but she was only partly joking. “Now make a fist.”
“Okay,” Kitty said, copying Gamora’s stance. It reminded her a bit of fourth position in ballet. Putting it in that context helped her conceptualize what she was supposed to do. The actual punching part didn’t translate, of course, but that was okay.
Moving closer to the punching bag, she settled into the same defensive stance again and tried to figure out the best way to make a fist.
Gamora showed Kitty. “It’s a really bad thing to tuck your thumb in, or let your wrist go floppy, that’s how bones get broken. And when you jab,” she mimicked a punch in slow motion toward the bag. “You’re gonna hit right here.” She turned and patted the middle knuckle on Kitty’s balled up hand. “That’s the strongest point. Try the motion not making contact and I’ll find you some gloves.”
She turned away and rummaged through the supplies for padded boxing gloves. “So you and Wisdom….” she asked conversationally. “How did you get out of that place?”
Kitty watched carefully and mimicked how Gamora made a fist and then attempted to make the same punching motion. It felt awkward, but she figured that if she kept practicing it would eventually feel more natural.
“Um, oh, it was a lot of luck, I think,” she said. “We both figured out how to use our powers to get out of our collars.” Her cheeks turned pink as she remembered how she’d ended up naked while doing so. “And he was able to hot wire a boat.”
Gamora found two matching boxing gloves that looked like they were a smaller size, and turned to see Kitty still practicing. Good, she thought, she’s serious about learning. “Here, try these on, then we can go on the bag.”
She did not put on gloves herself, but demonstrated how to hit the bag, pulling her punches enough to not set the heavy bag swinging. “Now you try.”
“So you and Wisdom….? He seems, um, rough around the edges.” She was interested in understanding other people’s relationships. She figured that people might look at her and Peter and wonder how they fit together the same way.
It didn’t occur to Kitty that Gamora was assuming she and Pete were a couple. Despite their lies to her parents, the idea was so unfathomable to her that she couldn’t imagine anyone thinking it was true. Well, anyone besides Tony Stark.
She put on the boxing gloves and cautiously hit the bag, barely making an impact. Once she was certain she wasn’t going to break anything, she hit a bit harder and smiled when the bag moved ever so slightly.
“Yeah, I mean… he’s not like anyone I’ve ever met before,” Kitty said. “But if it wasn’t for him, I’d still be there, so I’m grateful.”
“Peter wasn't like anyone I had ever met before either. It was easier, I guess, because everyone else expected us to be soulmates since we were before.”
Gamora looked at Kitty’s form. “That looks good, that's the most basic move, but usually effective. You get a little more power with a hook. Bring your arms up a little higher. Like that. Most of the energy comes from your hips.” She demonstrated in slow motion, then showed Kitty how to hit the bag.
The movements and motions of fighting were very similar to dance which allowed Kitty to understand and pick up on it more easily, she thought, as she followed Gamora’s instructions to try a different punch.
“What do you mean you were soulmates before?” she asked. She didn’t really know a whole lot about Peter and Gamora’s history so the statement didn’t make a lot of sense to her. And she still didn’t pick up the implication that the other woman was making regarding her own relationship with Pete.
Gamora leaned against the wall, crossing her arms over her chest. “It’s a long story. I died… was killed by my father as part of his plan to take over the universe. And then the Avengers went back in time, to before Peter and I met in order to stop him. So I’m from before. And he’s from after.”
She pushed herself off the wall. “Okay one more. The uppercut.” She kept talking while she demonstrated the move. “From what I know, the beginning of our relationship sounds a lot like yours to be honest. We broke out of jail together. I mean we were arrested for legitimate things, we weren’t always great people, but still.” She shrugged, smiling at the thought.
Kitty followed Gamora’s instructions. Halfway through her third attempt, the other woman’s words finally clicked and she felt her face growing hot. “Oh, I mean, Pete and I aren’t…. We’re just friends,” she said. The idea that they were more made her deeply uncomfortable. Pete was a great guy and she owed him her life, but they didn’t have that kind of relationship and she didn’t understand why everyone seemed to think they did.
“Does he know that?” Gamora asked, honestly curious. “You could ask Drax to help you with how to tell him. He is skilled at letting people down easy.”
She shrugged. “Okay so we have punching. Show me the thing you can do, and we’re going to figure out how to work it in.”
“Why wouldn’t he know that?” Kitty asked, completely perplexed by the turn this conversation had taken. She hadn’t had a lot of experience with relationships before all this, but she was pretty sure that people would know whether or not they were in one.
She was so confused by Gamora’s questions that she didn’t quite understand what the woman meant when she said ‘show me the thing you can do’. “What thing?” she asked, not realizing that Gamora wanted to see her phase. Too bad she still didn’t have good control over that.
Gamora shrugged. “In my experience, when men are thinking with what's between their legs, they aren't always able to think very well with what's between their ears. So it's always smart to be direct.” She smiled at Kitty, “Or, worst case scenario you kick them in what's between their legs. That shuts down whatever they're thinking real quick.”
She looked at the younger girl, wondering what it might be like to not have learned to think tactically in combat before you learned to read. To not have been trained on every new enhancement added to your body a mere hours after they were surgically implanted. In Gamora’s experience, it didn't matter where you got an ability or how you felt about getting it, you still used it to your advantage.
“Your power. You can walk through solid objects, right?”
The mere notion that Pete might be thinking about sex in relation to her made Kitty’s face turn even darker red. That wasn’t possible, right? Even though they’d lied to her parents and said it was a thing. That was just a cover story so they could avoid telling her parents the truth about what she’d been through.
She grabbed her water bottle and took a long swig, trying to get her face to cool down. “Oh, right, yes,” she said. “I can’t always control it, but I was able to use it to get out of my collar on Genosha.” Leaving behind her clothes, which she was pointedly not going to think about.
“Um, let me try though,” she said, walking over to the wall that led into the hallway outside of the gym. Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes and willed herself to go intangible. When she felt it happen, she stepped through the wall, then turned around and walked back into the room.
“Now that’s cool,” Gamora said when Kitty came back into the room. “Have you considered becoming a thief? The Ravagers would love you.”
She thought for a second. “Does anything you’re touching go with you? Does it depend on size? We need to figure out if you can carry a weapon and do that or if you’ll drop it, before we start working with weapons. And if someone grabs you and you do that, do you slip away or take them with you?”
Kitty felt a bit overwhelmed by all the questions and shrugged. “I really don’t know,” she admitted. “I can try all those things and see what happens.” There was every possibility that with enough time and practice, she’d be able to do all those things and more. Some of them hadn’t really occurred to her to try and in some ways, she was okay with trying to live her life the way she had before all this happened.
“But, no, I don’t think I’d want to be a thief,” she added, hoping that Gamora was joking about that.
Gamora watched Kitty’s body language. “It must be strange, to suddenly be able to have a superpower…. You don’t have to be a thief. Or a hero. Or someone else’s weapon. You could just ignore it. But…. does it ever happen accidentally?”
“Sometimes,” Kitty said. “Usually if I get really scared or angry.” Luckily, she was a fairly mild-mannered person so those occasions were few and far between since her arrival at the Tower. It was something that Sinister used to trigger her powers when he was experimenting on her.
She bit her lip. “I don’t want to ignore it. I got this for a reason. I just… need to stop being afraid of it.” Which was easier said than done.
“What are you afraid of?” Gamora hit the bag idly, pulling her punches in order to not break it. She wondered what it was like to be normal one day, and then in this world the next. She couldn’t remember much of her life before Thanos, in her mind, she had always been a weapon.
Shrugging again, Kitty said, “I don’t know, all kinds of things,” she said. “I mean, right now, the biggest thing is that I’ll get locked up again. Or that the people who took me will hurt my parents in an effort to get me.” Both of those things were why she was learning self defense. She needed to be able to protect herself if anyone came for her again.
“So your powers are key then,” Gamora said after a long pause. “If they can’t touch you, they can’t take you.”
She thought about it for a second, punching the bag and letting it swing. “I think we should talk with Hope. She was telling me about the material of her suit that lets her shrink and grow, and I wonder if the same technology could make sure your clothing, and whatever you carry with you, stays with you, no matter how you’re feeling. Because if someone comes after you, you’re going to be both scared and angry, and if that’s when it’s the hardest to control, you need to be ready for that.”
Kitty hadn’t met Hope yet and she appreciated Gamora’s suggestion. It would be nice not to have to worry about ending up naked somewhere again even if it meant that she’d be able to evade a captor in the process. “That would be great,” she said.
“Thank you, for helping me with this,” she added. “I think it will be good for me to have these skills.”
“No problem,” Gamora smiled. “Keep working on the form on the punches and next time we’ll figure out a way to do some sparring, so you can practice against another person.”
Gamora cleaned up the few things they’d used in the gym, thinking that she could get used to being a teacher. Thanos’s systematic training might at least become useful for something.