Poppy Barnes does not like pink. (commandandlead) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-06-15 01:57:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, blossom |
Who: Blossom and The Bat
What: Knife defense training, and Blossom being intimidated.
When: About a week before the party.
Where: The Bat’s warehouse.
Warnings: Nothing.
It was early for Poppy to be out, she would start what she would call her own patrol at around eleven, stay out until early morning then crash for a few hours. It wasn't healthy, but as she darted through alleyways dressed in her usual attire she wondered how she had lived without doing this. She couldn't remember what sleeping at night was like. Presumably more restful. She pulled her hood above her head as she headed towards her destination, mask and goggles firmly in place. The mask Rorschach had made her gave her an appearance of having no face at all, and she liked it. She moved more stealthily with it, as if she wasn't there at all. Then again, as she had realised earlier that day, stealth would be no good to her if someone could still potentially knife her. She shuddered at the thought.
She'd checked the warehouse address more than once to make sure, but even as she approached it she felt wary of whether she'd gotten the right one. It was odd. She'd never felt intimidated by these vigilantes when she had first joined the comms, yet now she knew their capabilities she was more wary than ever. She knew what they could do. Poppy slid in through once of the doors wordlessly, eyes darting from one side of the warehouse to the other. She'd learned long ago that she could never be too careful.
The warehouse was like many others the Bat appropriated for his use though he had a lair or two in more unlikely places, basements and occupied office buildings. The industrial lighting was entirely concealed from the outside, and there were no visible vehicles nor obvious means of exit or entry other than the front. Within, however, there was a large wall-less room, carpeted by gymnastic exercise padding, lined by practice dummies and closed metal cabinets.
The Bat stepped out from behind one of these dummies, a strange, equally inhuman figure, though dark instead of khaki. "What do you call yourself?" He looked peculiar because he wasn't wearing the cape, big, but in a very tangible and solid way.
The sense of meeting someone much more powerful than herself grew more potent with every breath she took, and for a second she had to resist the urge to look back to the door, neck muscles tight. She couldn’t run. She shouldn’t be scared of him, particularly when he was only trying to help her.
The name was a difficult one. Poppy forced words out, feeling them stick in her throat as she spoke. “They used to call me Pepper. But Pepper is too close to...” She struggled for a second to find the words that fit right. “The me in the daytime.” She shrugged. “So now I’m Blossom.” It was the boots that did it in New York, the pink combat boots with the flowers painted on. She had a flower on her goggles now too, just in the top corner. She looked very small compared to The Bat, but stocky, and it was a far cry from the slightly overweight girl in layers that had turned up to the first meeting. She shuffled uncomfortably, looking around again. An approving nod, then followed her first attempt to actually look at the other vigilante properly. “Nice. I want one of these places.”
He didn’t reply to that. It wasn’t in the Bat’s nature to communicate excessively, and if he felt something was obvious, he didn’t follow the natural social expectation that he would say something in vague agreement. Instead there was just a blank silence, and that tended to make people nervous, particularly if they were nervous to begin with.
You could see the gaze, some light color that the distance obscured, and it moved from the goggles to the boots. She was very small. “How old are you?”
The silence was as awkward as it could get, admittedly. The urge to run away fast was fading though, replaced by the new and slightly more comforting feeling of doing business. If she concentrated on learning, she thought, she could regulate her breathing. If she regulated her breathing, she wouldn’t pass out because she really did not want to be the vigilante who was so much of a chicken she screamed at fainted at one of the big dogs.
“Nineteen.” There was indignance in her voice, she thought she looked older than before now she had the gear. She clearly didn’t look in the mirror all that much, and immediately adjusted her goggles like an annoyed preteen. “Twenty soon.” That was an addition, forced out without her sense of dignity’s notice. “I’m not that young anymore, technically I’m twenty already and there’s no legal age for doing this-” The babbling was ridiculous and she silenced herself there and then. Poppy was not very good at professionalism, she realised, lips clamped tightly together under her mask.
The Bat’s mouth pressed together, because though he had become what he was over a lifetime of effort, he felt the youth of others as a fragile thing, belief under eggshell. However, he would teach this girl how to defend herself because she wanted to learn, and there was reason that she should want it. He didn’t pursue the topic of age again.
Instead he stepped forward, and he had in his hand a false knife of rounded edges, made of hard aluminum. “There are many kinds of knives. We will assume the knives you will defend yourself from are long enough to be illegal, such as this. We will assume you are close enough for the knife to be a threat; we will cover defense from thrown knives later.” He moved closer to her until he was an armslength away and the smell of the kevlar, a burnt chemical metallic smell, filled his shadow. The false knife was a bright spot against the dark, and it was obvious why he had not worn the cape. “Your mask is a good one for you, it hides where your eyes are looking. Don’t exaggerate your head movement for my benefit, but if I assume you’re seeing something that you don’t see, stop me.”
He demonstrated for her a series of ways the knife could come at her: underhanded, toward her stomach. Overhanded, toward her head or shoulders. Slashing, from shoulder to hip. Slashing across. “You never stop the knife. You stop my arm. You stop my arm at the right angle, the right way, and you defend against the knife. It is part of my arm. Now block.”
She watched carefully, silently, head tilted downwards ever so slightly as it usually was when she was concentrating. Listening wasn’t difficult with the mask on, despite the fact that it pulled on over her head, but she tugged at it at her jawline self consciously, giving subtle clues as to what she was thinking. Poppy could not screw this up; she had to learn as quickly as she could. She bounced up and down on the balls of her feet for a second, fists clenched.
She moved in an oddly disjointed fashion. In some ways it was useful, she was unpredictable. When she blocked her arms shot out mechanically, her head moving quickly or not at all so any movement was barely noticed. There was an unpredictable quality to everything she did as her small movements counteracted The Bat’, first simply moving backwards from the weapon. Then he demanded a block, and she complied, once lightly and then again, a little more deliberate force. “Is there any merit in trying to disarm?”
“Of course. First you stop me from killing you, and then you worry about disarm.” He made her practice several different blocks with the knife coming at her, slow at first and then with increasing speed. He could shift the weapon to either hand with no apparent trouble. After a good long time of that, they finally progressed to disarms. He taught her two that were extraordinarily simple, one that struck the back of an attackers hand with a smart force that forced it to open and relinquish the knife to gravity, and another that twisted the wrist until it was let go or let the arm break. They required only leverage and position, not strength, and they were easy to learn. After what seemed like hours, he stepped back. “Good. Practice. Call for help if you find a man with knives, Blossom.” He said it calmly, as if it was her own name, as serious as a birth certificate. “Let’s hope that what I just taught you will keep you alive long enough to do it.”
Blocks without strength were more difficult to learn than she expected, she was used to clubbing someone with the butt of a gun and hoping for the best. But there was something important here, something she needed to learn to stay alive. There were people out there on the wrong side with much better skills than her and it did scare her. She nodded to herself as she perfected each block, barely registering when The Bat finally stepped back. Her head darted up in recognition at last, attentive.
“If I died out here? I think a few people might dig me up and kill me again for being stupid.” She grinned under her mask, thinking of her enraged brother hundreds of miles away. The urge to add that she may well shoot the man if he came too close was tempting, but she kept quiet. There were some things the others weren’t going to approve of, and she knew that She cracked her knuckles before clasping her hands behind her back. “I’ve got the comm. If all of us are after him, maybe he should be worried.”
Perhaps that was so, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from the Bat’s expression, serious as it was, unmoving. It was hard to imagine the breadth of his skill, whatever it might be. The Bat’s problem was not skill; it was control. He moved his hand slightly and the blade seemed to reverse polarity in thin air, and then it was against his arm and gone. “You can come here if you need shelter, but I won’t always be here. Remember that.” He walked away, leaving her in the center of the vast, echoing space.