InsaneJournal

It was good to know that there was a space on the Enterprise where people could go to do things like brush up on their martial arts or break punching bags. Marian hoped it would also become a place she could keep her magic up to snuff, too, but first she wanted to have a look at it. It didn’t hurt that there was also an adorable immortal guy waiting there for her to use as target practice.

She was slow arriving, having felt the need to hunt down some clothing appropriate for exercising (though she felt half naked in the sports bra/tank top/leggings the replicator provided). And then of course there was the trick of figuring out which of the many similar looking doors opened up to reveal the Gym in the first place.

But eventually, Hawke stepped into the Gym and waved a hand at Lucifer. “And you still look like a sad puppy. I suppose you can’t stand that description for whatever reason, probably having to do with maintaining a strict reputation as some sort of hardass, but there it is. Also hello, I’m Hawke. Nice to formally meet you and all of that.”

Lucifer was wailing on his replacement punching bag when Hawke walked in, and he glanced up at her, punching the bag a couple more times before he returned her greeting. “If you prefer, I could look less like a sad puppy,” he mentioned, still uncertain how to take that comparison.

He examined the bag, and didn’t see any obvious damage. “Lucifer Morningstar, also known as the devil. I used to rule a place of eternal torture and punishment,” he offered, as she’d seemed to have no idea what that meant. Satisfied that he’d been gentler this time, he left the bag and walked over to Hawke.

“So I’ve no idea who you are or where you came from if not Earth, and I don’t know if my father created your world or not, but let’s see if you can actually hurt me or not?”

That was about as much introduction as he felt was necessary.

"Well that's... an interesting place to start, I guess. Are you hoping you get hurt?" Marian asked, arching one eyebrow at him. She supposed that's what they were there for, though. If they'd wanted to have a nice little chat they could have done that over drinks. "And I hope you understand if I'd prefer you were gentle about hitting back, if that's your intent at all. I'm not exactly an expendable punching bag. But lets see..."

She trailed off and squinted an eye for a few seconds as she sorted through her memory of spells. "Obviously lightning and fireballs are right out. Let's try... this."

As a Force Mage there were still a range of telekinetic things she could do, and that was as good a place to start as any. Hawke had left her staff at home, but she didn't need it to pack a punch in most cases. She waved a hand through the air, summoning the spell that would, in theory, push Lucifer across the room with crushing force.

“I’m not gonna hit you,” Lucifer said easily, eyeing Hawke. “I am interested in knowing if you can hurt me though.”

So he stood and waited. His list of known dangers included his parents, his siblings, and the demons who ruled with him in hell, as well as their weapons. And for some reason his father had saw fit to make him vulnerable in the presence of Chloe Decker. Other than that, other threats were unknown. Was magic one of them?

He watched as Hawke waved her hand, and after a moment waved back to her. “Uh, am I meant to do something else?”

"Well... that's..." Marian squinted at Lucifer, her facial expression somewhere between amused and just slightly embarrassed. "That's never happened to me before. I don't usually have any issues performing, you know."

She scratched at the side of her head for a moment, but there was really no puzzling through why her magic wouldn't have at least pushed him back a little. "You're no Templar, and even if you were you'd have to have actively mitigated my spell with your own. I once used that spell to knock back a man with gigantic horns who was, and I mean this quite literally, three times your size. It sent him clear across the room. It's how I won our duel, actually."

So Lucifer appeared to be outside the laws of any nature that her spells affected. Did that mean they'd only really work on Thedas? That was a troubling thought. Maybe the fire spell before had only been a fluke. In either case, she shrugged a shoulder and tried something else. There was only one way to test this and that was to cast Pull of the Abyss.

When the spell was summoned, there appeared an obvious swirling storm of energy in the middle of the gym. The spell, when it was working, would have pulled Lucifer toward it.

Lucifer laughed as she deliberately chose her words, and he offered his condolences. “Well better that if you’re going to disappoint, it’s here and not elsewhere,” he teased. “But there’s got to be some perks to being who I am, other than being charming and dashingly handsome.”

As she attempted her second spell, he could see it working, a vortex created out of nowhere. And he actually did move toward the epicenter, but that was only after the storm summoned the nearby free weights, and they crashed into his back. He stumbled forward a step, muttering, but then reached out and snatched an iron kettlebell that seemed to be flying toward her head.

She must have stopped the spell, because suddenly everything that had been airborne dropped to the ground. Lucifer glanced around amused, and then grinned at Hawke. “Impressive, if not the result you were going for,” he told her.

"And now you're charming, dashingly handsome, and also my hero," Marian remarked, with a bit of a smirk. She looked around the gym, raising her eyebrows as she assessed the damage done. Mainly there were weights and things scattered around, but that wasn't exactly what she'd been expecting at all. "And that weight doesn't look light at all, so you must also be strong. Perhaps even supernaturally so, considering the force you were working against."

Who was this man? No ordinary man. And he'd called himself the Devil, but she didn't really know what that meant. Some kind of Demon, but even the Demons from her realm were susceptible to her magic. "But I'm glad to impress. Even if we've ended up wrecking the gym. And we won't even get a twenty four hour bar out of it. Which is quite sad."

There'd been an effort involved in casting that last spell, and she ran the back of her arm over her face to clear some sweat out of her eyes.

“That is sad,” Lucifer mentioned. He held out the weight to her, for her to determine for herself whether or not it was heavy, and then took stock of the gym. “I’d better clean up,” he informed her, “As I’ve already threatened this gym and I don’t really want to get in trouble for it.”

All of the larger equipment seemed to be in place, so that was good. “So your stuff works, just not on me, which is just fine with me.”

He handed off the kettlebell and then went to work, trying to rearrange the free weights that had taken to the air into their proper place. “So where do you even come from that you can do all that?”

It definitely was incredibly sad, especially with so little else to do on the Enterprise to begin with but get roaring drunk. But Marian dashed the thought aside as she took the weight from him. It wasn't as heavy as it had looked, though it still took a bit of effort to carry it over to where it belonged. Her staff was just a little lighter and she did have some muscle tone, but it wasn't as if she was some warrior like her brother.

"We'll clean up together, after all this is MY mess we've just made. Oof. Quite glad that didn't smack me in the face, by the way." She replied, while grabbing a few of the lighter free weights to hand to him.

"I'm from a place called Thedas, to answer your question. Every so often - probably more often than others would like - a child is born with a connection to this... I suppose you'd call it a spirit realm... called The Fade. It's where most people go to dream, and the source of emotions and such. Only when you've been born with a connection like that, you end up being gifted - or cursed, depending on your point of view - with Magic."

“So do you think of yourself as gifted or cursed?” Lucifer grinned. “Or a bit of both?” She’d ended up on the ship after all, of course, she seemed to be alright with that.

“And is being here a blessing or a curse?” he asked her. “From what I’ve read of your conversations with other people, this may be a better option for you.” Of course, he hadn’t paid nearly enough attention, as he rarely did when things didn’t pertain directly to him.

"Maker, I don't even want to think about what my life would be like without magic. There's actually a ritual the Templars do to us when we can't control it, and it's like turning a person into... the Earth equivalent of a Zombie." Marian winced a bit, then shook her head. "But it's both. I love my abilities, they've helped me get through all manner of ridiculous situation. At the same time, I've had to hide who I am and am under constant scrutiny. I'm an apostate, you see. An Illegal Mage, one that lives in society. So it's like... I suppose it's like constantly being on the run from the police."

And it put her entire family in danger, which was something her mother and her little brother never let her forget. Not that any Hawke ever let anyone in the family ever forget their mistakes. Marian shrugged, and glanced around the room to see if there was anything else that needed straightening up. "It's a blessing, mostly. Thedas was still recovering from a civil war, a hole in the sky, demons running amok, the Mage Rebellion which caused all manner of havoc to innocent bystanders... Better I'm here, I guess. There's a few people I do miss."

That sounded like a horrific end, and Lucifer regarded Hawke closely now that the gym was back in order, or at least good enough by his low standards. “So you were a mage, an illegal mage, having to hide who you were or else you’d be turned into a mindless zombie by what I assume would be rather religious people who believe their way is the only way? And weren’t you with someone who hated mages?”

Stepping closer to her, he found himself staring directly at her, his gaze intense. “What if all your magic was stripped away then, as it is against me? Still able to fight?”

He really had been going stir-crazy on the ship, and he’d missed the fights he’d had with Amenadiel or the different forms of trouble he’d get into with the detective. Sure, he couldn’t fight back for fear of causing actual damage, but almost anything was a worthy distraction from the constant monotony that was becoming life in space.

Lucifer's gaze was the level of intense that Marian might have expected from Fenris. It bored right through her, though instead of looking away like she wanted to she found herself staring right back. "If they'd caught me, they would have imprisoned me in a tower that they call 'The Circle', which are homes for Mages where they hardly ever get to leave and never see their family again. And if I'd fought, yes, being made a zombie would have been my fate. And Fenris did hate mages. He learned to respect me when he discovered I had the willpower to look demons in the eyes and not succumb."

After a pause she added, "And... I can swing a bladed staff around. I can hold my own with it when I'm tapped out and can't cast anymore. Why? Do you have a few tricks you could teach me?"

If her magic kept on being this unreliable, holding her own in a fight was her top priority. Sparring 'The Devil' was at least more interesting than getting drunk.

“Well then,” Lucifer said, grinning as she mentioned her staff. “What are you waiting for? I expect you to hit me.”

He took a step back and watched for her to move, so he could react accordingly. “How’d that go for you?” he asked her. “Having to prove your worth to people who didn’t think you should be allowed to be who you were?” He related to that, so his question was a twofold attempt to get inside her head a bit while combined with genuine curiosity.

“So these demons in Thedas? What were they like?” he asked her. “I have my own demons, of course. But they’re more like my servants than anything else. Except Maze,” he added quickly, knowing full well Mazikeen wouldn’t take well to being called a servant. Especially after all they’d been through.

Without a staff, Marian wasn't quite sure what to do. She thought back to watching Carver deal with the other village children, then shrugged a shoulder and tried to swing at him. She already knew her own fists wouldn't do any damage either way, so there was no point in trying to hold back. "So many questions! But I'm not sure quite what to say, really. At the point I met Fenris I'd already lived through twenty some odd years of having to prove myself already. To my own family, to the local village... It's never easy, I expect. No use crying about it."

Her first swing connected with thin air and she lost her balance, though she quickly recovered. Circling a bit, she added, "So you... OWN demons? You're the head demon in charge, then? The ones where I'm from come in all shapes and sizes but are usually associated with various... emotions that our Chantry would call 'negative'. Rage, Desire, Pride. Pride demons are some of the worst. Right before I showed up here though I met the biggest, nastiest demon of all. GIGANTIC spider."

Marian shuddered at the thought. She hated spiders.

“Oh I agree,” he mentioned. “No use crying over that. Your ability to throw a punch, however?” He was teasing her, watching her as she moved. She’d recovered quickly enough but he’d barely had to move to escape her fist. “That leaves much to be desired, Hawke.”

“I wouldn’t say I own them and they’re nothing like you’re describing. Certainly no spiders. They were created to torture damned souls for eternity, which is actually rather boring when you think about it. Same job, day in, day out. Of course, if you meet Maze, you’ll realize she can be quite… creative, with her punishments. But not all of the demons were so industrious.”

He’d relaxed a bit and dropped his guard, when she threw a second punch at him, connecting with his eye. Dropping to the ground he clutched at his face, and said, “Well now why would you do that?” Followed by, “Bloody hell, I think you’ve blinded me!”

"What!?!" Marian's eyes widened a bit and she flailed her hand in the air for a few moments, not only because punching people hurt. She hadn't even been sure that punch would land, and there he was on the ground.

She stooped down to get a good look at him, "How dare you even lie to me about not being able to hurt you in the first place! This is your own bloody fault, damn it. Let me have a look, I can... maybe ice your face down?"

Her tone was more angry than she'd realised, and she knew it was mainly at herself instead of him. Everything in her entire life had been her fault, and now she'd gone and blinded a man with a single punch. "Maker, I have the worst luck."

“I never lie,” Lucifer said seriously, looking at Hawke with a sheepish expression. “I have been known to over exaggerate on occasion, however.” Like now, when she sounded surprisingly angry at him over this. He dropped his hand and showed her his unblemished face. “Are you alright?” he asked curiously.

Jumping back to his feet, he met her eyes. “Come on then. Get that anger out.”

When he pulled his hand away, Marian nearly punched him straight on that perfectly unmarked nose of his. That would have been perfect, punching a man while he was down, even if this proved he could take it. She punched the mat instead, and then rose back up to her feet.

"Am I OKAY!? You-" Marian pointed at him, then squinted, "Was that a PRANK just then? Oh very funny, it's a shame I can't really set you on fire."

She couldn't set anything on fire and it occurred to her that she really, really hated that. "Do you know how frustrating that is, by the way?!" She asked, while trying to throw another punch at him. In the absence of a new punching bag, Lucifer was a great alternative. Plus, he talked back. And he had invited her to get it all out.

“Apparently it’s rather frustrating, huh, darling?” he asked, looking at her with amusement. He dodged some of her punches, but then she was consistently landing blow after blow, and eventually he just stood there, taking them, waiting for her to wear herself out. Not once did he take his eyes from her, and when she finally showed signs of slowing he asked, “All good?” There was something near genuine concern in his voice, even.

This might have been the moment where she'd have broken down. All of that anger and frustration she'd built up over the years had taken up so much space inside of her that for the moment - whether it was truly all out of her or not - she felt completely drained. But Lucifer was still something like a stranger, and she wasn’t sure she was ready to let her guard down completely.

"I don't..." She mumbled, wiping an arm across her face. It didn't help with the sweat, since there was nothing on her arm to wash it away. "You didn't really deserve that, I'm sorry."

He really did sound concerned about her welfare, though, and she flashed a smile at him as a means of thanking him. Or maybe because she suddenly wasn't sure what else to say.

She stood there, in front him, sweating and yet somehow even more attractive, and it took all Lucifer had to remind himself that he was still in limbo, even if the detective was nowhere near. Because in that moment everything could have come undone, his willpower was shot to hell.

Instead, he searched for a towel and in finding one tossed it to her. “Where did all that come from?” he asked, both curious and in search of a distraction, hoping she’d provide one.

She caught the towel, swiping it out of the air with more grace than she really felt capable of. It was a carefully constructed series of smoke and mirrors, her life was. Marian doubted that Lucifer needed to hear her entire life story spew out of her mouth.

But she sank down on a nearby bench, and let out a sigh as she wiped her face dry. "You could point at any event in the last ten years of my life, probably. I honestly - It was as if you flipped some sort of switch. Do you have siblings? I was the oldest. Father... wasn't always in our life. I was practically running the household by the time the Blight came to run over our village. Maybe you reminded me of a few things. My sister died on the way. Before we could escape."

Well, that was a distraction until she started talking and while their situations were completely different, Lucifer found he could still relate to Hawke. “Yeah, I have a lot of siblings and my father tends to keep a good distance from me,” he said, in a clear understatement.

Sitting down next to her, he felt uneasy about their proximity, and yet he was drawn to her. He had no idea what she meant about the Blight, and her thoughts seemed to be scattered, but he was genuine when he said, “I’m sorry.”

"I was sorry, too," Marian said, her tone suddenly solemn. There were things that happened in your life that you never stopped thinking about. The memory of Bethany's death was etched on her mind, just like her mother's, and Anders', and dozens more. She closed her eyes and shook her head, "We Hawkes aren't the best at family communication, so while I'm certain that my mother meant to say 'It's no one's fault that a gigantic Ogre split your sister's skull in two and we should all pay our respects then hug it out', she instead opted for the finger pointing and the 'It's your fault' speech. Carried it on for several years, too. Never cross a Hawke, you won't live it down. Possibly, you won't live at all."

She glanced over at him and snorted, "Well YOU would. Since you survive everything."

“So that means you have nothing to be afraid of around me,” Lucifer pointed out. Which seemed like a rarity in her life from the brief glimpse that he’d been given. “And of course that wasn’t your fault,” he added, angered on her behalf. At least he’d brought on his own guilt himself. “Bloody hell, how could she let you live with that?” he asked, meeting her eyes.

Marian worked her jaw for a few moments, finding it harder to meet his gaze now that all of that fire had been punched out of her. "I don't know," She finally said, when her voice could be found. "Mother's life wasn't easy, and she made sure we all knew it. She was angry, I was the oldest... it was my responsibility. Carver felt the same way, too."

After a brief moment wherein Marian remembered that Lucifer had no idea who Carver was, she added, "That would be Bethy's twin brother. I swear it's why he joined the Templars. Like I said, never cross a Hawke. You don't know what Templars are, come to think of it. Well, perhaps you've gotten the gist. It's basically mage police. And yes... it IS quite nice to have someone to be around who can't seem to be harmed by any conventional means."

This wasn’t usually Lucifer’s strong suit, not by a long shot, but he was angry and frustrated himself, being stuck here against his will. Even if that was changing slightly with every passing day, he’d not yet recognized or admitted as much. And he knew what it was like to be blamed for things beyond his control, or to constantly be the scapegoat. His father had seen to that, and his anger there was reflected in the indignation he felt on her behalf.

“Well it wasn’t, Hawke. It wasn’t your fault.”

And then he pulled back because it simply wasn’t safe to be that close. “Are you rested up yet? Ready to go another round?”

It was easy to hear those words, 'It wasn't your fault', but harder to actually let them sink in. And it sounded like Lucifer had first hand experience with that. Marian squinted at him slightly, taking in his tone, and also noticing that he'd pulled away just slightly.

Which made sense. It was exactly that kind of emotionally charged moment where two random strangers who seemed to get along well ended up far too close to each other. She wasn't sure she minded. Marian wiped the towel across her chest and down her arms, while shaking her head. "Goodness no, you've worn me out I'm afraid. Have you considered a career in therapy?"

Then she added, softly, "You'll have to tell me about your demons sometime. And not the ones in your workplace."

The idea of him having a career in therapy made him laugh slightly, and he shook his head at that, amused. “No, thank you. I’ll leave that sort of thing to actual therapists, like mine.”

Lucifer almost laughed again, hearing hell described as his workplace. He suppose it had been, even as it had also been his home. He looked at her carefully and nodded, his expression growing more solemn again. “Yeah, I’ll tell you. I suppose we have time, with nothing else to do around here. But not right now.”

He stood and then offered her his hand, mentioning, “I didn’t even think to tell you that there are gloves you could have worn. You should probably ice your hands?”

Marian held her hand out and took his, glad for the help up and equally glad to get a chance to put a hand on him that wasn't in violence. Her eyes couldn't help but catch how red they were starting to look. Oddly, she didn't feel the pain yet.

She was sure she would soon, though. One of her eyes winced so hard it nearly shut completely, "Ice would be good, yes. And a bath, possibly getting into clothes that are actually clothes. But... get that drink with me sometime soon? We can have a chat."

“Right,” Lucifer answered. “You know me, I’m not going to turn down a chance to go to the bar. And if you want to go another round, I’ll remember that most people do need gloves.”

He cast another glance at her, contemplating and then added, “Good meeting you, Hawke. I’ll see you at the bar.”

And then he was gone, because he no longer trusted himself and it was time to put distance between himself and her.