WHAT: Katou goes to prove he can, in fact, kick Diego's ass (he cannot) WHERE: The Underground WHEN: Sometime after the Heirloom Sphere WARNINGS: Some talk of death STATUS: Complete
Back home, in the war between Heaven and Hell that Setsuna had managed to jam himself right in the middle of, fighting both the highest reaches of Heaven and the lowest pits of Hell at the same time, Katou had been considered one of, if not the, best fighter in the rebel army. He was the Messiah’s Guardian and Champion, a title that he’d earned not only from the astral powers he’d inherited through Setsuna, but also through an effective combination of being ruthlessly viscous, having absolutely no compunction about fighting dirty, and a complete and utter disregard for his own safety.
It wasn’t a combination that worked for him especially well here in Vallo, when he wasn’t actually trying to kill his opponents. He’d come in second in his first fight club, but hadn’t been able to break past the second round since. And it didn’t serve him very well either. At least, it didn’t serve him very well unless his goal had been to continuously run face-first into Diego’s fist and land very few of his own punches.
That had not been his goal.
He laid on the ground a couple moments longer, gulping down air, and then, with a grimace, climbed back to his feet. He debated, for a moment, charging in again and seeing if he got in a lucky hit through the ~*~element of surprise~*~, because what kind of idiot would keep fighting after the beating he’d just taken (aside from Setsuna, obviously), and then decided that no, his everything hurt and he wanted a cigarette.
He shrugged instead, easy and languid, palms turned up to the sky. “You’re just lucky I weren’t using my sword,” he said, and then turned to find his leather jacket and the pack of Luckies that was tucked into its breast pocket.
Diego, once upon a time, had been a mouthy teenager who fought hard, fast, and scrappy and couldn’t resist a fight. Now, he was a mouthy adult who fought hard, fast, and scrappy and couldn’t resist a fight. That even meant a kid (teenager or not, anyone was a kid to Diego, it was one of his ‘charms’) although of course Diego didn’t view it as a fight–merely sparring. That was why they were in the Underground, one of Diego’s favorite places in all of Vallo, with the ring and the training equipment, because it was more about learning.
“Could you even pick it up now?” he asked, grabbing Katou’s hand to help haul him to his feet with all the grace of hauling around a sack of potatoes. “Pretty sure your damn arms are about to fall off your fucking shoulders.” Diego walked over to the corner he preferred to start any fight in, and picked up a towel to wipe off his forehead and neck. He picked up a water bottle and chucked it straight at Katou when he noticed that instead of hydrating, he was going for cigarettes. And Diego didn’t miss.
“Drink some water, you idiot.” He didn’t really get the whole ‘dead but a body but not a zombie but also dead’ thing, but if Katou could smoke, he could drink water. That rationale made sense, at least. Sort of.
“Been there,” Katou snorted. “This is way better than having your arms fall off. I can definitely still swing a sword if –” he started, and then yelped in surprise when something hit him in the back of the head. His arm shot out instinctively behind him to catch it before it hit the ground. He stared at it like he didn’t know what to do with it for a moment, and then shot Diego a venomous look. This must have been how Adora felt when he’d whipped water bottles at her in Serendipity Hills.
He did, in fact, need water. Probably more than he needed just about anything else to stay alive. He hadn’t gone around testing things, but given the fact that his body was made of plants he was pretty sure water and the occasional bit of sunlight were two things he actually needed. He’d gone pretty long without sunlight before – the weird other dimensional space, for instance – but he hadn’t made any sort of endurance test without water.
“Most people yell ‘hey, heads up’ when they chuck things at people,” Katou snapped, twisting off
Diego shrugged, seemingly unperturbed, and drawled completely deadpanned. “Hey, head’s up.” Dish out the sass all you want, Katou, Diego liked to think of himself impervious to it as he himself could be accused of sass, but also his protege was quite the master of it.
He took another sip of water, and then held out his hand. ”Now I’ll take your money.” Pausing a beat, Diego smirked. “I’m fucking with you, I don’t want it. You got fucking guts, I’ll give you that. Did you learn from anyone or just pick it up yourself?” Probably the latter given the rapid fire, throwing his whole self into the brawl with any actual thought, no stamina because he went hard and fast style Katou had. For as shitty as Reginald Hargreeves had been, the Umbrella Academy had been well-trained childhood vigilantes. When Diego was kicked out of the police academy, he went right to what he knew he was good at: boxing. It took more endurance than most people thought, even though the rounds were so short. It was three minutes of going as hard as you could, balancing offense and defense.
Didn’t mean Diego didn’t make stupid decisions, of course. He did. He did a lot.
Katou rolled his eyes at the delayed ‘head’s up,’ but there might have been a smile tugging at the corner of his lips when he gulped down about half the water in his water bottle. Thirst quenched, he grabbed his smokes and lit one before Diego could protest.
“I don’t need no one to teach me how to throw a punch,” Katou said, despite the fact that the fight they’d just had proved rather the opposite of that. “I been fighting all my life. Pretty sure I’ve got that shit on lock.”
Of course, about half that fighting had been getting the shit kicked out of him when he couldn’t fight back, and the other half had been kicking the shit out of other people when they couldn’t fight back. It wasn’t until after he’d died that his fights had been a little more equal on all sides.
Light that cigarette all you want, Katou, you could take one puff before Diego grabbed it and snubbed it out. He flicked the butt into a nearby garbage can, it sailed through the air and landed without Diego even having to look at it.“You know this is a gym, right?”
Diego went to go unwrap his hands from the black tape he’d wrapped around them. Boxing gloves were meant to cushion the impact of punches, tape was to secure the bones and joints to better distribute shock across the hand. Diego had broken bones many times, especially the smaller bones in his hands, just because he had never met a fight he didn’t like, but at least at his place of work he wanted to practice what he preached when training.
“Didn’t say you needed to learn–and I didn’t say I’d teach you,” he added, pointing with a finger. “I asked if you had been taught. And I said you had guts, but you’ve got shit for stamina. Probably comes from sucking down those cigarettes you know.”
Katou yelped out a “Hey!” when Diego stole his smoke, and briefly contemplated lighting another one just to see what would happen. In the end he decided not to waste it. Cigarettes were a lot more expensive here than they had been in 1999 Japan (a lot more. Katou had nearly considered quitting after he’d bought his first pack).
“I wouldn't want you to teach me anyway,” Katou grumbled, deciding that if he couldn’t smoke, he could at least collapse into a heap near his jacket. “Doubt that’s the cause. These lung’s are practically brand new. And I actually have been smoking since I was twelve, so that ain’t about to change any time soon. It’s probably just because this shit’s hard work and I’m lazy.”
Very predictably, Diego rolled his eyes. He trained Serefin, after all, and Serefin had had the habit of punching the punching bag for five seconds and then demanding a 25 minute rest. “Hell yeah this shit’s hard. And hey, don’t work at it, no skin off my ass, keep getting your ass handed to you.” Diego knew full well how advice from an ‘old’ (gross, he hated that he made that reference, he also hated that he was an old to this actual kid, everything sucked) would go over, so he did what he always did: said what was on his mind when it was on there. No fluff or bullshit there.
He pinched the bridge of his nose the way Diego had a tendency to do whenever anything supernatural or magical popped up around him. Which, given the world they lived in? Meant his fingers were basically imprinted on there. “Alright, explain to me this body thing? You were dead, but have a body, and basically look alive but aren’t?” He thought, of course, of Ben, who was at least able to communicate this go round and didn’t have to rely solely on Klaus to communicate. He could even joke about his own death, Diego was pretty sure he himself would never get to that point.
Katou scowled – very nearly pouted, though he’d fight anyone who suggested it – at the idea of getting his ass handed to him. He knew that he was good in a fight. It wasn’t his fault that he hadn’t had much luck in Fight Club after his first month. Or that he’d just had his ass soundly handed to him just now.
“Yeah, that about sums it up,” Katou said, rubbing the side of his head. “Like I said, I died a couple times and ended up in Hades. Died a couple more times and got some astral powers from eating part of an angel.” A feather, to be precise, which had been fed to him by said angel, but he’d be lying if he didn’t say that he didn’t get a little enjoyment out of making it sound worse than it was. “And then the Angel of Death, the Archangel Uriel, crammed by soul into a body he made me so I could go back to the physical realm. It’s like…” He frowned, scowled at himself, and then said, “Like a doll, I guess. He made another one before me, for this obnoxious chick, Doll, and hers needs to be wound-up and shit, but I got the whole works: organs, peripheral nervous system, all the rest. It runs like a normal body, except it’s made outta plants. And I can do this.”
And with that, it seemed like he peeled the skin from his face, revealing Diego’s face, grinning a shiteatting grin, underneath; the skin he peeled off was absorbed back into his arm. It was only a couple of seconds before Katou ran his hand over it, and it was his own face grinning up at Diego again.
Diego was slightly ashamed to admit that he straight up jumped a good three feet in the air and backwards when Katou literally pulled off his skin and revealed Diego’s own face. “What, and I mean this very fucking sincerely, the fuck was that?”
He meant both the story and the actual face peeling, because again, what the fuck was that? Just when Diego thought he had a grasp on just how absolutely nuts people’s backstories were, something came along to surprise him. And Diego wasn’t one who freaked out easily, minus fainting with needles but Jesus Christ, what Katou was talking about was a lot of shit.
“That’s a lot of shit, kid,” Diego said, stating the very obvious.
Katou howled. That was the reaction he was always hoping for when he suddenly and unexpectedly changed his face, and he was pretty sure he’d get a kick out of it any time he actually got it, right up until the day he died. Again.
“The plant shit my body’s made of ain’t quite settled yet so I can change my face whenever I want. I mean, it’s a pain in the ass, since I gotta hold the whole image in my head, like, individual hairs and fingernails and shit,” this included his regular form, but he was at a point now where it was as automatic as breathing, “but I getta scare the shit outta people sometimes so it’s probably worth it.”
He climbed to his feet again, stretching his neck first in one direction than the other. “As for the rest, it is what it is. Dying was probably the best thing that coulda happened to me, and I was gonna die young anyway. If I gotta die anyway, better that my death meant something, and that I had a chance to, I dunno, be better, I guess, instead of just vanishing meaninglessly. You know?”
At least now, if he died for real, there’d be people to mourn him. He didn’t think anyone, other than his sister, maybe, was going to mourn the seventeen-year-old buried in a shallow grave behind his high school. Back home, at least, Setsuna would mourn him, and Kurai, provided they didn’t die while they were off trying to kill God. And here…well, he was doing his best.
He rolled his shoulders and cracked his knuckles. “Wanna go again?”
Diego flinched. Just barely, but it was there nevertheless. Ben had died when they were young, and no one but Klaus had been able to see him. Not until Ben had been able to live in Klaus’s body had Diego been able to talk to him–even though when Ben had first died, Diego had. Just in case Ben was around. Had his death meant something? It put the nail in the coffin for the Umbrella Academy, sure, but truth be told, Diego would have rather had his brother.
And left the Academy with double birds flashing to Reginald Hargreeves.
Right, well, that was enough emotion from Diego for the next five months. Diego cocked his head at a harsh angle until his neck cracked and crunched on one side, and then the other.
“Sure. Don’t mind kicking your ass all over again.”