concoursec | that's not the sound of desperation or anything (closed)

Entry tags:

that's not the sound of desperation or anything (closed)

Characters: Maria Cyphert, Yosuke Hanamura
Location: Training Centre
Rating: Let's say PG-13; probable eventual warnings for language, weapons and Yosuke
Open/Closed/Finished: Closed!
Summary: If she asked to see him again, that means she likes him, right?

The idea of being the one to decide when and how to train, of needing to do it at all, is a weird one to Yosuke. Even if he was back home, he's not sure it would sit any better with him. He's settled in pretty well, or at least he thinks so, but there's too much of the past year tangled up with it in his mind for stuff like this to be completely comfortable - or something like that, except harder to put a finger on.

He has to get used to it sometime, though, and he's already put it off for a little while. That's why he's here, trying not to let the humidity make him lose his grip on his weapons before he finds anything to whale on, kicking up the leaves underfoot as he walks because it's an improvement on the silence.

Now that he thinks about it, he could have come down here earlier, huh? That girl he ran into that one time... Sure, it hadn't been his idea of a date, but maybe he should have taken her up on the offer, pushed himself a little. He hadn't been certain that she was completely off her rocker and just going to use him as target practice, after all.

Well, what's done is done. He wonders for a moment if she's around here anyway, and then laughs a self-mocking laugh aloud to himself. "Yeah, what are the chances? There's nobody in here..."

...But never mind that. Time to focus.

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"Huh? What I can do?" Hearing this from the weapons enthusiast brandishing the impossibly tricked-out swords, Yosuke couldn't keep a bit of disbelieving laughter out of his voice. It wasn't as if he was unwilling, though - he even gave one of his kunai a confident little twirl as he emerged from the bushes. "Well, if you insist!"

With that, he charged in himself, both blades at the ready.

...Until a moment later, when one of them fell out of his hand. Whoops. Maybe the spinning was overdoing it.

He only glanced down for a split second, but a split second was long enough for the grat in front of him to pick up on his hesitation and, apparently deciding he made a more appealing target than said weapons enthusiast, lash out.

"Crap...!"

The tentacle skimmed the air inches from the end of his nose as he jerked it and the rest of his head out of the way.

Electing to intervene, Maria darted forwards, flicking her blades out. The left one hit, and she pulled the trigger, spinning around lightly to hammer the right one home in turn.

"You, uh, might want to pick that up," she said over her shoulders, keeping her gunblades spread wide so the grat would have to go past her to get to him.

The casual way she was saying that... Was she making fun of him? Well, if he had to ask, he probably already knew. Dammit. "Gimme a break," he muttered pathetically, backing away a little. "This stuff's easier inside the TV..."

He ducked down to retrieve his kunai and gave the grat an uncertain look as he straightened up. On the one hand, Maria seemed to have a pretty good handle on the situation all by herself. On the other hand, if he hid behind her now, he'd look even worse than he just did... unless he muffed his attack again... Argh, why did this have to be so hard to decide?

Forget logic, then. He'd just have to do what came naturally! And right now, that meant rushing past Maria with a yell, both weapons drawn.

She could totally respect a berserk, screaming charge! Maria darted sideways as he raced past, keeping the grat's attention on her with a few probing stabs of her blades that amounted to nothing more than a distraction. Beyond that, she intended to let him claim the honor, or at least redeem himself!

Yosuke didn't notice the help at all, caught up as he was in a rare moment of complete focus - rare, but familiar, which only spurred him forward. He lunged, struck once, twice, and followed up with a wide slash that knocked the monster reeling. "And stay down!"

But... having said that, he had to take another step back. "Uh, they... do stay down, right?" he asked, eyeing the prone grat warily.

"There's a rule I learned," Maria said as she stepped forward. With one smooth motion she hammered both gunblades through the grat and into the ground beneath it, then pulled the triggers half a dozen times or so until the vibrations had visibly shredded the monster. "If you have to ask, make it so you don't have to ask."

Yosuke let out a low, prolonged whistle as he relaxed. "Okay, okay, you sold me," he said, with a laugh. "That is pretty cool. ...Though I still gotta wonder who first came up with the idea."

He stepped over a few scraps of monster to poke at what was left of it with his foot. "But man, this stuff is a rush," he added, to nobody in particular.

She managed to restrain a comment about how she'd been right about the whole 'inconvenient grip' thing for those kunai somehow. "Galbadia, I believe. I know that some of their soldiers trained in their usage at the beginning of or just before the Sorceress War. And you haven't seen ANYthing yet," she said with a grin as she spun the weapons back into their holsters. "So your experience is... um, in a different environment?"

"Yeah, you could put it that way," Yosuke said vaguely. "A crazy one, like something out of a manga. Which is kind of appropriate, come to think."

With a distant look in his eyes for a moment, he idly threw one of his weapons up in the air, very nearly dropped it again on the way down, and resolved to stop doing that for the time being.

"But from what I hear, that's nothing special in a place like this," he added, pretty cheerfully. "You look like you must've been around, yourself -" ...Shit, that sounded wrong. Now there was something he clearly found a lot more nerve-racking than facing a grat. "Uh, scratch that."

Edited 2013-08-28 06:28 (UTC)

"Less than you'd think," she said, choosing not to take offense. "I haven't been a SeeD for that long, relatively speaking, but I've been training for it for years now, way before I even left Garden. The way I see it, I'm doing what I was always meant to do. Make it real easy to be comfortable with it," she said with a smile. She wanted to ask if the laws of physics were different in that other world, but didn't think she could do it without sounding like she was picking on him.

"Huh, I see." As cheesy a line as it was, Yosuke couldn't help but look a bit impressed. "Guess some people really are that dedicated."

He looked over at her, and it occurred to him that for all her pulling rank and posturing, she probably wasn't that far out of his age range... heck, maybe she wasn't out of it at all. Not that right now seemed like the best of times to ask - just an insistent little thought to file away for later, maybe.

Oh, had she been about to say something else? If she wasn't about to fill the gap in the conversation, he figured it couldn't hurt.

"Alright," he said, "since I haven't seen anything yet... what's next?"

"That depends. Have you learned to Junction a GF yet?" she said with an arched eyebrow. She enjoyed showing off, but not at the risk of him getting slaughtered, after all.

"Worried about me, huh?" He winked. True, maybe he didn't remember all the details, or for that matter whether he'd brought the machine with him... but if a girl wanted to show something off to him, who was he to complain? "That's the stuff that isn't summoning them, right? Yeah, they did show us a little. I'm pretty sure I get it."

"They really frown on cadets getting killed by T-Rexuars. But if you can Junction, then all they can do is put you into a comatose near-death state, so that's totally acceptable. You really want to see something impressive, then?" She reached over her shoulders to tap each gunblade with an index finger, grinning.

Yosuke's own grin was starting to look just a little frozen. Man, he couldn't tell if she was joking or not... What was with him and meeting people like this?

He rallied, though; it was probably a bit late to back out now. "Uh, y-yeah!" he said as fearlessly as he could manage, however unimpressive that might have been at the moment. "Bring it!"

Yeah, how weird that he might meet a combat-hungry, weapon-obsessed girl in a school for mercenaries? Go figure.

"Then we need to find a T-Rexaur." She strode confidently on ahead, whacking at some of the foliage as she passed it just to make extra noise. "Back when I first started, I used to run from these all the time... if you're going to be in here, get in the habit of doing that! But I'm with you so it should all be okay."

Yosuke's partner hadn't ever really been a weapons fanatic, that much was true...

He loped along close behind her, glad to steer the conversation away from the topic of his getting put in a coma. "A dinosaur? That shouldn't be tough to spot in here. Seems a little uncreative, though. Heh, you should see some of the things we used to run away from."

But as bright as he sounded at the prospect of witnessing something cooler, it did come as a surprise to him when he swung one of his own weapons at a few nearby branches and had it rebound off something... hard. Hard and, now that he squinted through the leaves, kind of reddish-brown. Possibly even scaly.

"Whoa..." Oh, wait, he doubted there was much point dropping his voice now. And what was that low noise in the background? "Hey, Maria-san...?"

"What?" Maria said, actually questioning the appendage of 'san' to her name more than anything.

Of course, once the T-Rexaur lifted itself out of the busy in a shower of shrubbery and with a mighty roar that rumbled out through the Training Center, she forgot all such questions. "Oh good, you found one!" she said, whipping her blades out happily. "Okay, first thing's first is I need to get bitten!"

"Sure, go for it," said Yosuke, hastily backing up and scrambling for a defensive stance despite his trusty blades seeming suddenly just a little inadequate in the face of the monster lumbering towards them.

But even with the approaching T-Rexaur's cry ringing in his ears and drowning out almost everything else, it didn't take him too long to catch up with her actual words. He whipped around. "Wait, bitten?" he spluttered. "Are you insane!?"

"Sure. Limit Breaks only come out when you're pushed past normal limits. Pain, adrenaline, rage, despair... That's what you need to really let out your power!"

She stepped forward, trying to draw the monster's attention as she held her weapons ready. "Of course, you could always get knocked out instead, but then you wouldn't be able to watch..."

Despair...? "That's not what -"

Even if he'd known exactly how he was going to finish that protest, it wouldn't have helped. As the monster turned to set its sights on Maria, its lashing tail caught Yosuke square in the unguarded stomach, knocking him effortlessly across the grass.

"Hey!" Of course her reaction to a comrade being struck was to charge up and smack the T-Rexaur with a double blow of her gunblades. The recoil backflipped her away from it to land several yards back, quite gracefully all things considered. "You okay?!"

Judging from the groan that came in reply, Yosuke was more stunned than hurt for now - the worst he could privately lament right now was the way he always seemed to land on top of his wallet pocket. He'd even managed to hold onto his weapons for once. Still more than a little winded, he started to struggle back to his feet, fighting to catch his breath.

The T-Rexaur beat him to it, though. Shaking off the gunblade impact, it reared and, with another enraged bellow, lunged for the closest target it could see.

Yosuke, therefore, got a perfect view of the monster seizing Maria in its teeth, shaking her body violently, then hurling her at the ground like one giant wad of spit. She hit hard, rolled to her back, then snapped herself upright with a kick. It was a hell of a blow for anyone to take, and blood shone bright on numerous lacerations on her arms and chest, but she didn't seem to feel the wounds in the slightest. "Come on! Get up! You stay on the ground, you're just easy prey!"

"Dammit, I know," mumbled Yosuke. Disoriented as he still sounded, he was at least back on his feet, although he'd almost lost his balance wincing in sympathetic pain as she hit the ground in his stead. That bite didn't look like the kind of injury she should've just been shrugging off, either... "Listen, I really, really think -"

Either this particular T-Rexaur was blessed with an impeccable sense of timing, or the sound of Yosuke's voice happened to rub it the wrong way, because it chose this moment to let out yet another deafening roar. It advanced on Maria, the ground trembling under each ponderous footfall -

- Yosuke's body seemed to move on its own -

- and the monster's jaws clamped down a second time, meeting about as much much meaningful resistance from the skinny teenager as it would from a rag doll.

He dropped heavily back onto the grass, trailing blood.

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