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clotpolesonly · 3 years

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for @laurahale-appreciation’s day 2 prompt: The Missing Years

Laura and Noshiko meet at a supernatural gym in NYC

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There was a gym in Hunts Point that Laura frequented. It was a small place, tucked away behind a laundromat and a pawn shop. There was no signage—one of those places you only knew about because someone already in-the-know decided to clue you in, and for good reason. Werewolves couldn’t very well go around flashing their claws at the Y.

They didn’t have to hold back here. That’s what kept Laura coming back. Here, she could snarl and roar and let her eyes blaze red all she wanted. She could let loose the full strength that she kept so tightly reined in most of the time, and she could throw it all at someone who could handle it and throw it back at her.

It wasn’t always werewolves. Aside from pulverizing the already broken down equipment, Laura had sparred with several werewolves, a variety of other were-creatures, a few wendigos, two supremely shady vampires, a particularly buff banshee...

and Noshiko.

(read on AO3)

Noshiko was older, though she wouldn’t say by how much. From what Laura remembered of her mother’s lessons, kitsune could live for centuries. Noshiko didn’t look a day over forty, but kitsune were tricksters known for their prowess with illusion and shapeshifting, so that didn’t mean anything. Something about her bearing, the way she held herself, gave the lie to her youthful appearance.

Laura had first sparred with Noshiko three weeks after she’d joined the gym. A friend of a friend of an estranged cousin of her mother’s had slipped her the address, pity in his eyes and useless platitudes on his lips. Everybody in the community knew what had happened to the Hales, but no one wanted to help in any way that mattered. Not that there was much that would help. No amount of condolences would bring her family back.

But curiosity had gotten the better of her, so she’d followed the directions and found herself in a dingy, dirty concrete room filled with punching bags, boxing rings, truly enormous weights, and a dozen sets of wary, glowing eyes turned her way.

The only eyes not lit up with suspicion had belonged to the asian woman in the back corner, calmly practicing martial arts forms.

Laura hadn’t stayed that day, too anxious to leave Derek alone for more than an hour. But she’d come back the next. Lifted some weights, avoided making small talk with anyone who tried to introduce themselves, left pretty quick.

A few days later, she stayed for longer. A werecoyote with a cocky grin goaded her into a boxing match and she laid him out in under a minute. The rush of it had put a smile on her face for the first time in three months. So she came back the next day and did it again.

She ran through most of the gym’s regulars that way. It wasn’t real boxing, honestly. She wasn’t trained for that, and nobody here bothered with protective gloves or padding. They fought dirty and they didn’t hold back. The ring was splashed with blood, hosed off between matches, and the banshee who hung out in the back occasionally stepped in if they got too strong a vibe.

The first time she flagged Laura was a shock. The thought that she’d gotten so lost in her rage and the catharsis of bloodlust that she might not have been able to stop on her own scared her. She’d resolved to stay away, shut up in the apartment she shared with her brother, trying to coax him to talk to her when he hadn’t said a single word since the fire.

It was less than a week before she was back in the gym.

That was when Noshiko approached her. The older woman had kept her distance up until then, never goaded by Laura’s calls for a challenger, content to practice her forms in silence away from the other patrons. She was silent as she joined Laura in the ring, too, face impassive. Laura, keyed up as she was and riding the high of another win, had thought it would be an easy match.

It was the first she lost.

Afterward, when Laura was nursing her broken arm and waiting for it to snap back into place, Noshiko had sat down on the bench beside her.

“You are angry,” she’d said.

Laura had laughed through the blood in her mouth. "What gave it away?”

“That much anger is dangerous,” Noshiko told her. “It is a wildfire inside you. You would do well to tame it.”

The irony had made Laura sick to her stomach. But it hadn’t stopped her from fighting Noshiko again the next day. Every day for a week, Noshiko had put he on her back in a way that no one else could manage. Calmly and without hesitation, never rising to the bait when Laura snarled or jeered or roared. Nothing Laura threw at the woman was enough to phase her.

Laura hated it. She hated how powerless she felt in the face of that impassivity. She wanted to rage and be raged at. She wanted to feel bone breaking under her hands. She wanted Noshiko to give her something.

What she got wasn’t planned. It was late at night, far later than usual, but it had been a bad day for Derek and Laura had fled. Holing up in the gym to avoid her shell of a brother was cowardly and she knew it, but beating her fists bloody against a rowan-filled punching bag was less painful than hearing her brother gasp through his fourth panic attack of the day, so here she was. The banshee was hosing down the boxing ring as the last of the day’s patrons limped out the door. She eyed Laura warily but didn’t tell her to leave.

Laura had almost worn herself out when Noshiko had appeared beside her.

“If you leave those fingers broken for too long, they’ll heal that way,” she warned, as if Laura didn’t know. As if she cared.

Laura kept punching. She didn’t mind the pain. One, two, three hits until the heavy chain holding the bag broke and it went skidding across the floor.

Noshiko didn’t flinch. She never did, even in the ring when Laura came at her with a roar that had sent season hunters running. She watched, idly unwinding the wraps from around her wrist. Her knuckles were scraped and red, her bare shoulders and stomach sheened with sweat. Her expression revealed nothing of her thoughts.

“Are you looking for a fight?” Laura asked, itching for it. Itching for the chance to get the woman on her back. To get the upper hand, just once.

“I don’t need to fight,” Noshiko said. “Not the way you do.”

“You don’t know what I need,” Laura snapped back, fists curling.

“I know better than you might think.”

Laura surged forward with a snarl. For the first time in all these weeks, Noshiko moved back. Only an inch. Not even a whole step, but it brought red to Laura’s vision. Fangs slurred her speech as she growled, “You don’t know me.”

“I know fury,” Noshiko told her, the first hint of heat in her voice. “I know grief and hopelessness. I know the pressing need to burn the world down and make it pay for all the ways it’s wronged you.”

With a hoarse scream, Laura swung. Her blow didn’t connect, the space that Noshiko had occupied suddenly empty. The force carried her forward and the flat of Noshiko’s hand found the back of her neck. She hit the floor and twisted, sweeping Noshiko’s feet out from under her. Both on the floor, they grappled, rolling in the dust until they came up against the raised base of the nearest ring.

By some stroke of luck, Laura came out on top, hands tight around Noshiko’s wrists to keep them pinned. Beneath her, she could feel the heave of Noshiko’s chest, the way her bare stomach expanded and contracted between Laura’s thighs. There was color in her pale cheeks for once, something other than careful control in her dark eyes.

The kiss was an attack of its own, sharp teeth and panting breaths, hands grasping and holding. Noshiko bucked once as if to throw her off, but only once. When she tore her wrists free of Laura’s grip, it was only so that she could bury her fingers in Laura’s hair and pull. Laura moaned, an unfamiliar heat rushing through her. Her fangs against Noshiko’s lips drew blood and it tasted sweet. The noise it earned her was even sweeter.

Before Laura could get her hands under Noshiko’s shirt—tear it off, rip it to shreds, anything to get to bare skin—Noshiko moved. They rolled again until Laura was the one pinned.

She could’ve struggled free. She had the kind of strength that no amount of leverage could combat, but Noshiko was pressed against her from knees to chest, breath hot against her cheek, and getting free wasn’t such a priority anymore. Noshiko didn’t kiss her again, though.

“You’re a child,” she said instead. “A rash, petulant, damaged child with no discipline and no control. You’re dangerous.”

Laura panted around the shard of glass that lodged in her throat, remembering the satisfying slick of blood on her hands and the savage thrill of victory.

She said, “Are you afraid?”

Noshiko’s dark eyes traced her face, every line of it. Her hand, damnably steady, stroked Laura’s sweat-damp hair out of her eyes.

“Perhaps I should be.”

She remembered herself. In a blink, she had rolled away and regained her feet. Laura was left gasping without her weight to hold her down, to ground her. Noshiko adjusted her sports bra, tightened her ponytail, brushed dust off the thigh of her leggings. When she’d deemed herself presentable again, she looked down at Laura still on the floor.

“You need training,” she said. “Proper training.”

Laura propped herself up on her elbows. “Are you offering?” She hitched a lopsided grin on her face, too suggestive to be mistaken.

To her surprise, Noshiko offered a smile in return. “I’ll have to run it by my husband first.”

Laura blinked. “Husband?”

“Don’t worry,” Noshiko said, reaching for a nearby gym bag and slinging it over her shoulder. “My husband and I are not strictly monogamous. He knows he is neither my first nor my only love.”

Hoisting herself to her feet, Laura said, “I wouldn’t have expected someone of your age to be afraid of commitment.”

Noshiko didn’t rise to the bait, though her face turned sad. “Not afraid,” she said. “But wise enough to know that I will lose him someday, as I lost all the loves before him.”

She lay a hand on Laura’s shoulder—the most gentle touch she’d offered yet.

“Loss will not break you, child,” she said. “But don’t let yourself lose so much that you are left alone. That is when you will lose yourself as well.”

Her hand slid away. The gym’s heavy metal door clanged shut in Noshiko’s wake and Laura was left, shaking, in her absence.

The banshee brushed past her, now with a push-broom, apparently entirely unconcerned by the scene she had just witnessed. She leaned on her broom’s handle and popped her gum in Laura’s direction.

“So,” she said, “you gonna be back tomorrow to make another mess?”

Laura tucked her hair behind her ear, skin still tingling from where Noshiko had touched her.

“Yeah. I think I will be.”

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