femmejosephine | For Porthos: Self-Defense Class

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For Porthos: Self-Defense Class

She hadn't been sure about it when one of the shelters had asked her to teach a self-defense class. Well, actually, they'd started by asking if she knew anything about that, and she'd said that she did. She'd lived on the street, after all. Self-defense was required, even without Section training.   She'd told them she had never been formally trained in it, and that was true. She'd been trained in offense more than defense.

Still, they'd asked if she'd do it. She'd considered it for a while, then decided she could do it without revealing too many of her skills. She didn't want to do that both for her own safety and to avoid too many awkward questions. Having a murder conviction was a disqualifying detail for almost every shelter, which she understood fully.

Tonight had been the third class. They'd started the course with a discussion of personal safety and personal space, as well as being aware of environments and strategies to get help when you didn't look like someone anyone would want to help. She'd wanted to emphasize to them that there was a mental as well as a physical component to defending oneself. Now they were moving into basic countermeasures, balance shifts, and non-lethal disabling strikes.    Everyone, including her, had to be the victim and the attacker at least twice with three different people. She was, not surprisingly, the best at taking people down and at attacking them, even those larger than she was, though she had played her skills down considerably.

When it was over, she was tired, but happy. Her students thanked her as they left, and she hoped that they'd retain something, that they'd be able to defend themselves if needed.   Only time would tell, though, and she smiled a little as she flipped the switch to turn the lights in the gym area off.

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"You know, not making an all brawn and no brains joke is really difficult with a set-up like that," she teased him lightly as they approached the pub door. She didn't fully trust Porthos any more than she fully trusted anyone else, and she was always prepared for him to use what he knew about her against her, but until that happened, she was willing to have a drink with him.

And if he did decide to do something stupid, she would handle it. He was larger than her and just as trained, probably, but that was how it went sometimes. Not all fights were as easily finished as the flips she'd just been doing on her self-defense students.

"But I'm going to resist, because I am a good person."

She wasn't. Not in a lot of ways. But that was what made the statement funny, at least to her.

"I got all the brains and the sense," Porthos boasts, which is possibly the scary part about his life in the Musketeers, but so it goes. He smirks, though, when she talks about resisting, shrugging because he has brawns, and more than enough brains.

He settles at the counter of the bar, lifting his hand to get the bartender's attention. "What do you prefer to drink?"

She actually did believe that, for all she teased him about all brawn and no brains. He'd lived on the street, and that took a lot of brains if you didn't want to die. It made people wary, suspicious, and smart, or it made them dead. She preferred the former.

"I'll just have a cider," she decided. "At least for now. We get too much into the past and I might switch to vodka."

"That's what wine and brandy are for. Good in good times, perfect in bad," he says and orders them both a cider and a bottle of red wine, in the event she wants to share. If she doesn't, then Porthos will still be fine. Drinking with Athos has given him a tolerance that would be the envy of most -- other than alcoholics, of course. "Are we going to get too much into the past?"

Red wine was so French, but she didn't mind. It was probably going to be a good wine, at least. She'd learned a bit about wine in Madeline's Deportment Classes, but not as much as a Frenchman knew or even had forgotten.

"You're the one who started asking questions about where I learned to fight," she pointed out. And she was the one who hadn't completely shut him down immediately, so they were in this together.

Edited 2015-05-25 01:15 (UTC)

"How'd I know it was your past where you learned it?" he points out, feeling like he ought to at least get in that he's not at fault for the past coming home to roost, not when he couldn't have known. "Besides, if you really don't want to talk about it, we don't have to. I know I don't love to, not without a drink first."

"And that's why I have one," Nikita agreed with a little toast to herself. "It's not a far guess. You know I lived in shelters. You know I got kicked out. You know I had to survive, however I could. That means I learned to fight. And to make deals, however I needed to with whoever I needed to. Probably a familiar story."

She and Porthos had too much in common sometimes.

"Who taught you?" Porthos asks curiously, because she's right that it's familiar, though he didn't have the shelters part. Then again, it's not like any of the orphanages would have even taken him when he'd lived, which is more a jab against the times, he's come to realize. He doesn't ask when she'd stopped, because he never had and he doubts she has either.

She thought about that for a moment. Before Section, who had taught her? Had anyone, or had she just learned because she had to? In Section, it had been Sensei, of course, or one of Sensei's helpers.

"I dunno that anyone really taught me, officially," she replied. "I mostly watched the other kids and learned where and when to hit people. I also learned the fine art of running away."

"I learned the running away first," he admits, because he'd been young and spry and had figured out how to be quick with his hands, but not quickly enough. "Learned to fight in the army, though," he says, with a firm nod of his head, remembering how it had made him better than just a thief and a coloured boy.

It'd made him powerful.

It was difficult to admit any of her past to anyone, but she'd told Cole a bit, vaguely, and maybe she could tell Porthos a bit, vaguely.

"Running away is highly underrated," she agreed, and sipped her cider while she considered what she could say.

"Yeah, after I was off the streets, I worked for some people who taught me to fight more formally, too. Never got rid of what you might call the street fighting bits, though. Drove some of my teachers crazy."

"Teachers?" Porthos asks, latching onto that bit. For all that he understands her past and shares a lot of what she's saying, he has to wonder what kind of teachers she's talking about. "People who taught you to fight, like for a job?" He's sort of had that with the Musketeers, but he doesn't know that he'd ever call them teachers, exactly.

She wasn't sure why he was questioning the idea of teachers. Everyone learned from someone else, probably, and fighting was no different. Section had had a dedicated staff of trainers and teachers for the recruits and for ongoing exercise and testing. She never asked why people who had that kind of knowledge of martial arts were in Section. She never wanted to know.

"Trainers, maybe, is a better word." Nikita shrugged. "Either way, they made sure I knew what I needed to know."

"And now you're teaching other people," he says warmly, liking the idea of that. He's always been open to teaching other Musketeers how to fight, but they always tend to run away when they figure out what it means to come up against Porthos' fists the way they have to. "You enjoy it? The fighting?"

She shrugged. She didn't really enjoy fighting, although she was good at it. She was more interested in teaching the people in her classes to fight back, which was different than fighting, at least in her head. She wasn't training them for bare-knuckle bouts. She was training them to be able to defend themselves as needed.

"It's more that I enjoy teaching people to take care of themselves," she replied. "There's a bit of teaching them to fight, basic defensive moves and whatnot, but my goal is that they won't be victims, or at least not as easily as they might otherwise be. People like that don't look like someone that others want to help, so they have to be able to help themselves."

That was a fairly personal statement, and it came from her experiences, which he probably could infer. If one person walked out of the class and could defend themselves a bit better, she'd consider it a success. If not, she wouldn't teach the class again.

"That's a good reason to teach it," he says honestly, because he does the classes, but it's mainly to keep them out of other trouble (which is something he'd learned from experience at a similar age, given that he'd been far too quick to find any and all misgivings that awaited him because he had too much time on his hands). "Do you feel like it's working out that way? That they won't be victims anymore?"

She considered that for a moment, sipping her cider as she did.

"No way to know," she finally said. "I'd like to think they'll learn a bit and might make someone think twice about hassling them. They came to the class, and that's a good sign. But anyone can be a victim in the wrong circumstances. Sometimes you can't fight back, not enough to make any difference. Five hundred kilo gorillas are out there."

Section was the five hundred kilo gorilla in her life, and she'd never made any difference whatsoever to what it wanted to do, not until she'd escaped.

Porthos blinks and stares at her, completely lost. English as a language does this to him sometimes. For all his best intentions, he never quite gets it right and this is one of those moments where he feels very, very wrong. "What's a five hundred kilo gorilla?" he asks, completely lost.

"Sorry, that's an idiom," Nikita chuckled. "A five hundred kilo gorilla is an expression for something you can't fight against. Something that's too big to be defeated. Gorillas are a really big ape, so if they don't want you to win, you won't. I'm sure the Greeks had some myth about it. They had myths about everything."

Porthos has yet to meet anything he can't defeat. Things usually aren't too big or too daunting for him, though he imagines he can see that some things might just be a concept, sort of. "I always just fought and fought harder until I found a way to defeat whatever I came up against," he admits. "But I suppose there's some things, like ideas, that I can't win against. Sort of like how people treated me, at home."

She'd tried to fight Section. She'd tried to escape Section. She'd even tried to change Section. None of it worked. Maybe if she'd stayed there longer, she would have found a way to defeat it, but since they wanted her dead, that wasn't going to happen.

"The people I worked for before, they were not very nice. I don't think anyone could ever win against them. I didn't, at least, and neither did anyone I ever heard of," she replied. It was still a risk to say even that, but she was gradually letting a few people know about her past. A little. Not much.

"So you learned to fight, only it didn't teach you enough to win against 'em," Porthos makes his guess as best as he can, feeling a bit sympathetic. "For me, it's where I grew up, only you can't even fight against it. It's just a place that swallows you whole and the only way you win is if you run away. Not exactly a way filled with honour, is it?"

He was more correct than he knew in talking about places that swallowed you whole. And running away. She'd known and done both.

"Well, there's honor and then there's survival. Sometimes the second's more important than the first. Which probably goes against all kinds of codes or whatnot, but I've always been a survivor more than anything else."

She shrugged as she said it. She was a realist, and most peoples' idea of honor wasn't something that worked with that. She had her own code and she followed that. Everyone else could just deal with it.

"I was, up until I reached the Musketeers," he admits, sloshing the liquid in his glass back and forth as he peers down at it. "I figured out that I hated the ways I was surviving and it was better to try and be someone else. Someone better," he says with a serious look on his face. "Now, I don't have to survive alone because I've got them."

"Never had that," she mused. "I've never been encouraged to be someone better. Someone else, sure. Lots of times. Not someone better."

It might have sounded self-pitying, in the wrong tone, but she wasn't pitying herself. It was just how it was for her. She'd never had anyone on her side except herself. And everyone had wanted to change her, but not for the better, usually. Just for what suited them better.

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