For Porthos: Self-Defense Class

[femmejosephine]

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. 

Comments

[du_vallon]

"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.

[femmejosephine]

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."

[du_vallon]

"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.

[femmejosephine]

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."

[du_vallon]

"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?"

[femmejosephine]

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.

[du_vallon]

"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?"

[femmejosephine]

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.

[du_vallon]

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.

[femmejosephine]

"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."

[du_vallon]

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."

[femmejosephine]

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.

[du_vallon]

"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?"

[femmejosephine]

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.

[du_vallon]

"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."

[femmejosephine]

"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.

[du_vallon]

"Not encouraged. Told myself," Porthos says, tapping his heart. "Everything started to feel wrong," he says, referring to the one place he always turns to in order to make himself feel better. "I'm sure you're still better than the people I used to know."

[femmejosephine]

"Nice of you to say so, but you've got no proof of that," she replied cynically. She had decent self-esteem, but she also had no illusions about the things she'd done and not done.

As for things feeling wrong within her heart or whatever, she could understand that.

"Got my own code of ethics. I try not to violate it. It's not everyone's code, but it's mine and it helps me sleep at night. Sometimes."

[du_vallon]

"Nah, but I got a good judge of character," he promises warmly, even if Aramis would be ready to dissuade him of the idea and say something completely opposite of that. He shrugs. "Maybe I just like assuming the best in people after seeing the worst," he suggests.

"What's your code, then?"

[femmejosephine]

"Simple," she shrugged, and took a long swig of cider. A bit of Dutch courage, even though her statement was going to be brief. "I don't hurt innocent people."

That all but acknowledged that she did hurt non-innocent people, and it left a lot of room for interpretation, but it came down to that. She'd lie, cheat, steal, and even kill if she needed to, but she wouldn't hurt innocents. And that didn't work for Section. She thought of Stanley again, of how idealistic he'd been, and how he was at the last moments of his life. Section had done that to him. They said she had, since she hadn't killed him when she was told, but Section had done it.

[du_vallon]

"What if innocent people are working against you, without them even realizing?" Porthos asks curiously, ordering another bottle once he starts to notice the one they're working on is getting a little low. "Sometimes, that happens. Not always by my hand, not usually, but enough times that I can't trust to that belief."

[femmejosephine]

He wasn't psychic. No one was, but he managed to hit pretty close to what she had been thinking and she turned her glass on the table, allowing the mindless but telling gesture.

"It did. But as far as I could, as far as I was able, I didn't hurt innocents," she replied. "The, uh, people I worked for, they didn't like loose ends. It was a point of disagreement between us."

[du_vallon]

"I've accidentally hurt a few people who were probably undeserving, but it'd been in the line of work," Porthos confesses, frowning as he listens to her talk, knowing now that where they're from seem to have their share of similarities, despite Porthos knowing that nothing will ever be exactly like the Musketeers. "You're here now, though. And you seem to be striking out for yourself?"

[femmejosephine]

Nikita nodded. She understood the simultaneous regret at hurting those who didn't deserve it and the knowledge that sometimes there wasn't a choice.

"I am," she confirmed. "Putting it all behind me, best I can. Which sometimes isn't that far, but you do what you can."

She couldn't stop the automatic judgment of everyone's threat level, nor would she ever be a warm, open, trusting person, but she was working on it. She was always armed, but she never wanted to draw. It was an important distinction, at least in her mind.

[du_vallon]

"You move on with friends, sometimes you get someone you love," Porthos says, grateful that he has both of those here in spades and that he's never been the sort of person to turn anyone away. People have been quick to dismiss him, of course, but never the other way around.

"You seem to be doing that with the shelter, though," he says, of the putting it behind her part. "You enjoy it?"