Misfits.
Author's Note: I do not own this.
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…
He is sprinting lightly, still learning how to tilt his weight forward on the balls of his feet as he runs. He is on the street, dressed in sweatpants, sneakers and the black zip-up sweatshirt that will become like a second skin to him. She had presented him the garment with a hesitant smile and he had taken it, eyes wide, with equal hesitancy.
The first day is easy. He cracks a broad and short-lived grin as he plants a foot solidly on the seat of a bench and then pushes off it hard. He jumps, throwing momentum behind the action and only just clearing the lip of the dumpster before his knees buckle and he lands in a heap. The air is taken from his lungs and he winces, feeling a stinging sensation on the side of his face.
The look on her face is easy for him to read. He wishes it wasn't, because her eyes travel over that broken patch of skin repeatedly and she bites the corner of her lower lip far too hard. He understands in that moment, yet he cannot explain how.
He doesn't give the scrape time to heal properly.
He is out again in two days, free-running by an industrial park not far from the community center. He pulls himself up a fire escape and takes the building's inside stairwell all the way down to the ground floor, calves burning , before heading back onto the street. He runs the edge of the lake. On the flat surface he can focus more on his stride, here he can compress his anger and fear and worry into motion and energy and speed.
She finds him one afternoon standing next to an electrical cord that had been unplugged and snaked around the leg of a streamlined metal chair. He is staring at it with all the analytical stoicism he can manage. She is looking at him in turn, the grocery sack in her arms forgotten. She wonders how it feels to stumble across the scraps of a life you have already had and try to build a replica with the pieces.
After a week and a half he finds a first aid kit sitting neatly on the kitchen table of their flat. Its one of those really good ones, with the surgical scissors and extra tape. He smiles to himself and washes the grit from the deep scrapes along his left forearm. A product of missing an ambitious long jump.
Three days after that there is more gauze wrapping sitting on their kitchen table. He doesn't smile. Instead, he is left wondering how often she catalogues the bruises and gashes he fails to notice. He wonders absently if the version of himself she has already met… the version he is trying so diligently to become… will bear the marks of missed steps and underestimated jumps.
He runs three times around the lake one evening several days later, ignoring the way his body tries to fight him into thinking about the motion of it. It wants to pull his brain in, demand a sequence and a structure. But it is running… and he has done this enough to not think about whether the movement is right or wrong in its execution.
He learns. Ever so slowly it comes to him.
The fluidity of his motions comes with muscle memory, after the hundredth jump over a seven foot gap between three story buildings a ten foot jump just becomes a shift in effort, a rolling landing to dissipate energy instead of a running landing. He stops thinking about it, because his body has learned these actions.
He is home late one night, shuffling silently to the kitchen when he sees a new black sweatshirt folded up and set on the table. Beside it is a case of bottled tea and a single individually wrapped yogurt and a spoon. He smirks, though it is really more of a smile and tugs at the collar of his current sweatshirt. It has been faded and battered for a while now, but he hadn't minded.
It is early one morning, nearing five a.m. and he finds himself holding the edge of the bathroom sink, red-rimmed eyes fixed on the image in the mirror in front of him. He cannot completely recognize the parts of himself that are left, between the girl tangled in grey sheets not thirty feet away and the sudden lean sheets of muscle tissue his body has grafted just under new skin… he is undoubtedly changed.
Months have passed since she carefully handed him that black sweatshirt and he wordlessly accepted the many lead-coated strings attached to it. He thought he has done well, he is half kneeling inches from the edge of a high rise apartment complex roof. He has a pair of binoculars in one hand and his vision fixed on a street corner he selected at random.
When he gets back, padding across the spotless white floor, he finds a note on the table. She tells him to stay put in compact unrushed letters. He stands still only a moment before wandering around the flat. He is now a contrast in motion and stillness, it has taken him months to learn a balance between them both.
She arrives, heaving the lift gate open with a grinding squeal. He spots the enormous black duffel over her shoulder and his eyes widen a fraction as he worries that maybe… just maybe, this is the moment she says she cannot do this anymore.
She puts the duffel onto the kitchen table and nearly bounces a step back as she clasps her hands behind her back and arches a brow at him. When she tells him the bag is his, he reaches for the zip slowly.
He tugs the duffel open and pauses at its contents. He isn't sure, for several consecutive minutes, if she means that this had once belonged to him or if she had purchased it recently. He casts a glance at her and she looks just as painfully lost in thought as he seems to be.
She reaches a hand into the duffel and tugs out a vest-like thing from amid bunches of black cloth. The vest has odd plates on it. She is murmuring something about impact absorption body armor. He catches her mention that she had to guess his measurements and he lets out a grateful exhale.
He begins pulling out the rest of it, another black zip-up sweatshirt and a pair of durable cargo pants, a t-shirt, a logo-less black belt. It is all there, including a pair of armor-plated gloves and tinted paintball goggles. She holds out a pair of combat boots and he wonders if he will be able to move as quietly in them as he can in sneakers.
He has to re-learn movement in the new clothing. It isn't that difficult, the vest fits his body perfectly and he chooses to wear it under a slightly loose sweatshirt. The change of footwear is no challenge at all, the boots protect his ankles and he finds he can still move silently in them.
The armor is hanging in its designated spot in their closet, safe from both their lines of sight, when he takes a look around the flat and wonders what it looked like when he had lived there. He doesn't register that he voiced the thought aloud until she weaves her fingers into his and presses her palm gently into his own.
She tells him it looked like this.
The lights are glinting off of every surface, the floors are white and the furniture is cold, garishly expressionless, stainless steel. It feels like an asylum, a hospital or a prison. It is windowless and it is theirs. It is beautiful and horrible. He looks at the ceiling before he asks if it looked just like this.
She pauses a moment before she nods once.
He squeezes her hand tightly for a second.
