5 Guys
Chapter 2
The Warrior
2.
Usually just before lunch on off mission days Muscles and Cameron like to spar in the workout room, and she likes to watch. Not for obvious reasons, although she does enjoy a friendly competition between two strapping men, but because she learns from observing. Her home world, a backwards planet run by empty-noggined men, wasn't too keen on training females to fight. When she gained her freedom from slavery and went out into the world as a teenager she vowed no one would treat her the way Fierenze and her parents had. Keeping out of trouble while getting into it is difficult, seduction takes care of a lot, but she studied various techniques and weaponry to fight if the time called for it.
"Good afternoon Vala Mal Doran," Teal'c greets as he hangs up a pair of sparring gloves.
"Afternoon Muscles," she grins back, she enjoys the way he says her name, the way they all do. Each addressing her in a different way with a different cadence. Appreciates when they don't bark her name like a certain anthropologist who didn't listen to her when she deciphered the glyphs before he did and is now a bit pissy and a bit radioactive because for once he blew up a room and she didn't.
Teal'c straightens the various weapons against the side wall before picking up a Ma'Tok staff, feeling the weight of it before adjusting his hold. He hikes an eyebrow when he notices her keen eyes. "Do you require my assistance?"
"No—well—it's just—don't you usually spar with Mitchell before lunch?" Rambles out her question afraid he might get the wrong idea with her wandering eyes, because she would get the wrong idea and her eyes do wander.
"Colonel Mitchell's expertise was required elsewhere." Although Muscle's voice is always pretty flat, she can tell he wants an answer to her intrusion.
"Well, I don't know if you've noticed, but I like to sneak in here while you two spar."
"Indeed," even he sounds fed up with her.
"No, no, it's not like that." Although it kind of is now that she mulls on it. "I like to learn from you."
He only lowers his eyelids, and probably his expectations of her.
"No, no, like how to fight."
"You wish to spar?"
"With you?" Shakes her head, braids whipping through the air, "Oh no, you'd annihilate me—"
A single bow forward and from the drop in his voice, she can tell that she's hurt him. "I would never purposefully harm you, Vala Mal Doran."
"And while I appreciate that, it doesn't exactly help me if I have to go hand-to-hand with a man of your—stature."
"Very well." In three short steps he's reattaching the staff to the wall. He clasps those big brisket arms behind his back as he approaches her again with another bow. "Let us spar."
In the same movement he takes a fighting stance and she feels her breakfast crawl up her throat. "Whoa, no, no, this is not what—"
A hand flies out at her and she dodges quickly to the left, her heart shudders a bit and she forgets to breathe.
"Your reflexes are impressive."
Fires another hand near her face and she spins out of the way. Another hand as she twirls out of the spin and slaps it away from impacting her side. He almost smiles, challenged with her fighting style, and his fists keep floating by but never land. They dance around the periphery of the ring, fists and dodging, hands and twirling, and maybe this is what it would be like to attend a high-class ball, swirling about while learning the moves.
That is, until his fist comes right towards her face and she flinches letting out a small shriek. There is no burst of pain and she doesn't understand. Desensitized from the years living with her father and Adria who practiced beatings when she was naughty, and she was hardly ever not naughty, and her mother who sold her off as a child slave when she was twelve. Hit so much her skin shivered into numbness.
She chances opening her eyes, his hand stays straight and unwavering less than an inch from her face, she can almost make out the whorls of his fingerprints. He comes into focus, attached but detached, from his near robotic arm. His face says nothing as it usually does, and his arm is slow in resetting.
"You fight well, Vala Mal Doran."
"Thank you," she huffs, her chest tightens with each breath as her brain talks herself down. The brutal few seconds before pain explodes, the horrid anxiety of waiting to be hit.
"You have had much practice."
"More than you know."
"Indeed."
Does he know? Could he possibly be aware of what had happened to her in the years before her adoption by the SGC. Know what it was like running from stall to stall in a firelit darkness holing up food in a secret sewn in pouch on her mandatory maiden's dress. What it was like to be bought at auction by her first husband, sentenced to death by her second husband, locked in a burning house while pregnant by her third husband, and saved and demeaned and slapped in the face by her fourth.
But his life hasn't been easy, none of their lives have and it's what sticks them together, magnetizes them as a team proficient to be role call one, because their strengths were all garnered under times of duress and their weaknesses are another team member's strength.
"Would you—Would you continue working with me? Teach how to bring down a big teddy bear of a man like you?" Stops him at the door with her words, hopes he can't sense the panic underlying them, the frantic need to be able not only to protect herself, but the team.
Only nods while holding the door open for her. "It would be my pleasure."