what would it take for you to notice
that i am a hand grenade
pin already pulled so don't let go
- Rise Against
"Methadone"
Young Lions
(2/3)
Don't Speak Her Name
Lucina's kicks meant business, as Roy found out the hard way, through the half foot thickness of a padded block that threatened to slip out of his hands every time she landed a full standing roundhouse.
Training a female student came with its own set of complications. For one, it was better to do it in private. Guys had a tendency to stare at a woman throwing punches, and they made no effort to hide it. It was like some sort of innate, primal fascination.
But then, the last woman Roy had trained with was Samus Aran. And Samus Aran gave absolutely no fucks whatsoever about who was watching.
And now it seemed that Lucina approached the situation with the same attitude, even as heads at the gym turned to the enclosed sparring cage, where she relentlessly drove Roy backwards.
Just watching her would have winded him.
"Next time," he said, when they took a short break, "we should do this during off peak hours."
"Why?"
He nodded toward the sidelines. "Knuckleheads in the audience."
Lucina spun around. A crowd of onlookers had gathered, though they kept their distance. She raised a hand and waved. Her fanbase waved back, stars in their eyes. Mac was among them.
"Unbelievable," Roy muttered.
"If they knew who you were, I bet they'd want to meet you too."
Roy shook his head. "Might hafta put up some curtains up in here."
His student shrugged. "I'm kinda used to it."
"I'm not."
"Is it because of me?" she asked. "Or is it because the Pharae style is meant to be a secret?"
Roy sighed. He crossed the stage and unzipped his gym bag. He removed two practice swords and tossed one to her. "Are you sure you want me to teach you?"
"Yes."
"I can still do that. But - " He took in the muscle tone of her arms and legs. "There is another sword style that may be better for you, in my opinion."
"You're a master of two schools?"
"No." Roy pulled a polishing cloth from his gym bag to wipe away dust from the wooden sword. "I'm gonna be upfront with you, so there's no misunderstanding. I am, officially, the master of no school. I never got ranked. Just so we're clear.
"I learned my father's sword style when I was a teenager. But before that, I practiced my mother's. Both schools were passed on to different heirs. What I used in competition was a fusion of the two. But I want to teach you my mother's art instead of my father's. I think it would serve you better."
Lucina considered him with a heavy look. After a moment, she said, "You should know that I've met your brother - or, your half-brother, I should say."
Roy paused and stared at her.
"He was a senior student at the academy during my first year," she explained. "I asked him about the Pharae style once. He was generous enough to answer my questions. But he said that he doesn't take students, so I wasn't able to learn from him formally.
"At school, the other students gossip quite a bit. I don't care for it personally. But there were always rumors about you. Of course, no one knew anything for sure. I didn't dare ask him about it. However I couldn't help but notice...no one in the Pharae court has never openly admitted to your existence."
"Huh." Roy dropped the towel back into his gym bag. "Sounds about right."
Lucina continued, "But all the girls at the school...they idolize your mother. We all know of her. Most of us could only dream of ever reaching her level of mastery of the art." Her voice lowered. "I just wanted you to know."
Roy straightened up. "Okay," he said quietly. "I get you. Are we doing this, then?"
"Yes."
"Gear up."
They stood across from each other in the circle. He aimed his first strike not at her head but at the empty space next to it.
A mistake. He realized it a second late - she had already knocked his weapon out of his hands. It flew halfway across the room, and the dull noise of it tumbling against the mat stung his pride hard.
His eyes met hers through the face guard.
"I am not an amateur, Master Roy."
The point was made. He retrieved his weapon. Her eyes tracked his every move until he settled back in place before her.
"Then I won't hold back," he said.
The way she smiled at that made him nervous.
The day after his training with Lucina, Roy started running again. It was on a Monday, down by the track and field by a local school. He had to avoid the gym because he didn't want to run into Mac there. That woulda been embarrassing.
Halfway through the first lap, he swore he almost died. Had it really been that long since he'd been out running? By the third lap, a burning sensation had worked its way from the back of his throat all the way down to his stomach.
Come on you asshole you useless fucking asshole move your goddamn goddamn don't give up don't you fucking give -
He dropped onto the grass, fell to his back, stared at the bright morning sky, gasping. Dark spots winked at him in that sky. His throat felt like it was on fire. His stomach ached.
Oh fuck you.
In his mind he heard the old Captain tearing him a new one. That hadn't happened in how many years? Five? Ten? Captain Falcon of the bargain bin superheroes. Blazing Falcon. The man whom so many of the trainees had wanted to become. The man who once grabbed Roy by the front of his shirt, lifted his wise-cracking ass into the air, and chucked him across the length of a room.
His parting words had stayed with Roy for years:
"You think you're funny. Here's what I think is funny. Most trash-talkers I know have some skill to back it up. You? You got nothing. It's just your mouth that seems to think otherwise."
Captain Asshole Falcon. Who rose before the sun every morning and never missed a gym day. Who lived by the creed of hard work and no bullshit.
Who had zero tolerance for pro bullshitters like Roy.
Falcon would be laughing his spandex-covered ass off right now.
Roy had spent most of his life keeping company with heroes and legends. And that, he'd come to realize, was the root of the problem. The standard of achievement for him had been raised to impossible heights. Roy was born to stand in the shadows of the greats. In retrospect, there had been no way he could have ever measured up.
Maybe, he was a slacker by choice. Or maybe, the pressure to succeed had crippled his mental state long before he ever stepped into the arena. Maybe, he backed away from his responsibilities to keep it all from crushing him.
Maybe he'd been chickenshit his whole life.
Roy was only really good at one thing. He could take hits like no one else. He'd go down like a brick, get kicked in the head for five straight minutes, and he wouldn't even black out. And when it was over, he'd get up and walk it off.
He could take any ass-beating. From Falcon or anyone. But he'd never win by being the punching bag.
The track was empty that day. Roy was alone. After the feeling returned to his arms and legs, he sat up. His mouth was dry.
Would your parents be proud of you? the old snake had asked.
He got up and started walking.
Without thinking about it, his steps took him away from the track, down several blocks, to a place that lived in his memory.
The building looked as trashed on the outside as he remembered it. He wondered how it had held up on the inside. A faded banner on the front advertised renovated studios for month to month lease at discount rates.
Between the cockroaches and the fragrant smell of weed that came in from his neighbors, Roy'd had some good times there, even if Wario was a slumlord among slumlords. For a guy who came from a family of plumbers, he'd never bothered to actually fix anything. The bathroom ceiling had leaked brownish water the entire time Roy had stayed there.
But for what the place was, or had been, Roy still held on to the memory of it, the stain of it.
Because you brought him there, the first time and every other time after, this kid with a trust fund and family ties to a deposed aristocracy, whose overseas relatives had old world money and a summer villa on an island with clean beaches and a winter estate up in the mountains somewhere. His passport had been stamped in countries around the world. And you took him there and fucked him in that place, that dank half-rotting room where junkies used to go to shoot up, where damaged people met for one-night-stands and lifelong mistakes, before the new maggot-eating landlord tried to spot clean it a bit. And still it smelled like chlorine, paint and stagnation, and at night you could hear the cockroaches rustling in the trash, chewing through the styrofoam surrounding last night's take-out.
You had to have been crazy. Or addicted to the way he looked at you. Which was its own form of crazy. But in the mornings, he'd be gone, so quick you'd think you'd dreamt the whole thing, because how could you imagine the son of a lord walking through these streets, out into the parking lot, past the liquor store and the vacant lot where people tossed their old furniture, to get into a waiting cab that would take him from this moth-eaten, graffiti-tagged neighborhood back to whatever castle he'd come from. You'd have called it a hallucination, if it hadn't been for the marks his teeth left on your fingers.
Roy took the stairs up the side, walked past the row of front-facing apartments until he reached the facilities gate at the end. He tossed his backpack over it, then took hold of the top bar and pulled himself over the gate. Another set of stairs waited for him there. He climbed up to the rooftop and over the last gate.
A mess of broken bottles, discarded cigarette butts, and clusters of white bird shit greeted him. It was a reunion, really. He walked all the way to the edge, looked out over the urban sprawl before him.
If you had worked harder, maybe you could have kept him. If you had fought harder, fought better, you wouldn't have lost your contract with the tournament league. You didn't need to be the best, just mid-tier, good enough. If you had kept your contract, you could have kept the dojo and the tradition and the right to your mother's name. And then you wouldn't have to live like a dog, chained to an assembly line, licking old wounds in the dark.
But the fight takes discipline, and you had no will for it. Too addicted to smoke, drink, and vice - and a boy with long lashes and hair that fell into his eyes and scars on his back that reminded you of your own.
Roy hooked his backpack strap over one of the spikes at the top of the gate. He pulled energy bars from the front pouch, tore off the wrappers, and crammed them into his mouth. Chewed, swallowed, washed it down with bottled water. The process was painful. His stomach protested, threatened to vomit it all up, but he forced down more water, somehow kept everything in. Gave himself a minute to settle. Then he made sure his shoe laces were tied.
He stood up, went to the edge again. He plotted his course over the adjoining rooftops, not a new trail, just old steps re-traced.
And 'sides, your momma raised you for something else, didn't she?
Roy took a breath and jumped.
And flew.
When his shoes hit the roof of the next building, he took off running.
The sun was bright and hot on his back. The concrete hit him hard with each footfall. But he didn't stop.
Though she had never said it out loud, Roy knew. He had always known. He was once and always: decoy and sacrifice, protector of his father's heir. Should calamity befall the royal house, he would take the fall in place of his half-brother.
So he ran, jumped, and climbed, and ran again. He ran as though that calamity were chasing him. As if he could out-maneuver fate. Or his parents' legacy.
He ran until he had nothing left in his lungs.
"You're eating a lot more." Mac noticed these things.
"Yeah, well, that training with Lucina got my metabolism up, so..."
"That girl's amazing, ain't she?"
Mac got the starry eyes again. Roy sighed. But he wasn't about to argue. Lucina was everything that he had once wanted to be.
"We're meeting up for dinner. You should come!"
Roy shook his head. "Nah, I'm cleaning out my closet."
"Are you serious?"
"Got some things I'm thinking of selling."
"Well, you gotta get your money, man. We'll be out a while though. Whenever you finish up, come join us."
"Sure."
Then he started the slow process of pulling things out of boxes and putting them into other boxes. Turned out it was a lot of junk. But still, he was pretty sure there were collectors willing to pay for mementos from the previous Smash era.
Then he pulled out something that gave him pause.
It was clean and pressed; its yellow trim sharp against the dark blue. It had been torn apart and nearly destroyed countless times on the stage. Roy had mended it each time. Sewing was a skill handed down to him from his mother.
He didn't need to see it now, didn't need the reminder of how much time had passed.
But still. It was there, and just seeing it put an impulsive thought into his head.
He pulled his shirt off. Then he tugged his old uniform off the hanger and slipped his arms through the short sleeves. It still fit over his shoulders but it didn't close completely in the front. He shed his pants and pulled on the leggings as far as he could get them. He fixed on the belt.
Then he turned and faced the mirror. The reflection that met him was ridiculous, a caricature of himself. Of course no one could have expected him to keep the same proportions he'd had as a teenager.
Back then all the guys had wanted to be like the Captain. They had all signed on for Falcon's boot camp, tired of being skinny or flabby or constantly winded. And Captain had made sure to put them through hell. The running, the pushups, the weights - Roy could handle all that. The only thing he couldn't handle was the eating. The constant eating. So much food that all food started to look bad after the while. Falcon could shove anything into a blender and drink it three times a day, even if it tasted like chalk. Even Kirby would have balked at the Falcon's nutrition plan.
Roy had eaten until he'd felt like throwing up. And his numbers on the scale had slowly creaked along toward the heavier end. But the added weight slowed him down, made it hard to climb walls and jump from ledge to ledge, and he hadn't been that fast to begin with.
So he'd turned to Samus for speed and agility training. Back then, all the girls had wanted to be like Samus. But when she became a trainer, words like "suicide" and "you're gonna need paramedics on scene" got tossed around. Naturally, Roy had signed up to be her student right away. He'd survived Falcon, so he'd figured, how bad could it be?
As it turned out, nothing could have prepared him.
"You're good," she'd told him as she towered above his prone gasping form, a quarter of the way through the first lession. Because, to Samus Aran, "not dead" meant you were doing well.
"Oh gods, I can't feel my legs..."
"That's normal."
Aran went hard during her own training sessions; there was no reason to think she'd go easy on a student.
"You boys have no idea," she'd told him once. He'd been spotting her during bench presses.
"What?"
"The world doesn't expect you to carry its weight while looking like a supermodel at the same time."
"Well fuck those guys."
But it was never that easy. Looking good meant you got sponsors. It meant you got placed in ads. You helped companies sell energy drinks, shoes, gym memberships, phone cards, makeup, video games, car insurance. You helped them, and they helped your bank account.
Samus bulked up while she was training, but she always cut weight right before picture day. The effect made her look incredibly lean in the promo photos, to the extent that Roy sometimes swore he saw a rib showing.
Of course, he'd been no different.
If Samus had seen Roy or Link in front of the mirror every morning, armed with combs, hair gel, and straightening irons, she might have been amused. Even Mario had a team of stylists charged with the care of his iconic mustache.
(Besides, everyone knew that the only person who ever woke up in the mornings looking like a perfect princess was the one in the tiara, though if you asked Roy, he looked less like a princess while sleeping and more like a stray cat that had wandered in on its own, curled up, hair ruffled, face half-hidden in a worn-out pillow that Roy'd had since forever.)
Between Falcon and Aran, Roy saw his body torn down and remade. He hit harder; dodged better; fell faster; but his air game still sucked. His edge game sucked even worse, and he still couldn't strategize worth shit.
As hard as he worked, others worked just the same, if not harder. He wasn't the exception; he was merely the standard.
In the end, Roy couldn't be sure if any of it mattered. Aran and Falcon eventually left the dojo. They weren't the only ones. For Roy, the excitement of being made an instructor fizzled out quickly after he saw how thin the class attendance had become. When he finally made head instructor, he realized he was the king of an empty castle.
He packed up his old uniform. It wasn't the worst thing to have come across.
He'd saved the worst for last.
It was locked inside a long embroidered box within a carrying case. Roy flipped the latch on the outer case and opened the lid.
The colored threads on the box had faded with time. The sharpness of the corners had been rubbed down from years of sliding along foreign roads, all the places his mother had seen. The box had been shoved into car trunks and closets, hidden beneath floor boards, smuggled across enemy lines. It had lasted for several lifetimes before falling into Roy's hands. He still remembered it, as a child, the one thing his mother had never given up, even after they had given up everything else. He remembered, with it, his childhood spent on roads, his feet bloodied from walking. He remembered the sounds of howling beasts that roamed the plains at night, the circling vultures and pungent odors that marked a killing field. He remembered also the wails of human beings pushed beyond their limits, the anguished cries that often woke him from troubled sleep as he swayed in a hammock at the squalid refugee camp where they waited years for asylum.
And she, unbowed, still, would hold him and tell him stories. She had dried his tears only once. After that, there would be no more coddling, and he had found himself out of tears. She herself never cried. She, who, night after night, returned to the border to lead others to safety.
A part of him had never left that long road which they had walked together. Years later he could still recall it with vivid clarity. His mother's voice haunted him at night, called him from somewhere in the darkness ahead of him, urging him to keep moving, to stay ahead of the enemy, refusing to slow down for him, because they belonged to a world that devoured the weak, and she would not carry him because he had to learn to carry himself. She had taught him that much. She had taught him everything on that road through wilderness and broken things, on their flight into exile.
He had never forgotten.
Roy shut the lid of the case without even opening the box. Selling his organs on the black market would have been easier than parting with this.
He sent a message to a dealer he knew. He did it before he could have second thoughts. If the price was no good, after all, he could always say no. Then he drained the last of the whiskey he had on hand and fell asleep.
That night, he dreamed of cutting off his arm and feeding it to a dragon.
The sessions with Lucina continued. And she worked him to the point that he felt like a stunt prop. Her sword arm was deadlier than her kicks, and he'd feel it for hours afterwards, a trembling in his bones, as if he'd been run down by a force of nature. Maybe that wasn't far from the truth.
He started running with Mac, against his better judgment. There was nothing in it for Mac, who probably could have lapped him twice before Roy even finished his first go around the track.
"Come on! You can do it!"
Roy hated Mac's optimism, but he needed someone there so he wouldn't crap out into a pile of shit like the other day.
In the end, Mac clapped him soundly on the shoulder. "Hey, man, ya did it!"
"Fuck you, I'm dying..."
"Keep it up! It gets easier."
"Fuck you so much."
"We gonna spar tomorrow, right?"
"Goddamn..."
"No backing out!"
"Ugh..."
"Hey look!"
They had a spectator. She hopped off the metal railing where she'd been perched.
"Hey, gorgeous!"
"Good evening." Lucina gave Roy a look-over. To Mac, she said, "Is he okay?"
"He's fine." Mac clapped his back again, and Roy almost threw up.
"Do that again, and I'ma hafta kill you..."
They took him out to eat afterward, to a place that served burritos and chips on flimsy paper plates. The countertops were stained with kitchen grease, and the plastic chairs were cracked from decades of use. Roy figured that he and Mac probably belonged there, but Lucina was definitely slumming it hard.
The old flatscreen on the wall was tuned to a sports newscast.
"Who is this Shulk guy?" Mac wondered out loud as he watched the ongoing Smash Bros. montage. "Like, where does he come from?"
Roy shrugged. "Who cares? He can fight. That's all that matters."
"Can he beat Falcon?"
"He's fighting Falcon?"
"That's what people are sayin'."
"Then he's dead."
"Come on, he can hold his own. He beat Mega Man."
"Falcon's knee is a globally recognized weapon of mass destruction. Monando boy is dead."
"Monado," Lucina corrected him.
"A dead guy ain't gotta worry about his name."
"He looks pretty strong to me," Mac said.
"Have you seen Falcon? That fucker is a sack of steroids on legs."
"Yeah but he's old, now."
"Dare ya ta say 'at to his face!"
"Does that guy even have a face?
"Why is Shulk half naked in all of these shots?" Lucina gestured toward the screen.
"If ya got it, flaunt it!"
Roy sneered. "Gross."
Mac hooked an arm across the back of Roy's neck. "Not your type, huh?"
"Stop cuddling me, freak."
"Aw come on, honey, don't be like that. I let you sleep on top every night."
Roy pulled back just enough so that he could jab his knuckles into Mac's armpit.
"Aw fuck! Shit! I just went numb right there!"
"Enjoy it."
"It's like - I suddenly have no armpit. What the fuck did you do to me? That some kung fu shit or what?"
Lucina's face went red from laughter. She hunched over, shoulders shaking.
"We should stop," Roy said. "I think Lucina's crying." That earned him a punch in the arm. "Ow!" That girl hit pretty hard.
Mac cheered her on. "Do it again! He's into that shit!"
She took a sip of her horchata while the flush receded from her face. "I'm impressed. You guys aren't even drinking tonight."
"We go loud and hard every night, baby!"
Roy popped an ice cube into his mouth and chewed. Oddly, a strange sort of peace had descended over him. Times like these made him forget the undercurrent of anger that always seemed to cling to him. He hadn't had good company in a while.
These things were temporary, he decided, so he should enjoy the moment while it lasted.
When they got up to leave, Roy stopped to slip on his jacket. The image on the flatscreen glitched out into a batch of pixels. Then it went blue. He looked back up at it the moment the reception came back.
Something else entirely had replaced the sports broadcast. A young woman, he thought, standing, but her face was blurred. Behind her, a grey wall. Over her shoulders, a cape. On her back, a rifle.
She spoke, the sound coming in rough, like an amateur recording. Words in an old language that Roy had not heard in years. Like a command he could not refuse, they rooted him in place.
He knew that language. His mother's language.
But it had been so long, it took his mind an extra second to translate. He only caught parts of the spoken phrases.
"...the abuses of the regime...cannot ignore...for our lives...for our families...and so..."
Then her image winked out. The screen went to pixels again, and eventually the corporate sports broadcast returned.
Roy shook free from the spell. He looked around. No one else seemed to have noticed. The other customers, seated at their tables, continued with their conversations. He turned and locked eyes with Lucina. Her mouth was set to a grim line. Even Mac, glancing back and forth between the two of them, seemed to pick up that something monumental had just happened.
In the restaurant, only they three appeared to have seen the quick hack into an official channel. The other patrons simply carried on. Their laughter, awkward now in the aftermath, hollow and ugly, grated on Roy's ears.
But then, he spotted two servers in dirty aprons, standing behind the register, their eyes still fixated on the screen, which was now playing a commercial. They looked as if they were waiting for the anonymous speaker to return.
"Was that her?" one of them asked.
"Yes, yes," the other answered. "The gods be with her."
Roy turned away. Only after he had stepped through the doors, out into the cool night air, did he realize that they too had spoken in his mother's native tongue.
The last words of the propaganda video circled in his head until, hours later, he lay in bed and finally unraveled them.
Roy knew that he had a half-sister out there in the world somewhere, whom he had never met. Some people said that she had survived the years of upheavals in her homeland, that she was still alive.
"We fight," she, the unknown rebel, had said. "We fight, we fight."
as we chase the sun
my shadow slows us down
without me along
you're better off, i know