Post by Aegle Verdant on Sept 15, 2019 0:14:48 GMT -5
The bag swung to and fro on its chains, and its music chimed, dissonant and out of time, with the percussive rhythm of her punches. Out of time even, or so it seemed, with the crooked girl's mind. It bayed across the gym, rung off the walls, harsh and coarse as half a hundred boxers, each one trying to punch their problems away. Though it was late in the evening, though she had been there for hours, though she had long ago stopped to feel the ache in her hands and the sting in her knuckles, though her wraps had been worn thin with the sheer pace of her punches, Aegle did not slow. She could not. She went on, punching and punching and punching, adding punctuation to the the arrhythmic beating with a sharp hiss here and a gasp there, but never for a moment stopping.
She thought about the first time she'd seen the gym, that strange night when she'd first arrived at Haven. The night she'd met Eva and Brawn, her first night away from Atlas, and she had found two Atlesian's for company. She remembered twisting her wrist on this very bag. It had hung too high and Aegle, too weak to adjust it, had held it steady while brawn did it for her. That had been three months ago, and the bag still hung half a stride lower than it had, half a stride lower than the dozen other bags which the gym had to offer. Three months of twice daily visits had left the bag dented and twisted, had turned parts of its red leather face pink with wear, had made for it strange peaks and sunken valleys. She'd done that to it, Aegle knew. She'd made it lower, so that she could reach it, and she'd made it twisted. Twisted with her compulsion, her obsession. It would never again resemble the other bags, but would forever stand apart from them, meaner and uglier than the rest, a testament to her time at Haven. Until the day she wore it too thin; Until her fists, through sheer repetition if not through force of arms, at last broke the bag which had served as her one outlet at Haven. That would be its reward, when Aegle was done, an ignoble conclusion to a life of misuse. Some part of her was trying to make it happen, she knew, was aiming for the well worn spots, was straining the most strained patches of pinking leather, with a yearning to see it break, a yearning to break it.
Why should she want to break it? The bag had done her no wrong. It wasn't to blame for the course her life had taken, nor the games the professors were playing with her. It was Shadecloak and Van Sange who were to blame; They, who would play a game with the whole first year class as their pieces. A flurry of hooks found the softest part of the bag, where the leather was worn thinnest of all, and made that spot hot with repeated impacts. Hot as Aegle's skin, as she thought about the new move the professors had made, about the new conditions of their game. She grit her teeth, so hard she forgot to breathe, and kept punching and punching and punching and punching, and punching and punching, and punching and punching... She kept on punching that spot, where the leather was thinnest, and pretended it could do anything to change the sick joke which was her life.
By the time Aegle breathed again, her vision had grown fuzzy and dark at the edges, and her heartbeat was a roaring in her ears. Her chest hurt and her arms trembled, but the bag, resilient thing that it was, had not surrendered. With a shuddering wheeze, Aegle put out her hand and steadied the swinging bag. She steadied herself for that matter, only then noticing how dizzy she'd become. As her vision cleared, Aegle saw the impact her flurry had made; The pink spot had been driven perhaps a hair deeper than it had been, and the pink of the leather was now run through with red. Not the cherry red of the bag, but a deeper, rustier sort, like fertile soil. Panting softly, Aegle dropped her hand, that she might avoid looking at the answering redness which painted a red line across her linen wrapped knuckles.
She wondered if anyone had seen her do it. The gym was usually quiet when she was there, mostly because she chose times when it was least likely to be in use, but that did not mean there wasn't someone else who kept hours as eccentric as her own. Carmim, for example. She didn't want to see her roommate just then, had been avoiding her all day in fact. Ever since she'd read the notice, and learned what Van Sange and Shadecloak had in store for her. Not that Aegle would have wanted Carmim to see her, even if not for that terribly unfunny piece of comedy. She wore her orange hoodie, her one comfort, and, though she'd cleaned it that morning, it was still stained liberally with her blood, and no amount of washing could clean away the many ragged tears and slices that now covered it. Aegle plucked at the mangled fabric, in a vain effort to pull it away from her sweat sodden skin, which the garment was clinging stubbornly to. She did so, and tried not to see the tremor in her arm, nor feel the swollen numbness in her fingers. She tried to ignore all the signs that she'd been at it for hours without rest, and tried not to think about how her roommate might react to seeing Aegle pushing herself so hard.
'Why do I do this?' Aegle asked herself, 'Why would anyone do this? Am I angry, or am I just plain mad?'
Despite herself, she smiled and shook her head. She pulled a fist and felt the sting bleed back into her knuckles, where the past few hours had split them. She squeezed and squeezed until it hurt, not only in her fist, but in her forearm and her chest as well.
'Better a masochist, than never been kissed.' She thought, and there was a bleak, comedic mood to it. Her eyes fell to the tears across her stomach and her chest, to those under her arms and along her hips; To all those marks the boarbatusk had left her, when she had been trying and failing to hurt it, and loving every moment of it.
'Am I hopin' I'll run out of dust? Is that what I want, t'go on punchin' till I collapse?' Her smile twitched a little wider, turning into a ghastly grin on a chalk white face, only barely this side of a skull.
'At least I'm not bald anymore.'
She hadn't noticed when she'd left for the midterm, but Aegle's thin stubble of hair had finally cross that indeterminate line between fresh growth and a plausible head as hair. It was still short as a bristle brush and thin as sparrow's down, and unlikely to be the equal of the thick hazel curls she'd once possessed, but it was something. After all, the doctor's had told her it would never grow back, so some was better than none.
Looking at herself in the mirrored wall which stood across from the bags, for fighters to examine their own form while they practiced, Aegle ran a trembling hand back through her downy hair. Her head hung unevenly to one side, a crooked extension of her twisted shoulders, one of which was higher than the other, and her bent back. She tried to stand up straight, and heard an answering whir from under her clothes as her brace tried to accommodate the movement. Even with mechanical assistance however, the best she could manage was to look a little less gnarled.
'Oh well,' Aegle thought, sagging, 'Doctors can't have been wrong 'bout everythin'...'
And hair was a really tiny thing to end up being wrong about. Her smile faded somewhat, her hand fell to her side and, fingers twitching, Aegle eyed the girl in the mirror. The girl in orange hoodie, one four sizes too large for her and crossed with scars of cuts beside, not to mention stained with blood. A girl in cargo pants that were also too big for her, which dragged under her heels and bulged about her hips and knees in a way no pants should. A girl whose heavy boots would have looked big on a boy thrice her height and were, in fact hand-me-downs from the same brother who'd given her the hoodie. A girl who, after three months at Haven, still wasn't any stronger than the day she'd showed up. A girl who the doctors had, for the most part, been totally right about.
'Sixteen and Five.' Aegle thought, her smile all but gone, and she punched the bag exactly twenty one times.
That was how it had been the whole evening, since she'd first arrived at the gym. Brief moments of pleasure, of accomplishment, enjoyed sparingly before reality once again came crashing in upon her. One would think she'd get used to it, and that the truth would lose some of its sting, but it never did. It always hurt just as bad, and made her just as angry, and her anger always turned out just as pointless, hurting her most of all.
'Me,' Aegle thought, collapsing against the heavy bag, 'and this poor old sack, what can't even complain 'bout it.'
She clung to the bag for a moment, swaying with it, chains clinking quietly overhead. Then she pushed herself off, pulled her fists, and started the whole cycle over again.
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