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Taylor- no, Catastrophe, these people don't know her real name- Catastrophe steps into the ring, still aching from her bout with Frostbyte. The hot shower had helped restore feeling, but the bruises the ice queen had landed on her still hurt like hell.
Her sparring partner isn’t here yet. She’s in post-op from a mission with Welvin, recovering and documenting. According to the gossip around this place she’s one of the best undercover agents this place has. All-American with a penchant for baking and a pageant girl smile, Knockout’s also known for her ability to kill a man with one punch to the abdomen- something she’s accomplished nine times and counting. It requires impeccable timing. Catastrophe's half frightened and all impressed.
Just as Taylor’s lined up with the punching bag (Calm down, it won’t hit back, Selena- no, Arsyn- says smiling up at her) Knockout enters the room. The first thing Catastrophe notices is her height. She’s built like an amazon- a common theme here, apparently- blonde and blue-eyed and relaxed as she strides towards Catastrophe.
Aaaaand she’s smiling with that signature girl scout-sorority flash of teeth that Taylor’s just a little kinked up for. Shit. “Hi!”
Catastrophe tries to mirror the enthusiasm, just a bit flustered. Flustered works here, in this weird parody of new kid meets head cheerleader. “Hey! Knockout, right?”
“That’s me. You can just call me K out here though.”
“Okay. Or, K. Not, like ‘oh, K.’ Sorry, I’m, uh...” Catastrophe flails a bit. So keeping her cool around this girl isn’t an option yet and eventually they're going to punch each other. That's fine. She's fine.
“No, I understand.” She’s still grinning, though it turns a little more serious as she lowers her eyes and successfully fights back a laugh. “Out here, I’m K. I fix your stance and I don’t hit you and we can be friends. But as soon as you get the go-ahead to get in the ring, I’m Knockout. And I’m not anybody’s friend in there. I’m just the best.”
“Um. Right.” Catastrophe swallows that statement down. Scary. “But what’s wrong with my stance?”
K laughs and it sounds genuine, at least. “I like you, Cat. And I’d probably like your knees too if you didn’t hold them so close together. Here, we’re going to practice walking before we do anything else.”
She walks for two hours. But she gets really damn good at it. K had called her a model student and gave her a nickname and if she said she wasn't preening a little bit she'd be lying.
-
Quickly her interactions with K turn into a game. Arsyn was a game in those first days- girls like them knew how to flirt, how to bat eyelashes and smile at the ends of sentences and brush hands for half a second too long. It was innate, it was daring, it was fun. Boys never knew what game they were playing. Arsyn knew exactly what Taylor was doing before she knew her name, and she was almost as good at it.
So Catastrophe starts playing again. K comes into the gym and she lets her eyes flick up and down her body, trails those elegant lines with a smirk on her face or her lip worried between teeth on days she feels particularly daring. K sees and reciprocates, hands lingering just a little too long in correcting her stance. She goes back to her bunk with the memory of sparks trailing her rib cage, down her wrists and up her arms.
It all comes together when K decides that Cat's ready for blocking. They go through the stances, K's eyes cool and intellectual as she takes a step forward for every time Catastrophe steps back.
"It's not bad defense, but you'll never accomplish anything with it. And now-" K strides towards Catastrophe as she backs into the rope- "you're cornered." Her grin is absolutely predatory and Cat would be lying if she said it didn't turn her on a little bit. K shifts on her heels a bit, face snapping back to business.
"Now how do you get out?"
They do this for a while, circling and going nowhere, Catastrophe ducking blows delivered with the intensity of a very slow-moving pillow.
Until she makes it interesting. Taylor is suddenly on the floor, K's ponytail hanging into her face and a thigh between her legs. Her wrists are up (surrender!, her body screams) and pinned under K's long, elegant, painful fingers. The girl's not even breathing hard, what the hell.
"What the hell."
K smiles again, and Taylor’s learned a little bit that the brilliant wattage she puts into it can mean approximately anything, including nothing whatsoever. Fuck, but she’s aware of her thigh.
"Guard was down. I told you to work on that, remember?"
"I've been working on it for an hour and a half. What changed?"
"It got better. It's still not good though." She shifts slightly, like she wants to let go but isn't sure that she should yet. Taylor’s not sure that she should yet. "Look, Cat. You're good at this! You've got a lot of natural talent and a lot of previous training, you're doing much better than a new girl should. But you can't get complacent. Me catching you off-guard is gonna help with that."
She’s off-guard for sure. Taylor swallows, eyes flickering up and down K’s face like she had just figured out how closely they were pressed together. Then she leans up, grinning faintly, to press her lips against K’s. Soften the blow. This is just practice. She likes the fact that K’s grip around her wrists tightens a little bit as their lips meet, releases as they breathe the same air for just a minute, as their eyes shudder open. She likes a lot of things about this girl.
She also likes it when K sits up all the way to get off her, hips rolling with the motion in a way that feels just a little bit intentional and very unfair. Catastrophe can’t really accomplish the same thing from underneath, but she makes sure to bump her hips up into K as she props up on her forearms and rolls the tension from her back. K offers her a hand to stand, enigmatic grin back in place.
The next day the dynamic’s shifted. K’s blows are a bit harder, a bit wilder. She doesn’t even bother covering up the hunger in her eyes, the predatory stance. It’s disorienting, prom queen-meets-Carrie, but in a very good way.
Eventually K lands a hit on her ribs just hard enough to hurt. Catastrophe lets out a low whimper, one she’s been holding in all day just to see the way K’s eyes light up. Her jaw slacks just a little bit and Taylor can see the hitch in her breathing, ribs tensing ever so slightly. Taylor silently thanks whatever line of sports bras sponsors this place so that she’s never seen K in a full shirt.
K retreats, hands up and wearing an expression that a non-spy might think was apologetic. “Sorry, that was too hard. I’ll save that for tomorrow after we block at this speed a little bit more.”
Catastrophe grins back, goes to the side of the ring where she’s left her towel. “What, are we quitting for the day?”
“Yeah. Time to hit the showers, I think.” There’s a flush on her chest that keeps spreading, like disease, like hope. Cute. “You’re, ah. You’re welcome to join.”
Taylor’s not sure if the nervousness is real or not. Either way, she follows dutifully to the gleaming locker rooms, Karlie’s ponytail whipping from side to side like a pendulum. Once they’re in the locker room and the door’s closed, she whips all the way around, spinning to face Catastrophe with a tight, anxious smile and hope in her eyes. Taylor hopes the agency took her late, hopes that some kid out in the sticks got to see this face before their first date without blood or alliances or death clenched between K’s even, white teeth. She’s beautiful when she’s vulnerable; the kind of beautiful that somebody could write a song about.
But that’s a luxury neither of them can afford, so back to the point. “-anyways, I’m rambling but I don’t want to fuck this up by thinking I’m misreading the signs, just because I want this doesn’t mean that you do. So I can get out if you want and tomorrow I’ll be back to-”
It’s about here that Taylor kisses her, because she’s perfect and beautiful and the best ally she’s found and Taylor wants, she wants so badly her soul aches. K’s lips are impossibly soft on hers as they stumble back to the showers, teeth tugging her lip as hands find her waist.
Miraculously, they make it to the shower in one piece. Taylor can feel her pulse hammering into her skin, and it’s so much better now that neither of them are holding back. The water beats out the harmony to a love song on her skin as K kneels beneath her, looks up and says “Say my name” like she’s praying.
She tightens her grip in the girl’s hair. “I don’t know it yet.”
-
Knockout’s real name is Karlie. She has three sisters and she’s actually a brunette. Taylor learns the first fact a few minutes before all that’s holding her up is the cold tile digging into her spine and Karlie’s hands on her hips as she gets up from her knees, legs a bit wobbly on her end too.
She learns the next two facts in the hours afterwards, after Taylor’s made Karlie come apart with three fingers and a smile and they get dressed, laughing in uncertain, hopeful tones. They head back to Karlie’s bunk- closest to the ring at her request when she joined the agency. They’re lying side by side, not quite sure where they stand with each other but sure enough that Taylor can play with her hair while she plays a spy’s version of 20 questions.
(like regular 20 questions, but the bitches are probably lying, Arsyn says in her head. Taylor asked even you? as a joke, but she’s still asking. She’s not sure if she wants an answer.)
She knows Taylor’s name now. She kissed her when Taylor told her, rolled it off of her tongue and leaned in still smiling into Taylor’s lips. That’s a liability, certainly- she could slip up or look for more information or do any number of things with this, but Taylor figures fair is fair. Besides, it’s hard to remember things like that now. She’s slipping up, maybe. She only cares a little bit.
Instead of caring she talks about things that won’t compromise her, talks about cats and baking and the way she loved to write when she was little. Karlie talks in sparse detail about the city she’s from, vague enough that it could painfully reminiscent of almost anywhere.
Taylor reciprocates by talking about her origins as a spy. Most of the agency already knows how she met Arsyn- they’re legends in a secretive kind of way, widely regarded as a myth to aspire to more that flesh-and-bones people. So she talks about that- the training assignment she didn’t think anybody else was on, vying for the attention of some business tycoon’s sleek playboy son. Selena was going after his little brother- she was younger and smaller, looked vulnerable then in a way she left behind after the mission for everybody but Taylor. They torched the place together and then held hands the whole ride back to the agency, laughing so they wouldn’t cry.
Karlie holds her even tighter after that story, speaks about the girls she came into training with in calm, soothing tones as her fingertips trail the notches of Taylor’s spine. Eventually Taylor evens out her breathing to the rhythm of the intel Karlie’s giving her, files it away for just in case. It’s fine, she’s a spy. It’s fine. It’s fine.
-
At this point she’s progressing through training at a near-meteoric rate. The other girls are wonderful, friendly and supportive but with just enough bite behind their smiles that she knows they’re good at their jobs. The wildly varied and colored bruises she’s collected from their lessons help drive that point home even further.
They know she and Knockout are together. Motherchucker almost asks her about it one day, but leaves it after a very pointed glare. It’s good to know she can still frighten people, especially the ones with eyebrows as intimidating as that girl’s. But the point still stands- this is the most obvious she’s been in a relationship with anybody other than Arsyn.
(She thinks back to whispering in her ear at some high-class party, murmuring “shut the fuck up” when an ex-mission took to the stage to make some bullshit speech about how successful he was. He’d be a lot less successful after she convinced one of his best friends to switch sides and sell corporate secrets to their main competitors in the international market. None of that mattered, though, not next to the way Arsyn laughed and smiled at her like she hung the moon, not after she had to leave with some dumbass whose eyes lingered on every other girl in the room. She glared him down as Selena pretended not to notice.)
The fact that she’s formed bonds with some of the most dangerous women in the world is the final key to getting her back into the field, according to Welvin. Now all she needs to do is pass her final exams. Driving, stealth, specialized weaponry- and hand-to-hand.
She was going to have to face Knockout in the ring.
-
She makes love to Karlie the night before, slow and gentle and teasing in a way that they normally don’t bother with. She’s kissing her way up her thigh, an arm slung across her hips to keep her from moving but without any pressure behind it. Keep her guard down. It’s hard to imagine the girl gasping at her touch as a killer, but that’s the point.
-
It was close. It was really close, but in the end Catastrophe won by attrition. And she couldn’t get the look on Karlie’s face out of her head- hurt, shocked, angry. Taylor had known from the beginning that Knockout wasn’t going to teach a master spy how to beat her, but they’d both been slipping up in the past few weeks.
They end up alone after the fight, leaned against the same lockers where they’d crashed together for the first time. Karlie wasn’t going to ask her how she won, but she really did want to explain. She liked this girl and she’d fucked her over, she owed it to her to speak first.
"I trained in hand-to-hand already. Best in my class."
Knockout's forehead is beaded with sweat from the fight. "Why’d you fake it, then?"
Taylor smiles, sun-and-fire bright. This is the version of her that most of the girls expect- brilliant and vicious and precise, more wolf than girl. She’s breathing heavy (unfortunate), but it just adds to the whole “feral bitch” look, which is half the battle. "Needed an ally. Didn't hurt that I like you."
And that’s that. Karlie lunges at Taylor, nails digging for purchase in her sides as she crashes into her mouth, bites her lip and drags her teeth until they come away with a quiet pop. She learned that move from Catastrophe.
They’re not here to make love, to pretend they can get back all of the things that they’ve lost with tender words and healing touches. They’re spies, they’re bad people, and they fuck. Taylor slides her fingers across Karlie’s folds with her nails just barely scratching sensitive skin before she puts two in, scissoring them around while her thumb finds K’s clit. Knockout throws her head back like an animal, eyes tightened as she lets out a sound that more shout than moan. Maybe it’s better this way, where it feels more like a fight than a comfort.
-
She doesn’t come the day that Taylor goes to fight Arsyn.
-
Instead she kisses her when she gets back, gentle and slow and forgiving as she tightens her grip in newly-red hair. They’re spies, and they love each other. It’ll have to be alright.