Archive of Our Own

Vi is already clearly sick of her shit before they even begin.

Tipsy and beaten as she is, Vi still breaches the wreckage of the chainlink fence stealthily, silently stalks forward with the same self-assured gait that sets her ring opponents quaking in their boots. The effect is ruined by Powder, huffing and puffing with the unbalanced weight of their bags piled high in her arms, getting snagged on all the jagged wires and tripping over her own feet. Vi doesn’t stop to glare at her, but the tension in her shoulders telegraphs the feeling well enough anyway.

Undeterred, Powder jogs after her the best she can. No amount of Vi’s grouching can quell the excitement stirring in her bones tonight. Everything is falling into place, just the way she planned, and the whole world seems to be matching her good mood. The night air is warm and still, a breath held in anticipation; trench crickets chirp away in the rubble in eager heartbeat swells.

They make their way into the abandoned gym piecemeal: Vi first, and then Powder tossing their various accoutrements through the smashed-in window before climbing in herself. She almost, but not quite, manages to avoid making a total ass of herself in the process, getting all the way over the interior sill without incident but fumbling the landing with a yelp.

While Powder dusts off her knees, Vi throws the rusty lightswitch: most of the chembulbs are busted, but enough of them hiss on to illuminate the ring in cold, bleached-out off-whites. The bulk of the equipment here isn’t worth the time it’d take to fix, but the boxing ring wasn’t too difficult to restore to functionality. Vi thinks it a rather prissy excess, says real fights are fought in the streets or the pits and you ought to train for reality, but Powder has always had a penchant for ambiance.

Vi’s clearly not inclined to setting the mood tonight. She gets as far as dragging a couple mostly-unbroken stools into opposite corners of the ring before she gives up on the appearance of the real deal. She doesn’t even take her jacket off; she just plucks her sixteen-ounce gloves from where they hang over Powder’s neck and slides them over her wraps, still-bloodied from tonight’s proper fight. Powder can live with that. She’s used to Vi not playing along, and has learned to find her own fun regardless.

Arranging her kit in her designated corner, she strips off her shirt, double-checks the bandages binding her chest and hands. Everything seems secure: another tick on her checklist of things Vi doesn’t have to fix for her anymore. There’s something thrilling about knowing she can prepare herself independently, that Vi can just show up and find her ready. She adores being convenient in a world otherwise insistent on making Vi’s life as obnoxious as possible.

“Hurry up over there,” Vi says, voice still rough from battle cries and booze. “This is going to take long enough already.”

Powder hastens, gets her mouthguard settled in firmly and pulls on her gloves. She turns to face Vi, bonks the gloves together in excitement and gets an eye roll in response.

“Alright, kid,” Vi says, rolling her bad shoulder. “You asked for it, you got it. Twelve rounds—if you can make it that far. I’ll count the time in my head, just listen for my call.”

“Don’t skimp,” Powder says, lisping a little around the mouthguard.

“Shut your damn mouth,” Vi growls. “Hands up. Round one.”

A hush falls over them immediately. For all that Vi avoids her, the slow dance before a violent crescendo is intimately familiar territory for them. Boredom is scrawled plain in the shadows over her sister’s face. Her movements are so familiar Powder could see them in her sleep; Vi paces around the ring with long, sweeping strides and a dark expression, and Powder keeps the distance measured, bobbing out of reach like a repelling magnet.

Even with Vi’s disaffected attitude, Powder is psyched out of her fucking gourd to have her attention. Her sister’s gray eyes are flat and cold, but there’s still a sharpness to them—they track Powder’s movements with snappy precision, a relentless pressure that makes her insides squirm. It builds up a fluttery verve in her like a sugar rush, spurred on by the antsy circles she has to skip around the ring as Vi stalks closer and closer.

Still, she reminds herself not to get carried away—she’s been strategizing for months just in case she got this chance, and she won’t let it go to waste now. More than anything, this will be a test of endurance, and that’s not one of her strong suits; she has to keep herself on a tight leash to avoid blowing early. She focuses on her footwork and her breathing as they drift into range, maintaining a steady rhythm while Vi lazily probes at her guard. Her jabs flicker out like tongues of flame, licking at the edges of Powder’s carefully structured shell.

Powder is perfectly content to live out this round floating at the edges of Vi’s range, making only the most cursory attempts at offense. Vi will be most forgiving of it in these early stages, willing to read it as her struggling to come up to tempo. She can’t pull it off for long—the whole way she managed to convince Vi to do this with her was with weeks of begging her to take a look at her new polished-up jab, and if she doesn’t make good on that there will be hell to pay—but she can eke out a round, and that’ll save her unnecessary punishment later.

The three minutes breeze by like that, leaving Powder no worse for wear by the time Vi calls the round’s end beyond a light, pleasant windlessness, like at the end of a dance. Powder plops down on the stool in her corner, buzzing with satisfaction. Across the ring, Vi doesn’t even sit down; she just leans against the ropes, fishes the bottle of whiskey out from her pile of random crap heaped just outside the ring, and takes a swig. Powder gropes for her water bottle and takes a drink too, clumsily from the side of her mouth, and wonders if she’ll ever look as effortlessly handsome as Vi does.

When Vi calls her up for the second round, Powder’s ready. She pushes harder on her offense this time—still noncommittal, it’s still too early to really make an attack without being punished for it, but she doesn’t want Vi to think she was blowing smoke about all those hours of practice she cranked out against the battered wall of their lonely apartment. She edges in, just nosing into the danger zone, and pops out a few clean lefts before skittering away from under Vi’s retaliatory swipes—back, around, in again.

She can tell Vi takes notice—Powder can’t really get close enough to connect, but she’s fast, and the edge of her glove keeps skimming Vi’s side instead of bouncing off her guard or flailing into thin air. Predictably, Vi starts hammering her guard harder: Vi always ups the stakes as soon as Powder starts to find her footing, makes an effort to keep her constantly unbalanced. Powder has to work to show things off, prove they’re worth her big sister’s limited attention, won’t just dissipate at a little upset.

Powder doesn’t mind; she knows she’s got something special here, has worked her form to a crispness that even Vi ought to find refreshing. And it seems to be working—distance is still her enemy, there’s no chance of doing real damage, but everything chains together buttery-smooth, and Vi’s lagging guard makes it seem like even she isn’t quite catching wind of the jabs before they’re already sailing out.

Eventually Powder’s overexcitement gets the better of her: she steps a little too close, and Vi immediately punishes her eagerness like she’s slapping her hand away from a hot stove. Her giant fist thunks into Powder’s skull with a rattling finality. A cut opens up on Powder’s forehead, right above the eye.

The round wraps up soon after, and Powder scampers over to her corner to tend to her cut the best she can. This was another one of Vi’s conditions; if she’s giving up this much of her night to entertain her kid sister, she’s not playing cutman too. Again, Powder doesn’t mind: it’s another opportunity to show that she pays attention to Vi’s lessons, that she can learn quick and pull her weight and take things on the chin without having to run crying to her sister like a stupid little kid.

The cut isn’t too deep, but it stings, and she really can’t afford to have her vision compromised if it starts dripping. It’s manageable, she tells herself, and clenches her jaw to try and still the shaking of her hands as she dabs at the blood. She’s a little heartened thinking of how much she’ll enjoy looking at it in the mirror tomorrow—Vi will yell at her if she pokes at it, but the feeling might be worth it anyway.

Powder goes into the third round light on her feet but heavier in the head. Sweat trickles past the sting in her brow. She keeps her distance again, scrawling looser and looser circles around the ring, widening the orbit to draw Vi towards her. She can’t let the pace slip away from her again—chokes up on the chain leash of her breath and keeps it taut and steady.

Vi lopes after her in long sweeping arcs that swallow the distance up like shadows stretching in the sunset. Her face is still impassive, but there’s a little more presence to her steps now, the beginnings of a building momentum. Powder can tell she’s lit a spark of curiosity, and has to fight not to grin. Vi hates when she smiles in fights, thinks it means she isn’t taking it seriously.

So Powder bounces instead, lets her enthusiasm trickle down and pool in her shoes to carry her footwork, rolls all of Vi’s slogans and mantras and stupid cone drills around on her tongue like candy she’s trying to savor. As much as she’s piqued Vi’s interest, she knows she’s starting to wear on her patience more. If Vi gets too frustrated with her skipping around like a bunny rabbit she’ll slam on the gas and bulldoze Powder before she can really get going—or even worse, just call quits on the whole match.

Powder starts to cut sharper and sharper angles, testing the waters. Vi adjusts with her effortlessly, almost lazily. Still got her legs. Still not pressing yet, but watching. The spark of interest burns steady behind her eyes, low and dangerous. Powder tries not to get too giddy about it.

The first time Vi bites, Powder zips out and fires a jab off the back foot. It doesn’t land, but it’s not far off—she’s getting better at thinking on her feet, taking shots without having to set up for four hundred years beforehand. She can see Vi taking note and it sets her all fizzy with joy, bubbling up from the soles of her shoes to the tips of her ears.

Once again, her excitement is her downfall. She gets greedy in her high, steps in a little too close—Vi, still perfectly flat-calm-bored out of her mind, cuts her off clean, slams a heavy straight right into her chest like she’s driving a post into the ground.

Powder stumbles, skitters off the line to recover—circles again, breathes deep through the pain, resets. Vi doesn’t chase, but she doesn’t give her any space either: she walks Powder down with squared shoulders and shuttered expression like she’s about to lay down the law about dishes being left unwashed too long. It makes something weak and childish buried in Powder’s chest quail—she wants to throw herself at Vi’s feet and cling to the cuffs of her pants and beg. The edges of the ring start to curl inward in the corners of her vision.

She can’t help it—she panics, backs up the wrong way, tries to shrink into her guard in a way that robs it of all its structure. Vi never lets her get away with rookie shit like that. She pounces, blows through Powder’s guard like it isn’t even there, and snaps her chin skyward with a picture-perfect uppercut that dumps her flat on her back.

Her vision pulses in a panoply of colors as she blinks up at the ceiling. Her sweat stings in her eyes. Something warm is trailing down sluggishly from the cut on her forehead.

“One,” comes Vi’s bored voice from somewhere off to her left, jolting her back to presence. “Two.”

Powder forces herself to heave over onto her side, ribs shrieking, as the count ticks up. “Okay,” she mutters. “Okay. Okay.”

It takes a great deal of wobbling and grunting and skff-skff-skffing her shoes against the canvas, but she’s standing by the count of six, taking a deep breath and bouncing in place. Vi steps back wordlessly and rolls her bad shoulder to reset, and Powder obediently plods after her, forcing her breathing to smooth out in preparation for the next hit.

It comes, of course, but Powder catches it firmly in her guard, stays shelled up through the next and the next. She can’t quite find her wind; it seems to drift further and further from her grasp with each impact, but exhaustion is starting to seep into her bones and it locks her up too much for her to slip the punches. She backpedals, blinking against the blood starting to ooze down into her eye, wishes badly Vi would give her enough space to wipe it away just for a moment.

As soon as the round ends, Powder slumps heavy against the corner post, thuds down onto her stool. She drags her arms up to fiddle with her dripping cut. Her breath wheezes in and out uncomfortably. A bruise is blooming along her jaw; her throat feels tight, pulse pressing hot against it from the inside.

Across the ring, Vi still isn’t looking at her; she’s leaned against her post with one glove off to drink from her bottle again. Since she isn’t being watched, Powder allows herself a nervous fidget. Vi looks tired, it’s true, but still a little more alert than Powder had been hoping for at this phase of the fight. She wonders if for once Vi really had gone light on the drink before coming home; normally the idea would make her swoon, but tonight she had sort of been counting on her sister showing up already drunk off her ass.

Their minute break rounds off, and Vi works her glove back on and summons her with a wave and a grunt. Powder staggers out of her corner for the fourth with as much bounce in her step as she can manage, but it’s not quite the same rhythm as before. There’s a new stutter in her head that works its way down into her feet, tripping her up like loose laces. The knockdown had rattled her all the way into her bones.

It didn’t matter, she tried to tell herself—she was still standing, she was still moving, and that’s what counted. But already having to tell herself that when she hadn’t even rounded the corner of the first third felt like a very bad sign.

At the very least, Vi also seems to be slowing. Her breathing comes a little heavier—she’s not winded, but it isn’t effortless either. Her movements are more deliberate, a touch of inertia clinging on. Maybe she had gotten properly tipsy before coming home. Powder certainly hopes so; she desperately needs the chance to start working in.

She weaves forward, trying to thread the needle into mid-range: hubris. Vi reads her like a menu and sends her careening off-course with a firm right hook. Powder’s breath collapses with the impact, and she has to stumble back to get some air. Vi follows steadily—not even aggressive, just relentless, keeping the leash tight. It makes Powder think of when Vi used to twirl her around at the roller rink on the good nights they never seem to have anymore, the weightless feeling of spinning around and around, flying at the very edge of her sister’s reach but knowing from her iron grip that there was no chance she’d slip away and fall. She misses when feeling powerless in Vi’s hands was something she was allowed to relish.

Powder stabilizes herself and tries again, angling lower this time. She slips the first two shots beautifully, but Vi crowds her in and snags her with a third that sends her reeling. Her legs go soft beneath her. She doesn’t go down, but her footing skews—it feels like something’s been knocked loose inside her, a misaligned gear or a dropped detonator. Her vision goes watery. Sweat, or maybe shame.

This whole idea was fucking stupid. She shouldn’t have asked, she’s obviously not ready—she burned through so much carefully hoarded goodwill to ask Vi for this, to beg her for her time, her undivided attention, and she’s wasting it, just absolutely humiliating herself. It’s all she can do to keep herself standing as Vi knocks her around the ring like a pinball machine—Bink! Bonk! Boonk!

She backpedals, then tries to duck back in, fire off a few more clean jabs to show she’s not completely fucking worthless—immediately catches Vi’s thunderclap of a hook square in the jaw, and watches in horror through the flashing colors as her mouthguard goes soaring through the air. It flies halfway across the ring before it lands, bouncing wetly off the canvas.

She looks back at Vi, face burning. Vi’s face is unreadable under all the sump grime and smudgy makeup. Her sister drops her hands and jerks her head in the direction of the mouthguard.

“Go on,” she says, dull and gritty, voice cracked from underuse.

Powder promptly scrambles after it, bent halfway double like she’s chasing a ball gone astray. She fumbles at it with her gloves, but she just winds up pushing it this way and that along the canvas, smearing her own drool back and forth. Her face screams scarlet with shame as she paws at it, trying to pinch it between her big stupid mitts. Somewhere off behind her, she hears Vi snort.

Eventually she does manage to wedge it up off the ground and get it back into her mouth, grimacing as the dust hits her tongue. Powder turns back to her sister with hunched shoulders, tucking herself away behind her guard like it’ll cover her humiliation. There’s still time in the round, but Vi doesn’t press—just circles her slowly, feinting and probing at her guard for a little longer before she lets Powder slink back to her corner to gulp water and lick her wounded pride.

Things start going very badly in the fifth. Powder opens the round reminding herself that she has a plan—Vi’s tired, she’s only getting drunker, and if Powder just keeps on pressing she’ll have to eventually pop into mid-range. Vi won’t hand it to her, but she knows she can take it by force—she knows she can pull miles and miles out of Vi, as long as she takes it inch by bloody inch.

The problem is, Vi is also keenly aware of her own budding exhaustion, and she decides she wants to make that Powder’s problem. Every time Powder tries to move in, Vi snags her halfway and folds her into a clinch. Her whole stupid sweaty body wraps around Powder like a straitjacket and layers all the weight on her shoulders, smothering.

Powder squirms and writhes, but she can’t get any air. Vi is so much bigger than her it’s honestly ridiculous—an immovable wall of solid muscle, bound up firm with bandages and leather and nasty knotty scars. The force of her slumping over Powder robs her of her energy in more ways than one. The sheer weight is exhausting, sapping her strength—but the closeness is intoxicating too. Her face is shoved into Vi’s jacket, and even though the buckles and studs cut into her cheek, she just wants to nuzzle further in. She can smell the leather, the whiskey on Vi’s breath, her sweat and musk—it’s overwhelming, addictive, makes her want to roll over and show her belly.

She misses being held like this so badly, wishes more than anything that Vi could love her like she used to. But their world is different now, and Vi is different, and she needs Powder to be different too. It breaks her heart that Vi doesn’t want her softness, her sketches and snuggles and sweet nothings in the night, all the things that come so naturally to her to offer up to her sister—but the point of a gift isn’t to satisfy the giver. Vi wants something else from her, and Powder will throw away her whole life in a heartbeat to give Vi whatever she wants.

So she digs deep down and wrenches up all the energy she can find and she shoves herself free, stumbles back with noisy, open-mouthed gasps, pawing at her own face with her gloves to scrub the sweat and the shame off her skin. Vi wants her to prove herself, so that’s what she’ll do. For all her frailties, she and Vi are still cut from the same cloth, built from the same meat and blood and bones. She may always be a pale imitation of her sister, may never truly make her proud, but she’ll never let it be said that it’s for lack of trying.

Vi doesn’t let up on her. She keeps batting her around the ring like a cat toying with a mouse, hot on her heels to scoop her back into the clinch over and over and over. But her eyelids are heavy now, and her breath is hot on Powder’s temple, and when she finally calls the end of the round she looks almost a little relieved to stomp back off to her corner. Powder is well and truly breathless, exhaustion fuzzing all through her body like she’s bread gone moldy, but even beaten and bruised as she is she feels like she sees a glimmer of light on the horizon.

Her sister sits down heavily on her stool, wrenching her hand out of her glove so she can pull her bottle through the ropes and take a deep swig. She sits back with a sigh, eyes screwed shut in a grimace—musses her hand through her greasy black hair, massages her temples with thumb and forefinger.

Something deep in Powder starts throwing a fit at the sight, aching to roll over and submit, to finish herself off as soon as they step back into the ring so Vi can go have a proper lie-down. The disappointment radiating off her is palpable—she obviously thinks this match was a mistake, that Powder isn’t worth the rounds, and that’s so much harder to bear than any cut or bruise or broken bone.

But, she reminds herself, Vi needs her to be strong—to prove she can handle herself in the hard world her big sister has to raise her in. Like Vi always says, Powder is weak enough that she’ll lose every fight she ever gets in—she doesn’t need to do her opponents a favor and do it on purpose. She’s certainly doomed to lose to her sister, but she might as well put up a proper fight, show that she can at least make Vi work for it.

She charges into the sixth with something to prove. Her arms are aching, her lungs are burning, but she’s up and moving and alert. She hates that it’s come to this so early, but Vi’s made it very clear that naïveté isn’t a cute look on her—she’s wised up fast, learned to look at it practically. She’s got one last dance left in her. She’s going to make it count.

Vi doesn’t seem to have registered her relit spark. She still just looks bored half to death and exhausted the other half. That, Powder decides, will be her undoing. When Vi wins (and she often does), she tears through motherfuckers in the ring because she needs it, needs the win like air, and gives herself over to rabid desperate bloodlust to get it. When she loses (and she often does that too), she loses like this—drunk and dull and disinterested, too much sway in her step, guard drooping because she thinks she can eat hits on the chin all day long. It’s not a terrible sin against Powder, who damn near has to jump to touch Vi’s face to begin with, but if she’s going to be poking a wolf regardless she’s happy it’s a sleepy one.

Powder has always taken Vi’s advice better than Vi has. Fight hungry, Vi always tells her. Her sister’s appetite is dulled on booze, but Powder is fucking starving.

She turtles up and stalks in low, sweeping around Vi at oblique angles. She’s almost out of gas for her usual bounce, so she chokes up on the leash again, moves steady and heavy and hopes Vi thinks she’s dead in the water. She can’t really tell anything that Vi is thinking, she’s so dead behind the eyes, but that might just mean the lights upstairs are getting shut off one-by-one. Makes Powder’s job a lot easier, if that’s the case.

Vi gets sick of the circling and blasts out a jab—it whistles past Powder’s ear. Vi presses in further, and Powder slips, weaves, dashes this way and that. It’s not perfect; she gets clipped a fair few times, and even though she manages to keep it all on the edges of her guard, Vi’s punches land like mine collapses, make her skid and scramble to keep her balance. But she’s got the energy of youth, springy elasticity and naïve persistence and sunny stupidity that just keep her coming back for more, and Vi is worn out and tired and fed up with the game. She can tell Vi’s starting to get actually pissed with her now, and has lost the ability to feel badly for it. All she feels is the thrill.

When it happens, her body registers it far before her brain does. Vi loads up a heavy right hand, fires it off clean but too telegraphed by the fatigue weighing down her big broad shoulders. With all the mindless grace of a dance step she’s done a zillion times, Powder slips deep, springs forward with every gasp of energy she can screw up, and throws all the weight of her leap into a left hook that slices through the air like a shiv and thuds straight into Vi’s liver.

The world freezes, so suddenly and sharply Powder almost trips and falls as she lands. Vi is stock-still, her right hand hanging in the air like she’s posing for a poster—and then she drops to her knees, breath wrenching itself from her throat in a strangled cough. Safely out of range, Powder’s chest heaves with wonder. Vi’s pretty silvery eyes have flown wide, her lips parted. All of the fatigue leaves Powder in a flash—she feels like she could slay kings, raze cities, burn nations to the ground. She—she—had felled her sister. Gods, Vi looked good on her knees.

In a moment that must have been seconds but felt like hours, Vi’s gaze slid to meet hers. It had come alive again—searing frostburn, years of rage and hate. Powder always hated herself for being pathetic enough to pull that look out of Vi, but all the same she couldn’t deny how much she loved the feeling of being pinned under it. She was so screwed. She was so, so fucking screwed.

“Corner,” Vi grits out, and Powder scampers away like she’s fleeing the belt. But when she makes it to her stool and looks back at Vi, she’s still just kneeling there, trying to catch her breath. Powder tries not to stare, to avoid provoking her further, but she can’t tear her eyes away from the bulk of her shoulders and the tightness of her mouth and her forearms flexing where they’re pressing her gloves into the meat of her thighs.

Eventually Vi drives herself up and stomps off to her corner to drape herself over the ropes. She fumbles over the side for her whiskey without even taking her gloves off, just clamps the bottle between them and pours half of it down her front before she fixes it in place and takes long, greedy gulps. Powder, slumped boyishly on her stool, tracks the movement of her throat and chews her lip.

The break stretches on—longer than it should, but Powder doesn’t mind Vi taking her time. They’re both panting like wounded animals—in the stony silence of the empty gym, Powder can hear Vi from clear across the ring. She sets the bottle down heavily, swears as she nearly knocks it over. Once she’s fumbled it back to standing, she sags into the ropes, eyes closed, near dead on her feet.

Powder relishes the sliver of Vi’s back revealed where her jacket rides up, the tattoo disappearing into her waistband. She knows she’s about to get her shit rocked, but this view alone is easily worth it: the big, brutal shape of Vi hanging on the ropes, worn out and ragged, far from the lights and the screams and the prying eyes of the crowd—laid out so pretty, just for Powder.

Vi shakes her head like a wet dog, spits over the ropes—turns to look at Powder over her shoulder, glassy-eyed. Powder’s internal organs do a series of backflips, maybe in rehearsal for the way they’re about to get mixed-up inside her torso like somebody’s making a cocktail.

“Get the fuck up,” Vi says, shoving herself up to standing.

Powder leaps to her feet and trots out to meet her in the center—she isn’t expecting Vi’s left hand to rocket out and lift her off her feet without even a call for the start of the round. She lands off-kilter and nearly falls to the canvas, but manages to stabilize enough to turn her stumble into a frantic dodge under Vi’s next strike and scramble away, almost underfoot.

Her head is still ringing when Vi catches her again with a hook that rips her wind from her like a back-alley mugging—and then again, again, driving her back. Powder pieces together a guard best she can and searches for an exit, but Vi crowds her in, presses her back against the ropes. She’s absolutely everywhere, smothering Powder half to death.

“You don’t fucking play with me,” Vi snarls, snapping Powder’s head around in a cascade of spinning stars. Powder tries to hunker down and protect her face and gets shoeshined for her trouble: Vi batters her stomach like she’s a damn speedbag and all she can do is writhe on the ropes, sobbing some tremendously embarrassing noises into Vi’s chest.

Eyes squeezed shut against the pain, it’s pure instinct that has her ducking as soon as the pressure alleviates on one side, slipping under Vi’s hook and trying to make a break for it. She’s just not fast enough—Vi loops an arm around her like a striking snake and drags her down. She’s so disoriented she doesn’t even realize what’s happening until she’s in it—it’s not even a clinch, it’s a fucking headlock, and Vi’s other fist is crashing into her face over and over and over like she’s trying to hammer in a nail and missing. It’s—it’s cheating, it’s filthy fucking cheating, it’s naughty, and the realization that she’s pissed her sister off so fucking much that she’s throwing a fit like this makes her even dizzier than the beating does.

“Is this what you fucking wanted?” Vi growls into her ear. “You fucking happy now?”

Then, yanking Powder up closer, ragged breath right against her cheek—“You think you’re fucking cute?”

Powder coughs up a spat of blood and grins around her mouthguard. “Little bit.”

Vi throws her to the ground with a disgusted noise, kicking her in the thigh for good measure. Powder scrambles to get out of range as Vi thunders after her. Blows rain down in her wake—she ducks the first, eats the second, backpedals and then slips out at a sharp angle.

The drink is catching up with Vi fast. She’s swaying, drenched in sweat and spilled booze. Her whole body heaves as she sucks in breath. Powder’s no match for her, but she’s still a tough kid, and Vi’s old and fucking tired. Powder dodges again and again, slips around Vi’s runaway-engine charges and makes her sister wheel around and around on increasingly unsteady legs.

Vi overcommits on a lunge and crashes chest-first into the ropes, swearing up a storm. The hand that isn’t half-tangled flies up behind her head, guarding her neck like she thinks Powder’s going to rabbit-punch her, but Powder just backs away and resets, savoring the moment to breathe and reset her guard. Vi may have changed the rules of the game, but Powder’s still a good girl. She won’t cheat.

Vi forces herself back up to her feet, but as soon as she steps off the ropes she staggers, goes careening off to the side and has to grab hold again. She leans heavily into the cable, fixes Powder in her hateful gaze. Powder bounces a little on her toes, fighting the urge to squeeze her thighs together.

“Round,” Vi spits out eventually, and collapses to the floor, too winded to even go back to her corner. Powder drops where she stands too, resting her gloves on her knees and spitting another mouthful of blood onto the mat. Vi closes her eyes and leans her head back against the rope, but Powder doesn’t take her eyes off her sister for a moment.

Powder may not be cheating, but she’s not all that much of a good girl, she decides. She knows it’s foul to get pretty girls drunk just to take advantage of them. But she can’t bring herself to feel shame, watching the sweat drip down Vi’s jaw, her throat, the hollow of her collarbones—with a prize like this, could anyone really blame her?

Vi rolls her head back up to meet Powder’s gaze, brow furrowing. She looks absolutely fucking wrecked and absolutely fucking gorgeous—hair mussed, skin flushed, face twisted up tight in that caged-animal fright that turns Powder’s guts to mush. She can almost hear the tension singing through Vi’s muscles, the same adrenalized fury racing through her own blood and clanging in her ears in off-key chimes. Vi’s teeth are clenched, jaw working; she’s taken the bait. Vi takes a deep breath. Powder matches.

Vi throws herself to her feet in a surge that synchronizes perfectly with the crescendo in Powder’s ears. “Up,” she snaps, and Powder’s racing toward her, and she’s ready this time—ducks, weaves, blocks, throws herself into the game with a second-third-fourth wind that feels fucking supernatural.

She doesn’t escape everything, but she’s feeling the rhythm now. Vi sends her tumbling to the mat with a stiff jab and Powder rolls backward right over her shoulder and bounds off before Vi can pounce on her. She fully caves to the rush and flat-out runs a loop around the ring, Vi barreling after her like a boulder tumbling down a hill. It almost works—but even if she’s drunk off her ass, Vi is still, like, a million times Powder’s size. Vi only gets tripped up on the first two turns before wising up and cutting across sharp; she devours the distance with her long, long legs, destroys Powder’s flimsy escape attempt with a bombshell right cross, and fucking tackles Powder to the mat.

Powder hits the ground with a cry, landing hard on her side. She scrambles to push up, but Vi’s already on her, straddling her—her fists rain down, overwhelming to the point that Powder can’t even track where they’re colliding. She’s just pounding, a constant breathless jackhammer that makes Powder’s vision flash in twirling rainbows.

She whimpers, squirming and kicking, clamping her gloves to her face best she can to try and weather the storm. Her whole body comes alive with wretched animal panic: sickly-sharp fear carves into her field of view, shredding up her vision into a sea of flashing light.

Vi pries her guard open, grinds her forearm down into Powder’s throat, squeezes broken gasps from her. She can’t move, can barely think—the closeness, the heat, the press of Vi’s body against hers lights her up from the inside, sets her blood ablaze in her veins. The sudden jolt to stillness lets her vision resolve back into parsable pictures; she stares up at her sister’s face, and it’s only when she sees it swimming before her eyes that Powder realizes she’s crying.

“You finished?” Vi snarls, voice cracking with rage or something else. “You wanna be done? You giving up on me now?”

Powder’s whole body seizes with panic.

“No!” she squeaks out, voice choked high and thin from the pressure of Vi’s arm. She bucks up into Vi, back arching, starts swinging her gloves at her madly, less punches and more a horizontal doggy paddle. “No, no, I’m not—don’t stop, I’m still in—”

Vi laughs, actually laughs in her face, barely even taking the time to bat away Powder’s scrambling fists—she just knocks another blow into Powder’s cheek, more of a slap than a punch, snaps her head sideways and making her keen.

Powder just keeps swinging, pawing at her sister desperately: “I’m good, I’m good, don’t stop, keep going—”

Vi wedges her arm under her chin again, leans in close till her sweat is dripping onto Powder’s face, into her gasping mouth. Something has woken up in her glazed-over eyes, a shine that has nothing to do with pain.

“You’re fucking dumb,” she pants. “Dumb little freak.”

“Weegh,” Powder says, wiggling aimlessly.

Vi huffs out another laugh, forces her arm in deeper until shadows start to bloom in Powder’s vision, and then sits back to watch her sputter and heave. Powder scrubs her gloves desperately across her tear-streaked face to try and clear her vision, blinks up at Vi blearily—realizes belatedly she ought to be trying to escape and makes a truly abominable attempt to shrimp out. Vi doesn’t move to stop her, just watches her impassively for a moment before snorting and pushing herself to her feet. She wobbles for a moment, but stays up, plants her boots and pulls herself up tall. Her jacket’s all mussed, hanging off crooked from one shoulder—knocked loose from Powder’s pawing, maybe.

“Round’s done,” she slurs. “That’s it. That’s fuckin’—that’s eight. Take a second.”

Powder doesn’t move a muscle, just stays puddled on the mat, ribs heaving, and watches Vi plod off to her corner again. She peels one glove off and then the other, tugging the straps with her teeth, and drops them to the ground, and then—Powder’s ragged breath catches in her throat—shrugs off her jacket, laying it delicately over the rope.

Vi leans over to fish out her bottle again, and Powder’s eyes rove over her, starvation-sharp. Vi’s torso, bare but for the bandages circling tight around her chest, is soaked with sweat and rippling like a prowling animal. Old wounds thread through her abdominal muscles, and new ones shine slick on her shoulders. Her whole body is littered with bruises, blushing too deeply to be from Powder—they’re for her instead, the cost of the food in her mouth and the roof over her head and the booze Vi has to chug nightly to tolerate her bullshit. As Vi leans against the ropes to take another swig, she turns enough that Powder can make out huge splotches of purple crawling up her right flank.

Her heart swells painfully, bloody and throbbing and hot-tight-full to bursting—she’s flooded with a rush of gratitude that Vi has made this space for her, has kept herself standing this late into the night just to give Powder attention, has absorbed so much pain to pay for Powder’s existence and has granted her the honor of being inculcated into it in turn. To feel a fragment of what her sister does is a privilege beyond reckoning.

Vi rakes her fingers through her sweat-sodden hair and turns to face Powder, studying her as she swallows the last mouthful of the bottle. She tosses it over the ropes without even looking; the sound of it cracking against the floors shatters the silence and electrifies the air.

“You ready?” Her voice is rough, thick with gravel and anticipation. Powder lurches to her feet as quickly as she can manage, nearly toppling herself over again in her panic.

“Yes,” she gasps, legs tangling together. “Yes, I’m—I’m ready.” She’s breathlessly giddy to have made it this far. This is the home stretch, the start of the championship rounds—her plan’s worked. Months and months of long, lonely nights and cold mornings and constant, aching craving have all led up to this moment, and she’s finally seized her chance and it’s fucking working.

The first hit Vi lands on her is the most blissful thing Powder’s ever experienced in her life. Her hand, her ungloved, bare-wrapped hand, cracks into Powder’s jaw and sends sunlight streaking through her vision. Again, and again—her hands are all over Powder, grabbing, shoving, gripping at her hips and shoulders, immediate and intimate. Powder thrashes in her grasp, flails at her best she can, but of course there’s nothing she can really do to keep Vi from manhandling her without consequence.

Vi backhands her across the face and she nearly falls flat on her ass—her sister grabs her around the waist and throws her into the ropes instead, on her in an instant before Powder can even fully stand up. She sinks in body blow after body blow, not even acknowledging Powder’s frantic attempt to batter her around the ears with the glove not currently tangled up in the ropes, or the hiccuping sobs she can no longer hold back.

“Fuck,” Vi pants into her ear. “Fuckin’ look at you, taking it like that. Where’d you learn to do that, huh?” She seizes a fistful of Powder’s hair and wrenches her head back, driving the other fist into her gut and grinding her knuckles in. “You let people do this to you? You let them rough you up like this?”

“No,” Powder wails, her glove bouncing pathetically off of Vi’s skull like a bird hitting a window. “No—no, just you—only you—I learned it from you—Vi, Vi—”

Vi slaps her again, sends her staggering and clutching at the ropes for support. Her face burns, her lungs burn, everything burns and burns and burns—Vi hits her again—again—she smashes Powder’s face open with a lightning-sharp cross and her mouthguard tears itself loose again, tumbling off through the air while Powder trips on her own feet and falls to her hands and knees onto the canvas.

When another blow doesn’t come arcing down from above to smite her into smithereens, she looks up at Vi blankly, blinking through tears and accidentally emitting a truly abhorrent whimper. Vi points off in the direction of the guard, standing straight and still, breathing deep.

“Go pick that shit up,” she says. Powder looks blankly at it, still too rattled to string the information together.

Vi scoffs. “I paid too much for that fucking mouth of yours to ruin it now. Go pick it up.” When Powder’s still slow on the uptake, she gives her a swift kick in the rear and shouts, “Go fetch!”

Powder scrambles after it, tripping twice on her way and crawling the last few steps on all fours. She desperately tries to scoop up the guard, but her big stupid gloves are in the way again. She tries to remember how she did this last time, pushes at the thing uselessly and nearly misses the sound of Vi stomping up from behind.

She comes back to herself when Vi plants her boot firmly on the back of her head and shoves her face down into the canvas. Terrified joy rips through her, makes her back arch and her shoulders tense up to her ears. Vi mashes the sole of her boot into her cheek and jaw and presses forward, scraping her head along the canvas towards the guard.

“Go on,” she says, grinding the treads down into her face. Powder thinks she might pop like a water balloon, from pressure or excitement or both—she lets the force of Vi’s boot wedge her jaw open, lets her tongue loll out against the mat, lets Vi laugh at her long and hard as she mouths at the guard like a dog being baited with table scraps. It takes her a few tries, but she finally gets her mouth around it, and Vi eases the pressure on her face enough that she can properly adjust it back onto her teeth.

She looks up at Vi, has half a mind to roll over and let herself be destroyed, but Vi just raises an eyebrow and says, “Well, hurry up,” and Powder remembers what she came here to do, remembers she still has a few rounds left if she’s to prove she’s really worth anything at all, and she shoves herself back up to her feet just in time to get clouted around the ear again.

She almost goes down, spots dancing across her vision, but Vi wraps her up in a clinch instead—bare arms locked around her, Powder’s face smushed into her shoulder, weight and grit and friction. They shove at each other, Powder battering Vi uselessly around the ribs while Vi pants in her ear. It’s so much skin, warm wet heat and musk and the smell of whiskey where it slopped all over the bandages around Vi’s chest, this whole thing is such a fucking mess, Powder wants to lick it off her so bad it almost makes her knees buckle—she sobs into her sister as she takes another blow to the stomach, she’s shaking, everything is shaking—

“That’s the round,” Vi whispers in her ear.

Powder’s legs give out immediately. She drops straight down out of Vi’s hold, her tear-stained face dragging along Vi’s thigh as she falls to her knees. Vi tries to step back, give her a little space, but Powder throws her arms around her leg, pressing the length of her body against it tight as she can.

“Whuh—” Vi manages, and then breaks off with a strangled sound as Powder straddles her boot, presses herself down on it with all the strength she has left, and starts humping like her life depends on it.

The sudden satisfaction of the craving that’s been gnawing at her guts all night, all year, all her whole pathetic life makes her lightheaded. The feeling hangs over her, wet and dense like the sleepy roll of fog. Everything is soaked in sweat and booze and her slick. The crotch of her shorts is drenched to oblivion; she can feel every lace on Vi’s boot pressing through the clinging fabric like ribs, counts them off one by one.

Vi tries to tug her leg away, and it snaps Powder back to herself as she fights to maintain her position. Powder rubs her cheek along Vi’s inner thigh, drinks in the scent of her in big open-mouthed gasps. Gods, they both fucking reek. She tries to nose at Vi’s fly, but her sister jerks back, angles herself away even when Powder whimpers. Vi’s thigh is wet against Powder’s cheek through the holes in her distressed pants. She turns, drags her tongue over the skin, moans—

With a revolted sound, Vi kicks her off her boot, sends her tumbling head over heels across the mat. Powder rolls up to her feet in a tangle of limbs, panting raggedly.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Vi splutters. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Powder can’t muster a response, still too lost in the mad spinning of her brain. Her footing is unsteady, but she wrenches momentum from the sway, barrels towards Vi with single-minded hunger. Vi plants her boot in the center of Powder’s chest and shoves her away; she falls flat on her back as the ceiling lights spin overhead, flails her limbs aimlessly like a turned-over beetle before she manages to lever herself back up to sitting.

“Stay down,” Vi says. “Kid—”

Powder does not stay down. She folds herself over to plant her gloves on the ground, sways, starts prying herself up one limb at a time. Her mouth feels cottony and overstuffed with the guard and gobs of blood. “Vi,” she mumbles around it, teetering slowly back up to standing. “Vi, Vi—”

“Are you fucking kidding me,” Vi says.

Powder wobbles towards her on baby-fawn legs, not a thought left in her mind for anything but the woman in front of her and the pulse between her legs. She trips over her own feet and Vi jolts out to catch her, nearly falling over herself in her drunken stupor—she hisses a swear into Powder’s hair as she rights them both, holds Powder up with her big rough hand clamped bruise-tight on her shoulders.

“Powder, sit down,” she says, with a rushed edge to her voice Powder can’t parse. “Just—shit!”

The swear trips out when Powder slams an uppercut into Vi’s right side, smack dab in the center of the huge streak of bruises; Vi slaps her sharp across the face reflexively, spitting out a stream of curses. Powder wheels about, arms windmilling. She doesn’t even properly right herself, just lurches around so the momentum carries her back towards Vi. Vi catches her with a flat palm to the forehead and holds her at arm’s length, letting Powder swipe wildly at her from outside her reach.

“You little asshole,” Vi pants, holding her injured side with her free hand. “The fuck is your problem? It’s over, kiddo, sit down.”

“Is not,” Powder whines. “We’re in the tenth round, we’re still going, I’m good—”

Vi goggles at her. “You’re good? You’re losing your shit.”

Powder doesn’t have much of a response to this, so she just makes a wordless sound instead, shoves all her weight forward into Vi’s giant fucking paw planted on her forehead. Powder’s oversized hand-me-down shoes skid uselessly on the canvas.

“You’re crazy,” Vi says. “You’re completely fucking crazy. You’re sick in the head.”

“Violet,” Powder whines into her palm. “Violet, Violet, Violet—”

A lucky swipe lands in the crook of Vi’s elbow and collapses her arm, lets Powder scramble in close enough that she nearly manages an actual body shot before Vi gets ahold of her again and reasserts the distance. “Okay, okay, shit! That’s ten—now it’s over—it’s over—”

“No!” Powder screams, flailing so hard she nearly topples herself over. “It’s not, it’s not, you said twelve, you promised twelve, you promised—”

Vi tries to shove back on her forehead, and in a burst of fury Powder clamps her gloves around Vi’s wrist to tug it down and sinks her teeth into her hand. Vi curses and bashes her around the ear once-twice-thrice till she dislodges her, sends her sprawling flat on the mat again. Undeterred, Powder throws herself forward—her legs have gone totally rubbery, so she plonks her gloves down firmly and drags herself along the ground like a seal, gaze fixed on Vi’s boots, which are currently backpedaling. It makes Powder feel like some big nasty hairy bug, the way Vi skitters away from her until her back is against the ropes—the thought makes her laugh wildly, blood running down her chin. She loves bugs, especially the big gross ones. Vi’s never been big on them, always wants to smash them when they work their way into the apartment, and it usually makes Powder cry—but she wouldn’t mind if Vi smashed her into a pile of goo. They really are perfectly matched.

She snags Vi’s ankle with her glove, loops herself back around the leg and collapses into it, sweat-slick and panting. Her hips are jerking before she even settles them back onto Vi’s boot, too overcome by the scent and the sight and the raw feeling of close contact. She buries her face in Vi’s thigh and moans brokenly in unabashed relief. It’s like all of her brains have been pulped up from the rattling of her skull and have drained down into a gooey nonsense between her legs. Dazed, she blinks up at Vi, rubbing her cheek against her thigh. Her sister is staring down at her, eyes blown wide, face twisted into something a little left of revulsion and a step beyond wonder.

“Holy shit,” she slurs. “Holy shit.”

Powder pants a wordless haah in response, rubs her face against Vi’s leg again in a way that might be a nod or might just be more nuzzling. The pressure of Vi’s boot against her is both too much and not nearly enough—it pulses through her body and makes her melt into pure desperation, glowing from the inside out with need, but no matter how wide she splays her legs she can’t quite resolve it—she just dissolves further and further, squeezes her eyes shut and rubs her face on Vi’s thigh and keens.

Her reverie is cut through in a flash of light as Vi fists a hand in her hair, tilts her head back at a sharp angle. Powder manages to flutter her eyes open and their gazes meet. She isn’t sure what Vi is looking for in her face, or whether she finds it—whatever she sees, it makes her bark out an astonished exhale of a laugh, shaking her head a little in utter bafflement.

“You’re crazy,” she says again, quieter this time.

Her other hand comes around to Powder’s face, and it lands on her with just enough force to make her head throb—but it’s more of a firm pat than a slap, really, just thuds heavily into her cheek and stays there. Vi’s thumb runs over her face, slides across her parted lips. It’s only when it sweeps back onto her cheek and smears wetness in its wake that Powder realizes how much she’s drooling—and when Vi pulls her hand back a little, and Powder can see it’s not just drool, but blood too, still welled up thick in her mouth.

Vi presses the pad of her thumb to Powder’s swollen lower lip again, waking up a lovely ache that makes Powder whimper—then she slips it further in, hooking the inside of Powder’s cheek and tugging her face off her thigh, tilting it down.

“Spit,” she said gruffly, and Powder does without a second thought—or tries to, anyway, having a little difficulty with the mouthguard. Still, she manages to clear a fair amount of blood and drool from her mouth, lets it spatter onto the mat—a little lands on Vi’s boot, which seems like it might get her a thrashing later, but her sister doesn’t react to it now. Maybe she’ll let her lick it up when they’re done.

As soon as Powder’s mouth is cleared, Vi’s thumb wedges itself back in again, tucking under her mouthguard to press down flat on her tongue. Powder closes her lips around it best she can, tries to take it all the way in. There’s a lot going on in her mouth and between her legs and hardly anything going on inside her head, so her attempt is clumsy, mostly results in her drooling wildly around Vi and making little mindless whimpering noises.

Vi laughs again, a little breathlessly, and rolls Powder’s head back and forth. “Look at you,” she murmurs, her voice more gentle than Powder’s heard in ages. “How’d my girl turn out like this, huh?”

Powder’s eyelids are so, so heavy, but she manages to look up at Vi through her lashes. She can barely make out her expression through the haze, but Vi’s hands on her are enough—more than enough when Vi releases her grip on Powder’s hair to force her mouth open with both hands, pinning her mouthguard to her teeth with one thumb, and spits a fat wad of saliva right onto Powder’s lolling tongue.

Powder jerks hard on her boot, sobbing her thanks as she fights to swallow around Vi’s fingers. Vi extracts them just to pull her hair again and deliver more of those slow, thudding slaps, sloshing Powder’s soul around inside her body.

“Gods,” Vi says, disgusted and amazed all at once. “You really want this.”

“Yes,” Powder sighs. “Yes, yes, more—more, more—”

Vi’s fist twists in her hair, and in a blur she’s hauled upright, swaying in Vi’s grip like a puppet. She can barely keep her feet under her, the world blurring around in sloppy strokes of paint, but Vi’s hold on her is iron.

“Round eleven, then,” she says, and breaks her open.

The passage of time seems to have lost its compass—Powder’s world froths into a flurry of sensations running this way and that, tangling all over each other with no sense of order. Pulsing rainbow zigzags throb in her vision, squiggly floaters and flashing orbs, and with every impact the whole mess lights up red-pink-red in sump-party strobes. Through the full-body muddle of aches and pains, she can’t even tell if she’s got a migraine coming in, or if Vi has just smashed her head through the fabric of reality and is giving her a swirly in the universe’s transcendental guts.

She thinks she falls, at one point or several—the world twirls around her so fast her sense of orientation is shot, but she thinks she feels the impact of the mat against the length of her body and the sway of Vi pulling her up and up and up again. For most of it, though, Vi just scruffs her and lets her dangle from her hand while she beats the living hell out of her; she sobs hardest and most wantonly when Vi hits her in the stomach, so Vi does that the most, sinks her first in over and over while Powder wails. She’s clenching around nothing so hard she feels her whole body tremble. She thinks she might die here.

The sensory-input slurry warps around Vi’s voice—Powder can’t tell what she’s barking out, but her tone is sharp, decisive. She looses her grip, and it’s only when Powder hits the mat in a spill of limbs, cheek smearing sweat and tears into the canvas, that she realizes it was her calling the end of the round.

Powder’s hardly stopped rolling before Vi kicks her legs apart and crushes the sole of her boot down square on her clit. It makes her whole body convulse, squealing and kicking wildly. Vi keeps the pressure light until Powder finds the leverage to thrust up into her, and then she grinds down brutally, meeting her rhythm with devastating weight like she’s trying to pulverize her into dust. Powder lets her head flop back onto the mat, eyes squeezed shut, and throws all her energy into humping her brains out on her sister’s boot. Her core burns and her legs ache, and every time her clit catches on the treads it throbs so hard her whole body twitches. She’s not doing a very good job, but she’s long since left behind the capacity for self-consciousness.

She’s gone so utterly mad that it takes her ages to realize Vi is talking to her again, barely able to distinguish her sister’s voice from her own mindless babbling. There’s barely any of her left at this point, but she figures it must be important, so she draws in a big breath and forces herself up on her elbows. It’s a nightmare of a fight to keep her head up—her chin keeps hitting her chest, and when she tries to raise it up her whole head slings backwards and makes her ears ring—but she manages it eventually, points her bleary gaze in the direction of the big, dark shadow her sister makes in the middle of the overstimulation cacophony, and listens as hard as she can.

“You better not be done,” Vi says—it’s her mean voice, her I-can’t-stand-your-bullshit grousing tone, but there’s an edge under it, not far off from fear, like she might need Powder to make it as badly as Powder does.

“Ngh,” Powder tries, and then, “mwugh—” She scrunches up her face and inhales wetly, trying to scrape together whatever brain matter is left, and she finally manages: “More, more.”

Vi shoves her boot down again, and Powder nearly blacks out; her arms give out from under her and her shoulderblades hit the canvas with a thump, head bouncing off the mat, and she makes more ridiculous noises she’ll be glad not to remember in the morning.

“This is the weirdest fucking birthday present you’ve ever asked for,” Vi says softly, almost confessional.

“More,” Powder whines at her—or tries to, anyway.

Vi seems to make sense of it anyway—she pulls her boot away, and before Powder can even cry at the loss she scoops her up by the arm and drags her to her feet. Powder starts to topple as soon as Vi releases her, has to be righted over and over—“Stand for me,” Vi says, “you have to stand.”

Powder leans heavily into her, inhales her scent, and plants her feet as firmly as she can manage. She wraps her arms around Vi’s waist and takes deep, greedy breaths, trying to still the spinning of her head as much as she can. For once, Vi lets her, keeps a firm grip on her shoulders and holds her up while she stabilizes.

When she’s as steady as she’s going to get, she taps Vi’s hip with her glove and lets her step back. She wobbles, but catches herself—blinks sluggishly at Vi and grins as smug as she can around the mouthguard. Raising her gloves to anything approximating a ready position is nearly enough to unbalance her again, but she holds fast—she’s up. She’s up.

She’s made it. Vi never thought she would, nobody ever thought she would, but she’s made it to twelve. Nothing else matters now. She’s proved them wrong—she’s survived this far against all the odds, and there’s no need to make it any further.

She takes a breath and manages to focus her gaze on her sister one more time. Vi’s backed away to set herself up at proper distance, but she’s never in her life felt closer. This is her victory too, Powder can see it in her wild eyes—she got Powder this far, dragged her along this long, and kept herself at bay the whole while. For all her sins, Vi has always fought to keep the worst of herself from her sister, to protect her from as much as she could for as long as she could. Twelve was far enough: enough indulgence, enough coddling, enough restraint. Powder’s ready to go, and she knows by the street-dog starvation, the slavering, ravenous desire pulling her sister’s face apart, that she’s ready, too.

The round isn’t long. Powder starts to lose her balance, takes a step forward to catch herself, then another—Vi is on her in a heartbeat, lightning-flash animal lunge. The uppercut pulls her off her feet like a snare, but she only has a split second to float before the overhand slashes down—whiplash, scarlet, splintering. The jaws close; she’s carved to pieces in the fangs; the candle is snuffed.