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Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

Part III

One day, in the middle of a workout, things changed again.

It was one of those days when everything was going well, when her timing was just on and she seemed to have grown an extra lung; she was in the flow, and rode it for all it was worth. She and Bitch were going at each other like Broadway dancers in the grip of meth frenzy: back and forth, an endless rhythm, bodies closing and separating in flashes of motion. Hits were taken and shaken off, blocked and returned; feints became direct attacks, attacks were abandoned to segue into entirely different techniques, counters were instant and automatic and merciless. A part of Cordelia knew that it wasn’t quite real; Bitch could have taken her down in a second (well, a minute), but she was letting Cordelia learn how it felt to be in the groove, to move with all her mind and muscle and wind in perfect concert with her will. Cordelia could recognize and even appreciate that without allowing it to reduce her dedicated hatred of Bitch by the smallest margin.

She was using kicks in an attempt to break her opponent’s rhythm. The ones she had learned from Sam were power techniques, and she had quickly found that these couldn’t be delivered quickly enough to be effective against her primary instructor; so she was sticking to low kicks, front snaps to the shin and downward-slanting side kicks directed at the knee, always ready to follow up or defend with fists and forearms and elbows. Again she had the sense that Bitch was cutting her just that least bit of slack, allowing her to test and develop an approach, and she pressed it as hard as she could, determined to get maximum mileage out of this unexpected and uncharacteristic lenience …

Bitch slipped her with a breaking spin that looked exactly like a basketball move, and before Cordelia could reorient, the other woman had dropped and taken Cordelia’s feet out from under her with a leg sweep moving about six inches above the surface of the floor. Unable to avoid the move, Cordelia went with it, throwing her body into the fall and turning it into a rolling tumble, and she came back up firing a waist-level thrust-kick to where Bitch might be coming at her in a follow-up.

No follow-up. No Bitch. The other woman was standing well away from her, keeping an automatic eye on Cordelia but with her attention clearly focused elsewhere. Cordelia backpedaled to put more distance between them — she wasn’t going to get caught in what could be a sucker-move — and then darted a glance in the direction her instructor was looking.

He was there, the man from that elusive memory, the man who had to be the He who was calling the shots here. Cordelia hadn’t heard him enter, but that was no surprise; she and Bitch had been going at each other so single-mindedly, it would have required a loud noise (or a glimpse of color and motion, that must be why the other woman had stopped) to catch their attention. Again He wore robes, though of a different pattern and cut, and He regarded the two of them with calm speculation and total confidence.

“You didn’t say you’d be coming here,” Bitch observed sharply. (Note to self: she didn’t just make snide comments when He wasn’t around, she would express her annoyance to his face. And yet, she had made it clear that He was the one in charge. File for future inspection.) “Could have picked a worse time, though. So, like what you see?”

His gaze moved unhurriedly over Cordelia, checking everything and considering what He saw. Not one to be hurried, which would tie in both with the whole master-of-all-He-surveyed theme and with his remembered statement that time was not a concern. At last He said, “Quite impressive, yes. This is your specialty, of course, but it appeared that she was fighting you to a standstill. Have you, then, reached the limits of what you can teach her?”

Bitch jerked her head in Cordelia’s direction. “Ask her.”

The man looked to Cordelia. “I am told you have learned quickly, and from what I just saw, you clearly have done so. Well? Could you defeat her?”

In the moments since his appearance, Cordelia had been thinking very quickly, though her expression remained the placid mask she had perfected before puberty. She had to choose, right now, how to respond to this new element, and if her chosen course was the wrong one, she had to be prepared to follow it out regardless. By the time He had spoken to her, she had made her decision. “Do we know each other?” she asked.

His eyes showed mild surprise, and perhaps amusement. “Surely it must be obvious that I am He who rules in this domain.”

“Well, yeah,” she said. And a pretty cheap-assed domain it is, she elected not to add. “But that still doesn’t mean we’ve met. I generally like to be introduced to a guy before he starts grilling me.”

“You are under my hand,” He pointed out without heat. “There is no law here other than my will. I could have you flogged simply for failing to show proper respect.”

“Okay,” she said. “So, is that a no on the introduction?”

He smiled. “I am Roxeim,” He said. (The ‘x’ was actually more of a soft hocking sound, like the German ‘ach’ but less guttural.) “You are alive now solely due to my intervention.”

“Cordelia Chase,” she returned. He almost certainly had the power to know that already, but might not have cared enough to find out. The main thing was that social pleasantries put them into a venue where she could operate with experience and authority. “And I prefer to think I’m alive because the universe can’t stand for this face to be lost.”

His smile held, but didn’t deepen, so maybe little “behold the glory that is me” comments weren’t the best approach. “Be that as may,” he said. “As to the question I first asked: which of you is now the superior in combat? you, or she?”

Cordelia truly wasn’t tempted, not even for a moment. “She is,” she said. “What you saw just now, that was her going light on me so I could stretch out and work something new. She could have decided to teach me something new instead, and pounded me through the floor till I got it right.”

Roxeim looked to the other woman. “This is so?” he asked.

Bitch nodded. “She’s coming along pretty well,” she said. “Better than I expected, and a hell of a lot faster. Right now she’s at a level where she might hang in long enough to take me with a lucky shot. It’s progress.”

Roxeim glanced from one of them to the other. Then he said, “Fight. Do your utmost, withhold nothing.” To Cordelia he said, “You will find it much to your benefit to win.” To Bitch: “You will not, I think, enjoy the consequences if you lose.”

Oh, joy.

Cordelia knew that what her instructor had said was true: she was good enough now that she might win, if she got a lucky break. It was also true that she was highly unlikely to receive any such opportunity. The problem was, Bitch knew she’d been picking up new techniques from Sam, and now was the time when Cordelia could be expected to try them. She would have to reveal at least some of what she had held back, or the other woman would realize that she was hiding a lot more.

Bitch was waiting, watching her with a thin smile. “This is your big chance, Princess,” she said. “Come on. Go crazy.”

Cordelia moved toward her, and they circled one another, assessing, looking (in Cordelia’s case, without much confidence) for openings. No-holds-barred meant they had to be more cautious at the outset, because commitment when made would be total and devastating. If Cordelia had any advantage at all, it was that she had in fact fought for her life before this; it required no mental adjustment for her to reach that frame of mind, she had already been there.

Strike-block-counter, that quickly and then they had withdrawn and resumed the slow stalk of one another. Cordelia had initiated the exchange, she realized: seen a possibility and gone for it, automatic as breathing, and — whoa! That one was from Bitch, lasted almost a full second longer, and Cordelia escaped it with a diving roll that brought her back to her feet in ready-guard position.

It was like dancing, two people who knew each other well moving in response to actions they could read before they were made. It was like fencing, initiating a motion to call forth a reaction, and probing that reaction for a hint of weakness. It was as if the world had contracted to contain only the two women, their awareness focused on one another to the exclusion of all else —

Yeah, right.

Cordelia whirled and dashed at Roxeim with a blood-freezing shriek … then stopped, spinning as if on a pivot, and her shin caught Bitch in the side as the pursuing woman ran straight into the kick. It was the first solid blow Cordelia had ever landed on her and it wasn’t enough but she was committed now, she drove in to close and they were attacking each other with everything they had, short full-power jabs and chops, blocks operating at a distance of inches, knee slamming into thigh, elbow strike deflected by rising shoulder, foreheads smashing together as they tried simultaneous head-butts. The impact stunned and blinded Cordelia but she grabbed for the other woman, caught an arm and a handful of hair and instantly spun in for a throw.

Her vision cleared just as she powered her enemy into the air, it was the sweeping hip technique and she had it perfect, a twist of her hands turned Bitch in a tight circle, slamming her onto the floor with an awesome crash. Now was the time to take a step back and start kicking to ribs or head … but Bitch, from flat on her back, powered a kick straight up into Cordelia’s crotch with enough force to raise her on her toes and oh dear God in heaven she wasn’t kidding about new worlds of hurt, but Cordelia let herself collapse forward, she was going to drop both knees into the other woman’s gut with all her body-weight behind it …

But she wasn’t going forward, she was going over, Bitch somehow had caught Cordelia’s wrist and shifted the kicking foot to brace at the crease between leg and abdomen, and she boosted Cordelia over her in a rising arc. Hitting the floor hurt a lot more than the same fall on tatami, but Cordelia had taken a lot of falls in the past weeks and was twisting even as she landed, ready to break away and drive in for ground-grappling, only Bitch still had hold of her arm, snugging it in tight and pulling Cordelia closer, and then her legs had somehow gone across Cordelia’s chest and she was arching backward, straightening and stretching the captured arm.

It was an elbow lock, and the rule for locks was that once she had you, you had half a second to surrender. It was the only mercy Bitch had ever shown her, and done strictly because breaking an arm or wrist would slow down the training schedule; but Roxeim had said no limits, and Cordelia didn’t know if that meant she was allowed to surrender, and before she could make up her mind, Bitch heaved and yanked and Cordelia screamed as she felt the elbow crack.

She was on her feet, though she couldn’t remember rising, and the pain in her arm was like nothing she had ever known; but she took a stance, left hand forward, and got ready to keep fighting in any way she could. Whatever that might be.

“Enough,” Roxeim said. “I am satisfied.” To Bitch he added, “You were correct, she is not yet your equal; and you were correct, she has shown remarkable progress.” We were both right, Cordelia thought dizzily. So why is my reward a broken arm? “Tend to her,” Roxeim was saying. “Notify me when she is fit again.” He started for the door, paused to look back. “She is determined to kill you if ever she can. You are aware of this?”

“Aware of it?” Bitch said. “I’ve made sure of it.” Then: “Come on, Princess. Let’s get that arm looked at.”

There were many responses Cordelia could have made: cutting put-down, disdainful sniff, icy silence. Under the circumstances, she decided that fainting was the way to go.

*                *               *

Sam was the one to inspect and set the arm; apparently, along with her firearms skills, she had received some kind of basic medical training at some point in her life. Cordelia’s injury she regarded with white-lipped fury; but when she heard how Cordelia had drawn Bitch out by a feint at Roxeim, her entire face drained of color. “Don’t ever do that again,” she whispered. “Don’t even pretend to do it. Don’t think of pretending to do it.”

“Okay, I got it, he’s the big cheese here.” Somehow, on learning the man’s name (assuming that he actually was a man), Cordelia had stopped thinking of him as He. She could still hear the capital letter in Sam’s voice, however. “He’s mighty and unstoppable, we’re puny slugs cowering under his power, blah blah ad-infinitum blah. It’s just, do you have to cower so hard?”

“You don’t understand,” Sam said. “The way things are here … it isn’t only the power He has over us, his power is all that keeps us alive.”

“Come again?” Cordelia said. Sam had given her a couple of Percocet and a couple of slugs of whiskey; bad combination, according to the AMA, but it hit fast and hard, and she was starting to feel deliciously fuzzy. “He what, how?”

“Where we are,” Sam said. “This place. It’s all from him. I mean, the doors and walls, the food and tools and weapons, He brought them in, the way He brought us in. But the here that He brought us to, He made that. And it’s no place at all, actually, it’s a state of mind. His mind. Where we are is like a bubble in the ocean … but the bubble is his will, and the ocean is … nothing. There’s nothing out there, nothing at all. We can never escape, because there’s nowhere to escape to. We can never defeat him, because all He has to do is relax his will and the bubble is gone. And we can never, never harm him or try to harm him in any way, because if He dies, so does everyone else here.”

Cordelia thought about that for a very long time. “Well, that bites,” she observed at last.

She slept for twenty hours, and then returned to her routine.

Sam welcomed her back with a smile and the field manual for the placement and firing of claymore mines.

Mandy expressed horror and outrage at Cordelia’s injury, and Cordelia got all teary and wound up lying on a small couch with her head in Mandy’s lap, letting the woman hold her and stroke her hair, comforting her while she blubbered. Thinking, Dope.

Bitch launched attacks at the broken arm, and Cordelia fought non-stop with one hand and both feet.

Life went on.

*                *               *

Given Roxeim’s departing instruction, Cordelia assumed she wouldn’t see him again until she had recovered from the damage to her elbow. The passage of time was hard to gauge, but she made a point of marking it off every time she went to bed for the “day”. The elbow healed in less than three weeks. She didn’t know if this was normal, but it seemed unusually rapid to her, and would tie in with things Sam had said and with how quickly she had recovered from broken noses and other things that should have incapacitated her for at least a while.

In the meantime, she had continued all her other studies. In fact, there had been an unexpected bonus: unable that first week to handle other weapons in her times with Sam, she had practiced left-handed with the M-9 Beretta pistol, and found that she was just as quick and measurably more accurate than she had been with her right. She was also, it quickly became apparent, better than Sam at quick, vicious close-in work with the bayonet and the folding shovel, so that Sam early declined to work directly with her on those, and assigned her solo practice. Not that much of a switch, really, from batons and pom-poms; the weights were different, the movements were different, but the necessary coordination of hand and eye were the same.

Bitch also had begun an introduction to the use of hand-weapons. Whether or not Sam had been right about the woman’s style being derived from Korean arts, her weapons of choice were Japanese: forklike things she called sai; staff (bo); shorter stick (jo); the familiar-from-movies double-stick flail called nunchaku; a police baton with a side-grip that Bitch told her was a modern adaptation of the tonfa; and, most perplexing, bamboo swords (shinai).

Cordelia had chosen not to hide her doubtfulness about the latter. “What good are these supposed to be?” she wanted to know.

“They’re training tools,” Bitch told her. “The bokken — wooden sword — is heavier and good for building strength in the wrists, but a shinai has basically the same weight and balance as a katana, and you work the same techniques. Get good at this, and the transition goes a lot smoother.”

This was intriguing. “Real swords?” Cordelia asked. “Samurai swords?”

Bitch answered that with a laugh. “The day I let you pick up a katana,” she said, “is the day I’ll be watching you from fifty feet away with a rifle. I’ll teach you the moves, but I’m not about to screw around with live blades, not when I’m working with somebody who hates my guts the way you do.”

Cordelia nodded. “Good thinking.” She studied the other woman speculatively. “You told him that you worked to make sure I hated you. For motivation?”

“Does it matter?” Bitch said. “It only works as motivation if it’s real. And maybe I just get a kick out of smacking around the prom queen.”

“Sour grapes much?” Cordelia retorted. “I can’t begin to imagine — ’cause first I’d have to care enough to try — what your prom was like.”

“I cleaned up,” Bitch assured her cheerily. “While the debs were prancing around inside the gym in their formals, I was out back peddling half a bale of rum-soaked pot. Very mellow high. Then some of the local hustlers tried to jump me for moving product in their territory.” She grinned at the memory. “Good times.”

She started with the sai, because — she said — they were hardest. Cordelia couldn’t see it, herself. The moment she picked them up, they became extensions of her hands. It just all made sense. With this weapon, strikes, blocks, traps and locks — any hand technique, basically — became ten times easier. Bitch showed her three moves, and then gave it up … because it was obvious to both women, within the first ten minutes, that here she had nothing to teach Cordelia.

They tested it out, moving against each other with increasing speed and intensity. All the focus that had been missing for Cordelia was there now, concentrated into two formed lengths of metal. She still had only partial use of her right arm, and Bitch still had the advantage of her in speed and in depth of technical skill; but, for the first time, they were contesting as equals with different strengths.

It was all sparring. They didn’t fight. The status of things had changed, and they were mutually aware of it. Any fight, now, would have a final ending. It was a matter of deciding whether they were ready for that.

At last they separated, drew back to regard one another with new eyes. After long, wordless perusal, Cordelia looked down at the twin sai she held. “I know these,” she said. “This guy I used to … this guy at my school, he was heavy into comic books, and one of the superheroes had a girlfriend who used these. She liked to stab with them, throw them.”

“You can do that,” Bitch acknowledged. “If you’re facing multiple opponents, now, throwing a sai means you just have one left. You want to go that route, it’s a good idea to carry a spare. Tucked into a sash, or belt, or boot. Then you can throw one, and still have one for each hand.”

Cordelia nodded understanding. “And stabbing?”

“Not the best use of the weapon, but you can do it.” Bitch gestured with one. “It’s all point, no edge. Okay for disabling — knee, shoulder, wrist — but if you want lethal, it’s strictly heart and brain.”

Again they studied one another, a long, silent assessment. At last the other woman said, “You’re still not at your best. You come at me right now, odds are about three to two in your favor. Another week, week and a half, I wouldn’t be able to stop you. — Well, maybe if I had the jo, but no guarantees even there. ’Course, you only have my word for that.” She nodded to Cordelia. “For all you know, this will be the best chance you ever get. Your call.”

Cordelia considered it. “Why the jo?”

“Because I’m good with the jo. I mean, really good.”

She thought about it some more. “If I beat you,” she said. “If we show him another match and I beat you … would he still have me training with you?”

“I don’t know,” the pale-eyed woman said. “Maybe, but I wouldn’t count on it. He’s got big plans for you, and even though He says time doesn’t matter, I think He’s been getting a little twitchy the last ten years or so.”

Okay, new questions, but they could wait. “If you think you could beat me with the jo,” Cordelia said, “then I want to learn the jo.”

“All right. We can do that.” And then, “Are you sure you don’t want to just kill me?”

Cordelia shrugged. “It really doesn’t seem that important any more.” She looked to the person who had been the bane of her existence for a time beyond her measure. “I don’t actually know your name.”

“Lynn,” the other woman said. “Lynn Gayer. And … wait, I remember, you told him and I remember: you’re Cordelia.”

Cordelia frowned. “You’ve been beating me half to death for months and you didn’t bother to learn my name?”

“I didn’t care,” Lynn said. “If I thought of it at all, I thought of you as Princess.”

“Right,” Cordelia said. “And I called you Bitch.”

“Ah.” Lynn gave her a twisted smile. “Then I’d say we were both right.”
 

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