Wild and Free

"You hit like baby. Angry baby, but baby."

Sasha finished off the punching bag with a spin-kick that was neither well planned, nor well executed. He lost his balanced, staggered as his foot made contact with the thick leather casing. Discomfort rippled starting from his knee and fading somewhere towards his ribs, burning his thigh and back. Luck allowed him to stay upright, despite it all, but it didn't stop Medved from erupting into laughter. Saying something about how Sasha was a baby, but never using the indefinite article. He didn't consider the burly man sitting at a desk near the gym's exit to be his friend, and he was pretty sure there was no desillusion on the other end. It was always the same, simple exchange: Medved laughed, Sasha tried to go on with his goddamn business, Medved laughed some more. "Do you treat every person that comes 'round here like this?" he retorted sharply as the final remnants of pain left his side.

"Only babies." Their first exchanged had been simple - Sasha had walked in, asked about memberships, found out they were, not unexpectedly, very cheap. The burly man, sitting at the same desk, had jotted down his name and said : 'Sasha. People here think it is girl name. Sasha is man name where I come from. But I look at you, and I know they gave you girl name.' It was one of the most skillfully delivered insults he had ever heard, although hindered by the poor English and the thick Russian accent. But it had clued the boy in to the fact that Medved wasn't stupid, he was just another breed of smart asshole.

He peeled off the bandages on his hands with a wince, inspected the bruises crowning his knuckles. "You want kiss on those from mommy?" called the gym owner. Although they bickered, Sasha never said much back, mostly because he was worried he would come out of the conversation with less ribs than he had started with, so any snarky response to the taunt remained in his head. They both fell quiet, while he worked on re-wrapping the bandages around his hands, trying to cool off the adrenaline that made his hands shake. Medved argued that he had no patience, 'too much bite for small puppy like you'. Sasha didn't understand what part of punching was about patience, and he didn't care too much to ask. He punched things exactly because he had been waiting an entire day to release what rage was pent up inside him - proving he had been patient enough beforehand.

Both of them looked up when the doors opened, Medved out of duty, and the boy out of passive curiosity. She didn't catch his eye for more than a couple of seconds, and he returned to finishing off the tight knots of bandage that reached up to his elbows. "New here? New playmate for baby?" asked the Russian man, to which Sasha scoffed, side-eyeing the girl more maliciously this time. "First time free - then you pay. No knick-knacks."  the man added. That was his number one, and probably his only, rule. It was printed out on a piece of paper, stuck to the desk with yellowing tape - NO KNICK-KNACKS. Everything that counted as a "knick-knack" fell under that rule - gifts, drugs, illegal fireworks. It was, all things considered, a solid way to run a gym and make sure it didn't land you in jail.

A needless competition, Sasha held her gaze tensely as she studied him. Cool tattoos, he had to give her that - she wasn't awfully unpleasant to look at, but she radiated an intensity he wanted nothing to do with. His sharp tongue got the better of him when she asked for details. "Means that if you plan to use your gift," the word rolled sourly on his tongue, sugar-coating what he really meant to say, freak-trait, "you can fuck right off." Medved cast him a warning side-glance.

"Baby angry." the man said. "Maybe feels threatened. By you." he added under his breath, snickering in a deep voice that made the laugh sound like tumbling boulders. Sasha didn't catch the last part, but he caught on to the fact that Medved was talking about him, because so far he had only heard the man laugh when it was on his behalf.  He stopped himself from making a face. "Go in, if you want. No knick-knacks. I kick you if you use knick-knack."