Chapter Text
Before you were a glorified nanny to a bunch of needy fighting celebrities, you were an adventurer.
Or maybe a mercenary. Er, freelancer. Hero for hire?
There wasn’t really a specific term for it. The point is you traveled, knew how to handle yourself in a fight, and had a broad enough set of other skills to fulfill a wide array of needs in exchange for money. A jack-of-all-trades, albeit a master of none.
Unfortunately that sort of life is a lot less glamorous than fiction makes it out to be. Know several languages? Congratulations! Almost all of them are useless in the new galaxy you hopped over to, and even if one happens to be spoken there the written form might be a completely different script! Handle your own travel? Well forget about insurance or repairs on that ship of yours, it’s all on you! No company’s gonna cover damages in an entirely different reality, and half the places you visit have blacksmiths instead of mechanics, let alone ones that can fix a spaceship!
You still didn’t like your new job, but you did appreciate the certainty of it. Wake up, run through a list of to-dos and handle a few random occurrences that all happened in an at most 10-mile radius of the mansion. Insufferable, but routine. No warlords trying to repo your ship or crazy doomsday cults kidnapping the cute local you hit it off with in the middle of your date for some sort of sacrifice.
If there’s one thing you miss more than anything else though, it was combat.
Oh sure, in the moment not knowing whether you’d live or die was terrifying. But that brief little high when the fight was over and you knew you made it? You won, you’re still alive? It made you feel a whole year younger, made you feel powerful, feel grounded. You’re alive, and you’re strong enough to stay that way.
Unfortunately you’re still in the interim “fighting for dear life” period right about now. You weren’t sure what this guy’s deal was. You had just finished loading groceries into the van when someone called out to you. You turned and saw a man in a rather fashionable red leather jacket and yellow aviators, with up-done dark hair and a strange looking sword hanging on his hip. It occurred to you that the look was pretty similar… and then he started cussing you and the smashers out for “stealing his style” and you remembered who he was.
Travis Touchdown: infamous assassin, probable sociopath, definite threat. And his signature outfit was turned into a mii-fighter costume. Most folks were happy to get in the game in any way shape or form. But for some people, being relegated to a suit design was the ultimate insult. Judging by the fact the sword at his hip erupted with laser light and was now pointed at you, you’re guessing he felt insulted. And of course your van has the smash logo on it.
“Time to die prick! Maybe your bosses will learn you can’t just ape a man’s look without letting him get in on the greatest fight of all time!”
“Look man, I just work there alright? I’m not part of management, I don’t make decisions, and I got some frozen goods in the trunk. Can we not do thIS-!” You began to shout as you hastily brought up your own sword in time to block his slash.
What followed was a desperate clash up and down Mainstreet, you mostly staying on the defensive but occasionally scoring the odd glancing blow against him. After the chaos began a few drones from the local news station zeroed in to pick up the fight. You really hoped this counted as sufficient video evidence to explain why you got back late with the groceries.
“GAME OVER!”
Assuming you made it back at all. You just manage to dodge another strike from his sword, the tip of the beam grazing a neat line from your collar bone down to your waist. Feels like a first-degree burn. Fun. Just when you think you have this guy’s fighting style figured out, he breaks out the wrestling moves. He parries your next attack with a spinning flourish, letting him get behind you and wrap his arms around your midsection before lifting you up and over for a suplex.
Your teeth clack against each-other as your head hits the pavement hard before you’re left to unceremoniously flop onto the pavement. Your vision swims, but not too much. Travis doesn’t seem to recognize that, given that he walks over you in a carefree manner and takes a bit too much time in pointing his sword down for the coup-de-grace. You wouldn’t be the Mii-champion if that’s all it took to keep you down, though.
While he’s busy monologuing, you plant one hand on the ground and twist your body as hard as you can, sweeping his legs out from under him and managing to come up just in time to plant your gauntlet dead-center in his gut. You let out the biggest blast you can, sending him flying off into the sky so far and fast he disappears as a little twinkle on the horizon. That… might’ve been overkill now that you think about it. But you did use up all the gunner-gauntlets battery in one attack so it’s not too surprising.
Plus he was trying to actually kill you so, ya know, probably justified. You’re not really sure how the legal system works around here. You like to think a town built around a fighting tournament has stand-your-ground laws but you’re not certain and you really hope you aren’t about to find out it doesn’t the hard way. You let out a deep sigh and turn to face the van, wincing at the deep smoking laser burns raked across its side.
“Well, it’ll probably still driv-“
And then it explodes in a fiery ball of car parts and thawed groceries. It takes everything you have not to break down crying when you remember the line in your contract about van damages coming out of your paycheck.
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You trudge your way back home clutching your sliced open shirt together while trying not to touch the burn under the cut. It stung like hell but at least you had physical proof that something went wrong when they inevitably complain about the lack of food. By now you’re expecting to get chewed out.
What you aren’t expecting is for Link and every other sword fighter in the mansion to be crowded around the door right after you open it.
“Listen about the food-“ you begin, only to be cut off by link waving his sword in one hand and holding up a bottled fairy in the other, smiling expectantly. You peer over his shoulder to see some of the other fighters sat in the living room couch watching the news, which is a live feed of the smoldering van you walked away from. Ah, you guess they saw the fight.
“…you want to spar and if I agree you’ll give me the fairy?”
He nods enthusiastically, along with Toon Link behind him.
“I mean I’m still kind of tired- oh, it’ll fix that too?” You ask when he puts up a hand and shakes the bottle around a bit.
“Um. Okay. Do you have enough for everyone here…?”
He slings his backpack off with a clinking sound, revealing a whole trove of them just waiting to be used. You’re tired, wounded, and cranky… but damn he has some serious puppy-dog eyes right now. They’re ALL giving you some, even Chrom! (How the hell is he pulling them off?) So with a tired sigh, you just take the bottle and uncork it.
The burn gives one last tingle of pain as it heals from top to bottom before fading entirely. The soreness in your muscles abates and your breathing feels clearer than it has in a few days.
“Alright,” you say looking him in the eyes. “You wanna do this in the gym or the backyard?”
And so you spent the rest of the day fencing with a good portion of the roster, ironically feeling less tired by the end of it than on a day of cleaning. Smash management finally decided they should splurge to get some automated transportation to and from the supermarket at least, so that’s one less thing for you to worry about.
(They still comped you for the van though.)