Chapter Text
Prologue
She hadn’t been thinking when she pulled off her mask.
When she’d scored the forty-fifth point– against Roland at that– she wasn’t thinking about anything but the fact that they had won. Their team won. She remembered Roland laughing in her face years ago at the thought that she could hold her own in a spar against him but who was laughing now?
Dawn had been squealing and jumping up and down, pulling her and Sunny into a crushing hug, and Marianne pulled off her mask.
Their third teammate, Bowie, her sparring partner of the last year, dropped his foil. She hadn’t noticed. He let out a shaky breath. She didn’t notice that either. Then… “Marianne?”
She froze. He knew her as Marie, she’d asked Dawn and Sunny to call her by that name just for the competition, she’d signed up as Marie, so how…
Bowie pulled off his mask, and Marianne felt herself go pale as well. It was odd seeing his expression slack with shock, without a trace of anger, without the icy glare she was so used to seeing when he was–
“Bog?”
She knew that face, every scar, line, and bump. She’d been slinging insults and punches at it for the past year. Hell, she’d broken his nose! And the whole time, the entire time, they’d also been… best friends?
-
One year earlier…
Marianne had been wrapping her hands and wrists as her sister fluttered anxiously around the locker room trying to talk her down.
“Do you know how many people die in boxing Marianne?! I looked it up, and Google told me it’s like a thousand! And Dad said he didn’t want you doing this, Dad said–”
“I’m twenty-six, not sixteen. Dad can disapprove but he can’t stop me. And neither can you.”
Dawn sighed. And she pouted. And when that didn’t work, she whined. “Mari, you’re being crazy. I know you’ve been upset about the whole–”
“Don’t bring him up.”
“-Roland thing, but joining a sport where people do nothing but punch each other is not the answer. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Hopefully I’ll be doing most of the hurting,” Marianne grinned and it missed the mark, looking more like a dog showing its teeth. She grabbed her gloves, which had been broken in by hours with a punching bag. “It’s just amateur anyways. Professional boxing is more dangerous.”
“You are terrible at comforting people, Marianne. Please let’s just go get drinks? I’ll buy.”
She made a compelling argument. However, Marianne had paid the entry fee and trained for months for the opportunity to release some serious pent up aggression in these amateur boxing matches. When her fist hit the punching bag, she often imagined a ‘perfectly chiseled’ jaw meeting her knuckles instead.
“Please?” Dawn tried the puppy eyes. Those were usually an argument ender. “We haven’t been to Plum’s in forever.”
Marianne wrinkled her nose at the phantom taste of a sickeningly sweet cocktail she was always reminded of whenever Plum’s came up. That stupid pink drink that was probably fifty-percent granules of sugar and edible glitter to the point where as soon as it hit her tongue she could feel the inevitable headache.
The ring had been there around the straw.
Roland, for some reason, thought she liked that drink. Or thought it would be romantic to propose with a menu item called ‘Love Potion’. She didn’t like it. But she drank it then, the ‘least she could do’ in the face of such a ‘romantic gesture’.
“Nope, I’m going.”
“Marianne!”
“Listen, you can watch and fret but do not distract me– no yelling or crying. If I die, you have full rights to say you told me so, but I’m going to win.” Didn’t matter that it was just amateur, didn’t matter that it was only supposed to be ‘for fun’ and ‘meeting new friends’ and all the other bullshit on the poster that had been cobbled together in Photoshop.
Marianne had the most fun when she was winning. It didn’t matter if winning was digging in her heels during tug-of-war on Field Day during elementary, running the fastest mile in middle school, getting her team all the way through the bracket during the basketball unit of high school PE.
The event had an amazing turn out actually. Sunny was probably happy about that. Or would have the mental capacity to be when he got out of ‘first aid mode’. He stood off to the side now, in a red polo with the sports complex’s logo on it, on high alert. “Don’t take it too seriously,” he’d tried to caution Marianne, “losing isn’t putting any marks on any records, there isn’t any prize for winning. But it is a way to engage the community, a chance to meet new people of all sorts of skill levels…”
Marianne’s audiobook had started back up again at that point and she didn’t hear a word Sunny was saying. She nodded in all the right places. He couldn’t see her airpods under her scruffy hair.
It was easy to tell who was here to box and who was here to support. The fighters were warming up, checking the list of semi-random pair ups, fiddling with mouth guards. The observers texted, made bets, mingled. There was one judge. (Sunny hoped that boxing nights, once they gained even more traction, would soon have two or three sets of eyes helping score.) The announcers, two short, giggly guys, quietly argued over who was going to start and snickered to themselves over some sort of private joke.
“Okayokayokay, first up to the ring: Marianne Frazier and Bog King!” One of them shouted while the other continued to stifle their laughter.
“Are you really going to use that stupid nickname the whole– whatever. Whatever.” A tall matchstick of a man clambered over the ropes. He scowled at the announcers, then scowled in the general direction of the crowd. “Who’s Marianne? I don’t have all day.”
“If you’re going to be like that, I’ll enjoy knocking you flat on your ass a lot more than I thought I would,” Marianne stalked toward the ring, slipping on her gloves. She took in his pointed nose, bruised shins, short, brown, spiky hair soon covered by his helmet. The scars across the left side of his face that warped the skin from nose to one smaller ear to jaw.
The man looked at her. Down at her. He was pretty tall up close. Still, she could probably snap him in half if he tried hard enough. “Who made these matches? What are you, a flyweight?”
Sunny rose up on his toes and gave a little wave. “Excuse me, no, hi, just wanna clarify, matches were made within weight class. We prioritize safety here at–”
“Sunny, butt out.”
“Gotcha.”
“And you’re one to talk,” Marianne turned back to her opponent. “Making fun of people with a lame nickname like Bog.” They had started circling each other, still sizing the other up. Watching where they shifted their weight. Sunny reminded them about their mouth guards, and if either one was looking they would have seen a twin eyeroll. But they complied. Marianne brought her hands up, and her opponent did the same.
“Seriously though, did they make a mistake?” His speech was slightly muffled. It was funnier to argue with the mouthguards in, but Marianne kept a straight face. “I’m not fighting someone–”
“I’m a welterweight. And you? You look like a stick figure, maybe I should be worried about a mistake.”
Bog huffed, glaring at her.
She swung first. He slipped to the side to avoid it, blocked her second blow, and tried to retaliate. Marianne ducked. She didn’t even have to duck far, easily avoiding strikes that were so high up. He realized this and tried to adjust, bending his knees a little further.
“So what are you? Five foot three?” he snarked, tone nonchalant as if their fists weren’t flying at each other.
“Five eight actually,” Marianne replied, landing the first proper hit. Her opponent staggered, but only for what seemed like half a second.
“Including the cowlick?”
She didn’t allow herself to smile. “Have you ever considered playing basketball?”
“Oh, fuck you.”
“How’s the weather up there?”
“So original!”
“Hey, you started it.”
“Fair.”
The rest of the room seemed to fade out, reduced to just this ring, the buzz of the surrounding crowd became white noise.
“Are you training to settle a score with a joey?”
“Okay, that one was–” Marianne ducked and felt her hair ruffle as Bog’s glove passed over. “That one didn’t make any sense.”
“It’s like a–” Bog paused as he landed a hit. “-a baby kangaroo?”
“Oh.”
“They can’t all be winners.”
“You’re so right, they can’t. And neither will you!”
The banter took a back seat for a while as both needed their breath for the next few seconds. Or minutes? Marianne didn’t actually know how long it had been, she wasn’t counting seconds. Time was doing that weird thing it did when she got in the zone and she felt like she was floating. Between jabs she was aware that her face hurt, but not because of the hits– it was because she was smiling. Wide. They were nearly matched blow for blow, but this was so much more fun than she thought it would be. And Bog was grinning too. Maybe the poster wasn’t complete bullshit? Maybe–
“Come on, you can do better than that, princess!” Bog goaded her when she missed again.
The smile dropped off of Marianne’s face.
Don’t be silly, princess.
It’s no big deal, princess.
You want me to be happy, don’t you, princess?
It’s nothing personal. We had a good run, didn’t we, princess?
She felt like the world was going in slow motion as the energy built– starting from her toes pushing off from the floor to come forward, building into her legs and building into her core where the molten anger pooled and building through her burning neck zipping through her arm and she knew it was wrong before the blow landed, before she made contact with the center. Of. His. Face. His eyes widened at the last millisecond like he realized it too.
The noise made her cringe. She’d never heard a dull crunch like that before but her instincts told her it wasn’t good. She leapt backward as soon as she got her bearings, gasping.
Bog hit the ropes, flung one of his gloves off, and tried to stem the rapid trickle of blood down his face. “Christ!” he yelped, then fell silent. Talking seemed to make it worse.
“Oh my god,” Marianne stumbled forward, then paused as he glared at her over his hand. Then Sunny was between them and the rest of the room was coming back into focus, the concerned murmur of the crowd crashing over like a wave.
“Let’s get you out of here, man.” Sunny slipped an arm around Bog and helped him over the ropes and out of the ring. “Marianne, pack it up.”
“It was– it was an accident.”
“I know. Pack it up anyways.”
Dawn was at her side and pulling her back to the locker rooms. They didn’t speak a word as gear was stuffed in Marianne’s duffel bag and she pulled on her jacket.
“Home?” Dawn asked softly.
Marianne nodded.
-
“There. Just keep the ice on it for a few more hours, you’ll be okay.” Sunny sighed, then crossed to the sink to wash his hands again. “Make sure to give it about six weeks.”
“Six?” Bog groaned.
“Or you could risk rebreaking it and making it more serious. Be my guest.”
The only acknowledgement he got was a disappointed (and rather nasal) huff.