Come into my Parlour...

He was actually smiling. Alicia cocked her head to the side as she examined him. That was new. It was almost like he’d enjoyed her smothering him out which… Hadn’t been the plan at all, really. But, well, fine. She wasn’t so much of a bitch that she’d wake him up and scissor him out just to ruin his day in every way possible.

Still, she’d never seen someone she’d KOed smile before. And she couldn’t help but stare.

After a while, Dmitri’s eyes fluttered. Then the lids blinked open. He stared at the ceiling like he hadn’t seen it before, his body twitching, before he finally looked over at her. It was a good start when he didn’t immediately panic. He just looked, like that was all he could manage.

Alicia just watched him back, chin tucked into her knees, sufficiently far back to not be immediately threatening. Not that he’d likely appreciate the effort. Eventually, he rasped out a few words.

”Hey yourself,” She offered in response, before chuckling – she hadn’t beaten his sense of humour of him, it seemed. The smile the British amazon turned on him was catlike, satisfied. ”Thanks for playing test dummy.”

For a long moment, there was silence, comfortable on Alicia’s part at least.

”I got you a glass of water.” She had in fact got him a glass full of cool water. It was sat a little way away, carefully placed so neither of them would accidentally knock it over. ”For your throat. Or I’ve got soup somewhere.”

It wasn’t very good soup but it was hot and soothing. Not that she’d do this for any of the AFW official trainers but they were being paid for letting her kick them around. Dmitri had volunteered and, aside from biting and trying to get her in trouble, had been a good enough sport about it.

A little niceness at the end was the least he deserved in her opinion.

”Oh.” Dmitri blinked a few times as he absorbed Alicia’s gratitude. ‘Thanks’. Not a word he expected to come out of her mouth, and he was initially puzzled on how to answer. He couldn’t really look at him getting massacred as a service worthy of recognition, per se.

Finally, after another awkward moment, he decided on: ”You’re, ah...you’re welcome. I suppose.”

Dmitri craned his neck up just enough to see the glass of water she was talking about, as if he wasn’t sure whether she was being serious or not. She was. It was there. Looked tempting, too. He reached for it, grasped it, made an attempt to sit up and drink it, then gave up about halfway through and flopped down again.

Come on. Come on.

Dmitri clenched his teeth hard and sat back up after a monumental push. He groaned all the way, his midsection churning with all kinds of pain that he didn’t even know he could experience. Not a fun feeling. But unless he wanted to spend an extended amount of time in Alicia’s sparring room - a bad idea for many reasons - he’d have to get used to it.

”Soup would be good. Thank you.” He reached over with one arm, hissed, then used the other one to grab the glass of water. The arm that hadn’t been caught in an armbar. They were both quite sore from the lotus lock, but he wasn’t in that one too long, thankfully. ”And after soup, I suppose...that’s it, then?”

He looked her way, unsure of how to proceed with any of this. It was such a wholly different experience that he had no clue on how to come out of it the right way.

Not making any move to help him, chiefly because it wasn’t who she was but also because he wasn’t going to want her anywhere near him, Alicia just sat and watched him try to pull himself to a sitting position with a look on his face that told her just how agonising that was. She hadn’t lost her touch then. And the groaning despite his best efforts as he succeeded on his second try was a good sign that way too.

”Soup it is.”

Rising to her feet in preparation for going to start getting his soup ready, Alicia arched her eyebrows down at Dmitri before a slight chuckle slipped out. To her ears, he almost sounded disappointed.

”Well, I kind of thought I’d wait ‘till you can walk again then call you a taxi.” From where she towered over him, the curvy kickboxer smirked down at him, hands splayed across her hips and weight resting on one leg in a cocky stance. She actually winked at him. ”Let you finally escape my clutches. Why? Got something else in mind?”

Now that was a new one and Alicia had to admit to being thoroughly curious. It certainly sounded like he did, which was hell of a thing for him to say – given she’d only just finished taking him to bits, she was still somewhat surprised he wasn’t desperately crawling for the door as fast as he could manage.

She meant, it was almost certainly better for him that he wasn’t but… Well, she’d definitely seen that reaction before. This? Not so much.

Dmitri drank the glass almost empty on the first try, taking it down with a full gulps. His throat was begging for it, and he was thirsty on top of it, having worked up a powerful sweat from being squeezed like a dishrag for...how long? It was a little hard to judge the time in this room, but it couldn’t have been longer than thirty minutes. Felt like a day, though.

He was still breathing hard after the supreme effort of sitting up when Alicia stood tall, her long shadow casting over him. He had to pause when he looked her way, had to crane his neck just to get a full view. It let him fully appreciate just how overly intimidating her physique was - he’d noticed it before, but now that he’d been trapped by it, crushed by it, he could fully appreciate the scope. This woman was terrifying, but there was a strange beauty to her, too.

He didn’t want to dwell long on it.

”No,” He brought his head back down and finished off the last few sips the glass could offer. ”No, I don’t have anything else in mind. This has all been a...unique experience.” ‘Unique’. That was the word he used, but the way he said it made it clear it was a placeholder, since he wasn’t aware of anything better in the English language.

”I’m not quite sure how to process it.” He ran a hand through his slickened hair and sighed. ”You’ve done this before, I take it?”

And that was why Alicia had brought him the water. Dehydration. He hadn’t been doing much, maybe, but he’d still been sweating like a pig as she worked him over regardless and he had to be feeling the pinch there. It wouldn’t be anywhere near enough, of course, but it was a start. She’d make sure he drank another glass with his soup – having taken all that trouble to make sure she didn’t crack anything, the mixed martial artist wasn’t about to let him get away with dehydrating himself. Tokyo like all cities was terrible for that anyway.

So water, soup and more water.

That was almost a shame, actually. She’d been hoping he’d have some idea to suggest.

”And here was me thinking you’d be asking for my number,” She mock-lamented. ”You could break a girl’s heart that way, Dmitri.”

And then he wanted to know if she’d done this before. The smart money would be to say no but… Well, in for a penny.

”Not here,” She told him honestly, But let’s just say I got through a lot of boyfriends back home. Mind you, I wasn’t so nice to some of them…”

They hadn’t done so well with the processing either, but a lot of them had been the sort of macho, muscle-head bullying types that she’d felt no qualms at all over knocking down a few pegs. Not that she felt many qualms over doing it to Dmitri but, well, they’d deserved it a lot more. They hadn’t got a choice in the matter, or a glass of water at the end – except when she’d thrown one in their face.

And, in that one memorable case, cracked ribs. She hadn’t known her own strength back them but it was still a moment she relished. He’d definitely deserved it for sheer stupidity if nothing else.

It was actually somewhat comforting for Dmitri to know that he wasn’t the only one who’d recieved this sort of treatment, that it was probably just a routine thing for Alicia. ”That’s good to know. I thought I might’ve angered you or something, that you were just taking it out on me.”

Dmitri tried to move his legs, half succeeding on that front. One of them, the one she’d put in a submission hold, was still hurting, but it would be good enough to move so long as he didn’t put too much pressure on it. The other had suffered her scissors, and was still a tingly, but he could move it without too much effort. Bend the knees, wiggled the toes, lift it.

He wouldn’t be doing too many spinning heel kicks in the next week, but he would be good enough to at least make it on and off a bus, which was what he needed.

”But okay, thanks, the soup sounds great. If you have any pain medication, that would be great, too. Ibuprofen, something like that.” Dmitri rolled his shoulders, then sat the glass aside and started to twist, testing out his abdominals, getting a feel for just how bad the damage was. “I’ll fill up and be out of your hair.”

He had one more pause, before he popped up with one, final question. ”Say I did ask for your phone number. Would you...actually want to meet again? And if we did, would this happen then, too?”

It was an odd question, and he felt weird for asking it, but...for some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to really hate Alicia. Aside from wrecking him on the mat, she’d been oddly personable, maybe even when he was getting into boring territory. Even during the car wreck she’d put him through, she never seemed malicious about it. Except for the part where he tried to bite her. But aside from that, he’d met far more twisted women in the AFW.

A low, dark laugh was Dmitri’s answer.

”In that case, we wouldn’t be having this chat, mostly because you wouldn’t be talking.”

Alicia liked to think of herself as broadly easy-going outside a fight, pretty tolerant and not the sort to hold grudges. But if someone had made her mad enough that she wanted to bring them back here, she’d almost certainly be in a mood to do some serious damage. Precisely what, that’d depend, but she couldn’t think of the last time she’d been that angry.

Angrier even than she’d been after her match with Gallium and she’d been pretty furious then. Alicia wasn’t a big comics fan but she did still know the line about the Hulk. And Dmitri wouldn’t like her when she was angry either.

As she watched him stretch out, Alicia laughed again, though it was frankly a much nicer laugh this time.

”I’ve been doing combat sports for ten years. Of course I’ve got painkillers. I’ll get you some.”

Still chuckling, because did he really think she’d survive without something along those lines, she turned and headed towards the door only to pause when his voice rose from behind her again.

That was most definitely a surprise. The big redhead resisted the urge to turn, standing in the doorway with one hand at her side, the other resting on the frame. She hadn’t expected him to ask. She’d been joking. But he sounded serious.

Alicia didn’t say anything for a long, long moment as she turned things over in her head. He’d been fairly boring earlier. But she’d just had a lot of fun, mostly, so she was feeling charitable.

Would she want to meet him again. And, if they did, would this happen again.

”I’m not sure,” She answered at last, ”Maybe. To both. This is who I am, y’know?”

At last, she half-turned, glancing over her shoulder at him. Her tone was soft.

”Would you like my number, Dmitri?”

With anyone else, Dmitri would’ve written off such as idle boasting. With Alicia, they came across a hard fact the moment she said them. He’d seen a flash of her fury, and just that was enough to last a lifetime. He didn't know what she might be like when fully angered, but he did know that, if it happened, he didn't want to be in the same room. Or the same building. Preferably not on the same block.

He returned her laugh with a nervous one on of his own. ”I’ll, ah, take your word for it. Yeah.”

Dmitri was frankly taken aback when Alicia stopped to answer his question. Not that he didn’t think she would - she came off too friendly to leave him hanging - but he wasn’t expecting such a serious answer. It deserved a serious response.

He’d just gone through a lot of pain, but in a way, it was sort of humbling. It showed he had a lot farther to progress in his own skills. It was a harrowing experience, yes, but there was a part of him, a very real part, that wanted to see if he could close the gap between them. See what he could do when he focused.

He didn't want to do it anytime too soon, but in a few months, maybe a year…

”Yes,” He nodded, after a few moments of deep thought. ”Yes, I would.”