By the Lake

There's no real way to measure the distance, but something inside him tells him that a lap around the lake is probably about three quarters of a mile. It's a fair-sized lake and he's run it enough in the past year and three quarters to have a pretty damn good idea of it, based on how long it takes and all that shit. Of course, this is an asteroid at the end of the universe, so who says the physics and laws of nature he knows apply here?

Not a damn soul. Not that it matters, either, because a run around the lake for an hour is a run around the lake for an hour, no matter how far it is or isn't. It used to be that he ran to stay in shape for himself so he could fight and be fast. Now he does it to stay in shape for Beth and for Junior. He won't be useful to either of them if he's hurt or out of shape or dead.

There's a bo -- a long wooden staff, and this one's just a broom handle -- perched up against that tree near the start of the lake loop. When he's done running he takes that up, wanting and needing to reacquaint himself with it before he starts working with Elaine on that in a few days. Jeet Kune Do is formless: it's adaptive, maybe the single most adaptive practice in all the martial arts. It trains you to act and react based on what's going on at the moment instead of being some set series of attacks and counterattacks, because in real life you can't rely on some opponent doing forms. When you work with a weapon, though, it's different at first. You have to learn how to wield it and how to move it and how to move with it, otherwise it's useless. So there, you have to start out with choreographed moves.

He only knows one way to teach it to anyone else. But that'll happen when he's out here with Elaine. For now it's just him and when he closes his eyes, he sees an only too-well-known sparring partner: the guy he grew up with like a brother. The guy he grew apart from.

The guy who, out there, he has to go kill. Or had to kill; he's already done it once.

No way in hell he wants to do it again. He knows how the story ends: a long, long time ago he told Beth the story sucked and had a shit ending, and it did and it still does.

Fuck. People always talk about their past coming back to haunt them, or about their past catching up with them. That second one's his preferred term for it because he doesn't believe in ghosts. The one thing he does know all too well is that shit about the past catching up: seeing Vicious outside the bar's front door that once, seeing Julia fallng into the bar and dying again. That phone call on the Bebop, the one from Bob.

Time for a different sort of memory.

(We use a staff like a sword, Spike: thrust and parry and block. Those are the three basic moves, remember them. Thrust. Parry. Block. That's all you need to know about using a bo. Layer your intuition and your speed and your sense of movement on top of thrust, parry, block, and it will serve you well.)

With every imaginary attack (thrust) or aggressive evasive maneuver (parry) or stop (block), the opponent in his thoughts -- Vicious -- grows weaker and weaker until finally, Spike can knock him to the ground and plant the bo on his chest like a victory flag. In reality that's not so easy and he knows it.

Hell, it keeps him up at night.

He hopes like anything that Beth and Junior never have to know the guy, never have to see him, never have to hear his damn voice. If the universe were fair and perfect, he could hold both of them separate from Vicious forever.

The universe, though, is neither fair nor is it perfect. Nothing's ever guaranteed: what happened to Joe taught him that much with a vengeance.