fandomtownies | Atlas Health and Fitness Center: Monday

Kaidan had woken up in a mood. He wasn't even sure, exactly, what mood it was, other than defining it nebulously as 'not good'. He spent an hour running up and down the steepest stairs he could find on the island, and when that hadn't completely burned off the feeling, he headed to the gym.

The weight room was empty when he got there. He changed out in the locker room and went to practice some really bad gym etiquette. Setting the weights to 'omg why do you hate yourself', he slid into the hack squat machine and began shouldering lifts. He let the plates crash down behind him aggressively. The noise echoed in the empty room and provided a soundtrack to the trainwreck going on inside his head. Something Kanan had said had gotten under his skin. He had no idea what to do, to change the behavior, but he more or less agreed it needed to change before he hurt someone.

Rep after rep, the weight plates crashed as he let his brain do its thing.

[OOC: Open! OCD up so you can choose whether to interact with aggro boy or not.]

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He's here. He's doing a punishing amount of exercise. He probably doesn't want to talk about what's in his head, but go ahead and try, or distract him.

There are other machines. You don't have to interact with the aggro biotic boy.

It's open.

Deliciously cool water, mmm.

ON A DAY LIKE TODAY WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?
But fine, it's open, and empty.

You know what to do.

So tired. Gonna be slow until 11am CST because I have to try to not fall asleep in an awful meeting.

Zack was a puppy in so many ways. So many. He'd pretty much earned his nickname, with as antsy as he tended to get just staying put for a while. But at least the island had a gym, which meant he had more ways to get it out of his system than just standing around doing squats all the time.

... There was a lot of smashing going on today, though.

Curiously, he peered in to see what was going on in there.

"Oh, Kaidan!" Yes, of course he remembered the name of a guy he met once who had just wanted to squish puppy cheeks around. "Hey!"

Kaidan exhaled slowly and gentled the next drop down so it didn't smash. "Hey, Zack. How's Girl?"

He was calm. He was fine. Everything was fine. Clearly.

... Clearly.

"She's fine," he replied, smiling faintly. Smiling was his answer to almost everything, really. For better or worse. "She's at home at the moment, but it'll be time for her walk in an hour or so. I was going to get some lifting in here in the meantime so I don't tire her out too much."

That usually went the other way around, with puppies.

"You want to come with? I bet she'd be happy to see you."

"Good to hear. She's a sweet little fuzz monster," Kaidan answered, doing more polite, non-crashy reps, "I might be up for that, if I burn off the adrenaline in the next hour."

"I know how that goes," Zack replied with a nod. He took his sword from his back, propped it against a wall, and then dusted off his hands and looked around the room to figure out what equipment he wanted to start in on. "Is that how you usually burn it off?"

"Usually running is enough," Kaidan admitted, "but I ran up and down the stairs for an hour today and it didn't do a lot of good, so now I'm trying for muscle exhaustion. If I were on the Normandy, I'd grab Wrex or Grunt or Jack and get a real workout in, but they're not here."

It was weird, the things he was missing lately.

"Back home, I'd go out and fight monsters," Zack admitted. "There aren't really any of those here, unless I want to go wrestle an alot, and those are usually pretty peaceful, so it seems cruel to. But I get wanting to work it off."

Kaidan's gaze went distant and he barked a sudden, somewhat hysterical laugh for a moment, "Shit, I never thought I'd miss Reapers, but here we are.."

"Productive venting?"

Zack's smile went kind of... sideways. A bit knowing, for a moment there.

"Something to take it out on that nobody will miss, that won't get anyone hurt, right?"

"A situation where I don't have to think, where everything's just reflex, and there's no moral grey area - just nice, clean, black and white," Kaidan confirmed. The weights came down a little too hard this time, because he forgot until the last moment.

Zack, at least, managed not to flinch.

"Can't get back to fight them either?"

He knew how that went.

"Don't know if I could get back," Kaidan said, then admitted, "Don't really want to go back. Wouldn't do any good if I did - war's over, Reapers are now extinct."

He did a few more gentle reps and added, "Which is a good. They deserved it. But man.. fifteen minutes and some Reaper Spawn right now and I'd be a happy, happy man."

"I can't even offer a portal to my world to beat on coeurls back home," Zack sighed. "I would if it was an option, though. There's not much more satisfying than taking down a monster that was going to eat someone otherwise."

Kaidan threw him a lopsided smile, "Thanks for the thought. I don't even really like to fight. I just like that when I do, my brain..stops normal thought process and goes into battle mode, where the only things that are important are target and response." He did a few more reps, "Except, mood I'm in, fighting is the last thing I should do. If I walked into something all wound up like this, well, that's just asking to get hurt."

Zack smiled wryly, and then just... started doing squats anyway. Because when you had a go-to that worked...

"I've done that before," he admitted. "Ended up relying too heavily on restoration items, maybe, but it was still productive.

Squat. Squat. Squat.

"Sometimes it's the only thing that feels like it'll work."

Kaidan nodded. He couldn't really disagree with the statement. "Was there a lot of fighting on your home world?"

"There was wherever I went," Zack noted. "Um, I was SOLDIER. Have been since I was too young to join, by most world's standards. If it wasn't monsters, it was war."

Or other members of SOLDIER.

Kaidan tilted his head at the obvious allcaps. "I was a soldier, a member of our military. Does the word have the same meaning for you?" He did a few more reps, "Our war was because of monsters. Only some of them were humanoid."

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Atlas Health and Fitness Center: Monday

Interact with Kaidan

Use the weight room

Sparring area

Pool

Sauna/Steam Room

Mod your fun

OOC

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