i just want skateboard bruises [Suki]
“Glock twenty-two. Most popular handgun for American law enforcement, favoured even higher than the nineteen due to its allowance of .40 calibre, nine millimetre ammo. Heavier, longer, with more weight in the chamber and with a harder kickback. What’s your poison, gun girl?”
Kozue didn’t even look at the other girl in the shooting range with her as she spoke, eyes instead turned downwards towards the table where she’d pulled apart her gun of choice into infinitely small components. Each spring, screw, and trigger was set out neatly before her, the cold cylinder of the barrel held reverently and delicately in her fingers. Finding the obstacle course had cheered her up enough – no more running in the halls for her. This was a bit more like home! – but a shooting range filled her with a fevered sort of nostalgia. Already, she could feel her adrenaline pumping and her breathing slowing.
For the first time ever, this underwater prison felt comforting.
Favoring the trickshooter with a small grin – she’d been smiling more than she had the whole time with recent room openings – Kozue nudged the controls on the range up to top speed so that the silhouette targets fairly flew. She’d come to this room expecting just to practice, but competition had conveniently reared its head when she’d run into Suki (that was her name, right? Suki?) and all but dragged her new companion into the range. An impromptu shooting competition was just what she needed now.
“For practice, or for stakes? I know we haven’t talked at all, so this is a good start to our impending relationship based purely off guns and bullets. Even though we just met, I’m not about to go easy on you.” Even as she spoke, she was already putting the gun back together; slower than her record time of under a minute, but still faster than most everyone else in the world. “This is a semi auto with a single trigger so the speed of shooting should about match any of the rifles, but we can go for accuracy too if speed isn’t your cup of tea. Guns are bullets are bullets are guns. This’ll be fun.”
Thank god Kozue wasn’t looking at her, because she wasn’t looking back at her. Instead, she was taking in her surroundings, gazing at anything that wasn’t Kozue’s face or the gun she had pulled apart. Even upon being asked a question, she went silent and looked away. Don’t answer, pretend she wasn’t there. There was always someone who made her so goddamn uncomfortable no matter what, and that person was Kozue. She walked away, far enough to not respond to her, but far enough to hear her.
A shooting range, was the only comfort she had here. And Kozue ruined that comfort. Her eye scanned over the array of pistols and rifles, her hand brushing against them all until she lifted up a pistol. Suki felt a chill down her back and a grin stretched across her face. A very confident grin. She set the pistol down, picking another one up. She repeated this process until she found one that felt right to her and turned to face Kozue.
Kozue, who was smiling at her.
She felt a little on edge as she faced her, seeing the targets fly around. “..S..stakes.” That was the only thing she had said so far, her voice strong for how shaky it was. “..For stakes. A..and.. I won’t go e..easy on you either.” She went to load her gun full of those rubber bullets she spotted earlier. It wasn’t real, which relieved her, but she hoped for something more perhaps.
She turned to frown at Kozue, pausing for a moment to speak. “..I..I’m good with.. both.. accuracy and speed..” She turns back around. “..Of course.. Shizuka-san.. f..fun..”
It still struck Kozue as odd that such a rabbit hearted girl could look at guns, so much as handle them, but she wasn’t complaining. The way Suki ran her hands over the different guns with a near predatory grin was something she was intimately familiar with and would otherwise have found unsettling – as it was, Kozue almost laughed at the sight. “Stakes, then. Since we don’t have much in the way of physical possessions here, how about something a little more valuable? The winner gets to ask the loser anything and no matter how deep or secretive, the loser’s gotta answer. Good?”
Slipping her headphones onto her ears, Kozue tested them with a few well timed raps with a knuckle. No sense in getting ear damage from shooting, even if it meant when she talked her voice was a little louder and closer to a shout. At the academy she’d been at the range enough that carrying her headphones around had been advantageous – now it was simply habit. “Strange. I would have placed you for a rifle girl, not pistol. You sure you can deal with the kickback without getting smacked in the face? These don’t have stocks to brace against, you know; if you get a black eye or a broken nose you can’t go blaming it on me after.” Following Suki’s example, Kozue popped the mag and filled both that and a spare with bullets before dropping one onto a loop on her belt and stepping to one of the front windows that opened into the range. “I’ll go on your count. You ever shoot against an air force girl, Sooks?”
