pearls before swine | perl & aran
Above everything else, the place smells like piss. It isn’t surprising for Aran, not really, because all the places he’s been like these always ended up, at one point or another, smelling like it. This time, he knows, it’s because of the kid--the young werewolf, a visitor in town--who had gone down in the first round, and messed himself across the ground-out patch of dirt they called The Ring. The judges, moderators, they’d thrown straw down into the muck and raked it up, and just like that, the fights continued, with a burly looking human taking on another, and winning, without much shock and awe from the audience.
Aran would have guessed: not much caused shock and awe among these types.
When it was Aran’s turn to go, the moderators decided to give him the welcome that the kid had gotten, putting him up against another werewolf (chance, they said, matches were drawn on weight alone) who was steel-cut, towering above Aran’s six-foot-four, all lean muscle, face more scar than smooth flesh. Bark-like. Inhuman. It wasn’t a fair fight, but Aran did better with unfair, and knocked the fucker out in the second round with a blind uppercut to the Ent’s jaw.
It was as he emerged from the ring, eye beginning to swell, that he spotted her, and without asking, calling attention to his actions, pulled the water bottle from her hand and took a swig of it..
..and coughed up half the vodka he’d mouthed, hacking: “--fuckin’ vodka?”
