Demons [Eddie Brock] Venom

11. Jagged

"Come on, Rory! You can push yourself harder than that," Eddie encouraged while holding onto her.

After two weeks of this, Rory was starting to get a good grip on fighting techniques. Nothing extreme, but she had the pivoting and the ducking, she was able to throw a mean punch, but she struggled at getting out of a grip. The moment Eddie has his arm around her collarbone or pinned her dominant hand behind her back she didn't know what to do. Each jerk of the body made the grip tighter, until she would tap out.

"Fuck," Rory muttered as she tapped out. "I'll never be able to overpower someone of your stature, this isn't fair."

"I know, you're right," Eddie said, not mentioning the fact that yes, she was quite petite and couldn't overpower someone of his build. However, with the right tricks up her sleeve she could do enough to get herself out of a situation. Already he printed off an article a friend of his wrote about escaping attackers; some of the methods seemed silly, but were proven to work. One of them was to drop to a 'turtle' position, and inch away; the back could take a beating, it was the head and stomach you needed to protect.

Eddie and Rory stood facing each other, he raised his hands. "Alright, pretend I'm that guy."

They hadn't talked about him since the morning Rory told him to stay away from her past, because it was ugly, and it would get one or both -likely both- of them hurt. Eddie heeded her warning, letting his curiousity fade because he was spending all this time with Rory; he was learning who she was through their own interactions, his own judgement. Being around her made him forget about Annie a lot of the time, and he didn't want his judgement of her clouded by whatever he could dig up from her past. Though he was curious, he wouldn't do that to her.

Rory's lip was curled into a grimace, her hands were clutched into fists and for a moment Eddie thought she was going to punch him in the nose. But she stood there, frozen.

"Come on, Rory," he encouraged again.

"If you were him, it doesn't matter what I learn here," she gestured to the gym, "I would shut down."

"Nah, you can't think like that, Rory."

"I do, that's a learned behaviour."

He sighed. "Want to wrap it up for today?"

She agreed, and they hit the street on the bike, heading back to the apartment. When they arrived, the obligatory parting to occur, Eddie stopped her before she disappeared behind her door. "I've been thinking," he started, "you spend so much time between places, I want you to have a key."

"What?" She turned to face him, surprised by this grand gesture that usually occurred between relatively long-term couples, not neighbours.