A Change of Air

[Madeleine Baudelaire&Russ Ford]

“See, that’s just really stupid,” Russ laughed. “An ugly mouthguard is still a lot better looking than a mouth missing its front teeth. And I’ve never actually played hockey, you know.”
He knew schoolkids played it as part of their PE class, but if you thought about the amount of time Russ had actually spent at school as a kid… well, it didn’t add up to much. Imogen always insisted on enrolling him at the local schools when they moved, but… well, the other kids never took kindly to him, the new dark gypsy boy And because he responded to children’s insults with his fists, the teachers never liked him either.
His mum hated it, but as far as kid Russ was concerned, if he lay down and took it like the other kids did, it’d never stop – and the children were little shíts anyway, they needed a lesson. Most of the time he ended up at home being taught by his mum, or if there was a teacher at camp he’d go to them, and he always did okay – without . They all did, in the end. Madeleine was home-schooled by her mum, and look where she was now.
Well, no. Not where she was now. He meant being Head in a school. Not…
Agh.
“If you’d given the kids I knew hockey sticks they would have started beating each other with them, so I doubt it would have worked,” he added, with a smile. “Bashed skulls and broken bones, never mind teeth. The end results probably aren't that different, though."

[The Delaney Twins]

“No, probably not,” she agreed.
The kids he knew…
Lynn didn’t ask Russ about his past very much. Or at all, really. And she knew fine well why she did it by now. Any time he mentioned anything about what had happened to him before Orchid she had never asked him to tell her more about his background for one simple reason – she didn’t want him to ask her more about hers.
That particular little hang-up had kind of vanished after Christmas Eve. But six months of friendship had been more than enough to turn hang-up into habit, and so since they’d been dating she hadn’t gone asking for any more information than she had before. But…
The difference, now, was that she wanted to ask him, but she also felt like she should know. After all, she’d known him for… what, eight months, now? It was stupid that she didn’t know half of had happened to him before he came here.
Funny, that had only really struck her now, but it was true – and so there was a moment in which she almost opened her mouth to ask him to tell her more about it –
… until common sense sauntered back on into her brain, and told her that that was probably – definitely – a really stupid idea. Come on, Lynn. Past meant family, it always did. And Russ was Madeleine’s cousin, so even though they hadn’t always known that, clearly their pasts must have been very, very linked. Any fool could see that.
So she didn’t ask now. Just… She’d wait. She’d ask him if Madeleine came back.
When Madeleine came back.
“Only difference is that any vicious hockey players need to be sneakier so that they can pretend they’re following the ‘rules’. And if I had to choose between them and a really pissed hockeyist, I’d almost prefer to be in with your kids. Almost. At least that way I wouldn’t have to be subtle if I needed to get my own back,” she laughed.

[Madeleine Baudelaire&Russ Ford]

Russ grinned widely at that one. “And if you weren’t a girl, they’d also not have to be subtle about trying to knock the crap out of you for daring to try payback, as hypocritical as that is. We were little shíts. We were lucky enough to literally have the world ahead of us, so we were cocky enough to think we owned it. Until we were like, eight or so when we wised up, or knocked it out of each other – though, didn’t we all?”
They were lucky, and when they were kids the world was theirs to roam, and it was a hard lesson to learn. The world didn’t belong to them, but apparently it belonged to those people who stayed in the one place and tried to trash them in the playground, slash their tyres, stone their windscreens…
But they’d all had good childhoods, there was no denying that. Kids these days got bubblewrapped so much it was crazy – they were barely allowed out onto the streets outside their houses without maximum supervision, for fear of everything that could possibly go wrong. Every caution was taken so that a kid wouldn’t take a step and hurt themselves. They were luckier, they were able to run bloody wild about the camps if they wanted to because they had everyone there to look out for them. Sure, they fell and they scraped their knees (or beat each other with hockey sticks) but they learned not to shove each other or run into caravans or whatever the hell it was they were doing.
Then it hit him: he’d just asked “didn’t we all”, hadn’t he? Christ, that was pretty tactless. Lynn had spent most of her childhood in… well, yeah. Russ didn’t really like thinking about it, if he was honest. It was difficult to think about, to try and grasp the magnitude of all of that. He followed her example on that count – they didn’t talk about it, not after Christmas Eve. And Russ didn’t dwell on it, because clearly, she wasn’t. But not thinking about things had, once again, resulted in a pretty tactless statement.
“Some of them took that …eh, violent energy and put it into boxing, in the end,” Russ added, quickly, but as casually as he could. “What about that – do you class that as a ‘manly’ sport?

[The Delaney Twins]

Really, Lynn doubted that she would have noticed the implications of what Russ had just said if he hadn’t tried to disguise it by rushing on like that. Lynn knew she wasn’t the most perceptive of people, but she just… she noticed it, this time. She didn’t know why.
And as it was… well, yeah. No, not all children had known the kind of world that Russ had known as a child. She hadn’t, Kennedy hadn’t, undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of others hadn’t – although that was a really depressing thought, she had to admit, it was almost definitely true. But that was okay. Lynn didn’t want to be tiptoed around because of it.
Or at least – at least, she didn’t usually. Now, though…
Lynn’s childhood was a nightmare. She knew that. But it was a nightmare that she had managed to bloody survive, so she was proud of that, and yet all the same… Right now, just after seeing the battle and the blood and the pain and the destruction, and after nearly – God knew she could hardly think it – nearly losing Kennedy again, she couldn’t think about it. There was no point putting herself through that. She could admit that right now. She was coping with what had happened to Kennedy five days ago, she didn’t need to cope with what had been done with them five years ago, either.
And so the original slight affront at hearing Russ veer away from that unpleasant subject, the defensiveness and the feeling of you-don’t-need-to-do-that-it’s-not-like-I-can’t-handle-it that had cropped up in her mind, abated completely and was replaced with gratitude. He wasn’t going to make her think about it. He was trying to stop her from thinking about it at all.
And she was glad that he was doing it.
“Boxing,” she mused aloud, the smile on her face softening, just slightly. It felt good, acknowledging that she didn’t need to think about that right now, knowing that Russ wouldn’t make her. “Dunno, I didn’t consider it. Boxing – it’s the one where it’s all fixed? Or is that wrestling, maybe? Always get them confused. All I know is, I have seen guys playing one or the other of those sports while wearing tights, and if that one happens to be boxing, hell no I do not think that is manly,” she finished, laughing. “Which may well go without saying. But I’m guessing it’s not that one?”