Pit Fighters 4: Family Ties 4 (Patreon)

Part 4! This one isn't too NSFW, but that should change soon. Comments appreciated!

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The area’s housing was arranged in blocks with four homes on each side and one on each corner. This left a squarish gap in the middle that was a shared backyard lot, consisting of a small patch of green in the center and a lot of cobblestones with moss etching their contours. Laundry lines zigged and zagged all across the place, some holding bedsheets, towels, upholstery, scarves, ponchos, skirts, pants, and all manner of clothing that some jobs required for whatever reason.

The flimsy screen door rattled as it struck the frame, and stayed open for lack of a working return spring. Kinny had only seen the courtyard through the open back window, and so in approach, measured it out by pacing all the way across and back, having to push aside a damp bedsheet flailing in the middle of his path.

Paris sat on the back stoop, not really wanting to get involved but highly anticipating the entertainment he was about to receive. Logan stood next to the open kitchen window. Blitz marched out soon after, the blue rabbit having put on a pair of thick fingerless gloves he’d retrieved from his bedroom. Samsa followed after, standing in the back door but going no further, clacking her gum and not looking up from her phone.

“All right, what are the rules?” Blitz asked.

“No leaving the courtyard,” Kinny said. “First on his back loses.”

“Hey!” Logan perked up. “Remember, we’re guests, so no blood. And don’t mess with the laundry.”

Kinny shrugged. “Yeah, okay.”

“Whatever,” Blitz spit to the side and fell into a standard stance he’d learned alongside Paris when all three brothers took karate together. “I’m not intimidated.”

“You go get him,” Samsa said with no enthusiasm.

Kinny held out open palms, standing in place and only just moving his legs out to a more solid posture. Blitz approached with exaggerated leg movements. Once just barely within range—a little too far for Kinny to reach out and punish—Blitz closed in, throwing a jab at Kinny. Kinny sidestepped it. Blitz followed it up with a left hook. Kinny blocked with an arm straight up and sweeping it out of the way.

Still standing there, Kinny still didn’t bother to make a grab at Blitz, even though he was well within the opossum’s reach. So Blitz just attacked faster, with a palm strike, a low kick, another jab, turning around into a much wider roundhouse kick to Kinny’s face. Kinny avoided them all—block, hop, block, and then he leaned over backwards to let Blitz’s leg sail over his body.

“You’re just dodging!” Blitz snarled. “I thought you wanted to fight!”

“I’m waiting for you to start,” Kinny said.

Blitz grunted and leaned in to more wild attacks. But no matter what blitz threw at him, Kinny didn’t seem all that bothered, other than moving his limbs with a bit more earnestness to block jabs. Finally, after dancing around the same spot for a solid thirty seconds, Blitz lunged with his whole body in an attempt to just get a hold on the slippery opossum. Kinny, of course, sidestepped this attack, but left his leg stuck out to trip Blitz—and gave him a gentle shove on his shoulder to spin Blitz around, so he fell on his back rather than his face.

Logan whistled. “That’s game for Kinny!”

Blitz sputtered, and pulled himself back up, flailing to not get his ears caught under his hands. “Wh-th-p-that’s not fighting!” he said. “Fighting is when you beat up the other guy!”

“It’s not a real fight,” Kinny said. “It’s a game. You win by getting to the win condition. If it was a real fight, I’d be using your testicles like a punching bag.”

Blitz coughed. “Whatever. Getting me on my back means nothing!”

Kinny considered this for a moment like Blitz had a real point to make. Instead of being dismissive, he smiled. “Hmm. Okay.” He offered his hand to Blitz and helped him up. “Let’s do it again. Wait for whistle to start, and this time, first to surrender loses.”

“That’s better!” Blitz said.

As they backed up into their staring positions, Logan turned and noticed the not-at-all subtle grin on Paris’s lips. “You’re enjoying this,” he teased.

“Oh, immensely,” Paris replied.

Paris recognized the mistake Blitz was making out the gate—karate, while good fundamentals, was not sufficient when it came to mixed martial arts combat. The forms presumed a soft fairness, or at the very least an untrained assailant. Blitz was smarter than to just hang onto fundamentals, of course—he attempted to throw in “wildcard” attacks, but they were akin to mashing buttons in an arcade game.

Still, it would be interesting to see just how much energy Blitz was willing to put in just to prove a point.

Logan put his thick fingers to his mouth and whistled. Blitz pushed in, this time fast and offensive right out the gate. It looked for a moment that Kinny was going to continue to patiently dodge Blitz’s jabs, but the moment that Blitz left himself open. Kinny closed in and slammed his palm into Blitz’s gut. Blitz staggered, but righted himself.

“Is that the best you got?” Blitz countered.

Kinny shook his head. “No, I just didn’t want to hit you in the sternum. That could break your ribs or stop your heart.”

“I want you to fight me!”

Blitz lunged—this time smarter than his first attempt, and actually managed to get his paws around Kinny, and wrapping his leg around Kinny’s backside to hold him in place. Paris sat up for a second—he still hadn’t gotten that close to getting inside of Kinny’s guard in the last several months. But even so, Kinny bent himself backwards into a handstand and somersaulted out of the grip like he was coated in oil.

But Kinny didn’t stop there. Almost entirely from his handstand position, his legs and tail made a wacky maneuver around the now empty-handed blue bunny, legs locking Blitz’s neck and yanking him to the ground. Kinny grabbed Blitz’s free arms and twisted them to hold them in place—not a perfect hold but a very unexpected one. Blitz struggled to free himself, legs kicking uselessly far from where Kinny was sitting.

“I’m not down yet!” Blitz shouted into the cobblestone.

“I can hold this for a while,” Kinny warned.

“Boys!”

Tyree leaned out the window next to Logan’s head and shouted outside. “Stop playing and come in for dinner! And wash your hands before you sit down!” She snapped the shutters closed.

Blitz stopped struggling. He peeked one eye up at Kinny. “…time out?” he asked.

Kinny sat there, still firmly pinning Blitz to the ground, as if weighing his options. He finally said, “Yeah, okay.”

—

Paris was never certain how his mother managed to afford all the food she did. She worked magic with coupons and kitchen wizardry and apparently a running mental list of all the cycling sales and deals around town. Being a port town, there was always plenty of fish, if frequently the cheapest cod or anchovy. Tyree expertly filleted them all, laid them on beds of rice, then did something something beans, something something potatoes, and something something a whole gallon of rich golden gravy to slather atop.

The wobbly dinner table was crowded with an unprecedented seven attendees, yet they managed to cram together even if Logan had to stop on top of a wicker basket to make up for the lack of chairs. Blitz, sitting next to his girlfriend who’d placed a single slice of cod on her plate, glared across the table at Kinny, who was loading down his place with as much rice, fish, and sauce as it could reasonably hold. Logan did too, but it was strange to see someone so small and someone so large eat about the same amount.

Tyree was explaining the bounty before them. “Since Paris said he was bringing some of his friends over, well, you know athletes, they like to eat!”

“It’s so much better than what they’ve been feeding us at the stadium, mom,” Paris said. It’d been a while but he realized that his mom actually made fish taste good—a fact that he’d taken for granted up until he learned how one could prepare powdered fish meal so poorly.

“Yeah, thanks a bunch Ms. Tyree,” Logan said with full cheeks. “It’s delicious!”

Tyree continued. “You know I was really worried because of how hard it is for Paris to make friends, but you two seem really sweet. It’s just a shame it took a fighting contract to get you three together.”

Paris paused just as he was about to take his second bite. “Um…”

Tyree noticed Paris’s apprehension immediately and turned to him inquisitively. Paris knew he needed to tell her—just at the start of dinner seemed like an awful time to do so.

Fortunately, Blitz of all people saved him. “What, are we gonna talk about Paris all day? Mom barely shuts up about you as is.”

“Yeah you should hear her talking at the potluck group,” Konner said. “Her baby bunny is gonna be a wrestling star!”

“Heh…” Paris muttered.

Kinny spoke between shovelfuls of rice. “Did Paris or Konner tell you about Brok stadium yet?”

Paris wanted to wave down Kinny from spilling the secret before he was ready, but he knew he couldn’t be too obvious about it.

“No?” Tyree asked. “Why?”

“We’re gonna have an exhibition tournament there in a week and a half,” Kinny said.

“Oh my gosh!” Tyree said. “I’ll have to tell everyone at potluck this weekend!”

“Mom!” Paris exclaimed, trying to sink down so his face was hidden behind the large pot of gravy in the center of the table.

“Well, your father will want to know at least!”

“You’re still talking to him?!”

“And he’s still very proud of you!” Tyree nodded. It was probably a lie, but it could have resembled the truth if one looked at it askance in the right light. “In fact, when I told him that you were joining the Pit Fighters he said something like, ‘at last he’s going to be doing something manly for once!’”

That got a snort around the table.

“Well, it’s true!” Logan said. “There’s very little that’s manlier than the Pit Fighters.”

“Oceans of men,” Kinny said. “Men as far as the eye can see.”

“Dad still doesn’t know how gay it all is, does he?” Paris asked his mother point-blank.

Tyree just smiled as she sipped her tea. “I think he wants to pretend otherwise.”

The conversation almost turned to another subject for a moment, but Kinny had paused mid-mouthful, and then turned to Paris’s direction. “Paris, I thought you said your dad was gone.”

“Well, technically, yeah,” Paris shrugged. “I know, I made it sound like he was dead,but…”

“He and mom separated when we were still in grade school,” Konner said. “Dad’s been at sea almost constantly ever since.”

“We’ve seen him like… five or six times since I started high school,” Paris said.

“I have a picture if you’re curious,” Tyree said. She somehow produced the photo album without anyone having seen her get up. She opened it up to an early page and turned it around for Kinny to see, and Logan leaned over Kinny’s shoulder.

“Holy shit!” Logan said. “Paris, your dad’s huge!”

Paris’s father, Moro, was a golden tiger around the height of Sultan himself—the picture of him in particular was him wearing a smock while on the docks, Tyree standing just next to him, dwarfed by the burly sailor.

Paris didn’t understand genetics that well, but it was part of the reason that Moro left. He’d wanted tiger sons, or at least big ones, but it was hard to tell how big someone was going to get at birth since all babies were more or less the same tiny size. At first, he was happy to have three sons, even if they did all turn out to be rabbits. But then middle school came around, and it was apparent that all three of his sons had just barely inherited a little of his prodigious frame. At that point, even if he was a family man, he couldn’t demand that Tyree just have more and more children just to play the lottery and lose a few more times.

It’d confused Paris an awful lot whether his and Tyree’s divorce was amicable or not, given how often they shouted at one another, but apparently he was still dutifully paying alimony, even if it didn’t amount to a lot. Paris also wondered if he had any tiger half-brothers off St. Marten-Cristo, but if Tyree knew about any of Moro’s new flings, she didn’t talk about it.

“Paris,” Logan whispered loudly enough for everyone to hear, “would you be offended at all if I said your dad is totally hot?”

“He would,” Paris stated flatly. That was the other reason Moro left, he was sure—Tyree was much more supportive of how non-hetero Paris was turning out, even though Tyree insisted that it wasn’t really a factor.

Samsa, having barely touched her tiny portion of food, snorted. “Why is there so much gay talk at this table?” The pink canine (or possibly mustelid?) exclaimed.

“It’s gonna come up,” Kinny said. “I mean… every guy at this table is gay.”

Blitz renewed his stare of daggers in Kinny’s direction.

“I’m only a little gay,” Konner said.

Blitz swallowed the bite of food left in his mouth, then blurted out, “Excuse you! I’m hetero as they come!”

Kinny snrked, his muzzle twisting up like he was trying to not burst out laughing.

“Okay, that’s it.” Blitz slammed his fork into his three-quarters finished plate and stood. “Backyard. Now.”

Kinny shrugged and set his plate down on the wobbly table gently as Blitz marked out the kitchen’s screen door. “I’ll be back for the rest of this, Ms. Tyree.”

“You want me to save you a dessert?” Tyree asked. “The baklava gets inhaled pretty fast.”

Kinny glanced up at the clock on the wall, as if weighing his options. “Yeah, okay,” he said.