Chapter Text
Motion
set during The Librarians 301 - "And the Rise of Chaos"
Jake’s a brawler. He’s comfortable with that — the give and take of the fight, bursting with the wild kinetic energy that’s both heritage and birthright. That’s what Pop taught him — pull ‘em in close and knock ‘em down hard. And Jake spends so much of his day-to-day up in his head that it’s a kind of relief not to plan his moves in advance, to just let his body react to the attacks as they come.
But Baird wants him to learn how to fight smarter, and Jake knows it seems incongruous, that a guy with more degrees than pairs of shoes should resist learn-smarter anything. He knows he’s being ridiculous. He’s man enough to admit that Baird’s better than him in a fight, and he knows it’s downright churlish, the way he’s pushing back when she’s being good enough to teach him.
He trusts Baird — trusts all of them, and isn’t that something — but he’s not ready to explain why something deep inside of him can’t bear the idea of learning to fight “properly.” Maybe he’ll tell them, someday. Maybe he won’t. Maybe when he can say it without choking on the words. Another reason he’s angry; that despite his brother being gone longer than he was ever there, it hurts like that still.
‘Cause Jacob doesn’t need a mirror to know what he looks like when he tries the punches tight and controlled like she asks. That’s how Eliot fought, darting efficiency and a tight control over the violence that simmers in all the men in his family, that sometimes threatened to boil over in Eliot until he learned to keep a lid on it. To bleed it off in careful releases of pressure.
Jake gets it more now, how Eliot could leave and not come back, but the hurt is too old and deep to heal so soon. If Jake fights like Colonel Baird, then he fights like Eliot, and Jake hasn’t forgiven Eliot enough to be ready to face that one, yet.