Leah swung first. It was a clumsy strike, untrained and overcommitted, the kind of motion that telegraphed itself a full second before it arrived, and Ivy's body responded before her mind had finished deciding whether responding was the right thing to do at all. She caught the girl's wrist with two fingers, redirecting the momentum harmlessly past her shoulder, and Leah stumbled forward from the force of her own missed swing.
LEA: That's not fair, you're supposed to actually fight!
IVY: I told you. I'm not fighting you.
LEA: Then block me properly!
She came again, faster this time, and Ivy moved through the next several exchanges with the particular ease of someone whose body had spent years learning exactly how to neutralize a threat without causing harm, deflecting, redirecting, absorbing the small clumsy blows against forearms that barely registered the impact. Leah was breathing hard within a minute, sweat beading at her hairline, her fury undiminished despite the obvious futility of the exchange.
LEA: Why won't you actually hit me back!
IVY: Because you're a child and I'm not interested in hurting you.
LEA: But you'll steal from people who never hurt you! That's worse! That's so much worse than hitting me!
The accusation landed harder than any of Leah's physical strikes had, and Ivy felt herself falter for the length of a breath, the particular sting of an uncomfortable truth delivered without any of the diplomatic softening an adult might have offered. Leah used the opening.
She lunged forward with everything her small body could generate, and this time Ivy's redirect came a half second later than it should have, distracted by the words rather than the motion, and Leah's fist connected weakly with her side, more contact than damage, but contact nonetheless.
LEA: There! I hit you! Does that count for something?
IVY: It counts for you being braver than you are smart.
She said it without malice, the particular dry observation of someone who had, despite everything, found something close to reluctant respect forming for the girl's complete lack of self preservation instinct.
Leah came again.
The exchange continued for several more minutes, Leah's attacks growing increasingly desperate and increasingly tired, her breathing ragged, her small fists swinging with diminishing force and increasing frustration, and Ivy moved through all of it with the patient unhurried precision of someone who had never once been in genuine danger from the encounter, redirecting, absorbing, occasionally catching a wrist or a shoulder and turning Leah's own momentum gently against her without ever delivering a strike of her own. Eventually Leah simply stopped, hands on her knees, gasping.
LEA: Why won't you just hit me back properly.
IVY: I already told you why.
LEA: That's not a real answer.
Ivy crouched down slightly, bringing herself closer to the girl's eye level, the storehouse lantern casting long shadows between them.
IVY: It's the only answer I have.
Leah looked at her, still breathing hard, her earlier fury cooling now into something more complicated, confusion tangled with the lingering edges of righteous anger and something else Ivy could not immediately name.
LEA: You could have hit me. Easily. I'm not stupid, I know I'm not actually good at fighting. You could have hurt me the whole time and you didn't.
IVY: No.
LEA: Why not, if you're really not a hero like you keep saying?
Ivy did not have an immediate answer for that, the question landing in the same place Greta's questions had landed, in the same fractured space the mirror had revealed, the particular space where two versions of herself refused to fully resolve into one.
LEA: I think it's because you can't.
She said it slowly, working through the logic the way children sometimes did, with a clarity that bypassed the complicated hedging adults brought to the same realizations.
LEA: You can't hurt me. Not really. Because you're a hero. Just like Noel. He could have killed my papa and he didn't either. That's what heroes do. They could hurt people and they choose not to.
The words arrived with a weight Ivy had not been prepared for, standing in a dim storehouse with stolen goods still loose in one hand and a child's exhausted clarity dismantling, piece by piece, every justification she had built over the past three weeks for who she had decided to become again.
IVY: A hero, huh.
She said it quietly, almost to herself, the words tasting strange in her mouth after weeks of insisting otherwise, and Leah straightened slowly, still catching her breath, watching Ivy with an expression that had shifted from anger into something gentler, something closer to the wonder she had arrived with before any of this began.
LEA: Yeah. A hero.
The storehouse held its quiet around them, the single lantern flickering slightly in a draft from somewhere unseen, and Ivy stood there with the stolen goods still in her hand, the weight of them suddenly unbearable against everything Leah had just laid bare without meaning to be cruel about any of it. She set the goods down on the nearest crate.
She did not say anything further. She simply stood there, in the aftermath of a fight she had never truly fought, looking at a child who had somehow, without training or strategy or anything beyond stubborn furious conviction, accomplished what three weeks of her own internal reckoning had failed to manage.