by Carnath-Emory » Thu Jan 09, 2014 1:20 pm
Fourteen months before, the swordswoman who was once this boy's teacher had come to his office expecting that she would not leave it.
Could you best him?
They'd asked her that. If the fight was fair; if it was nothing like. If it was your sword and his, if it came down to nothing like steel but mostly just sweat and fists. Could you put him down? She'd answered, every time. It was the same word, every time. She gave them nothing but the truth, and at no point did she harbour any desire to add that their questions were absolutely moot. She'd left that room with her heart a chaos and her skin intact; he'd remained, with his sanity somewhat so. Knowing the stakes before she went to him, inhaling that tension into her lungs with every breath they drew, she'd left understanding how very improbable that outcome was; how easily any moment might have swung towards irrecoverable disaster. They'd parted ways with some fragmentary ability to function and this, too, was luxury.
Today, she lets him lead. Invites it - which she'd done the last time, as well, only to wrest it right back from him almost immediately. Not today. It is his, because a swordswoman whose talent is for brutality would have made it clumsily cruel; because he will use it well -
And he does.
Oh, he does.
It doesn't deserve metaphor. It deserves to be this: a fist to the face, ironclad and unrelentingly direct. This is the truth delivered so unsparingly that she can stand straight-spined in the face of it, can stare it in the eyes - which sometimes means his; which sometimes, when disgust overwhelms her, means some distant point just past his shoulder. This is explanation served in a fashion such as she can fight her way through - motionless though she may be, silent though she remains. Except that at a point deep in the heart of it -
but they've been here before: the moment in which a swordswoman's fingers tighten upon the chair-back, the moment in which varnish chips and fractures beneath biting steel. They've been here before, and it is nothing that he can't have anticipated: the cold tightness of her features, the small, unconscious violence of her hands. "Chush' sobach'ya!" she spits, and it's torn from her throat half-gasping. He betrayed me. But of course he did. "On'ebanatyi pidarazthe - " Her jaw clenches down against whatever might have followed, trembles with the need to restrain an anger for which she hasn't words. The pale throat swallows - twice, hard, and this too is nothing that he has not seen. Time passes, because time is what is required for steel to subside and for hands to become still; for a woman to swallow back an anger that had rushed at her, hot and hard.
"There's nothing worse." That, when her voice has become a thing which can speak the words quietly. That, an assent that is almost murmured. "I would sooner have died," and it is the truth that she had almost spoken to an architect just days before; almost and not quite. "Don't call that irresponsible. Not in that respect; do not begin to. You did everything right, as right it could be; a very few choices left to you then, mn? You were right to hit, you were right to take him - there was no-one else, and how were you to know that - "
A hand rakes back through the dark of her hair; the whole of her slightly turns, sets its eyes upon some remote feature of his office wall.
No. A glance back towards him, now. "Thank you. But don't, do not, tell me it was worth - Golben. This. Do not begin to."