At Worst or Best [FFIX, Steiner/Beatrix]
Title: At Worst or Best
Author: ellnyx
Rating: M
Content: Sex, fumbling towards dominance-play
Prompt: Final Fantasy IX, Steiner/Beatrix: peace and quiet, a hundred years of bad luck
Word count: 3100
Summary: Beatrix can't reconcile herself to a world of peace, and what such a thing might mean for a woman who knows nothing but how to fight. Her relationship with Steiner is similarly awkward: what if all he wants is a woman, not a warrior?
.
The sun rose with customary inevitability. The room's shutters hung wide, permitting warmth and light a direct approach to the lone hand that fought free of the sheets, fingers which formed a hold about an invisible sword. Summer's leading edge progressed without provoking a defensive strike, until light-kissed lips tightened to a thin line, a barricade drawn closed too late.
Beatrix woke abruptly, as though by the sound of sword shattering on shield, the whipcrack of a spell's unstoppable edge.
It was another day.
.
Beatrix's training had instilled in her a belief that her end would come as soon as she proved worthless, as soon as she let herself become lesser. She had taken for granted that her strength insured her against this end only for a certain time. Her end might come in battle or in humiliation, defeat, but her end would come as inevitably as the years would pass.
It had been her custom to rise hours before dawn and train naked, the hall lined with mirrors. Her every form and pose, her every move confronted her then with her own vulnerable image, formed out of light and shadow and seemingly no stronger or more permanent substance as that; her flesh was as fleeting as a hundred yesterdays.
Foreign by birth, Beatrix had nevertheless once called Alexandria home: the newly foreign nature of an Alexandria at peace was not what stopped Beatrix from the resumption of her old habits. She had learned young that all countries were as foreign as the next, all situations to be mistrusted and nothing assumed; her strength could not be dependent upon her setting.
Yet the matter of peace could not be ignored.
For the first time in many years, Beatrix had no need for perfection. No war, nor cause or idol struck her as worthy of her dedication. She had betrayed herself once in lending her arm to the wrong cause, wary to fall into the same trap again. She served this current Queen but not as she had the last, with life and soul; Beatrix accepted her title as Chief of Staff, and left the blades for those who could trust where they let their allegiance fall.
Beatrix contemplated departure, yet lingered in Alexandria without admitting sentiment as a motivation. When asked why, she could but respond, why not?
Beatrix's predicament was one probably nobody could grasp. Fearful of failure, she tried to exorcise the threat of her own incompetence by immersing herself in it thoroughly. Lesser than she once had been, she must have learned mercy from somewhere or someone, for she still lived despite her growing inability. No one sought to put an end to her, to defeat her.
An unconscionably indulgent terror blossomed with each passing year: that the bed she slept in now might become her deathbed, herself decrepit, destroyed by her own mortal weakness where all wars and men had failed.
Peace was not her reward, but a cruel penance born of her past proficiency.
.
As Beatrix paced through the palace halls, people passed and smiled or passed and ignored her out of familiarity. She ignored them all without malice. Her single focus had never permitted her general association for the time it took away from reaching her goals.
Nevertheless, she did permit the rising sounds of lazy men at training to lure her away from her beat.
Beatrix knew them for lazy without seeing them, for peace indulged weakness even as the whipcrack shout of their sergeant-at-arms named them for it. The brightness of the parade court blinded her momentarily, strained physiology unable to match her pace. A moment of searching found Steiner in the shadow of a palace wall, watching the new cohort train, prejudgment turning his honestly homely expression to a disdain that did not suit him. Three of his peers arrayed themselves in various stages of relaxation about him, taking full advantage of the palace ornamentation on which to relieve their limbs of the strain of standing.
Steiner's habit had ever been to stand as straight as if he had been the recipient of the sergeant-at-arm's vile imprecations; Steiner's companions startled to a like attention at Beatrix's approach. Gravely, she returned their greetings not because she valued their acknowledgement, but because Steiner found something of worth in their friendship.
'Welcome to the sport of combat reenactment,' Steiner denounced. His tone was as earnest as his face, but Beatrix read the irony beneath.
'You become whimsical in your old age, Steiner.'
'Whimsy? Me?' The wet humor in Steiner's eyes always looked like gratitude for her presence, yet even this faded as his brow furrowed. He muttered, dark: 'Tis not I who performs this-this ensemble routine.'
Beatrix did not care to waste her sight on the shambling display. 'Are you jealous? This motley performance far outstrips any of your past ventures into comedy.'
Steiner stood tall, parsimonious lips straighter than his tone would suggest. 'Your compliments fall with as much delicacy as your blows.'
'Tis well then that I offer both with infrequency.'
'I shall treasure this one all the more for rarity.'
The conversation came to a natural terminus. Their awkwardness was not because of the Knights of Pluto who yet observed their performance, but more so for the nature of their beings.
'The day is exceptionally fine,' Beatrix suggested, and surprised herself: she had thought all excess nicety stripped from her being.
Steiner agreed wholeheartedly.
'Would you care to accompany me,' she balked from her intention to overlay sentiment, or even to imply that his company could improve the day, and inadvertently betrayed herself: 'to somewhere more peaceful?'
Beatrix gestured at the cohort (that particular percussion arose in well-timed response, of numerous fully armored knights collapsing under weighty incompetence). Her hand motion was frantic, as though fishing to recover herself.
Steiner bowed. 'A wise choice. We shall have the whole of the continent in which to roam.'
.
Peace put as demands on them both that endangered with compliance: even when they sought to relax, all their responses tended to natural violence. In the lazy heat of an afternoon that could have been one of a thousand days past, they sought to protect each other from the nature of their being with the dubious softness of kisses that seemed more appropriate shared by children, continuous caresses better gifted to a beloved pet.
Steiner was of a size to daunt Beatrix at her best, had his speed matched his girth. When they had fought, she took care to avoid closing with him, but the length and weight of him now was an intimate force that she felt some claim to own. Her feet drew aimless circles through the air, curling toes clutching at nothing in want of a brace. Beatrix could not quite span the wrestler's girth of Steiner's ribs, yet the very act of straining to bring her soles together above his spine proved innately satisfying. Beatrix whined.
Steiner ploughed her into the sheets with an accidental force such that her head, and presumably his, struck the headboard. The collision was hard enough she went momentarily blind, an old terror.
Beatrix beat against shoulders with her fists, fleshy smacks matching the sound of a sweating belly against hers; she pattered a feminine percussion across high buttocks with her heels. Friction of hair, sweat, motion and weight conspired to undo her knots, all across the sheets she unfurled, one limb cast away to each compass point.
She could only come together again after Steiner's own motion ended, with a great moan muffled in the briny wetness of her hair, on her blind side. Beatrix moved limbs she did not want to move to hold Steiner atop her. She longed to rise, to open a window, but Steiner would allow her to do so. She wanted to have him reach up at her from behind, with his great hands that could swallow her shoulders, permitting her only a taste of that fresh breath of freedom before forcing her back to the sweat of what had passed (the bed, Beatrix thought, that would become her deathbed and she an old woman; if this affair continued, no doubt she would wallow with him in indolence for eternity).
But Steiner would not command her. Beatrix suspected he was a decent man at heart, and so in lieu of her longing she submitted herself to his full weight for as long as she could bear: she, who had never been able to bear the weight of a knight's garb, who had forged her own armor instead of competence.
Steiner laughed as he fought free. Beatrix could not hold him. She heard his laughter as a response to her inability, and was annoyed. 'Why do you laugh?'
'Not at you.'
'But you laugh.'
Steiner's hair was awry, shot with grey and made the worse for his attempt to smooth it with his fingers. At moments like this Beatrix wanted to call him Adelbert: Steiner lived in his armour, not in his skin. (Delby, she could call him, or Berty, or Bert; anything that would suggest her right to do so was impervious to his right to respond and call her his Trixie, or even his love).
'Shall I sing instead?'
Steiner had never asked her why she set aside her sword. In return, Beatrix did not ask him again if he loved her, for either way the answer would be frightful. A love unconditional of her perfection daunted her. Thus, Steiner languished beside her perpetually in wait of her response, the weight of him making of the mattress a slope that she could not help but inch towards him with each breath. Eventually she was within range that he could enfold her in his arms; she preempted him and nestled her head where she could hear his heart slowing.
'Please don't,' Beatrix said, 'I rather value the quiet, and your voice is surely not fit for a lady's ears.'
He rumbled contently in return, 'Tell me when a lady enters the room then, General.'
Stillness grew between them at Steiner's use of the forbidden word.
Beatrix had not known she had forbidden it until this moment.
.
In a youth not quite halcyon, but certainly long ago, Beatrix remembered the formality of her childhood as full of a constraint she had despised enough to run away from it all. Seemingly, everyone around her had demanded more of her than they expected of themselves: immaculate dress, the precision of a fragile wrist, perfection in hair and manner. One day she would become better than all of that in any case, for with marriage, she would make a man her superior, her purpose at last completed.
After supper, she had followed Steiner without question, to the training hall lit for dusk with numerous gas lamps that yet did not fill the room: illumination turned mirrors into smoky fields of grey. Beatrix missed the clarity of morning. After dismissing the cohort within, Steiner set himself to lay out a suit of Pluto's armor with a precision that Beatrix recognized from her childhood, a manner her nurses had applied in laying out her daily garb.
It struck her suddenly that she had merely replaced one lot of conventions with another. Her lip curled with an involuntary despite; her cruelest critic had ever been herself.
Where poetry always escaped him, Steiner waxed rhetorical instead on his favorite topic, blunt fingers stabbing at fields of interest.
'Maintaining armor is not servitude, but a labor of love. For function, regular maintenance is required. All rivets and safety features must be in good order; there must be no stress fractures in the metal's surface. For brightness, a light sheen of wax keeps rust at bay without spoiling the finish - for the leather attached, a light coat of oil daily will extend its life. Following these simple steps can add years to the life of the metal.'
He spoke, Beatrix suspected, out of confusion as to why she suggested this particular scenario. Beatrix's fondness had never been for armor, preferring to trust her arm. She watched as Steiner lifted first the breastplate, wondering if she felt dread or desire - the metallic stink was as familiar as air. She wore a generic white suit of padding (her old calluses, from her vambrace, guard and gauntlet, had long since softened).
Her voice resounded momentarily in the hollow chest as Steiner dressed her, efficient here where he fumbled at the Queen's table with a knife and fork of far lesser weight. 'I would say in this day and age extending the life of armor is but wasted effort.'
'A time of peace.' Steiner paused as he buckled, and shook his head. 'Who would have thought it, that we would live to see this day? Not I. Someone wished a hundred years of bad luck on us both, preeminent knights, that instead of a glorious death in glorious service, we must instead grow old and die together!'
Beatrix could not determine if his despair was feigned; at precisely the moment when a conclusion could be made, Steiner released his hold of the plate and all its drape of mail. With an undignified squawk, Beatrix staggered under the sudden returned weight of steel to her shoulders.
Steiner's unfortunate laugh provoked her ire this time, well beyond her cage of restraint: she drew her borrowed sword.
It only occurred to Beatrix far later, when sweat and strain wrote her in ropes of effort, that she had never sparred with Steiner like this: they had fought, not thought to learn from each other. He did indeed have the advantage in full plate, her loss of speed crippling her worse than her blind side, for to that latter she was accustomed.
Yet Steiner still held back his blows with a wariness that could have been earned (she had felled him, thrice, in serious combat) or could have been derisive, a taunt towards her that she could not take him, nor the weight of his armor, the threat of what his bared blade could mean. Beatrix lowered her own point to cry:
'If you would love me at all, it must be in a manner acceptable to us both!'
Steiner was too old to appear confused; instead, a taut hurt drew thin lips as a line. He pressed his palm to his forehead, beads of sweat left flattened to a shine. 'By striking you?'
'Yes!'
'By hurting you?'
'Yes!'
'What have you done that you think you deserve such punishment?' The parsimonious lips curled, and Beatrix wondered when she had ever been able to think of Steiner without sentiment: his eyes swam with it. 'Or do you think it a reward?'
'I-'
He struck her, with a backhanded blow that came yet with the flat of his sword, or she would have lost an arm. She reeled more from her own incompetence than his success: her guard had dropped.
'Again,' she said, wildly, 'strike me again, and again, until I can rise to stop that blade and grab it and turn it back against you; until you present such a threat I can honor you and strive to subdue you; until you respect me sufficiently that you do not hold back; that who I am cannot be reduced by this situation we find ourselves in-'
He struck her, as she commanded; he struck her in a wild array of blows that matched her words, and she was glad he did not speak. Too often, he spoke what she did not want to hear, her name whispered too tenderly into her own ear.
At the last, her sword twisted out of a hand grown raw with its touch; Steiner took full advantage of her blind side to press in close. His presence was looming, an impendent storm on the horizon trapped in that susurrus of his breath. Beatrix knelt as though felled by what she thought she would hear. It was a triumph of a kind that she had provoked him so, yet a triumph that revealed her every weakness. She felt herself bleeding at the knees and shoulders, not from Steiner's blows but from the armor itself: it did not fit her well enough for motion.
'Is that all you want?' Steiner asked, calmly. 'Truly, Beatrix, is that all? I can give you that, without heartache. I have never wanted anything except for you to live as yourself, and the numbness you've worn of late has grieved me so. If freedom does not suit you, well, it has never suited me either, and we shall write our own code of conduct if necessary.'
'Yet without an enemy to stand again who am I? I cannot abide this peace. It is a thief worse than your friend. It robs me of everything that is my right.'
'It is a curse,' Steiner replied agreeably, 'this peace, and you and I not born for it and nor do we live for it. Yet if you and I stand in a hundred years time as the only two competent soldiers left alive, relics or no, we will have lived our lives well.'
With some consideration, Beatrix formed a hoarse whisper: 'Competent, Steiner? I could have ridden six oglops through the gaps in your guard.'
Steiner offered his hand and his smile: studying his face, Beatrix found all his sentiment already shed.
'Then rise, Beatrix, and tell me how I may strike you better that you cannot avoid me.'
His sarcasm was not evident, yet he was skilled at wearing that mask, and only limpid longing seemed apparent when she chanced to meet his gaze. Steiner was not simple, Beatrix knew, nor did he abide blindly by those laws he could quote so readily, yet somewhere in his history he had learned to respect conventions that supposedly consoled others. It was awkward to rise in armor, and she, tired; she did not turn her face aside as Steiner bent to kiss her.
And bit.
The salt of Steiner's sweat and sentiment clung to her cheek, not distastefully, even as something bloody and unreserved blossomed between them. Surprised beyond her usual bounds, Beatrix smiled. She more than any living being should know, the extent of mortal possibility could not be defined by the day that had passed before: complacency could not be permitted.
.
Author: ellnyx
Rating: M
Content: Sex, fumbling towards dominance-play
Prompt: Final Fantasy IX, Steiner/Beatrix: peace and quiet, a hundred years of bad luck
Word count: 3100
Summary: Beatrix can't reconcile herself to a world of peace, and what such a thing might mean for a woman who knows nothing but how to fight. Her relationship with Steiner is similarly awkward: what if all he wants is a woman, not a warrior?
.
The sun rose with customary inevitability. The room's shutters hung wide, permitting warmth and light a direct approach to the lone hand that fought free of the sheets, fingers which formed a hold about an invisible sword. Summer's leading edge progressed without provoking a defensive strike, until light-kissed lips tightened to a thin line, a barricade drawn closed too late.
Beatrix woke abruptly, as though by the sound of sword shattering on shield, the whipcrack of a spell's unstoppable edge.
It was another day.
.
Beatrix's training had instilled in her a belief that her end would come as soon as she proved worthless, as soon as she let herself become lesser. She had taken for granted that her strength insured her against this end only for a certain time. Her end might come in battle or in humiliation, defeat, but her end would come as inevitably as the years would pass.
It had been her custom to rise hours before dawn and train naked, the hall lined with mirrors. Her every form and pose, her every move confronted her then with her own vulnerable image, formed out of light and shadow and seemingly no stronger or more permanent substance as that; her flesh was as fleeting as a hundred yesterdays.
Foreign by birth, Beatrix had nevertheless once called Alexandria home: the newly foreign nature of an Alexandria at peace was not what stopped Beatrix from the resumption of her old habits. She had learned young that all countries were as foreign as the next, all situations to be mistrusted and nothing assumed; her strength could not be dependent upon her setting.
Yet the matter of peace could not be ignored.
For the first time in many years, Beatrix had no need for perfection. No war, nor cause or idol struck her as worthy of her dedication. She had betrayed herself once in lending her arm to the wrong cause, wary to fall into the same trap again. She served this current Queen but not as she had the last, with life and soul; Beatrix accepted her title as Chief of Staff, and left the blades for those who could trust where they let their allegiance fall.
Beatrix contemplated departure, yet lingered in Alexandria without admitting sentiment as a motivation. When asked why, she could but respond, why not?
Beatrix's predicament was one probably nobody could grasp. Fearful of failure, she tried to exorcise the threat of her own incompetence by immersing herself in it thoroughly. Lesser than she once had been, she must have learned mercy from somewhere or someone, for she still lived despite her growing inability. No one sought to put an end to her, to defeat her.
An unconscionably indulgent terror blossomed with each passing year: that the bed she slept in now might become her deathbed, herself decrepit, destroyed by her own mortal weakness where all wars and men had failed.
Peace was not her reward, but a cruel penance born of her past proficiency.
.
As Beatrix paced through the palace halls, people passed and smiled or passed and ignored her out of familiarity. She ignored them all without malice. Her single focus had never permitted her general association for the time it took away from reaching her goals.
Nevertheless, she did permit the rising sounds of lazy men at training to lure her away from her beat.
Beatrix knew them for lazy without seeing them, for peace indulged weakness even as the whipcrack shout of their sergeant-at-arms named them for it. The brightness of the parade court blinded her momentarily, strained physiology unable to match her pace. A moment of searching found Steiner in the shadow of a palace wall, watching the new cohort train, prejudgment turning his honestly homely expression to a disdain that did not suit him. Three of his peers arrayed themselves in various stages of relaxation about him, taking full advantage of the palace ornamentation on which to relieve their limbs of the strain of standing.
Steiner's habit had ever been to stand as straight as if he had been the recipient of the sergeant-at-arm's vile imprecations; Steiner's companions startled to a like attention at Beatrix's approach. Gravely, she returned their greetings not because she valued their acknowledgement, but because Steiner found something of worth in their friendship.
'Welcome to the sport of combat reenactment,' Steiner denounced. His tone was as earnest as his face, but Beatrix read the irony beneath.
'You become whimsical in your old age, Steiner.'
'Whimsy? Me?' The wet humor in Steiner's eyes always looked like gratitude for her presence, yet even this faded as his brow furrowed. He muttered, dark: 'Tis not I who performs this-this ensemble routine.'
Beatrix did not care to waste her sight on the shambling display. 'Are you jealous? This motley performance far outstrips any of your past ventures into comedy.'
Steiner stood tall, parsimonious lips straighter than his tone would suggest. 'Your compliments fall with as much delicacy as your blows.'
'Tis well then that I offer both with infrequency.'
'I shall treasure this one all the more for rarity.'
The conversation came to a natural terminus. Their awkwardness was not because of the Knights of Pluto who yet observed their performance, but more so for the nature of their beings.
'The day is exceptionally fine,' Beatrix suggested, and surprised herself: she had thought all excess nicety stripped from her being.
Steiner agreed wholeheartedly.
'Would you care to accompany me,' she balked from her intention to overlay sentiment, or even to imply that his company could improve the day, and inadvertently betrayed herself: 'to somewhere more peaceful?'
Beatrix gestured at the cohort (that particular percussion arose in well-timed response, of numerous fully armored knights collapsing under weighty incompetence). Her hand motion was frantic, as though fishing to recover herself.
Steiner bowed. 'A wise choice. We shall have the whole of the continent in which to roam.'
.
Peace put as demands on them both that endangered with compliance: even when they sought to relax, all their responses tended to natural violence. In the lazy heat of an afternoon that could have been one of a thousand days past, they sought to protect each other from the nature of their being with the dubious softness of kisses that seemed more appropriate shared by children, continuous caresses better gifted to a beloved pet.
Steiner was of a size to daunt Beatrix at her best, had his speed matched his girth. When they had fought, she took care to avoid closing with him, but the length and weight of him now was an intimate force that she felt some claim to own. Her feet drew aimless circles through the air, curling toes clutching at nothing in want of a brace. Beatrix could not quite span the wrestler's girth of Steiner's ribs, yet the very act of straining to bring her soles together above his spine proved innately satisfying. Beatrix whined.
Steiner ploughed her into the sheets with an accidental force such that her head, and presumably his, struck the headboard. The collision was hard enough she went momentarily blind, an old terror.
Beatrix beat against shoulders with her fists, fleshy smacks matching the sound of a sweating belly against hers; she pattered a feminine percussion across high buttocks with her heels. Friction of hair, sweat, motion and weight conspired to undo her knots, all across the sheets she unfurled, one limb cast away to each compass point.
She could only come together again after Steiner's own motion ended, with a great moan muffled in the briny wetness of her hair, on her blind side. Beatrix moved limbs she did not want to move to hold Steiner atop her. She longed to rise, to open a window, but Steiner would allow her to do so. She wanted to have him reach up at her from behind, with his great hands that could swallow her shoulders, permitting her only a taste of that fresh breath of freedom before forcing her back to the sweat of what had passed (the bed, Beatrix thought, that would become her deathbed and she an old woman; if this affair continued, no doubt she would wallow with him in indolence for eternity).
But Steiner would not command her. Beatrix suspected he was a decent man at heart, and so in lieu of her longing she submitted herself to his full weight for as long as she could bear: she, who had never been able to bear the weight of a knight's garb, who had forged her own armor instead of competence.
Steiner laughed as he fought free. Beatrix could not hold him. She heard his laughter as a response to her inability, and was annoyed. 'Why do you laugh?'
'Not at you.'
'But you laugh.'
Steiner's hair was awry, shot with grey and made the worse for his attempt to smooth it with his fingers. At moments like this Beatrix wanted to call him Adelbert: Steiner lived in his armour, not in his skin. (Delby, she could call him, or Berty, or Bert; anything that would suggest her right to do so was impervious to his right to respond and call her his Trixie, or even his love).
'Shall I sing instead?'
Steiner had never asked her why she set aside her sword. In return, Beatrix did not ask him again if he loved her, for either way the answer would be frightful. A love unconditional of her perfection daunted her. Thus, Steiner languished beside her perpetually in wait of her response, the weight of him making of the mattress a slope that she could not help but inch towards him with each breath. Eventually she was within range that he could enfold her in his arms; she preempted him and nestled her head where she could hear his heart slowing.
'Please don't,' Beatrix said, 'I rather value the quiet, and your voice is surely not fit for a lady's ears.'
He rumbled contently in return, 'Tell me when a lady enters the room then, General.'
Stillness grew between them at Steiner's use of the forbidden word.
Beatrix had not known she had forbidden it until this moment.
.
In a youth not quite halcyon, but certainly long ago, Beatrix remembered the formality of her childhood as full of a constraint she had despised enough to run away from it all. Seemingly, everyone around her had demanded more of her than they expected of themselves: immaculate dress, the precision of a fragile wrist, perfection in hair and manner. One day she would become better than all of that in any case, for with marriage, she would make a man her superior, her purpose at last completed.
After supper, she had followed Steiner without question, to the training hall lit for dusk with numerous gas lamps that yet did not fill the room: illumination turned mirrors into smoky fields of grey. Beatrix missed the clarity of morning. After dismissing the cohort within, Steiner set himself to lay out a suit of Pluto's armor with a precision that Beatrix recognized from her childhood, a manner her nurses had applied in laying out her daily garb.
It struck her suddenly that she had merely replaced one lot of conventions with another. Her lip curled with an involuntary despite; her cruelest critic had ever been herself.
Where poetry always escaped him, Steiner waxed rhetorical instead on his favorite topic, blunt fingers stabbing at fields of interest.
'Maintaining armor is not servitude, but a labor of love. For function, regular maintenance is required. All rivets and safety features must be in good order; there must be no stress fractures in the metal's surface. For brightness, a light sheen of wax keeps rust at bay without spoiling the finish - for the leather attached, a light coat of oil daily will extend its life. Following these simple steps can add years to the life of the metal.'
He spoke, Beatrix suspected, out of confusion as to why she suggested this particular scenario. Beatrix's fondness had never been for armor, preferring to trust her arm. She watched as Steiner lifted first the breastplate, wondering if she felt dread or desire - the metallic stink was as familiar as air. She wore a generic white suit of padding (her old calluses, from her vambrace, guard and gauntlet, had long since softened).
Her voice resounded momentarily in the hollow chest as Steiner dressed her, efficient here where he fumbled at the Queen's table with a knife and fork of far lesser weight. 'I would say in this day and age extending the life of armor is but wasted effort.'
'A time of peace.' Steiner paused as he buckled, and shook his head. 'Who would have thought it, that we would live to see this day? Not I. Someone wished a hundred years of bad luck on us both, preeminent knights, that instead of a glorious death in glorious service, we must instead grow old and die together!'
Beatrix could not determine if his despair was feigned; at precisely the moment when a conclusion could be made, Steiner released his hold of the plate and all its drape of mail. With an undignified squawk, Beatrix staggered under the sudden returned weight of steel to her shoulders.
Steiner's unfortunate laugh provoked her ire this time, well beyond her cage of restraint: she drew her borrowed sword.
It only occurred to Beatrix far later, when sweat and strain wrote her in ropes of effort, that she had never sparred with Steiner like this: they had fought, not thought to learn from each other. He did indeed have the advantage in full plate, her loss of speed crippling her worse than her blind side, for to that latter she was accustomed.
Yet Steiner still held back his blows with a wariness that could have been earned (she had felled him, thrice, in serious combat) or could have been derisive, a taunt towards her that she could not take him, nor the weight of his armor, the threat of what his bared blade could mean. Beatrix lowered her own point to cry:
'If you would love me at all, it must be in a manner acceptable to us both!'
Steiner was too old to appear confused; instead, a taut hurt drew thin lips as a line. He pressed his palm to his forehead, beads of sweat left flattened to a shine. 'By striking you?'
'Yes!'
'By hurting you?'
'Yes!'
'What have you done that you think you deserve such punishment?' The parsimonious lips curled, and Beatrix wondered when she had ever been able to think of Steiner without sentiment: his eyes swam with it. 'Or do you think it a reward?'
'I-'
He struck her, with a backhanded blow that came yet with the flat of his sword, or she would have lost an arm. She reeled more from her own incompetence than his success: her guard had dropped.
'Again,' she said, wildly, 'strike me again, and again, until I can rise to stop that blade and grab it and turn it back against you; until you present such a threat I can honor you and strive to subdue you; until you respect me sufficiently that you do not hold back; that who I am cannot be reduced by this situation we find ourselves in-'
He struck her, as she commanded; he struck her in a wild array of blows that matched her words, and she was glad he did not speak. Too often, he spoke what she did not want to hear, her name whispered too tenderly into her own ear.
At the last, her sword twisted out of a hand grown raw with its touch; Steiner took full advantage of her blind side to press in close. His presence was looming, an impendent storm on the horizon trapped in that susurrus of his breath. Beatrix knelt as though felled by what she thought she would hear. It was a triumph of a kind that she had provoked him so, yet a triumph that revealed her every weakness. She felt herself bleeding at the knees and shoulders, not from Steiner's blows but from the armor itself: it did not fit her well enough for motion.
'Is that all you want?' Steiner asked, calmly. 'Truly, Beatrix, is that all? I can give you that, without heartache. I have never wanted anything except for you to live as yourself, and the numbness you've worn of late has grieved me so. If freedom does not suit you, well, it has never suited me either, and we shall write our own code of conduct if necessary.'
'Yet without an enemy to stand again who am I? I cannot abide this peace. It is a thief worse than your friend. It robs me of everything that is my right.'
'It is a curse,' Steiner replied agreeably, 'this peace, and you and I not born for it and nor do we live for it. Yet if you and I stand in a hundred years time as the only two competent soldiers left alive, relics or no, we will have lived our lives well.'
With some consideration, Beatrix formed a hoarse whisper: 'Competent, Steiner? I could have ridden six oglops through the gaps in your guard.'
Steiner offered his hand and his smile: studying his face, Beatrix found all his sentiment already shed.
'Then rise, Beatrix, and tell me how I may strike you better that you cannot avoid me.'
His sarcasm was not evident, yet he was skilled at wearing that mask, and only limpid longing seemed apparent when she chanced to meet his gaze. Steiner was not simple, Beatrix knew, nor did he abide blindly by those laws he could quote so readily, yet somewhere in his history he had learned to respect conventions that supposedly consoled others. It was awkward to rise in armor, and she, tired; she did not turn her face aside as Steiner bent to kiss her.
And bit.
The salt of Steiner's sweat and sentiment clung to her cheek, not distastefully, even as something bloody and unreserved blossomed between them. Surprised beyond her usual bounds, Beatrix smiled. She more than any living being should know, the extent of mortal possibility could not be defined by the day that had passed before: complacency could not be permitted.
.