Chapter Text
“Allez!”
Mind the angle of your elbow. Don’t let your right foot drift. Take smaller steps, and keep the back foot grounded. Juri rolls the mantras over in her head – she can’t afford to let anything in her technique slip. Not in a bout with the fencing club captain, Ruka Tsuchiya, where the scores stand 4 – 4 with 30 seconds on the clock. Juri has made it this far many times before – but that last touch has always evaded her. Not today.
In the half-second after they step off the starting line, she can already tell that he will have priority if they go head to head in a lunge now – with the stature of a fourteen-year-old girl going up against an upperclassman with arms that long, she doesn’t have that easy route, not even to a draw. That's just one of the inequities of the sport that she's come to accept - if she wants the chance to strike at him, she's got to put herself out as bait and outcompete him at the first back-and-forth on his own priority, before she even gets to attack.
She takes a small step forward – a challenge – and then begins the well-trod pattern of a practiced tactical retreat, drawing his advance down the strip. Steady, steady, keep the distance. Hold your saber point high, but not too high – close enough that the threat will keep him at arm’s length, but not so close that he can beat the blade. Ruka's steps are assertive and swift - the kind of naked aggression that a fencer of his imposing stature can afford, the footwork of someone who doesn't need to work to maintain his menace. Tension claws at her chest. But she cannot let herself be intimidated. Steady, steady-
And there it is - the little rush of cocky impatience in his footwork that lets her know his lunge is coming. She stands her ground. Newly-sharpened reflexes twitch, legs crying out to her to use their full strength, to delight in their power to take her to safety. Instead, she takes a small calculated step backwards, clearing just enough distance that his lunge will fall short - raising her arm into perfect parry 5 form. It's predictable, really - tall boys like that, drunk on their own lankiness, always go for the head. As his blow comes down like a hammer, she reminds herself that this excess of power bearing down on her is sloppiness, a weakness – a weakness that guys like Ruka can afford to throw around.
And then she’s on the offensive. At the sight of her rival beating a retreat, giddiness rises in her chest and escapes as a triumphant and nervous urgency in her feet. She quells it, calming the pace of her step – the bout isn’t hers yet. Landing the touch will be the hard part. She advances carefully, pressing Ruka slowly and steadily. The grip of her saber is beginning to ache in her fingers. She tries to relax her hand, wrestling down the urge to strike, the urge to have it over with. Don’t waste this chance - wait for the right opening.
And there it is...his arm drifting just a touch to the right, leaving his left half exposed. Coiled energy explodes from her back foot and through her body, propelling her furiously into a lunge. She reaches out, left arm flung back, her entire body becoming a machine dedicated to a single ideal – forwards. Her limbs fall perfectly into place, a muscle memory every time she has stretched herself nearly to the breaking point for an extra two inches of reach.
As her lunge propels her in close, she sees Ruka's hand twitch. Before her foot hits the ground, she knows she’s fallen for his feint. She tries to pull her arm back in midair, and her form falls apart as she mangles a desperate parry into a messy tangle of swords and elbows. The clang of Ruka's blade against the side of her mask covers the sound of the buzzer going off - Ruka's touch.
She lets out a frustrated breath as the two of them walk back to the starting lines and salute. An angry flush rises in her face. There's no way to blame this one on any unfair advantage, no way to excuse it. She leaves her mask on for a few moments, wrangling back the stinging pricks in the corners of her eyes. Beneath it, she constructs a new mask - a Juri who is unbothered, who is the normal amount invested in the results of a sport fencing bout. She shields herself in the formality of the ritual as she extends a hand to Ruka in a sportsmanlike handshake.
“Not bad,” the fencing captain says, as he shakes her hand stiffly. His expression is inscrutable. “By the way – stay after practice? I have something to discuss with you.”
Then, turning over his shoulder, he calls “NEXT!,” leaving Juri to unclip her equipment and make way for the next girl.
The fencing salle feels too big when not filled with the clang of swords and shuffle of feet. Juri waits on the bench, feeling muscle aches from practice settle in, as she waits for Ruka. Eventually, he emerges from the men’s changing room, dressed again in the crisp uniform of the student council president. The squeak of his shoes echoes across the hall as he walks over to take a seat by her.
“So what was it that you wanted to talk about?”
The fencing captain wanting to talk to her alone like this is unusual. Apart from a brief interview when she first joined the high school fencing club, he’s never really made a point of getting to know her – she's never gotten more than an occasional approving nod from him in practice. She’s well aware, from locker room talk, that a number of other girls on the fencing team would be more than thrilled for the chance to stay after practice alone with Ruka - he's supposedly sort of handsome, and he's got a lot of admirers who like to blush and giggle when he says the words "fencing strip" or "flèche," and generally get on Juri's nerves - but he rarely makes this sort of exception for anyone.
Ruka leans his head back against the wall. “You're getting better. Maybe even close to becoming a real opponent.”
Despite the backhandedness, the compliment makes Juri smile. It's obvious that Juri - just one among many new freshman upstarts joining the team - sees Ruka - the established club captain, the man to beat - as more of a rival than he does her. Even this slight bit of acknowledgement feels like a victory.
“I know,” she says, with conviction. She doesn’t need Ruka to tell her that she’s good – even though she’s just a freshman, she’s already worked her way to the number one slot on the women’s fencing team lineup. Ruka is the only one in the club who can give her a decent fight. Fencing here feels different than it did in middle school, when she...well, when she mostly just joined the club because of Shiori. But after she started curling her hair in tight ringlets, and came to the high school as an established fencer with a reputation to uphold, and after Shiori had...fencing became something to throw herself into, a way to punish her body and occupy her whole mind so there was no room left for any other aches. And she likes winning- It makes her feel in control, makes her forget how weak she is. Some of the girls in the fencing club are already beginning to give her a nickname: "the beautiful leopardess."
“So what's this about?” she asks, ambitiously turning over possibilities in her head. Ruka must be recognizing her skill. He must know that the two of them are on a different plane from the other fencers in the club – destined for something other than just hobbyist high school competitions. “Is this about nationals? Or a solo tournament?”
Ruka chuckles – and the low sound echoing through the hall makes Juri suddenly very aware of how the two of them are the only ones in the room. “You could say that.”
He turns towards Juri and reaches a hand into the inside pocket of his uniform. He pulls out a crisp white letter sealed with a spot of pink sealing wax, and the sickening possibility briefly flits across Juri’s mind that the fencing club captain might have more personal reasons for trying to get her alone. She’s pretty sure that Ruka has a girlfriend already – she’s seen him around campus with an underclassman girl with dark skin and purple hair – and the last thing she wants is to get involved in another mess. She breathes a sigh of relief that there is no tenderness in Ruka’s manner as he hands the letter over to her.
“It wouldn’t have been my choice,” he sighs as she turns over the letter, examining the seal – the rose signet is the same as the crest on the ring that Ruka wears on his right hand. “But there is a certain…person who has taken note of your particular talents and wants to extend an invitation to you.”
“An invitation?” Juri asks, prying open the seal on the letter. Something feels strangely ominous about Ruka’s words, but the giddiness pushes that to the back of her mind. Someone has recognized her talents. A higher authority than even Ruka. The envelope tears in her hands, and its contents fall out into her lap – no letter, no note, just a small silver ring with a pink rose crest.
“But…” she looks quizzically at Ruka. “...I don’t understand.”
Ruka smiles. There is a certain quality to Ruka’s smiles which always strikes Juri as a little sharp and mean, though she doesn't know him well enough yet to speculate why. “A present from the End of The World. If you desire to become a duelist who seeks eternity, put it on your finger.”
“A duelist?” Ruka isn’t making much sense. She looks back down at the ring in her hands. “This ring...it’s like the one the student council members wear, isn’t it?” The existence of Ohtori's student council puzzles Juri - while she's managed to gather from her gossip networks that its members tend to be widely admired and crushed-upon, she's had a bizarrely difficult time determining what they actually do. “What’s going on here?? Just what exactly are you asking me to do? Hey!! Ruka!!!”
Ruka makes no move to answer her question. He gets up from the bench with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders. “The path you must take has been prepared for you,” he says, quietly, without turning back to look at her.