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The sound of careful steps against earth, gravel crunching underfoot tantalizingly slow. Her blade is so sharp it almost sings in the air, a barely there hum that he can feel buzzing in the very back of his mind. His eyes follow the movement of her feet as they circle each other, run across the taut muscles of her bare sword arms, trace the beads of sweat that trickle languidly down her heat-flushed face. Everything about her is slow and careful, and he can feel an uncomfortable anxiousness winding up in his stomach at the thought. She will strike soon; he can feel it.
Another measured step and he is acutely aware of how fast his heart is beating - how fast and restless and every opposite of her uncomfortable patience. If this is an intimidation tactic, Gerome hates how well it seems to be working. His heart is in his throat and his stomach, doing flips and spins in his abdomen, and with a flick of his wrist, he lunges forward and slams his lance tip against her blade.
Severa winces, grunting in effort as she steps back and redirects his weapon point, jumping over the low returning swing as he brings his lance back to his starting point. His opponent takes the small retreat as an opening, spinning past the extended shaft of the lance to avoid tripping, and then lunging toward him, the tip of her blade aimed dangerously toward his chest.
Gerome turns just in time, the sharp edge of her sword leaving a deep scratch in the black coating of his armor. The momentum carries her through the lunge, her long pigtails whipping past and brushing against his face. It’s the scent of riverbanks and campfire smoke that fazes him, keeps him from seeing the downward slash of her blade until it is upon him; he has to hold his lance above his head and block with the shaft to keep himself in one piece. Her blade becomes embedded in the wood handle, and as she tries desperately to yank it free, Gerome takes the upper hand, spinning his lance and her sword out of the girl’s grip. With a swift kick, her weapon skitters far across the training grounds, her eyes following it panickedly for a second, before flying back toward him and facing him with her fiercest glare.
He doesn’t allow her time to jump after her sword, swinging the opposite end of his lance at her stomach. She goes down, but not because of the impact; Severa drops down below the arc of his weapon, throwing her leg out and knocking him completely off his feet. A jolt of pain flashes up his spine as he lands ineptly on his bottom and his lance is torn from his hands upon impact. Looming above him, Severa flips her hair and twirls the lance in one hand, a self-satisfied smile across her pointed features as the halts the lance tip at his neck.
“Hmph,” she scoffs primly, “Pathetic!”
Gerome glares up at her visage, silhouetted by the blinding sun behind her, and quickly calculates how he could possibly turn this around. His own weapon hovers a few inches before his throat, and his legs are pinned together by a foot on either side of his knees. He feels his heart in his throat as his gaze runs up her legs - assessing her stance, obviously - and finds his eyes pausing by her shoulders. As seemingly assured her victory is, there is still a rigid tenseness in her arms, a tightness in her jaw and neck. Gerome has to mentally force himself not to let his gaze drop any lower than her shoulders, to slowly trace the curving neckline of her far too revealing tank, and inhales sharply to bring himself back to reality.
“You ready to yield yet?” Severa snaps, “Or do I have to take a seat, ‘cause this’ll take forever and a day? If your fighting abilities have anything to say about it, I bet your fat gut will make a wonderful seat for me.” She giggles at her own quip, a maddeningly irritating sound, and Gerome can’t help but scowl at her.
“Don’t talk like you’ve already won,” he growls, and as if to prove his point, he pushes his knees apart as forcefully as he can, widening her stance and knocking her off balance. His early observations proved useful, and the immense rigidity of her upper half had left her considerably unbalanced. Instead of falling forward as she might have, her weight instead follows the curve of her back, the subtle, domineering angle of her head, and she falls backward with a shout. She lands on her own rear with a satisfying thud. Gerome springs up and attempts to wrench the lance away from her as she tumbles back, but her grip on the weapon is vice-like; with both their hands wrapped tightly around the lance’s smooth, wooden handle, the pair follow each other toward the ground, and Severa chokes out a gasp of pain as Gerome falls heavily atop her and the wood handle is pressed heavily against her throat.
Her grip loosens, hands flying up to shield her tender neck, and as the brunt of Gerome’s weight is suddenly forced against the shaft, Severa gasps again, tears forming in her eyes. The whimper of pain is almost unbearable, and his pulse drops somewhere into his stomach as he panickedly tosses the lance aside. Without a weapon to place his hands on, they fall to the ground on either side of Severa, preventing him from falling any closer against her. She heaves shaky, uneven puffs as she tries to regain her breath, and the hot brush of her breath against his face makes Gerome painfully conscious of their position.
He has her effectively pinned, but any thoughts of their previous spar have long since left him, taken over by a dizzying awareness of the rise and fall of her chest as she breathes, the fluttering of her long eyelashes as she tries to blink away drying tears. The scent of late night campfire smoke and the rivers she always liked to sit and dip her feet into are distracting enough from a distance, but with his face inches from hers, they are heady and intoxicating, swirling at the forefront of his mind and dulling the small voice of reason that calls at him through the thick fog.
Once Severa steadies her breathing enough to look up, her eyes widen as they lock onto his. Her sharp inhalation is audible, and he can see the slight tremor in her jaw as she clenches it, tenses. She doesn’t twist and fight under his scrutiny, but he can feel her squirming slightly; her hip brushes against the inside of his thigh and Gerome almost curses as a strangled gasp tumbles past his lips, an electrifying jolt shoots up his spine.
Severa stares at him, burgundy eyes tracing what he knows to be the curves of his mask, and even though she can’t see where his own grey eyes point, Gerome can’t meet her gaze. He looks anywhere but her face, at the scarlet red hair sprawled out against the ground, barely ghosting the tips of his fingers. The first thing he focuses on is the bright line of red imprinted across her throat, a small grimace tugging down at his mouth as he remembers that he was partly - if not mainly - the cause of it. Severa’s long, slim fingers still rest gingerly around the painful mark, and Gerome is plagued by an itching urge to carefully tug her fingers away, to rub soothingly at the pale skin beneath it until the angry redness subsides. He absently recalls little children and mothers kissing their cuts and scrapes better; the thought of sultry, smooth skin beneath his lips leaves his mouth dry and him desperately praying that his face isn’t bright red.
At the sound of her voice, Gerome visibly flinches, mentally cursing himself as soon as he does. “If you’re waiting for me to yield,” she mutters, voice still weak from the beating her throat had just suffered, “I yield. Get off me.”
Her chin still manages to tilt upward arrogantly while she is pinned to the ground beneath him, a feat he finds amazingly unsurprising, but her eyes stare anywhere but him, wavering slightly toward some unspecific spot to the left. A light roseate dusts her cheeks, but he can’t tell if it’s because of their recent exertion or something else entirely. Her jaw is still tense, her lips pursed tightly, and Gerome forces himself to stop right there, refusing to consider her lips past the delicate downward slope of them, the soft divot where her bottom and top lips meet - he mentally curses again, shifting his tired arms. His fingers brush closer to her hair, softer than he’d imagined, and he tries not to imagine anymore; a brief, uninvited image of the cherry-red strands tangled in his fingers has his heart in his throat again - a not unfamiliar feeling whenever the redhead was involved - and Gerome can tell his face is flushed by now, rushing with blood and heat and a restlessness that suffuses his entire body, urging him to follow through with unspeakable thoughts. He bites down on his tongue, hard.
“Gerome,” Severa grounds out warningly, eyes darting up to meet hesitantly with his. There is something unfamiliar in her burgundy eyes, something quick and fleeting and tantalizingly warm, but it’s gone before he can decipher it, along with her eyes meeting his. “I yield, so just let me go,” she whispers shakily, a breathy noise that does terrible things to his head.
“You’re not meeting my eye,” he finds himself responding. “I’ll take your resignation resolutely, or not at all.” He isn’t sure why he prolongs their situation - his arms are growing more tired by the moment - but does not rescind his statement.
Severa huffs in annoyance at his words, a warm puff of air that fans distractingly across his face, but slowly lowers the arrogant tilt of her head. When her gaze meets his, boring past the whites of his mask as if they were nothing, Gerome feels his stomach twist at the intensity of it. He sees that slight unfamiliarity he had spotted earlier, now smoldering into a fire threatening to drag him in and swallow him alive. The heat of it licks his cheeks like the warmth of her breath, and it takes a conscious amount of effort not to jump in. His nails dig into the dirt beneath them and the taste of metal begins to spill from how hard he’s been biting his tongue.
She stares unblinkingly into his eyes and hisses, “I yield.”
Or rather: Severa would have yielded had Gerome’s tired arms not found then to be a good moment to give out, alongside his long standing adamancy not to crash his mouth unceremoniously against the delicate downward slope of her lips. He absently feels pebbles digging into the skin of his forearms on the ground, but nothing registers as acutely as the sensation of Severa’s lips against his. She gasps softly at the contact, a sound that quickly evens out into smothered moan against his mouth as swift fingers pull off the ribbon holding up her right pigtail and thread deftly through the strands. She moves her hands from cradling her neck to wrap them around his, pulling him flush against her.
A quiet grunt tumbles past her throat upon his weight falling against her, and Gerome places his hands at her hips so he can roll them over, crushing gravel underneath as he lands on his back. They don’t separate even once as he brushes twigs out of her hair with one hand, traces circles over the skin where her shirt had ridden up with the other, making her breath hitch. She repays him in kind, carding her hand through his hair and ghosting her fingernails against his scalp in a way that Gerome had never known would make him shiver like this. When they pull apart, they’re both breathing hard, chest heaving and faces flushed brilliant reds.
“What was that about?” Severa breathes, fingers still splayed across the back of his neck, tugging at the fine strands of hair above it. He doesn’t respond immediately, lost in the feeling of her fingernails gliding gently across his skin.
“You won the fight before we’d even began,” he mutters distractedly, tightening his grip around her back. One hand snakes up to her face, pulling her down so he can press his lips against hers once more. He’s stopped, though, by a set of pale fingers pressing against his mouth. Severa knows exactly how to meet his gaze, even with the mask. Her burgundy eyes twinkle.
“What’s this about me winning?” she asks coyly, and Gerome lets out a small groan.
“Just shut up for a bit longer,” he mumbles, tilting his head away from her hand and placing a soft kiss against the fading redness on her neck. She shivers slightly at the contact, but angles her head to accommodate him and moves her free hand to thread through his hair.
“No need to be such a sore loser,” she murmurs between kisses. Severa giggles at her own quip again, a sound that vibrates pleasantly through his lips, and there’s no need for Gerome to tell her to shut up; she doesn’t speak a word next time she drags his lips toward hers, but the smile on her lips has him thinking it nonetheless.