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He draws the bow. Inhale.
His aim is precise. Exhale.
The arrow flies.
To her sensitive ears, there is a sharp and high whistle and then the arrow finds its mark. Perfect center.
She could watch him all night. To be honest, she has before.
If he knows she is there (he knows she is there), he doesn’t comment. He draws the bow. The second arrow splits the first down its center. When he moves to nock the next, it’s a fluid, easy gesture that sets the tension in his arms, his chest, his shoulders. He does it so simply that she thinks it’s almost reflexive. The way you can press on a tendon in your wrist to make the fingers curl. The way your fingers curl to keep you from reaching. It reminds her of dancing, and how it lets her body think so that her mind can dream and wander.
Aymeric is a fine dancer too. He is practiced at a lot of things, and she thinks she might called it some kind of compensation if the meticulousness with which he manages himself didn’t seem to come to him as naturally as breathing. They are different, in that sense. And that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t call it compensation. They are different in this sense too.
He draws the bow. He draws the bow. He draws the bow.
Eventually, her attention slides across the yard to the rack, where the rich blue of Naegling’s blade catches the weak moonlight. She’s watched him run through his paces with the blade too. Not so intently, maybe, when he’s been in his knights’ company and it doesn’t feel proper to linger. As if it’s proper that she’s watching him now — why can’t it be proper? She folds her arms across her chest, leaning against the corner of stonework that shelters her from the full bite of the night breeze. It’s easy not to to think too hard when she’s watching him, the comfortable rhythm of his drilling playing her mind down paths of little resistance. Lately, that feels like an easy way to get herself into trouble.
Regardless, she knows he wields the sword as competently as the bow. She’s well aware of it as another shaft is shattered by his shot. Bullseye. He wields the sword as confidently, too. The smile he gave her when she once asked why he seemed not to favor a shield had been as striking as it had been unsettling. Sometimes she’s not sure if he’s planned the way he opens like a book, cracked wide, a thousand things she wants to ask about dancing and darting in those unwavering blue eyes. She thinks he could, if he wanted to. The Warrior of Light doesn’t know what to make of that. She thinks shields can be useful.
Tonight, she waits until he has completely emptied one of the two quivers at his hips, and created more business for the fletcher, before she clears her throat and picks her way toward him from her alcove. She is silent on her feet, delicate off the stone ledge where she’d been perched and nimble over the snow. He turns to her, rolling his shoulders — first one, then the other — in his thin, hempen undershirt, impervious to the cold in a way she will never quite understand. He told her he’d always run a bit warm once, when she found him similarly clothed and had failed to hide her incredulity. There’s probably something to the little details piling against his every move, and the way she’s committed them all to memory, but that’s not why she’s here. Why is she here?
“My Lady,” he greets her, and by his tone she’s certain he’s unsurprised by her presence. Not that she expected anything else. She doesn’t try to hide from him; never has. Still, there’s a small part of her that thinks she should be wary (or ashamed) for becoming an, apparently, expected intruder. But then she remembers that the way they find each other is mutually uncanny. He materializes in the places she goes to disappear more often than not. They retreat, as if by nature, to the same shelters. At least, she tells herself this is true (it’s not untrue). It’s better than looking for him. It’s better than wondering if he’s looking for her too.
Her cheeks flush. It’s probably the frigid air. She should go back to her room.
“Lord Commander,” she says. And then she doesn’t say anything else until she’s come to stand beside him, countable ilms between them (he knows the count, and that it is always the same when she chooses them).
They stand that way for a while. The silence is simple. Comfortable, even. He supposes it’s been moons now, since she first came across him training alone in the yard. There’s something about that he finds significant, but he has generally found it best not to unpack these things in company. Not hers, at least. That feels like an easy way to get into trouble neither of them need. He thinks, instead, that the moons pass more quickly now than they used to.
“Do you prefer not to be seen with the bow?” She asks when he thinks she may not say anything else at all. Her aim is precise. And he laughs. Short, and startled, but not unhappy.
“‘Tis not bashfulness, if that’s what troubles you,” Aymeric answers. She inclines her head, studying his expression. It’s the kind of scrutiny that made his skin crawl as a boy. Too many priests hoping to flush his intentions out on a wrong look, or too many knights testing for weakness. He’s never been shy, so much as he hasn’t often felt anybody had the right to his thoughts.
But he is, as ever, remarkably content under her gaze. He wants to know what she finds. A challenge, or safety, or both. Another sensation that he accepts is (has been) significant. Another sensation to be examined behind closed doors.
“No, I don’t expect it would be,” she says at last. “But, maybe it’s not just a matter of practicality either.” The Warrior of Light shrugs, as if the truth of his midnight practice might be inconsequential, but her attention roves over the bow anyway.
“Perhaps not,” he agrees. “‘Tis meditative as much as it is practical. Time to reflect, I suppose. Sorely needed, that.” He looks down at his hand, where a patchwork of callouses on his palms and fingers underscore his effort. There had been a time, not so long past, when he’d wondered if he’d lose the ones he’d formed among the Temple Knights’ archers. If he has to say when the ritual (the meditation) had become routine, it was probably then. Meditation, or running ahead, or running away; often enough, Aymeric thinks these things don’t feel all that different.
But he has considered that it made him unhappier than he expected to feel the sneaking danger of losing a piece of his former self that he’d chosen. Aymeric has generally not made it a habit to cling to the past, or anything else, that isn’t serving his present march (he can only hold on to so much, he can only reach so far). In service of the young man he was, though, angrier and so very determined to be anything but — well, for him, it had felt important to remember.
Then again, perhaps he can call picking back on this particular habit good intuition now. He studies the carefully composed profile of the woman beside him. She doesn’t linger when he takes the yard with his men. She doesn’t deign, even cautiously, to speak. He has probably always liked reasons to let the wide spaces of the night swallow him up. He isn’t opposed to another.
She reaches for the bow. Forward of her, by all accounts, and he’s happy to turn it into her much smaller hand. He helped her shoot it once, the first time she came across him here. Fingertips graze knuckles and linger, just long enough to catch her eye, just long enough to confirm to himself that she recalls the same.
The Warrior of Light tries not to think too hard about it. Against her better judgment, she says, “that’s understandable,” anyway. And it feels like she’s probably admitted something. Not much, but something that matters enough that she won’t forget and neither will he. She thinks he doesn’t seem to forget anything about her at all. Which feels conspiratorial itself. She can’t forget anything about him either. If their paths keep crossing like this, if it keeps on just being them, maybe there will keep being more to remember.
And if she keeps asking him questions, she might be accused of growing greedy. Her Father always told her questions were important because the answers cannot be unlearned. That it was important to know what to ask and when not to. She was raised to understand when to take the path of least resistance and when to be more prudent. Building up this trove of details she doesn’t need is probably not prudent.
So she asks: “Tell me why you switched to the blade?”
And he doesn’t bother challenging the idea, because she isn’t wrong even if he hasn’t ever really told himself he’s put down the bow. He wouldn’t have been picking at old calluses for so long if she were wrong. It strikes him, again, as the kind of scrutiny that would have generally disturbed him. He is used to discomfort — handles it well, even — but this makes him no less private a man, in the end.
The Warrior of Light does not make him uncomfortable in any way he wouldn’t (doesn’t) go looking for. As she waits for him to answer her, she worries her lip with a sharp fang and it’s distracting and he can’t help but think ‘just like that.’ Which begs the question: is her attention, the kind that carefully lays him bare in the most mundane ways, a kind of ritual now too? Can it be, if he keeps reaching?
He knows better.
He’s been coming to the yard alone long before the possibility of her. He likes routines when he can afford them. Little things firmly in his control when so much is not.
“It felt necessary,” he says at last, and then corrects, “or proper.”
She is careful as she draws a finger down the bow string. Without a bit of magic to augment her own strength, it is too heavy for her to draw alone, sized and strung for an Elezen knight. The thing is, she finds she doesn’t prefer to use magic. Not when —
Aymeric maneuvers himself carefully behind her. One hand on her shoulder, as if she needs him to tell her where he is. As if she isn’t keenly aware of exactly where she stops and he begins. This isn’t necessary (or proper) but she doesn’t say that out loud. He doesn’t ask her about the cleaved distance. He knows the answer and that it is different, spoken or unspoken.
“And Naegling was a gift of my late father’s. The Viscount, that is.” He does not need to let his fingers trail down the lengths of her arms as they return to settle on the bow, one hand wrapping gingerly over top hers, the other finding a shared space on the bowstring. But he does it anyway. This isn’t the first time, and she promises herself she won’t start counting. She promises herself she doesn’t come here looking for closure.
He has his routines and she has hers. The nights in Ishgard are cavernous. There is far too much room for both of them and all the city’s intentions.
His bare stomach is warm against her back and she feels a little like he becomes shelter when he curves around her like this. Sturdy. Sure. Certain. Familiar. She pushes the feeling into the dark. Together, they nock an arrow from the second quiver on his hip and let it fly. It doesn’t quite hit center, but neither of them is terribly concerned. It’s hard to be concerned about too much of anything, letting their bodies think while their minds wander. Where to?
“All knights must be adequate with a blade,” Aymeric says. “Even Estinien, though it might be generous to say the dragoons are made to fully participate in basic training with the rest of us.”
“But you favor the bow,” she says, matter-of-fact. Again, she isn’t wrong, and he rolls this around carefully in the fore of his mind. She is so certain. “And it suits you.” He will file this away, with all the other fluttering pieces of her, for careful review when her dark hair isn’t against his chest and he can’t feel her heartbeat tremble through her spine.
“Aye, given equal choice I’d do well watching from the flank.” Aymeric says easily. It’s not exactly a joke, but it could be, if it needs to be.
He is surprised again when she scoffs, loudly, and the next arrow they shoot together veers wildly away from the target and into the snow.
“I mean that it seems natural that you are steady in the way an archer should be. Focused. Or centered…” breathtakingly so, but she won’t say that part. She should stop saying more entirely. So she does. And the silence is comfortable again, so long as she doesn’t think about the way their bodies still speak. She has understood him since the beginning this way, across rooms, and she’s understood he’s heard her the same way. This close, she thinks, is like his voice pressed against her ear, intimacy by virtue.
Their next arrow finds its mark, cracking through the mess of shafts already lodged at the target’s center from Aymeric’s handiwork. He shifts against her and she feels like she can hear the slow smile coiling into his voice behind her.
“Is that so?”
It would be so easy to become greedy, she thinks. It is good she was also raised to be humble, deferential, like a hobble. Otherwise she might swallow the whole world when he makes it feel simple. Like it’s her right. But what, really, is in a smile she can’t even see? Why can’t it be proper?
“I believe you’re aware,” she mumbles. He laughs again. She thinks it would be nice if he laughed more, or had reason to. She thinks that if she does what Ishgard needs, maybe he’ll have those reasons eventually. He’ll wear the bow when he wants to. She thinks this is a better way to be thinking. She’ll make less trouble.
“Perhaps.” His thoughts wander. “To be honest, Naegling feels a bit like a promise to the family that raised me, which I know full well is far too sentimental for fundamentally bloody work.” He lets her go, putting the careful set of ilms between them that she — or they — have deemed necessary (lest they become greedy). She holds onto the bow, letting it occupy both her hands like she might otherwise reach too far. Fingers curl reflexively. Oh, prudence.
“Mostly, I cannot abide asking anyone to go where I will not go first myself. And lately it has increasingly become my lot to ask very much of my fellows.” She thinks he sounds ill at ease about it, which makes her hold tighter to the bow. He is too good of a man for the part he’s decided to play.
“Had you thought to march off alone, Lord Commander?” She asks lightly. She thinks he sighs, but she feels it is critical to keep her eyes trained on the toes of her boots. She is certain if she looks at him she’ll learn something else unforgettable.
She freezes when he brushes her cheek with the barest touch of his knuckles. “At one time, I would have liked to believe I could, though I have probably always known better.”
“And now?”
He doesn’t answer her for a long time. He doesn’t answer her at all.
“Why do you come here, my friend?” At night, alone, to me. She swallows down a number of answers she thinks are best kept unformed. She tucks away the quiet affection he lets slip in the careful solitude of the training yard. She’ll remember and leave it untouched, where sentiment can remain safe.
Happenstance. She lets it hang unspoken. She can equivocate to herself, but she doesn’t care for lying to him.
When she fails to say anything at all (the things that are on the tip of both their tongues), he makes up the ground for her: “I am both loathe to ask and deeply heartened to have you, and many others, at my side.” His hands come to rest carefully at his sides. “Perhaps it makes the burden of the blade a little lighter.”
She holds the bow out to him. “Well, I am here as you need me. And I am sorry to intrude beyond that.” His fingertips, the cold back of her hands, and all the answers he asked for. He takes the bow. The right and simple thing exists in the quiet. But why isn’t it easy?
“No intrusion,” he says. “Not now, nor ever before. Consider it a need, if you must.” Her gaze flicks up to his face sharply, and he is grinning. Charming. Open. Utterly undiplomatic. There is no polish in the way the curve of his lips is ever so slightly lopsided. He ruffles a hand through his wind-teased hair. “A moment to be myself, perhaps.” So very unplanned.