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“Captain.”
“Captain.”
Harvard slowly eased out of his lounged position, far back and returned his arms from being draped over the back of his bench to his sides, hands into his lap. The old wood creaked, the thick black metal cool on his elbow, and the fallen leaves at his feet rustled with each slight movement he made. The park was quiet, not so many people meandering about even with the sun still doing its best to peek out beyond the trees to stain the grass just beyond the path he sat off of.
He pulled down his sweater’s sleeves, a soft and thin wool more closely resembling cashmere dyed a cool toned purple, but still offered out a hand to the blond in front of him. The blond, in his long coat and dark neutrals, who pushed up wire frame glasses further up his nose, blinked blue eyes back at him.
“Thank you for meeting with me,” the blond told him, shaking his hand in return. “It’s been a minute.”
“Could’ve been worse, but it has been a bit,” Harvard agreed. He eased back again, allowing for room on the bench to be taken.
Slowly, Jesse took a seat next to him, exhaling quietly. “Haven’t been back here in a long while either.”
“Connecticut, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
Harvard hummed quietly. “You’re probably having a great time, though. New York and all.”
“I think so,” Jesse returned. “It’s fun for me. I’m glad to… have a bit more leeway to figure myself out. I mean, you guys stayed in Connecticut but you still moved, no?”
“New Haven’s not far. It’s nice to be just far enough to only really be able to go home on the weekends, but not too far where that’s out of reach,” Harvard explained. “It’s been good, for me anyway. I can’t speak for anyone else.”
Jesse nodded slowly. “I get it. It’s good for you guys, though.”
“So… why are you really here?” Harvard asked instead of imminently responding to that line of thought.
“I wanted advice,” Jesse admitted, tight as he did. He exhaled slowly, like it was an uncomfortable thing for him to be admitting to. “From someone who’s been running a team longer than I have, I mean.”
Harvard’s eyebrows knit together. “Must be important if we had to meet up and this couldn’t be a phone call. Not exactly an easy commute for you.”
“I’m… it was more convenient than you think,” Jesse told him, shrugging at the notion. He sucked on his teeth, waiting for another moment before summoning the words back. “But it was important. I just… how do you manage the different egos?”
“Oh, it’s like that.” Harvard laughed quietly, a short loosing of breath with a low pitch. “It’s not easy. Everyone’s got an ego, my team does tend to have a few that are a bit more inflated than others. Which, at least it’s better than the foil team’s. I don’t know, I try to mediate when I can, which winds up feeling like judge and jury most days it gets bad. Sometimes I have another mediator, sometimes it’s just me.”
“And how do you mediate without bias?”
“It’s like that?”
“Kind of.”
Harvard gave it a moment to think about it. He was trying to be deliberate with his answer. “It can be hard sometimes, and I go easier on Aiden than I should a lot of the time. But taking the issue and finding the middle ground when I know I might have bias helps. Or, bringing in a more neutral third party in on it too.”
“That makes sense,” Jesse told him. “I’m figuring that part out still.”
“Gotta keep them humble, but sometimes you do have to inflate the ego a bit. Usually best to save that for pre-bout though.”
Jesse nodded once. “Yeah. That part I knew about,” he remarked quietly.
“What brought this on?”
“Things got… a little heated when we lost to Notre Dame, and they’re still heated now. Bit of infighting, lots of egos. I’d rather not try and bench two of my best fencers, but the way they’re being over all of this as we’re trying to start up again makes it hard not to seriously consider it,” Jesse explained.
“How many are on your team this year?”
“We’ve got six epee fencers total. Which is fine, but some of them are stronger than others.” Jesse paused, tapping his knuckles together. “And you?”
“Five for us,” Harvard told him. It was a fair trade of information, he understood that much. “It’s true of every team, some people are always going to be stronger than others. But you’re only as strong as your weakest link.”
Jesse huffed. “Yeah, right.”
“It’s true. They wouldn’t still say it if it wasn’t.”
He tapped on his knee, then shook his head. “I guess so, yeah. If we want to actually win something big this year, I don’t want to be too drastic, but I might have to.”
“You can get your points across without drastic action. You start it small, conversations and practical tests. If it isn’t getting across, you ramp it up,” Harvard reiterated. “Jumping the gun tends to just piss people off and you’ll lose their trust. And besides, we might have you this year too.”
Jesse raised an eyebrow. “No offense, but Yale isn’t exactly all that in the grand scheme of things.”
“Same conference though. We’ll go head to head,” Harvard told him, cracking a smile. “And you wouldn’t come to me if you didn’t have at least a little respect for our team.”
“Yeah. Right.” Jesse’s tone may have alluded to the fact that he didn’t believe his own words, but he’d still softened a bit. “You’re also just a good captain for your team from everything that I hear.”
Harvard laughed quietly. “Who’s saying that?”
“...people?”
“Sure.”
Jesse waved it off. “It doesn’t matter. The point is, begrudgingly, I have to admit when someone might be a little more skilled than I am in certain aspects of all of this. Intrapersonal relations have never been my strong suit.”
“Well, it’s an acquired skill. Unfortunately it comes with practice and dealing with this kind of stuff,” Harvard told him gently. “Sometimes you have to put yourself into these situations to make yourself better at it.”
“You sound like my coach.”
“You wanted to be a captain, didn’t you? You’re handling all the shit your coach doesn’t want to,” Harvard pointed out.
Jesse rolled his eyes dramatically, not wholly unlike how Aiden would, and pushed hair out of his face. “I didn’t ask for this. It just happened. I was a captain before because I was just the best on the team, which made me experienced enough to handle it now.”
There were words Harvard wanted to say. Biting ones, things to wound, but he’d hold them in. That wasn’t what this was about, there was a time and a place for it in the future. “You’re incredibly lucky if this is your first real point of contention between teammates.”
“It’s not. But it was easier before.” Jesse shrugged. “Back then the preferred method was just to tell them to keep their heads down and fence. Doesn’t work like that now.”
“Better fencers now. Some of them might be Olympic hopefuls,” Harvard pointed out. “You have to change your method of approach.”
“Yeah. Which is why… yeah. You’re right.” Jesse rubbed his forehead, maybe a nervous tic, and shook his head again.
“Anything else?” Harvard asked, almost wary to do so. “You can’t tell me that you came all the way to New Haven to ask me that.”
“No, I didn’t. I have a date, actually,” Jesse told him simply. “It was just a reason to drop into town earlier.”
“Ah, I see.” Harvard chuckled quietly at the thought. He may have known with the getup on its own, but he never could be too sure. “Well, good luck to you on that front. I won’t keep you too long.”
Jesse tugged up his coat’s sleeve, checking a silver banded watch. “I’ve got time.”
“Oh?”
“I did have one more question, actually.”