fandomhighdorms | The Salle, Friday Morning

He could not afford to grow lazy. Having slipped out of bed early, Leto now stood in the middle of the salle, the blades in front of him on the floor. He pulled his shirt over his head and flung it aside, then stretched out his muscles, forcing away any remaining sleepiness. With a swift movement he grabbed the blades and hurled them spinning into the air, where they separated, so that a total of seven deadly sharp disks were spinning, hovering in the air. Best not to overdo it today. He reached out for the knives, waiting for the attack.

The blades attacked him from all directions. He dodged and parries, avoiding their trajectories. There was no time for mistake; he had to know every part of his body at any given moment. Pushing his body to extremes, he felt that stillness of mind that came with this training. The spinning discs kept retuning until he had forced each one of them off its path, making it strike and get caught in a hard surface. Leto crouched on the floor, breathing heavily.

[Open of course. If you want to know what this looks like, check here.]

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He shook his head. "No, but my body. To an extent that I can control the world around me. Did you come here to train too? I did not mean not to leave space for anyone else."

"No, no, I was just passing by -- I go to the gun range sometimes and it's near. I'm sorry to disturb your work."

Smiling, Leto said: "You were not disturbing me. I had almost finished." He laughed. "I need to remind myself not to grow lazy here."

"It's easy to get out of practice," Romeo said, shifting to be a fraction more serious. "There are few real threats, here. I've been here a year and no one's been killed."

No, that was never going to stop being surprising.

Leto stretched his arms, turning a little more serious too. "I seem to get different opinions on how dangerous this place can really be," he said.

"I think it depends on what one's home is like," Romeo said, mulling it over. "Things are strange here, sometimes frighteningly so. But I've never woken up to news a friend has been shot for drinking in the wrong tavern, and that's what I judge by."

"People seem to fear strangeness rather than death," Leto observed, nodding. "What would be the wrong tavern where you come from?"

Leto had put it well. "Exactly! Things are strange here but never deadly that I can tell," Romeo nodded as he considered the question.

"And that's rather its own long story. The shorter version would be that my family and a rival house have been fighting for generations. Any tavern hosting Caulets is not likely to welcome Montagues, and so the reverse. It is said to be better of late, but it's always a fragile peace."

... Romeo's short explanation was not all that short, no.

"And you have to live in the same town? House Atreides had been enemies with House Harkonnen for generations, but at least we had a planet each." Leto assumed rivalry was similar enough though.

"Down to the same church," Romeo nodded ruefully. "I think everyone was too stubborn to move." Or ... something like that. It wasn't a question he'd ever understood any answer to.

"What is your planet called?"

"I'm from Arrakis," he said, "But Caladan was the home of the Atreides until my grandfather's time."

"I'm never going to get used to the idea of moving planets," Romeo commented. "Is there fighting with your Harkonnen?"

"We defeated them," Leto replied. Apart from those who lived on in the minds of the Pre-Born, of course.

"So you have peace now?" Romeo asked, hopeful.

"There will always be enemies," Leto replied, picking up the blades.

That would make sense, of course. Romeo shifted his attention to the weapons in Leto's hands. "Might I have a closer look?"

Leto offered the blades to Romeo. They were sharp, but he must have seen enough of the practise to notice that.

He had, which was why he took the blade very gingerly and held it just long enough to verify it was sharp before returning them to their rightful owner. "I wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of that. Or any side, really."

With a smile, Leto said: "The blades are not used in the first stages of the training. Does your people mainly rely on guns?"

"Almost entirely," Romeo agreed, his hand going to his holster as he remembered his manners. "I'd already been to the locker to retrieve mine, if you'd like to see."

"Certainly," Leto said. "We have firearms too, but that doesn't exclude the importance of training for close combat."

Romeo offered the gun delicately; it was a standard pistol, save the elaborate imagery on the handle.

"And for close combat we would just use fists or knives," Romeo said in return. "But I'm not trained in any formal way, really."

Leto examined the gun, running a finger over the decoration. Then he carefully returned it to Romeo. "You're not?"

"I've learned as I grew." Romeo didn't normally think much about that; it was how things were. The well-off in Verona liked to pretend they weren't raising young men to fight on the streets, which meant Romeo had learned to fight through a process of getting knocked down and trying again, and to shoot by being handed a gun and told not to point it at anyone he wasn't willing to kill.

"But there's no art to what I can do, nothing like what you were doing when I happened by."

"The requirements of our backgrounds are different then," Leto said simply, smiling.

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