fandomhighdorms | The Salle, Friday Afternoon

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The Salle, Friday Afternoon

Cassandra had woken up with strange urges.

Not unfamiliar, but strange in their intensity.

She had lasted what portion of the day she could not spend elsewhere by thinking very hard about doing something else. Not something that involved the urges or anything related to them, mind you. Something far more cathartic and useful. Something she was, now that she had the time, at last capable of doing.

Within minutes of her arrival, the head of one dummy had gone soaring, slamming back against the wall. Cassandra gritted her teeth and lashed out again, this time leaving a long gauge in the dummy's arms. And then again. The third time, she kicked the dummy so hard it fell over, and she shoved her long blade straight into its chest.

She pulled it free with an angry hiss and turned towards the next dummy.

... the school could fund their replacement, surely?

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In lieu of pinning someone against a wall and kissing them hard, Anders had decided to make a more constructive use of his energies. Elemental magic drills, for example. Which was what brought him to the salle, which was why he was in prime position to watch Cassandra destroy the dummies.

It was unfortunate that his first thought was that it was rather immensely attractive.

He swallowed hard, attempted to fill his head with white noise and pleasant thoughts, and went to set up on the opposite side of the room. "Hello there," he said. "There's a chunk of neck still attached to that dummy. You might want to work on that."

Startled, Cassandra spun around immediately, her eyes wild as she kept the sword in attack position. Then she saw who it was, and she let out an angry huff and cast the sword aside.

"You," she growled.

"Me," Anders agreed, placidly arranging a group of three fresh dummies for his own use. "Sorry I didn't give you enough notice to have a cake ready. I'm sure you'll make it up to me next time."

He was never sure what it was in him that made him run his mouth at people like Cassandra. Possibly it was suicidal. Whatever it was, though, it made for an excellent distraction from the dark and the cold and the itch under his skin.

It was maddening, was what it was. Especially now, when she had brought so much focus into her work, and he just crept up and started making jokes.

"You are not funny," Cassandra said flatly, "Much as you seem to enjoy congratulating yourself on your wit."

"Seeker Pentaghast doesn't think I'm funny," Anders said to the dummies, pulling a sad face. "Well, that's it for me then. I'll go home and read boring things until I think of something appropriately somber to say."

Except he wasn't going to, because he had a right to work too. He nudged one of the dummies a fraction closer to the others and began to back away.

"Do you never get sick of the sound of your own voice, mage?" Cassandra reached down and picked her sword back up off the floor.

"It hasn't happened yet," Anders said, suppressing an eyeroll at the 'mage.' He knew she knew his name; someday she'd even use it. "I suppose it might eventually, and that'll be a sad day."

"Or perhaps you will then do us all a favor and stop talking to charm only yourself," Cassandra said.

She slid back into position, pouring every scrap of the strange and unwelcome instinct to look the mage's way into her motions instead.

"You have to like me at least a little bit," Anders said. He kept his tone jaunty, but there was some genuine hurt in it somewhere. "Chantry politics aside, I mean. I'm told I'm quite charming."

He didn't manage to look away as quickly as Cassandra did. Maker damn it all, the woman could fill out a suit of armor.

Edited 2015-02-13 17:04 (UTC)

"Who is it who tells you that, I wonder?" Cassandra said. Though her tone was slipping increasingly towards distracted, and not for the reason she wished was at fault.

"People with good taste," Anders said, largely because he couldn't think of a specific example off the top of his head when his brain was going from Cassandra's armor to women in armor in general to a novel he'd read a few years before with a particularly educational love scene between a warrior and an elven assassin. "Does it matter?"

He finally pulled his eyes away and tried to remember where he'd put his staff.

It was Cassandra's turn to dart a quick look his way-- all right, longer than quick. Many mages she knew were somewhat skinny; it had never occurred to her before that Anders was not.

"So no one, then."

Not skinny, no. Anders wasn't muscular by any stretch of the imagination, but he was solidly built, with a touch of softness that came from island overindulgence.

He sighed deeply, standing there with staff in hand as though he'd forgotten what he meant to do with it. "Maybe not in so many words that I can think of right now. My - Nathan's father called me amusing, does that count?"

"Not particularly," Cassandra said dryly.

She had her own sword still in hand, and her feet and hips were still in the ready position to strike. The rest of her was not; at least not for a few seconds more, until it occurred to her that staring at Anders' jawline was ridiculous and she turned once more.

"Alas," Anders said, and frowned at her when he realized how long she was lingering. "What is it? Did I have something on my face?"

He ran a hand over his scruff, checking.

"...No, besides the product of... poor shaving," Cassandra said.

The sentence had a few too many unintentional pauses for her liking, but there was no fixing it now.

"I have to have a bit of a beard to balance out the ponytail and the earring," Anders informed her. "I'm going for roguish, not pretty."

And now a part of his brain, probably the same part that had started teasing Cassandra to start with, was helpfully pointing out that she would probably be rather pretty if she wiped the sour look off her face.

"Rogues are nothing to aspire to," Cassandra muttered.

To the dummy, at which she was quite pointedly looking now, if only to obscure that face and its known proclivity to flushing in the face of... ugh.

"I didn't say I wanted to go rob a caravan, I said I wanted to look like I might," Anders muttered, wondering why he felt like such an idiot and when the gym had gone from frigid to far too warm.

He decided the best way to address this confusing swirl of emotions was by cleaving a dummy's head open with an expertly-laid blast of electricity.

It certainly shifted the mood.

The crackle of electricity snapped Cassandra back to full awareness. She released a frustrated battle cry and struck her dummy hard across the arm.

Fighting had a way of doing that, yes. Anders watched her work out of the corner of one eye while he ran through his drills. Electricity, fire, ice, spirit. Electricity, fire, ice, spirit ....

It was hard to do with Cassandra in the room, with the way she kept breathing and moving her body and having hair and suchlike. His impaired focus meant his ice and spirit spells were weak, though fire seemed to burn exceptionally brightly somehow.

Cassandra certainly had no performance troubles-- her frustration made every hit count double, as it had before. Unfortunately it also drove her to make quite a bit of noise, snarling and grunting with each strike.

The sound of fire beside her was almost fitting. Almost made one-- no.

Anders frowned harder, trying to block out the sound. He shouted a few times himself, but -- perhaps because he was so self-conscious about it -- they were pretty feeble attempts.

He just wished she didn't grunt so much.

Eventually, the inevitable happened and she distracted him just as he was lining up to cast. The wild blast of ice ended up freezing a nice patch of ceiling, and he cursed as he pursed his lips at it.

"Did you have to be so loud?"

The irritable sound Cassandra made was no large improvement, but at least it was... something else? She lowered her sword briefly and glanced his way.

"It is not my problem that you do not pay attention," she said.

"I can pay attention just fine when the person next to me doesn't sound like the back room at a tavren," Anders snapped, not entirely fairly. But his honor was at stake!

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