Log: Dela and AGB WHO: Dela and Alexander Graham Bell WHEN: Sunday evening WHERE: The Mount Weather gym WHAT: A training session so AGB doesn’t tragically die like in the Friday Meme, and also smooches. WARNINGS: Fluff. Pure candyfloss. You’ve been warned.
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An hour or so before, she’d swept into Alexander’s workspace without much hesitation, grabbing his hand and pulling him away from it. Between her own work in the medical ward and his nonstop inventiveness, she knew they needed a break and so she’d decided they’d take one. Dela offered a grin to him, just to reassure him that they wouldn’t be doing anything dangerous or awful and that this wasn’t some great emergency, and explained as they moved that it was time for some training. It would be good for their health, she said, to get out of the lab spaces and get some physical activity.
In the gym, she’d told him to take his shoes off and to lose some of the restricting layers he wore. “You are not so ideally dressed for this, I know,” she’d explained then. “But is better this way. You likely be wearing something like this if you have to defend yourself anyway.”
Training in Grounder warfare, particularly these early stages, was perhaps startlingly calm. Her version of it, at any rate. This very early part of training had consisted largely of positioning and fluid movements from one to the next. She adjusted his limbs into proper form, speaking instructions in a very gentle voice and in Trigedasleng exclusively. Between the tone of her voice and the sheer physical closeness of her adjusting him into each position, it was all fiercely intimate.
From behind him, one hand on his back for posture and the other running along his arm to the spear he held, she smiled. “And now you breathe,” she said. “And then, you strike.”
Alexander had been reminding himself to breathe for the entire last hour. Getting stolen away from his work would normally be objectionable, but not when it was Dela grabbing his hand and dragging him down the hall. It was the sort of thing that would make a man’s heart beat a bit faster, though, and it definitely made breathing less of an effortless, unconscious act and more something he had to spend some focus on. The fact that he was, by his own cultural standards, half-dressed in public. His jacket, vest, and necktie had all been thrown over the back of the chair, leaving him in just his trousers and shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up his arms...and a beautiful woman’s hands on him.
Breathe. Right. He could do that. Breathe, and strike!
He made the movement as Dela had demonstrated, and was so delighted at getting it at least more or less right that he laughed aloud.
“Like that? Did I get it?”
Dela had dreamed of battle, as she occasionally did, and she’d dreamed of Alexander being unable to properly defend himself. That, mixed with restlessness, had led her to steal him from his work to train. There was too much going on in and out of the mountain to waste too much time, and she always felt calmer after a good session like this. She stepped back once Aleck was in the perfect position and her instruction had been given, giving him exactly the amount of space he needed to execute the strike.
She repeated herself, telling him to breathe and strike, and then watched him do exactly that. She beamed with pride at his act and the resulting laugh that he emitted, moving around to face him and nodding.
“You did! You getting to know this quickly,” she said, grinning. “I am not so surprised, though. You too smart not to.” She reached for her own spear, taking position again. “Okay, now we slowly go through all of the motions together, yes? First, you make stable your feet.” She followed that with the Trigedasleng word for it.
Alexander nodded, taking up the same position as before. Start from the feet, ground yourself, and find the rest of the form from there. He could do that, if he could just keep his mind on his form and not on Dela’s smile. She did have a good point, after all, that this world was not one to go around not being able to defend himself. And of course this was an excellent opportunity to learn Trigedasleng - it was much easier to practice and remember when it was in context like this, rather than straight memorization.
“Right,” he said, and then went on in Trigedasleng. “Feet stable. Yes?”
Dela’s smile fell away into a very calm, confident seriousness as they started the series of maneuvers, because she didn’t want either of them to be distracted. She watched him position himself, nodding as he did so. She looked him up and down, making sure that his feet were in proper position. “Good,” she said. “Now, hands.” She demonstrated, holding her spear before her in both hands, establishing the proper grip. From there, she continued through those major positions, recreating them as part of the training before it was time to strike.
“Now this time when you strike, we move through combat formation. You strike, I deflect, I strike, you deflect. We go slow until you get it, yes?” she said, slipping into English to make sure he understood.
Hah! She said he was getting it right! Alexander grinned before making himself be serious again, setting his hands and posture as Dela had instructed.
“Right,” Alexander said with a nod. “Let’s go.”
Strike and deflect, strike and deflect - over and over through the motions. They began slowly, at a careful walking pace, then a little faster, and a little faster still - not at proper battle pace, not by a long shot, but fast enough to have Alexander working. He wasn’t in bad shape - he was a practical scientist, not a theorist, and he did plenty of physical work - but he wasn’t a warrior by any stretch of the imagination.
Dela was incredibly proud of his progress. He was a natural at this, she could feel it. It made her excited to teach him more — after all, this was very basic stuff. She liked to teach this way, though. Even if the Grounder style was often more violent and less refined, she thought it was best to have the basics down very effectively.
She smiled, offering a nod.
She gave instruction as they went along, sometimes pausing to use the tip of her spear to lift his into the right place or to adjust his feet. They built the pace over time, to the point that he was having to act and think on his feet simultaneously. A quick flick of her spear and a missed deflection and she caught him a little harder than she expected on his jaw and she paused, her expression concerned. “Are you okay?
“Oof!” Alexander flinched at the hit, but he quickly gave her a smile. It was a slightly awkward smile, because catching a stick to the face certainly wasn’t pleasant, but it was genuine. “I’m fine!” he assured her, because of course he didn’t want her to feel bad about smacking him in the face. “Truly, just fine. That is…probably going to bruise, but really I’ve had worse.”
Dela winced at his reaction, and she paused further still to take his arm and pull him closer to a light source, setting her spear down and placing gently adjusting his face with her hands so that she could see the impact sight. She winced again. “Definitely a bruise,” she said, offering an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry I hit you,” she added, brushing a thumb over the red mark. “Better your jaw than your eye, though? We celebrate that, at least.”
“Completely worthy of celebration,” he said, and--oh dear, was he speaking more quietly than normal? Yes, Alexander noted, he definitely was, because Dela was not only standing close, but she had her fingers brushing lightly over his face. His face which had swollen a bit, but not that much, and that was as good a reason to be smiling as any. “Really, it’s not bad. I promise. No need for an apology at all. That’s just how training goes, eh? What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and all that.”
Dela could’ve taken her hands away. She’d finished her examination, after all. And yet. She smiled, nodding, her thumb still making its soft, soothing passes over his skin where she’d hit him. “This is true,” she said, nodding. “You are starting to sound like a Grounder now, Alexander. Who knew all it takes is some combat.” Her smile grew a bit. “You want to keep going?”
Keeping going was what he should do, Alexander knew. That was clearly the proper thing to be doing.
Except that it definitely wasn’t proper, now that he thought about it. He was half-dressed, practicing staff-and-spear combat, with an equally half-dressed woman. There was nothing proper about it! His father would drop dead of apoplexy on the spot if he caught sight of him like this!
So really...really, what was being just a teensy bit more improper?
“What I’d really like to do is kiss you,” he said. “And then keep going. If you’d be amenable, of course.”
Dela knew it would’ve been better to ask the question if she’d already picked up her spear once more, but she didn’t. Instead, she’d just asked. By just asking, she was opening herself up to that possibility that he’d say what she’d truly rather do as well.
She looked at him curiously as she awaited his answer, still close, still touching. Dela knew warfare, and she knew this heat, but it was not so often she felt it the way she did now.
“I do not know what ‘amenable’ means. I think perhaps it means that I agree to the idea,” she said, smiling. “And I do, yes. Very much so.”
“That is exactly what amenable means,” Alexander said, and placed his hand at her waist. He leaned in just a little closer, within kissing distance and not quite there yet. “Amenable. Adjective. Open to a suggestion. What would that be in Trigedasleng?”
Dela grinned, leaning closer to him and reasserting her gentle hold on his jaw, her other hand moving to his shoulder. At his question, she was notably distracted, their proximity and the softness of his voice drawing her attention more to his lips and closing the gap between them and her own and not as much on his words. She smiled still, answering his question with the appropriate term in her native tongue, and then took the initiative to lean forward that extra little bit and kiss him.
That was one Trigedasleng phrase that Alexander wasn’t going to forget any time soon - or ever. A kiss like that, sweet and soft and long-awaited, made everything around it stand out in perfectly clarity. Funny, that - he would have thought everything but the kiss itself would be a bit fuzzy, but every smell and sound and touch was in remarkable focus.
The kiss, though - that was remarkable, too. More than remarkable. Excellent? Superb? Perfection? Vocabulary was rushing through Alexander’s head as his hand slid up to the middle of Dela’s back, and then entirely abandoned. In fact, Alexander found that his usually very busy mind was suddenly completely and utterly clear. Normally it was crowded with physics and acoustics and engineering and linguistics, and now it was all just Dela. That was…
“Oh, that was lovely,” he murmured, still not pulling back yet. “Definitely gonna have to do that again.”
Though such things as sex and physical affection were certainly not uncommon to her people or unfamiliar to Dela, she did not often preoccupy herself with such things. Certainly not recently, with all that had happened with the dragon and relocating to the mountain. Most of the people she’d interacted with recently had been patients, too, and she was never the sort to give into that kind of temptation. So it’d been awhile.
Even still, Dela was sure she’d never had a lovelier kiss than this. She moved closer still as his hand traveled, fitting her body against his to return the kiss as it was given. When they did separate their lips, she was breathless.
“Oh yes,” she said, nodding, and kissed him again without much hesitation, though she pulled away after a moment. “We should get back to fighting,” she said, their faces still close as she offered a teasing grin. “Or we never do.”
“A fair point, Miss Dela,” he said, and tipped his head once more to kiss her cheek. When he pulled back, he was grinning all over again. He gave his spear a little thump on the floor. “Shall we, then?”
She grinned, nodding, and reached to grab her spear as well. “We shall. Take your position, Alexander.”