A great roaring filled Dominicus’ ears, and it took too long to realize it was just in his ears. Just his blood. Some of which was leaking out of his face, with the pain-forced tears leaking out of his eyes, and the heat leaking out of his body.
He got out from under Third and walked away – simply ‘away’, not simply ‘walked’ because there were various things, injurious and not, wrong with his ability to properly manage his legs. The important thing was he was up and moving in the opposite direction even if he didn’t precisely remember how or when.
Too much. Far too much.
His vision narrowed down to the patches of wood and grass that made up the Cogadh field because looking at anything else felt deadly. His shoulder hurt and he was almost tearfully grateful for the sharp, enduring pain breaking into his mind – at least it was something specific, something real. It wasn’t so bad he thought he was deeply injured – Third hadn’t gone so far as that – but it was close. He needed to rest it, the whole arm probably, for a while.
Somebody in grey popping into his field of vision startled the shit out of him, even though logically there had to be hundreds of grey-clad cadets spilling out everywhere now that the match ended, taking advantage of the break before then next match started to move about or collect or place new bets. He wasn’t brown or green or yellow or flower-coloured and that was uncomfortable; Dominicus very much only wanted to be seeing trees and grass and bushes.
It was Teä. He had been saying something, or had some other intention, but had stopped to stare at Dominicus with a cocked head, concern and maybe fear furrowing his brow.
And then the stupidest possible thing happened.
Orga also came out of the woods. The rest of the team was following behind him, more or less. They had to convene to talk to the testméir about the end of the match. Orga saw Dominicus and, full of bluster, started yelling as he approached.
Dominicus closed and clocked him. Thank God he did it with right arm, which wasn’t working properly, because he had put his whole strength into it. It hurt like Hell to move his shoulder like that so soon.
Orga didn’t quite go down from the one blow, but Dominicus landing a solid kick to his gut certainly did it. Then Teä was on his back, and some half the team working to keep him from finishing Orga off. He didn’t feel shit about that except that he was glad all the things he was shouting were in Midraeic so nobody could understand him. He did his mother proud
He was physically present for the meeting with the teistméir in the little tent set off to the side from the Cogadh field. They actually let him sit so he could get checked out by the medics (the one who liked worms – thankfully he prescribed no worms but a sling, a couple of plasters, and a little rest), so he had some excuse to be distracted. It vaguely occurred to him that it was weird the judges were here, too, but honestly for most of it his mind was a fiery blank.
Eventually, he also noticed a little too much poorly-disguised staring at him, the whites of eyes sliding in and quickly out of view as cadets standing at attention tried to look without turning their heads or being too obvious, and naturally failing at both.
God, he hated staring.
But the medic was now ready to leave and the judges were asking them questions and he could stand, and join his team, meaning he could no longer afford to be distracted by... whatever.
“So, what was your plan?” One of the black-robed judges asked. It wasn’t all of them. Only three. Still, one judge would have been a lot to do something so lowly as speak to a First Year Cogadh team.
Up until now, Orga had been doing a good job of letting his recently-acquired head trauma excuse him from having substantive answers. Dominicus hadn’t really been paying much attention to the questions that had already been asked, but everyone got noticeably more nervous and it wasn’t because of him. And then, there was the rather stuttering, awkward silence that followed this.
“Well,” the fellow pretending to help Orga remain standing said, well aware that failing to answer was likely to get them all beaten, “that’s... really, Orga might be the best to–”
But Orga dramatically wobbled, in a way that let him step painfully onto the cadet’s foot.
“Or maybe...” the cadet followed lamely, but then – nothing.
They were all going to be beaten.
“Our strategy was independent teams,” Eire said, glancing repeatedly at Orga as he spoke, “more or less. So... so it may be hard to describe a single plan...”
This was stupid. More or less stupid than staying silent? Hard to say. More or less stupid than the way everyone kept sidelong staring at Dominicus...?
They could fuck themselves. Orga could fuck himself. Eire could fuck himself. The whole team could individually and then collectively go fuck themselves.
“Who were the independent teams? What was the motivation?” another of the judges asked. No idea who he was. Couldn’t get much except that from the collar of the uniform visible at the neck of his cloak he was a proper officer, in the actual Military, so not an Academy official.
“Well,” Eire said, which had to be the word most associated with their strategy at this point. They were all, alternately, like fish gaping, looking at him, and he each, alternately, silently thought ‘fuck you’ at them.
“We were concerned about Third,” Wynn piped up, his voice high and uncertain from the middle of the group. His face was terribly red. He shouldn’t even be speaking in the presence of a Cogadh judge, much less to one.
Good for him. Unfuck you, Wynn.
“...but it was hard to predict where he might be on the battlefield.” Wynn’s voice didn’t deepen, but did squeak less as he went on. “We... we... set out like a net. Whoever was going to run into him was going to have to do their best to tie him down for the duration of the match. So we couldn’t predict who might be going for the cró. So we... we more or less... trapped Third and regrouped to devise a strategy on the field.”
Utter horseshit, but he couldn’t very well say that half the team hated the other so they really had no idea what anyone else might be doing except that they all generally agreed they wanted to win somehow, which also apparently was a lie. He couldn’t very well say that he knew Orga was being dishonest about going along with the strategy Dominicus’ side of the team had come up with, and he couldn’t actually say what it was Orga’s side of the team had been doing because he knew they had an alternate plan they had refused to share. He also couldn’t very well say ‘we came up with some horseshit to feed Orga’s side of the team to keep them busy so he wouldn’t bollocks up our plan but he decided to utterly fuck us out of pettiness and even that only half-reliable strategy ended up getting shot in the nuts because apparently losing was better than working with Dominicus.’
That would make them all look petty and incompetent. No good for anyone.
While it was generally hard to read the expression of the judges, Dominicus was pretty sure that the one in the middle and kind of at the back had never heard anything so stupid in his life. But at least it was an answer.
“And so what was the disturbance following the match?” The one who asked this – an older man – seemed to be fighting hard not to find it amusing.
Well, he could chuckle his way into fucking himself.
But nobody was going to dare answer this, even with horseshit, so Dominicus stepped in to save their worthless asses.
“A personal disagreement,” Dominicus said.
The expression of the judges indicated this was insufficient.
“Cadet Bannamorga was...” a fucking traitorous idiot – no, that wouldn’t do–
“...in the heat of the moment,” and in every moment before and thereafter, unto the end of time, a blathering, wit-blighted, worthless, violent and cringing coward – nope–
“...disappointed,” and a disappointment, even to his own mother if God graced her with any sense – unhelpful, just finish with something–
“...in my performance during the match.”
A thick, stony silence fell in the tent. Dominicus liked to think the very breath of his lie filled the tent with the weight of sin.
“I expressed my displeasure... poorly,” Orga said, doing a good job of looking much more wounded that he should be. As much as he hoped he might have, Dominicus didn’t think he had even managed to break a rib, Prophet’s mercy always being wise if inexplicable.
If they were expecting to hear Dominicus say that he had also acted poorly, however, they were going to wait in this brooding silence a long, long time.
It was the teistméir’s turn to use the word:
“Well,” he said, “I think we have some of our answers. Cadet Galen, remain – the rest of you are dismissed.”
As they must, the rest of the team delivered their salutes (Orga, that cretin, with noble suffering), and filed out.
And they could fuck off eternally. At least now they couldn’t stare at him anymore.
But then, suddenly alone with the judges and the teistméir, Dominicus realized he probably ought to be worried.
And after he got done mentally doubting their parentage, he might even have started to be.
An hour later – hardly an hour, a rushed hour, in which he felt the need for satisfaction beyond satisfaction – how could he not be satisfied? And he was! But there was something else – then a long evening, a skipped dinner but no missed feast – later...
Cole had a fist buried deep in tight blonde curls, and he pulled, gently – ever so gently – to see the sigh forced out of the throat he opened with hands and body stretched...
He leaned back, a moment spent watching himself in vulgarity, marvelling at how an act so simple felt so good, and then he leaned forward and pressed his eyes closed against the throat, feeling the body he moved under him as his own.
Romance, he recalled.
To let him forget it was the simple joining of flesh and flesh that pleased him, he pretended it was romance and whispered whatever poetry came to mind when he heard the sighing, rasping voice shiver with want for him.
Coax it out, coax it out –
He pulled and grasped and bent and stretched and at every moment teased his partner closer and closer to crying out – to capitulation, the mounting of a single sigh into a long and clamorous moan.
He heard it.
He had wanted the sigh, but they finished in thorough violence – they were, after all, what they were, Cole always thought – and he and the body beneath him felt the same painful, blinding urgency to finish, to have and have done, to leave a mark that would remind them both, even with pain, of the fleeting moment of satisfaction.
Cole was blearily aware again, afterward, his fingers running through ringlets undone by sweat and vigour, that he was who he was, and Piet was Piet. He closed his eyes as they lay back, and let his rambling mind move unthinkingly through the motions of Piet's post-coital needs while he himself worked off to sleep. Lips settled against the side of his neck and promised quiet, and he safely went to sleep, duties done.
A suitable payoff, self-congratulatory celebration for his victories won today, and at least he had worked off the urge to blush.
Still dazed, Dominicus walked the long stretch across the grass from the main buildings to the walls, to his dormitory, clutching fistfuls of new papers, and even – somewhat inexplicably though thankfully – a new pair of boots. He didn’t know why they gave him the boots except that it seemed the officer didn’t like the state of his current boots, which was indeed sad and slightly too small. He had said something about how eventually they would be forced to take proper care of their boots except the First Years only got ones on their last legs anyway so it wasn’t really his fault but there was a slight a persistent buzzing in his skull – almost like a headache, but not quite – kept Dominicus from focusing properly.
It was still going, too, and like the waving air around a too-hot pot, had created a delicate zone of caution around several batches of thoughts he was simply too tired to entertain at this moment.
He would have to, yes – maybe not all of them – some certainly – anyway, what he wanted most of all was to sleep so deeply he nearly suffocated in his pillow.
He had thought, when they had made his team leave, and some short orders had been given, and he had spent an agonizingly long, quiet walk finding his way to the Quartermasters’ office, that he was being expelled.
The weight of a thousand years of Midraeic history, since the fall of Comidras and their expulsion from their own paradisiacal land to wander, though blessed often hated, among the peoples of the world, settled into a pinprick point of agonizing sharpness right at the spot where his neck met his shoulders. He understood totally the magnitude of his failure, the simplicity of the task he had been asked to undertake, the faith and desire embodied in the request of his father to make something happen, to represent his people, and he had fucked it up, royally.
They did not expel him.
It was hard to carry all the papers and the boots in one hand, as his right arm was still in a sling, and he could preoccupy himself with that until the fact that he was really quite tired, and really, more things than just his shoulder hurt interrupted for a bit, but those thoughts verged too close to the hot pot that was why he hurt quite so much and so he would go back to the papers.
Too much was going on. He just wanted to go to sleep, and could only pray that whatever amount he was about to get was enough, or that catching a beating for missing Stands would be worth it.
Oh, he didn’t want to think about that, either.
No, they didn’t expel him. But given all of the events of the day – even the ones he didn’t particularly want to think about – he was not certain what they had done wouldn’t be worse.