Winter took a long, decadent drag of her cigarette.
It was an expensive smoke, a Vacuo-made Argenti Élan, and one of her last. The ongoing diplomatic crisis and the ensuing shuttered borders meant that the brand was now all-but-impossible to come by, at least from the legitimate merchants Winter Schnee patronaged. Argenti brands were the traditional favorite of Atlesian officers, dating back to Mantle's occupation of the Sanusian deserts, a prestigious association the tobacconists of today were none too shy to play up.
The hit of nicotine to her nerves was so cathartic that she didn't even feel guilty, not even at the familiar disappointment in breaking what had until now been a twenty-two-day streak. That would come in an hour or so, when the perfectionist-disciplinarian part of Winter's mind reasserted itself. But for the moment that part of her persona was still safely squirreled away in her subconscious, beaten back for a night by nerves and stress and hormones.
Winter moved the cigarette away from her body, tipping the ash from its end with a practiced flick of her wrist.
A masculine grunt slipped out from beside her.
"I thought we weren't doing anything kinky tonight," James Ironwood muttered, his eyes still closed, even if his face was scrunched up in discomfort as the ash cooled on his chest. Winter had managed to avoid his cybernetics entirely, singeing the still-human skin.
"Just making sure you're still with me," Winter replied, returning the cigarette to her lips. Her eyes were still staring forward, resting on the bedroom's cabinet and the bottles splayed atop it. Mostly whisky and other spirits, their orange hues glistening faintly in the moonlight.
The General sat up, propping himself against the headboard. His torso was uncovered, like his Specialist's, the gunmetal gray of his cybernetics skin contrasting with the alabaster white of hers.
"Where else would I be?" he asked, making a small gesture with his hands.
Winter took a last drag of the cigarette before passing it back to Ironwood, still not glancing his way, not meeting his eyes. "In the War Room," she answered flatly. "Watching the Big Boards."
The Big Boards were a set of truly gargantuan holographic monitors that dominated the War Room of Atlesian military headquarters, projecting the closest thing to an actual god's eye view of Remnant. Terabytes of data was fed into the Boards every minute, providing everything from the real-time location of the Atlesian Fleets to meteorological data from Menagerie to the intelligence reports of individual Specialists in Vale. A small army of analysts – both humans and computers - parsed and processed and prepared the data for presentation, before projecting it into the Boards the General seemed to spend his every waking moment monitoring.
The General was silent for a long moment, lost in thought. Winter allowed herself a sideways glance, but his face was as unreadable as ever, Sphinxian. Even here, even now, his features were schooled, like a commanding officer who didn't want his subordinates to know just how dire their position was.
"I've been thinking about upgrading my neural interface port," Ironwood said, as the cigarette was slowly consumed by the fire at its tip. "I could get the data-stream from the Big Boards piped to this," he tapped the strip of metal above his eyebrow, "and then have the displays rendered by my visual cortex."
Winter plucked the cigarette from James' lips, and slipped out of his bed. She suppressed a shiver at the sensation of cold at the soles of her feet, and began scanning the room for her uniform. The clothing had been discarded, cast off, with what for her was callous carelessness, but it took her much less than a minute to collect all the articles from across the General's quarters.
"Do you think that's necessary, sir?" she asked, pulling on her panties.
"It may very well be," Ironwood answered. He glanced her way, his eyes conducting cursory sweep of her body, but there was nothing lustful in the look. "In the event of an attack, I might not have enough time to reach the War Room. It could mean the difference between life and death."
Winter stubbed out the remains of her cigarette in a glass ashtray, before making her way to the bottle-covered cabinet. The bedroom was too dark to make out the labels on anything, but she found what she was looking for with muscle memory alone, pouring herself two fingers of something twice as old as she was.
"What time is it?" the General asked, as Winter screwed the cap back on.
She reached for the General's jacket, draped over the back of a nearby chair, and fished out a pocket watch tucked away in an inner pocket. It was a genuine antique, a relic from before the Great War, the tiny timepiece having proven more durable than the kingdom that had created it. It would've gone for a small fortune in any auction house in Atlas, and Ironwood himself could never have afforded it, had it not been a gift from Professor Ozpin.
"Oh-forty-one," Winter declared, reflexively converting from twelve- to twenty-four-hour time.
Ironwood frowned. "It can't be the early," he replied, flatly, glancing in Winter's direction with suspicion in his eyes. "That lasted… longer."
Winter bit her tongue, a few choice complaints perilously close to slipping out. Neither of them had ever been much for pre-coital foreplay nor post-coital cuddling, but their lovemaking as of late has been particularly sparse, an almost spartan affair.
"See for yourself," she replied, clasping the pocket watch shut. She hesitated for a small moment, her thumb unconsciously tracing over the engravings on the case. A casual observer could've easily missed the decoration, consisting of just a single line along the rim…
She lobbed the watch over to Ironwood with an underhanded throw, and he plucked it out of the air without moving anything but his arm. He clicked it open, staring for a moment of supreme concentration at the delicately ticking second hand.
"It's slow."
Winter didn't roll her eyes, but only barely, and instead returned to her drink. "It's not slow," she bit back between sips. "You just finished… we were efficient, tonight."
Ironwood ignored her, squinting intently at the timepiece. "It's definitely slow," he reiterated," snapping it shut. "It just needs to be wound tighter."
"It doesn't need…" Winter let her sentence trail off, softly shaking her head in exasperation. "It's working fine, you're going to… "
Winter expected what happened next, but stop just short of saying it. Ironwood's cybernetic fingers wrapped around the small knob on top of the timepiece, tightening the mainspring. This was normally done every few days, providing the mechanism with enough energy for continual ticking, and resistance grew with each turn of the knob, until further winding was impossible. Normally.
She listened to the metallic ratcheting of the knob, the growing strain as it tightened. Ironwood either didn't feel or didn't notice that the resistance was now far greater than the torsional force human digits could've generated. Newer models might have had some feature to automatically disconnect the mainspring, but Ozpin's old one hadn't, and decades of metal fatigue were doing nothing for the watch's sturdiness.
Ironwood twisted the knob, further bending the steel mainspring around the arbor. Impurities in the steel – a hair too much sulphur when the alloy had first been forged – finally made themselves manifest, bonds ripping apart at the molecular level, cascading through the mainspring.
There was a disquieting whizz sound as the mainspring snapped free of the rest of the watch's inner mechanisms, causing Ironwood to halt. He glared at the timepiece, his brow furrowed in confusion, shaking it for a moment like a child with a broken toy.
"It stopped working," he said, flatly, snapping it shut. Winter bit back her own observations. "See if you can find someone who can get it fixed."
He lobbed it back at Winter, but the arc was short, and she had to swoop low to catch it before it collided with the floor. She breathed a small sigh of relief at the save, before straightening up, lips pursed. "Next time I have a free moment, sir," she replied dryly, wondering if he realized that that meant he'd be in for a wait.
"Very good."
Apparently not. Winter sighed, staring down at the broken machine. Her thumb traced the engraving – a wyvern devouring its own tale, the ouroboric symbol of endless cycles – wondering just what everything that was happening meant.
"Do you think I'm paranoid, Winter?" he asked, glancing back her way. The words might have sounded accusatory in another tone, but Ironwood's voice was as calm and cool as ever.
She pocketed the watch. "No, sir," she answered, just as evenly.
He stared at her for another second, as if searching for any sign of deception. But Winter's body betrayed nothing, and the General eventually looked away.
"You should get dressed, Specialist," he said, as Winter finished his drink. Whatever warmth they had once shared was gone now, and the commanding officer had returned. "I want to re-run the Red Attacker-7 simulation at 0530. Upsilon Team's response was sloppy last week, and would've gotten us all killed if it had been the real thing."
'If it had been the real thing', Winter mentally translated, 'meaning when it's the real thing'.
"I'll speak to Commander Kühlen, see if he can tighten up his unit's reaction times."
Ironwood nodded. "If he can't, have them reassigned to Grimm Control. We can't have a weak link like that when Mistral attacks."
'If Mistral attacks', Winter corrected, but only in her head. The General had long stopped entertaining the presence of such conditionals. "Yes, sir. Is there anything else you need tonight?"
And that's what the purpose of these nights had boiled down to: need. Not a romantic desire but a psychological demand. Mutual loneliness tempered, compounding stresses relieved. By the only partners either officer could still trust. They were using each other as crutches, Winter could admit to herself, and neither were steady enough for the task. Not in the long-run, that much was certain. Winter had seen their relationship primarily as a psychological one, wherein she could be his one trusted confidant, the one person he could be open and forthright and unequivocally honest with.
"No, Winter," he said, with a mechanical facsimile of a smile. "Thank you for helping me take my mind off of things. I don't know what I'd do without you."
Winter finished her drink. He might not be able to tell when she was lying, but she could definitely tell when he was. It had taken him a while to reach that point with her - longer than any of his other subordinates, to be sure - but the last threads of honesty had been snapped. His trust in her was no longer absolute but conditional, calculated as it was with all others.
She finished dressing in silence, and made her to way the door. She cracked it ajar, letting a ray of light from the hallway creep into his darkened quarters. She considered saying something as she left - some piece of advice, a heartfelt plea, a note of caution - but the words didn't come to her, and she left without speaking.
'When it happens,' Winter thought to herself, as her elevator descended to the Combat Information Center, 'I'll be ready.'
And there was now one more thing that she needed to be ready for.
[A/N: If you enjoyed this, please feel free to check me out on AO3 under the username Liara_90, where you can find over a hundred more stories from me, because I'm bad at cross-posting. And feel free to connect with me on reddit, Tumblr, or MyAnimeList, where I use the "pvoberstein" username.]