[Challenge pairing of 'Ishgardian x Gym', Estinien/Gymnasium. Set pre-game, spoilers for Estinien's backstory.]
Firesday's session was a rough one again - like always. The Shed never went easy on Estinien, no matter how faithfully he stretched out in advance and made sure to limber up. He wasn't going to be one of the many idiots who didn't make enough effort to prepare themselves, and who ended up in the infirmary after tearing something internally. There was always someone laid up there whenever he passed by, groaning quietly into the pillows. Dullards.
But the Shed put him to the test every time. There was no use in begging, or trying to bargain for mercy. Every evening he spent there was one that left him shaky afterwards, wrung dry from exertion and barely able to weave like a drunkard back to his room; he was always sore the morning after, shifting uncomfortably on the hard wooden seats during morning lessons.
The Shed put its mark on him. There wasn't a part of his body it hadn't touched.
Firesday was the start of the sennight, and so those were the days that Estinien pushed himself the most: a ward against falling into indolence. He could already tell how badly his muscles would throb on the morrow. His palms stung from having to catch his weight over and over in unending repetition. The slap of his heels against the mats had been a steady rhythm, a percussion matching the thudding of his heart.
He took another breath, testing for dizziness. The stone wall was a welcome coldness. Estinien splayed his hands against it as he panted, sweat beading between his shoulderblades, dotting his brow. Cramps were already threatening to knot up both calves.
Every ilm of his flesh already ached from hard use, and the evening was only halfway done.
"Not going easy on me, are you?" he rasped mirthlessly, and leaned down to brace his hands on his knees as each gulp of air began to slowly ease in his chest.
He didn't expect an answer; silence was his sole reply. But his own expectations nagged at him, prodding at him insistently until Estinien straightened up, stretching one leg and then another while he flexed his feet against the pain, the twinges in his muscles beginning to quiet enough to let him move again.
The nearest set of bars loomed only a few steps away. Staggering forward, Estinien grabbed for the lowest one: a padded leather strut that was as thick as a hyur's arm, wrapped with cords like the spiraling of tendons woven from rope.
He gripped it tightly. The sturdiness of the metal beneath didn't shift - as strong as if it were another person pushing back against him, waiting patiently as Estinien bent his body into the work.
Novices in his year were scheduled for group practice three times a sennight; individual sessions were up to the discretion of the trainee and their own desires, but were rarely enforced. Three was the bare minimum. Most stuck willingly to it.
Not Estinien.
Ishgard's drill regime was harder than anything he'd been run through by Alberic - but not in the ways it should have been. Alberic had done his best as a mentor, but the man had been just one instructor on his own after an abrupt retirement, huddled up at the Observatorium and better suited to penning histories of his own former victories. For years, the only soldiers Alberic had fought alongside had been other veterans, ones bearing their own battlescars. The tutorials derived from that had been wildly effective - but they were just as wildly lacking in any linear structure, mixing advanced techniques with the basics of how to hold a spear instead of a sickle.
The man hadn't planned to take on a student. He hadn't had coursework ready when Ferndale had burned. At the beginning, he'd ended up regarding Estinien awkwardly on the field half the time, both of them not knowing what to do with each other.
But - gradually, grudgingly - the training had come. Alberic had cobbled together a lesson plan as he went, drawing upon every trick he had clawed forth from decades of warfare. They were battlefield tactics, non-standard maneuvers that were carved out of an abbatoir of corpses instead of being carefully drawn up in the pristine halls of Ishgard; they were cruelly powerful, caring only about results rather than how you got there. Estinien had devoured them all, not caring about the consequences. He'd learned how to gut a wyvern in two steps before getting the fundamentals of basic midair maneuvers down first, because Alberic had forgotten that not everyone instinctively knew how to save themselves from a bad fall during corde lisse practice.
It made for a furiously unfair combination when Estinien knew he could kill his entire class with only a single spear at the ready - but his name kept coming in dead last on the ranking charts, calling him out again and again as the poorest performer.
Going to see your secret lover again? the other trainees liked to smirk whenever Estinien would ignore them all and head out of the barracks, choosing solitude instead of joining in with their communal meals. The lot of them stuck together like ticks clustered on a karakul, eating at the same tables when they weren't visiting their families on weekends, or gathering in packs to browse the Crozier. The worst of the lot were the meek ones, who crept up beside Estinien in the dorms and hallways, too shy to voice their introductions in front of the group as they sought to befriend him in hopes that he'd serve as their protector. He rejected them too. They were no different from their bolder peers: wasting their free time with socializing, making friends with each other and various cadets, dropping gossip freely about their own Houses and other people's relatives.
All of which would make them well-suited to sit around a fire later, Estinien figured, while they lied grandly about slaying mature dragons instead of half-grown drakes.
It didn't matter. Estinien had only his own training to care about. People weren't a concern of his.
Three sessions was the minimum. With the Shed's help, he always made it eight.
But no one came down to the Shed, and for good reason: the hall was poorly equipped for training, being one of the oldest practice rooms built in the trainee wing. It was situated on an outer wall of the keep, wedged on a corner where the cold came straight through the stone. Though Coerthas was a land which embraced a range of summer climes, it was a stern country when compared to its neighbors; it was enamored with its mountains, overly fond of its own cliffs, and allowed its fortresses to imitate the same. Lacking any sun to warm them, the naked metal of the practice bars regularly numbed Estinien's hands, even when he reluctantly pulled on the thinnest gloves he could find.
It was better to have nothing layered between him and the Shed. The blunt roughness of the equipment often left him aching afterwards - but Estinien preferred the intimacy of touch when it came to keeping control.
Stark enough to drive away even the most determined novice, the Shed offered little else. Its haphazard grids of bars, vaulting blocks and ropes formed a maze that threatened to snap any carelessly-placed limbs. Most of the padding had worn away long ago, and had never been replaced. The ceiling was too shallow for decent vertical jumps, and the protective rope netting was in poor condition, sagging in places like the softening body of a noble far past their prime. There were no cushions left to prop against the walls. A single slip, and a hapless trainee would bash themselves into the stone as neatly as a chef clubbing a fish overhand against a table.
No one ever joined his practices. Estinien alone was the originator of the curses and groans that regularly rolled around the Shed's walls; it was his blood that smudged the mats, his sweat that was smeared across each bar. Only the Shed was privileged to hear his shouts, muffled into the mats whenever he bent double after a bad fall, and trembled helplessly from the pain.
The privacy also meant that Estinien never had a spotter. He took his tumbles often, and poorly; there was never a hand offered to lift him up again, or give him a boost up onto the rails. It was risky to train this way - but it also meant that no one was present to see him fail, watching as he simmered in outrage because it was only a failure by their standards, their lofty ideas of what killing should be like. All of them were obsessed with the formalities of battle, the precise locksteps that would turn them into predictable, sturdy pawns for commanders to shuffle back and forth upon the field - when Estinien had already seen the truth of the world spelled out in the dismembered corpses of his kin, a chaotic mess that no amount of rehearsing could have ever protected against.
That Firesday was even colder than usual. More than once that winter, Estinien had discovered frost in the Shed's corners, his exhalations coming out in puffs of curling mist. If he waited until the noon hour, conditions would be more tolerable - but their latest studies had them memorizing the Canticles of Saint Reinette, which Estinien had no head for, and he got his best warm-ups in the bells before dawn anyway.
He had little choice in the matter. For their upcoming qualification exams, the instructors had assigned them the assorted exercises which formed les Dix aiguilles: a set of ten precision maneuvers wittily named after weaving tools, together forming an arsenal which trained a dragoon to judge distances along with the physical strength of their body. Senior dragoons had to be able to pick their target from over a malm away, flinging themselves like an arrow through crowded battlefields that could churn the wrong way in an instant. If you were inept enough to hit any buildings on the way down, or to misjudge a banner's colors - or to overshoot the target entirely, Halone forbid - then you could end up destroying your own allies faster than any dragon's claws.
And one's target was rarely kind enough to stay put during your descent. Experienced opponents knew better than to linger in the same spot whenever a dragoon took to the skies; any fool who kept their position fixed on a Coerthan battlefield was begging to ingest a cannonball. As a dragoon, you had to be capable of correcting your trajectory through any means possible, landing precisely on a designated spot, all momentum focused purely upon that single strike - without shattering all your bones in the process, which meant finding ways to divert that same energy away from your body when you couldn't roll to cushion the impact.
The only students allowed to move on to the next rank would be the ones capable of surviving it.
Challenged by this new trial to thin out their numbers even further, the trainees hurled themselves back and forth in the main practice halls, bobbing like scattered fishing lures between the mats and ceiling nets - but the Shed didn't contain nearly enough height for the same. Instead, Estinien had to go from side to side between its walls, twisting and springing off the stones as he pushed himself back and forth like a weaver's shuttle, contorting his body so that his feet struck the targets he hung on the stones. He could never afford to skimp on his velocity - like so many other trainees did, letting their inertia speed them back to earth - and so every jump was more aggressive than it needed to be, feeding its own force back into his blood.
In many ways, practicing like this was only hammering him full of the worst kinds of habits. Several of the vertical jumps were intended to be as rigidly straight as possible on purpose, whereas horizontal arcs needed to naturally curve to account for the drag of gravity. To reach the same targets, Estinien had to aim higher, veer off-course. Lacking a partner to move the targets for him, he could only simulate the randomness of some of the exercises; the ground marker was often attached to a rope, which one's training partner could use to yank it back and forth to simulate dodging.
Yet he'd scrounged up a child's wind-up shadowbox that could be cranked with a key, abandoned long ago thanks to all of its pictures being ruined by another's hand. With a bit of creativity, he'd managed to prop it up on a crate, pinning squares of fabric to each side. As the shadowbox rotated, it flashed a different color, matching one of four targets scattered across the room. He refused to let himself start on a predictable numeric count, so he never knew which marker to aim for until he was already rebounding off the far wall, searching desperately for the signal to be able to orient himself in time.
It was an unorthodox solution to correct Alberic's unorthodox training - all of it meant to fix the manner of unorthodox person that Estinien was, a farmboy who should have counted himself lucky to muck out the chocobo stables instead of being ushered into the ranks on the laurels of the last Azure Dragoon - and he grimly beat himself into following it.
He was in the middle of toiling through the footwork needed for the fifth exercise, l'aiguille du mépris - a particularly difficult maneuver that required one to not only land precisely on the target, but to also turn themselves entirely around in the process with a corkscrew flip at the precise apex of the jump - when the evening chimes tolled, warning that he'd worked straight through supper again. In half a bell, he'd be tired enough to see double. Another bell after that, and he'd risk breaking fingers too exhausted to properly grip the bars.
But there was still time between now and then, and he'd invested that much effort already; even if he headed straight for the mess hall now, he'd spoiled any chance of a decent meal. He'd do better to beg a hank of leftover bread from the kitchens than to risk being caught nabbing someone's half-finished plate.
He'd overestimated himself, however. Well before the half-hour mark, his grip began to weaken; his fingers were dull on the bars, hips slow and refusing to arch as needed. His palms slapped clumsily against the Shed's struts. Instead of precise flips, he found himself fumbling as he looped through the routine from start to finish, self-control sliding a little further each time his body crested the bars, exhaustion taking command in its stead.
He went back and forth like that for another few minutes, tossing his body haphazardly around until he misjudged a simple vault, clipping the bridge of his foot painfully against a corner. The blow jerked his balance awry. The edge of the landing block raced on an interception course for Estinien's skull; he barely managed to keep from smashing his face in by throwing one arm wildly forward, bracing himself for impact.
Like a ragdoll, he struck the wooden platform hard and tumbled to the mats, too disoriented to catch his own fall. The pain that shot through his arm was debatably good luck; he could have broken his jaw if he'd been any slower. Blood roared in his ears. Pain plucked his bones like overtight lute strings, testing the point at which he would snap.
All around him, the Shed watched in silence as Estinien wheezed for breath, mind hazed from the aftermath as his nerves shrieked like a burning choir.
He didn't bother trying to recover in time to impress it. Gingerly, he rolled over onto his back, checking his limbs gingerly one by one for fractures.
"At least you won't judge," he rasped aloud, the mirth bitter in his throat. He didn't need another person present to recognize the ludicrousness of it all. Here he was, with only an empty room for company - but that room was the one good companion that he had in all this mess, the only thing he could trust, who didn't seek to undermine him. It alone had never tried to either betray or ingratiate itself to his favor, and the fact that it was an inanimate object should have spoken volumes either about Estinien's character, or Ishgard itself.
And yet, he was grateful for it anyway. Here, he had the space to be flawed. To be able to make errors without anyone leaping on him for it, leering at every flaw in his posture - taking his measure only in how many bars he could vault and how many seconds it took for him to scale a rope. All the combat exercises he had doggedly taken pride in mastering under Alberic's instruction were considered eccentric when he threw them into the mix: transformed into a source of hilarity for the other students to demean him by, rather than admire.
Perfection would have negated all their criticisms. Perfection was what he didn't have. Lacking the bedrock discipline that had been drilled into all the other trainees since childhood, Estinien could only mimic an expert's techniques, understanding the results but not the process of getting there. He was a cake of ornate frosting with no substance beneath: unpleasantly raw at the core.
He lay there for a while longer, the bitterness slowly leaking away from him and leaving him withered of any emotion. The shadowbox wound down with a click. Its closest panel brandished a single red square in Estinien's direction, mirroring the furthest target in the room: the hardest one to aim for, pinned between two sets of parallel bars that required Estinien to clamp his arms tightly to his body as he dove through, ilms away from a concussion.
He stared at the marker for a long time, knowing its gears would not start again until he did.
"Better that you're here than any of those bastards, right?" he said aloud as he clambered back to his feet, grimly testing his balance. The nearest metal strut was cool against his palm. He let his hand linger there, thumb rubbing in an idle caress against the pitted surface.
"All right," he whispered. "Let's go one more round together."
Windsday was an even worse disaster. In front of everyone attending the practice yard, Estinien racked up the lowest scores of all the trainees in a rapidly-increasing landslide, bottoming out during the final morning exercise where he hit his mark and rolled into a backflip that took out a second target on the rebound. It was a seamless execution of a technique that left him positioned in a crouch, ready for the inevitable counterattack: an elegant motion that advanced a dragoon's momentum while forcing their opponent on the defensive. It should have been a victory - except that, by the ridiculous standards of Ishgard's elitists, the efficiency ended up decried instead.
"Keep to one training dummy if you please, Varlineau," the instructor drawled, scrawling down another low score, the indifferent cuts of his quill slicing across Estinien's name on the page. "If you flail about on the battlefield with equal indiscrimination, you'll end up as guilty of murder as a common heretic."
Aye, and when the second beast claws you in the back while you're busy preening? The words wanted to spit their way out of Estinien's throat. His face contorted into a scowl. Only the instructor's frown warned him against saying more.
He ducked his head - unwilling to mumble any form of apology - and the instructor moved on.
Alberic wouldn't have chastised him for taking out an additional threat. Alberic wouldn't have bothered with points at all - except that it was Alberic's fault that Estinien was failing to begin with, passing down lessons that had been focused on practical skills for slaughter, instead of the foppery that Ishgard valued more.
Skills that still hadn't been enough to save everyone Estinien had ever loved.
"Should have stayed in the country and mastered swiving your sheep instead," another novice smirked, dusting their hands with chalk as they swaggered their way to the front of the line, and Estinien tried not to notice how loudly his outrage howled.
It wasn't for lack of talent. It couldn't be. Estinien knew he was capable of performing the same motions as everyone else. He was good enough.
But try as he might, he couldn't make himself follow suit. He didn't agree with how Ishgard fought, how it arranged its dragoons like the rest of its common soldiers: with the expectation that they would mindlessly go wherever they were told, following orders even if the heat of the moment suggested better alternatives. The other trainees sparred as if they were dealing out a deck of cards, concentrating only on a single drill at a time before moving on to the next, rather than treating battle as one long, fluid motion - like a dragon itself, springing into flight and sliding from one air current to the next, never stopping until every last adversary was dead.
He didn't agree with Ishgard's tactics. He didn't want to fight like everyone else did, as part of a team of mediocrities, constantly distracted by having to consider the well-being of the rest of his unit. The more Estinien struggled to limit himself, the more it made sense that Alberic hadn't been escorted by a whole cadre of senior dragoons ever-present at his side. The former Azure Dragoon had traveled alone more often than not, roaming the entirety of Coerthas while strategically winnowing the Horde's ranks under the guidance of his own sensibilities.
Being alone was better. It allowed you to make decisions which best fit the situation without having to ask permission first. It let you kill any way you saw fit.
You didn't have to protect anyone when you were on your own. You didn't have to care what they thought.
On the next pass of l'aiguille d'amertume, he took the landing hard on the mats. Instinct folded him into a roll which transformed into a sidespring, rather than the crisp bounce that the instructors kept insisting on - and then Estinien turned the momentum into a heel-kick at the nearest padded dummy that had the misfortune to list within reach. When the strike only grazed the cloth, he slammed his other foot down, whirling around to throw a wild punch next, his entire body pitched into the attack without caring how crude it looked.
Seven hells take them, he thought - precursor to a longer string of curses - and then barked the rest aloud, his mouth curling shamelessly in a snarl.
"Do you think your prancing will save you from a wyvern?" he roared. Phantoms sneered in his imagination, scattering and reforming with every blink. Sweat stung his eyes. "That your fine footwork will block the gout of flame that roasts you alive in your own armor? Well?"
The echo of his anger was a weak beat in his ears. The sounds were already ebbing away, swallowed up by the lumps of canvas and rope massed in the Shed's corners - too cowardly to confront him directly, just like the very people he railed against.
He spun, finding every ilm of the room empty of anyone else, anything else save for more proof of his own frustrations. "I'll best you all, whether you like it or not! On my own terms, using these very same tactics you mock! I'll prove I'm the better fighter, the one who deserves to wear the armor of a dragoon. And all the rest of you can burn, for all I care!"
Dizzy with adrenaline, he slammed a palm into the nearest column - and then leaned against it, pressing his head against the support as the slapdash gantries creaked menacingly above his head.
"Right," he rasped to the Shed, as soon as he had breath. "Are you with me?"
The room around him was quiet in expectation. It watched as Estinien gathered himself together, waiting for his next move, and made no form of protest.
They held the test for les Dix aiguilles on a Darksday - an appropriate choice, considering how many trainees' hopes would be smothered like so many sparks in the night. As the instructors worked through the candidates, sorting them out into various categories of failure, Estinien watched even the most smug trainee begin to sober and then frown in concern.
Then the wyrm's-end of the alphabet was looming, and his name with it. Chalking up his hands, he refused to so much as a glance at any of the other students as he took position on the starting mark, bare toes bordering the edge of the block.
"L'aiguille d'apathie!" he heard snapped out behind him: a crisp, impersonal command. "Begin!"
One by one, he ran through each of the Ten Needles - looking not at the practice hall as it had been rigged up with only the basic equipment, but at the Shed as it existed within his memory, and all hazards it contained. He'd spent two weeks reweaving the equipment, stringing barriers to block his extra jumps and compress his momentum, building deathtraps between the bars that were of a nature he could respect.
Now, he mapped its cramped contours over the sterility of the hall, and threw everything else aside.
Wyvern teeth. The whip-quick lash of a dragon's tail. A flock of hatchlings screeching for his face, their wings fouling the air like a flurry of poisonous bats. Rather than limit himself to simpler stakes, Estinien increased them tenfold - until only one route remained each time, a single course of action that would bring death to his enemies while he remained intact.
Relentlessly, he drove himself through the course that he knew should have been there, the dangers which awaited him in a real battle: a gout of flame that would be on his left when he landed l'aiguille de la douleur, the jagged cliffs that prevented him from looping his jump wide during l'aiguille du désespoir. The standard practice hall no longer existed to contain him. It was not relevant.
In its place, Estinien built his own terrain of hostilities and fought that instead, a singular battle of himself against a world he knew already loathed him.
He heard the mutters of the other trainees upon every successful landing, a brewing discontent that grew with each target downed - but that was the only complaint that came his way. It didn't matter. Even as his heels struck the mats for the last time, Estinien was already looking back up towards the heavens, waiting for the shadow of wings to call him to the next fight.
"Excellent progress, Varlineau. Remarkable what a little self-discipline can accomplish," the instructor announced coolly, jostling him out of his concentration. "Mayhap you will remember to apply it during your future lessons. Next!"
In the end, only four of them were selected to move forward. Three of the victors grandly accepted the congratulations of their friends, clumps of sycophants gathering around them like mildew on a windowsill. The rest scrubbed their faces, struggling to suppress their disappointment before it crushed them in front of the crowd.
Estinien carried the blaze of his triumph alone, down through the cold outer reaches of the keep where no one else bothered to follow. The Shed was in the same condition he had left it in the night before. Ropes dangled like cracked willow branches in every corner, dipping through the bones of the acrobatic bars. Piles of canvas sat lumped wherever he had dropped them. The whole chamber was a disheveled mess, decorated with all the evidence of their exertions together, and Estinien paused as he touched the first knotted cord.
In only a few weeks, he'd be moved to a different section of the keep altogether - one with a fresh set of practice halls and courtyards, where he wouldn't need the Shed. He'd start a new course of study, with field lessons that would prepare them against larger targets and steeper falls. Even if he wanted to return, the room wouldn't fit him anymore.
He had outgrown it already, flinging himself away from its embrace even as his hand had stretched out to seize the future instead.
Carefully - with the respect he had refused to show during his trial - Estinien went to one knee on the mats. The worn canvas was fraying in wide patches, padding squashed to the consistency of stone underneath. His fingers brushed them in a slow, gentle caress, remembering how many times he had left scuff marks behind, adding his own share of damage to the room's inevitable decay.
Without shying away, he bent down and pressed his lips against the tattered fabric, holding the warmth of gratitude in his heart one last time.
"I owe you this," he whispered. "I won't forget."