On Melancholy Hill

Aegle had been in and out of consciousness since she first awoke, a state of she was not especially unused to. Brief periods of intense wakefulness and innervation would abruptly give way to a sudden and undeniable weariness that would carry her off to sleep before she even realized she was getting tired. She might have clung to consciousness if she had wanted to, if she hadn't been worried about extending her stay in Beacon's infirmary but, given that she wanted to get back to her life as soon as possible, she usually just let the weariness take her whenever it may.

She was on the wakeful end of this cycle when, unexpectedly, a mountain in a dark grey suit let himself into the room Aegle had been shut away in since the beginning of her convalescence. Aegle looked up from the throng of students milling around below the nearby window, eyes sleepy and unfocused, growing increasingly sharp as she took in the big man. She remembered him vaguely, through the cotton shroud of recent injury and medical care. A memory, made muzzy by a scattering of recent events far fresher in her mind, of a sad drunk telling her all about his problems one night, when she should have been in bed. Those were the salient details which had stuck most firmly in mind. What had not, and what she remembered only as Malinov crossed the halfway point between the door and her bed, was that he was the vice headmaster of Beacon.

Aegle sighed softly, a reluctant smile playing across her weary face, and she proffered the big man the smallest wave imaginable with one of her unbandaged hands. Her fingers, gnarled and crooked as the rest of her shrunken frame, looked especially slender without the wrappings so so often wore around them. They also trembled noticeably as she waved, and so she stopped after only a brief wiggle in Malinov's direction.
"Uh-oh..." She said, her grin wide in a pale face turned plum and scratched up in the fight with Solomon Moon, "Am I in trouble?" Malinov had told her he was in charge of disciplining students at Beacon, and she had been waiting almost since she first woke up for some member of the staff to show up and chastise her for what she had done.

A stern look crossed the big man's face, rolling across it like rockslide that turned everything sharp with craggy angles.
"You're a damned idiot," he told, as though she didn't already know, "Picking a fight with a monster like Solomon Moon in your first month of school." he stopped across the room, heavy footfalls like hammer blows on the sterile white linoleam floor.
"And with your bare fists, no less!" Continued Malinov, shaking his head from side to side. There seemed a tension in him which Aegle had not seen before, a sort of sharpness to his movements and a tautness in his manner which stood in rigid contrast to the sloppy listlessness she'd seen before. Was this the man who had been drowning under all that booze, hidden beneath the surface and made blurry and soft by his sottish predilections?
"You could have been killed, you could have gotten others killed."
He shook a finger at her, "You," He said, raising his voice, "and Ms. Yarrow both,"
His voice dropped back down, and some of the tension holding him taut seemed to filter out, replaced by a sort of weariness that seemed bone-deep. Aegle could simplify, given that she felt much the same way.
"Now we have a diplomatic nightmare to sort out, a damaged training room to repair, and injured students who can't even attend class because of their injuries." Malinov checked each issue off, as though it were a list that had been read out to him, one he'd been made to memorize, before frowning into the ensuing silence. Aegle couldn't help a wan sort of smile in answer. She would have shrugged too, but doubted she could make her shoulders move enough for the vice headmaster to see.
Then, as abrupt as a spring flood, a smile rushed over the frown, turning his features soft and smooth, almost youthful, as it spilled across the hard planes of Vice Headmaster Malinov's face.
"Kid after my own heart." He rumbled, eyes laughing.
"How was it," Malinov asked, with a hushed kind of excitement, "Staring death in the face? I've never actually seen Solomon Moon fight in person, and yet you experienced it firsthand. I'll admit I'm a little jealous."

Having braced herself to be given the exact sort of scolding she usually received for this sort of behaviour, Aegle was admittedly left a bit dumbstruck by Malinovs sudden radiant levity and what could almost have been described as pride. Aegle was almost certain he was not supposed to have said anything he'd just said, and that he would probably get in trouble for it if any other members of the staff were to find out. That made her smile broaden a little, cutting a bit of the tired out of the expression.
"He's strong," She said softly, grinning to match that which was stretched broad across the vice headmaster's face, "I didn't stand a chance."
Proffering a minuscule shrug, as if to say this was not a surprise to her, Aegle showed Malinov even more of her teeth. She felt strangely off-guard, dealing with this less sad version of the world-weary sot she'd met before, not the least because he actually seemed to approve of what she had done. She supposed the truth would suffice.
"Wasn't starin' death in the face though," Aegle heaved another slight shrug, dismissing the idea, "I knew he wouldn't kill me."
It was a bold claim, one which Aegle made with all the certainty of youth, a certainty she was unlikely to ever grow out of. She twisted a little on her bed. Thinking about the fight was making her restless, and she grabbed for the remove for her bed's back, that she might sit up a little bit.
"Wasn't really much of a fight though... I only got t'hit him cause he didn't wanna hurt me."
Aegle inched up on the bed's motorized incline, till she was more sitting back than lying down.
"D'ya wanna sit?" She flicked her fingers, all of them trembling, in the direction of a chair beside her bed.

"So I take it you already knew him personally before this?" The big man asked, the chair straining beneath the bulk of his weight. It wasn't an unfair assumption, but Aegle could do little more than grin at it. She knew of him and had met him once. If that was enough to know a person, then she might have just as easily claimed to have known Malinov.
"I heard you got a few good hits in." Malinov's eyes narrowed on her, his face wrinkling into a creased grin that matched her own, "Amazing you could do something like that without a weapon."
That made her smile slip a little. When the big man glanced down at her hands, it fell away altogether. She was sure he'd meant it as a compliment, that he'd not meant anything snide or otherwise in the bargain, but she still slowly balled her fingers into fists in a feeble effort to hide the tremors that always wracked them.
"Like I said," She told him, eyes slipping down from his, "It was only 'cause he didn't wanna fight me."
Aegle swallowed, then shook her head. Her grin twitched restlessly, trying in vain to pull itself back into place for a few quiet moments, then her eyes flicked back to the Vice Headmaster's.

She opened her mouth to ask him. What, she did not know, she only felt as though there were something she should ask. There was the obvious question of whether Malinov thought she would have even got one punch in if Solomon Moon had actually been taking her seriously. If he had actually been as bad as he claimed to be, if he had actually wanted to kill her. Aegle didn't need to ask though. She had no illusions, she had been there. She had felt the punches, and weathered the blows, and she knew with abject certainty that, had he wanted to, the Commander could have killed her without taking a scratch. He hadn't even drawn his sword. That was where Aegle rated beside him.

In spite of this, Aegle found she wanted to ask anyway, if only to see if Malinov was the sort of person to tell her the truth, or if he was the sort to lie right to her face in some misguided effort to preserve her feelings.
A fierce kind of grin dragged itself into place, and she honed her nerves on its whetted edges, "If he'd wanted it, I would'a been dead before gettin' near enough to breathe on 'im." She told Malinov, casually savage with the brutal truth.
She shrugged. It was difficult, and it hurt, but she did it anyway, "S'the whole point, weren't it? I knew he wasn't even gonna try to kill me. Not even with all them hard words he said before..."
Aegle wondered how much the big man knew of what had said between the two fight's three combatants. They had all said things they thought were true, and then had those claims tested. The only victory Aegle could claim was that she had known the Commander better than he knew, or thought he knew, himself.
Her grin stretched a little tighter; Perhaps she did know him after all.

She realized, as the ache radiated up her arm, that she had been squeezing her fists as hard as she could. Aegle relaxed her hands, and seemed to deflate in the process, though she still held her fingers curled and close to her body, hiding them as best she could.

"Hard words?" Malinov asked.
Aegle dipped her chin the minutest degree, "Yeah," She peered at him questioningly, "Y'didn't hear 'bout all the stuff he said? How mercy was weakness and how we were all better off killin' each other if it meant stoppin' more bloodshed in the future."
The corner of her mouth twitched, and she flicked the thought aside with another weak wave of her fingers. Then her gaze crawled away from Malinov again and she found something really fascinating on the ceiling to look at.
"He thinks he's a lot harder'n he is, I guess," Aegle said pensively, then shrugged the notion aside with a weary heave of her twisted shoulders, "That, or he just reckons the only person I'll ever kill is myself."
She grinned ruefully, "S'pose it could be either one of those. Could even be both."
Her eyes moved to the curtain partition separating her bed from Lily's, "The strong devour the weak, 'cept when the weak are more trouble 'n it's worth, yeah?" her grin twitched a little wider, "Not that I can blame him,"-she gestured at herself-,"All skin and bones, y'know?"
She giggled at her little joke, then subsided back into pensive silence, eyes fixed to the ceiling once more. She was still trying to figure out why she had done it. At the time, it had seemed like the right thing to do, to challenge the Commander and prove to him and everyone watching that he wasn't nearly as much of a monster as he'd made himself out to be, but decisions made in the heat of the moment still needed some justification once they landed you in a hospital bed.
She was actually pretty relieved that it had been the Vice Headmaster who'd come to see her first, and not some other functionary of the Academy whom she didn't know. Even if Malinov had been angry at her, it would have been better than having to deal with sort of uncomprehending exasperation she'd have received from someone else.

She looked down at herself again, at the thin outline of her twisted, meatless body beneath the covers, at the gnarled and trembling fingers on the ends of her scarred and crooked hands, and something like anger flashed briefly in the warm space behind her eyes. She grit her teeth hard enough to make her recently dislocated jaw hurt, and tried to force the anger back out. Just as she wasn't sure why she'd done what she had done, she wasn't sure why she was angry, or even who she was angry at; Solomon Moon for hurting her but not giving her an honest fight, Herself for fighting someone so unapproachably far beyond her abilities, or the nebulous circumstance that had all but ensured she would never, so long as she lived, be able to hold her own against those like the Commander. That her only recourse had been to let someone hurt her until they got tired of it.
Then again, maybe she wasn't angry at any one thing. Perhaps there was no particular grievance behind the discontent, the rage, that flushed through her when she really thought about what had happened between her and Solomon Moon. Maybe it was just infuriating in general; Maybe it was the only sane recourse, that she should be angry at a world that would allow such a thing to take place.

"I don't regret it, y'know?" She said, still looking at herself, "But I still feel like I failed..."

Malinov studied her, his strange eyes boring into her with an unerring sharpness she'd not been lead to expect in the depressive sot she'd met previously. He seemed to actually think about what she had said and, whatever his eventual reply might have been, she greatly appreciated that he'd done even that much. It was not hard for her to feel that nobody paid her opinions much mind, least of all those centered about her own life and person. Breathing in deeply, filling his massive barrel of a chest, Malinov pondered his reply in this manner for some several seconds before he eventually supplied his response.
"If you fall," He began weightily, and Aegle gave him her undivided attention, "You get back up. Failure is a part of life. If it doesn't kill you, you need to learn from your mistakes so you won't fail again."
A sort of smile etched itself into Malinov's stone jawed face, a smile halfways between reminiscent and, it seemed to Aegle, that mournful aspect which he'd previously shown to her, "Think back on your fight, figure out what you did wrong and what worked. That experience will make you stronger."

Aegle waited for him to say more, but then noticed the expected, almost self-satisfied expression which the big man wore, and realized he was done. His platitude had been spoken, his wisdom had been shared, and he had nothing more to offer. She deflated somewhat. Having hoped for something more immediately substantial, something which she could affect presently, she realized that Malinov's advice was the long term sort.
"Y'right, of course," She allowed, with a small wave of her fingers, as her eyes slid off of his and went to the window, "S'all y'can do is try and learn from y'mistakes, and try not t'make 'em a second time."
She stared at the window without really seeing the world outside, the world beyond her hospital bed. She felt the anger again, or that thing which was very much like it, and tormented herself with the complete acknowledgement of what she had done wrong, and why she had 'lost', of why she could never have won. Did Malinov know that it was all she could do, to get back up? Did he know it was that and nothing else which had seen her to the conclusion she'd desired from a fight she knew she could never actually win? Would he still have given her that advice if he had?
She wondered if she should tell him what her mistakes had been, and how there was no amount of learning from them that might let her overcome them.
Instead, she said, "He told me I should'a been goin' for his head." Aegle didn't look at Malinov. Once more she found it necessary to humor the vice-principle, and keep what she really thought to herself. He was only trying to help after all; He did not need to be made to feel guilty or stupid for it.
Aegle grinned ruefully, even giggled a little at the absurdity of Solomon Moon's advice, "Y'know, he's 'bout as tall as you are? Maybe a little shorter."
Fingers flexing, pulling shaky fists, she tried to imagine it, to imagine reaching up so high to touch the summit that was Malinove's jaw. She knew exactly where she needed to hit him, that the blow would wobble him even through aura, but knowing something and accomplishing it were two very different animals.
"S'as tall as I'm ever gonna get," she still didn't look at him, and still could not see the world beyond the infirmary, "and I can't stand up straight most of the time. Y'ever met a short hunter? Y'know of many short Grimm?" Her grin grew wider, as she tried to imagine how a fight with a Beowulf might go. It grew wider still as that Beowulf traded places with a Deathstalker or King Taijitu. The immense absurdity of it almost rivaled her baffling decision to try and become a huntress.
If she'd been able to hold a sword or spear, if she'd been able to use any weapon at all, it wouldn't have been so big an issue, but the fact of the matter was that she couldn't, and never would, have the grip she needed for such an exercise. She wondered what kind of weapon Malinov used, if he could even comprehend the difficulty of limited reach. She doubted it. More than likely he'd been big his whole life. He probably used a massive sword and ridiculously huge axe. He probably struck down his foes before they were even in arm's reach. Even if they did get that close, arms reach for Malinov and arms reach for Aegle were as distant as the Hunter's Star from the Moon.

Rather than agree, Malinov contradicted her well considered assertion, "I once had a teammate who was short," He told her, "And she used it to her advantage."
A softness passed over his countenance at the remembrance of this unnamed teammate, the edge of a smile ever so slightly tinted with the malaise of regret. Aegle recalled too clearly the sad words he'd shared with her, unbidden, over the course of their first meeting.
"I could never beat her in a fight, couldn't even touch her." He said, that echo of loss pervading throughout even this solemn admission. That begat a brief but keenly perceptible moment of silence betwixt the two which, though suggestive of a mere pause to collected his thoughts, only served to confirm in Aegle the loss she perceived in the big man's aspect.
"As for being tall," Malinov said, blowing out a quiet breath, "It's natural for me, but most of my size is from a diet I've eaten since I was young. Specifically designed for gaining muscle mass and keeping my energy high to support my fighting style and supplement my aura. I recognized from an early age that I was going to be big and I took advantage of it."
He leveled her another penetrating stare with this strange eyes of his, "I see no reason for you not to take advantage of your size. Being small gives you an edge in maneuverability. Against a larger opponent, it would be easier for you to stay in their blind spot and avoid precise attacks."
Aegle wanted to point out that the Commander had been considerably larger than her, and that it hadn't done her very much good. Solomon Moon had threatened her with all the efficacy of a natural disaster, his fighting style, an unavoidable catastrophe. Yet, she must admit, if only to herself, that she'd made no real effort to take advantage of the Commander's quite sizable blindspot. If she had kept to his eyeless side, she might have at least landed a single punch.

"Show me your hands."
Aegle lifted her head, roused from her brief remembrances, and looked questioningly back at Malinov. She reflexively curled her fingers and tried, without success, to hide the articles in question against her hips. Then, perceiving what she had just done, a flush of stubborn anger caused her to lift both hands without another thought, and present them with as much vigor as she as able. This amounted to little more than her levering her hands up at the elbows, standing them upright at her side, and turning them so he could get a good look at all that life and their owners had done to them.
Just like the rest of her, her fingers had been made crooked by the slow deterioration of her body. Even now, doing nothing, her fingers trembled with palsy, and seemed wholly unable to splay themselves out straight. This was the extent of the damage which nature had done them however; Aught else was the doing of Aegle alone. Thick scar tissue coated her knuckles, most of it still fresh and pink, with still fresher scabs that suggested, at imaginative length, that she'd spent some time punching things much harder than the punching bag in the training hall. Already crooked and gnarled by the malaise of her ill-health, the knuckles of her middle and index fingers bulged out most of all, the result of relentlessly fractured and hastily healed bone beneath the equally pronounce callouses. There were surgical scars on the back of her hands too, some resulting from the myriad efforts to keep her hands from being entirely worthless, and some the result of some exasperated doctor trying to fix them after Aegle had punched her fists into pulp. About her wrists was ringed another pinkish scar that encompassed them like a flesh bracelet. She had matching scars on her ankles and knees, and everywhere else her brace fixed too when she wore it.
In revealing herself to him, Aegle wondered if Malniov knew how little time it had taken for her to do this much damage to herself. If he realized that, less than six months prior, her twisted hands had born no marks other than the ones the doctors had left her.

Her hands had begun to shake. Even this effort was tiring, and she could feel the weight of her upraised arms aching across her biceps and shoulders for merely lifting her forearms from the mattress. She felt the anger again, and knew it for anger this time, and tried in vain to make the shaking stop. As well try to catch the moon.
"Happy?" she asked, letting her hands fall back to the bed.