pro_patria_mortuus | (no subject)

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Enjolras is not, on the whole, a man with a great deal of appreciation for the beautiful outdoors. He's a city boy, and a man whose interest is mostly occupied by people, and abstract concepts concerning people.

But Milliways is a very enclosed place, and a very boring place, and there's no city to go walking in here. And Enjolras is also a fairly athletic man, who would prefer a lot more exercise than one easily finds around this place.

All of which is to say: he's out for a walk. At the moment, he's just stopped by the stables.

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Unsurprisingly, it's all much simpler for Harry: it feels like home, so he likes it. He's not someone who's ever really at ease, but he seems close to it here.

"Well then." He grins. "Have I made thee too long the truant?"

Enjolras gives him a wry look.

"From the pressing engagements of my busy schedule? Certainly."

Harry snorts.

"Why, Feuilly is ever running from place to place, ever has some business in hand-- I did think it the French way."

"Feuilly," Enjolras admits, "is better than I at filling his time here."

That's because Feuilly, despite being just as intensely justice-focused as Enjolras, is a man who had a day job most of his life, and is consequently much better at figuring out how to have hobbies.

(Most people are better at figuring out how to have hobbies than Enjolras. But Feuilly is also better than some of the rest of them at figuring out how to have hobbies that don't require a bustling city full of peers and shared pop culture.)

"He has some skill in it," Harry agrees. He'd never thought of the ability to fill time as a skill before-- but it seems that it is.

"Well! We idle men will find a way. Thou canst teach me-- what was it called? With the-- the walking-stick?"

"Canne de combat." Which the Milliways translation may or may not translate as singlestick, unless of course Harry is hearing this whole conversation in French anyway.

"Yes, whenever thou likest -- dost thou have one?"

Easily gotten from Bar, if not.

Also, you know, practice padding is an option, but they may not need it for the first lesson or two anyway, depending on how different it is from what Harry knows.

Harry shakes his head-- a cane is a rather foppish affectation in his time (or at least, in Shakespeare's time which is half his), and so of course he doesn't carry anything of the kind.

"Will Mistress Bar provide one? Does she think it a weapon?"

"Mine came from her."

So clearly not!

Which is convenient, and points to the technicalities of the no deadly weapons rule as clearly as all the glass bottles of strong alcohol she gives out. A walking stick is the kind of thing any gentleman of the middle class might carry in Enjolras's day, and many of them would think little of it -- but, in the hands of a skilled bâtonniste, it's three feet of hard wood that can break a leg or a skull.

But then, anything can be a weapon, with enough skill or enough desperation behind it. There's no way to avoid handing them out. Enjolras knows this to his bones, and assumes Harry does too.

Harry breaks into a grin that would probably make most people think twice about letting him have one.

"Why, shall I go beg one of her, then?"

Why is Enjolras not surprised that whenever Percy likes translates to right now? Not that he objects, and in fact he was more than half-offering it.

He smiles back, much smaller, but genuine.

"Sure. --Where should we go? There's a room upstairs I use often, but thou mayst practice elsewhere."

Hey, no time like the present, right? Even when you have eternity. Or perhaps especially when you have eternity.

"O, we do but practice nearby, Feuilly and I-- but 'tis no proper sort of place at all. But this room I would gladly see."

Well then.

Barwards let them go!

To the Bar! Harry keeps up a brisk pace: he is On A Mission.

"But it is flat foolishness, is't not, that a stick may be given and a sword cannot?" he says as they make their way back across the lawn.

Enjolras matches the pace, which admittedly is easier when one has longer legs.

To the question, he makes an equivocating face. "Well, I do see the logic. A stick, that has other uses. A man might want to be fashionable, or support a weak leg. A sword or a gun..."

Well, hunting. But Bar gives out food, and there are no livestock here to protect except the few horses, and some animals are patrons.

"But if she refused to give out anything a man might use as a weapon at enough need, she'd provide us only porridge."

You could still fling porridge in somebody's eyes to blind them, or to make a slippery mess under their feet, if you were desperate enough -- but never mind.

Harry snorts. "Ay, 'tis true. Well, it is kindly meant, I warrant." (Though this is a rather grudging admission.)

They step inside, and there is the lady herself. Harry strides over to the Bar. "How fare you, madam? May I ask a walking-stick of you?"

Why, of course the Bar is happy to oblige! In the form of a nice, delicate little cane, gold-topped and intricately carved. Harry is not particularly amused.

"Something stouter, if you please."

Something like this short, fat little stick, really more like a rather long club?

Harry looks to Enjolras in exasperation: You describe it.

Enjolras is looking tolerantly bemused, in the way he often does when friends joke around: okay, if it makes you happy, but what's the appeal...?

"Like mine," he supplies, "or Joly's."

Bar takes him at his word. The short club-stick is replaced by something that's exactly like Enjolras's, down to the detail, except that the wood is several shades darker.

"My thanks," Harry says, more to Enjolras than to the Bar. Maybe the next thing he can learn in Milliways is a sense of humor, but-- not today, evidently.

He takes up the stick and feels the heft of it in his hand.

"Well, then. I shall follow thee."

Enjolras's is based significantly on tolerant patience.

So doubtless Harry's gonna grasp that one any day now.

Enjolras leads the way equably upstairs, and down the hall with its many doors. (They may pass by a room with a placard of Feuilly's making on the door, perhaps.) He stops at a particular room, and opens the door. It's unlocked.

Inside is a room with a wooden floor, and a few mirrors of very fine glass and no decoration, and a stack of dark blue mats of some futuristic plastic down at one end, and a closet with the door ajar. It looks like somebody took a standard Milliways room and converted it into a gym for aerobics or martial arts, with the bathroom turned into a storage closet, which may in fact be what happened. (Or maybe it's a Room of Requirement or something. Who knows?)

Harry steps in and looks impressed. Really, it's going to be a very long time before he stops being impressed by how clear mirrors are here, and these ones are so big!

(Because Harry, rather like a small terrier, doesn't ever totally grasp his own height in comparison to others, it's also the first time he really notices how much taller Enjolras is. Hm.)

"O, 'tis very nice. Have we need of aught but these?" He gestures with the walking stick.

(Enjolras, who's used to being taller than many people, hasn't fully noticed either. Oh, he's aware, but only as a vague background. Mostly what he notices instead is that Milliways is full of giants.)

He shakes his head, setting his stick aside to shrug off his coat. (After that will be the waistcoat, and the cravat. Of course he can fight in them, but there's no need to dirty and batter good outerwear when you don't have to.)

"There's padding -- for practice fights, sometimes. Canst see some in the closet there. But I doubt we'll want it for a first lesson."

Enjolras is very much playing this by ear, based on how Harry takes to it, so you never know. But he suspects the basics are going to be worthy of some practice. Longsword probably has some very significant technique differences.

Harry's down to his shirt as well, doublet and jerkin tossed carelessly into a corner.

Though he is composed almost entirely reckless impulsiveness-- named for it, after all-- Harry is able to muster discipline in at least one area of his life, and it is this. His eagerness may suggest he wants to dive right in to just whacking people with sticks, but in fact, he will take his time to be taught the unfamiliar forms, and listen attentively to the basics.

The basics first: the stances, the basic forms of a blow, and the parries to counter them.

The general form of the art will be apparent very quickly: light and rapid movement, crouches and jumps at need, quick switches from foot to foot or hand to hand, full use made of the ease with which a walking stick can be whipped about for feint or for a hard blow. (Enjolras, admittedly, is a slim and rapid-moving man, and his style tends that way in any case -- but it's not as if Harry has bullish size and strength either.)

Harry's general athleticism and balance and forearm strength should stand him in good stead, anyhow.

Anything that depends on lightness and quickness is different enough from the techniques Harry's used to, which are mostly designed to compensate for the fact that you're wearing your own weight in armor.

But he is strong and fast, and in marked contrast to his fumbling efforts to shape and understand politics or ethics or philosophy, this he starts to pick up with ease.

This is meant to be done in street clothes, and it borrows from both fencing and brawling in an era where neither of those were solely the province of sport. In later decades, this will become a gentlemanly sport, a process which had already begun in Enjolras's day, but that's not the version he's teaching; it's not the version he bothers with. There are no strict rules, not as Enjolras teaches it: this approved, that disallowed, this to be done with exacting and proper form.

Only what works, and what does not, for the serious business of putting down an opponent so that he stays down.

"It is not so unlike the ways I know," Harry notes when they pause. And indeed it's not, if only in the sense that he, too, is trained in methods that are meant for real combat, not for show or sport.