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It's official: I'm a really slow writer. I'm probably just speaking into the void here, but I hope you like the chapter!

Chapter Text

RED’S P.O.V.

Apparently, it wasn’t enough that he had to eat breakfast with his Dad every single morning; no, on top of it all, the conversation seemed to always creep towards the one subject that Red could really do without.

Red idly scrapes his knife across the egg-spattered plate, sending a chill-raising shriek through the tiny kitchen. Across the table, his Dad chews toast pertly, eyes locked on his frowning child.

“So,” he says.

Here we go.

To anyone else, the man across from Red would seem untouchable, stooped over the wooden table, fists locked around fork and knife, sharp jaw set as though preparing for battle. Age had touched his father lightly, leaving its only traces in his whitening hair and down-turned mouth. His olive, sun-leathered skin still clung firmly to his features, and only the ghosts of wrinkles could be seen around his eyes, his furrowed brow.

To anyone else, he was The Commander, legendary leader of Astera.

Painfully persistent father, making Red eat breakfast when he didn’t even like eating this early.

“So, the Huntsman told me that you haven’t yet registered with a partner. Are you forgetting the deadline?”

“I thought my private lessons with the Huntsman were called that for a reason,” Red mutters, taking a sip of cider.

His father doesn’t smile. He’s wearing his famous “you’re inadequate, but I’ll kindly make do” expression, the one that works so well on up-and-coming hunters.

“When I was your age—” Lord, help me. “—the Admiral and I were already hunting Tobi-Kadachis every weekend, staying sharp, fierce, always ready for the next greatest endeavor.”

His Dad’s eyes glimmer as he talks.

“The Admiral was even worse than me. He’d pull my aching body out of bed before the sun even rose, begging to head out... Now, to be clear, we didn’t fight clean or well, not by any measure, but the fire was there . ”

“Yeah, the fire ,” Red says, mimicking his father’s soulful tone. “The fire . You know, the Admiral sounds great. Maybe I’ll just head over and ask him now?”

“Red—”

“Any extra Admirals you know of?”

“It isn’t my intent—”

“Could really use one.”

“Enough, Red,” his father says. A muscle twitches in his jaw. “There are plenty of reputable hunters in your class, I’m sure.”

Irritated with his old man’s lack of empathy, Red snatches his plate from the table and stands up.

“None of the other Bloodhounds can keep up with me, anyways,” he says. “What am I supposed to do?”

In a scurry of paws, Tooke, a small, black Palico, rushes into the room and stretches up for the plate.

“Let me take that, young meowster,” Tooke says.

“Oh, thanks, Tooke.” Red partially crouches as he hands over the plate, repressing the urge to pat the little cat on the head. According to his Palico History professor from last quarter, head pats are terribly demeaning.

“Find yourself a Guardian, then,” his Dad says. “Like the Admiral. Best gunlance-user I’ve seen in my life…” His eyes are fixed on some invisible, distant point, past where Red stands.

Red snorts.

“That’s not gonna happen.”

Tooke, still at Red’s side, seems to sense the growing tension in the room. He flattens his fuzzy ears and silently shuffles into the hallway.

“And why is that? Before you answer, may I remind you that you do, in fact, have to choose someone !”

“Just--because!” Red sputters, hands waving.

“Why must you complicate everything--”

“I get on Guardians’ nerves! They hate me. It’s like--it’s like they always take what I say the wrong way! Like, if I’m trying to ask them why they have so many pencils, they get up in my face and call me the Pencil Police, then things escalate and suddenly we’re arm-wrestling, and then when they beat me I end up saying that they’re nothing without a Bloodhound hunting beside them!”

Red stops, shoulders shaking. He’s acutely aware that he’s recalling an incident with a Guardian from his Brute Wyverns class. His Dad crosses his arms.

“That’s… oddly specific, but I do know of the misunderstandings which can arise between our factions. It’s never comfortable to be around someone who fills your weaknesses with their own strength.”

By physically biting into his tongue, Red stops himself from saying that a Guardian could never do that for him. The memory of the girl from class storming off after his comment is fresh in his mind.

“Red. Even if you’re not ready to enter a cross-faction partnership, all students need to be hunting by year's end. Which means you must find a partner. Soon,” the Commander adds, firmly. “I want you out there.”

“I do too, Dad,” Red says tiredly. If only you knew.

His father nods after a moment, stiff, and pushes back from the table.

“Well—” he brushes his hands off, “—I’m needed at the Arena today. Special demonstration for the fourth-year engineers about heavy weaponry. The Dragonator and the pulleys.” He takes his Magda Ungulae dual blades from the counter, buckling them onto his back with efficient familiarity.

“Mmm.” Red plops back into the kitchen chair, not really listening.

“Will you be back for dinner?”

“Mm, maybe.”

His Dad lingers at the door, gloved fingers pressed to the frame. He sighs.

“I see great power in you, Red. I've seen it so brightly that it would feel like injustice for me to allow your lack of ambition.”

Red stares down at the table, pinned by the words.

“The Huntsman tells me you still refuse to activate Demon Mode during training. He says you have brilliant speed and reflexes, but no spirit to use them.”

Red can feel the weight of his father's gaze.

“This casual attitude has to go. I want you to understand—you owe it to the talents you've been given.”

Red feels an argument rising up his throat, but the Commander has already turned and stepped outside. The door shuts with an indisputable thud. Letting out an exasperated sigh, he runs his thumb idly along the wooden table. Tooke meanders into the room, ears twitching, and begins to clear the rest of the breakfast platters.

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“This isn’t a choice, dear.”

The plump lady gives him a toothy smile, face twitching at the edges like it’ll crumble any second to match the steel of her eyes. Red clutches her hand, turning it a hot crimson.

“Will you come inside with me?” he asks, looking up at her, pleading. Tears are budding in the corners of his eyes. “Please?”

He’s eight, and the Hall of Awakening waits beyond a faded wooden door.

“I’m sure your father told you all about this already, dear” she says. “It’s not a test. There isn’t a wrong choice.”

Red’s face begins to contort, tears running freely down his cheeks.

“I don’t wanna choose!”

The lady clicks her tongue, annoyed. “It’s not a choice, hon’. You’ll see which weapons speaks to you.”

“I don’t wanna see!”

Snatching her hand from Red’s grasp, she bends with some difficulty and looks him in the eye. “Do you not want to be a hunter, then?” she asks, saccharine sweet.

This sends him into an even louder flurry of wailing.

“I do! I do!”

“Don’t you want your own weapon?”

“I do!”

“Then go inside.”

“I don’t wanna go inside!”

Red doesn’t understand the exact feeling that’s making his lungs push out breath in vicious, gasping mouthfuls, but fear tastes the closest. Fear of what will happen in that Hall, when he’s alone with the fourteen weapons of steel and bone.

“They’ll kill me,” he sobs breathlessly, and he doesn’t think it’s true, not really, but it’s something close. “They’ll kill me when I go in.”

“What sort of ridiculous —” the lady catches herself, sighs. “ I mean, what an imagination, little Red!”

She pats his mop of shoulder-length red hair.

“Now, head on in there. Promise it won’t take more than ten minutes.”

Red sniffles. In front of him, the door waits, inevitable. He imagines he can feel his father’s hand on his back, pressing him forward, both comforting and insistent. He’ll have his own dual blades if he does this.

He wipes his cheek with the back of his hand.

He’ll have his own dual blades if he does this.

He opens the door.

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Now, Red probably wouldn’t say it out loud, but it’s a well-known fact that he has a fanclub.

It might’ve been unavoidable; after all, he was the Commander’s only son. For his whole life, he’d stuck out in a crowd, and the red hair certainly didn’t help. (Thanks, Dad, by the way. You see that your baby has red hair, you go and name him Red. Brilliant move.) Yes, Red had dealt with attention from strangers for a long time.

The staring was the new thing.

Not the subtle, corner-of-your-eye peeking, but the laser-like, aggressive staring. Ever since his first day at the Bloodhound training fields. And silence.

Almost complete silence as he kneels in the the training field dust and scrapes a whetstone along one of his dual blades. Some students have backed off the grass completely, whispering, while others have paused mid-strike, mid-battle. Red continues to sharpen, settling into a rhythm.

Some days, when he's feeling it, the gaze of the other students is like a shot of pure adrenaline, pumped directly into his blood. He feeds off of it, delighted in it the same way he delighted in the feeling of his blades in the belly of the training wyvern.

But today, after that breakfast with his father, he can really do without the expectant eyes on his back.

Red stands and pockets the whetstone, looking across the training field at one of the Rathian-shaped, meat-filled, canvas dummies. The spell breaks as soon as I give them a show. Irritation flares at the thought. He flexes his hands, feeling the leather of his fingerless gloves stick slightly to the grips of the Bone Hatchets. Already he can feel the thread of strength that the dual blades sap from his limbs, steady as sand through an hourglass. He pushes that awareness to the back of his head.

Red runs. Toes digging into the rough ground, he flips both Hatchets so the blade extends from below his fists: the Shien form, a style ideal for aerial maneuvers. Six more long strides and he reaches the Rathian; everything seems to slow down, fading into a blur of sound and light. He’s already coiling his weight, letting the energy move up through his feet into his calves and thighs as leaps forward, kicking off the Rathian’s nose.

A moment of weightlessness.

Red twists in the air and with one precise, vicious motion, cleaves off the training wyvern’s head.

He lands harder than he would’ve liked, falling into a sloppy crouch with his forearms still crossed from the attack. It always frightens and amazes Red how blank his mind goes when he’s executing a maneuver like that. The Huntsman has some fancy name for it—hunter eye, eye of the beast, something —but Red can’t believe it’s natural.

Finally, the voices of other students are starting to filter in around him. One group of three is laughing, giving him excited thumbs-ups as they pass by. He breathes hard, coughing wetly when he stands. But he nods at them anyway, lips bent into a smirk.

“That was beautiful, Red. But next time, leave some wyvern head for the rest of us, though, okay?” Wesley, a thick-limbed third year, claps Red on the back, grinning. He has a giant Girros Hammer slung over his shoulder. Red thinks he’s been over for dinner a few times before, and seems to recall him being reduced to a quivering wreck around his Dad.

“Give the Commander a hello from me,” Wesley adds jovially. Red wonders if he makes his voice sound that deep on purpose.

A few more Bloodhounds pass by, some which he recognizes from last quarter’s classes. Suddenly, a raucous voice pierces the air:

“You think I can manage that with two longswords? Yo, gimme your longsword, Peri!”

A girl with short, blue hair, grabs her friend’s weapon from its sheath. She mimics Red’s Shien grip, approaching another training dummy with a goofy, swaggering stride. Her two friends are cracking up as she takes several wild practice swings.

Yeah, Dad. There sure are a Jaggi-load of reputable hunters.

He turns away from the row of dummies, annoyed at the girl, his unnecessary bitterness, and his Dad’s constantly-biting pressure.

Can’t train like this.

Red sheathes his blades on his back and heads back towards the central Academy, welcoming the halls of the shaded outer ring. The sweat sits coldly on the back of his neck, and his breath comes too quickly, splintering as he takes it in. Some food would do him good, and he is not going back home for lunch. Or dinner, for that matter. Thankfully, it’s the weekend, so not many students are walking around.

“Hey, Red!” Some boy greets him, but Red doesn’t stop walking. What, is he supposed to say hi back? It’s a stranger.

“Have a good day!” The boy calls back over his shoulder.

“Red!” Another unknown boy, earnest as a puppy.

“Hey, sup?” A fourth-year girl, feigning familiarity.

Red smiles uncomfortably, nodding.

It gets to him, these people who assume friendship before they even meet him. The Bloodhound ones, he can stomach. They usually approach like Wesley, confident in their presumption. But the Guardians… Red swears they all live in a constant state of self-conscious turbulence.

Just last week, a wispy Light Bowgun boy had tried to ask Red to come to his birthday party. Not to mention all the logical issues with that random invitation, the boy had asked him in front of the whole class. In practically a whisper.

Who does that? It was like a baby Dodogama making Red kick it in the head.

Up ahead, Red sees a shock of white hair: it’s Rymer, a soft-spoken kid from his Basic Weapon Care class last quarter. He looks exasperated, talking down to a shorter hunter, a brown-haired girl—

That’s her.

Rymer begins to walk away, waving at her.

Where did she come from? She’s been fighting? She went hunting?

Red struggles to reconcile this image of the girl—Academy leather armor burnt and torn, streaks of dark soot and monster blood across her face—with the seething one he saw in Brute Wyverns just yesterday.

He doesn’t know her. Before the argument ( could it be called that? ), she hadn’t existed. And it was true what he’d said in class, about her needing a Bloodhound to hunt.

So why was his conscience giving him a hard time?

She turns towards the girls’ dormitory and Red walks towards her, driven by a strange, sick feeling.

“Yo.” He says it lightly, noncommittally.

Yet somehow, by the time she sees him, she’s already furious.