Chapter Text
The Ruin Grader wouldn't be such a problem if the goddamn adventurers weren't in her goddamn way.
"Get him out of here!" Fredrica snarls, for the third time, at the cowering girl who should never have been out on this job and the blond healer who, to his credit, is calmly weaving Anemo around his injured comrade despite the Ruin Grader stomping closer and the score-mark its eye-beam had left in the rock just above his head. Seamus is the only one qualified to be here, and she's going to tear him a new one for not tearing the Guild a new one for letting these other two take the job--just as soon as they're all safe.
It's a chokepoint for all of them. Short of climbing the sheer walls, which the injured adventurer can't do and his friends don't seem willing to do without him, the only way out is through the Ruin Grader who had pinned them into this narrow space in the first place. It's narrow enough between them and the Grader that it, in turn, is progressing only slowly, grinding its heavy feet against the narrow gap and shaking more stone off with every stomp. And she could get at and under it to disable those stomping feet if there weren't three fucking bodies in between her and said feet.
"Sir Fredrica, the eye beam," Seamus calls out, looking up from his work. He's right; it's charging up again, and this time it's carved enough obscuring stone off that it won't miss.
"Pull him back, then heal him!"
Seamus only shakes his head at her. Fredrica grits her teeth. The man drives her insane.
This is the third time she's run into him in the field in as many months, and it's always in situations like this--shepherding younger, more inexperienced adventurers who signed up for more than they could handle and, all three times, would have died without him there. He's calm and clever and tactically-minded and obstinate, respectfully thanking her for her help when the battle's over despite the fact that he acts as if her instructions are mere suggestions while it's on.
She's lost count of how often she's run into him out of the field, cheerful and friendly, always waving her over for a drink and introducing her to his adventurer friends as 'the best knight in the Ordo' as if Varka isn't winning every honor she's ever tried for and Seamus himself isn't so world-renowned in the Adventurer's Guild that Fredrica recognized his name on first meeting. Cheerful and friendly and just as obstinate out of the field as in it. Fredrica doesn't think she's ever escaped without being talked into at least one drink. Only Varka has ever been able to do that to her before. She doesn't like it. A virtual stranger shouldn't have the same magnetic pull as her childhood friend.
"Go up," he suggests, as if a Ruin Grader isn't about to burn a hole in his stupid heroic back.
Fredrica clenches her teeth harder on a most unknightly thing to say, because he's right. Normally it would take an archer to get a Grader in the eye, but by grinding itself up against the cliff it's put itself at just the right level for her blade.
She scrambles upward, flinging herself over the edge of the cliff and then spinning about, Pyro beginning to limn her blade as she plunges it towards the glowing eye. It flares bright as elemental energy touches whatever it is that makes Ruin Graders run, and then its head sags, temporarily disabled.
It hasn't stopped moving, though, and Fredrica isn't done.
She dashes past the Grader, then plunges back down into the little canyon, a perfect three-point landing from which she rises, pivots, and stabs the point of her blade into the glowing ankle joint in one smooth motion. A step in, swinging savagely into the other leg, and it totters and starts to fall. Fredrica steps backwards, out of its way-
Her heel catches on a rock. She falls, too tumbling backward, unable to stop herself in time, and watches the massive weight of ancient metal and petrified wood tumbling down on top of her.
Something else hits her first. Someone else. Wind rushes around them, deafening her, slowing the Grader's descent, and she and Seamus roll sideways, together, out from under the Grader's shadow just as it hits the ground.
"Thank Barbatos," Seamus breathes as they come to a stop, wide-eyed and more alarmed-looking than she's ever seen him. "I thought-"
Fredrica can feel his weight on top of her--she's always known he had broad shoulders for a man who uses a catalyst, but there must be even more muscle than she'd thought under that green uniform--and the heat that rushes through her has nothing to do with her own Pyro. He's still looking down at her in alarm and concern, breathing hard. She's never been so embarrassed, and she's never before noticed the blue of his eyes, the same color as the sky overhead.
She has noticed before this the long, straight, golden fall of his hair, of which he's famously and righteously vain. She's pricked him before, when he's cajoled her into a drink together, about how impractical and dangerous it is in combat, how he should at least wind it into a braid like her own. In this, as in everything else, he remains obstinate. Which means that his hair is falling now around them both, gleaming bright in the sun and shielding her, for a second, from the battlefield.
"You idiot," she tells him, reaches up to wind her fingers into that foolishly loose hair, and pulls him down into a fierce kiss. He makes a startled noise, but after a breathless second, kisses back with equal passion.
Then he abruptly pulls back and rolls off of her, up onto his knees, reaching for his catalyst. A noise from the twitching Grader suggests that it was the first twitch that roused him, so Fredrica tries not to feel rejected, nor frustrated, by that sudden loss of his weight and his touch. She scrambles to her own feet and draws her sword, looking his way.
"Can you Swirl my Pyro for me without hitting the feckless fools over there?"
"They aren't," he starts to say, mildly, then stops and smiles at her and nods. "Of course."
Good enough. She's still shouting at both him and the Guild for this later, but for now, Fredrica leaps back into the fight as the Grader starts shakily to stand, flames flaring around her, a wind at her back, the memory of his lips on hers lingering even as the battle consumes her thoughts.