Ber suppressed what would have been his fifth yawn in the past ten minutes. Equipment maintenance was tedious at the best of times, but sometimes fate - or, more likely, Woodwick - took pity on him and gave him an interesting partner to work with. Not today. Today, he had the pleasure of sharpening and polishing a large stock of swords and rewrapping their grips with none other than Sliva. Yay.

When she spoke, breaking the silence that had fallen between them, he paused from the sword he was working on and looked over at her. “Listen to many violinists, do you, Sliva?”

“Not sure a violinist would make much of a difference,” Ber said, setting aside the sword he’d been working on and picking up the next. He turned and looked toward the unpleasantly large pile of untouched weapons beside them. “Unless they can snap their fingers and finish all those so we don’t have to.” Ber paused, then looked at Sliva. “You can’t do anything like that, can you?”

Ber simply looked at Sliva as she stated the obvious. “Yes,” He agreed, tone as flat as hers. “At the end of the day, we have to work together.” Unfortunately. He gestured pointedly to the weapons around them. “Last I checked, Sliva, that’s what we were doing. Working together to clean these swords.”

“My problem is that I’m stuck in this room with someone who would rather talk than clean the swords we’ve been told to clean,” Ber shot back, giving the sword in her hands a pointed look before turning away to focus on the one in his. “We are not friends, Sliva. You just need to do your job, and I’ll do mine.”

Did they need to put aside their animosity for the sake of the upcoming war? Ber didn’t think so. “Have you seen the number of soldiers around here lately, Sliva? Do you think they all like each other or all get along?“ He picked up another sword, and his voice turned sharp at her claim. “You might need people to smile at you all the time.” Or shower her with adoration and praise or whatever it was that she needed. “But the rest of us don’t. We know how to not let personal feelings get in the way of us doing our jobs. And we know that when we all march onto that battlefield, our job is to watch each other’s backs.” It was what they had been trained to do - were training to do - and any less would be utterly unacceptable. They were Nevermereans above all else; it was the most basic, fundamental concept the military had taught them. “If you haven’t learned that by now, then you’ve learned nothing.”

That seemed to shut her up nicely. For all that she apparently wanted to hold a conversation with him, Sliva was certainly quick enough to fall silent when the one she got wasn’t going her way. He wasn’t sure why she was under the impression that he cared about building any sort of bridge between them when he had spent the past few seasons clearly only tolerating her company because he’d had to. After rebuffing her repeated and random attempts to apologize to him and win his regard, he would have thought it plain that ‘whatever the fuck was going on’ between them, an ignorance that only reinforced his opinion of her, was not something he was interested in resolving.

Regardless, silence, even a tense one like this, suited him just fine. He wouldn’t break it. As long as she did her fair share of the cleaning, Sliva could sulk all she wanted.