She wants his future.

She shoved him backwards, laughter and rage flickering across her face. "I want a future. I don't care what they demand, I want a future beyond this- This!" She threw her arms around her, gesturing expansively.

Before he could muster a reply, she whipped towards him once more, a finger pointing accusingly at his chest. "You! You were my success! My triumph! Ripping apart your band of pirates, slavers no less! It showed them what I could do!" The rapid movements had let more of her hair escape from her braid, falling across her face in lines of sunlight.

"We weren't just practice dummies in a yard, daft cunt. We were people." He couldn't keep the trembling anger from his voice anymore than he could keep from speaking despite his efforts on both counts.

She straightened up, a bit of the woman he'd feared returning again, cold dispassionate and calculating. "You were slavers and pirates. You butchered and raided and ****. I saw what you did to the women."

Rob took a slow breath but his temper flared at her challenge. "Slavers and murders and rapists we might have been. But we killed no enemy that wasn't offered the chance to surrender. We raided no village that we didn't ask for coin first." He hesitated a beat. "What did you do? No quarter. No offer of surrender. You walked through and murdered anyone that didn't take your fancy."

He didn't even see the blow when it struck, carrying him across the room and into the wall. All the air was gone from his lungs in an instant and he struggled to remember how to **** it back in. The second he could get a breath he was on his feet. His laugh came low and grim. "Finally. Thought you'd prattle on forever." He wished he couldn't hear how eager he sounded.

She stared at him, letting out a dramatic sigh as she settled into a fighting stance. "Is fighting all you know?" She asked, circling around him in a listless parody of their routine.

He **** a grin. "All I care about. Or near enough. All that talk had me worried. I thought you were going to start crying, girly." He swung his fist, the blow moving slow at first, then snapping the last bit of distance towards her face.

She whipped away from the blow, fast as a cobra. The withdraw was only a driver for the counter-blow, golden light snaking down her arm and hinting at the threads puppeteering her.

Once upon a time the odd sideways twisting of her fighting had surprised him but he'd learned. His feet pressed forward into her space defying the logic that he should use his longer reach against her. Instead he drove inwards, using his body to block the counter-blow before it had finished arcing towards him.

She darted back, **** to the defensive and whipping a foot out towards his head. Leaning backwards to avoid the kick he was already raising his meaty paws, blocking each following strike with his forearms. "You think I don't know your patterns by now? Don't know each step of this dance by heart?" He rumbled at her complacency.

That drew a laugh from her, the sound hard and brittle as it hung above the wet sound of fists meeting flesh and the shuffling of feet across the stone floor. "All this time. Memorizing this fight. Learning the steps to a dance, even as you refuse to admit you're a dancer."

Something about her words troubled him but he had no time to contemplate them as she launched another flurry of attacks each flowing seamlessly into the next. Rob was **** onto the defensive despite his best efforts, working back across the room. His growls had shortened into bursts of sound whenever he tightened his core, matching her own intermittent cries.

"No answer? Coward!" She challenged, landing a blow tinged with the aspect of her faith, sending him stumbling backwards and she swept in for a finishing move.

Without thinking, he emulated the odd sideways twist, moving out of the way and using the motion to snap a punch into her side. The **** of it sent her across the room, upending the table and crashing into the wall hard enough to make the oil lamps along the wall tremble. "Talking was always your thing." He rumbled out.

She'd collected herself, spitting blood and then wiping her mouth. "Are you so afraid of admitting that maybe you liked to listen?" She advanced on him once again, and they joined the battle once more. "I have just one question: Are you listening to me, or the message?"