The next half-hour existed in the same kind of haze that fell over memories of a drunken night with friends after a long day of work. Alex acted, Alex talked, Alex ate, Alex smiled and laughed and winced and offered half-hearted excuses and remembered exactly none of them, save for the vague sensation that they’d happened. He was still too shot full of the chemical impact of everything that had just happened to process much of anything.
Elza had pushed him to resort to things he never should even consider, and she still won.
And he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Not about the loss, not about how he could improve, about how he could beat her the next time around, but his mind was replaying snippets of their duel over and over again, trying to etch them into his memory. A tiny shard of his personality chastised him for being so weak as to do such a thing, but that was a small voice in a torrent of fascination.
“Being a loser is the worst, ain’t it?” Caleb asked him.
This was not what he wanted to hear.
The smaller, weaker boy clapped him on the shoulder. “Alexander - can I call you Alex? - Alex, you’re new at this, and lemme tell you, I’ve got a lot of experience at losing. You’ve gotta take it on the cheek, but keep your chin up. You’re stronger than they think you are. You can show them all, with the right chance, you can-“
“Caleb?” Alex said, wincing. He was halfway between a headache and vertigo.
“Yeah, Alex?” Caleb asked, smiling up at him.
“Please leave me alone,” he said, trying to keep the tone of his voice as far away from “dismissive” as he could, and failing spectacularly. “Could you sent Maxwell over?” Alex said. It was best to give people tasks that made them feel useful, and more than anyone else, he could use Maxwell right now. Or Francesca, but she was full of victory and pride, and he didn’t want to dampen that for her.
Thankfully, Instructor Leor had conjured up some faux-wooden bleachers for the students to sit on between matches, just like those of the Guardians. Otherwise, Alex could have slumped all the way to the ground, in part due to the effort of reckoning with his failure, and in part from enacting the most likely methods of avoiding any chance of meeting Elza’s gaze. Rather than think about what had just happened, he thought about the plank he sat on - Leor had emulated not just wood, but the latex-based paint of the late 20th century, and the flaking of years of age. There was something cozy about it, and he’d be sure that Maxwell would agree, but he be more interested to hear his justifications for why.
Ah, there he is, Alexander thought, as Maxwell sat down next to him.
“Hey buddy,” he said, somewhat bewildering in his choice of authoritative language. “How’s it going?”
“Poorly,” Alex said. Bad was the first word to come to mind, but that’d transgress against the laws of English, as best as he remembered them. Disrespecting the language of the True Church was the first step to disrespecting their philosophies, and that was unacceptable.
“You’ve lost before,” Max said. “You’ll come back, and come back ahead. You always do.”
Alex was skeptical. “Am I always this down in-between?”
Maxwell, against Alex’s expectation, laughed. “Uh, yes?”
“I am?”
“Yep,” Max said, giving Alex a tight, one-armed hug. “I know you like staying positive - “Remember the victories and forget the defeats”, like Harris Sarathiel III said, but you don’t always pull it off. That’s what me and Gabe are here for, right?”
Gabriel, coalescing out of seemingly nothing, sat down on the other side of Alex, wrapping his arm around Alex’s other shoulder. “Right you are, Max! You’re the best, but you wouldn’t be the best if you didn’t have your friends to support you in those moments that you aren’t the best,” he said, beaming.
Chess would berate me, and that would be right. It would push me forward, Alex thought.
He wondered what Julian would think.
And a small, but not insignificant portion of his wondered how Elza would respond to the emotion playing out in his head. He had the sense that she would slap him without a word of advice, which didn’t feel entirely wrong.