The room smelled of oiled brass and old varnish.
Mahogany paneled the walls, the grain darkened with time and polish, like the bones of a ship that refused to die. A sabre lay behind glass in a shadowbox—well-kept but clearly used, its hilt wrapped in leather gone smooth from years of command. Books towered on the shelves, leatherbound and gilt-edged, titles older than any of the young women on this island. The weight of tradition hung thick in the air. Heavy as salt fog. Sharp as an honor duel.
And at the center of it all sat Ark Royal.
Not the woman, but the post. The presence. The burden of decades carried behind a face of stillness and steel.
Her fingers steepled under her chin.
Across from her stood HMS Hood.
Immaculate. Waiting like a good British officer.
Not rigid, no—but composed. Not arrogant, but proud. Her posture was a study in the careful alchemy of regret and restraint, that finely distilled grace peculiar to the high-born and war-forged.
She said nothing.
Ark Royal did not rush to fill the silence.
There were long moments in which only the distant tick of the mantel clock could be heard—each second a gavel.
Finally, the Headmistress spoke.
"He is awake."
No elaboration. Just a fact, dropped into the air like a depth charge.
"He will make a full recovery, thanks to the care of USNS Mercy… and his own surprisingly resilient nanite network. You should be grateful to both Doctor Mercy and Lightning. In addition..." Her eyes didn't waver. They bored into Hood. "Captain Takeda has declined to press charges."
Hood gave a single, solemn nod. "Understood, ma'am."
Another beat passed. Measured in its silence. The sea before a storm.
"As the senior representative of His Majesty's Navy," Ark Royal continued, "it falls to me to lay sentence at your feet."
Her voice was not cruel. But neither was it warm. It was the voice of a ship's keel slicing through Arctic waters.
"You understand this, of course."
"I do." Hood replied, unflinching. She reached up and removed her tricorne hat, ready to lay it on Ark Royal's desk if it was demanded of her. Ark Royal loathed the look. A young girl should not be this calm!
Ark Royal rose from her chair.
She did not loom. She did not posture.
She walked, not quickly, toward the tall windows at her back, where pale light filtered through antique glass and painted long shadows across the rug.
"You are not the first to carry a name with weight," she said, her tone gone nearly wistful. "Nor the first to mistake it for destiny."
She turned halfway—enough to glance over her shoulder.
"You are, however, the first British Captain I've had to call into this office for putting a fellow Captain in traction on day one. For spilling blood in what amounts to a pub brawl!"
Her gaze sharpened.
"And it was your own Rowan Takeda's blood, no less! The first male Captain Chosen in over ten years!"
Silence again.
This time, it was Hood who held it. Staring forward, jaw tight, the ghost of guilt somewhere behind her eyes.
Ark Royal stepped closer, returning slowly to the desk.
Her fingers tapped the wood once, twice. Then stilled.
"I have served since the first. I may be the last first generation Frame Captain still in operation today. Most have died or retired or passed their Frames to others. But not I. I chose to continue to do my duty."
She leaned forward slightly, and for the first time, something like disappointment colored her words.
"I thought you would be different, Hood."
She let that linger.
Then she straightened, folding her hands behind her like a militant judge about to pronounce sentence.
Ark Royal did not sit.
She stood, hands folded at the small of her back.
"Tell me why," she said quietly. "That I might know how to judge this."
Hood lifted her chin.
Not in defiance. Not quite in pride. But in that particular manner of a girl born into duty and drilled too long in the art of composure. "I was at first acting in self-defense, Admiral," she said evenly. "Bismarck was… incensed. That I was having lunch with Master Takeda."
A pause.
Ark Royal's brow lifted a fractional degree. Master, not Captain. An older form of address, not often in use these days. "How familiar," The headmistress intoned dryly. "But proceed."
Hood inclined her head, but did not apologize for the form of address. She took a breath. Then another. And then the mask began to crack—not violently, but delicately. Like frost melting from a glass.
Her shoulders dipped. Not bowed, not slumped. But lowered, slightly. As if some unseen weight had settled there. She began to turn her hat in her hands. Slowly. Methodically. A sailor working a worry-knot through an old rope.
"But somewhere in the middle," the girl continued, voice quieter now, "it became about more than just keeping myself safe."
She did not look up, keeping her gaze firmly on the hat in her hands. "I wanted to hurt Bismarck."
The admission was soft. Plain. No defense. No excuse.
"I saw an opportunity," Hood continued. "To change my fate. To say once and for all…"
Her fingers clenched slightly on the brim of her hat. Her breath hitched, just once.
"That Hood defeated Bismarck."
She sniffed. The sound of it was small in the cavernous quiet of the room.
"I am sorry, Admiral. I did not mean for Master Takeda to get hurt. Truly."
The clock ticked loudly in the silence.
And Ark Royal… said nothing. Not yet.
For now was not the time for recrimination, but rumination.
This called for more than simple reprimand. This demanded a blow that would land—not across the face, but the soul. Something lasting. Something corrective. Something humbling.
The girl before her stood like a British sailor of old. Immaculate and eminently respectable. And yet she'd barely been at sea two years since her Frame was laid down.
She scarcely knew what it meant to be a woman, much less a warship. And it showed. All that pomp, all that poise—and yet she'd let herself be drawn into a brawl over a boy.
Ark Royal watched her carefully, the silence thickening into something ceremonial. Hood's hands still fidgeted over the brim of her hat, the slow circle of guilt and shame playing out in that quiet worry.
It was telling.
And it told her everything she needed to know.
Perhaps that was the key to this whole sorry debacle. The boy.
Ark Royal's thoughts turned with the calm deliberation of a gun crew loading charge and shot. No rush. No fury. Just precision. Possibility. A touch of madness, maybe.
But it just might serve.
And so, at last, she spoke.
"I appreciate your honesty, HMS Hood," she said.
Then she let the silence pull taut.
"And herein is your sentence."
Hood straightened unconsciously, as if expecting lashes—or worse.
"You will draft, record, and post a video apology. Your words only. No heraldry. No stirring score. No Union Jack fades or slo-motion inserts. Just you. Plain as rain." Her voice sharpened—not with anger, but with command. "You will explain exactly what transpired. You will apologize to Captain Takeda. And to Lightning." She stepped forward once, her shadow crossing the carpet like a noontide gnomon.
"And you will apologize to Bismarck."
That made Hood flinch. Not visibly—but Ark Royal saw the falter, the freeze.
"For allowing yourself to be goaded into combat. For compromising discipline. For dishonouring your own dignity. Do you understand me?"
Hood's lips parted. Then shut again. She swallowed.
"I understand, Admiral," she said, voice smaller than before. Honest.
She turned to go, but Ark Royal's voice came like the crack of sailcloth in wind.
"I did not dismiss you, HMS Hood."
Hood turned back, eyes wide despite herself.
"Ma'am?"
Ark Royal did not look up. She had returned to her desk, and was already unfurling a crisp parchment sheet from the drawer—a thick-cut vellum affair marked with the insignia of Avalon Naval Institute. She dipped her quill, old-fashioned but exacting, and began to write.
Her voice followed the ink. Calm. Cold. Implacable.
"Starting tomorrow," she said, "you will be assigned as ICS Lightning's personal tutor."
The scratch of pen on parchment was the only sound between the syllables.
"You are a battlecruiser. So is the Lightning. It is not a perfect match, but it will suffice."
She glanced up, just once, to measure Hood's face.
"Males," she said, "do not take the same coursework in secondary school as we do—not in Britain, certainly. I'm sure the Americans make the same error. The result is predictable: underprepared, overburdened, and expected to lead war machines."
A long, thoughtful breath.
"So. I am assigning you and Bismarck to the direct academic tutelage of Captain Rowan Takeda and his AI, Lightning."
Hood blinked—once, twice—but didn't interrupt.
"You will help him catch up. Strategics, historical protocols, threat recognition, formal dueling customs, and all the other half-forgotten disciplines that girls like you were force-fed from the moment your hatches opened. You will teach him on land and sea. In frame and out. And you will do it together."
She set the pen aside.
And then came the final shot.
"In addition," Ark Royal said, her tone betraying just the faintest glimmer of grim amusement, "I am reassigning your dormitory status."
Hood's spine straightened. "Ma'am?"
"You and Bismarck will relocate to one of the unused boys' dormitories. Together."
There was no reaction at first.
Just air.
Then the faintest twitch behind Hood's eyes.
"You will be bosom companions," Ark Royal said, so deadpan it sounded biblical. "You will eat together. Train together. Sleep on opposite ends of the same suite until you either learn to cooperate… or kill one another and save me the paperwork."
She folded the parchment crisply. The wax seal was pressed with practiced ease.
"This is not punishment for the sake of cruelty, Hood. It is discipline in the service of growth. Consider it… collision-course diplomacy. Take this to the bursar and she will arrange the move."
She extended the parchment.
"Now you are dismissed."
She took the paper with fingers that betrayed her.
Just a flicker. Just a tremble.
But Ark Royal saw it.
And said nothing.
Hood placed her tricorne back atop her head with deliberate care—like donning a mask. Then saluted, as precisely as she ever had.
She turned crisply on her heel and exited, the doors shutting behind her with a whisper of old hinges and command-grade authority.
Her heels rang out on the polished floorboards. Not the tidy clicks of a lady at court, but the cannon-shot cadence of a battlecruiser under full steam.
Outwardly, she remained immaculate.
But the moment she cleared the last set of walnut-paneled archways and stepped into the student hall, her posture fractured.
Gone was the elegance.
What remained was cold, incandescent fury.
Her spine coiled, her jaw set like a vice, and her hands curled into fists so tight the parchment in her grip began to crumple.
She didn't walk—she stormed.
Each step thundered toward the bursar's office like an artillery shell.
Live with that German?!
The words curled in her gut like bad shellfish.
Her. HMS Hood. Of royal bearing and historic pedigree. To be crammed into some humid communal sweatbox with Bismarck, of all people? It was beyond comprehension.
She had a private suite! Her father had paid for it, damn it—paid in full, with two letters of peerage and a personal commendation from the Admiralty Board!
And now she was to be demoted to the rank of roommate?!
Girls in the corridor turned to look.
Then turned pale and scattered like birds before a stormfront, pressing themselves against the walls as Hood advanced, her fury radiating from her in waves.
One poor cruiser Captain curtsied too slowly and earned a death glare so potent she nearly wept.
Hood didn't see them. Not truly. Her whole world was fire and insult and the mental image of that smug Prussian cow brushing her teeth at the neighboring sink.
Her face burned. With rage. With shame. And with something else, too. But she didn't have time to name whatever that might be.
Hood's eyes narrowed, nostrils flaring.
Hood wanted to eat her hat.
The indignity of it all clanged through her ribs like loose plating. The bursar's office door clicked shut behind her, but the shame remained lodged in her chest like a splinter.
She had brought this on herself.
Worse, she had done it in full view of the boy she was trying—however foolishly—to impress.
She'd stormed halfway down the corridor, her boots clicking like musket fire on the old Academy floors, when a voice as cold and cutting as the Channel wind slipped past her shoulder:
"Are you quite finished, Lady Catherine?"
The voice was her own.
Not hers, precisely. But the AI that bore her name. Hood's ghost.
A silver projection now hovered at her flank—half lady, half knight, rendered in a stately armor that shimmered with nanite filigree. Her expression was dry as a good sherry.
"Do not start with me," Hood snapped. "Now is not the time for your japery."
"I hardly jape, Lady Catherine," the ghost replied, inspecting her silvery fingernails with imperial boredom. "Though I must say, your current dramatics would not be out of place on the West End."
"I am not being dramatic," Hood seethed. "I am being insulted. I am to be roomed with a German, forced to tutor a boy who should have been in my hands like a toy and deliver a video apology to the world like a disgraced schoolgirl!"
There was a pause.
Then the AI raised one perfect brow. "And yet," she said, "we deserve it."
The words struck like a belaying pin to the gut.
Catherine Hood went still.
Because damn the thing—damn the smug, gleaming, superior thing—she was right.
Ark Royal had been merciful. No decommission. No Frame seizure. No court-martial or banishment from Avalon's halls. A slap to her pride, yes. But that pride had steered her blade.
She had earned every inch of this.
Still fuming, Hood turned and punched the nearest support column. The pain flared up her forearm—sharp and grounding. A reminder that she was still flesh beneath the legend.
She exhaled.
"Fine," she muttered. "We adapt. What's the plan?"
The knight shimmered into a full projection now, complete with ghostly hemline and shining plate. Her grin was mischievous.
"There we are," she purred. "Now, I had an idea…"
Hood groaned aloud. "Oh no."
"Oh yes," her ghost replied, materializing with a flurry of nano-particles and a cheshire grin no knight should ever wear.
Hood massaged her bruised knuckles and sighed. "This isn't going to involve cannon fire, is it?"
"Only metaphorically," said the spectral knight, now circling her like a tutor around a very dense pupil. "Consider your new role not as punishment—but opportunity. You have been handed unrestricted access to Captain Rowan Takeda's schedule. Daily instruction. Personal dialogue. You may shape his education, his posture, his opinions."
"Manipulation," Hood muttered.
"Guidance," corrected the ghost. "And think of Bismarck. She's just as bound to him now as you are. But unlike you, she doesn't know how to play the long game. You, Lady Catherine, were born for the slow siege. The patient victory."
Hood arched an eyebrow. "You want me to conquer him?"
"I want you to educate him," the ghost replied innocently. "And should his affections drift toward the woman who shows him most clearly what it means to be a Captain… well, who could blame him?"
Lady Catherine Hood rolled her eyes. "You are incorrigible."
"We are us, after all." the ghost quipped, giving a mock curtsy in full plate.
And damn it all, Hood smiled. Just faintly. Because the silly old girl was right again.
She always was.
Fine, then. Let Bismarck watch her teach. Maybe she could civilize the Teutonic brute, by example.
Or, at the very least, if the ice queen exploded Hood could watch the detonation at close range.