Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft - Race/Off (Thank the stars this is the conclusion)
Carter Schimpff
(( Running Track, Kerrit Dromos, City One – Rylor ))
The end of the fourth kilometer gave way to the beginning of the fifth with very little fanfare, which Roy Bancroft felt was, under the circumstances, entirely appropriate.
Still, he ran.
Not because the race remained salvageable in any competitive sense. That particular fantasy had, over the last several hundred meters, been reviewed, amended, and quietly removed from circulation. No – the objective now was narrower, but no less meaningful for it. He would finish well. Or, failing that, he would finish in a manner sufficiently controlled to prevent this from becoming the sort of story that followed a man into staff meetings and formal dinners.
Ahead of him, Commander Ava Munro continued to run with a degree of athletic professionalism that Roy was beginning to take as a personal affront.
He studied her from a distance with the calm, involuntary precision of a physician conducting an observational assessment against his will. Cadence: stable. Shoulder tension: minimal. Stride integrity: insultingly intact. Signs of systemic suffering: absent to a degree Roy considered spiritually objectionable.
There should, by now, have been something.
A hitch in the gait. A slight shortening of stride. The faint visible erosion of a person who was also, presumably, made of flesh.
There was none.
Munro did not appear to be fading. If anything – and Roy found this both implausible and deeply rude – she appeared to be assembling herself for a stronger finish.
Bancroft: ::under his breath, with feeling:: Unbelievable.
The crowd had become louder over the last several hundred meters, no doubt because the race had entered that particularly entertaining phase in which the winner was all but decided and the remaining drama lay entirely in the loser’s manner of coping. Their cheers carried across the warm Rylorian air in uneven waves – some earnest, some amused, some carrying the distinct tonal quality of people who were already mentally rehearsing how they intended to retell this later.
Roy did not look directly at them. He could feel them perfectly well without visual confirmation.
Somewhere off to the side, he was almost certain he heard Garlanak shouting something with the fevered urgency of a man emotionally overleveraged in a sporting market. Roy chose, on principle, not to parse the content.
Instead, he fixed his attention ahead and lengthened his stride – not dramatically, not with the doomed bravado of a man pretending a miracle remained on offer, but with the quiet, practical resolve of someone determined to at least conclude his humiliation in style.
There came, in certain engagements, a point at which victory ceased to be the governing objective and one’s ambitions narrowed instead toward a more modest but still worthwhile outcome: arriving in a manner that did not invite permanent conversational reuse.
Roy had reached that point approximately two kilometers ago.
And yet, to his own mild irritation, some deeply unwell corner of his competitive instinct remained active enough to keep searching for possibility. Not much. Not enough to be useful. But enough to be annoying.
Perhaps, it suggested, Munro might overcommit her finish and tighten up.
She did not.
Perhaps she might misjudge the final curve.
She did not.
Perhaps, in a deeply merciful intervention by a universe that had so far demonstrated no measurable affection for him, she might simply decide she had made her point and ease off out of generosity.
Instead, at what Roy estimated to be roughly four hundred meters from the finish, Ava Munro found another gear.
It was not dramatic in the way cinematic things often are. There was no theatrical burst, no exaggerated forward lean, no visible declaration of intent.
It was worse than that.
It was coldly efficient.
Her stride lengthened by degrees. Her cadence sharpened. Her form, already irritatingly competent, refined itself into something leaner and more decisive, and Roy watched with the cold, lucid horror of a man realizing that the person currently defeating him had, until this moment, apparently been exercising restraint.
Bancroft: ::breathless, aghast:: You have got to be kidding me.
There are defeats one can contextualize. This, however, was rapidly becoming less a defeat and more a procedural demonstration in humiliation.
Roy might, under other circumstances, have resented this. But the truth was harder to argue with and therefore more offensive: Munro had run an excellent race. Clean. Disciplined. Ruthlessly well-timed.
He huffed a single laugh through his nose that did nothing whatsoever to improve his oxygen situation, then drew in a deeper breath and gathered what remained.
The race was no longer his to win – hadn’t been for some time now.
But the manner of his arrival still belonged to him, and that mattered.
Perhaps not strategically. Certainly not mathematically. But somewhere beneath the fatigue and the indignity and the increasingly speculative integrity of his internal organs, it mattered.
Roy lifted his chin slightly and steadied his breathing as best he could. He let go of the futile arithmetic of the gap ahead and turned instead to the simpler work immediately available to him: one stride, then the next, then the next after that. The final bend approached beneath the bright Rylorian sky, the track curving red beneath his feet as the finish line and gathered spectators came more fully into view.
He could see Munro crossing well ahead.
There was applause. A sharper burst of cheering. The unmistakable collective reaction of people witnessing the conclusion they had both expected and thoroughly enjoyed.
Roy, for his part, kept running.
There was, he reflected, a kind of dignity available only to the comprehensively outperformed: the quiet refusal to become ridiculous in the final act.
The last hundred meters arrived with all the tenderness of a tax audit.
His lungs burned now in earnest. His legs had lost all pretense of enthusiasm. Every system involved in forward propulsion had entered some late-stage agreement based less on excellence than on mutual exhaustion. And yet he found, to his own surprise, that the embarrassment had mostly burned away, leaving something simpler and far less volatile in its place.
Perspective, perhaps. Or possibly oxygen deprivation.
The finish line approached, and the crowd beyond it sharpened into recognizable faces and shapes. He caught glimpses – crew leaning forward, smiling, laughing, clapping, some with the unmistakable expressions of people trying and failing to look appropriately sympathetic.
Roy crossed the line several very long, very undeniable seconds after Commander Munro.
And because there remained, buried somewhere beneath the ruin, a final surviving strand of self-possession too stubborn to die quietly, he did not merely stumble through it like a forgotten extra in his own humiliation.
Instead, as he passed the line, Roy lifted one hand – not high, not theatrically, just enough – and gave the waiting crowd a small, grave, almost courtly acknowledgment, as though accepting applause at the conclusion of a performance whose reviews had been mixed but whose effort had, at the very least, been visible.
Then he bent forward, hands braced lightly on his thighs, breathing hard enough to suggest that speech should perhaps no longer be considered a responsible activity.
He remained there for one breath.
Then two.
Then, with the solemnity of a man delivering a final medical finding from the edge of a minor collapse, Roy straightened only enough to angle a look toward Munro.
Bancroft: ::between breaths:: Well.
A pause.
Bancroft: I do hope you appreciate how irritatingly competent that performance was.
Another breath.
Bancroft: ::faintly, with dry resignation:: Thorough work, Commander.
Munro/Any: Response?
He let out one last breath through his nose, then straightened and offered her his hand. There was no theatrical reluctance in it, no wounded pride. It was a gesture extended with the quiet formality of someone who had been beaten soundly and intended, at the very least, to lose correctly.
Bancroft: ::genuine smile:: Enjoy this, Commander. ::arching an eyebrow:: But do remember… sequels have a way of being far less kind to the original leads.
Munro/Any: Response
TAG/End Scene for Bancroft
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Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft
Assistant Chief Medical Officer
USS Artemis-A
A240205RB1