(A/N: So my boyfriend and I were visiting his family, they turned this show on, and I pretty much immediately started shipping these two. So I looked up fanfiction when I got back, and it wasn't quite what I expected. Where was the hatesex, the rivalmance, the screaming fights interspersed with frantic kissing? Don't get me wrong, there are some fantastic emotional rollercoasters (I'm looking at you, Kyra4. You made me cry, and I loved every second of it.) but I found myself also craving something a little more...tongue-in-cheek. You know, Ammeh, I said to myself, if you want a fic written exactly to your tastes, you're going to have to write it yourself. So I am. Hopefully it's to some of your tastes, as well!

And since this fandom seems to like to keep things PG-13, this is also a challenge to myself to see if I can still write a 3000+ word fanfic without any smut in it. I haven't done that in years...which is incidentally why none of the stuff I've written in the past few years is on this site. And yet the formatter is as finicky as ever...)

Chapter One: Thinking of Little Else

Puberty was making Jane realize that her body was a sneaky, treacherous vessel, one which did not hold much stock in common sense.

First there were the breasts. Such unnecessary things—first they were sore all the time, and then suddenly they no longer fit into her armor. She still was not nearly as well-endowed as Pepper in that department, thank goodness, but she had needed to have a curved cuirass specially commissioned from a very quizzical leatherworker in the town. A very judgmental quizzical leatherworker, who kept asking why on earth she needed armor, being a woman and all.

Then came the bleeding. Two days a month of sore, achy hips that made training a chore, followed by several more days of having to run inside every few hours to change the cloth tucked inside her smallclothes.

And then one day Gunther Breech walked into the room, and she stopped breathing.

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It was not at all fair that her body should turn on her like this. As far as she could tell, the boys had gone through nothing more than a few weeks of unpredictable pitch changes before their voices smoothed out into something deeper than before. And here she was growing curves and wasting blood and fighting a strange fixation with Gunther Breech.

So perhaps she had been staring at him more than she used to. And perhaps he had begun to smell better than he had any right to after a long day of training. But recently it had begun to feel like her insides were tying themselves up into giddy little knots at his mere presence. She wanted to touch him. Which was silly, because she touched him…well…not that often, actually.

Why did she not touch him more often? They spent hours a day within arm's reach, but their wooden swords were the only things that touched. Which, now that she thought about it, was ridiculous, really! What if she should find herself without a sword? She would be unable to defend herself or her liege, and that was completely unacceptable. They needed to work on unarmed combat. She would mention it tomorrow.

And the fact that such training would require quite a lot of bodily contact with Gunther would just be a fortunate—unfortunate, of course she meant unfortunate—consequence.

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"Gunther, I have a thought," she began tentatively, during a lull in their sparring.

"Have you?" He raised a brow. "How unusual."

She opened her mouth to toss out an insult, before stopping herself short. This was for the good of the kingdom, after all. "I thought," she said, "that we ought to train in—hand-to-hand combat. How to defeat an opponent without the use of a weapon."

He scoffed. "You can learn that in a tavern. Just insult a drunkard's mother and you shall have all the unarmed combat you could want." He paused. "Unless you consider flagons and stools to be weapons, that is."

His smirk was absolutely infuriating, in a way that made her rather breathless. With rage. Breathless with rage. Definitely.

"I was not talking about brawling," she protested, "I meant something more along the lines of…wrestling your opponent to the ground and disabling them."

He gaped at her for a moment, cheeks flushed, before shaking himself out of a reverie. "Ah. Well, that sounds like…an excellent idea, Jane. We should do that. Soon."