There was always the element of balancing political relationships and the intricately woven web of loyalties, rebellions, even small defiances, and having the right lineage in the first place when it came time to evaluate the four royal spouses a new monarch must take.
The Northern Prince was about what they’d expected, slight of build and almost delicate in appearance, with fair skin like morning clouds and blue eyes like chinks of sky, narrowed at them in wary distrust. That delicate look, those airy features had always been deceptive, and even the most coddled royalty of the first of the Four Lands had an uncanny ability to survive.
Saruhiko caught his breath staring. No bone. No blood. No ash.
Mikoto gave a sort of bone deep weary sigh and leaned back with that tired look about him that sometimes made Saruhiko wonder if he ever felt regret.
“That’s too bad,” Kusanagi said.
Saruhiko blinked at him in surprise for the understated reaction, then looked down at his own hand. It was shaking. They’d said as much, but it was only hitting Saruhiko now that by taking Suoh Mikoto’s hand, he could have died.
A moment ago, there was a person. Now, there was nothing: no bone, blood, ash.
Ostensibly, Mikoto knows what a pillow is. His personal definition, Kusanagi thinks with some chagrin as he tries to reach around a grumpy redhead’s hair and face to fill in the next problem on his math, seems to be the person I like’s lap.
Mikoto grunts a complaint and Kusanagi almost swats him on the side of the head. He refrains, but he can feel the corner of his mouth quirking up in a small smile.
“Your choice to sleep there,” he comments easily, laying blame for all the awkwardness squarely where it belongs.
Mikoto just huffs. “Yeah.”
He stays.
Atsushi was ninety percent certain there was some ulterior motive in Dazai assigning him to stake out the office of a certain official to record his comings and goings with Akutagawa of all people. Not that Dazai was the kind of person to explain his motives, nor was it Akutagawa’s to explain what interest the Mafia had in this information that Fukuzawa could possibly go along with.
Yata wasn’t normally the fastest in picking up on conversation around him in the bar, but today he seemed particularly out of it.
“Are you all right?” Kamamoto asked.
He only got a mumbled reply, barely intelligible with Yata’s mouth buried in his arms on the counter.
“What’s wrong, Yata?” Kusanagi asked.
Yata looked up, blushed bright red. “What do you do when someone kisses you?”
The bar went quiet.
He blushed harder, buried his entire face.
“It depends,” Kusanagi answered. “Either you say you’re not interested or you kiss them back.”
“He’s interested.”
“It’s gotta be Fushimi.”
“Shut up!”
Too violent. Too harsh. Too unwilling to use violence until pressed. Willing to use too much violence after.
Reasons to throw her from one complement to another, one look at clawed hooks on her wingtips enough to teach anyone she’d been built at Canaf. Playing nice shouldn’t be her first reflex.
“A diplomatic envoy?” Maru asked, skeptical of her pilot.
“In a war complement,” Taseta said, tossing her braid and grinning. “A permanent post. We’ll serve as point.”
A war complement. They could use both her violence and her restraint.
“You really think it’ll last?”
Taseta shrugged. “At least try.”
Mikoto was like the kind of big cat that let kids crawl all over him. Particular kids. Just two really.
Anna could snuggle up right next to him and even tuck her hand into his without even a grunt of protest. Totsuka could make Mikoto his own personal blanket if he wanted and Mikoto wouldn’t do more than sigh.
He never failed to complain whenever Kusanagi encroached on nap space in an attempt to sit down, but then again, Mikoto may have been audibly put upon but he let Kusanagi sit down anyway.
“Softie,” Kusanagi teased.
Mikoto’s grumpy glare notwithstanding.
Wanting Misaki like this was a discovery, unpleasant and unwelcome burning in his belly. It was easier when they were friends, then when they were enemies, easier than looking at Misaki’s cheerful face and realizing he wasn’t content to be friends again, even best friends.
“Saru! Pay attention!”
Saruhiko didn’t really need to pay that much attention to win the video game, but it would be helpful to think a little less about how distracting Misaki was and more on winning against him.
He didn’t. He leaned over, shoved the controller out of a startled Misaki’s hands, and kissed him.
Kyouka dreams sometimes of her mother, her old life, the before that might have been. She dreams sometimes of the future, of Atsushi and the Armed Detective Agency, of eating tofu on bright summer days.
A knife is in her hand. You have to kill in order to save them.
She stares at the blade and whispers to herself, “No.” Those days are behind her. Demon Snow is behind her, sword out, eyes blank and promising.
“No,” Kyouka says and throws herself into battle to fight the enemy and save whoever her dream has concocted.
She wakes with bloodless hands.
It was a free day, more than she should have asked for, more than she should have wanted, but Atsushi let her take it and fate did not take it back. A day of sightseeing, crepes, childhood returned to her for a few precious hours with one who felt like a true friend by her side.
It didn’t matter if she went to the police station at the end of it, it didn’t even matter what happened at the end of it: for one day, Kyouka could be truly happy before the rest of her life—and pain—would resume.
Every time Akutagawa strikes her, it’s nipping on the heels of failure and leading a lesson by its throat. Kouyou-san frowns in clear displeasure when she sees the bruises that bloom across Kyouka’s skin, but her hands are gentle and the cloth cool as she bathes them.
“Tell Ryuunosuke not to hit your face,” Kouyou-san says with the hard voice of a Port Mafia executive. “The Port Mafia values your beauty.”
There are many messages wrapped in layers around Kouyou-san’s words and tongue, lessons delivered with honey rather than stinging pain.
Still somehow, Kyouka feels them ache in her bones.
Izumi Kyouka was prepared to die. She’d stood before the weretiger, willing to die to fight her and save everyone else, willing to save even her from the bomb she wore. He couldn’t save her and she’d sentenced herself to death.
He saved her. She had killed so many, blood on Demon Snow’s sword, and she deserved to be punished, to be executed, so she walked herself to justice before he saved her again.
He didn’t understand, but Dazai did when he finally told her she could redeem herself.
She’d chosen execution. Sacrifice was no more fearful.
Kyouka saved them.
There’s an angry goose whose job it is to know these things. They say the reason so few people meet their soulmate is because the goose can only herd around one soul at a time in the direction of their mate and until the goslings grow up, the country just has too many people to get through before it’s your turn.
Every country has its own soul guide. Theirs is the angry goose. Yata always wondered but didn’t dare ask if someone else had the happy goose. Had he asked, his mother would have told him, they’re all angry, dear, they’re overworked.
He doesn’t really think anything of it when he’s skateboarding past a park and there are birds flying up startled from the ground, making small angry sounds at his disturbance. Not until a very loud angry honking doesn’t fly up. Instead it follows him, startling him back into careening right off the skateboard into the grass.
And there’s an angry goose in his face. It thrusts its beak at him as if it wants him to get moving.
Fushimi Saruhiko was prepared for many kinds of craziness to be a part of his workday, but the last thing he expected was a certain familiar redheaded skateboarder to come tearing through Scepter 4 chased by a honking, biting goose close on his heels. Misaki crashed into Saruhiko’s desk, and the goose stopped to glare at them both with one beady eye.
It gave one last smug honk and waddled away.
A moment of peace, rain falling gently against the windows, the scent of fire and red aura mingling with mundane smells of an apartment shut up against the weather, stale scents of breakfast and cigarette smoke.
It’s rare and remarkable for highly ranked blue and red clansman to share that moment of peace together.
Seri lets her wary edge slowly fade before Izumo’s openness. He seems so close to his king, in ways she doesn’t have with the Captain. Friends.
She looks at him talking about friends and wonders a little to herself if this is what that feels like.
Munakata hadn’t forgotten Mikoto or the position Mikoto had willingly placed him in, forcing him to play executioner with little regret. He didn’t doubt his Lieutenant, never for a moment, but Munakata found himself reluctant to force her to slay him the way he had Mikoto.
A backup plan, one she could hardly miss, a blatant admission of his own weakness, but Awashima Seri shared his particular weakness, the inability to walk away from their own duty.
This wasn’t her duty. He’d given it to another. Even so, he should have known, she would do what needed to be done.
Mikoto could take a lot of punishment, harsh hands, hard surfaces under his body as Munakata slammed him into wall, street, even ground if he could manage it. Pain and the promise of it, rough and the bite of bright aura that wasn’t Mikoto’s.
He laughed, eyes alight with power and pleasure.
Munakata’s smug face was just right as he wrought actual pain and bruises on a nearly untouchable king. It didn’t feel like the rush of power or the nightmares and regrets that plagued him. It felt like something he didn’t have to think or worry about. Something real.
The first time Cor saw sand, he ran across the beach with giggles and bare feet, not even noticing the stinging heat and grit. Zana watched with a smile and settled down to build castles.
He came back over, curiously, after her towers began to rise from the sand, looked with wide eyes, never touching. She was raising him at essentially a spaceport. He knew to keep his fingers away from delicate things.
But he was her little brother. She took his small hands and showed him how to shape and pat and firm the walls.
“Our castle,” she said.
He was lighting a cigarette when Seri asked curiously, “How precise are you with that?”
Izumo stopped, stared at her for a moment, then smiled. “How precise do you want me to be?”
She shot him a look he could read easily, Don’t get too cocky. But her expression turned speculative, finger running over the lighter cap. “Hot but not painful.”
Which meant getting very close but not touching her skin. He glanced appreciatively over her skin again as she stretched out on the bed.
“You sure?” he asked one more time.
“Get on with it,” she commanded.
“Yes, Seri.”
There was soft singing coming out of Kyouka and Atsushi’s dorm room. It was late at night and both of them should have been asleep but while Atsushi was, in at least a manner of speaking, Kyouka had wakened with the tiger.
The tiger was sprawled across the bedding comfortably in the shape of a crescent moon, tail twitching back and forth in contentment as it purred under Kyouka’s gentle hand rubbing along its flank. She sang quietly as it stared at her with great lantern eyes, bright in the darkness.
It was not the tiger only who was content.