No Yesterdays
She wonders if this is how disappointment tastes. It lies thick and painful in her mouth, damming up all her cries as she watches silently, waiting for this charmingly sadistic man to leave the room.
He smiles and offers false promises of coming in later, loving her for real, and she nods towards the ground, hands clenched in her skirt.
Tyki is very beautiful, Lenalee realizes, until you touch him. He smiles brightly when Rhode plays with her, dresses her up in doll lace and ringlets, tells her easily that she's beautiful, with his gold eyes snapping her head to toe and never lost in the desirable middle.
She gets used to his back.
She's very young, really, and by the time she's sixteen she's grown into yearning. It's a constant, never ending variable of herself, and she doesn't know why she's here.
Rhode dances through centuries, her huge gold eyes childish and ancient as she laces up Lenalee's corset, funny little smile on her little-girl face. She skips in her ribbons and black lace and high, clunky shoes a little girl has no right to be wearing. Pint sized femme-fatal.
"Lenalee-chan," she says brightly, brushing clean her marionette strings, "Did I tell you about Allen-kun?"
Allen Walker is famous among the Noah for continuously avoiding death by their hands, and locking blades with the Earl. Rhode adores him. Lenalee has never met him.
"Tell me again," she says softly, and studies the washed out girl in the mirror, whose eyes are always retracing her steps, trying to find where things went so wrong.
The Noah is a family of elegant, dark beauty, where they bathe in blood to keep their skin clean. They dust the centuries from their coats when they don them, and it's painfully obvious she doesn't—has never—belong.
"Tyki," she swings her legs from her perch on the bed, tilts her head, "I'm compatible with the innocence, aren't I? So why aren't I on the other side?"
Tyki straightens his tie, and raises his eyebrows calmly. He touches the side of her face very briefly, "I wouldn't worry about it."
