-1 And Her Highness Said…
1. misfit for a name
This became her revelation when she first saw another raven-haired beauty saunter bare-foot through Order, her simply bound hair swinging side to side like a pendulum. She wore a perfectly fitted uniform on body small enough to vanish behind any adult. She had been too heartbreakingly young, and too lovely to die fighting, and too strong in her straight-backed stride. The focus in her eyes, barely clinging to a scrap of blue before black, was dark enough blind her to the truth of her life.
She was like the older girl cousins Lenalee had left behind in China. They had practiced an elegant indifference to things that did not suit them. Just like that, their pride would permeate the walls of the household in a murmur. The decisions of men named for things like the raging elements or the virtues of war would be colored with the wills of those who were never even mentioned. Their titles, painted soft from beauty and flowers, seemed too delicate to be keeping company with such heavy matters.
That was what it had meant to be a woman. To move mountains without breaking composure, without shaming others. Without even a raised voice.
One of the first things Lenalee had done after they had told her why she was at the Tower had been to point to the stiff-stitched coat of Klaud Nine. They had shook heads no. She had been too young, too small. She had years to go before the expensive uniforms would not be a waste on growing body and her carelessness. Lenalee had looked at the newcomer in her brand-new coat, tailor made for her child's stature. The material had been thick like armor and the girl had walked its weight like she didn't feel it.
That night, Lenalee had looked at her own soft dresses that someone else had picked for her. She had looked at the many frothy petticoats she had because she could not wear the dresses without them. Y-U-U. Three letters. One sound. It was so simple it seemed inhuman. Without body and a little bit like a god , like a lone bamboo stalk or a crash of water on the shore. When Lenalee had first came they had offered her Eleanor and Reginald and Lillian. Although she had picked her own they hadn't treated it any different. She stared at the pretty embroideries and prints for girls and they seemed to write out the princess names.
Learning that Kanda was really a boy turned out to change nothing because Kanda stayed the same. It being his rather than her expression didn't mean anything to how it still expected nothing of her in her fine-knit stockings and patent-leather shoes. In the meantime Kanda still wore nothing on his feet indoors because that was what he was used to.
She had asked him about his name, and he said it could be masculine or feminine, depending on how it was written. "Gentleness, superiority, distant, or leisurely," he had recited to her. But he didn't specify which was his. Lenalee remembers the silence of his step as her soles clumsily hit the tiles, loud. She had studied the matter-of-fact hand on his sword and even simpler tone of voice as he told her that if a place told him that he belonged it was better said by giving him its clothing to wear.
Her name, he said as they went through halls that he acted were his, was pretty. But hard to say. Lenalee clomped after him. Her gaze stayed fixed on his cheekbone because he never looked her directly. Kanda was obviously a boy now that she could look closer and knew how thought. He was made up of things like codes and principles, and was very noisy about them being at stake. But she could still hear the steady brush of hair, feel the braced strength of small shoulders.
"You are an exorcist too, aren't you?" and she heard how it was phrased as a question. "Do what you can." he said and brushed her off at a corner. Concentrating, she could the softest patter of his bare feet, the subdued noise carrying a heavy human life. She listened carefully to his dismissal: his distraction with his own cause and the trust in her to run her own little devices. It said that, without a doubt, that she would be able to move mountains without ever being seen.