Title: Love You Longer
Author: Nina/TechnicolorNina
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh!: GX
Pairing/Characters: Past-life Jyuudai/Yubel.
Word Count: 8 569
Spoilers: Third season.
Story Rating: R/M
Story Summary: The flashback: expanded.
Notes: Another past-life fic. Same universe. Also take note, Yubel swaps pronouns in the middle. Get used to it, because s/he's as contrary as all hell.
Feedback: There may be something out there that's better than a review containing concrit, but if there is, I haven't found it yet. So if you have two minutes and you wouldn't mind? Please? Arigatou. (And concrit is cool. Flames are not.)
Special Thanks/Dedications: For my cousin Kim, who helped.
I remember the smell of your skin, I remember everything
I remember all your moves, I remember you, yeah
I remember the nights, you know I still do
So if you're feelin' lonely, don't
You're the only one I ever want
I only wanna make it good
So if I love you a little more than I should
Please forgive me, I know not what I do
Please forgive me, I can't stop lovin' you
Don't deny me this pain I'm goin' through
Please forgive me if I need you like I do
Oh, believe me, every word I say is true
Please forgive me, I can't stop lovin' you.
~ "Please Forgive Me," Bryan Adams
It's been close to seven thousand years (or nine hundred, or well over a hundred-hundred centuries, or it may not happen until tomorrow—it all depends on which dimension's time-continuity she's following at any given time), but Yubel still remembers everything.
It begins in the courtyard behind the palace, the one where the Queen has been instructing her on where precisely on Jyuudai's arm her hand belongs during a specific ceremonial dance if that dance is performed on a given day between two certain times. She and Jyuudai are making faces at each other while the Queen's back is turned, trying to stifle their own half-giggling laughter—he in her hair, she with her face pressed against his neck before his mother can turn around to see them being decidedly improper in public.
The Queen does turn and claps her hands once, her exasperated tone when she says Jyuudai's name telling them both without another word to hush down before trouble starts. Yubel pulls back so she can be manoeuvred back into her proper starting position. Jyuudai wrinkles his nose at her, and she bursts out in a fit of laughter before she can help herself. The journey they took to Kashimin—part of a two-month trading mission during which Yubel took on the double-role of prince's consort and merchant's takhamin child—has settled something within her, and this, she thinks, is perhaps what people mean by "growing up." She did not return to Delain ready to fall into the prim and proper mantle of Queenhood that Jyuudai's mother seems to fit into so serenely, but she is able, now, to look at her upcoming marriage as a welcome challenge she will walk into with Jyuudai by her side, instead of as a locked cage from which she must escape. She will not, cannot, become the sort of kind but rigid royalty Jyuudai's parents exemplify, but she has at least learned to sit still and listen and behave herself.
When Jyuudai isn't making faces at her, at least.
"Yubel, please," the Queen says, and Yubel at least makes an effort to control herself. "You have two months to learn this—"
"I'm sorry, Your Majesty," Yubel hurries to say, before the Queen can get full-on momentum and leave them standing here for half an hour while she lectures them on the importance of not wasting time. Jyuudai has the grace to at least look sheepish. The Queen sighs.
"Go take off your sarabi and wash," she says, indicating the brightly-coloured wrapped dress Yubel fell in love with in the capital of Kashimin. One thing Yubel has come to enjoy about being a princess, or at least a princess-in-waiting: when she dressed out of the normal fashion as a Dailish commoner, she was the subject of gossip. Now she can dress as outlandishly as she likes, and instead of causing unfavourable comment, all those with means will be wearing the same thing by the next week in Amneth, and across all of Delain inside of a month. Yubel bows, not bothering to match her mode of address to the clothing she's in, and nods for Jyuudai to come with her. He reaches for her hand, both of them more than ready to get out of formal clothes and into the short pants and tunics they abandoned in Jyuudai's room after breakfast. She takes his hand and squeezes it, some part of her still amused and just a little irked at herself for how easily she has come, once it was put in front of her eyes, to love that particular smile he sometimes gives her.
She remembers every moment: the point when Jyuudai helps her unpin the fabric of her sarabi from over the underblouse beneath, the way his hand lingers just a moment on her bare waist, not quite daring to actually touch. They both know things now they were just barely aware of ten months ago, Jyuudai's mother standing in for Yubel's mother and father both to explain what she called "the duties and pleasures of the marriage bed." The two of them learned the topic as they have learned so much else—sitting together on Jyuudai's bed, talking and arguing round and round about what they have been told, trying to determine together if "to lie with a woman" or, in Yubel's case, a man, means they are not supposed to share a blanket in the time after Jackal-Moon when the wind turns cold, and if it does not mean that, then if they are perhaps supposed to sit up while they do so.
That was well on three months ago, and now they've gotten past the first part (fighting over it in that best-friend kind of way that isn't really fighting at all, only a kind of artless but effective communication) and the second part (taking their conclusions and misconceptions to every servant and tutor in the castle until they found one willing to talk openly about this mysterious thing called "man's privilege"), they've moved on to the third part—waiting for their chance to try it and see for themselves, both of them wondering just a little if they must wait, since it seems a shame to reach their wedding night with only the vaguest ideas and no real practical knowledge on how it actually works. But the edict is clear: Jyuudai is not to know her (a phrase Yubel finds inherently ridiculous) until the night the rites of their marriage are completed.
Instead they satisfy their curiosity with those little touches and half-articulated kisses, not daring much more just yet for reasons neither of them completely understand but both feel in their very bones without having to so much as speak. And so when Jyuudai rests his hand on her skin in a single feather-light touch she reaches for the tunic she has left on his bed and pulls it over her head, changing from Yubel-samir to Yubel-samor, princess to prince, in the time it takes to tie a sash around his hips instead of his waist.
They are walking back into the sun, both of them, mindful of the slightest nip of autumn in the air (a nip she can still recall as though it wasn't far away and long ago when it touched her skin) but with no real concern for it just yet, when Yubel is hailed by the King himself. He stops, and it is a mark of just how much has changed in ten months that when he does he doesn't let go of Jyuudai's hand. Still, when he is waved over he goes readily.
"I'd appreciate much if thee'd walk with me awhile," the King says, and Yubel nods, reflecting even as he answers—"Yes, Your Majesty"—that Jyuudai's father may be one of the last people in Delain to still use the speech of the Friend-folk. He follows obediently, having been party to the King's walks before—long, meandering things that usually come out on some private walkway or tower, a sure indication that Something Serious is going to be said. They had such a talk when Yubel accepted Jyuudai's proposal of marriage, and another when her father died in the sixmonth following. Yubel isn't surprised, then, when the amble he's been led on ends at a long pathway between two of the towers at the backmost part of the castle.
"Thee wit the prince thy betrothed to be one of the most important people in Delain," he says, and Yubel nods. "'Tis fair to say he, with his powers, may be also the most important person in this world or any other."
"I don't doubt it, Your Majesty," Yubel says, not bothering to wonder what point there is in stating the obvious. This is simply the way the King speaks, full of ceremony in even the most casual of conversations, and Yubel can tell even now that this is not just a casual conversation.
"Dost thee wit of his powers, then?" the King asks, and Yubel pauses, not sure how to answer. He knows that Jyuudai is sometimes able to make things appear, and disappear; knows that when he needs help and is unable to help himself, Jyuudai somehow always shows up just in time. And he knows that at least once, when Jyuudai stepped in to keep a girl from being beaten in the town square for having the falling-sickness, Jyuudai's eyes turned a bright and brilliant gold even with the sun behind him. At last Yubel answers as honestly as he knows how.
"I know there are things about him that aren't like other boys in this land or any other I know, Sire," he says, and the King nods.
"Unlike other boys," he says slowly, as though pondering. "Thee speaks far and fair, though not at all far enough."
Yubel waits patiently for the King to finish his thoughts, hands on the wall at the side of the path, just above the buttress. At last he speaks again.
"The prince thy betrothed is samah kitarrh," he says. "Not kitamh but kitarrh. Dost thee wot?"
Yubel nods. Not samah kitamh, the king of the land, but samah kitarrh. The king of all—but more than that. Kitarrh is a sacred word, a holy one. The sacred Ahli and Rydia, keepers and bearers of sun and moon, are maka kitarrh, the all-seeing eyes, and even as Yubel nods it occurs to him that it is only to Ahli and Rydia, and to Gamaru, keeper of earth, that Yubel has ever heard that word applied—and so he speaks before he can think about the consequences of his words.
"Do you mean he walks among gods, Sire?" he says, and then draws in a sharp breath at his own bluntness. Placing a mortal on a level with those sacred beings is beyond unthinkable, abhorrent, heretic on a level even Yubel does not dare.
The King nods.
"Listen, and listen well," the King says. "Many years ago, there were two forces great and immoveable, the Light and the Darkness. Those forces fought a great battle, and the Darkness was victorious. It shaped this world and many others, and the Light retreated to the very farthest reaches of the universe, beaten but not destroyed."
"Yes, Your Majesty," Yubel says. This is a story he knows from his lessons with Jyuudai and Kanti. There are four stories of creation in Delain—the story of Rydia and Ahli; the story of Tamar and the giant urn in which he rode out the tears of Gamaru, the tears that fell and gathered and became the salten ocean; the story of the lesser god Issar and how he built the world from the flesh and blood of Teham, his father fallen in battle; and this story, the one that identifies the shapers of the universe simply as Light and Dark—and Yubel knows them all. Still, he doesn't protest at hearing the story again—being refreshed, as it were, since he has little doubt it's important.
"The Light brooded and plotted, sealed but not broken," the King continues. "But now its bonds have grown weak. Dost thee wit the prophesy that speaks on it?"
"'When one stalks one with twelve betwixt, a dark one shall lead for good or ill,'" Yubel answers. "I do, Your Majesty."
"Jyuudai is that dark one," the King says. "But he is young—of an age for manhood in body, but not in mind. The Light grows stronger as each day passes, and it's ever wily at gaining what it desires by trick and by ruse. Its goal will be not just to harm him but to destroy him completely. If he is gone, it matters not whether the battle is won or lost, for the Light will take all. 'Tis fair to say that in this matter, the Prince is all."
"Yes, Your Majesty," Yubel answers again, solemn and battle-ready and wondering just a little why just once in his life things can't be simple.
"Until he grows to manhood he must have a guardian—someone to shield him from all harm," the King says, and before he can continue—no doubt to ask Yubel whom amongst Delain's soldiers speaks loyalty and fealty to the royal family even when half-drunk—Yubel speaks.
"I'll do it, Sire," he says, ignoring the King's look of shock. "No matter the cost, I'll protect him."
"Thee wit not what measures are necessary for his protection," the King answers. "Thy body itself would be torn to pieces and put together again, covered in dragon's scales, made so hideous in the purpose of protection that no eye could look on thee."
Yubel doesn't need to think about his answer, but a memory comes unbidden, all the same: a time when his hair was still long, when he was still just takhai, a girl with a man's title, and swimming with Jyuudai under a hot summer sun, the braid on her head becoming wedged between two rocks far beneath the water's surface. In his mind he sees Jyuudai's face, small and white and scared in the deep blue expanse of water, pulling on Yubel's braid and on the rocks, trying to separate them even as his own air ran out. He remembers regaining consciousness on the side of the pool, wrapped in Jyuudai's arms as Jyuudai tried to expel the water from her lungs and bring her back from the Shadowlands between Mim and Tan, the earth and the underworld. He remembers, even as he speaks.
"I don't care."
Night.
Yubel stands outside the door of Jyuudai's room, dressed in the dark blue sarabi she knows now she will never wear for its intended purpose. The court magician spared nothing when he told her what would become of her tomorrow after the afternoon town-call, and so after sitting on her bed meditating for much of what remained of the day, she slipped away alone and made a wreath of the light blue maiden's-hair that fringes the pool where she anticipates never swimming again. It sits in her hair now, a poor answer to the roses and passion-peach blossoms that are supposed to be in such wreaths, but at least she has one.
Her mother had none at all, and this is what Yubel remembers as she touches the chain of small blue and green stones around her neck. They are round, shaped and polished, the jewelry of the Yaron-folk from whom her mother was cast out when it was discovered she'd been gotten not by a Yaroni man, but a Dailish one. The chain is the last thing Yubel has of her, and completely unfit for the wedding of a future Queen. Yubel doesn't care; she is here now not as a result of the legal paper that promises her to the boy on the other side of this door, but because she has conned her own heart and discovered that her last vow to herself was broken long ago.
Her reasons for accepting the curse she has called on her own head go far beyond simple friendship.
She knocks on his door, incredibly aware of the shapes of her own newly-polished fingernails. This is not the kind of wedding where it will matter where on Jyuudai's arm her hand sits; this is the kind that is simply her own testimony to loyalty and promise, quickly to be annulled legally if not in her heart. Even so, she found herself unable to present herself at his door dressed in playclothes and with her hair tumbled loose, unkempt and unanointed.
There has been no blessing on her head, but an hour's work at the side of their childhood haunt has provided her with charstone to line her eyes, and though fat and ground birl-bark were not available to her for her lips, she has found that rinberries make a reasonable substitute. When Jyuudai opens his door it is not the helter-skelter friend from his childhood waiting for him, but a bride.
There is something bitter for her in his smile—free and easy and appreciative, without the slightest trace of guile or meanness in it—now that she knows what lengths she will soon go to in order to protect it. He reaches for her hand.
"Don't let arata catch you wearing that," he murmurs, kissing her cheek, and Yubel forces as much of a smile as she can onto her face.
"It doesn't matter," she tells him, finding the latch on the door behind her and turning it behind her back. And this is true; if Jyuudai's mother finds Yubel wearing the clothing intended for her wedding day, there can be no repercussions. What punishment is there for someone whose honesty on the marriage bed cannot be accounted, since Jyuudai's is impossible to tell without a witness and Yubel, whose lips will never speak the truth on that matter, will have no marriage bed after tonight?
She pulls him close and kisses him, not bothering to explain to him why she is here now, why she cannot be satisfied to wait only twomonth, until he squirms back and stares at her.
"Yubel . . . ?"
She forces herself to meet his eyes. "Do you love me?"
He stares at her, not hurt—not yet—but bordering on it. "What kind of a question is that?"
She doesn't answer him, just repeating the question and waiting for his reply. At last he gives it.
"You know I do, so why—"
"Then take your privilege now, if you ever plan to," she says, and something in either her face or her eyes or both must tell him he could argue all night and never sway her, because after his initial shock, he doesn't even bother to try. He simply reaches out and brushes her cheek with the backs of his fingers.
"Are you calling it off?" he asks, his voice soft, and now there are the beginnings of hurt in it. Yubel shakes her head, reaches up to his hand and clasps it between her own.
"My word is good," she tells him, willing her voice not to crack when she says it. Yes, her word is good—why else would she come to his room in the middle of the night instead of waiting for the bed intended for them to begin their lives as one together? Her word is good, and the word she must account for now is not one she has given to Jyuudai. It is a word from which she couldn't turn back if she tried—not with the blood of the dragon already in her, working its way slowly into her veins in preparation for the final transformation that will change her from human to beast. "Don't worry about it now."
There is still a question in his eyes—Yubel's untouched honesty is of paramount importance because of her status as neither royal nor noble but commoner, something that has been pressed on them both multiple times. Then he reaches up—so slowly and with precision enough that the two of them almost look as though they are finally performing the dance they have practiced so many times in the courtyard, a dance Yubel thinks she now understands—and puts a hand on the join between her neck and shoulder. She doesn't flinch, letting him make up his own mind—if he tells her to go, she will let him send her without argument.
Instead he reaches for her hand and leads her to the bed.
When she remembers, later, it is as though she is viewing the entire thing through a double-prism—as though even as he unpinned and unwrapped the sarabi she so carefully draped over her own shoulders she was watching from outside herself, instead of drawing the laces of his undertunic. He slides his hands down her sides to her waist, pulling her closer and kissing her, not objecting when she slips her hands up the back of his undertunic and presses them to the backs of his shoulders.
They break apart long enough for her to push his sleep-trousers down over his hips and for him to draw her underblouse over her head, both garments drifting together on the floor, and then they sit, Jyuudai reaching up to the garland in her curiously.
"I promise," she says, letting it sum up every reason she is here, since she does not trust her own voice to say more. Instead she pulls her legs up onto the bed and lets her arms fall around his neck when he kisses her again, twining her fingers into his hair and cradling the back of his head in her palm, feeling the warmth of him in her hands and arms. Jyuudai's hand leaves her waist and moves over her stomach, up to her chest, and there he lets it rest, fingers brushing the skin where less than two years ago there were breasts, his touch there drawing a shiver.
Jyuudai swings his leg over hers, all but sitting in her lap, Yubel feeling the slow burn of dragon's blood in her veins as she lies back against his pillows and pulls him down to her. Jyuudai kisses the side of her neck, and she turns her head to give him better access, feeling the press of his bare chest and stomach against her own. Yubel has seen him naked many times since childhood—swimming, and changing clothes, and on one heart-stopping occasion because he was ill enough for rumours of poison to spread. On that occasion she sat by his bedside through the night alongside his mother and the court doctor as Jyuudai fell in and out of delirious fits in which he called Yubel's name over and over, she holding his hand and bathing his fevered neck and shoulders and face with watered-down honeyfruit milk, never dreaming she would someday find herself lying in that same bed skin-to-skin with him in a very different way.
This is nothing like holding him through a delirious fit.
Jyuudai's eyes meet hers again, asking her one last time silently if she's sure as he shifts to put his knee between hers. Yubel pulls his head down with a single hand, kisses him, moves with him as he nudges her knees apart. He draws back from the kiss, a slightly perplexed look on his face. Talk they have done at length; hands-on demonstrations they've never quite gotten to, and while both of them have a fairly good idea what happens next, neither of them are entirely clear on the details. At last Yubel reaches for his hand and guides it between her legs, letting out a sharp hiss of surprise when Jyuudai slides two fingers inside her at one time, moving them about and exploring dark places in a way that feels very different from Yubel's own hands. She pulls her hand away from his, turns it, hears him groan low and far back in his throat when she begins to examine the changes his own body has undergone in the last fifteen minutes or so.
At last she reaches up to touch his face and get his attention—she cannot deny there is something incredibly pleasurable about his hands on her, in her, and another kind of pleasure in having her hands on him, but if men are anything like women she has the feeling much more of this will bring the night to a premature end.
"Can you learn your figures this quickly?" she asks, the irony she's striving for ruined a little by the waver in her voice. Jyuudai pulls his hand away, looks at it, then waves his fingers a little.
"Is it supposed to be sticky?"
Yubel, unlike Jyuudai, has had at least the benefit of a summer solstice festival ceremony following the start of her monthly bleed, and so she bites back the urge to simply echo the question back at him. Instead she shrugs just a little.
"It always has been." She runs her fingers though his hair, feeling the dampness from a combination of a warm night and their play—because there is no denying it is play, though of a very different kind from their usual sort—at the very nape of his neck, looking up into his eyes and feeling grateful that before the morrow she at least has this brief respite of kindness and pleasure to take with her in memory. Then he shifts, and she lets out a kind of soft surprised cry as something more interesting than his fingers moves inside of her.
She still remembers—remembers the feeling of having actual shoulderblades pressed against the feather-tick, her fingers on his shoulders and the back of his neck with no worry that she will scratch or harm, his lips on her lips and face and neck, the distinct texture of wind-roughened hair around still-human hands. She remembers the sound of his breathing mixed with her own, so different from nights they have spent curled innocently around one another in this bed with no greater intention than sharing warmth after an ill-thought-out run through dew-dampened woods late at night. She remembers the sensation of his hands—strong, but mostly free of the work-hardened patches that once covered her own—on her bare skin, and his quiet sound of surprise when she guides one of those hands where she wants it to go, speaking in his ear and asking him to show her how to return the favour. He only shakes his head, kissing her temple instead of answering.
He finishes before she does, making a low keening sound in the back of his throat and falling against her, his head coming to rest in the hollow beneath her chin. She strokes his hair, not fully sated but close enough to be content with this much. Then his fingers slide down to rub again, and it is her turn to make those low whining noises and squirm against his hand, her own fingers curling in his hair. He quiets her with a kiss before she can rouse anyone outside, pulls her close, and nuzzles against her shoulder as some tight coil inside her belly gives way, leaving her spent and boneless in his arms. Her own arms tighten around him.
She does not want to let go—wants to spend her last night as a human being curled in Jyuudai's arms, snuggled against him like an affectionate cat instead of alone in her own solitary bed elsewhere in the castle. But staying is not an option—there are maids, maids who come early in the morning to light Jyuudai's hearth and put out his clothes and bring him early-morning cider to warm him before he dresses and makes his way to the breakfast table. They would think nothing of seeing Yubel there—indeed, she spends more evenings than not in Jyuudai's room talking and playing bowlstone or tannot, and she often falls asleep in his bed—but if she stays now they will see her nakedness and the bridal clothes on the floor and they will talk to anyone will listen. It is too late for her own honesty to matter; by this time tomorrow nobody will want so much as to look at her, much less to lie with her. But Jyuudai . . . if there is any chance a woman has carried his get outside marriage, he will carry the taint of having made a potential bastard-child for the rest of his life, no matter how many legitimate heirs he produces. Such a taint could produce fears of revolt by an illegitimate son or daughter in the already troubled countryside, and those fears could in turn lead to not just a strapping for Jyuudai but potential trouble for the entire royal family.
Yubel intends that her first act as his new protector will be to ensure that Jyuudai's name is clear for whatever marriage-bed he may make. And so when his arms relax around her waist and he finally sinks into a deep and satisfied sleep, she manoeuvres herself out of his arms—carefully, so as to not wake him—and finds a tunic in his clothes-chest. She pulls it on, then finds both pieces of her sarabi and sorts them out from Jyuudai's sleep-clothes, putting the latter on the clothes-chest to make it look as though he simply decided not to use them on a night oddly warm for Thresher's-Moon. Then she finds the bridal wreath she made for herself, having no mother or sisters to do it for her, and tucks it into the dark blue fabric in her arms before unlatching Jyuudai's door and slipping out.
All told, there is only one thing she forgets to do, and so many years later she will remember that she forgot it. Indeed, she will remember by the next week, although by then the idea of legitimacy will be small news indeed in Delain and Yubel will simply curse herself bitterly in her heart for the danger she put him in—this, on the eve of becoming his eternal guardian.
At least she can be grateful that the only hay-cuts on Jyuudai's body were on his hands, not his legs, and so there was no way for the not-quite-red initiation-blood she leaves on his sheets to find its way beneath his flesh to taint him, as well.
Yubel remembers pain.
She remembers falling alone through space and burning, both inside and out, with no true conscious knowledge as to why. She remembers the pain of seeing her Jyuudai for the first time with the teal-haired boy she has since come to tolerate, if not accept outright—and the pang when she realised that Johan Andersen has taken up residence in the best-friends corner of Jyuudai's heart that was once occupied by Yubel herself, a pang made lesser only by the realisation that the Norwegian boy has no intention, and never had, of challenging Yubel's place as Jyuudai's guardian and closest companion. She remembers the pain of being torn again out of Jyuudai's hands and forced to fight against him, and the helpless rage at being set across a field from her darling and made to be his enemy. She even remembers the pain of her own dying, something she supposes very few sentient beings can lay claim to.
None of those memories come close to the day she lay shackled to a stone table with the magicians of Delain gathered around her.
She knows the transformation will not be pleasant; her own partial change from female to male left her with an incredible ache across her shoulders front and back for two or three days, and that was a well-known if slightly uncommon procedure. This is something both new and dangerous.
Xaquirah, the court magician, tells her first that he didn't expect her to come back. Then he asks her if she's aware the "damage" to her body will be permanent.
"There will be pain, young miss," he says. Yubel doesn't allow the address to annoy her—much. "Pain enough to drive a man mad, perhaps such as to kill him."
"I don't care," she says, and this much is true. Yubel has already steeled herself against the pain and deformity to come—or, at least, she thinks she has. She hopes. Xaquirah pulls up the hood of his robe. It is not his job to argue her out of her chosen path—he is simply to tell her of the risks and, if she refuses to turn aside on her own because of them, to supervise and lead the process that will change her, transform her from Jyuudai's beloved bride-to-be into a monster.
"Then with me, young miss," he says, and leads her to a room not so far from the walkway she stood on only the day before. This Yubel somehow expects, just as she expects the small glass decanter of coffee that she is given. There is a mild herb in it, Xaquirah tells her—not enough to completely remove the pain, far from it, no herb he knows of could do that—but enough to dampen the sharpest of it. Before Xaquirah will allow her to drink it he takes her hand and pricks her finger, squeezing out a fat drop of blood. Yubel sees the oil and wax that have been rubbed over the dark leather of his glove, feels their texture against her skin, watches as the drop of her blood against which he has protected himself runs down her finger toward her palm. It is no longer dark and shining red; now it is brighter, almost the colour of summer poppies, and there is a distinct golden sheen to it, like that of the blood she drank the day before in her own room. Were she full-blooded it would be pure gold, and far more lethal; this half-breed's blood is bad enough. Jyuudai will later be immunized against it, but dragon's blood is apparently not among the poisons Xaquirah has accustomed himself to. The transformation will protect Yubel against the fevers and sickness that would otherwise soon be forthcoming, but she has little doubt Xaquirah would rather not sacrifice his human status to prevent the illness that overtakes those fools or unfortunates who allow the blood to enter their system freely and without antidote.
Xaquirah nods, and one of the 'prentices standing near what Yubel has still mercifully mistaken for a worktable brings a tiny glass phial and pours two drops of something clear into the coffee. Yubel knows it by its smell, which is something like the sweet-tart syrup of the crushed black and red rinberries she rubbed on her lips only yestereven. Venisaut, the fabled and potent venom of the dragons found in the mountains east of Kashimin.
Yubel sits on the edge of the worktable when Xaquirah invites her, cautioning her against the transient dizziness the herb may bring. She raises the glass decanter and smells it, savouring the scent of the fresh coffee she may never have past this drink. Pure venisaut is supposed to be sweet, but someone has been kind enough to put vanilla-pod liquor in the coffee anyway, and Yubel takes her time enjoying the smell, knowing this may be the last time she smells it. Neither Xaquirah nor his students rush her; the protection of the Prince is the most urgent matter in Delain and all five people in this room know it, but the magicians and alchemists around Yubel also know just how great a sacrifice she is making, and they are not so far entranced by their own work as to be incapable of compassion—of allowing her to end her life as a human being on her own terms, and when she is ready.
She lets herself breathe deep of it one more time, then drinks.
Even with the immunity granted to her by her new hybrid blood Yubel can feel the burn of the venisaut on its way down, far stronger than the burn of wine or even the potato-mash liquor the sailors of Delain indulge in. One of the 'prentices—either Alik or Cuiper, she thinks—ties a scarf gently around her head, covering her eyes. Yubel knows what this is for—the eyesight of dragons is legendary, and the light of the torches around her will be bright enough to burn her unaccustomed eyes when she is changed. She does not stop drinking, even as the fire touches her entire insides alight. Then the unnamed herb Xaquirah brewed with the coffee kicks in and Yubel pitches forward, any marginal sense of balance lost to the scarf over her eyes. Someone catches her, pushes her back onto the table, and she swings her legs up obediently, remembering the way Jyuudai caressed her cheek less than a day before as she pulled herself in the same way into his bed.
Then someone grabs her arm.
Yubel lets out a startled gasp as she is forced to lie back, cold metal closing over her wrists. Someone else pins her ankles and clamps them down, murmurs something over her. There is a single hellish moment where she thinks of Jyuudai's voice in her ear and in her mind sees him standing over her in one of those magician's robes before reality reasserts itself: Jyuudai would never bind her this way.
Then the pain begins.
It lights up her insides first with an ache that manifests in front of her closed and blindfolded eyes as the image of a sickly-sullen orange-yellow sunset, baked heat spreading across cracked and untilled land, slowly growing hotter until it is not a setting sun but a great furnace on the horizon, drying and cooking the skin right off her bones until she is sure it must crack and split and spread bright golden blood over the stone table whose rough texture she can feel on the backs of her bare legs. It occurs to her that she has worn one of Jyuudai's tunics, wanting the comfort of his scent and the feel of him against her skin, and that comforting or not she ought to have worn her own twillseed one instead of this one, finely-woven soft cotton of the kind that costs a cendechre for just half a bolt.
And then, as though the very thought has summoned him, she hears his voice.
Yubel has sworn—for the honour of Yssaq, merchant-trader of Angon, and of Braundii, wandering woman of the Yaron-folk, and further, of Jyuudai of Amneth, Prince of Delain, the man she calls husband by customary law if no other—that she will not scream, no matter the pain. Jyuudai's voice wrings a kind of strangled groan out of her all the same—she does not want him to see her like this, shackled and bleeding and in pain only a few too-short hours after the pleasure they shared. Xaquirah and his 'prentices take no notice, not so much as pausing in their chanting and in the passes she can feel them making over her body.
"Yubel!"
The pain begins in earnest the moment he calls her name—tiny knives, a thousand, a million, more—beyond counting—tear holes in her flesh, and then blood does flow from her neck and arms and legs as scales force their way through her skin, growing and fusing in place. She can feel skin toughening, her shoulders broadening even further, her eyeteeth being forced out of place by rapidly-growing fangs. One of them tumbles down her chin. She tosses her head to one side and hears a sickening wet sound as it first catches on the soaked and useless tunic and then lands in a pool of blood. Jyuudai screams her name, and for a single delirious moment Yubel remembers falling off a horse during their shared riding lessons when they were children, and the way Jyuudai screamed for her then when she remained so very still. The pain is so great that even the memory is not truly a memory, just a doubling-back of a past sound and a present one. She hears the sound of someone running in—guards, by the sound of the footwear, and that she can tell it so easily from inside the seething, boiling fire of her pain tells her that the external changes are most certainly not the only ones—and then the sound of someone retching.
For a single moment she feels Jyuudai's fingers closing over her blood-slicked ones, hears a single harsh caw from Xaquirah to the remaining guard, and then the murmurs of someone trying to convince Jyuudai to leave, because as the Prince he cannot be simply dragged away.
Please let someone clean his hands oh Rydia please please don't let him—
She hears the voice of the King, panicked but still authoritative, ordering Jyuudai to be taken away by force if necessary, and she very nearly relaxes—as much as she can with the amount of pain running through her body, at least. Jyuudai has already seen enough, far too much, horrific sights fit to give him nightmares enough for a year. Yubel can feel the blood soaking into her borrowed fine cotton tunic and know that, even with her eyes covered. If she can keep any more horror from him—
Then she feels the fingers of her left hand split open to the bone, the flesh growing and expanding even as the bone within tears it further, sharpening into claws, the skin on her back ripping open as the bones there grow down and outward and she can no longer keep herself from screaming, screaming longer and louder than any human lungs ought to be able to scream, drowning out the chanting from above her and the sounds of the guards and even Jyuudai's own screams as he is pulled away.
Screaming until at last she has screamed herself out of air, and the world around her goes fully dark.
Screaming.
Her eyes no longer ache.
It has taken her two weeks to find the strength and balance in her new legs and body to stagger down to the seaside by the isolated castle-path instead of the shorter one through town. She did not understand sixteen days ago just what "made so hideous no eye could look on thee" meant. Now she knows, and wishes she didn't.
Still, her eyes no longer ache and her bones—those on the more human side of her body, at least—no longer feel as though they are grinding within her new, hardened skin. This is at least improvement enough for her to move about in the castle's shadows, unwilling to show herself openly to the people she once counted as family but equally unwilling to abandon them. Jyuudai has not been among them; word in the servants' quarters has been that the Prince collapsed of shock and dragon-fever on the same night that Yubel changed from human to dragon. He was saved from further illness and almost certainly death by a quick-thinking servant who without orders bathed Jyuudai's hands in a mixture of honey simmered in coco-nut milk, but a court physician has still labelled him convalescent ever since.
They also know about the night Yubel spent with him before her change.
This news distressed her until its sequel came to light: that because of the unique circumstances surrounding the end of their engagement, their single indiscretion is being counted exactly as Yubel hoped it would be—meaning not at all. In the eyes of the law Jyuudai will still be considered unmarried by custom or ceremony, free to wed whomever he sees fit, and those in the town will not know of it. It's possible that some loose-tongued servant may talk, but given the close nature of Yubel's relationship with the Prince even before their engagement, she expects that any such hearsay will be quickly dismissed as exaggeration.
For her part, Yubel still considers herself Jyuudai's bride—not one who will lay claim to that title during the Confession when he marries, but bound to him all the same. Part of her wonders if there was enough dragon nature in her already that night to claim him as a lifelong mate, and if so, what will happen to her when Jyuudai marries. The potential options—other than "nothing"—are far from pleasant.
She hears footsteps in the sand behind her, almost as hesitant as her own, and she turns to see who finally got up the nerve to approach the misshapen dragon-thing perched on the rock. Then she turns back, as quickly as she possibly can.
"Don't look at me."
"I want to look at you." Jyuudai's hands descend on her shoulders, and Yubel tenses with a distinctly inhuman hiss. The unbearable pain in her skin has mostly abated, but she has already been told the lingering ghost-pains may last for months—more, that the pain in the bones of her misshapen left hand and foot may never truly disappear. She hears that hiss and feels a dull flush of shame and embarrassment grow on her face. Jyuudai is not responsible for her pain, even though it is for him that Yubel has put herself not through pain but through outright agony that is not yet done; this choice was hers, and hers alone.
His hands leave her shoulders as he walks around her to sit on the other side of the rock in the sunset-light, reaching for the claw that is now her answer to a left hand. She looks away from him, out over the water, knowing there is very little she can keep him from seeing now and hoping he will at least mistake the dusky flush of her skin for dying sunlight instead of what it really is: her strange new blood flowing so close beneath the surface of the scales she now has in place of flesh, thin and flexible but tough and almost impossible to break or penetrate.
Jyuudai's hand lights on her cheek, gentle but irresistible, turning her face back toward him, forcing her to meet his eyes.
"I'm not afraid of you," he says, and Yubel thinks she should not be so gratified to see the lack of guile in his eyes. "I just want to know why."
For a moment she considers playing the Coromant and telling him she doesn't know what he means. Then she thinks of the sound of her teeth landing in her own blood. After that sound, she thinks, there is no room for lies.
"I don't mind," she tells him. "I just wanted you to be safe."
"But this?" Jyuudai touches her left arm, the scales covering her shoulder, indicates the patches of her hair that have gone pure white from shock and pain, runs his hand along the edge of one wing and forces her to bite back something approaching a moan at the feeling of his fingers on new and still-sensitive skin. "I'm not worth this, Yubel."
"You are to me," she says, and he must know that some things have not changed and will not change now, because he doesn't challenge her. Instead he just looks up at her with eyes so full of sorrow she thinks her heart may break. She smiles at him the best she can with her new mouth.
"Don't look at me that way. I love you."
The second sentence in the pair is out of her mouth before she knows she means to say it—indeed, before she has even so much as thought it—but it takes only a moment's consideration for her to decide it is simply her strange new mouth finally giving name to feelings she has not previously bothered to classify with words. Jyuudai rests his head against her hands.
"I'll never love anyone but you," he says, and Yubel is dismayed to feel her own relief.
"You have a duty to the kingdom to marry," she tells him. "You'll find another."
He shakes his head against her hands. "They'll just have to get used to it, then. I can always name an heir. Someone did it about a hundred and twenty years ago, I read about it—"
"Ianchar the Great," she says. "And it was a hundred and thirty years ago, and he named a cousin. You don't have a cousin."
"Doesn't matter. I can do it too, that's what matters. I'm not going to marry someone I can't stand and after this . . . " He presses his cheek against the backs of her claws, unafraid. "So many people say they'd do something like this to protect us. You did."
"At the risk of being called a doll, I have to admit this is one time I think I can honestly say my will is my lord's."
Jyuudai groans against her hands. "Yubel!"
She starts laughing, the sound startled out of her. It hurts to laugh—hurts her chest to expand that way, hurts her shoulders where the weight of her wings is still new and untested, hurts her stomach where the muscles are crisscrossed now in a different pattern than in a human body—but it also feels good, feels good to know that she has not lost her humanity along with her human body. Jyuudai laughs a little too, then looks up at her face and grows quiet. Yubel tries to still her own face back into solemnity; she has seen it in a looking-glass and doesn't think her new features are horrible, precisely, but the slightest change in facial expression can be enough to change her from not-exactly-repulsive to outright terrifying.
Jyuudai reaches up and strokes her cheek with the backs of his fingers. She leans into the touch in spite of herself, nuzzling her cheek against his hand, starved for a touch that does not end in the other person jerking back or pulling uncomfortably away. Jyuudai turns his hand to let the palm instead of the fingers rest against her face, runs the fingers of his other hand through her hair. She looks down at him as though transfixed by one of the knocker-men from the Shadow-world, grateful that her transformation has not left him alien and frightening to her, unlike so many things in her world that she must now slowly learn all over again. He no longer looks like a carefree boyman of only sixteen years; in this light and with that expression, Yubel would easily call him a man of thirty.
Then he smiles.
"You know, your eyes are really pretty now," he says, and Yubel knows it not for the insult some vainer girls would read in it—only now?—but the slightly awkward compliment of a boy unused to having anyone to give them to. She smiles back.
"Thank you."
Jyuudai gets to his knees so he can put his arms around her neck, kissing her cheek, and then, when she closes them, her mismatched eyes. She lets the fingers of her right hand slide into his hair, the feel of it different beneath her new palm but no less intoxicating than the night she held him in her arms.
"Will you still marry me?" he murmurs into her ear, and she feels her new, stronger arms tighten around him almost in spite of herself. There can be only one answer to that question now. The only true question is whether or not she can give it.
She decides she can.
"Yes."