Author's Note: I told myself I would update this once a week but I am a liar. I'm thinking it's time for a finals hiatus.
I've revised this chapter all over the place like three times now, and it's still giving me a headache, so I'm just going to set it down and walk away slowly.
Also shout out to the reviewer who brightened my day:)
Chapter 3: Waiting for Godot
Honor Code Point 3: Guards treat all orders from their superiors as absolute and unquestionable.
The portal deposits Isa and Lea, shivering and disoriented into the center of a topiary prison. Immaculately manicured eight foot shrubbery encircles the small patch of pavement stones beneath their boots on all sides.
"Where…?" Lea murmurs, thumb to temple, glancing frantically from the walls of green to the gray sky. He inhales, the air so fresh after the staleness of the void that he has to push off the desire to lay back on the cobblestones, unseen, and watch the clouds pass him by.
Outside an orchestra of voices pounds, one on top of the other and indistinguishable as grains of sand.
"The courtyard," Isa supplies, after listening a moment, disoriented enough that he doesn't suppress a marveled grin. "You did it."
"Holy shit," Lea whispers it under his breath. "My short cut worked."
Isa's brain sorts itself out enough that his smile fades. "Well," Isa turns away from him to press his ear nearer to the topiary leaves, trying to distinguish where the crowd is, how to exit least conspicuously, "there's a first time for everything."
"Hey." Isa feels a hand on his shoulder, Lea gazing at him, expression a little helpless, hair a little flat, like the Monday afternoon he had shown up on Isa's new apartment building's porch steps, rivets of rain trailing down his face, drenched to the bone, seeking shelter from an unexpected downpour.
He had known perfectly well that they had agreed, not a month before, only to meet up at Lea's place and only after dark, away from prying eyes and loose tongues. And he had come knocking anyway.
"I'm an idiot, you know?" Lea rakes a hand through his hair, a gesture reserved for when he's at a loss.
Isa usually finds this quirk—any sign from Lea of his inner turmoil, the depth beneath the confident facade—irresistibly adorable, sometimes downright sexy, but today Isa just feels cold.
"The fuck, Lea?" Isa can't do more than whisper it, eyes shutting, the anger cutting up his face into harsher angles. "Is that all you have to say for yourself? I thought Braig was going to eviscerate you."
Me? Lea stills, shivers a little—a remaining chill from the portal, maybe. What about you?
"I kind of thought so too." Lea's gaze turns skyward, words contemplative, and pockets both hands. "Which would have really sucked. I always kinda thought I'd die a hero."
There it is. Angry words freeze on Isa's tongue and smolder there unsaid. Fresh pain tightens Isa's chest until the air is all but gone. Dying, and Lea had been standing there thinking he wasn't doing it well enough.
His next breath is unsteady, but his voice is not. "I'd rather you refrained from dying at all."
Isa's words are curt and Lea's not sure he's allowed to smile or move closer, and usually he would do both anyway, because Isa is his and he is Isa's, and any space between them is no more than an illusion, a trick of the light.
But this morning he doesn't. Lea's lip curls only slightly, his thumb pressing just faintly as he releases Isa's shoulder.
"I'll see what I can do," Lea replies to the clouds.
Isa was planning to stay mad for the next year and a half at least, but the longer he considers Lea's eyes in their silent plea to the heavens, their intensity amplified by the dark liner, their green deepened by the surrounding pillars of leaves, the more vibrant the maroon pulse of the arrowgun in his mind until he feels it could blind him.
Lea plants his feet and braces himself for the verbal onslaught. No sense in self-defense. He figures he deserves it— to be engulfed by a whirlwind of outrage until he crumples up.
Lea hadn't known about Braig, but he should have. Should have known something was up, should have known something would go wrong. (When doesn't it?)
Should have known better.
Guess idiot doesn't really begin to cover it.
Isa takes a slow breath, grits his teeth, and lunges at Lea. The air slips from Lea's lungs on impact and he tries to dig his heels in, but they slide against the stone. He may be strong now, but Isa has always been stronger. They have been sparring since childhood, so Lea knows that much without thinking.
Lea's jaw locks, his head turns (protect the face), and he waits to collide with the ground.
Instead Isa's generously muscled arms wrap across his back, the corner of the book in his hand lightly jabbing between Lea's ribs. Isa settles his face into the bone of Lea's shoulder, mumbling, and Lea can feel the words warm his neck, "I'm just glad you're okay."
Is this my Isa? Lea's body remains tense, long fingers half bent, raised in surrender. My reserved, dignified, prissy Isa? After a moment, Lea's own arms wrap Isa's neck, eyes closing, fingers curling into the starch blazer across his shoulders. Lea exhales slowly.
Isa sees another flash of Lea on the doorstep, wet strands of hair pasted to his face, liner running in single drips like charcoal tears of laughter. "You can't stay," Isa had said, shutting the door behind him. Sternness slipping as Lea peeled off his shirt, his bare chest, scarred on one side, still glossy with rain that would taste like salt and flower petals.
Lea's lips had curled through another shiver. "Is that right?"
Isa had forgiven him then too.
Now Lea presses his lips into Isa's hair. Is that right? Another kiss, an inch away—some kind of lavender soap. "I'm glad you're okay, too."
They stand for a long moment, pressed together, content to just breathe in their interwoven scent of gray smoke and clear, cold water.
"They will be following us won't they?" Isa says, lips dampening the skin just under Lea's ear lobe.
"Mm, probably, yeah." Lea's eyes remain shut, his muscles still. He doesn't want to think about Braig and Elrena right now. Ever, really, but that's probably a bit ambitious.
"Then we should get moving." Isa lets his arms slip down Lea's back, fingers trailing reluctantly down his spine. "They can't make as much of a scene in the crowd."
Isa leans back his head to meet Lea's eyes, only to find them stubbornly shut, lashes a translucent pink, wingtips sharp, flawless. And there's something so inadvertently sexy in that rare second of vulnerability in his lion of a companion that Isa's breath catches. But now is really not the time.
"They'll make a scene anywhere," Lea objects.
Isa's arms drop, and it's just Lea holding on, wrapped around his neck like that worn yellow and gold striped scarf Lea's so goddamn fond of. A birthday present from Isa when they were, like, ten. "Lea…"
Lea can hear the scowl before he winks an eye open to witness it, but its not as angry as he expects. "Oh alright…"
They take another breath and untangle.
"We'll have to think of something to tell people," Isa continues, settling back onto his heels, releasing his mussed ponytail and smoothing the blue locks with a single graceful sweep. "A reason we're together, late, hidden in the shrubbery…"
Lea's smile widens on one side. "There's always break up sex."
"Besides break up sex."
Lea scoffs teasingly, tosses his neck tie over his shoulder, and pushes the shoulder between two bushes.
"Lea, we have to tell them something," Isa hisses, an amused slant to his eyebrows, snatching at his shirt tail, missing completely, as Lea wedges himself between the topiaries, which snap and snatch at his rumpled dress clothes.
"I told you so!" Lea sings before he's fully emerged, the beginnings of an excuse he hasn't bothered to formulate fully in his mind. His unnecessary volume tells Isa he's going to have to adlib. Fortunately, this is hardly the first time.
Isa rolls his eyes at the dull gray clouds and plunges into the break in the foliage, a wayward branch immediately thwacking his abdomen.
"Yes. Yes. Fine," Isa grumbles at half the volume, massaging his bruised spleen and rustling close behind. "You were half right."
Today the courtyard beyond could easily be mistaken for the castle garden, a sheer explosion of colors and bright mingling perfumes. At least a hundred hopefuls stand with their parents and siblings clinging, most dressed to the nines, bright-eyed, despite the hour, and everyone shouting and chattering and nudging and bouncing up on tiptoe, all at once.
Isa and Lea don't move for a second, taking it all in.
It seems more chaotic than they remember—from the few years they had gone with friends who had graduated, gone just to see it. But a quick glance to the castle doors-set atop a gray stone staircase, its banisters hung with pink and gold blooms on either side like blankets—explains why. Atop fifty steps the landing stretches barren, save for a pair of guards, Aeleusand a middle aged woman Lea doesn't know as well, suggesting nothing of any importance has happened yet.
For the first time in recent memory, the castle is running behind.
The jubilant, restless crowd forms a semicircle around the grassy courtyard, leaving only the smallest of gaps for patches of flowers, trees, shrubs. More townspeople trickle to the edges by the second, mostly friends, family, and potential employers, as most of the grads had been more punctual.
Upon exiting, Lea and Isa find they scarcely have anywhere to go, as they maneuver into places with their backs pressed to the shrubbery. Prickly, but manageable, and at least they're on the proper side.
Sure, the small grove marking the center of the courtyard and their new spots appears be closer to the crowd's center than back, but Braig isn't one to play by the rules, and frankly, they are grateful not to have found themselves in the king's private dressing room or teetering off the ledge of a lofty stone parapet.
Elrena stands just in front of them, arms crossed, hellfire in her eyes. An unusually large gap stretches on either side of her as if her touch might sting. Isa figures it probably had. Although it could be that she had just arrived through a portal of darkness, much less subtly than they. Isa figures Braig's aim must have been a few feet off the second time around. Or perhaps he couldn't resist showing off a bit.
A few other bystanders, bored of waiting, turn to watch the fresh commotion, already muttering at the sight of Lea and Isa together. They have been expecting this, seeing as they haven't been together in public much recently, but it still stings a bit, like ripping off a bandage from a wound that hasn't quite healed.
"What were you two doing for so long in there?" Elrena snaps, the surrounding aura of impatience and intrigue making her hostility seem more justified than usual. "I was beginning to think B. set you on the castle roof. Where is he?"
She stares for a second at the damage they've done the greenery, as if Braig might stumble out behind them, a curse on his lips and maybe a cigarette.
"Completely right," Lea continues to Isa without missing a beat, as if no one is watching, nodding and brushing a twig from his sleeve.
"About what?" Elrena drawls, lightning writhing through her four foot spiral ponytails like live wires. Two or three people scurry to avoid them, stumbling into their neighbors, as she weaves around them to draw closer to the attractive but troublesome pair.
"Yes, Lea." Isa, smoothing his shirt and blazer, offers just a glimmer of a smile as Lea searches the crowd for an answer. "About what?"
"A…ah…" Finally Lea spies the gold chain poking through the collar of Elrena's coat and recalls the Thundara charm permanently fixed to it. Inspired, he raises his hand with a flourish, "...treasure chest! We were looking for a treasure chest."
"Pshh." Elrena reaches out and smacks Lea's shoulder, aware this far-fetched explanation is not for her benefit.
"You," someone from the crowd sputters, wide-eyed, grinning. He had been in one of Lea's classes once, probably. "You found one? Here? But it's been months…"
As on many worlds, every August 14, from dusk until dawn, all of Radiant Garden's Guard and academy instructors spend the night setting up an elaborate treasure hunt. A hundred or so chests concealed across the kingdom. The hunt brags no clues or maps or rational explanation. Many have argued that this means it amounts to a quest for sheer dumb luck. Others that it promotes adventure and exploration of areas best kept off limits. Their objections serve no purpose. It's a holiday, after all. A tradition. And kingdoms are quite fond of those.
A few tiny, obvious chests of candy or a few munny appease the ecstatic children, but a well-placed box with a worthwhile reward could go months, if not years without being found-inside magic or heaps of munny or, every so often, a particularly nasty-spirited Heartless that had gotten their first. Decorum demands the treasure taken is replaced with another item, so that the hunt may continue. If empty for several hours, the chests are enchanted to disappear.
"No," Isa corrects pointedly, eager to end the charade and figure out what exactly is going on in the rest of the courtyard.
"But?" Lea prompts, shooing off Elrena's hand as if it's a gnat.
"We saw where one used to be." Isa's eyes skim the tops of the crowd, alighting on familiar hairstyles and postures all around. He had meant to meet up with countless friends earlier, and absently wonders if they thought him waylaid by a hungry swarm of swaying Heartless Soldiers.
"So I was right." Lea shrugs and grins, quick, white, and smug, as if to imply this is the natural order of the universe. "I said there was one there and there was." His knuckles bump Isa in the shoulder. "You owe me a pint."
Isa's sigh of exasperation is not fake, and the onlookers turn away courteously, not wanting to let on their eagerness to eavesdrop on any impending feuds. "Great, I'll deduct it from the keg you owe me."
But perhaps Isa's next sigh is a little too fond, because Elrena remains, lips in an uncertain pout, hands on hips.
Lea grins knowingly and waves her another step forward. "You waiting around just for us, Rena?"
Isa inclines his head in a cold greeting, wondering what her end game is, following them here. "Aren't we special?"
"Hmph. Don't get your boxers in a twist. There's clearly nowhere else to go." As she gestures to the walls of crowd, a nearby father directs his wandering toddler to the side of him furthest away from her. "B. dumped me here all on my lonesome and took off. So I guess you two are just going to have to entertain me until this snoozefest is over."
"Right." Lea retains his lazy calm and Isa his cool frown. The skin of her neck lights up like carpet burn. "She couldn't stay away," Lea hums to Isa, whose face remains impassive as the gray sky.
"Why would I want to be stuck with you two losers?" she demands, nose rising, half turning away. "I mean, please. You're not going to let me steal anything fun and your own families didn't bother to show. If that's not sad, I don't know what is." Her lip juts out in mock pity.
Attending the annual castle job placement posting, initially an informal proceeding, had over the years evolved into something of a family affair. A natural, sweet progression really, in the opinion of Lea's inner romantic, the desperation to know the fate of your loved one the second that they do, to give celebration or solace as soon as humanly possible.
Missing this ceremony is a little worse than missing your child's birthday and a little better than missing their wedding. Fortunately, Lea's no stranger to buying his own damn cake.
The crowd around them noticeably quiets as if Lea's father himself has stepped out of the shrubbery, smelling like a tavern floor, laughing enormously, stride slanted as if seasick. One eyelid stained purple and black, one hand wrapped loosely around the neck of a shattered bottle, lip slightly cut as if at one point he may have tried to drink it. None of which anyone would have noticed at first glance, because no one's eyes could travel far past his startlingly red tresses, tamer and longer than genetics had gifted his only son. The only one he got credited with, anyway.
But Lea's thinking mostly about Isa's parents, weary eyes in gaunt faces, carefully optimistic expressions, clothes made of patches and tucks and hems, when he takes a half step toward her and says, "Shut your mouth. Before I do it."
Elrena sneers. "Try me."
Isa sets a palm in the center of Lea's chest to contain him, calm him maybe.
So Lea doesn't push it.
She's looking kind of pathetic, really. Pale and bird-boned, swallowed by a dark coat, swallowed by a massive crowd. Still shielding her feelings with narcissism and arrogance, like I don't know better by now.
If things were different she would be wearing the shortest, most electrically colored dress in the place, blonde hair released from their ponytails into a yellow waterfall of spirals. She would be standing in the very front, waiting to see if her own name was on the list. Considering being her science marks, it might have even been there.
If she had never been kicked out, she would be situated not too far from Lea and the other grads with absentee parents (He doubts whatever blood relatives she has outside of the castle dungeons would have bothered to show, even if she had had a real shot at royal employment.) elbowing him every five minutes to share a laugh at somebody's expense and grinning childishly in spite of herself, tiny celebratory sparks flicking from her fingertips with every gesture.
This day is one massive reminder to her that she fucked up her future, Lea realizes, frown deepening. No wonder she'd been planning to stay back at her shop—away from the grins and anticipation, the oncoming onslaught of rainbow confetti and music.
I don't blame her.
"They're in good company," Isa points out, tilting his head toward the quiet staircase, the bare, arched wooden double doors. "Ansem's not dropped by either. At this rate, he'll be later than Lea was this morning."
"I wonder what the hold up is," Lea mumbles, following Isa's gaze. The guards remain stagnant as the stone fixtures beside them. The front of the crowd rustles and shifts—he can practically see their shoulders tensed—but no one dares break the line to investigate further.
"They don't give a fuck if they're wasting our time," Elrena replies as if it's obvious as the color of the suns, "that's the hold up."
Lea nods without realizing it. "Oh, I don't know…" he mumbles, thoughtfully.
Isa glances down at the witch as if surprised she's still here, with pale eyes so frigid she finds herself determined to light them with outrage, with pain, if only for a single glorious moment.
Ice queen, Lea's south-side friends had taken to calling him in ninth grade, because he refused to associate with them, delinquent punks, spurned their small talk and human emotion, but god was he pretty.
Shy. Lea had always excused with a low chuckle beneath his cigarette. You guys make him nervous, is all.
But he never saw the way Isa narrowed his eyes at her, dismissed her, told her to back off, stay away-after school, after an expulsion notice, a few hours before she spent her first night in a cell.
You're not dragging him into this. The alley wall outside Lea's place-their place-had been unforgiving against her back and the same cold eyes had held her there. You're not going in there.
And she hadn't.
"So, Lea's father's on the barroom floor," Elrena begins to tick off on her fingers, presently, "his mother's mopping up the tequila he spilled on his way down the night before. They stopped procreating while they were ahead..."
Lea doesn't so much as twitch. Living above a tavern his entire childhood, attending a school of preps and pricks, he's as used to these jabs, as an old horse to spurs. Although they are usually more drunken or pious in origin.
So she turns her condescending smile to Isa. She can see his teeth grit beneath the unmoving, stern line of his lips, and there, an ember of heat in his cool glare. Her grin stretches. "Where are yours, Isa?"
Isa shakes his head slightly, staring down at the wide-mouthed witch and wondering at her utter disregard for propriety, especially considering her own less than ideal situation. Lea has clearly not been delivering his 'nobodies stick together' spiels to her. "I could ask you the same question."
Lea's eyes dart between them as he contemplates intervention.
"I'm already employed, dipshit." I'm not the one with the fucking diploma, dipshit.
She smirks to gloss over her personal failings, her displeasure evident in the golden sparks at her knuckles, and edges closer, the silver chain at her collarbone jangling, as she wedges herself a step between Isa and Lea, getting in Isa's face, patting Lea's chest.
"I wanna know why Mr. Most Likely to Succeed here doesn't have a crowd of adoring fans." She tilts her head one way then another and giggles. "No parents, no bratty siblings, no girlfriend."
Isa makes a short, exasperated noise in the back of his throat. "Lea's here."
Her sharp, neat brows bounce. "Are you bragging about that?"
Lea leans back against the shrubbery, plucking off a leafy twig and twirling it between two fingers like a cigarette. "He'd better be."
Elrena snorts. "Whatever, god, you two are, like, painfully single. Lea, sweetie. When Ansem hires you and we all go get wasted to celebrate but mostly to forget how fucking boring all this standing around is, will you do me a favor?"
"Yes, Elrena?"
"Remind me to get you both laid."
Lea howls like a wolf, but cuts himself off, because Isa looks momentarily stiff, as if he has a lightning rod where his spine should be and she just zapped it. Lea grabs Elrena's wrist, spinning her toward him and away from this with a winning smile.
"'When,' huh?" Lea smirks, leaning toward her.
She rolls her eyes, busted. "Alright, smart ass, if."
"'We'?" is the part Isa finds more concerning.
"Riiight," Lea sings to her in an overly-familiar, lilting tone, "I'm sure your love life is just thriving with that friend of yours in the parlor gunning down anything with a pulse." The end note is flatter, harsher, than he intends, and her cheeks pucker at the unfriendly shift, never mind that she had initiated it.
Braig really rolled out the welcome mat for these two.
"Look, Lea," she sets a bare hand on each of his cheeks, tone low, and enunciates carefully, because she's not about to say it again, "I told him to go easy if you stopped by, he just happens to be shit at following directions." Her hands drop at his lack of a reaction, volume rising, "Why do you think I'm wearing this fucking straight jacket?" She tugs at the excess fabric near her rib cage, drawing it out double her size.
Light green slits peer down at her, and she can feel Isa looming at her back like an ice sculpture.
"What," her fist knocks harmlessly against the center of Lea's chest, "don't you believe me?"
"I," his eyebrows rise at the impact, a shock of agitated static energy. His eyes connect for a fraction with Isa's, whose are wide and blue and uncertain, before dropping down to the indignant jade ones, "yeah, I believe you," he answers, soft, almost apologetic.
Elrena steps back in surprise and Isa sighs audibly.
As the minutes tick by, the three settle into something akin to a companionable silence. Elrena starts to smoke, Isa to read, and Lea's eyes scan the nearby nuclear families apprehensively as he plucks another twig from the shrub and twists it lazily between his fingers. This is what it's supposed to look like. The families of Ansem's apprentices. Doting parents, tugging siblings. Optimistic, sober, downright cheery. It triggers something in his thoughts, a remnant of their earlier conversation.
Lea snaps a finger, and Isa and Elrena turn without hesitation. He regards Isa. "Thea's coming by later isn't she? With your mum after her early shift?"
Lea's tongue spins fictions so easily, Isa's unsure if the question is sincere or protective.
But Isa's tired of lying. Elrena's good opinion is hardly worth the effort, and he sees no reason to mislead Lea, who can always tell. "My father's out on the docks, fish-mongering, Thea's back in the hospital, nothing serious this time, mother's with her until her shift, the neighbor's watching the twins. Rhea's in class, or more likely, still asleep, since I'm not there to nag her."
An indulgent side glance to Lea. Thanks to somebody's influence.
"Just another Tuesday," Lea observes. But only because it's easier than asking about Thea in front of a gossip like Elrena.
"They don't have time for this."
Lea shakes his red mane, confusion furrowing his brows, "But I thought they would have wanted to make time…"
Isa's eyes dart to the side, away. "Well. I could hardly ask that of them."
Lea presses a hand to his forehead, ruffles the wayward spikes there back. "You didn't tell them, did you." It's not really a question.
It all crystallizes in Lea's mind. Isa hasn't told them about the postings this morning, that he had graduated third in his class, that the dean said Ansem's Head Scientist, Even, had asked more about him than any other candidate.
Isa had been at breakfast this morning, sipping distractedly at some orange juice, nibbling toast, and one by one his family had asked, off-handedly on their way out the door, about his plans for the morning and over and over again he had just… not said anything.
Afraid to get their hopes up. Waste their time. Why? Why with all his qualifications does he still think he's not going to get this job?
Lea's mouth falls open a little, considering his own gloved hand, still raised in the air, stretching out his fingers slowly. "Oh."
Right. Me.
"Tell them?" Isa continues, softly skeptical, oblivious to his friend's realization. "Should I have had to?"
The apprenticeship posting is one of the most talked about events of the year and he is one of the most talked about candidates. But his parents have always isolated themselves, devoted to their labor-intensive work, to keeping a clean house, to putting food on the table, to paying medical bills, to just getting by.
They didn't have time for friends or meet-the-faculty programs or made-up social obligations, and Isa would be the last person on the planet to put up a fuss and demand that they make it.
Even when he desperately deserves it.
"Besides," Isa dislikes the way Lea's pity brushes against his cheek, the way his fingertips might instead if they weren't standing in a crowded courtyard, "all the excitement would be a bit too much for the little ones."
Even Elrena's eyebrows rise at this. There are swarms of small fries chasing each other through the crowd and holding their family's hands and jumping up and down in doomed attempts to spot Ansem or his guard.
Bullshit.
Lea shakes his head again. How could I miss this? "Rhea knew."
The eldest of Isa's younger sisters, Rhea, with her pint-sized leather jacket and short, choppy black-tipped blue bob, goes out of her way to bump into Lea, an infamous badass, in the Radiant Academy hallways in front of all her little friends.
Lea always rewards them with a slow, knee-buckling smile or a clever remark, a wink, if he's feeling particularly generous. It's annoying really—he had tried to tell her to buzz off once, even—but there's just enough Isa in her eyes that he hates to see her lips turn down.
Lea crosses his arms. "I told her at least six times."
"Have you ever met a thirteen year old?" Isa smiles, thin, a little displeased, a little indulgent. "She's allergic to familial quality time." He gestures to a nearby toddler collapsed on the ground, dirt-smudged, pudgy cheeks held in her small hands. "And as far as standing around for a half hour, she doesn't even like to wait for the tap water to warm-up."
"Amen, little sister," Elrena intones, stepping back again, assessing her fingernails and then reassessing the crowd as if in search of more interesting company. Really she's wondering when their zillion friends will arrive to whisk them away to somewhere she can't follow. And where the fuck is Braig?
He was right, what he said the other day. I have no business here.
"She should have told your parents if you were being so gosh darn secretive."
"I told her not to worry about it," Isa concludes, thinking Lea doesn't have a right to look so irritated. Lea, who treats self-sacrifice like a hobby. "Truth be told, I'd rather spend today with you." He turns his attention toward the castle doors, evasively, as if he might miss seeing one of the guards shift their weight or blink. "Just you."
Lea's heart skips. It's not what Isa said—because of course—so much as that he said it out loud, in public, today, when they had agreed not to. In a careful, matter-of-fact, blink-and-you miss it tone that prevents Lea from even getting properly mad about it.
Lea's tongue flicks across the roof of his mouth in pause. But screw it. Screw everybody. "How romantic," he purrs, in a low rumble that make his usual sarcastic lilt sound like the voice of a stranger. His lips stretch and someone who knew him less well might have taken the pairing: that voice, that grin, as a cruel parody.
Elrena can't hold back a cheap bark of laughter.
It unsettles Lea for a second. He clamps his mouth shut and takes a slow breath through his nose, flicking his eyes to Isa's, saying it that way instead. I love you too, babe.
Isa's lip quirks to the side, a real smile, though he simultaneously affects his patent exaggerated eye roll, because they still have an audience of prolonged side glances, not to mention Elrena, her pert nose scrunching.
"What can I say? I can't bear to be without you." Isa deadpans, tone hollow. "Who else could have made me this late to something this important?"
"Yes, why did you come together?" In the dramatic toss up of her hands, the little circle she struts in, Elrena fully misses the amusement in their gazes as they flicker together, and so do the rest of the onlookers, watching her gesture their way and spinning forward to preoccupy themselves. "Everyone says you two aren't speaking to each other."
Their eyes meet over her head, silently deciding how to play this off.
Lea's green eyes catch the light, amusement flickering across his lips. "Isa, are we not speaking to each other?"
Isa's crosses his arms and fans at his neck with his novel. "Absolutely not."
Lea's eyes widen and his mouth stretches sportingly. "Not even a little bit?"
Isa nods curtly, unable to contain another, smaller quirk of his lip. "Not a syllable."
She tosses up her hands once more. "You know what I fucking mean." They stare down at her in unison, the same irritatingly blank expressions. "He moved out on you! Or you kicked him out. I mean, what happened?"
The book-fan in Isa's hand stills. "What a rude question."
"Sweetheart," Elrena leans in, "I'm a rude person."
"That's putting it mildly." Lea can only smirk at the tension between them, the zing of jealousy from Isa, as if he has anything to worry about.
"Well… are you?" she demands, patience battered as her front door back at the magic shop, held in place by a fire poker.
Lea mockingly mirrors her lean. Nose to nose with her and a tiny sound escapes Isa's throat. "What do you care?" Lea purrs to Elrena.
Her expression stills, mouth slack, and, Isa's gaze zeroes in, is that a pink flush on her cheeks?
Good lord. How does Lea not see it?
A sudden clap of music interrupts their conversation. Someone has cued the band to pick up, in hopes of entertaining the shuffling crowd. Isa and Lea hadn't even noticed it, thick as the crowd is, off in the distance to their left, the wooden grandstand barely visible above the swarm clustered around it. The instruments spill an urgent, haunting beat, too many notes piling onto each other.
It's too much for Elrena. All of it. The guys' conspiratorial, yet uneasy stares, the sudden cacophony, her traitorous, burning cheekbones. Mother-fucking Isa. "Answer the goddamn question, Lea. Are you fighting?"
"If we're not we're about to be," Isa notes ominously, music swelling under his voice, and they follow his gaze to the approaching Heartless.
Dusk, Lea corrects to himself. Braig had called them Dusks.
"Someone should run for the Guard." Isa scans the crowd for a uniform, but as he suspected, no one's nearby. They would be stretched thin today. Positioned along the perimeter of the courtyard to cover maximum ground and shield the exits.
"Hang on." Lea holds up a hand to pause him. "Braig says they're harmless." He lowers the hand as Isa raises his eyebrows. "Although, come to think of it, Braig also tried to impale us."
They watch four Dusks slink their way out of the topiaries, walking their tipsy, pointed walk. The leaves stuck to them shift off of their shivering bodies and crunch beneath their light, uneven steps. The temperature plummets twenty degrees.
A sick feeling spreads from Lea's throat to his stomach. "So maybe he's not the best judge of character."
Still they let the creatures pass them by. Unlike the Heartless, the Dusks move in utter silence, weaving through the distracted crowd as easily as water through a pile of stones.
"Where are they going?" Isa murmurs, fingers clenching. "And why can't everyone see them?"
Lea's reminded again of ghosts, though he doesn't believe in them, floating with one mind toward a common destination. They realize, together, too late, that in this case, that destination is the moody toddler not more than ten yards in front of them. She sits, oblivious, still sulking in the dirt, mud scuffing her face, a dandelion behind her ear, and a blade of grass sticking out from her mouth.
The Dusks ever-so-carefully bend to lift her by her tiny, fur trimmed boots and wrists, and she makes a surprised, dumbstruck peep like duckling, toppling over. And then she stares into their eyeless faces, their zippered mouths, and as they whisper "Shhhhhhh," she shrieks.
Her cry and her father's echoing bellow split through the music like a sudden silence, and all eyes in the surrounding crowd tear from the empty stone steps and empty castle door, tear from the melancholy entertainers on the bandstand, to fall on the man and the girl and the new seven-foot species of monster intruding on their celebration.
Oh now they fucking see them. Lea musses the hair at the nape of his neck in agitation, and then springs after Isa who has lunged himself forward, into the churning crowd, with nothing to defend himself but a hardback copy of Paradise Lost.
In no rush whatsoever, the Dusks begin to carry her off, picking their way around thrashing legs and swinging arms, toward the hedges they had sprung from.
"Hey!" They can scarcely pick Elrena's voice out at first, amid other shouts, calls for help, for the Guard, for people to band together. Don't let them get away! "Aren't we forgetting something, gentlemen?"
But already the circle around the girl is breaking, bystanders backing off, if not full on running away from the threat. It wasn't an extraordinary thing to do. Most of the kingdom was unequipped to fight the monsters: unarmed, untrained, and unwilling.
But the crowd Lea and Isa push into is so thick, the Guard might not make it through. Not in time. And grads and other young adults from the front where Lea and Isa should be, the ones who are trained, have begun to push forward to investigate, but they're swimming upstream. They won't make it in time either.
In time for what? Lea asks himself. If Heartless consume hearts, what do Dusks do? Make the sun set red?
And maybe they will eat her heart, but Lea senses something different about them than he does with the Heartless. Something more...intentional, in their movements, their zippers flapping as if they might be whispering to the girl. There's something less bloodthirsty, more... human. He remembers the one sniffing at the skeleton, like it was looking for a friend.
And the creatures don't seem to be hurting her any, gingerly toting her toward the alcove they had slipped out from. But why?
"Fuck Braig," Isa hisses, as if in response, tripling the weight in Lea's chest.
The old legends of the Keyblade Masters always told of villains with blackened souls ordering around armies of Heartless. But those were just bedtime stories. And the Dusk at Elrena's place was a quarter of the size of these. And it's not uncommon for new Heartless to spring up all at once.
So why can't Lea shake off the thought?
"I swear to the gods, if that wannabe pirate has something to do with this, I'll drag him straight to gallows myself," Lea mutters to the beat of his toes pounding through grass and cobblestones.
"What exactly are you two idiots planning to do?"
Isa and Lea halt, heels of their boots sinking into the mud and dirt. Electricity jolts up their arms and they both jump a bit, staring down at Elrena, chest heaving and pony tails still fluttering from her unexpected sprint after them.
"Smile at them?" She shakes out her hair, eyes piercing, tone unexpectedly dark, "You take those things on alone, unarmed, and they'll obliterate you."
She clearly knows something they don't, but every second they stand around prying it out of her is another second that little girl could get eaten alive.
Isa presses his lips to Lea's ear, "Find out what she knows about stopping these things. I'll see if I can keep them at bay until the guards arrive."
"Right," Lea manages through the heat trickling down his neck. He brushes past Isa toward Elrena, his head raised, look cutting, but Isa's fingers pluck him back by the sleeve, and hold fast.
"And Lea?" Isa's eyes are grounding, polished with some inner calm. In the distance the band ceases to play. "Be careful."
Lea smirks and squeezes the slender, calloused hand on his arm with his free hand. "My middle name, Isa."
As they split up, the girl's father gives a terrible groan. He's attempted to pry one of the Dusks off of her and it...did something to him. A pulse of black maroon light, not light, exactly, absence of it, maybe, like the shimmer of a Shadow on the sidewalk. In an instant the man is on his back a few feet away, face contorted, clutching his arm, his mouth moving in soundless agony.
The girl herself, rocking to and fro with the Dusks' uneven steps, has her mouth resolutely sealed, tears trailing from her cheeks to water the chrysanthemum blossoms below.