Chapter 7: Fear

Midoriya had stayed for a while to talk about the blacksmith's guild and the potential of an early spring thaw, but was eventually forced to excuse himself upon the appearance of Iida and the rest of the knight's patrol. Uraraka waved her farewells and began her slow walk home, leaving a steady trail of scarlet pinpricks behind her as her hand continued to trickle blood.

The bleeding of her nose had stemmed, but there was still red on her hands and face and in her hair. Exposed to the freeze of the late winter afternoon, the haematic drippings soon lost their warmth, congealing to a sticky cold on her skin that seemed to get everywhere; there was blood on the snow, on her once-white dress, on her lips with a salt-iron taste. As she fumbled with the floating lock of the gate, slipping off the contact plates, she cursed the slickness of the crimson sap that flowed through her veins.

Finally she gained enough purchase to heave the groaning gate open, and then gently closed behind her. She stared out at the empty, snow-covered courtyard before her, an expanse of undisturbed white.

Lasandu castle's courtyard had been built many aeons ago, when the mountain was young and welcoming and the winters far less harsh, and was as a result largely unfit for its current purpose. It was wide and straight, the result of years of heaving foreign stone up the massif, but so steep that it was near impossible to climb if iced over. When the princess was young, there had been lanterns and courtiers and row upon row of visitors' carriages lined up in the castle's broad margins, disguising its essential featurelessness, but now that it lay bare it was blank and intimidating.

She was a thin, dark needle against a blanket of white, stitching a red path behind her as she climbed to the castle gates. The light of the two pale suns reflected sharply from on high, pouring like a blinding rain, and suddenly the princess felt acutely how alone she was. Her footsteps were muted by the snow as she passed under the wearing stone arches of the garden, towards the bowing trunk of the familiar finko palm, into the cold shadow of the castle.

A high whistle of surprise echoed from the colonnade. The fantasmin had somehow escaped from the castle, she guessed, but had huddled in the greenery when it found itself locked outside. She let her bread bag fall to her hip as she crouched to meet it.

"Poor thing, aren't you cold?"

It recoiled from her, to shiver and cower behind a sweet fern. She reached out a hand, and it shrank back further.

Uraraka paused in confusion. But her hand was covered in blood, and in an icicle hanging above, her reflection was warping and disfiguring, a patchwork of bruise and blood and those tired, tired eyes.

"You're… scared of me?"

Without looking away she reached up, gripped the icicle and, hands shaking, snapped it into sharp fragments. The mimic-bird flinched. The great, ugly, fantastical creature, that strange, foreign and unwanted thing, the only living being that could not have known about her polluted past, was now afraid of her. Was there nothing in this life that she did not break? Nothing that could still look at her with untainted warmth? The chunks of icicle were melting into wine-red swirls in her palms. Her stomach twisted and the dizziness of nausea swept over her. A flame rose in her temples.

"How can you? Your master is my suitor and it is me that you fear? Don't you know that it was a suitor who did this to me?" She pointed to the mess of blood on her face. She quickened "Oh, yes, your master is of that same delightful breed; he too would prey on a young, vulnerable princess. He too is a monster." Her tone turned vicious, the fast words streaming into a single shrieked cry. Tears were welling in her eyes "And if he had done the same as Monoma, I would smash his skull too! I would rather send his soul up into cold, cold hell than ever let him marry me! How can you blame me? How am I different from any other girl? We only want to live. That is all we do, and that is why there are no saints in Lasandu."

The salt-water was blurring her vision, and her head was spinning, and she had run out of words. She fell stiffly to lean on a pillar, catching her breath, waiting for the world to fall back under her feet again.

The fantasmin was still shivering away from her when her sight returned. Seeing it compress itself further, tuck its golden beak as far back into the ferns as it possibly could, she suddenly felt ashamed of herself.

What would Izuku have thought if he had seen her then? Would he have given her his beautiful, heart-breaking look of pity? She was sure that she should have felt more shame that he was the only one holding back her anger, and yet a curious numbness was settling about her the more that she thought about it. Her empty stomach protested. She was too hungry and too tired to think about it now.

"I'm sorry." She said "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I am cold and half-famished and I am sure you are too. Please, please let's just go inside and I can cook and we can eat and it'll all be fine. It'll be fine, I'll leave you alone, I won't hurt you. I promise."

She sniffed and wiped her face, realising too late that she had smeared blood all over herself. And she had just paid two bronze cullets to wash, too.

The mimic-bird waddled carefully out of the sweet fern to tremble at her side, and with an appeased sigh she walked over to open the star-set door. As soon as she had heaved it open, the bird hopped past her at an alarming rate, rushing down the kitchen steps and leaving her to push back the floating lock on her own. The metal clanked horribly in the empty hall.

The princess went about making her supper mechanically, without any particular skill or finesse. She fetched the lantern from her room to light the kitchen fire, pumped a pot of ice-cold water and went about making a watery and jumbled stew with the few ingredients that she had.

Once the pot was safely suspended above the fire, she sat herself down in front of it, and watched the flames dance. Her face and hands were still damp from washing the blood away, and at present she was too exhausted to do much else.

She had always liked watching flames. The way that they flickered, waned and blazed back, twisted in on themselves, remained for her a little spectacle of nature. That undulation was so unobtainable, so coy, that even when trapped in lanterns or candles, a flame was wild and untameable.

She missed candles. As soon as the thought came upon her, she wished that she could have forgotten it; for it was not really the candles that she missed, as the memories came flooding back, but her parents.

It was with them that she had walked into each room every night, extinguishing each sconce and candelabra, and lit the festival lanterns, and fallen asleep in front of the hearth. There were hundreds of twitching candle-lights to illuminate feasts and ball-rooms, wrap their shadows together as an old song was sung before bed. After blowing out her bedside candle, her mother would kiss her on the forehead, all swaddled in darkness, and close the door softly to let sleep tiptoe in.

Goodnight, poppet.

In the silences where those loving words were never spoken, she mourned them every night. It did not pull at her limbs, or break her voice with sobs, or linger in her dreams - she did not dream anymore, and she was too still to fall apart. Her nights were like death, uninterrupted by the violent shaking that on occasion took her friends, and in her waking hours a heavy numbness settled over her. Her guts would knot in tight guilt as she watched others squirm with physical symptoms, because she had never experienced quite the same. Was there something wrong with her?

She could never cry for them when she needed to, never cathartically scream her grief away. It was only when she noticed some fingerprint of theirs, some remainder that they had left behind, that the tiny ball of anguish in her throat would inflate to strangle her. For a few debilitating moments, all she could think about was their tender smiles, and the purple of the plague-curse, and the 'goodnight, poppet's that she would never hear again. And then it would leave. And she would still be there, with that torpid numb, and the world still rushing around her, and the distant thought that she would miss them for the rest of her life.

A log in the fire crackled and rolled over, just as the fantasmin creakily edged out from a distant corner towards her. It wiggled cautiously, then sat down beside her, leaning in to the flame. To make a little more space for the huge bird, she pulled her knees to her chest and curled up, resting her chin on her kneecaps. She did not begrudge it: it gave her the perfect vantage point from which to watch its fire-bright eyes flit around, and she had warmed a little already.

"Silly bird," she said, just louder than the sizzle of the fire "you must be awfully cold. There's still two days to spring, and it's all a-freeze out there."

It whistled a short, low note of annoyance.

"I suppose you must be used to warmer climes, coming as you do from the coast. What a cruel master you have, to leave you in this crumbling castle with a useless princess and nothing but your Capcana cloak."

The fantasmin huffed, but there was no frustration in its voice. It leaned closer still to the fire, and a little further away from her. Unconsciously Uraraka followed it, and nearly set her hair alight, much to the derision of the bird.

"Oh, laugh whilst you can!" she retorted "If I had really burned myself, who would feed you?"

She tucked the long strands of hair that framed her face away, tying them loosely with a piece of twine that she had found in her sleeve, and stood. She grabbed a ladle that hung beside the fireplace and began to gently stir the stew, poking occasionally at the larger chunks of pignut to see how well they had cooked. A mellow but bitter smell wafted up, and she remembered with a frustrated twang that skirret tasted best when fresh.

She brought the hot ladle to her mouth to test a scoop-full. It tasted salty and earth-like, with the occasional sweet note of yacon and a deep, bitter aftertaste that tingled in the throat. Some of the black salsify was still rather hard, and the paracress leaves had started to disintegrate in the heat. All in all, it was barely palatable. Oh well, she thought, downing the last of the ladle, at least it was warm.

She fetched two bowls and poured out generous portions for them both. The fantasmin watched impatiently as she gave it a few extra chunks of bitter root, tapping its feet, and hopped after her as she took the bowl to the scullery. She placed it gently on the floor and took a wary step back.

"I'll leave you alone to eat now. You can come back into the main kitchen if you want more. Momo says that when you're cold you use a lot of-" she paused. What was the word again? "Ca-lo-ries, so it's fine if you eat a lot. Buh-bye!"

It twittered at her, presumably telling her to scram, and she hurried back to her own hot bowl of stew.

She sat in a single, lonely chair at the wide oak table and ate without enjoyment. She had never really eaten there before the great plague, she mused as she chewed the pignuts to paste. She ran her fingers through the rough knife-chop grooves and craters of burn marks on the table's surface and wondered who had made them. The kitchen always been the haunt of servants and cooks and busy scullery maids, and she had always been a nuisance in the midst of all that culinary bustle. She would eat well, and in the company of others, far away in the grand dining hall, and amongst all the guests and the diplomats and the servants she would not notice how big it was.

Now, empty and cold, the dining room swallowed her up as soon as she set foot on the wearing carpet. The unoccupied seats of her father and mother would smile wearily from the other end of the table, and the empty candle brackets would beckon, and she would know that she could not eat there. The scraping of her plate would echo repulsively on the high stone ceiling, and her throat would close up too tight to swallow at the sight of her parents' chairs.

Even the kitchen was too big for her now. There were cupboards and drawers and racks that she had never once touched, and between the four different fire-places there was only one that she could ever light.

She finished her bowl, and suddenly remembered that she had bought fresh bread. She gleefully cut off a thick slice and revelled in its softness. Ah, she thought, what good was there in this wretched world but the taste of Satou's wholegrain loaves? She would willingly face a blizzard every day in order to buy just another of his delicious baked goods.

Well, that was if she could afford it. If she did not sell another tapestry soon, it was unlikely.

And the fantasmin!

She quickly cut another thick slice to offer it and got to her feet, making her way to the scullery.

A throaty, grating roar issued from behind the closed door.

Yet another noise that she had not known the fantasmin could make. It must have heard her footsteps. She did not really want to know how it had made such screams, she decided, and set down the bread then and there.

"I've left some bread out here." She said, already retreating back to the kitchen.

XXX

When supper had been cleaned away and the spiral staircase to her room climbed, the princess found that she was too tired to weave. The fantasmin had sequestered itself next to the wardrobe with the goat skin, and was refusing to sing, and she kept finding mistakes that she had to painstakingly pick back. Finally, she gave up.

With an ungainly hop-step-jump she pulled off her day clothes and grabbed her night gown.

If a foreigner had seen her, she was sure that it would seem quite bizarre, but there was not a single Lasadnunian who did not know this frantic bed-time dance; it was in fact a highly calculated manoeuvre to minimise the time that bare skin was exposed to cold air. Perhaps one day it would catch on in other lands as a preserver of modesty, for in the whipping of the clothes off and on the fabric would billow and conceal a large part of the flesh, and in its own way it was quite the performance. If the dancer did not time the jump between slipping off their clogs and changing their socks, they would come crashing down onto the cold stone with a theatrical bang. It was a high-risk, high-reward undertaking, and one at which Ochaco Uraraka was an expert.

In the blink of an eye, she was fully changed, and walking over to the door as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. The fantasmin peeked up from behind its goatskin to see what the click of the wooden shoes was all about, and warbled in surprise when it saw the princess already changed.

She grinned cheekily at it as she pulled down the stiff iron lock on her door. She had not forgotten Yaoyorozu's warning.

"That's right, there are some things I'm good at."

She stopped. Her face hardened.

"Things that you could never dream of." She said. "Perhaps you really should fear me. Well, I'm not sure how much good that would do you now."

She made her way to bed. Something popped into her head as she pulled back the blankets.

"Would you like to hear another Lasandunian song to deliver you into your sleep? I'm sure that you've never heard this one before:

Alone, alone, all, all alone,

The children dead did lie,

And a thousand thousand slimy things,

Lived on; and so did I."

She settled under her covers and closed the curtain behind her.

"Goodnight."

XXX

In the dead of night, with the moonlight spilling in, Uraraka's eyes opened. There was a blond boy leaning over her. A blond boy with a knife.

A/N: What a shocker! I'm looking forward to the next chapter SO much. Finally, things are picking up.

By-the-by, I might not be able to keep up the bi-weekly updates. It's a lot, isn't it? I hope that I haven't disappointed you terribly.