Next chapter is on the 10th of April.
Yuuko appears in a rippling pool of light which settles out somehow into a light room, thin bands of wood cutting up the walls and rich, warm furniture sucking it in. She stands in the middle of it, an inky blackness deeper than the unlit room he is in somehow.
She has not forgone her usual costume however there is a change of something in the way she looks at him.
There is something in the sharpness of her eyes which belies her power, her distinct unhumanity. He recognises that instinctively, in the prickling of the curses that still bind him, the fact his hands feel hollow and curve around an imagined spear, some kind of blade, perhaps the first syllables of a spell, though she is dimensions away from him. Her power in strong enough for that, though leashed still, enough that it cannot trigger him.
He appreciates the acknowledgement. Power recognises power.
She stares at him, red eyes bird-like, curious and judging, and does not speak.
Fai feels no need for it either, knows that she will get to the point when she wants to.
"Mokonas, go to sleep." The witch says.
The constructs obey and then it is just Fai and Yuuko.
She waits still, just a moment longer.
"Fai D. Flourite, prince of Celes, are you still playing your part?" The witch asks.
Fai freezes, smile stuck on his face like wet flesh on frozen metal.
And then he shatters, bitterly, smile twisting as he lowers his eyelids, looks to his hands in his lap.
"Well. I seem to have been forced to, don't I?" He asks rhetorically.
The witch only raises an eyebrow at him.
"My act of rebellion, the one thing I could do to stop the process I'd started, that failed. I could not return the clone's heart to him. And then, the resolution to that, the one thing I could do to slow him down-" Fai looks at his hands, lets his claws extend, feels that uncomfortable extension of his spine, trapped beneath him, alien, "-the one thing that I could do to ruin that man's intended future, everything he's been grooming me for. That was stopped by your pawn, of everyone it could have been." He smiles and it is an ironic, sickly thing that makes him feel like laughing for all the wrong reasons.
He would if he didn't know that everyone else in the flat would hear.
Yuuko does not show that she is considering his words but he knows that she is, despite her cold, blank expression and the fact that she responds only a second after he finishes.
"Is that true?" She asks.
And Fai feels those words strike as deeply as if she'd reached through the gulfs between them and taken his chin in her bloodless taloned hands.
"What?" He asks, stomach gone and body distant from him.