ii.

Things would have been better if he hadn't been there. Lemillion-san. The shape of his hands still leaving pinpricks over Eri's cheeks.

Before, their trips to the market had been a small oasis – a little sliver of domestic normality with all the jewel tones of fresh fruits on sale and the gleam of salt water and the sound of busy people going about their busy business. Eri tended to count the hours leading up to market days. Chrono would buy her something sweet. They'd sit for a few minutes at the tables by the water, and Eri would relish the sparkle of sunlight and the taste of fresh air because they were luxuries she hadn't known for years. Years. And they were luxuries which could be stolen from her in moments. Moments. One wrong step and she'd never see Kagoshima's cloud-puffed sky again.

Now – this. Those hands on her face. Those blue eyes, gawking at her as though she were a ghost. He'd said her name, and a nightmarish sickness had swum itself into Eri's head. All this time, all these years, nighttime horrors of his dead body had tormented her. He was dead. He was dead and it was because of her. But now here he was: not dead. His hands warmer than Eri remembered and his face older. Softer. Sadder, with a shadowiness about the eyes and a flatness to the smile which Eri knew was her fault. Sadder, but not dead.

Chrono had asked Eri how he'd known her – that man. Who was 'that man'? And she'd said she had no idea. He'd only wanted to give her one of the apples she'd dropped.

To say so had left a fluttering acidity in her gut. Eri had never lied to Chrono before. And because she'd never lied to him, he believed her this first time that she did. At least, she chose to think he believed her, though it had been with a certain amount of suspicious glances and double checking that the front door was properly locked when they got home.

But how hadn't Chrono recognised him? That face so garishly familiar, even in its new agedness. How hadn't Chrono recognised him?

Those features had etched themselves onto Eri's heart. Since that very first day, she'd carried them around like a secret, and with all the same vivid lucidity which made her pulse freeze. He, Lemillion, came to her obtrusively and painfully throughout the day whenever she found herself confronted with certain smells or sounds. When she woke up in the morning. When she couldn't sleep – especially then. Lemillion-san. Always looking at her with those burning, blue eyes through the darknesses of her bedroom and memory.

Onto the kitchen counter, one of the maids rushing about somewhere in the scullery and the other off disinfecting something or another, Eri and Chrono laid out the items they'd bought.

Daikon and cucumber of absurd shapes. Radishes in pretty shades of pink and purple. Cabbage. Strawberries and apricots.

And one less apple.

"It's a pity," Chrono said, sounding sorry. "The taiyaki looked very nice today."

Eri didn't know what to say. So she said nothing, keeping her eyes down and willing herself against all the odds not to tremble like a little bird dropped from its nest.

Maybe if she hadn't forgotten her mask today, Lemillion-san wouldn't have known it was her. She could have taken the apple back even though it had touched the ground and was sullied and sick and would have to be thrown into the depths of the bay anyway. She could have stared at her feet, and thanked Lemillion-san with a curt bow, and she and Chrono could have carried on and eaten taiyaki by the water as though nothing at all had happened. If only Eri hadn't forgotten to wear her mask.

Chrono scrunched up the paper bags in which the vegetables had been placed, and threw them into the pile for the maids to burn at the end of the day.

"Perhaps Overhaul will have an idea who that man was," he said, though this time it was more to himself than to Eri.

But she threw her head up, and had to restrain a cry. "He was just being polite," she insisted, and the sound of it was choked even to her own ears. "That man. He wasn't anybody."

An unwieldy pause passed over the kitchen counter. Chrono raised his eyebrows at Eri in a flat questioning, and with a sigh he pulled down his mask to reveal a concerned frown. "You know you're not supposed to speak to strangers, Eri-chan," he said quietly. "If somebody was bothering you, Overhaul needs to know. That was the condition."

"But he wasn't bothering me. He only wanted to give me that apple." Eri's mind reeled, and she tried to blink away the possibilities. Lemillion-san. Overhaul would know exactly who he was if ever they were to meet, and there would be blood on the pavements. Kagoshima's blue sky would stain itself red, and Eri would never be allowed to see Japanese daylight again. "Please. Please don't tell him – just this once," she pleaded in as level a tone she could muster. "That man was just being polite. I promise…"

Chrono pulled his mask back up, taking an apricot and making as though to weigh it in his hand. His eyes dropped from Eri's with a shake of his head. "Go wash up. Overhaul should be back soon and he'll want to see you."

"So you won't tell him?"

"Eri-chan–"

"Please. For the taiyaki."

Chrono sighed again, this time with a resignation that brought a relieved curl to Eri's lips. "I'll think about it," he said. "Now go wash."

He turned away to the sink, still rolling the apricot about his hand, and Eri's body weighed itself into the floor. She knew what it was to have secrets. She hid them on the daily in the depths of her heart, forbidden feelings and thoughts and filthy daydreams about running away back to Russia or better still some place she had never been before. Possibilities that would have made Chrono cringe, and ideas that would have made Overhaul – no, not Overhaul, she didn't call him that anymore – tear her to shreds.

But now for the first time, Chrono would keep her secret too. Whenever he said he'd 'think about it' – he'll think about taking her to buy a new dress; he'll think about sneaking in candied nuts for her to eat when no one was there to see it – it always meant yes. And even if he didn't exactly realise he was keeping a secret – he would never have done that on purpose – Eri would know.

And in the glowing respite of that knowledge, she slinked away from the kitchen counter. Keeping her eyes on Chrono's back as he washed his fruit under running water, feeling her pulse throb wild through her veins.

A little rectangle of white, out of place upon the floor, caught her eye, and Eri bent with instinctual slowness to pick it up. Togata Mirio, she read. Nighteye Agency. Followed by a phone number. There was no reason for goosebumps to prick themselves upon her neck; Eri didn't know the name Togata Mirio or how such a name could have ended up there on the kitchen floor. Even so, she held the little piece of paper to her chest like a locket, and scurried away with its foreign immensity somersaulting through her mind.

There were pretty things on her dressing table, marked by memories of Russia and all sorts of shadowy insinuations. The matryoshka doll which hid itself within itself behind a lovely face of paint, always watching over the bedroom with a judging impassivity; the silver music box concealing a spinning ballerina, the music to which she danced a disturbing soundtrack to nights Eri didn't want to remember. Trinkets and sparkling toys meant as gifts; objects which to Eri were chains dipped in glitter.

However, even though they haunted her, representing all the dehumanised fragility she carried on her shoulders, their nooks and crannies made for excellent hiding places for the things Eri would otherwise not be allowed to keep. Newspaper clippings, for example, of the hero named Deku. Or the dried rose head from the first bouquet she'd ever received, salvaged and preserved in secret (because Eri could only accept flowers from one person, and this particular rose head had not been from him). Candied nuts in little pink bags. A Russian postcard from the one time he took her to watch a ballet in Saint Petersburg. As a reward. For being such a good girl.

Although, the postcard wasn't something Eri had to hide considering he himself had bought it for her.

But she did it anyway out of some deluded sense of power and privacy. She could keep the things she loved away from him and he wouldn't be able to break them, dissolve them, hurt them. He wouldn't be able to call filthy what he didn't know (still) existed.

Pinching the card in her fingers and rubbing over its crinkled edges with a charmed tenderness, Eri considered the name again. Togata Mirio – and again – Togata Mirio. Could it have been him? Was this her little sliver of the living Lemillion-san to cherish? She unpacked the matryoshka doll, laying the disembodied torsos and bottoms across her dressing table in a row, and then folded the card up small as it would go. Perhaps if she folded it enough, pressing corner-to-corner in ever tinier angles, the card would disappear entirely into some unseen cornice of space. Never to be found, for her eyes only. Her secret and his.

She dropped the card into the smallest doll. She packed them all back into themselves, spending much too much time aligning their colourful bodies just right and imagining their feathery weight to be just that much heavier with the paper inside of them. Indeed, Eri's heart felt heavier. An awe and a curiosity and a terror all mingled to create some confused cocktail of numb emotion, overwhelming enough that Eri was certain she'd be too weak to run her comb through her wet hair, too exhausted from the shock to stay awake until dinner.

The bedroom door – heavy steel, soundproof and leading out into a twisting basement passage – opened, and with a start Eri grabbed her comb and began brushing. Brushing, brushing, brushing like her life depended on it and not making a squeak when the teeth caught onto curling knots as the door closed again behind her.

She hadn't turned the light on – would it look suspicious, her sitting in the dimness like this?

She still wore her white dressing gown – should she have put on something nicer? A dress, perhaps? Or should she have just laid herself naked across the bed and waited for the inevitable while silently pleading with whatever gods would listen that it wouldn't happen tonight?

The bedroom in all its simplicity was plunged into clinical, white light. Eri twisted herself on the chair, swallowing hard against the shudder that reared itself through her spine. Cold hands. Hot face. Growing colder and hotter when her eyes met his – those golden shades boring into her like the slit pupils of a lion.

"Any reason you're sitting in the dark?"

"No," Eri rasped. "I was just distracted."

"Distracted by what?"

Distracted by Lemillion-san and the ephemeral afterglow of the things he'd stirred in her. Eri held her breath and clawed desperately within herself for the right thing to say. "Wondering when you'd be back," she murmured eventually, fingering the patterns on the music box in an excuse to drop her gaze as he came closer. "And if… we could have apple juice with dinner."

It seemed a frail lie, considering the knot in her stomach made the idea of food and even apple juice seem repulsive.

Just beside her now, Eri imagined a monstrous heat from his body along hers. With a gloved hand, smelling vilely of soap, he twirled a piece of her hair between his fingers. With the other, he pulled down his black face mask, unnecessary now in their perfectly sterilized bedroom. "Apple juice?" he repeated skeptically.

Eri nodded. "Yes please, Kai."

"That's not really what you were thinking about."

Her face was level with his chest, and under the dark weight of his attention Eri felt squashed even further. He leaned downwards as though to kiss her, and Eri shut her eyes as though it would hurt. He knew she was lying. It would hurt. But it didn't. His lips didn't meet hers – even though she'd brushed her teeth and had rinsed several times with mouth wash so that she was sure her tongue would burn minty fresh. But no. No kiss. Instead, he pressed his face into Eri's neck and sniffed. Deeply. Like an animal suspicious of its freshly killed prey.

As he always did.

And finding her satisfactory with the dews of cleanliness upon her skin, Kai grazed his mouth over the exposed ridge of her collar bone. Cold lips. Slithering and wet. He lifted a hand to grasp her throat gently – a tender threat – and moved the other to undo the sash around her gown.

Eri's stomach convulsed with a menacing sickness, and despite knowing what was good for her she touched her fingers to Kai's, pulling away. "Wait," she said sheepishly. "Just… please wait a little bit… You only just got back, right? Don't you want to have dinner first? Chrono said he wanted to see you about–"

Running his thumb over the bump in her throat, Kai hissed blandly, "My my, Eri, you're very talkative this evening."

Eri shrank into herself. "Sorry. I'm sorry."

"Get on the bed."

The matryoshka doll cast its judging eye, wide and dark like a Russian fairy, about the room. Inside of it, the teeny shape of Togata Mirio's card glowed like an ember, and Eri imagined the weight of it in her palm. Feeling guilty that her heart should clutch onto something so precious at a time like this – when she felt her dirtiest, when every part of her was to be gouged out like pomegranate seeds from the fruit in a messy extravagance. Trying hard to wipe the image of Lemillion's gentle eyes from her mind, Eri did as she was told and went to the bed. Kai followed quiet and predatory behind.