In Human Skin

by Akemi Homura-san

In January, a.t.b. 2010, Empress Marianne vi Britannia, Knight of Two and His Majesty's favoured consort, was assassinated at her residence in the Imperial Villa at Aries. But for Justine and Juliette vi Britannia, her daughters, this proves to be a blessing in disguise... Surrounded by old foes and sheltered by new and unexpected allies, their tale heralds the dawn of a new era.

44. La Vie en rose, Side A

Paris, Member-State of France, Frimaire, R.Y. 227

Leila wasn't sure if it was a grace or a cruelty, that the city she called home could remain so very beautiful, even as its citizens struggled to lead their increasingly beleaguered lives. With so many of their own dead, it was all the farmers in the Republic's breadbaskets, regions like Ukraine and Romania and Poland, could do to offset not only the loss of valuable farmland in Spain, but also their sudden shortness of hands, leaving a harvest that fell far below projections, and increasingly long lines at the market as the price of food spiked. Winter brought with it particularly harsh consequences to those whose businesses and entire livelihoods had fallen afoul of rationing or the rampant book-cooking of the ousted Richtofen Administration, with families having to choose between partitioning out the meagre portions of their emergency savings left for food, or to pay for the heating of their houses, and as if to add fuel to the fire, meteorologists across Europia were in agreement that this wouldn't be a mild winter, not by any means; and it struck Leila, then, how strangely reliable it was that it was times of hardship that truly illustrated the stark difference between the rich and the poor, laying bare the fact that the middle class in Europia, the perceived boundaries between the financially stable and the working poor, had long since evaporated. Even now, she went to and from High Command in an armoured limousine, with Akito in tow more often than not, passing by increasingly desperate signs of economic downturn that would have turned her stomach, had she the capacity to care in any but the most remote of fashions.

"What are you thinking about?" Akito asked her point-blank, and for all that his voice gave no sign that he truly cared either way, Leila felt like they knew each other well enough by now for her to know that if Akito hadn't cared, he wouldn't have asked, and it wouldn't have occurred to her to hold it against him.

"How far removed I am from the desperation of the common citizen," she replied, meeting Akito's preference for direct communication where it was, without turning her eyes away from the window as they rolled past, headed for the Malcal townhouse in the wealthier outskirts of Paris, on the other side of the Seine. "I wonder, Akito, if you ever thought that you'd wind up in this position…"

"I mean, it isn't like Yukiya and Ayano are struggling to make ends meet," Akito shrugged. "So it's not as if I'd wind up like those people outside anyways. Past that, I don't really tend to give it much thought at all, if I'm being honest. Unless you mean if I'd thought I'd wind up sitting on the other side of a car from you while we go back to your fancy mansion, in which case, I have—the last time we did this, actually."

Leila adopted an imitation of a smile, a show of approval for his attempt at sarcasm. She knew that his friend Ayano, who seemed determined to win his dead heart, seemed to think that Akito was very funny; but it wasn't as if she would know, now would she? Not when there were plenty of times when she knew it was expected of her to laugh even when a joke wasn't funny in the slightest, for the sake of civility. Though Akito, as always, seemed content to roll with it, and never to pretend that he was anything other than what he was, what they both were, maudlin though that thought might otherwise be. "I wonder what it's like, to be starving…"

"Distinctly unpleasant," Akito answered. "What's it like to die of cold, drowning in a frozen lake?"

"Touché…" she conceded with a sigh. "But yes, 'distinctly unpleasant' is about the size of it."

"…Though, to tell you the truth, I think your brother was right to take Ryō to Corsica," Akito said. "Ryō tries to hide it, but he's a bleeding heart through and through, a real softie under his admittedly prickly shell. Seeing all of this would just wind up bumming him out, to say the least, and that'd be a real pain to have to deal with…"

"Perhaps," Leila replied noncommittally. "And yet, it's expected of us. It's how the living maintain their friendships."

"But we're not living," Akito pointed out, and not for the first time. "So, why should we care?"

Leila sighed again. This was an old argument, and it always wound its way into the same cycle each and every time before they decided to call it quits, only to start the timer until the subject would once again come up between them. "I've told you before, Akito. Some of us have to blend in…"

"Maybe, but that's not why you're doing it, and you know it," Akito replied, the accusation also old, but no less true for it. "You're not doing it because you want to blend in, Leila. You're doing it because you want to live again."

"And why don't you?" she asked, posing a question she'd never actually thought about vocalising before now, simply for the sake of having the well-worn conversation tread a different path.

"Dead things don't get to live again," Akito replied with a roll of his eyes. "It's a waste of time and energy even to try."

"But that's not why, is it?" she pressed, turning the tables on her friend somewhat. "That's not why, not at all. Why don't you want to live again, Akito?"

"…Why don't most living people want to die?" Akito countered after a brief moment, shrugging his shoulders. "I can't exactly miss what I can't remember, and I've been dead so long that I've forgotten what living is even supposed to feel like. I don't want to try and return to the living, Leila, because living is so unknown to me that it holds no real mystery. You might as well ask me to try to guess how many stars there are in the night sky."

Was that really her problem? Leila wondered about that. Did she just remember too well what it was like to be alive, really and truly, in the way that the people beyond the confines of the armoured vehicle, for all of their desperation and their hardship, still got to be, for her to leave it behind, truly? Was life really that much more of a distant memory for Akito than it was for her? That was certainly possible, but privately, she rather doubted it; she'd been younger than Akito when she'd died, drowned and freezing and orphaned, and life wasn't something she missed, she understood, but rather something she coveted.

There was one thing she knew for certain, though: it would take an act of divine intervention for her friend ever to escape the grips of the inner death that had long since arrested them both, and for all that she valued his company and looked after his physical health as well as she could, Leila hoped that Ayano didn't waste the precious life she still had within and before her over such an impossibility, in that distant way that was the providence of the disconnected, the dispossessed, and the dead. Akito did not love, did not hope or fear, did not want or desire, neither in the case of friends nor lovers nor any other manner of thing; his lust for vengeance was his sole anchor to the world of the living, and she had no doubt that the moment that the one who had betrayed and killed him (she had gathered that it had something to do with betrayal, though he was understandably very tight-lipped about the specifics) was themselves dead by his hand, Akito would more likely than not collapse to the ground and rot in his own skin, languishing away to withered nothingness. It was a fate that she, at least, would be spared, for whatever that was worth.

With very little to talk about in general, the next few minutes of driving were spent in total silence, a dull machine humming from the car all around them the sole indicator that anything at all was happening outside of their little bubble. Leila kept her gaze on the paved sidewalks as they continued through the long and winding streets of Paris's urban sprawl, listening with one ear to the dull roar that kept climbing outside her door, as more and more people clambered over each other for loaves of bread, while the odd church that they came across often had lines around the block of even more desperate people looking for alms, for food and sanctuary; and as Leila witnessed all of this, she couldn't help but think of the tragic irony of it all, that a man who had gotten elected by playing upon the fears of the people he swore to protect in turn wound up as the very thing they should have feared all along—and now there was nothing left.

Richtofen and his draconian death cult, like locusts, had stripped the once-great republic clean.

"By this time next year," she mused aloud, uncaring of whether or not Akito had anything to say on the subject himself, "I don't know that there'll be much of a republic left—not if these things keep going at the rate they have been…"

"These things?" Akito asked, dispassionate as ever.

"The famine," Leila elaborated. "People cannot afford to live anymore, while the wealthy continue to accrue wealth. My being a beneficiary of that wealth doesn't blind me to the fact that this can't last. If we were a global hegemon, perhaps we could keep this whole sorry state of affairs limping onwards for as long as we wanted to, but with Britannia and the Chinese Federation at our heels? Something's going to give…"

"Mm," Akito grunted, as much a concession of the point as it was a shrug. "In that case, maybe we ought to try to make a run for it. I hear Area Eleven's real nice this time of year… The one in charge of it's some kind of big-shot, I hear. The viceroy. Maybe you could even get your birth family's title back…"

"I wasn't aware that you were tuned into any news out of Area Eleven," Leila remarked, turning to her friend and away from the window. "To the best of my knowledge, you don't have any family there…"

"Yeah, well, Ayano and Ryō do," Akito replied flatly, meeting her eyes with an even, blank gaze. "I hear a bit about the state of things going on there through the grapevine here and there, though Yukiya's as much of an orphan as I am… Not to mention, nowadays, even the hold-outs who wanted to try and get E.U. citizenship so that they wouldn't have to stomach living under Britannian rule have started moving back to the territory. Anything to get out of this deteriorating shitshow of a country, I guess…"

Seeing this as about as good of a conversation topic to pass the time with as any, Leila devoted her undivided attention to what Akito was saying, and asked, "What can you tell me about them? The viceroy?"

"What can't I tell you?" he scoffed half-heartedly. "By all accounts, Princess Carmilla's a real piece of work, sure, but she's dealt the Japanese a pretty fair hand, all things considered. Way I hear of it, even if they're kept mostly separate from the purebred Britannians, or even the Honorary Britannians, the Japanese civilians who live there, the 'Elevens', still aren't allowed to go hungry. In fact, a big focus of the post-war reconstruction was in providing government housing to resettle the people displaced by Britannia's invasion into roughly the same areas they lived in before."

"Oh?" Leila asked, her curiosity piqued—to the extent that such was even all that possible, at any rate. "And here I thought that Britannia's official policy when it comes to conquered peoples was, and in fact remains, a steady course of extermination, exploitation, and genocide…"

"It still is, yeah, in just about every other part of Britannia," Akito shrugged. "And believe it or not, the fact that the other options we could have gotten would have been happy to leave us squatting in ruins to rot is actually seen as a big point in the viceroy's favour—that she went out of her way to treat the Elevens like proper subjects instead of vermin, caring for our sick, feeding our hungry, housing our homeless… You know, forget about Britannia for a moment. I think it says a lot about the sheer state of things under the old regime that other Japanese people calling themselves and each other Elevens has actually changed meaning. Right after the war, it was about how our national pride was crushed, but now, I doubt you'd be able to find more than a handful of stubborn old cranks living as hermits out in the woods remaining who actually want things to go back to the way they were before Britannia invaded."

"I don't quite see how she's a 'piece of work', as you put it," Leila remarked, crossing one leg over the other as she shifted position, leaning against the door she had previously been people-watching out of. "To be honest, she actually almost sounds too good to be true. Like a good queen out of a fairy tale…"

"Trust me, Leila," Akito scoffed softly. "Snow White doesn't bring a group like the yakuza to heel. Princess Carmilla is fucking ruthless. But her provincial government's way better than any other we've had in living memory, and it's made her and Area Eleven as a whole filthy rich. Your average Eleven would probably take a bullet for her, and that's only slightly hyperbolic. She's fucking popular. And so's her wife, come to think of it."

"And what has her wife done, exactly?" asked Leila, raising a brow. It was always a little shocking, to be faced once again with the fact that Britannia didn't really kick up a big fuss about openly queer people as a rule, while even in the more progressive parts of Europia, such as the city of Paris itself, a pair of gay men walking out in public together could still draw looks, even before Richtofen's administration began to smear homosexuality, as well as the broader array of queer identities, as 'Britannian degeneracy.'

"According to Ayano? They apparently make a really cute couple together," said Akito. "They've got magazine covers and everything. She collects the things, actually."

"That's…certainly not the strangest thing I've ever heard of someone collecting," Leila shrugged, though she was to some degree taken aback all the same. "It's not like it's really all that uncommon around here to have some strange fascination with Britannian royalty, even for people with full E.U. citizenship…"

"Yeah, well, this princess, the one who's married to the viceroy? Her name is Princess Justine, and she's apparently really popular amongst the commoners these days," said Akito, continuing the explanation. "Remember that rebellion that Princess Friederike was all about when she addressed the Council of Forty, that day we ran into her? From what I hear, Princess Justine was the sister she was talking about. Common people believe that she put down that rebellion virtually single-handedly, and then, when she found out that the rebel nobles were actually using conscripts and putting other commoners into open-air death camps, she responded by putting all those nobles and their families on spikes."

"She put their heads up on pikes?" Leila asked, blinking in whatever shadow of an emotion passed for her astonishment these days. "And they're celebrating her for it? Seems a bit…mediaeval…"

"I mean, it would be, if that was actually what she did," Akito agreed, nodding. "But no, when I say that she put the nobles and their families on spikes, I don't mean she mounted their heads, I mean that she impaled them. Every last member of the rebel families, over six hundred highborn of all ages, arranged in a column from the entrance to the enemy capital to their own palace. The leaders' severed heads she then presented to the big guy on the throne during a session of court."

"And…the common people…like her for it?" Leila asked, more genuinely surprised than she had been in a very long time. "I had no idea that the Britannian working class was so bloodthirsty…"

"Well, it's like the Russians say," Akito replied with a shrug. "'Good tsar, bad boyars.' The emperor can be as much of an asshole as he wants to be, but a nobleman doing fucked-up shit to his subjects? That's not something that's ever really allowed to let slide, as far as your average common-blood Brit is concerned, apparently."

"So the fact that the rebel nobles did what they did to people like them makes common Britannians see her as some kind of avenging figure?" Leila summarised, her brow raising again.

"Apparently," said Akito. "My Britannian isn't the best, of course, but what I've been able to glean from the articles Ayano's given me in the past few months points towards that being the sentiment. It helps, of course, that her being told by her dad to go put down that rebellion herself, and insurrection being, of course, a big-time crime in Britannia—the biggest, actually, and considered a form of high treason—means that she had the full authority of the throne to judge them as she saw fit. I read someone say that it's weird that she purged whole noble lines, since that's usually something that only the emperor gets to do, but it seems like only certain parts of the nobility's actually getting bent out of shape over it."

"So, the viceroy of Area Eleven—Princess Carmilla, you said—she willingly married this woman?" Leila asked sceptically. "Well, I guess I can see now why you seem to think she's the most ruthless thing since Machiavelli…"

"Hey, don't look at me," Akito shrugged. "I wouldn't really get it anyway, so it's not as if I really have grounds to judge. It's all weird, as far as I'm concerned…"

Leila grimaced slightly, and sighed. "Great. Now you've gone and made it seem like I'm judging them unduly, Akito. After all, it's not like I have any more ground than you do…"

"I mean, you do have at least a little more ground," the boy countered. "I mean, after all, wasn't it your idea that we should start fucking in the first place?"

"Yes, you ass," she huffed, getting into the groove of the performance aspect. She knew that some of her coworkers, Klaus especially, frequented improv clubs on a regular basis, and she wondered if he felt as she now did when he was on stage, getting 'yes, and'-ed by a menagerie of various strangers. "And it was a decision that I'm now seriously considering rescinding…"

"Oh, you are?" Akito asked, unexpectedly seeming to perk up, to the extent that he ever did. "Cool. That'll give me more free time to do other things. Thanks, Leila."

Leila couldn't help it—she had expected that response so very little that all she could do was gape in astonishment at her friend. Wait, wait, wait a moment… Did I just…accidentally break up with Akito? On second thought, does it even count as a break-up if there weren't any romantic feelings involved in the first place? And…for that matter, why is he being so…casual about this…?! I thought boys were supposed to be all about sex, all the time, on some level… And yet, the most articulate way that she could phrase any of her thoughts out loud wound up being a dumbfounded "…I'm sorry, what?"

"I mean, no offence, Leila, but you're kind of insatiable," Akito confessed, turning to look out of the armoured limousine's window as he spoke. "Honestly, I feel like I could live the rest of my life under a vow of chastity at this point without issue. I didn't mind at first, but being unable to walk, or even to sit down in any kind of proper way the next day gets old fast, especially when that's happening on a daily basis… I was probably going to try and find an out myself, for the sake of my pelvis if nothing else. I mean, it's not as if I ever planned to have kids, so you wearing me down into infertility isn't a big deal, but if I don't draw some kind of line at needing a hip replacement by my eighteenth birthday, I'm not going to be in any state to take out my piece of shit older brother, wherever the fuck he is right now…"

In any other circumstance, Leila would have pounced on the opportunity to get Akito talking about any element of his mysterious past—this was the first time she'd heard him refer to his older brother of his own volition, for instance—to try and use the information he volunteered to learn as much about him as she could, just because she understood that that was the sort of thing friends were expected to do; but her offence right then trumped any sort of agenda she might otherwise have had (and later, after she had calmed down a bit, Leila theorised that that was actually why Akito had volunteered such an unambiguous bit of information right then, when he'd been so tight-lipped about such things historically, leaving her with the option to sink into a wave of renewed anger at him or to applaud his cunning (and, in the spirit of all of the stereotypes of her adopted homeland, she wound up choosing both)), and so instead, she knocked twice on the top of the car, which the driver knew to be a signal to pull over; and once it did, and came to a complete stop, she opened the rear passenger-side door closest to the sidewalk, and gestured for Akito to get out.

He looked at her blankly. "Seriously, Leila?"

"If you find my company so very objectionable," Leila replied, communicating with her expression that she was in fact dead serious, "Then allowing you the option to walk your way back to the house is only the conscientious and mannerly thing to do. So, go on. Get. Out. Of the car."

Akito stared at her for a moment longer, sighed, shook his head, shrugged, and did as he was told. A moment later, he was on the sidewalk, stranded in Paris, and was still able to find the gall to wave at her as she closed the door behind him, and signalled for the chauffeur to get back on the road.

Of course, Akito wasn't even slightly helpless—she had no idea where, exactly, he'd learned all the skills he seemed to be so very good at, but she knew that he'd have no issue getting back to the mansion; he even had about even odds of beating her there, in fact—but it was the principle of the thing, wasn't it?

Though, I suppose if I truly wanted to fulfil the stereotype of a Frenchwoman, I'd have tried to kill him with a champagne bottle instead, she reflected as she settled back into the dark leather of the seat that cushioned her in such lavish comfort. I suppose I must indeed be a bit more Britannian than I thought…

---

The Malcal household was not just across the Seine, but indeed all the way on the outskirts of Paris; within view of the skyline, certainly, but on its own grounds, and far removed from having to consort with any of the common people that the family didn't directly employ to maintain the estate. The limousine cut a path of asphalt through the carefully-cultivated greenery and artificial forest that surrounded the mansion as it approached, and then up the artificial hill that led to the elevated courtyard in front of the Haussmannian building to the stairs leading to the front door, before it came to a stop, and the chauffeur let her get out. She thanked him politely, for all that she didn't know his name—at General Smilas's behest, High Command had made sure to assign her a new one every two weeks without fail, ever since she made it out of OCS and was assigned as a staff officer and not a field commander, so there simply was never enough time for her to care to learn—while taking up her briefcase full of the work that she'd brought home with her, and after she closed the door, allowing him to begin the long drive back to High Command in the darkness of the encroaching winter night, she pivoted to take in the edifice of the lavish three-story building that she'd called home ever since a mere month after her death.

Huffing, she walked across the pavement and up the stone steps, granite or some such nonsense, she was sure, and reached up to knock upon the door, knowing that the servants were all around the house to let her in at any time of the day or night. She knew her other two adoptive brothers, Daniel and Stéphane, were probably somewhere on the estate, or otherwise out at any of half a dozen all-but-meaningless high society functions from which Leila's military career allowed her to abstain, but she rather hoped she wouldn't have to run into them—individually, each man had the follower instinct of a lemming, and combined, they could just about match one in intellect, and while Ioan usually ran interference for her in keeping them off of her back, so long as she helped him facilitate his continued trysts with his secret boyfriend (it wouldn't do for the youngest son of a family as prominent as the Malcals, both economically and politically, to be publicly known as une tafiole), in his absence, it fell to her to deal with the two elder dullards as best she could.

She wouldn't say that she was surprised to see who opened the door for her—she'd known from the moment she stranded him how likely it was that he'd wind up beating the limousine here—but it was still at least a little disappointing to see Akito, standing there in the doorway, holding it open for her. "Hey, Leila."

She sighed heavily. "Hello, Akito."

"…I talked to Ayano, and she told me I should probably draw you a bath," he said, jerking a thumb back into the house behind him, while he moved to present his profile alone to the door. "And at her advice, I made sure to stop by that boutique you like, and get you some macarons that you can actually taste."

Momentarily taken aback, but still determined to be polite nonetheless, even and especially in the company of someone who knew her well enough to understand if she didn't, she replied, "Thank…you…?"

"Don't mention it," he shrugged, his cobalt eyes refusing to land upon her for some reason or other. "You wanna come in, or…?"

"I would indeed," she replied, stepping over the threshold and into the darkened hall all around her, a chamber illuminated solely by the light of the moon through the large glass windows on the level above, and in the corridors stemming from this one room in the mansion. Akito closed the door behind her, but his pause after having done so signalled to her that he had something of consequence that he wanted to discuss with her, and so she stopped a few steps in, sighed again, and turned to regard her friend in the dark. "What is it, Akito?"

"That's not…all that Ayano told me," Akito sighed to himself, and she could hear the faint ruffle as his fingers (strong, good fingers, she recalled, and certainly quite deft) carded through the blue-black mess atop his head, a gesture mirrored by his shadowy silhouette. "And I've…been made aware, a bit painfully aware, that…the way I phrased what I did in the car might have caused some offence, made it seem as if I actually considered what we've done together to be a chore, or…or unpleasant. I've been told that…that's likely to be something that might have upset you, so…if that's what you got out of what I said, I…wanted to try and apologise the best I can."

What am I going to do with this boy? Leila asked herself, mentally shaking her head. Still, she felt a sense of hope that hadn't been there earlier that day—the fact that he spoke to Ayano about this, only then to listen to her well enough to seem chastened by her doubtless many and vocal admonitions, both things that he'd never actually done for her, Leila, made her think that there was actually a chance that the woman in question, with whom Leila's own relationship had always been rather strained, on account of the fact that the other woman, Ayano, didn't care to hide her attraction to and affection for Akito, would actually be able to fill Akito's heart with life and, in time, love—and it was what prompted her to shake her head, and to make the decision to brush the whole affair aside in its entirety. Not to mention, Ayano had spoken in her defence despite not really being all that fond of her, and so it seemed only fair for Leila to make sure that she moved far enough out of the other girl's way that she could pursue the object of her affection unimpeded. "Non, there is no need for you to apologise, appreciated though it is. And I will be taking those macarons, for the record, with a zero-tolerance policy on anyone else swiping from them, so don't you dare. But to tell you the truth, I'm actually glad that this happened. I think that both of us have only been keeping this going out of inertia, not caring enough to change anything even when we both knew that it wasn't working out; and while I can say with absolute certainty that my pride as a woman would very much have preferred for the end of our little arrangement to have happened another way, I think the important part is that it ended in the first place. Not to put too fine a point onto it, of course, but I think we can both agree that both of us deserve better for ourselves than each other, Akito."

"…Jeez, Ayano was right," Akito huffed, scuffing his boot against the floor tiles idly. "I did say that in the most assholish way possible… Hearing even what you just said sucks, even though I agree with it…"

"Just make sure never to repeat anything of its like in Miss Kōsaka's direction, and I think you'll be fine," she rejoined, smiling at him even though he couldn't see it. "Still friends?"

"Absolutely still friends," Akito agreed, nodding in the darkness.

"Bon," Leila nodded right back. She turned, then, to the corridor that led to the stairs, which led up to where her personal bathroom was located on the second floor, where Akito would have drawn her bath, and huffed—though this time, it was in satisfaction. "Then I think I will go and take advantage of that bath you drew for me. If you could bring those macarons you mentioned up to me so that I can eat them while I soak, that would be fantastic."

"Got it," Akito said, nodding. "I'll be up in a few. You go on and get settled. I'd suggest a wine, but, well…"

Leila chuckled. "Yes, we Frenchwomen are quite particular about our wine. Best that you don't."

"Right," her friend agreed, nodding again. "Glad to see that we're still on the same page…"

With that, they parted ways, Akito to go collect his apology gift from wherever he'd left it and bring it to her, and Leila to go up to her bathroom. Situated on the second floor, it was more of a suite, consisting of two rooms: an antechamber for her to disrobe, so that the maidstaff could easily get at her clothes for the sake of laundering them, with a rack to put her clothes upon, a sink for the sake of hand-washing and oral hygiene, and a toilet, and a second chamber, with a bath-tub which Leila knew from personal experience to be large enough to fit two people comfortably, and probably as many as three people, before it began to feel cramped, as well as a shower-station, for her to wash herself down before she soaked—and after Akito had pointed it out the first time, it was never lost on Leila that perhaps the defunct Empire of Japan's most often overlooked cultural export was its process of bathing.

She stepped into the antechamber, with its white tile, marble countertops, and porcelain toilet; as per usual, she stripped herself nude, making sure to gather the parts of her uniform onto the rack, her boots and all, so that it could be washed and returned to her in pristine shape, and stepped into the secondary chamber, where the scent of rosewater caught her attention almost immediately—the steaming hot bath-tub featured a floating bed of red rose petals all across its surface, confirming for her that Akito had actually been paying attention when she'd confessed to him, as awkward pillow-talk, that it was her favoured method of soaking, if a bit shamefully decadent…but then again, so too was gorging herself on macarons while in the bath, so perhaps that was a line that already had been long since crossed.

Washing herself at the shower station, in which the water had also already been drawn for her, was a brief affair—perhaps ten minutes, all told—and she made no move to hurry it, nor to extend it. Solely from the sheer volume of steam coming up from the tub amongst all of the scattered, livid rose petals, she knew that Akito had drawn her bath while it was just about fit to boil, and she would likely have scalded herself if she'd leapt right into the bath-tub the moment she entered the bathroom. In washing herself before soaking, she let the water cool to a more habitable temperature without running any sort of risk that it would wind up anything close to tepid once she sank into it, and once she'd drawn out her hair to its full, wavy length, and washed it and her body thoroughly—she washed her hair a few times a week, so as to care for it in the best and most proper manner while avoiding damage from over-washing—she stood, walked a few steps over to the tub, and sank herself into the piping-hot water with an involuntary moan of relief at the sensory pleasure of it all, from the scent to the feeling to the tableau of her own debaucherous display. Leaning her head back against the rim of the tub, she let her eyes slide closed, basking in the feeling of the rosewater upon her skin as the tensions of her day melted from her sore muscles.

A short while later, she was stirred from her semi-conscious repose, and, knowing that Akito alone would be so brazen as to think he could come upon her while bathing—for that was a liberty of which not even her own adoptive father could avail himself—she called out to him, "Come in."

And sure enough, once the door swung open, there was Akito, standing at the threshold, with a plate of macarons in his hands. He made no effort to avert his eyes away from her nudity—after all, there wasn't anything on display that he hadn't seen and touched before—as he entered, and as he came closer, she could see that he brought a small, foldable table with him, which he picked up and carried in alongside him, and with a level of dexterity that was one of the things that had drawn her to him in the first place, he opened the table with one hand, before setting the platter he held with the other down upon its surface, leaving the confections at the correct level and proximity for her to reach out for them without any difficulty whatsoever. He'd gotten her an assortment of them, considering the fact that her favourite flavour of them varied with her mood, and as she was craving citrus today, she selected one of the lemon-flavoured ones, and bit into it, moaning in even greater euphoria at being able to taste something again. She chewed, savouring the bite before swallowing, and once her mouth was clear, she looked at Akito, and said, with the bitten-into half of the lemon macaron still held between her fingers, "Thank you, Akito. This was very thoughtful of you. I hope you remember to appreciate the value of Miss Kōsaka's advice."

After all, considering the fact that she wasn't even debatably the other girl's romantic rival anymore, it seemed reasonable to conclude that the next best thing was to be the spirited young woman's wingwoman to the extent that she was able.

"I ordered her a shipment of daifuku, from a shop I know she likes in the Tokyo Settlement," replied Akito, waving her off as he leaned against the wall, folding his arms across his chest while they talked. "It's her favourite, though she doesn't know I know. I'd appreciate it if you kept it to yourself for now, though."

"But of course," she said, smiling at him suggestively. "After all, what are friends for, if not to keep each other's confidence?"

Akito stared at her in silence for a few moments, and then said, "…You're up to something…"

"Am I, now?" Leila asked, feigning astonishment and bringing the other half of the lemon macaron back towards her mouth at the same time. She winked. "That's news to me…"

She bit into the rest of the macaron, finishing it in one go; then, she reached for an orange flavour, a milder chaser to the combination of sugar, sour, and zest that had made up the last one's filling. He looked away now, not out of any consideration for propriety, but to gather his thoughts, free of the distracting sight of her body. She imagined that if she'd had any life left in her, she'd have grown quite vain by now; but she also wasn't convinced that that would be such a bad thing. After all, it wasn't as if she was unaware of how beautiful she was. Plucking up the next confection, she bit down into it, as well, as she waited for Akito to speak. "I mean, you've got a point. You're always up to something, in one way or another… I suppose it's only to be expected, considering how your W-0 proposal fell through…"

"Mm, it's a double-edged sword, that," she shrugged between bites of the macaron. "It's annoying, I suppose, considering that proposal would have been our path to promotion, but on the other hand, I'm glad for it. We're no longer at war, we ousted that awful man in charge, and your people are treated well in their homeland, even while it's under foreign occupation. There's a lot to be glad for, and I'd rather like to think that that makes up for any momentary irritation I might feel at such a temporary set-back for my career, and yours by extension."

"Mmph," he grunted noncommittally. "Oh, and I crossed paths with your dad on my way up here. I told him that you were in the bath, and the old man told me to tell you that he's got something to talk to you about tonight. He said it wasn't all that urgent, and that you should take your time soaking, and all that, but when you've got a moment, you should probably go find out whatever the hell it is that he wants."

"Your input is noted," Leila replied, as she picked out another macaron—this one was with a buttercream meringue filling, she noted—and bit into it. Once she'd chewed and swallowed, she continued, "And I'll be sure to do that. But for now, I'll take advantage of this lovely bath that you've drawn me. Truly, you should stick your foot in your mouth around me more often, if this is how you're going to apologise for it."

At that, he looked back at her, and said, "You know, you eat so many of those in a sitting, and have them so often, that I kinda have to wonder where it all goes…"

"See? Just like that," she rejoined playfully, gesturing with the other half of the macaron. Then, she drew her arms closer to her chest and jiggled her considerably-sized breasts a bit, and added, "And besides, I know for a fact that you know exactly what happens to all that extra weight. Britannian genetics do have their benefits, after all…"

"Yeah, yeah, real funny, Leila," Akito sighed, rubbing at the back of his neck and rolling the tension out of his shoulders. "You want me to get started on that paperwork you brought back with you? Two of us handling it together might actually get us to bed at a decent hour, even with that little talk that your dad said he wants to have with you, as well as the time you're gonna spend soaking in the bath here…"

"If you're so inclined, that would be lovely," Leila said, finishing the buttercream macaron and then leaning her head back against the ceramic rim of the bath-tub, resting her arms against that same rim as she laid back and let her eyes slip closed, letting the sense of physical relaxation swallow her cognition whole.

At some point amidst her relaxation, Leila dimly noted that Akito had left her side, gone on to get a headstart on the aforementioned paperwork—expense reports, maintenance orders, that sort of thing—but it passed in and out of her mind without remark. He'd closed the door behind him, after all, and that was what she'd asked him to do, so she continued to soak, unbothered, until the water began to cool around her.

The bathwater was only at a comfortable warmth in the eyes of most people, she knew, but she liked it just shy of scalding, and so its cooling was a sign for her that her bath was over. She was grateful for it, in truth: she was aware that there were some people as wealthy as the Malcals who'd chosen to invest in a tool to maintain the heat in their bathwater, and she knew herself well enough to know that if she'd had one such item, she might never leave the bath at all. And so, gripping the sides of the tub, and heeding the call of the thermodynamic alarm, she began to lift herself out of the bath, water coursing down her body as she did so. She stepped out of the bath, and huddled her arms about herself—and spotted a white terrycloth robe Akito had had the foresight to leave hanging for her on the back of the door. It was yet more confirmation to her, if indeed she needed any, that he was a better friend than he ever would have been a romantic partner—very thoughtful, but also willing to enable some of her perhaps…less-than-productive behaviours.

She took the platter of macarons with her once she'd swaddled herself in the robe, cinching it about her waist, and went to her room to put them down, and to find a towel for her hair. After all, she could go to meet with Sébastien (he'd never insisted she call him 'father', for which she was glad) in only her robe, for all either of them cared—he'd never once looked at her with even a hint of impropriety, even while making arrangements to engage her to the man she was meant to see as an older brother, and besides, she knew that she was entirely too young and several dozen pounds too slender to appeal to him, given the sorts of escorts in which he apparently indulged himself—but doing that with her hair wet would only result in damaged furniture and a miserable experience. So, after locating a towel, she dried her hair, and while she attended to that, she dressed herself, donning her favourite nightgown—a sheer, bright pink garment that was entirely too revealing for mixed company—over her undergarments, and putting a nicer robe over that, before going out to look for the master of the house.

It didn't take her long to do so—Sébastien Malcal was a creature of habit, and so there was only one place where he would be found on this day and at this hour, so when she made a beeline for his study on the western side of the second floor of the house, she wasn't remotely surprised to see him sitting there behind his large wooden desk, flanked not by books, but by the trophies of his youth (he'd apparently been quite an accomplished fencing master in his own right, before his own father forced him to give that up for the sake of inheriting the family business), swords and medals, a set of his old fencing gear in a glass case, photos of his greatest tournament victories, where he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with all the future Olympians he had bested in those competitions, that festooned the walls, alongside the odd taxidermied bird or small rodent, all of which had been produced in excruciating detail by Daniel, for whom taxidermy was something of a passion he wished to pursue. And while there were certainly a great many areas in which the Malcal patriarch could be said to have fallen short as a man, as a father, none could accuse him of not loving even the least of his children, for all that his insistence that none of his sons be made to give up what they loved for the sake of the family was certainly a result of having had that done to him.

It was said by the sort of people the Malcals rubbed elbows with that of the three Malcal sons, Ioan was his father's spitting image; and while that was true from a certain perspective, it missed the truth of the matter—that Ioan's appearance was his father's, but without the dignity. Like his youngest son, he was tall for a Frenchman (which was an advantage that served him as well in his business dealings with others in the corporate world as it had during his time as a fencer, adding just that much extra reach to every lunge); he had been about as slender as Ioan in his youth, as well, but time, age, and luxury had thickened his frame and distended his waistline. His hair was still dark and thick, but he'd never worn it as long as Ioan, and cut it even shorter during his time as the head of the family, a fashionable, wavy coif that framed the weathered age-lines of his almost square-jawed face and brushed against his strong, heavy eyebrows—they were quite a commanding feature on his face, and though his youngest son had inherited that feature where neither of the older two had managed the same, on Ioan, those same eyebrows only served to make him look like he was simpering half the time. The ageing tycoon looked up from his desk at Leila's approach, that brow dark above a set of equally dark eyes, their gaze always intense and scrutinising, and his thin lips curled up into a gentle smile at the sight of her, revealing the deep-set laugh lines around his mouth and his prominent, wide, aquiline nose that were otherwise wholly invisible at rest, clasping his hands before him at the desk. "Leila! Just who I was looking for…"

"Yes, I know," she replied with a nod. "Akito told me."

"Ah, yes, Mssr. Hyūga," Sébastien echoed, nodding, as his smile faltered. "Your…copain."

Leila rolled her eyes as she approached; he nodded towards the chair opposite the desk from him, to indicate that she should sit, so she availed herself of the invitation, plopping herself down into the chair and leaning her head back to glance at the ceiling above. "Akito and I were never together, Sébastien. He's a close friend and was my plan cul, but now we've broken that off, as well—just recently, in fact."

"Ah," he nodded in understanding. "My condolences, I suppose."

"It was a mutual thing," she refuted, making an airy gesture of dismissal. "But I'm certain that you wouldn't have called me here if what you wanted to discuss was my romantic prospects."

"Yes, you're very right," the older man replied in his deep, rumbling, resonant voice. "I called to tell you that we're going to be expecting guests to join us here for the first week of Nivôse. There are…certain parties abroad who have expressed interest in doing business here in the Republic, and they've reached out to our company to tell us that they'll be coming out to Paris to discuss forming a business relationship with us—but they are young, and both goudous besides…"

"Lesbiennes, Sébastien," Leila corrected, midway through cringing at the use of the slur.

"Ah, yes, pardon, they are lesbiennes," he amended. "And you are…certainly a beautiful woman, so I think that they will respond better to you acting as their host, rather than me, or your brothers…"

"So, you want me to play the hostess for two women you want to cut a deal with, both because I am, I assume, about their age, and because I'm beautiful while they're attracted to women?" Leila asked, raising a sceptical brow. "And what happens if they're together? After all, if they have enough influence to catch hold of your personal attention to this extent while being around my age, they would have to be Britannian, Sébastien, and Britannians have a tendency to marry much younger than others…"

"Well, they can certainly be friendly with you, can't they?" he asked her with a shrug. "Even before Madeleine died, it wasn't strange for prospective business partners to have women host me; and while I surely never strayed, I was still able to appreciate a beautiful woman's company. I thought it would be quite the same."

Leila sighed—though internally, she was glad that Sébastien had at least put some thought into what he'd asked of her that wasn't an expectation that she would try to seduce one of them. "Very well, then. I'll try my best to make them feel welcomed."

"Perfect," he replied, leaning back in his chair and grinning. "I'll give you a card that will serve as a blank cheque. I would like for you to show them around Paris, all of that, but it wouldn't be fair to ask you to do that without money to spend, especially with the way things have been going… Would two hundred forty million Euros be enough, do you think?"

That amount of money surprised Leila, but only somewhat—a quarter of a billion Euros didn't have nearly as much purchasing power as it might have a few years ago, or even a few months ago, with the E.U. economy artificially stabilised with war bonds, many of which had ultimately turned out to be fraudulent in the end, anyways. She nodded. "I take it that you would rather our guests not have to spend a single pound while they're here?"

"It's rude for a host to ask for a guest to pay their own accommodations," Sébastien confirmed.

"I suppose it's a good thing Ioan's on vacation in Corsica, then…" Leila mused.

"And good that he took his copain with him," the patriarch added.

"Wait," Leila said, suddenly wary. "You knew?"

"But of course! This is my house, and I know of all that goes on within it," he replied, bemused. "To tell you the truth, I'm glad that he's tied himself down and learned how to behave. I'll certainly save a lot of money on headache medications…"

"And…you don't mind?" Leila asked carefully, choosing her words. "That your son is in love with another man?"

Sébastien replied to that question with utter silence. For several long moments, he looked upon her, visibly considering as the clock ticked the seconds away. Then, at last, he said, "Leila, look around you, and tell me what you see."

Leila did as she was bidden, looking around the office that she'd observed entering it a little bit ago. "I see your trophies and medals, your photographs, your old gear, and some of Daniel's animals on display, atop what looks to be collections of Stéphane's poetry…"

"Dreams, in essence," Sébastien summarised. "Who my sons are, and who I could have been. Who I still am, in many ways—it's not a coincidence that the Malcal Conglomerate is one of the chief sponsors of the French fencing team. I would have gone all the way when I was Ioan's age, and had I been able, I might have been spending my days coaching the very team I've made sure to sponsor right now. But I wasn't able, because I had a father that was not someone who could be refused, and he commanded that I drop 'such childish pursuits.' It cut my heart out, to have to do that, and I wasn't able to recover any passion for life and living until I met my Madeleine. When Daniel was born, I swore that I would not do to my own children what my father had done to me, that they would never experience the pain I felt when I had to hang up my sword; so, I find that I am curious to know how you think I would not know that I would be no better than my father if I were to take such issue with who my youngest son falls in love with. Would I not be worse, in fact? For my father did not object to my marriage to Madeleine outright, though I knew well that he most likely did disapprove."

"So…you have no problem with Ioan being made to bite the pillow, as it were?" Leila probed.

"I find the thought disgusting, but I have no doubt my father felt the same seeing me spend so much time fencing," said Sébastien. "And besides, I am old enough to know that my disgust has no weight before God. It is a petty thing that men care about, and even when I was Ioan's age, I was comfortable putting it to the side. Many of my training partners and opponents, they also liked to lay with men, you know. So, for as long as it makes Ioan happy, no, I will not think to come between him and his…lover. Though, I will ask, as a personal favour, that when you speak of this to him, you impress upon him the importance of discretion. I am well-aware that the world beyond, it is not so understanding as I, nor has it likely witnessed the sight of its best friend kissing his husband; the world, therefore, may seek to do him harm, and the family will suffer for it if this is so."

"I suppose that's a fair line to draw," she sighed in return. "So, entertain two Britannian lesbiennes, both of whom are around my age, for the better part of the week, starting next month, all with a budget of two hundred forty million Euros to do it with, so that you can reach a business deal with them."

"That's what I need for you to do, yes," he replied with a nod.

"Then that is what I shall do," Leila accepted, standing from her chair. "Now, if you will excuse me, I have quite a lot of paperwork that needs to be filed before the end of this week, and I won't leave Akito to do it all. So, I bid you a very fond à bientôt, Sébastien."

He nodded again. "And a very productive evening to you, as well, Leila…"

---

It was a good thing, Leila reflected, that she had been told of the meeting when she had: as it stood, she only just barely made the deadline to get her arrangements in order to take a month of leave, throughout all of Nivôse—and as a side benefit, she was able to satisfy the people in the accounting department, who'd been at her heels about using up the leave she'd built up over the course of her career (she'd never used any of her leave, and it was beginning to build up), in the process. She was free to do whatever she pleased, the pressures of attending to her own duties now someone else's problem to deal with, and though it was likely that she would have to fix all of her replacement's mistakes when she returned to Headquarters (for some reason, none of the people they chose to stand in for her were anywhere near as competent as she was, and they always wound up messing up her filing system in the process of their failure), for now, at least, Leila was a free woman.

She celebrated this freedom in civilian clothes, walking abroad through the streets of Paris, revelling in the perks of having no one know who she was without her uniform to show where she worked. Her grey bridge coat kept the worst of the Parisian cold out, and her white cable-knit turtleneck sweater did the rest, while blue denim jeans, high-waisted and secured with a brown leather belt, and black calf-leather Chelsea boots kept her warm beneath the waist while she strolled beneath awnings and across streets that were made mostly of cobblestone even still—after all, this was Marais, one of Paris's more famous shopping districts, and cars were only permitted through during certain hours of the night and early morning; and even then, they were only allowed to go one way. It wasn't as if the narrow throughways, which were made for pedestrian traffic, could bear to accommodate two cars abreast of one another anyways.

In her purse (damnable pants had no pockets worth anything), she carried very little—her mobile, a compact mirror and small make-up kit, and her wallet, in which rested bank notes totalling a little bit more than thirty thousand Euro, her military identification card, which would also serve as civilian identification should it be needed, her Métro pass, and two bank cards, though only one of them was actually linked to her own personal accounts. The other, a nondescript black card, was the one that was linked to the hosting budget, a piece of knowledge that made Leila loath even to touch the thing—she had always been responsible while handling money that wasn't technically hers—even while her other card felt like it was ready to burn a hole through the black leather of her wallet, and the dark brown leather of her purse. So she tried her best not to think about it, brushing a hand through her unbound hair as she passed through throngs of people (which were thinner, now, than they had ever been in her memory before), indulging in the novel experience of being really and truly on her own, bodily as well as socially, for all that she knew that Akito was probably somewhere in the vicinity, tailing her for her own safety, and when he assured her that she would never catch sight or sound of him as he did so, she'd believed him.

So far, at least, that held true.

She'd started out from the mansion at nine, and arrived in Marais by quarter past ten; by eleven, she had passed through the Gendarmerie checkpoint, and was mostly wandering and window-shopping, on the lookout for anything that she could get to better supplement the limited options of her civilian wardrobe. Britannian nobles, after all—for only higher nobility would be able to supply the wealth necessary to catch the eye of the Malcal Conglomerate, even in this disaster of an economy—were well-known to have very…particular tastes in clothes and fashion, and frankly, Leila wanted to be able to show them how people dressed in the current century. Perhaps that was nationalistic of her, but it wasn't something she was ashamed of, all the same.

And yet, in all that time she'd spent doing her window-shopping, she still hadn't been able to find anything that really spoke to her in the way that she would have needed it to for it to be worthy of purchase, in her opinion, and so she continued on her way, through winding and crowded streets (though much less so than the last time she'd been here, before the war), past boutiques, boulangeries, bistros, and all other forms of high-end and hole-in-the-wall commerce, hoping that she wouldn't be walking away from here with her hands empty, and thus be forced to make do with what she had. She sighed, and decided that she could very much do with a cup of coffee, if only for the sake of the fact that around here, someone might actually have made a pot of the stuff that she could enjoy—those macarons that Akito had gotten her two weeks ago had actually come from a boulangerie in this part of Paris, so perhaps lightning might strike twice. At least she could hope as much, right?

Having turned her attention from clothes shopping and towards finding a decent café in this part of the city instead, she rounded a bend at the end of the current stretch of road, and proceeded past signs for a few dozen other small businesses in the area whose doors stayed open through the quality of their goods, as well as the deep pockets of their clientèle, in search of another street, the one upon which rested the front of her favourite boulangerie (after all, if one wished to have lightning strike twice, it made sense to invest in a lightning rod, did it not?); and once she'd turned the corner onto the street in question, she ceased to search the storefronts, and instead navigated with her eyes forward, familiar with this area as she was.

It was only on account of that familiarity that she caught sight of the couple that was coming down the sidewalk towards her: two women, walking arm-in-arm, was about as big of an indication of their status as Leila could think to find, after all.

They were something of a study in contrasts, she found, one being quite tall indeed (Leila wasn't at all short, herself, in all one hundred seventy-five centimetres of her stature, and this woman had her beat by at least ten); her long, thick, wavy hair, a lustrous golden colour that was far more vivid than Leila's very nearly platinum shade, was bound in a high tail, though there was just so much of it unbound even so that it only served to draw further attention to her face, to the piercing diamond blue of her eyes, the sharpness of her high cheekbones, the ruby shade painted onto her thin, smirking lips, the slender profile of her nose, and the manner in which the brow her fringe brushed against was somehow neither entirely fine nor strong, but walked the line between the two quite precisely. The radiant tan of her skin contrasted quite strikingly with the black of her three-piece suit, with its prominent shoulders, as well as the white button-down shirt that the woman had left halfway-undone beneath, leaving out on display an amount of full, bared cleavage that even Leila might have baulked at, especially if she was as well-endowed as the taller woman, and the black of her calf-length overcoat, the same kind that Leila had seen about the form of any number of corporate businessmen during the harsh winter months, for all that it was usually accompanied with a thick scarf, and men with expensive briefcases who wore them rushing as quickly as they could to warmth and shelter from the Parisian river-chill, though she could confess that she had never seen one nearly so fine.

And off of her arm, there hung a woman who was instead shorter than Leila, by about half as much as the taller woman had Leila beat, a pale, stark-featured beauty, dressed entirely in black. Wavy raven hair feathered down to just beneath the curve of her chin, hanging unbound beneath her black beret and partially concealing much of the left side of her face in the process, and a strong, dark brow hovered above her eyes, the hue of which was concealed by the semi-reflective red lenses of the pair of teashade sunglasses that sat perched atop the bridge of her nose, as her full, haughty, painted-black lips laughed and shifted and spoke.

It took Leila a moment, actually, to tear her gaze from those lips, from the thick lashes she could see around the shorter woman's arrestingly wicked eyes, accentuated as they were by the liberal application of eyeshadow and eyeliner, both of which, going by the lipstick, were likely black as pitch, and down her body to the stark white scarf she'd wrapped about her neck, the sturdy black leather jacket that she wore over a black shirt, showing upon its strained surface in a white outline what seemed to be a stricken-back head that was held within a star, which Leila guessed was the insignia of a band she had never heard of, but which the shirt proclaimed to be Les Soeurs de la Miséricorde, apparently; and then her eyes sank down further, to the pale woman's pleated black miniskirt, the hem of which extended to just under midway down her shapely porcelain thighs, and even further, to her black stockings, which were sheer but decorated in climbing briars and thorns, all sinking into a pair of buckled black knee-high combat boots.

The first thing to come to Leila's mind when she returned to herself with the realisation that she had been staring at them was to try to avoid the pair entirely; but before Leila could move to do as much, she calmed upon realising that the two women had yet to spot her, and therefore would not call her out on what she'd just been doing—that is to say, ogling them from afar. Then, the dark one looked up, spotted her, and began to wave her down with a hand clad in a fingerless black lace glove.

Suddenly, avoiding them was the very last thing that Leila wanted to do.

Thelast thing that shewanted to do…?

Well, Leila, you were asked to prepare yourself to host two lesbiennes, she thought to herself. So it'd probably help if you've interacted with one or two of them before. Let's go get some practice…

"Bonjour, madame," the pale woman greeted as Leila drew closer, her voice lilting and musical, a beautiful, charming mezzo-soprano, the likes of which Leila might otherwise have expected to hear on the stage at the opera. "Pardon, but we're rather new in the area, and we're quite famished. I don't suppose you would know anywhere we could sit down and get a bite to eat, perhaps?"

The woman spoke French, certainly, and from pronunciation to syntax, it was immaculate, but there was something about the way this woman spoke that Leila noticed, for all that she couldn't quite manage to put her finger on precisely what it was that she was noticing. But Leila, always polite, returned the greeting, and said, "Actually, I do, and you're quite lucky—I was just about to sit down to eat myself. Perhaps all of us could go together? If that's alright with you, madame?"

She'd addressed the taller woman, the one who actually looked like she'd seen the sun before in her life, with the second part of that, and in response, her fellow blonde shrugged her shoulders, and said, in a husky, almost sultry alto register, "Anything my love desires."

"Wonderful," the smaller woman said with enthusiasm. "Then please, lead the way, Miss…?"

"Leila," Leila replied with a nod. "My name is Leila. A pleasure to meet you."

"The pleasure is all ours, I assure you," the pale woman replied, smiling indulgently. She gestured to herself and the taller woman in turn, and said, "I'm Ophelia, and this is my beloved wife, Milly."

"It's wonderful to make your acquaintance, Miss Leila," the blonde, Milly, replied with a nod and an offered hand, which Leila took and shook firmly, while doing her best to mask her wince at the unexpected strength of the woman's hand—Milly's grip was like iron. "If you have the time to do so, we would be glad to have you show us around a bit."

"Well, it's not as if I'm making much progress on my shopping," Leila supposed, shrugging. "So I'd certainly be glad to show you both around a little, as well. Though, first, I was searching for a decent café, so…do you two drink coffee?"

"On occasion, we've been known to partake," the pale woman, Ophelia, replied. "And even so, you are the one doing us a favour, Miss Leila. We're certainly not so ungrateful that we would ask you to uproot whatever plans you had to better accommodate our needs. That would be exceedingly rude of us."

Leila nodded, glad not to have been further derailed than this detour to which she had agreed would have necessitated by its nature. "Bon. In that case, then, follow me, and keep your eyes peeled."

"Lead the way," gestured the taller of the two women with a nod.

"Actually," Ophelia interjected, raising a finger—which, of course, ended in a black-painted nail. "I saw a café a little while back that I thought we could try, if you're willing, Miss Leila. It's called 'Rebis,' if memory serves, and I am deathly curious as to the quality of their product. My apologies, darling—I didn't make any mention of it as we passed because I thought we were looking for something of greater substance. Else, I would have pointed it out…"

"I had already decided that we would swing back around to it in due time, my love. I know how you are," Milly replied, and the way they spoke to one another immediately made Leila feel uncomfortable, like she was playing the part of a voyeur.

Feel uncomfortable?

(It was at that moment that she realised that her gaze kept drifting down to the hem of Ophelia's skirt with the reliability of an adolescent boy beholding his first-ever pair of tits. So there was now that to deal with.)

It was only for a moment that that was allowed to linger, however, as Milly continued, "But, I rather thought that Miss Leila might just have an establishment that she favours of her own, and that it would be polite of us to allow her to lead us to it, should she already have had something in mind."

"Oh! Yes, of course," Ophelia all but chirped, before slumping slightly, duly chastened. "Sorry…"

"It's no trouble. I've never actually tried to find a decent café in this area before today," Leia rushed to clarify, having no desire to be in any way the cause of any sort of strife between the two. "The place you mentioned, Rebis? That seems as good as any other, if you remember the way…"

"Wonderful!" Ophelia said, grinning; then, she jerked her head back behind her, and said, "And I do indeed recall, as it happens. It's just this way…"

And like that, Leila found herself joining the couple as they proceeded back the same way that they had just come, tracing their steps in reverse, though they walked down the cobblestone roads almost wholly in a silence that was…oddly companionable, somehow. Leila had actually expected it to be awkward; she'd imagined that she might have to find a topic of conversation to broach with these two strangers, something that was sufficiently innocuous for a first meeting, but after a few moments spent grasping at straws, trying to find something, anything to say, she was struck by how…comfortable the silence now seemed, as if there was no need for her to fill it, though she was sure that attempts at conversation would be reciprocated. The idea that she wasn't required to find an appropriate subject for small talk, that she wasn't obligated to break the silence, made it much easier to ask, "So, how long have you two been in Paris?"

(There was also the small detail that saying it helped to keep Leila from staring at Ophelia's hips as they swayed back and forth with each step, her ass beneath the miniskirt rolling with what seemed to be an unconsciously sensual grace…)

"Oh, we just got in yesterday," replied Ophelia, with a small, friendly smile still upon her face, in all its pitch-black make-up and the otherwise unnerving effect of the reflective quality of her sunglasses. "We were actually meant to be here on business, but we decided to come early, see the sights, experience all that the City of Lights has to offer, you know, get the tourism out of our systems. It seemed like a good way for us to celebrate our anniversary, so that's also a benefit…"

"Anniversary?" Leila asked, somewhat taken aback. Unthinking, she said aloud the next thought to cross through her mind. "But you're practically my age…"

"Yes, our anniversary—our very first, in fact," Milly confirmed with a nod. "As of today, now that I think of it. We're combining it with her birthday celebration…"

"Just turned seventeen," Ophelia chimed in, her full, luscious black lips curving into a radiant smile.

"…So there's this trip here to Paris, and we're hoping to attend a performance at the opera with our would-be hosts—we made sure to get our hands on a non-renewing season pass, so that we can have all the flexibility we might need to go whenever we wish," Milly finished, and Ophelia snuggled into her shoulder almost immediately thereafter, her arms wrapping even more tightly around the other blonde's. "So, what is it that you do for a living, Miss Leila? I assume you're a native of Paris."

"Oh, I actually have a government job," Leila replied, having rehearsed the answer to this very same question, should anyone ask it of her while she was in civilian clothes. "I'm currently on leave, though. I'll be going back into the office at the first of next month."

"A government job," Milly repeated, smirking sideways at her. "How very specific of you."

"Don't pry, darling," Ophelia chided her. "If she wishes to tell us, she's welcome to. If she doesn't, I hardly think that we should try and ferret it out of her."

"No, it's fine," Leila said, shaking her head. She supposed, considering neither of them lived here, it wouldn't be the worst thing to admit to. Not to mention, this woman had to have caught on to how intensely Leila was more or less eye-fucking her, and the level of grace that she was being shown in return, with Ophelia consistently and politely pretending not to notice, made her feel quite a bit of guilt, which played no small part in moving her tongue to action. "I actually work at High Command. I'm a staff officer. Though, it's really more a question of it being a career path that would let me skip out on as many high society functions as humanly possible…"

"High society?" Milly echoed again. "So, I take it that you're a woman of some means, then?"

"My adoptive family's rich," Leila shrugged. "That's about all it takes around here, non?"

"You would certainly know that better than we," said Milly, shrugging her unoccupied shoulder.

"I don't know, I think that high society parties can actually be fun sometimes," Ophelia remarked with what looked like a pensive expression. "Though, for what it's worth, I can certainly understand how one could find it quite the onerous undertaking. I imagine it's a combination of company and perspective, if I'm being honest. The pretence can certainly be stifling, but if you think of it less as fluffing the egos of the other guests, and more as trying to insult them in ways they're too dim ever to notice, you've made it into something of a game, now haven't you?"

"Perhaps those sorts of parties are conducted differently here," Milly added carefully.

"I suppose that's possible," Ophelia mused. Then, her eyes darted up behind the red lenses, and she gasped, her plump black lips forming a cute little 'O'. "And here we are! Rebis…"

Leila looked, too, and saw a red-and-white storefront, with a sign hanging above, depicting in a very mediaeval style a person with two heads, one red and male and the other white and female, flanked by a sun and moon to either side, and standing atop a roaring dragon—and beneath the dragon, in gold lettering, was the name 'REBIS,' and beneath that, it said, 'Café - Boulangerie - Librairie.'

"It's…certainly something…" Leila muttered aloud.

Milly merely smiled at her, while Ophelia gazed up at the sign, excitement radiating off of her in invisible waves, seeming almost to buffet Leila with them as they passed. "Shall we proceed inwards?"

With that, Milly brought them forwards, passing over the threshold and causing the bell that'd been hung over the door to ring, signalling their entrance. The interior of the establishment was like nothing that Leila had expected: a red wooden counter topped with white stone for taking orders, with an acrylic display behind it that showed off pastries, confections, sweetbreads, and their like; dark, hardwood floors that ran throughout the shop; two entire levels conjoined with a spiral staircase with brass railings; metal tables with white tops along with wooden chairs with red upholstery; and finally, bookshelves. Massive, dark, looming wooden bookshelves, all along the walls, almost all of which spanned both floors of the café, leaving many of the titles that seemed to choke the massive shelves to be accessed only by climbing to the second floor. It was lit well, but not aggressively, in a fashion that brought out the warm tones and softened the harsh edges of the stark contrast between red and white that seemed to dominate the interior, in large part. Leila was left to wonder just how much all of this theming had cost the establishment…

The bell had brought one of the staff out from the back to receive them, and the couple moved to the counter at the sight of her, with Leila following behind them. They ordered, getting both coffee and pastries for themselves (Leila almost winced at the prices on display, knowing that they were likely at least five to six times as much as they otherwise would have been, even in Marais), and then went to find someplace to sit, ascending the spiral staircase and then deciding to sit at a table within arm's reach of the second-floor shelves, though in all honesty, Milly and Ophelia did most of the choosing, and Leila allowed herself to be dragged along for the ride. It was increasingly disorienting, staying around them, and Leila couldn't for the life of her figure out exactly why that was, why seeing how the two interacted with one another—Ophelia whose manner was vivacious and upbeat, and Milly, her wife, whose manner was calmer, indulgent, and knowing—made an uncomfortable, rhythmic, percussive thump hammer throughout her chest. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump… The trio removed their coats, draping them along the back of their chosen chairs, and when the server brought out their drinks and their pastries—lemon tart and cafè au lait for Ophelia, apple galette and latte macchiato for Milly, and clafoutis and caramel macchiato for Leila herself—she cut into the dessert, fully expecting for it to taste of nothing but ash, but very nearly embarrassing herself at the taste of cherry and marzipan that met her tongue, arresting her at once with the simple pleasure of eating that she had long since forgotten. When she took a drink from the cup that contained her caramel macchiato, Leila's eyes went wide at the taste, and the knowledge that came with it: the clafoutis wasn't a simple one-off.

She could taste again.

"Miss Leila?" Ophelia asked, snapping Leila back to reality. "Are you alright?"

Ophelia hadn't taken off her glasses, Leila noticed when she met the smaller woman's gaze, but her beret was upon the table, and she'd unwrapped the white scarf from around her neck, leaving the collar that lay beneath it bare to the naked eye—a beautiful piece of artfully-worked silver, decorated with the sinuous shapes of serpents with bat-like wings and flecks of ruby for eyes, all culminating in a greater central ruby at the hollow of Ophelia's beautiful, pale, fluted throat. Leila had, of course, never known before today that she had a thing for throats, but suddenly she could think of nothing more than plunging her mouth into that hollow between her neck and her collarbone, the temptation to kiss and suckle and bruise and mark almost too potent for her to resist, she who hadn't had sex in two weeks, and yet even accounting for that, was now embroiled in the most intense feelings of lust she'd ever experienced. Her eyes roved across the girl's face, the worried downturn of her kissable, bruisable lips, the concealed swell of her pale breasts, the immaculate flawlessness of her flesh, pale as marble and ivory and porcelain, through hair that she wanted to…

"Yes, yes, I'm quite alright," she said, shutting down that train of thought with some effort. If some part of her had chosen right now to break, as she had begun to suspect, checking on it and fixing it was, to her mind, a concern that was best addressed in private. Then, she looked around, and realised that they were quite alone all of a sudden. She frowned in confusion. "W-where's your wife?"

"She went to avail herself of the water-closet," Ophelia replied; and though Leila dreaded her asking any kinds of questions about where her mind had gone, or the lascivious direction it had just taken, as she'd been before, Ophelia seemed loath to pry, so those questions would not be forthcoming. "She'll be back in just a moment, I'm sure."

"That's good," Leila nodded, though inwardly, she was panicking slightly. Two weeks of a dry spell shouldn't have been enough to cause her sexual orientation to change entirely. Though…had it changed? Or had she always simply assumed that she was heterosexual on account of everyone around her liking boys? She'd certainly never been attracted to Akito, not the way that she'd heard others speak of it, though at the time, she'd imagined that was on account of how much of herself she'd left behind in that lake the night she drowned, and thought no further on it. And while certainly, Leila couldn't recall ever feeling all that much in the way of attraction to other women, either, none of them were like this woman. To say that Ophelia was a rare beauty was quite an understatement, and as she leaned back in her chair, sipping her coffee, crossing her legs one over the other with a quick flash of the pleats of her black skirt, her position emphasising how her stockings bit into the flesh of her thigh (she'd never wanted to be an article of clothing so badly), Leila couldn't help but notice the effortless grace and natural poise of the pale woman's movements, as if she'd come out of the womb a ballerina, enchanting onlookers with even the most innocuous of motions. Perhaps it was as simple as never having encountered her 'type' before—she would have to ask Ioan to confirm, as he was her only other point of reference with regards to same-sex attraction, but she was fairly sure that she remembered Ioan not having been able to admit his desires to himself until rough-hewn but earnest Ryō had walked into his life, so perhaps what she was experiencing was similar. "Where are you two from, exactly? I can't imagine you're French…"

"My late mother was, actually," Ophelia said with a mirthless smile, as she reached forth and placed her cup and saucer back upon the table. "She was actually born in Paris herself, as far as I'm aware."

"…Oh," Leila said, sensing that she was treading upon some uncomfortable territory. Though, she'd once learned that the proper response to that sort of information was to say, "My condolences."

"Why?" asked the pale woman with a baffled little snort.

"…Pardon?" Leila asked in return, completely nonplussed.

"Why are you giving your condolences?" Ophelia elaborated, her vacant smile softening slightly at its farthest edges. "She'll have been dead for exactly six years come two weeks' time, and believe me, Miss Leila, when I say that we're all much better off for it."

Leila wasn't exactly sure how best to respond to that. She blinked twice, as Ophelia took another sip of her coffee, all in absolute silence. When she put it down, picking up her dessert fork to go back to eating the lemon tart, she said, "As far as where we're from? As you've probably guessed by now, Miss Leila, my wife and I are Britannian. We've been travelling incognito, as it were, as a result of that—her with the use of her most common sobriquet, and I with the use of my middle name. We're aware, of course, of that most unpleasant bit of business with your former president here, but we weren't sure to what extent we might encounter those who hold some more…outspoken post-war views around here. You understand."

"I do," Leila replied, nodding. She took another drink of coffee herself, and another bite of clafoutis, and volunteered, "That's part of why I'm walking the streets in civilian clothes…to avoid recognition, and the resentment that tends to come along with it…"

"Resentment?" asked Ophelia, tilting her head in a gesture that struck Leila as…oddly avian to look upon.

"Oui, resentment," Leila confirmed, nodding. "The former president's rhetoric leaned heavily upon lionising the branch of government I work in at the expense of all the others. Now that the misdeeds of him and his allies have come to light, and have made living unlivable for the lowest in our society, whose labours keep the wheels of civilisation turning, that he sought to make us the face of his glory has now made us into targets of the scorn that the common people would otherwise direct towards him."

"Ah, you did mention you were in the military," Ophelia nodded, reaching a hand forward and tapping a black nail upon the table. They were tapering, elegant things, her fingers, each artful and perfectly proportioned, and every bit as pale as she was, which only made the black lace of her fingerless gloves, which Leila noticed now bore patterns of blooming roses worked into them, even more stark in its contrast. She really did look as pretty as a china doll, and it left Leila wondering if she was anywhere near as fragile as she looked—there was something at the periphery of her perception that told her no, no she was not… But whether that meant that she was more durable than she seemed, far tougher, or if she was even more easily shattered than that, Leila could not say. She knew only that Ophelia was not as she seemed, and the open question of it enraptured her. "Yes, that is not a unique turn of circumstance, unfortunately. Incidentally, this is why iconoclasm was doomed from the start: I've begun to believe that it is something of an innate human desire, to have symbols to blame for when these things go wrong. In times of hardship, people like to be able to malign what they can see."

"That seems…pessimistic," Leila pushed back gently. "Following that line of thinking, you arrive at a form of primitivism. It's a defeatist attitude that ultimately serves the aim of men like Richtofen, who will for one day proclaim the innate barbarism of man, and then upon the next extol the necessity that the people slavishly devote their lives to the state…"

"Perhaps, but I will offer that the issue with Richtofen's ideology, and the ideology of men cut from the same cloth, is not and has never been the recognition of mankind's capacity for barbarity, for cruelty, for the inhumanity inflicted upon their fellow man," Ophelia argued back, in measured, even tones, the finger that had been tapping upon the tabletop now circling the rim of the coffee cup, twice one way, and once in the opposite direction. "They who reject the power of symbols and idols do so at their own peril, doubly so should it come from some form of irrational faith in mankind's ability to transcend the evils of their past. We should aspire to ideals, but in that aspiration, it would serve us ill to neglect to contend with reality, and the sense of pragmatism that doing so demands of us, which is so often an ugly one. The heart of the ruin that has been wrought upon your Republic is not a thing of facts, but of the rejection of that self-same ugliness, which is to your direct detriment. It is an easy thing to do, to take all the nuance and complication and ugliness of the world and pare it down into the simplistic, the unambiguous, the blunt and the beautiful, for all that that beauty upon which they fixate is only ever as deep as its skin. It is an easier thing by far to ask the common man to swallow, that you can in fact distil down all that he does not understand and that is the cause of his woes into something that can be known, can be grappled with and defeated, even if that triumph is only an illusion."

"You do the common man little enough credit, speaking as you do," said Leila, and she was glad for the distraction afforded by the conversation, because it kept her from ogling the woman before her as much as she might have otherwise. She leaned forward upon the table, planting her sweater-clad elbows upon the top of it to support herself. "And down that road you call 'pragmatism,' are there not ends as unsavoury? How many dictators and tyrants, I wonder, have thought of what they have done as a 'necessary evil'? Does it seem to you as though they are knowingly doing harm as their power corrupts them, that their issue could be as simple as their so-called 'good intentions' were never pure from the outset?"

"Certainly not," Ophelia snorted, an indelicate sound that nonetheless seemed only to play into the aura of absolute poise she radiated, instead of dispelling it. Her middle finger joined the index in circling the coffee cup, the nail just as flawlessly black as the first, and her flawless skin every bit as immaculately pale. "There are certainly a great many ways in which the mind may twist itself to believe it is the same, even as evidence mounts with regards to the shift it has in fact undergone. But this is what I was speaking of: upon the sight of that which is unpleasant, the mind will do whatever it can to alter itself to alter its perception, to present to itself a more palatable image. Richtofen and his allies, as well as his ideological colleagues, do this work for the common man: their discourse, such as it is, is pre-rationalised, and that lack of necessary effort is attractive to the mind, which is by default an impressionable thing that dislikes its own anguish. It is a meal as easily consumed as it is poisonous, both to the cognition and to the spirit."

"But we were speaking of dictators and tyrants," said Leila, frowning at what she would have taken as an attempt to change the subject from anyone else. Why, exactly, she was less inclined to do so now was a mystery to her.

"And is a dictator not mortal?" Ophelia asked, tilting her head in the opposite direction; at the same time, her sequence switched—twice in the opposite direction, once in the initial cycle. "If you slice a tyrant open, would they not bleed? If a despot cannot eat, would they not starve? Take an autocrat and put them in a desert, and tell me that they would not die of thirst. By all meaningful metrics, these dictators and tyrants, as you so aptly called them, are themselves also of the common man, with all the same weaknesses and many of the same essential woes. As one of my teachers once told me, 'the only pure blood is the blood you spill.' Man is separated from their fellows by their deeds, for there is ultimately no essential difference between the two, the overreaching king and the beleaguered peasant. It is why systems were invented to try to create that essential difference, why stratification and poverty came to be."

"So your argument amounts to saying that while they may have initially had good intentions, all that they were forced to do in pursuit of those goals warped their minds?" Leila summarised, and she noted that throughout all of this, though Leila was sitting in a way that emphasised the size of her bust, Ophelia had not once even flicked her eyes down towards them, their burning intensity unerringly locked upon Leila. Akito could not make that claim, and nor had his gaze, no matter how pure, ever been half so heady for her to feel upon her person, as if her very soul was being stripped bare. It was equal parts exhilarating, and disappointing—and in that moment, Leila realised that she'd wanted to make a married woman's eye wander. She wondered, had she always been this sleazy, and just never had a reason to show it?

"No, Miss Leila. I did not disagree with your proposition of their 'good intentions' never being pure from the outset, merely that they are knowingly doing harm as their power corrupts," said Ophelia, shaking her head with a small, knowing smile. She removed her graceful fingers from the rim of the coffee cup, and tapped the table with both fingers twice in quick succession. "Human cognition is not an unalloyed good, nor has it ever been. I make no excuses for the atrocities of the individuals we're currently discussing, Miss Leila, nor the systems of hierarchy which insulate them from the adversities they inflict upon those whom they claim to rule. I posit only that it is entirely within the scope of the capabilities of the human mind to hold and become motivated by 'impure intentions', as you called them, even without the active knowledge of the person in question. It's why I, as well as others, have come to believe that power does not corrupt so much as it reveals: indeed, I believe that if you seek to know the truth of a man, to know his most essential nature in full, there are few methods more reliable than endowing him with power that may be abused."

"So, your stance is that power attracts the corruptible?" Leila asked the pale woman, mimicking her head-tilt ever so slightly.

Ophelia didn't respond to that immediately; she propped her other elbow up upon the table, showing off the elegant, bare stretch of her slender arm, an expanse of uninterrupted pallor all the way up to the cuff of her fingerless lace glove, and leaned forward across the table, laying her jaw upon her open palm, and in the process bringing their faces closer together. Those tapering fingers with their black nails tapped the side of her face idly, her luscious smile grew sharper and more wicked, the v-neck of her band t-shirt dragged Leila's attention to the swell of the raven-haired girl's impressive bust, and it was torn away with a flash of amethyst, as the lenses of her sunglasses dropped just far enough for Ophelia's eyes to pierce Leila's soul with their undiluted, unleashed intensity, hypnotic and revealing, a siren and a fury in one. And in a voice that was no different than before, but hit Leila's ears like temptation itself given aural form, Ophelia said, "I suppose you could say that, in a manner of speaking…"

At that moment, Leila Malcal was certain that she had never wanted to kiss a person as disastrously as she did then. Only the glint of silver and glimmering ruby around the Britannian woman's neck managed to ward her off, and even then, Leila still felt like she needed to feel those black lips against her own more than she needed her next lungful of air. Those eyes, glittering like gemstones, hooded and seductive…

"Apologies for the delay," came Milly's voice, which upended a bucket of ice-water upon Leila as it drew closer. Leila drew back, as if magnetically repulsed, and though Ophelia also retreated, she returned to her previous position with all the sinuous grace of a heron, or perhaps a serpent. And in either case, she did so with a triumphant glitter sparkling across her gemstone eyes, as she leaned back in her chair. She leaned her head back even further, craning her collared neck out, and from the side, Milly re-joined them, pressing her lips to her wife's in a brief expression of affection, but one that seared so hot and so bright even despite its brevity that Leila could feel the warm backdraft of it from where she was sitting. "There was something of a queue…"

"Hello, darling," Ophelia purred, leaning her head back into her wife's body as she passed to retake her seat. "Glad you're back…"

"As am I, my love, as am I," Milly returned with a chuckle, sitting herself back down, and partaking of her own coffee. Once she'd taken her drink, she placed it back down onto the saucer with a clatter, and in a flash, Leila realised that both women had finished their orders. Leila looked down at her own clafoutis, which was only half-done, and resigned herself to having to put it in a box and bring it home with her if she wanted to finish it. And in the midst of all of this, Milly asked her, "So, then, Miss Leila. To where shall we next abscond?"

---

So, to recap, Leila thought to herself as she took the limousine back to the mansion in the dark, with her day's haul in the passenger seat next to where she sat, moderately lost in thought. I met two Britannians today, had coffee and clafoutis, half of which I've taken home with me, got a few new dresses with the help of said Britannians, and experienced my sexual awakening in the company of a married woman, who's also one of the Britannians I spent the day with. Wonderful…

She sighed, leaning her head against the window and groaning despondently. Leila could only hope that she hadn't somehow managed to embarrass herself in front of the pair, but between how impossible she found it to refrain from ogling Ophelia for more than two minutes at a time, and how obvious she could see she'd been in retrospect, asking after the significance of the collar around Ophelia's neck (it was apparently a day collar, which functioned roughly as the equivalent of a wedding ring when it came to…certain circles of people), how they had met (apparently, they were childhood friends who had turned into lovers, and from there on to a married couple), and all sorts of other details, she imagined that her cause, in this case, was quite thoroughly and irreconcilably lost.

I wonder if I'll ever see them again, Leila thought to herself. Perhaps predictably, she found herself to be of two minds on the subject, stuck between wanting to have the experience she'd had today over again on one hand, and wanting to hide from her newfound sense of mortification on the other. And besides, will I even be able to find the same two Britannian tourists in a city as big as Paris? Somehow, I doubt it…

By the time the limousine had pulled up to the mansion proper, Leila had all but resigned herself to the two women she'd met today being nothing more than a story she'd probably wind up telling to Anne, if only to ward off her trying to set Leila up with other men, now that she and Akito were no longer sharing a bed on a regular basis, and she knew that come the next day, she'd have to be prepared to host another pair of Britannian women—nobility, this time—which caused her to sigh, and to try to brace herself in advance to deal with all the posturing and insincere pleasantries that came with it, basically every encounter that she had ever had with the Parisian elite multiplied by a power of ten. Needless to say, she wasn't looking forward to it.

She got out of the car, her shopping bags in hand, and walked up the steps to the front door, ignoring the car that was parked further along beyond identifying it—an Aston Martin One-77 Q-Series, one of only seven ever built—with the extensive knowledge of cars that she'd gained chiefly by osmosis after Ioan and she mended their relationship, as she knocked on the door, and waited for Akito to open it for her: she had no doubt that he'd beaten her here, as per usual.

Her first clue that something was up was that the face that greeted her on the other side of the door wasn't Akito's, and nor was it the face of anyone she knew. It was an older Japanese woman, with a brown bob and hard brown eyes that belied the more gentle softness of her face, and dressed in a maid outfit, of all the things she could be wearing. With her hands full as they were, the best that Leila could manage was just to nod in the strange woman's direction, and say, "My apologies, are you a new hire here?"

"Miss Malcal," the woman replied flatly, looking her up and down with an assessing eye. Then, she stepped aside, and gestured for Leila to enter the house. "Come in, but try not to tarry overlong. Your father awaits your presence in his parlour presently."

Leila nodded uneasily, and stepped over the threshold into the lavish mansion beyond—which, for once, was actually well-lit. She proceeded into the entrance hall, hearing the door close behind her, but once she thought to ask more about the Japanese woman and her identity, and turned around to do so, the maid had vanished entirely, without so much as a trace to suggest that she'd been there in the first place. "I… Huh. That's certainly not the first strange thing to happen to me today… It's still a bit creepy, though…"

With there being nothing she could do about it right now, she went down the hall and up the stairs to her room, dropped off her bags and her bridge coat, before leaving all of that behind, where it was safe, and making a beeline for Sébastien's parlour—which was on the southern side of the mansion, in the same wing as his home office. She saw no signs of other members of staff, nor of Akito, nor of the Japanese woman as she proceeded through the interior of the house, and when she saw the door she was looking for, she turned the knob and allowed herself in with a greeting of, "You were expecting…me…?"

She froze in place, her eyes wide as she beheld the two women cuddled together on the sofa, talking with Sébastien in his armchair. Leila knew both of these women who were snuggling into each other on the rich, dark leather upholstery of the sofa even now—she'd spent the day with them, as a matter of fact—and was it not just the very pinnacle of irony, that no sooner had she accepted that she would probably never see them again, only for them to wind up in her house, and further, to turn out to be in actuality the very same pair of Britannian noblewomen that she'd just been preparing herself to host throughout the entirety of the next day.

"Hello again," Ophelia called out, greeting Leila's sudden entrance with a bemused smile upon her black lips, and a saucy little finger-wave. "Fancy meeting you here."

"Small world," Milly agreed, nodding, her expression inscrutable.

"Ah, Leila!" called Sébastien from his armchair, his voice just barely concealing his alarm. "There you are! I see that you've already met our guests? The two princesses, Justine and Carmilla vi Britannia?"

"We had the good fortune to run across each other whilst walking through Paris," Milly—or rather, Princess Carmilla—confirmed with an encouraging nod. "Though, it goes without saying that, at the time, we were wholly unaware of her identity, and of her connection to you, Mssr. Malcal. I imagine this is about as much of a surprise to us as it is to you, Miss Leila—or would you prefer Mlle. Malcal?"

"Just Leila is fine, if you would," Leila said a bit stiffly, as she took in the pair—Ophelia, whom she assumed to be Princess Justine, had removed her sunglasses, her scarf, her beret, and her jacket, though her fingerless lace gloves yet remained, as well as the rest of it, and while Milly, who could be none other than Princess Carmilla, had removed less, doffing only her black coat, there was something that Leila couldn't quite put her finger on, that was distinctly different about how she carried herself, now that the other blonde had quite firmly abandoned any pretence of her civilian guise.

"Very well, then, Leila," Princess Carmilla accepted easily. Then, she gestured with the hand that wasn't wrapped around her wife's waist towards the other armchair, right beside Sébastien's. "Please, won't you have a seat and join us?"

Sensing that her presence was desired—after all, there were only so many ways one could receive a summons to this sort of thing—she did as she was bidden, sinking into the dark, lavishly cushioned leather of the high-backed armchair like she was laying herself down into bed for the evening. It was comfortable, of course, but as she crossed her legs, folding her hands in her lap, she got the distinct impression that what was on the horizon for her would be just about anything but. Princess Carmilla and Princess Justine smiled at her compliance, but where Princess Justine's smile was softer, meant to comfort and to encourage Leila, Princess Carmilla's own smile was significantly more difficult for her to read. "Now then, since we're all of us present, shall we begin?"

"From the top, if you would be so kind," requested Sébastien; he gestured towards Leila, and said, "My ward, she knows nothing of even what little we have discussed before your arrival."

"But of course," said Princess Carmilla, and the smile she gave was not to be trifled with. "From the top, as was requested of me: to put it bluntly, Mssr. Malcal, the Europian economy is in deep shit. That isn't news to anyone here, is it? Your food productivity is significantly under where it needs to be—under parity, even—and the mismanagement of your government has left affairs of state in what could most charitably be described as 'a shambles'. The value of the Euro is in free-fall, what anaemic social programs you do have are buckling under the weight of the needs of your impoverished and your working poor, and on account of exactly how your government's finances have been so egregiously mismanaged, there isn't enough room in your budget to go forward with any infrastructure projects or public works to attempt to alleviate the worst of your woes as a society. A conservative estimate puts complete economic default at around four months out. You won't even live to see the summer as a nation, not at this rate. Your military spending budget from the first year of the Richtofen Administration came in at around one hundred forty-six billion Euros—now, even that much couldn't even afford to purchase enough sakuradite to supply Paris with power for the next quarter, at least at current market rates. Are you with me so far?"

"You are describing the challenges that the Republic faces, I'm familiar," Sébastien said at length.

Princess Carmilla snorted. "To name the things I just described to you 'challenges' with any degree of accuracy presupposes that you have the capacity to surmount them without outside help. But, fortunately for you, we've come to offer you the outside help you so desperately require."

Sébastien started, and even Leila was surprised. Why would two Britannian princesses ever think to go out of their way to aid the E.U., one of their most steadfast perennial foes in the realm of geopolitics? "I think you are joking, your highness."

"Nothing of the sort, I assure you," Princess Carmilla replied, shaking her head. "Destabilisation, as a rule of thumb, is bad for business. An empire the size of Europia coming apart at the seams? That would be a disaster, for more reasons than simple economics. For all that our governments, and that of the Chinese Federation, would like to downplay or deny it, we exist in a global world in the modern day, Mssr. Malcal. These things have knock-on effects. For example, what, pray tell, becomes of the lithium mines in Central Africa, in the event of Europia's dissolution? What about platinum? That region holds eighty percent of the world's supply of it, after all. Hells, it holds eighty-five percent of the world's supply of manganese, to say nothing of other rare metals that are nonetheless essential to the continuous operation of the modern world. Personally, I believe it to be a much simpler matter to deal with a single government for access to any or all of these resources, than to attempt to appeal to the egos of dozens if not hundreds of petty, violent warlords who will all do their best to carve out their little kingdoms in that part of the world, in the event that the United Republic of Europia fails, and its member-states are left to their own devices. It's messy, and I don't think I have to tell you how bad things can get when they're that messy. And that's to say nothing of the humanitarian crisis that should befall your former citizens, shriven as they shall soon be of the industrial power-house that is Europia's African member-states. If you think things are bad now, you have no idea just how awful things will become if that possibility comes to pass, Mssr. Malcal. And those people? It's not as if they just go away. Should the Empire seek to expand its borders into lands occupied by your displaced, it now becomes the Empire's problem to resolve, even in the event that they should become subject to and victims of standard Imperial doctrine with regards to the treatment of Numbers. Should they seek to migrate in droves to the territories under the control of the Chinese Federation? In pursuit of living space, that might well spur the High Eunuchs towards more aggressive international policies, which then results in yet further wars that the Empire will need to fight.

"In summary, in all regards, it is our assessment that it is in the best interest, not only of ourselves and our own endeavours, but of Britannia as a state, to do all that we can to foster the formation of a more stable Europia," Princess Carmilla concluded, sitting back with as much ease as she had begun, as her wife cuddled up closer to her, which juxtaposed quite oddly against the bleak picture the blonde princess's words had just painted for them. "If you seek assurance as to our sincerity, Mssr. Malcal, there are no words that I could give you that you could not question, that could not be construed as falsehoods under a harsh enough lens. Instead, I ask that you place your trust not in our words, but in regards to our own self-interest. It helps us to help you, at the end of the day, and we are not so wrapped up in the fiery rhetoric that His Majesty so dearly enjoys that that reality escapes our notice."

"…If we are to take you at your word," said Sébastien after a moment, leaning forward with interest as he spoke, an entrepreneurial gleam in his eye. "If we are to believe that you have only the best intentions in mind in offering this to the Republic, then why come to us, and not to the government?"

"The Council of Forty is busy cleaning house, and they'd be too busy posturing in hopes of getting a few good sound bytes for their next re-election campaigns to actually govern, when it comes to what we're bringing to the table," said the blonde princess, shifting to lean further into her wife, tightening the grip she had around the raven-haired princess's waist and drawing their bodies even closer together on the sofa, to which Princess Justine responded with a delighted squeak. "Cutting out the middle-man by going straight to the individuals to whom the government would turn to get its work done for it anyways seemed like a more sensible option than attempting to prevail upon the better nature of those who fell in line with Richtofen in the interest of preserving civility to the direct detriment of all and sundry. Not to mention, Mssr. Malcal, it's important to pick someone you can trust with this sort of thing. I've looked into your corporate history, and it's all been shockingly above-board, all things considered. Your next five biggest competitors couldn't have held a candle to the integrity you've showed historically, and while my beloved wife and I certainly have a great many connections who could verify with a great deal of ease if other companies with whom we could have partnered are trying to cheat us, that seems like a headache that's honestly best avoided outright, to the extent that it's possible to do so."

Leila felt her brows rise towards her hairline, impressed despite herself at Princess Carmilla's ability to thread together flattery and implicit threat without any noticeable effort. She looked over, and saw, much to her disappointed expectation, that Sébastien had been taken in by the princess's flattery, and had thus been 'had like a blue', so to speak—though she had little doubt that the subtle warning had been registered in some part of his mind, slipping past his active cognition to embed itself into his subconscious, something he would remember later without being able to be exactly sure why he did. Leila looked away from him to the blonde princess, and then from her to Princess Justine, who, upon noticing that Leila was looking at her, raised a single finger to her full, black lips, and winked at her.

Leila felt her face flush, her cheeks burning as cherry-red as coals in a hearth; in a rush, she returned her attention back to the conversation, and did her best to ignore the silent laughter that she was certain had followed her being so incredibly flustered with such speed and ease.

Thankfully, she hadn't missed much.

"And what is it that you propose, then, Princess Carmilla?" asked Sébastien, leaning back in his seat and adjusting the solid grey three-piece suit with a single-breasted waistcoat that he had chosen to wear for this meeting. She couldn't help but contrast this against Princess Carmilla's own waistcoat, as black as the rest of her suit, but double-breasted with bronze buttons, in contrast to how open her white shirt underneath it still remained, and how much cleavage was exposed in the process. She wondered if this was some form of a display of power that was too subtle for her to have picked up on immediately, but her fellow blonde certainly wore it in a way that made her seem powerful, every little bit of her as royal in bearing as she was in status, her stylistic choices with her clothes included. "What do you propose to offer to us that would be enough to save our dear Europia from her disastrous downturn in fortunes?"

"Mssr. Malcal," Princess Carmilla said evenly, raising one leg and crossing it over the other during her brief dramatic pause. "I control the market on the single hottest new commodity of the modern age. It's not escaped your notice, I would hope, that on the little archipelago I govern, which we of the Empire call 'Area Eleven,' over seventy percent of the world's total supply of sakuradite is excavated out of the ground, purified, and refined. With the benefit of an oncoming boom in our workforce and the latest, bleeding-edge innovations in mining technology being developed and put into practise in those same mines, our estimates indicate that we can conservatively expect to be supplying something more on the order of eighty-five by the end of next quarter. That figure is likely to climb a bit higher as poorer mines run dry, and our efficiency only continues to ramp up as we reinvest into further excavation, purification, and refining infrastructure, but even as it stands, it is, to be clear, neither exaggeration nor hyperbole to say that we have the market cornered. We set the prices, we can drive our competitors out of business should we desire it, and all who wish to enter this market need to abide by our rules and standards, or they can kiss their dreams of profit adieu. If I was to offer you a lump sum of sakuradite for public works—enough to, say, supply all of Paris with enough power for the entirety of next quarter—purely as a show of good faith, I could do so without any noticeable negative impact on my bottom line. That would be where I'd start: a direct trade of a set quota of refined sakuradite, delivered to you on a monthly basis, in exchange for a set quota of various rare earth minerals, excavated from mines that are owned and operated by the Malcal Conglomerate, to be shipped back to Area Eleven, likewise on a monthly basis. A growing workforce, after all, comes with its own growing pains. This will, of course, enable you to offer to the Council of Forty contracts that are significantly more competitive than anything your competition will be able to bring to the table, which further allows for jobs and wages to go into the pockets of those who are most heavily impacted by the economic downturn, and thus serve to avert the rapidly-approaching potential for hyperinflation."

"And if our need for sakuradite outpaces these quotas?" asked Sébastien.

"Then we can either renegotiate the quotas, or you'll have to purchase the remainder yourself," said Princess Carmilla, the ghost of a sharp smirk playing about the span of her thin, ruby-red lips, and dancing in the predatory set of her piercing diamond-blue eyes. "Though, in such a case, I can offer to discount the purchasing price to roughly half of current market value, to reduce the burden as your company works to do its best to aid the government in setting things to rights around here. Though, of course, to sweeten the deal even further, I'll even offer to deal exclusively with you: any resale of excess sakuradite to your competitors and other companies can be done at full market value, and you'll get to pocket the difference as a profit. I'll note, of course, that I'll naturally expect the same deal in return when it comes to the set quota of rare earth minerals, though we can do without the exclusivity clause in your case. I'll also need to prevail upon your knowledge of Europia's markets to seek out and deal with other companies to sell to them other things that will further help to alleviate the E.U.'s woes."

"Such as?" asked Sébastien.

"Agricultural technology, for one," Princess Carmilla said, punctuating her statement with an airy gesture that was about ninety percent wrist. "We don't advertise it, because it's not our most valuable asset, but Area Eleven is on the cutting edge when it comes to vertical farming and hydroponics. It's how we've rebuilt our domestic agricultural sector, in pursuit of a self-sufficient food supply. Of course, there's nothing we can do for livestock, since the best methods for rearing them are all pre-industrial, but when it comes to staple crops like rice, wheat, maize, and other starches and grains, we've developed technologies that allow for them to be harvested at high yields in minimal space, and with minimal, in fact zero, reliance upon any form of expensive and optically nightmarish pesticide. But that's not a sector that the Malcal Conglomerate itself has interest in, so you would be expected to find us a reputable buyer—though, of course, I wouldn't be so controlling as to prevent you from taking your cut, as well, so long as it doesn't strangle business. We had quite the harvest this year, in fact, so you can deliver some of our surplus to them as a means to staunch the bleeding with regards to the ongoing and worsening famine, as well as to verify the value of our product in the eyes of the would-be partner for whom the Malcal Conglomerate would act as the sole intermediary."

"That does sound promising," said Sébastien, leaning back in his chair and nodding. "Though, I will have to mention, none of these measures directly prop up the value of the Euro, which, yes, is not currently our most pressing concern, I understand; but it will most certainly be a point of pain for us in the future if it is allowed to go unchecked."

"You won't have to worry about that too much, I assure you," Princess Carmilla said, that ghost of a smirk finally emerging into the genuine article, keen as a razor's edge, her eyes like the piercing gaze of an eagle, preparing to dive upon its prey. "There's an oncoming conflict in the Chinese Federation, an internal power-struggle that's certain to prove bothersome to the High Eunuchs. As soon as they begin to run out of money, which shouldn't take long, extend to them a series of high-interest loans to prop up their war efforts. The Euro regains its value, and the Chinese Federation will have to suffer the consequences, not the people of Europia. That's the problem with having a population that has been exploited as thoroughly as those who live under the rule of the government in Luoyang, you see: effectively, you've already squeezed them dry of all the blood that they had to give. Hiking taxation does nothing if your people simply cannot pay them on a sufficiently large scale: they'll have to turn to foreign investment to keep going—which they certainly will, if the High Eunuchs wish to maintain their hold on power—and I aim to ensure that all Britannian funds stay out of the pockets of the High Eunuchs, personally."

"I take it you have some manner of personal grievance against the High Eunuchs, then?" the ageing mogul guessed, raising a brow. Of course, Leila, having connected the two before her to the same two that Akito had told her about the moment she heard their names, recalled how the Chinese Federation was said to have had some great hand in the Britannian noble rebellion in which Princess Justine had been involved earlier this very year—knowing what Akito had told her of Princess Carmilla's propensity for ruthlessness, and having observed how she and her wife interacted with each other (which they were still doing as they spoke, the pale princess overtly curling up to her spouse's side, playing the part of fawning arm-candy with less shame than Leila had seen out of the majority of escorts, back during that time when Ioan kept buying them to hide the truth of his sexuality from himself as well as from those around him), Leila was given to wonder exactly what it was that Princess Carmilla had done to take her vengeance upon the High Eunuchs. She resigned herself to discovering that later down the line—what else could she do?—and returned a good portion of her attention to the arrangements being made, but the thought still played in her mind even so.

"You could say that, yes," the blonde princess replied with a slow, warning nod, and the message of that gesture was so clear that even Sébastien caught onto it, and visibly backed off from that line of inquiry.

"Before we go any further," Princess Justine interjected, immediately drawing her wife's attention. "I think it would be best if Leila and I excused ourselves before you two start getting into specifics. If she'd be so kind as to come and help me unpack?"

"Oh, certainly," Sébastien replied in surprise, though his surprised voice sounded awfully similar to his reasonably rare moments of blustering. "Leila, you're excused."

"Merci beaucoup," Princess Justine replied with a heartrendingly beatific smile. With that, the pale princess disentangled herself from her wife's side, murmuring a few quiet words and sharing a kiss as they parted, and stood from the sofa in her combat boots. She stretched, every line and curve of her body a living and shifting work of art, and walked past Leila to the coat rack by the door, grabbing her leather jacket and her beret off of the hooks where she'd placed them.

Princess Carmilla shot Leila a pointed look, as if to ask, are you going with her, or no?

Suddenly, Leila realised that she'd made no move to rise from her chair, and she scrambled to make right of that, standing almost to attention, and rounding the armchair she'd been occupying as the princess in black donned her jacket, draped her white scarf over her neck and the collar it held, leaving the garment to hang loosely to her knees, and put her black beret back upon her head. She looked behind her to confirm that Leila was prepared to follow her, flashed her a smile, and then turned to open the door, stepping out into the corridor beyond.

Leila, naturally, proceeded in her wake.

Once the door closed behind them, Princess Justine turned to her, and sighed. "Sorry about that. I've sat in on enough such meetings to know that it gets progressively more difficult to follow for the uninitiated from there on out, and I thought I might spare you that headache, as an apology for our deception earlier."

"There was no deception," Leila replied, shaking her head. "You were very open about the fact that you two were travelling incognito, after all. Your true identities are certainly surprising, to say the least, but you never tried to pretend that you were who you said you were."

"Indeed we did not," the princess agreed, nodding her head. "And yet, even so, I'd imagine you're glad to win your way free of that. Why it was that Mssr. Malcal wished for you to sit in on that meeting is rather a bit beyond me, I shall confess, but it was abundantly clear to me that you weren't getting all that much out of it, as things currently stand."

"I appreciate the rescue," said Leila, and she found that she meant it. A staff officer she may be, but a great deal of the nuances of these trade negotiations, she didn't doubt—for that was what they truly were, in reality, and not a simple business deal—went entirely over her head.

"Glad to hear it," Princess Justine smiled. Then, she gestured to the corridor beyond them, leading further into the mansion, and prompted Leila, "Shall we? I wasn't lying about appreciating an extra pair of hands with regards to unpacking our bags…"

"O-oh, certainly!" Leila stuttered briefly, before recovering fairly well, if she did say so herself. "I'll lead the way. You'll likely have been set up in the guest suite in the east wing, on the third floor."

"Then I'd be only too happy to follow you, Leila," the princess smiled, before ushering her on.

Thankfully, Leila needed no further prompting: putting one foot in front of the other, she made her way to the guest suite in question, the Britannian princess keeping pace on her long legs, and expending no visible effort in the process. Her combat boots were clearly audible against the floor even through the carpet that muffled it, but far from lumbering or clobbering or clumsy, her gait in the heavy footwear was graceful and decisive, as if they encumbered her no more than if they were mere ballet slippers in truth. Swiftly, the two came upon the stairs up, and with a gesture, Leila motioned for Princess Justine to take the first ascent, seeking to be as polite as possible; but it became clear the moment after the princess took her unspoken yet explicit suggestion that she hadn't quite thought that choice all the way through, because it made her into a captive audience for how the raven-haired royal's hips swayed with every step, a sight for which 'titillating' was too small a word. It was…enrapturing, hypnotic, mesmerising, watching her ass sway back and forth with the grace and rhythm of a swinging pocket-watch, and by the time they'd made it up to the third floor, it was all Leila could do to try and remain discreet as she wiped at her chin, hoping that she hadn't managed to start drooling down her front. She wondered for a moment exactly how she'd explain to the staff who laundered her clothes what had become of her underwear, before deciding that it would probably be safer to throw them out and be done with it. At the very least, the ones she was wearing weren't all that expensive.

"Is there something on your mind, Leila?" the seductress asked, pivoting on her heel and tilting her head in that same oddly avian gesture from before. Amazingly, she seemed genuinely unaware of the effect that her body was having on Leila's sanity, and Leila wondered if Britannian princesses were just that good at concealing their true thoughts and feelings from others, or if her expression of open concern and mild confusion was somehow genuine. "You seem…distressed. If I can help to alleviate that in any way, I want you to feel free to prevail upon me. I should hate to be known as a poor guest, to you or to others."

Leila immediately locked down on the part of her mind that seemed to take that as some manner of veiled proposition for sex—unless a more overt indication presented itself, she would only manage to make a fool of herself were she to take the princess's words as such—and shook her head. "It's nothing that you'd care about, your highness."

"I would thank you, Captain Malcal, to take care to avoid putting words in my mouth in the future," the princess replied, her tone and volume unchanged, but her words somehow sharper, her displeasure and irritation an acrid, almost sulphuric tang in the air. "If I choose to concern myself with your well-being, it is on account of my having determined to care about the cause of any distress that you might be experiencing, regardless of from whence it might have sprung. I have chosen, here and now, to concern myself with what thoughts besiege your mind, and therefore it is not yours to decide in my stead that which I shall and shall not care about. Am I clear?"

Leila shuddered, rubbing her arms at the sudden chill that had settled itself under her skin, wilting at the arched brow and the hardening of the amethyst eyes that pinned her into place just then. Princess Justine hadn't frowned or shown any other overt signs of anger—she hadn't needed to. It was as if the temperature of the corridor had dropped sharply, about five degrees or so, and her turtleneck sweater wasn't remotely up to the task of staving it off. "Y-yes, your highness…"

"Very good," the princess replied, her entire affect softening with the lowering of her brow, and the chill seeming to disappear with it. "If you would rather not confide in me, Leila, I would understand. I shall not press should you not be willing to tell me what troubles you freely, and of your own will. I ask only that you do not presume to know my mind. While I shan't begrudge you your choice to keep your own counsel, should you deem it preferable, caring is my decision to make, and I guard it jealously."

"…They are troubles of the heart, your highness," Leila said at last, her words carefully chosen, as she elected to err on the side of caution without lying to the woman before her outright. In the interest of the latter stipulation, she continued, "And of a…more intimate nature…"

"Ah, I do believe I understand," the princess replied, nodding. Then, her brow furrowed. "I seem to recall my elder sister telling me that you're originally of the defunct House of Breisgau, and thus ethnically Britannian. Tell me, Leila, how much contact have you had with your late birth parents' former countrymen before today?"

Leila paused for a moment, taken off-guard by the seeming non sequitur. She didn't quite get how this subject followed from the previous, and she didn't care to conceal it, not bothering to attempt to hide the interrogative note in her voice as she replied, "…You and Her Highness Princess Carmilla are the first two I have met outside of an explicitly formal context, your highness."

Princess Justine nodded sagaciously. "I see. That's quite understandable, then. Let's get to the guest suite, and then I'll do my best to help you mitigate your burden, alright?"

Still unsure of exactly how to take this, but now beginning to lean more towards interpreting all of it as a veiled proposition for sex—which was even more confusing, because the princess's tone didn't read as lascivious in the slightest, or sultry, or seductive, or really anything more than going to get Leila a bottle of over-the-counter pain medication for a headache, but given the subject matter, she couldn't figure out what else Princess Justine could possibly mean to communicate—she nodded hesitantly, and said, "It's just down this hall. Follow me."

She would not make the same mistake twice.

She grew increasingly more confused as she led Princess Justine down the hall, and though she was, at this point, newly hyper-aware of the pale woman's presence, and her attention along with it, not once did she feel her eyes lingering, or even venturing, anywhere that might have been considered improper. It was a hit to her ego, certainly, to be unable to tear her eyes away from this woman whenever the option presented itself for her to stare, only to have that exact same woman seem to be in no way, shape, or form attracted to her body. It stung in a way that Leila wasn't prepared for it to, and in fact didn't actually know that it could sting, for her attraction to go so thoroughly unreciprocated—but then, whatever could she have been talking about beforehand? Why would she flirt with Leila in the first place, with the wink, and her leaning in as if for a kiss when they were alone in that coffee shop?

Why was this woman so thoroughly indecipherable?!

They were before the door to the guest suite before Leila managed to claw her way out of her spiral of confused frustration and insecurity; she was still lost in it as she opened the door to allow the princess in, and came out of it only when she passed, and favoured Leila with an open, soft, kind smile. She was still in the process of shaking her way free of it, in fact, when the princess followed that smile up with ushering Leila in. "I did say I'd help, didn't I? Come in, come in. We'll make a priority to get on your issue, and then you'll help me do the rest of the unpacking. We didn't bring all that much with us, but the situation demanded that we bring a few things that need to be handled with some modicum of care."

Putting all of her complicated thoughts aside and stepping in after the princess, Leila did her best to keep her eyes from straying as they had before, dragging them back whenever they slipped down to behold how she walked, but thankfully, she began speaking, and Princess Justine's voice addressing her made it a great deal easier for Leila to keep her mind upon that, and away from her own fruitless lust. "How much do you know about Britannian nobility, Leila?"

"Not a lot, your highness," Leila admitted, following her into the bedroom, upon the floor of which rested two large trunks, both covered in black cowhide, with silver trimming the edges, and an identical seal upon the top of each—that of a golden eagle, its wings spread, with one set of talons holding a rose with all its thorns intact, while the other set was wrapped around the blade of a cruciform sword, held point-down.

"Well, if I wished to give you a run-down on all that you would know by now, were your family still of the peerage, we would be here well into the morrow," the princess said with a shrug. "Thankfully, your issue affords us the luxury of a much narrower scope. To wit: at some point, the series of bloody interregna for which Britannian succession is so known filtered down, to some extent, to the nobility. Rare though it was for a noble title to be in dispute, most noble families still wished to ensure that only the best and the brightest of their offspring would ever manage to succeed them. This, of course, led to there being quite a lot of offspring, both legitimate and not. Your average Britannian of noble standing will have about two or three children that have been born in wedlock, and about six to twelve who weren't—this going for both the lords and the ladies, though, for obvious reasons, Britannian ladies trend towards the lower end of that span, and Britannian lords trend towards the upper. This tendency got itself intermingled with the boom of the eugenics craze in the mid-nineteenth century of the Britannian calendar—that would map onto about the first century, in the reckoning of your Republican calendar—and the lingering effects of the reign of the Empress of the Night, Holy Britannian Empress Theodora nox Britannia, and the social reforms that that all brought about: simply put, Britannians on the whole tend to have significantly higher libidos than those of other nationalities, a tendency which becomes increasingly more pronounced the higher you go in society. I say this to assure you that your intimacy issues, such as they are, are actually rather normal: there was quite a bit of prestige behind the name of von Breisgau during the time of the Emblem of Blood, so I'd be rather shocked if you didn't have trouble finding partners who could keep up with you, as far as sex is concerned."

Those were…a lot of names, and a lot of information all at once. Leila did her best to filter out what she didn't immediately recognise: whoever this 'Empress of the Night, Theodora nox Britannia' was would keep until she could sit down with a book on the subject, if she could even find one, and she'd never heard of whatever this so-called Emblem of Blood was, but once she blocked them out, together with what could only be called the litany of questions the casual mention of those caused in Leila's mind, she focused on the core of what was being communicated, which was: "So, you're saying that my libido is high because those in the Britannian ruling class bred themselves into being constantly horny?"

"In simple terms, yes," Princess Justine nodded, as she stepped forth, bent over from the waist, and unfastened the padlock on the latch that held the first of the two otherwise-identical trunks closed. She drew the lid of the leather-covered wood back upon its well-oiled hinges, and began to rummage amongst its contents—at this angle, Leila couldn't see exactly what they were, and given the subject matter of their discussion, she had the sneaking suspicion that she would only be torturing herself if she tried to sneak a peek. "Libido and fertility—the promiscuity, on the other hand, is socialised into us, because as it turns out, contrary to what Europian eugenicists once thought, there's actually no gene that directly corresponds to one's sexual body count. Well, most of us, that is. As far as members of the Imperial Family are concerned, my younger sister and I are the odd ones out, to an extent…"

"So…how, exactly, do you mean to help with this?" she asked, finally surrendering to her confusion and her curiosity. "And what do you mean by you and your younger sister being…unlike the rest of you?"

"Well, with Juliette, at the very least, it remains to be seen," the princess shrugged as she continued to rummage, pulling out various items and putting them onto the bed—a rolled-up bullwhip, handcuffs that looked to be police-grade, a sturdy-looking collar made of thick black leather with a metal ring at the front, which was flanked to either side with the same insignia as the top of the trunk, embossed into the leather in gold, a riding crop… "Our half-sister Euphemia is currently involved in a polyamorous triad, and regularly indulges in casual sex on the side, but serial monogamy is every bit as common as polyamory, and for all that Juliette's current paramour is her first, the odds are even on whether Viscountess Stadtfeld will wind up being her only. Now, having seen them, I would be more inclined, personally, to bet on polyamory rather than serial monogamy, on account of being unable to envision them parting, really, but as I said, it remains to be seen."

"And yourself?" Leila prompted, averting her eyes from what was being unloaded onto the bed.

"I have only ever had eyes for Milly, I must confess," the princess replied. "I've come to understand recently that I fall into the category of 'demisexuality.' Bodies aren't particularly attractive to me, outside of aesthetics, as a first order. Milly's quite beautiful—stunning, in fact—but if I wasn't in love with her, then I would probably have regarded her in about the same way that others might regard a neoclassical statue: a thing to be appreciative of, certainly, but otherwise fundamentally devoid of eroticism. Aha! Found you…"

With that, the princess straightened, holding a small box in her hand, black and padded, like the sort that might hold a set of earrings or a ring within. She grinned at it triumphantly, and then turned to Leila, as she closed the lid of the trunk with her free hand. "As far as your other question was concerned, Leila, concerning how I mean to lend you my aid, precisely, this should suffice as an answer."

She held the box out to Leila, and Leila took it, opening the lid of it against the stiffened resistance and the sudden give that was characteristic of that kind of container, and looked upon what was inside of it, beholding the semi-familiar shape of the silvery egg held within in astonished, uncomprehending silence. Does she think that I…don't already have one of these? Leila thought; she asked, "A…a vibrator…?"

"Not just any vibrator," Princess Justine replied, circling around the trunk to come up closer to her. "This is a Silver Bullet. Top-of-the-line, heavy-duty, and designed specifically with the needs of Britannian noblewomen—and men, should they be that way inclined, though they might find it a little much—in mind. This new model uses a sakuradite battery for longer-term energy storage: even used at the highest settings and at a heavy frequency, by Britannian standards, you'll only ever need to charge it once a month. Less, if you prefer greater moderation in either settings or frequency of use. This one's a spare we brought along for the trip, but now it's yours. Consider it a gift, as thanks for being such wonderful company earlier today. We had a wonderful time, and you were lovely, even not knowing who we really were, from start to finish. Oh! I should also reassure you, it's brand-new, so…use it without fear."

"I…" Leila gaped, still dumbfounded by what she held in her hand. Purely on account of the social reflexes that she'd trained into herself to escape detection, she continued, "Th-thank you, I suppose…"

"Of course," said the princess, with a smile that made Leila feel a bit bad that she felt so awkward in receiving the gift in question—it seemed for all the world that this wasn't a gag or a joke or a set-up, for all that she awaited the punchline, but rather a gesture born out of a genuine desire to help. "And if you should have any questions moving forward about anything else that having been born to two Britannian nobles can spring upon you, I'll give you my contact information before we leave at the end of the week, so you can ask me about just about anything, and I'll answer to the best of my ability. Should you desire to stay in contact, that is; I certainly don't mean to presume anything."

"N-no, I'd like to!" Leila replied, before the thought of whether she'd accept or reject even crossed her mind. The earlier confession of the princess's sexuality had actually gone a long way towards soothing the wounds upon Leila's confidence in her own beauty that the pale woman's amethyst eye's unerring sense of propriety and complete lack of wandering had inflicted upon the blonde, and now that that got through to her cognition, a number of other things began to snap together in quick succession.

The raven-haired princess smiled again, just as dazzling as all the rest. She got the impression that a real, genuine smile being seen this often was something of a new development for the girl before her; she'd no idea exactly where she'd gotten that impression from—perhaps it was truly just something as simple as like recognising like—but now that she was looking for it, Leila saw it in the curve of her lip, in how she held herself as she did it: every smile was one she seemed to value, and it made sense, then, precisely why it was that the princess loved her wife as much as she did, if her intervention was in any way responsible for why Leila had seen that expression so often today. "I'm glad to hear it."

Then, something else occurred to her. "Wait, you said your sister's name was Juliette?"

"Juliette vi Britannia, yes," Princess Justine nodded.

"And what's her middle name?" Leila asked.

"Helena," said the princess, tilting her head yet again, the motion looking just as bird-like as before.

"Justine Ophelia vi Britannia and Juliette Helena vi Britannia, then?" questioned Leila, taken aback; she was no believer in nominative determinism, certainly, but she struggled to understand exactly why any parent would name their two daughters in such a starkly ill-omened fashion. In a flash, then, Leila recalled what little Princess Justine had to say about her own mother—that she was dead, and they were 'all much better off for it'—and suddenly, it made a sick sort of sense, that the dead mother had named her daughters in this way specifically because she wished ill upon one of them. "I can see why you're not all that fond of your late mother, then…"

The princess laughed, a light, breathy sound, almost like wind-chimes, caught upon the back of her gloved hand though they may have been; Leila imagined that the pale woman's peals of mirth would echo quite beautifully in the halls of a cathedral. Once her laughter had subsided, she said, "Yes, I quite imagine you can. Though, I'm surprised that you caught the second—All's Well That Ends Well is a bit chronically overlooked, after all."

"I took an elective in college where we read the 'problem plays,'" Leila said with a shrug, trying to play off how the princess's words of praise made her heart skip a beat. "I guess a few parts just managed to stick with me…"

"I see," Princess Justine said with a nod; then, with that, the pale beauty jerked her head towards the trunks, only one of which was even unlocked. "Now, shall we proceed to the unpacking?"

Leila started, and flushed with embarrassment. "Oh! Yes, of course…!"