Occupied Area of Japan, August, a.t.b. 2010
The day Shinozaki Sayoko was born, she was not born alone. At a remote estate near the Narita Mountains, her mother, Shinozaki Kayako, gave birth to two daughters—twin girls, three measly hours apart. The younger was given the name Sayoko, while the elder bore the name Sadako.
The Shinozaki Clan, the invisible hand that had guided the course of the shinobi world for decades, were the secret-keepers and practitioners of the Shinozaki School of Ninjutsu, and it was into this murky world of shadows and subterfuge that both girls were thrust by virtue of the accident of their birth. But the Shinozaki were an old family, seldom-mentioned by those outside their tangled, dark world of intrigue, intelligence, assassination, and sabotage, and they held to the old ways; thus, it did not take long for Kayako to become a pariah amongst the clan, and her daughters outcasts by proxy—for it was known that twins were an ill omen, a sign of assured misfortune.
It was no surprise that one of Sayoko's earliest memories was finding her mother in nightclothes, hanging from the rafters of the family estate by her broken neck.
Deaths in a shinobi clan weren't all that rare—indeed, the only way to ascend to the head of the clan was to successfully murder the previous clan head—but the old ways called for much in the way of ceremony, and so ceremony they had. Sayoko remembered Sadako wrapping her in a tight embrace as both of them watched the flames take the last remains of their mother and reduce her to ashes. To this day, she had never truly figured out if the embrace was meant to calm and soothe her, or to reassure her sister, but that hadn't mattered; what mattered was the fact that now, all either girl had in the world was the other. At the time, they were perhaps four years old.
When Sayoko and Sadako were six years old, after two years in their grandmother's cold, brusque custody (Shinozaki Okiku was not a warm woman and never had been), they slipped a potent poison into their grandmother's tea during breakfast. But Okiku, who had been the strong, hale head of the clan for longer than most other living clan members had been alive, detected the poison almost immediately, and, in an icy rage, one hand constricting around each of their necks, declared: "If you brats wish to succeed me as head of the clan, then we will do this properly."
That was the day Shinozaki Okiku had begun to personally oversee the twins' training in all the arts of the shinobi. As far as she was concerned, the head of the Shinzaki Clan could never be anything but the foremost master of all the clan's many techniques, after all; and from that day until the day the twins would at last come of age, their grandmother drove them doggedly and relentlessly in the pursuit of moulding them into the perfect clan head—"a shinobi worthy of succeeding me."
In the Shinozaki Clan, in accordance with the old ways, a son or daughter of the clan was to be considered of age only once they had undergone the ceremony of adulthood, which was traditionally conducted on their fifteenth birthday. Sayoko survived her grandmother's harsh training, and on that day, after nine long years, she became a full member of the clan.
Sadako did not.
The last time Sayoko had challenged Shinozaki Okiku for her position as head of the clan almost twenty years ago, it had ended with her and her alone watching her sister's body burn.
This time, it would be different. It had to be.
The young mistress was counting on her, after all.
She had expected the specially-made chainmail to feel odd on her skin after years in maid uniform, to feel like she no longer belonged in it. But donning it was still second-nature to her, even after all these years away, and it fit her like a second skin once it settled. Part of her thought she should be concerned by this, that her past was perhaps not so firmly in the past as she believed. The greater part of her, however, was pleased. Sadako, they said that I devoured you back then—that the two of us became one. If that's true, and you're with me now…
She sighed; sentiment had no place in matters such as this. Getting distracted here would mean failure—to come at her grandmother with anything less than every faculty fully devoted to killing her meant an ignominious and shameful death. With that admonition in mind, she scoured herself for all thoughts of her twin sister, now only so much ash sealed in a jar, gathered them up in her diaphragm, and with a harsh breath, expelled them. All that mattered right now—all that existed right now—was the mission.
Yes. The young mistress is counting on me.
Taking a deep breath to finally clear her head, she pictured in her mind's eye a flame, steadily bobbing in the dark, and brought it to the last of her misgivings, letting her dread burn away. She had passed beyond the bounds of the estate proper, ascended the steps to the temple that was the palace of the clan head and had been since the days of old, and passed through the four torii gates that framed the ascent; and now she stood at the massive double doors, embossed with a stylised relief of an eight-headed serpent, the Yamata no Orochi of Shinto legend who was intoxicated and then slaughtered as it slept, sculpted in bronze. Members of the clan were forbidden to make the ascent unless they were the heir, and for the heir to step beyond this boundary was to challenge the current head for leadership of the Shinozaki family. To step through this last gate was to symbolically approach the bank of the Sanzu-no-Kawa, where she would not be suffered to linger unchallenged.
She pressed both palms flat against the double doors, set her stance, and pushed.
A small shrine was what first greeted her, but in all directions, a dense forest was all that lay beyond that modest structure. Sayoko had the presence of mind to be thankful that her menpō at least concealed any expression of surprise that might otherwise slip through her composure, but her wandering eyes had not gone unnoticed.
"So, you've come at last."
She whipped around, her instincts screaming at her—her hand lashed up on reflex, caught the path of the projectile as it whistled for her face, plucking it out of its path a hair's breadth from its target: her open, exposed eye. A needle…
"My prodigal granddaughter has returned to claim my seat, has she?"
Okiku's voice came from a different place this time. Sayoko marked the points of origin from before and then now, her eyes widening as she realised how quickly the old woman moved. That was twenty metres in just under two seconds…
"You're not ready, girl. You'll never be ready. You're twenty years too early to even hope to defeat me," crowed her grandmother's voice, a harsh, aged croaking, eroded by age for all that it cracked like a whip, echoing in its sharp, scornful disapproval. Sayoko took care to mark that point, too, but there was something different about it that she couldn't quite put her finger on. "I took you in after my failure of a daughter took her own life in shame. You and your useless sister both. And so I suppose it's only fitting that I, as your master, must discipline my errant student. You think this is a game, do you, Sa-yo-ko? Well then…
"Asobimashō."
Sayoko's eyes shot wide. She lurched forth in a panic, twisting her body mid-lunge and drawing her ninjatō just in time to catch the thrust of a long needle on the drawing, steel scraping steel in a shower of red-hot sparks that stung and harsh screeching that echoed through the wood. Ventriloquism…!
Sayoko's powerful muscles, conditioned over the span of a decade of relentless training, corrected her imbalance, her body throwing itself into a handspring to gain distance and to bleed off momentum. She sprung lightly to her feet, shifting into a kenpō cat stance by unconscious reflex, and faced her elderly grandmother directly.
"Nicely dodged, girl," said Okiku. "It seems a life of Britannian indolence has not dulled your skills as much as I'd thought."
Shinozaki Okiku had been a withered crone when Sayoko had been a girl. Her hair had been stark white, with a texture like straw, her hands bony and discoloured with liver spots, with spindly fingers that she'd thought at the time looked like the legs of a spider, her build thin, and her face drawn, wrinkled, pinched, and marked all over with frown lines. Whatever beauty she might have once had in her youth had long since faded, the hardness of her nature, of her life, and the inexorability of the ongoing march of pitiless years giving rise to the murky-eyed old woman she and Sadako had tried to murder when they were six.
But if the years had not been kind to the Shinozaki Okiku of Sayoko's recollection, they had been actively cruel to the Shinozaki Okiku who stood before her now.
Her spindly fingers had degraded further into claws that held the long needles that had been her trademark in a death-grip. Her thin form had wasted away to the point where her faded, antiquated chainmail and gi hung off of her frame like cloth draped loosely about a skeleton, her skin was so pale it was practically translucent, and her face was sallow and gaunt, with hollow cheeks and skin stretched so tightly that one could clearly pick out her blood vessels pressed flush against the bone of her skull. Her colourless dried-straw hair was brittle, like so many strands of ash, and pulled back in a single braid, and her eyes, which had been failing her for years, were finally an opaque, sightless white.
She looked like death warmed over, ravaged by time and infirmity, her shoulders draped in a thick, knitted blanket, and moving with a dead woman's stiff vitality.
But to count Shinozaki Okiku as feeble was to seal one's own death, she had learned long ago, and for all her ancient infirmity, she stood erect and nimble, neither bent nor stooped, nor even needing the assistance of a cane. In a realm as brutally and mercilessly cutthroat as the shinobi's world of deadly secrets and shifting shadows, where the paths were paved with daggers and treachery was merely a form of currency, there was a reason why Okiku had remained at the top for over eighty years.
It was because she was strong. Even now, standing as little more than a burnt-out husk of her former self, there was not a doubt in Sayoko's mind that her grandmother was the greatest shinobi to have ever lived.
Her sightless eyes narrowed. "I do not recall raising you to be disrespectful, child."
It doesn't matter—I have my mission. Only that is of any importance. "This is no place for words, Honoured Grandmother. Only the shinigami may be heard."
"Watch your tongue, girl. I am still head of the clan," spat the old woman, her lip curling back from age-yellowed teeth in a silent snarl. "Tch. Impertinent child! Worthless daughter of a worthless daughter! If you have forgotten respect, I shall carve it into your flesh, that you might never again forget it!"
Here she comes. Sayoko braced herself as Okiku sprung forth from absolute stillness, but even then, she was ill-prepared for her grandmother's speed. If she blinked, she'd have missed her opponent closing the distance—and only her reflexes saved her from taking both of the long needles Okiku wielded, one in each hand, directly to her throat. She dodged one, parried the next, intercepted the first on her blade, and stepped back to evade the second; it cut back with a scream of air, and then the first struck twice, leaving her open to the second, a desperate twist turning the mortal blow into a dangerously close graze. Her fingers tingled and went numb in phases, as her wrists screamed in protest at having to contend with the old woman's monstrous strength—she could not win like this, so her fingers darted to a concealed pouch and dashed a handful of white powdered glass into her grandmother's face.
It didn't catch her, but then, Sayoko never expected it to; what she needed, and got, was a bit of distance. She plucked a grenade out of another pouch and dashed it onto the ground, using the bang and the heat of the flash to conceal her retreat.
Coiling her muscles, she leapt up into the tree cover, dashing from trunk to branch in an attempt to gain some height on the crone. A strange sound caught her attention, however, and so she put a bit more power in her bounds and her grabs to get up higher, faster, before finding out what the sound had been.
She found a nice, strong tree branch that could bear her weight without creaking under it quickly enough, but when she looked to her grandmother down below, it drew her to stillness.
Is she…coughing?
Indeed, a horrible, hacking cough was coming from her grandmother's withered figure down below. It was a painful sound, visibly racking her body with harrowing, rattling jolts as her spine bent in on itself, and the dry, percussive clamour turned wet and splattering. Suddenly, the old woman's knees gave out under her, and she collapsed to the ground on all fours, her body destroying itself to expel mouthfuls of blood onto the smooth, grey cobblestone below.
Sayoko was no stranger to mortality. She had been the one to find her mother's crooked, broken corpse hanging from the rafters, and so in a way, her earliest memory had been her first confrontation with the concept. It had shaped her life in ways both great and small, and was an inextricable part of her in all ways.
But she, as well as many others, had unconsciously assumed that the old woman they all feared and paid homage to was in some way immortal. Mortality was something that affected other people—the shinigami would never dare try to claim Grandmother Okiku. It was unthinkable, an impossibility, a profound violation of the laws of nature almost; and so there was nothing that could have prepared her for this moment. Grandmother is…dying…
"…My master failed me. My husband failed me. My daughter failed me. Her daughter failed me…" Okiku groused as she wiped blood off her chin with the back of a trembling hand. She chuckled bitterly as she stood, the trembling slowing until it went still, through what Sayoko could clearly see now was nothing less than a herculean exertion of her will. "And now…now, even my own body is failing me. Perhaps it is the will of the kami, that I should be surrounded on all sides by failures for all the days of my life.
"But not yet… No, not yet. Not until I have beaten this, my final lesson, into my insolent heir's body…"
Sayoko leapt from her position at that moment, scrambling with all the speed she could muster—and even then, the needle passed close enough by her face to cut a shallow line into her cheek, just above her menpō. She kept moving, but flying needles cut glancing furrows into her flesh all the same, even as her lethal, pantherine body threw every ounce of adrenaline-fuelled strength it had into evasion.
From branch to branch, tree to tree, Sayoko dodged through the forest, the sweat of her exertions rising in bullets to sting her open wounds, shallow though they were, her mind working furiously against itself in an attempt to formulate a winning strategy. But what was there?! All of these tools of her trade, and not one of them could she use against the woman who had branded the nuances and secrets of their use directly into her brain since the early days of her childhood! It was useless—wasted effort; to Okiku, a clan head was only worthy if they were the foremost masters of every one of their clan's most secretive and esoteric arts, and while the crone could be accurately described as many things, one thing she could never be called was a hypocrite.
How do I defeat the greatest shinobi to have ever lived?!
In a flash, Okiku descended from a higher branch, and swinging from it, she planted both feet squarely into Sayoko's solar plexus, clipping her out of her leap and forcing every last bit of air out of her lungs. And as the dying woman followed through, driving Sayoko from her great height to the ground below, she finished: "…That not in a hundred, nor in a thousand, nor even in ten thousand years will you ever manage to best or surpass me. Foolish grandchild."
There was a certainty that settled over Sayoko in that strangely tranquil moment, trapped in free-fall as her lungs struggled in vain to gain back their breath, her dying grandmother falling with her through a drop that would assuredly be fatal if she didn't manage to gain some sense of control over her descent. It was a certainty that stole upon a soldier in the brief moment between the click of a landmine and its detonation, a hapless civilian who had been run off the road, their car falling bumper-first into a ravine. The weightless, motionless certainty of one's own demise.
Truthfully, she'd been asking that question of herself ever since becoming a full member of the clan. It was a problem that had no clear solution at the time; never before had a head of the clan passed by natural causes, a process that was thought to bring the clan closer, generation by generation, to producing the finest, strongest, most proficient shinobi to ever exist.
It dawned on Sayoko then, for as little good as it would do her—the realisation that the ones who had put the system in place had considered it an impossible ideal, that there would not ever be a perfect shinobi; but they had failed to recognise that while they were correct, a peerless shinobi was, on the other hand, eminently possible, and would bring the entire system screeching to a halt.
Yes… It was an obvious truth that Shinozaki Okiku was not a perfect shinobi. She would, in fact, be the first to admit this—had freely admitted to such in the past. Such an existence was impossible, beyond unthinkable—a contradiction in all terms. But she did not need to be; all she needed, and all she was, was to be so incredibly beyond her peers that none could match her.
But neither do you…
A memory. Her mistress, Carmilla, whom Sayoko had served ever since she was little, had said as much to her before she left.
You say she does not need to be a perfect shinobi. But neither do you…
Sayoko felt like quite the dunce all of a sudden. The shinobi were masters of asymmetry. They gained the advantage not only by striking where their foe was weakest, but also by means and methods they had no ability to predict or counter. Her foe now was Okiku, who had been a cruel but undeniably effective tutor in all the arts of their clan. Of course the crone could predict what she was going to do! She was the one who had imparted those skills onto her granddaughter and forced her to hone them as she had! And worse than that, Sayoko had used those same arts to engage with her grandmother symmetrically.
She had been so caught up in the seeming impossibility of surpassing Okiku as a shinobi that she had forgotten what it was to be a shinobi.
Painfully forcing breath into her lungs down to her diaphragm, Sayoko twisted her spine up to wrap her legs around her grandmother's bony waist. Her ankles locked around the crone's middle, and she preemptively braced herself against oncoming pain, clenched her abdomen, and reversed their positions in mid-air.
She savoured the feeling of the crone stiffening in surprise for only a moment—using her own abdominal strength, she slammed a heel into Sayoko's lower back very precisely, forcing a spasm that both loosened her leg-hold enough for Okiku to scramble free, and sending the two of them flying apart from one another.
Swallowing the shock, Sayoko employed the techniques she had learned to fall for a great distance without injury with mechanical precision; a few brief moments later, both grandmother and granddaughter landed gracefully upon the springy ground of the forest floor, facing one another and meeting each other's eyes directly.
"What was that manoeuvre?" Okiku demanded without preamble. "I recall every motion I drilled into your muscles until you could reproduce them without flaw, girl—and that hold of yours was not of their number."
"It was a variation on a technique of Britannian wrestling, Honoured Grandmother," she replied. "A throw called the suplex."
"Britannian?!" Okiku spat, her face twisting in rancour. "You bring such things here?!"
"But of course," said Sayoko. "To be a shinobi is not only to strike where one's foe is weakest, but in a manner against which they can muster no defence—not even prediction. Is that not so?"
"…You surprise me, granddaughter," Okiku remarked, her ire melting instantaneously to display a bitter pleasure. "I see I did manage to teach you something worth learning. Perhaps you are not so much of a failure as I had feared…"
To say Sayoko was poleaxed by this new development was to put it lightly. "A-Are you not angry, Honoured Grandmother? That I would forsake the old ways so?"
"At any other time, I would have killed you for spouting such inanity. After eighty years, I find I have little patience left for it indeed," snapped Okiku. "But as you have learned well the lesson, I believe you have earned some manner of explanation.
"All this talk of our ancestral traditions and the old ways that lesser shinobi cling to—it is why none of them were ever worthy of the clan, and indeed, I had begun to worry that none of them ever would be," the withered crone began. "This was never about our arts, girl. You were every bit the equal of myself at your age when you stepped out of our home to live in Britannia, and you remained so when you stepped over that threshold to challenge me. Proficiency was not a concern. Mastery was obvious. But I have been using those techniques and honing that same mastery for over eighty years, girl, nearly a century. The chasm of experience that rests between me and you is not one any kind of genius or prodigy could bridge.
"But now, girl, you are thinking like a true shinobi! And you have at your disposal tricks I have never learned, strategies and techniques I have never seen, could not hope to predict! The very thought of it makes my old blood boil," exclaimed her grandmother, drawing out yet more needles as a grin split across her taut, deathly face in a rictus of joy. "And so now, you may consider this your final test. Bring to me all that you are, every technique you have learned, each and every mote of your fighting spirit, and claim my position, not as a Shinozaki, but as shinobi! Grant me a warrior's death!
"Come…Sayoko!"
When Kururugi Suzaku finally roused from her deep, black slumber, her very first act upon examining her immediate surroundings was to utter a resounding, "Fuck."
She was in a Britannian holding cell—this much was obvious; and while it boasted better accommodations than she would have expected of a place where the Britannian invasion forces kept their hostages, the fact remained that she had been taken captive. Which meant that the girl she had fought, that fancy-faced Britannian princess…had won.
Suzaku turned that notion over in her head a fair few times, expecting to feel some sort of indignation over having lost not only the fight, but also her freedom; but ultimately, all she could really muster was a shrug. "Eh. I suppose there are far worse opponents to be bested by."
The princess herself, on the other hand, was someone Suzaku could muster more than a sense of resigned insouciance about. Ever since she'd met Izanami-sensei while she was on a family beach trip to Shikinejima alongside her kid cousin Kaguya, and then subsequently started training under her, Suzaku had begun to think that perhaps she might never find an opponent worthy of her and the skills her beloved teacher had beaten into her; but fighting the Britannian princess had been an experience she would hesitate to call anything less than exhilarating. Facing her, it was like her soul had caught fire, and ignited the other girl's in turn; the altercation had left her with a nascent feeling of respect for the fancy-faced princess, and a burning anticipation for the next time she would get to fight her.
Huh, she thought to herself. Izanami-sensei, I think I might have just made a friend…
Looking around the holding cell, she saw a relatively barren grey room, with a toilet in a far corner, a wall of tinted plexiglas that looked out into a similarly clinical hallway, a small table that seemed welded to the floor, and the raised bed she herself was laid out upon, which was just soft enough to sleep in, but firm enough that she didn't risk oversleeping. A short test of jerking her weight around on the bed in an attempt to shift it resulted in the discovery that the bed frame was also welded to the floor, and there were no blankets or sheets in view no matter where she could think to look. Even her clothes were nowhere to be found, and instead she found herself dressed in a plain beige pair of pants and a black tank top, both of which prioritised function and practicality over form and comfort. It left her feeling a bit itchy across the back at the sensation of the rough-hewn hempen threads brushing across her skin, but she'd had worse. Britannians have this place locked down good and tight, it looks like…
There wasn't a timepiece anywhere Suzaku could see, but it couldn't have been very long before a hidden door in the plexiglas slid open, and in the threshold stood the exact girl she had just been thinking about. The princess who had bested her was dressed just as finely as Suzaku remembered her being during their last meeting, this time with tan trousers, a white blouse, the same pair of expensive yet sturdy boots as during their battle, and a pair of black gloves, which also looked familiar (though she couldn't tell if it was the same pair or just an identical spare set). Her long black hair was swept back off of her face and tied up high on her head, hanging loose in a tail, and her unspeakably pretty face was every bit as punchable as ever, decorated with a small smile, calm and even more mocking for its lack of obvious mockery.
At both sides she was flanked by an adult—a woman who didn't look all that classically Britannian with her long silver ponytail, darker skin and bright green eyes (though she certainly had the 'angles sharp enough to cut glass' sort of prettiness about her that was all Britannian), and a handsome man with a head of tousled wavy blue hair and sharp amber eyes who couldn't look any more like he had walked right off the set of a Britannian propaganda video if he tried. Both of them wore plain black uniforms and black knee-high boots, with the woman's short skirt and the man's slim trousers being the only real differences between the two outfits, but they did not carry themselves like plain grunt troops, and Suzaku did not doubt for a moment that both of them were armed.
"You will forgive me for failing to introduce my faithful retainers," said the princess, her voice smooth, full, and neither particularly high nor particularly low, her tone at once courteous, exceedingly civil, and effortlessly authoritative.
Suzaku couldn't help herself. "And what if I don't?"
The princess's calm smile flashed into a sharp, cutting curl of her lips that reminded her chillingly—and shockingly—of Izanami-sensei. "Well then, I suppose it's a good thing I wasn't asking, isn't it?"
Suzaku laughed uproariously, shocking even herself. "And I suppose you've got a point there, Hime-sama."
Her Britannian friend's face softened into indulgent amusement. She gestured to one side, and then the other, each of her two retainers bowing in turn. "Allow me to introduce two of my loyal companions: my future Knight of Honour, gallant Jeremiah, Margrave Gottwald, and the lovely Warrant Officer Villetta Nu. Though I sincerely doubt she'll remain of such low status for very long. I ask that you trust them, and treat them as if they are extensions of myself. And, if I may give you some advice, I'd counsel you to become acquainted with both of them. After all, I daresay you'll be seeing quite a lot of each other in the coming days."
"And what, exactly, are ya gonna do with me?" asked Suzaku, finally forcing herself to be practical here. "Ya can say 'political hostages' all ya want, but the truth of the situation is that you Britannians don't need any hostages to win this war. Your roller-skatin' robots are doing a decent enough job of runnin' roughshod over Imperial Japanese forces all on your own."
"Well, Suzaku—may I call you Suzaku?—that largely depends on you," said the princess, folding her hands in front of herself and approaching Suzaku, plopping her ass right down at her bedside. "And how willing you are to answer a few questions of mine."
"Tch. Ya felt it in that clearin' just as well as I did, so yeah, go ahead and call me by my given name," Suzaku sighed, slapping a palm to her face and dragging it down in semi-feigned resignation. "Honestly. It'd just be really weird for you to go around callin' me 'Kururugi-san' like some bloodless fuckin' stranger after what we shared back there."
The princess grinned, and Suzaku was struck by how weirdly kind the expression looked on her face. It was as if, for the first time, she could actually believe this girl was the same age as her, and not three or four years her senior at least. "Luckily for you, I happen to agree, Suzaku."
Suzaku found herself grinning in return, and it made a warm feeling blossom in her chest. She felt like she wanted to fight someone. No, not just 'someone', not just anyone: she wanted to fight her new friend. Another time… "So, whaddya wanna know, Hime-sama?"
The grin subsided somewhat, shifting into a calm, cool smile, a curling press of her lips, effortless in its absolute serenity, that once again made her seem like so much more than just another eleven-year-old. "The Kururugi Shrine. I would know what transpired there before we arrived—and what part, if any, you played in it."
"Well, ya obviously know it was bombed. Whether it was on purpose or a stray payload, I neither know nor really give a shit," Suzaku began easily. She felt no shame—or perhaps more accurately, no sense that she was somehow expected to feel shame—in divulging what she was about to say; there was some idea, some instinct, that her newfound friend would understand. "I wasn't anywhere near the house when it was blown sky-high, though. It was just my dad and a few of his aides and yes-men from the Diet, with a few guards thrown in for good measure."
"And yet it seems those guards, aides, and yes-men were unequal to the task of keeping a single assailant from slipping through their defences," remarked the princess.
"Yeah, well, their boss's eleven-year-old daughter wasn't exactly their idea of an assassin, I guess," said Suzaku, shrugging her shoulders insouciantly. "Really, that bomb did me a favour. They were all dead before I could get a search party sicced on my ass."
Suzaku had been expecting her friend to understand, sure, but even then, she'd expected more of a reaction than the princess just nodding. "I had indeed assumed you were the one to end his life, yes. A thrust to the heart like that—he clearly died shocked."
"That's it, then?" Suzaku asked incredulously.
The princess cocked a single eyebrow, bemused, and tilted her head in a manner strongly reminiscent of a bird. "Were you expecting something else? I could act as if I was surprised, if it would make you feel better."
"No, just…" Suzaku shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts. "Generally speaking, if ya say to someone, 'hey, I just stabbed my father through the heart,' ya get more of a reaction than just a nod."
"Britannia has a somewhat…different view of the value of family, and of the sanctity of the bond between parent and child, such as it is, than much of the rest of the world, I'd venture," said the princess, gesturing vaguely as she spoke. "Patricide, matricide, filicide…these are not so unheard of amongst the sorts of creatures who count themselves as members of the Imperial Court, let alone those of the Imperial Family. Though, I do find myself wondering why you did it. I was hoping you would be willing to tell me."
"Well, in all honesty, I don't know that there'd be much to tell," said Suzaku, reeling a bit from what she had just heard and what that meant for her preconceived notions of the kind of life her new friend had lived. "Like I said, you Britannians with your fancy mobile suits—"
"Knightmare Frames."
"—Went an' sunk the whole Imperial Japanese Navy, and then effectively backed the Army into a corner. It was obvious that you guys were gonna win. My father, Genbu, didn't wanna see it, didn't wanna go down as the prime minister who surrendered Japan to an invadin' force. He was gonna fight this war to the bitter end, and he was about to resort to givi'g the order that would authorise kamikaze tactics. Our remainin' soldiers would be ordered to throw their lives away, and for what?"
"So you killed him to save Japanese lives?" the princess asked sceptically.
Suzaku snorted incredulously, and took note of how the princess smiled again. "Fuck no. I killed him because he was fuckin' pathetic. I did it because he abandoned his pride as a warrior to save face as a bureaucrat. A warrior knows when they're beat down. They don't continue the struggle uselessly, like a thrashin', wretched animal, willin' to gnaw off its own leg to escape a trap, accomplishin' nothin' beyond succumbin' to fear. And a wounded animal is unsightly. Puttin' it down is a mercy, not only to it, but to the world. Besides, have ya ever actually just sat there and watched a rabbit go through its long, slow death throes? It's beyond borin'."
"And I suppose that it was his untimely death at your hands that inspired you to cut your hair off? The majority of it, at any rate?"
Suzaku shrugged. "I mean, yeah. It's not like he was an awful father or anythin'. I guess I'd go so far as to call him a good one, even. As ya can probably guess, I'm not exactly an ideal daughter, not in the eyes of the sorts of plutocrats and would-be aristocrats that surround the emperor in Kyoto like flies on rottin' meat. But Genbu didn't give a damn about any of that, and the man was more than willin' to put his neck out for me on more than one occasion. He listened when I said I liked fightin' and sucked at flower arrangement, got me teachers who'd fit their lessons to my interests. He never asked me to be anythin' I wasn't. Not once."
"I'm afraid I can't say I can relate," the princess confessed. "In Britannia, both the sons and daughters of the peerage—a group that encompasses the nobility, the landed gentry, and the Imperial Family—are guaranteed equal rights to educations that suit their individual aptitudes. A princess of the realm is every bit as able to enter the military and win renown for themselves as a prince of the realm would be. And much like the law outlawing discrimination or discriminatory ideas towards 'sodomites and daughters of Lesbos,' it was written into yew-law, so it can neither be changed nor infringed upon; not even His Imperial Majesty has the authority to do that."
"What's the catch?" Suzaku asked, her brow furrowing.
"There isn't one," said the princess. "Beyond, of course, the common Britannian caveats, that discrimination against the lowborn, foreigners, and 'Numbers' is entirely fair game. Though, of course, they're also equally discriminated against within their maligned demographics. In a twisted way, the protections of yew-law extend to them, as well."
"I honestly wasn't expectin' those protections to exist at all," said Suzaku. "Britannia is pretty well-known as 'discrimination central' to the rest of the world. We're all kinda taught to assume that you all are guilty of every kind of '-ism' ya can think of."
"As you've probably guessed by now, the Holy Britannian Empire defies such simple and neat definitions. It's quite easy to put us in that box, though it remains inaccurate," the princess explained, shrugging her slender shoulders. "Take for example what I just said. The entry into yew-law that protects 'sodomites and daughters of Lesbos' was a direct result of the martyrdom of Saint Oscar Wilde, whom the E.U. found guilty of 'gross indecency' for loving another man. As his work was much beloved by both the nobility and the emperor of the time, Orion ex Britannia, they resolved to ensure such a 'gross miscarriage of justice' could never occur on their shores, writing the aforementioned protections into yew-law, and declaring the twenty-fifth of May to be a holiday—the Day of Saint Wilde. Though you can be sure, this was just as much a demonstration of contempt against the E.U. for its own sake as it was genuinely mourning the fate that befell the man many regarded as an honorary son of Britannia. A similar tale surrounds the other edict of yew-law I mentioned, and indeed, I suspect many such edicts were provoked into being by such events. The Holy Britannian Empire is a polity built on a religion of power, motivated by a doctrine of ambition, and guided by a canon of spite—and that is perhaps the first and last simple thing one could accurately say about Britannia."
Suzaku chuckled at that. "I suppose so. But whatever else he was, Genbu…my dad…was a good man, and a good father. That, at least, I found worthy of my respect in death. So I took the sword I used against you, Norimune's Kiku-ichimonji, and cut my hair off. And while technically you're only really supposed to do that when you join a Buddhist monastic order, or when you're widowed, I figure any similarly significant change probably counts. I figure it's a good way for me to demonstrate that I'm willing to do what he wasn't, and try to bring this war we've already lost to an end."
"Well then, it might interest you to know that in spite of the death of Kururugi Genbu, the Chrysanthemum Throne has ordered the fight to continue, and has named your late father's chief cabinet secretary, a man by the name of Sawasaki Atsushi, as acting Prime Minister in his stead," said the princess, lowering her hands to the bed and tracing errant patterns into the mattress with her slender, gloved fingers. "More than that, thanks to the unexpected ingenuity of a Major Tōdō Kyōshirō, who reportedly employed sakuradite-based explosives against our forces, the tattered remains of the Imperial Japanese Army have slipped through our grasp at Itsukushima. Your people have become emboldened by this 'Tōdō of Miracles,' and have regained some of their will to fight. I, however, intend to produce a miracle of my own, to snuff out this resurgent sentiment. That our goals seem to be aligned in desiring a swift and total conclusion to this war is a welcome, if not totally unforeseen, development."
"Tch. Sawasaki, that grotesque little shit-weasel…" Suzaku snarled, bolting upright in the bed. The man was in all respects a bureaucrat's bureaucrat, stiff, shifty, bloodless, spineless. Every encounter she had had the displeasure of suffering through with the ugly, craven little pencil-pusher left her in desperate need of a bath and a reinforced feeling of disgust towards him.
"Quite," said the princess, mirth bubbling up in the lilt of her tone.
"What do you need to know?"
"Designs are already in motion to deal with Emperor Boruhito. What I need you to tell me concerns the whereabouts of your cousin, Sumeragi Kaguya," she replied, her finger halting in the middle of a pattern Suzaku hadn't been following. "As Boruhito is still a teenager, and has yet to properly marry or to produce a son, Sumeragi Kaguya is, at the moment, the heir presumptive to the Chrysanthemum Throne. If she could be secured, we could end this war within three days' time. And I suppose if you could tell me where Major Tōdō, who has likely been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel by now, and General Katase have squirrelled themselves off to, that they might continue to prosecute this doomed war effort of theirs, that would go a long way towards keeping my sister, Princess Cornelia, off of my back and out of our delicate business."
"Tōdō-sensei and Katase-taishō probably retreated to the emergency bunker near Narita, in the mountains closest to the city," said Suzaku, counting off two fingers. "It's a vast complex of tunnels and caverns built into the rock over the course of the last few decades. It'd probably be enough to house and supply the entire pre-war IJA in a pinch. It's got enough rations, bullets, and bandages stocked up there to last about a decade, and its water supply is fully self-sufficient. Takin' it would probably entail a long, bloody siege under normal circumstances, but hey, who knows? You Britannians just might be able to handle it with your 'Knightmare Frames.'
"Kaguya-tan's a more difficult nut to crack. Like ya said, she's the current heir to the throne, though you can be sure that none of the other families at court are exactly happy about that fact. She's whip-smart and more cunning than she looks, which, as far as the Six Houses of Kyoto are concerned, is a bad combo for a girl—sorta like me. So they've done what they could to neuter any of the authority she'd otherwise have. If I had to guess, she'd be holed up with the old heads of the other five families: Kirihara Taizō, Kubōin Hidenobu, Munakata Tōsai, Yoshino Hiroyosi, and Osakabe Tatsunori." Suzaku grinned at her friend conspiratorially. "Thankfully, they're pompous blowhards, the lot of 'em, so if you consider the creature comforts they'd demand, and which of the established safehouses would be able to provide that for all of them, you narrow down the places they could be tremendously."
"Any ideas?" the princess prompted patiently.
"If I had to gamble on it," began Suzaku, folding her hands across her upper abdomen as she spoke, "there's an upscale ryokan that doesn't show up on any registries, or really any maps that currently exist. It was built at the site where Honnō-ji once stood during the final days of the Ashikaga shoguns. Shouldn't be all that hard to find, honestly. Though it's also got an extensive basement to serve as both a bomb shelter and a way to access escape tunnels, so be warned."
The princess nodded, and then turned to her two retainers, the presence of whom Suzaku had honestly and embarrassingly forgotten about until just now. "You two heard that, I trust?"
"I'll bring the information on the missing IJA officers to Princess Cornelia," volunteered the dark-skinned woman—Villetta Nu, Suzaku recalled after a moment. "And of course, I'll do my best to make sure she's aware that it was Miss Kururugi who gave us this information."
"Very good," the princess nodded. "And Jeremiah?"
"I'll contact Miss Shinozaki using the means we agreed upon before, your highness," said the blue-haired man, Jeremiah, bowing from the waist.
"Good. And be prompt," instructed the princess. "Sayoko should be wrapping up her clan business soon enough. I want us ready to go as quickly as possible once she confirms it."
"As you will it, your highness," he replied, rising from his bow.
"Meanwhile, I'll use the ready room and contact Friede. We'll need her for what we'll be about shortly." Then the princess turned to Suzaku, rising from her seat on the bed with a level of grace that, to Suzaku's trained, albeit inexperienced, eye, suggested quite a lot of dance practice (she should know—Izanami-sensei had forced her to seriously take lessons, after all), and moved towards the door, where both her retainers stood. Then, nearly to the threshold, she turned back to Suzaku, and delivered the best damn news she'd heard all day. "Oh, and, by the way, a friend of yours is about to join us. I believe you're acquainted with the Lady Izanami? I'll make sure she knows where you're being held, so expect a visit upon her return."
! Suzaku's mind came alight in joy, glee, and girlish excitement that defied words. But it also brought to mind the kind of questions her beloved teacher would ask upon their reunion, the answers to which, to her mounting horror, she had failed to obtain. "Wait! Where exactly am I being held?"
"You are in a holding cell aboard a Britannian G-1 Mobile Command Base, positioned at the outskirts of the city of Yokohama," the princess replied over her shoulder. "My illustrious third sister, freshly-minted Brigadier-General Cornelia li Britannia, is currently on the front lines of a sortie that will likely come to be called the Battle of Tokyo. She should be making her victorious return within six hours or so, I'd imagine. And my name, in case you have forgotten it, is Justine. I pray you remember it this time—I would be most disappointed, to say the least, should I find the need to introduce myself to you for a third time."
"…Thanks…" Suzaku muttered, cheeks burning in embarrassment.
"Think nothing of it," replied Justine, turning on her heel and meeting Suzaku's eyes. Her stare was intense, and in a very different manner from the blue-haired guy, Jeremiah. The violet gaze that pinned her where she was was at once piercing and incredibly heavy, a grandiose sense of having earned the attention of something wholly larger than life. It was heady, and in some ways, almost overwhelming—she could easily imagine that glimmering gaze both causing lesser beings to cower before it and ennobling great warriors into mighty heroes. "I distinctly recall me beating your face in thoroughly enough to explain away any such lapses in your recollection. And besides—I do not require gratitude for the simple act of protecting my own."
With that, Princess Justine pivoted once again, sweeping out of the holding cell with her two retainers in tow, thus leaving Suzaku to stare around at her sparse surroundings. Yet, despite this, she wasn't bored—she was practically giddy, in fact; Izanami-sensei would soon be here, and she could hardly wait to introduce her teacher to the girl she had formed a connection with, out there amidst the blood and sweat of combat.
I was wrong, Izanami-sensei, thought Suzaku, laying back on the bed and grinning madly up at the unfamiliar gunmetal-grey ceiling. I definitely just made a friend…
Ironically, the Holy Britannian Empire was, as a rule, an aggressively secular culture; the closest thing Britannian citizens had to a god of any kind was His Imperial Majesty himself, and even then there was only the veneration of aspiration, and not of devotion. The emperor was, in many ways, less a deity unto himself in the unspoken nuances of Britannian spirituality, such as it was, and more the avatar of the altar at which the nobility bent their knees, the altar of power. It perhaps went without saying, then, that Jeremiah Gottwald's relationship with religion was not so much estranged as it was basically nonexistent.
It was apparent to him from the first moment he stepped over the threshold where he was to give Shinozaki Sayoko her marching orders, however, that her experience with the subject had been much different from his own.
When she entered the room, part of Jeremiah almost expected that she would be clad in a maid uniform as he remembered her, the visible mark of her long period of exemplary service to Duchess Carmilla, and through her, to Princess Justine. He knew, of course, that the idea itself was ludicrous, that here she was not servant, but rather the head of this 'clan' (which, as best he could discern, placed her on even keel with landed gentry while a bit below the status of nobility) of shinobi, intelligence operatives dating back near a thousand years in some form or another, so it would be altogether improper, that expectation; yet familiarity was not often a rational factor. So while he was bemused by his own surprise when he saw her for the first time in a month, it was also not wholly unexpected.
To his unforeseen relief, she looked quite hale as she swept into the room, and though she was much changed in this place that was so foreign to him, the compound he understood was her childhood home, there was a certain lethal grace she possessed that was not so self-evident when clad in servants' clothes. Oh, certainly, there had been a great many moments in the past few months when he had been reminded (as though he could forget) that the woman before him had been trained practically from the cradle in all the arcane and esoteric methods by which a man's life might reach an untimely end without leaving a trace. Looking as she did now, however, in her black kimono, with her brown hair pinned back into a secure bun by a pair of what at first glance looked like long pins but were in fact needles, deadly and subtle, her brown eyes flinty and with a spark of alacrity that seemed almost preternatural, the mould of her inheritance became clear as day, and not even the smile with which she favoured him as she slid the door closed behind her could erase the evidence of his senses. "Jeremiah! What a pleasant surprise!"
"Would that I could have come here sooner," Jeremiah replied, bowing his head. "I offer my apologies for the suddenness of my visit."
"Nonsense. You're just in time, as a matter of fact," she said, stepping silently across the floor and lowering herself to a perfect example of the very posture he had been attempting rather poorly until then. Seiza, he recalled, was the name of it, and the meaning was something akin to 'proper seating.' For all that the woven mat beneath his knees made the floor softer than if it was made of hardwood in here, as it was in the corridors beyond this room and indeed the majority of what he had managed to see, the position remained damnably uncomfortable; though the woman he had come to see remained the picture of poise throughout. "The funeral procession is today, as it happens; I would be glad for you to accompany me for the proceedings, Jeremiah, and then we can go over the details of what you mean for the clan to accomplish."
"A funeral?" Jeremiah asked.
Sayoko nodded. "For my grandmother. The previous head of the clan."
"My condolences…" he replied. "I confess, I'm unsure what to say…"
"Perhaps you could begin with congratulations," she said, her voice laced with a certain tone of coquettish charm that had long since become a staple of their private interactions. "I was the one who killed her, after all."
He blinked in surprise. "…Come again?"
"I'm afraid you'll have to try a bit harder than that," she said, and the feline curl of her lip betrayed the jest. "But yes. That is what I came here to do. In the world of the shinobi, the torch is not a thing that is passed to us by the old guard; we must claim it, and in the claiming, prove our worth as inheritors of their legacy."
"So, you secured your succession here by…killing your grandmother, then?"
"Indeed," replied Sayoko, the expression on her face oddly wistful. "Ours is the way that is the dealing of death, after all. What better test is there, I ask, of one's mastery of that way than to exercise it upon its foremost living master, and prevail? We do this so that with each new head of the clan, our shinobi may grow a little stronger, a little more adept, as lessons compile upon lessons across the span of generations, allowing that summit of mastery to ascend ever higher."
"Far be it from me to criticise the rite of parricide—I was born and raised Britannian, and as you're no doubt aware, such a thing is rare outside of the Imperial Family, but by no means is it unheard of, nor especially stigmatised," began Jeremiah, choosing his words carefully. "But I was under the distinct impression that Britannia and its peerage are something of an outlier as it relates to the severing of blood ties."
"You would not be far from the mark, in that," Sayoko replied with a small smile. "But we of the shinobi are and have ever been of separate stock. Ruthlessness is the first lesson we are taught, and all other considerations sprout from that shared cluster of roots. And…"
"…And?" Jeremiah prompted softly.
"…Shinozaki Okiku was seventeen years of age when she slew her father and succeeded him," Sayoko began, that same small smile turning equal parts wry and rueful. "She spent three days on funeral preparations, before finally placing Shinozaki Takeru's ashes to respite alongside his forebears' in the family shrine. That day was eighty-four years ago."
Jeremiah's eyes went wide. For a human still possessed of their mortality to live one hundred eleven years was perhaps not entirely unheard of, but it was exceedingly rare, and never in an environment like the one Sayoko described. "She was…skilled, then? Your grandmother."
"Shinozaki Okiku was, without hyperbole or doubt, the greatest shinobi to ever live," the woman newly-risen to the seat of the clan head replied. "But she was ancient when I was young, and when I returned, her body had begun to fail her. She was, I suspect, gripping to life through only a herculean exertion of will, tempered by bitterness and spite. She was not a kind woman, and certainly not a gentle one…but she was a master of the craft, and masterful in its instruction. For her guidance, for her mentorship, for the lessons she gave me that are as much a part of me as my own mother's blood, I granted her this kindness, this final mercy, from student to master: a warrior's death, with dignity. She died on her feet at the end, and she died herself."
They sat, then, in companionable yet pregnant silence for a few still moments.
Jeremiah was the first to break it, this time. "I would be honoured to accompany you in seeing her remains laid to rest, Sayoko; yet, I confess I have no knowledge of your ways."
"The Shinozaki are Shinto, traditionally," Sayoko explained. "With, of course, more than a few Buddhist influences. Her body has been prepared—we will see it burned, and then we will take her bones from the pyre with chopsticks. Those go in an urn, and while half the ashes will go into the family shrine, the other half will be sealed in the urn and given to the mausoleum. But this is of no consequence to an outsider: all you need to do is stand and observe. You're already dressed for it, fortunately; I was not looking forward to the trial that would have been rustling up a black suit from other members of the clan. You Britannians are very tall, and quite broad of build, after all."
Jeremiah chuckled. "I suppose your trade does not lend itself to frames such as mine."
"No," she replied, a whisper of a laugh on her lips. "It does not."
A soft chime rang throughout the halls, an odd sort of bell that Jeremiah could not say he had heard the like of before, and with a smooth, fluid grace he knew he could not match, she rose from her seated posture and affected a foreign yet unmistakable poise. She extended a hand, and he gratefully took it, glad to spare himself the ungainly indignity that was certain to be what his rising ended up, though from the look in her eye, she knew of it already. Sayoko was not one to tease or jest at his expense, however—not openly—and so she preserved his dignity for the sake of a later tanning by merely nodding towards the door. "It is nearly time. We'll need to make our way to the procession now. Follow me—I shan't lead you astray."
With a perfunctory nod, Jeremiah followed her further into the depths of the compound.
What struck him at first as a typical, if traditional artifice by the standard of what little he had gleaned of the culture of the area by virtue of osmosis in guarding Her Highness, quickly began to unravel around the first corner, as each practically identical corridor seemed to twist its way further into a labyrinthine interior structure. The walls were situated in such a way that it became progressively more difficult to track their progress through the compound, and with his sense of orientation, which he relied upon for (at a conservative estimate) perhaps nine-tenths of his sense of direction, quite thoroughly befuddled, he relied instead upon Sayoko to know the ins and outs of her childhood home. Dark wood gave way to muted echoes through shadowed halls lined with thresholds covered by paper in lattice frames of thin, similarly dark wood—shōji, his mind supplied helpfully—and though they came not upon another soul, Jeremiah felt the weight of many gazes lingering upon the nape of his neck. The security forces, then; he would not give offence by revealing their scrutiny to Sayoko, who like as not was so intimately familiar with the panopticon-adjacent feeling that she no longer thought it particularly remarkable (though, this was the first that she'd been back in perhaps a decade, as far as he knew, so perhaps she had lost her familiarity with it and was just as unsettled by it as he), but nonetheless was surely already aware of their presence and observing assessment.
All the same, he lamented that it was nearly a miracle when they came at last into the chamber where those whom he presumed were the branch and vassal families of the clan stood in silent vigil about the perimeter of what he could only describe as a sarcophagus, for all that it was wrought of wood. It was an elegant piece of carpentry, draped in an odd banner seeming to bear a stylised symbol of a flower, held down by a sheathed sword similar to the piece he had seen Her Highness take from the Kururugi Shrine, albeit possessed of a rather straighter blade; and carved into the wood was writing in the Japanese style that went far beyond what little he had picked up of the language, such that it was wholly indecipherable to him, accompanied by a few tasteful reliefs of a butterfly.
"Okiku mushi, more commonly known as the Chinese windmill," Sayoko supplied softly. "And inscribed around the coffin is a complete telling of Banchō Sarayashiki, the famous ghost story that was my grandmother's namesake. It is not a happy story, as you've likely gathered, but then, it was fitting…"
They came in at the tail end of that vigil, he saw, as the various men and women gathered around the coffin began to shift out of the room, picking up the coffin between them and taking it with them. It was bare wood, he noticed, lacking varnish or protective lacquer—but then again, he supposed, it likely would not require such protections, given that it was to be burned. His host was silent, watching the wooden box leave the chamber with a careful eye before speaking again. "This is somewhat nostalgic, I must confess…"
"…How do you mean?" Jeremiah asked.
She did not answer for a few moments more, as though mulling over her words. "The last time a funeral was held with such attendance—the branch families see to the affairs of their own dead, arrange their own funerals, and only the main family may command the attendance of any of them—was when I was no older than the young mistress."
"Your mother, I presume?" guessed Jeremiah.
"Heh. Hardly," Sayoko denied. "My mother had long since taken her own life by then. It was my sister, actually. My twin. Sadako."
Muted horror suffused him in that moment, and Jeremiah turned to face his comrade, jaw slack and eyes wide. "I…I chose my words poorly. I apologise…"
"In Japan, it is considered a mark of ill fortune for twins to be born," she said instead. "It is the amount, you see: two suggests imbalance. Strife. Impermanence. It was over this dishonour that our mother hanged herself, and we were pariah in the clan until Grandmother Okiku took us in. She cared for us, in her way—as much as she could have cared about anyone, really. Cared enough to refrain from killing us outright, the day we attempted to poison her, and instead took us under her wing. But for all that her tutelage was effective, her goal was to teach us strength, and so the lessons were all the harsher for it. Sadako…buckled, under that strain. And even as I saw to prepare my own sister's corpse for the proper rites, it was said that the ill omen had been set to rights, and that I had devoured her. All that she was, and all that she could have been."
"In Britannia, it is not especially uncommon that one sibling should sacrifice themselves for the sake of the other," Jeremiah replied, instead of offering platitudes in the face of a wound of grief a decade old. He had, he could readily admit, nothing more pithy nor appropriate to say for this sort of thing. "Parricide we hold as a feat and not a moral crime, for it is considered to be an act requiring ambition and resolve iron-clad, to shatter that fetter that would otherwise bind you to what is, instead of that which you wish to be, and is as such considered to be proof that one is in possession of those traits. But…one's sibling, full sibling, in seed and womb bound, this is the bond that is the greatest of all crimes to sever. Loyalty is owed there, and it is not an act of resolve or ambition that would see it betrayed, but self-destruction. It is hubris, grasping foolishly to that which one cannot handle, and becoming surprised when in grasping it, they burn their hand."
"I must confess, I had wondered," Sayoko remarked.
"It is not a thing a foreigner would know, and this I swear I do not mean as a slight," said Jeremiah. "It is not the sort of thing we would think to tell, in truth; we consider it self-evident, and I am taken off-guard each time it is not so in foreign lands."
"I loved my sister," Sayoko said, and her voice was a heavy thing in those moments. "In burning her to ashes, half of my spirit burned with her. Even now there is…a hollowness, in the spaces of my soul she once filled. But to tend to the young mistress, it is as though for the barest moment, that void is filled. It is a phantom pain, but it is also the sweetest of poisons…"
Jeremiah took that as his cue. "I bring the details of your first assignment. I know that we had intended to wait until the funeral was concluded, but…in truth, I know not if there will be a more opportune moment than this…"
"I agree," she replied gravely, all the humanity sliding off of her to reveal the cold visage of a hardened killer beneath. He knew such a face well: his mirror had him well-acquainted with it, as it happened. "What would the young mistress's betrothed have of me?"
And so the gallant knight of the Fourth Princess turned to his compatriot, with soft and exact words carefully laying out what they knew of the bloody business.
As a man of his word, he stayed with her after she had received her marching orders. As one, they ascended the stairs to a raised courtyard that, as best he could tell, had been erected for the morbid purpose it now served. The box that held the lifeless corpse of the great shinobi Shinozaki Okiku, granted this final mercy by her only living granddaughter and heir, that in the face of the inevitability of her death she had been given the chance to dictate the hour and the manner of her passing—to meet it with her head held high, her wits and dignity intact—was foisted upon a pyre of middling height piled on a floor of flat stone, and set to blaze.
Together, they watched it burn, remaining even as the other supplicants departed, and as the flames subsided to embers, Sayoko reached up to slide the needles from her hair, holding the weapons in her hands as she considered.
"The gardens have been rather dreadfully utilitarian of late… But what would suit best…
"Chrysanthemums for certain, and some spider lilies, I think."
As ludicrous as the idea admittedly was, trepidation dogged Justine's steps as she at last came to the door of the G-1's 'ready room': an otherwise empty chamber, save for the fact that it hosted a single reasonably comfortable chair and a utilitarian side-table, in case a communication ran overlong and refreshments were needed. Smoothing out a few imaginary wrinkles in her new garments, which in reality was the same as what had come to be her typical attire (consisting of a blouse, a pair of form-fitting trousers, gloves made of a fabric that reduced the effect the gloves had on her dexterity to a negligible and diminishing level, and sturdy yet elegant boots), save that the ensemble was entirely black, she swept into the room and sat herself down, crossing her legs and adopting a posture that was equal parts poise and comfort. Then, she reached for the side table and the control console in tablet form upon it, swiftly plugging in the end point for her call, and sat back as the main function of the ready room blinked to sudden life: a vast screen, capable of transmitting a video call to any other alike comm unit in Britannia.
Of course, when the call made contact, Justine realised she had made a grave error: she had somehow managed, in her haste, to forget that the Homeland and the warfront of Japan were in different time zones.
Sixteen hours apart, as a matter of fact.
There were very few things that were known for certain regarding the peculiarities of the upbringing of Friederike, Second Princess of the Realm. Her late mother, Empress Persephone el Britannia, had at one point been known for her peculiarities of behaviour, and her strict sense of discipline, which on the surface seemed like a logical throughline to the calm, composed persona that was the Prime Minister of Britannia; Justine was one of a very small number of people, even within the confines of the Imperial Family, to understand even a few of the complications that festered beneath that veneer of relative simplicity, the emphasis the dead woman had put on the idea that Friede should never look anything other than immaculate where anyone else could see, no matter who they were, being only the most prominent of them—and Justine more than most of that number understood the crucial part adequate sleep played in the maintenance of that lesson, the only one, Friede once said, that she had ever seen any value in.
And so her stomach sank to behold Friede looking very slightly dishevelled, a robe atop a nightgown her only garments, as she sat upon her chair on the other side: Justine realised, then, that she had woken her sister out of a sound sleep, which was a mistake that, quite famously, no one had ever managed to make twice.
Justine cleared her throat. Best to get ahead of this as best she could. "My utmost and most sincere apologies, sister. In my haste, I had managed to forget the time difference…"
Friede sighed, and waved it off. "Justine. A pleasure to hear from you, as always. I trust you would not have made such an error without ample cause, so I'm more than willing to let this be water under the bridge. Just, please try to not make a habit of it. Priscilla was quite displeased that we were woken—more for my health, of course, but…"
…That may well be worse, Justine completed without speaking. Priscilla Maldini's status as not only Friede's foremost aide, but also her long-time paramour, was something of an open secret, one rarely spoken in polite company if one valued their tongue—or their life, that is. "You may rest assured that I hadn't intended on it. That I have erred even this much is…galling."
Friede's full, elegant lips curled ruefully, delicate fingers pushing back a ringlet of golden hair. "It is not your wont to make such errors, Justine, I suppose I needn't mention. What could it be that is of such import that it would give rise to such a faux pas on your part?"
Justine took a breath, girding her spirit, and let that now-familiar mantle of calm fall upon her—a shift that did not go unnoticed on Friede's part, Justine saw. "You recall the timetable of the Office of Strategic Affairs for the annexation of the Empire of Japan, I trust."
"Vividly," replied the elder princess.
"I intend to advance it. Rather expeditiously so, in fact," Justine declared smoothly, and it was an unconscious regal impulse that had her prop one leg atop the other, her posture lounging upon the chair like it was a throne. "To the point: in a few hours' time, I will bring an end to this war, and Japan will enter the fold as Area Eleven, as planned. But for that to happen, I will need your authority as Prime Minister—for as I hold no governmental position beyond a distant claim to the throne, I lack the ability to sue for peace with hostile foreign powers. Your presence at that meeting will be required."
"And how do you intend to accomplish this?" Friede asked. "I was given to understand that the remains of the Imperial Japanese Army have yet to be found, and their governing bodies have gone to ground. We have the Diet, of course, but no one with any actual power."
"As we speak, agents of mine are securing the Chrysanthemum Throne," Justine replied. "As the authority of the Child of Heaven supersedes any secular body, both in the letter of this land's law and in the eyes of its people, reaching an accord there will bring hostilities to a close."
Friede stared at her in contemplative silence for several long moments, and with the calm entrenched within her, Justine had no trouble meeting her gaze evenly, certainty and sincerity written into every feature of her countenance. The spell was broken for a moment when Priscilla Maldini entered Friede's own conference room, pressing a steaming mug into Friede's grasp and receiving a smile and a murmured "Thank you, darling" in the process, but they returned to it as the countess swept out of the room, closing the door behind her.
Thankfully, Justine didn't need to wait much longer for Friede to break the silence that had settled between them. "What do you need from me beyond that, then? As surprising as this news admittedly is, I know there must be something more."
"There is," she admitted easily, and she let a note of severity enter her tone so that Friede knew it wasn't idly said. "I need you to let me handle this."
"To negotiate the terms of Japan's surrender and annexation?" Friede asked, cocking a flawless eyebrow as she pursed her lips at the rim of the white porcelain mug, taking a sip.
"The very same," Justine confirmed.
Friede sighed, lowering the mug to her lap, where her other hand curled around it. "Very well. We'll consider it a test, then."
Justine bowed her head. "Thank you, sister."
The prime minister hummed. "I suppose it needn't be said that I shall, of course, reserve the right to gainsay you, in the event that I should consider the course of negotiations to have become wholly intolerable."
"If I am to blunder so completely, it would only be proper," Justine agreed.
"My, you have grown up," Friede mused. "I was sceptical, you know. On the subject of your betrothal to Duchess Carmilla, that is. But I trusted then that your judgement was clear, and that you made such a decision of sound mind, and so I neglected to raise any protest. I am glad to see that I was not in error to do so."
Justine stilled; she was Friede's favourite, she knew—the fact that she still drew breath even now without them being numbered was irrefutable evidence of that—but a subject like this was one she had always assumed was beyond the scope of that favouritism, such as it was. "I am afraid I miss your meaning, sister…"
Friede's smile then was almost wistful. "Think nothing of it. Be sure to let me know of when I will be needed, and do so no later than a half hour in advance."
"You will be informed the moment I myself know," Justine promised.
Friede nodded. "The black suits you, by the way, Justine. You should consider wearing it more often."
With that seeming non-sequitur, Princess Friederike el Britannia closed the connection.
Justine let out a long breath; barring her initial blunder, of course, that had gone about as well as she had needed it to. She looked down at herself, garbed as she was, and considered for a few stolen moments.
"Black, hmm…?"