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.

40. Night Witches

Area Six, May, a.t.b. 2015

Nina stretched her arms high above her head, leaning back until the satisfying release of her joints cracking flooded her small body at long last, and for once she didn't feel the need to be self-conscious about the little yip that left her lips at the feeling. They weren't in Ashford Academy's halls anymore, after all, and anyone else who was here had more important things to worry about than the trivial matter of the school's resident antisocial child prodigy making a sound that might have embarrassed her in many other contexts—and that included her, of course. But Cécile had ordered her, in no uncertain terms, to stand up, stretch for a bit, and take a walk, while grabbing something to eat if she could manage it, and so she did, if only out of a desire to avoid the intimately mortifying experience of having her work habits compared unfavourably to Lloyd's, of all people.

The fact that the comparison wouldn't have even been all that inaccurate, that someone could accuse her of handling work about as rationally as a man who fluctuated between imitating an air dancer whenever he wasn't in the middle of the project, and tearing through a laboratory at all hours of the night for days on end as a one-man hurricane, fuelled entirely by black coffee and pudding cups, only made it worse.

That fact might have made her clam up and get defensive as recently as a few months ago, but she'd been feeling much more easygoing of late, and so it became progressively easier to brush such things off, to manage not to take such well-meaning admonitions and expressions of concern as a criticism or a personal slight. And while parts of her recent personal development could certainly be attributed to the heady rush of accomplishment that had come with the unmitigated success of the Lancelot's maiden sortie, although she might never admit it aloud, she knew well, for she considered it unhealthy to lie to herself, that the cooling of hostilities with one Shirley Fenette was more or less responsible for the remainder.

When Rivalz had more or less forced them to come to terms with one another, to stop fighting out in the open if nothing else, Nina hadn't been able to imagine just how much of a difference it made for her to be able to get along with the girl to whom she was so inconveniently (though admittedly, it was much less inconvenient now than it used to be) attracted, or that Shirley would take the time to adjust her previously invasive manner of care to something much more individualised and genuinely helpful. The overnight shift in behaviour was perhaps a little disorienting, of course, but it made her realise that Shirley was genuine in her desire to help, and not at all attached to the preconceptions she had previously held towards that end. In fact, now that she was no longer actively avoiding the strawberry blonde, she'd come to notice, appreciate, and admire just how cognitively flexible Shirley could be. It was as if confirmation bias and the sunken cost fallacy had no meaning to her whatsoever—it was actually quite awe-inspiring, once Nina started looking at her through a more charitable lens. Shirley Fenette was still more than capable of acting a bit airheaded and, dare she say it, ditzy, when the mood struck her, of course, but Nina could no longer regard it with the same level of annoyance and irritation she once had, and instead she considered it as an ample counterbalance to how self-serious Nina had realised she could be sometimes.

It was…nice, really.

Nina adjusted her ponytail and her glasses, straightening the lapels of her lab coat, as she turned the corner and came in sight of the woman herself, as if summoned by Nina's thoughts of her alone.

She leaned against the balustrade that overlooked one of the inner courtyards, her long hair bound back into a messy tail of her own, which drew Nina's eyes down the elegant slope of her neck to the collar of her loose, airy white blouse, and thus on down to her solid black pencil-skirt—and Nina could not help but note that it was considerably shorter than what she usually wore, the hem resting at just above the middle of her shapely thighs and exposing the welts of her black stockings, striking Nina temporarily dumb with the sight of how they bit into the soft flesh.

She'd never quite understood why, exactly, it was that more than a few of their Honorary Britannian co-workers found the narrow gap between stocking and skirt-hem so appealing. But now? Now, Nina got it.

And was that her imagination, or was there a bit of a lift to her heels…?

"I'm glad to see that you approve of my change in wardrobe," came Shirley's teasing voice, yanking the addled and dumbstruck Nina right back down to earth. Accordingly, she snapped back to reality, only to see that Shirley had turned to look at her, peering in her direction with a tantalising hint of a smirk upon her lips, and alright, that's just not fair—how was it that even Shirley's glasses were sexy?! "I wasn't quite sure about it myself, but based on your reaction just now, I think I'd like to keep it…"

"I… I… I…" Come on, Nina! Think for a second! You're supposed to be smart, damn it! Don't just stand there gawking like some…like some hormonal preteen boy, faced with his first pornographic image! "I didn't know you wore glasses…"

Nina Einstein, you are completely hopeless…

Shirley chuckled, and the rich sound of it sent silk-skinned fingers tracing down Nina's spine. With a bit of careful positioning, she laid the sketchbook she was flipping through down upon the surface of the balustrade, and lifted her hands up to remove the half-rimmed wire glasses from her face. "You're cute. I'm wearing them today only because my contacts decided to be petulant this morning. And I hear it's good for you to swap out every so often, just because contacts can dry your eyes out if you wear them too much…"

Nina tried not to let her brain shut down at the compliment Shirley had just thrown her way so very casually, and in such a teasing tone, to boot—she really, truly did—and to her credit, her efforts were at the very least marginally successful; the rest of what had just been said filtered in much more slowly thereafter, and Nina blinked twice before moving to draw closer. "They look…really, really good on you…"

"Is that so?" replied Shirley, a cocked eyebrow joining the broadening smirk, her hazel eyes shining with mirth. "I suppose that'll save me a few minutes on my morning toilet on the weekends—whenever I'm coming around to your place, at least…"

It demanded a great deal of willpower and discipline for Nina to shut down the desperately yearning thoughts that began to flood her mind, but she managed it, and snapped her attention to the sketchbook that had been set aside, as she searched for a new and less mortifying line of discussion. "What's in the book?"

Shirley's posture shifted imperceptibly but impactfully as she took the shift of topic in stride. Lifting the sketchbook from the balustrade, she gestured with it and asked, "This book, you mean? And would you believe me if I said I actually got this passed along to me by Princess Justine?"

That was a perplexing claim, though Nina had no reason to disbelieve it. She felt her brow furrow in her confusion as she stepped even closer to Shirley, close enough to look down upon the nondescript cover of the relatively slender volume, more or less over her friend's shoulder. "I believe you, of course, but that's strange. Why would Princess Justine hand you a sketchbook, of all things?"

"Well, in fairness, she did preface by telling me to see it into Lloyd and Cécile's possession once I was done with it," Shirley began, as her expression broke into a lighthearted grin. With a delicate touch, she opened the sketchbook and flipped through a few of the pages, and explained, "The first few pages are more or less diagrams for how to modify Sutherland parts with integrated Gloucester components, so those aren't particularly useful to us, inventive as some of her methodologies admittedly are. But, to hear her tell it, apparently she found some free time while on the march and quickly sketched out some ideas for how to convert the Lancelot into a mass-production seventh-generation variant."

"How would she have known what the Lancelot would look like in its final form?" Nina asked, her brow furrowing further. "We only finished its construction a little under a month ago, and a number of its subsystems were implemented as late as a week before. Meanwhile, she's been in the brush with practically nonexistent communications capabilities worthy of the name for almost six months now…"

"I'm admittedly not entirely certain, but she and Lloyd seem like friends of a sort. I wouldn't put it past Her Highness to have looked over our design documentation more than once before she left for the field," Shirley speculated, continuing to flip through, leaf by leaf, before at last coming across the page that she was looking for with a subvocal exclamation of 'a-ha!' "This one. Designated 'RPC-212, Kay.' In fact, it's good that you're here now, because I want to know what you make of it…"

With that, Shirley slid the open sketchbook into Nina's grasp so that she could see it more closely, and a brief adjustment to how her own glasses sat perched upon the bridge of her nose heralded the beginning of her evaluation of the details Milly's royal wife had thrown together on the fly.

The first thing that struck her, really, was the distinct artistry of the preliminary design. The profile and silhouette of the Lancelot, Lloyd's aesthetic brain-child to a great degree, was many things, but the first among them that came to mind was 'bombastic.' The Kay, on the other hand, from what she could see, shed almost all of that ostentation; the lines were clean, the geometries restrained, and there was a clear emphasis placed upon making sure that the junctions between components and joints between limbs remained easily accessible from multiple angles, at least whenever protection was not an issue in need of addressing. There was an air of the practical and the functional about it—more courser than destrier—and though it was clear in its lack of the subsystems that they'd added virtually last-minute (Nina's mono-eye, a configuration she'd designed to serve the combined purposes of head cameras and factsphere sensor, being, of course, the most visible such example), Nina had to admit that Shirley was correct to call the design methodology on display 'inventive,' if nothing else.

"Well, I have to give Her Highness this," Nina said, looking up from the sketchbook and at Shirley. "She was absolutely spot-on with regards to the Lancelot being a bitch when it comes to the practicality of field repairs…"

"Well, given the fact that she's apparently praised the mono-eye as 'inspired,' I don't know exactly how much of what's in that drawing will make it into the final product," Shirley remarked, turning back to the balustrade as voices and footfalls filed into the courtyard from a floor below. Nina snuck a peek, herself, and was wholly unsurprised to see that it was Princess Justine's school friends gathering down there, led by Milly's new best friend, the mysterious Mireya.

"I can't imagine the broad strokes will change too much, at least," Nina opined. "Some of the latter stage subsystems will probably get adapted for mass production, and sure, that'll change up some elements of the Kay's look, but…the reason why the Sutherland has been a workhorse for around twice as long as the Glasgow was even in service is because, above all, it's easy to strip down and reassemble on the fly. Lloyd can crow on and on about the bleeding edge all he wants, but if the Lancelot is ever damaged too severely, in a situation where dedicated repair facilities are not within timely reach, then it's going to be toast until it can get there—at that point, Lloyd's baby, his so-called 'pride and joy,' becomes nothing more than an expensive, overdesigned lump of metal and wiring. Whatever mass-production model comes next won't be able to afford that luxury, not the way a custom unit might—if there's broad adoption, and repairs are even half as finicky as they are for the Lancelot, then they're more of a liability than an asset, quite frankly…"

"Mmn," Shirley hummed, shooting a knowing side-eye towards Nina as the princess's friends began to split apart into groups at Mireya's urging. "So, tell me, was it the same book on the production history of Great War-era Euro tanks, or did you find a different reference just for the sake of appearances?"

Heat blossomed like napalm in Nina's cheeks, and she snapped her head away on impulse. "I… It's just that, I mean, it's important for me to know these sorts of things, not just as a research analyst, but as a design contributor as well…!"

"So, the same book, then," Shirley concluded, not exactly smug, but not all that far from it, either. "You know, Nina, I would have been more than happy to lend it to you, if you'd asked. There was no need to go out and buy a whole other copy…"

And there was the downside to being on good terms with Shirley: she was scarily perceptive, and it wasn't uncommon for her to see right through any of the excuses Nina tried to make for how her fixation on Shirley (no, it wasn't a crush, shut up!) made her act, vexingly enough. Not for the first time in the past few months, Nina realised that this girl really would be the death of her. "Yes, well, I just… I had the money lying around, okay! I figured I might as well. Not like I had any other use for it…"

"Have you tried taking up wargaming?" Shirley asked, and Nina was of two minds on whether to be grateful that the taller girl hadn't gone and called her 'cute' again, if only because she knew herself and just how poorly she handled feelings of embarrassment well enough to know that she really would throttle her, or to be further vexed on account of Shirley being so attuned to her and her limits that she knew just when to stop pushing. "My co-captain, Jeremy Sterling—he's in Milly's year, not ours—will happily complain about how expensive it is as a hobby for literal hours if you get him going."

"…No, I don't think so," Nina replied after a moment of serious consideration. "I don't think I quite have the patience to paint all those little miniatures. And if you're not going to do that, then what's even the point of it?"

"Very well," Shirley said with a shrug. "Though, maybe that's a bit of a non-issue. Considering how much Princess Justine seems to like you, I suppose that you could probably ask her for harpsichord lessons, if you were so inclined…"

"…Harpsichord?" Nina asked sceptically.

"Apparently it's her favourite instrument," Shirley said by way of explanation.

"And how on earth do you know that?"

"Milly dragged me along to go shopping for sheet music before we boarded the Avalon to come out here," replied the taller girl. "She said she wanted a fresh perspective from someone who likes the same sort of music her wife does—or thereabouts, I suppose."

"I mean, I suppose that makes sense," Nina sighed, leaning against the balustrade herself. "Though, when you talk about someone's 'favourite instrument,' I was under the impression that that tended to mean 'the instrument they most like listening to.' You implied that she actually knew how to play, though…"

"Oh, she does," Shirley huffed in mild exasperation. "Milly actually would not stop gushing, talking about how diligent her wife is… Knowing how Milly is as a general matter, and then going and seeing how she is with the princess, how she talks about her whenever she has an excuse, it's more than a little surreal. I can't help but feel a bit envious, even—is there anything Her Highness can't do? Because she seems by all accounts to be just…annoyingly perfect."

"…I mean, she can't do your job," Nina offered as a clumsy comfort.

"Hah. Look three pages after the Kay illustration," Shirley bade her, perhaps a bit bitterly. Herself more than a little perplexed, Nina began to do so, taking in the strange series of pictograms and poetic verse written in a calligraphic hand, small and neat for all that the lettering itself was beautiful, as well as a series of chemical equations beneath in Lloyd's spidery handwriting, presumably for the sake of clarification; and in the process, the taller girl continued, "I had to ask Lloyd to translate—apparently it's all been recorded in alchemical notation, of all things, in its original form—but she's made a few notes on how to further refine the titanium-sakuradite alloy I manufactured for the Lancelot's armour. I've no idea on how she became this well-versed in the applications of sakuradite in molecular engineering, but I wouldn't be able to figure out whether this is flawed or not without a computer to run a simulation of it, and that's already a bit too close to my job for comfort…"

"I mean, in fairness, are you really surprised?" Nina asked honestly. "The princess is just about the only person I know to exist who isn't remotely exhausted by Lloyd. Not even Cécile, whom I'm just going to assume is his queerplatonic life partner, at this point, can claim that much."

"I guess you're right," the strawberry blonde sighed, and the sound of it was very heavy indeed.

"And speaking of diligence," she continued, seeking to steer the topic further afield of the princess's inexplicable grasp of the dynamics of sakuradite on the molecular level—for the sake of her friend's ego, if nothing else. She jerked her head over the balustrade, and continued, "It seems, at least, that Her Highness's passed that trait on to those serving under her. We've been here, what, three weeks now, and they've missed how many days of training?"

"I suppose you've been keeping track of that?" Shirley prompted, as she seemed to take the change in subject in stride.

"I mean, Kururugi Suzaku's piloting data in the Lancelot is leaps and bounds beyond what she gave us even as recently as two years ago," Nina said, closing the sketchbook and putting it to the side so that it was no longer in the way of her leaning her arms against the balustrade to better take in the training session that was being conducted down below. The groups that they had split into, all nine of them—Rivalz had, as per usual, taken the opportunity to pick up an axe and join in, and to his credit, he seemed to be holding his own, albeit barely—were three members apiece, and they took turns, it seemed, stepping up one group at a time to challenge Milly's mysterious friend, only to get summarily trounced in relatively short order. "That level of overperformance makes me curious as to how she made that much progress so quickly…"

"I suppose," Shirley shrugged, as she directed her own gaze down to appreciate the martial prowess and athleticism on display down there, which remained beyond impressive even as it washed up against the immovable object that was Mireya. Nina caught the speculative gleam in the taller girl's eye as she opened her mouth to say, "Honestly, I wonder if Rivalz has the right of it. I'm almost half-tempted to find my way down there, pick up a weapon, and get put through my paces. If nothing else, it'll give me a leg up when we get back to school—the summer fencing season's going to be starting soon, and I want to be in top form."

Nina's mind no longer perceived what was transpiring in the courtyard below, no longer focused on the trio of Kururugi Suzaku, Odette Rochefort, and Marika Soresi working together to try and put pressure on Mireya, whose strange weapon seemed to be able to shift between a double-bladed and dual-wielding configuration on the fly; instead, visions of Shirley in athletic wear, her shoulders glowing in the sunlight, sweat rolling down her midriff, her cheeks flushed and eyes wild with exertion even as she held her sabre aloft, her body a union of lean strength and deliberate grace, smothered all attempts at thought. "…If you're so sorely tempted, I could take over delivering the sketchbook for you. If you… If that would be helpful…"

She barely even knew what she was saying before it found its way out of her mouth—but from how Shirley was now looking at her, as if she'd seen completely through her and, more importantly, liked what she saw, Nina supposed that she might finally have found value in speaking off the cuff more often. It was arresting, really, to have Shirley's hazel eyes locking up against Nina's indigo, and for once, the eye contact didn't feel like she was being psychologically flayed. It was…nice, really…

"No, that won't be necessary," Shirley said at last, favouring her with a kind smile that nonetheless held a predatory edge, as she leaned in, bringing her face closer to Nina's, and the (somewhat panicking) black-haired girl could feel Shirley's breath upon her boiling cheeks, warm and teasing and tantalising, as she said, "After all, there's no guarantee that you'll be able to get back in time to watch…"

This woman, Nina thought once again, and certainly not for the last time, will be the death of me…

Another set of approaching footfalls snapped Nina and Shirley both back to their senses, just as their lips began to brush ever-so-gently against each other, sending a shock into Nina's body that rattled its way down her spine. Irritated anger and flustered relief suddenly flooded her in equal measure, twisting upon each other and intertwining into new and increasingly convoluted snarls of conflicting emotion, leaving her, first and foremost, wholly uncertain of how she ought to feel.

Flustered and off-kilter, Nina brushed aside the muttered "clamjammer" that she was only halfway certain that she hadn't imagined coming out of Shirley's mouth mid-huff, and turned to regard the approach of a familiar, statuesque figure—the dark-skinned, silver-haired, illegally-sexy older woman whom Nina was absolutely sure had been more than one baby Sapphite's sexual awakening all on her own: Her Royal Highness Princess Justine's retainer, Dame Villetta Nu. "Good morning, Dame Villetta."

"Miss Einstein, Miss Fenette," Dame Villetta acknowledged with a pair of polite nods towards each of them in turn, as she drew up to a conversational distance and folded her arms behind her back, the heels of her black boots clicking together as she did so. "Please pardon my poorly-timed interruption, but I'm in a bit of a hurry. Have either of you any idea of where I might find Her Highness? We're set to convene in two hours, but unfortunately, I've just received news of which she must be notified immediately."

"She told me she was headed down to the interrogation chambers, in the dungeons," Shirley recalled without missing a beat. "Margrave Gottwald and Lady Rathbone ought to be down there with her."

"Very good, then. Thank you, Miss Fenette," Dame Villetta replied with a short, shallow bow, and a smile that must have ruined its fair share of undergarments in its time. "A good day to you both, then."

And with that, she walked past them, turned the corner, and vanished, leaving the pair alone against the balustrade, with only grunts of effort, battle-cries, and the razor-sharp calm of Mireya's voice to remind them that there was a world outside of the two of them. And yet, the mesmerising mood from before, which had nearly led to Nina's first kiss, had popped like a bubble the moment Dame Villetta entered earshot, and now she couldn't help but feel off-balance and uncertain in the wake of what they had almost done. It was a harrowing experience in perhaps the most intimate of senses, or at least the most intimate of senses Nina was aware of, and it left her feeling unpleasantly unmoored. Desperate to break the silence, she went all-in, and looked to Shirley, who seemed at least half as uncertain as Nina felt, and said, "D-do you want to… I mean, I don't think we'll be going directly back to Area Eleven once this is all over, and I've always heard that Pendragon has so many things you can do, and so I was… I mean, if you'd like, I'd be… It's just that, I mean, we just recently were talking about how I don't have a lot of things to spend money on, so…I guess, if you're willing, I'd like to spend that money on you…"

"Are you asking me out on a date, Nina, or are you propositioning me?" Shirley asked her, shifting back to lean against the balustrade, almost as close together as they had been just a few moments prior. The question itself might have sent Nina into a panicked spiral, if not for the fondness of Shirley's tone, which, at this point, the black-haired girl felt she could trust to be genuine. It fortified her nerves, and forced her to take a deep breath, and steady herself before responding.

"I'm asking you out on a date," she confirmed with a firm tone and a firmer nod. "In Pendragon."

"I was wondering when you would," the taller girl remarked with a broad, dazzling smile.

"Is… Is that a yes?" Nina asked, threading the need to know exactly where they stood into her voice as well as she could manage, and hoping that the strawberry blonde would pick up on it.

"Yes, Nina," Shirley replied with a low chuckle that did things to Nina's stomach. "I'd love to go on a date with you, whether it's in Pendragon or back home in Area Eleven."

"Oh, good…" Nina huffed in relief, releasing a knot of tension that had wound itself so gradually into her shoulders that she hadn't realised it was there until it was gone. "To be honest, I've been trying to work up the courage to ask you about that for literal weeks now…"

And then, in a blatantly unfair move, Shirley leaned in, brushing some of Nina's hair aside with her hand, and pressed her lips into her newly-bare forehead. When she pulled away with an audible 'mwah,' it was already so overwhelming for Nina that she fancied she could hear her heart pounding in her ears, but of course, Shirley, merciless and sadistic, purred, "You're adorable, you know that…?"

So, of course, Wilhelmina Einstein, so often lauded as perhaps the most intelligent student to ever attend Ashford Academy in all its brief history, did the only logical thing for a girl in her position to do.

That is to say, she fainted.

---

Li Xingke was unwell, and fatally so.

It was a shame, Justine couldn't help but think—he was a handsome man, certainly, so much so that those who found men to be particularly attractive might even go so far as to call him 'beautiful.' She could certainly see the appeal of the intensity of his narrow brown eyes, at least in the abstract, and the lush health of his waist-length jet black hair was the sort of thing that spoke for itself. His face was pale, and his cheeks were increasingly sallow, but it was obvious that prior to his capture, he took as great a degree of care with his body and his appearance as could feasibly be managed as that body continued to deteriorate around him. He was clearly intelligent, if perhaps more than a bit conventional, and the flavour of suspicion with which he was now looking upon her spoke to his practicality and good sense—she could easily imagine him to be a capable officer, a leader of men, albeit in the most traditional of senses. But the fact that he'd coughed up so much blood even in captivity, when he couldn't put himself under excessive strain, was clear evidence of his living on borrowed time, and his sharp awareness of that fact.

Of course, she knew it to be an even greater waste than he gave it credit for. But, she supposed, all things in due time.

She'd doffed her coat for this meeting—she didn't need to impress the man, after all, and in fact any attempt to do so was almost certain to backfire, so dressing down somewhat to portray a sort of divestment was by far the better choice—and Jeremiah, stood to the right side of her chair, dispatched his current duties of standing there and looking intimidating as well as usual. She could hardly have asked for a better knight, and she was keenly aware of how much better she'd have to be moving forward about demonstrating that. It haunted her sometimes, how he'd supplicated himself before her upon her return from Pirapora, and once it came to pass that she no longer had half a dozen more pressing practical matters to attend to, there was not a doubt in her mind that she would begin to flagellate herself for ever being negligent enough to let one of her oldest and most faithful allies feel so sidelined or undervalued. That, of course, was not truly a concern for the present, and so she focused herself instead upon the man sitting across the table from her, rather than the two armoured infantrymen standing at either corner of the back of the interrogation chamber, or even Lindelle and her assistant of convenience, who was helping her set up the equipment she would need for all that would transpire in this room before they left it.

"Do you know why you're here, Li Xingke?" she asked him, breaking the silence that had settled between them with perhaps the most mundane question she could choose from among all relevant queries.

Xingke glowered at her, but otherwise made no move to speak.

"You need not be so guarded, Xingke," she sighed, though she knew that saying as much would do more to raise his suspicions than lower them. Still, it was the truth, and so she told it as such. "None of the secrets that you might know concerning your home country are of any use to me, I assure you. Prying them out of you was not my goal here—if it was, there are far more effective methods that might be employed to that end than a mundane interrogation."

"What do you want," he said flatly, as if through gritted teeth.

"I happen to want a great many things, Xingke," Justine said with a shrug. "You're going to have to be more specific with the questions you choose to ask."

He scowled at her, and she cocked an unimpressed eyebrow in reply. Justine had already had far more formidable people attempt to intimidate her, for all that she doubted this man knew that; the fact that he thought he might be able to move her with his displeasure was, at best, laughable. Instead, she waited, as they both did, in silence—but, predictably, of the two of them, he was the one who broke first, in the end. "…What do you want with me, then?"

Justine shrugged, tapping her fingers twice upon the matte silver metal of the tabletop as she did so. "Well, for the time being, I'd settle for you holding still."

Xingke's brow furrowed, as the guards stationed to either side of the chamber caught the signal and began to approach the dying man. "Holding still? What for?"

His eyes went wide a moment later, as soldiers of the 588th finally reached him, grabbing onto his arms and his chest and restraining him. "W…what?!"

"I would advise you to calm yourself, Li Xingke," Lindelle chimed in, as she drew close at last from off to the side, a phlebotomist's gun held in her hand, the sterile intravenous needle primed and sharp. "It'll be much better for you if we can get this right the first time around…"

"Princess Justine! What is the meaning of this?!" Xingke demanded, snapping his gaze to her.

"Is the state of the Chinese Federation's medical science truly so abysmal that you've never before had anyone draw your blood?" Justine asked, playing up her scepticism a bit as a means of reassurance.

"'Drawing my blood?' What? Why?" he asked, nonplussed as to what Justine could possibly seek to gain from the man's tainted ichor.

Justine sighed, and lifted a hand towards him for peace. "Calm yourself, Xingke. I assure you, all shall be revealed in short order. And in that time, I promise that no harm shall come to you."

"You think I'd trust the word of a Britannian princess?!" Xingke spat balefully.

That's twice now that I've been thought of as untrustworthy, Justine thought to herself idly. If I mean to build a record to lend credence to future claims, I suppose it might well behove me to begin to keep track of such things… But, more importantly… She leaned forward just a bit more across the table, propping her elbows up upon its surface, and folded her hands before her mouth, fingers intertwined. "No, Li Xingke, I don't. I expect you to trust the word of this Britannian princess—or, if you cannot do that much, trust in the evidence of your senses. Tell me, if you would be so kind: do the phials of that gun seem to contain any sort of substance, or do they appear to be empty?"

Lindelle very helpfully brandished the six empty phials set into the back of the phlebotomist's gun directly in front of their prisoner's eyes, drawing his attention to their conspicuous vacancy. She turned the instrument over and around, letting him see it from every feasible angle, and at last he ceased struggling at the sight—though he did direct one more suspicious glare towards Justine for good measure, and said, "You could have poisoned the needle itself…"

Justine allowed herself the indelicate snort the absurdity of that claim brought out of her. "There is a line between caution and paranoia, Xingke. That's an awfully convoluted and, frankly, unnecessarily risky plot of which you have just accused me, when it would be significantly easier and considerably simpler for me to have had you strapped to a table and pumped full of a dose of Refrain large enough to blend your past and present together—hardly the sort of state in which you would have even the presence of mind to try and withhold information of any kind from me, if that was actually what I sought."

The thought seemed enough to make Xingke shudder, but his arm remained still, which was, in her estimation, the important part. "An abominable drug…"

"And yet, an extraordinarily useful one, all the same," Justine replied with an unrepentant shrug. "It saves all the time, effort, and guesswork that comes with torture—and I'm sure you've seen quite enough of the current state of the man once known as 'Santa Anna' to understand its punitive potency, as well…"

"Is that what you call it? 'Punishment'?" Xingke spat incredulously, as Lindelle's assistant swabbed the target stretch of the man's arm, in the crook of his elbow, with disinfectant. "The man barely remembers who he is!"

"I'd prefer to call it justice," Justine replied coolly, the hoarfrost mantle settling about the armour of her composure. Xingke hissed as Lindelle plunged the needle-tip into the affected vein, and one by one, the cluster of phials rotated as each filled with dark blood in turn. "An eye for an eye, Xingke. The man did not himself possess nearly enough to make up the sum of the death and suffering that he oversaw amongst the people he shipped out of the ghettos and into the labour-death camps—not even the entire rebel leadership put together possessed enough to settle that debt. But I took everything he loved from him, and perhaps that will be enough. Certainly, it's leniency far beyond what his deeds have earned…"

Xingke stared at her as if she were some kind of alien creature, his jaw slack and his eyes wide. He seemed to barely notice even as Lindelle retracted the needle-tip from his arm, and her assistant swooped in with a fresh, disposable medical pad, which swept across the affected area and left unbroken skin in its wake. His silence continued, seemingly interminably, and finally Justine cocked a brow, her head tilting slightly to the side, and asked, "Is anything I said really so extraordinary?"

"I… I thought Britannians didn't think much of the Numbers…" he offered up, blinking.

"There's a gamut to be run, though you're largely correct," Justine admitted with a shrug. "Though I should state, for the record, that the lion's share of the vitriol comes directly from the peerage, and trickles its way down. The vast majority of commoners, I'd wager, don't tend to devote much thought to them at all. I suppose that, on some level, even they must recognise that in the eyes of men like Santa Anna and the rest, commoners and Numbers have more in common than not. They are subjects of Britannia nonetheless: they are owed all considerations of noblesse oblige as the rest of the common people, and, most crucially of all, excesses committed against them are no more excusable than they would be were they perpetuated against the aforementioned common people."

"I can't imagine that's a very commonly-held belief…" Xingke remarked with a small smile, as the guards now released him and retreated back to their original position. "Especially since you seem to mean it genuinely, given that you didn't seem to have to hold back vomit at the thought of saying as much…"

"Oh, I am deathly serious about it, Xingke," Justine sighed, as the permanent recollections of those few days she'd spent with Suzaku, undercover in Pirapora, flashed through her mind's eye—the sights, the sounds, the rank, repulsive stench of human decay, phantom echoes of which lingered with her still… "And after what I've seen, and what each of my friends has seen on my behalf, if it is indeed not a common belief amongst those in power, then I shall make it commonly-held. By whatever means necessary."

"And if that requires the downfall of your entire empire?" Xingke challenged with a raised brow of his own.

"If treating its subjects as subjects, entitled as they are to just rule and well-managed prosperity, is in fact enough to topple Britannia," Justine began, leaning forth just that little bit more, so that the man across the table from her could see how dearly she meant every single word she spoke, "then Britannia deserves to burn."

"Impressive resolve," Xingke remarked with a complimentary nod. "But it remains to be seen if it'll stay that way, or if you'll become just like all the rest in time."

"I suppose we'll just have to see, then, now won't we?" Justine shrugged again—she'd learned early on that bravado came easily to the ignorant, and of course, she had no idea what the years before her might hold in store; and thus, she had no grounds to take offence to Xingke's insinuation. But all she could do was to worry about the here and now, and make plans for the future, and that would have to be enough. "Though I will say, the corrupting nature of power and the conspiracies of the world to reduce even the very best of intentions to ruin is no excuse not to make the attempt, at the very least. To think otherwise, to believe that the risk of corruption, of the world and its manifold adversities turning you into a monster—or, perhaps, revealing that you were nothing else all along—exonerates you of the duty, the natural obligation, to leave the world and its people better off than you initially found them, is a coward's ideology. Nothing more."

"You're very young yet," Xingke cautioned, his voice grown quiet. "You might come to regret those words in time. You're not the first teenager who's been all fired up to change the world, only to then have to bow to the wisdom of your elders."

Justine couldn't help her disgusted scoff. "If the sorry state of the world today is the best result that the so-called 'wisdom of my elders' can produce, Li Xingke, I would much rather rely upon my youthful impetuosity. If any of them would say that this status quo is in any way acceptable, then I don't care how wise they might purport to be, or how many more years and decades of desolation and ruin to which they have borne witness, and made no move to correct—if they dare to speak such falsehoods to me, I'll cut out their lying tongues."

A sudden beep from the side of the room, and the portable terminal that Lindelle's assistant had set up for her, drew Justine's attention away from the conversation she was having, and towards the true reason for her presence down here, sat across from Xingke. She sighed, pushing all the indignation out of her with that breath, as much as she could manage, and changed the subject. "Lindelle, what's the result?"

"Positive," Lindelle replied flatly. "Just as you predicted."

Xingke turned his head to the side, trying to look over at the terminal into which all six of the blood phials had been inserted, his brow furrowing in confusion as he asked, "Positive? What is that supposed to mean?"

"It means that you've been poisoned, Xingke," Justine replied, settling back into the actual issue at hand. "And from the looks of it, you've been poisoned consistently over a protracted period of time. I doubt you would have noticed, though—most likely, you've already dismissed it as some form of terminal illness. Unspecified, of course—but coughing up blood whenever you push beyond a continually narrowing margin of physical stress tends to be a fairly evocative indicator of oncoming fatality, if not particularly specific."

Xingke's eyes had indeed widened before, but now they seemed as if they were attempting to bulge their way free of his skull. "I… What…?! But… But who? And how? And…"

"And why was this not caught sooner, every time you underwent medical examination, only to then be told that you were terminally ill, and that they could not treat it?" Justine finished, for the marked man's sake. "I believe you already know the answer to that, Xingke. But I could spell it out for you, if that would be easier on your mind."

"But… But I served them! Loyally!" Xingke protested, the shock beginning to turn into anguish and disbelief. "For years I've done their bidding—every dirty job, every atrocity…"

"But you weren't loyal, were you, Xingke? Not to them, anyways…" Justine prompted, doing her best to be gentle as she led him along the cognitive path he may or may not have previously been equipped to travel on his own. "No, you were always loyal, first and foremost, to Jiang Lihua, the Tianzi. Everything you have done in their service, no matter how base or contemptible, you have done not for them, not for the High Eunuchs or their unending lust for power and control, but for her sake, and hers alone. And of course, why shouldn't you? That's part of why they selected you, why you've risen so high so fast. But, of course, that's also why they made absolutely certain that you had an expiration date, let's call it."

"But to what end?!" Xingke demanded. "Can you tell me that?!"

"I can, as it happens," Justine replied calmly, leaning back in her chair once again. "After all, it's not as if your situation is in any way unique…"

"…What are you getting at…?" asked the man, his voice low with complicated emotions.

"Your true value to the High Eunuchs is not in your service, Li Xingke, but in your capacity to act as—well, let's call a spade a spade, shall we—breeding stock," she explained patiently. "I'm personally of the belief that it must have been Mao Zedong himself who set this arrangement into motion, though I shall, of course, acknowledge that any detractors have a point inasmuch as it being far more gracefully handled, I daresay, than that business with sparrows. In the wake of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Qing Dynasty was, at best, a polite fiction. And yet, there was a perceived need for strong symbolic leadership, what with Josef Stalin's ascension to Tsar of the Russian Empire, and so came his efforts to effect the restoration and reformation of the old imperial system, but with a weakened head, and an administrative council to handle the duties of governance that had proven the downfall of the recently-deposed Qing. And yet, this was not enough, for Mao was above all a student of history, and so he could not have failed to come across the tale of a young, virtually powerless princeling—Ying Zheng, of the Kingdom of Qin. The boy who was born to be a tool for a lowly merchant's rise to prominence, but whose ambitions and aptitudes far outstripped the ability of those around him to frustrate either. Mao would likely have been wary of history repeating itself, and so advised the first iteration of the High Eunuchs, who were now in charge of the newly-united empire that became known as the Chinese Federation shortly thereafter, to put into place the system of which you, yourself are now a victim. And, if you know the nuances of young Ying Zheng's story, I have no doubt that it will become apparent exactly what this system entails—though, admittedly, I'm not nearly so well-versed as I likely ought to be on the extent to which the High Eunuchs and their government go to obfuscate any such historical truths, and so I'm more than willing to explain, if you have need of such."

"Why… Why would some old story about a boy mean anything to me?" Xingke asked, as if baffled by the allusion that Justine was drawing.

"Well, you might know him better by his title," Justine, making good on the offer that she had just extended, replied with yet another shrug. "After all, I doubt there are very many people alive today, what with our Age of Information, who wouldn't be able to recognise, even obliquely, Qin Shi Huang."

Justine went silent to let that name sink in, took in the flicker of recognition in Xingke's eyes, and nodded to herself. She'd been prepared, of course, to explain that far back if need be, but that by no means meant that she wasn't grateful that she ultimately wouldn't need to spend however long relaying the litany of tales describing that eventful period of his own homeland's history. She hardly wanted to come across as a pedant, of all things. "The child chosen to serve as the figurehead and cornerstone of the coming dynasty, a young girl who was the issue of the last of the Qing emperors by way of one of his concubines, was weak as one might imagine a girl born to that culture might be, at least in the political sense—Confucius and his ilk were a pox, and I will not apologise for saying as much—but even still the High Eunuchs, and perhaps even Mao himself, were fearful of what such a child might achieve with proper alliances, though above all else, theirs was the fear of losing what power they had gained. To combat this, they chose a peasant man to become her bodyguard and companion, with the intent that eventually, the situation would take its course, he would sire a child upon her, and then he would be put to death to deny her the opportunity to affirm her own position against the High Eunuchs. When that plan very nearly ended in catastrophe from their perspective, they did not distrust the plan, but the implementation: with every successive generation since, this pattern has come to pass repeatedly, that the Tianzi would be paired with a peasant man that the High Eunuchs would own in body, if not in mind or soul, and that once she had gotten pregnant with a girl-child, the man would die, and the Tianzi would 'succumb to illness' as soon as her daughter was weaned."

"And…you're saying that…I'm next?" Xingke asked, his face having gone more and more ashen as Justine spoke.

"In so many words," Justine replied with a short bob of a nod. "I had my suspicions, but those were all I had to work with…until just now, with the confirmation of the predicted level of toxins in your body."

"So…they want me to…" he began, just as weakly. "With… With Lihua…?"

"They expect you two to fall in love at some point in the near future, or, ideally, for the Tianzi to try to press the issue with you, so that she can have something to 'remember you by,' or somesuch sentiment. It will like as not get her pregnant—I remain unconvinced that they don't lace her food with fertility agents as they lace yours with a mixture of poisons—and once she's given birth, young as she is, she'll be sufficiently weak and in fragile enough condition that once you are dead, and what allies you've managed to collect to yourself are scattered to the wind, it will be child's play to convince the populace, and thus the world entire, that she succumbed to the injuries incurred in the birthing bed, and finally perished in her sleep."

"H-how did you come upon this…?" Xingke gulped, looking as stricken as anyone Justine had ever seen. It wasn't as if Justine couldn't sympathise, of course, but she wouldn't have chosen to inform him in this manner unless she had something to offer in her back pocket—proverbially speaking, of course, given that her breeches didn't have pockets, let alone back pockets.

"The OSI kept meticulous records of the state secrets of every nation of any significance, or any that had the potential to become significant, in the world entire," Justine explained, waving the question away. It hadn't been particularly shocking for her to learn that the OSI had conducted global surveillance to such a granular level, but some of the things that had been stored in those pages were quite off-putting, though she had made a point of memorising them regardless of her personal feelings. And now she was here, with the secrets stored in those documents proving their usefulness beyond a shadow of a doubt once again. "Thanks to their indefatigable efforts, I even know the precise concoction of toxins and poisons that they've snuck into your food over the course of the past decade, at the very least, and the tests that were just run on your blood were confirmation enough that they haven't even seen fit to adjust what they were using. It's…oddly clumsy, now that I think of it—perhaps it truly was Mao's idea after all…

"Which brings us, ultimately, to you, Xingke," said she, coming around at last to the crux of all that she sought to accomplish with him right now. She leaned forth in the chair once again, laying her arms right back onto the tabletop. "What do you want? I can give you the antidote to the substances that labour to kill you even as we speak, I can cleanse your blood and we can hope that your condition will improve with their removal, but if I do that and send you back into the lion's den, they'll just poison you again; and even were you to take into account that you were being poisoned and no longer trust your food or drink as it has been given to you, perhaps even changing up how it's being made and who's making it, all that will do is let the High Eunuchs know that you're onto them—and as a bunch, they're as flighty as they are paranoid, so thus, I cannot in good conscience recommend you take your chances with them. They can't kill the Tianzi, not if they don't have an exit strategy lined up—which they don't—but you can be replaced, and they have more than enough resources to cover it up if they have one of their loyalists force themselves upon her, should it come to pass that they think it necessary to eliminate you."

To those points, Xingke could not, it seemed, construct a counter-argument to her claims, or to the High Eunuchs' machinations. He was floundering, discounting his options for action almost as soon as he thought of them—truly, it was saddening to watch him flop about in his desperation, for he'd believed her when she said what she did, but of course, knowing how and when to remain silent while in the midst of negotiations was arguably more important than knowing how and when to speak during the same. At last, as a man defeated, in heart as well as in spirit, Li Xingke brought his face to rest in his hands with a wretched, chest-shaking sigh. "…What would you have me do?"

"I would have your allegiance, Xingke," Justine replied simply, leaning back from the table so as to have the space to cross her legs as she spoke. "I can get agents into the ranks of the High Eunuchs' service, I can have them swap out the poisoned food, I can have them keep you apprised of every paranoid delusion that crosses through their painted heads. But I cannot in good conscience expose good, loyal agents to one I do not know for a fact that I can trust. My sister, Princess Friederike, has taken the base of their power and brought a mallet to it, and so they will become ever more erratic and ever more prone to lashing out wildly as power-hungry opportunists and would-be warlords begin to close in around them. I want you to do your best to gather your allies for extraction, and then my people will get you, as well as the Tianzi, out of there. But that will take time, and it will be difficult, and so I'll need to know if I can count upon you, Xingke, as a loyal subordinate—for young Lihua's sake, if not your own."

A pin could be heard to drop in the silence that followed. But Justine bore it comfortably: she knew, as Xingke no doubt knew, that if everything she said was, in fact, true (which, of course, it was), she was the best option he had right now, his one way out of not only the death of the girl to whom the black-haired man had sworn himself, but his own, as well.

Yet, she didn't let this silence persist for too long: she knew well that he was poleaxed as well as conflicted, with no rational reason to believe her claims. Ergo, it was incumbent upon her to give him one.

She rose from her seat, then, and held out her hand—and Jeremiah, knowing what she needed right then, took the phial of antidote from where he'd stored it within the breast of his black jacket, and handed it to her with commendable celerity. "Lindelle, prepare the injector, if you would be so kind. And Xingke, I'll have to ask you to do your best to hold still again."

"What do you mean to do to me?" he asked her, morose and confused, a lost man.

"I shan't take offence that you should think so little of me on account of my national allegiance as to believe that I would resort to holding the antidote over your head, so as to compel your obeisance," Justine explained coolly, as she rounded the table and took up the injector Lindelle gave her into her other hand, the phial snapping into place with a mechanised shirk! "And yet, for all that I shan't blame you, Xingke, it is, I must say, categorically untrue regardless. You see, I don't believe in striking these sorts of bargains while I hold the opposing party under considerable, and quite arguably intentional, duress. So the antidote comes to you as a gesture of good will. I ask only that you hold still, that I might administer it properly."

"Well, I suppose the worst you could do is kill me faster," Xingke sighed, resigned. "Where do you need to put it?"

"The jugular vein would be ideal," Justine explained. "We'll need the cleansing agent to go towards your heart and get dispersed from there throughout the rest of your body—and if this was Refrain, which is psychoactive in nature, we'd administer it into the carotid artery instead, to carry it up to your brain."

"I suppose that's…good to know?"

"It is," she affirmed, flicking the tip of her finger against the phial to be certain that there were no air bubbles near to the injection needle. "It's important to have at least a working knowledge of the distinct functions of different types of pharmaceuticals, given the fact that you and I both are in fields where poisoning is a real and credible threat. But I digress. Neck to the side, please—either side works."

Xingke sighed, and did as he was bidden, tilting his head to rest upon his shoulder and holding as still as he was able; Justine took a breath in, planning how the administration would take place, and then on the exhale, she executed. The needle sank into his exposed jugular, and a depression of the trigger sent the cleansing agent, which would scrub his metabolism clean of the poisons that were killing him (a potent tool of Britannian medicine born out of the Empire's lineage of assassination and political infighting, limited by the fact that it needed to be formulated on a per-toxin basis) with each beat of his heart. The man hissed at the sting of it, but Justine paid it no mind—he was a soldier, after all, a general who'd risen from the ranks and then been trapped inside a dying body. He was made of sterner stuff than this, and she intended to give him the chance to prove it.

Once the phial was empty, she removed the injector from his neck, wrenching a gasp out of him in the process, and Lindelle's assistant came by once again with a fresh medical pad, formulated for the sake of providing instantaneous healing for broken skin and minor lacerations. She handed the injector off to the assistant—a boy, Edmund, whose sister, Avery, was a member of Villetta's budding secretariat—with a nod of thanks, and then regarded Xingke once again, sitting herself upon the table right before him, and resting a boot up upon the arm of his plain, utilitarian chair.

"That wasn't so bad…" Xingke grunted out, with a halfhearted chuckle.

Justine, on the other hand, didn't smile. "It's about to get worse."

The black-haired man blinked twice in surprise. "W-what?"

"Once the agent reaches your heart, that's when it begins to take effect. Its function is to scrub your system clean of all traces of the toxin, and that's not a painless process, not by any means," Justine told him honestly. "You'll be in our custody for some time yet, Li Xingke, so, once the pain reaches the point where it incapacitates you, we'll be monitoring your health and keeping you alive. It'll feel something like a high fever, as your metabolism works overtime to cleanse itself—there's nothing for it, I'm afraid, but for you to sweat it out. But I swear to you: in three days' time, once the cleansing agent has run its course, the cocktail of poisons that's killing you will be little more than a distant memory."

"You didn't… GAH!" His head lashed back in the chair, and his hand flew up to clutch at his chest. His knuckles went white, and his face contorted into a grimace, which progressed into a rictus of agony.

"The pain may well be far beyond anything you've ever felt before, Li Xingke," she told him, in the precious few moments of lucidity he'd have before him for the next seventy-two hours. "And certainly, it's well beyond the threshold of any pain you're ever likely to suffer for the remainder of your life. But I swore to you that it would save that life, and so save your life it shall. I ask only that you hang in there. The worst will soon be over."

Xingke's eyes rolled back into his head, his chest rising and falling as his lungs laboured to get more air into his body, his cries of pain necessarily rendered breathless for it. Soon, he would begin to thrash, and by the time that happened, Xingke would need to have been placed in a gurney already, and restrained very thoroughly for his own safety; knowing that, Justine left her perch, swung back around the table to her side of the room, and looked to Lindelle. "He's all yours. Maria, Raphael, you're to put yourselves at Lindelle's disposal. Help her with whatever she needs. Edmund, Lindelle, good luck."

"'Luck is the final refuge of the slovenly and the senseless,' Justine," Lindelle chastised her, even as she changed the needle-tip on the injector to the intramuscular version, ejected the phial, and placed another phial into it. "I am neither."

Justine chuckled, smiling fondly at her friend. "True enough. In that case, Jeremiah and I will leave you to it."

"Yes, yes, give me room, give me space to work," Lindelle replied, brushing her off. "You two, I'll need you to carry the man out of here…"

Justine paid no further mind to what was going on, moving towards the door and out of the chamber with Jeremiah in tow. She grabbed her coat off of the hook just outside the room and shrugged it back onto herself, and once she'd adjusted her cuffs to make sure everything was in order, she turned her attention to her knight, and asked him, "So, would you care to speculate on which way our honoured guest will decide, once he emerges from his delirium?"

"I'll strike wagers with Villetta, your highness," Jeremiah replied honestly, with a small, and dare she say it, fond smile. "But not with you."

"Who said anything about wagers?" she countered, matching his expression with a grin of her own. "I only recall making mention of speculations."

"Either way, we'll find out in time," said Jeremiah with a shrug. "You've saved the man's life, but it serves us none to wonder on which way he'll go. Ultimately, the choice is up to him—and I don't believe a few dossiers written by a paranoid old nobleman's cronies, or even by Miss Shinozaki's operatives, will let us know him well enough to predict the direction he'll choose."

"I suppose you're correct. This isn't a strategic scenario, after all," Justine sighed, as she rolled her shoulders, continuing to put one foot in front of the other as she and Jeremiah strolled out of the recently vacated dungeons. "To be perfectly honest, I think Li Xingke is a good man at his core, and I think that he's chomping at the bit to get a chance to prove it. I intend to present him with that chance, of course, but I've no way of predicting whether or not he'll recognise it for what it is. As I've recently been informed, I don't precisely have the greatest grasp on all the factors that guide the conscious decisions of others…"

"If you have faith in him, your highness, then I'll have faith in him as well," said Jeremiah, folding his arms behind his back. "He would hardly be the first stray you've taken in, and I, for one, can't help but think that it would be rather hypocritical of me to object."

That statement stopped Justine short. She whirled around on her heel, her shame for having played what part she did in the erosion of her gallant knight's confidence, one of her oldest friends, prickling at the back of her neck, and, with a determined set to her jaw, shoved her finger into his chest harshly enough that he stumbled back a step, his eyes wide with shock as he threw up both hands in surrender. "You are much more than just some stray, Jeremiah Gottwald. And should anyone else have done you such a disservice as you have just done yourself, for that offence I would have their tongues."

Jeremiah rolled his eyes—which irritated and gratified her in equal measure, that he felt at such ease with her that he would take such liberties—and sighed. "I meant nothing by it, your highness. Merely that I would have felt unmoored were you not there to take me into your service. I might even have fallen in with a bad sort—Heavens and Hells alike know the Imperial military abounds with them—and every day, I'm grateful that you've made certain I'll never have to find out. So please, calm yourself."

"O-oh…" Justine stammered, her eyes wide as she retracted her finger. The mortification came next, that her insecurities had gotten the better of her once again, had slipped out past the once-tight noose of her composure, and she turned on her heel again to avert her eyes from him. Stupid, senseless girl… Her hand flew to her throat, and when she pressed two fingers into the central ruby of the silver collar, she at last was able to take a deep breath, and push that negativity out of herself. It had taken her off-guard at first, exactly how reliant she had become upon a piece of jewellery, no matter the sentimental value, but her awareness of it did nothing to diminish how the physical reminder of Milly's love bestowed upon her a semblance of the peace and stability she found in her wife's presence—a safe port amidst the storm. Not even a week had passed since Milly went on ahead to handle some affairs in Pendragon, and already her absence was once again a gaping, livid wound; but at the very least, the collar could staunch the bleeding. "I apologise, then, for having jumped to conclusions just now. Nonetheless, we ought to carry on."

She sensed that Jeremiah was about to say something, but the clattering footfalls of boot-heels down the steps grabbed both of their attention, and Justine at once turned her gaze upon the stairwell that they were originally headed towards, only to see a familiar pair of long legs, complete with dark-skinned thighs, making the descent a moment later. "Villetta. What brings you down here?"

Villetta didn't seem particularly harried—she very rarely did, what with how deftly she handled her workloads on a regular basis—but she did seem hurried as her bright green eyes lit up at the sight of them, and she closed to a conversational distance, her heels clicking together as she drew to a stop. "You do, your highness. I bring urgent tidings."

"And I presume by your venturing down here to find us two hours ahead of schedule that this news is too urgent to wait even that long?" Justine prompted, sliding back into business with a sort of relief: once again, she was on firm footing.

"That is correct," Villetta confirmed with a vigorous nod, her expression composed but grave. "His Majesty has returned to Pendragon, and the Crown Prince's regency is dissolved, effective immediately. At court tomorrow, he'll be making a public appearance. We ought to arrange to depart with all haste."

"Damn it all…" Justine hissed, carding a hand through her hair in frustration. Truly, this was in fact the worst possible timing. "Has the Avalon returned?"

"It's en route, your highness," the older woman informed her. "I took the liberty of requesting that it make all haste on its way back to us, and of apprising Mr. Ried of our accelerated time-table. He's assured me that he's quite confident that this won't meaningfully affect his efforts here, and the Avalon ought to be arriving within two to three hours."

"Very good, then," huffed the princess, the situation too fraught for her to feel anything but relief at the thought of Villetta's characteristic thoroughness and initiative. She did some quick mental maths, and as she did that, she commanded, "Round up the 588th. It'll take us, what, ten hours to reach Pendragon?"

"Nine and a half hours, at the Avalon's maximum safe speed," her retainer replied with a perfunctory nod. "I made sure to ask."

"You, Villetta, are a life-saver," Justine praised profusely.

That got a small, pleased smile out of her. "It's what you recruited me for, your highness."

"That I did, that I did," the raven-haired princess chuckled. "We leave at dawn."

---

If there is anything good at all that may be said of the Imperial Court, Juliette thought to herself, it's that there's never a dull moment…

She doubted that there was a highborn soul in all the Empire who hadn't heard the news: after more than three months of absence from court, and from Pendragon itself, to the point where not even Friederike knew of his whereabouts, for all that she'd had to pretend otherwise for the sake of optics, that the Crown might not appear meaningfully weakened in the immediate aftermath of their lord father's disappearance, it was time for His Majesty to return from his protracted sojourn and take the throne once again, much to the relief of the freshly-ousted Lord Regent, now simply the Crown Prince once more. And of course, if Her Excellency the Prime Minister hadn't known ahead of time, Juliette's many machinations certainly weren't able to account for this sudden turn of their fortunes; and yet, she was nothing if not adaptable. In fact, this was even the preferable eventuality: if what was to transpire had occurred under Odysseus's watch, a son of the Imperial Family who was famed for his meekness and his mediocrity, then it would be open to scrutiny, and that, unfortunately, left the door wide open for accusations of malfeasance and manipulation; that this would occur under His Majesty's watchful eye, however, would lend it further credence instead, for Charles zi Britannia was regarded even in the case of his extended absence as a ruler of surpassing strength—the image of all that a Holy Britannian Emperor was meant to be.

Now, all that remains to be seen is how Justine means to play this, she mused, as her lover extended her hand to help Juliette leave the cabin of the Panther De Ville behind. It was, quite thankfully, a much less difficult task now than it would have been earlier in the year: with how deep they were into spring, and the summer right around the corner, practically brushing up against them, she'd exchanged her gowns made of heavy silk and ruffles for layered muslin and lace, the muslin dyed a rich, royal blue, while she reserved the silk for other things. Her hair had been pinned up so that the only locks that so much as brushed against the nape of her neck were artfully arranged ringlets of sandy blonde, and while the decoration of feathers had in fact waned with the changing of the season, she'd successfully managed to beat Guinevere to the punch in starting a new fashion of hair ornamentation—there were lengths of copper wire that had been woven into her elaborate updo, and once the effect had been displayed at Clovis's Spring Gala, with the light catching onto the metal, it had seen widespread adoption. There was a vicious satisfaction in it for her: first, Juliette had arranged for Guinevere's favourite sister to be publicly executed, and now the hag had to follow in her footsteps, or be left behind as 'eccentric' or 'unfashionable.'

To someone who lived so much of her life at the mercy of courtly sentiment as Guinevere did, there were few greater or more intimate humiliations. Juliette would not have taken such delight in the act were it otherwise.

Though, of course, some concession had to be given to Friederike: her 'war gown', as they privately called it, had caused such a stir that it had brought cloaks and capes into fashion, and this fashion, at least, had managed to persist past the tail end of winter, and now lingered well into spring, and seemed poised to continue on to the cusp of summer. But that was no object: in lieu of a shawl, Juliette had donned a cape of blue silk chiffon, and both it and her muslin gown were embroidered richly in gold—as was, of course, her parasol, which she proceeded to open as soon as her silk court slippers stepped upon the pavement, and the bronze fan that, at present, remained folded, secreted away inside Kallen's coat.

Kallen, for her part, looked every bit as dashing as she ought: Justine's corsetière, Maiya, had done exceptional work as always, and after a brief adjustment period, Juliette would even have gone so far as to say that her older paramour wore it well. She'd adjusted to the point where she wore everything well, as far as Juliette was concerned: her white linen shirt was starched, her tan buckskin breeches melding effortlessly into the soft brown leather of her knee-high riding boots, her moss-green and double-breasted marcella waistcoat complementing the forest hue of her tailcoat perfectly, brass buttons and all, while also creating a striking contrast against the crimson colour of her chin-length hair, the curled tips of which brushed up against the stiff collar and white muslin cravat that was secured about her neck. Juliette looked her lover up and down, openly appreciating what she saw, and a comfortable warmth filled her from within at the sight of Kallen's fond smirk that made her sapphire eyes dance with mirth and affection as the older girl extended her brown leather gloved hand out to her.

Juliette, taking the cue, placed her own hand, clad in a royal blue satin opera glove, into the offered grasp; then, together, they ascended the steps to the open, prohibitively, absurdly expensive carved redwood doors that marked the entrance of the Imperial Palace.

No sooner had they entered, coming into view of the courtiers who saw fit to mill and mingle about the foyer—scavengers and bottom-feeders, gossip-mongers of the highest order, the sorts who would be the very first to scrutinise and pick apart the performance art that was inherent to every element of appearances at court for the slightest of revealing details, which was why she and Kallen had approached hand-in-hand and not arm-in-arm, the latter of which was purely romantic in connotation, and thus would rob Kallen and her appointment as a Knight of Honour of its necessary gravitas—and, in an expected turn of events, none other than Juliette's very own sister-in-law, Milly.

She had to give the love of her sister's life this much: she knew how to look the part of a member of the Imperial Family. Black Hessians, trimmed and tasselled in gold, tapped their heels upon the stone of the floor with a deceptively calm rhythm; her black buckskin breeches flattered the prominent, lean musculature of her thighs as well as the prominent curve of her rear, and the gold-embroidered crimson kerseymere of her waistcoat, which was double-breasted with gilded brass buttons, contrasted sharply yet harmoniously with the black superfine of her tailcoat, and the golden épaulettes that adorned her well-built shoulders. Her white linen shirt ended not in cufflinks, but in equally white ruffles, and she'd eschewed the white gloves she'd taken to wearing over the months she'd spent at court in favour of a pair of black leather gloves, in which she held an ebony gentleman's cane with an effigy of a golden eagle forming its gilded head—pure gold would have been too fragile, too malleable, and the finer details of the eagle itself would likely be distorted over time, whereas the brass that lay under the gold leaf could be re-gilded over and over again, if need be. Her golden hair cascaded, unbound as ever, past the stiff points of collar and the wrapping of her white muslin cravat (which was pinned in place with a simple golden brooch that featured a ruby cut into a diamond shape) and down her back, and at this angle, it obscured where her eyes were—but one look into the hand that was not holding the cane made it obvious to Juliette that Milly was very pointedly studying her golden fob watch.

"Ah, I was wondering when you two would show," Milly said smoothly, snapping the watch closed with a sharp click and sliding it back into her waistcoat. Her sister-in-law raised herself to her full height, then, all one hundred eighty-five-point-five centimetres of her, even discounting the boost of her Hessians, her shoulders relaxed, but still back enough that her generous chest was thrust out just enough to grant her posture an aura of command—completely distinct from Justine's aura of the same, of course, but more than enough to make her seem anything but out of place amongst the heaviest hitters of the Imperial Family. "I have Naoto out meeting with Miss Hekmatyar to formalise the specifics. You've done well, Juliette, I must say."

"Thank you, Milly," Juliette replied with a raised brow, eyeing those around her as surreptitiously as she could—but of course, Milly's choice of words, while daring, was just vague enough to sidestep any real risk of eavesdroppers having enough information to go off of, leaving Juliette just a bit frustrated with her sister-in-law: call her superstitious, but they were this close to the finish line, and Juliette misliked anything that so much as looked as if it might risk the desired outcome. Still, that hadn't happened, and she knew that Milly had just as much skin in this game as Juliette herself did—largely the same skin, actually, now that she thought of it—and so she elected instead to bury her paranoia and go on with the show. "Has our arrival caused us to miss aught of import?"

"Not as such, no," Milly replied, shaking her head. "His Majesty has yet to make his appearance, in fact, though that is, of course, rather typical of him."

"Then let's not dally any longer," Juliette decided with a sharp nod. "Is Friederike already within?"

"Not that I've seen," said the blonde. "But I don't believe it's any cause for concern. Personally, I find it likely that she's been detained, and is briefing His Majesty as we speak."

"Wait, detained?" Kallen asked, her voice as low in volume as her tone was harsh with alarm.

"Not in that sense," Juliette reassured her. "Milly simply means that as the prime minister who spent months presiding over an incompetent regent, our elder sister, Friederike, is the one who is best positioned to grant His Imperial Majesty a full and comprehensive accounting of all that has transpired in his realm, as well as beyond it, over the course of his absence—not that she is being held against her will on suspicion of wrongdoing."

"Oh, I see," the redhead said with a suppressed sigh of relief. "That's better, then…"

"Quite," Milly replied with a mirthless smirk. "Rest assured, Kallen, that should Friede ever come into captivity on suspicion of malfeasance, either she is soon to be freed of it by her own cunning, or we are all already dead. Either way, such a situation would be entirely out of our hands, so it doesn't bear worrying about, now does it?"

"I suppose not," Kallen sighed, shaking her head. "Are we going to be heading in anytime soon?"

"In a moment," said Milly—and then her diamond-hued, diamond-hard eyes flicked to Juliette. "Do you intend to carry that parasol around all day, or will you be making a visit to our coatroom?"

"Your coatroom?"

"Oh, I suppose you've never had occasion to know of it, since your elder brother usually takes care of all that on our behalf," Juliette realised in a flash, turning to her lover for the sake of a quick explanation. "As a branch of the Imperial Family, we're entitled to a private coatroom for our use upon the occasion of our appearances at court. Ours would be the vi Britannia coatroom, which would be…"

"Down the hall on the right, left at the first intersection, third door down on the right-hand side," Milly interjected, the moment Juliette realised that she'd never visited it personally, herself—before Naoto, it had been Jeremiah who'd handled those sorts of things for her. "You've got time enough to get there and back. Marrybell, Oldrin and Euphy only arrived a few minutes ago, and the Interior Ministry's findings will not be reported until His Majesty deigns to indulge us with his presence, in which case, Friede will be there, as well. Go on, then—make haste!"

A few minutes and a quick trip to the aforementioned private coatroom later, Juliette stood, divested of her parasol and armed instead with her bronze fan, which featured panels of royal blue lace embroidered with cloth-of-gold, with her lover by her side, hand in hand. She turned her head to regard the redhead who had somehow managed to blitz her way into what passed for Juliette's heart, and with an encouraging smile upon her rose-painted lips (she judged any more intense shades of red to be entirely too aggressive for her purposes, and instead elected to leave such things to Milly for the time being) she pointed forward with her closed fan, the metal of the outer covers studded with small, tasteful sapphires. "Are you ready?"

Kallen snorted at the question, and met her eyes with a half-smile. "You know, I always thought that was supposed to be the top's line—going off of how it goes in bodice-rippers, at any rate…"

Juliette giggled, catching her mirth on the back of the hand that held the fan. "You'll have plenty of time to rip my bodice once all this is said and done, I promise you."

The half-smile broadened into a full, lascivious grin. "Oh, I don't doubt that at all, your highness…"

"Hush, you," Juliette chided playfully—reminders of the disparity between their stations had long since lost their sting for her, and Kallen proved only too willing to give her vigorous reminders of the fact that she wanted them to be together, power imbalances or no, on a nearly daily basis since the memorable event of their first repeat performance. "Eyes front, soldier. The show must go on…"

Together, then, they stepped towards the double doors that led into the audience chamber, and as one they swung open as the silent, ceremonially-clad members of the Royal Guard pushed upon them.

Elsewhere beyond the threshold, the herald cried out, "Presenting Her Royal Highness Juliette vi Britannia, Sixth Princess of the Realm; and her companion, Viscountess Kallen, of the House of Stadtfeld!"

And once again, they were now officially at court.

The chamber was well and truly packed, just as Juliette had expected; and though there was a potent rush that suffused her upon her entry into the marble flooring of the grandiose throne room, it was not at all the sight of such rich fabrics, nor the smell of extravagant fragrances and perfumes, that brought the thrill of it all upon her: rather, it was almost a sort of sixth sense she possessed, to feel the silver-tongued deceit and the naked ambition riddling the air with its tang, like ozone. It was the satisfaction, also, of knowing that all of them looked upon her and saw Britannia's Rose, and even those among them who might have had some inkling of her true nature had only that. They thought themselves vicious and ruthless, but they would never know the sheer, orgasmic ecstasy of another's destruction—not as she did—and, for another matter, nor would they ever appreciate the careful craft of cruelty, the sweet savour of stripping someone of everything that they loved and valued, layer by layer flayed bare of all that they used to define themselves, and salting each and every wound with care.

Her eyes zeroed in upon her eldest sister, Guinevere, whose prominence Juliette had taken great pleasure in usurping, and she noticed with a sharp note of joy how all those whom she had engaged in conversation averted their eyes from her as if she were no longer there, the very moment that the herald had announced Juliette's arrival. The eldest daughter of the Imperial Family had never truly recovered from the execution of her favourite sister, Carine—Juliette made certain of that. She doubted that any who were here and present would know how to appreciate the carefully-chosen words into just the right ears that had made it possible to bring the woman's life slowly crumbling down around her, leaving her the despondent husk of her former sanguinity that she now was, withering away a little more by the day, as her relevance at court was stripped from her, her predations upon far younger men were met with disgust instead of being politely overlooked, her jests fell flat, and her increasing alcoholism erased more and more of whatever embers of her former beauty she still had left.

It's almost a shame that no one will think to speak ill of Justine after today, Juliette thought, flipping her fan open to conceal the flush her thoughts brought to her cheeks, and any unguarded smiles that might otherwise have peeked out of the cover of her composure. I might have liked to do this kind of thing again otherwise, once our dear sister sees fit to take her own life… It was quite a lot of fun, ruining her life over that ill-considered comment… But, then again, I suppose it's only fitting—we'll be moving on to bigger and better quarry, soon enough. There'll be little enough time left for such intimate ruination anyways…

"Where should we stand, do you think?" Kallen asked, as she leaned over to Juliette and whispered the question into her ear. "Milly's already started mingling, it looks like…"

"His Majesty will be suspicious of Justine above all, but he has a blind spot with regards to me. We will linger in the vicinity of Euphy's triad on account of that: it lends their claims credence in his eyes, and it keeps either of us from being in the vicinity of anyone he might consider to be suspicious by proxy—that is, to say, Milly," she replied in equally low tones, her fan working to conceal the movements of her lips from prying eyes. It had been a difficult pill to swallow at first, in the wake of Carine's undoing, and she hadn't wanted to believe it; but with Justine's suicide mission, at which she had somehow succeeded, it became clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that, really, it seemed that His Majesty genuinely liked her, and had inherited Marianne's grudge against Justine. She had thought for so long that the woman who had birthed them hated them both in equal measure, but over the years since Marianne's death, it had become increasingly clear to her that that was not at all the case—the resentment was aimed squarely at Justine, and in contrast, Juliette seemed to have been afforded the consideration of being the late Commoner Empress's true and genuine issue, the daughter she didn't regret having. And while the Juliette of a decade past, the Juliette who had not sat there and watched, horrified, as her big sister burned for her, might have been overjoyed at such a revelation, and perhaps even have gone so far as to rub it in Justine's face, the version of her who now existed, who had seen it and been shaped by the experience in half a hundred indelible ways, who had seen Justine's kindness and compassion for what it truly was, who had been the recipient of her care and consideration and love, was nothing short of appalled by the very notion of it. The regard of their parents had come at the cost of Justine's suffering, and on that account, Juliette firmly disdained even the mere suggestion that she was to be favoured.

She wouldn't hesitate to exploit to the utmost degree the allowances that that parental regard—that Marianne's regard—now granted her in evading even the most paranoid of His Majesty's suspicions, but when she'd poisoned Cornelia, she hadn't spoken idly.

As far as she was concerned, she already had a mother; and that the late Marianne vi Britannia may well have thought to lay claim to that title brought Juliette nothing but disgust.

"Alright, we'll head over there," Kallen assented; then, seemingly taking stock of Juliette's mood, she added, "But I'd like to know how likely we are to get ambushed by your fangirls en route."

She fought down the colour that rose into her cheeks at that prospect—they'd gone to the opera one night, about a month ago, as a date, so that Juliette could use it to complete the guided tour she was giving her lover on everything there was to do and see in Pendragon, and in making the choice to avoid using the private box reserved for Milly and Justine's use, they'd landed themselves squarely in the midst of all of the lowest highborn refuse, who bought fully and uncritically into the rhetoric of Britannia's Rose. It had been a mortifying evening, to say the least, and in any other context, she might have appreciated Kallen's attempt to lighten the mood—Hells below, she still did in this context, if she was being honest with herself—but in that moment, she didn't engage, and instead simply answered, "Not at all. No one who's foolish enough to conduct themselves in such a fashion at court would be here without a chaperone who knows better than to allow that kind of behaviour. We ought to be well and truly in the clear."

Kallen, thankfully, got the message, and nodded, as they pushed together through the crowd to stand beside the new Minister of the Interior, the Grand Master of the Glinda Knights, and their shared lover. "I'll take your word for it, then. The greetings are up to you, though."

"I appreciate your discretion," Juliette replied seriously, and then looked to the three in turn.

Marrybell had grown very well into power, it seemed; her maroon gown, which was low-waisted in the same style as the one Juliette now wore and had popularised over the past six months and change, ever since the night of Justine's birthday ball-cum-bridal party, hugged and flattered her (relatively, at least) modest curves, with rich muslin waves cascading to her ankles—though hers possessed the long sleeves characteristic of the white gown Friederike had worn when naming her to the position in an official capacity, leaving her hands correspondingly bare, while Juliette's still featured the puffed short sleeves common to her high-waisted gowns. Her hair was up only in part—a style that communicated gravity without outright aggression or hostility—and what parts of the salmon-hued wave were pinned up were decorated throughout with threads of rose-gold wire, while the rest fell down to join her carmine cape, complete with a mantle that sharpened her shoulders to points. But most importantly of all, she held herself with an air that communicated that she deserved her post, that there was no one alive who was more qualified to do her job than she was herself; and in contrast to Oldrin, who was dressed in the uniform of the Glinda Knights (which would have seemed more at home in a ballroom or a bull-fighting ring than in a parade or a battlefield, if Juliette was being quite frank, which she supposed quite accurately represented the Glinda Knights' status as a paramilitary organisation) with the addition of a maroon cavalier's cape that fell to around mid-thigh to complement her unbound dirty-blonde hair and her accompanying black beret, and Euphemia, who had resorted to a standard breeches, waistcoat, boots and tailcoat-with-épaulettes combination, instead of anything that might have been considered more daring or ambitious—the most striking choice of the entire outfit was the cobalt hue of her superfine tailcoat, in fact—Marrybell's appearance did an excellent job of demanding the attention of those around her.

"It's almost showtime," Juliette remarked from behind the lace panels of her fan as she sidled up alongside her older half-sister. "'Break a leg,' as they say."

"I appreciate the vote of confidence," Marrybell rejoined from behind the golden embroidery that adorned the carmine panels of her own fan, the outer frame of which was also bronze, and further studded with red diamonds. "But yes, the moment of truth is on the horizon. And it finds me prepared…"

"And is the accused in the audience, perchance?" the Sixth Princess asked.

"Near to the rear corner, by the western windows," replied the Minister of the Interior. "Do you see him?"

"I do," Juliette confirmed—and she did. Reginald Hargreeves, Marquess of Greater Virginia and the Chief General of the Imperial Army was almost disappointingly stereotypical in terms of his appearance; a tall man, and about as thin as a rail besides, he had taken the time to fastidiously comb his gradually receding head of bay-brown salt-and-pepper hair, his moustaches were prominent to the point of entirely concealing the shape and position of his mouth, his sideburns had been cultivated to a frankly aggressive degree, and his rimless monocle, which sat in his right eye, seemed almost to have been designed for the express purpose of catching the light in such a way that it was rendered opaque. He and his staff officers who were present had attired themselves in the monochrome livery of their corps, with only rank insignias to tell them apart, and he held a silver-hilted black cane in his hand, upon the aid of which he seemed to rely quite noticeably. But when she scanned the room further, she noticed something else entirely. "I don't see the Minister of War, however… Wherever could the oh-so-very dashing young Fleet Admiral von Lohengramm be at this hour, so close to the judgement of his underling?"

"Your guess is as good as mine, quite frankly," Marrybell responded honestly. "But I'd bet anything that his absence from these proceedings is at Oberstein's behest…"

That name wasn't as familiar to Juliette's ears as she felt it ought to have been. "'Oberstein?'"

"High Admiral Paul von Oberstein," clarified the Fifth Princess. "The chief advisor and left-hand man of Fleet Admiral von Lohengramm. He's a savvy enough politician, perceptive and sharp as a tack, and I hear he's a coldblood, though obviously, I can neither confirm nor deny that. It's likely that he saw which way the wind was turning and advised Marquess Reinhard to distance himself from the soon-to-be former Chief General with all possible haste…"

"Hmm," Juliette considered, mulling over the implications of what she'd just been told. It remained to be seen what, exactly, if anything, she ought to do about Admirals von Oberstein and von Lohengramm, so perhaps it would be a more prudent course of action to refrain from acting at present, at least until she got a better idea of which way the chips were going to fall—though the fact that this man, this High Admiral von Oberstein, had seemingly counselled his superior not to act against Juliette even obliquely was encouraging, if only tentatively so. "I suppose in that case, he's someone to keep an eye on…"

"Two eyes, and as often as you can spare them," Marrybell recommended. "Mark my words, he's a slippery one, and even if he's not actually a coldblood, he's about as difficult to read as one…"

Juliette nodded idly, as her eyes scanned back across the crowd—she spotted Cornelia and Guilford, approaching the mass of officers surrounding the outgoing chief general, and after a brief kerfuffle in which Hargreeves seemed to engage with them calmly, while the Third Princess grew increasingly more incensed, they parted ways; and Cornelia, who was dressed in the very same monochromatic dress uniform as the rest of them, stormed off, finding herself a perch against the wall between two massive windows, a thunderhead resting heavy upon her brow. Her gaze lifted shortly after Lord Guilford caught up and took his position by her side, and whatever else she was looking for (Euphemia, if Juliette had to guess) was forgotten the very instant that she caught Juliette's eyes upon her.

The Third Princess scowled, glaring daggers in Juliette's direction—and Juliette, perennially unable to resist as she was, responded to the hostile, yet impotent sentiment by lowering her fan and favouring the older princess with a patently insincere smile capped off with a jaunty little finger-wave, just as she'd done the night she'd sealed Carine's fate.

All the pieces are on the board, she thought to herself as she raised her fan back into place. Now, we have only to start the Game…

As if summoned by her thoughts alone, the doors opened, and the herald proclaimed, "My lords and ladies of the court! Presenting His Imperial Majesty Charles zi Britannia, Ninety-Eighth Holy Britannian Emperor and Lord Protector of the Realm! Attended by Ser Bismarck Waldstein, Grand Master of the Order of the Round Table and Knight of One, and accompanied by Her Excellency the Prime Minister, Friederike el Britannia, Second Princess of the Realm, and Her Excellency the Minister of Foreign Affairs Priscilla of the House of Maldini, Countess of Newfoundland!"

Juliette smiled behind the panels of her fan. And thus does the Great Game begin…

His Majesty led the way through the middle of the audience chamber, his great footfalls akin to the rumbling tremors of an earthquake as his mountainous, graven body, voluminous cape and all, cut a path to the Chimeric Throne upon its raised dais at the rear of the audience chamber, the very northernmost end of the throne room. Behind him, then, came the somehow yet taller Knight of One, whose singular eye was at all times kept squarely upon His Majesty, while Friederike and Priscilla came in behind both of them, with Friederike in her white war gown and immaculate cape, her hair threaded with strands of platinum even as it hung unbound about her shoulders, and Priscilla's hair, which was bound at the nape of her neck with a black ribbon—the tail brushing against the sash of her office, which was still slung about the span of her black tailcoat—featured its share of rose-gold wire to match its natural rose-gold hue. Friederike and Priscilla picked them out of the crowd more or less immediately, and moved to join them, dispensing with pleasantries and greetings to simply settle into a position to watch what would happen next (and of course, Juliette couldn't possibly miss the unconscious tension that went right out of Kallen's body at the sight of Friederike's unmolested arrival—her paramour had the most endearing habit of worrying herself sick over some of the most inconsequential things…), but Juliette's attention was almost immediately back towards the front once again, as His Majesty sat upon his throne rather…gracelessly, even by his standards, and Bismarck went to stand to the right-hand side of the throne, along with the other members of the Knights of the Round, of which two were new in terms of full initiation. Juliette hoped that Milly knew what she was doing when it came to Weinberg and Alstreim, but it wasn't a situation she could feasibly affect, and so for the time being, she put it out of her mind.

"Long has been my absence, and much has transpired in its wake," the Holy Britannian Emperor began, and he had never before more precisely looked the part of an old man. "A rebellion in our southern provinces crushed utterly, a war won in Europe, and collusion on a scale that may be said to be very nearly without precedent between certain traitors, and our foes to the East, both near and far. It may well be said that the timing of the business upon which Lord Waldstein and I embarked was fortuitous, for it ushered our enemies—enemies that we have held close, have trusted, have counted as allies and friends for years, out of the darkness, and into the light.

"I have been apprised of the evidence that has been discovered against Reginald Hargreeves, he who was appointed to the sacred position of Chief General of the Imperial Army, to guide Britannia's sons and daughters into the annals of history as glorious conquerors. That trust, which is sacrosanct, has been broken beyond repair. And yet, in appreciation of his many years of loyal service, I declare that he shall be spared the indignity of a trial, and of his sentence which is death. Let it never be said that the Crown knows not the meaning of mercy, when it has been duly earned…" Juliette could feel her eyes widen further with each and every word out of His Majesty's throat—this was, of course, not the ideal circumstance, not by any means; she'd instructed the evidence fabricated and placed with great care, and the mountain of it was damning on its own, without consideration given to the severity of the crimes into which Hargreeves would have been implicated by association, crimes laid very squarely at the feet of Floyd Hekmatyar, Chairman of the Board of Directors at HCLI, whom the evidence named as his co-conspirator. But it was more inconvenience than issue for Juliette and her plans—she was more shocked that in attempting to thread this needle, for surely it was the case that His Majesty suspected foul play for all that he couldn't show as much overtly, not without casting doubt upon this entire stage of his reign, in attempting to navigate his way through this situation in which all options presented to him were to his direct detriment, he had managed to choose one of the worst possible options. Mercy and sentiment, to a man that nearly all those assembled believed to be a traitor of the highest order, was a direct blow to the foundation of Charles zi Britannia's own reign. Not to mention, it was a clear and unambiguous snub directed at the Minister of the Interior, while also acting as though there was no fault that could be found with her work—past Holy Britannian Emperors had been assassinated for blunders that were even half so dire as the follies he seemed determined to lay before himself now! "He has acted in the interests of the Empire on this account in tendering his resignation, and so shall it be accepted. My judgement is thus: having resigned from his post, Lord Hargreeves is to return to his estate, and to live out the rest of his days with the knowledge that his titles and lands are stripped from his line in perpetuity."

So that's what he thinks he has as an out, Juliette realised as he spoke. A resignation. And he seems to mean to leverage the prior incidents of his reign, and a perceived unwillingness of the peerage to plunge themselves back into the Emblem of Blood with his usurpation, towards that end…

It was a miscalculation on his part, and a grave one at that: one that she'd already set the wheels in motion to exploit to the fullest possible extent…

"In his letter of resignation, Marquess Hargreeves has nominated my daughter, Lieutenant General Cornelia li Britannia, as his successor," His Majesty continued to proclaim, as Lord Waldstein reached into the coat of his uniform and held the letter aloft, for all to see that the document did, in fact, exist, and was handwritten so as to be easily verified. Juliette knew the hand even at this distance, of course—she had been the one to order for it to be forged, after all, and she'd looked over quite a few of the forgeries personally, for the sake of quality control, to the point where she could visualise the genuine article upon the backs of her eyelids were she so inclined. The letter was, of course, genuine, and there was no getting around that; Juliette felt as if she could practically mouth the words she knew His Majesty was going to say next. "And in light of her distinguished service record, I see no reason why this choice of his ought not to be ratified. Thus, by my sovereign authority as Holy Britannian Emperor, I hereby promote Cornelia li Britannia, of the Imperial Family, two steps in rank, that she might be known as 'field marshal,' and further appoint her to the newly vacant position of chief general of the Imperial Army."

The chamber came alight with polite applause at that, and Juliette looked on with narrowed eyes as Guilford urged Cornelia forth to receive the honours of her new appointment. The fuschia-haired princess, for her part, seemed acutely overwhelmed—had she truly not expected Hargreeves, who, over the past few years, had all but announced to the Empire that she was his apprentice, his foremost protégé, to name her as his successor? But as she pushed through the crowd, Cornelia seemed to remember herself, and by the time she was out of the crowd and standing before the throne, with Lord Guilford looming over her left shoulder, as was only proper in his position as her knight, she had composed herself enough to send a vicious look of triumph in Juliette's direction—as if she was gloating over Juliette's plan backfiring on her.

Lord Waldstein stepped forth, drawing forth the longsword that the towering mountain of a man had brought into court strapped to his waist—an immaculate blade with a cruciform hilt, the sort of weapon that was more a tool of ceremony than a genuine armament—and brought it before him with both hands, the hilt held steady just at the joint of his clavicle, and the sharpened point directed skyward; at the clear and unambiguous nonverbal cue, Cornelia knelt before the Knight of One, to be sworn in.

"Cornelia li Britannia, Third Daughter of the Imperial Family," Ser Bismarck intoned solemnly. "Do you swear to honour the Empire of Britannia and its laws?"

"I do," Cornelia responded dutifully, her head bowed in a show of humility.

"Do you swear your fealty to Charles zi Britannia, the Right Honourable Holy Britannian Emperor, ordained and anointed by the Serpent and the Lion?"

"I do."

"Do you swear to protect the Empire and its interests from foes near and far? To maintain your vigil against those who would wish us ill, and to bring the light of Britannia to distant shores, as your liege lord commands you?"

"I do."

"Then give proof of your fealty, and be anointed, in the legacy of the Lion," said the Knight of One, as he lowered the longsword, slowly and with a tangible sense of gravitas, its silent descent halting only the moment that the point brushed against the hanging fuschia bangs, just barely shy of Cornelia's forehead.

The Third Princess reached up, and with her naked hand, she grabbed hold of the blade, visibly biting back a hiss of pain—Juliette avoided rolling her eyes, but only barely, more than once having borne witness to Justine getting stabbed, obviously nonlethally,during the course of her vigorous training sessions with Suzaku, only for her raven-haired elder sister not to so much as flinch—as she gripped it hard enough for the sharp edge to bite firmly into her palm. Then, she yanked her hand down its length with an open cry at the sting, clearly audible even as she tried to bite it back as well. "Gyah!"

Cornelia's palm was cut and bleeding, and the blood was streaked thick down the span of sharpened metal that she'd gripped; and it was at this that Bismarck, his expression unchanging, lifted the blade again, just slightly, and only enough that the rivulets of her blood could run down the fuller and off of the edge to rain droplets of her dark red ichor into her long, unbound hair. "With blood and salt art thou anointed; thou art charged to obey thy liege, to honour him and protect his lands, to bring his glory to distant and heathen shores, in the sight of the gods above, the gods below, and of the Serpent and the Lion, foremost above all. Arise and be known to us, Field Marshal Cornelia li Britannia, Chief General of the Imperial Army."

As she had been commanded, Cornelia rose from her knelt position, and to the ovation of the crowd of courtiers. She stood tall and resolute, her injured hand fallen by her side, dripping onto the red carpet of the throne room, and their lord father nodded at her with what looked suspiciously like pride.

And of course, this would have thrown perhaps the mother of all wrenches into Juliette's scheming, had Cornelia's promotion not been a key element of her latest handful of plots.

The problem with Reginald Hargreeves was that he was uncontrollable. Very much unlike Cornelia, the man knew well how the Game was played; the very fact that Juliette had had no usable leverage on him to start with meant that if she wanted to get a handle upon this man whose decisions could easily either save or doom Justine, she would have to get leverage, which would have inevitably meant pitting her power base against his—and even if she won that guaranteed hot mess of a shadow warand got him under her control, there was no way to ensure that that state of affairs would persist for any significant length of time, which was before even considering the fact that he'd almost certainly dug himself in deeply, and would be almost impossible, as a result, for her to uproot. Juliette knew herself to be uniquely talented when it came to the underhanded, the indirect, and the circumspect, but that talent allowed her to know that there was no degree of genius that would allow her to easily surmount the fact that she remained a relatively new player to the board, who had gone after small fry, chiefly—even Justine, her sister and surrogate mother who claimed to be a monster but was in truth just about the furthest thing from it,boasted a more impressive list of bested political foes than she could.

So instead, she'd threaded the needle. The delay of the suppression forces had a mundane reason, and was not at all of Hargreeves's design, but rather a complication brought about by insufficient materiel due to a simple compounding error in book-keeping; but of course, she'd made sure that to anyone who might look into the situation, the cause seemed anything but mundane. Credible evidence falsified through painstaking effort, calling upon the aid of powerful allies, empowering other allies, forging new alliances entirely, and, of course, the unhesitating seizure of a wholly unforeseeable once-in-a-lifetime opportunity the very moment it presented itself had been brought together and synthesised by her own hands into a scandal of high treason that ruined the man's reputation, distanced him from his allies, and effectively decapitated his entire power base for ease of uprooting. And of course, the very same qualities that had made Reginald Hargreeves so thoroughly intractable on such a fundamental, practically ontological level were what made Cornelia such an ideal candidate to replace him—Cornelia, who believed her hostility and knowledge of some shade of Juliette's true nature shielded her from manipulation. Cornelia, who disdained the very same Great Game that was synonymous with the national identity of Britannia itself, that was the foundation of every single cultural ritual of note. Cornelia, whom Juliette knew, and who could be controlled simply through the strategic application of the presence of the pink-haired womaniser Juliette was currently standing near.

Cornelia was hostile to Justine and Juliette both, and that made her fatally overconfident; she was known, she could be leveraged, she could be manipulated, and the very situation that had made Hargreeves such an undesirable political opponent was now reversed between the two half-sisters: even if she did come to realise the level to which she was exposed to the machinations of others, she would be beginning from such a distance behind the starting line that, so long as Juliette did not allow herself to become complacent, like an amateur, she could attach as many strings to Cornelia, to hamper her and control her, to present her with only bad options that would all work directly towards Juliette's and Justine's benefit in one way or another, as she wanted to, with relative impunity.

And the fact that Cornelia was so fundamentally ignorant to all of this coaxed Juliette's arousal into a low, persistent flame.

She exchanged a heated look with Kallen, and she could see the knowledge in those sapphire eyes: her paramour knew that she'd be made to see stars later that night, and she welcomed it.

But of course, there was one more piece that needed to fall into place for all this to truly go together.

"And yet, this is not the occasion of a single resignation, but two," His Majesty proclaimed once the applause had died down, Cornelia had taken a bow, and then retreated into the crowd to get her hand bound and bandaged, now that she was allowed to do so—a quick glimpse showed that Guilford was binding it in a hurry, right there by the windows—and the sound of his voice quelled the subsequent hubbub. "Once, the offices of Minister of the Interior, Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Prime Minister, and the High Chancellor were all held by one woman: my second daughter, Friederike el Britannia. But in light of this…conspiracy, and of her failure to detect it, the Second Princess has chosen to humble herself, and to divest herself of all the duties in which she has seen herself as delinquent. She holds two positions still—but ere we depart this day, only the one shall remain."

And at that cue, amidst a clamour of sudden whispering, shocked as the attendees were that the most dangerous woman in the Empire might seek to weaken herself once again (for to surrender power of any kind without clear and unambiguous cause was anathema to the Britannian way of doing things), Friederike stepped out from the crowd to stand before the Chimeric Throne as their sister had just done; yet, unlike her, the Prime Minister's back was to His Majesty, as she addressed all the courtiers present in the throne room. She held herself tall, her chin slightly raised, her hands clasped before her and held at the level of her navel, before she began to address the entire chamber: "My lords and ladies of the court—peers, gentry, and countrymen, one and all—what His Majesty said is true. I have told you all that I must pay the price of my failure, that I have been remiss in the exercise of my duties, and their oversight. And yet, this is not entirely about that. No, far from a mere recession from public office, this is meant as recognition of the one woman who, it may be said, may well have been even more instrumentalin the exposure and the indictment of this most heinous conspiracy of treason, than the Grand Master of the Glinda Knights, or even the new Minister of the Interior herself. Step forth, Juliette vi Britannia, Sixth Princess of the Realm, and be recognised."

Right on cue. Juliette permitted herself the brief indulgence of a small smile behind her fan, before she swiftly composed herself once again, and stepped out from the small crowd of her closest allies and into the cleared path between the doors and the throne, marked as it was with that blood-soiled red carpet. She snapped her fan closed with a flick of her wrist, and took measured, august, unhurried steps to bring herself before her second-favourite sister, being sure to let the stiffness and mild shivers of her arousal through her facade, so that they might be considered signs of her anxiety—it was useful, after all, to play the part of the ingénue before the eyes of the ignorant. With her furled fan in hand, Juliette grabbed two gentle handfuls of the royal blue muslin of her skirts, and with a sweep of her right leg behind her left, she gave to Friederike, His Majesty, and the Imperial Court a curtsey worthy of a diagram in a textbook on etiquette. "You honour me greatly, dear sister, but I am, as always, merely a loyal and humble servant of the Empire…"

"How fortunate it is, then, that it is none other than a loyal servant of which our Homeland has most dire need in these uncertain times," Friederike replied indulgently, and so naturally that it was as if they had not, in fact, discussed how this situation was to proceed, were they to seize the opportunity to go through with it, as they'd planned. "When trusted friend aids mortal foe, Ruin watches on with ravenous appetite. Halcyon are these days in which we have emerged reborn from the flames and strife of the Emblem of Blood, but it is ever a fool's dream that such peace might last for ever. Vigilance is what the Empire needs, and that much you have shown with distinction. And it is in honour of that, in this, Britannia's hour of mounting need, that I hereby pass the torch. I can think of none more deserving."

Then, Friederike turned upon her heel, her immaculate white cape fluttering out enough to achieve the desired dramatic effect, but not so significantly as to risk having the hem slap Juliette across the face, or indeed any other part of her body. "By your majesty's leave, I hereby abdicate my post. No longer shall I hold the offices, privileges, or duties of the High Chancellor: I name in my stead Juliette vi Britannia, that her actions might serve the Crown even half so well as her vigilance, spurred on by the unsightly delay that befell the dispatching of the suppression force against the now-vanquished Peninsular Rebellion which put her sister, her kin in both seed and womb, into jeopardy, and her subsequent testimony on the corruption of our erstwhile chief general, already has."

His Majesty was silent for a moment thereafter, considering, and Juliette stood patient, making sure to act as perturbed as would credibly serve the maintenance of the false face of Britannia's Rose. Then, he shifted upon the throne, and asked, "Juliette, do you accept the solemn burden that your sister seeks to place upon you?"

She nodded once, without hesitation, resolute. "Yes, your majesty. I wish only to serve your empire, however I may."

She had laid the filial piety on a little thick there, perhaps—but not nearly so much that anyone who was yet ignorant of her true face would know to suspect it. She genuflected with a low curtsey that she held for good measure, awaiting the Emperor's decision with a calm born of certainty.

"…Very well," Charles zi Britannia ground out, his voice all gravel and boulders. "Then in view of Serpent and Lion both, I shall hereby permit this appointment of Juliette vi Britannia, Sixth Daughter of the Imperial Family, to the offices, the privileges, and the duties of the Serpent's Legacy. I bid you now, arise and be known to us, Juliette vi Britannia, High Chancellor of the Empire."

If Cornelia's applause was polite and respectful, the ovation that greeted Juliette's new position was positively uproarious. Privately, she preened at that, only because she knew that this would steal every last mote of wind from out of Cornelia's sails, proverbially speaking, while rubbing salt into the wound that was the disgrace of her erstwhile mentor. She rose from her curtsey, and was glad for the flush that the building heat in her core drove into her cheeks as it compounded—it made her look embarrassed, but radiant. It was yet another piece of the act, of the reputation that Clovis had inadvertently crafted for her, and she made use of it without shame; she turned to the chamber in a fluttering flourish of muslin and silk, and basked in the acclaim of her unsuspecting prey. And she curtseyed to them, as well, for good measure, before making her way back to her lover's side: addresses were all well and good, but as Cornelia had chosen to forgo hers, it would have seemed as if Juliette was deliberately upstaging her if she chose to give one—and what fun would that be, to give away the game so woefully early?

"A stirring performance," Kallen whispered into Juliette's ear out of the side of her mouth. "Hells, I almost believed you…"

"Hmph," Juliette huffed in supreme satisfaction, as she brandished her fan and snapped it open once again with a flick of her wrist, fluttering herself with it and concealing her lips behind the embroidered blue lace once more. "All in a day's work…"

"Humble, too…" Kallen teased with an insufferably charming little smirk.

"Humility is grossly overrated," Juliette shot right back, deliberately playing up her diction into the prim and proper tones Justine so often used without realising it.

"Now, on to other matters," His Majesty began from his seat upon the throne once the applause died down (which, Juliette couldn't help but notice, took considerably longer for her appointment as High Chancellor, the Head of State and of the civilian government, than it had for Cornelia's as chief general).

But before the Emperor could officially transition to any of those other matters, the double doors of the audience chamber swung open with a jolting crash, and a great black raven swept into the throne room, its squawking corvine calls echoing through the sudden tense silence as it swept around the chamber once, twice, thrice, before alighting upon one of the crystal chandeliers high above, where it perched, and loomed over them ominously. Two unknown soldiers in black armour stood where the Royal Guards ought to have been, and a small crowd of figures, backlit and thus practically indistinguishable at this angle and distance, seemed to approach the threshold.

And then a single step—heel, then toe—struck the marble floor with a thunderous clack!

---

Three months. Charles had spent three months unconscious.

He didn't know what had woken him—not even Doctor Jest could so much as gesture vaguely at an explanation. Perhaps the thing that was devouring his brother's Code, that his brother had released from its containment, whereupon it then went and wiped all life out of the lands around the Nile, had decided that it had had its fun, and then chose to exercise clemency and return him to the waking world.

But learning how not to look a gift horse in the mouth was one of many keys to this deicidal quest, a journey which took them rather far beyond the boundaries of what mortal men were meant to know—it was an easy danger to run afoul of, the complete loss of sanity that was said to follow digging too deep, that was said to dog the steps of anyone who thought to satisfy that natural human urge to know. And if nothing else, the thing that Vespasian had released from that damned tomb had proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that nothing good could come of attempting to discern its nature, so instead of wondering why he'd awakened when he had, Charles had focused on being grateful that he'd awoken at all.

The strict prohibition against using his Geass was something he was significantly less grateful for.

It was…sobering, really, to return to Pendragon and be faced with affairs of state, to look an old ally in the face in the form of Hargreeves, and be wholly unable to plunge into his memories and discern, once and for all, whether he was truly innocent, or if he had turned on Charles at last, and was guilty of every last conspiratorial charge of which he stood accused. The man maintained his innocence, of course, but in that horrifying moment, Charles had at once become very keenly aware of the degree to which he had taken for granted his ability to rifle through another's memories like he was consulting a filing cabinet, as well as the degree to which he had come to rely upon it, both when it came to ruling, and when it came to quieting the insistent voice of his persistent paranoia, not nearly so mastered as it had once been.

He'd stared Hargreeves, someone he'd known for what was quite literally decades, in the face, and he'd been unable to definitively tell whether the man was lying to him or not.

It was that uncertainty that had made him progressively more uneasy as Friederike had briefed him on everything else he had missed over the course of his absence, and he had grown increasingly certain that the conspiracy of which Floyd Hekmatyar, his son and heir, Kasper, and Hargreeves (and several of his more prominent staff officers) had been accused, the destruction of Carine's family which had led to her execution, and the death of Deusericus to decapitate and vivisect the OSI were all connected. That suspicion had driven his desire to refrain from trying and executing Hargreeves outright, but he could see as soon as he did it that it was far too late for his judgement to make people wonder as to the veracity of the charges. Indeed, they seemed all convinced already, and he got the distinct impression that instead of his relative mercy having stoked doubt in the charges, it had instead resulted in stoking doubt against him himself.

And then Friederike had begun to divest herself of power, perplexingly enough—which would have made him suspect her of being the mastermind, if it wasn't for the fact that he'd been keenly aware of how absurdly dangerous Friederike could be if she so chose, and so made it his business to be able to know and to predict her, and this was not her handiwork—which led to Juliette, his and Marianne's second-born, the daughter Marianne had planned to birth from the very beginning, being appointed to the office of the High Chancellor, right after pushing through Cornelia to replace her disgraced mentor, and he couldn't shake the distinct impression that he was being made to play an exceptionally aggressive game of catch-up against the one who sought to unmake his reign, whoever they actually were.

It was when the doors slammed open that things seemed to go properly from bad to worse.

The one thing he'd been spared a briefing on, but that he'd found out regardless—for even when he wanted to spare Charles some kernel of knowledge, Bismarck had never once let that impulse proceed to actually attempting to conceal information from him—was how the mission that he had sent Justine on, the mission that Marianne had suggested to be the most effective, discreet, efficient, and risk-free way of taking the threat that their eldest daughter posed even without Geass and neutralising it, had actually developed. It had been, on paper, an unwinnable scenario, a surefire means of disposing of the girl, and it had seemed progressively more likely, as delays began to mount and compound upon each other, thus frustrating the formation of any suppression force worthy of the name, that Justine would have had the ground disappear beneath her feet, dead in some doomed suicide charge against the southern rebels.

To say that none of that had transpired would be an understatement.

When he woke up, it was already entirely too late to suppress the news. Her campaign had defied all odds, pulling off what was perhaps one of the most stunning military victories in history, cutting the armies of the insurrectionist nobles in half in a daring forty-to-one engagement, and once the suppression force had eventually formed and broken through the defensive line straddling the Isthmus of Panama, causing the last of the defenders to scatter, searching for the surviving half of their forces, to hear the Knight of Four tell of it, the mere legend that Justine had built for herself in that brutal battle had smothered what remained of the rebellion's will to fight, shattering morale and leaving the suppression force to conduct a glorified mop-up operation. And then, after that, she went on to take the capital of the rebel territories, sank a fleet of Chinese warships in the harbour, and put herself into a position to accept the surrender of the last of the rebel nobles.

But that hadn't been the worst part.

It was being celebrated all across the Empire, Friederike had informed him when he'd seen fit to press her on it. The rebellious nobles were seen now as monsters whose naked ambition had consigned the common Britannians who had lived under their rule to suffer the same fate as the local Numbers to fuel their need for materiel—they had conscripted the commoners to fill their ranks, branded them with numbers and forced them to waste away in their labour camps, starved them when they could not eat, themselves… It was chattel slavery of the lowborn, and in restitution for these excesses, Justine had ordered those who were culpable to have their entire families exterminated, down to the last member, by impalement.

The common people whispered her name with praise upon their lips. A rising tide of vindictive and vengeful sentiment in response to the excesses of the provincial aristocracy, stoked by how Hi-TV, and then all subsequent media outlets, were covering the events, had seized the commoners in a sort of frenzy; it had turned an act of cruelty, savagery, and barbarism that had turned even Charles's stomach to look upon into a sort of divine retribution. She had punished the wicked lords, or so it seemed in the eyes of the lowborn, as they had deserved to be punished, granting them no quarter that they themselves would not have given.

Now the name of Justine vi Britannia was upon the lips of even those wealthy enough to claim their residences in Pendragon, and no amount of the peers of the realm looking upon her acts and whispering her to be 'Justine the Impaler,' 'Justine the Butcher,' or even 'Justine the Demon' or 'Justine the Black,' would be able to erase the fact that she was, as far as any of them were concerned, wholly untouchable on this count. The brutality she had displayed in punishing the rebel leaders was a thing worthy of celebration in their eyes, not scorn, and as Charles looked upon his vassals, he saw the very same knowledge written upon very nearly all of their faces, that there would be nothing they could openly do to her that would come without consequence at the hands of their subjects.

That she had done these things in broad daylight, and was then hailed as a hero of the common man for it, was incontrovertible proof of the righteousness of his, Marianne's, and his brother's shared dream of deicide. If mankind would celebrate this in the streets, as they were even as far away as Europia, where the exposed excesses and self-serving deceptions of their disgraced warmonger of a president made that very sentiment, of those born to privilege who openly regarded the lives of the common-born as disposable, who saw their suffering as an acceptable price to pay for ever greater power, being made to suffer such indignity, punishment, and death, resonate like a tuning fork, then perhaps they had always been correct, and mankind was truly beyond salvation, absent their metaphysical intercession.

But those thoughts, high-minded as they were, were about the furthest things from Charles's mind at that moment.

The door flung open, and it was as if an icy draft had chilled the court's collective blood; and the moment that that heel had struck the ground like a clap of thunder, it was as though the sun itself had grown dim outside the windows, as a palpable darkness seemed to swallow the throne room.

And then they advanced, the backlighting at the threshold subsiding to reveal all of them.

Forty soldiers, clad in combat armour that covered them from head to toe in segmented plates black as night, capped off with closed, round-headed full-face helmets, with only a single band slashing sideways across the blank helms at eye level, the gap plated with a single polarised lens, marched in formation about a group of twelve. Of these twelve, eleven of which were women, ten wore identical uniforms, despite the obvious disparities in height, build, and age—uniforms that were themselves nearly identical to the garb of the Knights of the Round, he realised immediately: but where the uniforms of the Order of the Round Table were stark white in their tailcoats and trousers, drawing a sharp contrast against the black of their boots, their shirts, and their gloves, these uniforms were uninterrupted black. Their tailcoats, the breeches that they wore in place of trousers, their gloves and their boots, all of these were black; and though the tailcoats were, much like those worn by the Rounds, fastened with lengths of woven golden cord, in all other places where gold was used, the designs were not the sigils of the Imperial military, but instead serpentine dragons and chiropteran wings. And where the individual Knights of the Round had leave to choose for themselves the colours of their cloaks, the cloaks of their ten black-clad imitators were a uniform crimson, the style all but identical, fastened with woven golden cord—though these, too, were embroidered with draconic motifs in lieu of Imperial crests, and trimmed in gold.

And of the two remaining members, standing ahead of the rest, Charles could recognise them at a glance: his and Marianne's monstrous firstborn, and her Knight of Honour.

Justine's black boots reached her knee, and at once it was clear that hers was the heel that had struck the floor. Her black breeches clung tight to the muscle of her thigh with each unhurried step, and the scalloped hem of her long black coat swished back and forth as her hips rolled with every graceful stride. The boiled black leather of her overbust corset and the silk of her lace-cuffed black blouse both worked to conceal and protect the pallour of her skin, and that lace swung airily about her black-gloved hands as her arms drew elegant arcs in time with her steps; the metal pauldrons upon her shoulder, layered two each, did much to smooth out the slender cast of her narrow shoulders, but it also drew the eye to the silver collar that was fastened about the hollow of her throat, decorated with priceless rubies. Like this, he could spot for the first time the wavy quality of her silken, darkly iridescent raven hair, the same hue as Marianne's in what seemed to be a perversion, a pantomime of the woman he loved, which the chin-length cut revealed to an extent that had been invisible when he'd last seen her wear it long, and in the sharp definition and strict sculpture of her jawline, her cheekbones, and her strong, dark brow, it was as if she was neither his daughter, nor Marianne's, but instead the long-dead Agrippina's.

At that moment, he realised what had come over him: 'beauty is a blade,' or so the saying said, and his prodigal daughter was perfectly willing to play into this. It was clear the moment he looked for it, took a special notice of the grace of her step, the confidence of her bearing, the satisfaction of her sashay, studying each element apart from the others—with every immaculate stride, she sharpened that blade further, making a weapon out of her obscenity.

The realisation, and the knowledge that he, too, had been caught up in it, transfixed by her display, however briefly and however morbidly, sickened him to his very core.

She was every bit as dangerous as Marianne, and at least twice as arrogant.

Her knight, a former Royal Guardsman whom Marianne had once considered a potential member of her chapter of armigers, Jeremiah, Margrave Gottwald, kept pace with her, his uniform one of parade dress, basket-hilted ceremonial sabre and all, and he bore the winged sword pin upon his breast with a level of open pride that, for the first time, made Charles wonder whether Marianne hadn't made a mistake to choose the nobleman as a future man-at-arms. His teal hair was fashioned into a windswept style that was fit for the cover of a bodice-ripper, his amber eyes flicking this way and that as he took in every aspect of the chamber around them, but unlike Justine, he was making no effort to be seen—he was her shadow, vigilant and loyal to a fault, and it would not surprise him to learn that the man had hollowed himself out in Justine's service as surely as Bismarck had in Charles's.

And behind the two of them came the crimson-cloaked women, Justine's cronies if he had to guess, each of whom carried with them one of a variety of weapons in ways that all but shouted from the rooftops that they were familiar with their use. They came in ranks, four to a row, and the forty soldiers clad in their black plate armour seemed to escort them, stepping straight and tall and in perfect unison. And yet, behind them stood another eight, gathered about a cube-shaped object covered with an opaque dark blue shroud, as if the very knowledge of its nature was itself precious.

One could well have heard a pin drop in the sepulchral silence that followed—even the herald had taken leave of his duties in his mesmerised, terrified paralysis—save for the sound of his returned daughter, as her heels met the floor, and thus marked her approach.

Her hair was parted, and that part covered half her face in wavy raven locks, obscuring her eye; and he itched to peer into her mind, to confirm his suspicion that she now wielded the Power of the King, that it was not her, after all, but their plan to be rid of her that had failed so catastrophically—but even the thought of it seemed to sear the vitality out of his limbs, and he knew that even if they were alone, even in the case that he were able to use his Geass ability without fear of being rendered comatose all over again, it might be to no avail.

After all, not once had she ever met his eyes directly.

Her painted lips were curled into a vicious grin, haughty and triumphant and effortlessly superior. It was the grin of one who revelled in her deeds, in the notoriety those deeds gained her, and the effects such a reputation had upon the courtiers. It was bloodthirsty and dismissive in one, supercilious, high-handed, and utterly ruthless—and she favoured him with the expression as she came at last to stand before him, at the base of the dais, heedless, or perhaps simply uncaring, of how the Knights of the Round seemed to tense in her presence, for one reason or another. And once she drew to the appropriate distance, she did not bow, nor did she curtsey: instead, in a single fluid motion that revealed the flash of a strange Japanese blade hanging from the right side of her hip, concealed though it was beneath the cover of her coat, she knelt, bowing her head in submission so derisive that it might as well have been paper-thin mockery. "Your Imperial Majesty. Your loyal servant, Justine vi Britannia, has returned from the field of battle to report the subjugation of the noble houses of Area Six, the judgement that they received for their acts of high treason and their violations of noblesse oblige, and that she comes bearing a gift for His Majesty, to commemorate the occasion."

"Rise," he commanded gruffly, knowing as he did that, for whatever notoriety and infamy that she had gained as she campaigned against the rebellion in the south, she had done so by his command, and that she had followed those commands to the very letter. She had gone within the appointed time, with only the resources she could scrounge together, and now she returned in triumph—if he rebuked her, or did anything to criticise her handling of the situation at all, when she had in fact defied neither his edict, nor the letter of Imperial law, or even its spirit, strictly speaking, then he would be setting a precedent for rewarding success in service with punitive action, or even worse, making it seem as though he did not control her. And if he'd gone ahead and done that in a situation where she had only middling acclaim or none at all, that would be one thing; but in her first outing, she had eclipsed even Cornelia's unimpeachable record, which meant that if he made it clear that she had slipped the leash even once, her very existence would become an immediate threat to the bedrock of his reign. So though it galled him mightily to do so in the face of the young woman who had proven herself to be the embodiment of all that he despised, he had no choice but to play nice. At least for now. Seeing that she had risen, he bade her, "Let us see this gift of yours."

"But of course," Justine very nearly purred; she lifted her right arm into the air, and rolled her wrist in two counterclockwise circles. Behind her, and behind her cronies, whose outrageous uniforms did not technically constitutestolen valour, but sent a clear and unambiguous message all the same, the small group of eight who guarded the covered cube grabbed the shroud and yanked it off, revealing a cage, of all things. And in this cage was a man of clear and unambiguous high birth. He was shorter than Charles, perhaps, but they boasted similar broad, strong builds, and he dressed in the manner of royalty rather than that of a noble of Area Six, for all that the influences of that regional sensibility could be seen in the cut and the stitching of his finery. His hair was a long, voluminous cascade, a mixture of iron grey and snow white, and that hue went right down to its roots, with strong, thick, bushy eyebrows, and a well-groomed beard and moustache that had been oiled to a set of sharp points. His lips were thin, his jawline square, every inch of him bearing the pride of a dozen or more blue-blooded generations, uninterrupted in either status or privilege; but most distressing of all, aside from the fact that one of the man's legs ended in a tied-off stump at the knee, were his eyes—slate grey, but dilated, glazed, and unknowing, carrying within them barely even the awareness of an infant, a voiceless child, wide-eyed and innocent.

The soldiers opened the latches on the cage, heedless of the growing murmurs of the courtiers at the strange sight, and one of them brought forth a large iron key upon a length of fine chain, all of them coordinating without words, as though they'd done this very thing half a hundred times before. And once this began, Justine turned upon her heel, and strode through the now-parted ranks of her cronies, who now stood in pairs to either side of the carpet; when she reached the cage, the soldier holding the chain with the key upon it gave it into her hands, to which she replied with a cryptic smile and a nod. Then, her expression shuttered, cruel and harsh, and with a sharp nod in the two other soldiers' directions, the infantile man in finery was dragged off of his perch, the only other thing inside the cage—a trunk, it looked like, of substantial size, to which he was clinging—and forced back away from it, before they began to haul the trunk out of the enclosure.

Not that that gave Justine pause. She turned her back on him, and led the black-armoured soldiers back through to the base of the throne, the trunk held in their hands—and a quick glance at those members of the Order of the Round Table who were assembled at court today revealed that three of them, the two new recruits and the Knight of Four, Dorothea Ernst, had gone completely ashen, aghast at what they now beheld, not of the trunk or its contents, but instead of the man in the cage himself. Charles wondered why, exactly, that was—wondered what the identity of this man could have been, that they were reacting in such a fashion—but that was not a question he could easily risk asking in this situation.

Finally, with one last mighty heave-ho, the trunk was brought to sit just behind Justine, leaving the man in the back to scramble weakly, without direction or sight, and whine like a bereaved newborn at the loss of the trunk upon which he had been perched. He made no move to escape his enclosure, and gave zero indication whatsoever that he was even aware of the world around him. Several of the courtiers closest to this display visibly seemed to wince at the sight of it, and Justine, seeming to catch a glimpse of the horror in the eyes of three of the Knights of the Round, swept her gloved hand back to indicate the half-man in the cage clearly, first and foremost. "To His Majesty, your loyal and obedient servant presents to you the man who styled himself 'Santa Anna', he who was the self-proclaimed king of the nascent Neo-Spanish Empire. Here is the chosen leader of the rebellion, whose naked greed and surpassing hubris has seen him bereaved of all that he held dear—even his own mind."

That declaration provoked a collective gasp and a swirling of dismay and horror to arrest the entire crowd of courtiers—and suddenly, the horror in the faces of Bismarck's subordinates made a terrible degree of sense. They had, after all, been the ones to capture him and mop up the last of his forces—there was no way they would not have seen him before he had been reduced to this pitiful, wretched state of abject and total mindlessness. He could hardly imagine it, himself…

And then, unremarked-upon, that same pair of black-armoured soldiers who had brought forth the sealed trunk knelt down to either side of it and set about unlatching it. Once the latches were undone and the lock alone remained, the soldiers retreated to a good distance—and with a well-aimed and explosively powerful kick, Justine smashed the lock open and flung the lid back upon its hinges, revealing…

"These trophies—this man whose excesses sentenced him to a husk, and the heads of all those who sought to oppose your supreme authority—your loyal and obedient servant presents to you, your majesty," the monster who shared his blood proclaimed. She reached in and grabbed hold of one pale, ghastly head, hoisting it high upon its dead, greasy hair, the man's final expression one of agony and despair; and then she lowered it to the ground and rolled it like a bowling-ball down the rest of the way to the dais, to land upright, upon the coagulated stump that was once the head's neck, leaving the rictus of bereavement and suffering as a still, ghoulish display, facing the throne directly. Then at last, Justine swept her off-hand out to encompass herself, and those of her cronies who stood clad in those affronting, very nearly blasphemous uniforms—her eyes flashed, and her smile was sharp as the bite of winter. "She does this in the name of Justine vi Britannia, and of her friends and subordinates:

"The Order of the Dragon."

---

The bathroom tiles were cold beneath Justine's bare, black-clawed feet, and she was glad for it.

The cold was bracing. The cold was grounding. With the cold tiles beneath her feet, and the cold air caressing her bare skin, it seemed so much easier for her to gather up all of her anxieties, made up of every errant thought that had plagued her in the wake of her breakdown on the night of the full moon, and push it all out with a breath, expelling that frustrating negativity from her body and mind. It would return in time, she knew, but she was determined that tonight would be better. It would be her chance to do it over.

This was the first night of her delayed honeymoon, after all. It would go right if it killed her.

What clothing she had not shed by the time she was bidden to ready herself now sat folded upon the counter-top. The scars of her childhood were all too visible to her even now, and so she refused to look, she refused even to think to consult a mirror. She focused instead on the road ahead of her, the locked-away lust that made her core burn and her breasts ache with phantom pain, her thighs urging her to let them brush up against each other. And instead of allowing that lapse of control, she reached her hand up and touched two naked, black-nailed fingers to the red jewel in the centre of her collar, for one last burst of reassurance.

Milly had chosen her. Milly had married her. She had nothing to worry about.

With that kept in her mind, she reached out and rapped her knuckles twice upon the heavy, sturdy wood of the door that kept her from her bridal bed, which had been decorated in her absence.

"Come in, my love," came a hungry, throaty, husky purr that made her insides clench.

Screwing her courage to the sticking-place, Justine reached the hand that she'd used to knock down to the doorknob and turned it carefully, keeping as much control over her limbs as she could manage as the door swung open upon its softly-squeaking hinge. And through that gap, Justine stepped over the threshold to feel the soft, lavish dark carpeting beneath her toes, and to take in the bedchamber at night.

The electric lights were off, and in their stead, a broad assortment of lit tallow candles illuminated the room while keeping the atmosphere low and warm, padding the apartment with a cosy sort of intimacy, the maroon colour of the walls seeming to hem the room in, keeping its surfeit of space from appearing empty or particularly agoraphobic. Milly's exercise equipment had been set aside to clear the area for their bed, which had been moved closer to the window, thus freeing up more space for the ceiling-hook, and the chains and manacles which dangled from it, to find proper use. There was music playing from the record-player in the parlour, and she could hear it, muted but clear, even through the closed doors, and she swept her sight over to the doors themselves, making sure that they were securely locked, before swinging her gaze back to regard the trunk at the foot of the bed, where a tempered glass pitcher with more ice in it than water rested alongside a pair of tall glasses upon the treated black wood.

And then, at last, she allowed herself to look upon the large, metal-framed bed itself, the sumptuous, lavish, sturdy thing, where the love of her life sat, reclined, and watchful.

Just as with the night of the full moon, she was deadly and sexual in one—the same black boots that rose to a bit below her knee, the same black leather leggings that left her waist and the defined musculature of her abdomen bare, hugging her hips instead, and the same black leather bare-skin corset that struggled to contain her bust even as it supported it ably, with metal hooks and loops that sealed her up the front, leaving her arms and shoulders and the upper third of the swell of her breasts open, revealing a broad expanse of sun-kissed lightly-bronzed skin to Justine's ravenous eyes. Her bare shoulders were rounded and prominent with her muscle mass, and her arms, though lean even still, were incredibly toned, so that even while at rest, the shapes of her biceps, her triceps, and her deltoids were clear before Justine's eyes, almost like some manner of nonverbal boast. The strength of Milly's palms was obvious, as was the sturdiness of her wrists, the dividends of having spent years training to throw a punch for the sake of a hobby as bloody as bare-knuckle boxing, and her fingers were thick, but not unsightly, not even remotely—they were thick in the way that one could tell at a casual glance just how easy it would be for her to wring the very life out of something with them, or someone, as the case may be. Her nails were carefully manicured, but genuine, and stronger for it…

And then the obvious would no longer be avoided, as she brought one of those strong, lethal hands up, and curled a finger in a clear and unambiguous 'come hither' gesture.

Justine obeyed, once more making to approach, and making no effort to conceal her own nudity, nor her arousal, which by this point was weeping its way down her inner thighs and filling the air all around her with her scent. And it was…gratifying, in a way, to see how the heady mixture of pheromones made the nostrils of Milly's button nose flare, the black points amidst glittering diamonds devouring more and more of the blue expanse as they dilated and darkened with arousal, to watch her slender painted-red lips press themselves together, the glass-cutting aristocratic angles of her jawline firming as it set, her golden brows, somehow both strong and slender, furrowing in fraying restraint—she was the sun in summer once again, and Justine was certain that never before had the voluminous, lustrous gold of Milly's unbound hair, hanging in wild but neither unruly nor tangle-prone curls, seemed more like a halo of auric flame. But she collected herself, rallying against her lust in all its bestial fury, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath to brace her self-control for long enough to give a command. "Come here, and kneel."

Obedient as she was, it took Justine three strides to cross the space that remained, and for once, she didn't bother to disguise how she hurried to comply.

The carpet was plush and pleasant beneath her knees, thankfully—she'd lowered herself into seiza, and while the position wasn't one she found especially uncomfortable (unlike Suzaku), decent cushioning still made a world of difference. That was present here in spades, in this room that was purpose-built to be their sanctum, where they might find succour and sanctuary in one another—a proper place for the woman who was, to Justine, the one safe port amidst the storm.

That woman's strong fingers seized Justine's chin, lifting her face up so that she might at last look upon her wife, and the thought of attempting to fight against it didn't so much as cross Justine's mind.

Justine looked up past Milly's crossed legs, past the ankle that hung out in the air, motionless, and at last past the mesmerising, flexing washboard of her abdomen, and the swell of her chest in the corset. And in that moment, Justine did not look, nothing so base or vulgar—instead, Justine beheld.

Those same fingers danced delicately down the underside of her jaw, down the fluted expanse of her throat as they left a trail of gooseflesh in their wake, all the way down to rest upon the jewel-encrusted band of decorated silver that had become Justine's lifeline, a phylactery of peace.

"Do you remember the night I gave this to you, my love?"

Justine felt her brow furrowing in confusion at the strange question. Of course she remembered that night at the opera, and what had come after—even if she'd been physically capable of forgetting something, anything, it most certainly wouldn't be that enthralling, magical dream of a night when Milly had made her a woman. But Milly didn't ask her rhetorical questions, not at times like these, so she nodded in response.

This was enough for Milly, though Justine knew from experience that it would no longer be enough once they properly got going. "I do, too. You were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen that night—my most prized possession, dearly cherished above all other earthly things… I gave you this collar that night, placed it around your pretty little throat with my own hands, but I've been remiss. Complacent, in a sense. And, to my everlasting shame, I hadn't realised how much my negligence hurt you, my love, not until you were crying in my arms…

"But tonight is a new night, a night to correct the mistakes of the past," she continued, and Justine made no move to contribute or interject—Milly didn't like being interrupted, and when she wanted Justine to speak, she'd make that clear. Until then, her task was to remain kneeling, to stay silent, and to listen, like a good girl. When Milly's fingers left her collar, left her throat, she ruthlessly suppressed the high, pleading whine that tried to force its way out of her at the unwelcome loss of contact. Even now, she didn't know if sounds like those were permitted while she was supposed to keep quiet—she'd never wanted to risk it. She never defied or disobeyed Milly's orders, not in any way, and certainly not if she could help it. And she was rewarded a moment later, when her wife's hands found her jaw again, sweeping back across the expanse of her livid cheeks to cup her face in those strong palms, her fingers threading themselves firmly into her hair and rooting themselves tight against her scalp as Milly leaned down, ever so slowly, like she fought to savour every last moment. "I'm so very fortunate to have been given a second chance—to have been granted a chance to do this properly…"

With a sudden surge, Justine's mind flooded with soothing, sheltering darkness, where the glimmers of the death-lights of ever-distant long-perished suns were precious jewels sewn into the fabric of the night. It was intoxication and bliss, stillness and quiet, weightless and sedate, peace and relief and blessed silence, as Milly's lips pressed greedily against her own, insatiable and ravenous, passionate and tender—never gentle, but always, always adoring.

When they broke, Justine was flushed, her chest heaving, her lips swollen and kiss-sore, and all the world was just that much clearer, just that much more vivid and colourful, and it very nearly overwhelmed her in all the most desperately desired of possible ways. In such a state, her thoughts were sluggish, and her heartbeat slammed like war-drums on a galley against the inside of her ears, and so when Milly brought her fingers, strong and demanding and assuring as they pressed along her delirium-prickled pale flesh, against her throat again, Justine was docile and pliant, so much so that it took her a moment to realise what was being done when the familiar weight left her throat, and the band of figured serpentine silver came into her view.

It was the slow descent of a snowball down a shallow decline before the true danger of an avalanche that most closely resembled how Justine's heart began to fall, irrational thoughts fighting against the current to claim her, to whip up the storm into a hurricane that tore through all in its path even as it tore itself apart; but just before any of them could gain any considerable momentum, well ahead of those thoughts reaching critical mass in her dazed and kiss-addled state, another black band entered her view, and as it was secured and settled around her neck in place of the silver collar, she noticed as she began to return to herself that the new weight was considerably heavier than the last had been, and there was a slight constriction to it, too, as if Milly's hand was now wrapped gently around her neck, not yet squeezing, but tantalising Justine with the potential for it all the same.

"There we go," Milly cooed, lowering her face again, so that the tips of their noses were pressed flush against each other, and there was nowhere else for Justine to look, save for the intoxicating diamond depths of Milly's shot-wide eyes. "A proper collar, for a proper bride. How is it, my love? Does it feel like it fits?"

"…Yes, darling," Justine replied after a poleaxed moment, as powerful emotions pushed against her like a riptide, trying to drag her into the undertow. She felt the tears welling up in her eyes once again—but these were not the anguished tears that had marked that disastrous night three weeks past; they were tears of pure, unmitigated, smothering joy. "It feels… It feels wonderful…"

Milly grinned at the sight and sound of that, broad and toothy and very nearly as delirious as Justine felt. She drew one hand back, but with the other, she hooked two of her fingers into the cold metal loop at the front of the thick band of sturdy, robust black leather, and with that purchase, she pulled Justine up and forth, bringing her up out of seiza in the process. Hunger, lust, desire, adoration, obsession, all these things mixed and melded into one another in the dilated darkness of Milly's pupils, her control near to snapping as she purred out, "Good girl… My girl… Are we ready, my love? Shall we begin?"

Justine nodded, her joy mixing with her own yearning, desperate lust into a heady cocktail, so much so that she impressed even herself with how steady she sounded when she replied, "Yes, darling. I want to feel your love upon my skin. So please, love me viciously…"

At long last, after sixteen years of life, Justine was finally home.

And for once, all was right with the world…