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.

42. Rule 34

Area Eleven, November, a.t.b. 2015

Mornings had become a simple pleasure for Milly, and a jealously-guarded one at that; truly, there were few feelings that approached the sublimity of awakening in her large, lavish bed, with her beloved wife wrapped firmly in her arms, their nudity intermingled with one another. Her Justine was an early riser, and Milly had adjusted accordingly, awakening when the earliest rays of autumnal sunlight poured in through the large windows behind their headboard, illuminating the black silk of their bedsheets and caressing her wife's skin with radiance. Hers too, of course, but hers was much more tanned, and so didn't glow the way her Justine's porcelain and marble pallor did, and so she admired it as she did the rest of her wife's body—the purpling marks that Milly's hands and knuckles had left behind, the unconscious expression of relaxation that only appeared when she was fast asleep (she had married a very high-strung woman indeed), the iridescence of her raven hair that was all the more noticeable now that the sun was hitting so much of it directly, the gentle rise and fall of her pale shoulders and full chest as she breathed, the way that she unconsciously moved herself closer to Milly whenever there was any distance between them whatsoever… She was so clingy, and it was adorable; and while Milly did wish that her Justine could feel less self-conscious about being needy, could understand that Milly knew she was needy, had married her knowing she was needy, and was acutely frustrated by the fact that her wife felt it necessary to try and conceal that from her, seeming to think that Milly would grow to be irritated by how needy and high-maintenance she was, instead of overjoyed that there was yet more about her wife that she could know, that she could possess, it wasn't something that Milly blamed her for.

Because she'd known, hadn't she? Milly had gone into this knowing well that the lion's share of the difficulties their union promised to bring stemmed from the fact that her wife didn't know how to be loved, had been taught to believe that her needs were unwelcome at best. She'd gone into this knowing that she'd fallen in love with a woman who demanded nothing but perfection of herself, for all that she would never in a thousand years expect it of those around her, not nearly to the standards to which she held herself. It was a fact of her wife's nature, that she seemed to feel pathologically driven to shoulder the burdens of others, and of the world itself—burdens and duties and obligations that were never, and never would have been, hers to bear—and so she curbed it where she could, did what she could, and resolved to hope that the rest would work itself out in time.

Until then, she contented herself with basking in the knowledge that this beautiful creature was hers, and no other's—that she owned her, body, mind, and soul, and would own her forevermore. For there it was about her throat even now, the collar that she had commissioned: a sturdy band of immaculate black leather, with a metal loop at its front, and the coat of arms of the House of Ashford embossed in gold on either side. It hadn't been easy, finding a master leatherworker with the artisanal skills to get every petal of the rose and every last detail of the cruciform sword not only correct, but consistently correct on such a small scale, but she spared no expense for the woman she loved, the woman she had married; and now it served its purpose, a symbol of her love, of her possession, and the care she swore to take with her each day.

Milly watched her wife sleep for a few moments more; but after a while, then, her Justine at last stirred from her rest, her strong, dark brow furrowing, her full, kissable lips setting themselves into a mild grimace. The act brought to mind the aftercare that had capped off the last night's session—how Milly had carefully wiped all the streaks of make-up, of running eye-stain and eyeliner, the irregularly scattered smudges of lipstick that remained, both her own crimson all around her princess's face, and her wife's preferred dark shade of plum upon the lips themselves, away from her skin; how her fierce, spirited love had allowed herself to be handled like she was something precious for once, the younger woman far too tired by that point to allow the tightly-woven mixture of masochism and insecurity to return to the fore as it so often did. Milly, of course, greatly enjoyed indulging her own sadism, painting a portrait of pain onto the blank canvas of her wife's body—'loving her viciously,' as her Justine had so eloquently put it—but she also adored the quiet moments that followed, the moments when the woman she loved allowed herself to be something other than indestructible, for she saw each and every facet of her Justine as hers to have, to hold, and to drown in affection: affection that her wife soaked up like a sponge.

Her wife's long, lush, dark eyelashes fluttered, and softly, they opened, flicking over to Milly almost immediately. Those plush, haughty lips of hers—Milly couldn't look at them without wanting to kiss and bite them until they swelled up and bruised—curled into a smile at the sight of her, her body shifting to face her more properly, consciously pressing their flesh together into new and intoxicating configurations (her wife did so love to rile her up, menace that she was), and with her voice scratchy from sleep, yet indulgent in tone, she murmured, "Good morning, darling…"

"Hello, my love," she replied, restraining herself, but only barely; for all that her wife's mind awoke into full alertness all at once, her body was rarely so cooperative. "Did you sleep well?"

Her Justine arched a sceptical brow at her, though her lips remained smiling. "And why do you ask? Are you doubting your abilities, perchance? Did you think to go easy on me last night, or was the flesh not quite so willing as you might have wanted, hmm?"

Milly pulled her wife closer in retaliation, the softer, squishier parts of her raven-haired princess's body flowing over Milly's lean musculature as their bodies were squeezed together. The low gasp that stole its way out of her Justine's lips at that squeeze sent a potent jolt right to Milly's core, and both the fresh bite marks set into her collar and the furrows carved into her back tingled with the surge of renewed lust. She'd been warned that the honeymoon would bleed off a lot of the arousal her wife's presence stoked in her with everything she did, but if anything, it seemed to both Milly and her Justine as if the opposite was true—that three weeks had evolved into three months was evidence enough of that. The more they had of one another, the more desperately they wanted each other. It was a wildfire that continued to feed upon itself, and it was as if each time they came together, each time Milly fucked her wife, it only managed to whet their appetites for more. Her body was a drug, the sweetest possible addiction, and though it was sometimes a struggle for Milly to manage her cravings for her Justine, she didn't mind it at all—though the fact that the denial of those impulses that the craving brought about only made it all the more intoxicating when that craving was slaked certainly helped matters, coupled with the fact that if spending the lion's share of each day for three months straight fucking this woman had done nothing to cool her ardour, it was, to say the least, incredibly unlikely that caving to a momentary urge to find and ravish her again would be much more than a drop in the proverbial bucket.

"Darling, while I'd love for nothing more than to go for another round, believe me," her wife chided softly, shifting so that her hands were caressing Milly's biceps and the muscles of her lower back as she spoke, partly so that Milly could use the cyclical motion of that contact to ground herself and focus on what was being said. "I'm going to remind you that I have to get up and go do my morning exercises, and you have to get ready to break your fast with your father. You promised him, remember?"

Milly scowled, but conceded the point, pressing a kiss into her Justine's hair all the same. "Yes, I do. You're right…"

"I usually am," she teased, before gently disentangling herself from Milly's grasp. "But don't worry. I won't be going far. I never do."

"And what are you going to be doing while I'm meeting with my father?" she asked as she watched her beautiful woman slip out from under the sheets, putting her feet upon the floor and standing in a stretch that sent all of the hidden muscle—the 'sleeper build', as Rivalz had called it—of her body into sharp relief. Her arms went high above her head, highlighting her triceps, the shifting, wiry muscle of her back, the tone of her hamstrings and her shapely calves, as well as the width of her hips and the deceptive softness of her ass, which could tense to the point that it had actually hurt Milly's hand once in the past. She hated that this was a question she needed to ask, that she didn't already know how her wife would spend every last minute of her day that they spent apart from one another, but there was much to be done, and her princess was one of the most driven women she'd ever known. The longer her woman spent idle, or merely unoccupied, the less and less comfortable she grew, as her nerves wound ever more tightly, to the point where any attempt at finding a situation where her love could relax became almost a contradiction in terms. There was really nothing to be done about it, then—if Milly spent too much time trying to memorise what her wife was going to be doing a week in advance, she was liable to forget crucial obligations of her own.

"Rakshata and Lloyd have apparently managed to get the hadron cannons to converge," her Justine replied as she slipped into a more comprehensive stretching regimen, getting her body moving. Some of the exercises she was going to do would likely be rather more dangerous than they already were, if she were to attempt them without warming up first. Life with her Justine had drilled into Milly's head what the method was—callisthenics in the mornings, and cardio in the afternoons or evenings. "They apparently managed it a week ago, but then they got into a flurry of optimisations and streamlining processes, and now they've at last agreed that it's in a fit state for presentation. I'll be meeting Valerian there, and now that she's gotten to grips with how the Kays are going to be operating, she's hashed out a few different training regimens to get any prospective devicers in fit shape to withstand the demands of piloting the machines, so I'll be reviewing those with her after the demonstration. After that, Rivalz's elder cousin, Julian Cardemonde, is coming by to meet us—that is, myself, Villetta, Valerian, Sif, and Yennefer—and we're going to see for ourselves if we think we can work with him. Apparently Oberstein agreed with Villetta's recommendation of the man, and we do need a commander-in-chief of the Legion specifically. After that, you should be finished with your meeting with the other viceroys via remote communications, so I'll be swinging by your office around that time."

Milly nodded as her wife shifted from her stretches to fall face-first into a push-up position, starting her cycle of twenty normal push-ups, easing into her routine. Watching her Justine build up to the more exceptional parts of her morning work-out granted Milly a level of peace of mind that she wouldn't otherwise have had if not for the sensible progression, for all that she would never have even thought to attempt many of the exercises that made up the bulk of her wife's work-out. Twenty push-ups progressed into another twenty-five clapping push-ups, and after that would come the sixty one-arm push-ups, thirty for each arm, and that was effectively the limit of what Milly was willing to attempt. She would strap seventy-five kilogrammes onto her waist and do chin-ups with that much weight without batting an eye—she had actually done that, and though her personal best was eighty, it was still a bad idea to train with that much weight as she currently was—but while she admired the grace and balance and fine muscle control that her Justine's calisthenic work-out demanded of her, it was nonetheless beyond her ability or her willingness to replicate.

By the time she hauled herself out of bed, stretched, and readied herself to go attend to her morning toilet, her wife was at last well-into her one-arm sets; and when she returned from that to gather what she'd wear (Milly had carved out a part of the day specifically for working out once her workload had subsided to a manageable level, with enough of Area Eleven's bureaucracy properly organised that she was at last able to delegate effectively), it was just in time to catch her Justine in the midst of handstand push-ups, of which her routine called for thirty-five, in a continuation of the work-out's ramping-up demands. Milly knew that she had a full day ahead of her after breakfast with her father, so instead of choosing from her collection of commoner clothes, after her undergarments, she pulled on a black pair of buckskin breeches and a pair of cotton hose, for under her boots, followed by a pair of black Hessians (which had become something of an identifying style for her, she knew), then a camisole and a corset to wear beneath her shirt. At some point, Sayoko materialised as if out of thin air and wordlessly helped her dress—a development that she was used to, by this point—and once she'd donned a shirt, chosen a waistcoat, and donned that as well as her cravat, she looked over to peer back into the bedroom, only to see that her wife was in the midst of one of the more strenuous exercises, something that was apparently called 'bent-arm planche to L-sit,' but looked like some kind of circus trick.

By the time she was finally ready to go meet with her father, her Justine had moved on from that wonder and nightmare of an exercise to wall splits, in which she would spend two to three minutes for each leg; after that, she would go back through the work-out again, in reverse, and then she would be done. She'd done this every day, even while on their honeymoon, diligent to the utmost in the maintenance of her strength and of her body—though Milly was glad to hear that Suzaku had a routine that had much more in common with Milly's own work-outs than her Justine's. Perhaps, Milly thought, she would call upon the Honorary Britannian who was her wife's best friend, and see about getting into exercising together, trading tips and such. She filed that away as a thought for a later time, and after she spared a parting kiss for her princess—who maintained the wall split flawlessly throughout, no less—and took the time to switch out her collar for the day collar she'd commissioned years ago, Milly left her apartments in the Government Bureau behind her, and made instead for the rooftop gardens, where she'd said she would meet with her father.

Lord Elend looked significantly better now than he had when he came back into her life. The years, far from leaching his vitality, had seen his health much-improved, now that he'd left behind his lifestyle as a wastrel, both for Milly's sake and for his own. His emerald eyes were clear, the rich, wavy golden hair she had inherited from him was styled into a ribbon-bound tail, his skin was clearer, and many of his wrinkles seemed almost to have vanished from his face entirely. Like this, he did not seem even remotely close to his true age of almost forty, and though she could always see, even in his darkest moments, how her father had been seen as one of the most eligible bachelors of his day, now it was almost blindingly obvious where she had gotten a great deal of her own features from—she wasn't a conceited person by nature, but the fact that she could appear in public alongside her wife without anyone batting an eye was enough of a confirmation of her own attractiveness. She'd inherited her mother's thin lips, but the shape of her eyes and nose was his, as was the tone of her skin and the shape of her brow. The shapes of her jaw and chin were from either her mother or her grandfather, depending on who one asked.

He sat beneath the shadow of the gazebo-pagoda thing that her grandfather had had commissioned for the space to commemorate the transfer of power from him to her; their breeches matched, but his boots were in the Wellington style, and not the Hessian; he wore a blouse instead of a shirt, with ruffled cuffs that brushed against his knuckles, and the waistcoat he'd chosen was a midnight-blue in contrast to her crimson, decorated with silver brocade in contrast to the gold that adorned her own. He had his nose in a book as she approached, and once he noticed her arrival, he looked up from it, smiling broadly enough at her that the crow's feet at the corners of his eyes were made visible. "Good morning to you, Milly."

"To you as well, Father," she nodded, stepping up into the shade and taking the seat opposite where he was sitting. It wouldn't take long for the sun to get high enough that the rays poured in and dispelled the shadows of where they were seated, whereupon they would eat while watching out over Tokyo Bay, and in the meantime, she got herself settled, and asked him, "Which book is it this time?"

"It's a novel that your wife recommended to me, as a matter of fact," her father replied, showing her the decently-hefty book that he'd just put down. "It's entitled The Man In the Iron Mask, a historical fiction text that was written by a Frenchman, no less. She recommended I read it after she heard of how thoroughly I enjoyed The Three Musketeers."

"I'm familiar," Milly said, nodding again. "Though, of course, I'm significantly more partial to The Count of Monte Cristo, as far as this particular Frenchman's work goes."

"I find myself wondering how she has the time for fiction, of all things, what with how busy she seems to be these days," her father remarked, not unkindly.

Milly snorted indelicately, and smirked at the man who'd sired her. "Father, I live with her, and not even I can account for the sheer litany of tasks that she somehow manages to accomplish on a day-to-day basis. It's a state of affairs that I've long since grown used to."

"Yes, as long as your wife makes time for you as well, I'd imagine you're quite content to leave the dragon to its hoard, as they say," Lord Elend said contemplatively. "Though I'd also imagine, knowing you as I have come to over the course of this past half-decade, that you're already doing all in your power to try to keep her from burning herself out, or otherwise neglecting her health."

"That the headway she's been making in her various endeavours is impressive rather than frightful is only because I can still reliably convince her to get a full night's rest," said Milly, leaning back against the chair's metal back.

"Yes, convince her, indeed," her father needled, with a raised brow and a knowing smirk—her own, now thrown back into her face. The indignation that knowledge sparked was a unique sensation.

"I'll have you know that I can be very persuasive," she replied in kind, not giving the man even the most paltry of ground.

"Indeed, indeed," Lord Elend nodded, his affect sobering. "Speaking of your powers of persuasion, what's this I hear about you holding a remote meeting with six other viceroys? That's today, yes?"

Milly didn't reply immediately, and instead thought about how she was going to respond. What she settled upon was close enough to the truth that it was barely even a lie by omission. She said, "We got the first recruitment numbers for my Justine's Dread Legion back at the beginning of the month. The initial figures are quite promising, but it wouldn't hurt to find the means to glut those numbers a bit, now would it? And even should they not desire to enlist, there are plans in the works to expand our sakuradite mining operations, to ensure that we have enough of a stockpile to invest into other resource-intensive projects."

"Like the war machines your research facility has been developing," her father guessed, listening as intently as he was able—his brow furrowed, and his smirk and smile both gone from his face in the midst of it all.

"Precisely like that, yes," Milly confirmed, nodding. "And those planned expansions can always do with a larger labour force to work with, even as we invest more and more in more efficient methods and advanced machinery, so that we can make the labour force we currently have go further than it has. In either case, it also works to alleviate some of the worst effects of the baby bust that the defunct Japanese Imperial government's economic policies inflicted upon its citizens; and not to mention, one of the groups that we've been keeping an eye on has a rather notorious attitude towards ethnic purism that it expects its membership to uphold. By diversifying and further integrating Area Eleven's population, we reverse the after-effects of frankly draconian economic doctrines, weaken the most likely sources of future opposition, and maintain a steady grip on civil order, all in one fell swoop."

"And what about racial tensions?" he asked, leaning back and folding his hands into his lap with his fingers interlaced as he spoke. "After all, even though this archipelago is relatively insular, even within the limited pool of local ethnicities—the Ainu, the Ryūkyūan, the Ōbeikei Islanders, the Yamato—there's quite a brutal history of ethnic repression and racial conflict. We aren't exactly dealing with a population with a precedent for tolerance to foreign influences here…"

"It will have to be mediated with care, admittedly," Milly conceded, as at last, some of the staff that Sayoko had trained—who naturally pulled double-duty as both maidservants and shinobi—ascended with a few trays of food and tea, as well as a certain phial full of ghostly green fluid that glowed just a little. "But I should point out that they aren't likely to get less xenophobic on their own. The circumstances—material conditions, as my wife would call them—need to be cultivated in such a way that they're more or less forced to abandon those prejudices. We've already done a great deal of the heavy lifting with our own domestic economic policies—fomenting racial tension and reinforcing prejudice is best accomplished through the weaponisation of economic difficulties or disparities, and given that we've done our best not to allow for solid structures of stratification to form, there will be little for our opponents to use against us in that regard—but if we want to maintain our hold on Area Eleven, we can't give them any reason to take up arms against us, not even their own historical penchant for nativism or xenophobia."

Lord Elend nodded, but he did not seem wholly reassured. "And what if this plan ends up bringing things to a boiling point?"

"Then the situation will have come to a boiling point at a moment of our choosing, instead of that of our opposition's," Milly said with a shrug. "And as a result, we'll be able to make sure that we're in a better position to contain it than we otherwise would be. The yakuza bucking our yoke is, as I've been told, all but an inevitability at some point. If it was made up entirely of men like Majima and Kiryū, then perhaps we'd have a chance of the current status quo on that front remaining in place interminably, but they're not. Even as recently as the eighties and nineties, they've shown that though they're domestic organised criminals, and thus have a great degree of community outreach and a number of redeeming qualities, being, as they are, full members of those communities, at the end of the day they remain a criminal organisation, whose membership cannot all be said to be rational actors. When one thinks of how to predict the deeds of such creatures, Majima isn't the illustrative example—Tsar Josef I Stalin is where you'll want to look. They are brutish, they are hamfisted, and above all else, they are opportunistic and power-hungry."

With that proclamation hanging in the air between them, they took a brief pause as the maidservants unloaded the platters onto the table. They ate as they could from the bounty of the land itself, which served as a political statement as well, a declaration of their intention to preserve the culinary traditions peculiar to Area Eleven—generously-sized bowls of steamed rice and seaweed (nori), pickled daikon radish and ginger (takuan and gari, respectively), grilled river-char (iwana), chicken eggs that had been seasoned, beaten, and fried into rolled omelettes and sliced into rectangular portions (tamagoyaki), fermented soybeans (nattō), a moderately-sized pot of miso broth, a decanter of water, and tea for afterwards, were made into the contents of the table in short order; and once the staff bowed and disappeared, Milly and her father reached forth and set about putting their own meals together from the offerings. The father and daughter pair divided the food as they always had—two-thirds of it went to Milly, whose lifestyle was, quite frankly, a much more active and demanding one, and the remaining third went to Lord Elend. She set about it almost without thinking, taking rice and seaweed, fish and omelettes and nattō, a portion of the soy sauce they were given, the phial full of the mutagen distilled from Izanami's immortal blood through processes that only she knew, let alone understood, and a full glass of water, before setting to feeding herself.

They ate quickly and cleanly, the only sounds that existed between them for some time being that of their consumption, the clacking of pottery against itself, of chewing and swallowing—and as it happened, it was her father who was the first to break the incidental silence that had fallen between them, wincing as he swallowed an unhappy mouthful of nattō. "I have no idea how you can eat this sort of thing so easily…"

Milly shrugged, clearing the load of food in her mouth first before speaking, as she picked up one of the cloth napkins they'd been left and dabbed at her face, careful not to disturb her make-up. She had a tube of lipstick that she could use to reapply it, should she need to, but the entire point of the exercise was, at the very least to some extent, not to eat in such a way that necessitated that she go recuse herself for the sake of cosmetic reapplication. "You get used to it, given enough time. You'd be used to it already, Father, if you'd not taken to eating so much Britannian fare yourself whenever we're not dining together. Though, I will confess, my wife seems to enjoy it. She's always favoured the salty, the sour, the bitter and the savoury over the sweet, I should state for the record."

Her father shook his head, a touch rueful, and wholly resigned. "Well, I suppose if I must, I must…"

"I've been told it's good for you," Milly offered. "If nothing else, you can consider it analogous to a nursemaid coaxing you to eat vegetables you find unpleasant."

"That might not be the best of ideas," Lord Elend chuckled, shaking his head in recollection. "I was always very resistant to such things as a child, you see."

Milly smiled, though this was one of the things she had more in common with Cassiopeia than him; by all accounts, she'd always been a rather accommodating eater, through virtue of the fact that flavour was rarely sufficient to move her in any direction, emotionally or preferentially. She wondered for a moment if there was a correlation—she recalled that her wife was rather picky even now, though she kept it restrained, and while the circumstances of her childhood could account for her practical skills when it came to food, as they'd found during their beach trip to Okinawa during the height of the summer, leaving behind almost all of their servants to see to themselves, at least to some extent, that only went so far; and meanwhile, she had very nearly burnt their beach house down the one time she'd tried to cook, failing in the process of boiling water for something else. Perhaps the fussiest, pickiest eaters were exhibiting an eye for detail and a series of acute senses that gave them an advantage when it came to culinary matters; but of course, this was more of an errant consideration than anything, and so she returned her attention to the situation at hand. "I could call Sayoko forth, see if she has any ideas on the subject…"

Her father blanched, and shook his head emphatically. "No, thank you."

Milly looked away, chuckled, and went back to eating. Once they had emptied their bowls, cleared the serving-plates, scoured the pot of broth empty, and ensured that there were no more pickled vegetables left, they settled into the quietude imposed by the drinking of the tea that had been prepared for them. As they enjoyed the companionable silence, her father swirled his cup of tea in his hand, thinking; and when he came upon something he wished to express, he signalled it, his brow furrowing very nearly to the point of scowling at the featureless white cup in his hands as he opened his mouth to speak. "Carmilla."

Milly looked up at the man who had sired her, as she uncorked the phial. "Yes, Father?"

"Take care not to underestimate them," Lord Elend advised her, training his emerald gaze upon her over the rim of the white cup of tea that they drank to help settle their stomachs. "The viceroys with which you'll be negotiating today, I mean."

Milly snorted; that was an absurd statement prima facie. "I can't imagine that that'll be particularly difficult. They wouldn't be meeting with me if they were running their provinces efficiently or effectively; they've failed categorically to prevent the corruption, undermining, and frankly egregious mismanagement that is the death-knell for civil order in an Area. They're not even pathetic, Father, they're just…nothing."

"Be that as it may, Carmilla, those who fail to recognise that idiocy often poses the greater danger do so at their own peril," her father chided gently. "Backed into a wall and with no clever options they can see, they'll be at their least-predictable, and can no longer be considered rational actors. When you go to meet with them, you would be well-served to do your best to account for that. And be sure to take care."

Milly sobered, nodding as she took in the advice as it was meant. "I will, Father."

Lord Elend smiled softly, and nodded in return. "That's all that I ask."

Returning the smile, she downed the phial's contents all at once, and stood from her chair. "This has been lovely, but it's time I got to work."

---

The room was dark when she entered it, a private meeting room recessed fairly deep into the bowels of the Government Bureau, and commissioned for just this sort of purpose. The single shaft of light that fell upon it all vanished when the door closed behind her, and, employing her gentleman's cane for what was, at least ostensibly, its intended purpose, the tapping upon the andesite flooring, which had been blackened and polished to a mirror sheen after being excavated from a quarry in Kanagawa, heralded her finding her way over to where she'd left her seat. Once she found the black leather-upholstered ergonomic chair in roughly the centre of the room, she fluttered her tails out and lowered herself to the cushion, keeping the cane close to hand as she settled herself into position.

Milly moved her chair the short distance towards the centre of the room—a position of power and of impartiality in meetings like these, as one could always trust the Britannian aristocracy to layer even as new and modern of a technology, relatively speaking, as video conferences with hyper-specific ritual—and laid her cane down across her lap, before leaning back, taking a deep breath in, and huffing it out as she forced her mind into the state that would allow her to deal with the six idiots she'd effectively courted for this meeting. Juliette, of course, could do this without thinking, but Juliette's was a level of madness of which even Milly was wary, for all that she had tested and made sure to know that her sister-in-law's loyalty to her wife was absolute; though it was certainly the case that Juliette had an easier time with this sort of thing, Milly didn't envy her that ease.

Judging herself to be about as ready for this ordeal as she was ever likely to be, Milly called out, "I hereby call this meeting to order."

As if her command had awakened a slumbering, antediluvian beast, large screens snapped to life all around the walls of the room, illuminating the chamber with the bluish light that poured out of them. Then, that bluish tone subsided as the blue light filters kicked in half a second after booting, and once the clock ticked over to signal the top of the hour, the blank screens filled, one after the other, with footage of other people, attired in adherence to similar sensibilities of dress to that which defined Milly's own attire, with snippets of their offices in the provinces they ruled filling in the negative space. There was a smattering of ages, though only two were anywhere near her age, and only one of them was also a woman; all told, there were only six of them—the viceroys of Areas Ten, Twelve, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, and Seventeen—and they were, to put it diplomatically, a collection of harried incompetents whose provinces' poor economic performances had gained them the special attention of the Ministry of Finance, and the Exchequer in particular. They were the group that Friederike had suggested Milly start with, back when she'd originally pitched this idea; she saw the sense in it, that if these idiots could see that she was fleecing them, then the motion was too transparent by half, but Milly was braced to have to exercise a great deal more patience than she'd ever before felt the need to display nonetheless.

"I'm certain that you're all wondering exactly why it is that I've brought you here today," she began, her tone perhaps a bit conspiratorial—but the chiaroscuro (another word her love had taught her) off of the screen made her face difficult to read, she knew, which meant that while she would never be so reckless as to think that she could afford to relax her affect, as even the lowliest of the nobility was trained to pick such things out, she allowed herself to feel reassured that the strange lighting might well make it even easier to achieve what her goal was, here. "You, who govern some of the newest provinces of the Empire. You must be wondering to yourselves, I imagine, precisely what it is that I seek. But even in situations such as these, it behoves us ill to neglect the proper civilities; and so to each of you, I bid a good morning."

"A good morning to you, as well, your highness," said a square-jawed, red-haired man who was the viceroy of Area Ten, formerly the Indochinese Peninsula, as he bowed his head in proper deference. "And a good morning to each of my fellow viceroys, who are likewise endowed with the solemn duty of taming these wild, savage lands in the name of His Imperial Majesty, Charles zi Britannia."

Milly barely managed not to roll her eyes; and next, the viceroy of Area Sixteen, formerly known as the Korean Peninsula, opened his practically nonexistent lips, pushed the square lenses of his spectacles up the bridge of his hawk nose, and said, "Yes, yes, well met, your highness. Ah, pardon me, but I believe I speak for all of us when I say that there is much to be done, and, pressed for time as we are, we haven't exactly the luxury of properly observing these pleasantries."

She straightened at the impertinent request, and though Milly was smiling internally at the fact that she was no longer expected to cling to the rules of etiquette quite so closely as she had been, she made sure that the others would interpret offence in her change in posture. It would give her much more leeway here, that they thought that she had taken umbrage with the veiled rudeness of the reedy man's behaviour—a bad combination, given that even collectively, the six of them were in a much weaker position than hers, even if they somehow did not themselves already know it. "Oh, my apologies, viceroy. I would imagine that it must be quite time-consuming indeed to figure out exactly how your Area has failed to meet the quarterly quotas the Exchequer expects all of us to meet for the past four years running."

The man whose territory was her most immediate neighbour blanched at the backhanded insult, and adjusted his collar openly—an unacceptable demonstration of weakness. "The situation here is complicated, your highness. The Numbers here are unruly, and efforts to bring them to heel have been met with limited success, to say the least. Not all of us have the luxury of royal connections upon which we may prevail."

What an unpleasant man, Milly couldn't help but think. I wonder if the others appreciate how deep of a grave he's digging them… "Yes, yes, I'm certain that His Majesty will find your no doubt endless litany of excuses for your own incompetence very convincing, indeed."

"What is it that you desire of us, your highness?" the one woman of the group interjected, shooting her mouthier colleague quite a respectable death-glare. The viceroy of Area Seventeen, she recognised, was a woman of lower birth but high ambition, a daughter of an otherwise-destitute noble house who wished to rebuild her family's fortunes, and had done quite a job of it so far, impressing Friederike enough to gain the position she now held largely on merit. Unlike the others, her issue wasn't incompetence, as per se; it was a lack of imagination more than anything, much like the flaw that had dogged Cornelia, for all that this was a much milder instance of that shortcoming. She'd been in charge for two years now, going by the book to an almost slavish extent, and as a result, she hadn't yet managed to meet the targets that the Exchequer, as an arm of the Ministry of Finance, demanded of her, because the book itself was something of a trap. It was, as a matter of fact, very nearly expected of the viceroys to go well beyond the boundaries outlined by virtue of their roles to meet what the Crown demanded of them.

"I come before you all today with a proposition of sorts," Milly chose to answer, cutting to the chase as an unspoken favour to the one person here for whom she had any shred of sympathy, if only that. "Quid pro quo, you might say—an arrangement of mutual benefit."

The three who hadn't spoken perked up at that. The square-jawed, broad-shouldered man nodded, as the thin, bespectacled one continued to quail at the glare the severe, sharp-featured woman had shut him up with, and the woman herself narrowed her eyes. "Pardon my impertinence, but what sort of arrangement are you suggesting, your highness?"

"Well, as our fellow viceroy has so eloquently put it, the six of you, to varying degrees, have cited in the reports you were required to file with the Ministry of Finance that you see your Number populations to be the foremost barriers to the economic development and Britannianisation of your provinces," said Milly, her hand raised in a gesture of sympathy she did not feel. "The fact of the matter is that Areas Ten, Twelve, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, and Seventeen have lagged increasingly far behind the developmental timetables set by the Crown, year after year. For some of you, such as yourself, my lady viceroy, the relative youth of your administration is something of an exculpatory factor, but for the rest, the delays that you have recorded are, to put it bluntly, inexcusable, and as we speak, the majority of you teeter on the edge of the threshold of punitive action for your failures. I have come to offer you all something of a lifeline.

"It should come as no surprise to all of you that Area Eleven has, under my governance, produced a quantity of refined sakuradite sufficient to fill our quotas at least twice over," she continued; in reality, they could fill the otherwise exorbitant quota four times over even if said quota was doubled, but that wasn't all that relevant to the current situation. "I would be quite willing to extend to each of you a significant portion of that surplus; and in exchange, I would have you ship a commensurate portion of your Numbers to Area Eleven, whereupon they would be registered as Elevens, and thus be made into my problem to deal with. A win-win for you, wouldn't you agree?"

"You seek to give us your sakuradite, in exchange for more Numbers to worry about?" the viceroy of Area Seventeen asked, her tone sceptical and suspicious. "Forgive me for asking this, your highness, but what's your angle here, exactly?"

My angle is knowing that you don't see the sheer value of the manpower you could have to hand if only you ceased to toe the Imperial line, which exists at least in part to give all you vultures and parasites something that you can dominate without consequence, since you can't do that to commoners anymore, she thought to herself as she stared down the cleverest of those with whom she was currently dealing. Ironic, is it not? Even now, you are suspicious of me for the wrong reasons. You see not what you stand to lose, which is much more finite than my supply of sakuradite, and focus only upon all the ways in which this deal seems to be weighted in your favour. And that is just as well, because the suspicion you currently feel blinds you to how I actually mean to ruin you. Perhaps this is why Juliette likes this sort of thing so much. It's an odd sort of thrill, I'll give it that…

But of course, Milly knew better than to say any of this, to point out the things that had made Area Eleven flourish as much as it had while their own provinces continued to stagnate, that in Milly's enduring refusal so much as to entertain the seeming-temptation to squeeze as much value as she could from this land as quickly as she possibly could, heedless of what she exploited and discarded in the process, she had done what her wife had once spoken of so hopefully, before she'd forgotten how, and laid down the foundations for future rule. That she had exerted the patience to sow properly had enabled her to reap enduringly, and to give other prospects the time and opportunity to make themselves apparent; and she had come into this with the knowledge that these other provincial governors fundamentally lacked that same capacity. So, instead of expressing her disdain, she replied, "My angle, insofar as I can be said to possess one, is that it behoves me greatly to have you all in my debt, naturally; and of course, it isn't lost on me, as well it shouldn't be on any of you, that all of your territories are neighbours of my own. It is not at all beyond the scope of possibility that any failure on your parts to maintain proper civil order, up to and including open rebellion, may be seen to have a cascade effect upon the rest of the Empire's holdings in the West Pacific; and if that danger can be mitigated, or eliminated outright, with the simple expenditure of a few portions of surplus sakuradite, then I should consider it to be an advantageous trade."

Now then, Milly thought as she leaned back in her chair. Let's see if they take the bait…

"If we're going to give you flesh, then we don't want just the refined sakuradite," spoke the cleverer one, her tone shifting into one of seeming-negotiation. "Our true need is for infrastructure, not just the raw materials to keep it running. If we're getting sakuradite, I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we also want hardware."

"The House of Ashford is not in a position to offer military hardware," Milly pushed back gently, or at least made it seem like that was what she was doing. "That charter at the moment is held solely by HCLI, and its new president, Miss Koko Hekmatyar, by extension. However, civil hardware, on the other hand, we are certainly in a position to supply in bulk, according to your needs. The precise details can be hashed out between our retainers in due time."

"If it results in getting the vermin out of our hair, I suppose I agree that your terms are acceptable," said the reedy one, no longer cowed by the clever one's glare. The three who hadn't spoken, who seemed to be content to reap the benefit of the leading trio's rhetorical risk-taking (the behaviour of scavengers, for all that it was anything but foolish) nodded emphatically.

"…You've given us much to consider, your highness," said he-of-the-square-jaw.

"Hopefully more than merely consider, my lord," Milly said, cocking a sceptical brow.

"Yes, indeed," he groused, rubbing that broad, square chin with a large, meaty hand. "I, at least, will be instructing my staff to reach out to yours. We'll aim to have the particulars decided upon within the next few weeks. This quarter is already done for, but perhaps the next may still be salvaged if we act with proper urgency…"

She smiled, nodding slowly. "My thoughts exactly, my lord. My man Stadtfeld will meet yours."

And if one of them capitulates, all of them are as good as spoken for, Milly reminded herself. Each of them is Britannian to their core. It is not in their nature to baulk at a challenge, particularly a perceived competition, nor to lack pride so thoroughly as to allow themselves to risk falling even further behind their fellows than they already have…

"I'll send my own retainer to meet with yours, as well, your highness," the clever one, quick on the uptake, rushed to add. And perhaps she might have been less credulous had they met one-on-one, instead of altogether with the other viceroys; but then, that was entirely by design. The fear of missing out, no matter how clever she might have been on her own, would blind her to what she was stumbling into alongside the rest of the idiots. It was almost a pity to commit to such a waste, Milly supposed—but then, Villetta would have seen through this ploy immediately, so regardless of whether or not it could be said to be a waste, any attempt to bring her under their wing would (thankfully) only result in redundancy.

"Mine as well," said the reedy man.

"Yes, quite," said one of the men who had not yet spoken.

"Stanley! Stanley! Hasten to me!" cried another, having already left his chair, presumably to flag his own retainer down.

And the last one hung by the camera long enough to ask, "And what, precisely, do you intend to call this arrangement, your highness?"

That provoked perhaps the first genuine smile out of Milly that this entire situation had managed. It was a name she had thought of herself, spurred on by one of her Justine's many impromptu history lectures, and the knowledge that it was something she was quite certain very few Britannian highborn had ever even heard of made the fact that it was this project's namesake so much more fitting. She lifted her chin a bit in a gesture to communicate her pride, with the knowledge that its source would certainly be misinterpreted, and stated in response, "I've taken to referring to the arrangement I'm proposing as the 'Amistad Accords.'"

There was a fair bit more hemming and hawing to their meeting before Milly finally saw fit to draw it to a close, enough for the name not to be the final impression that the other viceroys came away with; she hardly wanted her extremely poetic naming choice to spoil the surprise, now did she? And with that last bit of reassurance, with the last screen winking out and going dark, leaving her alone in the pitch blackness of the room, she let out a heavy, satisfied sigh, and stood from the chair, letting the cane help her find her way out of the room through the dark. It took her much less fumbling than it otherwise might have to find what she was looking for—that is, the control panel, which was concealed from sight, but not from touch—and light poured into the chamber once again, a single shaft that illuminated only its portion, through which she left the chamber behind, and returned to the adjoining series of rooms: her office in the Government Bureau proper, of course.

And it was in that office that she came upon the one person she least expected to see awaiting her.

Milly stopped in her tracks, and blinked twice. "Miss Blackwood. Quelle surprise."

And indeed, standing there—no, sitting there, upon her desk—and gazing out at the picturesque view offered by the window-walls that defined the entire left-hand side of her office, from where Milly was standing, was the woman herself. Just as she had before, Rhiannon Blackwood dressed in black slacks and strappy, heeled sandals (which were quite an unseasonable choice, to say the least), but instead of the blouse, she'd gone with a jacket, a black blazer, under which she seemed to be wearing nothing at all. It was a mercy, Milly imagined, that at the very least, the jacket was buttoned enough that the immortal woman didn't expose anything beyond the fact that there was naught but bare skin beneath it. Her hair was pulled back into a high tail once again, and just as before, enough of it was unbound to fall in a lengthened fringe over the right side of her face, obscuring one of her scarlet eyes beneath a curtain of jet; and she leaned the delicate arch of her neck backwards, the black flood of her tail flowing even further downward, and those full, lush lips, once again painted a rich crimson, were pulled into a smirking smile, not at all mocking, but rather teasing and flirtatious. "Well, well. If it isn't just the pretty girl I've been looking for…"

Milly found herself smirking despite herself, cocking an incredulous brow. "You must not have been looking for very long, in that case—I'm hardly a difficult woman to find."

The immortal ogled Milly shamelessly, her eyes openly scanning her up and down appreciatively. "I have to admit, you would stand out in a crowd…"

"I am rather tall," she countered easily, shifting her position to stand with both hands upon the eagle head of her cane. "And to what do I owe the pleasure of your company, then, hmm?"

"Not just mine," Rhiannon replied chidingly. "Don't you go leaving my cute secretary all out in the cold like that~! It's rude."

Secretary…? Milly wondered, perplexed.

"She means me," spoke a voice higher than either of theirs—maybe even a few hairs higher than her wife's, even—from behind Milly, causing her to stiffen and curse internally. She'd grown so used to being in the presence of shinobi that perhaps it had atrophied her capacity to sense when she was being watched, a dangerous weakness for any member of Britannia's aristocratic class, let alone one directly connected to the Imperial Family as she was. She made a note to try to remedy that, and shifted a bit, to the point where she needed only to turn her head to see the aforementioned secretary, whose voice was about as clear as a bell. "It's a pleasure to finally meet you, your highness. I've heard so much about you."

"Most of it good, I hope," Milly replied as she took in the secretary—she was of average height, for a Britannian woman at least, with a figure that was almost like her Justine's, though the balance definitely leaned more heavily towards the voluptuous than the slender for her, while her wife's frame, in contrast, with its wiry concealed musculature, struck a near-ideal balance. The secretary's mouth was small, her lips full and lush, her face framed with a messy mop of chin-length dark blue hair, and her nose was a bit more prominent than that of Milly's princess, but only just; the heart shape of her face, the tilt of her mouth, the mild upturn of her eyes, and the fair hue of her flesh only further reinforced the unsettling non-resemblance to Milly's wife, and even without accounting for the seemingly baleful scarlet hue of the woman's eyes, she nonetheless gave off a sense of the predatory, the sinful, and the insidious. Her Justine was beautiful like the keen edge of a masterfully crafted, expertly-tempered blade; this woman was beautiful as temptation, and in that, there was something unmistakably carnal to the deceptive softness and delicacy that abided in all the places where her wife was stark and striking. "My apologies, I don't believe I caught your name."

"I didn't give it," the secretary replied, arching a brow of her own; then, she adjusted her jacket, and it became clear to Milly at once that perhaps the sole difference between the manner in which the two were attired, Rhiannon and her secretary, was the fact that the secretary saw fit to wear a white shirt beneath the professional black blazer. "There's no need to fish for it, your highness. I'll tell you outright, if you want to try asking directly."

Milly smiled thinly, while her irritation for this woman began to build. "And exactly what is your name, pray tell?"

"Amalia," the secretary replied, as a glint of wanton mirth danced in her eyes, for all that her affect otherwise remained every bit as professionally neutral as before. "Amalia Aeschlimann, personal assistant and chief secretary to Rhiannon Blackwood."

"A pleasure," Milly replied flatly, and she was already getting a sense of déjà vu regarding how her unexpected first meeting with the Blackwood woman had gone some months prior. There was a similar sort of uncertainty here, as if her instincts were subconsciously assessing whether the woman before her was a potential threat or an ally in the making, and she liked it even less the second time around than she had the very first, with the woman who was still sitting on top of her desk. "Miss Blackwood, I'd ask that you don't continue to sit upon my desk. It was expensive, you see, and it's not really intended to be sat upon."

"I can always fork over the cash for you to get a new one," she shrugged.

"Money is not the issue," Milly maintained. "The furniture I use every day was commissioned by an artisan who lives locally around here. The primary constraints to replacing it would therefore be time and opportunity instead of mere money, so unless you can 'fork over' that as well, I'm afraid I must ask you to find someplace else to sit."

"Fine," the immortal huffed petulantly as she slid off of the desk and onto her feet. "Spoilsport."

"I did warn you, Rhiannon," Amalia chided her, stepping well around Milly and going to stand near to the woman who was at least nominally her employer.

"Yes, yes, you were right, I was wrong," Rhiannon sighed, folding her arms across her chest. "Don't tell Tali. I'd never hear the end of it."

"And rightfully so," Amalia jabbed right back without so much as missing a beat. "Whoever heard of a Blackwood losing a bet, after all?"

"My apologies for interrupting," Milly interjected, not bothering in the slightest to try and make her apology sound at all genuine. "But I must assume you've called upon my office at this hour because you have matters in need of discussion. Now, my wife has informed me that she'll be meeting me here at around this time, and, while I mean no explicit offence to either of you, personally, I would very much prefer to spend as much of my limited free time with her as I'm able, so if you would kindly get to the point of your visit, I would be very much obliged indeed."

"…Right, then," Rhiannon said, clapping her hands together sharply. "To business. Tell me, are you at all familiar with the economic difficulties of reconstruction?"

This was…not the line of questioning she was expecting, she had to admit. She blinked, and replied, "I can't say that I am. Not in any particular detail, at any rate—though I'd wager that the processes of the post-war incorporation of annexed territories and Britannianisation are adjacent enough to that that I'll be able to follow along, should you see fit to explain your point further."

"Well, it's very simple, really," the Blackwood woman continued with a nod. "Or at least, I'll try my best to put it into simple terms. Essentially, Europia's found itself in quite a unique predicament in the half year, or very nearly, of its current post-war period—in the wake of Richtofen's ousting from the presidency at the behest of the Council of Forty, and the complete disgrace of his party, internal investigations into the wrongdoings of the so-called Weimar Coalition, though spurred by public pressure, have discovered that the former president's allies have engaged in a truly staggering amount of corruption. Funds that were marked by their Appropriations Committee for the financing of public works and infrastructure maintenance were, for the most part, embezzled for personal investments, and their defence spending, as well as their methods of raising quotas by empowering local criminal outfits to act as paramilitary organisations and intimidate a large portion of subsidised manufacturing has led to entire warehouses of supplies, whether they be medical or munitions, that can only truly be said to exist on paper. To the surprise of no one who is aware of the sort of rabble who had allied themselves with Richtofen's cause and his ideology, his administration's egregious mismanagement has created a situation wherein the E.U. lacks the resources to rebuild the Member-State of Spain, the foremost land-battlefield of their war against the Empire, and on account of the death toll that the war inflicted upon their population—estimates currently favour the figure of twenty million over the course of the past two years, though it's really more like twenty-two months all told, in terms of how long the war lasted—there's an entire generation that should be entering their work force right now that is instead buried in graveyards all across the Republic, if they're not to be found in indiscriminate bits littering battlefields from Andalusia to Asturias."

"To summarise the situation more succinctly," Amalia interjected, though from the look on the face of the Blackwood woman, it was less an interruption and more a simple matter of picking up the thread of the conversation. "The United Republic of Europia is currently headed for a major economic downturn, and they fundamentally lack the resources necessary to avert it."

"And what, exactly, am I made to make out of this?" Milly asked, very pointedly. She scoffed as she asked, "What, are you somehow of the mind that I should fund the reconstruction efforts with sakuradite exports? That I should endeavour to see that Ashford finances are invested so heavily into the recovering economic infrastructure of the E.U. that merely applying economic pressure is a crippling measure for the entire coalition, rendering them little more than a financial vassal state?"

Amalia and Rhiannon both blinked, seemingly dumbfounded, though it was Rhiannon who replied, "Yes, actually. Exactly that."

"Capital idea," said Milly, rolling her eyes. "And pray tell, exactly why would any industrial entity, let alone the Council of Forty, or even the Hemicycle broadly, ever think to place enough of their trust into any Britannian enterprise, let alone one helmed by a princess-consort of the realm, that I could think to get anywhere close to that level of influence, hmm?"

Both of them blinked once again. This time, it was Amalia who asked in a careful tone, "Are you at all familiar with the economic doctrine of capitalism, your highness?"

This time, it was Milly's turn to blink in confusion, and consult back through her memories of every historical topic her wife had told her about whenever Milly took the time to encourage her to talk her ear off about whatever it was that had taken her fancy—which was often. "Adam Smith, correct? On the Wealth of Nations? 'It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest?'"

"Yes, that one," said Amalia, nodding.

"And what's the relevance of that, precisely?" Milly asked in return. "Smith reportedly made it clear that neither health care, nor education, nor infrastructure ought to be privatised, so frankly, I don't quite see how the fact that his writings form the basis of the E.U.'s economic structure gives us any sort of 'in.'"

"In theory, yes, that's true," Rhiannon explained patiently. "The reality, however, is quite different. As a result of the shortcomings of the French Revolution, in particular the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the noble families who managed to escape the guillotine, as well as noble families in parts of Europe that didn't remain under the French Emperor's yoke, or never fell under it in the first place, particularly in Prussia and Sweden, and later Russia, essentially shifted their assets into the new system, and as a result, the protections outlined by Smith were never actually implemented. To this day, the E.U. has no centralised infrastructure for public health, and whether that's privatised or not depends on the member-state; more to the point, all of the reconstruction efforts would absolutely be undertaken by corporate entities acting as contractors to take the money of the republican government for building back and maintaining roads, bridges, rail lines, canals, and other public works. Further, they're enthralled by the collective myth of infinite economic growth as a direct result of an incentive structure entrenched by decades of deregulatory policies of austerity."

"They're incentivised to seek their own enrichment, and that of their investors," said Amalia. "It's a legal obligation, actually. 'Fiduciary responsibility,' they call it. This is all in very simple terms, of course, but the bottom line is, the fact that you're a Britannian princess-consort, your highness, matters only so long as you don't wave enough money in their faces. There are good reasons why the discontented citizens who backed the Weimar Coalition, as well as other radical groups, whether they're concerned with the collection of absolute authority in emulation of Britannia or Napoleon, or the economic and social liberation of their working class, have often derided Europia United's culture as being chiefly concerned with the worship of money."

"So…let me get this straight," Milly said, acutely appalled by what she was hearing. "Not only has an economic system designed to divest the old European nobility of their monopolistic control on finances failed so very horribly in implementation that it's given rise to a fresh oligarchic class, but also, that class is so thoroughly disconnected from their national interest that they'll accept foreign investment, even if it's to the direct detriment of the state of which they count themselves citizens? And these people are somehow the ones who get trusted to maintain critical infrastructure?"

"Essentially, yes," Amalia confirmed with a nod. "That exactly, in fact."

"…I'd ask how, precisely, the Empire hasn't managed to completely annihilate the E.U. yet, but then I remember that having land on this planet left to conquer is the only thing standing between Britannia and complete self-destruction," sighed Milly, removing a gloved hand from the head of her cane and running it through her hair. The gloves themselves amused her greatly—unlike her wife, she didn't feel anything close to naked without them on, which she did on account of her peculiar set of sensory issues, but the aesthetic sensibility seemed to have rubbed off on her regardless. "And sometimes, even that proves insufficient…"

Just then, one of the bookshelves closer to the doors, on the wall opposite the window-walls, parted with a barely-audible hiss of hidden hydraulic mechanisms, and through that secret entrance into her office came three people: Jeremiah, wearing his gold-trimmed all-black uniform, his white cravat immaculate and the ornate winged sword pin of his post diligently polished, worn with pride; a woman Milly hadn't had the pleasure of a private conversation with yet, and so didn't really know—Valerian Rowe, the Grand Master of the newly-formed Chivalric Order of the Raven, which was founded to account for all of the rank-and-file devicers under her Justine's command—but who was dressed in accordance with her new position: a tabard, black in colour, with stiffened and somewhat pronounced shoulders and calf-length tails, the whole garment decorated with gold trim and fastened closed to one side, all the way up to the high collar, over a black shirt with long sleeves, a pair of elbow-length black gloves with gold trim, black breeches that tucked neatly into knee-high black boots, themselves trimmed with gold around the pointed, knee-guarding cuff, a black leather belt from which hung a ceremonial sword, which seemed to be a modernised take on the tachi style that her wife so favoured; and overtop all of this, the officer who had so impressed her wife had fastened an ankle-length shoulder cape in the cavalier style, which was once again black with gold trim, but with a cord of gold fastening it together. If nothing else, the fact that the woman seemed to favour the colour as much as her Justine did was one that Milly couldn't help but find impressive, given how inflexible her wife's choice of colour palette was in the wake of a single off-hand comment that Friederike had once made.

Not that she was complaining. Her half-sister-in-law had absolutely been correct.

And naturally, in the lead was none other than her wife, who was so deeply and animatedly engaged in conversation with who was likely only her second-newest acquisition of talent (for whom the binding of her hair back into a low tail, fastened with a ribbon, seemed to work extraordinarily well) that, if Milly was any less absolutely certain was purely platonically and professionally motivated, would have pushed her to give some serious thought towards eliminating the threat the woman might have been perceived to pose. As it stood, Milly had already secured her claim to her wife in every way imaginable, and Sayoko had ventured to posit that the woman in question was incapable of romantic attraction from the first, the same way that a number of others were incapable of sexual attraction, so Milly didn't see the harm in letting this go without comment—there were so few people who could truly keep up and meaningfully converse with her princess once she truly got going, particularly when it came to subjects like military doctrine, that perhaps her desire to keep close to her coldblooded cavalry commander would do her some good.

And then Milly registered what her wife was wearing, and all that came to a halt.

Milly had experimented with wearing commoner clothes in the past—obviously—but she found that didn't exactly prepare her for the sight of her Justine in buckled black combat boots, sheer black stockings patterned with climbing swirls of briars, a pleated black miniskirt, a short-sleeved black shirt, and a black leather jacket over all of it. Her chin-length raven hair was styled the same as always, as were her eye-stain and eyeliner, but she'd eschewed her favoured shade of deep plum lipstick for a starker shade of solid black that, together with the rest of her attire (including fingerless gloves of black lace), shifted her appearance so very drastically that it was only due to her familiar carriage and the glint of silver and ruby about her throat that Milly had recognised her immediately at all.

Then, her wife turned her attention to Milly herself, and to the company she had in her office, and it caused her to draw up short, the dawning smile on her face turning slightly brittle. "Hello, darling. I see you have…company… I trust that it's nothing I need to be worried about?"

"Nothing of the sort, my love," Milly rushed to reassure her, hating that flicker of uncertainty in her princess's eyes, Marianne's filthy fingerprints upon her wife's soul. She gestured to the pair, and said, "This is Rhiannon Blackwood—one of Taliesin's sisters—and her secretary, Amalia Aeschlimann. They've come here unannounced to speak of business, nothing more."

"Well, I wouldn't say nothing more," Rhiannon drawled speculatively, as she took a prowling step closer to the three who had just entered, and it caused her Justine's expression to shutter, as she quite visibly locked down on her emotions. "But you can rest assured, your highness, that neither of us would ever think to proposition your darling without including you, as well…"

Sudden, perplexing visions of the three of them locked into carnal orbit about her wife, her Justine, in a tangle of sweaty limbs and pleasured exultations arrested Milly's mind, and dozens of fantasies she'd never had before played out against the backs of her eyelids with every blink. It was all that she could do to clench her jaw and return her hand to her cane, white-knuckling the gilded eagle design and being glad that she'd chosen a stronger metal than steel for this, because she could feel the gilding beginning to give under the strength of her hand and her fingers as they clenched against the temptation of the strange thoughts that the bewitching immortal and her gorgeous secretary had threaded into her mind; and she knew that, despite what it felt like, these were somehow her own thoughts (part of Izanami's training regimen for her had, in fact, concerned how best to tell the difference between one's own ideas and beliefs, and those implanted by the influence of Geass, for all that she had stressed that actually putting that knowledge into practise all but required a will so strong as to be wholly unassailable), which only made her feel further unsettled. It wasn't like she was her wife, who'd expressed that she was wholly unable to think about any but Milly herself in a sexual light—Milly very much had, in fact, felt significant sexual attraction towards and lust for the bodies of other women from time to time—but the intensity of the desire that that suggestion of the Blackwood's had sparked in her was…wholly unexpected, to say the least.

"We're flattered, but I'm afraid we'll sadly have to decline," her wife replied crisply, that same will of iron that Izanami had spoken of making itself known once again—because Milly could see that her wife was in fact as affected by this as she was herself, and the fact that that knowledge didn't immediately spark Milly's blood towards murder was actually more distressing than the ideations themselves. But none of that stopped her wife from leaving her previous position, crossing the room, and wrapping her arm around one of Milly's own, prying a hand off of the head of her cane and interweaving their fingers together. "In fact, as it happens, we have a fair bit of business of our own to discuss, Milly and I; shall we take a rain check on the remainder of this meeting, then?"

"Forgive the presumption, if you would," interjected Valerian, though the tone of the woman's voice very clearly indicated that, for all the humour of her demeanour, with the cutting little smirk on her face, the pleasantry was not in any way a request. "I take it that you're affiliated with the Ashfords, and thus indirect financiers of the 588th Irregulars?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes," said Amalia, and her tone, strangely enough, was that of grasping at the intervention as some manner of lifeline. "We of the BlackFrost Corporation can somewhat accurately be described as business partners of the Ashford Foundation, in particular the Imperial Branch of vi Britannia, albeit usually through a number of intermediary entities."

"Then if it's truly business you're here to discuss, that is a subject that would best be broached with Her Highness's retainer, the Baroness of Kai, Villetta Nu," Valerian informed them, folding her arms back behind her as she spoke, her chin raising ever-so-slightly. "I am preparing to depart for Headquarters myself in short order, with your highness's leave…"

"You have it," her wife replied without hesitation.

The dead-eyed woman nodded, and continued, "…and so I would consider it a privilege, really, to have you both accompany me to the construction site, so that the proper channels for this sort of thing may be consulted."

"We would love to," Amalia accepted with a nod that seemed equal parts eagerness and relief. "Both of us. Isn't that right, Rhiannon?"

Rhiannon, for her part, seemed not to be paying attention, and was instead ogling Milly's wife in her new attire; Milly kept expecting to feel the urge to rip this woman's head clean off of her shoulders (for all the good it would do her), to kill and maim and torment, but from that familiar part of her soul came only a deafening, utterly alien silence. "Mm. You've got her well-trained, Milly. Colour me impressed…"

"Rhiannon!" Amalia snapped, seemingly at her wits' end.

"What?!" Rhiannon half-whined, half-groaned.

"We have places to be!" the nominal secretary scolded her. "For Hell's sake, woman, at least try to keep it in your pants!"

"Yes, Mum," the immortal conceded with an aggrieved sigh. Then, she all but dragged her feet over to where Amalia had joined Valerian, who was already making her way to escort them down to the private bullet-line for their journey to the site of the still-under-construction headquarters in the city of Kōfu, three hours away; and, impressively, the woman in black and gold made a point to usher the Blackwood into the concealed passage first.

Amalia, for her part, hung back for a few moments, and flashed them an apologetic smile. "My most sincere apologies for Rhiannon being…well, Rhiannon. We'll be sure to take you up on that rain check, but I hope that neither of you will mind if next time, it's just me coming to meet with you."

"That would probably be for the best, yes," Milly sighed heavily, relaxing the tension that had built in her shoulders as her wife leaned into her even more closely.

Amalia nodded; the woman gave her Justine a quick up-and-down consideration, and smiled at her, adding, "And for what it's worth, that's a sharp outfit you've got there, your highness. Until next time."

And with that, they were gone.

Once the bookshelf closed behind them, and Milly was sure they weren't going to return, she turned her attention to her wife, and asked, "So, what inspired the change in wardrobe, my love?"

"Oh!" she exclaimed, as if surprised that Milly had thought to ask after it. She was very silly in that way, that for all her eidetic memory, she seemed to require constant reminders that Milly obsessed over her, that she loved her and wanted to know everything about her, down to the most inconsequential of moment to moment developments. "Well, Sayoko mentioned that you haven't been to see your man Majima in quite some time, and I've never actually had the time to go and see all that the 'other side' of Area Eleven has to offer the way you have, and so I figured that we might as well make an outing of it, take a night out on the town—you know, go on a date! The way commoners do. That's… That's alright, isn't it?"

Even after all the chaos that had just transpired a scant few moments ago, Milly found that she could still chuckle at the little quiver of uncertainty in her wife's voice at that last part—as if there was even the slightest possibility that Milly would refuse her, particularly on this, of all matters. "Yes, my love, it's quite alright. Let me go and get changed, and we'll venture out amongst the masses, hm?"

"Alright, then," her wife replied, though the sound of it was not unlike a sigh of relief. She smiled as their bodies parted, and folded her arms behind her as that smile broadened into a teasing grin. "Don't keep me waiting, darling~."

Milly couldn't help but grin in return at the slightly challenging lilt in her wife's voice; she reached out, and with one arm, she wrenched her love's body right back into hers by the waist, savouring the sudden shocked gasp out of her painted-black lips at the roughness of Milly's handling. In one swift motion, Milly then claimed her wife's lips, pouring all of her affection and passion and lust for this temptation of a woman into the demanding kiss, and when she released her wife, she beheld the dazed and intoxicated state that her lips always seemed to push upon the princess she loved so dearly with no shortage of self-satisfaction. She leaned down again to press their foreheads together, and her voice lowered to a purr as she spoke. "Believe me, I wouldn't dream of it."

Then, as quickly as they'd come together, Milly released her; and as her wife struggled to keep her footing amidst her daze, Milly left her office, and thought of what she'd like to wear as she headed back to the apartments they shared, grinning to herself all the way there.

Truly, all was right with her world.

---

After dark, Kamurochō became the portal to an entire new world, a surrealistic realm of sight and sound and touch, a bright and shamelessly gaudy monument to mankind's basest excesses; and while such had been just as true even shortly after Milly's first meeting with Majima Gorō, where the darkling sky yielded to bright lights and flashy tableaus, further years of reconstruction and wealth flowing into this part of the Settlement especially, glutting it with the spoils of the services it was only too happy to provide, had, as it happened, only served to heighten this effect further, to the point where the opulence of this district was so brilliant that it very nearly pained the eye to look upon. Yet, over the years, and over the course of her deepening familiarity with the incremental changes this part of her domain had undergone, she couldn't help but feel as though it had become a little too easy for her to lose sight of the forest for the trees, with all of the allure of novelty stripping away to the point where all she could perceive, now that she was aware of just how much some of these things cost, having been briefed on the most minute nuances of such things whenever Majima and his construction company sought her personal approval for their renovations, was an admittedly artful mundanity, utterly devoid of marvel and wonder.

This was very much not the case for her beautiful wife, however; and with her by her side, it was as if she was learning to look upon all of this with new eyes.

Her wife looked upon all the flashing lights and the bright, lurid sights that surrounded them with a wide-eyed sort of wonder that seemed adorably innocent on her—almost childlike, even; this way and that, she looked, as if trying to devour it all whole with her unblinking eyes, refraining from gawking only by the reflexes that growing up amongst the Britannian upper-crust had made so second-nature, so very ingrained in them that they couldn't relax them even when they were meant to be at rest. The evening chill was staved off in the heat of the lights and the press of bodies, weary souls seeking baser comforts for what ailed them, any of the manifold anxieties of existence, to the point where, even attired as she was, Milly had no worries that her wife might be suffering any of the downsides of the autumnal night weather—though she generally handled cold in particular extraordinarily well, so perhaps that was also a mitigating factor. Her hands clung to the sleeve of Milly's solid black three-piece power suit (for though she might well have liked a bit more variety of colour than her wife favoured, she'd found herself growing increasingly fond of wearing black as a basis even so) like a lifeline, the sleeve of her black calfskin jacket threaded securely through the crook of Milly's elbow beneath the calf-length black overcoat that Milly had draped about her shoulders, all drawing a contrast with the crimson shirt she wore half-unbuttoned underneath it all, thus leaving her own cleavage on display—after all, if her wife was going to dress so daringly, she thought (and given the venue that they were in the area to patronise, even if only as a pretence, it wasn't even an inappropriate choice), why should she willingly elect to maintain Britannian standards of public dress for highborn?

They threaded through the crowds while Milly drank in her Justine's fascination, navigating the full sidewalks and streets with practised ease, and though she remained semi-conscious of Sayoko and Jeremiah both maintaining a vigil over them at a considerate distance, it felt for all the world like they were alone in a world of faceless silhouettes, where none would prevail upon them, nor seek to come between or separate them, not ever again. A world without a vindictive emperor to send one of them off to die, without teeming masses of people and responsibilities to demand her wife's time and her attention, to ask her aid in finding solutions to their problems, to trigger that troublesome sense of obligation she seemed to feel towards all the victims of the world's manifold injustices, the downtrodden and the maligned. A world where nothing stood in the way of Milly claiming her wife, in body, mind, and soul, in their entirety and their perpetuity, claiming every moment of every day to keep her by her side and just be, to love and to make love in turn, in their time, day after day until the very end of days—a world for the two of them, and them alone.

It was, at the very least, a nice thought.

And yet even that came to a close, because there were only so many steps one could take until they came upon the finest establishment of its kind in all of Kamurochō, if not Area Eleven in its entirety; for its edifice loomed as a monolith, it seemed, above all its neighbouring establishments. The Cabaret Grand had more than earned its title over the years, consistently raking in quarterly revenue that, according to Sayoko, would have been considered to be staggeringly impressive even during the absolute height of the economic bubble of the Japanese 1980s, with the so-called Lord of the Night's shrewd management guiding the club to a level of grandeur that not even many similar well-known establishments back in the Homeland could match, and the thick throngs of people lined up for entry as the cabaret club opened for the night were something that she saw as an open tribute to that reality. And were they here to enjoy the experience, she would absolutely have waited in line with her wife for them to gain entry alongside the mixed crowd of Elevens, Honorary Britannians, and natural-born Britannians that populated the queue; but her Justine had made it clear that they were here for business as much as pleasure, a date in which she would get to see how Milly dealt with the underworld that she held in the palm of her hand more so than any performative tableau of feminine flesh, and so Milly bypassed the queue as she usually did, and headed straight for the bouncer guarding the door.

The man was tall for an Eleven, to the point where even Milly was shorter, if only slightly, and built broad and powerful, with a barrel chest draped liberally with mounds of bullish muscle that his suit couldn't hope to conceal, not in a thousand years. His hands were large and heavy, his fists like cinder-blocks, and his face could well have been chiselled from stone, for all she knew—his close-shorn black hair, seemingly perpetual grimace, and intense, aggressive dark eyebrows over his almond-shaped black eyes only added to his ponderous brutishness, but Milly knew from personal experience that that powerful build packed just as much speed as it did brute strength, and it had quite a bit to give in both respects. He was also a very smart man besides, and a decent conversationalist, if perhaps somewhat inelegantly blunt, but that was only to be expected, in Milly's opinion, from a man whose adolescent aspiration had been to become a primary school teacher in his adulthood.

"Saejima," Milly called out as she approached, her wife very much in tow.

"Higanbana-sama," Saejima Taiga replied with a curt, but respectful bow. Then, he turned to regard her princess upon her arm with a questioning expression—though it was only through knowing the man as she had come to that she could read that, given how his natural stoicism seemed to interfere with his ability to emote in as discrete a fashion as other people.

"My wife," Milly replied simply, giddily relishing in the fact that she could introduce her woman to others as that, regardless of the fact that they were coming upon the first anniversary of their wedding. "We were wed very nearly eleven months ago."

"Congratulations," he said, bowing again, and she knew by now that he meant it. "Are you here for business, or pleasure?"

"I suppose you could say a bit of both," Milly replied with a lopsided shrug. "Is he in this evening?"

"Yes, he is," Saejima nodded, gesturing towards the private doors with one of his large hands. "I'll make sure he knows that you're here to see him."

"I'd appreciate that," said Milly, smiling at the stern older man. "Please give Yasuko my regards."

"I'll let her know," said the man, with the barest hint of a smile on his face as Milly drew past him and into the VIP entrance of the Cabaret Grand, with her wide-eyed and curious love stepping in time with her, as Sayoko and Jeremiah, coming up from behind them, had their own conversation with Saejima before being allowed to follow in their shadow as they entered the luxurious interior of the wildly profitable venue, with its rich red carpets and expensive wood and opulent crystalline light fixtures.

As they walked, Milly leaned over and murmured into her wife's ear, "That was Saejima Taiga, one of the old Tōjō Clan's lieutenants, who's now serving directly under Majima in his outfit. Back when I was learning the ins and outs of the underground fighting circuit, he was regularly chosen as one of my sparring partners, and so we eventually became acquainted. He got involved with the yakuza in the seventies, for the sake of his sister Yasuko, who was in need of a kidney transplant at the time, but before that, he'd wanted to be a primary school teacher. He's one of the few people in this organisation I actually take the time to keep in touch with even outside of my business dealings with the Majima Clan."

"Were things truly so dire back then?" asked her Justine, her brow furrowed in antipathy. "He isn't that old, so he couldn't have been an adult when that happened—not that it would have been all that much better if he had been, of course; anyone being forced into a life of crime in order to finance a loved one's medical expenses is an indictment of any such society that allows for such naked desperation to fester under its governance, regardless of how old the person in question is…"

"He was younger than we are now, to hear him tell of it," said Milly, trying to recall the details that her own investigations into the state of things under the pre-war regime had gone. "But this would've been right after the military's failed attempt to reinstate the shogunate during the fifties and early sixties, so he'd hardly have been the only one to fall into such egregious cracks after that kind of societal upheaval. Though I will say, his story is hardly unique—even during the boom of the eighties, the recession of the nineties, the discovery of sakuradite and the subsequent resurgence of the Japanese Empire's economy, such tales were a dime a dozen."

Her wife looked troubled as she nodded in response; but before Milly could pull the thoughts from out of her pretty head, one of the girls working the reception desk rounded her post and approached them, a bow already in progress before either of them could react to her interruption. "Welcome to Cabaret Grand. May I take your coats?"

"Of course," Milly replied almost automatically, shrugging her overcoat off of her shoulders as she and her wife disentangled for a moment, so that Milly could properly handle the mass of fabric, and so that her Justine could similarly doff that admittedly quite fashionable black leather jacket, and then so that they could easily hand both outer garments to the woman, who seemed increasingly flustered at the sight of the two of them together. No sooner were both the coat and the jacket in the woman's possession than did Milly find her wife wrapping her arms around the sleeve of Milly's suit jacket all over again, and Milly would be lying if she contended that the rush she got from her wife clinging to her so readily, her day collar glittering in the warm light of the reception area, clear and unassailable proof that Milly had conquered and tamed such a fierce and beautiful creature as her princess, her wife, her Justine, was not intoxicating in itself—let alone in concert with the certain knowledge that the combination of her own beauty and the otherworldly allure of her woman was enough to draw gawking stares from all those around them. That others envied in abject futility that she possessed what they never would sent another thrill through her, but tonight, at least, she refused to dwell on that any more than she already had.

There was business to be done here, after all. Indulging her own vanity could come later, once they were once again in more pleasurable quarters.

Milly nodded to the girl sharply, and passed her by, while her wife clung to her arm, keeping in lock step with her as she navigated through this area of the building.

"It needs to end," her wife said suddenly, while there were no others within earshot. "It can end. If it doesn't, then there won't be much of a world left for us to live in…"

What…? "What do you mean, my love?"

"I know you think I'm doing too much," explained her Justine, not meeting her eyes. "I know that it seems like I aim too high, that my ambitions are too much, that…this calling of mine is some manifestation of Marianne's lingering influence, that I have some manner of…martyr complex. And while I won't try and deny that that might well be part of it, there's… There's more to it than that. And you've made it very clear that I'm not to hold my thoughts secret, that I'm to tell you everything—a-and I want to tell you, I want to be a good wife to you, but…I'll need you to listen, too."

So, that's what she was thinking about… "My love…"

"Please," she pleaded, looking up at her at last and meeting her eyes of her own volition; and Milly, thinking better of what she was about to say in light of that, let her jaw click shut, and nodded gently. "It's a thought that I've had recently, questions I've asked myself, trying to disentangle my motivations from one another, to determine which ones are actionable and which ones I really should just leave alone until at last I can excise them wholly…but while I'd love to do nothing more than to just…focus on us, for as much of a sliver of eternity as we wind up getting, I can't ignore that there's a whole world around us, filled with all manner of people, some whose lives were shaped by iniquity as Saejima's was, and others whose lives were warped by far greater injustices. And more than that, it's a world we have to live in. Does that make sense?"

"So far, at least," Milly conceded—and then she looked around at the area through which they were slowly moving, and reluctantly broached an adjacent subject. "But is this really the place that we should be having this conversation in?"

"…Perhaps not," she relented, nodding pensively. "But if I don't say it now, I don't know that it will ever be said, and it must be said…for both of our sakes…"

"Then by all means, say it," Milly decided, pulling them to a stop in this relatively vacant area, and taking both of her wife's hands firmly into her own. It was a balance that she struck, to be firm, rough, and sometimes even violent with the woman she loved, while always making it clear that the passion in her that drove her to such acts was born of the love she felt for her, because she knew well that her wife's head was full of doubts. Gentleness she would mistake for a perception of weakness, of burden and not of care; if she sought to be tender, her wife might interpret it as a deception, for sugar and pleasures are often employed to manufacture vulnerability before the blow was landed. To her wife, pain was honesty, deception fleeing before the truth. More than honesty, it was truth itself, that there were few pleasant truths of which she was able to conceive, and thus, when Milly showed her her love, she did not have to take care to withhold herself, to try to restrain herself—the marks that Milly left upon her body, and the collar around her throat, were the only ways that she could be convinced that Milly's affections were genuine. And so she did not take hold of her love's hands like they were delicate, like they were precious and must be protected, and instead with all the desire that she could place into an otherwise innocuous gesture, and the trust in her wife's strength that her woman so desperately needed. "Say it, my love, and I shall listen."

"Thank you, darling," she replied with a sigh of relief, and in that sigh, Milly was painfully aware of how much doubt, not in her, but in the world, and in herself perhaps most of all, still lingered, in spite of Milly's efforts to dispel it, to pull it out of her and destroy it wholesale, that it could torment her no longer. Her wife was hers to torment, damn it—hers to torment with adoration and desire, and hers alone. "My heart bleeds for them all, whether I wish for it to or not, and…and I have the power, we have the power, to fix it, if only we reach out and seize it. We could fix this system that creates men like Saejima, who desire to teach and to enlighten, but are forced to…to steal and kill and hate. But above all, darling, I am, at heart, a pragmatist; I would never have allowed my compassion alone to drive me to potentially ill-advised courses of action on their own. But this is a tipping point that we are approaching—and we are approaching it rapidly—where the inaction of our forebears leaves us to pay the butcher's bill… Let alone the world for a moment; when Britannia falls upon itself, our blood ensures that we'll be dragged into it whether we want to be or not. I'm not content to sit by and let it creep upon us to catch us unawares; and if the fate that I expect befalls all the world, then all will be strife and bloodshed wherever we go, and there'll be no more room for us, darling. I am humbled every day by your love, and I can only hope to be worthy of it—sometimes I fear I have given too little in return, only myself and all the love that my being is capable of, and sometimes I cannot help but to compare it to yours and find it wanting—and I don't want you to doubt, I don't want myself to doubt that I'm fully committed to us, above all else."

With that, she leaned up and pressed a kiss to Milly's lips, one of the vanishingly few she had ever herself initiated, and it was clumsy and awkward as a result of it, at least at first, until Milly took over, and once again she succumbed with all the ease in the world. When they separated, her wife locked eyes with Milly, and continued, "These things I do, I do for us, no less than for any other reason, and much more than a fair few. A-and I need you to know, to understand the terrible necessity of it…"

"I have never asked anything of you, my love, other than that you be mine," Milly reminded her softly.

"I'm trying," she swore emphatically, her grip tightening about Milly's hands. "A thousand monks aspiring to virtue every day, unerring, for a thousand thousand years, could not make up the barest fraction of the sum of my trying. But unless this is done, all of my efforts shall come to naught, I'm sure of it. Strife will not part us if I can help it, but…but what if we have children? What manner of world will we give unto them to inherit, where we must struggle so, to carve out enough space for us alone?"

Milly stiffened, every thought in her mind coming to a screeching halt. Where was this coming from all of a sudden…? She was fairly certain that she'd never hinted at wanting children before, for all that the field of seminal derivation had come a long way in even the time since the end of the Emblem of Blood, so the getting of progeny would not be nearly so difficult or complicated as it had historically proven to be, but it seemed that her wife had gotten the idea in her head regardless. And when she allowed that thought to do as it would, Milly found that it caused a seizure of desire deep in her core, the mental image of her princess, round with their child, so perhaps that was a thought that would warrant further consideration in the future, but when she dragged herself back to the present moment, all she could think to ask was, "…Children, my love? Even if we were to have any, that would still be a ways off…"

"With the magnitude of power that we wield, and that we could yet come to wield in the future, it is incumbent upon us to think that far ahead," she insisted, her tone impassioned. "And…yes, I can't deny that one day, I would like to bear your children, but that's… That's not the point I'm making right now."

"And what is the point that you're making?" Milly asked, her voice low and soft as she tried to coax the answer out of her brilliant, disastrous handful of a wife.

She sighed heavily enough that it rolled through her shoulders. "My point is. It must be someone, darling. And if not me—if not us—then who? Upon whom may we impose this burden—upon whom may I impose this burden—if I am not willing to shoulder it myself?"

Milly would never have pretended she had an answer to that question. Or at the very least, she had none more specific than 'anyone else.'

"And on a more basic level…" her wife continued, flicking her eyes back down at their conjoined hands as she confessed, "when I was younger, I used to dream of a better, kinder world, and then I felt as if that was burned out of me, ground down day by day, until only duty and obligation remained. But it was you, darling, who taught me what desire was, and how. You spoke, once, of scrubbing the last of Marianne's poison out of me. And…and I'd like to start by proving to myself that that girl who had hoped for a better world where people were kinder to one another isn't as dead as I'd always assumed…"

Damn it… Milly groaned internally. That wasn't something she could dissuade her wife from, and it got her all twisted up inside to know that one remark about the infidelity of thought had driven her wife to go this far to expunge Marianne's influence. How her Justine could think that her love wasn't enough, when it had motivated her to this extent, was fundamentally beyond Milly's ability to comprehend.

Still, they were standing inside Cabaret Grand, so Milly couldn't exactly resort to her usual methods of rewarding her love for being a good girl; so instead, she leaned in and kissed her wife on the forehead. "I think we ought to put a pin in this, just for the moment. Let's enjoy our evening together, and then, in the morning, we'll carve out some time to sit down and talk about how I can support you in this, okay?"

Her wife nodded in silence; and after a few moments, she said, "Thank you, darling. For listening."

"Even if I were deaf, I would learn to read your lips, my love," Milly professed, as she leaned down to press a kiss against her wife's mouth. When they broke it, she sighed, and said, "Now, I do believe that we have kept our good host waiting for quite long enough by now."

Her love nodded, her dopey smile in the wake of the kiss turning into a grin that was radiant as the full moon. "Then we'd best not tarry a moment longer."

"That we shan't," Milly agreed, chuckling; she turned back towards their original path, bending her arm and thrusting out her elbow, and her wife didn't hesitate to twine their arms together about the crook of the joint. "Shall we, my love?"

Her wife nodded, the grin subsiding back into a glowing smile as she bade Milly, "Lead the way."

Together, they left behind that vacant part of the building's VIP area, and in very little time at all, it was the general population of patrons that lay spread out ahead of them. But Milly had been here before, as the influx of people approached its peak hours, and so instead of taking her wife into the new crowd, just as soon as they'd cleared the threshold, she steered them to the left, up one of the guarded flights of stairs that led to her private area, where her business was conducted. Her wife's combat boots clomped upon the stairs as they ascended, echoed by Sayoko and Jeremiah climbing the steps behind them, maintaining a distance that kept them within their line of sight while remaining outside of earshot, and she nodded to the two men standing guard—neither of them had ever sparred with her before, and they were obviously fairly low in the rankings, wakashu at best, but probably just trustworthy shatei, so she'd never bothered to learn their names or even to remember what they looked like, beyond the general recollection of the fastidious silhouettes of their black suits—and breezed past them into the private area's balcony, right above the ground floor, where the stage dominated much of the otherwise intimately-furnished auditorium. Already, there were girls doing their opening number upon the stage as people continued to file in (they must have started into their routine while Milly and her wife were talking), and hostesses milled about the floor, attending to the desires of the male and female patrons in equal measure, while servers worked together with the master of ceremonies on the cabaret's floor to keep everything running smoothly. The Lord of the Night, naturally, was not attending to things personally, as he often preferred to do—and instead of the overflowing charismatic magnetism of Majima's stage persona, there was a sturdily-built Eleven man with coiffed black hair, an intense black stare that seemed to communicate an ambient level of displeasure, a seemingly perpetual frown engraved upon his face, and a set of strong, blocky features to fill out the portrait of Eleven machismo in a black tuxedo down there, who was himself currently on duty.

Milly couldn't say that she'd ever meaningfully interacted with the saiko-komon of the Majima Clan herself—she knew of Kiryū Kazuma largely by reputation, and by the proficiency of his singular student in the form of Kallen, but not the man himself, not directly—but the fact that Majima made a habit of putting the man in charge of the floor whenever he had to meet with her said a lot about how dependable the man in question found his old friend, so she didn't think too much of that ignorance, at least not right now. Instead, she turned away from the blaring of the music and the glamour of the stage, and instead plunged the two of them behind a set of thick curtains cordoning off their meeting place.

No sooner had they passed through the drapes than did she lay eyes upon her favourite sofa, as well as the number one man in her resurgent yakuza—though how long that organisation would remain as firmly in her grip as it currently was, and had been, was, as she was rather painfully aware, anyone's guess—who, she couldn't help but note, was also in a tuxedo of his own. That…immediately raised alarm bells in Milly's mind, not on account of anything going wrong, but rather because the only event that Majima Gorō would have dressed like that in order to hold, if not a night of the Cabaret Grand as the Lord of the Night, was beneath their feet, in the (very literally) underground fighting ring circuit. And while in the past, she'd used the ring as a way to keep her wits sharp, she was still training with Izanami on a semi-regular basis, which did more to satisfy that requirement than even a full week booked with nothing but gauntlet ladder matches would've ever been able to manage, so she didn't precisely feel inspired to end the night with a surprise return to the underground arena herself.

"Higanbana-sama! Sacchin! Hisashiburi da ze!" Majima greeted them bombastically, as Sayoko at last caught up to them, Jeremiah in tow. "And two new faces…"

"Hello to you as well, Majima," Milly replied, their familiarity with one another having been judged sufficient for her to eschew honorifics entirely while addressing the man, for all that Sayoko and he both insisted upon him observing the difference in their respective stations. Not that she was complaining—her wife might have found it troublesome, but Milly was more than content to work within the enforced observance of social strata as it currently existed. "Allow me to introduce my beautiful wife, Her Royal Highness Justine vi Britannia, Fourth Princess of the Realm, and her Knight of Honour, Lord Jeremiah, Margrave Gottwald."

"Yoroshiku onegaishimasu," her wife replied with a cordial nod of her head.

"…Well-met," Jeremiah decided upon after a moment's deliberation.

"Omedetō gozaimasu," Majima replied, bowing properly at the waist as he spoke. When he rose, he gestured to the sofa that Milly so favoured, and bade them, "C'mon, sit down, take a load off. Now, I know you two don't drink, Sacchin, Higanbana-sama, but can my people get your wife an' her guard somethin'?"

"I make a point about never drinking alcohol on an empty stomach, so, no," her wife replied without a moment's uncertainty, even as Milly began to coax her over to the plush sofa that she'd come to think of as something akin to a throne in its own right as she grew more familiar with the challenges of governance. She sat upon the plush cushions, and almost at once, her wife joined her, and cuddled up flush against her body, folding her legs upon the cushion as she leaned into Milly eagerly. "Though, Jeremiah and I will take tea or water, if you would be so kind…"

Majima nodded, throwing out a barely-there gesture that Milly was certain that someone had seen, and would then pass along to the wait staff, before settling into his own seat, while both of their bodyguards stood vigil over the meeting with one of the most legendary gangsters in the entire history of the yakuza.

The sofa was plush and comfortable, if a little gaudy with its crimson upholstery, and of course, the best part of it was wrapping her arm around her wife's waist, and holding her close, as Majima got himself warmed up; this parted-off section had its own lights, and with the crimson of the drapes especially, it cast a warm glow about the space in which they met, with a low end-table made from old, dark wood, stationed between them and Majima, acting as a central point of the area by means of the sharp contrast it drew. More than one troublemaker had met his end at that table, on the rare occasion that Milly had to exercise the more overarching powers of her Higanbana persona—she recalled that sometimes, for theatricality's sake, she'd ordered that a wakizashi be left upon the table and the trouble-maker brought into the space with her, where hers was the only seat left to remain. It made the message clear, and those who bore witness to it spread her reputation through recounting and rumour, thus further cementing the legitimacy of the iron grip she held upon the organisation as a whole, that even Majima, officially the oyabun, the uppermost head of the clan in its entirety, deferred to her, in a language that even the greenest of the shatei understood.

"It's been too long since I've checked up on things here," she began, though she well-knew, even as the words left her mouth, that that was something of an understatement. "But I'm pleased to see that you've not managed to bungle everything we've built in the year in which I've left you to your own devices. What, then, have you to say for yourself, Majima?"

Majima was as unruffled as she'd expected him to be, as he leaned back and splayed his own body across his armchair, the Lord of the Night melting away to reveal the carefree quasi-mania held just beneath the surface, so much so that she half-expected for the tuxedo to transmute into snakeskin and leather. "Kept our noses clean. Had a few of our boys helping out at understaffed restaurants and small businesses. Given our new role in Area Eleven, Kiryū's been suggestin' ways for them to build up a sense of community spirit. He's good for that sorta thing, Kiryū-chan. Opened a few nightclubs and izakaya, bought a whole bunch more—we've been pushin' out a few snot-nosed small-timers what thought that they could get away with runnin' protection rackets in Osaka, thinkin' we went and got ourselves soft since the war and we've been rackin' up a fair few acquisitions and new businesses in the area in the meantime, to the point where we've pretty much got the docks in our hands already, and we're pushin' inland from there, cuttin' out the opium dealers as we go. Business is flourishin', ya see, and we're on track to have the powder out of the whole Area in no time at all. Though we did note an uptick in how much volume we got into movin' earlier this year, midway through Q1, and it hasn't died down since."

"I've been forming some inroads with the Syndicate since around that time," Milly explained, as she all but waved off Majima's ignorance of her dealings. "So it doesn't really surprise me that their leadership has elected to help you move the merchandise."

The merchandise in question, of course, being a portion of Area Eleven's quarterly output of refined sakuradite, which she kept off of the ledgers given to the Imperial Exchequer (though she made certain that she kept Friederike 'in the loop,' so to speak, on the actual figures, because the surest way to make sure that any secret you intended to keep was blown wide-open in the least convenient way possible was to fail to let her know about that secret preemptively), and which existed for the sole purpose of selling it to any number of interested parties through the global black market. It kept the yakuza under her control, for she had long since allowed them to take a hefty portion of the sums the material fetched as an agreed-upon commission, and it also let her maintain a stranglehold on the global sakuradite trade, even through illicit channels, thus undercutting her competitors, even in enemy nations. She almost made more off of pumping sakuradite into the E.U. illegally, circumventing the wartime embargo, than she now stood to gross by supplying the Euros with the resource over the table; but then, doing it through official channels had its own benefits.

What she was doing over the table wasn't technically considered to be treason, for one.

"You're seein' other outfits? I'm hurt," Majima japed.

She snorted derisively all the same. "Believe me, Majima, you're in no danger of being replaced. While you don't have the reach of the Syndicate, I sincerely doubt that the Syndicate's enforcers have much in the way of 'community spirit,' as you've so eloquently put it."

"Ha! Damned right," he crowed, leaning his head back against the armchair as he did. "But, if we're bein' all serious-like, you're right about them havin' a reach we can't match. Just hope they don't go bitin' ya in the ass."

I hope the same of you, Milly thought but didn't say. She was sure that neither Majima nor men like Saejima would turn on her, or even think to bite the hand that fed them; but her meetings with Arsène Lupin had sharpened her awareness regarding the kind of organisation the yakuza was at its core, and the levels of foolishness to which they could be pushed in the grips of ill-advised ambition and rampant greed. What she said instead was, "I have it on good authority that they won't. And you'll just have to take my word on that, I'm afraid."

"You've treated us honourably so far," he shrugged with a broad, toothy grin. "If you were gonna fuck us over, you'd have done so already."

"True enough," she chuckled, herself, shaking her head. "Though I'll remind you that you said that, next time we're playing mahjong and you've accused me of hiding tiles."

He scowled, but insincerely, and transparently so. "Y'know, speakin' of sportin' contests, the ring's been missin' ya. You've probably guessed, but there's a ladder match happenin' tonight down below. If ya wanna get back into it, throw your weight around, I can get ya booked in in a hurry. The gamblers're gettin' a bit cocky about their chances, and you appearin' to pull an upset would go a long way to remindin' them of Rule One…"

"And what's Rule One, precisely?" her love asked, the avian tilt of her head signalling her curiosity as clear as day.

Milly knew what Majima was going to say already, of course—it was an answer that he had taken a personal interest in seeing beaten into her head—so it was in unison that she and he both proclaimed, "That the House always wins!"

"I see…" her wife replied, her eyes wide and owlish as she blinked, and then subsided into thought as she laid her head back against Milly's padded shoulder. And before Milly could figure out how she could best let the man who'd taught her how to play to a crowd in the ring down easy, her wife continued, "A ring down below, you mentioned? Like, a fighting ring?"

"Higanbana-sama's our reignin' champion," Majima bragged, with genuine pride in his voice.

"Maybe some other time," Milly interjected, knowing herself and her wife well enough to know that if she didn't, she was likely to get talked into it, regardless of whatever matters of business she actually did need to discuss. Not to mention, she'd already gone through her workout earlier today, and doubling up was not the sort of thing she wanted to indulge in, not if she wanted to be able to perform to her usual standards when they got back home. So instead of allowing that temptation to rear its ugly head, she pivoted, albeit a bit sharply, to the most recent developments. "For now, I need to know, Majima: is it at all possible for your organisation to expand its operations beyond the currently extant borders of Area Eleven to the surrounding provinces?"

Majima frowned as he closed his single eye, and his brow furrowed as he mulled over her question, assessing half a hundred facts and figures, weighing another dozen disparate and contradictory factors, and after a few moments, his chestnut brown eye flashed open, locking with her pair of diamond blues before he replied, "Not impossible. Doable, but difficult. We'd be stretchin' ourselves plenty fuckin' thin just tryin' to get ourselves a foot in the door. We Elevens ain't exactly all that popular amongst the other Numbers in this part of the world, if ya haven't exactly noticed. Particularly the Sixteens, I gotta say…"

"You and your organisation will be amply compensated, and supplied with any of the resources you might need to make this possible," Milly assured him, and she meant it. Though part of her goal was to split the yakuza's attention across the west Pacific, such that only Majima himself, albeit with Kiryū's help, had so much as a prayer of keeping the organisation together, thus pre-emptively hampering any opportunistic ne'er-do-wells (and just when, exactly, had that term wandered its way into her vocabulary, she wondered?) should they attempt to usurp control from the men in whom she'd entrusted the authority to oversee it under her sanctioned jurisdiction, that didn't mean she was going to make the mistake of denying them any of the backing necessary for them to succeed at the task she required of them. "As for opening the doors, I'll have to ask you to leave that to me…"

"Oho~? What're ya plannin'?" Majima asked, leaning forward from the equally crimson upholstery of his armchair in obvious intrigue, interlocking his fingers together as he folded his hands in his lap.

"Oh, nothing much," she teased with a shrug, as she leaned her head over to nuzzle it against the top of her wife's, smirking all the way through. "I just had the most interesting meeting with the viceroys of the neighbouring provinces earlier today, and it seems we're soon to be on the hook to deliver some rather large quantities of refined sakuradite and sakuradite-based civil infrastructure around to Areas Ten, Twelve, and Fourteen through Seventeen, to rescue them from their socioeconomic woes, at the low, low price of around as many of their Numbers as they feel like they'd get a benefit out of exiling onto our welcoming shores."

"So…you're trafficking them…?" the mobster inquired, suddenly quite wary—rightfully so, at that, so it wasn't as if she was offended. If she was any other Britannian viceroy, she wagered she'd have proved whatever his darkest thoughts might be regarding what she would do with these displaced Numbers to have fallen a fair bit short of the mark.

But, thankfully for him, he was dealing with her and her wife, and them alone.

"You can be quite certain that it's nothing of the sort," she reassured him airily. "They will be trying to traffic their subjects; but once they reach our shores, I mean to ensure that they receive all the rights and liberties I've personally seen fit to bestow upon the Elevens, such that they will be, in an administrative and bureaucratic sense, Elevens themselves—by the end of the process, our new arrivals will, in fact, be all but indistinguishable from you or Kiryū in that regard."

"And to what end?" he pressed, visibly relaxing quite a bit, but still wary.

"Resolving the oncoming baby-bust without a significant hit to our bottom line, or other undesirable knock-on effects, chiefly," Milly responded with a performatively-flippant shrug. Truthfully, Milly watched Majima's reaction very closely, seeking out any hint that she was wrong to trust him, that he would seek to undermine her on this, that he held some level of nativist or xenophobic sentiment that would be the final straw that broke the camel's back on his loyalty to her. But thankfully, he gave her no indication of that, no matter how closely she looked, and one look in Sayoko's direction confirmed that her fears were unfounded at the moment, though they'd certainly remain vigilant moving forward. "The corporate culture popularised by your previous government dealt quite the blow to your numbers in that regard, and this ought to do quite a bit to alleviate the trends they put into motion with their various shortcomings, shall we call them? We've quite enough space and resources besides to sustain the sorts of social programs that the rapid increase with regards to immigration that we're seeking to engineer will demand for the sake of proper integration, and in time, with any luck, we'll have avoided the worst of the population squeeze that would otherwise cause us a fair number of problems."

"Mm-hmm. And I'm sure the huge-ass complex y'all're buildin' in Kōfu had fuck-all to do with it," Majima asserted sceptically.

"While I won't prohibit the migrant Numbers from enlisting with the 588th, whether that be in the Dread Legion, the Raven Knights, or other unformed branches besides, and I would indeed be overjoyed to have them, should they believe that enlistment with my forces is in fact the best way for them to develop their aptitudes and to further their interests besides," her Justine chimed in, her tone polite but firm. "Allow me to make one thing exceptionally clear: I am neither in the business of fielding penal cohorts, nor am I in any way in the business of conscription. While properly staffing the ranks is, of course, a concern of ours, it would be quite abhorrent for us to pressure our prospective new subjects into such dangerous commitments and occupations, whether that be through direct action or indirect coercion on our part. When they arrive here on our shores, they shall all be looked after properly, I can assure you."

"…Well, you've always been as good as your word so far, ojō-chan, so I guess I'll just have to trust ya," Majima relented with a heavy sigh. "Should've said it earlier, but this's a different fuckin' world than when we were comin' up… Got kids out here buildin' empires right in our backyard…"

"With respect, Majima," Milly said, as gently as she could. "This isn't a different world at all, not in the slightest. This is just Britannia—Britannia, as it has always been."

After that, Majima grumbled his displeasure, and he would say no more.

---

The passage of several months' worth of construction had done a great deal to reshape the skyline of the city of Kōfu, which was still undergoing its own process of re-urbanisation—Milly having had to make the restoration of the bombed-out shell that was the Greater Tokyo Area and its extensive reshaping into what now constituted the expansive bounds of the Tokyo Settlement a priority, at least at first, leading to a number of large waves of migrants leaving behind their ravaged home cities, either for the rural areas of the countryside, or for the offerings of government housing and civilian stipends in the Tokyo Settlement—now beginning to orient itself around the construction of the massive complex that was to be the headquarters of the 588th Irregulars, split as it was between the Dread Legion and the Raven Knights. The central buildings of the complex (which her wife had apparently found the time at some point to draw out herself in extensive detail between the pages that also held notes for prospective Knightmare Frames and other bits of assorted brilliance), had already been largely finished, and their current state of functionality allowed for the new baroness to direct the construction efforts directly from her own offices, as well as the resettlement, as those in the countryside rushed back to the city in search of work, which they found in abundance as the need for bureaucratic processes and the miscellany of living in the area continued to create demand.

Training had already begun on the grounds, for all that only some of the dormitories reserved for the auxilia (which was the title given to all the legionaries-to-be, one they would bear for the duration of their year-long cycle of training) were complete enough to serve as adequate housing, thus requiring many of the newcomers to spread themselves out in pre-built residential camps that would be dismantled progressively as the headquarters was built up, and from the crack of dawn all the way to nightfall, if not beyond, all over the compound, the campus was teeming with recruits going about their duties, whether that meant gruelling courses of conditioning, firearm drills, or even simply masses of auxilia going from one building to the next as they sat in classrooms detailing the maintenance and operation of their equipment, basic military doctrine and battle tactics, and an assortment of what seemed at first blush to be more mundane subjects, such as the sciences, mathematics, the humanities, et cetera, though all were bent towards the combined vision of those who concerned themselves with what manner of soldier they wished to command—namely, her wife, both of her wife's current generals, and the tactician power couple of Yennefer Desrosiers and Sif Blaiddyd, with a great deal of input from both Suzaku, and, surprisingly, Izanami, who seemed to have taken an interest in the broader instruction of combat, to the point where she was often the chief contributor to what they settled upon as the curricula for arms training in the end.

But in spite of that, even the most dutiful of her wife's soldiers knew better than to go near the arena where Milly and their head instructor—Izanami herself—were hanging out.

Milly didn't quibble too much over the potential obstruction—there were several such fields already built to serve the same purpose, after all, and really, she could tell that as much as her friend was surprising herself at how much satisfaction she derived from instruction, it was still a stressful enough proposition that she needed these releases quite desperately. Milly could certainly relate, and as a result, they'd made a point to seek each other out like this, because they were both in search of the same thing—a release of stress and tension entirely dissimilar to that which their lady loves could provide. Because while certainly, Milly loved and adored her wife, just as Izanami loved and adored her very first student, Suzaku, in her own way, both of their significant others would probably have been the first to admit that seeking out the company of those they considered friends was also of critical importance.

It was midmorning, and the weakening sun shone down upon the dark tile of the training area while the two friends, both women in love, studied each other across the way. Milly adjusted her grip on the haft of her double-bladed axe as she kept a sharp-eyed watch on the footwork of the woman on the other side of the ring, the twinned backswords she wielded held low with a casual carriage that didn't fool Milly one bit. Izanami, or 'Mireya', as those who knew her as Milly's friend or their instructor called her, was exceedingly fond of the Fool's Guard, and had over the course of her incomprehensibly long life devised dozens, if not hundreds of ways to integrate its functionality into a significant chunk of her combat methodology, and Milly had come to develop an eye for when she was at her tricks again, after having run afoul of her chicanery one too many times in the past. She knew by now when her friend was trying to bait an impulsive reaction out of her.

The reality of the matter was that Milly derived only moderately less pleasure out of sparring with her friend than her friend did, and that was due chiefly, in her mind, to both Izanami and Suzaku seeming to see a duel as not merely analogous to a sexual encounter, but an outright replacement for it. While Milly, in all honesty, didn't exactly see herself as being in danger of getting her rocks off simply by fighting, though, there was a pleasure all its own to be found in challenging Izanami, someone who could push her out of her comfortable rut, whose sheer prowess motivated her to infuse the seething rage that was her perennial and constant companion, either a set of stoked embers deep in her heart or a spitting flow of magma that seemed to bubble up and roil under her skin when she was truly, actively angry, into each serious swing of her axe.

It was gratifying, also, to see her friend shed more and more of the untouchable, prickly persona that was Izanami by the day, to the point where she probably heard the name 'Mireya' more often these days; as she re-integrated with humanity, with Milly and with her younger lover and with the whole crop of recruits she was whipping into proper shape, it was as if the weariness of immortality began to sluice from her flesh as her hunger for battle, ever-present but historically rather subdued, began to sharpen and flourish with the ongoing renewal of her spirit, to the point where she was pulling from her extensive collection of weapons from across history much more frequently than she once did—last time, she'd wielded a single Chinese jian instead of any of her paired options, or even the tachi she'd once favoured, against Milly's axe, and while it had ultimately ended in Izanami's victory even still, Milly could tell that her friend was enjoying herself nonetheless.

This shift had affected how she presented herself, as well: gone was the death-white garb of all that time she'd spent teaching her Justine and Suzaku to tell one end of a sword from the other, and gone as well was the antiquated, though still technically appropriate, ensemble she'd worn over the duration of their stay in the Britannian Homeland. In its place, she seemed to have fully adopted the service uniform designed for the legionaries—she wore black trousers that tucked into knee-high black boots, shaped with segmented matte black plates of armour, and though she wasn't wearing the black gloves that technically went with the uniform, the black jacket with its silvery gunmetal pauldrons and the matte black armoured vambraces that were meant to be strapped to the back of her forearm, where they could catch a stray blade or bullet, perhaps, both having been eschewed at the beginning of their bout, she'd kept the high-necked sleeveless black shirt that was meant to go under it very firmly on, though it was the version made with lightweight fabric for warmer climes that she'd chosen to wear, instead of the sturdier winter version—with some of her Justine's aesthetic influence proving itself apparent in how she'd seen fit to cut her bone-white hair into the same chin-length style, which she now sported proudly alongside her natural deathly pallor.

In that, if nothing else, the continuing association of that Hekmatyar woman with their group proved a boon: for if an assuredly mortal woman could look that pale with bright blue eyes, then it removed a large obstacle in presenting Izanami's colouration as odd, but not wholly unique in a way that would raise any of the wrong sorts of suspicions.

The lean, powerful musculature of the immortal's bare arms flexed and tensed in anticipation as the two of them took each other's measure, Milly's black trainers treading upon the ground as she steadied her stance in her black compression pants, and her breathing was even and steady, aware as she was of the rise and fall of her chest beneath the breathable fabric of her own crimson (she really should look into branching out into other shades of red, because this was getting a bit ridiculous) tank top, her blonde hair having been tied back into a high tail to keep it from dripping sweat into her eyes, and to keep it from resting too heavily upon the nape of her neck, fingerless black leather gloves covering her hands and protecting her knuckles as best the metal plates inserted into them could. After all, they were using live steel, and while Izanami could regenerate from anything Milly could inflict, and she could heal Milly's wounds besides, Milly didn't want to chance it any more than she absolutely had to.

Being reactive and springing into action off of her back foot had never been Milly's style; there was something about her nature that made her impetuous, more akin to Suzaku than her wife in that regard, and so it was she that took the initiative at last, availing herself of the fact that the second blade on her axe gave it the more centred balance of a double-edged sword as she took a step forth and twisted into the advance, a testing swing of her two-handed battleaxe striking to force a reaction out of her opponent.

The slender profile of Izanami's scimitar seemed to have no trouble fending off such a blow, and she deflected it almost teasingly, the corner of her pale mouth pulling up into a goading smirk, saying without a syllable of speech that she knew Milly could do better than that.

And you know what? Milly agreed with that assessment wholeheartedly.

She didn't retreat or reassess. She took hold of that impetuous impulse inside of her and ran with it, swinging again and again, each hew controlled and with excellent form, but no less ferocious for it. Both of Izanami's weapons would have been a nightmare on their own, and when she wielded both of them together to form an impenetrable hurricane of sharp metal, Milly's skill had always proven insufficient for her to try to break through properly—though the memory of her wife deftly deflecting each blow as they came at her faster and faster during one of their first bouts after her return from Area Six was a stark one, and not only on account of the fact that it had been the first time her wife had actually managed to defeat her teacher in a duel—so the key, she figured, was simply not to allow Izanami the space to erect her net of cutting steel.

Thus, she went on the attack, the clash and clang of metal as true and false edge alike failed to catch the immortal out of the shimmering dance of her whirling scimitars ringing out across their arena, though Milly struck with such ferocity and speed, chaining each failed blow into the next, minding her footing while striking with the momentum of her body with each hew, that Izanami was forced to gain speed, her blades flashing faster and faster even as she began to give ground; encouraged, Milly dug deeply into herself, and fed her smouldering anger fuel before channelling it through her body, the surging rush racing through her blood, sparking from synapse to synapse in a thunderstorm above a rushing river of flame beneath her skin. It caused her flesh to prickle, and her every sense to sharpen, her mind to work faster as the rage overflowed its banks, flooding her mind in a chaotic torrent until she was so submerged in it that a submarine sort of calm prevailed upon her thereafter, making it easier to focus, to act and react.

She could not replicate Suzaku's power, certainly—nothing of the sort—but she knew this rage, and it served at her command, needing not the providence of the Power of the King to lend its fury to the gale of her axe, the keening howl stirred by the weapon's heady passage.

A high hew hit crossed blades; seizing the opportunity, she twisted and pulled the lock forth, closing in to check Izanami in the chest, but the immortal rolled with the impact and disengaged from it, evading the uppercut that Milly shifted into. The biting point and cutting edge of one scimitar shot at her while she reeled, but the blunt butt-cap of her haft fended off the initial riposte, and she swung hard into the weakened side, heedless of the other blade as it struck for her—she could take the hit, if it let her land one in return.

And land it did, the biting edge of her own axe sinking deep into her opponent's bicep, even as the scimitar carved its due out of her ribs, causing Milly to grunt against the pain as the sharp edge skittered off of the sensitive bone. Her wife's claws did not cut as deep as usual against the flesh of her back, but it was a pain she was familiar with nonetheless, for all that this was arguably a more intense version of it, so while taking the hit certainly hurt, it didn't hurt so badly that she couldn't work through it.

If a little of her own blood upon their bedsheets didn't make Milly call it quits during sex, then why would her blood on the arena tile during a sparring match be any different?

Izanami pulled away regardless, the blood from the wound Milly had inflicted upon her all flowing back into the open flesh, cut through to the bone, as the injury stitched itself back together. Milly's undying friend looked her over and nodded approvingly. "An even trade. You've improved a great deal since the last time we sparred like this. I'm impressed."

"I'm glad," she quipped, remaining on guard as she spoke—you dropped your guard while sparring with Izanami only after she'd sheathed her weapons, and before that, you did so at your own peril. "What's it now, half-speed?"

Izanami threw her head to the side in an equivocating gesture. "You managed to push me a bit closer to two-thirds there, if I'm being honest. It's still an impressive feat regardless."

Milly chuckled, changing her stance, and her guard with it. "Oh, I'm well-aware of that…"

"If you think I'm formidable," Izanami offered with a half-shrug. "Even my skill with the blade falls far short of my sister's. I haven't been able to win a single bout against her since we were children, so don't you go and start getting hasty about laying laurels at my feet."

"This is the first I've heard you mention having any siblings at all," Milly remarked, throwing her ponytail back over her shoulder as she did.

"And if it was my sister here, teaching you, I daresay right now is when you'd be hearing of me for the first time, as well," Izanami shot back with a mirthful smirk. "We're not really in the habit of talking to others about each other."

"Oh?" Milly inquired, taking one hand off of the haft of the axe to wring out her wrist and palm, as well as the muscles therein. "Why's that?"

"Mm. Some bad blood and prolonged sibling rivalry early on that led to us leading entirely separate lives from one another," Izanami shrugged, this time with both shoulders. She returned both scimitars to her belt, giving Milly the signal that it was alright for her to drop her guard, which she did, only for a wave of fatigue to sweep over her, thus causing her to sag in place, and only partly on account of the exertion of the sparring match. "If we ever ran into each other, my twin and I, you can be sure it was always by accident. Though that hasn't happened in nearly three millennia by now, so I suppose we've both gotten a little better at staying out of each other's way… But enough about that. What do you say I patch you up, and we go for a new bout at a higher speed, hmm?"

"Yes to the patch-up, at least," Milly chuckled, rolling the soreness out of her shoulders. "As for the next bout, we'll see where we are when I'm working with a full supply of blood."

Izanami chuckled, and then drew closer, pulling a tantō from a concealed scabbard at the small of her back and slashing her own palm open, so that the too-dark blood that flowed through her veins could well forth at her command. "Absolutely fair enough. Lift up your shirt, if you would."

Milly chuckled, propping the axe up by her leg so that she could lift her shirt, letting her friend have a clear shot at the wound as she poured her nearly-black blood into it with an incantation of twisting words, none of which Milly had come to recognise in the slightest, even after all the time both women, mortal and immortal, had spent in each other's orbit by this point. She would have chalked it up to an assumption that the words were in a language thousands of years dead, if not for the odd nagging sensation in her mind that hearing them always seemed to trigger, like a smell or a song outlining part of the shape of a lost memory, a thing that on some level, she felt like she should remember, for all that she couldn't for the life of her. It was not the intense irritation of a word lingering upon the tip of one's tongue, but rather a lesser form of it, and a more persistent one, for all that it lacked in sheer momentary potency. So, to take her mind off of it once the wound had been mended, and the cut in Izanami's hand sealed itself back up all the same, Milly dropped her shirt back into place, and remarked, "You know, you've changed quite a bit, Izanami. In the past eleven months alone, you've almost become a different person entirely…"

"And why shouldn't I?" she challenged, raising a bone-white eyebrow as she rose back to her feet in full. "It's the nature of all living things, mortal or no, to change and grow. Why should I be any different?"

"While that's true," Milly conceded, stretching her torso back and forth to test out the new flesh that had bound the wound, and the fresh blood that now flowed through her veins, "That also wasn't what I was getting at."

"No, what you were getting at was asking me why my words when I heal you sound like they ought to make sense when they don't," Izanami stated bluntly, as she drew away, back to her previous position in the square ring, picking up the discarded parts of the legionary uniform and donning them once again. "You were just trying to distract yourself from actually asking it, because you know I can't tell you—or at least, I'm not at liberty to do so."

Milly sighed, rolling her eyes and cocking her freshly-healed hip in exasperation on two fronts. "I hope you know that two things can be true at once."

"Certainly," Izanami conceded with a sagely nod. "And as far as me changing goes, I suppose I was just finally given enough of an impetus to do so. Suzaku's lovely, but if I asked it of her, she'd be content to retire with me to a hermitage, where we could keep each other's skills sharp to our hearts' content; she's not the sort of person who was going to drag me kicking and screaming into the modern age. That much, I must admit, comes from you and your wife both—though from you more so than from her; she reminds me too much of someone I used to know fairly well for it to truly be modernity that she would have managed to drag me into. As for the second truth, I daresay that'll be taken care of in short order."

Milly was about to tell Izanami that she wasn't sure what the immortal meant, exactly, but it was at that precise moment that Izanami's cover story herself, and her entourage of seven killers, pranced into the vicinity with a comically broad grin and an exclamation of, "Hi hi! Sorry we're la~ate!"

Milly suppressed a groan, forcing herself from her 'hanging out' headspace and back into her 'play nice' mode as she turned to regard the team of newcomers. She didn't hate Koko Hekmatyar—really, Milly could count the number of times she'd actually met with the woman face-to-face on one hand with fingers left over, and that was far too small a timetable to develop anything akin to hatred, even for her (though she made an exception for extraordinary circumstances, which was a bar the ashen twig of a woman still failed to meet)—but even so, the arms manufacturing heiress-turned-magnate's overly exuberant antics during the few meetings that they had had together made her a trial to deal with. The simple process of existing around someone with that much pep and willful childishness to spare was unbelievably draining on its own. But, it was important that she make nice all the same—Koko Hekmatyar was, unfortunately, entirely too valuable an ally for Milly to risk alienating.

So instead, she braced herself to play the game, turning to the woman and her bodyguards fully and turning on the charm. "Miss Hekmatyar. Quelle surprise. A pleasure, as always."

"Glad to hear it, your highness," the pale woman replied, taking her own stance with arms akimbo, a figure dressed all in white (in particular, that long white coat of hers, with the outlandishly overt fur collar) amidst the sea of darker colours that characterised the neo-Gothic sensibilities that had informed the way in which her wife had designed this complex, which Villetta, to her credit, had in fact worked day and night to see fully realised. "You've met my main bodyguard, Valmet. This is the rest of them! Blondie with the scar is Lutz, formerly of the German State Army, 82nd Prussian; tall guy who looks like he wasn't fed as a child is Mao, formerly of the Red Army, 401st Xinjiang; big beefy guy with the haircut is Ugo, who used to run with the Sicilians back in the Old Country; Wiley over here is former Imperial Army, 208th Regiment of Foot; Lehm here's been with the family for years by now, so he's officially one of the old hands; and last, but certainly not least, we've got Tōjō here, who is formerly of the Imperial Japanese government's Bureau of Military Intelligence. So he's clean."

"This is Mireya," Milly replied, and though she was admittedly grasping at straws just a bit, she was far too well-trained in this branch of etiquette to let on that she had any but the utmost confidence in what it was she was doing here. "As the Legion's head combat instructor, she organises the curricula on everything from arms training and conditioning to small unit tactical drills."

"Your head combat instructor, I must confess, who has places she has to be," Izanami added, nailing Milly with a knowing look, the fucking traitor. "Until next time."

And with that, she forsook Milly to the wolves. Milly, in turn, bit back the urge to sigh at the fact of her abandonment, and instead braced herself for the reality of dealing with the strange, white-haired and chalk-pale woman who was one of their most valuable allies. "Not that it isn't wonderful to receive you all under any set of circumstances, but might I be so bold as to inquire after your itinerary here?"

"You might indeed," Hekmatyar rejoined, leaning back on her heels for a moment as her bodyguard squad shuffled around behind her, perhaps on account of being just as uncomfortable beneath the weight of the awkwardness of this unannounced visit as Milly herself felt. The arms manufacturer, for her part, didn't seem inclined to speak further, at least not without prompting.

What is it about this week that it's taken up sending women who love to irritate me to my doorstep? Milly wondered in no particular direction. She kept it together, and tried again. "What business do you have here, exactly, Miss Hekmatyar?"

"Here? Nothing," the pale woman shrugged. "Behind closed doors, though? I've come bearing a bit of a proposition for you and your wife that I happened to think you both might find interesting."

"A proposition…?" Milly asked, cocking an eyebrow—in the ordinary course, it likely wouldn't have occurred to her to suspect that choice of words, but at the moment, she was being forced to reckon with the fact that her previous impromptu meeting with Rhiannon Blackwood and her secretary, Amalia, earlier that week had rattled her more thoroughly than she'd initially realised. Both of them were gone by the time that Milly and her wife had taken the train out here a day ago, thankfully, but the shadow of everything strange about that encounter, it seemed, lingered still within the confines of Milly's own mind, at the very least.

"A business proposition," Hekmatyar clarified, clasping her hands behind her back as she leaned to one side, and then the other. "Strictly professional, I can assure you."

"In that case," Milly said, letting a little bit of her relief seep out, at least. "Come along, and I'll take you to her. And please, stay close; I wouldn't want any of your entourage to get lost in the compound, what with the ongoing construction and all."

"We'll be on our very best behaviour," promised Hekmatyar, with a smile that seemed to have been at the very least genuine enough to have been intended to reassure her.

"Well then," Milly said as she picked up her axe, and hefted it up to rest upon her shoulder with one hand as she headed over to the weapon racks, upon which Milly replaced the piece in its proper position. Then, she turned back to them, hip cocked and arms akimbo herself, and continued, "I'll just have to hold you to that, now won't I? This way, now, and step lively."

With that, Milly turned away, and led Koko Hekmatyar and her gaggle of bodyguards deeper into the compound, towards the dark and imposing edifice of the main building; and as they walked, Milly took the time to hope to herself that she wasn't about to make a terrible mistake.