Chapter 78: Unfortunate Circumstances

{Kohaku}

Serena looked at Lily lying in the leaves. Then she looked back down at me, and her jaw set.

"You."

"Okay, so, before you do anyth- ACK!"

Her hands closed around my throat.

She put her weight on it too, so she had to shift forward, and that meant she sat down properly on my lap. My body has been doing whatever it wants since the day I woke up in it. At that particular moment, with a very angry noblewoman in my lap and my shirt somewhere over by the log, it wanted to go up.

Serena stopped. ℴℴ𝘮

She was still choking me, technically, but her hands had gone still and she was staring at the tree behind my head.

"Is that-"

"Mmhm!"

"G-Get it off me."

"I ken’t rilly control-EGH!"

Her thumbs pressed in and my voice went out completely.

"Two months," she said. "I have known you for two months. Do you understand what I had before that? I had a system. I bathed at hours nobody else does, I slept in my clothes for six years, and I sat through a hundred and forty dinners with my knees together while my mother’s friends asked me when I was going to give the prince an answer. My tutors never knew. Everdawn spent years in my wing and never knew, not even the night she sat on my bed and asked me six separate times to take my shirt off." She leaned down. "Two months of you, and I am kneeling on a mountain the shrine will not put on a map with my hands on the throat of a naked fox."

"Hlf nkked."

"What?"

"Hlf!"

I got a hand free and held up one finger. Then I pointed down at my trousers, which were still on.

Serena throttled me.

"Do you ever stop? Is there a single moment in your day when you are not doing this!?"

"Thet’s nnt-"

"Say another word."

I said several. My eyebrows did most of the work. I tapped her forearm twice like we were in a ring, but she didn’t accept the tap, so I smiled at her instead while I ran out of air.

Serena growled. She was going red from the collar up and her hands were shaking. She was also still extremely hard, and she was still not letting go.

Then something hit her from the side.

"STOP IT!"

Lily came out of the leaves and put her shoulder into Serena’s ribs, and the two of them went off me and into the dirt together. They rolled about six feet. Lily’s rope came off her shoulder and unspooled down the slope, and they came to a stop against the fallen log with Lily on top.

"Don’t you dare touch her, Serena, I mean it, you don’t get to just-"

Lily stopped talking.

She was straddling her. Her hands were flat on Serena’s shoulders, her knees were on either side of Serena’s hips, and she’d come down with all her weight in one specific place.

Nobody moved.

I sat up and rubbed my throat. Lily’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again, and her whole face went scarlet. Serena stared straight up at the branches and didn’t blink.

"Serena," Lily said, very quietly. "What is that?"

"Nothing."

"That is not nothing! I can feel it! It’s touching me!"

"It’s a knife."

"You don’t have a knife!!! You’re the strongest mage in the world! You don’t need a knife!"

I breathed in some sweet air as I stared at the sky.

[Well, this took a turn.]

---

Serena had been apologizing for eleven minutes.

The doors here are paper, so we got every word of it. She told the healer that the fever broke on its own and she’d gone out for air and lost the path. She told the steward the same story with different words. Then the Queen Mother’s attendant showed up and she said the whole thing a third time, in a soft little voice about four notes higher than the one she uses on me.

[She sounds like somebody’s very polite daughter. I hate it... But, also, I kinda wanna see her do it again.]

I sat on my futon in one of Lily’s spare shirts. It’s two sizes too small. The top three buttons had already popped open and I’d given up on the fourth. Their sacrifices would be remembered.

Lily sat on her own futon with her hands in her lap. She hadn’t said a word since the trail.

The apology ended. The attendant went off down the hall, the door slid open, and Serena came in and shut it behind her.

She stayed standing.

"Ask," she said.

Lily looked up at her.

"... What was that?"

Serena sighed.

"My mother spent a summer at the northern estate when she was twenty-two, and she spent it with a man from the Wildfolk. My father has never been told and he never will be. I came out looking human enough that the midwife got paid instead of killed." Serena had her hands behind her back. "I’m half wolf. I didn’t get the ears. I didn’t get the tail. I got the... you know."

[YEEEEES! There it is!]

I gave her that backstory when I was fifteen. At the time, I thought it was a fantastic twist on her character. Now, I was just glad the world had conformed to my intentions for once.

Lily nodded. Then she nodded again. Then she stood up.

"Then why did you break up with me?!"

Serena blinked. Her mouth opened partway and stopped.

"Everdawn-"

"No! I’ve had a year and a half of this, Serena, so you’re going to let me finish! You sat me down in the green room and told me it wasn’t going to work and you would not say why. Not one reason! I asked you four times and you just looked at the window! So I went back down to the servants’ floor and decided it was because I’m staff, since that was the only thing left it could be, and I have believed that every single day since!" Her hands were fists at her sides. "I cried into a laundry basket! For a week! Do you have any idea how hard it is to cry quietly into a laundry basket?!"

"It isn’t a small thing to tell someone."

[Ain’t that the truth.]

"You let me think you were ashamed of me!"

"I was ashamed of me!"

A bell rang down the hall for the sixth hour. Nobody said anything for a while.

Serena breathed out.

"In the past, the Church has burned people for less than what my mother did. Half the families at that table would have me struck out of the register by winter, and I have sat there and listened to those same women talk about the Wildfolk over dessert." She looked at the floor. "So I thought you’d take one look at me and be finished. I thought you’d be disgusted."

Lily stared at her.

"Why would I be disgusted?!"

"Because it’s-"

"Look at Kohaku!"

[Wait, what?!]

Serena raised a brow.

"... What about her?"

Lily threw an arm out toward my futon without taking her eyes off Serena.

"She’s my roommate, she has one, and I’ve seen it like four times or something! She leaves the bathroom door wide open and she sings in there, and I’ve never once thought there was anything wrong with her, since she’s my best friend and I lov-"

She stopped.

Her arm stayed pointed at me. Her mouth stayed open. Serena’s head turned toward her, and then Serena’s head turned toward me.

[... What the fuck did she just say?]

Lily went red from the jaw up.

"I L-LIKE HER!"

"Everdawn."

"A LOT! I LIKE HER A LOT!"

"That isn’t what you-"

"AS A FRIEND!!! BUT A LOT!!! THAT IS ALL I MEANT AND IT IS COMPLETELY NORMAL!"

Serena said nothing.

I looked at the ceiling. Then I looked at the wall. Then I put a hand over my mouth and faked the biggest yawn of my life.

"Ahhhh! Wow. Okay!" I stretched both arms over my head. The fourth button gave out and my tits came most of the way through the front of Lily’s shirt. Neither of them looked. "You know what? All that excitement really got to me. The moth, the mountain, the whole thing with the hands around my neck. I’m exhausted! I’m going to go take a bath."

"Kohaku-"

"A long one~ Really soak it out." I was already at the door. "You two should keep talking! This is good. This is healthy. You’ve got a lot of history and it deserves the time!"

I got the door open, got through it, and slid it shut behind me.

Then I stood in the hallway.

[... What a day.]

And I started walking to the baths, humming some dumb old pop song.

This was.... Admittedly, not how I figured this day would turn out. Not at all.