Chapter 91: Awkward Accomodations, Once Again

This trip was different.

Not just in the destination, but in how we got there. We all got on the coaches expecting another pleasant drive but, to our surprise, as soon as everyone was accounted for, the damn things started flying!

I spent most of the flight with my face against the window and my tail going side to side like an idiot.

Here’s the thing. I didn’t spend too much time describing the beach in the original. After all, I just wanted the characters to be in swimsuits and move along, so I wrote "they arrived at the beach." I put, like, four words of description, max.

So I had no idea what was down there. And what was down there was a coastline that somebody else had clearly spent real effort on.

The water came in three separate colors, green near the sand and then a hard band of blue and then almost purple-ish further out. There were rock formations standing up out of the shallows with trees growing on top of them. Actual trees, with roots hanging down into the sea. Birds I certainly didn’t come up with were doing loops around the coaches. Way off to the east there was a headland with a lighthouse on it that I absolutely did not put there.

"Kohaku, you’re fogging the glass."

"Let me have this!"

We came down onto a cleared field behind the dunes, and the whole first year poured out into air that smelled like salt.

Then the teachers lined us up.

Instructor Halvard went first, a wide man with a voice built for reporting the weather, and he covered the schedule. Morning sessions on the east beach, afternoon sessions in the water, evening free unless you’d earned otherwise. Open-water endurance on days two and three. Spirit handling on day five, on the rocks, where the local minor spirits apparently behave differently because of the salt. One social on the last night, supervised, which he said in a tone that suggested he’d be the one supervising and he was already tired about it.

"Do not swim past the marker flags. Do not swim at night. Do not go up onto the headland." He pointed with a whole arm. "There is a reason the flags are where they are. Last year a young man decided he was a stronger swimmer than the sea, and the sea disagreed, and we spent nine hours trying to find him. Our attempt was unsuccessful."

[Ominous. Noted. Not my problem, though, since the only person who goes in the water this trip is Lily and that’s on day four, preferably with a boy attached.]

Then Sabine took over for rooms.

"You are in fours, some of you will be in twos, one of you will be on their own. You do not swap, and I will know if you swap." She had a list and she did not look up from it. "Group One." She went on and listed some people.

One group after another, people received their partners.

"Group Ten. Everdawn, Frostfall."

Lily and Serena looked at each other at the exact same moment and then away at the exact same moment, and I filed that for later.

"Group Eleven." Sabine turned the page. "Sakana."

Every single student’s head turned toward me, like a scene out of a horror movie.

"... And?"

"And nothing. Group Eleven is a storeroom with a bed in it. This facility was built for a hundred and four students and, today, we have brought a hundred and five." She finally looked up. "You’ll be quite alone, Miss Sakana. Right at the end of the west corridor. No neighbors."

There was a pause.

Then Fenna Greywild put her hand up.

"Professor, I’d like to move to Group Eleven."

[... Excuse me?]

"Uh," Sabine raised a brow. "Are you sure?"

"Yes, Professor. I-It would be sad if she had no company, after all!"

I just stared at her.

Sabine wrote something on the list without changing her expression in any way, and behind me somebody made a noise into their hand, and Odette said "fascinating" at a volume clearly intended to reach me.

And, apparently, Sabine took my silence as a "yes."

"Approved," Sabine said.

[Oh my god.]

Fenna picked up my bag, which she had already been carrying, and adjusted it on her shoulder, and did not look at me at all, which was somehow worse.

So... I was going to be sharing a room, for weeks, with a woman who explicitly said she wanted to put pups in me.

[Oh my GOD. I’m going to be SO pregnant by the end of this!!!]

---

The west corridor was a long stone hall with one window at the far end, and Group Eleven was the very last door.

Sabine had not exaggerated calling it a storeroom with a bed in it. There were crates stacked against one wall, a shelf of folded towels, a bucket, and then, shoved into the corner under the window, a bed that was clearly meant for one person who did not move much in their sleep.

Fenna set my bag down by the crates and then stood there with her hands behind her back.

"It’s, um. It’s got a nice view?"

"Hm?"

"The window faces the water. That’s good. That’s a good window." Her ears were twitching, and her tail had curled in. She was looking anywhere in the room except at me. "Y-You can have the side by the wall, if you want. Or the other side. Either side, really. There’s two sides."

[Don’t you dare act shy right now! You did this!]

I opened my mouth, found nothing to say, and went and looked out the window instead, which felt like a strategic withdrawal at the time and probably read as one too.

From up here I could see down the length of the east wing, where the actual rooms were, the ones with more than one bed and fewer buckets. Two floors down and about forty feet along, a door opened onto the balcony walk, and Lily came out of it carrying her trunk with Serena behind her carrying nothing at all.

They stopped at their door. Lily said something. Serena took the trunk off her, which was not a thing she needed to do, and went in first.

Lily stood there for a second before she followed.

I let out a breath.

[Well. Six days, one room, and a woman who dumped her once already. Hope she’s going to be okay.]

Then I turned around, and Fenna was on the bed.

She had gotten there fast and quietly, which are both things she’s good at, and she had arranged herself on her side with one arm propping up her head and one knee bent, and she was attempting an expression. I want to be fair to her. It was a real attempt. It was also being made by a girl whose ears were still flat and whose face had gone red all the way to the collar.

"So," Fenna said, in a voice about a third lower than her usual one. "Six days."

"Uh huh."

"That’s... a lot of days."

"It sure is, buddy."

---

People spent the afternoon settling in, which mostly meant arguing about drawers, and I went down to the east wing before dinner. I wanted to see Lily’s face and judge for myself how bad this was.

I found her on the balcony, shaking sand out of a shoe she had somehow already gotten sand into.

"How’s the room?"

"It’s lovely! There’s a proper wardrobe, and a mirror. Oh, and the window, the window’s enormous." She banged the shoe against the rail. "Serena took the bed by the door. She said something about drafts. I think she just likes being between me and the door, which is a very her thing to do."

I blinked.

[This was... decidedly not the answer I was expecting.]

"And you’re okay with all of it?"

Lily looked up, pouting.

"Why does everyone keep asking me that?"

I raised a brow, smirking.

"Oh, I dunno, because just a couple of weeks ago you two were certainly not on speaking terms and now you’re sharing a whole room."

"I-I know." She turned the shoe over, checked it, and put it down. "But we talked. Properly, for the first time since we were, uh... You know. A-And I don’t want to spend six days being careful around her. I want to actually, I don’t know, find out who she is now? She used to be my favorite person in the world, Kohaku. I’d like to see if there’s any of that left."

She said it in a completely ordinary voice, like she was talking about the shoe.

On my end, I was surprised.

[... Is that so?]

"So," she said once she was done, standing up. "You wanna come in?"

"I..." For some reason, I hesitated. "I’ll stay out here. Uh, I gotta make sure Fenna isn’t conducting some fertility ritual or something."

And with that, walking a bit faster than normal, I turned and left.