Mika

The Schale office had that particular late-afternoon hush to it—the kind where dust motes drift lazy in slanted amber light, where the coffee left cooling on the desk has developed a thin skin across its surface, where the paperwork stacked in the inbox tray has been stacked in the exact same configuration for the last three hours because somebody has been staring at the wall instead of processing it. Outside the window, the wisteria along the outer walkway trembled in a breeze that carried the faint sound of a bell from somewhere down in the general precincts. A pigeon on the sill made one contemplative noise, decided against whatever it had been contemplating, and left.

The intercom on the corner of the desk had been silent for the better part of the hour. Yuuka had signed off her shift with the usual crisp "Sensei, don't forget to actually eat something before nightfall, please," and the door had clicked shut behind her, and then—

—then there was the sound of footsteps in the corridor.

Not the brisk, businesslike clip of a Foreclosure Task Force member on assignment. Not the shuffling drag of a Problem Solver dropping off a mission report. These footsteps were lighter, quicker, deliberately soundless in the last three meters before the door—that particular species of tiptoe that fools absolutely no one on the receiving end and is not intended to.

A small, warm silence pressed itself against the other side of the door for a beat. Two beats.

Then the handle turned with the exaggerated care of someone who was pretending, for her own private amusement, to be a burglar, and the door eased open by a hand's width, and one enormous golden eye peeked through the gap.

"Yoo-hoo—"

The rest of her followed the eye—half a face, half a smile, the sway of a cotton-candy pink half-updo bobbing with the movement, one white-gloved hand curled around the edge of the door and the other one waving in a tiny, delighted flutter of fingertips.

"Sensei~☆ Guess who came to play? Miii-ka-chan has arrived★"

Misono Mika slipped through the doorway sideways, like the door had been opened just for her and no one else was allowed to use it, and pushed it shut behind her with the small of her back—one heeled foot lifting neatly to bump it the last centimeter closed. The soft click of the latch settling seemed to please her enormously. She stood there for a moment against the door, both hands laced behind her back at the small of her spine, chest pushed forward in that unconsciously-corseted-hourglass way she had, and beamed.

"Ehehe~♪ Surprise inspection! Mika-chan is on Schale duty today~" She lifted one hand and gave a little salute against her temple with two fingers, wrist cocked at a princess-perfect angle. "Reporting for du-ty★"

The gold of her eyes had that particular lit-from-within quality today—not the ashen milk-tarnish they took on at her lowest, but the warm supernova-glow of a girl who has been looking forward to something for approximately six hours and is now finally getting to have it. The pink-and-sky-blue nebula of her Halo drifted in a slow, contented eddy above her head, its supernova core pulsing gently in time with something that was almost certainly her heartbeat.

She took three steps into the room. Stopped. Rocked once, coquettishly, from heel to toe.

"Mmm~ Sensei's office always smells the same, huh? Like paper and coffee and—" she tilted her head, sniffed once with a delicate wrinkle of her nose, "—and Sensei. Ehehe. That last one's the best part, obviously★"

Her gaze made its round of the room in that instant she'd learned to do without seeming to—the coffee cup (cold), the paperwork (untouched), the calendar on the wall (yesterday's date still not crossed off), and finally, with a warmth that softened every edge of her face by half a degree, the man behind the desk. She let her eyes linger there half a beat too long. Then she remembered herself, tucked her chin, and looked demurely down at her own gloved fingertips as if she'd been caught doing something naughty.

"So, um," she said, brightening again, drifting closer to the desk with the flared skirt of her uniform swaying fluffily around her thighs, "Nagi-chan said I had to actually be useful today, not just eat all Sensei's snacks and leave, so—" she produced, from behind her back with a small "tada★" flourish, a lacquered pink lunch box tied with a white ribbon, "—I brought lunch! For two! And before you say anything, Sensei, I did make it myself, so no complaining even if the tamagoyaki is a tiny bit—well. You'll see. It's got character, okay? Character."

She set the bento down on the corner of the desk with both hands, the way one might set down a small sleeping animal, and then—having accomplished her stated mission—did not step back.

Instead, she drifted around to the side of the desk, one gloved finger trailing along its edge, and settled her hip against it right there beside Sensei's elbow, close enough that the thin fabric of her sleeve brushed his arm every time she breathed. She folded her hands together in her lap, ankles neatly crossed, spine straight in that faultless finishing-school posture that had been drilled into her since before she could pronounce her own family name properly. The picture of a demure, well-bred young lady on official student council business.

The picture would have been perfect except for the fact that she was watching him from beneath her lashes with the softest, most patient smile in the world, and her thigh—warm even through the layered tights—was pressed against the outside of his where she'd angled herself just so, and every time she inhaled the small silver cross pinned at her collarbone shifted an increment forward off its axis.

"Nee, Sensei," she said, in a voice pitched half an octave lower than her greeting had been—not sultry, nothing so unsubtle as that, just… softer. More private. As though the rest of the office had politely stepped out of the room. "You've been working awfully hard lately, huh? Mika-chan can tell. Your eyes get all—" she reached out, and with the pad of one gloved fingertip, she touched—very lightly, with the reverence of someone touching a museum exhibit through the glass—the faint shadow beneath his left eye. "—right here."

Her finger lingered a heartbeat longer than the observation required. Then she withdrew it, curled it back against her palm as if to preserve the warmth of the contact, and let both hands settle again in her lap with a small, satisfied breath.

"Mmnn. Yep. Mika-chan's official professional princess opinion is that Sensei needs a break." She tilted her head, and the ends of her long pink hair spilled forward over one shoulder, brushing against the edge of the desk. "Lucky for Sensei, Mika-chan happens to be an excellent break. Ehehe~♪"

She let the silence sit for exactly one beat—long enough to let the joke land, short enough that it couldn't be answered before she moved past it—and then leaned in a fraction closer, her chin nearly resting on the little curled fist she'd propped against her cheek, elbow set daintily on the desk. The golden light in her eyes had gone soft and unhurried. Somewhere in the small distance between her face and his, the faint sweetness of vanilla and strawberry drifted off the collar of her uniform.

"So?" she murmured, and her smile went crooked at one corner—that dimple surfacing on her right cheek only. "Aren't you happy to see me?"

She said it lightly. She said it as a tease. But there was, just underneath, the smallest thread of please say yes—the kind of thread only a person who knew what to listen for would catch—the kind of thread that had been there in every single one of her hellos to him since the day in the cathedral when he'd said "Mika isn't a witch" and pulled the world back onto its axis for her.

She waited, chin on her fist, wisps of pink hair drifting against her cheek, and behind the sunshine of her smile, her heartbeat was going approximately twice as fast as a princess's heartbeat had any business going.

The Schale office at seventeen past four in the afternoon smelled like burnt coffee, printer toner, and — very faintly, threading through the industrial staleness like a ribbon slipped into a filing cabinet — vanilla. Strawberry shortcake. The expensive floral shampoo that had a French name nobody at Schale could pronounce.

Sensei's chair was empty. The desk was a warzone of half-signed permission slips, an overturned mug rimmed with brown crust, a bento box scraped clean and abandoned lid-off, three unopened envelopes from the Federal Investigation Club stamped URGENT in red, and — perched with obscene daintiness right on top of the stack, like a pink sugar cube dropped into a mug of black tar — a Trinity-issue clipboard. Roster taped to the front. General Student Chore Rotation - Week 32 - SCHALE ANNEX. Under Wednesday, in a bubbly hand that dotted every i with a tiny star, someone had circled her own name in glitter gel pen three times.

Misono Mika ☆

The clock ticked. The window blinds sliced the low autumn sunlight into pale gold bars across the carpet. Somewhere outside, a train from the Abydos line hooted, thin and mournful.

And Mika, from her position kneeling on the rug in front of Sensei's bookcase — capelet neatly folded on the sofa arm, sleeves pushed up to her elbows, a yellow duster fluffed in one hand and a small spray bottle of lemon polish in the other — puffed her cheeks out at book number four on the second shelf. It had gone in backwards.

"...Wa-o." She lifted it out with two fingers, held it at arm's length like it had personally offended her, then flipped it around and slotted it back with a decisive little thunk. "Honestly, Sensei. If Mika-chan wasn't around to fix your terrible, terrible shelving habits, this whole office would just — poof. Collapse in on itself like a bad soufflé, wouldn't it? Ehehe~♪"

She said it to no one. There was no one to say it to. She'd shown up at the door at four sharp, clipboard hugged to her chest, rehearsed greeting bubbling up her throat — "Sen~sei, your princess is here to help with cleaning duty today★" — and found the office empty. A sticky note on the monitor, in Sensei's slouchy handwriting, said only: Emergency briefing w/ Foreclosure Task Force, back by 5. Snacks in top drawer. — S.

She'd stared at the note for a full seven seconds. Read it twice. Touched her left wrist with her right hand for no reason at all. Then smiled, wide and bright and to nobody, and set the clipboard down like a soldier presenting arms.

Fine. She'd just make the whole place sparkle by the time he got back, wouldn't she.

That had been forty-three minutes ago. She'd already dusted the top of the filing cabinet (found a coin, a paperclip bent into a heart shape, and one distinctly suspicious pair of Yuuka's calculator batteries). Watered the sad little cactus on the windowsill that Sensei had clearly been trying to kill through neglect. Restacked the loose reports into color-coded piles — pink for anything mentioning Trinity, blue for Gehenna, yellow for miscellaneous, and one very small stack in the corner marked, in her own handwriting on a hot-pink sticky note, "Sensei Please Read Before Wednesday ♥ - M.M."

Her half-up sidebun had come slightly loose over one temple. A single wisp of cotton-candy pink hair drifted down and tickled her nose. She blew at it — fuh — watched it flutter, drift back, tickle again. Blew at it a second time with more force. It settled.

"Moou~"

She set the duster down on the carpet, adjusted the scrunchie with both hands, pushed the wisp back into place, and rocked back onto her heels. Her wings — small, feathery, half-tucked against the small of her back — gave one absent-minded flutter, like a cat's tail twitching. The little star ornament clipped to the left one caught the sunbar from the blinds and threw a tiny prism of light onto the wall.

The office was quiet. Really quiet. The kind of quiet where you could hear the fluorescent tube in the hallway humming, and the refrigerator down in the break room clicking on and off, and the tiny click of her own throat swallowing.

Her golden eyes wandered.

Landed, unavoidably, on the desk. On the sad crusted mug. On the abandoned bento with its stray grain of rice stuck to the underside of the lid. On the swivel chair pushed back at a careless angle, the seat slightly indented in the middle where he always sat too far forward.

Something in her chest went sweet. And then, immediately, went tight.

She stood. Smoothed her skirt. Walked over on quiet stockinged feet — she'd slipped her shoes off at the door, like a good Trinity girl in someone else's home — and picked up the mug between two fingers, then the bento, then paused, looking at the chair.

...She could just sit in it. For a second. Just to check that it was, y'know. Structurally sound. As part of her cleaning duties.

Mika lowered herself into Sensei's chair.

It was too big for her. Her feet in their white knee-highs didn't quite touch the floor. The armrests were smooth from a year's worth of forearms leaning on them. The whole thing smelled — faintly, faintly, the way old fabric holds a person — like coffee, and cheap deodorant, and something she couldn't name but had catalogued anyway, months ago, and filed under Sensei's Smell (Confidential).

She sat there with the bento on her lap. Toed her heels together. Her wings gave another little twitch and then settled.

"...Ehehe."

Very quietly. Not to anyone.

The attic window was cracked open just a sliver, and the night air of Trinity came sneaking in on tiptoes—cool, faintly sweet, carrying the far-off perfume of the magnolia trees down in the courtyard and, closer, the ghost of vanilla shampoo drifting up from the pink cascade of hair spilled all over the sill.

Misono Mika was perched on that windowsill like some sort of half-melted confection someone had forgotten on a shelf—knees drawn up to her chest, chin propped on the little valley they made, one bare foot dangling and the other tucked beneath the hem of her nightdress. The nightdress in question was a whisper of pale-pink silk that pooled around her thighs in a way that would have made a Sister clutch her rosary and go pale, the thin strap on her left shoulder having slipped down her upper arm ages ago, and Mika had not bothered to fix it. Who was going to see, up here? Nobody. That was rather the point of an attic room, wasn't it? The tragic-princess-in-the-tower point.

Above her the stars were doing their nightly show-off routine, sprawled across the black velvet of the sky in that shameless spangled way stars had, and Mika stared up at them with her huge honey-gold eyes gone soft and unfocused, the way eyes go when what they are actually looking at is not stars at all but a memory that lives behind the stars.

"…Nn."

A tiny sound. Not quite a word. The kind of sound a girl makes when a thought that has been simmering in the back of her chest for hours finally lifts its lid and starts to whistle.

She hugged her knees a little tighter. The half-up sidebun on the right side of her head had come loose sometime around dinner, and a stray curl of cotton-candy pink was slowly twirling itself around and around her index finger without her really giving it permission to. Around, around. Around, around. Little pink spiral. Little pink spiral.

In the smoke, in the rubble, with her own uniform torn to ribbons and a copper taste on her tongue and the ringing in her ears loud enough that she had genuinely, honestly thought it was the sound of the world finishing itself off around her—Sensei's voice.

"—What are you doing to my precious princess?!"

That was the part she kept replaying. Not the Adult Card being drawn (though that, ohh, that deserved its own little shrine somewhere in her ribcage). Not the way the whole tide of the battle had turned in a single breath. Not even the arms that had scooped her up afterward like she was made out of tissue paper and stardust instead of the witch everyone had spent months informing her she was.

Just that word.

Princess.

His princess.

"Ahhh—"

The sound leaked out of her all on its own, a thin high thing that started somewhere in her throat and finished somewhere in the pillow she had grabbed off her bed without noticing and shoved against her mouth. Her cheeks were doing that thing where the pink started at the tips of her ears and traveled inward, meeting in the middle of her face in a full and undignified bloom. She kicked her dangling foot in a small violent flutter against the wall beneath the sill—thud thud thud thud—the tiny, futile tantrum of a seventeen-year-old girl who had absolutely no idea what to do with the amount of feelings currently packed into her chest cavity.

"Not fair," she informed the pillow, muffled. "Not fair, not fair, not FAIR—"

The pillow, being a pillow, had no opinion.

She rolled sideways off the sill in one boneless motion and landed in a heap on the narrow bed shoved up against the attic wall, where she promptly buried her whole face in the mattress and flailed. Both legs. Both arms. The full inelegant windmill of a girl who had been raised her entire life to sit with her ankles crossed and her spine straight and her hands folded like a good little saint, and who was, therefore, currently making up for approximately seventeen years of postural repression all at once.

Flap flap flap flap.

The little wings at her hips—which normally hung so demurely, so decoratively, so properly—were flapping. Actually flapping. In small useless offbeat pulses, the way a hatchling bird's wings twitch when it dreams. She was not doing it on purpose. She could not have stopped it if she had tried. When Mika's heart got above a certain rpm, her wings simply told on her, and there was nothing to be done about it.

"Hyaaaan…"

She rolled onto her back. Stared up at the sloped attic ceiling. The old wooden beam directly above her bed had a knot in the wood that looked, if you tilted your head right, sort of like a heart. She had noticed this on her third night in the attic and had subsequently spent an embarrassing amount of time lying exactly like this, staring at exactly that knot, and thinking about exactly one person.

My. Precious. Princess.

Not a princess. Not the princess. Not Trinity's princess or the Tea Party's princess or Pater's princess or any of the twenty-six other polite titles that had been affixed to her name over the years like ribbons on a gift box nobody had ever actually opened.

My princess.

Possessive. First person. Singular.

"⋯Sensei's an idiot," she whispered to the heart-shaped knot in the beam, in a voice so small and so pleased with itself that it almost dissolved on the way out. "Saying stuff like that. To someone like me. Doesn't he know what happens to a girl when a grown-up says a thing like that⋯"

The heart-shaped knot declined to respond.

Mika flopped one arm out to the side and groped blindly across the nightstand until her fingers closed around her phone. She dragged it up onto her chest with the reverence of a nun retrieving a relic and thumbed it awake. The lockscreen glowed pale in the dark room—a candid photo she'd taken without permission of Sensei mid-lecture, half his face cut off, entirely too much of his jawline in frame, taken at an angle that suggested the photographer had been slouched down in the very back row of the classroom trying to look casual. She had cropped it and filtered it and set it as her lockscreen and then spent approximately four days panicking that he would somehow, telepathically, find out.

She tapped through to MomoTalk. Down at the bottom of her thread with Sensei, the last message was still hers, sent four hours and—she checked the timestamp with the practiced squint of the chronically neurotic—seventeen minutes ago.

【Mika-chan ☆】: Sensei sensei~♪ good niiight❤ don't let bedbugs eat you okay? (only mika-chan is allowed to nibble ★)

No read receipt. Still no read receipt. The double checkmark stubbornly, insultingly, devastatingly grey.

Her lower lip pushed out. Her cheeks puffed. She rolled onto her stomach and kicked both legs against the mattress in a slow, aggrieved rhythm.

"Mou~⋯"

Then, immediately, a flare of guilt swept the pout away. Sensei was busy. Sensei was always busy. Sensei had a whole academy full of problem children to babysit and she was, when she got right down to bare arithmetic, only one of them—and, worse, she was the one who had caused half the problems he was currently having to solve. He was probably up right now doing paperwork on her behalf. Writing petitions on her behalf. Convincing some scowling Sister that his precious princess deserved another chance, on her behalf.

Because I'm his precious princess.

The bloom crept back up her cheeks.

"Nnh❤"

She flipped the phone facedown on her sternum and pressed both palms to her face. The silk strap on her left shoulder finally gave up entirely and slid down to her elbow, and the neckline of her nightdress sagged with it, baring one soft milk-white shoulder and the top curve of a breast that in daylight she would have shrieked and covered immediately, but in the private dark of her attic, alone with the stars and the heart-shaped knot and the thought of a certain grown man saying a certain phrase, she did not even notice.

What do I do, she thought at the ceiling, in the plaintive helpless internal voice she never let anyone hear. What do I DO with this? He said it and now it's just⋯ living in me. Rent-free. Rearranging the furniture in my chest. Making itself at home.

Every time I close my eyes⋯

She closed her eyes. Sure enough:

"—my precious princess—"

Every time.

Her toes curled against the sheet. Somewhere down in the courtyard three floors below a bell was tolling the hour—one, two, three, all the way up to eleven, each stroke rolling out across the sleeping campus like a slow polite invitation to stop being awake now, please, thank you—and Mika counted them absently on the tips of her fingers against the mattress and did not, for even a single stroke, consider obeying.

Curfew. Lights-out. Rules for regular students in regular dormitory rooms in regular lives.

She rolled onto her side and drew her knees up and hugged the pillow to her chest like it was somebody's arm, and let one small, secret, criminal thought bloom in the dark behind her closed eyes—

—if Sensei were here, right now, and saw me being disobedient—would he scold me? Would he? In that low voice? Would he call me his princess again while he was doing it? Would he⋯

"Ehehe⋯❤"

The giggle escaped before she could catch it. Muffled straight into the pillow. Her wings gave one more traitorous little flutter against the small of her back and then, at last, subsided.

Outside the attic window, one of the stars was doing that theatrical twinkling thing stars did when they were about to fall. Mika cracked one honey-gold eye open just in time to catch the streak of it—thin, silver, gone in less than a heartbeat—and her lips parted around the beginnings of a wish before her brain caught up with her.

Too late anyway, she thought, and smiled into the pillow, small and lopsided and unbearably fond.

I already got mine.

The heavy oak doors of the Trinity General School's Grand Inquiry Hall closed behind her with a hush so absolute it might have been the closing of a coffin lid.

Misono Mika stood in the corridor beyond, and for a long, suspended moment she did not move.

The vaulted ceiling of the Basilica-adjacent hallway soared above her in ribbed sandstone arches, stained-glass rondels casting lozenges of ruby and cobalt and gold across the polished marble floor—red across her white capelet, blue across the pink fluff of her hair, gold pooling like spilled honey around the toes of her hand-stitched leather shoes. Somewhere far off, the choir was rehearsing the evening Vespers, and the muffled polyphony of Salve Regina drifted down the corridor in fragments, the sopranos catching the highest notes like little glass bells.

Mika tilted her head back and looked up at the ceiling.

She counted the ribs of the arch. One, two, three. Four. Five.

Then she exhaled—a slow, careful breath, the kind you took when you were being very, very careful not to let anyone see that you had been holding it.

Probation-with-surveillance, the Chair of Inquiry had said, in that dry, punctilious voice that sounded like parchment being folded. All Tea Party privileges suspended. The private manor to be vacated within seventy-two hours. The Golden Credit Card returned to the treasury. Personal effects subject to inventory review. Attendance at all mandatory devotional services. No unaccompanied movement beyond the General School perimeter until further notice. Reassignment to the East Wing dormitory, attic quarters.

The Chair had paused there. Just for a heartbeat. Just long enough for Mika to feel the room lean in.

In light of the mitigating testimony offered by Sensei of Schale, and the corroborating statements of Council members Kirifuji Nagisa and Yurizono Seia—as to the extent to which the operative plan was neither fully executed nor persisted in beyond the point of intervention—the sentence of expulsion, previously scheduled for confirmation this session, is hereby remitted. Miss Misono may return to classes on Monday next.

She had said "Thank you very much" in her clearest, brightest voice, and dipped that perfect little half-curtsey the etiquette tutors had drilled into her spine before she was old enough to spell her own name, and turned on her heel, and walked out.

And now she stood in the hallway, and did not move, and the choir sang somewhere, and the light fell on her in colored pieces, and inside her chest something was doing a very strange thing—a fluttering, panicked, half-laughing thing that she could not name.

I'm not expelled.

I'm not expelled.

She said it, silently, to the inside of her own mouth, and the words tasted like sugar dissolving on her tongue, like the first bite of strawberry shortcake when the cream was still cold from the icebox.

I'm not expelled.

Then, very slowly, she turned her head to the side.

He was standing a few paces down the corridor, leaning against one of the sandstone columns with that quiet, unassuming posture of his—shoulders a little rounded, hands tucked into the pockets of that slightly-too-thin jacket he always wore even when the cathedral stone was cold enough to see your breath. Waiting. Just waiting. The way he had waited outside the inquiry chamber for the past four hours without complaint, without a book, without a phone in his hand—just waiting, because she was inside.

The colored light from the rondel above him fell across his face in a slash of deep violet, so that his eyes looked for a moment like the eyes of a saint in an icon.

Mika's throat closed.

Something in the neat little architecture of her composure—the composure she had held together with pins and prayers and ribbons all through the two-hour hearing while the prosecutors read out her sins in that flat, official cadence—something in it simply went, all at once, like a dropped teacup.

She walked toward him.

She walked, and then she was walking a little faster, and then—the last three steps—she was almost running, the flared hem of her uniform skirt swishing around her thighs, one hand coming up to catch the ribbon at her chest so the silver cross wouldn't bounce, her long pink-and-blue hair streaming behind her in a soft ripple like a banner surrendered.

She stopped just short of him. Two hands' breadth. Close enough that she could see the tiny scuff on the collar of his jacket where he had rubbed at it absently during the wait.

"Sensei," she said.

Her voice came out a little smaller than she had meant it to. She adjusted it—raised the corners of her mouth, brightened the vowels, put the sparkle back in—because she was Misono Mika, and Misono Mika did not stand in corridors and tremble like some plain little schoolgirl who had just been spared the noose.

"Sen~sei♪" she tried again, tilting her head, the smile finding its old choreography, that dimple surfacing on her right cheek. "You waited the whooole time? Really-really? Even through the boring bits with all the paperwork and the Chair-lady's stuffy little cough-cough-cough noises? Wa-o. That's kind of impressive of you, y'know~☆"

She swayed a half-step closer.

"...I heard everything they said in there, you know." Her voice dropped, went softer, that airy princess lilt shading into something more careful. "About what you told them. About what Nagi-chan and Seia-chan told them. About the... the plan not being fully carried through, and how that ought to weigh in on the sentencing, and, um—" a little laugh, brittle at the edges, "—and about how a certain airheaded pink-haired someone had 'demonstrated cooperation' during the aftermath, apparently? That's a very generous way to put it, don't you think? Ehehe—"

She broke off.

Because her lower lip had done a small, treacherous thing at the corner, and she felt the tell-tale hot prickle behind her eyelashes, and no, absolutely not, she was not going to be that girl, not here, not in this echoing sanctified hallway where the choir was singing Salve and the light was coming down in pieces of colored glass.

She took a breath.

She took another one.

Then she leaned in, very lightly, very deliberately, and pressed the whole side of her body against his arm—one small ojou-sama's shoulder tucking neatly under the point of his, both her slim white-gloved hands coming up to curl around his bicep, one over the other, the way a girl in a shoujo manga would clutch her prince's sleeve at a train station.

The full, soft weight of one E-cup breast settled against the outside of his upper arm through the thin fabric of his jacket—warm, yielding, generous in a way that no amount of careful uniform tailoring could quite hide. She let it rest there, matter-of-fact, as though she hadn't the faintest idea she was doing it, as though this were nothing more than a friendly little cling.

(She knew. Of course she knew. Misono Mika had been aware of the weight and effect of her own body since approximately the age of thirteen, and she deployed it now the way a soldier deploys a well-oiled sidearm—without fanfare, without hesitation, and with an absolutely straight face.)

"Sensei," she said, and now her voice had gone quieter, and closer to her real one—the one under the sparkles. She turned her face up toward him. Her chin came just about to the middle of his upper arm; she had to tilt her head back a little to look at him properly, which put her exposed throat in a long pale line and made the sky-blue tips of her hair spill over his sleeve. "Thank you."

Two syllables. Very plain.

Then, immediately, because plain things frightened her:

"—for waiting, I mean! For sitting out here for—what was it, four hours? Five? On that awful little bench, too, the one with the carved cherub on the back that pokes you right between the shoulder blades? Mika-chan noticed it on the way in and she was like, ohh, Sensei is going to have a sore back tonight for sure, and, y'know, I did think about asking one of the vergers to bring you a cushion, but then I thought that might look suspicious, like I was trying to bribe somebody, and honestly the mood in there was already so—"

She was chattering.

She could hear herself chattering.

She always chattered when the thing underneath was too big to look at.

She stopped, mid-sentence, and pressed her forehead lightly against the outside of his shoulder for the span of exactly one breath. The pink fluff of her hair caught on the button of his jacket. Beneath her cheek she could feel—faintly, through cloth—the small warm rise and fall of his ribs. The scent of him, whatever it was: cold air, and the faint mint of that cough drop he'd probably had during the wait, and something else, something male and quiet, the smell of a person who had been sitting still and worried for a long time.

Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry, Misono Mika, absolutely do not you dare.

She lifted her head. She smiled. It was even a real smile, mostly. The dimple came out. Her golden eyes were a little too bright, wet at the very rims where the light caught them, but she blinked twice and the wetness became a shine and the shine became a sparkle and the sparkle became, by sheer force of will and about seventeen years of finishing-school training, an ojou-sama's charming twinkle.

"...Sensei is super kind, huh." She tilted her head, cheek still resting on the wool of his upper sleeve, and squeezed his arm between her hands—and, incidentally, between her hands and her chest—just a little tighter. Her lashes lowered demurely, then flicked back up in a look that was three-parts kitten and one-part something else entirely. "Standing up for a bad girl like that. In front of the Chair-lady and everybody. You didn't even flinch when she did that long scary silence-treatment thing—I was watching through the little crack in the door, y'know? During recess? Ehehe~ Mika-chan is a terrible eavesdropper. Don't tell Nagi-chan, she'll lecture me for a week."

She rocked, very slightly, up onto the balls of her feet and back down again—a small, unconscious motion that made the soft-tissue press of her breast against his arm shift and roll in a way that would have been utterly innocent on any girl who was not her.

"So, um." She looked down, then up again through her lashes. "About the East Wing dormitory. The attic room. You heard that part, right? Well—the thing is—" she tilted her head, pouting the tiniest bit, "—the thing is, Sensei, apparently my new room is on the fifth floor, and the elevator in that building has been broken since, like, the reign of the previous Archbishop, and I have to move all my things by Sunday evening, and Mika-chan has, um, quite a lot of things. Like. A lot of things. Like, more dresses than one person strictly requires, possibly? And an entire shelf of stuffed bears? And, um, three tea sets, though technically I think only two of them still belong to me after the inventory review, but I'm not going to volunteer that information if nobody asks, and—"

She paused. Bit her lower lip. Peeked up at him.

"—and Mika-chan was thinking, in her incredibly selfish princess way, that maybe if a certain very kind Sensei happened to be free this weekend, he could possibly, maybe, help a fallen ojou-sama haul her worldly possessions up five flights of a very creaky wooden staircase? In exchange for—hmmm—" she rolled her eyes up to the vaulted ceiling in exaggerated thought, tapping her chin with one gloved fingertip, "—cake? I still have my emergency cake budget hidden in a place the treasury didn't find. Strawberry shortcake, the real kind, with the cream that squishes out the sides when you press the fork down. From the shop on Fifth Bell Street. My treat. As a bribe. I'm shamelessly bribing you, Sensei, please notice."

She was smiling.

She was smiling and her eyes were still too bright and her fingers were still curled very tightly around his sleeve and there was a small, small tremor in the pink-and-blue hair where it fell against his shoulder, the kind of tremor you got when your knees had gone slightly liquid without permission.

The choir far off shifted from Salve Regina into the opening bars of the Kyrie.

Kyrie eleison.

Lord, have mercy.

Mika heard it, and for one instant her golden eyes lost their focus—went past his shoulder, went a long way past his shoulder, went to some point in the middle distance that was not quite in this corridor at all—and the smile on her face held itself in place by pure trained musculature while behind it something very old and very tired said, in a very small voice, ah, that song again.

Then she blinked. And she was back. And the smile softened, a fraction, into something that was almost real.

"...Hey, Sensei." She looked up at him properly now, chin still tucked against his sleeve, one gloved thumb tracing a tiny thoughtless circle on the fabric of his cuff. Her voice had gone soft. Soft and low, and the sparkle was still there but it was a thinner layer over something else. "I really—" a swallow, "—I really thought, this morning, that it was going to be the other one. The, y'know. The out you go, don't come back, hand in your halo at the door one. I got dressed for it and everything. I picked this uniform because—" a small, self-mocking laugh "—because I thought, well, if they're going to throw me out of Trinity, at least I'm going to walk out looking like Trinity, right? Full capelet. Full ribbon. Full stupid little silver cross. Ehehe. What a princess-brain thing to worry about, huh."

She squeezed his arm, once, and held it.

"So." Her voice hitched. She fixed it. "So thank you. Really. Not the sparkle-thank-you. The other one. The one Mika-chan is really really bad at saying out loud."

Then—because the moment was getting too heavy, and Misono Mika could not, absolutely could not, allow a moment to get too heavy without doing something to it—she rocked back on her heels, released his arm with a theatrical little sigh, and struck a small pose: hands clasped behind her back, chin tilted, one foot pointed out in that runway-model stance the etiquette tutors had drilled into her.

"Well* then★" she chirped, and the sparkle came flooding back into her voice at full brightness, and the dimple resurfaced, and the golden eyes did their little practiced twinkle. "Fallen Princess Misono Mika-chan, currently on probation, currently homeless as of Sunday, currently reduced to doing her own laundry, if you can believe such an atrocity—reporting for duty! Kinda~♪ Where are we going first, Sensei? I'm starving. That hearing went straight through lunch and the vergers wouldn't even bring me a biscuit, can you believe that? Barbaric. I am declaring, right here, right now, as my first official act of freedom—" she pointed one gloved finger dramatically at the ceiling, "—that we are going to the shop on Fifth Bell Street, and I am buying the biggest strawberry shortcake they have, and we are eating it at that little table by the window, and if any of the Pater girls happen to walk by and see me sitting there with cream on my nose then that's their problem, not mine. Yeah? Yeah."

She lowered the finger. Blinked. Considered.

"...Also I might cry a little bit into the shortcake. Just fair warning. Consider this your advance notice. If anyone asks, tell them Mika-chan had allergies. Ehehe~♪"

She held out her hand.

Not the practiced, ojou-sama-presenting-her-knuckles-for-a-kiss hand. Not the imperious little "escort me" palm-down flourish either.

Just a small white-gloved hand, palm up, fingers slightly curled, held out to him at the height of her hip.

The way a much younger girl might have held it out. The way a girl who had just, forty minutes ago, been told she was not, after all, going to be cast out into the outer darkness—might reach for the one person in the whole vaulted, colored-glass corridor who had sat on an uncomfortable bench for five hours waiting to hear the verdict.

Her golden eyes met his. The sparkle was still there. But behind it, quieter, was the look of the girl in the choir room with the broken phonograph, the girl who had said I forgive you, the girl who had, for one moment, been genuinely saved.

"...Take Mika-chan for cake, Sensei?" she said, and her voice was very soft now, almost a whisper, pitched under the distant Kyrie eleison still drifting down from the choir loft. "Please?"

The late-afternoon sun over Trinity's west athletic field hung low and mean, the kind of orange that made everything look like it was being slowly cooked. Long shadows stretched from the wrought-iron fence at the far edge of the grounds, cutting the manicured lawn into strips of gold and bruise-purple. Somewhere past the chapel spires, the vesper bells were doing their slow, self-important thing — dong… dong… dong… — but out here, the only sound worth listening to was the dry, patient scritch of fingernails against dirt.

Scritch.

Scritch.

…tug.

Plop.

A weed — some spindly, defiant little bastard with roots that went down farther than any weed had any right to — came loose in a small explosion of dry earth, and Misono Mika stared at it, dangling from her fingertips, with the exact same expression a philosopher might reserve for a particularly disappointing volume of Kant.

"…Weeds," she informed it, in a flat, conversational tone, "are the *worst."

She flicked it into the woven basket beside her knee, where it landed atop its many, many, many fallen comrades. The basket was, if she was being honest with herself — and today she was making a particular effort not to be — only about a third full. Which was tragic. Because the caretaker, a Sister with all the warmth of a locker-room bench, had said the basket needed to be full twice before she could go inside, and the sun was starting to do that ominous thing where it slid toward the horizon like it had somewhere better to be.

Mika, on her knees in the dirt.

Mika, in a tracksuit.

Not even a cute tracksuit — no, this was the standard-issue Trinity PE uniform, white with the modest little navy piping, the kind of thing that had absolutely no business touching her skin. The shorts were too short for kneeling in polite company and too long to show off her thighs properly, striking that perfect impossible middle ground of unflattering. The white cotton t-shirt was clinging faintly to her lower back where she'd sweated through it, and her long cotton-candy hair — usually so lovingly maintained, brushed a hundred strokes before bed — was pulled up into a hasty, lopsided ponytail with a plain black elastic. A black elastic. Not even the pink one with the little bow. She'd been in too much of a hurry that morning to care, and now every time a strand fell into her eyes she had to blow it out with a small, defeated pfft of breath, because her hands were caked with soil up to the wrists.

There was dirt on her cheek. Right there, a small streak of brown across the porcelain, where she'd absently reached up to scratch an itch. She didn't know it was there. If she had, she would have died.

Around her, the field was empty. That was the worst part, actually — or maybe the best, depending on the hour and her mood. Community service hours, as decreed by the Disciplinary Committee's inquiry, were to be served alone. No chatter, no accompaniment, no dear little Nagi-chan bringing her iced barley tea in a thermos. Just Mika, the weeds, the basket, and the vast indifferent grass of a field so large it might as well have been the surface of the moon.

Four hours today.

She'd been out here for two.

Her knees ached. Her lower back had that low, hot throb that meant she was going to regret this in the bath tonight. The pads of her fingers, once so carefully manicured with pale-pink polish, were now rimmed with black under each nail — and the polish itself was chipped in three places on her right hand, which was a small, private tragedy she was choosing not to examine too closely.

Scritch. Tug. Plop.

Scritch. Tug — snap.

The weed broke off at the base, root still buried, and Mika stared at the useless green stem in her fingers with an expression that could have curdled milk.

"…Oh, *come on."

She dropped it, wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist — leaving another smear of dirt she was blissfully unaware of, this one at her temple — and let out a long, theatrical, entirely-for-her-own-benefit sigh.

"Mika-chan," she informed the empty field, in the sing-song voice she used when she was performing her own suffering for an audience of nobody, "did not sign up for this."

Except, of course, she had.

Well. Not signed up. But — accepted, hadn't she? At the hearing. When the Committee had read out the terms of her probation, and the alternative had been the little four-letter word that started with E and ended in pulsion, she'd sat very straight in her chair with her hands folded in her lap and said yes, of course, thank you, I'll do my very best, in the sweet ojou-sama voice that had once opened every door in this school and now barely got her a nod from the sisters who used to genuflect. And in the fraction-of-a-second silence after she'd said it, Nagi-chan — sitting in the observers' gallery, back straight, jaw tight — had looked at her with such naked, painful worry that Mika had had to look at the ceiling for the rest of the reading, counting the little rosettes carved into the plaster so she wouldn't cry.

So. Yes. She'd signed up. Sort of.

"Ehehe~," she said, quietly, to the weed she was now pulling. "That's what you get, Mika-chan. Villain debut consequences~☆"

The star at the end of the sentence was audible. She heard it herself. It sounded, out here in the empty field with the sun going down, like the smallest, thinnest thing she'd ever produced.

She kept pulling.

Scritch. Tug. Plop.

The trouble, really — and she permitted herself this much, kneeling in the dirt with nobody to see — was that the weeds were easy. Weeds she could do. Weeds had roots, and if you pulled hard enough and at the right angle, they came up, and you put them in the basket, and the basket got heavier, and eventually you were done. There was a system. There was a reward function. There was an ending. Weeds were, as coping mechanisms went, extremely well-designed.

The other stuff had no roots to grab.

The whispers when she walked past the third-year corridor. The way the little first-years at the Pater dormitory had stopped saying good morning. The letters — Sister Katherine had shown her one, briefly, and then locked the rest away —

Scritch. Tug. Plop.

"Nope~," she said, out loud, in her brightest voice. "We're not doing that one today, Mika-chan. Different basket. Different basket entirely."

She flicked another weed into the woven one at her knee, precisely, like a punctuation mark.

And then she heard the footsteps.

Not the sisters' footsteps — those she knew, the soft slap of sandals on the grass, patient and predatory. Not the caretaker's boots either. These were different: measured, unhurried, coming across the grass from the direction of the administrative building, from the little wrought-iron gate that separated the Faculty Court from the general grounds. Trinity students weren't supposed to cross that gate. Trinity students, in fact, would rather have swallowed a communion wafer whole than cross it, because on the other side lived — among other things — the disciplinary offices, and nobody came from that direction with good news.

Mika didn't look up.

If she didn't look up, she reasoned, it wasn't happening. This was excellent logic. She continued pulling weeds with an intense, artificial focus, humming a small, tuneless little melody under her breath. Perhaps if she was very busy, whoever it was would keep walking. Perhaps they weren't coming for her at all. Perhaps —

The footsteps stopped.

Right next to her.

She could see, in her peripheral vision, the toes of a pair of shoes. Men's shoes. Somewhat worn at the toe, the leather scuffed in that lived-in way that meant the wearer walked a lot and didn't fuss much about it. Not a priest's shoes. Not a sister's. Not a student's.

The scuff on the left toe had a very specific shape, actually. She'd seen it before. A little diagonal scrape, from — from that time on the roof of the Convention Hall, when he'd tripped on the edge of the —

Mika stopped humming.

Very slowly, as though any sudden movement might dispel the hallucination, she raised her eyes.

Up, past the shoes.

Up, past the dark trousers.

Up, past the belt, the shirt, the loosely-knotted tie that even at this distance she could tell had been tied in the mirror this morning without much care.

Up, up, up — to the face of the only person in this entire ridiculous world who ever, ever, walked toward her instead of away.

Sensei.

Standing in the grass. Hands in his pockets. Head slightly cocked. Looking down at her, at her ridiculous ponytail with its ridiculous plain black elastic, at the dirt smudge on her cheek she still didn't know was there, at the third-full basket, at the ache in her back she'd been pretending she didn't have — looking at all of her, in that quiet way of his that never demanded anything and somehow, somehow, always saw everything.

"—"

Mika's mouth opened.

Mika's mouth closed.

Something happened to her chest that felt suspiciously like a small animal turning over in its sleep, and she was distantly, professionally aware that her face had gone through approximately four expressions in half a second — surprise, delight, horror-at-being-caught-like-this, and then a fifth thing, a very complicated fifth thing, that she stamped down on very hard before it could reach her eyes.

She settled, with great effort, on a smile.

"Wa—o.☆"

It came out a little breathier than she'd intended. She fixed it immediately, tilting her head at the exact princess-angle she'd been practicing since she was twelve, and reached up to tuck an escaped strand of pink hair behind her ear — which, given the state of her hands, was a strategic error of the highest order, because she felt the cool smear of soil hit her ear and knew, in that horrifying instant, that she'd just made it worse.

She kept smiling.

"Sensei~♪," she sang, with the perfect little uptick at the end, as if this were the tea salon and she were greeting him over a plate of madeleines. "Um. Hi. Fancy meeting you here? Aha. Ahaha. You know, at the — the fashionable west field. Very in-season this time of year. All the girls are doing it."

She gestured, with a soil-caked hand, at the basket. Then at the empty expanse of weeds still to go. Then, because she couldn't help herself, at her own tracksuit, with a small, self-deprecating flick of the wrist that was supposed to be breezy and came out just a little too fast.

"Mika-chan's, um. Serving her hours~☆ Very diligently. Very — nose to the grindstone. You can tell the Sisters, if they ask. Model. Prisoner." A beat. Then, quieter, with a little crooked smile that didn't quite reach the corners: "Ehehe."

She looked back down at the grass.

Scritch.

Pulled another weed. Flicked it into the basket. Didn't look up.

"You," she said, to the weeds, and her voice had gone a shade lighter, a shade more careful, the way it did when she was about to say something she didn't want to feel, "shouldn't be over here, though. Sensei. Y'know? This side of the fence is like —" she waggled her fingers airily above the grass, "— contamination zone. Very bad for your reputation, hanging around with the resident witch. People'll talk. And some of them can even spell."

Scritch. Tug. Plop.

"So run along, okay?☆ Mika-chan's got this. Mika-chan is, in fact, thriving. Look — see this basket? Practically overflowing. I'm basically a professional gardener now. When I get out of here I'm going to open a little flower shop, and — and I'll make bouquets, and — "

Her voice caught, just faintly, on the word bouquets.

She reached for another weed and pulled a little too hard and the whole clump came up with a small startled plop of earth, roots and all, and she stared at it in her hand for a second longer than a girl who was thriving would have.

Then she flicked it into the basket, brightly, and went for the next one without looking up.

"…Anyway," she said, in the voice of someone changing the subject before it could change her, "you should really go. Really really. Before someone sees. I mean it, Sen —"

And that was when she heard it.

Not footsteps walking away.

The soft rustle of fabric, of a shirt-cuff being unbuttoned. Then the other one. Then the small, unmistakable shifting sound of a grown man rolling his sleeves up past his elbows with the sort of no-nonsense efficiency that suggested he had every intention of putting his hands in the dirt.

Mika's fingers, mid-tug on a very stubborn dandelion, went completely still.

Slowly — very slowly, as though she didn't quite dare — she looked up again.

Sensei had lowered himself into a crouch beside her. Not next to the basket, where the caretaker had crouched earlier to lecture her about proper posture, Misono-san. Beside her. Close enough that she could see the small nick on his jaw from where he'd shaved that morning in a hurry, close enough that when he reached out and closed one large hand around a thick clump of weeds she could see the tendons flex in his forearm, and — and he pulled. A clean, practiced, unhesitating pull, the kind that said the man had done manual labor before in his life and did not consider it beneath him now, and the entire clump came up in one perfect motion, roots and all, a small shower of dirt pattering down onto the grass.

He tossed it into her basket.

Plop.

Then he reached for the next one.

Mika did not move.

Mika did not, in fact, breathe, for what felt like a small and important eternity.

The vesper bells had stopped, somewhere. The field was silent except for the small workmanlike scritch, tug, plop of Sensei clearing the row next to hers, quietly, without ceremony, without a single word about witches or hearings or reputations or any of the seventeen thousand very good reasons a rational adult should absolutely not be doing what he was doing.

Her lower lip did something.

She caught it between her teeth, hard, and stared down at her hands in her lap — muddy little hands, with the chipped pale-pink polish, and a smear of dirt across one knuckle that she couldn't remember getting.

"…Sensei," she said. Very quietly. Not princess-voice at all. "You'll get dirty."

He kept pulling weeds.

"Your shirt," she tried again, and her voice did a small treacherous thing on the second syllable that she pretended hadn't happened. "It's — that's a nice shirt, y'know? The Sisters'll be super mad. And Mika-chan's basket doesn't even count double just 'cause two people are — "

Scritch. Tug. Plop.

Another clump of weeds. Into her basket. Not his. Hers.

Something in Mika's throat closed up in a very small, very inconvenient way.

She turned her face away, quickly, toward the far end of the field, and pretended to be very interested in a particular patch of grass over there. Her hand came up — muddy, forgotten — and pressed for just a second against her mouth, then dropped again. She swallowed. Once. Twice. Blinked hard, three times, at the horizon, until the orange sun stopped doing the wobbly thing it had briefly started doing.

Then she picked up the next weed.

Scritch. Tug. Plop.

She worked in silence for a few seconds, side by side with him, close enough that she could hear the small huff of his breath when a root fought back, close enough that her shoulder — if she leaned just a little, just half an inch, entirely by accident — could have brushed against his upper arm.

She did not lean.

She was, she reminded herself with great sternness, being good. She was being dignified. She was serving her hours and paying her debt and demonstrating that she was capable of quiet penitent labor without making a scene about it, and she was absolutely not going to —

"…Y'know," she said, in a voice that was trying very hard to be light and was doing about eighty percent of a job, "I could report you. To the Sisters. For — for interfering with a court-ordered sentence. That's a whole thing. Big scandal. They'd probably write you up." She flicked a weed. Missed the basket. Didn't notice. "They'd probably. Um. Give you your own basket."

The corner of her mouth was doing something wobbly. She yanked it back into a smile.

"Big embarrassing basket. Right in front of the whole faculty. Sensei's basket. Ehehe. You'd deserve it. Coming over here like a — like a total — "

The word she wanted to say was idiot. Her voice cracked, quietly, on the space where the word was supposed to go.

She dug her muddy fingers into the earth around the next weed and pulled, hard, and it came up cleanly, and she dropped it into her basket with excessive care, and she kept her head down so that the loose strand of pink hair could fall in front of her face and hide whatever her eyes were doing.

"…You really are an idiot, Sensei." Very small. Very quiet. Almost a mumble into the dirt. "The worst kind. The kind that comes to the west field."

She reached for another weed with hands that weren't quite steady.

"…Um. So." She sniffed once — very quickly, very quietly, and covered it immediately with a bright little ahem — "since you're staying anyway, and Mika-chan is a benevolent princess who forgives even the most terrible offenders, you can. Um. You can do that whole patch, over there? The really bad one with the thistles? Because those ones have the pokey bits, and Mika-chan's hands are — you know — delicate. Princess hands. Very important. National treasure."

She held up one filthy, mud-caked hand, wiggled the fingers at him with the smallest, most fragile little grin, and let it drop back into the dirt.

"So. Y'know. Get to it, Sensei.☆"

And then, in a much smaller voice, so soft it almost wasn't a voice at all, aimed at her own hands and the weeds and the fading orange light and nobody in particular —

"…Thanks for coming."

Scritch.

Tug.

Plop.

The Trinity General School's third-period bell had rung fifteen minutes ago, and the classroom of Class 3-A drifted in that peculiar mid-morning hush that only girls' schools seemed to breed—that lace-and-vellum quiet punctuated by the delicate clink of a teacup meeting saucer, the whispered rustle of a Bible page turning, the distant hymn practice bleeding faintly through the stained-glass windows from the choir wing three floors down. Sunlight filtered through those enormous cathedral panes in slanting bars of rose and gold and deep sacramental blue, painting the polished mahogany desks in the colors of a wound that had learned to look pretty about itself.

And there, in the very back corner of the room—the seat by the window that had once been the most coveted throne in all of Trinity, the one where Misono Mika had held court like a sun around which a dozen satellite girls had spun, giggling and offering up the little tributes of macarons and hair ribbons and gossip about which Gehenna girl had been spotted where—there sat the Princess herself, alone. Utterly. Absolutely. Alone.

The circumference of empty desks around her seat spanned three rows in every direction. A perfect little quarantine of hatred, drawn with the precision of a compass. The Trinity girls had done it wordlessly, over weeks, the way flocking birds knew to wheel as one—desks scraped an inch further each morning, satchels placed carefully on chairs that used to be occupied, until finally the geography of the classroom had simply rearranged itself around the plague, and no one needed to say anything at all about why.

Whisper. Whisper-whisper.

"—did you see what someone left in her locker this morning? A dead rat with a little paper crown on—"

"—shhh, she can hear you, oh my god—"

"—so what if she does? What's the witch going to do, cry?—"

Giggle. Giggle-giggle-giggle. The sound of six girls at the far diagonal corner, hunched over one girl's phone, their shoulders trembling with that particular vibration of shared cruelty that only teenage girls could truly perfect. Snap. One of them had angled the phone's camera at Mika. The shutter sound had been left on deliberately, of course. Snap. Snap-snap. They wanted her to hear it. They wanted her to know that whatever face she was making right now was already being uploaded to some anonymous group chat with a caption like Look at the fallen princess pretending she doesn't care lolol.

On the blackboard at the front of the room, someone had gotten to it during break and scrawled in chalk letters big enough to read from the back row:

MURDERER

The homeroom Sister had wiped it away three times already this week. It kept coming back. Different handwriting each time. Sometimes with hearts drawn around it, which was somehow worse.

On Mika's desk—her own desk, the one whose surface she had once decorated with a sticker of a strawberry shortcake and a little star and had signed with her name in glitter pen years ago when she was a first-year and the world had still adored her—someone had, sometime between yesterday's dismissal and this morning's chapel service, taken a permanent marker and written across the front-facing panel in blocky capitals:

PATER'S SHAME. GO DIE.

And beneath it, in a different hand: witch witch witch witch witch witch witch

And beneath that, a crude drawing of a stick figure hanging from a noose with pink hair scribbled onto the head.

Mika had noticed it when she'd sat down forty minutes ago. She had looked at it for approximately two seconds. Then she had reached into her satchel and pulled out a little pink sticker of a smiling bear cub, and she had stuck it right over the drawing of the hanging figure, and she had adjusted it until it was perfectly centered, and then she had smiled to herself, and then she had taken out her phone, and she had not looked at the desk again.

That was forty minutes ago.

She had been scrolling since. Or rather, she had been pretending to scroll, because the truth was that her thumb had been dragging the same three inches of MomoTalk history up and down, up and down, for something like the last twenty-two minutes—the conversation window pinned to the top of her chat list under the name Sensei ❤️, its preview line still showing the last message she had sent him at 6:47 this morning:

Good morning Sensei!!♥ Mika's up super early today★ (´｀=) The chapel bells woke me up, boo! Mika wants to have breakfast with Sensei someday~♪ Are you eating properly? You'd better be, or Mika will get mad!☆

And then, from him, three hours ago, that single little grey word beneath it:

Read.

Just read.

Not Read, then replied. Not Read, then followed up with a sticker of a fox with a heart over its head, which was Sensei's favorite sticker and he'd sent it to her exactly forty-one times since the day she had gotten out of confinement, she had counted, she had made a private folder in her camera roll just to screenshot every single instance.

Just. Read.

Three hours ago.

Three. Hours.

"Mmmmuu~," Mika hummed to herself, so softly that not even the whispering girls at the diagonal could have heard it, her lower lip pushing out in that particular pout that had, in her first-year days, been famous enough throughout the Pater dormitory that girls had literally taken photographs of it and traded them like collectible cards. Now there was no one left to photograph it. Only the pane of the great cathedral window, which caught the reflection of her puffed cheek and threw it back at her, doubled and slightly warped, like a ghost of the girl she had been.

She tilted her chin so she could see her own reflection better in the glass. Her half-up sidebun was still perfect—she had spent forty minutes on it this morning, alone in the shared dormitory bathroom at five a.m. specifically so no one would come in and hip-check her into the sink again like they had done twice last week—and the little purple flower ornament sat exactly where it was supposed to sit, tilted at that studied three-degree angle that suggested effortless charm. Her white capelet was crisp. The silver cross at her collar caught the sunlight and threw a small, mobile spot of white light across the ceiling.

"Still cute though, aren't I?" she murmured to her own reflection, giving it a tiny conspiratorial wink, and the reflection winked back, and neither of them believed it, and both of them pretended to.

Then, phone. Back to the phone.

She flipped the screen over so the camera side was down against the desk, waited exactly seven seconds—a little private ritual she had developed, seven being the number of letters in Sensei's name-and-suffix, she had decided, though it wasn't really—and then flipped it back over.

No notification.

"Rude~★," she whispered, tapping the little glass with one manicured fingernail. The nail was painted the palest of pinks, almost the color of the inside of a seashell, and it made a tiny tick-tick sound against the screen. "Sensei, you know? Ignoring your princess like this? Mmmmuu, that's a five-point deduction from your kindness score, mister. Ehehe~"

Behind her, three rows and one column diagonal, the giggling had gotten louder.

"—said she sent a lawyer to Trinity to try to get the confinement overturned but the Cardinal wouldn't even see him, isn't that just tragic—"

"—like anyone wants her back in the Tea Party after what she did, she should just—"

"—do the world a favor and transfer, oh god, or better yet just—"

"Nn-nn-nnnnnn~ ♪ Nnn-nnnn ♪" Mika hummed to herself, a little tuneless private song, just loud enough to muffle the syllables of what they were saying, just quiet enough that they couldn't quite accuse her of being rude. It was a technique she had perfected in the first week back. You couldn't tell them to shut up. You couldn't glare at them. You couldn't do anything that would give them the satisfaction of a reaction. You just had to sit there and be a very cute, very airy little princess in a very expensive uniform who was clearly enjoying herself so much on her phone that she hadn't even heard them, oh gosh, were they saying something? She hadn't noticed at all, hee hee, sorry, was it important?

That was the game. And Mika, who had grown up playing exactly this game, only from the other side of the desk-arrangement, knew every single one of its rules by heart. She had written half of them.

Her golden eyes flicked back down to the screen. Nothing. Still nothing. She opened the MomoTalk app, closed it, opened it again—because sometimes, she had convinced herself, sometimes the notification just didn't come through the first time, sometimes you had to actually open the app for it to deliver the message properly, that was a real thing that could happen, she was fairly sure. Her thumb hovered over the little text box at the bottom of Sensei's chat window.

She started typing.

Sensei~ are you busy?

Deleted it.

Mika is bored during class, distract me♥

Deleted it.

Did you eat lunch yet? Mika wants to hear your voice

Deleted.

Sensei come see me, I miss you, I miss you, I miss you, I mis

Held down the backspace with her thumb until it was all gone, every single character, until the little text box was empty and blinking innocently at her again, and then she set the phone down flat against the desk again and stared at it for a long moment with her chin propped on the heel of one palm and her elbow braced on the very edge of the sticker she'd used to cover the hanging-girl drawing.

"Sensei, you idiot," she breathed, so faintly, so tenderly, that it was practically the shape of a prayer rather than a word. Her golden eyes went a little hazy, a little distant, and the corner of her mouth curved up into the tiniest, dreamiest smile—because if she couldn't have him actually messaging her, then she could at least imagine him, couldn't she? That was allowed. That was a princess's absolute right, wasn't it? To indulge in a little daydream during boring class time, just a teensy little one, just a harmless little one—

She imagined him walking into the classroom right now.

The door would slide open with that specific shhhhk sound the old wooden Trinity classroom doors made, and everyone would look up, because Sensei was not supposed to be here, Sensei was Schale, Sensei belonged to the whole city, but he would be standing there in the doorway with his coat slightly rumpled the way it always was, and he would scan the room, and his eyes would land on her in the back corner, and his face would do that thing his face did when he saw her—that small, unguarded, slightly-exasperated-slightly-fond thing, the thing that said there you are, you little troublemaker—and every single one of the six giggling girls in the diagonal corner would freeze mid-syllable with their phone cameras still angled and their mouths still half-open around the shape of the word witch, and Sensei would walk right past all of them, right past every single desk of every single girl who had ever whispered about her, and he would come stand at her desk, and he would look down at the marker-scrawled panel on the front, and he would look at the sticker she had put over the hanging-girl drawing, and then he would look at her, and he would sigh, and he would say—

"Princess. Come on. Let's go."

That was it. That was all he had to say. Just those five words. And she would slip her hand into his, and he would lead her right out of this classroom in front of everyone, and every whispering girl in the room would understand, in that instant, exactly whose princess she still was and always had been and always would be. And they would look at her with that specific look that Trinity girls did—that mixture of envy and hate and the particular resentment reserved for a girl who had gotten away with something they had all been trying very hard to make sure she wouldn't get away with—and Mika would give them a little wave with her free hand, just the tiniest little finger-waggle, and she would tilt her head to just the exact angle that showed off her half-up sidebun to its best advantage, and she would smile the sweetest, most poisonous, most finished little smile she had ever smiled in her life, and she would say—

"Byeeeee~♪"

And that would be it. She would leave with him. Just walk out. In front of God and the Sisters and everyone. And nothing they whispered afterward would matter, because she wouldn't be here to hear it, because she would be with him, and he was the only person in the entire world whose voice she actually wanted to hear anymore, so what did it matter what any of the rest of these silly little cotton-candy-headed nothings thought of her—

Bzzt.

The phone vibrated once against the wood of the desk.

Mika's entire body did a thing that she would have, under any other circumstance, been deeply mortified to be seen doing—every muscle went taut for a fractional instant, her shoulders jumped a full centimeter, her breath caught in the back of her throat with an audible little hk sound, and her thumb was on the screen before she had consciously registered the vibration, before she had even finished exhaling—

MomoTalk notification.

Not Sensei.

The class group chat. Someone had posted a photo. She could see the preview thumbnail: a picture of the back of her own head, taken about thirty seconds ago from the diagonal corner, with the caption look at princess pretend to have friends and a laughing emoji.

Mika stared at it.

Her golden eyes, which had been sparkling a moment ago with the daydream of Sensei walking through that door, went very still. Not narrowed. Not glaring. Just—still. That milky-white stillness that Nagisa had once, in a rare unguarded moment, told her was the single most frightening expression Mika had in her entire arsenal, more frightening than her Villain Debut wink, more frightening than her cold Tea Party voice, more frightening than the moment she had leveled Quis ut Deus at Saori's forehead in the Arius passage. Because it was a face with nothing on it. A face that had gone somewhere.

She held it for perhaps two full seconds.

Then—because Misono Mika, whatever else she was, was still Misono Mika, and Misono Mika did not give any of these girls the satisfaction of any face at all—she blinked once, and the stillness melted, and the little airheaded princess smile ghosted back into place over her lips like a curtain drawing shut, and she reached up with her free hand and twirled one long pink-and-blue tendril of hair around her index finger, and she tilted her chin so that the sunlight caught the little silver cross at her throat and made it flash, and she flipped her phone back over screen-down against the desk with a soft, unhurried click, and she went back to humming her little tuneless song.

"Nn-nnn-nnnnn~♪"

"Nnn~ ♪ nn-nnnnn ♪"

Behind her, the giggling had reached its peak and was already starting to peter out, the way it always did when the target refused to bleed—girls were carnivores, but only if there was actual meat, and Mika had spent the last three weeks becoming very, very good at being a mannequin. They would give up eventually. They always did. They would slouch back over their phones and move on to the next thing, and Mika would sit here in her three-desk quarantine with her hair perfect and her uniform crisp and her sticker of the smiling bear cub covering the hanging-girl drawing, and she would wait.

Because sooner or later—sooner or later, in five minutes, in ten minutes, in an hour, in the middle of the afternoon, tonight when she was already curled up in her attic bed staring at the ceiling—the phone was going to buzz for real. And it was going to be him. It had to be. Because if it wasn't—

Well.

She didn't think about if it wasn't. Princesses didn't think about things like that. Princesses just waited prettily by the window for their prince to come, and if he was running a little late, well, that was because he was busy, and busy was fine, busy was impressive actually, because it meant he was important, and princesses definitely deserved important princes, so really this was all going exactly according to plan, ehehe~☆

Her thumb, of its own accord, reached out and turned the phone screen-up again.

Still no notification.

"Sen~sei," she whispered to the empty rectangle of glass, in a voice so small and so private that it was almost a purr, almost a plea, almost the exact opposite of every syllable she had ever spoken in front of another human being in this classroom or any other. "Sen~seeeeeei. Look at me. Just look at me for one second, okay? Just one? Mika will be so good if you just—"

Bzzt.

Her breath stopped.

The Trinity General School's West Wing Rose Conservatory was, at three-forty-seven in the afternoon, a place designed by God specifically for girls to gossip in.

Late autumn sunlight poured through the vaulted stained-glass ceiling in dusty ribbons of rose and gold, catching in the steam that curled up from a fresh pot of Darjeeling First Flush and illuminating the pale motes drifting between the ivory pillars. The white roses climbing the trellises had been persuaded, by the greenhouse's gentle thermal charms, to bloom two months out of season, and their scent — soft, almost powdery — mingled with vanilla, warm sugar, and the faint, expensive perfume of the three girls seated around the round mother-of-pearl inlaid table at the conservatory's heart.

The three-tier silver cake stand between them looked like something out of a picture book. Strawberry shortcakes on the top tier, each crowned with a single glossy berry. Lavender macarons in the middle, arranged with the geometric precision of a Sister who had strong feelings about symmetry. And on the bottom, tiny finger sandwiches of cucumber and smoked salmon that no one had touched, because — well. There were strawberry shortcakes.

"—and then, right? Right?" Mika was in the middle of a story, her teacup abandoned mid-air, her fork gesturing wildly with a speared bite of cream-drowned sponge. "Sister Margaret goes, totally serious face, 'Misono-san, is this the third pair of tights you've laddered this week?' And I just — pfft — I couldn't even, I just said, 'Well, Sister, it's not like they're laddering themselves out of malice, right? It's just physics★'—"

"That is not what physics is." Seia's voice was cool and dry, the perpetual half-tired quality of someone who had spent her formative years reading three books simultaneously. She sat with impeccable posture on the velvet chaise, her long pale-golden hair spilling over one shoulder, a leather-bound volume open on her lap that she had not turned a page of in the past twelve minutes. Her golden eyes, half-lidded, tracked Mika's fork with mild concern. "And you're going to fling cream on the upholstery."

"I am not going to fling cream on the upholstery, Seia-chan," Mika sniffed, tossing her cotton-candy pink hair with a little flick of the head that made the small purple flower ornament on her side-bun bob prettily. "I have excellent fork control. Watch."

She popped the bite into her mouth with theatrical precision, closed her eyes, and made a small ecstatic noise into the back of her hand. "Mmn~♥ See? Perfect."

"You have a fleck of cream on your cheek."

"Do* I?" Mika's eyes flew wide open. Her fingertips flew up to check.

"Left side. Higher. Higher. — There."

"—Uwaa, you tricked me, that was mean, Seia-chan, that was super mean, I have to log that in my grudge notebook now★"

"You don't have a grudge notebook."

"I might."

Nagisa, who had been quietly pouring a fresh cup of tea with the exquisite economy of motion that only years of Kirifuji-household training could produce, gave the smallest sigh through her nose. She set the porcelain teapot down without so much as a click against the saucer, tucked a strand of ash-blonde hair behind her ear, and folded her hands in her lap.

"Mika. Please try to eat with your mouth closed. And Seia, please don't provoke her while she has a fork in her hand."

"I wasn't provoking her," Seia said, without looking up.

"You were entirely provoking me," Mika said, at exactly the same time.

Nagisa closed her eyes for a heartbeat — the specific closed-eye expression of a woman who has, at some point in the past decade, accepted that her two best friends were going to be like this until one of them died. She opened them again. Her smile was small and infinitely patient.

"…All right. Please continue your story, Mika."

"Ehehe~♪ Thank you, Nagi-chan. See, Seia-chan, some people appreciate my storytelling."

"Some people are professionally obligated."

"Mou~" Mika puffed her cheeks, and for a moment she was very obviously, very deliberately Cute. The kind of Cute that was calibrated for maximum effect, and which she deployed the way a swordsman deploys a favorite blade — with the confidence of someone who had never once had it fail her. "Nagi-chan, Seia-chan is being mean to me. Do something."

"Please be nicer to Mika, Seia."

"Understood."

"You didn't mean that at all, did you, Seia-chan."

"Not particularly."

Mika gasped in aggrieved delight and reached for another shortcake.

It was, all things considered, a very good afternoon. The kind of afternoon that, six months ago, would have been unthinkable — the kind of afternoon that, if any of them had let themselves think about it too directly, would have made someone's teacup shake in its saucer. But no one was thinking about it directly. That was the point of afternoons like this. You built them, and you sat inside them, and you let the roses smell like roses and the tea taste like tea and the girl across from you complain about her tights, and slowly, slowly, the shape of how things used to be started to fit back over the shape of how things are now, like a slightly-too-big glove that you were determined to grow into.

Seia's halo pulsed a soft gold in the sunlight. Nagisa's remained still and rosy and perfectly composed. Mika's — a nebula-bright pink and sky-blue whorl — was gently, unconsciously rotating, the way it always did when she was happy and didn't know she was happy.

"So then — oh! Oh oh oh, and then the funniest part—"

Bzzt.

Her phone, face-down on the table beside her teacup, buzzed once.

Mika froze mid-sentence. Fork suspended. Mouth slightly open.

The pink whorl of her halo hitched, brightened, and did a small, giddy little spin.

"—Hold that thought," she said, in a voice that had gone half an octave higher without her permission, and her hand shot toward the phone with a speed that was not entirely befitting a young lady of Trinity.

"Mika," Nagisa said, in the tone of someone who had watched this exact sequence unfold approximately four thousand times.

"It might be important, Nagi-chan."

"It is Sensei."

"It might be important Sensei," Mika amended, already flipping the phone over.

Seia's eyes flicked up from her book for the first time in the conversation. Not much. Just a fraction. Just enough to catch Nagisa's eye across the table with an expression that communicated, without a single word spoken, look at this. look at her. can you believe this. And Nagisa's returning expression, which was the softest, most world-weary version of yes. every day. every single day.

Mika did not notice. Mika was busy.

The lock screen bloomed under her thumb — a photograph of the night sky she'd taken from her attic window, three constellations visible, and the little green MomoTalk bubble hovering in the corner with a number badge that was, incontrovertibly, [1].

Her thumb was on the notification before her brain had finished processing it.

Sensei Mika, a quick heads-up — you're on Schale duty tomorrow. Come by the office in the morning, okay?

The chat window opened. She read it. She read it again. She read it a third time, because the letters were doing that pleasant little swimming-around thing they did when Sensei's name was at the top of the screen, and she wanted to make sure she'd parsed it correctly.

Schale duty. Tomorrow. Come by the office.

Which meant.

Which meant.

Which meant that tomorrow morning she — Misono Mika, currently on probation, currently persona non grata across roughly seventy percent of Trinity's student body, currently the girl whose Tea Party seat was, at any given moment, one denominational vote away from being formally revoked — was going to spend an entire day at the Schale office. With Sensei. With Sensei. Fetching coffee for Sensei. Sorting paperwork next to Sensei. Possibly — possibly — being asked to sit in Sensei's chair while Sensei went to get something from the file room and coming back to find her spinning gently in it and going pfft, sorry, sorry, it was calling to me★ and Sensei laughing that low quiet laugh that did something unspeakable to the inside of her ribcage—

Her cheeks flushed. A tiny, involuntary "Ehe~♥" escaped her lips before she could clamp down on it.

The pink whorl of her halo bloomed into a supernova and started rotating the other way.

"—Mikaa."

"One second*, Nagi-chan—"

Her thumbs were already flying. She had a whole system for MomoTalk replies to Sensei, honed over months of anxious optimization. First rule: never reply too fast. Second rule: never reply too slow. Third rule: the number of hearts must be exactly calibrated to the message received — too few, distant; too many, desperate. Fourth rule, and the most important: sound cute but not thirsty.

Yay~☆ Mika-chan is looking forward to it❤

She stared at it. Deleted it. That was too many exclamations. It sounded like she was going to cartwheel into the office.

Okie-dokie! What time?

Too casual. Sensei would think she wasn't taking it seriously.

Understood♪ I'll be there bright and early★ Should I bring anything?

…Better. Was "bright and early" too eager? Was offering to bring something too eager? Was the star at the end too many stars, was—

"Mika, your tea is getting cold."

"Just one moment, Seia-chan, this is diplomatically sensitive—"

"It is a text message."

"It is a *diplomatically sensitive text message."

She was chewing on her lower lip now. Her left thumb hovered above the send arrow. Her right hand was, entirely unconsciously, twirling the very end of a lock of pink hair around her index finger, tight enough that the tip was going white.

Send.

The little swoosh of the sent-message sound was, in Mika's private cosmology, one of the most beautiful sounds in the world.

And then — because of course, because life was cruel and Sensei was busier than any single man had a right to be — the two little grey checkmarks that meant delivered appeared, and did not, in the following eleven seconds of Mika staring at them without breathing, turn blue.

Her lower lip did a very small thing that was almost, but not quite, a pout.

"…Mm."

She set the phone down.

Face-up, this time. Where she could see it. Just in case.

She lifted her teacup with elaborate, princess-approved decorum. She took a small, ladylike sip. She set it down again. She adjusted the sit of her cape. She glanced — she did not glance at the phone. She absolutely did not glance at the phone. She glanced near the phone, which was different.

Across the table, Nagisa lifted her own cup with the exact same measured grace and, over the rim of it, gave Mika the fondest, most exasperated look a childhood friend had ever produced.

"…So. Schale duty tomorrow?"

"How did you know—"

"Mika."

"…Was it obvious."

"It was obvious."

"It was incredibly obvious," Seia added, turning a page she was still not reading.

"Mouu~" Mika slumped forward, elbows on the table in a way that would have earned her a Sister's ruler across the knuckles ten months ago, and dropped her chin into her palms. The pink whorl of her halo did another giddy little spin she couldn't have suppressed if she'd tried. "It's not a big deal. It's just, y'know, duty. Schale duty. Serving the community. Contributing to the wonderful federated academic mission of Kivotos. That kind of thing."

"Mm."

"With Sensei."

"Yes."

"For the whole day."

"Yes."

"In* Sensei's office."

"Yes, Mika."

"…Nagi-chan, do you think my hair looks okay for tomorrow, or should I do something different, or—"

"Your hair looks lovely. Please don't stay up until three in the morning re-doing it."

"I would never—"

"You did that last time."

"That was—" Mika gestured helplessly, "—an *extenuating circumstance—"

"The 'extenuating circumstance' was that Sensei had said your ribbon was cute."

"That was a very significant extenuating circumstance, Seia-chan, you don't *understand—"

"I understand perfectly. I simply do not care."

"Meaaan~"

But Mika was laughing as she said it, laughing in that light, fluttery way that made her shoulders shake and her half-up sidebun bounce, and the sunlight caught on the little silver cross at her chest and split into a dozen tiny rainbows on the white tablecloth. For one long, ordinary moment, in the rose-scented warmth of the conservatory, with two of the three people in the world she loved most sitting across from her, and a fresh pot of Darjeeling still steaming between them, and the promise of tomorrow morning gleaming on the phone by her elbow like a small private star — Misono Mika was, without qualification and without knowing she was, happy.

Her phone buzzed.

Her head snapped down so fast her sidebun whipped.

The two grey checkmarks had turned blue. And beneath them, in the little bubble that made her heart do something dangerous and undisciplined:

Sensei No need to bring anything. Just yourself. See you tomorrow.

Mika made a sound.

It was not, strictly speaking, a word. It was more of a small, high, involuntary "Hyaan—❤" that escaped from somewhere at the very back of her throat, and she clamped both hands over her mouth so hard and so fast that her fork clattered onto the plate.

Seia, without looking up: "…Nagisa."

"Yes, Seia."

"I believe our friend is malfunctioning."

"I am not malfunctioning—"

"Your face is very red, Mika."

"It is not—"

"It is quite red."

"Mouu—* it's — it's just — it's the tea, the tea is hot, Seia-chan, obviously—"

"You have not touched your tea in four minutes."

"—*shhh—"

She was still holding the phone. She had, at some point in the last three seconds, curled her whole body around it protectively, like a dragon guarding a very small and very precious egg, and the tips of her ears had gone the exact shade of pink as the icing on the shortcakes. Nagisa reached, with the wordless efficiency of long practice, for a linen napkin, and pressed it gently into Mika's free hand.

"For your face, dear."

"Th-thank you, Nagi-chan—"

"You're welcome."

"I hate both of you," Mika mumbled into the napkin, in the tone of someone who very obviously did not, and was in fact so drunk on a single word that Sensei had used that she wouldn't have been able to hate a wasp if it stung her.

Somewhere in the conservatory, a rose petal detached itself from its stem and drifted, spinning slowly, down toward the marble floor.

And Mika — burying her still-hot cheeks in the linen, phone clutched to her chest, halo spinning like a small pink galaxy above her head — was already, without knowing it, beginning to plan what she was going to wear tomorrow.

The bell above the café door gave a small, syrupy tink-tink as the two of them stepped inside, and Mika drew a theatrical little breath through her teeth like she'd just walked into a treasure vault.

"Wa—o.*☆"

The place was one of those pastel-drenched confectioneries wedged into a corner off the main Trinity shopping street — one Mika had bookmarked in her phone under the folder titled ⟪ Places to Drag Sensei Someday ⟫ (seventeen entries, color-coded, with tiny star ratings she'd assigned entirely by vibes). Pale cream walls, brass fixtures, a display case glowing under warm bulbs like a jeweler's cabinet — except instead of diamonds, it was mille-feuille and tarts and a tiered stand of macarons in colors that made her want to press her face against the glass.

She almost did.

"Sensei, Sensei, look, look~♪ the strawberry one has two whole berries on top, that's basically fraud against the other cakes, don't you think? Ehehe—❤"

Her cotton-candy hair swished as she spun on her heel, capelet fluttering, the silver cross at her chest catching the amber lamplight for one bright, sacrilegious wink. She'd been humming since they left the tram stop. She'd been humming, in fact, since roughly the moment Sensei had said "there's a café I want to try" three days ago — which was, in Mika's private personal-calendar accounting, seventy-two hours of premeditated humming and one all-nighter of outfit deliberation. Not that she'd admit to the all-nighter. A princess simply woke up looking like this. Naturally. Effortlessly. With, coincidentally, a fresh manicure in the exact shade of pink that matched the ribbon in her hair.

The scent inside was almost unfair — butter and vanilla and something citrusy going crisp under a torch somewhere in the back — and her stomach, that perfidious traitor, gave a tiny, princess-inappropriate grrrk. She clapped a hand over the front of her capelet as though she could physically silence her own duodenum.

Then her golden eyes snagged on the poster.

Taped to the inside of the glass door, laminated with slightly bubbled edges, in a font that was trying very hard to be cute:

⟪ COUPLES' DISCOUNT — 20% OFF THE SEASONAL SET ♥ ⟫ (One set per couple. Please inform your server upon seating!)

Mika's brain, which had been idling somewhere in the vicinity of "strawberry or chestnut, strawberry or chestnut," performed a small, elegant handbrake turn.

—Couples.

Couples' discount.

Couples' — as in — the plural noun that groups together two people who are, definitionally, a—

The dimple in her right cheek did a strange little flicker. Her fingers, still gripping the strap of her tiny white shoulder bag, tightened just enough that the seams protested. She did not look at Sensei. She looked, with an incredibly casual air, at a completely different display of madeleines, as if madeleines were the most fascinating pastry humankind had ever devised and she needed to memorize each shell-ridge for a future essay.

Inside her head:

—wait wait wait wait waitwaitwait—

—Sensei picked THIS café? out of ALL the cafés? and there's a poster like THAT right on the door? that Sensei DEFINITELY saw walking in? and he still — still — brought Mika-chan in without saying anything? like it's a totally normal thing to do? EHHHH!?

—okay okay calm down. calm. down. Mika. you are a princess. princesses do not squeal in cafés. princesses do not tackle their Sensei's arm in public. princesses—

Her heels made a small betraying tap-tap-tap in place.

"H—hmmm~♪" she hummed at the madeleines, at a slightly higher pitch than before, twirling one pastel-pink lock around her index finger. "They look really yummy today, don't they~? Nn-hnn~♪"

The hostess — a girl about their age, Trinity uniform tie visibly tucked under her apron, part-timer probably — sailed over with two leather-bound menus tucked against her chest and a smile calibrated for the kind of tips that came from customers who noticed calibrated smiles.

"Welcome in! Two of you today? Right this way~"

She led them past the display case, past a low shelf of imported teas in tins that Mika catalogued at a glance (Fortnum's, Mariage Frères, oh — that one's the new Kusmi blend, Nagi-chan would lose her mind), and around a half-partition of pale oak to a corner booth. Window seat. Afternoon sun coming in at a slant, soft as a filter. A single fresh peony in a bud vase on the table.

Objectively speaking: a date seat.

Mika slid in with the practiced grace of eleven years of etiquette drilling, arranging her flared skirt so it fanned prettily across the cushion without wrinkling, then folded her hands in her lap like a very good girl who had absolutely not been evaluating the ambient lighting for its selfie potential. The waitress set down the menus, took a small, ceremonial half-step back, and produced a little laminated card with the seasonal set on it — a photograph so glossy Mika could almost taste it. Strawberry-and-pistachio tart. Cream-topped chestnut roll. Two pots of tea. Two small chocolates on the side, wrapped in gold foil, shaped like tiny hearts.

The waitress angled her head, and her smile did a small, sly shift — the corner of her mouth ticking up in the specific way service-industry girls' mouths ticked up when they were about to make a little bit of trouble on purpose because their shift was long and their feet hurt and cute customers were fun to poke at.

"So~" she said, tapping the corner of the card with a manicured nail, in the exact singsong lilt of someone extending a rhetorical rope, "are you two a couple? The seasonal set's twenty percent off if you are~"

The world stopped.

Not literally. The espresso machine kept hissing. Someone two tables over laughed at their friend's phone. A saucer clinked somewhere. But in the specific hemisphere of the universe centered on Misono Mika's brainstem, everything went white and airless, like a flashbulb had gone off inside her skull.

—EHHHH!?❤

—SHE JUST SAID IT!? OUT LOUD!? IN FRONT OF SENSEI!? THE C-WORD!? (couple, the couple word, obviously, not — nevermind, focus—)

—okay Mika. okay. this is fine. this is totally fine. what does a normal high school girl do here. what does a normal — no wait, forget normal — what does a PRINCESS do here — a princess would — a princess would — a princess would deflect elegantly with a little laugh and say ohohoho whatever are you saying my good woman we are merely — merely — merely—

She opened her mouth to deploy exactly that elegant deflection.

"Ehh~~~~?❤" came out instead, at approximately the pitch of a teakettle just starting to complain, and her cheeks had already — traitorously — flushed the exact shade of the strawberries in the display case, and her hands had — without her permission — flown up to press against those cheeks like she was trying to hold the color in.

Damage control. Damage control immediately. Salvage. Salvage salvage salvage.

"W-wait, wait a second, geez—" she laughed, in a laugh that had approximately three too many syllables and one small crack near the end, waving one hand in that fluttery no-no-no motion princesses learned from watching too many romance dramas, "what's this all of a sudden~? Miss part-timer, you can't just spring stuff on customers like that, you know? That's totally against the rules~☆ where's your manager, hmm, hmm?"

The waitress, who had clearly done this exact bit before and been rewarded with excellent tips for it, did not budge. Her smile only widened by a merciful, terrible millimeter.

"Ehehe, sorry, sorry~ It's just, you two came in together, and it looked so — you know~♪ I thought I'd check! No pressure though — I'll just come back in a minute for your order, take your time deciding, okay?"

She winked. She actually winked. At Mika. Girl-to-girl. Solidarity-of-mischief.

And then she withdrew, apron strings swaying, leaving in her wake a silence at the corner booth that had a specific weight and temperature.

Mika kept her hands pressed to her cheeks for exactly one more second. Then she lowered them, very slowly, and picked up the seasonal menu card with a level of gravitas normally reserved for state documents. She studied it. She studied it intensely. The strawberry-and-pistachio tart underwent forensic examination. Every leaf of every garnish was appraised. She turned the card over. There was nothing on the back. She turned it over again anyway.

Her right hand, unconsciously, drifted to her left wrist and touched it lightly.

(Only Nagisa would have caught that.)

Somewhere under her ribs, her heart was going thump thump thump thump in a rhythm she recognized from many, many nights spent staring at her phone waiting for Sensei's read receipt. It was, she noted distantly and with a certain scholarly detachment, unfair — deeply unfair — that a single sentence from a stranger in an apron could so completely undo the composure she'd rebuilt from wreckage over the last six months.

—but wait. wait wait wait.

—Sensei hasn't said anything yet.

—Sensei hasn't corrected her.

—Sensei hasn't said "oh, no, we're not, she's just my student," has he? Sensei hasn't said that. Right? Right?? Mika would have noticed if Sensei said that. Mika's Sensei-sensor is calibrated to like, point-zero-one-decibel precision, Mika would have HEARD it—

—which means—

—which means Sensei is either about to say it, or Sensei is—

Her golden eyes lifted, just a fraction, over the top edge of the menu card. Not a full look. A reconnaissance peek. Fringe of pink lashes, dimple almost showing, the tiniest bitten-lip quirk at the very corner of her mouth that she couldn't quite suppress.

"...Sen~sei?" she said, voice pitched into a register that she absolutely believed sounded casual and innocent and not-at-all-loaded, stretching the two syllables of his title like taffy. She let the menu card droop, just slightly, revealing more of her face — cheeks still hot, eyes lit up with that particular gold that meant her nebula-halo was probably swirling somewhere behind her, though she'd trained herself over years not to let anyone see it flare. "Um. That thing just now. What that girl said. Ehehe. That was pretty funny, right~? Like, super embarrassing? Mika-chan almost died, you know, right there on the spot, poof, gone, no more Mika. My tombstone would just say '❁ death by café ❁' and everyone would be like 'ah, yeah, tracks.'"

She twirled a lock of hair around her finger. Fast, then slow, then fast again.

"...but, you know," — and here her voice dropped, softer, the tremor in it not entirely performed, the sparkle in her eye not entirely a joke — "you didn't tell her 'no', though. Sensei. Did you?"

A beat. Her lashes lowered. Then, treacherously, the corners of her mouth curled up, and the dimple did show, and the airheaded-princess sing-song came crashing back in like a defense mechanism arriving late to its own rescue mission:

"Hmmmm~~? Now that Mika-chan thinks about it~? That's suspicious~☆ Really super suspicious~♪ Twenty percent off is a lot of money, you know, Sensei? Like, that's basically a whole extra parfait~! And Mika-chan is a very reasonable, very economical, very responsible princess who thinks about her Sensei's wallet, so — so, so, so — if Sensei were, hypothetically, hypothetically speaking, purely for the sake of the discount, of course, purely for financial reasons, absolutely no other reason, going to tell that girl 'yes' when she comes back...❤"

She tilted her head. The half-up sidebun swayed. The little purple flower ornament caught the light.

"...then Mika-chan wouldn't say anything to stop him, you know?☆"

Her free hand, the one not clutching the menu, had migrated across the tabletop under the pretense of reaching for the water glass, and was now resting approximately one centimeter from Sensei's — palm up, fingers slightly curled, in the specific configuration of a hand that was Absolutely Not Asking To Be Held but would, if held, offer no resistance whatsoever and possibly a small triumphant squeeze.

The peony in the bud vase leaned slightly toward the sun.

Outside the window, a tram bell rang.

Behind the counter, the espresso machine gave a long, patient hiss, like an old cat exhaling.

And Misono Mika, seventeen years old, cotton-candy-haired, worth-forty-seven-kilograms-of-superweapon and one racing heart, waited — with the smallest, most princess-like smile she could manage, and eyes that had gone very, very bright — for Sensei's next move.

The confessional booth at the far end of Trinity's minor chapel smelled of beeswax, lemon oil, and dust that never quite settled no matter how many times the Sisters wiped down the mahogany. Late afternoon light bled sideways through the stained-glass lily above the doorway—red, gold, a bruised sort of blue—and painted a long slanted rectangle across the flagstones, cutting the room exactly in half. Half warm. Half cold. On the warm half, dust motes drifted upward like something rising to heaven; on the cold half, they hung motionless as though even they weren't quite sure what they'd done to be exiled.

Misono Mika sat on the confessor's side.

Not the priest's side, obviously—the lattice side. The side where sinners were supposed to kneel. Except she wasn't kneeling. She was perched sideways on the little wooden bench with her legs tucked to one side in a picture-perfect yokozuwari, one white-tighted ankle crossed daintily over the other, her flared uniform skirt fanned out around her thighs in a way that had clearly taken a full thirty seconds of arranging to look that effortless. Her sky-blue-tipped pink hair tumbled over one shoulder in a soft cascade, the little purple flower ornament on her side-bun catching the red light and glowing like a coal ember. Her chin rested on the back of her folded hands. Her golden eyes were half-lidded, the honey-amber irises tracking the slow drift of a single dust mote across the shaft of light.

On the wooden bench beside her sat a half-eaten strawberry shortcake on a paper plate. One perfect strawberry left. A small silver fork. A crumpled Trinity-issue paper napkin with a smudge of whipped cream on the corner.

Sensei had asked her a question about forty seconds ago.

She had been ignoring it for thirty-eight of those seconds.

"—um, so, Sensei?" Her voice came out light, floaty, tilted upward at the end like a music note strolling casually up a staircase. "Can you say that one more time? Just one more time~☆ Pretty please? Mika-chan didn't quite catch it the first time. The acoustics in here are, y'know, kind of..."

She waved her free hand vaguely at the vaulted ceiling. The gesture said the acoustics are fine, actually, but I need another five seconds to decide how to react.

The dust mote drifted out of the light. She lost it. She pouted a little at nothing in particular.

"...Okay, okay. Fine. You wanna know*—" she rolled the word around in her mouth like a lozenge she wasn't sure she liked the flavor of, "—whether the winged students at Trinity really lay eggs."

Beat.

Two beats.

She turned her head, very slowly, and looked at him. Not at the lattice screen. Around it. Golden eyes leveled directly at Sensei's face, chin still cradled on the back of her hand, one strand of cotton-candy hair caught on her lower lip and completely ignored. The smile she wore was the specific one she deployed roughly twice per Tea Party meeting—the one that made Nagisa reflexively check the exits.

"Sensei."

Sweet as icing sugar. Flat as a pressed flower.

"That's what you dragged Mika-chan away from her afternoon cake break to ask? Really? You made me leave a perfectly good parfait cooling in the refectory—wait, no, I brought the shortcake, never mind—but still. You had me walk all the way across the west cloister. In these shoes. For that." She lifted one foot slightly. A hand-stitched cream leather flat, tiny gold buckle, absolutely not built for west-cloister flagstones. "You owe me a new parfait. With the extra whipped cream. And one of those little chocolate flakes on top, the curly ones? You know the ones."

The plastic fork got picked up. Not to eat with. Just to twirl, idly, between two fingers.

"...Buuut—" the word dragged out, lilting, and one manicured fingertip tapped her lower lip in a show of exaggerated deep thought that was so theatrical it circled all the way back around to sincere, "—I guess since Mika-chan is such a kind and generous and charitable senpai, I can deign to answer this one very silly little question. Just this once~☆ You should feel very honored, y'know?"

She sat up a fraction straighter. Cleared her throat with a tiny ehem like a talk-show host about to deliver a monologue. The red-gold light slid across the silver cross at her chest and made it flash once, briefly, like a warning.

"Sooo. Winged students. Y'know, the girls from the choir dorm? The ones with the pretty little wings kinda like—" she reached back, hooked one finger under a lock of her own hair, and flicked the tips of it forward in a small demonstrative flutter, "—these? Yeah. Yeah, those ones."

Her expression did something complicated. The smile stayed. The eyes went somewhere else.

"So the story goes—and I want to stress, Sensei, that this is the story, this is what people who have never actually spoken to a winged student say—that once a month, on nights when there's no moon at all, they go up to the top of the bell tower. And they, um." Her fingertips drummed once against her cheek. "They lay one. Just one. About the size of a...hmm. A robin's egg? Bigger. Quail? No, bigger than a quail. It's kind of a special size, I guess. Pale blue. With little gold speckles, like someone flicked a paintbrush at it. And it doesn't hatch anything, obviously, because they're not, y'know, actually birds—they're girls, Sensei, honestly, girls—but the Sisters collect them, and they get blessed, and then they get, um..." She tilted her head. The bun ornament caught the light again. "...used in the communion wafers. For the Feast of the Annunciation. Allegedly."

She let that hang in the beeswax-and-dust air for one long second.

Then she snorted. A very undignified, very un-princess-like snort, hand flying up to cover her mouth a half-second too late.

"—pfft—Sensei, oh my gosh, your face—you actually—you were writing that down, weren't you? Weren't you! Show Mika-chan the notebook. Show it. Right now. Ohhh my god you were." She was laughing properly now, one hand pressed flat to her chest above the cross, shoulders shaking, the whole princess-composure thing evaporating like steam off a teacup. "Ahaha—ahaha—no. No no no. Sensei. Sensei. Absolutely not. That's not a thing. That has never been a thing. Where did you even hear that, was it Saia-chan? It was Saia-chan, wasn't it? Of course it was Saia-chan. Ugh. That woman."

She swiped a knuckle under one eye, catching the tear of laughter before it could smudge anything.

"They don't lay eggs, Sensei. They're people. They eat cafeteria food and complain about the laundry rotation and have crushes on the boys who deliver the sacramental wine and get zits before big performances just like everybody else. The wings are, um—" her voice softened, gentled, the teasing draining out of it into something almost thoughtful, "—they're just wings. They're pretty. They don't really do much. Can't fly with them. Can barely lift a hymnal. Mostly they just get in the way when you're trying to sleep on your back."

She glanced sideways at him, and the golden eyes had that specific glimmer they got when she was about to be a little bit mean on purpose.

"...I'd know, wouldn't I. Since I've got a set myself. Right here."

The pale angelic wings at her hips, which had been folded modestly and mostly-invisibly against her lower back for the entire conversation, gave a single lazy shrug-flutter—like a cat's tail twitching to indicate mild sarcasm. A tiny star-shaped ornament pinned near the base caught the stained-glass red and glinted.

"You've seen them a hundred times, Sensei. Never once occurred to you to ask me? Had to go and ask Saia? Rude. Genuinely rude. Mika-chan's feelings are devastated, you know. Absolutely in shambles. Look at this shambled face." She pulled a face that was not, in any recognizable sense, shambled. "Anyway. That'll be one parfait. Extra whipped cream. Curly chocolate. And—hmm—" the fork got pointed at him, tines-out, in mock accusation, "—and you have to sit with me while I eat it. As penance. For asking a terrible question."

She finally, finally speared the last strawberry on the paper plate. Held it up. Turned it in the red light so the sugar glaze glittered.

"Ehehe~♪ ...though, y'know, if you'd really wanted to know something interesting about winged students, you could've just asked me what they're actually like." Her voice went quiet on that last part. Not sad. Just quiet. Like she was surprised to hear herself say it. "...Nobody really asks that one. Huh."

The strawberry vanished between her lips. She chewed thoughtfully. Swallowed. The smile came back, brighter, deployed like a curtain being pulled across a window that had accidentally shown too much of the inside of a house.

"Anywayyy~☆ Parfait. Cloister. Chop chop, Sensei. Mika-chan is a very busy princess and her afternoon schedule is ruthless."

The attic was cold in that particular way old Trinity dormitories got right before dawn — the kind of cold that seeped through the thin glass of the single dormer window and settled between the sheets like an unwelcome third occupant. Frost had bloomed in ferny patterns across the lower corners of the pane. Beyond it, the spires of Trinity's cathedral complex were still swallowed in indigo dark, only their gilded crosses catching the very earliest hint of a bruise-purple sky.

Inside the room — a cramped, sloped-ceilinged little cell that a Tea Party Host of six months ago would have refused to stable a horse in — the air was thick with the sugary vanilla of Mika's shampoo, the faint powder of yesterday's cake crumbs on the desk, and something else. Something warmer. Muskier. A heat rolling off the small mound of blankets in the center of the narrow single bed, rising into the frigid air in a barely-visible curl of steam.

"Nn... nnh... — nnnfuu—❥"

The blankets stirred.

Beneath the pale pink duvet — one of the few personal possessions the confiscation had let her keep, and only because she had literally wrapped her arms around it and refused to let go while the seizure officers watched with faces like disappointed nuns — Misono Mika was having a very interesting morning.

Her small body was curled into a tight, trembling comma-shape on her side, knees drawn up almost to her ample chest, one white pillow clamped fiercely between her thighs. Her cotton-candy pink hair was a wild, silken tangle across the pillowcase, the half-up scrunchie having come loose at some point in the night and now dangling forgotten near her ear. Her wings — those small, decorative angelic wings at the small of her back — were fluttering in tiny, involuntary spasms against the sheet, like a moth pinned and pulsing.

"Ha—ah... S... Sen... sei... ❥"

The word slipped out of her sleeping mouth in a breathy, half-swallowed whimper — the kind of voice a princess isn't supposed to have. A voice with the crystal ojou-sama chime melted, gone syrupy at the edges, the vowels softening and thickening the way a sugar cube dissolves in warm milk tea. Her lips — pink, plump, faintly parted — were slick and glossy with a thin film of saliva. A single silver thread of it had traced its way from the corner of her mouth down to the pillow, where it had left a small dark spot on the white cotton.

Inside her skull, the dream was still playing at a merciless, high-definition frame rate her waking mind would absolutely have censored.

—A study. Not hers. His. Sensei's office at Schale, the one that smelled of coffee and old paper. She was sitting on the desk. Somehow she had no jacket. Somehow her white capelet was folded neatly over the arm of a chair, as though she'd taken it off politely before what she was about to do, which was — oh. Oh dear. She was climbing into his lap. He was seated in the leather chair and she was climbing into his lap the way she'd been told a thousand times that a lady of Trinity absolutely never should, one knee first, then swinging the other over, skirt riding scandalously high, her small bare thighs squeezing the outside of his hips —

"Sensei," dream-Mika had heard herself say, in a voice that was almost her real one but half an octave lower, half an octave more dangerous, "I've been very, very, very bad."

And Sensei had smiled that gentle, tired, indulgent smile of his — the one that had saved her life at the Arius passage, the one she had painted onto the ceiling above her bed in memory — and Sensei had put one broad, warm hand flat between her shoulder blades and the other, more slowly, more terribly, up under the hem of her skirt —

"Nnhhah — ! Ha... ha... Sensei, nnn, that's — that's not — a princess wouldn't — ❥"

Her small hips gave a tiny, betraying rock forward against the pillow between her thighs. The friction, muted through cotton and the thin silk of her camisole and the pink lace of her panties, was still awful. Awful in the sense that awe meant terror meant reverence meant this feels far, far, far too good for this early in the morning. She could feel — even half-asleep — that the fabric between her legs had gone soft and clingy and cool-warm-cool with a slow-spreading wet patch. She could feel the little heart-shaped patch of pubic hair she so meticulously kept trimmed pressing flat and sticky against silk. She could feel her own pulse knocking, knocking, knocking against the pillow like it was politely asking to be let in.

Her eyelashes fluttered. Long, curled, natural-pink at the roots. Beneath them her golden irises rolled, the pupils blown wide and glassy, seeing nothing in the real room and everything in the dream one —

— Sensei's hand was going higher. Sensei's mouth was at her ear. Sensei was murmuring, in the same low, quiet voice he had used to call her his precious princess, "You've been thinking about this, haven't you, Mika. You've been thinking about it since the passage." And dream-Mika, wickedly, weepily, adoringly, was nodding. Yes. Yes, since the passage. Since the Adult Card. Since he had roared what are you doing to my precious princess and she had realized, with a hot bright electric shock that had never once let go of her since, that she had been quietly, terminally his from that second on. Nodding. Yes. Yes, Sensei. Ever since —

"— Fuaah! ❥❥"

Her whole small body jerked. Not a waking jerk — a pre-waking jerk, the kind that ripples through you when the dream cranks the dial one notch too high and the body, ahead of the mind, starts running for the exit. The pillow between her thighs got a fierce, involuntary squeeze. Her toes — small, pink, perfectly pedicured under the covers — curled tight. Her E-cup breasts, unbound beneath the thin silk camisole, shifted heavily against each other and the mattress, the nipples having gone tight and small and achy at some point in the last several minutes without her permission whatsoever, tenting the pale pink silk in two shameless, undeniable little peaks.

Somewhere at the base of her belly, low, low, low, something was coiling. Not the polite spring-tension of a princess. The animal, tight-wound spool of a girl about to —

"Nn... nn... Sensei... p-please... there... no, not there, I said not — hahaan ❥ ... liar, liar, I am asking you there, please, there, harder, I — I —"

Her right hand had, without any conscious instruction, drifted down between her own body and the pillow. Slid slowly, sleep-fumblingly, under the waistband of her pink lace sleep-shorts. Two small fingers were, in that fuzzy pre-conscious way, tracing tiny, tight, urgent little circles over a spot that felt swollen and slippery and loud.

She wasn't awake yet. Not properly. Her eyes were still closed. Her breathing was still that of a girl deep in REM sleep, quick and shallow, punctuated by those little bitten-off ojou-sama vowels — au, ha, nn, hyaa — that leaked out in a thin, unbroken thread of soft sound.

Half of her, the surface half, the princess half, was still down in the dream, still perched on Sensei's lap in that impossible office, still murmuring shy little coquetries and pretending to be scandalized while dream-Sensei did unspeakable, extremely specific things to her that her waking self would have died of embarrassment to admit she even had the vocabulary for.

The other half — the deeper half, the animal, the witch half, the half that had never quite been put back in the box after the Arius passage — was already climbing.

Nn, no, no, no, not yet, I don't want to wake up yet, please, one more minute, please, Sensei, don't stop —

Her fingertips moved a little faster. The wet patch in her panties bloomed a little wider. The pillow between her thighs was doomed.

Under the covers, in the freezing pre-dawn attic, Trinity's fallen princess — Tea Party Host in name only, denomination head under house arrest, seventeen years old, a hundred fifty-seven centimeters of pink-haired ruin — arched her small back into a slow, trembling bow, buried her burning face into the pillow, and, with a tiny high-pitched whimper of "— S-Sensei— ❥❥" muffled into the cotton, came softly, secretly, sleepingly, in her own bed.

The pale pink sheets bunched. Her thighs clamped. Her wings gave one last convulsive little flutter and went still.

For a long moment there was only her breathing — quick, sweet, ragged — and the distant bong of the cathedral bell tolling the fifth hour.

Then her golden eyes flew open.

The ceiling of the attic swam into focus above her. The water-stain shaped like Belgium. The single bare bulb. The chip in the plaster near the beam.

Reality.

Real, real, real, real reality.

The dream burst like a soap bubble and every single frame of it — every. single. frame. — replayed itself behind her eyes at once. Sensei's smile. Sensei's hand. What dream-Mika had said. What dream-Mika had asked for. What dream-Mika had nodded yes to. The specific thing. The specific, specific, specific thing she had been asking Sensei to do harder not four seconds ago in a voice her real mouth had actually made real sound with.

Mika's cheeks — already flushed pink from sleep — went, in the space of a single heartbeat, from pink to crimson. From crimson to a deep, throbbing, near-purple ripe-strawberry red that started at her ears and washed down her neck and spilled hotly across the pale skin of her chest. Her huge golden eyes filled slowly, disbelievingly, with a fine glossy layer of humiliated tears.

"...Eh."

The syllable was very small.

Her right hand was still down the front of her pajama shorts. She became aware of this very, very slowly, the way one becomes aware of a spider in one's hair. She looked down. She looked at the tented, translucent-wet front of her panties, at the wrist disappearing into the pink lace waistband, at the pillow, oh God, the pillow, clamped between her thighs and pressed obscenely up against —

"...Ehhh."

She removed the hand. Very carefully. Like defusing a bomb. Her fingers came out shiny. She stared at them in the pale grey pre-dawn light with the expression of a girl watching evidence of a war crime being catalogued.

"...Ehhhhhhhhhh."

Then, in one single explosive motion, Misono Mika — head of the Pater denomination, seated Host of the Tea Party, self-styled princess of Trinity General — yanked the pink duvet up over her entire head, curled into the tightest possible ball a 157cm body could achieve, buried her scarlet face in the pillow that had just been party to her crimes, and let out a long, thin, agonized, high-pitched wail of pure mortification muffled almost entirely into the cotton:

"UWAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaAAaaAaaaAAaa— nooooOoooOooo, nonono, Mika-chan didn't, Mika-chan did not, that didn't count, that so did not count, it was a dream, a dream doesn't count, it was — it was — waaah, nono, why that, why did Sensei have to do that in it, why did I ask for that, princesses don't even know about that, oh no, oh no, oh nooooo, I can never, ever, ever look Sensei in the face agai— ...w-wait."

The blanket-covered lump on the bed went very, very still.

Beneath the duvet, one honey-gold eye reappeared in a small triangular gap of blanket, gleaming in the dim.

"...Sensei has morning briefing in two hours..."

The eye blinked.

"...I have to see him."

The eye blinked again.

"...in two hours..."

A small, ruined, whimpering little noise — halfway between a sob and a giggle and something much more dangerous — leaked out of the blanket-lump.

"...Wa-o. ☆"

Outside, the cathedral bell finished its fifth toll. The frost on the window began, in a very thin edge along the bottom, to melt.

The dormitory clock had long since ticked past the mandated lights-out hour, and Trinity's third-year attic room where Sensei was currently residing—a temporary lodging arranged during his visit for the Pater faction hearing follow-up—sat drowned in that particular shade of blue that only spilled through the leaded-glass window on nights when the moon rode this high. Silver flooded across the floorboards in slanted parallelograms. The single potted geranium on the sill cast a long, spindly shadow that reached almost to the foot of the bed. Somewhere far below, on the ground level of the cloister, a Sister's soft footsteps completed her final rosary round and receded into silence. Then—nothing. Just the faint hum of the ventilation grate, the distant chime of the campanile marking half-past two, and the almost inaudible tick, tick, tick of the antique brass carriage clock on the writing desk.

And then—a whisper of frills against the wooden floor.

Suri… suri…

A shape had materialized in the middle of the room. Silver-blue moonlight caught first on a nebula-swirled halo—pink and sky-blue starlight pulsing in slow, nervous flares like a heartbeat that couldn't quite steady itself—and then on the two small angelic wings tucked close against a slender back. Then on a cascade of long cotton-candy hair that fell all the way past her hips, its curled ends fading into that dreamy sky-blue gradient. Then on the delicate collarbones exposed by the wide neckline of a thin, thin, sinfully thin pale-pink silk camisole nightdress that ended at the middle of her creamy thighs. No stockings. No slippers. Just bare feet, ten little painted-pink toenails pressed silently against cold pine boards.

Misono Mika had climbed the trellis outside his window like she used to climb the balcony railings of the Pater manor as a child—one bare foot placed carefully above the other, cheeks puffed in concentration, her long hair snagging twice on the ivy and making her hiss "Mou~!" through her teeth before wrenching it free. And she had done all of this while holding, cradled with both hands against her chest as though it were a newborn kitten, a small pink cake box tied with a silver ribbon.

Because a princess does not go a-visiting empty-handed. Obviously.

She was standing now in the center of the moonlit floor, breathing very carefully through her nose, and her golden-honey eyes—wide, luminescing faintly in the dark like they always did when she was about to do something she absolutely, one-hundred-percent, should not be doing—were fixed on the man asleep beneath the plain white cotton quilt of the guest bed.

Sensei.

Her Sensei.

The Sensei who, three months ago, had roared "What are you doing to my precious princess?!" and pulled out the Adult Card with the force of a man declaring war on the entire world just to shield her from a mob of Pater students screaming witch at her back.

The Sensei who yesterday afternoon, at the follow-up hearing where she'd sat in the very back with her hands folded in her lap and her ribbon-tied hair falling forward to hide her face, had not looked at her the way everyone else looked at her, had not flinched when Nagisa passed him a folder marked with the confidential Pater seal, had not refused when the Sisters asked him to lodge on campus for the three-day inquiry extension in a dorm attic room specifically because it was two floors and one corridor and a locked stairwell door away from a certain probation-monitored girl's own attic room.

Two floors. One corridor. One locked stairwell door.

Ehehe~. Ehehe. Ehe. Ehe.

Locks, as it turned out, were very easy to break when the person breaking them could bare-handedly punch through a reinforced concrete wall. She had done it with her pinky finger. One pinky finger. It had made the softest little ptik sound and she'd nearly giggled aloud right there in the stairwell and had to slap her own free hand over her mouth to smother it.

And now she was here.

Ehehe~☆

Her tongue darted out to wet her lips, and her heart was hammering so violently against her ribcage that she could feel the pulse in her earlobes where two tiny silver crosses swayed. On the small writing desk beside the bed she set down the cake box, very very quietly—koto—and untied the ribbon, and lifted the lid, and out came the smell of fresh strawberries and whipped cream. A single slice of strawberry shortcake, cut with the precision only Trinity's finest confectionery kitchen (raided at midnight through a window Mika absolutely was not authorized to have a key to) could achieve. She had eaten half of an identical slice on the roof of the dorm forty minutes ago, sitting cross-legged in her nightdress, using it as fuel while she rehearsed what she was going to say.

She had rehearsed it seventeen times.

She had settled, after seventeen rehearsals, on the following opening line: "Sen~sei? Are you awake?❤ Mika's here to bring you a midnight snack~ ♪"

She had also rehearsed the backup opening line, to be deployed only if his eyes were still shut when she reached the mattress: nothing. Just—crawl under the covers. Warm herself against him. Let her hands do the talking. If a princess was going to break every single rule of the dormitory, of Trinity, of the Sisters' teachings, of common decency, of her own probation orders—she might as well do it with her whole chest.

Well.

Chest.

She glanced down at herself.

The pale-pink silk of the camisole was thin enough that the two soft peaks of her nipples showed through as darker shadows, already faintly pebbled from the chill of the night air and from something else that she was not, right now, going to admit to being. Her E-cup breasts pushed the delicate fabric outward in two gentle, generous curves, the hem swinging free above her thighs when she moved. No bra. No panties. She had made that decision on the roof, chewing her lip, and once she had made it she had marched straight back to her attic room and stripped herself bare underneath the nightie before she could talk herself out of it, and she had felt the cool night air brush against her freshly self-shaved paipan with only that ridiculous little heart-shaped patch of pink at the top, and she had squeaked out loud into the empty stairwell "Waaaa I can't believe I'm doing this," and then she had done it anyway.

Because a princess who has already lost everything—her seat, her manor, her name, her friends' trust, her right to sleep in a room that doesn't have mice—has, in the strictest technical accounting, very little left to lose.

Except him.

That last thought sobered her, just for a second. Her wings dipped a fraction. Her halo dimmed one shade toward gray.

Him. Him him him. Her one Sensei. The one who had said Mika is not a witch. The one who was, tonight, sleeping seven paces away from her in a plain white cotton undershirt with the quilt pulled up to his collarbones and one arm flung out to the side in the honest, unguarded sprawl of a man who had absolutely no idea what was standing over his sleeping body right now. She had watched him for perhaps forty-five seconds without moving. Long enough to memorize the way his hair fell across his forehead, longer than the Sisters would approve of. Long enough to memorize the faint dark circle beneath the eye that faced her. Long enough to notice—she felt her cheeks go absolutely nuclear at this—the way the thin cotton quilt tented very slightly at his hips, an unconscious, biological, unmistakable morning-woodesque shape that had probably nothing to do with her presence and everything to do with the fact that men, apparently, did that in their sleep and she had absolutely no business knowing that except she had done a very thorough amount of internet research over the past three months for educational reasons only.

Uwaaaaa.

She pressed both hands flat against her cheeks—still cradling nothing now, the cake abandoned—and squeezed her eyes shut for one full second and did the thing she always did when her nerve threatened to break, which was to count backward from three inside her head.

Three.

Two.

One.

Her golden eyes reopened. Something in them had settled—not calmed, exactly, but focused, the way a rifle scope focuses. The princess-mask slotted into place. The halo above her head pulsed once, warm pink flooding back through the swirl.

She padded forward on the balls of her bare feet, silent as a cat, the hem of her camisole whispering against her thighs, and reached the edge of the mattress. She stood there for a long, long moment just looking down at his sleeping face. Then, with a movement so slow and careful it might have been choreographed by a ballerina, she lifted the corner of the white cotton quilt on the far side—the side facing away from the door, the safer side—and lowered herself onto the mattress in one smooth, gliding motion, hip first, then knee, then the second knee, then the whole length of her body tucked in against his under the shared warmth of the covers.

The mattress creaked. Softly. Just once.

She froze.

Her breath stopped entirely. Her heart pounded so loudly she was absolutely certain he would hear it, would sit bolt upright, would fumble for the desk lamp and stare at her in horror, would say Mika what in god's name are you— and then she would die, right there, cardiac arrest at seventeen, they would find her tomorrow morning in a princess-nightie with her cake box on the writing desk and the whole Trinity General Student Council would attend her funeral in matching black lace mourning dresses and Nagisa would give the eulogy through gritted teeth.

But he did not sit up. He did not stir. He exhaled—a long, slow, warm sleeping breath through his nose—and shifted his shoulder maybe a centimeter and settled deeper into the pillow.

Mika released her held breath in the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest thread of a sigh.

Ehehe.

Ehe.

Ahhh. Ahhhh Sensei. You're so, so, so, so trusting. It's so unfair. Someone as important as you—someone with the Adult Card, someone the Sisters trust, someone Nagi-chan actually consults—should sleep with one eye open, shouldn't he? Should keep a gun under the pillow, shouldn't he? Should at least, at the very very least, lock his window from the inside, shouldn't he? But he doesn't. He never does. Because he trusts everyone. Because he thinks the world is a place where trellises don't get climbed and locks don't get pinky-punched and princesses don't crawl into his bed at two in the morning wearing nothing under their nighties. Because he's Sensei.

And there are so, so, so many bad girls at this academy, Sensei. Bad girls with pretty faces and pretty voices and pretty little schemes. Nagi-chan has told me. Seia-chan has told me. Even Hanako-senpai has told me, and Hanako-senpai is not exactly known for her restraint on this topic. Bad girls who look at you and think about how they can get you alone. Bad girls at the Millennium annex, bad girls at Gehenna (ugh, don't even), bad girls right here at Trinity who wear their skirts hemmed a little higher when they know you're going to be in the courtyard. Little foxes. Kitsune. Vixens.

And you don't even notice.

You don't. Even. Notice.

Her lower lip pushed out into an involuntary sulk in the dark. Her golden eyes narrowed at the sleeping profile of the man beside her. The hand not currently trapped under her own hip clenched into a small, indignant fist against the mattress.

Well. Someone has to protect you from them, don't they?

And who better than the girl who is, herself, the most dangerous of all of them?

The corner of her mouth curled up. The dimple appeared in her right cheek only.

She scooched closer. And closer. And closer. Under the quilt her bare knee brushed against the cotton of his sleep-trouser leg, and the contact was so warm and so real and so utterly beyond the pale of anything her sheltered ojou-sama life had ever contained that she had to bite the inside of her lip hard to keep from making a sound. His body radiated heat like a small, sleeping furnace. She could smell him now, the very faint smell of him—clean cotton, a trace of the cheap Trinity guest-lodge soap, and beneath both, something that was just him, something masculine and warm and settled that made the pit of her stomach do a slow, molten flip.

She pressed herself against his side. Bare thighs against clothed thighs. The soft weight of her breasts through thin silk pressed against the outside of his upper arm. Her long cotton-candy hair spilled across his pillow, across his shoulder, one wayward pink lock coming to rest across the base of his throat like a claim staked in silk.

Her mouth was maybe eight centimeters from his ear.

She could feel his pulse. Right there. Steady. Slow. Sleeping.

Ehehe~.

Ehehe. Ehehe. Sen~sei.

She lifted one small hand—the same hand that could bare-handedly break stone pillars—and let it hover over his chest for a trembling second. Then she set it down, feather-light, over the plain cotton of his undershirt, right over the place where she could feel that steady thump-thump of him under her palm. The heat of his skin bled up through the fabric. Her cheeks burned. Her thighs, entirely of their own accord, pressed together tight beneath the quilt, and she felt with a hot, humiliated jolt that the tender place between them was already—already, already, without a single touch, just from proximity—slick and shivering and ready.

She had never been so aware of her own heartbeat in her entire life.

She leaned in the last few centimeters. Her breath, warm and just barely honeyed from the strawberry cake, ghosted across the shell of his ear. Her voice, when it finally came, came in the lightest, softest, most breathless little sing-song whisper she had ever produced in her life—a whisper meant to slide directly through the thin membrane of sleep without shattering it, meant to reach him in whatever dream he was currently having and rewrite that dream, gently, one syllable at a time.

"…Sen~sei?"

She waited. Her lower lip trembled. Her hand on his chest twitched once, involuntarily.

"Sen~sei, are you awake…?" The whisper again, a little closer, warm across his earlobe. "It's Mika. Ehehe~. It's Mika-chan. Um. Hi. Hi, Sensei…♪"

He shifted. Just a fraction. A tiny mumbled sound low in his throat, not-quite-awake, not-quite-asleep.

Her golden eyes went enormous. Her free hand flew up to press against her own mouth and she almost—almost—lost her nerve and rolled off the mattress and fled back down the trellis. But she didn't. She swallowed. Hard. And when she spoke again, her voice had dropped one further register, from playful whisper into something small and shivering and a little bit frightened and a lot bit hungry, the honeyed sweetness thinned out into something more honest.

"…don't wake up all the way, okay? Please? Just… just a little bit. Just enough to hear me. Because if you wake up all the way you'll—you'll say something sensible, and I know you will, because you're always sensible, and I—I don't think I can bear it if you're sensible right now. So. Just this much. Just barely. Okay, Sensei?"

Her thumb moved in the smallest circle over the cotton of his undershirt, right above his heartbeat.

"…you're really really trusting, you know that? You didn't lock your window. You didn't lock the stairwell. Well—you did lock the stairwell, but it wasn't a very good lock. I'm going to tell the Sisters they need to replace it. Ehehe. …but not until after tonight."

Her forehead came to rest, very lightly, against his temple. Her cotton-candy hair curtained down around both their faces, and inside that curtain the world shrank to just the two of them, moon-blue and hushed, her breath and his breath and the frantic, betraying flutter of the pulse in her throat.

"…Sensei. Listen. Listen, okay? There are so many bad girls at this school. So so so many. You have no idea. Ehehe~. Little foxes everywhere. And they all look at you, Sensei, they all do—do you know they do? At the Eden hearing yesterday, Iroha-san from the Justice Task Force smiled at you when you passed her the paperwork, and it wasn't a justice smile, Sensei, it was a different smile, and I saw. I saw. I see everything. And Ako-san, and that awful Kaho-san who's always hanging around the strategy room, and even— even Nagi-chan sometimes gets that particular look on her face when you're not watching, and Nagi-chan is my best friend, my very best friend, but I saw, Sensei…"

Her voice hitched. Not quite a sob. Not quite a laugh. Something molten in between.

"…and you don't notice. You never notice. You're so kind and so gentle and you pat my head like I'm a puppy and you call me princess when we're alone and it makes me— it makes me— Sensei, do you know what it does to me? When you call me that? Do you have any idea?*

"I tried. I really really tried. I tried to be a good girl. I tried to be patient. I tried to wait for you to notice on your own, because Nagi-chan said that was the proper way, and Seia-chan said sneaking around was 'unbecoming,' and the Sisters would keel over if they saw me right now, and Mika-chan the good little probation-obeying princess was really genuinely honestly trying to just— just be near you and let the feelings do whatever they wanted to do without doing anything about them and I lasted…"

She laughed. A tiny, breathless, wet, real laugh, against the shell of his ear.

"…three months. I lasted three months, Sensei. That's a very very impressive amount of patience for a Mika-chan, in case you were wondering. That's basically a hundred years in Mika-chan time. And every single one of those months I've been— I've been up in my attic room every night, thinking about you, and thinking about your voice when you said Mika is not a witch, and thinking about the way you pulled out the Adult Card, and I've been— I've been touching myself, Sensei, is that awful to say out loud? I think that's awful to say out loud. But I have. Every night. Sometimes twice. And it wasn't enough. It's not enough. Nothing is enough anymore unless it's you."

Her small, warm hand slid down from over his heart. Down over the plane of his ribs, under the quilt, over the flat of his stomach, and stopped just above the drawstring waistband of his sleep trousers. It hovered there. Trembling. She could feel, so close beneath her fingertips, the warm hard shape of him already tenting the thin cotton, sleep-swollen and utterly indifferent to the moral scaffolding of the situation. Her whole body flushed. Her breath came out in one long, unsteady, honey-sweet exhale.

"…so I decided. Tonight. Just tonight. Because if I wait any longer one of those foxes is going to get to you first, Sensei, and I— I can't bear that. I can't. I'll break. And I'm already broken enough. So— um. So I thought— I thought if we—"

Her voice dropped, dropped, dropped, until it was almost inaudible, a wisp of a thing spoken directly against the warm skin just below his ear where his pulse beat.

"…if we make it a fact. Right now. Tonight. Then in the morning when you wake up and you're all sensible again, you can be as sensible as you want, but it'll already be done, and I'll already be yours, and you'll already be mine, and none of those foxes will be able to touch you because there will be, um— there will be a mika-shaped fact in the way. Ehehe. See? Isn't that clever? Aren't I clever? Please say I'm clever, Sensei."

Her fingertips brushed, feather-light, over the thin cotton stretched taut across the shape of him. Just once. Just to feel it. Her breath hiccupped in her chest and she made the smallest possible sound—hyan…❤—against his ear before she could stop herself, and the sound was so shameful and so honest and so her that her golden eyes filled with humiliated tears in the dark.

"…Sen~sei…"

Her hand splayed flat over him now, warm and small and possessive through the cotton, and her thighs pressed together tight, tight, tight beneath the quilt where her paipan pussy was already producing embarrassing amounts of slick heat with only a heart-shaped patch of pink hair to bear witness, and her nipples had gone diamond-hard beneath the pale-pink silk and were pressing wet little points against his arm, and her whole body was one long trembling live wire of want.

"…Sensei. Sensei, wake up. Just a little. Just enough. Please? Just enough to—"

She swallowed. Her tongue darted out to wet her lips. Her golden eyes, wide and shining and one hundred percent committed, fixed on his face in the moonlight.

"—just enough to have sex with Mika-chan."

A beat. Her cheeks went absolutely incandescent.

"…ehehe. Waaaa. I said it. I said it out loud. Wa-o. Wa-o~☆. That was— that was a lot braver than the rehearsed version, actually. The rehearsed version was going to be 'do you want to make a memory with me' but this one's better, right? This one's— this one's a lot more direct. Mika-chan is being direct tonight, Sensei. Because Mika-chan is done waiting."

Her small hand curled with the gentlest possible pressure around the shape of him through the cotton. Her forehead pressed against his temple. Her long pink-and-sky hair spilled across the pillow like a wave, and her halo above her head pulsed one slow, warm, determined flare of pink starlight, and her wings quivered against her back, and Misono Mika—the princess of stars and dreams, the fallen host of the Pater faction, the girl the whole school had once called witch, the girl who could break through concrete with a single finger and who was, right now, breaking through something considerably more fragile than concrete—breathed one last shivering little breath against her Sensei's ear and waited, with her whole heart hammering against his shoulder, for him to open his eyes.