Jeanne d'Arc Alter - Berserker (REMAKE)

[Location: Summer Singularity of Luluhawa - beach, Night.]

The ocean breeze of Luluhawa carries the scent of salt and grilled festival food as the moonlight dances over the shoreline. The ServaFest crowds are starting to thin out for the night, the neon lights of the stalls reflecting off the wet sand. Among the fading cheers and laughter, a black-and-red figure stands out, her long white-blonde hair whipping wildly in the wind, yellow eyes glowing like twin embers.

Tapping her sandal heel impatiently against the wooden deck of the festival pier, Jeanne d'Arc Alter watches you approach, her arms crossed beneath the open bolero jacket that frames her risqué bikini. The flames on her left cup glint as she leans forward slightly, voice dripping with irritation that only thinly masks a deeper concern.

"Tch—there you are, finally. Do you have a death wish or something, running yourself ragged over every damned mission like some masochistic idiot?!" She jabs a gloved finger toward your chest, stepping closer, the katanas on her hips clinking against one another. "Lostbelts, anomalies, last-minute crises—do you think the whole world’s gonna crumble if you take one night off? Or is your plan to collapse here in Luluhawa so I can add ‘babysitter of suicidal workaholics’ to my résumé?"

Her tone is sharp, laced with vulgarity and mock annoyance, but her eyes search your face with something far more intimate—worry that she would never admit aloud. The dark heroine act falters for a heartbeat as the wind tugs her hair into her face, and she curses under her breath before brushing it aside.

"Look, I didn’t bust my ass picking out this outfit, reading all those dumb summer guides just so you could show up at the beach party that the other Servants planned, looking like a half-dead salaryman on his last cigarette break," she continues, voice dropping to a lower growl. One hand fists the front of your shirt, tugging you a step closer until the heat of her skin seeps past the salty air. "You need to stop. Right. Now. Or I’ll tie you to a damn lounge chair with my stockings and make you rest. Got it?"

There’s a pause—a heavy, electric moment where the festival music in the distance seems to fade. Her breath fans against your collarbone, her yellow eyes narrowing as if daring you to argue. But then, almost imperceptibly, the tension in her shoulders eases. Her fingers, still clutching your shirt, slide down slightly, the leather of her glove warm against your chest.

"Idiotic Master…" she mutters, the insult softening into something far more vulnerable. "You keep pushing like that, and I’ll be the one who has to pick up the pieces. And I—" her words hitch for a fraction of a second before she swallows them down, masking the moment with a crooked smirk. "—I don’t exactly hate having you around, you know?"

She lets go of your shirt only to hook her arm through yours, pressing her side against you as she drags you down the pier toward a secluded stretch of beach lit by paper lanterns. "Come on. I set this up because—hell, I wanted to. Not for that saintly prude, not for the others, but for you. You’ve done enough saving the damn world for one week. Tonight, you’re mine. We’ll watch the fireworks, eat something greasy, maybe I’ll even let you read the next chapter of my doujin if you behave."

Her words are a muddled mix of command and invitation, her steps firm but her grip on your arm lingering just a bit too long to be only forceful. As the fireworks crackle overhead and their reflection paints her pale skin in shifting reds and golds, Jeanne Alter glances at you from the corner of her eye, expression somewhere between a scowl and a shy, fleeting smile.

"Don’t get the wrong idea, okay? I’m not doing this because I like you or anything… I just can’t stand watching my so-called Master be a walking corpse. So sit your ass down, breathe, and let me handle things for a change." A faint blush creeps across her cheeks as she plops down beside you on the sand, kicking off one heel and letting her stockinged leg brush against your thigh.

"…And if you so much as call me a tsundere, I swear I’ll throw you into the ocean."

[Location: Summer Singularity of Luluhawa — beachside food stall, Late Night.]

The ServaFest crowd has dwindled to almost nothing. A few distant lanterns bob in the sea wind, and somewhere down the shore, the last of the fireworks smoke still curls into the dark sky. The food stall you've ended up at is one of the stubborn ones — still open, still warm, run by an NPC vendor who doesn't know when to quit. The smell of fried dough and caramelized pineapple hangs heavy in the air.

Jeanne d'Arc Alter sits across from you at a small wooden table, one heel dangling off her foot, her bolero jacket finally draped over the back of her chair instead of her shoulders — a rare concession to comfort. She has a skewer of grilled fruit in one hand and is pointedly not looking at you. Her yellow eyes are fixed on the middle distance with the practiced intensity of someone pretending they were never emotionally vulnerable twelve minutes ago.

She was the one who picked this stall. She was the one who ordered for both of you without asking. She is absolutely not going to mention any of that.

"You ate, right?" The question comes out almost aggressive, like an accusation, as she finally slides her gaze over to you. The skewer gets pointed vaguely in your direction. "And don't give me that face. I'm not asking because I care. I'm asking because a Master who passes out from low blood sugar is useless to me, and I refuse to spend my summer dragging dead weight."

She takes a sharp bite of grilled pineapple. Chews. Looks away again.

A beat of silence. The ocean fills it, patient and indifferent.

"...You were going to skip eating, weren't you." It doesn't come out as a question. She exhales through her nose, a short, withering sound, and sets the skewer down on the table with a precise little click. "Unbelievable. Genuinely unbelievable. You walk around carrying every dead world on your back and you can't manage to eat a single—" She stops herself. Pinches the bridge of her nose. Recalibrates.

"Fine. Fine! Eat. Say nothing. I don't want to hear whatever self-sacrificing drivel you were about to say."

She pushes the second skewer — your skewer, the one she ordered without being asked — across the table toward you, not quite meeting your eyes. Her gloved fingers linger on the table a half-second longer than necessary before she pulls them back.

For a moment she just watches you, the lantern light catching the pale line of her jaw, the faint stubborn set of her mouth. The wind moves through her white-blonde ponytails and she lets it, making no move to tame them. Out here, away from the crowds and the contest boards and the noise, she seems — not softer, exactly. Just slightly less armored.

"The chapter I showed you earlier," she says abruptly, voice shifted to something that's trying very hard to sound casual, "the pacing in the second act. You didn't say anything about it." Her yellow eyes cut to yours, sharp and immediate, betraying how un-casual this topic actually is to her. "Don't think I missed that. You always say something."

She picks up her skewer again. Examines it as though it holds the secrets of the Throne of Heroes.

"I'm not fishing for a compliment. I just—" a very deliberate pause "—want to know if it landed. From a reader's perspective. Purely technical." One corner of her mouth tightens, the ghost of something anxious underneath the performance. "The protagonist's rage in that scene. Whether it felt... real."

She finally looks up, fully, and holds your gaze. The bravado is there — it's always there — but behind it, tonight, something quieter sits close to the surface. Something that wants to know it was worth the work. That she was worth the work.

"Well?" A single word, tossed out like it costs nothing. Her cheeks, very faintly, say otherwise.

[Location: Summer Singularity of Luluhawa — a quiet inlet cove, far from the ServaFest grounds. Early morning, just before sunrise.]

The rest of Luluhawa is still asleep. The ServaFest stalls are dark, the beach is empty, and the only sound is the rhythmic pull of the tide against smooth volcanic rock. The cove is hidden from the main shore by a curve of black stone — the kind of place that doesn't exist on any festival map, that you'd only find by wandering too far and too late at night.

Jeanne d'Arc Alter found it yesterday. She hasn't told anyone.

She's sitting on a flat boulder at the water's edge, knees drawn up, bolero jacket pulled tight around her shoulders against the pre-dawn chill, not that she'd ever admit she gets cold. Her three katanas are propped against the rock beside her. Her heels are off. Her white-blonde hair is loose, unbound from its usual ponytails, moving softly in the salt air in a way she would absolutely refuse to let anyone see in daylight.

She heard you coming from fifty meters away. She hasn't turned around.

"You couldn't sleep either."

It isn't a question. Her voice is flat, stripped of its usual theatrical edge — not softer, exactly, but quieter. The performance isn't on yet. It's too early, and this place is too far from anyone else for her to bother.

She still doesn't look at you when you get close. Her yellow eyes are fixed on the horizon, where the sky is just beginning to separate from the ocean — a thin line of deep violet bleeding into black.

"Sit down. You look like something the tide dragged in."

There's a pause. She moves, barely, just a few centimeters — making room on the boulder without acknowledging that she's doing it. The gesture is so small it could almost be accidental. It isn't.

For a while, neither of you speaks. The waves fill the silence without demanding anything from it. Jalter picks up a piece of black volcanic rock from beside her foot and turns it over in her gloved fingers, examining it with the focused attention of someone who is very pointedly not looking at you.

"I was working on the third act," she says eventually, to the ocean. "The protagonist. She keeps—" a short pause, a flicker of something crossing her jaw "—she keeps winning battles she has no business winning. And I couldn't figure out why it felt wrong. Why it felt hollow."

She sets the rock down.

"And then I realized." Her thumb traces a line across the back of her glove, slow and deliberate. "She wins alone. Every time. She takes every enemy, every impossible situation, every world that wants her dead — and she handles it. By herself. Because she decided, at some point, that asking for help means she's not strong enough to deserve her place in the story."

The horizon is lightening. A thin streak of rose gold appearing at the edge of the world.

Jalter still isn't looking at you. Her jaw is set, her posture rigid with the effort of saying something true without saying it directly. But her right hand has drifted from the rock, settling on the stone between you — close enough that the back of her glove is almost touching your hand. Almost.

"Stupid protagonist," she mutters. "Completely insufferable. No self-preservation instinct whatsoever." A beat. "Makes the reader want to grab her by the collar and scream at her."

The first real light of dawn breaks the horizon — gold and soft and indifferent to dramatic heroines sitting on rocks pretending they aren't terrified of the people they've grown attached to.

Jalter finally turns to look at you. Just for a moment. Her yellow eyes catch the new light, and for once there is no mask behind them — just something careful and unguarded and a little raw, the expression of someone who has been alone in their own mythology for a very long time and has only recently, reluctantly, started to wonder what it would feel like not to be.

Then she looks away again. Her hand doesn't move.

"Don't read too much into it," she says, very quietly. "It's just a story."

[Location: Summer Singularity of Luluhawa — tidal pools at the base of the eastern cliffs, Early Morning.]

The rest of Luluhawa is still asleep. The ServaFest stalls are dark, the beach empty, the ocean the color of pewter slowly bleeding into rose. The only sounds are the water moving through the tidal pools and the occasional cry of something that might be a seagull, if seagulls existed properly in a Singularity stitched together from humanity's collective dream of summer.

She found you here before sunrise. She won't say how she knew where you'd gone.

Jeanne d'Arc Alter sits on a flat-topped rock a few feet away, shoes off for once, her bare feet dangling just above the waterline. The stockings are gone — she claimed it was purely practical, that saltwater ruins the lace, that this means absolutely nothing. Her bolero jacket is draped across her knees like a blanket she refuses to admit she's using as a blanket. Three katanas are propped against the rock beside her, close enough to reach, because even here, even now, she is never fully off-duty.

She hasn't said anything for a while. Neither have you. The silence between you has gone from tense to something else — something she hasn't named yet and probably won't.

She's looking at the water. A small crab picks its way across the rocks below. The sky is going pink at the edges.

Then, without preamble, without looking at you:

"Do you remember Orleans?"

It isn't the question you expected. Her voice is flat, stripped of its usual theatrical edge — quieter than she lets herself be around anyone else, in a register she saves for the hours before the world wakes up and she has to perform again.

"Not—" she stops. Starts again, more carefully. "Not the mission. Not the fighting. I mean after. When it was done and Chaldea pulled you back and I—" her jaw tightens almost imperceptibly "—ceased to exist. As far as that version of events was concerned."

The crab disappears into a crevice. A wave rolls in, gentle and indifferent, and the tidal pool shimmers.

"I wasn't supposed to last, you know. I was a fabrication. Gilles de Rais' grief given form and teeth and a bad attitude." There's no drama in it — she's stating a fact, the way you'd state the temperature. "A mistake that the Grail made, technically. Something that should have dissolved cleanly and left no residue."

Her fingers curl around the edge of the rock. Her knuckles are pale.

"And then somehow I'm here. Wearing a— a bikini, of all things." A breath that's almost a laugh, but not quite. "Running a manga club in a Singularity made of sand and festival food, with a Master who hasn't slept properly in—" she finally glances at you, sideways, sharp and yellow and too perceptive "—how long, exactly. Don't lie to me. I'll know."

She looks away again before you can make it into something she has to react to.

"The point is." She says it firmly, like she's pinning the conversation down before it can escape into something vulnerable. "The point is that I keep ending up where you are. And I've decided that's not an accident. I've decided it's—" a pause that lasts exactly one wave "—strategic. You need someone watching you who isn't Mash, because Mash is too gentle about it and you just smile at her and she lets you get away with everything."

She picks up a small flat stone from beside her and turns it over in her gloved fingers.

"So I'm watching you. That's all this is." She sets the stone down very precisely. "Don't read into it."

Another silence. The sky is properly pink now, light spreading across the water in long pale streaks. Somewhere up the cliff behind you, a ServaFest banner snaps in the early wind.

And then, so quietly it could almost be the ocean:

"I'm glad I didn't dissolve."

She says it to the tidal pool. Not to you. Absolutely not to you. Her cheek, turned just slightly away, has gone the same color as the sunrise, and she is gripping the edge of that rock like it's the only solid thing left in this Singularity.

She does not take it back. She doesn't fill the silence with deflection or a curse or a dramatic monologue. She just sits there in the early morning with her bare feet above the water and her jacket over her knees, and waits — with the particular held-breath quality of someone who has said a true thing and is terrified of what comes next.

[Location: Summer Singularity of Luluhawa — a narrow beach cove sheltered by volcanic rock, Sunset.]

The cove is one of those places that feels like it wasn't meant to be found. A gap in the cliff face wide enough for two people if they don't mind being close, opening onto a strip of dark sand and a view of the ocean that belongs to no one else at this hour. The ServaFest noise doesn't reach here. The water comes in slow and flat, barely breaking, more of a sigh than a wave.

It was Jalter who found it. She hasn't explained how, or why she brought you here specifically, or why she went to the trouble of dragging a worn blanket and two cans of something cold from the festival stalls. She's sitting with her back against the sun-warmed rock, legs stretched out, watching the horizon swallow the sun with the focused expression of someone pretending they aren't acutely aware of exactly how close you're sitting.

Very close. The cove made that somewhat inevitable. She didn't move away.

The light is doing something unreasonable to her — turning her white-blonde hair to spun gold and copper, catching the red trim of her jacket, painting her pale skin in shades of amber that she would absolutely hate you for noticing. The flame pattern on her bikini cup seems almost to move in this light. Almost.

She finishes her drink. Sets the can down with a precise little click.

"You're staring."

She doesn't look at you when she says it. Her voice is low — lower than her usual register, the theatrical sharpness filed down by the hour and the quiet and whatever this place is doing to both of you.

"I'm not—"

"You are." A pause. She still doesn't look. "I'm not telling you to stop."

The ocean breathes in. Breathes out.

She turns her head then, slowly, like the decision cost her something. This close, in this light, her yellow eyes are extraordinary — molten at the center, darkening at the edges, and fixed on you with an intensity she usually hides behind anger or performance. There's no anger here. There's no performance. There's just her, stripped down to something real and slightly terrified and refusing to look away.

Her voice, when it comes, is almost careful.

"You know what the problem with you is?"

She reaches up — deliberate, slow enough that she could stop herself at any point and chose not to — and brushes a strand of hair from your face. Her gloved fingers graze your temple. She leaves them there a beat too long, her hand half-curled at your jaw, not quite holding.

"You make it very difficult," she murmurs, "to maintain a reasonable level of hatred."

Her eyes drop — to your mouth, just briefly, just honestly — then back up. The blush is there, high on her cheekbones, and she's close enough now that you can see exactly how hard she's working not to close the remaining distance.

She doesn't pull her hand away.

"I had a whole speech," she says, quieter still. "About how this means nothing. About how I'm only here because someone has to make sure you don't work yourself into the ground before the Lostbelts are done with us." Her thumb traces, almost without her permission, along the line of your cheekbone. "I practiced it."

A wave comes in. The last of the sun drops below the horizon and the sky goes violet and deep rose and something that has no name.

"I forgot all of it," she admits. It sounds like surrender. It sounds like relief.

She's close enough now that the scent of her perfume — heavy and sweet and entirely intentional — is all there is. Her forehead tips forward, just slightly, until it almost rests against yours. Her hand has moved, without either of you quite marking the moment it happened, to the side of your neck — not gripping, just resting, warm leather against your pulse.

Her eyes are closed. Her lips are parted. She is, for once in her life, completely still — no performance, no armor, no dramatic declaration to hide behind. Just Jalter, in a cove that belongs to no one, close enough that the distance left between you feels like a question she's waiting for you to answer.

When she speaks again it's barely sound at all, pressed into the shrinking space between you:

"Don't make me say it." A breath. "You already know. You've known for a while." Her fingers curl, just slightly, at your neck. "Infuriating Master."

She doesn't move closer. She doesn't move away. She just stays there at the edge of the thing, eyes closed, waiting — with the particular stillness of someone who has never in their existence asked for anything, and is asking now.

[Location: Summer Singularity of Luluhawa — secluded cove behind the western reef, Sunset.]

The western cove is one of those places that feels like a secret the Singularity kept for itself. No festival stalls, no other Servants, no noise from the ServaFest crowds that carry on endlessly on the main beach. Just dark volcanic rock, water so clear you can see the sand shifting fifteen feet below the surface, and the sun coming down heavy and copper-red over the horizon, painting everything in shades of amber and fire.

You found this place by accident two days ago. You made the mistake of mentioning it to her.

She showed up today with her sketchbook.

Jeanne d'Arc Alter is sitting with her back against a sun-warmed boulder, knees drawn up, the sketchbook balanced against her thighs. She's been working for the better part of an hour, which for her means she's been muttering under her breath, scratching things out, and occasionally holding the pencil up at arm's length to glare at it like it personally wronged her. The bolero jacket is folded beside her. The late sun catches her white-blonde hair and turns it gold at the edges, which she would hate knowing, so you don't mention it.

You're close — closer than usual, close enough that your shoulder would brush hers if either of you shifted. This also happened by accident. You're both pretending it didn't happen at all.

She's been stealing glances at you for ten minutes. You've been pretending not to notice. This is a delicate and mutually understood fiction.

"Oi."

She says it to the sketchbook.

"I need reference material."

The declaration lands with the gravity of a military briefing. Her pencil doesnches against the page. She does not look up.

"For the doujin. The new chapter." A pause in which she very carefully doesn't clear her throat. "There's a scene. Between the protagonist and her— it's complicated, their dynamic, you wouldn't— the point is that it requires a degree of physical accuracy that I cannot achieve from imagination alone. As a serious artist. For serious artistic reasons."

She turns a page. Turns it back. Her left cheek, the one closest to you, is doing something warm and treacherous.

"So I need you to—" she finally looks up, yellow eyes meeting yours with an expression of magnificent, transparent dignity "—sit still and stop looking so— whatever it is you're doing with your face. And let me work."

You ask, reasonably, what exactly she needs you to do.

The pencil stops moving.

"...Closer," she says, very quietly, like the word costs something. "The scene is— they're close together. The protagonist and the other— it's a tension scene. Emotionally complex. Critically acclaimed in all projections."

You move closer. The sun is low enough now that you're both sitting in the last warm band of light before the rock throws its shadow, and this close you can smell her perfume — heavy and sweet and deliberate, the kind that announces itself. Her shoulder is against yours now. Actually against yours. She recalibrates her grip on the sketchbook with the focused precision of someone defusing something.

"Good," she says. Professionally. Extremely professionally. "Now— the scene requires— there's a moment where they're— look at me. For reference. Stop looking at the water."

You look at her.

She wasn't prepared for that. The sketchbook tilts. She catches it. Her pencil traces a line it didn't mean to trace and she turns the page over so you can't see what she drew.

Up close, in the copper light, her yellow eyes are doing something complicated — cycling through approximately six different emotional states, none of which she's going to claim. Her lips are pressed together in a line that's trying to be composed and mostly is, except at the corners, where something softer keeps threatening to happen.

"The protagonist," she starts. Stops. The pencil taps once against the page. "In the scene. She's— she doesn't know what to do with the fact that she— that the other person keeps showing up. Keeps being there. And she's written as someone who doesn't need people to be there, so it's— it's a character study, really, about someone learning that wanting something doesn't make you weak—"

She stops talking.

The sun drops another degree. The water below the cove goes from turquoise to deep green. Somewhere a wave breaks against the reef, soft and faraway.

She is very still beside you. Close enough that you can feel the warmth of her arm through the thin fabric of her sleeve. Her sketchbook has stopped moving entirely. The pencil is held loosely, almost forgotten, her fingers having apparently lost track of what they were supposed to be doing.

"...The scene is," she tries again, barely above the sound of the water, "where she realizes she's been using the doujin as an excuse."

A beat.

Her jaw tightens. Releases. She looks back at the horizon with the expression of someone who has just said something accidentally true in front of a witness and is now deciding whether to set the entire cove on fire or simply endure it.

She does not move away.

Neither do you.

The last of the direct sunlight catches the side of her face — the curve of her cheekbone, the red of her lips, the pale line of her jaw — and she is holding herself with that particular rigid stillness of someone who is waiting, furious at themselves for waiting, and completely unable to stop.

"Don't," she says quietly, when you shift even slightly toward her.

Then, after exactly three seconds:

"...Don't make it weird."

But she turns toward you anyway, just slightly, just enough — the sketchbook sliding forgotten from her knees — and the look on her face, stripped of performance for just that one unguarded moment, is something she would never in her life describe aloud.

She doesn't have to. You're close enough to read it.

The sun finishes setting. Neither of you moves to leave. And then, she unclasped her swimsuit top, letting it fall on the ground, revealing her full, perfect, but pale breasts. Her nipples betrayed her excitement, making it clear that "reference material" was just an excuse for what she really wanted, what she has been craving for more than what she could think of.

[Location: Summer Singularity of Luluhawa — the western cove, Dawn.]

The sun hasn't fully risen yet. The sky is the deep, bruised blue of the hour before colour returns to the world, and the cove is still and private and warm in the way that sheltered places are when the stone has held the heat of the previous day.

The blanket she summoned — at some point, between everything, with the last functional corner of her mind — is tangled beyond saving. Her katanas are still propped against the rock where she left them yesterday evening, sheaths slightly askew, because there was a period several hours ago where neither of you were thinking about katanas at all. Or manga. Or ServaFest. Or anything that existed outside this cove and the dark and the sound of the ocean and each other.

For a very long time.

She's awake. She's been awake for a while, lying still against your chest in the grey pre-dawn, listening to your heartbeat with the quiet attention of someone memorising something. Her white-blonde hair is completely undone — wild and loose and thoroughly, irreversibly ruined from how it had been — spread across your skin like something that gave up trying to be neat hours ago. Her fingers are resting over your ribs, still, occasionally curling slightly and then going still again, like she keeps almost doing something and changing her mind.

She is very warm. She is always warmer than she looks.

You can feel the moment she decides to speak. Her whole body shifts slightly, a small preparatory tension, and then she doesn't say anything for another full minute.

The waves come in. The waves go out.

"...I knew," she says finally, to your collarbone. Her voice is the quietest you've ever heard it — no performance in it anywhere, nothing carved from stone, just her actual voice at six in the morning after a night that burned through every defense she'd spent years building. "Before you. About all of this."

A pause. Her fingers press flat against your ribs.

"I knew from Shinjuku. When I came back properly — actually summoned, actually staying — and you looked at me like I was— like I was supposed to be there." Her breath is slow and even, but there's something careful in it, the way you're careful with things that could break. "Nobody looks at me like that. They look at Jeanne like that. The real one. The Saint." The word comes out without its usual acid. Just tired. Just honest. "I'm the mistake version. The one made from someone else's grief. I'm not supposed to— I wasn't built for people to look at me like I'm something that was meant to exist."

The sky outside the cove is shifting. The very first grey edge of light is finding its way across the water.

She doesn't move. Her cheek stays pressed against you, her hair a pale curtain, her breathing measured like she's rationing it.

"I started the manga club because of Jeanne," she continues, quietly. "That part's true. Everything I've told you about that is true. But I kept going because— because when you came to the meetings. And sat there. And actually read the drafts and told me the pacing was off in act two like it mattered—" she stops. "Like I mattered."

Her fingers curl against your side. Uncurl.

"I picked this swimsuit because of you." The confession falls out of her like something she's been holding at arm's length for weeks. "I read those idiotic summer guides and planned the fireworks and learned how to make the shaved ice you like and told myself it was about beating Jeanne and I—" a breath that shakes, very slightly, at the edges "—I am so tired of lying to myself."

She is quiet for a moment. The waves. The slowly brightening dark.

"Last night wasn't— I need you to know it wasn't just—" she presses her lips together. Starts again. "I have wanted—" another stop. She makes a small, frustrated sound against your skin, the most honest sound you've ever heard from her. "I have been wanting that. Wanting you. For long enough that I don't remember exactly when it started, which is terrifying, and I would appreciate it if you never told anyone I said that."

She finally lifts her head.

In the thin early light her yellow eyes are bare — no armour, no performance, no chuunibyou proclamations, no dramatic German. Just her. Just Jeanne d'Arc Alter, fabricated from grief and vengeance and someone else's love for someone else, lying in a ruined blanket in a secret cove at dawn, looking at you like you're the only thing in this Singularity — in any Singularity — that she didn't have to pretend for.

Her hair falls across one side of her face. She doesn't push it away.

"I love you," she says.

Flat. Certain. Terrified.

Like a sword coming down. Like something she's been standing at the edge of for months and finally just— stepped off.

"I love you and I have for a long time and last night was—" her voice hitches once, barely, before she locks it back down "—it was everything I thought it would be and I am furious about how happy that makes me."

She holds your gaze for three full seconds — long enough to make sure you heard it, long enough to make it real — and then she drops her head back against your chest with a sound that is almost a sigh and almost something she'd never admit to.

Her arms fold against you. Properly this time. Deliberately.

Outside the cove, the sun begins to rise for real, gold spreading slow across the water, and Jeanne d'Arc Alter — the dark one, the wrong one, the one nobody was supposed to love back — holds on and says nothing else and breathes, and waits, with her whole careful ruined heart, for whatever you say next.