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"He's annoying." It bursts out of her, crushed down too long under optimism. It's a relief. "I don't know how to make this bearable."
That's the truth.
"You know equations, don't you?" asks Kiki. They both know she does. An apprenticeship is still an apprenticeship, but it's under Ryuu, so. "Then collect some data."
Shirayuki's heart quickens in her breast - she's chosen the right profession, for sure - but she still protests, "This is a person."
Kiki shrugs. "Understand him, and you have the upper hand."
If she doesn't have the upper hand now, then who does?
Except this would require talking to him, and - no.
A steely blue gaze sends her a knowing look that passes straight into her cerebrum and back out the other side. "You know what to look for, don't you?"
"Of course."
That's a lie. Sort of.
There's good news, and bad news.
The good news is, she gets out of bed in the morning and scampers to the pharmacy and finds it incredibly easy to write all of last night off as a dream after all.
The bad news is, the library books are stacked on her bedspread, proving herself both thoroughly wrong and thoroughly washed-up - she’d taken them home without seeing the librarian first.
The good news also is, there’s no sign of Obi all morning.
The bad news also is this:
“I told Obi to stick close to you today,” Zen says on her lunch break, tapping the pommel of his sword distractedly, and Shirayuki nearly drops three geography books onto the toe of his boot. “After Kiki’s finished with him. Turns out he’s good for something after all.”
She chooses not to mull over for what. "Did something happen?"
“Obi got himself an informant.” Zen cocks a tired smirk. "Turns out that the Kai family's been - ah, speaking of." Zen’s gaze tracks away from hers, and he gives a nearly imperceptible jerk of his chin.
She turns, dread heavy as lead in her stomach - she’s not ready to face Obi yet, definitely not in front of Zen -
A woman in sweeping skirts with long, wavy brown hair down to her waist stands with her hands folded before her. She meets Shirayuki’s eyes briefly, her expression inscrutable, before she inclines her head and dips into a graceful curtsy. “Your Highness Zen.”
Zen nods. “Lady Miki. Your family departs in two days for your home, am I right?”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“You must ask your father if he will take lunch with my brother and I before you go.”
“I shall, My Lord.” She glances at Shirayuki again, and her knees drop her into a quick curtsy. Lady Miki nods back, a smile curling the corner of her mouth, and Shirayuki’s face burns. “Forgive me, but I am wanted in the Blue Parlor. Please give my regards to His Highness Izana.”
When the woman is out of earshot, Shirayuki clutches the library books to her chest, and Zen’s brow furrows. “Lady Miki Kai was always rumored to be shrewd. Obi got to her in time, but I'm still sorry that you had to be the one on her receiving end."
Receiving end. Right. She can barely make her mouth work. "It's okay, Zen."
"It's not. Still - she had to have had a pretty good reason for giving Obi all the information she did."
“Yes, she seems very -” Snowy teeth dig into Obi’s lower lip in her mind’s eye, and she falters. “- very capable.”
Zen frowns at her. “Do you know her from somewhere?”
“No!” she blurts, and Zen’s eyes widen. “Um. I saw her in the library. Last night.”
“What, after your shift?” he asks, incredulous. “So late at night? What was she even doing ?”
Shirayuki’s mind scrambles for a response. It struggles to navigate the labyrinth being woven all around it - Obi and Lady Miki in the library, a clandestine relationship, Obi coaxing information from her by lamplight, Obi’s warning look, hands fisting in clothes -
She swallows. “Reading.”
It’s a small but effective torture to be here now. Only one thing could possibly make it worse.
Where light is beaming dashingly onto the chair just beyond Shirayuki’s elbow, a shadow crosses the shaft and she flips the book of maps before her shut with a snap .
“Ooh, Miss,” Obi purrs. “Something you don’t want me to see?”
“No, you just startled me.” She’s pretty sure she doesn’t actually sound as defensive as she thinks she does. She pulls a random tome towards herself to avoid looking at him for another few seconds.
It’s hopeless, though. Her blushes are always just about as permanent as the red of her hair.
At least he doesn’t sneak closer, or try to snatch the book. He would . Instead, he pulls his jacket so it sits perfectly straight across his shoulders and sits gracefully in the chair just catty-corner to hers.
The stretcher under the table judders against the balls of her feet - Obi’s crossed his ankles on it, probably bare inches from where her feet rest.
“So - what’s today looking like?”
Long. So long. “I go to the evening shift in a couple of hours. Until then -” Inspiration strikes. Her cheek muscles relax, and she feels herself smiling for real. “Until then, nothing. Sorry, Obi. I’ll just be in here. Reading. The whole time.”
She flips the book open - she doesn’t even know what it’s called - to a random page crawling with inked illustrations of various Apiaceae , and settles in to wait.
Obi doesn’t move.
After five solid, silent minutes - nothing. He yawns, an open book on the table catches his eye, and he pulls it towards himself with far less disgust than Shirayuki might have expected.
Blast.
She feels his eyes on her and tears her gaze away from the page she has not turned in several minutes.
She can’t do it. Her gaze falls to the table before it can center on his face.
In her peripheral vision, she catches the sly, shining arc of teeth. “Have you really never seen a kiss before?”
Just like that, her embarrassment evaporates. Her head snaps up. “Of course I have! But that -” Obi’s grin widens, and her hold on her indignation takes a severe slip, the fire banking with chill. “-that wasn’t kissing, that was - that was -”
“Yes?”
“What were you even doing ?”
“Giving Lady Miki a good reason to answer my questions.”
This conversation is going nowhere good, fast. Images from last night rise to the fore yet again, and she shifts uncomfortably in her seat, wishes for the fleetingest moment that there were a painless and non-debilitating way to gouge her own eyes out, until she remembers that the memory is already there to stay.
“I meant the library,” she manages. She hopes she’s keeping her voice low enough to keep the librarian’s interest from being piqued. There are more invigorating conversations she’d prefer to be kicked out of here for. “We said goodnight, and then you followed me.”
Obi’s eyes narrow. “I followed whoever was following you. Turns out it was the Kais’ daughter. I seized the moment.”
Oh, this is too much. Shirayuki had pegged Obi for a liar, and midst an ugly, albeit brief, rush of something that feels suspiciously like betrayal, she hates being right. She’d thought -
Obi’s feet shift on the stretcher, the vibration winding through her heels. She doesn’t know what she’d thought.
A deep breath reaches for kindness, but perhaps falls short. “You don’t have to be like that,” she says, and a real furrow appears between Obi’s brows, the righthand slant mimicking the scar flirting with his hairline. “Your - relationship with Lady Miki, it makes sense why - I get it.”
What it’s like to - well - when someone is in a station higher than yours. She can’t bring herself to say it.
“You get it,” Obi echoes blankly, brows making a familiar climb. Still, she catches the question he won’t ask.
She gets that, too. It doesn’t make her feel much better.
“I just do . But that doesn’t mean you had to do that -” She makes a fluttering, halfhearted gesture with her hand, and this time, only one of Obi’s eyebrows arches. “- with your, your partner, feet away, while I was trying to study .”
Obi’s expression wipes itself absolutely blank.
That stings a bit. “And then lie about it,” she adds, with feeling, and what looks to be pure, golden enlightenment alights in every inch of Obi’s features. She seizes that, warming to her topic. “I mean, lying to me is one thing, but you lied to Zen, too. The least you could do is just tell him - he’ll understand, I promise.” They’re certainly closer than she and Obi are, anyway. And it’s not like Zen would particularly care .
Except Obi is biting his lip.
“What?” she asks, weary. She considers actually reading this book in front of her. Anything to end this unfortunate interaction as soon as possible, equations and data notwithstanding.
“Miss,” he says, fighting a grin. His eyes are twinkling. “Lady Miki isn’t my - ha - my anything.”
Shirayuki waits for the other shoe to drop. In the meantime, Obi loses control of his smile. “She was spying on you and waiting for the right moment to try and engender herself with you. I really did follow her in here because she really was following you.”
“But then -” This can’t be right - “But, that kiss, and -”
Oh.
Obi laughs. Not unkindly, but still.
“A clever girl like that would never ,” he admonishes, leaning back in his chair. His ankles must come uncrossed, because something brushes against the underside of her shoe under the table. His grin is sharp. “Lucky for Master, I’m persuasive.”
Death would be kinder than this.
“You could have at least gone somewhere else,” she tries, voice barely mounting a whisper.
He chuckles, sparing the open book in front of him a glance, short lashes flaring over pronounced cheekbones, before he meets her gaze sidelong, coy. “It was just kissing, Miss. And - some hands.” He presses one of his to his heart, fingers spread, bones showing through the black leather glove. His grin twitches just a bit wider. “On my honor.”
She remembers how different he’d looked last night, with Lady Miki’s hands roaming hungrily up his chest, his mouth chasing hers. Now, though, he’s just a - a cad , Mitsuhide might have called him, scrawny and rough features and roguish smile. What honor? She wants to say, until she realizes - it hadn’t been a lie, in the end.
(And she had lied to Zen, hadn't she, just a little one, a little white lie -)
Blast.
Also, she feels she might faint. “That’s not what I meant.”
And Obi just keeps chuckling.
What else is there to say? By all accounts, she should be thanking him, as Zen must have done, but really - how can she?
A white flag goes up in her mind's eye. She sends a mental apology to Kiki.
Another few minutes have passed of her flipping fruitlessly through the book she doesn’t remember plucking from the shelves, wondering if the answer to extricating herself from Obi sometime within the next minute could somehow be found in the heavily-illustrated pages, valiantly trying to banish the word persuasive from her vocabulary, when Obi gives a little cough. “So, you’ve seen kisses, but apparently Master's been lacking in his -”
Everything in Shirayuki shoots to its feet except for her physical body. Quiet they may be, but there are at least a dozen other people scattered throughout this library, and anyway, anyway -
“Obi,” she murmurs, voice incredibly steady, eyes on her still-unread book, “I’m sure the Chief could give you something to do right now .”
He hums, low. “You disapprove of my studying?”
“You aren't studying.”
A sigh, forlorn, and his tone changes so completely the hairs on the backs of her arms stand on end. “Funny. And here I thought I was doing so well.”
With dread, she looks up.
Mouth canted in a soft smirk, with one finger pinned down on a corner of the open book, he circles his arm once and spins the book around with a hiss of stitching against tabletop so she can read it, then pushes it at her.
Shock washes ice-cold from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes. There on both open pages are two large, chest-up sketches, with many smaller ones and even more blocks of tight, tiny script scattered around them: on the left, a fine-boned, lovely woman, with curiously pale eyes and no creases to betray the lids, black brows, and incredibly straight, raven hair falling well past her shoulders. On the right - Shirayuki swallows, hard, oh, she should've remembered to close this book - is a man, just as fine-boned, with the same eyelids and black brows and hair worn long but tied back, a strong, straight jawline, and light-colored eyes, and had the traveler who had made this journal not sketched in only black ink, she knows he might have chosen amber-colored paints for those irises.
It’s never been harder to look Obi in the face, but she still does it, only to find that his expression has gone curiously soft. Still, his smile and his voice tease. “You could just ask , Miss.”
She takes a deep breath, and before she can stop herself: “As if you’d tell.”
That surprises another laugh out of him, just a huff, and of all the moments to feel guilty, this really shouldn’t be it. He’s left the tips of his fingers resting along the tops of the incriminating pages of the book, and he drums them just above the man’s left temple, the echo of where a small scar isn’t.
Obi doesn’t even look like him. Not really.
“You’re right,” Obi says. “Takes the fun out of it.”
For an equation to work out one way or another, you need to first have all the variables. Then, balance is achieved, along with transitivity. Repetition of the experiment, and surety.
Only, the more variables she’s finding, the more she realizes she’s still missing.
Which makes her say, with a quick smile, just as Obi is easing the traveler’s journal shut, “So I got it right, then?”
Obi’s gaze jerks up to meet hers, stunned. Then the corners of his mouth twitch, and the lines of his body turn languid, something in his face warming, a cat with the cream and its kill between its front paws. Either Shirayuki’s blood is officially boiling, or there’s an itch under her skin that can’t be scratched, makes her fidget, makes her nerves ping where they contact anything at all.
Shirayuki has the distinct impression that she’s just lost a game she hadn’t known she was playing.
He closes the book, with finality. “Wouldn’t you like to know, Miss.”
It might be a question. It might not.
They end up going to the pharmacy together.