Gilded Ashes: When Shadows Reign

"What do you mean."

"I mean I wasn't going to put you to work."

"But - you said -"

"I said you don't have to worry about the garden, Raizen. Arashi and Keahi can manage the garden. They've been promising to manage that garden for three years, and I'd like to test whether the promise has any actual content. You're not going out there with them."

She reached across the table.

The motion took some effort. Her bandaged hand stayed flat on her lap, and she used her good hand to lean forward over the wood, the small grimace at the corner of her mouth visible for less than a second before she swallowed it. Her fingers crossed the distance between her bowl and Raizen's slate, which he had set on the counter near her elbow when he'd come down. She tapped the dead screen once with two fingers.

"It was old anyway."

Raizen looked at it. The water had dried into a faint line along the bottom of the casing, but the indicator at the corner was still cold, and the slate was very obviously not going to wake up again.

"And," Kori continued, "you've got quite a bit to catch up on."

He let out a long breath.

He hadn't yet allowed himself to think about it directly - gone for a considerable amount of time... That meant tons of lessons missed, especially with the pace the Academy was moving at, each competence with its own preparation curriculum. The thought of sitting down with the catch-up stack - which would now need to be completed and studied on another slate – made him want to scrap everything and go in hiding until those lessons didn't even matter anymore. The only answer he gave back was a dry "Yeah."

"Huh?"

"It's just… That's a lot of work."

"It is."

Kori adjusted her seating slowly, carefully – her hip was beginning to remember the petal impact from the night before. She settled into a sitting position that suggested she had no intention of getting up for the next several minutes.

"Raizen, dear..."

He looked up.

"I'm too comfortable here. Could you please fetch me my own slate? It's in my room, on the bed."

He pushed his chair back.

"Sure."

He crossed the living room in two quick steps. Kori's room was the first door on the right, the one with the old brass knob she had refused to replace despite what Arashi named "Agonizing months and years of neverending suggestions", which probably just meant that he didn't like it and kept buzzing Kori until she would do something about it.

Raizen hand was already on the knob. His body - for reasons he did not think twice in the moment – he was moving with unnecessary haste, as if he was running away from his responsibilities, or maybe just wanting to be helpful and wanting to be useful and wanting to demonstrate that he was, in fact, fully functional despite the broken slate.

He turned the knob, and pushed the door open in one motion.

Standing in the middle of Kori's room, half-turned, her hair tied back the way it had been at the table, the formal jacket and trousers folded neatly on the corner of the bed…

Hikari.

She was not in garden clothes.

She was in armour.

The plating barely covered her chest in a single solid contoured piece, white steel with a shining pearl finish that caught the morning light and scattered it. The chest plate extended down to a flared waist guard that closed the gap to her hips, the metal articulated in narrow segments that allowed motion only in the small range her body needed to remain upright. Below the waist guard was a ridiculously short skirted plate that covered her lower torso, ending well above the knee – probably made so short for maximum mobility. Above her chest, the plate rose into a high stiff collar that framed the line of her throat without restricting it. Her arms were bare. Her legs were bare. Her stomach was mostly bare. The armour covered the parts of her that needed covering and nothing more.

More pieces were scattered chaotically on the floor, as if Hikari took her time trying to figure out which piece went where.

The plating was beautiful… But the fit was not.

Hikari's hips were locked at an unnatural angle that suggested the lower waist guard was not built her body – or she just put it on backwards - and her left foot, in the half-second Raizen had been standing in the doorway, was beginning to shift backward in a slow involuntary correction as she tried to keep her balance.

Her head snapped up.

Her eyes met his.

For a quarter of a second, neither of them moved.

Then her balance went backwards.

The armour was heavier than she was used to. The skirted plate restricted her hips at the exact moment her body needed to compensate. Her foot reached for the floor, but the weight of the chest plate carried her shoulders backward past the point where her hips could recover, causing her to fall. Her arms came up in a quick reflex, grabbing just empty air.

Raizen's face went through several stages in less than a full second.

The first was startled recognition. He completely forgot she was here.

The second was the sudden, sharp awareness of exactly how little fabric was involved in the parts of her body the armour was not covering.

The third was the immediate, mortifying recognition that he was now standing in a doorway, frozen, staring at a half-armoured girl falling, in a state that any reasonable observer would describe as blankly staring.

The fourth was the recognition that he had two options. One of them involved stepping forward to help, catching her in the half-second until she hit the ground. But that would have made him a complete pervert, and~

The other involved stepping backward immediately.

Raizen stepped back through the doorway in one quick motion and slammed the door shut behind him.

The half a second passed in dead silence.

Then, from inside the room, a sound so loud it made the floor vibrate. Like throwing a dozen steel pans down the stairs, but the staircase is behind a door.

After a few moments of silence, a series of other sounds reached Raizen:

The first sound was steel scraping wood. Then came a small frustrated breath, the sound of one piece of the armour falling against another, then a clattering cascade of approximately ten metal components tumbling against the floor.

Raizen stood in the hallway, back to the door, hand still on the doorknob.

His face was the colour of paper.

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