Gilded Ashes

Raizen opened his eyes slowly.

The light in the attic was the soft silver-gold of a morning still negotiating its terms with the night, and for a few seconds he could not place where he was. The auroras above weren’t lighting up the night. The blanket over him was... Strangely, his own. The mattress beneath him was also his own. The angle of the ceiling above him was familiar in the way only one ceiling in his life was familiar.

He slowly turned his head, eyes still blurry with last night’s sleep.

Hikari was on her side, facing him, her hand laced through his across the small gap between their mattresses. She was already awake. She had been awake for some time, by the look of her.

She was looking straight at him.

Raizen’s first morning thought - usually some variation of "the slate, the slate, where’s the slate" - did not arrive. The second thought – "what time is it" - also did not arrive. The third thought, which arrived clearly and immediately, was simply: she’s been watching me while I slept again, huh...

He turned his face away, grabbed his pillow with his free hand, and buried his face in it.

"Will there be a morning," he said, muffled, "where you don’t insistently look at me?"

Hikari laughed quietly. The sound was entirely pleased with itself.

"Sorry," she said. "Your sleeping face is too irresistible. Normally, you’re so... Well-defended, I don’t know."

Her free hand - the one not holding his - flicked the side of his arm. The flick was light, yet he felt it through the blanket anyway.

"It’s not fair."

"It’s not."

"You could have warned me."

"I’m warning you now."

"That’s not how warnings work, Hikari."

"It’s how my warnings work. If it’s not convenient enough for your majesty, then I’ll just stop giving you warnings."

"As if it’d make a difference, really..." Raizen came up from the pillow. His face was warmer than he wanted it to be. He squinted at her through his hair, which was doing whatever a night of sleep on a roof had done to it, and she watched him with the same soft amusement she had been watching him with for the last several minutes.

"What time is it."

She turned her head to glance at the clock on the wall - the one mounted above the stairwell, just above the doorframe of the attic - and her eyes settled on the hands, as if she did not particularly care about the answer.

"Eight."

"...Eight?"

"Mm."

Raizen sat up, letting go of Hikari’s hand.

He had been planning to be up at six. He had been planning to spend the early morning with the slate, which was - he realized with a small cold drop of his stomach – not next to him. He had work to get through – tons of lessons, not nearly enough days. The first session was supposed to start at -

He stopped.

He stopped because Hikari had also stopped.

Her face had drained of its soft morning ease in the space of a single second, and the hand that had been holding his was now close to her chest, tightening around whatever it was holding. Her eyes were no longer on him. They were on the stairs.

He followed her gaze.

The stairwell led down from their attic into the main floor of the house, and the doorframe was perhaps three metres from where he was sitting. Two heads were visible at the very edge of that doorframe - just enough of them to be seen, not enough of them to be acknowledging that they were seen. One head had Arashi’s particular shock of pale brown hair. The other had Keahi’s messy red bun. Both of them were perfectly still. Both of them were watching with the unblinking attention of two predators who had been holding their position for what was clearly not the first minute.

Neither of them moved when they were noticed.

Arashi’s eyebrows were the only part of his face that was working. They were halfway up his forehead.

Keahi’s mouth was a thin line that was visibly working to suppress a small laugh.

For one long second, none of the four of them moved.

Then Arashi’s mouth opened. "Keahi, if you don’t move, they won’t know we’re here. They’ll think they have Schizophrenia-"

"How long have you been there," Raizen said, very flatly.

"Define been," Arashi said.

"...How long."

"In the strict sense, or the philosophical sense-"

"Arashi."

"Well, uh... Long enough."

Keahi closed her eyes and pucked her lips trying to hold back another burst of laughter.

Hikari had gone an interesting shade of pink. Raizen, who had been hoping for some kind of out, looked back at her, and her hand - the one not still tightly curled around whatever was in it - had risen halfway to her face in the small reflex of a person trying very hard not to laugh and not entirely succeeding.

"Get out," Raizen said.

"We came up to wake you," Arashi said. "Kori sent us. There is, and I quote, work to be done. We did not expect what was, frankly, a much sweeter scene than we had been led to expect by anything in your respective personalities -"

"Arashi, just shut up already."

"- and we have been here for -"

"Out."

"- a non-trivial amount of -"

"Out."

Seeing that Raizen was one more word away from throwing his pillow at both of them, Keahi grabbed the back of Arashi’s collar.

She just dragged him backward by the fabric, and the two of them disappeared down the stairwell with Arashi’s last muffled, joyful protests. "Just don’t be too late, or Kori herself might come and whoop your-"

Silence returned to the attic.

Hikari let out a small, helpless laugh into the back of her free hand.

Raizen looked at the ceiling because he didn’t have anything else he could look at. The colour in his face had begun the slow journey from pink to something more normal, and the recognition that the entire group downstairs was probably about to know exactly what had happened on this rooftop last night - the broad strokes of it, at any rate - had begun to settle into him: A small disaster he was going to have to manage for the rest of the day.

He glanced sideways at Hikari.

She was still laughing into her hand. The other hand - the curled one - had not opened - he noticed that now. Her fingers were closed in the kind of careful fold that a person used when they were holding something small, warm and... Still asleep.

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