Rias
The room felt too quiet after everyone else had left.
I had waited at my desk working on papers for Kusari to return.
Asia and Koneko had come back from their contracts already and I told them to head home.
I had sent out my familiar to let the rest of the peerage know to teleport, or in Issei’s case bicycle, home after they finished for the night.
Now, it was just the two of us.
Tea cups still sat on the table.
One chair was slightly out of place from where Issei had gotten up too fast.
The faint moonlight shone through the windows, turning the glass into a mirror that reflected the two of us back at me: my clubroom, my silence, and Kusari standing in it with her hands folded neatly as though this were an ordinary report and not something that had been sitting in my chest ever since the battle with Kokabiel.
I explained that I had asked the others not to be present so that the two of us could talk alone.
I had meant to ease into it.
I did not.
“Kusari-chan,” I said softly, “we need to talk.”
She did not look surprised.
That was the first thing that tightened something inside me.
She simply stood there, calm and still and watchful in that way of hers, and nodded once.
“Yes, Buchou.”
I gestured toward the sofa. “Sit.”
She obeyed at once.
Too quickly.
Too neatly.
That still bothered me.
More now than it had before.
I sat across from her instead of at my usual place at my desk.
Now only the table coffee table sat between us because I did not trust myself to decide whether I wanted the distance or not if I sat closer first.
For a few seconds, I only looked at her.
Kusari sat with perfect posture, her expression quiet and unreadable, but I had stopped mistaking stillness for ease some time ago.
She was still tired.
Not the way she had been immediately after Kokabiel, when it had looked as though standing itself had become something done on borrowed force.
Better than that. Stronger again. But not untouched.
None of us were untouched from that fight.
I folded my hands together in my lap so she would not see that I wanted to fidget like a child.
“What happened,” I asked, “before Albion arrived?”
She did not answer immediately.
Not because she was refusing.
Because she knew exactly which part I meant.
I watched her throat move once.
Then she lowered her eyes for only a moment before lifting them again.
Silence first.
“It was simply what I thought was necessary at the moment.”
She gave a nod and then answered as if it were a small and plain issue.
That was all.
And it infuriated me a little, because for all the progress we had made, for all the ways she had begun to soften around us in recent days, when something mattered enough she still returned to this—silence, composure, the shape of somebody preparing to tell only what was necessary and no more.
I kept my voice gentle.
“Kusari. I’m not asking as your [King].”
That made her eyes flicker.
I knew that it meant more to her to hear that.
For anyone in the peerage to take away the pretense of distance or hierarchy.
“I’m asking because I need to know exactly what you meant to do.”
She was quiet for another heartbeat.
Then she answered in the same way she had on the field—only calmer, because the battlefield was gone and there was no longer any excuse left but the truth.
It was still clinical and distant though.
“We were going to lose,” she said. “Kokabiel was too strong for us to defeat. We needed time to retreat since our plan of stalling him wouldn’t work. Someone had to hold him there long enough for the rest to escape.” She paused. “I was the only option that made sense.”
There was no drama in the words.
No plea for praise.
No self-pity.
That made them worse.
She really thought it could be a logical and easy choice.
I felt my hands tighten against each other.
“So sacrificing yourself was acceptable?”
She did not react visibly to the phrasing.
“Yes.”
The directness of it made anger spark through my chest so fast I almost stood.
“Why?”
That came out sharper than I intended.
Her gaze did not leave mine.
“If Albion hadn’t arrived,” she said, “someone would have died.”
The certainty in her voice chilled me.
She believed that completely.
Not as fear during a battle. Not as panic mid fight.
As a fact.
“And I couldn’t let that be one of you.”
One of you.
Not someone. Not the peerage. Not even my comrades.
One of you.
My chest hurt.
I forced myself to stay still and asked the next question anyway.
“If there had been another way?”
Her answer came immediately.
“I couldn’t see one.”
The room quieted around us again.
Outside the windows, a cloud blocked the moonlight, leaving us only with the dim lights of the club room.
For one irrational second I hated the ordinary night continuing beyond the clubroom walls while we sat here discussing how close she had come—how calmly she had come—to asking me to help her die.
I looked down at my hands.
Then back at her.
She was watching me carefully now.
Not pleading. Not apologizing. Waiting.
As though my response mattered and she had already accepted that whatever it was, she would deserve it.
“What if there was another way? What if we all could have escaped together? Or if Issei’s balance breaker could have been enough?”
She nodded as if they were valid questions.
“I already told you why I was the only choice while we were on the field facing Kokabiel. It hasn’t changed.” She paused for a moment. “Kokabiel was toying with us the whole fight. He didn’t actually fight back against anyone until Albion arrived. I saw it. With my Veil-sight. The way his holy energy changed when he tried to face Albion. It was still more than Issei-san could handle. You saw how powerful Albion is. Issei-san can’t compare to him yet, and if he had fought Kokabiel he would have lost.”
She explained everything calmly without shifting her perfect posture once.
“Kusari, I understand your reasoning, but I can’t accept that we should have left anyone behind.”
I tried to keep calm when I replied. The idea of any of my servants being left behind to fight that monster was something that would keep me up at night if I thought of it too long.
“Buchou, we were very close to being killed.”
She spoke as if she had decided to stop dressing it up and give me the most brutal version of it.
“We could have all died in that fight. There were versions of it where parts of the peerage survived and none did. I only suggested the version that would ensure most people would escape while Kokabiel was stalled.”
“Kusari—“
“What would you have done if Asia didn’t come back from that fight? If you had to watch her get killed by that mad man.”
I stopped completely.
The image that her sentence produced in my head floored me for a moment.
She didn’t wait for me to respond.
“What about Koneko, Yuuto, or Akneo? Or Issei? What if you had to sit here alone because you were the only one left? You know that if it came down for it everyone in the peerage would make sure at least you made it out.”
“Kusari, stop.”
My voice was smaller and more strained than I should have let it be.
“I want you to understand the thoughts that led me to ask you to let me stay.”
“And you? It would be alright for you to be the one missing from this clubroom?”
She didn’t respond for a moment.
“I told you that I would rejoin you after I distracted him long enough.”
I looked at her.
She stared back with her purple eyes revealing nothing.
We both knew it was a lie, and perhaps she was simply hoping that she could pretend it wasn’t.
I exhaled slowly.
“All right,” I said.
That seemed to surprise her more than anger would have.
Not much.
Just enough that I saw it.
She expected me to push more, not drop it and move on.
I didn’t want to but I realized that it wouldn’t change anything now.
So I went on before she could retreat behind silence again.
“Then I understand what you thought you were doing.”
That was not forgiveness.
Not agreement.
But it was truth.
I understood the logic. I hated it, but I understood it.
And if I stayed there too long—if I kept asking why she had valued herself so little, why she had spoken of losing one member instead of all of us as if she expected herself to be the obvious answer, why her fear of being left behind had hurt more to hear than her willingness to stay—I was going to lose the careful shape of this conversation entirely.
So I changed course.
“Then, about your seals,” I said.
That got her attention immediately.
I felt that it was something that always would.
“My Onii-sama told me your body may not be ready yet for another release.” I kept my voice level. “He also said that if I remove another one without permission from a Maou—or without a strong enough reason that it is clearly necessary—he may interfere again.”
Kusari listened without interrupting, though she did tense slightly when my brother was brought up.
When I finished, she was quiet for a moment and then said, “My body will most likely be ready to release another seal soon.”
The confidence of that bothered me.
Or maybe not the confidence. The familiarity.
As if she had already measured her own limits and knew exactly when she expected to be useful enough again.
Then she gave me a dry look.
“I also don’t think Sirzechs-sama could complain very effectively about releasing a seal during a battle with Kokabiel.”
I stared at her.
Then, against my own will, laughed once.
Just once.
It was impossible not to.
Because she wasn’t wrong.
If I had actually done it, if Kokabiel had still been in front of us and I had released one of her seals to stop him from erasing my peerage from the fight, even Onii-sama would have had trouble arguing that the reason wasn’t good enough.
I hadn’t thought of it at the moment.
I had been too preoccupied with the fight.
Kusari’s expression didn’t change, but I saw the smallest shift in her eyes when I laughed.
A little less tension.
Her tails shifted to sit more comfortably.
Her posture was a little less perfect.
And because I am apparently weak where she is concerned in exactly the ways I least enjoy admitting, I relented before I had fully intended to.
“We’ll watch your condition carefully,” I said. “No decisions before then.”
She nodded.
“Yes, Rias-Buchou.”
That was the easier topic finished.
The harder one had been waiting underneath it the whole time.
I hesitated.
For the first time since she came back from her contract, I hesitated.
Kusari noticed, of course.
Her expression changed by a degree.
Only enough to say she understood that I was approaching something I did not know how to phrase.
I hated that she could read that so easily now.
I also hated that I was relieved by it.
“There’s something else,” I said at last.
“Yes?”
I chose my words carefully.
“Something Onii-sama said.”
Her face went still.
More still than before.
Not fear.
Wariness.
That alone told me enough to make my stomach tighten.
“He mentioned,” I said slowly, “your previous [Kings]. Previous peerages. He spoke as though… you had attacked them. Or other members.”
Kusari did not move.
Did not blink.
The silence that followed was not refusal, not exactly.
It was the kind of stillness that comes when something that you don’t want others to see has been brought to light.
She looked like she was already expecting judgment from me. Like she expected the worst outcome to be the most obvious one.
I kept my voice quiet.
“I want to hear it from your side.”
That got a reaction.
Tiny.
But noticeable on her closed expression.
Because she was shocked that I was going to listen to her over what I had already been told.
That I wanted to draw my own conclusions about her rather than follow along with what my Onii-sama said.
It seemed like the exact thing had happened to her before and she was shocked that it may be different now.
“I want to know everything. Not only what I’m told,” I added.
She looked down then.
Not to close herself off more. Not in shame.
Just enough to gather herself around whatever answer she was about to give.
When she finally spoke, her voice had gone quieter and softer.
“I was defending myself.”
The simplicity of it hit harder than a longer explanation would have.
My throat tightened.
Kusari continued, still not looking at me.
“I wasn’t attacking them. I’m not an animal.”
That old, ugly anger rose in me again—cold this time, not sharp.
Because I believed her immediately.
Not because I was naive.
Because of the way she said it.
Because of everything I had learned to see in her.
Because no one who had truly belonged anywhere would say the next part in that tone.
“I have never truly been treated as part of a peerage,” she said quietly, “until I was placed in yours.”
Placed. Not welcomed. Not joined.
The way she said it made me realize how off things had been when Onii-sama had brought her to join my peerage.
It made me think of how she had tried to keep her distance and prove her usefulness to me as her [King].
I could not speak for a second.
Because I knew, all at once, that if I said the wrong thing here—even kindly, even with good intentions—I would wound her further. Not from cruelty.
From failing to understand the shape of what she had just handed me.
That she had to defend herself from her own [King] the peerage she was supposed to be a part of.
When she did so, she was treated as if she were a dangerous and rebellious servant.
That because of this being treated as part of a peerage was something that never happened until mine.
I had thought I understood so much already.
I had not understood enough.
And sitting there across from her, with the room dimming around us and the night deepening behind the windows, I realized that this conversation was not going to end tonight.
Not properly.
“Kusari-chan, thank you for telling me. I believe you.”
She finally looked up at me.
“I…. Thank you Rias-Buchou. But I should tell you… more.”
“No, that’s enough for now. It’s late and we should both get some rest. We can talk more later. When you’re ready.”
She looked as if she might protest, until she realized that her hands had started to shake and that she had not taken a deep enough breath since she first told me she was defending herself.
She took a moment to breathe while folded her hands in front of her.
“I understand Buchou. We can talk more soon.”
She stood and moved to leave the room. She paused for a moment and looked back over her shoulder at me and at the clubroom.
Her fox ears twitched once as she adjusted some over her silver-white hair away from her face. Her tails shifted behind her before she turned and continued out of the room.
I watched her leave and didn’t move for a while before sinking further into the couch.
That was only the beginning of what she had to share.
What more was she not ready to tell me?
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