High School DxD: Fox of Ill Omen

Rias

By the time Kusari arrived, most of the others had already returned.

The clubroom had the lived-in disorder that always followed a night of Devil work.

Reports on my desk.

A few opened ledgers.

A half-finished cup of tea Akeno had abandoned and then immediately reclaimed as “still perfectly fine, Rias.”

Xenovia standing too ridged for someone supposedly relaxing after work.

Asia helping Issei patch a scrape on his hand from a fall that apparently involved a lamp post and a stray cat. 

Koneko was reading over one of the completed contract slips in silence, though every now and then her eyes flicked toward the door.

Her usual plate of snacks was ignored.

Though I had been doing the same thing.

I had hardly gotten through any of the reports on my desk.

When the door to the club room opened, my shoulders tightened before I could stop them.

Kusari must have teleported to her room before coming to the club room. Hopefully that wasn’t a bad sign.

She stood perfectly still for a moment after the door shut, one hand holding a plastic bag and the other held the completed contract seal.

Her silver-white hair caught the late sunlight from the window, turning almost pale gold at the edges.

Her fox ears were visible, along with the three tails she had been hiding less and less around us.

One ear twitched once, then settled.

The tails hung low and calm behind her, though I had learned by now that “calm” with Kusari often meant “controlled.”

She looked at the rest of the room.

Then me.

Only after that did she step forward.

“Rias-Buchou,” she said, coming to my desk and placing both the seal and the bag down neatly. “The contract was fulfilled without incident. The client confirmed completion.”

I glanced at the slip first out of habit.

Then at what I assumed was the payment.

The bag held two boxed, limited-edition collector’s figures.

One was from an anime that Issei would absolutely recognize on sight and loudly mourn not owning.

The other was from a more popular one that I recognized, and might keep for myself….

Akeno leaned over my shoulder and laughed softly. “Ara. That certainly fits the request.”

Issei, of course, had already heard enough to look over. “Wait, what kind of client was it?”

Kusari’s expression stayed perfectly level. “A man in his early twenties who called himself an “otaku”.  His request was “A pretty girl to clean his room”.”

There was a beat of silence.

Then Issei slapped both hands onto the table. “That bastard.”

Asia blinked. “I-Ise-san?”

“No, Asia, think about it. Think about the injustice. He got to summon a beautiful girl to clean his room, and I had to bike uphill to a client who wanted help carrying furniture.”

“W-Well you could treat it like building character. R-right?” Asia said.

“Asia-chan, my character is already incredible.”

“That is why it still requires so much work,” Koneko said.

Xenovia nodded once as if this were a profound truth. “A difficult task demands repeated labor.”

Issei collapsed on the couch

“I hate all of you.”

“That isn’t true!” Asia said immediately distressed.

He looked at her and visibly softened. “Not you, Asia.”

Akeno’s smile turned sweeter. “Ara. So only Asia-chan gets special treatment? How selective.”

Kusari had stepped to the side by then, just enough to remove herself from the center of the conversation without seeming to retreat from it.

It was the sort of thing she did so easily that I used to miss it.

I did not miss it anymore.

She wasn’t hiding tonight, not exactly.

Not the way she once would have.

She didn’t vanish into the background completely.

When Issei groaned dramatically about demonic power inadequacy and his hatred of bicycling, the corner of her mouth almost moved.

That small thing hurt to look at after our last conversation.

Because I knew now how much effort it had taken her to let even that much show.

One by one, the others finished handing in their reports.

Asia and Xenovia left first, since they had already promised to stop somewhere on the way back.

Koneko followed after a short pause, though not before looking once at Kusari, then at me, in that blunt, quiet way of hers that often felt more perceptive than words.

Yuuto was next, she had arrived and saw that the others were leaving and quickly finished her report to follow.

“What happened to your hands Issei-kun?” She asked after finally noticing the bandages Asia had used. 

“I just fell off of the bike. It’s not a big deal,” Issei said.

“You hit a post.”

“A stray cat ran in front of me! I had to swerve around it!”

“Into a post,” Koneko repeated from the doorway.

The three of them left with Koneko and Issei bickering while Yuuto tried not to laugh too loudly.

Akeno lingered the longest.

Of course she did.

She set her cup down on my desk, then looked at Kusari, who had moved to one of the windows and was pretending to examine the darkening schoolyard outside.

Then Akeno looked at me.

Not openly questioning.

Not enough for anyone else to call her on it. Just a slight lift at the edge of her gaze that said she knew I wanted to speak to Kusari again, and that she knew Kusari knew it too.

I held that look for a second, then said lightly, “Good work today, Akeno.”

Her smile warmed without becoming any less sharp. “The same to you, Rias.”

Then she leaned closer and spoke in a hushed and more serious tone. “Don’t push her too far too quickly.”

And then she left.

The door closed.

Silence settled over the room with a different weight than before.

Kusari did not move right away.

Neither did I.

There were things that became harder to begin the more you wanted to do them carefully.

She was standing half-turned toward the window, her reflection faint in the glass.

Three tails. Silvery hair. Purple eyes. A profile too elegant to be fair. Too still.

When she finally looked back at me, I saw that she had understood exactly why she’d stayed.

“You can go, if you want to.” I said softly.

A faint pause.

Then she crossed the room toward my desk again, more slowly this time, and stopped a short distance away.

“No,” she said. “I think if I wanted to, I would have left with the others.”

That would have been almost playful from anyone else.

From Kusari, it felt like she was laying something fragile in my hands and pretending it weighed nothing.

I rose from my chair.

Not quickly. Not enough to make her flinch.

“Kusari-chan,” I said, keeping my voice as gentle as I could without turning pitying, “are you all right continuing what we spoke about before?”

Her ears tilted back a fraction.

The tails behind her drew closer together, not quite hiding, but not bristling either.

She could have said no.

I think she finally knew that now.

That mattered more than it should have, perhaps.

That she knew she could refuse something asked of her.

She looked down once, then back at me.

“Yes,” she said.

A moment later, more quietly, “I think I should.”

I had expected her to sit only if I told her to.

Instead she moved to the sofa on her own and sat near one end of it with unnatural neatness, knees together, hands folded lightly in her lap.

Her posture was composed, but too deliberate. Every part of her looked arranged meticulously.

I sat across from her rather than behind the desk.

For a while, neither of us spoke.

The evening light had shifted lower now. The room was warmer in color, shadows longer, everything gentler to look at than the conversation deserved.

I folded my hands so I would not reach for her too soon.

Yesterday I had asked questions I needed answers to.

Today I understood better that getting those answers did not mean I had the right to pull more from her than she could actually give.

So I waited.

In the end, Kusari started speaking first.

“I thought about what you asked,” she said.

I kept my voice quiet. “About your past?”

She nodded.

“About the previous [Kings] and peerages. About what Sirzechs-sama said.”

The title came out smooth and proper, and that alone made something cold move through me now.

“Yes,” I said.

Her gaze drifted to the table rather than to me. “I wasn’t lying.”

“I know.”

“No,” she said, and there was the faintest roughness in it now, so soft someone else might have missed it. “I mean I really wasn’t. I didn’t attack them because I was unstable, or rebellious, or because I was trying to run wild.”

The words were cold.

I said nothing. She needed to speak.

Kusari exhaled through her nose and looked down at her hands.

“They called themselves my [King],” she said. “Some of them were for a while. Others were for a short time. None of them treated me as anything more than a possession, a thing.”

My chest tightened.

She kept going in that same precise tone, as if delivering a report she had already decided how to organize.

“I was valuable enough that passing me between hands became convenient when my owner needed something. Sometimes loaned to others. Sometimes I was bought out of their peerage. I was never allowed to move freely for fear that I would try to escape. It was never particularly stable.”

One tail twitched once behind her. A sharp, displeased motion.

“They all wanted something slightly different,” she continued. “Power. Novelty. Status. A weapon. A curiosity. A tool that could be pointed at a problem. A thing they could tame and show off afterward.”

Her mouth curved very faintly.

It wasn’t humor.

“I was young enough, at first, that it was dressed up. They liked words that made it sound better than it was. Education. Refinement. Guidance.” She tilted her head a little. “Disipline.”

Something ugly settled in my stomach.

“Kusari-chan…”

She looked at me then, and the calm in her face made the hurt in it worse.

“I know how it sounds, Buchou.”

“No,” I said immediately. “I don’t think you do.”

That finally changed her expression.

Only a little.

A pause, rather than a flinch.

But it was enough that I knew I had interrupted the script she was trying to follow in her head.

Slowly, I continued, “I don’t think it sounds smaller than it is because you say it calmly.”

For a second, I thought she might apologize.

Instead she looked away again and let out the smallest breath.

“I’m trying not to make this difficult,” she said.

My hands tightened in my lap.

“There is nothing you could say that would make this difficult because you’ve failed somehow.” I kept my voice steady with effort. “If this is difficult, Kusari, then it’s because of what was done to you. Not because of how you tell me.”

Her ears flattened.

Not from anger. Not exactly. The motion was too brief, too caught.

When she spoke again, her voice was still level. It was just more fragile now around the edges.

“What happened to me was never treated as important.”

“It is to me.”

A long silence followed that.

Outside a door to the new school building loudly shut.

The sound broke the silence, then faded.

Kusari stared at a spot near the edge of the table as if the wood grain had become fascinating.

“I learned quickly,” she said at last, “that people are kinder to useful things. Or at least more patient with them.”

The words made me feel burning anger immediately.

“If I was obedient, they called me disciplined. If I was quiet, they called me elegant. If I endured the pain of my own spells well, they called me gifted.” She folded one hand over the other more tightly. “If I did exactly what they wanted before they had to say it, they said I was exceptional.”

I could hear the shape of the trap as clearly as if I had lived it myself.

“If I made them repeat themselves?”

Her eyes lowered.

“They stopped using the kind words. They stopped caring about how damaged their property got.”

My throat went tight.

She still hadn’t looked at me again.

“How far did they go?” I asked.

It was the wrong question in one sense.

Too broad. Too impossible.

I probably shouldn’t have asked so directly.

But she answered anyway.

“Far enough that obedience became natural and fear only came when I couldn’t complete an order,” she said.

The room went silent around that sentence.

I had wondered, when we last talked, what it meant that she spoke about being left behind as if it were the most practical thing in the world.

Now I knew.

Or part of it.

Far enough that obedience became easier than fear.

She continued before I could say anything.

“At some point I stopped expecting to be treated like a person by default.” She gave a small shrug, a motion so graceful it hurt to watch. “That sounds dramatic when I say it like that. It didn’t feel dramatic at the time. It felt natural.”

“No,” I said quietly. “It sounds monstrous.”

She smiled at that.

Not happily.

More like I had said something she appreciated for being correctly phrased.

“Efficient,” she replied. “If they wanted a curse, I gave them a curse. If they wanted me displayed, I stood where I was placed. If they wanted me to keep smiling, I smiled. If they wanted me punished, I stayed still and hoped it would be quick.”

Her voice never rose.

It would have been easier if it had.

I watched her ears. Her tails tails. 

The barely visible tension climbing through her shoulders.

The way she kept sitting too straight even now, as if her body still believed perfect posture might save her from something.

I said carefully, “And when you defended yourself?”

That made her go still in a different way.

For the first time since she’d begun speaking, I saw something like sharpness cut through the careful control.

“They forgot,” she said softly, “that useful things still have limits.”

The cold precision of it would have been frightening in almost anyone else.

From Kusari, it sounded like something she had to remind herself because she couldn’t afford to forget.

“I didn’t attack them because I wanted freedom,” she said. “I figured out early on that I would never have it. I fought back because they decided they could do one thing too many.” Her eyes finally came back to mine. “There were times where it was too much to quietly accept.”

She paused for a moment before continuing much more quietly.

“But I figured out when it was worth it to fight back. I realized that sometimes accepting what I could stomach was better than trying to tell them no.”

The pain in that was so naked it almost knocked the breath out of me.

“How many times?” I asked before I could stop myself.

She understood what I meant.

“Enough,” she said.

Then, after a pause that hurt more than the word, “Too many.”

Kusari’s words made me remember how she had reacted each time she was affected by Issei’s dress break.

The second time she wasn’t hit because of Koneko, but it still affected her.

She froze and nearly collapsed into herself from it. She had been pale and shaking after nearly being stripped.

The first time was worse. Because it did hit her.

Her clothes were torn off in front of us.

I had expected embarrassment or anger.

Instead she had dissociated and defaulted to learned obedience.

That having her clothes torn away meant she had to please her master. 

I hated them.

All of them.

Men and women I had never met, whose names I did not yet know, whose titles meant nothing to me except that they had used them as an excuse for cruelty against someone they should have been protecting.

A [King].

A peerage.

What was the point of titles like mine if they could be used for that?

And Onii-sama had treated her like a tool.

I hadn’t forgotten how Kusari looked when Grayfia arrived and told her she was being removed from my peerage. 

“What they called peerages,” Kusari said quietly, “never felt like one.”

Her hands had stopped fidgeting only because she’d locked them in place by force.

“Retainers. Assets. Curiosities. Weapons. Pets, sometimes too.” That faint, bitter curl touched her mouth again. “Those are not the same thing as a member of a peerage. No matter how carefully someone says them. That’s how some [Kings] view their servants. 

The relationship between a [King] and their servant was supposed to be mutually beneficial.

It was a contract between the two where the servant would accept to serve their master and the master would fulfill a goal or desire of the servant.

I knew that once a Devil became part of a peerage their [King] had control over them, but it wasn’t supposed to make people into slaves.

I understood that not all Devils would treat their servants well.

I had not realized how awful it could be. And now I was seeing first hand what could happen to someone. 

I knew she was giving me only pieces.

Even now. Even after choosing to stay.

Even after agreeing to continue talking to me.

She was cutting away details so I would not have to see their full shape.

But the pieces were enough to horrify me anyway.

“Why tell me this now?” I asked, and hated how small the question sounded compared to what she’d already given me.

Kusari blinked.

Then she looked genuinely caught off guard.

That, more than anything else, told me she hadn’t expected that question.

She had expected inquiries, perhaps.

Clarifications. Pushing for more.

Not why.

“Because you asked,” she said.

I waited.

Understanding dawned over her face a second later, and I watched it happen in painful increments.

“Oh,” she said softly.

I think, in that instant, she realized what I had meant.

That I was not asking why she was explaining herself.

I was asking why she had chosen to trust me with it at all.

Her eyes dropped to her lap.

For the first time, her calm faltered badly enough that the next words came uneven.

“Because you looked at me like you…” She stopped.

I kept still. Let her find it.

“Like you believed me when I told you what happened,” she finished, quieter now. “Not just the parts of it you were told by others.”

Something in my chest ached so sharply I almost reached across the space between us anyway.

“And because,” she added, forcing the words smoother than they wanted to be, "I want to try to trust you. Everyone in the peerage.”

I didn’t know what to say for a moment.

Kusari continued before I could figure out how to respond.

“I know that it probably isn’t the smart thing to do. But I think I should anyway.” Her voice was louder than before but still pained in a small way.

“I’ve been proven wrong for trying before, but I think I still need to. I want to try again, even if I’m wrong again.”

When I looked closer at her, Kusari’s composure was fraying in ways I doubted anyone unfamiliar with her would have noticed.

Her ears were lower now. Her tails had drawn tighter together.

Her breathing was even only because she was making it even.

She was calm and collected like normal.

She was holding herself together with both hands tightly grasped and forced composure.

“Kusari-chan,” I said softly.

She didn’t answer. Not in words.

I moved then, slowly, leaving my chair and crossing the small distance between us before sitting beside her on the sofa instead.

Not touching. Not yet. Just nearer.

She noticed. Of course she noticed.

Her shoulders tightened. Her tail shifted.

Then, after a moment, her posture eased by a fraction.

“You don’t have to keep speaking if it hurts,” I told her.

A humorless little breath escaped her. “That would be a poor point at which to stop.”

“It would be a humane point”

“Ironic for a Devil.”

I almost smiled despite everything.

“Kusari-chan.”

This time she looked at me immediately.

It was worse up close.

Beautiful, yes.

I had eyes. That had never been difficult to notice.

But right now what I saw was something far more painful than beauty.

I saw the terrible grace of someone who had learned to survive in a way that made trusting anyone a wrong choice. 

“You can trust us. I won’t let you be wrong again.” I said.

That finally broke something.

It would have been easier if she had just burst into tears.

Instead her mouth parted, then closed.

One of her hands twitched in her lap.

Her eyes shone suddenly, not with tears yet but with the effort of not allowing them.

Like it was instinct to stop any of it from showing. 

When she spoke, her voice was still controlled.

It was also very clearly failing.

“I want to believe that,” she said.

A pause.

“I think.”

Then, quieter, “I don’t know if I can do it again.”

A small and sad confession from one of my precious servants.

I wanted, in that instant, to find every person who had ever trained that sentence into her and show them what destruction really looked like.

Instead I said the only thing I could.

“Then we’ll learn to.”

Her head turned toward me very slightly.

“We?”

“Yes.”

The tears did not fall. But the expression she made then felt more intimate than tears might have been.

Not belief.

Not yet.

But something dangerously close to wanting to.

And that was enough to make my own throat tighten.

I let the silence sit there for a while. Let the room breathe around us again.

Let her gather herself in whatever way she needed.

Eventually, because I had to ask it before I lost my nerve, I turned back to the thing that had been haunting me since church.

Since our last talk

“Kusari-chan,” I said softly, “about Kokabiel.”

She went still again

I forced myself onward anyway.

“If something like that happened again… would you try to do the same thing?”

She didn’t answer.

I could feel how much of her had gone rigid beside me.

I kept my voice quiet. “Would you try to make us leave you behind again?”

Still nothing.

The quiet was answer enough, and my heart clenched.

I turned toward her fully now. “I don’t want you treating yourself that way.”

That got a reaction.

A small one. A flicker in her gaze. A movement in her ears.

So I continued, because if I stopped now, I might never say it.

“I don’t want you looking at a battle and deciding, before anyone else does, that you’re the one who should stay. I don’t want you speaking about your own life as if it’s the simplest piece to trade away. And I don’t want—”

My voice caught.

I took a breath and began again.

“I don’t want you thinking that because others treated you that way, I would allow it too.”

Kusari looked at me then.

Truly looked.

Her eyes were too steady now. Her face too calm. The contrast was unbearable.

And then, slowly, she smiled.

It was beautiful.

It was gentle.

I could see the pain she wanted to hide behind it.

“Rias-Buchou,” she said softly, “you don’t need to worry about that. Like I said before it would have been fine. I would have held Kokabiel back long enough for everyone to get to safety, and then I would join you.”

It was the same lie she had told me before.

It was made to comfort me.

She said it so I didn’t have to hear that she would choose herself to be the one left behind.

That she would do the same thing again if given the chance.

She smiled while saying it as if that smile could protect me from the truth underneath.

And because in that moment, with the first of the nights moon light on her hair and grief hidden inside her smile, she was so heartbreakingly beautiful that for one stunned, terrible second all I could do was stare.

END OF VOLUME 2

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