Ch.4
She was already at the fountain when I got there, standing with her hands behind her back, wearing a sundress with a ribbon at the collar that she'd definitely chosen for maximum innocent-schoolgirl effect. White. Light blue accents. Her long black hair was loose instead of tied up, and she'd done her makeup so subtly that a teenage boy wouldn't notice it at all. I noticed.
"Issei-kun!" She waved with both hands, bouncing on her heels. "Good morning!"
"Morning, Yuuma." I walked up and stopped close enough that she had to tilt her chin up to look at me. She was shorter than I'd registered on the bridge. The violet eyes caught the morning light and looked almost purple. "You look nice."
The blush came on cue. Rehearsed, but convincing. "Th-thank you! You look... um, you look good too."
I was wearing jeans and a button-down shirt that I'd found in the back of Issei's closet, still creased from the packaging. The previous owner of this body had apparently bought it and never worn it, which tracked. I'd rolled the sleeves to my elbows because the morning was already warm.
"So." I put my hands in my pockets. "Have you been to the arcade on Third Street?"
Her eyes lit up. Scripted enthusiasm. "No! I haven't explored much since moving here."
"Let's start there."
The arcade was a ten-minute walk from the fountain park, through the shopping district, past a row of clothing boutiques and a curry place that smelled good enough to make me consider lunch plans early. Yuuma walked half a step behind me, which was part of the act, staying in the demure-girlfriend lane. I slowed down until we were side by side.
"You don't have to walk behind me," I said.
"Oh- I wasn't-"
"You were." I looked at her sideways. "Walk with me. It's a date, not a parade."
Her mouth opened, closed. Then she laughed. Short, surprised, and she cut it off fast, but it was real. Her eyes went to the ground for a second and when she looked back up, the Yuuma mask was in place again, but the edges were softer.
The arcade was loud and dark inside, all flashing screens and electronic music and the clatter of tokens in metal trays. A group of middle-school kids were hogging the fighting game cabinets. An old man was playing pachinko in the corner with the intensity of a surgeon. The air smelled like heated plastic and cheap popcorn.
I steered us toward the crane games. There was one in the back corner with a row of stuffed animals on the prize shelf, the kind with oversized heads and stitched-on smiles.
"Which one?" I asked.
Yuuma looked at the machine, then at me. "You don't have to-"
"I know I don't have to. Which one?"
She pointed at a cat. White, round, with little pink ear-tufts. "That one's cute."
I put in the coins. The claw descended on the first try and closed on empty air about two centimeters from the cat's head. Standard crane game rigging. The machine wanted your money, not your skill. But I'd spent a lot of evenings in arcades in my previous life, and crane games all cheat in the same direction. You adjust for the drift on the second try.
The claw came down. Closed on the cat's body. Lifted it clear of the pile and dropped it into the chute with a thunk.
Yuuma's mouth fell open. Her eyes went wide, genuinely wide, and she stared at the cat sitting in the retrieval slot like it had personally offended her expectations, and then she laughed. Loud, bright, both hands coming up to cover her mouth because the sound had come out before she could stop it. Her shoulders were shaking. Her eyes were squeezed shut.
Fallen Angels don't giggle at human boys winning them stuffed cats. But Raynare just had.
I pulled the cat out and handed it to her. She took it with both hands and held it against her chest. Her fingers pressed into the plush. Her chin dipped down toward the cat's head. Then the act reassembled itself, piece by piece, and she was Yuuma again, blushing and grateful and sweet.
"Thank you, Issei-kun! You're amazing!"
"It's just a crane game."
"Nobody ever wins those on the second try!"
"I've had practice."
We left the arcade and walked through the shopping district. Past a stall selling accessories, jewelry, phone cases, leather goods. Yuuma's eyes snagged on a brown leather wristband displayed at the front of the table, simple and unisex, the kind of thing a couple might share.
I knew this wristband. In canon, Yuuma asked Issei to buy it for her. It was the token, the keepsake, the thing she'd later use to track him and manipulate his emotions. Rias destroyed it at the end of the arc as proof that the entire relationship had been a tool.
Yuuma was looking at it. She hadn't asked yet. She was working up to it, composing the right version of shy.
I bought it before she could ask. Picked it up, paid the vendor, and held it out to her.
"Here."
She blinked. Her hand came up automatically, and then stalled. The script said she was supposed to ask, to perform the shy-girlfriend request, to be the one who initiated the keepsake. I'd skipped her line. For a second her mouth worked without sound, and I watched the confusion crawl behind her eyes before the act filled in the gaps.
"For me? Really?"
"It caught your eye. Why not?"
She took the wristband. Turned it over in her fingers. Slipped it on. And for just a moment, the look she gave me was measuring instead of grateful. Calculating. Who is this boy who reads me this well?
Then the blush came back and she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and everything was normal again. We kept walking.
Lunch was crepes from a street cart near the park entrance. The vendor was an older guy with a bandana and forearms like he'd been flipping crepes since before I was born in either life. I got chocolate and banana. She got strawberry and cream. We sat on a bench in the shade while the midday foot traffic moved past us, families and couples and a guy on a unicycle who was either practicing or lost.
Yuuma took a bite and cream smeared across her lower lip. She didn't notice. She was talking about her school, the fake one, inventing details with the casual fluency of someone who'd memorized a cover story. Her favorite teacher. The library. The school festival last year that she'd helped organize. All of it fiction, delivered with the warmth of real memory.
I tore off a piece of my crepe and held it out. "Try this. The chocolate's better than it looks."
She stopped mid-sentence. Looked at the piece in my fingers. Looked at me. Leaned forward and took it with her teeth before the act caught up with reality, and then her jaw slowed as she chewed and she realized what she'd just done. A guy she was pretending to date had just fed her, and she'd accepted it like it was natural. Her eyes dropped to her crepe. Her ears were going pink.
Then I reached over and wiped the cream off her lip with my thumb.
She stopped talking. Her eyes went wide. My thumb was still touching the corner of her mouth, and she was staring at me, and for a half-second I was looking at Raynare. The real one. Violet eyes with no softness in them at all, frozen because a human had touched her face and she hadn't pulled away.
Then she blinked. Swallowed. Looked down at her crepe.
"Th-there was cream on your lip," I said, like it was the most natural thing in the world. I wiped my thumb on my jeans. "Sorry."
"It's okay," she said, and her voice was quieter than the Yuuma voice. Lower. She went back to her crepe. Her ears were pink.
We finished lunch and walked into the park. The afternoon was warm, the trees filtering the sunlight into shifting patches on the gravel paths. There were families on the grass, kids chasing a dog that was too fast for them, an older couple sharing a bench and not talking, just sitting.
Yuuma talked less as we walked. The narration about her fake school had dried up after the cream incident, and she was walking closer to me than she had been all morning. Our shoulders almost touched with every other step.
Then she hooked her arm through mine.
She did it casually, slipping her hand around my elbow like it was part of the script. But it wasn't. I'd watched every episode. The arm-hook wasn't in any version of this date I'd seen. Yuuma didn't touch Issei like this. The date in canon was sentimental distance, kept just far enough apart that the betrayal would sting. This was close. Her fingers were curled around my forearm, and her body heat came through my sleeve, steady and warm.
She held on for maybe twenty steps. I let her. A kid ran past us chasing a ball into the bushes, and a woman called after him in a voice that was half concern and half exasperation. Normal park noise. Normal Saturday afternoon. And Raynare's arm was through mine like we'd done this before, like this was a date that had a future.
Then her fingers loosened. She pulled back, slow, deliberate. Let go and put a half-step of space between us.
She didn't say anything about it. Neither did I.
The sun was past its peak. The shadows were getting longer, the light turning from white to amber. I tracked it without looking up. I'd been tracking it all day, every hour, every shift in the angle. The clock was running. It had been running since I woke up this morning, and now the hands were reaching the number I'd been waiting for.
We circled back toward the fountain. Yuuma's pace changed. Slower. More deliberate. Her spine had straightened, and the bounce was gone from her step. The transformation was subtle enough that a normal date wouldn't have caught it. The sweet schoolgirl act was still there on the surface, smiling, eye contact, all of it. But underneath it she was hardening. Getting ready.
The fountain was ahead of us, water catching the late-afternoon light. The park was emptying out as families packed up. The light on the cobblestones was going gold, and the shadows of the trees were long and dark.
Ddraig stirred. She'd been silent all day. Through the arcade, the crepes, the arm-hook, all of it. She'd been watching through me, feeling what I felt, and she hadn't said a word. But now the presence in my skull shifted, focused, and her voice came low and steady.
"Partner. It's time."
I knew.
We reached the fountain. Yuuma stopped. She turned to face me, and the sunset was behind her, catching her hair, lighting the edges gold and red. She was smiling. The same radiant, completely false smile from the bridge.
I looked at her. The smile that was about to drop. The violet eyes gone flat and hungry while the rest of her face kept performing. The stuffed cat tucked under her arm, the leather wristband on her wrist, the cream that was gone from her lip but that I could still feel on my thumb.
"Issei-kun," she said. "I had a really wonderful time today."
"Yeah," I said. "Me too."
The light went red. The fountain splashed behind her. The park was empty.
And in my left arm, underneath the skin, a faint green pulse answered the sunset.