Ch.12
Akeno had patched my shoulder and my hip and rubbed something into my forearm that smelled like eucalyptus and stopped the tremor, and by the time Asia opened her eyes I'd been sitting on the ORC clubroom sofa watching her breathe for most of the night.
Morning light was coming through the heavy curtains in pale bars that caught the dust in the air. My left arm was wrapped from wrist to elbow in white gauze, tight enough to limit movement, loose enough to let the skin breathe. The gauntlet had retracted sometime before dawn. Ddraig had gone quiet in my head, her presence dimmed to a low warmth at the back of my skull, and I wasn't sure if she was resting or just giving me space.
Asia stirred on the other sofa. She turned her head. Her blonde hair was loose and messy across the cushion, and the borrowed shirt she was wearing, one of Koneko's, was small enough to actually fit her. Her green eyes opened and found the ceiling. Then found me. Then went very wide.
She sat up fast and immediately grabbed her own head with both hands.
"Easy." I didn't get up. Sudden movement from me would just scare her. "You're safe. You're at the ORC clubroom. The girls from the school. Remember?"
Her mouth opened. Her hands came down from her head and she looked at them, front and back, and then she looked at me again and her eyes went to my arm in its gauze and to the dark stain on my shirt where the shoulder wound had bled through the first bandage before Akeno had re-wrapped it.
"Issei-san." Her voice was barely there. "You came for me."
"Yeah."
"They were going to-" She stopped. Her chin dropped. Her shoulders pulled together and her hands closed into small fists in her lap, and when she looked up her eyes were full and her lower lip was shaking.
"They didn't," I said. "You're fine. Twilight Healing is yours. Nobody took it."
She looked at her hands again. The faintest green pulse ran across her middle fingers and she made a sound that was half laugh, half sob, and pressed her hands against her chest. She was holding her own Sacred Gear like a child holding a toy she'd been told was lost.
Then she was off the sofa and across the room and her arms were around my chest and her face was against my shirt and she was crying. Full, body-shaking crying that came from her whole chest, nothing held back. Her hands gripped the back of my shirt, small fists pulling the fabric tight, and her tears soaked through to my skin in seconds.
I put my good arm around her. My right hand came up to the back of her head and rested there, fingers in her hair, and I held her while she cried because there was nothing else to do and nowhere I'd rather be doing it.
"Thank you," she said into my shirt. "Thank you for saving me. Thank you. Thank you."
"You're welcome."
She cried for a while. I didn't time it. The dust drifted through the light from the curtains. Somewhere in the building a door opened and closed. My shoulder ached where her head pressed against the bandage and I didn't move.
When she pulled back, her eyes were red and puffy and her nose was running and she wiped it with the back of her hand with absolutely no self-consciousness.
"What happens now?" she asked. Her voice was steadier than I expected.
"You don't have anywhere to go."
Her face crumpled. Just for a second, the reality of it landing on her all at once. The church was gone. The convent had thrown her out. She had nothing in Italy to go back to, and she was a seventeen-year-old girl in a foreign country with no money and no one, carrying a Sacred Gear that made her a target for anyone who knew what it was.
"You're staying with me," I said.
She blinked. "What?"
"I have a guest room. My parents will love you. You'll start school at Kuoh in my class. It's already being arranged."
This was partially a lie. It wasn't arranged yet. But it would be, because Rias owed me cooperation and I knew exactly how Devil cover stories worked from the anime. Memory adjustment, paper trails, the whole package. The supernatural world had been hiding girls in human households for centuries.
Asia stared at me. Her mouth was open and her green eyes were still wet and she looked like a person who had been handed a gift she didn't know how to carry.
"I can't- you can't just-"
"I can. I am." I squeezed her shoulder once and let go. "We'll figure out the details."
The door to the clubroom opened.
Rias walked in carrying two cups of tea and an expression that said she'd been awake as long as I had and had used the time to think about things she was going to bring up whether I wanted her to or not. She was wearing the school uniform, hair pinned back, looking like a student council president who happened to command the Power of Destruction.
"The girl is awake," she said. She set one cup of tea in front of me and kept the other. "Good."
"Rias, this is Asia Argento. Asia, this is Rias Gremory. She's the one who helped save you last night."
Asia's eyes went wide again and she dipped into a small seated bow, both hands in her lap. "Thank you so much for saving me, Gremory-san. I am in your debt."
"You're welcome." Rias's voice was warm. She was genuinely kind when she wasn't negotiating or trying to recruit me. "How are you feeling?"
"My head hurts. But my hands work." Asia held them up and the green glow of Twilight Healing flickered between her fingers. She smiled and it was the first real smile I'd seen from her since the burger shop. "See? Everything is okay."
Rias looked at the green glow and I watched her calculate. A Sacred Gear wielder. Healing type. Unaffiliated. Sitting in her clubroom, in her territory, bonded to a Longinus wielder who refused to join her peerage. Her blue-green eyes moved from Asia's glowing hands to me.
I gave her nothing. She moved on.
"We need to discuss the Fallen Angels," she said. She sat on the arm of the opposite sofa, one leg crossed over the other, the tea cupped in both hands. Behind her, Akeno appeared in the doorway, drying her hands on a towel. Koneko was somewhere in the building. Chips.
"They're in Akeno's barrier," Rias continued. "It will hold for a few days. After that, I'll need to either strengthen it or transfer them to Gremory custody."
"They're staying in Kuoh."
"They tried to kill you, Hyoudou-kun."
"We covered this last night."
"We covered that you wanted them alive. We did not cover logistics." She sipped her tea. "Three Fallen Angels in a temporary barrier on Gremory-Sitri territory. Akeno's barriers are excellent, but she can't maintain one indefinitely while also attending school, training, and managing her duties as my Queen. They need a permanent containment solution."
"I'll figure it out."
"Will you."
"Yeah."
She looked at me over the rim of her cup. The steam curled between us. Akeno, in the doorway, had stopped pretending to dry her hands and was just watching.
"You're collecting responsibilities the way other boys collect trading cards," Rias said. "A Sacred Gear holder who needs housing. Three Fallen Angel prisoners who need containment. An alliance with a Devil peerage that you refuse to formally join. And a wounded arm that my Queen spent two hours healing."
"Your point?"
"My point is that at some stage, the pile becomes too large for one human boy to manage alone."
"I'll let you know when I reach that stage."
Her mouth pressed together. Her eyes narrowed. Then the corner of her lips twitched upward and she hid it behind her teacup. She was trying to be frustrated with me and it wasn't working.
"The Fallen Angels stay in Kuoh," she said. "Under your responsibility. Akeno will transition the barrier into a semi-permanent seal on a location of your choosing. But Hyoudou-kun." She lowered the cup. Her voice dropped. "If any one of them raises a light spear on my territory, the consequences fall on you before they fall on them. Are we clear?"
"Crystal."
"Ara ara." Akeno's voice came from the doorway, light and musical. "You two argue like a married couple."
Rias's ears went red. She stood, smoothed her skirt with one hand, and walked out of the room without responding. The crimson hair swung behind her and the door shut hard.
Akeno smiled at me. "She likes you."
"I know."
"Be careful with that." The smile didn't change but her eyes did. Older, more careful. "She's not as sturdy as she pretends."
Then Akeno followed Rias out, and it was just me and Asia in the clubroom, the dust floating through the morning light.
I looked at Asia. She was watching the door where Rias had left with an expression that mixed confusion with fascination.
"Is she your girlfriend?" Asia asked.
"No."
"She seems like she wants to be."
I picked up my tea. "Let's go home."
Getting to the house took thirty minutes on foot. I could have asked for a ride via magic circle, but Asia was human and the walk was good for her. She needed normal. Streets and traffic lights and a guy on a bicycle who ran over a puddle and splashed his own shoes and swore about it. She watched everything with the wide-eyed attention of someone who hadn't been outside without an escort in weeks.
My parents were already primed. Rias had sent Akeno ahead with the cover story, and whatever Devil memory magic they'd used was seamless. By the time I walked through the door with a blonde Italian girl, my mom was already setting an extra place at the table and my dad was asking whether she preferred green tea or barley tea. Asia, who had never been in a Japanese family home in her life, bowed so deep she almost hit her head on the entryway shelf and said "Please take care of me" in textbook Japanese with an Italian lilt that made my mom audibly coo.
The guest room was upstairs, across the hall from mine. Small, clean, with a futon my parents had pulled from the closet that still smelled faintly of fabric softener. Asia stood in the doorway and looked at the room and touched the doorframe with her fingertips and didn't say anything for a while.
"It's not much," I said.
"It's mine?" Her voice was so small.
"It's yours."
She touched the futon. Ran her hand across the pillow. Sat down on the edge and folded her hands in her lap and looked up at me with green eyes that were about to fill again, and then she pressed her lips together hard and breathed through it and didn't cry.
"Thank you, Issei-san."
I left her to settle in. My mom brought up fresh towels and a set of pajamas she'd dug out of a drawer somewhere. I went to my room and sat on my bed and stared at the wall for a while. The shoulder wound ached. The hip was a dull throb. My left arm felt hollow inside the gauze, empty where the gauntlet had been, and the muscles twitched when I tried to make a fist.
The bathroom door opened across the hall. Footsteps. Then a knock on my doorframe, light, tentative.
"Issei-san? I wanted to say goodnight."
I turned my head.
Asia was standing in the hallway in the borrowed pajamas, which turned out to be one of my old t-shirts. It hung to her thighs. The collar was too wide, slipping off one shoulder, and the fabric was thin enough that the hallway light behind her showed the outline of her body through it. Her blonde hair was damp from the bath and she was barefoot on the hardwood, toes curled against the cold floor, and she had no idea what she looked like.
I knew what she looked like.
I looked away. Then I looked back because my eyes did what they wanted and what they wanted was to trace the line of her bare shoulder and the curve where the shirt hem hit her thigh and the damp hair stuck to her collarbone.
"Goodnight, Asia."
She smiled. Warm and sleepy and completely unaware. "Goodnight."
She padded back across the hall. The guest room door closed. I sat on my bed and breathed out through my nose and thought about cold water and combat drills and Freed Sellzen's face when I'd headbutted him.
It helped. A little.
"You are aware, partner," Ddraig said, her voice rising from the back of my skull like a coal bed being stirred, "that you have a nun living across the hall from you."
"Yeah."
"A nun with a Sacred Gear. Who you rescued from a ritual altar. Who is wearing your clothing."
"I'm aware."
"You also have three Fallen Angels in custody. An heiress of one of the seventy-two Devil clans who wants to make you her servant and is also visibly attracted to you. A Queen who can incinerate a building and finds you amusing. And a Rook who has not yet decided whether you are trustworthy but watches you more than she watches anyone else."
"Your point?"
"My point is that you are smiling."
I was. I hadn't noticed.
"Best isekai ever," I said.
The silence that followed was different from Ddraig's usual silences. Her usual quiet was watchful, the focused stillness of a predator resting between hunts. This one had texture. A vibration in my chest that wasn't the Sacred Gear and wasn't my heart.
Ddraig was laughing.
Low and rolling, more felt than heard, a rumble that moved through my ribs and settled behind my sternum. The laugh lived in the connection between us, traveling through the mental link as warmth that spread up through my arm and into my chest. It lasted a couple of seconds. Then it faded, and the link went quiet, and her presence settled back into its watchful warmth.
She had never done that before. I was sure of it.
I lay back on my bed. The ceiling was white. A water stain near the light fixture looked vaguely like a dog if I squinted. Asia was in the next room. Three Fallen Angels were in a barrier across town. Rias Gremory was probably lying awake somewhere, staring at her own ceiling, thinking about a human boy who kept doing things she didn't expect. And Ddraig, the Red Dragon Emperor, the Welsh Dragon, the sealed god-killer who lived in my left arm, had just laughed at my joke.
This was only the beginning.
I closed my eyes.