Is it Wrong to Have a Harem in DxD

I left the shrine before the sun was fully up. Akeno was still asleep on the tatami, her Fallen Angel wing folded over the spot where I'd been lying, her hair spread across the floor in a black fan. I'd covered her with a blanket from the closet and left the shrine door unlocked because locking it would have woken her and she needed the sleep more than I needed to pretend I hadn't been there all night.

The walk home was cold. December morning, frost on the hedges, my breath showing in the air. I was wearing yesterday's uniform and it smelled like incense and ozone and sex and no amount of December air was going to fix that. My shirt had scratches on the inside from her nails and a small scorch mark near the collar where lightning had arced during round one. A jogger passed me going the other direction, a woman in her forties with a small brown dog on a leash, and she gave me the look that adults give teenagers walking home at six in the morning in yesterday's clothes. I didn't have the energy to be embarrassed.

The Hyoudou residence was quiet. I let myself in through the front door and took my shoes off in the genkan and the house smelled like rice and miso soup and something was sizzling in the kitchen.

Asia was at the stove. She was wearing an apron over her school uniform and she had a spatula in one hand and she turned when I came in and her face lit up.

"Issei-san! Good morning! I made tamagoyaki. Issei-san's mother showed me yesterday." She held up the spatula. The egg was slightly burned on one edge. She was proud of it anyway.

"Looks great, Asia."

"Your mother and father left early. Your father had a meeting and your mother said-" She paused. Looked at me. Looked at my rumpled uniform and the wrinkles and the fact that I was coming in through the front door at six AM. Her green eyes went wide and her mouth opened and the question was right there and then she swallowed it. "She said to eat breakfast."

"Thanks."

I turned the corner into the dining room.

Rias was sitting at the table.

She was wearing one of my t-shirts and shorts she kept in the guest room and her crimson hair was loose and unbrushed and she had a cup of tea in both hands and she looked at me over the rim.

She'd been sleeping over. Twice in the past week, she'd let herself in through the window after my parents went to bed, and Asia had started setting a third place at breakfast without being asked. The Hyoudou household was adjusting to the supernatural with the quiet resilience of people who'd been hit with Devil memory magic and now thought the exchange student and the upperclassman were both completely normal.

Rias looked at me.

She inhaled.

Her nostrils flared once. Her blue-green eyes, still soft with sleep, sharpened. She set the tea down. Slowly. Her fingers didn't leave the cup.

She could smell it. The incense. The ozone from the lightning. Akeno's scent underneath all of it, warm and floral and mixed with mine. I hadn't showered. I'd walked straight from the shrine to the front door and the evidence was on my skin and in my hair and in the shirt I was wearing.

Rias's fingers tightened on the cup. The ceramic creaked. A hairline crack ran from her thumb to the rim and tea seeped through it and ran down the side of the cup onto the table in a thin brown line.

She didn't look at the crack. She looked at me.

"Good morning," she said. Her voice was level. The noble register.

"Morning."

Asia came in with the tamagoyaki and a bowl of rice. She set them on the table and looked at me and looked at Rias and the cracked teacup and the tea dripping onto the table and her mouth opened and closed and she sat down. She folded her hands for a prayer that would give her a headache because she was a Devil now, and she closed her eyes and her lips moved.

We ate. Rias didn't speak. Asia made small comments about the tamagoyaki recipe and how the eggs at the Japanese market were different from Italian eggs and had I noticed and did I think she should try adding dashi next time. I answered. Rias ate her rice. Her jaw was tight and her movements were precise and the cracked teacup sat at her elbow leaking steadily onto the table and neither of us acknowledged it.

The walk to school was worse.

Rias walked beside me, bag in hand, stride even, posture straight. Asia walked slightly behind us, humming a hymn under her breath that trailed off when it gave her a headache and then started again because she couldn't help herself. Rias didn't speak or touch me or look at me. The gap between us was about two feet and I let her have the silence because pushing would have been worse.

At the school gate, she turned left toward the main building without a word. Her crimson hair swung with the turn. She didn't look back.

Asia watched her go. Then she looked at me with green eyes that were worried and confused and more perceptive than most people gave her credit for.

"Did I burn the eggs?"

"The eggs were perfect, Asia."

She went to class. I went to class. The morning crawled.

The ORC clubroom at lunch was empty. Kiba was at practice. Koneko was in class. Asia was eating with girls from her year who'd adopted her because she was foreign and pretty and slightly helpless, which in a Japanese high school was an irresistible combination.

Rias was sitting behind the desk. The curtains were drawn. The candles were lit. Her hands were folded in front of her and she was sitting the way Sona sat when she was chairing a meeting, back straight, chin level, every inch of the Gremory heiress locked into place.

"Sit down," she said.

I closed the door. Didn't sit.

"You were with Akeno."

Her blue-green eyes were flat and her mouth was a line and her crimson hair was pulled back in a clip she didn't usually wear and the effect was severe and cold.

"Yes."

Silence. Her jaw flexed once.

"All night."

"Yes."

Another silence. Longer. She unclenched her hands and placed them flat on the desk. The tendons in her wrists stood out.

"I see."

"Rias."

"I see," she said again, and the second time it was quieter. She wasn't angry. She was hurt. She'd woken up in my house wearing my shirt and I'd been at another woman's shrine and she'd thought she was the only one.

I crossed the room. She didn't move. I came around the desk and she tracked me with her eyes but she didn't turn in the chair and when I reached her I put my hand under her chin and tilted her face up. Her jaw was set. Her eyes were bright and hard and the blue-green was more green than blue right now and there were no tears because Rias Gremory didn't cry over a boy but her lower lip was pressed between her teeth.

"You are not replaceable," I said. "Nobody is. That's the point."

She searched my face. Her eyes moved across mine, reading.

I didn't give her an excuse. I didn't break eye contact. I let her look.

The composure cracked. Her chin trembled once against my fingers. Her eyes went wet. She breathed in, shaky, and her hands came up from the desk and grabbed my shirt at the chest, both fists, bunching the fabric.

She kissed me.

Hard. Her mouth hit mine and her fists pulled me down to her and her whole body pressed up from the chair against mine. Her hand went to the back of my neck and gripped and her mouth was open and aggressive and her tongue pushed against mine and she bit my lower lip, hard enough to hurt, hard enough that I tasted copper, and the bite was a claim. Her body was warm against mine and her breasts pressed against my chest and her hips ground forward once, a single roll against me, possessive, deliberate.

She pulled back. Her lip was red and her eyes were wet and her hands were still fisted in my shirt and her breathing was fast.

"If this is what you are," she said. Her voice was rough. "If there will be others." She swallowed. "Then I'll be first. Always."

I looked at her. The heiress. The first girl. The one who'd given me her body on a desk in this room and on a couch in this room and who wore my shirts and set my schedule and whose Power of Destruction had scorched the furniture I was leaning against.

"Always," I said.

She exhaled. Her hands loosened on my shirt. She smoothed the fabric where she'd bunched it, sat back in the chair, and picked up a pen. She pulled a report toward her.

Her ears were red. That part hadn't fixed itself yet.

The door opened.

Akeno walked in.

She was carrying a tray with the tea set, the same one she brought every afternoon, and her ponytail was back in place with the orange ribbon and her uniform was immaculate and her violet eyes were warm and her smile was composed and she looked exactly like the graceful Queen of Rias Gremory's peerage and nothing like the woman who'd screamed my name at a shrine ceiling while lightning arced across the beams.

Rias looked up from the report.

Akeno stopped in the doorway.

They looked at each other. Rias in the chair, Akeno in the door. Blue-green met violet. The silence had weight and edges and went on long enough that I counted my own heartbeats. Five of them. Each one loud.

Then Akeno smiled. Smaller than her public one, aimed at Rias specifically.

Rias sighed. It came out of her like she'd been holding it since breakfast.

"Tea, Akeno."

"Of course, Buchou."

Akeno crossed the room and set the tray on the side table and began pouring. The ritual of it, the familiar sounds, the clink of porcelain and the pour of water and the faint smell of green tea filling the room. Rias went back to her report. Akeno brought her a cup and set it at her elbow and their fingers didn't touch but the proximity was close enough that both of them knew it.

Akeno poured a second cup and brought it to me. She handed it over and her violet eyes held mine for a beat and the corner of her mouth turned up, barely, just for me, and then she turned and went to the kitchenette.

Normal. As if the world hadn't rearranged itself over breakfast and a cracked teacup and a bite that tasted like copper.

The door opened again. Koneko walked in with a bag of rice crackers and a juice box. She sat on the couch. She opened the crackers. She ate one, looking at nothing in particular, her gold eyes flat and her expression blank.

She turned to the next page of the book she'd brought with her. A light novel. The cover had a guy surrounded by girls in combat outfits.

"Loud," she said.

She ate another cracker. Nobody asked what she meant. Akeno's hand paused on the teapot for a half-second. Rias's pen stopped moving. The moment held, then released, and the afternoon continued.

Outside, the December sun was cutting through the clouds and hitting the ORC windows at an angle that turned Rias's hair into fire. Akeno was pouring tea. Koneko was eating crackers. Asia would arrive in twenty minutes and set her books on the table and ask if anyone wanted snacks and the answer would be yes because the answer was always yes.

The harem was real. Two girls who knew. A nun who was starting to figure it out. A cat who'd figured it out first.

I drank the tea. It was good. Akeno's tea was always good.