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For a plan so simple, it is amazing how wrong it goes.
“This isn’t where you’re supposed to be,” Zakura tells her irritably, which she expects. He is, as Obi puts it, married to the plan.
Shirayuki favors him with her sunniest smile, letting her eyes grow wide and wet as she stares up at him.
“It’s no use, my lady,” he tells her. “Your knight’s tried that as well. I’m quite immune.”
She screws up her mouth, swallowing against a knot of annoyance. “I’m one who designed them.”
“And the one who said a child could use them,” he reminded her. “Sir Obi explicitly stated that you were to stay back at the safe house.”
“Well –” Her gaze cuts to where the soldiers have lit the fuse. “It’s too late now.”
Zakura twists, seeing how his men have begun to scatter, and utters a word not fit for polite company. He seizes her arm, yanking her behind the barrier. “When we are done here, we are going to have a very long talk about how your sensitive feelings for –”
Never has Shirayuki been more glad of an explosion.
A jagged hole exists where once a set of doors did, wooden planks still hanging dejectedly on their hinges. Zaruka’s men pour into the warehouse; the ringing in her ears muffles his great speech, but she hears enough to know that he is calling for the man known as Senki to stand down.
There is no reason for her to believe that plan has gone awry at all until the smoke clears and she sees the body of Senki convulsing on the ground, Obi standing over him. There is a goblet in Obi’s hand that matches the one strewn next to Senki’s prone form.
“What?” The word falls into the heavy silence as loud as a thunder clap. Obi turns, shock etched into his features.
“Miss.” His eyes are wide, wild. Even from where she stands she can see a ring of white around them. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”
Her steps falter. “What do you–?”
The goblet he holds in his hand clatters to the floor, and a moment later his body follows, collapsing like his strings have been cut.
The shriek that pierces the air is inhuman, and its only when her throat burns that she realizes that it was her that made the noise, her that screamed his name as if it were torn from her.
She doesn’t remember moving to him, only the way his body arches and writhes while she is too far away to do anything, only the way his mouth makes terrible, choked off noises as his chest spasms, trying to suck in air it can’t breathe.
“What have you done?” Her words are ragged as they fall from her lips, frayed at the edges as she is. This is not the way she’s been trained to act in a medical emergency, but she cannot be bothered to care. She pulls his body to her, nearly on top of her as she kneels. “What have you done?”
Each breath he takes is a wheeze, tightening ever so slightly each time to a hoarse gasp, and her heart locks in fear with each exhale, wondering which one will be the rattle. He slaps at her hands weakly, trying to shove her away until he suddenly isn’t, until he reaches to pull her closer, pull her down to him. Her forehead rests against his, his eyes so close they are hardly more than a blur –
And then he closes them.
Her heart stutters, skips a beat, but his breath is still thin on her lips, still there. “You’re an idiot if you think I’m going to let you die,” she mutters, and that is when she notices the smell.
It’s musty, cloying, and – mousy? She hardly moves save to breathe in the thin strain of his breath. Definitely mousy.
She pulls away from him, his limbs too weak to resist her – that scares her most, that he does not struggle to hold onto her, that enough of him is gone that there’s no fight – and finds the cup. Beneath the metallic tang of pewter, she catches it again, strange and sickly. She dabs a beat of the liquid onto her finger, placing it in her mouth, and it’s – it’s hard to taste it under the wine, but it’s there, the faintly bitter taste of parsnips.
Her heart give a single, painful pound, and the cup falls from her boneless finger. “Hemlock.”
There is no antidote for hemlock. Only suffocation, agony, and death.
She needs to think, she needs to do something, but she is frozen, her mind unable to do much more than replay the last moments before Obi left.
Senki is my problem, he says, back when Zakura asked who would be the distraction. He wouldn’t be here if not for me.
If anything happens, he says, hand on the safe house door. Go to Master.
He turns back to her, one last time, and presses a hand to her cheek. Please take care of yourself, Miss.
She should have known. It is – it is easy to see, now that she makes herself look.
She presses a hand to his cheek now, thumb skimming along the ridge of cheekbone, his breath hardly more than a tight gasp. “Don’t leave me.”
It’s strange not to hear him answer. She wonders if she will live her entire life leaving space for when he would speak, a silence that should be filled.
What would he say now if he could?
No antidote? He would grin. That’s because you haven’t made one yet, Miss.
She’d laugh, if –
Wait.
“Most poisons destroy structures,” she murmurs, sifting through her satchel. “But Hemlock only disrupts the chemical pathway –” Similar to the way Kihal’s people poisoned their arrows.
Which means – “Cat’s claw.” She digs in truth now, her hand finally clasping on the small jar that hardly holds more than three or four of its strange thorns.
She works quickly, crushing it until she thinks the powder could slip down his throat without cutting him, then thinning it with water until its a thick reddish liquid.
“This is going to taste awful,” she tells him, but he’s beyond caring, hardly conscious. She has to massage his throat to even get him to swallow.
It’s when she sits back on her heels, ready to wait out the results, that he stops breathing entirely.
“Obi?” She presses two fingers to his neck, feeling nothing but a thready pulse that is fading with each beat. “No. Don’t do this.” She pushes him off her lap to the floor. “Obi!”
She needs to keep him breathing, keep his heart beating. Keep her heart beating.
She doesn’t even think twice, just tilts back his head, opening his mouth, and breathes into him.
“Don’t go,” she says when she pulls back, then move to thrust her hands down on his abdomen, in just the way Kazaha had show her once. “Don’t you dare leave me.”
She loses track of time; there is only her hands pressing just beneath his breast bone, broken by her lips sealing over his, forcing her breath into him. It feels like hours – like forever – but it must only be minutes that his heart has stopped beating, since no one else has moved.
Her mouth is on his when he coughs beneath her, sputtering against her lips, and she pulls back. All she can see are his eyes, wide and amber and shocked as he stares at her, and suddenly her mind fixes on how her lips just moved against his, how their faces are still so close, how his gaze has drifted down to her mouth, and –
Obi promptly rolls over and vomits.
She sighs, gently rubbing his back as the contents of his stomach empty onto the warehouse floor. “Well,” she says with a relieved laugh. “That’s one way to get the poison out.”
The muttering starts then, though she doesn’t think anything of it. Not until Shirayuki hears the words the man are passing between each other. Kiss of Life.
She grimaces. Of course that’s what it looks like, of course it is.
She counts her blessings that at least Obi isn’t awake to hear it. She’d never hear the end of it.
He can’t speak for over a day, at least not without pain, and though Shirayuki would love to ask him what exactly he was thinking when he decided to poison both himself and Senki,she doesn’t get the chance. By the time he is well enough to hold a prolonged conversation, Zen has arrived, Mitsuhide and Kiki in tow.
“You are not taking him out drinking,” she tells them, hands fisted on her hips. “He nearly died!”
“If I’m good enough to talk, I’m good enough to drink, Miss,” Obi tells her, voice still filled with gravel. He’s dressed as normal, with a grin tilting his lips, but she sees the stiffness in his movements, the tightness at the corners of his eyes, the way he clutches at his shoulder.
Zen sweeps his hand, so there. “See? He wants to.”
Her mouth pulls into a long line. “I’m not sure what that has to do with –”
A hand fall heavy on her shoulder, warm even though the fabric of her dress. “If you’re so concerned, Miss, you should come with us. For supervision.”
She sighs. “Fine. But I say when you’re done.”
He huffs out a laugh. shaking his head. “Aw, Miss…”
It takes two rounds for someone to get bold enough.
“How’d you save him?” Mitsuhide asks, his face lined with worry rather than curiosity.
She hesitates, weighs the technical words against lay speak, trying to formulate an answer.
“Miss kissed me,” Obi says with relish. “And it woke me right up.”
Jaws drop around the table, and heat blooms across her cheeks. “Who told you that?”
“Zakura’s men.” He rubs a finger around the rim of his glass, the corners of his mouth twitching. “They said you woke me with true love’s kiss.”
“I did not,” she denies vehemently, though something hot squirms within her at the thought. For that moment, when he finally breathed, when his lips had brushed over hers – an accident, she knows, but still, still. “It was a very technical medical procedure!”
“Yes, it felt very technical when your lips were on mine –”
“True Love’s Kiss?” Mitsuhide echoes, looking a little ill. “Like some sort of fairy tale?”
“Why, Obi,” Kiki drawls, arm slung over the back of her chair. “Were you rescued like some sort of princess?”
“Oh yes.” Obi eagerly seizes upon the opening, batting his eyelashes coquettishly. “Miss even let me ride on her horse. She was a very gentle prince –”
“This is – this is not what happened,” she assures her friends, sending Obi a quelling glare. “It wasn’t kissing.”
“Miss is right,” Obi says, and for a moment she is relieved.
She should know better.
“It was more like the meeting of two souls.” He leans over the table towards Mitsuhide, shielding his mouth with his hand as he loudly whispers, “There was tongue.”
She squeaks. “There was not.”
“We believe you, Shirayuki,” Mitsuhide says unconvincingly. “I’m sure you’d never use your tongue with this reprobate.”
Kiki adds a dubious sort of hum in solidarity.
Zen, for his part, says nothing at all.
It’s strange how easy it is.
We both want something different. There’s a question in that.
Yes. In this there’s not enough of one.
Word’s already reach Wistal by the time they arrive. Guards clap Obi on the back when they think she won’t notice. Some nobles give her speculative looks as she passes. Higata asks quite helpfully if she’d like some sylphium from the stockroom before she heads north. Not necessary, she snaps, and Higata winks. If you’re sure.
Kiss of life? Garrack asks archly. She gives Obi a long look. I’m sure it brought something back to life.
It’s almost worth it, for the way his skin deepens in hue.
The joke has grown thin when they reach Lyrias. For her, at least.
Obi never seems to tire of embellishing the particulars of their ‘kiss’. His additions grow more outrageous with each telling, and she understands on a base level that it’s actually…funny. He’s being purposefully ridiculous, trying to make people laugh at something that – that makes her breath catch when she thinks about it, that makes her heart pound fearfully in her chest, that makes her hands tremble. It can’t be any better for him.
But still, still.
She doesn’t want to think about – about this either. About his lips dragging over hers, about the slick slide of tongues, about his long fingers trailing down her back, his body beneath her, arching up into her hands, and –
It’s enough.
Yuzuri stares at her with wide eyes as Obi recounts the story, turning the moment they shared one breath into an extravaganza of teeth and tongues. Shirayuki squirms in her seat, uncomfortable with the way eyes linger on her as he speaks. It’s just their friends; hers from working under Shidan – but not, thankfully, including him – and his from the garrison, people she feels comfortable with, but –
“And what about you?” Yuzuri asks, knocking her from her stream of thought. “How was kissing Obi?”
The room goes silent, and she knows what she should do. She should say it never happened, that it was nothing more than her providing air his lungs could not.
“It was wet,” she says instead. “And kind of sloppy.”
She might as well have slapped him, from the look on his face. Her mouth pulls wide in a grin. “And I’m not sure if it’s supposed to feel like he’s devoring my face…”
The shoe is on the other foot now. Jirou flags her down while she’s walking the walls between the castle and the academy, asking her to repeat some of the choicer parts of her review. Aya and her posse of young apprentices break into furious whispers whenever Obi saunters into the pharmacy, giving him speculative – and unimpressed – looks.
“This has gone on long enough, Miss” he says one night, cornering her in the lab. “You’ve had your fun.”
“What fun?” Aya’s made a note that some of the stocks don’t match the inventory, and Shrayuki’s determined to straighten out the mistake before she leaves. He lets her push past him, stalking after her when she moves into the stockroom.
“Today one of the recruits mentioned that it was surprising I got all the knives into the target, considering my sloppy aim.” He leans against the drawers next to her, arms crossed over his shoulders. “And don’t pretend you don’t know anything about it.”
“What am I supposed to do about it?”
“Tell them I’m perfectly adequate kisser.” He hesitates. “No, an amazing kisser. That would be better.”
She barks out a laugh. “Obi, I’m not doing that.”
“What? Why not?” He reaches above her, pulling a drawer down her her inspection.
“In case you’ve forgotten, we’ve never actually kissed.” She fights back a blush as she says it. She’s an adult, she shouldn’t get so – so squirmy and bothered from just talking about kissing. Not with Obi. “I’m not going to lie to soothe your ego.”
She hands him back the drawer, and he’s silent, too silent.
“Then kiss me.”
She drops the papers in her hands, sending them scattering across the floor. “W-what?”
“Then just kiss me,” he takes a step toward her, his hands fisted at his side. “If that’s what’s keeping you from fixing this whole thing –”
“Or you could just tell them it’s not true,” she offers, bending down to pick up the mess she’s made. Her hands shake; she hopes he doesn’t notice.
“They’re not going to believe me. Not when you’ve agreed it happened, and said I was – that I was bad at it.” His mouth is rucked up in a petulant twist, and she can’t help but laugh, shaking her head as they leave the stockroom.
“This really matters to you, doesn’t it?”
He presses a hand to his chest, a smirk pulling at the corners of his mouth. “My reputation is at stake here, Miss.”
She lays down the papers at her bench, sighs. Beneath her skin, her heart beats triple time. It’s useless to try to calm it, not when she’s already made up her mind.
“Fine,” she sighs. “One kiss.”
He gapes. “What?”
“One kiss,” she repeats, trying to keep her voice even. “If you’re as good as you keep insinuating, that should be all it takes, right?”
He nods.
“All right.” She steels herself, as if bracing for a punch. “Impress me.”
Obi hesitates for a single moment before stepping up to her, closing the distance between them. He’s so much taller, in a way she’s never quite realized; she barely reaches his shoulders, and when he stands close like this she has to crane her neck up and back to meet his eyes. His hand comes to cup her face, fingers threading though her hair, and she’s about to ask him whether he means to do it or not when his mouth is suddenly pressed against hers.
She’s almost relieved to feel nothing. It’s just his mouth on her mouth, no inconvenient fireworks, no earth-shattering revelations, just – nice.
Then he sighs, breath skimming over her cheek, and tilts his head, and – oh.
Oh.
It’s so much more than nice.
His lips are so soft as they move against hers, tempting her to chase his mouth in the brief moments where they are not touching. Her hands fist in his coat, catching the smooth fur between her fingers, and he hums into her mouth, his fingers sliding against her scalp to pull her closer. Heat coils between her legs, at her core, and it’s embarrassing, mortifying, and –
Not enough. Not even close.
She hasn’t – hasn’t done more than this, but she wants to; oh how she wants to when his hand palms her hip, when his thumb drags over the bone of her pelvis. She’s not sure how to make it more, but she tries, darting her tongue out to sweep over the bottom curve of his lips, hoping he understands –
The noise he makes is incredible, leaves her weak in the knees and clutching to him for support, and then he is on her, devouring, his hands raking through her hair – it will be a mess when they’re done, but she’s not sure any other part of her will be much better –
“Ah, Miss,” he groans against her mouth, and he’s – he’s never said it like that before, like she’s killing him in the best of ways – and finally her poor, abused knees give out beneath her.
He catches her, he always does, and then he’s lifting her, higher and higher until the backs of her thighs settle against the coarse grain of her desk, and –
It is all she can do to hold on, his mouth dragging down the column of her neck, sucking wetly at her skin whenever she makes a noise louder than a gasp. He hands are tugging at her, thrusting her against his hips in a sloppy rhythm, but it’s enough for her, more than enough, making her arch into him, exposing more of her throat above her collar and –
Someone – someone else – heaves a sigh. They burst apart, but it is too late, Ryu is already shaking his head, muttering, “Is no place safe?” He shoves some texts into his satchel. “First Suzu and Yuzuri in the stock room, now this.”
He glances up, noticing that they have – have ceased their activities, and are now staring anywhere but at him. “I mean, I’m glad this worked out.” He rubs his neck, inching for the door. “Have a nice night.”
Shirayuki covers her face, willing the floor to swallow her whole.
“Wait,” Obi says sharply. “Suzu and Yuzuri?”
“I still don’t understand how this is going to help,” Shirayuki murmurs, her breath coming out in cold clouds. Obi keeps a steady pace beside her, his eyes scanning the walls above them. “I can’t just go around and tell everyone that you – that we –” She doesn’t know how to obliquely infer that they devoured each other on her own bench, so she doesn’t try.
He squeezes her hand where it grasps his. “Don’t worry, Miss. I have it covered.”
She means to ask how, but then she sees Jirou on top of the wall, waving down at them, calling out something to Obi –
Her knight drags her close, mouth slotting over hers, and proceeds to thoroughly disrupt all of her thoughts for a full minute.
He releases her with a pop, and it’s not good for her health, having his grin this close. “See?” he says, as she suddenly realizes there is whooping and cheering from the top of the walls. “Problem solved.”