Both fighters pulled apart.
"Evelyn...!" Claude growled the name at the woman standing before him.
He was the first to sheathe.
"Why. Why do you have to get involved, Evelyn!"
Evelyn lifted her chin, meeting his eyes just barely.
"Because anyone who would turn a blade toward Her Majesty—"
"I'm helping Flaure."
Aim's eyes widened a fraction, then narrowed as he looked closer.
"So it's Flaure now, is it. You disrespectful—"
"Evelyn, we ended a long time ago, damn it!"
Evelyn stomped forward, her blade coming free of its sheath with every intention of finding his throat — and Claude turned it aside without much difficulty at all, the sheer speed of him making the parry look almost bored.
Aim, still on the floor with Isolde's weight against his back, watched the exchange and understood exactly one thing from it: the woman was fast. Faster than anything he'd trained beside in the Academy, faster than the Redcoats he'd run from.
And the man had swatted her aside like a branch across a doorway.
She's holding her own on purpose, Aim thought, distantly, the investigator part of him still working even now. No. She's holding her ground. There's a difference, and she knows which one this is.
"The problem IS YOU. You dare to challenge and disobey Her Majesty's order? And even point your sword toward her?!"
Claude's eyebrow twitched. His expression soured all the way through.
"Stay out of it. Lady Flaure is mine to protect—"
"Ridiculous. A human, protecting a god! If Lady Flaure wishes to go with them, that is Lady Flaure's right!"
"Just listen to me!" Claude caught the tip of Evelyn's blade and tried to wrench it away from her in one fast motion. Evelyn was not slow enough to let him.
Evelyn stepped back once. Claude stepped back once.
"I'm listening," Evelyn said, and slid the god-forged katana back into its sheath.
"..."
"Lady Flaure... there might be two of her."
Evelyn's eyebrow rose.
"What kind of nonsense is that? There is only one Lady Flaure, and she is the finest there is!"
"I'm only saying it. Just listen!"
Both of them went quiet for a moment.
"That Lady Flaure — that one, the one who left — might not be the strong one."
"OH SO NOW YOU SAYING SHE IS A FRAUD, A PUPEPT?!" Evelyn's voice cracked out of her, teeth gritted, fists locked white.
"Lady Flaure... Lady Flaure has done so much. How can you say that — because you're a Veilnoir?! You came into this world with the right hand's seat already waiting for you!"
"You never had to try the way I did. You never tried like I did. You were never some dirt-poor child from nowhere who clawed and clawed and only got a life at all because Lady Flaure reached down and turned it over! You think it's funny, do you, to stand there and say things like this to me — to the woman you used to be with — when you know exactly how capable she is, exactly how much she's done for peoples, and you still stand there belittling her to my face!"
"Lady Flaure could never, ever be a fraud."
Claude answered with nothing but silence, and a breath let out through his nose.
Sigh.
He looked down at the woman standing a good head shorter than him.
"So what are you doing here."
"Carrying an urgent report to Lady Flaure."
"...Is that so. Am I permitted to know?"
"Know it or don't. Humans like us can't do much about it either way."
"...Yesterday, past nightfall. Almost dawn—"
The residential quarter inside the wall. Eastern District.
The house was small and it was warm and it smelled, at that hour, of butter and scorched sugar.
"Evelyn, dear..." A soft, aging woman's voice. "My little Eve~"
The purple-haired young woman curled deeper under her blanket. "Is it morning already... five more minutes..."
"No, no, dear." A gentle hand traced slowly down the length of Evelyn's hair, the way it had every morning of a childhood in this same narrow room, in this same narrow bed she had long since outgrown.
"It's only that I couldn't sleep, you see. So I made a cake."
"But you don't have to eat it now if you don't want to. It really is very late."
Evelyn rubbed her eyes and pushed herself upright off the bed. Four days of leave. The first she'd taken in two years, and she had spent two of them asleep in this room, in a house where nobody called her Officer and nobody wanted anything from her at all.
"Mm."
She leaned forward, took the fork, speared a piece of the cake, and put it in her mouth.
It was too sweet. It was always too sweet. Her mother had been making it too sweet since Evelyn was six years old and had once, exactly once, said she liked it that way.
A small smile.
"Mm, it's lovely—"
"Hm?"
Her mother had not moved.
The hand had dropped from her hair. And her mother was sitting exactly as she had been a moment before, upright, facing her — except that her eyes had gone wide, wider than a face was built for, fixed on nothing at all in the dark past Evelyn's shoulder.
"Why... why are your eyes like that, mom?"