Chapter 06 | Girlfriend

The coffee shop Aki chose was the kind of place that had made certain decisions about itself and stuck with them, dark wood, low light, a menu that used the word origin several times. It was also, Matthias suspected, chosen specifically because it was the sort of establishment where a person dressed in all black would not draw the particular attention they might elsewhere.

She was already there when they arrived.

Black high-heeled boots, the kind with enough architecture to qualify as a structural decision. Black leather cardigan over a black top, both of them the specific shade of someone who had opinions about the colour rather than simply defaulting to it. Pale skin, not the porcelain unreality of Belial and Astreal, but the natural pallor of someone who spent meaningful time indoors by preference. She was tall. Matthias registered this with some surprise, because tall did not fully cover it, she had the kind of height that reorganised the spatial relationships in a room, giving her a presence that was less about intimidation and more about a simple, physical fact. Where Belial and Astreal carried themselves with the proportional elegance of figures from a painting, this woman occupied her height the way a manor house occupied a hill, as though the scale had been specifically intended.

Her eyes, when they found him across the coffee shop, held the particular combination of mischief and self-assurance that Matthias was beginning to recognise as a recurring feature of women in his life. There was an aristocratic quality to her expression, not hauteur, exactly, but a kind of casual ownership of her own eccentricity, as though she had long ago stopped measuring herself against any standard but her own and found the resulting freedom quite agreeable.

She was beautiful in a way that was entirely different from the other varieties of beautiful he'd encountered recently. More grounded. More present. More human, in the sense that looking at her did not produce the same faint cognitive friction as looking at Belial or Astreal, the sense that one was perceiving something whose existence predated the usual categories.

She raised one hand from her coffee cup.

"'Sup," she said.

Aki sat down across from her with the ease of someone who had done this before. "As described," he said.

"I'll be honest," she said, resting her chin on one hand. "I expected the reincarnated dark lord to be a bit more..." she tilted her head, searching for the word "...imposing. There should be something about the set of the jaw. A gravitas. Some intimation of ancient and terrible power." She considered him for another moment. "You look like you take the train."

"He does take the train," Aki said.

"Just as you told me," she said, nodding at him with the air of a researcher whose hypothesis has been confirmed. "Just as you told me."

"Yuki Strauss."

Astreal's voice had the quality of a file cabinet being opened, precise, measured, containing more than it showed. She was looking at Yuki with an expression that was not quite the hostility she'd deployed at Aki, but was not entirely relaxed either.

"You resemble Leona Strauss considerably."

Yuki brightened. She turned toward Astreal and Belial with an expression of genuine delight, and then she winked, a slow, deliberate wink, fully committed. "Am I as striking as she was?" she asked, with a mischievous lilt that implied she already suspected the answer and intended to enjoy hearing it anyway.

Astreal did not respond to this with the ease it called for. Belial managed a controlled look.

"I should like," Matthias said, before the moment could develop further, "to get to know you properly. Without assumptions in either direction."

Yuki set her coffee down. Then she stood.

She was, standing, precisely as tall as he'd calculated from a distance, which meant that when she moved around the table and into his immediate space she was looking at him at almost exactly eye level, which was a novel experience. Belial and Astreal closed ranks between them with the reflexive precision of two people whose bodies remembered threat faster than their minds could brief them, but Yuki stopped short of contact and simply looked at him from an arm's length, her expression carrying the full weight of a very specific idea she had apparently been incubating for some time.

"I have a better idea than getting to know each other normally," she said.

He waited.

"I'll be your girlfriend."

"No," said Belial.

"No," said Astreal, simultaneously, in a tone that made Belial's sound exploratory by comparison.

"You see," she said, lowering her voice to the confidential register of someone sharing a perspective they consider very reasonable, "I have, for essentially my entire life, been absolutely captivated by the narrative potential of a romance between a hero and a demon lord. The drama. The forbidden quality. The very specific dynamic of..." she paused, and the mischief in her expression acquired a new dimension "...submission. To the demon lord." She tilted her head slightly. "I feel I would be very good at it."

"No," Matthias said.

Yuki's face collapsed into a theatrical pout. "You're no fun."

"That's her," Aki said, with a dry resignation that suggested this was not the first time he had been present for a version of this. "That's the whole thing, in one exchange."

Yuki straightened with the speed of someone who has just had a new idea and is already several steps into it. She clasped her hands, dropped her voice into a high, affected register entirely unlike her usual tone, and looked at Matthias with an expression of exaggerated anguish.

"Oh, my lord," she said, her voice carrying clearly enough to attract brief attention from the next table, "please punish me..."

"I'm not interested," Matthias said.

"...for my terrible transgressions against..."

"Yuki."

She stopped. She looked at him. The performance dissolved as quickly as it had assembled, leaving behind her usual expression, the mischief still there, unrepentant, but beneath it a genuine warmth and what he was beginning to suspect was a very particular way of getting comfortable with new people that involved testing every available boundary first.

"Fine," she said, returning to her seat with complete composure, as though the previous thirty seconds had been a minor administrative matter. "Fine." She picked up her coffee. "I can be reasonable. As long as you don't go full dark lord on us, the brooding, the evil speeches, the territorial acquisition, I'm happy to coexist." She glanced at him sideways. "I'd much rather go to an anime festival than spend my weekend standing vigil over a demon lord with a persecution complex."

"I have no intention of going full anything," Matthias said.

"Good." She nodded. "The Strauss family has a sword, for the record. Holy. Two-handed. Heavy enchantment against darkness, very effective, very inconvenient." She turned her cup slowly. "It is absolutely terrible to bring to a cosplay event. I have tried. Once. The organisers had opinions." She looked at him with a sincerity that was only partially comedic. "Please stay low so I don't have to retrieve it from storage."

"It's a miracle you haven't sold it," Aki said.

"I've thought about it," Yuki said, without any indication that she was joking.

She looked at Matthias again, and the mischief resurfaced with the irresistibility of something that simply couldn't stay down.

"Consider the proposal," she said. "Mistress. Below Belial and Astreal in the hierarchy. I am flexible on the terms."

"No," said Belial.

"No," said Astreal.

"I know, I know."

Yuki waved a hand. She was smiling.

"Worth floating."

"The thing is," Aki said, after the proposals had been declined and the coffees had been refilled, "none of us are particularly who we're supposed to be." He said it without any apparent weight to it, a simple observation about the shape of the present. "I'm not Corvus Cronqvist. She's not Leona Strauss. The duty exists, the lineage is real, the sword is technically in her possession, but we didn't choose any of that, and neither of us woke up this morning particularly motivated by ancient obligations."

"The ancient obligation has a rota," she said. "The rota is very detailed. I have found many uses for the rota that do not involve standing vigil."

"So we watch, in the loosest possible sense," Aki continued, "and as long as the situation is what it currently is, which is a man who takes the train and has two people cooking for him, we'd both vastly prefer to operate in a chill capacity." He looked at Matthias. "You understand."

"I understand," Matthias said.

"Speaking of the Marco line," Yuki said, with the air of someone remembering a footnote, "Joseph Marco is currently in Central America. Mayan ruins." She stirred her coffee. "He's studying their calendar. The one that ended in 2012."

"That ended fourteen years ago," Matthias said.

"Yes." She stirred some more. "He finds this very interesting, apparently. Joseph is not, how to put it, operationally oriented. He's a scholar. He got very excited about the calendar and has been in the jungle about it for the better part of a year." A pause. "He's also, by all accounts, extremely chill. Just in a slightly more academic direction."

"So," Matthias said, looking around the table. "The three hero families are: a man who prefers cards and beer over vigilance, a woman who would rather attend cosplay events than draw the holy sword, and a scholar currently lost in the jungle over a fourteen-year-old calendar mystery."

Aki raised his cup slightly in a toast. "Legacy," he said.

At home, the evening had the comfortable weight of a full day coming to rest.

Astreal stood at the kitchen counter, and her expression had the specific quality of a person running a comparison against memory.

"She is very different from Leona Strauss," she said.

Not with hostility, with the considered tone of someone updating a record.

"Leona was solemn. Very certain of herself. A great deal of conviction." A pause. "Yuki has the mischievousness but none of the gravity."

"The resemblance is still there," Belial said, from the other side of the counter. "The eyes, mostly. The way she holds herself." She was quiet for a moment. "We should still be careful with her. The sword is real. Her commitment to not using it may be sincere, but she is still a Strauss, and she has a tendency to, arrive in his personal space with agendas." She glanced at Matthias. "Her specific agenda."

"She's interesting," he said. "She's genuinely interesting to talk to."

"She is eccentric," Astreal said, which in her vocabulary covered significant ground.

"Carefree," Belial offered. "Aki is chill. And the Marco descendant is apparently in a jungle being academic about a calendar." She tilted her head at Matthias. "The three families have changed considerably."

"Which is," Matthias said, "probably the best possible outcome." He looked at both of them. "They've moved on. None of them want to resume their ancestor's work any more than I want to resume mine. The best thing I can do is make sure they never have a reason to." He paused. "No dark lord disposition. No territorial ambitions. No brooding speeches."

"A remarkably manageable standard," Astreal said.

"I'm very good at managing it," Matthias said. "I've been doing it for twenty-eight years without knowing why."

Belial smiled at the counter. Astreal made a sound that was not quite a laugh but occupied its neighbourhood.

Outside, the city went about its evening business, indifferent to the arrangements being made within.