Chapter Text
Reinhard listened.
That was the first thing Subaru noticed about him, he listened the same way Crusch listened. He just looked at Subaru and listened.
"-so Crusch said you might be able to help." Subaru finished. "Fifth candidate, unknown, somewhere in the city or nearby. And honestly I have no idea where to start because I don't have the insignia and I look like nobody because I am nobody."
Reinhard was quiet for a moment.
"Lady Crusch is correct." he said. "I've been searching as well. I received orders several days ago." A measured pause. "Without success so far."
"So we're both looking for someone we know nothing about." Subaru said. "Perfect."
"Practically speaking, yes."
"Okay." Subaru stopped by the wall of a nearby stall and leaned against it, frowning. "Let's start with what we do know. The fifth candidate, how does the Dragon even choose? It can't be random. There has to be logic."
Reinhard looked at him with mild surprise. Not unpleasant, the kind that suggested the question was different from what he'd expected.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"Well, if we look at the candidates we already know about." Subaru said, straightening slightly. "there has to be a common denominator. Something connecting them. Something the Dragon is looking for." He pointed at Reinhard. "You probably know the other candidates better than I do. Can you tell me about them?"
Reinhard considered for a moment.
Subaru could see it happening, the knight weighing loyalty against information, duty against practicality, protocol against common sense.
"You're helping search for the fifth candidate." Reinhard said finally. "At the request of one of the four known ones. I think under these circumstances I can share what I know."
"Appreciated." Subaru said.
"Priscilla Barielle." he began. "A woman of extraordinary confidence. Her candidacy surprised many." A short pause. "She is unpredictable. She believes the world turns according to her will." He paused again. "And for most purposes, she's right."
"Sounds like someone who's impossible to argue with." Subaru muttered.
"Extremely." Reinhard confirmed, with the lightest trace of amusement, the only irony he seemed to permit himself. "Anastasia Hoshin. She comes from Kararagi, a merchant. Young, but she's already built a commercial empire that many older trading houses would envy." A pause. "Intelligent. Pragmatic. She looks at the world as a coin."
"And the third?" Subaru said.
Reinhard's eyes moved briefly to a point somewhere past Subaru's shoulder.
"Emilia." he said."A half-elf. Silver hair, violet eyes." A pause. "Her candidacy is… controversial. Because of her race and certain associations people make."
"Associations." Subaru repeated.
"She resembles the Witch of Envy." Reinhard said, evenly. "People are afraid. Not always fairly."
Cu said. "A half-elf associated with a witch running for king. That's either very brave or very stupid."
"Perhaps both." Reinhard said, without malice. "But the Dragon chose her. That is fact."
Subaru nodded slowly.
"What about Crusch?" he said. "Honestly all I know about her is that she's from some big family and she can put three men on the ground without breaking a sweat."
Something warm moved across Reinhard's face.
"Lady Crusch." he said, "is one of the most honourable people I know. House Karsten is an old and respected family." A brief pause. "But there's something about her that might interest you." He looked at Subaru. "She was quite close to Prince Fourier."
Subaru straightened.
"Fourier?" he repeated. "Was he part of the royal family? The one that-"
"That died from illness. Yes." Reinhard spoke evenly. "Fourier Lugunica. He was one of the last members of the royal line." A pause. "He was a good man."
Subaru was quiet for a moment.
"I'm sorry." he said. "For asking about it so… directly."
"Don't apologise." Reinhard said. "It's history. Important history."
Subaru nodded. And then, because once he started thinking it was genuinely difficult to stop:
"The royal family, House Lugunica. What did they look like? Any defining features?"
Reinhard looked at him with slight surprise.
"Golden hair." he said. "Red eyes. It was distinctive, unmistakable in a crowd." He paused. "Why do you ask?"
"Because I'm looking for common things." Subaru said. "The Dragon picks candidates, but on what basis? Power? Bloodline? Character?" He held Reinhard's gaze. "If it's bloodline, even partial bloodline, then maybe the fifth candidate isn't someone new. Maybe she's someone who's been here all along and nobody looked at her the right way."
Reinhard was still for a moment.
"Everyone died." he said carefully. "The illness was total. There were no exceptions recorded."
"Reinhard." Subaru looked at him steadily. "I came to this… city two days ago. I've been set on fire, tied to a wall, and I'm currently blind in one eye." He paused. "I stopped assuming things were impossible approximately forty eight hours ago." He looked out at the market. "Golden hair. Red eyes. That's our starting point."
Silence.
Cu was looking at Subaru with the expression of someone who had just seen something unexpected and decided they approved of it. The quiet, warm approval of someone watching a younger brother do something genuinely clever.
"That would be." Reinhard said finally, very carefully, "an extraordinary discovery."
"Extraordinary things keep happening to me." Subaru said. "Literally. Since yesterday."
Cu laughed, short, genuine, fond, and shook his head.
They walked.
"Hey." Subaru said to Reinhard. "The insignia. Do you have one? To confirm candidacy when we find her?"
"Yes." Reinhard reached into his jacket and showed it. He held it for a moment, then tucked it away. "I've been carrying it since I received the assignment."
"Good." Subaru looked at the street ahead. "One less problem."
Cu had been walking slightly behind them.
"We should split up." he said.
Subaru turned to look at him. "...Why?"
"City's big. Three people walking in a line asking questions is slow." He shrugged. "We cover more ground separately."
"That is a completely reasonable explanation." Subaru said slowly, "and I don't believe it for a second. What's the real reason?"
Cu looked at him.
"I don't want to walk around asking people questions all day." he said. "It's boring."
"IT'S-" Subaru stared at him. "We're looking for the future ruler of an entire kingdom and you're bored-"
"I'm a warrior, Su."
"You could at least PRETEND to be invested-"
"I am invested. In finding her." Cu tilted his head. "Just not in the walking-around-talking part of finding her."
"Then what exactly is your PLAN if you're not doing the walking-around-talking part-"
Cu looked at the nearest building. At its roof. Back at Subaru.
"I'll go high." he said. "Better view."
Subaru stared at him. "You're going to jump across rooftops."
"Yeah."
"Like a monkey."
"Like someone who can actually cover this city in under an hour." Cu raised an eyebrow. "Unless the genius has a better idea?"
Subaru opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Looked at the city around him.
"No." he admitted. "I don't have a better idea."
"Thought so."
"But-" Subaru pointed at him. "If you find something, how do you tell us? You'll be on a roof somewhere and we'll be down here and-"
Cu tapped his temple once.
Subaru blinked. "What? Talk through… heads?"
"Talk through it, yeah. You'll hear me in your head. I'll hear you."
"That is-" Subaru paused. "Actually useful. Also deeply unsettling. Please don't just wander around in there-"
"Your head's not that interesting, Su."
"GET OUT OF MY HEAD-"
Cu laughed, loud and unguarded, and before Subaru could say anything else he'd taken three running steps and cleared the gap to the nearest rooftop in one jump.
He landed without sound. Stood up. Looked down at Subaru with his arms crossed.
"Call me when you need me." he said. And turned and was gone across the rooftops, moving between them with the casual ease of someone taking a pleasant walk.
Subaru watched him go.
"He does that a lot?" Reinhard asked, beside him.
"I've known him for less than twenty four hours." Subaru said. "But yes. I think this is just what he's like."
Reinhard looked at the rooftop where Cu had been standing.
"Shall we?" he said, and gestured at the street ahead.
Eight hours later, Subaru was significantly less philosophical about the whole thing.
"Nobody." he said, to no one in particular. "Eight hours. Not one person."
"Every individual we spoke to said the same thing." Reinhard confirmed, with the composure who had apparently not lost patience at any point during the last eight hours, which Subaru found personally offensive. "No one matching the description. No golden hair, no red eyes."
"I HEARD THEM." Subaru said. "I was there for all of them. I didn't need the recap."
"I apologise."
"Don't apologise, I'm just-" He pressed his left hand over his face. Breathed. Removed it. "I'm frustrated. Eight hours, Reinhard. Eight hours of excuse me have you seen anyone with golden hair and red eyes and eight hours of no sorry I haven't." He looked at the sky. "We're doing something wrong."
He reached out through the bond, the internal thing that he still wasn't entirely used to.
“Cu. Anything?”
A pause. Then Cu's voice in his head, dry and immediate: “Flew the whole city twice. Nothing. Either she doesn't exist or she's very good at not being found.”
“Or we're looking in the wrong places.” Subaru thought back.
“That too.” Cu said. “What are you thinking?”
Subaru looked at Reinhard.
"We're looking in the wrong places." he said.
Reinhard turned to him. "What do you mean?"
"We've covered the markets, the main streets, the residential districts, the better parts of town." Subaru met his eyes. "Where haven't we looked?"
Reinhard was quiet for a moment. Then something shifted in his expression.
"The slums." he said.
"The slums." Subaru confirmed.
"The Royal Knights don't patrol there often." Reinhard said. "We're not particularly welcome in that district."
"Yeah." Subaru thought about a small house. "If someone was trying not to be found, that's where they'd go."
Reinhard looked at him for a moment.
"That." he said, with genuine warmth, "is good thinking."
"Don't sound so surprised." Subaru muttered, but he was already moving.
“Cu.” he sent through the bond. “We're heading for the slums.”
“About time.” Cu came back immediately. “I'll cover from above.”
The slums hit different at dusk.
Reinhard walked beside him and was, immediately, the problem.
"You're very visible." Subaru said.
"I'm aware." Reinhard said.
"The uniform-"
"Also aware."
Subaru looked around. A bundle of dark cloth sat against the base of a wall nearby, a cloak, old, probably discarded. He picked it up, shook it once, and held it out.
"Put this on."
Reinhard looked at it.
"It will cover the uniform." Subaru said. "And most of your face if you pull the hood."
Reinhard took it without further argument and pulled it on. He went from unmistakably a Royal Knight to someone who could be, at a stretch, a very tall and suspiciously well-postured merchant.
Subaru took off his eyepatch. Looked at the lion crest on it for a second and put it in his pocket.
Reinhard looked at him. "Your eye-"
"If knights aren't welcome here, neither is anything that looks like nobility." Subaru said. He touched the scarring around his right eye briefly, not quite self-consciously. "And this doesn't look like nobility."
Reinhard's eyes moved to the right side of Subaru's face. The scarring. The closed eye that didn't track.
Above them, between the close-pressed rooftops, a blue shape moved, Cu crossing another gap, smooth and unhurried, pausing at the peak of one roof to scan before continuing.
“Anything?” Subaru sent.
“Nope.” Cu came back. “Still looking.”
They walked deeper.
The man came from a side lane, middle-aged, rough-edged, with the particular watchfulness of someone who had lived in the slums long enough to read people accurately on first sight. He looked at Subaru.
"The hell happened to you?" he said.
"Which time?" Subaru said.
The man's mouth twitched. "Fair."
"I'm looking for someone." Subaru said. "Golden hair. Around here. You know anyone?"
The man looked him over again. Slower this time.
"Who did that to you?" he said, nodding at Subaru's eye.
Subaru didn't hesitate.
"I was a kid." he said. "Wrong place, wrong time, and apparently the wrong answer to whatever question they were asking." He met the man's eyes. "Took a long time to stop flinching every time I saw the knightly uniform."
The man looked at him for a long moment.
Then something relaxed in his face.
"Golden hair." he said. "Yeah. I know someone." He scratched the back of his neck. "Felt. Fast kid, doesn't sit still for long." He gestured vaguely to his right. "She turns up at Old Rom's place. Loot House, just around the corner. If she's anywhere tonight, she's there."
"Thank you." Subaru said. "Genuinely. I owe you one."
The man waved it off and kept walking.
Subaru turned.
Reinhard was beside him, hood still up, and his expression beneath it was doing something careful.
"You lied to him." he said.
"The knights-burned-my-eye story? Yeah." Subaru started moving toward the corner the man had indicated. "You told me knights aren't welcome here. I needed him to talk to me, not walk away." He glanced at Reinhard. "A true story about a fireball and a girl I barely knew would have taken twenty minutes to explain and he still might not have believed it."
Reinhard was quiet for a step.
"You thought quickly." he said.
"I lie badly about most things." Subaru said. "But I'm very good at picking which lies people want to hear."
Reinhard looked at him.
"That is." he said, "a surprisingly useful skill."
He sent the information through the bond as they walked, and Cu's response came back immediately: “Already there. Give me a second.”
Subaru rounded the corner.
The Loot House was exactly what the name suggested, a squat, old building.
Cu was crouched on the roof above it.
"You're fast." Subaru said, looking up at him.
"You're slow." Cu said back, without heat.
"Did you hear anything inside?"
"Nothing." he said.
"Nothing like quiet-nothing, or-"
Cu looked at the door.
Then he dropped from the roof, landed without sound, crossed to the door in two moves, and kicked it open.
The door swung hard. Hit the wall inside.
Cu walked in.
"-was that necessary?!" Subaru started.
Cu didn't answer.
Subaru and Reinhard went in after him.
The smell hit first.
Then the light landed on the interior, and Subaru's brain processed what it was seeing in pieces, the way it did when something was too much to take in all at once.
Old Rom was on his side near the far wall. Large man, and completely still. His throat was cut open.
Felt was closer to the centre of the room. Small. Her head was lying on a chair. Golden hair. Red eyes open and not looking at anything.
Subaru stared.
He made it three steps back out the door before he lost everything he'd eaten that day.
Subaru pressed his left hand against the wall. Breathed.
"We were-" Subaru stopped. "We spent eight hours. If we'd started in the slums-"
"Su-."
"We were RIGHT THERE, we were in this part of the city LAST NIGHT-"
"Subaru." Cu's voice. "Stop."
Subaru stopped.
Subaru turned. Went back in.
Reinhard was crouched beside Felt. He had removed his hood. He reached into his jacket and produced the insignia.
He placed it carefully in Felt's open hand.
The room was very quiet.
The insignia glowed.
A confirmation that should have happened in daylight with people watching. Instead it happened here, in a room that smelled like copper, with two bodies and three people who had arrived too late.
Reinhard looked at it for a long moment.
Then he closed Felt's fingers gently around it and stood.
"You were right." he said to Subaru. His voice was even. "Your reasoning was correct." A pause. "I failed in my duty. She was my responsibility to find and protect and I-" He stopped. Something moved behind his eyes, controlled before it reached his face. "I failed."
"Reinhard-" Subaru started.
"Don't." Cu said.
Both of them looked at him.
Cu was standing near Old Rom, crouched low. His eyes moved across the floor, the walls, the positions of both bodies.
"Two people." he said. "Minimum. The old man and the girl were killed separately, different angles, different weapons." He stood. "And this happened-" He looked at the state of the blood, the way it had spread and begun to dry at the edges. "Three hours ago. Maybe a bit more."
"What do we do now?" Subaru said, to Reinhard.
Reinhard was quiet for a moment.
"I need to inform the knights and the council. Get people here, document what happened, begin an investigation." He looked at the insignia still in Felt's hand. "And I need to report what we found." A pause. "What she was."
Subaru looked at Felt's body.
"I'm sorry." he said. "For not being faster. For not starting here first. For-"
"Su."
Cu's voice. Sharp enough to cut through.
Subaru looked at him.
"Listen to me." Cu said. He crossed the room and stopped directly in front of Subaru and looked at him straight on with those red eyes. "You couldn't have known. You didn't know where she was. You didn't know what was coming. You didn't know any of it." His voice wasn't gentle. "This is not yours. You don't get to carry this."
"Cu-"
"I'm not finished." He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. "You've been here for two days. Two days. You've been set on fire, nearly had your stomach slit by a psycho woman, and found yourself in a race for the crown." He held Subaru's gaze. "This one isn't on you. Say it back."
Subaru stared at him.
The room was very quiet.
"...This one isn't on me." Subaru said.
"Again. Like you mean it."
"Cu-"
"Subaru."
A breath. "This one isn't on me."
Cu held his gaze for one more second. Then stepped back. Crossed his arms.
"Good." he said.
Subaru looked at the floor for a moment. Then at Reinhard.
"We need to tell Crusch." he said. "She needs to know what happened. That we found her, that she was the fifth candidate, that-" He stopped. "That we didn't make it in time."
"I'll handle this." He looked at them both. "Return to Lady Crusch safely. Both of you."
"Reinhard." Subaru said.
The knight looked at him.
"You didn't fail." Subaru said. "Someone worked very hard to make sure this happened before anyone could stop it. That's not the same thing as failing."
Reinhard was quiet.
"Thank you." he said, after a moment.
Subaru nodded.
He walked out. Cu fell into step beside him without being asked.
They didn't talk on the way back.
Subaru watched the street ahead and didn't say anything.
Cu watched everything else and didn't say anything either.
It was, in its own way, enough.
The Karsten estate was lit from within when they reached it, warm light through the tall windows.
They reached the corridor outside Crusch's study.
Subaru raised his hand and knocked.
Silence.
He waited.
Knocked again.
Nothing.
He looked at the door. Looked at Cu. "She might be somewhere else in the estate-"
"Maybe." Cu said. "I haven't heard anyone moving in this wing for a while."
"How long is a while?"
"Since before we got back."
Subaru frowned. He looked down the corridor, no Wilhelm at the end of it, no Felix appearing from a side room with a cheerful comment about him being back. The corridor was empty in both directions.
He knocked a third time.
The door, not quite latched, swung open slightly under his knuckle.
Subaru pushed it.
In the middle of the room, near the centre of the floor, there were three flies.
Subaru stopped.
They were large. Not housefly-large, wrong-large. Half the size of a person, wings folded, bodies dense.
He stared at them.
His brain tried several interpretations and rejected all of them.
And then, he remembered.
She doesn't forgive failed contracts. When she finds us, she'll turn us into flies.
He had repeated it back to Crusch. Crusch had confirmed she'd heard no lie in it. And he had filed it as something serious that was also somewhat abstract.
These were the size of half a person.
These were on the floor of Crusch's study.
"Cu." Subaru said. His voice came out very level, which surprised him.
"I see them." Cu said, from directly behind him. The spear was already in his hand.
Subaru couldn't move for a second. His one working eye tracked from fly to fly to fly and his brain was doing the count.
Then the laugh came.
From the shadows at the far side of the room. Not the corner, from somewhere that shouldn't have had space for a person but apparently did, because that was where the sound came from.
"Ohhhhh~"
The voice was sweet. Genuinely, technically sweet, the way something rotten could be sweet if it had once been fruit.
"Another little pile of meat walked itself right through the door~"
A figure stepped into the lamplight.
"I was starting to get bored waiting~" she continued, drawing the last word out like it was something she could stretch to her preferred length. Her eyes moved to Subaru. "But then you walked right in~ All by yourself~ Like a good little-"
Her eyes found Cu.
The smile didn't leave. But it changed quality. The way a fire changed quality when something new was put in it.
"Oh." she said, and for just a second the sweetness was completely gone and something else looked out from behind her face. Then it came back, warmer and worse than before. "Oh, this is delicious~ Two little piles of meat for the price of one~" She tilted her head, far, too far, at an angle that necks didn't prefer. "The contractor said one black-haired boy. He didn't say anything about a~" she looked Cu up and down with an expression of grotesque appreciation, "-tall, blue, very interesting accessory~"
"Accessory." Cu said flatly.
"Mmhm~" She smiled wider. "Don't be offended, darling. It's a compliment~"
"It really isn't." Cu said.
"Where are they?!" Subaru asked. "And WHO are you?!"
"Ohhh~" She pressed one hand to her cheek with an expression of theatrical sympathy. "Is the little one worried~? They're right there, sweetheart." She gestured at the three large still shapes on the floor. "Right where I left them."
Subaru looked at the flies.
The room was very quiet.
Cu moved to stand in front of Subaru, the spear held easy and loose.
"Tell me." she said, looking at the spear with that grotesque appreciation, "does that hurt~? When you stick people with it?" She tilted her head the other way. "I do hope it hurts. Pain is so much more interesting than the alternative~"
"You'll find out." Cu said.
She laughed.
"Oh I like you~" she said. "I like you so much~"
She hadn't moved from where she stood.
She was still smiling. Still tilting her head at that angle that necks didn't prefer. Her eyes moved between Cu and Subaru.
"Sooooo~" she said. "Which one of you wants to go first~?"
Cu stepped forward.
"Su." he said, without looking back. "Find somewhere to be that isn't here."
"Cu-"
"Not a suggestion."
Subaru looked at the three flies on the floor. At Her. At Cu's back.
He moved toward the door.
Her arm moved.
The way arms didn't, extending past where arms ended, the skin splitting and reforming into something that wasn't an arm anymore. A lion's jaw, massive, the teeth longer than Subaru's fingers, the whole thing stretching across the room on a neck that kept growing, kept reaching-
Subaru threw himself sideways.
The jaw hit the wall where his head had been and took a chunk of stone out of it.
Cu was already there.
Gáe Bolg came down in one clean arc and the extended limb hit the floor in two pieces. The jaw end snapped twice, reflexively, and went still.
She looked at the stump where her arm had been.
Then she laughed.
"Ohhh~" Genuine delight. Horrible genuine delight. "Oh that's interesting~"
The stump wasn't closing.
She looked at it with the specific fascination of someone who had never encountered something her body couldn't fix, turning it slightly, watching the edges of the wound stay exactly where they were.
"That hurts~" she said, in the tone of someone describing a flavour they'd never tried before. "It actually hurts and it's not stopping~" Her eyes moved to the spear. "What a lovely thing you have there~"
"Glad you like it." Cu said. "Here's what's going to happen. You're going to tell me how to undo what you did to the people in this house. And then we're going to have a very different conversation."
"Orrrrr~" She tilted her head. "I could just kill you~"
"You could try." Cu said.
She tried.
The floor cracked under sudden weight. What stood in Her place was something that had her face at the top of it, still smiling, attached to a body that had borrowed from several different animals.
Cu didn't step back.
"Hm." he said. "Bigger."
"Much bigger~" She agreed, from somewhere above him.
She came down with one forelimb the size of a table and Cu rolled left, came up moving, drove Gáe Bolg into the joint of the limb where it met the body and dragged it sideways. The wound opened and stayed open, She shrieked, high and wrong, the sound of something that didn't know what to do with pain it couldn't close.
"THAT-" The sweetness was gone for a full second. Raw fury, real and total. "That is incredibly rude~"
"Get used to it." Cu said.
She swiped at him with the other forelimb, he ducked under it, close enough that the displaced air moved his hair, came up inside her reach and drove the spear into her side twice in rapid succession. Two more wounds that wouldn't close. She reared back, the ceiling cracking where her mass hit it, and reformed.
A dragon.
Cu looked at it.
"Alright." he said, and something in his voice shifted. The voice of someone who had found the gear they'd been looking for. "Now we're getting somewhere."
The dragon breathed black fire.
Cu went sideways, used the bookshelf as a step, got above the blast and came down on the dragon's neck with the spear driving forward with his full weight behind it. The scale split. The wound opened. Her scream was genuinely animal this time.
She threw him.
He hit the far wall hard enough to crack it and dropped to the floor and was up with blood on his face and his expression not changed in any meaningful way.
"Good hit." he said.
"DIE YOU SCUM." She said, and for one moment her voice was completely flat and completely real.
"Been tried." Cu said, and charged.
Subaru ran.
He'd made it out of the study when the wall had first cracked, and the sounds from inside were doing things to his ability to think clearly, but his legs were working and the corridor was in front of him and he moved.
“She's going to kill him.” the voice in the back of his head said. “She's going to kill him and it's going to be because you came here.”
He turned a corner.
“Crusch is a fly. Wilhelm is a fly. Felix is a fly. Three people who were fine before you walked into their city and brought everything with you.”
He ran faster.
“If you hadn't come here, if you'd just woken up on those cobblestones and gone anywhere else, done anything else, none of this would have happened. They would have gone to bed tonight and tomorrow would have been a normal day and-”
Meili.
The thought arrived sideways, cutting through the other ones.
Meili and Elsa were in the cells downstairs.
The door to the cell corridor was already wrong.
Not open, destroyed. The frame splintered outward, the door itself halfway down the corridor, and the silence coming from inside had a quality that made Subaru's feet slow before his brain told them to.
He walked through anyway.
He stopped.
He looked at what was in the cell and then he looked at the wall and he pressed his left hand over his mouth.
He knew what he'd seen. Where he had last seen Meili and Elsa, there was now something that looked like a pile of flesh with eyeballs. He could hear it moving and-
Something moved.
From the doorway of the third cell, something thin and fast and he had no time, no warning, nothing except the sudden cold pressure around his throat and the bright line of pain as the spikes bit in and his back hit the wall.
He couldn't turn his head. The spikes had him against the wall and the angle was wrong and all he could see was the corridor ahead and the ruined doorframe and the dark beyond it.
A voice. Female. Soft, almost apologetic.
"We weren't expecting anyone else."
Footsteps. Light. Coming toward him from the dark.
A shape resolved out of it, small, slight, blonde hair, green eyes that caught the dim corridor light. She looked at him with that gentle, empty patience.
"I'm sorry." she said, and raised her hand.
The bird formed between her fingers, light made solid, wings spread, hovering for just a moment with the terrible beauty of something that existed only to end.
The Bird hit him in the chest.
The corridor tilted.
The floor came up.
He lay there and the cold was spreading from the centre of him outward. He could feel the blood pouring out of him, and his vision was slowly fading. Subaru could hear something, a male voice.
"WHAT DID YOU DO-"
Running footsteps. Stopping.
A long silence.
"You killed him." The male voice. Shaking. Genuinely, totally shaking. "You killed the target. You STUPID-" A sound of something hitting a wall. "Mama wanted him ALIVE, Maria, she wanted him ALIVE and you just-"
Maria's voice, gentle, somewhere above Subaru: "He was going to-"
"I DON'T CARE WHAT HE WAS GOING TO DO!" The voice cracked. "You stupid bitch, you have no idea what she's going to do to us when she finds out-"
The voices were getting further away.
Or maybe Subaru was getting further from them.
Then Subaru Natsuki died in his own pool of blood.