Chapter Text
Eli thinks it might be time to make for a hasty exit when Hoshizora Rin bursts through the double French doors, her vermillion hair flopping unbrushed to one side and arms spread wide to hug the nearest unlucky recipient who may or may not be the hostess. A sleek black cat daemon skitters around her ankles, tapered tail flying high. Seeing that Rin’s enthusiastic disregard for personal space hasn’t much changed in the last ten years, Eli slides smoothly sideways through the crowd of cocktail dresses and pressed suits, avoiding both paws and toes, and Thrall winds his way behind her.
She’s not doing a great job of avoiding childhood acquaintances tonight, though – Eli’s only partway through the ballroom, heels clacking like miniature hammers against the burnished marble floor, noise barely hidden by the subtle plucking of the orchestra behind her, warm anabaric light shining off Thrall’s fur, when she nearly runs headlong into Nishikino Maki. Maki has a champagne flute in one hand – is she already old enough to drink? Eli is awfully shocked for a moment, the feeling like swallowing a cherry pit or seeing her sister’s daemon move too far away from the human – and the other hand’s fingers curled lightly in the intricate fur of a great leopard seated on its haunches. She’s chatting with another girl, a woman with a sweet heart-shaped face and a white dress paired with a glinting pearl necklace. There’s a ram daemon with coiled horns politely examining a gold-trimmed painting just behind them both. Eli recognizes she cannot flee from everyone, and steps forward, Thrall’s tail brushing her bare legs as she swallows her nerves, her heartbeat at her side.
“Ayase Eli,” says the girl with the ram daemon in a voice that is far too grateful and sweet, like she’s using the opportunity to thank Eli for simply existing. Eli forces a smile and extends a hand, but the girl moves closer and hugs her, thin arms gripping with a surprising strength and nostalgia. Nishikino Maki takes the handshake though, her dark eyes half-narrowed. Thrall, his silly, oversized fox ears cocked at an angle that is somehow respectful, touches noses with Maki’s gigantically intimidating leopard daemon, and Eli feels the awkwardness diminish slightly.
“Congratulations, Kotori,” says Eli, “One day, we’re racing through the slum streets with the gutter rats, the next we’re being inducted into things like the Ministry of Education,” slipping into an informal tone as best she can. Immediately she feels horrendously inappropriate, as though she’s slipped out of her dress and begun the steps to the latest lower-class dance craze. But neither Kotori nor Maki’s daemons look ruffled, so Eli supposes she has not committed a horrible faux pas and informally embarrassed herself out of her birthright as heir to the Board of Government. Thrall nips her shin, which means focus, and Eli hurriedly reapplies herself to the small talk that always happens at these sorts of ridiculous gatherings.
“Thank you, Eli.” Kotori has a smile brighter than the flickering anabaric lights. “I’m ever so grateful you were able to attend my celebration as representative for the Ayase family. It means a lot to me!”
“We did waste a lot of our childhood together,” drawls Maki in a way that just screams money, somehow, and her daemon thrashes his tail, just once. A few partygoers tiptoe around the leopard and ram, and Eli thanks the stars that her soul settled in the form of a Sumerian Fox. Much easier to work with. Thrall puts his paws on her legs and moves his whiskers back, as if to say he agrees.
“What are you new responsibilities in the office?” Eli asks, to keep the conversation moving, and snags an elegant crystal goblet of an electric blue liquid from a passing waitstaff. Hm. Tastes like moonlight and mint. Thrall sneezes.
Kotori sounds like she’s reading from the pamphlet the Magisterium prints and sends monthly. “I have just been placed in an office that overs national high school curriculum and promotes egalitarian learning options for students with disabilities.”
“Lofty,” says Maki, and looks at her nails.
“That’s… great!” Eli replies, and downs half of her drink. “That sounds perfect for you.” Never mind that Kotori’s been born into the position, or even poised to make Board member through her family’s connection. Kotori will do well in that office because the girl has something kind in her soul, something as soft and fine as her daemon’s wooly back, and daemons do not lie.
Maki is connected to the highest of the high in the Ministry of Health and Welfare. She’s changed a lot in the last few years. Eli hasn’t seen her since her daemon settled.
Eli gives her old friend a side-eye, seeing a colder, sleeker Maki than the one that decorates her memories with laughter and embarrassed flushes. Eli sees a grown woman more inclined to discussing politics within the Magisterium and medical advances than their childhood. Does she remember sloughing together through the clinging mud by the city streets?
There’s not much time to process the changes. Hoshizora Rin appears in the grand archway to the ballroom behind Maki and starts forward towards their little cluster of young women at once, heeled combat boots striking the floor with a powerful air of girth that pushes the crowd along before her almost imperceptibly, parting couples and daemons with alacrity.
Rin’s hardly 155 cm though, so when she arrives with her cat daemon dashing along, she looks like a ten-year-old besides the upperclassmen. Her striking eyes tell of her confidence, though, despite her lithe little frame – Hoshizora Rin stands to inherit the Otonokizaka Corp, that monopoly that manages financials for half the country. “Old friends here tonight,” she crows, and shuffles her suit jacket a little awkwardly. “It’s been quite a while.”
“Almost ten years,” says Kotori softly. Her daemon shifts on his hooves and exhales loudly.
“What have you fools been up to all this time?” demands Rin excitedly, hands wringing together. She can’t stay still, but it contributes to her aura of energy.
“Oh, please,” says Maki. “Kotori and Eli are only twenty-two. Rin, we’re only two years younger. We’re still in the prime of our youth, finally stepping forward to take our destinies.” Her hand swirls her champagne flute. Eli has decided Maki isn’t old enough to drink, but who would stop the elegant young heiress? “Nothing has possibly happened since we last saw each other, except that we grew up and stopped smearing mud on our faces and started using creams.”
“Destiny,” says Eli, rolling the word around her tongue and surprising herself. The group glances at her, even everybody’s daemons. That’s embarrassing. Thrall shakes his ears and bares his teeth, telling the other girls that Eli’s soul, at least, will not be humiliated. The other daemons look away.
”Did we even go to one another's settling parties?” Rin asks softly.
Eli thinks this over. Thrall settled when she was twelve. She remembers Kotori’s Abraxas settled not long after that. Was there a party? She just remembers her mother buying her a new diamond earring set in congratulations; remembers her sister crying about how pretty Thrall was.
Kotori sidesteps the question and coaxes Maki into discussing the latest experiments the Ministry of Health has conducting. Eli is a little offended that Kotori would raise this subject – everyone knows the Nishikinos on the Board of Health directly opposed the Ayases on the Governing Board about using live criminals and daemons for the health experiments, but Maki explains the discoveries anyway. Apparently her people have found that it’s possible to vivisect daemons without killing the humans, using a manganese-titanium alloy blade – daemons don’t have organs, obviously, but inside their physical forms are glittering particles that the Magisterium has enthusiastically dubbed Dust and funds research on them almost endlessly…
“What about your music, though?” Eli interrupts, and Kotori goes red around the ears when she realizes her mistake. It’s true that Eli has only mentioned this in a quest to redirect the conversation, but she hadn’t guessed how Maki would halt midway through a rather gruesome explanation of daemon cutting.
“It’s… almost nonexistent,” Maki admits, and seems to disturb herself with how much saying the words aloud hurts. She makes a tiny frown to herself, and her daemon leans against her leg and hums comfortingly. He has a deeper voice than Eli would expect – she jumps like she’s received a tiny sting, but nobody’s looking at her – “I get some time every weekend to play the piano, but since my medical lessons have taken over so much of my day, I don’t – I haven’t done much.”
Rin’s picked up her daemon who’s been whispering in her ear, and now she perks up when she hears Maki being accosted about her old passions. “You were so good though, Maki! You could play sweet enough that your heart could fall out,” she sighs.
“What about you, though,” Maki shoots back. “Surely your parents haven’t allowed you to continue running amok?”
“Not amok,” says Rin, and it takes more than that to offend her dandelion gaze. “Competitive running is out of the question, obviously, when they tell me there’s more of a chance that some angry customer stinted on a business deal will put a bullet in my back, but I still do laps around the gym at my summer home. You, Kotori?”
Kotori, still scarlet around her creamy ears, smiles now, a real smile, one not like diamonds but like sunshine. “If I could be a fashion designer, I would. I invited Horacio Gulli tonight, actually – have you seen him? I thought about showing him my childhood designs, but, oh, it was embarrassing. So much lace.”
“Nonsense,” Eli urges, “you were so good. You’re probably still amazing. Maybe you can design on the side.”
“I have to be designing lesson plans for the whole country, now,” sighs Kotori. “What about you, Eli? What do you miss from before we grew up?”
There’s a horrible silence. Eli can’t remember the last time she did something for herself instead of the Magisterium. Thrall whimpers.
A bell from further inside the party sails through the air, clear as crystal. Dinner is ready.
**
At home, Eli reads the newspaper.
It might be a little low-class to have to read the morning news when scrying glasses and servile witches deliver updates from across the country fast as light, but there’s something nice about the crinkling of paper between Eli’s perfectly manicured nails and the plain, reassuring checkered black-and-white print lines. Thrall likes to chew on the corners, too, so it’s a good deal all around.
The kitchen staff brings Eli a platter of breakfast foods, hot and greasy, and Eli reaches around the edges of her paper and gropes the mahogany table until her finger come into contact with a roll, which she chews thoughtfully. Her father comes down the stairs, through the hall and into the dining room. She can tell by the lumping noises of his echidna daemon. He turns on the glass radio without speaking to her, and by the wind that rustles her paper, Eli can tell the staff is bringing him breakfast as well.
There’s a peaceable sort of silence – it’s broken occasionally by the guards and their wolf daemons sometimes growling at each other, or Eli’s father cursing at something the radio’s saying, but it’s a nice morning overall. After about twenty minutes, there’s a scrabbling of paws on the hardwood surface, and Eli’s father snarls.
“What the hell is this?” he wants to know, and Eli lowers the paper, and Thrall barks, sharp and shrill.
Her little sister, Alisa, has come down for breakfast in a pretty yellow sundress. It makes her strawberry hair shine. Behind her is a big golden retriever. Eli shivers in horror, because like any person, she knows a settled daemon when she sees one.
The staff retreats to the kitchens, banging pots and pans most convincingly, and Eli’s too afraid to rise and retreat from the room. She can’t abandon Alisa like this.
“A cur?!I My own daughter has the soul of a mangy dog?” Alisa takes the yelling stoically, her thin thirteen-year-old expression composed into the poker face the Ayases have been taught from birth. “How dare you, Alisa. We did not raise you to be this inappropriate – it’s against everything we stand for an elite young lady to have a dog daemon. You were… you were groomed to be better than this.” Her father is almost spitting. “What kind of servile trash have you become?”
“Nobody can help it,” Thrall mumbles into Eli’s ear, jumping up to paw her shoulder sadly. Looking at her little sister being berated, her heart feels like it’s coming out of her chest.
“No,” she whispers back, “they can’t.”
On the radio, a newsclip is playing. Eli can’t raise her newspaper, and though she hasn’t really spoken to Alisa since they were children, she can’t bear to see her sister cry. The announcer is talking about a proposed bill in the Ministry of Law – “Intercision, folks, you heard it here first! Since the drama between the Magisterium Boards of Governors and Health, the Law office has proposed a new way of dealing with criminals rather than sending them to the blades of experimenters – find out in ten minutes when we get back!” Nobody comments on this. Eli’s father is still hissing venom at Alisa, pointing violently.
Eli hates herself, but she gets up, grabs Thrall into her arms, and leaves through the kitchen door. Thrall bites her for being a coward, and she knows she deserves it.
“Are you ashamed of my form?” asks Thrall as they pelt up the carved staircases, the shrieking of her father and the horrible hisses of air finally escaping her sister’s lips following them.
“No,” says Eli, and presses her fingertips into Thrall’s coarse fur, feeling the short, spiky hairs against her nails. She tells the truth. “Foxes are clever. We’re acceptable to them.”
“It’s our destiny,” says Thrall.
“Yes,” is all Eli can say, and she closes the doors to her wing gratefully.
**
“Goodbye, dear,” trills Eli’s mother from the foyer, and Eli comes out of the sitting room with a book in one hand and a bandage in the other. “We’re off to the office – oh, I made that rhyme, didn’t I? Aren’t I clever?”
“The cleverest,” says Eli unthinkingly. “Goodbye.”
Her parents are still fiddling with their cases and papers by the door, guards with wolves before them and behind them. Alisa is somewhere in the mansion, granted, but Eli knows she will never find her sobbing little sister. She’s too good at hiding, after all these years. A great shame settles in Eli’s stomach like a lump of crystal hanging from the chandeliers. At least Alisa has a superior dog daemon. That means she’s destined to be a superior servile.
A nattering ring echoes through the house. Eli’s nearest to the telephone in the entryway, but she stands where she is as a maid sprints down two flights to catch it, her panting Chihuahua daemon half a step behind, the majority of the master Ayase family watching her curiously.
“It’s Hoshizora Rin,” says the maid, one hand covering the speaker.
“The eldest Ayase daughter?” the maid says into the phone, and turns her eyes to Eli with a clear question. Eli nods, and the maid says thankfully, “Yes, she’s here. One moment, ma’am.”
“Excellent choice of friends,” Eli’s father calls up the landing. “She’ll be going far in the world – stick with people like her, Eli.”
“This is Ayase Eli.” Her parents finally move out the door.
“Hi!” says Rin’s voice, and even though it’s reasonably early in the morning, her tone is laced with cheer and sunshine. “I was thinking we should catch up some more since the party! It’s been a few days, so I thought we could go out into the city for some fun.”
“That’s vague,” says Eli, settling in to lean on the wall.
“Mistress Ayase, I do wish you wouldn’t scratch the wallpaper,” says the maid frettfully as Thrall sharpens his claws.
“Thrall, what are you doing?”
“Sorry.”
“What?” asks Rin.
“Oh. Yes, I’ll come into the city. Should I order a liter or our carriage?” says Eli, snapping back to the conversation.
“No need,” slings Rin into the phone. “I’ve got one of those fancy new machines. I’ll meet you on your lands about noon.”