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It wasn’t easy being the mortal, fleshy girlfriend of a single Noble, much less Lady Margaret and Lord Simon at the same time. However, Lilian applied herself to the task with gusto, even when she was being dragged by Lord Simon and their metamour, Lady Jessica, three thousand fathoms under the sea.
“My Lilian, my Lilian!” Lord Simon bubbled excitedly, the fog on his visor making him look like a blind cyclops as he ambled over to her. “Look what I found!”
She recoiled only a little when she saw her boyfriend handling a giant octopus the size of a small car, bio-enhanced strength letting him wield it like a small cat. In earlier days, it would only be Helen or perhaps Gordon who would pull off such a Herculean feat with ease, but now that all of the Lords and Ladies of Radham had the blood of nobility flowing through their veins, it hardly fazed her at all.
“Put it down, Lord Simon,” Lilian gurgled through the short-distance radio transmitter. “Or you’re going to ruin the god-damn diving suit that Duncan and I spent so long making!”
“Hey!” Her boyfriend chuckled. “Everything we make in Radham is damned by God. That should be our tagline or something.”
“I’m serious, m’Lord! You’re going to hurt yourself!”
“Oh, your face is so adorable when it goes all pink from screaming bloody murder at me,” Lord Simon teased, pinching Lilian on the arm. “You know… I know another way that’ll make you go pink with a very different type of screaming involved.”
Thankfully, Lady Jessica pirouetted to her metamour’s rescue, kicking off a nearby rotten plank of wood and snatching the octopus out of their mutual boyfriend’s hands. The octopus went careening into the abyss beyond the shipwreck, followed by an angry trail of bubbles. Lilian saw Lady Jessica wince a little upon landing next to her, but she returned to her abnormally graceful stance in less than a millisecond.
“You have my infinite gratitude, m’Lady,” Lilian said, doing a short curtsey at her. Lady Jessica gave a nod of acknowledgment, cheeks flushing a beautiful rose color.
“Lord Simon, it is rude to shove a giant octopus into the face of a Lady, much less one whom you are dating,” said Lady Jessica, making a tsk-tsk sound with her tongue. “You have a reputation of good manners and gentility to uphold.”
“Who’s going to see us down here! We’re in the god-forsaken Mariana Trench, Lady Jessica!
“A Lord or Lady never knows when he’s being watched,” Lady Jessica chided, pulling Lilian close to herself. “Take five and come back when you’ve cooled off. We’ll be standing right here.”
Lord Simon balked at that, the features of his face exaggerated by the helmet’s visor.
“What if I start hallucinating again once I can’t see you, Jessie!” exclaimed Lord Simon, forgetting the proper honorifics in his huff-iness. “What’re you going to do then?”
“That has gotten a lot better ever since we became Nobles,” Lady Jessica said, rolling her eyes in a perfect arc. “Besides, if you hallucinated every time you didn’t see one of us, then you couldn’t blink or sleep, now could you?”
“Okay, but what if you leave me down here,” he said pathetically, throwing fistfuls of sand into the water above them. “I’ll never find my way back to the surface without you or Lil' to guide me!”
“I think my Lady is right, Lord Simon,” Lilian chimed in, nervously straightening the folds in her diving suit. “We’ll be right behind you. Don’t worry.”
“I feel betrayed, Lil',” Lord Simon said, holding his heart like she’d shot an arrow into it. “I can only handle one of my beautiful girlfriends negging me at a time! Two of them double teaming me at once - well! We’ll have to sort this out in the bedroom later, won’t we?”
Lilian tossed a rock at the space just above Lord Simon’s head using her wyvern-enhanced aim, close enough to shoo him away. When he was finally gone, Lilian and her metamour collapsed into a tangle of limbs, knocking their diving helmets together with a light clonk.
“Thanks a lot, Lil'. For backing me up there,” Lady Jessica said with a pearly-white smile.
“No, thank you, J-Jessie,” Lilian said, feeling more than a little awkward about using her friend’s former name. She’d trained herself so hard to avoid them while at Court that they felt almost sacrilegious to say out loud. “He’s so annoying sometimes. How do you deal with it?”
“I could ask the same of you,” Jessie sighed. “I only have to deal with one of him. You have him and Mary to deal with.”
‘Lady Margaret’ had been very much against her going down to the Mariana Trench with Sy and Jessie, and only some of it was out of jealousy. With their duties at Court, all of them had only a tiny amount of time to dedicate to their relationships with one another, especially their friendships. It had been almost a month since Lilian had even seen Jessie at Court, much less go on a fun trip with her to some ridiculous extremity of the world. It was nice to see her old friend, especially after all the time that they’d lost during the insanity of their young adulthoods.
“Lady M— I mean, Mary. She’s a lot to handle, but in a different way from Sy, if that makes sense? Sy is all big emotions and fireworks, while Mary is like a slow burning fire,” Lilian said, feeling like she was explaining it somewhat poorly.
Jessie at least pretended to follow along. “I think that Sy will only get better with more time to heal. The damage from his Wyvern usage can never be undone, but they can be worked around and managed.”
“And I want to give him time to heal, but…” Lilian trailed off, staring up at the vast and crushing weight of pitch-black ocean above them, illuminated by the wavering light of their diving suits. “The Court of Radham keeps us busy. Like super busy. How are we supposed to find time to heal when our feet are constantly sore with dancing?”
“Oh, Sy would go insane without the dancing at Court. Most of us would,” tittered Jessie. “But we’re all healing from our wounds in our own ways. Lord Asher is helping with the gardens. Lady Helena is on sabbatical. Even Lady Margaret has found some peace in doll-making, hasn’t she?”
Lilian pulled her hand through the diving suit to scrounge up the little warbeast doll that Lady Margaret had given her. She pulled up into the vizor for Jessie to see, almost smacking herself with the plushie as it floated around her head.
“That’s wonderful,” Jessie said, a tear welling in her eye as she squeezed Lilian’s hand. “I’m so happy that the two of you were able to work something out.”
“It’s hard balancing my time with her and Sy,” Lilian said, pulling the warbeast doll back into her suit. “But I love them both so much that I’d balance the two of them for the rest of my life if I had to.”
“Oh, honey,” Jessie said, eyes watery and almost white behind her visor. “We appreciate it so much. I appreciate you so much. Thank God that we’re still alive and friends.”
Lilian felt a melancholy hole in her chest at Jessie’s words. They were still alive, and they were still friends, but at what cost? More than half of them were Nobles now, whose self-appointed duties were far-ranging and involved a constant risk of bodily danger to themselves and others. Lilian and the rest of the Lambs were still alive, but they were of a fundamentally different substance than the Lords and Ladies of Radham. Jessie or Mary could treat her as a peer and equal, but they would never be seen as anything other than an odd curiosity - a commoner who dared to love Nobility.
“I love you, Jessie—as a friend, y’know? And I want to see you more often than I do. Maybe Sy could arrange…” said Lilian, noticing Jessie’s pulse get oddly weaker through the suit.
All of a sudden, Jessie coughed up a wad of blood as she clutched at her right side. Lillian noticed with alarm that her hand was over a puncture wound, too small to notice at first but weeping now with venomous-filled pus.
“Holy shit, Jessie!” Lilian cried, apparently loud enough for Lord Simon to take notice and speed back to the two of them.
“What the hell—!” Lord Simon shouted upon seeing the wound. “Lilian, what happened?”
“I think the giant octopus bit her on the way down!” Lilian said, panic filling her voice as Lord Simon rushed to pick Lady Jessica up. “We need to bring her back to the ship.”
“I’ll swim. Hang on,” Lord Simon said curtly, as he grabbed her with his free hand. Immediately, they darted off at the speed of sound, the dark and forbidding ocean easily parting in front of them. Lilian trembled as she felt her heart leap in her throat, but thankfully it was over in less than a minute, and they were in the submarine that Lord Simon had prepared for them.
“I need my shears! They’re in the other room.” Lilian shouted, and Lord Simon rushed to fulfill her request. When he was out of sight, she tore the diving suit away from the legs down, revealing the blackened skin underneath, and set to work isolating the venom.
Thankfully, she’d thought to bring every antivenom known to man aboard the ship. She hadn’t gotten a chance to ID the octopus, which must have been some sort of escaped lab experiment, but she got something that was close enough and administered it with haste.
“Don’t… look—” Jessie mumbled. “No one should see…”
“Don’t worry, love,” Lilian snickered. “Sy’s in the other room looking for shears that don’t exist. You’re okay.”
“No,” Jessie said, trying to hide her legs with the ruined pants from Lilian’s sight. “Don’t look here.”
“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, I promise.”
And then Lilian saw them. Wire work scars that criss-crossed up and down Jessie’s legs, long since healed. Self-inflicted, she realized with a start.
“What the fuck, Jessie?” Lilian whispered, tears immediately welling in her eyes. “These scars! Did you—”
“It was stupid but it helped,” Jessie snipped. “Don’t tell Lord Simon.”
“I won’t, but…”
“This will be a matter for discussion later, Dr. Garey,” Jessie stated coldly, transforming into Lady Jessica right before Lilian’s eyes. “Now, work.”
Lilian sobbed quietly to herself as she finished fixing her friend up, feeling more keenly than ever the emotional rift that now yawned between them. The wounds were so old that this must have started before she’d become a Noble, maybe even before she had left the Academy with Sy. Just how alone had Jessie been this entire time, even when she was in the company of the Lambs.
At that moment, Lilian wished so selfishly that Jessie had told her first. That whatever friendship they had as children carried over to the present moment. But she knew why Jessie hadn't—word would get out eventually, and Sy would lose whatever progress he had made as soon as he learned about it, blaming himself first and foremost. Sy was simply too fragile to handle the truth of what Jessie did to herself behind closed doors, and Lilian couldn’t find it within herself to be angry with either of them.
Lord Simon finally made it back to the room, oil inexplicably smeared over his handsome and dumb face. He turned to Lilian and crisply said, “How is Lady Jessica?”
“She’ll be fine,” said Lilian as she hastily pulled the blanket over Jessie’s legs and middle. “The antivenom was administered. She might be out of it for an hour or two before she wakes up.”
“Good,” said Lord Simon, giving Lilian a small kiss on the cheek before moving on to stroke Lady Jessica’s hair. “Thank you, Lilian. Seriously. I don’t know what we would do without you.”
“Happy to help!” Lilian laughed hesitantly. “Just no more giant octopus wrangling on this mission, okay?”
“No promises, honey!" Lord Simon laughed, deep and throaty, and bent down to kiss his other girlfriend. Lilian carefully searched Jessie’s features for any sort of reaction, catching what she thought might be the faintest hint of a smile on her lips, before it smoothed out into the thin and noble face of Lady Jessica.