Chapter Text
Keigetsu had told herself she wasn't going to do this.
She had said her piece under the pavilion, made her point about not needing anyone's help, and she'd meant every insufferable, prideful word of it — right up until the moment Reirin turned and walked away with that same maddening, ramrod-straight posture, and Keigetsu had wanted, quite badly, to throw her teacup at the back of her head.
She hadn't thrown it. She'd sat through Houshun's questions and Seika's scolding and even choked out a thank-you to that insufferable Kin girl, because Reirin was always saying how proud she'd be if Keigetsu learned to do that without being begged. She had done everything right, for once, and it hadn't felt like anything at all.
So no. She was not going to go check on her.
...
She went to check on her.
The cloisters at Cloud Ladder Gardens ran long and dark between torches, and Keigetsu — currently occupying a body that fainted if you so much as raised your voice at it — took them slowly, one hand trailing the railing, silently daring anyone to ask what "Kou Reirin" was doing wandering the grounds at this hour. The prince's shadow had already come and gone from the door at the end of the east wing; she'd waited for that much, at least, crouched behind a thoroughly undignified pillar until he took his leave. No sense explaining herself to him on top of everything else.
She knocked once, softly, and let herself in before she could lose her nerve.
"What are you—" Reirin, sitting on the edge of the bed with her skirt hiked to the knee, went rigid with the particular guilt of someone caught red-handed. She was working a wet cloth over her own calf — Keigetsu's calf, technically, striped an ugly mottled purple and crossed with thin, half-dried lines where branches had opened the skin. "I told the maids I didn't need—"
"You told the maids a lot of things tonight, apparently." Keigetsu shut the door and crossed the room before Reirin could rearrange the hem she'd so carefully arranged an hour ago, under torchlight, in front of everyone. Up close, in the honest dark, she could see how badly the girl was shaking. "You ran the whole way down that mountain, didn't you. And then you stood there telling me it was nice that His Highness made it in time, like I'd asked about the weather."
"It was nice."
"That's not what I meant and you know it."
Reirin didn't answer that. She went back to the cloth, dabbing with a care that was almost insulting given how badly her hands were shaking, and Keigetsu — who had spent the whole walk over rehearsing something cutting about not needing rescuing, thank you very much, she'd handled the emperor of Ei perfectly well on her own — found she couldn't say any of it, not with the evidence sitting right in front of her.
She knelt down instead and took the cloth out of Reirin's hands without asking.
"I didn't run because I thought you needed rescuing," Reirin said quietly, to the top of Keigetsu's head, since that was easier than saying it to her face. "I ran because I couldn't stand not knowing. And then I got here and you were fine, and everyone was fine, and I felt like the world's greatest fool for putting myself through that for nothing — so I said something appropriately fine right back and let you send me away. I don't think I did that very well."
"You didn't. For the record." Keigetsu kept her eyes on the bruise. "You looked like you'd swallowed a fence post."
"I felt like it, too."
That surprised a short, unwilling laugh out of Keigetsu — the first honest sound either of them had made all night. She set the cloth aside and, for lack of anything cleverer to do with her hands, took Reirin's between her own — her own hands, technically, worn rough now in ways they'd never been before the swap — and held them still.
"I wanted you to be proud of me," she admitted, low, the words costing her something. "Out there. I wanted you to say it. Not just think it where I couldn't hear."
"I am proud of you. I have been the entire time you were sitting under that pavilion, being unbearably composed and thanking Kin Seika like a civilized person." Reirin's mouth curved, small and real. "I simply thought you'd earned the right to hear it from someone whose opinion mattered less to you than mine does. I didn't want to make your victory about myself."
"It's a little bit about you regardless. That's what happens when someone steals your body and then refuses to fall apart in front of her afterward." Keigetsu exhaled, and some of the evening's careful posture went out of her along with it. "Stop hiding your legs from me, by the way. They're my legs at the moment. I'd like to know if they're broken."
"They're not broken."
"I didn't ask what you thought I wanted to hear."
Reirin, for once, didn't argue. She let the hem fall the rest of the way open and sat still while it was looked at properly, which was, Keigetsu suspected, the closest thing to admitting she still needed looking after that Kou Reirin was ever going to manage in one sitting.
It would do. Keigetsu could work with that.