A Hazy Full Moon
June 5th. Five in the morning.
The sky was still dark, but a faint dawn had begun to pale along its edge.
And the bed where Perzen and Laura sat was soaked in red.
His shirt hung open, and dried blood had settled thick across his body. Here and there the marks of teeth stood out, sharp and unmistakable. The wounds were so disordered that symmetry was beyond imagining, and so—apart from the exhaustion of a night spent awake—Perzen was, fortunately, under no particular strain of mind.
“Ah…”
Laura had been held back, again and again, from tearing flesh toward his heart. At the very moment she meant to twist her own hand and threaten him with a harm done to herself, she came back to herself like someone waking after a murder committed in a rage she could not master. Her whole body shook as she stared at his bare torso.
“Is your head working properly now?”
“Th…”
Under the clear stare of those crimson eyes she tried to draw back, but the quirk had kept her steeped, without pause, in a pleasure no words could reach. Her legs had gone slack, and they would not obey her.
“Your reason is still in there with it, I see. So you can think.”
Perzen reached out and wiped her lips with his thumb. His blood, smeared across her mouth, spread like lipstick and left a suggestive stain.
“Laura de Charles Rosenberg.”
“Y-yes…”
“I’ll return your altar.”
The rosary settled into his bloodstained hand.
“If you’ve spilled the water, you ought to wipe it up.”
She understood at once what he wanted of her. She opened her subspace and hauled out disinfectant and a jumble of medicines all at once. The sensible order of things would have been to use the corpse of the elemental magician she kept, and wash the blood from his wounds before anything else—but she was too flustered for even that much sequence. She simply uncapped the bottle.
The faint smell of alcohol spread, and made the raw, metallic reek of blood filling the room all the sharper.
“I-I’m s-sorry…”
She retched, her face crumpling, and apologized. She knew perfectly well that a single sentence would not begin to suffice. So she tore her clothes off almost as if she meant to rip them, and came to stand before him.
“P-Professor, you should… d-do the s-same… t-to me…”
“Enough.”
A small body, frail and narrow. At the center of her modest breasts, pink nipples stood shy from the aftermath of pleasure, holding beads of sweat like dew. She might have looked not quite ripened—but through the smell of sweat that had run down her, the unmistakably carnal scent of a woman rose from between her legs, and left no doubt that she was a woman, not a girl.
“If I paid you back in kind, I wonder whether your body could even endure it.”
Perzen smiled and took her slender waist in his hands.
“Look.”
“Nnh…!”
“A little force, and you bend like a flower. And…”
“I-it hurts…!”
“Press any harder here, and that alone will leave a red handprint on your skin. Bite flesh that frail, scratch it with nails, and the scars would likely remain forever.”
He took his hand away and went on.
“Your future husband would be delighted to see them, I’m sure.”
“…”
“Don’t thrash about trying to lighten your guilt. Treat me, and be quiet about it.”
She had no choice but to obey. She drew out the elemental magician’s corpse she kept and washed the blood from his wounds until they were clean, then dampened cotton with disinfectant and dabbed it on with the greatest care. Ointment followed, and bandages, and she dressed every wound with meticulous hands.
“I-I’m finished…”
After a long while she drew her hands back, knelt like a dog watching its master’s mood, and clasped her hands rather tightly while she waited for whatever he would say next.
“You did well.”
Perzen gave the work a brief look, buttoned the bloodstained shirt without expression, and rose. Laura reached out and caught the hem of his clothes in a soft grip.
“A-at the very least… l-let me make it up… f-for the clothes…”
“No need.”
She was a daughter of Rosenberg, whatever else she was. He held her leash, but there was no harm in letting a debt accumulate. The moment he refused, though, her face crumpled toward tears.
“Do you want to write the guilt off that badly?”
“N-not write it off, exactly…”
He had been about to leave once the last button was done. Instead he looked down at her in silence. She was naked but for her panties, and only now did she hastily cover her pink nipples and bow her head.
The bed creaked as he sat on its edge.
“It was roughly nine hours and forty minutes, so ten strokes, rounded up, ought to be enough. What do you think?”
“Yes…?”
He did not answer the question. She knew well enough what those ten strokes meant. Shame alone had made her ask.
“…”
“…”
Silence turned in the room. She glanced once at his bloodstained shirt.
“I-I understand…”
At last she nodded. She crawled to him on all fours like a dog, laid her stomach across his knees, and lowered herself with care.
Fabric slid.
“Ah…!”
The smack landed.
“Hiek!”
Set against that small, slender frame, her bottom was plump with a fair amount of flesh, and under his large hand it flushed red. Worse than the pain, though—what shamed her most—was the blatantly lewd scent of a woman spreading, naked, from beyond the panties he had drawn down.
“P-please… l-let me breathe… th-through my mouth…”
She buried her face in the bedding and begged him in a very small voice.
Another smack.
“Aagh!”
The plea might as well not have been spoken. He struck her again in silence—a second, a third, a fourth.
“Hngh…”
Not even five minutes passed. Clutching her burning backside, Laura pushed herself up and watched his back as he took up an umbrella.
“The sheets, the blanket, and—while you’re at it—finish the cleaning, then return to the Academy. This much shouldn’t be difficult.”
“Yes…”
She nodded. He opened the black umbrella, opened the door, and walked out at an easy pace.
The door shut.
Laura let out a heavy sigh.
Not all of it, just as he had said. Still, she remembered a great deal. The beginning, especially—those first moments after the quirk had seized her—was painfully clear.
I’ve lost my mind…
That she would take his seed. That she would burst his heart the instant before he came. The words she had stammered out came back to her, and she seized her white hair and tore at it in a self-harm that was not quite self-harm. Her reason had been there the whole time. She had not even needed to be pinned so the quirk could not run its course; she had threatened him by stopping her own breath, by trying to deal herself a fatal wound. And he had accepted it, and been hurt in silence.
The weight in her chest grew heavier. She had thought of him, inwardly, as a greenhorn. He was a grown man, and a steady one.
“…”
She drew her knees in and wiggled her toes. Rain pattered at her ear. Listening, she felt mind and body settle by degrees. Then she looked at his blood on her fingertips.
She licked it.
She did not know why. The taste was, as she had expected, sharply metallic. But each time that taste spread through her mouth, the feeling of having clawed his flesh with this hand and bitten his body with her teeth seemed to stir faintly back to life, and the sensation turned strange. Was some thin aftermath of the quirk still in her? A tingling excitement gathered in her body. Sure enough, when she slid a hand down and drew it along herself, a clear, suggestive wetness came away on her fingers.
It clung. The viscosity was astonishing—rub the fingers together, and it stuck worse than honey, drawing out in long threads.
“Ha…”
She stared at it, then pressed a hand to her brow and let out a hot, strengthless breath.
I’m like a pervert…
Self-loathing deepened without bottom or end. She shook her head, forced herself up, changed her clothes, and—as he had asked—cleaned the shabby house until it was spotless.
She returned to the Academy, and still there was no time to rest. She took up letter paper and sat at the desk.
The vacation. If the quirk was to be kept in check, she had to remain at Perzen’s side no matter what. He had told her to take her time and slowly alter the smokescreen she had already laid, and if that groundwork was to be set, now was the only moment for it.
But what was she supposed to say? No other pretext came readily to mind. Going up to Ruerug over the vacation in order to become the domain’s territorial mage would not be taken at face value. It would tangle with the smokescreen already in the air and invite a worse misunderstanding still.
Even so, there’s nothing else I can use right now…
She tapped the nib against the white paper. When no better plan offered itself, she began to set the matter down in a beautiful hand.