So we like HaruMichi BatB, huh? Here’s part two! Part one is here

Also, reminder that comments keep stories alive 🙂

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It had been a very long time since the curse had brought her something more than wariness. Michiru had stopped counting the days and years, resigning herself to be as she was until the world turned to dust.

“Michiru, do you think she might be the one?” The shade of her lady in waiting asked as she combed what passed for Michiru’s hair. The time would come soon when she would not be able to, Michiru was certain. Makoto was barely a shadow now. Michiru’s closest attendants had been casualties of the curse, and now they had faded into ghosts.

“Do you think she knows my daughter?” Her handmaid Usagi twiddled with the vanity mirror, tilting Michiru’s reflection in and out of focus. “She must be at least… two and twenty by now!”

Time no longer tethered the shades. The came in and of consciousness, sometimes worn down by the decades— perhaps the centuries— sometimes feeling they’d all been human but a day ago.

“There is no one.” Michiru stood. “It is only in stories that curses break.” And yet… It was not that she felt hope, exactly. It was something more like fear. You shall be made to feel as low as you make others feel, and then a hundred-fold more. If the curse were to be broken, it would be because she fulfilled its terms.

“She is rather handsome,” Makoto said, her voice soft enough that Usagi would not hear. “You fancy her.”

Michiru curled her long tail around herself. It was more than the girl’s looks that called to her. “She sat on the floor.” She had not recognized it in the moment, but as she had turned the night over and over in her mind, it had struck her.

Makoto did not have face enough to smile, but her warmth came through all the same. “She is the opposite of what he was.”

“You have always been to blunt.”

“Forgive me, my lady.”

Michiru stared into the mirror. She had been a beautiful lady once, the envy of near every court woman and the desire of every man. And now… she was a diamond, crumbled into coal. “I cannot look presentable for dinner, can I?”

“Oh, my lady,” Usagi cried, having lost none of the bounce her physical form had. “Beauty comes from inside, she’ll surely see that.”

It was an easy belief for someone like Usagi, low of birth with no great beauty, who’d had her pick of the townsmen anyway. She could not see that Michiru had never had that sort of light inside her. If the saying were true, Haruka would recoil from her all the same.

She took her leave and wound her way towards the dining hall slowly. She had forgotten what it was to want. The perversity of her form felt new again, the way it bent along the stairs, the way she could feel bones and muscle and scales in places they shouldn’t be, the way her fingers were jointed to accommodate claws. It was easy to not feel like a monster when there was no one to see her but her shades.

Michiru took a breath outside the doors. She was a well-bred lady, whatever she looked like. She would carry herself with decorum worthy of her blood, and come what may.

Haruka looked small, sitting at the grand table, surrounded by empty chairs. She had not touched the small pile of food before her, nor had she changed out of the clothes she arrived in.

“Have you found nothing to your liking?”

“What?”

Michiru gestured to her garb.

“Oh… I… I haven’t looked.” She stood. “I can go change, if you want, I didn’t mean—“

“There is no need. I merely want you to be comfortable.”

Haruka sat back down, but Michiru saw in her eyes that she was never going to be comfortable here. She took a seat at the far end of the table, to give her space. Haruka took food in silence. Michiru stared at her place setting.

She had not bothered with proper silverware for what felt like ages. Her hands shook. She could not hold them right, with the claws. They clattered against each other as she tried, every movement of her fingers left deep scores in the tabletop. The whole table shook each time she attempted to pick up her fork. She let her arms fall to the side and resigned herself to a dinnerless night.

Haruka looked at her from the corner of her eye, but quickly turned back to her food.

This had been a terrible idea. All Michiru had done was make her monsterousness all the clearer.

“I do apologize,” she said, rising. “I do not seek to burden you.” Perhaps it would be better to let her go, rather than face further humiliation. She made for the door.

“You don’t  have to go.” Haruka’s voice shook. “If I’m going to be stuck here, I might as well have company.”

Michiru let her claws sink into the wood around the door handle. “If you fear loneliness, I can send others to keep you company.”

“There are others?”

“Ghosts, or something like them. But I assure you, you will enjoy their company much more than mine.” She propelled herself from the room, grateful and repulsed at how fast her body could move. Shame stung at her eyes. The once great Lady Kaioh was now nothing but an ugly fool. She retreated to her room, her one small piece of luck being that her ladies had gone elsewhere for the night.

The vanity mirror taunted her. Look at the monster, see how it cries. She how it dares now to act like it has a human heart, when inside it has always been this. See how—

She swung her scraggy, boney fist, and it shattered. It did not matter how the shards cut into her knuckles, nor how the pieces on the floor sliced her tail as she moved. It did not matter when a monster bled or cried. And a monster was what she was, only that and nothing more.