Chapter Text
Yuri hasn’t thought of the name Bernadetta von Varley of his own volition in ages.
It’s a red mark in his ledger, a faltering failure standing head and shoulders above a sea of sly, hard-won successes. It irks him to dwell on that night, with her still and defenseless and his hand frozen, unable to follow through on a stab he had done countless times before, with far more practice and far less hesitance than a gardner’s assistant his age ought to have had.
He had hesitated then, and he had paid for it. He had escaped with his life, though, and so he struggled forward just the same as ever, putting the sorry affair squarely behind him and forging ahead.
His face healed, flawlessly, as did the bruises and wounds and broken ribs his rather… abrupt exit from the Varley estate left him with. He milked them for sympathy from traveling merchants, reported his failure to the intermediary who would have paid him, and headed west. Once they hit a town bigger than just another podunk village, he disappears into less official channels and retires his garden boy pseudonym for the next one on his list.
He goes through about three new identities and nearly five times as many successful jobs before somebody brings up the name he has most certainly not been thinking about.
“I heard the heir of Varley has been in mourning for her grandfather for years,” his current target says in a salon in Enbarr, murmuring to another boy their age.
The young, lovely noble ladies milling in with the group of young, promising noblemen immediately pounce on the subject.
“Really?” One covers her mouth with her fan in a clumsy parody of shock that turns Yuri’s stomach. Amateurs, the lot of them. “I heard she’s sickly—so frail she can barely use her Crest.”
Hardly. Yuri has to fight back a snort, remembering the girl who trotted after him with all the eagerness and energy of a puppy. The damn shears fiasco had been caused in part by her tripping and double-throwing the tool in question in a Crest-triggered misfire, otherwise he would have spared his face and just dodged properly.
A slightly older girl with a sterner cast to her face—the leftovers from last year’s social debut, Yuri clocks her as soon as he sees her—frowns and shakes her head. “No, I heard that she’s actually quite prodigious when it comes to Dark Magic, like her mother before her, and secludes herself to study.”
Preposterous. The girl he knows…
Knew. Knew. The girl he knew preferred the fine arts to the magical arts hands down, any day of the week. A deft hand with a quill when turned to a purpose that pleased her, sure, but hardly ever for studying.
“Is that so?” A soft, cultured voice breaks in, bright and eager. “My father, Duke Aegir,” says the perfectly coiffed boy who can only be Ferdinand von Aegir, “has recently been in talks with the Count about perhaps arranging a few meetings between his doubtlessly lovely daughter and myself. I must confess my curiosity has been quite piqued!”
Yuri’s killing intent is damn near piqued, because what the hell does this kid think he’s doing? You can’t just say shit like that in the heart of Enbarr of all places. Oblivious as she is to the world outside of the gilded cage that is her ancestral seat, that girl already has too many targets painted on her back than he cares to count; having Future Duchess Aegir pasted on would just be the poisoned cherry on top of it all.
His gut clenches sickly at the thought, because of how heinously politically inept the next Prime Minister is going to grow up to be, surely.
The near-fact that the little airheaded tagalong he remembers wouldn’t last five days with this earnest moron on her arm is a thought that barely ghosts along the back of his mind.
“Chlothar?” His target glances up, brow cocked, jolting Yuri back into the here and now. “What is it? You’re wearing the oddest look right now.”
Shit.
No. No, this is fine, it’s Yuri, he can handle this. ...well, technically it’s ‘Chlothar’ at that particular moment, but that’s semantics.
“Well,” he drawls out softly, eyes down, the very picture of respect and reluctance. “That is—my lord must understand, it’s only hearsay, of course. But servants talk to servants who... occasionally... talk to far-off relatives in the Varley territory. I may have heard some things myself.”
“Well, don’t leave us hanging in suspense!” The fan-girl trills, eyes glinting.
“Yes,” his target agrees. “What have you heard about the mysterious Miss Varley?”
Yuri hems and hesitates, a perfect servant torn between obedience and propriety, and in the meantime leafs through what he knows about the Prime Minister’s son—his weaknesses, his preferences…
And, of course, his fears.
Back behind his own eyes, Yuri smiles in a way that is all teeth. On the outside, he gives the gossiping baby nobles a doleful, defeated look and bows his head, speaking quietly. As one, they mindlessly lean in, hook, line, and sinker.
“You didn’t hear this from me, of course,” he insists, pushing up his fake glasses.
“Of course,” his target assures him.
“We are the very souls of discretion,” Fan-Girl swears to him, doe-eyed, which means that surely every girl of an age in Enbarr will know by dusk tomorrow.
His lips curl brightly in a way that isn’t entirely manufactured, for once.
“Thank you so much, sirs and misses,” he says, straight from the heart. “Now, you didn’t hear this from me, of course, but…”
He spins a tale off the cuff, folding lie in with truth and embellishing it just grandly enough that he knows they’ll eat it up gladly. He talks about her fledgeling attempts at felting little dolls, but phrases it in such a way that a lazy, uninformed mind might jump to thinking of as sinister, rather than a new and innocent crafting project. He weaves the new habit of reclusiveness she has taken to in his absence into something just shy of foreboding. He talks and he talks and he doesn’t lie, really, but it’s hardly his fault that they don’t have the context to properly see the whole of who and what she is.
If they come out of this thinking that her talents are marks against her, well… that’s on them, isn’t it? Who told them to go and take some commoner’s words as gospel?
Ferdinand von Aegir excuses himself from the get-together early, citing a sudden but very urgent matter he just recalled which needed his parents’ attention posthaste, and Yuri allows himself a brief, hidden moment of satisfaction while the rest of the nobles go through the longwinded song and dance of social niceties and farewells.
When they refocus, he steers the conversation towards them pressing him for more under-the-stairs gossip, and segues into talking about a recent rise in the usage of love potions that a certain chamber maid told him about. A few pointed details, an offhanded mention of the signs and flavors he’s supposedly been lead to believe are accurate…
Too easy. Within two days, Yuri’s target breaks up with his daughter-of-a-baronet secret girlfriend, and the young man’s father has paid Yuri as handsomely as he promised.
The (now infamous) daughter of Count Varley has become an overnight boogeyman just as quickly, smothering at least a dozen idle plans for courtship in the cradle.
Pfft. Nobles are honestly so petty it's pathetic, sometimes.
His sense of accomplishment and disdain carries him along a few weeks. It’s bolstered briefly by the latest ingenue the Mittelfrank Opera Company has uncovered, the young and beautiful and common as dirt Dorothea Arnault. The ruling class all but trips over itself to faun over a finely dressed urchin, tossing praise and flowers at her feet—
“I love hearing you sing,” she admits, glancing up at him shyly behind long, purple bangs. “You ought to be on stage!”
“Oh? Tired of me already?”
“Never!” She shakes her head so wildly she nearly topples into the rose bush he’s pruning that day. He catches her before she can. “Not ever. I just… I think you’re so amazing. I never want you to leave but… it’s such a waste for somebody talented like you to be cooped up here with me forever. …i-is that weird to say?”
He stuffs the memory back from whence it came almost violently when his latest ‘employer’ wraps her arms around him from behind, finely-rouged lips pressing up the side of his throat.
“You’ve got such a look in your eyes, darling,” she cooes at him. “It’s a lovely piece, to be sure, but I hadn’t realized just how much you like it. I’ll just have to keep you close so you can see when it hatches, I suppose.”
What the hell is she on about, Yuri wonders, even as he forces himself to melt into her embrace. Belatedly, he realizes that amidst his woolgathering, his gaze had fallen onto an ornate cage in the corner of the boudoir. He focuses on the woman’s voice, rather than what her body is doing.
“The cage is carved from a single piece of white jade,” she boasts. “I’m told it took years to craft. The door slides up, but will be too heavy for the chick to lift on its own.”
“The… chick?” Yuri asks, faking a musical moan.
“I suppose it’s no surprise an unworldly creature like you wouldn’t know,” she says, and he counts the ways he could make her choke on those words one by one to keep his body loose and pliant. “It’s a Kinshi egg—they’re terribly rare, and used to be the exclusive mounts of some far off fallen kingdom’s royal family, they say. The birds age slowly, but I’m told their plumage is to die for.”
“Amazing,” Yuri praises her half-heartedly, though luckily she’s too absorbed in her own endeavors to catch on.
He’s able to keep quite a few irons in the fire around that time, when Arnaultomania is in its fever pitch and a pretty lowborn singer is even more of a hot commodity than usual, but he finds that by the time he starts tying up loose ends, something inside of himself has… not so much changed as shifted.
Cooled.
Solidified.
“Sing another for me, won’t you, Gale?”
By chance, he’s with the Kinshi woman his last night in the city. He’s tired, and singing has come to be a chore rather than a talent to be proud of; the thought of another song brings a prick of bile to the back of his throat.
He bats his eyes at her and stretches out in her silky, overly perfumed sheets. “One more song and my voice will be ruined for days. And then how will I ever manage to keep your interest?”
She pouts at him in a way no woman over the age of twenty has a right to even try, and he casts about for a distraction before his threadbare patience snaps entirely. His gaze lands on the jade cage and the now-hatched Kinshu chick, rumpled and butter-yellow and so clearly depressed with its living situation its a wonder the little thing hasn’t done something drastic.
Tiredly, thoughtlessly, he offers a story in place of a song. His mark is delighted to accept.
“Once there was a girl,” he says, eyes still affixed to the chick, mind fogged with a fatigue that goes beyond the physical. “A little noble girl. She had good breeding from her father, and a brilliant beauty for a mother, but she was shy and clumsy and so very… very… delicate.”
He thinks of bruised and scraped knees, teary iron-gray eyes, thinks of soothing words and bloody, soil-smeared, split skin beneath his lips.
He has put his mouth on far filthier things and to far filthier purpose since then, he realizes.
“One day, she met a boy. He worked in her family’s garden,” Yuri continues, because why not? He hadn’t intended to spill the story when he first opened his mouth, but it will save him the effort of coming up with something original, at least. He spreads the whole tale out—the boy, the budding friendship, the good days, the idyllic time spent in that blooming garden, in that gilded, inescapable cage that was her little world.
How the boy was a liar, and a scoundrel, and worse.
How he crept into her room, spied her sleeping, peaceful and unsuspecting, how he raised the blade high—
How he lowered it again, bewildered and frustrated.
“Well, of course he couldn’t do it,” his audience of one scoffs, jolting him out of the memory of that room, that night, that sight of her, pale and dreaming of something pleasant. “There’s no way he could have.”
“Oh?” He forces a laugh, light and airy and flirtatious. “I never took you for a master assassin.” She wouldn’t know one if he was staring her in the face, he thinks spitefully. “Why do you think he couldn’t do it, then?”
She rolls her overly-shadowed eyes. “Gale, sweetheart, don’t bother playing coy over something so obvious. It’s clear as a bell that the boy was in lo—”
She falls back, choking on her own blood.
Yuri blinks, and slowly shifts his gaze from the cage to the blade in his hand. He had lashed out without any conscious thought, on his part, but one way or another she was going to have kicked the bucket before he left her bedroom for the last time. He glances down at her corpse and sneers, the coldest and hardest Enbarr has made him yet in this moment.
“Grow up, you crazy hag.” He wipes the sword off on her stupid, overly-frilly neglige. “Life isn’t some fairytale. It doesn’t work like that.”
He leaves her like that and empties out her purses and jewelry boxes, but a sad little trill stops him before he reaches the balcony for a proper getaway.
He knows he shouldn’t, but he looks back.
The Kinshi chick warbles at him with big, liquid, iron-gray eyes from behind the carved bars of its priceless little cage.
He clenches his jaw.
He crosses paths with Rowe not long after he leaves Enbarr, and the rest, they say, is history. Years pass, choices are made, many a clandestine bargain is struck…
Once Aelfric is dealt with and the professor has endeavored to usher all of the Ashen Wolves under their relentless wing, Yuri finds himself stepping back into old Garreg Mach proper for the first time in what feels like ages. He tilts his head back, lets the wind sift through his hair, ignores Constance’s immediate switch to doom and gloom—
“Linhardt! Edelgard!” A booming voice cuts across the courtyard. “There you guys are! Hubert’s been going absolutely insane. Where’ve you been?!”
Yuri straightens himself, eyes snapping back open, and finds himself looking at a boy with Bergliez blue eyes and a girl’s hind-quarters hoisted prominently up on his shoulder.
It’s certainly not the worst welcome he’s ever received, all things considered. The boy is handsome enough in that bred-for-it Adrestian sort of way, if a bit on the short side, and the derrière is shapely and toned, like the lithe, pale legs attached to it. They’re clad in tight shorts and a skirt a bit more pleated than the standard uniform he recalls, so he imagines the owner of the whole package must either have a history of frequent, swift bursts of running, or equestrian experience.
“Caspar, please,” the Imperial Princess sighs deeply and pinches the bridge of her nose. “We’ve talked about this. Put Bernadetta down.”
Yuri’s brain makes the rough mental equivalent of a dagger scraping across a chalkboard, and his pleasant smile freezes in place.
Caspar probably-von-Bergliez blinks, then laughs. “Whoops. Sorry, Bernadetta!” He bends and releases the girl he had slung over his shoulder like a sack of flour. She scrambles to her feet and whirls around, hands fisting in the hem of her skirt as she pins him with a watery, iron-gray attempt at a glare. She’s small and pale and her purple mop of hair clearly hasn’t seen a comb since the last time he brushed it, but sure enough, it’s Bernadetta von Varley herself.
The last time Yuri felt quite like this, a seventh golem had just appeared like a bolt from the blue, six feet in front of him.
Beside him, Linhardt yawns. It feels as though he hears it from a mile away. “What was that about Hubert?”
Bernadetta lets out a soft whimper and shivers, ire forgotten in the wake of whatever memory that stirs up. Years and lifetimes later, Yuri’s fingers still twitch ever so slightly as he quashes the old urge to reach out and pat her head to soothe her.
“He’s been making us all buddy-up,” Caspar explains to whoever actually cares about that. “Y’know, just in case we disappeared like you guys did, too. Bernadetta slipped out so Hubert said I had to go with her and come back soon, or else.” He snorts, crossing his arms. “Normally I wouldn’t worry, but with you gone? I wouldn’t put it past him to chain us to our desks in the classroom and run headcounts every hour until you got back.”
“I-I can be totally safe by myself! In my room! Alone!”
Her voice hits him like a punch to the gut. It’s lower than it used to be and edged in stress and anxiety from direct and continuous exposure to the mysterious Hubert, apparently, but it’s still the same as he remembers. Same cadence, same faint, petulant extension of syllables, same soft, glum finish for when she knows a victory isn’t and never has been in the cards for her in the argument at hand.
They hadn’t argued much back in the day, given who he was and what he was trying to accomplish, but he had usually won, regardless.
“Bernadetta,” Edelgard says again, this time directly. Yuri’s brain has another dagger-screech moment, before he forcibly reroutes his attention. “We shall address you sneaking out later—”
“Eep!”
“—but as it stands,” the princess continues, either unyielding or used to Bernadetta’s quailing. “I will capitalize on this rare chance and introduce you to the new allies we’ve made recently. Given your… proclivities, it’s entirely possible you’ll run into them when you next see fit to leave your room, and I want to minimize any… undue alarm.”
The tone of her voice carries the tired expectation that undue alarm will definitely still be involved.
“New…?” Bernadetta blinks, and then finally seems to catch sight of the other House members and the Ashen Wolves, who have been watching this entire tableau so far. Her eyes go wide and she trembles, gaze darting from face to face with the expression of a small animal finally seeing a trap as it starts to close in on her.
He knows the exact moment she sees him, because time stops.
Or at least, it feels like that to him; his heart goes still in his chest as their gazes lock, everything fades to the background, the world, it seems, goes still.
He parts his lips, with no conscious decision as to what he could possibly say once his voice unsticks from his throat. He smiles instead, to buy time.
Bernadetta goes bright red, then goes dead white, then lets out a strangled little scream and bolts away from him, running full tilt the whole way.
The world slams back into motion and a thousand excuses for why she might react like that leap to mind, the instinctive need to run damage control and assuage any concerns as to his new status rushing in to fill the void tunneling down from his chest to the pit of his stomach that goes deeper with each step she puts between them.
Edelgard beats him to the punch before he can say any of them.
“Well,” she sighs. “I suppose that went about as well as can be expected.”
Caspar laughs. “Wow, she actually hung around for almost minute this time! Go Bernadetta.”
“Fifty-one seconds,” Linhardt says, his flat tone either mocking or entirely serious. “Easily a new record, compared to how she nearly climbed Ferdinand like a tree to get away after making her greetings to the professor a few months ago.”
“Huh,” Balthus says, squinting after her rapidly shrinking silhouette and rubbing the back of his neck. “Bit of an odd kid. She’s always like that?”
“Not sure you get to call anyone odd, Baltie,” Hilda scoffs. “But yeah, Dorothea says most of the time she couldn’t even get coaxed out of her room to come to class, before the professor started chipping away at her. You guys got pretty lucky, actually seeing her out in the open outside of a mission.”
“Rude,” interjects the Ashen Demon, firm but expressionless as ever, even up here on the surface. “Bernadetta is a good student, and an excellent officer in the making. She just requires… a bit of maneuvering and leverage, to get her into the right place. And the right state of mind.”
“And the right lockpicks too,” Caspar says, without even a hint of irony. “Or that’s what Petra says, anyways. So, where did you all come from, anyways?”
The conversation and introductions meander on, though it takes a second longer for Yuri to tear his eyes away from the last turn Bernadetta took to get away from them.
From him.
He thinks Hapi notices, but she’s too distracted by tending to Constance as they step out into direct sunlight to follow up with him about it. He bounces back to his normal level of wit and charm seamlessly, aside from that first, unexpected hiccup, and resolves to keep up the appearance of business as usual since he has such a ready-made excuse. It’s a simple plan. It’s a good plan.
It survives exactly as long as it takes for Yuri to attend one of the lectures Bernadetta is almost physically dragged to, these days, and he realizes that while she may be infamously reclusive and fearful, she is also actively and explicitly ignoring him.
She picks the desk furthest away from him, when she has a choice. She crawls under her own when his seat is too close for comfort. She skips class more and more. She actively accepts going on missions with other Houses, then makes the most miserable little noise when she realizes that he has been invited along as well.
The professor helps, when the problem becomes so obvious it merits direct intervention, but Bernadetta finds a way to shrink away from him and minimize the amount of time they spend together no matter how many group tasks or lunches they’re paired together for.
More drastic measures may be required.
He lingers at the entrance of the greenhouse for hours, one day, and almost doesn’t realize she has crawled out past him through the greenery until she is already running away with leaves in her hair and dirt on her knees.
Dedue gives him a long, loaded look, and turns back to the flowers he is repotting in silence.
Yuri has never felt so judged, frankly.
The incident is more than a little incendiary, and probably the precipitating cause of why he promptly tosses his current plans aside and turns to actively cornering Bernadetta late one evening in the cathedral after choir practice, which under normal circumstances he’s informed she chooses to avoid as passionately as he does.
She’s humming peacefully, up until the second she sees him. He hears her mutter some nonsense about hiding and stones and blithely ignores it, choosing instead to hail her, brightly.
“Hey, Bernadetta!”
“Ah! You can see me?!”
Okay, not the most auspicious of beginnings, as conflict resolution efforts go, but he’s dealt with worse before.
“Clearly,” he sighs. “You’re a tricky one. Always trying to hide when I’m around.” Even if it drives her to playing dead or crawling through the dirt. There are people—or, well, were people—that he has actively and viciously menaced who are—or were—less desperate to get away from him. Honestly, he’s starting to get a little bit offended over this reception; he never even managed to do anything to her, and he’s still being treated like the second coming of Nemesis himself.
“S-Sorry!” She looks up at him with those big, watery eyes of her, trembling and the very picture of contrition. “Please forgive me!”
“If you want forgiveness, then explain yourself,” he insists, his eyes narrowing. She’s being absurd, asking for forgiveness from the man who once nearly killed her, but he’s sick of beating around the bush. He wants to know what warped logic is making her act like this. “But make it quick,” he tacks on, at that thought. “You always ramble on.”
Bernadetta responds with about as much tact and obedience as she usually does. “Um, well,” she wrings her hands in front of him, and he quashes the urge to grab them and keep her still, the way he did when they were small. “When I was little, my mother and father, they—”
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” he mutters under his breath, before pinning her with an unamused look. “Cut to the chase, please.”
“Uh…” She flinches, then finally spits it out. “You… you remind me of one of my old friends.”
…what?
His brows raise, along with a knot of odd feelings he doesn’t feel inclined to untangle here and now. “Oh come now,” he coaxes, to buy some time. “Whoever this friend of yours is, they can’t possibly compare to me.”
“I’m telling the truth!” Bernadetta insists, stomping one foot against the fine marble with a snap that echoes through the cavernous room around them.
“All right, all right,” he pacifies her, before she makes any more of a scene. He doesn’t want an audience for this, however it shakes out. “What was this friend like, then? The way you run and hide from me, they must’ve been a real piece of work.”
“That’s not it at all,” she says, shaking her head with more determination than he really expected. “My friend was gentle—”
When it suited him, Yuri amends for her. Even way back then, he gave about as good as he got, when he was escaping the Count’s security detail, after all.
“Trustworthy…”
As if, he thinks. He’s not sure who she’s trying to fool. Perhaps she’s worried about other people listening in, too.
“Gorgeous.”
Always, he has to admit, and preens a bit despite his lingering annoyance with her fussiness.
“And... well, he was the only person who was ever nice to me,” she says, still just as embarrassingly open and candid as he remembers. “We used to run around the gardens playing together.” A fragile, fond smile steals across her face.
“And why is it you keep running away from me?” Yuri steers this interrogation back on target, before they both get lost down the winding path of memory lane.
She freezes, and the smile melts away. “That’s, uh…” She shrinks back, but he made sure to cut off any avenues of escape, this time. “D-Do I really have to say? We hardly even know each other!”
I knew you better than anyone, he snarls back in his head, with far more vitriol than he expected or such a statement really merits in the first place. He makes sure it doesn’t leak out, and shakes his head with an artful sigh. “You never have to do anything,” he assures her, as if there’s actually a chance of him letting her go without settling this, one way or another. “But if you don't, you and I won't have a shot at knowing one another, and you'll carry on avoiding me forever.”
“But that’s no good either!” Gratifyingly, she wilts at the very thought. “…okay, okay! I’ll tell you!” She bites her lip, takes a deep breath, and stares hard at the floor, each successive word coming out like pulling teeth. “The thing is, because of me, he got in trouble. After that, I never saw him again.”
He knows that part, though he wouldn’t quite phrase it that way himself, but he manages to keep from showing any outward impatience.
“You see,” she says, still hesitant and defeated. “My father hated commoners, and when he found out I was spending a lot of time with one… Well…”
He wants to tell her to stop dressing it up so prettily, to call it what it was—a betrayal, a lie, worse—but something snaps in her and her head whips up, and he’s stunned into silence by the tears swimming in her eyes and the look of utter, unmistakeable self-loathing painted clear across her face.
“He's probably dead now! ” She wails.
His jaw drops open, slightly, but she pays him no mind.
“And it's all my fault! It's 'cause of me! He… he must've hated me!” She continues, distraught but unstoppable.
“That… ugh.” He reels back, each cry of dismay landing like a haymaker from Balthus. “That doesn’t sound right to me.” Any of it. “Why would you think all that? Nothing you did would make his death your fault.” Frankly, Bernadetta was the only true innocent in that catastrophe of an assassination. “And hating you for something that isn’t your fault is absolutely absurd—delusional, even.”
He can’t even begin to wrap his mind around blaming her. For… any part of it, really.
“You’re wrong!” She insists, which is… just as… absurd to say…
Oh.
Oh, he realizes. She really… doesn’t understand what going on at all, does she? Or what happened back then, for that matter.
“He'd definitely hate me if he knew!” She finally looks at him, her expression defiant and despairing in equal measure. “How would you know, anyway? What, did you know my friend or something?”
“In a manner…” He fights the urge to rub his face, scrapping the mangled remains of his original plan entirely. “Right.” There’s only one way to get through to her on this one, he supposes. “So, remember back when you were a kid? You tripped while holding some gardening shears. And your friend got cut pretty badly.”
She hems and haws for a moment, her brow knitting in thought before recollection dawns. “Oh yeah! I remember…” She had better. It was a miracle he came out of it without a scar. “But… how did you know about that?”
“If I bore you any ill will,” he assures her, “it would have been for cutting my face with those damn shears.”
“Cutting your face…” she sputters weakly. “Shears… But! There’s no way!”
“But there is,” he counters mercilessly. “That friend? That was me, Bernadetta.” He claps her on the shoulder, feeling light and bright all of a sudden. It felt good, to finally say that to her. “Anyway, I'm glad I finally got to hear how you felt about all of that. Let's spend time together and chat about the good ol' days. Get to know each other again.”
He shoots her a wink and saunters off, leaving her sputtering in his wake.
He thinks that’s the end of it with uncharacteristic optimism, and that thanks to her ignorance and her father’s odd silence on the truth of the matter, they can just pick right back up where they left off, all those years ago.
Of course, it’s not remotely that easy.
She trades hysterical avoidance for a fumbling attempt at looming along the fringes of his awareness. It’s a bit like when she would trail after him when they were children, admittedly, except with her clinging to the walls and shrubbery rather than his hand or shirt.
He confronts her again, but this time with radically less progress. Despite her continued obliviousness to the truth of what brought him to the Varley estate all those years ago, she accuses him of wanting to kill her in the most dramatic, inefficient ways anyone could ever even conceive.
Pushing her into a ravine? Sinking her into the ocean?
He’s almost more offended she thinks he’d be that sloppy, but not even that can trump the sick, creeping realization that he really is going have to lay out the whole ugly truth out for her.
Luckily or unluckily, he never quite figures out which, the world goes to hell in a hand basket before he can find the time to corner her yet again.
It’s another five years before he sees her in the flesh again.
Taking care of his people kept him busy, in the interim. He has blackmarkets to regulate, men to recruit or retire as necessary, orphans to settle, information to gather and sell in careful, measured doses—five years practically flies by, really, and he only spares a thought for her and the things left unfinished between them once or twice.
…a day.
Usually.
Regardless, five years comes and goes, and the Black Eagles Strike Force reconvenes, and the professor rises again, inexplicably, and more impossibly than even that Bernadetta von Varley has the absolute gall, the utter audacity to stumble back into his life clad in a bodice and skirt that fits her like a fucking glove, all but oozing fine embroidery and understated, battle-ready elegance in each curve-hugging inch of fabric. Her hair is always neatly brushed, now. She wears a modicum of makeup, now.
Yuri is so appalled he can’t look at her directly for the better part of a week, but eventually the itch of her continued lurking prods him into cornering her once more for the sake of finishing this.
…whatever this is.
“Frigid ocean waters!” Bernadetta yelps, seamlessly consistent in her completely ridiculous fears. It’s almost enough to make him smile. “I can feel them already…” She rubs her arms with a frantic little shiver, which does things to the cleavage her damnable bodice eposes that Yuri refuses to dwell upon.
“Calm,” he coaxes her. “Caaaalm. Just listen to me for a minute. There’s… something I need to tell you.”
He takes a breath.
Lets it out.
Looks her in her big, iron-gray eyes, wide and wary as they are.
Nothing left but to rip the bandage off, he supposes, and finally quits procrastinating.
“The reason I worked for House Varley, Bernadetta,” he says, clear and steady, “was to kill you.”
It takes a moment, for her knee-jerk persecution complex to rise up, falter, and fall by the wayside, but he patiently lays it all out. The motive that bankrolled him, the means he used, the tipping point…
His ultimate failure.
To her credit, aside from the initial disbelief, she does follow along for the most part. She fumbles with the idea of her father running him off to protect her, for some reason, which he doesn’t quite understand; part of the reason she had been so easy to befriend was because she had been kept tucked away and guarded on all fronts from relatives and rival noble children her age, back then. The Count guarded her as jealously as some heirloom jewel, as he understood it.
But, as he assured her long ago, he doesn’t give a shit about her father, frankly. The most he’s thought of the man since the bruises faded was a vague sense of reassurance that he’d be even more on guard for any more attempts on Bernadetta’s life, after Yuri left it.
“At this point,” he says, steering things back on track and snapping her out of her bewildered ruminations on that, “I figure it's you who hates me, and not the other way around.”
Ridiculously, the words are almost unbearably sour on his tongue.
By the way Bernadetta jolts in surprise, it’s every bit as unpalatable a thought to her, which is… more than he’d bothered hoping for, honestly.
“I don’t hate you, Yuri!” She shakes her head, almost frantic. “But, I mean…” She frowns, running a gloved hand through her hair, almost tousling it back into Officer’s Academy Era messiness. “I do feel weird… but, I don’t know how to feel… I just—” She looks up at him, uncertain and pleasing and so, so hopeful it makes his chest constrict painfully. “Can’t we just be friends? Like back then?”
Yuri is so shocked you could knock him over with a feather, at that offer, despite it being exactly what he was angling for, five years back.
“You want to be friends?” He parrots back, eyes wide. “With… me?”
With him. Yuri, not the Garden Boy. The caustic trickster, not the honey-tongued honeytrap. Him, the criminal, him, the scoundrel, him, the one who raised that blade up and almost, almost brought it down in the dark, years and years and years ago.
“The reason you couldn’t kill me was because we were friends, right?” Bernadetta asks him, eerily on point with her own train of thought.
This is the part where he should say ‘yes’. The part where he should affirm that it’s the exact reason, that she’s right, that it’s still true. The part where he closes the book on their estrangement, and they can pick back up with the banter and innocent intimacy, just like he’s craved since he put his back to Varley County.
He doesn’t. He hesitates. “Well…”
“You were my first friend,” she presses on, suddenly relentless. “My very first friend. The person who played with me. The first person who went on adventures with me. The first—“
“And you were the first friend I had to baby that much,” he cuts in, because his chest has gone from tight to throbbing, because he has an inkling as to what other first he might be for her, because he is beating back the dawning, horrified realization that she might have been a certain first for him too. Might… still be that.
“What do you mean?!” She pouts at him, shoulders squaring and chin raising high. Something in him warms. Something he doesn't care to name goes soft. He's struck with the sudden urge to tell her to stop there, but doesn't follow through on it. “Well..." She falters, briefly, before shaking off the hesitance and plowing ahead. "Even so... You were the first friend who cared for me!”
“Don’t bother playing coy over something so obvious. It’s clear as a bell that the boy was in lo—”
…fuck.
Oh, fuck.
Yuri has just tumbled down a precipice he has been blindly, stubbornly edging around for literally most of his life now.
Luckily, his mouth keeps going even if his brain is caving in on itself. “The whole thing was probably a sham anyway,” he drawls. After a beat he tips his head with a sigh, conceding. “Though, you know... Even if it was... I did have a lot of fun with you.”
“I knew it!” She beams at him.
He grins back, without even planning to ahead of time.
He is so, so fucked.