The berry red footprints on the marble were a taunt, a cryptic trail left by a prince who in his eyes was taunting him. Shiro stood frozen in the echoing silence of the lecture hall long after Kuro's departure, the phantom sting of scalding soup still vivid on his thighs, the echo of 'slum rat' and 'ghost' ringing in his ears like Harken's cracked bells. The cold defence against the Professor's accusation, aligning them momentarily against a common enemy, hadn't erased months of calculated cruelty. It felt like another manipulation, another layer of the gilded cage Kuro inhabited and enforced, pulling Shiro into its shadow. Relief warred with resentment, leaving a bitter, metallic taste in his mouth.
He didn't follow the footprints immediately. Instead, he walked the long way back to his alcove, deliberately choosing corridors thick with the lingering scent of polished stone and aristocratic indifference. The cold seeped into his bones, a counterpoint to the simmering anger and confusion churning in his gut. Why? The question was a relentless drumbeat against his skull. Why the kitchen encounter? Why the star cakes, the figs, the cryptic talk of rewriting language that felt like a language he didn't speak? Why defend him only when Harken's accusation threatened Kuro's own carefully constructed facade? The memory of Kuro's raw wrist, the fresh, brutal royal seal brand, warred violently with the image of his polished boots stepping over Shiro's mud stained charts in the courtyard, the casual disdain in his storm grey eyes that day. Burnt outside, unfinished within. Kuro's words about the cakes haunted him. Did they describe the prince himself? Or was it just another performance?
He reached his alcove, the thin blanket on the stone slab offering no comfort, only the chill reminder of his displacement. On the cold stone floor, just inside the doorway, lay a small, unmarked jar of opaque white glass. He picked it up, its smooth surface cool against his palm. Inside was a thick, pale green salve that smelled faintly, cleanly, of aloe and calendula, expensive healing unguent, the kind nobles used, far beyond anything available in the slums or the academy's stingy infirmary. No note. No explanation. Just the jar, left like an afterthought. Shiro stared at it, his knuckles whitening around the cool glass. Was this for the soup burns? A prince's belated, impersonal charity, a salve for his conscience? Or another calculated move, a pawn placed on the board to keep him off balance, grateful, or silent? He almost hurled it against the wall, the impulse fuelled by the humiliation of needing it, of Kuro knowing he needed it. Instead, driven by the persistent, angry ache radiating from his thighs, the skin still tight and sensitive, he uncorked it with stiff fingers. The scent intensified, clean, medicinal, alien. He applied it gingerly, the cooling relief instant, spreading a blessed numbness. Yet, it felt like a violation, an intimacy forced upon him by the very hand that caused the wound. The relief was undeniable, the implication infuriating.
The next few days were a tense, exhausting dance. Kuro resumed his princely mask with chilling efficiency, cold, aloof, untouchable, perpetually flanked by his coterie of fawning nobles. He didn't look at Shiro in the crowded corridors, didn't acknowledge his existence in class, didn't react when the jade buttoned boy, Koji, "accidentally" knocked Shiro's borrowed astronomy text into a puddle. Yet, Shiro felt watched. The berry red footprints had vanished, scrubbed away by unseen servants, but their ghost lingered. He caught the flicker of storm grey eyes in his peripheral vision when he bent to retrieve the soggy book, felt the weight of an unseen gaze when he lingered too long studying a star chart in the library corner. Was it Kuro? Or one of his father's spies, alerted by the classroom confrontation? Paranoia, sharpened by slum survival, became a constant companion.
In Celestial Navigation, Harken was subdued, a snake coiled but not striking. His venom was carefully sheathed, though his eyes, magnified behind thick spectacles, held a new, simmering hatred whenever they flickered towards Shiro, colder and more dangerous than his previous open contempt. He focused his barbs elsewhere, safer targets, a timid girl who miscalculated declination, a boy whose family fortunes were rumoured to be waning. During a complex calculation exercise involving lunar parallax, Shiro found a scrap of parchment tucked into the spine of his borrowed astrolabe manual. Not a star chart this time, but a single, meticulously drawn symbol: the constellation Lyra, the Lyre. Its lines were precise, elegant. Beside it, in tiny, precise script that mirrored Kuro's annotations: "Harmony requires dissonance first." No signature. No context. Just the symbol and the cryptic phrase. Shiro crumpled it instantly, the paper crackling like dry leaves in his fist, a sound of frustration. He shoved it deep into his pocket, the edges sharp against his thigh. A philosophical platitude? An apology in code, too cowardly for words? Or simply another piece of the prince's inscrutable puzzle? It felt hollow, meaningless against the backdrop of public disdain and private surveillance. Harmony? After the soup? After the names? The dissonance felt overwhelming, irreparable.
He saw Kuro in the library once, isolated at a heavy oak table, surrounded by thick, leather bound tomes on royal lineage and celestial taxation. The titles screamed duty, obligation, the crushing weight Kuro seemed to both carry and resent. Their eyes met across the hushed space, dust motes dancing in the slatted sunlight. Kuro's expression remained impassive, princely, the mask flawless. But for a fraction of a second, a heartbeat suspended in the quiet, his gaze dropped. Not to Shiro's eyes, but lower, to his hands resting on the table, perhaps checking for signs of the burns, for the efficacy of his anonymous salve, before flicking away as if Shiro were merely inconvenient furniture, a smudge on the polished floor. The dismissal, so casual, so absolute, reignited the humiliation, hotter than the soup had been. Shiro turned and left, the phantom taste of fig pulp turning acrid and bitter in his mouth, the crumpled note a hard lump in his pocket. Dissonance indeed.
Seeking solace, or perhaps just escape from the suffocating atmosphere of judgment and watchful eyes, Shiro found himself drawn back to the sundial in the neglected garden. The air here was marginally fresher, scented with damp earth and decaying leaves instead of stone dust and tension. The dark stain where his blood and the berry dye had mingled weeks ago was still there, faded but unmistakable, a scar on the pale stone. He traced the lines of Cassiopeia he'd carved; the angle deliberately corrected to Kuro's specification, West, not East. A truth hidden in plain sight, defying the Academy's sanctioned lies. Like the prince himself? Burnt outside by cruelty, unfinished within by… what? Regret? Or just more layers of deception?
He was adding details to Orion's belt, the knife scraping rhythmically on the weathered stone, trying to lose himself in the familiar act, when a shadow fell across the sundial. Shiro didn't need to look up. He knew the silhouette, the stillness. Kuro stood there, not in his usual pristine uniform, but in simpler, dark trousers and a grey tunic that made him look less like a prince and more like a scholar, or perhaps a prisoner out of uniform. His silver streak was the only blatant sign of nobility. He held two apples, their skins polished to a deep, flawless red, like drops of royal blood against his palm. He didn't offer one immediately, just stood, watching Shiro carve, the silence stretching, thick with unspoken history.
"The belt's uneven," Kuro stated eventually, his voice carefully neutral, devoid of its usual princely inflection or cutting disdain. He pointed with one apple towards a specific star. "Alnilam drifts south here. See?" He took a small step closer, not invading Shiro's space but reducing the distance. "The angle from Mintaka is off by half a degree."
Shiro didn't look up, his knife biting deeper into the stone, a sharp, grating sound. "Says the expert on caramelised lies and convenient mishaps." The words were barbed, aimed to wound, a release for the simmering resentment.
A beat of silence. The wind rustled the dry laurel leaves behind the hedge, a sound like whispered secrets. Kuro placed one apple on the edge of the sundial, near Shiro's hand, but not touching him, leaving a deliberate inch of cold stone between the fruit and his fingers. He took a deliberate bite of his own apple, the crunch loud in the quiet. "Lies have structure, Slum rat," he said, chewing slowly. "Even burnt ones. Recognizing the flaw," he paused, his gaze fixed on the misaligned star Shiro was carving, "is the first step to rebuilding something… truer." He swallowed. "Something that won't crumble at the edges."
Shiro finally looked at him, wrenching his gaze from the stone. Kuro met his eyes, no defiance, no coldness, just a weary, unsettling frankness. The berry dye stains on his fingers were faint but undeniably present, a lingering mark of his hidden actions. "Why are you here, Prince?" Shiro asked, his voice tight, the anger barely contained. "Another test? Another performance for invisible spies? Or just slumming for the afternoon?" He gestured vaguely at the simple clothes.
Kuro's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly, a flicker of pain or frustration crossing his features before the mask smoothed again. He looked down at the half eaten apple in his hand, then out at the crumbling statue of some forgotten star gazing king, moss claiming its eyes. "The garden is… quiet," he repeated, his voice low. "Fewer eyes. Fewer expectations." He took another bite, the movement almost mechanical. "And the apples," he added, a touch of bleak pragmatism entering his tone, "needed eating before they spoiled. Waste irritates the stewards." It wasn't an apology. It wasn't a heartfelt explanation. It was a statement of presence, a gesture stripped bare of the usual princely armour, yet still frustratingly opaque. Was it vulnerability or just another angle?
Shiro looked at the apple on the sundial. A peace offering? A bribe? A prince's casual discard? Or a genuine, clumsy attempt at connection? He didn't touch it. The cool red skin seemed to pulse with unspoken implications. He focused back on Orion, deliberately deepening the groove he'd made for Alnilam, pushing it further south, making the flaw Kuro pointed out even more pronounced. "Tell your spies the slum rat appreciates the… royal charity," he said, the sarcasm thick as the academy's porridge. "Does His Highness require a report on its crispness?"
Kuro didn't rise to the bait. He didn't flinch. He finished his apple in silence, core and all, a surprisingly un princely, almost feral act of consumption. He tossed the stem into the overgrown rosemary bush beside the laurel. "Harken watches you closer now," he said abruptly, changing the subject, his voice regaining a hint of its usual clipped precision. "The lens sabotage… it won't be the last. He's cornered. Humiliated. Cornered rats bite hardest, and he has fangs he hasn't shown you yet." He turned to leave, then paused, his back still half turned. "The salve…" he started, then stopped, as if the words were physically difficult. "…use it. All of it. Infection in these ancient stones…" He glanced around at the decaying garden, the crumbling walls. "…it festers fast. Becomes… inconvenient." He walked away without waiting for a response, his stride quickening as he vanished behind the laurel hedge, leaving Shiro alone with the sundial, the uncarved apple, and a fresh wave of confusing, cold fury. Inconvenient. Was that all Shiro's pain, his potential suffering, was to him? A logistical hiccup? The word echoed Harken's dismissal of the ruined portrait, trivialities. Shiro picked up the apple, its perfect surface cool and unyielding. He stared at it for a long moment, then hurled it with all his strength into the thickest part of the rosemary bush. It vanished with a soft rustle. The gesture felt futile, but necessary.
The simmering tension between Harken and Shiro, stoked by Kuro's ambiguous presence, reached its inevitable peak during a practical observation session on the academy's lesser used east balcony. The air was bitingly cold, the wind whipping around the stone parapets. Shiro was carefully adjusting a delicate brass refractor lens on its mount, trying to focus on the waning crescent moon despite numb fingers. Polaris glittered coldly above, a fixed point in the chaotic sky.
Harken, smelling of camphor and barely contained malice, circled him like a carrion bird drawn to weakness. Kuro stood nearby, ostensibly adjusting a larger equatorial mount telescope, his back mostly turned, his posture radiating detached boredom. But Shiro felt the weight of his presence, another layer of scrutiny.
"Ensure the polar alignment is perfect, Ghost," Harken hissed, leaning too close, his stale breath fogging in the cold air near Shiro's ear. "A degree off, and your calculations are gutter scribbles. We wouldn't want another… accident." His bony finger jabbed towards the lens mount, dangerously close to Shiro's adjusting hand. "Slum carelessness has no place near precision instruments paid for by the Crown's grace." The insult was deliberate, probing, seeking a reaction he could punish.
Shiro's hand tightened on the cold brass adjustment knob. The urge to shove the lens into Harken's sneering face was a physical pressure in his chest, hot and desperate. He saw it happen in his mind, the satisfying crunch, the spray of glass. He took a slow, ragged breath, the cold air burning his lungs, forcing himself to focus on the shimmering edge of the moon in the viewfinder. Stars don't lie. Stars don't lie.
Suddenly, Kuro's voice cut through the wind, cold and sharp as a shard of the ice forming on the parapet. "Professor Harken." He hadn't turned, still seemingly engrossed in his own scope. "Your shadow," he stated with icy precision, "is obstructing the subject's line of sight. A fundamental error for an instructor of your… reputation." He finally half turned, his profile stark against the grey sky, his storm grey eyes fixed not on Harken, but on the distant horizon. "Perhaps your familiarity with the practical application of these instruments needs refreshing? Oversight can creep in, even for the most… established." His tone was detached, critical, but its target was unequivocal, a public rebuke wrapped in academic critique.
Harken stiffened as if electrocuted. His face flushed an ugly, mottled puce, clashing violently with his powdered neck. He opened his mouth, likely to unleash a torrent of vitriol at Shiro or perhaps even Kuro, but his eyes caught the icy glint in the prince's profile, the absolute lack of warmth or tolerance. The memory of the defaced portrait, the ink stained hand, the unspoken threat of the King's displeasure, it all slammed back into him with paralyzing force. He snapped his mouth shut with an audible click, stepping back from Shiro with a jerky, almost spastic movement. "I… of course, Lord Kuro," he stammered, the words thick with suppressed rage and fear. "A momentary lapse. The cold… affects the concentration." He muttered something else unintelligible before turning and stalking towards another group of students huddled near a sextant, his skeletal frame vibrating with humiliation.
Shiro didn't look at Kuro. He kept his eyes glued to the eyepiece, his knuckles white on the adjustment knob, his breath coming in short, sharp bursts. The moon's edge blurred. Kuro's intervention wasn't kindness. It wasn't protection. It was control. A stark reminder that he decided when and where the slum rat was tormented, when the pressure was applied or released. The salve, the apple, the note about Lyra, the garden encounter… were they all just tools to maintain that control? To keep Shiro perpetually off balance, grateful for scraps of reprieve, wary of the hand that could just as easily strike again? The anger curdled in his stomach into a cold, hard knot, heavier than the brass telescope. He felt like a pawn on Kuro's personal chessboard, moved according to rules he couldn't comprehend.
Later, seeking solitude away from prying eyes and the suffocating weight of Kuro's ambiguous manoeuvres, Shiro climbed the worn stone steps to the rooftop. The wind was stronger here, biting, scouring, promising a clarity the academy below denied him. He expected emptiness, the harsh wind his only companion.
Instead, Kuro was already there. Not sprawled on the tiles facing the city as before, but seated on an overturned, empty wooden crate near the parapet, facing away from the entrance, hunched slightly, looking out over the jagged rooftops towards the slum district shrouded in its perpetual fog. The star carved plank, Aki's plank, lay beside him on the crate, not glowing, just a piece of wood in the twilight. Shiro hesitated at the top of the stairs, the wind whipping his white hair across his face. The urge to turn around was strong, to retreat from the confusing presence. But the rooftop was his sanctuary too. He walked to the far edge, leaning his back against the cold stone parapet, deliberately putting the width of the roof between them. The silence stretched, thick and uncomfortable, filled only by the moan of the wind through the gargoyles.
Kuro didn't turn. He didn't acknowledge Shiro's presence. He seemed smaller on the crate, less the Prince, more a boy dwarfed by the skyline. He picked up a small, dried fig pit from his pocket, likely saved from the garden apple or another solitary moment. He rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, the berry dye stain on his thumb a dark, permanent smudge against his skin. After a long moment, contemplating the pit as if it held cosmic secrets, he flicked it. Not at Shiro, not aggressively, but in a high, careless arc out over the edge of the roof, watching it vanish into the gathering dusk below.
Shiro watched the tiny pit disappear, swallowed by the gloom over Higaru. A tiny, pointless act. Throwing away the inedible core. Yet it felt profoundly different. Not princely. Not performative. Not cruel. Just… human. A simple, almost instinctive gesture. He remembered Aki flicking breadcrumbs for the scrawny sparrows that dared venture into the slum courtyard, a small, defiant act of generosity against the grey grind of survival. The cold knot of anger in Shiro's stomach loosened, just a fraction. It wasn't forgiveness. It wasn't understanding. It was a moment of shared, unadorned existence.
He didn't speak. Neither did Kuro. They existed in the shared space, the wind howling its own language around them. Shiro looked past Kuro at the plank resting on the crate. It wasn't glowing. It looked like just a piece of weather beaten wood. But it was Aki's wood. A connection to something real, warm, and fiercely honest, beyond the academy's gilded lies, Kuro's cruel games, and the suffocating ambiguity. He thought of Kuro's branded wrist, the shattered quill, the raw fear in Harken's eyes, the careful placement of the apple, the cryptic note, the intervention on the balcony. Burnt outside, unfinished within. The phrase resonated with new complexity.
Kuro shifted, a small movement breaking his stillness. He pulled something else from his pocket. Not a fig, but a small piece of charcoal, its tip already blunted. He didn't look at Shiro. He leaned over, not towards any parchment, but towards the star carved plank. Slowly, hesitantly, as if the wood might burn him, he reached out. His berry stained fingers hovered for a second above the grooved surface depicting Cassiopeia. Then, with a deliberate slowness that spoke of intense focus, he began to redraw a line near the throne's base, correcting a slight warp Shiro hadn't even noticed. It was a small gesture. Insignificant in the grand scheme of the academy or the Crown. But it was done on Aki's plank. On the symbol of the truth Kuro's father sought to erase. On the one thing Shiro had brought from Higaru that held pure, uncorrupted meaning.
Shiro didn't stop him. He didn't protest. He watched the charcoal move, guided by the stained fingers, darkening the groove with careful precision. No words of apology were spoken. None could erase the soup, the names, the public humiliations, the sense of being a manipulated pawn. Words felt cheap, broken, like Kuro's quill. But this… this silent act of correction, this shared focus on the stars they both saw truly, on the wood that held Shiro's deepest connection… it was a language beyond lies and lingua franca. It was Kuro showing, not telling. It was an unspoken regret etched in charcoal, not ink. It was a bridge built not on grand declarations, but on the quiet, shared understanding of a flawed line needing mending.
The crow cawed overhead, a rasping counterpoint to the wind's sigh, its prismatic eyes catching the last of the twilight. Shiro finally moved. He walked across the rooftop, the wind pushing at his back. He didn't sit beside Kuro on the crate. Instead, he crouched near the other end of the plank, his knees protesting on the cold tiles. He pulled out his own carving knife, the blade catching the fading light. He didn't speak. He didn't look at Kuro. He simply selected a blank space near the edge of the plank, a small patch of unmarked wood, and began to carve. Not a constellation yet, but the faint outline of a new star, small and tentative. A placeholder for a story not yet shared, a possibility not yet defined. The scrape of his knife joined the soft rasp of Kuro's charcoal. Kuro paused in his careful redrawing, his storm grey eyes flicking to Shiro's hands for a moment, watching the blade bite into the wood. A flicker of something unreadable crossed his face, surprise? Acknowledgement? Then, without a word, he returned to his own task. The rooftop held only the wind's moan, the scrape of knife, the rasp of charcoal, and the heavy, fragile weight of a bridge slowly, painfully, being built plank by silent plank over the treacherous ashes of betrayal and cruelty. The dissonance wasn't resolved, but for the first time, a note of something else, fragile, hesitant, but undeniably present, began to weave through it.