The air is thin and stirs with thrumming energy you feel in your blood, the beat of bone rhythm he can hear through the shadows at the corner of his eyes. The drapes are pulled closed and Hiyoko kicks her legs when she leans farther back, staring her amber eyes against his pallid perfection, posture still divine when seated upon the flat surface of a desk. The royal blood has begun to course through him and she’s always seen stars, but their beginnings are anything but humble.
There’s the distant sound of talking in the hall, further down. The classroom is unlocked, but nobody will be entering.
He sits like he’s on a throne, ankles crossed and hands steady at his side, and she should know it, knows he’s always felt the diadem on his skull and envisioned himself in black, forging the stars she can read. Their height has him looking downward at her, but be it mountain or seat, he is beyond them all.
“Do you do readings.”
They don’t go where she goes, they don’t go where he goes. Little woolly sheep, every one of them; Saionji’s physically repellent, a sun-gold blonde toxin in the air and a shouting megaphone of utter bitch, but him. Oh, him. Nobody would dare. He’s a palpable force. He’s divine. He walks with a purpose nobody here -- so secure in their greatness -- would begin to understand.
She doesn’t keep decorations in this, her little domain of an unneeded classroom. No silk shawls or special mats, no crystal balls or paper fortunes. No unnecessary accouterments to her gift-- or at least, not outside the exam room. When there’s no need to show off, it’s just her and her all-seeing eyes, wide and childish and fixated on him with a hunger that ekes unaccountably into something inhumane; a plane just beyond her that watches him through her eyes.
“Sure do,” She breathes, and sways forward, elbows on her knees and little chin on cupped palms. Not quite like kneeling, but then his royalty is future-tense; Hope’s Peak is dying, but not yet dead.
“Not with cards, or anything,” Ah-- there it is. Her well-earned pride, bled in around the corners of reverence, around the folded-sharp corners of bright and bloody futures and presents. Not snobbish, not snide. This isn’t a face that’s familiar to those who know Saionji even in passing. But then, who here at this school will ever do anything to earn her respect? “But this platform-- she does readings.”
“You want one. Little sis’ll give you one, but. Why? How come you wanna know what you already know? What makes it different to hear from her? Tell her that, and she’ll read you. Tell her why you need a reading at all.”
