Chapter Text
Like any dandy worth his salt, the Viscount de Durendaire had mastered the art of the fashionably late entrance—and so it was that he made himself known to Leveva and the Warrior of Light only some five minutes after they had quelled Kinko's unrest, single-handedly saving the lives of all those who lived in Kugane, promising a new beginning for the field of geomancy, et cetera, ad nauseum. Quadruple-handedly, perhaps, as Leveva and M’hso were in possession of two apiece, and Kyokuho had done practically nothing of note. Exhausted, sweaty, and covered in a film of ectoplasm, Leveva snapped, “I explicitly stated in my letter you were not to follow me!”
Jannequinard sighed fondly. “Lady Leveva, I’m disappointed. You of all people should know had you wanted me to stay put you should have rather demanded I come.”
“Doesn’t she always?” said M’hso distractedly, scrubbing preternatural slime off her hands with the tattered hem of her Athenaeum robes.
The blush painted across Leveva’s cheeks went unnoticed by all present until Jannequinard said, “Well, usually, yes, but sometimes the lady prefers I remain at attention, as it were,” and the lady in question choked on naught but air.
“Janne!” she snapped, when at last she found her breath. “Why you—”
“Don't chastize him too harshly,” Kyokuho cut in, welcome for once. “I’m glad to see you here, Jannequinard, against Lady Leveva’s orders or no. Is this your first time visiting Kugane?”
“Ah, ‘tis!” Jannequinard’s grin was as bright as Leveva’s future might have proven were she not surrounded exclusively by idiots—but then again, too bright and you’d never catch a glimpse of the stars. “Truth be told, I’ve wished to make a trip for some years, but I never could find a decent enough excuse. I had the good fortune of attending a small number of events at the embassy in Sharlayan some fift—twenty some-odd years ago, you see, and the exquisite taste of Hingan sake has lingered ever since, in my memory if sadly not on my tongue.”
“Why is he being so friendly?” M’hso whispered as Jannequinard and Kyokuho began to discuss the local dining options, which involved rather a number of fancy Hingan words even the Echo couldn’t make heads nor tails of. “And what’s ‘sushi’?”
Leveva shrugged, making the noise in the back of her throat which universally meant how should I know? “Because we had a lengthy discussion before I made for Kugane,” she whispered back, “where I made it clear that Kyokuho’s boyish charms were not like to steal me away.”
M’hso snickered. While she knew by now that most people—even most Miqo’te, these days, to hear Y’shtola talking—didn’t abide by the same old traditions of the M tribe, she couldn’t help but envision Jannequinard and Kyokuho taking to fisticuffs to defend their mating rights. Janne wouldn’t be much good in a fight, she reckoned, but even M’zhet would look competent with only Kyokuho to pit him against. Surely twenty-odd years of alcoholism and orgies had landed Jannequinard in enough sticky situations he’d learned how to throw a punch. “It’s sweet, how protective he is.”
“Protective? Possessive, more like,” Leveva said, and the disdainful note in her voice met its match in the wistful expression she could not quite obscure.
M’hso grinned wickedly, leaning in close enough Leveva could feel her whiskers and lashes against her cheek. “Like that, do you?” Blocking the two men’s view—if even they were to notice, amid their debate on the merits of restaurants versus bars—with her own body, M’hso slid her hand up the inside of Leveva’s thigh, the young lady giving a shocked little gasp at the pressure the palm of M’hso’s hand put upon her clit through the drag of her robes. Rough enough to provide some stimulation in their own right, but not so much so to lead to pain, M’hso expected Jannequinard had chosen the fabric with such mild exhibitionism in mind. Certainly they’d found little else to do while manning the front desk together once card games had inevitably lost their appeal.
Leveva grabbed M’hso’s wrist, but neither pulled her hand away nor in to rut against. “People could see—!”
“What people?” M’hso said, casting her eyes about the abandoned bridge. “Or do you just mean those two? Perhaps I ought to steal you away from Janne,” she murmured low into Leveva’s ear, “right under both their noses. Let them watch a master at work.”
At the same moment, the man in question clapped his hands together, and Leveva, flushed, disentangled herself from M’hso, smoothing down the front of her robes. “Very well!” Janne cried. “The Shiokaze Hostelry it is! And while I may be your guest, Kyokuho,” a bold statement for someone who had been expressly forbidden to accompany them, “I really must insist upon handling the cheque. Propriety, you see.” Kyokuho and Leveva’s puzzled frowns showed they did not, in fact, see.
(M’hso, for her part, neither saw nor was puzzled; in the seconds between the start and end of Jannequinard’s pronouncement, she had gotten distracted stalking a bug.)
- Ꚛ ☽ ☀ -
Kyokuho, as it turned out, did know at least one thing: the restaurant he recommended was, indeed, crowded, and the entryway contained numerous picture frames filled with positive reviews from what were apparently highly regarded food critics. Led to a table once Jannequinard let the weight of his purse carry on a more successful conversation than his stilted Hingan, M’hso sandwiched herself in between him and Leveva, leaving Kyokuho alone on the other side of the table. She glanced around the room, poorly lit in the way classy places always were. “Is that fish?” On the next table over were several cuts of something that certainly looked and smelled the part, but it sat uncooked on the plate. “I thought,” M’hso groused, “you didn’t eat raw meat.”
Jannequinard reached around her back to put a conciliatory hand upon her shoulder. “It’s raw fish, my dear, not meat.” Realizing perhaps a moment too late that an obligate carnivore may not make the same distinction the upper echelons of Ishgardian society did, he added, “Regardless, in Ishgard we eat neither. Here, let’s look at the menu, shall we?” and with unreasonably long arms opened it with his arm still wrapped around M’hso’s shoulders.
Having been abandoned by her partners’ public display of affection, Leveva huffed and opened up her own menu, crossing one knee over another and angling herself so her body was half facing away. Jannequinard’s rings dug into her back in a rather uncomfortable manner, but it was about the principle of the thing. She wasn’t jealous, no! She was better than that, curling up together in a booth like lovesick youths. M’hso’s tail curled around Leveva’s waist, the tip flicking against her skirts, and Leveva’s resolve faltered. She let the back of her head rest on M’hso’s shoulder.
“Hmm, let’s see…” Jannequinard said.
“You can read Hingan?” asked Leveva, doubtful yet hopeful. Her own menu was inscrutable, without even illustrations to guide her, and to ask Kyokuho for assistance was unthinkable.
Defensively, Jannequinard said, “Why, of course I can! Did I not tell you I studied Hingan?”
“Right, right, your crush on the ambassador, how could I forget?”
Leveva watched with interest as Jannequinard inspected the menu, his expression strongly suggesting that, had he ever been able to read a word of Hingan, he’d lost the knowledge at the bottom of a wine bottle years past. “Oh, would you look at that, my darling!” he proclaimed suddenly, triumphant. “They have your soup!”
“What soup?” asked Leveva.
Jannequinard had the good sense to look abashed. “My other darling,” he clarified, rather unsuccessfully.
“They have my soup?” M’hso echoed. Her ears pricked up, pupils widening until her eyes were all dark, and against Leveva’s thigh the tip of her tail thrashed excitedly. “Can we get some? I’ve still never tried it.”
Leveva had not felt so strongly she was the only sane man amid their number for—well, for a few weeks at least. There had been that one drunken debate after M’hso attempted to channel the stars of the nocturnal sect and the stars of the nocturnal sect alone in some sort of insane experiment Jannequinard had put her up to, citing half-remembered rumors from his time at the Sharlayan Athenaion. Listening to M’hso swear on the Fury’s spear and the very lives of her daughters that this had somehow adjusted the very archetypes of the collective unconscious, changing the effects of her spells in turn, Leveva thought she must have gone mad. M’hso had yet to prove her claims even now, insisting her pool of mana was still recovering. “What is all this fuss about soup?”
Jannequinard laughed. “I can’t believe you’ve never been told the story! You see, when M’hso first wandered into the Athenaeum, I must admit I was so taken with her that I made quite the fool of myself—”
“As if you don’t always!”
“Yes, well, moreso than usual. As you have doubtlessly noticed, most people who take a wrong turn somewhere to find themselves inside our esteemed institution are not the most chatty bunch, hard as I try to engage them in conversation! So when a lovely foreign lady walked through the door, I introduced myself—as you do—and asked for her name in turn, but I was so surprised when she actually gave it to me, rather than say something charming like, ‘Ah, ‘M’hso’! What a fine name. ‘Tis rare we have visitors from lands as far-flung as Gyr Abania!’...” and with this Jannequinard gave a winning smile, gesticulating with his free hand as if M’hso were standing before him and not tucked beneath his other arm, “...what I said instead was a rather bewildered, ‘Like the soup?’”
Laughing, M’hso maneuvered herself as only a Miqo’te could comfortably do so that, without otherwise adjusting her position, her legs were now resting across Leveva’s lap. “I thought it charming,” she told Jannequinard.
“‘Tis only because you are wholly charmless yourself, my dear,” Jannequinard said affectionately. Raising his voice over Leveva’s exasperated sigh, he went on, “Miso soup—with an ‘i’, and not so much hissing—is a classic dish in Hingan cuisine, as I was then obligated to explain to M’hso. ‘Tis simple, but delectable.”
M’hso blushed.
“You mean to tell me you seduced her by comparing her to soup?”
Clearing his throat, Kyokuho gave a rather uncomfortable laugh. “Well, I’m certain there was more to it than that, Lady Leveva. In time, doesn’t the heart grow fond of even the worst of first impressions?”
Leveva thought of Kyokuho’s, and made a face. “No.” He seemed to think he stood a chance at winning Leveva’s heart, no doubt thanks to how shamelessly Jannequinard and M’hso hung off each other—M’hso a lap cat by nature, and Jannequinard, while perfectly able to be subtle when it suited him, full glad to let rumors fly about the Viscount de Durendaire’s little stray he brought home to the manor and sour his father’s wrinkled face all the more. Unfortunately for Kyokuho, Leveva had her hands full with the two students she already had at beck and call, and he was not nearly so charming as he thought himself to be.
“Ah,” Kyokuho murmured, and let his hopeful eyes fall back to his menu. When he offered his recommendations from it, Leveva very carefully was not grateful. ‘Twas the principle of the matter.
But damn him, he knew good food, and Leveva found herself begrudgingly thanking him. M’hso’s soup was good enough, but it was plain fare indeed: little more than strips of plant material floating in a light broth, not precisely what Leveva would call a full meal. Kyokuho ordered for the table a flight of Hingan sake, to Jannequinard’s delight, and several platters of that dish called sushi, which turned out to be raw fish, vegetables, and rice encased in a wrapping of that same plant from the soup, and though Leveva could not quite get past the mental block the raw flesh provided, the flavors were nice, and letting M’hso eat the fish out of her cupped palm was nicer still. Embarassment burned in her belly alongside arousal, but Leveva reminded herself that, for one thing, it was far too dark in the restaurant for anyone to notice what they were doing, and for another, if Kyokuho had not gotten the memorandum that Leveva was taken already, clearly she needed to borrow one on Jannequinard’s letterhead. This was public foreplay for a cause.
“Why, would you look at the time!” proclaimed Jannequinard loudly as their meal began drawing to a close. With one hand he flipped open his gold pocket watch, as with the other—emboldened, perhaps, by his ladies’ show and the alcohol—he drew lazy glyphs into the small of Leveva’s back, a seemingly random array of stars and major aspects. When she realized he was writing their synastry chart, Leveva shivered, casting him a heated glance across M’hso’s lap. “I’m sorry to say it, but I do think that the travel has done me in. I’m not the age I once was, you know.”
M’hso and Leveva both gave Jannequinard a confused look as Kyokuho politely demured about what a shame that was, and do you need directions to the inn? They were astrologians, their sleep schedules synced not to sunrise but moonrise—even accounting for the airship travel, Jannequinard could not have been awake for more than some seven or eight hours.
“Why, thank you very much for the offer, Kyokuho, you really are too kind, but I’m quite sure I’ll manage,” Jannequinard promised. He clicked his tongue twice in succession.
M’hso’s ears perked up. “Oh! Ah…did you know—” she gave a theatrical yawn, covering her mouth with the back of her hand, and kicked Leveva under the table, “—that Miqo’te sleep as many as eighteen hours per day? It’s true! So I should probably be heading off to bed too.”
“That’s not tr—”
“Ah, what a shame,” Kyokuho said as Jannequinard and M’hso extricated themselves from the table, taking up their decks and torquetums which they had set aside whilst they ate, and did not bother to hide his kiddish glee. “Why, the stars are still out! Lady Leveva, if it isn’t a bother, I should love to show you the constellations as we know them here in Kugane.”
Realization dawned on Leveva at last why her companions acted as they had, and horror followed quick at its heels, for she now found herself alone at the table with the geomancer, and could find no excuse on the tip of her tongue to refuse the offer. She did want to study the stars from Othard, even if Kyokuho was not the man she wished to have stargazing alongside her. Sighing, Leveva resolved to give her wayward lovers a piece of her mind come the dawn, and to Kyokuho said, “Oh, very well.”