THE APPLE OF SNAKES

lv. sister

After dinner, Nerluce went to his rooms - they seemed so dramatically large now - and changed out of his father's old robes and back into the clothes he'd worn on the ride. They were dirty and probably smelled, but Nerluce could not manage another moment in those robes. Strange looks be damned, he didn't care anymore.

With his robes successfully changed, Nerluce went to find Coam.

She wasn't all that hard to track down. There were only ever three places she'd be. The gardens, the stables, or her own chambers. Checking the other two first, Nerluce was forced to knock on the door of a room he hadn't been into in well over seven years. He didn't even know what it would look like.

Coam opened the door, eyes widening when she saw him.

"Nerluce," she said. "What do you want?"

"To come in," Nerluce said.

Coam narrowed her eyes then snorted, letting him into her room. It was different than how Nerluce remembered it. It was now the room of a woman, not a girl. Coam collected swords instead of dolls and displayed them above the place she slept with pride. Nerluce felt bad for any partner she brought in here to share her bed.

Not all of it was different, though. The walls were still all painted white and the views out the windows had not changed all that much. There was still the same silk divider, embroidered with cranes mid-flight. Nerluce could remember hiding behind the divider once when he was playing with Coam. He smiled at it fondly before sitting down at a table that replaced a dollhouse. The chairs were all carved with cranes.

"Alright, now that you're in my room, what do you want?" Coam asked, sitting down at the table next to him. "You want to knock something over."

"A bit," Nerluce said. "For old time's sake."

Coam snorted again before she set an elegantly folded paper crane on the table. Nerluce looked at it and then looked at her before batting it off. They both smiled and Coam picked up the paper crane from the floor and put it back into a jar containing what must've been hundreds maybe even thousands of them in all different colors.

"I didn't know you liked origami," Nerluce said.

"I didn't know you liked fans," Coam countered.

"I have one."

"It was the only thing you brought home with you from Ethera," Coam said. "It must be pretty important to you."

Yeah, it was an important reminder not to be nice to anyone unless he wanted to be fed to the wolves, quite literally. Nerluce ought to have burned the thing a long time ago but... it was still a very, very pretty fan. One of the nicest that he'd ever seen. And whenever he thought about burning it... he couldn't bring himself to do it. 

"When did you learn?" Nerluce asked.

"After you left," Coam said which made Nerluce feel a little better. "I kept having... I had trouble sleeping. Making these helped calm me down enough so that I could go back to sleep whenever I woke up in the middle of the night. And then... I guess I just kept making them in the day." She smiled. "It's so... static here compared to the front. I never feel like I'm doing anything or I'm not doing enough things."

"Yeah," Nerluce said. "They don't have servants in Ethera."

"I've heard," Coam said. "A couple of the elite soldiers we sent with you came back whining about that." She rolled her eyes. "Lady Mother was convinced you'd be home any day back then."

"I can do chores," Nerluce said.

"I did them some on the front," Coam said. "Sometimes it would help me thing. Sometimes it would just make me more upset."