Yulivia Stories

Yunan and Olivia pt 2: Plans

Well. I'm still crying over The Hardest Thing, but I wrote the rest of this over the course of this week to try and get me through it. It's a little choppy in places, because I kept stopping and then coming back to it. But it's Yuliviaaaa, so it makes me happy :) Please enjoy.

Every weekday for the next three weeks, Yunan showed up nearly every afternoon to Olivia's workroom - their workroom now, she had to keep reminding herself. Yunan would sit down, though not for long, and begin reading and discussing whatever reports, essays, and other such things Olivia had put together for them the morning before. Half an hour into this, all of Yunan's restless energy would catch up to her, and she'd jump up and start pacing the room, scowling at the papers and moving her hands animatedly as she talked with Olivia. It was, however, less annoying than in the beginning, because she'd started to show up not in full armor.
Olivia remembered the first time Yunan had walked in without it. She hadn't heard her coming without the grating scrape of her metal plates, so when something had lightly tapped her shoulder, she'd half-leaped back in her chair and looked around wildly before her eyes settled on the general.

"Yunan!" she'd said, clutching her chest. "Don't creep up on me like..." Olivia trailed off, blinking. "What are you wearing?"

Yunan almost self-consciously looked down at herself. Her usual silvery armor dripping with military awards had been replaced by a simple cream lace-up shirt and a pair of trousers that cling her her muscular body. "Oh. This? I just thought it would be more comfortable, plus I'm not exactly fighting anything right now."

Olivia cleared her throat. Her cheeks felt hot, for some reason. "Well. You look... good. Not that you didn't before," she hastily added. "It just... looks nice."

Yunan actually seemed to blush. "Thank you, my lady."

"Right. We should start working, then. There's some papers in your desk I'd like you to go over."

For the rest of that day, Olivia kept sneaking glances at Yunan. There was something so... endearingly striking and vulnerable about Yunan out of armor. Sunlight from the window poured across her desk, limning the general in gold and casting faint shadows around the definition of her musculature. Olivia struggled to drag her gaze away.

She still found Yunan plenty irritating, of course. Her approach to handling the toad situation was totally bull-headed. And she was still arrogant and loud and boastful, with that exasperating tendency to repeat all her accomplishments to everyone she met. Olivia had caught her just yesterday introducing herself to a group of terrified-looking servants as General Yunan, Scourge of the Sand Wars, Killer of Bandits, and Supreme Fighter of Newtopia. But Olivia was starting to think that perhaps Yunan wasn't quite as infuriating as she'd thought.

The days started to blur together. After her morning duties, Olivia would take a shirt break and return in time to tackle her ever-growing pile of paperwork and plan out what she and Yunan would do that day. Yunan would arrive approximately three hours later, and they would hold discussions and read for a while.

Olivia learned many things about Yunan during this time. Chief among them was this: she kept a very strict sleep schedule, waking at six in the morning and going to sleep at nine at night. Yunan refused to work past eight thirty precisely for this reason, citing that a well-rested person was a better worker. Olivia supposed that military training had cemented the importance of rising and going to bed early, but, being a lifelong despiser of mornings, she could not for the life of her figure out why anyone would voluntarily get up so early.

Olivia also learned that Yunan ran drills with her soldiers from nine to eleven in the morning four days a week. She took care of other duties before and after drills and during the days she didn't have drills. But, Yunan once told her proudly, she still trained solo on the weekends to further hone her skills.