Sweet as Belladonna: Chapter I
An Akagami no Shirayuki-hime (Snow White with the Red Hair) Fanfic
Shirayuki stares down at the package of dried leaves in her hands. She may not enjoy studying poisons as much as Ryuu, but every herbalist knows how to identify them.
There’s only one reason the crown prince would send her this, and she doesn’t want to think about it.
She’s been watching Obi, ever since Izana told her his suspicions about his lineage, but he’s nearly always with her. Surely if he were targeting either prince, he wouldn’t spend so much time in the pharmacy, carrying jars, reaching high shelves, or napping like a cat in the sun.
Her hands tremble as she shoves the package deep into her pocket, trying to forget about it. Still, she watches, because she doesn’t want anything to happen to Zen if she can help it. She knows Obi sees her watching, but he doesn’t seem to suspect why. He sees her tense when he pulls out his knives near Zen and doesn’t do it again. He flirts with Kiki and spars with Mitsuhide, and neither of them seem to suspect anything either.
The only hint she sees of the villain Izana believe he is comes in Tanbarun, when he covers her mouth and says her opinion doesn’t matter. She’s never heard him talk like this, never seen this side of him, but still, his anger is at himself. When he insists he can no longer protect her, she argues. She’s never been afraid of him for herself.
Obi becomes a staple in all their lives. He stays by her side except when Zen needs him. He teaches Ryuu to climb trees on sunny days. He drinks and shares jokes with Garrack. He helps Shirayuki plant or harvest herbs in the greenhouse.
It doesn’t take much longer for her to become certain Izana was wrong, and when she and Ryuu are sent to Lyrias for two years, she thinks he’s reached the same conclusion. She only becomes more sure when Obi follows them.
It’s a beautiful day, and Obi will not stop picking on her–about her low tolerance for hot foods, the sappy love poem left by one of the new botanists (he’s only Ryuu’s age for goodness’s sake!), and her so-called poor eating habits.
“I do eat,” she protests.
“Mmhmm. When was the last time you ate today, besides that soup you just called spicy and barely touched?”
She opens her mouth, then stops walking when she can’t remember. He smirks, then continues walking without her.
A few steps behind him, she sees the exact moment he stiffens, then steps directly in front of her. She ducks her head and pulls her hood up, sticking close to his heels. This turns out to be a mistake when a man going the other way bumps into him, causing her to do the same. She squeaks, then covers her mouth as the man apologizes and continues on his way.
Obi grabs her arm and pulls her around so he stays between her and the stranger. She stares up at him. He’s glaring down at his hand, and she sees a tiny scrap of paper clenched between his fingers.
“What’s wrong?”
He forces a smile. “Nothing, Miss.”
Everything comes crumbling down after that. He stops hanging around the pharmacy, stops teasing, stops bringing food around late at night, stops helping Kirito with the fighting lessons he begged for for months. Everyone notices the change, but she’s the only one who knows when it really began.
She doesn’t understand what’s going on, but it scares her, and she knows he won’t give her answers if she asks. Still, she tries. She finds him every chance she can to invite him to eat with their friends or just to check on him.
One day she goes to his room at the suggestion of one of the guards. She needs to check on the progress of some flowers, and she hopes he’ll go with her, but one look at his empty room lets her know that’s unlikely. Her pencil slips out from under her arm as she adjusts her notebook, and it rolls under his bed.
She’s on the floor, reaching for the pencil, when she sees the knife–elegant, expensive, and stuck to the underside of his desk.
It looks nothing like any of his others, but she recognizes it. She saw it in his room several months ago, stuffed into a drawer. She asked about it, and he laughed, saying he didn’t need it anymore and just forgot to get rid of it.
She notices a seal engraved on the hilt. Her fingers clamp around her pencil, and she flips open her notebook without taking her eyes off it. It feels like a betrayal to show her drawing to Suzu. He’s suspicious, of course, but she makes a vague reference to the library, and he returns to his experiment satisfied. “Right, you’ve only been in Clarines a few years, haven’t you? That’s the seal of the house of Sui.”
Weeks pass, months, and Obi almost returns to normal. He’s present again, going through the motions, but it’s as if he’s separated from them all by a curtain.
She would pull it down with her bare hands if she could.
The first time she hears his laugh again, at some comment she missed from Yuzuri, she begins to hope she misunderstood. She keeps hoping when Zen’s formal invitation arrives for his brother’s engagement ceremony.
It takes days to pack, trying to find enough formalwear for every event she knows she’ll have to attend, casual clothes for days spent in the gardens or pharmacy, and still fit in her lab coat and nightgowns. Yuzuri’s opinion on everything she packs does not help. When she finally kicks Yuzuri out, she knocks on Obi’s door to ask if she’s packing too much.
He doesn’t answer, and . . . she needs to know, so she pushes open his door. She sees his trunk, already meticulously packed and standing in the corner. She creeps past it and over to his bed, then climbs onto the floor.
The knife is gone. She thinks this is what dying feels like.
She doesn’t really think he would kill Zen or Izana. Not anymore. But she knows enough about his past jobs to know refusal isn’t an option either.
She postpones too long and they’re halfway to Wistal before she musters the courage to say what she needs to. They’re at a fairly empty inn, eating supper at a table secluded enough to be somewhat private, and Obi’s in far too good a mood to be genuine. After the fourth joke about how glad she must be to see Zen, she’s had enough. She grabs his hand, and his words cut off.
“Obi? Would you–would you run away with me?”
“Eh?”
“I want to run away.”
He frowns and drops his spoon so he can rest his hand on her forehead without pulling his other out of hers. After he determines that this is not, in fact, the ramblings of a fever, he asks, “why?”
“I don’t want to go back to the palace.”
“But–”
“No, I–I’m done!” Why is she shouting? “I’m done with–with princes uprooting my life and messing everything up.” She doesn’t know where the words come from, but they feel too real.
“Miss . . .” Obi’s expression is so gentle, so full of affection, and she just breaks.
Tears run down her face. They clog her throat and soak into her sleeves. Obi’s beside her before she realizes he’s moved, and she feels his sleeve against her face as he wipes up the tears. “I’m so tired,” she chokes, and he squeezes her wrist. “I just want to go home.”
“To Lyrias?”
She shakes her head. For a time, she had hoped to make Lyrias her home permanently, but she’s beginning to think that will never be an option for her.
Her vision has cleared enough to see Obi’s brow furrow. “To–to Tanbarun?”
She shakes her head again. “I want to go far away.” None of her homes really exist anymore, but she will make a new one, just as she always does.
Obi is quiet for a long time, and she can’t make herself look at him. He murmurs, “that’s why you told everyone in Lyrias you were leaving. I thought you were planning to stay at the palace.”
He stands up, and she grabs the corner of his coat. “Will you?”
He takes her elbow and gently helps her up. “Of course.”
It feels too easy. After the tumultuous weeks of pain and heartbreak, this can’t be all, can it?
And yet, the planning goes smoothly. Obi decides they should leave as soon as possible, so Shirayuki stays downstairs to ask for some herbs and food they will need on the way, and Obi goes up to gather their things. He hadn’t been happy about the arrangement, but she had reminded him that she knew better which herbs might be helpful, and he knew better how to pack lightly. He reluctantly agreed.
The innkeeper takes a long time finding several of the herbs Shirayuki wants, and even longer negotiating a price, so she expects Obi to come down long before she is finished. She pays the innkeeper and carefully wraps the few plants in paper, but he still hasn’t come down, so she goes back to their room, hoping the packing is just taking longer than expected.
He’s sitting on one of the beds, staring at a package of dried leaves when she comes in. Her chest tightens when she sees it. She struggles to pull in a breath. She thought she had lost that little package, and had been glad of it. She had never considered that it might be stuck in her trunk.
He looks up, and he should look much more upset. She knows he knows what it is. There were some plants he was better at identifying than either her or Ryuu, though she never liked to think too much about why.
“Why didn’t you use it?”
The question is . . . not what she expects, and her breath catches. “Would you? If it were me?” He stares at her. She hates the confusion she sees there.
She steps into the space between the beds, not daring to move closer. “I’m sorry–”
“For what? Being cautious?” he asks, and she flinches.
“For not telling you. I was never–never going to use that, but I didn’t know how to tell you what I knew.” She feels something on her cheek and realizes she’s crying again. His hand reaches out, then stops, still inches away.
It hurts that he’s not angry. That he’s still trying to comfort her. She sniffs and wipes her face. “I’m . . . I’m kind of glad you know, though. I don’t want any more secrets between us.”
His face is too empty when he tilts his head and asks, “none?”
Her heart sinks to her feet. It won’t matter, she promises herself. Whatever it is, it won’t matter, but she’s just so tired of all the secrets.
“None.”
He unfurls and slides off the bed, landing in front of her. He’s closer than she anticipated, but she doesn’t bother to step back, just stares up at him, waiting.
“As you wish, my lady.”
He wraps his arm around her, pulling her against him, and before she can ask what he’s doing, he crushes his lips against hers.
She thought she was watching, thought she was paying attention, but she sees now she’s been so very blind because it feels like he’s been waiting for this.
His hand burns through the thin fabric of her dress, and they’re pressed so close she’s sure he can hear her heart race as his lips slide against hers and his thumb runs down the side of her face. His hand curls around the back of her neck and tangles in her hair.
She doesn’t know what to do. She’s never kissed like this, never been kissed like this before, and she’s not sure what she think about it except that she’s not ready for it to end just yet.
She reaches out, and when her hands brush the fabric of his shirt, she latches on and leans into his touch. The noise he makes in the back of his throat makes her knees weak. He breaks away too soon, leaving her gasping. Her legs tremble and she sinks onto the bed.
Obi opens his mouth, then slams it shut again. He turns away and grabs his bag, then steps toward the door. “Go back to your prince, Miss. We’re not too far from Wistal, and I’m sure you’ll be find on your own until then.”
Her head is spinning and it’s making it hard to think." “Obi, wait!”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to the palace.”
That’s not what she’s worried about. He makes it sound like he’s leaving, like he’s leaving her–
And that kiss felt too much like goodbye.
She shoots to her feet, and her knees buckle, but she stumbles over, and slams her hands on the wall on either side of him. She can’t keep up with him, and if he steps out that door, she knows he’s gone forever.
His eyes widen as she blocks him in, and she knows he could easily push past her if he tried, but he won’t. “Where are you going?”
He smiles, but it doesn’t look right. “I think telling you kind of defeats the point, Miss.”
“No, because I’m going with you. You said we were going together.”
“There’s no need. You can go home. You don’t have to keep pretending for me.”
Were any of her words earlier pretending? She doesn’t know. “Wistal isn’t my home either.” She loves Zen, she does, but she doesn’t need him. Not the way she needs Obi. “You said you would go anywhere with me. I didn’t say the same, but I should have. I want to stay with you.”
His eyebrows draw together, and a shadow crosses his face. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“No, I don’t, but I mean it anyway.” She latches onto his shirt like she had before. “Please don’t make me live here without you.”
His eyes widen, then he grabs her shoulders and pulls her close, tucking her head under his chin. She clings to him and whispers, “Promise. Promise you won’t leave without me.”
His sigh ruffles her hair. “I promise.”
Soon the news will come to Wistal about the inn burning, and how everyone made it out except the court herbalist and her knight. Zen will be upset, she knows, but better this temporary heartbreak. If he knew the truth, he might never trust anyone again.
She watches the flames flick up the stars. This feels more like an ending than leaving Tanbarun had. A new start, a new life, a new home, once again. She wonders if it will ever end.
A hand tightens on hers, and she squeezes back. At least this time, she isn’t alone.