I own nothing.

It's the sixth time she's called in three days and Asumu's been the one to pick up the phone. She stands paralyzed, ready to hang up as she always does in this sort of situation, when something out of the ordinary happens.

"Kyrie-san?"

Kyrie gives no response, and Asumu sighs heavily. "Kyrie-san, I know it's you. And don't hang up! I want to talk to you. If you're willing to do the same, meet me at the Italian restaurant in Higashiyama-ku tomorrow night at seven. You know the one."

Then, there's only the dull chiming of a receiver gone dead.

-0-0-0-

Kyoto's miserable in December, or at least such is the opinion of one Sumadera Kyrie. It's rarely ever cold enough to snow, but it is more than cold enough for the streets to be slicked with slush and freezing rain, and Kyrie turns up her coat collar as she steps out of her car in front of a certain little bistro. The street lamps overhead, soft and golden, flicker above black asphalt sparkling with rain. She pauses at her car door, barely noticing the wretched weather all around her or the drizzle wetting her skin, fingers grasped around the key.

If Kyrie is here, it's only out of surprise and curiosity. Surprise that Asumu, meek, mealy-mouthed Asumu, would take such a direct tack in confronting her husband's mistress (His first lover, Kyrie thinks to herself, the one who by all rights ought to call herself his wife now). Curiosity as to exactly what Asumu's planning on saying to her—she doesn't think Asumu's dragged her out here just to scream her down. Asumu's not the sort to make a scene in public; Kyrie will give her that.

Probably cares too much for her own reputation than to let anyone think that anything's not completely perfect. It'd probably kill her to have to admit that anything's less than perfect in her perfect life.

Frankly, beyond that, Kyrie doesn't really want to be here at all. The sight of Asumu's face fills her with the near-instinctive desire to lodge her fist in that prim little mouth of hers and she doesn't honestly think that anything productive is going to come of this. The only thing Kyrie would consider "productive" would be Asumu conceding defeat and proceeding with a divorce; that's even less likely than her having a fit in public.

Oh well. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I'll just have to make sure she doesn't try to slip anything in my food, heh.

The cold outside is really quite piercing, even through her coat. Once inside the restaurant, Kyrie is barely given a moment to let warmth wash over her skin, her bones, her frozen-solid fingers before the host asks, "Do you have a reservation?"

Kyrie looks up, startled. Of course, she's eaten in the sort of restaurant that requires a reservation before. She's not some poor-bred working class girl; a daughter of the Sumadera is well used to high society. But work and business and the amount of concentration needed to steal moments with Rudolf has positively consumed her life. If she gets food from anywhere other than her own refrigerator these days, it's more likely to be takeout. Cold takeout, at that.

"'Ushiromiya'?" she tries. The restaurant isn't all that big; a quick scan of her surroundings tells Kyrie that Asumu isn't here. Kyrie's immediate reaction is, simply: She's not here. She's not coming. That bitch played me for a fool just like when she stole Rudolf out from under me. Kyrie has to swallow down on her own bile to keep from screaming in rage, or maybe just finding something flimsy and breakable to smash against a wall. Like a table, for instance.

And why on Earth do I keep underestimating her like this?

"Ah, yes." Kyrie barely hears the host peruse his records and confirm the reservation. "We have a table for you. Mrs. Ushiromiya—" again comes the twinge of rage at the appellation 'Mrs.' "—has called to tell us that she will be running late. She has asked that you wait for her. If you will follow this server—" he nods to a young waitress who's seemingly materialized out of nowhere "—she will show you to your table."

Following the lead of the waitress, Kyrie weaves her way between tables until she's led to a booth in the back. Watery light from the street lamp outside dribbles down the dark wall; the grainy yellow light of the lamps overhead gives the restaurant the air of a sepia image or a faded photograph. Kyrie is flashed a too-wide smile, handed a menu, and left alone.

She doesn't look at the menu. There's no hunger to be found anywhere in the fibers of her body, though she's not eaten since noon, and even then, it wasn't much of a meal. Even if she was, Kyrie knows every item of this menu like the back of her hand, can rattle them off in her sleep. She knows this place very well.

She and Rudolf… This was where they ate, when they first got together. They would bring paperwork and drafts and look at them together over a warm meal. When one of Rudolf's ventures had gone particularly well, they would come here to celebrate, growing flushed and happy on strong Italian wine. Of course, this is the place he brings all the other women too; Kyrie knew that from the start. She always knew it, and it didn't hurt, it didn't sting at all, until it occurred to her that this must be the place he brings Asumu too. That she sits in Kyrie's place, that she drinks wine with Rudolf and they talk and smile and share secrets here.

What must they talk about? Not business, surely. Rudolf likes his women innocent of the ways of the business world—Kyrie having been the only exception to that—and Asumu certainly qualifies as that. Not business. Not money, or what he does to make his money; what would "innocent" little Asumu think if she knew the way Rudolf makes his money? Does he talk to her about his work? Does he complain about the stresses? Does she commiserate, and comfort him? Funny. Her eyes drift downwards. He never did that with me.

Kyrie gets another image in her mind, an attempted balm to the sudden twinges in her heart. She imagines Asumu talking about her day, of the insignificant things she did that day, and of Rudolf nodding, and giving comments, but not really listening. She imagines Rudolf, in fact, being desperately bored by the whole thing. She smiles. But it doesn't really get rid of the twinges. It just dulls the pain for a little bit.

Suddenly, there's a rustling opposite her and something blocks out the light. Kyrie looks up to see Ushiromiya Asumu slide into the booth, shedding her navy coat and accepting the server's menu with a smile. Kyrie narrows her eyes, says nothing. Asumu meets her gaze evenly, the only sign of stress the fluttering at her frail, breakable throat.

Asumu looks much the same as usual. Warm complexion, eyes the smooth green of polished, quality jade, girlish pink lips. With her small, delicate physique, Kyrie has a hard time believing this woman is supposed to be older than her. The golden light catches in her pale brown curls; she almost looks like she's wearing a halo. Given the image the woman tries to put forward of herself, Kyrie finds that appropriate—and laughable.

Silence sits between them for the longest time. Brown eyes meet green and neither of them are willing to be the first to speak, as though speaking first will relinquish power and put them at a disadvantage. Kyrie's already at a disadvantage, being the one who was invited here in the first place; she's certainly not going to make her position here any more vulnerable than it already is.

Finally, Asumu seems to decide to break the silence.

"So," she says, no inflection in her light voice.

"Hmm," Kyrie responds, lacing her fingers and setting her hands down on the table.

Perhaps the deadlock will drag on for a little while longer.

Sensing the need to break tension, the server returns. "Ah, I'm sorry. Did either of you ladies wish to look at the wine list?"

"No thank you," Asumu responds, summoning a gracious smile the same way Kyrie's come to expect out of the woman in any situation where Asumu is called upon to seem appealing.

"The same," Kyrie agrees.

They are left alone again.

After a few more moments of staring at each other awkwardly and waiting for the other to break the silence, once again, Asumu seems to grow too exasperated with the state of affairs to let it persist any longer.

"Kyrie-san… I suppose you know why I asked you to come here, correct?"

Kyrie doesn't answer right away. She's just gotten a look at Asumu's left hand and realized that she isn't wearing her normally-prominent wedding ring. When she'd first seen that woman wearing the thin gold band of matrimony on her finger, when she'd seen Rudolf wearing an identical ring, she'd felt sick. She actually was sick, barely getting out of sight before vomiting into an alleyway. Her hands shook with rage and despair and she was filled wit the desire to see them torn apart. Kyrie is absolutely not intrigued by the little gold ring's mysterious absence, no, not at all.

But as it stands, she may as well play along and figure out exactly what Asumu wants. "To talk about Rudolf, I suppose," she says with a shrug, a look of practiced not-quite disdain coming over her face. Better not to appear too emotional in front of her.

"My husband of five and a half years," Asumu notes coolly.

"My lover of seven," Kyrie retorts, lip curling. If all you wanted me here for was to sling accusations and hurl "morality" at me, then why don't I leave? Why don't I leave right now?

Something Kyrie has noticed about Asumu is that she never glares at anyone. She doesn't raise her voice and she doesn't glare, managing to give the illusion of delicate femininity even in situations where other women would swear a blue streak. However, even if she doesn't glare, the look she directs at Kyrie in that moment can only be described as deeply scathing.

They hold these looks for what seems an eternity, the ambient noise dropping away, Kyrie glaring and Asumu not-glaring. Then, Asumu sighs as heavily as she had yesterday on the phone. She bows her head, bringing her fingertips to her temples, and now, the shadows carving lines into her face, now Kyrie can believe that Asumu is supposed to be older than her. "This," she mutters, not meeting Kyrie's gaze, "this is not what I wanted this talk to turn into. Not in the slightest."

When Asumu looks up, she's smiling, but it's not with the sort of emotions that Kyrie would associate with a smile. If anything, she looks… peaked. If Kyrie didn't know better, she'd swear Asumu was sick.

"Kyrie-san… I have a question for you."

Kyrie props her chin on the back of her open hand and shrugs again. "Whether I answer it would depend entirely on the question. I'm open to hearing it, though."

She nods. Asumu's eyes flit to the window, staring out at the rainy night, glazed over and far-away. "I was wondering, Kyrie-san… When you and Rudolf first got together, he was already…" she struggles for the word she's looking for "…with other women, wasn't he?"

"He sure was."

"And when you and he got together, he made you promises, didn't he? That you were the only one, and that there wouldn't be anyone else anymore?" Asumu asks quietly, still staring out the window.

Kyrie's face tightens. "Yeah," is all the response she gives.

Yes, Rudolf had given promises like that. He was always prone to making wild promises he couldn't keep, not out of malice but out of the sheer inability to keep from running his mouth off. She doesn't think that any of the other women in his life had ever really taken him seriously when he made those promises. Rudolf isn't a bad man, but he can't resist a pretty face, and most of the women he's drawn to are the sort who've heard those promises before. The sort who've heard them a lot.

Kyrie wasn't one of those.

She was hardly an innocent. She'd had boyfriends, had sex, whatever the matter of the man her family (read: her mother) intended for her to marry. (Still intends, as it happens; she'll have to break the news that she's not playing ball anymore sometime soon. Oh well; Kasumi can have him. She'll probably leap at the chance to become the next heir to the Sumadera group.) But the boys she'd gone out with had been like her: young, relatively inexperienced, and not silver-tongued at all. Not like Rudolf.

And maybe she had believed him when he made those promises. Maybe… Maybe she was the only one who had.

"Hmm." Asumu makes a soft sound in her throat. "…It was so easy to believe, wasn't it?" Those pensive words, wispy and quiet, sound more like a question addressed at herself, but Kyrie still fixes her in a blistering glare, wanting nothing better than to pick up her fork and ram it through the back of Asumu's exposed hand, or maybe stick her knife through the woman's eyes. But she does nothing. She doesn't move. She doesn't blink. She barely even breathes.

Asumu turns her gaze back on Kyrie, frank and piercing, more so Kyrie thought she was capable of. "But that's not how it went, was it?" She traces her slim fingers around the edge of a vacant coaster. Rain splatters against the window, drop by drop by drop, and she pays it no mind. "Instead, he would make promises over and over again, and then go out and behave as though they'd meant nothing to him."

"And whose fault was that?" Kyrie challenges, finally finding the use of her tongue again. She sneers at her companion for the evening, but finds that she's no longer feeling quite so, erm, homicidal towards Asumu as she usually does.

Kyrie only gets another scathing look for her troubles. My, my, I guess this is how she keeps Rudolf at home—when she keeps him at home. "It was easier to blame you, you know," she says candidly. "Blame you, and it's easy to tell myself that the problem can be fixed simply by keeping Rudolf away from you. After all, you're not someone I love; you're not someone I even particularly like very much. But if I were to look at the situation more rationally, and see what the problem really was, I'd have to see that I was—"

"Oh, for God's sake, what are you—"

"Kyrie-san."

"What?" Since when does Asumu interrupt people?

"Think."

She's still holding that uncomfortably piercing stare, seeming to bore straight through Kyrie's skin. Where's the server when you need her? Kyrie wonders to herself sarcastically. I could use a drink right now even if the doctor did say no.

"Think about it," Asumu goes on, a touch more gently. "Do you really think that if I died tomorrow, you'd have Rudolf all to yourself for the rest of your life?" She bites her lip, looking suddenly like the sweet, innocent young woman everyone seems to think she is, and not like the person she's shown herself to be here and now, and tucks an errant brown curl behind her ear. "Do you really think it's that easy?"

Well, come to mention it, yes. Kyrie doesn't quite meet Asumu's gaze as she mulls over her thoughts in her head. That's not precisely what Kyrie's line of thinking was, but then again she'd never given much thought to what the future held beyond getting Rudolf away from Asumu—permanently—and back to her. She didn't really plan anything beyond that, she's realizing now. Well… That was… short-sighted of me.

Asumu takes Kyrie's lack of response as an invitation to go on. "I used to think so, I suppose. I thought that if you vanished, all my troubles with Rudolf would disappear with you." Her face darkens, soft mouth hardening. "And I wanted you to disappear. Because believe me Kyrie-san. I really don't like you. But then, recently, it occurred to me.

"Even if you did disappear, eventually, another woman would catch Rudolf's eye, and take the place you had. A woman like you, or maybe not, but she'd pose the same threat to me with him that you do. She'd take your place seamlessly. And if I disappeared, the same thing would happen to you. Someone would just fill the void I left. You realize that, don't you?"

That thought is Kyrie's darkest nightmare given voice, shown to the light of day (Well, erm, evening). The thought that even if Asumu's gone, she'll still have to fight tooth and nail just to keep from losing Rudolf to another competitor—because out of all of the women Rudolf's ever been with Asumu's the only one Kyrie's been able to call "competitor"—makes her blood run cold. It makes her feel so tired. And it makes her angry. Angry that she can't keep him from constantly looking at other women. Angry that she can't have a normal, stable relationship like everyone else seems to have.

"And then," Asumu whispers, the veins in her throat fluttering, her voice ever so slightly topsy-turvy, "I realized that that must mean that he doesn't care enough about my feelings to stop. That he doesn't care enough to even try to stop. He loves me but he doesn't care; that hurts worse than being hated. And I realized that if the most Rudolf cares about whether I feel hurt by his affairs is if I find out, and that to him it's alright so long as he doesn't get caught, then that doesn't mean a whole lot. In fact, it doesn't mean anything at all."

Kyrie slumps in her seat, no longer caring about appearing vulnerable in front of Asumu. God almighty. Her lips shake in frustration. Good God, I…

If she was just hearing the words as something Asumu's realized about her own situation, it wouldn't bother her. If anything, Kyrie suspects she'd be rejoicing to the depths of her black blood to hear Asumu say such things, if it meant that Kyrie now held the advantage over her long-time, long-hated rival. How I've longed to hear her say such things. She's lain awake in bed at night, staring up at a dark ceiling and pictured Asumu conceding defeat, of despairing or being rejected by Rudolf. That he'd have the wool pulled from his eyes and see her for the user she is, or that she'd finally grow tired of always being the saintly one who ignores his affairs with due dignity. That she'd leave, and Kyrie would finally have Rudolf to herself. How she's longed to hear these words.

But the victory is hollow, for Kyrie hears these words now in her own mind, being spoken with her own voice. She sees in her mind's eye a picture of her own life. Every day, she goes to work. The day passes; Kyrie works hard alongside Rudolf, working to further the business and make money any way they can. She thrives on his smiles and compliments, and then goes home to her silent, empty apartment. To her bed, where she sleeps alone most nights. These past seven years, she has been faithful to Rudolf, and only Rudolf, but he, great lover of women that he is, seems not to have noticed. Kyrie doesn't think he ever means to hurt her, but he takes her fidelity and crushes it beneath his heel every time he sleeps with Asumu or one of those flashy girls, all slinky dresses and cheap costume jewelry, no substance at all, that he often takes to bed.

For all these years, there's never been anyone in my life but him. But if my faithfulness is really treated this way—if he can really take some other woman to bed or even marry some other woman and keep me on the side like this, even now, when he needs me in the business world more than ever—then what have I been doing all this time? It's been seven years of wasted effort, and for what?

"Why are you telling me this?" Kyrie asks quietly, staring down at her hands. There's the old childhood scar from when she'd gripped a kitchen knife wrong and it had slid down her palm. And there's all the lines she's accumulated over the years, seeming to grow deeper with every passing day.

Asumu shrugs. "Because I can? Do I need a better reason than that?"

"Yes you do!" Kyrie's head snaps up, her eyes blazing. If Asumu is frightened by her sudden shift, she doesn't show it. "There's no reason for you to just be telling me this out of the goodness of your heart. The motive's everything. There has to be another reason, so what is it, Asumu?" Her mouth's twisted in a sick, lopsided smile. "What, you couldn't stand to suffer by yourself? You had to drag me into it too?"

Oh God, what have I been doing? What have I been doing?

It's not another scathing look Kyrie gets in response to this accusation. Just a long, steady stare, in which all traces of her agitation vanish, replaced only by a cool calm. "If you really want a reason, Kyrie-san, then I suppose it's because that though I do not like you, I don't dislike you enough not to at least try to see what I think the truth of this whole thing.

"And there's another reason, I suppose. I'm pregnant," Asumu says conversationally, never skipping a beat.

Kyrie gapes at her, unable to formulate a more intelligent reply than a slack-jawed, "What?"

Asumu flashes a brief, vaguely exasperated smile. "Evidently." When Kyrie keeps gaping, she frowns. Then, her shoulders seize up and 'Well that's just perfect' look stamps itself all over her face. "Oh, don't tell me you're pregnant too! Is that why you've been calling the house so much?"

"…Yes. I found out from my doctor a couple of days ago." She remembers the shock of her physician's pronouncement. She remembers the commingled terror, elation, triumph, frustration. She, Sumadera Kyrie, would be an unwed mother in a few months, at just twenty-seven. There was no doubt she would be disowned from her family once they learned the truth, but if the child lived, this could serve to dislodge Asumu entirely. After all, she's been a wedded wife for more than five years but has never conceived, and what is a marriage without children, Kyrie reasons, but a contract written up on paper, easily dissolved?

Suddenly, Asumu's jade eyes narrow shrewdly. "How far along are you? Do you know?"

"About ten weeks, the doctor says. My menstruation's irregular and I only noticed something off about a week ago."

"…So am I."

The implications of this sink in for them both, and it's all Kyrie can do to keep from dissolving in hysterical laughter. Rudolf slept with them both at about the same time. That's the only explanation for this. God, Rudolf, why can't you ever keep it in your pants?

"I know what we should do." A wicked grin stretches across Asumu's face and Kyrie stares at her, seeing a whole new creature born beneath the woman's skin in this moment. "I haven't told Rudolf yet; I wanted to wait for the right moment. He's coming back from a business trip at about ten tonight. We should go back to my house and tell him the good news."

For a moment, Kyrie stares at her. Then, a grin unfurls across her lips to match Asumu's own. "I think that sounds like a wonderful idea."

About Rudolf and Asumu already having been married for five and a half years… I know that in Dawn she says that Rudolf and Asumu got married as soon as the latter discovered she was pregnant, but then in Banquet she said she was envious of Asumu for eighteen years during her grudge match with Leviathan. Thus, I suspect she was trying to make Asumu look bad in front of Jessica, and that Rudolf and Asumu were married for six years before Battler was born.

Hope you all enjoyed reading this.