Chapter Text
“So.. what was it that made you guys start.. Y’know,” Sunny and Nephis both shifted as Effie smothered his laughter. “What made you two start dating?”
Sunny really considered faking a seizure, right here, right now.
“I—uh, it’s sorta—private?”
“Yes.” Nephis agreed. Very helpful. Dead Gods.
“We all know it wasn’t—love at first sight.” Effie started to flush with the obviously herculean effort it was taking to stifle his humour, and simultaneously Sunny tried to have him set on fire with nothing but her own sheer hatred and withering glare. Nephis’ breathing quickened slightly and she mentioned that,
“Yeah, we, uh, had a rough first few meetings.”
Sunny smarted. Sunny also willed herself not to state that, ‘rough’ felt a bit like it missed a bit of the nuance that ‘Nephis tried to have Cassie get me sectioned’ wouldn’t have. Just a bit. But like, who cared, y’know? Not Sunny. Nope, never, not possibly in this life nor universe nor—
Nephis nudged her.
“Yep. Real awkward. We’re so over it, though. No, seriously, don’t even worry about it, Effie. I swear, it’s—” What did she say now—shitting hell, did she have to say something like ‘it’s new’? “—private.”
“Okay. I’m glad you guys finally did something, though. Like, honestly, all of us were saying—” Pause, who’s ‘all of us’? “—that this will-they-won’t-they was getting kinda embarrassing. To watch, I mean.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Right.” They all stared. You could probably hear a pin drop in the room.
Effie left the room with surprising speed, actually, after.
So. How did this happen? Shit.
Sunny did not say she hated Nephis. She had never said those words.
‘It was implied,’ said a voice that sounded an awful lot like Cassie. But she didn’t say so, voice of whom nobody asked the opinion, which was all that mattered. Nephis was—something. In Sunny’s mind, she started as an amorphous.. thing to hate.
Sunny had come into Cassie’s house through the window one night, maybe not the best idea, alright fine, but she had no bad intentions. She came for a chat, honest! Her shoe scuffed slightly on the outside of the house, she broke her index finger nail on the wall but she was determined to get out of the cold. Sunny stumbled her way in and started to ramble and rant in a possibly mad way and, in response, the blob of what she later knew to be Nephis in the dark of Cassie’s (really quite beautiful) canopied, four-poster bed was immediately on the offensive. Some might say sensibly, Sunny would say over-sensitively. Maybe she hadn’t looked the most sane, having just run from her place to Cassie’s to tell her about the huge, huge, news about—
“What the—Get back, now! Cass—come here.”
“No, no,” Cassie’s laughter rang out, “No—I know her, Neph, I know her!”
“Cassie, you’ve.. known lots of interesting characters. Come here, please?” Cassie, smiling, shuffled closer to Nephis and mouthed ‘over-protective’ at her.
“Sunny, why the window?” She was going to answer, but this news really just could not wait.
“Cass—listen—seriously, y’know how we thought Xu was only moving to Ardon ‘cus of Seishan? And Song’s lot had this plan—” The blob in the bed had tensed at that, and Sunny glanced over with her mouth going a mile a minute; Cassie was properly giggling now, even though her eyes betrayed her interest in what Sunny had to say (Hah! Cassie was such a huge massive gossip) and the blob seemed to grow slightly more uncomfortable.
“—to big up some ‘horrible conspiracy’, as Revel would say, to put Night on the back foot in negotiations due to ‘inter-personal scandal’ across the companies? And that Valour—” Holy shit, that blob was genuinely looking scary right now. Daemons be damned, that would be in Sunny’s nightmares this week, “—had some stake in this, especially since Gwyn’s sister’s-best-friend’s-cousin had been with Hel when they were younger? Yeah, guess what I found out.”
Cassie’s eyes shone when she said, “Gwyn’s-sister’s-best-friend’s-cousin came back from abroad, exposed it all and told Hel to get fu—”
“No, oh my Gods, it’s something that actually matters.”
“Mordret’s dropping out because of all this?” Cue the blob (Sunny should really figure out it’s name, or face, or it’s views on homicide considering it looks like it’s really, really, considering that. Hopefully not near Sunny) tensing to the point that it surely is going to get a cramp. Or snap.
“No,” Sunny dragged out the vowel so it was more of a ‘wuh’ noise and sat on Cassie’s dressing table, disregarding the perfectly good chair, “It means that Caster is about to get fucked! Think about it. His family is oh-so-close to Valour so when, inevitably, Xu gets found out due to his obvious, now real, crush on Ardon and Night realise what’s goin’ on, they’re gonna dish out some overinflated—overrighteous—offense. I think that this is gonna blow all the way to Valour, and they’ll put up some side branch’s assets to placate ‘em and the Han Li clan have been notoriously on the outs, of course—after the whole scandal with the secret clan heir—”
“Cassie.” The voice in the dark spoke sternly. There was little room for Sunny to continue, little room for Cassie to ask her to—even if she’d wanted to.
“Right. Sorry. Sunny, could you—?” Could she what? Cassie jerked her head to the left, to the door.
“Uh—yes..?” Sunny stood upright and crossed the room, trying to catch a glimpse of the girl in the bed on her way out, and held the delicately embossed door handle.
“Will you give us a minute.” Cassie’s tone made it clear this was nowhere near a question.
The hallway was cool and very airy. That feeling may just have been thanks to the immense pressure of the room that had just be yanked off of Sunny’s shoulders, but nobody could know for sure. Who was that girl in the bed? How was she related to Valour? Why was she so fucking twitchy, and why was she so over-protective? What was her problem?
Sunny took a minute to take in Cassie’s parents’ polished bannisters and clean white carpets and immediately pressed her ear to the door. For research.
“..ou know this! ..tell—ing you— ..’sn’t safe. ..be— …so much fucking danger!”
“—this f’r you! …m’.. not that— ..weak, Neph! You need someon—”
And Sunny, actually, decided right then that maybe this was none of her business. So what if this girl—
There was a massive slam in the room. Yes, Sunny thought again, this was none of her business.
She put her ear back on the wall.
“—fucking therapy! Seriously! That sort of—”
“Come on, Neph! What?”
“—obessession isn’t healthy! 3 years, you said? S— That girl has problems, and you know it’d be better for everyone if she was in a psych-ward.”
Was this about her? She stepped back. Had Cassie told her about their years-long investigations? She wouldn’t, surely. Then how did she know it was 3 years? She started on an ‘S’, ‘S’ for ‘Sunny’? Cassie had said her name. Why was she overreacting like this, what the fuck?
“Nephis! Seriously, oh my Gods, you know as well as I do that—”
“People like S—like her are dangerous. Cass—”
What the fuck, she repeated, with feeling. She must have been jumping to conclusions.
Fuck this, though. Why should Sunny find out the actual details? The bitch in the room clearly hadn’t asked Cassie anything but how long they’d been gossiping about this. If she did then she would’ve known that Caster, and all the high-and-fucking-mighty Great Clans had—
They’d—
She’d ran down the hallway, shoved open the bathroom door, then the window and the rest was inconsequential.
Fuck that.
Wait till the next time she saw that bitch, Sunny thought, gritting her teeth, just bloody wait.