With the languid, almost theatrical grace of a seventeen-year-old god who had just finished enslaving the first brick in his empire of cosmic domination, Phei swung his legs off the edge of the bed.
Cassiopeia rose with him — still stubbornly attached to his hand like a loyal shadow, her small fra unfolding from its perch on the mattress with the wobbly dignity like she’d been running on twenty-four hours of no food, no sleep, and sheer stubborn refusal to admit defeat.
He steadied her at the elbow with a touch that was almost gentle. She took a careful breath. He let go.
Then he looked — properly, critically — at the bed.
And around the room, at the ceiling, then back at the bed.
A long, judgntal silence stretched between them.
"Cassiopeia."
His voice was unusually flat, the kind of deadpan that could make lesser mortals question their entire life’s décor choices.
"Yes, Master?"
"Whose fucking idea was this."
Cassiopeia blinked. Her brain, still sluggish with the aftershocks of her long vigil, took a beat to register that her master was not referring to anything specific that had happened tonight. He was gesturing at the room with the slow horror of a man discovering he had been sleeping inside a bleached cri scene.
The vast white bedroom with its vast white bed and its vast white ceiling and its vast white walls and white floor-to-ceiling curtains and white plush hide rug that was almost certainly a real animal at so point in its life but had been bleached beyond any reasonable claim on its forr identity.
"The... the decor, master?"
"The blindingattempted murder by interior designer, Cassiopeia."
He squinted dramatically against the pale expanse, as though his own divine beauty was being personally offended by the lack of contrast.
"I wake up in what I am now certain was an attempt to pass seamlessly into the afterlife without noticing the transition. I open my eyes and I’m in what can only be described as God’s clinic after a particularly lazy paint job. I’m lying on a bed that is white, sheets are white, duvet is white. The headboard is white, pillows are white, pillow tassels are white. The wood beneath the headboard is white.
"The carpet is fucking white too.
"The hide rug on the carpet is white; walls are white even the lamp shades are white. Who looked at an entire room and thought, ’What this place is really missing is more white — enough white to make a man question if he’s still among the living or has already ascended to so minimalist purgatory?’"
Cassiopeia’s face had begun, very slowly, to change expression — the corners of her mouth twitching in betrayal.
"I have never woken up in a room and wondered whether I was currently alive, dead, or inside a dental comrcial," Phei continued, warming to his the with the relish of a stand-up codian who had just found his perfect heckler.
"Until this one. The lighting is white. The air is white. If I died and God personally escorted to the pearly gates, Cassiopeia, I would have more colour in my surroundings. I would have at least one pearl. A creamy accent. A faint ivory. Sothing to fra this face properly, for the love of all that is unholy."
A laugh escaped Cassiopeia, small, half-dead, slightly hysterical, completely involuntary laugh — she had been crying for hours but the machine that produces tears had, through sheer exhaustion, switched into its reverse function and started spitting out giggles instad.
Her hand flew up and covered her mouth. The laugh kept coming. Her shoulders shook with it. Fresh tears started sliding down her cheeks again, but these ones were coming out of the other half of the eye, and Phei could see that she was laughing against her will and absolutely unable to stop.
He had not bothered to enter the bedroom since he’d arrived in his penthouse so he had not known how much of a cri it was.
Cassiopeia’s laugh had progressed to the stage where she had to grip the bedpost for support. Her face was a glorious ruin — red-rimd eyes, salt-tracked cheeks, a helpless grin trying to break through the devastation of six hours of silent grieving.
She pressed her forehead against her own wrist and wheezed.
Phei watched her laugh, faintly pleased with himself, a quiet spark of satisfaction warming the edges of his narcissism like a cat stretching in sunlight.
It had worked.
He had not been sure it would — the Cassiopeia who had folded onto his chest ten minutes ago had looked like a woman a week into mourning, not soone who could be coaxed back into the living with a complain about interior design — but it had, and the relief he felt at the sight of her shoulders shaking with laughter instead of grief was one of the more straightforwardly pleasant sensations he had experienced in the last few days.
Almost as pleasant as the knowledge that he looked like sin incarnate while doing it.
He let her laugh it out.
Then —
"Right. I have to try sothing. Shut up for a second."
"I wasn’t talking, I was laughing —"
"Okay, stand still."
She stood still, wobbly, still grinning, still hiccoughing a residual laugh every few seconds.
Phei closed his eyes.
[Slave Sight.]
He opened his eyes.
And the first thing he saw was himself.
Specifically — his own face, an inch too close, one eyebrow arched in concentration, his long dark hair falling around his jaw like liquid midnight, his athyst eyes steady and luminous, his mouth parted slightly with the residual faint smile of the shared laugh. Every devastating detail of his own face delivered to him from a perspective he had never, in the seventeen years of being alive, occupied.
A quiet beat.
"Fuck."
Cassiopeia, whose perspective he was now seeing through, blinked. Her sight — his sight — rotated a fraction as she tilted her head in question.
"Master? What—"
"When did I beco this beautiful."
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