Chương 482: 228.Crossed Signals 1

Last night's punishment came in the form of a headache. Not the polite kind that gently reminds you not to drink so much next time. No. This one felt like someone had clamped red-hot tongs around both my temples, and then, apparently unsatisfied with that, tightened them another notch every few seconds. I woke into that kind of near-interrogation morning. Before my eyes were even fully open, my first thought was that I wanted to die. My throat was dry. My stomach was hollow.

The back of my skull ached like it had been struck, discreetly, with something blunt. From bone to skin, my whole body still carried the expensive, thoroughly punchable aftershock of last night's whisky—as if the drink hadn't been meant for consumption at all, but for soaking a person's personality soft before hanging it up to air-dry. I kept my eyes shut and pressed one hand against my forehead. Useless. Pain was pain. Reasonable pain.

The kind that felt like the universe personally explaining, through firsthand experience, that a Seitokai Vice President has no business treating an Imperial princess's private liquor cabinet as a lubricant for peace talks in a club booth. I dragged in a breath, trying to work out what position I was even lying in. Then something wrong surfaced first.... Heat. There was warmth beside me. Not the trapped warmth of being wrapped in a blanket. Not the phantom fever of a hangover.

This was the clear, close body heat of another person, carried through the dip in the mattress, separated only by a thin layer of fabric and bedding—not exaggeratedly close, but absolutely not the distance of someone sleeping alone. My brain, still churning in hangover mud, didn't catch up. I just took another breath on instinct. Then the second wrongness arrived. Alcohol. I smelled of it too, obviously. But the scent lingering at the edge of the bed wasn't the vintage I'd been drinking last night.

And it wasn't a scent I recognized. Even drunk, Maki never smelled like this. She was usually clean—not sterile, but the kind of clean where even her drunkenness seemed pre-edited by her own hand. Even last night, in that booth, her scent should have been faint and thin: wood, tea, the smell of paperwork and cold coffee she was always surrounded by. The person leaning against me now carried something softer, more lingering, with a faint, cold note pressed underneath it. Not sweet. Not cheap floral.

More like frost that hadn't melted yet on a winter morning, settling onto expensive fabric—a scent that refused to lower its guard even as a scent. Something in my head clicked, very quietly. Wrong. I finally, slowly opened my eyes. The system's simulated morning light leaked through the gap in the curtains, cutting the room into strips of unnaturally quiet light and shadow.

Something on the nightstand caught that light and threw back a hair-thin line of cold silver—the same flash I'd half-seen right before I blacked out last night. Not a trick the whisky had played after all. My stomach started to drop. Before it hit bottom, the third wrongness arrived. Breathing. Very close to me. Too close. And the rhythm was wrong. Maki didn't breathe like this asleep. Even lying next to me, her breath stayed steady, shallow—holding onto a sliver of that infuriating self-control even unconscious.

This person was different. Her breathing was softer, more clinging, like the alcohol hadn't fully cleared and she was lazily sunk into the bedding, in no hurry to resume diplomatic relations with the waking world. My throat tightened. Unease is a strange thing. It doesn't shoot you in the face right away. It prefers to edge closer, poke you once, and ask whether you're still planning to pretend you haven't noticed. Body rigid, I looked down at the shape of someone else beneath the blanket.

Then, with the faint, near-prayerful hope of someone bargaining with fate, I slowly pulled the blanket down. The first thing I saw was hair. Very long. Spilling softly over the pillow, catching the morning light in a faint, milky-gold sheen. Not pure gold, not flaxen—the specific shade that would look absurdly theatrical on an ordinary head, and on one particular person only ever prompted the thought: of course it's her. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

My soul screamed. There was exactly one person on this entire ship with that hair. One. Single. Person. My throat went bone-dry. My hand shook badly enough to nearly send the whole blanket flying. But some things don't crawl back under the bed and pretend they never happened just because you'd rather not look. So, with the grim resolve of someone accepting that today might be their death anniversary, I yanked the covers all the way back. Hedwig was curled up beside me.

Not lying neatly, decorously, the way a Third Imperial Princess ought to manage even drunk. She was on her side, leaning into me, her white chemise pressed into soft creases, milk-gold hair scattered across my shoulder and the pillow, her face half-buried in the bedding. Sleeping soundly, and with total, unquestioning entitlement—as if this bed had always been meant to be split with her. My vision went black. Not a figure of speech.

For one genuine second I thought last night's whisky had circled back for a second strike.

"... Your Highness." No response. My voice jumped a register.

"Your Highness!" Still nothing. Ignoring the headache, I reached over and shook her shoulder.

"Hedwig. Wake up. Wake up, now." This was catastrophic. Genuinely, catastrophically bad. If it were Jess lying beside me, I could claim she'd gotten drunk and wandered into the wrong room. If it were Lan, I could at least drag Roy in immediately to share the shock. Even if, at the far edge of absurdity, it were Akari, I could probably claim she'd deadpan-sleepwalked through the wrong door. But not Hedwig von Wittelsbach. This woman wasn't a "classmate."

She was the Third Imperial Princess of the Galactic Empire—the kind of person where picking up the wrong teacup by accident could spontaneously inflate into something "symbolically significant" in a political context. And right now she was in a white chemise, asleep in my bed, pressed against my side. This had gone well past symbolic. This was the kind of thing that goes straight into a diplomatic incident report. Hedwig, apparently annoyed by the shaking, finally frowned, lashes trembling. But she didn't sit up.

She didn't check her surroundings. Instead, heavy with sleep, she reached out on pure instinct and wrapped both arms around my waist. I froze completely. That wasn't a casual hold. That was deep-sea-octopus-level clinging. The kind of purely instinctual death-grip only a person drunk, dead asleep, and nowhere near consciousness could produce.

Her arms tightened, pulling her whole body against mine, her forehead settling naturally against my side—as if I weren't a person at all, just a premium body pillow she'd successfully requisitioned for the night.

"... Stop that," she murmured, voice rough with sleep, her usual princess-grade cold softened almost entirely by alcohol.

"Just a little longer..." I nearly ascended on the spot.

"Not a little longer of anything, Your Highness, let go—" Before I could finish, the door opened. The sound of the handle turning was, in that instant, more terrifying than any shipboard alarm. I looked up. Maki stood in the doorway, holding a bowl of hangover soup, still steaming. She'd clearly just walked in. She hadn't even finished her sentence.

"Shimo, I made some soup to—" Crack. That wasn't just a bowl hitting the floor. That was a distinct part of my life shattering along with it. The porcelain hit the deck with a clarity that bordered on cruelty. Pale broth and shards spread out together, steam leaping up, and the room filled instantly with the smell of ginger and alcohol—absurd, like fate had personally simmered a pot of irony and served it at exactly the worst moment. Maki didn't move. She just stood there, hands empty, looking at me on the bed.

At the arms locked around my waist that clearly weren't mine. At Hedwig, curled beside me, milk-gold hair spilled across the pillow, white chemise and all. I swear the air pressure in the room changed in that second. When Maki got angry, she wasn't the type to write it across her face. Her usual method was to push the fire down low, underground, keeping the surface almost honor-student calm. Not this time.

Whatever was behind her eyes was too bright—like someone had wired the ship's main-gun ignition sequence directly into her irises. I was dead. Thoroughly. My survival instinct finally kicked in and I blurted:"Wait—" The second it left my mouth, I knew exactly how much it sounded like the opening line of someone caught red-handed. Which, as it turned out, it was. Because Maki looked at me and said nothing. She just got quieter. That silence was worse than if she'd flipped the whole bed.

"Maki, it's not what it looks like." Perfect. Made it worse. I could hear myself applauding somewhere deep inside—not encouragement, a eulogy. That line was so textbook it might as well have had guilty stamped across my forehead. Maki finally spoke.

"Oh." One word. Light. Flat. Less a question than her seriously weighing whether to drag me out of bed first or peel Hedwig off me first, and whether last night's whisky deserved to be charged as a co-conspirator. My throat went dry.

"I can explain."

"I'm listening." Her tone was almost polite. That was the most terrifying part. If she'd exploded, I'd at least know where the fire started. This calm told me she wasn't not angry yet—she was angry enough that raising her voice felt like a waste of energy. And of course, right then, roused at last by the sound of the bowl breaking, Hedwig's lashes fluttered. Her brow creased. She pressed her face deeper into my side first, then murmured, still half-caught in the dream:"... Why's it so loud?" I closed my eyes.

Perfect. Now my disaster had its own sound effects department. Maki's gaze moved past me to Hedwig. Hedwig finally cracked her eyes half-open, unfocused, still wading through sleep and alcohol. She looked at me first, then followed my gaze slowly toward the door. A few seconds passed before she seemed to register who was standing there. And then the Third Imperial Princess of the Galactic Empire did something that scattered what remained of my soul. She didn't let go.

She kept her arms right where they were, stayed silent a moment longer, and then, in a voice just woken, faintly hoarse, and still carrying that infuriating trace of inborn nobility, said to Maki at the door:"... Good morning." I nearly cried. Not from being moved. From pure grief at watching a life run out of road. Maki's eyes came back to me.

"Hoshino Shimo." Full name. Both parts. Each syllable light, and each one landing exactly on my forehead like a reticle settling into place.

"You had better have a very good explanation." I wanted to answer immediately. The problem was my head contained nothing but headache, shock, princess, white chemise, the crime scene of a dead bowl of soup, and what exactly did I do last night—none of which wanted to assemble into anything resembling an explanation. Worse, Hedwig, apparently still not fully awake, tightened her arms around me another notch.

I looked down at her, then back at Maki, who was already approaching main-gun preheat, and understood with sudden, total clarity: The Asgard's first crisis of the morning hadn't come from an external enemy. It had come from my bed.