Upon what instrument are we two spanned? [closed]

[onlyluminous]

Characters: Light Yagami perfect_justice and Uni Giglio Nero onlyluminous
Content: A lieutenant with ambitions. A healer without a past. Recognition, conversation, and tea.
Setting: A surprisingly upscale little tea shop/pavilion set up in the temporary town.
Time: Early to late afternoon, the same as this log. (Why, they might be in the same place at the same time. Imagine

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[perfect_justice]

Since that day not so long ago, the lieutenant had grown fond of tea houses. Where they had once been a place of reprieve or merely a way to idly whittle away the long hours of the day, now they had become places of opportunities yet undiscovered. A store filled with doorways and conversations that had yielded fruit in seasons past and though the boughs may look bare now, the knowledgeable gardener knew that the harvest would once again return in the fall

[onlyluminous]

She had been waiting for her tea.

Or, rather: she had been waiting for her tea and thinking.

The deaths of men who had served her (not him or her mother or the old and vanished ideals of excellence, honor, pride that had been part of the legacy of her house -- but her, Uni Giglio Nero, although she had been but a child back then) had settled onto her shoulders, a familiar weight, with the donning of the dress and the coat. She knew this, knew and accepted it, and-- perhaps it was not such an unexpected thing after all, but an inevitability.

So it was not of those deaths that she thought, but other, more pressing concerns: the crew of the Fiertia, for one; the captain's connection to Joseph Falls, second and more worrying. Whatever kind of connection it was, she did not know -- and perhaps she did not want to know. Uni had begun to see that the less she knew of Yuri Lowell the easier it would be to sleep at night. That way she did not wonder about why she was here. Why she had been told to watch him

[perfect_justice]

Perfect. The man's smile widened pleasantly in response to her approval. The lack of blush on the woman's face told him he had been correct in his assumption. The hesitant yet almost demanding tone she had used when speaking to her not-self had intrigued him enough to allow her a place amongst the few figures he would seek out. The rest, well, they would come to him; there was no need to expend energy that could best be used somewhere else. Pieces would inevitably gather around a King - regardless of color - if only because of the symbol of power he possessed, not because of how many spaces he could move.

Another half-bow moved him over to the chair beside the couch. "Thank you." He gave her a moment to get used to the new presence before sitting down. Dark eyes studied her behind a wall of polite interest. "Light Yagami, my lady." He wondered just how much she knew of him, but it was immaterial considering more recent developments. In the meantime, he processed what he knew of the quiet business woman

[onlyluminous]

Once, a long time ago, she would have hesitated. Once she would have waited until her guardians told her it was safe, because a stranger in a strange place, when one's kingdom was already being beset on all sides by forces that wanted more than destruction, was not someone to be entrusted with something so precious as one's name. Names held power. To be known for what one truly was -- it was not an opening lightly granted.

But that was then and this was now, and she was no longer the heir of one of the largest companies in Ivona but merely Uni, sometimes Ninfea, a healer on the airship of a mercenary guild. An instrument waiting to be used, but his instrument and therefore under his protection, so