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Quincy wakes up, but doesn’t open his eyes. It’s far too troublesome. He’ll probably just end up falling back asleep, anyway.
He feels a light weight on his lap, and reaches a hand over to come into contact with soft fur. He strokes the creature, who nuzzles further into his warm touch.
He should probably check what time it is. As much as he’d love to sleep all day, he does unfortunately have duties to attend to. He cracks open an eye to see if the sun has even risen yet.
He looks out the window to the left side of his bed, where the sun has indeed risen. It casts a ray of warm light into the room, which Topper has taken advantage of as he naps on the windowsill.
Quincy smiles softly and-
Wait.
If Topper’s on the windowsill, what’s on Quincy’s lap?
Quincy sits up and looks down. He is greeted by the sight of soft lilac fur. He cocks an eyebrow in confusion. He’s seen this before, but it’s been a long, long time. Why would Kuya be in his full animal form, considering he usually takes great lengths to conceal those features? Secondly, why is he in Quincy’s house? In his bed, no less? Quincy doesn’t remember going to sleep with him last night. Had he snuck in while the forest guardian slept?
Quincy considers whether or not to wake the fox. He doesn’t have to consider for long, however, as the creature begins to stir on its own. It raises its head and sniffs the air, before letting out a big yawn. It then sleepily blinks its eyes open, and…
“AH!”
The fox leaps up from his curled position, and leans back in a defensive stance- despite still standing on Quincy’s legs.
“What are you doing here?”
Quincy looks at him quizzically. He’s silent for a few moments before stating the obvious. “…This is my house.”
Kuya looks around, taking in his surroundings. “Ah. So it is.”
They stare at each other for a few moments. Quincy breathes out a slightly annoyed sigh. “Can I ask what you’re doing here?”
Kuya sits back, straightening his posture. “While I am not entirely sure, I can only assume that I came here of my own will, last night, while I was in a state of semi-consciousness.”
Quincy stares at him, dead-faced. His explanation doesn’t explain a thing. “Is there…a reason you’re…” He nods towards the fox, indicating his diminished form.
“Ah, yes, about that,” Kuya says. “Can’t a yokai want to break from the monotony of human life every once in a while? Don’t be so judgmental, old friend.”
“You’re lying.”
“…”
“…Something happened.”
Kuya frowns. There must be some reason he subconsciously sought out Quincy when he found himself in this predicament, but he’d rather not take the blow to his pride by admitting it.
The blonde shifts on the bed, propping himself up on one sturdy arm. He stares the other in the eyes. “Kuya.”
Kuya snarls. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you not to look a predator in the eyes? Some forest guardian you are.”
Quincy groans. “If you won’t be honest with me, I can’t help you.” He lies back down.
“What- are you doing?”
“Going back to sleep,” Quincy mumbles. “Troublesome fox.”
It takes Kuya all of twenty seconds to finally break the silence. “Ugh! You are so-! You insufferable oaf!” He struts over to where Quincy’s head lies on a pillow. “Fine! I will admit that I do not know the exact circumstances that resulted in my current situation, and I would like your assistance in determining them.”
“Mmm…” Quincy hums. “Are you going to say ‘please’?”
Kuya growls. “Help me, or I’ll eat the ferret.”
“SQUEAK?!” Topper has woken up just in time to hear the kitsune’s threat.
“Go ahead,” Quincy mumbles, burying his face in his pillow.
“SQUEAK?!?! SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK-“
The incessant noise is worse torture to Kuya’s sensitive ears than Quincy’s stubbornness is to his pride. He turns sharply to face Topper. “Will you-?!” He turns back to Quincy. “Fine. Please. Help me figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it.”
Quincy cracks a smile and removes his face from the pillow. Topper, beyond offended, hops off the windowsill and scurries off to the kitchen for some comfort food. Quincy sits up and looks Kuya’s fluffy body up and down.
“Low essence?” He asks. The last time Kuya was stuck like this, it was because his essence had become so depleted that it was impossible to maintain his human form. “Easy fix if so,” Quincy offers. If it’s essence that Kuya needs, Quincy happens to have an abundance of the stuff.
Kuya makes a disgusted face. “You would engage in carnal activities with me in this state?”
Quincy shrugs. “I’m not against it. And there’s other ways to replenish essence besides sex, you know.”
Kuya files that “I’m not against it” statement in the back of his head for later. However, he can tell that Quincy’s offered solution would not work. He sighs. “No, my essence is fine.” To illustrate his point, he lifts a paw and conjures a ball of bright purple foxfire. “I don’t know what it is. Every time I try to shift my shape, it’s as if there’s some sort of block keeping me from doing so.”
“Do you know how this happened?”
“The last thing I remember with perfect clarity was retiring to bed last night. I woke up in the early hours of the morning, in this form and disoriented, and my instincts kicked in to get me somewhere…” he realizes what he’s about to say, and how it’s going to make him sound weak. But he’s already given up his pride to this man, and he truly needs the assistance if he is to fix this situation. His ears droop backwards in embarrassment. “…get me somewhere…safe.”
Blessedly, Quincy does not mock him. He simply hums in understanding. He reaches out a hand towards Kuya, who flinches away. Quincy holds his hand still in the air, and Kuya eventually sighs and relaxes. Quincy’s large hand pets Kuya’s ear, soothingly stroking over the soft fur.
Kuya’s glad he’s not a cat, because he doesn’t know if he’d be able to fight off the biological need to purr, and that would leave him so abashed that he’d rather just let whatever curse this is take its course and kill him.
Curse?
Kuya perks up. “Perhaps this is a curse of some kind.”
“A curse?” Quincy asks, still petting the other.
“It’s not as if I have a shortage of enemies,” Kuya thinks aloud. “But I am highly feared and respected. Who would dare lay a curse upon me?”
Quincy shrugs, indicating that he doesn’t know either. “I can take you into town to see Father Olivine. He may know some magic to remove the curse.”
Kuya hisses at the idea. He’s already embarrassed himself enough by revealing his weakness to Quincy. The priest would surely tell the young master, and Kuya will not have that insipid sorcerer and the rest of his clan gossiping about his frailty.
Quincy rolls his eyes. “That’s a no, then.” He thinks for another moment. “How about Rei?”
Kuya’s head tilts in a show of inquiry. “That hermitic scientist?”
“I know you’re worried about your reputation. He lives in the woods and doesn’t make much contact with others. He won’t talk.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it, he won’t,” Kuya grumbles under his breath.
“Is that a yes?”
Kuya thinks about it. He really doesn’t have much of a choice if he wants to get out of this. And he very much wants to get out of this.
“Fine,” Kuya acquiesces. “But if he makes even one wrong move, I’m eating the bird.”
“I thought you were trying to stop being a fox.”
“Silence.”
———————
They make the trek across the forest, walking side-by-side. Topper was in the midst of drowning his sorrows in dried meats, so they left him to remain in the house and journeyed on without him. At one point, Quincy gets tired of Kuya complaining about dirtying his paw pads, so Quincy scoops him up and carries him the rest of the way.
“You will tell no one about this,” Kuya hisses.
Quincy humphs noncommittally.
It’s hours later when they arrive at Rei’s abode.
“This better have been worth the trip,” Kuya growls. “Or the first thing I’ll do when I get my body back is blast you to bits.”
Quincy ignores the threat. He places Kuya down on the ground beside him, and knocks on Rei’s door.
…
Nothing.
Quincy knocks again.
…
Still nothing.
“Maybe he isn’t home,” Quincy offers.
“Of course he’s home, I can smell him. He’s just got that large head too shoved up in some experiment to offer any basic hospitality.” Kuya steels himself and barks at the door: “Open the door this instant!”
Quincy rolls his eyes and makes the move to knock again, but the door swings open, seemingly on its own.
It turns out it did not, in fact, swing open on its own, as the small figure of Father makes himself known from behind it with a “Coo.”
“The bird can open doors,” Kuya drones. “Perhaps you should train your little stoat to do the same. It would certainly make him more useful.”
Quincy glares at him, and “accidentally” steps on the tip of his tail.
Kuya hisses loudly and pulls his tail back. “I was merely making an observation, you overly-sentimental fool.”
“Can you two keep your marital bickering to a lower volume?” A voice calls out from deeper within the house. “Some of us are trying to get important work done, here.”
“He’s home,” Quincy says, before cleaning the mud off his boots on the doormat and making his way inside.
“Yes. I know. I told you that,” a highly-irritated Kuya grumbles.
The two make their way inside the house, careful to step over all the odds and ends that are scattered about the scientist’s floor. Father closes the door behind them. They approach the workbench at the back of the room, where Rei is hunched over some shining object, scrutinizing it with a large lens attached to his eyes.
“Rei,” Quincy says.
“Mm,” Rei says.
There’s a few moments of silence. Kuya looks back and forth between the two human-shaped men, waiting for either of them to say something. When they don’t, he takes it upon himself to speak.
“Are you two just going to play the silent game for the next couple decades, or are we going to address the issue we came here to discuss?”
At his voice, Rei straightens up, lifts the lens above his brow, and turns around in his chair. As he does so, he begins to ask, “What are you doing on the floo- oh.” He stares at Kuya with an unreadable expression.
Kuya snarls. “What, going to laugh at me, now?”
“Fascinating,” Rei says, leaning down to get a closer look. “Was this transformation voluntary? Or involuntary?”
“What do you think?” Kuya snaps.
“Involuntary, I see,” Rei answers. “And I take it you are unable to change back, and this is the reason you have come to see me?”
“What a genius. You should be the new king for your vast intellect,” Kuya snarks.
Rei stares at him with zero amusement. “When I find myself in a position of undergoing an unwanted transformation,” he begins, “I just shove something in my ass and it fixes me right up.” He looks Quincy up and down, and then looks back at Kuya, clearly implying that Kuya should use a certain “something” (or “someone”) in the same way Rei does to solve his predicament.
“You think we hadn’t thought of that?” Kuya asks. “It won’t work.”
“Have you tried?”
“This isn’t an essence level issue. Something is blocking my transformation ability…” Kuya says. “We suspect someone may have done this to me. On purpose.”
Rei lets out a fake little gasp. “You mean to tell me that someone actually got the best of the incredible Kitsune Kuya-Sama?”
Kuya growls, and hops up a series of items to land on Rei’s desk and come eye-to-eye with him. “Do not test my patience. Tell me what is wrong with me. Now.”
Rei groans. “I can’t be sure without tests. It could be that someone has done this to you. Or it could be that something you did had this unintended effect on yourself.”
“Unlike silly little boys who treat their own bodies like toys, I don’t make a habit of experimenting on myself.”
Rei rolls his eyes. “Fine. You’re right then. Someone else did this to you. Hooray.”
“But who?” Kuya demands, as if Rei will have the answer.
“But what,” Quincy corrects him. “It doesn’t matter who did it as long as we find a way to fix it, does it?”
“Actually, who did it might matter a lot,” Rei says. Kuya looks at Quincy with an “I Told You So” expression. Rei continues his explanation. “I don’t know much about magic except for where it intersects with science. But I do know that when it comes to these kinds of curses, usually it’s the curser trying to send some kind of message to the cursee. Someone wants you to do something, and the only way they could think to make you do it was to curse you until you do. You have to find out what that thing is, do it, and the spell will be broken.”
“That’s it?” Kuya asks. “I could have found that out from a book. I didn’t need to make this trip.”
“But we don’t know what the ‘thing you have to do’ is,” Quincy points out.
“You could always just try everything until you figure it out,” Rei suggests with an unreadable tone.
“Do not play games with me,” Kuya growls. “How do we find out what the ‘thing,’ as you call it, is?”
Rei shrugs. “Think of who might really want you to do something, and what that thing is, I guess. I don’t know. And I don’t really care.” He turns back to the strange metallic ball he was observing before. “Now if the Misters Hindrance wouldn’t mind leaving me be, I have some incredibly important work to be getting back to.”
Kuya snarls and bares his teeth, as if he might rip out Rei’s throat at any moment. Quincy sighs, snatching him up off the desk. “Come on, old fox. Let’s figure out which of your many enemies did this.”
“What the-?! Put me down, you brute!”
“Not until you promise you won’t bite my ankles.”
“In that case, keep holding me forever!”
They exit, Father shutting the door behind them before flying over to his perch next to Rei’s work desk.
“Coo?”
“I don’t know. I suspect we’ll either get an invite to the wedding, or to the divorce court.”
—————-
Quincy walks through the woods, a grumpy fox in his arms.
“Where exactly do you intend on taking me?” the fox asks.
“Yours,” Quincy answers. “We might find some clues about who did this there.”
Kuya huffs. He supposes it makes sense.
The journey to Kuya’s home passes in relative silence, the fox occasionally making some snippy remark about a tree or a bird or some such.
A few hours of this, and they have nearly reached their destination. The pathway leading to Kuya’s doorstep has just barely come into view when-
Kuya suddenly tenses in Quincy’s arms, and snaps his head to the left, staring into the brush.
“What-“ Quincy begins, but he is unable to finish as the fox quickly squirms out of his hold and leaps into the forest, darting after whatever it was that caught his eye. Quincy pinches the bridge of his nose with a “Troublesome,” and heads off in the same direction to follow the other.
Kuya, on the other hand, is sprinting as fast as his vulpine legs can carry him. He caught a whiff of something that smells like trouble, and before he even reaches the bush he caught it from, a shadow bounds out of said bush and dashes into the woods.
Eyes on the prize, he chases down the shadow. It bounces back and forth in a zigzag pattern, cutting sharp angles around trees to try and lose him, but Kuya is too smart to be fooled. As he gets closer, the shadow becomes less of a shadow and more of a defined creature, something round and covered in brown fluff. It turns around the corner of a large puddle, but Kuya leaps over the puddle with ease, catching up with the creature and swiftly pinning it in place.
He flips it over and uses his paw to pin its neck to the ground.
“Grar!!!” the tanuki- for that is what Kuya can now tell it is- growls.
The thing reeks of Kuya himself. It has been in his house. Recently.
“What are you doing?” Kuya growls right back.
“Chitter, chitter chitter! (Giving you what you deserve!)” It can’t use the human tongue, it seems. No matter. Kuya is fluent in yokai.
Kuya presses down harder on its neck. “If you value your life you’ll explain yourself immediately. Tell me everything.”
“Chitter, chitter, grarrr! (I shouldn’t need to explain myself! Isn’t it clear? This is my revenge!)”
Kuya digs his claws into its flesh, pinpricks of blood rising to the surface.
“Glachk!” The tanuki chokes. “Grrarrrr, grrrrrr, grahhh! (I’m just doing to you what you did to me!)”
Kuya stares at him blankly. “I have no idea who you are.”
The tanuki gasps with offense. “Gggrrrrrah! (You tormented me for decades!)”
“Do you have the slightest idea how little that narrows it down?”
“Grrrrowwwlll! Grah! Chitter! Chitter! (All I wanted was your attention! I even made a plan to impress you at the banquet! And then you did THIS to me! You reduced me to a mere animal!)”
Kuya scans his memories. “Ah.” He remembers now, but he doesn’t care who the other yokai is. What he cares about is his current situation. He pushes his paw down harder, cutting deeper into the tanuki’s neck. “You still haven’t explained what you’ve done to me or how you will be undoing it. You’d best begin soon, or this time I won’t be so merciful as to leave you alive.”
“Grrrr….grah. Chitter! Chitter! (I’m…not as powerful as you. I can’t drain your essence in a single moment. But I found a spell that would have the same effect! And it worked!)”
“What spell?”
“Chitter! Chitter! (A spell to make you turn back into a fox! And you’ll never break it!)”
“All right, then,” Kuya deadpans. “If you cannot tell me how to break it, then I have no reason to keep you alive.” He raises his unoccupied paw and flexes his claws, ready to strike.
“CHITTER!!! Chitter!!! Chitter chitter!!!(WAIT!!! Please!!! I’ll tell you how to break it!!!)”
Kuya doesn’t lower his paw. He keeps it frozen in the air, a threat that could come down at any minute. “Pathetic,” he snarls. “Go on then. If you cherish your pitiful little life.”
“Chitter…chitter… (I said you’ll never break it…because there is a way to break it, but you’ll never be able to do it…)” The tanuki glares up at Kuya. “Chitter. (The only way to break the spell is true love’s kiss.)”
Kuya squints. He shakes his head slightly, as if to brush off the absolute idiocy of what he just heard. “I’m sorry, do you take me for some kind of children’s book character?”
“Chitter! Chitter! Chitter, chitter! (It’s true! That’s what the spellbook said! And since you don’t love anyone, you’ll never be cured!)”
“I’ve had it with your foolishness,” Kuya snarls. He lifts his paw higher and swings it down across the tanuki’s face, leaving streaks of blood in its wake. He opens his jaw, ready to tear out the creature’s throat.
But…
“Old fox,”
That lumbering giant just has to interrupt, doesn’t he?
“What,” Kuya growls. “Can’t you see I’m about to dispose of the waste?”
“Let him go.”
“I will not-“
“Now.”
Kuya hisses, and lets go. Not because Quincy told him to. But because killing him won’t help him break the curse, so why expend the energy? The tanuki runs off into the forest, never to be seen again.
“You will not believe what that imbecile told me,” Kuya growls.
“I heard,” Quincy answers, kneeling down in front of the fox.
“He said-“
“I know.”
Before Kuya can get another word out, Quincy is gently taking his head in his own large hands, and pulling their faces together. Quincy leaves a small, soft kiss on the top of Kuya’s snout.
…
“Did you actually believe-“
“Shhh.”
A moment later, shining sparkles begin to emanate from the spot on Kuya’s nose where Quincy had kissed him. The sparkles increase in number, slowly surrounding his entire body until he is completely obscured by light. The light lasts for a moment, before subsiding in the exact same way it had formed, dispersing little by little until only a smattering of sparkles around Kuya’s- very human- nose remain, until those disappear as well.
The two stare at each other.
Kuya, now human-shaped and sitting on the forest floor, blushes furiously and crosses his arms, looking to the side. “I doubt that fool actually managed to do the spell correctly, I bet any old kiss from anyone would have worked.”
“Sure,” Quincy says, but he can’t hide the smile in his eyes. He looks the newly-transformed Kuya up and down. “…You’re naked.”
Having not realized this, Kuya’s eyes widen as he looks down at his own body. “So I am.” He brushes a lock of hair out of his face. “Nothing you haven’t seen before.”
“Doesn’t make it any less pretty.”
Kuya gapes at Quincy. He tries and fails to fight the blush that rises to his cheeks. “Sentimental oaf. Come, let’s retire to my house. I could use a rest after that ordeal.”
“Agreed,” Quincy says. He stands up, offering a hand to Kuya, who accepts it and rises to his own feet.
Kuya raises his hand and prepares to snap his finger, no doubt about to conjure himself some clothes. Quincy stops him, grabbing him by the wrist.
“What are you-“
Quincy brings Kuya’s wrist to his palm and kisses it. Then, he trails kisses up the inside of Kuya’s arm, then up around to his shoulder.
Kuya shivers. “Insatiable. Wait until we’re indoors, at least.” He snaps his finger and a purple robe appears on his body. “Come,” he says, walking off in the direction of his home.
Quincy follows.
When it comes to Kuya, Quincy always follows.