Chapter Text
Kou gets to the supermarket early that evening. He loiters around the bike racks, in the shadows, away from the trickling flow of customers spilling out of the bright-lit entrance.
He waits. He checks the time. He waits. It’s hot as hell. Even now the sun’s gone down, the summer night is as clammy as sweat. A kid drops the key to his bike lock and Kou scoops it up before the kid can, and passes it back. He checks the time again. Mitsuba doesn’t even wear a watch. But Mitsuba probably has some other way to tell the time. He must do – he’d have said something otherwise; when Kou cornered him at school and said, let’s meet tonight at nine, Mitsuba would have said: and how the fuck should I know what time that is?
But Mitsuba could have lost his nerve since this afternoon. Kou paces restlessly from the bike racks to the vending machines; he paces back again. Mitsuba won’t lose his nerve. He didn’t like Kou’s plan, he didn’t want to agree – but he did agree: so he won’t back down. He’s too proud for that. Kou’s sure.
Headlights sweep across him from the car park every now and then. People go past with their shopping trolleys rattling. Every time the supermarket’s automatic doors slide open, the faint strains of jingly music escape. Kou searches the darkness between the streetlights: no sign of Mitsuba. He refused to meet Kou anywhere in sight of the school, but it’s not hard to get here from Kamome. Kou drew him a good map. Mitsuba’s got no reason to get lost.
Kou checks his phone from habit. Mitsuba doesn’t even have a phone. The screen is flashing full with messages from Teru, out on patrol: what are you up to? anything fun? studying hard? don’t forget to call me if you’re lonely!
Kou takes a deep preparatory breath, steeling his courage, flexing his imagination. He has to tell another lie, and it has to be a good one. Simple, believable. Kou is home alone, and he – he’s about to, he’s...
Inspiration strikes: Kou, home alone, has just vacuumed the downstairs rooms – perfect. As fast as he can he sends the message; then he hesitates, uncertain. He isn’t used to lying. Was that too much? Not enough?
Better safe than sorry. His cover story needs to be airtight. Next, Kou texts Teru with grim resolve, he’s going to vacuum the upstairs rooms.
Then he hits send before he can think twice and locks the screen so he doesn’t have to see the blatant damning evidence of all the lies he’s told already to Teru, to Tiara, to their grandfather who’s cheerfully agreed to take Tiara and her Mokke for a Friday night sleepover; he lowers his phone, his heart racing with guilty apprehension—
Mitsuba pats his shoulder. “Who were you texting?” he asks.
“Fuck!” says Kou, startled, and drops his phone. “Fuck!” he says, and plunges to his knees to fumble across the concrete, groping blindly in the dark between the tires and chains of bicycles.
“If that’s the kind of welcome I’m getting, I might as well go right back to school,” Mitsuba says from above him. A narrow flick of something darker than the shadows flashes past Kou, its recoil as quick as a yo-yo. Mitsuba retrieves Kou’s phone from the curled end of his scarf and doesn’t give it back to him. “Say thank you before you get up, please. You’ll seem more grateful if you’re on your knees.”
“Yeah, thanks, whatever, give it here.” The wave of relief crashing through Kou is so powerful it threatens to knock him off his feet even as he’s clambering back to them. “Took your time, didn’t you?” he says in whole-hearted gratitude, giving Mitsuba’s upper arm a squeeze of greeting: he’s here, and he’s all in one piece. Kou throws his arm around Mitsuba’s shoulders for an even better squeeze. “You get lost or something? I was starting to think you weren’t gonna come.”
“I thought about not coming,” Mitsuba concedes. “But then I thought about how you’d be waiting outside a supermarket all on your own on a Friday night crying like a baby because I stood you up, and it was so incredibly embarrassing I basically didn’t have a choice. I mean, obviously you wouldn’t have been embarrassed about making an exhibition of yourself. But everyone who saw you would have been. So I’m here for the sake of all these people,” he explains, waving to the car park.
“Yeah, you’re the most selfless guy I ever met,” says Kou, slinging his dark blue duffle bag from his shoulder. He offers it to Mitsuba for inspection. “Here – I used to use this for elementary school gym class. I dunno if it’s big enough, though. Well, I didn’t know how big you’d want it to be... You reckon it’s all right?”
“It’s fine,” says Mitsuba. “Hideous. But fine. And I’ve brought my own bag, anyway, which is obviously better than yours.”
The first and strongest wave of Kou’s relief is subsiding. Now, in its wake, things are getting jittery: anticipation, apprehension, restless nervous tension. He rubs his sweaty hands on his shorts; he slaps them together, getting ready to motivate himself as much as Mitsuba. “All right! Right! Let’s do this! Ready to go?”
Mitsuba shrugs. He’s looking up at the neon illumination of the supermarket’s name.
“Mitsuba,” says Kou. “You ready?”
Mitsuba steps away from Kou, towards the huge glass panels which make up the supermarket’s front wall. In the warm yellowy light of the supermarket’s heart, behind the glass, people are queueing at the tills, packing groceries into bags, bustling through the self-checkouts. “It’s big, isn’t it...? I didn’t imagine it’d be so big.”
“Yeah,” Kou says, coming to join him. “Yeah, uh – it’s pretty big, I guess... There’s other supermarkets that’re smaller, though. This is just a big one.” He hesitates. “You wanna go in?”
Inside the supermarket, inside the glass, only a metre from where Mitsuba and Kou stand watching outside, a youngish guy in beach sandals dumps his empty basket into a stack of other empty baskets and breezes on heedlessly past towards the exit. Mitsuba watches him go; then he shakes his head, and turns away from the windows. “No. Too many humans,” says Mitsuba. “Let’s just hurry up and get wherever we’re going.”
“You want me to tell you?” says Kou.
“I don’t really care,” says Mitsuba.
Fine. No problem. It’ll be a surprise. Kou slaps Mitsuba heartily on the back, and keeps his hand pressed to Mitsuba’s back as he ushers him on towards the supermarket’s big bright main entrance and straight past it, into the light and out of it. Touching Mitsuba is a safety measure, a reassuring one: he’s really here. He hasn’t changed his mind and slipped away. He’s not only Kou’s wishful thinking. He’s right here with Kou and he’s staying with Kou, and, as long as Kou’s touching him, then Mitsuba also knows that Kou is staying with him: Mitsuba can be reassured by it, too. Neither of them has to worry that either of them’s going anywhere else, so long as Kou’s keeping hold of Mitsuba.
-
There are a lot of fancy big old houses in this area, and not a lot of people on the streets. Anyone who’s got plans for their Friday night is unlikely to have plans involving this quiet residential part of town; the few cars which pass are probably families on their way home, heading back to the large cool rooms of their air conditioned houses. This is Kou’s neighbourhood, Minamoto home turf, and he leads Mitsuba through its peaceful streets in a state of relentless, half-terrified vigilance. Out of any shadow could step Teru – or their father, or an uncle; one of their many cousins, or a second cousin, or a sworn member of the shrine unrelated by blood but bound by duty...
Mitsuba doesn’t dawdle; he doesn’t wander off. He doesn’t try to make conversation. He doesn’t even try to pick a fight. He keeps quiet and he keeps up with Kou’s fast pace. All he does is what he’s told, without complaint. Kou doesn’t like it.
Most of what’s wrong with Mitsuba is so obvious you can’t miss it. All you have to do is look at him, spend five seconds talking to him. No one, in Kou’s opinion, could meet Mitsuba and not come away knowing that there’s a guy who’s got a hell of a lot of stuff wrong with him. But this morose resignation, this listless calm: it’s not right. It’s not Mitsuba. The total lack of unnecessary aggression puts Kou on edge; the absence of any fighting spirit makes him jumpy, upset, dissatisfied in a way he can’t explain. Like catching a glimpse of a cockroach – there and gone, only a flicker of movement, the merest hint of scuttling, too quick to be sure he ever saw it at all; it’s a problem which exists only at the corner of Kou’s eye. He can’t even prove that the problem is there. All he has is the uneasy suspicion that something he won’t like is lurking in the shadows: a problem that doesn’t want to be found.
Fast and furtive, Kou takes shortcuts, checking back again and again to make sure Mitsuba’s still following. No exorcists waylay them; no trouble finds them. They make good time – above the entrance is a clock, and Kou glances up as they arrive: still nearly ten minutes to spare.
Kou breathes in deep. He gets ready to get tough. He says, toughly, to Mitsuba, “We’re going in here.”
Mitsuba looks curiously into the open mouth of the train station until he realises he’s looking into a train station, and then he stiffens; his expression shuts tight. “I am not—”
Kou seizes him by the elbow and draws him aside. “We gotta get out of the city,” he says in a rapid undertone. “Teru-nii’s out on patrol tonight, and this whole city is Minamoto territory. He’s gonna hear about it if supernatural stuff starts happening. He’ll be there right away to investigate. And we can’t risk running into him. We can’t. So we got to leave the city.”
“I could take your brother,” says Mitsuba. He’s looking past Kou, eyeing the station mouth with grim unhappy focus.
“Even Hanako got the shit knocked out of him by my brother,” says Kou. He moves to block Mitsuba’s view. “There’ll be way more supernaturals around once we get out of Minamoto territory, anyway. They just run wild out there, they do their own thing. No one ever hunts them. Free range. Listen – listen,” Kou says fiercely, tightening his grip on Mitsuba’s elbow. He can’t give in, or he’ll be telling Mitsuba it’s okay to give in. Mitsuba will follow through if Kou follows through. Letting Mitsuba have his way would be the same as letting Mitsuba down. “We’re gonna take the train. There’s no other way. We got to. I’ll drag you on there myself if I have to, and that’s the end of it.”
Open aggression is what finally gets through to Mitsuba. He looks at Kou – he really looks at Kou, a familiar hostile spark flickering to life in his expression. “I am not taking a train,” Mitsuba says witheringly.
“What, you got money for a taxi?”
“I’m not doing it,” Mitsuba says. “Minamoto-kun, I’m not. I can’t. Are you insane? I mean, for real? Are you actually literally out of your extremely small mind? I can’t take a train! I can’t just, just... I can’t—” Words fail him. He smacks Kou’s hand away from his arm and grabs a fistful of Kou’s T-shirt instead. “I... can’t... leave... the... city,” Mitsuba says right into Kou’s face: slowly, ferociously, weighing down each word like a threat. His voice isn’t steady. “I can’t. What if something happens?”
“To you?” says Kou. “Or because of you?”
“Both!” Mitsuba says wildly. “What if I can’t leave the city? I can barely leave the school! What if I, if – if I go too far, if there’s a limit, and the train goes across it and I just... fall to pieces? And there’s nothing I can do about it! Because I can’t just turn the train around! And Tsukasa-kun won’t be there to fix me! And that’s that, that’s the end!”
“You’d have a problem with that, would you?” Kou says unkindly. He’s putting in a lot of effort to keep his voice unsympathetic, his expression unmoved, his attitude hard as stone. Teru is harsh on Kou, for Kou’s own sake: Kou’s got to be like Teru is.
“I don’t want to die on a train!” Mitsuba yells; and Kou, hearing the note of shrilly panicked fear in his voice, offers up a prayer of private and fervent gratitude: Mitsuba’s terror is far better than Mitsuba’s hopeless resignation. “And if I get weak, if I – and we’d be on a train, you have to stay on a train, you can’t escape if you need to get away from—How long would I even have to stay inside it? And – on a train, there’ll be humans, there’ll be so many of them, and if I get weak, if I – I... What if I...?”
Teru wouldn’t soften: Kou won’t soften. “If you what?” he says mercilessly.
“If I – do something!”
“Then don’t,” says Kou. “If you think you’re gonna do something, just get a grip and don’t do it.”
“Do you think it’s that easy?!”
“I don’t care if it’s easy! So it’s difficult, so what? So it’s a challenge! So what! Make a fucking effort!” Kou shouts right back at ferocious full volume. “Put a bit of work in! If you think you’re gonna do something, don’t do it!”
Mitsuba falls quiet. He’s unsettlingly still, staring at Kou with creepy solemnity. “You’d stop me,” he says eventually.
It’s not quite a question. Kou only barely manages to crush his urge to reassure Mitsuba with absolute unguarded wholehearted sincerity that yes, he would, and Mitsuba will also have Kou’s help in every other way possible forever. “No,” Kou says roughly. “Do it yourself. You’re not helpless. You wanna stop, you can stop yourself.”
Mitsuba just keeps staring at him. He’s right up in Kou’s face, gripping the front of his T-shirt. The fabric is thin enough that Kou can feel how cool his hand is. Teru would be able to hold Mitsuba’s discomfiting stare with no trouble, so Kou can do it too. He won’t back down. If Kou gives in, Mitsuba will give up, and the single driving purpose of this entire night is proving to Mitsuba that Kou won’t ever allow him to give up; Mitsuba needs to be forced to accept that Kou is never going to give up either.
Teru is tough as hell. Kou is, too. He is – he will be; for Mitsuba’s sake, he has to be... But Kou can’t help it: this eerily serious Mitsuba stresses him out. Mitsuba’s worry worries Kou too. Mitsuba’s bad feelings become Kou’s own bad feelings – he can’t help it, he’ll never be cold like Teru can; his heart grows fearful with Mitsuba’s fear, desperate with Mitsuba’s own despair—
Kou can’t take it. “It’ll only be fifteen minutes,” he blurts in a rush. “And there’s never many people on the train this late, so it won’t be as bad as you’re thinking. You’ll be all right. Honest you will – I’d never try and make you do it if I didn’t think you’d be all right.”
Mitsuba’s stare remains eerily serious right up until the moment he finally lets Kou go. “Better get a move on, then,” Mitsuba tells him briskly, and steps back. “What are you standing around out here for? You think I’ve got enough time to waste it? Go on!—go on! Get in there! Don’t you have a ticket to buy?”
“Got a train pass, actually.” Relief – another desperate, overwhelming wave of relief; it slams into Kou with colossal strength, floods him until it suffocates him. The plan is still on: Mitsuba is willing to cooperate.
The bright-lit station isn’t busy. The attendant inside the ticket booth doesn’t even look up. The gates open for Kou’s train pass and close again while Mitsuba, insubstantial, is passing through behind; Kou makes no comment when he feels Mitsuba take a handful of the back of his T-shirt, keeping himself close. Anything that makes him less stressed out is fine by Kou.
The platform’s roof only stretches to the platform’s edge. Above the tracks is the not-quite-darkness of a city night, the stars obliterated by the urban glow of streetlights and headlights and neon. They wait, alone, in the ghostly pale light of a vending machine, until the train swings into sight beyond the station with a long blast of its horn. With it comes the oncoming roar of pistons and wheels and squealing grinding tracks; and the glare of its front lights too, stark and huge and dazzling.
Mitsuba presses close against Kou’s side.
“You all right?” Kou asks him without looking around.
“Yes,” Mitsuba says tightly.
“Scared of trains?” says Kou.
“Fuck you!” says Mitsuba. “I’ll get on first, I’ll get on without you! I don’t need your help to take some rusty old piece-of-shit train! Where’s the door? Scared, I’ll show you scared—”
Hydraulics wheeze; the doors slide open. Mitsuba bolts inside, and freezes as soon as he sees a young woman sitting scrolling her phone right in front of him.
Kou takes him by the wrist and heads purposefully down the near-empty carriage, past an old guy dozing with a newspaper on his lap, past a couple of high schoolers still in uniform; he keeps going until there’s no one else around, and then Mitsuba sits down at the very end of a long empty bench seat. He keeps a wary sidelong eye on Kou until Kou is safely seated with him.
The train moves on. No one is sitting on the bench across from theirs; their reflections are bright in the long windows opposite. Mitsuba is gripping the metal railing beside his seat as tightly as the front bar of a rollercoaster. Ought to say something, Kou thinks, ought to take his mind off it; and he casts about for small talk, watching his reflection as it watches him back... The train’s tracks lift up high, the city falls down low – and now they’re speeding past rooftops instead, and the limitless glittering landscape of the nighttime city opens up around them, and no small talk comes to Kou’s heavy thoughts at all. He’s got to be tough like Teru. Cold like Teru. Why was Mitsuba late? Did he really not want to come? Did he get into trouble on the way? Did he get lost? Was he okay? Is he okay? What can Kou do to make him okay? What – and Kou’s thoughts, by now, are settling into a slow, grinding loop around a familiar circuit – can he do to make sure Mitsuba isn’t ever anything but okay in the long run too? How can he make him okay...? What can Kou do? What else? What more? What can he do—?
“Apartment buildings,” says Mitsuba.
“Eh?” says Kou.
“Those,” Mitsuba says impatiently, pointing out the window behind them, “the tall buildings, with all the lights. They’re apartments. Aren’t they?”
“Uh – yeah,” says Kou, turning to see. “Yeah, those’re probably apartments. Not that one with the sign on top, though. That looks like an office block.”
Mitsuba scrambles around to sit on his knees, nose to nose with the glass and looking straight out into the night. “What’s that?” he wants to know. “The big round thing?”
“That’s, uh – a stadium. Baseball. Concerts too, sometimes.”
Mitsuba gives a quick nod, like he’s filing that away for later. He’s studying the view as keenly as Tiara studies the telly when her bouncy hyperactive kids’ cartoons are on. Kou, baffled, twists around to look out into the night as well, trying to see in it whatever it is that Mitsuba’s seeing: apartment buildings and streetlights and the jumbled angles of rooftops all packed in close; a cluster of lumpen warehouses, the barren tarmac of an industrial estate; the sleek lines of elevated highways, sweeping over traffic jams tangled up below; a playing field ringed with floodlights, its artificial grass so brightly illuminated that its surreal green glow is the only real colour in the city’s dark night... The city whips past the windows, and Mitsuba’s keen searching stare overlaps it: layer on layer of reflection.
“I’m not blind,” Mitsuba says presently. “I can see you staring at me. I know you think you’re being sneaky because you’re doing it in the reflection, but you’re not. And you’d have to be stupid as hell to try tricking me with a reflection, anyway.”
“I wasn’t staring at you,” says Kou. “I know what you look like. I was just... You’re into this stuff, huh? You like looking at it?”
Mitsuba glances away from the window only long enough to cast Kou a look of devastatingly scornful incredulity. Mitsuba does this all the time; Kou isn’t fazed.
“We can do this again,” Kou vows to him. “I’ll take you on a train any time you want. Any time – even if it’s right in the middle of a school day. Especially if it’s right in the middle of a school day. Especially if I’m meant to be in maths. Or science. Or English. Or basically any lesson.”
“And a train would be this empty in the middle of the day, would it? You could keep me away from humans just as easily?”
“Then... how about photos? I’ll catch a bunch of trains in the daylight and take a load of pictures, and bring ‘em to school and show you, so you can see what it looks like anyway.”
“Do not do that,” says Mitsuba. “I never want to see a photograph taken by you. You have no artistic instinct whatsoever. Don’t even suggest it. Don’t you dare. You’d be shit at taking photos.”
“Then I’ll ask some kid from the photography club to come with me,” says Kou. “They’ll know what they’re doing, won’t they? They’ll take decent pictures.”
“It wouldn’t be the same,” Mitsuba says, and he goes back to studying the unremarkable night view like an animal born and raised in a pet shop who’s never been taken out into the world before, fascinated by the sight of everything he never would have seen if Kou hadn’t picked him out to set him free.
The real Mitsuba liked looking at stuff too. The other Mitsuba. The first Mitsuba. That Mitsuba would have been miserable as hell if he hadn’t ever had any new stuff to look at, Kou supposes, so if this Mitsuba feels even half as strongly about looking at stuff as the first Mitsuba did... But that kind of thing is the exact kind of thing they’ve got in common: this Mitsuba must feel exactly as strongly about looking at stuff as the first Mitsuba did. It’s as cruel to this Mitsuba as it ever would have been to the real Mitsuba – the first Mitsuba – not to let him always have a fresh supply of stuff to look at.
Kou’ll let him look all he wants.
-
No one else gets off the train at their stop.
“’Cause there’s nothing going on round here,” Kou explains, trying to keep his voice down low. “It’s too far from the city, it’s all old folk that live here. No one’s gonna see us, ‘cause everyone’s gonna be at home watching quiz shows and doing jigsaws and stuff.”
“No one’s going to see you,” says Mitsuba.
“Eh?”
“You said they won’t see us. You mean they won’t see you.”
“Well, they won’t see you either, will they?” Kou says heartily.
Every shop along the narrow main street has its shutters securely fastened. A light shines inside the window of a single tiny restaurant, though a sign on the restaurant’s door says CLOSED. All around them, insects buzz and hiss and whirr and click as they settle into the dark damp nighttime heat.
Kou leads the way along an unlit side street hardly any wider than an alley. Water gurgles from an unseen pipe. Another side street crosses theirs, and at the crossroads stands an elderly stone shrine no bigger than a postbox: a jar of sake on its altar, a posy of fresh flowers.
“Shrines all over the place round here,” Kou says wisely, tipping his thumb towards it. “That’s another reason I chose this place, ‘cause supernaturals love that stuff. They go mad for it. Uh... that is—” conscientiously, remembering who he’s talking to, “—the ones that live out in the wild love that stuff, I mean. Urban supernaturals. Feral ones.”
No comment from Mitsuba. He’s been subdued ever since getting off the train. Probably just nervous, Kou supposes. Stressed about being so far from home. Or maybe he’s not feeling so good. Feeling weak. Feeling like it’s getting hard to keep control. Or maybe Mitsuba is too far from home – maybe he was right, arguing with Kou outside the station; maybe Mitsuba isn’t as fully unbound from Kamome as Kou thought. Maybe Mitsuba knows he’s already in more trouble right now than he’s letting on to Kou.
“Plus,” Kou hastily starts again, with determined good cheer, “this place’s got the oldest-looking graveyard I’ve ever seen.” Another steep dark alley forks upwards to the left: he reaches back for Mitsuba’s wrist and holds tight, making sure he’s keeping up with Kou’s own fast pace. No dawdling. The sooner they get to business, the better. “I came here for research the other day, to check the place out. See if it’d be all right for us. And I went round a whole bunch of other old places, too – looking for the best spot; so if it doesn’t work out here, we can just get right back on the train and try the next place on my list—”
Mitsuba stops dead, yanking Kou’s arm to stop him too.
“What—?” But then Kou sees it: a gauzy veil of shimmering silvery mist hangs beyond the alley’s narrow end, a supernatural aura strong enough to shine even from a distance. “That’s gotta be coming from the graveyard, it’s right up that way... Listen,” Kou says resolutely, and he turns his back on that supernatural glow. He clasps Mitsuba by the shoulders and looks him straight in the eye; and Mitsuba, translucent, a collection of vague dark shadows in an alleyway full of dark shadows, looks blandly back at him. “If you wanna leave this to me, you can. All right? You wait here, and I’ll go ahead and, uh... take care of things. I’ll do what’s gotta get done. And then I’ll come back and meet you afterwards with the stuff! Yeah?”
“Yeah?” says Mitsuba, suddenly snappish. “Yeah? You think I’m going to say yeah to a brain-dead plan like that? Am I supposed to be impressed that you think you know how to kill things all on your own?”
“I don’t give a shit if you’re impressed or not! I’m trying to help you, is all. I’m trying to save you the trouble of doing it yourself,” says Kou. “If you wanna sit back and put your feet up and relax for a bit and let me handle the dirty work tonight, you can! That’s all right! I’ll do it myself, and you can just—”
“No,” says Mitsuba. He walks right past Kou. He doesn’t even know where the fuck they’re going. Kou smacks him in the arm and shoves in front, taking the lead again.
The next alleyway is so narrow they’d have to turn sideways to raise their arms. At its other end it opens out into an uneven footpath, lined along one side by the backs of houses; along the opposite side of the path runs an old stone wall. And on the other side of that wall, stretching enormously out of sight into the darkness, lies the graveyard.
An elderly stone lantern stands either side of the graveyard’s gate, a flickering glow deep within each of their stone cages: candlelight, burning in the darkness like a pair of wide-set eyes. Beyond the gates, the graveyard extends to their left, to their right, merging with the darkness so that its limits can’t be seen; it extends straight ahead, rising up onto the steep slope of a hill until the graveyard’s edges tangle with the creeping outskirts of the forest. The darkness bristles with obelisks: the pale, ghostly shapes of tall narrow grave monuments.
And above all of it hangs that silvery glow, as still and calm as morning mist. It’s unnatural light – it’s the light of ghosts; it’s the light of haunting. They’ve come to the right place.
Kou draws his staff, keeping a hand clamped over its end so the rings won’t jangle. His heart is pounding. He doesn’t care. The plan’s on track. He approaches the wall and peers over, scanning the silvery shadows of the graveyard for any sign of movement.
“They’re there. But they’re hiding,” Mitsuba says from behind Kou, speaking at his ordinary volume. “It’s always like this. They can tell a stronger supernatural’s in their territory, they get scared, they try to hide... But if it’s going to be too difficult for you to find some weak supernaturals hiding in the dark then you can just sit this one out, Minamoto-kun, you just sit back and relax and let me handle the dirty work, I can take care of—”
Kou flips him off and vaults the wall. His feet hit the ground. A shiver of sudden fast movement ripples around him – grass shaking, gravel rattling; a flickering quality to the shadows: wavering, unstable movement in the silvery glow – a sense of something fleeing... Of what fleeing?
A thump behind him as Mitsuba jumps the wall too. “We’re splitting up,” he tells Kou brusquely. “Don’t argue with me. I’m not changing my mind. If you get into trouble and need to get rescued by someone more powerful and competent, make sure you scream loud enough for me to hear.”
“Same to you,” Kou says automatically. He turns, looking back down the aisle of graves to see Mitsuba watching him, translucent in the darkness. “Is there anything I should, like... know?” Kou asks with awkward sincerity. “Like if, if you’re... allergic to anything. Or if there’s any kinda stuff you can’t – if there’s any stuff I shouldn’t try and catch. Or stuff I should try and catch. Like, if there’s stuff you like.”
Mitsuba shakes his head. “Anything’s fine. It’s all the same. The stronger the better: that’s all.”
“All right,” says Kou. “I just thought, ‘cause – if I was making food for someone, if I was gonna cook for them, then I’d wanna find out about that stuff. Like if they can’t eat shellfish or whatever. So I thought maybe you can’t eat shellfish.”
“I can’t imagine you’re likely to find any shellfish here,” says Mitsuba.
“No,” says Kou. “Yeah, well. No, I guess. I didn’t mean like actual shellfish, just like – like, if... All right,” he says, pulling himself together. “You ready?”
“Are you?”
There’s only one possible answer. Mitsuba takes off fast once Kou gives it, like he can’t wait to get away, can’t wait to be out of sight.
Kou goes on alone. Shadows ripple nervously through the grass as he stalks deeper into the graveyard. The silvery haze shifts; flashes of tiny movement flicker at the edge of his vision, leaping over graves, ducking away, freezing invisibly in place whenever Kou whips his head around to glare at them straight on.
Alone in the dark, a trace of some queasy feeling passes through his gut. Here I am, Kou thinks uneasily, foolishly – here they both are, a long way from home, no one but each other knowing what they’re up to; they’re really here. They’re really doing it. This is Kou’s plan, and they’re seeing it through.
Only his own footsteps disturb the empty quiet of the graveyard. Wherever Mitsuba is, whatever he’s doing, he’s keeping the volume down. Kou has nothing to feel uneasy about. This is what Teru does. Kou right now is more like Teru than he’s ever been: he’s stalking the night in search of supernaturals, looking for prey; he’s hunting with intent to kill. That’s what Teru does. That’s what Kou is doing. Teru takes the burden of the hunt upon himself to make sure everyone else stays safe: that’s what Kou is doing, too. Teru goes out hunting so that no one ever has to learn about the danger he protects them from: that’s what Kou has to do, too.
Kou is following in Teru’s footsteps more surely in this moment than he ever has before. The thought bolsters his courage; it pushes back his shoulders, it raises his chin. If Teru knew what Kou was doing, he’d be proud. Or, at least, if Teru knew what Kou was doing but only, very specifically, the part about hunting, and protecting, and not any of the other parts of Kou’s plan and not any of the context and not any of the lies Kou’s already told Teru to put the plan in motion even this far, and not – not ever – anything involving Mitsuba...
If Teru knew a nearly completely fictionalised version of Kou’s plan, he might be proud. Kou’s determination rises. His courage rises even higher; it surges, it overflows. And his unease settles – he’s calmer now, he’s focused. He does know what he’s doing. He’s a Minamoto of the long as hell Minamoto bloodline. Hunting is what everyone’s been expecting him to do since birth, more or less.
The next rippling flash of shadowy movement that dodges out from between two graves and across the path gets Kou’s staff rammed straight down through the top of its segmented abdomen: squelch.
He rips his staff free: squelch. He slings his gym bag to the ground and unzips it; he picks up the creature by one bristly leg and drops it inside. He doesn’t bother zipping the bag closed again. He’ll be needing it again soon. He’s breathing hard, his focus sharpened by savage relief at his first victory of the night.
Something shrieks: a high sudden desperate cry that cuts off sharply. It wasn’t Mitsuba.
Kou keeps going. He’s done it once. He can do it again.
-
He does it again and again. He meets nothing particularly dangerous. Whatever lives here, whatever random low- to mid-level supernatural assortment has been drawn to spend its nights in the peace of this vast old graveyard, seems to mean no harm to humans. Things run away from Kou: they don’t attack him. Sometimes they try to attack after being attacked, but the level of fight between them and Kou is never fair.
He heaves into his arms the cold, heavy body of a creature like a leathery aardvark, and then he raises his voice and yells for Mitsuba.
Mitsuba calls back to him. Kou, panting for breath and sodden with sweat, follows his voice through endless rows of uneven ground and dark grass and pale stone; he yells again, and Mitsuba calls back again.
He’s up on the hill somewhere. Kou begins a slow and steady ascent up the rising slope of graves, trudging towards the dark tangle of the forest far above.
“Took your time,” says Mitsuba. He’s sitting on the lowest stone step of a grave, between an ornamental stone lantern and the altar’s empty incense burner. Mitsuba doesn’t have a glow-in-the-dark shine the way Hanako does; he’s just translucent, and in the dark he’s hard to see – even for Kou, who knows he’s there, and who’s had a hell of a lot more practice than most people when it comes to seeing Mitsuba.
On Mitsuba’s knees, and at Mitsuba’s feet, and strewn here and there on the gravel and grass around Mitsuba in bits and in pieces and in chunks are the fruits of Mitsuba’s labour. Dead things. Parts of dead things. Whole and complete dead things. No problem. The plan’s going fine. “Did you get anything?” Mitsuba says to Kou.
The question is an insult. Mitsuba’s haughtily disdainful tone says that of course Kou got nothing.
Kou opens his arms and drops the leathery, bloodstained corpse of the aardvark-looking creature. He slings his old elementary school gym bag from his shoulder and drops that too – wide open, bulging so full that he couldn’t zip it closed.
Mitsuba wipes a wet filthy hand on the stone of his grave and leans down to investigate. At the same time, Kou spots a different kind of movement: in a flash his staff is in his hand, coming down from over his head in a swinging arc which drives straight through the hard-shelled body of something like an oversized swollen beetle and slams home into the dirt below.
He wrenches his staff loose again. “One of yours wasn’t dead yet,” he explains to Mitsuba.
“No shit!” says Mitsuba. “Thanks a lot! You think I didn’t know that? You think I don’t know the difference between dead and alive? Put that stupid stick away, will you?”
“Raiteijou’s not stupid and it’s not a stick,” says Kou, affronted. He puts it away, and hesitates a moment. “I, uh – I killed all mine,” he ventures cautiously. “Everything I brought back with me’s dead. Wasn’t that what you—Like, should I have... Did you want them alive? Did you want me to bring them back still kinda—”
“It’s fine,” Mitsuba says irritably. “Forget it. Whatever.” He’s digging through Kou’s gym bag again, his head bowed. “Tsukasa-kun says it only takes about an hour for supernaturals to lose their power once they’re dead. So you have to eat them as freshly dead as possible, or else they’re no good. It’s best if they’re not even dead yet. So don’t kill any of the others,” he says testily to Kou. “They’re not going anywhere. I trapped them. I’m saving them for later.”
And Kou, looking past Mitsuba, notices for the first time that the darkness beyond him isn’t empty: more bodies, more near-motionless hulks of shell and meat and bone. Their forms are translucent, heaped on each other between the close-packed graves; their shapes are hard to distinguish. A long muscular slippery tail, a snakelike torso – twitching spasmodically, not dead but not going anywhere: maimed, incapacitated...
In the darkness it’s hard to make out the details, and Kou doesn’t much want to. He looks back at Mitsuba instead: sitting on his gravestone, rummaging with a bloodstained hand through the contents of Kou’s bloodstained gym bag.
“Like... like an expiry date,” Kou volunteers, doing his clumsy best to show willing. “Like – like how some food doesn’t start going off till you open the packet, so the longer you don’t open it the longer you can keep it fresh. Sure, I get that. Sure – sure, yeah! You should’ve told me! I’d have left mine alive for you too, if I’d known!”
Mitsuba shrugs.
Kou tries again. “Where’d you find such big ones, anyway? How come I got the puny little weak ones and you got the monsters?”
Another shrug. “There’s a trick to it,” Mitsuba says vaguely.
Then he stops. He flicks a sneaky little look up at Kou – and Kou knows that look, and hates that look: furtive, assessing. Can I tell him? Should I tell him? Yeah, Mitsuba can fucking tell him. What good has ever come of Mitsuba not telling Kou shit? But Mitsuba flicks that wary look up at Kou, like he’s trying to decide for the very first time ever whether Kou can be trusted, and Kou keeps his mouth shut with a manful effort. If he tells Mitsuba to trust him and spit it the fuck out, Mitsuba will never spit it out; Mitsuba’s brain is wired in reverse.
Mitsuba looks down to the grass again. “If you catch a small one,” he begins, in a weird far-off voice, “but you don’t kill it. You just hurt it. You make it make some noise... And then bigger supernaturals will hear it, and they’ll think it’s trapped or something, they’ll think it’s wounded; they’ll think it’s easy prey. So the bigger ones come to hunt it down. But you’re waiting for them. And when they show up, you hunt them. And then... just do it again. Lure in the even bigger ones.”
And that look again: flicking up to Kou, checking what he thinks. Kou is not going to think anything at all, or at least nothing that shows on his face. Kou is tough as hell. Kou is Teru’s brother; Kou can wield just as much iron self-control of his emotions as Teru can.
All he says, roughly, is: “Tsukasa taught you that, did he?”
“No,” Mitsuba says in that weird vague voice. “He didn’t have to. It’s not that difficult, really... It comes naturally.”
Fine. Sure. So what? Hunting is the same in the wild. This is the wild. Animals stalk and hunt and trick other animals to kill them, and that’s normal; that’s just nature. Humans stalk and hunt and trick animals to kill them too. Kou eats meat too. It’s in his nature just as much as Mitsuba’s. The only difference is that Mitsuba’s more direct about it: he cuts out the middle steps – the farm, the slaughterhouse, the processing plant, the supermarket. Mitsuba skips the bullshit. That’s all.
Mitsuba’s not done yet. “Most supernaturals are just a feeding instinct,” he continues, speaking down to the black-stained grass. “They don’t have minds. They just want to eat. So it’s not hard to trick them once you understand how badly they want to eat. And the more I become like them the better I understand them, so it gets easier every time I have to—”
Kou takes two stomping steps across the gravel and sits himself down on the stone base of the grave opposite Mitsuba’s. The path is narrow; their feet are close. He leans forwards and shoves his damply stuffed gym bag right up against Mitsuba’s leg. “If everything I caught for you’s gonna go bad within the hour, you better stop talking and start eating,” he says loudly.
Mitsuba won’t look at him. “It’s not really a problem that you killed what you caught,” he reluctantly concedes. He takes something from Kou’s bag like a rice ball from a lunchbox, holding it in his lap like he’s ready for a nighttime picnic. “And it’s not like I told you not to, anyway. You can go for a walk now.”
“Why would I wanna go for a walk?” says Kou, who understands perfectly well why Mitsuba wants to send him for a walk.
“Go for a walk and I’ll try to be done before you’re back,” says Mitsuba. They’re face to face, but he’s still not looking at Kou. His voice is winding up tight. “You don’t have to stay.”
“Course I do,” says Kou. He makes a valiant attempt at humour: “How else am I gonna be sure you actually eat that stuff, eh? You think I’m gonna go to all this trouble to hunt for you and I’m not gonna stay right here and make sure you don’t just throw it all away as soon as I turn my back?”
“That’s what Tsukasa-kun used to say,” says Mitsuba, and at once a knot of disgust and loathing and remorse wraps tight around Kou’s heart and wrenches it tragically all the way down to the bottom of the world. “He doesn’t anymore, though. Well, Tsukasa-kun doesn’t have to worry about that anymore; it’s not an issue anymore... It’s – actually... right now, it’s harder for me not to... to eat, with everything just—” A flick of his sleeve: with the supernatural buffet lying slaughtered on the grass around them. “So you can go for a walk,” Mitsuba concludes with false airiness. “Go on! Up you get! Off you go! I’ll be here when you get back!”
“I’m not going for a walk,” says Kou.
Mitsuba finally lifts his head. “I want you... to go... for a walk,” he says to Kou, loudly and slowly and clearly like he thinks Kou still doesn’t get what he’s really trying to say.
“Yeah, well, too bad. I’m not gonna go for a walk,” says Kou. “I’m not going anywhere! Idiot, you think I’ve never seen anyone eat before? I don’t give a shit! The only reason we even came out tonight is so you could eat stuff, I’m not gonna freak out just ‘cause you actually do eat stuff. You just have your dinner and don’t stress about it, all right?”
No answer.
Again, but more threatening: “All right?”
No answer. Mitsuba looks down at his lap. He’s holding a shapeless lump of something he took from Kou’s gym bag. He pulls at it until it rips, wetly.
Then he leans forwards and offers a handful to Kou. “Share with me,” says Mitsuba.
Kou stares, uncomprehending. “What the fuck?”
“Share with me!” Mitsuba says. “You’ve shared your food with me before, haven’t you? You’ve split your lunch with me, you’ve given me snacks at school! When only one person has food, it’s polite to share,” he tells Kou primly. “Don’t you know anything about manners, Minamoto-kun? Are you unfamiliar with basic hospitality?”
“But it’s yours,” Kou says unthinkingly. He can’t pull his stare away from the limply ragged black shape of what Mitsuba’s holding out to him. “It’s for you, that’s the point. We came hunting for you.”
“Oh, I can spare this much,” says Mitsuba. He sweeps a floppy sleeve around them. “Look how much we’ve caught! This is hardly a mouthful, I won’t miss it. And I’d feel so rude if I didn’t offer you anything.” His tone says he’s joking, says he’s teasing, says he’s making fun of Kou. The disconcertingly intense stare he’s fixed on Kou says he’s deadly fucking serious.
Kou can’t answer. He’s too rattled, bewildered.
“Tsukasa-kun would share,” Mitsuba says to him, brandishing what he’s holding in a way that only makes it grosser: limp, dripping, trailing the ragged ends of some torn membrane. His bright voice is getting even brighter. “Tsukasa-kun often eats with me. He’d do it. I mean, if it’s too gross for you then I get it. If you think it’s disgusting then I totally understand. I only offered because you made such a big deal about how none of this freaks you out, but if you’ve changed your mind—”
“Give that here,” Kou says instantly, and snatches it himself from Mitsuba’s hand.
He bites down. It’s cold and stringy. It’s hard to get his teeth into. Kou tries again, using his back teeth instead; he bites hard, harder, and he pulls at the meat and shakes it and manages to rip off a piece small enough to chew, and chew, and chew – it’s not changing texture. Kou swallows. It’s fine. It’s whatever. He’s eaten Teru’s cooking before now; he’s eaten way the hell worse than a bit of raw undead flesh.
Mitsuba is watching him.
“What?” Kou says. He feels inside his mouth, digs something nonchalantly from between his teeth with his thumbnail. “Eating supernatural meat is just gonna make me get a bit more supernatural for a couple of hours. Big deal! I’m a Minamoto, I don’t care about getting in touch with my supernatural side.”
Mitsuba scoffs, but half-heartedly; he can’t entirely commit to the pretence of not caring. “So long as you don’t get a taste for it,” he says. He sounds more like himself again: that bright false teasing note has left his voice. He rips again at what he’s holding. “The rest’s all mine. I’m not sharing.”
Relief crashes into Kou. He shoves it out of sight, and takes another ferocious bite of his scrap of supernatural meat to drive the message home: it’s not weird. It’s not gross. Mitsuba isn’t going to disgust him. Kou is never going to recoil.
And again. Again. None of Kou’s teeth are sharp enough for this. His jaw’s not strong enough. He wishes he’d thought to bring a steak knife. He bites as hard as he can and pulls, shakes, worries at the meat until another piece comes loose. There’s got to be a knack to this.
Mitsuba has the knack. The noises are pretty bad. But if Kou closed his eyes they’d be the same noises as normal kitchen noises, more or less: the ordinary domestic sounds of his own afterschool routine. Tearing, ripping, squelching. The familiar wet slap of raw chicken pieces smacked down onto the cutting board. Certain cuts of meat have the bones in, and they have to be removed; sometimes the bones have to be snapped. The long drawn-out gristly sound of skin peeling from flesh. Sometimes Tiara isn’t in the mood to eat the skin either, and Kou peels it off for her while she whines about how gross it is: it’s pretty much the same kind of noise. Handling raw meat is a basic kitchen skill.
The smooth pale stone of Mitsuba’s grave is smeared with dark wet stains. Normal humans won’t be able to see the stains. Kou will clean the grave afterwards anyway, though. Not tonight – but tomorrow morning, perhaps, in the daylight – he’ll come back alone, as early as he can; he’ll catch the first train, try to clean up their mess before anyone else comes by...
At the distant entrance of the graveyard burns that pair of old stone lanterns; but Kou and Mitsuba are deep inside the graveyard here, far from the gate and far from the curtained lights of houses, and the darkness is so absolute on the hillside that it’s hard for Kou to make out the details of even his own shoes. The clammy heat of late summer sticks his T-shirt to his chest, pastes his hair against the nape of his neck. Sweat trickles beneath his clothes. He sits on the stone of a stranger’s grave, his feet spread wide on the gravel. He’s watching.
Mitsuba is just getting on with it. He’s not wearing his human shape anymore. No reason he should. Makes sense that he wouldn’t, in fact. Makes sense that Mitsuba would need to take a less human shape for such inhuman behaviour.
But everything Mitsuba does is inhuman, so that’s not a criticism: it’s just a fact. Kou watches him. If he looked away he’d be saying he doesn’t want to see. Mitsuba hasn’t yet once looked up, but if he did, if he does, if Mitsuba glances up with that furtive little look he’s so prone to giving, and if he sees Kou looking resolutely in the opposite direction so that he doesn’t have to know what’s happening, then how is Mitsuba going to feel? If he sees that Kou can’t even look at him? If he’s forced to conclude that Kou talks the big talk but can’t walk the walk?—that Kou only has his back in theory, when it’s easy, and doesn’t have the guts to stick by him once it all gets real...?
Kou watches. He keeps watching. Nothing either of them has killed tonight is anything that Teru wouldn’t have killed too. Supernatural corpses have to be disposed of somehow; might as well make use of them. Mitsuba doesn’t need a steak knife because he can do it bare-handed. Run a clawed fingertip straight down the middle, like a scalpel; open up the body, like a zip. Practical. Saves time. Built-in supernatural efficiency.
It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. This is Mitsuba: that’s all Kou needs to know. Whatever Mitsuba is or does, Kou accepts him. Whatever Mitsuba becomes, Kou always will.
At length Mitsuba gives the wearily satisfied sigh of someone who’s eaten too much and enjoyed it. He sits up straighter, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, then wiping the back of his hand on his other sleeve, then wiping his sleeve on the grave’s altar, even though all of them are equally filthy with gore: Mitsuba, fussy to the point of lunacy. “It’s creepy you staring at me the entire time,” he remarks to Kou, though he sounds much too cheerful to be believed. “Makes me feel like I’m in the zoo. Or being stalked. Like you’re watching me with binoculars through a crack in your curtains like a total freak.”
“Sorry,” says Kou, abashed.
Mitsuba scoffs at him, and pats the empty patch of bloodstained gravestone at his side. “What?” he challenges, when Kou doesn’t immediately leap to his feet. “The big tough exorcist boy’s scared of a little blood? You don’t want to get your clothes dirty? Learn to do your fucking laundry, get over it! Come here!” He slaps the stone again, like he’s calling a disobedient dog to heel.
This is the most irritating Mitsuba has been all night so far. Deeply relieved, Kou goes to sit beside him. “You all right?” he asks.
“Fine,” says Mitsuba, without hesitation. “Pretty good. Yeah, I’m good. I think I’ll save the rest for later. Here – I’ve got another bag...”
Mitsuba has brought an enormous shapeless waterproof case for transporting a tent, with the tent removed. Together, they stash the rest of the dead and not-quite-dead creatures into their two bags. Some of them are too big to fit: those ones, Kou leaves aside for Mitsuba. He’s more supernatural than Kou. More used to dismemberment, too. Mitsuba has more ways to make them fit.
At last they’re done. The footpaths between the graves are clear again: no corpses, no near-corpses, no body parts. The night is so dark that it’s impossible to see how stained the grass might be. Side by side on the flat stone base of Mitsuba’s grave, they sit looking out across the graveyard.
“Do you wonder how many of those supernaturals were originally the spirits of people buried here?” Mitsuba asks brightly.
“Shut up,” says Kou.
“Probably lots of them, right? Or else they moved into the graveyard just to eat the spirits of people buried here, so they would have had plenty of humans’ spirits inside them anyway. I expect most of them must have been humans at some—”
“Shut up,” says Kou. He thumps his fist into Mitsuba’s thigh. “Seriously. Don’t worry about it. Forget it.”
“I’m not worrying about it,” says Mitsuba. “All I’m doing is talking about it. You’re the one who’s worrying about it. How many human souls do you think I just ate? How many people died for my dinner? Roughly? Approximately? What would you say?”
“I’d say shut up,” says Kou. “They were supernaturals. That’s all they were. They weren’t human. I don’t care if they died. And – and,” he says more loudly, as Mitsuba begins to interrupt, “if they ever were human, it was a hell of a long time ago. And they weren’t human tonight. And—and! Will you shut up and let me speak for half a second?! And,” Kou says again, ferociously loud to drown out Mitsuba, “I don’t care, anyway. I did it already and I’d do it again. I will do it again. You’re not gonna find some way to say all this shit that makes me magically change my mind about it all of a sudden. I’m gonna keep doing it, and you can’t talk me out of it. You can’t stop me. No one’s gonna stop me.”
Instead of replying, Mitsuba changes himself: Kou feels the ripple of supernatural energy, sees the shimmering in-between state of Mitsuba’s appearance before it settles. He’s back in his school uniform, restored to immaculate condition. His cardigan, grey in the darkness, looks like it’s been freshly laundered.
Mitsuba examines the fingernails of a hand which now looks more or less like Kou’s, except cleaner. “So you think supernaturals are worthless compared to humans, do you?” he inquires.
“I’m not talking about you,” says Kou. “Moron, you don’t count. You’re not just any old random supernatural. And if you were human you wouldn’t be just any old random human. You’re Mitsuba.”
Mitsuba remains silent for long enough that Kou glances around, expecting to catch him in the act of giving Kou that weird, furtive stare; but Mitsuba isn’t even looking at him. He’s staring straight out across the shadowy expanse of the graveyard below.
“Mitsuba,” says Kou. “Hey. Listen. All I’m saying is—”
Mitsuba smacks his hands to his knees. “I’m sick of this graveyard,” he announces, and jumps to his feet. “Come on! Let’s go somewhere more interesting. Take me on another train. Show me the sights.”
“I’m covered in blood!”
“And? So what? Who else will even be able to see it? You really thought you could take me out for dinner and leave me to sit around in a graveyard all night and I’d be satisfied with that? I want fun,” says Mitsuba, “I want entertainment, I want novelty, I want creative and original ideas tailored to my own personal interests, I want—Not that one,” he says swiftly, as Kou heaves himself with a long-suffering sigh to his feet and reaches for the handles of his leaking, overstuffed gym bag, “give that one to me, I’ll take that bag. You take the other bag.”
“The other bag’s your one,” says Kou.
“They’re both mine now,” says Mitsuba. “But the other one’s much bigger and heavier, it’s got more food in it, and I’m more physically delicate than you, my health is more fragile and important, so you should carry the big one. And I’ll take the small one, so I don’t get tired. Where are we going now?”
“Yeah, I think I like you better when you’re depressed,” says Kou, and: “Fuck!” says Kou, staggering away from Mitsuba’s physically non-delicate kick in the shin; but Mitsuba was already laughing before he even kicked him, so fracturing a bone or two is worth it. Bones will grow back. Mitsuba is rarely this cheerful.
-
They go back down through the labyrinthine network of alleyways and emerge on a wider road, where here and there a streetlight shines; where, now and then, a car goes by. They wander the quiet streets. They go into a convenience store, and Mitsuba virtually disappears under the strong stark glare of the overhead lighting; Kou grabs his elbow, panicked by his sudden near-transparency, and Mitsuba scoffs at him and twists away and sets off boldly by himself to look at the ice cream cabinet.
“I want strawberry,” he tells Kou.
“’Cause it’s pink?”
“Because I like strawberry.”
“Yeah, but ‘cause it’s pink?”
“Are you going to hurry up and buy it for me or not?”
“Dunno,” says Kou. He puts the tent bag, bulging with its bloody writhing contents, on the smooth plastic floor; he unpeels his T-shirt from his sweaty skin and flaps it in the chill of the air conditioning. “I’ll have to think about it. This bag you’re making me carry’s so heavy I might not have enough strength left to get my wallet out, I might not even be able to pay.”
“I’ll get it out for you,” says Mitsuba. “Which pocket? Left? Right? Front? Back—?”
“Hands off!”
A pair of older girls standing at the chilled drinks display look around to him, startled by the volume of his yell; they see Kou standing all alone, clutching his backside and burning scarlet with embarrassment, and they don’t see Mitsuba laughing beside him, and they look away quickly and whisper with their heads together and then they move in a hurry to another aisle.
“I didn’t even touch you!” Mitsuba cries with scornful delight. “Are you really that scared I might touch you?”
“I’m not scared! I was just, I – I was surprised,” Kou says, defensively belligerent. “I was surprised! You surprised me! You can’t just try and grab a guy’s bum with no warning!”
“I didn’t even touch you!” Mitsuba jeers, trailing Kou to the cash register to watch him pay. When they leave, Mitsuba lingers just outside the exit, looking back, until the automatic doors slide closed in his face: they think there’s no one there; they don’t recognise him as a human presence.
They set off down the street. Then Mitsuba says, “What about with warning?”
“Eh?”
His tone of bullshit airy innocence is the most suspicious thing about the question. “What if I warned you before I grabbed your bum?”
“Why the fuck would you wanna grab my bum?”
“I’m warning you,” says Mitsuba. “This is your warning.”
“What?—hey!” Kou twists aside from Mitsuba’s spirited feint. He’s carrying the enormous tent bag in both arms, cradling it like a monstrous baby; he can’t defend himself from Mitsuba’s stupid game. Mitsuba feints the other way and Kou dodges back, staggers off-balance, crashes into a traffic light pole and rebounds, cussing; Mitsuba catches him by his shoulders to steady him, laughing in his face. “If I had my hands free,” Kou says, trying to sound threatening, trying to rise to the occasion as aggressively as Mitsuba clearly wants, “if this was a fair fight...”
“Then you’d grab me too, would you? Yeah, good luck with that. You’re human and you’re slow as hell! In your dreams! Give me my ice cream before it melts,” says Mitsuba, digging into the plastic bag hanging from Kou’s elbow.
They find a park. They climb over the low fence and walk through the park. Mitsuba claims to be unimpressed, but Kou sees him checking out the trees with an appreciative eye; he has more interest in looking at the bunches of fat raggedy-looking bushes sitting clumped together in the dark than any normal person would. “Got some flowers over that way, too,” Kou helpfully informs him, pointing.
“I can’t believe you’re trying to show me flowers in the dark,” Mitsuba says derisively.
Nonetheless, he stays crouched beside the flowerbeds in contemplation of the flowers for much longer than Kou, by himself, would ever feel the desire to contemplate flowers.
The evening has turned to night. The tiny local train station is deserted. Mitsuba wants to be the one who taps Kou’s train pass to open the gates: Kou, adequately warned, lets him take it from his back pocket. None of Mitsuba’s earlier uncertainty remains; he’s as aggressively confident about the train, and going through the station, and waiting on the platform, and watching the train arrive and getting on and taking their seats as though he’s taken thousands of trains before now, uncountable quantities of trains; he’s an expert, he’s mastered the art of trains.
To Kou’s relief, their carriage is entirely empty. He lowers his bulging tent bag to the floor with the sound of suspicious, macabre squelching. Something inside it lets out a thin whine: Kou chooses not to hear. Mitsuba is already sitting back-to-front, kneeling up with his nose against the window, waiting keenly for the train to leave the station.
Exhaustion overcomes Kou. He sits back against the cushioned bench. “You’re all right, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Mitsuba says decisively. He pats Kou’s shoulder, and Kou looks around to see him. “Thank you,” Mitsuba says to him. He’s being sincere. Not the fake over-the-top bullshit sincere he usually does: actual sincere, like a normal person, like he means it.
Kou jerks his head away. He folds his arms self-consciously and glowers out the window across from them: his own reflection, reflected beside the reflection of Mitsuba’s back. “Don’t make it weird,” he says.
“Yeah, that’s your job,” says Mitsuba. “Why are you facing the wrong way? Make yourself useful, Minamoto-kun! Turn around, look out the window with me! You have to tell me what I’m looking at! You’re completely useless to me otherwise. You’re just dead weight! You’re a nuisance and a burden! You’re—”
“I’m gonna tell Teru-nii to meet me at the station,” says Kou, reaching for his phone, “so he can exorcise you as soon as we arrive—”
“Don’t you dare!”
Kou doesn’t even want to dare. He turns around and looks out the window with Mitsuba; as best he can, he makes himself useful.
-
The station is empty when they arrive. Even the ticket booth has been closed, its shutters drawn down.
Only as they’re passing through the station gates and out into the dark night beyond does it occur to Kou that his plan is now, technically, complete. Meet Mitsuba, take the train with Mitsuba, hunt for Mitsuba, provide for Mitsuba, prove his aggressively unyielding support to Mitsuba; come back safely again with Mitsuba. They’ve done all of that. The plan was a success: the plan is over. And now – what? Walk him back to school? Deliver him straight back to Tsukasa? Not a fucking chance.
“Now what?” Kou says to Mitsuba.
“I’m not going back to school yet,” Mitsuba says instantly. “You don’t have to go home yet either, do you? You already told me no one’s going to care where you are till the morning, so you’ve got no excuse. You can stay out just as long as I want you to.”
“Till sunrise,” corrects Kou. “Teru-nii never comes home till sunrise.”
“So you can keep me company until the sunrise, then,” says Mitsuba. “You can do whatever I want until then. Can’t you?”
“Not like you’re gonna give me much of a choice,” says Kou. The success of his plan, combined with the absence of Tsukasa from Mitsuba’s immediate future, is lifting his mood to a much more cheerful level. He bumps his shoulder against Mitsuba’s. “What d’you wanna do, then? The supermarket? Did you wanna go and have a look in—”
“I want to see your house,” says Mitsuba.
“You’ve seen my house,” says Kou.
“Inside your house,” says Mitsuba.
“No,” says Kou. “No way. Are you mental? No.”
Mitsuba stops and turns to face him, gazing pleadingly straight into his eyes. “Minamoto-kun, I’ve never been inside a house before! This could be my one and only chance to go inside a house, a real live human house, my only chance ever!”
“That face is not as cute as you think it is!”
Mitsuba seizes Kou’s upper arms. “I’ve never been inside a house!”
“But—c’mon, let go,” Kou says, trying with an awkward jerk of the shoulder to disentangle them. Mitsuba doesn’t let him go. He bats his lashes like a fucking epileptic. The tent bag cradled in Kou’s arms squelches hideously between them. “Listen, I would invite you in. I would! I’d ask you over anytime! I’d make us dinner and you could do my homework and we could just hang out – I would, if I could. But I can’t,” insists Kou, already stricken by the familiar agony of knowing exactly what he shouldn’t do and knowing, also, for Mitsuba’s sake, exactly what he is going to do. “I can’t, ‘cause I’m an exorcist! I’m from an exorcist family! I live in an exorcists’ house! D’you have any idea how secure that place is?! No supernatural’s getting in there without like twenty alarms going off and calling our dad straight home from the shrine and Teru-nii straight home from patrol to come and kill the intruder – and that’s even if all the anti-supernatural traps already sprang and killed it first! Teru-nii’ll come home just to destroy what’s left, purify the remains. Mitsuba – listen. Mitsuba,” says Kou, trying to fill his voice with urgent significance as he holds Mitsuba’s revoltingly winsome gaze, trying to make him understand. “There’s no way anything supernatural’s getting into my house. It’s rigged to hell and back.”
Mitsuba’s expression relaxes. He releases Kou. “You don’t know how to switch off an alarm?” he says disdainfully.
“These aren’t normal alarms,” says Kou. “These are exorcists’ alarms.”
Mitsuba doesn’t deign to respond. He turns away, and stoops to peer into the narrow crack of light escaping beneath the shutters in someone’s front window, trying to see the illuminated room within.
“Like, protective charms and that,” Kou says doggedly. “Safety wards. Anti-supernatural seals. This stuff’s all high-grade exorcist material. Our granddad used to set the alarms for us but now Teru-nii does it himself, and he made them a hundred times more complicated than they used to be.” He shifts the weight of the tent bag in his arms, and tugs at the back of Mitsuba’s scarf. “Stop that, you’re being creepy.”
“I bet these people aren’t exorcists,” says Mitsuba. “If you don’t let me into your house, perhaps I’ll let myself into their house. Show myself around. Have a look at all their things. They won’t even know I’m there.”
Kou pulls harder at Mitsuba’s scarf. “Mitsuba,” he says. “Oi. Cut it out. Mitsu—”
Mitsuba rounds on him. “So what if they’re exorcists’ alarms?” he says impatiently. “Aren’t you supposed to be an exorcist?”
“I told you, they’re difficult alarms!”
“Oh, they’re difficult, are they?” Mitsuba mimics back, lifting his chin in scornful challenge. “They’re a little bit tricky for you, are they? They’re tough for you? Well, too bad! Make an effort! Put some work in! If I can manage to take a train without killing anyone, you can sure as hell work out how to switch off an alarm!”
Kou shuts his eyes despairingly tight. Mitsuba has never been in a house before. Mitsuba might never go in a house again. “I swear, if Teru-nii finds out—”
“But he won’t find out,” Mitsuba says swiftly, his voice going a million times sweeter and fluffier like he thinks Kou’s ever going to buy that he has a heart and soul of delicate harmless spun-sugar candyfloss. “Because you’ll switch off the alarms, won’t you? Because you’re a really powerful and talented exorcist, I know you are, Minamoto-kun, I believe in you, and you really want to let me go inside a house for the first time ever, don’t you? So you’ve got really strong motivation to make sure you do it all perfectly, haven’t you? Because it really really really moves you and touches your heart that I’ve never experienced such a simple basic fundamenta—”
“You are laying it on way the fuck too thick!” says Kou.
“I want a guided tour,” Mitsuba says happily.