Archive of Our Own ^beta

Once upon a time there was a black oni, who after wandering far and wide picked a nice lonely mountaintop to settle upon, where he would have only the quiet company of the wind and rocks and trees and crows.

He decided on this particular mountaintop because it was close enough to a human village that other youkai would give it a wide berth. At one time, an oni might've preferred to live near a village, to snack on the occasional lost kid (goat or human); but in recent years the humans had developed protection such that wise oni would steer clear of them, and stupid oni—well, stupid oni were fewer than they once had been. So the black oni thought his new home would be far from any of his brethren.

He was therefore surprised to discover some days later that he was not alone; further down the mountainside, that much closer to the village, dwelt another of his kind. The black oni bumped into this fellow while taking a forest walk during one of the first snowfalls of the season—if by "fellow" one meant a stout blue oni with broad, rounded shoulders and two white horns; and by "bumped into" one meant "accidentally trod on his shin."

In the black oni's defense, the other's leg was stretched right out on the path, and lying down as he was the falling snow had dusted him, such that the black oni thought he was stepping on a frozen log. He only realized his mistake when the owner of the leg squawked, "Ow! Geddoff! Watch where you're going! Are you trying to kill me?"

He sat up, glaring up at the black oni. The black oni stared back down at him in turn. The other oni's skin was blue like ice, an ordinary enough complexion for their race, but his eyes were a shade the black oni had only ever seen in the sea, mid-storm. He was holding a short length of metal in his hand, too blunt to be a knife, not that oni usually bothered with knives when they had teeth and claws.

"What are you supposed to be?" the blue oni eventually huffed. Rather than the traditional tiger-skin loincloth, he appeared to be wearing a striped cotton yukata, stretched over his broad shoulders, and he brushed snow off it as he asked, "A tengu? Because I don't need you sticking your long nose into my—"

"No," the black oni contradicted, "I'm an oni. Like you," he pointed out, speaking loudly and slowly in case the blue oni was a bit deaf as well as apparently blind.

The blue oni continued to stare. "No you're not," he said.

"Yes I am."

"Whoever heard of a black oni? Our species typically exhibits two pigmentation phases, the blue and the red."

"There's exceptions," the black oni said, bristling a little because it wasn't the first time he had heard it.

"Oh, you're a mutant," the blue oni said, waving a clawed hand dismissively as he crouched to squint at the tree stump in front him. "Or else a particularly dark variant of the blue, I suppose. Either way, if you'd please get back to your pillaging or bashing things with your iron club or whatever you were doing, some of us have work to do."

The black oni blinked. "I was taking a walk in the woods. And do I look like I have a club on me?"

The blue oni glanced up at him. "So where is it, back at your cave?"

"Well, yeah," the black oni admitted, because it was; really now, what oni didn't have a good kanabo?

The blue oni sniffed like he hadn't expected any better, and began poking the base of the stump with his not-knife. The black oni couldn't quite make out what he was doing past his blue bulk.

There was no particular reason for him not to continue his walk; for him to go up to his cave and gather his few belongings and seek out another, uninhabited mountain.

Instead the black oni said, "So, the name's John." (Or actually Janen¹, "wicked thought," a traditional enough oni name, but as his elder brother had been given the exact same name by their impressively uncreative dam, he had gone by the diminutive since he had learned to talk and hit rabbits with his club.)

"Huh?" said the blue oni. "Whose name? Oh, what, yours?"

"Yes," the black oni said patiently. He had been wondering why the blue oni would live so close to a human village, but apparently he was of the less than intelligent variety. Why this should disappoint John, he couldn't guess. It wasn't as if he had been looking for conversation.

"So why are you digging up this stump?" he asked after a moment.

"I'm not digging up anything," the blue oni said, in a tone teetering between testy and distracted. He sighed. "If you must know, I'm attempting to improve the efficiency of the heating coils, as with the recent cloud cover the solar power absorption's been diminished, so the birdbath's freezing over, and it's hardly any good to anything that way, now is it?"

The black oni looked at the hollowed-out top of the stump, where a thin sheet of ice coated the water pooled there. "It's a birdbath," he said.

"Very clever, you must have been first in your class at oni school," the blue oni said.

"Sarcastic, much? Anyway there's no such thing as oni school."

"Hence the sarcasm."

"Why are you fixing a birdbath?"

"Because it's mine; I'm the one who built it."

"...Why did you build a birdbath?"

The blue oni rolled his unusual eyes. "For birds to take baths in. Look, don't you have trees somewhere to be knocking down?"

"Not especially, no," the black oni said. "Is it a thermostatic heater? That'd be more efficient when it gets above freezing," and ignoring the startled squawk as the blue oni dropped his tool, he settled himself on a nearby stump that hadn't yet been converted into a birdbath, to watch his new acquaintance work.

The blue oni's name, John eventually learned, was Rodney—he had been named Rodon-oni ², but while most oni wouldn't have a problem with being named "imbecility", or in fact know their own name kanji to begin with, Rodney was not most oni. That he kept any of his original name was only in stubborn defiance—which was a common oni trait, but Rodney brought it to new and interesting levels, as he did with everything.

There was, for instance, his cave, which had five lantern-lit chambers with central heating, steam pumped through carved vents from a wood-fed furnace. He also had furniture—mostly wooden tables and a couple sturdy benches, upon which he built things like the birdbath heater and a device that warned of storms, dexterously twisting and assembling bits of metal between his powerful clawed hands.

At first Rodney was reluctant to show John any of these, or let John into his cave at all. John, who had never cared to invite another oni to his own domicile, didn't push. But every couple of days he would amble down the mountainside to stretch his legs, and usually he encountered the blue oni on the paths.

Finally, one particularly frosty day, when the snow was piling deep and the howling winds were amping up to blizzard gusts, Rodney hmphed and told him, "You might as well come inside. If you tried to make it back in this, you'd end up walking across the frozen sea and find yourself on the mainland, the way you get lost."

"I do not," John objected; Rodney rolled his eyes and muttered, "Houkou-onchi³," and lead John into his cozy caverns.

By the time the storm died two days later, Rodney had introduced many of his various creations to John, with increasing enthusiasm as John didn't smash anything and asked questions instead. John had long been intrigued by the strange doohickeys humans made, ever since he'd seen one of them actually float off the ground in a giant balloon; but Rodney knew not only what things worked, but how. When John left, it was with two smoke-free lanterns for his own cave, and a little glass case holding a needle that always pointed north (which, he neglected to tell Rodney, meant little to him when he didn't know whether his cave was supposed to be to the north or to the south—east, perhaps, or was that the sun? But it was the thought that counted.)

In turn, the next time he came down the mountainside, John brought with him his shogi board. A kappa had taught him the game, early in his travels; John had since played with tanuki and kami, but never with another oni. Rodney picked it up quickly, however, and while he won rarely, John kept having to devise new strategies to stay abreast of him. Rodney was easily as clever as any youkai John had ever met, and the gleam in his narrowed eyes as he studied the board was bright as any scheming kitsune's.

Together, too, they began to invent new games to play. John had never met another oni who could count beyond their twenty fingers and toes (save those few who possessed more than twenty digits), but Rodney was as fond as numbers as John was, and they'd challenge one another with polynomial equations or factoring possible primes.

Really, hanging out with Rodney wasn't like being with any other oni John had ever met. While most oni tended to be loners, John was used to the females who would approach him come breeding season, attracted to his classically pointed ears and naturally tangled black hair. But they only ever wanted one thing out of him. Occasionally they might go for a hunt together as foreplay, but then it was all stalking and snarls, not much in the way of conversation.

Rodney didn't particularly like to hunt. For one, he didn't actually own a kanabo anymore; he'd melted down the iron club to smelt smaller instruments, a hammer and a wrench and the flat, blunt not-knife he called a screwdriver, none of which were big enough to take down prey. Mostly he ate radishes and other vegetables, and fish he caught in the river: a bizarrely bland diet for an oni, but he said he liked it.

He did enjoy the meat John brought over, sinking his sharp teeth in with carnivorous pleasure; but he also insisted on cooking it first, roasting the boar hocks and venison steaks until well-done—"Do you know what kind of parasites wild deer have in their intestines?"

"Then don't eat the intestines," John said, though secretly he'd had a taste for barbecue himself ever since he'd frightened a human family away from their lakeside picnic, when he was still a young youkai.

Watching Rodney eat, licking the last marinade off his claws with pleased little growls, John couldn't help but think about how very un-oni-like Rodney was. It wasn't just the inventions and the mathematics, but the slightly rounded softness of his tummy under his yukata, where most oni were proud to display rock-hard abs above their loincloths; or the bluntness of the horns sticking up from his thatch of unreasonably fine brown hair, like he never bothered to file them sharp. He did keep his claws nicely pointed, but John knew that was only because he used them to pry and poke at his devices.

Rodney's most atypical trait, however, John didn't discover until one morning in early spring, a little after the plum blossoms had fallen, when he came down the mountainside to find Rodney nowhere in his cave or outside of it. John could have climbed back up to his own cave to eagle-watch, but he was bored and the warming spring breeze made him restless. Instead he followed Rodney's path through the forest.

It wasn't particularly difficult to track him through the broken and trampled underbrush, but the further along John got, the more uneasy he became. Rodney's trail was heading straight toward the human village.

John hadn't thought much about the village since he had started living here; in the winter the humans stuck close to their homes and didn't venture up into the mountains much. But now hunters and hikers would be wandering the mountainside, and while John's cave was probably out of reach, what if they came across Rodney's?

Or maybe that was the way Rodney liked it; he stuck to fish in the winter, but snacked on wayward humans in the summer, and there was no reason that should upset John—it wasn't as if they weren't both oni. And while okay, yes, John had happened to have more opportunities to interact with humans than most oni, it wasn't as if he particularly liked them or anything; his own dietary predilections were a personal lifestyle choice, and he'd never been one to push his own principles onto others. If Rodney liked a sweet succulent human child now and again, who was John to argue?

When he finally reached Rodney, the blue oni was crouched behind a mulberry bush growing on the side of the single mountain road, just in sight of the village. It was a perfect spot to ambush any passing travelers. He jumped when John bumped his shoulder, turned and yelped, "You—what—what are you doing here?"

"Bored," John said, "and keep it down, don't you know anything about hunting?"

Rodney sniffed. "I'm not hunting."

"Then what are you doing down here?"

"I'm," and then Rodney shut his mouth. "Nothing," he said.

Rodney voluntarily shutting his mouth happened approximately once a never, so John poked his ribs. "What?"

"Shh," Rodney silenced him in return, brushing leaves out of the way to look through the bush.

John peered over his shoulder at the village. He had only been by the place once before, and then it had been night, silent under a blanket of snow. It was a little different from other villages he had seen, the shops and houses with their blue tile roofs clustered around a tall central tower. Now people were just rising, opening their doors and bringing out market tents and motorized carts.

"Look, there they go," Rodney hissed, pointing to a group of men and women dressed in gray and blue the same shade as Rodney's hide, heading toward that central spire.

They were all adults, and neither particularly lean nor particularly fatty; not that John was much of a judge, but they didn't look especially tasty to him. "Them? What's so special about them?"

"They're the scientists," Rodney said, as if that explained everything, and John hadn't heard that particular awed tone in his friend's voice before.

With the spring's thaw, Rodney went down to the human village nearly daily to watch the scientists go to work in the tower, often staying there until they left again come evening, or later. Sometimes he would bring the tube fitted with glass lenses that he used to watch the stars, and aim it at the tower's great glass windows.

"Look at that," he'd say, with a sigh that sounded hungry, starved, even though he insisted he had no interest in eating any scientist. "That's the latest in digital plasma displays—and that chemical spectrum analyzer, what I could do, if I could have but one day with that..."

He would let John look through his tube, but John never saw anything through the windows but cubes with blinking lights and humans writing out numbers on white boards or tiny black boxes, which was apparently most of what scientists did. Sometimes they apparently wrote on paper as well; one chamber of Rodney's cave was filled with stacks and stacks of what he called journals, their smooth pages covered with tiny black numbers and characters. John could read a human newspaper, but the books in Rodney's collection had so many obscure kanji and other scripts he didn't know that they were almost indecipherable. Sometimes when Rodney was bored he would take out these journals and scribble all over them in messy red pen, crossing out numbers and writing in his own, mumbling about idiots and morons and if this was the kind of nonsense they taught in university, then he was better off not having gone anyway.

Now that winter was ending, the scientists also left the village on occasion, and that was when John learned that Rodney's obsession went beyond a harmless hobby.

The first time a party of scientists departed from the tower, John was with Rodney, creeping with him through the trees to follow the group at a safe distance. Armed soldiers accompanied the scientists, keeping a wary vigil as they ascended the mountainside to a ledge. There they erected a spindly, shiny silver instrument, topped with a wobbly antenna taller than John or Rodney.

It took them most of the day to set it up, and Rodney insisted on staying to observe the process. After sunset, when the humans had returned to the village, he examined it. "It's a weather gauge," he explained, "they're monitoring climate change—but this transmitter's grounding is a joke, the next bad electrical storm will short it out."

Sure enough, the day after the thunderstorm two nights later, the scientists with their guards again emerged from the village to climb the mountain. They argued over their instrument, loud enough that John and Rodney could hear most of their words from where they were concealed in the underbrush. Rodney muttered responses nonstop, but when he got too loud John clamped his hand over the blue oni's mouth. Rodney glared with his strange seawater eyes and bit John's calloused palm, but at least they weren't overheard.

A week later the mountain was hit by another spring storm. John had a bit of a cold and stayed in his own cave, out of the rain and sleeping. When he woke up the sun was shining brightly, and it took a few minutes for his sore, stuffy head to make sense of this.

Then he jumped up and charged out of his cave down the mountainside, his instincts sending him not toward Rodney's cave, but to the ledge with the scientists' instrument. He wasn't quite sure of the way, but it turned out he didn't need to be; his sharp ears heard the screams across the distance.

By the time he reached the ledge, the scientists had screamed themselves hoarse, but the soldiers were bellowing, "Stay back!" with their weapons raised, standing protectively in front of the scientists huddling around their metal structure. Rodney stood before them, his clawed hands raised.

"Listen," he was saying, "I'm only trying to explain how completely you morons have underestimated the—"

"I said back, monster!" shouted the soldier in the lead.

"If you'd just—" Rodney began, sidling a step forward.

"Rodney!" John yelled, as the three soldiers triggered their weapons.

With a high-pitched hum, blue light burst forth, flickering over Rodney's skin and brightening its hue to cerulean. He jerked stiff as if he'd been struck by lightning, then started to topple over.

John was there before he hit the ground, heaving the other oni over his shoulder and plunging into the forest before the soldiers could aim for him, too. He didn't stop running until he reached Rodney's cave, out of breath—John was used to running, but Rodney weighed as much as he did, if not a bit more.

He dropped Rodney to the floor. The blue oni grunted when he thudded against the stone, but he didn't wake up, even when John shook him by the shoulder. He didn't have any apparent injuries, though, no blood, and he was breathing, so John crouched next to him and waited.

A good half an hour passed before Rodney finally groaned and blinked open his eyes, fuzzily mumbling, "Wha' happ'n'd?"

"Are you crazy?" John demanded, cuffing the other oni hard across the head.

"No! Are you?" Rodney snapped back, batting John's hand away as he sat up.

"I'm not the one going up against armed humans!" John snarled. "We're way past the age of slings and arrows, Rodney, they could've—they—"

"I wasn't attacking them." Rodney put his head in his clawed hands, rubbed his temples under the horns.

"A couple hundred years ago, their muskets couldn't do much damage," John told him, "but the artillery they've got now can pierce our hide. You're so damn fascinated by these humans, you should at least know that much about them. If they'd had automatic guns, instead of those—whatever those blue things were—"

"Stunners," Rodney said. "The scientists invented them, or discovered them, anyway. Though they must've upped the power output, the headache wasn't this bad before. Ow."

"Before?" John demanded. He grabbed Rodney's arms and yanked his hands out of the way, to glare him in the face. "You've pulled this before?"

"I've approached worthy scientific expeditions on occasion," Rodney snapped, all irritated confidence, but he wouldn't look John in the eye. "This...wasn't the worst reception I've gotten."

"The worst? You—they could've gone hunting!" John cried. "They could've sent a party of soldiers up the mountainside, found your cave and burned you alive in it!"

"Not likely," Rodney sniffed, "stone doesn't exactly burn easily. Why else would I live in a cave?"

"Yeah, and what about your gadgets and books and things, are they all fireproof?"

Rodney glanced shiftily at his nearest worktable. "...Not all of them."

"And oni aren't, either. You're lucky they haven't come after you—you should stay away from the village, too, it'll be dangerous."

Rodney's jaw took on an obstinate set. "And who are you to tell me what to do?"

"I'm your friend," John said.

"...Oh," Rodney said with a twitch like he'd sat on a tack, his big blue eyes blinking. "Oh."

To John's astonishment, Rodney actually listened to him, and didn't go near the village for a whole four days. It was like winter again, hanging out in Rodney's cave flipping through his incomprehensible books while Rodney fiddled with his devices; or playing shogi together, sitting outside on a broad sun-warmed rock.

On the fifth morning, Rodney was nowhere around, and John found himself following the blue oni's fresh footprints up a path that was becoming all too familiar. Fortunately when he came in sight of the ledge with the weather gauge, no humans were in sight, only Rodney himself, crouched before the instrument.

The blue oni started to see John, then turned away as if he hadn't heard him coming. John stalked up behind him and crossed his arms. "You're not lying in wait to grab a passing scientist, are you?"

"It's not your business, but no, I'm not," Rodney primly answered, climbing to his feet and folding his own arms. "If you really must know, their transmitter has shorted out yet again, and I—"

"Shit, that means they'll be coming up again—"

"Not for a couple hours yet," Rodney said. "Scientists keep late hours."

"Then what—" He caught a flutter of white under Rodney's sandal, crouched and snatched up the slip of paper. While he didn't know a few of the kanji, the messy characters in bright red ink were all too familiar, and John made out idiots, useless, and other key words. There was also a scribble of lines that looked like various diagrams from Rodney's journals. "You're leaving the humans a note?"

"They really should've realized the problem by now," Rodney said, aggrieved. "It's absurd for them to keep making the trek up here, when they just need a simple protection circuit and more surge arresters. I'd fix it myself but I don't have equipment to spare, and it's not like they don't have the proper supplies, if only they had the brains to use them."

John turned over the note and frowned. "Why does this say, 'for further advice or discussion, bring inquiries to the southwestern slope cavern complex'?"

"Well, my thinking was...if the scientists still fail to understand, or if they wanted clarification on any—"

"Rodney," John protested, "you might as well put up a sign on the road pointing to your cave—'Friendly Oni This Way, Scientists Welcome, Come for Tea'."

"Like that would work," Rodney snorted. "Besides, I've never learned the tea ceremony. Although..."

"Rodney, you do not want humans coming to your cave, with guns and flamethrowers and stunners and whatever else they'd bring on an oni-hunt!"

"Not humans," Rodney argued, "just a scientist or two."

John tapped one claw on the note. "For discussion."

"Exactly."

"When have you ever discussed science with anyone?" John inquired with some skepticism. "You'd just call them imbeciles. And probably devour them if they disagreed."

Rodney looked affronted. "I would never! ...Unless I was really hungry, and only if I had to."

"Riiight."

"Hey, hypoglycemic, here!"

John wordlessly held out the scrap of paper. Grumbling, Rodney took it, scratched out the final message on the back, then tucked the note between two of the instrument's spindly spokes and turned away. "The humans will be coming up the mountain soon," he said, "we should go if we don't want to be seen."

Rodney didn't quit going down to the village, but he kept his distance, even when the scientists in gray and blue emerged for other spring expeditions. He would follow their excursions down to the river to collect samples of the water and mud, or up to the peaks to send large red balloons dangling equipment into the air, but he stayed quiet and wasn't spotted.

John would have been relieved, except that Rodney stayed almost as quiet even when he had only John for company, dour, impenetrable silences lasting over the shogi board, or when they ate together. In the last months, John had gotten used to Rodney's near-constant rants and ruminations, on anything and everything; the silent mountainside felt unsettling now, like he'd suddenly gone deaf.

He thought Rodney might be holding a grudge against him, and finally offered for them to go up to the mountaintop and fight it out; but Rodney just stared at him as if he were crazy. "No, it's not that. You're right about the humans; it's not you."

"So we're cool?"

Rodney's mouth twisted around his fangs. "You're cool, I'm fine," he said; but the next day he was more sullen and taciturn than ever.

The cherry blossoms in the village had already fallen when the mountain sakura came into full flower, bursts of white and pale pink dotting the drab, muddy slopes. Rodney didn't see much of them, however; if he wasn't squatting behind a hedge near the village, peering into the central spire's windows, then he was locked in his cave, sitting at his tables working with tools or writing out complicated numerical functions. When John suggested he could do his math outside, Rodney complained about the effects of wind and rain on paper and refused.

But cherry blossoms are too short-lived to go unappreciated, so one clear night John got out the three special jugs of shochu he had won from a river serpent on the southern island, and dragged Rodney out of his cave. They sat together under the largest sakura tree on the mountainside and drank the sake, looking up at the wind-shifting flowers, ghostly and luminescent in the pure cool light of two of Rodney's lanterns. The glowing petals were like the leaves of phantom trees; as white as snowflakes, only when the breeze broke them free of the branches to flutter down, they settled softly on their skin, not stinging with cold or melting away.

For a while the two oni talked, but as the evening clouds drifted apart to reveal the stars spread behind them, they fell silent. The heated shochu was warm on John's tongue and warmer in his belly, as he stretched out on the ground, his hands propped comfortably behind his head. Only his elbow was brushing Rodney's hip, but they were close enough he could feel the other oni's warmth. Rodney's quiet was different in the still night, contemplative but not unhappy, as if he were thinking, not brooding.

Some time after they had finished the second bottle of drink, Rodney picked up the third and pushed himself standing, steadying himself against the tree trunk. John sat up. "Where are you going?"

"Um," Rodney said. "I thought you'd dozed off—um, that is—I was—can't finish all this by myself, just thought I'd—just share a bit, in the spirit of hanami⁴—" He'd already drunk more than John, and he stumbled over the words, blushing violet in the lamplight.

John frowned. "Who're you going to share it with, up here?" he started to ask, and then got it. "The humans? Rodney—"

"I thought—their cherry blossom viewing parties are over now, maybe they'd like to be invited to one more. The sakura in the village are already gone, but what we have up here are beautiful, and this is really quite excellent shochu, and humans enjoy a good drink as much as any youkai—"

"Rodney—"

"I could at least ask," Rodney snapped, sounding short and angry, but he looked miserable. "If they're a bit inebriated, if I try to be polite—"

And how likely was that—but John didn't say so; instead he said, "You're an oni, Rodney."

Rodney sat down with a thump, and drew up his legs to rest his head on his arms and his elbows on his bent knees. "You know," he said, a little muffled through his yukata's sleeves, "a lot of humans don't even believe in youkai anymore."

"What do you mean? Don't believe we do what?"

"That we exist," Rodney said. "They think we're fairytales, legends, myths. Scientists especially. That's why they've never sent the soldiers to hunt for my cave."

"They believe you exist," John told him. "They saw you."

"Yes, well, they didn't know what they saw. The biologists are probably writing up papers on the encounter. That's why they used stunners instead of guns, they wanted a live specimen. To figure out what I really was, since what I looked like couldn't be real."

"That's crazy."

"They're humans." Rodney didn't sound derisive but wistful. "They're so crazy, that's why they can think up such fascinating things. Like their math—I'm good with numbers, but over the millennia humans have come up with so many amazing things to do with them. And the things they make, their tools, their inventions—"

"You invent stuff cooler than any human could," John said. "What about that thing with the wings you've been working on, the metal bird big enough to carry both of us?"

"But it doesn't matter!" Rodney said. "If I can't get it done before I die, then no one will—there's no other oni who will work on it, except maybe you—otherwise it'll just be forgotten. Or my mathematics, they're useless, really—my calculations could be used to find new black holes, but I can't do that without a computer, without better telescopes, it'd take too long by myself."

"You might have time. Oni live a lot longer than humans," John pointed out. His stomach felt unsettled, though he hadn't drunk that much shochu. Rodney would still be inventing brilliant gadgets and math and such for years yet, for centuries, even.

"But it still doesn't do much good, not if no one else knows about it. And even if I give an idea to the scientists, they don't know it's mine; no one knows they're my theories, my inventions. I can't talk about them with anyone, and none of the scientists know my name, even when they know my ideas are genius."

'When', not 'if.' John sat up straighter. "When'd you share your ideas with scientists?"

Rodney's head sank lower, buried in his arms. "Anonymous letters," he said. "To a few journals. They wouldn't let me publish papers, not when I couldn't give them any university or doctor as a reference, or even an address. But they printed my responses to other papers, and a few scientists responded, in the letters section. I lived near a city with a university, I would steal journals from the recycling, and drop my letters in their mailboxes.

"There was this one scientist living in the city—one of the best, she's brilliant, almost as good as me. She cited my letters in her own paper, gave her address and asked me to contact her, so I did. She'd leave messages to me under a pine tree in the forest outside the city. I shared a lot of my science with her, and she let me correct some of hers that hadn't been published yet.

"Then she wanted to meet me, so I agreed, and waited for her under that tree. But when she came and saw me, she—well, she didn't scream, I thought she would, but instead she pointed a gun at me, so I had to run for it. She thought I'd eaten the scientist she came to meet, I guess."

"Really," John said.

"Apparently," and Rodney raised his head, tilted it back to look up at the sakura branches above them, "they decided I was a variety of mutant bear. The city sent hunters into the forest, everywhere, so I had to leave the area entirely. That was a couple years ago. I came here because this community's another major site of scientific discovery. There's a few geniuses living here, along with the idiots. I used to write to a couple of them, I was hoping they'd remember me, but I don't have any way of getting in touch with them, and I can't meet them anyway."

"Because even if they believed you existed," John said, "they'd think you were trying to eat them."

Rodney sighed. "I never thought I was all that scary an oni."

"You're not," John said frankly. He reached over to ruffle Rodney's oddly soft hair, ran his thumb over the blunt rounded tips of his horns. "But they are only human, after all."

Rodney dropped his head back onto his arms. "Yeah."

John poured him a drink from the last jug of shochu, passed it over. "Here," he said. "Can't do anything about human stupidity tonight. So don't think about it. Just enjoy yourself."

Though later in the night, when the third bottle was mostly gone and Rodney was flopped snoring on the ground, his head pillowed on John's thigh and one of his horns poking into John's stomach, John was still awake, staring up at the stars showing through the pale cherry blossoms, thinking about nothing else.

It wasn't a terribly complicated plan; in fact it was so simple that even sober it seemed as sensible to John as it had that night. And yet for some reason John found himself hesitating over it, deliberating as if there were a million details to get just right.

But it didn't hurt to be cautious, even with simple plans, and this day was too rainy, and the next too muddy, and the day after he happened to get up too late, and then he'd already promised to help Rodney with the working model of his flying thing—which wasn't a complete success, although it did soar for several tree-lengths before crashing in a spectacular explosion ("The distilled fuel might be slightly more volatile than predicted," Rodney noted.)

Then a week had gone by, and Rodney was still trekking down to watch the village's tower at least once a day, and the longing never left his eyes even when he smiled his sardonic half-smile. And John knew that he had to do this now, not in another week or a month or a century, because if he waited he'd never be able to.

So the next morning, John didn't hike down to Rodney's cave, but instead wandered along a different route until he came across the human trail. Then he followed it over the mountainside to the ledge.

The metal weather gauge with its transmitting antenna had been working for several weeks, despite another storm; the scientists must have taken Rodney's suggestions the last time they fixed it. John squinted at the rising sun, just torn free of the horizon; the late-rising scientists should be awake by now. And hopefully monitoring their transmitter.

With a grunt of effort, John raised his heavy iron club over his head, and brought it down on the instrument. It crashed and clanged and crumpled satisfyingly. John stomped on it a couple of times for good measure, twisting the metal spokes into the earth.

Then he sat down and waited.

It evidently took a while for the scientists to gather their soldiers and make the trek up the mountainside; the sun was sinking by the time John's sharp ears heard them coming up the trail. And Rodney would be behind them, he knew, following the expedition with interest. Probably a little confused as to why his repair advice had failed.

John crouched in the lee of a boulder, the stretching shadows concealing his black form, until the humans had climbed up onto the ledge. The soldiers in green were leading and following, three hapless scientists walking between them, ushered along.

All seven humans jumped as John opened his mouth and let loose a roar that echoed over the mountainside. He sprang up out of the shadows, letting his mouth gape open so his fangs showed, waving his club in one hand and making rude claw gestures with the other.

He'd considered bellowing, "Yum, tasty humans!" but had decided that might be overkill, especially if they were just going to think he was a mutant bear anyway. The humans reacted satisfyingly regardless, shrieking, pointing, flailing, even the soldiers momentarily too shocked to raise their weapons.

Then, before they could get their bearings, Rodney charged in between the humans and John, waving his arms and shouting, "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

John grinned at him, an open-mouthed leer that displayed every pointed tooth in his mouth, and licked his tongue over them. "I'm gonna eat them," he snarled, "get out of my way!"

"What the—" Rodney's eyes were round, as extraordinarily clear blue as a tropical sea in the sunlight. "Are you rabid or what—except oni can't even contract rabies—"

"Nope," John denied, "I'm just hungry!" And he raised his club to bash Rodney out of his path to the humans.

Rodney blocked, clumsily as he ever fought but John jerked his club back like it'd been pushed aside. "Let me at them!" he snarled, and threw one carefully calculated punch and another, both timed to barely connect.

Rodney's returning swing had more purpose, even if his face was confused. "Wait, no," he babbled, "you can't do this, don't hurt them, they're—this is—stop, snap out of it—no!" and as John lunged forward, Rodney checked him with his own body, slamming him aside hard enough that John almost lost his footing.

Over Rodney's shoulder, John could see the humans gasping and staring. The soldiers had their stunners up, but hadn't pulled the triggers yet. John's grin gaped wider and he reached out toward them, clawed fingers splayed and grasping.

"No!" Rodney roared, giving John another shove that knocked him stumbling to his knees. He found his footing and looked up to find Rodney looming over him, breathing in great heaves with his hands clenched in big fists.

"Leave them alone," Rodney growled, like he'd memorized the script. "Get out of here."

The soldiers' stunners were raised, but none were pointing at the blue oni, only at John. John grinned up at Rodney, teeth still showing but not in a threat anymore, and Rodney blinked and rocked back on his heels. The sudden comprehension in his eyes was blinding.

John looked away from it, pushed himself to his feet and started running. Behind him he heard the teeth-grating hum of the stunners, and a streak of blue light flashed by his eyes. Then something hit his arm like a vicious bee sting, numbing it from shoulder to claws.

John zigzagged through the trees as more stunner beams flashed past him, running all out and not looking back.

It took a good hour for the feeling to come back into his arm, burning and tingling. John flexed his fingers as he walked through the forest, making his way silently along the slope.

He heard the voices drifting across the twilit mountainside, and smiled at one particular strident tone even before he could make out the words: "—not that it isn't an intriguing idea in theory, but you really ought to have known that the freezing point—"

"—yes, but we believed we had taken that into account—" That voice John didn't recognize, though the challenging, excited pitch was almost the same.

Ducked low and safely hidden in shadow, he pushed aside a pine branch to get a good view of the ledge below. The humans were sitting in a rough half-circle, their backs to the mountainside, and Rodney sat on the ground in front of them, his hands raised, claws gleaming as he gestured.

Two of the soldiers had their stunners resting on their legs, aimed somewhat in Rodney's direction, but their hands weren't clutching them tightly; precaution, not outright threat. Of the three scientists, two were pressed back, somewhat behind the soldiers; but the third was sitting closest to Rodney of any of the humans, even unarmed. As John watched, this man leaned forward to touch Rodney's knee, his glasses glinting in a last stray sunray.

"I must say," the human remarked, "while I have long wished to meet the mind which could devise such incredible ideas, I was not expecting the body which housed it to be equally incredible. If you'd permit it, I'm sure the biologists—well, of course, only if you would be willing to enter our labs—"

"Really?" Rodney asked, and John didn't need to look at his eyes to know the eagerness that would be shining in them. Then he coughed, "Um, that is, well, I suppose I might conceivably be persuaded..."

Within his concealment in the forest, John smiled. "So long, Rodney," he murmured, too softly to be overheard, and headed back up the mountainside for the last time.

John didn't have much in his cave. A few piled hides to sleep on, some cured meat, the lanterns Rodney had given him, a few books he'd borrowed. His shogi board was down in Rodney's cave, but he didn't want it anyway; he didn't expect he'd be finding an opponent anytime soon. He bundled one of the lanterns in the hides, left the other one with the books, stacked neatly in the center of the cave. Rodney would come looking for them, sooner or later.

He made sure the ashes in the fire pit were completely doused, dumping all the remaining sand over them. Then he looked around the cave a final time, making sure he was carrying everything that was his, and extinguished the lantern, so that only vague moonlight outlined the rough stone walls.

There were places up north John had never seen. The mountains on the northern island were older, not quite as tall as these ranges; but there were fewer people living there. Humans didn't like the cold. And there were less youkai around than there once had been, even in the wild places; he shouldn't have much trouble avoiding them.

He turned to leave, only there was a shadow blocking the cave's entrance, blotting out the glow of the rising moon. A silhouette with blunt horns and broad shoulders and his hands on his hips.

"And where the hell are you going?" Rodney demanded.

With the moonlight at his back, John couldn't make out the other oni's features, even the blue glare of his eyes, and didn't try. "You shouldn't be here," he said. "If the humans see you with me, they'll realize they've been tricked."

"Yeah, so?"

"So—you think they trust you after one meeting? You think not one of them is suspicious, wondering if you're trying to trick them into something? Even if they don't all believe in us youkai anymore, some humans must remember the stories."

"Probably," Rodney admitted.

"So go," John said. "They won't see me again, they'll think you scared me off—their protector. Hell, maybe you can pass as a guardian spirit. If any of them still believe in those."

"Maybe," Rodney said.

That calm lack of argument was so strange that now John did try to get a look at his face, just to make sure he was really speaking to the right oni. "Weren't you invited down to their labs anyway?" he asked. "What are you doing on the mountainside?"

Rodney's snort was much more familiar. "Yeah, right, like I'd show up there at night like a proper monster and scare the wits out of half the village. Not to mention I'll need a few more guarantees before I step foot in any lab, to make sure they're not planning on locking me in a cage and drawing blood until they've mapped oni DNA. These are humans we're talking about, scientists or not. I don't trust them anymore than they really trust me. Not yet. It's going to take time."

The relief of hearing that punctured John, his angry unease draining away, leaving nothing. "They could've had a soldier follow you," he said, even his voice sounding hollow to his ears. "You have to go. Before they see me and figure everything out."

"So what if they do?" Rodney asked again. "I'll just tell them it was your crazy idea, I had nothing to do with it. Besides, they don't know oni well enough to tell one of us from the other; we can say the attacker was your evil brother or whatever."

"It's not worth the trouble," John said. "Not worth the risk, now that you've gotten what you wanted."

"What I wanted?" Rodney repeated, his intonation as flat as John's.

"You're their friend now," John said. "Even if they don't trust you yet, they will. You've made friends with the scientists. And I—it only makes sense that I go, before I mess that up for you."

"Made friends?" Rodney echoed him again, just as flat, and then his tone shot up to an incredulous pitch. "Made friends—why'd I want to make friends with a bunch of scientists so idiotic they didn't even believe I existed until I was standing in front of them? And that meteorologist, I think he was still doubting me. Though Kusanagi, and the other one—what was his name, Za-something, with the glasses, great mind, I've read a lot of his papers—they believed in me, at least, but still, if you knew how ridiculously wrong Za-whosit's theory of transmutational—well, he's not exactly what I'd want to call a peer, an assistant, perhaps...

"Anyway. The point is, I never wanted to be their friend. I just wanted to talk to them, and have them listen to me and my ideas, and learn my name. And now they do. I don't need more friends, I've already got—" and then Rodney shut his mouth so fast one of his fangs sliced his lip. "Ow," he whimpered under his breath.

John stared, and then, unable to pierce the shadows even with his sharp oni eyes, he took a few steps forward, took Rodney by the arms and gently pushed him a few steps back, out of the cave and into the night. In the moonlight he could see Rodney's eyes, wide and blue and fixed on him with a sort of desperate, defiant look, like the longing he'd seen whenever Rodney watched the village's tower, only different.

John looked at him for a long moment, then asked, "So you don't want me to go?"

"Well," Rodney blustered, "it's your choice, of course, it's not like it's any of my business. Though it's not like you've been here very long, not even a whole year, and autumn is the best time in the mountains and you shouldn't miss it. Admittedly the summer is awful, and there are taller mountains in the next range and I know how you like heights, but—um. No. I don't want you to go."

"If your scientists find out—"

"I don't care," Rodney said. "Or rather, I do. But not as much. As this," and he swallowed and looked away.

John's hands were still wrapped around Rodney's thick biceps, the tips of his claws trailing along the blue hide, not quite scratching.

"Also," Rodney added, still looking away, up at the stars and down at the ground almost simultaneously, "it occurs to me, since you're already packed, you could just—it's not like you have much stuff, and my cave is quite extensive, there's another chamber I've almost completed hollowing out, and believe me, in the summer you'll be wanting my coolant system. Not to mention I've got an extra futon, rather than a pile of smelly hides, and—"

John felt himself smiling, the points of his fangs pricking his lips. "Okay," he said.

And that was that, least until the summer, when not only did the scientists discover John (he claimed to be unrelated to their attacker, and was only mistrusted by a canny few humans better than most at recognizing youkai) but also two other youkai—a lovely dark-eyed auburn-haired kitsune, and a kappa on the run from some especially unsavory kami—happened to take up residence on their mountainside. And while their intrusion left less time for shogi, finally John had enough players to teach Rodney mah-jongg...

...But that, as they say, is a story for another time.