Chapter Text
[Thursday, November 3rd , 20XX]
To Mai’s immense misfortune, while she was still in a cast, she was off her crutches within the next three days. This was great for her mobility, and terrible for her in other respects. Aforementioned other respects could be summed up succinctly in two words: ‘cultural festival’.
Having been on the case at Yuasa previously, she had been excused from the preparations for the annual culture festival due to needing to work. Tanuki of a principal or not, her school was quite generous when it came to making allowances for students with financial need.
That being said, she could only use work as an excuse for so long. On a day that she didn’t necessarily need to go into the office, she didn’t necessarily have to do so, especially if Naru was informed in advance, and to add insult to injury, her school actually went to the effort of informing students’ registered workplaces of the upcoming culture festival, since it also functioned as free advertisement.
In other words, Naru had already informed her that she didn’t need to come in.
Mai also knew that Keiko and Michiru had really been looking forward to participating with her. She didn’t want to earn the ire of her other classmates for skipping out on helping either—she had a feeling she might get a bit of a reputation, as despite other students working as well, she was the only freshman who had a job that took them out of classes for over a week at once.
The crutches that were related to a ‘workplace’ incident had also gotten her more than just a few concerned looks.
The issue, unfortunately, was what her class had actually chosen to do for the cultural festival. Mai recalled the day, about a month back, that they had been deciding it.
Kuroda Naoko, one of the representatives of freshman year class 1-F and—though she no longer remembered it—one-time incidental killer, as well as guilty of attempted murder, was the one who stood at the blackboard in the front of the room. Beside her was Jingouji Hayato, the other class representative—a boy with bleached hair that was already showing roots, and red rectangular glasses. Despite his appearance, apparently, he was a pretty studious guy.
“The options that have been given so far are as follows: haunted house, maid café, food stall—”
“Wait,” a male student behind Mai called out. “I’m giving another vote to maid café.”
“You would, Kurose,” Mai heard the voice of Ayakawa Ruuri, a classmate she occasionally went to flea markets with, respond in a dry tone.
“Perv,” another girl agreed.
Within Mai’s mind, Hacchan chirped in mild disgust. She’d almost forgotten that the bird was a misandrist, since it had become somewhat okay with Naru’s presence after he’d saved her when Hacchan could not reach her, but in this case, the bird’s misandry seemed justified.
“Unfortunately, you can’t do that,” Jingouji said. “You were the one who suggested it in the first place.”
The entire class burst into laughter. When it quieted, Kuroda spoke up. “As Jingouji-kun was saying, the other options are doing a play, and giving a musical performance.”
The class was silent. Finally, a girl asked, “…Can any of you even play any instruments?”
In an offended tone, another girl responded with, “You know I play the violin, right?”
“Have you ever heard of a band with a violinist in it?” a boy asked, sounding amused.
“…Fair.”
“Forget that, has anyone here even been in a band before?” another boy asked.
A resounding silence was the answer, which Mai took, as she assumed everyone else did, to be a ‘no’.
“Then we’ll take that out,” Jingouji said, and crossed it off the list.
“If we did a play, what would it be?” a girl asked.
Keiko perked up and eagerly answered this with, “We should do something romantic!” Mai knew that Keiko’s aim during this festival was to get a boyfriend. She had already decided that that prospects at their school were dim, and though she’d gone on goukons often, none had bore fruit. Perhaps ‘hunting’ on her own would get her somewhere—so Keiko’s mentality went.
She knew her friend was also not particularly happy with the fact that both Mai and Michiru were no longer single, thus leaving her the odd one out.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Ruuri said, earning a glare from Keiko. “It’s going to put too much work on a few students over the rest, and the focus would change, too.”
“We can’t all offer the same amount of time to the festival, anyway,” Keiko snidely countered. “Isn’t this a good balance for that?”
Mai knew Keiko and Michiru were a little bit jealous of the time she spent with Ruuri—or so Michiru had quietly informed her. She had tried to balance her time, but when dating Naru had come into the equation, things had fallen off-kilter again.
“Let’s put it to a quick vote,” Kuroda said. “All those in favor of a play, raise your hands.”
Just a few hands short of half the class raised their hands, Keiko waving two in the air.
“No cheating,” Jingouji said, and Michiru pulled down one of Keiko’s hands with a sigh. Keiko looked at them with betrayal, noticing that neither of them had raised their hands in support for her.
Mai gave her a shrug with a wince. She hadn’t wanted to do the preparations for a play either.
“Honestly, why don’t we just do a regular café?” Michiru offered. “We can just stay in our uniforms, too—an authentic schoolgirl café, for the weirdos like Kurose.”
Kurose made a sound of offense from behind Mai. “Oi!”
“You are,” a girl from what sounded to be the same area said.
The only response was a dejected sigh.
Hacchan chirruped with dissatisfaction at the allowance to the boy, and Mai returned a sense of amusement to the bird’s feelings. Kurose was more bark than bite—he had been her desk mate, until recently, and hadn’t made any overtures towards her at all.
…Then again, she wasn’t exactly his type. Hacchan seemed simultaneously offended and relieved by this, which was a funny emotion to receive from her little tsukumogami. She slid a hand into her pocket and tapped the back of the mirror lightly in reassurance.
“Then, all in favor of a café where we stay in uniform?” Jingouji asked. Most of the class’s hands were raised in response. “Great. Then we’ll move onto deciding the décor and menu, and splitting into teams of who will do what…”
And that was how Mai had earned the position of a tea server not just at work, but at her school’s cultural festival. The thing was, despite the fact that it was supposed to be just a normal café, some of the girls had decided that it was a waste to not dress up at least a little and had ‘adjusted’ their uniforms to a cuter look for the sake of the café.
The theme was ‘cute’. A frilled pink and white variant on their usual black and cream sailor uniform, complete with a white bow and a flared, plaid-patterned, pleated miniskirt. Keiko had bullied her—read, pleaded with Mai until Mai had given in because she had thought the outfit was pretty cute—into wearing the outfit, despite her not being one of the main waitresses.
Both the shirt and skirt of the outfit were pocketless. It meant that Hacchan, her irritable little bird, was safely stored away in her uniform pocket in her bag. It also meant she wouldn’t be communicating with it during the festival, which wasn’t too concerning—there was nothing haunting her school besides teenage drama at present. This she was sure of.
Michiru, who was one of those making the food because she was a surprisingly good cook (she liked cooking for her boyfriend, and it served as good practice), was not wearing it, instead opting for what loosely resembled chef’s clothes. She wouldn’t be waitressing at all.
At the very least, she thought, she wouldn’t be seeing anyone from SPR here. Even if she wasn’t working, Naru would surely still be at the office, and she had a feeling that Genji would be going to Masako’s school’s cultural festival, which was being held on the same day. Mai had a fleeting thought as to what the cultural festival of an expensive school filled with rich, famous students might look like, and promptly shoved it away with a shudder.
She was curious enough that she might have gone, if it weren’t for the fact that her own school’s were being held at the same time. She had a feeling Masako might have come to see her as well, if it weren’t for that fact. She wondered what Masako would be doing.
A talent show performance? A beauty pageant?
All were plausible.
Mai finished whisking another batch of matcha for the lattes that were a part of the menu.
The beverage menu they had decided on was mostly a variety of cutesy drinks popular with younger people, things that ended in latte or frappe. Matcha latte, strawberry latte, cappuccino, mocha latte—were just some of the options on the menu.
There were also standard tea options—koucha, hojicha, or sencha. At some point, bubble tea had been considered, but they hadn’t been able to get the tapioca in time due to the person who had been assigned the task—Kirigawa-san—falling sick at the exact wrong moment. Everyone had forgotten it was their task, and they’d only recovered in time for the day of the festival itself, so they’d given up on it.
Still, all of the available drinks seemed to be popular enough.
Then, there was the dessert menu—consisting of mostly puddings, some variants of buns, mochi, and dango, ordered in rather than handmade by the students because the entire class had agreed that they didn’t have the time to make them on the day of, but with everyone pitching in, they did have the budget. Mai felt tempted to steal a snack herself every time she saw an order go out, and she had a feeling she wasn’t alone.
The actual meal menu itself was mostly the same types of things being sold at the food stalls being held by other clubs or classes—bento sets with rice, various types of yaki, and steamed noodle options.
There had been some contention over the decision to not have any soup on the menu. The end conclusion had boiled down to the fact that several people were worried that certain students were more liable than others to drop burning soup at a particularly inopportune moment.
Mai steadfastly refused to acknowledge that she had been included within that group.
“Taniyama-san, have you finished Table 7’s drinks? I’ve already brought them their meals—”
“Coming!” Mai called. “Just a moment, I’ve got them!”
She set the drinks into the cardboard cupholder tray—a small matcha latte, a large hojicha, a small mocha cappuccino, and a large café latte, organized so that the tray was at least moderately balanced—and carefully brought it over to Table 7, which held three girls and a guy that looked to be just about the age of middle schoolers—second or third years.
She smiled. “Sorry it took a bit! Here’s your order!”
One of the girls, short hair tied into pigtails with little pink bows, smiled at her. “Thank you!”
Mai nodded and made to return to the prep area, but glanced at the entrance to the class café as she heard the door open—and froze.
Dark hair, dark eyes, soft purple sweater, grey-toned slacks—
Naru—? What is he doing here!?
The moment he entered and looked around, it seemed as though the eyes of everyone in the area had immediately turned to him. She shoved away the hint of pride at the fact that someone that pretty was her boyfriend, and quickly spun around and speedwalked into the prep area to hide.
Looking around, she tried to find Michiru—and found her friend smirking at her.
“You—” Mai stared in mild betrayal. “Why do you have that look on your face?”
“Keiko just went out to get your boyfriend’s order,” Michiru teased. “Since you ran back in here to hide from him…”
“Michiru! This is embarrassing, I can’t see him dressed like this!”
“I’m a hundred percent sure you’ve been around him wearing way worse outfits,” Michiru said unsympathetically. “At least you look cute.”
“It’s like cosplay!”
“Mai, you are literally a schoolgirl who wears a school uniform. It barely counts.”
“It’s still embarrassing!”
“You can’t hide in here the whole time he’s here,” the other girl pointed out. “First of all, how mean to your boyfriend who came all the way here to see you on a workday. Second of all, he’s going to find you sooner or later, and no one’s going to be able to stop him from coming in here.”
Mai paled at the second sentence, because the first part aside, Michiru was entirely correct on the second. Any insult to Naru would be returned twofold with interest, so Mai didn’t particularly worry about that.
“…I’m going to change.”
“No, you aren’t, Mai,” Ruuri said, passing by with an empty bowl in hand. “You’re not on break yet, build up your courage and go face your boyfriend. The guests are already starting to swarm him, and to be honest, he’s starting to kind of look like a demon.”
“Probably still as good-looking…” Mai muttered, mildly annoyed.
“He is. I think the angry look is actually getting him more attention,” Keiko’s voice agreed, having just entered the area. “He wants you to make his tea, by the way, he didn’t miss you running in here.”
Mai grumbled as she moved to start pouring. “Did he at least say what kind of tea he wants?”
“Large hot hojicha, nothing else.”
She grabbed two teabags and set them in. “As if it’d make a difference if it were someone else…it’s not even loose leaf…”
The other girls in the area snickered. “Taniyama-san, you’re so lucky,” Asano-san said.
“Handsome and attentive, what a catch,” Mikado-san agreed.
Mai couldn’t argue that both of those things were true, but when her classmate put it like that, the implications were entirely different from the truth. With a pout as she endured the ribbing from her classmates, she finished up making the tea and went out to serve her ‘dear boyfriend’.
Aforementioned boyfriend was not, as she’d been led to believe, surrounded by a crowd of interested girls sticking their noses where they shouldn’t be. No, that honor appeared to be going to the man with bleached hair sitting in the seat across from Naru—Bou-san.
Bou-san, who should have been busy today, but was instead sitting and sipping away idly at a mocha latte. He seemed to be perfectly handling the crowd of girls, while Naru fiddled with his cellphone in a way that clearly showed he wasn’t actually using it, but pretending to do so to look occupied—or just bored.
…I’m going to pretend like I didn’t run from him earlier. Maybe Bou-san didn’t see.
“Mai,” Naru’s cool voice caught her attention.
She tried for a bright smile. “Naru! I didn’t expect to see you here!”
“I’m sure you didn’t,” he replied smoothly. “After all, you ran away in such a rush earlier—as though you’d committed some great crime.”
Shouldn’t it be ‘as though I’d done something to you’? Why does he always have to phrase things like that…
“Well, I was just rushing to get an order! It’s busy here, you know? So…why don’t you come back la—”
“Your break is in five minutes, is it not?” Naru interrupted. “Your pigtailed friend informed me.”
“Her name is Keiko—and yes, it is, but why—”
“As I do not know her surname, I have no intention of referring to her so familiarly. You’ll tour me around the festival—I’ve never seen one before. It ought to be an educational experience, at the very least.”
But you called me by my name from the moment we met…
Well, that had probably foreshadowed the fact that they would be together in the future, come to think of it.
I don’t really want him to call Keiko by name either.
“It’s Yamamura. Are you really interested in the school festival?” Mai’s eyes narrowed. “I know for a fact you don’t like this sort of thing, what’s really going on here?”
He hummed. “…It’s a common thing, isn’t it, at Japanese schools? The seven mysteries of the school.”
Mai blinked. “Ah, yeah, we do have that…though it’s six, now.”
“The old schoolhouse, I assume? The last time I was here, the focus was mostly in that area—I’d like to see what the others are.”
Mai reminisced lightly about their first real interactions, with some melancholy at the thought that the place they had occurred no longer existed. Though their first meeting had been in the Audio/Visual room in the basement floor of the school proper, Mai didn’t really count it as their true first conversation—it was more of their first antagonistic encounter, to be honest.
…Not as much of a cold fish as I thought, huh?
As though hearing her thoughts, Naru gave her a slanted smirk, eliciting a few squeals from behind her.
“Finish up here and meet me in the hallway,” he said lightly.
Mai looked over at the busy Bou-san—and was surprised to see him wink casually back at her.
“Don’t worry about him,” Naru said, noticing her look. “He’s our ride.”
“…Okay. I’ll be back in a moment—”
“—and don’t waste time by changing, either. Your clothes are perfectly serviceable.”
Foiled again. She clicked her tongue. “Fine.”
Mai brushed down her skirt slightly as she walked towards Naru. She could see someone else trying to approach him—before the other girl reached him, she went up and wrapped her arms around one of his. He blinked at her but didn’t seem surprised or startled.
“How forward,” he murmured.
She blushed slightly. “I’ll…let go.”
“No need,” he said lightly, and looped their arms together. They began to walk towards the entrance to the school. “They didn’t make you walk too much?”
Mai glanced down, having entirely forgotten about the cast at all, since the layers on it had decreased so much. “…I forgot. No one made me do anything, though. It doesn’t even hurt.”
She heard a tch sound come from Naru before he replied. “Your lack of awareness…at the very least, those around you should be trying to compensate for it. How long have you known those two?”
“…Not as long as you might think, you know.”
He clicked his tongue again but didn’t say anything else. The silence that fell between them, though punctuated by the noisiness of the students and other guests around them, was pleasant. Even the sound of others talking faded into an indistinct haze.
As they continued walking, Mai gave a light tug on his arm as she directed him towards a less crowded part of the school—the stairwell, which would take them up to the lab classrooms used for the science classes. They were currently empty as they weren’t being utilized for any festival activities, and also, conveniently, were the locations of one of the typical seven mysteries of a school—one that her school shared with most others.
This was, of course, the mystery of the moving anatomy model.
She informed him of this as they went up the stairs, and Naru gave her a droll expression. “I highly doubt that particular occurrence is supernatural,” he told her flatly.
She snickered and nodded. “You’re right. It’s actually a bunch of third years doing it.”
“…And we are going to see this model for…what reason, then?”
“It’s quieter up there,” Mai answered simply.
“Would you not prefer touring the festival?” Naru asked, more curiously than harshly.
She glanced at his eyes, which were looking at her with a hint of confusion. “You wouldn’t, though.”
“I am not opposed to it—I wouldn’t have come here otherwise, you realize?”
Mai tilted her head a bit, thoughtful, before she responded. “…Alright, to be honest, I kind of don’t want to tour the festival, either.”
“I would have thought someone like you would thrive in this sort of atmosphere.” Naru seemed perplexed. Mai couldn’t help but find it funny that she was apparently breaking some sort of preconceived notion that he’d had about her.
“…I guess that’s because of the way I am at SPR. But, you know—that’s because we’re all a little weird, there.” Mai hummed slightly, entwining her fingers with Naru’s in a rare moment of no shyness. “You know, I’m only really close to three of the girls in my class? I’m not lonely or anything—and I’m friendly with everyone else—but I’m not close to everyone.”
“Is that not often the case, with those who are social butterflies?”
“I can’t believe you even know what that is.”
“Look at who I shared a womb with, and repeat those words.”
Mai laughed. “Okay, that’s fair. But that’s what I mean, you know—Genji is friendly, but that just means it’s harder for him to really let people in, right?”
“It sounds as though you’re projecting onto him.”
“Maybe? I think we’re alike—Masako’s told me so, before. And she said you and her were alike—isn’t that funny?”
Naru grimaced. “Unfortunately true.”
“Mhm. But—do you, um, get what I’m trying to say?”
“Yes. I suppose I do.” Naru looked down at her. “Then us being in this position, right now, must be nothing short of a miracle, given that neither of us are willing to open up to others, should it not?”
Mai smiled at him. “I don’t think so. I think even if it took us a long time, we might still have gotten to this point.”
“Are you crediting fate? Fanciful of you.”
“Of course you don’t believe in fate,” she replied with amusement. “But that’s not what I’m saying either—I think no matter how bull-headed either of us are, it applies to everything. One of us would wear the other down, one way or another. No version of you would be willing to give up on anything—”
“—and no version of you would willingly live a lie forever,” he completed for her.
She grinned. “I hate lies, after all,” she said, only half telling the truth.
Naru, able to read her mind, could hear it as well. He gave her the slightest twitch of his lips, and then glanced through the open classroom door she’d stopped in front of.
It was a room clearly meant for a biology course, with jars smelling of formalin off to the side, anatomical and skeletal charts on the walls, and various lesson plans pinned to the side of the whiteboard. The desks were neat and organized, indicative of the fact that the class had been cleaned up the day prior and not used since.
And right at the front of the room, standing in its place of honor, was the anatomy model—half an example of internal musculature, half a ‘normal’ human, if most humans were bald and unsettlingly solid-colored and lacking pores.
“…Does that just stay in the classroom all day?” Naru asked, sounding mildly repulsed.
“I mean, there’s a closet for it, usually. They might have been using it for a class recently, and just not bothered to put it back in case another class needed it.”
“And the purpose?”
“…To teach anatomy? What else would it be for?”
“Would textbook diagrams not suffice?”
Mai looked at him with genuine confusion. “Are you…against anatomy models, or something?”
“No, I—let me change the question. Anatomy models are a normal thing, in Japanese high schools?”
“…Yes?”
“For what reason?”
“…?” Mai stared at her boyfriend, with whom she was meant to be on a culture festival date on, with immense confusion. How am I supposed to know that?
“…I should have expected that answer. Never mind.”
“We don’t have a skeleton at our school, though.”
“Of course you don’t,” Naru said drily. “I assume that’s the norm—to have a skeleton.”
“At school,” Mai added.
“…Why don’t we look at some of the other mysteries?”
Mai shrugged. “Sure.”
“So, I can’t show you the haunted mirror at the end of the second-floor girl’s bathroom, or the cursed stall at the end of the third-floor girl’s bathroom, since, you know, they’re—”
“Why the end of the bathrooms?” Naru interrupted.
They had gone up the stairs to the third floor, where some of the third-years’ classes were holding their events. Naru, having noticed more and more eyes on him—and, Mai had read from his mind with some surprise, a few eyes on her—had wrapped an arm around her waist.
“Makes it creepier. But I can explain the mirror to you! I actually went to check that one out, I got curious—”
“Mai…” The warning tone in Naru’s voice had come out.
“No, wait, listen!” she protested. “I went with Michiru, and I already knew it wasn’t dangerous!”
“Fine. So, what was it?”
“A picture.”
Naru gave her a blank expression. “Would you like to elaborate?”
“Someone, apparently, thought it would be funny to print out a creepy, half-transparent portrait on laminated plastic, and stick it on the mirror. That bathroom has an issue with the light in the back flickering sometimes, so it kind of makes it look like you’re seeing something creepy in the mirror…”
“…And not a single person noticed?” he asked incredulously.
“Most people just avoided it, used the other stalls, or went to a different bathroom,” Mai answered with a shrug. “I don’t think I’m the first person to notice, I just think everyone else who did thought it was funny, so they didn’t do anything about it. Michiru got scared by it.”
“…In other words, a mutual effort…tell me, did you leave it up?”
“Well…”
Naru gave her an amused look. “The pot calling the kettle black, I see.”
“…Maybe just a little. It’s not hurting anyone, you know?”
“It’s limiting stall usage,” Naru suggested.
“It’s freeing up a stall for the people who know,” Mai countered. “It’s practical, like women’s only train carts.”
Naru inclined his head, seemingly giving her the point, though she could hear a rush of counterarguments flitting through his mind in the span of seconds. But she would take the verbal choice of winning that he was giving her and ignore his instinctive need to argue anyway (which she shared, so she shouldn’t be talking, either way).
“Okay, I think I need to go back and help at the café,” Mai said, feeling a little upset by the prospect. “But we haven’t even gotten food…”
They’d walked around the school for some time, idly conversing about the various mysteries, about the mysteries that had been present at Mai’s middle school, and in the vaguest terms imaginable, about Naru’s extremely short secondary school experience—apparently, he’d never finished primary school and skipped straight into secondary. Mai, personally, thought the way that he described it was a bit strange—what happened to high school? But frankly, most of her thoughts could be summed up in one word.
Geniuses.
But Mai had liked learning about Naru’s past. Whether it was him or Genji, both were reticent about their past, their family, and even their home, only sharing anecdotes akin to the manner of the one that had been shared on Halloween. Stories that didn’t really tell her anything but what their personality had been like when they were younger, which didn’t seem to be all that different from their present selves.
She knew they had their reasons for being quiet, evidenced by the way Lin appeared to become tense whenever either of them spoke a little too in-depth about their pasts, but that didn’t mean she didn’t wish she could know anyway. She had shown that Naru could trust her, hadn’t she?
“Your shift ends later, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, but it’s still a few hours…”
“I can wait,” Naru told her.
She blinked. “…Are you sure?”
“Continue to supply me with tea, and there will be no issue. And keep the crowd away.”
“…Um, no promises about my classmates…”
“They’ll know what’s good for them.”
Mai did not understand this particularly ominous statement until she returned to her class café, where Bou-san appeared to no longer be present, and found that some of the girls of her class she knew better than the others—including her friends—had set up a specific little table where Naru quickly went to sit, and promptly ordered tea from.
After that, time went by in a rush as Mai made drinks, took orders, and served drinks, only occasionally stopped to notice Naru quietly reading a book, and occasionally pausing to write quick notes in a notebook she hadn’t realized had been on him at all. As he’d stated, no one bothered him—he looked like the picture of a slightly older, studious, university student—which he was, though not quite in the way the statement implied.
When she was finally done with her shift proper, she couldn’t help but ask her classmates when exactly that had been planned.
The girls had looked at each other and then at her. “To be honest, a lot of us have kind of been rooting for your love story, you know? It’s…romantic? It’s really kind of like a fairy-tale, so…”
She had looked at Keiko and Michiru, who had looked sheepish, and Ruuri, who did not meet her eyes, whistling as she glanced to the side. “…I’m getting the feeling that I’m providing free entertainment for you all.”
“Maybe a little?” Asano-san said awkwardly. “But we don’t mean anything bad, and we don’t know any personal details, we’re just rooting for you. You’re pretty nice, you know, but you’re out so often and you get hurt a lot—it’s kind of worrying, just a little.”
Mai blinked, confused. She remembered what she had said earlier about not being too close to most of her classmates, though she knew them all on a friendly basis.
…Was I…the only one who thought so?
For someone who’s good at reading others, Naru’s voice murmured into the quiet of her mind, you seem to have a penchant for letting your own bias overrule the reasonable answer to things like that.
In a quieter, lower register, she could hear a different undertone to his thoughts—wordless affection, the knowledge that others shared that affection, and both satisfaction and dislike at that knowledge. She hadn’t taken Naru for the jealous type.
Well, she hadn’t taken him for any type at all, besides mildly possessive of the things he cared about. Which…she was a part of.
“…Thank you,” she finally said. “It’s still kind of weird, though.”
“No, you’re right,” Suzume-san said with a nod. “I’ll apologize for prying into your personal business, but not for putting that guy out there in a free eye-candy seat. We’re also trying to increase business, you know, but we don’t want to piss him off.”
Mai burst into laughter, and so did everyone else, at the candidness of their classmate. A little bit more conversation, then she’d changed into her regular school uniform, and gone to tour around the festival—properly—with Naru again, this time with food in hand at some point.
He’d taken her home after that, and just as he had the last time he’d taken her home, on Halloween, kissed her. It had been a longer kiss than the peck that night three days ago, closer to the moment they’d shared in his office and just as sweet, tasting of the matcha dango she’d convinced him to split with her, despite his dislike of sweet foods.
Naru had entered her world, for just a little moment—her normal little world, far from ghosts and the supernatural (though still including mind-reading and ghost stories)—and had fit in as though, just a little bit, he had belonged. Maybe one day, she’d be able to properly enter his world as well.
The drifting soul laughed playfully as the finch flew in a circle around her head, seemingly trying to impart some sort of important knowledge upon her. She hardly knew what it could be. She was not awake, now, to find some dark thing or follow some greater goal—she wasn’t beholden to any instinct, for once—
Save for that which told her to find the dark one. The dark one, that her waking self loved dearly, though she still had yet to truly admit it to herself. But the drifter knew the truth, because the drifter accepted no lies in a realm which saw straight to the heart of everything.
She would listen, she decided, as she had listened before and teased the dark one. No longer was she upset at him for restraining her—rather, now she was curious as to how he noticed her, and how his brother noticed her, when no one else ever could.
It was, perhaps, a curiosity that should have been aroused much longer ago, but hadn’t because she simply hadn’t realized that the bright one had noticed her presence before she had passed through him. Which meant that she had never needed to do so at all.
Regardless, regrets were for the living, and what was done was done.
Floating into the night, she sought out the connection to her soul made of ashes and flame, and followed it like a light in the dark.
I blink, and there’s an odd scene in front of me. It’s not somewhere I’ve been before. There’s a boy looking back at me—his eyes are familiar. Black schlera, gold pinpricks for pupils, red irises…it’s a little creepy.
But I shake my head as I think that. These are eyes that I know; they aren’t scary. And that’s a kid—a real kid, not something pretending to be a kid, though it’s definitely not a human kid.
The boy isn’t looking at me. He’s looking through me, at something behind me. It’s a silhouette I can’t see clearly—I don’t know why. The boy can see who this is, but it’s like something is hiding it from me.
“You’re a monster, you know. You were born to be. The perfect [_______].”
The deep voice cuts out as the last word is spoken. I don’t know what he’s talking about—I think it’s a he. It feels right.
The little boy talks back. “You aren’t real. It doesn’t matter what you want me to be. You’re dead.”
“And yet here I am, haunting you. You know that being dead doesn’t mean I’m gone, don’t you?”
“I don’t care,” the boy repeats insistently. “It doesn’t matter.”
“How unfair. Your brother, the blessed one, and you…getting the shitty end of the deal, aren’t you? You could give up, you know?”
The more I hear, the more I don’t like what I’m hearing.
“Shut up.”
“Give in, little monster. Little—”
“Who are you to talk like that to him?” I shout, accusatorily, protectively holding my hands out in front of the boy I feel weirdly protective of. “Stop it!”
The boy, who was looking straight through me, suddenly has wide eyes as he looks at me. “M—what are you doing here? You have to—”
“Oh, you have a defender now?” The silhouette of the tall man’s tone is darkly amused. “Does she know what you are? Or have you tricked her, too—?”
“Shut up!” I shout, realizing soon that the boy had shouted it in sync with me.
The boy looks between me, and the man that should be calling himself a monster. “…You can’t be here,” he says. “It’s not safe. You have to wake up.”
His tone of voice is familiar, and yet I can’t place—
“Wake. Up.” He firmly repeats these words, now ignoring the taunting jeers of the shadowy man, and I realize that the world around me is fading into white, the dark surroundings that I could barely make out to begin with now unintelligible.
“Wait—” I begin to shout, but it’s too late.
I am already—