Chapter Text
Taki forgets the cupcakes. Tanuma says, “Natsume won’t mind if we’re a few minutes late,” and they double back to her house to retrieve them.
When the Days Eater has gone, and Nyanko is left with a pint-sized Natsume where the proper one should have been, Taki and Tanuma aren’t there to intervene and the child slips away from the unfamiliar tanuki yokai, moving as silently and certainly as a little ghost.
Natsume is fairly certain he’s lost, and fairly certain he hasn’t been missed. But he wouldn’t want to cause the family he’s staying with any trouble – not sooner than he can help, at least. So he’ll follow the road into town, and figure things out from there.
He can’t go far before he has to stop and roll the legs of his pants up. They keep slipping down so he cinches the belt tighter, and loses the long socks completely. The grass feels good under his feet anyway, sun-warm and springy. He’s surrounded by fields that seem to sprawl forever. He doesn’t know where he is, but it seems calm and welcoming. It seems nice.
“–told you, look at him! He looks just like Natsume! Right down to the thousand yard stare.”
Natsume jumps, whirling around and losing his footing as he does. He lands with an oof and looks up to find himself face to face with an older boy. A high school student, maybe. There’s two of them, but only one is at his eye level, crouching in the road with an expression of wonder.
“Kitamoto, seriously, are you seeing this? Hey kid, what’s your name?”
He’s shrinking from them automatically – bigger bodies and bigger numbers usually don’t mean anything good for him, and he doesn’t want to go home with bruises on top of everything else he’s put his current family through – but there’s no real fear in his heart of these older boys, none at all.
That’s… surprising.
So he says, softly, “Natsume.” And blinks when the boy in front of him grins, like his name was the right answer.
“I knew it! Natsume never told us he had a little cousin. Your family must have super genes or something, ‘cause the resemblance is scary.”
“Do you hear yourself when you talk, Nishimura? You’re freaking him out.” The other boy – Kitamoto – yanks Nishimura back by the hood of his sweatshirt so he topples backwards, but not in the mean way Natsume’s classmates do. Nishimura squawks in outrage and scrambles for a second like a stag beetle tipped on its back, and Kitamoto offers Natsume a hand with a warm smile. “C’mon, you’ll catch cold out here. What are you doing, running around without shoes on?”
“You’re not his mom, Acchan. He might look like Natsume, but there’s no way he gets sick as easily as him. No one gets sick as easily as him.“
Natsume takes Kitamoto’s hand tentatively, and the high schooler doesn’t hold it too tight or pull too hard; just brings him up to his feet with a friendly yank, and then tousles his hair a bit.
“You – you know my,” he swallows hard, and says, “Natsume? You know him?”
“Well, sure,” Nishimura says, dusting himself off. “We’re his buddies. He’s in my class, too.”
The tanuki yokai said the same thing, sort of. About being a high school student, and living in this area with people called the Fujiwaras. And he doesn’t think these people are lying to him. They’re too warm and lively to be monsters, the human or the spirit kind. They’re smiling at him nicely.
He likes them.
By the time Nyanko finds them, a few minutes later, he has two more older kids in tow, a dark-haired boy and a fair-haired girl. They all look equally disheveled and a little pale – even the tanuki, through all his fur. Natsume presses behind Kitamoto, folding fingers into the fabric of his jacket, and feels a hand settle on his head.
“Don’t worry, mini Natsume,” Nishimura says with a wide grin. He’s crouched down again, so Natsume doesn’t have to tilt his head back to look up at him. “They’re some of Natsume’s friends. Ours, too! Real good ones. Oh, and they have his ugly cat with them, of course they do.”
Kind people have kind friends. Natsume’s pretty sure that’s something he knows. So he steps out from behind Kitamoto, but keeps a hand clenched around the hem of his jacket, and feels a little bit better when Nishimura drops a friendly hand on his head.
The two new people seem nice, he thinks. They look really worried, but they also look relieved to see him, and with a guilty pang he wonders if maybe he had been missed by someone in this place, after all.
“Sorry,” he says without thinking, once introductions have been made. He can’t bring himself to talk very loud, but they all fall quiet around him anyway. The attention is nearly too much. He wants to hide behind Kitamoto again. “For – for being lost.”
“You don’t need to apologize,” Tanuma says. He stoops to talk to Natsume, too, the way Nishimura did. “We were afraid something happened to you, that’s all. I’m glad these two found you when they did.”
“Come to think of it,” Nishimura says brightly, in a tone that promises trouble. “It’s kinda weird Natsume didn’t tell us he’d have a little doppleganger running around town this weekend. Just seems like something he’d mention.”
“On top of that, he told us he doesn’t have any close relatives,” Kitamoto adds, with steely resolve in his voice. “That’s why he moved to this town in the first place. He wouldn’t lie about something like that, not to us.”
Wherever this place is, Natsume thinks, awed, it would have been nice to live here all along. Whatever he did to earn friends like these, he wishes he could have done it sooner.
Tanuma is rubbing a hand through his hair awkwardly, and Natsume missed the excuse he came up with but it must have been a weak one, because Kitamoto and Nishimura aren’t buying it.
“No way,” Nishimura says vehemently, “I know that look in your eye, Tanuma. That’s the Natsume Look. The last time you looked like that was the other day, when he totally zoned out and nearly walked straight into traffic.”
“Same look,” Kitamoto agrees, face folded into a scowl. “You only come running like that when it’s for him, so explain why you came running like that for a grade schooler who looks just like him.”
“And before you try it, I know it’s not his brother,” Nishimura adds with certainty. “He doesn’t have one.”
Natsume shuffles back a step, heart racing. He doesn’t like arguments, they always lead into fights. He doesn’t want to cause trouble – honestly, despite everything, he really doesn’t.
They don’t think he’s a liar yet, and he doesn’t want to change their minds, but he doesn’t want these friends to fight. This place and these people are good, and he doesn’t want to be what makes that good go away.
“Um,” he says, faltering under the weight of five stares. “Um, maybe – it would be okay to tell them.”
His heart thumps painfully in his chest as he says it, because he’s been here before and it never goes right. But a sudden touch has Natsume looking down, and he’s surprised to find the tanuki – the cat yokai leaning its considerable weight in a companionable way against his leg. It’s purring, dark eyes glinting something close to green in the sun, and even without speaking it seems to be giving Natsume a nudge.
It’s familiar, he realizes. He knows what that grinning face is trying to tell him. He pets it carefully, a little dazed, and tries to remember a time anyone else has ever said to him “I’m right behind you.” He can’t.
“Okay,” he whispers.
It pushes out of his hand with a huff, shaking out its fur, and then says grumpily, “Alright, brats, you heard him. Let’s just air this out right now.”
Nishimura and Kitamoto both spring away with a yelp, and Kitamoto plucks Natsume right off the ground, holding him up and away from the talking calico. Everything is dead silent for a handful of seconds that feels like an hour. The gentle breeze is the loudest thing in the world as it rustles through the trees lining the road.
Tanuma buries his face in both hands, and Taki says, “Nyanko-sensei! You know better!”
“We weren’t solving anything just standing around, were we! And besides, these idiots may be thick but they’re not thick enough to buy whatever cover story the priest’s brat puts together.”
“A cat just called me an idiot,” Nishimura whispers. Natsume dangles in Kitamoto’s arms, trying to wrap his mind around the novel concept of another human protecting him from a harmless yokai. That might have been the most ridiculous thing to happen so far today, and Natsume muffles his mouth behind both hands and laughs.
The bickering cuts off as abruptly as it started, and Natsume is lowered slowly to the ground. He’s still grinning a little bit when he stops giggling – he can’t help it! “I wish I met you sooner, Nyanko-sensei,” he says, stretching his hands out for the cat. “It would have been a lot easier to make people believe me if I had you around.”
The cat waddles over agreeably, giving Tanuma a smug look from the circle of Natsume’s arms, and Natsume glances up when Nishimura tentatively draws closer.
“So, call me crazy,” he says, with a nervous smile, “but I think I’d know that laugh anywhere. What have you got yourself into this time, Natsume?”
Kind people have kind friends. For the life of him, Natsume doesn’t know what it took for someone like him to get close to people like this, but he’ll do it again – over and over, forever, if that’s what it takes to keep them.
He hugs Nyanko-sensei close, and smiles up at the older boy he doesn’t know, who knows him so well.
“A monster made me little again,” he says. “Will you help me?”