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It was ten o’clock on a windy September evening, and Natori Shuuichi was sitting at a bar in the only hotel between Ashoro and Shintoku Township, with the heir to the Matoba clan by his side and the makings of what he anticipated would soon be a splitting headache hammering away at his eardrums.
A bossa nova track was playing from scratchy speakers hidden somewhere on the liquor shelf behind the bar, and in the absence of a bartender, Matoba called over a desk clerk from reception and offered to pay him to turn the music down.
Natori sat frowning into his soju and waited for Matoba to finish the transaction. Even here, on the edge of nowhere, the Matoba clan acted like they owned everything they touched.
“This assignment has proven more difficult than either of us expected,” said Matoba as he turned back to the bar, apparently satisfied with the volume.
He said either of us with such grace it made Natori want to kick his teeth in. Can’t admit defeat without implicating me too, can you? he thought darkly, and watched the ice melt slowly into his drink. It also hadn’t escaped him that Matoba had said assignment, rather than job, as if this was an excursion, a field trip.
“Difficult?” repeated Natori, “I should say so,” And drained his glass.
Natori’s day had begun much like any other: at a train station in Sapporo, with a bag full of tricks packed and a pair of reliable hiking boots on his feet - blissfully alone, save Hiiragi. Three days previously, his telephone had rung. When he picked up the receiver, he was treated to the usual slew of concerns - crockery splitting and crumbling where it sat unused in the pantry, as if subjected to an invisible force of considerable weight and pressure. Doors slamming shut even when there was no wind to push them, shadowy figures dancing in the peripheral vision, things going bump in the night. This was the first Natori heard of Shintoku-cho.
The train ride inland had been uneventful, but when Natori arrived at the wooded estate he was meant to exorcise, he found Matoba Seiji waiting for him. The elderly couple in charge of maintaining the grounds weren’t taking any risks, it seemed, and had hired more exorcists than they knew what to do with. These weren’t uncommon circumstances, but Natori found them deeply undesirable all the same. He exchanged the necessary pleasantries with Matoba and slipped away to work alone at the earliest opportunity, and for a few hours his affairs ran smoothly. That was, until the whole operation took a nosedive around noon, when Natori had stumbled - foolishly, he chided himself - straight into the thing’s nest.
There was nothing Natori Shuuichi hated so much as being rescued.
And now they sat side-by-side at the hotel bar, two exorcists wearing windbreakers and probably looking a good deal less suave than either man styled himself. They were each a-glass-and-a-half deep into the bottle of soju when Matoba announced nonchalantly that he had been “considering something you said, Shuuichi-san”.
Natori made sure to raise an eyebrow. “Have you?” That had to be a first.
“You told me I was a terrible kisser.”
The look on Matoba’s face when he said it was so irritable, so petulant, that Natori couldn’t help but laugh. “That’s to be expected,” he said, elated and trying desperately to commit the image of a scowling Matoba Seiji to memory. “I imagine I’ve had a good deal more practice than most people.” This was true. Daytime television dramas tended to be heavyhanded with the kissing, if only to make up for the lack of other narrative essentials - plausibility or thematic consistency, for instance.
The particular brand of pettiness upon which the Matoba Clan had founded itself perplexed and infuriated Natori in equal measure, especially where Seiji was concerned. The young clan head’s penchant for condescension and passive-aggression was what made him both insufferable and intimidating - except for times like these, when it backfired spectacularly. There was a small, unpleasant part of Natori Shuuichi that lived for these moments: when Seiji miscalculated, and Natori got to watch as his carefully cultivated professionalism cracked under the strain of...something else. Natori had found Matoba Seiji’s ego difficult to wound in the past, but by god was it rewarding when he succeeded, even by accident.
Natori found Matoba’s particular brand of pettyness so amusing that he completely failed to anticipate the direction in which the conversation was headed, until Seiji looked at him with that impenetrable stare and said in a voice that was absolutely colorless, “I want to try again.”
Oh.
If Matoba wanted to play those sorts of games, Natori would make him ask properly.
“What is it that you want to try again?”
Matoba’s sigh was so characteristically impatient that Natori was nearly fooled, for a split second, into thinking this was a normal request to make of a business partner or colleague or enemy or friend.
“I dislike…” Matoba began. His voice drifted, tapering off into the air like a candle blown out. “...I dislike the idea of being terrible at anything,” he finished, and Natori had to stifle his laughter with a cough. No shit, really? He’d have been hard-pressed to find something Seiji disliked more.
Natori knocked back another swallow, the clear liquor burning pleasantly in his throat, and beckoned. “Alright. Come here.”
Matoba leaned in. This kiss was only marginally better than the first, but at least this time Matoba had figured out that he ought to tilt his head a bit. Natori resolved to be grateful for the small things.
Matoba broke the kiss and looked at him expectantly. “So?”
Natori shook his head.
“What does that mean?” Matoba asked coolly, albeit a little too quickly.
Natori refilled his glass. “What’s this all of a sudden? Are you engaged? Has Nanase-san finally found a nice girl from a respectable exorcist family to take your hand in marriage?” That finally hadn’t really been necessary; Natori knew that when the time came, there would be dozens of potential brides lining up for the chance to marry into the clan. He suspected there were already several possibilities lined up, and that in truth Seiji could have married at eighteen if he’d had any inclination to do so. Whether anyone had tried to make him yet was an impolite question, and one that Natori had no way of asking.
Instead he said, “This is how you kiss someone.”
Those first few seconds were an awkward shuffle: the scrape of wooden chair legs on wooden floors as the two of them shifted their barstools closer to one another. The bartender had drifted away after fetching that first bottle down from the shelf, and the two exorcists were the bar’s only patrons to speak of.
Natori leaned in, so close he could feel Seiji’s breath on his cheek, only to draw back almost immediately. “You’re supposed to close your eyes.” (He supposed Seiji could in fact be closing only his right eye, but dismissed the idea as unlikely).
Matoba made a movement that was as close to flinching as Natori suspected he would ever see on the man’s face. When Matoba’s eyes snapped shut reflexively, Natori leaned in once more.
Seiji’s small, pliant sigh made Natori dizzy; the head of the Matoba clan was kissing him with the complete focus of someone who is concentrating very hard on Not Messing Up. Natori tried his best not to feel as if he was holding a live wire in his hands. Or a sharp knife, or an open flame.
. . .
The first time Matoba kissed him had been earlier that afternoon, of course.
Natori had taken a wrong turn in the expansive estate gardens (already withering in the cold Hokkaido autumn) and couldn’t seem to remember the way back to the manor. Rows upon interlocking rows of hedges, seven feet tall in some places, blocked the rest of the gardens from view. Before he knew it, Natori had no visible landmark to orient himself with the northwestern grounds. He couldn’t recall which direction he’d come from, and was starting to get annoyed when he realized he was being followed.
The creature he - and, he supposed, Matoba - had been hired to exorcise took the form of a swirling cloud of plum blossoms. That was the first giveaway: plums weren’t in season now. The trees in the orchard were barren, their boughs empty. And still the swirling cloud of petals drifted closer, floating down the rows of hedges after Natori like a phantom.
It looked as a shapeless hunger. Natori tried to summon Hiiragi, and realized he couldn’t - something was stopping her from getting in. The hedge maze was a microcosm, a closed circuit, so to speak. A space that used to be liminal, before being claimed by --by this thing.
This garden was its nest, and Natori was trespassing.
He was a skilled exorcist, yes, but a marathon runner he wasn’t. The last thing Natori remembered was being enveloped: the creature folding him neatly into itself, white petals filling his nose and throat until he could hardly breathe. White petals falling across his eyes, obscuring the world from view.
He couldn’t see, he couldn’t think - but did he need to?
It was fragrant and warm, here among the plum blossoms. There was no need to go, no need to be anywhere else. No need to see, Natori thought numbly, no need, no need. He was weightless. He was going to stay here forever.
No need, he thought, no need---
“Excuse me.”
Matoba spoke softly, but his voice carried. Natori wondered dimly whether he was addressing the creature, or Natori himself.
“That isn’t yours.”
The creature, then, Natori decided.
He still couldn’t see - didn’t want to see - but the unmistakable sound of a bowstring being drawn tight gave him enough information to guess what would happen next.
Wait! He wanted to say, Don’t! He opened his mouth to call out, and immediately choked. He tasted flower petals between his teeth. Don’t shoot! Natori wanted to stay here in this blind, fragrant place for the rest of his life. Did Matoba realize that he couldn’t kill the creature without also killing its victim? Would he take the shot anyway? These thoughts were far away, transmitted from a distant part of Natori’s mind that he no longer knew.
But the arrow never came.
“This is inconvenient,” Natori heard Matoba say in his flattest, most matter-of-fact voice.
Without further ceremony, Matoba leaned in and pressed his mouth to Natori’s. It was a clumsy kiss, clumsier than any other thing he’d known Seiji to do. Matoba didn’t tilt his head when he kissed Natori, and as a result their noses pressed together in a decidedly un-romantic squish. And then Matoba pulled back and Natori could see again - as if some veil had been lifted. White petals floated slowly downward, and dissolved when they hit the ground. Matoba stood before him, the look in his eye just as flat and incomprehensible as it had ever been.
“You’re a terrible kisser,” said Natori, because it was true and because saying so fed the small cruel part of him that thrived on seeing Seiji knocked off-balance.
Matoba blinked - the only indication he’d heard Natori at all - before bending an arm back to draw an arrow from its quiver. In a fraction of a second, he had lined up the shot and let the arrow fly over Natori’s shoulder. A scream from behind told Natori two things: that they had a pursuer, and that their pursuer had been hit.
“Run,” Seiji said, and they’d done just that.
. . .
Four hours and a hot meal later, Natori Shuuichi found himself at the hotel bar, nursing a glass of something pale and strong, while his companion stared pensively at the opposite wall and, eventually, asked about kissing. And so, when things inevitably progressed, Natori was compelled to think back on all the decisions he’d made that day that had somehow added up to put him in his current position. In retrospect, none of those decisions had been particularly unwise (except maybe definitely that last one), and Natori knew he would lie awake later that night, picking apart the day in an attempt to figure out just where and when he’d gone wrong.
The head of the Matoba clan kissed like a virgin. It was a mean, juvenile thought, and immediately Natori was hit with the usual twinge of shame that sprouted whenever he was reminded that he wasn’t the person he wanted to be. But this time, the guilt was overridden by something else: something giddy, which leapt inside Natori’s gut, jumping to get out.
For an alleged prodigy, Matoba Seiji was surprisingly slow on the uptake (but I am nothing if not patient, Natori thought again, straight from that dark, giddy place in the pit of his stomach).
Natori brushed his tongue against Matoba’s lips until Seiji finally understood he was being coaxed into opening his mouth. When he let his hand drift up to rest on Matoba’s waist, Natori felt Seiji shiver and wondered idly if Seiji was going to pull back. A silly question; Matoba’s intake of breath - inaudible, but Natori felt it on his skin nonetheless - told him everything he needed to know.
Objectively-speaking, Natori knew he was the one who should be pulling back. Matoba Seiji was dangerous and insufferable and someone he had made a successful practice of avoiding. These were the reasons Natori ought to stand up, conjure some transparent excuse, and hop on the next train south as soon as possible. Instead of doing any of those things, he licked into Matoba’s mouth, and felt Seiji shiver against him in response. He brought his other hand up to cup the side of Matoba’s face, and felt the cloth of Seiji’s eyepatch wrinkle beneath his fingertips.
When Natori finally broke the kiss, he made sure to pull away with a sparkling direct-to-TV smirk.
“You’re blushing, Matoba-sama.”
Seiji did flinch this time, hard and fast, and in that moment it was the most satisfying thing Natori believed he would ever see. I’m a bad person, Natori thought, and relished the way Seiji’s eyelashes fluttered when he reached out to tuck a renegade strand of dark hair behind his ear.
They finished their drinks in silence, and by the time they were prepared to make eye contact again, Natori found Seiji’s mask perfectly composed once more.
“I’ve made preparations for the ritual tomorrow,” Seiji said briskly. “The creature draws its strength from the wind, so we must be ready to begin at any time.”
Natori nodded his agreement. “The binding could go badly if the weather turns for good.”
“Earlier, rather than later, then.” Matoba stared down at his glass, still half-full. The melting ice made soft clicking sounds as it shifted.
“I can be ready to start as early as sunrise,” Natori said. The sooner he was back home, the better. The sooner they completed the job, the sooner he could get out of this damn windbreaker, the sooner he could get away from this hotel and the Matoba clan, and the sooner he could leave whatever surrealist romp this job had turned into and return to the land of the living.
“How did you know it would work?” Natori asked. How did you know a kiss would break the spell?
But Matoba Seiji was already turning away, voice raised to call the bartender over. “I’d like my check, please.”