Archive of Our Own ^beta

A man is at Shuuichi's front door.

To be sure, it's a paper man wedged in the doorframe, flapping in a wind that is not there. But this is not something he had put there or had been expecting.

He knows better than to touch it. He leans in to discern the sender's name, a signature, any handwriting he might recognize. The paper man must sense the closeness of his presence, as it wriggles frantically, slipping itself from the door enough for Shuuichi to read: 

Tomorrow, mine, 9 a.m. 

Despite the frankly insulting briefness, he knows who this has come from. Only one exorcist would so brazenly assume Shuuichi would know he is calling without it being written.

Shuuichi brushes his finger to the paper man, his touch releasing it from the door, and it flies away to its sender to confirm the message has been delivered. He watches it go, lip tugging down.

What does he want of me now? he thinks, unlocking his door, walking in. This thought of his, unrepentant in its constant invasion of his mind, locks him in the barely-furnished place he detachedly calls home more than the shutting door does.

He throws himself on the sofa, staring at the white ceiling. It couldn't be an exorcist meeting; those are described as such and come in handsome invitations. And it couldn't be a poorly disguised request for him outside of his exorcism duties. Those messages, when written rather than whispered in forgotten hallways, were even more cryptic than the one he'd received today. They were careful about... them.

"Hiiragi," he says into the living room, walls absorbing the lonely sound.

The air itself disembodies, forming swirling clouds that bring Hiiragi in. "Master."

"Can you sense if he was here?"

"I cannot sense him, rather his shiki, but I do sense that it was here."

'He,' 'him,' 'his.' Even his shiki does not like to speak the name. Saying 'Matoba Seiji' tastes like salt and sucks the water from his mouth just the same.

"Yeah," he sighs, sitting up. "He left me a paper figure telling me to go to his manor at nine tomorrow. And that's it."

A mask may cover Hiiragi's face, but it's in her stiff body language that her displeasure is obvious. "Master, your associations with him-"

"You weren't there," he says, stubborn. He lies back down, tossing hat and glasses away, crossing his arms over his chest. He can feel his heart thumping as he remembers younger days. "I know he's... like that. But he was someone else, before."

"'Before,'" she echoes.

"Yes, but- sometimes, I see that person again." He sinks further into the sofa. If he closed his eyes, it might feel like a mattress. With this talk of Seiji especially. "He's not all that bad sometimes."

"'Sometimes.'"

"It's complicated!" he says, bolting up, cheeks warm. Why is he arguing this with a shiki? And one who hasn't been there from the beginning; who does not know the clockwork intricacies that connect him to Seiji because she had not been there when they were crafted?

"Yes," Hiiragi says, flatly, "I've noticed." Clouds sweep her away.

He sighs, wearily, bones grinding to dust, resting his arms over knees drawn in.

He'll be going. When it comes to Seiji, he has surrendered himself to this.

The main Matoba manor stretches luxuriously in its perfectly immaculate forest seclusion. Sounds of nature – rustling leaves, trickling water, birdsong – distract from the ugly truth within the house. But today, a calm and many-voiced murmur creeps out of the notches on its wooden walls.

So I'm not the only one invited. This is something official, Shuuichi thinks, his relief washed down with something bitter, and that this realization tastes anything but sweet only makes the bitterness stronger.

The Matoba shadow shiki, like sentinels at the entrance, usher him inside. He's taken to a meeting room, the other exorcists already seated on cushions going around a low, long rectangular table. And who sits at one of the table's short ends, on a cushion plumper than the others, than a certain Matoba Seiji smiling shallowly at him.

"Ah," Seiji says, "you're finally here, Natori-san."

Shuuichi frowns as he takes his seat. "But I'm on ti-"

"Now that we've all gathered," Seiji says, "I would like to begin."

Shuuichi quickly studies the room. Every seat is occupied. Did he give me a later time than everyone? He aims a frown at Seiji, but he is not looking his way. His eye, dark and pointed as obsidian, is set in front of him at no one in particular, and the smile he wears is not one of amusement.

"I do apologize for the short notice, but this was urgent." He steeples his hands in front of him, and it reminds Shuuichi of all the prayers he's whispered onto them. Seiji meets everyone's eyes, briefly, coming to Shuuichi's last, and he holds on to them as he says, "There is a man-eating youkai I would like to enlist your help in exorcising."

The remembrances of old nights fade like the dreams they might have been. The commotion is immediate.

"Man-eating?"

"You're certain a youkai is to blame?"

"If this is true, why ask and have a meeting?! If people are being killed, we need to get over there now!"

"Quiet!" orders Nanase, seated at the other short end of the table. Her voice is like a whip and as effective. "We're not done explaining. Save questions for the end."

Seiji tips her head at her in thanks. "West of here, in the mountains, is a village that has seen multiple attacks on its people." His revelation had cooled Shuuichi's blood, but the smile he offers the congregation fully freezes it. "First was a man. Walking home from work, he reported seeing his daughter on the street crying, and when he approached her, she tried to scratch off his face before fleeing. He lived, but the marks on his face did not appear human. More like claws. It turns out the daughter was at a friend's house at the time of the attack. It was shrugged off as a delusion of his until a week ago, when the body of an old woman was found. She was covered in scratches, but her face" – he traces the shape of his own – "was chewed off."

Shuuichi's shudder feels like worms crawling wetly down his back. Another exorcist in attendance covers their mouth; a few more begin to mumble in consternation.

"That attack was blamed on a feral dog," Seiji continues impassively, "and certainly, the injuries looked like what an animal might have done. But there were no tracks. No animal sightings. The next day, a child was attacked. He suffered injuries similar to the first two cases and told a story similar to the first attack: he was walking home from school and saw his mother in the forest calling for him. He approached, and she attacked, but he was able to escape. The police were little help, and the peculiarity of these mysteries prompted one of the villagers to request a different view be considered." He puts his hands palm-up to either side of him. "And here we are."

The table is stunned to silence and stillness, the closed windows unable to provide even a breeze to stir movement into them.

"No questions?" Seiji mildly asks, smiling humorlessly. "Hmm. To address earlier ones: while there is no evidence for this being a youkai, neither does anything discount it. After some deliberations with my clan, I feel the victims' logic-defying stories warrant our involvement, and we will proceed assuming this is a youkai's doing, especially as my sources tell me this village houses a once-famous shrine fallen into disrepair. The supernatural and the spiritual have a tendency to be entwined. As for why we waited: every scheme needs to be strategized before its execution. I called you here because if a youkai is behind this, of which I am very certain, it's powerful and dangerous. We can't go into it with righteous anger and nothing else."

A few people shift on their cushions, uncomfortable at this hated man's cold, if rational, words.

"Besides, precisely because this youkai has harmed and murdered, I needed to know if you would help us. I would not take with me exorcists unwilling to risk themselves. If we'd acted before planning, who's to say how many of you would have cowered upon facing such a youkai?"

A hand slams the table and all heads turn to the dissenter.

"I don't like your tone there, Matoba," growls an older exorcist. "We wouldn't be exorcists if we weren't serious about it."

"So you're willing to come?"

"Obviously! I think I speak for everyone here."

Quiet agreements, nods of heads. Shuuichi simply purses his mouth.

"If any of you will not join," Seiji says, "I ask you to leave this room. But you'll be kept here, of course, until the rest of us take care of this. I cannot allow the rumors of this youkai to reach other ears."

"Forced to do what you want either way, huh?" someone grumbles.

"You came into my house. Expect to follow our rules." He looks around the table. "Will any of you leave?"

This stillness is not from consternation, but determination.

"That's that, then." Seiji stands, and everyone ripples to their feet in accordance, Shuuichi purposefully last. "If you live close by and require any tools at your homes, please feel free to get them, but you will be accompanied by one of my people. Those of you who live far will be borrowing ours, though if you're close by and don't wish to travel back, you're welcome to our things as well. You'll be assigned a partner later, and every team must have one offensive and one defensive tool at the least. We'll meet at eleven to discuss our plan before heading for the village."

As the exorcists file out with whispered robes and appalled mumbles, Shuuichi stays behind.

"Matoba-san," he says, catching Seiji's eye. "Can I have a word with you?"

Nanase, standing next to Seiji, raises an eyebrow at him. Seiji gives her a small nod and she leaves, though not without an amused look back at Shuuichi. The door shuts and it's just them in this room too large for them, in seats too far apart for a proper conversation. Shuuichi should move closer, but he doesn't. This distance is safer.

"The invitation you sent me. Were you trying to make a fool of me? Why did you give me a time later than everyone else?"

Seiji looks to the paper-covered window, sunlight filtered through in grainy white. "You're quite the early bird," he says to it, folding his hands behind his back. "If I'd told you to be here at the same time as everyone else, not only would you have been the first to arrive, we would have had to spend a dreadful amount of time being the only ones in the room." Though it is his eyepatch that stares in profile at Shuuichi, it feels like his real eye beneath it is focused on him. "And you wouldn't have wanted that, would you?"

No. Yes. He crosses his arms, remembering the paper man flitting away, lifeless and flat and no longer needed.

"Regardless," Seiji says, turning to him, "thank you for coming. With the briefness of my message, I wasn't sure you would. Having to write that several times for several people was annoying and I didn't want to prolong that."

"You could have told me a little about what you wanted." He sounds petulant, even to himself.

"To have you panic and come to my door about five minutes later? No, I wanted everyone together to explain this only once."

He crosses his arms tighter, glowering to the floor. "But why ask anyone outside of your clan?"

"I said I wanted the best exorcists on this, which is true, but if any of you are injured, it's not someone in my clan."

Shuuichi snaps his head up, a condemnation of Seiji about to be set loose, but it gets stuck in his throat when he sees Seiji has walked up to him during this conversation and is standing so close that if either of them simply put their hands in front of them, they would know the other's heartbeat.

And Seiji does raise his arm to bring a thumb to Shuuichi's bottom lip. "I've never seen it here before," he says to himself, the hint of a smile on his voice.

"You've never seen what?" Shuuichi says, mouth moving unsteadily beneath Seiji's archer-rough skin, heart lurching inside his rib cage.

"Your lizard." He brushes his lip as if it's made of glass.

Shuuichi doesn't let himself breathe in or out. He lets himself actually be made of glass, immobile, tiny imperfections transparent, just for a little while.

Seiji withdraws his hand, takes a step and then another back. "Do you have everything you need? For the exorcism."

Blood and nerves come to life again, and Shuuichi can move, can breathe. "I always carry paper with me when on the job."

"I'd suggest another offensive weapon. I can lend you a staff, if you'd rather not return to your house for yours." There is something improper in his eye as he adds, "I'm sure there's a room somewhere we can go to look for what you need."

"I'll go home to get mine," he quickly says, walking past Seiji. He doesn't take help from the Matoba clan if he can help it. And now, his revived blood and nerves, more heightened than before, tell him to get away. At the foot of the door, he pauses, pivots back, his condemnation remembered as he rethinks what Seiji had offered. "How could you suggest that at this time?"

"Suggesting another weapon offended you?" Seiji says, bemused.

Had Shuuichi imagined the wickedness in his tone and implication? He's certain he didn't. But if he had, what did it say of him?

He doesn't deign a reply. The distance between them must grow. 

Shuuichi nervously thumbs his staff, the smoothed wood wearing away stroke by stroke. Ingratiatingly, Seiji had been right: he'd been one of the first ones back, and would have been the first if he hadn't spent a few minutes at home pacing, wondering if this exact scenario would unfold. He's not sure if it's better or worse that a couple of other people are in this room that Seiji occupies like an emperor. The other two exorcists talk quietly with each other, leaving Shuuichi staring determinedly down at his staff on his lap to avoid Seiji's eye, and thus a conversation, and thus things best left unsaid when not alone.

In the time it takes for the rest of the exorcists to arrive, he might wear the staff down to a stick.

His thumb pad begins to burn from the friction, and he thinks he can see smoke sizzle up, that the wood is charring and his thumb is blistering, when Seiji's voice cuts through it all.

"The plan," Seiji says, and though he speaks no louder than ever, the rapt silence of the room makes his voice a clarion, "is to set up a warding perimeter around the shrine with a one-kilometer radius. The same will be done to the village. If the youkai is already within these bounds, we have trapped it. If it's not, we have kept it out of people's way. A quarter of us will stay inside the shrine perimeter's, another quarter outside, another quarter inside the village's, and the last quarter outside. My people will be combing the leftover areas, but it's unlikely the youkai is there. Due to its violent behavior and unknown abilities, we will be working in teams of two, as I'd mentioned." His eye meets Shuuichi's, whose own were on him as he was speaking, but now Shuuichi has to glance away. "Each team will be given a sealing pot. The sealed youkai is to be brought to me."

"So you can then make it your shiki?" someone asks, a porcelain crack in the room.

It hadn't occurred to Shuuichi until now, but it is as calculating as would be expected of the Matoba clan. For someone to speak it, however, shifts the already tenuous unity they'd come to.

"No," Seiji says, composed as ever. "It's injured people; it'd be troublesome to control." And here he offers a smile that shows his teeth and does not come close to his eye. "Don't you think?"

The man has the decency to look down.

"As I was saying," Seiji says, "I will receive the youkai. If you require assistance to seal it, send shiki to the group closest to you. You'll see who your partner is, where you're working, and where other groups will be on the paper Nanase is giving you."

She slides it smoothly in front of Shuuichi just after Seiji says this, and he thinks he sees the tiniest smirk on her face. It can't mean anything good. He reads the groups.

He's been partnered with Seiji.

Rather, Seiji – the one who'd decided the teams – partnered himself with Shuuichi. To have him on edge? Because he genuinely thinks they would work the best together?

He looks to Seiji, who answers him with a smile.

It's likelier they're paired for real teamwork. That he so easily shakes Shuuichi's core is a sick perk for him.

"Matoba-san," someone says, "this is all well planned, but how are we supposed to hunt something whose appearance we don't know?"

"Ah, that's the second reason for partnering. The two survivors each saw a different person beckoning them. It could have been a trick of the mind, but I speculate that this youkai is a shapeshifter." He rests his chin on folded hands. "The shape it took both times was one the individual knew. Someone they would approach. That's part of the danger: the youkai can somehow read into people to manifest itself in a way that will get them close. But with two people, either each will perceive a different person, thereby calling out the youkai for what it is; or it will get confused and show no human shape, which still calls out the youkai."

"What if there's someone our partner and ourselves know?"

"I've arranged the partnerships to minimize that. But think, won't you? Why would someone you know but are not partnered with be in the forest precisely when we're searching for a shapeshifter?"

The inquiring exorcist covers their face with a hand, embarrassed. Shuuichi glares at Seiji for his tactlessness, but he is ignored.

"Lastly," Seiji says, "I'll require reports every hour. Send your shiki to me even if nothing of note has been found." The corner of his mouth turns up, his hand brushing away strands of hair from his eyepatch – on purpose? Mindlessly? "I'm sure I don't need to remind you to use even more caution than usual. Trust nothing you see."

"Not even your partner?"

The eyes on the room swivel to Shuuichi, who blinks. That had come out of him, hadn't it, dry and scornful. He can handle the curious looks of the other exorcists, but it is Seiji's unsurprised countenance that he's locked to.

"No," he says, "you can trust them – if you do not let them out of your sight." A fleeting smile, an eye still on Shuuichi's. "That'll be all. If there are no further questions, we'll head for the village."

From the corner of his eye Shuuichi sees the exorcists shuffle out. He and Seiji remain, eyes meeting in silent smolder. He's the last to leave, but Seiji trails after. They're partnered, after all. 

The Matoba clan revel in black. It is in their robes, in their leader's hair, in their cars – inside and out. We should be doing this at night, Shuuichi thinks, so it matches their colors. He rests his elbow on the car's window, leaning his head against it, the motor sending vibrations down his jawbone. It makes the passing scenery darkened by the windows blur even more than their speed. "I still don't know why you asked me to come," he says.

"I've already told you," Seiji says. "I wanted top exorcist talent."

"Okay, but why partner with me? You're even less... friendly with the other exorcists, so your circle of acquaintances is smaller. You'd run less of a risk of the youkai transforming into someone you know."

Seiji's response is as swift as it is smooth. "We've exorcised together before. I have an idea of what it's like to work closely with you."

Nanase coughs politely into her hand.

"Besides," Seiji adds, "how many people do we both know that the youkai would try to trick us with?"

That it takes no time for Shuuichi to think about it is kind of pathetic. "Not many, but we're..." He drifts off, remembering Nanase and her partner are here. He holds Seiji's gaze, hoping his eyes reflect all the things in their past that haunt them in their present, and then glances down.

"Your capabilities have nothing to do with your hatred of me."

Shuuichi's hand moves to his lap; his spine forms a perfect line. "I don't hate you," he says, and something else was about to follow, but the others' presences keep it away, make him forget it.

"Well," Seiji says, "I don't hate you, either."

Nanase scoffs.

"Do you have something to say, Nanase?" Seiji says, turning to her, and Shuuichi recognizes his tone for false sweetness.

"Nothing you haven't heard before."

And what is that supposed to mean? Shuuichi thinks, looking between the two. Did she know?

Seiji hums flatly in non-answer, to Shuuichi's private anxiety.

He simmers in it for the duration of the car ride, Seiji burning in his periphery, Nanase and her partner vague human shapes.

They arrive at the village. Nanase and her partner file out first, and Shuuichi takes the opportunity to tug the back of Seiji's sleeve.

"Wait," he says. Drops his voice. "What was that about earlier? With Nanase-san? Did you tell her about- you know?" 'Us,' he'd meant to say, but even the broadness of the pronoun wraps them up neater than what they are.

Seiji, peering at him over the shoulder, gives him a well-bred cat's smile. "If you're trying to keep people from knowing what we are, Natori-san, holding me back in the car after an ambiguous conversation in front of others isn't the way to do it." He slips away as heat creeps up Shuuichi's neck.

The exorcists set out for their assignments. After carving the earth with a protective ward at one corner of the village's perimeter, they check that the rest have been properly made. Rather, Seiji goes, and Shuuichi has no choice but to follow. The afternoon sun remains high up, but with autumn's tilt it barely warms them. They haven't spoken since the car, the trance-like ward incantations replacing what better people might say to one another.

It confuses Shuuichi when, back in the village, feet roaming on this scraggly land, Seiji says, "I never told her."

A second later, he realizes what he means. "If you never told her, why did she seem so-"

"-knowing? Because while I never told her, she figured out the... complex nature of our acquaintanceship on her own." He reacts to Shuuichi's horror with an amused expression. "We're not terribly good at hiding it, and Nanase is a smart woman."

The heat returns to Shuuichi's face as he mentally reexamines every encounter with her, viewing it now as she would. He is an old almost-but-not-quite-friend of her leader who spat and glared his way and never did seem to stay far from him for very long. "And you never refuted it?!"

"I never confirmed it, either."

"Saying nothing is as good as saying she was right!"

"She's not judging you."

"No, she definitely is! The smirks and coughs and scoffs? What is that if not judgment?"

Seiji considers it. "She's not judging you in a negative way."

Shuuichi twists his mouth aside and stares steadfastly ahead, hand clenching his staff.

They get odd looks from the villagers they pass. They do make quite the pair. Seiji: long hair, flowing robes, eyepatch covering half his face, smile hiding all his true intent. Himself: a modern young man featured on silver screens. Where people's brows crease at Seiji's appearance, recognizing Shuuichi brightens them.

"Natori Shuuichi-san?" a woman their age asks, clutching a book to her chest, smile wobbly.

He wipes his scowl to offer her his best actor's smile, swooping off his hat as he does. "The very same."

She takes a hopeful step toward him just as Seiji pulls him back, nimbly stepping in front of him, strip of paper flitting down his hand from an unseen sleeve pocket. "And who might you be?" he asks her before Shuuichi can get a further word in.

She retracts her step, eyes widening, book tighter to her chest. "Just- I'm a fan of Natori-san's. I was wondering if that was him, because we hired... um. Well. Not actors. For something in the village."

Shuuichi pushes past Seiji, giving the woman an even better smile, kicking back at Seiji – probably not subtly – in a wordless Stop whatever you think you're doing. "It is me." A lie slides out. "They graciously invited me along so I can learn how these people work. It's for a role I'll be doing in the future. Don't mind him, he's like this because of his job."

"Oh. Well." She tries her smile again. "Could I get your autograph?"

"Of course you can."

He can hear Seiji's mouth turn imperceptibly down at his control of the situation, and savors this rare comeuppance as he inks his name on the book's first page. He keeps this brush on him for anything a charm paper might need written where a spoken spell would not suffice, and seeing his name, come by his other self's tools, bleed into this life is jarring. But he keeps his smile on, strengthened by Seiji's suspicious squint, as he hands the book back. The woman beatifically thanks him, blushing and stammering, as she leaves.

His smile disappears as he turns to Seiji, fixing his hat in place. "What was that you tried to pull?"

"We're here to hunt a youkai that can imitate people, and there you go, allowing someone you don't know to saunter over."

"You said it'd take the shape of people we know."

"That was an educated guess, based on the established pattern. Better to be safe than sorry."

"You didn't have to be rude about it!"

"And if she had been the youkai? Was I supposed to give it a smile like you and hope that sort of charm would work?"

Shuuichi opens his mouth to argue back, but for once, he thinks about it before he spits it out. He resumes walking, sulking.

Seiji catches up. "No reply because despite your good intentions, you know I'm right?"

Shuuichi stops abruptly, Seiji bumping into his back and then into his chest when Shuuichi swings around and underestimates their closeness. Its unexpectedness leaves his head blank, and from the thinnest ring of white around Seiji's dark iris, he'd not expected this either. For this measly moment, they're other people with something else. He steps back, breathes out, briefly closes his eyes. His voice is measured. "We're hunting a dangerous youkai. We can't be like this, Matoba-san."

Seiji watches something behind Shuuichi's back. "What do you propose we become, then?"

He chooses his words with the care one might when threading a needle. A slip of the hand, a wrong word: a prickle of pain. "Don't be you."

Seiji's eye swings to his, keeps him trapped in its darkness, hauls mud in Shuuichi's lungs. "Unfortunately, I am all I know how to be," he says, hair and robes swishing as he passes Shuuichi.

The sun is to their backs, their spindly shadows stretching forward on the earth, joined to them inescapably by their feet.

The village isn't very large, more wilderness than houses, and Shuuichi almost wanders into it several times before Seiji offers a liquid Natori-san that makes him shuffle back to their path, embarrassed. It's the closest thing to conversation that passes between them in this green open space. And Shuuichi isn't even replying.

Just as well. There's never much to say when he's with Seiji – nothing good or comforting, anyway. There's even less to say when Shuuichi's mind, so often drowning in the countless contradictory ways Seiji's existence pulls him in, is also preoccupied with a youkai out for innocents' blood.

"Are you nervous about this?"

It was stupid to ask; Shuuichi knows this as soon as it's out of his mouth, and it gets a small, condescending smile his way. "Not at all. This is not how I die." Seiji says it with the certainty only someone of his power and upbringing could believe like the truth of the sunrise. "Are you nervous?"

"No, I can take care of myself." But, just because, he lets himself think: What if this youkai is what kills me? And it makes his stomach drop, realizing that it hasn't been that long since he fumbled out of adolescence and into adulthood; he hasn't fully found his way through the exorcists' world, an outcast among the outcasts with a late start, leaving him pitifully behind; he's just beginning his more quotidian career, the slope up limitless; and he is utterly lost in everything else. Really, if he died now, what could he say he had done?

"Natori-san?"

The curiosity in Seiji's voice gets Shuuichi looking at him, and he hopes he is not wearing his sudden fears. Seiji would pounce on his weaknesses. The things he's not yet resolved.

"But if you died today," Shuuichi says, tasting sand, "would you have any regrets?"

And that was stupid to ask, too. It had come from a wisp of a doubt and allowed itself spoken to seek a yes-or-no answer. The cousin of resolution sculpted with the distant sun as their witness. He expects a dismissive laugh; it is he who is sentimental, who says these kinds of things before thinking of their consequences. He expects it and it does not come: he is met with a pensive silence as Seiji glances to the leaf-covered earth. Like he's actually thinking about this, like this is something he hadn't considered before to have a lithe answer at the ready, like this is something he is unsure of.

His eye is level on his. "I would."

Shuuichi's organs constrict, they expand-

"There are still many things I can do for my clan."

-they deflate. "Ah." He looks to the sun. It hurts, obviously, and when he turns his vision elsewhere on the sky he sees its phantom brilliance dancing with the subtle twitches of his eyes. It's always for the clan. The sand in his mouth accumulates to a mound that he grittily swallows.

They walk and walk, slopes rising and falling, and the surroundings suddenly seem familiar. They have encircled the village, its calm maintained.

"How dull," Seiji mumbles.

A shiki swirls to existence before him – one of the other exorcists'. "My master says there is nothing to report outside the village."

"So dull," he sighs, the shiki disappearing.

Other shiki come and go, all saying the same.

Except.

"My master found something at the shrine," a shiki says, face impassive behind its mask. "It is not the youkai, but he asks you come look. He believes the police should be called, as well."

"The police?" Seiji say, intrigued.

Shuuichi's unease tastes like bile.

"Yes," the shiki says. "He and his partner found what might be human remains."

Seiji's eyebrow goes up. In Shuuichi's throat, it's only bile.

They follow the shiki to the shrine.

It is as dilapidated as Seiji had informed them. Wood splints and rots, if it has not fallen already. The grass grows wild; leaves older than this autumn carpet the grounds and swirl inside the shrine, the dust they bother glowing under slabs of light seeping through holes on the roof. The stones have gathered moss; the komainu guarding the entrance are mottled, broken, and weathered by time.

There the exorcists wait, their faces distressed and pale.

"You found human remains?" Seiji asks them, ever to the point.

"Y-yes, we think so." One motions to the tangled shrubbery at the foot of the right komainu, jaw broken in its silent snarl. "There, where the grass is dead. It looked like a flayed face."

Seiji is immediately on his knees, brushing the plants aside with bare hands.

Shuuichi, hesitantly, kneels as well.

There, buried under crisp, long stems of mostly dead plants, folded on itself on top of the earth, is a gray, ragged flap of- of something.

"Natori-san, let me see your staff," Seiji says.

Shuuichi hands it over unthinkingly, but protests when Seiji uses it to lift the thing off the ground.

The stench is overpowering; Shuuichi covers his mouth and nose on the crook of his elbow, the taste of bile stronger. It is unmistakably someone's rotting face, eye and nose and mouth holes screaming even after death. They are cut jaggedly, as if by teeth. Which is exactly what had happened to the old woman whose face was bitten off.

The other exorcists have similar reactions to Shuuichi, but Seiji calmly hands the staff over to one of them.

"Have one of your shiki tell Nanase about this and call the police. I doubt their forensic department will come to the real conclusion, but we can't say we didn't do our civilian duty."

Part of the face sloughs off.

"And try not to let any of the villagers see you," Seiji finishes.

They're horrified, rightfully, but they move. This job requires quick adaptation in the face of the grim.

Seiji taps his chin, eyeing the flattened grassy spot where the face had been. "This all but confirms the youkai is related to the shrine. But how?"

Perhaps Seiji's unperturbed segue into sleuthing is what relieves Shuuichi's disquiet. There is normalcy to be had here; they must have it. But he says, in a sudden moment of sullen realization, "They took my staff."

"Obviously. Without gloves, it's the most hygienic way to take it."

"But- it's my staff..."

"You still have paper as your weapon, don't you?" Seiji pats his bow bag slung on his back. "And I have this. You'll be fine."

"Are you saying you'll protect me if it comes down to it?"

For how unchanging his expression is, Seiji might as well be carved from the same stone as the komainu. "We're in teams for safeguarding." He turns to the komainu, running a hand over its time-smoothed face. It is dimpled where the eyes would have protruded, worn away where the nose once flared. The mane's elaborate curls have become wart-like growths; the ears are rounded, deafened to what they might have heard before. "Why would the youkai leave the face here?" he mumbles to himself. "There must be a hint somewhere..."

Shuuichi glances at the other komainu, its features only slightly less faded than its counterpart's. He then looks to the shrine, the forest creeping closer to reclaim what had been lost from it, and realizes now nature is all he has seen here.

"There are no other youkai," he says, turning to Seiji. "Here or anywhere in the village."

Seiji hums. "You're right..."

"There are youkai everywhere, even the city. So if they're not here-"

"-something caused them to leave. And what would scare a youkai more than one so violent it would trespass into the human realm?"

They let the weight of it settle on their shoulders.

"Maybe the teams should be bigger?" Shuuichi suggests, a cool breeze sending a shiver up his spine.

Seiji's curt look is answer enough, but he says, voice like vinegared honey, "You don't trust the others on their own?"

"It's not that, I just-" He bites his cheek. "I'm not doing this, I told you. You know what I meant. Safety in numbers."

"They each have shiki. Not everyone is as helpless as you."

He chokes on the first syllable of his annoyed reply, dangerously close to having it spoken. I'm not doing this, he reminds himself, eyeing the komainu's white, gray, and green marbled streaks. "We should head back-" he starts, and stops when his eye falls on something dark on the komainu closest to Seiji. He approaches it, leaning close. It's a smear, rust brown, on something made of stone. On something standing tall beside human remains.

"I think that's blood," he says. "The other komainu doesn't have anything this dark on it."

Seiji goes next to him, elbows bumping. "Hmm," he says. He rounds the statue, coming to the opposite side of the smear. "Wouldn't you know it, there's a bit of that color here, too." He meets Shuuichi's eyes. "So we have a bloody statue that we found a human face by. I think it's safe to say the face was put on the statue." He steps back. "But it still doesn't tell us why a youkai would do any of this."

The wind sighs through the holes in the shrine, barely audible, but it sounds like the cries of someone lost. In the span of a heartbeat, Shuuichi remembers other shrines and temples he's visited haunted by the unholy. The thread common to them, as for all youkai who viciously turned against humans. "Youkai hurt people when they're impure," he says, resting a hand on the cold stone, "and they become impure when people have done something so terrible to them that it changes them."

Seiji raises an eyebrow – both, Shuuichi thinks, from the crinkling on his eyepatch.

"Most of the time, anyway," Shuuichi adds, rubbing his hand idly, lizard crawling across it.

"You doubt yourself too much, Natori-san, and it's not as based in truth as you think," Seiji says. "I think you're on to something. What motivates youkai is not dissimilar to what motivates people. They say revenge is best served cold. On the contrary, I've found it's often delivered with passion."

The earlier half of Seiji's words are still sinking into Shuuichi, that offhand reassurance, that he doesn't listen to the rest – he'd heard it, but he hadn't listened. How could he, when Seiji had glimpsed into his psyche and cut to his quick with one sentence?

"The relationship between the youkai and the shrine is also still unknown," Seiji continues, and briefly, madly, Shuuichi wonders if it is to keep him informed or to chase away his words that had been close to kindness, "but tearing off faces, shapeshifting to forms the victims would know, a shrine in disuse, giving the faces to these faceless statues..." He contemplates the komainu. "We'll have our answers soon, I'm sure." The grass whispers as he walks over it and to the pebbled path, back the way they'd come from. "Let's return to our post."

Stone gives way to earth beaten thin by years' worth of feet. Simple houses crop up where trees once stood, though the forest's loss is not complete, as trees huddle over roofs, past yards that seamlessly blend into wilderness. Though this area is lived-in: the mumbles of people muffled inside their homes, in passing conversation with a friend. It is lived-in, despite bordering the green unknown, and it makes Shuuichi worry his lip that the youkai would violate the sacrament that is the divide between the mundane and supernatural worlds.

Then again, if a youkai is capable of such atrocities, it would not follow that.

And then again, he willingly walks into forests of old forgotten by all but the youkai who call it home precisely to seek and seal them when duty mandates it. Here he is, after a shapeshifter, because the enemy of that enemy was his friend in ways the adage could not possibly predict or hope to pithily summarize. He's not sure he can do it himself, and he's one half of the mess.

He runs a hand through his hair, mouth pulling to the side. This silence, suppressed jointly with Seiji, is getting his thoughts into places he'd rather not think about. His eyes betray him as they wander to Seiji next to him, his expression cool as steel.

Youkai can hunt people, and he is the proof.

But wanting an eye is different than wanting death, Shuuichi thinks. Yet the similarities, eerie as they are, prompt him to break the silence. "What can you tell me about your youkai?"

Seiji glances at him. "My youkai?"

"The one after your eye. It wants revenge, too. Maybe there's things about it that can help us figure out what the village's is after."

The sunlight glides off the ink on Seiji's eyepatch. His mouth is level as the horizon.

"What, are those things you don't divulge to anyone outside your clan?" Shuuichi asks, defensive. "It could be helpful in solving this. You don't need to be that guarded."

Seiji stares ahead. It doesn't seem he will reply, pride overtaking the little good he has in his heart, but he eventually says, "My youkai can shapeshift as well."

Shuuichi's mouth drops in surprise, the autumn chill sneaking in between his teeth. His breath hisses in like he's pricked his finger on the edge of a metal sheet. "You tell me now?"

"Because you asked. And out of necessity for our current predicament."

"You should have told me earlier!" he says, but he does not think of today. A repressed remembrance of the first time he saw Seiji's face half-covered flits by. "This isn't the kind of thing I need to ask you to tell me."

"You know now. What good does it do you? Other than blackmail."

His anger is swept away by surprise. "You think this is about blackmail? I told you, I just want to know what I can to get this youkai. Not every exorcist is as ruthless or underhanded as you, Matoba-san." The name comes out bitterly. He winces: from its taste, from what they're delving back into. He rubs the spot between his eyebrows, lines etching there the more time he spends with Seiji. He wills investigative thoughts. One comes to him. "Does it also change into people you know?"

"With all this talking you're doing," Seiji says, smile taut as his bow, foot crunching on a twig like a bone, "you'll miss the youkai if it comes, Natori-san."

Shuuichi looks at how the sunlight flashes on Seiji's teeth before turning his attention to what lies in front of him. His lack of an answer said more than he thought, and for a fleeting moment Shuuichi thinks, selfishly, of a monster with his own face.

Something black moves in the bottom of his vision: his lizard, skittering to his nose. He'd cursed it once, not knowing what it meant, fearing it. He'd come to grudgingly accept it; it was simply part of him. Now he is thankful for its constancy. If he was marked by Seiji's name or likeness on his skin just as he was on his mind...

He draws his mouth to a thin, tight line and does not let go until the pressure proves too much.

Another hour passes, and besides the completion of the tasks Seiji had assigned the exorcists responsible for finding the victim's remains, nothing new is reported.

Seiji sighs. "Perhaps the youkai's smelled us and refuses to come out." It's the first thing either of them has said in a while.

It doesn't seem like an invitation to continue the conversation, and Shuuichi has no desire to play the guessing game Seiji implicitly incites when they're around each other. He goes with a noncommittal hum as a response.

"Are you hungry?" Seiji asks him.

It's out of nowhere and Shuuichi's tone comes out like a question. "No?" And he isn't. Not terribly. Though he does note now his stomach feels hollowed out, caving in itself. He'd not felt like having breakfast, and food had been the last thing on his mind since the morning meeting.

"Let's find the nearest grocer's. I think there was one past this ginkgo."

"But I'm not hungry," Shuuichi says, following after Seiji's sure footsteps.

"Yes, I heard you; I'm the one who's hungry. Regardless," he says, eyeing him briefly, "you should eat something. This will be a long day, and we'll need all the energy we can get."

"Are we not going to sleep or something if this drags on to night?"

"We'll take shifts. But on short notice, and with this situation, I don't know how good of a rest anyone will get." His smile is slow and dead as the leaves strewed on the ground. "If I'd dragged Natsume-kun here with that servant who heeds him, we might have solved this already."

Shuuichi's anger is so sudden and immense he stops, whirling around to Seiji, vision briefly going white – it would have been easy to believe it came from his emotions, but it is the sunlight playing off his glasses – and his mouth curls back to denounce Seiji for this suggestion.

But it bloats like a corpse when he sees Seiji's target-wide eye and teeth peeking through lips parted in bewilderment.

He bites off the worst of what he had meant to say and grumbles, "Don't ever bring him into anything we do."

All traces of surprise have vanished from Seiji's face, steel impassivity sharper. "I wasn't being serious about it."

"I don't care. This is the kind of crap that makes me not want to talk to you."

Whatever Seiji was going to reply goes unsaid.

They pass a ginkgo, leaves a brilliant gold, and as Seiji had said, a grocer's stall is around the corner.

"Choose something," Seiji says, not looking at him but at the goods on display.

"I'm not hungry."

"How about fruit?"

"Are you listening to me?"

"Yes, and I'm choosing to ignore it."

He's not forgiven Seiji for his crude attempt at humor, and he goes his own way, looking over the food. Fresh or pickled or packed. He ends up choosing a pork bun, artificially shiny in its plastic bag, and brings it to the counter to pay. Seiji is already outside, dipping a hand into a paper bag, dropping its contents into his mouth. Shuuichi goes to meet him.

"What now?" he asks.

Seiji calmly chews and swallows. "We keep making our rounds."

The food blessedly keeps them from having to talk to each other, though the crinkling of Shuuichi's food in the otherwise idyllic countryside afternoon tense with mutual discomfort is not much better. Seiji's bag crinkles occasionally, but the papery sound is not amiss when Shuuichi himself has paper talismans and dolls tucked inside his jacket.

They have encircled the village again. The mundanity of it all almost lulls Shuuichi into forgetting why they're here. He removes his glasses and rubs his eyes, focusing. When he opens them, he sees Seiji gesturing his paper bag to him.

"You can have the rest if you want. I'm full."

Shuuichi had tossed his bun's packaging some minutes back, apparently hungrier than he'd thought. He takes the bag with a mumbled thanks, reaching inside and realizing he didn't know what Seiji had been eating. But it's wrinkled and a little sticky. Wary, he pulls it out.

A dried, candied loquat.

And he remembers: a summer's day years ago, admiring loquats growing high on a tree he'd need to stand on his tiptoes to pick, the wide-eyed stare of a boy just like him, Yorishima-san finally noting that stare and handing the fruits over with a chuckle, how Seiji had cradled his like something precious, their mouths wet with the fruit's juices, the bitterness in Shuuichi's loquat despite its inviting yellow brightness.

He searches Seiji for an answer or at least a purpose.

"I just wanted some," Seiji says, and it could mean anything.

Shuuichi turns over the fruit as if its wrinkles might be read like a palm that will tell him what Seiji doesn't. But there is no answer there, either.

What did I expect? he thinks, nibbling it.

Unlike that summer, it's unbelievably sweet.

But, when he swallows, there's a bitter aftertaste the fresh fruit had had. A taste the fruit probably doesn't actually have, and this is his memory and tongue tricking him with the contrast of nostalgia to now.

He has no memory of finishing the loquats, but his hand reaches into the bag and feels emptiness. He can't throw it away fast enough.

The day, too, passes by without mercy. Hour after hour, none of the exorcists report anything, but Shuuichi is sure he could draw an elevation map of the area blind.

"What a boring day," Seiji says, looking up to the deepening sky, the sun yearning to touch the line of the horizon. "Not that you haven't been an excellent conversation partner, but I wanted to do my job instead of walk the whole time."

You're the one who paired me with you! Shuuichi thinks, so hotly it takes all he can to not blurt it. Rising to Seiji's provocations is like pouring gasoline over a fire and wondering why the flames have leaped out to burn him. It is better to smother the flames – which is far more difficult than anyone could fathom because no one but him has this sort of relationship with Seiji. Still, he tries. "We did learn a bit about the youkai, though."

Seiji looks at him as if parsing his intent, as if he's anything like him. "I suppose. But it's not enough." He digs through his sleeves and withdraws paper men and, to Shuuichi's surprise and mild amusement, a modern ink brush, cap popping off. He scribbles message after message and summons a shiki, its oily and lanky arms receiving the papers. "Deliver these to the others."

"New shifts?" Shuuichi asks.

"Yes. We're going to be outside the shrine. Let's go." He walks so hurriedly Shuuichi picks up his pace to catch up.

"Shouldn't we go get flashlights or something?" he says. "How are we going to exorcise anything if we can't see?"

"The sun has not yet set."

"We have an hour at best until it does."

"And we'll take care of that come the hour."

It's tempting to disobey Seiji and head to the village to get flashlights, but it would mean leaving him on his lonesome, and the thought of that pangs oddly in Shuuichi. Because of the youkai, he thinks. They are in teams for protection. Seiji is powerful, but this youkai has murderous intent; it could kill as a person could, and against a person, Shuuichi isn't sure how Seiji would fare. He shouldn't be alone. Not now, not like this.

Shuuichi stays.

They're mindful of branches overhead and underfoot, of the land's gradient, as they maintain a silence woven by the coming night and their own selves. Strange to think he's spent this much time with Seiji with less spit acid than expected. Or anything else spoken, really. And it's stranger yet that the silence he so seeks when Seiji is around is staling.

He probes at it with a question benignly presented. "Why did you move us here?"

"I'm sure you already know, Natori-san."

"To investigate around the shrine ourselves, since something was found here earlier?"

"Yes. It seems I really can't rely on anyone outside my clan."

"I'm not in your clan," Shuuichi immediately says.

He glances at him. "You aren't. But you prove useful sometimes." A leaf spins to the ground, and Shuuichi watches Seiji watch it fall. "I've been thinking about what you said. The youkai seeking revenge. How that fits into the shrine. What we know already of vengeful youkai."

"What were you thinking about?" Shuuichi says when Seiji's voice fades as if awaiting a response.

A smile crosses his face. "That there are too many possibilities. I'm an exorcist, not a detective."

Shuuichi's own lip tugs up. "Did you have anything more concrete than that?"

Seiji fixes the bow bag's strap over his shoulder. "I'd been comparing it to the youkai personally after me. They're both shapeshifters who harbor anger. Mine is like this because of a broken promise made between a man and a youkai, and it is angry enough it comes after us month after month, year after year, leader after leader. Promises matter to them." He clears his throat so delicately it might have been a stray breeze. "I was thinking perhaps something similar happened here, but they were hesitant to call us in. But being here, I can feel their skepticism in what we do. I'm not sure anyone here can see the youkai to then betray it. If anyone had our sight, we'd have heard whispers of it in a place as small as this." He raises his shoulder in what passes for a shrug. "That's as far as I got."

The thin autumn air carries Seiji's voice. Shuuichi takes a moment to speak as to let it sink in, free of thorns. "People's relationships with youkai are often one-sided because not everyone can see them. Maybe the youkai wasn't promised anything explicitly, but it expected something. It didn't get it anymore, and it lashed out."

"Such kinds of youkai tend to be gods. I don't know if I've heard of a god being corrupted like this."

"Me either."

"It must understand human speech, for it to take advantage of us," Seiji says, haze filming over his eye as he thinks of more than he speaks. "I'll question it after we catch it."

"And if it doesn't?"

"Then," Seiji says, eye clear, voice light, "I'll have to settle for never knowing."

Shuuichi cannot tell how much of that flippancy is genuine and how much is forced.

"The goal is to exorcise. Everything else is secondary."

Ah. But that, that he's too familiar with.

The sun is sinking low, half-eaten by the horizon, throwing up shadows long and unnatural. Trees, naked from the season, easily become monsters. The forest's nightlife is roused, and Shuuichi knows these should all be normal animals, as the youkai have been chased out, but part of him wonders if one of those noises is their prey.

"Matoba-san," he says, "we need flashlights."

"Hmm? Oh. Yes, I suppose we do." He cranes his head over his shoulder to the path they've left behind. "We're a bit of a ways from anywhere, though." He turns back to Shuuichi. "Have one of your shiki get one."

The suggestion is so unexpected Shuuichi falters. "Mine?!"

"It was your idea. The other attacks weren't at night, so I'm not that sure it'll appear now."

"How are they supposed to buy anything? They're youkai."

"We can borrow one of the villagers' flashlights and return it later. Or have them take a torch. A lantern. Anything is fine."

"That isn't the problem, it's-" He cuts himself off with a sigh. "Hiiragi."

Her cloud rolls in like fog. Despite her mask, Shuuichi doesn't miss her subtle consideration of Seiji. "Yes, Master?"

"Go to the village and see if you can find a flashlight or something that'll let us see."

"Don't humans have these already on their small tools for calling?"

"A phone?" He hadn't thought about that, and he's the one who uses it. "Their flashlights don't tend to have long ranges, but I didn't take mine with me anyway." He looks at Seiji, dressed like a ghost from a bygone era, black hair and black robes and black shadows on his pale skin like dead things. "I doubt you own one."

"As a matter of fact, I do. It's for contact with our clients in politics. You'll understand that I don't presently have it with me, but thank you for your vote of confidence."

"Does he need one as well?" she asks, pointing to Seiji, the disdain in her voice and posture evident.

He offers her a predator's smile. "If you so kindly could."

"False flattery is for fools," she says, but swirls away.

Seiji gives Shuuichi an amused look. "I see I'm popular in the Natori household."

"If your shiki could talk, I think they'd treat me the same way," he says, for the sake of having something to say. He runs away from Seiji's response by continuing walking, though with more caution, as the light fades with the day.

Their silence returns with a vengeance, thickened by the forest's sounds at night.

Shuuichi strains to pick each of them out, to judge them as natural or not. Nothing is out of the ordinary. A rustle to their left gets him snapping his head in that direction, holding Seiji back with his arm, but it's a passing deer.

Seiji smirks and opens his mouth to say something that is overtaken by a two-toned voice trapped by its own hollow echo.

"The god... demands a face..."

Shuuichi's eyes widen and meet Seiji's, who nods, reaching for his bow bag as inconspicuously as he can. While he arms himself, Shuuichi reaches inside his jacket, the end of a paper chain smooth between his thumb and forefinger.

"Human ingrates... unbelievers... you will pay..."

The voice comes from everywhere at once. Shuuichi darts his eyes about, hunting for the smallest sign of unnatural movement somewhere in the shadows, and is startled by Seiji rounding him, pressing his back to his.

"Did that really scare you?" Seiji murmurs. In these stances, Shuuichi is blind to him, but he is not deaf to the smile dripping off his question.

"Shut up," Shuuichi whispers back just as the weight of a boulder comes crashing down from above and in between them.

The force flings them in opposite directions. Shuuichi, hat fallen off, glasses askew, is thrown to a tree, a crack splitting in his ears he desperately hopes did not come from him, but if the burst of pain on the back of his head is any indication, it might have been. A breath rasps out of him only to be cut short by hands squeezing his neck.

"Your face!" the youkai screeches, the words rattling into Shuuichi's bones rather than his ears because the youkai has no mouth with which to screech: it has no face. But it is not mannequin smoothness. What Shuuichi nauseatingly stares into is emptiness darker than black expanding eternally. There is nothing there, a nothing so incomprehensible that bile rises acerbically in Shuuichi's throat as he drowns in its recesses, the existence of his limbs and desire to fight back a vague concept. The youkai has no face but in that nothingness sharp and rusted teeth part, hot breath steams at his jaw-

The thrum of something thin flying by – an arrow, skimming the youkai's back, landing harmlessly somewhere in the forest floor. Angered, the youkai lets Shuuichi go, maw closing, perfect nothingness returned to its lack of face. It drops Shuuichi to slink away in pursuit of the attacker.

Shuuichi gets a chance to catch his breath, however hoarsely. His vision is unsteady and his legs are wobbly but he manages to whip out a paper chain, the warding written on it finding the youkai faster than his eyesight growing poorer from every minute he stands, from the sun's disappearance, from his crooked and broken glasses splitting the world. The chain tenses. A howl fills the air.

I have to draw a banishing circle, he thinks hazily, pressure in his head. But he'd given his staff away earlier. And Seiji, his arrows stabbed through with paper banishment wards, is the one with the pot.

Shuuichi winds the chain around his arm, hurriedly following it. "I caught it!" he calls out, throat scratchy.

"Yes," comes the reply in the direction he's heading, "I gathered that when it shot back while it was lunging toward me!"

Shuuichi distinguishes a darker shape for the youkai and something slender a few meters behind it for Seiji, bow wavering.

The youkai shrieks, high overtone ringing over a feral bellow; its fury is hellish, and the chain lashes like a serpent. Shuuichi tightens his hold on it, though the youkai's strength is mighty; he puts all his weight onto his feet, digging onto the earth, to keep himself and the youkai in place with minimal success.

"Would you shoot already?!" he yells.

"A face!" the youkai roars. "To bring back the god! To make the humans pay!"

"I am ensuring my aim! If I'm off, it's a waste of an arrow, or it'll hit you! And, in case you have yet to notice, it's hard to see!"

The youkai drags Shuuichi forward centimeter by centimeter, and with each step Seiji's ambiguous shape melts away in the night. The night envelops them, blinds them, Seiji's already impaired vision delaying his shot, bow and arrow changing direction as the youkai violently struggles in the paper chain. Seiji walks backward, aim inconstant, finding the surest place to down the youkai as it thrashes, nearing him, shortening the time and distance Seiji has to release the arrow – which he does now, gracefully, grin glinting in the moonlight and then winking out as the flaky earth beneath his feet in a rise above the forest crumbles, taking him down with it.

A name Shuuichi has not allowed himself to speak outside small, dark rooms is ripped from him like a crusted bandage covering an old wound.

"Seiji!"

He does not cognizantly let go of the chain, but it is suddenly no longer in his hand, now outstretched as he rushes to the broken overhang, youkai forgotten, just another shadow in the forest.

But the youkai has not forgotten him, nor did it stop watching the arrow, its path altered from Seiji's fall. With Shuuichi's grip on the chain gone, the youkai is freed from it; it slithers to the side, where it swipes the arrow from the air to fling it back.

Iron sharpness slices Shuuichi's senses, the hastily returned arrow piercing his left thigh. It gets a cry out of him; he topples over, leg unable to do anything except scream from every nerve that it has been maimed. Seiji's fate is lost to the black underbrush and Shuuichi's pain, overwhelming even his own sense of self.

He's easy prey for the youkai. It flies to him, hands gripping his neck, and he chokes on his pain because there is no air to let it out with. But it's bright on his leg, blooming like the bruise that is surely purpling on his neck. With his good leg he tries to kick the youkai, but the night is creeping in on him and his strength is failing him. He cannot manage to summon a shiki, and so his fingers probe blindly for the inside of his jacket for a paper man to hurl the youkai off him. He cannot breathe, his gasps squeezing through the single vocal cord left to him, the night waiting for him, but this cannot and will not be how he dies; there is far too much to do, to see, to amend. His hand twitches through his jacket in its search for the creaminess of-

There.

With all his weakened strength he slaps a paper charm on the youkai's arm, blue light crackling off the ward. The youkai screeches and recoils, clutching at its severed arm wisping shadows, as Shuuichi gulps in a lungful of crisp air. He fumbles for another paper chain, throwing it out at the youkai and squeezing like it's his own arms strangling it.

"Hiiragi," he wheezes.

She comes in a puff of smoke. "My apologies, but I've yet to find- Master!"

"Tend Seiji. He fell."

"Your thigh-"

"Seiji," he says – commands, with a seriousness beating in his temples to the drum of his heart.

She dives for the underbrush.

He tries to stand, and the instant he puts weight on his left leg the arrow reminds him it's still very much ripped through his skin. He sits, braving the pain pulsing from the wound with gritted teeth. "Urihime, Sasago."

They come in a flurry as agitated as Hiiragi, but the firmness Shuuichi puts into his eyes and voice quiets them. "Urihime, get the nearest exorcists here. Sasago, get Nanase-san here."

They obey despite the fear stiff in their bodies.

Shuuichi's blinking is lasting longer and longer, the black totality his closed eyes seduce him with a respite he forces himself out of. I can't seal it, he thinks. He'd need one hand free to hold the pot, the other to form the proper gesture – but in doing so, the paper chain would unwind and the captured youkai would be free. His shiki cannot help in holding the chain or the pot; they'd risk the tools harming them. Sticky warmth has pooled on his thigh, saturating his clothes enough to drip into the soil.

That's a lot of blood, he vaguely notes, blinking deeply, opening his eyes with jaw-locking effort. When did that happen?

He has plenty of paper to harm youkai on him. None to heal a human. He watches the stain on his thigh grow with detached fascination, wondering if maybe its arrival is what's leaving this cold in its wake.

His fingers uncurl, the chain slipping the slightest from his hold.

Harsh wind erupts from below. He looks up and sees Hiiragi in suspension, one leg propelling her up, carrying Seiji in her arms.

Ah, he thinks. He's okay. That's good. That's really good...

Hiiragi gracefully lands just shy of the bound youkai, still cradling Seiji, who stabs the youkai with an arrow, charmed paper fluttering at its end, his hand immediately forming the holy shape it must for the incantation flowing from him like a whitewater rapid to seal it. The youkai is screaming, so like a human Shuuichi's skin crawls, as its body twists in grotesque directions, pulled to the other thing Seiji's holding. The pot. The pot eats it in one fell motion, its paper seal snapping closed with a flash of white that makes Shuuichi shield his eyes.

The night reclaims the forest, and Shuuichi squints; everything is darker from the blinding power of the light. Quick footsteps come to him. Hiiragi, who sets a protesting Seiji down by him. His expression is open, for once, readable despite the dark. His right shoulder juts out far too sharply, perhaps that being the cause for the strained pull in his face as he quickly shifts himself by Shuuichi's thigh. He removes his obi, jaw tight when it comes to tugging it off his right arm, He bunches it around the arrow, covering the wound, and with more strain yet on his face when it comes to using his right arm, presses his hands down.

Shuuichi screams – he's tired, too tired, but Seiji's weight draws out brilliant pain, the arrow's serrated edges biting through muscle, squishing out what his skin keeps contained. The greatness of it soon fades into the background, becomes something else that's he's only hazily aware of. His breathing's become the loudest thing he hears, fast little pants that don't seem to take in any air at all.

Cold, he thinks, though Hiiragi has draped her haori over him.

"-with me, Shuuichi," comes Seiji's voice, faintly. "Help is coming. Can you hear me?"

Barely.

"Shuuichi, I need you to say something if you can hear me. Or blink. Blink twice if you can hear me."

He hadn't responded, had he? He couldn't, not when his tongue is thick in his throat. He squeezes his eyes, laboriously: once, twice.

Some of the strain on Seiji's face relaxes.

The blood squelches out of him. He's cold. That's stealing his warmth, isn't it? That's what happens when you lose blood.

Distant yells and many pattering feet hurry up the hill. Yellow lights, too, bobbing and glowing like giant fireflies; shiki flit in and look at the two of them, battered and broken and bloody, with wide eyes.

"You're going to be fine," Seiji says. It sounds heavy as a promise.

But the Matoba can't keep them.

"Shuuichi, you are going to be fine. Stay with me."

Through this dream, something cuts sharper than the arrow had.

Seiji said my name. He said-

"M'name," Shuuichi slurs before the darkness claims him. 

Conscious – he's conscious, he thinks. Thinking. That's what this is, right? Awareness of... something. Dappled peachiness in his vision. Closed eyes, a light above? Tall, thin, dark shapes, one of which is mumbling: surgery, recovery, anesthesia, sleep. A shape leaving, two remaining, exchanging words so quiet he does not know them. Another shadow gone. One left. Drawing closer, growing in size. Something soft on his forehead. A single utterance: Shuuichi.

That's me, he thinks, slipping back into the dark.

He cannot say how long the darkness lasts, or that he was in it at all, until his senses trickle back to him, slowness in a second. First is sight: the familiar cool behind closed eyelids. Then comes the sensation of sheets covering him and a faint pulse on his left thigh as if he wears his heart there. He is lying down, someplace brightly astringent. A hospital? He squints his eyes open. His body, blanketed; minimal decorations on a white wall ahead, a table below it with his dirty hat and broken glasses disturbing the beauty of a flower vase – yes, a hospital. He tips his head a degree to the side, neck muscles protesting the movement. The outlines of people at his bedside.

"Look who's up."

The fuzziness takes shape into Seiji, hair down, right arm stiff on a sling at his side, sleeplessness lining his face despite his smirk. Next to him stands a frowning Nanase, her arms crossed.

Shuuichi's head is stuffed with cotton, scratchiness is at his eyes, dryness is in his mouth. He wants to pick his head up, but the effort is so great and his strength is so sapped he cannot do it. "How long was I out?"

"You very briefly woke up an hour after surgery," Nanase answers, "then slept for"  – she eyes her watch – "ten hours."

"You were out like a light." Seiji's smirk widens. "A light who drools."

Part of Shuuichi knows that is meant to fluster him, but these drugs (drugs must be what's making him this bleary and nauseous; his own body cannot still be that battered) must be very potent. He blinks sluggishly, thinking he raised a shoulder in a shrug, and from how weak he feels it's probable it had remained a thought.

"Why are you here?" he asks instead. A thought drifts in the back of his mind. I was unconscious and you waited for me to wake up. He's certain when he's regained his better senses he'll use this against Seiji.

"To ensure you hadn't died."

"Since when do you care about me," he says, tired, not inflicting it as a question. It must be the drugs that make him imagine a flash of hurt in Seiji's eye.

"It would have been problematic to have a death in the field," Nanase supplies, pragmatic as she is. "If you'd died, we needed to get started on the paperwork as soon as possible."

Paperwork? he thinks. The Natori name cursed by paper even in death. Kind of funny, actually.

From Nanase's raised eyebrow, the laugh made it out of him.

"Happy to relieve you of that," Shuuichi says.

"Sure," she says, in a tone that indicates she doesn't care. She looks between him and Seiji. "I'll step out for the time being."

"I know you know," Shuuichi blurts, but she's gone.

"My," Seiji says, grabbing a chair and putting it to Shuuichi's bedside as he sits, "those drugs they gave you sure are something." He sits with great care and leans forward at an angle, good elbow propped on the bed. He's looking at something on the distant wall. "How are you feeling?"

He mulls over the best word. "Fuzzy. These really are drugs."

Seiji chuckles. He turns his eyes to his. "What of your leg?"

The slow pulse on his leg is heavier than the one in his chest. "It doesn't hurt. Just feels... weird." He rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms, stars bursting behind his lids disappearing as the whiteness of the room contrasted with Seiji's black fills his vision. "Why are you here?"

"I told you already."

"Here-here. Nanase left." He smooths down the bed sheet over his good leg. "You stayed."

Seiji pauses. "Would you prefer I leave?"

And so does Shuuichi. "I don't know."

Seiji looks elsewhere. His eyepatch faces Shuuichi, loose hair falling over it, hiding even the false ink eye. False eye over his real eye, real eye sought by a youkai. Seeking. Revenge. Youkai. He blinks again, quicker, last night's events returning to him. "The youkai. Did you-?"

"It's dead."

"Dead? Didn't you seal it?" There had been light, blinding; a pot that absorbed its sins. Hadn't there?

"Yes." He moves to pick up something beneath the bed: the pot, paper-sealed, holed on opposite sides as if stabbed through with an arrow. A lightning-shaped fracture crosses its circumference. "And then I killed it."

Shuuichi sits up in a hurry and immediately is made aware he can't; he falls on his back and closes his eyes, dizzy. A hand that isn't his hovers over his forehead but it is not there when he opens them again. "Why?"

"It had killed a person and grievously harmed others. Sealing wasn't enough."

"And purification-?"

"-would have been a sentence too good for it." His eye goes over the pot's fracture and then flicks to Shuuichi's. "Could something this tainted ever have returned to how it once was?"

"Yes," he says, without a single doubt.

The tenacity in his tone takes Seiji aback, his eye widening. But it narrows again, turning to the pot, which he slowly tilts this way and that. "You're much too soft," he says, and not to the pot.

"And you're too heartless." It comes out of him unbidden, the drugs they'd given him numbing more than pain.

Seiji puts the pot down carefully, eye fleetingly to Shuuichi's covered thigh. The corner of his mouth is emptily tugged up. "So I've been told."

Maybe that had been too much. "Okay, you're not- you're not too heartless. Not all the time. You can be nice." He purses his mouth. That had just worsened things. His hand on top of the covers idly wanders to the dressing over his wound. He can be nice.

Seiji's eye follows the movement. "Anyone would have tried to help you." He picks nonexistent lint off the bed sheet. "Besides, imagine the convoluted lie I'd have had to come up with to explain why the actor Natori Shuuichi, on supposed research for an exorcist movie role, almost died on me."

"I really almost died?"

Seiji's hand flat on the bed, close to him, slightly grips the sheet, wrinkling it all the way to where Shuuichi can see. "There was a lot of blood."

Shuuichi turns his head up to the ceiling, not liking the roiling in his chest. He traces the shape of the bandage, thick and different from his skin even over the sheet. "Do you think," he wonders out loud, "this is why my lizard never went to my left leg?"

"In anticipation of an exorcist's arrow coming to it years later?" There isn't a trace of his usual condescension in the question; he genuinely considers it. "I suppose it's possible. Some youkai tell fortunes. Perhaps this one can tell its own."

"I hope it is. I don't want anything worse to happen to my leg." His cheek presses into the pillow as his eyes meet Seiji's. "That arrow really hurt. No wonder the youkai scream when you hit them."

Of all things, Seiji laughs.

Shuuichi's face warms, the pillow soaking it, and it gets uncomfortable. "I wasn't trying to be funny."

"I know." He shifts on his chair, minutely, but he winces.

"Hey." Shuuichi's hand reaches for his, like it did... how many hours ago? Time is just a word.

"I'm fine," Seiji says. "I bruised my tailbone. Finding the best way to sit is a bit of a challenge."

"What about your shoulder?" He motions to the sling with his eyes. "I remember seeing it looked... wrong."

"I dislocated it."

Shuuichi's mouth drops. "You sealed a youkai and tended me like that?"

"Oh, it hurt like nothing else, but yes. That was more important than self-wallowing."

He's not moved his hand; Shuuichi's still rests on it.

Shuuichi's fingers press lightly onto him. "I wouldn't have called that self-wallowing."

"My injuries weren't life-threatening. Yours were. It's very simple, Sh- Natori-san."

His slip-up had barely been there, but Shuuichi had heard it, and its repetition in a forest dark with night and blood rushes back to him. The roiling in his chest surges to his throat.

"Seiji," he says, quietly. The hospital room's white walls, brighter from the sunshine filtered through the curtains, reflect the sound.

But Seiji's hand twitches beneath Shuuichi's. He'd heard, too. And he slowly meets his gaze, caution in his single eye.

"Thank you," Shuuichi says.

The caution melts as if it had never been there, and the smile on his face seems like it has always graced him. It hasn't, of course – Seiji has never looked at him so fondly that it makes Shuuichi's breath stop – but it should. It's nice.

Seiji removes his hand to cradle Shuuichi's cheek, thumb to his bottom lip. The warmth returns, exuberant.

"Is my lizard on my lip again?" he asks.

"No," Seiji answers, leaning in across the bed to kiss him.

Their intimacy has long been desperate and acrimonious. Lust in place of love. That Seiji can kiss him like this – delicately, almost hesitantly – stuns Shuuichi so much that he doesn't kiss back.

Noting it, Seiji stops. "I apologize-"

Shuuichi quiets him with his hand tucking the hair in front of his eye behind his ear. He keeps his hand to his cheek. Finds the simplest words he can to convey his feelings. "You shouldn't," he says, easing Seiji back down.

They've kissed before, but it's never been like this. Shuuichi would never have believed they could even be like this, with his hand gentle on Seiji's nape, suggesting contact rather than demanding it, and the contact itself being tender – afraid, even, of this side of them. Maybe he's exposing too much of his vulnerability, the soft-heartedness Seiji had accused him of.

But, when Seiji kisses back just the same, maybe it doesn't matter.

Being with Seiji satisfied a more physical need. It had never filled the emptiness in his rib cage; it worsened the disquiet of his heart. This, though, makes his insides defy gravity, flipping upside down. As is probably his relationship with Seiji.

Whatever this is, it feels like this is what is right.

Seiji pulls back but stays close enough that the tips of his hair brush Shuuichi's forehead. "You're as noble as you are stupid," he says, a smile playing on his voice.

The lightness in Shuuichi bobs, as if dragged by a weight. "Mmm, there's the Matoba-san I know."

Seiji's quiet laugh ghosts over him. "I think," he says, stretching out along the edge of the bed, eye curious on a distant point, "you could call me 'Seiji' again."

He does already: in his head, in secret nights with him. But he knows what Seiji means by this suggestion.

"'Shuuichi' is fine for me, too," he says.

The air filtration hums in the ensuing silence. And it's not terribly unpleasant. Though it is a little crowded.

"This bed isn't really made for two people," Shuuichi says.

Seiji turns his head up at him. "Did I ask?"

Some things about them remain familiar.

"You should be nicer to me," he says, the sternness he'd meant to use falling out from a smile. "It was your arrow that hurt me."

"Because you, in your overbearing kindness, thought letting go of your chain to chase after me having fallen off a cliff was a good idea." Seiji rests his cheek on Shuuichi's arm. "This is what I meant by you being noble and stupid."

"It wasn't a cliff; don't be so dramatic."

"I hurt my tailbone and shoulder. I fell a significant height."

"But not off a cliff."

His IV drips to the silent movement of Seiji's eye-roll.

Shuuichi flicks him on the forehead. "We're gonna be out of commission for some time, aren't we?"

"You still have your acting," Seiji says. He tilts his head up to him, smirks, and one-handedly squishes his face. "Good thing the arrow didn't hurt your most important asset."

"Stop," Shuuichi says, or at least he tries to, but Seiji's hand squishing his cheeks makes the sound come out funny.

Seiji laughs, withdrawing his hand.

Shuuichi glances at his other hand, kept stiff by the sling. "It's worse for you," he says. "You're only an exorcist. Will you be fine when you can't use your bow?"

"You say that like it's my only exorcism talent. I can throw paper and recite spells in this condition."

"Will Nanase-san want you to?"

Seiji's smug expression briefly falters. "I'm the clan leader, not her. I will do as I see fit."

Shuuichi can't help a small laugh, and it earns him a halfhearted smack on the arm. His laugh fades, the hospital room's pensive silence seeping in. But the lack of anything to say isn't for a need to stay quiet because it is what is safe. This, with Seiji an odd comfort beside him, is alright. He casts his eyes down to Seiji and at this lack of distance sees how bad the puffiness under his eye is. "Did you not sleep well?" he asks, and leans down. "Your eye looks a little red-"

"I'm perfectly fine," Seiji says, pushing Shuuichi's face away, himself turning the opposite direction.

"That's not how someone 'perfectly fine' would react." He pauses. Puts together this discovery along with Seiji's quiet kindness. A disbelieving grin spreads on his face. "Were you worried about me? Was the proud Matoba Seiji worried about me dying?"

Seiji puts more effort into pushing his face away. "You ask stupid things."

Shuuichi laughs – not out of malice, but from surprise. Something like happiness. "You were worried about me!"

"You are belittling the talents of the medical staff."

"Yeah, yeah." He moves Seiji's hand away and sees that he's scowling a little. It makes his grin wider, and, in turn, Seiji's scowl deepens.

"You were not nearly this annoying when I looked over you when that youkai cursed you," Seiji says. He doesn't need to specify which youkai on which occasion: the memory is vivid, something wistful Shuuichi had told himself to forget and never did. The scowl flattens out, a smile twitching. "You have a talent for getting youkai after you, don't you."

"You're not one to talk."

The smile materializes, tame and toothless.

"But," Shuuichi says, carefully looking aside as he fluffs his pillow, "I guess you also have a talent for helping me out."

"It's a burden I bear."

"And for staying to make sure I wake up."

"It would have been... disagreeable if you didn't."

"'Disagreeable'?" Shuuichi grins. "Who talks like that? Just admit you were worried ab-"

"I wonder," Seiji says over him, "if I'd been the one with the more serious injury, and I pestered you like this, would you give me the answer you want me to give you?"

Shuuichi's grin slowly falls as he pictures himself, stubborn as stone, avoiding speaking the blunt truth hitting him like a hammer – if something serious had happened to Seiji, one of his life's certainties who he never really could part with, he wouldn't know what to do. Seiji has just been there the past seven years. Not always in a good way, not always close by, but Shuuichi has defined the start of his life with their first encounter. It had led him, often bruised or bleeding, to where he is now.

"I like you better when you're not talking because you know I'm right," Seiji says, simpering. "Who but me do you have to look after you?" And, seeing Shuuichi open his mouth, he adds, "If you say Natsume-kun, a child of sixteen, I am going to laugh at you."

Shuuichi closes his mouth.

Seiji laughs anyway.

"But what about you?" Shuuichi, cheeks warm, tries to get a hold of the conversation. "Besides me, you have Nanase-san, and she's old enough to be your grandmother."

His lip sullenly curves down. He doesn't say anything, but it doesn't feel like Shuuichi has won. They're both hopeless. Together, though, they balance each other, one's flaws the other's strengths. At this place where they both stand in each other's lives, it's not a perfect fit – they each have things they must polish to be who they want to be – but they're alright. And that's alright.

"Should you be here this long?" Shuuichi asks. "I'm sure a nurse will come in to check on me soon since I'm up, and we'll both be in trouble if we're seen like this."

"Nanase is likely stalling them while I'm here. But is sharing a hospital bed against the rules?" he says, settling further into it.

"Probably," Shuuichi says, halfheartedly nudging Seiji off. "We're both injured and I'm just recovering. Get off before the nurse sees."

"Are you thinking of flirting with the nurse to be discharged earlier or something?"

"I wasn't thinking that, but that's a good idea. Thanks, Seiji."

He's about to say something – nothing nice, Shuuichi is sure – but he stops. And then speaks anyway. "I hope the nurse is a woman and ugly," he says, carefully sliding off the bed.

Shuuichi's private satisfaction at snipping off the barbs in Seiji's words goes away. "Hey, I can still flirt with women!"

Seiji puts a contemplative finger to his cheek, head tipped aside. "So you think."

His spluttered reply gets a smirk from Seiji, and he realizes this is what Seiji wanted. He is still him, after all.

"Jerk," Shuuichi says as Seiji opens the door.

Seiji waves blithely at him before disappearing as the nurse walks in.

He only half-listens to the nurse, a smile small on his face, because whatever is next between him and Seiji will be something better. The path he's long tread will be closer to his. It won't cross it. Not yet. But it will come closer.

Upon his discharge a day later, rolled out of the hospital in a wheelchair he'd insisted he didn't need but that the nurse smilingly ignored, Seiji walks beside him to escort him to his car. The reality of it – he's leaving a hospital after a few days with Seiji personally seeing him out – makes Shuuichi keep darting his eyes to him as if any moment now the sun will break through the clouds to strike him, evaporating him like fog.

The sun does break, but all it does is highlight the curve under his eye.

Seiji catches him looking. "Is there something on my face?"

"Your eyepatch," Shuuichi says after a pause, not being able to keep away a smirk.

Neither can Seiji, apparently. "You think you're clever, don't you. Here." He extends his hand, and Shuuichi briefly doesn't know what it means. But the wheelchair, the car. He takes it, coming to his full height just a breadth above Seiji and finds that he can meet his gaze unflinchingly.

"Any day now," says a voice behind them.

Nanase-san, sitting inside the car, drums impatient fingers to her leg.

"Sorry," Shuuichi says, ducking inside, Seiji following. Unlike their ride here – a lifetime ago, it feels like – he sits next to him. He's not pressed to his side or anything so drastic so soon, but he's closed the distance they'd had.

An old knot in Shuuichi's chest undoes itself with a cathartic release that makes him lean against the seat with a sigh.

"Natori," says Nanase, voice like a well-oiled door hinge, "how did it feel like to almost die at a youkai's hand?"

He gives her a bright smile. "As fun as you'd expect."

She harrumphs, but the corner of her mouth is up.

There is no one sitting next to her. And, peeking from the tinted window, there is no procession of black cars behind them. "Where's everyone else?" Shuuichi asks.

"We drove them back home after it was clear you made it," Seiji replies. "There was no use in everyone taking up hospital and village space when Nanase and myself would do."

"Sorry for taking up your time," Shuuichi says, somewhat guilty. The Matoba clan ran like its own bureaucracy, and its top two people being away even for a few days would set them back.

Seiji waves the apology aside like a pesky insect, but Nanase says, "Apology accepted. You acted incredibly stupidly. So did you; don't get cocky," she says, addressing Seiji.

"What's done is done," he says. "The youkai has been exorcised. Not everything went exactly as planned, but we completed the job."

"Were you able to question the youkai?" Shuuichi asks, turning his head to him, cheek squeaking on the leather seat.

"No. Its sanity was far gone, but it was easy to deduce its motive from what it kept screaming."

The screams. A terribly human voice with terribly human grievances. But a human it was not, for its nature and for the atrocities it had committed.

"The village's declining faith in the shrine's god led to its death," Seiji says, "and this... retainer, I suppose, for its loyalty to the dead god, wanted to exact revenge on its master's murderers. Although I'm not certain why it targeted faces. It did mention the komainu, so my conjecture is it was misguidedly trying to give the statues faces so that, complete again, their protection might bring back the god."

"Dead gods and shrines aren't unusual these days. Why did the youkai get like that?"

Seiji blinks, slow as a cat, and flits his eye away. "Even I don't have all the answers."

It isn't the most satisfying conclusion, but not all mysteries end like the dramas Shuuichi stars in, where fate is decided. Reality isn't as kind.

The road winds down the mountain, straightening at its base, stretching on past fields and small towns that later become the city proper. The car smoothly pulls up to Shuuichi's apartment complex. He and Seiji exchange a look.

"Well," Seiji primly says. "This has certainly been an experience."

"It has been," Shuuichi slowly agrees.

"Do neither of you realize you can both step out of the car," Nanase says, "and do whatever you need to do without me in the background?"

"I'll see you out, Shuuichi," Seiji says, opening the door, and they both step out with as much dignity as they can muster.

"So," Shuuichi begins, and doesn't know where he's headed after, instead holding out the word before it piteously tampers.

"So?" Seiji prompts, fitting his hands onto his robe's sleeves.

"You... know where I live now," he says, lamely, gesturing to the complex. Meaningless though it had been, he thinks of something true to say. "And you can visit me sometime. Um, if you'd like."

Seiji's lip quirks up. "And you know my main residence quite well. Maybe I don't have to sneak you around anymore."

"Won't that bring you trouble?"

"I'd love for anyone to complain about who I associate with to my face," Seiji says, a glint in his eye like he genuinely wants a clan member fool enough to question his decisions.

Shuuichi laughs. "You're kind of terrifying, Seiji."

"I try."

"But clearly not all the time," he says, smile spreading, "since you stayed behind while I was hospitalized."

"Are you going to hold this over me forever?"

"Probably."

Seiji exhales, hair over the eyepatch fluttering.

Without thinking about it, Shuuichi tucks it behind his ear.

Without expecting it, Seiji curls his hand around his, keeping it pressed to his face. The eyepatch is silk-smooth, his hand is callused by years of archery.

"It's nice," Seiji says, "to hear my first name again."

He's Matoba-sama to an entire clan and Matoba-san to those outside it. Just as his predecessors. A name rich with power and deprived of any individuality.

And to the exorcists Shuuichi is Natori-san, last of his kind, a name whispered with surprise and old respect. Just as his predecessors. To the rest of the world he gives his full name, glittering in movie posters, last and first names always smashed together to bring to mind that charming actor that they cease to have any meaning on their own.

He thumbs the spot below where Seiji's covered right eye is. "I was thinking the same thing."

Seiji smiles and lets him go.

His hand feels empty, Seiji's tree bark roughness strangely comforting. He pauses. Tree bark. Wood. His staff. "What happened to my staff?"

"It's at my manor." He wields his smile like a blunt knife. "Now you have a reason to visit."

"With that expression, you make it seem like a threat."

Seiji frowns as he reaches for the curve of his mouth.

Shuuichi laughs, moving it away. "It's fine. You're you, you know? I'll stop by soon."

"I look forward to it," Seiji says, the formality in it belied by the crinkle in his eye.

The sudden need to kiss Seiji overtakes him, but Nanase is in the car purring patiently beside them, and they're outside his building. He'd already leaned in, though, carelessly, and it makes the swift swoop away from Seiji and toward the complex awkward.

"Unbelievable," Seiji mumbles as he yanks Shuuichi by the wrist, whirling him back for a brief, bumpy kiss.

"I didn't want to make things weird!" he explains, heat rising to his face. "We're in public and Nanase-san is right there."

"Nanase is my right-hand woman, not my overprotective guardian."

"Yeah, but she makes me anxious."

"She has that effect on everyone."

"That's true," Shuuichi cedes, "but we're also outside. I can't be caught with anyone. My agency would kill me."

"As pretty a ghost that you'd make, that would be inconvenient." He glances at the car. "And we shouldn't rush into this, either, for the sake of your other career. Exorcists are dreadfully conservative."

"Okay. I'm glad you understand," he says, smiling in relief. Then in smugness. "What was that kiss, though?"

Seiji's eyebrow comes down. "Excuse me for not having the opportunity to shove my tongue down every popular actress's throat."

"It's fine." He gives him his most dazzling smile. "I'll make up for it."

"Leave," Seiji says, but there's no denying the quiver in his lip.

Shuuichi heads for the doors, tossing one last grin over his shoulder. Up the elevator and to his door, he walks to the window, where he sees the black car just driving away. 

A man is at Shuuichi's door.

But he is made of warmer things than paper, of tougher things than fibrous pulp.

"How did you find out where my room was?" he asks Seiji as he approaches him, a smile finding its way to his face.

"I told the receptionist I was your agent and needed urgent access to you."

"And she believed you when you look like that?"

Seiji's smile is wry. "That's probably why she did. There are eccentric people in your business." He tucks his hands into his kimono's sleeves. "Open the door before someone sees us."

"You can't do it yourself?" Shuuichi asks, though he slides open the door to his room anyway, letting Seiji go in first.

"It's your room."

"That you invited yourself into." The door shuts, and the room's enclosure, tatami-lined and paper-walled, doesn't seem like it'll be enough to contain them.

"Please, Shuuichi," Seiji says as he languidly wraps his arms around Shuuichi's neck. "You let me in."

"I can kick you out if it'd make you feel better," Shuuichi says, but he holds him close with his hands on the small of his back.

Seiji gives Shuuichi a flat look.

Shuuichi smirks, but it softens as he rubs light circles to the base of Seiji's spine. "Does it still hurt?" He flits his eyes to his arms careless around him. "Should you be doing shoulder movements like that?"

"It's been three months. I'm fine. They were small injuries, anyway." He wraps the hair at Shuuichi's nape around a finger. "How cute of you to ask. What about your thigh?"

"Other than the fact it was, you know, your arrow, I'm okay. I don't know if I'll be asked to wear any shorts any time soon."

"A shame. That scar adds character."

"Really?"

"It makes you seem tougher than the sentimental stick of a man I know."

"You're awful," he says, but he's smiling as he presses his forehead to Seiji's, kissing his own expression away. Seiji gives in readily.

There's no fear of having his blood drawn or skin bruised from an accidentally-on-purpose bite; there's no chance of fingernail trails red on his back. Well. Not today. And on other days, it wouldn't be like before with their old possession, mania, violence. Something truer binds them now.

Shuuichi places kisses in a wavering path from Seiji's mouth to his neck, where he murmurs, "Don't you have clan business?"

Seiji hums: affirmation, approval of what Shuuichi's teeth and tongue are doing. "What are they going to do, demote me?"

His quiet laugh sinks into the crook of Seiji's neck. "You're awful."

Seiji's fingers, woven through Shuuichi's hair, jerk his head up to him. His mouth is curled in that manner that precedes nothing good coming of it. "Maybe I could make an anonymous report that a certain actor moonlighting as an exorcist is getting quite close to the Matoba clan head."

He tugs Seiji's fingers free so he can come to his full height. "You'd sabotage yourself like that?" He frowns, thinking. "Yeah, you would if something funny happened to me."

"I was kidding."

"I don't think you were completely."

Seiji's smile is quick as the beat of a moth's wing. He places his hands flat on the front of Shuuichi's shirt. "Let me prove you wrong."

Swallowing a helpless yield has never hurt his throat this much. Shuuichi puts his hands on top of Seiji's. "I think you should go to your clan meeting. I'm sure your people will go looking for you if you don't show up soon, and it won't be good for either of us to be found out."

Seiji's sigh tickles. "You're so suddenly responsible. But you're right." He extricates himself from Shuuichi. "Imagine the scandal we'd cause. The Matoba and Natori clans more closely associated than what is proper."

"I'll be here. For when you're done."

"Oh, you'll wait, will you?"

He reaches for Seiji's cascade of hair. Runs his fingers through it like water. "Yeah."

With that word the last edges in Seiji's countenance are chipped off. His face softens – not quite a smile, but the sincerity of it, still new to him, takes Shuuichi's breath away. It is taken from him once more when Seiji says Then please wait for me against his mouth, sealing it with a kiss like a holy oath.

And it's an oath Shuuichi will not break.