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And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you—it’s born with us the day that we are born.
***
Peko observes her soulmate for exactly thirty-one seconds before deciding that she doesn’t like him. He's a student in the year above her—a transfer—and there's an unearned arrogance in the slope of his shoulders that she inherently distrusts. Arrogant newcomers are always the most dangerous kind of people, no matter what organization they’re in. He makes eye contact with everyone who comes too close, and his gaze is unrelenting. Harsh. Judgemental, but with no fire behind it. His eyes are cold, like a snake’s eyes, and he's far too tall. Peko's by no means short, but he's easily a head taller than her and is more than willing to use that to make his way through the hallway easier than he would if somebody knocked a few centimeters off of him. So Peko doesn't like him. It’s an easy conclusion to come to, even if she’s normally not particularly good at deciding what she likes and doesn’t like.
Her classmates seem to hold different opinions.
"He's so handsome!" Sonia coos as they walk to the cafeteria. "And mysterious, too. He looks like he’s from a detective novel!"
"Yeah, yeah! Just check out that look on his face," Ibuki says. "So cool!"
"He looks constipated," Hiyoko says. Peko would laugh, but her laughter always sounds like choking. She needs to work on it, but it’s hard to find time to practice.
"Do we have a clear view of the mark?" Mahiru asks. "If the poor girl who's stuck with him is in our class, we should warn her."
"Back of his left hand. It's a circle with an arrow inside of it. It always points north," Peko chimes in. There's a stunned silence, so she adds, "I got new glasses last week. I think they might have given me a stronger prescription than I need.”
There’s a general consensus that her explanation makes sense, and the conversation moves on to what his name is (The surname is Inoue, but no one can agree on what his given one might be), where he’s from (Tokyo), why he moved (No one knows), and if he has a girlfriend (It seems unlikely). Peko glances behind her to get another solid look at Inoue, to memorize the man that the gods placed her with.
Inoue’s handsome, she supposes, but in a plain sort of way. He looks vaguely like someone colored in one of those old Greek statues at the museum and then let it loose. He doesn't seem kind, but Peko knows that people don't think she's kind at first, either. If she successfully integrates him into the Kuzuryuu clan, they could maybe have an alright life together. A tolerable one, at least, so long as he understood where her priorities lie. And she could ensure that he had the same priorities, so long as she was patient and persistent. It would be an acceptable partnership.
Peko knows what she should do. She should rub off the foundation she's tirelessly applied to her left hand since she's started going to school, make herself known to him, and let the courtship begin. It's what everyone does. It's what's expected, and the Kuzuryuu family has always had a plan for this situation. They'll keep him alive and useful and Peko can continue her work, just like they've done for generations of tools before her. If he’s a nuisance, they’ll kill him. It will be fine. He’s looking at her, must have noticed her staring, so it would be the perfect time to do it.
But Peko can hear Fuyuhiko arguing with Kazuichi about if the color of a car can actually make a car seem faster, can hear him put his whole soul into something as small as this, and she looks away.
***
Peko wasn’t raised with bedtime stories, but the closest thing she had to one is this: the first tool of the first master was bound to a woman with the mark of a lotus on her right shoulder. The tool loved her, but she disapproved of what he did. She wanted him to settle down with her, to retire from his position and stop serving the master, who he had known since he was a child. The bond between the tool and the master was one not of the gods, but of circumstances and trust and loyalty. Duty-bound to his master and fate-bound to the woman, the tool was faced with a choice.
For him, the decision was easy. The tool went to a temple and bribed a mage to remove his mark. The lotus woman died of heartbreak and the tool was cursed by the gods and the mage alike, but the Kuzuryuu family thrived. They thrived and honored him with a place in the first family portrait, where he stood behind the first master, grim and unsmiling. The curse had made his hair turn white before its time, made his eyes turn red, damned him and his whole bloodline to be marked as heretics.The gods were constantly throwing injuries and danger in his path, but he never relented. The worst of it could have been undone with repentance, but he refused to apologize for what he had done. Eventually the gods were so furious with him that they struck him down with a bolt of lightning. There was no body left behind.
Now, nobody knows his name. Even the first master had forgotten it over time. He served so well that his name vanished with the rest of him in that glorious bolt, a testament to his role as the ultimate tool.
It’s not a story that was meant to happen twice.
***
Peko and Fuyuhiko only walk home together on Wednesdays anymore. It’s not like in elementary school, where they would walk home together every day, or middle school, where they would walk home together every other. Peko hasn’t asked if he’s growing tired of her, but she thinks that Fuyuhiko would say it directly if he was. He seems to have some other motive for only being seen with her once a week, but she hasn’t figured out what it is yet. Hasn’t had the guts to ask him. He’s the only place where Peko has the luxury of being a coward, and this is one of the few times she allows herself to indulge.
Luckily, today’s Wednesday, so they walk home side by side. Natsumi’s club is staying late, so it’s just the two of them.
“I heard about the new guy,” Fuyuhiko says. “Inoue’s his name. You hear about him?”
“I heard about him.”
Fuyuhiko kicks a pebble down the street and it hits the side of a garbage can with a resounding clang. “You hear about his mark? It’s a circle with an arrow in it, pointing north. Same as yours, ain’t it?”
“...Yes.”
“At least that means I didn’t do all this recon for nothin’, then.”
Peko glances over at him. “You did recon?”
“Of course I did recon. You wanna hear what I know or what?”
“I do,” she says. The sidewalk cracks are suddenly very interesting.
“Well, his name’s Inoue Haruto. Second year in Class 2-C. Moved here from Tokyo, like the rumors say. His parents work for TAT, which we basically own. They both got transferred to the Kobe station for a nice pay raise. His grades are pretty good, but not as good as yours or anything. Still, he’s not a fuckin’ moron, which is a relief. He doesn’t have any siblings, but he’s got a couple of of cousins. No girlfriend, either. Oh, and he smokes Hi-Lites,” Fuyuhiko pulls a pack out his pocket, waves it in front of her face, and then tosses it in the trash. “I nicked ‘em from him. He’s got at least three years before he turns twenty, the bastard. He didn’t even hide them well.”
Peko doesn’t comment on the inherent discrepancy between being the son of a mob boss and stealing someone’s cigarettes because they’re smoking underage. She just treasures it, a funny little thing that only she and a few others have the luck of being privy to. It’s a piece of him that no one else can touch, something that Peko can keep eternal to herself. It’s a shame she can’t focus on it longer, but Fuyuhiko’s making a face at her like he wants her to comment on what she’s learned. That means coming up with something to say.
“Well, it’s good that his parents don’t work for ART T.V.,” Peko decides. “That would make things more difficult.”
“Yeah, guess so,” Fuyuhiko agrees. “You haven’t told him yet, have you?”
“I haven’t.”
“Well, I get it,” he says. “I want more information on him, too. Not just to make sure he’s clean, but...I don’t know. I wanna make sure he’s not a loser. Make sure he’s someone you’d be comfortable with and whatever.”
“It matters if I’m comfortable with him?”
Fuyuhiko trips over his own foot and barely stops himself from face-planting on the concrete. Peko retracts her arm from where she shot it out to catch him. “YEAH, THAT MATTERS, PEKO.”
“Oh.”
“Look, this guy is supposed to be your soulmate. Of course it matters if you’re comfortable with him! Like, you gotta get this through your head, Peko. Your feelings are actually important here. They’re important other places, but they’re especially important here,” Fuyuhiko stops to run his hands through his hair, and then he shoves them in his pockets with unprecedented force. “I’m gonna gather some more information on him and then we can move on from there. Don’t you worry about doing it, you’ve got enough on your plate. Just try to...I don’t know. Do whatever it is that people do to prepare for meeting their soulmates.”
“I’m not sure what they’re supposed to do,” Peko admits.
“You’re smart. You’ll figure it out.”
And that’s the thing about Fuyuhiko. He looks at her like he believes that, like he really thinks she’ll figure all of this out. He believes in her. This miracle of a person, so full of life that he’s brimming over with the force of it, has put his trust in her. He puts his trust in her every day. It doesn’t matter how good of a person Inoue is; nothing he does can ever come close to that. No one can ever come close to Fuyuhiko. Peko knows it in the intrinsic way she knows where her arms are and how to find her way home in the dark. Fuyuhiko is the most important person to her, now and always. No soulmate is ever going to compare to that.
But the soulmate’s been found. The gods have said that this is who her person is going to be, that this is who she’s going to marry and have kids with and spend her life with. This is it.
(This isn’t what she wants. When she walks into the Kuzuryuu estate, Peko knows for sure what she wants, and this mark on her hand isn’t it.)
***
The story she was told is not a love story. It’s about duty and honor and obligation, things that are always going to be more important than whatever Peko’s feeling. When she does it—and it’s not unheard of, not all legend, other tools have done it when they found their partners troublesome—she’ll say it’s about that. If there’s love there, it doesn’t matter because no one else will ever know about it.
Natsumi’s voice resounds in her head, a semi-taunting question from years and years ago when she had seen Peko mess up a kendo form: If a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?
Peko hadn’t answered then and she refuses to answer now, because she doesn’t know what it means when the answer is It can’t afford to.
***
The school day ends and Peko is very careful to walk at a normal pace as she exits the building. There’s a deep, childish urge to run that settles in her shins, but it’s easy to ignore. She’s timed it out, and she has twenty minutes to get to a temple that’s only ten minutes away, fifteen minutes for a transaction that won’t take more than five, and twenty minutes for a walk home that will take exactly that long. She’ll have time to spare, will get home before Fuyuhiko comes back from the business that tempted him to skip school today, and no one will know.
(Fuyuhiko will know. Not right away, but after a few days. When it’s too late for him to talk her out of it. But that’s fine. Peko can bear his disapproval so long as she still has his trust. Besides, it’s not like she’s violating an order by doing this; she can't violate an order that she was never given.)
Once the temple is in sight, it’s fairly obvious that Inoue is tailing her. That’s not shocking; she’s heard that some people will develop little crushes on their soulmates before they know for sure that it’s them. She didn’t expect that to happen to her, but it’s just as well. It doesn’t even take ten seconds to lose him, and Peko circles back around to get where she needs to be. The grand doors open without a sound, allowing her shelter from the cold outside. It’s an odd temperature, doomed to give them either freezing rain or sleet. Peko can’t tell which one it’ll be yet, and the weatherman this morning was equally undecided.
“Can I help you?” A girl asks, and she...doesn’t look like what Peko imagined a temple mage would look like. Her hair is in two high ponytails and instead of traditional dress, she’s in a plaid miniskirt and a tee-shirt that says something in French. Still, she’s obviously a mage. It’s something in the air around her that gives it away, thick and cloying in a way that makes her nauseous. Some kind of charm magic, certainly. This is who’s going to help her.
“Yes. I’d like to speak to you, or any mage that’s available.”
“Well, I’m free, so let’s move it! I don’t do meetings in the main hall.”
She starts strutting away, and Peko walks a respectable three feet behind her.
“You got a name?”
“Pekoyama Peko.”
The girl snorts. “That’s unfortunate. I’m Enoshima Junko, and I’m here to solve whatever magic problem’s got you down. Whatever it is has to be serious, because you look like you swallowed a fucking lemon. Seriously, you’ve gotta lighten up! You’re going to give yourself wrinkles if you don’t.”
Peko doesn’t say anything to that. Doesn’t know what she would say if she deemed it appropriate to speak. Enoshima opens up a door at the end of the hall, and she finds herself in a room that’s painted electric blue. The shade hurts to look at; Peko looks at the window instead.
“My personal quarters,” Enoshima explains, and then sits down on the floor. Peko sits down across from her. “So, what’s your deal?”
Peko holds out her left hand. The mark is obscured by the foundation, but a true mage would be able to see the shape of it despite that. “I need this removed. I don’t have an appropriate bribe with me at the moment, but if you tell me what you’d like, I will be able to get it for you. I’m not opposed to signing a contract stating as such, either.”
“A bounded one?”
“Yes.”
“Huh. I haven’t had someone willing to go for a bounded one in like, six months. People get sketchy when contracts could result in them dying, ya know?” Enoshima takes Peko’s hand between her own. Her skin is soft, but her nails are sharp enough that Peko keeps an eye on them. “So, who in your family did this before? Parents? Grandparents? Your eyes are pretty red, so it can’t be too far removed.”
Peko would like to say that she’s a descendant of the first tool, would like to trace her lineage back to that great hero, say it was a great-great grandfather who died honorable and unafraid. In some metaphorical way, she supposes that she can, but Enoshima isn’t asking for metaphors. “I don’t know. I’ve never met them.”
“Adopted, then. Not shocking! What do you need this removed for, though? I thought yakuza girls just beat up their soulmates when they got pissed at them.”
Peko doesn’t ask why Enoshima knows she’s yakuza. There’s nothing judgemental in her tone, nothing that indicates that this will wind up in an incident. She sounds like she deals with the yakuza on a daily basis. Whether she just has a sense for it or knows Peko from rumors makes no difference to her. “I have a duty to someone else,” she says. “It’s more important than a soulmark.”
“Mmmm, Peko-chan, you gotta be careful saying that kind of thing! A lot of other mages would get super mad that you’d even imply there’s something more important than a soulmark, even though I’d bet they’d remove it for ya anyways. We mages love a good bounded contract, because you nerds can’t get out of them until you give us what we want. But more importantly, don’t ya know that the gods tend to curse people who get their soulmarks removed? They don’t curse the mages who do it, but you? Look at your complexion, Peko-chan. The gods don’t love you.”
“I’m aware.”
“Of which part? About the curses, or about the gods not loving you?”
“...Both.”
Enoshima laughs, gripping Peko’s hand with all of her might. “Oh, you are a riot! Now, you have to get this removed because of a duty, right? Just that?”
“Yes.”
“Uh-huh. Cool. But I gotta do something first. Keep your hand still and…”
And Enoshima stabs the palm of her hand with those sharp, sharp nails, drawing a single bead of blood. She wipes it off with a finger, and then proceeds to stick that finger in her mouth and taste it.
Mages. Peko will never understand them, and she never wants to.
“Liar’s blood!” She declares. “Or, sort of. If it was 100% the taste of liar’s blood, I’d kill you now, but it’s not, so I’ll go easy on you.”
“...Excuse me?”
“Didn’t ya know that like, five percent of mages can taste the difference between lies and truth? I could get a small taste of it in the air, too, but I like getting it straight from the blood. It’s more certain, and it’s so fun. You should’ve seen your face! You actually make an expression. Incredible stuff, really.”
“I wasn’t lying,” Peko says. “There must be something incorrect with—”
Enoshima makes a sound like a fire alarm. “Wrong! It’s only half of a lie that you told, and you know that’s true. There’s more to the story. I’m not going to ask what it is because I don’t care, but what I am going to do is curse you, mkay? I don’t like being lied to, even by yakuza girls. And a soulmark removal? Really? Those are so boring! I was thinking that I could do it anyways, get some goods out of it from our contract, but the more I look at you, the more I realize that’s just not going to happen. If being with whatever loser the gods put you with causes you pain, that’s because you’re supposed to be in pain. Look at you, Peko-chan! You’re so good at it! Suffering is the perfect look for you.”
Peko swallows. Her throat is too dry all of the sudden. She needs some water. “My purpose isn’t to suffer. My purpose is to—”
“Nope! You’re wrong. You’re wrong, I’m right, I’m not gonna hear anything else. You were born to live in agony and then die in agony and get reincarnated into even more agony. That’s just how it is, babe! So I’m going to move on to the cursing. Before we start, you know what happens if you try to outrun a mage in their own temple, don’t you? Because if you run, I don’t want to have to deal with it.”
Peko’s fairly certain that everyone knows that story, but she nods anyway just to confirm that yes, she’s aware that attacking or running away from a mage in their own temple is a great way to get murdered.
“Cool! Now, let me just…”
Enoshima steps closer to her. Peko does not step back. She’ll have to try a different temple next time, maybe go to a different section of the city. This isn’t the curse she was expecting to get, but it’ll be something she can deal with. She’ll have that new mage undo it, build a cordial relationship with them, and then ask for the removal. She’ll prepare a bribe in advance instead of asking the mage what they want and agreeing to sign a contract to get it for them after. This is no different than when her old kendo teacher broke her pinkie to teach her about how to properly wrap her hand around her shinai. Pain is an excellent teacher.
Lighting cracks in the distance, and Peko doubles over. She retches, but nothing comes up, and then she makes a wild scramble to get the fabric off of her arms, her arms, burnt elbow to wrist. They’re a furious shade of red, so deep that it’s nearly purple, and the burns don’t look like they’re going to heal for several weeks.
“A little bit of an ouchy, just to let you know who you’re dealing with,” Enoshima explains. “But the curse doesn’t stop there! It’ll continue to manifest in whatever way it finds the most convenient. I’m not totally cruel, though. I’ll undo it! You just need to apologize for lying to me and for trying to get your mark removed, sign a bound contract to get me what I would’ve had you grab if I went through with it, then do some volunteer work around here. You won’t believe how fast these floors get dusty, and you look like a good sweeper.”
“I sincerely apologize,” she manages, and then bows to her at a perfect ninety degree angle. She doubts it’ll work, but she tries anyways.
Enoshima giggles. “Silly Peko-chan! You have to actually mean it. Now, get out of here.”
And Peko should maybe say something else. Do something else. She’s not sure. Something feels unfinished, but Peko can’t name it or its solution, so she leaves.
***
It’s raining outside, and Peko almost doesn’t want to get out her umbrella because at least the rain is something cool on her arms. It’s coming down too hard for her to ignore, though, so she fishes the umbrella out of her backpack and keeps walking, forcing herself to pull her sleeves over the burnt flesh. It’d attract too much attention if she didn’t.
The umbrella lasts all of a minute before the wind snaps it in half. A fairly benign manifestation of the curse, Peko would say. She doubts she’ll die of wet hair, or the cold she might get afterwards. A few passerbys give Peko some pitying stares, but she ducks her head and continues walking. She’s not far from home now. She’ll go home, get the first aid kit, get that sorted, give an adequate half-truth to her kendo instructor about how she got the burn, and continue on with her life. She’ll deal with the curse as it comes. This is not a problem.
What is a problem: Peko passes a corner store, and Inoue comes walking out. She does not sigh or tense up or do anything that might draw attention to herself. If she walks very quickly and gets to the other side of the street, she should be able to avoid an interaction.
She can see it on his face when he sees her. Inoue’s disinterested, detached gaze turns wide and amazed, like he just witnessed the dead rise from the grave. He’s quick to tamp it down, return his expression to something more neutral, but Peko saw it happen.
“Hey,” he calls out, clearing the distance between them with two easy strides. He holds out his umbrella to her when he comes to a stop. “You need an umbrella?”
“No, thank you,” she says, and then steps to the side before stepping forward. Walking away. Natsumi’s forced rom-coms on her before; she knows what umbrella-sharing means.
Inoue catches up with her. “You sure? It’s only going to get worse out here.”
“I’m sure, thank you.”
“You go to Kamome, right?”
The umbrella is lingering over half of her head. Peko’s arms are still stinging, but distantly. There’s a more immediate threat here, a boy who’s interested in her and who she is meant to be with. The burn can go on the backburner for now. She shoves her left hand into her skirt pocket (who knows how much longer the foundation will hold up in this weather) and nods. “I’m in Class 1-B.”
“Huh. I’m Inoue Haruto, Class 2-C.”
“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Inoue-senpai,” Peko gets out, and then spots a good store to escape into it. It’s only a few feet ahead, and she doubts that Inoue will follow her into a Nano Universe. She just needs to make it one, two, three, four more steps.
“What’s your name?”
Peko slides into the store before giving an answer. It's a good escape; she hopes she has a few more of those left before the curse forces her hand.
***
Peko makes it back to the estate ten minutes late. She pulls up her sleeves as soon as the door shuts behind her and takes off her shoes. Her socks will need to go, too; they’re completely waterlogged. She’ll have to dry herself off here before looking for the first aid kit, but Peko at least had the foresight to go in through the backdoor. Being seen like this by possible guests would be a disaster.
Further down the hall, footsteps. Peko tenses up, but then relaxes. She knows the sound of Fuyuhiko’s feet on the floor, knows that he has the luck of hitting every squeaky footboard. There’s no one else it could possibly be, and while this isn’t great, this means she doesn’t need to run back outside.
“Oi, there you are! I was just looking for…” His voice trails off and Fuyuhiko freezes. Peko goes to pull her sleeves back down, and he springs back into action. “Jesus Christ, Peko, don’t do that! You’re going to give yourself a fuckin’ infection!
Peko stops, and then bows. “My apolo—”
“Don’t apologize right now. What the hell did you even...Actually, don’t answer that! Let’s just deal with this first. Motherfucker,” He exhales and turns, starts pacing a three-step span of floor. Peko isn’t sure if her nausea is from the pain or the guilt.
A second apology is forming in the back of her throat when Fuyuhiko takes out his phone and makes a call. There’s a pause, and then someone picks up.
“Yeah, Natsumi? Get your ass to the back door now, and bring the first aid kit. Don’t tell anyone.”
Peko is distantly aware of squabbling on the other end of the line. What she’s more aware of is the pinpricks of pain she can no longer ignore. The adrenaline that had gotten her here is fading fast, and there’s nothing left except an all-over ache. Even the air hurts her arms, but she’ll bear it. She has to. She counts out her breaths, inhaling for four and exhaling for eight. If she can keep doing that, she won’t pass out.
The brief yelling match is over and Fuyuhiko goes back to pacing. He makes it three more rounds before stopping again. “Towels! Jesus Christ, how did I forget about towels?”
“I can go get—”
“Uh, no. You’re not getting anything. I’ll be back in a second.”
Fuyuhiko darts down the hall without another word. Towels might be the best idea she’s heard all day. Peko is, in fact, soaked to the skin, and this much water will definitely ruin the floor if she doesn’t get dry soon. That would be a shame. She can’t lean against the walls, either, because those would get ruined faster than the floors would.
It would be nice, though, to lean against something. Relax. Maybe sleep for the next couple hours, and wake up in a world where the past few hadn’t happened. That won’t be happening anytime soon, though. Not even mages have figured out time travel yet.
The world narrows to just pain and breathing. The raw feeling of air on her arms, and trying to combat it with the rawer feeling of air in her lungs. Peko’s only aware of things as they get closer. The towels appear when they’re just in front of her face, Natsumi with an empty first aid kit when she’s right at her side. She’s saying something about how it was full not even two days ago when she needed a band aid for her finger, but the details are lost to the Herculean task of drying herself off without moving her burnt elbows.
Peko gathers what’s generally happening, though. The first aid kit is mysteriously empty. The normal doctor they call for yakuza-related injuries isn’t answering his phone. No one can find a bottle of Bufferin. Enoshima wasn’t lying about that curse, then. Peko will have to get a great bribe for the next mage. Hundreds of thousands of yen, at least.
She doesn’t fully come to her senses until her arms are in the sink, cool water running over them. How did she get to the kitchen, anyways? She must have walked here, but she doesn’t remember it. The servants rush out of the kitchen, scared by some combination of the burns on her arms and the look in Fuyuhiko’s eyes. Natsumi has gone off somewhere. The rain has turned to hail outside, and it thrums against the roof incessantly. With all of the grace of a goose trying to rollerskate, Fuyuhiko throws a towel over her head.
“You’ll get a cold if your hair stays wet for that long,” he says, and with Peko bent over the sink, he can dry off her hair with no problem. Peko doesn’t know how well it’s truly drying her hair since it’s still braided, but that doesn’t stop Fuyuhiko from trying.
He gives up on it when the water is halfway up her forearms. “I’d get a hairdryer or something, but with our luck, it’d fall in the sink and fuckin’ electrocute ya.”
“I believe that it would,” Peko agrees. “Still, thank you, Master.”
“Don’t call me that,” he mutters.
They fall into a peaceful silence, punctuated only by the running water and the hail overhead. Beneath the distortion of the water, Peko’s soulmark looks like just another part of the burn. The foundation disappeared some time ago, but Peko can’t pinpoint exactly when. Now, it could be just an awkward bit of the back of her hand that got singed along with her forearms and elbows. It looks like it would maybe fade when the rest of the burn vanishes, and she’d never have to think about it again.
“If Inoue doesn’t sign your Get Well Soon card, I think I’m going to cut off one of his fingers. You wouldn’t mind being with a guy who didn’t have a pinkie, would ya?”
Peko blinks at him through half-dried bangs. “I’m getting a Get Well Soon card?”
“If you have to miss school because of this, then probably.”
“...If you would like to cut off his fingers, I have no objections.”
Fuyuhiko snorts, and then his phone rings and he takes two steps back and answers it. The conversation is brief, and it ends with an irate sigh.
“The grocery store doesn’t have any Bufferin. What kind of fucking store doesn’t have a bottle of Bufferin? They better hope they don’t owe us money,” Fuyuhiko says. Peko nods, semi-sympathetic. “It’s like this day is cursed.”
The comment is light. It means nothing. Peko looks at her arms and wills it to mean nothing. Fuyuhiko’s looking at her arms, too. He’s looking at them for far too long.
“You wouldn’t,” he whispers.
It’s not a question. She’s not being asked if she would, or if she did. She can get away with saying nothing. She should say nothing. She shouldn’t worry him.
(Fuyuhiko, age eight, after watching some pulpy yakuza b-movie that they spent most of the runtime laughing at because they managed to get everything wrong: You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?
Never.)
“I didn’t succeed.”
Peko braces herself for a scolding. It doesn’t come. Instead, Fuyuhiko leans against her shoulder, careful not to aggravate any wounds. He doesn’t say anything to her; he doesn’t need to.
And Peko tries as hard as she can, but she’s not sorry for it. Sorry that she got hurt, maybe, and sorry to have worried Fuyuhiko, but the rest of it? She can’t apologize, and Fuyuhiko doesn’t ask her to. He understands, and that’s more than anyone else can do. The gods must know that, surely. They must know, and they’ve done this anyways. Heresy bubbles in Peko’s throat, hotter than the burns and sharper than her blade.
She swallows it. That would only make the situation worse, and Peko can’t afford that. Not only for herself, but for Fuyuhiko. “Did Natsumi-sama try the pharmacy? They might have a replacement for the whole first aid kit.”
“I’ll ask if she calls again.”
Fuyuhiko sounds like he’s speaking around a similar feeling. Like he doesn’t want her chained to this, either. Like he feels every renegade, reckless thing that Peko feels about the mages, the gods, Inoue Haruto, the innocuous circle on her hand and the dot beside his right eye that almost blends in with his freckles. Neither of them can say it, though. Not today. All they can do is run the water as cold as it will go and wait for the sink to fill up. That’s what’s left for them.
But it’s not all horrible, Peko decides. It’s bearable, and perhaps preferable to anything else, because they’re standing here together.