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“You’re still walking around with all your supplies on you?” is how Matoba chooses to greet him.
Natori touches his bulging school bag and thinks maybe he should have left it at home instead of leaving Urihime. He and Matoba have fallen into something of a routine for exorcist meetings; they linger somewhere out of the way, trade chatter and petty insults, and absorb as much information as they can until someone comes over to deliver the obligatory lecture about how children shouldn’t be here. Matoba typically laughs and claims the head of the clan sent him, and Natori is starting to get a sense of when it’s the truth and when Matoba is just daring someone to call his bluff—when he has actual business, he abandons Natori to the scolding with nothing more than a cheery wave. But even if he’s here as a Matoba tonight, it’s too early for that to be much of a risk.
“No, I just didn’t have time to drop it off at home,” Natori says, though there are hours stretching between the time school lets out and when the exorcist assemblies properly begin. In theory, he’d fill them with jobs. In practice, he sits in the drafty storehouse with his comforter around his ears and Urihime hovering over his shoulder as he fumbles through the family papers. He has a feeling that Matoba knows this, but he doesn’t call him out on it. “It’s Valentine’s Day.”
At Matoba’s questioning stare, Natori sits and flips open his bag. Nearly a dozen packages ranging from expensive department-store gift bags to homemade chocolates carefully wrapped in plastic are crammed in alongside his ofuda and notebooks.
“Do you want some?” Natori asks. “I don’t like sweets much, so.”
“Sure,” Matoba says predictably, going straight for the largest of the homemade ones. “So many… It looks like you’re pretty popular with the girls, huh, Shuuichi-san?”
He’d spent the day alternating between pretending he didn’t see the girls trying to catch his attention and feeling guilty about it. He’d thought he had enough of a reputation around school by now—stuck-up, distant, full of himself, uninterested—that they wouldn’t try, but there were more packages waiting with his shoes at the end of the day than there were last year. This apparently shows on his face, because Matoba lets out a delighted laugh before tearing the wrapping off.
“I don’t encourage it,” Natori says defensively, reaching over to break off a piece of (with a quick glance at the abandoned tag) Kakizaki-san’s gift before Matoba could shove it all in his mouth. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. None of them can see. It’s not like I’m… rushing to get a girlfriend or anything when it’s something like that.”
When they have no idea what’s going on in the world around them; the lizard slithers around the corner of his jaw as if to punctuate that. Matoba watches it crawl with a bored, vaguely distasteful expression as he licks a smudge of chocolate off of his thumb.
“What if they could?”
If they could see it? As uncomfortable as Natori feels now, as girls whisper to each other completely oblivious to the ayakashi sitting in plain sight on his face, he can only imagine it—a stare of Matoba’s intense, hyperfixated caliber, watching him nonstop throughout the day as he tried to pretend he was normal. The idea of being seen so clearly makes him momentarily sick to his stomach, and he has to watch a trio of masked shiki walk by, shake off the line of Matoba’s sight, to get the privacy he needs to pack it away again.
He waits for the shiki, who lean in and whisper to each other once they catch him looking, to pass before he responds. “Well, they can’t,” Natori says. “So it doesn’t matter.”
“Mm.” Matoba settles back against the wall, silent for a moment as he works on freeing a stubborn chunk off the block. He breaks it free with a snap, then looks out into the room as he says, “My marriage partner has already been chosen, of course. So it’s not something I have to bother with.”
Natori chokes and whips his head around to look at him. Matoba said it so casually, is still smiling the same smile he always does, that Natori can’t tell if he was serious. It seems like he was, but… “Really?”
Matoba rolls his eyes as if he’d just revealed another blind spot in his exorcist knowledge and helps himself to another bite of Natori’s Valentine’s chocolates. Natori wonders, absurdly, if Matoba said the same thing to anyone in school that day. Natori is hardly interested in dating, or anything like that, but to realize that Matoba didn’t even have the option available…
After a moment, he asks, “Have you even met her?”
Matoba shrugs, still casually scanning the crowd. Could he be—looking for her? No, Natori thinks as soon as that occurred to him. No way. “I’ve seen her in passing. She’s got fairly good sight and comes from a decent enough branch of one of the remaining old families.”
Natori waits, but it seems like that was all Matoba had to say. And that’s probably all that matters, isn’t it? That she was skilled. That she was well-connected. That she’s been steeped in this world of power and politics as long as Matoba has. That her family name, whatever it was, is something people respect, one that’s still considered worthy enough to attach to the head of the Matoba clan.
Natori’s gaze falls down to the school bag between them, full of surface-level expressions of affection, and he wishes he had the courage to turn the girls down outright instead of taking their gifts to be eaten by someone they’d never know.
“Haha, this is pretty good, isn’t it?” Matoba says cheerfully, smiling at Natori as if nothing had happened. “Tell Kakizaki-chan that she’s not bad at cooking.”
Natori elbows him in the side. “She’s older than you, you brat.” Matoba laughs and takes another chocolate from the bag.
A month later, Matoba gives him a chocolate bar still wrapped in a plastic bag from the convenience store.
“I don’t like sweets,” Natori says again, but he puts it in his bag for later anyway.