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The clan meeting is as it always is: a complete bore.
Satoru has always found them a terrible waste of time and energy, and this one is no exception to the rule, the latest in a series of tedious, inescapable, unavoidable political gatherings, and quite possibly the most tedious yet. It takes many hours. Over the duration of it, he works his way through three boxes of taiyaki and a bottle of sugary commercial starfruit drink, all the while happily ignoring the glares of dozens upon dozens of old farts all around him. A few minutes before they officially close the meeting, Satoru stands and makes his way leisurely out. The crack of his back as he stretches is soft and the most satisfying part of the day.
He happens to wander past the gardens. The Kamo estate is painfully traditional and meticulously managed. Large, smooth rocks freshly wet from the early morning rain, sparse old shrubs speckled grey with the beginnings of disease, creaking trees. A carpet of dark moss over the rotting soil, and two children, one almost hidden behind the other, hunched at a grouping of ferns beside a gaping log, folded into themselves at the brim of the pond. Satoru comes closer. His footsteps meet the ground with the scrape of gravel and the children look up, two boys, formally dressed, and Satoru finds himself tickled at the sight. My, my. The scions of the Kamo and Zenin, the clan heirs, kneeling here in the dirt? How cheeky! How mischievous!
"Oh, Gojo-sama," says the older one. "Fancy meeting you here." He doesn't move to show any other greeting, nor a sign of respect, and Satoru notes this with some amusement at his audacity. He notes also: Zenin Naoya, one of the younger sons of that old fart Naobito, slit-eyed and smiling; in his hands—a thin, infant's knife; in his lap—a gasping carp, stolen from the shallow pond.
"Ah, Naoya-chan!" says Satoru. "How nice to see you! Huh, what do you have there?"
The boy is not nearly so young as to be cute. He knows this, is aware of it. The crinkle of displeasure forms at the corners of his eyes. But the smile remains, tight and stretched over the fragile frame of his young jaw. "I was asking Noritoshi-kun about the Kamo clan's technique," says Naoya lightly. He curves his eyes up at Satoru's face and does not mention the faint gold scales bloody on his hands. The boy who is being spoken of looks up, then. He has been quietly observing the skin of his wrist, his eyes locked onto the thin curve, the tendon raised in the centre of it.
"Gojo-sama," he says respectfully. His cheeks are still round with early childhood and his pressed sleeves are wet with dew. He bows his head.
Satoru blinks behind his glasses and decides to bid them farewell. It is not his business what children do in their spare time, and neither is it his business the livelihoods of pondfish. It might be a curiosity, perhaps, if it were not for the long morning that Satoru has tolerated so far. He is far too sleepy to be bothered with these kinds of things, and the thought of going home is too sweet to dismiss.
They don't exhale as he leaves, but he does feel Naoya's precocious little eyeballs digging deep into the notches of his spine as he turns his back towards them. How kittenish! How sharp!
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"Kids like to be curious, right?" Satoru asks Shoko idly, one day in school when he remembers.
"What reasons do you have to ask me?" Shoko asks him in return, sighing out of the side of her mouth. "What strange things have you involved yourself in now?"
Satoru makes a face at her, a childish face that she rolls her eyes at. Petulantly, he decides to keep his observances to himself. After all, it's not like Shoko should be trusted with children at all, seeing as she'd instantly give them lung cancer. Her opinion doesn't matter here, hm? It's not like she'll be able to dissect this matter. Satoru steals a drink from the thermos on the table beside her and goes 'blegh' at the bitter taste, after which Shoko kicks him out of her room.
Satoru crouches with his back against the wall of the corridor, brings his clasped hands to his mouth. He does not have a very large frame of reference to compare the behaviour of children who skin their pet fish in their family homes with other children, but if he thinks back to his own childhood, he can recall a morbid fascination with the birds that sometimes roosted on the roof of the main house, and a later curiosity about aquarium creatures, how they might flounder on the cold linoleum if taken from the water.
"Hm," he says to himself. "I'm sure it'll be fine!"
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There is one time, another time he is passing through the Kamo home, that he comes across the young heir, Kamo Noritoshi. It is in a dark hallway with only faint light against the walls and the floor and the ceiling, and Noritoshi is a little taller than his waist. He looks up at him solemnly with all the silent respect and unspoken judgments that he has been taught by his seniors, and he greets Satoru politely. And then he reaches out a pudgy hand towards Satoru's and hands him something small.
Satoru wiggles his fingers around the object and feels how it sits, innocuous, in the inner crook of his knuckles.
"It's a Vitamin D supplement," says Noritoshi, wrapping his tongue around the name like it is something serious, as if it isn't an artificially sweetened children's gummy vitamin. He nods his pale little head—untouched by sun; how long has it been since he has been let out, hm?—and makes to walk past, tiny shoulders set stiffly. Satoru pops the gummy into his mouth and grins down, through his glasses, and then he continues on his blithe way out of the household as the child heads further within.
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Sometimes he sees them interact with each other, Noritoshi and Naoya. The older boy slants his teeth at the younger in a friendly way and ushers him out of the door during social meetings, leading him by a hand wrapped around the wrist, tucked under the cover of rich cloth.
Noritoshi isn't very old. He is warier that most children Satoru sees, but the kind that Satoru sees most are those that play freely on the street and at the parks. Rather, Noritoshi is one of the least reticent of these latest of highborn sons. Though he is not all highborn, and that could have something to do with it. Because he is not old, and not so haughty—yet, Satoru thinks—he will follow Naoya out the door, and when they return a while after, their sleeves are damp. Perhaps they are washing their hands of other people, the cloying mass of clansmen and stale tradition, or perhaps they have spilled a cup of water on the kitchen counter, or perhaps one boy has taken the other to a corner of the labyrinth and taught him how to cut open a vein and drain the blood. Perhaps they are being curious, as children are wont to.
After they return, Naoya will keep the smaller boy close to him. The thin smile will crease over the folds of his face as he holds Noritoshi by his brittle shoulder, his fingers curled into the finely woven, sleek black sleeves of his clothes. Someone once told Satoru about this: adolescent lions kicked from their original packs are known to form their own, built of younger males under the guidance of a more experienced elder who was unable to lead a normal pride due to age, or just poor, poor luck. These prides are often successful, and a coalition is safer than a male on his own.
He can't quite remember who told him about it (oh, but that's a lie, isn't it? Messy black hair, calm, proud eyes, Suguru—) but it's a fanciful little thing to think about, especially in a setting as tiresome and troublesome as this. A coalition of exiles, hm? What an interesting thought.
Naoya-chan meets his gaze from across the room and his precocious eyes are as sharp as ever, his smile just as taut over his canines.
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In his bed, Satoru considers: wild ducks in the sky, the flight of red-crowned cranes; the migration of lemmings when a population becomes too dense; flocks and herds and packs and prides and schools of fish in the sea. The safety of abundance. Movement is best done in masses.
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On a red afternoon in the Zenin household, after yet another meeting—so long, so boring, so draining, ugh!—Satoru comes across a sink running in a bathroom. Standing silently before it is Noritoshi, having grown just tall enough to reach the taps without straining, but still small enough that he is strange to look at against the backdrop of polished wood and clean lines.
He doesn't notice Satoru at the door, and that must be why he tugs his heavy sleeve up over his elbow, bares his pale arm to the round, propped-up mirror on the countertop. There are old white scars on the skin there, methodical, made with a small blade. There are scars that have healed irregularly, leaving raised lines like stringy tendons, or pinkness. There is a scar, tiny, near the inner crook of the boy's elbow, and it spells out neatly the characters of Naoya's name. This one is fresh. With his eyes, Satoru sees it clear as day.
Noritoshi wipes the blood from his arm with water, but it wells up again, gleaming grey under the poor lighting, like seabream scales. He breathes out. "Have a good journey home, Gojo-sama," he says.