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Natsume appears in his dreams, sometimes.
Sometimes he does nothing at all - he will sit silently on Tanuma’s porch and stare at the koi pond that only he can see, or he will walk beside Tanuma through his dream world, soft and indistinct - his smile will be kind, but still he will be silent, his companionship ghost-like.
Other times, he will talk to Tanuma. He will sit in a fanciful cafe with floating tables and a star-speckled ceiling, and he will point out the cafe window at a great forest, dark and wispy and unreal.
“See the lantern, Tanuma?” he will ask.
His eyes will glow a little, and for a moment he will look more like a yokai than a person. Tanuma will nod, because as Natsume speaks the eerie blue glow of a distant lantern will creep through the trees, as if Natsume himself spoke it into existence. “Those lanterns mean there’s a festival there. They have the most beautiful fireworks.”
#
There are two Natsumes.
Real Natsume is soft and quiet and warm. His eyes are like amber, and when he smiles - not the blank, vacant smiles of old Natsume, afraid to make friends, afraid to talk to Tanuma, afraid to talk to anyone - his eyes will crinkle and the amber of his eyes will look like melted gold. He has honey hair that he brushes incessantly out of his eyes during class. Nishimura gave him a headband that he wore only once, to the raucous, but not unkind, laughter of his friends. Real Natsume likes to keep his worries to himself, but he is always trying to be better - he tells Tanuma about the small spirit that he returned a name to - “It was beautiful, Tanuma.” His entire face will soften, like butter in the sun, and his entire being is so filled with care for everything around him that Tanuma sometimes wonders that he can exist at all. Tanuma thinks that Natsume is the most human person he has ever met.
Dream Natsume is not so soft. Gentle, perhaps, but not soft. Dream Natsume has green eyes that gleam sharply, like gemstones. Out of the corner of his eye, Tanuma might see his eyes glow - they do not look human. He has silver hair that floats around him, as if blown by a summer breeze that only he can feel. He looks knife-like, illuminated by nothing but moonlight and dreams. This Natsume is not hesitant or delicate - still he is kind, but where Real Natsume is rounded and fragile and always, always worrying - here he moves with the easy confidence that Tanuma associates with cats - a predatory grace. This Natsume dips his toes into a koi pond that Tanuma can’t see and grins keenly at him - “The water is so nice, Tanuma - be careful you don’t fall in.”
Tanuma doesn’t know if Dream Natsume is real. He certainly feels real - when nothing in Tanuma’s dream is defined, but he is racing away from something strange and frightening, Natsume will appear in a long and dark corridor and raise his hand. Sometimes, he is wearing a crimson kimono that billows around him, and a silver dragon will slither across the fabric. Just like that, the corridor will fall away, and with it the monster of his dream is gone - Dream Natsume will throw him a relieved smile.
“They can be nasty, sometimes.”
When Tanuma sees Real Natsume at school, he will search for that silver-haired Natsume who chased away the nightmare, and Natsume will just smile at him - it will look sweet, and it will make the classroom seem brighter in the way only Natsume’s smiles only ever seem to, but it will not be sharp or keen or cat-like. It will be like sunshine, and Tanuma will soak it in.
“Is something wrong?” Natsume will ask.
“Just a dream,” Tanuma will assure him. And just like that, Dream Natsume will fall away.
#
Natsume fainted on the way home from school. Ponta sighs, long-suffering, as Tanuma carries him home.
“Is it…” Tanuma pauses, uncertain, “still around?”
“Of course not. I got rid of that weakling as soon as it tried to get Natsume. It was no match for me.”
They walk in comfortable silence for a few more minutes, before - “Ponta, does Natsume ever have weird dreams?” Ponta scoffs.
“He dreams all the time. Dreams, memories, they all come to him - from people, from yokai. He's a magnet for trouble.”
“Actually,” Tanuma hesitates. “I was wondering if he ever goes to other people’s dreams.” Ponta’s green eyes flash for just a moment, a there-and-gone something that Tanuma almost misses.
“Yokai go to dreams,” he says. “Humans just receive them.”
Tanuma is home before he realizes that wasn’t quite an answer.
Tanuma is dreaming again. He is sitting in the high branches of an oak tree, the only one in a field of canary yellow wildflowers. A gentle breeze caresses his cheeks, and it smells like musky summer sun and flowery perfume. Tanuma doesn’t tightly grip the rough bark of his oak branch because he knows, somehow, that he need not fear falling.
“I once met a yokai who had a stone face, here.” Dream Natsume is perched on a nearby branch. He isn’t wearing his red kimono today, but his school uniform. One leg is pulled to his chest, with his arms wrapped around it - the other dangles freely in the air. He looks calm. He looks like he was born to be sitting in this imaginary tree.
“Was it a good yokai?” Tanuma asks. Dream Natsume shrugs.
“I wouldn’t say that,” he says. “It was just a yokai. It was looking for its home. I helped it find it.” Tanuma watches Natsume stare at the flower field. He teeters on the branch, like he is prepared to drop down at any moment.
“Are you going down there?” Tanuma asks. When Natsume turns to reply, his sharp edges seem indistinct. He looks unreal. He feels like the yellow flowers, dreamlike - imaginary.
“Not today.” he replies with an odd smile. It doesn’t fit right on his face, a shoe just a size too small or large. It looks uncomfortable. It looks unfamiliar.
“Are you real?” Tanuma blurts in an effort to wipe that smile away. Dream Natsume blinks. His smile falls away, replaced by a bemused frown.
“Of course I am. You see me everyday.”
“I don’t mean at school.” Tanuma frowns. “I mean here. This is a dream. Are you…a dream?”
“I wouldn’t say that.” Tanuma blinks and Natsume is sitting on his branch, swinging his legs and looking down at the flowers. “Maybe I’m like your koi pond. There, but invisible. Real, almost - but not quite.”
“Wouldn’t that mean you’re a…yokai?” Tanuma watches Natsume’s face, and startles a bit when he looks up to meet his eyes. They are a deep forest green today. They don’t look like they’re glowing - but they are a shade too dark, a moment too deep - they feel a little wrong. Like the eyes of a person, but a step to the left.
“Maybe I am,” Natsume hums. “But what would that mean for me when you wake up?”
“But surely you’re not actually Natsume,” Tanuma breathes. He is still looking into his eyes. “You’re completely different.” When Natsume finally looks away, he leans forward, seconds away from falling into the yellow flowers.
“Are you so sure about that?” he asks. A wind is whispering through the flower field, and the petals shiver. An ominous groan seems to climb straight out of the earth. When Tanuma blinks, the flowers have turned a fleshy pink color. They look like hands, fingers outstretched toward him and Natsume.
“Watch carefully,” Dream Natsume whispers. He leans forward - and leans, and leans. When he slides off of the branch, Tanuma lunges to grab his blazer.
When he jerks awake, his hand is still outstretched.
Real Natsume, at school, looks tired.
“It was just a nightmare,” he assures Kitamoto and Nishimura. A shiver crawls along Tanuma’s spine like fingertips.
Later, Ponta, Natsume, and Tanuma walk along the riverbank to pick up manju for Touko-san.
“Have you ever helped a yokai with a stone face?” Tanuma asks. Natsume turns to him, surprised. Ponta’s brisk, manju-fueled pace doesn’t falter, but he turns his head just slightly to watch Tanuma.
“I have, actually,” Natsume says with a smile. “There was a very pretty flower field. The yokai - he was called Chōchinobake - had left his chōchin lantern and couldn’t find his way back.”
“A useless weakling,” Ponta remarks. “Gave us a piece of stone as a gift. As if that was worth anything.” Natsume laughs.
“He was just repaying our kindness, Sensei. It was kind of him to give us anything at all.” Ponta just grumbles.
“So he was a good yokai?” Tanuma asks.
Natsume shakes his head, still smiling.
“I wouldn’t say that. He was just a yokai, after all. He just needed help finding his home, so I did.” Natsume pauses. “But how did you know? I didn’t think I'd mentioned that one before.” Ponta is eyeing Tanuma again.
“I don’t know,” he murmurs. “Maybe you did, once.”
#
Tanuma is panting. His breath catches heavily in his throat, and he thinks, more unconsciously, that the night shouldn’t be so crisp. It should be oppressive, the kind of stifling darkness that Natusme sometimes fights in his dreams. But instead the moon hangs low and sweet over the forest, and the silver light of it paints a gentle path beneath the trees for Natusme, Taki, and him to race through, a desperate escape from the Basan. Its breath scorches Tanuma’s back - he thinks it ridiculous that such a silly looking monster should be so powerful. And mean.
“Ouch!” Taki yelps as she trips over a branch and tumbles, gracelessly. The Basan roar-caws viciously, a triumphantly hungry cry. Natsume, who is holding an unconscious Ponta in his arms, whips around to pull Taki up. His porcelain skin has a ghostly pallor. His amber eyes are wide and afraid. Tanuma doubles back to help them both - but suddenly the Basan bursts from the trees. Its plumage is ruby red and toxic green - Tanuma imagines that if its face, with that cruelly curved beak and unnatural crimson eyes, were not so horrifying, it might have been beautiful. For a moment, as time seems to slow around them - the Basan opening its beak to spew a river of deadly flames; Natusme, Taki, and he frozen with fear, too slow to escape it - Tanuma is suddenly absurdly happy for the slip of paper wrapped around the monster’s gristly leg. He knows what will be killing him.
But then Natsume releases Taki’s arm and gently places Ponta beside her - when he rises, Tanuma is momentarily stunned by the green glint in his eyes. He looks, for a moment, if not cold then certainly not afraid. Is it the icy moonlight that is making Natusme’s hair seem silver? Is it the determination that makes his gait seem suddenly distinctly un-prey-like?
He holds up only one hand, and his fingers are slender and white and he says something to the Basan, but his words are lost to the roar of the monster and the eager crackling of fire. He says something again, and this time Tanuma sees a slip of paper in his fingers that had not been there a second ago. The Basan meets Natsume’s eyes, and it is as though the entire forest falls still. Natsume steps toward the Basan. His eyes are unearthly green - his hair drifts about his head, the same cold silver of the moon.
“Leave,” he commands, and just like that, the Basan turns and fades away into the darkness, as if it were never there at all. Time begins again - Taki is gasp-laughing into Ponta’s fur, as she had picked him up and was cradling him close to her chest. Tanuma catches a sleepy grumble from Ponta as he begins to wake. Natsume turns back to them, and he looks like Real Natsume - a bit flustered, skin damp with sweat, cheeks still white with passing fear - but his eyes are amber gold and his hair is plastered to his forehead, a flaxen crown. Then Natusme is walking towards them, and he is laughing too, if still afraid, and the Basan’s fire is out, magically, as if it had never set anything on fire at all - and the three of them (and Ponta) stumble back to Tanuma’s temple, relieved, exhausted, ready to pass out on his floor when they arrive.
#
The festival is warm and sweet and filled with the buttery gold light of lanterns and evening laughter. The air is dense with the almost unreality that seems to go hand-in-hand with summer festivals, a content feeling of mystery that just barely warps the edges of the bustling stalls. It feels a little like a dream.
Natsume and Tanuma are sitting at the fringe of it, munching on takoyaki and waiting patiently for the fireworks. Ponta is nowhere to be seen - Natsume just laughs when he asks about him.
“He’s probably getting drunk,” he says, long-suffering. But then his eyes crinkle, and they smile and talk and enjoy the warmth of the summer night.
“Natsume,” Tanuma says, suddenly filled with the inexplicable certainty that this is when he needs to talk about Dream Natsume, about inhuman Natsume, about the Natsume in the red kimono. Ponta isn’t here - Taki isn’t here. It is just them, on the edge of reality, a dreamlike night, almost real but not quite.
“Do you ever go into others’ dreams?”
Natsume’s smile doesn’t fall, but it does change a little. It feels a little sharper, a little more knowing. It reminds Tanuma of Dream Natsume.
“Sometimes,” he says easily. “I see yokai’s dreams all the time, after all.” Tanuma recalls Ponta’s words and isn’t sure that is the same thing.
“Have you ever been in my dreams?” he asks. The night, full and thick and content, seems to fall suddenly very still. It isn’t unnerving, or uncomfortable - only sudden, and strange, and Tanuma couldn’t discern whether it was illusion or true magic, of the sort that seemed to follow Natsume around unerringly.
“Perhaps,” Natsume hums quietly.
“What did you do to the Basan?” Tanuma asks, just as quietly. The Natsume sitting beside him doesn’t feel like Real Natsume. But he isn’t Dream Natsume, either - he thinks maybe this is just Natsume, in his truest form, shifting in the night, strange, fuzzy-edged. His hair could be silver, or that could be a trick of the light - his eyes could be strange and green, or amber, depending on how Tanuma met them.
“I asked him to leave.” Natsume’s eyes fall shut. “Sometimes that’s all I need to do - I speak easier with yokai than humans, it seems. Sometimes I forget that I am human at all.” He blinks open, and smiles sadly at Tanuma. “But I’m not quite ready to forget completely. I couldn’t sit with you, like this, if I was a yokai.”
“Right,” Tanuma murmurs. The fireworks begin to explode in the sky, a great flurry of gold and violet and starry blue. They fill his ears, and his eyes, and he realizes, belatedly, that the world is moving again. Natsume is watching them too, when he turns away from them to glance at him furtively, and Ponta has taken his place in Natsume’s lap.
Tanuma sees Dream Natsume again that night, and his visit tastes of bitter finality.
“Are you leaving?” he asks, sadly. He is sitting in the center of a great flower of some kind, blood-red and floating in the middle of the ocean. When he dips his fingers into the warm water, they come back dripping gold.
“This will be the last time, I expect,” Natsume says softly. He sits beside Tanuma, running his fingers through the ocean water as the floating flower begins to move in no discernible direction. The air tastes florally sweet.
“Is it because I questioned you at the festival?” Natsume laughs.
“Of course not. This was always going to happen. I can’t be in your dreams forever, Tanuma.” Panic twists Tanuma’s breath.
“I thought you weren’t ready to forget being human,” he chokes.
“I’m not,” Natsume says, and when he turns to face him Tanuma is startled to see that although his hair is still that wispy silver it always is in his dreams, his eyes are the warm amber of Real Natsume.
“It’s just time for me to go, Tanuma,” he says easily. “I am separated, like this. I exist here, in your dreams, and there, outside of them. But it is not meant to be. I am both. I am human. I am real. But also…” he hesitates. “I am not. Maybe there is a little bit of inhuman in me.”
“How long will you be human, Natsume?” Tanuma asks. And Natsume smiles at him, and even though it is a little eerie, a little left of perfectly human, it is undeniably warm and indescribably Natsume - “I will be around for a long time, Tanuma. Like your koi pond.”
#
Natsume Takashi dies at 53. Tanuma, who had stayed long in his temple, tending it, more to continue to be close to Natsume than through a passion for the work, had been there, though only a select few knew that. Natsume had been helping him clean up the temple. He had decided to stay the night. As he laid down in his futon, he had gifted Tanuma a small, sweet smile, the kind of smile that wasn’t real or dream or anything - it was just Natsume.
“Good night, Tanuma.” And he had fallen asleep, and so had Tanuma.
And that had been it.
He had died in his sleep, peacefully - many assumed it to be a stroke of some kind. Spontaneous, strange, unforeseen. He was so, so young.
Like Reiko, Ponta had sighed.
The funeral was a somber affair. Natori was there, and Shibata, and other people that Tanuma didn’t know at all. There were Touko-san and Shigeru-san, weeping, faces red and puffy, clutching each other, and Taki, and their classmates, older now but grieving all the same - but everyone there seemed to hold in their hearts a secret knowing, not to be said aloud but recognized all the same - that this was inevitable - a young death, a brief, beautiful life.
The life of a Natsume.
Like Reiko-san, Tanuma thought. When a chill curls its way up his spine, Tanuma turns away from the weeping funeral party and grave, to look at an oak tree up the hill. There sits Ponta, alone but seemingly content. There is no one else there that Tanuma can see, but he doesn’t think Ponta seems lonely. He waves. Ponta nods, a small, nigh unnoticeable acknowledgement, before disappearing. Tanuma smiles, small, and private. He turns back to the service.
“To seeing you again,” he murmurs over Natsume’s grave, and drops a single, delicate yellow flower onto the earth.
#
Natsume turns away from the procession with a sad smile, Sensei trotting beside him.
“They will miss you,” Sensei muses from beside him. There is a rush of air, and he grows into his true form. His voice is deep, ruminating. Natsume imagines that it is a little sad, too - they had been his friends too, he knows, even if Sensei will never admit it. He smiles.
“I will miss them too.”
In a single bound he leaps onto Sensei’s back, the red kimono he now wears billowing about his legs as he does so - as he grips Sensei’s fur a silver dragon sliters across his sleeve with a purr, and Natsume smiles down at it. With a great roar Sensei jumps into the sky, ripping through the clouds. They have no destination in mind, not necessarily - they are just flying, just free. Natsume laughs as Misuzu appears beside them, his great purple form billowing and writhing, ribbon-like. A low hum reveals Hinoe, and soon there too are the mid-ranks, Chobihige, even the kappa, looking terrified as he desperately grips the collar of Chobi’s kimono. Benio lays on her back even as she floats through the air with them all, and Natsume relaxes on Sensei’s back, a little sad, a little wistful - he misses Tanuma, and Taki, and Nishimura and Kitamoto - he misses Touko-san and Shigeru-san, and Natori - he misses all those people that finally made him feel worth something, that made him happy to be human, if only for a little while.
“Thank you,” he whispers into the wind, as his Night Parade dances through the sky, beautiful, powerful, all that remains of Natsume Takashi, grandson of Natsume Reiko, friend to so many, humans and youkai alike.