Chapter Text
Maintaining the fragile peace between humans and yokais was an extremely exhausting task.
Yokais managed to quarrel and bicker even among themselves because someone strayed into someone else's territory, or because someone looked at someone without enough respect, or because someone forgot some words said four hundred years ago, or because of another hundred reasons. And humans were keeping pace with yokais, often outrunning them with the absurdity of their causes for enmity. For example, Ayato knew two human families in Inazuma, whose members threw themselves at each other generation after generation when just passing one other on the street, because their ancestors once didn't share a piece of iron. Truly astonishing.
But when both humans and yokais went into action, mutual understanding and patience towards the other side became simply impossible. Ayato just finished dealing with the case of a young playful bakedanuki who, foolishly wanting to get himself a companion for fun, messed with a traveler so much that the man couldn't leave the forest for several weeks and eventually died there. The family of the deceased, of course, wished to get justice (an execution, nothing less), the small bakedanuki truthfully didn't know that humans die without food, and Ayato spent five hours straight coaxing the human side to show understanding. Eventually he managed to get a reluctant agreement for the child to work out his mistake for a hundred years. He will as well learn about humans something new aside from them not having any fur.
And Ayato, who after the more or less resolved issue was heading towards the nearest teleportation point to finally get home, was fed up with the current situation. Some months ago he met Makoto in an informal setting, with tension expecting such important topics they could only talk about them in private, but instead of that they were leisurely drinking tea and discussing last news.
Ayato knew that human advisors with great admiration discussed how their shogun-sama tirelessly worked for the sake of Inazuma day and night, but they had no idea about their ruler having a twin sister. One tirelessly split for two goddesses was working through the sleeves for both of them, that's why Ayato, who didn't manage to remember the last time he took a rest day and got worried because his memory was starting to fail him, was, to put it mildly, outraged. Shogun-sama, who entrusted personally him and his sister with the task of maintaining peace between humans and yokais, had enough free time for drinking tea and useless conversations.
Ayato decided to certainly take a vacation. After he resolved the barrier problem for the next yokai festival. And dealt with that tragic love story of a human and a teapot yokai. And dealt with bakedanukis and their low level of knowledge about humans.
Having ignored in Hanamizaka some beggars which clearly couldn't make as much trouble as the lately spread texts about creation methods of small yokais, including inugami, Ayato noticed a poor man surrounded by dogs out of the corner of his eye and slowed down. He then stopped.
From afar it looked like a small pack of dogs gathered around a corpse of some unfortunate person to have lunch, but, on closer inspection, the poor man turned out to be not unfortunate at all. He was lying by a tree and hugging one half of the dogs, while the other half warmed him up from behind. It looked like the human was a part of this pack.
It was quite surprising, especially now. If Ayato remembered it right, humans lately have been catching the dogs for inugami creation, so only the most vicious and untrusting ones should have been able to survive. This was not in keeping with what he was seeing now.
Out of curiosity, Ayato came closer, and one of the dogs growled threateningly (vicious and untrusting, as he expected), but immediately stopped and whined, turning tail, getting closer to its human friend. He patted the dog, comforting it, looked at the uninvited guest, got up and sat. He couldn't stand up, judging by an unskillfully put splint, his leg was broken.
"Young friend," Ayato said after having examined him from head to toe, noticing both his tattered, torn in several places clothes and his foreign dirty gold hair. He smelled, as expected, like dogs and not like a yokai at all, so the interest grew further, "How did you find yourself in such a deplorable situation?"
"Got into trouble," the man said hoarsely and coughed, he obviously hasn't talked to anyone for a rather long time.
Ayato touched his chin, chuckled, without turning his eyes away from him, and, without thinking twice, said, "If it goes on like this, you'll die soon. Don't you want to come with me?"
"No," the beggar said, getting more and more wary with each passing second.
Kamisato, who remembered how one human once saved him as a baby and who thought that he could now do the same thing out of curiosity, only in reverse, sighed in disappointment.
“What a pity,” he sincerely complained, noticed that one of the dogs, wagging its tail, approached him, and bent down to stroke it.
When he straightened up and looked at the beggar, the man stared at him in astonishment with wide eyes.
"He... likes you," he forced himself to say.
“Undoubtedly, he sensed my incredibly kind and gentle temperament,” Ayato stated without a drop of modesty, smiling, and added meaningfully. "I love dogs dearly."
The gloomy stranger hesitated a little, looking at Kamisato with his dull green eyes, then turned his gaze to the dog that had growled earlier, stroked its head and asked, "What do you think?". When it barked, he asked the others the same question, and they barked back at him almost in unison.
Charming. He wandered for so long that he thought he could talk to dogs.
"Have you changed your mind, young friend?" Ayato asked with interest.
"If it's not too late?" he sounded like he was ready to get rejection.
"Of course it's not too late," Kamisato purred, considering this rescue, which had nothing to do with the relationship between yokai and humans, as the first step towards his vacation. Then he gasped as the stupid beggar leaned against a tree to get up with a broken leg, and stepped forward to catch him. The man stared for a moment at the place where his dirty clothes stained clean luxurious ones, and abruptly looked away like an ashamed dog. "I think it will be easier if I carry you."
"What? No, I…" he did not have time to say his objections to the end, as Ayato already picked him up like a princess, and smiled a charming smile. After a couple of seconds of shock, the ashamed dog said. "Strong…"
"Thank you," without an ounce of modesty, Kamisato said and looked at the dogs, "What about them? Should we take them with us?"
"No… Their place is here," the beggar mumbled and froze not knowing how to behave.
"And where is your place?" Ayato asked and got going to the teleporter in order to get home before the moment when he should start to get tired of such a burden.
"I don't know…" the man said, and the thread of the conversation completely tore off.
Ayato picked up a human who was very sad. Kamisato couldn't wait to see what he would become with just a few weeks of care. The people were very fickle.
Having reached the teleport, Ayato in a few seconds got through the ley lines to exactly the same teleport point in front of his estate, and the beggar, who had been too afraid of touching him more than the minimum before, finally clung to him, snuggling closer. Kamisato walked past the guards, who bowed to him at once, and took the first step through the gate to the estate.
He froze for a second and immediately took a step back, put the beggar down next to one of the guards, and smiled at him in the most pleasant way.
“Wait here for a while, I need to sort something out,” Ayato said amiably, and after a short pause, the man nodded, shaking because of something. The humans were so incomprehensible.
After smiling one last time especially charmingly, Kamisato stepped through the gate, through the barrier that separated the entire estate from the outside world. Thus, to anyone looking into the estate from the outside, it seemed that nothing unusual was going on there. Even unusual sounds and smells were cut off.
But even with the barrier in place, the courtyard of the Kamisato estate had no right to look like that. A maid with cat ears and two fluffy tails ran past, a group of small one-eyed yokais sat right on the ground and played cards. Quite small creatures dozed in the air, lying down on the clouds and snoring, and a huge horned ayakashi was lying idly in the distance.
Even though the estate was hidden behind a barrier and guards watched the only entrance, all these klutzs were ordered to either take the human form or hide throughout the day, such that a human, who came in by accident, wouldn't find out that every single one in the Kamisato clan, that was responsible for the peaceful coexistence of humans and yokais, wasn't human.
Ayato, a bloodthirsty smile on his lips, revealed his true form and roared threateningly, calling every single one to gather and get their lesson.
Now he wanted to settle the picked up human in his estate not only for his own amusement but also as a trial for the silly subordinates who would have to constantly hide their inhumane nature. Anyone who fails won't get the salary for the next fifty years.
He urgently needed a vacation, the very first in hundreds of years.