Work Text:
Here, so far to the south as to be forgotten by the country, nevertheless the seasons remember themselves. They exist as discretely as their own names, and naming any month will evoke in Natsume a memory he cherishes of living here, fortunate to be somewhere where time is not merely measured but witnessed: flowers bud, ceding to sun-dappled lushness, reddening as the sun sets sooner every day, finally lost when the sun won’t come out at all. Yet Natsume can never discern when it is, exactly, that a season has become another.
Formally, it is autumn, and the trees shedding their leaves are in accord with the calendar. That very calendar denotes winter’s creep. Natsume is in accord with that, too: he dons gloves and there are the wispiest puffs out of his mouth as he speaks. The river he and Tanuma pass on their walk to and from school flows briskly, as if it needs to or else it will remember the chill. If asked when he’d first made these observations, Natsume would not be able to answer. They simply existed one day.
Tanuma’s elbow is a padded suggestion against Natsume’s coat. Natsume blinks and turns to Tanuma, whose light coat is not collared so high as to hide his smile.
“You were spacing out,” Tanuma says, “weren’t you?”
Natsume returns his smile and spares another glance at the river. If he squints, the water rushing whitely over stones could pass for frost. “Just thinking that autumn is almost over.” He rubs his gloved hands together. “Though I’m already cold…”
Tanuma stops walking. “Do you want my coat?” he asks, unbuttoning only the first button before Natsume stops him.
“No, no! Thank you, Tanuma. I’m alright.” He does the button up for Tanuma. “You’ll get cold, too. And you’re sicklier than me.”
Tanuma’s self-conscious chuckle is close by—Natsume has not yet stepped back. He does so with a hasty Sorry that Tanuma dismisses with a mumbled It’s fine.
Natsume turns his heat-speckled face toward the river and meets the beady gaze of a catfish poking its boulder-sized head out of the water.
“What is it?” Tanuma asks, going up beside Natsume. He follows Natsume’s line of sight. In not yelping or gaping at the catfish, Natsume knows Tanuma does not truly see. It is as much a fact of life as the changing of the seasons, but it is still melancholic that Tanuma cannot see what he can. Natsume has said nothing, and it is that lack of words that speaks: Tanuma’s face falls in understanding. “A youkai,” he says, not posing it as a question.
Nyanko-sensei pops his head out from Natsume’s shoulder bag. “I thought I felt something,” he says. His eyes widen. “It’s a fish! A fishy! Natsume, I wanna have sushi for dinner.”
The catfish youkai disappears under the water with barely a ripple.
Natsume flicks Nyanko-sensei on his head. “You scared it away, Sensei.”
“I didn’t say I was going to eat it for dinner! Just that I want sushi!”
“You heavily implied it!”
Tanuma laughs. “A fish youkai, huh? What did it look like?”
“It was a big catfish,” Natsume replies, resuming walking. “I wonder if the cold bothers it, like it would fish that aren’t youkai. Sensei, do you know?”
“It was a small fry. So probably.”
“But you get cold…”
“It’s because I’m in this body!”
Tanuma scratches the top of Nyanko-sensei’s head and his eyes slit close with pleasure, annoyance forgotten. “I’m not sure about fish youkai,” Tanuma says, “but the fish that live here just swim down to the bottom of the water, where it doesn’t freeze. They’re okay for the winter. Just cold, I guess.” He smiles. “That’s very like you to worry about them, Natsume.”
The heat on Natsume’s face burns stronger.
Nyanko-sensei paws at him. “Walk faster or else the good sushi will be gone!”
Natsume squishes Nyanko-sensei’s paw. “Alright, alright.”
Beneath their feet, the grass still bends softly, and stray pebbles clatter quietly with friction, not frost.
Freezing rain has glossed the road. Natsume is conscious not just of every step he takes but how he does so: feet flat and apart, steadily moving forward a handful of centimeters at a time. He feels absurd, but after seeing Nyanko-sensei slide down the house’s driveway—to, Natsume will admit, laughter preceding inquiries as to his well-being—he is not risking anything. It doesn’t stop Tanuma, walking confidently ahead, from grinning at Natsume over his shoulder.
“You’ve lived here longer,” Natsume says, pouting. “You know how to move in these conditions. And I have Sensei’s weight throwing me off.”
From the top of Natsume’s head, Nyanko-sensei harrumphs.
“That’s true,” Tanuma says. “It’ll still be funny when it gets colder and you have on four layers while you waddle like a penguin, though.”
“I think even you—”
From the side of the road, a watery gurgle.
The night had witnessed temperatures low enough to fringe tree branches, grass blades, and the river’s shore with ice. It crunches as Natsume, curious, walks to the edge of the road, almost drowning out Tanuma’s call of Be careful behind him as he follows.
“It’s the catfish youkai,” Natsume says fondly. Less of it peeks out from the water than yesterday, but there is nothing else of that size or those striking eyes that it could be. “How are you?”
The water around the youkai is perfectly flat.
“I don’t think it’s very smart,” Nyanko-sensei says.
“It could be shy. You did scare it, Sensei.”
“Where is it?” Tanuma asks as he comes up next to Natsume, and points. “Is it that shadow?”
“Yes. Most of it is underwater, but it’s definitely the same youkai.”
“It hasn’t talked, has it?”
“No. It’s a fish,” Nyanko-sensei says, licking his paw to clean his ear. “It’s stupid!”
“Don’t be rude, Sensei,” Natsume says just as the catfish gurgles again.
All three of them startle: Natsume and Nyanko-sensei at it reacting to their conversation, Tanuma at the ripples appearing to him unprovoked.
Natsume is the first to recover. He offers the catfish a polite bow. “Please excuse Sensei. He’s a rude cat.”
“Hey! I’m not even a cat!”
The catfish looks and looks at Natsume.
A shiver goes up his spine, tingling the base of his skull. “I’m really sorry, but we have to be going. I hope the water isn’t too cold.”
With a muffled plop, the catfish dives underwater.
Nyanko-sensei scoffs. “Rude.”
“You shouldn’t be saying that…”
“Do you think,” Tanuma says, “it can tell you’re powerful and is intrigued?”
Natsume and Nyanko exchange a glance. It could indeed be that—or, likelier, unbeknownst to Tanuma, the catfish senses the Book of Friends snug in Natsume’s shoulder bag. In nothing more than that glance, Natsume resolves to return and confirm the catfish’s name isn’t in the Book; Nyanko-sensei, predictably, narrows his eyes.
“Natsume?” Tanuma says, worried.
“Sorry,” he says, quickly, and quickly, too, lifts the corners of his mouth. “Yes, I think it’s intrigued by either me or Sensei.”
“Definitely me,” Nyanko-sensei says. “It knows I could eat it if I wanted to.”
Tanuma studies Natsume so carefully that it is difficult to continue meeting his eyes—averting them would be conceding guilt, a secret. The secrets Natsume hoards from Tanuma are too many by sheer virtue of existing.
The silence fits just like a glove, stretching into every furniture nook and filling every stony crevice, that when Natsume wakes he thinks he has lost his hearing. But no. Out the window is the all-encompassing, muffling white of early snow.
A clack: Nyanko-sensei’s jaw closing after yawning. He curls up tighter on his cushion.
Natsume pats his round belly. “You can stay home today, Sensei. It’s the kind of weather that’s best to sleep in.”
Nyanko-sensei mumbles something, covering his face with a paw.
Natsume bundles up and regrets not having worn an additional layer prior to having left the house. Shivering, he stuffs his mittened hands into his pockets and finds they aren't deep enough.
Down at the river, where their respective paths home converge, Tanuma isn’t waiting for him.
He’d gone a lifetime without knowing Tanuma, a lifetime where the prospect of meeting someone he could confide his spiritual abilities to was—unlike a world beyond the mundane—as impossible as a dream. Now it is impossible to reflect on that lifetime as having been his; that he had accepted inevitable, complete solitude when, all along, Tanuma existed.
The weight of Natsume’s shoulder bag is heavier than it should be.
He nears the area he had seen the catfish youkai in. Being alone, he can approach it and ask if it has its name in the Book. Or whatever it requires of him. Natsume treads down the incline leading to the river, the snow spilling like sugar as his boots upset its overnight piles.
The river has not frozen entirely, but needle-like ice crystals swirl in the slow current and gather at the banks. The youkai is nowhere to be seen.
“Hello,” Natsume says, quietly enough that no passerby would overhear, but loud enough the youkai should, wherever it is. “Are you here?”
No movement in the water.
He takes a few more steps forward, kneels, and waits. He mulls what Tanuma had said: that the youkai might be keeping warm in the river’s depths and would not swim swiftly up. Soon, he is rewarded for waiting. The youkai plops its head out from the water, its eyes on Natsume.
It’s paler than he remembers. Its whiskers quiver; its eyes are keen and appraising. Mute it might be, unintelligent it is not.
Natsume smiles at it. “I’ve been seeing you often. Did you know my grandmother, Reiko?”
The youkai slightly shakes its head.
A line forms between Natsume’s eyebrows. “Then, did you need my help with something?”
It doesn’t reply.
So the youkai had been intrigued after all. Sensei will be glad he hadn’t lost a page in the Book. Natsume stands, dusting snow off his legs. “I’m sure it gets cold down there, and that food is harder to find with the weather like this,” he says. “I don’t know if I can do anything about that… If you get hungry, I can bring you something. Do you eat bread? Oh, bread is bad for fish, isn’t it? Vegetables, maybe.”
The youkai opens its mouth.
Natsume laughs. “Alright. I have some vegetables in my bento, I think.” He takes out his bento box, plucks a broccoli with his chopsticks, and tosses it in a high arc.
The youkai widens its gaping mouth almost impossibly, and there the broccoli lands, insignificant in sating a youkai of that size. It looks expectantly at Natsume. Feeling guilty, he feeds it the rest of his broccoli. The youkai keeps its mouth open. Natsume next tosses it the few tomato slices he has. And it keeps its mouth open.
“I don’t have anything else you can eat,” Natsume says, closing the bento box and putting it away. “I can buy you something at school and give it to you in the afternoon, on my way home from school. Would that be okay?”
The youkai barely bobs its head.
“I’m sorry that what I had wasn’t enough,” Natsume says. “I’ll do everything I can to help you.”
With its eyes even on Natsume’s, the youkai slowly, slowly disappears into the water, a blue so dark it obscures the youkai far sooner than he’d have thought.
Come afternoon, Natsume has a pre-packed salad in his shoulder bag and no one walking beside him. Given Tanuma’s constitution, he must be under the weather. Natsume promises himself—and Tanuma, even if he cannot hear it—to visit after feeding the youkai.
The sun, though long risen, has neither melted the snow nor warmed the air. The chill seeps through Natsume’s clothes and worsens at the riverbank, where he calls out for the youkai. It takes it longer to surface than it had in the morning and Natsume finds its eyes are milky. His stomach twinges. There are many reasons the youkai could have fared worse in so little time. None of them are good.
He offers the youkai a smile anyway. “Hello again.” He grabs the salad box out of his bag. “I hope this fills you up more.”
Everything Natsume tosses at it, it eats; despite the salad’s hefty size, it isn’t sufficient. The youkai sluggishly closes its mouth and studies Natsume.
“I’m sorry,” Natsume says. “That’s all I have… I guess I should have expected that with your size, you’d need a lot of food. I’ll ask another youkai I know if maybe there’s something else to help you.” It’s likelier that Nyanko-sensei will proclaim the catfish youkai a lost cause. Natsume will still ask. “I’ll be back tomorrow, but I might be late. Can you wait until then?”
The youkai nods so imperceptibly Natsume isn’t sure if it nodded or was swept in the river’s flow. It must have been a nod: it swims away, ending the one-sided conversation.
He tells Tanuma about it at the temple—after being assured that Tanuma’s absence was only due to a headache, brought on with the weather’s changes in barometric pressure.
“You’re always going out of your way to help them,” Tanuma says.
“No one else really can, so…”
“It’s not a bad thing. It gets you in trouble sometimes, and that worries me, but you wouldn’t be you if you weren’t so kind. I like that about you.”
A pause. Natsume, pink at the ears, coughs; Tanuma averts his eyes and smooths the quilt over his lap.
“Um. Anyway… Do you,” Tanuma says, “need fish feed? We can spare some of what we give the koi in the pond. That should fill the youkai up more than human food.”
“That would be great. Thank you, Tanuma. Ah, and here,” he says, opening his shoulder bag. “Today’s assignments and notes I made you.”
Tanuma thanks him and takes them. “And you’re helping me on top of everything.”
“It’s nothing,” Natsume says, though it feels like quite the opposite. “Will you be at school tomorrow?”
“Yup. I’ll meet you at the usual place so we can walk together. For the fish feed, my dad can show you where it is. Grab as much as you like. I’d show you myself, but if I know you, you won’t want me getting up right now.”
“You do know me,” Natsume says, grinning. He gets to his feet. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Tanuma.”
“See you, Natsume.”
Outside, the sun has begun its descent, robbing the day of the modicum of warmth it had provided. The weight of the fish feed bag in Natsume’s arms tires them, and his breath comes out in stronger puffs, but the buoyancy in his chest is mightier than anything.
Natsume burrows his face out of his scarf and sneezes into the crisp air. Though a soft sound, in the snowy morning it’s a disturbance. He stops short of apologizing into the emptiness, not wanting to mar the peace any further.
Tanuma is not by the river. It is early and there is no risk in waiting for him—nor in feeding the youkai meanwhile. He pads down to the riverbank, the snow deeper than yesterday, the ice over the river expanded in fine lattices. Nyanko-sensei has stayed home today, too. There is no one to pester Natsume about ‘wasting’ his time feeding what Nyanko-sensei had deemed, indeed, a lost cause.
The youkai is waiting for him, sunk lower than yesterday beneath the water.
Natsume opens the fish feed bag. “This is made for koi, but you should like it. The bag is heavy, though. Could you come closer?”
The youkai wades through the pockets of water around the ice. It’s close enough to touch when it feebly waves a fin.
Natsume bends down further. “What is it?” he asks, and has yet to close his mouth when icy water floods it, the youkai having snatched his leg in its jaws and dragged him deep, deep into the river.
His cry is lost to the water, gurgling out as bubbles; and, out of reflex, out of breathless panic, he thrashes, he swings his arms: with all the force he can muster while drowning, he’s hit the youkai’s face. Reeling, stunned, it lets him go.
He is not conscious of rising to the surface or of hauling his sodden self up. There he suddenly is, sprawled on the riverbank, spitting up water, hacking in paltry gasps. His lungs ache with the effort of exhaling as much as inhaling. The snow under him melts to his shape; and somewhere behind him, the air is clear with the sound of his name, cried out in Tanuma’s panicked voice.
“Natsume!” Tanuma says again, sliding down the incline. Natsume has yet to recover his breath and can’t reply. He doesn’t need to. Tanuma is helping him up and out of the outermost clothes, heavy with cold water and dangerous for it. “We need to get you somewhere warm,” Tanuma says, hoisting Natsume’s coats over his shoulder, making no comment on their weight. “One of our temple’s parishioners doesn’t live too far from here. Can you walk?”
Natsume nods. His coughs are subsiding, and his throat itches to thank Tanuma profusely. “Ah—” he starts.
Tanuma shushes him. “Don’t talk. Here.” He offers Natsume his arm. “Just to be safe. We’re going to have to walk fast, okay?”
Natsume gives another shivering nod.
Pain shocks the leg the youkai had grabbed when his weight must fall upon it. They struggle to walk, but time is meaningless and elastic; either a few minutes or a year has passed when they get to the parishioner’s house, who gasps at seeing them and ushers them in.
“I have spare clothes from when my son was around your age,” she says, “if that’s alright?”
“Yes,” Natsume rasps. “Thank you.”
He’s shown to the bathroom, where his numb fingers fumble in removing his clothes. He dries himself off and easily grabs the clothes he had been given, thick and knitted. Their comfort as he slides them on is immediate. Outside of the bathroom is Tanuma, anxiously pacing, then pattering up to him and wrapping a blanket around his shoulders.
“Are you alright?” he asks. And, dropping his voice, “Was it the youkai? I saw the fish feed was spilled.”
“Yes. To both things.”
Tanuma purses his mouth.
“It’s fine,” Natsume says. His fingers grip the edge of the blanket. “You should get going to school, Tanuma. I’ll be fine.”
“Thank you, but no. School can wait. You’re too nice for your own good sometimes…”
The parishioner peeks her head around the corner. “Come, dear, you need to sit under the kotatsu with all of the quilts I have. Can you tell me who I should call to let them know what happened?”
Natsume tells her the Fujiwara landline and gratefully, if also embarrassedly, allows her to fuss him over as he sits on a cushion by the kotatsu, where she promptly buries him under a mountain of quilts. Tanuma sits across from him and chuckles. Natsume pulls the bottom-most quilt closer around his face.
“I’ll make you some tea,” the parishioner says. “Would you like a cup as well, Kaname-kun?”
“Yes, thank you, Masukawa-san,” he tells the parishioner. She disappears and he turns to Natsume. “Are you sure you’re alright?”
Unlike the weather, this pattern of theirs is predictable: they offer each other genuine care but never answer it in full truth, as to not worry the other. It requires another push to get a better answer. And Natsume’s are never in full.
His stomach twists. “No,” he admits. “The youkai grabbed me by the leg. It hurts.”
“Could I see?”
When Tanuma looks at Natsume like he’s the only one worth caring for, he can’t decline. “Here,” he says, not meeting Tanuma’s eyes.
“I don’t see a bruise or anything. Do you?”
“No…”
Tanuma lets out a small exhale. “I guess that’s good. It didn’t actually injure you. Was the fish food not enough and it got angry or something?”
Natsume shrugs as he tugs the pant leg down. “I think youkai would prefer to eat me than food-food, so maybe. It did seem to be in bad shape; it could have thought eating me would make it healthy again…”
“And where was Ponta?”
“At home. He doesn’t like the cold.”
“If,” Tanuma says, “I hadn’t come when I did…”
There is nothing to say to that. There is a knot in Natsume’s throat.
Tanuma rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms and hastily drops his arms when Masukawa returns, a tray with a teapot and cups in her hand.
“Fujiwara-san will be here in a bit,” she says as she pours them tea. “Enjoy your tea meanwhile.”
Natsume manages to thank her without his voice wavering; Tanuma only nods his gratitude. When she is gone, Natsume and Tanuma begin speaking at the same time.
“You first,” Natsume says with a small smile.
“Okay.” Tanuma breathes in, deeply and steadily. He holds it a moment, and, all in one go, says, “When it comes to youkai, I wish you’d depend on me more.”
Natsume’s lungs feel as constrained as they had underwater.
“I know I can’t see them like you, and that I’m sickly,” Tanuma continues. “But I’m not useless. You can tell me about them, and I can come with you to help you deal with them. Or,” he says, quieter, “to make sure you’re okay.” Quieter still, so quiet Natsume’s heart stops beating precisely to hear: “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. You’re too important to me.”
“That’s exactly why I’m scared to drag you into this,” Natsume blurts.
Tanuma blinks at him.
“Tanuma,” he says, “if something happened to you because I’d brought you into this world, I’d never forgive myself.” He can’t burden another person with the Book of Friends and all that it entails. It’s a duty that never sleeps. Youkai scarcely follow even the rules of their own making; they strike at any time, for any reason, and—
“I don’t think that’d happen because we’d overcome anything together.”
Natsume opens his mouth. Closes it.
There’s a smattering of color across Tanuma’s cheeks. “I mean, two are better than one. And I want to help you. Or,” he says, speaking faster, his color darkening, matching the warmth Natsume feels in his ears, “if you could just wait for Ponta to be there before doing anything with youkai… You help everyone, but who helps you? If it can’t be me, or Natori-san, then at least have Ponta be there.” He bows his head and starts to bend down. “Please.”
“Ah, Tanuma! Please don’t do that,” Natsume says, shuffling forward to put a hand at Tanuma’s elbow, gently pulling him up. “I…”
“‘You’?” Tanuma prompts, holding his gaze evenly.
Natsume bites the inside of his cheek. “I’ll do as you say. It’s not a promise—sometimes the youkai find me, first—but if I have to deal with a youkai, I’ll do it with Nyanko-sensei, Natori-san,” he says, then breathes out, like it’s the last thing he’ll ever say, “or you.”
And if those were truly his last words, they would have been worth it for the smile on Tanuma’s face.
“Kaname-kun?” Masukawa says, startling them both. “Your friend’s father is here.”
The warmth in Natsume’s chest makes itself more comfortable at Masukawa’s innocent error. He does not correct her, but he does thank her and starts to gather his belongings. His wet clothes Masukawa had put into the dryer; and she hands them to him, to his continued thank yous, added on to when she says he can keep the clothes he borrowed.
Tanuma puts his coats on and helps Natsume, equally bundled, to his feet, making him lean on him to get weight off his injured leg.
“You’re going to school, right?” Natsume asks him as they walk to the front door.
“Yeah. You gave me the assignments I missed when I was gone. I should return the favor. Otherwise, we’ll both be lost, and I just told you I was going to help you.”
They share a look—and then laughter, curling sweetly out of their mouths up and into the morning, its chill ever so mildly abated.