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Kuon Hizuri was dangerous in the moonlight.
There was no singular moment when Kyoko realized this. But this thought had crossed her mind with worrying frequency the longer she stayed at this mortal’s side.
Now that it was summer, Kyoko found herself following Kuon out to the riverbed to watch the stars in quiet contemplation. They whispered through the night, talking quietly so that not even the plants could hear. The day would slowly lose its petals and wait patiently for the moon to cast its spell for the new day. In those moments of transfiguration, those moments of magic being worked from the other side of the veil separating humans and fairies, Kyoko swore Kuon looked otherworldly.
Silver light brushed over the planes of his face, making his blonde hair glow white. His eyes shone like bits of chrysoberyl had been embedded into his irises. He looked, without question, like a fairy. Like the last year of Kyoko’s life had been nothing but a nightmare, and she was safe and sound in her home realm, wings and all. Then a cloud would pass through the sky or a tree would rustle and the magic would be stolen away all over again. Kyoko had been banished to the human realm for almost a year, though she tried not to think about what she left behind anymore.
It wasn’t easy. She had woken up screaming the morning the Queen banished her; her back screamed at the betrayal before her brain knew what had transpired. The first thing they did was steal her wings. That was the first rule of banishment; the desecration of the wings. It was one of the worst punishments a fairy could receive, usually reserved for acts of treason. Kyoko committed no such crime. Her only misstep was believing that the Queen’s son would be honest in his affection. But nobody punished a prince; so Kyoko was cast away for being foolish enough to believe Sho would ever love her.
The shock of the amputation made her pass out and the next thing Kyoko knew, she woke up sobbing in the middle of a river sandbar in Kyoto. Shards of her wings surrounded her like pieces of bloody glass as a stranger looked down on her. Lory Takarada, she would learn. The man took her in wordlessly and asked no questions about her identity or her past, instead giving her a room to stay. He let her cry for a week straight until her eyes had drained their reserve. From that day forward, she was known as Kyoko Mogami. Mogami because that was the name of the river Lory found her in (‘Kyoko’ because, well, it had always been her name).
Lory never told anyone where he found her, and Kyoko never entertained anybody asking. That was how the Takarada House operated. Lory’s house was a safe haven for all the wayward teens in the area who needed an escape. No questions asked. People at the Takarada House came and left with the weather. There was once a girl who once stayed only overnight, never to be seen or heard from again.
Then there was Kuon.
The only consistent residents were Lory, Kuon, and Kyoko herself. With Lory out of the house doing whatever it is that he did to support the transient souls he took in, that meant Kyoko and Kuon had more than enough time to become acquainted.
Kuon had a rocky past, too. One that took a while to unfurl, waiting until he was sure that she wasn’t going to abandon him. Weeks turned into months, and Kuon finally felt safe enough to open his heart to this inhumanly peculiar girl. He found himself drawn to her presence more often than not as if she’d placed a spell over him.
It wasn’t long before he confided in her his secret hideaway, where he hid from the other residents when the house felt too small, too crowded. Kuon led her by hand to a riverbed tucked in the woods behind the Takarada House. At first, they would steal away brief moments to dip their fingers in the cold water before returning home. Now he found himself calling her out in the middle of the night when the house was quiet. When there was nothing to run away from but their own thoughts.
They sat together under the moonlight and Kyoko tried her best to ignore the past and think only of the future ahead of her. The infinitely short future ahead of her, without magic. But some nights, when the moonlight hit just right...
Kyoko could almost taste the magic that had been stolen from her for a fleeting moment.
When her thoughts hurdled back to reality, Kyoko would once again be sitting beside Kuon with a dull ache radiating from her spine. He would look at her with eyes softer than they had any right being and ask where she had gone without him.
The first time he had asked her that question, she stumbled over the answer, her brain short-circuiting between trying to register what he meant and how to answer in Japanese. Nowhere. She never left; didn’t he see that?
He laughed. Not meanly. Explained the question--where was her mind? What had transpired that stole her so completely from their previous conversation?
She wanted to tell him. Kyoko could spend hours recounting the lifetime she spent in the fairy realm, and how much he reminded her of all the things she couldn’t have anymore. She wanted to tell him that he was magic incarnate. She couldn’t.
It was too dangerous.
There were worse things in the fairy realm than banishment. Worse than the removal of wings. Things like transmutation and forbidden magic. Things worse than death. All of these possibilities made it impossible for Kyoko to share the truth. Impossible to share her mourning for something Kuon could never understand, no matter how many times he bore his heart to her. She didn’t answer the first time he asked her this, opting instead to withdraw into her shell where she couldn’t see any of Kuon’s pseudo-magic. But loneliness was unbearable. So, she found a way to tell answer him to the best of her ability.
Not a lie. Not the full truth either. But an answer that skirted the best of both worlds until perhaps one day Kyoko was safe to reveal her secret.
She told him that she was with the butterflies