Chapter Text
Everything is shades of muted dark, foggy; the world hasn't been anything but smears of color for a long time. He simply hasn't been able to see through the haze of black that's covered his eyes like gauze. Something catches his ankle, tugs.
The thing at his feet chatters, a clicking of teeth and bones. He falls onto the pavement, the ground cold and unforgiving.
Sunlight glares bright through the glass façade of the optometrist’s office and Kei sighs through his nose, eyes burning already. The pain doesn't let up when he steps outside, colors and crisp early springtime sunlight piercing his retinas.
He misses the fog his glasses provide already; in fact, he's ready to turn around and take them back, taped bridge and all. It's too much.
Even though it's a new section of town, all bright steel and shining glass and flat concrete, the streets are still bubbling with them, oozing their ozone bodies out of the ground, seeping like boiling tar.
He watches them over–long, and they feel his attention. Eyes pop out of nowhere, large and slit-pupiled. They catch his presence.
good smell good you you you smell nice good food food help help come back help food eat blood good help spirit
Their sounds fill his ears: their mockeries of voices, wet smacking like too moist tongues against dried lips, slurred vowels and moans. Under it all, there’s the persistent sound of fluttering wings, like a flock of birds taking flight in dead air; more than the sound of the spirits’ dirge, this is what unsettles him the most. It isn’t a new sound, but it’s a troubling one—he only ever hears it when something particularly nasty is about to go down. There’s still a scar across his shoulder that reminds him to be wary when he hears the sound.
He hastily averts his eyes from the fog of spirits, fingers fumbling with the sides of his headphones. He snaps them over his ears, muffling the unearthly howling in his ears. He lingers on the threshold of his optometrist’s, knowing between the wards on the office (there was a reason he continued to visit this particular doctor) and he ones he’d coaxed into his headphones, some of their attentions would falter.
Or at least, for a moment. He adjusts his scarf against his neck, tucking it over his mouth, and briefly considers forgoing the pastry shop visit, but decides against it. Cake trumps the prickly discomfort that walking through spirits gives him.
He’ll just have to shower for a bit longer to clean away the gritty feeling the more powerful ones will give him, that’s all. That’s all it ever is. That’s all it’s going to be.
He tucks his hands into his pockets and murmurs under his breath, “Unnoticed.”
He strides out of the office and down the sidewalk, legs carrying him at a brisk pace towards his favored patisserie. Spirits scatter at his feet, leaving a wake behind him. Some, the ones that are too powerful for a quiet litany to work, reach for his ankles, shadow-sinewed fingers slipping against the air mere centimeters from the fabric of his jeans.
He keeps walking, focuses his energy on walking and keeping up the barrier. It looks like every spirit in the damn city is out and on the streets that afternoon; Kei isn’t certain if he’s seeing more because he doesn’t have his glasses to divert his attention or if something’s up.
He hopes it’s the former, not the later. He doesn’t want to be on the streets if something spiritual is about to go down; but then, he thinks, that Akaashi would have warned him in the office. The man knew Kei’s distaste for the spiritual community and getting swept up in petty exorcisms and psychic dribble—and as one of the city’s strongest psychic pillars, his optometrist surely would know if something nasty had stirred.
Or maybe he wouldn’t. Kei doesn’t know.
He’s never asked. He’s never wanted to know the answers. In fact, he doesn’t want anything to do with any of it; if it hadn’t been the only viable option, Kei wouldn’t have started visiting Akaashi’s office anyway.
He sighs into his scarf, bumping up the volume of his music, trying to drown out his thoughts like he’d cut off the moans of the surrounding ghosts.
He makes it to the patisserie without much incident aside from having to kick a particularly nasty female spirit off of his leg; judging by the way her back was twisted and arms were disjointed, she’d been hit by a car and was looking to drag him into her same fate.
He’d been particularly pleased with the way her shadow flesh had splintered under the sole of his boot. He’s not sure where they go after he does that, but it’s never bothered him other than a mild curiosity. He rather hopes she went to hell.
He buys an entire cake and a large cup of coffee for the walk home. The warmth seeps into his chilled fingers—the sky may have been bright and blue, but spring hadn’t yet managed to shake the last of winter off yet, he thinks.
He hits the crosswalk and sips his coffee contemplatively. Someone bumps into him and jostles his headphones off of one ear; the rush of wings fills his ears again. He nearly spills his coffee in his haste to slip them back on, but by that point he feels something’s attention slip down his spine.
He hesitates, looking around as the pressure on him increases, the hairs on the back of his neck rising with the gooseflesh that shivers across his skin.
There is nothing. It is nothing. Nothing at all:
The sludge of spirits from the office has dissipated back to a usual level. There’s a small sprite skittering down the sidewalk with a piece of trash in its tentacle-lined mouth—small kodama hang from the trees planted up and down the sidewalk. In the air on the horizon, something is floating like smoke—but not a single one of these things have their attentions on him, and none of them, not one, are powerful enough for this feeling.
As abruptly as it comes, the feeling of being watched leaves. Kei swallows, taking a long gulp of coffee to wet his suddenly dry mouth. Suddenly, the desire to go home overwhelms him.
He does something in his panic that he never does—he turns at the crosswalk rather than cross it and heads towards a poorer section of town, one that's all pawn shops and close-packed, run-down apartment buildings. It’s shorter to cut through this part of town than to keep to the newer sections, but he long-ago decided to steer clear of it.
Not just because it’s a rough section of town and he’s a young male with nicely tailored clothes, the sort that are made to look rough and cheap but really aren’t, and expensive headphones—but also because that part of town is old.
There’s a shrine nestled behind one of the apartment complexes that Kei thinks is at least a century old. Age combined with poverty… does not make it a neighborhood he wants to stroll through, unless he wants to have to curb stomp more spirits. Typically, he does not.
Today, though, he just wants to be home—badly enough to take a risk he normally wouldn’t.
But he wants it so badly.
He doesn’t stop to think what it is. He just fills in the blank himself: that he wants to go home.
He hurries down cracked sidewalks, weeds already blooming up through the concrete, fueled by sunlight and the melted morning frost and desperation to thrive. The spiritual aura of the area presses on his eardrums, a loud, roaring silence, even through his headphones. Dingy windows with flickering ‘open’ signs reflect his harried stride, and from the corner of his eye he sees the first wisps of actual spirits in the area. Old ones; some of them might have even been living spirits, born from the ill-will of the neighborhood residents. Kei doesn’t take the time to notice.
He presses forward, taking the corners blindly and quickly. Residents follow his movement with their eyes, but Kei doesn’t meet their gaze or run into anyone.
His stomach churns and his mouth is dry. Coffee from his paper cup sloshes over his fingers, and the feeling of being followed starts to grow higher. He doesn’t turn around to look. He keeps moving forward.
He tries to focus on his music, but the song has gone to something electronic, with a bass line that matches his own rising heartbeat and he hasn’t been this certain that something dangerous is about to happen since the day he’d realized the white pebbles he carried in his pockets were pieces of skull.
He’s contemplating darting through the street, crosswalk light be damned, when someone starts screaming.
It pierces through his headphones, breaking the ward at his ears with its panic. Its wordless, terrified and it freezes Kei’s heart.
“Someone help me, help please—!!”
The words form seconds after and he only hears part of it before the howl of spirits cuts in. He turns, looking behind him wildly. He runs towards the sound—the voice screaming sounds human.
The noise emanates from a dingy side ally, concrete breaking away to moss and dirt and rubble; it’s barely big enough for two people to walk down. The buildings around it cast the alley into shadows, like the alley has been plunged into night. It’s made even darker by the fog of spirits swarming in and out; it stinks like a rotting body, and for a second Kei thinks he’s heard a ghost scream for help when a dirty hand stretches out from the darkest part of the alley and scrabbles at the gravel, nails digging tracks into the moss as its pulled backwards.
Kei dives into the darkness. “Get out of my way!” he shouts, fixing his mind on the image of spirits dispersing away from him. Something catches in his chest and for a brief second, he can’t breathe, something thick and slimy and tasting like burnt rubber invades his open mouth.
As quickly as it comes, it leaves, leaving him gagging as he dives forward towards the hand. He crushes his foot down against the shirtsleeve, spirits flooding away from the spot like shots. They howl curses at him, spiting in anger over being forced away from their meal. He looks at them as they flee and scream, light filtering through overhead as the brunt of the lower-level ones flee. It burns through the stupider, weaker ones and there’s a sudden burst of wing-beats, and the rest flee.
“Pathetic,” Kei mumbles, watching them dissipate. He can’t shake the feeling that it was far too easy to get rid of them—that many, and with them hungry enough to physically drag a human, should not have been banished by a simple command.
He turns his attentions away from his unease and kneels in front of the kid they were dragging. It’s a teenager—maybe even someone his own age.
He can’t tell if they’re a girl or a boy, only that their hair is long and dark and matted, and that they are absolutely filthy. They reek of evil spirits, and their clothes are tattered and worn and maybe a bit too big.
It looks like the spirits had tried to consume the average homeless person in their hunger. Kei lifts his boot and huffs. “Get up and get inside before it gets dark,” he says simply.
He turns and steps out of the alleyway. There’s scrabbling behind him, and a soft voice calls after him, “Wait!”
Kei looks over his shoulder, and sighs. “I’d rather not. They’ll come back soon enough.”
“I know,” the boy cries. He clutches something in a dirty hand. Kei scowls and squints at it as it catches the light; it’s a large chunk of quartz, the sort you’d buy at a souvenir kiosk in a museum. It’s wrapped in a cheap leather cord that’s looped around the boy’s hand and wrist.
To the untrained eye, it probably looks like smokey quartz. To Kei, it looks like it’s been used one too many times to disperse spirits. It looks like it's in desperate need of a clearing to purge it of the evil spirits trapped within.
“Please,” the boy pleads. “They won’t leave me alone.”
“I’m not becoming their dinner in your place,” Kei retorts. He sets back off down the sunny sidewalk.
Footsteps follow him; Kei doesn’t look back, but he’s certain the boy is following him. He wonders if he walks fast enough, or just ignores the kid, he’ll be left alone. Somehow, though, he doubts it.
And he’s right to: the boy follows him all the way to Kei’s apartment, pleading with him up until the moment Kei slams the door right in his face.
Kei kicks off his boots and hangs up his coat, sighing softly in relief as the voice goes quiet.
He walks to the kitchen and sets his box of cake down on the counter, peeking warily into the box. It’s a bit smushed and definitely jostled, but still edible. Though, he thinks as he cuts himself a slice, he’s eaten a completely obliterated one before, having had tripped with it in his arms when a spirit grabbed at his ankle.
He’s midway through a second slice and a cup of tea when the window over his sink starts to rattle. Kei turns to look at it with apprehension.
A large, fleshy mouth is pressed up against the glass. There are too many teeth, and the jaw scrapes against the panes, opening up until Kei is certain that if it were a human mouth, it would be dislocated. A bloody, shadowy tongue licks up against the glass. He stumbles back a few steps before dashing to his bedroom to look out the window there—a similar sight meets his eyes. Hands push up against the frame, forming and reforming endlessly.
He swears and runs towards the front door, throwing it open. The boy falls over the threshold and Kei takes a handful of a dingy hoodie and pulls, dragging the boy into his entrance way. He slams the door and pushes against it, wood creaking as shadow-flesh hits it. The stink of corpses fills his nose. The door thuds once, twice, three times before falling still against Kei's back.
“You!” he hisses, turning to face the boy. “What the hell are you thinking! Drawing them to you like that!”
“What?”
“You’re calling every evil spirit in the prefecture to my apartment!” Kei shouts, “And you stink! No wonder they’ve come after you!”
The boy gapes up at him, head turning in a slight shake. “I—I don’t—I didn’t know—”
Kei heaves a sigh and pinches the bridge of his nose under his glasses. “Just—first thing, take a shower.”
The boy perks up, “May I?”
“Yes. God, shut up. Look, my name is Tsukishima Kei. And you’re not staying here permanently. I’m kicking you out once these spirits disperse.”
“I’m Tadashi. Yamaguchi Tadashi,” the boy says, “But please, before you do—tell me how you got them to go away.”
Kei looks at Tadashi and sighs. “Shower first. You’re disgusting.”
“Ah,” Tadashi murmurs, looking down at his clothes. “Well.”
“And leave those clothes out; I need to put them in the burnable trash pile.”
“I don’t have any more,” Tadashi confesses. He feels his face burn in embarrassment; “I know I’m… dirty, but... they’re all I have, really.”
Kei sighs. “Fine, I’ll just wash them in salt water. Maybe that’ll purge it enough to keep the spirits from coming back to you.”
Tadashi nods softly. He stands and slowly undoes the laces on his shoes, careful not to dislodge the parts that are peeling away. Kei tries not to note that they’re held together with duct tape in places.
He’s letting a homeless man shower in his house.
A homeless man that reeks of evil spirits and has a hunk of rock tucked in his pocket that’s in desperate need of purification—something he isn’t good at. A homeless man that drew spirits to his apartment like it hadn’t been warded against them; a chill goes down his spine as he wonders if the year-old o-fuda will even hold. He doesn’t want to owe that man anymore favors—he’s a bit frightening about it all, all dark, calculating eyes and fussy temperament.
Kei swallows dryly as he makes a mental note to pour salt into the other man’s shoes.
“Come on, this way,” he murmurs, brushing aside Tadashi to show him to his bathroom. His apartment is nice, clean. Everything is more or less new; because of that, it’s sparse.
Kei pretends it’s minimalist rather than admit he refuses to buy second-hand furnishings just to avoid the spirits and living curses attached to a good deal of them. He gestures silently towards the small hallway that opens up in the space between his kitchen and sitting area. “Second door on the left.”
“Thank you,” the young man says again.
Kei clicks his tongue. “There’s a shelf with towels, use the white ones.”
“Ah, they may end up…” Tadashi murmurs softly, rubbing the back of his neck anxiously. Dirt flakes away at the movement. Kei tries not to flinch.
“I’m aware. White towels are bleachable,” Kei says, feeling a bit cruel to point this out. “Look, white ones are cheap too,” he mutters, feeling a bit like a jerk for picking on the other man for circumstances he might not have been able to help.
For all he knows, he could have ended up homeless too, had his grandmother not recognized what was happening to him. He clears his throat and laces his fingers together at his waist, looking away from Tadashi. “Leave your clothes out by the door once you’ve stripped down. All of them. I’ll find you something to change into while these are being washed. They may need more than one pass with salt.”
“A…all right,” Tadashi murmurs. “Um. Things that can’t go in the wash? Wh… what should I do with those?”
Kei purses his lips. “Like? Wallet and phones? Things like that? They can just be sat in a baggie with the salt for a bit. It’d be better if I could leave them out in the sunlight, but… It’s getting late, and I don’t want to risk that,” he says, talking more to himself than to Tadashi.
“How do you know all this stuff?” Tadashi asks eagerly, leaning forward onto his toes. “It’s amazing—you’re the first person who knows anything—Even when I’d speak to the grannies at the shrines, they just—they… Well.” He falters and rubs over his collar-bone self-consciously.
Kei makes a face, a chill shivering down his spine. Something about the action unsettles him deeply. There’s a sudden whiff of corpses and Kei takes a step back. “I don’t know anything. Get into the shower. Something’s on you. There’s a homemade bottle—it’s in the cabinet, with herbs and salts—douse yourself in it. Use it all. Something—you’re—”
“Tsukishima? Are you alright?” Tadashi asks softly, taking a step forward. He holds out one dirty hand, fingers raw and bloody from where he’d used them to hold himself when he was being dragged back; Kei notices it suddenly, and the scent suddenly is more than he can handle.
“Stay away from me!” he snaps, taking a step back. “Just do it.” The roar of blood in his ears sounds like a thousand wings beating all at once.
“Okay,” Tadashi says hesitantly. “I’ll just set them outside of the door,” he murmurs.
Kei runs a hand through his hair absently, not really listening. He stands as Tadashi slinks down the hall and disappears into the bathroom. He lets his muscles lock briefly before giving one long sight, letting his face relax, then his neck, then slowly down until he drops his hands to his side and lets them hang limp.
Everything is fine. It’s fine, and he can handle it. He can handle it. He can, he tells himself.
Kei pads into his bedroom, socks sliding on the laminate; the action brings a memory of even slicker floors and a larger hand in his own. He doesn’t dwell on it. It doesn’t do to dwell, but the flicker of it calms him enough that he’s able to choose clothing for his guest and go to the bathroom door without any lingering anxiety.
“I’m leaving the clothes out here, don’t forget to lay out yours,” Kei calls through the door, rapping it twice with his knuckle before leaving.
“A-all right,” Tadashi calls back.
Kei sighs through his nose and puts the clothes at the door; it’s just a simple pair of cotton lounge pants and a sweater, as well as an older pair of undergarments. He hopes they’ll fit Tadashi, because otherwise, the other man is out of luck.
He turns and opens the folding, slatted doors that hide his washer and dryer. He taps his fingers, looking up at the shelves. He pulls his detergent down, as well as the dark paper bag behind it. He opens the washer and sets the load to hot and heavy soil and lets the drum fill before he empties half of the paper bag into the water, the white, opaque crystals settling into the bottom as they slowly dissolved.
He sighs through his nose and shakes the bag, studying the remaining amount. He starts to tally the things he needs in his head. Rock salt. Check the o-fuda. Distill more water for minor purifications. Buy more plastic bags.
He massages the bridge of his nose and goes to collect Tadashi’s heavily soiled clothing. They reek of spirits despite being filthy from wear and mud. Kei imagines he can hear them hiss as they touch the water in the washing machine. He sticks his hands into the water for good measure, sinking his hand deep into the drum to scoop up a handful of grainy salt to scrub at his skin.
He lets the washer close with a bang. He picks up Tadashi’s wallet and shattered-screened cellphone with the tips of his fingers, holding them away from him. He kicks the black-tinged crystal in front of him, unwilling to even touch it.
The wallet and phone get put into bags of rock salt, each topped off with a piece of quartz that had been left in the sunlight. He seals the bags and sets them on the counter.
“Ugh,” he mutters to himself, eyeballing the chunk of crystal on the floor. It was lucky, he guesses, that Tadashi had stumbled upon using quartz as a protection stone, but it was obvious he had no idea what he was doing.
And Tadashi wanted Kei to teach him how to do it, it seems. Kei clicks his tongue and turns away from the makeshift necklace, reaching for a jar of clear water from the cabinet above him.
“Shit,” he sighs. “The last one. Dammit. First the glasses and now this.”
He rubs the back of his neck and looks between the jar and the sullied rock on the ground.
He could just… not purify it correctly. That’s an option. Tadashi wouldn’t know the difference. He wouldn’t know to blame Kei when the rock eventually rejected itself and started projecting the negative energies it’d absorbed.
Kei could send him on his way, hand him a bag of rock salt and clean clothes, and never see him again. He could keep the water for himself, and his own misogi. He would never have to know what would happen after they part ways.
He didn’t have to utilize all his supplies, leave himself open and vulnerable, in a state where he couldn’t help himself. He didn’t have to make himself helpless.
The memory flashes through his mind, unbidden.
A hand, reaching out from the blackness. Clawing at the ground.
He’s not helpless anymore, he tells himself quietly. He knows where to get the things he needs, and knows how to barter for them. He’s not ignorant anymore.
There’s no need for anyone to die because of his own lack of action.
He unscrews the lid of the jar very carefully, and uses it to scoop the makeshift amulet off of the floor, much like he would scoop a particularly large insect onto a piece of paper before flinging it out the window.
He lets the crystal tumble into the water; he screws the lid on as quickly as he can, cutting off the high pitched whistle the amulet was beginning to make underwater.
Around the glass edges of the jar, the water roils like it’s boiling, and the glass shakes. Kei sets it carefully into the sink, where it can tumble off of the shelf or counter and break—he hadn’t been warned about the immediate effects of misogi on sealed objects the first time he’d dropped something into the pure well-water.
The jar had rolled off of the counter and shattered, releasing a very agitated spirit in Kei’s kitchen. Iwaizumi had roared in laughter when Kei went back the next day, battered and agitated and down at least fifty gallons of ritual water; Kei never wants to repeat the experience. He swears he still finds broken glass to this day.
He runs a hand through his hair and sighs for what seems like the fiftieth time that hour, contemplating the next course of action:
Tadashi obviously wants him to tell him about spirits and exorcising them, but…
Kei stiffens, every hair on his neck rising as the scent of corpses overwhelms him again. It’s stronger now, undiluted.
He hears a crow caw outside of his window. It continues shrieking and the scent and presence grows stronger. The scar on his shoulder burns and aches, his fear as pain that drips into his bones.
It’s the scent and presence of a very, very potent spirit—Kei can only identify it as that of a demon, and it’s one he’s vaguely familiar with. Kei backs up against the counter; whatever it is, it is in his apartment and it’s coming closer. Towards him.
“Thanks for the clothes, Tsukishima—they’re a bit big, but it’s nice to wear something clean, you know?”
Kei’s eyes track to his guest. It takes him a moment to process the information that’s hitting his senses: the smell, the pressure at the back of his skull, the crow’s cry and the sound of wings—they’re all connected.
It’s Tadashi.