Chapter Text
Fujiwara no Mokou sat against a bamboo shoot, blowing the smoke from her kiseru into the night air. A fire crackled in front of her, kept alive from a steady stream of split bamboo she'd occasionally toss in. She could have also just used pyrokinesis, but that meant concentrating on keeping the flame alive, which was a problem when all she wanted at the moment was to space out and think of nothing.
Mokou slouched with another puff, staring at the darkened skies. It was probably pretty cloudy since she couldn't see any stars.
After another minute of blankly staring, she noticed there wasn't any moonlight either. Good. She snorted and took another sip from her pipe.
Mokou closed her eyes, her kiseru falling out of her mouth and spilling tobacco all over the ground. She held her breath, heat warming her lungs.
"Smoking's bad for you, you know."
Now, were she caught in this position a few centuries ago, she probably would have shot up fast enough to break the sound barrier while violently coughing and would maybe turn the trespasser into a smear on the ground. But now?
Mokou lazily exhaled through her nostrils, not bothering to dignify the voice with a response. The shuffling of clothes and the scraping of boots against the ground meant they probably got comfortable by the fire. Were she young enough to still give a damn, she probably would have put it out just to spite them, assuming they weren't already turned into charcoal.
"Apparently," the voice was irritatingly chipper and Mokou began to seriously consider putting the flames out anyway, "it can cause lung cancer, which is when the stuff in your lungs start growing out of control, and then it gets so hard to breathe that you end up dying of asphyxiation, or something like that."
After trying and failing to come up with a witty retort, the immortal only grumbled. "Good," she muttered, and she would have taken another swig from her kiseru to prove her point, but it lay in a cold heap somewhere beside her.
Mokou listened half-heartedly for any more movement indicating the intruder had walked away, but she only heard the crackling of a fire she couldn't see. Well, as long as she didn't have to talk, she guessed it was fine.
"...Almost sounds like you want to die..." the voice finally broke the silence, and something in her ticked.
"Do you?" She shot back, a spike of irritation hitting her.
"Hell no!" Was the intruder's exaggerated response, and Mokou immediately knew she'd never get along with this guy. "Dying hurts, you know! I try to avoid it if I can help it!"
That made Mokou pause. Loud and annoying as he was, the connotations were not lost on her. She didn't like dying all that much either. The aches that came after were always a bitch to deal with.
She tried to shift the pipe in her mouth, only to remember it was on the ground. She instead licked her teeth.
"Not what I meant," Mokou began, testing the waters. A hot fire sparked in her chest. "Do you... do you want to die and stay dead, is what I mean."
She felt a similar fire once, a long, long time ago. Right before she got her mitts on that damn elixir, when she was young and stupid and had no idea what she was getting herself into. She recognized the feeling, tried to quash it down, but at the same time...
The stranger never answered her. Maybe she could get along with this guy.
Mokou opened her eyes.
Sitting cross-legged before the fire was a raven-haired man adorned in a long, black cloak that draped against the grass he sat on. His cheek rested on a fist covered in black markings, and a tattered green sleeve wrapped around an arm. A dirty orange scarf covered his neck, and more notably, a whip coiled at his hip. The man craned his neck over, and Mokou swallowed.
Staring into her own were the eyes of a rotting corpse. Someone who had seen death far more times than either of them could care to count, and she briefly wondered if this was really the same overbearing, obnoxious intruder that wormed into her privacy only a minute ago.
"You're like me." She only realized she even said anything after she processed her own words. Another few seconds and she realized the man had said the same thing she did. The man widened his eyes a fraction, blinked in apparent surprise, then chuckled and shook his head. It was almost eerie how animated his actions were in comparison to what lay behind those dead eyes.
Then the stranger pushed himself up on his feet, a cocky smile that looked completely out of place plastered on that face of his. He jutted his hips out, placed a hand on his side, and pointed skyward in an incredibly stupid-looking pose. Mokou had to rub her eyes to make sure her boredom didn't get so bad that she started hallucinating.
"Natsuki Subaru, at your service! Homeless, clueless, broke beyond compare, and completely and utterly lost at the moment! Nice to meet you!"
Mokou, bewildered, only noticed the newly named Natsuki Subaru's outstretched hand after she let go of it.
"Mokou." Her mouth twitched, and she concluded that she must be smiling.
And so, for the first time in... probably her entire life, thinking about it, Fujiwara no Mokou had made a friend.