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1.
Your purpose , he has been told from the earliest age he can remember, is this.
He carefully watches his parent clip branches from the fruit tree.
If we leave the unfruitful and corrupted branches, it will stunt the rest of the tree. The purpose of the tree is to make fruit for us—you like the fruit, don’t you?
He nods. The figs from this tree are delicious. He reaches up for the smallest one on a lower-hanging branch.
His parent pulls the branch out of reach, smiling.
If you don’t fulfill your purpose, you will disappoint me. You will have to make up for it, otherwise I might be very angry with you.
His parent looks at him, head at a slight tilt, cheeks still lifted in a gentle smile.
I could make another of you. Did you know that? And I could unmake you, as easily as I could break these shears. You are my creature, Yaboku. My tool.
He is given the shears, handle first.
Now, little one. Do as your father tells you.
2.
“Alone, alone, alone…alone again!!”
There is a guttering spark of hope still in his heart that Tomone will hear him and turn back, offer herself as his shinki, apologize for abandoning him so cruelly—just so he could laugh in her face, and maybe kick some dirt on her clothes as well.
But he wouldn’t do that.
If Tomone turned around—which didn’t seem likely, since she had in fact vanished a good ten minutes previously without a glance backward—Yato would take her again. He’s familiar with the feeling of being weaponless, but that doesn’t make it particularly nice.
He grabs a can of spray paint as though it could serve as a divine blade, and begins busily defacing the nearest bridge with his phone number.
He lifts his voice in a misery-laden crescendo:
“Aloooooone…AGAAAAAAAIN!!!”
“Shut up!” shouts the red-faced, wild-haired wino camping under the bridge. He chases Yato down the street, brandishing a half-empty bottle.
Yato loses his pursuer quickly–it’s nice to be able to fade into the background in such moments. He slinks into the shadows of a shrine, fingers tight around the neck of his own glass bottle. The heavy clink of the coins is comforting. Now that Tomone is gone, it is also his main weapon.
He lies down under one of the benches, trying to trick his mind into spinning a dream of his own lavish shrine. Covered in gold, studded with gems, absolutely lousy with shrine-maidens…it will be the best shrine, certainly for any god in the country, perhaps even the world.
Yato goes to sleep, smiling, hugging his bottle, the grandiose architecture of his imagination wrapping him as soundly as any blanket.
He won’t fade forever.
3.
As Yato watches his new shinki sleep the dreamless sleep of the dead, he considers his options.
He just wanted a weapon. What he got was…this.
Responsibility.
He hasn’t had much to do with that concept for a number of years. Perhaps, in fact, he never has had a single responsibility, which is what makes this situation so damn uncomfortable.
Now he has two charges: a foul-mouthed, broken-hearted child ghost, and the human girl who guilted him into keeping that ghost around.
“He’s your responsibility,” she had said, ad nauseam. What she hadn’t said was: So am I.
It should be so easy to be rid of them both. And they are both truly massive problems for him.
The kid would be easy enough to get rid of, as long as he doesn’t think about it too hard. That girl though…she might be more complicated. But his cuts have always been clean. For now, she’s not the problem.
Yato knows, even before he spends the rest of the night convincing himself how bad an idea it is, that he won’t revoke Yukine’s name.
It will be the hardest thing he’s ever done.
4.
The work takes less time than he thought.
He makes sure the hole is deep enough, and digs an extra two feet for good measure. He takes up his light burden and lays it within the earth. He entrusts it to the living soil that will make new things, growing things, out of something that should have been new and growing itself.
Because it takes less time than he thought, and also because he cannot yet make himself leave the little mound alone there on the hill, he sits there for a time. He wanders off after a while, comes back with a pack of cheesy buns, and eats all but one. The last he sets, carefully, on the overturned dirt.
Then he walks away.
5.
In the end, the decision is his.
A soft, helpless voice deep inside him—a voice that sounds like Hiiro’s—asks:
Will it be worth it? Will they be happier without you? Really, truly happier?
Then growing to a shriek inside him, nearly physical in its desperation: Is this the only way?
And it is. The only way he can go, after all, is toward the thing that made him, and toward the thing that will unmake him. He doesn’t mind that. He’s already been lucky enough to find happiness twice, which is two times more than he deserved.
He closes his eyes, feeling Kazuma’s impatience growing with every second of delay. His newest shinki’s willingness to toss both their existences on the fire without a second thought is something Yato never thought he would value, but it certainly serves his ends now.
The image of the little shrine flashes through his mind, hooking his heart like a struggling fish. The scarred fingers that built it—how long can their owner keep waiting for him? How hard can she possibly believe in him? How much does he deserve that faith?
After all, he tried so hard to chase her off. Her first prayers to him were in the form of ghosted texts and screened calls. She had been his first, his only, his most relentless worshiper, and he had spurned her for it.
Here, at the start of the day and at the end of the world, Yato only knows that he owes her a debt.
You’ve been my god of fortune for a long time.
He opens his eyes, and across the dark and silent space between them, he senses Kazuma sit up. The dawn is gray and still, holding its breath, until Yato says:
“All right. It’s time to go.”