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The day before her second Summer Performance, Kisa’s not nervous at all.
A year ago, she felt like a taut ball of nerves threatening to snap into a thousand different pieces, but her act is now complete. If anyone suspects she's not a boy, they don't say it, at least not out in the open, and with so many performances under her belt, she's more worried for the first years, if anything.
Still, it's nice to go out on afternoons like these once classes let out to the forest, where it feels like Tsuki’s guidance is in the warm breeze and the swishing leafy branches that smatter the path up Mount Oodate. It helps to clear her head, to remind her that everything will work out for the best.
She knows the path like the back of her hand at this point, greeting each landmark like an old friend. More than a few hours go by as she leisurely makes her way up the mountain and arrives at a specific stump. When she gets there, Tummy’s already holding the space for her, skittering off the chopped wood to nip at her shoes and trill out a welcome.
She picks him up—he lets her, nowadays—and she takes a seat with him curling around one of her shoulders. Content, she hums a bit, the tune escaping her with nostalgia. Beyond the Plane Tree. Tummy seems to perk up at the song, bobbing his head slowly, almost like a concertgoer waving a lighter.
“Ha, you like that?” she asks, gently scritching a finger under his neck. “I can come back and sing for you again, if you’d like.”
He squeaks with excitement.
“Okay, okay, you got it.”
“No, I swear I heard singing,” Oshinari says in the courtyard during lunch, so loud that even Ataru, who’s sitting across the way with Dante and Nagayama, can hear. “I just went to go take some photos of the hydrangeas, and I heard this creepy voice from deeper in the forest!”
“Maybe someone was just practicing?” Ichinomae suggests.
“Why the hell would someone practice in the woods when we have perfectly good rehearsal spaces?”
“Probably to avoid you,” Ushiro snickers to a now-fuming Minorikawa.
Dante and Nagayama seem to have picked up on the conversation, too, all three of them now eyeing the group. “That wouldn’t be too unusual,” Nagayama finally whispers. “I thought I heard a voice on a hike last year. I asked my brother, and he said there were similar rumors when he was younger. He said it’s the spirits of departed students trying to guide lost souls back to the mortal world.”
“Really?” Ataru says flatly. “Spirits?”
“Whether you like it or not, it’s an explanation.” Dante shrugs a bit, the conversation lapsing into silence after that.
Afternoon rehearsals come and go, and after dinner, Ataru looks outside from his room, considering everything Nagayama said. It’s ridiculous, really: ghosts aren’t real, and there’s surely a logical answer for whatever’s happening on Mount Oodate.
There’s still daylight. No harm in checking the area out until the sun starts setting. He pulls on his sneakers and heads out into the waning heat.
Tummy circles Kisa happily after her fifth song, demanding more.
“Another?” she asks in disbelief. The sun’s starting to set behind the rolling hills of Tamasaka, so far down and far away that their lush green appears as a distant, hazy blue. A cool evening breeze flutters through the clearing, giving her just enough energy to say, “Alright, just a couple more. But then I really have to go, okay?”
He chitters, as if he actually understands.
She sings until the sky blazes orange, then dims to a light navy. The stars start tentatively dotting the sky, as if peeking out to catch a snippet of the melodies that drift out between the trees.
Eventually, Tummy falls asleep on her lap, content. While Kisa’s more than happy to keep humming and petting him for a while, eventually, it starts getting uncomfortably cool for summer, an eerie fog settling in that starts chilling her to the bone, but she can’t exactly shift much, lest she disturb his rest. Instead, she pauses her song, carefully lifts him, then sets him down next to her on the stump. He doesn’t stir too much; he just curls in on himself a bit more.
It’s then that she hears it: a snapping in the brush nearby. It’s nothing more than a twig at first, something that she writes off as just a squirrel or maybe a fox that’s made a misstep, but it starts getting louder and closer.
A… a deer, then.
She starts to see movement, leaves and branches giving way to something taller.
Definitely not a deer.
“H-hello?” she asks. She chides herself. In all of the horror movies Sou’s talked her into watching, how many times did the ghost actually respond before killing its victim? No response, not that she expected one. The disturbance gets louder still, before finally, she sees a human silhouette, like a walking shadow. She can't help but scream.
“Tachibana? Woah, hey, it’s just me!”
She recognizes the voice, boyish but steady. “Kasai!?”
“Yeah, it’s just me, okay?”
As he emerges fully into the clearing, she calms down enough to make sure it's actually him. Dyed pink hair. Wide, concerned fuschia eyes, vivid even in the dying light of sunset. Those same blue sneakers he wears with everything. Relieved, she sighs, “You scared me.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to. I was just looking into something I heard about some mysterious singing on the mountain,” he explains. “Looks like I found the source.” He’s oddly sheepish, running his hand across the back of his neck with the trace of a smile on his face. “Now I just feel a bit guilty for intruding.”
“It’s fine,” she says. “I was just singing to Tummy, anyway.”
His head cocks in confusion. “Tummy?”
“Oh! You haven’t met him.” She gestures to where he’s sleeping; or rather, where he was just moments ago. “Huh. He must’ve left.” She looks back to Kasai, who now seems even more bewildered, and she explains, “He’s a weasel who lives on the mountain. He visits me here sometimes. He likes my singing, I think.”
“Ha, I can’t blame him,” Kasai says, and Kisa can't help but be a bit surprised that he just accepts the explanation without hesitation. He eyes where Tummy was situated—she nods, and he takes a seat. “It’s nice here. I can see why you like it.”
“Yeah. It’s a nice place to be alone.”
Another pang of uncharacteristic remorse flits across his face. “Oh, I—”
“Oh, that’s not what I meant!” she hurries to say. “I just mean that…”
“You don’t have to explain,” he promises her. “I get it. Sometimes a good place to be by yourself is the only place you can really be yourself, right?”
Does he know, too? She doesn’t dare ask—that’s generally how she’s been avoiding the conversation with everyone else—but she does watch him carefully, looking for any sign that he’s implying something. He doesn’t break eye contact, instead meeting her with unwavering faith.
Ah. He knows.
“Yeah,” she says.
Kasai opens his mouth, like he’s about to say something, but she hears more noise before he can respond: this time, it's a howling of the wind that sounds closer to a pained wail. She jumps, and instinctively, she finds herself clutching Kasai’s arm.
“S-sorry!” she stammers, removing herself immediately. “I just heard something again.”
“It’s okay,” he says, smiling. It looks like his cheeks might be tinted, too, but that could be just a trick of the light. “I think it's about to start raining. The fog and the wind,” he explains, looking up at the overcast sky, which has gotten dark pretty quickly, even for the end of the day. “We should get going.”
She nods wordlessly, getting up to fall in step alongside him. They wind their way through the forest, Kisa eventually taking the lead to keep them both from getting lost, but at one point, they find themselves in the clearing they started in.
Ataru’s pretty sure he notices before Tachibana does—the fog is dense everywhere but the clearing, after all—but he can see the moment the lightbulb goes off. She turns to him, a bit of shame written on her face, and she says, “I think we’re back where you found me.”
“No worries,” he says coolly. “I don’t mind the extra time with you at all.”
And, god, he feels a bit terrible, but the bashful face that Tachibana makes is one of his favorites. Her mouth slackens, like she can’t quite believe what he’s said and is trying to find a way to brush it off as just two guys being friendly, but surely she’s figured out that he knows by now.
Not that it would have mattered anyway.
It’s then that he feels it. A fat drop of water, right on his nose. It’s so big it splats onto his lashes, causing him to flinch.
Tachibana, previously wound up with tension and clearly a bit spooked by the wind and the snapping branches, laughs. Loudly. “S-sorry again!” she says, getting herself under control with a hand pressed over her mouth. “It’s just—haha!—you looked funny like that.”
“Can’t say I like being the butt of the joke, but it’s good to see you’re feeling better,” he says with mirth. Seeing that look on her face again, he feels his posture settle into something more relaxed, something more gentle. “Hey, Tachibana?”
“Yeah?”
Something in the back of his head tells him this isn’t the time, nor the place, especially not with the large globs of rain starting to pick up. “Never mind,” he says, shaking his head and replacing whatever expression he was wearing with what he hopes is a reassuring smile. “Do you remember how you got here?”
“Yeah, but it’s hard to see in the fog,” she says, perplexed. Before she can speak further, though, a chittering gets closer, surprisingly to Tachibana’s relief.
“Tummy!” She hears him before the both of them see him scamper up the stump again, standing on his hind legs. “What are you doing back here?”
He—Tummy, the weasel, Kasai processes—squeals, chasing his own tail in a circle on the stump before racing off into the forest.
Seconds later, Tachibana’s grabbing his hand with an urgent, “C’mon!” and leading him into the thick of the forest after Tummy, the trees shielding them from the rain that picks up to an almost deafening thunder as it hits the canopy of the forest, but not the fog that once again gets so thick that he can’t even see Tachibana in front of him. He’s effectively blinded, but she squeezes his hand once in a while as if to say, still here. It brings him more comfort than he cares to admit.
When they finally make it back—about half an hour later—to a clearly marked trail from which they can see the entrance, the rain has subsided completely along with the wind, and the sky is as clear as it was when he left. Something about that seems wrong, but Tachibana turns around with a smile so bright it almost blinds him again, and he can’t help but beam back.
When she looks forward again, though, she sighs. “Aw,” she says, sounding disappointed. “I wanted to thank Tummy for getting us back safely.” He hears her say something else, but he’s too hung up on her previous words until she waves her free hand in front of his face and calls, a bit louder, “Hey, Kasai, are you okay?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah,” he says, letting her go and trying to force an easy smile. “So, you really think he brought us back? I couldn’t see a thing in that fog.”
She doesn’t seem to be buying his act of composure; she averts her gaze and looks toward the treeline. “Yeah, he does that, sometimes. He’s always there when you least expect it. I didn’t even need to see him, really, I can just sort of… sense him?”
She says that as if she’s just talking about the weather, but Nagayama’s stories come back to him, and he can feel a chill down his spine.
Spirits, lost students—no, he reminds himself, none of that is real. The real person who was singing and the real person who brought him back are one in the same, and she’s standing right in front of him. He grounds himself in the concerned look she gives him, and says, “Well, either way, you really saved me there. Thanks.”
“I should be thanking you. If you hadn’t been there, I’d probably have been to afraid to move.”
“Yeah, I getcha,” he breathes out.
It’s only then that he realizes he’s given her too much to read into. It’s too late, though. Hearing that, her concern seems to finish running its course. Her frown curls up into a bit of a teasing smirk, and she asks, “Oh. Were you scared, too?”
He barely remembers how he dodges the question, but the greatly amused look on Tachibana’s face as he ends the conversation and makes a beeline back to campus stays on his mind for the rest of the night.