Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Being trapped in haunted residences, at this point, was par for the course for SPR. Of course, that did not mean that any of them were happy to be trapped inside an old estate located high up in the mountains, temporarily abandoned by its superstitious owners while they investigated, but it was not as bad as it could be, since the residence had a stocked kitchen and such.

They’d manage for a bit.

If that were all it was, however.

But when the women of the team entered the base on the second morning of the training, panicked, it was clear something had gone wrong.

Upon going back to the girls’ room, they realized that it was because Mai had gone missing from her bed...

But Naru was the one that heard a sound from under the bed and stepped forward to kneel—and met the large, somewhat frightened brown eyes of a small child.

His immediate thought was an impossible and improbable assumption he was tempted to throw out immediately.

“...Who are you?” he asked, even as he already knew the answer. He knew that face, after all, even if it was much tinier and rounder than it ought to be.

“...Kaa-shan says no talking to shtrangers. Even if Nii-shan ish pretty.”

“...Your...kaa-san...sent me to take you back to her,” Naru blatantly lied. “Mai, right?”

“Nii-shan knowsh my name?”

He held out his hand, and as Takigawa said, “Naru-bou, who on earth are you talking to?” pulled out what appeared to be a Mai that had barely reached toddlerhood and didn’t even reach Naru’s knees.

Everyone gaped.

When Naru tried to stand, the toddler Mai refused to release his hand, and he abruptly realized he’d have no choice but to pick her up or shake her off, the latter of which he was reluctant to do for reasons he didn’t want to consider.

As he picked her up, the silence became prolonged, but it was finally broken by—

“That can’t be Mai,” Ayako said slowly.

“Mai ish Mai,” Mai immediately disagreed. Then she clutched at Naru’s shirt while also making a game attempt at sticking her thumb in her mouth, to his disgust.

“How old is she?”

This stunned question from John, thankfully, prevented the thumb-sucking as Mai proudly held up four stubby fingers and announced her age.

They were off to a great start. Trapped in the house, little to no information to go on, and one of their mediums was currently a toddler, by sone curse.

Perhaps Naru would wake up from this nightmare hallucination if he knocked his head into the door frame.

Unfortunately, he did not get the opportunity to bash his own head in. He was aware that it would not help the situation, after all, and the tiny Mai was still cradled in his arms.

He had expected a young Mai to eagerly soak up the attention of everyone around her, but after her initial bout of promptly responding to anything she was asked, she quickly became shy. He now had an armful of child tucking her face into his sweater and definitely stretching the fabric as she pulled on it.

“Nii-shan,” she mumbled. “Mai ish hungry.”

Naru gave an expectant look to the others, raising a brow. They could clearly hear her, couldn’t they?

“I’ll get a snack,” Ayako said.

“Bou-san, go with her. I don’t want to deal with a toddler version of Matsuzaki as well,” Naru ordered.

Ayako scowled at him, but Takigawa grimaced and nodded in agreement. The two left and headed to the kitchen.

Naru sat on Mai’s assigned bed, and then made a game attempt at putting Mai on the bed instead of his lap. It was entirely unsuccessful; tiny Mai was not budging. It seemed she was as stubborn as her more mature counterpart.

She looked up at him curiously. “Nii-shan is pretty.”

“You have good taste,” he said, feeling a vague sort of amusement.

“What about me?” Yasuhara said, taking a seat beside Naru. “Aren’t I pretty, Mai-chan?”

To Naru’s surprise, Mai’s eyes lit up. However, the reason promptly became clear when she immediately shouted, “Shiny!” and tried to snatch Yasuhara’s glasses right off his face.

Naru managed to stop her without bursting into snickering. John, however, was unsuccessful at restraining his own laughter; Mai turned to look at him, easily distracted as most children were.

“Shunny onee-shan!” she exclaimed, pointing at him.

Naru snorted. Clearly, she had been prone to terrible nicknames since a very young age.

John looked torn between amusement and some level of genuine offense. “Ah, I’m actually an ‘onii-san’...”

Mai frowned. “Too pretty,” she rejected.

“...But Naru is an onii-san, isn’t he?” John tried.

Mai nodded. “Pretty onii-shan. Not ash pretty ash onee-shan.”

Naru had the faint sense that Mai didn’t have any word for aesthetically pleasing beyond pretty, which was probably why she was using this sort of logic. Or any actual concept of how gender worked, but she was four, so that was a given.

Eventually, the pair that had left returned with a small bowl of rice, topped with dried seaweed flakes. Naru expected Mai to be displeased with the food, but she seemed enthusiastic about it—had he been a child that wasn’t a starving orphan who ate whatever he could get his hands on, he certainly wouldn’t have chosen to eat plain rice—then he remembered she was a Japanese child, and this was probably staple fare for her.

Once she was done eating, it was time to discuss what exactly their next steps would be.

Little Mai was an enigma, Naru decided. She was so similar and yet so different to the older Mai in ways that were unexpected, and not simply because she was a small child whereas the usual Mai was on the cusp of adulthood.

Naru had seen Mai grow from a teenager into an adult, had undergone that process alongside her—but he hadn’t known what she’d been like before that. He’d never met a version of Mai who was secure in the love of a family save for the one who had grown to perceive SPR as one—the very intersection of his and Mai’s lives had only been because they were both orphans.

But this tiny Mai was even freer with her affection than the Mai he knew.

She was honest, as his own Mai was, not simply in her joy but her sadness too. His—their Mai was free with her anger and her happiness, but rarely so with her sorrow, unless it was for another.

The tiny Mai had tripped over her feet once and immediately burst into tears, heralding the panic of the whole team—including Naru himself, though he’d made sure to not show it—until John had knelt and soothed her gently.

She hadn’t even injured herself, really. It had been the surprise change in position that had caused her tears. Children were so nonsensical, in that regard.

More than that, what eluded his understanding was her fondness of him.

He could attribute it to the fact that she liked the way he looked, but she liked Ayako’s and John’s appearances and Lin’s and Takigawa’s heights as well—yet time after time, she crawled back into his lap and smiled up at him in a way that made something inside him hollow out strangely.

“Nii-shan,” she said. “Mai shaw a fake Nii-shan in her shleep.”

He raised a brow. “What did the fake Nii-sh—san say?”

She shrugged. “Dunno. Mai kicked him. Mai din’t like that he wash shmiley.”

That...would be an issue. He restrained his grimace. “Listen to him, next time. He’s actually my nii-san.”

It was strange to call Gene like that—he’d only ever used ‘aniki’ with him.

“Nii-shan’s Nii-shan...sho he’sh Nii-Nii!”

Naru would not only pay to see the look on Gene’s face when Mai called him that, but also the scene of the tiny Mai kicking his brother out of her astral plane. Unfortunate that he couldn’t.

“Did you see anything else?” he asked, patting her head gently.

“Hmmm...” she scrunched up her face in deep thought. “Shaw Ayaya kishing Bou-shan.”

He wrinkled his nose. He didn’t need to know about that. “Besides that.”

She shrugged. “Dunno. Wanna nap.”

Well, that part of her wasn’t any different. “Then nap,” he allowed, and watched until she fell asleep against his chest.

Chapter Text

In the end, the entity that had cursed Mai into a child had turned out to be a demon born from the spirits of countless deceased children; a demon that had devoured the very man that had killed them all, and then used other adults to lure in more prey to kill. The children had all been psychic in some way, shape, or form—that was what had allowed them to force one of SPR’s own to regress into a child state.

The intention had been to possess Mai’s body and leave the place—of course, against SPR’s combined efforts, they had failed, but they’d left an—according to Lin, temporary—curse in their wake. Mai was back to normal, despite remembering all of her mortifying behavior from her time as a child—but now, a scraggly-haired, tiny Naru wearing an oversized, patchy shirt and too large pants was tucked into her arms.

His first question had been—

“Where’s Aniki?”

When John had awkwardly answered that he wasn’t there at the moment, the tiny Naru had stared blankly, then said—

“Like Kazuko?”

Suffice to say, it had been the opposite of how Mai’s introduction had gone. Little Naru didn’t respond to any names—when they’d called him Naru, he’d looked only mildly perplexed. It had been Takigawa that had noticed this and asked him what his name was.

“…Don’t have one yet,” he had said. “Was going to pick with Aniki.”

He didn’t look sad, or even tear up. Mai thought that was the worst part.

Still, he easily took to being called Naru. It took some time to coax him into being willing to be carried by one of them, but eventually, he’d been willing to trust Mai.

Now, they were at the SPR office, and he had yet to leave her lap. Mai wasn’t quite sure what to do with him—surely Lin would take him, when they had to leave for the day?

But when she queried Lin about this, the man stared at her with horror.

“No,” a voice said. It wasn’t Lin’s, but that of the child in her lap. “Not going with him. Don’t like him.”

Mai bit her lip. “He’s your babysitter.”

“Shitty babysitter,” Little Naru said frankly—where had he even learned to talk like that!?

“That’s a bad word!” she scolded, but he simply clutched tighter at her sleeves.

Mai was stunned as he looked up at her with wide, pleading eyes. Naru—Naru, of all people—had been capable of playing cute at some point in his life? What kind of strange creature was this!?

“Please?” he asked.

She folded like a house of cards. “…Fine. You can come home with me.”

The pleading look was gone instantly, replaced with a distinctly smug smirk. The little con-artist!

Little Naru had, upon entering her apartment, immediately developed a deep fascination with her kotatsu.

So far, as she had set her kettle to boiling and then set the timer on her rice cooker, she had watched as he had first stuck a single finger under the blanket, then half of his arm. He had done the same with a toe, and then his foot. She’d watched as he’d stuck both feet underneath, then both arms, and then—

“Not your head!” she yelped.

Naru stopped at looked at her. “Why?”

Even at this age, he was already a little scientist. His method of examining the kotatsu had been as meticulous as an adult Naru’s methods for examining the location of a case.

“You might get hurt,” she said. It was unlikely that he would, of course, but he was so small, and it was so easy for him to get trapped under there or bump into something.

Really, it was just that his size made her genuinely aware of how human and fragile Naru really was. Even Naru, at some point, had been a tiny baby.

A tiny, very curious, baby. For an older Naru, that curiosity had thinned to solely encompass the field of hunting ghosts—but little Naru, it seemed, had yet to lose that desire to learn about everything else in the world, too.

“But there’s no hurt on it,” he countered.

She blinked at him. “What do you mean?”

He poked at the blanket, and then the table. “It’s warm. Good warm. Like you. Everything you have is warm.”

Everything she had was…? Oh, she realized. Naru didn’t have control over his psychometry yet, at this age. He must have been getting emotions and memories off of everything—no wonder he’d been reluctant to touch anything that wasn’t her, if that was how he’d been perceiving things.

But it was strange to have the sense that the things she owned were—filled with pleasant memories, rather than loneliness. It wasn’t something she could ask a child about, though.

“Is that why you wanted to come home with me?” she asked, taking a seat at the kotatsu next to him.

He nodded. “If Aniki’s not here, then it’s hard to find them. Warm things.”

“I see. None of the others felt warm to you?”

He frowned slightly. “...The father. But churches are bad. They kill witches.”

Mai blinked. “Witches?”

“Like me. And you. Jeffrey said.”

Mai hoped she never met Naru’s biological parents face-to-face. The consequences of their actions were making her feel the same violent urges she’d once only felt towards a certain teacher that had driven a student to the point of suicide.

“Alright,” she said. “You can stay here. But we’re going to have to see the others tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“I work with them.”

Little Naru frowned. Then he said, “When I grow up, I’m only going to work for myself,” he said.

She almost burst into laughter.

Little Naru had curled up next to her in the futon eventually, but not until after several questions had been asked about why she slept on a blanket on the floor.

“And why do you live in a tiny place?” he said. “Can’t those other people give you more money?”

This was, of course, not the reason that Mai still lived in the small apartment that she did. She lived there because she had bought the place herself shortly after finishing college and moving out of student housing, and because she genuinely preferred small, cozy spaces.

“I like my tiny place,” she answered simply. “I’m the only one here, after all.”

Naru frowned at her, and then pointed at himself. “Wrong. I’m here, too.”

She gave him a wry smile. “But you’ll be going home soon, you know.”

He shook his head, and then tucked himself against her body, grasping her arm tightly. “No. I’m going to stay. When I find Aniki, I’m going to bring him here. This is better than home.”

She sighed a little, and stroked his hair. “Alright, Naru. You can stay.”

“And Aniki too?”

“And your brother, too.”

The next morning, she woke up next to a fully grown Naru wearing the same clothes he had when he’d been cursed—including the shoes. He had nearly torn her futon trying to get his feet out.

Of course, neither of them were particular uncomfortable with having shared a futon—they’d done it before on cases, after all, and, well—

“My younger self had a point,” Naru said as he sipped at the tea she’d made. “I pay you more than enough to find a better place than this.”

“I like this place,” she answered, as she had when they’d had this discussion before. “It’s homey. And it’s familiar.”

Naru hummed. “...If familiar is what you want, why don’t you just move in with me?”

She blinked at him.

And there was that, of course. They had been in a relationship for almost a year, now.

“...Well,” she said. “I...guess I could?”

“Good,” Naru said. “...Regarding the things I said as a child…”

She pursed her lips. “I...don’t usually ask you about your childhood. I know it was hard. But...if you’re okay with it...I wouldn’t mind hearing more, you know.”

“There aren’t many pleasant things to say about it.”

“I’d still want to hear.”

Naru nodded. “Then—I’ll extend the same offer to you.”

She blinked. “To me?”

“To listen to any tales you have about your childhood. It would make for a...balanced mood, I would think.”

She hummed. “My childhood is—was—really fuzzy to me, honestly. But after this...little things are a bit clearer. It’s nice.”

“Mhm.”

Later, Naru would quietly admit to her that having the memories of her, stuffed somewhere in between his childhood memories, somewhat distant but still strangely warm, had made the coldness of those memories melt just a little more than before.