Archive of Our Own

There was a time when Seiko Ayase believed she held the world in her palm.

A family.

The respect of her peers followed, grudging but undeniable. Old women who had once rapped her knuckles raw for a crooked seal now inclined their heads when she entered the room.

A legacy stretched behind her, swept clean each morning by generations of aching hands. Not power, precisely, though power came with it. Talent, certainly. The accumulated knowledge of an unbroken line, each technique honed and handed down, one careful hand to the next. She possessed the tools to face any obstacle, the wisdom to navigate any threat.

Perhaps it was telling, the order in which these things occurred to her. Perhaps if she had guarded her family as fiercely as her pride, the rest might not have unravelled as it did.

But Seiko Ayase had been young once, and the young mistake confidence for armour.

She made her choices. Some were mistakes. Some were betrayals wearing the mask of necessity. She was cast out, blood in her mouth and gravel in her palms, left to watch as the careful architecture of her life collapsed inward, room by room, soundless.

Her elders turned their backs, one by one.

Her partner disappeared into memory, then into nothing.

Her daughter—

Her daughter became a name she could barely speak, a ghost more present in its absence than any spirit she had ever banished.

Now Seiko Ayase carried different things: a weariness soaked into her bones like old smoke into cloth, a contract signed in blood with the god of the land, paid in prices she was still discovering.

And a granddaughter.

A granddaughter who laughed too brightly, too easily.

Who had inherited her mother's eyes and her grandmother's stubbornness.

Who had been touched by the supernatural and pulled into its undertow with nothing to protect her but an old woman who had already failed everyone she'd ever tried to save.

Years passed, each one somehow briefer than the last, as if time itself had grown impatient with her.

Seiko had become a different creature now: edges worn sharp rather than smooth, eyes that saw too much and expected too little. The world had taught her its lessons in blood and loss, and she had been an apt student.

She wrapped her granddaughter in every protection she knew, and the protections were a kind of cage. Every doorway warded twice, then three times, painted in salt and ink and a bead of her own blood pressed into the grain of the wood. Every window sealed with symbols that hurt to look upon directly, sliding out of focus if you tried to hold them. The shrine's boundaries drawn so tight the air inside them hummed against the teeth, until even the gentlest spirits turned back at the gate, repelled by something that whispered no.

Not here. Never here.

Twice that winter she found some small, nosing thing pressed flat to the outer ward like a moth against a lit window, and twice she burned it to ash before Momo woke.

Momo grew within those walls like a flower under glass. Alive, but pale. Safe, but wilting.

The training began when her granddaughter turned seven. Earlier than tradition dictated, earlier than kind, but Seiko had surrendered kindness for pragmatism long ago.

There was potential in Momo. The same spark Seiko had glimpsed in her daughter, that raw, unrefined gift she had mistaken for something that would survive without tending. Her daughter's power had bloomed wild and sudden in a single, terrible instant. An awakening that left Momo in an old woman's care and a mother's name too painful to speak.

Momo took to the lessons with dutiful focus, but she was no prodigy. Her barriers flickered. Her sight wavered. A paper charm that should have held for an hour curled black at the edges after three minutes. Some days, Seiko watched her struggle with basic wards and felt her chest tighten with a fear she refused to name.

It wasn't enough. It would never be enough.

And worse: the child was withering.

School became Momo's only reprieve, those precious hours within the reach of Seiko's patron god, where other children existed, where normalcy was permitted to flourish under divine protection. She would return with stories clutched like treasures: a classmate's joke, a teacher's praise, the mundane magic of a world that didn't smell of incense and old prayers.

The rest of her life was silence. Empty rooms while Seiko worked, fulfilling contracts written in blood and necessity, coming home with salt under her nails and the cold of some other place still clinging to her coat. A garden where Momo named the earthworms and built kingdoms for beetles, her voice bright and hollow as she narrated adventures to an audience of none.

Seiko would find her some evenings, seated at the kitchen table with two cups of tea poured, conversing earnestly with the empty chair across from her.

“Who are you talking to?” Seiko asked once.

“Nobody,” Momo replied, and her smile was so brave it cut.

Something in Seiko gave.

She began to bend her own rules. Small compromises at first. Bringing Momo along on the safest jobs, the ones barely worth her attention. A lingering presence in an abandoned house, too weak to manifest. The echo of a death that had left only cold spots and the faint smell of flowers. Cleansings that required nothing more than salt and words, where the greatest danger was the living who might ask questions.

Then larger risks. Supervised playdates where Seiko lurked beyond windows, smoking through one cigarette after another without tasting them. An afternoon at the library while she cleansed the building next door, one eye always turned towards the exit, counting the minutes until she could confirm her granddaughter still breathed.

Each small freedom was a calculated gamble, and Seiko knew exactly who would pay if she lost. But when Momo laughed, really laughed, not the careful performance she'd learned to give, Seiko found herself willing to wager more than wisdom advised.

She told herself it was strategy. A bitter child made mistakes. A lonely child grew reckless.

But late at night, watching Momo sleep with that same determined furrow in her brow her mother had worn, Seiko knew the truth. She was weak. Love had made her weak again, just as it had before.

It happened, as fear had always promised her it would.

An ambush on what should have been routine: a simple cleansing turned trap, orchestrated by enemies whose faces she couldn't place but whose hatred she recognised. She had accumulated so many over the years, each grudge a stone added to an avalanche waiting to fall.

She fought, but they had prepared for her. Each ward she raised, they split at the seam. Each technique she employed, they had foreseen. She was on the back foot. Not unusual in itself; she had survived worse odds.

But this time.

This time they had Momo.

There was a truth about yokai that too many forgot: they could not lie. Deceive, yes. Twist, mislead, imply. Seiko knew that intimately. But a plain statement from a yokai was true, or believed true, and that was often near enough to damn you.

So when the serpent yokai, its scales shifting through colours that left a pressure behind her eyes, coiled around Momo with its mouth already glistening and spoke, she knew it for prophecy.

“I will kill your granddaughter before your eyes, and you will know it was your arrogance that brought her here.”

The truth of it rang like a funeral bell.

Seiko fell to her knees. Then lower. Her hands flattened against the stone, her forehead following, groveling before the laughing creature. She begged her patron god first, though she could feel the contract pulled thin as old thread. Then every deity whose name she knew. Every spirit she had fed, bargained with, spared. She offered her remaining years. Her blood. Her sight. Anything that could be taken and counted as enough.

Silence answered. Whatever Seiko had left to give, it was not enough—nothing against the pure soul standing before her, small and trembling and brave.

Momo was smiling.

Even now, with the serpent’s jaw widening above her, her granddaughter's eyes were turned not inward but towards her. That small face held no accusation, no fear for herself—only sorrow for the grandmother who would be left behind. Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes and held there, bright and stubborn.

“It's okay, Granny,” Momo whispered.

The yokai's laughter became a shriek of triumph. Its jaw unhinged, stretching past what bone should allow.

Then the world was red.

Then silent.

The serpent withdrew and watched, tongue tasting the air, as Seiko crawled across stone that scraped her palms raw. It did not attack. Why would it? It had found what it came for.

She reached her granddaughter's body and drew it to her with shaking hands. Still warm. Still smiling, though now she could see where tears had finally escaped, tracing clean lines through dirt and blood.

Seiko gathered Momo to her, though there was too much wrong with the shape of her, pressing the pieces close as if love alone could undo reality. Prayer deserted her. Training deserted her. What remained reached blindly for anything that might listen. Not resurrection. She knew those prices too well. But for... she didn't know. Didn't care.

Please.

The word went on after her mouth stopped moving.

Please.

There was—

Something.

Light that wasn't light. The air went thin. The blood stilled in her ears. Her knees were still on stone, Momo still in her arms, and yet something beneath her had opened so wide she could not find the bottom of herself.

Something saw her.

And then she knew nothing at all.

When awareness returned, she was lying in her own bed, in her own home. The familiar scent of incense and old wood surrounded her, but it sat oddly in her nose, like a smell remembered rather than breathed.

Momo was pressed against her, warm and whole and breathing.

Breathing.

The serpent yokai was gone.

The air tasted different, though she couldn't say how. Incense, old wood, blood beneath her tongue, and under it all a new taste she had no name for.

Around Momo's neck sat a thin black band she had never worn before. A single teal gem rested in the hollow of her throat, its twin set at the nape of her neck.

The stones caught light from nowhere. Their surfaces held depths that seemed to continue past what the eye could follow.

When Seiko reached for it with her senses, the way she would test any unfamiliar object in her home, there was nothing to find. The wards did not see it. The house did not know it was there.

The child's eyes fluttered open. Her breath warmed Seiko's collarbone, and Seiko clutched her close.

Momo stirred against her and mumbled something about a strange dream.

Seiko held her so tightly her arms ached, and could not bring herself to ask which dream Momo meant.

She could not ignore it forever.

Some part of Seiko, the part that had spent years watching Momo fail at wards and sight-work, whispered that Momo's power had finally come in.

The rest of her, older and colder, knew better than to hope a dead child came back carrying only power.

The question was not whether Momo had changed.

It was how much.

It was among the rarer gifts her patron god granted: the ability to perceive deeper layers of the spiritual realm than mortal eyes could reach. Yokai and spirits lived closer to the dark than humans did. Gods lived closer still. By channelling her patron's sight, she too could glimpse such depths, if only for a moment.

Unlike most divine gifts, this one came without blood price or bitter bargain. She had used it liberally over the years, to assess threats before they fully manifested, to track lost spirits through the veils, to chart Momo's growing aura as training progressed.

She had looked upon her granddaughter's soul more times than she could count.

And yet it took her two weeks to gather the courage to attempt it.

“Momo,” she called, keeping her voice light. “Come here, sweetheart. Let's check your progress.”

Momo came readily, folding herself into position with practiced ease. But something in her movements seemed heavier. The floorboards answered too late beneath her feet. The air shifted after she had already stopped moving.

The air between them felt too thick. When Momo breathed, the room seemed to breathe with her. Walls expanded on her inhale, contracted on her exhale. Shadows pooled wrong around her feet, too dark, too deep, as if they continued down into spaces that shouldn't exist beneath solid floor.

Seiko smiled and settled into position, channelling her chi, preparing the aperture through which she would borrow divine sight.

Momo tilted her head.

She knew this routine. She should have been squirming with excitement, pushing her aura outward, trying to make her spiritual flame burn as bright as possible for grandmother's inspection. It was a game they'd played since she was seven.

Instead, she watched Seiko with quiet confusion, as if she'd forgotten the steps to a dance she'd once known.

A warning, perhaps. One Seiko ignored.

The circuit connected. Divine sight flooded through her.

And she saw.

She woke, once more, in her bed.

She could remember nothing beyond light. A mercy, she knew somehow, though she couldn't say who had granted it. When she carefully probed, Momo could give her even less. Only strange dreams she could not describe, and could not quite remember.

Seiko felt... strained. Her skin prickled under her sleeves, as if something in her had been rubbed raw. A tremor in her hands that wouldn't still. A ringing in her ears that grew louder whenever Momo entered the room. Nightmares that left her waking with her teeth clenched and no memory of why.

It took her three days to realize her sight had degraded. The world blurred at edges that had once been sharp. Text that should have been clear required squinting, then holding at arm's length, then setting the page down.

She needed glasses.

Her eyesight had always been perfect.

She took it in stride. She had to. For Momo's sake, she could bear the glasses, the headaches, the way Momo sometimes seemed to have a second shape at the edge of Seiko’s vision, gone the moment she looked straight at it. A cheap price, she told herself. Insultingly cheap.

The harder truth came later.

An emergency call pulled them out one evening. Nothing serious. A minor haunting in a shop whose owner paid well for discretion.

But Momo was with her, and Seiko couldn't leave her alone. Not anymore.

When the spirit proved more aggressive than expected, Seiko reached for her patron's gift by muscle memory, preparing to See deeper, to understand the threat's true nature.

Nothing.

The circuit wouldn't form. Where divine sight should have flooded through, only emptiness answered. Like reaching for a familiar door and striking bare wall.

She swallowed panic and fought blind, relying on decades of experience while her granddaughter watched with those too-quiet eyes. Momo did not scream. Did not ask what was wrong. When the spirit lunged, her gaze stayed fixed on Seiko’s face.

They survived.

Seiko hated that it had felt like luck.

It was only weeks later, investigating alone miles away from home while Momo slept, that muscle memory betrayed her again. She reached for the gift reflexively.

And it came.

Clear as ever, the patron's sight flooded through her, showing her the rot in the walls, the spirit crouched inside it, the old grief it had mistaken for hunger. She tested it twice more that night. Twice, the circuit formed. Twice, the sight came cleanly.

Not a punishment, then.

Which begged the question:

was her god trying to protect her from what she might see?

Or had her god flinched?

Sight was never a one-way thing. Not truly. If you could look at something, even using a god as your lens, it could look back.

In the days that followed, Seiko realized something had changed.

Not all at once. Not cleanly.

In absences, first.

Momo no longer laughed as she waved her hand through the tangled weave of the shrine's wards, pretending to stir their invisible threads. She no longer paused in doorways to peer at corners where the shadows sat wrong, or tilted her head towards the spirit-bell when it had not rung.

That did not stop the things lurking in the dark from seeing her, however.

But neither did she flinch when shadows bent the wrong way at her passing. She did not notice how her reflection sometimes lagged behind in glass, a heartbeat late in copying her smile, or how bathwater rippled outward from her body before she moved. She did not question the faint glint of teal that sometimes flickered in her eyes, or the choker around her neck, which never shifted, never loosened, and rested against her throat with the easy intimacy of skin.

Perhaps Seiko had been wrong before. Perhaps whatever had looked down on her broken granddaughter and brought her back had not acted out of curiosity.

She thought of Momo years younger, a summer child with an unburdened neck, crouched in the garden with dirt under her nails. She had lifted an earthworm from the path, worried, her small voice explaining that Jiji said it would die if left to dry in the sun. Seiko had watched as she carried it inside, full of soft conviction. And then, with the clumsy mercy of a child, she dropped it into a tub of water.

The worm writhed, drowning in the gift meant to save it, while Momo clapped her hands, certain she had done something kind.

Perhaps the thing that had reached for her granddaughter had thought no deeper than that. It had lifted Momo from the dirt, stitched her with strange threads, and returned her to a world where she could not breathe.

Perhaps, when it stripped from her the perception of half the world, the hidden, the uncanny, the terrible, it was not cruelty but the only way it knew to help.

Seiko had felt herself come apart after glimpsing that thing for only an instant. It had left her shaking for weeks, waking with blood on her pillow, dried beneath her nose and crusted at the corners of her eyes. What would it do to a person to carry such depths inside them? To look down at their hands and see eternity staring back?

To think that it may have been a kindness.

Somehow, that was even worse.

She still tried to train Momo, though it felt like correcting brushwork after the ink had vanished from the page. Without the ability to See, without even the memory of what she was meant to be looking for, every lesson became an exercise in futility.

She pushed harder. Fear drove her where wisdom should have counselled patience. She demanded the exercises daily, then twice daily. The wards. The meditations. The channelling rituals that should have awakened something, anything, in her granddaughter's veiled soul.

“Again,” she would say, cigarette trembling between her fingers. “You're not concentrating.”

But how could she correct what she couldn't perceive? How could she guide what she couldn't see?

Months passed that way. Then years. Momo lost baby teeth, grew into her school uniform, learned to tie her hair with quick, impatient hands. The lessons stayed the same. The incense burned down. The wards failed. Seiko said again, again, again, until the word lost all meaning between them.

Momo's resentment grew in small, ordinary ways. In bitten-off answers. In the stiff set of her shoulders when Seiko called her in from the garden. In the way she began to look embarrassed whenever a classmate caught her making the first shape of a channelling ritual with her hands.

No progress meant no defence against the teasing of children who called her grandmother a fraud, a crazy old woman playing with incense and superstition. Worse, it meant Momo had no defence against herself. The part of her that should have known better had been sealed away with everything else. Whatever certainty she had once carried had thinned, year by year, until there was nothing left for her to hold up against their laughter.

The girl who had once hung on Seiko's every word now rolled her eyes at each lesson.

“This is stupid,” Momo said at thirteen. “None of it's real.”

“It's necessary,” Seiko replied, the same words every time, unable to explain why.

By fourteen, Momo stopped arguing. Stopped training. Stopped talking beyond the minimum required to share a house. She moved through their home like a ghost herself, present but unreachable.

And yet.

The shadows that pressed against their wards made no move towards her granddaughter. Seiko could feel them watching, these hungry things that should have seen an untrained girl as easy prey. They saw Momo, she was certain of it. They saw her, and stayed away.

Perhaps they were as frightened as her god.

The thought should have been comforting. Instead, it left Seiko paralysed. She couldn't push harder without risking whatever slept beneath that choker. Couldn't draw Momo into the supernatural world without potentially waking it. Couldn't explain without knowledge she didn't possess.

So she accepted it. The resentment. The silence. The careful distance her granddaughter maintained, as if Seiko were something to be endured rather than loved.

Let Momo live a normal life. Let her think Seiko was embarrassing, even foolish. Let her go to school and make friends and dream ordinary dreams, never knowing what waited at the edge of them.

Never knowing what she had once been capable of. Just as unaware as Seiko herself was of what might still sit sealed beneath that black choker, waiting.

The years passed in careful silence, and Seiko told herself it was enough that her granddaughter was alive.

Even if that life had no room for her in it.

She found the boy on the path outside one day, hunched over her granddaughter's prone body.

The curse was on him, one of the most fearsome modern yokai burning through him. Not only in his eyes, but in the whole wrong shape of him, his body bent past boyhood into something stretched and grinning and barely contained by skin.

There was no time to decide what remained of the boy beneath it. Seiko saw only Momo on the ground, and the thing above her.

She moved.

By the time fear caught up with her, the curse was contained, the boy was still breathing, and Momo was inside the wards.

Momo woke and spoke more than she had in years, questions tumbling into apologies, apologies into hurried explanations. Her hands kept closing around the blanket, twisting the fabric, letting go, twisting again.

She said Seiko had been right all along.

She said she could see the supernatural now.

She said she had unlocked psychic power.

One bright teal hand bloomed over her own, the same colour as the gem that glinted at her throat, and reached, trembling, towards the cup on the table. Porcelain scraped softly against wood as it slid half an inch towards her.

Momo lit up. Tired and shaken and bruised as she was, she looked for one breath like the little girl who used to shove half-formed wards under Seiko’s nose and demand to know if she had done it right.

“See?” she said, almost laughing. “Granny, look.”

Seiko watched the hand fade.

Momo looked relieved. Vindicated. Fiercely alive.

Seiko listened, and was terrified.

For all her preparation, for all her years of experience, Seiko could do almost nothing to help them against the old yokai.

That was the part that sat worst.

She had wards enough to crack stone, charms steeped in the god of this land, a lifetime of tricks burned into her hands. None of it had mattered the way the children’s terror had mattered, the way their desperate scrambling had mattered, the way Momo’s bright teal hands had closed around the impossible and refused to let go.

Seiko struck the final blow. She knew it for what it was: a formality. The last nail driven into a coffin the children had built.

Her charms burned hot enough to sting her fingers. Through them, she felt her patron god press forward with a fervour that was almost eagerness.

She told herself it was zeal.

The thing deserved destruction.

She did not let herself ask whether her god was so desperate to end an evil spirit, or to be seen ending it by something greater.

Back home, once the house had gone quiet and the boy had returned home unburdened, Seiko made herself face what Momo had unlocked.

She was unreasonably relieved when Momo's power proved… small.

Not in shape. The hands that bloomed from her were large, bright, and unmistakably teal, the same colour as the gem at her throat. But small in what she asked of them. A teacup lifted between luminous fingers. A door eased shut from across the room. Once, when Momo's temper slipped, one bright hand clenched over her own fist and every pane in the house hummed in its frame like struck glass, a hairline crack opening across the bathroom mirror that Seiko never did get round to replacing.

Parlour tricks, against the measure of what she had feared.

She should not have been comforted. The wards around her home were not casual protections. They were years of labour layered into lintels and window frames, into the shrine steps, into the garden stones, all of it drawn tight around the house and fed by the boundary of her patron’s land. Concentrated there, they had been barely enough to keep the boy’s curse contained.

Momo could press it down with a sweep of one teal hand.

Not extinguish it. Not entirely. Seiko thought that might only be inexperience. But Momo could bank it, quiet it, fold it back into the boy’s body with an ease that made Seiko’s mouth go dry.

And there had been the colour.

Most of the time, the hands behaved like light. But once, when the girl reached too far, the teal deepened. Not lit teal, but the colour itself, the way deep water is its own darkness. Seiko's tongue prickled. Her back teeth ached. For one awful moment she felt the colour inside her chest, pressing outward against bone.

She made herself look away.

So she watched them over dinner instead: the boy talking too fast around a mouthful of rice, Momo calling him disgusting and stealing the last piece of fish from his plate before he could protest. He protested anyway, wounded and indignant. She laughed at him, bright and mean and alive, and one of her teal hands flicked a grain of rice from his cheek with such casual precision that Seiko nearly forgot to be afraid of it.

For one evening, she let herself believe they had won. That the danger had a shape now, and the shape was small enough to sit at her table and argue over seconds.

Turbo Granny ended up remaining.

Not as a threat. Not exactly. As something almost domestic: an ancient yokai trapped in a maneki-neko body, taking up space at the edges of Momo’s life with all the entitlement of a cat that had decided the house was hers.

They were alone when she turned those old, old eyes on Seiko, the little ceramic body still as a shrine ornament.

“Do you know what you’re playing house with?” she asked.

Seiko tapped ash into the dish.

“I’m not playing house.”

“No?”

“She’s my precious granddaughter.” Seiko looked towards the next room, where Momo was singing to herself over the washing-up. “That’s the whole of it.”

Turbo Granny stared at her for a long while. The smoke from Seiko’s cigarette climbed dead straight between them and then bent, gently, deliberately, towards Momo’s voice.

Neither of them remarked on it.

At last, the yokai made a low sound in the back of her throat, too old and too deep for the small ceramic body holding her.

“Then hope she keeps playing along,” she said. “For all our sakes.”

The danger passed, or so Seiko told herself.

A quest for missing anatomy was inconsequential, measured against what she had feared for years. There were far worse things to lose in this world, after all.

For a little while, hope made itself useful. Perhaps this was all it had ever been: trauma, delayed sight, a birthright slow to wake. Momo had needed time. Maturity. Danger. Nothing more. Seiko fed the thought because it let her sleep.

It died the instant Momo brought home the pink-haired girl.

Her patron god recoiled.

Seiko felt it through the contract. Not words. Not warning. A flinch, sharp enough to make her hand close around nothing. The girl stood in the doorway, solid and breathing, and every spiritual sense Seiko still possessed insisted she should not be.

Momo's eyes shone with tears and triumph as she told the story.

How the pink-haired girl had died.

How there had been a yokai.

How Momo had taken its aura and given it to the girl.

The words tumbled out in a rush of joy and disbelief. Momo told it as a rescue. As a miracle. As proof that saving someone was sometimes only a matter of refusing to let go.

Seiko heard her, and thought of a worm drowning in a tub of water.

Her granddaughter glowed with the pride of having saved a friend.

Terror took root in Seiko's chest once more.

Time passed, as it was wont to do.

Not gently. Not without cost. But Momo came home each time, bruised or limping or grinning too wide, with more people gathered around her than Seiko knew what to do with. Friends, she called them. As if the word were simple.

Seiko watched them orbit her granddaughter. Loud ones. Strange ones. Children with spirits in their shadows and grief heavy in their hearts. They came to the house hungry, tracked mud across her floors, argued over food, and looked at Momo when they thought no one was watching.

Four-Eyes looked the longest.

So she was not surprised when he knocked on her door one day while Momo was at work.

She slid it open, let him in, and set a second cup beside the kettle.

They sat. Steam rose between them. Seiko lit a cigarette and watched the first thread of smoke curl towards the ceiling.

The boy held his cup in both hands. He had not drunk from it yet.

After a while, he pushed his glasses up and went straight to the point.

“Miss Seiko, this may be an odd question. Is Miss Ayase human?”

She blew out a slow puff of smoke.

“No.”

She was certain of that much, at least.

He did not seem surprised. His eyes flicked, briefly, to the photo on the shelf. The surface of the tea in his cup shivered, as if tapped from beneath. Seiko pretended not to notice.

“Do you know what she is?” he asked.

“My precious granddaughter.”

He nodded, as if the answer were not an answer at all, but something he had expected her to say. His fingers tightened briefly around the rim of his teacup.

The silence between them stretched. The clock ticked. The kettle settled on the stove with a soft metal click. In the ashtray, Seiko’s cigarette burned down by a fraction.

“Do you have any other questions?” she said at last.

“I don't.”

He rose carefully, smoothed his trousers, and bowed. His glasses caught the light in a way that hid his eyes.

“I'm sorry for the trouble. I had to ask.”

She listened to the soft scrape of him putting on his shoes, the slide of the door easing open.

“Ken,” she said, not looking up as she ground the cigarette into the ashtray. “What do you think Momo is?”

He turned without hesitation.

There was red at the edges of his eyes, the curse close to the surface.

“My best friend,” he said.

She had believed him when he said Momo was his friend.

Not because the words themselves were proof. The boy was too earnest to doubt, but earnestness had never made a thing true. A yokai could not lie. But a yokai could be wrong, and so, Seiko was learning, could a boy with a curse in his blood.

He believed she was his friend.

He believed he was hers.

That did not make it true.

And yet.

She came in from the garden to find the two of them at the kitchen table, bent over a textbook and a scatter of loose paper, arguing.

Not about anything important. About whether the answer to the fourth question was the one Momo had written or the one the boy insisted on. Their voices climbed over each other, Momo jabbing the page with her pencil hard enough to tear it, the boy holding his ground with the doomed stubbornness of someone who was right and knew it would not save him.

“It's clearly B.”

“It's not B. You wrote B last time and got it wrong.”

“That was a different question!”

There were two cups on the table.

One in front of the boy, half drunk.

One in front of Momo.

Seiko stood in the doorway a while, unnoticed, and looked at the second cup.

She remembered another kitchen table. Years of them. Her granddaughter small and bright and unbearably brave, two cups poured, the chair across from her empty, the careful conversation going on and on to no one at all.

Who are you talking to?

Nobody.

The chair was not empty now.

There was a boy in it, ordinary and exasperating and entirely solid, arguing about the fourth question and drinking the second cup of tea.

Momo looked up and caught her standing there.

“Granny. Tell him it's B.”

“It's not B,” Seiko said.

She turned to put the kettle on again, because two growing children would want feeding, and because her eyes had gone and done something foolish, and she did not care to explain it.

Behind her, the argument started up once more.

Stupid and loud and alive.

After that, Seiko watched from the shore.

She was too old for the deep water, and it was not her fight. So she learned its shape by what came home on the children: salt in Momo’s hair when no sea lay near, mud that dried the wrong colour, bruises that faded too quickly or not quickly enough. The boy’s sleeves smelling of ozone and burnt sugar. A schoolbag with a handprint scorched through the cloth, too broad and with a finger too many.

Some nights the news made a nervous little theatre of it. Lights over the bay. A blackout in a district that had not lost power. Witnesses who forgot what they were saying halfway through a sentence. By morning the stories were gone, and the children were at her table arguing over rice.

Momo pushed past sense and came home grey and grinning, with torn cuffs, split lips, and names Seiko knew better than to ask after. Sometimes she brought someone new with her. Sometimes she only brought silence.

Seiko renewed the wards. Set out tea. Said only what wanted saying.

The house took on a smell by then: incense, cigarettes, rice steam, damp shoes by the door, and under it all, very faint, the smell of places her granddaughter went and would not name.

It was not unusual to see Four-Eyes trudging back with Momo slung over his shoulders. She pushed herself too far, too often. Or pushed the vessel too far, Seiko thought, and hated that the distinction came to her so easily now.

What was unusual was the way he carried her this time.

Not over his shoulder, complaining all the way up the path while Momo cursed weakly into his back. He came through the gate with her limp in his arms, held close against his chest, his transformed body moving with a care too deliberate to be natural.

Momo was unconscious, and the first fear that took Seiko was simple and animal.

The second came when she saw the jacket wrapped tight around her granddaughter’s neck. Beneath it, the ragged shreds of the boy’s own shirt had been tied into makeshift bindings, layer over layer, as if he had run out of cloth and kept tearing anyway.

He did not look down at her throat, and that frightened Seiko most of all.

“It's okay, kid,” she said, hating the tremor in her voice. “I can take her from here. You can drop the transformation.”

Four-Eyes blinked at her too slowly. His crimson eyes were wide and bright, but unfocused, the curse sitting close to the surface of him. His gaze kept slipping past Seiko’s shoulder, then back to Momo, then nowhere at all. He looked like a boy listening to something very far away.

“I don't think she'll let me,” he murmured.

The words were soft. Almost wondering.

Seiko’s hands tightened at her sides. “Are you okay, kid?”

That reached him. His attention snapped to her, sharp enough to make the air feel cut.

“Of course I am. Momo-chan would never hurt me.”

There was a fact too many forgot about yokai: they could not lie. They could twist, mislead, misunderstand. But they could not say a thing plainly and know it false.

Four-Eyes, cursed as he was, seemed caught by the same rule.

She was not sure the children had realised this yet.

Seiko drew in a slow breath. The house was quiet behind her. Somewhere inside, the kettle clicked as it cooled.

“What did you see?”

His eyes drifted back to Momo.

“Her.”

The word came out like he had forgotten there were other words. Seiko stepped closer, watching the cloth around Momo’s throat shift with her breathing. Nothing else showed. No blood seeping through. No light. No sign of what lay beneath it.

That absence did not comfort her.

“And?” she asked.

Four-Eyes swallowed. For the first time, she noticed his hands were shaking. Not from strain, not exactly. The tremor moved through him in little delayed waves, as if his body had returned before the rest of him knew how to inhabit it.

“She was terrifying.”

The word should have carried fear.

It did not.

His voice was quiet, raw at the edges, full of something Seiko did not want to name.

“She was terrifying,” he said again, still looking at Momo as if the sight of her hurt and he had no intention of looking away. “And breathtaking.”

Once he had recovered enough to stand without swaying, the boy asked to speak with Momo alone.

He insisted on keeping the curse active.

Momo scoffed at that, saying she trusted him completely, but he only shook his head. He knew she did. That was not the problem. It was himself he did not trust. Not his hands, not his body, not the curse. His own courage, when the time came to say what needed saying.

They spoke for a long while behind closed doors. Their voices rose and fell in low tones, too soft for Seiko to make out, though once she heard Momo say his name in a way that made her hand pause over the kettle.

When Momo finally slid the door open, her eyes were clouded. Heavy with grief, with guilt, with something she did not yet know how to carry. She rushed past Seiko without looking at her.

The boy remained where he was.

For a moment, Seiko could hear only Momo’s footsteps retreating down the hall.

“Did you tell her?” she asked.

Her voice broke on the last word.

They both knew what she meant. Not the fight. Not the blood. Not the cost to him, though it was clear he had gotten that much across.

Ken shook his head slowly.

“I couldn’t.”

His voice was hoarse, quieter than usual.

Seiko opened her mouth, ready to tell him she understood, but he lifted his eyes before she could speak. The crimson glow was dimmer now, but steady.

“No,” he said, as if correcting her before she had made the mistake. “I mean I couldn’t.”

The room seemed to hold still around the words.

“She wouldn’t let me.”

Seiko looked towards the hall where Momo had gone.

Ken swallowed, his gaze dropping to his hands.

“I don’t think she’s ready yet.”

She kept a close eye on the boy after that.

He had not come out of it unscathed. She would have been a fool to think he could.

Momo let things slip, here and there, with the careless worry of someone pretending not to worry. That Four-Eyes always had bags under his eyes now. That he nodded off in class with his pencil still in his hand, only to jerk awake a moment later, eyes wide and fading from red. That he laughed it off before anyone could ask.

Seiko knew the distance between a person’s dreams and the word they refused to give them. She had been keeping that same distance for years.

His sight had not escaped either, it seemed.

He came by one afternoon in new glasses, the lenses thick enough to throw small curved worlds across his cheekbones. He said he had been due a checkup. Said it lightly, the way he said most things now, his gaze sliding half a degree off true whenever it crossed the patch of room where Momo had stood that morning, as though the air there still held the press of her.

They were green.

He had told her, shyly and with a little pride, that Momo had said she liked them. Miss Ayase, he still called her then.

Seiko said nothing.

She knew the shape of the cost too well to name it. To stand close to her granddaughter was to be spent quietly, a little at a time: sleep, sight, the steadiness of a hand. Seiko had paid in the same coin, for far less.

What she could not understand was why the boy kept paying, and did not seem to mind.

Perhaps foolishly, she began to wonder if the sword would never drop.

That Momo’s abilities, extraordinary as they were, might be enough. That whatever slept beneath the choker might remain only half-woken, only half-seen. That her granddaughter might live her whole mortal life without ever reaching deeper into herself.

She should have known better. There was always a bigger crisis.

Seiko was not involved directly. It was outside her territory, and frankly out of her league. She watched the news until the broadcasts cut to static, then to nothing, and waited.

Hours later, someone knocked at the door.

She knew it was Momo at once. That familiar pull had become part of the house by then, the comforting wrongness at the edge of her life, like standing too close to a precipice and learning to call the vertigo ordinary. And yet wrongness crawled up her spine.

Momo did not knock. This was Momo’s home.

The doorbell started as its usual cheerful chime, then threaded through with the deeper resonance of the second bell, the one meant for spirits, for things caught between. Both rang at once, separate and entwined, until the sound pressed against Seiko’s teeth.

She opened the door.

It was Momo—but not enough of her.

Her granddaughter stood on the threshold with her outline bleeding at the edges, teal light spilling from her in slow, uneven pulses. Seiko’s eyes refused to hold her all at once. Hair singed and wild. Clothes torn to ribbons. Dark stains on her sleeves, maybe blood, maybe something that had only borrowed the colour. Each detail slipped away when Seiko tried to fix it in place.

What remained clear was Momo’s throat.

Her pink sweater had been wound clumsily around her neck. Through the fabric, light bled in soft, awful beats, too slow for a pulse and too bright for blood. Something pressed beneath it, not breaking through, not yet, but making the cloth strain as if the sweater were the only thing in the world still insisting on the shape of a girl.

Then Seiko saw her face.

Tears streamed from Momo’s red-brown eyes, each one lit from within by teal fire.

Seiko stepped forward, arms reaching, and Momo stumbled back.

She was speaking too fast, too much. Her voice layered over itself, one strand coming from the girl on the doorstep and the rest from somewhere else, each echo a fraction late.

The words were incomprehensible. It did not matter. Seiko knew what her granddaughter sounded like when she was scared.

“Momo, come here.” She kept her arms open and her feet planted. One wrong move and the girl would run. “It’s going to be okay.”

She had no idea what had happened. Worst cases rose and broke inside her, one after another, and through all of them she was achingly aware of the boy’s absence. Momo’s constant shadow was nowhere to be seen. But this was her granddaughter. She would make it okay, whatever it took.

ṣ̵̡̛̗͍̔̈͒o̶̫̣͉̽ư̷̡̟͔̬̠̂͛͜n̸̤̈́̈́̚̚d̸͖͍̼̆̄͋͝͠͝s̸͙̺͍̒̾̎̎̌͘ ̸͓̓̈́̀t̵̡̛͙h̴͖̪̗̫̿ͅä̶̢̡̙͍͉́͛̓̀̈t̷̺̱̩̹͌̉̏ ̴̲̙͚̮̈́͘m̵̲̊͌̑̚̚į̸̡̭̗̇̋͜͜͠g̴͙̥̓̆h̶͕̳̺́̌̿̍ͅt̷͓͇̩̟̿̊͒͋͠ ̴̡̞̦́̾͊̕ḩ̶̦͍͚̙̈a̸͔̗̯̟̘͛̑̈̓͘v̸̰̱͂̈̾̌̓͜ͅe̶͇̓̀̆͝ ̸̜͈̲̮̳͌̋̾b̶̢͓͌̊̍̓͝e̵̡̠̠̝͎̔ȩ̴̀͛̅͘ͅn̸͍̳̙̘͒͒̚͝ ̶̱͉̹̦̼͒̏̓͆̆̕w̵̖̕ǫ̸͚̣͎͕͖̔͝ŗ̸̳̮̆̀̏̉̊d̵̢͇̝̺̭̈́͝ś̴͎͚͒̂̀̈́̇,̸͕̰̾̄̇̃͝ ̷̢̳͕͓̤͂̿̉́͛͜m̶̛̛͎̯̝̦̭̳̌i̴̫͛̌g̸͓̅͘͝͝ḩ̴̹̳͕̲̤͊́͝t̷̼͔̙̀̓̍͗ ̵̧̛̣̪̫͚̪̈́h̴̳̦̤̜̲͖͋́͊̏a̵̭̳̳̍̿͗̌͂͠v̶͍̬͉͇̒͑e̸͓̞̗̿̎̀̄̓ͅ ̶̫̱̼͆̉b̷̦̱̌͋ę̶̥͕̯̺̼̋̋́̊ĕ̴̡̜̖̣̫͗̈́͊̃ň̵̨̜͇͘ ̸͓̳̔̓̃̑s̸̘̦̔̏͋͜o̸̭͋̃̏̕͝b̷͚̭͉̩͓̕s̸̭̼̩͕͉̃̓͌,̵̡̥̙̮͈̖̌̓́̒͗̚ ̷͇͙͙̥͚͍͊͋͆͘̚͝m̴̗̓̅i̴̜͗̏͊̕g̷̟̽̔͆͒̅h̴̩̜͇͋̍̂̀̂t̷̲̬͎͑̑̃̉͆͝ ̸̭͂̆̽̍h̶̨̳̙̏ȧ̷̡̮̖̦̠͓̀͋v̸̹̼̈́̉͐̄̾͜é̸̟ ̴̞̫͎̪̝̑̆̌b̶͓̟͕̜̋̑̈́̇̽̕ͅe̵͚͂e̷͉̼͓͔̍̋̂ṋ̶͎̂̇͛ ̴̱̹͎͓̣͂s̵͔͋͑̅͊̒̌o̴̫̫̟͎͈͓̔͑̿͑m̴̖̥̀ȇ̵͙͖͚̈́͑t̶̢͇̗̯͙̆̈́̿̑ḧ̵͕͊̚ì̵̹̺̘̐̿̽ǹ̴̤͊͂̕g̸̲̠̪̬͔͑̈́ͅ ̸̭̱̀͆e̵̹̞͓͇̲͒l̷̜̹̼̱̜̳͛̍͑̃̄s̵̨̛̾̍̇̕ẻ̴̘̺ ̴̼̤̺͈͑̆͌̊͠ȩ̶̫̤͎̒̈̀̽̈́ͅn̷̢̫̅̏ẗ̶̞̩̦̎̈́͝i̵̲̥̜͔̬͌̃̓͆͘͝r̷̝̰̯̝̈́e̷͔͍̾̍̓̍̾͐ͅl̷͔͚̜̣͇̘̉y̵̢̩͇̞̍͑̋̾̎̏

“̷G̷r̴a̸n̷n̴y̶,̸ ̸I̶’̸m̴ ̷s̸o̵r̶r̷y̵.̶”̴

One more sentence came after that, halting and choked and frustrated, but Seiko could not keep hold of it.

She blinked.

The doorstep was empty. Cold air rushed in where Momo should have been, and the second bell gave one last low note before falling silent.

Something hot and metallic dripped from Seiko’s nose. When she touched it, her fingers came away red.

The dreams came again that night, but this time they stayed when she woke.

Momo was there in the dark behind Seiko’s eyes, her mouth working around Seiko's name, one hand reaching. Each time their fingers should have touched, the distance opened again without a sound. Not wider, exactly. Deeper. As if something had slipped between them and taught the room another direction.

Momo wept, and her tears fell upward. Where they rose, they took the light with them, so that she grew dimmer the longer she cried.

Seiko surfaced with her pillow wet and her nose bleeding, a hot line running down over her lip and chin. When she blinked, her lashes stuck together. Blood had dried at the corners of her eyes.

She lay still and let it run.

The house ticked and settled around her, full of no one, and somewhere inside it a clock she did not own kept a slower time.

The hospital called the next morning.

They gave the boy’s name, then hers, and for a moment Seiko only stood there with the receiver in her hand, listening to the thin buzz of the line.

Four-Eyes was their patient. Somehow, she was the one they had rung.

She had not known he had listed her as his emergency contact.

They said he had simply appeared in the emergency room, unconscious and critical. No ambulance. No one signing him in. One moment the bed had been empty, the next it was not. They did not say that part plainly, of course. Hospitals had their own ways of refusing the impossible.

But Seiko caught whispers once she arrived. A sickness that had touched several members of staff. Confusion. Short-term memory loss. The same missing hours repeated from mouth to mouth, as if those hours had been lifted cleanly out of their minds.

His emergency contact.

No parents came to claim the right. No relatives appeared to question her being there. Only Seiko, sitting in a hard plastic chair beside a boy who might be the only other person alive who understood what her granddaughter was.

And Momo would want her to.

There was no point looking for Momo herself. Wherever her granddaughter had gone, Seiko would not have known how to follow.

So she kept vigil.

Three days of vending-machine tea gone cold in her hands. Three days of nurses lowering their voices outside the door. Three days with no sign of Momo.

When he finally woke, Seiko was in the chair beside him, watching the pale morning drag itself across the floor.

His eyes opened.

He stared at the ceiling, and Seiko had the uncanny impression he was looking at something behind it.

“She's gone,” she said.

The words came out blunt and ugly. She did not soften them. She did not have the strength.

For a moment, he said nothing. His face was slack with exhaustion, his skin grey beneath the hospital lights. Tubes ran into his arms. One hand was wrapped so thickly in bandages it no longer looked like a hand.

Then his eyes shifted, not quite to her.

He nodded.

“She’ll be back.”

He said it simply. Not hopefully. Not bravely. Like someone stating the weather in a room without windows.

Seiko looked at him for a long moment.

“You’re sure?”

His eyelids lowered, then lifted again.

“Yes.”

The doctors and nurses swarmed the moment they realised he was conscious. They were not subtle about their surprise. They had not expected him to wake at all.

They hesitated to share details with her, but hospitals leaked. A phrase outside the door. A file left open too long. A young doctor who forgot she was listening.

Severe burns on his right hand, the pattern unlike anything they had seen. Not quite heat. Not quite chemical. Tissue damaged in ways they could not classify. Retinal scarring in both eyes, worse in the right, as if he had stared into an eclipse and kept looking. Neural inflammation consistent with extreme electromagnetic exposure, except the readings made no sense.

And stranger things, spoken only in hushed tones: his brain activity during the coma lighting up in patterns they had never documented, the way equipment failed in his proximity, how some of the nurses swore they had seen light leaking from behind his closed eyelids in the dark.

It was days into his recovery, the tubes gone from his arms and the nurses' barely hidden pity turned to actual cheer, when Seiko let herself ask.

She did not put it into words. She drew a chair to the bedside, folded her hands in her lap, and let the question stand in the room until he answered it.

He transformed without a word.

Seiko was almost certain it was for his own benefit.

The change came over him without sound. His shadow reached the wall before his arm did, long and thin across the hospital paint. The fluorescent tube above the bed did not dim so much as lose interest, its light sliding off the new black of him to gather on the floor, in the corners, along the metal legs of the chair. His eyes held a steady red now, no flicker left in them, and the air around him carried the cold of a deep cellar and the copper smell of a storm that had not broken yet.

When he shifted against the pillows, the room took a moment to agree that he had moved.

The heart monitor kept its rhythm. Too steady, perhaps. Too polite. The little green line rose and fell as if nothing in the bed had changed at all.

He looked at his bandaged hand for a while before he spoke.

“It's my own fault,” he said. “I reached out for her. I knew what would happen.”

The room seemed to draw closer around the words. Seiko could hear the hum of the light, the soft tick of cooling plastic, the distant roll of a trolley somewhere down the corridor. In the red of his eyes, for half a second, something teal caught and vanished.

Or perhaps she only imagined it.

“But you did it anyway,” Seiko said.

“Yeah.”

His clawed hand lifted towards the ceiling. Slowly. Carefully. The bandages pulled at the wrist, and Seiko found herself staring at the length of the claws, wondering if they had always been quite that long.

He reached as if the thing he wanted was still there, just above the bed, just beyond the cheap hospital light.

“She was crying,” he said.

Momo did not come home.

When Seiko pressed him, the boy only said she would come back. He did not say it the way you say a hope. He said it flatly, as a thing already settled. She would come back when she was ready.

Seiko had not the strength left to begrudge him the certainty.

So she waited. She sat up the first night and the second, watching the gate, and somewhere in the smallest hour she let herself think it: that this was the time the door stayed shut. That the girl had finished becoming whatever she had been becoming all these years and had simply kept walking on into it, the way water keeps walking downhill. That Seiko had spent a whole life guarding a child only to watch her thin away into the dark she had been lifted out of.

Then she came back.

Seiko felt her at the gate before she crossed the threshold, that old swimming pull behind the navel, the floor of the world tilting its half-inch towards her granddaughter. She was at the door before the knock.

Momo stood on the step looking starved and grey and almost human. A length of torn cloth was wound clumsily at her throat. Through a gap in it, the night behind her seemed nearer than it ought to be, as though a sliver of somewhere else had been left ajar.

Seiko made herself look at the girl’s face instead.

“You’ve seen he’s okay, right?” she asked.

Momo flinched.

It was small. There and gone. But Seiko saw it, and something mean and human in her understood before her kinder parts could stop it.

“You went to Okarun first.”

It was not an accusation. Not quite. She thought she had earned one small hurt and meant to carry it without making a sound.

“No.” The word broke. “I came here first, Granny. I came home first.”

Then the girl was against her, too light, shaking, and her tears were warm and plain and ordinary on Seiko’s neck. Only that. Only a child’s tears. Seiko held her the way she had held her once before, the night Momo came back breathing with a stranger’s gift at her throat.

Seiko fetched the other choker from the drawer where it had appeared one morning years ago, laid neatly on a folded handkerchief as if someone had meant for her to have it ready.

She had never touched it unless she had to.

Now she folded it into Momo’s hands and turned her back.

She listened for the small click of the clasp.

She did not turn round until her granddaughter told her it was done.

The boy stayed in the hospital a few days more. When he came back, his right hand held cups too carefully. His fingers sometimes missed what they reached for, and his eyes took a moment too long to settle on Seiko’s face.

He took it the way he took everything. Without complaint.

Things went back to normal, or as close to it as their little family ever came.

They did not speak of the doorstep, the doubled voice, the exposed throat. But the silence between them had changed its temper. Before, it had been the held breath of two people each pretending not to know a thing. Now it was only quiet, the easy kind that costs nothing. Seiko found she could sit a whole evening in a room with her granddaughter and not hear her own heart going in her ears.

The choker began to change.

Not its nature. It still lay against Momo's throat like a second skin, still belonged to no hand but hers. Only its face altered. Some days it was the old teal. Other mornings Seiko would look up and find it the dusty pink of Momo's sweater, or darkened to the colour of the ribbon in her hair, the gem rearranging itself overnight with no hand laid on it. As though, having decided to stay, it meant to be a good houseguest about it.

Once, she watched it shift while Momo dozed at the kitchen table. Teal bled slowly across the gem, then softened into the same green as the boy’s new glasses, as if the thing at her throat had learned sentiment by observation.

Once Momo was home, Turbo Granny began seeking her out again.

Seiko noticed the change before she understood it. The yokai had always kept a careful foot of air between herself and the girl, even trapped in that ridiculous maneki-neko body. The way you keep back from the lip of a well. Now Seiko came in from the garden one blue evening to find the two of them out on the engawa with their backs to her, the small ceramic body sitting close enough that one painted shoulder almost touched Momo’s arm.

Yokai and spirits lived one step closer to the dark than humans did. Seiko had known that all her life. It was another thing to see something as old as Turbo Granny sit beside her granddaughter and look, not safe, but resigned.

She caught only pieces.

“...don’t know yourself,” Turbo Granny was saying.

Momo’s hands lay folded in her lap. “I know enough.”

A low sound from the yokai. Not quite laughter.

“Enough to reach. Not enough to know what reaches back.”

Momo was quiet for a long while. More words followed, too low for Seiko to hear.

“Then you understand why I’m asking.”

“I do.”

“And I won’t,” Momo said. Her voice was low, and sure, and wholly her own. “Not while I can help it.”

Whatever passed between them after that passed without words. Turbo Granny turned her head and found Seiko in the doorway. For once, she did not bristle. Did not warn. Did not say a single ominous thing. She only looked at her a moment, one old woman to another, across the weight they had both agreed to carry, then went back to watching the dark at Momo’s side.

The two of them sat very still, as though listening to the same far-off sound.

Seiko never asked what had been requested, or what her granddaughter had promised not to do. She knew by now that some questions only became dangerous once you turned to face them.

But the fear had gone out of Turbo Granny. That was the thing. One of the oldest, most fearsome beings Seiko had ever dealt with had sat herself down at the girl’s side in the dark, and what stood now where the fear had been looked almost like grief.

Or something near to grace.

She could never afterwards decide which.

Not everything went back to normal.

Four-Eyes was marked. Seiko did not know how else to think of it.

Not by his curse. That was obvious, written in his too-fast shadow, his cold hands, the red that waited behind his eyes. This was something quieter. Something that had settled into him after standing too close while reality bent around Momo and did not quite bend back.

There were stories for that sort of thing. Every tradition had them. Stare too long into the abyss and the abyss stares back. Stay too long in another realm and you come home with the wrong hunger. Eat the food of spirits and never truly leave their table. Meet the eyes of certain gods and spend the rest of your life paying for the honour.

Seiko had lived long enough to know those stories were not always warnings against evil.

Sometimes they were warnings against wonder.

The boy's gaze had changed. He looked at Momo like someone who had seen a storm from inside it and still missed the sound of rain. Dazzled. Exposed. Grateful, almost, and not sensible enough to step back.

At first, Seiko could not tell whether she was seeing devotion or a crush.

Teenage boys were ridiculous creatures. She knew that much. They stared too long at girls they liked, made fools of themselves over nothing, mistook a kind word for destiny and a smile for divine revelation. Four-Eyes had always been awkward enough that ordinary affection might well look strange on him. Perhaps this was only that: a boy dazzled by a pretty girl who had been kind to him before he knew what to do with kindness.

But there were moments when the shape of it changed.

It would have been easier if it were only wanting. She could have understood that. The ordinary hunger of a boy for a girl, the kind of thing a grandmother frowned at and was secretly glad of. But this had ceremony in it. A carefulness that kept him half a step away. A habit of watching Momo’s hands when the teal light gathered there. A silence that came over him whenever she reached too far, as if some part of him had knelt without asking the rest.

Seiko knew that distance. She had lived in the cold heart of it once. There had been a time when people looked at her like that too: respect, deference, the careful air kept around a thing they had decided sat above them. She had taken it for love until the day it turned its back and she understood it had never been love at all.

Reverence did not sit at the kitchen table at two in the morning and argue with you about nothing. It admired from a careful distance. It never came close enough to be annoyed, or frightened, or bored. Never close enough to understand what it claimed to love.

She did not want that for Momo.

Of all the fates she had feared for the girl, and she had feared a great many, this was the one that crept up on her in the ordinary evenings and would not leave: that her strange, lonely granddaughter would be adored by the whole turning world and never once, not by a single living soul, be simply loved. Held without awe. Wanted up close, not from arm’s length.

Then one evening Seiko came in at the end of some argument over dinner.

The boy had filled Momo’s cup before the girl knew she wanted anything, and the old fear had already settled in Seiko’s chest like a swallowed stone. Small. Attentive. Anticipating. The kind of care that looked, from the wrong angle, too much like service.

Then Momo stole the pickled plum from his plate.

Four-Eyes stared at the empty space where it had been.

“That was mine.”

Momo was already chewing. “You hate pickled plum.”

“I was saving it.”

“For what, old age?”

He went scarlet. “Miss Ayase, you’re impossible.”

For one brief, blessed moment, there was no reverence in him at all. Only a boy glaring over a bowl of rice at a girl who was laughing too hard to swallow.

Seiko let out a breath she had not known she was holding.

Then one of Momo’s teal hands flickered into being long enough to steal another piece from his plate, casual as a reaching arm. Four-Eyes looked at it, and the strange softness returned around his eyes.

Not fear.

Not worship, either. Not quite.

Something between wonder and fondness, between the abyss and the kitchen table.

Seiko did not know what to call it.

More time passed. Seiko was not sure whether she was glad of it.

There were evenings she sat at the edge of the lamplight and watched the pair of them bent over the low table, heads close over homework, maps, charms, half-eaten bowls of rice. The boy would gesture at nothing, too earnest for his own good, and Momo’s laugh would come loose and real in a way it never quite came for Seiko anymore.

Each time, something turned over in Seiko’s chest that she did not like the taste of.

He could go where she could not. He had looked on the thing beneath the choker and come back marked, not whole exactly, but near enough to stand beside her. He carried his own mouthful of the dark behind those thick green lenses, and so he could bear the weight of Momo’s without flinching.

When Momo woke gasping from dreams she would not name, Seiko heard the phone ring before the girl’s breathing had steadied. When she laughed the unguarded laugh, the one Seiko had spent years coaxing out of a lonely child, it was nearly always something he had said.

Seiko had given her granddaughter a life.

The boy had given her the one thing Seiko never could: someone in the deep water at her side.

The jealousy shamed her. She let it. She banked it down like a coal and went on standing where she always had, at Momo’s back. Close enough to catch her. Far enough not to throw a shadow across whatever the girl was reaching toward.

Momo grew up. That had always been the point of all of it.

She moved out: a flat across the city, a course Seiko never fully grasped, the ordinary machinery of a life assembling itself around her. A kettle of her own. A walk to the station. A future with edges Seiko could not see and was not asked to.

And the boy, to Seiko’s surprise, went away too.

Some university in another city. A real one, with lecture halls and examinations and a subject that had everything and nothing to do with curses or the dark. Space, from what Seiko understood of it. Stars, equations, the old ambitions he had carried before Momo and never surrendered after. Not even her radiance had drowned out the sky for him.

He packed a case and went, the way ordinary young men go.

Seiko watched her granddaughter let him.

That was what she had been watching for, though she would not have admitted it. Some thread pulled taut. Some quiet refusal in Momo’s face. Some small proof that whatever stood between them was not love at all, but need, or gravity, or something worse wearing a tender shape.

But there was nothing of the kind.

Momo helped him pack. Momo teased him about city girls and meant it. She was sad in the plain way anyone is sad to lose someone they love to a train, and she waved him off, and came home, and got on with things.

For years, he was a voice on the telephone and a face at the holidays. Momo did not pine. Not much, anyway, and Seiko would not begrudge any young woman the opportunity to grow around an absence instead of being hollowed out by it. The two of them, apart, were simply two people living their lives.

Seiko let out a breath she had been holding for longer than she liked to admit.

And then he came back.

Not summoned. Not pulled. No crisis reeled him in. His studies ended, and he came home because there was nowhere else he would rather be.

The first Seiko knew of his return was the pair of them squabbling in the genkan over whether he had grown or she had shrunk. Momo flicked his forehead. The boy swatted her hand away and complained. Both of them were laughing.

No awe in it. No held breath. No careful half-step back.

He had come home and was being annoyed at her. Ordinarily, gloriously annoyed, the way nobody is ever annoyed at something they worship.

Seiko went back inside and put the kettle on, and did not let them see her face.

The shrine went quiet after that. Not empty. Turbo Granny remained, claiming with great offence that someone had to keep an eye on the place, and that Momo’s flat had terrible sunlight besides. She took to sleeping in the warm square by the kitchen door, insulting Seiko’s tea, and pretending not to notice when Seiko set out a second cup.

But it was quiet the old way, the way it had hummed before a loud, bright child arrived to hold tea parties for empty chairs. Seiko told herself this was what success looked like: a wall outliving its need. She had only ever been the thing a frightened child grew up behind, and walls did not follow you out the gate.

She was on her knees in the garden, thumbing aphids from the chrysanthemums, when the dread arrived.

It came up through the soil into her wrists before it reached her mind, a cold the warm morning did nothing to explain. The flat animal certainty that somewhere, something had gone wrong.

She was already on her feet and moving for the house when the telephone began to ring.

It was Momo.

Momo on that absurd little human phone, crying the way she had not cried since she was small enough to fold into Seiko’s lap.

“Granny.”

Something terrible. Again. There was always an again.

The boy was a man now. Seiko had blinked, and the years had done their quiet work. But it was still Four-Eyes in her mind when Momo told her he was in a coma. Worse than last time, the doctors said. Worse than they had words for.

He had put himself between a child and Momo.

Seiko did not get the whole of it for some time, and there was not much to get. There had been a child caught somewhere a child should never have been, and Momo had reached too far, or been pulled too deep, or simply been too late in remembering the shape of herself. He had seen what was about to happen and stepped into the space between them.

Not against Momo. Never that.

For her, as much as for the child.

Seiko saw the girl once, later. An ordinary, frightened, perfectly normal little thing, breathing because someone had loved Momo enough to stand in front of her.

That was the whole of it.

By the time Seiko reached the hospital, Momo was sitting in the corridor with her phone still in her hand, as if she had forgotten how to put it down. She looked up when Seiko came in, and whatever she had been holding together fell apart.

Seiko held her weeping granddaughter and understood, all at once and in her whole body, how small a thing her jealousy had been.

It did not matter who Momo called first. It did not matter what waters the girl swam in past the edge of Seiko’s sight, or who swam there beside her. Seiko was her grandmother. Whatever else Momo was, in whatever measure past counting, she had still reached for her.

So Seiko would be the thing that did not move.

She had been proud once, and then broken, and then for a long while merely upright. She could be this much: the stone in the river—the place the water could come back to break against and gather itself.

The boy woke after three weeks.

He asked after Momo before he asked anything for himself. Then he asked after the child. Only when he had both answers would he let them tell him about his own body, and even then he listened with the distant patience of someone being told what had happened to a house he no longer lived in.

His sight was worse. His right hand did not always close when he told it to. His legs remembered standing before they remembered walking, and the remembering was slow, humiliating work. Some things returned a little at a time. Some did not.

He took each loss as it came, set it aside, and turned to the next thing that could still be recovered. Momo stayed at his elbow through all of it, stubborn and pale and fierce, helping him relearn the parts of the world he could no longer simply move through.

He came to Seiko afterwards and bowed far too low.

“Thank you,” he said. “For being with her while I couldn’t.”

Seiko looked at the crown of his bent head, at the too-careful set of his shoulders, at the hand that still curled wrong at his side.

“Straighten up before your spine sets that way,” she said.

But she let him hold the bow a moment first.

She asked him, once, why he stayed.

Not cruelly. Not as a test. She asked it with the same plainness he had used years before, when he had come to her door and asked if Momo was human.

Seiko had tallied the price by then, and it frightened her: the eye that no longer tracked quite true, the hand that curled stiffly in cold weather, the cane he was far too young for, the lost sleep written plainly under his eyes. Though as the years went on, she could not always tell whether those shadows were sleeplessness or simply the first crow’s feet gathering there.

“You could go,” she said. “You’ve given enough. No one would hold it against you.”

He was quiet for a while.

The night pressed close beyond the wards. Moths worried themselves against the porch light. Somewhere in the dark, something small scratched once at the boundary and went still.

Four-Eyes did not look towards it. He did not have to. He sat with his damaged hand loose on his knee, his breathing slow, his shadow pooled too dark beneath the step. When he turned his head, the red behind his glasses caught the lamplight.

And there, threaded through it, unmistakable now, was teal.

Not reflected from anywhere. Not imagined. A thin, impossible glint moving behind his eyes like something seen under deep water.

“Do you want me to go?” he asked.

“No.”

“Does Momo?”

Seiko looked towards the room where her granddaughter slept. Momo would never want to see him go. Of that, she was certain. Want was not the question.

If he asked, if he truly asked, Momo would let him. It would break something in her, perhaps, but she would open her hands.

“No,” Seiko said.

“Then I’m staying.”

It was said so simply that, for a moment, Seiko had no answer.

“You know what it’s costing you.”

“I know.”

“You can’t keep pretending not to.”

“I’m not.”

His fingers flexed once. Not all the way. The hand gave up halfway through the motion and settled back against his knee. He looked at it without anger, without grief, with a patience that made him seem older than he was and less human than he ought to be.

“What I got from her is more than what I lost,” he said.

Seiko looked at him sharply.

He shrugged a little, embarrassed now, as if he had said too much. “That’s all.”

“That’s not all.”

“It is to me.”

From inside, Momo shifted in her sleep and made a small, unhappy sound. The boy’s head turned at once. The teal in his eyes brightened, just for a breath, and the thing at the boundary stopped scratching.

Then Momo settled, and so did he.

Seiko watched him across the dim porch light, this quiet, half-ruined creature who had looked too long at her granddaughter and somehow come away not hollowed out but filled.

He was not untouched. He was not whole. But there was something settled in him now, something quiet and deep-rooted, as if part of him had learned to live in the dark and found it peaceful there.

And he was, against all sense and every law Seiko knew, happy.

And that unsettled her more than the eye, or the hand, or the cane ever had.

Their relationship did not follow the usual path.

There was no wedding Seiko was invited to pretend not to cry through. No family home in the way people meant it. No children of their blood.

Seiko stopped waiting to understand it somewhere along the way, and found she did not have to. You need not know the name of a thing to know it for love, and whatever ran between those two, the woman who was more and the man who had stared too long into her and come away grateful, was love down to the root. Of that, and not much else, she was certain.

But Momo had always been drawn to small broken things. To worms stranded on the noon path. To the cracked and the lost and the ones the rest of the world stepped neatly around.

So the shrine took in strays.

Not many. Momo had learned, somewhere along the way, the cost of gathering too much to herself, and she kept the number small on purpose. A boy who saw the dead and could not persuade them to leave. Twin girls who came out blurred at the edges of every photograph. A silent child who woke screaming in a language no living country spoke, until Momo sat through enough of her nights that the screaming stopped.

Three, perhaps four at a time. No more.

They were taken in with the same soft, unbudging certainty Momo had carried since she was small enough to drown a worm in kindness: that nothing alive should be left to dry in the sun.

Seiko ended her long life a great-grandmother several times over, without a drop of her own blood in any of them, every one of them calling her Granny.

Momo and the boy left her in charge sometimes when they went off. A weekend. A month. A stretch the calendar would not put a number to.

And here was the thing Seiko never got used to: not one of the children was ever afraid. Not of the dark, not of the things that scratched along the wards, not of being left. They waved their parents off at the gate and turned straight back to their games, certain past any doubt that whatever went out into the night would come home wearing Momo’s face.

Seiko, who had spent a lifetime learning fear because fear was what kept you breathing, found their calm the hardest thing in the house to sit beside.

The years went on doing what years do.

Decades of them. World-ending things rolled in and broke and drained away again, until Seiko stopped marking them, the way a woman raised by the sea stops hearing the tide. There were funerals. Laughter. Ten thousand ordinary suppers. The whole vast, unremarkable middle of a life she had once been certain her granddaughter would never live to have.

When Seiko looked into the boy’s eyes now, she still felt the old drop in the belly, the lean of standing over a depth with no floor to it. It comforted her, these days. She had learned to read that depth the way you learn a loved face in a dark room: by feel, by faith, by the certainty that what you cannot see is still there.

He was in there.

He had only made room.

And Seiko grew old. Properly old at last, the kind no ward or contract could talk down. Her hands shook. Her poor sight got poorer, and then poorer than that.

Through every year of it, Momo kept coming back.

She came with bags of groceries Seiko had not asked for, and pretended she had only bought too much by mistake. She came to sit on the engawa and complain about the children, the boy, the neighbours, the price of rice. She came for the old lessons too, kneeling where she had knelt as a child while Seiko corrected the angle of her hands, though they both knew by then which of them could crack the sky if she chose to.

And sometimes she came without excuses. On the rare nights when even Momo had to set her face down somewhere, she came home, took off her shoes, and put her head in her grandmother’s lap.

Seiko never did work out whether the girl came for her own sake or for Seiko’s. Whether Momo still wanted the comfort, or whether some vast and tender part of her had understood that an old woman needs, right to the end, to be needed.

She let the question lie.

There are kindnesses you take without holding them up to the light.

At the last, it was only the two of them.

Seiko asked where the boy had gone; she had not seen him all evening. Momo said he'd thought the two of them ought to be alone for this.

Sharp lad, Seiko thought. He always had been.

The room had gone soft at its edges, the way the whole world did now. Her body no longer answered her properly, distant and quiet beneath the blankets. Momo sat close, holding a hand Seiko could only half feel, and in the low lamplight she looked, for a moment, no older than seven.

There was a question Seiko had carried for longer than Momo had been alive. She had swallowed it at kitchen tables and hospital bedsides, in every long hour when sleep would not come. There had always been a reason to wait, and the waiting had always dressed itself as love.

There was no time left to spend on waiting.

“Momo… what are you?”

Her granddaughter smiled, her head tilted just so, the ever-present choker still at her neck.

“I'm your precious granddaughter, aren't I?”

The words were simple, childlike, and they struck something old in Seiko’s chest.

She wondered, then, whether the thing that had looked down on them that day had seen Momo at all. Or whether it had seen an old woman on her knees, holding a dead child together with both hands, and mistaken grief for prayer.

“Of course…” Seiko whispered. “I just wanted to hear you say it.”

Her only reply was the tears rolling down Momo's face.

“Now, before I go… let me have a good look at you.” Her voice was soft, but edged with urgency.

“Granny?” Momo's brow furrowed, confusion flashing across her face, then understanding dawned. “Granny, I… I can't. It would…” The sentence broke before she could finish it.

“I'm about to die, Momo.” Her tone was steady now, almost fierce in its calm. “Let me go knowing I've looked at my granddaughter and seen all of her.”

Momo's lips trembled. She looked unsure. Scared.

Seiko hated that look on her. She had hated it every time.

“It's all right,” she whispered, squeezing Momo's hand with what little strength she had left. “Please, Momo.”

The fear eased, thinning into something that might have been hope. Seiko felt the brush of Momo’s power as one bright teal hand slid the lock and another drew the blind. Momo’s own hands rose to the choker.

They paused at the clasp. Momo watched her carefully, waiting for the confirmation.

She nodded, a warm smile on her face.

The choker fell away.

A hollow opened at her throat. Not a wound, not quite. Threads of light moved under the skinless dark, drawing inward and outward with each breath. And then she saw her.

Momo.

And faintly, the afterimage of what had touched her once.

It was breathtaking.

She saw kindness. Pity. Fear. The shadow of self-revulsion.

But most of all, she saw empathy.

Endless empathy, pouring outward like starlight.

For worms stranded in the noon heat. For an old woman about to lose the last of her family. For an awkward boy hounded by bullies. For spirits with no mouths, heard anyway. For desperate aliens who only wanted a home. For a little girl who faced death head-on and thought only of her grandmother, and how lonely she would be when it was over.

She glimpsed an eternity of empathy: terrifying in its vastness, dazzling in its brightness.

And in its heart, she saw Momo.

“There you are,” she whispered.

Even with the vastness pressing against her, what filled her vision were the tears trembling at the edge of her granddaughter's lashes.

She felt the gentle tug as Momo sniffled and fastened the choker back into place. Her eyes burned. Her thoughts rang strangely, as if something inside them had been struck and left vibrating.

Her hand tightened faintly around Momo's warm fingers. That was enough. After all the gods and contracts and impossible things, that was what carried her.

Momo smiled, soft and watery, and Seiko thought of the girl she had raised, who had never feared death, not once in her life.

And she knew then, with a certainty beyond words, that they would not be parted for long.