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Hiyori lay prone on the park bench, chest heaving, her exhales puffing out in humid clouds. She imagines them as tiny spirits, swirling against the backdrop of the night before blurring into the starry heavens. The exerted flush of her skin blazes in contrast to the cool spring evening, staving off the chill. Lush branches of sakura trees stretch above her resting spot, fingers of bark adorned with pale blossoms, grasping for one another but always just out of reach. Hiyori reaches upwards with her own hand, feigning an intertwining of her own fingers with those of the trees.
A soft breeze stirs the canopy, sending a cascade of petals around her like a snowdrift. Along with the season’s leavings the wind carries a bouquet to Hiyori. Floral notes mingling with the tang of new growth, and something…something else.
Hiyori’s nose crinkles and her nostrils flare as she breathes the scent in deep. A familiar itch stirs deep within her mind, like a sneeze that refuses to come. An itch that’s plagued her for almost ten years. At this point she’s accepted it as a lingering symptom of her former idiopathic narcoleptic episodes.
Daily she wrestles with the feeling that she’s forgotten something. It doesn’t help that the journal she’d kept of that entire year had gone missing. She’d maintained the habit well into adulthood, in part hoping she would eventually recover that lost time, but it remained a mystery. A part of herself, shorn away.
Hiyori sits up and reaches for her water bottle, unscrewing the cap and raising it to her lips. She stops short as, once again, that smell snags her attention. She can think of nothing to liken it to as it flits playfully around the edges of her awareness, like a word she should know but she’s momentarily forgotten.
Of their own volition, her lips form into two syllables and she exhales them into the night, but the wind scoops them up and whisks them away.
A sharp snapping of wood causes her to jump in her seat.
Her head swivels left and right. She’s still alone in the park–not many frequent this jogging path, especially at this time of night. Her first time running here she’d been overcome with a strange apprehension. Some instinctual premonition that seemed to convey that she should be afraid of the dark and what may lurk in its shadows. Still, she’d felt drawn here, her feet bringing her back night after night. And though she’d since tamped the childish fear down, she couldn’t overcome the sense that something was always lurking right at the periphery of her vision.
Hiyori stands and stretches on her toes, reaching her hands high overhead. She leans backwards slightly and is rewarded with a satisfying pop. A moment later, a shooting star streaks across the velvet sky.
“Oh!” She exclaims.
She can’t remember the last time she saw one of those–years probably.
Her face splits into a grin. “I guess I’d better make a wish!”
She clasps her hands together in front of her face and squeezes her eyes shut.
I wish…
She squeezes her eyes shut harder.
I wish…!
Fragments of a wish from a lifetime ago.
A wish…and a promise.
Hiyori’s eyes fly open and at the same moment she shouts, “Yato!”
As her eyes readjust to the light, Hiyori can make out a dark silhouette on the largest branch of the canopy above. Her line of sight traces up the figure, revealing a pair of black tracksuit pants split up the side by a white stripe and tucked into scuffed leather boots. The matching jacket is partially unzipped revealing a plain white t-shirt, the neckline wrapped with a threadbare ascot. The figure’s face is entirely obscured by sakura blossoms.
Her breath catches and the wind picks up once again, whipping Hioyori’s hair about her face. As she frantically gathers the strands, she hears a soft tump.
Vision again free from her unruly locks, she sees a young man is now standing on the ground several feet away. His hands are stuffed in his pockets, gaze dropped to the budding grass at his booted feet.
“Yato?” Hiyori whispers, voice laden with an entire year’s worth of surging memories. Adventures and mishaps, laughter and heartbreak.
His head whips up and his shining eyes meet hers as a flush blooms high across his cheekbones. His lips part wordlessly as he falters with whatever he had planned to say.
But Hiyori wastes no time as she charges Yato. He looks momentarily stricken and raises his arms in front of his face, bracing for the inevitable blow.
She collides with him, the pair falling to the ground in a heap. Yato expels a sharp gasp as the wind is knocked out of him. She balls his shirt in her fists and buries her face in his rigid chest as his elusive and wholly unique fragrance envelops her.
“Hi–Hi–yo–ri,” he croaks.
For the second time tonight her chest heaves as Hiyori’s body is wracked with sobs. Hot tears flow freely down her cheeks before being wicked away by Yato’s cotton undershirt. He melts beneath her, his arms circling around her back. He simply holds her while she cries and doesn’t even complain when she wipes her snotty nose on him.
When her tears dry up, she pushes herself up to a sitting position next to him and swipes her eyes with her palms. He props himself up on his hands, still eyeing her warily.
“Yato,” Hiyori smiles, savoring the familiar feeling of his name on her lips.
His eyes brighten, twinkling with tears of his own. “Hiyo–”
She cuts him off, this time barking his name, “Yato!”
He flinches at her admonishing tone.
“Yato, it’s been ten years! Why…!” She raises a hand as if to punch him in the shoulder but lets it drop listlessly into her lap. “Where have you been?”
He looks exactly the same as he had all those years ago, his ageless face framed by a mop of shaggy dark violet hair. The stray god she’d met as a teenager would have averted his eyes in shame, but this Yato meets her accusation with a surprising resoluteness.
“Tenjin was right,” he starts. “It was selfish of me to keep you entangled with the far shore for so long.”
“But I asked to stay with you!” Hiyori protests. “My wish was to stay with you longer.”
Ten years ago, that’s all it had taken to make this lonely god of calamity capitulate, but something in him had changed after that clash with his father.
“You died, Hiyori.” Yato stares her down with a hardness he’d never dared level at her before. “Father severed your lifeline, and he was only able to do that in the first place because of me.”
A chill hand rakes down Hiyori’s backside and she feels the phantom sensation of a limb she’d never possessed in her human form. Reflexively, she looks around expecting to see a tail, but of course there isn’t one.
Her first concrete memory from that time is waking up in the hospital, a frequent outcome of her narcoleptic episodes. Her family had explained that she’d been found by emergency personnel in a remote village during the height of winter and resuscitated at the scene.
She recalls the countless warnings from Tenjin and Kazuma regarding the fragility of her half-spirit state and the mortal consequence if anything were to ever sever her lifeline. But if her soul cord had been cut, how did she get back to her body?
“How..?”
“I had to anchor you to something. Maybe I should have just let you go, but I’m nothing if not selfish. And what kind of god of fortune would I be if I didn’t fulfill my followers’ wishes?” He smirks in a pale imitation of the arrogant god she remembers.
Hiyori tilts her head. “What do you mean you had to anchor me?”
Yato refuses to meet her gaze as he explains. “I gave you a name.”
The realization hits Hiyori like a thunderclap. “You made me your shinki?”
“Shiro.” Yato signs with his index and middle finger in the air. “Hakki.”
Hiryoi feels a faint tug at her navel, but remains kneeling on the grass.
She blinks once. Twice.
Then the peal of her laughter splits the night. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wonder what it would be like to be a shinki. Was I something cool like Kazuma or Yukine?”
“You were a garment-type shinki.”
“Really? What did I look like?” Her hand flies to her mouth. “Wait, does that mean you wore me!?”
“You were a sumo wrestler’s loincloth,” Yato replies with a completely straight face.
“Eyy!?” Hiyori squeaks, flushing at the mental image.
This time it’s Yato’s laughter that fills the air as he doubles over. Hiyori reflexively makes a fist but mercifully stays her hand. “Very funny.”
Once he’s finished laughing at her expense, he tells her the truth. “You were a beautiful shortsword.”
Hiyori purses her lips. “I kind of thought I might be a pair of boxing gloves, honestly.”
“Swords are much better,” he says matter-of-factly. “It’s much more stylish than punching someone.”
Hiyori snorts. Then her shoulders droop under the weight of her own shame. “I’m sorry, Yato.”
His face whips back to her. “What could you possibly be sorry for?”
“I forgot. Again. I promised myself–and you, and Yukine–that I wouldn’t. But I still forgot.” Hiyori tangles her fingers in the grass. “I wrote in my journal every day so I’d always remember, but I lost it. I was careless…”
Slowly, Yato reaches into his tracksuit jacket and pulls something out before placing it delicately in her lap.
A frayed notebook, the corners and spine worn down from repeated openings.. The cover is adorned with faded stickers and titled Hiyori Iki, 20XX. She runs her fingers lightly over the front as if it might crumble under her touch.
“You found my journal!” Her heart swells at the gesture, but quickly deflates at Yato’s guilty expression.
“It wasn’t lost, Hiyori.” His hands are clenched so tightly his knuckles are turning white. “I took it that night.”
“Why? Why would you take it?” Her voice cracks. “Why…”
…did you leave me?
Her implied words hang in the air.
“I had to, otherwise it would have made what I did pointless.”
Hiyori suddenly remembers another promise. One between Yato and Tenjin.
“You cut our ties,” she says flatly.
“I thought it was the safest thing to do.” He avoids looking at her directly.
“But your father’s gone. I wasn’t in danger anymore. And as much as you believe it, you are not a god of calamity!”
“Hiyori!” He pleads. He takes a steadying breath before continuing. “I couldn’t promise you’d be okay if I hadn’t. I don’t know of another god that’s made a shinki of someone they knew while they were alive. I couldn’t risk you turning into a phantom if you remembered me, especially if you still had one foot on each shore.”
She knows he’s right, but that doesn’t make it sting any less. The last ten years flash before her eyes. Years full of happy memories with her family and friends. Years without Yato. Their time together was a blip in her life, but it held just as much joy as all the other years combined.
“I haven’t left my body since then, so cutting our ties must have worked,” she says. “So how do I still remember?”
“Obviously, I’m just too amazing to forget,” he flashes her a white smile.
She reaches out to flick his nose but he dodges, batting her hand away.
His expression turns serious again. “By turning you into my shinki, I made myself your anchor, creating a new tie. The connection must have transferred to your human body.” He shrugs. “I’m not really an expert at this.”
Hiyori visualizes a line stretching between them, from her navel to his. A second line materializes in her imagination, this one spanning the distance between their hearts, tied in the middle by an ornamental knot.
“But if you don’t want to be connected anymore, I’ll find a way to undo it.” He adds. “Just say the word.”
He proffers his hand for a customary offering.
The lines of her imagination snap, leaving her cold and empty.
Hiyori digs into her pocket for the lucky 5-yen piece she carries everywhere. The day she’d awoken in the hospital, it had been sitting on her side table. No one had copped to putting it there when she’d asked, but it felt like a good omen at the time. A reminder that she’d survived.
She holds it gingerly above his palm, searching his eyes. She knows then that if she asks he will follow through on his word. She’ll continue on with her life as it had been, without Yato.
“I have a new wish,” she says, the resoluteness of her tone surprising even her. “I don’t want to stay with you a little longer.”
Yato swallows, but holds his hand steady. “Your wish–”
She cuts him off again. “I want to stay with you forever.”
Hiyori drops the coin into his open palm.
Yato’s lips part in muted surprise. Then his slender fingers close around the offering, and he brandishes it by his face, pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
“Your wish has been heard.” Yato breaks into a grin.
Hiyori stands and brushes the grass from her clothes. “Good. Glad that’s settled.”
Yato follows her lead, standing as well.
“Hiyori.”
She looks up to see his azure eyes locked onto her, glowing with an otherworldly light in the night.
“Will you grant my wish as well?”
“Huh?” Hiyori chirps.
Yato flips the coin in the air and catches it before holding it out to her. “I wish to be by your side. Forever.”
“But I-I’m not a god,” she flounders as her heart backflips in her chest.
“All it takes is a wish to make a god.”
She considers for a moment before shaking her head in disbelief. “I doubt it’s that simple.” She reaches out to take his offering, regardless.
As soon as she plucks the coin from his hand, Yato entwines his fingers with hers and pulls her in close.
Her pulse quickens as she flushes from her face all the way to her curling toes. Yato’s face mirrors her own, despite his brazenness, the heat multiplying between them. Their faces are mere inches apart and yet he doesn’t move.
The memory of Hiyori’s last kiss surges in her mind. Unwanted and forced upon her during a vulnerable state. She’d had several opportunities to overwrite the tainted memory, but none had ever felt right.
Until now.
Hiyori closes the gap between them, pressing her lips to the stray god’s. Yato responds by wrapping his other arm around her waist, practically lifting her off her feet in his enthusiasm.
When she pulls back, his mouth is cocked in an inebriated grin.
Hiyori laughs. “Your wish has been heard.”