Chapter Text
“This time I’m sure I’ve got it right,” says Arataka as he comes in the door. For the last few weeks, it has been his greeting of choice. Shigeo looks up at him; he has his bag full of research materials and extra paper, but for what he wants to do they won’t be necessary. Shigeo thinks he just likes to be prepared in case he needs to write a spirit tag.
Arataka falls into one of the chairs at the kitchen table and sighs loudly. He’s still panting a little bit from his ride here, so Shigeo floats the kettle and a cup over to pour him some tea. He would get up, but Milk is sitting in his lap and he doesn’t want to disturb her. “Good afternoon, Arataka-kun,” he says.
“Why are you giving me tea, Master?” asks Arataka, slumping down onto the table. “I’m already hot from riding here.”
“Warm water is absorbed more easily into the body, so you’ll be hydrated more quickly. You keep forgetting to bring a water bottle.” But he takes some of the heat out of Arataka’s cup and transfers it to his own, which is getting a little cold. Arataka has trouble drinking hot things, anyway.
“Thanks,” says Arataka. He takes a cautious sip of his tea. “Anyway, I was doing some research on the ki system since it’s kind of related to psychic power, if you squint, and there’s these channels in your body that ki can flow through. So I was thinking, maybe that’s where the psychic power needs to go. I printed out some acupuncture guides.” Shigeo doesn’t see the connection between psychic power flowing through the ki system and Arataka printing out acupuncture guides. It will probably become clear. Right now Arataka is pulling out sheets of paper with diagrams of the human body on them, spreading them out over the table. Shigeo moves his book out of the way (it’s a book of watercolors given to him by a painter he helped a few weeks ago) and leans forward to look at the diagrams.
Instead of explaining anything, Arataka looks at him expectantly. “What are the acupuncture guides for, Arataka-kun?”
“Obviously you have to direct your aura through my pressure points in order for them to get into my ki system! Come on, Master, that was obvious, right?”
“It wasn’t. Doesn’t this seem a little unsafe?”
“Nahhh.” Arataka flaps a hand at him in a strangely complex pattern. Shigeo enjoys his expressive hand gestures; no-one else he knows does anything like that. “Here, I’ll find one of the pressure points for you.” He starts poking various places on his wrist while looking closely at the diagram. “Ah. Yeah, that’s one. Put your finger right here.”
“Can you come closer, please? There’s a cat sitting on me, so I can’t move.”
Arataka doesn’t just roll his eyes, he rolls his entire head. But he does come to sit in the chair next to Shigeo. “Okay, now will you do it?”
Shigeo puts his forefinger on the place where Arataka’s thumb was. His middle finger, next to it, feels different. Arataka’s pulse seems louder or stronger on the pressure point. He presses the tiniest amount of psychic power he can manage into Arataka’s wrist, just through that one finger.
“Feels kind of tingly. Put more power into it, Master. I think something’s happening.” Shigeo gradually increases the power, watching as his student’s hand starts to glow with Shigeo’s own aura. It spreads up his arm, and then his whole body is glowing. “Woah,” he says. Shigeo cuts off the power. “No, no, it was a good woah. I feel great. I think it worked, we have to go find a spirit to look at!”
In Arataka’s excitement, he seems to be levitating his teacup and a pen. Shigeo anchors them to the table, and he doesn’t seem to notice. “There are plenty of benign spirits on the farm,” Shigeo says. “One of them told me my power protects it from stronger or malicious spirits, so it’s a sanctuary where they won’t be eaten. If you go outside you’ll probably… Oh, here’s one now.” He points at a spirit snuffling along the floor, which is purple and has five eyes arranged in a circle on top of its head. It has about twenty segmented legs, so it moves a little like an isopod. It’s the one he calls Banban. Milk sits up and trills when she sees it, swiveling her ears forward.
“Eh?? What the hell is that?” says Arataka, pointing at it too. “It’s a little weird monster! Why would you let something like that in your house?”
Banban chatters and curls up into a ball, and then rolls slowly away.
“I think you hurt its feelings,” says Shigeo, after it disappears out of the corner.
“What? Can they understand Japanese? It’s like a bug.” Arataka sits down again, glancing over his shoulder like he’s worried Banban will come back.
“I already told you all the spirits here are benign. They’re just like animals, except they don’t eat our crops so there’s no harm in them. I can’t exactly tell if they understand it when I talk to them, but it seems like they do. One of the things a spirit needs to survive is a will, so it makes sense that they would speak Japanese too. Like dogs.”
“Please tell me not all spirits look like bugs,” says Arataka. He’s making a very intense expression that Shigeo would classify as ‘disgusted’ or ‘creeped out.’ “The one thing I can’t stand is bugs.”
Shigeo has to think about that for a moment. “Some of them do, I guess. I’ve always been able to see them, so I just think they look like normal animals, except they glow a little.”
“That’s so creepy.”
He tells Musashi about it later that night. They’re on the couch, Shigeo still looking through his watercolor book and Musashi composing a letter. He’s using Shigeo’s legs as a table, because Shigeo likes sitting with his legs in Musashi’s lap. Musashi has been frowning at his half-finished letter for a while, so Shigeo thinks he wouldn’t mind an interruption. “Today Arataka-kun figured out how to see spirits,” he says. Musashi looks up immediately, and Shigeo decides he probably wasn’t making much progress. “It seems he was right that psychic energy flows through the ki system. I don’t know how he figured it out. I think he’s much smarter than me.”
“That’s interesting,” says Musashi. He rests his warm hand on Shigeo’s ankles, which have a tendency to get cold, even when he’s wearing thick socks. “Ki is a concept that’s important to martial arts, but I wouldn’t have guessed it also has to do with psychic power. So what he figured out was that if you have psychic power in your ki system you can see spirits?”
Shigeo smiles at him, impressed with the deduction. Musashi is smarter than him too, although he is certainly worse at math. “Yes, that’s exactly it.”
“Ah, in that case anyone would be able to see spirits as long as someone with psychic power knows how to put it into them.” He frowns thoughtfully. “Why can I see them?”
“Can you?” asks Shigeo, shocked. “You never mentioned it, and I’m sure you’re not psychic.”
“Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so much time with you,” says Musashi, smiling. “It was very slow. For a while I just thought I was a little paranoid, and then I realized you could see them too, and I thought it wasn’t worth mentioning.”
Shigeo pulls his head down to kiss him on the cheek. He’s thinking of what he told Arataka, that the farm is now imbued with his psychic power just because he’s lived here so long. Could the same be true of Musashi? He gets distracted from his line of thought when Musashi tilts his head and puts it in the crook of Shigeo’s neck. Shigeo lets his cheek rest on top of Musashi’s head. His face is getting a little hot, and the feeling he sometimes has, like something is boiling in his gut, is getting stronger. It’s something he often feels when Musashi touches him, a strange combination of excitement and contentment.
Eventually Musashi sits up again (he kisses Shigeo’s jaw, and the pot boils a little higher). He says, “Kurata would be very interested in this, wouldn’t she?”
“Probably,” says Shigeo, still distracted by Musashi’s arm around his waist. “Wasn’t she interested in… um… aliens, not spirits?”
“She talked about telepathy a lot,” says Musashi. “This is a little similar, isn’t it?”
“I guess so. I’ll email her to see if she’d like to hear about it.”
For the rest of the night, he completely forgets about Kurata. Musashi doesn’t finish his letter either.