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tenspontaneite · 7 years

Text

Paper Cranes (17/?)

Hikaru obtains a very important piece of paper.

Hikaru wandered home in a half-daze, all of his attention irrevocably commanded by the precious piece of paper he was carrying.

There were so many other things he could be focusing on – like the subtle strangeness of the shrine, or the wardlights in three different places, or even the fox spirit who’d somewhat violently aided his breakthrough, who was trailing behind at a modest distance. But…they all seemed so irrelevant, in comparison.

It was just a spark. The merest of lights, considerably weaker than what he carried on his soul or in his fan. But…

A spark.

His fingers were numb and trembling with strange tension by the time he came home, the wards of his home washing over him. He felt almost deaf and blind to his surroundings, and didn’t notice his mother greeting him until she was right beside him.

“Hikaru?” She said, presumably when he’d failed to respond to an initial greeting. “Aren’t you going to close the door? It’s cold outside.”

“…Uh, yeah, sure.” He agreed, distractedly, and shot a glance to the fox as it waltzed leisurely through the doorway, the wards rippling happily around it. He closed the door as soon as the distortions left by its tails were clear, and sighed into the warm air of his house. “Sorry, I’m a bit tired.” He added belatedly, removing his bag and setting to work at the fastenings of his coat.

His mother took the coat from him almost as soon as he had it off, tutting softly. “Did you stay up late at your friend’s house?” She asked, knowingly, as she went to hang up the thing for him.

“Actually, no. It was just a tiring day. You know – official game and all.” Hikaru hedged, hefting his backpack onto one shoulder and kicking off his shoes. As his mother was unaware he had left the city for the night, he wisely avoided mentioning the travel related exhaustion.

“How was it?” The question seemed automatic. Kind of like ‘how was your day at school’, with pretty much the same level of interest, which was very little.

He shrugged. “I won it.” Having divested himself of his outdoor things, Hikaru held his prize furtively from view and made for the stairs. “I’m gonna go to my room now, okay?”

“Dinner will be at seven!” She called after him, and he made an acknowledging noise as he left her view.

Hikaru felt oddly, desperately relieved to close the door to his room. He hardly even noticed the fox walking through it and settling in the corner – all of his focus was on the precious piece of paper in his hands. He stumbled over to the kamidana, unwrapping the paper with shaky hands, and let his eyes run over the name written artfully on the ofuda.

Fujiwara no Sai.

He opened the kamidana’s doors, and set it carefully inside. He stared at the name, silent, for several more seconds, and then closed the doors on it.

His every sense was so, so desperately honed on that piece of paper. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting – the same sense of awareness or presence as from an Inari shrine, perhaps – but in the end very little happened. The tiny, dormant spark in the ofuda loosened, almost imperceptibly, and settled into the kamidana. That was all.

Hikaru remained half-kneeling in front of the kamidana for who-knows how long, watching, waiting.

But that was all.

Slowly, he came down to sit in seiza on the floor.

He wasn’t disappointed, was the weird thing. It should have hurt, for his newly endowed shrine to have no waking awareness inside it. It didn’t. He still felt like he was...waiting. The entirety of his attention was arrested by that little, somnolent ofuda-spark – so faint, and yet so much more alive than the traces he carried were. Sai.

Surely, surely, something was going to happen. He felt oddly, quietly certain of it.

He waited.

It was only when his mother called him for dinner that he realised he'd been sitting, waiting, for over an hour. It had just...slipped by, in a sort of calm and watchful expectance. Nothing had happened, but...he was so certain that he was waiting for something real. So certain that the lack of activity didn’t disappoint him at all.

Something was building within the shrine that had not been there before.

---

Eating dinner with his mother, and the subsequent after-dinner chores, served to rouse him from the odd state he had fallen into, waiting in front of the shrine. Hikaru felt as though he were steadily coming awake, becoming aware of his surroundings as if he had merely been sleepwalking before, and the difference in experience was quite disconcerting. He noticed that he’d missed a number of messages from Utagawashi, having not even noticed his phone buzzing.

Hikaru returned to his room a little wary, eyes drawn unfailingly to Sai’s kamidana as he entered. It made his heart ache a little to feel the ofuda there, dormant and bereft of awareness though it was.

The sense of quiet, lingering anticipation remained.

With some effort, Hikaru pulled himself away from it, uncertain what he was actually sensing. He turned his attention to Utagawashi’s messages in an attempt to distract himself, flopping onto his bed with a sigh. His muscles exhaled their various tensions and aches all at once into the mattress, a blissful sensation if ever there was one. He opened Utagawashi’s messages and set to reading them. He snorted.

Apparently, the priest had no compunctions about interrogating him on the subject of foxes if it was by text.

‘My fox started following me at the shrine I went to yesterday morning,’ he typed, leaving out the ‘where I prayed for your life’ part. ‘It started off really hard to sense, but I got better at it. It also warned me when Kaminaga was getting close one time.’ That was the first part of the information the priest had demanded, and the next…let’s see…ah, differences between the two foxes. ‘Your fox is smaller and weaker than my fox. It’s grumpier and hides behind the other one when it can. They’re both white, and wearing red neck cloth things.’

He thought carefully back to what he’d seen, and spared a glance for the fox in the corner of his bedroom. It made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up a little – once again, it wasn’t making as much of an effort towards stealth while inside the wards, so it was a vaguely white shape in the corner of his eye. Needless to say, having a white spirit in the corner of his eye in his bedroom was causing him some uncomfortable feelings.

‘Yours has two tails, I think.’ He typed, after a pause. ‘Mine has four.’

Hikaru glanced at his vulpine probably-bodyguard periodically as he and Utagawashi began gossiping furiously.

The priest informed him that white fur on foxes was meant to be a sign of them being Inari-servants, which was pretty obvious by this point. The red bibs, likewise. He also mentioned that foxes were supposedly meant to grow a tail per hundred years of ‘life’, which would put Hikaru’s follower at at least four hundred. This would have probably sounded more impressive if Hikaru hadn’t lived with a thousand-year-old ghost for two years.

In turn, Hikaru elaborated on the personality traits he’d observed in his fox thus far; namely, an amount of interest in various intellectual pursuits, and what seemed to be a deep enjoyment at watching people in various embarrassing or flustering predicaments. He also explained in depth what had happened at the shrine, including how he’d slapped a four-tailed fox spirit half-way across the shrine grounds with his fan.

‘Perhaps you could try that on Kaminaga.’ was the priest’s suggestion after that.

Hikaru was not so certain. ‘I think sword beats paper,’ He typed back, and tried not to think about how precisely that might work out.

Eventually, when Utagawashi had exhausted his knowledge on the foxes, he turned to the matter of Hikaru’s weird soul.

‘You say that Fujiwara-san’s energy has formed a layer over the surface of your soul,’ The priest began, and Hikaru swallowed at the evidence that apparently, writing the ofuda had solidified Sai’s name for the man. ‘Is it the same thickness everywhere? Does it exhibit any behaviour?’

And, well, he wasn’t really sure about that. Hikaru felt relatively sure that the layer wasn’t uniform, but he knew little else about it. He said as much, and then added that he would put aside some time to work on it when he could. He then took the opportunity to text Yashiro and assure him that he still had all of his blood in his body and that his skin was intact.

It was relatively late by the time he put down the phone, but there was still something important to do. He looked at the kamidana and swallowed, leaving his bed to extract some of the incense from a drawer.

He set it carefully into the burner and rummaged around for his lighter, then paused. He shot a glance at the spirit sitting in the corner of his room. “Could you maybe not be here?” He requested, more than slightly uncomfortable with the idea of actually talking to Sai in front of some random fox he barely knew. “Like, can you go downstairs for a while?”

The vulpine presence shifted languidly, and stretched. For a second, Hikaru could see pearly-white teeth in a red mouth as it yawned, and then it was back to being an indistinct pale shape. It walked through the door and headed down the hallway to the house shrine, which he supposed was good enough.

Why the hell was a spirit yawning, anyway? Didn’t that imply an ability to sleep? Sai hadn’t slept – was that just a Sai thing or a ghost thing or did it apply to all spirits?

Hikaru shook his head free of the pointless wondering and lit the incense, trembling a little at the first breath of it. It felt like it had been a very long time since he last smelled it. If he actually thought about it, though, it had only been about…five days? But so much had happened, it felt like an eternity. He removed his fan from his pocket and set it at the kamidana, very carefully.

He settled in front of the shrine with a sigh, closing his eyes for a moment to breathe in the familiar scent in the air. Something was different this time, and there were a lot of reasons for it.

Hikaru reached out, carefully, and touched his awareness to the spark in Sai’s ofuda. It was somnolent, empty of intent, but…alive. Compared to before, it was like the difference between a hearth of cold ashes, and one with just the tiniest glowing ember. And, interestingly, the presence of the fan seemed to…do something.

“Hi, Sai.” He said, quietly, and watched with his heart in his throat as the fan and the ofuda…melded, sort of? It was as though the densely saturated energy in the fan became the seat of the spark, the proverbial fireplace. That was definitely different. “It…actually hasn’t been that long, but holy fuck does it feel like it.” He could almost hear the reprimand his language would get him, if there was more than a dormant spark there. “To start with, I’m still in the Kisei league, which is good. I think I should be fine until the second preliminaries, at least, because no offence to them but I usually beat Isumi and Waya pretty well now…”

Steadily, some tension he’d been carrying fell away as he allowed himself to fall into idle babble, talking first about the few people in the first preliminaries he worried about, then about his estimation of Waya and Isumi’s chances against each other (in Isumi’s favour, for now, but it could go either way) and then he settled in for a replay of that day’s match.

“So, it was a pretty good game. I look forward to seeing what happens to this guy’s game once he’s had a few more years of seasoning.” And yes, he fully appreciated the irony of saying that when he himself barely had any years of practice himself. “Honestly though, things have been too fucking mad for me to play enough lately. You’d be in Go withdrawal by now, if it was you in my place.” He grimaced briefly at the thought. Sai might fare better against a hideously threatening sword spirit, but then again…he might not. “That sword isn’t making my life easy, that’s for sure.” He sighed, and then with reluctance went off into a tale of far less pleasant things than a decent game.

In a way, it was good to talk about it all, especially since he didn’t get into the emotional impact it was all having with anyone else. On the other hand, it was pretty unpleasant subject matter and that had its own effect.

“So now I have this fox following me around and I’m hoping I live long enough for that Onmyouji guy to show up.” He finished, after a rather involved narration of his last several days. “So it’s mostly been shit, even if the fox is kind of interesting, and I finally figured out where all your energy is. And you’ve got an ofuda now, which…it feels…good.” He blinked at the kamidana, wondering if anything had changed about that feeling of waiting now that he was praying.

He felt for it, and…it wasn’t difficult to find. Which was odd, because he didn’t notice it unless he was paying attention, but…

That feeling was still there. Subtle, but very insistent.

Wait.

Hikaru waited.

Then he was quite rudely interrupted by a fluffy tail to the face. He spluttered, jolting out of his reverie with shock, and before he could push the tail away he was being face-slapped by another one. “Oi!” He said, outraged, and when the next one looked like it was going to have a go he reached out and slapped it, with hand and spirit both.

A very smug-looking fox, fully visible, backed away and snickered at him. Then it stealthed again, by some definition of the word. Its presence was still exceptionally obvious in the wards, so he wasn’t sure why it bothered.

“What’s even the point of going invisible again?” He demanded, getting shakily to his feet. He discovered that they were entirely numb, as though he’d been playing a seriously long game. The abrupt return of blood was painful. “Fuck,” He swore, and went to retrieve his fan from the shrine before falling onto his bed as an almighty case of pins-and-needles besieged his limbs. The fox snickered at him, again, and he glared balefully. “What was the tail to the face for?” He asked, belatedly.

Its presence rippled with a sort of contemplative shimmer. Then it shrugged. Spirit-trap maybe. It suggested, presence shifting in the direction of his shrine. Passage-of-time.

He frowned, then got out his phone. Then he swore again when he discovered that, at some point, it had become three in the morning. He was certain he’d not been talking to Sai that long, but…it hadn’t felt like he’d spent long waiting, either. It was kind of alarming to lose time in such a way, but at the same time, he really couldn’t bring himself to be threatened by that feeling of waiting hanging around the shrine.

It wasn’t a bad thing. Not at all. He knew it. But…even that had its risks, he supposed.

“I’m going to need to start setting alarms any time I go near my room.” He muttered, and then slunk to the bathroom to brush his teeth as quietly as possible so as not to disturb his mother.

---

It was somewhat fortunate that the following day was a Thursday, with no expectations of early-rising. However, this was somewhat ruined by the fact that, at slightly past eight in the morning, a new presence outside the house tickled at Hikaru’s senses and sent him wide awake. He blinked around, half-panicked and blinking grit out of his eyes, and flailed wildly around with his senses. He relaxed a bit when he found the fox nearby, which seemed settled and not at all alarmed.

Still, there was something new. He reached out to where he’d felt it and found…

Another fox?

He blinked, befuddled, and felt at it more insistently. It bristled uncomfortably under his spiritual attention, and he briefly discerned that it was one-tailed before it slipped away, feeling disgruntled.

“Why is there another fox there?” He asked, confused.

The four-tailed one crept a little closer, offering clumsy young one isn’t sneaky enough.

Hikaru scrutinised the white blurriness. “That’s why it woke me up, not why it’s here.” He pointed out, sweeping his awareness out again to try figuring out where it had gone, but it was outside the wards and therefore a little more-

He froze, feeling several presences flinch at his touch and make efforts to be stealthier. He looked back at the first resident, a little accusatively.

“How many foxes are here?” He demanded.

The four-tails considered his words, and then…the curl of its presence felt oddly grim. Not enough. It said, and then wouldn’t say any more.

Well…okay then?

---

Throughout his somewhat surprising morning, Hikaru identified fourteen foxes hanging around the vicinity of his house, all but three of them one-tailed. The remaining three seemed to have two tails, though there was one he wasn’t sure of. They were none of them as stealthy as his own follower and though they moved around a lot, he eventually became quite certain of the count.

He texted Utagawashi, of course. “I woke up this morning to 14 more foxes around the house. Mine won’t say why.”

The remainder of his getting-ready time was spent filling the priest in on pertinent details, like tail counts and apparent behaviour, and then he ran out of excuses to stay in the house.

He brandished his fan warily and left the wards, four-tailed fox falling in step behind him.

All of the loiterers got quite hastily out of his way as he walked. A good half split off to follow behind the existing stalker-fox and the other half formed a loose circle around his home.

It was…unnerving, to say the least.

Hikaru did not let go of his fan for a second, all of the way to the Touya salon. Even more weird, he kept finding more foxes as he travelled, apparently stationed all over the city. His followers tended to greet them as they passed, which made them easier to spot, though the much larger four-tails never strayed far.

As a result, he barely managed to raise his belligerence shields before he entered the Touya salon, and had to hastily prepare himself to face the music.

The lady at the reception counter whose name he kept forgetting looked at him with something approaching tired resignation, took his payment from him, and pointed him towards the back of the salon with a beleaguered sigh. Hikaru took that long-suffering look as a badge of honour and went on his merry way, pushing thoughts of fox-armies out of his mind as he went to bite the bullet.

Touya was at his customary goban, and appeared to be replaying his and Hikaru’s last game. He was placing the stones with a sort of angry click, the look on his face more than slightly threatening. Then he paused, spotting Hikaru, and straightened to make eye contact. Hikaru saw nothing less than pure vengeance staring out at him, and grinned with relish. “You.” Touya snarled, and several nearby patrons glanced over in alarm at the pure venom dripping from that word.

“Hi, Touya.” He said, cheerfully. “I saw yesterday that you got kicked out of Honinbou – again – by Ogata – again. Why didn’t you tell me? Embarrassed?”

Touya hardly seemed to notice the barb. “You,” He said again, apparently gone monosyllabic at the sight of him. “Game. Now.”

“Hikaru game now,” He agreed, mockingly, and sat down at the goban while Touya performed the most impassioned board-clearing he’d ever seen. Within seconds, its surface was pristine, and then a second later it wasn’t, with Touya’s hand obscuring a number of black stones.

“Nigiri.” Touya ordered, his eyes absurdly, intensely green.

Hikaru rolled his eyes and put a stone down. Begrudgingly, he was ceded the black stones, and he bowed to start the game. Touya’s answering onegaishimasu was in as much of a growl as everything else he’d said so far today.

He placed his first stone, and from there onwards it was exactly the glorious thing he’d expected of a rival he’d thoroughly pissed off and then left to stew for a while. Touya was ruthless, allowing not a single, tiny inch of give, and he went so thoroughly on the offensive that Hikaru barely managed to get a stone in edgewise.

Which wasn’t to say that he didn’t manage at all. A few times, Hikaru managed to spring some truly impressive comebacks on his nanadan rival, promptly eating his way into some delicious board-corners and then stamping his presence all over the place with subsequent stones. Touya was not to be dissuaded, though, and bit by bit gnawed his way into Hikaru’s territory, making a brutal invasion of any cluster that was even slightly less than perfectly defended.

He became aware around the half-way mark that he probably wasn’t going to win, so set to work preparing an especially mighty final blow that went off at around the two-hundredth move, striking true and beautiful as it killed one of Touya’s largest clusters in maybe three exchanges of stones. The look of outrage on his face was fantastic and the sight of his lovely new territory even more so, each of the empty points singing out like a gigantic ‘fuck you’ in goban form.

Still though, it wasn’t enough to make up the territory difference so Hikaru resigned pretty much right after that, nonetheless satisfied with what he’d managed and feeling like he’d scrounged a symbolic victory at the very least.

There was also that Touya looked a bit less liable to lunge across the goban and tear out his throat, now, which was always a good thing. Seemed like most of his ire had been channelled productively into the game.

“Discussion?” He inquired, idly, taking a moment to assess the proverbial spiritual tides around him. He found those proverbial waters full of foxes, somewhat unsurprisingly, but also that a number of them were alarmingly close, which was surprising. He flinched a little, finding that some particularly stealthy specimens had insinuated themselves around the goban while he was occupied with the game, their numbers comprising of Hikaru’s four-tails, one three-tails, and two two-tails.

He sent a wordless sweep of intent at the lot of them, made up of blunt demand, which translated handily to ‘what the hell guys’ in practice.

Hikaru’s first stalker was the one to respond, flashing back an amused watching.

“Pff.” Hikaru muttered to himself, getting an annoyed look from his rival, who was waiting to start the discussion. Well, it wasn’t as though he wasn’t used to audiences, even if foxes were sort of not the usual sort of crowd. He put the foxy observers out of mind and set to conducting the discussion in the most intentionally irritating way possible.

By the time his final bold move came about in the discussion, Touya was red-faced and visibly restraining himself from a good shouting match, since they’d both been told off about that and usually made passing efforts to keep things civil in public. It didn’t take much to push him over the edge, then.

Hikaru took a stone to the face with sunny grace, and then absconded from the salon, very pleased at having put off Touya’s interrogation by hopefully at least another day.

---

The day proceeded as laden with foxes as it had begun, and after doing his rounds of a couple of salons and raking in cash from some teaching games, Hikaru headed home to get some proper studying in. He printed off the kifu of every Honinbou game he’d missed in the tumult of his recent days, including Touya’s, and retreated to his room with them, ready to spend some quality time with his goban.

He was getting quite good at ignoring foxes by that point, so it came as something of a surprise when they started crowding around him again. He blinked, and suddenly there were foxes surrounding the goban, like right there, in his room, where only the four-tails had come inside before. And what’s more, they weren’t bothering with the subterfuge, sitting there all fluffy and white and inquisitive-looking.

Hikaru stared. “Everything okay?” he ventured, after a moment. It was all one-tails there, and they were a lot smaller than the four-tailed one was. Normal fox size, maybe, or even smaller. Definitely smaller.

Game talking, one of them requested, black ears alert and little tail twitching. He stared at it, aghast, because he wasn’t used to finding himself surrounded by fuzzy faces looking so…well…yeah, they were sort of cute. Please?

Like with earlier-boy, another agreed, its own tail swishing. Game talk?

He took a moment to wonder at what his life had come to. “You want me to talk through the game?” He clarified. He received a whole lot of affirming spirit-pushes at that, and he had to shove a couple of them away when they got too excitable. They were…fluffy. In a weird way. It felt like he wasn’t exactly feeling the fluff with his hands, more…something else. But the texture remained. “Yeah, okay,” He sighed, rubbing at his forehead incredulously. “But just this game, alright? I’ve got to study properly sometime.”

Little not-quite-audible yips went around the spectators as they settled in. The current game he was perusing was between Kurata and Ichiryuu-sensei, and was impressively high-level. Hikaru suspected that he might see it at a study session, sometime soon.

Hikaru exhaled, and then set about narrating the game to a host of foxes.

Later, somewhat furtively, Hikaru made a whole rice-cooker load of rice and set it outside in a plastic mixing bowl, giving a brief mutter of offering that consigned it to the appetite of Inari’s servants. They all waited until he was out of sight, but the instant he was, he felt a good dozen spirits congregating around the bowl. The four-tails wasn’t among them, but instead projected approval at him as he climbed the stairs to go back to bed.

“I’m so glad you approve.” He said, dryly, and put himself to sleep at a far more respectable hour than the previous night, sparing a moment to text Yashiro and beat back the threat of blackmail.

By morning, the bowl was completely spotless.

---

The Friday sun dawned on even more foxes. There weren’t any more in his immediate vicinity, so it took a little while for him to notice, but there was…something. Hikaru reached out towards it, wary, and happened to brush over several vulpine presences along the way.

The thing was kind of far away. He concentrated, and…yeah, it was at the shrine. It had the same sort of feel as the rest of them, which Hikaru was swiftly coming to associate with foxes, but it was also…very very different. It wasn’t hiding at all, to begin with. And, um, its presence was really noticeable?

“What the hell kind of fox do you have at the shrine?” Hikaru asked the four-tails, finally, once he’d been staring at the wall for long enough that his blink reflex was getting insistent.

It inspected him for a few seconds, and answered five-tails.

He blinked. “…Okay.” He said, slowly, and got out his phone to very promptly report that answer to Utagawashi. “Are there going to be any more foxes?” It shrugged unhelpfully. No response seemed forthcoming after a few seconds, so Hikaru rolled his eyes and went off to shower.

The alleged five-tails in the distance was…strong. Really strong. It practically radiated power, and felt bright in some ephemeral spiritual way he wasn’t sure how to put into words. It was almost like a kind of embodied foxy wardlight, blazing like a beacon in the distance. Whether or not it felt stronger than the demon, though…that was harder to say.

“Does one tail really make such a difference in power?” Hikaru asked his first follower, once he’d left the shower and dressed himself. “That five-tails is loads stronger than you.”

The fox rippled at him, then tried to push maths into his head. He blinked and waved the thought projection away, not having expected a spirit to present him with mathematics, which he was not great at. “I am a shit student.” He explained, patiently. “Can you use words, maybe?”

There was a pause, a shimmer of intent, and then the word “Exponential” resounded in the room, perfectly audible in what sounded like very well-pronounced Japanese. Hikaru jumped, profoundly shocked, and got laughed at when he almost tripped over his own feet as a consequence.

“You can talk?” He asked, astounded, because that had very much been out loud and he was quite certain that an average human would have been able to hear that.

Obviously, the fox replied, pointedly not out-loud. Focus.

“On wha- oh.” He thought back to what the fox had actually said. “…Exponential.” He repeated, feeling somewhat concerned as the meaning dawned on him. He wasn’t a great student, but he knew what that meant. “So, what, your power increases exponentially when you get a new tail?” That was insane. What the hell must nine-tailed foxes be like, if that was true?

The fox wavered pensively. Not quite so much. But nearly. It answered, oddly coherent.

Hikaru looked at it, wide-eyed. “…Are any six-tails going to show up?” He asked, warily.

Ha, it projected, almost morose, with a curl of wistfulness that said I wish.

He sat on his bed and thought for several minutes, quiet.

So, foxes were showing up by the dozen. The one-tails and two-tails, judging by how they felt, probably wouldn’t be any sort of match for the demon. The three-tails would be outclassed, and if he was going to admit it, he didn’t think this four-tails stood a great chance either. The five-tails, though? That was…quite a lot better. But the fact remained that a gigantic host of foxes were arriving in Tokyo, seeming to congregate around him, Utagawashi, and the priest’s shrine. Inari foxes, nonetheless.

“Are all of you here to protect us?” He asked, a little overwhelmed at the thought.

The fox’s aura did a sort of flopping twist that expressed kinda.

He fell quiet. Then: “So, it’s because of the demon? …Is it really that much of a threat?” Enough for a god to send his servants out in force, even a five-tails?

Very grimly, the four-tails reached out, and pressed words into his mind. Worse than you think, it said, firmly, and then retreated. It sank, once again, into a dark-feeling silence.

Feeling more than slightly threatened by the assertion, Hikaru packed up his things and went looking for something to distract him.

---

Despite the current chaos of his life, Hikaru was quite aware that tomorrow was a fairly significant day in the Kisei preliminaries, if only because it was the day that Waya and Isumi had their match. Last time he’d seen them they were starting to stew nicely in pre-match rivalry flavouring, so he expected they would both be somewhat manic with it by now. This presented an excellent opportunity for distraction.

Hikaru went to their apartment block and pinged Waya’s button on the intercom repeatedly and very obnoxiously, which resulted in the other boy’s voice coming out of the speaker in curses once he finally got to his door thing. “Shindou, that’s got to be you, no one else is that annoying,” He greeted over the intercom, once he was done swearing.

“Your glorious tutor is here to play with you.” He said, severely. “Show some respect.”

There was a loud snort. “Yeah, right.” He sneered a little, and then the door buzzed. “Door’s open. You know which flat is mine, right?”

“It’s not like I could have buzzed you if I didn’t.” He pointed out, and entered the building. A few flights of stairs later, he was being waved into a doorway by an unimpressed-looking Waya.

“What are you even doing here?” The boy asked, closing the door behind him. Hikaru winced because the fox was there and that made him slightly uncomfortable, but naturally it just walked straight through the door. “Don’t you know I’ve got a game to prepare for?”

“Why do you think I’m here?” He shrugged. “You need someone good to play so you don’t get all stupid stressed out studying.”

Waya made a show of looking around. “You brought someone good for me to play?” He asked, with mocking false-surprise.

Hikaru wondered briefly if a four-tailed fox spirit counted, but he had no idea if it’s interest in Go translated to a talent for it, so. “I brought myself.” He proclaimed, wandering into the tiny flat to appropriate Waya’s Goban. “And the greatest gift I can bestow on anyone.”

“Silence?” Waya guessed sarcastically, rushing over to clear the Goban himself.

“My presence.” He corrected, and settled into seiza. “What do you want, full length game or timed?”

The boy considered it. “Timed.” He decided, eventually. “Same as Insei games.” He disappeared briefly to retrieve his game clock from a nearby shelf.

Hikaru remembered, looking around the room, that Waya did not have a house-shrine in his flat. The knowledge made him oddly uncomfortable. He waited as his opponent set the timer and arranged the bowls, gathering some stones for nigiri. Hikaru got black, like he had the day before, and they began.

It became increasingly evident as the game went on that Waya’s play was a bit…off. He was clearly stressing far too much about the various individual stones and not reading properly, and it was kind of a mess. “Stop thinking so hard.” Hikaru said, at around the seventieth move, unable to help himself. “Loosen up, it’s not like tomorrow’s is the last league game you’ll ever play.”

Waya scowled at him, then at the wreck of his game. “Fuck you.” He said, but it was very half-hearted. “Whatever, I resign. Can we start over?”

“Yeah, sure.” Hikaru nodded agreeably, and they cleared the board away. This time, Waya got the first move, and they set about a new start.

He was a bit better, that game. He still lost, but he loosened up a little. Hikaru pestered him into another one and he was almost back to normal on that one, posing a decent challenge.

“That was better.” He declared, at the end, and launched into an explanation as to why this was the case. They powered their way through a very efficient discussion and then Hikaru abandoned Waya to his fate. “I’m going to go bother Isumi, now.” He said, grabbing his bag and heading for the door.

Waya eyed him balefully. “Consorting with the enemy.” He commented, not bothering to stand up from the Goban.

“He’s your best friend.” Hikaru countered, rolling his eyes. “That’s hardly ‘the enemy’.”

“We have a match tomorrow. We are at war.” Waya insisted.

He snorted and opened the door, feeling the four-tails brush past. “If you say so.”

“Your betrayal will not be forgotten!” The boy shouted after him as he left, door clicking shut behind him.

Isumi was surprised to see him. “Shindou-kun,” He greeted, his appearance far neater than Waya’s. Despite this, the bags under his eyes and a sort of haggard air around him betrayed his own pre-match nerves. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“No one ever expects me.” Hikaru agreed, and made himself at home. “I’m here to play you, and distract you from your game nerves.”

The young man smiled, ruefully, and followed him to the board. “Much appreciated.” He murmured, sitting down. “Have you visited Waya yet?” There was a subtle undercurrent there, a hint of an information probe.

“Yeah, and I played a few games with him. He’s stressing out, too.” Hikaru initiated the nigiri, since Isumi seemed distracted, and ended up with the first move.

“I don’t think I’m that stressed,” Isumi said with dignity, but obediently bowed into the game when Hikaru gestured at him insistently enough. His standard of play promptly ruined any hope of Hikaru believing him about his stress levels, because while he didn’t play as badly as Waya did when he was stressed, he took absolutely ages to make moves. Hikaru began to wish he’d demanded a clock for the match.

Unsurprisingly, he won, but it took so long that he was reluctant to give Isumi another game once they were done discussing. He waved the other professional away and then raided his fridge for something to eat. “I’m not playing you again unless it’s on an hour-clock.” He insisted, shoving a cereal bar into his mouth and completing his next sentence around it. “Actually, better yet, make it speed Go. Might loosen you up a bit.”

Isumi gave him a withering look, but nodded reluctantly. “Perhaps.” He agreed, and fetched his own clock. He looked at Hikaru hopefully. “Forty-five minutes?” He asked.

“Thirty.” He countered, firmly. The older professional sighed, resigned to his fate, and set the clock.

Hikaru apparently had very good instincts about how to unleash his friends from their shitty stress-playing, because after some initial floundering, Isumi started thinking quickly again, having no time for the anxious rumination that drew out his moves so much. He wasn’t the best at speed Go in general, so Hikaru looked upon the completed game with some lenience, powering through the discussion and then demanding another go.

“Speed game, again?” Isumi sighed.

“You obviously need it.” Hikaru told him, and so they set to it again.

Another good thing about speed games was that, well, they were quick. The first game had been a two and a half hour beast, so he wasn’t going to give Isumi too much more time, but he did consent to a third game, and by the time that was done he felt a bit more confident in Isumi’s ability to not bring shame upon his house in his match tomorrow.

“There. Now both you and Waya should be able to put up a decent fight tomorrow.” He said, with satisfaction, and stretched. “Now I need to go prepare for my own game, so I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Isumi looked somewhat reluctant to let him go, but saw him out with good grace. “Tomorrow,” He agreed, and Hikaru left with the four-tailed fox in tow.

---

It was coming up to late afternoon by the time Hikaru left the apartment building, and he was very hungry. The cereal bar he’d shamelessly liberated from Isumi was not nearly enough. As such, despite dinner probably not being all that far off, Hikaru stopped by a convenience store on his way to the nearest station, inspecting its selection of lunch goods critically.

After some dithering, he settled on a little package of onigiri despite being hungry enough to eat far more than that. He felt somewhat proud of his restraint, and turned to go to the counter.

…Except.

Hikaru glanced surreptitiously at the fox following him around. “Do you want anything?” he asked, in a low voice, because there were people around.

The fox seemed startled, if the little jump in its presence was anything to go by. Hikaru felt its attention shifting unerringly to the sushi section before it focused back on him. It appeared somewhat baffled.

“Inarizushi, maybe?” He said, as though musing aloud.

The fox extruded a tendril of intrigued intent. ‘I couldn’t possibly’ it seemed to demure, despite the rest of its aura saying yes quite insistently.

Hikaru rolled his eyes at it and picked up the little package of crappy store sushi, and went to pay for the items. He put the sushi in his bag and ate the onigiri on the way to the station, polishing off the last one just before he got onto the train. It was raining by the time he got off, and he pulled up his hood to hurry home, wondering idly if spirit-foxes got wet in the rain. Sai hadn’t, but he hadn’t been capable of audible speech, either.

He shook rain from his coat as he passed through the edge of the wardlights, muscles loosening a little as he entered the considerably warmer interior of his home. “I’m home!” He called, but his mother must have been out or something, since there was no answer. He shrugged, and divested himself of shoes and coat before he retrieved the sushi from his bag. He brandished it at the fox, whose silhouette shimmered in a pleased sort of way. “Do you want this in a bowl or something?” He inquired.

Unnecessary, decreed the fox, so he went to the kitchen to dispose of the lid and then awkwardly put it on the floor. The fox approached, then looked at him.

“Are you going to be weird about eating in front of me?” Hikaru asked, raising an eyebrow.

The fox appeared to consider that, then shrugged, and dropped stealth. It then proceeded to scarf down the inarizushi in all its fuzzy four-tailed glory, utterly unconcerned with his presence. Hikaru, for his part, stared without shame. It really was pretty big. And the paleness of the fur also made its defined muscles really obvious.

In very little time, there remained only a few trace scraps of food in the plastic packet. Then the fox…did something, extended itself and burned, somehow, and those scraps were gone too, leaving only the plastic. Gratitude-for-meal, it expressed, and then just sort of…stood there. Still plainly visible.

Hikaru tilted his head, staring a bit longer, and noticed that it had black ears and sort of amber eyes. Then he retrieved the packet and threw it away. “You’re welcome.” He said, finally, and then grabbed his bag to head upstairs.

As it happened, the fox did not re-stealth, and it turned out that having a large fluffy creature in one’s room was far more distracting than an indistinct white haze. Hikaru spent fifteen unfocused minutes looking at kifu and determining that tomorrow’s opponent really, really wasn’t going to be a problem before he finally asked “Why aren’t you, you know, hiding?”

The fox, who had curled up in an impossibly soft shroud of furry tails, projected an indolent kind of indifference that said couldn’t be bothered.

Hikaru scrutinised it. “Well, okay then.” He shrugged, and returned to his preparations.

---

He did not have anything against the fox spirit’s presence in his life. In fact, having a guardian creature there whose agenda seemed to be taking down the demon was exceptionally welcome, and it had very been helpful on the matter of Sai’s energy. This did not mean, however, that it was very easy to wake up and see white in the corner of his eye, when he was still fresh from the piercing dreams that hardly ever let him alone, and vulnerable to the trappings of his unconscious mind.

The part of him that still expected to see Sai whenever he turned around soared, helpless and exalting, at the pale shape and the corresponding sense of presence that was right there – then he woke up, truly, and that part of him crashed and burned. Again.

Hikaru gritted his teeth, sat up, and breathed carefully while his fingers sought the fan at his bedside. He clutched it, burying his awareness into the energy within to find some fragile comfort, and sat quietly for several minutes.

When he felt a bit steadier, he stood up, greeted the fox, and then went to get ready for the day. His own game ought to be easy, but he was very interested in seeing what came of Isumi and Waya’s match.

---

When he arrived at the game hall, both Waya and Isumi were already there, and the aura of tension around them was…palpable.

Like, actually palpable, he could feel it, in a spiritual way. Hikaru eyed them from a distance, fascinated, and reached out with insubstantial hands to feel at the texture of the emotion they were both emanating. It was…interesting. First because, on inspection, he could actually feel their souls – normal, insensitive human souls – and he’d never felt his friends’ souls before. There was no possible way he could describe them in the limited terms offered by his language, but he went away from the experience with the oddly satisfying knowledge that the feel of their souls suited them perfectly.

The second interesting thing was that the emotion didn’t actually extend past their souls at all. It was just being…loud. Or bright, perhaps, in a different way to usual. When things were usually bright, in a spiritual sense, it was because they were powerful, but here it was just…noticeable. Distinct, maybe. Like a striking pattern viewed from a distance.

Hikaru briefly considered poking them in the souls. He decided against it, since he didn’t really understand what he was doing, and he could plausibly cause them harm and that would be awkward. Instead, he moved forwards and marvelled at the way they’d apparently been sitting in extremely tense silence for god-knows how long, occasionally making eye contact in the most hilariously intent way.

“Oh my god, have you seen yourselves?” Hikaru demanded as he drew near them. “You look like you’re trying to kill each other with your eyes.”

His remark handily broke their weird pre-game combat aura. They averted their gazes away from each other, avoiding eye contact as they looked at him instead. “Shindou, have you seen yourself and Touya, at any point ever?” Waya shot back, acerbically.

Hikaru ignored him, instead inspecting the lines of tension in their shoulders. “Holy fuck guys, I did not spend all of yesterday loosening you up for you to explode before your match.” He said, severely, and considered them. Who was more agitated, according to the emotion-texture-thing on their souls?

…Probably Waya, he decided, and abruptly realised the potential for privacy-invasion this might lead to.

Worse, it could lead to unfair advantages across the Goban, he realised with dawning horror. He might be able to tell when someone was preparing a heavy blow, or was bluffing, or….any number of things. That was so not okay.

If my spirit powers make me cheat at Go I fucking quit, he thought in an incoherent, panicked brain-babble. I am so not okay with this-

The fox, nearby, sighed. Then it gave him a light slap with a tail. Pull reach inside. It said, rolling its eyes, and Hikaru discovered that a fox rolling its eyes looked seriously weird.

He listened to its thought-projection, and considered it. Then he did the opposite of reaching, which felt bizarre, squashing himself back into only the space naturally occupied by his soul, which there wasn’t a lot of. He hadn’t quite realised how reflexive reaching had become, or how he’d started doing it with numerous threads of attention, until he had to stop.

Everything was oddly muffled when he finished. Like he was missing a sense, somewhere. Which he sort of was. It made him uncomfortable, but he couldn’t feel Isumi or Waya anymore, so he wasn’t doomed to involuntarily cheat at every game for the rest of his life.

It was, he realised, kind of like games with Sai, in that both of them had a mental avenue to feel stuff from each other. This hadn’t been terribly useful for Hikaru, though, given that he mostly tended to feel interest and intrigued from Sai, with the occasional flashes of amusement/superiority/playful and so on. He’d never been good enough for something like emotion-reading to give him a significant advantage. But…well, other people couldn’t block him out, could they? And he was good enough for that to make a difference against a lot of his opponents. What a pain.

The fox tail-slapped him again. “What?” He asked, reflexively, and then noticed that people were trying to talk to him. Oh.

“Shindou, you’re zoning out again.” Waya told him, impatient. It seemed like being vaguely irritated with him was helping his nerves though, so-

Did I figure that out by looking at him or by looking at his soul? Hikaru wondered for a second, panicking, and focused on his spiritual awareness until he was satisfied that, yes, he was actually just capable of detecting emotional shifts the normal way and wasn’t reaching out again.

“If I am, it’s because your dumb pre-game drama is making me.” He claimed, and looked for a clock. “Well, hm. Games are starting soon. Are you going to go to the goban?”

Waya and Isumi looked at each other. Tension built again, immediate and obvious, even when he wasn’t sensing it. “…Yes, I think so.” Isumi said, softly, and Waya’s chin jerked down in a nod.

“Have a good game.” He told them, hoping neither of them would freeze up embarrassingly, and watched as they walked off stiffly. It was kind of hilarious to watch them, actually. Were he and Touya really that bad when they had an important match?

…Hikaru was self-aware enough to admit to himself that, probably, he and Touya were worse by a long way.

He watched his friends take their seats opposite each other and resume the intense staring, then shook his head and went to find his own seat. His opponent, a kind of average Shodan, sat down across from him a few minutes later, and Hikaru nodded to her in greeting.

Then it was time to begin, and he immersed himself into the (not that great) game.

---

Hikaru went to record his win and then promptly went to look at his friends’ in-progress game, standing quietly nearby. He raised his eyebrows, withholding a low whistle. It was close, and well into the endgame. He wasn’t certain, looking at the board, who would win.

Tentatively, he released the strict control he’d imposed on his spirit sensing, and found both of them firmly in the grasp of fierce, intent concentration. They were tense, they were excited, they were worried – so many things, squashed into a particularly intent cocktail of fervour. It was kind of infectious when he looked at it too hard, and he backed away a bit, spiritually speaking, to get some breathing room.

He found, as he ‘looked’ elsewhere, that a few more foxes had shown up nearby while he was playing, and he…hadn’t noticed.

Hikaru realised, uncomfortably, that he would be vulnerable to sneak attacks by demons whenever he played, now. Hopefully, once this one was dealt with, that wouldn’t be an issue any more, but…it wasn’t a nice thought. At least he had the four-tails to keep watch.

He shook out of his concerns and watched the game unfold. The current conflict was Waya trying to get a few moku out of Isumi’s upper-right group, and Isumi trying his best to kick Waya out and get some moku out of him. There was a fairly intense double ko fight in progress, with Isumi taking one of Waya’s stones and then Waya taking it back and then Isumi taking Waya’s stone at the other ko point and then Waya had to decide whether to defend the point where he’d taken the ko or the one where Isumi had taken it…

Hikaru read ahead, carefully. If Waya was attentive enough, here, he could win the ko fight, and maybe the match. Otherwise, Isumi would shore up his defences and inch his way inexorably into that little stretch of Waya’s ground, and it would be enough for him to win.

He watched. Waya took the stone at the second point, and when Isumi retaliated by attacking the first one, he…

Threatened the now-vulnerable cluster at the second point.

Isumi hastily fell back to defend it, all the while Waya poked him in the weak points, and once Isumi had been forced to fill in three of his own points to defend, Waya drew back and secured the first ko point.

Good. Hikaru thought, with satisfaction, and knew that Waya had won. Isumi knew it, too, if the way he stared at the board was any indication, if the whispering pattern of searching-hoping on his soul said anything…

“I resign.” Isumi murmured, resigned, and bowed. Waya bowed back, sighing as a small smile stretched the corners of his lips. They cleared the stones away, and then Waya went off to record his win.

Isumi stood up, meeting his eyes. “Good game.” Hikaru said, very quietly.

The young man nodded, pensive. “It was.” He agreed, just as quietly, and they headed out of the game hall.

“That was a really good game from Waya, better than usual,” He said, once they were away from ongoing games and they could speak properly. “But it was a good one from you, too. I didn’t see all of it, but that shape in the bottom half – you did really well in the opening hands, didn’t you?”

“It was a very strong start.” Isumi agreed, wryly. “Unfortunately for me, Waya was very stubborn today.”

Hikaru nodded. “Well, we’ll wait for Waya, and then we can go back to your place and replay it.” He said. “I guess I’m playing Waya in two weeks then.”

“And I suppose I need to find a new league to enter.” Isumi pursed his lips, a contemplative expression falling across his face. “Ouza, maybe.”

“Doesn’t that start in December?” He’d actually been thinking of entering that, himself.

“That’s only two months away.” Isumi shrugged. “If I train hard enough in the meantime, I might do better. Maybe get into the second preliminaries at least.”

“Hopefully.” Hikaru said, and then noticed Waya leaving the game room. “Hey, Waya. Congrats on your win.”

“Thanks.” The boy smiled, looking thoroughly exhausted but very pleased. “It was a good game.”

“One of your best in a while,” He agreed. “Want to go back to yours and replay it?”

He straightened. “Of course.” He sounded slightly offended that Hikaru would think any other answer possible.

“Well, come on then, we’ve been waiting for you.” Hikaru said, belligerent, and bickered with Waya all the way back to his place.

---

Later, Hikaru checked his phone, and found it the recipient of very welcome news.

‘I think I finally got through to him, at least a little.’ Utagawashi’s text read. ‘He said he’d put another ofuda on, and was more coherent.’

Hikaru read the text out to his vulpine stalker with interest, even as he typed a reply. ‘Thank fuck. Hopefully that will hold him off for a while’. He sent it, then looked at the fox. It was frowning, which looked vaguely threatening on anything with that many teeth. “What’s wrong?”

It looked at him. Not enough, it said, eventually.

“Well, it at least buys some time, right?” He pointed out, considerably cheered in the wake of the message. “That’s not a bad thing.”

No, the fox agreed, though reluctantly. As ever, it was tight-lipped on the subject of the demon, going quiet and a little ominous in the aura.

“I’ll probably visit the shrine tomorrow.” Hikaru said, in an attempt to distract it. “That five-tails won’t eat me, right?”

It sort of worked. The grimness eased out of the fox’s frame, and it looked at him with amusement curling in its soul. No, it answered, huffing slightly.

“I heard that people as messed up in the soul as me look really tasty to possessing spirits.” Hikaru said, suddenly interested. “Is that true?”

The fox rolled its eyes. Yes.

“Then are you sure that five-tails won’t eat me?” He persisted. “Aren’t foxes sometimes possessing spirits?”

It eyed him. I’m more likely to eat you than it is. The fox informed him, pushing a little to make a coherent thought out of it.

Hikaru thought to how he’d slapped the spirit across the shrine grounds. “I think I could take you in a fight.” He opined, waving his fan.

The fox’s whiskers twitched at him. Maybe, it said, huffing again, before laying its head on its paws, apparently leaving it at that. Hikaru obligingly left the spirit alone and went to lay on the bed. He had a thing to investigate, after all. He’d told Utagawashi he’d investigate the layer of energy on his soul and it would be a bit embarrassing to turn up to the shrine without having done it.

Still, closing his eyes and reaching inwards bore an uncomfortable familiarity to his early, very reckless soul-delving. He wondered how much damage he had done himself, unknowingly digging fingers into the flesh of his own soul and tearing. It was hard to say, now. He opened a set of not-eyes, and looked out across the scarred landscape. It had, after all, always looked this way to him. Hikaru sighed, and settled in to investigate.

The ‘colours’ of his and Sai’s energies were really remarkably similar, and the overall…’texture’, he supposed, as well. He wasn’t surprised he’d missed it for so long, but now that he was really paying attention, it became kind of obvious where the divide was. Hikaru wandered, and quite quickly determined that the most healthy part of his soul, where there were almost no jagged furrows and rips and tears, was almost completely bereft of the odd layer of Sai’s spiritual power.

There was, however, a kind of subtle dancing light that was everywhere. Like motes of dust, glowing in sunlight, or specks of bioluminescent matter. They danced in slow, evanescent trails, spinning after him when he disturbed them, and…he realised, that was Sai’s energy too, just a different kind. He reached out to touch one of the motes of light, and it scattered over his skin like a spark of pain. Then the others came, each one bearing tiny traces of memory, emotion, feeling-

Rustle-of-robes, shift of a paper fan, feeling-of-shared-joy –

Hikaru breathed, sorrow eddying over him like droplets of rain, and moved away from the tiny remnants. They weren’t what he was here for.

He focused and went back to investigating the layer. Moving away from the rather slim bit of healthy soul, he watched carefully for where the coating of Sai’s energy began. He traced the edges of the thin wounds that began to root through his spirit away from that healthy edge, and found it.

The wounds weren’t very deep here, but there was something of a layer, even so. It seemed to be wedged into the wounds themselves, a slightly more purple glow than the soul around it, and it emanated echoes of Sai when he poked. Interesting. Hikaru moved, and went closer to the edge to investigate the awful wounds there, and there, it was so obvious.

At the edge of his soul, where there stopped being light and was instead just empty, aching space, there were horrible injuries. They extended into the rest of his soul like the spiderweb shatter-lines of glass, but so much more messy and visceral and painful. Near the edge, there wasn’t anything in those awful furrows except agony, tearing and shredding and oozing despair, but further in…

Hikaru observed the not-him glimmer of energy, inside one of the large wounds. Its interior was…smoother. Less like a messy wound with bits of skin and flesh hanging about, and more like a scar, except not. The wound was there, and it was just as messy as the rest, but…

Sai’s energy was covering it.

It took a fair bit of investigating to become certain, but once he felt he understood what the energy was doing, he withdrew at once and opened his real eyes. The sights and sounds and smells of his bedroom rushed back in, disorientating, but nothing like it had been back when he was accidentally doing himself harm.

He stared at his wall and processed what he had learned. It was a little difficult, since both the side effects of soul-delving and the implications were making him tremble with barely-leashed grief.

Inquiry? The fox prodded, from its corner.

“I was checking out the…layer of spirit stuff on my soul.” He explained, a little distantly. It felt like there was a lump in his throat, and more annoying: his eyes were prickling a little. He blinked rapidly to ward the feeling away. “I think I’ve figured it out. It’s…filling in my wounds, isn’t it? Like…I dunno, skin glue.” Holding the vulnerable deep tissues together, to make it easier for them to heal. Except…he was a living human. His soul wouldn’t heal.

Yes? The fox blinked amber eyes at him, which he noticed bore a slit pupil each. Obvious.

He shot it a glare. “Maybe to you,” he muttered, ruthlessly pushing away all of the stupid emotional influx. “Is this why I’m sort of doing okay even though most of my soul is gone, then? Because the energy he left behind is…helping?”

It nodded. You’d be dead without it, it claimed, and sat up, tails curling around its paws. Very, very dead. Or insane. Or both. It was the longest coherent thing it had bothered to say to him.

Hikaru inhaled. Exhaled. Tried not to feel very many things about the fact that, apparently, Sai hadn’t only accidentally mutilated him, but had left behind enough energy to stop it from killing him. “Okay.” He said, weakly, gathering his composure. “And…why is it doing that? It’s just…leftover energy. Right?” He was pretty sure it was just leftover energy, there was no reason for him to always get those idiotic flashes of hope whenever he asked stuff like that, dammit.

No mind, no soul, the fox agreed. Just energy. But energy remembers. It stood up in a languid flurry of tails, stretching briefly.

“Remembers what?” He demanded. Despite his efforts, he was a little shaken, and a lot off-balance.

It approached him, until it was at the edge of the bed, touching its nose briefly to the fan held tightly in his hand. Hikaru felt it investigating the energy, feeling it out, and then withdrawing. The fox stepped back and looked up at him. Emotion, wishes, sentiment… The fox shrugged, and let the thought trail off.

Hikaru breath faltered. “So…what?” His fingers trembled, a little. His eyes were stinging again.

So, that spirit loved you. The fox said, bluntly, knocking out all the breath from his lungs with one sentence. He wanted you safe. Alive. What he left behind…remembers. So it protects you. Amber eyes were sharp, with their slit pupils, but the feel of the fox’s soul was quietly sympathetic as it spoke to him, and Hikaru…

His breath stuttered on a sob. He cleared his throat, tried helplessly to push it away, to stabilise his breath, to ward back the loss and heartbreak bubbling up through his chest and – couldn’t. He couldn’t. Hikaru clutched his fan and let his limbs curl inwards, hunching over to hide his face in his knees as grief lodged in his throat like a physical thing, like it was choking him, like it was extinguishing all the life in him-

He wept. He couldn’t help it. It welled up in him and pushed free, pushed past the grief in his throat and the pain in his chest and shook him in its grasp until he was weeping, salt stinging past his eyelashes and raking trails down his cheeks. Anguish clutched at him until every breath was a shaky, shuddering, pitiful gasp and he couldn’t, he couldn’t-

A large shape moved up beside him, its weight not affecting the bed at all, but it was there regardless. Fur pressed against his arms. Dumb, pitiful human child. It said, but without any derision. It sat beside him, one tail curling behind his body, and stayed there all the while Hikaru wept out what felt like the remainder of his soul.

The unrelenting anguish held him by the throat for what felt like forever. Hikaru soaked his shirt with tears and had to put his fan aside for fear of damaging it, but steadily, the absolute dominion of his grief did start to lose its hold on him.

Gradually, his breath came back to him, flowing a little easier every minute. The obstruction in his throat dissolved, almost begrudgingly, and settled back into the usual sick ache of absence. When Hikaru realised he wasn’t crying anymore, he felt…exhausted. Utterly spent, and completely drained, but the grief remained.

Fuck, I miss him. He thought, and it threatened to start the tears again. He clenched his eyes shut and forced himself into a steady breathing pattern. He cleared his throat. “It’s awkward for you to be all cuddled up like this when I don’t even know your name.” he muttered, after a very long silence, to the fox that was still there beside him. His voice sounded thick and hoarse.

The large fluffy form shifted, stood, and shook itself out. Fluff poofed against Hikaru’s damp face, and then it was on the floor again. For a moment, he thought it was responding to his comment by just not being snuggled up any more, but instead it sat before him, four tails fanned out behind it. It held out a snowy forepaw, and for a moment, Hikaru thought comically of the handshake trick that most dogs were taught-

Yonbi no Setsu, it said, very coherently and almost grandly, and held the paw out until he finally consented to shake it.

“…Setsu, then?” He asked, wondering why a presumably pretty old Japanese spirit was shaking hands, of all things. The paw was very soft. The leathery pads on the underside seemed to lack any of the thickness you’d expect of something used for walking, and the white fur everywhere else was just as fine as it looked.

That will do. Setsu said, satisfied, and then it withdrew its paw to lay down again.

“Are you a boy fox or a girl fox?” Hikaru tried, since he seemed to be on a roll with getting identifying information out of the spirit.

Whichever. It shrugged, utterly unconcerned, and completely failed to do any clarifying.

Hikaru waited several seconds, but it didn’t say anything else, so he sat back and exhaled in a long, shaky breath. Beyond the deadening emotional exhaustion, he was faintly surprised at his lack of embarrassment, having lost it in the presence of a spirit he barely knew, but...well, maybe it would come later. He wiped his eyes, finding them swollen and a bit sore. “Sorry about all the crying.” He mumbled, and forced himself to stand up.

Setsu shifted on the ground, curling a little tighter and looking up at him. For an alarmingly large and certainly sapient fox spirit, it was alarmingly cute. Nasty wounds, it commented, dismissively. Easy to set off.

“They really are.” Hikaru agreed with a sigh, inspecting the time on his phone. It was a bit early, but he could definitely use some sleep…

Die, the fox suggested, out of the blue. He stared at it.

“…What?” He questioned, taken-aback.

Die, it repeated. Souls heal when not in a body. No more problem.

….He supposed to a spirit who had presumably been dead for at least four hundred years, dying would seem like a very sensible option, but... “Um, no.” Hikaru said, tone strange. “No. I’ll live as long as I can, thanks.”

Setsu huffed air at him. Suit yourself, it said, shrugging. Masochist.

He should be respectful to spirits, he should be respectful to spirits, especially ones guarding his life and soul, oh to hell with it- “Fuck you, Setsu.” Hikaru said, with some newly recovered cheer, and went to get ready for bed.

Thankfully, Setsu didn’t seem to give a shit about being sworn at, so Hikaru thought it could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

—

End chapter.

Anniversary Notes: This chapter totals at over 11k, partly because I’m trying to get to the end of the arc but mostly because it’s the anniversary and I wanted to do a long chapter for it. A year ago, on 10/08/16 (or 08/10/16 if you’re from a country that puts their months first) the first chapter of Paper Cranes was published on Tumblr for Esama’s random Hikago event. Since then, I gained the overwhelming majority of my tumblr followers – so it’s kind of an anniversary of me being active on tumblr too, in a way. I’ve got such an overwhelming amount of attention for this story, existing as it does in a tiny slumbering fandom, and I get notes and kudos and such every day, it’s bloody amazing. Thank you to everyone who has been reading and giving the story attention – and I hope you stay, because there’s a lot of this story left to come :)

Chapter notes: I really kind of wanted to make this chapter a monstrous monster that would take us all the way to the pre-climax point of the arc, but my god that would be immense, it took me 11k to cover like a third of the material I’d have needed to and absolutely did not have the time. So it might be another chapter or two until the arc climax because I am really bad at writing short things. I take so many words to write things. You know when I started this I thought Paper Cranes would be about four chapters long? Hahahaha, oh, past me.

Also: there is art of Setsu that I did. It’s here on my tumblr, if you want to inspect.

Also2: Reminder that Paper Cranes is on ffnet. I’ve only got the one chapter on there so far but I’m working on getting more proofed.

04/06/18 – minor edits

#hikaru no go #shindou hikaru #waya yoshitaka #isumi shinichiro #spirits #kami #exorcists #fic: paper cranes #my writing #my fanfic #paper cranes #paper cranes chapters

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