#look i haven't written anything proper in a month due to christmas and stuff going on

[catsafarithewriter]

Haru Yoshioka, Monsterhunter

A/N: Belated Secret Santa (or not-so-secret, since you asked for this, but who knows? maybe you forgot asking for it) for the ever-lovely @tcrmommabear, Shelby, my dear. You asked for Haru the Monster Hunter, so Merry Christmas!

(To my official Secret Santa: your present is coming! Sorry!)

The idea of Haru walking away from the Bureau after her Cat Kingdom adventure, aged 16 and with a whole world ahead of her, was to give her the chance for an ordinary life. 

Haru knew that and respected that. 

She just didn’t necessarily agree with it.

The thing about discovering that the world is made up with magic and mystery, hidden just behind the mundane veneer of ordinary life, is that it suddenly gets very difficult to unsee it. Suddenly, she could no longer ignore the shapes in the shadows, the shifting forms in the smoke, the people who - if looked at for just a moment too long - didn’t seem quite real. And, upon realising what she was seeing, she couldn’t just pass it by anymore. 

Most supernatural creatures weren’t inherently malicious, she discovered. Petty, maybe. Fickle, definitely. But as long as people respected them - or, at least - kept their distance, and most people instinctively did even if they didn’t realise it, then there was no problem. Usually. As long as she figured out what the problem was, it was no big deal. 

However, there were always the exceptions. 

A month after the Cat Kingdom adventure, she discovered an oni had taken up residence in the school sports shed. 

One heavy research session, several missteps, and a soybean-and-holly rite later, it wasn’t anymore. 

And, after that, things had just kind of... spiralled. Snowballed. That was the word she was looking for: snowballed. Things had snowballed and so, here she was, nearly a decade later, breaking and entering into her local museum at half two in the morning. 

Not the most logical of career steps, she had to admit, but it had made sense at the time. Things usually did. It was only later, when Haru was trying to explain why all the generators at the carnival had simultaneously blown and she was standing over the main one with a wrench and a fire extinguisher, that it all fell apart. 

Oh, sure, the carnival loved ghosts as far as the Haunted House ride went, but the moment she started trying to explain a spirit had been living in the electricity and was the reason for two near-electrocutions in the past week, it was like they didn’t want to know. 

Hypocritical, much?

She hopped over the low rope fence that marked the museum grounds, and started for the back entrance with lockpicks at the ready. A sign hung above the handle.

This door is alarmed, it said.

It wasn’t. 

They never were. 

Well. Nearly never. 

Inside, the museum was dark. Quiet. Her footsteps echoed along the tiled floor, long shadows cast from the heavy-duty torch she held in one hand. Just what someone might expect from a museum in the small hours of the morning, if that same museum hadn’t also been the location for six missing people in two weeks. 

She stopped by the Asuka exhibit and fished out a printed map marked with six dots.

Six dots for six missing people. 

Three kids on two different school trips. One young artist. An accountant. And a museum curator. 

There had been some difficulty tracking down their last known locations. For starters, the museum had never invested in security cameras - something they were now reconsidering - and, while this was working to her advantage right now, it did mean she only had eyewitness accounts to guesstimate how these people had vanished. 

For the artist, there was only the vague account of employees seeing her briefly on the second floor. The accountant had been with his family, detoured to the bathroom and never returned. The curator was the vaguest; she never arrived home and no one saw her leave at the end of her shift. 

The schoolchildren though... that was where things got interesting. 

Sure, she could understand something snatching away an errant visitor or employee who strayed into an otherwise empty room or stayed too late after hours. (Didn’t mean she was about to let the creature get away with it, but she had encountered enough monsters to know that was their usual modus operandi.) But three kids disappearing in a crowded room, surrounded by their peers and teachers? That took some doing. 

That was where she would find her answers. 

The room in question was the temporary exhibit space, recently renovated as a local history piece. She remembered it being announced in the newspaper - history from your town, it had declared. Artefacts from the people who had lived here! She supposed, with a call like that, it was unavoidable that something brought in would have been haunted. Still, that was why she did what she did. To stop supernatural happenings like this. 

She gently eased the door open. It squeaked. But nothing came at her, nothing moved. It was... just an empty exhibit. 

She lowered the torch she had raised above her head, gingerly flicking its beam across the room. Illuminated were mostly items she recognised from her grandmother’s era. Musty clothes, traditional wooden toys, and old collections of make-up and dressing table items. Schoolbooks from nearly a century back were resting in glass cages, carefully selected pages open for the public’s perusal. 

And... bingo. 

She came to a halt before a wide, low display, sheltering an old dollhouse. 

Not that she had any evidence yet that this was the cause. But, come on. It was an old dollhouse. It practically screamed haunted. 

Haru hunkered down, bringing her eyes to the same level as the house’s first-floor windows. It was closed, which seemed strange for a museum piece. She would have expected it open, so the visitors - and the occasional monsterhunter - could see all the little details that made up the interior. As things stood, she could only see a glimmer of white paint and tiny fabric cushions through the wooden windows. 

Something moved inside. 

Nope. 

Noooooooope.

She could walk away now. No one would blame her. Not least because no one knew she was here in the first place. Of course, that would still leave whatever monster was causing this at large, but even so... 

Haru groaned and knelt back down before the dollhouse. 

“Dammit,” she muttered. “Sometimes being the good guy sucks.” She flicked her torchlight over the exhibit, the glow catching on windows and doors and what little details lay inside, but no more movement. “Hello?” she whispered. And then, because she felt a little foolish whispering in an empty room and she had generally found that sounding scared in such cases was a bad idea, she tried again, louder. “Hello? Is anyone there? I’ve come to talk to you about the people you’ve been taking.” 

Her torch tapped against the glass barrier and then

She wasn’t in the museum anymore. 

She was in a traditional bedroom, with futon bedding and sliding panel doors to a living room. A lantern hung overhead, but no light came from it. A lone circular window revealed a giant world beyond. 

The dollhouse. 

She was in the dollhouse. 

And tiny. 

Haru barely resisted the urge to groan again. As things went, she merely dropped her forehead against her wrists and rubbed at her eyes. When she opened them, she was still in the dollhouse, but now there was a new shadow falling over the wooden floor. 

She whirled and slammed the torch into the - side? Into the side of whatever had approached her. (Her mistake. She had assumed it would be a child ghost. Creatures that haunted dolls and dollhouses tended to take on younger forms, and that smack should have landed its head.) The thing - she caught a glimpse of grey material in her hurried state - staggered, and she swung her free hand into her backpack. She found her pouch of herbs and beans, a concoction she had discovered (through a fair bit of trial and error) to be effective with oni or Japanese-based ghosts. She threw down a handful at the creature. Smoke and sparks sizzled off. 

That was partly her own invention. It didn’t do much with ghosts, but it sure looked intimidating. Any moment now, the ghost should be receding, giving her some time to find its source of power within the house and--

It coughed. 

The creature - ghost, monster, oni - coughed. 

A gloved hand appeared through the smoke and waved away the fog.

So. Probably not a ghost then. 

Haru shifted her grip on her torch, ready for another swing, when the creature staggered out of the smoke and she could finally see the cause of all this trouble--

“Baron?”

The feline Creation coughed again, politely into a handkerchief, she could now see, and met Haru’s gaze. "Haru?”

She grinned. “Long time no see, huh?”

His gaze travelled over her - to the slightly-dented torch (she had used it as a blunt instrument more than once and, frankly, it was a miracle it still worked), to her still-dusty hands, to what Haru liked to consider her ‘monsterhunting gear’ (which was practical clothing, with the luxury of a long coat and a smidgen of leather) - before finally putting all the context clues together. 

“Haru... what are you doing here?”

Okay, so maybe he hadn’t pieced the clues together. 

“Same reason as you, I’m guessing,” she said. “Haunted dollhouse, people vanishing without trace, possible monster activity...” She ticked off the points on her fingers. “All in a day’s work.”

“You do this regularly?”

“Sneaking into museums or getting trapped in haunted dollhouses? Because the latter is definitely a first for me.”

“Seeking out the supernatural,” Baron said. 

“The official term is monsterhunter,” Haru corrected. “And I’m pretty good at it.”

Baron glanced down at his jacket and picked off a remnant of the anti-oni concoction. “Is this... a soybean?”

“Roasted,” Haru confirmed. “It helps drive oni away. As do sardine heads, apparently, but that gets a little smelly to keep in a bag.” She couldn’t help it: she beamed. “I know these aren’t the best circumstances, but I’ve gotta admit it: it’s good to see you again. Sorry for throwing soybeans at you. And hitting you with my torch.” 

He smiled back, and Haru’s stomach did a funny little flip. 

(After all these years, really? Couldn’t a woman grow out of her schoolgirl crush, she lamented?)

“It’s good to see you again, Miss Haru.” 

There was a roar from deep within the house.

“And I believe that is our cue,” Baron said. He extended a hand to Haru. “Are you coming?”

Haru hefted her torch in her spare hand. “Always.”