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It could have gone better.
It was easy to indulge in self-criticism, lying sprawled and muddied and soaked to the bone, but Shuuichi decided to congratulate himself. The youkai would trouble the lake’s visitors no longer, which was what he had been hired to ensure. And it was summer and the sun was high. His clothes would dry soon enough.
The fish — it was hard not to think of it as a fish, even when it was staring at him balefully with the kind of eyes no mundane creature should have — was too big to live in a bowl. It would be too big for a fishbowl, but he didn’t even have that, just a mixing bowl set on his stainless steel counter and filled near to overflowing with water that turned brightly and strangely crystalline the moment he released the youkai into it. He'd looked away before he could see his reflection change.
He could have bought a fishbowl, he supposed, but something about that seemed ridiculous.
“Do you think it even needs to be in water?” he asked Hiiragi when he caught her staring at it.
She frowned, probably, behind her mask. “Do you want it flopping around your apartment?”
No, though he wasn’t sure why he thought keeping it in a mixing bowl was going to do the job.
“So you’re the one who took that job.” Nanase’s voice, as ever, was as dry as her garden. Shuuichi suspected her home existed more for the sake of her guests than herself; its upkeep was perfunctory at best, and in hotter months, the entire estate seemed to wilt. Not her, though, not even conceding her customary suit to the heat. “I never thought of you as a fisherman, hat aside.”
Shuuichi clutched the brim in mock offense. “I’m not,” he admitted. “I just dove in.”
“Not literally?”
At his noise of vague assent, Nanase burst into a crackling laugh, and Shuuichi smiled back. It was strange to be here, taking tea in her dying garden as they waged an unofficial cold war, but the invitation hadn’t been unexpected. One often followed an unplanned meeting, and after the chaos at Hakozaki’s manor, he’d been waiting for a slip of paper to hit his window. She hadn’t asked him here to question him about the wild goose chase or the fire, though, or for seemingly much of anything at all.
“Well,” she said, “that makes it all the more impressive that you managed to get your hands on it. No more drowned children, and quite the prize for you.”
Her ease made him distinctly uncomfortable. “No one actually drowned,” he said. “Definitely no kids.” He thought, reflexively, of Natsume, who was now apparently his only point of reference for the entirety of his generation. Or not even, that — they were the same generation, weren’t they? Shuuichi had the sense that doing the math would make him feel older either way.
Nanase’s smile was fixed in a way he recognized; she had leaped past the conversation and into some machination she had been assigned. “It’s good no one was hurt too badly,” she said. “Now, the clan head is interested in acquiring—”
“I’m not selling it,” he said at once. “Certainly not to him.”
It had taken him a full year of being an actor to learn to quirk a single eyebrow. Nanase did it with finesse. “Don’t be petty, Natori-san. You can’t afford to hold grudges.”
Shuuichi, feeling the slow approach of anger that circled around every one of these meetings, set down his cup with a clink. Me, specifically? he wondered but didn’t ask. “I can afford not to give this up.”
Nanase rested her cup on the table with a matching noise. “What are you going to do with it? Divination has never been in your family’s wheelhouse, and unless you’ve done some intensive reading, I’m not sure how much you’re going to get out of it.”
Divination.
His stomach didn’t quite drop, but it did stagger. He took a sip of the tea.
“It’s not exactly the Matoba clan’s specialty, either,” he said.
That fixed smile could have been concrete. “We have connections.”
“It’s not dead.”
“I didn’t think it was?” Shuuichi said, alarmed, slumping onto his couch and wishing he had a better one. Softer, at least, one he hadn’t bought for style.
Hiiragi had been poised at the counter since he walked in the door, and might have been there since he left. It was hard, sometimes, to guess at her expressions or try to follow her eyes, but there was no way to miss how her whole body curled toward the bowl. “You can’t leave it here forever.”
He covered his face, feeling the beginning of a headache. “What, does it need food? You don’t.”
Hiiragi cocked her head. “I like food,” she said passively, then added, “It needs attention. From humans, not from me.”
This was a mistake. Exorcise things when you’re told to exorcise them, don’t squeeze them in a jar and try to steal them away. That was what an arrogant beginner would do.
Or Matoba.
“I don’t have time for a pet,” Shuuichi said. He barely lived in his own apartment. He barely ate his own food. (Did jam go bad? He had forgotten, until that moment, that he had a jar from Natsume’s mother. Or whatever he should call her.) “Nanase-san said the Matoba clan wants it. That’s a bad idea, right?”
Hiiragi drummed her fingers on the counter. There was probably some unspoken element of her contract preventing her from saying something about how bad most of his ideas were.
“I’m not giving it to them,” he said, decisive. Hiiragi kept drumming, and looked away.
People didn’t ring his buzzer, as a rule, and with his phone disconnected it was easy to become used to the illusion that staying in his apartment was tantamount to entering an isolation tank. Shuuichi wasn’t sure for a minute if he was cursed or dreaming when the buzzer went off, but after staring at it in confusion for probably too long, he hit the receiver.
“Natori-san,” said a voice he could recognize even through the tinny speaker, even after only his name, “would you mind letting me up? I have something I’d like to discuss.”
It occurred to Shuuichi to wonder how Matoba knew his address, but it was barely a consideration worth dwelling on. He’d known where he lived when he was a teenager with no resources, before anyone invented digital stalking. He hoped desperately that Matoba had paid off some fangirl for the information, if only for the mental image.
(Realistically, he was aware that he hadn’t drawn enough attention for stalkers, even if his agent had called him last night to tell him that he made third place on some popularity poll with extremely specific qualifications.)
“Are you trying to buy my fish?” he asked absurdly. He amended, “The youkai?”
Matoba laughed, of course, and said, “No, actually. I haven’t come to take anything that’s rightfully yours.”
There seemed to be an accusation in that, and Shuuichi fumed; he had done nothing to deserve Matoba’s spite. To think he was ever the one to play unfairly.
Still, even fuming, he was collected and sparkling and in his own home. There was no better time or place to entertain Matoba’s unfounded pettiness. He pressed the button.
It was always irritating when Matoba dressed well, and while he had forgone the robes that afforded him maddening dignity at gatherings, his suit suggested that he had been visiting with someone much more important. As did, Shuuichi noticed with pleasure, the fact that a few strands of hair were sweat-plastered to his face, at least where it wasn’t covered by cloth. What did his nicer clients think of the eyepatch? It should have been ridiculous, but Shuuichi could still remember the chill he felt when he first saw the swirl of ink on white fabric across his eye.
There was power in being the one who opened the door, he reminded himself. “So, what is it?”
Matoba smiled. “You’re always so suspicious. No wonder the Natsume boy seems so terrified of me.”
“Yes, no wonder,” Shuuichi said drily. “For the record, I haven’t been poisoning his mind against you. I really do not care that much.”
The smile only grew, though without an inch of warmth to match. “No, you just spy on me. How did that work for you, by the way?”
They were getting distracted, Shuuichi reminded himself, talking like villains in a second-rate drama. “Fine, thanks,” he said, the brusqueness of his tone seeming to surprise Matoba. “But you still haven’t told me why you came here.”
He couldn’t say why he stepped aside when Matoba stepped forward, moving to let him past as easily as if it were routine. “I only wanted to see your catch,” Matoba was saying in his root-deep voice. “I’m no more an oracle than you, but at least I have some idea of how it’s meant to be used.”
A voice of childlike innocence in Shuuichi’s mind — not his own, he didn’t think, he couldn’t remember ever thinking that way — protested Matoba’s insinuation. Maybe there wasn’t a way a youkai was meant to be used. (The way the idea formed was so naïve it embarrassed him. Of course — Hiiragi, Urihime, Sasago—)
But that wasn’t the issue at hand.
“Nanase-san mentioned divination, too. But there’s no — it’s not some kind of crystal ball. It just makes nonsense visions to confuse you and draw you in.”
When Matoba turned, Shuuichi could have predicted (oracle or no) the expression on his face. The bright smugness hadn’t changed in seven years. “If you don’t know what you’re doing, sure.”
Shuuichi gritted his teeth.
After a moment, though, he wondered if Matoba might be onto something after all. He found the youkai without being directed, striding through Shuuichi’s apartment as if he believed he belonged there, and set to mumbling over the bowl the kind of archaic sentence fragments Shuuichi associated with typical Matoba jutsu.
“What—” he started, but Matoba flapped a hand to silence him. It was such an odd and inelegant motion that Shuuichi felt inexplicably gratified. For a half-dazed moment he imagined a world where this was normal, where the presence of Matoba Seiji in his apartment was as natural as he tried to make him believe it was.
Once, maybe, he’d thought… But no, he remembered, with the same instinct that reminded him how he’d always thought of youkai. He’d never lost himself in a wild delusion about the future. That had been Seiji, and when he’d recognized that bizarrely unguarded want in his eyes, Shuuichi had—
His stomach had dropped the way it did now when Matoba looked up from the bowl, his face vague and too soft. Not in any material way, of course, it was still nothing but hard angles, but he looked like he had caught sight of something in the distance.
“What did you see when you caught it?” Matoba asked before Shuuichi could speak. “You didn’t even know what it did.” His voice was insistent, but Shuuichi didn’t know why, what he was pushing at.
He wasn’t sure what he had seen, either, before he had fallen. A woman he had known instinctively was his mother, even though he could remember ever seeing her healthy and beaming like that, and she had never owned a kimono blooming with so many flowers. After that, it made even less sense, just a blinding wash of images over the lapping water.
Matoba stared, though, expectant. “I’m not sure,” Shuuichi snapped, suddenly defensive. “Something with my mother, I think.”
“Your mother is dead,” Matoba observed.
It was not an observation that deserved a response.
“I mean,” Matoba said, “your vision didn’t mean anything. I thought perhaps that anyone who can see youkai would receive a glimpse of a possible future, but evidently I was wrong.”
Shuuichi’s jaw tightened. The salamander youkai skittered from his throat to just below his eye, where he could see its dark smudge under his lashes.“Yes, I know how useless I am. Thank you.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Matoba said with gracious gentility. “You know, we would have been good partners.”
Shuuichi scoffed, more from the uncertainty of how the hell to respond to that than anything. “What are you doing?”
The silence that followed was as much agonized as agonizing, then Matoba said, slow and clear, “Telling the truth as I saw it.”
Shuuichi stared.
Then, in a flash, Matoba was all business, tugging at his cuffs and striding toward the door. “If you don’t intend to learn to read the messages, I recommend scrapping it,” he said, the words flowing like an afterthought. “But if you see something that — You know how to reach me.”
“No vision of the future is going to tell me that I belong under your thumb,” Shuuichi said, half-regretting it as he spoke, remembering being sixteen and wanted by exactly one person. Maybe, maybe — but if all of this had ever been so simple as what either of them had wanted, it had stopped being that way long ago.
Matoba nodded once, level. “Fair enough, Natori-san,” he said, hitting each syllable of the surname and closing the door behind him.
For a long moment after, the quiet was more a presence than an absence. Then Shuuichi took a breath and considered learning something about the future.