The weather all week had been warm and sultry, a series of hot summer evenings that had greedily gathered as much moisture as they could until even nature had rebelled. The thunderstorm that had come through to restore order was long overdue. It had layered dark clouds relentlessly over the sky until the sun had been replaced by a murky haze by mid-afternoon, and only then had the rains begun.
Ootengu was less fearful than most to brave such weather, but even he scowled as he beat his way through the winds, splitting them with his fan whenever they threatened to overpower him. It was like trying to hold onto an eel with only one hand. The air pressure had plummeted, giving his wings nothing to push against; he narrowly skirted the mountain trees as they reached up towards him, a few of them raking against his clothes as he sought out every updraft he could, grimly cursing each second he was airborne.
Without his fan, he wouldn't have even had enough lift to fly. With it, he still struggled. The rain crawled past the protection of his heavy, hooded robe and soaked into his skin; the earth threatened to pull him down into a murderous embrace. He fought doggedly against both forces, dipping and rising like a child's toy until he finally saw the spot of color he'd been searching for, and dove towards it with relief.
Ubume's small, huddled form was perched on a moss-covered lump of stone, the legacy of a guidepath that had once been built for pilgrims and had since fallen into disuse and decay. She had made no attempt to take shelter from the storm, allowing the rain to pour freely over her until she had become drenched in it. The blue and gold of her clothing had gone so dark that she seemed painted with shadow; her stockings were like rusty stains of dried blood. Her wings were wrapped tightly around a wadded blanket that she clutched to her chest, a brown scrap of fabric that had gone mud-colored and sodden with rain. An umbrella - one of the sturdier, reinforced models, but thankfully not her heaviest metal one - lay shut beside her, dripping rivers of raindrops that gathered and glistened along its length.
Ootengu grunted as he opened the umbrella and attempted to prop it up on his shoulder. It wasn't meant to ward off rain efficiently, or to be held upright for long durations - Ubume had better versions for that, lightweight umbrellas that would not slip and accidentally crush the fragile lives sheltered under them. The sole kindness of the one she brought was that it could fit two people beneath it; Ubume always picked the designs of her umbrellas to cover more than simply herself, and he was grateful for her foresight now.
"This is wretched weather to fly in, Ubume," he declared with false nonchalance, and sat down hard on the stone beside her, feeling the dampness of his clothes press cold against his skin. He braced the umbrella between them, checking to make sure she was properly beneath as much of it as possible. "You're lucky one of my tengu saw you in passing on his way home. Where did you misplace your hat?"
She didn't stir to acknowledge him. With a sigh, he wrestled with the ties of his outer robe until he could pull it off and drape it around her shoulders, trying not to drop the umbrella on either of their heads in the process. Her hair was soaked and dripping; he patted at it futilely with his sleeve. The strands were plastered against her skull, ebon black with moisture. Her cheek, when he touched it, was frigid as ice. She must have been sitting there since before the storm began, while the life bled slowly out of her with each vanishing wisp of heat.
No matter how many times it happened, each one always hit her hard.
"Your umbrella needs repair," he coaxed, gentler this time. "Come back with me, and my tengu will attend to it for you. I'll send someone to search for the rest of your things -"
"I lost another one," she said.
Her voice was a crane's cry with its throat slit: reedy and strained, barely a whisper escaping its ruined body. Her features crumpled before she had even finished speaking. She ducked her face away, gasping until she could stifle the sob back into her throat.
He grimaced, and pulled gently at her arm until she lowered it enough to allow him to see the pinched, cold face cradled against her chest, its skin discolored, its body motionless. It had been dead for hours, easily - chilled by the cooling weather, yet warmed by her proximity. She wouldn't have put it down once since it passed, he knew. If he hadn't come by, she would have held it all through the night, locked into a private world of grief that knew no dawn to end it.
"Ubume," he said again, knowing better than to attempt to force the corpse out of her arms. One lesson had been enough. "There will be others. You can try again."
It was poor comfort, and he knew it - he was not made for comfort, it was a foreign battlefield with strategies he could not navigate - but it got her to react at last. "There will always be others, Ootengu," she whispered raggedly, her gaze fixed on the swaddled bundle in her arms. "Human parents abandoning their children in a hundred ways, hoping that nature will kill them a little faster so that they do not have to bear the guilt directly. Human parents who know that help is needed, but who will not lift a finger to give it themselves. Or find others who can. Knowing there will be others is no cause to rejoice, Ootengu."
To that, he had no counterargument.
He discarded half a dozen responses that would only worsen the matter, and focused on practicalities instead. "We should lay it to rest before it curses us." Or before Ubume herself was further defiled, he thought. There were numerous spirits whose natures were that of the graveyard, of decay and rot - but for Ubume to embrace such things would twist her very nature down to the deepest roots. She would want him to kill her first. "A bath will do you well once the rain stops. There are streams here which are appropriate for misogiharae. We will lend you a change of clothes, and you can warm up afterwards. Come."
His order held little weight. She did not even look at him, even when he pulled authoritatively on her arm. "He was so weak," she whispered. "I knew he was ill, but I had hoped with just enough care, with soup broth to sip, he would recover his strength. He would not stop coughing. His lungs sounded so thick. Such a little body, and such a terrible cough. Each day I held him and sang to him and hoped..."
Lightning glistened in the skies above them, but the clap of thunder that followed was quieter, subdued, moving away with the storm. Ootengu spared the weather a wary glance. He couldn't tell if it was getting better or worse, but as far as he could tell, the damage had been done; Ubume couldn't possibly get any more drenched, even if he picked her up and carried her into the river himself.
"By the time you reached the child, it was likely already too late, Ubume," he said, hoping to steer her away from her grief. If he could succeed in distracting her, she would recover that much faster. As deeply as she grieved, her resilience was as hard as steel - out of necessity, or else she would have crumbled long ago, back when he had discovered her filling up her first graveyard and already needing a second. "Humans discard their offspring all the faster if they suspect illness. This child was likely far beyond recovery before you even saw it."
"He did not come into this world sick, Ootengu. If only his parents had tried harder at the start - "
Her shoulder bumped into his as he shifted closer, and then Ubume leaned against his weight, exhaustion disarming the stiff fortress of her bones. He could feel the heaviness in her that betrayed just how worn out she was, too cold to even shiver - dangerously cold, at risk of illness or worse. She wouldn't be able to travel well without rest. Flying was out of the question, particularly with the burden of her umbrella.
"Human infants do not always need their family's milk to survive," he said quietly, wrapping his arm around her in hopes that the physical warmth might somehow help, even if his voice could not. "But when they are sickly, it aids their chances greatly, and their birth mother's most of all. And you cannot provide that, Ubume. Not now."
"And when their mother refuses to give it? And other human mothers? There are few spirits who can nourish a human baby."
"There are," he acknowledged. "And that is why I say there will be others, Ubume. If the child's own mother would not offer sustenance, then the child had no choice but to die."
She shook her head hard, her wings tightening on the corpse; Ootengu fought the urge to try and rip the thing out of her grasp, hating the sight of it clutched so dearly to her chest. With all life gone from it now, its body was simply an avenue for pollution and decay, keeping Ubume paralyzed in the rain with grief.
He closed his eyes for a moment in dismay, and then slid his arm around her waist to pull her closer, studying the paleness of her face. "You haven't always had your efforts fail, Ubume. If they choose not to go with the monks when they grow older, or down to the villages, sometimes my tengu have managed to find other homes for them. Others still have struck out on their own, and have had full lives thanks to you. And there was that one boy who we could never find a place for, yet he refused to leave, so he stayed with us. Remember that? He was useful physical labor."
The corners of her mouth moved at last in a twitch - faint, but enough of a smile that it was cause for celebration. "Daigorou. Yes. With that hair of his. Always such a mess."
"'Bird-Nest' Daigorou." Bracing the umbrella between their hips, Ootengu reached up and wiped at her forehead, cleaning away some of the strands that were still sticking to her skin. "He used to say all the time that it wasn't his fault. He was raised by tengu, but since he didn't have wings, he had to inherit a nest for his head instead. He lived well, Ubume. He lived because of you."
"Yes," she murmured, some of the strength finally seeping back into her voice. "Daigorou. My little bird. So many of my little birds, running around and getting into trouble. Enough that you would even complain, sometimes."
"Only when they had no manners. Which was, quite seriously, all of them."
"You raised them, Ootengu."
"You found them, Ubume."
He didn't ask if she remembered the name of every child she had rescued; he already knew. He didn't ask if she had already named the one in her arms. The mountain under their feet was filled with tiny graves from peak to valley, hidden pockets where fragile skeletons had been sown like seeds, an unending legacy of human neglect - and Ubume could pinpoint them all. Ootengu knew she would never forget.
She had warmed up enough now that the storm was no longer soaking her that her body had begun to wake up and shiver, making long, slow shudders that racked her like convulsions, coming at irregular intervals that shook and bowed her shoulders. He rubbed her arm, willing her blood to circulate faster, and then folded one of his wings around her for added insulation. He could feel the raindrops pelting against his feathers where they extended beyond the umbrella's protection - slower now, but heavy enough to warn against walking.
"Ubume," he ventured cautiously, when she was silent for too long. Her skin was too damp for him to tell if she was still crying.
At the sound of his voice, she turned her head for the first time away from the corpse in her arms and towards him: towards him, towards life, away from death. She didn't meet his gaze, but only rested her cheek against his shoulder. Slowly, fraction by fraction, her arms finally began to unclench, lowering the child's body at last into her lap.
He felt the tension unwind inside him as she relaxed, closing his eyes for a moment as he tried to conceal his relief. "The rain will let up eventually," he said, feeling her sigh quietly against his shoulder. "We can stay here until then. Get some rest, Ubume. I'll wake you when it's past."