Doubt the Stars Are Fire
Prologue
The sun was setting as Natsume followed the road beside the river home, and he was alone except for Nyanko-sensei, who had met him at the school gates. This had happened before, usually with the excuse that it was to be expected for a bodyguard, but with the actual purpose of demanding Natsume buy him something to eat. He hadn't demanded anything today, or said much, although he'd muttered to himself once or twice.
It had been two days since Natsume had seen any spirit other than his cat. At one time this would have been an immense relief, and it was still nice not to have been woken up at odd hours since Monday, or threatened for the Book of Friends except in a desultory sort of way, by Nyanko-sensei. But he had gotten so used to seeing the friendlier neighborhood ayakashi, and…he might be beginning to worry. He glanced down at the squat round figure walking beside him, wondering if Sensei was likely to say anything useful, if Natsume asked whether he thought they were alright.
Probably not.
"Sensei?" he hazarded anyway, as the road curved along the river where his spirit friends had once thrown a party and invited him.
"Mm?" Nyanko-sensei grunted absently, eyes fixed intently on a little yellow butterfly as it fluttered slowly to perch on a grass stem.
"Do you know where all the ayakashi—" His bodyguard flung himself facefirst into the tall grass, scattering early-spring flower petals and startling the butterfly into the air. "Have gone?" Natsume added after a second, when Nyanko-sensei seemed to have finished rolling end over end.
"What do I care? Idiots!" The cat-shaped spirit sniffed in affront, got his stubby legs under him, and shuffled off with a great rattling of grass and weeds, muttering angrily. Natsume sighed. Sensei chose really inconvenient moments to embarrass himself sometimes. He'd ask again after dinner, maybe.
He kept going along the scenic route, in no particular hurry—year-end exams were coming in just a few weeks and he had lots of studying to do, but not much assigned work, and the last two days without ayakashi interruptions had left him ahead of himself. The sun was bright and the days were warming up nicely, and he thought maybe when he got home he'd see if Touko-san would like help in the garden.
He was nearly through the last trees before the house when the tall grass rattled again. He turned toward the sound to watch a distinctive trail of disturbed stems shooting right toward him.
His neck prickled. "Nyanko-sensei?"
No response. Natsume took a step back. The rattling stopped, just the other side of a fallen log. Something leapt up.
Like a manju fired out of a cannon, Nyanko-sensei burst from the trees on the opposite side of the road and slammed the ayakashi to the ground. It screamed.
"Oh," said Nyanko-sensei, some of his smugness falling away. "It's just you. What do you want?" he demanded, baring his teeth into One-Eye's face.
"Ahaha…nothing, Madara-sama!" the little creature quaked.
Natsume had never expected to be this happy to see One-Eye. "It's okay, let him go, sensei," he encouraged. "Where's your friend?" He didn't think he'd ever seen the two midlevels apart before.
"Natsume-sama!" One-Eye burst out rather than answer, scrambling onto his knees, while Nyanko-sensei withdrew to lick loftily at a forepaw.
"Hey." Natsume sank onto one knee to get a better view of the cowering little oni. "Is everything okay?"
The little figure grabbed at the front of Natsume's uniform jacket and tugged at it urgently. "Natsume-sama, it's terrible!" he burst out. "You have to hide!"
"Eh?" asked Natsume. The back of his neck prickled again and he cast a look around. There was no suspicious mounting shadow, no burst of chilling wind or rattle in the leaves. He bent so that the ayakashi could speak more quietly, but the grip on his jacket didn't loosen. "Hide?" he asked quietly. "Why?"
"Something terrible is coming!"
"Terrible…what?"
One-Eye looked furtively from side to side. "The burning man!"
Natsume frowned. The mid-level spirit wasn't what he would call brave, but he'd never seen him this scared. So scared he wasn't even asking Natsume to help, just warning him. And fire…fire could be so very dangerous. "Who?"
"A dreadful being! They say that he was killed, and faced down the judge of the dead in battle, so that he returned to life a powerful sorcerer. That he was then defeated by a stronger sorcerer, but rose again the most powerful of demons to take his revenge! They say he struck down the King of Hell and raised a new one in his place!" One-Eye finally let go of Natsume's jacket to press horrified fists to his own forehead. "Killing him would do no good!"
Natsume swallowed. Rumors, it was only rumors, but every ayakashi in Fukuoka seemed to know about him lately. Which meant that…the rumor network didn't carry information badly all the time, even if the accuracy of anything the mid-levels said was to be treated with caution. Even if only the tiniest amount of this was true, this kind of a person…
It also meant that this newcomer might hear about Natsume, assuming any local spirit spoke to whatever-it-was rather than finding a hole to hide in. He could only hope someone so powerful would have no interest in the Book of Friends. "And he's coming here?"
One-Eye tugged at his beard in distress. "Two days ago we felt his approach, like a wave across the land. He is very near! He is hiding himself now, so no one can say if he passes from place to place, or sits in the forest awaiting some moment to strike, but he is here somewhere! Oh, he is here! We have heard, he has killed so many, so many…he could spear us like frogs and munch us like dango!"
"Shh!" Natsume looked toward the warning hiss and felt a little of his worry fade at the horned face of One-Eye's companion peering from the base of a shrub at the edge of the treeline. "Don't shout! The Burning Man could be anywhere!"
One-Eye seemed to shrink a little further. "We have to get back to hiding," he told Natsume in a loud whisper. "Be careful, Natsume-sama!"
The reason he hadn't seen any spirits in two days was that they were all hiding from the least possibility of this Burning Man. "Did you come out of hiding just to warn me?"
One-Eye shuffled his feet. "And we were out of supplies."
Cow-Face produced a slightly weak grin and held up a bottle of sake in each hand. Natsume smiled a little. If they were still making booze runs, it couldn't be too bad.
After seeing the two mid-levels on their way back to wherever they'd chosen to cower, Natsume went back to following the road home, unsettled. He looked down at the trotting figure of his bodyguard.
"Nyanko-sensei," he said again.
"Hm?"
"Have you heard of an ayakashi like that?"
The ball of fur shrugged. "Eh. What do I care about newborns? Even if he's powerful, he's got a while to go before anyone should take him seriously."
"What they said about coming back from Hell…"
He sniffed. "Infants are big braggers, that's all."
There was some kind of lie in Nyanko-sensei's voice—he wasn't very good at hiding things. Natsume's steps slowed to a stop as he thought, and Nyanko-sensei's industrious waddle took him several feet ahead before he noticed and stopped. "Keep up!" he barked over his shoulder.
"Sensei…" Natsume said slowly. "Did you feel him coming, too?"
"Don't ask stupid questions! There's nothing strange in the woods! If you're going to be dawdling like this, you might as well carry me!"
Natsume bent down to pick his bodyguard up and walked the rest of the way home without responding to the cat's mutterings about what a terrible pet Natsume was. The day was still beautiful, but somehow he couldn't enjoy it as much anymore. Still, he was happy to know that everyone was still okay. Hiding was much better than if everyone had been driven away, or purified, or had some other terrible thing happen to them.
He hoped the Burning Man demon moved on without making any trouble.
A/N: This crossover has been sitting around in my computer for a few years now; the Go Natsume Go! victory encouraged me to come back to it. ^^ Note that YYH takes place in the 90s, Natsume Yuujincho circa 2005. You can tell by how many cell phones there aren't.