a/n: inspired by xxyyxx's /witching hour/.
[(the witching hour)]
. / .
cause, cause
i talked to satan cause
cause
(he listens)
-xxyyxx :: witching hour
. \ .
When she is younger, she recalls having a friend who spoke to her in the soft susurrations of a fall breeze rippling across stacks of crackly parchment leaves, told her midnight stories and came through the shadows when the clock struck eleven and left when it struck six.
She's older, she doesn't remember all the stories anymore, but she remembers the lilting way he spoke (she thought he might have been French, she doesn't remember) and how he smelled like jasmine, sage, nutmeg, and something a little rotten in a good way, and when he left he gave her a goodnight kiss on her right cheek and made her curtains shudder and set her bookstacks slightly askew.
And afterwards, she tasted peppermint on the tip of her tongue.
A little older, and her friend is still there, still breathes soil and talks to her in stars and intangible midnights.
They have their gods, Shinto gods, nature personified into pale-faced men and women and monsters that are carved from pigments and formed from shooting stars and a bit of saliva. They have the foxes of the harvest moon, the Byakko, the three-legged crow Yatagarasu, the eight-headed snake Yamata no Orochi, the gods and goddesses of their pantheons astride clouds and suns and spacedust.
The lanterns they hang are red and scrawled in gold Kanji lettering, smooth and elegant and somehow too sharp to put on paper; she wants something softer, something that isn't so harsh as swordstrokes and rose thorns and is earthy like granny's garden, something fuller. So, she paints on bamboo rolls, dips her fingers in the clay pots and comes out with reds and blues and greens and yellows and fluffy marshmallow whites that dripdripdrip onto the canvas like egg yolks, splatter like raindrops.
She paints him among the godpeople and it might be blasphemy but she's so absorbed in her work, dabs forest-greens and rich, muddy browns and leaves and briars and makes him King of the Rock; he's majestic, smiling crookedly through the paper and it almost feels real(er) than it is.
She can't see him, can't touch him, but she feels his breath close to her ear and shows him her painted-covered fingers.
Nod.
Yuki is a new variable in her quiet life of constants, and she's not quite sure how she'll react to him but she puts him at ease with a friendly smile and she tries not to blush or stare too long at the cute moles that dot his face. Yuki is a little older than her, but he already looks so stern and commanding, regal in his True Cross outfit, carrying two handguns that bulge through the black fabric and a belt to which is clipped vials of holy water, blessed ash, and strings of silver crucifixes inlaid with strips of Latin prayers. Although she can't really see it, she senses a faint but powerful aura about Yuki, something that smells like metal and winter and that is what offsets her reaction, she thinks.
Yuki, he's strong, she can tell that much. Beside her, he shifts and fidgets, tap-dances across the hardwood floors.
She's counting out medicines for him, weighing them carefully on her scales, when he suddenly tenses and looks around, eyes peering out sharply behind the lenses of his glasses. She pauses; a handful of powdered ginger stands suspended over a white pouch.
"What's wrong?" she asks, curious (and a little frightened because he's a little anxious as well).
"Did you feel something just now?" Yuki inquires, one hand already starting to twist the cork off of a holy water capsule. "I felt- I don't know, but something was in here, something big." He wrinkles his nose. "Cold, almost resembling poltergeist activity, but off."
She gazes at him, eyes wide and open, and lies resolutely. "I didn't hear or see a thing. I didn't feel anything, either. Maybe it's just drafty?"
"Maybe," Yuki agrees, and takes his order and walks out, swallowing down her untruth, but something about the stiff set of his lips and the way his eyes kept moving, roving all over tells her he didn't quite believe.
"Is he gone?" she wonders aloud.
"Yes," he whispers. She sighs, releases a heavy breath, and slumps down onto a chair.
"Did he see you?"
The figure stills, hesitates. "Perhaps. He can't see me if I don't want him to, though."
She smiles tiredly. "That's nice." Her hands cover her mouth as she lets out a yawn and rubs wearily at her eyes; my, how exhausted she feels.
"Sleepy?" She gives a little incline of her head. "Come on, then. Get some sleep."
"But the shop-"
"It's fine," he reassures her, and she looks back once and sees the shadows swimming like fish are moving through inky water in huge schools. But then her footsteps resound sharply off of the stairs and she finds herself under the sheets again, head resting on her pillow, with no memory of how she gets there but a small niggling feeling of being engulfed in autumn leaves.
Rin the demonboy is the second anomaly. He comes in a whirlwind, touches her gates and dispels the barriers with only a small shock, and stands slack-jawed as she screams and backs away from him because oh, he's a demon and he's going to kill her, nonono.
He doesn't, though; it turns out he's Yuki's twin brother, whom she's only heard of and has never seen. He's amicable enough, tries to help her out in his clumsy, uncoordinated way, but she rather enjoys the way his hair is so messy like he just fell out of bed, the cute droop of his eyelids when their eyes connect and her cheeks are set aflame, how nice he smells, at times, like something spicy-sweet.
The other seems to perk up at his arrival; she feels it, the subtle nuances and stirrings of something supernatural, something ethereal; his fingers ghost over the ground, setting up a chilly breeze. Rin shivers in his short sleeves, and it's summer and the sun should be as hot as an oven right now, but the temperature drops to an almost springtime median and when she glances down, the soil where she dropped a few seeds only minutes ago have burst open with small green shoots. Bluebells and violets, she thinks, not sure how she knows but sure in her conviction. Standing up, she feels a sharp little prick of pain in her legs, which have been aching and throbbing for a while now. It feels like they're infected with something.
Unsteadily, she teeters and would have fallen over if Rin hadn't caught her in the nick of time.
"You alright?" He looks concerned, she holds her hands to her heart in a typical damsel-in-distress way, tries to calm her beating heart, and says yes, she's okay (and your hands are wildfires, please remove them now or I'll burn).
Twelve o'clock in the afternoon, like clockwork. Perfect zeros. Her mother calls for lunch.
"Are you coming?" Yuki calls, his sleeves rolled up and standing propped against the doorway. "You both look quite busy." He grins at them, and she grins back while Rin scowls.
"Just a sec," she answers, and turns to Rin. "You'd better get inside fast before Yuki takes all the sukiyaki."
"Sukiyaki?! That bastard wouldn't dare-" And then, he realizes he's cursed and scratches the back of his head sheepishly. "Oops. Sorry."
She giggles. "It's fine, really," she trills, and gives him a light shove to get him moving. "Hurry! It's going fast!"
"Yukio I will kill you if you even think about-" Rin stops mid-sentence and makes a mad dash for their house.
She takes a few steps away and collapses, her legs feeling like they have been doused in gasoline and a matched tossed in for good measure. This is a painful kind of burn, a raw, arthritic pain that spreads from the base of her feet to her hips, making her sway, making her feel faintly feverish.
The chill is back, the shadows lengthen. Twelve o'six. Ghost touches.
The pain abates, and she exhales, breathing in cold for what seems like hours until her mother calls again and the finger slip from the sleeves of her kimono and she runs, runs, runs through the sliding doors and closes them.
Tapping on her window, someone says, "May I come in?"
They make the burning stop. It's because she watered her plants too much; a weed started growing inside her, they explain, Yuki explains, Rin watches compassionately. There was a bad weed who took advantage of her sadness and started to grow, first from the legs, then gradually upwards, eventually becoming powerful enough to assume total control over her body.
It was a demon, but it's gone now, they say. They try to placate her with their scientific words and their fancy glossary terms, but she won't listen, simply stares at her shaking hands and tries to calm them. Ten fingers, two hours (or minutes) until twelve.
She decides then and there that she wants to be an exorcist, wants to go to True Cross with a conviction that rivals everything else she's ever done. She doesn't want to feel the burning again, it hurts too much.
Eyes watch, nails trace circles into her back, and a raspy voice whispers, "Maybe it'll be fun," with a hint of bitterness to the sound that mars the encouragement and makes her feel shaky inside.
The first thing she summons is a Greenman.
Izumo, the girl with the proud eyebrows, scoffs in derision. Rin looks awed. The professor seems pleased.
A tiny pain in her finger, and she wipes it on the carefully constructed summoning circle. Five points, words and letters, a bang and a puff of smoke, ashy clouds that scud through the air.
"Niii!" it chirps, and from its bursts a bouquet. She smiles at it, cradles it in her arm, wonders about the coincidences.
Midnight. Their hour. The clock strikes twelve.
"Who are you, really?" she questions, sitting on the edge of her bed, fingers digging into the fabric.
No response. He has always spoken to her; now, he is mute.
"Tell me, please." She feels like she is on the verge of tears.
A long, drawn-out whisper. "I think you can put the pieces together with the knowledge you have. Make a hypothesis. Draw conclusions. Perform an experiment."
"That's not helping." She's trembling, she really is, there's an earthquake going on inside of her, a terraforming of the planet that is Shiemi Moriyama and he's not speaking, not saying anything at all.
"Try," he hisses.
"Amaimon."
The word is small, it is long, it comes with a fanfare of mountains topped with ice, soil littered with pebbly grains and bits of debris, wheatfields and orchards and life, springing into existence underneath her but also of animals sinking into the soft quicksand of the mud, buffalo skeletons in dry, cracked desserts that have been picked clean and which are now only gleaming white bone. A plethora of sensory details, and the devil is in the details, correct?
She's aware that she's crying now. She really doesn't give a shit.
Silence.
Then, "Bingo, cram-school girl."
How fitting that moniker is; bittersweet irony she can actually taste.
Rin and Yuki ask what is wrong.
She lies again, smiles through the untruths cascading from her traitorous tongue, smooth as quicksilver unlike the dull magma flow that was before all this. It's become easier, and it scares her, but he's right behind her back, encouraging, leading her on.
With unsteady hands, she pours tea for them both, tries to discern his messages in the steam.
She cannot understand the words anymore.
Black ink lines, curvy like calligraphy, swan-necks and flower-stems.
It begins with a pentagram, the basis for all summonings, the idyllic representation of light and dark magics interwoven into a single shape that tilts whatever way the compass needle points.
Then, the swirling curliques and jagged lines, the name arrayed in a circle around the five-point star. Whispered words, murmured incantations as sinuous as the shadows themselves, clustered around her stocking-clad legs with all its angry red veins and swarming around the candle flames, threatening to drown her in their spectrum of absolute oblivion.
"Amaimon."
A silver ring that points north. Head lowered in deference. The flames are snuffed out and her room is plunged into blackness.
She remains perfectly still as she hears the nails scraping across her walls, the footsteps of someone walking towards her (but from which direction?), the redolent perfume of rich earth choking her and making her gasp.
A gloved hand clasps her chin and tilts it towards the boy. Droopy eyes. Pale skin. Crooked smiles.
"Did you miss me?"
She smirks and kisses him.
a/n: please review! :)