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Kokkuri-San
(Part II)
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5 - Impartation
Izzy lowered his head with a despondent sigh, his chest contracting. He was staring at his shoes—if he could see them. A deep, pressing, enveloping darkness was his sole, consuming focal point, and in its void he tried to organize his thoughts, regulate his breathing, wash out the eerie creaks and whispers of the world at night.
"I-Izzy."
His name was spoken just as he fought off a rib-rattling shudder, which made no sense when the evening temperature was forecasted to be in the mid-sixties. Fingers seized him by the shirt sleeve.
He sighed a second time.
"Yes, Hana?"
"Don't leave me." Her grip on him was like being cast in irons. Fear had superglued her to the fabric of his shirt, made the shivers that he fought radiate out of her like pulses in the air.
"Please," she continued, and it almost sounded like she was weeping, "by all that is holy in this world, Koushiro, please, please, please don't leave me."
The part of him generally ill-amused or unmoved by outer stimuli had him ready to say, "If I want to avoid Tai killing me, then, yes, I wouldn't dream of it," but, by Providence, he had enough social awareness to recognize that now was not the best time to be sassy.
Despite the bedlam that ensued, it didn't take him very long to figure out that their plan to scare Hana had gone awry. Perhaps on some level Tai would view it as a success (Hana was, indeed, scared), but other factors failed to compute. Firstly, the signal from Tai to T.K. to move the coin was never made. Matt had the camera solely on them, and even in the dimness, Izzy was near enough to see that the eye-shift never happened. Either one of them misread the other and moved the coin too early, or the coin moved on its own. Izzy's guess was that Tai, over-eager to get on with the night's mayhem, pushed the coin and T.K. had to quickly keep up face.
Secondly, it was cold. Not just chilly. But cold. And it was perfectly warm but ten minutes earlier. This was what he mused on while Hana stood quivering beside him, clinging to him like a koala bear to a eucalyptus tree, claws and all.
While the incongruences would have disturbed the regular teenager, Izzy was blessedly unaffected. True, he knew their present situation—separated from the group, robbed of vision, cold, disoriented—called for application of a different set of emotions. But his greater concern was how he would last in Hana's company before Tai decided the charade was up. Judging by how fiercely she was holding to him, even after rescue, she'd probably be so overcome with relief that she'd cry and wet herself anyway.
"Is your cell phone still functioning?" he asked.
It took a full thirty seconds for Hana to reply, the question taking that long to seep into her brain. Her hold on him relaxed only a mite. "… Barely. I... I have less than five percent on my battery."
"How convenient."
His body tilted, the shove Hana smacked him with hard enough to disturb his balance. Being scared certainly did not entail a lapse in physical reaction, not for Hana, anyway.
"And I expect yours to be fully charged?" she retorted.
Well, it is, recalled Izzy, patting his arm. Unfortunately, Tai stole it prior to this entire ordeal...
He located Hana's hand and pulled himself free of her grip, an act which, he imagined, was not unlike removing an octopus and its suction cups from the skin. He wondered if there would be bruises the following morning.
"Never mind," he muttered. "Let us just collect our bearings." He paused, fingers curling into fists as he attempted to clear his head, but the darkness was invasive, leaking into his ears and into his brain and muddling the flow of thought. That, or Hana was breathing too loudly. Or he was.
"And then what?" she protested. "We're blind here, Izzy!"
He sighed and rubbed his forehead.
"What would you have us do, then, Hana? Languish here?"
A pause.
"...No."
"Then please allow me a moment to think."
"The silence will kill me, Izzy. I can't. I'm about to have a heart attack. If you're going to insist on thinking, I'm going to have to talk while you have your moment."
Izzy grinded his teeth.
"Your request that I do not abandon you is jeopardized if you insist on speaking."
Silence, precious silence, was her reply. Izzy breathed the quiet in, using it to rejuvenate his brain. The healing process was punctured when Hana spoke again.
"Are you...?" she began, and never finished. "Bon Dieu, Izzy. Are you threatening me?"
"No," he deflected, his posture slackening. "Those are merely my terms, the conditions." For some odd reason, he thought of spitting cobras, and he half expected venom to be sprayed onto his face.
"I didn't know my general safety was something I had to bargain for," Hana argued. Her tone was biting, corrosive, it could have cleaned rust. "Usually, you know, friends like to keep their friends safe because, you know, they're friends."
"That wasn't what I meant. You misunderstand me."
"Explique," she spat.
He sighed.
"In order to secure your safety, Hana, I have to be able to think clearly. That requires some quiet. Therefore, in essence, your safety is contingent upon my ability to strategize, which is aided by silence. With that said, I kindly request your cooperation and for you to permit me five full minutes of unadulterated—"
He cut off, a realization zapping into his brain like a thunderbolt from heaven. His fingertips even tingled from the epiphany.
"You're..." He hesitated, the darkness facing him making it difficult to speak with any conviction. He knew Hana was somewhere in the void, but at present, he was speaking to a black wall. "You're not... frightened."
"What?"
Izzy turned around. Hana's voice had reached him from behind, which meant that she was moving, wandering around. It was easy for her to do so undetected, given her years of practice tiptoeing with her ballerina feet. But Hana's anxiousness from fear had her talking a lot, not roaming about. She felt secure enough to amble. And, moreover, she wasn't babbling anymore.
"Kurosawa," Izzy intoned. What he was aiming for was a paternal sound, official and firm, but it came out expectedly whiny.
"What?" she repeated, annoyed, to which Izzy replied with his own repetition:
"You're not frightened."
What followed was what sounded like a hiccup, vocal folds snapping shut into an abrupt silence. He swore the air was shaped by her gaping mouth, darkness bending around lips parted in surprise.
"I... Well... I..." She bumbled. "Well, what do you expect? What's a ghost who can suck the very soul out of me to a friend who makes me bargain for my safety?"
Izzy frowned, the blackness around them absorbing his shift in mood. He didn't know whether to be flattered or insulted that his natural aloofness summoned out of Hana an irritation great enough to abolish her fear.
"Again, I reiterate,"—he was not about to have himself misunderstood a second time—"that you misinterpret my words. Your safety is a priority, Hana—Tai would ensure that—but I cannot protect you if I cannot think lucidly."
She sighed, aggravated, and he heard the scuff of a heel on the dirty ground, followed by a muttered (but echoed), "Like you'd really be able to stop a ghost from bleeding me dry."
Izzy smacked the butt of his palm to his forehead, groaning silently in their mutual blindness. Hana was getting closer and closer to becoming completely inconsolable. It wasn't enough that she thought herself threatened by the nonsense that was the paranormal, but now she was angrily resigned to her fate, doubting his capability to protect her. Briefly, he wondered how Tai could deal with her shortcomings in reason, but he realized that Tai would have never requested they stop and think. He'd have gone with the gut feeling, grabbed her arm, and, blindly, run towards an uncertain haven.
But there was more than one way to establish a feeling of security—and it wasn't through boldness or the foolhardiness to try one's luck in desperate situations. It was through reasoning.
"How does one stop Kokkuri-san, Hana?" he asked.
She answered readily enough.
"The objects used to start the game have to be used somehow. Re-purposed."
"How?" Izzy prompted, his wrist running his hand in circles.
"You... You..." She huffed. "I don't know. The coin needs to be spent—put in a vending machine or something, and the pen needs to be kept and used—like in the movie. The girl who found it kept it to write her diary."
"Then what must you do?"
It simultaneously bothered and intrigued Izzy that he was actually indulging Hana's inexplicable attraction to the horror genre. On some level it was whimsical, encouraging her to act as if she were in a scary movie full of the implausible. On another, it was embarrassing, as if, simply by association, he, too, believed that their safety lay in fulfilling superstitious rituals.
"I... I have to find the coin," she said, her voice rising. "I have to find the coin and the pen, and then I just need to use it and we'll be all right! Izzy, get on your knees!"
"I beg your—"
He felt fingertips brush his side, the sensation disappearing into the dark only to return with more velocity, a full hand landing on his shoulder and shoving him down. To his left, he could hear the smack of a palm on the dirty concrete floor. Hana was in charge of her own destiny, fervently slapping the ground for the items that would procure her salvation.
"You're still with me, right?" she asked.
Izzy was about to comment on the fruitlessness of the question—where else would he go?—but withheld it.
"I would have done as you asked without the push, Hana," he said instead.
"What?"
The pat-pat of her hands stopped. The air went still.
"I said you didn't have to shove me."
There was a pause, dense and stifled like audio static. It was as if the space around him had iced over. He could even feel the thread-like muscles in his arms tense, lifting every hair up in the descending chill, moreover when she finally replied.
"But I never touched you, Izzy."
—
6 - Annihilation
His lungs ached. He liked to think of himself as relatively fit—given his spare consumption of processed fatty foods, the occasional tennis match with his girlfriend, and whatever his slim figure portended—but none of those factors seemed to matter when he actually had to run for his life.
The pitch darkness, coupled with the chill and the augmenting of his breath and heartbeat had him feeling like he had been thrown into an ocean maelstrom. Everything became a whirl, cold and coiled, the environment conjuring ways to betray him—a wall punching him in the cheekbone, debris tripping him up, echoes of slow, persistent footsteps creeping up behind him. Sometimes he bumped into Tai, who—damn him—was always a few steps ahead.
Blinking repeatedly in Matt's mind was the image of what he had seen drifting in the dark, his body on the cusp of physically rejecting its challenge to reality. Nausea plagued him, and with the cold sweat seeping through to his clothes and the subtle vibrations in his bones, he felt more like an invalid suffering an ague than a teenager about to pay the price for his irreverence.
A dry heave promptly rose up his esophagus.
But instead of a spew of movie theater popcorn and iced tea, the only thing that lurched was him. Something collided into his shin, and he tumbled forward, the camera still in his grasp freed as he hit concrete. Moaning, he rolled over, hearing the skid of Tai's sneakers as they came to a halt. Oddly, what he took to be a slapping sound also came to a stop.
"Matt?"
He blinked and the world took on an ounce of clarity. He could make out shadows of lines, dark, but distinct, shades of gray. Faces.
"Get up, dude."
A hand promptly grabbed his shirt sleeve and pulled, giving him enough of a start to find his footing. It was Tai who had hefted him, Izzy's cell phone glowing in his palm. A quick flick of the device and the light showed a pair of figures on the floor, one on all fours and the other kneeling, sitting back on her legs.
Recognition was instantaneous, and Hana, her hair flying all over her face, leapt to her feet and threw herself on Tai, arms and legs wrapping around him, issuing cries of relief and gratitude in half-wept French. Izzy's cell phone was dropped upon impact, its glowing screen the sole torch in an otherwise shapeless, obsidian void.
It provided enough light that Matt could make out the figures of all three of his friends, and he stooped to retrieve the camera he had dropped, checking it for damage. He was anxious to switch on his backlight, if only to illuminate the path behind them and whatever could be hiding there. A shuffle of feet drew part of his attention, his blue eyes glimpsing to his left to see Izzy approaching, palms and kneecaps sooty from the dirty floor.
"We should get moving," Matt muttered under his breath. The camera, again, was refusing to cooperate, its screen but a window of blackness.
Izzy allowed a low hum, and Matt took it for agreement, albeit a weak one. He fussed some more with the gadget, trying Tai's method and giving the camera a few hard whacks.
"Forgive my impudence," Izzy began, the interruption stopping Matt's hand, "but, for lack of a better expression, Matt, you look like you've seen a ghost."
He winced, half the muscles in his face tight with exasperation. A flash of what he had seen sparked through his memory, bringing with it wisps of a silhouette veiled in smoke, pale, gaunt features, like the face of a tombstone angel rubbed blank by rain. He blinked and saw the screen on the camera brighten.
"Finally," he said. It never occurred to him that he had avoided responding to Izzy's accurate observation. He was just glad for the light.
"What are you looking for?"
For a second, Matt thought the question was a stupid one—especially coming from Izzy, but then he registered that the voice behind it was higher than Izzy's conversational tenor. He turned around, prepared to see Tai and Hana stepping towards them. The latter seemed more at ease under the arm of her beau, though, the one hand that was visible was clutching the front of Tai's shirt like a cat's protracted claw.
"Noth—"
Tai cut him off.
"Matt saw a ghost, Han," he answered.
Matt could feel his eyelids stretching at Tai's provocation. His girlfriend had just recovered from one scare and, not five minutes later, he was ready to frighten her all over again.
"W-What?" Hana stammered.
"Just ign—"
"You heard me, Hana. Why do you think he came flying in here out of breath and shaking?" Tai chortled unbecomingly, a hand to his side for effect.
"We gain nothing dallying here," Izzy said. The words acted like a snap of the fingers, drawing their focus. "We have two light sources. We shouldn't waste them."
"Izzy's right," added Matt, hoping to drop the subject. "Let's go."
"Well, at least describe what you saw, Yamato," said Tai.
"You ran, too, dumbass. So don't—"
For the third time, he was interrupted. Except, this time, the interjection didn't come from Tai. They had just taken the first steps towards the room's exit when Izzy's phone rang, blasting trills through the emptiness.
"Whoops," Tai said, sliding his thumb over the screen and stopping the noise. He turned to Izzy. "That was my alarm to come get you." He smiled sheepishly, ignoring the smack on the chest Hana gave him for startling them all.
"I swear, Tai," Hana seethed, "sometimes you—"
She never finished. The repeated sound of a door banging open and shut echoed back to them, flinging through the shifting air. A breeze blew in from behind.
Quickly, Matt turned around, aiming the camera in the darkness, its backlight shooting a beam of weak, white light through the room. Specks of dust floated in the glowing stream. Behind him he could hear Hana's breath quicken.
"Taichi, don't you dare—"
"I'm not, Hana," he muttered back. "I'm not going to leave you. But this is the second time I've heard this and whoever's messing with us is going to get a pounding."
"Tai!"
"Just stay with Izzy. Izzy, stay with Hana."
She unleashed something between a growl and a squeal, and Matt felt Tai's arm brush against his. He glanced to the side and saw the brunet cup his hands around his mouth, his chest expanding as a large breath was taken in.
"Hey!" he shouted. "Who's there?"
A pause followed, its silence cavernous and thrumming, weighing on them like an extreme gravitational pull, the kind that could snap necks or crush concrete. He didn't know why he expected someone to yell back—as if that would make them feel any better about the situation—but he did. He waited for identification—"It's me!"—but heard nothing. Instead, he jumped back at the passing blur that blipped in and out of the camera viewing screen. Fast, a pale smear, gone in a second, as baffling and unsettling as a magician's disappearing act—or a UFO's.
"Did you see that?" Tai cried, spinning around and shaking Matt by the shoulder. "Holy shit! Did you see that?"
It took one hard swallow for Matt to realize he couldn't talk.
"Follow it. Did you follow it?"
Briskly, Matt shook his head, his heartbeat so intense he could feel his cranium throbbing. The nauseous feeling returned, and he gave no fight when Tai, fed up with his muteness, grabbed the camera out of his hands and shoved him aside.
He stumbled back a half step, someone's hand stopping him from tripping backwards—Izzy's, he assumed—before Hana shrieked, her scream ploughing through his skull like gunshot.
"There!" she wailed.
What followed was a strangling noise of some sort, and Izzy gasping, "Windpipe!" as Tai maneuvered the camera to follow the phantom lurking in their midst.
"Damn it!" Tai grumbled. "I just saw it! Come out, you little—"
Matt found his voice.
"Just drop it, Tai! Let's g—"
He broke off into expletives so loud and profane, it drowned out Hana's screams. Something tickled him, ran what felt like fingers up and down his torso, and he jumped, fumbling back into a pair of bony bodies, one of which gasped another plea to free his pinched trachea as the three of them crashed to the floor.
The light that came from Tai shining the camera at them came a second too late, and when next Matt blinked, he saw and heard Davis, Yolei, Ken, and Naomi laughing hysterically, the foremost rolling on the ground and pounding his fists.
"Oh, God," cried Davis, "if you could just see your faces!"
"The hell, Motomiya!" Tai shouted, making means to chuck the camera out of his grip. Luckily, he thought twice about throwing the expensive gadget in a rage and slipped it off his hand before charging at the younger teen. Within another blink, Davis was headlocked.
"Hey! Wait! Wait!" pleaded Davis, flailing his hands. "It wasn't me! It wasn't me!"
"Like I give a damn if—"
"Don't hurt him, big brother."
Tai turned around, his fist centimeters away from drilling noogies into Davis's scalp. Matt did the same, and saw Kari standing by with T.K., who, unsurprisingly, had a white plastic poncho—or altered garbage bag—over his shoulders, his arms making waving motions beneath the material.
"Ooooooh," he said.
Matt's mandible loosened, mouth dropping as his saliva dried up in disbelief.
"Are you kidding me!" He sat upright, alleviating Izzy of his body weight, and slapped his hands once on the floor before jumping to his feet. "Takeru Takaishi!"
—
7 - Capitulation
Izzy settled onto the sofa with apparent unease, as if he had arthritic knees or debilitating back pain. It was the only spot available; and, having put off the social engagement for as long as politely possible, he was now obliged to spend the next hour or so sitting beside Hana Kurosawa.
To be fair, she was not bad company. But, given his natural aversion to close physical contact, and Hana's predisposition to skittishness and screams during horror films, Izzy had every reason to anticipate discomfort. Already, Hana was prepared to deflect the terrors that would grace the television screen. Her knees were brought up to her chin, twiggy arms pressing a couch pillow over her chest and half her face.
"Do we have to do this?" she mumbled into the fabric.
Izzy's tongue slid over the backs of his front teeth, lips parting, ready to offer agreement, but Tai cut him off.
"You've had a week to get over it, Kurosawa," he retorted, hooking his video camera up to the T.V. Scuttling over, knees sliding over the carpet, he resumed his spot on the floor in front of Hana, and, once there, he wasted no time frustrating her further. In what seemed like the motions of a stretch and yawn, he reached back, snatched Hana's protective pillow, and promptly held it out of her reach.
She only managed to get in a swat on his head before the video started playing, and she was reduced to sitting cross-legged on her side of the couch, bent full forward from the waist up with her arms around Tai's neck and her face half hidden in his hair. Izzy grunted subtly, his left thigh twitching under the pressure of Hana's knee.
A hiss for quiet followed, Davis turning his head once to glare at them from his spot closest to the T.V.—one he shared with Naomi, Yolei, and Ken. Not a second later, and the lights switched off. Kari's lean shadow drifted over the screen as she made way to the loveseat, pausing once to set a bowl of popcorn on the coffee table before she took her place beside T.K.
A shift to Izzy's right startled him, and a quick look in that direction had him watching as Matt tilted away from him, into Sora, who was the sole reason why they were reliving the prank executed a week ago.
"Huh," she observed, eyebrows rising in the glow of the television. "Nice touch with the night vision, Yama."
"Thanks to me," Tai murmured.
The next half hour had them gazing upon the T.V. in short-lived rapture. Commentary, naturally, was ongoing:
"And this is where Yamato nearly wet himself."
"I don't know why you all rely on your cell phones for light. Does no one use a flashlight nowadays?"
"Some of us live in the modern age, Takaishi."
"And here is proof that Taichi is an ass. But did we really need the proof?"
"I'm sorry, Yama, but... who taught you to hold a camera?"
"Tai, obviously."
Matt's poor cinematography, oddly, became the hugest topic of the evening, with the recording being rewound and fast-fowarded countless times to highlight the worst, most eye-rolling, and nauseating sequences. Throughout, Izzy could feel his eyelids growing heavier by the minute, his entire body, on occasion, freezing in spasm as he fought off the plunge into slumber. Hana had relaxed somewhat beside him, enough that he didn't feel like he would lose circulation in his leg. She even started weaving tiny braids into Tai's hair.
But, just when they reached a lull, a moment of disinterest strong enough that only a few—namely Sora and Matt—were paying attention to anything on the screen, the calm was punctured, shot through like a lancet into the flesh.
"Wait, wait," Sora said.
She laid a hand on Matt's hand, her body tipping forward as her nether lip curled in under her teeth.
"Davis, hand me the remote."
She paused the video, freezing on a particular frame in the middle of a shot featuring Matt and Tai. Izzy's senses wakened slightly, his dark eyes blinking a few times fast as the television screen came into focus. From what he gathered, they were back at the part of the film where Tai and Matt, separated from the group, were currently assessing how long to let Hana's prank go on before she was "rescued."
"Look there," Sora directed. She pointed at the screen, her finger hovering over a dark space in between Tai's head and Matt's.
Yolei peered at the spot in question, lifting her eye glasses away from her face numerous times in an attempt at clarity.
"Is that...?" she began, before falling silent.
Izzy trained his eyes on the spot Sora had drawn their attentions to. At first glance, there was nothing remarkable—just Tai and Matt frozen in a perpetual state of neon-green bickering. He blinked again, compelled to deepen his examination by the increasing murmur of his friends—the whispers of an unsettled crowd.
It took a few sweeps—eyes drifting right to left, right to left, right to left—before the miniscule details unseen before coalesced into a grand picture. Blurred outlines, shades of light, strokes of shadow—they all blended, meshed, to distinctly form a recognizable unit.
A face.
On instinct, Izzy swallowed, tightly, forcibly, throat muscles as taut as the horse hairs on a violin bow. Tai supplied the reaction he quietly withheld.
"Holy. Shit."
The soccer captain, however, giggled gleefully afterwards, tickled by the discovery. Izzy could only stare on in unblinking blankness, his mind desperately scrambling for logical footing—an explanation, a fact, worded reason as solid and sure as stone. Unfortunately, he feared that, in his quest, he'd empty the universe in search of answers and realize that there were none to be had. He looked down at his hands, studying the prints like one having an existential crisis.
Glare from the camera? A smear on the lens? Artwork abandoned from the building's former tenants?
He wasn't the only one in denial. As he fell deeper into thought, Izzy caught traces of Matt's half-baked reasoning.
"T.K.," he heard the blond say, "Is that—?"
"You don't really think I look like that, Matt, do you? I'm a little too many millennia young to sport the skin-peeling, sinew-exposed, cataract-eyed rage going on here."
"You must have been wearing a mask."
"A ma...? Matt, I pulled the prank. Don't you think I'd know if I was wearing a mask?"
"You lied before. All I'm saying is—"
"Hey, Kurosawa."
Thus far, Hana had been determinedly oblivious to Sora's disturbing discovery. She had busied herself with braiding her boyfriend's hair until said boyfriend crawled away towards the TV, calling her name.
Izzy looked up, knowing that Tai had played his trick well. By routine, Hana would raise her eyes, stop the hands presently picking at a loose thread on a sofa pillow. She'd give him her undivided attention, and she'd regret it.
"Take a look at this."
By the time Izzy followed the line of Hana's green gaze to the television, the image of the extra face was blown up on the screen, magnified to fill it from corner to corner. His muscles almost jerked with her when she jumped in her seat, hands flying back against the cushions, a small, barely audible gasp escaping her before her mouth snapped shut, teeth settling into a grind, face paling to the color of milk while the rest of her body stiffened. She swallowed once and then shook her head, her opened eyes still and unflinching against the stinging air. Then, without a word, she stood up and walked out of the room, her steps as rigid and robotic as if she were Frankenstein's monster himself.
"Dude, go after her."
Matt jerked his thumb over his shoulder, and Izzy noticed that the digit was shaking subtly. By the way Sora instantly reached out and cupped her hand over it to bring it back to his person, she, too, had seen it.
"Hold on," Tai replied, staring on with Davis at the television screen. The both of them had their noses against the glass, soaking the haunting image in in cross-eyed wonder. "Do you guys really think this thing is for real?"
It was the last thing Izzy heard before he stood up to use the restroom, and on his way out, he caught a glimpse of Hana in Tai's room, manically digging through her purse.
He didn't take a step forward, deciding initially that it was best to leave her alone. But, after a glance at the others in the living room—Tai had started a debate on whether what they were staring at was a legitimate memory of a supernatural being—Izzy reconsidered. He knocked once on the doorjamb.
Hana spun around, hair sweeping like the swings of a carousel in motion.
"Izzy," she said, uncommonly out of breath.
"You... seem to be in search of something," he replied, avoiding asking her how she felt. "Can I assist?"
"You already did," she muttered, turning back around. "Sort of." She sighed. "I'm looking for the coin. I just want to make sure I... that I... still have it. Just... Just in case."
Silently, Izzy approached, exercising caution—not because he was wary of her company but because he realized, for perhaps the first time since he met her—he preferred her company over everybody else's. He'd be lying to himself if the events from that hectic night ended with Matt tackling his younger brother to the ground in the Kumagai parking lot. Whether he wanted it or not, the supernatural, the inexplicable, the mysterious, would forever be associated with Hana Kurosawa, and how, in her presence, something potentially inhuman had touched him, breached the barrier between a dependable reality and the flimsiness of the unknown.
He would never admit it to her or their friends—at least not so soon—but she had persuaded him to align his beliefs with hers, to suspect, to trust that angry souls and spirits existed, and they had power to beware.
After a pause, he kneeled beside her, keeping to a respectful distance and continuing not to say a word. She didn't make note of it, didn't look up and raise an eyebrow, didn't ask him any questions. She simply continued looking for the desired object—the magical, life-saving coin—and, after a moment of deliberation, he reached out a hand and joined her in moving the objects she had thrown out of her bag. A metallic skid sounded when he moved the circular disk of her compact mirror, and when he lifted it, the coin in question winked its bronze face at him.
"I'll use it next time I have to pay something with cash," she said, more to herself than to him. Her fingers closed around the coin, and she dropped it into an empty purse pocket. "Not that it'll really do anything now that we know there actually was a freaking spirit following us on Friday night and quite possibly still following us and just waiting for nightfall to reap our souls and drag us all down into hell, but at least I'll have my coin, right? Right?"
"Kurosawa," Izzy said. She exhaled loudly and looked at him, still ashen, still looking like she was waking from a cryogenic stasis.
He looked down and smiled grimly, embarrassed or annoyed—he didn't know which, and pulled from his pocket the gleaming black barrel of a ballpoint pen.
Holding it by its tip, he showed it to her, and her lips twitched before breaking into a smile, relief coming in the form of several eye-blinks.
"That's the pen," she said. "You found it. And... you kept it."
"It has to be used, you said, correct?" he replied. She nodded. "Well, it is now exclusively used to solve math equations in my calculus class, which means, verily, that it's re-purpose is ensured for a very long time."
xXx
A/N: So, obviously, I am the queen of cheeseball endings, but that's okay with me. XD Um... right. Plans for this collection of stories. Depending on whatever gets written first, you may see 3 different updates for A Boy and Girl Affair. You may get Taishiro friendship time, you may get Part II of the Paris arc, or you may get a continuation of the Dissent arc.
Most of it depends on whatever I feel like writing the most, but it could also depend on you guys and how eager you are to see any of the three—if you're eager to read any at all, that is! XD
Anywho, that's all I can offer you in the way of story plans. Thanks for reading and reviewing! :)