Hi! I wrote this back in September-December 2018 for the BSD Yokai Zine (bsdyokaizine on tumblr) by Arella and Haru, but I kept forgetting to post it. And now the zine has been released for over a year now...
Anyway, now I remembered to post it! It's my first ever piece of fanfiction I wrote for BSD, and I'm still very happy that I got to be part of this wonderful zine! The wonderful cover art is by my zine partner Middy/midnight 14 (wingedtrinket on twitter)!
I hope you will enjoy reading this one-shot^^
Not Quite Human
Each summer, he wondered how terrible a person he must have been to be reborn as a Karasu-Tengu. After all, only during summer, visits from the residents in the city below visibly increased. It was not the wanderers, not the hikers that bothered Fukuzawa Yukichi; it was the visitors that came at night, that were arrogant enough to dare to hold that silly rite of theirs on the yōkai cemetery behind his temple. Throughout the entire year, people like them would go to his temple to prove themselves, to risk a glimpse at the Tengu, or to do both, but it would only happen every now and then; the peak was during summer—the only time they ever came in groups.
Every time they came, Fukuzawa suppressed a sigh while he grabbed his ha-uchiwa, his feather fan, before going out to use it to stir a wind strong enough to chill the visitors' bones and blood and scare them away. Most of the time, it worked; sometimes, it didn't, and he was forced to switch plans until the very last one had learned to respect him and his fellow yōkai living in the mountain forest. He was the forest's guardian for over a thousand years now, had watched humanity and civilisation change and shift like the tides. Still, over the centuries, humanity's taste for danger had proven to be as unchanging as the seasons. And so, each summer, the number of Fukuzawa's unpleasant visitors increased—and so did the amount of alcohol he consumed.
Tonight had been one of those especially annoying nights when people kept coming and coming as if they were magically manifesting out of thin air. When Fukuzawa finally allowed himself to go to bed, the dark sky had already begun to turn orange and purple and fade slowly into light blue. He had given up on sleeping during summer nights a very long time ago, and the instant his head touched his pillow, he fell asleep and was met by a dream.
The only reminder of what he had once been was his humanoid physique; everything else had been erased when he died and was reborn as a Karasu-Tengu. There were many things Fukuzawa wondered about from his time as a human, but the thing he wondered about the most, wanted to re-experience the most was dreaming. Was being able to fall asleep and into a new fantasy spun on truths and lies and wishes, into a new adventure to live and forget every night before duty called and all was the same again. But Karasu-Tengus could not dream, not in the way humans could. Instead, on rare nights and days when someone remembered that Tengus were more than taunting, obscure creatures and sent a prayer out to them, a sleeping Tengu could visit them in their dreams to see what the person had been doing and why they needed their help. It was not a dream per se, but the closest thing Fukuzawa had. And when he was called for the first time in a while, he followed the prayer and stepped…
...into a forest quite unlike his, barely green with bare branches and flecks of buds here and there. But what was truly curious was that Fukuzawa could hear nothing, not the clicking of cicadas, not the cries of animals, not even the faint steps of mice on fallen leaves and broken branches. And that the forest was as unmoving as it was silent. The wind blew through the woods, but touched no leaf; Fukuzawa walked through the forest but could disturb nothing: not the branches remarkably unbreakable beneath his feet, not the ones hanging in his face. It seemed as if the forest was frozen in time while the world around it kept on moving: the wind was still blowing, and the sun, having hung high and proud before, set now, tinting the blue-grey sky red and gold.
While Fukuzawa watched the sky, he wondered what the dream, the prayer, was about before realising what else the setting sun initiated besides night: the ōmagatoki, the time between sunset and the darkening of the sky. The time when the borders between this and the yōkai world blurred together and allowed more yōkai to enter the human world. There were always yōkai in the human world, but they had fixed locations, fixed places where they dwelled and which could be avoided. During this twilight hour, however, yōkai of all kinds appeared everywhere they liked, and fearing for their lives, humans had begun to lock themselves up from dusk to dawn.
And, then, two children—a girl and a boy, siblings from their appearance—ran through the scenery, an anomaly in the stillness. They were carrying sticks but were quick to dispose of them when they realised that they were nothing but a hindrance. The children were not slow, did not linger in one place for too long—still, no matter, for how long they ran or how fast, they were unable to leave the forest. It was as if the world around this section had ceased to exist, as if the children were trapped by a spell or a terrible joke.
Eventually, the girl began to dash from tree to tree, knocking against them all, and the boy followed her example. They worked their way through the trees until, finally, the girl found what she sought. She drew her brother's attention to her before taking out a knife wrapped in cloth. Her hands shook slightly while she unwrapped it and cut through the bark, and the boy looked around, cautious and alert. When the girl was done, she stepped through the little door-like opening into the hollow tree. She reached out to her brother to pull him inside, but he did not take her hand. A chill pierced the air, and in the blink of an eye, the door was slammed shut and all went dark. Fukuzawa believed that this was the end of the dream…
…but then, everything lit up again when the girl pushed open the door and stepped outside. During the ōmagatoki, yōkai could leave their world and enter the human one—but what went one way could go the other; and here she stood: In a still, still world beneath a purple-blue sky with her brother nowhere in sight and only the faintest of chills indicating that he, and something else, had been there at all.
"Tengu," Fukuzawa heard the girl's sweet quiet voice. "Two weeks ago, I heard that someone looking like Ryu was spotted; it was really him, he is really back after all those months, I know it. But I cannot find him, and he didn't come back on his own. So, I am asking you, can you help me find my brother?"
It had been a while since Fukuzawa had last gone to the town at the foot of his mountain. Usually, he disliked coming here—a town meant more humans after all—but, today, he welcomed the change of pace with open arms, hoping that if so many were wandering through his woods, he would find the town half-empty.
Unfortunately, there were still many people in the town, making it quite difficult for Fukuzawa to get to his destination—after all, how often did people see half-raven, half-human creatures walking around? But after detour after detour and numerous failed attempts to feed and befriend local cats, Fukuzawa finally reached the abandoned hospital. It looked just like the last time he had seen it: battered with the plaster crumbling away with the wind, the windows meticulously sealed with cardboard and furniture to make sure that not even a little bit of sunlight could steal its way into the building.
Fukuzawa quickly went through the front door and closed it behind him before he realised that he did not have to rush so much to minimalize the amount of light he let inside: from the path he had taken to the hospital, everything had looked normal, but now that he was inside, Fukuzawa saw that some cardboards were damaged.
"Hello, Fukuzawa-san," he heard a voice from a corner. He looked up and saw Elise stepping forward and stopping right before where the light hit the ground. In her hands, she had cardboard and tape, and she definitely did not look amused.
"Hello, Elise-san," replied Fukuzawa. "Was it thieves again?"
Elise huffed. "Dirty thieves trying to steal Rintarō's things and use the hospital as their hotel. Of course, he scared them away quite easily—but not before they could damage the covers. And now here I am: fixing Rintarō's mess," she said, glaring at the sunlight to her feet and taking a step back when it moved.
"Speaking of him, can you bring me to Mori-sensei?"
"As long as I don't have to patch cardboard," Elise said, putting down her utensils and walking back into the darkness. Fukuzawa followed her downstairs, staying as close to her as possible so that he would not lose her. In contrast to the ground floor, the basement was still plunged in darkness; and contrary to their reputation, ravens were neither nocturnal nor could they see in the dark, and if Fukuzawa was not careful, the chance that he walked against something was ridiculously high.
"We're here," Elise eventually said and kicked against Mori from what Fukuzawa could hear.
"Ow, Elise-chan, how rude of you to wake me up like that, but I woke up to your adorableness, so that's—ow!"
Fukuzawa heard shuffling and shoving noises and when he narrowed his eyes and focused on the place the noise came from, he could vaguely see Mori Ōgai sitting up.
"Good afternoon, Fukuzawa-dono," Mori greeted him. "What brought you here? Ah, wait, take this first." He threw something at him, and even in the dark, Fukuzawa managed to catch the candle and the lighter. He lit up the candle and the weak flame flickered over neatly arranged medical instruments and books—and Elise's disgusted expression.
"Oh, right. Excuse me for a moment," said Mori, changing from his full Hyakume form into his more human-like one, from a pink lump of flesh with hundreds of eyes into a man slightly more pleasant to look at. "It is just more comfortable to sleep in my natural form."
"Rintarō, you are so ugly," Elise said. "And why do you always have to transform when others are around? Your pink, lumpy form is disgusting enough, but when your lumps shift around…" She shuddered. "Please never transform back."
"Aww, you are so cute when you are upset, Elise-chan."
Fukuzawa cleared his throat.
"Oh, my apologies, Fukuzawa-dono," Mori said. "It looks like you haven't slept well; your pouches have pouches of their own—are the kids bothering you again? Do you need something to make you sleep better?" He stood up and started to rummage in a box. "I have something that will help. It is made of grasshoppers, beetles, a pinch of scorpion powder—and berries! All the things you love." Mori held a vial out to Fukuzawa who showed not even the slightest inclination to take it. Elise chuckled.
"Huh? Very, well…" Mori put the vial away. "It would have tasted wonderful, I tell you. Elise-chan handpicked those berries after all." He sat down at his desk. "I agree, the nights are too precious to waste and, unfortunately, aren't particularly long right now. And before we lose ourselves too much in joyful ramble and notice too late that it's morning again, we should go straight to the point, so…" He leaned his head on his hand, a grin on his face. "What miserable tale do you have for me today, Fukuzawa-dono?"
"Oh, fabulous," said Mori and clapped his hands together after Fukuzawa had finished speaking. "A boy who was taken during an ōmagatoki—a boy who was apparently returned. But who says that the girl's source can be trusted? People are seldom able to return from the yōkai realm, the ikai. It is neither a pleasant place nor half as much fun as the human world; that's why so many of us are dwelling here rather than there. But no matter how unpleasant the yōkai realm is for some of us, it's indefinitely more terrible for humans. If the boy really came back two weeks ago and still didn't go back home, he might have survived the yōkai world—only to die shortly after his return to this world, the sekai. Interdimensional travel takes a great toll on fragile mortal bodies. And if he never returned at all, the chance is high that he never will. It's a lost cause, Fukuzawa-dono. Just tell the sister to find herself a new brother or something."
Fukuzawa said nothing, just crossed his arms in front of his chest and looked at Mori.
"Fukuzawa-dono, even if her brother came back, I think she would want him to leave again right afterwards. Humans entering the ikai never return unchanged. He could have returned with three heads or no heads at all."
"It should be fine as long as he does not return as a pink, fleshy monster with thousands of eyes," Elise remarked.
"You're hurting me, Elise-chan."
"That's exactly what I wanted," she said as gleefully as Fukuzawa had ever heard her.
"Mori-sensei," he said and broke Mori out of his sulking.
"Fukuzawa-dono," Mori replied with a sigh. "The boy may be dead, the boy may be alive; he may be here, he may be there. I cannot think of a search more directionless."
"I thought you liked riddles, challenges—and didn't you say that we should not waste the nights and that they are currently not particularly long?" Fukuzawa nodded towards a clock on a wall. "It should be safe for you and Elise-san to go outside now. I know that the boy is not in my forest; all I ask of you is to quickly scan the town and the surrounding area for the boy or any clue that could lead to him."
For a while, Mori just looked at Fukuzawa, not saying anything, before he sighed again. "Very well. We will look around for something suspicious. But if it turns out that he did not reappear in the human world, I am sorry, Fukuzawa-dono, but I will not help you searching for him in the yōkai realm. I have patients to take care of and no desire to participate in a search even more futile than this one."
"That's not what I am asking of you."
"Very well," Mori said, standing up and running his hand through his hair. "Elise-chan, it's time for us to go."
"Took long enough," she replied and left the basement.
"Elise-chan, I adore you despite everything, but did you have to tell Fukuzawa-dono that you found the cut open hollow tree?" Mori asked, shirking from a too-low hanging branch and almost losing balance on the uneven ground and falling face-down into the mud. "It's not even a real clue."
"Spirited away people usually reappear around the area they vanished," said Fukuzawa. "The exact location of the hollow tree is, therefore, a legitimate clue."
Elise stuck her tongue out at Mori. "It is a clue; you are just mad that you didn't find one yourself, Rintarō."
"Fukuzawa-dono, there's a reason why you don't find any Hyakumes in a forest," Mori said, circling around an ant hill. "We just aren't compatible at all—Hyakumes and forests. It is too dirty."
"Elise-san is doing just fine though."
"Anyway—the sun is going to rise soon, so we should hurry up to find a place for Elise-chan and me to stay."
"Oh, you don't suggest to return to the hospital?"
"I am not very fond of forests and I have patients to look after, but as you've said: I am a friend of challenges and riddles, and I would love to see what has become of this boy who wandered through the worlds—if he is here and alive. The possibility of meeting someone like this is incredibly low—and so are my expectations, but I am taking this chance anyway.
"To change the topic, Fukuzawa-dono, Elise-chan and I won't be able to help you if we burned to cinders. The sun's nastier in summer than anytime else, and if we don't find some place to stay soon, Elise-chan and I have to stay in the hollow tree all day. It will certainly be fun, just not very comfortable."
Elise grimaced. "I really don't want to be squeezed into a tree with Rintarō, Fukuzawa-san."
"I think I saw a sign pointing to a village a while ago," Fukuzawa said, already beginning to regret that he had taken them with him. But everything is better than to be at the temple right now. He looked up and saw sunlight grazing the horizon. "Instead of bicker, I think you should hope that the village is not too far away."
Getting a room for the day had turned out to be just as difficult for three yōkai, one odder than the other, as anticipated. And now, while Mori and Elise were sleeping, Fukuzawa was left alone in this village to investigate. But while everyone wanted to steal a glance at the peculiar birdman and whisper about him behind their hands, nobody seemed to be inclined to actually look at him and speak to him. They were curious, but ultimately too scared of him, and Fukuzawa spent half his day trying to engage a villager in a conversation to no avail.
Too tired to continue, Fukuzawa found himself a quiet place where he could stay until the others woke up. He had not been there for long when he heard a cat walking by. A second later, Fukuzawa had a treat in his hand and was carefully approaching the elegant creature, holding out the morsel. But the cat lifted its head and quickly ran away when it saw him. With a sigh, Fukuzawa let the treat vanish in his sleeves again.
"Oh, are you an idiot?" Fukuzawa heard and he tore away his gaze from the direction the cat had run to. Only a few metres away from him stood a girl. "You are a giant part-bird—what did you expect?" she said. "Karasu Tengu, what are you even doing in this village? It's not like one of you is regularly seen running around in this area, making a fool of himself carrying around this crepe tape broomstick."
"It's called a ha-uchiwa."
"Gesundheit," said the girl, sitting down on a nearby bench. "So, what are you doing here?"
Fukuzawa would rather return to the inn, currently not having the capacities to talk to this irritating girl when he was already working together with Mori. Unfortunately, she was the only one who was willing to talk to him, and so, he sat down next to her. The bench creaked beneath his weight. "I am searching for a boy. He vanished around here many months ago, and I want to find out what happened to him."
"Oh, I see."
"Can you help me with this?"
"Of course, I can," she replied, nodding.
"This is very kind of—"
The girl clapped her hands together, interrupting him. "Of course, I can help you," she repeated, a wicked smile appearing on her lips. "But only if you beat me in a game."
"Fukuzawa-dono! You're back! But you look battered—did something happen?" Mori greeted him in his human-like form when Fukuzawa finally returned to the inn after playing fourteen rounds in a ridiculous made-up game with inconsistent rules. What a price to pay for a few snippets of information.
"I was gathering information while you were napping," Fukuzawa told him and sat down on the ground.
"And what did you gather?"
"A few days ago, a villager found an unconscious, sickly boy fitting the description of the girl's brother in the woods. She took him to her home and nursed him. However, as soon as he woke up, he ran away. The woman wanted to hurry after him, but it was too close to sunset, and she was too afraid to go after him."
"From one ōmagatoki to another. How high are the chances that he was spirited away a second time?"
"Apparently, the beginning of the ōmagatoki wasn't the only reason why the woman didn't go after the boy."
Mori raised an eyebrow. "How interesting. Elise-chan, gather around; it is story time."
"Absolutely not," she replied, not looking up from her sketchbook.
Fukuzawa cleared his throat. "Oh, yes, I'm sorry, please go on, Fukuzawa-dono," Mori said.
"Only around a week before the woman found the boy, a monster started attacking the village. A monster nobody has ever seen before. Not even the ones most familiar with yōkai know what it is—if it is even a yōkai at all. It comes at night, destroys everything that comes in its way and leaves as quickly as it came. The woman believes that the monster killed the boy—or may have taken him away. Four, five people were already taken by the monster, but they were always found injured but alive over the course of the following day."
"Neither this boy nor we seem to have any kind of luck."
"Apparently," said Fukuzawa, and just a moment later, the room, the entire building began to shake.
"Speaking of the devil," Mori mumbled and struggled to his feet while Elise jumped down from the desk, leaving her sketchbook behind. They walked downstairs. Inside, all that could be heard was scared whimpering; but through the inn's walls, through the tiny openings in the barricades in front of the windows, ran a monster's howl. Mori was the first to arrive at the door, but the instant his hand touched the knob, the innkeeper hurried towards him, grabbing his arm.
"Are you insane? You cannot open the do—" the man started to say before he saw the dark expression on Mori's face.
"Let go or you will wish to be outside instead," he said, and the innkeeper shrieked away.
"It will be fine. We only want to take a peak, but it would be better if you hid now," Fukuzawa told the horrified man who quickly went into the basement.
"Let's take a look at this monster," said Mori, opening the door—and closing it immediately afterwards when a monster's black head with glowing red eyes and teeth appeared right before the door. Fukuzawa shoved a cupboard and himself in front of the door right before the monster slammed against the building.
"That's definitely not a yōkai," Mori stated, brushing his hair back. "At least, not one I know. Fukuzawa-dono?"
"I haven't seen something like this ever before either," Fukuzawa replied.
"I really hope that there aren't more of its kind around. I really don't want one of them wreaking havoc around the hospital. We would do nothing else but to repair cardboard until the end of our days."
Elise groaned. "Please no."
Once again, the monster slammed against the inn, and Fukuzawa could only save a handful of items in the cupboard while the rest fell to the ground and broke. He was ready for the next time the monster attacked the building, but it didn't return and now, all that was left was the whimpering, the muffled cries.
"Is it… gone?" Elise asked, frowning. "If yes, that was fast."
"It was fast indeed," said Fukuzawa, pushing the cupboard away. The door fell out of its hinges as soon as he touched the doorknob. He stepped over the door and outside. Mori followed him. "Good gracious," Mori exclaimed while they examined the destruction. "What is that thing?"
"Elise-chan is in position," Mori told Fukuzawa from within an old, abandoned hut they found in the woods. It was only a question of time until sunset. All day yesterday, they had discussed a plan on how to catch the monster, and already today, they would bring it to action. There was no guarantee that they would be successful, but it was worth a try.
"Mori-sensei, the sun is gone," Fukuzawa said, and the hut's door opened. "It was about time," said Mori, stepping outside.
"Are you ready?" asked Fukuzawa. "Surely," Mori answered, and in the distance, they already saw the black monster approaching them.
Their plan was surely not particularly elegant or witty, but they hoped that it was still enough. Fukuzawa and Mori jumped apart when the monster tried to crush them underneath it. From up-close, the monster was even more impressive with its dark body crackling with red energy. Before the monster could attack again, they started running.
They had let the monster come for one more night, had observed it from a safe place while it raged through the village. It couldn't attack very often in concession; it always needed a bit of time to recharge before it could attack again, and when it did, it was not as powerful as it might be. The monster was like a child who had just learned how to walk but was far from mastering it, falling down just as often as it could take steps. And during the day, Fukuzawa had asked around the village again. This time, the villagers had been much more forthcoming as they hoped that Fukuzawa and the others would get rid of the monster for them. They had told him that the monster took away only children and injured only adults.
With the little information they had managed to gather, Mori and Fukuzawa had tinkered together a simple plan: Elise would wait for the monster to arrive in the village and lead it to Fukuzawa and Mori who would then continue to lead the monster away while trying to keep the damage caused as minimal as possible.
There was one specific place where they had to take the monster. To get there, they had to cross the town, and Fukuzawa could not be happier of the fact that, for decades, he had studied the town's paths, trying to find the calmest ones, the least populated ones. And through these paths, he let himself be chased by this monster of darkness and wrath. Mori and Elise were somewhere nearby, making sure that no fool had decided to sneak through the night.
The monster was ridiculously fast, and Fukuzawa didn't seldom have to draw his sword to block one of its attacks when it managed to come too close. Just a little bit more, Fukuzawa thought, speeding up, and finally arrived at his destination. The monster followed him—and the instant, it entered Fukuzawa's forest, it considerably calmed down.
A Tengu was a forest's master and guardian; the forest was their domain, and all yōkai inside a Tengu's forest automatically became the Tengu's subject.
"We did it, Fukuzawa-dono," said Mori, making sure not to cross the line to Fukuzawa's forest.
"Not yet." Fukuzawa approached the monster which was visibly confused by what was happening to it. And before Fukuzawa or anyone else could demand the monster to speak, it started to dissolve. Layers of layers of darkness were unwrapped; and Mori, Fukuzawa, and Elise watched in amazed silence a boy appearing beneath the layers, and the darkness turning into a coat hugging the boy's frail frame.
"Oh, that's what happens when you cross veils," Mori said.
It took days for the boy to recover and a few more for him to accept what had become of him. And when he had done so, Fukuzawa let him go. But the boy did not immediately return to his sister. From afar, Fukuzawa watched him wander aimlessly through the town, and when he began to doubt that he would ever go back home, the boy walked hesitantly into the slums. A group of children recognised him and wanted to welcome him back, but his sister was faster than everyone—and from one moment to the other, she had her arms wrapped around him. And only a split second later, he hugged her back.
When, on this day, Fukuzawa went to sleep with the sun's awakening, he was, once again, met by a dream; a dream that was everything the last had not been—neither long nor odd or born from a desperate plea. And with the dream slowly fading away, Fukuzawa fell into regular, unexciting sleep.
"Thank you for bringing back my brother."