CHAPTER 18: We Spy With Our Aural Eyes

The scene was like this when Kanae returned from the storage room: Kyoko and a very tall, blond man were facing off in the middle of the store while Maria stood to one side with the giddiest expression of unadulterated glee on her face. Based on the few descriptions Kyoko shared with her in the past, she guessed the man was Kuon, her lost—and subsequently found—well, whatever he was. She had more than a few guesses as to her friend's true feelings towards him but kept her theories to herself. Kyoko's life had become complicated enough without her trying to add labels to things.

It, apparently, had also become so complicated that she forgot how words worked.

"You—"

He seemed to be waiting for her to finish her thought.

"You…!"

The waiting continued and he'd folded his arms across his chest while struggling, and subsequently losing, at keeping a smile from stretching his lips.

"You were supposed to leave this morning," the words finally tumbled out with awkward pauses in between. "Why are you still here?"

"I think I've already established that," Kuon extended an open hand, beckoning for her to fill it with the item he requested. "My scarf, please."

An indignant grunt came from Kyoko. "It's not your scarf."

"Well, not anymore it's not. But it was once, wasn't it?"

"How do you—" She gasped and took two steps backwards, her back colliding with the counter behind her, but she stayed where she was as if she refused to get any closer to him. "You know but... you don't remember."

Kanae scrunched her face in confusion. Was that even possible? It conflicted with her own memories and what she knew of the whole situation. If he knew about what happened between the two of them, shouldn't she have some recollection of who he was? Is? From where she stood towards the back, Kanae noticed Maria's rapturous smile go into immediate hibernation and guessed that Kyoko was glaring at her accusingly. Maria's eyes darted between the two of them, opening her mouth to defend herself when Kuon shook his head.

"She didn't tell me anything I couldn't have figured out on my own."

"But it wasn't supposed to— I mean, you weren't— I don't understand!" Kyoko gave up with a wail.

Kuon withdrew his hand, letting it hang at his side, and took a half step forward. "Before I came here a month ago, I'd been having these dreams."

Maria had started inching her way away from the two of them and stopped in her tracks when this new tidbit of information reached her ears. She turned to stare at the back of Kuon's head from where she now stood by the door. Kanae imagined the look on her face was probably the same as the wide-eyed expression the older woman wore.

"They were the most boring dreams you could imagine," he continued with an dry chuckle. "I was always alone in them and never doing anything interesting."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because they always took place in this city, either in the coven or some apartment I don't recognize," he explained "Because that's probably all I had left after we erased the echoes of my other life."

Kyoko didn't answer, but the way her shoulders and elbows made small, squirmy motions clearly showed how uncomfortable she was. Kanae was eighty percent of the way to convincing herself that she should intervene.

"Please, Kyoko," he begged with soft eyes and an even softer voice. "Let me remember the rest of it."

"No."

"Please—"

"No!" Kyoko shouted it the second time, her tiny frame trembling. "I already made up my mind, remember? This is the burden I've chosen to carry alone."

Kuon scoffed. "So you're just making decisions for me now?"

"No, I made that decision for myself," her words were saturated with irritation. "You just happened to get involved because someone couldn't keep their meddling hands to themselves."

By then, Kanae was already several steps away from physically breaking up the argument. But, when she looked over at Maria, the woman shook her head once before intervening herself.

"Okay, time out, you two." Maria held up her hands. "How about we give you a little privacy to sort yourselves out, hm?"

Kanae watched her run a hand over the surface of the shop's door, the sign flipped itself from 'Open' to 'Closed' and the lock engaged. Facing the pair again, she raised her hands and traced an arc through the air. Maria then walked away to stand beside Kanae with a grin. Kyoko and Kuon both looked at her in confusion and she simply gestured towards them in a shooing motion while mouthing the words 'go on.'

"They can't hear us?" Kanae asked, looking between Kyoko and Maria.

Maria nodded. "And we can't hear them."

"We still get to watch, right?"

"Oh, absolutely," Maria's mouth stretched into a wide, devious grin. "Watching is the best part."

"Are you sure we don't need to separate them?" Kanae kept looking back, eying Kuon warily while Maria ushered her towards the storage room. "Kyoko looks a little anxious around him."

"Don't mind them, darling," Maria dismissed her question with an airy sigh. "They're just madly in love with each other."

While it looked as if they'd retreated to the back room to leave Kyoko and Kuon alone—something that should have seemed suspect to the two people remaining, but they were too caught up in themselves to notice—the truth of the matter was that they'd fallen back so they could spy from a more discreet location. There was no use of fancy magical means to do so. The door to the storage room was merely pulled in, giving the appearance of being closed. Only, it was mostly closed and two pairs of eyes peered out from the crack that remained between it and the door jamb. Being the taller of the two of them, Kanae peered out from the upper part while Maria bent over to look through the lower. Because sometimes the basic approach works just fine.

"I wish I could see Kyoko's face," Kanae lamented with a concerned frown.

Maria laughed. "What kind of spy are you? Use the reflection in the front window."

The view was slightly warped due to the lighting and the angle, but Maria was right. She could see the myriad of expressions that crossed Kyoko's face as she and Kuon talked. At first, there was agitation paired with exaggerated gestures. Her arms would flail wildly and then wrap protectively around herself. Kanae tried to translate the shapes her lips made into actual words but could only make out the word 'scare' (or was it 'scared'?). And that was mostly because Kyoko screamed it at full force, causing the man standing across from her to flinch. Eventually, the pace of the conversation did slow down and her movements were less frantic, her face more pensive.

"Oh, he's very good," Maria murmured from below her.

"What?" Kanae demanded. "What is he doing?"

"She's reconsidering. Can't you see it?"

Kanae answered only with a noise of utter bewilderment.

"Right, I have a slight advantage I guess." She smiled sheepishly up at Kanae when she directed a questioning look her way. "I can see their auras."

"Ah."

"But you can sort of see it on his face too," she added. "I mean, who can resist puppy eyes like those?"

She had a point. The rounded, beseeching eyes the man was sporting could nearly get a starving person to give up their last morsel of bread. It worked in his favor that he wasn't also pouting at the same time as there was a fine line between just enough and laying it on way too thick. He must have recognized that distinction and opted for the former over the latter. She could appreciate that.

What Kanae found herself struggling with was why she had such a hard time keeping her eyes off Kuon's face after that. Sure, he was unfairly attractive even despite his disheveled state, but it was something else. She became overwhelmed by the sensation that she recognized him from somewhere. It was something in the far reaches of her mind that was just out of her grasp. Her nails dug into the door as she wracked her brain.

"Why does he look so familiar?" she whispered to herself.

Being as close as she was, Maria overheard her. "Because you're starting to remember."

"What?"

"His echoes are slowly returning." Maria looked up from her crouched position. "She must be close to admitting how she feels about him."

It happened so seamlessly and naturally that Kanae was left baffled. She could have sworn that she knew nothing about the man mere minutes before, other than his questionable and tenuous relationship with her friend. And yet, she also had knowledge of him from a time long beyond the past month. She knew his face, his voice, his status in the community. Most of all, she knew exactly how he felt about Kyoko as well as how she felt about him, despite the young woman's attempts to convince her otherwise. Memories of cracking wise while sitting atop a horrifically expensive sofa next to Vandersud's second-in-command (or was it first now?) flooded her mind. They overlapped and intertwined with memories of seeing Kyoko enter the shop after spending hours researching at the coven, a soft smile on her lips and the blush of a newly blossomed rose on her cheeks.

A quiet cheer from Maria put a halt on her musings. Her eyes focused once more on the couple—because that's what they were, weren't they? She didn't know when they'd even closed the distance between them, so lost was she in her thoughts it seemed almost instantaneous. Kuon's one hand rested on Kyoko's hip, the crook of his fingers betrayed his desire to grasp it desperately tight instead of the light and careful manner in which he'd placed it there. His other, she couldn't see well enough to know for sure but she guessed it had to be somewhere near her face. From what she could read in Kyoko's body language, she wasn't uncomfortable with the contact. The tension in her shoulders from earlier was nearly gone.

"Oh if only you could see it," Maria breathed wistfully.

"See what?"

Maria patted at her sides for a moment, appearing to check the contents of her pockets. Coming up empty, she snapped her fingers and produced a small oblong stone. Kanae instantly recognized it as an adder stone upon noticing the hole that had been naturally carved through it.

She almost laughed. They were literally standing in a magic accessories shop, there were at least five similar stones displayed on the small shelf near the register and several more in the back room where they were now huddled. This one was higher quality of course, probably sourced in some exotic mountainous region where years of pounding river water exploited the weak point in the stone. The ones she sold were, for the most part, manufactured within certain specifications to make sure they were suitable for magical use.

The chill from the stone seeped into her fingertips so she made sure to keep it far enough away from her face so that her cheek wouldn't have to share the experience. She held it so gingerly that she nearly dropped it when she looked through it to where Kyoko and Kuon stood. It slipped just a scant fraction of a millimeter before she tightened her grip and stared, open mouthed at the sight before her.

Sure, she already knew what Kyoko's aura looked like. The sunny yellow that surrounded her was an accurate representation of her usual temperament—though less so in recent days, mostly due to the man who now held her in his arms. She couldn't comment on the man in question as she'd never had the opportunity to observe his before, but the cobalt radiating from him didn't seem like a mismatch either.

It was the color she saw forming between them that took her breath away.

One aura melded into the other and where they met, it was nigh stupefying. Try as she might, Kanae's attention refused to remain on the way their faces closed in on each other. She was too taken in by what she saw going on around them. It was amethysts and lilacs. It was fields and fields of lavender stretched out before her. It billowed and twisted and steadily grew until the golds and the blues disappeared and violet was all that remained.

Kanae's mouth was bone dry and the fact that it refused to close only made it worse. Her breath was nothing more than short huffs that barely filled her lungs. Still, she managed to dislodge her tongue from where it felt fused to her teeth.

"What—what was that?!"

She heard Maria's quiet chuckle. It had the dreamy lightness of a collector who finally found the piece they fervently sought for decades.

"That, I believe, is what Lory Takarada would call 'meant to be'."


BECAUSE YOU NEEDED TO SEE THIS FROM OUTSIDE EYES FIRST. I actually had to write half of the dialogue for the next chapter just to write this one. So, you know what that means…

...Yep, it'll be at least another two weeks until the next chapter is done ^^;

See you then!

AUTHOR OUT