A/N: (So I lied. Teachers!AU is being stubborn, Fishy Antics is doing smoothly, One For Sorrow has now hit a rather worrying case of writerblock. I'm taking a break.)
Hmm. This was widely inspired by katiesparks, in two occurrences—her ghost!Kaito, for one, and her Shinichi-in-a-yukata, for another. Of course I had to go with Kaito in a yukata, then. And, well, we might as well take the 'phantom thief' epithet half-literally from time to time, no? *gets tomato-splattered*
… hope you like this anyway, Katie-chan.
Disclaimer—what I do own is an extended liking of Aoyama's and Miyazaki's respective works. One is an inspiration, the other the material. Or vice-versa. Whatever.
-
And Close To Windfall
-
The house was medium-sized, flat and large on its base, a little way from the village, and surprisingly western-styled. There were hand-made embroidered curtains hanging in the nearest window; thin enough to let the early September sun flood in, but white enough to conceal the room to the exterior eye. When she touched the bell, the note rang high-pitched and diffuse, waning quickly in the summer air.
The door was opened mere seconds later, after a rapid and short shuffling of socks on a parquet, by a boy of six or seven, who looked at her through thick, enormous black-mounted glasses. "Hello," said he, and his voice was surprisingly calm and poised for a child that young. "You are Nakamouri Aoko?"
Aoko blinked and smiled, and crouched down to his level. "Yes," she said. "Is Mouri Ran here?"
More feet-shuffling. "Conan-kun! Who was at the door—oh."
For a moment two near-identical faces looked at each other.
The recovery was quick on both sides. Mouri Ran extended a hand and offered a smiled, both of which were duly accepted by Nakamouri Aoko, who returned them. "How do you do? I am Mouri Ran—we talked on the phone—and this is Edogawa Conan-kun."
"Nice to meet you both. I am Nakamouri Aoko. I am so sorry to be this late, Mouri-san—I said I would be here around three, but—the trip proved out to be longer than what I expected."
"It's perfectly okay. I would stay at home all afternoon long anyways. Do you want to come in and refresh yourself? or do you prefer going straight to the house?"
Aoko glanced back on her tiny blue car, parked a little way downward, packed all over with most of her belongings. The futon took the best of the space, whichever way she tried to squeeze it in, and she'd crammed in everything else in the corners. "I think I'd rather unpack first and be done with it."
Mouri Ran laughed. "Of course. Shall I show you the way? It's only a five minutes' drive. Conan-kun, stay inside. I'd best climb in with you, if you don't mind," she added, as they made their way down the slope and back to the car. "It'll spare me the trouble of opening the garage."
Ran's directions, surprisingly, led them not back to the village, as Aoko had vaguely expected, but further down the road (which quickly became of earth and stones, and not of concrete), into a grove that rustled on each side of the car's wings, branches and wilting leaves; and then, past an arcade of green and sudden gold, in a flurry of sprinkling gravel, onto open space. Long grass, wild and unkempt, started down.
This second house was also very flat and large on its base, and this second story must be nothing more than an attic or a storeroom, but its style was strictly Japanese, and quite old by the look of it. Tides of incense and wood wafted from it, off the porch, the long sliding panels, the skewed roof, and behind it the forest in shades of dark to light green backed it, cast it in the scenery.
"What do you think?" Ran asked, mildly.
And Aoko realized she had now exited the car, one hand kept on the door, and was somewhat staring. She recoiled. "It's a beautiful house," she said, and let the door snap shut under her fingers. "But I am amazed at its being so large. The rent is rather low in comparison." She laughed, to diffuse the awkwardness of this last remark, "Are you sure I did not miss a digit?"
"Certain," said Ran, stepping out of the vehicle also. "We have kept it low for several reasons. People usually do not want to live there." She hesitated, stole a glance in Aoko's direction. "After all, it is rather an ancient house."
"I like it," Aoko said.
"I'm glad to hear it. It may be old, it has all the modern appliances. Townsfolk—" Ran smiled, and stopped short of townsfolk. "The keys—this one opens the front door, this the back one—" she pointed at the bushes at the side of the house, grazing down stone steps, "you might want some pruning in that corner to get easy access to it—and these two small ones are for the attic. Do you want help with your stuff?"
Aoko accepted the smile, accepted the keys, accepted the help. They were half into carrying her futon in the (square-shaped, shoji-sided) bedroom when Ran added, "When do you begin at the library?"
The question, which Aoko had not been expecting, took her somewhat by surprise. "Day after tomorrow," Aoko replied automatically. She heaved the futon down with deliberate slowness. "I figured I might want a short delay to settle in."
Ran's smiles, she reflected, were of those that broke through the clouds and warmed one's heart. "I thought so. Tomorrow's marketday. You might come with me—I would introduce you."
This was a relief. She had rather dreaded this entrance. "I would like that very much," she admitted, meeting Ran's smile with one of her own, though, she felt, much less beautiful in all its sincerity. Futon was set down, against a panel, ready to be unrolled. A window opened on the opposite side of the room; and as she looked, while working on the straps, it fogged up, exactly—she thought, one second mesmerized—as though a breath had fallen down on the glass, someone looking in from outside.
Aoko frowned, still kneeling.
"Aoko-san?" called her landlady, from the door.
They went down to the car.
-o-
They were nice people, she reflected, later that evening (in the kitchen, heating up instant ramen). The hour she had spent at their place, drinking lemon tea, had been agreeable and pleasurable. Ran's father may be a little on the do-nothing-drawl-around side, and the little boy they took care of was clearly a genius for his age, and as such a little disconcerting; but Ran was nice and cheerful, and would probably grow to be a good friend.
(There was a sad edge of her, however, which Aoko couldn't quite puzzle out; but she contemplated it as an aspect of the other woman's life she would come across some later day.)
As for the house—well, it was the sort of place she had dreamt to live in as a child; though that wish had rather gotten stranded in-between her Tokyo life and her accelerating work basis. But now that it surrounded her, wide and not too wide, rustling with the sounds of wind over the forest, it seemed to swell around her evening with a sort of breathless thankfulness.
She took the ramen out and exited the kitchen with its steaming cup, but let the light on, a cream-coloured glow on the shoji panels. She, instead of settling down at the low table, stepped out on the porch and sat cross-legged against one wooden post, still clad in the jeans and t-shirt she had adopted to travel.
She was clumsy at first, still and stiff in the unfamiliarness of a new place. There was nothing reassuring in the great waves of dark green that created the forest circle around the house; and even the known warmth and feel of Tokyo-bought ramen still felt stranger between her hands, on her tongue. But as the moment passed and the dusk blues impressed on her, her minding waning, she began so relax, limbs less constricted.
It was a warm evening-soon-to-be-night, still twined in the tangles of Summer, even though August had faded long ago and September was now well-passed. The lamps from inside the house only did so much to light on the grass Aoko's feet were grazing, dangling down from the wooden slats; and beyond the clearing was shaded until it faded in greyed darkness. Beyond that even, the car were a mere frame, hardly distinguishable in the dimness, and above the great tress rocked black against the still-clear sky.
Steam was rising regularly from Aoko's ramen, and she blew on it while eating, hissing a little at her slightly burnt fingers.
Moths, she remarked, had grouped around the lamp overhead; they were a moving blur surrounding the gold source. Aoko contemplated them for a long moment, wondering how this light was seen from a little distance—from her car, or from Ran's house, if they could see between the trees. A light—a spot of ever-mobile gold—in the tumbling darkness, soft on the shoji panels as that of a candle, casting elongated shadows on the grass, their grey fading to black. And then, because one thought led effortlessly to another, she wondered what she must look like, in her lounging position against the post in her jeans and t-shirt as she absently ate ramen. As such she saw herself from some outward eye, and slowly it wasn't this house that was strangest at all.
And as the thought processed there was a great, violent rustle, a brief gush of wind, and she turned to find all but one of the shoji doors closed—
—those she and Ran had slung open just hours earlier to let the house breathe, and which she had since not seen fit to close.
It startled her. The moment, now broken, left. She remained, watching them for a good minute, wondering. Of course, the only plausible explanation was the wind. A great gust and—blam—and evidently this was a very windy place.
But the move had been too sudden, too fast; and the panels were completely shut, not just halfway. This was intriguing—enough to defy coincidence and start finding explanations that dwelled in another realm altogether—
But eventually her interest faded, and the strength of the night and the forest overpowered her again. She turned back, absently laying her bowl to the side, half-eaten, and in one of these states of mind, which after a great emotional turmoil, suddenly appease and calm, she learnt to appreciate again the quiet of the evening and the tall green trees, and wondered whether the cicadas might still be coming out.
-o-
The next day she put on a skirt. It turned out to be a mistake. The morning was a clear, white blue, fresher than she had expected after the evening's diffuse warmth, and when Ran honked up at her from the road the wind amused itself in playing hide-and-seek with the long folds of the skirt as she came down to meet her.
"They might joke you around a little," Ran warned, as they drove to the village. "It is their way to be friendly with strangers."
On the backseat, Conan snorted.
It was, come as it may, a pleasant morning. The village was neat and fine in the sun (it must look, Aoko reflection,, much more of a muddle under the rain) and she took the merchants' jokes with no ill-humour. The morning and the weather pleased them all. From a few she received a discount; 'to celebrate her arrival,' they said; and one woman offered her a free sack of rice. Aoko, flushed with pleasure and animation, laughed and talked and followed Ran around, grateful for the distraction.
They didn't only meet sellers, however. Ran made the introduction, with the amiable smiles that seemed to belong to her only.
"That was Azuki-san, a waitress at the streetcorner's café—café Poirot, they make delicious coffee if you're ever out of it—oh, hello, Takagi-keiji, Satou-keiji! —our local inspectors, they're both very nice. Their superior, Megure-keibu, is a friend of my father's… hullo! Eisuke-kun!"
"Ran-kun, good morning!"
"Hakase," Ran said, her smile growing a tad more genuine. "Good morning! This is Nakamouri Aoko, whom we're letting the old house to. Aoko-san, this is Agasa Hiroshi. He is my best friend's next door neighbour," she explained, with a flush that told Aoko exactly how much of a best friend that was.
Aoko folded her hands over her basket. "Pleased to meet you, Agasa-san."
"Pleased to meet you as well, Nakamouri-san." He was looking between them. "The two of you are remarkably alike. Are you related?"
"Not that we know of," Ran laughed. They had discussed it over the evening before, over lemon tea as the evening fell in blue, lukewarm curtains around the Mouri home. The matter, however, was not taken any further. With a great cry of Conan-kun! four children flung themselves on them.
No, Aoko corrected, once passed the first moment of dizzy bewilderment, three only did. The fourth, a girl with ash blonde hair and a disinterested air, walked up by Agasa's side and glanced quizzically up at her.
Once all the entangled limbs had been disentangled and gathered by their respective owners, the children turns out to be Ayumi-chan, Genta-kun, and Mitsuhiko-kun, all of them smiling and cheery, and very eager to know why Ran-neechan had never told them she had a twin sister.
"I am not Ran-san's twin," Aoko clarified, crouching down to talk to them without getting an awful crank in the neck. "I'm renting the house up by the forest, in the clearing. I've only just arrived."
To her surprise, they all gasped. The fourth just looked bored. Before she could understand, they were talking again, but so fast that only a word in ten reached her brain; even though they were following they were following the exact same train of thought, which somewhat moulded their indistinct rambling in form and sense.
"—can't live there—"
"—don't you know?"
"—that house is haunted!"
"Of course it's not," Conan-kun said, in that calm, serious voice which seemed to be as essentially his as Ran's smiles were hers. "Haunted houses do not exist. It's only a rumour," he said, glancing explicitly at Aoko.
"It's true!" exclaimed Mitsuhiko-kun, all red in the face.
"It's true!" echoed Genta-kun, hands fisted.
Ayumi-chan looked ready to echo the echo, and it might very likely have finished in cried, or, alternatively, a fight, had not Ai-chan (still looking bored) yawned and said, "If we want to go play at Hakase's house before lunchtime, we'd better hurry. It's almost noon."
And with that, and without any further ado, all children were run away, trailing bewildered-looking Agasa and deadpan-looking Conan-kun in tow.
Aoko blinked. Twice. She looked up at Ran, who sighed.
"I'd hoped that you wouldn't hear that on your first morning," she said, helping her up. "I wanted you to get a little used to the house before—" she dropped off, and handed Aoko her basket. "It is true that there are rumours—countryfolk like to talk. They will say that your house is caught under the protection of a kindly kami." (What she did not add, but that Aoko understood fairly well, was that the kami was free to decide whether the current inhabitant of the house pleased it or not.) "Of course, it is only gossip that has it," she added firmly, picking up her groceries.
"I'm not superstitious," Aoko murmured, only half truthful. "Is that why no one in the country would rent the house?"
Ran left her at her own house, Aoko having assured her that she could go on the rest of the way alone, and no, the groceries weren't that heavy at all. But as she emerged from under the bent arcade of branches, one bag slung over her shoulder, soaked in green and gold shade, and walked up the grass to her house, the wind flew right through the leaves' tunnel she had just left and blew her skirt sky high.
Halted, startled, bewildered, Aoko nearly dropped her basket. She gathered the cream-coloured folds back to her legs, blinking hazily at the grass, at the house only ten steps away. And it seemed to her that the wind chuckled.
-o-
The first week passed as eventful as one's first week n a new neighbourhood is expected to. Her first few days working at the local library were a little awkward, but on getting to know the woman who shared her shift (chattery, friendly, pigtailed Momoi Keiko), she found herself blending in rather more easily than she had at first believed.
The children did a great deal to help, as well. They barged in the library immediately after school almost every day, mostly to read detective stories; and told her at great length of the phantom who resided in her house. He loved playing pranks, they said, and trapping humans, and weren't she afraid?
When she told them that she was not, or at least not much, her fame quickly got round the village's circle of children.
"They mean no harm," Agasa-hakase said on the seventh day, as the look at all five children playing soccer (Ai-chan less playing soccer than observing the moves, and Conan-kun leading the game) in Ran's garden. "They're very curious."
"Of course they are," Aoko said, savouring the taste of Ran's excellent lemon tea on her tongue. "They are at that age when you believe in everything and anything."
"When Ran-kun and Shinichi-kun were that age—" and he trailed off with a stray look.
Ran, busy chopping salmon for that day's dinner, cast a look over her shoulder and laughed. "You can go on ahead, Hakase. Aoko-san knows everything about Shinichi. I told her."
She had, Aoko thought, watching the tablecloth, Ran, and the children outside as Agasa-hakase rambled off in a ten-year-old treasure hunt, and, by doing so, had managed not to tell much. Kudo Shinichi, childhood friend, best friend, living next door to the professor, cocky of temper, strong sense of justice that had eventually developed in detecting skills, currently absent from the country—all facts and locations. Ran's sharp, anxious look at the ringing phone had told her infinitely more than all her words had.
Ayumi ran after the ball, and thus ended up at the window, surprising them both.
"Aoko-neesan!" she panted, and picked up her toy. One petite hand came up to grip the white sill, "Have you met the kami yet?"
"Not yet," Aoko laughed. It had become the kids' customary greeting every time they met her. Ayumi pouted, but soon smiled again, and ran off with the ball, her short black hair bibbing around her shoulders. Soon they heard her friends' shouts of Has she? and her cheerful reply, Not yet, she says!
"They like you," Agasa-hakase remarked with a smile.
"I'm glad," Ran said, dropping the dripping salad on the chopping board. "It is a good thing when children like you, especially when you've just arrived in a new neighbourhood. Aoko-san?" Aoko had become absorbed.
Agasa-hakase gently touched her shoulder. "Aoko-san, what are you thinking of, looking outside like that?"
"Shoji doors," replied Aoko without thinking, and instantly flushed. "Oh, I'm sorry. I wasn't attending. What did you say?"
"I said, it mustn't always be easy to arrive in a new neighbourhood, is it?"
It was not. By daylight she managed fairly well, and without really meaning to. She had been lucky in her choice. The villagers were friendly, the village itself not unpleasant under the last warmth of fall; she had already made a few friends; and most of the children around liked her. She came home every evening with a smile.
By nighttime, however, things were not so easy. The night forces us with ourselves, and in Aoko's case, more with what she had lost than what she had gained. It was, after all, a rather large house, surrounded by forest, though in one point thin, and nothing at all like the intimacy of her previous lodgements in Tokyo. Lights from the village were few and far between, distant and mobile between the trees.
She was not unhappy at all. But on some evenings a sense of loss and dread would strike her, unrecognizable despite its familiarity, and she would, for one abrupt, painful moment, still.
Those evenings she mostly spent on the porch, sometimes with a book, sometimes just listening. The moths fluttered around the lamp overhead, reflecting small blurs on the golden-tinted grass. Around the forest would never be quite immobile, but swaying and rustling with small, whispery sounds, and Aoko rested her head against the wooden post, and listened.
The radio was muttering bits and pieces, unknown voices that dropped a few (almost-)indistinct words before crackling away. And on and on the words-that-were-not-silence came and faded, shunning lopsidedly into the great void of quiet nights.
The book fell from Aoko's hand in her lap. And slowly, smoothly, without any grand acts of passion or despair, tears rolled down, salty and lukewarm between her lips, and Aoko nestled her head in her folded arms, nudged her noses against her jeans-clad knees.
Minutes passed, clear and sound like piano notes. Then it seemed that some warm material had been lain on her shoulders.
Aoko straightened puzzledly, feeling up her arms. There was nothing there but the thin-soft cotton of her t-shirt. Yet it still felt warm, and fine, and better; exactly as though she had been enveloped in one of those thin, fluffy white towels in the bathroom. The book was laying beside her legs, neatly closed. The radio had been turned off.
Aoko sat there a few minutes more, trying to puzzle it out. Then she went to bed.
It was two mornings after that one evening that she woke to fog on the window and this wide-breathless quality distinct to early awakenings. She tossed for a good half-hour, and then decided that she was not sleepy.
She was not hungry either, she found, straying in and out of the kitchen. The house around spread like an openwinged bird, just alight before taking off again, fluttery. It rippled in blues and whites, paler where the light touched them, eerie and quiet as they unfurled before Aoko's eyes.
It was very calm. She slipped in a robe, relishing in the water-like feel of the folds brushing down her skin, left the living-room, and slid open one of the shoji doors.
A young man was sitting on the porch, leaning back against that wooden post that had become her favourite. He was—she registered in the brief second of time she was allowed—draped in a yukata that was either light grey or pale blue; his hair surprisingly black against his white skin. And, when surprise tumbled from her lips, he started and looked up at her with eyes that were as wide and blue as the morning sky.
Then he was gone.
-o-
Ran nearly choked on her tea.
"You saw the kami?"
"Yes. He—" and here Aoko opened her hands as though on a blossoming flower, to emphasize her point, "sort of disappeared on me this morning. I'd woken early, and he was sitting on the porch…" She thought back, to eyes of cornflower blue that had risen startlingly to her. "I believe he was just as surprised as I was."
Ran blinked very slowly. "What did it look like?"
Aoko frowned. "Like a young man. I think he was supposed to look my age." Again her hands lifted, threading through air in mute demonstration. "Dark-haired, with a pale grey yukata—" Pause; her mouth scrunched up in thought. "It was very strange. One moment he was there and the next he was gone."
"Some men do that," Ran said, with a twitch of her lips.
Aoko cast her a frowning look over the patterned tablecloth. "You don't sound very surprised."
She was not. Countryfolk are more superstitious than townsfolk are, she said. Faced everyday with the small sanctuaries and shrines erected in forests or beside roads, they disregard the rational outlook of technology and science and are prone to quiet beliefs long gone in the largest cities. "Besides," Ran added with a laugh, "my friends have always teased me about my fear of spirits and demons." And then her lips thinned in another smile. "No, I am not surprised."
Of course. Aoko slumped a little. From this morning onwards her mind had been spinning with meanings and illusions. But here there was lemon tea and flower patterns on the tablecloth, and Ran laughed and said she believed—
"What I hope," her landlady was saying, in and through the haze, "is that you won't feel you need to leave the house, Aoko-san."
Aoko marked a short, negative shake of the head. "I don't. I would feel far too stupid. It is just that—" it was just that, that, her words were on the wrong edge, a little too full with water, "It is just that I don't know how to react now. What is one to do in such a situation?"
"He did look friendly, didn't he?"
He didn't look anything. One moment he was there and the next he was thin air. "He was surprised," Aoko said again, and did not feel as though she was repeating herself. "I woke early. He didn't expect me to walk in on him. He really was just sitting on the porch," she said, a little lamely, in lieu of an explanation.
Ran had the look of one secretly smiling. "And you don't want him out of your house?"
"I—no—is that even possible?" Aoko amended helplessly, and Ran laughed again.
"I doubt it. Well, then, I think the right course of action would be to show the kami that you have no ill-intentions. You could say a prayer to him tonight, or perhaps make an offering."
Images arose in Aoko's mind of local shrines and bald priests, and then altars and flowers. She was not too certain what to say, when Ran stated this as fact with a quiet determination. "Oh. But what kind of—food?" An idea struck her, terrible and petty, somewhat wrapped together. "He wouldn't ask for my blood or something, would he?"
"Nothing so far-fetched as that. A glass of milk will do."
-o-
Granted, she felt a little ridiculous that same evening, as she laid the glass on a windowsill, giving out on the porch. For all she knew, she thought, staring down at it, any stray cat could come and lap at it during the night. It wouldn't be proof of anything at all.
"Um."
She clapped her hands together twice, to recall herself to the serious of the situation at hand. "Um," she said again. (To be truthful, she had never really done this, bar some New Year prayers at the local temple, but that was demanding favours, and this—for some reason, was not.)
She thought instead. (She did feel a little foolish.) Um. I never really did this sort of thing before, so—well, greetings. I wish you no harm, and I hope that the feeling is returned. I was told to make an offering, so, well, here it is.
A vague gesture at the milk. Again she clasped her hands.
I hope you will enjoy it. It may not be much but—
She broke off. Outside, the night was soft, and a little later than it had been before. As she stepped out on the porch, hesitant and barefoot, the wind tangled around her ankles and in the folds of her thin-draped robe, bringing promises of clean wood and fallen leaves; and, turning back, she saw the square, golden window with the glass of milk.
I bid you goodnight, she thought-said, and though her words were formal they held a quiet, austere sincerity.
She bowed then, deeply so, and to what? to the night, to the wind, the hope of fall to come. She bowed and went to bed.
While she slept the night enveloped the house in roaring tides, and with it the clearing and the trees, and below the village lights. Cradled in her nest of covers, Aoko dreamt of pale hands framing her face, and cool lips pressing to her forehead, even as her breathing deepened out to quiet.
In the morning the glass was empty.
-o-
It was three days before the kami manifested itself again. Aoko spent them working late in the afternoon, as children who had gone to school demanded distraction at the library. She returned tired; once had supper at Ran's; played video games with Conan-kun and his little gang. She slept and did not dream.
The third evening was one of blue and black; dark clouds swept over the still-clear sky. The sun had not yet gone, but was invisible below the tall, flowing mass of the trees, and it lit up the horizon, outlining every curve and line with thick, black strokes. Aoko, parking her car at the feet of the slope, saw that the wind had blown the clothes she had hung to dry right off the string; they now lay mindlessly on the grass, each a few feet from another.
She cursed softly, dangled the car keys down her pocket, and set about picking them up. Now she'd have to wash the lot all over again—
She had reached the last-but-one when a minute shiver ran up her neck. She stilled, her back to the house, and then straightened, not quite daring to turn now. She had good idea what the situation was, and thought—her arms laden with clothes, exhausted after the trying day—it wasn't exactly how she had pictured this to go. If at all.
"You can turn around," an amused voice, slightly more playful than she had expected, said. "I will not randomly put a curse on you."
"… that's good to know," she said, slowly, and turned slowly also.
He was, she saw, still dressed in the same yukata, now definitely pale grey in the tilting dusk, and the strong, dying light seemed to thicken and darken every line and shape, anchoring him down where she had first seen him ethereal in the morning, blurry at the edges. His hair was a wild, black halo around his face, and his eyes very blue, focused on hers with a fast determination that caused her to shiver again.
"Good evening," he said, and his voice had turned as smooth as fine water, clear and polished. Aoko shuddered. She bowed low.
"Good evening." She was not too certain what honorific to use, and therefore used none. Ran would have known to the millimetre what and what not to say, probably. As such, however, Aoko meant every word.
She did not really know what she expected by now. The situation as she thought it was had spun stunningly off, spiralling downward even as the last violet hazes of the day faded out and left them drowning in half-blues and half-greys. She felt calm. When all of one's expectations have been turned down one by one, she found, agitation wanes into quiet waiting.
That didn't help the flaring surge of surprise when one pale hand rose to her face. Long fingers grazed her cheek, bony and cool, warming only to her heated skin; and a moment floated. Aoko, by this time, was merely focusing on holding onto the clothes in her arms, feeling them scratchy and familiar as a kami's palm fitted against her cheek.
The caress intensified, and with a jolt she realized she was leaning into the touch.
The kami's hand fell away, and he was close now, so close that his eyes appeared strangely dilated, bluer by night than they had been by day; he was breathing hard. (She hadn't even known kami could.) Presently he stepped back.
And he bowed, bowed low. "Nakamori Aoko. I thank you for your offering."
Aoko balanced between being bewildered by the bow or bewildered by the words for one wondering second, and then settled for simply looking fazed. "—you're welcome."
She blinked at him, almost expecting him to disappear now. He didn't. "Um—it was nothing really. A glass of milk—"
"It was more than I could expect," the kami interrupted. A smile was gracing his lips, his voice much warmer now; and Aoko made a quick note to remember to thank Ran for her suggestion. She smiled back.
"I was going back in," she said, remembering the bundle of cloth and the last shirt on the grass. She picked it up, and stepped hesitantly toward the porch. "I could heat some more milk. Or something else," she added, uncertain.
He looked at her. She stood by the porch, both arms full with clothes in the faint light of the tumbling evening, clearly wondering whether she should ask him or whether he would simply stroll in—
"You really don't know what you are about, do you?" he asked, amusedly.
Aoko couldn't repress a nod. She was mildly panicking, in a calm, eerie sort of way.
"… if you invite me in," the kami said, with only a faint hesitation she wasn't quite sure how to interpret, "it means inviting me in. Not merely in the house—in the human part of it, where our kind do not usually tread. It will signify that I will have open access to both the spiritual and material sides of the house—" the briefest pause, "and everything that is in it."
Including me, Aoko understood. The answer was surprisingly quick and easy to come. The house had been his long before it was hers, after all, and it seemed only fair. For this, and for that other disconcerting thought that had been spinning in her mind, and that had to do with amused smiles and eyes of such, such blue it impeded all breathing, she set the clothes down, and, stepping on the porch, sliding open the shoji,
"Will you come in, then?" she asked, and above saw the wind and the trees in tall green waves.
The kami's eyes softened in that moment it took her to look up. "Yes," he breathed, "yes," and finally, finally crossed the threshold.
-o-
Done! *dies*
-
On a side note, you've probably already seen this in katie's Kirby's Corpus, but here goes the announcement: we're planning to send a birthday card to Gosho that would come from the fandom. Anyone interested in adding in a comment can send it via email, plus their penname, to either katiesparks or me. Due date is on June 10th. Oh, and anyone who would know Gosho's adress would be welcome to speak up—we're doing researches but it would be easier for us that way.
Announcement ended. Thankyou.