The only excuse he has is that he is young and wild and stupid. He was raised by wild things and so knows no fear, not even of the things he should be afraid of. Cat is old enough to know what a car in the driveway means, but he's also soft enough to let his friend watch excitedly from his ruff as the woman unlocks the door and airs out the abandoned house that has an owner after all.
Fascination inexorably reels him in. He excuses his curiosity with the tea blend he's working on, and misses the look they exchange over his head. The woman didn't come alone; he manages to hide when the girl opens the gate, but it's a close call and even Crow chastises him for it despite being his senior only by months.
He can sense Cat's suspicious glare as he smiles behind his teacup. They can't stop him.
He is young and wild and stupid. He has been taught to live as his people live, but also to walk in the wet wild woods by his wild lone and greet the things that lurk in the darkness as friends; we be of one blood, ye and I. He knows no fear, not of wolf nor of hawk nor of man. So while the Woman and the Girl explore and clean the house by day, he explores and Borrows by night.
He loves it.
"Look at this, Crow!" he will whisper one night, because Cat disapproves of these outings but Crow is similar enough to him to be roped into them. "Have you ever seen a salt shaker so big?"
Or, another night: "These floors are so cold, what do they put on them?" (He learns it's tile. His friends find it hard to break him of sneaking into the human church's library after that.)
Or, "I think this is a needle! Oh, this looks promising. What shall I do with this?" (He makes himself a sword-cane with it and prides himself to no end on this accomplishment.)
For the first time he glimpses a world other than his own. His world glitters in dewdrops and flies on the wings of butterflies, even if something always makes a shadow and the shadows are always so big. This world—the world of the human beings—consists of things that can kill him without trying, but it sparkles with cleverness and smells like home.
There's even a little dollhouse in the Girl's room, perfectly sized for him. Moths and time have long ruined many of the decorations, which he's sure must've been magnificent. The books, however, have somehow survived, and once he finds them he wiles away many a night in the dollhouse, poring over them.
He doesn't remember learning to read, but he commits the feelings in the pages to memory. Dreams break open for him and he finds that they come naturally. Soon the words that give dreams meaning leak into his speech and he lets them.
His fine clothes seem spun out of fantasies. At least his voice matches them now.
"Glad you're enjoying yourself," Cat grumbles. "I hope this is worth it."
"Be careful," Crow cautions. He runs his hand over Crow's scar and assures him he will.
The Girl and the Woman—her mother, he guesses—seem sick and sad. Sometimes he can hear them talk about big things, heavy things, things beyond the capacity of a Borrower. Sometimes the Woman doesn't sleep. She stays still but her lamp stays on and he dares not venture into her room after the first time he watched her cry like a wounded thing. However, unlike any wounded animal he's ever seen, she gets up in the morning and does her part, even though he can see the Girl would readily shoulder the burden.
Other times, he can hear them revel in small things, like the flowers he leaves for them or a quilt pattern or some tea. They smile and laugh and put them in treasured places and look at them fondly, like nothing has ever hurt before.
He loves it.
He is a Borrower; he borrows some of this human spirit and tries to forge it into his world like the knickknacks that litter his room. It's in his nature, after all.
But for being six inches tall, he makes a lot of noise.
One night, he's tugging at a sheet of tissue paper, wishing desperately it would just come so he didn't wake up the Girl, when a low murmur freezes him in place: "Hey."
She's been watching him. He fascinates her.
He likes that, though he shouldn't.
He and the Girl talk well into the night, so softly he doubts even Crow, sitting outside, can hear. She comes from the city; she and her mother took a family friend up on the offer of a stay here because her father has recently died and they needed a change of scene. Never having known a father, he offers his sympathies awkwardly. She understands what he means anyway.
When the sunrise starts painting the sky outside her window, he has to say goodbye.
"What's your name?" she asks, with a sleepy smile. "Mine's Haru."
Haru. Spring. It suits her. He doesn't know quite how. But he has no name to give her in return. He is a wild thing, he has never been tamed. The closest things he has are the handles Cat and Crow use. Borrower. Boy. Idiot. Brother.
None of them satisfy Haru, though. "Just wait," she says, as she rolls out of bed and brings him to the windowsill. "I'll find you a name."
"Until next time, Miss Haru," he says instead of farewell. He'll see her again, if he has anything to say about it, and he usually does.
She raises an eyebrow. "Aren't you a gentleman?" Her voice lilts teasingly and catches him off guard.
He thinks he might've said, "I try," back. He doesn't remember.
He returns to his friends full of wonder and giddiness. Even Crow doesn't like it. "Humans are dangerous," his friend warns him, but he is young and wild and stupid, and doesn't listen.
She shows him her world and asks to see his. He teaches her how to walk between the branches of hissing things and be respected by them because she knows herself. She teaches him how to sit by a fire, in a bed, with a blanket, passing secrets back and forth like the cup of tea they're sharing. She reads to him, and slowly the edges wear off his words as he learns to wield them as aptly as the sword-cane he insists on carrying everywhere. He runs with her, and slowly the edges wear off her curiosity as she learns to use it to discover beautiful things.
Crow takes to her inquisitive nature immediately, and banter and wit no longer needs to come from just the two of them. Cat needs more time to be won over, but in the end he becomes irrevocably fond of Haru and her soft bed and good food and brave heart.
"Don't any of you have names?" she asks one night. The three friends look at each other in surprise. They have never felt the need for names. They are who they are and what they're called is of little significance.
"You can give us names if you wish," he says slowly, and his friends nod in agreement.
Haru reaches out and strokes Crow's head. "All black and loyal as heck. You're Toto."
She pokes Cat in the side and laughs when he flicks his tail in irritation. "You look like a Muta."
She turns to him and brushes a gentle, lingering thumb over his cheek. "Oh, you're a tough one, my lord."
He smirks, though his heart is pounding in his chest and it might show in his face. "I should hate to bore you."
When he looks back on that moment he wonders why it felt so heavy and yet so light. Like a bud with something swelling inside, something small and lovely and fragile. He is a Borrower; he takes it and holds it in his heart and loves it, as is his nature. The thought occurs to him, but he does not speak it.
Speaking it might shatter it. And he couldn't bear that.
More often than not night finds him on her windowsill. The time they spend together glows brighter in his memory than the time they spend apart.
Haru brightens and blossoms like the spring she's named for. It delights him more than any flower he's ever found. He can tell Toto and Muta—and even her mother—are pleased by this change too. Haru seems not to notice how much she's been opening to him, but even so, it seems fair to pay her back in kind. This he does, until he realizes that, while he can tell which parts of this are him and which are Haru, there is no more boundary. There is no more gate.
"My mom seems happier too these days," she remarks one evening. "Maybe it's just because I'm happier, but I'm glad." She turns to him, her heart in her eyes, or maybe it just looks that way. "I'm glad I moved here."
"So am I," he says, stroking her cheek affectionately.
And still he doesn't know the true extent of what he has done.
He doesn't realize how stupid he's been until the night she rolls over and says, "I think I've found you a name."
He's sitting on her nightstand. He cocks his head. "What would that be?"
"How would you like to be Baron Humbert von Gikkingen?"
"I would be honored," he says, like he doesn't know what he's saying—because he doesn't, and he will not know for a long time yet. "But that seems a little unwieldy, doesn't it?"
"Yeah, and you don't look like a Humbert to me. Don't worry, I'll just call you Baron."
"Where did you get that?"
She raises the book she was reading. He can't see the title from here, but it doesn't really matter. "There's a character here by that name and you're so alike I wonder if this was inspired by you."
And so his name is Baron.
Just like before, he prowls the night with Toto and Muta by his side and hisses at the things in the branches, we be of one blood, ye and I. But unlike before, that is all he is; he is of their blood, but he is not one of them, not anymore. Unlike before, he is not wild and proud and nameless. He has a weakness. He has a name. He has a home.
Baron falls in love with the little things. He is a Borrower; it's in his nature. The click of Toto's claws as he lands after a long day. The sarcastic snap of Muta's comments about his 'cheesy light show'. The taste of Haru's tea. That one time they had to pretend to Haru's mother that Baron was a doll she found and Toto and Muta were strays who liked her. The night they watched shooting stars in the meadow. His corner of the quilt and his corner of the old treehouse and his corner of this life.
He braces his legs against Toto's neck as Muta lopes beneath them. Ahead he can see the small light Haru puts on her windowsill as a signal for them that it's safe. The bag of tea and mulberries rustles in his lap. "Do you think Haru has angel food cake tonight?" he asks Toto idly.
"She better, if she doesn't expect Buta there to eat them out of house and home."
"I heard that!" Muta yells from below. "At least I've got better taste than you, worm-eater!"
"What are you talking about? You can't even enjoy tea, you uncivilized lump."
"That's because it's boiled grass, or are you too much of a birdbrain to see that?"
Things are temporary. Things run out. Baron is a Borrower; he knows this. He'll get tired of this someday, or someone else will. But for now he laughs and pats Toto's head and falls in love with the wind against his face and the light in his eyes.
He falls and he falls and he hopes with all his heart he never hits the ground.
After all, it's not the fall that kills you. It's the landing.
So, how was my first foray into the TCR fandom? This is actually an AU of an AU I'm working on at the moment; I'm outlining a multichapter Borrower AU that includes more of the movie cast than this one does. In that one, they're both Borrowers, but a combination of Kaze ni Naru and Catsafari's Unspoken pushed me into turning a random thought into this very unpolished one-shot. And then in the editing I highlighted the influences from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book; there aren't a lot, I haven't read it in ages and I don't think I'll reread it, but they're there.
No doubt I've made some bad choices in the writing of this, but I can always come back and edit this later. I hope you've enjoyed it in spite of my mistakes.
Title comes from the English translation of Kaze ni Naru.