A/N: So many lovely reviews – thank you everyone! But really, these guest reviews that I can't reply to… x')

Dear Guest
Oh, you flatter me… I'm a monster, I admit it: whistle innocently at night and I'll come creeping in through your bedroom window, bringing steamy hot dreams of One Night Stands that you will wake from before finishing. Like a really, really douchy succubus. ;9 Since I can't write a reply directly to you, I'm posting it over in BtEatB. It's not exactly an apology, though. =u='

Dear Dare mo
Ah, you weren't the only one to find that chapter difficult. I wrote it to reflect Shiro's state of incoherent anxiety, so it is hard to piece together, especially if English isn't your first language. I answer all questions, long and short. When I get them from anonymous reviewers, I put the reply in my next chapter, like this. I find your English perfectly comprehensible, but if you feel more comfortable writing in Spanish you can do that. I don't know much Spanish, I'm afraid, but I think I know enough Latin and Italian to pick my way through a Spanish text if it isn't too advanced (and if all else fails, there's dictionaries). I will reply in English, though. ^_^'

Refs to: ch 27.

I do not own or profit from any of what Kazue Kato has created.

Never listen to a demon's deceptive words. He knew that. Still, as the crescent moon sailed slowly over the night sky, they kept echoing in Shiro's ears.

He stood vigil at Kasumi's hospital bed that night, listening to the monotonous hum of the fan and the incessant beeping of machines in the dark room. Shizuku had fallen asleep in a chair, adding his snoring to the disharmonic lullaby. A nurse had passed by on her night round, an hour ago or so: she had put a blanket over him. She had asked if Shiro wanted one, too. He didn't.

Love is like lobotomy. It makes people take stupid risks. Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, Romeo and Juliet – classical literature was full of them, and they all ended badly.

Shiro had stared so long at the bandaged face that he had nearly forgotten it was her. At some point it had ceased to be a person and become a still picture; a surreal photography encapsulated in the clinically dreamless sleep of drugs and anaesthesia. A few times, he'd actually thought it was someone else, and that this all was some dystopian fantasy his mind had tricked him into believing. A few times, he had stopped breathing, thinking Kasumi had died.

A few times, he had wondered how close she had been to dying.

When Shizuku had arrived at the hospital, Shiro had taken his chalk-white classmate aside to explain. He hadn't resisted when Shizuku beat him up. It didn't make him feel better, it didn't make anything any better… But Shizuku needed to let off steam. That, at least, Shiro could do for him.

Shiro had told him how it had happened, how they had been walking back to her hostel together in the evening. How she had hopped up on the steps to somebody's porch and waved him closer. How she had pulled him tight and kissed him. How everything went black after that.

He didn't tell Shizuku that he usually let his barriers down around Kasumi. It had been at the edge of his teeth, tipping like a vase on a bumped table, but it never came out. Couldn't come out. It clung to his tongue with piercing barbs, promising to shatter the ground beneath his feet if he ever told the whole truth.

There were bandages over her chin, a small gap for her breath to wheeze out, bandage over her nose, cheeks – swirls of ruffled, sun-bleached hair sticking out where the white gauze crawled around her head. If not for the tattoos reaching out from the short sleeves of the green hospital robe, the listless shape on the bed could have been anybody.

If not for the tattoos, she could have been dead. Shiro himself couldn't remember, but his skin remembered the burning force of the wards. That's what had called his consciousness back. Too fucking late.

To say he was sorry didn't come close to covering what he felt. There was no excuse for what he had done, nothing he could say that would make her stitches disappear. But tomorrow would come, and when Kasumi woke up he would have to tell her something. He had no idea what, but he had all night to figure it out; and all night, useless syllables void of meaning piled up in his gut. Funny things, words. The ones you really need never exist.

A thousand imagined scenarios later, Kasumi woke. It started as a feeble fluttering of her eyelids, a strained swallowing through a dry throat… and then her eyes opened. And Shiro had no words.

"Hey there", he whispered softly, noticing how his fingers – except the right index one, which was splinted – tightened around the clipboard he held. "Don't talk. Doctor's orders", he smiled wanly. "Your lip needs to heal together first. Meanwhile, he said you could use this to communicate."

Gingerly, as if it were a shrine offering, he placed the clipboard in her lap, along with the ballpoint pen attached to it by string. Was that all he had? After all that time, empty words echoed from a doctor's mouth was all he had to say to her?

"…I'm so sorry, Kasumi." His voice started breaking on the last syllable of her name. He swallowed, lowered his gaze to the clipboard and blinked a couple of times. "I'm… I should leave you and Shizuku alone for a while. Somebody needs to inform the doc-doctor that you're awake, anyway."

An inarticulate noise made him turn around when he was about to go wake Shizuku. Kasumi's fingers worked pathetically to pick up the pencil, her eyebrows knitted together in frustrated concentration.

…Shiro picked the pencil up for her and helped close her fingers around it, but it immediately fell out of her limp grasp.

"I think it's better if you rest for now", he murmured, stroking the calloused hand gently with his thumb. "Maybe Shizuku is better than me at guessing what you want." Better than him in every way.

When he turned leave, the urgent noise came from Kasumi's closed lips again, and powerless fingers tried to hold his hand in place. She looked sharply at him, pointing the question with her worried eyes, and managed a limp, graceless motion with her lower arm.

What happened to ya' face?

Shiro had been preoccupied with other things and hadn't noticed until Kasumi looked at him like that. The bruises from Shizuku's swings must be a dark shade of blue by now.

"He needed it, and I deserved it." She blurred in his vision, shit, he shouldn't- "I'll go wake him now."

Turning away, he blinked the tears back in line. Focus, dammit. He was still a mess, and demons still hoped for another chance. Steadying breaths accompanied his footfalls the short distance to the hospital chair, where Shizuku was sleeping in a position only possible if you've slept on the ground since you were little.

"Hey. Shizu-sa… Shizuku-san." He shook the pilgrim's shoulder gently. "She's awake."

Like magic words in a spell. Shizuku woke instantly, and wasted no time rushing over to his sister. Shiro took the opportunity to disappear through the heavy hospital door. Once outside, he clenched his teeth and grimaced, fighting back tears that tightened around the sobs in his throat.

What happened to ya' face?

"Why do you worry about me at a time like this, dammit…"

The hospital couldn't permit him to sleep in one of their beds, in case they suddenly found themselves in emergency need of one. Policy, or something like that. Shiro didn't give two shits about policy, and negotiations to convince him to go sleep in his dorm, or in a nearby hotel, had broken down rather quickly. He was fine with sleeping on the waiting room couch, and the personnel were fine with leaving him there. One nurse had asked if she should fetch an ice pack for his swollen lip, but he had declined.

Kasumi hadn't changed one bit. As soon as the anaesthesia released its grip on her muscles, her pencil scribbled through pages at lightning speed. About half of it were hiragana words: the rest were doodles of facial expressions she couldn't make through the bandages.

[Doctor says I get rid of the wrapping tomorrow already. =D I'm the record holder, you know? 103 stitches!]

…it was absurd. How she could be in high spirits like that. Both Shiro and Shizuku had asked if the morphine she had been given during surgery had some boosting effect on mood, and had received the reply that yes, they might have; but miss Honda seemed to be running mostly on her own steam. A psychologist had been sent to evaluate her status, and had concluded that Honda Kasumi was, despite the gravity of the accident, in perfect mental condition.

"Kasu, I know ya've been asked this a thousand times already: but are ye really okay in the head…?" Shizuku inquired, sitting with his arms folded on the backrest of a chair he'd turned around.

[Was I ever okay in the head, otouto? =P I think we've seen a bit in life already and gone blunt. Or mentally calloused. Or whatever fancy name shrinks like to use for it.]

"Ye're not just keepin' up pretence ta keep me from worryin', are ya? Or 'im." Shizuku nodded his head at Shiro. "Not that it's doin' much good with 'im anyway."

Shiro was too deep inside his cloud of gloom to even respond to the jibe. Looking at the siblings was like looking through a window to another dimension. Kasumi had basically dismissed the whole incident with a shrug, and as soon as it was clear that she would be okay Shizuku had gone from rabid dog to a mother hen that attended to his sister's every need. They really could just… leave it behind? Move on, not looking back?

It was different for them, of course. They didn't know of the imprint, or the reason Shiro was constantly targeted. They had no idea just how badly this could have ended. For them, this ordeal belonged in the past. They could move on in bliss ignorance, mentally calloused but strengthened by each other's company.

…once again, Shiro had to smother the wish that he could be the same as everyone else.

Next morning, Shiro woke to the gurgling screech of a huge, pink bat perched atop the couch backrest. It could have simply dropped the letter on him and left, but the darn creature still held enough grudge against him to wake him before taking off.

…trust the old goat to buy his stationery at the toy store. Rainbows and glitter, what the hell…

Dear Fujimoto Shiro-kun

I have been informed of the nature of your absence…

Shiro skimmed the letter sleepily: deep sympathies, relieved of janitor duty because of injury to hand, and…

Would you join me for a sojourn to Mepphy Land on Friday, before school starts? he read, eyelids hanging in a state of half-mast dullness that could just as well have sat on Mephisto's face. The bruise under his left eye had blossomed fully into purple now. "Unbelievable. As bloody carefree as Kasumi."

Shiro dropped his head back down on the couch with a pained groan, and left letter and envelope on the table. He had been dreaming. Not about the accident itself, but about… hunting. He hadn't seen what he hunted, and it hadn't mattered; it was the hunt itself, the thrill coursing through his straining muscles as he closed in…

Never mind. Just never mind. It wasn't a dream he cared to remember.

They both took this so lightly. If he could do the same, maybe… Just let it pass, look at it from the bright side; it could have been worse. Sure it could. Kasumi was alive, she was bouncy as ever, she wasn't mad at him – really, things could have been a lot worse than that. He should count himself lucky to get away with so little damage after such an irresponsible screw-up. There were things still standing in the ruins. There were things still there to build on.

Shiro had himself pretty convinced of that - until Kasumi's bandages were taken off.

Failing fans left the hospital corridor to be slowly heated by the morning sun through the window, like a greenhouse smelling of disinfected plastic and ingrained routine. Shiro leaned against the wall outside the examination room, staring blindly at the beige carpeting with shredded delusions etched into his cornea. All he could think of was a peach, and somebody biting into it; but instead of eating it, the flesh was left dangling, scraped halfway off by teeth. A peach, soft and sweet and-

"Dear god…"

He covered his eyes with a trembling hand, held upright by the wall supporting his shoulders. As if he could blot out the picture of Kasumi's bold pixie face. A patchwork of split flesh and black stitches.

He breathed, alone in the throbbing darkness, and listened to the air wheezing through the hole in his chest. Shit, shit, shit… A door opened smoothly next to him. The sound of more laboured breathing was heard, and a gait he recognised as Shizuku's.

Shiro kept hiding behind his hand as he spoke. His voice wouldn't carry for more than a whisper:

"I don't understand how she can smile."

"It's 'er gift." Shizuku didn't sound like himself. His voice was thick and hoarse, clogged with emotion he tried to keep in check. "She'll fuss over the smallest details in 'er carvings an' such, but in life nothing will bother her s' long as she's got feet ta walk on an' hands ta work with. I dunno how she does it." He bit the sob off as soon as he heard it creep into his voice. "But she does. An' I always thought she was amazing that way. Like she could truly… truly appreciate life, no matter how bad things got. Like she could see things in it that I couldn't. Forgive things… that I couldn't." The next sob couldn't be held back. Shizuku sniffled and swallowed thickly. "Look, man, I'm…" his voice wobbled unsteadily, "I'm sorry I hit ya. I was-"

"Don't be", Shiro murmured, letting his hand drop and looked away, fixing his eyes on a poster with hygiene prescriptions to let his friend have some privacy with his tears. "It was the right thing to do."

"But I shouldn't. I still shouldn't. I know I got a temper", he sniffed, wiping fiercely at his eyes. "But I shouldn't let that get ahead 'o my thinking. I know ya didn't mean any o' this. I know that." He wiped his hand on the threadbare shirt he wore, eyes cast on the ground. "But my feelings don't."

"Yeah…" he murmured feebly to himself. "Feelings aren't good at thinking, are they?"

Outside the hospital the sun was shining brightly, completely unaware that it wasn't appropriate for Shiro's mood. He let the smoke waft out of mouth and nostrils at its own leisure, empty eyes tracing its dance as it disappeared in thin air. The cigarette rested awkwardly against his splinted forefinger.

The bites had torn the buccal branch of the facial nerve on the right side of Kasumi's face, the doctor had explained. The lower part of the infraorbital nerve, too. She couldn't move her mouth and cheek properly, or feel her upper lip. Her prognosis was uncertain. The nerves might grow back together, or they might not: it would take at least two years before they could say anything for certain. The only thing they could say was that her flesh seemed to heal together without complications, but her chances of getting full feeling back were low.

And still, she had smiled at the news.

A smile is a slow dagger, slipping in between your ribs…

But her muscles didn't feel what they were doing.

…and twisting

Shiro had felt the stitches tear in his heart, all one hundred and three of them, when that impish signature smile of hers had tugged the patched ragdoll features. It had been distorted, a grimace, a miserably failed attempt to act as if nothing had changed. That was when he had decided to go out for a smoke.

There were three cigarette butts in the metal box now. The first one had been to calm his rampant guilt. The second had been for capturing the seed of an idea that had sprung from chaos, once guilt had been subdued into a dull, aching knot in his chest. The third had been nurture, as the seed had begun sprouting… suggestions. They had been mere fancies at first – daydreams and madman's hopes – but the more he thought about it, the closer the red glow crept to the filter…

The fourth cigarette, the one rolling thoughtfully back and forth between his fingers, was the scales measuring the weight of his decision.

There was a way to make amends. Make things right, clear up the mess he was responsible for. There was always a way. If you were willing to pay the price.

Maybe it showed on his face; maybe the rumour of female intuition held some grain of truth. Whichever it was, Kasumi's serious eyes nailed him in place as soon as he re-entered the hospital foyer.

"Hullo there, Fuji. I was worried ye'd left." There was worry in her voice yes: not that he had left, but for where he had gone. "There's somethin' we need ta talk about."

It's a strange experience, to go for a walk in a hospital. You can't help but listen to your footsteps, as they thrum a thousand stories out of the silent walls; the joy of expecting mothers, the fearful pain of children injured in wild games, the slowing heartbeat of an elderly husk waiting to expire… A library of human life, in its entire garish rainbow.

"Ye know how I told ya I can read every thought in ye' head?" Kasumi began. She kept the usual humour in her voice, even though it greyed like withered petals around the edges. "Right now ye're thinking o' doing something really stupid 'cause ye' conscience tells ya to. Don't, Fuji." He looked away, as if she really could read his mind if he met her eyes. "Look at me. This isn't yer fault, okay?" she said, touching her fingertips to stitched skin that couldn't feel them.

"It is", he replied without emotion.

"No it ain't. Ya didn't mean ta do this, right?"

"No, but I-"

"No 'buts'." She cocked an eyebrow at him, daring him to argue against her. "It was an accident, an' nobody could help it. An' I'm no worse fer wear. Sure, I may be a little uglier than I was before, but I'm not gonna have any problems eatin' or speakin'. I'm gonna be alright, Fuji", she said with emphasis. "An' ye're not gonna sign some blood contract ta fix something that's alright."

Maybe it showed on his face, maybe she knew him well – maybe she was telepathic. Regardless, things were as far from bloody alright as they could have been. And it was his fault.

"You won't be alright for years – might never have full feeling back. Look, I-"

"That doesn't matter. Trust me, it doesn't matter." One of her eyebrows rose disdainfully at the next question: "Or ya don't want an ugly girlfriend…?"

"No! No, that really isn't it." He halted, fumbled for words, wet his lips; forced himself to meet her eyes. "I did this", he murmured to her, "and I won't ever be able to look at you without remembering that. This is all my fault, and I should… I should make it right."

She placed a finger over his lips, shaking her head gently. To her, the situation really was nothing but a minor detail, another pebble on the road, and she would let it pass without a second thought. She was as amazing as Shizuku had said she was, and she would no doubt carry on like she always had... but all Shiro could think of was the suture smile that clawed at his heart.

"It's noble of ya, ta think like that, but it's not worth it."

"It is worth it. You don't understa-"

"Look, Shiro, I understand just fine", she cut him off, and her voice was so sharp he lost his train of thought. "Ye blame ye'self. That's natural: I blamed me'self when my little sister died." Remembrance softened her eyes. Memories of pain and of learning to live with it. "But ye gotta accept that accidents happen, an' there's nothing one can do about it."

"I can d-"

"Sure: ye can. There's many things people can do, but that doesn't mean they should do 'em. It's not worth it." Without warning, she grabbed his glasses strings and gently tugged him down, the way you'd pull someone by the collar. "Look, I know Sir Pheles is yer buddy… But when it comes ta business a demon's a demon, an' that's never gonna change. Ye're not making any deal with him, ya hear me?"

How could he promise her something like that? How could he agree to promise that, when he felt every stitch in her mangled face tear at his conscience? He tried to block it out, of course he did; tried to let the feeling slide, wash over and be gone, like water off a duck's feather. Good luck with that.

Time stretched, and only silence left his lips.

"I thought ya wanted ta be an exorcist." Kasumi stabbed the words at him like an accusation. Despite her scant size, she felt much bigger than he was. "This is reality fer an exorcist. People get hurt. People die. Blame themselves. Wish they could'a done somethin' about it." Regret. Sticky as pine resin in the dark depths of her eyes; regret for all the wishes that had gone unfulfilled. "It's not just demons ye fight out there: it's yer own human nature. It's in our nature ta love, ta mourn – ta wish fer miracles when we're desperate." A shaky breath, a tense pause… and as she let go of his strings, her voice softened: "Demons know that. That's why it's in desperate situations that an exorcist has ta show 'is true strength. If 'e fails ta do that, he'll be defeated: not through magic, not through claws, but through 'is own heart."

…and finally, they came. Water off a duck's feather. A broken dam with emotion pouring freely down his cheeks, and no chance in the world of stopping it.

"I'm sorry." He buried his face in her hair, pulled her close and felt her soft warmth seep into his skin and hold him together. "I'm sorry, I'm so s-sorry…!" he repeated through incoherent sobs. "I shouldn't have gone o-out with you at night, I sh-shouldn't have-" Shouldn't be giving in to emotion like this, even if it was daytime. They were waiting, they were always waiting, but…

…it might be the last time he cried.

"It's alright, Fuji." No, it wasn't. It wasn't bloody alright: he was responsible for all this, and here he stood like an overgrown cry-baby and got comforted by the very woman he'd almost- "It's alright ta cry."

"It's not", he sobbed, choking on shame and pressing her close as if she'd dissolve in smoke if he let go – god, he was pathetic… "I should-"

"Ye should what?" she murmured into his shoulder, rubbing warm, comforting circles onto his back. "Sign a contract fer each friend that gets hurt? Fight demons by day an' bargain with 'em at night, until ye got nothin' left ta sell?" She turned her head in his arms and planted a soft kiss on his jaw. "Ye've got the heart of a lion, Fuji, but even lions can't protect everyone."

He could have, if he had cared to watch his emotions properly. But he had been weak. Selfish. But most of all, he'd been human. It's in human nature to love, to mourn, to feel: it's in human nature to want to feel. Yet, feelings aren't good at thinking, and so here he was: harming people he loved because of his human nature. As much as he wanted to – as much as his feelings wanted to –, he could not allow himself to repeat that mistake.

"I won't make a deal with him, or any other demon", he whispered thickly, closing his eyes and breathing in the smell of her hair. "I promise."

A/N: Well, my dentist education has begun now, which is why all of a sudden there's stuff like neural damage in the face showing up. *swotting anatomy* This also means I might not update as fast as I have done up until now. One chapter at a time, maybe two? I won't stop writing, but I will be slower. x')