A/N: Messing with the Moriyamas again. I don't think they actually have a tradition like this one: but I think it would suit them. ^_^'
I do not own or profit from any of what Kazue Kato has created.
August passed, burning the Academy complex on forested pyres. September-October turned gold to blood and put fruits on every branch. November glazed the stone walls with chilling rain that chased the birds southward, before the season started snarling around the buildings, sharp gusts clawing the wizening flesh from wooden skeletons. By the by, humidity festered grey on towering structures. Strangled the sap in tree trunks. Shrouded Japan for her burial in the numbing winter white.
Days grew shorter, hours gasping out wispy breaths as they hurried from one chilled dark night to another.
Words grew scarcer. Rusted from days of disuse. Rotted with the fallen leaves.
Sometimes, he didn't recognise his own voice.
Sometimes, he wondered if people would hear him even if he spoke.
Life squared. Straight lines of routine between four dots of bus stops: Samael, Southern Cross monastery, desk, Moriyama. Round and round. Jump on the ride and it'll take you there, no detour thoughts for misery to catch up on. Straight lines. Straight lines and enough work to keep his brain attached to them.
Manners are awful fucking things.
Samael didn't give a shit how he felt. Father Hayashi didn't know how he felt. Moriyama knew – and politely bought his lies when he said he was fine.
Fucking incredible. That people still trust the words from your mouth when all the rest of you is screaming.
"This will be the last class for the season, I'm afraid." Moriyama Mayu thumbed a tiny, cloth-wrapped bundle. Her cheeks were like autumn apples, plump and faintly blushing in the spicy scent of the supply shop. "So I wanted you to have this." She offered the bundle to him on hard-worked palms. "It's a little early, I know, but nature has her own schedule. With some luck, you might even get to see them sprout before you leave."
The little exorcist supply shop was in business year around, but with winter whistling at the doorstep the growing of herbs was no longer part of the daily work. Shiro had been assisting all semester – learning how to grow them, when to reap them, how to preserve them – and learning their uses for exorcism and healing. Everything from common basil to sandalwood could be used to ward off demons, and there were hundreds more to be used to treat poisoning and ailments in humans. Some plants were made into incenses, some were distilled to be drunk or sprinkled over the ground as tinctures; some were living sentinels, planted like a wall around the house.
…and then there was the warden tree.
Shiro had never heard of a tradition like that before he was apprenticed by Moriyama-san. In her labyrinthine gardens there was an old linden tree, which was part of the garden and yet not. It should be watered and cared for, like all the other plants; but it should never be pruned, or robbed of a single leaf. It grew in majestic solitude in a clearing, rearing its crown up on a trunk so massive it seemed to delve down through the ground like a drill head, through the stone pillars the supply shop rested on, in search of the earth below.
The linden tree had been planted when her great-great-grandmother established herself at the Academy, Moriyama-san had told him. For fortune, and for protection. Each living thing had a spirit, and that tree was the embodiment of the spirit that guarded the house and the Moriyama family. Her great-great-grandmother lay buried underneath it, as did all the descendants that had continued her service as the Academy's supplier of herbs and goods. Shiro had seen Moriyama-san go to pay her respects to her ancestors, once, and seen her honour the warden tree before she washed the graves.
…and he stared, in blank silence, at the handful of browning seeds that had been hidden in the cloth she gave him.
"If you plant them before the end of November, you'll see them sprout in spring", she smiled softly, fingers still fidgeting with cloth they no longer held. "Or you can dry them, and they'll be good for planting at least three years from now."
"Moriyama-san, these are from-"
"Yes." She cupped his hands and brought them together, wrapping up the seeds once more. "She has protected my family for many a spring and fall, so I'm sure she'll do the same for you."
She hesitated, he could tell. Hesitated, because what he had shown her was that he wouldn't acknowledge things for what they were, and she didn't want to make him feel awkward. So she bought his lies and joined in his silence, pretending that things were normal when they weren't. Worry had worn her smile, waning like the sun as the days of frost approached, but it still shone with warmth that almost thawed the disconnection he had sought to drown in.
"Winter is always hard", she told him softly, casting her waning smile down on their hands. "Sometimes I think the plants only make it through because they know there will be spring."
She brushed his hands gently with her thumbs – big, smooth hands in old, calloused ones. Warm, steady hands that nurtured, protected; loved. They let go of his, and gently pulled him into an embrace.
Humans adapt; that's how they survive. One can survive on rice for weeks, and it will keep you alive. The body adapts. The tongue forgets what other tastes there are. It will still remember, with voracious clarity, how good real food tastes when it's put before you. How real nourishment pours warmth and bliss throughout the body.
Shiro's eyelids shut out the world. The embrace soaked into him, saturated his every fibre with warmth - human warmth, worlds apart from warm clothes or warm radiators. The body always remembers: no matter how long it is starved of contact, it remembers what it's like to be held close.
Moriyama-san's hair tickled his nose as he leaned into her warmth. It smelled of earth and pottery. He couldn't remember what his own mother's hair had smelt like, but he wished it had been earth and pottery.
"Thanks, Moriyama-san." It's human nature, that longing to feel. To touch. To be close. Nothing is lovelier, and nothing is more dangerous. "I'll plant them right away."
A/N: With this unusually long pause in writing, I've forgotten who wished Shiro to have a hug. =_=' But anyway, this chapter's dedicated to you. ^.^
Warden trees are an Old Norse custom, which you can still find alive here and there. These trees – often elm, ash, or linden – were highly revered and loved, so that sometimes the families tending to them would take their name from them. You all know Carl Linnaeus, right? His surname (Linné) is from the warden tree, a linden, which grew in his parents' homestead.