Satoru is experiencing the strangest sense of deja vu as he listens to Natsume's ugly cat complain about all the trouble it's going through. He's heard this grumpy old man's voice before, he thinks. He remembers hearing Natsume talk to it once, a long time ago.

"It's always you that seems to find trouble, brat," the cat says without any real heat, jumping from Tanuma's lap to cross the floor to where Satoru is sitting. It puts its paws on his knee and lifts up to get a better look at him, staring without blinking through narrowed green-black eyes. "There's definitely a cloud of something nasty hanging over you. Let me see the curse mark."

Satoru slides his sleeve up out of the way and offers his arm. He's too surprised to do much more than obey, and throws Taki a bewildered look over Nyanko-sensei's round head. She smiles encouragement at him, and even does a really good job of not looking worried.

Next to him, sounding as dumbfounded as Satoru feels, Kitamoto says, "If you guys want people to believe you about yokai stuff, why don't you just get this weird cat to talk in front of them? It'd convince me."

Tanuma blinks. "I guess… I never thought about it?"

A symbol lights up Nyanko's head, a strangely squiggly character that Satoru doesn't have a chance to study before it beams a blinding white that fills the room. When it fades, everyone in the room has flash blindness but Taki, who was the only one sensible enough to cover her eyes.

Blinking through sunspots, Satoru watches Nyanko pull away from the mottled bruising on his arm with distaste.

"It's not something my light can break," it says. Kitamoto stiffens, and Taki and Tanuma both look grave and frightened by the news, but Satoru isn't overly surprised. In his experience, it's never this easy. "Does it seem to wax and wane? Get worse and then better intermittently?"

"Yeah," Satoru replies. It's remarkable how quickly he's getting used to having a human conversation with the same lazy housecat he's snuck table scraps to, and carried around in the summer heat. "Earlier this morning it was almost gone."

"Then it's probably psychosomatic," Nyanko says. "How you're feeling affects the curse. What have your moods been like?"

Satoru blinks rapidly. That's a big question to unpack. Uncertainly he says, "Normal, I guess? I've been a little stressed lately, but - "

"He's been acting different," Kitamoto says right over him. His hands are folded into tight fists. "Guarded. Overshadowed, almost. I thought it was just the weight of this secret he's been keeping, but maybe there's a little more to it than that."

"And he acts as though we're strangers to him sometimes," Taki puts in quietly. "Especially the other day, when we tried to get close to his arm. He looked at us as though he didn't know who we were."

"I didn't," Satoru starts, heart racing. "I wouldn't - "

"You didn't mean to," Taki says quickly, leaning towards him. "We know you didn't mean to. You don't realize it, Nishimura, but the rest of us do, because we can see you acting strangely."

"Maybe it's the yokai." Tanuma's contribution is abrupt, as though the revelation just occurred to him. "The books Taki found in her grandfather's library made us think this might be a type of sympathetic magic, the yokai that cursed him affecting him from afar. Could it be the reason Nishimura's been acting oddly lately? Maybe it's psychosomatic and sympathetic at the same time."

"So the yokai is affecting Nishimura's mind, and Nishimura's mind is affecting his body?" Kitamoto says slowly, in the tone of someone taking apart a horror story word by word.

"That sounds feasible," Nyanko says at length, and as one, everyone else in the room turns to look at Satoru with varying degrees of pity in their eyes.

Satoru stands up, and it feels like he's moving through fog or water. "I'll be right back," he tells the room at large, but even his own voice is muffled in his ears, and if any of his friends reply he doesn't hear them.

He makes his way down the hall of Taki's huge house, and he's glad he finds the bathroom on his first try because he's sick almost as soon as he's in front of the toilet. He throws up until his stomach is cramping and all that's left in his body is dry heaves and a headache.

He doesn't look at his arm. It hurts so badly he knows what it must look like.

A cool hand settles on his forehead, pushing sweaty fringe out of his eyes and lifting his face from its awkward cradle against his arm. It's Kitamoto, sitting on the lid of the toilet and shifting Satoru's head to rest against his knee instead. He doesn't take the hand out of Satoru's hair, continues smoothing it back in a gesture that's as familiar to him as Kitamoto's bedroom, and his mother's homemade dinners.

"I understand why you didn't tell me," Kitamoto says softly. "Taki and Tanuma were talking to the cat when I left after you. They think the yokai behind the curse on your arm is making you feel - isolated. It's the reason you've been doing so much by yourself, acting like there's no one around to help you. It makes sense now. I'm not angry with you, okay?"

Pressing his mouth into a firm line for as long as it takes to fight tears and win, Satoru just sits there and leans against him for what could have been a minute or an hour. When he thinks he can talk without crying, he says, "At first I really was trying to handle it by myself, though. I don't know - when it changed - "

He's been acting differently, and he didn't know. Overshadowed, his friends said in worried voices, guarded. Unfamiliar.

And he didn't even realize, and that's the scariest thing. What if the people who loved him were any less nosey, and this curse managed to turn him into a different person right under their noses? What if he lost to it, and no one knew how to help him? What if there was no one left to try, because he pushed them all away?

"It's Natsume's secret, isn't it?" Kitamoto says into the quiet. "The one you've been keeping."

Satoru feels too hollowed and hunted to do more than close his eyes and nod. On top of everything else, this is a personal failure he's seen coming, to the point that it almost feels anticlimactic now. He couldn't keep it from Kitamoto forever, he doesn't know why he even tried.

"It makes sense. Later, when I have time to think about it, I'm sure it will make even more sense. I just wish - one of you had said something. I wish you didn't feel like it had to be a secret in the first place. You could have trusted us with it from the beginning."

"It's not about that, " Satoru says plaintively, "it's the principle. Natsume - he's always - he's never had people like us. Like you and me, and Taki and Tanuma, and the Fujiwaras. I know, and you know, that we all would've believed him if he told us - I mean, you believed me without asking for proof, and you'd believe him, too. We know that, but Natsume can't yet. And then I found out, by stupid accident, and he asked me not to tell. So I - wanted to keep this secret for him." It sounds childish and lame, and Satoru is abruptly glad Kitamoto can't see more of him than his profile, because he feels so stupid. "I wanted to prove that it was different here. Maybe if I kept his secret, he'd come a little closer to - trusting. In us, and this place. Maybe he'd feel more at home here, if he knew he could count on me."

But I ruined it, he thinks, and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. It's all a mess now.

"I don't know what to do," he admits, and his voice comes out thick and wobbly. He's always been quick to cry, and his eyes feel hot behind his hands. "I can't take any of it back, and I almost wish I could. I'm so tired, Acchan."

Kitamoto shifts, dislodging Satoru to sink to the floor beside him and wrap an arm around his shoulders instead. Maybe it should be at least a little awkward, but it's the closest to safe Satoru has felt in a long time.

"We'll figure it out," Kitamoto says, so firmly his words might have moved mountains if he let them. "We're not gonna let that monster get its hands on you again."

The thing is, Satoru isn't Natsume. As close as he might come to understanding the way Natsume thinks and the way he experiences the world, they're never going to be the same. Satoru grew up with a mother that didn't have time for him, and a brother that grew out of him, and a best friend who took both their places as easily as breathing. Kitamoto walked home with Satoru after school and poured over their homework together and made him feel better when he was lonely or hurting or sad, and when Kitamoto says everything will be okay, Satoru believes him.

And there's very little a curse can do in face of something like that.