The whole thing comes to an end as quickly as it started in the first place.
Satoru and Kitamoto sit there for what feels like hours, until Tanuma finally comes to find them, and Satoru feels aged when he climbs through pins and needles back up to his feet.
Tanuma is watching him warily, hovering as though he's afraid Satoru is going to faint off his feet or make a run for it, and Satoru trades a long-suffering look with Kitamoto as he allows himself to be shuffled back into the sitting room.
Before they can go in, Tanuma stops him with a hand on his arm just outside the door.
"Um," he says eloquently, followed by, "I promise we didn't call him over here."
"Call who?" Kitamoto asks, but Satoru can guess. He's flat out of surprise for the day, and shakes his head as he steps around Tanuma, tiredly resigned to another uncomfortable confrontation where he hadn't wanted any in the first place.
"Hi, Nishimura," Natsume greets him with a smile.
There's fresh tea waiting and a place at the table set for Natsume, who sits on a comfortable cushion with Nyanko on his lap. Taki is in the middle of cutting into a strawberry shortcake, and looks as though she's going to hold this situation together by sheer force if she has to.
"Nyanko-sensei left while Touko was making lunch," Natsume says without heat, idly scratching his cat behind the ears. "It makes me nervous when he acts shifty, and some friends said they saw him heading this way, so I decided to come see what he was up to. I hope I'm not interrupting anything."
He doesn't sound hurt at what anyone else would probably have perceived as intentional exclusion. He also doesn't look uncertain of his welcome, sure in an unremarkable way of his place in their lives and Taki's bright home - which is the most marked change of the person he was when he first moved here, and the person he is now.
Satoru isn't sure what to do. Taki decides for him.
"Before you say anything," Taki says primly, "it's not because I feel bad for you, it's because I want you to feel better and cake always makes you feel better. Come sit."
He's too wrung out to feel anything but touched, and sinks back onto his cushion and accepts the plate she hands over. His stomach is still in knots, so he contents himself with picking pieces of strawberry out of the middle while his friends settle in around him.
"So," Taki says lightly, "what should we - "
"Natsume, I told Kitamoto," Satoru blurts before he can think better of it or talk himself down. As soon as he gets the words out his shoulders hunch defensively up by his ears, like his subconscious is expecting a blow. "Sorry."
There's a beat of silence, in which Satoru is too cowardly to look at anyone. Then a slender hand crosses his line of vision and Natsume's fingers are folded over his own.
"Start from the beginning," Natsume says gently. He's probably worried. Satoru feels bad about that, and keeps his eyes glued to the deconstructed cake in front of him, talking more to it than anyone else.
"I kept the circle. Taki and Tanuma found out, and I told Kitamoto. I'm really sorry."
Now that it's out, he wants it all out. He's ripping the bandaid off, because he has always lacked grace and subtlety and anything else that could have made this conversation any easier.
"What?" Natsume's voice is mildly horrified, at best. "You found that yokai circle months ago! You've been using it all this time? That's not the kind of thing you should mess with, you have no idea what it could have been doing to you all this time!"
He's not loud - Satoru has never heard Natsume get loud - but he's emphatic enough that it might as well be yelling anyway. He stares more resolutely at his plate, dread pouring out of his heart like a sieve.
Natsume is right to get mad. Satoru messed up, big time. There's no reason to feel like he's about to cry, or for Kitamoto to bristle defensively and say, "He was just trying to help!"
"No, I'm - hey, Nishimura."
Natsume is moving - dumping Nyanko off his lap unceremoniously and moving around the side of the table. His hand around Satoru's is squeezing tighter and tugging him around, until finally Satoru has nowhere to look but into Natsume's wide amber eyes.
And Natsume has no idea how to do this. He's more comfortable here, with them and this place, than he's ever been with anyone else, anywhere else - but he's never been in this position before. Natsume doesn't know what he's doing, as he tries to make his friend feel better, but he's doing a good job regardless. Satoru thinks that is so unfair.
"I'm not angry at you, you idiot, I just - I had no idea." He hesitates for barely a moment, and then looks over Satoru's shoulder at Kitamoto behind him. "I - the only person I've told is Tanuma, everyone else just happened to - "
Kitamoto dismisses that beginning of an apology before Natsume can get warmed up to it with a wave of his hand. "It's fine, this isn't about that."
"What I mean is, I would have told you," Natsume goes on doggedly. "Maybe not at first, but - I trust you. You're one of the first, best friends I've ever had. But it was a conversation I didn't know how to start."
And Kitamoto softens at that, the way anyone who really knows him could have guessed he would. "I get it, Natsume. It's really fine."
Natsume is somehow too preoccupied to spare much thought the revelation that his only remaining friend also knows his most heavily guarded secret. He turns right back to Satoru and says, "You just have to be careful, Nishimura. We don't know what yokai magic like this could be doing to you long-term. You're so sensitive to these things now, you have been ever since you were possessed."
"I was what?" Satoru finds the breath to squawk. The rest of the room parrots him a second later, Kitamoto going so far as to throw his hands up.
"He was what?"
"A few weeks after I first transferred here," Natsume says. "Something was hunting me, and it followed me to Nishimura's house. It latched onto him after that, and hung around for days."
He's either unaware of the horror in his friends' expressions or he's ignoring it with a poker face that belongs in a hall of fame, because he just keeps talking.
"Sensei had to banish it for us. That day I carried you to the hospital, do you remember?"
How could he forget? But Taki says, "I don't!" and Tanuma puts his face in his hands. Kitamoto looks two shades paler than he was a few minutes ago. Satoru takes pity on all of them and moves the conversation along.
"I remember. I never got the chance to apologize for that - for what I said - "
"I think we just established it wasn't you who said it," Natsume teases gently, and gives Satoru's hands another squeeze to take the nonexistent sting out of the quip, before letting go and sitting back on his heels. "But like I said, that sort of thing leaves a footprint behind. You need to be careful. Tanuma is overly sensitive to yokai, too - he gets migraines."
He's something different as he talks about this. A creature of quiet confidence, sharing a wealth of expertise about a subject no one else could possibly know as intimately as him. In a room of people who like him, who believe him, he sits a little taller than he normally does.
Noisily helping himself to Natsume's abandoned slice of shortcake, Nyanko adds, "Most humans can sense a yokai, even if they can't see it. Especially in rural towns like this, that lie so close to yokai dwellings. Why else do you brats think your parents are so superstitious?"
"That makes more sense than it doesn't," Taki says fairly. "And it also might explain why that yokai is following Nishimura around now."
Natsume's eyes sharpen, his body going taunt. "There's a yokai following you?"
"He tried to walk it home a few days ago," Tanuma explains, so tonelessly that it's obvious he's forcibly suppressing the impolite urge to add, "the moron." "Since then he's been seeing it everywhere."
"That's why he told Kitamoto," Taki adds, apparently just for the sake of a well-rounded conversation. "It chased them both to Nishimura's house."
Satoru watches Natsume go through something that looks painful. Before self-recrimination can stubbornly take root, Satoru tells him firmly, "It had nothing to do with you, Natsume, so don't start. I just made a bad call."
"A bad call," Tanuma echoes faintly.
"I thought it needed help! It looked nervous around all the people - I didn't know it was secretly a monster. It's almost like it switched places with an evil twin there at the end."
Nyanko sits up and tips his head to one side fractionally, interest piqued. The frosting on his whiskers does a little to detract from the visage. "Like there were two of them? Did you ever take your eyes off of it?"
"No, I - well," Satoru falters. "I was clearing a path for it through the crowd. It walked behind me most of the way. I think my eyes were off of it most of the time, actually." His friends are staring at him, incredulous, and Satoru feels a flush creep up his face. "It was creepy! I didn't want to look at it!"
"But you wanted to walk it home." Kitamoto shakes his head, looking at Satoru with a complicated combination of exasperation, concern and reluctant amusement. "Nyanko was right. It's always you that finds trouble, Nishimura."
"His trouble is our trouble," Natsume replies with no small conviction, and looks at Satoru with eyes that burn gold in the afternoon sunlight. "Thank you," he goes on, nonsensically, "for doing everything you did for me. Now let me do this for you."
"Let us," Taki corrects gently. Natsume only smiles.
"Let us," he agrees, and reaches for Satoru's hand again, holding tight - as though to impress, in a kinder way than possessions and curse marks, that he won't be letting go easily.