A/N: Hey everyone, welcome to my new fic, 'Four Drowned Leaves'. This story is a bit of a crack premise - it's an isekai to a world with magic. Nevertheless, I'm planning to take the concept completely seriously, and put my full effort into making sure the story is as good as possible. This is a bit of a side-project for me, which I'll be working on in bits and pieces whenever I'm not able to focus on writing for my main Fuu/Yots fic, "How We Met Again". Due to that, I don't expect to keep any kind of regular update schedule, or even to update regularly at all - when there are new chapters, they'll likely be quite long (on the order of 10-15k), and drop sporadically. In other words, they shall drop when they drop.
This is a Fuu/Yots fic taking place about halfway through chapter 114. Obviously, there are spoilers for that chapter. I think it would be fair to say that it falls under the category of 'established relationships' - there's no slow burn here, though there will certainly be a deepening of their relationship over time.
One last note: this fic is rated M on FF.N and E on AO3 for a reason. In particular, those reasons are as follows: violence, blood/gore, and also possibly sexual themes/smut later on. While I don't expect any of those themes to run rampant throughout the fic by any means, I want to leave space for them to appear later on. I'm not entirely decided yet on the last bit, but I wanted to warn that it was a possibility before it comes up. Regardless, this fic will certainly be taking on a significantly darker tone than my other fic.
With all that being said: enjoy!
Chapter 1
Descent
It was probably the stupidest place possible to fall.
Uesugi Fuutarou had been left alone in the nurse's office as the woman he loved had hightailed it away from him - whether out of revulsion or fear or anxiety or some unholy mixture of the three, he had no idea. For a moment, he was stunned; immediate rejection hadn't been the expected outcome of this setup the quintuplets had decided upon. At the very least, he had wanted some kind of explanation.
He had decided to run after her.
He had then decided that she was really freaking fast.
Yotsuba had briefly escaped his sight, but her escape route was betrayed by a traitorous sister (i.e. Itsuki), who had told Fuutarou to just go - to devote his attention to the fleeing girl, and to leave the broken hearts of her other sisters to her. Worrying about them too much would, she claimed, only make things worse.
It was after these... unexpected turn of events that Fuutarou found himself chasing after Yotsuba along the school grounds. He almost caught her on a walkway near a hill, but she escaped before he could get close enough. She was too fast - he was starting to lose sight of her again. In desperation, he increased his pace. Yotsuba had exited the school grounds, and was running alongside a nearby river. She was getting further and further and further and further away, and he was beginning to lose hope-
As he was crossing a bridge to charge after her, Uesugi Fuutarou made a fatal error, and ran on wet concrete.
Frankly, a rookie error - not running on wet surfaces is one of the core elements of pool safety. Admittedly, he wasn't near a pool; but it was more or less the same thing. Alas, erudition had given way to passion, and he was going to catch her, damn it!
As he ran over the small bridge, Fuutarou slipped, and fell towards the siding. The railings were poorly maintained, and rusted through to the point of being held together by a thread; and under his body weight they bent, held for a second, and then they gave way. Fuutarou fell head-first towards the water - however, as he fell, his foot caught on the gnarled remains of the broken wrought iron, and allayed his descent. With a jolt, and a sickening crack, he came to a stop. The boy hung there for a few moments, slowly twisting in the wind.
Well... this will certainly be wet, he thought to himself morosely as he stared down at the currents below him. Idly, he noticed that his ankle was supporting his entire body weight, and was twisted a way it was surely not meant to go. It hurt. Badly. The way he was hanging upside down... it strangely reminded him of another time he'd been with Yotsuba, and had ended up in an improbable situation. He'd been upside down then too.
Perhaps I simply defy gravity. Something in my core being has become one with antigravity, and I must hang upside down.
He chuckled at his own joke, then winced as it sent tremors up his leg to his ankle, and awaited the inevitable moment when his ankle gave out and he got a soaking. Somehow, despite the pain, he was calm.
At least the river isn't too shallow, nor too fast.
"Uesugi-san! Are you alright?!"
He glanced to the side to see the girl of his affections standing along the side of the river, a concerned look on her face. He pondered for a moment if he ought to have done this on purpose to get her to come back. That struck him as a little too manipulative. On solid ground he may have done it - but dangling from a bridge was perhaps... well, it was perhaps a bridge too far.
"Well, my ankle seems to be the only thing supporting me, but..."
Fuutarou shrugged helplessly.
"Oh geez. Ok, hang on! I'll help you up."
"Actually," Fuutarou said drily, "I think hanging is about all I can do right now."
"Is this really the time for this, Uesugi-san?!"
"It's always the time for this," he whispered smugly to himself.
Yotsuba ran around to the bridge, and reached her hand down. Mustering the measly amount of core body strength he possessed, Fuutarou swung himself up as best he could and grabbed her hand.
"Alright, Uesugi-san, I'm gonna pull!"
"Wait, what about my ank-owowowow!"
Yotsuba had pulled, and the gnarled iron dug further into his leg, piercing the skin and gouging into his flesh. Fuutarou yowled in pain, and Yotsuba immediately lowered her arm back down, sliding him back into position.
"S-Sorry! I didn't realize it was dug in like that."
"Me neither. Then again, who the heck expects this?"
"That's... That's true. Alright, I guess let's try again the-"
As Yotsuba spoke, Fuutarou's ankle suddenly slid loose. By accidentally stabbing the iron further in and gouging into him, it had allowed his leg to pivot slightly, and the distribution of the weight shifted. This caused the wound to suddenly rip open, and as the metal pulled back out, Uesugi Fuutarou's sole support failed him.
With that, he plunged towards the river-
Except that his hands were still clutched around Yotsuba's, and she had been off balance, as she'd been about to pull on him again. Her feet slipped on the wet concrete which had betrayed Fuutarou in the first place, she fell forward through the gap in the railing, and in a moment, both of them were out above the churning depths.
Then, they fell.
The distance from the bridge to the water was not large - only about three metres. Additionally, the river was fairly deep, meaning that within approximately 0.78 seconds, they ought to have found themselves submerged in the icy depths, free from the danger of any rocks concealed beneath the inky black surface. In fact, given that Fuutarou had begun his descent from below the level of the bridge, the impact ought to have been even sooner.
And yet, they never reached the water.
Fuutarou's eyes were clenched shut, but a few moments later, they snapped back open as he felt a strong wave of nausea, likely induced by the fact that his body, which had been falling head-first towards the water, had undergone a sharp re-orientation, and appeared to now be experiencing a gravitational pull from the side. This was evidenced by the fact that he had just hit something with his back. Hard.
He sat up, and was immediately aware of three very important facts.
Fact number one was that he was not submerged in a river; but rather, was sitting in the middle of a clearing in a pack of trees - likely a forest of some kind. Above him, the sky was filled with stars, more than he had ever seen in the skies of Nagoya. Despite the light, the area around him seemed strangely dark.
Fact number two was that his ankle was torn to ribbons. His pants had been ripped apart by the wrought iron, and the pain was starting to win its war against the adrenaline which was still coursing its way through his body. His ankle also looked to be twisted.
Fact number three hit him like a bag of bricks - Yotsuba was nowhere to be seen.
His first instinct was to call for her - to try and find her, to chase after her.
His second instinct was to not do that, because he was in the middle of a forest filled with who knows what, and alerting that who knows what to his presence could be a potentially fatal move.
Fuutarou tried to stand up, but putting weight on his ankle was an immediate no-go. As such, he laid back down on the ground, and attempted to strain his ears to see if he could gain any other useful information that way. It was, after all, the first rule of a successful scientist - gather all relevant information you could, and seek to tease out the truth from it.
He couldn't hear any movement, which was useful information in its own right. In his current condition, his ability to escape would be limited if who knows what decided to make him into a tasty meal.
After listening for a few minutes, he decided it was probably safe to call.
"Yotsuba?" he called, softly. There was no response.
"Yotsuba?" he called, louder this time.
There was still no response.
He called one more time, shouting at the top of his lungs, hoping that somehow, some way, she would hear.
Silence.
Fuutarou closed his eyes, and re-evaluated. Yotsuba was clearly not here. Therefore, the first priority would be survival, and information-gathering.
The pain in his leg was beginning to get annoying. He decided to make a sacrifice for the sake of his health, and he took off the shirt he had been wearing. From his pocket, he withdrew a small pocket knife, and cut the sleeve off the shirt, starting at about the elbow. Repeating the operation on the other side for the sake of symmetry, he then cut the fabric into strips, and used it to bandage his ankle as tightly as he could. The first layer quickly became soaked through with blood, but the second layer seemed to hold relatively well.
With the makeshift tourniquet applied, Fuutarou attempted a second time to put weight on the ankle, and found this time that it was slightly more tolerable. He rose to his feet, and looked around the clearing one last time. There wasn't much he could make out in the darkness of the night, but he thought that the trees looked perhaps slightly thinner in one direction, and so he made his way towards that part of the tree line.
Fuutarou made it only as far as the first tree before the pain in his ankle began becoming unbearable again, and he was forced to sit once more. His back up against a tree, he stared morosely up into the darkness.
"Well," he muttered to himself, "this is certainly not how I expected the evening to go."
After all, usually when one goes to confess to a girl, the outcome is expected to be binary - either acceptance, or rejection, though admittedly he hadn't expected the flat-out rejection he'd gotten.
"I never considered the third option - she runs away in a panic, and then you both fall into a river and get... and get..."
And get what?
"...and get dumped in a strange meadow with a busted ankle," he finished lamely, not quite sure what to make of the situation.
There was no physical principle of which he knew that would lead one to fall into a river in the city and instantaneously find oneself in a clearing in the woods. The only conclusion was that something metaphysical had happened. Somehow, Fuutarou found that difficult to accept. However, as much as he turned the concept over and over in his head, there was no logical alternative he could find.
In the process of his thoughts, he must have fallen asleep, because he was startled awake by the sound of rustling leaves. It took a moment for his mind to process the noise, but his body reacted far ahead of that, pumping adrenaline and cortisol into his system immediately. His eyes snapped open, and he found himself face to face with a young woman, mere centimetres from him. She had auburn hair, and was dressed in the clothing of a European peasant. Her face was a tanned brown, though whether that was due to the effects of the sun or it was her natural skin colour, Fuutarou could not say.
"Who are you?" Fuutarou asked.
The woman stared at him blankly. Then, she opened her mouth, and a language that he didn't understand came pouring out.
Ah. Of course. Stupid of me.
"I do not understand," Fuutarou said, fully aware that she would have no idea what that meant.
The young woman seemed briefly bemused, and then she stepped back from her position right up in Fuutarou's face. She looked around her, and then seemed to find what she was looking for, because she put down a woven basket, and reached for something.
When she turned around, he could see that she was holding a thin stick.
That thing is far too narrow to be a suitable weapon, so I suppose she means me no harm.
The woman walked a short distance away, and indicated for Fuutarou to follow. Unlike the Japanese, however, she indicated in the Western style, with her fingers pointed up and curling in. He attempted to pull himself up onto his leg, and found that it hurt more than the night before; standing was out of the question. It would certainly require some sort of medical attention. He opted instead for crawling after her, an action that made her raise her eyebrow - a gesture that Fuutarou supposed must have had a common meaning between her culture and his.
"Leg," he said, pointing to it. "Ow."
The woman looked at his leg, and then she winced. That, too, seemed to be a common gesture. The woman was standing next to a small sandy area, and she began to draw with the stick. As her hand quickly flitted across the surface, images began to form - a small village, perhaps, and stick people. She pointed at Fuutarou, and then at the drawing.
I suppose, he thought, she wants to take me to this village.
Fuutarou looked up at her and nodded- but as he did so, he realized that he had no idea if she would understand the gesture. There were, he had heard, countries where the meaning of shaking and nodding one's head were reversed. There was also, of course, no guarantee that the gesture had any meaning at all for her.
"I will follow," he said, still perfectly aware that the sounds meant nothing to her. He hoped, however, that his tone was vaguely affirmative.
The nod must have been indicative enough for her to get the message, because she came over, and threw Fuutarou's arm over her shoulder. He was surprised by how strong she was - she could have given Yotsuba a run for her money in the raw strength department. She lifted him up on the side where his leg was injured, and together they began slowly walking, his injured ankle lifted off the ground. As to where they were going... Fuutarou could only hazard a guess.
As they walked, he felt a sharp, near overwhelming pain in his chest in the aftermath of the mental comparison he had made at the thought of Yotsuba. He had no idea where she was, nor if she was safe. The fact that she had been nowhere to be seen... it was deeply concerning, but also confusing.
If whatever mechanism brought me here didn't bring Yotsuba... what happened to her? Did she just fall in the river? Did she end up somewhere else? Is she safe? ...Is she alive?
The anxiety briefly threatened to overwhelm him, and he shuddered. His companion made a concerned-sounding noise, and turned her head to face him. Fuutarou shook his head, and gritted his teeth. There would be time to be worried later. His more pressing concern was reaching this village, and (hopefully) receiving some form of medical treatment, even if it was just cleaning out the wound.
After walking - well, hobbling in truth - for almost three hours, there was a break in the trees, and the pair emerged to the sight of a small gathering of thatch-roof cottages about a kilometre away. It seemed to be mostly flat land between the forests' edge and the houses, a fact for which Fuutarou was extremely grateful.
At their slow pace, it took another twenty-five minutes to reach the edge of the small village. Their glacial pace wasn't aided at all by the fact that the land between the forest and the village, despite being relatively flat, was littered with dense bramble bushes that interfered with their slow and steady advance. Nevertheless, eventually they arrived. The young woman called something out in the language that Fuutarou didn't understand, and a few people came out of the nearest huts. They began speaking to his companion in rapid-fire speech that he couldn't remotely comprehend, but he very clearly understood when the woman pointed to his injured ankle.
One of the burlier looking men came forward, and began speaking quietly to the woman. She shook her head vehemently, and he sighed. Then, he took her position supporting Fuutarou's injured side. The large man was surprisingly gentle, though the height difference presented slight problems. He walked Fuutarou over to the largest house in the village, and took him inside.
The interior of the building was cozy, despite its size. A fire was burning in a fireplace at the far end of the room, and there was a long dining table in the centre. The man, however, took Fuutarou to a side room, where there were a number of small beds - or at least, what passed for beds. The mattresses seemed, as best he could tell, to be stuffed with hay.
Regardless, it was more comfortable than the tree had been the night before.
The man settled Fuutarou down on the bed, careful to not touch his ankle. Fuutarou attempted to thank him, but of course it meant nothing to the man. He shrugged his shoulders - another gesture in common - and then left, leaving Fuutarou alone in the room with just his thoughts. He took the opportunity to look, trying to gain some sort of understanding of where exactly he was.
It was a simple affair. The floor was made of planks laid tightly over dirt. The ceiling had wooden beams supporting the structure above, but he could see the thatch roof fairly clearly. The walls themselves seemed to be stone, with plaster over top of them to keep the water out; however, in places, it was peeling away, which was how he knew the construction was stone to begin with.
All in all, it felt very much like a medieval European peasants' hut, as he'd seen it depicted in various books throughout his studies.
He was distracted from his inspection of the surrounds by the sound of a door opening and shutting. Then, an old woman entered the room. She was wrapped in silks, and seemed somehow wealthier than the other inhabitants of the village. There was something almost... regal about her. As she walked in, she spoke, but her words were just as incomprehensible as all the others.
"I'm afraid I cannot understand," Fuutarou said, thereby purposely communicating that he could speak, but simply not in her tongue.
The old woman paused a moment, then hobbled over to where Fuutarou sat. She started to unbind the torn strips of polyester that were wrapped around his injured ankle, and then looked down at the gashed skin and twisted foot. She made a tutting sounds, and then left the room again.
I suppose she must be some sort of doctor.
The woman returned a few minutes later with a bowl of hot water. She took a cloth, dipped it in the water, and then pressed it against the wound. The water was extremely hot, and Fuutarou yelped in pain, but attempted to stay still - as best he could tell, the woman was attempting to use primitive methods to sterilize the wound.
This seems to be the best I can hope for. Hopefully, it doesn't get infected.
When the woman had finished cleaning out the wound, which she seemed to have some experience doing, she left again. This time, she was gone for longer. When she returned once more, she had a small bowl with a poultice in it. She applied the poultice to the wound, dabbing it around the entirety of Fuutarou's leg. The poultice didn't feel like it was having any immediate effect, but so long as it wasn't actively hurting, he didn't particularly see the harm.
Then, the woman began to sing.
Her voice was high pitched, a clear soprano. He couldn't understand any of the words, but the timbre of her voice was enough to bring some sort of emotion to the surface; but what the emotion was, he couldn't quite say. It was something that he didn't quite understand - a sort of bittersweetness and heartache with no discernible source. For a second, he wondered if perhaps the emotions he was feeling were not quite his own.
As the woman continued to sing, the tempo increased, and the music became more complicated. There were highs and lows, and her voice rose into a crescendo, before fading to near-silence, and then rising again, hitting each note with a staccato, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and-
It was only then that Fuutarou realized that there was a strange light in the room.
He had been so drawn in by the music and its inherent hypnosis that he hadn't noticed the fact that a faint green light had begun to illuminate the space around the woman's hands. As she sang, and the cycles of decrescendo and crescendo repeated, the light grew brighter and brighter. From whence it came, Fuutarou could not say. Eventually, it was blinding, to the point he needed to cover his eyes.
Then, his ankle began to burn.
It was not, as far as he could tell, literally on fire. However, it felt as though he had received a sunburn on his entire ankle, a bad one, the sort where the skin radiates heat. He gritted his teeth, scrunched the bed linens in his fists, and attempted to bear it. There was certainly something happening here that he didn't understand, and all he could do was be carried along for the ride, and hope that it succeeded.
He felt something shift, as though his bones were re-aligning. His ankle was fire, incandescent and hot.
As the song reached what felt like its climax, the light began to pulsate, and it almost seemed as though there were voices harmonizing with the woman's voice. A deep baritone, rich and full of flavour, seemed to underlay the notes, permeating the edges of Fuutarou's senses - he was certain that he was not hearing it with his ears. An alto, a tenor... a whole chorus were singing in a way that he couldn't quite comprehend, because only the woman's voice was arriving in the form of sound waves entering his ear drums.
Suddenly, violently, the light vanished, and the woman fell silent.
Where once there had been a deep wound on Uesugi Fuutarou's leg, there was now merely a torus of red skin, as though a few layers had been stripped away. His foot was back to its proper alignment, like it had never twisted out of place to begin with. The woman staggered, and grabbed the foot of the bed to support herself.
Fuutarou stared at her in a daze, then looked back down at his leg.
"What the hell was that?" he whispered.
He did not expect a response. He didn't get one.
The woman took several breaths to steady herself. Then, she looked at him, said a few words he didn't understand, and then hobbled back out of the room. Fuutarou sat there, shaken. It was one thing to be transported across time and space in a way he didn't understand.
It was another thing to have his wounds healed by song.
It was magic.
Then, he shook his head.
"Magic," he whispered, "is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology."
He leaned back. It was obvious that whatever this place was, it followed different rules from what he was used to. There would be a long learning curve - because in the absence of an understanding of the mechanism by which he had arrived, he had no understanding of a mechanism by which to reverse the process.
He was stuck here.
Fuutarou laid back in the bed, and stared at the ceiling. He thought back on the people he'd left behind, and for the first time, truly realized the magnitude of what had happened.
"Yotsuba," he whispered. "Where are you? Did you get stolen away as well? Or are you safe back home?"
He had no answer to his questions, but as the adrenaline of the healing retreated, he found himself exhausted, and he fell into a fitful sleep. How long he slumbered was difficult for him to assess, but he was sure that at least one time when he awoke, the young woman who had found him was sitting by the bed. Another time, he thought he heard arguing from the main room. The memories seemed vague and dreamlike, as though he were watching someone else experience them.
When he woke up next, the light outside the window at the front of the house was a reddish-purple; whether that indicated dawn, dusk, or something else here, he wasn't sure. As he sat up, a cloth fell off his forehead, and landed in his lap. He frowned, and felt it with his hands. It was damp, and cool.
How peculiar. Was I... feverish?
That would certainly explain why he had felt so detached from his few waking memories. If he had been delirious when they happened...
Perhaps I had a negative reaction to... whatever that woman did.
He looked around him, and saw that the room was empty. Deciding to take a risk, Fuutarou cupped his hands around his mouth, and called.
"Hello?"
There were a few moments of silence, and then the old woman who had healed him hobbled into the room. She looked at him with a guarded look, and then spoke with words he did not understand.
"I cannot understand," Fuutarou said half-heartedly.
What's the use?
Then, the woman got a look on her face like she was pondering. She wandered over to Fuutarou, and pressed a wizened finger to his forehead. She whispered some words under her breath, and then began to hum. A faint white light appeared at her finger, and then she pulled her hand away from his head. The light seemed to swirl as though it were made of mist... but a contained mist - a sphere that dance and sway. She attempted to pressed the light to her own throat, but the glowing eddies seemed to recoil from her skin as though afraid, distorting away from their spherical shape.
The woman frowned.
Then she said something, her voice low and dangerous, and the room seemed to darken, despite the window being wide open. The shadows grew deeper, and though she was but small, she dominated the room. The swirling misty light immediately returned to the shape of a ball, and slowly, achingly, disappeared into the skin of her throat. The woman looked back up at Fuutarou, and the room seemed to return to its previous lighting.
Then she opened her mouth, and spoke.
"Do you now understand my tongue, outsider?"
Where before her language had been incomprehensible, the old woman was now speaking Japanese.
It was stilted, to be sure - but it was perfectly understandable. Fuutarou gaped at her for a moment, and then slowly nodded his head.
"I understand you."
The woman smiled.
"Good. Then you can answer my queries."
Fuutarou swallowed.
Of course. I showed up out of the blue with no knowledge of their language, and I took up some of their resources. Naturally, they would have questions.
"What brings you to Foryth Eldi, boy?"
She pronounced the words with a hard sound, an accent which did not seem to fit the Japanese words in her mouth - like the name was not one that belonged of the language she spoke, and the Japanese words were uncomfortable expressing it.
Fuutarou frowned. "I don't know. I awoke in the woods, injured and alone. I have no knowledge of how I came to be there, nor of where I am."
"Your words make no sense... but I sense them to be true. How peculiar. You do not seem sent to harm us."
The woman seemed to ponder over his words, turning them over in her mouth like they were a new delicacy, waiting to be savoured - or spat out, depending on the flavour.
"Your magic is... different to mine. Antithetical. They do not mix well. They are like water and oil."
My magic...?
Then she looked back up at Fuutarou.
"What is your name, boy?"
"Uesugi Fuutarou," he said quietly. "My name is Uesugi Fuutarou."
"I shall remember it," she said, equally quietly. "You are lucky to be alive, boy. I was able to heal your wounds... but your body reacted badly to my magic. A high fever soon rose. It was all we could do to keep it down, and allow your body to fight."
"I... almost died?"
"Indeed. Kora stayed by your side, making sure you had water, and what food she could get you to eat. It was five days that you fought the fever."
"Kora," Fuutarou said, pondering. "Is she the woman who found me?"
"It is so. The one who protected you from those who did not want another mouth to feed, as well."
He slowly nodded. "I owe her my thanks, then."
"That you do."
"How is it that you can speak Japanese now?"
"Is that the name of your tongue? I do so only by virtue of mimicry of your magic. I have not used this trick before. I fear it is not stable. With one of my own people, there would perhaps be more time - but our magics do not mix. I fear I cannot maintain it for long."
"I see," Fuutarou said. "Then I have just two questions that are pressing. The rest can wait."
"I will answer if I can."
"The first is this: I can't speak your language, and I have no knowledge of my surroundings. If I leave this village, I will almost certainly die. However, I have no desire to leech off you. What can I do to earn my keep?"
It was more practical than that - if he didn't work to earn his keep, he was certain that within short order, he would have no choice but to leave.
The old woman shrugged. "You do not seem to have the build for field work, but we have no need for layabouts. I will discuss with the chieftain and see what needs be done. If you wish to work for your bread, we will let you work."
"I see. I'll be in your care."
The woman nodded slowly.
"My second question is the more important one. Have you found another outsider like me? A girl with red hair, and with a green bow around her head?"
She slowly shook her head.
"You are the first outsider to come to Foryth Eldi in many a year, boy. If there were another, we would know."
Fuutarou's heart sank.
I don't know if I should be happy that she's not here... or terrified that she's not here. If she's still home... at least she's safe. But what if she's not home... and also not here?
"You seem worried. Is this... girl your lover?"
That made Fuutarou pull up short, snapping him out of his reverie of introspection.
"That," he murmured, "is a question that has yet to be resolved."
The woman laughed. It was a melodious laugh that belied her appearance - but matched perfectly with the voice she had displayed when healing him many days before.
"That is the folly of youth."
Then, she frowned. "My time is almost elapsed. The temporary harmony between our magics is collapsing. I fear I shall be unable to speak for a few hours. Alas, it seems that they are immiscible. To merge them is to invite backreaction."
Fuutarou nodded. "In that case, I'll wait until we can speak again."
The woman shook her head. "I would not venture to do this too often. I fear overuse may permanently damage my ability to speak - and to lose my speech would be to lose my magic entirely. No, this will be the only time, I think."
"Then... how will I speak to you? Or to this... Kora?"
The woman smiled. "You will have to learn, as do our babes. It will be a long journey, Uesugi Fuutarou."
Fuutarou sighed. At least learning languages is something I already have knowledge in. Thank goodness for English classes, I suppose... not that I'll have cause to use English again, come to think of it.
The woman in front of him began to cough, and a small amount of blood spattered on the fist she used to cover her mouth. As she did so, the thin wisps that she had forced into her throat came out of her nostrils like smoke, and dispersed into the atmosphere. She looked up at Fuutarou, and let out a croak.
He bowed his head to her, and she got a look on her face that looked almost like... a smirk. Then, she hobbled out of the room, and was gone.
It was only later that Fuutarou realized that he had never asked for her name.
A while after the old woman left, the younger woman who he now knew as "Kora" entered the room. Seeing him awake, she came over with a small jug of water, and a plate of food. She spoke in the language he didn't understand, and then pointed at the food.
Fuutarou stared at her, then at the food. Then, he reached for it, and took a small bite.
It was passable. By modern Japanese standards, it was hardly something to write home about, but as he ate, he found the taste growing on him more and more. The bread that was on the plate was a kind of sourdough, which he quite liked. There were also fruits on there that he didn't recognize - perhaps new species entirely.
As he ate, the woman sat on the bed next to him, and just watched. For some reason, she seemed fascinated by him. Her gaze made him somewhat uncomfortable, but he ascribed that largely to the language barrier. After he had finished eating, and drank the water that had been offered to him, he looked at the woman, and then pointed at her.
"Kora?" he asked, attempting to confirm her name.
The woman seemed surprised. Then, she nodded, and pointed at herself.
"Kora," she said. Then, she said a second word, which Fuutarou assumed was the word for 'name'. Then, she pointed at Fuutarou, and repeated the word again.
"Fuutarou," he said, pointing at himself. Then, he said the word for name. His accent was, he presumed, atrocious. The woman, however, smiled, and let out a rapid-fire string of the language. Suddenly overwhelmed, Fuutarou raised his hands in surrender. The woman laughed, and then gathered the plate and jug, and took them away.
She returned a short time later, and sat on the other bed.
"Fuutarou."
"Fuutarou," he said, nodding.
She nodded, almost as though to herself. She then repeated the name to herself under her breath a few times. Then, she looked up at him, and smiled. It was a bright smile, but it somehow reminded him of someone he knew. There was a layer of mischief there, as though she had a new toy to play with.
Though the two looked almost nothing alike, her grin reminded him strongly of Ichika.
A stabbing pain went through his chest.
I might never see her again. I might never see any of them again.
Kora seemed to sense that his mood had changed, because her grin changed into a frown. Then, she did something unexpected. She pointed at Fuutarou, and then pointed at her own mouth... and then used her fingers to drag her lips into the shape of a smile.
Is she trying to tell me to cheer up?
Something about the pantomime was unexpectedly funny to Fuutarou, and he found himself cracking up. The woman across from him smiled at his reaction. Then, she pointed at him again.
"Fuutarou."
Yes. That is indeed my name.
She pointed at herself. "Kora."
That's also your name...
Then, she stood up, and walked over a table in the far corner of the room, where there was a chair. She pointed at the table, and said a word in the language he didn't understand. She then repeated it again.
Fuutarou frowned, and then his eyes widened.
Is she... trying to teach me the word for table?
He repeated the word back to her. She said it again. He pointed at the table, and said the word. She nodded. He repeated it to himself again. She pointed at the table, and said the word one last time.
Then, she pointed at the chair next to it, and said a different word.
That must be the word for chair.
This process repeated for a while - Kora would point at an object, and say the word for it. Fuutarou would repeat the word. Kora would say the word again, and Fuutarou would practice the word until it was approximately correct. They continued this around the room until he had a vocabulary of about ten words, all of them common household items.
Then, Kora pointed at the table, and said two words.
Fuutarou recognized the first of them as the word for window.
Then, she pointed at the chair, and said two words. The second was the same word. The first was the word for bed. Fuutarou frowned, and then nodded as it clicked: she was attempting to teach him negation - 'not window, not bed'. He pondered for a moment, and then pointed at himself.
"Not Kora", he said with the words he had just learned.
Kora laughed at that, and then pointed at herself.
"Not Fuutarou", she agreed.
They continued in this fashion for another hour, by which point Fuutarou's vocabulary had risen to about thirty words. He had learned basic negation, and also seemingly how to say the equivalent of 'to be'; as in, 'it is a table'. Hardly enough to communicate - but more than he had expected to learn. Of course, memory being a fickle thing, he expected to have forgotten some of the words by the next day. Nevertheless, he was pleased with his own progress.
The purplish-red light outside had long-ago faded to black, and Fuutarou was on the verge of allowing himself to return to sleep, despite Kora's ongoing presence, when the old woman re-entered the room. She spoke in rapid-fire words to Kora, who grimaced, and hurriedly left. She then turned to Fuutarou, pointed at the bed, and then mimed putting her head on the pillow.
That, Fuutarou could understand. He nodded, and lowered his body to the bedding.
The woman left, and he was alone. Exhausted, he laid there, turning the events of the day over in his mind. The language they spoke seemed to be some kind of verb-subject-object language, which he wasn't used to at all - of the two languages he knew, Japanese was a subject-object-verb language, and English was a subject-verb-object language. The lessons he'd learned on linguistics were proving only marginally useful, in that they were only allowing him to classify the language. It was of little practical help.
Before he knew it, he was asleep once more.
Over the course of the next week, he spent many hours with Kora, slowly learning words from her. The girl seemed to delight in teaching him, which was extremely lucky for him. On the third day, she took him outside into the village for a short period of time, pointing at things and telling him the nouns for them. On the fifth, she took him out into the fields around the village, and told him the names of things like 'trees' and 'bushes'.
Or at least, he thought it was bushes, and not the taxonomical name of the plant species. Obviously, there was no way for him to tell.
By the end of the week, Fuutarou was noticing a problem. He had, by now, a passive vocabulary of around four- or five-hundred words, but they were almost all nouns. There was no grammar to connect them. It was like having bones with no tendons or sinew. There was nothing to make the parts he was learning move.
He pondered briefly how to get this point across to Kora, but he couldn't really see how to do so clearly. So he simply attempted to absorb more nouns as best he could, and attempting to listen to the other villagers talk where he could. However, their rapid-fire speech was far too much for him, though there was one ecstatic moment when he recognized the word for "tree" in one of their sentences.
This is difficult, but it isn't impossible. I'll slowly get there... and having a dedicated teacher is making all the difference.
The next week, the old woman started having Fuutarou clean dishes - the beginning of his 'earning his keep', as he had requested. The members of the village usually seemed to have meals together at two long wooden tables in the middle of the circle of huts, the dishware for which were then taken into the big house and cleaned. The only one who was excluded, and didn't eat there, was Fuutarou. He presumed it was due to the language barrier - but there was still something lonely about being the odd one out. He would eat his meals alone in the big house, and then, after breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the dishware was brought into the kitchen, and he would begin to scrub.
"It's not so different from that one job I had at that restaurant," he murmured to himself in Japanese. "I can certainly do this type of work."
Kora had developed a habit of sitting in the room with him as he washed, which confused him to an extent - he was fairly certain at this point that each member of the village had some sort of assigned role they fulfilled. The old woman was some sort of medicine woman, or healer. She was not the chief, however. Some of the burlier men, as well as a few of the stronger women, would till the fields around the village, further away from the ragged edge of the woods. Others would venture out with bow and arrow to hunt for game, leaving early in the morning and returning around midday.
There did not seem to be many people who simply lazed about. If anything, Fuutarou was beginning to suspect that there were only one, who was sitting on a table next to him kicking her feet back and forth, and watching him.
On the fifth day, as he finished the final dish from the communal dinner, he had a sudden thought. He turned to Kora, and said, "Tree?"
Kora looked extremely confused.
Yeah, obviously that would make no sense.
Instead, Fuutarou mimed writing on his hand.
This did not seem to convey any information to her at all, something which Fuutarou found mildly concerning. He suddenly wondered if the people around him were completely illiterate. That was, somehow, a scary thought. Kora was looking at him expectantly, as though waiting for him to continue.
"...Stick?" he said, pulling the word from deep in his memory. She had said the word a week ago, and had not uttered it since. He was pleasantly surprised to find that he remembered it.
She looked confused, but went outside for a moment, and came back with a short stick. Fuutarou took it, and bowed his head to her, a gesture that she seemed to find amusing somehow. He then stepped outside into the pale twilit exterior, and crouched down to the dirt outside the door. Kora followed him, and peered over his shoulder.
They wouldn't have anything like a pen or pencil... but perhaps quills exist? Or ink?
Fuutarou began to draw in the dirt. He was by no means a skilled artist, but he was passable enough due to his interest in geometry. After about a minute, he had a decent representation of a scroll, and a quill. He then pointed down at them, looking back up at Kora. She looked down at them, and then looked back up at him. Then, she said a word he didn't recognize, and walked back into the big house, indicating for Fuutarou to follow.
He stepped inside to see her rummaging about in a cupboard. She couldn't seem to find what she was looking for however, and let out a frustrated sigh. At that moment, the old woman walked into the house, and Kora perked up. The two engaged in a rapid-fire conversation, the old woman turned to look at Fuutarou, and then let out a short bark of laughter. Then, she indicated for Kora and Fuutarou to sit at the table, and hobbled out of the room.
A few minutes later, she came back out with a small bundle of cloths. She placed them down on the table next to Fuutarou, and slowly opened them. Inside of each one appeared to be a scroll. The handles were made of rough wood, and the material itself was parchment of some kind; perhaps sheepskin, or some other herd animal. When she opened one of the parchment scrolls, Fuutarou could see that they were, for the most part, blank. One of them, however, had some kind of writing on it.
The script was a flowing, cursive script. If he were to relate it to a language he had seen before, it seemed almost as though it were a cross between Arabic and Hindi. He wondered if, over time, he would be able to learn to make sense of the squiggles on the page. Presumably, if he became fluent enough in speaking the language, he would be able to go on to learn to read it as well.
Finally, in one of the containers, there was a small ink-well, and a quill which had very clearly seen better days. As the old woman handed it to Fuutarou, he felt his fingertips tingling, and for a brief moment, he wondered if there was magic imbued into the quill. However, after a second or so, the feeling subsided.
Fuutarou dipped the quill in the ink-well, and then held it over one of the blank parchments. He looked over at his two companions, and the old woman nodded her permission. Then, he began to write in Japanese. The first phrase he wrote was the one for which he had requested the material in the first place:
異世界の辞書。
Dictionary of Another World.
He looked down at what he'd written, and then nodded.
I need to make as much preparation as I can... for two reasons. For one, so that I can improve my active vocabulary, and become fluent as quickly as possible. The second, though... I'm going to need to teach Yotsuba if I ever find her.
At that thought, a pang crossed his chest, but he quickly buried it, lest it bury him in turn. The old woman and Kora both stared down at what he had written, clearly perplexed at the Japanese characters. He then slowly began to write down all the words he had learned so far that he remembered off the top of his head - the word in Japanese, and then the equivalent word in the language of the village, written out in katakana. As he did so, he murmured the words under his breath. He had long since begun constructing mnemonics to try and remember the words... but having a physical repository of his knowledge was invaluable.
It may not be flashcards, but this is the next best damn thing.
Over the following weeks, his knowledge of the language began to expand at an accelerated rate as he was able to drill the words he'd learned repeatedly. When one has between twelve to sixteen hours a day with nothing to do but drill vocabulary, one tends to pick up the details fairly quickly. In particular, Kora had grown a bit bored with just repeating nouns at him, and so had started saying actual sentences to him, albeit short ones. From these, he'd finally begun to pick up some of the grammar, though it was still simple. By the end of the second week of making 'flashcards', he was starting to be able to form the barest of sentences. It was still not enough, however, to truly function as a member of the community.
The one-month mark of his presence in the village took him by surprise. It was only as the sun was setting that he realized how much time had passed. On the other hand, Kora and the old woman had apparently not forgotten. The next day, Kora took him out of the house, and had him sit with some of the villagers for the first time as they had lunch.
From a language perspective, it was a trial by fire. Even with Kora there (presumably) reminding them to speak more slowly, they still chatted with one another at breakneck speeds, and mostly seemed to ignore Fuutarou's presence. One of the men, however, seemed to be curiously eyeing him up, and Fuutarou recognized him as the man who had carried him into the big house on his first day in the village. He seemed marginally more friendly than the other villagers, and so Fuutarou decided to be brave.
"What... is name?" He asked, struggling with forming the sentence.
The man seemed to find this amusing, though why that was, Fuutarou wasn't sure. A grin on his face, the man glanced at Kora, and said something quite quickly. Then, he turned back to Fuutarou, and pointed at himself.
"Gryf. I am Gryf."
Gryf... that sounds sort of like a Western name. Maybe short for griffin. Though I suppose it's unrelated. I wonder what it means in their language...?
"Good... to meeting." Fuutarou said, uncertainly.
"Nice to meet you," Kora said, shaking her head.
"Nice to meet you," Fuutarou repeated.
Shit, I knew that.
Over the course of the next few weeks, Fuutarou had lunch with Gryf every few days. He was a fairly reserved man, tending to eat his meals in silence, only making the occasional comment. This was helpful, because a more talkative lunch partner would almost certainly have been overwhelming.
Having the exposure to more speakers of the language was helpful in another way - it had made him realize that Kora's way of speaking was somewhat idiosyncratic. She enunciated her words significantly more than the average villager, a fact whose source Fuutarou was unsure of. It could have been for his sake as a learner, but it seemed that she spoke in that manner to most of the villagers, even as her speech increased (dramatically) in speed.
His best guess was that it had something to do with education level, but he really had no way of telling.
By the end of that second month, Fuutarou's passive vocabulary had reached a size of about four-thousand words, though his active vocabulary was less than half that size. More important, however, was the fact that his grasp of the language's grammar had improved exponentially. He could now form significantly more complex sentences, though he still stumbled while saying them - and his accent was, as far as he could tell, as awful as the day he began speaking the language.
One morning, Kora took him with her into the woods to pick mushrooms and herbs for the old woman's poultices. As they were walking, they were finally at the point where they could make small talk, at least to an extent.
"Did you sleep well, Fuutarou?"
"It was... fine, thank you. How did you sleep, Kora?"
"Like a baby," she grinned, stepping over a tree root. "I fell asleep with the sun."
Fuutarou frowned. "Me too, but... I did not sleep like a baby."
"I didn't wake up with the sun, though. Hehehe."
He rolled his eyes. One thing he'd already learned about Kora was that she loved two things above all else - sleeping in, and good food. Actually, there was a third as well; teasing Gryf, though he still couldn't understand most of what they were saying when they engaged in what he could only assume was banter.
"If you want to sleep like a baby, you must become like a baby, Fuutarou."
"What does that mean?"
"Who knows?" She said, laughing. Then, she bent over, and picked up a mushroom.
They continued walking through the woods, idly chatting as best they could. At one point though, Fuutarou felt a growing urge to address something that had been bothering him.
"Kora?"
"Yes?"
"I have a question."
"Yeeeees?"
"...What is outside the village?"
Kora turned around to look at Fuutarou with a deeply confused look on her face.
"Why are you asking me that? You're from outside the village. Shouldn't you know that?"
"I am from... far-outside. Not close-outside. I don't know what is close-outside."
The construction felt unnatural, but he didn't know the words for distant, nor region. It would have to do.
"Then how did you get here...? Oh well, nevermind. I don't know, Fuutarou."
"You do not know?"
"I was born here," she said simply. "I have never left the village. No one will tell me much about the outside world."
Fuutarou frowned. "If they will not tell you, they will not tell me."
"Maybe. Ask Granny."
'Granny' was how Kora referred to the old woman who, to the best of Fuutarou's estimation, was her mentor. Whether they were in fact biologically related was something he was as of yet unable to ascertain. They certainly didn't look that alike, though their eyes were, somehow, the same - twinkling with an air of mischief.
"You know something...? Anything?"
"What level of-" word he didn't understand "-are you looking for?"
"I did not understand that word."
"Ah. Level of knowing things."
"Hmmm... So it was understanding, I think?"
"Don't ask me, I don't know your words, but sure."
"Oh, ok. Question. This... word body we speak, what is called?"
"What is it called. Not 'what is called'. Also... word body?"
"Thank you. Uh... I do not know the word. So, word body."
She looked at him, and then laughed.
"What is funny?" Fuutarou asked indignantly.
"I just like 'word body'. Hehehe. I think the word you want is language."
"Thank you. Language. I had forgotten. What is this language called?"
"It is just our words. I don't know that it has a name... oh, wait. I think I heard Granny say once that it was called 'Tayernasi'."
Fuutarou turned the taste of the word over in his mouth. Somehow, it felt a bit... different. For the first time, he truly felt like he had a box in which to put this language he was learning in order to survive.
I suppose now I speak Japanese, English... and to a limited extent, this 'Tayernasi'. It vaguely makes me feel like I'm learning Esperanto or something though...
"I think it maybe is only called that by... teachers though," Kora continued. "If there is only the one tongue, why would we need a name?"
"For if there are two," Fuutarou said simply.
"Hmm... Maybe in some far-away places they speak different tongues? Oh, wait, they must, sorry - your tongue."
"It is called Japanese, and I do not think any of your people speak it."
The two continued to talk as they collected mushrooms and herbs, and eventually returned to the village. At lunch, Fuutarou posed the same question to Gryf, but he simply shrugged, and bit into his sandwich.
"Dunno. Outside the village is far. I only know a little bit."
What a goddamned incurious people! Fuutarou cursed in his head.
Finally, that evening, he found the old woman, and attempted to get answers out of her about the surrounding countryside - but her lips were sealed.
"We do not speak of the outside of Foryth Eldi, Fuutarou. This land is a holy land, and those who were born here rarely leave. Outsiders rarely come. We keep to ourselves, and the big lands leave us alone."
While her words didn't answer his question, they were enough to reveal some important facts. First of all, there was some kind of religion to which the land he was on was important. Secondly, the village and Foryth Eldi were, perhaps, not quite the same thing. Finally, he learned that there existed 'great lands' with which the old woman wanted to be thoroughly unacquainted.
Even though he didn't really know any of the other villagers besides Kora, Gryf, and the old woman - or 'Granny', as he too had begun to think of her - he began talking to them as well in hopes that one of them would, perhaps, be able to give him answers about the wider world.
The responses were always the same, though.
"Dunno."
"I do not care about the outside."
"Who needs that stuff?"
As the days passed and Fuutarou remained unable to obtain any sort of cogent answer, he grew more and more frustrated. He was convinced that the village chief and Granny both knew the answers to his questions, but they both refused to share. In fact, the village chief had scarcely said a word to him since he had arrived. He was a tall, burly man with a large moustache, and he usually acted as though Fuutarou didn't exist.
About a week later, he was in the middle of washing the dishes, when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned back around to see the old woman standing behind him.
"Yes?"
"I have a question for you, Fuutarou."
"...Yes?"
"You are able to read and to write."
"Yes."
"Can you use-" word that he didn't know.
"I do not know that word."
The woman indicated counting on her fingers.
"Ah. You ask if I know mathematics, yes?"
"I do not know this... mathematics, but the teaching of-" word he didn't know, but was presumably the equivalent of 'math' "-is not common. If you know it, I would like your help."
"I do. I know very strong... mathematics."
"Very strong?"
"I do not know the word. I have big power in mathematics."
The old woman nodded, perhaps only to herself, and then a slight mischievous look appeared in her eyes.
"What is two-hundred fifty-seven plus five-hundred eighty-five?"
"Eight-hundred forty-two," Fuutarou replied after a moments' pause and a quick mental calculation. He silently thanked his past self, who had insisted on having Kora teach him their numbering system as soon as he'd had enough vocabulary to assert himself. The old woman looked impressed, which struck Fuutarou as somewhat amusing - it was, after all, elementary school level math.
I've studied integral and differential calculus... but the thing that will be relevant here is arithmetic. There's something funny about that... and also deeply depressing.
Over the next few days, the old woman began getting Fuutarou to keep ledgers. Ledgers of how much meat had been hunted, ledgers of how much food had been harvested, and also ledgers of how much of the accumulated stock had been depleted each day. It was somewhat mindless word, but that didn't particularly bother Fuutarou - the work was, after all, preferable to having to go hunt in the woods.
In the weeks that followed, Fuutarou began developing an unexpected problem - he began developing insomnia. Every time he would attempt to sleep, his mind would wander to Yotsuba, and his heart would break. It would also, occasionally, turn to her sisters, and the pang would be strong there as well. After all, while he certainly didn't harbour any romantic feelings for the others, he loved them nonetheless.
I have no clue if I'll ever see them again...
He wasn't sure if these anxieties were being broadcast to his face and his body language, but Kora took to spending more time with him as the insomnia grew worse. One day, almost three months to the day since he had landed in the forest, Kora pulled him aside. By this point, with practicing twelve to sixteen hours a day, his speech was more fluid, though certainly still rudimentary. If he had to estimate, he would have guessed that he had more than a thousand hours of practice time under his belt.
"Fuutarou," she said, "I was talking with Granny..."
"Dangerous," Fuutarou said, smirking. Kora rolled her eyes.
"Oh no, you have jokes now. What have I done?"
"I am dangerous with... jokes too."
"Ha ha. I was talking with Granny, and we both agree that you should learn some magic."
Her statement caught Fuutarou completely off-guard. He still had trouble accepting the fact that magic, however one wished to define it, existed in this world - the idea that he could theoretically use it was even more baffling. He had vowed to determine the way magic worked, but somehow it hadn't properly occurred to him that, in order to understand magic, he would need to learn to use it.
"I am... happy. Happy to learning. Ah, no it is 'learn'. Not learning."
Kora nodded. "I'll take you into the woods to practice tomorrow."
"Why woods?"
She winked. "In case you explode."
Fuutarou had only learned the word explode a couple of weeks before after a very unfortunate incident where Kora had decided she was too lazy to try and light the fireplace manually, and so had tried to do it with magic. The fireplace had proceeded to explode, and so too had Kora's eyebrows... another word he'd learned as he laughed at her.
Now, the word seemed far less humorous.
"...Will I explode?"
"Who knows...?"
Kora sauntered away, and for a moment, the resemblance to Ichika was uncanny. Fuutarou shook his head, and then scowled, returning to his work on the ledgers.
I would prefer to not explode if at all possible. It seems quite discomfiting. Also, painful.
One of the downsides of his overall unfamiliarity of the world was that he was fairly certain Kora was joking... but there was no way he could be entirely sure. It was best to be safe, and assume that she was serious, and so he attempted to emotionally steel himself.
The insomnia reached its peak that night. Throughout the hours and hours of darkness, Fuutarou tossed and turned, unconsciousness evading him as though he had the plague. For the few moments when sleep did reach him, he had nightmares: indistinct images of Yotsuba falling through an inky darkness, and something dark and evil beyond his ken reaching for her, tendrils of shadow wrapping and pulling and tearing and ripping and-
He snapped awake, cold sweat coating his back and chest. Panting, he sat up, the room pitch-black save the dull light of the moon and stars coming in through the window. His heart pounding, Fuutarou slid out of bed, and went to stand next to the window. The moon was high in the sky, and with its full glow, he could vaguely make out the gently-swaying sight of the village's crops.
I never want to see something like that again. I'm so scared to find out what happened to Yotsuba... but what if I never find out? How can I handle going the entire rest of my life without knowing?
It was a question to which, even when the sun cracked over the horizon, a sleepless Fuutarou had no answer. The shapeless fear was omniscient, and he couldn't shake it, no matter how hard he tried.
When Kora eventually came to collect him, she stopped sort of the sight of him.
"Wow... you look like shit."
"Thank you," Fuutarou said drily. "Sleep was no."
Kora gave him a sympathetic look, and then took him outside to grab some food before their journey. As they ate, Gryf sat next to them.
"Are you teaching Fuutarou magic?" he asked
"I'm going to try."
"Why won't you teach me though?"
"Because you're just not a special enough boy, Gryf," Kora teased. Gryf frowned.
"How do I become a special enough boy?"
"I could tell you, but then I would have to kill you."
Gryf returned to his sandwich with a sad look on his face, and Fuutarou suddenly felt immensely bad for the large man. He glanced over at Kora, and she got a vaguely guilty look on her face, but then shrugged, as if to say 'it is what it is'. Then, she got up, and went to prepare supplies.
An hour later, Kora had gathered food and water in a waterskin, as well as a bow and arrows, which she handed to Fuutarou - a useless gesture, as he'd never fired a bow in his life. When he informed her as such, she merely raised an eyebrow, and took the bow back, handing the water and food to him.
He wasn't sure whether to be insulted, or relieved.
The pair made their way across the bramble field, and into the forest. They walked for several hours - further than Fuutarou had ever been. At one point, about forty minutes in, they passed by a clearing which he was fairly certain had been the location where he landed - but with Kora's ground-eating pace, it was all he could do to keep up. He most certainly was not about to start wandering off to reminisce.
Finally, four hours later, the trees cleared, and Fuutarou found himself at the edge of a small lake - really, closer to being a pond. The trees encircled the place, but stopped at least twenty metres away from the waters' edge on each side, giving space to circumambulate, if one chose to do so.
Fuutarou did not choose to do so. He was freaking tired.
"Why did we walk so far?" he asked, panting.
"To be alone," Kora said simply. "Magic is secret."
Fuutarou nodded. That, at least, made sense.
"So... what do I need to do?"
"I will show you."
Kora opened her mouth, and a single note rang out - from Fuutarou's limited musical knowledge, it sounded like a middle C. She then indicated for Fuutarou to do that same, an invitation which made him freeze.
I've never seriously sung before. What the heck am I supposed to do?
She indicated again, and he sighed.
I suppose I have no choice.
Fuutarou opened his mouth, and attempted to hit the same note, though lowered an octave. As he did so, something stirred in his gut. He wasn't quite sure what it was - and when he cut off the note, the feeling went away.
"Good. Now, close your eyes, and visualize something."
Fuutarou closed his eyes, and briefly wondered what to visualize. Then, he decided to do something simple, and just imagine a small smattering of water falling from the sky.
"Now... sing, and allow that thing to become real."
Fuutarou frowned, his eyes still closed. Those were immensely vague instructions. He opened his mouth, and tentatively sang the note again... and then the feeling in his gut returned. However, with the visualized image in mind, the pull was stronger, and then suddenly a feeling raced through his core, and into his throat, and a sensation took him, like he was almost about to cry, or laugh, or shiver, or-
Fuutarou suddenly realized he was singing in a voice that he had never known he was capable of making.
It was a beautiful baritone, deep and rich, with layers and layers and layers to it. The song itself didn't quite have words to it, though what words he was singing were certainly in Japanese, and not Tayernasi. Nevertheless, he could feel the nature around him reacting to his words and his voice. For the second time in his life, he felt as though there were voices that could only be heard without his ears, harmonizing to his voice - a soprano, and an alto, a vibrato on top of his notes that gave them an almost... hazy feeling, like a vision seen only through a mist.
The song grew louder, and louder, and as the crescendo reached its maximum, suddenly Fuutarou heard a whistling sound. It began at a low pitch, almost indiscernible, but then grew higher and higher. It almost sounded like...
"Fuutarou! Watch out!"
It was a Doppler shift. His eyes snapped open, and he looked around him just in time to see something smash into the lake from the sky at an extremely high velocity. There was a boom, and a plume of water sprayed about forty feet into the air, raining down all around the lake - and making real the vision that had appeared in his mind, though of course significantly more violently, and not at all how he had imagined it. A flock of birds took flight from nearby boughs, and the sound wave caused the trees to shake.
"What the hell was that?" he muttered. After a few moments, he started slowly walking toward the lake to investigate...
Then, his mind went blank.
His body moved on its own, immediately breaking into a full-on sprint, the most desperate sprint he had ever experienced in his life. He could feel his emotions coming up into his throat, choking him, as he ran, slipped and fell on the muddy bank, and then got up and kept running. Then, he could hold it in no longer - and he flung his arms around the person who had emerged from the lake, drenched.
"Yotsuba!" He cried, squeezing her tightly, his voice hoarse and broken, the pain of three months leaking out. "Oh my god, you're alive!"
"Eh? Uesugi-san, I'm- I'm happy you're hugging me, but of course I'm alive - why... wouldn't I..."
Yotsuba suddenly looked around, and her eyes widened.
"...Wait. Where... where are we?"
Then she looked at Fuutarou, who was still wrapped around her, bewildered.
"Uesugi-san... what's going on?"