The Thursday before Hachiman is to check out Kamiki the Elder's inherited collection of potentially extremely concerning artifacts, he's walking home accompanied by the floating woman. It's then that she does something she hadn't before.
Along a deserted stretch of pavement, next to a quiet road, there's some weeds growing out of a crack in the pavement. The woman lands beside them, and she crouches down, to stare intently at the weeds with her arms around her knees.
"What now?" Hachiman demands, vaguely intimidated.
"These are nettles," the woman tells him, without looking up. "Nettles are the plant that the people you call the Stoneworkers associated with me. I took them on as a symbol."
Hachiman's eyes widen. His hand darts to wrap around the opposite forearm. "So on the tattoo, those are…?"
"Nettles," the woman repeats.
Hachiman swallows. Somewhere, a crow caws into the light of the dying day, like it's laughing.
"Hey," Hachiman says, but it comes out a little choked up. He coughs into a fist to clear his throat. Tries again. "Hey. When you fly off, what do you end up doing?"
The woman doesn't answer right away.
Hachiman hazards, "Are you looking for the others?"
The woman sighs and, unhurried, takes back to the air, to hover a bit off the ground and contemplate Hachiman down her nose.
"Honestly," says the woman, "As much as I want to see them again, there's still too much I don't know about this world. Before I can start to seriously look for everyone, I need to make up my own mind about the way things are now."
A wind blows through them, picking up Hachiman's bangs and the woman's pigtails. Hachiman hadn't noticed before, but she's pretty like a picture is pretty, with an uncanny symmetry to her face and impossibly manageable hair. Even now, though, more so than that she's pretty, it's the melancholy of the woman, of it all, that strikes him.
It must be tough, being an adult.
Far above, the sky is yellow-pink like melting ice cream, veiled only with a flimsy film of wispy clouds. It's the kind of sky his younger, middle school self would've had a field day with, especially with a floating, invisible god right in front of him. There's still a part of Hachiman that really is giddy about it, despite everything, even against the chill of the season, but there's an uncomfortable lump in his stomach like a weight.
"That doesn't really answer my first question," Hachiman observes.
The woman glares at him. "I'm not going to answer it."
Hachiman should've expected a reaction like that, but somehow, it stings, and he's so surprised that he jolts, and blinks at the woman. She blinks back at him, surprised with his reaction in turn.
Awkwardly, Hachiman tries to laugh it off, eyes anywhere but on the woman and reaching to scratch the back of his head. "I guess I shouldn't pry into your…"
"That's not it," the woman interrupts, cutting him off. She crosses her arms and shakes her head. "I don't mind if you're curious. Anyone would be, in your situation, and as a matter of principle, I'm never going to discourage you from questioning the world as it appears to you."
Hachiman's hands are weirdly clammy. More so than usual, anyway. "So then…?"
"I didn't get a choice in having you for my high priest, but you didn't get a choice in being my high priest, either." She scowls. "Inherently, Hachiman, in some way or another, involvement with a god is going to change the way you live your life. The only thing you get even a semblance of a choice in is the extent to which that's going to be true." The woman pins him with a look, like he's an insect on a corkboard. "I'm not going to do anything that could become your problem. Beyond that, is there anything you feel that you really want to know?"
Hachiman stares at the woman, drawing a blank.
What kind of person would he have to be, to assure the God of Repulsion without even thinking about it that he wanted to know more, damn the consequences? That's what he was trying to get at in the first place, isn't it? Probably, he would have to be someone like Hayato Hayama, who puts his friendships first not because he's afraid or desperate, but because he was naturally able to conclude that there's nothing more important than the connections he's made. Or someone like Yukinoshita, maybe, who barges into other people's lives like a bull into a china shop, utterly committed to her harebrained ideals.
But Hachiman is Hachiman.
For the rest of the way home, there isn't anything else that he and the woman talk about. Hachiman does, though, feel a bit better when she's still determined to have him keep to his new routine of exercising when he gets back to the house.
He then feels, immediately, like a huge idiot about the whole thing, but that's not really up to anyone.
XXX
Hachiman almost cancels his plans with Kamiki the Elder. He would have canceled them, in fact, except that he's so taken with brooding, he forgets he's made them until nearly the end of Friday's school hours. By that point, it's too late.
Soon enough, Hachiman finds himself in front of Kamiki the Elder's place, with the woman floating to one side of him. The house itself is perfectly ordinary, of average size for a suburban home, and Hachiman wonders if Kamiki the Elder had inherited it from his grandfather along with the collection.
The collection, of which Hachiman already knows nothing at all can be wholly ordinary anymore. For one, there's the woman.
Hachiman pulls his school bag more firmly onto his shoulder by the strap, grits his teeth, and closes the rest of the distance to Kamiki the Elder's door. With the woman at his back, he rings the doorbell.
Kamiki the Elder had, naturally, been expecting him, so it's not long before he opens the door.
"Hikigaya," Kamiki the Elder greets, his smile politely approachable enough not quite to rival Hayama's, but then, adults by default don't scan to Hachiman as especially approachable. "Thanks for coming." Kamiki the Elder steps aside to let Hachiman through. Begrudgingly, Hachiman does as he's expected to do. "Can I get you anything? Tea, coffee?"
"Uh," says Hachiman. "I'm good."
Kamiki the Elder accepts this easily. He leads the way up to the second floor, where there's a hatch in the corridor's ceiling, already open. From it, a built-in stepladder has been let down, and Hachiman and Kamiki the Elder take it up into the attic. The woman just floats up through the ceiling, as one does.
Kamiki the Elder goes before Hachiman, and near the top, holds out a hand in offer to help Hachiman the rest of the way. Hachiman grimaces and awkwardly accepts, blinded by Kamiki the Elder's model citizen aura and unable to meet his eyes. In trying to make it less obvious that he's avoiding eye contact, Hachiman has a surreptitious look around the room.
It's just about everything Hachiman would imagine of an attic, cramped and full of boxes, but not particularly dusty. It doesn't surprise Hachiman that Kamiki the Elder had kept the room clean, since besides the boxes, Hachiman also spies various artifacts from different cultures carefully strewn across shelves and the boxes themselves, most of which he's confident just at a glance to be replicas. The only really odd thing about Kamiki the Elder's attic, really, is the green-haired woman floating in it.
Or at least, that's what Hachiman thinks, until he attempts to look directly at Kamiki the Elder again. Until he attempts it, and winds up looking behind him.
Hachiman's mouth falls open, horrified.
Kamiki the Elder smiles crookedly at him, a little helplessly, and gestures vaguely at the stone slab behind him.
The stone slab, which is missing its carving.
"As you can see," Kamiki the Elder says, "I seem to have misplaced a god."
The god in question ignores him, and Hachiman too, for that matter. Studiously blank-faced, the woman hovers over to inspect some of the boxes next to her slab.
Hachiman snaps out of it. "It wasn't like that when I left the storage room," he just straight-up lies.
Kamiki the Elder nods, but Hachiman doesn't know if that means Kamiki the Elder actually believes him. Kamiki the Elder loops his thumbs in his pants pockets and regards the slab. He tells Hachiman, "I thought maybe, since it's just a replica, it was a screen the whole time, rather than a real carving. I don't know why it's malfunctioning like this, though, and after all this time. I kinda figured I might've accidentally hit it on something when I was moving it, and that's why."
"Maybe," Hachiman agrees, unconvincingly. His throat is dry.
Kamiki the Elder shakes his head. "It's too bad, but I might be out of luck. No one seems to know anything about it, and I even tried posting about it on a forum I found."
The woman whips around to be glaring at Kamiki the Elder, wide-eyed and back to her full height in the air, her hands fists at her sides. For one sudden, horrible moment, it's as if there's a weight not only in Hachiman's stomach, but on his shoulders, inside his skull, like gravity bearing down. Then, in the next breath, the woman hisses an exhale, and it's gone.
Kamiki the Elder coughs. He tacks onto the end of his last sentence, a bit strained, "No dice."
The woman orders, "Tell him to delete that post."
"You have to delete it," Hachiman complies immediately, hoarse.
Kamiki the Elder startles. He looks at Hachiman in askance. "Huh?"
"Your post," Hachiman reiterates. The woman's eyes are terrible pinpricks of blue, boring holes into him. "You have to delete it."
Kamiki the Elder opens his mouth like he'll prompt Hachiman for more of an explanation, but then he looks from Hachiman to the stone slab and back again. Kamiki the Elder contemplates Hachiman, but not for long.
"Alright," Kamiki the Elder says. He leaves the attic, presumably to get to his computer.
Hachiman grits his teeth and balls his hands into cold, clammy fists.
"What the hell was that?" Hachiman demands of the woman. "Now there's no way I can pretend it's got nothing to do with me."
But even as he gives the words voice, he's already thinking, No. No, Kamiki has to delete that post. He shouldn't have ever made it in the first place. If this god isn't the only one that's awake, if there's anyone else who knows about them, there's people out there who would do anything for proximity to this kind of power. It's like the floor's bottomed out underneath him. Hachiman covers his mouth with his hand, nauseous. The internet is forever. Just how many corporate scrapers have already found Kamiki's post?
Hachiman can feel himself begin to panic. What the woman says, though, isn't any of what he'd come up with on his own.
"The Stoneworkers, as you call them, are the ones we had an agreement with," she reminds Hachiman. She crosses her arms. "But they're all gone. If any of the others are awake, and if they find out that this person might know where another god is, I don't know what they might decide the best thing to do is."
Which is awful in its own right. Hachiman hadn't even considered that.
The thing is, though, that the woman hates people. Her opinion of humans, Hachiman knows, is amazingly low. Ever since she'd popped back out into the world, she's been constantly complaining to Hachiman about what people are like, what their civilization is like, and how they're inclined to hurt themselves and each other.
So why isn't she bringing it up? Even if a god would obviously be more dangerous than a human, there's many more humans in the world, and aren't they infinitely more likely to come across Kamiki the Elder's post?
For the first time, Hachiman lets himself look up at the God of Repulsion, know that she's real, and remember: this is a creature who isn't human. Who is very old, who does not die, and who's watched the births and deaths of empires.
He feels himself on a precipice, between the world he knows, and this other one. The world he knows, where life makes sense and all of his problems are still real, but in the grand scheme of things, very small. And then this world, full of monsters that he can only comprehend because there's a brand on his forearm forcing him to. This world, in which Hachiman is very small and his problems are existential.
She's keeping quiet on purpose.
And moreover, she knows that Hachiman knows. She has to. She knows that he knows, and she knows that he knows she knows, and still, she says nothing. The woman contemplates him down her nose, impassive.
Hachiman doesn't have it in him to pry justifications out of her.
Soon but not soon enough, Kamiki the Elder returns, and as he's coming up the ladder, he gives Hachiman a thumbs up. For lack of a better reaction, Hachiman makes a thumbs up back at him. Kamiki the Elder doesn't mention the stone slab again, and instead, he goes over to the boxes that the woman had been poking at, crouching down beside them.
"My great grandpa and then my grandpa collected all kinds of antiques," Kamiki the Elder says, conversational, as if none of that weirdness from before had happened. "So I don't actually know how much Stoneworker stuff there is in here, at the end of the day. I can't tell just by looking."
Hachiman, glad for the change in subject, goes over there to peer over Kamiki the Elder's shoulder. He half expects the woman to do much the same, but when she doesn't get any closer, there's a part of him that's relieved. When he realizes, his gut does something acrobatic about it, but Hachiman isn't sure what it means for him.
Kamiki the Elder sets one box aside and opens the other. From it, he retrieves a mask, which he twists around to hold up to Hachiman. Hachiman hesitates, but he takes the mask to examine.
The mask is smooth, sort of like those you'd find for sale at a summer festival, but the material is heavier. Hachiman doesn't think it's stone, but if it's plastic, he can't tell. It has two horns, like an ogre's, and a sky blue line bisecting its center vertically. The rest of the mask is yellow, and most notably, it has no eye holes.
"It's just a replica," the woman informs Hachiman.
That, too, is a relief, and Hachiman doesn't feel even slightly guilty for it. He waves the mask at Kamiki the Elder.
"We don't know what these masks were for, but they're Stoneworker artifacts," Hachiman, in turn, informs Kamiki the Elder. "They turn up in museums sometimes, so there's pictures online. I don't think this one's real, though. The blue part's supposed to be… something like colored glass, I think, but this one's just painted on."
"Do we know what the Stoneworkers used them for?" Kamiki the Elder asks.
Hachiman shrugs and gives the mask back to Kamiki the Elder. "We think priests wore them, but that's about it."
"High priests," the woman corrects.
Hachiman chokes, discreetly. Kamiki the Elder, who can't perceive the woman, turns the mask over in his hand.
"Huh," Kamiki the Elder says. He puts it back in the box. "Cool."
From there, they go over most of the rest of Kamiki the Elder's grandpa's old stuff. The majority of it isn't anything to do with the Stoneworkers, so Hachiman knows less about it, but even the things that are in the Stoneworkers' style are from the nineteenth century at best, according to the woman.
"It's kind of a relief," Kamiki the Elder admits, as he's cracking open the last box. It's pretty small, about the size of a cookie tin. "If I found out I had a genuine artifact right under my nose, I wouldn't feel right keeping it. I'd want it to go to a museum, or something. But if it's just a bunch of normal antiques, that's not so much pressure."
Hachiman makes a non-committal noise of concord somewhere in his throat. He and Kamiki the Elder take a look at the contents of the box, which consist only of a small, cylindrical tube. It's the same green as the woman's green, accented with the same grays and whites as her clothes, and carved with details that are the same striking blue as her inhuman eyes.
Hachiman is instantly suspicious. Kamiki the Elder picks the tube up so that they can both see it better.
"That one," the woman says, "Is real." She adds, "And it's mine."
Hachiman swallows.
"It's definitely Stoneworker," he tells Kamiki the Elder. He adds, lying, "But I don't recognize this one. If I've seen it before, I don't remember where."
Except that in reality, Hachiman had recognized the tube on sight, which is fairly embarrassing. Still, archeologists don't know what it was for. Probably ritual purposes, but that's just historian for, we have no idea what that thing is.
Of course, the woman would know, though. She'd been there for when this tube was in use, after all.
And if Hachiman doesn't find a way to get Kamiki the Elder to let him take that tube, the woman is going to steal it. Hachiman doesn't need to be implicated in something like that.
Hachiman musters his resolve and goes on, "I've got some books at home I could cross-reference it with, if you let me borrow it."
Kamiki the Elder considers him. Hachiman doesn't actually have any books about the Stoneworkers, everything he's learnt about them is either from the internet or firsthand from one of their gods, but Kamiki the Elder doesn't need to know that.
"You don't think this one's real either?" Kamiki the Elder asks Hachiman.
"No," Hachiman says, and it's even true. Hachiman really doesn't think that the tube is real. He knows it's real.
"Alright," Kamiki the Elder allows, after a beat. He offers Hachiman the tube. "You can just drop it off with Miki at school, once you're done with it."
Hachiman nods and, cautiously, he takes the tube. He doesn't actually really want it, and once it's in his grip, he's terribly aware of its mass, of the geometric grooves carved into its surface. But right now, he wants to leave things in the woman's hands even less.
Hachiman pockets the tube. Since it had been the last item Kamiki the Elder had for him to look at, and since it's starting to get pretty late, Hachiman should be getting home, and Kamiki the Elder sees him to the door, pursued by the invisible god. At the threshold, Hachiman and the woman to one side and Kamiki the Elder on the other, Hachiman and Kamiki the Elder make their politely stilted farewells. The woman is just there, disconnected as she usually is from the earth, her back to Hachiman's and glaring into the increasingly blue-black sky.
"I really do appreciate you taking the time to come and look at Grandpa's things," Kamiki the Elder says. "It's nice to know what at least a few of them were supposed to be for, when the Stoneworkers were still around. I'm not really a history guy, but it's still cool."
Hachiman nods, awkward. "Sure. And…" He scratches the back of his head. "I'll let you know about that tube thing."
Except that, ideally, he'll find some way not to have to. Maybe he should tell Kamiki the Younger, later, that he'd lost track of it. Hachiman doesn't think that Kamiki the Elder is invested enough to take him to court for it, and the Kamikis' opinions of him aren't really of any import.
Kamiki the Elder nods back at him. Hachiman would feel bad for lying to him, but in all honesty, Hachiman is probably doing him a favor by separating him from the woman's property. Kamiki the Elder says, "Thanks. There's no rush, though." And, "See you around, Hikigaya."
"Yeah," says Hachiman, eager to get away. He nods again, nebulously, and turns to make his escape.
Hachiman is just barely to the yard gate when Kamiki the Elder calls, "Wait."
Hachiman freezes. Woodenly, he glances over his shoulder, where Kamiki the Elder is watching him with an expression that isn't precisely complicated, but which Hachiman can't read. A sort of neutral grimace.
"Just one more thing, Hikigaya," Kamiki the Elder starts. "About what you said before, about the post that I…" He trails off. Then, he grins, self-deprecatingly lopsided. "Nevermind. I already deleted it, so I guess it doesn't really matter."
For a third time, Hachiman nods, and hurries off before Kamiki the Elder can change his mind, the woman in Hachiman's wake.
I hope he thinks I'm just a huge weirdo, Hachiman pleads with the universe. I really, really hope he just thinks I'm a huge weirdo.
It isn't quite a prayer.
XXX
Note: I ended up winning that contest I was in, so thank you to anyone who voted! And thank you for reading this far!