Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

i.

There’s a person sneaking by the shrines.

What the hell, the spirit thinks. He pulls off his hannya mask to peer closer—and yeah, there it is. That’s a human all right, sneaking towards the smaller shrines like the area’s not closed off for the night, instead of staying in the summer festival crowd and buying up the shaved ice he and the Sunshine girls worked so hard on.

Time to stop them before their itchy little human fingers went around nabbing shit that wasn’t theirs.

“Hannya-san!” Yuki-chan hisses. “Don’t leave the stand! We need you here!”

Maybe they do; maybe they don’t. Yuki’s the one fretting over his mask, insisting it’s far too scary for a summer festival and that it’s terrifying would-be customers away. (What was he going to do? Replace his actual mask for the gimmicky plastic throwaway garbage humans go for nowadays? No wonder the world is going to shit.)

“The lot of ya can manage,” he insists. What could a yuki onna do if not conjure up snow and ice? “An’ I’m only gonna be a tick!”

He follows.

ii.

The interloper is a tourist. He recognises those clothes – yukata rentals are the same year-round, since he’s the one dropping off the old wardrobe the Sunshine girls don’t use into the shrine’s rental store. She’s come prepared: one hand carries an electric torch, a plastic bag holding offerings looped around her wrist; her other hand holds a cane, tapping the ground cautiously as she goes.

Ah, that’s a pity.

Now he has to be nice to her. Blind people have it tough, even before they get terrorised by a grumpy spirit.

“Lady,” he starts, “I’m thinkin’ ya ain’t meant to be here.”

She shrieks and swings her cane at him.

Be nice to her, the spirit reminds himself while he dodges the cane going for his face. For a blind girl, she wields the cane stunningly well.

But being only half-blind with one working eye is advantage enough. He steps aside when she over-swings and nearly topples over her own feet. Her geta are rented, unsteady and unfamiliar. He isn’t that cruel (whatever it is said about him) (not to blind girls at least); he catches her before she goes down, with his hands tight around her shoulders.

“Yer not gettin’ into trouble—”

Under his hands, her shoulders are thin and shaking. Her torch clatters to the ground. Her bag of offerings swing, knocking against his arm – he hopes for the trouble this is worth, nothing inside breaks or spills.

“C’mon, yer really not,” he sighs. “Just come back in the mornin’."

“I… was allowed.”

She’s cowering from him when she says it. The dark might be scary enough for the blind, but it can only be scarier still alone with a stranger in the night.

“Really. I was going to leave an offering like normal, but one of the shrine attendants said that mine would be better received at night, and I thought… it couldn’t hurt when they said the more dedicated supplicants… did the same too.”

“Yeah?” he grumbles.

His heart lifts all the same. He likes it when they do this.

He’ll be nice to the shrine attendants later. Let them win big at mahjong next week, then watch them waste the money away on expensive booze and fancy women before they come back to work, come back to him.

Back to the matter at hand. Dedicated supplicants or not, he’s not risking humans nicking things from the shrine, not when the offerings are so generous today, in that there’s an offering at all. A white ceramic flask of sake with matching cups sits unattended, waiting to be retrieved.

He goes for her fallen torch and wonders, absently, how severe her blindness might be if she still needs a torch for the dark.

The beam swings up into her face. The blind girl backs away, startled.

That’s real shit of him, blinding already-blind women like this, even by accident. Under torchlight, she’s very pretty, made prettier with summer yukata and a flower pinned to her hair. She has dark wide eyes, turned unseeing towards him, and hair cut short to skim her jawline.

She’s more than just pretty. She looks like—

“Mirei-chan?”

And then she shakes her head. The illusion breaks.

Mirei never had that softness to her face. Mirei prefers her lipstick just a shade lighter.

(He shouldn’t start being cruel to her, just because she isn’t Mirei.)

“I’m sorry,” she says towards the ground. For intruding? For not being who he wanted her to be? “I’ll… I’ll come back in the morning.”

And what if she doesn’t?

He pulls the torch back when she reaches for it.

“Tell you what—yer right. It is real dedicated of ya, showin’ up like this. Let’s get ya sorted, lady.”

iii.

It’s a pathetic thing, setting up offerings on a human’s behalf, but it gives him a moment to think while he rummages through her bag. She holds the torch while he lays out her offerings: a Styrofoam box of takoyaki (sauce unspilled, a miracle in and of itself) and a takeaway bottle of sake, branded in royal blue with the words ONE CUP OZEKI.

It’s not a very fancy offering, but it’s not a very fancy shrine she’s making it to. The hokora in this corner of the grounds play second fiddle to the shrine for the Sunshine girls, kami for women on the matters of medicine and commerce and family raising and happy marriages, and who definitely are doing well and good at their shaved ice stand now that his mask isn’t scaring people off.

(And if they aren’t, he’s never going to hear the end of it from Yuki-chan.)

This shrine doesn’t get dusty or cobwebby, but it’s no one’s first choice. Most people don’t make wishes like these.

“When yer ready,” he tells her. And then, because he wants an excuse, he adds, “Oi, not there. You’re standin’ in the wrong place.”

She’s not. But she’s blind and the shrine is still a shadowy blur to her. The only thing she does once he steers her in front of the shrine, with his hands lingering at her shoulders for a moment longer than he should, and the torch handed over to him to keep her hands free, is to thank him, soft and solemn.

Mirei never sounded like that – that quiet, with a voice that could disappear into the night like the blinking of a firefly.

He shifts the torch in his hand, laying his palm over where hers had been. The plastic is still warm. He wonders what her hand would feel like, folded into his.

The blind girl bows twice, deeply, with an elegant straight back, then claps her hands together twice.

He counts backwards from ten, long enough for her prayer to be made. “Hey, lady. Ya know which kami it is that yer prayin’ to, right?”

“I… Yes?” Her voice is questioning.

He’d like to be sure. He waits.

A moment of silence ticks over, and then she says, “The lord of the night.”

(He likes the way she says that, the name so reverent and solemn on her tongue. Could stand to hear her say it a few more times actually.)

“Didn’t think the likes of you,” he waves his hand over her; no matter if she can’t see it, “would be praying to the likes of him an’ all.”

“I know what he serves.” Under the politeness, there’s a curl of frustration. “I need his luck.”

His luck? It’s been a long time since he’s heard it phrased so. The lord of the night is for luck—good luck at the gambling tables, ill luck for foes, the questionable sort of luck for salvaging floundering businesses and failing relationships. She looks too sensible to be the gambling type or the big spending type, so some boyfriend’s probably left her. If she wanted something to put her at ease, she’d be praying to the Sunshine girls to learn how to be happy in the aftermath of that; if she wanted him returned at any cost, she’ll ask the lord of the night to fetch him back.

“His luck’s nothin’ good,” he offers. “Hell, I had some of it and…”

Well. The less said, the better.

He claps a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s get ya back t’ the festival, miss. Got this great shaved ice stand I think you’ll like, the girls runnin’ it make some top-notch stuff—”

She hasn’t moved, rooted in place, like a jizo statue.

When he turns back, she’s staring at the shrine as if all her hopes are pinned on it. Her wide dark eyes hold unshed tears. Her mouth is a hard line, closed around her unspoken grief.

“Haw? Miss—”

“My brother’s gone.”

That’s vengeance beneath the sorrow. The quiet politeness is her shield to put people at ease; beneath that, he can recognise that single-minded determination: revenge and nothing else.

“My brother’s gone,” she repeats, pulling away from his hand. She shakes her head like she’s clearing it of any thought that distracts her from what she came here for. “And the people who are responsible—none of them have answered for it. None of them, and none of them ever will unless—”

There are enough men in the world who are above the rule of human law, beyond the reach of hired killers, wealthy enough to having bureaucrats dancing in their hands. Very few are higher than a kami, even one of a tiny hokora which sees more days without offerings than with.

“—unless the lord of the night goes off an’ makes ‘em all pay?”

It’s so easy for the offer to come to mind. So easy too, to clasp his hands around her shoulders and pull her towards him. She stumbles on her geta and crumples against his chest. He can’t possibly let her trip now, with his arm looped steady around her waist.

She blinks up at him with her wide dark eyes like she knows. His body holds no heat, never mind a heartbeat.

Her mouth is trembling. (He wonders if it’s like Mirei’s.) “Yes,” she breathes. “Yes.”

And because something like this is greater than what a box of festival takoyaki and takeaway sake can buy, he adds, “An’ what are yer offerin’ fer that?”

Her eyes close against the dark. “Anything.”

Her torch hits the ground. They’re already gone by then.

Chapter Text

iv.

There’s someone stroking her hair.

Makoto hasn’t been mothered for so long, but it’s like she’s home. With her parents, half a lifetime ago. With Lee, who hovered at her bedside when she woke in the throes of a nightmare.

There’s also someone arguing in the background.

That’s not home. Her grandfather only ever had sullen silence for her at the end. Lee never dared raise his voice around her.

“Ah, there you are, miss.” The voice is too cultured to be her mother’s—her mother’s Japanese never got to be that good. Its owner is mopping the tears from her face. “You gave us a fright, when we came back to find hannya-san having brought you here. It’s best you return home now.”

Home, Makoto wants to say. I don’t know where that is.

Instead, she manages, “Hannya-san?”

“The shady loudmouth one over there,” someone else huffs. Her frustration is evident. “He says you were at his shrine, but really, what an awful excuse to make to justify a kidnapping.”

The shrine for the lord of the night. And the stranger she ran into in the dark, who helped lay down her offerings, who asked her what she would do for her vengeance—

“I haven’t been kidnapped.” If they send her back, the opportunity will be all but gone. She gathers her muddled thoughts together (where is she? who are they? what is happening?) and settles for, “Don’t send me away, please. I want to… I need to be here.”

The arguing cuts off and a chorus of protests rises up—“Miss, you really shouldn’t,” and “Hannya-san’s being an idiot, please don’t encourage it.” Footsteps thump on the tatami, and then a set of hands seize hers.

“Oi, you’re up!” He’s manically cheerful now, where he had been gravely serious the night before. “Ya remember me, don’tcha?”

Makoto swallows. He had been so at ease around that shrine. “The… the lord of the night.”

He hums in gleeful response. His hands tighten in clasping hers. “And ya remember what it was we talked ‘bout last night?”

Behind her, someone rumbles, “Kyoudai, ya gotta send her back. This ain’t a place for her.”

He sounds so much like Lee that her chest hurts, thinking of him. Lee, who’s gone, like her brother. Lost in a sea of flames. There’s no reneging now.

 “I remember,” Makoto says. “Do you remember what you promised?”

“Every word. ‘specially those shrine offerings of yers.”

Takoyaki. Sake. Anything.

She nods.

He turns her back to the woman who held her earlier. “There, ya ladies happy? Ain’t a kidnappin’ at all. We got time, might as well do this tonight.”

Makoto finds her voice. “What’s happening tonight?”

“Ah, I guess you were sleepin’ through it,” the lord of the night concedes. “The wedding.”

v.

Where she is: a teahouse that the kami run. It’s a good teahouse by any measure – the tea fragrant, the staff polite. It sees more human women than anyone expects: she who prays at the shrine will find herself guest here, and after conversation, tea and wagashi, will wake confused by her strange dream but finding her problems suddenly have answers. “Sometimes,” one of the kami offers, as she combs through Makoto’s hair, “it’s just a matter of looking your problems differently.”

Who they are: the kami honoured at the shrine Makoto visited, the ones receiving the greater lot of prayers and offerings where the lord of the night had a shrine on the wayside.

What is happening: “I don’t understand,” Makoto says. “Why a wedding?”

She’s been helped out of her rented yukata and (after an argument of insisting she could dress herself here) into a new juban. Her wedding kimono is in hand while they work: a white shiromuku with red lining, soft and light as a cloud. Someone’s told her how lovely it is, embroidered with cranes and pine and bamboo. Makoto imagines white cranes hidden in a snow-fallen mountain and wishes she had the eyesight to see such a thing.

The cheerful chatter quiets.

“There’s no good reason to. Not really.”

“Because he wants to. He’s decided that no one can rein him in anymore and when a thought comes into his mind, he’s reckless enough to do it right away.”

“He does what he likes, beholden to no one. The less you understand what he does, the more likely he’ll do it.”

She’s starting to second-guess the decision to pray at his shrine.

“And...” There’s hesitation in those words. “It’s because you look like his last wife.”

It’s been difficult enough to try to live to someone else’s expectations. To be a good Japanese granddaughter for her grandfather. To leave her vengeance well enough alone for Kiryu-san and Nishikiyama-san and Yuko-chan’s sakes. (And most importantly, to do that because Sera-san had asked.) She’d like not to again.

“What was she like? His last wife.”

She and Mirei-san, she learns, have little alike. Mirei is spoken of like a long-gone stranger, but flatteringly enough: she sounds bolder and more headstrong in a way that served her, instead of getting her a bullet for her efforts. But they’re both dark-haired and sloe-eyed; under a certain light, she’s told they could have been sisters.

Makoto practices walking in her shiromuku—small, furtive steps across the room, with a guide at her arm—and one of the kami offers that, yes, they’re alike there too. Fine-boned and elegant, some sort of grace in the way they carry themselves.

She wonders what else of Mirei-san the lord of the night sees in her.

vi.

Only after the last of the makeup is applied, with a gentle brush of beni over her lips and upper cheekbones, does Makoto dare ask, “And after the wedding… that much doesn’t change, does it?”

The wataboshi is dropped over her head; pins and some sort of magic pull it into place. While they work, Makoto feels a hand pat hers soothingly.

“Are you worried? You’ve not been married before then.”

“No,” she says. It’s not untrue.

“Tell him. He’s quite an idiot otherwise—and once he ran around all of Osaka looking for vinegar and ended up forgetting to bring any back.”

“You’ll need to talk to him, as much he’ll need to talk to you. These things,” and someone tidies up the elaborate shiromuku to prove her point, “are terribly complicated for good reason. There’ll be time to talk while he figures it out.”

She hopes he’ll need the whole night. She hopes he’ll never find what’s wrapped beneath the layers of her kimono.

But her brother needs vengeance more than she needs hope, so she puts those thoughts aside and hopes that whatever her new husband thinks, he’ll find her enough like Mirei-san to not send her away.

vii.

The wedding is unforgettable.

Her husband-to-be forgoes a priest – not that he’s got anythin’ against a priest, he says, but he ran into a cult leader years back and has never trusted ‘em since. Makoto does not ask as to why kami need their own priests.

They forgo the summoning of auspicious kami because they’re already here. Mostly for Makoto’s good fortune, they add pointedly. The lord of the night grumbles pointedly in return. Nothing is said about Mirei-san.

The one who sounds like Lee-san officiates. At the norito, the lord of the night’s title is announced, and then the words halt into silence.

The kami holding the sake cups coughs. “Hannya-san. We call you a sketchy layabout all we like and we don’t always mean it—”

“Ya serious?” he mutters. “Bein’ so mouthy at my own wedding?”

“—but did you ever find out who it was you were marrying?”

The silence holds.

Makoto offers, “Makimura. Makimura Makoto.”

Someone clicks her tongue at the lord of the night. The lord of the night returns it with a lupine snarl.

“—Makimura Makoto,” the kami officiating continues. Makoto can’t see him under the veil of the wataboshi but it’s easy to imagine that he’s frowning at the idea of marrying a stranger that no one knows the name of.

Lee-san comes to mind. Disapproving, she imagines, at the notion that she’d gone off to do this. But her vengeance might ease his heart, once it’s done.

Her hands only shake a little around the sake cup someone kindly guides her towards as she thinks of it (no more than they had when she clasped them around Lee’s as he found her in that dark terrible place). She steadies them and swallows down the sake: nine sips of sake from the three cups, shared with the lord of the night.

The sake is cool and bitter on her tongue. And just like that, she’s married.

viii.

There are high floors of the teahouse not intended for visitors. Spare rooms now used for storage, her husband says, but one’s been set aside and cleaned in a hurry. There’s no pine, bamboo or plum to be had in summer, but someone has placed tall vases of what he says are hydrangeas for good fortune around the room. The shoji screen opens to a balcony and the summer night, where the moon hangs like a mist-shrouded pearl in an indigo sky.

It’s very picturesque. If Makoto had the heart for it, she might call it romantic. But it’s summer, and the shiromuku is heavy, and she can feel perspiration cling to her skin. There’s far too much moonlight illuminating the dark. She can’t bear to look at the futon laid out on the floor.

The lord of the night was solemn at his shrine and brashly confident when she woke. He’s neither of those things now. “So. Uh.” He draws her away from the shoji screen. “We didn’t hammer out any finer points of this. Ya reckon there’s anythin’ else you wanna talk ‘bout?”

“I’ve married you,” Makoto says. “Was there more you wanted?”

He picks the wataboshi from her hair. In silence, he arranges it on a lacquered kimono rack awaiting it. The shiromuku will go there, she realises (and tries not to panic.)

“Guess there was nothin’ else.”

His voice suggests there was.

“What sorta vengeance was it ya wanted?”

“The people who… who killed my brother,” she starts.

He steps closer and she braces for—his hand sinking into her hair. Looking for pins. A careful gesture, not a tender one.

“Mmm?”

She finds her voice. “One man who led them. Three men who followed him. And an assassin who followed his orders. I want their heads.”

“Five heads? Ain’t too hard,” he remarks. His other hand slides into her hair too. He tugs her face up. “Suppose that’s the wedding present ya really want.”

His face tips down. Her heart jumps. She flinches, feels his mouth skim her cheek instead.

She can hear the blood in her ears. Nothing else.

“I… I haven’t been married before,” she tells the floor.

The lord of the night hasn’t moved. “What, did the girls say hannya-san here was a right awful husband?”

He’s only bewildered, not angry. Makoto counts it a blessing.

“No,” she whispers. She wonders what happened to the first wife. If she left because of some cruelty. If a kami of misfortune and ill luck could be an equally unkind husband. “I… I only…”

I only wish not to be married. I only want my brother back. I only like to have Dojima Sohei’s head in my hands without needing to do this.

He nudges the collar of her kimono aside to drop a kiss to her throat. She can feel teeth on her skin; they might be sharp enough to tear her neck open if he’s unhappy. And he might be if she doesn’t step away from the moonlight when he gets her wedding garb off her.

Off her—and he does before she’s realised, pulling the uchikake from her shoulders until it crumples into a heap of silk at her feet.

He gathers it up for the kimono rack. Makoto tells herself that she’s not shaking when he turns back to start on her obi next.

“Oi, easy there.”

His hands catch her wrists.

“I know, I know. First marriage an’ all. I ain’t gonna bite.” He presses a kiss to her palm. There’s teeth there still. “An’ we got the whole night.”

His offer is kind. The obijime is easily unpicked all the same.

It’s happening to someone else. Some other bride who has the fortune of marrying a kami who can grant her wish for so small a price, who’s blinking away tears on her wedding night. It’s not Makoto there, frozen in place with tears rolling down her face while her husband hushes her with a voice meant for settling scared animals.

He’s very gentle with this—this thing of his hands sliding through her hair and his mouth shadowing the tear trails on her face. Whatever he says seems low and soothing, but no more than static under the sound of blood in her ears.

The obi-age comes off. And the obi. And the shiro kakeshita, gathered up in his arms like a pile of snow.

Left in her juban, Makoto finds her voice again. “The door,” she tries. “It’s too bright, and—”

“s’alright.”

(It’s not.)

She should warn him. She opens her mouth, trying, as he eases her onto the futon and undoes the last ties on her juban. To ask him to close the shoji screen so the dark can hide the worst of it. To tell him to spare her a moment to crawl under the blankets. Her insistence on donning the juban herself, so that no one could see what was beneath her yukata, would come to nothing now.

The lord of the night peels apart her juban and the only thing she manages is a sob.

“What—”

He’s looking for words. Lee told her what it was, in hoping to heal it; her doctors on Sera-san’s payroll confirmed it and said nothing less than surgery would hide the worst of it.

“—the fuck is this—”

She should apologise. Her mistake – to not tell him sooner or shut the shoji screen herself. How could he want her now, when he’s seen what someone else has already ruined?

The words stick in her throat; another sob leaves her instead. And another. And more still, until she slaps her hands over her face trying to hold them back even as helpless noises leak out of her.

She won’t stay married now, but her brother and Lee-san will stay unavenged. She cries all the harder.

Something drops over her shoulders – heavy and cotton, like a blanket to hide the wreckage of her skin. Her husband drops a hand to her hair wordlessly before he stands to leave.

If he leaves—if he leaves—

Makoto makes a grab for him and snatches a handful of his hakama.

She pulls. He freezes.

Whatever she says now—her brother and Lee-san rely on it.

“Danna,” she croaks. She hates how her voice sounds, hates knowing that she can’t pretend to be Mirei-san in any way or form looking like she does, hates knowing how she’s failed again. “This wedding—you said you would—you said—”

Whatever he's said he’s forgotten by now, because he pries her hands off and tightens the blanket around her shoulders, and all that’s left for Makoto is the dark and her own wretched tears.

Chapter Text

ix.

Eventually, his kyoudai returns, grim-faced. “Took her back. Left her in one of the shrines.”

The shrine attendants will find her there and take her home. Someone else’s responsibility now.

Some strange look crosses his face. “What was it ya thought you were doin’, kyoudai?”

Yuki interrupts what would have been the lord of the night’s answer. Even in the middle of summer, she finds the effort to dump a pile of snow on him.

“The lot of ya act like I knew,” he snaps. He shakes off the snow melt like a dog, feeling like one. “Wouldn’t have done that shit if I did.”

His clothes being wet is a bother. That those who know him best, thinking so poorly of him, is another.

(But what bothers him most—he doesn’t even need to say it.)

x.

Makoto drifts into sleep after the exhaustion of crying and wakes to frantic shouting.

She gives her statement at the police station and declines the offer of a forensic exam at the hospital. (There’s nothing to find. Her husband left her be, after all.) She has no answer to the question of why she was found mostly undressed and without the yukata she rented for the festival, nor why the shrine attendants found her draped under a black haori.

A montsuki haori, a nurse whispers to her during the check up for head trauma. There was some strange thing on it, at where the family crest ought to sit. Did Makimura-san know what it was?

“Ah, I don’t,” Makoto says. “I’m blind.”

Her voice does not tremble.

“A hannya’s face. Did you know? The shrine you were found in – nearby, there’s a shrine for a kami that’s said to wear that mask too.”

If she was married to a kami, Makoto says, she hopes she’d remember it.

(If anything, she’ll remember that she failed so miserably at it too.)

xi.

It takes over two weeks and too damn long to get to Kanto.

The lord of the night set off early, once he was done brawling it out with his kyoudai and enduring the yelling and the scolding from the Sunshine girls. With his clothes still damp, Yuki-chan exhausted (there’s only so much snow to be summoned during summer), and his face smarting from being punched in it, he returns to the Sunshine girls’ shrine to apologise.

His wife is already gone.

Of course she is. Her yukata was rented; it’s tourists who do that.

He treks around the grounds. Pieces something together from idle gossip.

A woman who was spirited away returns two days later in a shrine that the police and shrine attendants already checked from floor to ceiling. She’s found wrapped in a wedding haori and little else. Her tourist group, all members of a community group for the blind, were in a tizzy to bring her home and left as soon as she was cleared by the police and hospital. There’s some talk about the shrine having bad publicity (who wants to visit a place where people disappear?) but there’s others who have their faith renewed in the local kami who returned her. Credit goes to the Sunshine girls for her return. Few people talk about the lord of the night or his brethren.

“Ya really saw her?” someone says, too many drinks into his night around Sotenbori.

“Saw her being loaded into the ambulance this mornin’.” The man takes a drag of his cigarette. “Real cute, just blinking like a baby deer to everything happenin’ around her.”

“What’d you think happened? Really, I mean—naked woman in a shrine wearing some guy’s clothes?”

The lord of the night is a good—

(no)

—decent—

(not that either)

—honourable husband. He stalks off before he can hear more and makes sure that whoever’s smoking drops the cigarette out of their mouth when he’s laughing and burns a hole through his clothes for the trouble.

Tokyo is bigger than it was when he last visited. The country was rebuilding then, after the war that had them busy handling the ones who survived. His kyoudai listened and consoled and quieted the fears of civilians who’d lost their siblings to war. The Sunshine girls found no shortage of grieving women. The lord of the night drew the line at crossing the sea to act out upon all the vengeances asked from him and settled for ill luck for the thieves and looters and parasites who came to prey on those rebuilding the country. He remembered Kamurocho when it was building itself up from the ground, whistled at the sight of its bars growing stacked upon one another, tossed a body into the bottom of a construction site, then headed home to Kyoto.

Two weeks later, he’s nearly at his wife’s doorstep. The cane she left behind is in hand. Its return will be his first apology. He’s still working on the second.

Except there’s a nuisance in the way: a pallid, ill-looking nuisance leaning on her own cane to stay upright.

“This is private residence,” she says firmly. The look she gives him says she can’t imagine how he got through all the locked security gates in the apartment complex. “Are you meant to be here?”

Blind girls. Sick girls. For once, he wishes he ran into more healthy humans who deserves his bad temper.

“Yeah.” He swings the cane onto his shoulder, gives her a warning look. If she doesn’t move, it says, he might try swinging it at her. A sick girl who can’t stand, using her own cane. The fuck is wrong with him?

“You remind me of my brother.”

“Do I now? Ya don’t got a great brother if he’s goin’ about lookin’ like me.”

And she mustn’t, with how he’s dressed to look more human. He wandered through Tokyo and made off with some things made from dead animals for his camouflage – a snakeskin jacket to replace his haori, and cowskin trousers to replace his hakama, and steel-tipped shoes nabbed off some yakuza who thought he was some easy pickings tourist type.

He smiles at her, all teeth to scare her off.

She frowns and tosses a handful of salt at him.

xii.

Some things Makoto has done since returning from Kyoto:

1. Apologise to her community group. The holiday to Kyoto was meant to be restful. The summer festival was meant to uplifting. She didn’t really slip past the chaperones on her way to the lord of the night’s shrine, she’s not sure how she got lost at all, but people worry about the safety of its members all the same when someone vanishes on an outing. It’s hard enough trying to just live as they are with their blindness. It’s worse knowing that there won’t be any overnight trips for some time when they’re all thinking about her disappearance.

2. Apologise to Yuko-chan for making her worry once Makoto comes back to Tokyo late. And because Yuko-chan worries, her brother and Kiryu-san are roped in with her fretting until Makoto promises that she’s fine. Nothing untoward happened. She repeats what she said in Kyoto until Nishikiyama and Kiryu give up on asking and call for takeaway to settle the mood. They’ve gotten into some windfall of cash to get fancy sushi on their dime; Makoto and Yuko are smart enough not to ask about.

3. Apologise to her brother.

The family’s plot is in a Tokyo graveyard – she’s seen her mother interred there, hears about her grandfather’s too late, and has just enough eyesight once she leaves the hospital to see her brother off. She visits one sunny day, picking her way slowly through the headstones until she’s found the Makimura family plot.

(She’s asked Sera-san to make sure there’s space for her too one day.

There’s no business advantage to be had for Sera-san but he agrees nonetheless.)

She sits beside it for some time. Thinks on what to say.

In the end, there’s little else beyond, “Onii-chan. Forgive me.”

4. Explain to Sera-san that she didn’t know what happened in Kyoto; but surely, it’s nothing for him to worry about.

(There’s a car outside the graveyard when she leaves, an inconspicuous mass of black parked right at the entrance.

Makoto strides past.

“Makimura-san,” someone calls out. His tone suggests she should stop walking. “A word with the Chairman, if you can.”

She can. This is the nicest way Sera-san can offer to tell her that she should.

They exchange rudimentary greetings. Sera sounds properly upset that Makoto lost her cane – for a man with a limp like him, a cane is protection and weapon in a way that everyone overlooks. Makoto appreciated it too, for how much better she felt with a knife in hand, going about her everyday life.

“I heard you ran into a mishap in Kyoto.”

Makoto says nothing back. There are some conversations that go better when she stays silent and is the one being talked to.

“It’s an interesting shrine you vanished in.”

She turns her teacup around in her hand.

“Yes,” she agrees. She downs her tea. It’s more bitter than her wedding sake. Harder to swallow too. “Although I don’t recall any of it.”

“It’s good that you didn’t come to any harm,” Sera says. “But it would be bad luck to return.”

Makoto prefers Sera-san when he’s frank with her: that the kidnapping he organised was rough but necessary to ferry her from Kyoto to Tokyo; that she must meet with her brother as soon as possible in order to claim her inheritance; that after her brother’s death and the botched assassination attempt that nearly killed her, she need have faith that the Nikkyo Consortium would provide for her, blind and alone, with her brother’s money and the sales from the Empty Lot to safeguard her future.

He pours her more tea. “Someone else might also hear about you going to such an ill-fated place and want to ask you more of it, and less kindly than I would.”

“It’s a nice shrine. It’s good luck for women to pray there for…” she recites some facts from a tour guide, “marriage. And health. And business. They’re all things I need, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” he agrees. “But the Nikkyo Consortium were in Sotenbori long enough. I’m quite familiar with what else is prayed for there and what trouble comes from it.”

They finish their tea.

Makoto is sent home.)

5. Throw the door open at the first sound of scuffling. Yuko-chan said they should get dinner together because it’s a Friday night. Her brother’s too busy to visit on Fridays, so it’s Makoto going down to Yuko’s floor or Yuko coming up to Makoto’s, and takeaway to treat themselves.

So that’s Yuko at the door. And someone else not Yuko, shouting about having shit thrown at ‘em, what the hell lady, what insane shit is that?

Makoto has her cane. A pharmacy store cane, not the bladed one gifted to her from Sera and lost in Kyoto. It’s raised high when she swings the door open, a good height to smack someone over the head. She’s practiced how.

She swings down. Someone catches it in his hand.

Her heart sinks.

Yuko yelps.

“There ya are!” the lord of the night crows. “You, ah, that mad I didn’t come by sooner?”

xiii.

He came because he wanted to talk, her husband says. To her. Just her.

(That last part is directed at Yuko.

Yuko, Makoto imagines, is frowning back in kind.)

And it’d be nice if they could do that, the two of ‘em, no interruptions or anythin’. Grab a bite to eat too.

And that is how they end up on a date.

(But before the date:

“How do you know her?”

“Haw? This some sorta interrogation?”

Whatever Yuko’s doing, be it glaring or readying another handful of salt (why is Yuko carrying salt?), eventually gets her an answer: “Met her in Kyoto. Real recent, when she was there on holiday.”

There are some conversations that go better when Makoto stays silent. She’d like to know how he knows that.

“She’s got that community group, buncha people holidaying with her? She nearly ran into me an’ I figure, we got some common ground, might as well try talkin’ to her…”

“You don’t really have that much common ground.”

The lord of the night scoffs. “C’mon, yer glarin’ like it’ll set me on fire. Ya aren’t really sayin’ that I’m not blind, are you?”

That’s news to Makoto – that her husband, like her, is blind, and never once thought of mention it.

“Half-blind isn’t really blind—”

Yuko stops.

“Ah, Makoto-chan, I didn’t mean it like I was judging—”

“It’s fine,” Makoto says, the first thing she’s felt at ease enough to say. She rolls her cane around in her hands, wonders what can be said with Yuko here.

I didn’t think you still wanted this marriage.

How did you even find me?

After that, what is it that you think you’d get from me?

“I didn’t think I’d see you again.” She feels her mouth lift at her own joke. “Well, you know.”

“Ah, Makoto-chan…”

“Oi, wit like that is what I’m livin’ for,” her husband snorts. Something taps the floor near her. “Here. This is yers—I mean, ya got one now, but this is the one ya left with me.”

She recognises it when he lifts it towards her like an offering: her cane, the one Sera-san gifted her, lost in Kyoto.

She receives it, balances herself around the familiar weight of it, thinking of the blade hidden inside. And feels ready for anything now.)

It isn’t really a date, is Makoto’s protest, as Yuko steers her back inside and to her closet.

“This is a date,” Yuko says grimly. “He’s even wearing a suit jacket.”

“Is he?”

How odd of him. She had expected kami to stay traditionally garbed.

“No. He dresses worse than ani-san,” which is dire indeed. What Nishikiyama does—and what Kiryu, and how they know Sera so well—has kindly stayed undiscussed between them. “That suit jacket, you actually might be glad not to see it. It’s snakeskin, actual snakeskin, and he’s not wearing anything under it.”

Yuko, already overexerted by her mood, leans against the closet door and starts rifling. Time, she announces, to get Makoto dressed for a date.

Makoto thinks there’s no need, when the other party has come here, shirtless, in what Yuko-chan declares are the world’s gaudiest, tackiest, clothing. She accepts Yuko’s decision for clothing all the same: a light jacket to keep her covered, jeans that fit well for running, their pockets stuffed with pepper spray.

xiv.

It’s like a normal date. He calls a taxi. He asks her to pick somewhere in Tokyo she likes; he pays for the ride there.

(Where had he found the money?, she asks. There had been little at the hokora when she was there.

Nabbed it from some yakuza this mornin’, he says. So dinner’s on me tonight.)

He lets her choose dinner – she needs to eat; he does not. Makoto wants street food because she wants to pick at her takoyaki. She can’t stomach much else.

She’s not fussy for where to go. Dinner’s just a way to be polite with each other before they talk.

He convinces her to sidle into a darkened side street with him – ya don’t gonna act like that, he huffs, I ain’t here fer shady stuff – and leaves her standing by the wayside while he’s deep into conversation with street cats about the best takoyaki stand in the area.

“Cats?” she wonders aloud.

“Pickiest eaters around, I reckon. An’ you can trust a cat to know everythin’ that goes on around a neighbourhood.”

He pays for takoyaki: a box of six, for a couple to share, slowly nibbled away by Makoto on a quiet park bench while he paces and waits for her to be done.

Out of nowhere: “That any good?”

She’s halfway through and barely tasted it. It’d be unkind to offend the neighbourhood cats and their high standards. “It’s not bad.”

“Fftt. Been ages since I was human but I can tell when food’s no good.”

New unknowns here too: he was human once. He’s half-blind. He had a wife that he would like her to replace. There’s so little about him that he shares with her. This is a terrible start of a marriage.

“Here.” She jabs the toothpick into the fourth takoyaki and holds it up as an offer. “You try.”

“Told ya, I don’t gotta eat.”

“It’s for a couple to share, isn’t it?” Or so the takoyaki seller had said, trying to urge them into buying more.

He plunks down beside her. What she thought would be swiped from her hand becomes his fingers wrapped around her wrist, pulling it up towards his mouth.

He’s still inhumanly cold. She can’t hide her flinch.

“Pretty good,” he manages through chewing. “Better back in Sotenbori though.”

Takoyaki in Sotenbori had been good. Better still when it had been shared with Lee-san during a lull between clients at the massage parlour. And what would he think of this here – her sitting on a bench, wasting time with small talk, while his killers go about their lives?

The lord of the night feeds himself the last of the takoyaki. “So. Guess we gotta talk.”

She glances around. “Here, of all places? It seems so public.”

“No one’s comin’ here. People keep walking away from this park since we got here, y’know?”

That they have; Makoto hasn’t noticed with her preoccupations. No doubt this is his doing too.

 “I’m not sure what to say. Did you really want to stay married to me?”

“Sure. Ya still want yer brother avenged?”

It’s the only thing she wants in life now. She nods.

He slouches into the bench. “Then I’ll do it. Promised ya that, didn’t I?”

“Even… if I’m not a good wife?” Or one that he really wants, remembering how their wedding night had gone. “Even then? Why keep that promise, if I… might not be able to keep mine?”

“Why not?”

“Nobody does anything without wanting something in return.”

How foolish she had been, thinking a stranger in Sotenbori wanted to help her find her brother for nothing. Sera-san for all his generosities has asked for—and gotten—her compliance. Nishikiyama and Kiryu’s decency to her helps ensure Yuko has a friend, however blind and small, at her side.

He cracks his neck. “Will it make ya happy, havin’ those five heads?”

Will it? What family she had is dead and what home she had is gone.

She looks down at her feet and at the cane she’s kept balanced against them – these things that have kept her going forward, no matter how difficult the blindness and the last three years have been. It’s not happiness she needs.

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll do it.” He taps his foot against hers. “Secret t’ a happy marriage is a happy wife, right? We got that sorted, so we can talk ‘bout the rest later.”

She’s agreeable to that. “I’d like to go home first. But I need to buy dinner for Yuko-chan first.”

The lord of the night whinges up a storm about annoying brats carryin’ more salt than any one person needs (and ignores her questions on why Yuko-chan is carrying so much salt.) He buys okonomiyaki and yakisoba and ikayaki, everything that Makoto asks for, more than a single person can eat all the same.

xv.

There’s something rustling on her door when they returned. Many somethings – the door’s covered in it, pale and shivering when she extends her hand to touch it.

“The hell is this?” the lord of the night hisses. “How’d that kid get all this?”

“This?”

“Ofuda,” he snaps. “She a priestess or somethin’? Her family all priests?” Yuko-chan’s dinner, which he reluctantly carried (how could he let Makoto carry it after all, when she had her cane to worry about?), go back into her hands. “Go on, get this to her. If I don’t handle this, I’m not gettin’ in.”

Makoto departs. Paper sizzles and smokes as she leaves. Doubtless, him not getting in was exactly Yuko’s intentions.

Yuko thanks her for dinner – she settled for cup noodles without Makoto, the sort of thing her brother hates her eating, but the dinner can be lunch for them both tomorrow – and does her best to waive off any and all questions about ofuda.

“How many? On your front door? It sounds like it would have taken a while. I had dinner and a TV drama to watch, actually.”

Nishikiyama got her a videocassette recorder, just because so many things could be missed while she was at hospital. Cup noodles make for a quick dinner.

Makoto persists. There’s always been charms hanging off Yuko’s bags and odd things about her home to bring good luck and health, but it’s never ventured into Makoto’s space. “Why do you have so much ofuda? And the salt? I didn’t know you need to carry around salt. And why need it against—”

My husband, she nearly says.

“—him.”

“Him,” Yuko echoes. She hesitates, then takes Makoto’s hands between her own. “Makoto-chan. Please believe me. There’s something strange about that man. He’s like ani-san, but not. I can’t explain it, but there’s something very wrong with him.”

Makoto’s always known Nishikiyama to have his secrets. Puzzled too, at how such a cuttingly pragmatic man like Nishikiyama who somehow seems to work so perfectly in sync with Kiryu-san and pretends to not do anything Sera-san is involved in, has found so many charms and knick-knacks for Yuko’s health.

She chances a smile. “Other than him being half-blind and terribly dressed?”

“Oh, you know what I mean!” Yuko whines. Her voice lightens all the same. “Please be careful around him.”

“I will. Please be kinder to him too?”

Evidently, her husband needs some kindness when she finds him standing in a cloud of smoke on her return. He’s still ill-tempered about it when she lets him inside, flopping himself down onto the couch as soon as his shoes are off.

Makoto starts with her own shoes. “Was it hard work? The ofuda.”

“Not hard work. Just annoyin’. That friend of yers knows she’s got the stuff for little bothersome spirits, not the real dangerous ones, right?”

Makoto does not. She doesn’t even know why Yuko has so many ofuda, or if the lord of the night considers himself to be a ‘real dangerous one’.

“And against kami?”

“Gives me a headache, but it doesn’t make me leave,” he mutters. “Hey, that reminds me. Do ya need protection here – y’know, from somethin’ not me?”

Sera-san takes care of that. The apartment complex is part and parcel of why Yuko and Makoto live here.

“I’ll be alright.” She’d like not to explain these arrangements yet, when he’s told her so little of himself. Or nothing, really – his first wife, his half-blindness, this thing of being human once, are things that were revealed, not told. She cleans the bottom of her cane from outside dirt before she approaches him on the couch. “Actually, do you know what you remind of? One of my clients at the end of their work day, wanting someone to listen to their woes.”

“Are ya one of those fancy foreign doctors with that couch fer listenin’ to problems?”

“Massage therapist. I have a different couch for work. Listening to problems isn’t what I’m there to do, it just ends up like that sometimes. I don’t mind it. It’s like they’re seeing the world for me. And it’s interesting to figure out what caused the pain that they come in with.”

A thought comes to her then. Clients say so much with only a little prodding. Her husband has been guarded this whole time; what’s to say he won’t open up like the rest?

She pats his shoulder. “Actually, why don't I show you? You’ve done so much work clearing the ofuda after all.”

He’s too tall to be comfortable on the couch. She talks him into flopping face down onto her bed – there’s no other place for him to lie down – and drapes a towel over his back.

Just like work, she tells herself. He’ll be off her bed later and... and on the couch tonight too. She won’t allow anything else. The privacy of sleep is hers alone. 

“Say, let’s flip this ‘round a bit,” he mumbles against the pillow he’s mashed his face into. “You tell me ‘bout the five heads ya want. So I can start.”

“Start?”

“Ah, you know.” Something dark creeps into his voice, a rough low sound in his throat. “Hunting.”

Chapter Text

xvi.

But hunting is for later: the lord of the night sleeps, dead to the world, when Makoto’s done.

“Danna.” She shakes his shoulder. “You’ll need to get up.”

He does not, corpse-like in sleep, cold and breathless and quiet. How he needs to sleep when he doesn’t need to eat stays a mystery to her.

The radio turned on at the loudest volume for this time of night does not wake him. Neither does her cane thumped on the headboard right over his head. Yuko-chan would toss a handful of salt at him; Makoto’s forced to dismiss the idea. It’s as safe as tugging a sleeping tiger’s tail. What would he do if he was woken like that?

Had he fallen asleep as she talked? She had concentrated so hard, she wouldn’t have noticed if he dozed off either.

She spoke of it as though the story had happened to some other girl, so that thinking of it wouldn’t bring her to tears again: there had been an older brother, lost for a decade, and a sister who went to find him in a city she thought he could have drifted to.

(“Osaka,” she adds. Where his shrine had been.

Two years later and she still thinks on reflex: there’s someone here who knows where he is.)

She did not find him a long time. Then out of the blue, a businessman named Sera, whose business is in the yakuza, whisks her to Tokyo in a flurry of panic and terror: Sotenbori yakuza kidnap her first, Sera and Tokyo yakuza kidnap her from them, a dear friend and father was killed by a bomb amidst it all; and the compensation for all her suffering is that the brother has come looking for her and has moved heaven and earth in order to succeed.

Dojima Sohei and his three lieutenants do not care for her brother’s machinations. They fight tooth and nail for land that the brother holds, with a final kingmaking piece in the sister’s name. What would have moved heaven and earth crash to a halt with an assassin’s bullet and a sledgehammer, held by a Dojima man, that knocks the brother’s life from his body.

And then there’s nothing else. (Nothing that bears explaining to a kami – land sales, contracts, a promise from Sera-san and the Nikkyo Consortium to keep her future well-guarded with the money she’s made from that wretched patch of dirt.) Nothing but a blind woman standing at the shrine for the lord of the night, hoping beyond hope for some justice.

If her husband slept through all of that, she’s not capable of repeating it again.

xvii.

The fact is this: Makoto intends to sleep on her own bed. A double bed is a luxury of space in a one-person Tokyo apartment. She needs it not to feel boxed into small spaces.

The couch will not do. Neither will the sleeping mass at one side of her bed.

But it’s not breathing. Or snoring. Or pawing at her. It could be a heap of unfolded blankets. If she faces it when she sleeps, she can watch it for motion. And her cane, placed between them and dividing the bed down the middle, is always in arm’s reach. He won’t know there’s a knife at his back. Between the two of them, she has the advantage.

(Does she?

She noticed it while she worked: her husband isn’t large by any means, not the bulk and mass she thinks of when it comes to brawling, like Lee-san or Kiryu-san, but still lean and hard with muscle. There’s scar tissue on his back and arms that she kneaded the tension from. He’s no stranger to fighting.

And he has one more working eye than she does.)

She sneaks her hand out from beneath her blanket and settles it on the cane. Thinks of how to sheathe and unsheathe it, a twist of the handle and a pull, the blade sliding out like a silvery fish catching the light in the water…

xviii.

There’s some light left, enough to see the bat tattoo on the man’s arm.

And then there’s no light in the world anymore.

Not until… not until it’s that of the Kamurocho street signs above her head in that tiny corner of dirt. There’s a shadow in Kiryu-san’s arms that she reaches her hands out towards it—

—and it’s cushioned, colliding into her knuckles when she ought to be reaching for her brother. In her bed. Her bed. Not even Lee-san ventured into that space, so that means—that means—

Makoto grabs her cane and kicks it away from her.

It rolls away with a yell and a thump onto the floor. With her above, she’s at an advantage. She can’t see where the knife needs to land, but no matter: she’s been blind for so long; she can guess where a neck ought to be.

She pulls the blade from its sheathe and lunges.

She lands above it. The blade does not; her arm is seized by an iron-cold grip as someone swears, “What the fuck—how the hell do ya even have this—”

It’s a hard grip but it’s at her elbow. There’s space still to swing. Makoto does.

The stranger yelps and then his fingers jam into the inside of her wrist. Her grip slackens reflexively, and in one fluid motion, he’s yanked her knife forward and thrown her off.

She hits the floor, curls up into herself to save herself another beating.

“Makoto? Holy shit—Makoto, I didn’t mean t’ do that—”

It can’t end like this. She won’t allow it. If she stays like this, he’ll let his guard down. Come closer. And if she gets it right, she can strike up somewhere more vulnerable. The inside of his thigh or his groin or his stomach. He’ll collapse inwards to guard himself. She can try to get her knife back or to get her fingers in his eyes.

“Makoto?”

His hand lands on the floor. Not close enough yet. And she can’t hear the scrape of the blade on the ground – where is it?

“Makoto.”

She’ll have to wait. Just a bit more—

“Makoto.”

—for nothing. Nothing reaching for her. Nothing grabbing for her.

The floor becomes cold. Her name is being called out to her through the dark by a voice she hardly recognises.

“… danna?”

“Yeah. Just me.” Something rustles near him. “C’mere, will ya?”

He’s angry. He’s furious. He ought to be, what with a woman trying to stab him in the middle of the night.

How would he have handled his first wife in his anger? If she obliges and apologises first, he might—might gentle his anger.

She clambers up, crawls back. Her feet are too unsteady for standing; she tries not to think of a last wild grab for her cane.

Something drops over her shoulders—his haori? the wedding one, like the one that she was found in after her wedding night, but he couldn’t be wearing it now surely—and then she’s lifted, blanket and all, back to her bed.

She waits for his anger, whatever form it takes.

“Did Dojima do that to ya too?”

“What?”

Silence holds. “That.”

He does not elaborate.

Makoto huddles under her blanket, sheltered by its warmth. He’s sitting on the bed still—she can hear him near her. He’s out of her reach. (She’s out of his reach.)

She shakes her head, wondering if he can see that in the dark.

“He killed my brother. That’s… what I want him dead for.”

There’s some rustling near her: a click of her cane being re-sheathed, then dropped to the bed.

“Oi, if it ain’t Dojima, then who’d I gotta kill fer that?”

Lee-san had gotten there already, for some of the men responsible. She tells him so in as few words as possible: her guardian and surrogate father had, in finding her, killed her captors; and while there’s one man she had hoped Lee would find and stop, he couldn’t be found and might never be now. If she’s optimistic, the black market business he does has put him at the bottom of Sotenbori’s river; if she’s realistic, he’s out there still, shadowing behind the most vulnerable girls in Osaka.

“Ya want his head too?”

“You won’t find.” It’s an upsetting truth. “I could tell you something about Dojima Sohei and his lieutenants. All I can tell you about him is a bat tattoo on his left arm, and all yakuza keep those things covered out in public.”

The lord of the night says nothing. Thinking. Weighing up the odds of finding Dojima, his lieutenants and his assassin in Tokyo, or trying to hunt down a stranger with a tattoo in his own familiar haunting grounds of Osaka.

“Earlier you said…” she starts, “or Yuko-chan said, you were half-blind. Like me, in a way. If I hadn’t been blind when I came to your shrine, would you have helped me?”

“You don’t gotta think of it like that.”

She pushes. “Or if I hadn’t looked like Mirei-san?”

The mattress shifts, with his weight off of it. “Guess the girls told ya that. Well, yer not Mirei-chan and it’s my own damn fault fer thinkin’ ya could be.”

Of course not. Mirei-san sounded like she had been beautiful, not ruined.

She could try.

“You could tell me more about her?”

“Ya don’t gotta be like her,” he retorts. “I shouldn’t have looked at ya thinkin’ of her, I should’ve…”

He trails off.

His footfalls are beside her bed. She feels his hand fall to her hair, the silly sort of head patting that she remembers only happening in television dramas.

“I should’ve looked at ya fer what you are.” He’s more sombre than she’s ever heard him. “Tougher than anythin’, to make it this far. And that’s without even thinking of that knife ya keep ‘round you. Can’t believe I just up an’ handed it right back to ya.”

She’s not sure what to say, and is thankfully saved from it: he announces he’s sleeping on the couch—tiny thing as it is, she really ought to get him a futon or somethin’ if he’s staying in Tokyo this long—and leaves her blinking wordlessly to herself until she sleeps.

(But she does sleep. And she doesn’t reach for the knife again that night.)

xix.

The lord of the night is gone by morning.

Off hunting, she assumes. She wonders what his camouflage will be, when he’s going about dressed even more questionably than Tokyo yakuza.

Yuko visits for lunch. She does not ask where Makoto’s husband has gone, although she remarks that someone’s moved around the cushions on the couch and left a blanket there too. She tags along with Makoto as she goes weekend shopping for a new futon. For the summer heat, Makoto insists. Yuko agrees – and tells the salesperson, over Makoto’s protests, that they don’t really need a large one for someone as small as Makoto.

“It’s really big,” Yuko says over their lunch of reheated okonomiyaki. “It seems like it’s better for someone taller.” Say, a whole head and shoulders above Makoto’s own height.

“Someone tall,” Makoto agrees. “Too tall for the couch and not allowed in my room.”

It’s enough to convince Yuko to lay the futon out in the living room before she goes. She’s also left something else – when her husband returns, Makoto can hear him calling her name from the door but not knocking.

“Ofuda,” is how he greets her. “That friend of yers knows it’s nothin’ but annoying, don’t she?”

“She knows,” Makoto agrees. She steps back to let him in, wrinkles her nose when he’s inside. “Danna, have you… done something strange to yourself?”

He smells like sweat. And blood. And alcohol – like someone’s poured it on him.

“An’ tried to set it on fire,” he adds. “Ya got a shower?”

In spite of all that, he’s in a good mood – Makoto can hear him singing through the walls during her dinner. He returns, draped in her fluffiest towels and wearing something proper – something that looks like haori and hakama, not off-yellow and black leather – to kick back on her couch.

“When yer done eatin’,” he rumbles sleepily, “I got news fer ya. And not sooner. Might ruin your appetite otherwise.”

The news is that he’s found out something about Dojima. Not much but it’s a start. He found some guys around town with Dojima family crests, tailed them to where they do shakedowns and favour bars and run gambling joints, got into a fight with some that led to broken bones and bloodied noses…

“Are you alright?”

Surely a kami can’t be easy to harm.

“Not a scratch on me.”

But he’s got leads. He’ll resume tomorrow once he sees what they do when panicked.

She’s not sure what the right thing to say is (should she thank him for getting into a fight for her?). Before she can try, he laughs nervously. “Ya really up an’ got a futon? Fer me?”

She nods. “If you’ll be staying in Tokyo this long.” A thought occurs to her. “If you’re tired from all the…” fighting, “… searching you do, and if last night helped, I could…”

“Really?”

He can’t hide the cheer in his voice. So the massage helped, even if he fell asleep and she ended up being the one to talk all the way through it.

“I don’t mind. And I’ll be helpful to you this way, won’t I?”

“Think we’re ‘bout even on that one, you gettin’ this futon and all.” He flops himself onto it to make a point. “But ya know what else you can get fer me?”

“Yes?”

“A kamidana.”

xx.

Before her vacation to Osaka, before she prayed at the lord of the night’s hokora, Makoto’s life had been like this:

Her weekends are spent with Yuko-chan or her community group. She and Yuko go to museums and art galleries that have slow guided tours. Nishikiyama-san visits to make sure Yuko is looked after; Kiryu-san follows like second nature. They bring things for shabu-shabu ‘so Yuko is properly fed’; Yuko and Makoto in turn make sure Nishikiyama and Kiryu eat vegetables and drink something non-alcoholic.

Her weekdays are for work. Sera-san has, as promised, safeguarded her future: she’s apprenticed to teachers who can teach massage and acupuncture to the blind; she’s a face in the handful of charitable organisations that he supports (philanthropic businessman as he is); she’s taught how to wield her cane like a bo staff in evening classes with a sifu recommended by a pair of ex-pat restaurateurs from Osaka.

Now there is a kamidana that she makes offerings to in the mornings. The lord of the night says he’s not fussed about what she offers – whatever it is must be freely given. Makoto settles for sake and notices it vanish most days.

(Kiryu-san and Nishikiyama-san helped set it up. The lord of the night would not – it’s one thing to lay his offerings down in her stead at his hokora, but it’s another thing to set up a household shrine for himself.

Kiryu does not ask why her sudden devotion to otherworldly things. She already has a family altar for her brother and Lee-san; perhaps, he does not need to.

Nishikiyama is frighteningly good at hunting down what she needs: the shrine itself, its ritual offerings, the little things for worship. He’s less enthusiastic to help place everything compared to Kiryu—he’d rather sit back and direct—and he only tells her once that he couldn’t find the last thing she needed: an ofuda from her guardian kami that she’s chosen.

“I’ve got it sorted,” Makoto says.

It’s not a lie. The lord of the night can provide his blessing when it’s needed.

Nishikiyama shrugs. Keep your secrets then, it says. She knows it’ll be reported to Sera-san, as everything will be, and that Sera-san is already thinking of the shrine she vanished at in Osaka.)

And now there is a husband who returns to her apartment most evenings. Some nights are hers, when he returns to Osaka to mind his own hokora. The rest… the rest is like being married.

She comes home. Makes dinner. Her husband comes back at any time of evening he likes (and he doesn’t need to – the lord of the night being what he is, after all). He fusses over her dinner (whatever she can cook is hardly enough) and tries his hand at cooking (poorly) and foists convenience store bento and street-side takeaway on her with whatever money he’s nicked from whichever unassuming yakuza he was bothering today. They talk about their days: new things Makoto has learned, new information the lord of the night has unearthed. She practices new techniques on him that causes his joints to make the funniest sounds and he allows her to take a swipe at him with her cane just once.

(Safety precaution, he says afterwards. You show me anythin’ more an’ I’ll wanna start teachin’ ya the way I was taught.

What’s wrong with the way I fight?

Nothing’s wrong with the way ya fight. He’s likely still thinking of the night she tried to put her knife in him. But yer better off learning from one teacher fer one thing at a time, before you start mixing up the things you learn.

He meanders into a story about how he did know some foreign restaurant owners who were always training by the Sotenbori river, which makes Makoto think Osaka truly is that small.)

And sometimes they pass the night like… like a couple. He takes her out to the city when he says he’s restlessly bored and she ought to see more of the world (“A terrible joke, danna,”). Not a big world. Just Tokyo at night. But it’s more than what she had seen when she first arrived here, unable to speak even a word of Japanese, and it’s more than what she would have explored by herself – so it’s pleasant. Nice. Fun, even.

They go to karaoke bars and he sings worse than she does to make her laugh. They go to game arcades so she can gesture to one specifically brightly coloured thing in a UFO machine that he spends all his coins trying to catch. One odd night where it’s still summery and warm, he takes her fishing on the harbour and steers her towards a successful catch.

(“And this will work?” Makoto wonders aloud, grasping the fishing rod tensely in her hands.

“‘course it will,” he says. He taps on the rod and then her hands. “Yer feelin’ it, right?”

She does, but not well: the first three fish she hooks escape because of it. ‘s nothing to fret ‘bout, her husband says, her being a beginner and all. It ends with him hunched behind her, his hands—more sensitive than hers—placed atop hers as she tries her damned hardest to pick up on the minutiae tugging and twitching of a fish at the end of the fishing rod.

Her first success is really his: he pulls an octopus that lands on him—on his face, he squawks as he leaps back, fighting to get it off, and Makoto’s too busy clutching her stomach in laughing that the next she sees of her octopus is it sailing off in an elegant thrown arc into the sea.

“Danna,” she splutters, “you sounded—” and another fit of giggling overtakes her.

“It got lucky,” he hollers, dusting his hands off loudly. “I was nearly ‘bout to make takoyaki outta it.”

When her giggling settles, he pokes her in the ribs. She should go again. Try landin’ something she can keep.

Yes, Makoto nearly agrees. Doing that again means remembering the weight of him at her back and his hands guiding hers, and then her stomach somersaults at the thought.

It’s not unpleasant.

It’s sign enough that she should stop.

“Let’s not endanger yourself more,” she says, and sends the lord of the night into more grumbling.

But he acquiesces and she is glad for it.)

There’s more of him she learns through it. How his mood goes from sombre to gleeful without warning and when it’s genuine and when it’s not. His fondness of the things he ropes her into, from good singing to bad dancing to cash-eating arcade games. What it is he misses from Osaka: his brother in arms who officiated their wedding, and his friends who helped organise the wedding (especially poor Yuki-chan, always so over-exerted in the summer), and his hokora, humble and small as it is, for what it brings to him.

(What does it bring to him, Makoto asks.

The desperate sort at end of their luck, the lord of the night says. Stops. She was the desperate sort at the end of her luck during that summer festival after all. He coughs and tries again: ya know, gamblin’ types. Lost all their money at the mahjong tables and cho-han halls and them shiny silver ball things—

Pachinko.

That thing. And, ah, other shit that people don’t plan well for. Anything that doesn’t sound like it involves family-related vengeance. Businessmen who bankrupted themselves on hookers an’ bad choices, guys who treated their girl wrong and want to do just ‘bout anythin’ to get ‘em back…)

It’s like they’re married.

He tells her how he lost his eye.

When she tells him how she became blind in return, she realises: they are. (And the thought terrifies her like nothing else.)

xxi.

Conversations from a married life:

“Oi, the sakaki’s fake.”

The lord of the night pokes at it. Makoto tries not to frown: for someone who said he wasn’t fussed with what she’ll offer, he sounds rather fussy.

Her offering dishes are dusty – look, the salt she’s laid out is already going grey.

Her human friends (and even he sounds wary when he calls them that) who helped place the kamidana have left things skewed. (Makoto is sceptical – whatever he thinks of Nishikiyama is coloured by what he thinks of Yuko-chan.)

Makoto pours new sake into the offering bottle and shoos him away.

“Are you staying for this?”

“Haw?” he splutters, “‘course not, who sticks around t’ watch themselves get prayed to?”

Makoto bows once. The lord of the night yelps and vanishes.

She bows again. He has not reappeared.

Two claps and one bow later, her new morning ritual is done. Her husband is nowhere to be found between then and when she leaves for work.

But evidently he’s pleased by it – she comes home from work and there’s a whole takeaway box of takoyaki, buried under a small fluttering mountain of bonito flakes and green onion circles, waiting for her. The bottle is lightened of the sake she poured that morning. The lord of the night has all the sensibility of a cat lazing in the sunlight, draped over her sofa.

“Thank you for the takoyaki.”

“Don’t mention it.” His head lolls over the sofa arm; he smiles at her upside-down. “And ya know you gotta pray to it at night too, right?”

and

“So that’s yer brother.”

“Yes.”

Makoto expects a comment on how she has a kamidana for him and a Buddhist altar for her brother and Lee-san. Instead, the lord of the night peers closer at the photos.

“Your fella there looks like my kyoudai, ya know?”

The kami who officiated her wedding – like Lee in voice and so too in looks, if the lord of the night is to be believed. She’d like to see him, if only as a balm for her grieving heart.

“Who pointed you to my hokora anyhow? If anythin’, you ought to have gone to his.”

His kyoudai is a kami for families, lost or grieving or stricken, and for keeping them together. He has a soft spot for siblings looking for one another; he would have listened to Makoto if she had been at his shrine.

(She does wonder: would he have been gentler in what he wanted her to offer? Or would he have decided that what she wanted—vengeance and beheadings—was too great a thing to fulfil, given what the lord of the night says about his kyoudai’s conduct.

Perhaps this one would have never needed her to marry him.)

“The tour guide mentioned it. What people came to the shrine for,” she confesses. She wipes down her brother and Lee’s framed photos until the glass shines. “Once I heard enough about what the lord of the night was, I made up my mind that his shrine was the only one I would need to visit.”

“Well, there ya have it,” her husband says, pleased. “Put like that, I think we were meant t’ have met.”

and

It happens by accident: with Makoto sitting on the couch and the lord of the night on the ground in front of her, perched in the space between her knees. Her practicing acupressure with a compliant kami, after she assured him that it did not involve needles, only her fingers finding pressure points on his head.

Does it help?

Can’t say it’s doin’ anything, he says. ‘s good massage though.

It might be – acupressure is on the learning path to acupuncture, and whatever she can find on herself is harder to find another person. The most she’s learned by poking at him is the shape of his skull; and that he’s been nabbing her shampoo every time he showers off the blood and grime from picking through Dojima’s men; and for all his oddities, he does take care of his hair, which slides in soft short strands between her fingers (he’s been taking her conditioner too then).

Hey, that’s good, he mutters, turning towards her hand.

It knocks her hand off-course. She corrects herself and bumps against—something cold and hard, a flat thing where she’d expected a face to round out. It’s over his left eye. What’s left of it, which is… nothing—

He nearly breaks her wrist in seizing it.

Makoto yelps. His grip does not loosen and she’s too terrified to ask him to. Or to say anything now.

It’s very quiet in her apartment. She can hear the blood in her ears. If the lord of the night needed to breathe, at least there would be his ragged rough breathing to tell her something. Anything.

“Danna,” she whispers. “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry, I—”

He drops her wrist.

“Ain’t yer fault,” he says. He hasn’t moved otherwise. “Ya can’t see what’s there.” He barks out a laugh. “Or what’s not there.”

“I’m didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“There’s nothing there t’ hurt.”

(But there is. He wouldn’t near-break her wrist over nothing.)

He continues brusquely, “Well, go on. No reason to not keep goin’, is there?”

There is: her wrist hurts far too much to continue. But it seems worse to tell him that, so she reaches for him with her uninjured hand, until her palm finds his hair again.

“I’m sorry.”

“I told ya, there ain’t a thing fer you to be sorry for.”

She swallows. “I’m sorry it happened. It’s a terrible thing to have lived through.”

He shakes her hand off, fumbling for something, and then pulls her wrist back to his face. Her fingertips are a breath away from what’s left of his left eye, held immobile just in case she’s somehow decided to poke at it. Yuko-chan was right – they are alike, in what they’d prefer not to share.

“What, ya scared of it now?”

There’s disdain in his words. It’s only meant for him.

“Or scared ‘bout how I lost it?”

“It’s not scary.” How he lost it might be though, so she says, “It’s sad. That it’s caused you grief—and that I’ve done the same now.”

He splutters. “Oi, c’mon—you don’t gotta be sad fer me.” He pulls away from the couch. “I still got one eye. And this shit here was my own problem, back when I was human, gettin’ into fights with the wrong people.” A thread of bitterness creeps into his voice, black under his words. “That was years back, back when Edo was still a swamp. No one’s ever gonna have the chance to do that again.”

But someone did and he’s never forgotten it since.

“And anyway, it’s meant t’ be me, apologisin’ to you.”

“It’s no matter. You didn’t hurt my wrist that much,” she lies.

“… hold up, yer wrist hurts?”

He reaches for it. On reflex, she pulls back and watches his hand freeze mid-air, caught in that memory: at times like this, she does not want to be touched.

The lord of the night lowers his hand. “I was apologising fer the night we got married.”

“You already did. You brought my cane back. You bought me takoyaki. You offered me what I wanted even when I thought…” there was no marriage still worth keeping.

“That’s nothin’,” he insists. “Or not a proper apology. Doin’ any of that shit—even if I hadn’t known—”

She cuts in. “Would you want to?”

If he understands, he’ll pity her more than ever. She doesn’t need it, that pity, but it will get her those five heads; she will tolerate it.

He’s very cautious when he says, “Only if ya want to.”

Makoto does not want to. Be that may, she must, so she tells him, like it’s the story of another eighteen year old girl, some silly fool of a thing who went to Sotenbori in search of her brother and did not find him. Another person found her instead, tricked her with a false promise of knowing her brother, and sold her off as human chattel. Whatever happened next carved its grief into her and left her blind. The rest she’s already told him: Lee-san found and saved her. Gave her an occupation. Did his hardest to find the man with the bat tattoo to no avail, before Tokyo yakuza swept into Osaka and threw what semblance of a life she had with her surrogate father into chaos.

By the end of it, she feels water on her face. She hadn’t even realised it was there until she stopped talking. The water leaking from her eyes is no more important to her than rain on an umbrella-less day.

But it must be important enough to the lord of the night – he’s dismantled his futon to bundle her up into a blanket without a word.

“You needn’t say it,” Makoto mumbles. “That you’re sorry.”

“Wasn’t gonna say that. Was gonna say you lived through something rough. I meant it before, that you were tougher than anythin’ to survive that an’ Dojima’s assassin, and make it out to…”

To find the likes of my shrine.

“I’m glad,” she sniffles. She swipes at the tears. It hasn’t stopped dripping out of her, no matter how much or little thought she puts towards it. “That you’re not sorry for me.”

“Yeah, I know.” He picks her up, his blanket and all, and hefts her back to her room. “Ya don’t need sorry, ya need vengeance.”

She’d protest if she wasn’t so very curious as to what he’d do next, now that he’s given up his bedding to her. What he does is deposit her on her bed and unwrap his blanket from her shoulders like she’s made of glass.

“And I meant what I said before too,” her husband says. He dabs a dry corner of his blanket to her cheek. “After you get yer vengeance, I want ya to be happy.”

Chapter Text

xxi.

It’s not something that Yuko likes admitting—that she’s the jealous type—but it’s hard not to be.

Jealous. Of the children who have families while she grows up with her ani-san in Sunflower Orphanage. Of ani-san being only half her brother (Kazama-oyaji will not talk of what the other half is), of needing to share him with friends who can keep pace with him, no matter how much she loves Kiryu-san and Yumi-chan. Of anyone who has a healthy enough body that hasn’t done its hardest to fail them their whole lives.

And now, of whatever’s taking up all of Makoto-chan’s time.

There’s an oddness to the stranger, beyond the terrible sense of style and carefree mania. Neither ofuda nor salt ward him off; Makoto even asks her, gently, if Yuko could stop plastering ofuda on her front door. (It’s only twice, Yuko decides not to argue.) If he hangs around after the new year, Yuko will not rule out throwing beans at him during Setsubun.

Ani-san asks her, just too casually, if she knows why Makoto wanted help to set up a kamidana. There’s something off about her apartment, like she’s rearranged things for fusui, which unsettles him. No doubt it will have unsettled Yuko too.

Makoto does not speak of it over Friday night dinners and weekends. She does not speak of the stranger (not really a stranger now, for how much Yuko sees him around) that has taken up residence in her living room.

It makes Yuko fret. The weekend sees her down in the apartment’s courtyard, some benches around low hedges between the towers, turning her omamori between her fingers. Makoto had planned Saturday for them – breakfast, lunch, shopping for winter futons (and there’s no need to say why Makoto needs a winter futon now too) – except she’s late.

It’s not usual for Makoto to be late. Something (someone) has held her up. Yuko’s not keen to go to Makoto’s door only to find that unearthly thing behind it.

“Hey, little lady.”

She looks up. Someone’s sat himself down on the bench opposite her – more an arcade side-scrolling fighting game character than a person. A military character type to explain the strangeness of his clothes: army boots, camouflage-printed trousers, and an olive-green cargo jacket to boot.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you around here.”

Ani-san had her moved here from Sunflower Orphanage to make her treatments easier, a thing made possible by being useful to people senior to him. Sera-san ought to be keeping his end of the bargain on having the apartment complex guarded, for all her brother is at Sera’s beck and call in this arrangement.

“First time here,” the stranger says. He nods towards her omamori. “Got somethin’ bothering ya?”

Yuko shrugs. “Nothing that can be helped.”

“That ain’t true. You got some worries ‘bout someone close to ya, right?”

She frowns. “I know about the sort of fishing that psychics do in a cold reading. You’ll need to do better than that.”

“Ah, I can.” He slouches back in his bench, casting his eye over to the apartment tower where Makoto-chan is. “Bet yer worryin’ about whatever trouble my kyoudai is stirring up over here.”

xxii.

Makoto sleeps in. It’s hard not to: crying is a tiring exercise, no matter how much or little she cries. She ought to be out of tears by now, but telling the lord of the night the sad tale of how she became blind wrung a few more out of her.

She drags herself up. And nearly steps onto what’s sleeping on a hastily constructed futon beside her bed.

Makoto shrieks. Flails back trying not to step on him.

Her husband yelps and makes a grab at her before she can go over backwards.

He succeeds, grabbing at her knee before she goes down. And he overdoes it, pulling her forward – she trips forward onto him. They go down together: he slams onto his back with only a summer futon to cushion him and Makoto collapses on top of him, face colliding into his chest. Hard enough to make her teeth rattle.

“Ya know I was here, right?”

“I forgot,” she mumbles. “It was a long night.”

“Right, right.” His sigh is more exhausted than exasperated. “You didn’t get hurt there?”

Her dignity is sore from the fall. And from—whatever this is, this clumsy result of the fall. It’s a silly and terrible romance drama setup, but her teeth hurt, her head spins, and he’s a very cold body without a heartbeat beneath her. And lean as well, without the cushion or softness of being a decently fed body – he’s only a fraction softer than the ground.

“No,” she lies. She props her chin up and asks him very seriously, “Danna, must you really need a blanket if you stay cold anyway?”

“Yer feelin’ better if that’s your sense of humor coming back,” he notes dryly.

But he does not speak further on the matter – not of her crying, or of his promise to see her vengeance fulfilled – while she prays at the kamidana and makes breakfast. What he does do is nearly fall over himself in a panic when Makoto dashes out of her room, half-showered, in a mad hurry.

“Holy shit, what the hell are ya doin’—”

“Yuko-chan!” she yelps, “I left Yuko-chan—I’ve completely stood her up by now, I’m so late—”

“Ah, that’s all.” He deflates in relief. “That ain’t an issue at all.”

xxiii.

The secret to a happy marriage is a happy wife, Makoto says. It’s his own words – he’s not fond of it thrown back to him, but it’s reason enough to walk her down to Yuko-chan’s floor with her. No sense in letting her rush down, trip over her own feet and break her neck now that so many things are going well.

“What’s going well, danna?”

“What ya expect, really.” He’s cackling to himself. “Kamidana set up. Dojima bein’ hunted down—no, I can’t tell ya anything yet, that’ll ruin yer surprise. And a happy marriage—you said it, not me.”

Is it? It’d been a joke when she said it – but when she thinks of it now, of her new usual routine and how normal it is that he slots himself into it, she can’t think of that routine before him. Or that routine without him.

He halts at Yuko’s door.

“Eh, there it is.”

“Danna?”

“’m in trouble.” Not trouble he hasn’t expected – his mood hasn’t shifted. He knocks on the door and ruffles her hair before he turns to leave. “Have fun with that brat of yers,” which is an unkind thing to call Yuko-chan when Yuko hasn’t menaced him with salt or ofuda for weeks now. “He knows where t’ find me when he needs me.”

Whoever ‘he’ is goes unasked: the door is thrown open and Yuko is ushering her inside, admonishing her gently for being late – she understands, it’s the weekend, who doesn’t want a sleep-in? – but she did worry, and even if she didn’t mind the wait, she found a way to pass the time.

There’s a guest at Yuko’s table with a laughably small teacup in his giant hands.

“Ah, this is Suzuki-san.” Yuko makes a wave in his direction as she pulls out a chair for Makoto. “We met in the courtyard, we just got to talking…”

“Ane-san,” and a nod is how the kami that officiated her wedding greets her. “My kyoudai is here?”

“Outside,” Makoto says faintly. Her husband travelled from Osaka to Tokyo—more than once, going back and forth to handle his affairs. What’s to say another kami could not to do the same?

The kami who reminds her of Lee-san thanks Yuko for the tea and departs with quiet single-minded determination that says he cannot be distracted from things that need to be done.

“So,” Yuko offers after a long silence. She pours tea for Makoto with a deft calm that is certainly rehearsed. “How come you didn’t tell me you were married?”

xxiv.

“I was scolded,” Makoto tells the ceiling. Saturday with Yuko leaves her exhausted and flopped boneless on the couch.

“Mmnh.” Atop his futon on the floor, her husband is much the same.

“I didn’t even know she could manage it.”

“She toss a handful of salt at ya too?”

Yuko grilled her instead. How Makoto got married (no, don’t tell her, she figured it out: when she went missing overnight on her Osaka trip). Why Makoto got married (Makoto will not say). Why to that man. Does Makoto even know what it is that makes Yuko so uneasy around him – surely she must?

(Makoto turns her teacup in her hands. “Did you notice anything about Suzuki-san?”

To her credit, Yuko is like her brother: not the type to lie to her, only to side-step her way around the truth. “I know. Your husband’s like Suzuki-san.”

She pauses. Adds, impishly, “But Suzuki-san is actually rather nice.”

“Most people can be if you don’t throw salt at them.”

“He’s so normal-seeming,” so only normal-seeming; not normal, “that I wouldn’t feel the need to.”)

“That all?”

Yuko fretted so much that Makoto wondered what would finally be told to Nishikiyama-san (and then, inevitably, reported back to Sera). That much was out of her hands – and her husband would be no better off to know about Sera-san and what business he was involved in.

Another worry for him. She files the thought away and decides to keep it quiet.

And what of him?

Well, he starts with a huff that’s so exaggerated that she can’t help but smile. His kyoudai came back with somethin’ close to nagging, as though it’s possible to nag a kami. Something about him slacking off (as if he was doing such a thing, going back to Osaka to mind his hokora) – there’s been more people coming by. Far larger a crowd and far more attention than his hokora usually attracts; his kyoudai worries he’s gotten himself into the sort of trouble that cost him an eye when they were both human.

“It, ah, ain’t anythin’ to do with ya, is it?”

For the first time, his self-assuredness falters.

“… unless there’s somethin’ ya wanna tell me?”

They could be Sera’s Nikkyo Consortium. They could not be.

“Everyone I know is really just in Tokyo,” she offers.

(But Sera-san knew she vanished in Osaka, if only for a day.)

For a moment, he muses her words over. Maybe he thinks she’s lying. Maybe she’s becoming as good as Yuko-chan in side-stepping around the truth.

And then he flings himself off the floor and the worry is gone. “Right then. Back to Osaka—and ya know, you gotta send me off with somethin’, yeah?”

xxv.

He’s only half-serious. She already makes offerings to his kamidama – that’s all she needs to keep doing. But couples separated over a long distance give each other things, don’t they? And he’s never gotten anythin’ from anyone, ever, so now’s a good time fer her to start.

“You’ve been back to Osaka before,” Makoto points out.

“Nah. I went back to Osaka before, that’s my own call.” He flops onto the couch beside her. “Me bein’ called back there, that’s different. There’s responsibility an’ then there’s duty.”

One of them demands a gift. Well. She knows what he wants. His is a roundabout way of asking, but he’s in arm’s reach and being draped over her couch like he’s a Friday night date makes it easy.

And why should it be hard?

She reaches towards him, finds his face with her hand.

“Eh? Makoto—”

And from his face, she can divine where everything else is. His neck sloping into her palm. His cheek in her other hand. He’s holding himself very still when she leans forward, lets her mouth brush against his cheek. It’s much like the kiss on their wedding night – nearly nothing, not even a lipstick stain on his skin.

But nothing doesn’t terrify her. Nothing doesn’t make her want to crawl under her blankets. (Nothing makes her want to go back and try again and—make it something.)

Makoto draws back.

“There,” she says solemnly. “Your parting gift. You have a strange way of asking these things, danna.”

“Yeah, uh.” His words are clumsy. “I actually meant—somethin’ to take with me. I heard high school kids are givin’ each other buttons now?”

Sensibly, the next thing she ought to do is lock herself in her room and never come out. When she’s scrambling off the couch to do just that, the lord of the night hauls her back with a bout of giggling: she’s the sweetest, really – what do high school students and their uniform buttons have on her? – it was only a paper crane or a braided lock of her hair he wanted, something to tuck away in a pocket while he was away.

“You’re laughing at me,” Makoto mumbles.

“I ain’t.” He hasn’t let go of her for embarrassed squirming. His chin drops on her shoulder once his frenetic giggling subsides. “Figures that whatever ya offer would always end bein’—eh, different.”

He’s talking about the takoyaki from that festival night. Or he isn’t, if she’s thinking of what he’s thinking. What she said before he whisked her away.

“I… I do have something then.” Something she hasn’t thought of in a long time, left aside and forgotten.

He trails after her while she rummages through her drawers. She picks through household clutter before she fishes it out for him.

“Haw? Yer sure this is it, I mean it’s…”

“Broken,” Makoto says. And then, “Useless.”

She watches him turn it over in his hands, a broken useless thing that no one has any use for. Someone took it, as part of her personal effects, from her when she was in a medical coma from the gunshot wound. Once she was well enough to go through her things after the hospital discharge, she sat there for a good part of an hour, thinking. The watch she once loved for its sensibly red straps, its solemn face, its gentle melody. Something from a lifetime ago, when she had sight to need it, when its music box mechanisms still worked.

Lee-san said he would take it to get fixed sometime, and she had hoped, and then Lee had died, and what was left was Makoto by herself, turning over a broken watch in her hands. And once the thinking was done, she put the watch aside and left it.

“It’s not much use,” she adds. “Not to you or to me, but… it is mine. From better days. I can’t fold a paper crane now and I don’t think my hair’s long enough to braid, so you can have this if you like.”

I won’t need it anymore.

The lord of the night nods. Her watch vanishes somewhere into the sleeve of his haori, then he rearranges himself.

“Say,” he starts.

“Danna?”

“I oughta thank ya. Fer the gift.”

He reaches for her, cautious. It’s familiar. It’s how she reached for him – this much she remembers as his hands slide against her neck, her cheek.

“Only… if ya want t’ accept it, y’know.”

His mouth is very close. He stays cold, a body without heat, but the shiver that courses through her has nothing to do with that.

She closes her eyes. “I will.”

He drops a kiss to the top of her head—because he’s so much taller and she isn’t, and it’s the easiest part of her to reach, but all she can think of is how glad she is to have showered and washed her hair that morning. Then he stoops down and presses another to her brow.

“Is that,” Makoto stammers, “is that all?”

She dares not open her eyes in case what she sees will be him shaking with laughter.

He tips her face up. “Ya wanted more?”

This patience, while kind, is gnawing into her heart. She ought to tell him that, whatever the words end up being. In a heartbeat, the words trip off her tongue: “Yes—anata—”

His mouth slides down against hers. It’s cold—every part of him is cold—but she doesn’t mind, not the chill of it or the scratch his beard makes. Not when his mouth is so careful on hers. There’s a spark on her tongue when he draws away.

“Makoto?”

Her husband hardly uses her name. Unfair of him, when she uses danna so often. He ought to pay her back. A kiss seems fair. Once for every time he’s avoided using her name. She tells him as much.

“Sounds ‘bout right,” he agrees, and draws her back in.

The next kiss is less cautious—she doesn’t need delicate handling when her fingers are knotted into the collar of his haori. And still gentle, as though he can’t tell she’s flush with heat enough for the both of them. There’s something to this, all this effort of kissing that’s starving her of air and sensible thought, which leaves her weak. If not for his arm looped around her waist, she would nearly collapse into him.

Makoto anchors herself to him when he staggers back, thrown off-balance by the weight of her folding into him.

“Anata,” she whispers. Her mouth is dry when she works them around the words (and no matter – he’ll doubtless see to that too). “Take me to bed?”

xxvi.

He does. Not in the way she might want him to, and only because it’s easier to kiss her without needing to stoop down to reach her, it’s a hell of a crick in the neck, ya know—

“Is it?”

He’s right about that. Being curled up against his chest means finding his mouth with hers much easier. She owes him some thanks for that – she slides her hand around his shoulders to knead that muscle tension away.

The lord of the night shifts closer to make it easier for her. “Yer really good at this,” he rumbles, cat-like in satisfaction. His mouth is a breath away from hers; she could—just lean forward to kiss him, as easy and normal as breathing.

She does.

It’s nice. Kissing. Just that, nothing else being asked of her. When he loops his arm around her waist and draws her close, she thinks he could dare to slide his hand into her shirt. She could brave that.

She swallows. “Danna—”

“Eh? Back to that?”

“Anata. When was it…”

Her words falter in nervousness.

“When was it that you saw me? And not Mirei-san?”

By now, he must have. He’d said so, on that awful night where she tried stabbing him.

He pauses; his brow knocks against hers. “I reckon I’ve been looking at ya fer a while now. Be a deadbeat of a husband if I was lookin’ at anyone else—I just figured you weren’t ever going to even think of lookin’ at me, when all yer thoughts goes towards…”

Vengeance. What she came to his shrine for. What she married him for.

“If I’m lucky enough to see properly again,” she says, leaning up to kiss him again, “what I’m looking forward to seeing will be you.”

xxvii.

The lord of the night is gone in the morning. He had told her as much, as he bundled her up in her blankets and settled to sleep beside her – too cold of a body to be worth cuddling up to, he scoffed, though Makoto had tried.

She drags her hand sleepily over the indent he made in the mattress, then rolls herself into it. He’ll be in Osaka for as long as he needs to be. Not too long, she hopes, resettling the blankets around her, and drifts off to sleep.

Her routine continues. She prays at her kamidana and keeps it stocked with a daily offering of sake. Class proceeds—massage, acupuncture, self-defence—and Makoto excels. Yuko-chan does not ask where her husband has gone, and if Nishikiyama-san and Kiryu-san visit, more frazzled than usual, she and Yuko do not ask. Some concerning news hits the radio—yakuza activity, trouble in Kamurocho, abnormalities in Sotenbori all the way over in Osaka. Nishikiyama and Kiryu are well enough (to not talk about it, to deflect any questions when Yuko and Makoto do ask). Dojima’s name does not come up.

Three weeks of solitary living later, Makoto comes home on a weekend to off-key singing drifting out of her room. She’s untwisted her cane before she recognises it – not having gone to karaoke for some time has wiped her husband’s singing clean from her mind.

“Danna?”

His embrace comes close to knocking her over. The sleeves of his haori, a very formal black one, swoop over her like the wings of some great bird. He might have swung her around the room if there was space for it. Saturday was a busy and tiring day with Yuko-chan, however enjoyable; it’s all she can do to embrace him back and drop a kiss to his cheek before she admits she needs dinner and a shower before she’s in any shape to talk.

“Food later,” he insists. Some wicked glee colours his voice; she can feel a smile stretched over his face when he presses it to her neck. “Got a surprise fer ya.”

The surprise is a kimono – bridal white, though not bridal finery. Time has worn the silk thin, discoloured what was glossy white silk – it’s better that she can’t see it, her husband claims, but it’ll do very well for what other surprise he has lined up for her.

She wonders aloud as she dons the juban: “Aren’t we already married?”

“We’re married,” he confirms from the other side of the room. He promised to keep his back turned; she believes he is, from the noise he makes arranging the pieces of the kimono into place.

“And this is… one of those vow renewal ceremonies that are so popular overseas?”

He’s never heard of such a thing, which is what Makoto ends up explaining to him as he folds her up into her kimono. That he’s a deft hand at kimono dressing is a surprise – when she says as much, he snorts and goes into a long rambling aside about how good he is with clothes (Yuko-chan would doubt him, and loudly too); and how well the Sunshine girls dress is credit to him; and he really did wish she could properly see what was offered in the rental kimonos at their shrine because he had kept those impeccable when he dropped them off charitably from the Sunshine girls’ ever-changing wardrobe.

“There’s so much I don’t know about you,” Makoto remarks when he’s done. He drops the wataboshi over her hair and begins fixing it in place; she seizes her courage and folds her hand over his. “I want to know more of it – just us talking, I mean. Properly, sometime.”

He pauses. Sweeps the wataboshi off her and takes her face in his hands. “That’s what’ll make ya happy?”

The secret to a happy marriage, he’d said.

So much of him she’s learned perchance from another conversation: that terrible things befell them in the past, that he’s half-blind from something that occurred before he was a kami. They’ve never been of the nature to talk of these things so openly. She feels as bare as she did on her wedding night.

She nods.

“Then yeah.” It’s so easy when he says it – and then he leans down to touch his mouth to hers. A kiss as soft as her breath, no heavier than wedding silk, and enough all the same. “As long as yer happy, I’ll be too.”

(And that, Makoto thinks, is reason enough for a vow renewal, even for how strange he finds it: their wedding made anew, made proper, this time around.)

xxviii.

What he tells her is brief: keep the wataboshi on. Keep her eyes low (as terrible as it sounds – would Makoto mind it, with things hard to see as they are? – she does not mind it, she tells him.) Do as he says – walk where he tells her to, follow him where he leads. And not to stumble, because he’s borrowing her cane, and the geta he’s gotten for her are elegant if a touch too tall to be comfortable.

“Stumble?”

“Yeah,” he scoffs. “Just looks tacky.”

He helps her into the geta while she’s seated at her dining table. However odd she remarks it is to wear shoes inside, he merely brushes off. “Just hold tight—right here—an’ wait fer me to get ya, yeah?”

She’s hungry, no matter what he says about ‘food later’. The elaborate get up of a wedding kimono makes movement a strain. Makoto nods.

He vanishes—much like the night they met—and for long minutes, she’s left waiting. He could have left the radio on for her. She idles away some minutes imagining what she’ll tell Yuko-chan that not only was she married in secret, she wants to be married again. She thinks about dinner (that he can pay for, at this rate). She hums a song on the radio that she remembered him liking before he left – something about a princess with glass slippers at midnight – and sings through it three and a bit times before he reappears.

He stinks of blood.

He’s dripping it on the floor.

He’s getting it on her when he reaches forward and takes her hands in his.

“Ready?”

She can’t remember nodding—only knows that she must have—because when he pulls her to her feet, he’s also pulling her away to—to wherever this is. The floor is full of bodies, only nearly dead. A symphony of pain—groaning, near imperceptible sobbing, the wet noises of blood being coughed up and crawled through— and the smell of it all greets her, as the lord of the night leads her by the hand through this venue he’s made a slaughterhouse. Whatever this place it is, she’s glad that he’s brought her to the aftermath instead of the thick of it (where would a woman in a bridal kimono have to stand in the midst of it?), and then her thoughts come to a halt with her husband.

“Shibusawa,” he coos. “Ya ain’t happy that I crashed yer party—but c’mon, ya gotta tell me, what party am I crashin’ anyway?”

Shibusawa—what’s left of him, she supposes; there’s little to see with her eyes low and the wataboshi falling over her face—gurgles with a mouth full of blood.

“‘salright,” the lord of the night cackles. His hand falls away; she can feel him making a show out of looking around the place given his wild arm waving and side-stepping around her. “All yer big talk about—what’d I hear, police investigation ceased? I heard it’s sorted now, no more people lookin’ into that Tachibana real estate office death last year.”

Whatever Shibusawa says next are hardly words, only noise. Makoto can’t hear it anyway – what she hears is her blood in her ears, the pounding in her head drowning out all else.

“Say somethin’,” her husband snarls, “fer all the shit yer family brought to hers.”

Shibusawa spits out more blood than words. “To fuck with that—her—and her brother—”

The lord of the night unsheathes the blade from her cane and swings it down. There’s the clean whoosh of the knife slicing through the air, then the scream, and then the wet noises of cutting—

If she opens her mouth, she imagines she could taste the blood so heavy in the air. She could lick it from her hands so they’d be clean when she reaches forward to take her husband’s face in them and—

“Sweetheart,” the lord of the night purrs. “Hold out yer hands fer me, will ya?”

—and when she does, he drops the first head into them, like a splitted piece of overripe fruit.

Makoto pries her mouth open, tasting blood on her tongue.

“Anata,” she whispers, lifting her face up. She wonders what is it he notices first: the trail of tears on her cheeks or the smile that’s blossomed on her face.

There’s something she ought to say to him. Thank you. I love you. I'm happy now.

And all those words are only a shadow to what sits in her heart, so she settles for silence and reaches up to kiss him.

Chapter Text

xxix.

The important things are done. He’s brought Makoto home. He’s dropped Shibusawa’s head into a jar of brine to keep (the first of five prepared). He’s put her cane aside so he can clean the blade later. He’s done enough to keep Dojima off his trail, with the survivors of that party left babbling about an unworldly thing that appeared from nowhere and a bride dyed with blood come to receive his underling’s head.

He sweeps the wataboshi from Makoto’s face when it’s done. She’s glassy-eyed and swaying like the fronds of a weeping willow, but smiling still.

Perhaps he’s overdone it—with the theatrics. Being witness to this death might make the memory of her brother’s and guardian’s harsher, or ruin her mind entirely. Her smile hardly falters when he slides his bloodied hands into her hair.

(And in spite of it, he thinks: she should have looked like that on their wedding night, when he unveiled her under the moonlight.)

“Anata,” she breathes. Her first words since he took her hands in his and led her away. “I’m so happy.”

The proclamation is punctuated with a kiss. She stands unsteady, collapsing against him without warning. She trembles like the cold has crept in; it’s only sensible that he heaves her up onto the table to keep her steady. And when he’s done that, her arms wind around him to pull him closer. Why pull away when her kisses are so earnest and clumsy in their hunger?—Shibusawa’s death sate some of that hunger for vengeance, but the rest is for the lord of the night to appease.

They shouldn’t be doing this on a table.

He shouldn’t be doing this with his hands wet with blood.

She shouldn’t either: she’s mirroring his mess, with bloody handprints on his back and shoulders as she clutches him close.

He shouldn’t be pulling away the collars of her kimono and her juban to bare the soft column of her throat, or dragging his teeth down from her mouth to her neck.

Makoto shouldn’t encourage him. She does with a faint gasp. There’s little space to move between him and the table; what she manages offers her throat to him. He could find her pulse so easily with his mouth, or he could make a game of searching unhurriedly in the dark of her half-lit apartment.

“Ah, anata—wait—”

He does. There’s a chirp of nervousness in her voice that makes him draw back.

Makoto blinks up at him, eyes dark and wide. Her fingers, which have found their way into his hair, only tremble a little. A little is reminder enough that she deserves to be—unhurried. And clean. And off of a table.

“Maybe it ain’t the best time fer it.” He makes a show of dusting her bloodied handprints from his shoulders.

“Oh,” she manages. She takes the hand that’s offered; when righted, her gaze fixes on him. She gestures at the blood she knows he’s gotten in kind on her wedding kimono. “We should wash this off, shouldn’t we?”

“Mmhm.”

“Then… will you help me take this off?”

xxx.

He does. It’s pragmatic: she needed his help getting dressed; it stands to reason she needs it getting undressed. And it’s hard to think of anything else when his thoughts linger on what hers must also be fixed on. What it is that Makoto wants. How terrifying it is to want – again, or ever. (And how to answer that wanting.)

“I’m not trying to be coy,” she mumbles. “With you helping me here.”

His attention should be on the elaborate wedding obi and all the complex configurations he needs to help her out of. Instead, it’s on the nape of her neck left bare from what disarray he made of her collar. (He could press his mouth to it. And then the elegant slope of her back, moving downwards. She might let him, if only on a better day.)

He hums noncommittally.

“And I might need your help to wash too.”

That gives him pause. He squints up at the ceiling and wonders what he ought to do to get the room to half-light without blowing up some light bulbs.

It’s not what he thinks, she explains. Shibusawa’s blood clotted under her nails when he dropped the head into her hands. And she’s sure that even for her cautious steps over the bloodied floor, guided on his arm, something could have splashed up to her ankles. She’d like not to leave any part of the crime scene on her and she can’t see well enough to clean it off on her own.

By her own admission, it’s not a compelling seduction.

(But there’s still four more heads, which gives Makoto some more times to try it.

He wouldn’t mind that. Her trying. When this matter is all done, he’ll have the opportunity to reciprocate.)

“And… I don’t want you to be surprised.” Her voice is above a whisper. “By the rest of it.”

He had been surprised by what he’d seen that night because it had been unexpected. (And then he had been horrified because he would not have coerced her into marriage if he’d known.)

“I got bad news fer ya,” he offers.

“Bad how?”

He holds the front of her kimono closed as he unwinds her from her obi. “You said that you’re lookin’ forward to seeing me someday? I promise ya, I got shit no one wants to see on me.”

Makoto ponders the sentiment he’s offered her and nods all the same. “Then when I see you properly, I would be glad to see how we’re alike.”

Her hand lands over his before he can pull away. “And you hadn’t answered earlier, anata—would you help me wash?”

And what they end up doing is arguing about the bath.

The lord of the night takes cleanliness seriously for all the shit he gets from people assuming he doesn’t—a year of having a bucket of water dumped on you in lieu of a proper bath stays with you, he doesn’t want to tell her yet—and just putting Makoto in a bathtub, to scrub that blood off into the bathtub, would just let her steep in a different mess.

“I grew up overseas,” is Makoto’s defence. “I didn’t have any other way of washing before I came here.”

“Wrong ways of washin’,” he corrects.

She frowns, looking for all the life of her like an angry hamster. Too justifiably irritated to think of seduction in this state, he thinks. He ends up, overly gleeful, telling her just that as she bats his hands away to undress herself.

(She fails terribly. He’s allowed to continue.

When she huffs in disappointment, he pokes her in the cheek—balloon-round, like a hamster, he says—and cops a smack on his shoulder for it.)

They settle the argument about the bathtub with: fine, his sensibilities can be offended, he’s fine with Makoto washing herself and getting all the blood inside the bathtub, she can empty and refill it with more water if she chooses (no matter how wasteful it is for the environment). And then he tosses in an armful of her strange bath things to make the water so cloudy he can’t see anything through it.

“Thank you,” Makoto mumbles. She folds her arms on the edge of the bathtub and drops her chin on it so he can scrub at her hair. Pressed against the bathtub and in soap-frothed water, there’s nothing of her to see while he works. “I didn’t realise how tired I was until now.”

Well. She did have a busy day before he returned, and there was the excitement of the party they rudely interrupted, and she didn’t end up having dinner all night. There was more he wanted to talk to her about—on what he was looking into when he returned to Osaka—but his attention is taken up with the bath while she nods off, sleep-softened and drowsy.

It’ll wait. There’ll be time to talk about Osaka in the morning.

xxxi.

A night that ended so well can only lead to a morning of consequences.

His kyoudai was pacing in the apartment courtyard at daybreak. The lord of the night had expected him—readiness is in his kyoudai’s nature—but not the way he was greeted.

“It ain’t about what you’ve done here,” he said, which spoke plenty to something having come about from Shibusawa’s beheading. “It’s about what’s happenin’ back home.”

They had looked into the strangers that had been prowling around the lord of the night’s hokora, but there was little they were doing beyond the prowling. They might not have been welcome in Sotenbori. They did not stay long. Men of their ilk never were, when they had their own haunting grounds in Kamurocho.

And last night, on the night that the lord of the night had said he would be away doing business in Tokyo, someone had finally tried to take a sledgehammer to the hokora.

The Sunshine girls had readied themselves for it. The weather turning towards the cold meant that Yuki put a good number of strategically-placed patches of ice anywhere anyone might want to flee the shrine. And his kyoudai had dropped in on the intruder in the way he liked best, looking for, all the life of him, much like a tiger. The lord of the night’s shrine was left unscathed, but the sledgehammer-wielding intruder, however injured, had escaped in the end.

“Well, shit.”

“I knew you were gettin’ into trouble. Just not trouble like this.” A pause, then: “What did you end up doin’ anyhow?”

The lord of the night relayed what had happened to Shibusawa’s head. (And sensibly, not how grateful Makoto had been to receive it.)

“This would be happenin’ at the same time,” he wonders aloud. “My gate crashin’ that party, and you and the girls gate crashin’ on whatever the shrine intruder was doing. Ya don’t think…?”

“Couldn’t be linked,” his kyoudai says. “Or shouldn’t be. You’re getting into trouble with these Tokyo fellas but whoever showed up last night was about as local as I was.”

Then he pauses and in offering a rare smile, adds, “Or about as local as you pretend to be.”

“Trying to start shit,” the lord of the night grumbles. He’s been in Kansai for enough centuries and his accent is perfect by now: he is a local kami in Osaka as far as he’s concerned.

But that’s more of something to mull over – two different sorts of trouble at his shrine. It’s hard enough to figure out what’s happening with one – what it is they want, where it is they came from.

He could ask Makoto again, what more she knows about Dojima he couldn’t find out after these long weeks skulking around Tokyo and stirring up trouble. Or there might be nothing else to ask of her – twice she’s disclosed it and twice it’s put her in tears. After that, he might well leave it alone.

“So what now?”

“Some of the girls are lookin’ after your shrine until ya get back,” with the implication that the lord of the night ought to head back too – those remaining heads can stand to wait, no matter how much he’d like to drop them, one after another, into Makoto’s hands. Then, without so much as a beat, his kyoudai nods towards the apartment tower that Makoto inhabits. “And I wanna visit that kid again, while I’m here.”

“Kid,” the lord of the night echoes. “Haw? What kid?” And then, remembering: “Oi, that brat? What, ya ain’t getting ‘nuff salt thrown at ya or something?”

“She doesn’t mind me. More than she likes you anyway.”

The lord of the night starts up an insincere bout of grumbling.

Maybe his kyoudai will put in a good word for him. Warm the kid up to the notion that this marriage between he and Makoto is more than just a bargain struck on the night of a summer festival. Get her used to the idea that he’s staying around Makoto’s place for the long haul.

xxxii.

But visitation will be for proper daylight hours. It’s still dawn and this part of Tokyo sleeps. The lord of the night and his kyoudai set out for the city proper.

Police swarm what had been the Shibusawa family’s party, striding past what looks like a shirtless man in a snakeskin jacket and an underground brawler wearing military second-hand without a word. They lean against a wall and chain-smoke their way through human cigarettes as they eavesdrop on an active investigation: yes, only one murder victim, with his head yet to be found; most survivors have been sent to the hospital, with some dying en route as collateral from a violent beat down that focused on Shibusawa Keiji alone. The whole thing had been a yakuza family celebrating the end of a police investigation that had gotten nowhere: the death of a part-foreign real estate agent, found in a tiny square of dirt at a heart of a land grab and that ‘21^st Century Redevelopment Plan’ for Kamurocho. Might there be grounds to restart that investigation? Possibly, with how this murder looks – and maybe they’ll get some yakuza families with links to this one to finally cooperate, with how they might be on the list next.

“Are they?”

The lord of the night takes a drag on his cigarette. “Shibusawa’s done. I got an Awano and a Kuze to sort out, then Dojima and an assassin of his are last.”

In this way, Dojima could feel the net close around him. It’ll be desperate. Poetic.

The lord of the night thinks Makoto would indulge in that. She’ll deserve to.

“But,” his kyoudai adds, frowning, “no one else? These yakuza families won’t go after ane-san if they think she’s tied to any of this?”

“Yakuza underlings barely get to hear ‘bout what their higher ups are doin’.” The name Makoto Makimura gets passed around as a warning: some idiot of a civilian who attempted an assassination on Dojima and caught a bullet for her troubles, yet still worked her way around to sell that kingmaking piece of land she owned to Sera Masaru and fuck over Dojima entirely. The lesson of that – to kill civilians properly, and to have a finger in every pie where yakuza were concerned, and to never underestimate the likes of Sera, risen to chairman of the largest yakuza organisation in Tokyo now.

“That meant to ring a bell too?”

“Sera Masaru?”

It ought to, only for him – Makoto mentioned it once before, during that first massage she bestowed on him, which had then knocked him out cold with how good it’d been. He’d filed the thought away—a businessman who’d come to take Makoto from Osaka to Tokyo—and found out the rest of Sera and the Nikkyo Consortium’s successes later.

“There’s somethin’ funny ‘bout the guy,” the lord of the night says. He glares up into a cloud of smoke he’s exhaled. “He’s guarding her future an’ all that – a trust fer her money, organises these self-defence and massage therapy and acupuncture lessons, gets her face places fer these charity things he’s got goin’.”

His kyoudai makes an interested noise about the self-defence classes – what sort of self-defence class does a blind woman practice? – but he’s following the thread that’s been laid down.

“And that makes him suspicious?”

Raking in this much luck around the Empty Lot, at the very heart of Makoto’s tragedy, makes him suspicious. Knowing how to be everywhere at the right time for that luck makes him suspicious. Being around this much as a benefactor makes him suspicious.

And Makoto having told him nothing of this – that’s suspicious too.

She ought to have by now, for all she’s told him about Dojima. Sera might not be the target of her vengeance, but someone this deep in the whole yakuza business must have something to do with it. Their poor start of a marriage ought to have given way to better things.

“Suppose ane-san had her reasons.” His kyoudai offers a hard look. “Suppose you should talk it out.”

The way they wouldn’t have when they first married.

The lord of the night stomps out his cigarette. “Right, right. Ya don’t gotta nag. Let’s just see what else the cops gotta say and then we grab breakfast.”

xxxiv.

There’s a crowd of people at Makoto’s door when he returns, with the breakfast to make up for her missing dinner last night: men in onna masks nabbed straight from a Noh theatre, decked out in decently tailored suits and that shiny little pin the lord of the night recognises as Nikkyo Consortium. Yakuza that’s a step up from the usual street thug.

They’ll need to talk about this Nikkyo Consortium and Sera Masaru stuff afterwards, once he’s cleared the bodies from her doorstep. He can’t look forward to it, their first fight as husband and wife. He could throw the takoyaki he’s gotten for her breakfast at someone in a red spike of rage.

Except—except one of them looks up from where they’re banging on her door, ready to break it down if Makimura-san doesn’t open up, it’s urgent—and looks right at him, where the lord of the night ought to be unseen to the human eye.

“Ah,” comes the voice, unhindered by the mask. “That’s who the Chairman wants to see.”

Not everyone in the Nikkyo Consortium, he realises, has a human eye.

The lord of the night puts the takoyaki aside and makes the running lunge forward first.

xxxv.

The Nikkyo Consortium men go into the elevator, unconscious, and back down to ground floor. If they stay there, unable to walk out, that’s their problem – what matters is they’re off Makoto’s floor.

The takoyaki was flattened in the fighting. Not an impossible fight by any means, but one against so many, and he trying not to kill anyone unnecessarily by throwing them over the railing (not yet – there’s still a Sera Masaru to speak with), meant that Makoto’s breakfast went down under someone’s foot all too quickly.

Makoto’s front door stays closed.

When he knocks, nothing.

When he sidles past its lock and announces his presence sans breakfast, nothing.

When he opens her bedroom door—closed, which it hadn’t been when he left that morning—it slams right back into his face. His nose crunches, a break that will be a bitch to fix; the pain is still registering, like a slap in the face, when Makoto ducks out behind it and throws him down with all her weight behind her.

The weight is nothing. It’s the surprise of it that makes landing on his back so much more jarring.

Her face is like iron, like it had once been on a night she woke beside him, caught in a bad dream. He catches her wrist before the blade it wields can land into his own face.

“Oi, Makoto.”

He’s glad she’s well-rested enough after last night to come at him, and armed at that.

He’s not glad about much else.

“It’s just me,” he garbles through a mouthful of blood. “You expectin’ someone else? Like a carload of Nikkyo Consortium boys at the door?”

The look of her face falters. If she worried about Nikkyo Consortium banging at her door, she’s more worried about what he’ll say now. (And he remembers that look too, after he wrestled a knife out of her hands and left her curled in terror on the floor, on a night so long ago.)

He touches it carefully. Gently, however angry he feels now. Lets his hand slide against her cheek, familiar.

He started their marriage on the wrong foot. He ought to be angry at himself too.

Her face crumples. Her arm holding the knife too, and then she’s pliable enough for him to roll himself upright and gather up into his arms.

“Listen,” he says towards the wall, “I ain’t gonna lie. I’m a bit mad at ya fer not tellin’ me this.”

Against his shoulder, Makoto shakes. Not tears – that’s a good start. He gentles it with his hair running over her hair, all soft and dark and glossy from his hard work scrubbing it clean of blood the night before. If he leans down, he can press his mouth against it and breathe in the human smell of her, the way he had done that morning, curled up beside her in bed.

“But I’m real mad at myself fer not bein’ the sorta husband that you could tell this to.”

“Nikkyo Consortium aren’t here to hurt me,” she says, neither reassuring or certain. “If they’re here—Sera-san will want to talk. Only talk – he’s not much for harming civilians. Even if it won’t be a nice talk.”

Sera doesn’t normally settle on these types of talks though, she confesses – this matter of men banging on her door and calling her outside, when lurking around graveyards and being chauffeured to a family office does the trick. What they did last night at the Shibusawa family party must have been stupidly evident, even if accusing her of suddenly appearing in bridal finery and leaving with Shibusawa’s head is as a wild and groundless accusation to make.

“Whassat about a graveyard?”

Makoto recalls it for him: before her husband showed up in Tokyo, Sera-san had asked about her disappearance in Osaka and told her, as obliquely as he’s used to telling anyone anything, to stay out of trouble. The trouble, no doubt, that comes from praying at the lord of the night’s hokora and asking for vengeance.

“An’ the trouble of marryin’ him too, I reckon?”

Makoto blinks up. “I’m glad for this trouble. Even if my husband makes for a terrible singer—”

“Haw? Ya serious?”

“—I would not have given up my marriage.”

She jams her face back into his shoulder. “Sera-san can be as unhappy as he likes,” she mumbles. “Even if he wanted to make me give up on revenge, I would not give you up.”

Not for the first time, he wonders exactly what the hell Sera has over her as her benefactor.

And before he can ask, they’re interrupted by his kyoudai banging at his door, with that salt-wielding persistent child in tow, wondering what the hell happened when all he left to do was to grab breakfast for Yuko-chan and come upstairs to ane-san’s floor, why’s the floor all covered in blood and smashed remains of Noh masks and how come the elevator is stuffed full of unconscious men when normal people need it free to use?

xxxvi.

“Sera-san’s good to us,” Yuko offers to her taciturn quiet friend who insists on naming himself Suzuki-san. She nibbles at the breakfast he’s brought her – convenience store onigiri and sliced fruit, the healthy sort of breakfast young women like her ought to be having instead of those instant noodles she sneaks in, he insists – and nods firmly when he turns his disbelieving glance at her.

“For real? Ane-san here had a group of men menacing her door an' you still think that’s the sort of man you can trust, kid?”

“Makoto-chan,” Yuko corrects, because she can’t get used to Makoto being ane-san of any sort, “has an arrangement with Sera-san too. She wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t.”

Here being a guarded apartment complex that Sera arranged. Her ani-san’s deal with Sera was loyalty, even if he was part of a different Tojo Clan outfit (or possibly, because of it; Nikkyo Consortium needs people outside of it under their control, especially from rival yakuza families). In turn, Yuko was moved from Sunflower Orphanage to Tokyo for her medical treatment, to be kept where she was in safe hands near her brother. Neither he nor Kiryu-san like to speak of it, but not speaking of it doesn’t make it less true: what her ani-san has sworn to Kazama-oyaji needs to be balanced with what he’s sworn to Sera-san, for both their sakes.

But Makoto-chan’s arrangement was different. She arrived carrying a hospital bag that Yuko recognised as being from the rehab wing of where she also received treatment, with a bodyguard who pointed out every security door, gate and camera in the complex. Ani-san had told her that this was one of Kiryu-san’s associates who’d come to Tokyo – nice girl, a little unwell even after leaving rehab – and she was near Yuko’s age herself, so they could be friends, and Makoto-san could keep an eye on her, terrible turn of phrase as it was.

And Yuko, her ani-san said without the barest hint of subtlety, could keep an eye on her too.

Makoto makes for a good friend. It makes keeping an eye on her and telling ani-san what she sees crueller than it ought to be.

Suzuki-san rubs his hand over his face.

“Suzuki-san, are you going to tell her?”

“Nah. Stuff like that is for you to be responsible for.”

It’s the sort of thing his kyoudai—Makoto’s husband—is fretting about. She glances over to the other side of Makoto’s apartment—and yes, there he is, fretting away as he spoke to Makoto in low hushed tones over her newly bought breakfast. “Really?”

“Yes.”

Suzuki-san is the type to never stop frowning or staring severely at things. The look he fixes on her is no different.

“When I had a sister—an’ that was years ago, don’t give me that look, kid—she knew what she was responsible fer too. I had her back in a lotta things and I looked out for her, but if I couldn’t take care of her, I made sure she knew what she had to do to take care of herself.”

A sister he no longer speaks of. Best not unearth old wounds there, so Yuko asks no more.

“There anything else ‘bout this Sera guy I oughta know about?”

Not him. His kyoudai maybe.

For Makoto’s sake, although even she doesn’t know how useful it’ll be, Yuko says, “Ani-san is… only half my brother, actually.” She looks down at her hands. “My parents were just normal people. Ani-san’s father wasn’t, but my father loved ani-san all the same.”

Suzuki-san tosses an incredulous look towards Makoto and her husband – the look that says what on earth is with these mortal women and their marital decisions? – and turns back to her. “I’ve seen yer brother around. He ain’t too odd where it matters.”

“It does matter,” Yuko insists. “Other people feel there’s something strange about him and they don’t like him for whatever reason they can think of.”

All of which are bad reasons. Nishikiyama’s too much of a smooth talker, he’ll turn on you next. Nishikiyama’s so self-assured it’s a wonder his neck doesn’t creak when he looks down on you.

“But Sera-san… Sera-san said he had use for things like that,” and people like her ani-san, not all human, not all not-human in a place like Kamurocho – people that even he has some reign over, although Yuko has figured out it’s best not to ask how it’s possible.

“So… so ani-san has made his promises to him. And things will be better for him eventually.”

“Eventually,” Suzuki-san echoes. He turns a thoughtful look back to his kyoudai and Makoto. “Your Sera-san’s got everything falling into place where he’s concerned, right?”

It doesn’t matter if Yuko nods or not. Suzuki-san’s probably made his own conclusion from what he’s heard.

“And whaddya ya reckon Sera’s like, when something like this,” he continues – and this is quite clearly the news on the radio this morning, some violence at a yakuza family office that Yuko had turned up the volume to pay close attention to, “pops up when he’s least expecting?”

Yuko pokes at her breakfast. The thought is unappetising, but she confesses, “He’ll want to have a long talk with you. And decide from there.”

xxxvii.

Yuko spends the day inside Makoto’s apartment, going through everything good and bad on the radio and television and pretending that this was something they planned to do, and that there’s nothing of consequence waiting for them outside the door.

The lord of the night did something to keep the door shut, even though he apologised for locking them inside by loading up her fridge with convenience store groceries. Yuko-chan’s friend, still calling himself Suzuki-san, went with him, saying that there was business in Osaka that needed him.

His kyoudai would be back, he added, to walk Yuko back to her floor.

“Do I really need that?” Yuko wondered aloud. She had a cane; she could walk herself down once things quietened and Sera-san’s men decided to finally leave the elevator on their own two feet.

“Ya probably don’t,” Suzuki-san said. “But he wants ya to think nice things of him, so let him.”

His kyoudai in question makes a snapping remark at him before they depart. Makoto focuses on the positive: her husband trying to make it to Yuko-chan’s good side now.

“Was it you?” is all Yuko asks once they’re left to themselves. She’s cleaning up from breakfast, sounding as though it’s the most natural thing in the world to ask. “With the news, on the radio this morning.”

Makoto hadn’t the chance to listen to the radio – it was Nikkyo Consortium men knocking on the door that woke her that morning.

“It was us,” she corrects.

Yuko stays silent for a moment, scrubbing away at a clean dining table, then says, in a voice heavy with regret, “I knew it, Makoto-chan. Of course he was a bad influence on you.”

The laughing breaks the tension. Yuko does not speak of it further until evening and the lord of the night returns to escort her home.

He’s left something with Makoto before he departs, for her to look through until he’s back. She picks through it, recognising a white juban and a black kimono, solemn and sober with its inky dark silk. Without the delicate embroidery or pattern of a high-end hostess or a more old-fashioned traditionalist woman, it’s a solid black meant for funerals. The obi he’s picked is off-white to make it clear that it’s not entirely funereal. The last garment she does not recognise – a woman’s haori, black too, embroidered with crests she can’t make out the shape of.

“Montsuki,” her husband says on his return. He’s helping her into her kimono when he mentions it, focused on how it’s shaped and how the obi sits. He has one for himself too, so she’ll just have to be patient while he dresses himself next.

The word rings a bell. Makoto rummages back into her memory and recalls the hospital she attended a day after their wedding.

“Oh. Crests? And… yours is a hannya?”

He hums his agreement. His crest, and she’s wearing it. What it means is clear enough when they’ll go to see Sera together.

xxxviii.

“I suppose this is how Shibusawa didn’t expect you,” Sera-san notes.

The Tojo Clan Chairman would not keep normal hours, but even so, Makoto thinks they were lucky to catch him in his office this late at night. Or perhaps Sera was here anyway, managing the aftermath of what happened to the Shibusawa family a night ago.

Her husband settles his hand on her back, barely felt through the obi. A night ago, he reminded her, he needed her face low and hidden beneath a wataboshi, without a word out of her, such that no survivor could pin back Shibusawa’s murder to Makimura Makoto. There’s no need for that now – Sera has clearly figured out something when he sent an elevator’s worth of Nikkyo Consortium men to her door. She lifts her chin up and looks Sera at where his eyes ought to be, thinking of what her husband said: Tojo Clan Chairman or not, Nikkyo Consortium President or not, an’ guy who gave ya a cane with a blade or not, ya show men like that you’re scared and they’ll hold it over you fer life.

(I am, Makoto admits. Scared.

Yeah, healthy amount of scared’s pretty normal.

He finishes applying beni in a red sweep over her mouth and adds, but what I mean is, when yer with me, you ain’t meant to be scared. What kami would ever settle for a wife that couldn’t match up to him?)

“It’s useful, having someone who can vanish into and out of places,” Sera continues. Even their sudden appearance in his office hasn’t unnerved him. Yet. Her husband had said he’d do the prodding to see what makes a Tojo Clan Chairman flinch.

“It has been an agreeable marriage in this way,” Makoto agrees.

If Sera-san reacts, she can’t see. It’ll be her husband who picks up and prods at it.

“My congratulations,” he says finally. There’s sake on a cabinet behind him that he hasn’t lifted a finger to retrieve. “I don’t recognise your family crest,” which means he’s seen the hannya on her montsuki haori, “so I expect your husband isn’t from around here.”

“Yes. He’s from Kansai.”

Sera muses on it. Picking at the threads, pulling the one that leads to Kyoto and a night where she disappeared at a summer festival. Or perhaps Sera’s always known, because he’s always suspected. On the night before her husband had left, the night she’d given him her broken watch as a keepsake, he’d told her that there were more people at his hokora than usual and that was why he was needed back to keep an eye on it. This morning too, while Yuko-chan was breakfasting under Suzuki-san’s watchful eye at Makoto’s dining table, her husband had told her what had nearly happened at his hokora during their expedition to the Shibusawa family party, and about the stranger who’d tried to take a sledgehammer to it.

“I hope Tokyo has been kind to him,” Sera offers blandly.

“It ain’t bad,” the lord of the night says, his first words since dropping the two of them into Tojo Clan offices out of nowhere. “Though I’m not much a fan of this redevelopment plan ya got goin’ in that gaudy pleasure district out here.”

“Really? Although Makoto-san was instrumental in making that redevelopment plan happen?”

She was. She could bear to sell the Empty Lot to him once she woke from that medical coma. Better Sera and Nikkyo Consortium to win that Tojo Clan land struggle and win over the seat of Chairman, than to let Dojima and his family kill her brother, fell her with a bullet, and spit on both their graves by taking it from her.

“But from what I see, I expect Makoto-san has been displeased with how things have proceeded from there.”

She expects, if her eyesight was any better, that Sera-san has turned his impassive gaze to her now.

Even with the costume of a vengeful woman in white, even without saying a word at that party, even with a husband who could vanish them in and out in the time it takes to blink, Sera says, it’s very clear to see that no one else could be so motivated to carve up Dojima and his lieutenants so. The Dojima family might not be able to explain how she did it – unlike Sera, their minds do not expand to matters of spirits and the like – but gokudo like them don’t need the how, only the why in order to spur them on.

Awano and his Taihei Association, Kuze and his Kenno Clan, and Dojima and all his subordinates are on high alert—one that Sera has spent the day trying to untangle—and a hunt to track down a Makimura Makoto again. It had been important that Sera find her first before they did – and just as well that he knew exactly where she was stashed, although someone had incapacitated all the men sent to retrieve her.

 “Haw? If yer guys were any better,” the lord of the night mutters, “they wouldn’t have ended up takin’ a morning nap in that elevator.”

“My men saw you, even if you weren’t trying to be seen,” Sera-san says simply. “Dojima men might not look for the likes of you, but do not underestimate my Nikkyo Consortium like so.”

His tone sharpens when he turns it back to Makoto. “I said once that I would safeguard your future. For your brother’s sake, I meant it. That Dojima and his lieutenants never answered for your brother’s death has bothered you—”

“And,” the lord of the night adds, “somethin’ ‘bout an assassin?”

Sera neatly ignores him. “—but what you’ve done now would stretch my resources to keep you alive and out of Dojima’s hands. They’ve all gathered in agreement for something where it would be in their best interests to stay alive after you’ve lit a fire under them all with Shibusawa’s death—”

“They what?” the lord of the night cuts in. “Gathered. Together?”

Sera stops. As if it’s registered what he’s said means—or, to Makoto, as if he’s giving her husband a moment to scheme in exactly a direction he wants them to.

“If Dojima and his lieutenants,” or what’s left of them, “were to meet a terrible end at the hands of a spirit that few outside the Nikkyo Consortium men could see or even believe in,” Makoto starts, “would it be all so devastating for you, Sera-san?”

“It would. The Dojima family is one of the largest of the Tojo Clan. You might not care much for it, but I would face a diminished clan whose numbers are difficult to recover.”

His voice gives away nothing.

Makoto would like to prod at that truth a bit more. Would like to ask exactly how supportive Dojima and his ilk are of Sera’s ascension to Tojo Clan Chairman, when her sale of the Empty Lot to Sera snatched a sure victory from Dojima’s hands.

But Sera doesn’t need to know what she’s thinking, so she casts her eyes low and asks, “Will you stop me from doing more?”

From taking Kuze’s head, and Awano’s head, and Dojima’s head, and that assassin’s of his too.

“I expect your husband would come for my head in kind,” Sera says. “And I would also expect no kindness from the lord of the night, being a kami for ill luck.”

Her husband in question stifles what irritation might have arisen with a cough.

“No,” Sera continues, without any visible delight in catching them off-guard. His voice is heavy with exhaustion – even if he doesn’t dare stop them, there’s a mountain of work in managing what comes next. “I cannot stop you. But nor can I guarantee that I can protect you against Dojima and his men now that you’ve decided to do this.”

He fetches the sake from his cabinet and lays down three sake dishes on the desk.

“A toast to your happy marriage, Makoto-san. I feel that if we do not drink now, there will be no further chances for me to congratulate you.”

He drinks the first dish from one her husband picks out at random – proof it’s not poisoned – and adds, once they’re done, “Are you sure of it then? That this lord of the night will safeguard your life against Dojima better than the Nikkyo Consortium has this past year?”

“Yeah,” her husband says, reaching forward casually to top up his sake dish again, “I reckon I’ll do alright against a buncha humans that don’t believe in spirits or nuthin’.”

xxxix.

They return home with little fanfare. Sera-san sends them off with the expectation that he’ll see her next at her funeral.

At home, once the matter of undressing from the sombre montsuki haori is done, Makoto makes her evening prayers at the kamidana and the lord of the night runs circles around the place, checking her apartment is warded and guarded and secured, from door to windowsill. Makoto can go out—although he doesn’t advise it—but no one else can come in.

“Yer gonna hafta stay in here a bit,” he concedes, “but once it’s alright, I’ll come back to get ya. And, uh, I’ll stack this place up with food in the meantime.”

“It feels like I’ve been quarantined with an infectious disease.”

“That ain’t funny,” he mutters. He’s already making a list of things that aren’t cup noodles to stock in her pantry.

“But it… it won’t be long, will it? If Dojima and his men are just…”

Gathered together, Sera-san said. And so easy to pick off because of it. Surely it’s too easy, although her husband insists that’s what humans do in panic: safety in numbers and all that. And even if they aren’t, he’s been hunting around Tokyo for all these weeks, sussing out Dojima’s hideouts and dens. There’s only so many places they’ve set up as hidey-holes.

“Hey,” he says, running his fingers through her hair. He draws her close and drops a kiss to her cheek. “It’s almost done. Yer almost free of this, and then you can do whatever it is ya want to do. Make yer dreams come true, figure out the rest of yer life, and all that.”

“And get married again in a vow renewal ceremony,” she agrees.

He shakes with his cackling, although she does mean it. A vow renewal ceremony and a fresh attempt at their wedding night. They’ll get it right this time around.

He bundles her off to bed with the promise that no, of course he won’t put a hand on Nishikiyama-san or Kiryu-san if he runs into them – they were her friends who helped set up her kamidana, after all – and that he’ll stay with her until she goes to sleep. He'll have to leave right after. The night is best for hunting, after all.

xl.

Makoto wakes to a quiet day. Nothing happens in the morning, once her morning prayers to the kamidana and breakfast is done. The afternoon news on the radio has some apprehension about a spate of violence going around Tokyo, with a story still developing.

Makoto keeps herself busy. Cleans the kamidana, then each room of her apartment. Colour-coordinates the interesting assortment of cup noodles her husband has bought, then plans out two weeks of meals from what’s in the kitchen. Keeps an ear on the radio for local breaking news in Tokyo. And all the while, run over in her mind what’s happened in Osaka. Strange people at the lord of the night’s hokora. The attempted attack on it with a sledgehammer. And Sera-san being aware of it, including her husband’s name and having in his employment those Noh-masked men who can see her husband even when he meant to stay hidden, means that this was his doing, surely. Although—for someone who said he wouldn’t stop them, and most certainly would reap the rewards of Dojima and his subordinates no longer being a hindrance to him when her husband is through with them—why need a sledgehammer attack?

She’s still pondering it when the knock on her door comes. She lets it go—easier to pretend she isn’t home if she won’t be opening the door anyway—but it persists until Yuko-chan’s voice drifts inside.

“Makoto-chan?”

Yuko’s never sounded like that in her life, even when Makoto visited her in hospital in some awful bouts of her illness. That much terror, held together in a trembling voice.

The knocking starts up again.

“Makoto, please—please open the door. Ani-san isn’t—he isn’t—if you don’t open the door, I don’t know what’ll happen to me.”

And Makoto won’t want to imagine. When she’s dragged her leaden feet to the door and fumbles the lock open with her shaking hands, she can see the shape of Yuko at her doorstep, held like a shield in front of someone with their arm looped around her neck. And a cluster of men around them both, like crows ringed around a corpse.

“Makoto-chan,” drawls the stranger that’s holding Yuko hostage. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Step outside so we can have a talk, or something might happen to your friend here.”

He’s right – it’s been a long time since that night in Osaka where he told her, of course he knew where her brother was, he could take her to him right now, just before her life descended into hell. But with that memory, she could pick the voice out anywhere.

The lord of the night hadn’t thought of this. But then, neither did she, and now Yuko is paying for it.

She apologises – to her husband, to Yuko, to Nishikiyama-san for doing a terrible job at being a good friend to his sister – and steps out past every guard and spell and ward on her doorstep.

Chapter Text

xli.

It’s never a good thing to be called into Kamurocho like this, with every man in the Dojima family on alert like a war’s about to break out. And—there is, isn’t there? Shibusawa murdered in the middle of his own party, celebrating the end of an investigation that Nishikiyama was loathe to be glad and angry about: yes, that’s less shit for Dojima and the lieutenants to take their frustrations out on the likes of him and Kiryu; no, that’ll do nothing for Makoto-san’s peace of mind, no matter what Sera says.

Someone pulls him aside – Kazama-oyaji’s called for him. Yes, it’s important – it wouldn’t do for Kazama, even as family captain, to make decisions like this, when Nishiki isn’t a Kazama family man who needs to obey those orders.

The Kazama family office is near-empty when Nishiki arrives, everyone heading out to do what it was Nishiki had been called away from. Kiryu arrives minutes later, frowning harder than he has in his life. He gives Nishiki a look—they’d talked about this yesterday, in a moment amidst the chaos: if Makoto-san’s involved in this, they deny it until they’re blue in the face—and then Kashiwagi-san calls them in.

Kazama-oyaji looks like he’s about to sweep out the door too. It’s well-known that he was Dojima’s hitman in the years before Nishiki and Kiryu swore up into the gokudo; it’s only now that he’s really looked the part.

“The hospital called,” Kazama-oyaji starts, tapping at the desk he’s about to leave. “Yuko missed an appointment. You’ll need to pick her up and take her in yourself.”

The hospital ought to call Nishiki first, being family.

Kiryu’s no wiser. “Sir?”

“If you can’t find her,” Kazama-oyaji continues, “you ought to look.” He gestures at the desk and the assortment of things upon it that should have no place there. Ofuda. A book of norito that surely neither he nor Kiryu could commit to memory by the night’s end. Bottles of water, neatly marked with a date and the name of a shrine near Mt Fuji – as though Kazama-oyaji really does believe in sacred water.

“Sir,” Nishiki says finally. He hardly recognises his voice. “Has something happened to my sister?”

“When you find her,” Kazama-oyaji says, as though Nishiki hasn’t said anything at all, “it’s best you do whatever it is that the Chairman calls you to do next.”

Kiryu is already picking up what Kazama-oyaji has laid down. He manages a ridiculously serious bow for someone with his arms full—Nishiki can’t even manage that even though he’s carrying nothing at all—and then he rushes out the door as quickly as he can once they’re dismissed.

“Nishiki,” Kiryu says, “we’ll need your car.”

xlii.

There’s nothing wrong with Yuko’s apartment, except that when Nishiki places his hand on the handle, he finds the front door unlocked.

It swings open drunkenly, sagging lopsided on broken hinges. He and Kiryu shoulder past it, saying nothing.

Inside, it’s mostly neat. Mostly. Her cane left at the dining room table. A cup of tea knocked over. A chair on the ground. If someone came inside to drag her out, with all those charms and knick-knacks for her health and good luck doing shit all to keep her safe, they’d need to do no more than that.

“Nishiki—”

“There must be something. A—a ransom note.”

There’s nothing – nothing taped to the fridge or left in her room or pinned under her salt and pepper shakers on her dining room table.

Kiryu fishes out one of Yuko’s grocery bags to hold the ofuda, the book of norito, the bottles of sacred water. He looks up, as though he can see through the floors. “Let’s check Makoto-san’s place too.”

There’s even less out of place at Makoto’s flat. He’s uneasy walking in, with legs that suddenly seem to be moving at a crawl. Like he’s wading through mud, only even the air becomes thick and swampy. His head goes cloudy like he’s had too much to drink. For Yuko, Nishiki persists. Only Makoto’s front door is left open—no one needed to break it open, unlike Yuko’s door—with her cane left leaning by the table. It’s so quiet that the only thing Nishiki can say is, “What the fuck is happening?”

He turns over a chair in fury – it doesn’t break, but if it did, Makoto could replace it anyway, what’s a chair to a billionaire?—and the words escape him harsher than he would like: “What’s happening? Why Yuko? Sera told us to keep an eye on Makoto and make sure nothing went wrong and we did, so how is Shibusawa missing a head? Why has Dojima called everyone together like a gang war is about to start when nothing’s happened between any family for so long—”

“Nishiki—”

Kiryu makes a half-hearted grab at him, the sort of thing where he’d shake him by his shoulders, try to knock some sense back into him.

Nishiki side-steps him, clumsy still, and rebalances himself with the first thing he grabs. The kamidana – the one he and Kiryu helped set up because Makoto couldn’t see well enough to do it herself. Those are the shrine offerings and things he’d gotten for her. That’s the ofuda with a kami’s blessing that Makoto had gotten herself. The plastic sakaki’s wiped clean of dust; the salt is fresh; there’s no doubt the sake in its bottle is too. Everything so neat and clean, which is typical for what they know of Makoto.

But with Yuko gone and Shibusawa beheaded, he has to tell himself: they don’t really know what it is that Makoto thinks or feels. They never have, since the moment Kiryu had laid her brother’s body at her feet. The dull thud in his head like the start of a headache doesn’t help.

He clears the offerings from her kamidana in one clean sweep. Kiryu yells—who cares what it is that Kiryu’s shouting, it’s drowned out by his own shouting at the shrine: what is it, who is it, Makoto couldn’t have done this all by herself, what sort of assassin did she buy with the billion yen to her name—

Kiryu grabs him by the shoulder.

Nishiki wrenches it away—or tries to, because that’s a grip harder than what Kiryu would attempt on him.

“Oi, brat.”

It’s not Kiryu behind his shoulder.

“Ya mind telling me what yer doin’ to my altar?”

The stranger who’s appeared out of thin air scowls at him – a man, little older than he is, one eye hidden with an eyepatch – and then Kiryu smacks him over the head with the dining room chair that was knocked over.

The stranger hardly blinks. He cranes back to stare at Kiryu like he’s one of those possessed dolls from a foreign horror film and Nishiki finally realises, right, that’s what Makoto’s billion yen bought her.

And then the stranger conjures a tanto out of nowhere and dives at Kiryu, and Nishki’s next thought is: oh shit.

xliii.

It’s a pity they trash Makoto’s apartment – whoever kidnapped her left it in better shape than they do, and he and Kiryu were here to help.

They’re hardly the cavalry. The stranger can’t be either – he doesn’t look the part, not in a uniform that’s all but stolen from a gokudo captain’s wardrobe. It takes a minute once the fighting halts – a long minute where Nishiki wheezes up blood and Kiryu yanks out the ofuda hurriedly, not even realising he’s held it inverted and backwards – for Nishiki to realise: yes, he called in backup somewhere when he snapped that it was an unfair fight, two against one; no, they don’t know how he did it but a giant wrestler type appeared out of thin air and threw himself into the fight all the same; and yes, they’ve seen the guy around Kamurocho before.

And it’s the guy Yuko told him about too. Some guy in their twenties. Missing an eye. Hair cut short for practicality more than fashion (too short to yank on in a fight). All snakeskin and leather from head to toe. Allergic to shirts.

She’s left out telling him about the knife, but doubtless, even the stranger decided not to pull it on an ill girl mobilising with a cane, for all the salt she’s claimed to have thrown at him.

“The hell are the lot of ya doin’ here?” the man with one eye snarls.

“What have you done to ane-san’s place?” the underground wrestler-looking one says.

“Makoto-san,” Kiryu starts, still wielding the ofuda like an idiot. He looks like he’s ready to throw it. He also looks like he has no idea where he should do the throwing. “Her door was unlocked. Like Yuko-chan’s—and they’re both missing.”

He adds sombrely, “And you also trashed Makoto-san’s place.”

“Makoto’s missing? Ya expect me to trust someone who started trashin’ the place, starting with the kamidana—”

“What’s happened to Yuko now—”

They attempt peacemaking with Kiryu putting the ofuda down and the one-eyed man putting his tanto down and Nishiki saying, “We helped Makoto-san set up that kamidana, you know. I got all those things together. Makoto just needed to get an ofuda with a kami’s blessing for it.”

He frowns at the stranger. “But… why do you look like that?”

“Look like what, kid?”

A guy who climbed out a very high-end dumpster, he’s tempted to say, but the wrestler-looking one says first, “You’re Yuko’s brother then? The not-all human one. Step outside, buddy – you ain’t gonna do great on account of all these charms.”

Nishiki stays put, wondering: no goddamn wonder he feels like shit. But this matter of how human he isn’t is not meant to be talked about—he hates it when he overhears it said in hushed tones, there’s something up with that Nishikiyama guy—which Kiryu picks up on, faster than anyone.

“There’s nothing wrong with Nishiki.” His voice is terse. “And it has nothing to do with Yuko or Makoto-san being missing. If someone’s taken them both, it’ll have something to do with what’s happening across Tokyo right now.”

To the one-eyed man, Kiryu adds, “I expect you would know something of this. You’ve said as much – that’s your kamidana there and it’s Makoto you’re worried about.”

The one-eyed man scowls. “It takes a lot to trust yakuza t’ find her.”

“I’ll trust yakuza to find her and Yuko,” the wrestler-looking one snaps. “That one’s her brother. That other one hasn’t thrown ofuda at us yet—and kid, ya realise that it’s backwards and upside down, don’t ya?”

Kiryu’s face doesn’t change. “Yes.”

Trust him to be stoic at moments like this.

“My kyoudai here handled this Shibusawa at ane-san’s request. And then he pissed off some Sera guy doin’ so, but then he also said Sera wouldn’t stop him from doing what else he needed to do. So what else is there?”

A man who appeared in this apartment abruptly and held up against he and Kiryu for a while without backup is entirely coherent with being a person who gatecrashed the Shibusawa family party and left with a head. And at ane-san’s request too.

“You killed Shibusawa because Makoto asked you to?”

The awful truth is dawning on him. It’d be better for he and Kiryu if Sera-san kept them informed about all this.

Nishiki swallows the lump in his throat. “And the rest of what you need to do, that Sera-san won’t stop you from doing – is that taking down the whole Dojima family?”

He and Kiryu are Dojima family. Just for once, he wishes the family pin on his jacket would vanish in a puff of smoke.

The one-eyed man—the kami, with the kamidana, with the marriage to Makoto if the title ane-san means what Nishiki thinks it does—leers at him. His teeth are bared like a wild dog. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Makoto asked me to not go near you two. Says yer friends and all, an’ I remember you two setting up her kamidana. So you’re in the clear but only for that.”

A wild thought comes to mind: they’ll need to plead for Kazama-oyaji’s life, and Kashiwagi-san’s too, because they hadn’t been the ones that killed Makoto’s brother last December—but the kami continues with a sniff, “And it ain’t yer whole Dojima family. Just a Kuze, an Awano, and Dojima and his assassin.”

“Lao Gui,” Kiryu offers. A haunted look passes his face – Nishiki remembers they faced each other once. Kiryu barely left alive. Then the look passes and he says, resolute, “You can have all of them then.”

What he says is treachery. What he says will get him and Nishiki both killed.

Even before Nishiki can muster the words to ask what the fuck Kiryu is thinking, the kami cuts in. “Yeah? The two of ya are in the clear, but I ain’t trustin’ ya as far as Dojima guys are concerned. Who just up an’ hands their bosses over like that? How are you even workin’ for someone who killed her brother like that?”

“My reasons are my own.” The look on Kiryu’s face hardens. “But I grieved Tachibana-san like a brother too. Makoto-san has never finished her grieving even when she sold the Empty Lot to Sera-san and should have washed her hands of all this business. If this is what Sera-san and Kazama-oyaji told us to stick around for, then I suppose what they’ve been playing as the long game is finally coming to a head.

Dojima will have been the one to order Makoto-san’s kidnapping. I can’t prove it to you, but even he knows that no one else has that great of a reason to want Shibusawa dead. Gokudo would start a gang war. Only a civilian like Makoto-san would try for something like an assassin.”

“He showed his hand, didn’t he? Goin’ about like he wasn’t yakuza,” the wrestler-looking one rumbles. He glares at some patch of the ceiling like Dojima himself was pinned to it. Exhaustion over the matter crosses his face. Anguish for Yuko too. “So if we’re done talkin’, where do we find Dojima?”

“I figured out where all the Dojima hideouts are, we can hit all of ‘em right after each other—”

“No,” Kiryu says. “Not a hideout. I don’t think so. A hideout would be for himself. He’ll want to torture her like he did Tachibana-san—”

The kami lunges at Kiryu. Only being grabbed by that kyoudai of his holds him back.

Over the sound of Makoto’s—assassin’s? husband’s?—panic, Kiryu says, “He will. If he wants to be poetic about it, he’ll choose the place where Tachibana-san was killed.”

“The Empty Lot,” Nishiki says, the first useful thing he can muster trying to keep track of all that’s happening. Something jars in his chest – Yuko had nothing to do with this at all. Whichever of Dojima’s men took her did so to make Makoto cooperate. But if Makoto hadn’t recklessly wanted so many men killed, none of this would have happened.

(It’s easy to be angry at her. For starting this.

Or, because there’s a murderous kami only metres away from him and who knew if he could read minds, it’s easy to be angry at Dojima for killing her brother in the first place.)

“I have a car. I’ll drive.”

“And yer driving like your life depends on it,” the kami with one eye snaps. “How’s this happenin’—all that time scoutin’ out those hiding places and Dojima’s somewhere I never even seen him go to.”

Kiryu grabs the ofuda, the book of norito and bottles of sacred water from where they’ve been tossed around Makoto’s apartment. “There’s something else. We need to talk about Oda too.”

xliv.

There’s a van waiting for them, large enough to fit that many kidnappers. She and Yuko get thrown into the back. It makes for a rough ride but what makes Makoto panic is: Yuko’s left without a blindfold. There’s no need to blindfold a legally blind woman. Whatever it is that Yuko can see is something that no one cares about her repeating.

The man who kidnapped her in Osaka has no interest in her while she’s being tossed around by rough turns and bad driving. It’s a desperate moment to think. It was only Dojima, his assassin and his three lieutenants she wanted dead – but Dojima doesn’t know that. However large the Dojima family is, according to Sera-san, there might be someone else in there who thinks her going after Shibusawa meant open season on everyone else.

No. Her husband left a mess at the Shibusawa family party, but she heard men who were alive when they arrived and stayed alive once they left with the head. Those were the survivors to report that it was only Shibusawa that was wanted. The lord of the night’s work, however bloody, is focused.

Then… then what else?

Dojima knew she was coming – Sera warned her as much – because of the affair around the Empty Lot. Those are the men most concerned with what she’ll do. Men she’ll enact vengeance upon, for what they did to her brother.

Does the kidnapper with the bat tattoo share that in common with them? Did he too have some share in her brother’s death?

No. Not that either. His claim to know her brother was a lie. It’s not all impossible – he was in Osaka, her brother might have come through later, they might have crossed paths and the man with the bat tattoo might have reason to harm him once – but it’s too many ‘might have’s. She puts the thought away.

Or… another reason: Dojima had an assassin in his hire, being too high and lofty to kill her brother himself. It was a spirit that killed Shibusawa. If Dojima could figure that out from the hysterical ramblings of the survivors at the Shibusawa family party, for all Sera-san had said that Dojima family did not believe in spirits, then this man, with the bat tattoo, who had told her to step outside of her warded and guarded apartment using Yuko-chan as bait, might be that too. An assassin, but not for humans. Not completely.

She closes her eyes. Steadies her breathing, as hard as it is through the cloth jammed in her mouth.

Her husband is the lord of the night. A kami of misfortune and ill luck. He fixed the nose she broke a day ago with a bloody cough and a grumble about the effort being exhausting, but no further complaints. He pretends not to take anything seriously when it suits him, but his focus is as sharp as her knife.

(Her knife. She wishes she had brought her cane with her for this kidnapping.)

What worry could an assassin, even a spirit one, be to him?

What else? The strange people at her husband’s hokora and the attempted sledgehammer attack – and if it wasn’t Sera-san behind it, then who? Dojima and his men? How would they know about her disappearance in Osaka for one night? Why would they care?

But this is Kamurocho. Someone always cares, if there’s something to be gained by it.

The man with the bat tattoo had found her in Osaka. Perhaps he had never left, despite Lee-san’s best efforts to find him there. Perhaps he had been the one to sneak around the lord of the night’s hokora. She’s guessing now, but those aren’t impossible guesses either.

The exit from the van is as rough as the entry. Between being pulled up and pushed to move forward, she sees overhead street lights signs—all much like the rest of Tokyo, but why would Dojima ever leaving his haunting ground of Kamurocho?—before they vanish underground into the cold and damp. Someone drops her into a chair and fixes her in place with duct tape before the man with the bat tattoo seats himself opposite to her.

“We got a minute before Dojima gets in?”

“You got just that and he wants ya at the front to greet him, Oda-han.”

“Pushy old shit,” Oda grumbles. He reaches forward and pries off the duct tape slapped over her mouth. “The glaring’s cute, but I’m told ya aren’t able to even see me properly anyway.”

Is she glaring? She hasn’t noticed it – it’s the only face she can think of making at him now. Makoto works saliva around her mouth, then manages, “Where’s Yuko?”

Oda stands, just to spin her chair around – like it’s no effort at all, as if she and the chair she’s tied to weigh nothing – to face another corner of the room. There’s a body squirming on the ground, mouth still taped – Yuko, alive for now.

“If you can’t see the brat there,” Oda remarks, turning her chair back around, “then I can’t do anything else about it.”

He drops back into his chair. “You’ve got questions, don’t you? I’m not going to answer them all but—”

But there’s only one she needs answered. “You had something to do with Dojima killing my brother, didn’t you?”

She expects some awful smug gloating – he’d known her brother from Osaka and some grudge took him here to Tokyo to kill him; her brother was just another assassination target sent his way by Dojima.

She doesn’t expect the blow across her face to catch her so violently. There’s blood in her mouth and ringing in her ears before the shock gives way to pain.

“Oda-han, you gotta wind it back, Dojima ain’t even here yet—”

The man with the bat tattoo seizes the sides of her chair to loom over her. Looming – she can feel it more than she can see it, when her face has been thrown to the side with the violence of that strike. He shakes the chair as if he’d rather be breaking her arms in his hands. “No. No. You’re the one who killed your brother. If you’d died in Osaka, if no one did anythin’ to get you back to Tokyo, he’d have no reason to be on Dojima’s shitlist and I wouldn’t be here, sucking up to a deadbeat like him—”

Someone drags him away from her. He’s said too much somewhere and not enough elsewhere, and who knows if he’ll be so reckless to say more – but those are the ramblings of a madman, telling himself one version of a story over and over until it becomes his truth.

“You had a hand in it,” she mumbles. She ought to look up at him instead of the ground her face is turned to. Glare at him, as he’s said she’s been unwittingly doing. “And you still think it’s my fault instead of yours.”

He pulls her face towards his by her hair. It hurts, a sharp pain at her skull; it pulls her out of the disorientation from the first blow. “You as good as killed your brother when you made him go looking for you. As if Tachibana-san wouldn’t do anything to see you alive, and it was the anything that killed him—”

Someone smacks his hand. He lets her go and her head flops back into where it had been, tipped down to the ground.

“Oi, leave something for Dojima to do. Get out there before Dojima thinks we’ve betrayed him and sets Lao Gui on all of us.”

Dojima’s here. His assassin too. Perhaps—this will be a good thing. Everyone she wanted dead in one place by the time her husband arrives to—to find her.

The thought rattles coldly in her head.

No. Not that. He’ll do more than that. He’ll avenge her too.

The thought grounds her – he’ll find her, he must, even if he’s late in doing so – and it almost distracts her from the new figure whose shadow falls over her. He’s flanked with men who look as blurry as they had the first time they tried to kill her – but they should all be here now. Awano. Kuze. The assassin. And Dojima himself, lifting her face up to him like the man with the bat tattoo had, with a fistful of her hair in his hand.

“Well, young lady. It’s bad luck for us to meet again like this.”

Yes, she thinks. For you.

Her head spins too much for her to say it. Dojima lets her go and plunks himself down in the chair in front of her. “I suppose you’ll want to know what gave you away. And how quickly we were able to find you. Oda says you whored yourself out to a spirit to make him your killer—”

He pauses. Looks up to somewhere behind her. “What was it again?”

“A kami. Somethin’ they were calling the lord of the night back over in Osaka.”

There. That’s someone who was lurking around her husband’s hokora then. In all of his work done piecing together Dojima’s routes and patterns in Tokyo, even he wouldn’t have imagined a man who’d done her such grief resurfacing like this.

Dojima gives her a low whistle. The tone in his voice leans towards impressed. “A kami. Not even a normal spirit or a half of one, like one of Kazama’s orphanage kids. You got a kami, and he can’t even hold up to Oda-san here.”

It clicks to her now that the man with the bat tattoo was anything but that. A man. And—that might be why he’s done so well in never being found again, by Lee-san or her husband.

Makoto lifts her head up from where it’s angled to the ground. “How did he kill my brother?”

Dojima snorts, dismissive. “A civilian like you hears too many rumours. Oda here has nothing to do with that. He’s just a good hire, much like Lao Gui.”

Dojima’s being lied to.

She can’t figure out why – but why expect any honesty from the likes of the man with the bat tattoo?

He leans towards her with his elbows on his knees. Easy. Relaxed. Certain in knowing that he’s gotten her and her husband hasn’t arrived yet, might never arrive, and that it’s sure doom for her now. “Do you want to hear it then, miss? Where it is your grand plan for revenge to take my boys’ heads went to ruin?”

It’s not all failure. Shibusawa’s head is still pickling in brine somewhere.

But if Dojima wants to gloat about his successes, like he had once before his assassin put a bullet in her, she’ll let him. It’ll buy her time – even a bit of it might be enough.

Behind her, with a voice becoming wary now: “Sir. It might be best if you hurry this along.”

Something drops to her shoulder. A hand. And the knife it holds onto, tapping just over her chest. The blade angles down but it could so easily tip up to her neck.

“We’re fine, Oda,” Dojima says easily. “Go on. You should be proud of your work.”

The man with the bat tattoo has sold her into hell, helped put her brother in his grave, and now delivered her to her own death too. If her husband arrives in time, she hopes there’ll be nothing of Oda, not-man or spirit or whatever it is, to be left in the world.

Dojima speaking is like static droning in her ear. His men stay silent out of respect. He takes her silence for attention, while Makoto furiously pieces what she can together. Did Makimura-san know that she had always been followed after December 1988? Oh, there were Nikkyo Consortium men always around her, when she went to work, when she did charity things as Sera’s philanthropic pet, around that guarded apartment complex all held under Sera’s name. Someone had said she needed to be watched, just in case – the Empty Lot was sold and her brother was buried, but none of his killers faced prison. Sera’s billion yen could buy her an assassin, if she wanted, and nothing could deter a madwoman in her grief. Oda-san had volunteered to keep an eye on her. A lot of time on his hands, that one.

And Oda-san, being a good hire, with men enough like him to bring over into Tokyo (men not all human like him, she realises), spotted that thing she had brought back from Osaka first. It had not seen him because it had not been looking – and what was better at hiding in the night than a bat? It was clear enough what it was looking for. Dojima. And his three lieutenants. And an assassin. All tied to the Empty Lot that had been fought over a year ago.

(The night was best for hunting, her husband had said, and not realised he was being hunted in return too.)

Makimura-san had shown her hand by going to Shibusawa’s party and expecting that no one would believe the near-mad ramblings of the survivors, or their talk about a monster that appeared to carve a man’s head off, or the woman in white accompanying it. A pity for Shibusawa – one of their best, but still so sceptical of the need for caution once the police investigation was dropped. And once her Nikkyo Consortium bodyguards had been sufficiently distracted by the ensuing chaos, what was there left to do but grab her from where they had always known she’d be?

“Dojima,” Makoto says finally.

He’s being lied to. A man like Oda would volunteer nothing, out of a deficiency of a heart – how he had a hand in her brother’s death remains unclear, but if he blames her for being the cause of his worries that got him killed, there’s no doubt on what he feels towards Dojima.

He had a lot of time on his hands, after all. And he’s not all human – waiting is not so hard to him.

But Dojima has to discover that for himself. What she says instead is, “My husband will kill you.” Even if it becomes eventually.

Behind her, she can feel the man with the bat tattoo readying his knife.

“Give my regards to your brother, miss.”

There’s an insult she’d like to spit out – there’ll be no dying in stunned silence like his last assassination attempt – except the door explodes with a force that knocks her chair to the floor and all the world descends into yelling.

xlv.

(Later, Makoto hears of it like this, bits and pieces pulled together by what Kiryu-san says. What Nishikiyama-san says. What Sera-san tells her at her bedside.)

The lord of the night comes, baying for blood. His kyoudai too, spurred on by fear for Yuko-chan. With them, Nishikiyama-san and Kiryu-san. Nishikiyama for his sister. Kiryu – by more than a few things: loyalty for her brother, even after so long; guilt that he was taken back into the Dojima family when not all wrongs from December 1988 had been righted; and uneasiness, over Oda-san.

(Kiryu-san tells her this, in as few words as possible. Taciturn as always, but uneasy too. It’s Yuko he’ll visit next.

Oda-san? You knew?

Not that he was the one to betray you to Dojima. Or that… he had something to do with you becoming blind in Osaka.

Just that they’d met in the days Kiryu had worked with her brother, under the direction of his Tojo Clan superiors and in the guise of a real estate agent. Oda had not been a good man, but he’d been consistent – he’d die to see Tachibana’s will done. That much Kiryu could expect from him. They’d been sent to retrieve her from Osaka. A change of plans, with Oda still bloodied and recovering from a Taihei Association beat down, meant that Kiryu had gone alone, and ferried her back under gunfire from Shibusawa.

The change of plans had stayed in Kiryu’s mind because he hadn’t seen Oda since. Not in Little Asia. Not in Kamurocho. And Sera-san had asked, mildly, once the matter of the Empty Lot was settled—nearly settled, he corrected, for what it was Makoto-san had done—if Kiryu had seen Tachibana’s right hand man since. Makoto had buried her brother’s ashes with few people present. Kiryu had been in attendance. Sera-san too – and he realised, once he was asked, that even through it all, Sera’s eyes, or whoever in the Nikkyo Consortium present with him, had always drifted to the horizon instead of Tachibana’s grave. Waiting, perhaps, for something to show up in the middle of it.

Dead, then, Sera had said. His voice gave away nothing. I expect Dojima must have seen to that, given his war against Tachibana Real Estate and anyone associated.

Kiryu nodded. He agreed. He said nothing else. He filed the thought away.)

They’ve gotten ready, with what they can. The book of norito is put aside – the only one who can read them is Kiryu and he’s in no state to focus. But Makoto’s cane is given to Kiryu, once the blade has been doused in sacred water – like the ofuda, he’s also the only one who can carry such things. And during Nishikiyama’s manic drive to Kamurocho, Kiryu elaborates: he’s had suspicions that someone by the name of Oda is involved and he’s somehow escaped a set of events that saw the downfall of Tachibana Real Estate last year—

“Oi, Makoto’s brother?”

—when few other people had made it out. Other people had suspicions too: Sera-san, and by proxy, Kazama-oyaji. People who knew of Kiryu being around Makoto, by dint of being around Yuko, and said nothing of it. There’s no way of knowing what Oda could or couldn’t do, but if he really was alive, he’d gotten out of trouble as slippery as an eel; it reminded him of Nishiki in their childhood days at the orphanage.

Like an eel, Nishiki grumbles once he’s stopped at a red light. Not even a koi?

For their part, the lord of the night and his kyoudai agree: if Oda wasn’t human—there’s no clearer reason why Makoto had walked out of a heavily warded apartment—then it falls to the two of them to handle anything not-human that might be around once they find Makoto and Yuko. The rest of the humans—Dojima family, maybe Lao Gui; even Kiryu doesn’t know where Lao Gui falls—will be up for Kiryu and Nishiki to handle.

“My head’s still hurting from your wards,” Nishiki points out. “What if there’s more of that where Dojima’s concerned?”

“It better not fer Yuko’s sake.”

(If it did, Kiryu admits, Nishiki would not have spoken of it after.)

So they find their quarry like this: near the Empty Lot, right where Kiryu had suspected. Right where Tachibana had died. Not the Crescendo Building—it’s already demolished—but one near it, still condemned to fall for Kamurocho’s redevelopment. There’s tape barring off the entrance. There’s a circle of men around it, only half-decent in their farce of loitering.

(There was something strange about them, Kiryu says. Like bats, melting into the night amidst the cigarette smoke.)

There’s little to say about them – looking at them makes Kiryu’s head hurt, so he doesn’t – and it’s Makoto’s husband and his kyoudai that make them their concern. Whoever—whatever—lunged for her husband first, knowing what he was, found himself on the end of his knife. Whoever went for his kyoudai next was thrown over all their heads and into the concrete beneath them. And Kiryu and Nishiki are already running ahead, leaving what’s not-human behind for someone else to handle.

The door is barred and sealed where the two of them might normally shoulder it down. Kiryu gets a sore arm for his efforts. Nishiki’s knuckles start to bleed when he’s usually made of stronger stuff.

“Ofuda,” is all Nishiki says. He stands back when Kiryu slaps one on—right way up, proper side out—and throws himself into the door again.

And the door explodes off its hinges. As if Kiryu’s weight had equalled that of a tiger – those are Nishiki’s words: like it had been a beast that broke down that door, a tiger throwing itself into a bloodbath.

(Nishiki had looked for Yuko first. It’s only natural he did – he fought towards her, a much easier battle, while Kiryu went for the men at the thick of it. Dojima. Kuze. Awano. The assassin that they couldn’t tell was human or not.

And Oda.)

What Kiryu remembers of it is: Dojima lieutenants, for whatever Makoto thinks of them, do rush to their boss’ defence first. Them, and the assassin, being paid to do what he does.

It’s Oda who tries to flee.

Nishiki lets him, so distracted with fighting off Dojima men to get to Yuko. Kiryu lets him too – it’s Makoto he has to get to (and no one’s cared a whit for her once her chair was knocked to the ground; he’s seen her trying to wriggle free of where she’s taped to a chair, but no one’s trodden her underfoot, so he’s forced to leave her as is) and Dojima lieutenants he has to fight off. Makoto-san’s blade, washed in sacred water, helps – absurdly well. Lao Gui’s skin all but melts once the blade cleaves through it. If only they’d known about such things when he had first faced the assassin when he tried to save her brother.

(Kiryu pauses to apologise. Makoto can’t see very well yet, but it’s not a picture he ought to put in her mind.

Go on, she says. The thought doesn’t bother her at all.)

And the sacred water Kiryu poured over his hands helps too. He and Nishiki had laughed over it once—imagine it, overseas boxers needing to register their hands as weapons—but the lord of the night’s kyoudai had advised it.

Trust me, was all he said; so Kiryu had doused his hands with it. Perhaps Kuze goes down quicker than he expected, underground boxer or no, because of it. When it comes to Awano – he’s not much for fighting at all. With or without sacred water, Kiryu’s punch shatters his jaw. Even non-fatal injuries will shake a man’s sense out of him from the pain.

(Whatever it is – Kiryu barely remembers those fights for how relatively easy they had gone.)

Which leaves Dojima. And when he spins around to look for him, finds him backing away from it all, with nothing but a gun that he can’t even properly fire an accurate shot with towards Kiryu—

(He is, Kiryu says, like the words are sticking in his mouth, so sorry for what happened to her.)

—Oda’s returned.

(Yes, Makoto says. She remembers this much. It needs help from Kiryu recalling what he can, with so much of his memory fogged by the adrenaline of the fight, and Nishiki recalling what he can when all of his focus was on Yuko then.

But they’re clear in this: whatever Oda had met with in trying to flee would have been her husband and her husband’s kyoudai. One looking for her. One looking for Yuko-chan. Both ready to have done anything to find them safe. Both well aware that it was Oda they were looking for, given what Kiryu had said.)

It’s Oda’s who smacks Makoto over the head, a blow that stuns her into ragdoll-limp bonelessness, and rips her out of the tape holding her to a chair. She’s not much of a good hostage in a chair – can’t hold up a woman like a shield in front of him after all; and for what she can remember with her head spinning and her legs aching from being taped into immobility, she had been good at that for him. A good hostage, with his knife at her neck: no one able to stab him without his knife jutting out and catching her too. An effective hostage too – she hears Kiryu’s shout before it’s drowned by her husband’s howl of rage.

Oda has a hard time dragging her to the door. The knife slips and nicks her in a shallow cut down her collarbone. (It’s the ripping of her shirt that enrages her husband more, Kiryu recalls.)

It’s not easy: there’s two murderous spirits at his back, Nishiki somewhere on the side and ready to start after him once Yuko’s safety is secure. That’s a lot of threats Oda’s needing to make, shouting to make himself heard. She hears him assuring the lord of the night to leave now before he opens her throat and drops her corpse at his feet.

And yet it’s made easier, with Kiryu clearly in his range of sight and forced to put his attention to either Dojima with his gun pointed at him or Oda dragging his hostage away. If Kiryu has to hold off Dojima, that’s one less problem for him.

It’s Oda who seals his own fate.

(Kiryu’s words. What happened next was like a chain reaction from it.

He sounds like he’s close to apologising again, so Makoto cuts in before he can. Yes. Go on.)

“The lot of you can do what you like with that old fuck,” he snarls. (Something like it. There’s a lot that escapes memory.) “But we’ll be taking our leave from here.”

(Kiryu has omitted some of Oda’s harsher insults. She lets him.)

And he’s sure – it’ll work. No one will try anything with a line of blood already sliding down her chest. Two yakuza can’t stop him. And two kami can do no more than they can. Which leaves, of course, Dojima. Dojima, basking in his success only minutes earlier, who’s been lied to without realising it. He had her here, at the mercy of his last lieutenants and his assassin and that excellent hire who tracked her down for him – and now that it’s all gone to hell, he’s decided: they’ll all go with him.

Or if not all of them, at least Makoto, and the ruin she’s brought to him.

Dojima makes one good shot with his gun and it lands on her. Goes through her and into Oda too.

(It’s not the site of Lao Gui’s first bullet, Sera assures her. The surgery would have been so much harder if that had been the case.)

Makoto sags—she was barely upright anyway—and Oda flounders, unable to be killed with something so small as a bullet—but it’s enough of a distraction that his grip on her loosens, and when he staggers, jolted by the impact of the bullet, her husband makes a grab for him. Nishiki makes a grab for her too and drags her out of the way, before he shouts when something else catches him across the back.

(Nishiki was hit, Kiryu explains. Not too badly – no bones broken, no skin torn – but it is astonishing, when you aren’t expecting it, to be hit by the wing of a bat.

A bat? Like the one…

On his arm? Yes.

Why a bat, he can’t say. How a bat – much in the manner of Nishiki’s existence, he expects. Not all human and always feeling singled out because of it.)

Makoto rolls, winded, on the floor. Head spinning already, with thoughts on worse now that she can feel the blood escaping her. She can’t see much, only the shape and noise of a battle she needs to stay clear of. Being caught underfoot will distract her husband. What she crawls away from finds her with her hand on her cane again: Kiryu’s dropped it trying to get to Dojima—Dojima’s fired another shot in the mayhem, and this one’s caught Kiryu in the shoulder, although it hasn’t stopped Kiryu going at him bare-knuckle with his one working arm—

(It’s fine, Kiryu says. He recovered in hospital so quickly. Almost got better overnight, like a miracle.)

—and amongst her panicked thoughts, this much is clear: she must keep the blade away from Kiryu for his safety. When she snatches it up in hand, something else catches her eye: a monstrous shape of a thing rearing upright, tall enough to touch the ceiling with its head.

And whatever Makoto does next must be a thing of insanity.

(Kiryu’s words again. She can’t say what drove it, except for the blood loss and the rush of panic that surged up in her chest when she saw the thing that was a bat knock her husband and his kyoudai and possibly Nishiki of their feet.)

Oda, she thinks. Or yells – if it happened by Kiryu’s recollection, she doesn’t remember. Something makes her get up to her feet, even if briefly, and when she charges, it’s with the knife out, aiming for the closest thing she can reach.

It lands in what would be his leg. (Kiryu thinks she was going for his groin, as an act of justice.) A leg matters little to a bat that can fly away; but anywhere would do to make Oda react in pain. What it does is make him kick her into the wall, where she crumples motionless to the ground – and more importantly, it staggers Oda enough, caving down on one side that when the lord of the night and his kyoudai and Nishiki go for him, he goes down.

(It’s all very well and good to be told these things, Makoto says.

What she wants to know is what happened to her husband. And why he’s not here.

And to that, Kiryu and Nishiki and Sera have very little to say.)

xlvi.

There are things Sera would like to tell her. About the success of the surgery and the necessary rehab. About what her doctors have said about her eyesight – that it’s coming back now, albeit slowly, more clarity day by day. About how Yuko’s doing – she was knocked around a bit, with no broken bones, but for a girl with her medical condition and weak organs, she would need a hospital stay to recover too.

About what he had found out about Oda, from what Nikkyo Consortium and their temporary allies—once her brother’s allies—in Little Asia had gathered: some story of a half-spirit man who was her brother’s right hand man, who had vanished during the events of December 1988 but not resurfaced, which had triggered their suspicions, until they found that he had nothing else to live for after Tachibana’s death and would like to do nothing more but see to her death.

(It’s a story for later, Makoto says. Knowing these things would worsen her rehabilitation period.)

About Dojima’s death—not her responsibility, but partly Kiryu-san’s and Nishikiyama-san’s, but their employment could be shuffled into the Nikkyo Consortium’s as needed—

(Sera-san, she interrupts. Perhaps later. Although I am glad to hear they’ll be alright.

He clears his throat. Not too alright. But they cleared some trouble for him and kept her safe, in this matter of keeping an eye on her.

And if there was no other way for Makoto to agree that the death of Dojima, his lieutenants, and his assassin, was highly beneficial to Sera-san as Tojo Clan Chairman, the quiet nod she gives him is sufficient. The Dojima family might be one of the largest of the Tojo Clan, as he said, but their downfall suits Sera well enough. The matter of Oda, whose disappearance was always a mystery to him, is tied up too. That, together with Makoto’s vengeance technically fulfilled, puts all the matters about the Empty Lot to bed at last.)

What Sera cannot tell her about, in all his manner of dealing with unworldly things and leading a Nikkyo Consortium that can very well see and believe in spirits, is what happened to her husband and his kyoudai. Something got her and Yuko to hospital in time, even as she bled a terrifying amount from Dojima’s bullet. Something also totalled Nishikiyama-san’s car getting them there. But he’s set Nikkyo Consortium men to guard her and Yuko’s rooms at all hours, from the operating theatre to the intensive care unit to the ward once she stabilised, and he’s received no reports from them.

Makoto blinks up at the ceiling that’s slowly becoming clearer and clearer by day. She’ll be in the rehabilitation ward for a while—knowing that, would it be too much to ask Sera to arrange that her kamidana be brought from home into the hospital?

“It’s a household shrine,” Sera-san says evenly. “It makes little sense to take it away from home.”

(Nishiki also destroyed it, according to Kiryu.)

“I would like it anyway,” Makoto says. When she’s better, she’ll—she’ll wipe the plastic sakaki clean, and pour new sake and salt in the offering bottle and dish, and pray to it, steady as clockwork, in the morning and evening. It’ll do something. It must.

“I’ll make arrangements,” is all Sera-san says. He ties up the conversation with talk of paperwork and fixing her damaged apartment, and before he leaves, adds that the nurse mentioned a visitor leaving something for her in her bedside drawer. A visitor that his Nikkyo Consortium did not deign to report to him about, for whatever reason.

When he’s gone, she pulls the drawer open. Even with her eyesight still recovering, she could not miss it, when its strap was a dark bold red against the white of the drawer. He’s returned it to her, still broken and unfixed—but when she holds it up right in front of her nose, her slowly recovering eyes can pick out movement. The ticking of the clock hands, counting the seconds passing.

It’s alright, she tells herself, as she fixes her watch back to her wrist. He’s gotten her watch repaired. He’s gotten her the vengeance she asked for, even if it wasn’t heads that he laid at her feet. It’s everything she wanted. He’ll come back himself and tell her these things, and then she can remind him that they’re married and she won’t be going anywhere. That she’s been left behind by so many people – by her family, by Lee-san, by her brother; and it’ll be a poor look for her to be left behind by her husband too. Of all the people she could keep – why not him, at the very least?

“It’s alright,” she repeats to herself. Aloud, the words sounds more true.

In the late afternoon, when the chime on her watch rings, a melody she’s forgotten after two years of silence, Makoto blinks the tears away and tells it to herself again. It’s alright. He’ll come back. After she gets her vengeance, he’s said, he wants her to be happy. And as long as she would be happy, he would be happy too.

And how could she be, without him?

Chapter Text

xlvii.

He and his kyoudai return to Osaka without fanfare. The Sunshine girls don’t say anything when they return to their old haunts, although he can catch worried glances in his direction when they think he’s can’t see them with his last remaining eye.

The lord of the night dusts off his hokora, and picks up the offerings left for him, and tries not to be disappointed that none of these are takoyaki. Tries not to think of a woman in Tokyo who might be coming home to a broken kamidana that’s no good for praying at anymore.

(No. She won’t be coming home soon, not with how he left her at the hospital.)

Yuki gives him one week before she dumps a treeful of snow on him. Getting to winter at near year’s end has made her bold. When he shakes it off with grumbling under his breath and a hard glare but nothing else, she makes a gesture that threatens she’ll do it again.

“What’s happened, hannya-san? You won’t say anything, and your kyoudai won’t either—but you’ve been going around frowning at us like it’s our fault—”

It’s not their fault. It’s his. Only his, not his kyoudai’s: going about Tokyo so certain of himself, thinking that five human heads were easy as anything to claim if all he needed to do was bide his time and keep track of patterns and routes and behaviours, not knowing the whole time that there was something else he hadn’t even considered because he’d thought that trouble had stayed in Osaka.

And Makoto had paid for it.

xlviii.

Here’s what he won’t talk about, as he nurses a cup of sake by his lonesome: he was there with her until the moment he left Tokyo. He had been there to get her and Yuko to hospital, once Oda and Dojima were dead. If he or his kyoudai had known the way there, they could have just—appeared there, a path clear in their minds. But neither of them had bothered, not seeing the need for human hospitals until the moment it was critical, and so, it had been Yuko’s not-all-human brother who had driven at breakneck speed and he and his kyoudai deterring people from getting in the way of the car. The car had hit another one at the hospital emergency entrance in the rush, but they’d broken through the doors in order to get them all inside.

(The boy who’s learned to hold ofuda properly recovers from his bullet wound and the car crash astonishingly quick. He’s born under a lucky moon. Or he’s not as human as he thinks he is.

The not-all-human friend slips away from trouble, true to form. His kyoudai does have a soft spot for siblings after all.)

So they’d delivered three limping, bleeding, staggering young people to the hospital and carried one bleeding young woman into an operating theatre and then made themselves scarce before the hospital staff pull themselves together to ask more pressing questions.

Makoto’s operation and Yuko’s medical assessment take a long time. At the end of it, they’re both alive – Yuko sent off to another hospital ward for intensive monitoring, Makoto in a drugged sleep that she’ll wake from. Eventually.

His kyoudai goes after Yuko. And Yuko’s brother will need something to yell at once he’s medically cleared to be allow to yell at things in his fury. A soft spot for siblings also means being a bolster to someone’s grief.

The lord of the night stays by Makoto’s side, just out of sight from the hospital staff. At some point, Nikkyo Consortium men arrive at the door, but do not dare enter—just as well, what if Makoto woke up to find a hallway of ghastly men in Noh masks looming over her?—and which soon heralds the eventual entrance of Sera Masaru. His face is one of exhaustion—all that work of handling the chaos amongst Tokyo yakuza wearing him down, then—but his stride into Makoto’s room remains steady. He comes bearing the bladed cane that the kid used to stab the one called Oda, which he props against her bedside table.

“Have you been here long?” he asks towards the wall.

“Been here the whole time,” the lord of the night says.

They stand there in terse silence, before Sera offers placidly, “You’ve kept Makoto-san alive. I’m glad.”

“Fuck off,” the lord of the night snarls. Hasn’t it been said enough already, even if it was only said once?—that he would safeguard her life from Dojima’s wrath. And here he was, making a ruin of one year of protection from the Nikkyo Consortium in only one day.

“I’m not here to antagonise you,” Sera continues. The calmness of it makes him bristle even more. “Makoto-san is alive. Her surgical team told me about the success of her operation and what her rehabilitation may look like. Her brother’s death has been avenged. And an unexplained mystery that had lingered about one of her brother’s associates has been solved. You have my thanks.”

“Yeah, we sure cleaned up some of your shit fer ya, didn’t we? Dojima and his top-rankin’ guys all dead, and your position from that Empty Lot is as secure as ever.”

“While I have already paid Makoto-san for the purchase of her land,” Sera-san says, “I am also willing to cover this bill and her rehabilitation costs for her troubles. And I have other news for you both, about Oda Jun and what he was planning since Tachibana-san’s death, although it can wait until Makoto is awake to hear—”

“Tell me now,” the lord of the night says. His throat hurts with the raw ache from shouting too long at Makoto’s prone body for her to wake up, please, get up before his kyoudai got him to get his shit together. “I got no right to stick around after this.”

Sera talks.

It goes right over his head as he keeps his eye fixed on Makoto, motionless save for the soft rise and fall of her breathing. Sera talks about vengeance and the wild despair that love lost does to a man (although he admits he’s also guessing there, because everything has come second-hand from allies in a migrant enclave), and all the lord of the night can think is: good job there. The only head I wasn’t asked to get and then ya got him yerself.

(Technically, she got a leg. He and his kyoudai and that Nishikiyama fellow got the rest. But getting that leg ensured the getting of that head, so he’ll attribute that success to Makoto.)

He’d like to—take hold of her hand and say it aloud. Or smooth her unbrushed hair off her brow. Or—something, anything, that ought to be done in privacy without an interloper in here too.

Sera leaves easily when he says that he wants a moment alone. When it’s just him and her and her quietly beeping medical machine, he takes her hand in both of his. Her hand, still cold after her surgery, in the icy grip of his. Thinks of the right thing to say to her when he knows she can’t hear him. When he had the right words before, but it’s clogging up his throat now, like the tears and apologies in there too.

He blinks. Something wet from his right eye rolls down his face. (Nothing comes from the left eye; never has, since the eyeball was lost.)

“Makoto,” he rasps. Rough, like a knife scraping over stone. He looses her hands to fish something from his sleeve, kept secret for far too long after he’d gotten it mended: the watch she gifted him once. He could put it on her wrist, so he’ll be sure she won’t lose it—but what if she doesn’t want it, this memory of a useless husband who couldn’t keep her safe?

The watch goes atop the bedside table. If the hospital staff or Sera decide to move it, they can – he’s unable to stop them – but they might tell her that it was there, at least.

There needs to be something to say before he goes. Something like: I’m sorry, or I fucked up, or I’m sorry I fucked up so bad an’ Dojima nearly killed ya again.

Or: goodbye.

What he says is: “Be happy, alright?” Without me.

And then he’s gone.

xlix.

When his kyoudai sits beside him and pours himself a cup too, he doesn’t talk about it either. There’s nothing to say, when they were both there to see it all happen.

l.

The end of the year comes. The end of the year goes.

When the new year rolls in, Makoto reappears at the shrine, with Yuko in toll. Whatever’s happened to her since he saw her last has worked out in her favour: she can see now, somehow, and it’s Yuko she holds onto so they can keep each other steady. Yuko keeps her cane; Makoto has not.

They’re one of many in a crowd for Hatsumōde. It’d be so easy to lose track of them if he wasn’t sitting on a roof making sure no one does anything untoward to them. In this weather, both have opted for sensible winter wear instead of new year kimonos.

(That’s just as well. Makoto stays as slight and vulnerable to the cold as she’s ever been. And to see her in kimono would remind him of their wedding or the night they went off to collect Shibusawa’s head.)

After they’ve waited their turn to pray to the Sunshine girls (marriages—better marriages, and health, and good business, all good and sensible things to ask for), they separate. Yuko in the direction of his kyoudai’s hokora. And Makoto in the direction of his.

What happened between them is already settled: her vengeance was gotten and her watch was fixed.

It’s done. There’s nothing to revisit. There’s no reason for her to visit – but it’s hard to take his eye off her, so he follows, treading from rooftop to rooftop on light cat’s feet, until he bounds off and lands in the tree that casts a shadow over his hokora.

Makoto sweeps the snow dusting his hokora with a mittened hand. Supplicants have placed new offerings: convenience store sake, decent quality cigarettes, kinako mochi in neat little boxes. She’s brought nothing but herself, cheerfully bright in her orange coat amidst the cold.

“I thought… I thought I’d find you here.”

Well. He is here.

He just doesn’t want to be found.

“You’ll come back, won’t you? I did pray for my marriage to last, and your friends seem to be good on issues like that.”

(She’s right. They haven’t settled that – this matter of their marriage.)

She bows twice, claps her hands together twice. Her prayer done, she stands at his hokora in silence.

He wants her to go. He wants to stop her from going when she eventually must.

“I wanted to tell you, anata,” she continues, “that I can almost see properly again. Not nearly to how I could see... before, not yet, but the doctors tell me the chances are good. I can read my watch again so that’s far more than I ever hoped for before.”

She peels her sleeve back so she can show the shrine the mended watch in question, the strap strikingly red on her pale wrist.

“I said it, didn’t I? That when I can see again, what I want to see is you.”

He almost upends himself from the tree. It sends a light flurry of snow onto her head, and when she looks up, he imagines that if she was anything like her friend Nishikiyama or the Nikkyo Consortium men, she could just see him scrambling to pull himself together overhead.

She doesn’t. Part of him is glad to know that when she turns her eyes back to his hokora, there’s disappointment in them instead of realisation.

Another part of him wants to reach down and let his hand fall on her hair, like it had on a night many nights ago.

He goes before he becomes tempted to.

li.

His kyoudai comes by with sake at nightfall. Tells him, soberly, that Yuko came to visit. Makoto-san got them from Tokyo to Kyoto today – a bit of escape artistry out of the hospital. They ought to be recuperating in their rehab unit – and ane-san responded to being told they couldn’t leave for health and safety reasons by sneaking out when staffing thinned out during the new year holidays.

Yuko came to his shrine to ask why he hadn’t come back to Tokyo since that awful night. He’d said that her brother wasn’t much keen on seeing him again—and who could blame Nishikiyama for that—and he was a kami from Osaka, so he ought not to stray too far from home.

Makoto’s husband came to Tokyo plenty of times.

Guy had a job to do. An’ it’s done now.

And, the lord of the night doesn’t add, look how that turned out. Whatever she and Makoto will have talked about with that kidnapping is between them only.

Yuko placed her offerings – kinako mochi, sweetly traditional as young women seem to be – on his kyoudai’s shrine, and before she left, put another paper-wrapped gift box down too. For the lord of the night, she said. She won’t tell Makoto that they had this talk. And just as well – it’ll hurt her more, knowing that someone had shown up to greet Yuko but no one had come to meet with her.

The lord of the night downs his sake and cracks open the box.

Inside: some white foodstuff, grainy but fine.

He scowls. “Salt?”

“Mmm,” his kyoudai replies. Busies himself, pouring more sake.

Well. He pokes at the thing—not salt, up close—and licks his fingers clean.

Sugar then.

Why sugar, he’s close to saying, before it clicks. It’s a relief she didn’t throw it at him. It’s the closest he’ll get to Yuko’s approval, for all the good it’ll do now: a gift, offered at last, instead of a handful of salt as banishment.

“Guess the Sunshine girls could do some cookin’ with it,” he says, and they don’t speak more of it for the rest of the night.

lii.

Makoto returns for Setsubun as spring arrives. Her eyes have sharpened – no cane and no reliance of steadying herself on anybody’s arm now.

Then back again, for hanami, standing amidst a flurry of cherry blossom petals in a matching kimono – he’s tempted to reach over and brush them from her hair.

Then Tanabata in summertime. She and Yuko, in brightly coloured yukata, wander in a crowd of happy young couples.

His kyoudai lingers over them to make sure Yuko doesn’t over-exhaust herself working her way around people. The lord of the night lingers over Makoto’s tanzaku and the wish she holds that will never come true at this rate. After Tanabata, as the shrine attendants commit the bamboo and paper-bound wishes to the fire, he loiters and watches it go up in smoke.

Later in the summer, watching Makoto adamantly buy cup after cup of shaved ice from the Sunshine girls at their festival stand, he realises: right, they’ve been married a year, and he’s been gone just over half of it. The Sunshine girls aren’t much for talking – they can’t really, not in a crowd of humans who just think they’re just shaved ice vendors – and it’s finally one of them who sends her off with a suggestion that with all the shaved ice she’s buying, she could give it to someone else. Or offer it – Makoto’s standing on shrine grounds after all.

Makoto heads off to his hokora with a colourful heap of flavoured slush. Worse offerings have been given in the past. He preferred the takoyaki and convenience store sake she had first come with.

He follows. With a dark blue yukata dotted with white star jasmine, disappearing into the night as she walks away from the festival crowd, Makoto looked much like a cloud of summer fireflies.

She lays down the shaved ice as solemnly as she had arrived to his shrine a year ago. She sweeps stray leaves from his shrine, careful not to knock askew what offerings have already been placed. She’s so pretty and sad doing it that he’s close to reappearing to her so he can tell her to divorce him already. Or marry someone else instead. Being happy and being well away from his mistakes doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive things.

“Anata,” Makoto says.

He should leave.

He stays to listen.

“Were you much for sweets? I don’t think you were. I think you just liked stealing mine when you could.”

(That’s true. Half the fun in taking it is seeing what she’ll do next.)

“Your friends say you’re partial to anything offered properly.” She frowns at her cheap festival food. “Should I be placing amazake at your kamidana? Would you answer me then?”

The kamidana her friend wrecked. He’d hoped she’d throw it away – broken things that won’t be bringing her fortune, if it ever did (and if it had been anything other than his ill fortune).

He should answer her. He should recommend a divorce.

Except—he can’t bring himself to say anything, knowing she almost died because of his recklessness. His failures.

Makoto breathes hard, swallowing her disappointment. He’s close enough to see the tears at her eyes and notice she’s staring in the far-off distance, in the way someone close to crying will try to not cry.

He’s not much for seeing her like that either. Cautious, he sweeps away the leaves that have fallen into her hair. Let her pretend it’s the wind pulling at, instead of his fingers.

Makoto turns, not seeing him. “Anata…?”

If she turns some more, he could just—pull her, stumbling, on her unsteady geta, to him. Like he had a year ago. When she offered anything and he accepted.

He leaves before he’s tempted to.

liii.

After summer, Tsukimi in the fall. Then winter again, and when the smoke from end of year fireworks clear, the new year.

And over and over again, year after year, Makoto visiting the shrine and getting nothing out of it, other than short holidays with Yuko.

Yuko, for all her visits to meet his kyoudai, discloses nothing to Makoto. In contrast, his kyoudai tells him everything as well-aimed torture or misguided good intent: ane-san has been well, ane-san opened a business and expanded, ane-san was learning to specialise in workplace injuries and continuing philanthropy work with the blind (although she was doing it in places without any of Sera’s involvement).

“Yer givin’ me hell, you know that?”

“Sometimes,” his kyoudai grumbles, “I think you deserve it.”

Then, once the tussling and the punching and the throwing each other across the courtyard has ceased and one of the Sunshine girls comes down to tell them to quit it, his kyoudai says, “You could ask ane-san how she’s doin’. And you could tell her whatever you’ve been doin’ too.”

“There’s nothin’ to tell,” the lord of the night mutters. Whatever he’s been doing has nothing to do with Makoto: he’s a kami in Osaka, so that’s where he’ll stay, and it’s only terrible men in Osaka that have been vanishing. Men who prey on women in a bad state, men too despicable to be even allowed into the most sordid areas of Sotenbori. Men—or not men, not really—like Oda Jun, who had thought a young woman, like Makoto, was easy pickings and a good profit.

Makoto, safe and well in Tokyo, with a life going back on track, needs to know nothing of that.

Except there’s a year that Makoto comes alone in early winter, heralded by no festivals, making her way to his kyoudai’s shrine first. Whatever they talk about, they do so in isolation. Before her departure, Makoto places a small gift box meant for wagashi at his hokora and pats it sadly.

“She did mean well towards you,” is all she says.

The visit, however puzzling, had not been done for his sake – as his kyoudai tells him later, cups deep into his sake, staring into the early snowfall.

“Yuko died.”

As all humans do – although the kid’s poor health had been the more dire thing there. No doubt it’s brought his kyoudai’s long-gone sister back to his mind.

They drink in solemn silence. When they near the end of the sake bottle, his kyoudai adds, “Ya opened what the kid left for you yet?”

What Makoto had left—or, what Yuko had left, and what Makoto had brought on her behalf.

Inside: sugar, much like that first visit, Yuko and her sign of approval. Has her approval lasted all these years, for all he’s done not to act on it? He’ll never know now.

“Ya want it? It’s the kid’s last gift.” As Makoto says, he’s not much for sweets.

“It’s meant fer you.” His kyoudai gives him a look. “You do somethin’ useful with it. An’ try not to waste it.”

He hands the sugar over to the Sunshine girls, who use it for a plate of syrupy mitarashi dango. He and his kyoudai finish it over another bottle of sake—there’s been more than one emptied between them, since news of Yuko’s death—and at last, he says, “It was a good gift.”

“Yeah.”

“Ya don’t think I wasted it, did ya?”

“Nah.” His kyoudai pours out the last of the sake, and still, somehow, sounds entirely coherent when he adds, “There’re other ways she’s probably want you to use it. But this ain’t half bad.”

The lord of the night keeps his kyoudai’s words in mind for a long time after it, even if they don’t talk about Yuko again.

liv.

Makoto misses the following Hatsumōde.

He notices. He’s disappointed he’s noticed. He’s irritated to be disappointed and spends a bitterly cold week wondering why. It’s only a good thing that she’s not here – she ought to be in Tokyo; she’s finally moved on. Or it’s only a bad thing instead – she’s mourning Yuko still; she’s never made this trip alone, it must be a jarring reminder of Yuko’s absence. Or the thoughts melt together (that she’s alone grieving in Tokyo but surely she’ll be back next year—no, that’s bad) until he can’t even guess how things are with Makoto. And—how could he, after so many years apart?

At Setsubun, Makoto returns. She’s easy to see, because she’s avoided the festivities of bean throwing to go straight to his hokora, and because he’s never been able to help not looking at her in every festival season.

As he has every other year, he follows.

And this year, the offering she brings is her watch. The watch he had repaired years back, the one left by her hospital bed before she woke. She fishes it tentatively from the pocket of a blue blazer and lays it down before she makes her prayer.

No longer wanted, then. It’s been kept in good shape since she first came back to his hokora with it, except for the straps breaking – and even if that’s an easier fix than the watch itself, it’s not a thing useful to her anymore.

Well.

It’s a good thing. She’s moved on – no divorce needed, some happiness found without him.

He should leave.

He stays. He steps into the side of her sight beside her, in front of his hokora, and reaches for the watch that’s been laid down. A keepsake, for him now, and not even of better times.

“Oh,” Makoto says, startled. “I didn’t see you there—and, actually, I’m not sure you should take that unless you’re a shrine attendant—”

The lord of the night turns the watch around in his hands, not looking at her. “Think you oughta head back to the festival, miss. They’re nearly done tossin’ out all the beans at this rate.”

“I’m not here for Setsubun, I’m…”

Makoto pauses. There’s a scrambling that he can catch from the side of his eye: Makoto stopping mid-sentence, as if the concentration of taking a proper look at him has meant she has no thought for anything else. He turns his head a fraction, and she’s staring at him like he’s not just some attendant in a black haori, ignoring the festivities and meddling around in the corner of the shrine grounds.

“You—have an eyepatch,” is what she says at last.

He does.  He’s never mentioned that – only that he’d lost an eye.

“Had this fer a while now.”

He should pocket the watch and make a run for it before she puts it together.

He stays.

A suspicious look replaces her startled one. “And—what do you want to do with my watch?”

If Makoto had that bladed cane with her, he’s certain she would stick it in him at a wrong answer. Attagirl.

“Fix it, I reckon. It’s just these straps, right? I mean, it’s a good gift but ya might have better luck gettin’ an answer if it ain’t—”

“Broken,” Makoto says. “Useless.”

If he flinches, she’s so close that she can’t miss it. And she’s so close that when she grabs his sleeve as he tries to back away, it takes her no effort to dig her heels in and hold her ground. He’s fought off Dojima men and Nikkyo Consortium men and Oda Jun, and he somehow doesn’t have the strength to shake her off.

“You said it once,” Makoto continues. Her eyes are wide and disbelieving – it’s hard to say whether she’s outraged or not. “That you should thank me for the gift—most people would say that something placed on a shrine would be an offering, but—”

But he’s not most people. But most people wouldn’t know what her watch was.

He should tie this up now, before he lets her get any further.

“This is, uh, a return, ain’t it? Fer somethin’ ya don’t want anymore?”

Tears well in Makoto’s eyes, falling when she blinks. She releases his sleeve—thank the heavens—and then she flings her arms around him in a death-grip. Or a hug. It’s much the same to him. It nearly overturns them both; the only way they stay upright is his desperate catch around her back, to keep her anchored in turn. At the eve of spring and no matter how cold his body is without a heartbeat, she’s the warmest thing within reach.

“You’re a fool,” she rasps. Through the tears, it’s hard to say whether she’s overjoyed or not. “I left my watch to make sure you’d fix it again.”

“… haw?”

It’s a shrine, he should say, it ain’t a repair shop.

He blinks bewildered into the air instead.

“It’s awful,” Makoto says. Her voice catches, and then she laughs through it, tears and joy together. “I’m married to such a fool.”

The lord of the night drops his chin on her head. There’s—so much to tell her, starting with an apology. Or an explanation, the only one he can give, but which might not satisfy her years of waiting. Or he could try grovelling at her feet until she thinks he’s worthy of forgiveness.

The easiest thing to offer her right then is: “Yeah,” he concedes. “Yeah, I guess you are.”

lv.

Somewhere, beans are being thrown to drive off malicious spirits. The Sunshine girls must be busy with the crowd. His kyoudai is—well, who’s to say? but it’s not unlikely he’s gone off to visit Yuko and tell her about the spring she isn’t around to see.

He and Makoto go home. It’s Makoto’s decision – she only visits for the day in Osaka, now that she doesn’t have a travelling companion with her, and home is a nicer place to talk, and she could really ask anything of him and he’d agree to it without thinking. She’s owed that much; her asking him to come home and letting her doze on his shoulder on the bullet train is the least he could do.

(Makoto napping is a good idea. He can think about what he should tell her, for a few hours to himself on the train. He can just sit there and ignore the weight of her head on his shoulder. He can pretend it’s not the hardest thing in the world to not lean over and press his mouth against her hair, when keeping his distance from her had been difficult enough for these last few years.)

Home—Makoto’s home, who knows if she’s forgiven him enough to allow him to stay—has little to do with the apartment she had under Sera’s surveillance. Her room still only has an occupant of one. His kamidana, repaired somehow by persistence and tenacity, occupies a prominent space near the front door, beside the altar for her brother and Lee. There’s a photo of Yuko and Makoto together, tourists in summertime yukata, on a living room shelf. Her yakuza friends aren’t around in any photos, but he’ll leave that part of the storytelling to her.

“‘s nice. Ya got this place fer long?”

“After you left—” she starts, then pauses, thinking of another way to phrase it. The act of tea making gives her time to make her words kinder. “Once I got better,” after he left, “enough to leave rehab and live by myself without… needing Sera-san’s protection, now that everyone who had cause to harm me in the Dojima family was gone, I wanted to find my own place.”

“Guess so.”

Makoto pours him a cup he doesn’t need to drink, then one for herself. She smiles wistfully at him. “Actually, I wanted to stay there for longer. Sera-san wouldn’t have minded—I’m sure he might find some way to turn it to his favour—but what I was worried about was… if you’d decided to come back and then I wouldn’t be there when you came to find me.”

He has nothing to say to that. It must be written all over his face.

Makoto saves him from it by taking a sip of her too-hot tea. “Yes. I know – you’ll tell me what your reasons were. I’ll give you time to think about it,” as if the hours on the train trying not to turn the waiting into a cuddling session with her sleeping, insensate self wasn’t enough. “Would you like to hear what I’ve been doing then?”

There’s a lot to cover for the years—eight years—that they’ve been apart. Eight years is nearly a third of her life by now. The past year where Yuko has died, and that stone-faced yakuza friend who couldn’t tell the right way up on an ofuda has gone off to prison for something she’s sure he’s not responsible for, and Yuko’s brother spiralling into some terrible despair that’s left them out of contact, has felt longer than most.

The waiting, she admits, was tempered by knowing that his hokora was attended to and Yuko’s vague assurances that the lord of the night was still in Osaka. The trips she took to visit the shrine when there were occasions to do so (and to wear proper yukata and kimono, and to go sight-seeing around Osaka, including that giant crab near the river!) – those were a balm to her heart too.

(She says nothing about how he surely must have known she was there. He’s grateful for it.)

It made it tolerable; she thinks she could have waited a decade more.

“No,” he cuts in. His voice nearly fails him. “Eighteen years waiting—I’d want ya to be somewhere better after that long.”

“Where’s ‘somewhere better’?” she ponders aloud. She taps her fingers on her tea cup, thinking. “Tokyo is where the Makimura family and my brother are. Lee-san is in Osaka – and you are too, but after all that had been done to get me to Tokyo and to keep me safe here, it seemed unkind to just leave it behind like that.”

And, she doesn’t add, if he did decide to come back to find her, he wouldn’t know where she might be.

But there are better things to tell him about too. She’s opened a clinic here, all proper and licensed with the training she had from Lee-san and finished up with the classes Sera-san covered, and it has a training and employment route for people who are blind. She’s put part of her billion yen towards philanthropy that’s well free of Sera-san’s well-polished public persona, making sure women who escape trafficking have a future to create themselves. She’s rebuilt her life, piece by hard-worn piece, as exhausting as it is rewarding.

His news is less pleasant than hers for the eight years they’ve been apart. Makoto remains eager to listen to it all the same: the tracking and vanishing of terrible men in Osaka, disappearing into the Sotenbori river for the police to find. Sometimes yakuza, sometimes triad, sometimes mafia – all of them better for Osaka being no longer in it. It’s work that keeps him busy. If he directs police to warehouses where women are kept and bodies are newly strewn and bloodied on the ground, and mutters, out of eyesight, that the shrine with the Sunshine girls might be a good place to go to have difficulties heard – well, that’s keeping the Sunshine girls busy too.

They talk so long over the tea that quickly vanishes, then a dinner of instant ramen barely tasted, that it doesn’t register that Makoto might tire until her head drops towards the table.

“I’m not tired,” she yawns. “And we’re talking—”

“Yeah,” he agrees. Over her sleepy protests, he bundles her up to bed. “But I figure, we can talk in the morning.”

lvi.

Makoto sleeps, restful and dreaming in a way he hasn’t seen for years. He stares down at her, bundled in her winter bedding, thinking: the last time he’d seen this was the night before she’d been kidnapped. Makoto in her hospital bed had been nothing like this.

“Oi,” he says aloud. “Ya said it – gotta talk in the morning, right?”

No use beating himself up all night when he could be sleeping instead.

In the middle of the night, something nudges against his back and knocks him out of sleep.

“Anata,” Makoto says, her voice low. A warning, where there hadn’t been one before on the night she lunged at him with her cane. “Is that you?”

“‘s me,” he mumbles. Sleep makes his voice rough. If she tried to stab him now in panic, he’d allow it. “Not gonna spring up an' try knifing me again, are ya?”

Makoto shifts, kicking aside her winter bedding despite his protests that it’s still cold, he’s a body without any heat, she’ll freeze cuddling up to him. Curls up beside him like he’s not icy cold and leeching the heat from her as she jams her face into his bony shoulder and loops her arm around his waist.

“I’ve dreamed about this, you know.”

“Freezin’ yerself sleeping?”

“Waking up,” she clarifies, “once all those awful things were over—and finding you here. Home.”

Before he can think up another apology to make, she adds, “I’m glad it is you. And you’re not as cold as you say you are.”

See? she continues. She hooks her foot around his at the ankle and—heaven help him—drags it up his calf sleepily. His extremities aren’t cold, and that much is tolerable, because if she ended up with cold feet, then she’d have something to complain about, and—

“Anata,” Makoto cuts off. Whatever she’s noticed has dredged her out of sleep. “Is that—”

Her cuddling up to him, half-asleep, started it. And her pressing up to him, tucking herself neatly against his neck with her arm around him, aggravated it. And her hips lined up to his when she jammed her feet between his and nothing short of molested his legs—

“Yeah.” It’s been long enough, since he was last married and with amiable company in bed. “You—uh, just untangle yerself an’ I’ll go manage this—”

Whatever Makoto thinks of that – she must disagree. On it being an individual undertaking, because she manages to find his mouth with hers, clumsy in the dark. A collision more than a kiss, with her jaw being jostled and his beard scratching her. Makoto huffs, pulling back and realigning herself – her fingers spread over his cheek, her thumb tapping over his mouth to be sure of its placement.

“Did you know,” she starts slowly, “what else I dreamed about, in eight years of waiting?”

Asking might end him.

He asks.

Makoto tells him.

There’ll be time fer it in the mornin’, he could say. And—she’s waited so long, what’s one more night when they could see each other properly in the morning light?

What he says is: “C’mere then.”

lvii.

It’s still gonna be real cold, he tells her, by way of warning. Makoto responds by flicking the bedside light on and frowning at him: how could she be cold now? Long years of winter, finally over – and before he can say more, she’s already pulling him close and kissing him.

If she’s cold because of him, there’s no complaint. Only her fingers sliding into his hair and her mouth shockingly warm on his, before he rolls her astride him. Her hips rock down into his to answer his wanting, and then her hands pull at his hakama.

“Take this off?”

The downside to what he normally wears, unlike that animal skin getup he’d chosen going about Tokyo, is that haori and hakama and juban are harder to remove. He’s most of the way through undressing before he peers over his shoulder. Makoto smiles back him, not a button on her pyjamas undone, watching.

“Oi. Makoto.”

“Yes?”

“Yer just—” he waves a hand at her, a remarkable feat since the other is occupied undoing his hakama, “watchin’? And not—”

Undressing for her part.

Her smile warms. “No. I’d like you to do that.”

How fortunate it is that he’s allowed to, unpicking each button of her shirt and dragging his mouth down what uncovered skin he finds. If his mouth is cold—Makoto only sighs and squirms to coax him to where he’s wanted. Where he’s wanted is not the stretch of her stomach that bears the bullet wounds from Dojima’s assassin first, then Dojima second; he presses his mouth to them in apology all the same.

“I’m alright,” Makoto says. The sound becomes a gasp. “It doesn’t hurt like that.”

So it might hurt in other unseen ways. They’ll have to speak of that, later.

But now he can pull his mouth further south to where he’s already tugged her clothes down from her hips. His hands must be cold under her thighs when he pries them apart – Makoto trembles, her breath quick. Her voice goes high and shaky from what could be his mouth being too cold on her. Or—maybe not too cold. Whatever sound she’s making aren’t complaints, not with her hands sunk into his hair and her voice so agreeable. And if he’s too cold, she has heat enough for both of them. A heat that colours her wonderfully, flush and warm when he draws back near her peak so he can look at her in the lamplight. Admire how she’s all soft and wet and falling apart against his mouth.

“Yes,” she says thickly, to what he hasn’t asked yet. She blinks, her eyes wet, her tears happy. Where he’s left her has her shaking and overwhelmed as she reaches for him. “Come here then.”

He does. As if he could anything but, with her smile so warm for him as he heaves himself up to her.

“There’s something I should have told you.” She catches one of his hands mid-air, bringing it to her mouth. That’s fine – he only needs one hand free to hoist her leg around his waist. “Before this.”

Her hands over his tightens, when his body nudges against hers. Into hers. She’s warm and wanting enough that it shouldn’t hurt, and it still must: Makoto tenses, eyes squeezed shut, breath caught in an inhale without exhale.

Kissing her might be a good distraction. Leaning down to reach her mouth sinks him deeper into her. She flings her arm around his shoulders when he tries to pull back.

“Yeah?” He coaxes her mouth open with kisses until her breathing evens. “Tell me.”

Her hold on his shoulders hasn’t let up. He can only move so much like this, but a little is enough: his hips moving slow, finding more give until she trembles with something absent of pain.

“Makoto?”

“I love you—I forgot—” she gasps. Her breath comes quick again as he rocks himself forward into her. “I hadn’t told you before, I—”

You did, he should say. All that time spent waiting said it, although he doesn’t mind hearing it again.

He pulls them upright. Lets Makoto settle her weight on his thighs and adjust to where she’s seated and full with him, even if the newness of it robs her of the sense to talk.

“C’mon.” The word leaves him as a growl. He swallows it down—won’t do to scare her now—and nudges a kiss against her mouth. “Keep tellin’ me.”

“I love you.” The sounds she makes as he slides his hands soothingly across her back are wonderful. As is her grip on his shoulders, her nails biting, as sharp as her desire. As is the slow lift of her hips, rolling down to meet his, a wanting made real by her own hand after long years of waiting. “I love you.” Heat rolls off her – her breath fanning hot on his mouth, and the warmth between her thighs, and the bright shine in her eyes as she cradles his face in her hands. Her thumb sweeps over his cheek, beneath the hollow of his eye. “Anata, I—”

It’s in his nature to collect heads and fix watches, more than it is to talk. He cradles her hips close and pushes himself up, deeper into her, finds her mouth, and lets that speak for him.

lviii.

Morning wakes her, with a chill that lingers even for how bright it is. Makoto stirs, half-asleep. Decides, even with the sunlight creeping through the curtains, that sleep is better. Everything feels faintly sore. With her cocooned in so many blankets, it’s too heavy and unfeasible to move.

She peers down. It’s not only blankets that makes it difficult to move. The man with his head pillowed on the blankets over her chest is a heavy sleeping weight that won’t be shifted.

On her bedside table is her watch with the straps still needing mending. She’d taken with her to the shrine yesterday and—not gotten it fixed after all, but—

“Anata.” She brushes the mess she made of his hair off his face. He’d washed her hair for her once—a long time back, when she thought what they’d ended up doing last night would happen much sooner. There might be a chance to repay the favour now. (Or… or stay in bed and do that all over again.) “Good morning?”

“Mornin’,” he rumbles. He shifts, barely. Buries his face deeper into the blankets at her chest, and nearer to her gently combing fingers. “How ya doin’?”

She’s rather tender from overexertion. She needs a hot shower and a longer bath. She’s happier than she’s ever been for the longest time.

She drops a kiss to his brow. “I’m alright.” Then, contemplating, as she feels sleep being slowly shaken off: “What now?”

“Breakfast,” her husband says. He hasn’t opened his eye, content to bask. “An’ then we figure out the rest of our lives.”

Makoto considers. Shower, a bath, breakfast, a visit to a watchmaker. And other things too—but as it is, it’s a good start to the first day of spring.