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Chapter Text

Miyoko is eighteen, freshly out of the house in a student apartment, studying to become a primary school teacher. She still wasn’t sure about the career path, but a brief run-in with a distant cousin two years ago had made her a little more interested in children. The cousin, Takashi-kun, had stayed with her family for about four months when they were young, and after hating him then and being what she can only describe as rude to him at their short reunion, she’d started to really think about why she felt so strongly, so negatively about him. It wasn’t like Takashi-kun had done nothing wrong; he was always an attention seeking liar back then, but he was just a kid. She was just a kid. It weighed on her heavily.

So now here she is, leaving her Intro to Developmental Psychology class and heading to a cafe where she could study. She honestly thought the class would bring some closure to her mixed feelings about Takashi-kun, but instead she's learning about all the ways that childhood trauma can shape a person, how much instability can damage the growing mind. Maybe someday, she’d have the guts to look Takashi-kun up and apologize for real, now that she understood his behavior a little bit better.

She isn’t expecting that someday to be today, though, when she enters the cafe and sees her cousin sitting at a table with another man. He was laughing, but when he catches her eye, he goes silent. Well, she’d been seen. She better go say hi.

“Takashi-kun,” she says as she approaches. 

He smiles at her, eyes kind of closed. “Miyoko-san,” he says. “It’s good to see you.”

“Hello,” says the other man. To Takashi-kun, he says, “Natsume, is this one of your new college friends?” and Miyoko looks at him. He looked so familiar, like if he’d just take off his glasses he’d be the spitting image of…

“Natori-san, this is a relative of mine. Aoi Miyoko. I stayed with her family when we were little for a while. Miyoko-san, this is my friend, Natori Shuuichi.”

And suddenly, Natori Shuuichi is glaring at her. He’s still smiling, but all the warmth from his expression has dropped. She’s flummoxed for a moment; she had a poster of him on her bedroom wall, and somehow he was friends with Takashi-kun. Somehow, they were in the cafe she liked to frequent in the town she now lived in over an hour’s train ride from home, and nowhere near the tiny sticks town she’d last heard of Takashi-kun living in.

“Anyway,” Takashi-kun breaks the tension. “What have you been up to?” he asks her. “It’s been about two years now?”

“Right,” Miyoko says, doing her best to ignore her favorite actor glaring at her . “I’m at the teacher’s college here in town. Just got out of my psych class. How about you? Are you in college now too?”

Takashi-kun bobs his head. “History,” he says. He doesn’t specify where, and even though his face is as pleasant as before, she can feel that the conversation is over. She tries not to think of the last time they met, her yelling at him in the street, him literally running away. She’d been horrible, truly horrible. She couldn’t blame him for dismissing her now.

“I see,” she says. “Well,” she adds, “it was good to see you.”

“You as well,” he says. “Give your parents my best.”

She nods, takes one last look at Natori Shuuichi, who is still smiling that cold smile, and bolts to an empty table. She pulls out her study materials, orders a drink, and turns on her headphones. She tries not to glance over at them again, but she can’t help it. Eventually they leave, and she finally focuses in. She has eight stages of Erikson’s psychosocial development theory to memorize, after all. If things like mistrust and guilt make her think of her cousin, she can’t be blamed.

A few hours pass in the cafe before she realizes it’s time to go. The sky has turned a rosy shade of pink, and if Miyoko cuts through the wooded park instead of going around it, she should be back at her apartment before it gets dark. A stroll through some trees might do her some good, too. Help her reset her mind.

She’s halfway through the woods when she sees them again, Takashi-kun and Natori Shuuichi. Natori-san is drawing something on the ground, and Takashi-kun is holding a big, fat cat. Miyoko panics, then hides behind a tree, hoping they didn’t see her. For some reason, she just can’t take another interaction with Takashi-kun. Her heart is beating a little fast, so she tries to breathe deeply and settle it down. Just as she’s about ready to head back and take the long way, though, she hears Natori-san speak.

“Do you want to talk about it, Natsume?”

“No,” her cousin says. “Let’s just focus on this.”

“Hey, I’m the one doing all the work here.”

“This is your job, not mine.”

“True. Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”

There’s a pregnant pause before Takashi-kun finally says, “It’s not like anything was her fault. She was just a kid. Her parents were kind, they always fed me, they never hit me. I was the problem.”

A third voice, a grumpy old man’s voice, said, “It was the mushikui’s fault, if anything.”

“A mushikui?” Natori-san said. “What did it want?”

“For me to draw it a mouth so that it could eat the people in the house.”

“Is it still in their house, do you think?”

“As if,” the old man said. Miyoko didn’t see an old man with them, but he must be there, right? The old man continued, “Natsume lured it out and got attacked, so I ate it.”

“You’re a good bodyguard sometimes, I guess,” Natori-san said.

Miyoko’s heart was beating faster now, and she was holding her breath. She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be spying, no matter how accidental, on Takashi-kun. She shouldn’t be hearing them talk about a mouthless monster living in her house that only Takashi-kun could see as if it was real . 

“Still, Natori-san, you didn’t need to be so rude to her,” Takashi-kun is saying now. “Like I said, it wasn’t her fault. And she’s probably your fan, she’s the right demographic.”

“There, the circle’s done. Now we just have to wait for Hiiragi and Sasago. You’re right, I’m sorry. Should I send her some merch in the mail?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Here it comes. Do you have the bottle?”

“Yes. Sensei, are you ready?”

The old man says nothing. The trees rustle around her as a massive wind blows past toward the place where the two men wait. Natori-san is muttering something that sounds like an incantation, then the breeze vanishes.  Miyoko swears she sees a bright light coming from behind the trees. Her heart is thumping in her chest now, as it dawns on her, Takashi-kun was telling the truth .

The quiet that envelops the park is thick. Miyoko lets out the breath that she’s been holding. Maybe now she can make a break for it, she thinks, but then she feels a hand on her shoulder. She looks and is face-to-face with Takashi-kun. She doesn’t know what she looks like, but there’s a compassion on his face that makes her feel wretched. Before she knows it, she’s crying. “Takashi-kun,” she says, “I’m so, so sorry.” Then she takes a page out of his book, and she runs.

It’s only once she gets back to her apartment, slams the door behind her and kicks off her shoes that she breathes. She wonders, if Takashi-kun’s lies were true, if Natori Shuuichi could see his monsters, too, what does that mean for the world she lives in? Miyoko has never been a spiritual person, but even when they were little, Takashi-kun would visit shrines like it was his job. Maybe she should start doing the same.

When she finally got online later that night, she was shocked to find a follow request from Natsume Takashi.

Chapter Text

Takashi-kun doesn’t ask what she was doing in the woods, doesn’t ask how much she saw or overheard. She follows him back online, and stalks his feed. The posts only go back about a year and a half, which must have been when he made his account. Late to the game, Miyoko thinks–she’d been on social media since she was thirteen. Most of his posts are pictures of nature with cryptic captions asking people what they see, and most of the comments on those pictures are about how beautiful the scenery is. There are pictures of the Fujiwaras and his friends, and a few pictures of Natori Shuuichi, who Miyoko still can’t believe she met . Even considering the celebrity candids, it’s a totally normal feed. But after a while, Miyoko notices that there are very few pictures of Takashi-kun himself, and those that exist are ones he’s been tagged in. She likes a few of the more recent photos, then gets a notification that he’s liked one of hers.

They never talk about that night again, but to Miyoko’s surprise, they talk. It starts with a simple “Happy Birthday” message on Miyoko’s birthday two weeks after their encounter.

Thank you so much! she writes back, expecting that to be it. But those three dots that show he’s typing show up on her screen. Then disappear. Then come back. 

Sorry about Natori-san , he replies. 

Are you kidding? Miyoko sends quickly. I’m a huge fan! It was so cool to meet him. How do you know him??

…my cat broke onto his set when he was filming on location in Hitoyoshi, and we just realized we had a lot in common. It was like two months after I moved there? 

Wow, that’s a long time. I’m surprised you’ve never shown up in the tabloids!

Well there was this one time… and Takashi-kun recounts a moment from two years ago when a picture of the two of them had been published speculating that Natori-san had an illegitimate half brother, but Natori-san had it squashed so quickly that it didn’t end up making waves. Natori-san, Miyoko realizes, guards his personal life like a bulldog. And Takashi-kun finds him embarrassing when they get caught in public together. Apparently her idol is vain, like most stars, so this doesn’t surprise her. 

Then a few days later, he posts a picture of a tranquil riverbank with the caption “wouldn’t it be cool to see a kappa here” that Miyoko likes. She scans the picture several times, but there’s definitely no kappa. Still, there must be one somewhere in the picture that only Takashi-kun can see.

He gets tagged in a post by Fujiwara Shigeru that’s a side by side of a photo from a few years ago and a photo from today, both pictures of Takashi-kun with the big fat cat and the Fujiwaras. The caption reads: Four years with these rascals in our lives, and we couldn’t be more blessed. Takashi, we’re so proud of the young man you’ve become. Miyoko sees that he’s commented, nyanko-sensei just keeps getting fatter, and she laughs. Truly, the cat is so rotund he looks like a maneki-neko statue instead of a real cat.

Her phone rings; it’s her mom. “Hi, mama,” she says when she answers. “You’ll never guess who I ran into a few weeks ago.”

“Oh, who?”

“Takashi-kun,” she says. “He’s doing really well.”

There’s a moment of silence before her mother says, “That’s good to hear. I was wondering if you were going to come home this weekend for your dad’s birthday?”

“Yeah, I’ll be there! Hey, should we invite Takashi-kun, now that I’m in touch with him?”

“I don’t see why,” her mother says. “Wait, you’re actually talking to him? I thought you didn’t like him. You hated each other as kids.”

“Kids are terrible people,” Miyoko says. “I feel like I’d like to get to know him now, though. I don’t know, he probably can’t anyway since it’d be so last minute.”

“Well, if you want to invite him, I have no problem with it. Just let me check with your father.”

Twenty minutes later with the go-ahead from both parents, Miyoko sends Takashi-kun a message inviting him to her parents’ house this weekend.

Will there be other relatives there? he asks, several minutes after he’s seen the invite, and Miyoko has no idea. So she calls her mom back, finds out what relatives are going to be there, and sends Takashi-kun a list.

Oh, I can’t then , he says after he gets the list. But thank you very much for the invitation. She doesn’t know much, because her parents didn’t keep up with him after he left, but she’d heard from other cousins that he’d been just as much of a problem at their houses. She remembers how he’d told Natori-san that her parents hadn’t hit him, and she wonders which relative did to make that his line of acceptable treatment. Besides her, of course. She remembers it now, beating him up and telling him to go back to where he came from. It shouldn’t have surprised her that Natori-san had been cold to her.

The party for her father goes well, with everyone in attendance happy and lively. Miyoko has a good time, and she sends a picture to Takashi-kun.

Another two weeks go by before she gets a message from him. It says, are you still a fan of Natori-san?

Yes! She replies. Absolutely!

Cool. Would you like a ticket to the Fukuoka premiere of his new movie?

YES!!! She sends back immediately. She’d never been to a movie premiere before, and the trailers for this one looked so good. Fukuoka wasn’t that far away; she could absolutely make it work.

Great , Takashi-kun replies. 

And Miyoko hopes she’s not trying to get close to her actual relative just for access to his celebrity friend. 

When she gets to Fukuoka that weekend, she finds Takashi-kun waiting for her at the train station with three other people that all looked about their age. She waves and rushes over to him and his group. “Hi, Takashi-kun,” she says.

He quickly introduces his friends as Sasada, Taki and Nishimura. “Miyoko-san is a relative,” he explains, and then the boy–Nishimura–is on her.

“You’re not one of the bad ones, right?”

“Nishimura-kun!” Sasada nearly shouts as she gently whacks him on the arm. “You can’t say that!”

Miyoko’s smile falters, but Takashi-kun is quick to say, “I wouldn’t have invited her if she was, you know. Thanks for coming, Miyoko-san. Our friend Kitamoto was going to take the last ticket, but he couldn’t make it, and Natori-san would be melodramatic if his friends and family section wasn’t full.”

“Well, we can’t disappoint Natori-san!” she says even as she wonders why the actor doesn’t have any family in his friends and family section.

Miyoko gets along with Taki and Sasada almost instantly after that as the group of five catches public transportation to the theater. The other girls tell her about Takashi-kun’s brief stint in the public eye during high school, and how that’s how they eventually found out that he was friends with Natori-san. Nishimura, it turns out, was a huge fanboy all through high school and Takashi-kun had kept it a secret as long as he could so that Nishimura wouldn’t freak out.

“What was Natsume-kun like as a little kid?” Sasada asks.

Takashi-kun doesn’t hear the question over the rattle of the train. “Honestly,” Miyoko says, “a crybaby. But I was a brat, so a lot of that was my fault. We were only five, so I don’t think either of us understood what was going on. He must’ve had a hard time.”

“Yeah,” Taki says, “you’re one of the good ones.”

Miyoko doesn’t feel like one of the good ones. She feels like a fraud amongst this group of friends. But she tries to ignore that feeling. Takashi-kun invited her, after all.

When they get to the theater, Natori-san is on a red carpet getting his photo taken. He spots the gaggle of teenagers and waves, poses for a few more shots, and makes his way over to the group. He ruffles Takashi-kun’s hair. “Welcome,” he says.

Takashi-kun smacks the actor’s hand out of his hair. “Can you not do that in public?”

“Aww, you’re no fun, Natsume.” Then Natori-san’s eyes are on her again. They’re not cold, not like the last time. “I’m so sorry,” he says, “can you remind me of your name? I remember that you’re Natsume’s cousin.”

“Aoi. Aoi Miyoko. It’s nice to meet you again,” she says.

And then both Natori-san and Takashi-kun look to their left as if something startling was happening in the street. Miyoko looks, but there’s nothing there. An unspoken conversation happens between them, then they shake it off. Miyoko notices that Taki is also tuned in to whatever this conversation is, but that she didn’t look to the same place as the two men.

“Anyway,” Natori-san says, “Let’s go find our seats.”

The movie is phenomenal, but sitting next to Takashi-kun, she occasionally hears him stifle laughter at the more serious scenes. It’s amazing, she realizes, how comfortable he is now. Even when they’d seen each other two years ago, he’d been so stiff, so formal and polite. But in this context, surrounded by friends, he’s goofing off and having a good time. He’s acting like a totally normal guy. When the credits roll and the lights go on, he looks at her and asks what she thought.

“I loved it!” Miyoko says, loud enough for Natori-san on Takashi-kun’s other side to hear.

Natori-san leans forward to talk around her cousin. “Thank you,” he says. “I’m glad.”

Over the next few weeks, Miyoko becomes friends with Sasada and Taki online, and suddenly the Takashi-kun content on her feed quadruples. Taki especially is always posting photos of him at their university where they both study history together. Miyoko wonders if they’re dating, but they don’t seem to be physically affectionate in any of the posts. In some ways, Takashi-kun is still as much of a mystery to her as he was before their fateful meeting at the cafe. 

Then one day in June, she gets a message from Taki saying, we’re planning another surprise party for Nastume-kun’s birthday; do you want to come?

Another? she asks. 

Yeah, we’ve been doing it for the past three years, but he always acts surprised. The first year he was in town, he forgot to tell anyone it was his birthday until like a week later, so we’ve made it a tradition to remember for him. This is the first time he’s shown any interest in connecting with family, though, so we wanted to be sure you were invited.

Miyoko wonders again at Takashi-kun’s situation, feels all the guilt that her child mind couldn’t have processed. If she had just been nicer to him, maybe they could have grown up together and become like brother and sister. Instead, she had been a terrible host and a terrible person. It was crazy to think that Takashi-kun wanted anything to do with her at all. Well, she decides, all she can do is move forward. I’ll be there; when and where?

Chapter Text

Taki meets Miyoko at the train station in Hitoyoshi. “Natsume-kun is being distracted right now, so we should get to the Fujiwaras’ house before him. Have you been out here before?”

“No, I haven’t,” Miyoko says. “It’s pretty far out in the countryside. It took me nearly three hours to get here!”

“Yeah, it’s very rural,” Taki agrees, “but it’s got a lot of charm. Most of us grew up here, and then we got Natsume-kun and Tanuma-kun as transfers in high school. I wasn’t really friends with the whole group until Natsume-kun showed up, though. He really helped me out of a tough spot.”

Taki’s smile is broad, and Miyoko can’t help it anymore, so she asks, “Are you two dating?”

Taki laughs. “No, no. He’s just very important to me. I wonder about him sometimes, to be honest. I don’t think there’s anyone that he’s ever been interested in romantically. We’re taking a left up here.”

Miyoko follows Taki through a small downtown section, past the high school, and out a long road until they finally come to the Fujiwaras’ house. Taki knocks on the door, and Fujiwara Touko opens the door.

“Tooru-chan, come in! And you must be Miyoko-chan! Welcome. We’re almost set up here. Takashi-kun should be back in about fifteen minutes. We’re hiding shoes in the back, I hope you don’t mind.”

Miyoko follows Taki into the house, removes her shoes and picks them up. Once the pair have successfully deposited them onto the back stoop, Miyoko takes a moment to appreciate the house. It’s older, but big, and she can imagine how it would have easily become a great place to hang out with a group of friends.

Taki pulls her into the sitting room, where a decent crowd of people are waiting. “You’ve met Sasada and Nishimura-kun before,” Taki says. “This is Kitamoto-kun and Tanuma-kun, we all went to high school together. And this is Shibata-kun, he knew Natsume-kun in elementary school. This is Aoi Miyoko, she’s Natsume-kun’s cousin.”

“Hello,” Miyoko adds. Takashi-kun’s friends immediately pepper her with questions about herself, her interests, what she’s studying in school. Every one of them is unfailingly kind to her, and she feels it again, that creeping feeling that she doesn’t belong here, doesn’t deserve this kind treatment from the people who obviously care about Takashi-kun the most.

“Everybody, quiet!” Nishimura calls out. A hush falls over the group, and the sound of the door opening permeates the house.

“I’m home,” Takashi-kun calls out.

“Forgive the intrusion,” Natori-san’s voice follows. 

“No shoes. I’m sure they’re here, though,” Takashi-kun says. “Do you think they’re upstairs like last year?”

“At least act surprised when you find them,” Natori-san replies.

“What’s surprising is that they’re still doing this,” Takashi-kun says. Miyoko hears the floorboards creak as he gets closer to the sitting room.

The door slides open, and the whole room erupts, Miyoko included. “Surprise! Happy birthday!”

Takashi-kun jumps back half a step, a true look of surprise on his face, though Miyoko suspects the surprise was in finding them so quickly as opposed to them being there. They’d all heard him speculating in the hall, after all. Takashi-kun quickly appraises who is here, and when his eyes land on Miyoko, he smiles. “Miyoko-san,” he says, “how did they get you wrapped up in this, too?”

“It was easy,” Taki says. “I invited her.”

From there, the party continues much as it had before Takashi-kun had gotten there, only with him as the center of attention. Miyoko slowly finds herself drifting out of the conversation and standing along the wall. In truth, she doesn’t know anyone well enough to impose on this party. She almost doesn’t notice when one of the guys she’d been introduced to–she couldn’t remember which one–ends up leaning against the wall next to her.

“Taki said your name’s Aoi-san, yeah?”

“Please,” Miyoko says, “Aoi is fine. I’m sorry, could you remind me of your name?”

“Shibata Katsumi.”

“Right,” Miyoko says. “The friend from elementary school.”

“Actually, I was a bully in elementary school,” Shibata says. “I got into some trouble with a girl in high school, and Natsume ended up being the person who helped me out, even though I bullied him when we were younger. We’ve been friends pretty much ever since.”

Miyoko feels herself let go of some tension. “Actually,” she says, “I was pretty mean to him, too.”

“I think a lot of people were,” Shibata replies. “But the thing about Natsume is that if someone wants to do right by him, he meets them where they are regardless.”

Miyoko hums in agreement. “I feel horrible about it now. Even two years ago, I was so mean to him, for no reason. But he’s so kind, I don’t even get it. If I’d gone through half of what he went through–”

“You can’t think about it like that,” Shibata says. “It’ll drive you crazy if you do.”

“For sure,” she says. 

From there, she and Shibata make small talk for a while until Nishimura pulls Shibata into some kind of contest. Even though it’s Takashi-kun’s birthday, the boys don’t hold back, and one of the other two–Tanuma, maybe?--ends up winning. Miyoko laughs along with the other party goers and relaxes. Maybe it was okay for her to change, to want to be better as a person. She takes a picture of Takashi-kun with his face lit up in laughter and sends it to her parents.

Natori-san ends up hovering by Miyoko’s self-designated spot on the wall. “Aoi-san,” he says. “That night, how much did you overhear?”

Miyoko hesitates before answering, and only in part because Natori Shuuichi knows her name.. “Enough,” she settles on. “It wasn’t intentional,” she adds.

“Still,” Natori-san says.

“I know,” she replies. And she does know that Natori-san and Takashi-kun have a secret life that involves invisible monsters and ghosts and flashes of light in the forest. And she knows that whatever power the two of them possess caused Takashi-kun to be violently ostracized for most of his life. “I won’t tell.”

“Good,” Natori-san says, then he hands her a business card. “If you ever need an exorcist, you know where to find me.”

Miyoko pockets the card. “Let’s hope not,” she says.

Takashi-kun chooses this moment to come over to Miyoko. “Hi,” he says. “Are you having a good time? Sorry that Taki dragged you all the way out here.”

“No, I’m glad to be here,” Miyoko says, maybe too fast. “It took forever on the train, though. I was surprised.”

Takashi-kun smiles. “I’m glad you’re here, too.”

Miyoko smiles as well and pulls Takashi-kun in for a selfie. I wish I’d been better to you before , she thinks one last time before finally letting the thought go and looking forward to being better now .