leaving well enough alone
Soon there will be papa!Hibari fic. Ah ha ha…ssssomething may need to be done about my sense of humor. o_O
But meanwhile and far less disturbing, Kekkaishi fic!
Kekkaishi ♥. I hear the series is complete, but I irrationally refuse to read the scanlations because I don’t want it to be over. I shall turn back time and tide with the force of my denial! XD
This fic, though, is set wayyyy back around chapter 193. It’s about Yoshimori’s classmates. Surely they must have noticed something weird about his lifestyle by now.
SURELY.
Kekkaishi doesn’t belong to me. Even more sadly, no castle cakes belong to me. Woe.
Thank you to zephy_magnum for the beta! :D
Leaving Well Enough Alone
“I realize I’m wasting my breath here,” Ichigaya murmured. “But, Tabata, this is the stupidest idea you’ve ever had. Which is saying something.”
“Shh, what if he hears you!? This is a priceless data-collecting opportunity, and I won’t let you mess it up with your big mouth!”
They were, for reasons Ichigaya did not respect, crouched across from the Sumimura residence in the middle of the night.
The Sumimura residence was quite fancy. Ichigaya had had no idea; you’d certainly never know it to look at Sumimura. It was the kind of place, in fact, where you had to wonder if there weren’t guard dogs.
“Tabata, if we die doing this, my mother will disinherit me.”
“She won’t be able to. You’ll be dead. Now shh!”
“Why am I even here?” Ichigaya asked, pushing his glasses up disapprovingly. “This isn’t my idea; it’s your idea. I’ve never wasted time worrying about Sumimura’s sleeping habits.”
“You’re 20% more irritable on days when Sumimura is so tired he walks into a wall before lunch.”
“I enjoy the way you apply number values to my mood. How did we ever become friends, anyway? Really, Tabata, what is it that we have in common? I firmly hope nothing.”
“Yukimura Tokine, first year high school student, Class B,” Tabata said. Ichigaya wondered briefly if this was meant to be a reply, but then he realized that Yukimura Tokine (first year high school student, Class B) was standing not ten feet from them. In the middle of the night on a school night.
Strange.
Yukimura was dressed hardcore traditional, though hardcore traditional what was tough to decide. But the important point here, Ichigaya felt, was that she was also looking bad-tempered and carrying a big stick with a spike on the end of it.
“We should leave,” Ichigaya whispered as softly as possible. “Before she catches us lurking in the bushes across from her house and stabs us to death.”
Tabata gave him a reproachful look and mouthed, “Shut up.”
It didn’t matter anyway, because Yukimura was already marching purposefully off somewhere. All alone. In the middle of the night. With a pointy stick.
“Maybe everyone in the neighborhood is nocturnal,” Ichigaya suggested. “How fascinating. Let’s leave.”
Tabata elbowed him.
After another ten minutes of fidgeting and muttered threats, Sumimura appeared.
Ichigaya hadn’t believed for a minute that Sumimura really wandered the town at night. His best guess had been that Sumimura stayed up late playing video games. Maybe Yukimura had shaken his faith in the sanity of the neighborhood a little, but Sumimura was just so…normal.
Or he’d seemed normal. Right up until now.
Sumimura’s stick had a blade instead of a spike, and his traditional dress was in black instead of white. He was wearing those clothes like a second skin, more comfortably than he’d ever worn his school uniform. He was wearing them with a backpack like a dork, which was comforting, at least. But on the whole, it was still distressingly surreal.
“There you go. He and Yukimura do cosplay in the night. Can we go home now?”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Tabata hissed, apparently unaware of the irony. “Of course we’re going to follow him.”
“There is no ‘of course,’” Ichigaya insisted. Not that it did him any good, because Tabata had already crawled out of the bushes and was sneaking down the road after Sumimura.
Ichigaya followed. He’d gone this far, after all. What was a little more curfew-breaking and stalking, in the scheme of things?
* * *
Sumimura went to school.
Admittedly, there was plenty about tonight that didn’t make sense, but this was the sticking point for Ichigaya. School. Sumimura wasn’t mentally at school even during the day, so what would possess him to lurk around the place at night? What the hell was he doing there?
“What the hell are you two doing here?” came a voice from the tree above them. They jumped. Ichigaya clutched at his chest and wondered if teenagers ever had heart attacks.
“Oh,” said Tabata, who entirely lacked a sense of self-preservation. “You’re Kagemiya Sen. Class-”
“Shut up, Tabata,” Ichigaya begged.
Kagemiya Sen, yes. But not the Kagemiya they’d seen during daylight hours. That Kagemiya was friendly, even silly. Pretty and he knew it, popular with girls. Weak.
There was nothing weak about this Kagemiya. And nothing friendly about him, either. In fact, if Ichigaya had been inclined to give a one-word summary of him for Tabata’s book, he would have gone with feral.
“This is a seriously bad time to be hanging around Karasumori, you fucking morons.”
No, not at all like the Kagemiya Sen they knew.
Adding to the general sense of bewilderment, a voice abruptly spoke up behind them. “Sen-chan, what are you…? Oh.”
Ichigaya jumped and turned. The guy who’d spoken was also, it turned out, familiar. Well, his face was familiar. His wings, not so much.
“High school student,” Tabata whispered. Apparently he couldn’t help himself. “Akitsu Shuu. The wings are new.”
“Oh, no. I’ve had ‘em forever,” Akitsu said, and grinned like it was no big deal for people to wander around sprouting wings.
“Leave,” Kagemiya said abruptly. “I don’t want Yoshimori torturing himself over you two when you get yourselves killed. He’s enough of a pain in the ass as it is.”
Oh, so scary Kagemiya was on given-name terms with Sumimura. Haha. Why?
“Sumimura’s here?” Tabata asked. A stupid question. After all, they’d followed him every step of the way.
“Killed?” Ichigaya asked, because he felt that was more relevant.
Kagemiya leaned down out of the tree and said, slowly and clearly, “Yes, Yoshimori is here. Yes, if you stay here you will die. If the full ayakashi don’t get you, I will. Leave!”
“Oh, Sen-chan,” Akitsu sighed.
Ichigaya herded Tabata behind him and started backing away. He didn’t know whether Kagemiya was serious or not, but he didn’t feel the need to find out.
Three steps later, something behind them went boom, the ground shook, and Kagemiya screamed, “Don’t leave, don’t leave! Get back here! Back back back!”
Ichigaya froze, but found himself being dragged forward by Akitsu, who half-flew, half-ran back to the tree, muttering, “Not good, not good.”
Tabata, Ichigaya thought. I told you so.
Akitsu shoved them under the tree and stood between them and where the boom had come from. “Should we get Tokine-chan to make a kekkai for them?”
“Are you kidding me?” Kagemiya demanded, jumping out of the tree and landing uncomfortably close. “That short-pants woman? She’d probably kill them to keep the secrets of the kekkaishi. You know what she’s like.”
“Tokine?” Tabata whispered. “Yukimura Tokine?”
“Yeah, Yukimura Tokine,” Kagemiya answered. Apparently he had keen ears. “Most heartless human I’ve ever met.”
Ichigaya didn’t much care for the sound of human as a distinguishing feature. Equally, he didn’t care for the idea that Sumimura was so tired every day was because he spent every night with these insane people and whatever it was that had gone boom.
“Should we get Yoshimori-kun to make a kekkai, then? They are his friends.”
“No, don’t bother him. I don’t like to distract him when his tiny brain’s working on a problem.”
“But, Sen-chan, that means we’ll have to watch them. And you won’t be able to observe, and the chief will-”
“We can observe just fine,” Kagemiya snapped, “if we take them along.”
“But Sen-chan-”
“And if they die it’s their own stupid fault for coming here at night, what the hell,” Kagemiya interrupted, and stormed off toward the booming.
Akitsu sighed. “Well,” he told them, “you may as well come along. It’s definitely not going to be any safer here.”
Kagemiya and Akitsu were one as comforting as the other, really.
* * *
They came out from under the last of the trees into the cleared ground around the school buildings, and up above them…
“Ichigaya. Ichigaya, Sumimura is standing on the air.”
It was good that Tabata had such a firm grasp of the obvious.
“On the air, Ichigaya. Nothing under him. He’s floating.”
“Yes, Tabata. I see that.”
Sumimura was indeed standing on air, seemingly effortlessly. He’d lost the backpack, and without it, the clothes made him look…dignified. Like someone you should fear and respect, even. And that was without taking into account the expression on his face.
He’d only seen Sumimura half-asleep before, Ichigaya realized, and that might have been a good thing. Because apparently when Sumimura woke up, he was terrifying.
Sumimura pointed at something with two fingers, and there was another boom. Sumimura was the one blowing things up. By…pointing at them.
Oh God.
“Well, this is a waste,” Kagemiya huffed. “It sounded way worse than it is. What are those little wormy things?”
“I don’t know,” Akitsu said thoughtfully, peering into the seemingly empty air. “We’ll have to ask Tokine-chan after they’re finished.”
Speaking of whom, Yukimura came bounding out of the woods opposite them, then up into the air, like she was running up invisible stairs.
“Ichigaya?”
“What, Tabata?”
“Oh my God, you were right.”
“Yes,” Ichigaya agreed sadly. A pyrrhic victory if ever there was one. “I know.”
* * *
Kagemiya walked them home. Akitsu had offered to take them, but Kagemiya had ordered him to help with the cleanup instead. Apparently they had to fill in all those big holes in the ground. Well, of course they would, wouldn’t they? There was school in the morning.
Ichigaya had been deeply sorry to see Akitsu go, but had managed to keep himself from screaming anything embarrassing, such as, Help! or Don’t abandon us! At the time, he’d been proud of that. In retrospect, he should have screamed for all he was worth.
In the glow the of the streetlights, Kagemiya’s eyes looked like a cat’s. As if to support the impression, he held up a hand and for-God’s-sake claws extended from it. Ichigaya missed Akitsu bitterly, wings and all. He also missed daylight, ignorance, and the sane world.
“Don’t tell anyone anything,” Kagemiya said. Threatened.
“Not a soul,” Ichigaya replied promptly, and Tabata agreed after Ichigaya elbowed him really hard.
“It’s for your own good anyway,” Kagemiya said, claws retracting. Not that Ichigaya was ever for a second going to forget they were there for the rest of his life. “People would only think you were nuts. Which you are. Wandering around Karasumori in the middle of the night, what the hell is wrong with you?”
“Well, we didn’t know,” Tabata huffed indignantly. Ichigaya wondered if Kagemiya was going to stab him. If Ichigaya had retractable claws, God knew there were times when he would have stabbed Tabata.
“How many years have you lived here?” Kagemiya demanded incredulously. “Are you all stupid? I mean, sure, some of it you could pass off as weird, fluke things. But there’s way too much. People acting crazy, people fainting en masse, enormous cracks appearing and disappearing on school grounds-”
“Enormous cracks…?” Tabata asked. Kagemiya firmly ignored him.
“And you two, you’re Yoshimori’s friends, right? Yoshimori, the guy who’s asleep every minute he’s not bolting out of class with no explanation? And, what, you just accept that?”
“Obviously we realized there was something going on,” Tabata said defensively. “That’s why we’re here. We were worried.”
“Uh huh, you’re worried now. What about when he was the amazing scarred ten-year-old?”
“Scarred?” Ichigaya repeated. Kagemiya sneered, disgusted.
“We were ten, too,” Tabata said defensively.
“Believe me, when I was ten, I noticed if my friends showed up with random scars.” They clearly weren’t winning any points with Kagemiya.
“We’ve lived here all our lives,” Ichigaya said slowly.
“Yeah,” Kagemiya snapped. “Which is why-”
“We’ve lived here all our lives, and there are questions you don’t ask. There are things you just have to…not pay attention to.” He’d never realized before how very true this was. “Questions never get answered anyway, so there’s no point asking them. Everyone’s figured that out except Tabata. Tabata’s…” He trailed off and frowned at his bizarre friend. One of his bizarre friends. “Tabata does things his own way.”
“And yet he didn’t notice-”
“He tries to pay attention to everything, so sometimes he misses things right in front of him.”
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” Tabata said stiffly. “I notice important things.”
“Bet me,” Kagemiya snapped. Kagemiya, Ichigaya thought, was a lot like Shishio in the way he was obviously much closer to Sumimura than either of them wanted to let on.
It made Ichigaya wonder about Shishio.
“Do you know Shishio Gen?” Ichigaya asked, partly because he was curious, partly because he was trying to prevent Tabata from getting himself murdered.
“…I knew him, yeah,” Kagemiya answered, expression closing down into something even more fantastically dark and forbidding. Ichigaya plowed on anyway. Maybe being around Tabata so much was affecting his common sense.
“What happened with him?” What with the events of the evening, Ichigaya was beginning to doubt it was anything as simple as a transfer.
Kagemiya gave him a sidelong glare. “What did they tell you?”
“That he’d transferred schools.”
Kagemiya snorted. “He didn’t transfer fucking schools. He’s dead. He died here. I told you idiots, it’s dangerous.”
Tabata gasped, and Ichigaya…Ichigaya thought back to the look on Sumimura’s face when Tabata had told him about Shishio’s transfer. Strange, he’d thought at the time. Very strange.
This was the reason asking questions in Karasumori was a bad idea.
“After he died, Yoshimori went after the guys who’d killed him,” Kagemiya continued. “And he wiped out their world.”
“…Wiped out their…?”
“Gone. It’s gone, it doesn’t exist anymore. The guy who killed Shishio? He dissolved. People he was working for, gone. The place they lived, gone. And-get this-Yoshimori’s the nice one. What I’m saying is, don’t screw with kekkaishi. And I suggest you forget all about tonight, supposing you like life.”
Forget. Right.
* * *
The next morning, Ichigaya had a lot of unexpected sympathy for Sumimura. He was exhausted. Sumimura must go through every day like this. Wasn’t that bad for your health? And your brain? Sumimura was probably stunting his growth and mental development through sleep deprivation.
“Ichigaya, I’ve organized the new page!” Tabata cried, bounding down the aisle.
Ichigaya wished he had the energy to wish Tabata dead. Tabata, unaware of this, joyously shoved his data book under Ichigaya’s nose. The entry on display was “Sumimura Yoshimori.”
“This is a bad idea,” Ichigaya said, leaning back as if distance meant safety.
“You haven’t even read it yet,” Tabata huffed, folding his arms impatiently.
“Sumimura Yoshimori,” it read. Date of birth, vital statistics. Associates. A list of cross-references and sub-references (‘cooking: castle cakes, fixation on’). Various crossed-out guesses as to what his relationship with Shishio had been. Various crossed-out guesses as to what his relationship with Kanda was. “Possible tendency to hallucinate?” had recently been crossed out.
At the very bottom of the page, it read, “Sumimura, when angry, calls down the wrath of the gods. Trust me.”
“Morning,” Sumimura mumbled. They both jumped, and Ichigaya slammed the book closed.
Predictably, Sumimura didn’t notice. He slumped into his seat, oblivious, pulled a pillow out of his backpack, and put his head down on it.
Same as always, which was probably the most disturbing thing of all. Same as always.
“Hard night last night?” Ichigaya asked, ignoring Tabata’s incredulous gaping.
“Huh?” Sumimura looked up woozily. “Not…really? I just don’t sleep much. God, it’s annoying.” His head thunked back down onto the pillow.
Subtly done. Not one untrue word, and he’d given the appearance of answering the question without actually answering anything. If Sumimura was capable of being subtle, that meant they didn’t know anything about him. Or rather, everything they knew was wrong.
It was in the midst of this aimless distress that Kanda Yuri walked up. Kanda had a crush on Sumimura so dire that the poor girl hadn’t said anything logical to him in months. As per right now.
“Um,” she said nervously. “Flying…shrimp?”
Poor Kanda. Poor, addled girl. But at least Sumimura was unfailingly nice about it. There was that, at least: even if he was a scary man of mystery, he’d always been nice to poor Kanda.
Sumimura sat up and made an attempt to look alert. “Still?”
“Last night,” she said.
“Oh.” He gave her a kind smile. “Taken care of.”
She beamed back at him. “Okay. I thought so. Thank you, Sumimura-kun!” She bounced off. Talking her crazy talk with Sumimura always seemed to cheer her up. Sumimura was full of it, though, because Ichigaya knew what he’d been up to last night. He’d been standing on air and blasting unidentified…
flying…
things…
Oh God, was Kanda one of them? Tabata seemed to think so; he was scribbling madly in his book.
Wait. Tabata was scribbling in his book. Kanda was talking crazy talk. Sumimura was preparing to sleep through class. This was just another day, wasn’t it? This was normal.
“Ichigaya,” Sumimura mumbled with sleepy concern. “You look kinda weird. You okay?”
Ichigaya stared Sumimura directly in the eye. “I think,” he said, “I’m going to give up worldly things and become a monk. That’s the only way this makes any kind of sense.”
Tabata dropped his pen and Sumimura’s eyes widened, though he didn’t bother lifting his head from his pillow. “Uh…what? Wait, what?”
Ichigaya sat back, satisfied. There. Now everyone was confused.