there may be very vague manga spoilers in this fic, but if you haven't read Noragami you should still be fine *thumbs up emoji*
It takes less than ten seconds.
The harsh clatter of the cart's wheels over the uneven road ends in a jaw-shattering jolt. The silence of the exhausted travelers escalates into a chorus of distress and anguish. The colorless, fog-shrouded road explodes in a spectacle of red. The attackers strike with blinding speed and force, their convergence around the humble caravan like a snake coiling around a mouse.
The last thing she sees is her mother's terrified face, before she is shoved into the corner of the uncovered cart and nearly smothered with a heavy, damp sack. She feels instantly crushed, and tries to push it off.
"Shh, Hiyori," her mother urges.
She has to nearly shout in Hiyori's ear over the clamor outside, and her voice is caught on the sharp edge of fright. But underneath the fright, there is a calmness that is somehow much worse.
"Don't breathe the smoke—don't breathe at all. Don't move."
Her mother's words rasp against her ear outside the damp sack. Hiyori's short legs cramp at once, but she tries to obey. She hears muffled chaos through its thickness, and her father's voice. His voice is the loudest. The other members of their small caravan are out there too, Hiyori hears them. And she hears other voices.
Male voices. Cold. Just like the endless fog.
"Hiyori, you hear me?! Don't move," her mother begs, pushing her head down toward the floor of the cart and shoving her farther into the corner. Something heavy rolls in front of the sack, replacing the weight of her mother's body.
Then she's gone. Hiyori hears her father's voice again, high with distress.
"—Sayuri—!"
A slice of metal through fog, and a few sickening thumps. A few minutes later, there's the sound of boiling, bubbling flesh. Hiyori smells it through the thickness of damp cloth. Her insides ball up, squirming horribly right below her throat.
She doesn't hear her parents' voices anymore. It's silent, except for the bubbling, except for the loud stench that creeps through the weave of the cloth. She smells the burning.
Her head spins and she loses herself in darkness.
/
The first thing she hears, out of that darkness, is the cold, male voices talking just on the other side of the cart's low wall. She has a wild urge to call out for her parents, but her voice won't work.
Besides, her mother told her not to move, to be very silent and still.
Outside, one of the men slams his palm against the side of the cart, and Hiyori jumps. Her feet collide with the rolling object her mother shoved against her, and it careens across the cart floor. Something—it sounds like heavy pottery—shatters a few feet from her.
There is abrupt, listening silence outside.
Hiyori curls up under the heavy cloth, her muscles screaming.
There are quick footsteps, and the cart rocks on its wheels as someone puts weight on it. Curled up on the floor, Hiyori shivers uncontrollably as a hand rips the damp cloth off of her, exposing her brightness-blinded eyes to the mist.
"What's this? A little sweet for dessert!"
The voice belongs to a man, but it's not one of the cold voices. His voice is warm, friendly.
And, like the terrible calmness in her mother's voice, this seems to her more wrong than anything.
He crouches down, no longer casting a towering shadow over her. One of his hands reaches toward her face, pressed against the rough floor of the cart.
"You are just that—a little sweet. Aren't you?"
His fingernails are long, and yellow. The index finger of his right hand curves across her cheek like the talon of a hawk, and Hiyori presses her eyes shut, turning her face away. Splinters dig cruelly into her cheek, and the man laughs kindly.
"Sweet…but silly."
Another voice breaks in; now that she's uncovered Hiyori can hear the men outside the cart clearly.
"Nobu, we have to leave. Just get rid of the little girl."
The man addressed as "Nobu" takes Hiyori's chin between two of his taloned fingers, forcing her to bring her eyes up to his. Her stinging cheek leaves the floor of the cart. He stares into her eyes, and Hiyori stares back, into a face that seems more skull than flesh.
The eye sockets are sunken, starving, with irises the color of coagulated blood. She can't look away from them, but she notices the skin on his face is pitted with deep scars and scabbed over. The leprous, diseased appearance doesn't match that wine-smooth voice.
"We don't have to get rid of her right away," he replies softly, never taking his fingers off Hiyori's chin. His other taloned index finger loops around a few strands of her hair.
She is utterly frozen as he leans in, smelling like fire and rot and overwhelming, clinging mist. He sniffs her, and a barely perceptible shudder passes through his body.
Then, he suddenly lets go of her with both hands, and turns to the men outside the cart.
"Just look at her," he says cheerfully. "Someone in the city would pay quite a lot for this one. Don't you think so, Koizumi?"
"We don't have the time or luxury to bring a child along with us. Get it over with, Nobu, or I'll do it."
Nobu pauses, his body going very still.
"Hmm."
Such a gentle noise, from a mouth that could drip venom.
"It sounds like you've forgotten who led you here, Koizumi. It sounds like you've forgotten that you still are in debt to me."
Tense silence extends, and there's uncomfortable shifting outside the cart. Mutters, from several mouths.
"I—well, I just—" Koizumi begins.
"Come now, don't stutter like a baby."
Nobu is back to cheeriness.
"This one hasn't even seen ten summers and she's putting on a braver face than you are."
His long, long fingernail glides over Hiyori's ear, and something pungent crawls to the top of her throat. Nobu's head swivels back down to look at her, his gray teeth bared in a smile.
"Little sweet, don't be afraid. If you are as sweet as you look, you can come with me. Nobu will protect you."
His fingernail stops stroking her ear; he reaches farther to cup her cheek with his smooth, moist palm. Hiyori flinches away, and before she remembers moving, she smacks his large hand away from her face. The harsh crack is quickly swallowed by the mist.
Nobu's smile stays frozen in shock for a half-second, and then it disappears completely.
"Oh, that won't do," he says. It's low enough to reach only her ears.
Koizumi's agitated voice interrupts.
"Very well—do whatever you like. But it has to be done fast. We need to leave."
"I knew you'd listen, Koizumi."
Nobu bends toward her, and Hiyori scrambles back from him, as far as the walls of the cart will let her.
"Be still," he says, very quiet. And as soon as he says it she is still, like his calm, pleasant voice is a chain around her very bones.
She is perfectly still. Her eyelids won't blink. Her ribs won't expand for breath. Those two words have turned Hiyori's own body into a weapon against her. Nobu watches her as she stares back at him, horrified, motionless. Her blood begins to scream for oxygen, and her wide-open eyes burn, burn, in the mist and smoke.
He stares for a few more seconds, blood-colored eyes locked on her burning ones, and then he says:
"All right. That's enough."
The first breath is a sobbing, heavenly gasp, and Nobu watches in satisfaction as she collapses, boneless with relief, against the cart's back wall.
"You'll come along without fighting, little sweet."
And she has to. Nobu tells her to get up, and she does. One of the men outside the cart reaches up to grab her and lift her down, muttering curses as he does so. In the middle of the road, six other carts are lopsided and ransacked, their gutted contents soaking up the mist and the blood. A little ways off the wide road, there's a tall, black stack of something that lets off foul, hanging smoke. The reek coming off it is rancid with gas and bubbling fat.
The man named Koizumi looks at her in discontent.
"She'd better be worth it, Nobu."
"She will," he replies, contentedly.
Out of the mist, there's a sound. Laughter. A child's delighted giggle.
"What is that?" Koizumi asks, his head whipping around. The other men turn to look in the same direction.
Nobu doesn't look where they look. He grips Hiyori's upper arm and nearly yanks it out of its socket as he drags her around to the other side of the cart—the far side, away from the sourceless, eerie laughter.
"Shit," he mutters.
There's a hiss of wet steel, and the thump of a body dropping.
"Show yourself!" cries Koizumi's voice.
Nobu stands up, releasing his cruel grip on Hiyori's arm. As he stands, he sniffs the smoky, mist-heavy air, and his expression transforms into nightmarish rage. His already ghoulish face loses every ounce of its remaining humanity. He spits:
"Fuck that magatsukami."
There's a sound like rushing water—the girl's clear, chilling laughter—and the drop of another armor-weighted body to the ground. Koizumi's voice rises in panic as he tells his men to fan out.
"Nobu—get back here!"
Nobu crouches again behind the cart, hissing a string of curses through his teeth as another of the men drops with a last loud, gurgling breath. He pushes Hiyori roughly under the cart, behind its heavy, broken front wheel, where nothing but her feet are visible from the outside.
"I think we might have to say goodbye after all, little sweet," he says, with a trace of real regret.
His talons reach for her again, and Hiyori suddenly remembers how moist his palm was—like a tongue. She presses herself flush against the inside of the wheel and fights to remain still. Acid burns the back of her tongue.
But he doesn't touch her. She opens her eyes, peering around the edge of the wheel, and there is nothing but empty mist-drenched roadside, and wafting smoke. The copper scent of blood mixes with the cacophony of other smells.
The next moment, she realizes the clang of metal has vanished, leaving silence.
Hiyori waits, crouched behind the wheel of the destroyed cart, and she feels the silent presence of another person outside. The air weighs down heavier on her with every second.
She opens her mouth to speak, and at first, nothing comes out. Then, she manages to push out a sound.
She means to ask "who's there?" but the shapes of the syllables vanish, and it comes out as a high-pitched whimper.
A single set of footsteps approaches the cart, so light she can barely hear them. They stop a few feet from the far wheel.
Hiyori can't stand it. She flings herself from behind the wheel and tries to dart off the road. Her feet, numb from cold and shock, feel like they've vanished from under her, and she hits the ground at once, landing wrong on one arm. One of her fingers gives a sickening pop. The immediate pain of it rips her insides open; she heaves forward, emptying the contents of her stomach right there on the cold ground.
The soft footsteps approach around the side of the cart, and Hiyori clutches her roiling stomach, rocking back on her heels to try and stand again. It doesn't work, and she falls forward onto her elbows, over the pool of sick.
"Eugh. Disgusting."
The laughter is gone from the river-cold, female voice. Hiyori waits for her insides to stop convulsing, and doesn't look up.
"I didn't know there was anyone left alive," says another voice. This one is lower, male.
Two voices. Even though there had been just one set of footsteps.
"There doesn't have to be. We could leave this place all clean."
After her eyes stop swimming, Hiyori sees her elbows planted on the road. She follows them to her hands, one broken finger angled crookedly and throbbing.
She looks at the two sets of bare feet, while the voices they belong to talk high above her.
She looks up.
The first one she sees is the girl.
She looks like she could be a few years older than Hiyori herself. Certainly no older than twelve. Her white yukata is spotless, and so is the white headpiece banded around her hair. Her skin is littered with markings: many, many names inscribed on her flesh. They dance on her ankles, below the hem of the yukata and above its collar. Her face is round, its porcelain perfection accented with a small nose and rosy, puckered lips. Right now, her nose is turned up in disdain from the puddle Hiyori still crouches over.
Hiyori looks into her eyes, and a chill shivers down her spine. The girl's eyes are like open graves.
"We could," the male voice agrees, and her gaze snaps to its owner.
/
Magatsukami.
When she is little more than a toddler, Hiyori begs her father to tell her about them: the wild gods who kill for sport.
"They are terrible creatures," her father tells her, his voice growling in mock aggression. He tickles her toes.
"They answer the worst wishes people have, and they love death above all else. You can see it in their eyes—how much they enjoy causing suffering."
"Have you ever seen a magatsukami?" Hiyori asks him, squirming in his lap.
"No, and I don't want to," he says. "They are gods who bring only blood, war, and suffering."
"So a magatsukami is causing all the bad things to happen around our town?" Hiyori asks, innocently.
Her father's face crumples. Hiyori's child eyes have not missed the unrest settling over the town like a fog. Soon, it will drive her family from their home, with death on their heels.
"No, Hiyori. Those are only men."
Then, her mother comes into the room, scolding him for scaring their small daughter with his stories. But Hiyori hadn't really been scared.
Not then.
/
Not now.
In all honesty, the person who towers above her is just a man. He looks about her brother's age—probably a little older.
In the time that she stares up at him, Hiyori can't imagine such a face ever aging. He keeps looking down at her, just like the girl does.
You can see it in their eyes.
She can. No human could have such eyes.
Looking up at him makes her dizzy, so her gaze moves back down to his feet. Behind him she sees the imprint of bloody, shallow footprints.
"My parents…" she says, weakly.
The girl giggles again.
"How cute! She thinks they might still be alive."
"Hiiro," he reprimands, softly. The girl called Hiiro puffs her lower lip outward in a pout.
Hiyori's vacant stomach gives an unexpected heave, but there's nothing left in her to expel.
"You killed them, didn't you?" she asks. "Those—those men."
She looks back up at him, into eyes that are the bluest part of a flame. He nods once. She scoots away from the puddle of vomit and sits back on her heels.
"Then…I owe you my life!"
The last word breaks on a sob. Hiyori clutches her mud-soaked clothes tight around her shoulders, ignoring the pain in her finger. She leans forward, nearly touching her cold forehead to the ground. Words spill out, leaving every last part of her hollow.
"You came when he was—when they were going to take me…I don't know, I don't know where they were going to take me, I don't know what they would have done to me…especially—especially—"
A shuddering wheeze rasps out of her as Nobu's predatory leer extends behind her eyelids. He had his talons in her hair, on her skin, and suddenly she wants to rip out every strand, scrub off the parts of herself that touched him.
"Th-thank you—thank you—thank you…"
Her spine aches, and her broken finger throbs, but Hiyori doesn't look up.
It's a full minute before the man speaks to her. His voice is still soft, and now slightly curious.
"Should you really be so grateful to me for taking lives?"
Her breath catches in her lungs, and comes out again in a desperate whoosh. Hiyori belatedly realizes that she's severely hyperventilating. Her teeth are chattering hard enough to make speaking difficult.
"Th-they took more lives than you. Th-they k-killed everyone. Everyone except m-m-me…"
Her spasmodic inhales aren't enough to allow for crying and speaking at the same time. She swallows the tears back, whispering:
"Even my p-parents."
With tremendous effort, she calms her breath. She flattens herself before him, her elbows digging into the freezing ground.
"Yes, I am grateful to you, magatsukami-sama."
His posture tenses; stones shift underneath his heels. She raises her gaze slightly, up to his pale, red-smeared ankles.
"Yatogami," he says, almost angrily. Next to him, the girl stiffens.
"Not magatsukami."
Hiyori leans forward again. Her forehead presses right against the road.
"I am grateful to you, Yatogami-sama."
/
She wakes up on a soft surface. Her broken finger screams for attention. Every muscle in her body feels like it's been prodded with hot needles. At first, Hiyori doesn't know anything except her physical pain.
She groans, and footsteps approach her.
"She's waking up," says an unfamiliar voice.
Then, she hears:
"She is?! Hiyori…!"
Her grandmother? Why is she with her grandmother? Her grandmother lives a hundred hours away; it would have taken days to travel…
Her eyes snap open, but for a few seconds she's blind to the room and the faces in it. Her body's agony collapses under the grief barreling down on her. An awful noise grinds through her teeth: something animal, ribbed with pain.
"Hiyori, calm down," her grandmother soothes.
But how can she calm down? How? Those men took her parents; they killed them and burned them on the roadside. They were going to take her with them.
Hiyori closes her eyes again and sees a row of gray teeth, bloodshot eyes, an invisible talon that scrapes the side of her neck. She realizes with sinking despair that the man Nobu was not among the dead.
"I know, I know," her grandmother talks to her, gently.
Hiyori remembers more: her mother's voice—terribly afraid, terribly calm—and the pile of burnt, smoking corpses, and the bodies of the slaughtered raiders, and the overturned carts. She remembers…arriving in the town, carried on the back of a stranger's wagon. She recalls her brother and grandmother coming outside to welcome the rest of their family, and instead seeing just her nine-year-old, broken, mud-spattered body. She remembers having a hard time breathing, and feeling very cold, and a man with a soothing voice had poured something into her mouth and told her not to think too much.
She remembers nothing more than that.
"She's awake?"
Masaomi shoves the thin door aside, letting in light and chatter from without the room.
"Yes," the unfamiliar voice says. It's the same soothing voice that she heard the night before—or maybe it was the night before that, or perhaps several even before. Hiyori does not trust her perception of time at the moment.
"She will need quiet and rest, but her external injuries aren't severe."
"Thank you," her grandmother says sincerely, and walks with the doctor to the doorway as he prepares to leave. He tells her a few more things in a low tone, but Hiyori doesn't listen. Her brother kneels next to her, and begins asking her questions in a gentle voice.
Meanwhile, something other than the horrors in her memory begins to bother her.
Who saved her?
The men were going to take her. They were speaking of selling her—making money off her. But before they could pack her up and abandon the scene of the carnage, someone else had arrived.
Who had saved her? Was it…was it really just one person?
Hiyori shakes her head and closes her eyes, ignoring her brother. She tries to recreate the event—every hideous detail of it—because not knowing is worse than reliving. There were at least fifteen who set upon them, all armed and mounted. It would have been impossible for just one person to kill that many, unless he was immensely skilled. Unless he was—
Her eyelids fly open again. The magatsukami—the Yatogami—and his companion with the cruel, angelic laughter. Everything about him comes back in a rush: everything, from his bare feet, to his blood-drenched yukata, to his terribly, achingly divine face. How could she have already forgotten?
"Hiyori!"
Her brother's voice demands she return to herself. She stops grasping at the memories that slip away like fish under a fast stream.
"Who were the raiders?"
She shakes her head.
"I don't know."
"Were they just a band of plain thieves? Did they have a lord—a commander?"
His voice rises in desperation; it says, give me an answer, give me something—why did they kill our parents?
"I don't know…"
Her brother's mouth tightens, and his thin shoulders hunch over.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. You had to see it all, Hiyori, and I'm…so sorry…"
His voice shakes, and she sits up on the low bed to reach over to him. Offering him comfort gives her something to do; it helps her.
"Those men are dead now," she says, hearing her own voice speak it so blandly.
"They were killed after they butchered the caravan."
Masaomi stops shaking. He sniffs once, looking up.
"What…? I didn't hear that."
He clears his throat, swiping a sleeve across his eyes. He continues:
"The man who drove you into town said he didn't see what had happened. All he said was that he had nearly driven his wagon into a stranger in dark clothing, who was carrying you along the side of the road. The stranger offered to pay him well to make sure you arrived here safely. After you were dropped off last night, an armed group left town a few hours later to see what could be salvaged from the wreck. Maybe, if the attackers' bodies are still there, they'll have some identification…"
Back when he first started speaking, Hiyori's spine had gone ramrod straight. The rest passes emptily through her ears.
"A stranger in dark clothing, you said?"
"Yes—?"
"Did you hear anything more about who it was? About their appearance?"
Masaomi's eyebrows pull together.
"All he said was that at first, he was all alone on the road, and then a second later a strange man stepped in front of his wagon, handed you and the money over to him, and left in less than a minute. He didn't even give a name."
Hiyori stares down at her hands.
He carried her, the Yatogami. He found help for her, and she can't even remember the way his face looked, or the timbre of his voice. She doesn't remember what she told him. She must at least have told him the town where her brother and grandmother live.
Either she told him that, or he somehow knew.
Masaomi sits cross-legged beside her, and starts wondering aloud whether the men who attacked were vassals of a nearby landowner, and if so, what it means for them to be roaming, reaving. Hiyori doesn't care who the men were. She only cares that they are dead.
All except for one, with sunken, blood-colored eyes. Little sweet.
Her breath shudders. Good thing her stomach is still mostly empty.
Masaomi's voice cuts into her thoughts again.
"Hiyori, did you see who did it? Who killed all of them?"
A nameless god. A wild god. A god of ashes, with eyes like the bluest part of a flame.
"I don't know," she says.
It is not a lie.
~ ~ ~ eight years later ~ ~ ~
"Hiyori-chan, if you come to the market with us, you might at last find a stall that sells husbands."
Hiyori smiles, and keeps her eyes turned toward the rice she's mixing.
"I'm sorry, but that's not really a convincing argument. You're in more of a rush to get me married than you are to fend for yourself, Yama-chan."
Yamashita glowers at her from the doorway, then tosses her hair in mock offense.
"I'm only being a good friend. You're making it so I have to work hard enough for the both of us."
"And what about me?" Ami asks from the storage room, before she comes back out to help Hiyori.
"You're hopeless. It would be no use for me to even try."
Before Ami can hurl an insult back, Hiyori bursts into laughter, and the two look at her in surprise.
"Why don't you both just go buy what you need and have a good time? I'll finish this up."
"Are you sure?" Yama asks her. "It's only a few hours before the biggest shrines will be packed with people."
"I have it handled," Hiyori assures her, jauntily waving a rice-covered hand.
"Well…all right," Yama concedes. "But on your head be it if you are still unmarried by next New Year!"
Ami wipes her hands clean and follows the other girl out the door, leaving Hiyori alone with the food.
The New Year has been her favorite time for as long as she can remember. It means renewal. It's the starting position of a familiar dance. It reminds her of what she should forget, and what she should always, always, remember.
Forget the faces of the men who took her parents from her. Remember the boy who saved her. And now she knows: he must have been just a human boy—one with extraordinary, alien eyes, a delusion of godhood, and an unbelievable talent for murder. Despite his strangeness, she is certain that if magatsukami were to exist, they would not look like him.
During the days of her recovery, after she was saved from the smoking debris of the caravan, Hiyori began to find it very difficult to remember a few key details of the event. Her grandmother chalked it up to trauma, but it was more than that. Patches were vanishing out of her mind, leaving blankness where there should be color, silence where there should be sound.
And, out of it all, Hiyori remembers the worst parts the most clearly. The taste of the air is still seared, stickily, to the inside of her throat. Despite her resolve, she remembers the men's faces, Nobu's especially. In short, wretched nights, she's visited by his gray teeth, his thick talons, his eyes surrounded by pitted flesh.
But her rescuer. She holds with everything in her to the slippery image of him, clinging the most desperately to the odd name he insisted she use for him.
So today, like she has for the last eight years, she repeats it under her breath. The syllables are round, real, concrete. Repeating a name, even a false one, is her best thanks.
Yatogami. I remember you.
/
The town is always beautiful during New Year's. It might be the glow of lanterns, or the waft of fresh food, or the intricate garments that people have worked their fingers to the bone for. It might be the casting off of worries, or the thousand hopeful prayers rising at every shrine. It might be all of these things, and whatever it is, Hiyori is glad of it.
After she hands off the load of food to a grumbling Masaomi ("What took you so long, I'm starving?!") Hiyori finds herself dragged to the largest shrine by Yama, with Ami on their heels. The three of them settle in a quiet corner near the outskirts of the crowd.
"How'd the hunting go?" Hiyori asks Yama through a mouthful of food.
"Poorly," the girl sighs. "But there's still plenty of opportunities tonight!"
Ami groans.
"This is supposed to be a time for serious re-evaluation of your life goals, Yama-chan. Take it a little less lightly!"
Yama looks aggrieved.
"I'm not taking it lightly! Marriage is very serious—probably the most serious thing ever!"
Then, her mouth turns up in a disquieting smirk.
"Speaking of which, Hiyori-chan, where's your attractive and still very unattached brother?"
Hiyori rolls her eyes.
"You really must be scraping the bottom of the barrel," she says jokingly, and Ami winces. Yama nearly chokes on her food.
"Ouch."
Hiyori grins at them.
"He and my grandmother are over that way—in the courtyard."
She indicates the throng of people they had just succeeding in extricating themselves from. Ami groans.
"I really wanted to leave my request there, too…" she laments. Yama grabs her by the elbow, and pulls on Hiyori's sleeve so hard she nearly trips.
"Then come on! It's not gonna get any less busy."
"What—wait—!"
She's not quick enough. Yama is dragging them both back into the thick of the crowd.
"Out of the way!" says a stern voice, right behind the three of them. Hiyori automatically steps aside to make room for a paunchy man to pass through, carrying a vat of something huge and steaming. Yama's hold on her sleeve breaks. Her friends somehow end up on the other side of him, with their faces obscured by the trail of steam left in the vat's wake. By the time the air clears, they're looking around for her in bewilderment, and over the tops of the people's heads, Hiyori barely hears them calling her name. Before she can elbow her way back toward them, the crowd carries her in its swell toward the shrine, and she's separated hopelessly from the two of them.
"Ami-chan!" she calls, cupping both hands around her mouth and fighting the flow of the crowd.
"Yama-ch—!"
She trips on her yukata's long hem, and collides heavily with a stranger's back. Both of them yelp, and her full weight pushes him all the way to the ground. Hiyori stumbles, managing to right herself. The person she ran into gets up from the ground, brushing dirt off his knees and elbows.
"I'm so sorry," she begins in humiliation, as the man turns around, scowling. "I was just trying to—"
She cuts off mid-sentence when he turns toward her, and his face comes fully into view.
"They didn't invent the term, 'excuse me,' just for shits and giggles, you know," he says, rubbing his elbows woundedly.
Her prolonged silence draws his attention up to her face, and their eyes meet.
He cannot be there. And yet, he is: solid flesh, the crowd parting around his still form like water.
She doesn't miss the spark of recognition in his eyes. Then his expression, which started out at thoroughly pissed, slides smoothly into neutrality.
"I'm sorry," he says. "It was my fault, actually. Enjoy the rest of the celebration."
He turns away from her again. He's going to brush past her into the crowd; she still has his face vivid in her mind, and now he's about to disappear again. So she does the most natural thing, and panics.
Reaching a hand out, she grabs the back of his yukata, right between his shoulder blades.
"Yatogami."
He stops short, and throws a startled glance over his shoulder at where her hand grips his clothes.
Hiyori doesn't question why it feels like the crowd of people around the shrine has suddenly abandoned them.
"Isn't that what you told me to call you?" she asks, when his silence doesn't end.
His shoulders visibly tighten, and she lets her hand drop from him. He turns back toward her.
"You're joking, right?"
His tone is bitter, openly mocking her, and Hiyori's blood turns to fire.
She's not playing his game. She hasn't worked this hard, she hasn't fought this long to remember him, only to have him pretend they've never met. Especially not since she never thought she'd see him again. Especially not since it's been eight years, and he looks like he's stepped directly from the pages of her hard-won memories into the lamplight.
He has the same pale, eldritch features; the same dark hair falling forward over eyes that have no business in a human face.
Hiyori has no idea what words are about to spring from her mouth, so she decides to just trust her instincts and hope for the best.
"I am Iki Hiyori."
He blinks, and so does she.
She was hoping her instincts would be a bit more inventive, but it's too late now.
"And what makes you think I care about your name?" he asks. The mocking note is gone, but she's still stung.
"Do you not want to remember the names of the people you've saved?" Hiyori shoots back.
He casts a quick glance over his shoulder to where she'd barreled him to the ground a few seconds ago, and he shrugs.
"That seems like an exaggeration. You probably would have just skinned your knee or something."
"Wha—no! Not that."
He gazes at her, unimpressed. She feels herself growing desperate.
"You don't remember, really? Eight years ago. You were there. I know it, it was you—and…"
She breaks off, looking around, suddenly aware that his white-clad companion is not nearby.
"If you're looking for Hiiro, she's not with me right now."
Hiiro. That's right. He says the name with a strange inflection, like its owner is already dead, or worse.
Hiyori remembers all at once, every detail of the girl's appearance from eight years ago: eyes like empty graves, skin scattered with the pale lines of a hundred names, and she realizes with a jolt: Hiiro had not wanted her to leave the scene of that massacre alive.
His voice pulls her out of the past, impatiently.
"Hey, lady. Are you here? You awake?"
She blinks back into the present and her voice abandons her. Is she awake? The surrounding crowd is blurry at the edges of her vision, and curiously silent.
It is just she and the Yatogami, and now, he can't seem to take his eyes off of her. They're so blue, so violently blue. Her knees shake.
"Do you really remember me?" he asks.
"Yes," she says.
He keeps looking at her, and she realizes what is so strange about his stare. He regards her as if it is she who belongs to the supernatural, and not himself. She asks:
"Are you really a god?"
The question is unfathomably stupid.
Her peripheral vision picks up the movement of the human crowd, the warmth of lantern-light on human skin, and the pressure of a thousand human lungs expelling night air. He stands in the middle of the crowd around the shrine, unnoticed by any except her. A presence like salt, like ice, among the surrounding embers of mortality.
"Yes."
His right arm reaches up, slightly toward her, but then he lets it fall limp back to his side. The blurriness pushes inward on her; everything but his face swims into black.
"And you should have forgotten me long before now, Iki Hiyori."
/
"Hiyori—oh, thank gods—Hiyori! Are you all right?"
She blinks, and sits up. And the world tips disastrously to her left.
"Ugh."
"Don't sit up yet. Not until you're steady."
Ami, Yama, and her brother are standing around her as she lies on a makeshift bed of empty sacks, while her grandmother kneels next to her. They all look so worried.
"Did something happen to me?" she asks, blinking harder, forcing her eyes to focus.
"We lost you in the crowd, and then when we finally fought our way back, you were on the ground. We're so sorry, Hiyori-chan—!"
She looks up at Ami, smiling reassuringly.
"It's fine; I'm not hurt. I don't feel that bad. Just…sleepy."
To her surprise, she discovers that she is. Very sleepy indeed.
"You should go back home and get into bed right now," Masaomi tells her, scooping one arm under her shoulders and lifting her up, bearing most of her body weight on himself.
"No arguments, little sister."
Hiyori yawns hugely.
"I'm not arguing."
The rest of them smile, and she's glad to see their worries abate with her awakening. But it doesn't help that she's now reinforced her frailty in their eyes. Now, her main point of identity will not only include, "orphaned survivor of the caravan massacre," but will also include "fainting damsel."
She's never fainted like that, just out of nowhere.
You should have forgotten me long before now, Iki Hiyori.
"Wait."
Masaomi stops, and Hiyori steadies herself on her own feet, pushing him gently away.
"Did you see someone else, besides me—a man? He had—"
She pauses, trying to put his true appearance into phrases. She fails.
"—dark hair and blue eyes. And a black yukata."
The four of them exchange looks.
"No," Ami says. "You fell down in the thickest part of the crowd, but I didn't see anyone like that."
Hiyori looks at the others, and they shake their heads.
Silently burying her disappointment, she thinks that if she truly lost consciousness, then maybe her mind had simply pulled him out of her memory. That would explain how he wore the same face, aged not by a single line, that she saw eight years ago. She realizes, disheartened, that when he appeared before her just moments ago, the rest of reality did seem to waver, falling apart at its seams.
Maybe she has already stepped too far out of her sanity by clinging to a false name. Maybe she has no business trying to remember a fictional god. She's heard of many, many gods—but never the Yatogami.
Yet, if it was an illusion, how real it seemed. How vivid her memory had built him, down to the sharpness of his nose, the shadows underneath his eyes.
How very, very real he was.
/
Masaomi insists on seeing that she gets all the way into bed before he concedes to return to the celebration at the shrines.
"What if it's something serious?" he asks, assuming the older-brotherly tone of voice that she knows all too well. Hiyori is ready to stop being handled.
"Really, I'm fine. I just got very tired…very quickly."
"And you're sure it's nothing more than that?"
"I'm sure that if you don't give me some space, I'll throw you out of the house myself."
He puts his hands up in mock defeat.
"Fine, fine. I'm leaving! See?"
He backs out of the room, smiling at her, but the lines above his mouth are still worried ones. Once she's left alone, Hiyori leans back onto the low, lumpy mattress, letting out a long sigh through her nose.
Well, she's wide awake now.
Moonlight pours into the large room, and from a distance Hiyori hears the sound of the crowd: the reverent revelers, sending off their prayers to whatever gods may listen. She hasn't even had the chance to make her first request of the year.
But this doesn't occupy her nearly so much as the fact that she's seen him. She's felt him; he is real.
Hiyori can't accept that she merely dreamed up such a presence. She touched him. His clothing was warm. If she can't trust her own skin, then what is she supposed to trust?
Still, as solid and real as he had been, Hiyori can't help but feel that by acknowledging him, by talking to him, and most of all, by remembering him, she has broken one of the most important laws. Her body knew it, even if she did not, and so it had countered her by falling suddenly—embarrassingly—asleep.
And, just like her nine-year-old self, Hiyori no longer questions that he is a god. It is far less strange to think of him as god than it is to allow for the existence of such a human.
How strange that he should appear before her, and then seem to deny their ever meeting. How strange that he seemed to care more about her remembering him than the fact that he had prevented her death.
She lies awake—incredibly awake, as though compensating for her earlier narcolepsy—and wonders why the Yatogami appeared tonight, after so many years. She wonders if that meeting is the last she will see of him. She wonders if the last words she'll ever hear in his voice will be those telling her she should have forgotten him.
What a rude thing to suggest.
"I'm not going to forget you," she says angrily, to the silence.
The silence answers, in a voice like wine and honey.
"That's good to hear, little sweet."