Hiyori isn't sure how she gets Yato back to town. The sun is sinking into the mountains by the time she pounds her fist against the closed door of her house.

Masaomi opens it. His eyes widen in alarm at her sweat-streaked, exhausted appearance. It doesn't help that her knees are quivering under the weight of the bloody, half-conscious stranger draped across her shoulders. Hiyori tightens her right arm around Yato's waist, gripping his left wrist where it knocks against her collarbone and shifting him slightly more upright. At the small movement, Masaomi's attention focuses on Yato, and the color drains from his face.

"Who…"

Hiyori is about to collapse under hers and Yato's combined weight. Her right elbow jars his crushed arm, and he whimpers. "I know this looks odd," she hisses, and Masaomi blinks at the understatement. "But can you please help me?"

Together, they heave Yato's uncooperative body into the house, onto a blanket that Grandmother hastily spreads on the middle of the floor. As she unwinds his left arm from around her neck, Hiyori is about to lay it carefully across his stomach. Before she can let go, his fingers clench around hers. Hiyori's breath catches in her nose. She tries to move her hand away again, and wrinkles delve into Yato's damp, pale forehead forehead. So she takes his hand again: her hot fingers against his cool ones. The wrinkles on his forehead ease.

Hiyori looks up at her grandmother, who is silently witnessing the whole event. Her eyebrows have ascended nearly to her hairline.

"He's hurt," Hiyori whispers. Grandmother reaches for her face, stroking Hiyori's sweaty hair back from her forehead. "He's broken," she corrects. Hiyori is too tired to figure out how the two differ.

Masaomi comes back into the room with an armful of clean rags. He dumps them on the floor next to Hiyori, then gives a pointed glance to where her hand and Yato's are linked. "So…who's the corpse?" he asks. Grandmother lets out a slow exhale. Then, she chuckles.

"This is, I believe, a stray."

/

Night settles outside the house. Grandmother brings Hiyori a bowl of something that steams. She sets it down on the floor next to her folded knees, and Hiyori smells mushrooms and eggs.

"He's not going to wake up for a while," Grandmother says. Hiyori nods heavily. The whole day has left her drained and numb. She's spent hours scooping rocks and debris out of Yato's open wounds, dabbing them clean, and wrapping them in bandages fashioned from the rags Masaomi brought. She watches her hands move over Yato's body as though they do not belong to her anymore. Her fingers work as an entity unto themselves, detached from the pulsing ache inside her skull.

Hours earlier, Masaomi had crouched on Yato's right side, his narrow fingers prodding the area of the break.

"I've never set a bone before," he had said doubtfully. "Are you sure you don't want me to fetch the doctor—?"

Hiyori had shaken her head vigorously. It turned her stomach to think of bringing someone outside her family in to see Yato like this. It felt somehow disrespectful. Masaomi had sighed, heaving himself upright once more. He looked around the room for a moment, his eyes going slightly out of focus. It wasn't the first time this had happened since Hiyori brought Yato into the house. She had cleared her throat, jerking her head toward Yato to jog her brother's memory into gear. Apparently the ability to remember him was limited to the women in the family.

"Right," Masaomi had muttered, his eyes clearing.

Now, Hiyori watches her grandmother studying Yato with unnerving focus.

"You said you didn't see anyone," Hiyori says.

Grandmother lifts her eyes from Yato's motionless body. "Pardon?"

"During the New Year celebration," Hiyori says. "After I fainted. You said you hadn't seen anyone with me—even though you must have seen him."

She looks back down at Yato. His chest rises and falls under the thin blanket. Her hand yearns to arrange his limbs more comfortably, to straighten the cover over him, to smooth the hair out of his eyes.

"I didn't see him," Grandmother says.

A surge of irritation rushes through Hiyori. "How!?" she demands. "You see him now! Nothing is different now than it was then!"

The half-smile that always seems to live on Grandmother's mouth vanishes suddenly. "Worship is powerful, Hiyori," she says. "Far more powerful than you realize. I wouldn't be shocked if you kept this poor boy alive through sheer resolve."

Hiyori is suddenly very aware of the miniature shrine that lays overturned in the corner of the room.

"And now I have another job," Grandmother says. She stands up, twisting her spine, the vertebrae cracking in a noisy orchestra of stiffness and aches. Hiyori gives her a confused look.

"You left something out there, didn't you?" Grandmother says by way of explanation. Hiyori sucks in a breath. The bow. She scrambles to her feet, narrowly avoiding toeing Yato in the ribs.

"I'll go for it," she says. "It's dark out there, and you don't know where I dropped it."

Grandmother waves a hand airily.

"Stay with him," she says, nodding her head toward the still-unconscious Yato. "I think he's more comfortable with you next to him."

Hiyori opens her mouth. Her face reddens, and she shuts it again.

"It should be near the—"

"The clearing where you practice?" Grandmother interrupts. Hiyori's face gets somehow more red. All those months of sneaking and evasion had done her precious little good.

"Yes," she mutters.

Grandmother moves quickly around the room, pulling on a cloak and lighting a lantern that glows like a tiny sun in the shadows.

"I'll be back soon, Hiyori," she says. "Don't let in any more yokai."

Hiyori glances at the god lying on their floor and smiles, though the blush on her cheeks won't fade anytime soon.

"I won't."

/

Hiyori jerks awake, dragged out of a pitch-dark slumber by something rustling in the room.

She paws around for the candle—which has melted down nearly onto the floor next to her—and struggles for a moment to relight it. The flame sputters disconsolately to life, and by its light she sees Yato is no longer lying there on the floor next to her. There's a scraping noise, like a wounded animal trying to drag itself across the floor, and Hiyori sits up, lifting the candle above her head. She squints in the feeble light.

Across the room, Yato is trying to get out through the open window.

Hiyori stands up, unsteady on her sleepy legs. "What are you doing?" she asks in a croak.

Yato stops halfway through the window, one leg still dangling absurdly inside the room. He blinks back at her, his useless right arm slung against his body. The reflected candlelight makes his eyes look like two blue coals.

"Nothing," he says.

"You can't be up!" Hiyori whisper-screams. "You need to lie down again."

Yato slithers a bit further out the window, wincing.

"I'm fine."

Hiyori, struck dumb with disbelief, watches him shimmy over the windowsill. He loses his balance, landing on the other side with a sad thump. She marches over to the window and leans out, extending the candle so she can see him lying on the ground. Yato squints up at her, his eyes watering in pain.

"You're fine?" Hiyori asks tartly.

He nods jerkily, his body crumpled on the cold ground.

Hiyori sighs. She retreats inside the window, and uses the candle in her hand to light a larger lamp. The lamp gasps to life, sending the shadows in the room huddling into the farthest corners. Hiyori takes the blanket from the floor where she had been sleeping, retrieves the candle, then slides into her sandals and walks out the door. Rounding the edge of the house, she finds Yato still curled pathetically into himself like an injured kitten.

"You're awful at 'thank you's,' you know," she grumbles, kneeling next to him with his back curled against her knees. Yato makes a soft coughing noise that could be mistaken for a laugh. She drapes the blanket around him, trying not to think too much about how warm he is through the fabric, how nice he smells even lying here in the mud.

"I can't carry you back in," she says. "I need you to try to get up."

She withdraws her hands from the blanket, and her finger accidentally brushes the side of his neck. They both stiffen.

"Sorry," Hiyori murmurs, boiling with embarrassment.

Yato is silent for a long moment. Then, with a groan, he uncurls himself from the fetal position and sits up without looking at her.

"It's cold out here," he says.

With considerable difficulty, and a lot of agonized groaning, Hiyori succeeds in getting Yato on his feet again. She loses a moment wondering how on earth he got all the way across the room to the window without waking her, when now every slight movement causes him to hiss in pain.

Walking back into the house is another manner of torment completely, because Hiyori once again has his arm slung across her shoulders, hers looped around his waist. She had drawn strength from somewhere deep inside herself to half-carry him all the way from the forest, but this short walk around the corner of the house seems ten times longer. His labored breath is right next to her ear, and something low in her chest starts quivering uncontrollably.

Once they get across the threshold and properly into the house, Hiyori dumps him down on the blanket rather more roughly than she intended. Yato yelps.

"Sorry," she gasps. "Um. Tea?"

He looks up at her, his mouth scrunched in pain. "Wh—?"

"I'll make tea," Hiyori interrupts, rushing into the kitchen. Her hands are shaking so violently she almost sets fire to the floor mat instead of the kindling in the stove. Trying to calm her racing heart, she takes significantly more time than necessary to prepare the tea to boil. She cannot hear anything from the next room. Once the water is merrily boiling and the trembling heat in her chest has somewhat subsided, Hiyori notices that she is hungry.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, she walks back into the adjoining room. Part of her expects to see Yato trying to climb out the window again, but he is still there on the floor. He's wrapped both the blankets around his shoulders, so to Hiyori he looks like nothing more than a pile of fabric with a messy, pale head poking out the top.

Screwing up her nerve, she asks: "Are you hungry?"

Yato's ears perk up, and his eyes brighten.

"Is there food?" he asks, as though unable to believe his luck.

"I can make something," Hiyori says, glancing back over her shoulder into the kitchen. She could make some rice quickly…and maybe some soup…

Hearing a strange noise, Hiyori turns back to Yato, only to find him scooting along the floor toward her. He looks like a very strange, very large species of crab, bundled up in a blanket and using his one good arm to push himself along.

"What are you doing?" she asks in outrage.

"Gonna help," he grunts.

"How?"

He answers only with a loud, pained grumble. Hiyori widens her stance, effectively blocking his way into the kitchen.

"You are not going to try to help me," she says firmly.

Yato glares up at her, his eyes narrow and cold. The thought flickers through Hiyori's head that those eyes have been the last thing many people have seen. But she crosses her arms and meets him with a stern glare of her own. Yato caves first. He drops his gaze to the floor in front of him and doesn't look up again. Instead, he reaches forward with his good arm, absently digging his pointer finger into the space between the floorboards.

After a few moments of awkward silence, the only noise the scratching of Yato's finger in the dirt, Hiyori says hesitantly:

"I—I would let you help, if you could stand up, or do anything with both your arms, but since you can't—"

"If you paid someone to help, then would you let them?" he interrupts. It's not an impolite interruption; the meditative way he asks it makes Hiyori think he simply wasn't listening to her.

"Yes, I…I suppose so," she says, bewildered.

Yato pauses. Then, he holds something up between his index and middle finger—something round, with a square hole in the middle. Hiyori stares at it, unable to recognize it at first in the dim lighting. The dull metallic surface is dull with a lifetime of grime from where it had lain between the floorboards.

Hiyori stares at it, then at Yato, her mouth hanging open.

"Five yen?" she asks in disbelief.

He cracks a grin.

/

As it turns out, all Hiyori can really do is give him the mundane task of checking the water to let her know when it's boiling. He frowns.

"I'm good with sharp things," he says sulkily, watching her mince herbs. Hiyori's lip twitches.

"Can't I stir something?" he whines. She silently hands him the bowl of uncooked rice. He takes it from her one-handedly, scowling into it as though the rice has personally injured him.

"Sift through that and see if you find any bugs."

"That's not—"

"Or you won't eat any of it," she finishes sternly. He bends his head over the rice, obediently picking through the grains for traces of infestation. They work in silence for several more minutes. Outside the window, the night is velvet darkness. Hiyori peers through it, wondering whether midnight has already passed.

"The rice is clean," Yato announces, pushing the bowl away. "What else?"

"Is the water boiling?"

"Not yet."

"You didn't look at it."

"I'd hear if it were boiling."

Hiyori sighs. "Crack this egg," she instructs. Yato takes the egg and happily cracks it into the bowl she hands him.

"Good job. Now watch the water." He grumbles, but allows her to work in silence for the next few minutes. Eventually he says: "It's boiling."

"Put the rice in, please."

Hiyori squints her eyes against the sting of the onions. The rice slides hissing into the water, and Hiyori hears Yato put the lid back on the pot. Blinking fast, she sets the onions aside and prepares to move on to the carrots.

"What's wrong?"

She whirls around, the knife in her hand narrowly missing Yato's chest.

"Why are you standing up?!" she demands, her hand still aiming the knifepoint at his sternum. "And don't do that—!"

"Sorry," he says, automatically. He doesn't look away from her stinging eyes.

"What's wrong?" he repeats. His eyes are such a bright, strange blue. They seem to cast their own light in the dim room. She forgets to blink, and a single tear creeps from the corner of her eye. His gaze immediately drops to it.

"Onions," Hiyori says breathily. A second tear follows the first. And then a third.

Yato looks down at the knife held between them. He raises his left hand, and gently takes it from her grip to set it behind her. Hiyori squeezes her eyes shut, but more tears leak down her cheeks, dripping from her nose and chin.

"They're strong onions," she says, swiping at her face with a sleeve.

Behind her eyelids, playing across her vision in nightmarish color, Nobu stands over Yato's limp body with a rock raised in his fist—a rejected shrine lies gathering dust in a dark corner—she takes aim, and a bowstring thrills under her fingers—the air smells like blood, the air crackling with greasy smoke from the burning bodies on the roadside—

Her eyes fly open again.

"Why couldn't you stand up?" The words burst out of her before she can stop them, like air pushed from her lungs after a punch. Yato takes a sudden step back. He looks at her in alarm, but the tears gathering in her eyes reduce his face to an oval blur. Her voice comes out wet and rough.

"Why couldn't you fight him? You were about to die—!" Hiyori covers her burning face with her hands. The onion residue on her fingers mixes with her tears, making her eyes water more fiercely.

"Aren't you a god?!" she wails.

The echo of her cry bounces around the kitchen, ringing in the silence.

After a moment, Hiyori pulls a deep breath from the bottom of her lungs, and lets it out in a long, shaky exhale. Her hands are still pressed over her face, water streaming down her cheeks from the onion she rubbed into her eyes.

She feels like a piece of paper balancing on its edge. Just one little push. Down she'll go.

After a full twenty seconds of the heavy, unforgiving quiet, Yato swallows. When he finally speaks, there's a strained edge to his voice, like he's fighting for every syllable.

"Why did you make that thing?" he asks.

Hiyori lowers her hands from her face. Her cheeks and nose are red and shiny, her eyes swollen like overripe fruit. Everything is a watery blur. Damn onions.

"What?" she asks thickly.

Yato points to the next room with his good hand. Hiyori turns her head, blinking savagely to clear the onion tears out of her eyes. His finger indicates the corner of the room, where her bed is pushed against the wall. Her eyes drop, and there it is.

The miniature shrine, that had somehow ended up half-under the cot. A corner of it still pokes out at her like an accusation.

"That," he says.

Instead of answering, Hiyori walks over to the shrine. Her feet land quietly on the smooth slats of the floor, striped with icy moonlight from the window. She leans down and tugs it from underneath the cot. Her fingers leave streaks through the dust on its slanted roof, and she runs one thumb over the name carved into it.

Behind her, she can hear Yato's labored grunts as he makes his unsteady way toward her. She turns to help him, but he's already at the foot of her bed, his eyes fastened on the shrine in her hands. Hiyori's eyes widen. Despite the critical injuries he had sustained, he bears little resemblance to the Yato she had half-carried through the door hours before. It's hard to see from just the moonlight, or even the lamplight filtering in from the kitchen—but it seems to her that his face already has more color, that the shadows beneath his eyes are less skeletal.

He seems to feel that her eyes are on him, though his own never leave the shrine in her hands.

"I'm feeling better," he explains, correctly interpreting her silent observation of him.

"That's good," Hiyori says. She sits down. Yato joins her in sitting, though he leaves nearly a foot of space between them as he perches near the end of her bed.

"I didn't have a good reason," she says at last. Her fingertips whisper over the imperfect, splintered face of the shrine, and her throat tightens at the lie. From the corner of her eye, she sees Yato's shoulders shift, very slightly angling his upper body toward her.

Hiyori starts speaking again, after a pause of a few moments to gather her thoughts.

"I think about that day a lot," she says. Her voice is soft, and steadier than she could have hoped.

"I've never really moved past it. It's haunted me. I feel the ghost of it hanging over my shoulder whenever I hear something outside at night, or when I'm walking alone. I've replayed a thousand versions of it in my thoughts, in my dreams, and I think…"

Hiyori swallows. Her throat has suddenly closed up. She takes a shuddering breath and continues: "I think I was supposed to die that day. Or if I didn't die, then something worse would have happened to me. But maybe…something was knocked out of balance when you arrived."

Her hands tighten, digging into the shrine, and she realizes she's not crying anymore, though it feels like she should be. Her fingers have gone numb.

"I was supposed to die there," she says, feeling the truth of it in the weight the words lift from her chest. "And Nobu—whatever he is—it's like he's the curse that's been following me ever since then. Whenever he's close to me, I feel trapped. Paralyzed. Like I'm being dragged back into my worst memory—into that smoke. That was the most awful thing about him: he had this power to make me feel like I was still…like I was still there. Like every hour, every second I had lived beyond that was part of a future I had snatched from another Hiyori—and maybe the Hiyori that I was supposed to be is eternally existing in that hell."

Yato is no longer looking at the shrine. He looks at her face, at the blue shadows crawling across it as clouds pass over the moon. Her eyelashes tremble against her cheeks, her eyes fixed on the floor as she continues speaking in a low, steady voice.

"You saved me from that. You saved my life that day. I know it was you. You killed the people who were going to hurt me. You drove away Nobu. You brought me to my family. It was you, Yato. All the days I've been alive since then…I owe them to you. And that is why I made this."

She looks at him then, her hands shaking as she extends her arms, holding the shrine toward him. Yato reaches with his good arm to take it. For a moment he just holds the thing without looking at it. It's so fragile. His thumb finds a splinter, and he scrapes over it, digging the point of it into his thumb.

"It's not very much," she says. "I wish it looked nicer. I wish I could have convinced more people that you were real, even just a few. Then you might have had a real one now, a real shrine with all the rest."

Yato is motionless, holding the tiny shrine in one hand, his eyes fixed on some point just shy of her forehead. A muscle starts to tic in his jaw.

"I don't help people," he says finally. "That isn't what I do."

His voice is jagged. He doesn't look away from that invisible point. But, though his words are angry, his eyes are wide, almost fearful.

"Then what is it you do?" Hiyori asks. She feels herself breathing faster.

Yato looks at her then. There is no fear in his eyes. Only bright, mad blue. The kind that churns through Hiyori's chest and makes her stomach warm and fills her veins with fire.

"I kill things," he says.

The shrine in his hands begins to shake. An earthquake of tremors is passing through his body.

"I don't help people. I can't help people. I don't preserve. I destroy."

"You didn't destroy me."

She thinks that a better version of her would be brave enough to lessen the distance between them on the bed.

"I didn't…I didn't feel like destroying you," he says.

"Why not?"

"I don't know," he admits, and she believes him.

He is closer to her than before. She doesn't remember the moment he moves, but there he is. The side of his leg nearly brushes hers. Yato's eyes are holding her in some spell, completely different from Nobu's sick magic. They are more cold, more blue than heaven.

"Hiyori," he says. So close to him. The smell of him knocks her thoughts loose; there is the salt and blood of his injuries, the fresh linen of the bandage—something else, the godscent, like how the moon smells on the water—

"I wish you would tell me to leave."

He looks at her, waiting, eyes lowered to the space between their knees. Her heart sinks.

"Why?"

He swallows audibly. "I don't want you to feel indebted to me. I don't deserve all this."

By "all this," he can only mean the tiny shrine. Hiyori kneads her knuckles. She's going to go crazy from frustration, or confusion, or—

"You're unbearable!" she snaps, her voice loud and sharp in the quiet room. "I'm not settling a debt. I'm saying thank you."

Yato leans back, his eyes wide, looking at her like she's an angry weasel. Even she hears the bite in her voice, but the angry rushing in her ears is much louder.

"Can't you just accept it as a gift?" she demands, her volume climbing. "You may have heard of it? It's something friends do for each other. There aren't any strings. This doesn't have to be about something that happened years ago, or about you being a god and me being a human. You've wanted one of these, right? So I made one for you. You're welcome."

She pulls herself up short, breathing heavily through her nose. Yato still leans away from her, shock covering his face.

"But it is," he says, mirroring a small measure of her annoyance in his tone. "This is exactly about you being a human, and me being a god. You don't understand the weight of a gesture like this. You don't understand what this says, Hiyori."

Hiyori stares at him and her irritation evaporates. She looks deep into his face, through his eyes, and it doesn't really surprise her to find that behind them he is not a god, not a killer, not a tortured boy, but Yato. Just Yato.

"Yes," she says. "I do."

His nostrils flare. His mouth starts to crumple. Hiyori puts one hand on the shrine, and, avoiding his fingers, she pushes it toward him.

"I really do, Yato."

He looks at the little shrine, his face still screwed up, caught between a sob and a laugh. Another few seconds pass before he sucks a wet breath between his teeth, then sets the shrine next to his knee. Reluctantly. Reverently.

"You're the strangest human ever," he mumbles. Tears sparkle on his eyelashes. One starts to drip down his face, interrupted by the jag of a cut across his cheekbone.

Hiyori swallows a hard, hot lump in her throat. "Be quiet," she says weakly.

Then she lurches forward and kisses him.

Yato grunts as her weight puts pressure on his arm in the sling trapped between their bodies. Hiyori feels the hiss of his breath, the painful tightening in the muscles of his mouth. His lips are a hard line, and though she presses hers against them for another desperate moment, they don't soften.

She pulls back, resuming her seat on the bed. Her heartbeat is a raging river, pounding her breath against its harsh shores. Hiyori lowers her head, and for a while, neither of them say anything. She doesn't know if she wants to cry, or run away, or lie down on the floor and let her shame turn her to dust. The night air prickles against her hot, disturbed skin.

From the corner of her eye, Hiyori sees Yato pull his hand away from the shrine and raise his fingers to his lips. She can't bear to look at him directly. When his hand doesn't move away from his mouth, she turns her head to the side, only a little.

Yato stares into space, fingers pressed to his lips. It's like he's feeling the shape of his mouth for the first time. Because he isn't looking at her—and he doesn't seem to be offended or accusatory—Hiyori can raise her head again.

"I'm sorry," she mutters. Her voice is miserably small. "I shouldn't have—I'm sorry. That—that was…"

She trails off, digging her fingernails into her knees. She wants to crawl out of her skin. She isn't sorry at all. Hiyori knows that inside her, in the apex of her being, something has been screaming for this. Woken in her dreams, fed by her memories, stirred by his presence—this is it. This is the thing she wants.

Well. At least she tried.

She gives the smallest of sighs. Now she's going to get to her feet again, walk into the kitchen, forget she just kissed a god, and finish making that stupid rice.

Next to her, Yato draws a soft, trembling breath. His hand falls away from his lips. "I see," he says.

Hiyori is halfway to standing up when a hand takes firm hold of her elbow. Yato pulls her back, practically onto his lap, knocking a short, shocked gasp from her lungs. She stares wildly into his face—their noses nearly touching—and his eyes are only mirrors to her. Hiyori looks at herself rendered double: twice the anguish, twice the longing. He smells so beautiful it makes her want to cry.

Then he kisses her.

It isn't very good at first. Not with her sitting spear-straight, propped stiffly against him with his hand gripping her arm. Her eyes are glued wide open. It isn't real. The warmth of him, the sparks of response deep in her—it's too much for her mind to parse or process. He might as well be kissing a plank of wood.

Then his hand slides up her arm, moving with the curve of her shoulder and neck, and gooseflesh erupts down her arms. His thumb tilts her chin upward, settling his mouth more against hers.

This kiss makes her paltry effort look like a chicken peck.

It's a wonderful kiss, full and fragile and unpracticed. Her hands leave her lap—avoiding the sling—creeping up to explore the dip and hollow of his collarbones, to cup his cheeks, fingers catching in his tangled hair. Hiyori tastes salt on her lips from the tears rushing down his face. The tip of her nose presses into Yato's cheek; his skin is cool. The want inside her is overwhelming, oceanic: to hold him so close like this, to be something to him that no human or god has ever been before.

After some moments, his lips soften and he pulls away. Hiyori keeps her eyes shut, her mouth parted, hanging onto the last breath of the kiss. Then she opens her eyes again. His face is centimeters away, and he's studying her. She shifts, and realizes she's resting against his injured arm. The pain must be terrific. She tears her eyes away from her face, trying to adjust her weight so she doesn't hurt him, but he tightens his free arm around her.

She looks back at him, brows slightly furrowed.

"Your arm," she reminds him, her voice coming out in a humiliating, gravelly wheeze.

Yato ignores it. "The strangest human," he repeats. Hiyori's embarrassment abates a bit when his voice comes out even rougher than hers.

Her eyebrows gather together in a half-scowl. "Is that supposed to be a compliment?" she demands, looking down. The color rushes to her face when he chuckles, his breath trembling over her eyelids and cheeks.

"Not really," he replies, but his hand tightens around her, digging into her waist.

There's something burrowing in her mind: a long-held discomfort at the back of her consciousness. As glorious as it is kissing him, there's a piece that hasn't stopped bothering her. Hiyori leans away from him, keeping her eyes downcast as his gaze follows her.

"Sakura," she says. "Who is she?"

She can't keep the slight waver out of her voice. The smallest of shudders passes through Yato's body at the name. His hold on her waist loosens, and his breath catches.

"How did you hear about her?" he asks. There's a jagged hook of pain in the question, and she looks up at him again. She isn't prepared for the horror and regret written on his face.

"Hiiro," she says without hesitation. The raw grief in his eyes surprises the jealousy out of her.

Yato presses his lips together, and he lets out a long, trembling exhale. Hiyori isn't sure she wants to hear any more. The look in his eyes is terrible.

"Sakura was a friend," he says.

"Did you love her very much?" she asks.

Yato shuts his eyes and nods once. The knot in her throat is almost unbearable.

"I look like her," she whispers. "Hiiro said so. And…and Nobu, when he talked to me—it was like he thought I was someone else, for a few moments. Someone he used to know. Someone who looks like me."

Hiyori pulls away from Yato, putting her head in her hands. It's falling into place now. The thick, honey-sweet mockery she heard in Hiiro's voice. The wild, inhuman longing in Yato's face before he kissed her.

It isn't Hiyori he sees. Maybe it never has been.

Yato's voice punctures her misery like a cold needle.

"I killed her," he says, unprompted.

Hiyori jerks her head out of her hands, staring at him. His mouth is set in a stubborn line. They both wait for her reaction, and it surprises them both when it doesn't come. Hiyori's been dragged headlong through so many emotional extremes in the last two minutes alone that this admission feels almost anticlimactic.

"You killed her," she repeats carefully.

Yato nods again. "It's not something I like remembering," he admits. "But it was self defense. Mostly."

Hiyori's eyes are burning. She repeats her earlier question, only altered by one word.

"Who was she?"

So Yato tells her: the whole, sick, tragic story of the girl who befriended him, protected him, taught him. The girl who was killed because he was young and easily manipulated. The girl named Sakura, who died once. The girl named Tamanone, who died twice. When he finishes, he sits silently, shoulders slumped and head bowed.

Hiyori somehow manages to keep her lips closed around all of the apologies, condolences, and excuses that occur to her. It would be like trying to use a spoon to bail water out of a ship.

Several minutes of silence fill the space between them. Then Yato says:

"You do look like her."

The floor drops from under Hiyori.

"But not to me."

Her shoulders stiffen. Then she looks at him.

"You look like Hiyori," he says, and it rings genuine.

A smile rises to her lips. His mouth echoes it.

Hiyori notices for the first time that his eyes are gummy with sleep and salt. There's a trail of dried saliva down his chin. His hair is a nest of matted tangles. Bruises from the day before are rising to the surface, mottling his throat and blooming on his cheekbones. There's still a crust of blood around his left ear. He doesn't look particularly godly at all. And yet her heart careens against her ribs like a runaway stallion. She will never make sense of the way she feels about this boy. Never, ever, ever.

Smoke tickles her nose. Something is burning.

"The rice!" Hiyori leaps from the bed and races into the kitchen. The rice has thickened into a burnt, gray mass against the bottom of the pan. She scrapes the ruined blobs into a bowl and stares at it mournfully. After a few minutes of grunting and scraping, Yato gets himself to the door of the kitchen. He looks at the "rice," and a small laugh bursts from him. Hiyori shoots him a glare.

"Sorry," he says, schooling his face into false penitence.

"Weren't you the one who was making a fuss over food?" she demands.

He tilts his head. "I don't remember making a fuss."

"But you did bother me into letting you help!"

"And I would have, if you had let me do something more interesting than sifting rice."

Hiyori marches up to him, planting both hands on her hips. "You have not earned that five yen. Give it back."

Yato smirks. "No."

"Then that's stealing."

A strange look crosses his face. He leans toward her, and there is the soft, quick press of his lips against hers. He pulls away, searching her face.

"Have I earned it now?"

Hiyori's lips are tingling. "No," she whispers.

He kisses her again, cupping her jaw with his good hand. Her lips part, and Yato catches her bottom lip between his teeth, sucking it. Her knees turn to water.

"And now?" he breathes against her cheek. Hiyori can't speak, so she just shakes her head.

Yato's eyes narrow. He moves his hand to the back of her neck, grips her hair, and damn near kisses the life out of her. Her whole world is the smell and taste of him. Her hands creep into his hair, burrowing in the soft tangles, holding him closer, closer. Her heart is galloping louder than she's ever heard it, and the noise of their breath is messy, greedy, as they steal oxygen from the scant inches between their bodies. When he pulls away, she almost cries.

"Now?" Yato asks, panting. His pupils are blown wide, reducing the blue around them to an icy ring. Hiyori nods weakly, half-collapsed against him. "Yes."

They stand there for another few moments while Hiyori tries to breathe normally. She takes a deep inhale, and the acrid sting of smoke singes her sinuses. Wrinkling her nose, she tries not to think about what her grandmother will say if she comes home to a kitchen turned black with smoke grime—

Hiyori's heart leaps into her throat. Then it drops straight into her stomach, sinking there like a rock. Sensing the sudden tension in her body, Yato holds her shoulder, looking into her face. As soon as he sees her expression, his half-lidded eyes fly wide open.

"What's wrong?" he demands.

"She's not back yet," Hiyori whispers. Her body is flooding with ice, freezing her in place. She can't move. She can't breathe.

"Who? Your grandmother?"

Hiyori barely hears him. A faint ringing erupts in her ears.

"I have to go."

She knows the voice that speaks is hers, but it sounds like a different person. Before Yato can pull her back, make her explain, she runs for the door. Hiyori throws it open, dashing into the street barefoot, her thin clothes whipping around her in the icy, pre-morning chill. Her heels encounter sharp rocks, but she runs onward, past the shrines that clatter with prayer plaques, past the ancient, yawning mouths of their gates. She runs out of the town, down the path with wagon ruts, onto the narrow footpath. Her stone-bitten feet are already numb with frost. Her lungs burn like they've been filled with salt water. She bursts into the clearing.

Her feet stutter to a halt.

There is a dark something in the middle of the clearing: a black lake of shadow, dead ahead of her. Hiyori feels like the ground is tilting.

She walks forward, approaching the dark shape lying on the ground. Grandmother's face stares back at her.

Her eyes are blank, filmy like rotten fish. Her head rests on her stomach, and both hands lie folded on top of it reverently. Almost like she is praying.

Hiyori creeps closer. The thing in front of her and the grandmother she knows are not the same thing. They cannot be.

The neckline of Grandmother's clothes has been torn aside, showing the torn stump of her neck and the blotchy, gray skin beneath it. Into the flesh of her chest, someone has made cuts. The lacerations are deep, already swollen and rancid with moisture. Hiyori stares at them, her eyes refusing to acknowledge that the marks form words.

LITTLE SWEET