Firecat Fanfics - Sakura and Snow

Sakura and Snow

Chapter 4

By Natalie Baan

The space of his own mind surrounded him: wide, and high, and luminous with a muted gold light. He was looking up into the "sky." A crack had opened in it, and the crack was spreading jaggedly, relentlessly. Inside, there was nothing in particular. There was no wind, but he could feel the force of that broken sky pulling at him. It made him ache, bone-deep, soul-deep, in a way he didn't really understand.

He braced himself and stared at it defiantly. He set the force of his will against it, but it would not obey. The crack continued to widen inexorably, and it threatened to swallow everything, to take into itself all those pieces he was made of. He held onto them fiercely as he raised his hands to fight--

The magic did not come.

Looking up, he felt that damaged sky tearing at him, trying to rip things away, and he didn't know what he could hold onto in this place, if his own abilities were not enough, didn't know how to defend himself against the danger.

He looked, and he was...afraid.

/Afraid./

He clung to his sense of himself, and he glared into that sky.

He was Sakurazukamori.

He must not lose himself to this.

And then, all at once, there was a cool wind that reached him, and water, and a soft sound like the crying of birds. He felt a strange and sudden peace. The crack in the sky above him began to melt away....

Seishirou fell back into a dreamless sleep.

* * * * *

He woke slowly, drifting out of unconsciousness. It seemed as though he'd been dreaming, but the details all were vague. Still feeling a little muzzy-headed, he cracked his eyes open just a bit, letting the room swim into focus around him. The soft, steady glow of the overhead light was reassuring after...wait.

Light?

He snapped alert immediately, lifted his head and started to get up, because it had been mid-afternoon when he'd fallen asleep, he remembered it, and he definitely hadn't been the one to turn on the light. He looked around and--

/--Subaru--/

--was curled up in the chair across from him.

Subaru's legs were drawn up beneath him, his arms were wrapped around his chest, and his eyes were closed. He appeared to be asleep.

Seishirou allowed himself to exhale. He swung his legs off the couch and sat up slowly and very carefully, wondering how much time had passed, what had happened while he was unconscious.... Something fluttered down from the back of the couch and landed beside him.

Paper.

He had caught a glimpse of thin and graceful calligraphy.

He snatched up the talisman and turned it over--stared at it. It was...it was....

A ward?

"You were dreaming," Subaru said.

Seishirou looked at his adversary. Subaru was awake after all, regarding him with a kind of taut stillness that seemed to speak of hard-won inner control. At least, the inclination to rip Seishirou's face off appeared to have left him...Seishirou glanced down again at the piece of paper in his hand. It had been torn from the note pad by the phone, he noticed, the incantation written out in ball-point pen. He frowned at it very slightly. Crumpling it into a tiny ball, he shot it at the wastebasket across the room. It bounced off the wall and went in.

<Three points,> he thought.

He stretched at length, put his hand casually to his shirt pocket and found the new pack of cigarettes still there. Tapping one out, he reached for his lighter.

He wasn't about to let Subaru know how badly disconcerted he was.

Subaru seemed calm enough himself, but his eyes locked onto the cigarettes in Seishirou's hand with the intensity of an addict. Seishirou scrutinized him for a moment, then slid the pack and lighter across the coffee table. Subaru set his jaw. He refused to accept the offer, instead lowering his gaze and tracing one finger down the upholstery of the chair, as if it presented him with some meaning.

Seishirou leaned back, one arm along the top of the couch, and exhaled smoke in a leisurely way. He watched Subaru in silence, unsmiling. Though his mind wanted to race, to try to put together the events of the last however many hours, he didn't permit his attention to wander from the person before him--did not choose to speak, either, to get caught up in the temptingly easy dance of words, the verbal sparring that could so easily be a distraction. Let the burden of conversation rest on the Sumeragi a while.

As a result, there was a long silence. Seishirou's cigarette had almost burned down when Subaru finally spoke. "Seishirou-san," he said, and hesitated. When he went on again his voice was very small. "Where is my sister?"

The question seemed tangential...Seishirou had noted the slight hesitation and wondered whether it was what Subaru had truly meant to say. A feint, perhaps? No...that was his own inclination speaking. Subaru was more direct, more honest than that. This would of course be an urgent matter for him, yet also one that was difficult to express.

"What makes you think /I/ know where she is?" Seishirou asked.

"I've looked for her a long time," Subaru murmured. "Everywhere I go, I ask each ghost and spirit that I meet if they've seen her. None of them ever has. So I tried, a couple of years ago, to call to her myself. I tried to summon her back from the other world just to see her, just to speak with her one more time. I know that it was wrong, and that the dead should be left in peace, but still--" He shivered, and flinched slightly, abandoning that train of thought. "I couldn't find her," he whispered instead. "I called for days, but there was nothing. If she could have answered me, I know she would have. I know it, but--" That flinch again. Subaru was rubbing the back of one hand, and Seishirou wondered if he was conscious of the gesture. "I found the sakura again. I studied it, and I know that the souls of all the people that you've...that have died there are bound to the tree.

"That was the other thing I was trying to do that night. I was looking for Hokuto-chan among the souls in the sakura. But she wasn't there, either.

"So I wondered...if you had done something else. If you had done something different with her...." He lifted his head to look at Seishirou, his eyes filled with a kind of hopeless prayer.

Seishirou frowned again.

"Why would I do something like that?"

The look vanished instantly as Subaru's face went cold, and he sat up straight, stiff with the dignity of those who feel themselves made fools of. "Yes--" he said sharply, "--why /would/ you." He uncurled from the chair, stood up and demanded, "Where are my clothes?

Seishirou did smile now, a very little. "The plastic hospital bag in the closet." Poor Subaru, too polite even to rifle through his unconscious enemy's belongings. Turning his back on Seishirou, Subaru stalked out of the room, and Seishirou let him get away with it, that potentially fatal error. He listened to the near-silent sound of retreating bare footsteps, the noise of the closet door opening in the other room....

His eyes flicked to the kitchenette window, now that he had the chance. It was dark outside. Seishirou looked at his watch, and almost couldn't believe it.

He had been asleep for hours.

How long had Subaru been roaming around the apartment?

</Lucky,/> he thought, <I'm lucky that you seem to have reverted to being a pacifist again.>

<Far luckier than I deserve for being such a fool.>

He smiled into the empty living room, and ruthlessly suppressed the desire that had risen in him: the wish to walk into that other room and plunge his hand through Subaru's heart right now, and in one eruption of magic and blood stop the whole ridiculous, /stupid/ affair which had already taken up so much--too much--of his time and energy. The source of that desire was purely embarrassment at how near he'd come to disaster, he was certain of it, and such a feeling was not anything that had a right to motivate him.

Such a feeling did not serve him.

He crushed it in his mind.

/Stubborn/...he had no intention of being moved by anything other than his will and the necessities of being the creature he was.

And he would play the game out to its conclusion. He had decided the outcome long ago, and saw no reason to change his mind.





<Indeed, you should have killed me today, when you had the chance. Well, too bad for you.>

<I've learned from my mistakes now.>

<Will you be able to do the same?>

He realized then that he was still more than a bit disturbed: probably the last vestiges of the healing spell's return. That wouldn't do at all. As Seishirou attended to the soft, awkward sounds of Subaru in the other room, taking clothes out of the plastic bag, he carefully put his own mind in order, letting the bright pieces of its structure settle into their usual configurations. After a while, it felt as though the effects of backlash were fading. That had been very odd...he couldn't understand why a wholly positive spell, one he'd performed for himself numerous times, would come back in that way--and if it had, why his protections hadn't stopped it. Maybe it was because he'd called more power than was usual for the spell and sustained it longer...or maybe because he'd used it to heal another person.

Well, he wouldn't do that again, anyway.

Seishirou stretched again and ran a hand through his hair. He felt quite clear now in mind and body. There was still one very small disquiet, though, and it bothered him.

He didn't know what had happened to Hokuto.

It was true, as Subaru had said, that the souls of all the Sakurazukamori's victims were bound to the ancient tree. What Subaru perhaps didn't realize was that those souls lost their identity in the binding; even if Hokuto had been among them, Subaru would not have been able to find the person that he had known and loved.

But when Seishirou had reached out to bind that one victim's soul, he had found...nothing. A hint of essence that vanished even as he tried to touch it, and that was all.

Hokuto had gone somewhere, in the moment of her death, and Seishirou had no idea where she could be.

He had wondered at the time if Subaru had had something to do with it, or if possibly it had been the grandmother's action. If Subaru didn't know about it, though, then it seemed that neither was the case. Perhaps something else had already claimed her soul...or perhaps her uniquely carefree nature had given her the ability to escape his spell.

In any case, a single mislaid soul shouldn't cause any problems. She had not been a magician, after all...he didn't imagine that she could do anything to affect him, should she happen to turn up again. But he didn't like leaving the matter even the least bit uncertain--and particularly not now, when he felt a new and urgent need to be alert in all things regarding Subaru. He would have to put some effort into tying up that loose end as well.

It was a bother and a complication.

Seishirou scowled slightly. The combination of cigarettes and the afternoon sleep had left a vile taste in his mouth. He swung off the couch and strode into the bedroom, ignoring Subaru's outraged yip at being caught half-dressed.

<Too thin...seen better.>

He didn't speak or offer Subaru more than that briefest of glances as he passed through. Best if Subaru left quickly, Seishirou decided...best to give him the opportunity, if he chose to take it.

Seishirou walked into the bathroom and shut the door.

* * * * *

He'd brushed his teeth.

He'd brushed his hair.

He'd gone out into the bedroom and closed the closet door and made the bed and stood gazing at his reflection in the window for more than a suitable amount of time and /still/ Subaru was hanging about in the other room.

<Subaru-kun, do I have to pick you up and put you out the door?>

It was almost getting to that point, Seishirou thought. Shading his eye against the light in the bedroom, he looked outside. Dark, as far as Tokyo ever got dark, and enormous flakes of snow were falling steadily: several inches had come down already, and it showed no signs of stopping.

He could put Subaru to sleep again and leave him in another snowdrift.

The idea had distinct possibilities.

Well...no matter what he decided to do in the end, right now he had better go out there. Probably Subaru felt there was something more to be said, and once that was taken care of it was quite likely that he might simply leave. He'd certainly had his chance to kill Seishirou, if that was what he wished to accomplish.

And if Subaru had changed his mind and did want to fight him now, Seishirou was ready.

Of course....

He walked into the other room, moving softly despite his house shoes--so softly that Subaru didn't appear to hear him. The younger man was meandering back and forth in short, aimless steps, a movement not even resolute enough to be called pacing: a restless, directionless energy which could find no other outlet. He stopped by the stereo finally, his back to Seishirou, and drew a finger slowly along its sleek black edge.

As Seishirou came around the side of the chair, Subaru finally seemed to sense him and looked back over his shoulder: still a suggestion of the broken and betrayed look, but the pain now sealed behind a certain fatalism. He watched in silence as Seishirou sat easily in the chair, picked up the remote, and began toying with it. Then he turned away for long moments, staring down once more at the top of the stereo.

It definitely didn't look as though he was thinking of fighting.

<Pacifist,> Seishirou thought again. <Well, even if your hatred for me no longer rules you, it doesn't matter for my plans.>

<There's always your "duty" to motivate you...the fact of your being one of the Seven Seals. There's your consideration for the well-being of other people. I can't believe it's true, as you've said, that you care nothing for the future of the earth.>

<But even if you don't care for that....>

<You'll meet me on the final day, one way or another...and you know it.>

<It's waiting for both of us, Subaru-kun.>

Seishirou watched Subaru teeter on the verge of saying something, and then back away from it. He chose to be patient. He leaned back, crossed his legs, and merely observed the slender figure before him, letting time pass until Subaru chose to speak.

"Seishirou-san," Subaru said eventually, after a few more minutes had gone by, "there's one more thing I want to know."

It was a question again, as Seishirou had rather suspected: Subaru was still looking for answers. Seishirou wondered what he'd found to ask about now. One would think the important matters had been made abundantly clear to him.

"What if you had lost?" the Sumeragi asked.

"Eh?" Seishirou blinked.

"What if you had lost your bet with me? What then?"

Seishirou thought it over for a moment, amused. "I probably would have let you go," he said at length, "I suppose." He might have, in fact, if it had come to that--but it had not, and he had known that it would not, had known that he was not like other people and that the exercise had been largely futile, an excuse to play with his prey in a new and interesting way. The play itself was what mattered, and that had been exceptional--even now, he admitted, when Subaru was being vexingly difficult to move, it offered him a challenge that was unusual. The game had been everything that he had ever expected. That he had proven incapable of love after all was not really significant. "I probably would have let you live."

"/No,/" Subaru said, with emphasis, "that isn't what I'm asking. What would /you/ have done then? What would you have done, if you had found that you could feel something--could you have gone on in the same way, and still been...this?"

Seishirou frowned. "What ifs" were not something that interested him, and he rarely concerned himself with them. He'd never even considered such a question. He was as he was...there were no other possibilities.

"What does it matter?" he asked. "It doesn't change anything. I /won,/ Subaru-kun."

"But what if--" Subaru mastered his evident frustration as he turned to face Seishirou. "Why would you even bother?" he insisted. "Why take the chance that I might live and become a person who could fight against you? Why risk the possibility, however small, that the bet might change you, might make you into something that you don't even understand--why would a person like you make a bet like that!"

His breath caught, stilling the rush of words.

"Are you lonely?" he asked.

Seishirou smiled at the mortal seriousness in Subaru's face. "You sound like a phone-sex girl," he replied. "Are you considering a new occupation?"

Subaru's mouth tightened. He glared into Seishirou's mismatched eyes briefly before turning away. Drawing himself up, he gathered the last shreds of his pride around himself, and coldly he informed Seishirou, "I'm leaving."

Seishirou didn't bother to reply to the obvious. Neither did he trouble himself to follow Subaru with his eyes as the onmyouji left, relying instead on hearing and that "other" awareness of Subaru's presence to track the onmyouji as he walked to the door and struggled into his sneakers. Seishirou twirled the remote control lightly between his fingers, then tapped the end of it against his cheek as he listened to Subaru take his coat down off the rack and put it on, as he heard the door open. The sounds fell silent for a moment. Then there was a step, and a second one, and the door closed behind the Sumeragi. His presence was receding down the hall.

It was quiet.

Seishirou sat in his chair for another minute or so, listening to that stillness. Finally, he bestirred himself and smiled a little. It was done with at last: Subaru was out of the way, and if it perhaps hadn't gone quite as he'd intended it, well, Subaru was alive, and had plenty of things to think about in the interval before the final day.

He had reasons enough to live. Reasons to fight. That much was certain....

Seishirou started out of what threatened to be a reverie. He'd better pack, just in case Subaru decided to be uncivilized and not wait for the appointed moment. And while he was doing that...Seishirou lifted up the remote control. He aimed it at the stereo, and moved his finger over the power button, wanting to bring the sound of voices into this silent room.

He stopped.

He stared at the stereo and the featureless walls behind it, unseeing.

The sound of....

The remote slipped out of his fingers. He let it fall to the rug. Standing up swiftly, he strode toward the door. He kicked off his slippers and stepped into a pair of shoes.

/The sound of voices./

In the hallway, he glanced at the elevator. It had left the floor already, of course. Seishirou pulled open the door to the stairwell and started down the stairs. Taking the first couple of flights at a walk, he calculated the speed of the elevator, the amount of time it had been traveling; and he picked up his pace then, began to run, vaulting the railing at the corners of the stairs, the sounds his feet made echoing faintly up the well.

He reached the bottom. Stopping a moment, his hand on the fire door (he was not out of breath at all...good), he tried to sense Subaru. Subaru was...not that close.

All right.

He opened the door and looked across the lobby. There were glass doors at the other end of the long, narrow hall; through them he could see the empty, snow-covered street and sidewalk, more snow coming down hard and fast, and Subaru, standing irresolutely just outside the doors, looking first one way and then the other.

Subaru raised his hand suddenly and took a step forward. By some miracle, a taxi passed in front of the doors, the only traffic on the entire street. As it left Seishirou's angle of view it was starting to pull cautiously toward the curb. Wrapping his coat around himself, Subaru hurried in that direction and disappeared from sight as well. Seishirou stepped out of the stairwell and walked up to the front of the lobby. Looking out through the glass, he saw where the taxi had come to a slightly skidding stop. Subaru was talking to the driver through the man's open window.

Subaru nodded then, and put his hand on the taxi's rear door handle.

Seishirou opened the door of the apartment building and stepped out into the snow. Neither the streets nor the sidewalks had been cleaned yet this evening; his feet sank into a blanket of whiteness that had only been disturbed by Subaru before him. He took another step, coming out from the lee of the building into the full dizzying falling of the snow.

Subaru turned his head. He looked back from where he was standing with the cab door open, ready to climb in. Seishirou could feel the snow settling onto himself as he returned that gaze: snow coming to rest on his hair and on his shoulders, the cold wetness melting through the cloth of his shirt.

The two of them stared at each other.

Then Subaru murmured something to the driver. He closed the door and stepped away from the cab. The taxi pulled slowly from the curb, fishtailing a little before gaining purchase. Its red tail lights gleamed at them briefly until it vanished from sight.

Subaru took a step toward Seishirou. He stopped then, hands clenched, as if he had run into a wall that he could not pass through. His face was a set mask: a different kind of containment, giving nothing more away. Seishirou understood. He himself had made it this far, but he couldn't take that next step either...he simply was not capable of it. Though all that lay between them physically was that expanse of whiteness, there were barricades of time as well--of words and deeds and two irrefutably different natures--and neither one could cross what parted them.

They stood facing each other in the snow.

"I know," Seishirou said then, slowly, softly, his breath frosting thinly among the flakes of snow, "I know where Hokuto-chan is." Subaru went tense and wary and hopeful, all at once; a change in his stance, mostly, but also the slightest flicker in his face, like fire, like something that might be warm and alive.

"She's...here." It was an effort to say the words. Seishirou struggled with them, who so seldom found himself at a loss, trying to get something across, though he himself wasn't sure what. "She's /here./" He made a tiny, directionless gesture. "Between--Subaru-kun, can't you /feel/ it?"

And Subaru's eyes grew wide. He reacted as if struck by the force of a spell: gasped and buckled suddenly, his arms coming up and crossing over his heart, his hands clutching tightly at his shoulders. He bent forward, and Seishirou saw his gaze shifting away...shifting inside....

...inside himself.

/He knew./

Subaru shut his eyes. Light condensed out of the air in front of him, a silver-white evocation that gradually assumed a shape: the indistinct form of a human figure lapped in shimmering layers of brightness, a figure that hung suspended, gleaming, above the snow. Its back was to Seishirou...he was unable to see its face.

Subaru raised his head, opening his eyes again. He straightened slowly, and extended a hand toward the figure, the light playing over his anguished, yearning expression. The figure reached out as well and touched fingertips to his. Seishirou had seen pain and death and even what people claimed was love; he had seen the looks that accompanied those states, and what lived and moved in Subaru's eyes then was all those things and far, far more: feelings so vivid, so alien to anything Seishirou knew that he had no references for them at all, and could only watch them pass in silence.

"I'm sorry," Subaru breathed, his voice cracking on the words. "Neesan, I'm sorry....

"Please--

"/Forgive me./"

Something intangible moved between them, brother and sister, living and dead--passed like a thought traveling between two halves of one mind. Then--

"Go," Subaru whispered--

"/Go./"

The ghost escaped into the air like a cry--like the cry that broke from Subaru as it vanished, as the light began to fade, a single, fractured cry of utter loss--

--but the ghost's flight was a cry of freedom.

The last of the light disappeared from the sidewalk. The snow that it had briefly illuminated into sparkling brilliance continued steadily to fall.

Subaru's hands had dropped. He looked down at his empty hands; looked up at Seishirou, across the distance that separated them, and he was trembling, his eyes brilliant as if they still held light...no, it was tears, finally, tears from out of a soul that perhaps had not wept in nine years, not since one particular day.... Subaru staggered then, took a swift stride into the space between them--moved forward in an unexpected, hurtling rush that made Seishirou take a half-step backward in surprise. Then Subaru's arms were flung around Seishirou's chest, Subaru's face was buried in his side, and Subaru was crying, tremendous sobs wracking his entire body, and the tears falling free at last.

Seishirou caught his balance on the snow-covered sidewalk, and then he stood very still. He let Subaru spend that grief upon him in the midst of the falling snow, in the muffled silence of the storm-bound city. It was easy enough to do.... He ignored the snow melting on his hair and clothes and into his shoes, and he concentrated on one thing only: the thirteenth head of the Sumeragi clan, who was holding onto the precarious support Seishirou offered as though it were the only anchor in his world.

How people clung to things, Seishirou mused to himself, even those things that hurt them so badly. How difficult they found it to let go.... Subaru had loved Hokuto--his twin, his second self--and in that moment of feeling her death he had drawn her to himself, across the city. He had drawn Hokuto's soul /inside/ himself and had bound her within his own heart for nine long years.

And he hadn't even realized that he had done it.

<You, Subaru-kun, who are the head of the Sumeragi clan...whose duty is to bind Japan's onmyouji against the "misuse" of powers...who should have known better.>

<All these years, you were a prisoner of what you had done just as much as she was.>

<Denying yourself every happiness, every hope, in a quest for revenge that she would never have asked for...isn't that so? Trapping her in the walls you put around your own heart, those walls of loneliness and pain....>

<It was Hokuto-chan who touched me in your dream, wasn't it?>

<And now that she's gone, now that you have discovered what you've done and found it in yourself to let her go at last...here you are. Bereft, with no family, your sister and grandmother both dead, you are turning back to me. Is it only because I'm here, because I'm a convenient person?>

<Or because I'm truly all that you have left?>

<Subaru-kun, I think perhaps you still feel love for the person you thought I was.>



<You should know better in that regard, too.>

He laid a hand gently on Subaru's back.

<But then...is it so different with me?>

<I, also, should have known better.>

<You were right.>

<You were right, and I didn't even realize it until you left me to the silence and your words came back to me-->

/Are you lonely?/

<Of course....>

</Of course./>

Seishirou stared at where, on the fabric of Subaru's coat, lacy openwork stars came to rest: flakes of snow forming patterns, touching each other, spreading into networks of white. How could one be other than lonely, when in the whole world there was only oneself...and "other people," who were nothing more than shadows?

Nothing more than things.

Ordinary people, who were no more than half-present in their own existence, let alone in his, consumed by fleeting, futile wishes and continual distractions...whose bravery was at its best the stupid, blind bravery of the ignorant and whose attention was a flimsy, uncomprehending thing...who knew nothing, understood nothing at all outside their small lives, felt nothing but fear in the face what he stood for...he could not really perceive them, any of them, as real.

He could admire them for that courage they showed when struck by the great or little difficulties of their lives; he could ignore them, when it suited him, as being utterly insignificant; he could watch the endlessly repeated joys and tragedies and everyday, mundane occurrences of their existences...but he could not fit himself into their world, or them into his.

/Could not./

Not without destroying himself...and in the end he knew he wanted to continue more than he wanted that other thing.

But still that emptiness, that sense of lack, remained.

<And then there was you, Subaru-kun...a child...and a practitioner.>

<Mine completely, to do with as I wished.>

<And so I made that choice.>

<When I made that bet with you, I was so young myself. I don't think I was really conscious of what drove me. There was only that sense of hunger...of wanting something that I couldn't identify.>

<You were like me, and yet entirely unlike. I thought that I might find that thing in you.>



<Since that day you have been with me, always. When nothing else could move me, I bent my life around you. Waiting for you to grow up, playing out the one promised year...and then, when the chance arose to hold onto you--for you to continue to exist until the moment when my purpose was fulfilled, and my own life began to come to its end--jumping at it despite every instinct, despite everything I know, foolishly.... >

<Without intending it, I let myself grow to be affected by you.>

<I'm no longer able to imagine a world where you don't exist.>

<Almost seventeen years...almost half my life...you have been that constant presence. >

<My adversary. >

<My plaything.>

<My beautiful and pure reflection.>

<You are something that reacts to me, that acknowledges what I am...you're something I can speak to, even if it's only inside my own head...>

<...like this...>

<...and you have become necessary to me...to who I am.>

<In the very act of making the bet, I lost.>

Snowflakes spun down all around them. As he tilted his head back, looking up into the sky, they touched his face gently: little feathery touches.

<But still, Subaru-kun, after all of that....>







<No regret, no remorse for all the pain I've caused...nothing that would stop me from hurting you again. I only feel that emptiness inside me, and the fact that you fill it, a little.>





<Well...it doesn't matter, does it?>

<It doesn't really matter after all.>

<All that matters, all that counts, is that you continue to exist until it's time for you to die.>

<That you give me something to struggle with, something to speak to...>

<...so I know that I am not so absolutely alone.>

The snowflakes were falling into Seishirou's face as he gazed up, catching on his eyelashes and threatening to blind him. He raised his hand to brush them all away.

They left a tiny dampness on his skin.

He looked down at Subaru, crumpled against him, whose sobs were quieting at last, and whose trembling seemed nearly to have ceased. Seishirou smiled with unmerciful tenderness. He wiped the snow from Subaru's shoulders and from his dark hair...and as Subaru straightened slightly, his eyes still dulled and glazed with pain, Seishirou slipped one arm about the onmyouji and turned him around.

Seishirou began to walk toward the door of the apartment building, and Subaru went with him silently, without the slightest hesitation.

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