a(n) earring
a(n) earring
g. 2838. Sakurai Sho, Horikita Maki.
Sakurai meets a charming girl.
Edited but unbeta’d.
This particular story is many months later than intended, but hopefully the writing is better for it. Inspired by __sine and her stunning Storm Children AU, especially this later addition to the canon, a girl. While it could probably be read alone, um, why would you want to? Go read Storm Children now!
__sine, I hope you don’t mind, and perhaps even enjoy some bit of, this humble, possibly plotless and meandering entry to your universe. ♥
This is also dedicated to tinyangl, who is wonderful, lovely, and far too sweet to undeserving little old me. And also because every once in a while I can actually write something for you that you aren’t already expecting. ;) ♥
Sakurai likes newspapers. He likes information; crisp, tangible details that smear against his fingertips. A black stain of knowledge. Knowledge is power in this town, a tremulous, ambivalent force second only to, perhaps, though he’s loath to admit it, magic.
There are three newspapers printed and distributed without fail every morning: the Crown, the Raven, and the Heron. He does not read these newspapers for the truth. Even the tiniest glimmer of it is concealed beneath walls of text interwoven with lies and deceit. The papers say nothing of mysterious occurrences, disappearances, death. Not even the unusual numbers of crows perched on the edges of buildings that wish to scrape the skies, atop the dizzying heights and dangerous lows of dilapidated telephone wires, lurking in the shadows of every shifting corner and disappearing alleyway. Murders on every street and reporters busy themselves with front page news (the rising cost of cigarettes), weather forecasts (never accurate), business dealings (moffle monopolies and other trivial interests), local news (idle town gossip) and obituary pages as empty as the grave (all hail the king). No one can afford a proper burial anymore.
Sakurai doesn’t know where these papers come from, nor from who, but he doesn’t read for that, either. He reads only to understand what is passing for knowledge in this town, what citizens believe as truth, or want to believe is true. Delude themselves into thinking could be true. It would be easier to be one of them, to tell the truth.
He reads, digests, and them promptly discards what he reads in the papers. The only information worth knowing comes from unreliable lips, loose words dripping down slippery tongues.
Still, without fail, newspapers continue to be printed every day. And to understand what information to ignore in this town, Sakurai continues, without fail, to buy a newspaper every day.
Until he finds a crater where once stood his newspaper stand.
*
Sakurai is lost.
It is neither a new nor welcome experience. He has, over the years and on innumerable occasions, found himself walking in aimless circles, desperately clinging to deceitful scraps of paper, searching for a way. He blinks against the sun, a rookie mistake. When he sets his eyes back on the road, the buildings have all merged save for a single flicker of light in a thin, unfamiliar alleyway. He follows it all the way through, squeezes sideways when it narrows. The alley spills open into a street filled with little stalls, but none of them tout newspapers except for one.
The girl at the stall is young, looks no older than sixteen, though he’s well aware that looks can be deceiving-looks tend to be deceiving. She’s dressed in a sun-colored dress and nice, polished shoes, flats with a hint of a heel. She is reading, and the dusty, faded, cardboard sign in front of her reads, in sloppy, loopy strokes:
tarot reading
fortune telling
simple charms
newspapers and
magazines
“Hello,” Sakurai starts. She glances up at him, then down at his shoes, before making her way back to his face. She doesn’t say a word and, after a moment of silence, goes back to her book. “I’d like a newspaper.”
“I’m out.”
“A magazine, then?”
“Out.”
“I didn’t even say which one I wanted.”
“Doesn’t matter-clean out.”
“When do you expect an arrival?”
She glances up at him beneath lowered lashes and there is a ghost of a smile on her lips. “Information is not my specialty.”
Sakurai frowns. “I suppose you don’t get much business.”
“My kind of business doesn’t come easy in the presence of the police.”
“How did you-?”
She’s reading again, popping her heels out the backs of her shoes, and back in again, scuffing the tips against the concrete.
“I’ll be back tomorrow.” If he can remember where to come back to. “You shouldn’t do that. You’ll ruin your nice shoes.”
*
By the time he finds Nino in a different alleyway, shuffling his dirty cards, Sakurai is not in a good mood.
“I’m here for any news,” he says, cutting short a conversation that will lead nowhere.
“Read the papers.”
Sakurai bristles. There is something vexing about the smile on Nino’s face, about the beady, steady eyes that glower at him. Nino knows a lot, but he can’t know everything.
Satoshi arrives before Sakurai’s hand twitches toward his gun. He humors their exchange and they leave-are left-with a scrap of numbers and the stench of magic.
“Hungry?” Satoshi asks, offering a cigarette.
“No,” Sakurai replies, squinting his eyes against the sun. He just wants a nice cup of strong tea.
*
“Newspapers?”
“Out.”
“Magazines?”
“Out.”
“So what do you sell?” he asks, exasperated. He didn’t spend all morning looking for this stall just to come away empty handed again.
“What do you want?” Her eyes are impossibly inscrutable.
“Information.”
“That’s not my specialty.” It’s there again, the slight curl of pink lips.
He bites down the sense of deja vu and presses on, “Then what is?”
“Protection.” Her smile grows a touch wider. “Fortunes.”
*
He refuses to return for a whole week after that, begrudgingly does so only because he cannot find a single other store or stall in town that will even admit to selling newspapers.
“Hello, Sakurai-san.”
He frowns. “Did I introduce myself?”
She smiles up at him and taps her temple with an index finger before going back to her books. Always with the books.
“New-”
“Out.”
“Maga-”
“Out.” She sounds almost amused by it all, but it’s hard to read her face when it’s pressed so close to the book on the table.
“What are you reading?”
“Studying.” She tilts the top of the book toward him so he can get a better look. “Numbers.”
“Mathematics?” He squints his eyes at the text. “Old math. That’s no good anymore. Why study it?”
“Numbers used to be finite.”
“Don’t you mean infinite?”
“I meant never changing, but not anymore.” She glances up at him without expression. “If I study old math, I can better understand why the numbers have changed.”
“That’s like trying to better understand why this town is the way it is.”
“Or like searching in vain for newspapers every day.” Her comment stings, but her tone is agreeable, and when he glances at her, she is rifling through her bag. She unearths a tiny wrapped candy and offers it up to him. He can’t think of a single reason not to take it.
He pops it into his mouth. Yuzu-flavored. “Do you like yuzu?”
“Only when there’s no milk candy.” She pops one into her mouth and turns a page of her textbook. “There’s never any milk candy.”
This is all he will get out of her today, he thinks. He wonders if she will have his newspapers tomorrow. He wonders if he will try.
“Your shoes look nice again,” he says by way of goodbye.
“Not as nice as yours.”
When he turns the corner he spits the candy into the palm of his hand with a grimace. He hates the taste of yuzu.
*
“You seem distracted,” Satoshi tells him, the grey smoke of his cigarette curling into his hair, winding its way around the office.
“I’m not.” He is. He’s thinking of how not a single store or stall in the entire town sells newspapers.
Or milk candy.
He doesn’t even know her name.
*
There aren’t any newspapers or magazines in the plastic shelves behind her, but there is an extra stool today. He sits, watches her read her books, and then sighs and stretches his arms over his head. “Were you waiting for someone?”
“Hmm,” she replies noncommittally.
“Do you know the names of the newspapers?”
She blinks at him, caught off guard. “The Crown, the Heron, and-” She purses her lips thoughtfully.
“The Raven,” Sakurai supplies. “It’s funny, isn’t it? Ravens and crows are both known as omens of ill fortune, yet it’s called a murder of crows versus an unkindness of ravens.”
“Is it?” She’s looking at him fully now, the book left forgotten in front of her. “I’ve heard it called a storytelling of ravens.”
“A storytelling of ravens?”
She nods. “And a hedge of herons.”
“Storytelling ravens and hedging herons. Someone should have let the Crown in on the joke.” He laughs roughly, the sound swallowed up by the wind, but she’s not laughing with him, glances at him with thoughtful, curious eyes.
“Perhaps the joke is on you, Sakurai-san,” she says gently, taking up a pen and writing quickly on a scrap of paper. When she’s done, she curls the end the page over the side.
A murder of crowns.
Sakurai shudders involuntarily and she goes back to her book.
“If you were to read my fortune,” he says after a measured pause. “What might it say?”
“Follow the crow.”
“Could you be more specific?”
The wind rustles as if on cue. “Not for free.”
She isn’t much for conversation after that, so he leaves, tries to find the shortest distance back to the station. He stops in his tracks when he sees a lone crow in his path. It has a bit of gold tinsel on his head.
A crowned crow.
It hops a few paces forward slowly, waiting, watching. Sakurai can’t think of a good reason not to follow it.
It leads him down blurred grey buildings and concrete streets through a thicket of dead trees he didn’t know still existed; he doesn’t know he’s out of breath until it stops and flies straight past the trees and into the sky.
The building before him is an okonomiyaki shop, whose bell chimes defeatedly when he enters. “Hello?”
Toma, the shop owner, invites him to stay for lunch and an afternoon of reading. “Newspapers? We have stacks of them.”
Sakurai goes immediately into reading the back issues of each paper. The tea is lukewarm and average, but the smell of the griddle is tantalizing.
“Have you ever noticed,” Toma says, flipping the okonomiyaki cleanly over on the grill, “that all three newspapers are written by the same typewriter?”
Sakurai almost spills tea down the front of his shirt. “What?”
“Yeah.” Toma finishes with a thick layer of sauce and then lifts the okonomiyaki onto Sakurai’s plate. “You can tell by the ‘y.’ There’s always a little nick in the tail.”
Sakurai has never noticed.
He quickly shuffles through all three papers and wonders how he could never notice.
“Maybe they all write together,” Sho proposes after a moment.
Toma chuckles. “Have you ever met a writer?”
*
Nino is waiting on the windowsill of his office by the time he arrives. Sakurai starts, almost spills his tea again, before stalking over to let him in. He doesn’t come in.
“Someone left a message on the wall behind the station.”
“A message for who?”
“For all of us, perhaps.” Nino looks almost pensive. He never looks pensive.
“For-”
“The king is dead. That’s what it said.”
Nino leaves shortly after that, pushing off the sill and soaring clean into the sky.
*
“The alleyways have been quiet.”
“Really? I find that the crows have been quite raucous lately.”
Sakurai frowns at Satoshi. He always has an answer to everything Sakurai says, but never a good one.
“Nino has been quiet.”
“Do you miss him?” Satoshi’s tone is airy, but there’s always a flicker of something when he speaks about Nino. A trick of the light. Like he’s hiding something.
“No,” he replies, which is true. He doesn’t miss Nino, but Sakurai doesn’t like not knowing he’s around, either.
“You could look for him,” Satoshi offers. “I think Nishikido once mentioned a girl Nino was sweet on.”
“Nino? Sweet?” He snorts, swallowing the last of his tea and crumpling the styrofoam in his hands. “I’m going out.”
“To the bay?”
Sakurai wrinkles his nose but doesn’t reply.
*
“Maki-san.”
“Ah, did I introduce myself?” Maki murmurs vaguely. Her books are stacked in her bag and she’s wearing the same faded yellow dress and shoes she wore the first time they met. She is fiddling with something small and metallic in her hands. It is a tiny nail, whittled thin and burnished a clean, gleaming silver, twisted into the shape of a circle.
“Do you know where Nino is?” She starts at that, looks up at him with the most expression he’s ever seen on her face.
“Sorry?”
“Nino. You’re friends right?”
She opens her mouth, seems to think better of it, but then finally nods. “Yes.”
“So you know where he is?”
“I told you once that information was not my specialty.”
Sakurai reaches into his pocket and places several coins neatly on top of her table. “What if I buy that.”
“That?”
He nods. “That ring.”
“I can’t tell you where he is,” Maki protests, but Sakurai shakes his head firmly.
“I already put the money down.”
“I literally can’t-he doesn’t tell me where he is.” When he continues to stare her down, she adds, softly, “He just knows when I’m looking.”
“So look.”
She sighs and fiddles with the nail in her hands. “It won’t hurt.”
“So you’ll try?”
“No, I mean to put this in your ear. It won’t hurt too much.”
“In my where?”
“You already put the money down.”
She lied. It hurts.
A lot.
Nino never shows up, either.
*
On the way back to the office, Sakurai pauses at a piece of stray cardboard at his feet.
His left ear hurts and he can’t for the life of him recall why.
*
Nino appears only when he’s least expected, never one to be found and always the one to do the finding. Sakurai’s office is a mess, all of his documents and papers are scattered across the room, windswept and blown over with shards of glass.
“I heard you were looking for me.” Nino is as cheeky as ever, perched on his desk and devouring the last bit of candy from a glass jar.
“I wasn’t,” Sakurai mutters, staring at the jar. “Now get off my desk.”
Nino complies, alights beside the hole in the window with his head cocked.
“I hear you’re the sort of man who prefers guns over magic. Is that true?”
“Maybe,” he replies, and his left ear throbs. “Maybe I like how a gun is a gun. It’s never fickle.”
“I guessed as much,” Nino replies loftily, sweeping his eyes over the room and then over Sakurai slowly. Sakurai touches his left ear self-consciously and his finger comes away cool-metal? “There’s not a lick of magic on any of your things.”
When Nino leaves, Sakurai picks up the jar of sweets from his desk and frowns at the label. Yuzu-flavored.
He hates yuzu.
He catches the reflection of a tiny silver hoop on his left ear and he frowns, trying to remember when and why. His brain doesn’t offer an answer, but at least his ear stops hurting. The hoop feels weightless, inconsequential against his skin.
*
They travel together, the five of them, only as far as the entrance to the town.
Matsumoto leaves first, with a curt nod and a smile that implies to be continued. Aiba swoops off soon after that, like the whisper of the wind. Satoshi lights a cigarette and leaves a trail of smoke in his wake.
Nino stares at him once they’re alone-at his left ear. Sakurai covers it self-consciously. “What?”
“Nothing.” His subsequent grin reveals nothing but teeth. “I was just thinking it suited you.” And with one swoop he, too, disappears.
*
Sakurai is lost.
It is certainly not a new nor a welcome experience. When he finally finds his way into a bustling street filled with stalls, a voice calls out, “He finally let you off, did he?”
“Sorry?”
“I’m not.”
He still doesn’t understand, but he notes her sign and clears his throat. “Can I have a copy of today’s newspaper?”
“I’m out.”
And everything clicks into place.
“Maki-san?”
“It’s nice to see you again, Sakurai-san,” she says lightly. Followed, he thinks, by a mutter that sounds suspiciously like, “It’s nice to be seen again.”
“What-” His jaw works faster than his foggy brain. “Nino.”
She tilts her head to the side, but doesn’t say a word, lets him work out the kinks of his brain. “He did something didn’t he-and wait.” It comes back to him. Nino’s toothy grin and not a lick of magic on any of your things. “He would never let me live down having a charm unless-?”
“Not a drop of magic in there,” she confirms with a light bob of her head.
“Then . . . why?”
“I thought it suited you.” Her grin is wide, toothy and familiar.
“Do you know what a group of hummingbirds is called?”
“No . . . what?”
“A charm.”
***
+A few sections of dialogue were lifted straight from the original AU without technical approval-I hope this was okay, __sine!
+The bird group names were taken from here.
+This may have also been inadvertently influenced by my favorite indefinitely hiatused webcomic, Saturnalia.
g. 2838. Sakurai Sho, Horikita Maki.
Sakurai meets a charming girl.
Edited but unbeta’d.
This particular story is many months later than intended, but hopefully the writing is better for it. Inspired by __sine and her stunning Storm Children AU, especially this later addition to the canon, a girl. While it could probably be read alone, um, why would you want to? Go read Storm Children now!
__sine, I hope you don’t mind, and perhaps even enjoy some bit of, this humble, possibly plotless and meandering entry to your universe. ♥
This is also dedicated to tinyangl, who is wonderful, lovely, and far too sweet to undeserving little old me. And also because every once in a while I can actually write something for you that you aren’t already expecting. ;) ♥
Sakurai likes newspapers. He likes information; crisp, tangible details that smear against his fingertips. A black stain of knowledge. Knowledge is power in this town, a tremulous, ambivalent force second only to, perhaps, though he’s loath to admit it, magic.
There are three newspapers printed and distributed without fail every morning: the Crown, the Raven, and the Heron. He does not read these newspapers for the truth. Even the tiniest glimmer of it is concealed beneath walls of text interwoven with lies and deceit. The papers say nothing of mysterious occurrences, disappearances, death. Not even the unusual numbers of crows perched on the edges of buildings that wish to scrape the skies, atop the dizzying heights and dangerous lows of dilapidated telephone wires, lurking in the shadows of every shifting corner and disappearing alleyway. Murders on every street and reporters busy themselves with front page news (the rising cost of cigarettes), weather forecasts (never accurate), business dealings (moffle monopolies and other trivial interests), local news (idle town gossip) and obituary pages as empty as the grave (all hail the king). No one can afford a proper burial anymore.
Sakurai doesn’t know where these papers come from, nor from who, but he doesn’t read for that, either. He reads only to understand what is passing for knowledge in this town, what citizens believe as truth, or want to believe is true. Delude themselves into thinking could be true. It would be easier to be one of them, to tell the truth.
He reads, digests, and them promptly discards what he reads in the papers. The only information worth knowing comes from unreliable lips, loose words dripping down slippery tongues.
Still, without fail, newspapers continue to be printed every day. And to understand what information to ignore in this town, Sakurai continues, without fail, to buy a newspaper every day.
Until he finds a crater where once stood his newspaper stand.
*
Sakurai is lost.
It is neither a new nor welcome experience. He has, over the years and on innumerable occasions, found himself walking in aimless circles, desperately clinging to deceitful scraps of paper, searching for a way. He blinks against the sun, a rookie mistake. When he sets his eyes back on the road, the buildings have all merged save for a single flicker of light in a thin, unfamiliar alleyway. He follows it all the way through, squeezes sideways when it narrows. The alley spills open into a street filled with little stalls, but none of them tout newspapers except for one.
The girl at the stall is young, looks no older than sixteen, though he’s well aware that looks can be deceiving-looks tend to be deceiving. She’s dressed in a sun-colored dress and nice, polished shoes, flats with a hint of a heel. She is reading, and the dusty, faded, cardboard sign in front of her reads, in sloppy, loopy strokes:
tarot reading
fortune telling
simple charms
newspapers and
magazines
“Hello,” Sakurai starts. She glances up at him, then down at his shoes, before making her way back to his face. She doesn’t say a word and, after a moment of silence, goes back to her book. “I’d like a newspaper.”
“I’m out.”
“A magazine, then?”
“Out.”
“I didn’t even say which one I wanted.”
“Doesn’t matter-clean out.”
“When do you expect an arrival?”
She glances up at him beneath lowered lashes and there is a ghost of a smile on her lips. “Information is not my specialty.”
Sakurai frowns. “I suppose you don’t get much business.”
“My kind of business doesn’t come easy in the presence of the police.”
“How did you-?”
She’s reading again, popping her heels out the backs of her shoes, and back in again, scuffing the tips against the concrete.
“I’ll be back tomorrow.” If he can remember where to come back to. “You shouldn’t do that. You’ll ruin your nice shoes.”
*
By the time he finds Nino in a different alleyway, shuffling his dirty cards, Sakurai is not in a good mood.
“I’m here for any news,” he says, cutting short a conversation that will lead nowhere.
“Read the papers.”
Sakurai bristles. There is something vexing about the smile on Nino’s face, about the beady, steady eyes that glower at him. Nino knows a lot, but he can’t know everything.
Satoshi arrives before Sakurai’s hand twitches toward his gun. He humors their exchange and they leave-are left-with a scrap of numbers and the stench of magic.
“Hungry?” Satoshi asks, offering a cigarette.
“No,” Sakurai replies, squinting his eyes against the sun. He just wants a nice cup of strong tea.
*
“Newspapers?”
“Out.”
“Magazines?”
“Out.”
“So what do you sell?” he asks, exasperated. He didn’t spend all morning looking for this stall just to come away empty handed again.
“What do you want?” Her eyes are impossibly inscrutable.
“Information.”
“That’s not my specialty.” It’s there again, the slight curl of pink lips.
He bites down the sense of deja vu and presses on, “Then what is?”
“Protection.” Her smile grows a touch wider. “Fortunes.”
*
He refuses to return for a whole week after that, begrudgingly does so only because he cannot find a single other store or stall in town that will even admit to selling newspapers.
“Hello, Sakurai-san.”
He frowns. “Did I introduce myself?”
She smiles up at him and taps her temple with an index finger before going back to her books. Always with the books.
“New-”
“Out.”
“Maga-”
“Out.” She sounds almost amused by it all, but it’s hard to read her face when it’s pressed so close to the book on the table.
“What are you reading?”
“Studying.” She tilts the top of the book toward him so he can get a better look. “Numbers.”
“Mathematics?” He squints his eyes at the text. “Old math. That’s no good anymore. Why study it?”
“Numbers used to be finite.”
“Don’t you mean infinite?”
“I meant never changing, but not anymore.” She glances up at him without expression. “If I study old math, I can better understand why the numbers have changed.”
“That’s like trying to better understand why this town is the way it is.”
“Or like searching in vain for newspapers every day.” Her comment stings, but her tone is agreeable, and when he glances at her, she is rifling through her bag. She unearths a tiny wrapped candy and offers it up to him. He can’t think of a single reason not to take it.
He pops it into his mouth. Yuzu-flavored. “Do you like yuzu?”
“Only when there’s no milk candy.” She pops one into her mouth and turns a page of her textbook. “There’s never any milk candy.”
This is all he will get out of her today, he thinks. He wonders if she will have his newspapers tomorrow. He wonders if he will try.
“Your shoes look nice again,” he says by way of goodbye.
“Not as nice as yours.”
When he turns the corner he spits the candy into the palm of his hand with a grimace. He hates the taste of yuzu.
*
“You seem distracted,” Satoshi tells him, the grey smoke of his cigarette curling into his hair, winding its way around the office.
“I’m not.” He is. He’s thinking of how not a single store or stall in the entire town sells newspapers.
Or milk candy.
He doesn’t even know her name.
*
There aren’t any newspapers or magazines in the plastic shelves behind her, but there is an extra stool today. He sits, watches her read her books, and then sighs and stretches his arms over his head. “Were you waiting for someone?”
“Hmm,” she replies noncommittally.
“Do you know the names of the newspapers?”
She blinks at him, caught off guard. “The Crown, the Heron, and-” She purses her lips thoughtfully.
“The Raven,” Sakurai supplies. “It’s funny, isn’t it? Ravens and crows are both known as omens of ill fortune, yet it’s called a murder of crows versus an unkindness of ravens.”
“Is it?” She’s looking at him fully now, the book left forgotten in front of her. “I’ve heard it called a storytelling of ravens.”
“A storytelling of ravens?”
She nods. “And a hedge of herons.”
“Storytelling ravens and hedging herons. Someone should have let the Crown in on the joke.” He laughs roughly, the sound swallowed up by the wind, but she’s not laughing with him, glances at him with thoughtful, curious eyes.
“Perhaps the joke is on you, Sakurai-san,” she says gently, taking up a pen and writing quickly on a scrap of paper. When she’s done, she curls the end the page over the side.
A murder of crowns.
Sakurai shudders involuntarily and she goes back to her book.
“If you were to read my fortune,” he says after a measured pause. “What might it say?”
“Follow the crow.”
“Could you be more specific?”
The wind rustles as if on cue. “Not for free.”
She isn’t much for conversation after that, so he leaves, tries to find the shortest distance back to the station. He stops in his tracks when he sees a lone crow in his path. It has a bit of gold tinsel on his head.
A crowned crow.
It hops a few paces forward slowly, waiting, watching. Sakurai can’t think of a good reason not to follow it.
It leads him down blurred grey buildings and concrete streets through a thicket of dead trees he didn’t know still existed; he doesn’t know he’s out of breath until it stops and flies straight past the trees and into the sky.
The building before him is an okonomiyaki shop, whose bell chimes defeatedly when he enters. “Hello?”
Toma, the shop owner, invites him to stay for lunch and an afternoon of reading. “Newspapers? We have stacks of them.”
Sakurai goes immediately into reading the back issues of each paper. The tea is lukewarm and average, but the smell of the griddle is tantalizing.
“Have you ever noticed,” Toma says, flipping the okonomiyaki cleanly over on the grill, “that all three newspapers are written by the same typewriter?”
Sakurai almost spills tea down the front of his shirt. “What?”
“Yeah.” Toma finishes with a thick layer of sauce and then lifts the okonomiyaki onto Sakurai’s plate. “You can tell by the ‘y.’ There’s always a little nick in the tail.”
Sakurai has never noticed.
He quickly shuffles through all three papers and wonders how he could never notice.
“Maybe they all write together,” Sho proposes after a moment.
Toma chuckles. “Have you ever met a writer?”
*
Nino is waiting on the windowsill of his office by the time he arrives. Sakurai starts, almost spills his tea again, before stalking over to let him in. He doesn’t come in.
“Someone left a message on the wall behind the station.”
“A message for who?”
“For all of us, perhaps.” Nino looks almost pensive. He never looks pensive.
“For-”
“The king is dead. That’s what it said.”
Nino leaves shortly after that, pushing off the sill and soaring clean into the sky.
*
“The alleyways have been quiet.”
“Really? I find that the crows have been quite raucous lately.”
Sakurai frowns at Satoshi. He always has an answer to everything Sakurai says, but never a good one.
“Nino has been quiet.”
“Do you miss him?” Satoshi’s tone is airy, but there’s always a flicker of something when he speaks about Nino. A trick of the light. Like he’s hiding something.
“No,” he replies, which is true. He doesn’t miss Nino, but Sakurai doesn’t like not knowing he’s around, either.
“You could look for him,” Satoshi offers. “I think Nishikido once mentioned a girl Nino was sweet on.”
“Nino? Sweet?” He snorts, swallowing the last of his tea and crumpling the styrofoam in his hands. “I’m going out.”
“To the bay?”
Sakurai wrinkles his nose but doesn’t reply.
*
“Maki-san.”
“Ah, did I introduce myself?” Maki murmurs vaguely. Her books are stacked in her bag and she’s wearing the same faded yellow dress and shoes she wore the first time they met. She is fiddling with something small and metallic in her hands. It is a tiny nail, whittled thin and burnished a clean, gleaming silver, twisted into the shape of a circle.
“Do you know where Nino is?” She starts at that, looks up at him with the most expression he’s ever seen on her face.
“Sorry?”
“Nino. You’re friends right?”
She opens her mouth, seems to think better of it, but then finally nods. “Yes.”
“So you know where he is?”
“I told you once that information was not my specialty.”
Sakurai reaches into his pocket and places several coins neatly on top of her table. “What if I buy that.”
“That?”
He nods. “That ring.”
“I can’t tell you where he is,” Maki protests, but Sakurai shakes his head firmly.
“I already put the money down.”
“I literally can’t-he doesn’t tell me where he is.” When he continues to stare her down, she adds, softly, “He just knows when I’m looking.”
“So look.”
She sighs and fiddles with the nail in her hands. “It won’t hurt.”
“So you’ll try?”
“No, I mean to put this in your ear. It won’t hurt too much.”
“In my where?”
“You already put the money down.”
She lied. It hurts.
A lot.
Nino never shows up, either.
*
On the way back to the office, Sakurai pauses at a piece of stray cardboard at his feet.
His left ear hurts and he can’t for the life of him recall why.
*
Nino appears only when he’s least expected, never one to be found and always the one to do the finding. Sakurai’s office is a mess, all of his documents and papers are scattered across the room, windswept and blown over with shards of glass.
“I heard you were looking for me.” Nino is as cheeky as ever, perched on his desk and devouring the last bit of candy from a glass jar.
“I wasn’t,” Sakurai mutters, staring at the jar. “Now get off my desk.”
Nino complies, alights beside the hole in the window with his head cocked.
“I hear you’re the sort of man who prefers guns over magic. Is that true?”
“Maybe,” he replies, and his left ear throbs. “Maybe I like how a gun is a gun. It’s never fickle.”
“I guessed as much,” Nino replies loftily, sweeping his eyes over the room and then over Sakurai slowly. Sakurai touches his left ear self-consciously and his finger comes away cool-metal? “There’s not a lick of magic on any of your things.”
When Nino leaves, Sakurai picks up the jar of sweets from his desk and frowns at the label. Yuzu-flavored.
He hates yuzu.
He catches the reflection of a tiny silver hoop on his left ear and he frowns, trying to remember when and why. His brain doesn’t offer an answer, but at least his ear stops hurting. The hoop feels weightless, inconsequential against his skin.
*
They travel together, the five of them, only as far as the entrance to the town.
Matsumoto leaves first, with a curt nod and a smile that implies to be continued. Aiba swoops off soon after that, like the whisper of the wind. Satoshi lights a cigarette and leaves a trail of smoke in his wake.
Nino stares at him once they’re alone-at his left ear. Sakurai covers it self-consciously. “What?”
“Nothing.” His subsequent grin reveals nothing but teeth. “I was just thinking it suited you.” And with one swoop he, too, disappears.
*
Sakurai is lost.
It is certainly not a new nor a welcome experience. When he finally finds his way into a bustling street filled with stalls, a voice calls out, “He finally let you off, did he?”
“Sorry?”
“I’m not.”
He still doesn’t understand, but he notes her sign and clears his throat. “Can I have a copy of today’s newspaper?”
“I’m out.”
And everything clicks into place.
“Maki-san?”
“It’s nice to see you again, Sakurai-san,” she says lightly. Followed, he thinks, by a mutter that sounds suspiciously like, “It’s nice to be seen again.”
“What-” His jaw works faster than his foggy brain. “Nino.”
She tilts her head to the side, but doesn’t say a word, lets him work out the kinks of his brain. “He did something didn’t he-and wait.” It comes back to him. Nino’s toothy grin and not a lick of magic on any of your things. “He would never let me live down having a charm unless-?”
“Not a drop of magic in there,” she confirms with a light bob of her head.
“Then . . . why?”
“I thought it suited you.” Her grin is wide, toothy and familiar.
“Do you know what a group of hummingbirds is called?”
“No . . . what?”
“A charm.”
***
+A few sections of dialogue were lifted straight from the original AU without technical approval-I hope this was okay, __sine!
+The bird group names were taken from here.
+This may have also been inadvertently influenced by my favorite indefinitely hiatused webcomic, Saturnalia.