No. 6 -- Flame Distinctly
Title: Flame Distinctly
Fandom: No. 6
Pairing: Nezumi/Shion
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,050
Warnings: major spoilers!, some language, obnoxious literary allusions
Summary: Then meet and join.
Author's Note: I wrote the first three-quarters of this almost a month ago and let it sit and sit and sit and finally I got sick of having it linger and just… yeah. I suck. X'D AND NOW I'M GOING TO GO READ MORE MUCH ADO BECAUSE I'M TOO TIRED TO INTERNET.
FLAME DISTINCTLY
Dogkeeper did not expect that Shion would come back.
Well, that’s putting things too simply-Dogkeeper does not expect anything, because Dogkeeper is not stupid.
Dogkeeper did not think that Shion would come back.
Dogkeeper did not hope for it.
Was Dogkeeper in the idiotic habit of expectation, however, Dogkeeper might have anticipated that the dogs on guard would whine with delight and bare their bellies to Shion’s familiar hands. The anticipation doesn’t make it any less embarrassing, but there it is.
Shion is rubbing as many ears and ruffs and muzzles as he can reach. “No one’s washing you!” he says.
Dogkeeper leans against the railing at the top of the stairs and scowls down. “And here I thought you couldn’t get any fucking dumber.”
Shion beams upward, a spot of too-bright white on all the muddled, muted browns.
“I missed you, too,” he says.
Dogkeeper does not know (or care) if everyone in Number 6 enjoys the staggering impracticality of wearing white, or if it is Shion’s choice completely. When he stands up straight, the subtle seams and the stark monochrome lines make him look taller and leaner-like a gleam of light on a knife blade, Dogkeeper thinks.
But he’s not standing now; he’s crouched down among the mass of slobbering dogs, washing any ear or tail or shoulder that will stay still long enough to catch some soapsuds. The clinical lines of his white clothes are jagged now, broken up with folds, and they’re not going to be white for long at this rate.
Shion doesn’t seem to mind, or doesn’t seem to care.
“And it sounded like things in Number 6 were going so well,” Dogkeeper says. “Do you need your old job back?”
Shion looks intently into a collie’s eyes and scrubs at a tuft of matted fur beneath its chin. “I was hoping to ask for a favor,” he says.
So that’s the game-make Dogkeeper owe him, then ask for charity. They’re turning him into a proper politician.
“You can ask,” Dogkeeper says-as if anyone has refused Shion anything in a very long time.
“Next time you get puppies,” Shion says, stroking his fingers through the tangles, “would you let me know?”
Dogkeeper shrugs.
Ryan is not smart enough to be here, strictly speaking; surely today’s the day someone calls him out. Surely today’s the day the new council decides they don’t need someone archiving their minutes and organizing their notes. Surely today’s the day they unveil him for a fake, for a failure-
But Shion’s just so nice.
So Ryan has his arms full of blueprint tubes (and he could just watch for hours the way that Shion summons them and twists them and pivots them and taps the buttons for the specs, the way his strange eyes flick over the numbers and the letters and the lines; there’s something about his hands; they’re light) and his heart full of desperate hope that the car’s somewhere nearby.
“I’ll take those,” Shion says.
“It’s really all right,” Ryan says. “Or do you take a shuttle? I could…”
“I live in Lost Town,” Shion says. He holds his arms out for the blueprints, and he smiles. “It’s not far. Thank you, honestly.”
Ryan stares at him. “But-you could live anywhere you wanted.”
“I know,” Shion says. “I live exactly where I want to.” He lifts the tubes out of Ryan’s arms, swinging out an elbow to bounce a wayward one back into the balance before it falls. “Right next to the best bakery in all of Number 6.”
The next night, there is an extremely dirty little boy loitering at the bottom of the steps where Ryan and Shion usually part ways. He scrubs a few knuckles against his running nose and holds the other hand out to Shion.
Ryan has recoiled so instinctively that it takes him several moments even to see the narrow strip of paper Shion has taken from a juvenile plague carrier.
“Thank you,” Shion says. He reaches deep into his pocket and retrieves a coppery-gleaming thing, which he tosses towards the child-in a wink of light, it’s gone; and then the child is gone, melting into the shadows at the edges of the night.
Ryan does not have the faintest idea what to say.
But he catches sight of the message just before it disappears into Shion’s pocket-all it says is NEW DOGS NOT CLEAN, which is really not the sort of news that should justify Shion’s grin.
Nezumi holes up in the attic of the house across the street. Through the small, round, grime-streaked excuse for a window, he can watch the comings and goings of the locals.
Well-he can watch the comings and goings of Shion, anyway.
The weather’s turning, and the cold is seeping in through the cracked boards and the torn pink fiberglass fluff of the insulator. Nezumi’s always thought it looked like cotton candy; how many stupid, unwary Number 6 children might think the same?
His companions in this dim-lit slant-roofed cavern of a hideaway are mostly dusty toys and broken furniture. There’s a stack of photograph albums that stands almost to his knee, though he can’t imagine why someone would go to the trouble of collecting so many self-absorbed mementos only to squirrel them away.
The corners start to become familiar; unlike some people, he wouldn’t name the rodents and arachnids under duress, but he recognizes the regulars. He doesn’t know much about children other than that most parents don’t think to consider them a weakness, but it seems that all the toys are made for a young child, and very few of them seem to have been used.
He mostly prowls around at night, skirting the main streets, trawling for the odd jobs and the easy locks. Some part of him is sad that even with all of Shion’s labor, there’s still no shortage of scales on the underbelly.
Shion must have at least an inkling. He was never stupid, he was never quite as blind, and he learned a thing or two in the West Block that ought to serve him well now-as he cultivates his budding new utopia, beset on all sides with slugs and aphids and rot.
But there was always something detached about Shion. There was always something missing-some inhibition, some second guess. It’s why he broke the rules well before they’d ever betrayed him; Nezumi thinks it’s why he trusts so quickly and strives so hard. He has always lacked some sort of reluctance, some sort of hesitation-a rationality that makes people examine a situation and choose to preserve themselves. But it’s not quite a selflessness, not really; it’s too clinical to be called altruism. There’s something cold about it. He’s not quite right.
Nezumi hates that. He hates that it gives him so much hope. He hates the very concept that Shion might need him; he hates that he doesn’t mind; he hates that he can sling himself to the ends of an orbit, but he can’t escape.
He hates that he’s here, watching through the smears of dreck and old rain on the windowpane as Shion comes home with those two damn dogs of his, one black, one white.
When the storm comes, the roof leaks. When the tempest ends, will civilization wreck itself upon the wild?
Or is it the other way around?
No one would mistake the theater manager for a brilliant man, but he was the one who insisted that they cast Nezumi as Ariel, not Miranda.
And at first he thought of Shion as Ferdinand, washing up on an unfamiliar shore, all the devils are here-but Nezumi’s innocence was never in danger, and it wasn’t his life that was really at risk.
Shion is the one who freed him-and in so doing bound up a spirit, enslaving his soul.
It drives Nezumi to distraction that the way his heart quickens isn’t for fear.
It almost makes Nezumi’s eyes roll out of his head that Shion dresses his dogs in little plastic ponchos before he takes them off to work with him.
The rain is dripping through the roof in earnest and puddling in the dust. There’s a particularly incorrigible dribble right next to Nezumi’s preferred window-viewing seat, and in another day or so the rain is going to soak through the floorboards and start dripping into the house proper, and very likely the residents will venture up to rescue their belongings.
He puts up his hood and puts the walls up, too, even though he knows that they’ll be useless. Shion doesn’t see them. Shion doesn’t care. Shion walks right through them like a ghost, like a breath of air, like a soundwave trembling. Shion breezes into castles and imprisons erstwhile kings.
Nezumi hates that he doesn’t mind.
When Shion steps into the house, Nezumi is sprawled sideways across his favorite armchair, flicking through a blueprint with evident distaste. Except for the fact that he’s let his hair down, he is utterly unchanged.
Shion has little choice but to prioritize taking the raincoats off of the dogs, or they’ll start trying to bite them. Before he learned that lesson, they made mincemeat of the first ones, and scraps of wet plastic were randomly turning up all over the house for weeks.
“Did you find something to eat?” he asks Nezumi as he scratches behind Dorian’s damp ears.
“This is absolute shit,” Nezumi says, smacking his hand sharply through the hologram of the blueprint for emphasis. “Drop just one safeguard, and any fucking idiot could walk in here and tear the whole thing apart.”
Shion pets Bartleby too. “What makes you think that was unintentional?”
When he looks up, Nezumi is staring at him.
“It’s not like the original founders set out to make a city that would breed corruption,” Shion says, straightening to hang his own coat by the door. “I don’t imagine that my intentions are nobler than theirs were once, and of course it’s impossible to execute this perfectly. It’s very likely that a day will come when someone else will have to do what we did, and I’d like to make sure that they can.”
When he turns, Nezumi is still staring.
“What?” he asks.
“You’re planning for your own failure,” Nezumi says.
“Yes,” Shion says.
Nezumi has several smiles which somehow manage not to look like smiles at all. “And a city built on arrogance has chosen you for its savior.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Shion says. “I didn’t give them a choice.”
There’s a flash of a sliver of ivory as Nezumi starts to grin, and then it’s swiftly replaced with a slightly disgruntled expression before every trace of feeling is wiped clean.
It’s almost sad, really, how fervently Nezumi tries to shut people out-and how frustrating it must be for him that Shion simply slipped through an open window, and by the time Nezumi noticed how close he’d come to the center of things, it was already too late. They’re woven so tightly, somehow, that to eradicate Shion now would be an act of self-destruction. Nezumi’s most adamant instinct is to protect himself; his animal soul will never let him try to pry them apart.
There are few things Shion knows as a certainty. That they are linked is one of those things, and it makes all of the lesser things quite bearable.
“Are you hungry?” he asks the shadow in his chair a second time, padding past it on his way to find dinner for the dogs. “Or did you ransack my kitchen when you got in?”
Nezumi stretches like a comfortable cat, and this time the hint of an expression belies a smirk. “Don’t I have legal protections against self-incrimination now?”
“That depends,” Shion says, opening the cabinet where he keeps the bowls. The tails start wagging instantly. “Are you planning to become a citizen?”
“That depends,” Nezumi calls. “Are you planning to make it worth my while?”
Shion grins at the dogs. They read his happiness and respond with their wonderful tongue-lolling smiles, and he scratches behind their ears in turn to thank them for the thought. They’re pleased that he’s pleased, whether or not they know why; they don’t have to understand his feelings in order to share in them. They don’t need to be told that he had almost managed to convince himself that he didn’t miss the wiseass wraith sprawled in his armchair, and there’s no relief quite like no longer having to pretend. It doesn’t matter to dogs that his elation has an explanation; the simple fact of his gladness is enough.
“What’s your going rate?” he asks.
“Steep,” Nezumi says from just behind him-hovering almost-too-close, statue-still, on soundless feet.
Shion slants a smile at him. “And what are you hungry for?”
Nezumi’s expression doesn’t change but for the slightest gleam of silver shifting in his eyes. “Everything.”
The trick with Nezumi is that you have to leave all the doors open.
He’s a natural-born investigator with a feverish curiosity; he needs to know things; he needs to find things out. If that’s not enough, he’s an instinctual defender of any domain his feet can conquer. He’s restless, deep down, and analytical, and while Shion thinks the sheer wanderlust has faded from his eyes, he’ll never stop. What it all amounts to is that he can’t pass up an unattended entrance-unless, of course, he suspects that there’s no way out.
Shion tests it, of course. People change, and sometimes they change in such small ways that you can’t tell until you’ve cut them open and seen the meat. Sometimes the cadence of a heartbeat shifts so subtly that only the most practiced ear might notice, but the tiny difference resonates so vastly that it alters the whole body built around it.
It’s best to be sure.
When Nezumi gets up and stalks his way over to the restroom, Shion leaves two keys on the end table beside the chair that he’s claimed as his dominion-one to the front door, one to the back.
By the morning, they’re gone.
He lets cabinets stay open for days. He unlocks the combination safe and leaves it gaping. He stops pulling the doors to after him; he lets them creak their complaints. He abandons the deadbolts. He cracks the windows and mops up the pools of rain.
He trusts Nezumi to consider that the only way this house won’t be robbed blind is if it’s protected by something far more capable than the average thief.
The only way to catch a spirit is to set it free. To owe is to be owned. Mastery is not in chains and shackles; it’s not in wristbands to be scanned; it’s not in rote promises or unexamined faith.
It’s in fulfillment. And it’s in fear.
It’s in providing something that can’t be had anywhere else, no matter how many miles a scarred and dusty pair of boots has tread.
Nezumi is a wolf, not a dog, but he’s not so different, and the moment he appeared in this house he betrayed his weakness.
Nezumi is here because he scoured the world for something that felt like Shion’s presence, and he couldn’t find it anywhere. Nezumi is here because the bands and cords that stretched between them are contracting, and he senses that he doesn’t want to feel the backlash if the threads and ribbons snap. Nezumi is here because there’s nowhere else to run. Nezumi is here because the greatest snare of all is an insulated bubble of belonging.
Nezumi is here because the rest of the planet failed to offer him anything he couldn’t bear to lose.
And Shion can.
It hardly counts as a gamble if you know you’re going to win, but Shion bides his time a little all the same.
And when there’s a tingle in him of serendipity-a prickle of confluent coincidence, because he can’t believe in luck-and the dogs are dozing by the still-warm oven, and Nezumi is scowling not-too-vituperatively at a news update, Shion stands and stretches.
“I’m going to take a shower,” he says.
Nezumi spares him an assessing sort of glare. “Good for you.”
“It wouldn’t kill you to take one, too,” Shion says lightly, and he shrugs off his cardigan and drops it on the floor, dog hair be damned.
Nezumi is watching closer now; it’s like it’s always been, since the first night, the true beginning, where the air between them vibrates with potential.
“Shows what you know,” Nezumi says.
“I know you,” Shion says, and he starts off down the hall.
He can’t hear the footsteps, but he knows for a fact that Nezumi follows.
When he reaches the bathroom, he leaves the door wide open and undresses, slowly, with his back to it.
When all the fabric is pooling at his feet, he says, without turning, “See anything you like?”
“Nothing I haven’t seen before,” Nezumi says.
That’s Nezumi’s version of permission to acknowledge him, and a glance confirms that he’s leaned against the side of the doorway, both arms folded across his chest. As always, the smirk is both a challenge and a mask.
Shion grins at him. “Take a picture; it’ll last longer.”
“Yeah,” Nezumi says, rising to his feet again so smoothly that his whole body undulates like a tongue of flame; “but pictures aren’t as good.” He saunters over and starts to circle. Shion breathes very quietly. “You can’t watch the way they move when they don’t know you’re looking.” He meets Shion’s eyes for a long moment and then keeps walking, swinging around behind; his fingertips drag slowly along the winding trail of the long, long scar. “You can’t touch them,” he says as the pad of his thumb trails so lightly up Shion’s cheek. His hand drops, and then he leans in so close that his hair brushes along Shion’s jaw, and his mouth grazes Shion’s throat- “And you can’t taste anything.”
“You make a pretty convincing argument for holding on to the real thing,” Shion says.
Nezumi’s eyes snap up to his again.
Shion smiles.
Slowly, slowly, Nezumi smiles back.
Fandom: No. 6
Pairing: Nezumi/Shion
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,050
Warnings: major spoilers!, some language, obnoxious literary allusions
Summary: Then meet and join.
Author's Note: I wrote the first three-quarters of this almost a month ago and let it sit and sit and sit and finally I got sick of having it linger and just… yeah. I suck. X'D AND NOW I'M GOING TO GO READ MORE MUCH ADO BECAUSE I'M TOO TIRED TO INTERNET.
FLAME DISTINCTLY
Dogkeeper did not expect that Shion would come back.
Well, that’s putting things too simply-Dogkeeper does not expect anything, because Dogkeeper is not stupid.
Dogkeeper did not think that Shion would come back.
Dogkeeper did not hope for it.
Was Dogkeeper in the idiotic habit of expectation, however, Dogkeeper might have anticipated that the dogs on guard would whine with delight and bare their bellies to Shion’s familiar hands. The anticipation doesn’t make it any less embarrassing, but there it is.
Shion is rubbing as many ears and ruffs and muzzles as he can reach. “No one’s washing you!” he says.
Dogkeeper leans against the railing at the top of the stairs and scowls down. “And here I thought you couldn’t get any fucking dumber.”
Shion beams upward, a spot of too-bright white on all the muddled, muted browns.
“I missed you, too,” he says.
Dogkeeper does not know (or care) if everyone in Number 6 enjoys the staggering impracticality of wearing white, or if it is Shion’s choice completely. When he stands up straight, the subtle seams and the stark monochrome lines make him look taller and leaner-like a gleam of light on a knife blade, Dogkeeper thinks.
But he’s not standing now; he’s crouched down among the mass of slobbering dogs, washing any ear or tail or shoulder that will stay still long enough to catch some soapsuds. The clinical lines of his white clothes are jagged now, broken up with folds, and they’re not going to be white for long at this rate.
Shion doesn’t seem to mind, or doesn’t seem to care.
“And it sounded like things in Number 6 were going so well,” Dogkeeper says. “Do you need your old job back?”
Shion looks intently into a collie’s eyes and scrubs at a tuft of matted fur beneath its chin. “I was hoping to ask for a favor,” he says.
So that’s the game-make Dogkeeper owe him, then ask for charity. They’re turning him into a proper politician.
“You can ask,” Dogkeeper says-as if anyone has refused Shion anything in a very long time.
“Next time you get puppies,” Shion says, stroking his fingers through the tangles, “would you let me know?”
Dogkeeper shrugs.
Ryan is not smart enough to be here, strictly speaking; surely today’s the day someone calls him out. Surely today’s the day the new council decides they don’t need someone archiving their minutes and organizing their notes. Surely today’s the day they unveil him for a fake, for a failure-
But Shion’s just so nice.
So Ryan has his arms full of blueprint tubes (and he could just watch for hours the way that Shion summons them and twists them and pivots them and taps the buttons for the specs, the way his strange eyes flick over the numbers and the letters and the lines; there’s something about his hands; they’re light) and his heart full of desperate hope that the car’s somewhere nearby.
“I’ll take those,” Shion says.
“It’s really all right,” Ryan says. “Or do you take a shuttle? I could…”
“I live in Lost Town,” Shion says. He holds his arms out for the blueprints, and he smiles. “It’s not far. Thank you, honestly.”
Ryan stares at him. “But-you could live anywhere you wanted.”
“I know,” Shion says. “I live exactly where I want to.” He lifts the tubes out of Ryan’s arms, swinging out an elbow to bounce a wayward one back into the balance before it falls. “Right next to the best bakery in all of Number 6.”
The next night, there is an extremely dirty little boy loitering at the bottom of the steps where Ryan and Shion usually part ways. He scrubs a few knuckles against his running nose and holds the other hand out to Shion.
Ryan has recoiled so instinctively that it takes him several moments even to see the narrow strip of paper Shion has taken from a juvenile plague carrier.
“Thank you,” Shion says. He reaches deep into his pocket and retrieves a coppery-gleaming thing, which he tosses towards the child-in a wink of light, it’s gone; and then the child is gone, melting into the shadows at the edges of the night.
Ryan does not have the faintest idea what to say.
But he catches sight of the message just before it disappears into Shion’s pocket-all it says is NEW DOGS NOT CLEAN, which is really not the sort of news that should justify Shion’s grin.
Nezumi holes up in the attic of the house across the street. Through the small, round, grime-streaked excuse for a window, he can watch the comings and goings of the locals.
Well-he can watch the comings and goings of Shion, anyway.
The weather’s turning, and the cold is seeping in through the cracked boards and the torn pink fiberglass fluff of the insulator. Nezumi’s always thought it looked like cotton candy; how many stupid, unwary Number 6 children might think the same?
His companions in this dim-lit slant-roofed cavern of a hideaway are mostly dusty toys and broken furniture. There’s a stack of photograph albums that stands almost to his knee, though he can’t imagine why someone would go to the trouble of collecting so many self-absorbed mementos only to squirrel them away.
The corners start to become familiar; unlike some people, he wouldn’t name the rodents and arachnids under duress, but he recognizes the regulars. He doesn’t know much about children other than that most parents don’t think to consider them a weakness, but it seems that all the toys are made for a young child, and very few of them seem to have been used.
He mostly prowls around at night, skirting the main streets, trawling for the odd jobs and the easy locks. Some part of him is sad that even with all of Shion’s labor, there’s still no shortage of scales on the underbelly.
Shion must have at least an inkling. He was never stupid, he was never quite as blind, and he learned a thing or two in the West Block that ought to serve him well now-as he cultivates his budding new utopia, beset on all sides with slugs and aphids and rot.
But there was always something detached about Shion. There was always something missing-some inhibition, some second guess. It’s why he broke the rules well before they’d ever betrayed him; Nezumi thinks it’s why he trusts so quickly and strives so hard. He has always lacked some sort of reluctance, some sort of hesitation-a rationality that makes people examine a situation and choose to preserve themselves. But it’s not quite a selflessness, not really; it’s too clinical to be called altruism. There’s something cold about it. He’s not quite right.
Nezumi hates that. He hates that it gives him so much hope. He hates the very concept that Shion might need him; he hates that he doesn’t mind; he hates that he can sling himself to the ends of an orbit, but he can’t escape.
He hates that he’s here, watching through the smears of dreck and old rain on the windowpane as Shion comes home with those two damn dogs of his, one black, one white.
When the storm comes, the roof leaks. When the tempest ends, will civilization wreck itself upon the wild?
Or is it the other way around?
No one would mistake the theater manager for a brilliant man, but he was the one who insisted that they cast Nezumi as Ariel, not Miranda.
And at first he thought of Shion as Ferdinand, washing up on an unfamiliar shore, all the devils are here-but Nezumi’s innocence was never in danger, and it wasn’t his life that was really at risk.
Shion is the one who freed him-and in so doing bound up a spirit, enslaving his soul.
It drives Nezumi to distraction that the way his heart quickens isn’t for fear.
It almost makes Nezumi’s eyes roll out of his head that Shion dresses his dogs in little plastic ponchos before he takes them off to work with him.
The rain is dripping through the roof in earnest and puddling in the dust. There’s a particularly incorrigible dribble right next to Nezumi’s preferred window-viewing seat, and in another day or so the rain is going to soak through the floorboards and start dripping into the house proper, and very likely the residents will venture up to rescue their belongings.
He puts up his hood and puts the walls up, too, even though he knows that they’ll be useless. Shion doesn’t see them. Shion doesn’t care. Shion walks right through them like a ghost, like a breath of air, like a soundwave trembling. Shion breezes into castles and imprisons erstwhile kings.
Nezumi hates that he doesn’t mind.
When Shion steps into the house, Nezumi is sprawled sideways across his favorite armchair, flicking through a blueprint with evident distaste. Except for the fact that he’s let his hair down, he is utterly unchanged.
Shion has little choice but to prioritize taking the raincoats off of the dogs, or they’ll start trying to bite them. Before he learned that lesson, they made mincemeat of the first ones, and scraps of wet plastic were randomly turning up all over the house for weeks.
“Did you find something to eat?” he asks Nezumi as he scratches behind Dorian’s damp ears.
“This is absolute shit,” Nezumi says, smacking his hand sharply through the hologram of the blueprint for emphasis. “Drop just one safeguard, and any fucking idiot could walk in here and tear the whole thing apart.”
Shion pets Bartleby too. “What makes you think that was unintentional?”
When he looks up, Nezumi is staring at him.
“It’s not like the original founders set out to make a city that would breed corruption,” Shion says, straightening to hang his own coat by the door. “I don’t imagine that my intentions are nobler than theirs were once, and of course it’s impossible to execute this perfectly. It’s very likely that a day will come when someone else will have to do what we did, and I’d like to make sure that they can.”
When he turns, Nezumi is still staring.
“What?” he asks.
“You’re planning for your own failure,” Nezumi says.
“Yes,” Shion says.
Nezumi has several smiles which somehow manage not to look like smiles at all. “And a city built on arrogance has chosen you for its savior.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Shion says. “I didn’t give them a choice.”
There’s a flash of a sliver of ivory as Nezumi starts to grin, and then it’s swiftly replaced with a slightly disgruntled expression before every trace of feeling is wiped clean.
It’s almost sad, really, how fervently Nezumi tries to shut people out-and how frustrating it must be for him that Shion simply slipped through an open window, and by the time Nezumi noticed how close he’d come to the center of things, it was already too late. They’re woven so tightly, somehow, that to eradicate Shion now would be an act of self-destruction. Nezumi’s most adamant instinct is to protect himself; his animal soul will never let him try to pry them apart.
There are few things Shion knows as a certainty. That they are linked is one of those things, and it makes all of the lesser things quite bearable.
“Are you hungry?” he asks the shadow in his chair a second time, padding past it on his way to find dinner for the dogs. “Or did you ransack my kitchen when you got in?”
Nezumi stretches like a comfortable cat, and this time the hint of an expression belies a smirk. “Don’t I have legal protections against self-incrimination now?”
“That depends,” Shion says, opening the cabinet where he keeps the bowls. The tails start wagging instantly. “Are you planning to become a citizen?”
“That depends,” Nezumi calls. “Are you planning to make it worth my while?”
Shion grins at the dogs. They read his happiness and respond with their wonderful tongue-lolling smiles, and he scratches behind their ears in turn to thank them for the thought. They’re pleased that he’s pleased, whether or not they know why; they don’t have to understand his feelings in order to share in them. They don’t need to be told that he had almost managed to convince himself that he didn’t miss the wiseass wraith sprawled in his armchair, and there’s no relief quite like no longer having to pretend. It doesn’t matter to dogs that his elation has an explanation; the simple fact of his gladness is enough.
“What’s your going rate?” he asks.
“Steep,” Nezumi says from just behind him-hovering almost-too-close, statue-still, on soundless feet.
Shion slants a smile at him. “And what are you hungry for?”
Nezumi’s expression doesn’t change but for the slightest gleam of silver shifting in his eyes. “Everything.”
The trick with Nezumi is that you have to leave all the doors open.
He’s a natural-born investigator with a feverish curiosity; he needs to know things; he needs to find things out. If that’s not enough, he’s an instinctual defender of any domain his feet can conquer. He’s restless, deep down, and analytical, and while Shion thinks the sheer wanderlust has faded from his eyes, he’ll never stop. What it all amounts to is that he can’t pass up an unattended entrance-unless, of course, he suspects that there’s no way out.
Shion tests it, of course. People change, and sometimes they change in such small ways that you can’t tell until you’ve cut them open and seen the meat. Sometimes the cadence of a heartbeat shifts so subtly that only the most practiced ear might notice, but the tiny difference resonates so vastly that it alters the whole body built around it.
It’s best to be sure.
When Nezumi gets up and stalks his way over to the restroom, Shion leaves two keys on the end table beside the chair that he’s claimed as his dominion-one to the front door, one to the back.
By the morning, they’re gone.
He lets cabinets stay open for days. He unlocks the combination safe and leaves it gaping. He stops pulling the doors to after him; he lets them creak their complaints. He abandons the deadbolts. He cracks the windows and mops up the pools of rain.
He trusts Nezumi to consider that the only way this house won’t be robbed blind is if it’s protected by something far more capable than the average thief.
The only way to catch a spirit is to set it free. To owe is to be owned. Mastery is not in chains and shackles; it’s not in wristbands to be scanned; it’s not in rote promises or unexamined faith.
It’s in fulfillment. And it’s in fear.
It’s in providing something that can’t be had anywhere else, no matter how many miles a scarred and dusty pair of boots has tread.
Nezumi is a wolf, not a dog, but he’s not so different, and the moment he appeared in this house he betrayed his weakness.
Nezumi is here because he scoured the world for something that felt like Shion’s presence, and he couldn’t find it anywhere. Nezumi is here because the bands and cords that stretched between them are contracting, and he senses that he doesn’t want to feel the backlash if the threads and ribbons snap. Nezumi is here because there’s nowhere else to run. Nezumi is here because the greatest snare of all is an insulated bubble of belonging.
Nezumi is here because the rest of the planet failed to offer him anything he couldn’t bear to lose.
And Shion can.
It hardly counts as a gamble if you know you’re going to win, but Shion bides his time a little all the same.
And when there’s a tingle in him of serendipity-a prickle of confluent coincidence, because he can’t believe in luck-and the dogs are dozing by the still-warm oven, and Nezumi is scowling not-too-vituperatively at a news update, Shion stands and stretches.
“I’m going to take a shower,” he says.
Nezumi spares him an assessing sort of glare. “Good for you.”
“It wouldn’t kill you to take one, too,” Shion says lightly, and he shrugs off his cardigan and drops it on the floor, dog hair be damned.
Nezumi is watching closer now; it’s like it’s always been, since the first night, the true beginning, where the air between them vibrates with potential.
“Shows what you know,” Nezumi says.
“I know you,” Shion says, and he starts off down the hall.
He can’t hear the footsteps, but he knows for a fact that Nezumi follows.
When he reaches the bathroom, he leaves the door wide open and undresses, slowly, with his back to it.
When all the fabric is pooling at his feet, he says, without turning, “See anything you like?”
“Nothing I haven’t seen before,” Nezumi says.
That’s Nezumi’s version of permission to acknowledge him, and a glance confirms that he’s leaned against the side of the doorway, both arms folded across his chest. As always, the smirk is both a challenge and a mask.
Shion grins at him. “Take a picture; it’ll last longer.”
“Yeah,” Nezumi says, rising to his feet again so smoothly that his whole body undulates like a tongue of flame; “but pictures aren’t as good.” He saunters over and starts to circle. Shion breathes very quietly. “You can’t watch the way they move when they don’t know you’re looking.” He meets Shion’s eyes for a long moment and then keeps walking, swinging around behind; his fingertips drag slowly along the winding trail of the long, long scar. “You can’t touch them,” he says as the pad of his thumb trails so lightly up Shion’s cheek. His hand drops, and then he leans in so close that his hair brushes along Shion’s jaw, and his mouth grazes Shion’s throat- “And you can’t taste anything.”
“You make a pretty convincing argument for holding on to the real thing,” Shion says.
Nezumi’s eyes snap up to his again.
Shion smiles.
Slowly, slowly, Nezumi smiles back.