Work Text:
“Hello there.”
Akaashi felt the beat in his heart thumping louder when he heard a greeting voice from his side. He would’ve turned his head immediately if he hadn’t been alone in the dark, tall trees and occasional sounds of something moving surrounding him.
“My, my, what a surprise to see a human child at this kind of place,” the voice continued, and Akaashi felt his brain numb when the voice sounded closer to him by every syllable. He wanted to run, but another part of him wanted to know how the owner of the voice looked like. Tears not stopping, he clenched his fists and looked up to see the man whose shadow had prevented the moonlight from reaching him.
Putting his bag on the desk and himself on the chair, Akaashi Keiji lets out a short sigh before he tidies up a few books in front of him. Friday is his favorite day—he finishes class earlier so he can take his time grading papers, catching up with books and deciding what movie he will watch tonight.
Well, time to get some work done before the weekend comes.
In front of Akaashi stood a young man, with their short, blonde hair shining with the reflection of the moonlight, and their grin as wide as the crescent in the sky. But that wasn’t what surprised him, no—what did was what seemed to be a pair of animal ears coming out from their head, and three tails that looked like a fox’s from their back, slowly and softly moving in a rhythmic motion.
“Wh… who are you?” he asked without thinking, face battling between fear and curiosity.
The young man’s grin widened as they came crouching down, patting the boy in the head. Akaashi felt warmth despite the smirk on their lips. “I’m just someone who happened to pass by and heard a crying voice,” they said, voice gentle yet mischievous. The boy clutched on the edges of his shirt with his eyes alert. “Are you lost, boy?”
Akaashi gulped down quietly, his eyes were fixed onto the ear on their head. He could feel his heart drumming to his throat and a shower of cold sweat streaming down his nape, but a shivering voice managed to pass out his lips, “I—I’m not supposed to talk to people I don’t know.” The young man laughed.
“That’s very admirable of you, but fret not, I’m no human,” they said, wiggling their tails and lowered their head so Akaashi could see their ears closer. “See?”
The boy stayed silent for a few moments as the young man made a gesture for him to touch the furry ears. He did, and jolted in surprise as soon as he felt it in his hand. It was warm. It was alive. They chuckled.
“Do you believe me now?” the young man asked. Akaashi looked at him reluctantly, but quietly nodded his head. They smiled. “Good. I’m gonna help you out of here if you follow me. Only if you want, of course.”
Hesitant, he took the hand the young man offered.
Akaashi closes the papers in his hands, then skims over all 8 pages. A good concept and very thorough research albeit some mistakes here and there—he’s quite satisfied seeing a good paper written by a freshman. He flips to see the writer’s name. Ah, it’s the brown-haired boy who always sits at the back and sometimes chuckles quite loudly with a black-haired boy beside him. Akaashi taps his pen a few times and writes an “B+, see notes” on top of the page.
He counts the stack of papers labeled ‘ungraded’ on his right. One, two, three… Eight more, and he should be done for the day. He’s been reading so many papers lately that his eyes feel a bit tired, but he doesn’t particularly dislike it.
“What’s your name, boy?” the young man asked, smiling. Their left hand was holding a lantern, the other holding the boy’s awkward, shivering hand.
“Akaashi… Akaashi Keiji,” the boy answered with a hoarse voice, not looking back to the taller being. There was a brief pause before he added, “‘Kei’ written with ‘kyo’ for ‘Kyoto’, and ‘ji’ with the letter for ‘to heal’,” his voice still shaking but louder than before, an attempt to force fear out of himself. The young man’s tails wiggled a little.
“That’s a very pretty name, Keiji-kun. Can I call you that?”
“...Yes,” Akaashi, staring down to his feet, answered. He then felt a squeeze in his palm as he heard a soft voice,
“Keiji-kun it is.”
Akaashi still had his eyes to the ground, all kinds of thoughts rushing through his brain, and the young man was quiet all the time. It took the boy a few more seconds before he finally gathered the courage to ask them back, “And you, Sir? What’s your name?”
The man’s fox ears tingled a little when they grinned. “It’s a secret.”
“Excuse me.” Akaashi hears three knocks followed by a familiar voice from behind the door. He looks up from the paper in his hands and says,
“Come in.”
The door creaks a little as it’s pushed, and a head peeks from the gap. “Good afternoon, Akaashi-sensei, sorry to bother you,” a young man, one of Akaashi’s students, says from behind the door. “Is it a good time to drop my paper?”
“Sure,” Akaashi replies, pointing to a blue box by the door. “Just put it in the box over there.”
The man lowers his head a bit while entering the room and mumbling another quiet “excuse me.” He takes a stack of paper from his bag and puts it in the box, and once again lowers his head to the professor. “Then I’ll be leaving now, thank you, Sensei.”
“This is where I shall leave you.”
The boy looked up, tears that had stopped began to fill his eyes again. The young man grinned as he patted Akaashi’s head and handed him the lantern in their hand.
“If you walk straight from here, you’ll find a road and a house not too far away.”
The boy reluctantly stepped forward while still staring to his back, his grip on the lantern tightened. The young man grinned wider as they waved their hand, tails making a move just like when Akaashi first saw them.
“Goodbye, Keiji-kun.”
Akaashi pauses his movement for a second, tapping his pen to the desk, then speaks up before the door fully closes. “Onaga?”
“Yes?” the student replies while swinging the door open again, surprised by the call.
“Your paper on the Edo folklore was great. Keep up the good work.”
The student’s eyes widen a little before a beam curves on his lips and he lowers his head once again. “Yes! Thank you, Sensei!”
“O... Oinari-san?”
A roughly 30-year-old man turned their head as they heard a familiar voice, surprised. They saw a little boy standing behind him with glad, hopeful eyes on his face. The man’s widened eyes slowly curved down as a smirk formed on their lips. “How did you find me, Keiji-kun?”
“I remember there’s a shrine for foxes around here, and I thought maybe I could find you here...” the boy fidgeted. "I... brought some offerings in case I really do find you, so...”
“My, fried tofu! How thoughtful of you,” the man said, and Akaashi saw their tails slightly swinging up and down.
Akaashi teaches two to three classes every semester, and one he’s always in charge of every fall is folklore 101. There are years when the class isn’t very exciting because a lot of students only take it for the sake of credits, but this year’s students really make him look forward to every assignment they turn in. The student that just came in, for example, seems to be very interested in shapelifting creatures. His paper on racoons and foxes is one of the best his students have ever written, and Akaashi is especially picky when it comes to foxes.
“Oinari-san!”
A woman dressed in a miko outfit peeked over from the shrine’s rooftop and found a little boy looking left and right. They couldn’t help a grin showing on their lips as they called,
“Keiji-kun.”
“Oinari-san!” Akaashi flashed a smile as he saw a long-, black-haired woman waving from the top of the building then hopping down to where he stood.
“I’ve told you before that I’m not Oinari-san, right? There’s no way an important god like them hangs in a tiny shrine like this,” the woman said as soon as they reached the ground. “I’m just a small, unworthy fox spirit.”
“I’m calling you that because you won’t tell me your name,” he answered with a little frown, and the other laughed.
“Of course I won’t, names are very important for us and there’s no way I’ll give it to a little kid like you.”
The frown on the little boy’s face stayed as the spirit patted his head, or actually, messed his hair. This was the first time Akaashi had seen them taking a woman’s appearance, it was always men of various ages and races before (once they appeared as a 90-year old Caucasian man and needless to say Akaashi had been very confused). He peeked through the fox’s arm to see a grin on their face—that was one thing that never changed, no matter what appearance the fox was in, Akaashi would always recognize that grin. “Anyway, this is today’s offering,” he said, handing them a paper plate with two mochi served on it.
“My, thank you,” the spirit took it and the grin on their face became wider as they did so. Akaashi stared for a bit, grinning might have seemed to be the fox’s only expression, but that didn’t stop him from liking it. He liked how their lips widened, how their pupils hid behind their eyelids, how their fox ears moved every time a grin was forming on their face. “Shouldn’t you spend your money for something you want instead of giving me offerings every day, though?” they asked.
“This is what I want, though. And don’t worry, I plan my finances carefully,” Akaashi answered, and the fox gave him another pat on the head as they chuckled.
“You always have an interesting answer, Keiji-kun.”
“It is believed that names hold a big significance to spirits,” reads the line on the paper in Akaashi’s hand. He’s back to grading the rest of the paper, now only 2 left. “When a spirit is given a name, or when its name is taken away, it must oblige to the name-giver’s or name-taker’s commands.”
He circles the text with a red pen: “Source?”
“Aren’t you bored?”
Akaashi stopped reading the book in his hands, glancing to the fox in a 7-year-old boy body who was making gestures at the sky (Akaashi never knew what kind of drawings they always made—he tried deciphering it a few times but could only guess it was either a rock or a fried chicken… probably neither). “Bored of what?”
“You’ve been coming here for years,” they said, then turned their head to Akaashi. “Doing nothing but sitting around reading books and talking to me. Aren’t you bored?"
The black-haired shrugged a little. “Not really. If I were, I wouldn’t come,” he said. “Besides, I thought you’d be lonely by yourself.”
The spirit chuckled at the reply. “Don’t worry about that, I won’t. Years might seem like a long time for humans, but it’s hardly a day for us— we live in different timelines, boy.”
“Hmm,” was Akaashi’s reply.
“I don’t know what makes you think you’ve got to come here and accompany me.” The fox added, rolling over. “I did help you, but it was more than 7 human years ago.” Another pause as their ear went up then down again, to Akaashi’s amusement. “Besides, I’m probably not as good as you think I am.”
The boy turned his stare away and looked back to his book. “You mean how you were the one who led me into the woods in the first place? Yes, I knew.”
The ears were now up by surprise. “Oh?”
“When I thought of it, it’s weird that I came that deep into the forest in the first place, though I knew well I shouldn’t,” Akaashi began, his eyes still following word by word in his book. “Then I remembered that before it happened, I was playing with a hare. It hopped and it hopped and I tried catching it, so much that I didn’t pay attention to my surrounding. Before I knew it, I was where you found me,” Akaashi paused. “It was you, wasn’t it? The hare.”
“What, so you knew?” the fox laughed. “And you’re still hanging out here and giving me offerings even after knowing that?”
“Well, you helped me in the end, so all is well,” Akaashi answered. He then adjusted his position before asking, “Are you bothered that I’m here?”
“Hmm,” the spirit turned their gaze at him. “Not really.”
“Then I’ll come again tomorrow.”
Akaashi huffs as he closes the papers and decides to take a little coffee break before finishing up. His co-worker bought him coffee earlier and he saw the name “WASHEEO” written on it. The barista is probably the same white-haired person who once wrote his name as “AKA-C”.
“Keiji-kun, you’re in high school now, right? Why are you still visiting me every day?”
“Why are you always here when I visit?”
The coffee tastes bitter with no milk and no sugar, but Akaashi likes it that way—he’s always had, even when he drank it the first time after begging his dad when he was 8.
“Oinari-san,” Akaashi called after closing his book, glancing at the fox who was in the same appearance as Akaashi had first seen him ten years ago: a young man, short blonde hair, small wide eyes.
“Hmm?” the fox replied, but still distracted by a few small spirits in his hands.
“What do you think about humans?” he asked. Akaashi eyed the spirit carefully as they turned their head slowly with their eyes widened just a little bit, smirking and shooing the poor little spirits they’d played around with.
“Now you’re asking me that?”
Akaashi shrugged. “I’m curious, so I decided to ask.”
They let out a soft chuckle before rolling closer to Akaashi. He could feel warmth from their body—he’d gotten so used to it that the idea that he had once thought spirits had cold bodies was silly. “Well, I think they’re interesting. I enjoy watching them and seeing their reactions to many things, the appearance of a spirit in front of them for example.”
“Was that why you made me lost ten years ago?
“I guess you could say that, yes."
“I see.”
Akaashi seemed to be lost in thought as he placed a finger on the edge of his lips with his eyebrows furrowed. He tapped his chin a couple times, tongue passing over his lips, and the spirit couldn’t help to feel a little curious. “Why are you suddenly asking?”
The boy was still staring blankly into the ground then blinked once, twice, thrice before he finally turned his head to the fox. “Because I think I might be in love with you.”
A B-, and… that’s it for today. He gathers all the assignment papers, stacks them, and makes sure every one of them has been graded. All that’s left is uploading the grades... The temptation to just do it on Monday is very high, but Akaashi manages to convince himself to finish it all now.
“In love with me? You’re 20 years too early, boy,” the fox replied while wiping a single tear on his cheek from laughing a little too much. Akaashi knew they’d have this reaction but couldn’t help feeling a little offended, though at the same time he knew there was something underneath that laugh. He stared at them for a few more seconds when the loud laughter became slightly awkward and silence replaced their confident voice. Amusement and surprise, Akaashi decided.
“Alright, then,” the boy said, his eyes still watching the fox's eyes, which were now staring carefully back at him despite his grin. “I'll take your word for it. After graduation next week, I’ll leave." He paused. The fox had his lower face hidden under his left hand, but that didn't hide the startled look on their eyes. It was a rare sight, and Akaashi secretly enjoyed it. "I'll leave, go out, see the world. Then I’ll come back here in 20 years to find you. That sounds fair, right?"
Silence bloomed for what seemed like forever, and the chilly spring wind turned into a warm breath of air when it was once again broken by the fox's laugh. “I've told you before that you're an interesting lad, but boy, I change my mind! You're the most interesting human, no, the most interesting creature I've ever met," they said, having the second best laugh for the day while all Akaashi could think of was how their current expression exactly described the phrase 'grinning ear to ear'. "Very well. 20 years from now, on this date and this same hour, I’ll be here, if you decide to come.”
And that concludes the work of this week, Akaashi thinks as he saves his spreadsheet document and closes his laptop. He cleans up his desk, tidies his stationeries, puts laptop to his bag, returns books to the bookshelf, stacks graded papers unto the “done" box, adjusts the collar of his light blue shirt. All done.
The black-haired closes his office’s door, locking while pondering what he should have for dinner. He greets back a couple of students passing him as he gets out of the building, feeling the breeze bumping into his cheeks. He shudders a little and begins walking.
The orange autumn leaves falling from the trees remind him of a certain fox's name.