Chapter Text
Fujiwara no Mokou sat against a bamboo shoot at the edge of the clearing, blowing smoke from her kiseru. A fire crackled in front of her, the only light in an otherwise pitch-black night.
Mokou slouched with another puff, eyes craned upward. No stars in sight.
No Moon, either. Good. She snorted and took another drag from her pipe.
Mokou closed her eyes, her kiseru falling out of her mouth and spilling tobacco all over the ground. She held her breath, heat warming her lungs.
"Smoking's bad for you, you know."
Mokou, after a beat, exhaled through her nostrils, not bothering to dignify the voice with a response. The shuffling of clothes and the scraping of boots against the ground meant they got comfortable by the fire. Were she younger, she probably would have put it out just to spite them, assuming they weren't already turned into charcoal for the intrusion.
"Apparently," the stranger continued, chipper and irritating, "it can cause lung cancer, which is when the stuff in your lungs start growing out of control, and then it gets so hard to breathe that you end up dying of asphyxiation, or something like that."
After trying and failing to come up with a witty retort, the immortal grumbled. "Good," she muttered. She would have taken another swig from her kiseru to prove her point, but it lay in a cold heap somewhere beside her.
Mokou listened half-heartedly for any more movement, either from the guy getting up and leaving or attempting an attack. But she only heard the crackle-snap of a fire she couldn't see. Well, as long as she didn't have to talk, she guessed it was fine.
Crackle-crackle
"...Almost sounds like you want to die..."
"Do you?" Mokou began to seriously consider putting the flames out anyway.
"Wha—no!” the intruder barked, and Mokou knew she'd never get along with this guy. "Dying hurts, you know! I try to avoid it if I can help it!"
That made Mokou pause. Loud and annoying as he was, the connotations were not lost on her. She didn't like dying all that much either. The aches that came after were always a pain to deal with.
She tried to shift the pipe in her mouth, only to remember it was on the ground. She licked her teeth instead.
"Not what I meant," Mokou began. Another flame caught, this one familiar and caged in her ribs.
“Do you…” It had burned once before, a long, long time ago. Right before she got her mitts on that elixir, when she was young and stupid and had no idea what she was getting herself into. She recognized the feeling, tried to quash it, but at the same time–“Do you want to die and stay dead, is what I mean.”
Crackle-pop-crackle
Hm. No answer. Maybe she could get along with this guy.
Mokou opened her eyes.
Sitting cross-legged before the fire was a raven-haired man adorned in a long, black cloak that draped against the grass he sat on. His cheek rested on a fist covered in black markings, and a tattered green sleeve wrapped around an arm. A dirty orange scarf covered his neck, and more notably, a whip coiled at his hip. The man craned his neck over, and Mokou swallowed.
Staring into her own were the eyes of a rotting corpse. Someone who had seen death far more times than either of them could care to count, and she briefly wondered if this was really the same overbearing, obnoxious intruder that wormed into her privacy just a minute ago.
““You're like me.””
Mokou paused at the double tone. The man widened his eyes a fraction, blinked in apparent surprise, then chuckled and shook his head. It was almost eerie how animated his actions were in comparison to what lay behind those dead eyes.
Then the stranger pushed himself up on his feet with a cocky grin. He jutted his hips out, placed a hand on his side, and pointed skyward in an incredibly stupid-looking pose.
Mokou had to rub her eyes to make sure her boredom didn't get so bad that she started hallucinating.
“Natsuki Subaru, at your service! Homeless, clueless, broke beyond compare, and completely and utterly lost at the moment! Nice to meet you!”
Mokou, bewildered, only noticed the newly named Natsuki Subaru's outstretched hand after she let go of it.
“Mokou.” Her mouth twitched, and she concluded that she must be smiling.
And so, for the first time in... probably her entire life, thinking about it, Fujiwara no Mokou had made a friend.