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Even before he met Tanuma—ever since he came here, Natsume has been feeling different. Not different in the way that he's always different. Different inside himself... He doesn't dislike it but he doesn't want to get used to this feeling; he doesn't want to get too comfortable.
Nevertheless he couldn't help getting excited, although he knew he shouldn't, when he heard there was someone who seems to see things that aren't there—someone who might be like him. Someone who had heard the same about him, maybe, and was looking for him. Natsume has been burned by that before... but still, that first glimpse of the dark haired boy at the window made something shift inside him, like a piece slipping into place.
The slow shifting hasn't stopped since then. When he sees the reflections on the ceiling at Tanuma's, chiaroscuro sunlight and goldfish, the shifting amplifies. Sliding inside himself, he follows Tanuma to the door. "Look," Tanuma says, smiling as he gestures to the backyard through the open doorway. "The garden doesn't have a pond."
Even before he looks, Natsume knows there is one. As he gazes at it, the shifting opens a luminous fissure inside him where he's always thought there was nothing; another shift and he slips down inside the luminosity.
He's not sure how long they've been standing there before Tanuma says, "There's a pond, isn't there?"
Natsume nods.
"What color are the fish?"
"Red." Natsume takes a breath as a small shadow, at once strange and familiar, flutters across the pond, swooping around the fish as they leap from sunlight-dazzled water. "They're red..."
He turns to Tanuma, exhales just before their mouths touch.
The kiss is new but Natsume has seen this pond; he has been here before.
Natsume has been here before. Not to this exact institution but to ones enough like it that they may as well all be the same. So he knows the answer when the woman in the white coat says, "Do you know why you're here?"
Because I'm troublesome. Because I'm different; because I'm weird. Because I see things no one else does. Because nobody wants me. Because I don't fit anywhere.
He knows why he's here but he doesn't say anything.
"The relatives you've been living with are not able to take care of you anymore," the woman says. Natsume wonders if she knows that's a lie. If so, she's probably only lying to spare his feelings, so he doesn't hold it against her.
She explains that they've located another relative to take him in but, since he can't come right away, Natsume is to stay here awhile. When she stops talking but keeps looking at him, he nods. She seems satisfied and stands up. "Come along, then. I'll introduce you to the other children."
He counts eight other kids in the room she takes him to. Some of them look a few years older than he is and some even younger. They all glance up for the introduction and then go back to drawing with crayons on huge pieces of paper. The woman in the white coat gives him some paper and tells him he can draw too.
Natsume looks at the blank piece of paper in front of him. He looks up at the woman in the white coat. "What should I draw?"
She smiles. "Whatever you like. Whatever comes to mind."
He looks at the piece of paper again, fingers curled loosely around the crayon he picked up without looking at the color.
"Why don't you draw your favorite place?" the woman in the white coat suggests.
Natsume looks at the blank paper. It turns out the crayon he picked up is orange. He draws orange lines on the paper, turning them into a box, turning the box into a house. The woman in the white coat pats him on the shoulder and moves away.
He does a lot of drawing while he's there. After that first time, when the answer didn't really help him, Natsume stops asking what to draw. The woman in the white coat wants to talk about his drawings but Natsume doesn't have anything to say about them.
One time Natsume draws a spiderweb he sees in the corner. He draws it a couple of times. The woman in the white coat wants to know about it, why he keeps drawing it. He shrugs. That's not good enough for the woman in the white coat and she asks him more questions he doesn't have answers for, until one of the other kids says, "He's drawing it because it's cool."
The kid, a year older, grins when Natsume looks at him and Natsume can't help smiling back.
The next day, Natsume isn't the only one drawing spiderwebs.
Maybe it's because of that, that the spiderweb is gone the day after. Natsume doesn't have anything to draw so he draws a house he's never seen, like he did his first day here. It's not his old house; the woman in the white coat had asked that and Natsume had tried to explain it was just a house. She'd written something down then, her mouth curved in a way that made him think he shouldn't draw houses.
She doesn't ask him about the house this time but his friend does. "Not the spiderweb today?"
"Well," Natsume glances at the empty corner, "it's not there anymore."
"Oh, okay."
His friend doesn't even look in the direction of the corner and Natsume realizes it wasn't a spiderweb after all. This kid, who he thought was just like him, never saw it at all. Natsume is alone again. Not again: still.
The kid must feel the distance between them too because after a couple of days, they still smile at each other but they don't sit together or talk anymore.
That's when Natsume starts seeing the shadows from the corner of his eye. He doesn't know how long they've been following him—awhile, maybe, and he just didn't notice when he had a friend. Anyhow he doesn't try to look at them whenever he senses them, because he doesn't want to know what they are; he already knows too much.
The crayon Natsume picks up first today is green. The blunt end of the crayon is chipped but the point is okay so he starts drawing lines. He turns them into grass: an ocean of grass.
He trades the green crayon for a blue one. The end of this one is chipped too; maybe there's something wrong with the whole box. There's nothing wrong with how it draws, of course. He makes a circle in the grass ocean, puts a dot inside the circle, off-center.
After he adds the other eye, he sits back and looks at the picture. He thought it was going to be a strange fish in the strange grass ocean but now he thinks the face might be him.
His brow furrows when he sees the upper left corner of the paper is torn. He didn't notice that before but it's fine; it's not like his picture is very good and even if it were, he wouldn't have anyone to give it to. He bends to the paper again to start drawing his body.
As he's reaching for a brown crayon, a flash of movement tugs at the edge of his attention. Natsume doesn't want to look up. He doesn't know what he's going to see but he already knows he doesn't want to see it. He looks anyhow:
The shadow youkai is looking at him. Right into his eyes.
Natsume looks back into its one eye. Even looking at it directly, it still looks like a shadow. It's small, so small it could probably fit in his hand. It's holding a shard of brown crayon; Natsume looks at the one in his hand and sees a chip gone from the end. He looks down in front of the youkai and sees the missing corner of his paper, a drawing there:
A green ocean of grass, a small blue figure lost in it.
Natsume looks at the youkai again. Then he bends to his drawing and adds a brown tree to it.
When he looks at the youkai's drawing, he sees a brown tree there too.
As he draws another tree, he keeps glancing at the youkai. It's focused on his hand, watching his movements. Then it bends over its drawing. It's too fast for Natsume to follow but when it sits back, he sees another tree in the youkai's drawing.
He sits up straight and the youkai does too. When he puts his crayon down, the youkai puts down the shard. Natsume leans forward and the youkai does too; it tilts its head when Natsume does. Natsume blinks but since his eyes are closed during part of it, he can't tell if the youkai blinked too, so this time he tries winking.
The youkai looks at him with its one eye. Then it turns its head, which is not something Natsume did and he thinks it must not be copying everything he does after all. But as the head keeps turning, another eye on the side comes into view. The youkai closes its front eye.
Natsume laughs. The youkai looks at him; either it doesn't know how to laugh or it can't, or anyhow it doesn't.
Now Natsume pushes his drawing to the side and the youkai does too. Natsume leans forward, stretching out his arm, placing his hand palm-up in front of the youkai for it to climb into.
But of course, the youkai also stretches out its arm and lays its hand on the floor palm-up.
Natsume's mouth quirks down on one side. The youkai is gazing up at him intently, waiting for the next thing to copy. When he thinks of how fast the youkai moved when it was drawing, Natsume knows he wouldn't be able to catch it if he grabbed for it. He doesn't know why he wants to pick it up but he does. It looks worried and scared. He wonders if that's the youkai's own expression or if it's copying him. Does Natsume really look that worried and scared? He hopes not; what relative will take him in if he looks like that?
The youkai is still watching him, waiting. "Can you understand me?" Natsume whispers. The youkai just keeps looking at him. "Can you climb in?" Natsume tries, even though he doesn't know if the youkai can hear him or if it can understand him if it does. "In here?" He taps his hand, palm up and open, against the floor. The youkai looks up from Natume's hand to his face, and mimics the gesture.
Natsume sighs. It's stupid to think he can communicate with a youkai.
Then, just as he's about to give up, he gets an idea. He extends two of the fingers of his other hand, tucking his thumb and the other fingers against his palm as he places the fingertips against the floor. Then he "walks" into his open hand. He looks at the youkai to see if it has understood but it's just copying him with its own hands.
"No." Frustrated, Natsume shakes his head and so does the youkai.
Natsume sets up his walking fingers again. This time, he points to them and then to the youkai before putting his other hand flat on the floor and walking into it. He draws his hand out from under his fingertips, points to the walking fingers and then to the youkai once more.
The youkai starts to copy him—and then it looks at him. Its eye opens wider, its mouth comes open into a silent o. Natsume holds his breath. The fingertips of his open hand twitch hopefully.
Still looking at his face, the youkai stands up. Natsume smiles and nods. The youkai does something with its mouth that might be a smile and, with a nod, looks at Natsume's hand. It takes a step forward, looks up and, when Natsume smiles again, keeps its gaze on his face as it walks to his hand. Another hesitation; and then it climbs in.
Natsume lifts his hand up until the youkai is eye level with him. Even this close, it looks like a shadow. It feels solid, though; solid and delicate and soft. The softest thing Natsume has ever touched.
When he looks closer, he sees that the youkai has more than two eyes: it has a ring of eyes all around its head. Not all of them are open, though; some look damaged, gashes scratched across them. In a way, Natsume thinks, this youkai is not so different from him: he sees things he shouldn't, the youkai can't see everything it should.
"I want to help you," Natsume decides.
The youkai blinks up at him with its undamaged front eye.
They can't talk to each other—but they can draw. When no one is looking, he hides a crayon inside each of his slippers. He can't hide the paper that way and at first he doesn't know how he's going to get any back to his room without being suspicious. At the end of drawing time, they're supposed to leave their pictures with the woman in the white coat. This time, though, Natsume asks if he can keep his.
The woman in the white coat raises her eyebrows. "Why do you want to keep this one?"
He wasn't expecting such a question and doesn't have an answer prepared but he's afraid that if he shrugs, he won't be allowed to take it. "Um," he says. "I like this one?"
Looking at the picture now, she makes a sound that probably means something to her but doesn't mean anything to Natsume. Then she smiles. "Very good. All right, Takashi, you may keep this one."
In his room, Natsume turns the picture over and smooths out the paper. He sets down the crayons and waits for the youkai to draw something.
After a few moments he realizes the youkai is waiting for him to draw something. If he wants the youkai to tell him how it got here and what it needs to get out, then Natsume should do the same. He draws a figure, points to himself and then to the figure. When he thinks the youkai understands that's him, he draws himself with some relatives. Then he draws a youkai—nothing like the little shadow youkai but unmistakably a youkai. He draws angry faces on his relatives, and he draws himself alone, and he draws himself drawing while the woman in the white coat stands there. He draws the little shadow youkai next to him. Finally, he draws a faceless relative taking his hand. (He's tempted to draw an arrow from the last faceless relative back to the first ones he drew, but he doesn't want to confuse the youkai.)
It takes a really long time to draw all that but the little youkai watches the whole while, never looking away.
When he's done, Natsume lets the youkai study the drawings.
At last the youkai looks up from them. Natsume hits the crayon against the floor to break a piece off the end, which he sets down in front of the youkai.
The little youkai begins to draw. Natsume leans closer to look at the images that appear on the paper. They're much more complicated than the ones Natsume drew so he has to look at them for longer than the youkai looked at his, but he figures out that the youkai is a type that doesn't move through time the way humans do. If he's understanding correctly, this little youkai already has "memories" of meeting him in the future—at least Natsume thinks that's supposed to be him as a grown up, or anyhow older than he is now. He points at the crayon figure and then at himself, and the youkai nods.
Natsume keeps studying the paper. It actually looks like one big drawing, rather than a series like the ones he drew. It seems that the world itself has dreams or something like dreams, and that's where the little shadow youkai is from; that's where it's trying to get back to. In the world's dreamscape, the little shadow youkai has wings—and Natsume realizes that in the form before him now, it isn't fully grown yet. It fell out of the dreamscape and, from the drawings, it seems it needs wings to get back. It needs to cocoon to transform and it needs a web to support the cocoon. The "spiderweb" Natsume saw was actually a support web for the youkai's cocoon.
The little youkai keeps trying to spin new webs and new cocoons but they keep getting damaged, and the little youkai keeps getting damaged too.
In one corner of the picture, though, there's an undamaged web attached to something, a cocoon cradled in it safely. Natsume bends closer. It looks like—uncertainly, he points at the figure the web is spun around and then at himself.
The little shadow youkai nods.
Natsume takes a breath.
And nods too.
He holds out a hand and the youkai climbs in. They look at each other for a few breaths before Natsume lifts his hand to his shoulder and feels the youkai step off.
The web it spins goes all around his head. It even goes over his eyes but Natsume can see through it. It feels weird but not bad; the strands of the web and cocoon are somehow even softer than the youkai. When he looks in the mirror, the strands look ever so delicate but when he touches one, he feels its strength. He lets his fingertip go along the strand, back to where the youkai is nestled behind his ear.
He really hopes this works.
For the next few days, he walks around with a web spun around his head and a youkai cocooned behind his ear. No one says anything. No one gives him a second glance. The web doesn't go over his mouth, just his eyes and nose, so he can still eat and drink. He can still breathe normally and he can see what's going on around him.
He sees other things too, in shadows and light: a fat cat that follows a boy everywhere, a pond shimmering on the ceiling in the corner of a room, a book with ragged edges inside where pages have been torn out and a different name on every page still in it. He sees some silhouettes that must be youkai and others that he thinks are human: an older couple, a man in a hat, a girl who carries a stick everywhere, two boys at a pond that doesn't shimmer on a ceiling.
Of all the things he sees inside the web, the pond is Natsume's favorite. The pond is the only thing he sees in color in here. Not the pond itself but three red flashes, fish leaping from water into sunlight and splashing down again.
It's so peaceful and beautiful at the pond, and Natsume wishes he could stay here forever. But after five days, strands of the spiderweb start disentangling and drifting away. The cocoon breaks and the youkai emerges. It walks down Natsume's arm to his hand, one spun strand still connected, trailing behind it. When it extends its wings, Natsume sees they have eyes too. All of the eyes wink and blink at him. Natsume blinks and winks in return.
The little shadow youkai flaps its wings and rises up. It flutters in a spiral around Natsume and he spins to watch its flight. The one strand is still dangling and Natsume reaches out for it but the youkai is moving too quickly for his hand—and then it's gone. He feels something of himself go with it.
Natsume is alone again.
He looks around the room, wondering why he's standing in the middle of it.
Later that day, he finds a piece of paper folded up and hidden away. He unfolds it, wondering if it belonged to the kid who lived here before him. There are drawings on both sides. He recognizes one as something he did a few days ago, himself in an ocean of grass. Some of the drawings on the other side look like he might have done them too but he doesn't remember them. He definitely didn't do most of the drawings on the back.
He stares at them until his hands start to shake. Then he rips up the paper and all the pictures on it.
He's alone for a long time after that. No matter where he goes and who he meets, he's alone.
That's why it's dangerous when he comes to live with Touko and Shigeru—it would be better to feel alone instead of the way they make him feel, because sooner or later and in the end, alone is how he's going to be anyhow.
The dangerous feeling digs into him, though. The most dangerous thing about it is that it doesn't feel dangerous. Even as it's making him shift and slide inside himself, he doesn't feel in danger...
And then he sees the pond shimmering on Tanuma's ceiling, silhouette fish swimming through it. He and Tanuma stand by the pond in the backyard.
He kisses Tanuma, and Tanuma kisses him.
Fissures of light crack open, wide and wider, inside Natsume. Something flutters around him; he opens his eyes without breaking the kiss, catching the hovering shadow of the time youkai. The last lingering cocoon strand disentangles from it, floats towards Natsume; he blinks when it touches him, lets his eyes stay closed as he touches Tanuma's face in the kiss. As the spun strand melts into him, he emerges from the fissures inside himself, expanding and filling all the empty space inside him.
"Wow," Tanuma says when the kiss breaks. The wonderment in his eyes is spilling out over his face. "What are you seeing?"
Everything. The whole world; the universe; myself.
Natsume looks at the pond: flashes of red as fish leap from the water into the sunlight, splash back down.
"Three red fish." He smiles as he turns to Tanuma and, when Tanuma smiles back, kisses him again.