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He is searching.
For what, he doesn’t know. But it feels like he’s drowning if he doesn’t, drowning in longing and grief and want-
And so he searches.
It starts small, a glimpse of a girl.
Black hair, in pigtails. Small in stature, clothed in a pink kimono with a flower pattern.
But her eyes. Turquoise and beautiful and they are the wrong shade, his mind recognizes, but they are close enough that he doesn’t feel like he’s dying.
He just watches, for a few months.
Watches her go about her daily life, peaceful and prosperous with only childish concerns like exams and friends that plague her. Her parents are not particularly well-off, but they are kind. They love their daughter with all their hearts, and take as good care of her as they can.
But he watches them argue, sometimes, watches the girl storm out in tears but always be grasped in a hug, once everything is over. And she cries and apologizes for her tantrums, and her parents reassure her.
He thinks, somewhere deep inside, that he could do better. He could let her never shed a tear, let her be happy, always, if she just became a demon like him.
It is a bitter thought.
It is inconceivable, the logical part of him says. She is a child, if you can barely stay afloat, how will you keep her alive?
The emotional part of him could not care less.
She is a child, but she is his.
But her parents love her, to an almost painful extent, work hard all day and take more jobs to give her good gifts and good food.
So he watches, and does not act.
But the thought festers. Festers until she is all he can think about, until the hours he spends hunting for himself or going back to the Garden feel unbearable, feel like he is drowning all over again, but with an anchor pulling him down this time.
It festers, so he sends an errant demon to her house on the outskirts of their little town, if only to get rid of her parents.
He sees her father step outside, broom in hand. He sees him fall, and does nothing.
He feels nothing except satisfaction, that one of his biggest obstacles to her is gone.
Her mother falls next, but not before hiding her daughter. She tucks her away in a closet, kisses her forehead tearfully and runs, leading the demon away from her, using herself as bait.
The scene makes him feel… something.
Grief, perhaps, and he wonders, just briefly, if something like this had happened to him too, if he had hid while another person runs.
He shakes the thought off easily. It doesn’t matter. The past is the past.
He drops down from his perch easily, slaughters the demon in one swift slash of his claws and traps him in a ball of water that he tosses into his shadow anyway. The distinctive hiss of the Garden opening up is what greets the demon, and the sphere and its prisoner he hands to Kuchinawa’s mercy.
The woman’s gratefulness only lasts for a second, as she collapses on the ground, her body convulsing as he controls the water in her body and makes her strangle herself.
He packs her corpse neatly in a small ball, and sets back towards the house.
The town is still bustling, and he was lucky that the woman had run towards a side street, or else a slayer might be alerted, he reflects.
He walks silently, human disguise firmly in place.
When he enters the house, the girl greets him with a frantic hug, her clammy hands gripping him tightly as her tears wet his kimono. She looks up only when he does not hug back, and stumbles backwards terrified.
“Your parents are dead.”
He speaks, cold and impersonal.
“No matter. I will take good care of you.”
Before she can scream, his hand is in her head and his blood is rushing through her body.
She screams then. Her body convulses just like her mother did, but she is hoping she could do what her mother could not and survive him.
He does not know what he would do if she does not, and thus prays to his lord that she will.
She stops trembling eventually, her body falling slack, two small horns growing on her forehead.
With muted relief, he picks her up, and sets out on a hunt. Her parents alone would hardly be filling enough.
-
He carves her the charm on a whim.
A symbol of his ownership, he decides. Of his care. That way, no demon would dare to touch her.
A tiny fox mask is carved under the moonlight as she feasts, unknowingly on her parents and on her best friends.
Three concentric circles, just like her pupils, in the same brilliant turquoise as an girl’s eyes.
He holds it up to the light, and smiles. Perfect.
-
She wears it on her neck, on a crimson cord the color of blood.
The irony never occurs to him.
-
Just like the charm, her name is given on a whim.
He is eying her pupils when he decides on the name.
Mawani.
Ma for truth, and wani for circle.
He is not sure why he chooses the kanji for truth, when her life with him has been built on a lie, the lie that he rescued her from parents who did not love her.
It is familiar, he thinks. Familiar in the same aching way her eyes are, familiar in a sense of drowning and pain and life.
Mawani, he decides. He names her as such, and takes her to the Garden.
Iwata is talking to her when he comes back, and he glares at the wind demon in disdain as he ushers Mawani away from him.
Iwata glares back, unspeakable venom in his eyes.
The thing is, they are similar. Both know that. But where Iwata has Genya, he has none.
So while he steals children, Iwata merely watches, and scorns him for doing as he did to Mawani.
He resents him for that. For being lucky enough to have someone but still acting like he, who has nothing, should be held the same standards.
It never occurs to him that he should have standards in the first place. It never occurs to him that he never learnt Mawani’s original name, that though he has spent countless hours watching her, he still does not know it.
To him, her only name is Mawani.
That is all she is and ever will be.
-
Mawani dies to a slayer in a moment of his negligence, when he is too occupied staring at a boy with peach pink hair and gentle lavender eyes to keep her in sight.
The slayer receives a deservingly gruesome death, but his heart is barely in it.
He is too fixed on that boy.
He is familiar, in the same way Mawani was.
He sees the bun he is wearing, the feminine features and hair comb, but it is no matter, he decides.
He untied Mawani’s hair, even to her protests. He can change this boy, he is sure.
He is Upper Three, after all.
He will get what he wants.
(He never wonders why the boy, Iyuto, he decides ahead of time, should be a boy.
Why would he?
Haseiko is a shallow demon, as shallow as rock pools at low tide and as fickle as the waves.
That is fact.)
-
Perhaps Mawani eventually becomes something more, in someone’s mind.
Iwata sees her in every turqoise-eyed fox-child that follows.
To him, at least, she is more than a medium through which Haseiko’s soul does not feel like sinking.
(But perhaps it is worse, to be seen as a symbol.)