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Hiromasa only realized how long it had been since he had last seen Seimei when he saw the leaf.
One of his close friends planned to have a night concert to distract them all from the rising heat of summer. He had begged Hiromasa's help, saying that he was by far the greater musician and promising that he could have everything just how he liked. And so for weeks now, Hiromasa had been busy soliciting the best musicians he knew and arranging everything.
There had been several practices already, and the list of songs was almost prepared. Hiromasa took some instruments and written music out to the fishing pavilion to finalize the selection while catching the faint breezes that stirred the water and delighting in the fish swimming, jewel-like, under the water.
A fresh maple leaf, bright and green, happened to drift by as he admired the fish, knocked early from its tree somehow or other. The water brought it right by the pavilion, and Hiromasa held back his sleeve and leaned over to pluck it out, careful not to fall in himself.
The leaf reminded him of Seimei as soon as he had it in his hand – maple leaves were always pretty, particularly when the sunlight glimmered through them or when they grew crimson with autumn, but this one had a particularly spectacular star shape that echoed the ones that decorated Seimei's estate and spells.
Suddenly missing him – and feeling a little bad for how much time had passed since he last visited or wrote him, although Seimei hadn't written, either, and might well have been busy himself – Hiromasa shoved aside the music he'd brought to hastily write a letter.
He perhaps nattered on a bit long about the preparations for the concert, how he'd picked older Chinese pieces for nostalgia, how they would end on a recent Japanese one, and how diligently he had searched the scores for cooling feelings. But he promised to play one particularly lovely piece for Seimei the next time he visited. Seimei may not have been the type for parties (or the type to be invited to them), but he did enjoy music, and Hiromasa always delighted when he could see the effect a particular song had on Seimei. There were songs that made him relax, boneless, into his favorite pillar, songs that made him perk up and tilt his head, songs that made him stare very fondly at Hiromasa....
The letter was sent off with the maple leaf, and when no reply came, Hiromasa decided that Seimei must have been occupied after all. Perhaps the beautiful skies recently had lent themselves especially well to astronomical observations, or perhaps he'd found himself a magical research project, or perhaps his ear was being bent by some acquaintance at court.
Distracted by his concert, Hiromasa let Seimei be for several days until he came home after a long practice to find the servants aflutter.
They said there had been a commotion in his quarters shortly before his return and a spirit had entered them, which was incredibly worrying and almost had him turn right on his heel to get Seimei's help. Then one of them added, "I saw it, it had the shape of a girl."
Ah. "A girl with a strange hairstyle?" Hiromasa asked, gesturing from his head. "Probably wearing blue?"
"Yes," the servant added. "Her robe was made of an odd fabric, shining like beaten silk but moving like water, and it was a very bright blue." He peered at Hiromasa, who now felt rather less concerned.
"It's one of Seimei's spirits," he said, beaming at them. "She's quite harmless."
Their unease didn't relax as much as Hiromasa's did – even the men that regularly escorted him to Seimei's estate never entirely seemed to trust the way the gates opened and closed on their own – but at least the main part of their anxiety seemed to die down. He ordered that someone should bring honeyed water and went to go see why Mitsumushi had come to visit him.
When he arrived, the screens were all flung open, and Mitsumushi crouched on the edge of the walkway, her eyes fixed on the flowers of the garden. Today, her outer robe was as blue as the sky above at her shoulders and deep indigo at the bottom, and it flowed around her as she jumped up to greet him.
She smiled at him, then smiled wider when offered the honeyed water; to his consternation, she stuck her fingers in the cup first. It was only after she had licked her fingers clean that she took a deep, unladylike gulp. Perhaps it was some butterfly habit, Hiromasa told himself, though one that was less charming than her fascination with flowers. Sometimes Seimei's shikigami didn't quite seem to know how to act human, but she had seen them eating and drinking plenty of times.
"What's brought you here?" he asked. As lovely as it was to see her, this had never happened before. Now he was worried again about what that could mean. "Has something happened with Seimei?"
"Seimei needs help," she said.
Hiromasa frowned, a weight growing in his chest. "Is he hurt? Ill? Cursed?"
She shook her head; she didn't seem overly worried, at least, and she took another drink. "Seimei needs help," she repeated. "Seimei needs Lord Hiromasa."
"Needs me?" It was hard to imagine what kind of trouble Seimei might have gotten himself into that he needed Hiromasa's assistance. But of course he would go. "What kind of help does he need?" he asked as he stepped behind a screen and went further into the room. "Did he say?"
"Seimei didn't say," she said, trailing him in. "Seimei didn't ask."
Hiromasa had knelt to retrieve Ha-futatsu from its case, as it had come in handy so often before, but he looked up at her words, startled. "He didn't send you?"
She took one last gulp from her cup and set it on his writing desk, then shook her head.
The weight in his chest sank further down, pulling at his insides. He hastily retrieved Ha-futatsu and puts its case away. "What happened? Is he alright?" Had she come because Seimei couldn't send for assistance?
"Not hurt," she repeated. "But stubborn." She glided several steps forward and tugged on his sleeve. "Come and help."
As confused as he was worried, Hiromasa hastened away with her and called for an ox-cart. It didn't seem very proper to share one with her, even if she wasn't an ordinary noble lady, but she followed him right in, and everyone else was too thrown by her presence to protest overmuch about the propriety of it.
Resting did feel good after the long day, but it was hard to enjoy himself much when different potential stories kept running through his head – a spell that awry, or an attack by a rival onmyouji. Surely it was not anything mundane where Seimei was involved. Why were ox-carts so slow?
He did try to take some comfort in the way Mitsumushi kept peeking out the curtains and giggling under her breath at whatever she saw. If she wasn't deathly concerned, then Seimei couldn't be in any serious way, although that circled around to the problem of what Seimei might need him for that was urgent enough that she had come to fetch him.
When they finally arrived, he dismissed the retainers and the cart – there hadn't been any time for them to pack any provisions for waiting, and he suspected this wouldn't be a short affair. Then he turned around and was faced with a gate that was very much shut.
Mitsumushi approached the gate and put her hand upon it, but nothing happened. "Seimei," she called, and then, "Seimei," high and frustrated. The gate didn't yield to her, however.
Seimei's gate had never remained closed to him before. Hiromasa, too, called Seimei's name, but he wasn't surprised when that had as much of a result as it had for Mitsumushi.
"Does Seimei not want me here?" he asked her. Nothing about this situation was making sense, and his head was beginning to ache almost as much as his heart was.
"Stubborn," she said. She glared at the gate and stomped her foot, then whirled and tugged on his sleeve again.
She led him down the road, and soon the trees of their favorite garden were visible over the bounding wall. Hiromasa eyed it for a moment, wondering if she meant for them to clamber over – surely that wouldn't work? But then she grabbed his arm more insistently, and then she grabbed his other one, too, and then—
They were flying! Hiromasa yelled when his feet left the ground, startled out of his skin, but Mitsumushi ignored him and guided them on a high bound over the wall. The ground fell away, a dizzying sight, and then they passed over part of the garden and the dirt rushed up to meet them – gently, Mitsumushi set him down.
Hiromasa stumbled and fell on his backside. He tried to blink away the tumbling sensation that filled his head. His heart was racing away, and it took him a long moment to catch his breath.
Yes, he was safely back on the ground now, solid beneath him, and the trees were once again above him and not below. There was the maple that was half green and half red even though it was full summer, there was the hydrangea with delicate white and blue blooms, there was there the cosmos peeking out among the irises.
All very strange, but normal for Seimei's place. What was not normal was the way the house was closed up tight, with the shutters down in broad daylight.
Mitsumushi hadn't quite come down all the way to the earth, and now she glided to the veranda until her feet dipped to meet the wood. "Lord Hiromasa is here," she announced to the shutters, and then, more pleadingly: "Seimei?"
There was no reply that Hiromasa could detect, but as he stumbled to the veranda, much less elegant than she had been, her shoulders did seem to drop out of their tensed position.
"Seimei?" he called again as he clambered up. More and more mystified, and feeling as though he'd eaten a rock made of anxiety, he peered around but saw nothing obviously amiss. "Seimei, I – I don't know what's going on or what's happened, but Mitsumushi said that you needed help." Needed his help. Hiromasa held onto that.
Silence met him, but somehow, it seemed as though he could feel Seimei's presence now. He was here, behind these shutters.
Hiromasa touched one and said, "If there's anything I can do, let me help you." He spread his fingers out, the worry tightening his throat. There was no way he could force his way past these if Seimei didn't let him in, and there would be no jumping over them, either. "Even if I can only do a little, no matter what's happened to you. Please."
The shutter jerked minutely under his hand. Hiromasa drew it back, and then the shutters started to recede by themselves.
He looked up at Mitsumushi, who looked seriously back at him and nodded. Once the shutters were up, she pulled one of the screens open just enough to admit him.
The screen closed behind him as soon as he stepped in, leaving the room almost totally dark. Blind after being in the open evening sunlight, Hiromasa tried to recall the layout of the room and took a hesitant step forward.
"It's not pleasant."
Seimei's voice was like a sharp knife. But it relieved Hiromasa to hear it at all and slowed the thudding beat of his heart.
"I don't care," he said, taking another hesitant step. Yes, there was a standing curtain, its outline faint, and Seimei's voice had come from beyond it. "What is all of this about?" He hadn't felt this worried sick since, well, since the last time the capital had been attacked and Seimei had died, or almost died. Life had been quiet since then, and neither of them had come close to dying, and he very much preferred things like that.
As he began to edge around the curtain, there was a soft sound, like the last rib in a fan folding closed, and suddenly a lantern burst to life. Hiromasa's eyes, thankfully, hadn't yet gotten too used to the dark now. And there was Seimei!
For the first moment, Hiromasa felt a flood of relief at seeing Seimei alive, alert, and looking straight back at him. But ah, wait, no, something was wrong – he was without his hat, not even Seimei went around without his hat – and then he saw Seimei's face.
Hiromasa clapped a hand over his mouth and almost fell over again. He sank slowly to his knees instead, horrified.
Seimei had half turned into a fox.
But nothing about it was neat at all. This wasn't just a shadow of a tail, this wasn't the shape of foxes standing on two legs as he'd seen in a picture scroll.
Fur sprouted from his face, which was pulled halfway into a snout, and the reason he had no hat on was that his ears had migrated up his head and elongated, not the perky upright things Hiromasa had seen on a fox and not the normal flat shape of a human's. His fingers – and Seimei had such wonderfully elegant fingers that could make shapes faster than Hiromasa could follow – had grown stunted and clawed, his hands narrowed like a paw.
There was nothing Hiromasa could do but stare, and stare, Seimei staring calmly back, until at last Seimei's mouth twisted. "I told you it wasn't pleasant," and even his voice was odd, pulled higher, as though this awful transformation had drawn his vocal cords tight.
Hiromasa wanted to cry for him, but he was in too much of a state of shock even for that.
'Were you cursed?" he asked, and Seimei shook his head, opened his mouth again. Before he could answer, though, Hiromasa blurted, "Does it hurt?"
If it was terrible to look at Seimei like this, how could it feel to be him? But Seimei started minutely at the question.
"Hurt? No, it doesn't hurt. And it's not a curse." His mouth twisted up this time, but in no way could it be called a smile. "This is my own fault."
"A spell…?" It seemed inconceivable that Seimei could mess up a spell so badly as to result in this, and yet he nodded.
"I've been working on correcting it," he said. He glanced in the direction from which Hiromasa had approached. "Mitsumushi wanted to bring you. I told her not to."
"But why?" Hiromasa asked. The weight in his chest had vanished, to be replaced with a chasm. "I know I'm no good with magic and spells, but I'd have dropped everything if I knew this had happened to you!"
Seimei's gaze fell, and he turned away a little, even raising his arm to cover the bottom part of his face, and oh, oh.
Hiromasa's heart broke again. He understood: Seimei hadn't wanted Hiromasa to see him like this.
And yet he had insisted, and Mitsumushi had insisted – and Seimei had, in the end, let him in. Lit a light so Hiromasa knew exactly what had occurred, this twisted form he had been forced into.
There was no way that Hiromasa could voice the thick feeling in his throat, so he grabbed the bottom of Seimei's sleeve instead. And slowly Seimei let him pull it down, his expression tense and unpleasant in a way that had nothing to do with his altered nose or the fur along his cheeks.
"You were right," said Hiromasa. "It's not pretty – but I don't think I've ever seen you look this unhappy, too."
"I suppose I might have looked worse when you were dead," Seimei said. Hiromasa flinched at that memory; everything had been very blurry and very painful, but he was still sure that Seimei had cried. He let go of Seimei's sleeve, and Seimei resettled his hand in his lap. "It doesn't hurt," he said, "but it's uncomfortable. It's not a natural form for anyone – even half-fox children look like human ones."
Hiromasa swallowed. They didn't talk about Seimei's family or his mysterious past, but he knew the rumors at court as well as anyone did. Before they had become friends, back when Seimei was simply a strange, distant figure he occasionally saw in passing, once or twice someone had leaned into him behind a fan to tell him horrid stories of his childhood. Then they had tittered at the thought of a child having to watch his mother vanish because he'd discovered a deep, shameful secret of hers.
Were any of those stories true? He didn't know. At times he was curious about where someone like Seimei had ever come from, and at times it didn't seem to matter, as though when they enfolded themselves in Seimei's estate and drank together and admired the busy birds or beautiful moon, nothing beyond the walls had anything to do with them.
"Then how did it happen?" he asked, trying to keep his voice level and calm. "How do you turn back? How can I help?"
Seimei picked up his fan, which had been laying nearly invisible on the mat next to him. It was difficult to watch him open it with his transformed hands, but when he flapped it, a cool breeze seemed to come straight from the snow-capped mountains painted on it, and several more lamps lit themselves.
"I received a request from a cousin of mine. On my mother's side," he said deliberately. "She lives near a temple and has of late become fascinated with nuns and what she's overheard from them. But she has no talent for transformation. Instead, she asked me to make her a human for some time so she could join them. Although I told her that she likely wouldn't be able to fully understand the dharma simply because she had a human shape, she was so persistent in pleading with me that I gave in."
"She wouldn't be able to understand properly because she would still be a fox at heart?" Hiromasa guessed.
Seimei nodded. "Foxes are very clever, but they are animals. Even if they take on a human shape and learn to act like humans, there's a level of understanding they can't reach."
"But even then, if she wants to try to learn the Buddha's teachings, it seems cruel to deny her," Hiromasa said, feeling sorry for this cousin. "It was good of you to agree to help her."
A tiny ghost of a smile came to Seimei's face, and despite how disturbing it was to look at him, Hiromasa was relieved to see it. That Seimei looked like this was one thing, but here he'd been suffering all by himself – Hiromasa hoped he hadn't been shut away like this the whole time. How long had he been like this? Days?
"Unfortunately," Seimei said, his expression turning more rueful, "I was distracted and prepared my spell incorrectly, and I didn't catch my mistake until the effects were already underway – instead of turning my cousin into a woman, I started to turn myself into a fox." He flicked his fan; another cool breeze rustled through the warm room. "As for turning myself back – well, since I've gone and made myself halfway to a yin animal, the energy of a human man would be helpful for returning to my usual self."
So he could do something! Hiromasa smiled at him.
Though he asked how it would all work, eager to return him to normal, Seimei said it would be best to do the spell when the sun was high, so they would have to wait for tomorrow. Mitsumushi brought them something to eat, humming, and she exchanged a funny series of raised eyebrows with Seimei that culminated in Seimei smiling and inclining his head – surely accepting that she'd been correct to fetch him, Hiromasa thought – which made Mitsumushi smile widely and jump up before she fetched another tray.
After that, Hiromasa might have left for the night. Seimei could have magicked up a couple of shikigami to escort him home. But it felt wrong to leave him like this – it felt wrong enough to even just venture onto the veranda to look at the half-full moon and leave Seimei frowning over a scroll floating mid-air in the room behind him.
But sitting and drinking alone wasn't very interesting, and bored, Hiromasa couldn't help but wander. "You should tell me which temple your cousin is going to," he said, poking at the elaborate, mysterious charts that lay on Seimei's desk. Were those stars? They looked like stars. "You'll fix the spell for her once you're yourself again, won't you?"
"Of course." Seimei leaned back and added, teasingly, "Did you want to go and visit her? They do say that foxes make very beautiful women...."
"Seimei!" He shook his head. "I'll make a donation to accompany her. And some of my mother's women are very devoted to the Buddha, I'm sure they would be thrilled to make a fine copy of the Lotus Sutra as well...."
He lost his train of thought as he came upon another star, but not drawn on paper. A leaf, dried but verdant. It was resting on top of the letter he'd sent.
"I'm sorry I didn't reply," Seimei said; Hiromasa's head jerked up. "It's difficult to hold a brush like this."
"If you couldn't write, you could have sent Mitsumushi before she decided to go herself," Hiromasa replied. "When I didn't hear from you, I thought you were simply busy with something." The concert was of no importance compared to Seimei's well-being, and by now anyone would accept without question an excuse that he needed to see Abe no Seimei right away.
"So I'm hearing from all quarters tonight, it seems," Seimei said with a little sigh. "I'd hoped to fix it by myself." He leaned back and glanced at Hiromasa. "You don't need to force yourself to look at me. I know it's disturbing for you."
Hiromasa pressed his lips together and turned more fully toward Seimei. "Yes, it is, but – if you had turned entirely into a fox, or even like this, and were happily continuing on as though it were normal for you, it would be disturbing, but I would think that I could get used to it. But like this... I know you said it doesn't hurt, and yet every time you go to pick up your chopsticks or your fan, the way you move is so awkward and painful."
Seimei's face softened. "You're a good man," he said quietly. "And I confess, I'm looking forward to having real fingers again."
Hiromasa looked back down at the letter, the one where he'd written so long about what musical pieces he was choosing while Seimei hadn't been able to pick up a brush, and he hit on something that might cheer them both up while they waited for tomorrow.
"I promised to play for you," he said. "Would you like to hear?"
He did, of course, and Hiromasa felt much more at peace while he played the particular song he'd promised Seimei; it was bright and sweet, and it seemed to make the glow of the lamps warmer.
When he finished that one, he went out to the veranda to breathe in the flowers and play some more, going with whichever piece came to mind when he raised Ha-futatsu. Seimei eventually left behind his scrolls and came to sit with him, the lamps extinguished. As long as Hiromasa didn't look at him overlong, it was the most normal things had been this whole evening – a clear sky sparkling with stars (he could even see their star) and filled with Ha-futatsu's music, and Seimei sitting close enough that Hiromasa could almost feel his warmth.
The next day, as Seimei set up his spell on the veranda, Mitsumushi helped, hardly needing a word to fetch what was needed and put it in place. She moved with her usual light footsteps, her loose robes fluttering about in the air as she worked; Seimei didn't quite manage his typical grace, though he looked to be trying. Hiromasa wondered what had happened to his limbs under the robes with his accidental half-fox transformation, though he wasn't sure he wanted to know.
What he did know was to stay out of their way lest he ruin one of Seimei's perfect star lines or upset the incense Mitsumushi had started smoldering. Still, Mitsumushi turned to him at one point and said, "Don't ruin the barrier."
"I won't ruin the barrier," he promised, giving her a nervous smile. She returned it more candidly.
A few minutes after, the spell preparations seemed to be finished. Seimei gave everything a slow once-over, and then he nodded. Mitsumushi nodded as well and withdrew.
Seimei directed him to sit in the center of the star with him. The incense filled the air with the scent of agarwood and sandalwood, a hint of something salty, while underneath Seimei's wild garden exuded the faint aroma of many flowers. Above, the sun shone warm and bright, nearing its zenith for the day without a cloud to block it.
"Relax," Seimei murmured. "Let the spell work."
For a moment, Hiromasa almost asked if it would hurt, thinking back to the way he'd seen some of the possession victims writhing – but it didn't matter. He would bear it if it hurt, for Seimei, who had been through much worse these last few days.
(And at times, not all of them seemed to have been in pain while Seimei exorcised them, exactly—)
Seimei began to chant, low and smooth. A hand settled on his back, right between his shoulder blades. Hiromasa didn't know what the syllables meant, but they sounded familiar. Some of Seimei's chants he had started to be able to tell apart by the rhythm and the soothing, meditative sounds, even if he hadn't yet inferred which were to be used when.
It didn't hurt. The spot Seimei was touching began to feel warmer, and perhaps there was a bit of tingling in his hands, a bit of rush in his veins.
Hiromasa listened to Seimei and relaxed every muscle in his body in case it would help, his eyes closed against the bright sunlight. One repetition of the syllables, two, three – then he lost count.
After several minutes, Seimei's voice began to lower in volume. Was something happening? Hiromasa couldn't see, and he didn't feel any different than when the spell had begun. Not weaker, not warmer. Seimei's hand didn't feel like it had changed from that stunted, half-paw shape, either.
Seimei's chant faded to nothing. There was a long moment of quiet – something was wrong, wasn't it? – and then he came around in front of Hiromasa. He was frowning, but more importantly, he looked very much the same. Perhaps, if Hiromasa was feeling optimistic, slightly less furry.
"What happened?" Hiromasa asked. Had he somehow ruined the spell after all, despite sitting still?
"There isn't anything wrong with the spell," Seimei said slowly. "It's the flow of energy. It's not enough to work."
"I don't suppose playing Ha-futatsu would help?"
Seimei's odd lips quirked up, and he glanced at Hiromasa's sleeve as though he could see right through the silk to the flute. "As marvelous a flute as it is, I don't believe it's the solution this time."
A shame. "Then what is?"
Seimei's tiny smile faded. He hesitated – how unlike him – and then said, "Perhaps direct skin contact—"
Hiromasa grabbed Seimei's left hand with both of his own, making him jump. "Like this?" He leaned forward. "If you need to touch me, Seimei, all you need do is ask."
"All I need do...?" Seimei echoed under his breath. There was a weight to his gaze; it was different now, tinted green, but Hiromasa felt it all the same.
Now it was his turn to hesitate; they hadn't given word to the tangle between them. If things were normal, Hiromasa might well have struggled for hours over writing a poem instead of the letter he'd sent with the maple leaf, choosing his metaphors carefully, agonizing over whether he should use pine as his imagery or jump to butterflies and chrysanthemums, before beginning all over again when he needed to choose the paper to write it on.
But things weren't normal with them, and the proof of that was less in how Seimei looked right now than in the unruly garden behind him. Butterflies that didn't care about the season. Red and green maple leaves sharing the same bough in high summer. Autumn cosmos peeking out from between irises in full bloom. Nothing at all in taste, and yet all harmonized in its own way. Somewhere that an emperor's grandson could drink with a low-ranked courtier.
Hiromasa swallowed. And then he gave Seimei his most earnest look.
"Yes," he said. "Anywhere."
Seimei gazed at him for a long moment. Then he raised his right hand to his lips, the half-transformed fingers awkwardly twisted into that gesture Hiromasa had seen so many times, and he quietly began to chant again.
This time was different; this time all the heat in his body seemed to flow towards his hands, toward where they clasped Seimei's. Hiromasa took a deep breath, filling his lungs with warm wood and soft sweetness, and urged his body to relax, to let the spell work over him, over them.
Seimei's right hand moved, shifted, catching Hiromasa's eye. It came slowly toward him – so slowly, drifting – and then it touched his cheek, just barely.
It felt odd. Not like having a paw touch his skin, like when Hiromasa had played with a placid young kitty. Not like having a hand touch him, either. Half skin, half fur, the impression of nails that were too thick to be human.
But it was Seimei's hand right now, so Hiromasa gazed back at him and let him touch.
When Hiromasa didn't push him away, Seimei's touch grew bolder, his fingers spreading out, pressing against the bones of his cheek and jaw.
And the spell was working.
Seimei's eyes were fading from that strange greenish color that caught the light oddly to their normal handsome, dark gaze. There was something in the air between them now, and in the places where their hands were touching. (Hiromasa's fingers were definitely tingling now, not like the pins-and-needles of being asleep but something more alive.)
That thing – the magic, Hiromasa hoped – increased as Seimei, still chanting low and steady, began to lean in. Slowly, again, his eyes not leaving Hiromasa's.
Hiromasa found himself swaying toward him, and then they met in the middle, their foreheads pressed together. Though his eyes crossed, Hiromasa could see the strands of fur on Seimei's face now melting into the skin, one by one. It made his stomach turn, but however awful it was to watch, Seimei was the one suffering, so he shoved his disgust down. Relax. Sink into the magic, into the warmth of Seimei against him.
He relaxed, and the warmth, Seimei's closeness, brought memories to the surface. A night where Seimei, pleasantly drunk, had teasingly told him about a thing that lovers did in China, pressing lips to lips, but when asked how he'd learned such a thing, had only smiled behind his cup.
Another night, closer, where Hiromasa had fallen asleep on this veranda and woken to find Seimei sitting beside him – gazing at the early mist in the garden, looking very proper and mysterious, except that his fingers were playing with the layers of Hiromasa's sleeves.
A different evening, nearer still: Hiromasa had cajoled Seimei into playing the koto as accompaniment, but one of the strings was a little off-tune. They both went to fix it at the same time, and their hands had brushed, and they'd looked up at each other.
They might have leaned over the instrument from either side, in that moment, like they were now. They hadn't; Hiromasa had let Seimei fix the string, something aching in his chest.
The ache was back, now, stronger. Seimei – but Seimei was leaning into him, too, as though his chest also ached. His heart was beating, visibly, in a vein in his throat, and the air between them tasted like salt and something hot.
Hiromasa let go of Seimei's hand with one of his, though the other grasped tighter. He slid it along Seimei's jaw, along his hair – Seimei's eyes were wide, bright, and Hiromasa closed his own, pulled Seimei in on an instinct—
For the first moment, it was hard to see what was so special about it that any lovers would bother with it. And then Seimei gasped against his lips, a sound that went straight down Hiromasa's spine, and something snapped in the air between them, something that made Hiromasa's ears ring and his head spin.
He blinked his eyes open in confusion as Seimei pulled away, just a small distance, and oh, Seimei.
There he was again: himself, with those narrow, dark eyes, his ears firmly back in place and only hinting at a point, his fingers once again long and narrow in Hiromasa's tight grip. Not a single stray fox-hair was left on his face.
Hiromasa gaped and hastily checked him over, eyes darting to and fro – yes, his eyebrows were back to normal, and his cheekbones too, and his lips were their usual shape, and—
Even Seimei pulled his right hand back from Hiromasa's face to touch his own cheek, as though he needed to make sure.
"It's all back in order?" he asked, with that teasing smile of his.
"Yes," Hiromasa sighed, brimming over with happiness. "Seimei is Seimei again. Although," he continued, "I can only check your hands and face."
"If you want to make sure I am all free of fox-fur, perhaps all you need do is ask," Seimei said, lowering his eyelids.
Hiromasa smiled back at him, his heart beating against his chest at the thought – though something still bothered him a little.
"Seimei, what happened there at the end?"
"I believe," Seimei said, "that you might have cast a spell of your own. A small one, which provided the last part of the human and yang energy necessary to bring my form back to normal." He tilted his head, looking thoughtful. "A gesture can be a spell – though I can't say I've heard of this particular use for that one."
Hiromasa beamed – all this running around with Seimei had taught him something, and he'd been able to help Seimei with it! – though he was less pleased when Seimei continued.
"Of course, your technique was very poor – it only worked because of the greater context of my own spellwork."
Hiromasa let out a sigh and pulled Seimei, laughing, into him by their still-connected hands.
Luckily, Seimei took it upon himself to show Hiromasa the correct technique. And there was no burst of energy this time, no dramatic snap, but all the same it was much better, and Hiromasa understood why people might want to do this, why he might want to pull Seimei in after it ended to do it again, again, again.