Chapter Text
They call him the Ghost, though Nene can’t remember ever addressing him that way herself: he’s always been Hanako to her, or just Teacher, her elusive master who haunts the Tower alongside his raven familiars and Nene, his assistant. Were it not for the letters she sorts each morning, opened and scanned through and set into piles, she might not know that title at all.
It’s one of her very favorite parts of mornings, sorting the mail, the shining-silver letter opener sparkling in her hand like a dagger. Hanako has never expressed any concern over her reading his correspondence, sets it as one of her daily duties, but it always feels a little bit taboo anyway; she finishes before the sun comes up by habit, in between making breakfast or opening all the curtains, tucked into the kitchen window well before he’s out of bed.
Sometimes, with the dark of early morning still looming at her back, her master and the world with him not yet awake, Nene can feel the whole universe fall away but for the words on the page. Typed and standard or ink on parchment, tight and professional or personal, pleading — Nene swallows them all down. She lives a fulfilling life as assistant and student to such a powerful mage, but even so, eyes wide and greedy, fingers tracing the paper, she craves that outside contact. Other than her teacher, and the birds, and the various knickknacks lying around who bear the brunt of her absent-minded murmuring, she doesn’t talk to much of anyone.
It can get very lonely in the Tower.
Sir Ghost, this one begins; many of them do, though Nene is fairly certain that Hanako has never been knighted by much of anyone; at least, he has not mentioned it, I trust your Artifact preservation is going well? We Witches of the Green would of course be willing to offer our assistance, provided you are willing to make a bargain. Recently, a village under our protection was attacked by a beast of unknown origin. If you would be so kind as to allot us your generous service once again…
The Witches of the Green — Nene has read about them: an elusive bunch of magic users in a closed-off bubble of reality, tending to it like a great big garden and governing a people unaware of how precarious their own existence is, how terribly it does not fit into the real world. Were the Witches to let it fall, to cease their careful maintenance, that whole expanse of sweeping valleys and ever-ripe fruit trees would simply cease to be, falling into nothingness like falling asleep. It toes the line between ethical and unethical, the question of keeping it up or letting it fall; and they are therefore some of the people Hanako keeps most closely in contact with. He doesn't seem to get along especially well with most of the magic world, after all.
Nene is just setting it carefully into the important pile, eyes sparkling and cheeks rosy, still daydreaming of the Green, when Hanako steps into the kitchen.
It’s hours before he usually wakes, and it shows: he’s still half-asleep, hair mussed and shirt unbuttoned at the collar. Mid-yawn, he freezes when he sees her sitting there at the window daydreaming, a pained sort of hope lacing through him like a string through his spine, forcing him upright and awake.
“Morning,” he grins, snapping flame between his fingers to light the stove. “Someone’s having a good day.”
Nene flushes, shoving her romantics down. Hanako is awake, which means her work day is really just beginning. “Not particularly,” she replies, voice clipped with embarrassment as she stumbles into standing, stacking the letters one after another and then hurrying off up the long spiral stairs that run the center of the tower to the study. Taking the stairs two at a time, she very nearly escapes the laugh that echoes up after her.
Later, perched on a ladder refiling books, Hanako at his desk somewhere beneath her, the words just slip out. “Have you ever been there? To the Green?”
The sound of rustling papers stops. Nene freezes, too; she didn’t mean to ask; it isn’t really like her to ask, anyway. Hanako has never been anything but kind to her, if somewhat cold, disinterested, but Nene is more than aware of the force of mana thrumming, reaching, in his veins.
The ladder teeters as she swirls to face him, mouth already opening to take it back; but he only steadies the ladder with an errant wave of magic on his fingers and sets his pen down. His expression is strange, guarded, grinning like he’d just tasted something bitter. “I have."
Nene nearly sighs picturing it: the rolling hills swept through with wildflowers, pushed and pulled into random patterns with the persistent breath of the wind — and Hanako, her teacher, superimposed in his swirling black overcoat like a smoky-breathed romantic lead. Quietly, she says, “It sounds beautiful. I would love to go one day.”
Hanako blinks at her, stunned. Nene feels color bloom embarrassed up her neck. “I mean — ”
“We could go.”
“What?”
There’s a furrow in his brow, a strangely intense openness to his expression as he looks at her like he’s seeing her for the first time, elbows leaned on his desk, work forgotten. He’s always been a handsome man, Nene thinks dazedly, not that she’s ever considered it much — but something about today, the stifling heat of the room and the abject fascination on his face, makes it hard to push the thought away.
Pinned under his gaze like a butterfly in a glass case, Nene swallows; Hanako’s eyes follow the motion every inch from her lips to her throat to the collar of her dress.
Then he shakes his head slightly, leans back into his chair, and picks up his pen again. “I could take you there,” he replies, voice distinctly cool, though it doesn’t escape her notice when his eyes jump back to her, “someday.”
This, like everything else, doesn’t have to mean anything. He could take her there — as an assistant, no doubt, set to carry his elixirs and make his tea and listen to his lectures just like everywhere else. If his work happens to take him to the Green, and if Nene happens to be helpful at whatever he needs her for, and if he feels like it, maybe he could take her there, someday.
Still, it’s the someday that rings in her head over and over and over as she goes about the rest of her duties, sorting and piling and cooking and arranging. Even when she sits down to her daily evening magic lesson, it’s still ringing; she can’t tell if she’s imagining the heavy consideration to Hanako’s gaze or not as he cups her hands in his, encouraging her to breathe in certain ways, tracing the veins in her wrists where her magic is meant to burn. And when she lies in bed chasing sleep, it’s ringing still.
—
Nene doesn’t sleep much; she spends late nights frowning at spell books and stumbling over cantrips, and early mornings fussing with any and all things she can get away with without waking Hanako. Since her teacher’s room is several floors up, at the second-highest level of the Tower where not even she’s allowed, that’s quite a lot.
She dresses, first and foremost, all her clothes plain but soft and comfortable and practical; she goes through so many sets of blouses and skirts and dresses and aprons that it never feels right to make them any fancier. For all her practice, her magical mending skills are somewhat subpar, and her clothes are always smeared in potions and oils or singed at the corners, some leftover evidence of her previous exploits. Her hair hardly leaves the braid down her back; it doesn’t need washing unless something gets in it. Hanako has always braided it for her afterward, her kneeling before his desk chair, his hands gentle and fingers growing cold with the contagious wet, but lately Nene has been trying to fix it up herself in the mornings, even though her hands are very uncoordinated, even though she has to scowl at herself in the mirror with all her concentration for something that seems to take Hanako no effort at all.
It makes her feel so clumsy to do things like this. Nene is good at a lot of things: gardening and cooking and sorting come to her as easy as anything. Spells are hard, if not impossible; she practices until she can jumble them out, helplessly watching them become an approximation of what she wanted. But a lot of fine detail work — like braiding her hair, or doing up her own buttons — vexes her. Maybe she had an injury to her hand a long time ago, some permanent impairment to her dexterity; she doesn’t remember. She supposes it doesn’t matter anymore.
She knows she’s no great mind, but Hanako insists none of that is a sign of much of anything. “And anyway, it’s not like I mind,” he grins, fixing up the last button at the nape of her neck, his fingers brushing the skin, accidental and electric. “Who could turn away a pretty girl?”
A blush paints her face, blooming under the skin like blood in water, as Hanako laughs off the comment and unties the ribbon holding her hair. It spins itself loose in heavy ropes, and when he begins finger-combing through it, Nene leans back, sighing into the touch. She thinks that there must have been a time when she’d been embarrassed about this kind of thing; maybe if it was someone else, she would be; surely there must be something loaded about kneeling at the feet of an older man, letting him button your dress and undo your hair. It’s no familial relationship between them, she doesn’t think — but then, it isn’t anything else, either. She doesn’t quite know what they are, other than teacher and student, master and apprentice. She only knows that she lives here, and has always lived here; and for as long as she has, Hanako has done her hair for her.
And so she sits obediently on the floor of his office, bare feet tucked under her, tracing the individual fibers woven into the spiraling pattern of the rug. It’s scratchy, just a little, rubs her knees red, stings her fingers when she picks at it too much; but it distracts her from his hands touching her scalp, her ears, her neck, his breath hot on her skin, his hum lulling under and into her flesh until he’s left some impression of himself all over her, inside and out.
A raven caws at the window just as Hanako finishes tying off her hair: a wine-red ribbon this time, distinctly his color, woven through from base to end like a brand. He mutters an opening spell, the window clicking with the motion as he rises from his seat, and Nene scrambles to get out of his way. But he hardly even looks at her, frowning at the message tied around his familiar’s leg and waving Nene off absently when she excuses herself.
Sometime before she’d arrived, or maybe right when she arrived, or maybe sometime after, Hanako had built her the most beautiful greenhouse, all brass-lined and crystalline; outside of and maybe even more than her bedroom, it is the only place she can really call hers. She doesn’t practice magic here, doesn’t want to risk harm coming to the plants, but it’s doused in her vitality anyway, as if her roots, too, are planted here, alongside the tomatoes and oleander. She hums as she works, weeding and trimming and watering and measuring, pouring out all her confused feelings into her plants as she calms down from the interaction.
Everyone in the greenhouse is doing well; there’s a great wall of a roses sat proudly toward the front, thorns tucked behind velvet petals, protective and strong and lovely; and just behind it, a barberry bush looms vibrant and sharp-edged. In the back corner, twisted to press to the window, is a cherry tree that Nene has never quite been able to make bloom; on the other side there’s forget-me-nots, green grapes, foxglove. It’s a veritable mess of a garden, like there had been no vision to its layout or inhabitants at all besides fitting them all inside.
Still, Nene likes it in here, with the soothing thrum of magic in the pipes, the persistent press of heat in the air; sometimes, she imagines she can hear voices from the plants, whistled in whines between the greenery, their leaves outstretched, ever-reaching, sliding between her fingers and calling her name.
Right in the center of the greenhouse is a planter box she’s never been able to get to bear much of anything; even with all the utmost care and effort, the best products, the most research, it sits empty still. It haunts her, the emptiness, makes some strange melancholy rest like a stone in her gut whenever she’s around it. Sometimes, when she leaves the greenhouse, reaching for the door, she feels that void’s eyes on her back like it’s something living, something worse than living.
Later, while researching in the library, she ignores her usual troubleshooting haunts in the botany section and looks into other books at random, running her finger down embroidered spines and fading tables of contents — but before she can make any headway, or even know what it is she wants to make headway on, Hanako steps inside. He’s in a good mood today, humming quietly, reading something off a floating sheet of paper she can’t make out from here — but panic still swirls in her gut as she hastily puts away the book she’d just pulled out, heart thumping so loud she’s certain he must be able to hear it.
—
Hanako is very busy most days. He makes it a point to make it to her magic lessons unless some emergency happens, perfectly on time no matter what he’d been up to: he’s stepped into the study before with his hair smoking or face covered in soot or elixir, halfway through a mana-deficient fever, halfway asleep, or, once, still steeped in magic, the end of an hours’ long incantation rasping on the tip of his tongue. But he always makes it to lessons.
Despite all his teachings, Nene is not very skilled at magic; her potential is low, and she exhausts herself easily on even the simplest of spells no matter how hard she practices or how well she prepares. Hanako makes her charms to wear around her neck or waist or fingers that ease the cost somewhat, but Nene still shies away from using up any more mana than is absolutely necessary. After all, if it’s Hanako’s job to teach, then it’s Nene’s job to not only learn but to manage the Tower in all of its shifting rooms and unkempt glory, and she can’t do that if she’s confined to overexerted bedrest.
The only rooms she isn’t allowed in are the very top two: Hanako’s bedroom, and above it, the room for the preservation of the Artifact, Hanako’s life’s work. She doesn’t know what it is, only that it’s very delicate and very complex and she is under no circumstance to ever attempt to see it for any reason.
Nene is a curious girl, and lately, it’s like that curiosity has only been growing. She’s lived here for a while but only recently has she been waking up to the vastness of the wonder all around her, and she throws herself enthusiastically into every corner of the Tower: the library, the archives, the whisper of the stone and the creak of the stairs — even the kitchen, with its self-turning cookbooks and hearth that never goes out. She finds herself wondering wistfully as she chops ingredients for dinner if every bit of the world is so wonderful.
But that curiosity doesn’t extend to the very top floor. To Hanako’s room, sure — her teacher is nothing like her friend but they’ve grown cautiously attached, and she can’t deny the desire to see how he treats the space that only he can access: what colors he’s strewn up, if he keeps his window open, if he has any personal effects or half-read books or mementos from home.
He’s seen her room; she would like to see his. The thought makes her face color.
What would it mean, for Hanako to invite her into his bedroom? Maybe if he were sick — though, do wizards of his level of expertise even get sick? He’s never been sick so long as Nene can remember — tired, yes, or feverish or sore, with a creaky voice or scratchy throat from some long-winded spell that had kept him up all night spilling over words he couldn’t stop for risk of the walls crumbling down around him. But those things can all be fixed with a day off, an extra few hours of sleep, a cup of tea with extra honey. None of them suggest a need for Nene to laze around in Hanako’s bedroom.
What about for another purpose, then? Nene bites her lip, fingers drumming nervously against the cutting board. Hanako doesn’t seem to think of her as a woman, not really, but he’s fond of her, and she of him; they don’t have that kind of relationship, but neither do they have any other kind of relationship.
What is teacher and student, exactly, the nebulous relationship of magus and assistant, master and apprentice? Nene has read through every dictionary definition of the words she can find with a bone-deep, ravenous fervor. She takes care of him, prepares meals and draws the curtains, arranges his correspondence, makes nice with his familiars. He takes care of her, too.
The ribbon laced through her braid, wine-red woven dark into silver, seems to tie her to something more than just her own hair.
A raven squawks loudly, perched on the open window where the hearth’s smoke is directed to blow. Yanked out of her daydream, Nene could almost mistake it for a bad omen, her knife clattering out of her shocked hand to the counter below. “Hi,” she whispers to the bird, almost afraid, as if it could read her thoughts or rat her out. “Do you have something for me?”
It isn’t until she’s reaching to untie the slip of paper from the raven’s leg that she realizes she’d sliced her hand open when she’d dropped the knife. It’s bled generously and everywhere, pooled on the cutting board and splattered across what would have been dinner — but even as she presses the wound to her apron, hot red staining the linen, it doesn’t hurt, not even a little.
—
The Tower doesn’t have visitors. It doesn’t even really exist, not where anyone could find it, tucked away into some folded pocket of space separate and hidden from the real world.
Still, there’s winds and weather: storms beat at the windows and sun bakes the roof; in the winter, persistent frost threatens the greenery even in the deepest reaches of her greenhouse. Maybe it’s an intentional sort of enchantment; maybe even Hanako misses the real world. Maybe it’s a gift for her, or maybe it has nothing to do with either of them; maybe it’s from the previous Ghost of the Tower, if there ever was one, if Hanako wasn’t the first to make a home in these walls.
Sitting curled up on the floor of the study, Hanako’s familiar fingers in her damp hair, his legs on either side of her, she longs to ask him. Hanako has been treating the skyrocketing rise in her comfort and curiosity with a confusing sort of grace, all twisted up and straightened out so that she can’t quite tell if he likes it or not. But he answers all her questions, or at most slithers out of them; there would probably be no harm in asking. Students are meant to be curious, aren’t they?
But when she finally works up the nerve, what tumbles out of her mouth is, “Do you like living here?”
His work slows but doesn’t quite pause. Today is a little bit different than usual: there are two tiny twisted bits of hair by her temples carefully separated and carefully braided into the rest like a sort of crown. Nene wonders, a little dreamy: if she brought him flowers from the greenhouse and asked really, really nicely, would he braid those in, too?
Often, Hanako pushes questions away with a smile, just sharp enough to warn her not to press; today, he’s quiet, thoughtful, muted. “I have a lot to do here.”
She can’t quite help herself from twisting just enough to catch the focused line of his brow in her peripheral, even though he always chides her that doing so will make the braid uneven. “Like managing the Artifact?”
A jerk of startled fingers catches her hair in knots, yanking at her scalp. Nene winces, and before her eyes are even opened again, Hanako is hurriedly tying her hair off. The ribbon is a deep ocean green today, tied only along the edge instead of woven through, like the cool undertones of Nene’s hair.
“When did you get so curious?” he asks lightly, ruffling her bangs and stepping carefully over and around her, work still spread across his desk. The skip in his step doesn’t quite disguise how quickly he crosses the room, like he’s physically running away from the conversation; and when he turns down the stairwell, he almost looks ill.
He bounds downstairs with only an airy, “Don’t forget lessons today,” as if though they don’t have lessons everyday — and then Nene is alone in the study, with only the dusty old books and the sound of clanging jars in the alchemical laboratory below for company.
—
One day, in the letter stack: a plain, unremarkable envelope with no return address, no sender. Nene doesn’t hesitate to open it, relishing in the slide of silver along the page — but as she begins to scan the page, the words give her pause.
Hello, Miss, it begins, and isn’t that strange, that it would be Miss?, doesn’t everyone address Hanako as Hanako or Ghost or Sir?, Have you been well? Are you getting these letters at all? Please continue to burn them once they’re read, as I presume you have been, given that the Ghost himself has not come after me.
Nene frowns, confused; the tips of her fingers feel startlingly hot against the page. The Ghost — so then, this isn’t addressed to Hanako? But who else could it be? The only other person who lives here and could possibly be opening and reading and destroying these letters is her, but nobody writes to her; she’s a nobody; she’d been a nobody before Hanako, is a nobody outside of Hanako, and there’s no one in the whole world who would bother to write to her. And she certainly hasn’t been burning anything.
Please, Miss, the letter says. I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: please check the top floor of the Tower. There is something there that you need to see; you cannot rest until you do.
A good student would leave the letter on the table and present it to Hanako when he wakes, allow him to look at it and examine it for enchantments and maybe even console her, pat her head, tell her it’s all a misunderstanding. A good student wouldn’t hesitate — and besides, she isn’t allowed on the top floor anyway. A good student’s heart wouldn’t pound, stomach wouldn’t drop with dread.
But Nene has never received a letter before.
Even with all her misgivings, she can’t bring herself to burn it. There is a floorboard in her room, just under her bed — not loose, but with a gap too small to bother patching and only just large enough to slide something into. In the later months, frosty air blows through it, dry and sharp and shocking, to prick her ankles and have her mumbling warming spells under her breath. But she’s never mentioned it to Hanako, nor he to her, and when she crawls belly-down under her bed toward it, the folded up letter only barely fits.
It’s too small, too dark to see much of anything down there, but Nene stays a minute anyway, freezing and ridiculous on her floor, puzzling over the top floor of the Tower, murmuring sorries to a sender she doesn’t know.
—
Lately, as the Tower sinks deeper and deeper into autumn, Nene likes doing her gardening as the sun sets. The heat of the day is still present, clinging but blunted into something more comforting than constricting. And there’s something wonderful, too, about the sky’s colors filtered soft through the glass, orange and pink like sherbet, like seashells, like a flickering flame.
So she goes more often now, sneaking out after dinner and back in before lessons, shoving her gloves into her apron and brushing dirt off her skirts. Taking the stairs two at a time, she hauls herself up into the study, leftover chill laid across her like a cloak until it’s pushed off and away by a burst of warmth as she shoulders the door open.
By habit, Hanako is only very exactly on time: never late, never early. Nene takes this for granted most days to check her appearance in the mantle mirror before he arrives, tucking any flyaways back into her braid, rubbing a sleeve over any part of her face or neck or hands still plagued with smudges.
Today, Nene takes several ungraceful steps across the room before she realizes that Hanako has gotten there before her.
Both his eyebrows are raised, watching her with a sharp sort of assessment, the book in his hand long forgotten. He hasn’t said a word, the two of them frozen; dusty and out of sorts, Nene feels suddenly like an animal in an exhibit.
He raises a hand in a tentative wave, and that tension bleeds away. “Come here, then,” he says with a crook of his finger, but the severity of it is lessened by the curious smile spreading fast across his face. “You’re late.”
Nene blinks. “I am?”
Idly, he motions to a clock on the wall somewhere behind him; Nene murmurs a vision enhancement spell, staring wide-eyed as the numbers swirl into brilliant focus. It is, in fact, about five minutes past the hour.
“Oh,” she squeaks, ducking her head sheepishly as she sits across from him on the opposite loveseat. There are two cups of tea set on the coffee table between them, hers mostly cooled; as Hanako sets his letter down, he waves his hand over it, heating it so quickly that steam snakes translucent between his fingers.
“I’m sorry,” Nene blurts suddenly, hands curled into fists in her lap, boot heels jittering nervously to the hardwood with a light series of clicks. “I was gardening, and I didn’t think… I mean. I didn’t think to check the time.”
A moment passes in silence before Nene reluctantly lifts her gaze. Hanako meets it calmly, laying an arm casual across the back of the sofa — but even his easy posture and lazy smile can’t hide the laser-focus in his eyes. “You didn’t think to? How do you usually get here on time?”
Is he mad? He sounds mad. Nene swallows, trying to remember if she’s ever been late before, ever been chastised for something other than sloppy spellwork or butter fingers. “I usually just… know what time it is? I don’t know.”
She frowns, eyes dropping back down to her lap. “I must check the time sometimes,” she adds after another awkward pause, “and just not notice it.”
Hanako hums, opening his book to the inside cover over the jut of his knee. When he flicks his wrist, a pen appears in his hand. “And what were you doing this time, that time got away from you?”
“Um,” Nene says, watching nervously as he begins scratching notes into the page, “I was gardening, like I said. The greenhouse — um, there’s a planter box in the middle of the greenhouse where nothing will take. I was working on that today.”
“Have you worked on that before?”
“Yes? I mean — yes, I have, on and off. Um, Teacher, is this really important enough to warrant this level of…” She frowns at the page, leftover enhancement spell not enough to make the upside down chicken scratch any more legible. “…Attention?”
“What do you mean?” Hanako asks, closing the book and tucking it carefully into some pocket of space that zips into nothing the moment he pulls his hand away. His smile is careful ease over unease, laid smooth and creaseless. “I always pay attention to the wellbeing of my favorite student.”
Nene can’t escape the feeling that there’s something important here, something she should be paying attention to — but she’s stuck in the curve of that smile, the unfiltered attention the usually oh-so-busy Hanako is paying her. When she speaks, her mouth is dry, her voice barely more than a whisper. “I’m your only student, Teacher.”
If Hanako hears her, he doesn’t refute it. “Your tea has gotten cold again,” he says, almost chiding, and she watches transfixed as his bony hand swipes over the suddenly steaming cup before he’s pushing it toward her. “Drink this before we start. You look like you could use something to warm you up before I get to you.”
There’s something playful in the spark of his eye, and Nene flushes at the insinuation she can’t quite tell if she’s misreading or not. As she takes the cup, their fingers brush.
Hanako jerks away as if burned. “I’ll start by explaining the concept to you,” he says, hurriedly arranging himself back on the sofa, leaning away from her and into the cushions; separated by the coffee table, they feel a million miles away. “What can you tell me about the transformative arts?”
Eager for an escape from the loaded strangeness of the previous conversation, Nene throws herself into the discussion and lecture and practical application that follows with gusto. When she sneaks the occasional glance up at Hanako, there’s a tense, curious blankness there, and she wonders if he might be doing the same.
The tea he’d handed her is the perfect temperature, but the delicate cup is so hot — not enough to hurt, but enough to tingle uncomfortably, like a freshly-healed scar.
—
In the morning, Nene sits at the window and sorts letters. Just like always, the sun has not yet risen; as autumn turns its face nearer to winter, the days grow shorter and shorter, and Nene spends more and more time in the dark. Again, she puzzles over the logistics of it all — whether Hanako was the one who built the Tower, or set it up to function like this, and if so, why?, and if not, who?
The mail bears no answers, though. Letter opener heavy and cold in her hand, she slices envelopes apart like cracking open an oyster, ever curious of what she’ll find when she peers inside.
Hanako is not exactly popular; his correspondence makes that clear. Many people are wary of him and some past series of alleged actions that no one actually puts down in writing. Even those that send word requesting his aid or expertise in this research project or that spell or this finicky defensive ward are never especially warm, all clipped words and subtle digs, with some promise of payment prepared, as if though they don’t expect even a possibility of appealing to Hanako’s better nature.
Nene thinks this unfair. True, her teacher is strange, cold, distant; true, he is often caught up in his own research and machinations, and sometimes she goes days without seeing him outside of their scheduled lessons and lectures. But there is a warmth to him, too, behind the strange smiles and loaded questions. Nene doesn’t doubt that Hanako cares for her, if not in a way that she understands, and if he cares for her, some silly charity case of a teenage girl constantly dropping valuable books and bottles and making a general ruckus in his tower, then surely he must care for others, too.
The dismissive scoff he lets out over his breakfast hours later does little to chip at this conviction. “They’re getting impatient,” Hanako mutters, and Nene glances over from her reading to see an unbleached envelope with an orange stamp clutched in his hand, its wax imprinted with the insignia of the Witches of the Green. It had said something about a monster den, she thinks; it had sounded terribly exciting. Much more exciting than the old-school alchemical textbook Hanako is quizzing her on this evening.
She drums her fingers against the table. “Are you going to have to leave soon?” she asks, trying and failing to keep any semblance of a whine from her voice. Are you taking me with you?, she wants to add.
Sighing, Hanako sets the letter down and leans back into his creaky old chair, running his fingers through his bangs. He has nice hair, Nene thinks distantly — thick and dark, a sharp contrast to her own fine, wispy locks. She wonders what it would feel like between her fingers, if he’d ever let her find out.
“I’m not sure,” he answers eventually, voice flat in that specific way that marks him lost in thought. “I’ll put it off for now.”
Turning to the side, Hanako’s profile is lit by the morning sun: a long line of glowing white all along his furrowed brow, the slope of his nose, the curve of his lip distorted as he frowns at the window. Like this, he looks both younger and older than she would expect, all smooth skin and eye bags she’s never noticed before, flipping a pen around in hands too red and wrinkled at the knuckles to match his face. Magic does strange things to its conduits, and Nene has read of powerful mages who lived to be a hundred or five hundred or even more — but those all feel like stories, almost fairytales. Nene forgets, sometimes, that Hanako isn’t only ten or fifteen years older than her; he must be much, much more. She would ask about it if only she had the courage.
Instead, she stares: at the curve of his jaw, the jut of his shoulders, the strip of exposed collarbone uncovered by his rumpled sleep clothes. There’s something very honest about people soon after waking; Nene has read all about it in the novels stacked in her room. She feels that honesty now, hungry and almost voyeuristic, scarfing down the cracks in his facade before he’s awake enough to stop her.
When he yawns, Nene watches that, too — exposed teeth, a peek of a pink tongue; her teacher is so very human like this — before he quickly covers it with a hand. “I’ll write them a response,” he says eventually, audibly reluctant and rounded with the end of the yawn, blinking the morning from his eyes as he turns to face her. He doesn’t look at her, though, not yet; instead, he flips the envelope over and scrawls a list before sliding it across the table to her. “Could you go get these potions from the lab in these amounts? You’ll have to make the People’s Fire fresh; be sure to read the description before you start. Everything else should be in the cabinet on the east wall.”
Nene doesn’t know which wall is east; she didn’t even think there was an east in the Tower. “Okay,” she says anyway, already resolving herself to check each cabinet for the necessary elixirs.
Textbooks tell her that even the most talented, well-rounded magic users have specialities born of affinities, but if Hanako has one, he’s never mentioned it. Nene can’t remember ever seeing him struggle with a spell at all; whether it’s incantations, alchemy, nature or fire or light magic, he seems to be able to reach for all of them like they’re spread out on a table before him. No wonder there is so much halted reverence along with all of the disgust and fear in the letters for him: amateur though she may be, Nene thinks Hanako must be one of the most powerful magic users in the world.
She thinks about that now, as she measures and sorts and grinds a fresh vial of People’s Fire together, frowning down at Hanako’s notes, as neat as he could make them, in the little book of recipes he’d prepared for her. Dense hardwood, smoked over open flame and then ground into powder with an alkaloid pestle, measured out in pinches, not in scoops, and gently blown on, then whipped drop by drop with clouded ichor, the thick, dull, yellow oil that comes from the distilled fats of only the rarest of demonic beasts — Nene follows along with every step, heating, reheating, cooling and blowing and speaking and heating again, and thinks that certainly, she must not have any special talent for alchemy. She has no love for the discipline, and it no love for her.
Still, as she works, a little song hummed low in her throat, it is a little bit fun: a bit like cooking, if cooking smelled something awful and ran the risk of blowing up the work table if left unattended too long. It’s a bit like baking a cake; Nene thinks she must have baked a cake once; she remembers what it’s like. It might be just a little bit like that.
All throughout, Hanako’s notes make for a helping hand and pleasant story. People’s fire, the description at the top reads, so called because it only burns items, creatures, persons, and environments that have been touched by magic. Non-magic users along with their belongings are completely safe, as are the majority of plant and animal life; the flames may pass on top of them, but will not catch. Primarily used as a defense against beasts. Potentially deadly to magic users in close quarters.
It is probably the most dangerous elixir she’s made by herself, and that thought makes her glow with a sort of pride, especially with how smoothly it’s going. Hanako isn’t here guiding her the way he must have when she’d first started her alchemy training, but she imagines she can feel him watching her anyway. Maybe an appraising smile would cross his face; maybe there’d be affection in his eyes; maybe he’d find her so charming, lost in thought as she putzes this way and that, that he would take her in his arms and —
“…Yashiro?”
Nene pivots on a heel so quickly her head spins, a hummed note lodged incomplete in her throat like a fishbone. “Teacher,” she breathes, embarrassed flush spreading fast across her face — oh no, what had she been doing when he’d come in; she’d been humming, and had she been dancing, too? Clutching Hanako’s notebook close to her chest, she stammers, “I… I didn’t think you’d be coming.”
There’s a strange, loaded look on Hanako’s face; he comes nearer slowly, one step at a time, like approaching a wild animal. “I thought I’d see if you were having any trouble with the elixir.”
“Oh,” Nene replies quietly, backing away from him until she makes contact with the counter behind her. She isn’t frightened, exactly, but her instincts tell her to stay away from him anyway, the weight of the look he runs up her body as massive and all-consuming as a black hole.
He tilts his head to the side, considering her, the hard soles of his shoes clicking light against the floor as he takes another step. “And have you?” he asks, quiet and searching, eyes slightly narrowed.
“Have I…?”
Finally, Hanako reaches her, pausing only slightly closer than appropriate and leaning in. His body, even hidden under his clothes, is a strong, solid line; Nene can feel the warmth of his skin as he sets his hands on the counter on other side of her, the two of them face to face, only inches apart. And it isn’t that she minds; it’s only that this is her teacher, and he is usually so very, very distant, and they only ever touch occasionally, in brushing fingertips as she hands him something, or in practical lessons, his strong hands covering hers, guiding her, keeping her there where he needs her to be —
A touch to the cheek has her startle, eyes blinking open; she must have shut them at some point. Hanako’s visage greets her, too close for comfort; that deathly seriousness has not left him, and Nene has the immediate, instinctive urge to twist away like a frightened pet. This close, she can see all the white-gold flecks in his eyes, the unadulterated pure black of his pupil as it dances from her face down her body and then back.
Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, that searching intensity falls away, like sloughing off a layer of grime. A flurry of emotions flickers by, too quick to catch, too quick to classify, and then that hand on her cheek brushes her bangs aside to lie across her forehead instead.
“Have you had trouble with the elixir?” he clarifies, wry smile both faintly amused and faintly concerned. “Are you alright? You don’t feel like you have a fever.”
Nene goes so red she feels like she swallowed some of the People’s Fire by accident. Walking Hanako through her steps and presenting him with her in-progress product, she nearly burns under his gaze; he stands just behind her as she finalizes the potion, hands hovering just over hers, his breath hot on her ear as he reads quietly from the book of his own making. She can’t shake the feeling that he’s teasing her, but she blooms more than bristles at the thought — that it’s less than serious, that it’s just for fun.
When she watches Hanako pack the prepared vials into a brown leather case, padded with anti-magic batting and locked tight, she pays special attention to his hands: knobby and long, with the strange pronounced joints of an old man, scars and callouses scattered across them like a star map. Magecraft doesn’t have to be hands-on at its highest levels, but it can be, and Nene feels like she can trace his years’ experience in those marks: burns from alchemy and scrapes from beast-handling, neat white lines scarred into the center of each palm clear evidence of blood magic. They’re strong, capable hands; she thinks about his skin hot against her forehead, about how capably he handles every part of his Tower, herself included. Guilty attraction races through her bloodstream like a virus, and she blinks hard, forcing herself out of her thoughts and into the much safer present.
Across the table, Hanako is leaned on an elbow watching her. She sees the telltale flicker of notes written in magic across the air being brushed away for later, but before she can think to ask about it, his mouth is opening. “Daydreaming again?” he asks, hand reaching out as if to touch her before dropping down limp to the table. His gaze darts around her like he can’t decide what to focus on, and there is a distinct hunger there that almost scares her: halfway scientific, and halfway something else, something deeper.
His voice carries none of that weight, though; it’s soft, almost wistful. “I’d love to know what happens in that head of yours.”
There’s something she can’t shake off about the interaction: not just the strangeness, or the closeness, or even the glassy fervor with which Hanako had looked at her, with an intensity of desperation she didn’t think any one person could carry. There’s something else, and it escapes her no matter how she searches while she completes the rest of her tasks for the day: the sweeping, the studying, closing the curtains and making dinner and gardening. Even as she runs up the stairs to the study, already a few minutes late for lessons, it escapes her, always just around the corner, always on the very tip of her tongue.
It isn’t until they’re midway through a spell, when Hanako cups her hands in his and sparks fly just above her palms, crackling starlight hissing golden against her skin, that he says it again: “Good job, Yashiro,” a fond crinkle in his eye, and pride in his smile that makes her entire body go hot. “This is a tough one.”
She sputters out some reply and he looks at her with so much warmth that the light bursting to pieces above her palms almost feels cold, and she realizes, suddenly: he’s never said her name before. Before he’d walked into that room and found her humming, dancing, twirling with his notebook as a partner, she can’t remember him referring to her by anything at all.
—
Things change after that. Suddenly, Hanako is awake earlier and staying up later, talking more, asking even more questions and looking more and more cautiously delighted by her nervous answers. It makes her notice the absence of conversation between them only in retrospect: every time he compliments her cooking or laughs when she chats with the ravens or peers over her shoulder while she’s studying to make sure she’s understanding everything, Nene reels with the closeness and reels, too, with the change. Something has shifted, only she doesn’t know what — and now, every time she leaves a room, she can feel Hanako’s eyes on her back, watching her.
He touches her more now, too. Nene almost never needs help with her buttons anymore except for the dresses and shirts that fasten in the back; those she always gives up on before the very top one can close, left hanging annoying and open behind her. Hanako had never commented when she’d stopped coming to him after morning chores to fix her clothes — or, now that she thinks of it, maybe before she’d only changed after bathing, and then Hanako would usually be there anyway, to brush and condition and braid her hair for her. She hasn’t thought on it much; she only needs to bathe when something gets on her, anyway. Sweat and whatnot isn’t an issue, and basic cantrips keep away most of the daily dust and grime.
But nonetheless, eventually, Nene had begun changing her clothes every morning with no help, and if Hanako had noticed, he’d never commented on it. That top button was always swinging open, and Nene grew used to ignoring it.
Now, with his newfound attention, Nene is at the mercy of Hanako and that button. Sitting at the kitchen table, kicking her feet and humming, she’s staring intently at a spinning coin practicing a spell when she feels Hanako come up behind her. Her humming stutters, and with it, the coin — but Hanako only flicks the button at the base of her neck into its loop, quick as anything, before he’s gone. “You can always ask, you know,” he calls out, kind of teasing, kind of not, but Nene doesn’t miss how quickly he walks away, scratching at the back of his head like he’d surprised himself.
His fingers had been so light she’d barely felt them through the linen; he didn’t even make contact with her skin, not directly. Still, coin clattering clumsily to its side, when Nene brushes her fingers against the nape of her neck it’s like she can still feel that moment of his touch reverberating until it’s constant, until she can feel it echoing all the way down her spine.
Later that week, when she fumbles an incantation and accidentally sets her book on fire, Hanako is there in the room with her. Coughing, she waves the smoke and his offer to wash her hair for her away as she leaves the room; she’s been washing her own hair for months now. Her fingers have gotten so much more dextrous; she’s gotten so much feeling back in her body; for ages, she’s been doing more and more without his direct help. It’s strange to think he’s never noticed.
Already rushing away, she doesn’t see the way Hanako freezes halfway out of his desk chair to watch her back as she scampers down the stairs and to the bathroom.
When she comes back to the study shortly thereafter, loose hair curling into waves down her back and sticking damp to her shoulders, Hanako doesn’t look up right away the way he has been lately. Nene doesn’t notice immediately, still lost in a longwinded daydream she won’t even remember later, just like usual. But by the time she’s crossed half the room and not yet met Hanako’s eye, she begins taking note.
Hesitant, she pauses just in front of his desk. Hanako is still fully dressed despite the late hour, all dark shirt and dark slacks and dark shoes; she can see the gleam of his belt buckle from here, the accented reds and golds embroidered on his outerwear. There’s work spread all across every available surface: books and scrolls and letters and notebooks, uncapped pens and discarded bites of spells, sticky notes crammed into pages and full of scrawling words Nene has no chance of deciphering. He’s busy — she can see his lips moving around a pen cap, wordlessly sounding out whatever it is he’s working on, his long, boney fingers tapping idly at the page. Magecraft is all words and sounds and rhythms for Nene, but from here, Hanako’s notes almost look like equations, and she finds herself strangely, vividly jealous of the attention he lays upon it while she stands here shivering with her damp hair.
Eventually, his eyes flick up. Over the rim of his reading glasses, they look impossibly bright, and Nene finds herself wilting under the weight of it; suddenly, she feels very young and very underdressed in her slip dress and thick socks, shawl hastily thrown over her shoulders. It had been more than enough when she’d put it on, but in the brief seconds that Hanako’s eyes drag down her neck, her collarbone, the curve of her waist, she feels practically naked.
But he only looks a second before returning to his work. Turning his chair slowly to the side, he continues looking down at the paper in his hand, uncrossing his legs to make room between them where she usually sits. Nene hesitates a moment, clutching at her shawl, but by the time he makes a vague hand motion to the floor, she’s already padding over.
Is he mad? He doesn’t seem mad. Like she’d noted earlier, he looks busy: the way he gets when he takes a job or request last-minute, or when he gets really, overly invested in a project, to the point that Nene has to shoo him off to his bedroom and still make him extra coffee in the morning to make up for hours lost to muttered half-spells and indecipherable notes. Part of Nene’s trying to do more and more on her own has been for her own benefit, the mental security that comes from being able to wash and dress yourself; but part of it, too, has been for that reason. Hanako is so busy, dark circles under his eyes, requests always incoming; one assistant doesn’t seem like enough. And yet, in spite of that, Nene can’t see him letting in anyone else — and she would never accept it, sharing the position.
He must just be lost in thought, then. Kneeling at his feet, Nene does her utmost to be still and patient and not at all distracting, though she can’t help but fuss with the lacy hem of her slip, with how much or how little shoulder peeks out around her shawl. It’s so chilly tonight — even in the study, one of the coziest rooms in the Tower, the occasional shiver wracks her body. The wet hair can’t help, but it isn’t the only reason: this time of year she bundles up even in daylight, and the dark night sky has long since come out. She can feel every strand of hair curving icy against her neck, every hair on her arms standing up with chill, can feel the way her nipples harden and brush oversensitive against her clothes. Embarrassed, she clutches her shawl closer, shifting her weight, wiggling her toes in her socks and willing Hanako to hurry up.
Nene has become much more dexterous; braiding her hair, though, is still a struggle. She’d given it a good try today after bathing, frowning at herself in the mirror and trying to do whatever Hanako does, but had only gotten stubborn tangles and broken hair ties for her trouble.
Hanako continues reading a while before touching her, and by the time he does, those tangles are halfway dry. It’s uncomfortable whenever he pulls at them, no matter how gentle he is: not painful exactly, but something like pain. Nene bites her lip, eyes tearing, like her body remembers how to experience tangled hair more than she does, and scoots backward toward him to hide her face against his thigh, just above the knee.
It’s comfortingly familiar to sit here, in a spot she’s sat so many times before, head tipped back and leaned on the only person she can ever remember knowing. The thought makes something uncomfortable twist up inside her, raw and rushing; she wants to cling to him, wants to run from him, wants to be with him forever. Sniffling, Nene does her utmost to shake away the sudden barrage of feeling as she wraps her arms around her knees, feeling young and small and childish. Here she is having a muted breakdown over something she can’t even identify, interrupting Hanako’s work because she can’t even do her own hair. And he’s so busy: too busy for this, too busy for her. With every passing day, Nene wonders more and more why he even keeps her here.
The fabric of his trousers is cold, and a little bit rough against her face. She wonders if it’s expensive; feeling her wayward tears soak in, she hopes not.
Hanako’s fingers slow their work, though they don’t stop entirely. Back to him, Nene feels more than sees when one hand extracts itself from her mess of hair to brush against her cheek, skin made unfamiliar and cold and sweet-smelling with product. “Are you crying?”
The soft, surprised, almost reverent tone of voice takes her off guard, and Nene can’t think of a single thing she’s done in her entire life to warrant the way Hanako’s looking at her when she twists enough to check.
Immediately, she drops her eyes, but it’s too late; she can feel the stubborn tears running hot down her cheeks. “No,” she says, and then, more hurriedly, “It’s not — nothing’s wrong, I just…”
His thumb brushes her cheek in a tender, soothing gesture. “It’s okay,” he murmurs, some faux-casual distance laid thick over fascination, and Nene wants to twist away from that voice, wants to duck her head and hide. “Does it hurt?”
It doesn’t; there’s the occasional unpleasant pull, but it isn’t even in the same family as pain, like pain is something completely separate, completely other. Nene can’t remember the last time she’d felt pain.
But the alternative is to tell Hanako about how she’s feeling, and even the thought of that has mortification swelling like an oversized balloon in her throat. “Yes,” she squeaks, stumbling over the lie; she presses her face back to his leg, feet tapping nervously against the rug, a light shiver shaking her when his hand falls dejected from her cheek to her shoulder. “A little.”
An automatic, wounded noise leaves her as his hold tightens momentarily, one on her shoulder, bare where the shawl has slipped, and the other forming a fist in her hair; and even though he relaxes them immediately, murmuring an apology and rubbing her back, she wonders if that false admission of pain must be important somehow, to have caused such a powerful reaction, if not for reasons she can understand.
They don’t speak for the rest of the night, but when she finally gets up to leave, hair nearly dry and tied dainty with goldenrod yellow, she can feel his eyes on her back. A raven sits in her window that night, its gleaming black eyes like polished glass — not unusual in it of itself, but every time she looks at it, she feels like she can hear Hanako’s voice echoing in her head again, all desperate fervor tucked neat and tidy into the words: Does it hurt, Yashiro?
It storms that night, the first real storm of the season: all banging and caterwauling, the hiss of the rain as it drops in sheets down the Tower walls. It seems never-ending, and even as the sun pokes hesitantly out in the morning, made dim with the clouded veneer of mist, it doesn’t quite feel over — like an omen, an afterimage, some suspension of action hidden just beyond the horizon only barely out of reach.
—
The storm rages on for days, on and off and on again; Nene sleeps rarely already but it’s even less now, spending her nights clutching a magelight stone and scanning through books she’s borrowed from Hanako’s library — potions and maps and summoning, the chemical makeup of different catalysts, the debated effect of state of mind on spellcraft. She reads a biography of a famous knight enchanter; a field journal of a green witch; a recipe for a potion called Fairy Eyes, revealer of paths and hidden truths; and a case study of some old building whose protection runes were ritually reinforced with the life of young mages. It’s interesting enough, but none of it is especially helpful or applicable to an amateur like her. But it fills the nights; she can’t even remember what she must have done to fill them before.
There’s next to no history in the library, though — some textbooks with short blurbs on various ancient peoples and long-past eras, but no reference to modern history, on what people are and have been doing out there in the real world. Nene can’t imagine leaving the Tower, really, but she wants to imagine it; some nights, with only the rain and the birds and the dark for company, she sighs over Hanako’s promise to take her to the Green someday. She wonders if he meant it, if he remembers, if he really, actually wants to.
Asking Hanako questions has gotten easier as he’s warmed to her, but when she asks him about the lack of history books, he gets that funny, guarded look again. “I’m not much of a history teacher,” he says, all strained and strange, and Nene can’t shake the feeling that she’s missing something.
Another letter arrives for her not long after, much the same: Hello again, Miss, it reads. Have you thought about what I told you? Have you checked?
Hanako knocks at her bedroom door, “Yashiro? Are you in there?”, and Nene hurriedly shoves the letter in between her floorboards before she can finish reading it.
“One second!” she calls with a breathless panic, and when she slams the door open with probably more force than necessary, standing there red-faced and out of breath, skirts rucked up and hair a mess from being under her bed — maybe Hanako thinks he’s just interrupted something other than an illicit pen pal, because he coughs into his fist, eyes sliding to the side just a little too quickly, ears dusted pink.
“I,” he starts, folding his hands in front of them, then unfolding them. “You just weren’t sitting in the window like you usually are this time of morning. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Oh,” she says between her teeth, closing the door behind her and leaning her back to it, a million and one worst-case-scenarios of Hanako finding her letters swirling through her head like the storm outside. “It, um… The sound of the wind on the glass was giving me a bit of a headache, so I…”
“A headache,” Hanako breathes, looking down at her astonished. “You have a headache?”
Is she in trouble? Is she missing something? Does he know something, only he doesn’t want her to know that he knows yet? Nene blinks, brows knitting. “Yes?”
A laugh spills from his lips before he can catch it, light and relieved. “I’ll make you something for that,” he says, already bounding toward the alchemy lab, and as Nene watches him disappear down the stairs, she wonders for the first time why Hanako seems so delighted whenever she claims to be in any kind of pain.
—
The greenhouse grows great and vibrant even as the weather gets colder, winds turned frosty where they sneak through the cracks in the window, the stone parts of the tower eternally uncomfortable to the touch. Nene spends an increasing number of hours in the greenhouse whenever possible, or her bedroom, or the study, its hardwood and rugs and thick velvet curtains doing their utmost to keep out the worst of late autumn’s vengeance.
Still, even with all her time and effort, the center planter box in the greenhouse won’t take. Nene has tried it all: different plants, different soils, different fertilizers and treatments and frustrated mutterings. She would move it but for the thick iron pipes connecting it to every other box in the greenhouse, so she settles for messing with lighting and temperature and researching desperately to see if proximity to this plant or another can kill a seedling or prevent a seed from sprouting.
At one point, in her stubborn desperation, she considers moving one of the fully-grown adult plants from elsewhere into the box. She even starts the process, trowel lodged in the dirt of her very favorite foxglove, its leaves ever-reaching up as if trying to leave the dirt, its flowers an unusual white tipped in bright, vibrant red. But she hesitates, picturing herself dislodging the reluctant roots, placing it into a spot that has only ever killed that which lives there — and maybe it’s superstitious, unreasonable, but it doesn’t feel to Nene like anything short of murder.
And so the mystery of the central planter box remains. Holed up in the greenhouse on a rainy day, Nene frowns, one hand on her hip and the other holding her trowel, hungry for something to do. It isn’t quite the largest, really; most of the boxes and pots are quite large. Still, she can’t quite stretch an arm across the width of it; it must be at least the size of a bathtub, if not larger. Surely long enough for her to lie in, at least, if she folded her arms across her chest, or laid them straight at her sides.
Nene blinks, and finds herself with a knee up on the box, sinking wet and cold into the soft soil, as if though she was in the middle of climbing inside. The edge of the container digs uncomfortably into her shin, and she only knocks into it more as she rushes to free herself, stumbling back and away from the box.
A stilted sense of dread overtakes her; she could be sick; she could throw up — and the heel of her boot, shiny-slick already from the damp ground, slips underneath her.
It doesn’t hurt when she falls, when her tailbone meets the ground and her elbow tries its best to catch her; it doesn’t hurt when her calf lands on the sharp edge of her trowel or when her head cracks into the corner of the box just behind her, pointed wood jabbing hard enough to break skin. If it weren’t for the blood burgeoning bright and hot on her scalp, streaming down her neck, she might not notice at all. Nene gets one solid look at the ground, the way the red blooms soft into pink as it meets the water; her eyes shut, open, shut again. There is some alarm bell going off in her body — not quite pain, but something like pain — and she thinks she might call out for help, for someone, hand reaching out helplessly and eyes shuddering open again. She isn’t sure; she can’t focus long enough to think about it.
Her fingers feel cold; her eyes close. The rain falls harsh on the glass above her, a constant, thundering laugh, rocking her into unconsciousness.
—
It’s cold in the dark: wrong and comforting and terrifyingly familiar, like a long-forgotten story or a childhood home years after leaving. Nene doesn’t think she wanders, exactly, but neither does she sit perfectly still: it’s a bit like wading, a bit like dancing. There is no way out, but there is a path, and unquestioningly, Nene takes it.
Sometimes she blinks or moves certain way and that darkness recedes, ever-lurking in the corners while she tries to see through the hazy filter of her own eyelashes. She’s in a room she doesn’t recognize — or maybe she does, maybe it’s her own room, and the darkness only makes it look stranger; or maybe she isn’t there at all, she’s still in the dark, and this is just the next stop on the trail. She tries to get up, but her body won’t cooperate; even her eyes won’t move. Glassy and lost, she stares through unseeing eyes into a ceiling that might not be there at all, catching only glimpses of movement or a person’s voice. They sound awful, frantic, heartbroken; dazedly, she wonders what could have happened to make them sound like that.
And then she’s back in the dark. In a way, it’s easier like this; there’s dread here, but it’s a comfortable sort, long-since making itself at home in her skin. And most importantly, that numbing ineptitude is absent; Nene can move all her fingers and all her toes, can wade and walk and dance. Maybe she could even fly, if she really set her mind to it. She wonders if Hanako can fly.
Yashiro? someone is whispering, but when Nene whips around, there’s no one there at all.
The dark begins forming bizarre, steadfast shapes in between the shivering cold. Nene thinks she might extend a hand; she tries to; and her fingers seem to make contact with something solid. It’s less like the walls are closing in around her and more like she’s only just now noticed the walls; teeth chattering, she does her best to follow along.
Wading and dancing and following — the wind pushes at her back like a steadfast friend, leading her, guiding her, taking her by the hand. Yashiro, it’s whispering, barely-there, otherworldly, and then, more intently, Yashiro, can you hear me?
She can, but there’s no real way to answer. Blindly, she reaches for the air as if to give it a pat, some comforting caress; it seems to grab hold of her wrist, trying to pull her sideways off the path. The cold familiarity around her recoils like a second skin, and she jerks backward along with it, stumbling away and further down the path in the process, chased by the wind.
The path is like a maze, but Nene knows the way like she was always meant to be here, like she’s been here before. The wind becomes increasingly persistent and Nene tries to will herself to move faster as if to escape it, but it’s like swimming in molasses; there is a destination, and there is a pace, and there is an end; she is powerless to defect from either.
Ahead of her, the darkness ripples and splits, incandescent even in the total absence of light. Just a few paces away, a few more steps, and Nene will arrive — where, she doesn’t know.
And then suddenly the ambiguous mouth of beyond opens, revealing in the distance a large, round mirror, flat on the ground and longer across than Nene’s own body. Even here, an in-between place characterized by a complete and total absence, its surface ripples like water under wind.
The comforting breeze turns harsh, domineering, like fingers digging bruising-tight into her skin. Yashiro, someone is whispering — the wind, but someone else, too — and it’s a man’s voice, a familiar voice, it’s — You need to wake up.
A breath rattles her throat, turning in an instant into a cough, awful and sharp and bitter-metallic. Her eyes fling open and white light floods them, so bright it almost hurts — and before she can even take stock of what she’s seeing, someone’s hands are climbing up her body, from her hand to her arm to her shoulder, until a familiar, calloused palm is pressed hot to her cheek.
“Yashiro,” Hanako breathes, a hysterical laugh bubbling up and out of his mouth and squashed down just as quickly. “Welcome back.”
—
The room she’s in — Hanako’s bedroom, as he’s quick to explain — looks like a tornado has just blown through it, all stray papers and open books scattered across every available surface, spilling onto the floor, smudges and fingerprints and puddles of ink staining the bed cover. There are open containers of food, half-full, like he’d been in such a rush to return to her that he hadn’t let himself take more than a few bites, and bottles of elixirs stacked precariously in every corner. Hanako too looks a mess, all mussed hair and red, sleepless eyes, his shirt unbuttoned and yanked loose from his trousers, hands stained with burns and chalk and ink, lips bitten raw.
Given that he’s spent the last few days bringing her back from the dead, though, Nene supposes she can give him a few passes.
“You weren’t dead,” Hanako repeats, voice raspy with exhaustion, kneeling on the floor beside the bed like he doesn’t even have the strength left to stand. “Not — not exactly, not all the way. You were just… somewhere else, in the place in between. It would have been much, much harder to pull you back if you were fully dead.”
Nene blinks. “I didn’t know there was an in-between place,” she says faintly. “Did we cover this in lessons?”
The dark bags under his eyes make Hanako look something like a skeleton when he levels a look at her, all suspicious and sullen. “You’re taking this well.”
In truth, Nene can’t quite tell how she’s taking it: she feels distant, far away, almost out of her body; she flexes her fingers and wiggles her toes and settles uneasy into her own skin, but it’s like she can’t quite feel any of them yet, like she can watch her eyelids close over her eyes and her knees press together under Hanako’s blankets without experiencing the sensation herself. She thinks of Hanako’s late night lessons, tracing the veins of her wrists, explaining mana pathways, likening them to nerves; maybe she’s just overloaded, the way you can be overloaded with magic, or wiped out, tanks empty. Maybe it’s the shock, or maybe her body is just too tired to fully process any of this yet, leaving her brain in the dark without sensation while it fully powers on.
It reminds her somewhat of the distant before, the before she can’t quite remember anymore, no matter how hard she tries to picture it: back when Hanako had hardly spoken to her, never touched her when he didn’t need to, never looked her in the eye, and she had performed her duties about the Tower dutifully if clumsily. She can’t recall a single opinion she’d had back then, a single thought, a single feeling — and as she tries to picture herself tripping up the stairs or holding a broom so tight it splinters into her palms, she can’t remember any sensation either. No pain, no pleasure, no anything — overloaded or overrun or completely, horribly empty.
But the longer she tries to remember, the farther away it becomes. Scowling at her hands in her lap, her voice is but a murmur, her mind a million miles away. “I guess.”
Hanako doesn’t reply, but Nene doesn’t notice right away: she’s looking down at her short, uneven nails, broken with work, dirt wedged under them. She wonders if Hanako has anything she could use to tidy them; his hands always seem neat, scarred and well-used but consistently clean. She wonders why it’s never bothered her before, her nails looking like this. It can’t be attractive.
By the time she looks up, there’s a harsh, worried crease between Hanako’s eyebrows, staring so intently she nearly shrinks away. When he rises from his knees, his knuckles tense white on the bed, face pale and shiny with sweat, the telltale sign of a coming mana-deficient fever. Still, he doesn’t voice it, and nothing in his words betray any sense of sickness as he hurries to the door.
“I’ll get you something to eat,” he says with one last, worried look, and then he’s ducking down the stairs, all the way down the Tower to the kitchen at its base. Maybe magic will help him get there, if he has any left.
Instinctively, her lips move around a spell: not anything specific, nothing neatly defined in one of her textbooks, but some vague, warm whisper of quickening, of light steps and lighter joints, of the endorphin high of exertion without the extra force. It crests into a cough at the end, some horrid gravel-throated wheeze of an objection breaking ground in her body, and she slumps back into Hanako’s pillows weak-limbed and woozy to await his return.
This isn’t exactly how she’d imagined her first look into Hanako’s bedroom, sour-mouthed and iron-limbed with oversleep, as creaky and stiff as a corpse. She supposes she had been a corpse, or something close to it, out for three whole days while Hanako poured every ounce of his magic into dragging her back.
She had always thought him untouchable, a vanguard of the magical arts, his mana inexhaustible and his technique flawless. He works hard, she knows that; she’s caught him asleep at his desk more times than she could count, and he’s always in the middle of one or two or five books or projects or potions, eternally studying, eternally seeking. But even so, he is her teacher, her master; Nene likens him to a statue or a saint, intangible and unflappable and impossible.
Her fingers brush her lips, thinking on how chapped and awful his had looked when she awoke, how they’d parted around her name, blood at the corners where he must have wiped it away. On his knees, too tired to think, already burning with fever — he was beautiful, real, so vivid it nearly hurt to look.
Maybe he is her master — but he’s just a man, too. The thought makes her cheeks glow pink.
As if as a testament to his humanity, the room swims into focus all around her. In the absence of Hanako’s pressing eyes and frantic voice, she can see more than the disarray she’d observed before. Under all those stacks of papers and empty vials sits Hanako’s private space, all at once just like and nothing like Nene had pictured it. Maybe because of his dark-toned wardrobe, just the occasional white shirt in a sea of black and dark red and indigo, she’d envisioned his room dark too: red walls, black bed sheets, a few dimly-lit lamps lighting the way.
In truth, it’s a fairly normal room by wizarding standards: a wooden bed, a plain little writing desk, a perch at the window for the birds. The storm must have ended sometime while she was out; through the window, bright robin’s egg blue is spread in a thick layer, cloudless in the way of dry, windy autumns. Ignoring its current state, his clothes are all put away, and the curtains are tied back neatly, books and a few knickknacks lined up on a small bookshelf. It’s well lived-in, but tidy — not at all the moody, ornate cave of a bedroom in her imaginings.
Nene halfway expects disappointment to bleed cold under her skin, but it doesn’t; if anything, her fondness for her teacher only grows. He really is just a man under that whole immortal master thing he has going on, and his bedroom at the near-top of the Tower is really just that: a bedroom.
She’s eyeing the bookshelf curiously, eager to see what books Hanako considers too precious to keep in the library, when he comes back out of breath and visibly exhausted, holding bread and soup and tea on a clattering tray.
Even as Nene chokes some broth and tea down, uncomfortably warm all the way from her mouth to her throat to her stomach, Hanako continues fluttering around, giving her this potion to drink and these instructions for getting better. Eventually, she wears him down until he sits at the edge of the bed, rubbing roughly at his eyes before continuing to speak.
“And,” he says slowly, “you may notice some… changes.”
“Changes?”
Hanako nods woodenly, squinting off into the opposite wall. Nene can see that fever burning him inside out, making his forehead shine and his eyes unfocused; she wonders if it’s giving him a headache, too. “To your body. You may feel strange, far away, numb; it may be hard to feel or express emotions. You may have trouble focusing, or doing complicated tasks, or creating, storing, and recalling memories. Pain may be numbed, or you may not feel it at all.”
Frowning, Nene runs through the list; it’s too bad that she’s only just shaken off many of those symptoms, and is about to experience them again.
Maybe Hanako misinterprets her frown, because he pats her comfortingly on the knee. “It’s okay; it should pass quickly. You weren’t fully dead, so I’d give it just a few days. In the meantime, I’ll keep an eye on you.”
“And who will keep an eye on you, Teacher?” Nene asks, trying and failing to keep the skepticism from her voice. “You’re clearly sick.”
Some mischievous spark glints in Hanako’s eye; it makes him look younger, spirit less weathered with the years his body doesn’t reflect, as he leans in toward her. “If you wanted to stay in bed with me, Yashiro, all you had to do was ask.”
Face flushed, eyes wide, Nene stammers, “I can?”
That makes Hanako’s face turn red, too; he jerks back slightly, bright and embarrassed and boyish. “I,” he starts, stops; a cautious, flustered seriousness overtakes him, and she watches that furrow between his brow burst back into being when his mouth opens again. “Do you want to?”
And so Nene takes up temporary residence in Hanako’s bedroom. He makes her finish her broth and some bitter-tasting medicine, and she makes him take a fever-reducing potion; he has a few stored away in his room, a mark of how frequently he overworks himself. Neither of them have the energy to do much more than that, and so the ink on his hands and the dried blood in her hair and the leftover mud creeping up both of their bodies from when he’d hauled her on his back out of the greenhouse stay, sticky and crusty and pulling uncomfortably on the skin, smudged ugly and foul into the bedsheets. Laundry is going to be miserable, and bathing too; maybe Nene will ask for help washing her hair this time, for old time’s sake, if Hanako is more recovered than her by tomorrow.
But that’s a question for tomorrow. Hanako hovers awkwardly, still seated at the edge of the bed; when she tries to scoot over to make room for him, he steadies her with a firm grip on her shoulder and a firm expression on his face. Gingerly, ears dusted red, he circles the bed to sit on the other side, pin-straight and stiff, not looking directly at her even as he coughs into a fist and continues to give her various instructions for her recovery. She doesn’t listen much, too tired for comprehension beyond simple obedience, but she nods along like she is, and he talks and talks in his stern, hushed teacher’s voice, like lecturing is second nature to him, like this is the most comfortable dynamic they have that he can think to fall back on.
They must make for a sorry sight, the two of them, both exhausted and ill and out of sorts. Even just having woken up or just about to go to sleep, Nene doesn’t think she’s ever seen Hanako like this — his voice slurs and his eyes shutter; a yawn pulls his mouth impossibly open; he loses his train of thought, blinking slower and slower.
Nene isn’t far behind; she can’t remember the last time she’s been this tired. When she too drifts off, lying on her side and watching him, his profile is outlined glowing against the backdrop of the setting sun, painting itself golden just outside the window.
And for the first time in ages, the first time she can remember, Nene sleeps through the night.