Work Text:
with clouds and mist
in a brief moment a hundred scenes
brought to fulfilment
- Matsuo Bashō, translated by D. L. Barnhill
The hiss of the coach doors sets him off like a starter’s gun. Before she can collar him, he is up, out of his seat. He pushes past tourists and old folks and god knows who else, to get to the door, because she’s not raising a child so much as a wild animal doing a credible impression of one. The emperor himself could be on the 7am coach to Fujisan Station and it wouldn’t stop her son using feet and elbows and whatever body part he deems necessary to be the first down those steps.
She aims a conciliatory smile at the tourist he has just kneed in the kidney and then takes off up the aisle after him because he is already disappearing out of her field of vision.
"Bakugo Katsuki, you get your butt back here this goddamn instant, you rotten little slime, or it’s curtains. I mean it.”
People are staring now, but they are both used to that.
Station 0
It’s 11 in the morning, and the bus is late, and she is cold, and tired, and miserable. All the euphoria of watching the sun rise together has dissipated on the long slog down the mountainside, and Masaru has had to tow her like a cow on a rope for the last two kilometres. Her feet are swollen.
She is 22, and nine weeks pregnant, and it was not planned.
If she had ever imagined motherhood at all it had been in the abstract, a faraway land that she might visit one day, when she was 30 plus, old, and had decided to let herself run to fat. Not now when she has better, more vital things to be doing.
More than once, she has considered taking care of the little mite, but maybe she’s just sentimental. As soon as she started thinking of the mite as a mite and not just some process, like a quirk, overrunning her body and making her hurl up her guts every morning, she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.
Masaru longs for a girl. And she agrees that a little girl with her looks and his temperament sounds like a very presentable option; a doll-like ornament who follows Mama and Papa around, and looks pretty, doesn’t make noise, and does exactly what she is told. Yet, somehow, she can’t picture that little girl, or any other child. Just the mite, clinging stubbornly onto her insides, like a lemur to a tree, and preparing to change her body in all sorts of unexpected, horrifying ways, and then to burst out of her whether she is ready or not.
“I’m hungry,” she moans, “I want coffee. And cake.”
“Just a little further,” says Masaru, with that patience she would find so annoying if she didn’t love him like it was a disease.
They stop at the sengen shine for a rest. As Masaru searches for five yen pieces, she thinks of Konhanasakuya-hime, who had come down from the mountain, and, in a fit of pique at her ungrateful husband, had been pregnant for only one night, and given birth to her sons inside a flaming building, just to show that she could.
When she prays at the shrine it is that she might have some similar opportunity for spectacular brinkmanship during her pregnancy, and that it will be over just as quickly, and as painlessly.
They stop at Kitaguchihongufujisengen to pray.
He grabs the bell cord, two-fisted, and yanks to set the bells clamouring, and to let the kami know they are here. Too late, she sees the smoke rising off the cord.
“Katsuki!”
“Oops,” he says, not sounding the least bit sorry, as he tucks his hands behind his back.
There is now a handprint charred into the ornate, plaited cord. It looks… sort of dramatic and badass, actually.
Not that she’s going to tell him that.
He examines his handiwork with a tilt of his head, “They’re going to think the Goddess put it there.”
She pushes at his ear, and thinks back to how she had prayed to the goddess of motherhood and volcanoes, nearly nine years ago now, and how the Goddess had played a little joke on her, in return.
“Maybe she did.”
Station 1
He is six hours old and he is a good-looking kid. She knows that this shouldn’t matter and in a way it doesn’t. Both Mikoto and Rin’s babies have heads like cauliflower – Mikoto’s figurative, Rin’s literal, stalks and everything – and yet everyone cooed over them and said how adorable they were, nevertheless. She is essentially certain that she would have loved him anyway. Still, she is glad that of all the kids she knows, hers is the best looking.
He came out screaming and kicking, with the cord twisted around his neck like a garotte, and she realised then and there that he is not planning on making life easy for anyone around him, most particularly for himself.
After what feels like hours of fussing, the nurses put him in her arms to nurse, and now the two of them are in a silent war as to whether or not he’s going to latch. His face is purple with upset and scrunched like he has got somewhere to be.
"You're only miserable because you're hungry, and you're only hungry because you won't nurse." She lays it out for him. "So you've got no one to blame on this one but yourself, kid."
This appeal to logic only causes him to bellow. He's got the lungs of a moose.
“Come on, you little monster, take a drink. You think I don’t got things to do?”
She puts her finger in his hand, and his tiny fist squeezes tight around it. The lump in her chest is heavy as lead, like she has just caught a cold whose symptoms are never going to shift.
Eventually, the two of them negotiate a truce, and he begins to suck.
It’s easy going between the first and second stations, a pleasant, woodland ramble. Since most climbers don’t join the route until the fifth, it’s just the two of them for now. He is buzzing, zipping in and out of the trees like a pinwheel. She hears a loud crack and hopes its just that he has tread on a dry branch.
“Bakugo Katsuki, if you burn down a sacred cedar you will haunt these woods. I swear on your grandfather’s grave.”
“Yeah, yeah.” His voice comes from the canopy and she looks up to see him perched on a branch, like a diver.
She starts to run. “Katsuki, don’t you dare!”
But he is already airborne.
Station 2
He is three and a half and he makes a friend.
Midoryia Inko is a sweet woman, and lonely, much like Mitsuki herself, stuck out here in Mommyland. Their sons are almost the same age.
Katsuki doesn’t always do great with new people. Depending on his mood, he will roll back his head and howl, or throw himself on the floor, shrieking unpleasantly, or just bury his head in her chest and glare at the strangers from the crook of her arm.
But little Izuku is as sweet as his mom, and biddable, and perfectly happy to follow Katsuki around as Katsuki points out his bucket and spade and his swing set and his fire hydrant. And Katsuki, in turn, seems surprisingly content, if anything, pleased with the attention. He doesn’t even seem to mind when Izuku can’t manage more than the first syllable of his name, just pats him on the head like he is a good dog.
He even volunteers half his rice ball to Izuku. It’s the first time she has seen him share anything with anybody, and she is curiously moved.
A pause in their hike, after his big jump, to stamp out the smouldering leaves in the pile that cushioned his fall and to see to ouchies.
He hates it when she fusses, and she struggles to restrain him long enough to patch up the deep gash on his knee. He is stupidly fearless and almost uncomprehending of the idea that he might come to real harm.
“A really sensible mother would keep you on a leash, you know.”
“It’s fine,” He wriggles and tries to yank his leg out of her grasp.
“You want to go back to the bus?”
“…No.”
“Then sit still while I bind this sucker up.”
He throws back his head, and sticks his jaw out in a pout. “There’s not even any blood.”
Station 3
He’s almost four and yes, the quirk was a surprise.
It sounds foolish to say that she had never given it much thought. She has never had what anyone would call an active quirk and nor have any of her sisters. Mazuru’s passport has that little oxidising ring warning label on it under quirk designation, but that doesn’t mean much more than him having to wear special gloves at the airport. The lady at the registry tells her that that Katsuki won’t even be allowed on an airplane until he’s ten and has passed a basic quirk control test.
They had got a book from the library called, “Firestarter: Loving and living with your flammable child” and another one with pictures in it called “Reirei-chan Meets the Fire Foxes”, which had maintained Katsuki’s interest for all of three seconds, long enough for him to figure out that All Might wouldn’t be putting in an appearance.
Anyway, there seems to be more to his particular quirk than just pyrokinesis, if the loud bangs that come with his nightmares are any indication.
But his little firecrackers are cute and she doesn’t mind a few singed t-shirts. He doesn’t like his Kevlar blend bedsheets much, but he hasn’t burned the house down either.
It’s only when her mother-in-law arrives and Katsuki manages to propel himself 10 feet in the air to get away from her, hanging from the ceiling fan like a scalded cat, does she think that yes, this quirk might be a challenge.
And then only when she stops howling with laughter.
He kicks at the marker that shows they have reached station four. The wood at the base of the marker is motheaten. People have carved their names into the post. He reads them, idly as he waits for her to catch up.
“’Yousuke loves Kaname’, ‘Badly Dinosaur: The T-Rex Hero’.” He snorts and says to the air, “You’re never going to be a hero if you can’t even get the name right, idiot. That’s not even correct English.”
Sometimes she admits, if only to herself, that having an amazing kid is all sorts of validating.
At eight, he has got the reading age of a 13-year-old. There are already three Gifted Children programs lining up to recruit him. He is the star of his swim and baseball teams. Even his quirk keeps getting more impressive, with only the occasional premature explosion setting fire to the curtains.
She always thought it would be a pitched battle to get kids to do their homework, but Katsuki just does his, automatically, without comment or complaint, or even much need for help, and it comes back from the teachers tattooed with gold stars and tens out of tens and ‘excellent, excellent’ in green pen.
She definitely would love him anyway, even if he was dumpy or a little slow. But it is nice to know her kid is the best one.
She pushes him ahead of her, “Okay, Shoyo Tsubouchi, keep moving.”
Station 4
She has always been the disciplinarian in the house and Mazaru has always been the peacekeeper, so it’s a rare and frightening sight to see her husband lose his temper.
Katsuki’s nine years old, and white-faced. He’s all angles as he sits on the couch, crossed arms and raised hackles, trainers poised like a sprinter on the starting block.
“I have never,” Mazaru is shaking now, “Been more ashamed in my entire life. That you would lay a finger on that poor boy... That you would do anything to him other than treat him with dignity and respect. Is this the behaviour of a future hero? Hah?”
“You don’t understand,” Katsuki is sulky, pulling into himself in even as he tries to puff himself up. “Dek– ”
“Your grandmother doesn’t have a quirk. Your uncle doesn’t have a quirk. Even your mother and I… Is this how we raised you? Is this the man you’re growing into?”
“I…”
“Get your coat. We’re going to go over there right now, and you are going to apologise. Immediately.”
Katsuki is holding his breath. He looks more grey now than white, but when his father says this, he exhales suddenly and sharply. “Fuck you, you stupid old bastard. I’ll never apologise. I’m not sorry. He… he deserved it!”
“Katsuki!” She gets to her feet.
“Go to your room, Katsuki.” Masuru’s voice is rough and splintered. “Now. You’re grounded. No video games, no training. No friends. No quirk. God help me, I don’t want to see your face again this evening.”
He takes off without a word, but at the foot of the stairs he stops and looks back at them both. “Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou,” he says, before bolting upstairs. She hears his bedroom door slam shut.
Masaru sinks into the couch and buries his face in his hands. She sits down beside him and presses her face into the sleeve of his shirt.
Station Five is where most of the climbers join the route. Coaches discharge passengers and the path becomes congested with people. He likes this less than when it was just the two of them, and she can see the tension start to build in the cant of his shoulders and the lines of his face.
If she’s being honest, she preferred the more solitary pathway herself. Dodging fat hikers and the forest of selfie-sticks takes some of the shine off the splendour of the sacred mountain.
Then a man hits Katsuki in the face with his backpack as he turns to gawp at the view. Her son stumbles and takes one step off the path, glowering and rubbing his head.
“Hey lardass,” she snarls, “You mind not punting my son off the mountain?”
“Excuse me?” The man turns again and Katsuki has to duck.
“Yeah, you, you sumo stable reject. Don’t mess with my stupid kid. Or do I need to address your ass directly to get the message across? Is that your quirk, huh? Is your ass so far away from your blob of a head that it had to grow a mind of his own?"
She grabs Katsuki by the collar and hauls him away from the edge of the cliff. He’s staring at her. He looks almost impressed.
“Come on, Katsuki. Let’s not waste time with the idiots. We’re moving ahead.”
Station 5
He is 13. He has zits on his chin and his voice sometimes squeaks like a bicycle wheel in need of oiling. He can’t seem to decide if this is a cruel joke played on him by an unfeeling universe, determined to throw up obstacles in the path of his inevitable ascension, or if the fault is internal. As if his body going through something as common and unsightly as puberty is a flaw in his make up that makes him somehow unworthy of his dream of number one hero.
On the bad days it’s both.
His quirk is troubling all three of them again lately. The sudden force of it that has been unleashed by puberty makes her long for his firecracker days.
She knows he does his best. From the time he was a kid he has been diligent about control, but lately there are scorched finger marks on the inside of the fridge door and Masaru has tucked away all his grandmother’s china.
One afternoon, she comes back home to find him flat on his ass in the back yard, in the middle of a six-foot blast zone. He is dazed, starry-eyed and he calls her that word for the first time in ages. He even lets her lead him into the kitchen and put him sitting at the table.
She tries to call Masaru, but he is in a meeting, and by the time she gets through to him, Katsuki’s back grousing at her again, calling her ‘hag’ as he peels the skin from an orange with his fingers. So, she supposes he is alright.
Up in thinner air, the path is a little clearer.
He’s hollering back at her from the next trail marker now, using words no eight-year-old should use about their mother, and certainly not on the sacred mountain.
But, fuck, she thought she was in shape. When the hell did it get to be that she was being outpaced by her own kid?
“Come on, come on, you fat pig, you’re so slow.” He bounces from foot to foot, and his shouts startle an elderly couple, who are making their way back down the trail.
She smiles politely at them as they pass, but then sees him taking off without her. “Katsuki, don’t you dare move. Katsuki, I am warning you, take another step and you will be rolling back down this mountain.”
“That’s how we’re going to have to get you down, piggy.” He is off running again.
“Katsuki!”
But he is leaving her behind.
Station 6
He is 14 and he is late for dinner. She tries his phone and gets dead air. There comes a knock at the door and she feels a stone settle in the pit of her stomach.
There are police outside. There are two heroes with them. A slip of a girl in a cream bodysuit and a man in a birdlike mask and yellow cloak. Neither of them say anything.
“Well, are you just going to stand there gawping? One of you say something. Good grief,” she snaps.
“Are you the mother of Bakugo Katsuki?”
“Yes. What about him? What did he do this time? That kid!” If she can just keep talking, she can keep whatever terrible future awaits her at bay. “It must have been pretty lousy to have all you important people upset and standing at my door.”
They glance at each other, uncertain, almost embarrassed.
“Uh, you don’t happen to have seen him, have you?” asks one of the heroes, sheepish.
And then the whole farce comes out, and they are tripping over themselves to tell her how brave her son was, and how strong his quirk is, and how awfully sorry they are that they didn’t have the privilege of escorting him home, only actually, he had given them the slip, and nobody knows where he is, and could he perhaps have brought the most famous hero in the world with him, because they can’t seem to find him either?
Katsuki himself slouches in twenty minutes later, trailing soot and gloom. No Symbol of Peace though, to her mild disappointment.
He’s solid and real and unharmed and also testy as a bear with a toothache. He has to be manhandled to get him to sit on the couch while she serves their visitors tea. “Where the hell have you been, you ungrateful brat? You kept all these people waiting. Do you know how much more important their time is than yours, you pest?”
He can turn on the charm when he wants to, if he thinks a person is worth his time and attention, but today it’s all drab monosyllables.
“And what about school?” asks one of the officers. “Do you have a plan?”
She elbows him. “Katsuki. Answer him.”
“Don’t prod me, bitch,” he snarls. “I already told them I’m going to UA. It’s UA or nothing at all.”
After that outburst the delegation takes its leave and he tramps off to his room.
There is soot and scum ingrained into the weave of his uniform when she collects it from outside his door. She tries to scrub it out and finally realises that it’s not going anywhere. That it’s dyed in there permanently.
Upstairs, for the first time in a long time, she hears a tempo on the drums.
They stop at station seven, to rest and to eat. She buys them chicken katsu curry and he clears his Styrofoam plate. He has walked for nearly nine hours without so much as a complaint. Now he has his arms folded on the table, and his chin in the shelf of his elbows, and he’s picking at a knot in the grain in the wood.
“How are you doing?” she asks.
“I’m not tired,” he replies, though that is not what she had asked.
She scrapes the last of the thin curry together on her plate and waits for what he will say next.
“Deku says that there was a villain named Magman who tried to wake the volcano. That he asked for a trillion yen or he would make Fujisan erupt. He says that when the heroes went to capture him, Magman was already dead. That the power of the mountain was so big he couldn’t control it. That it burned him up from the inside out.”
He shivers.
“Well,” she says, “Maybe De… Maybe Izuku-kun got it wrong.”
“No,” he says flatly and she doesn’t know if he means no, because he looked it up, or no, because information volunteered by Midoriya Izuku is somehow beyond reproach.
Poor Izuku never did manifest a quirk. At the time Katsuki had taken it… not badly exactly, but intensely. He had pinballed between glee, grief, and terror, as if the poor kid’s quirk was somehow his own very personal business. He couldn’t seem to decide, at first, if it was karma announcing his own superiority over his friend, or if it was a fate worse than death that could jack-knife back onto him at a moment’s notice.
He rarely mentions Izuku at all now, and she would chalk it up to a childhood friendship that had come and gone as childhood friendships do. But in the moments like this, when he is beyond tired and his guards have all slipped, it’s Izuku who tends to make sudden surprise reappearances among the actors of his life, who gets cast in the role of oracle, or ally, or arch-villain by turns, who gets ascribed an importance she doesn’t understand and is not sure she fully likes.
She had asked Masaru if it was a boy thing, but he had only shrugged.
Maybe it’s just a Katsuki thing.
“I’d never die like that,” he says, “It’s stupid.” His finger scratches at the whirl of wood.
When she was his age she remembers being afraid of murderers and of mice. The things her son worries about seem so much bigger, weirder, more abstract than anything she concerned herself with as a child.
She comes and sits on his side of the bench. “Are you cold?”
“No.”
“I’m cold. I’m going to put my arm around you.”
“Don’t. I’m not a baby.”
But he doesn’t say it with any force, and he doesn’t shrug her away and the rigid line of his shoulders grows softer as he bows into her.
In a little while, he is asleep, curled in the hook of her shoulder.
For now, at least, he still lets her have this.
Station 7
She is asleep until the long squawk of the doorbell rouses her. She’s faster than Masaru, throwing on her robe and turning the handle on the bedroom door before his head is fully off the pillow.
He is sixteen. He is supposed to be at camp.
Neither of them can get the details out of him, but it’s clear that school is not going well. All the things she had been attributing to the stress of the entrance exam, just seem to have been amplified since he started at UA.
His mood hadn’t improved when term ended either, though his grades are good as ever. School is demanding and he had been so banged up after the final exam that he had had to spend the day playing video games on the couch.
“Do you want to talk about Shiketsu again?” His father had taken a seat on the couch next to him as she stood by the sink and let the water run. “It’s a good school. We’d miss you but–”
But he had jumped off the couch without a word and gone upstairs.
And now there are lights in the driveway; the red and blue of sirens. She stops at the foot of the stairs and bites into the flesh of her knuckles, then wrenches open the door. “What?”
Police and heroes at her door again. This time a middle-aged detective and the small, dapper figure of her son’s school principal. They are not the sort of people who can be deflected or distracted by bluster.
“I am afraid it is very serious. May we come in?”
“Katsuki, wake up.”
It’s well past sunset and hikers are starting to shuffle out of the rest stop, so they can begin their final ascent. For those that make it in time, Fujisan will show them a dawn like no other.
He is disoriented at first and it gives her time to belt him back into his coat and his gloves and to get the headlamp tied tight around his head before he is awake enough to fight her.
He scratches his eyes with his thumb and forefinger and she has to control the twitch to move his hand back to his side as she would have done when he was younger. It has always been among her biggest fears, that he would blind himself accidentally.
“What time is it?”
“Time to get going.”
Outside, the wind has picked up. It’s cold. He pushes a little closer to her without seeming to realise what he’s doing. The train of bobbing lights crawling back and forth along the switchbacks show him how much further he will need to go.
She hears him take a breath.
“We don’t have to do this,” she says, “I’m pretty tired.”
“No,” he says, “Lets go. To the top.”
Station Eight
It is New Year and there comes the sound of keys in the door, but she opens it before he can push inside.
He is nearly 17. He has grown again and is doing his best to hide it with his customary slouch. His shirt is rumpled. And honestly, is he ever going to learn to tie a tie?
“Oh, I see,” she rolls her eyes. “You’re just going to turn up at the doorstep, unannounced, like a lost puppy. Did they finally expel you or something?”
“Can it,” he growls. “I know they told you I was coming. They’ve probably been crawling all over this place all week.” In fact, they had issued her with a panic button, and an instruction not to tell him about it, another indicator they understand her son.
She glances over his shoulder. There’s a glamourous, dark-haired woman wearing the shortest trenchcoat Mitsuki has ever seen and not much else, standing by the gate. She salutes Mitsuki.
“So did you finally bring a girl home to meet us? That’s cute, Katsuki.”
He utters a choked bark as he barges past her into the house, but she can see his face has taken on the colour of a pomegranate. Mitsuki returns Midnight’s salute and shuts the door.
Katsuki has paused with one foot on the stairs. “Dad, can you get the old hag under control? She seems even more off her meds then usual,” he yells, dumping his bag in the usual spot and beginning to unwind his scarf, as if he hasn’t been gone from the house for almost four months. “This place smells like a dead dog. Didn’t you – ”
He freezes, because she has put her arms around his shoulders. She feels him go rigid, arms stuck to his sides like a tin soldier’s, but he doesn’t shake her off.
“You’ve gone soft,” he says eventually, “It’s creepy.”
“Well, you’re a big shot hero now.” She is getting his shirt wet. “You can finally handle it.”
She rests her forehead on the crest of his shoulder. After a moment’s hesitation she feels his arms close around her back.
“It’s okay, Mom,” he says, “It’s okay.”
They reach the summit at dawn.
He punches the air as he passes through the torii at the summit. She doesn’t tease him about it.
They wait in the biting cold, as the sky is shot through with grey, then white, then copper, like paint running across a canvas. The plain below is in black and gold relief.
He stands with his arms tucked behind his head, staring at the view. His conquering grin turns to something more solemn and contemplative. “It’s so high.”
“Yep.”
He takes a step forward and cups his hands around his mouth. “Hey world, do you hear me? I'm Bakugo Katsuki and I'm going to be number one!”
Perhaps he’s hoping for an echo back. But the air seems to swallow up his words and the mountain is indifferent to his shout.
She hooks a finger into the hood of his parka, so he can’t get any closer to the edge.
He looks back at her and he shows that tight, wild grin of his that he only flashes when he’s feeling uncertain. “It’s different then I thought it would be.”
But up here, it doesn’t seem such a bad thing.
Summit
“I’m dying.”
“You’re not dying.”
“I’m dying, and my ungrateful son isn’t even sorry he killed me. Do you know I hauled you up here, by myself, when you were just a mouthy brat?”
“You didn’t haul me, you’re not dying, and if I have to carry you, I’m going to do it like you’re a sack of rice. Just a couple of steps more. Here, count back from a hundred.”
She counts, and then blessedly, by the time she hits 58, she’s over the crest of the slope and standing on the lip of the caldera.
“See, you ain’t dead yet, and now you can mooop at the sunrise with all the other sentimental saps.”
He speaks with spirit, but quietly, because there are plenty of other hikers on the mountaintop, waiting for the sunrise, and he dreads the attention. He’s grown used to his fame, but doesn’t enjoy it in the way she knows he expected he would when he was a kid.
He needn’t worry. With a baseball cap covering that shock of hair and two raccoon eyes where a steel girder recently ran into his face, he looks almost like any other 20-year-old kid.
He is benched for two weeks, as per the Commission, whose laws he treats as a kind of loose guideline, and as per both his sensei, whose word he treats as absolute law. If he had not been forcibly on break she never would have got him up here. There is always so much to do for him now, and so many people who rely on him.
She wonders what Sakuya-hime felt when she birthed her sons into a world already on fire. Had she been frightened, or had she been confident that when the time came they could handle it? How did she feel watching them from a far off mountaintop as they got caught on magic fishhooks and in the snares of dragon princesses? Were these outlandish battles with gods and demons less frightening to watch if you were a Goddess?
Perhaps next week, when he has gone back to Tokyo, she will bring Inko out here and they can visit Kitaguchihongufujisengen together and have tea.
She finds a rock and settles herself there to let her breath return. The wind cuts like the edges of a rusty hacksaw and she pretends not to notice when he parks himself upwind to shield her from the worst of it. She takes a sip of her bottle of water and almost gags with the cold.
He rolls his eyes.
“C’mere, old lady.” He reaches out, palms up. “Can’t have you dying of exposure. It’d be a pain to drag your body back down the mountain to Dad.” She places her hands on top of his, and the heat coming from him, the barest flicker of the chemical reaction that set the course of his life, warms her up.
He was never exactly a kind child, but there is a gruff goodness about him that she thought that only she would ever see clearly, that she had worried once would be buried for good under strata of pride and pain, like the slag on a mountainside. It has been the privilege of her life to see it uncovered.
“You should cut your hair,” she says, “That fringe, Katsuki.”
“Don’t start. It’s fine.”
“You look like a bum.”
“Yeah, yeah. Tell it to the mountain.”
He grumbles, but he doesn’t pull away.