Chapter Text
One of the first things that Juza was taught by his mother – after, of course, the traditional raising of him to speak with his manners, be kind to others, not abuse the power of being alive by causing misery to other living things, and such – was to never covet any object or person too closely to the heart. The explanation given had been simple : to covet and to desire is to invite undue pain. Whether something is lost or it dies, that is the nature of how the things in the world change, and it does not do one well to try to change that nature.
In hindsight, it’s a difficult thing to teach a child, who wishes for sweets and sunny days and toys while clutching what they have tight in small fingers. Juza hadn’t questioned it at the time, of course. He remembers even now being in awe of the gentle way his mother had said it, using a small bit of her magick to portray a short-lived candle light in her palm. After that day, he had felt awfully smart to know this secret to living fully. Pride had often bloomed in his chest when, seeing another of the town’s children crying in the street for dropping a treat, he knew that the tears were something he never had to suffer.
Of course, there had been lapses in this diligence. He still loved the sweet breads his mother baked and the fancier treats the neighbors could bake when they had some extra sugar and flour. Admittedly, it was remarkably easier to get him to do things when a sweet food was on the line. Occasionally, his mother would bribe him with fresh sweet buns in order to get him to help her at the cauldron.
But those were small moments in an otherwise long life.
For a few years, his mother had told him that he was a slow grower. But, with how quickly kids grow from toddler to child, it hadn’t been long before she had finally sat him down on the stool in their small living room and told him.
Their family’s bloodline – though hard to trace beyond a few generations in the past – was one of the many, many lines where dragon descendence was present, and he had the ever-rare luck of being born with those bundles of genes at the forefront. It only occurred to a few families every generation, meaning that, of the entire kingdom, he was perhaps one of only two or three born with strong enough traits to really be called a ‘dragon.’ At first, he hadn’t believed it. Laughing, he had asked his mother if this was another story. Her small, nervous smile had told him otherwise and, even as a child barely out of his toddler years, it had made him nervous, too.
That night, he had learned why he grew so slowly compared to the other kids in the town, why he had particular fondness for specific things, and – most importantly, most dangerously – why it was important for him to never covet too much any thing or person. Dragons, his mother explained, had the wonderful skill of giving life to whatever they love. She had called this affection ‘hoarding,’ which he had asked her to define. It meant to keep excessively, she had explained, but the meaning was different for dragons. It could also mean to imprint so strongly an affection onto something that it becomes something they depend on to live happily. Without their hoard, a dragon could fall into deep depression or violent rage.
But there was a catch, she said, to this wonderful gift of life and love. To steal something from a dragon’s hoard is to control that dragon indefinitely, if they are lucky, or to die if they are unlucky. Kings and their royal servantry have the means to survive stealing from a dragon and the means to keep a dragon under their control. The common thief does not.
And so, at the age of ten, with the mind and body of a five-year-old, Juza had essentially been taught that to love, for him, is to run the risk of killing or being killed.
He had spent several days alone in his bedroom, afraid for his life and crying : terrified every time his mother knocked on the door with food and words of comfort. According to his mom’s dinner stories at the table nowadays, he hadn’t left his room for a week and the house for even longer.
But, eventually, he had left his house’s walls again and enjoyed sunlight and the smell of the forests and grasses again, holding tightly to his mother’s skirt.
Hachiko, for her part, fiercely loved her son and was prepared to go so far as to kill anyone who sought to steal from the hoard her son would eventually begin to accumulate. Her kindness, in the beginning, had been to caution her son from imprinting on anything too young. Nostalgia is a dangerous affection. Coupled with a dragon’s coveting, there could be no undoing that sort of dependency. But if Juza knew in anticipation of loving, she had given him the gift of distance. Letting go of things in his hoard would, in theory, be easier. It had been the first step to ensuring freedom for her son.
The second step, in her rulebook, was to ensure that her son knew how to separate love from coveting. She taught that in the ways she raised him and loved him without demanding his attention while he was busy nor keeping him from leaving to go play far from home. In a sense, Juza had more freedom than any other child. A dragon’s scales could protect them from all mortal injury, and the state of both the kingdom and the town community gave her no reason to fear any other fates.
Juza grew up, learning how to help his mom run their small magick shop. This was the third step : to ensure that he had entertainment beyond his scales and coveting. And so, Juza accompanied his mom on her ingredient-gathering trips across the kingdom. He had studied, starting at age eighteen (but nine, if any of the travelers asked) the basic properties of magick and their interactions : just enough to let him help at the cauldron when his mother was busy. Eventually, he had discovered a certain aptitude for hiding things in small containers charmed to shrink objects for carrying.
This had its benefits, of course. Traveling was much easier with this skill, as well carrying ingredients and deliveries about the town. Somehow, though, he knew that this worried his mother – how easily he could begin to hide things and collect a hoard without anyone’s knowledge – and he strove to never carry anything more than he needed. He didn’t dare try to vindicate himself in front of her, just silently took caution. And she seemed to know this, after a little bit of time.
The next big moment in his life had been meeting Tsumugi.
His mother’s magick shop was plain and unassuming in both its appearance and in the kinds of orders it fulfilled. Located in a small town away from major roads, it had low traffic from mainstream travelers, who were the primary concerns that Juza had to be aware of. Royal travelers, he had been taught to avoid at all costs.
But the shop’s infrequently praised specialty was his mother’s dragon blood garden.
Dragon blood – or lycoris draconis – is, perhaps surprisingly when considering its name, a flower rather than actual dragon’s blood. However, its namesake comes from dragons for a reason. The red, silk-petaled lily secretes a unique type of resin from its pistils that, if collected and combined with a small amount of other ingredients, works as a blood coagulation medicine for dragons, whose blood notoriously is susceptible to disorders from too much clotting to an ability to clot. And while a dragon cannot die from a mortal wound, necessarily, dragons may fall into deep sleep or risk constant fatigue and dizziness if a wound is left open to bleed.
Juza’s mother’s main reason for growing her dragon bloods was to protect her son, but there was a significant quality to the hybrid she had managed to breed : it could also act as a general stabilizer for emotion dysregulation, another common trait in dragons whose livelihood once often depended on raging until reclaiming objects or persons of its hoard. It was for this unique quality that Tsumugi had come to buy pots of the hybrids from her.
Juza remembers that he had been skittish around Tsumugi just as much as any stranger or customer at first meeting, but it had been easier, somehow, to trust the man as he returned a few times each year for his mother’s fertilizer. Sometime in the first few years of their knowing each other, his mom had explained to Juza that Tsumugi was a dragon, too, from the eastern lands of the kingdom territory. It had been emotional and overwhelming, in the beginning, to know that he knew another dragon.
Juza had asked Tsumugi all sorts of questions : how old he was really, how he knew he was a dragon, what he did to pass the time, if he had a hoard. And Tsumugi had answered his questions as they came, never unkindly, explanations on the tip of his tongue if his answers ever caused Juza confusion. Tsumugi was, really, thirty-five years old, though Juza’s mom often teased him for being a teenager still, and he lived in a large house near the eastern river delta with four husbands. All of his four husbands were people in his hoard, and the only other thing in his hoard was his extensive acreage of gardens and greenhouses that he maintained on behalf of the queen.
Tsumugi, it was explained to Juza, already worked for the royal family as an agreement that the royal family never come near his residence nor his partners.
This was a much scarier thing to learn.
For another twenty years, Juza traveled between home with his mother and Tsumugi’s place near the rivers, where he met and befriended Tasuku, Homare, Hisoka, and Azuma.
They were all kind to him in ways that, explicitly, he could trust unlike any other adults he had met before. Tasuku was just as old as Tsumugi : cribmates in the wet nurse’s home that had ended in the baffling situation of a dragon infant already having imprinted on another. Homare and Hisoka had come together : former employees of an inn in the capital where Homare worked as entertainer (though it was never explained to Juza what, exactly Homare did to entertain ; he assumed it was the poems but received no confirmation when he asked) and Hisoka worked as a hunter of rare, wild boars for the kitchen. And Azuma, both the calmest of the bunch and the one that Juza didn’t know if he liked or didn’t, had met Tasuku first and, intrigued at the idea of meeting a dragon, had accepted Tasuku’s offer to visit.
Beyond familiarizing himself with another dragon's lifestyle, though, Juza learned skills from Tsumugi that were crucial to his future. He learned the process of imprinting : that is, to include something in one’s hoard. Tsumugi described it peculiarly, but, at the same time, it had somehow made sense.
“I don’t really remember imprinting on Tasuku,” Tsumugi had chuckled softly while showing Juza how to trim the stalks of the orchid plant after blooming. “But when I imprinted on my first flower… how do I put it… it felt like, well, like I couldn’t live if I couldn’t care for it. It was like I knew that it was a part of me, somehow, and that I wasn’t myself without it. Is that helpful?”
It had been. Tsumugi had also confessed, later when they had finished trimming for the day and were carrying the gardening scissors back to the shed, that he was trying to learn how to let people in his hoard go. His plants, Tsumugi had said, he could let go. Part of the reason why he played royal gardener was because he could imprint on plants and keep them alive until they were to be returned, upon which he could easily retract his imprint and let them back out of his hoard.
People, apparently, were harder for Tsumugi. He had yet to understand how to let any of his partners go. They weren’t asking, but Tsumugi had confessed that it was imperative to him that they had the choice to stay or leave.
Juza still often wonders if it’ll be the same for him.
Kumon was born only fourteen years ago but is almost Juza’s physical and mental age already. He zips around the house, growing faster than Juza can even comprehend, but Kumon is kind and never professes anything other than deep love for his older brother. It makes it easier to return the affection, even when the pool of fear churns in his stomach knowing that he will live to see his brother’s entire life before he himself even begins to grow into old age.
His mother is already so much older, too. She was only twenty-three when she had him, but she’s already two years away from her sixties. It scares Juza, a little, to know that he’s already spent more time alive with her than he probably has left remaining. He knows most kids don’t have this : most kids get to show their parents what their adulthood looks like, introduce them to their new lives. He won’t have that with his mom.
It’s a little lonely.
A knock on his bedroom door startles Juza out of his textbooks. He doesn’t really understand the processes that go into magick, but he’ll be damned if that means he doesn’t spend as much time as he can memorizing the helpful tips. A glance out the window tells him it’s getting close to dinner time.
“Sweetie?” his mom calls.
“It’s open,” he answers.
There’s a moment before the old doorknob creaks and she pushes inside, hinges squealing a little. Her eyes fall on him at his desk and go gooey with her usual affection. Juza really doesn’t think he deserves all of the praise she gives him for continuing his magick studies.
“Almost dinnertime.”
“Uh, yeah. Did you want help?”
“No, no,” she hums and comes further into the room. She draws up Juza’s window-side stool and sits with him at the desk. “I got a meat pie started in the oven. Just waiting for Kumon to make his way home. Oh, are you working on your potions?”
“Sorta.”
“You know for that one,” she points at the list of potential ingredients for mood-calming incense, “you can add wild rosehip jam instead of any of the other herb berries. Makes it way easier and cheaper.”
He jots the note down on the page. She listens to him write ; he listens to her swing her legs idly. This is normal for them : this comfortable silence in being together. Many a night they spent curled up together on the couch downstairs without talking before Kumon came along.
“There’s going to be a star shower tonight,” she says. “I saw it in my afternoon tea.”
It’s unusual, Juza thinks, that his mom takes the time to check the tea leaves. She must have been looking for something else.
“At the north shores?” he asks.
There hasn’t been one there in so long. The sand along its beaches has already lost much of its potential for magick use.
“No, further east. Somewhere local. I was thinking of asking you to go out for me and try to find where they land : get some of whatever gets blessed.”
“You’re not coming?”
“No, my knees are acting up again,” she sighs. “I’m going to need to invest in a good cane soon, I think. Maybe one of the alchemist’s will have a decent one with some carnelian.”
“Should I take Kumon?”
“If you’d like,” she stands back up from the stool with a slight wince. Her knees must really be acting up. She carries the stool back over to where it was. “He’ll be home soon, so keep your ears open for dinner.”
“You can leave the door open,” he offers, and she leaves it open with a small wink.
Her footsteps trail down the hallway and, heavily, down their narrow staircase. Juza turns back to the textbook and shuts it. Going out scouting for a star shower isn’t something they do very often : mostly because not many star showers come this far south. They’re all usually up around the north shores, except, of course, for the recent drought. New starfall, even if not where it’s needed, is good.
He starts packing his bag, getting his record book and his star-collecting gear. Stars, for dragons, are a somewhat dangerous thing to handle. The fragments, which are most of what falls from the night skies, aren’t that much of a worry. It’s still a good idea, his mom has told him, to pack gloves, though. There are other things, too : small boxes and capsules that will shrink whatever he finds and keep it safe and portable until he gets home.
At dinner, he asks Kumon if he wants to come along for company, but Kumon – surprisingly – answers that he has plans to go out with some of the other kids in town and play tricks in the woods. Their mother reminds Kumon to use his best judgment of what counts as play and what doesn’t, and Juza settles in for a nice and quiet night running errands. He loves his family, but he also loves his alone time. It’s quieter that way : less stressful.
He sets out a few hours after nightfall and keeps his eyes trained skywards.
Something in his gut tells him to head due east. There are huge fields in the forest there : birch trees as far as the eye can see in the daytime and dense underbrush that is home to all kinds of pixie’s herbs. The pixies aren’t often friendly to travelers. It’s the footsteps that crush their grasses and snap their branches that infuriate them to the point of swarming people with their sparkling-hot hands and wings, grabbing and stinging wherever they can.
They seem to leave Juza alone, though. Maybe it’s because they know they can’t get through a dragon’s scales. Maybe they know he’s a magick user and permit him to harvest their excess. They’re like bees, in a strange sense, Juza thinks.
At night, some of them like to venture a little beyond their neck of the woods. Juza catches glimpses of their small, indigo shimmer in between the leaves of trees he passes beneath. A few more mischievous ones drop pinecones on his head until he looks up, upon which they vanish from sight.
“It’s the dragon,” he hears their whispers still, even as they hide from his view.
The word ‘dragon’ rustles like wind through the trees. He presses on and ignores their whispers. Pixies are ambivalent creatures. What they say is never outright rude, nor is it ever particularly kind. It’s up to the confidence – or lack thereof – of the traveler to internalize and attach an imagined tone to the words. In Juza’s ears, they’re frightened.
His mother insists that’s not true.
There’s a river that cuts through the fields in the forest and separates the west banks of nutrient-rich herbs from the east banks of the herbs rich in flavor and scent. In the daytime, the yellow leaves of the bushes gleam with their waxy leaves and look almost like a sort of golden fog, clinging to the ground. At night, their bright, golden yellow is subdued and hard to distinguish from the other flora of the forest. Only when a pixie lands on a leaf does the small indigo light offer a glimpse of the color.
This was one of Juza’s favorite places to go in his childhood. When he was too short to see over the crests of the underbrush, all he had to do was run due east from the town center through the forests as far as he could go until the river. When he was done for the day, he just had to run towards the setting sun, and it would lead him straight home.
Juza stoops by the river bank and peers down into the waters.
This river runs into the Sumeragi Kingdom from its birth waters in the mountains of the Tachibana Kingdom : the mountains serve as a type of natural border between the two kingdoms. Although, hearing from the talk about the town square of the merchants with the travelers, that may be changing soon. Regardless of who owns the river, though, it carries with its water various types of jewels useful for alchemy and magick alike. Of course, the mountainside towns of Tachibana get the largest of these jewels, but the smaller ones can avoid their nets and trickle down into these backwaters.
Juza spots a small nocturnal zircon in the riverbed and begins to take off his sandals. He wades into the shallow waters of the river – it’s deeper the further one goes – and scoops it out of the rocky bottom. It’s small but still worth enough. His mom will be happy to have some extra in her ingredient stock.
He can’t spend much time hunting for river gems tonight, though. He has to keep his eye on the sky. So, he returns to the shore and dries his feet as well as he can on the grass.
He collects some of the pixie lilac that grows so strong and abundant here under their bushes and hunts for owls caught in hunter’s canopy traps. There are a few tonight, and he climbs the trunks of the trees with those occupied traps and, collecting a few feathers, lets them fly off into the night. Then, he dismantles the traps. Hunters aren’t allowed in pixie fields to begin with.
It’s close to midnight when he sees the first star droplet fall in the sky. It lands somewhere east : just across the riverbank, and he curses his luck for a moment before sucking it up and swimming through the cold waters of a river born from melted mountain ice. At least it’s summer, he reminds himself. He doesn’t need to rely on fire magick in order to stay warm tonight.
The star shower leads him to the edge of the eastern pixie bushes : in a small clearing he hasn’t stumbled across before. Rosehips and wild cosmos creep along the bushes and the grasses in quantities like he hasn’t seen before. Even just by walking, he crushes flowers under his feet. The stars continue to rain down in small, broken up fragments. The summer air has already done a number to them as they enter the atmosphere.
The plants they hit glimmer and, absorbing the magick of the star fragments, glow faintly in the night. They will grow strong beyond anything imaginable for the next few months, thriving just off of the magick. The deer that stop to eat the leaves and the birds that pause to eat the berries will also flourish, strengthen, and breed. Insects, too, will grow large and healthy. The pixies may even see increased vigor.
He’ll wait for the star shower to stop, he decides, then collect what fragments lay unabsorbed on the supersaturated flora, as well as some of the blessed berries and flowers. It takes some time, of course, for a star shower to end, so he huddles down at the edge of the clearing and takes the time to stare up and admire the sky.
If his mom were here – or Kumon – they’d have to give the shower a wide berth. Unlike Juza, whose scales can protect him even at the last second of impact, they would have reason to fear small fragments hurtling towards them at such awe-inspiring speeds. Even if it is something as harmless as star droplets.
But it’s then that he notices a bright light in the sky, bright enough that its light shines throughout the clearing like daytime. It hurtles down, seemingly larger and larger as it grows close.
Juza gapes, wordless, motionless.
It’s a full star.
Granted, it’s small for how large stars often come, but it’s full, and it’s, he squints, it’s hurtling straight for him. He barely has the time to react and outstretch his hands, because in that split second something in him decides that he cannot bear to let it be absorbed into the grass and flowers, before it hits.
Juza hasn’t felt his scales come out in a long time. The last time, in fact, had been almost a decade ago when he had accidentally dropped the wrong ingredient into his mother’s cauldron and, her shrieking a warning and grabbing him to run out of the room, had some of the liquid explode onto his face. He had been fine, of course, but his mother’s burns had been bad.
This star should have burned his hands right off, but instead it floats – ever slightly – over his palms innocently. The deep purple of his scales closes after a second, leaving only his usual skin to hold the star.
And something, he can’t describe how it feels – can’t even begin to think about how he feels – but something moves inside him like he’s been asleep for a very, very long time : like he’s never been awake until now. It settles warm and flickering in his stomach, creeping up into his heart. It’s warm like the heat and warmth of the star in his palms.
And suddenly he feels like he could stare at it forever and never tire of its beauty.
Then, he pauses. He looks up into the clearing, now resting : the star shower having passed. Darkness begins to creep back in from the depths of the forest. A few pixies are here to also harvest, but they are not harvesting. They peek over the leaves of the bushes at him.
“The dragon has a star,” one whispers.
Wrong. Juza has a hoard.
He now understands what Tsumugi meant when he said something about not feeling whole, feeling empty and used, at the idea of not having his hoard. This star in his palms, he needs this.
Panic is the next emotion to wash over him. He hears his mother’s warnings burn in his mind – do not covet, do not succumb to the pain of being unable to let go – and he curls in on himself in shame. There’s nothing he can do now, though. It’s not as if he can just let go.
So, he hides it. Just like his mother always feared : just like he had always feared. He draws out from the pocket of his knapsack one of his capsules – the one he keeps on him at all times in case he finds something pretty to show his mom – and he uncaps it. His magick is strong for this, and even the star shrinks down to the size of a small bobble sewn onto a gown’s hem for glitter. And then it’s in the capsule, and the lid is shut, and Juza has hidden a star.
The pixies shiver their wings.
“Dragon,” one calls. This is unusual. The pixies do not speak to anyone but themselves. “There is a traveler following you.”
Another one, deep indigo, crawls out tentatively around a rosehip cluster.
“Do not hide the star from your mother.”
Juza startles. “How do you know-” he tries to demand, but their wings shiver again, and he silences.
“Pixies know all,” the first one murmurs in a voice like a firefly’s blinking light in the dark. “All that enters our fields, at least.”
Another shiver rustles through the bushes. The pixies are leaving.
“The dragon has a star,” they continue to whisper to themselves as they leave. “The dragon has hidden a star.”
Juza stares down at the capsule. He has. He swallows thickly. He has hidden a star.
Juza forgets about the pixies' mention of the traveler as soon as they leave him in the clearing. His thoughts are too busy and his mind too frantic. He can barely keep his hands from shaking as he picks the rosehips off from their branches. He scoops up some of the star fragments, too, but he leaves some behind for the pixies. Why, he doesn’t understand. Something in him tells him to leave them : some kind of apology or expression of gratitude for what they witnessed.
With luck, they will not whisper of this to his mother. Juza's not sure he could handle breaking her heart like that.
He’s across the river and halfway out of the forest when a twig snaps somewhere in front of him, and he tenses up.
“Y’know, I’ve heard a lot ‘bout dragons, but I thought they’d be,” the guy in front of him takes a long time to find what he wants to say, “better.” Juza scowls, and the guy snickers. “What are you? My height, only a little heavier? Shouldn’t you have scales, big boy?”
“Name yourself,” Juza growls.
“Settsu Banri,” the guy sniffs and stalks forward. For an introduction to a dragon, he has guts to already be sliding his sword out of its sheath. “But what’s really important is my girl’s name,” he swings the sword in a little mocking pattern. “She’s my baby Lucy.”
Juza snorts, and the guy doesn’t seem to be flattered by it.
“You got a fucking problem?” he spits.
“What?” Juza retorts. “You’re so pathetic you call a piece of metal your girlfriend?”
Settsu doesn’t answer with words. Something angry snaps in his eyes, and, in the next second, that same sword comes down furious onto Juza. If this weren’t a fight – and if Juza wasn’t royally fucking pissed off – he’d be a little more impressed at the fact that the guy can swing a sword as fast as a star can fall. Given the situation, though, Juza just smirks when the metal clangs off his scales without dealing the slightest amount of damage.
It hurts a little, sure. The scales don’t absorb the pressure, but there’s no cut : no blood.
“Ya really do have scales,” the guy sneers. “Guess you’re not a total fucking waste of blood.”
He goes for a second swing, but Juza catches the sword in his fist this time and tugs it right out of his hands. Now, there’s a little bit of something new in the guy’s eyes. Juza continues to walk up into his space, and the guy doesn’t move. His lips, now parted – in terror or in amazement, Juza doesn’t care – match his wide eyes. Juza stops in front of him.
The guy swallows.
“Woah,” he says intelligently, and it’s the last thing out of his mouth before Juza punches him hard enough in the face – scales out – to send him up off his feet before he hits the ground.
He’s out like a light, of course. Juza takes a small moment to stare down at the guy’s body, still as a stone, before he drops the sword and rubs his hand and shoulder. Damn, he packed a fucking punch behind his sword swings. But Juza steps over him anyways on his way towards town.
Juza doesn’t realize how much that little spat interested him until he gets in through the door at home. His mom’s voice from the living room welcoming home is what jerks him back to the reality of the evening – he remembers the star – and he breaks out into a nervous sweat instantaneously.
“Honey, that is you, right?” her tone’s becoming concerned.
“Uh,” he says. He needs to respond, or he’ll scare her. “Y- Yeah!”
She hobbles out into the entryway and looks him up and down. “Are you alright, honey? You’re shaking head to toe.”
“Cold,” he says. “Cold outside.”
“But it’s summer?” she says and opens the door to stick her head out. “Honey, it’s plenty warm. Are you feeling alright? Do you want some warm soup?”
“No!” And then, he feels bad when she flinches at his volume. “No, I. I. Stuff. Star. Stuff. Berries.”
She’s getting really concerned now. “Kumon!” she calls up the stairs. “Can you come down here? It’s your brother!”
She doesn’t need to say another word before Kumon’s flying out through his bedroom door and launching himself down the steps. His eyes find his brother’s, and then Kumon rakes his gaze up and down.
“Why’s he shaking?” And now his voice sounds panicked, too.
“Fine,” Juza says. “I’m. I.”
Kumon’s arms find his shoulders and begin to steer him into their home, towards the hearth in the living room. It’s a kind gesture. But then his mother’s hands begin to take the knapsack off his back, and the sight of the capsule with the star sears into his vision, and his sight goes blank for a moment. When he blinks back, his mom’s on the floor.
Kumon lets go of his shoulders. His mom stares up at him in shock.
“I need to go,” Juza blurts, and he makes a break for the stairs.
In the solace of his room, he can somewhat calm down. He slumps to the floor against his bedroom door and stares at the floorboards. He’s never gotten aggressive to anyone before in his family. He would never hurt Kumon or his mom, or so he thought. He hates himself suddenly in a uniquely violent way. She was trying to help him, for Gods’ sakes.
Then, he thinks about the guy that tried to stop him : tried to open him up with his sword. Dread settles into his stomach. Juza could have killed him. He has no idea if he did kill him.
Juza pulls the star’s container out from the pocket of his knapsack and stares at it for a moment : the crude metal behind which something quite literally not even of this planet is hidden. He takes it over to his desk and hides it in the back of a drawer. Tomorrow, he’ll take one of his fancier boxes and try some sealing magick : anything to be able to keep the star safe while hiding its magick traces from his awareness.
Hopefully, that will mitigate the effects of his imprint, too.
A small knock comes at his door.
“Juza.” It’s his mom’s voice. She sounds tired and horribly sad. She must know. “Juza, honey. You… you have a good night. Get some sleep. In the morning… if you want to talk about, I’ll listen. But if you don’t, I won’t ask.” There's a small silence. "Honey, I love you, okay? Whatever happened tonight... you're safe here. Don't worry about any of that."
Guilt chokes him in his throat.
Her footsteps leave and turn downstairs. From the entryway, Juza can hear Kumon ask his mom something and her answer, but it’s far enough away that he can’t make out the words.