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Even recreated out of nanoskin, the house settles exactly the same. Momo lies still in her bed, face-up, listening. A creak here, a shudder there—water moving—the night wind blowing through a crack. She might have her memories back now, every last one, but that doesn’t change how beautiful all of it sounds, suddenly: not just sounds, not on their own, but sounds that she’s always known.
She shifts around under her quilt, but doesn’t roll over. She just keeps watching the ceiling, afraid to close her eyes. It’s weird: it’s the same ceiling, and yet it’s not. How could a ceiling have changed like that in three months? A couple of hours ago, she’d been none the wiser, and now…
Now everything is touching that ceiling. Serpoians, telekinesis, Turbo-Granny, Acro-Silky, Evil Eye—Sumer, Kur, Reiko Kashima—Danmara. Aira, Jiji, Vamola, Sakata, Zuma.
Okarun.
Momo shuts her eyes tight, pulling the quilt over her head. Underneath it, she breathes quietly, gathering heat. After Turbo-Granny and Manjiro and the Masked Priests had done their ritual—after the Uchide-no-Kozuchi had tapped each memory back into her heart, one by one—she had lost her balance, dizzy with the weight of herself, and Okarun had been the one to catch her in his arms. His left palm had laid flat on her back, as if to hold her down on earth. His school uniform had smelled fresh, like Lion detergent and sunlight. Overcome by the remembering—Okarun’s hand her hand everything rising his voice breaking on the word love—she had choked back an impossible sound, and gripped his shirt for dear life, and started to cry.
Then Jiji had rushed into the embrace, too, and Vamola, and Sakata—and Aira had played it cool on the fringes, her words as rude as ever but her voice unmistakably wobbly—and Jiji had been sobbing, and Aira had yelled at him for sobbing because if his tears cooled off too fast on his stupid face then Evil Eye would show up and that was the last thing they needed—and Momo had been surrounded by arms, and elbows, and bodies: the bodies of her friends. That’s right. That’s right. She had so many of those now. She had ached, briefly, for Miko and Muko to be there, too.
If Granny hadn’t been there after—bandaged and cranky as ever, but healthy, and alive, and so in Momo’s estimation more gorgeous and awesome than anyone in the entire world—Momo probably would have laid down right there on the temple floor and slept for a week. But Granny had been there, waiting for everyone to let Momo go before opening her arms and leading her to the car to drive home.
Glasses Guy, she’d said gruffly over her shoulder, jerking her head in Okarun’s direction. You come, too.
Now—now, as the walls settle into their proper places—Okarun is sleeping somewhere in her house, and Momo remembers him. She remembers everything. Those drafty nights in the half-ruined house, those long walks home from Moe Moe Kikoho, their mouths knocked together in the school courtyard—she flushes, unconsciously covering her lips with one hand. The two of them had been absolutely silent in the backseat for the whole drive from Shimane to Kamigoe, and she had wanted eighty times to turn to him and say, Okarun, I remember now, I remember. But what would that have even meant? Okarun, I remember your eyelashes, I remember your knuckles, I remember how much I wanted to kiss you.
She squeals and furiously kicks her feet around. The quilt comes off, flung aside by the violence of her reaction. She lies sprawled and panting on her mattress, redder in the face than Granny after a full bottle of sake. She swallows.
She can’t stand looking at this ceiling anymore.
#
There are a hundred pathways through this house, ya know, Granny had told her once, sweeping autumn leaves off the engawa in the early morning. It can trick you, especially at night. Sometimes you’ll be led to your heart’s desire… sometimes to a hungry yokai!
Granny, you’re weird, Momo had replied—ten years old, long-haired, and deeply resentful of the kosode and hibakama she was being forced to wear.
Maybe so. Then Granny had grinned wickedly and swept some leaves in Momo’s direction, making her shriek. But don’t come crying to me when a yokai nibbles on your toes!
D-Don’t say that, Granny! And as if my heart’s desire would be in this crummy old house!
#
The hallways seem longer in the dark, or maybe that’s just three months’ worth of memories deepening everything Momo sees. She tiptoes silently through the house, trying to work out where Granny put Okarun up for the night. There are a lot of rooms, after all, and Granny’s always using them for something different, relic storage or a mahjong table or another beat-up TV on which to watch her Bakatono DVDs—he could be anywhere. She might have made him sleep in the shrine, for all Momo knows.
Eventually, she spots a set of fusuma left slightly ajar on the south end of the house, near the garden. Mathematically, it’s maybe the farthest point from Momo’s room that someone inside could get. She creeps closer and peers through the opening.
There’s a curled-up body on a futon. Okarun’s messy curls are distinctive even with the lights off, even half-covered by a big pink comforter. Momo’s heart twists gently. She slips inside.
Okarun doesn’t stir when she walks closer, or even when she lowers herself to the floor to sit cross-legged beside him. His glasses are folded neatly above his pillow. One bare foot sticks out awkwardly from the comforter. His breathing makes a quiet, tide-like sound in the bare room. Momo closes her eyes for a second, just to listen. There’s so much of Okarun that she can hear in there, even though it’s just air moving through him. Suddenly, she feels sleepy—even though it’s chilly.
She stretches her legs out, shifts her hips as silently as she can, and lies down on her side to face him. Without a futon under her, it’s pretty uncomfortable, but she doesn’t care. Now, from this angle, she can see his face straight-on, tucked close to the hem of the comforter, his mouth hidden, his eyes softly closed, his features bare and new without his glasses.
Stupidly, without even thinking about it, Momo reaches over and brushes his hair from his forehead. Within a second, his big brown eyes are open again, staring hazily at her.
“Momo-chan,” he breathes, gravelly and half-dreaming. Then, blinking, seeming to comprehend how close she is, he flails into a sitting position and yelps, “AYASE-san!”
“Shhhh!” Momo claps a hand over his mouth, making a vicious zipper motion at her lips with the other. “Don’t wake up Granny, she’ll kick your ass!”
“Don’t tell me that!” Now it’s more of a whisper-yelp. Okarun fumbles for his glasses, and when he can’t find them, Momo sits up, too, and picks them up, and passes them into his open hand.
He puts them on, pink-faced. “Thank you.” Then he puts his hands in his lap, glancing over her from head to hip like he’s checking for injuries. “Did you have a bad dream?”
“Huh? N-No.” Momo shakes her head a little too quickly. Why’s he sound so dreamy saying something like that? Is the spirit of Takakura Ken possessing his mortal body? “I just, uh, couldn’t sleep.”
“Oh… I’m sorry.”
“What for? It’s not your fault.” Well, it kind of is. Frantically, she changes the subject. “Did Granny give you enough blankets? It gets cold back here this time of year.”
“Ah, y-yes, I’m very comfortable,” Okarun says. Polite as ever. Momo takes in his baggy purple t-shirt, the slightly visible elastic of his boxers. How can he look so cute in such a basic fit? What the hell is his problem? “Actually, since Turbo-Granny’s powers came back, I get overheated pretty easily… so I told Seiko-san that I didn’t need a space heater.”
Momo is pretty cold even with her hoodie and slippers on, but now she’d feel like an idiot saying it. She stuffs her hands into her armpits.
“The truth is, I was having trouble sleeping, too,” Okarun says sheepishly. “Everything that’s happened these last few days… it’s a lot to keep track of. Are you… doing all right, with all of your memories back? It must have been confusing to get them all at once.”
Typical Okarun, spending way too much brainpower on what she might need and barely any on what he does. Momo’s eyes skate over the bandages on his right arm, the cut glued shut on his right cheekbone, the bruises on his chin. It had been a hell of a fight, getting to the priests. Waves and waves of Serpo had come after them, crushed them into the ground with that obnoxious Awesome Zone of theirs—but Okarun had kept getting up, blood in his mouth, Evil Eye and Acro-Silky on one flank and Turbo-Granny on the other, cutting a path forward.
Momo had just run, powerless and small, with scrapes on her knees and white-hot tears streaking across her face. She hadn’t known what to do with all of it. Being loved that much.
“Yeah,” she mumbles now, rubbing at her eye with two fingers. “My head kinda hurts. Actually, my everything kinda hurts.”
“Do you need anything? Bufferin? Salonpas?”
“Nah.”
“Okay.” Okarun bows his head, staring intenly at his lap. Momo realizes that she likes how he looks with the lights off—clearer, somehow. And there’s a faint, almost imperceptible glow in his eyes, gold like the depths of Turbo-Granny’s tunnel. Had that always been there?
A long, companionable silence unwinds between them, settling on the floor like warmth. Momo’s hands come loose from her armpits. She wants to lie back down again, but she would feel weird doing it if Okarun wasn’t lying down, too.
“What time is it?” Okarun asks after a while. Because of course he wouldn’t know. Because he doesn’t have a phone.
Momo checks hers, tilting up the screen without removing it from her hoodie’s front pocket. “Two in the morning.”
“That’s not so bad.”
Even this feels sacred, all of a sudden. Small talk with Okarun. Words, tiny words, about nothing at all. Love and guilt swell thickly in Momo’s throat, their edges pressed together. How could she have forgotten?
“I was horrible to you, Okarun,” she murmurs.
Okarun looks at her, stricken. “No you weren’t.”
“I was. I was awful.”
“Don’t say that,” Okarun insists. He twists slightly closer to her, the quilt disrupted, the slim muscles in his neck straining softly. “You didn’t owe me anything, Ayase-san. You didn’t know me.”
“But I should have!” Momo’s voice is sharper than she means for it to be, almost splintering. “I should never have forgotten you! What kind of person am I, huh? The guy I…” She falters, eyes prickling; to hide it, she reaches up and fiddles with her bangs. “Someone I care about so much… I… I betrayed you, Okarun.”
“That’s not true. It wasn’t your fault.”
How can he argue with her so easily? Hadn’t there been a time, not that long ago, when he’d have balked and looked away and mumbled an apology, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong? Now he’s gazing at her straight-on, both hands bunched loosely on the quilt in his lap, his eyes so gentle and insistent all at once that she can’t look away from them, bound to him by an invisible rope.
“It wasn’t your fault, Ayase-san,” he repeats, firm as a hand against her ribs. “I know you know that.”
Momo’s eyes well up, then, with tears. So embarrassing. She wipes furiously at her face with her sleeve. “I don’t know that, idiot! I should have been stronger—I should have—” She breaks off, almost out of breath. Beating herself up doesn’t come naturally. It’s like a strained muscle. But she can’t help it. Her mind flings itself back to that moment in Danmara, grasping Okarun’s hand as he floated away from her, desperate not to let go and letting go anyway. “I should have held on tighter.”
“You saved Seiko-san!” Okarun exclaims, his eyebrows pinched urgently. “That’s what you do. You save everyone. You saved me. You’ve saved me lots of times, Ayase-san.”
Momo sniffles. “R-Really?”
Okarun softens. “More than I can ever repay.”
“Who said anything about repayment?” Momo scrubs the tears off of her face one more time, then gently slaps her cheeks. “I’ve put you through so much crap. If anything, I should repay you. I need to buy you, like… three hundred hamburgers.”
“No one would ever need that many hamburgers! I would die!”
“Ugh, damn it, Okarun!” Momo yells, angrily mussing her hair with both hands. “Here I am trying to apologize, and you’re not accepting it, damn it! Accept it, damn it!”
“But I’m telling you, you have nothing to apologize for!” Okarun yells back. Granny is definitely going to wake up and kill them both. “I refuse to compromise!”
“That’s just like you!”
“Take it or leave it!”
They both glare at each other, fuming, for a few seconds. Momo tells herself that the drumming of her heart is from good old-fashioned rage, rather than the sight of Okarun’s eyes shining in the dark, the splotchy flush on his neck. She won’t break eye contact first. Not this time! Not ever again!
“Then… tell me something about yourself!” she demands, flustered. “Something nobody else knows! A secret. If you do, I’ll call it even.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, Ayase-san,” Okarun replies, but she can tell by his look of concentration that he’s already searching his heart for something to give to her. Something precious.
If Momo strains to listen, she thinks that she can hear rain. That’s right—there had been a storm forecasted overnight. Granny had taken in the drying and everything. Soon it will be spilling from the eaves outside, trickling back into the garden, to make things grow come spring.
Okarun adjusts his glasses, eyes downcast. Momo traces the outline of his face, his shoulders. All the parts of him she’s bandaged up, all the wounds she’s cleaned; healing over, vanishing, now. Out of sight.
Momo wants to memorize him, exactly as he is now, and lock it away in the deepest part of her spirit, where no stinking curse can ever reach it; where it can never, ever be shrunk away.
“I don’t,” he murmurs, no louder than the rain, “know if I exist.”
The house creaks faintly around them, readjusting to the humidity, or maybe to the weight of what Okarun’s just said. Momo stares at him, speechless.
“My parents—aren’t around. My mom’s brother pays my rent so I can go to school. But… he doesn’t keep in touch. Just puts a deposit in my bank account every month. Before I met you… I was pretty sure that I wasn’t even real. That I was… an alien, or something. But when you—” He gulps, reaching one bandaged hand up to fidget with his glasses, even though they’re all the way up on the bridge of his nose, even though he must see everything clearly. “When you sat down in the desk in front of mine, and—and you talked to me…”
He shakes his head, his memory mingling with hers. Fresh as it is in her mind, Momo can almost feel the classroom light, can almost smell the magazine pages and pencil shavings.
“Anyway, I…” The bandaged hand goes still in his lap, over where his knee must be bent. “I still wonder about it sometimes. I can’t help it. Where did I even come from? Who made me? Can this—really be my life? I get to eat Seiko-san’s cooking, and play soccer with Jiji, and go shopping with Aira-san, and play Tekken with Kinta-san til we both fall asleep, and teach Vamola about, like, citrus trees and convenience stores… and I get to carry hay bales for Mr. Mantis Shrimp, and run in the yard with Turbo Granny, and all kinds of other amazing things… and when I get back to my empty apartment at the end of the day, Ayase-san, I…”
He looks up at her suddenly, his mouth set in a hard line, his throat clenching up. Heat seeps onto Momo’s face before she can collect herself.
Okarun, she thinks, breathlessly, is so handsome.
“I…” He makes a hesitant, abortive motion, like he’s about to take her hand. Momo wants him to. She wants him to. But he doesn’t. “I have a pair of Bigfoot slippers in the entryway that you gave to me.”
Momo doesn’t think that anyone, ever, in all of human history, and maybe extraterrestrial history, has ever wanted to kiss anybody so bad as she does right then. She wants it more than she had in the backseat of Granny’s van. More than she had on the night she’d thought he was outside her window, begging to see her face. More than she had as Danmara’s gravity remade itself; more than all the times he’d come charging in to back her up, fast and lithe as pure shadow, his back against her chest, her first name in his teeth.
“Of course you exist,” she says instead, lamely.
Then she scoots across the floor on her knees, closer to him, until their bodies are parallel. She nudges her hip and shoulder against his.
“Feel that?” she asks.
Okarun’s breath is warm in the air between them when he turns to look at her.
“Yeah,” he whispers, all wonder. “I feel it.”
They stay like that—Momo leaning into Okarun’s side, Okarun’s neck bent close to her—for longer than they need to. Momo rests her head on his shoulder, wrinkling the fabric of his shirt. It will leave a little red impression in her cheek, probably, like a crumpled pillowcase. How they end up sharing Okarun’s futon, forehead-to-forehead underneath the quilt, listening to the rain and the settling of the house—how they end up falling asleep like that, the sides of their upturned hands touching—Momo doesn’t know. She’s brand-new, after all. She doesn’t know anything.
But she remembers.