Dinner and a Training Montage

Dinner, was— as usual—quiet.

But this time, the silence seemed to hang even heavier, his attempts at conversation hitting a brick wall even with Drake, who seemed to be trying to turn invisible. A hard task for someone his size.

He'd been doing that since this afternoon, and truth be told, Lachlan was starting to get concerned. Especially with the hallucinations jig the akuma had been throwing around.

"Doing alright?" He probed lightly in Angaelic, Ariake squinting at him briefly and Eden either not hearing or ignoring him.

"Mmph."

Sounded affirmative enough. "Can't say I was expecting to run into a bathroom demon with a talent for digging up ghosts."

Drake's eyes flicked in his direction, just enough to maybe confirm his suspicions. "I wasn't either."

He waited for a moment, but the other didn't seem interested in adding anything further. "At least it didn't try to eat your face."

"No. I guess it could've been worse." Drake sent a sly sort of look at Ariake, and added in Nihonjin, "I ate enough of it, though."

Ariake twitched, squinting up and flicking between the two of them. "What?" He demanded.

"Next time don't throw bathroom slime at me."

Ariake slapped his chopsticks down on the table. "It wasn't my fault, baka! You have an akuma attached to you and see what happens!"

Lachlan hummed, leaning an elbow on the back of his chair. "I didn't do anything, just saying."

"Yeah well, we got it off before it could possess you. All of you were too slow for me." Chopsticks stabbed in everyone's general direction.

"Stop flinging your rice everywhere," King Ed snipped, turning a narrow glance at Ariake. "Your will was too weak to resist it, anyway. None of us could have gotten there in time, no matter how fast we moved."

"It slimed me and then jumped on my back—!"

"Alright boys, no schoolyard fights," Lachlan interrupted. "I think we can all agree Ariake throwing up mould all over us sucked, but it wasn't all him. We were pretty rough out there today. Our teamwork still needs a lot of work."

"Speak for yourself, team leader," Ariake snapped.

"It wasn't his fault, either," Drake jumped in just as he opened his mouth, "We went on ahead without him. We should have waited."

Ariake opened his mouth, and then closed it, his glare turning more petulant than anything, Eden funnily enough staying silent, too.

Huh. Couldn't say he'd been expecting a defence, or for "you take Tonkatsu Road"-san to miss an opportunity for arguing the point. The sudden silence was a little awkward, though. Clearing his throat, he let a little quirk pull up the corner of his mouth, tapping the edge of the table lightly with his chopsticks. "Must've been a first. Don't think I've ever heard of an akaname turning this bad—the most I've ever seen is a yokai having a bit of mischief. Must've really had something against bathhouses."

"It probably formed from someone pissing in the sauna," Ariake muttered.

Lachlan inhaled rice down the wrong pipe.

"The collective disgust when the water turned yellow?" Drake said, far too thoughtfully. "I can see it."

Lachlan wiped at his eyes, thumping his chest. Oh god, these two could make a good comedy act. "I'd become a demon, too, if that was what birthed me."

"Could you be any more childish?" And there was Eden scowling at the lot of them.

Lachlan smirked "Blue-footed boobies."

This time Ariake choked. "What?"

"It's a type of seabird from out east somewhere," he explained, deadpan.

"It is not said like that. Is it?"

"Is in Angaelic." He smiled and shovelled more rice into his mouth.

"It seems I was wrong," said Eden, whose mouthful of rice had magically turned into sour lemons, from the looks of it, "you can be more childish. I shouldn't be surprised."

"Ti—"

"Hey hey, we're in polite company." Lachlan poked at Drake's shoulder with his chopsticks, glancing sideways at the nearest table, stocked full of girls. "We don't need the entire academy against us, Dragon-san."

The lad actually blushed, just slightly, maybe a hint of light disappearing too fast from his eyes for Lachlan to tell if it'd been there or not in the first place. "I uh, it just slipped out."

He quirked an eyebrow, matching Drake's lapse into Angaelic. "'Course it did."

"Dragon." Ariake weaponised his chopsticks again to point at Drake. "How did you even get a dragon for a yuurei? Kami are the only ones who can take that form— you can't take something that doesn't exist."

Drake shrugged. "Luck?"

"That's one hell of a cosmic lottery," Lachlan muttered in Angaelic, adding in Nihonjin, "You struck gold, then."

"But how?" Ariake pushed.

Drake's face went carefully blank. "I prefer not to talk about it."

"What?" Ariake frowned. "Why? Did a psychopath mentor you?"

"Don't be a jerk, Mr. Clearly-There-Is-No-Hawk-san." Lachlan flicked his own chopsticks at him, and the teen twitched, glaring. "Not everyone has an obake sensei, anyway."

"What other way is there to become one?" Ariake scowled. "And don't call me that, gaijin."

What other way...? Lachlan squinted at him, wondering if he'd suddenly picked up a coy sense of sarcasm.

"Do you really not know?" Drake echoed his thoughts.

Ariake's scowl deepened as he glanced between them. "Know about what?"

"Well—" Lachlan waved a circle with his chopsticks, tilting his head "—how'd you become one?"

"My parents are obake." The teen kept flicking between them, his scowl turning confused. "I came of age and wanted to become one too."

"So they made you complete a little task?" Lachlan prompted. "And you gained a yuurei?"

"Obviously," Ariake said, less scathing and more uncertain.

"We aren't barbarians in Nihon, gaijin," Eden put in. "This is the way our people have become obake for generations. To do otherwise would incur the death penalty."

Fantastic, I'm not a murderer after all. He hummed, the phantom taste of blood back to haunt him. And he'd just gotten rid of the mould, too. "Suppose that hasn't happened for a while, then."

"Is someone going to explain?" Ariake demanded. "What are you talking about? Death penalty?"

Lachlan hummed again, gathering his empty tray. "I'm sure you can figure it out. Your parents would've said something in there."

"Really? That's it? You're just going to leave me with that?"

"I'm afraid I don't feel like explaining." The other two started gathering their things, too, as he rose and skirted around the table. "Besides, I have advanced Nihonjin homework to do. Can't slack off."

He left him to finish off his dinner, firmly shoving aside the ghostly echo of salty iron on his tongue. The lad'd figure it out.

_________________

Other things, though, Lachlan himself had to figure out.

Another week passed by, this time with a higher-points assignment they won that involved hunting for illegal glimmer "factories". Mostly the kind yakuza-affiliated set up in hidden-away locations with little bags of fairy-water hanging on clotheslines.

And it made him think.

An akuma hanging around the yakuza. A man with a snake tattoo shooting what he could have sworn was a glimmer bullet at him. Except glimmer wasn't strong enough to make an entire pistol that could shoot a bullet without cracking. Wasn't practical, either. People used shards, whips, or even "fireballs"—if they felt like wasting it all in one shot—for a reason. The only way it would be practical...

...was if you used Core-En.

His own Ki rifle seemed to weigh down his shoulder as he fired it at a target through a pounding torrent of rain, his distant skin crawling under the teeth-grating influence of both throttles synced at notch-three. Could sense the glimmer despite the limits of conventional visibility—standing out differently to the thrumming life of his teammates and their cores.

Had that been what he'd felt, back in that room? He hadn't paid enough attention, and he mentally cursed himself for that now.

It wouldn't be. It couldn't be.

Or so he would've thought if he hadn't already seen a white-hot beam of pure sun-formed energy streak from the hand of a Samurai. Or armour formed from Ki that pulsed with runes the more you poured power into them.

Maybe Core-En wasn't kept out of dangerous hands as much as the SC liked to claim.

After long days pushing neck and neck with team Seven on the bottom, his discovering a seed of their own team spirit that he was stubbornly set on watering, those runes crept quietly into the dark of night. They haunted the space behind his eyelids whenever one of Eden's beams burned across the training grounds, and sometimes his hands tingled for no reason, notch-three's ghost breathing at the back of his neck.

Sitting at their little private common room table in the eery quietness of early morning, he closed his eyes for a moment, driving back the image of a glinting sword stained red. He could still see crimson dripping onto a pristine floor as clear as if it were yesterday.

You know, I could really do with a pint.