Nomenclature

Noa had the sense, as Ogumura led them to a restaurant, that she was uncomfortable about something. 

There were a couple of things she might be uncomfortable about. He hadn't been at her house to let her in like she'd asked. She'd found him chatting away with her relatives and halfway to a first-name basis with them. He was about to spend more money on her than he'd spent the day earning. 

He'd argue that none of these things were his fault, exactly, but that didn't mean Ogimura might not like them. 

Oh, and he'd just performed impromptu magic on her as well as on her family's house. That one was his fault, no matter how you looked at it. Or at least, it had been entirely his idea. 

But also: that had turned out fine, and he'd had a great deal of fun doing it. Enough so that even if Ogimura didn't like it, he would wait for her to say so out loud before apologizing. 

As they settled in at their booth, having retrieved their drinks, she finally seemed to settle on something to say. "Just so you know, a lot of human stores won't even take ryokudama." 

"That's fine," Noa said. "I brought cash and bills too. I can save it up to exchange later." 

Ogimura made a complicated face in his direction, but didn't press the matter further. It was obvious that she didn't like talking about money, and that suited Noa just fine. There were many more interesting—and less risky—topics to cover. 

Such as, for instance: "You usually study around now, right? Sorry to slow you down. You can go ahead and ignore me if you want." 

Ogimura hesitated, but then pulled her schoolbag onto her lap, digging through it. "Do you want to look at anything? I have most of my notes with me."

Noa turned down her offer and left her to it, sipping his drink and considering the menu instead. It was a little easier to be at peace with the idea of not going to school anymore when he'd spent the day being useful in the real world. 

(Three days. That had been all it took to turn his expectations of his life, future, and relationship with his mom upside down. Three days. He was still getting by mostly by trying not to think about it…but he also wouldn't have expected a day like today to even be possible four days ago.) 

Trying to continue not thinking about it, he busied himself with peeking at Ogimura's notebooks from upside down, then with tucking in once the first round of food arrived. Magic was hungry work, especially after spending hours at it.

Ogimura was distracted by the food arriving too, shoving her books to one side and trying not to obviously inhale her doria. Noa politely looked away when she took too hot of a bite and started trying to breathe around it, and his gaze landed on a magic circle sticking out of her folder. 

"Mind if I look at this?" he asked. 

She waved a hand in front of her face, nodding. 

He pulled it out and inspected it, whistling silently. It was trickier than he'd been expecting. He traced over the lines Ogimura had filled in with a finger, genuinely impressed. 

Ogimura, meanwhile, seemed to have managed to swallow. "That was a pop quiz this morning," she said. "It threw a lot of people off. It's supposed to power a light display, but the pattern is—" 

"Not a pattern at all, right?" Noa said, tracing under a line of Ogimura's characters. "It was attached to a secondary enchantment elsewhere that was controlling the input. Probably to an outside energy source linked to…weather? No, that's stupid—probably something a lot smaller, like sunlight through leaves on a tree. Something constantly changing, so efforts to channel power into it directly would just backfire." He grinned. "Katsuura-sensei seems like the type to trick her students into exploding things." 

Ogimura stared at him. "Does it say that anywhere?" 

"No, it's just—this type of connection is really finicky, so people don't choose it without a good reason. Usually it's because you don't know what exactly the spell is going to have to work with—not a steady source like ley lines or plant growth or seasonal changes. Spells that are anchored to things like the weather, or people coming and going, or someone's request. My mom…" 

He stopped. His mother used these all the time, he was going to say. He'd been really looking forward to covering them in class, because she complained about how hard they were to customize even though they were her specialty. 

It had been the sort of complaining that was more than half bragging. It was because she was so good at making spells sensitive to moment-to-moment changes that she won the high-end, oddball contracts that had sent them back and forth across Kikyo over the years. 

Except apparently she hadn't done quite as good a job with those contracts as he'd thought she did. That, or they simply hadn't been enough to cover….

Ogimura frowned at him. "Takasu-kun?" 

He shook his head, letting another train of thought take over. "Actually…I know it's a bit of an awkward request, but do you think you could just call me Noa?"

Ogimura blinked. "I…sure? If you want?" She looked away. "I didn't realize you didn't like it. Sorry." 

"It's not that I don't like it, it's just…. I'm sorry if it's weird." 

"No, it's fine." She met his eyes again. "And I'll do it if you stop calling me Ogimura. It's only going to be awkward when most of the people you're living with have the same name." 

Noa hesitated—but she'd given a much more reasonable explanation than he had, so there was really only one way he could respond. "Thanks, Miyori-san."

"Don't mention it…Noa-kun." 

They ate in silence for a while after that. Miyori pulled out her history textbook to read as she ate. Noa traced his fingers over the magic circle absently until Miyori pulled out her textbook and passed it over to him.

It was one of the few textbooks he'd actually started reading ahead in. He cracked it open and found the spot where he'd left off in his own copy. 

Despite his current lifestyle, he'd seldom spent time in restaurants—his mom was the type to bring food home over eating out. However, watching Miyori try to shovel food into her mouth and underline passages in her textbook at the same time, surrounded by the chatter and a friendly sort of anonymity, he thought he was coming to understand the appeal.