#for the dramatic nickorin reunion

[yoshizora]

part 10

lmao wow i’m finally updating that monster au!!!

Things begin to seem bleak after a while. Not when the snow melts, because hope is still fresh in their hearts, not when the flowers bloom, because they can’t acknowledge the worst case scenario, but when Hanayo’s arm falls off at the shoulder they realize it’s summer and they’re far from home and who-knows-how-far from Rin. They’ve got nothing to show for their efforts.

Hanayo’s body is falling apart but even that doesn’t seem to matter much to her. She’s a walking, groaning stack of bones and skin and hair held together by spider threads, still mournfully caterwauling at night in case Rin hears. But there never are any responses, only the fearful scattering of animals and other things that hide in the dirt. All Nozomi can do is keep them moving in case. Just in case. That perpetual just in case that never happens and when Hanayo’s other arm falls off as they’re climbing along the foot of a mountain, Nozomi contemplates going home.

But, Hanayo had once articulated, it isn’t home when Rin isn’t there.

The windy mountains slope down into a forest not too unlike the one where they had come from. It’s by a bubbling creek where a spider comes whispering in Nozomi’s ear, and for the first time in weeks, things don’t seem so bleak after all.

“Spread the word to Nico and Eli, dear,” Nozomi says to the long-legged spider. It obligingly skitters away and Hanayo tilts her head. Her face is nearly gone at this point. Nozomi smiles wide, and gently cradles her skeletal jaw in one hand.

“She’s close.”

Hanayo’s bones rattle in anticipation.

—

“Rin.” Maki, ever the impatient one, kicks dirt up when she catches Rin napping in a patch of sunlight. It gets in her hair and all over her clothes, but Rin does nothing but roll over and curl up.

“Rin.”

She could kill her. It’d be easy. A manticore without its venom is just about a regular mountain lion, if mountain lions also had wings, but Rin’s wings are too tattered to catch any wind. What use is she, then? None at all, apparently. Completely useless. She can’t even go fetch the things Maki told her to get.

“Rin!” This time, instead of kicking dirt, Maki kicks her in the side.

It does the trick; Rin startles and jolts, scrabbling at the dirt and vigorously shaking her head. Her ears press flat against her head, a telltale sign of her guilt. “A-ah, Maki! I was just— napping!”

“Yeah, I can see that.” Maki rolls her eyes. “I thought I told you to go gather things for me.”

“Ummm. I’m nocturnal?”

Maki’s fingers curl around air like she’s handling something particularly unpleasant. Rin’s still lying on the ground, pouting up at her as if she expects something like that to actually work. “At least put some effort into your excuses!”

“Maybe it’s seasonal!” It isn’t. Rin maintains her pout as she stands, stretching those useless wings to shake the dirt off. “I was gonna get to it eventually!”

“Eventually is a terrible work ethic.”

“But it’s still ‘eventually’!”

Arguing with Rin’s special brand of logic is pointless. Maki was quick to learn that lesson when they met back when the snow was melting, when she came across her bleeding in the bushes. Rin had attacked, of course. But a wounded beast would only have two options when confronted, and this one was clearly too hungry to run or recognize a fight she couldn’t win. Yet even after Maki gained the upper hand and lopped off Rin’s tail with the knife she used to cut plants, Rin didn’t leave.

Assuming Rin was dead was her first mistake. The second was dressing her wounds and trickling water down her parched throat, when Maki found her still feebly twitching on the ground the next day. But what can Maki say? She’s weak to her own bouts of pity.

She just doesn’t like to see things die, is all.

“Hurry up. The last of the mandrakes will be dying off soon,” Maki says. She turns and looks up at what bits of sky are visible through the trees. Behind her, Rin loudly yawns and smacks her lips.

“Uh huh. Two basketfuls, right? What’re you makin’ this time?”

“Just medicine to sell at the village.”

Maki reflexively freezes up when she feels Rin stepping too close to her, leathery wings stretching and circling around them. She knows by now that Rin wouldn’t hurt her, but it’s a reflex nonetheless.

“I wanna come with you. It’s boring when you’re not around.”

“Don’t be stupid, you know I’d lose all credibility if I brought the likes of you around.” Humans trust unicorns. They practically worship Maki. If they saw Rin, on the other hand… “Besides, you know I’ll only be gone for a day.”

This time, she nearly jolts when Rin hesitantly wraps her arms around her.

“H-hey, you’re supposed to be harvesting mandrakes for me.”

“I know, I know.”

It’s just… awkward. She sometimes wants to ask why Rin had been bleeding in the bushes that day they met when the snow was melting, but somehow it never came up after she nursed her back to health. It’s like she had simply fallen out of the sky. Maybe she did. Where did she come from? Who hurt her? What happened? The questions burn in the back of her throat, but die on the tip of her tongue.

Sometimes she gets the impression that Rin just doesn’t want to talk about it.

Then Rin finally lets go of Maki and wordlessly goes to fetch the baskets. Maki lets out breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, unsettled by Rin’s odd moment of sentimentality. Awkward, indeed. She’d like to ask her someday, but that someday implies that Rin would be staying here for some time to come.

But she wouldn’t, would she?

It isn’t long before the air is filled with the horrible shrieking of mandrake roots and the panicking of birds fleeing by flocks, and Maki retreats back into her burrow to avoid the brunt of the noise. Her headaches are bad enough as is. At least she has someone to do the dirtier bits of work for her now.

—

Rin’s severed tail hangs from the dirt ceiling amongst dangling tree roots and garlands of herbs like a piece of decoration, a constant reminder to Rin that Maki is no pushover and a reminder to Maki that Rin is more or less harmless now, teeth and claws aside. She hates vegetables, and hates fish even more, but Maki doesn’t like hunting and for some odd reason, Rin prefers forcing the bitter soups down her throat than going out to look for her own food. Truly harmless, indeed.

But she’s a carnivore, and an herbivore’s diet is slowly making her weaker and weaker until even Maki has to say something about it. No wonder she’s been sleeping so often. Rin hasn’t been lazy, she’s just been fatigued.

“Go hunt, for gods’ sake. I won’t have you dying inside my home. I don’t mind as long as you don’t bring leftovers back here.”

Rin fervently shakes her head. “I can’t hunt.”

“You can’t, or you won’t?”

“I- I don’t wanna.”

And she looks so uncharacteristically afraid for some reason, who even knows why, that Maki just sighs and makes a half-biting comment about how useless Rin is. The next time she journeys down to the humans’ village, she uses some of her own saved money to buy pieces of boar meat for Rin.

On the way back, she imagines she smells something like decay along the warm forest path, but can’t find any dead animals when she investigates.

—

The smell doesn’t go away. In fact, it only gets stronger the closer she gets to her burrow, and Maki’s quick trot breaks out into a run when she finds traces of frost along the trees that don’t belong in this summer heat. Why here? Why now? Panic grips her and Maki slips on leaves that had been coated by melting ice, nearly giving herself away with a shriek when she spots the rotting thing circling her tree, searching for the entrance to her burrow.

Rin. She’s probably inside sleeping, completely unaware of the terror right outside. Maki’s no predator, her kind don’t fight, her instincts all tell her to flee and find refuge in the village where the humans will surely protect her with their guns and steel.

But Rin’s useless as she is and can’t defend herself. She can’t just leave her there at the wendigo’s mercy without a clear conscience.

Something sharp taps her shoulder, and a woman’s voice greets her from behind.

“Hello, there.”

Spiders crawl up her legs. This time, Maki does scream.

—

If Hanayo still had a working heart, it would’ve fallen from her chest with how quickly it would have been beating away. The scream from the treelines doesn’t deter her, because Nozomi can take care of whatever it is, and Rin’s scent is so strong that it’s all she can focus on.

There. A bit of loose dirt. She plunges one hand in and scoops, and the dirt collapses inward with a cloud of dust. The hollow beneath the tree is large enough for a family of bears to stand in, but there are no bears, only an assortment of odd wooden furniture, and the strong odor of herbs, and…

A manticore’s tail hanging from the ceiling.

She reaches out to it with a trembling claw, brushing over the dried shell. It’s Rin’s. It’s unmistakeably Rin’s and the rest of Rin is nowhere to be found. Whoever was screaming outside is still screaming, and it clicks into one piece with a dreadful conclusion.

Hanayo pulls the tail from the ceiling and ducks back outside, the frost around her feet spreading.

—

“No, no, it’s alright! Stop screaming! We’re not here to hurt you, we just want our friend back—“

“GET THESE SPIDERS OFF ME!!”

“Well now, I can’t stop children from being children.”

“THEY’RE SPIDERS!!”

“They’re children.”

“SPIDERS!!!”

—

As if things couldn’t get any worse after Maki fell over with the spiders all over her and the arachnid cheerfully trying to explain how curious children naturally are, the air suddenly gets a noticeable chill. On the bright side, the spiders are driven away by the abrupt cold. On the downside, the wendigo is now wrapping one skeletal hand around her wrist and lifting her up clear off the ground, all teeth bared.

Maki wheezes, and the only thought going through her mind is of the package of boar meat spilled across the dirt. For gods’ sake.

—

But she was never really in any real danger, because Hanayo’s anger is never, ever potent enough to drive her to kill or even fight and Nozomi wouldn’t allow it anyway. In fact, it was simply a matter of miscommunication; Hanayo, unable to speak coherently, had her dreaded desperation mistaken as murderous intent, and Maki, already riled up by Nozomi’s spiders (“children”), was too busy screaming and flailing to listen to Nozomi’s attempts to explain themselves.

But one typically doesn’t respond with rational calmness when a wendigo and arachnid show up at the doorstep, so.

—

“Kayo-chin?”

Everything stops at once, even the spiders, except for Maki’s shrieking. Hanayo slowly turns around, eye sockets brimming with tears. Or it could be pus, either or. Nozomi’s hands fly to her mouth and her eyes do fill with tears, all eight of her legs trembling with disbelief.

There, only a few meters away, stands Rin, gaunt and scruffy but very much alive.

Maki finally stops screaming, and instead grunts when she’s carelessly dropped. Hanayo carefully treads closer to Rin as if the ground is made of thin ice, hands extended and sad noises coming from her throat.

The words could come, but they can’t. So instead, Rin rushes to close the rest of the distance between them and throws herself into Hanayo’s arms, wailing.

“K-Kayo-chiiin…! I’m s-s-sorryyyy—“

Gods, the noise is nearly as deafening as the mandrake cries.

—

Everything does eventually get sorted out, sort of, and Nozomi does give Maki a somewhat unfriendly frown when she reluctantly confesses that she was the one who cut off Rin’s tail and strung it up like a piece of decoration. But Rin is too busy crying and stuffing her face with the boar meat to really comment on that part, so it slides for now.

They finally found Rin, and that’s all that matters.

“I- I can’t go back. Because Nico…”

“Nico already forgave you,” Nozomi sadly smiles and pets Rin’s head. Rin dribbles and sobs again, pressing herself up against her. “She misses you a lot, too. We all went looking for you. Ever since Hanayo came back, we’ve been looking.”

Rin swallows, the semblance of her usual energy already trickling back with each bite of meat. She hugs Nozomi, then hugs Hanayo, then looks to Maki with round, wet eyes. “A-a-and Maki saved my life!!”

“It wasn’t a big deal…” she mumbles, leaning back against a tree a bit away from the others. “I just didn’t want you to die right outside my home. It would’ve been a pain.”

Nozomi gives her an odd look, but says nothing.

“Hhhggkhhaarrgh.”

“I thought about you too every single day!!”

They’re making a mess with all that hugging. Hanayo looks like she’s going to fall apart with how tightly Rin’s holding onto her.

“Hhgahgh rrkkah?” Hanayo looks at the tail, laid across Nozomi’s back.

“Umm, maybe we can just tie it back on…”

“Or Maki can reattach it with her… unicorn magic?” Nozomi’s lips slowly spread into a smile, eyes narrowed. “It shouldn’t be hard at all for a beast with such magical strength.”

“I- It’s not that simple!” Maki, flustered, tugs at her hair. “There’s a lot of ingredients to be gathered and prep to be done, a-and the tail is dried already, and—“

“And you’re not a unicorn, are you?”

Rin’s endless stream of tears stops. Hanayo looks up as well, head tilted. Ah. Well, their staring is only making her even more nervous, and Maki contemplates just making a run for it. But that’d be silly and useless, of course.

“What do you know? Leave me alone.” She scowls, looking away. Nozomi approaches with hands outstretched threateningly, reaching for which parts of her, Maki isn’t sure, but she doesn’t think she wants to find out. She quickly ducks away from Nozomi and hurriedly steps away.

“Have you been lying to our dear little Rin this whole time, Maki?”

“No.” Yes.

“Of course Rin wouldn’t know any better, since she probably doesn’t know what a real unicorn smells like.” Nozomi clicks her tongue and shakes her head, but she’s still smiling with an infuriating twinkle in her eye. Maki thinks that maybe she’d rather be frowned at. “Right, Rin?”

“But the humans in the nearby village love Maki! She told me so! Cuz she’s a unicorn!”

But the gig is up. Rin might still be in disbelief but Nozomi and Hanayo could probably tell from the moment they saw her burrow. Real unicorns don’t live in dark dusty little burrows beneath trees, they live in flowery meadows beneath the open sky, prancing about like assholes. 

Maki buries her face in her hands and groans.

“It was for business. Humans don’t care about… my kind, but they practically worship unicorns. You can’t blame me for deceiving them like that.”

“Nooo, we can’t.” Nozomi’s grinning now, just waiting for Maki to finally admit the final piece of the truth. “So…?”

Maki glances between her, Hanayo, and Rin. Is it still to late to consider running? Yes. Gods, her face is burning up, which is obviously only making things worse for herself. She’d been so careful all this time too, living in a secluded part of the forest, careful about keeping her burrow hidden, never letting any humans follow her home… taking care of Rin was clearly the first of many big mistakes that snowballed into this final reveal.

Not that she truly regrets saving Rin’s life, but still.

She sighs a heavy sigh. “…I’m a gnome.”

Rin makes a face, swallowing another mouthful of boar meat. “What?”

“I’m a gnome! I use my magic to disguise myself! The horn is just a fake! Now leave me alone!”

For the first time since she’s met her, Rin’s face lights up and she laughs a real laugh, full of joy (but she’s also just laughing at Maki, partly) and all of that vague guilt and hesitance that’s been plaguing her all this time finally gone, and Maki thinks this might not be so bad after all, even with Hanayo politely covering her horrid grin and Nozomi chortling.

“So, so can you still attach Rin’s tail back, then?” Rin asks.

“Oh… no, I can’t. Sorry.”

“Oh.”