Promises || Teru Minamoto x Reader (TBHK)

a long road ahead || 4.3 || ǝʌᴉʇɔǝdsɹǝd ʍǝu ɐ

  "So... What are we even doing? You never told me." She asks, dragging her shoes in the dirt as she walked.

  "We're trying to exorcise a tengu. They're pretty much just guardians of the mountains, albeit a bit aggressive. We usually just leave them alone since they're not hurting anyone as long as they don't venture here, but as of recent one has been troublesome. A few hikers have been getting killed on a nearby trail, so it's better off if we just exorcise them. It's not like they have anything worthwhile to protect, anyways."

  "Well, I wouldn't say that. Perhaps something about this land is meaningful to them in their own way." She reasoned logically. She's always been the type of person to try and see things from another lens. I remember in seventh grade she had her favorite pencil stolen from her, and it wasn't one of those plain pencils, it was one of the fancy mechanical ones with the rubber grip and a white cat charm hanging from the eraser. She was bummed about it, and when I offered to take it back she said that it was fine because the kid who stole it from her was probably happier with it anyways. I don't understand the mental gymnastics she went through to justify that, but I've always thought it was a little funny, albeit cute.

"That doesn't matter much, they're still killing innocent passerbys so we might as well just get rid of them. And not to pressure you or anything, but this is my first time exorcising one so a little suggestion..." I make an abrupt stop, turning around to look at her with a cocky smirk. "Don't fuck it up." She slumps over, letting out an annoyed sigh.

"This is gonna be hard, is it?" She complains, surely contemplating her decision on going here with me. No, she didn't even have a decision to go here anyways. Oops.

"No. They seem relatively easy to defeat. Worst case scenario, we have to flee. But I don't imagine that happening."

"You're a little too confident. I guess I'm just a bit nervous, that's all."

"Don't even fret about it, I'll protect you if need be."

"Yeah, yeah. Anyways, what's with that giant lake up ahead? Are we gonna have to walk all the way around it?" She asks, a curious expression painting her face. I automatically become skeptical, I haven't seen a lake on the map leading to the mountains. I turn around to confirm my suspicions, however, she'd been one hundred percent correct. There was a huge lake that spanned multiple kilometers across the land. There's no way we're walking around that.

  "Well, do you reckon we could swim across?" I suggest.

  "I hope you realize that I can't swim too well, especially not for that long."

  "Hm. Yeah. Wait, you're literally a spirit. Can't you just like, float your way across or something while I swim?" I say with a deadpan look.

  "I uh, don't like being off the ground much. Listen, maybe we're better off just walking-"

  "Wait," I grab her wrist, preventing her from continuing on the path around the body of water. "Lets build a raft. There's a bunch of trees around and I might be able to cut wood with this." I shuffle through my bag, grabbing a small axe. Originally I brought it just in case we needed a fire pit, but this worked too.

  "Ah, that's a great idea. I brought a rope to help us climb the mountain, do you suppose we could use it to tie the logs together?"

  "That's great, actually. Let's get to work before night comes. It'll probably take us a while, but it beats walking all the way around."

After a few hours of manual labor, cutting down trees and tossing each other logs and materials to complete the raft, we had finally completed construction. It was sturdy which was perfect as we'd probably be on there for a good 20 minutes before reaching the other side. It was finished at a convenient time as well, right before sunset. Setting the raft on the lake, (Y/N) carelessly jumps on, sitting down with her legs crisscrossed. I follow, balancing out the weight on the raft with my bag which had been full of heavy trinkets.