Eitsu's Nine Lives (永津の九生) [yuri/GL yokai reincarnation story]

19 - Yuki

CW: Horror stuff

***

The morning arrived as softly grey as Eitsu's fur in her fourth life. Tai Kikuryuu had taken Ayame to join the younger disciples of Hanasan after breakfast.

Eitsu and Tsubaki sat alone in their room. The only sound was the whispery patter of light rain.

The box lay between them.

"How many?" Tsubaki asked. Her voice was hoarse.

"Six."

"I see."

Eitsu pushed the box closer to the other woman.

"I don't want to."

"Of course you don't."

With a slightly forced exhalation, Tsubaki reached for the box, slender hands pushing the damaged lid open. "It's open."

"Take them out."

"I... I don't... want..." She gritted her teeth, revulsion and misery chasing their way across her face as she lifted the first pelt out, still shining gold despite the cloudy day.

One by one, she removed each pelt, her hands trembling so badly over the fourth that it dropped from her hands. She lingered over the fifth. Tears began to flow in earnest at the sixth.

In spite of them, a tender smile crossed her lips as she picked up the seventh, a pure white fur.

She saw the eighth, the tiny kitten pelt.

Eitsu lunged forwards reflexively.

Tsubaki's face was terrifyingly pale. She swayed. Eitsu's supernatural hearing could hear her heart judder, stop, start, speed up, cease again.

"No... no... Why is there... eight? Eight..." Tsubaki seized the furs in a frenzy, counting and recounting them, until her eyes returned to the forlorn little pelt in the box. It was only a little bigger than her hand.

An unintelligible wail replaced words. Eitsu tried to grab her hands, but she twisted away, cowering. "NO! Don't touch me!"

She's losing her mind. I've got to help control it.

"No! No!" But Tsubaki wasn't about to let her do anything. She seized the bedclothes, wrapped herself in them and dove into a corner of the room. Eitsu froze, unwilling to forcibly tear the woman from her cocoon to try and treat her.

For the next day, Tsubaki refused to let Eitsu near her, but she called anxiously when the latter tried to leave the room.

What are we doing? The two of us just keep circling around in this same space, trapped.

"Aya-chan, you should stay in another room for a bit. It's only for a little while," Eitsu assured Ayame, and the poor child could only accept this as fact.

"We'll look after her," Tai Kikuryuu said.

Eitsu nodded.

Tsubaki stared at the wall.

"This isn't what I wanted for you," Eitsu told the inert woman that night.

"What makes you think you could hold onto a god?" she shouted at Tsubaki the next morning.

"I'm barely even a god right now," she murmured in the afternoon. "There's still so much I'm missing. I don't know who I'm supposed to be."

She said nothing the next day, merely watched the clouds scudding across the sky.

The last two pelts stared at her like mismatched eyes, laying where they had been left several days before. One pure white, one tiny and brown, the faintest of stripes only just beginning to show.