Who Cares What My Name Is Anyway?

酔眼朦朧 - Suiganmōrō

It was a quite eventful day for Shoyō, more eventful than he expected. Any more eventful and he would be in a state most aptly described as making being sentenced to eternal damnation in the lowest level of the Burning Hell look like a trip to the hot springs.

Being the shikigami of the onmyōji poet with a peculiar mind that was Kanemasa was never idyllic in the first place, but he never thought this would happen. He willingly traded his formerly peaceful and quiet life for constant interruption of supposedly silent moments to appreciate beauty or compose poetry out of his master's perpetual need for chatter, gratuitous and unnecessary use of onmyōdō despite his skills' not even being close to average, the "Kane-san" problem, or a myriad of other things brought about by his master's childish mindset, but he never thought this would happen. He had to save his master from several malicious individuals on numerous occasions, like that horned kotoist who refused to let them go unless they listen to his frustratingly long recital until a stroke of magical ink to his face forced him to free them, but he never thought this would happen.

Kanemasa was missing.

oOo

"Where am I?"

The voice of the groggy Minamoto demon sword slung over the gourd on Shuten-dōji's back sounded a tad higher and softer than usual, but his ears were not fine-tuned enough to hear any difference. "I never thought I'd ever say this, but man, you're drunk." Shuten-dōji said, not even looking back. "I told you not to overdose on that stuff. Shinshu ain't to be taken lightly. Only I'm strong enough to drink a lot of it. Ibaraki-dōji drank more than a plate of that stuff once and he couldn't tell a monkey from a crab and was convinced he was a persimmon. That was a mess. But that's nothing compared to..."

Whatever was left of his rambling story fell on deaf ears as he carried on, assuming the silence from the other man to be his swallowing every of his words rather than the complete puzzlement rendering the soul inside said man's body unable to utter another word that it was. However, unlike what one would expect, it was not puzzlement at finding himself in a wholly different environment from the one he went to bed in; it was at how familiar everything around him was, from the forest surrounding him to the red-haired man he was draped over. It was certainly not where he went to bed the previous night, but he couldn't help the feeling that he had been here before even though he couldn't tell where. Blaming his notoriously unreliable memory, he finally managed a weak whimper, "I am drunk..."

"As if I don't know that." Shuten-dōji said, "And that's why I'm taking you home to your 'daddy' so he can justly 'discipline' you... haha, sorry, that never gets old." he laughed at his own joke, "But come on, who doesn't know you're that guy's most treasured wakashū, we all know what's gonna happen tonight when you're returned well and alive to his estate..."

At that, Higekiri's confusion about the strange familiarity of everything around him vanished in place of a shocking realization that hit him with the impact of a thousand lightning bolts.

I am not a sword, but in fact a poetry collection?!