A nighttime breeze whispers through the forest of plaques that hang in disorderly rows around the small shrine, setting them clattering against each other like teeth. Inside the shrine burns a miniature camp lantern. Three dark figures are huddled around it on roll-up mats.

"There's one left," Hiyori says, pulling a cheesy bun out of a plastic bag. Yato snatches it out of her fingers before she can blink.

"Well, you're back to normal," grouches Yukine from his mat. He's nose-deep in a comic they picked up at the convenience store along with the food, angling the pages toward the camp lantern as he thumbs through it.

Yato mumbles something around the cheesy bun and ruffles Yukine's hair, earning himself a swat. Hiyori picks at her own food and watches them, a giggle stinging the corners of her lips.

Rebuffed by his shinki, Yato scoots backwards onto her mat. They sit there for a moment, cross-legged and avoiding eye contact. Hiyori clears her throat.

"How long can we stay here?" she asks, keeping her voice low enough so Yukine can't overhear.

"A few days," Yato answers. He licks the remains of the cheesy bun off his fingertips. "Then we'll hop to the next one."

"We'll need to repay Bishamon somehow," she muses, before Yato scoffs.

"She hardly needs these branch shrines." He drags a finger through the thick layer of dust that still blankets the corners of the small room, despite Kazuma's preparations. "If anything, we're doing her a favor."

Yukine's nose droops into his comic, and he jerks awake again with a start. It's cold in the little shrine, but Hiyori can feel the suggestion of heat from Yato's body. She clears her throat.

"How…are you?" she asks hesitantly.

Yato turns his head to look down at her. Avoiding his eyes, Hiyori reaches for the blanket at the bottom of the mat and tugs it around her shoulders. The silence wraps around her like a noose.

"I'm happy," he answers. Her heart drops in relief.

"Even though we're here?" She nudges her chin outward, indicating their decrepit surroundings.

"Yes."

"And Heaven wants us dead?"

"I've been there before."

"And the world is still awful?"

"It's survived this long."

"And I have a weird, deadly hand that gets rid of ayakashi?"

Yato laughs. Yukine, asleep with his head on page 42, flinches at the noise and rolls over.

"I'm happy about your hand," he says, honestly. "I'm happy about all of you."

Hiyori still can't look at him. Ever since their reunion, new memories have been getting clearer by the minute, but she's having a hard time trusting them. Some seem too good to have been real.

"I wish…" she starts to say, then stops abruptly, chewing on her lower lip. So much has changed—so much has been complicated by absence and sorrow.

Yato makes a quiet noise in the back of his throat, and she finally looks at him. His eyes glow at her, reflecting and magnifying the light of the camp lantern. She is a moth, caught in them.

"I still take wishes, Hiyori," he says. His breath ghosts over her eyelids, and she shivers.

"I don't have five yen," she whispers.

"We can work something out."

He dips his head, kissing her right cheek, lingering there so the tip of his nose sweeps the top of her cheekbone. Hiyori closes her eyes.

"Okay."

He kisses her again, this time between her eyebrows, and she inhales the wonderful scent of his neck.

"I wish…" she says.

He kisses, very lightly, her jaw beneath her ear. Her grip on the blanket loosens, and it falls down from her shoulders, crumpling around her.

"I wish I had told you again," she murmurs. "Before…all that happened."

Yato straightens a bit, but doesn't move away. The tip of his nose brushes hers.

"Told me what?"

Hiyori's cheeks warm.

"I just—I think I remember once, I said something to you that was really important. And I wish I had said it again. That's all."

With effort, she makes her eyes focus on the face so close in front of her. It gives her a small amount of relief to see he's blushing too.

"That's not really a wish I can help you with," he says.

He takes her left hand where it rests on the mat, and kisses it twice: once on the knuckles, once on the palm. Hiyori's chest burns when he takes her right hand, and after examining it for a moment—the bluish black in the deepest areas of blight, and the sick, ashy purple of her fingernails—he leans down to it, and does the same.

"I love you," she says, before she can think about it too much and scare herself. Yato goes very still, his lips an inch above her hand.

"That was it, right?" she asks fearfully.

Yato sets her hand down. Before she can move, he cradles her face and kisses her full on the mouth. She clings to his shoulders, dizzy, until he lets her go enough to laugh breathlessly against her lips.

"I love you, too," he says. A single tear slides down his cheek. She catches it with her thumb before it falls to the mat.

Then she smiles, and kisses him again, long, and smiling, and sweet.

/ in a year /

With her ayakashi-subduing ability, and the gradual slowing down of vent activity, phantoms no longer overrun the Near Shore. She hears it on the radio, and on the television: crime rates are dropping, along with suicide numbers, and the darkness that seemed to wrap itself around the whole country has loosened its hold.

The skies are clear again.

The sunshine is no longer a surprise.

She is still growing accustomed to the prayers and the wishes. It is strange to appear to someone, to hear and address their problem (usually by painlessly removing the phantom-shroud), and to understand that to them, the memory of her existence will last no longer than a bruise. It is disorienting to think of herself as a being of the Far Shore.

She wonders if her parents, her friends, or anyone who knew her will make a connection between the new god born from the cry of a dying city, and the girl whose death a year ago they mourned.

/

"You didn't even have to wait ten years for your first shrine," Yato wails. "I had to wait a thousand."

"Quit whining," Yukine gripes. "She deserves it waymore than you."

"Next thing I know, you'll want to switch masters and serve Hiyori instead. You have no loyalty, Yukine!"

"Maybe I will switch."

"Maybe I want you to!"

Hiyori sits across from the bickering pair and giggles. Nothing has changed.

It's true, she still has no shinki of her own. She doesn't need one—but she does often think about what it might be like to give a wandering soul a new name.

Later, when Yukine has fallen asleep, she and Yato leave the house to talk a walk in the coolness and quietness of the night. It's a habit they picked up over the past year: a vestige of a nightly patrol that used to be necessary, but is now just part of the routine.

They talk quietly, mostly about trivial things—more glad than ever to have the chance to even discuss trivial things. The return of trivialities means danger is no longer at the forefront of their thoughts.

His left arm wanders behind her, around her waist, pulling her gently into his side with the rhythm of each step. If someone were to watch the road where they walk, they might see a lovestruck young couple. Or they might see an elderly man and woman, strolling in the cool night and enjoying each other's company. They might see a pair of children, sneaking out after dark. They might see nothing but starlight and stirring grass.

In the faint luminosity, Hiyori's eye catches a speck of brightness a little way off the path ahead.

"What's that?" she asks, breaking the comfortable silence that had fallen between them. She points to the soft glow, and Yato looks in the same direction. His arm drops from around her, and both of them break off the path, into the grass and toward the brightness.

They stop a few feet away from it.

"It's a spirit," Yato says. "An uncorrupted one."

Hiyori stares down at it. It's tiny: smaller even than Yukine before he was named.

Somehow, she knows things about it simply from looking. This is a girl: eleven years old. She floats above the grass like a petal from a cherry tree.

"She's still untouched by ayakashi," Hiyori notes, with a touch of pride. It's been a very long time since such a tiny spirit could survive in the open like this. It means she's doing her job right.

"She should be given a name, before something else gets to her," Yato says. He looks at Hiyori.

She thought it would be a little while longer before this happened; she thought she'd have more time to prepare. But there is no chance she's leaving this helpless spirit behind for an ayakashi to ravage. She smiles nervously, and glances at Yato.

"Are you sure?" she asks, failing to not sound panicky. "You could finally have a second shinki."

Yato glances behind them, in the direction of the roof under which Yukine is fast asleep.

"Nah." He smiles fondly. "I can barely make it taking care of just one whiny kid. Two would be pushing it."

His casual tone masks the affection beneath. He and Yukine are a good team. Nothing has to change for them, not for a long while yet.

Hiyori turns back to the spirit, still floating like an iridescent bubble above the ground. Since her godhood, she has never needed a shinki—her right hand is all she's ever used. Although, she thinks, there's no telling when that could change.

As though waiting to offer itself to her, the shape with which she will bond this spirit to herself appears in her head. Her arm extends, and the light of the naming shimmers underneath her fingernails.

Before opening her mouth, she glances at Yato again. He's standing a little off to the side, smiling at her.

She looks back at the hovering spirit, and speaks to it: words that seem to press on her tongue heavier than the rest of them, words older than the oldest god.

/ end /

A/N: thank you so much for the kind words and messages that pushed me through months of writer's block. I truly hope you like the ending I gave this story.