Yato's boots pounded on the slippery rock and splashed through the water gathered in rivulets that flowed down the dark passage. His footsteps echoed in the still, dank air and his ragged breathing filled his ears, but they were nearly lost beneath the scurrying of a dozen other footsteps scrabbling along the rocky corridor behind him.

"Where are you going?" Izanami asked, her voice echoing off the rocks until her words were jumbled over each other a thousand times and slid across each other in the way of the ayakashi she birthed. "Come back. Let's be friends. You wouldn't leave me here all alone, would you?"

Yato skidded around a corner, his boots plunging into water up over the toes as the underground river deepened and widened, and threw a quick glance over his shoulder as he started racing down the new branch of the tunnel. The skeletal queen was gaining ground, and tendrils of long, black hair snaked along the ground like sentient things reaching out for him. A horde of ghoulish women with blue-gray skin, glowing eyes, and mouths full of sharpened teeth skittered along the passage on all fours like broken creatures. Their chittering melded into a haunting chorus of whispers that echoed in the gloom and sent chills down Yato's spine.

He didn't wait around to see how close they were getting. His lungs burned and the muscles in his legs were beginning to cramp, but he didn't dare slow his headlong rush. The murmurs of ayakashi threaded through the shadows, but they were the least of his problems.

"Come back!" Izanami wailed behind him. Her voice dragged nails down his spine and sent a shudder rippling through his body. "You have to stay! It's so lonely!"

Yato wished Yukine was here. And immediately felt bad for it. Yukine would be terrified of the darkness cloaking every inch of this labyrinth, and it wasn't like Yato would be able to defeat Izanami even with a weapon. She was the undisputed ruler of Yomi, and he had no way of standing up to her. All he could do was stay one step ahead and search for a way out, and even that was becoming more hopeless by the second.

He threw a look over his shoulder, but there was only slimy rock and water shimmering darkly in the gloom. Maybe…

He turned back and screeched to a halt so abruptly that he nearly lost his balance and pitched forward.

Izanami stared at him with empty, shadowed eye sockets.

Yato stepped back, boots squelching in the water. "H-how–?"

"Where are you going?" she asked again in a creaky, rasping voice. "You belong with us."

"U-us?"

Soft shuffling and splashing sounded behind him, and he realized what had been missing. But when he whirled about, it wasn't the ghoulish women closing in on him. They had been replaced by a horde of shambling…corpses, maybe. They were obviously dead, and not just because they'd found their way to the underworld. They were mangled to different degrees, blood dripping from wounds and slashes across their body. Men, women, children, all reaching out for him and staring at him with dead eyes as they whispered and moaned.

Yato's breath caught in his throat and he backed away. He would rather face Izanami than the countless people he had killed over the centuries. The cloying scent of iron clogged his nostrils, and the river had turned red and thick. The blood sloshed over his boots, dyeing them crimson.

"Why?" whispered the voices that whistled and moaned through the passage like the wind. "Why would you kill us? Why would you send us here? Stay with us, little god. You belong with the dead."

Yato's heart rattled at the cage of his ribs like a captive shaking the prison bars as he slid back another step. "I–I didn't want… I'm sor–"

His voice died in his throat and he shook his head helplessly. His apologies and excuses meant nothing. Less than nothing. They would be as good as insults to the hundreds, thousands, of people reaching for him with bloodstained hands. The blood running along the ground was rising steadily higher, swirling about his ankles and climbing ever higher toward the tops of his boots like a river overflowing its banks. A flashflood he hadn't anticipated.

"Yato-sama?"

He jerked around, eyes widening and heart lurching before he even saw her. "Sakura?"

She looked exactly like he remembered, with her dark hair and warm eyes. It had been centuries, but every feature had been burned into his mind. It was surreal to see her standing there in the blood-drenched underworld with the shadows pressing all around after so long.

"You've gotten so big," she said. Her voice still had that warm, musical lilt to it, and her lips curved into a gentle smile. "You're all grown up."

"I–I'm sorry," Yato whispered. He hunched his shoulders and dropped his gaze to the crimson flood creeping up his legs. "I didn't know…"

"It's okay. You're here now. We can be together again."

He risked a glance up to see her holding out a hand. Her eyes and smile held no condemnation. He…did want to be with her again. He didn't want to be here in Yomi, wanted to escape, but…maybe he owed her that much.

He reached out, hesitated, and slipped his hand into hers. Her smile widened and she laced her fingers through his like a cage.

"Wonderful," Izanami rasped. Yato started in surprise and looked back, having almost forgotten her. She was holding a plate of rotten food in her skeletal fingers now. "It's been so lonely. It's nice to have a friend. Now eat this so that we can be together forever."

There was a fish crawling with fat maggots and reeking of rot, and some featureless lump of gray flesh going green and black at the edges and swarming with flies and little white worms. Yato's stomach turned over, and not only because it was disgusting. Eating the food of the underworld meant that he would never be able to leave. He had to escape. He wanted to go back to Yukine and Hiyori and everyone else.

He stepped back, the pool of blood sucking hungrily at his boots, but Sakura held him tight and crushed his fingers in hers.

"Stay," she said, and an otherworldly rasp slithered over and under and around every note of her voice. Yato whimpered and shrank away as her features melted into a monstrous mass of bulbous lumps and ayakashi eyeballs. This, too, was burned into his memory. "You wouldn't leave me again, would you?"

He cried out as the creature that had taken Sakura's place pulled him back and held him tight. Dozens of grasping hands closed around his arms and legs and clothing, and strands of black hair wound about his limbs and throat until he was helplessly tangled in a spider web of silk stronger than iron.

Izanami's bones clacked together as she stepped forward and held out the plate of spoiled food. The stench of decay mingled with the tang of blood and set Yato gagging, but he kept his lips pressed in a tight line.

"Open up," Izanami said. "You belong with us. It's so lonely here. You understand, don't you? You're one of us. Let's all be friends."

Yato shook his head vigorously, wincing as the hair threaded about his neck like a noose cut into his skin, and kept his jaw clamped shut. Gnarled, twisted fingers pried his mouth open despite his efforts to bite back down, and Izanami swooped down on him. The taste of rancid fish burned Yato's tongue, and his entire body heaved in desperation to expel it. A hand closed over his mouth and another pinched his nose. He writhed against his captors, but dozens of the vengeful dead held him fast.

Black spots danced at the corners of his vision, and his lungs spasmed and burned as he tried to pull in air and found nothing. For a moment, just before he blacked out, he could have sworn his own face smiled back at him from where it stretched across Izanami's skull.

The next thing he knew, he was choking past the rotten flesh squeezing its way down his throat. It settled heavily in his stomach, and he swore he could feel the maggots and worms squirming around inside him.

The hands released his face, and he sucked in a ragged, gasping breath. Oxygen flooded his lungs, but he immediately pitched forward and dry heaved. Izanami laughed in delight and started shoving more ghastly food into his mouth despite his best efforts to lock his jaws.

There were bodies pressed all around him, smothering him and tangling him hopelessly in their trap, and his thrashing grew weaker and weaker as his battered mind grew hazy. All he could feel was the wriggling mass of decaying flesh sliding down his throat and gathering like a writhing stone in his belly. And the blood river that had been steadily climbing up his body and filling in the tunnel finally lapped at his mouth. He tilted his chin up as far as he could, eyelids fluttering hazily, but it was no use.

Salt and iron flooded his mouth, sticky and smothering. He choked and sputtered as the sweetly metallic liquid slid down into his stomach and filled him mercilessly. It closed over his nose, his eyes, and he couldn't breathe, couldn't–

He collapsed to his hands and knees, coughing and gagging. His stomach heaved and churned, but he couldn't force the offending food back up. It burned and clawed at his organs, as if eating him from the inside out.

"Now you're ours forever," Izanami said in delight somewhere above him, her voice tinny and distant in his ringing ears. "Eternity is a long time, little god."

Yato choked and retched, but the damage was done. He dry heaved for what felt like an eternity, his entire body shaking like a leaf in a windstorm, before resigning himself to his fate. He caught his breath and sat back on his heels with the nauseous, queasy, biting feeling still ravaging his insides.

Izanami had disappeared. Yato whipped his head around, but the entire passage was empty: no skeletal goddess, no ayakashi, no ghoulish women, no murdered souls, no Sakura-turned-beast. The brackish water running along the rocky ground lapped at his knees, with no sign of blood to be found.

Yato sat there in a shivering heap for a long time before pulling himself to his feet unsteadily. He was trembling so hard that he nearly collapsed upon taking the first step, but he managed to stagger down the tunnel.

He didn't know what he was doing, only that he needed to move. He didn't want to think about the why. He was looking for an escape, but knew there was no chance of leaving anymore. He would never see Hiyori or Yukine or the sunlight again. There was no one here but him.

Maybe he was trying to avoid Izanami and her vengeful spirits. Maybe he was seeking them out because they were the only company he had now.

Maybe it didn't matter, because he found no one at all.

He wandered the tunnels, splashing through stagnant puddles and clambering over slippery stones. Occasionally he heard the ghostly whispers of ayakashi from somewhere deeper in the shadows, but he didn't run across any.

He roamed the dark, desolate labyrinth for an eternity, the empty shadows clawing at his mind and eating away at his sanity. There had to be someone. Anyone. He could scream until he went hoarse, and only his own cries echoed back at him. And still he wandered, aimless like a ghost, searching for anything to prove he wasn't the only lost soul languishing here.

"Yato?" asked a familiar voice from behind him. "Oh, thank goodness we found you! Are you alright?"

"Hurry up, bakagami. We need to get you out of here now, while we still can."

Yato's withered heart leaped into his throat. He turned slowly, praying this wasn't a delusion of his broken mind.

Yukine and Hiyori were standing behind him, bright and beautiful against the grungy, blackened stone and grasping shadows. Their eyes widened in unison, and they both flinched back.

"You came," Yato rasped.

"Wh-what…?" Hiyori stepped back, her entire face twisting in horror. "What happened to you?"

He had thought he'd never see them again, but here they were, come to rescue him. Except that it was too late to be rescued. But still, they were here and that was something. Their presence filled in some empty place in his soul, breathed a touch of life back into these empty walls.

"You'll stay with me, won't you?" he whispered. They scrambled backwards, but he reached out and wrapped skeletal fingers, bone-white but stained a rusty red, around their arms and held them firm. They stared in horror and struggled, but his jaw stayed locked in a perpetual smile. "Forever."

Yato sat upright with a gasp, unvoiced cries sticking in his throat and sucking the air out of the room. He clapped a trembling hand over his mouth as his stomach heaved, but he swallowed down the bile past the lump of panicked wails clogging his throat. His fingers were clammy against his skin, but that meant they were flesh rather than stained bone.

His eyes darted about the shadowy room before him. It was dark, dark like–

He slammed that train of thought to a screeching stop. There was enough light filtering from the lamp across the room that he could make out the closed door and shadowy table in the corner. This was Kofuku's shrine, not the underworld, and Yukine was the one afraid of the dark, not Yato. He was shaking all over and his breaths were ragged and gasping, but he dropped his hand as he came to the conclusion that he wasn't actually going to lose his dinner.

He sought out the light like a moth drawn to the flame, eyes sliding across the room to lock on the circle of yellow light encircling the other futon. He relaxed marginally as it chased the dark away. See? Everything was alright. He was safe in the world of the living and he wasn't alone when Yukine was–

His brain screeched to a stop again. The blankets were thrown back in messy folds, and there was no telltale mop of blond hair peeking from beneath the covers. Yukine wasn't there.

Anxiety sank its little needle-teeth back into Yato's heart. Where was his kid?

"Are you okay?" asked a voice from beside him.

A choked cry caught halfway up his throat, and he whipped around at the same time he flinched back. He clutched the covers with trembling fingers and stared at Yukine with wide eyes. The child was sitting on his heels next to the futon, watching him with furrowed brows. Yato's first, random thought was that Yukine should be on the other side of the bed closer to the light, before wondering if he'd picked this side so he could still see the lamp across the god's futon. He held on to that ridiculous thought to try calming his pounding heart.

"Yukine?" Yato managed past the tightness in his throat. "What are–what are you doing?"

Yukine had the decency to look a little sheepish. "Sorry. You weren't sleeping well, so I, uh, might've woken you up."

Yato winced. "Sorry," he mumbled back. "I didn't mean to wake you."

The very corners of Yukine's mouth quirked downward, and his gaze wandered off to a point just shy of making eye contact. "You alright?" he asked again.

"Yeah."

Yato shifted uncomfortably, his hands twisting the blankets of their own accord. This was uncharted territory. Usually he was the one badgering Yukine to talk about things, the one sitting with Yukine after nightmares, the one staying strong for the both of them when Yukine was falling apart. That didn't mean there weren't things he should talk about or that he never had nightmares or that he never fell apart, just that he always handled those things alone. It had been a huge step to tell Yukine and Hiyori even just the basics about Father and his killing sprees, and it still made his skin crawl just thinking about it. That was the kind of vulnerability he couldn't afford to indulge in. Centuries of relying on himself and trusting no one had made it taboo.

He searched for the words that would ease Yukine's concern—which was a tight ball in Yato's chest—and the smile or laugh or flippant comment that would sell it. Tonight, he came up empty. He was still jittery and ill at ease, his mind fogged with sleep's cobwebs and hazy snippets of nightmares. He didn't feel like he could pick up all his broken pieces and slap a mask over them right now.

"It's okay," was the wonderfully reassuring sentiment his tongue produced. He wanted to roll his eyes at his stupid brain. "You should go back to bed."

He was optimistic that even such a weak response would coax Yukine into dropping the whole thing since the shinki was emphatically a teenager who did not, as a rule, get involved in Yato's emotional disturbances, but the kid stayed put and worried his lip with his front teeth.

Yukine let the silence drag on for a few more seconds before saying, "I guess Yomi wasn't a very fun place, huh?"

Yato twitched in surprise again. "How–?"

"You always talk and move around a lot in your sleep."

He winced. "Sorry."

He wondered what he had been muttering and acting out. Nothing good, especially if Yukine had figured out that much already. How ridiculous. He could keep his mouth shut and his secrets close better than anyone while awake, but he had zero filter while asleep. Yukine had often complained about the god's sleep-talking, but always in the context of dumb dreams and not nightmares. It made Yato uncomfortable to think about what Yukine could have picked up if he was listening at the right time.

Yukine flapped a hand in a dismissive gesture, but he was still chewing on his lip and his eyes were clouded over. "What…? What happened?" he asked with a distinctly cautious air. "Down there?"

Nothing, Yato wanted to say. Nothing important. But Yukine had already been angry and insecure after discovering how much Yato hadn't told him, and that was all still raw. There was no way Yato wanted to delve into specifics, but he could offer a few crumbs. He frowned down at his hands as he clasped them together in his lap. They were still wrapped in bandages, the same as his neck and half his body. The slowly healing wounds beneath them itched and stung.

"You would've hated it," he said. "Real dark everywhere." He hesitated, sighed, and kept going. "You know I said my father sent me down to get Ebisu? Didn't realize until later it was to frame him for being the sorcerer… Anyway, mostly I just tagged along and made sure he didn't get eaten by ayakashi." A faint smile flickered over his face as he remembered Ebisu's clumsy adventure, but it disappeared when he remembered how he'd grown to respect the other god in such a short time and unwittingly played a role in his forced reincarnation. "He dragged us all the way to Izanami to get a Koto no Ha. You know, the locution brush to create and control ayakashi.

"She was willing to give it to him, as long as one of us stayed down there with her. She's really desperate for someone to keep her company besides ayakashi, and she even wears a glamour of the person you feel most comfortable with to try and snare you. The creepy skeleton look only comes out once you piss her off. Ebisu tricked her into giving him the brush, and then we ran the hell out of there.

"But she has total control of the place, so there wasn't really any way out. Eventually I told him to just make a vent with his stupid brush, and that's how he escaped. Izanami caught me and dragged me back down, but the psycho bitch showed up and threw a fuss and got summoned back before she could do anything useful. And you guys managed to figure out my real name and do a soul call. And…that's about it."

There. Just enough information to satisfy the kid, but nothing that would shake up Yato's shattered pieces. Hopefully it would be enough, because he had no intention of submerging himself in memories right now. The nightmares were horrifying enough without comparing them to reality.

"That sounds creepy," Yukine said after a long pause. He wrapped his arms around his stomach and watched the god with an expression Yato couldn't decipher for the life of him. "Even with you downplaying it all. But…it's okay now. You don't have to go back, and the evil skeleton lady can't get you here."

Yato didn't know how to explain that Izanami's reach was nothing compared to that of his own mind. Whether or not Izanami herself could haunt him here, he had been marked by the underworld. And being a creature of death himself, a tool for bringing death to the thousands who still lurked at the edges of his conscience, maybe he halfway belonged there all on his own.

But he neither cared to voice those thoughts nor tease Yukine for his uncharacteristic concern.

"I wouldn't call her 'evil'," he said instead, half to himself. "Gods are above right and wrong. If anything, I…pity her, maybe."

Yukine's eyebrows crawled up his forehead like fuzzy yellow caterpillars and nearly disappeared into his hairline. "Pity? Didn't she try to keep you trapped in the underworld forever?"

"She's lonely," Yato said with a shrug. "Trapped down there in the dark with only ayakashi and ghouls for company, knowing that no one will stay with her and they'll only regard her with horror and disgust if they see what she really looks like… I'm not saying it's right that she's trying to trap people down there, but I don't think she's evil. Crazy, more like. Desperate. Being alone that long will drive you crazy sooner or later." He paused and added, as a cover-up, "I'd imagine. I'd be more surprised if she was still sane, to be honest."

He thought that should be simple and clear-cut enough to put an end to the discussion and send Yukine scurrying back to bed, but the kid still stayed stubbornly put. Yato resisted the urge to sigh. His brain was still buzzing and he felt twitchy all over, and he really just wanted Yukine to go back to sleep already so that he had time to sort out his tangled mess of thoughts and fears and emotions on his own.

"You know…" Yukine trailed off and chewed on his lip some more. At this rate, he'd eat through the thing by morning.

"What now?" Yato asked with a sigh, kneading his forehead wearily.

"Just… You aren't really alone anymore, right? I mean, Hiyori is practically glued to your side, and everyone is still tolerating you hanging around. And I got suckered into being your hafuri, so now I'm stuck with you for good. Even though we know about some of the ugly things you thought would chase us off. So stop worrying like a baby."

This, Yato had learned, was a teenager's way of trying to express affection and chickening out at the last second. It was something Yukine did not engage in too often—his normal method of expressing affection was geared more towards insults, sarcasm, and acts of physical violence—and meant that he was unreasonably worried to even be attempting it now. This conclusion was further supported by the dull ache throbbing behind Yato's eyes.

Yato wondered if he was really that transparent.

"Of course," he said with a smile that he hoped looked more genuine than it felt. A flicker of motion caught his eye, and he realized that his fingers were still trembling while playing restlessly with the bandages wound about his wrists and arms. He slipped them beneath the covers and out of view. "It was just a dream. What are you so worried about?"

He didn't feel the need to explain that just because he wasn't alone now didn't mean he wouldn't lose everything at any moment. Hiyori could forget or die, Yukine could leave or die again. Father could always decide to take them away like he took Sakura. Yato had lived too long to grow complacent about how long he could keep the people he grew attached to.

And just because he had friends now didn't mean that he didn't still feel alone sometimes. Disconnected, distant, alien. The same way he felt painfully alone even when stuck with Father and Hiiro, except that he much preferred Yukine and Hiyori's company.

Yukine's fingers were tapping a nervous rhythm on his knee, and Yato resigned himself to more uncomfortable conversation. Kids could be such a pain sometimes and he was too old and tired to have the patience for such stilted prying, but he owed Yukine a lot and had grown rather fond of him and so resisted the urge to snap at him.

"You wouldn't be like that," Yukine said finally.

Yato's brows drew together in confusion. "Like what?"

Yukine stared down at his knees intently and began picking at his sleeves. "I mean, I can't say I understand everything, but I don't think you would have ended up like her, going crazy and trapping people like that. Not that all the other stuff you did was okay, but you aren't like that."

Unease wriggled in Yato's stomach. Exactly what had he been saying in his sleep? Or were his insecurities really so obvious despite his best efforts?

"I never said I was," he said stiffly.

Yukine winced and rushed to cover his faux pas. "I just mean, you've been alive a really long time, right? I think it would've driven me crazy pretty quickly to be alone like that even without having a dad like yours to mess with my head, but you turned out okay."

Something like amusement coiled low in Yato's belly, and he eyed the kid with an indulgent half-moon smile. "But now you're assuming I'm still sane."

"What?" Yukine looked up, his hands stilling, and blinked at the god with wide eyes.

"Really, with how often you call me crazy and deal with my antics, I thought you'd already decided otherwise." Yato snorted softly and tilted his head, eyes sharp with bitter-edged amusement. "No one is alone as long as I've been and stays totally sane, kid. Actually, no one lives as long as me and stays sane. I'll let you in on a secret." He leaned forward and flashed Yukine a toothy smile. "I'm pretty sure all gods and shinki that have lived more than a few centuries are a little bit cracked, if you know what I mean. Time does funny things to your head, and we've all seen and felt a little too much."

It wasn't funny, really, but there was something a little amusing about such naïve misconceptions. Children like Yukine and Hiyori couldn't truly understand what it meant to live for centuries. They might occasionally glimpse more disturbing depths beneath his façade and those of the other gods and shinki, but most of the ageless had long since picked up devices to protect their sanity and were good at keeping them firmly in place. But if you looked closely enough, pried deeply enough, there was a little bit of crazy buried in all of them.

Yato included. He might be worse than most, torn between Yaboku's role as Father's killing tool and Yato's bid for independence. The conscience Sakura had planted in him gave him the ability to at least try being a better person, but it also set him at war with himself. Father's orders had never torn him apart this way until after he learned better. Self-awareness was both a blessing and a curse.

If he wasn't a little crazy, he probably wouldn't have clung to Father and Hiiro for so long. If he wasn't a little crazy, he probably wouldn't have latched on to Yukine and Hiyori so tightly and so quickly. It reeked of desperation and instability.

Surrounding himself with Father and a parade of shinki he kept at arm's length had done little more for him than surrounding herself with ayakashi and unwilling souls had done for Izanami. They were alone in a very real sense, regardless of who was around them.

But Yukine and Hiyori, whatever else, gave Yato some kind of meaning and purpose. Whether he had clung to them out of desperation or not, they genuinely felt like family. He didn't feel so painfully alone when he was with them, even if the loneliness still crept up on him sometimes. They did wonders for his sanity.

"Uh…" Yukine swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing nervously. Then he shook his head and huffed out a breath, the tension draining out of him. "I think you say things on purpose to push us away sometimes," he muttered. Yato had nothing to say to that, because he thought it was probably true. "Yeah, you're totally crazy and drive me crazy too and did some pretty messed-up things, but… You've had a lot of shinki ditch you, right? And you always released them instead of forcing them to stay. And you were going to cut Hiyori's ties to fix her soul issue and let me go with Ebisu if I wanted. And you gave us the chance to back out when you told us about your dad. So no, I don't think you're like Izanami. And we aren't planning on going anywhere either."

Yato smiled a little despite himself. He thought he was rather more like Izanami than Yukine realized and certainly didn't trust himself, which was probably what all of this boiled down to.

But tonight that didn't matter. For now, he would let Yukine shove all of that aside. Yukine might be dead, but with his second chance he was as alive as could be. He was practically bursting with life, and that was what Yato liked about kids even when they were annoying and naïve.

Tomorrow, everything could fall apart again. But for tonight, he would let Yukine ground him in the land of the living.

"Fair enough," he said. "It's alright, kiddo. I'm just tired and cranky. You should go get some sleep, or you'll be tired and cranky in the morning too."

Yukine twitched and averted his gaze. "I'm not really tired," he mumbled.

Yato regarded the child curiously and considered the sudden bout of nerves before arching an eyebrow. "You having nightmares too?"

"…Maybe."

"Oh?" Yato ruthlessly swept aside any lingering jitters. This was more familiar territory, and he would rather take care of Yukine than deal with his own issues any day. "Anything interesting?"

Yukine shrugged and fiddled with his sleeves some more. "Not really. I don't remember much. It was just really dark and maybe I was searching for something…or someone. I don't really know. It's not a big deal."

Yato hummed to himself and uncrossed his legs to straighten them out. He stretched his arms above his head until all the muscles in his arms and chest tightened and relaxed. Covering a yawn behind his hand, he slid out of bed and tapped Yukine's knee with his foot.

"Come on, kiddo. I'll show you what you can do with the dark."

Yukine eyed him skeptically but trailed after him. Yato settled himself cross-legged on Yukine's futon and twisted the head of the lamp until the circle of light brightened the wall like a soft yellow moon against the night.

"What are you doing?" Yukine asked as he sat down beside the god.

"Watch and learn!"

Yato twisted sideways and brought his hands up to cast shadows in the light.

Yukine was not impressed. "Shadow puppets? Really? What are you, fi–? Holy crap, how are you doing that? That's so realistic!"

Yato laughed. "I saw this guy who entertained kids with really good shadow animals. Must've been…a couple centuries ago, maybe. These things have been around forever. I was bored and started playing around with them."

It was just one of the many odd quirks he'd picked up over the centuries, less impressive than his drawing skill and less useful than his uncanny ability to clean even the grungiest of bathrooms until they sparkled. He had impressed Hiiro with them for a while, before she brushed them off and dragged him along to get back to work. He had practiced in the night when the insomnia struck or the nightmares woke him. For a while, they'd been the closest thing he'd had to friends. Which was maybe just a little more of his crazy peeking through.

He knew how to use both hands to great effect, how to smooth over the telltale bumps of his fingers to give an added air of realism, how to twitch and crook his fingers to mimic the movements of animals and people. He had always spent a good deal of time watching even when no one noticed him in return, and he could represent the things and people he saw nearly as well with his hands as he could with paper and pencil.

Yukine watched with his mouth hanging open as a shadow bird perched on a branch—with a tree trunk that might have looked suspiciously like an arm under other circumstances—spread its wings and fluttered about. A cat stalked across the light, tail twitching and ears swiveling. Hiyori's face appeared in profile out of the edge of the darkness to lecture them about homework. That one took a couple attempts to get right because people's faces were harder, especially if you wanted them to be recognizable as someone in particular.

"It can't be that hard," Yukine said as a rabbit hopped across the light and flopped its ears about. He had picked his jaw up off the ground and was overcoming his awe because teenagers were not impressed by childish things like shadow puppets, especially if Yato was the one making them. Yato eyed him in amusement, almost able to hear his thought process. "Anyone can do that."

He lifted his hand and wriggled his fingers about, and Yato tilted his head as he tried to decipher the shadowy mass writhing on the wall. Some kind of generic animal, maybe. It had an eye-hole and finger-ears, anyway.

"That's a very nice…hand," Yato offered, unable to unravel the mystery.

Yukine scowled and puffed out his chest indignantly. "It's a dog!"

"If you say so," Yato said skeptically.

At least if the kid was getting offended and throwing himself into silly projects, he wasn't worrying about nightmares or unstable gods. He seemed distracted enough as he set about experimenting with finger wiggling, and Yato smiled fondly. Yukine himself could be a good enough distraction for Yato.

"Here."

Yato positioned his hands to cast their shadows from the bottom of the circle of light and rearranged his fingers into the shape of a wolf's head. One finger twitched back to flatten the ear back against the skull, while his hands moved together to make the jaws part and snout raise and head bob until the wolf was howling silently against the backdrop of the yellow moon.

Yukine's mouth dropped open again. "No way! How do you even make it move like it's real?"

"Practice," Yato said with a laugh. "I know what a wolf looks like when it's howling, and from there it's just a matter of playing around until I can replicate the motion. Here, it helps if you use both hands and use the border between the light and shadow to disguise anything you don't want to show."

"Sounds like you spend way too much time on dumb crap," Yukine muttered, but he lifted his hands and tried to mimic Yato's gesture with awkward movements.

"Doesn't it make you feel better to know I wasted just as much time before I started annoying you with it?"

Yato poked and pulled Yukine's fingers until the shadow they cast looked a little like a wolf, even if it was a bit lumpy and started falling apart if the kid tried to move too much.

"It's harder than it looks," Yukine said in his defense.

Yato's quiet chuckle filtered through the stillness. "I know."

He lifted his hands again to show Yukine an example of exactly how it was done. He smiled to himself. For the first time, the lone wolf howling at the moon was joined by a smaller companion. Maybe it had finally found its pack.

Yato leaned over to drape an arm around Yukine and prop his chin on the unruly mop of blond hair despite the kid's protests, and smiled at the flailing shadows on the wall. He had always roamed and wandered—searching for something, anything, someone—but tonight the itch was gone. This was, he figured, the closest thing to peace he'd ever find. It didn't seem so bad.

Note: Nightmare sequences can honestly be the creepiest things ever x.x Anyway, I saw these absolutely amazing shadow puppeteers on some show way back when right before I wrote this and was honestly super impressed. It's amazing how good they were. Everything I ever tried to make just looked like fingers lol Somehow it leaked into this fic a little. Seems like one of those kinda pointless talents Yato could've picked up over the years lol But the main point was the parallels between Yato and Izanami, and I feel like the whole episode with Yomi could've messed him up a bit.