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When Ashiya presented him with the flower arrangement one day in the Mononokean, Itsuki wasn't entirely sure what to do with it.
It was some sort of ikebana thing. Two irises curved elegantly to one side and then back toward the center, while pink orchids – he thought they were orchids, anyway – chased them up out of the small pot. Nice and asymmetric.
He took the pot in his hands, stared at the flowers for a long moment, and then glanced up. Ashiya looked strangely nervous, with his back straight, hands clenched in his lap, and lips pressed together. Did he think Itsuki knew anything about ikebana, that he would judge it the same way he'd criticized Ashiya's few sloppy attempts at following along with the proper order of tea ceremony? Maybe he'd joined that ikebana club he'd mentioned finding at his university and this was his first arrangement.
"Thanks," Itsuki said. "It looks nice."
Ashiya drooped.
"What?"
Ashiya frowned at him. "I – that's all? It looks nice?"
"What else do you expect me to say? You're the flower expert here!" Ashiya looked pitiful enough, though, that he ground his teeth together and found something more specific: "I like the shape."
And to show that he didn't hate it, he shuffled over the Mononokean's mats and put it in the alcove. Ashiya made a strangled noise behind him, so he sighed and moved it towards the side of the space. That way the hairball would have enough room to curl up and sleep there as he often did.
Why don't you explain about the flowers, Hanae? the Mononokean suggested, and then it drew some little doodles of the flowers in the arrangement.
"I know these ones are irises," Itsuki pointed out.
Ashiya shuffled up beside him and pointed at the pink flowers. "These ones are called butterfly orchids." He gave Itsuki a strangely intense look. "We often use them when people order arrangements for weddings."
"I guess I can see why." He poked one of the flowerheads. "Their shape is interesting." They sort of looked like butterflies with their overlapping petals on either side and the one poking out at the top like a head, although maybe they were called that because butterflies liked them.
Ashiya sighed and ran a hand through his hair.
They had a job to get onto that day, though after they had sent the happy youkai on its way to the Underworld, they lingered in the Mundane World together. Everything was flowers today, apparently; Ashiya had drawn out from the youkai a desire to see his favorite blossoms one more time before he left them behind for the flora of the Underworld, and so Ashiya had hastily found them a botanical garden to visit.
And, well, they'd paid for the tickets. For their client, Ashiya had gone on and on and on about the flowers, but now that the client had left through the Mononokean, Ashiya walked quietly next to Itsuki, suggesting a direction to go here and there where the path diverged.
"You can talk about the flowers if you want," Itsuki eventually said, because it was weird for Ashiya to shut up for so long.
Ashiya laughed and pointed to a wisteria pergola. "I think there were some benches over there," he said.
They sat in the shade of the long, purple flowers dripping down over their heads, Ashiya leaning into him as he pointed up and talked about wisteria cultivation, his eyes bright. It wasn't the most interesting topic, but there was something to seeing Ashiya so animated and talking with confidence about something he actually knew well.
And the flowers were nice. Above them, the flowers were so thick and perfectly purple that it was like they had sat down in an old woodblock. The air smelled sweet, and the shade was refreshing in the growing warmth of spring. They had the area mostly to themselves, so it was just Ashiya's voice in his ear.
There were worse ways to spend midday in the Mundane World.
After the Mononokean dropped Ashiya back at campus so he could make it to his afternoon classes, Itsuki knelt by the alcove and adjusted the flowers again. Belatedly, he realized that he should have asked if there was anything in particular he was supposed to do to keep the flowers fresh, or if all they needed was fresh water.
The burst of spring in the room was kind of nice.
"I wouldn't mind if he brought more flowers for you," he admitted to the Mononokean.
The Mononokean responded with a giant question mark on its scroll, and when he quirked an eyebrow in response, it wrote out, The flowers weren't for me. The text disappeared, and new words appeared: They were for Itsuki.
"I suppose," he huffed, sitting back on his heels. The warmth of their walk seemed to be lingering in the Mononokean's air.
~!~
This time, the arrangement was more like the ones the Ashiya family's flower shop sold. The pink-red azaleas were clearly the star, with the rest of the space filled with smaller white flowers and red-orange-yellow flowers he didn't know.
Ashiya was giving him a more hopeful look this time for some reason.
Itsuki couldn't fulfill those hopes; he stared at the flowers and struggled for a name. "What are the orange ones?"
"Safflowers!"
"Oh, the ones they use for dyeing and makeup." He'd read about it before. So that was what the flowers themselves looked like.
"Uh.... yeah, it makes a nice red. And the white ones are chamomile."
Itsuki nodded, though that name was less meaningful. "Thanks," he said, setting them on the mat next to him, and why the hell did Ashiya look so disappointed just because he didn't know anything about flowers?
Their first order of business today was in the Underworld with the Legislator. Afterward, as they climbed back into the Mononokean, Itsuki was still grumbling about the Legislator being too lazy to carry out his own work. As he moved aside so Ashiya could follow him inside, protesting that he didn't mind helping out, the vase full of flowers caught his eye again. They did have awfully cheery colors.
He picked them up as the Mononokean whirled them off to their second destination of the day, this one at the center of the Underworld.
"Abeno?" (Itsuki had told him to knock it off with the san a while ago; at some point it had gotten embarrassing to be addressed with it after everything. Especially the times when they were holding hands to help Ashiya activate his own inborn Influence now that Sakae's was gone.)
"Aoi would like them."
He didn't think much of the words, so it was weird to see Ashiya's face scrunch up oddly. But they were a present for Itsuki, the Mononokean pressed.
"So? If they're mine, I can put them where I want them." Ah, damn, maybe Ashiya thought he was trying to get rid of them, even though he slept in Aoi's pavilion some nights. "You know I spend a lot of time there when I'm not at work? And this way they won't be in danger of the hairball trying to knock them over."
"Right," Ashiya said weakly.
Sure enough, after he'd carefully carried the vase through all the defenses guarding the center of the Underworld, where Aoi had eventually taken over the Princess's duties in upholding the magical protections, Aoi exclaimed over them and took the time to nudge all the disturbed flowers back into place.
"Is it a holiday in the Mundane World? Or some other occasion?"
"I don't know. Ashiya's the one who made it."
Aoi's fingers paused among the blossoms. Aoi glanced over at Ashiya. And then Aoi drew a sleeve up over their mouth, though the fact that they were smiling was clear to see from their eyes.
Itsuki glanced at Ashiya, too, though all he saw was a more awkward smile on Ashiya's face.
"I see," Aoi said. "Well, then, I'll place it right over here, where he can see it when he stays over with me. A gift like this should be cherished."
...they were just flowers, weren't they?
After they had tea with Aoi and spoke for a while, there wasn't any other business left for them in the Underworld. Usually, Itsuki would have walked back to the Mononokean with Ashiya and seen him off there, but for some reason, Ashiya seemed lost in thought as they emerged from the last of the defenses. Something about him almost seemed depressed.
It wasn't like him at all, and it was, strangely enough, annoying. Nothing about their conversation with Aoi today warranted this weird reaction!
"Let's take a walk before you leave," Itsuki decided, and Ashiya gave him a surprised look but agreed.
There was a spot where he'd often napped with the Justice when he was younger not far away from here. It was a short climb down the mountain, though they had to step with caution down steeper areas of the path, and within a few minutes, there they were, on a narrow, grassy outcropping that got the full force of sunshine from above and had an expansive view of rice fields below.
Just as he'd thought, the scenery snapped Ashiya out of whatever he was worrying about. "Look! You can almost see the town if you squint – and there's where we dropped off that poor kid we found in the Sea of Trees – and Abeno, look, there's people out working today!"
"Sit down before you fall off," Itsuki sighed, having already sat down with his legs dangling from the ledge.
"I'm not gonna fall!"
But he sat down anyway. There wasn't much room, so their legs had to press together. If it was anyone else except maybe Aoi, it would have been uncomfortable enough to draw away from, but....
Ashiya shaded his eyes and peered down at the fields below. "I wonder what they're doing?" he said, pointing to one of the nearer fields. A couple was tending it; one crane-like youkai went slowly through the water, clearing its surface with each stride of their long legs, and while another, frog-like youkai swam through and sometimes vanished beneath the water. "I guess even the Underworld rice probably has to deal with weeds and stuff. Are there different ones here, or is it the same as in the Mundane World?"
"How would I know?"
"You know that safflowers are used for dye! Why wouldn't you know something like that?"
"That's completely different from knowing anything about agriculture! What do you even know about rice farming in the Mundane World?"
Apparently, Ashiya's elementary school had done a whole unit in civics or whatever about where food came from. Itsuki half-listened to him yammer on about how they'd grown their own potatoes in the school garden and then cooked them in their home economics class and he'd gotten in trouble for pulling a weed because the teacher thought it was a flower and he'd cried, and so on and so on.
He finally took a breath and said, "Did you do anything like that in elementary school?"
"No."
There wasn't a need to offer up that he hadn't really attended elementary school. Youkai had taught him far more than any human teachers had.
"You missed out," Ashiya sighed. He stretched his arms above his head, and when they came down, he leaned father into Itsuki's side as he pointed out something else he found interesting in the view down the mountain.
Itsuki had half a mind to tell him to stop, but, well, if Ashiya got worked up in an argument, he really might fall off. So he let Ashiya's weight press against his and said nothing.
~!~
"Hey, today, did you want to – ow, what the hell, hairball, get off!"
But the hairball, who had spent the night at Ashiya's place, refused to stop shoving himself into Itsuki's face. Itsuki had to take a few steps back and really wrestle with him to get him to loosen his grip.
"What's gotten into you?" he grumbled as he bent over and set the hairball down. The hairball just closed his eyes and wriggled all three tails at him. "You were gone for, like, twelve hours! You couldn't have missed me that much!"
Itsuki huffed at him while he straightened up. Always causing so much trouble for a supposed employee....
And when he glanced up, Ashiya was giving him the world's most nervous, frozen smile while hiding his arms behind his back. "What's up with you?" Itsuki snapped. This was supposed to simply be one of those days off from Mononokean business that they'd started occasionally taking together a couple of years ago, and now Ashiya and the hairball were both acting weird.
Ashiya took a long, deep breath, glanced away, looked back at him, and took his arms out. He was holding something, Itsuki realized half a second before that thing was revealed to be—
A bouquet of red roses.
The moment seemed to pause. Roses. Red. A bunch of them. They sure were there in front of him. Itsuki tried to process it.
There was no getting around what the gesture signified. No way of misunderstanding it. He just had to make it make sense and then figure out what on Earth he was supposed to do with that.
The Mononokean's reaction to the other flowers. Aoi's. Ashiya's.
"The other flowers," he said, his voice sounding faint to his own ears. "They were also supposed to mean...."
He couldn't say the word.
"Yeah," Ashiya said quietly.
Annoyance was the first thing to flash into his head. "...and you couldn't just say it?" What was this, a Heian novel where they had to communicate with flowers and poetry and colors because nobody could talk to each other in straightforward terms? Only florists could care that much about flower meanings these days – had Ashiya really expected him to get the message?!
"Well, I was – I was going to try to explain, or wait for you to ask or something, but then you acted like you didn't understand why anyone would give you flowers! And we're both guys, so it was already hard in the first place—"
"What does that have to do with anything?"
Ashiya gaped at him for a moment. "Because it does! I don't know, maybe youkai don't care about that sort of thing, but in the human world, you can't just say I like you, please go out with me to another guy like you would to a girl! Especially if you don't even know if he likes guys or cares about going out with anyone! And it's kind of hard to just go up and ask, before you say anything about that – I just – got this feeling from you, and...."
His upset blew out of him, and he deflated like a balloon. The Mononokean was conspicuously quiet; even its energy had quieted down like it was trying to let them be. The hairball was drooping.
Fuck.
Itsuki ran a hand through his hair and tried to yank his thoughts back on track. So Ashiya liked him, as in liked him , and he—
He—
Well, whatever he felt, if he didn't do something , Ashiya was going to just leave from the sheer awkwardness and do something idiotic like try to avoid him for ages, probably, and Itsuki did need him for work. And... liked seeing him. Thought he made the human world more tolerable to visit and understand.
And Ashiya had clearly put a lot of work into those flowers. Had taken a chance just by trying to say anything because, right, humans often thought that certain kinds of love should only occur between men and women.
Youkai didn't, mostly. Their ideas of what relationships looked correct found other lines. The kitsune-woman would cause a lot less of a fuss by marrying another kitsune-woman from the right family rather than a kappa-man, or worse, a kitsune-man whose family had been having territorial spats with hers for the past thousand years. Nobody they knew in the Underworld would blink at the idea of him and Ashiya. It certainly wasn't what had thrown him for a loop, just, Ashiya giving him flowers and sitting so close to him and asking to spend more and more time together outside of work, hell, how had he not understood it?
Ashiya started to open his mouth. Itsuki didn't give him the chance to dig them even deeper into this supremely uncomfortable hole and instead swiped the flowers out of his hand.
"You don't—"
He yelped when Itsuki grabbed his hand and dragged him toward the other side of the room. An idea had popped into his head to make up for the misunderstanding, and bonus, it would give them a little more privacy to figure all of... this... out, so he didn't waste time thinking about it.
Itsuki had taken the flowers with his right hand, and his left had found Ashiya's right. Their Influence hands. There had always been a weird tingling whenever they tried to practice bringing out Ashiya's Influence, and there was one now, even though they weren't attempting anything. It buzzed up Itsuki's hand, up his arm, across his shoulders as he nudged the closet door open.
Not much was in it right now except another door half-hidden behind a hanging storage rod. He'd never let Ashiya see back here before today.
"What are you—"
He slid the other door open, pulled Ashiya through, and threw the door closed behind them, shutting them away by themselves.
The sound was very loud in the small, dark room. Itsuki let go of Ashiya's hand.
Ashiya grumbled about being dragged around, but apparently curiousity won him over quickly, and he turned his head back and forth.
"Where is this? I didn't know you were hiding a big space like this behind the closet."
"My bedroom." Itsuki glanced down at the flowers. They were so bright that even in the dim light, he could see the intensity of their color. "At my parents' place."
"Oh," Ashiya said, unusually quiet. He started across the floor, hesitant at first and then his usual bold self when Itsuki didn't stop him. After peeking around one of the rarely opened curtains, he drew half of it aside and turned to look at what the light had been thrown on.
"I don't spend a lot of time here." That much was probably obvious; he still slept here occasionally, but mostly it was a place to keep things. His old schoolbooks were piled on the desk. The hairball's favorite beachball and a couple of other toys they'd found for him over the years were kept next to the door that opened to the Mononokean, just out of tripping hazard range. There weren't any pictures of friends and family, like at Ashiya's place.
"Your parents don't believe in youkai, do they."
"No."
Ashiya began to poke around. "I kinda figured after that thing you said when we were helping Manjirou-san about nobody believing if we tried to explain." He opened the main drawer on the desk; besides writing supplies, it still held his old childhood notebooks, the ones where he'd learned to write his basic characters in the kitchen while his parents cooked dinner for their ryokan's guests. "But you only ever talked about Aoi-san, so I wasn't really sure what had happened with them. I mean, I figured they probably hadn't gotten eaten by youkai like my dad's family, but...."
"A scared kid who can see youkai is an easy target. For youkai seeking energy, or for ones who are just bullies." He shrugged. "And I hadn't learned to shut up about what I was seeing yet. I thought if I kept trying, they'd understand me."
Ashiya straightened and gave him a pitying look. "I wish they had," he said, sincerely. "It must have been kind of hard to see my mom believe me so easily, huh?"
He shrugged again. Ashiya Nara was a very different person than either of his parents had ever been. "I think I was more surprised that she did."
Ashiya turned to sit on the bed and look out the window. He gave Itsuki a small smile. "Anyway, then one day, Aoi-san came and rescued you from the bullying youkai, right?"
Itsuki stepped across the room. "Yes. And took my parent's crazy problem child off their hands most days, and he stopped talking about seeing things." He sat next to Ashiya and set the roses in his lap. They were deep and more vivid than the bright red fabric of his haori.
"You probably don't get along with them as well as my mom and I, then."
"We don't talk much." And not about anything important. His ability to see youkai and their refusal to believe in it had strangled whatever relationship they were supposed to have. "Aoi and the three Powers did a lot more raising me than they did, after that."
"I'd guessed that," Ashiya said, leaning forward again. "It's sad that you have a gulf with your parents, but at least everyone in the Underworld was there for you." He cracked a better smile. "And thanks for showing me. I was really curious for a while why you didn't want me to sneak a look into the Mononokean's closet! Of course, I got used to it, but I'm glad to know now."
Itsuki found the corner of his lip quirking up in return, and then his gaze fell back to the flowers.
Before he could say anything, Ashiya must have seen, because his mouth started running again: "You know, I always thought you looked great in kimono – I think at first because it made you seem really cool and mature, the same way it was kinda cool that you used those stupidly hard words and did polite language correctly. And I thought that was just normal for a long time, until after Aoi's New Year's party, I was telling Zenko and Yahiko about the new clothes you were wearing, and I had to stop because I realized it sounded really gushing. Then Yahiko demanded I tell him all the snacks we ate." His grin widened. "That's when I started thinking maybe it was a bit more than just thinking your friend is handsome."
Ashiya hadn't left him alone during the party, but Itsuki hadn't thought anything of it. "You don't look half-bad in kimono yourself... at least, now that you know how to wear it properly."
"Hey! I learned a while ago! It's just, the obi knots are hard to get right." Ashiya huffed at him, and then his eyes fell to the flowers. "So, um...."
Itsuki didn't know what to say. Words wouldn't form, nothing like an I like you, too. No let's go out together. No I don't think that's how I feel, either, though. Not even a I need time to think about it. Just a blank.
But....
There was a feeling, light and heavy in chest at the same time. His free hand crawled across the bedspread almost of its own accord until it touched Ashiya's. Overlaid it.
The tingling swept up his fingers, up his wrist, wrapped around his elbow, spread across his chest.
Ashiya turned his hand over and locked their fingers together, which only intensified the buzzing. The grin spread across his whole face, up his cheeks, brightening his eyes. It was a good expression on him.
"I was going to say," Itsuki said, "before the hairball threw itself in my face." Distracting him so he wouldn't see the flowers, he realized now. "Was there anywhere in particular that you wanted to go today?"
Ashiya started digging in his pocket and pulled out his phone. "Right, yeah, I was hoping if – I mean, well, there's this place I found online, it's a nice cafe next to a lake. The reviews say they have great tea, and apparently the village has a lot of youkai stories, too, so even though it's our day off, you never know!" He tapped on the screen for a moment, then shoved it into Itsuki's face.
The menu looked promising. The pictures looked even better. Far brighter and lovelier than this dusty room.
"We should find a vase for these," Itsuki said as they stood, looking at the flowers.
Ashiya glanced around, but there were no good flower containers to be found here. "I'll get one from my mom's collection! Be right back, Abeno!"
He made a confused sound when Itsuki prevented him from leaving by grabbing his sleeve.
"...you can use my given name." It would be silly if they called Zenko by her given name but not each other, if they were going to... be together.
That got him another smile. Itsuki suspected he was going to be seeing a lot of those today. "Okay, um... Haruitsuki? Wait, no, your name is too long. Should I call you Itsuki like everyone else does, or should I call you Haru, or—"
"Stop overthinking it."
"Okay, fine! Itsuki! I'll just call you Itsuki!"
Red blotched across his cheeks, but he gave Itsuki a stubborn, expectant look.
"Like I told you..." He took a breath. "...Hanae."
Simply changing how he called someone shouldn't have made his cheeks heat the way they did.
Hanae beamed at him again before he turned bounded through the closet; Itsuki followed after closing the curtain and found the Mononokean already empty. While he waited, he knelt by the Mononokean's scroll and considered the flowers once more. Maybe not in the alcove, this time. They'd be out of the way but still very visible if he put them in the corner.
The Mononokean's bell rang, and he looked up. Did you work things out okay? You both seem a lot happier, but Hanae rushed off.
"Hanae's just going to get a vase," he said. "Then we're going out together."
The Monononokean put up some of its favorite heart and music-note symbols. Do your best! it encouraged him in an energetic font. The hairball, too, began to happily tap its way in circles around the room, its tails waggling in synch with each other.
"I will," he said.
Even if he didn't know exactly what he would be doing with Hanae. But how hard could a date be compared to taking care of a client or bringing Aoi back from the brink of death?