Ink Stained

103: why won't you?*

なぜあなたはしませんか？

Four days after getting back home from Kyoto (having successfully dodged imprisonment, and taking along with them Misao and Kurama's assurances that the 'So Fu matter' would be looked into more carefully thanks to her testimony and Shin's corroboration of it, Pai had absolutely no idea how she found herself alone in a luxury penthouse in Maruyama with Shin.

She did know, but she didn't at the same time. It was frustrating to retrace their smattering route through the day and the city, to logically see how it led to this.

But how?

It started off as a ordinary morning, much as it could be in Ayashi House. It was Wednesday, which gave her the reprieve of Shiori barging into her room like Pai hadn't put that chair in front of the door to specifically keep Shiori out until at least after eight o'clock. Shiori was a late sleeper, but she liked to wake up early on most days either to get to school on time or, if it was Sunday, to give Pai hell. Saturdays were the only days Shiori did neither thanks to the end of the school week, and to her unshakeable belief that Fridays were sacred and Saturdays, holy.

Unfortunately, today was a school holiday, a time when the kids assumed it was perfectly excusable to start up a hellish racket because no-school days automatically translated to all kinds of 'fun' for them. A good portion of that fun involved tormenting the Daitengu in impressively creative ways. Pai usually found herself roped into trying to control the chaos they made, together with Yukiji and Mizutani.

That hadn't happened this morning, though.

The kids didn't know what she'd done, where she'd been for the years she was missing, or what she was. They were much too young for that. She was relatively certain that someone had told them something, at least, for she woke that morning to their exuberant cries not in her room, but muffled through several walls.

They had decided the next best person to violently awaken that morning would be none other than Shiori. It was her enraged yells of, Let me sleep you demonic flying fiends! that echoed around the house ridiculously early that morning, and any stragglers still trying to remain barricaded in their rooms to sleep didn't have a chance to continue their peaceful slumber.

She would have enjoyed watching Shiori chase them around, waving one of the Karakasa umbrellas and mock-threatening to end their devious ways with it (much to the poor Karakasa's trauma). She would have loved to do that, instead of having to meet Aihara again that day – and this time, instead of Kaede being there to silently glare suspiciously at the nurse in alliance with Kanou, it was Shin who came.

Despite playing it off coolly, acting mature and level-headed as she liked to pretend she was, she felt like she'd walked a tight-rope the entire time Shin and Aihara shared breathing space in the room at Dokokai Hospital. It was exhausting to fend off Aihara's still suspicious questions regarding the obvious relationship between Pai and Shin whilst also keeping Shin from flat-out scowling the nurse away.

She couldn't decide which was worse; revealing to Sojobo Kurama that the monsters they all had to fear weren't hiding under the bed, but wielding guns right in his backyard, or acting as a human buffer between the man she loved and the woman who'd told him Pai was going to die, no matter what any of them did.

Shin wasn't an idiot. He knew that Aihara was but a messenger of what was to come. But several times throughout the meeting, she'd caught him looking at Aihara as if he blamed her for what was happening. All Aihara had done was bring their attention to the fatal reality simmering under the surface of their perceived happiness – yet perhaps it was for that very reason he faulted her for it all.