| [Mar. 5th, 2018|04:13 am] |
Raidou blinked. Himself had said something like that before, but there hadn’t been time to dwell on it. “You’re sixteen hundred years old?”
Himself blinked back. “No, that’s just when they showed up. I’m not really sure how old I am.”
Meaning he was more than sixteen hundred years old?
Kurenai opened her eyes. “How much of the human world have you watched, in that time?” she asked eagerly. “Our histories are so incomplete…”
“Humans have very short lives.” Himself waved a dismissive hand. “Villages come and go. I remember — oh, when was that? Well, it was long before you were born — we helped them terrace some rice fields. The poor things didn’t know what they were doing. You can still see the terraces, even though those humans died and trees grew up in the rice fields.”
Kurenai visibly swallowed her disappointment, along with the rest of her sake. “Was that in the villages in these mountains? Tanigawa or Hiraizumi?”
Himself gave her a quizzical look. “Those villages are still standing. This one is gone. I think they called it Ryoushitsu-something.”
Kurenai glanced at Raidou and Genma in turn, eyebrows arched in question. The name clearly meant nothing to her. Raidou offered a blank shrug. Genma shook his head. “I don’t know that one.”
Himself chuckled, a sound that rolled like old alcohol and past seasons. “It was long before you were born. Before the dogs moved in, for that matter.”
“Moved in from where?” Raidou asked.
“They used to live between the rats and the cats, near the tengu,” Himself said. “Lived there for generations, actually. But their neighbors got fed up with them, banded together, and kicked them out. Which says a lot. Rats and cats teaming up?” He raised a hand and sketched elaborate kanji in the air. “‘A common enemy makes foes into friends.’ ”
Raidou was not surprised. He hadn't met that many summons in his life, but the wolves had seemed more savage by a wide margin. Popular speculation said Yondaime-sama's toads were as alcohol-loving as the tanuki. Orochimaru's snakes were rumored to be coldly intelligent, just like their summoner. Anyone who’d survived the Third War knew Tsunade's slugs were healers. Were the wolves younger than their counterparts, or just naturally more untamed? And who had they taken their new dimension from?
Raidou rumpled a wet hand through wetter hair and almost wished Kakashi was here to ask. Or at least Pakkun.
Kurenai filled their cups again, including Himself’s. “Is there much communication between neighbors, here? Trade, correspondence…? Do you have drinking parties with kappa?”
Raidou snorted into his sake. Genma laughed, making ripples spill out across the water’s surface.
Himself’s mouth broke into a wide grin that made Raidou think, trickster. “Oh, the kappa. I could tell you stories about the kappa. When they visit they always bring their own cucumbers, because they’re very fussy about their vegetables.”
Raidou didn’t have many memories of his paternal grandmother, but one involved being bounced uncomfortably on her knee while she told him that if he ever tangled with kappa, his best chance was to fling cucumbers at it and run in the opposite direction. He’d always thought she was just trying to make him appreciate his greens.
“Huh,” he said. “What other stories have you got?” |
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