Ink Stained

44: who are you?*

あなたは誰？

Shin had no idea what Pai was doing.

Shin had no idea what he was doing following her.

It was becoming a trend with her, this confusing myriad of emotions whenever his thoughts strayed to her.

Shinigami laughed behind the wall between himself and his True Ayakashi, a wall that was weakened greatly after his Mask had been taken off twice in his lifetime now. Shinigami was laughed as if the sight of Pai was the funniest thing he had ever seen through Shin's eyes.

Shin had to hold in a snarl of irritation. He didn't have time focus on Shinigami. He needed to figure out why Pai wasn't in her room, asleep, as she should be – why was she out here, in the cold, wandering around in the dead of night?

He tucked his wings close to his back as he drew his arms in and plummeted straight down to the ground, through a hole formed by the canopy of leaves the forest trees made. The chilly wind rushed over his body, ruffling his hair wildly. He landed on the ground with his hands on either side of his body, muscles in his legs tensing as he absorbed the shock of the landing. His wings disappeared from sight in a shower of faint light that enveloped his body for a brief second before that, too, faded away.

He stood, left hand resting on the hilt of his katana belted at his side. His other weapon remained comfortably resting against his leg in a matching sheath.

Pai hadn't noticed him yet.

He frowned at her total lack of reaction before glancing on either side of him, stretching out his senses to touch the vital life forces of all the living beings around him, searching out any threats that might be around.

There were none. He could feel the life of the forest around him, ground teeming with insects and small nocturnal animals running to and fro across the forest floor. The bare branches of the trees smacking against each other in shivers from the cold breath of the wind blowing through them were the only source of obviously audible noise. None of the animals were threatening in the least, most scurrying away rather than approaching the two humanoids in the forest.

For the half-minute he extended his senses, he could feel every living thing for a mile out on either direction of him. The sensation of it was enough to completely overwhelm an ordinary person, but Shin did this often enough that it didn't incapacitate him. All the overload of sensory input and the weight of the force of nature, or life, pressing in around him was something he was used to. It was something he could easily partition in his mind so that he wasn't overcome by it all.

It was only when he was withdrawing himself that he realized it; he couldn't sense Pai's aura. It wasn't that it had changed in some way to become something else, or it was being cloaked by something.

It simply wasn't there.

He could still catch her scent, a subtle whiff of vanilla and something else he couldn't quite put a name to, a scent that attracted both his and Shinigami's attentions whenever she drew near to him. But her aura, the one he had grown so accustomed to in the year they'd shared the same house, wasn't there anymore.

Instead, it was like a spherical wall of empty nothing surrounded the immediate space around her body. If he closed his eyes and ears to the sight and sound of her walking around aimlessly, it would be like she wasn't there at all. Touching that void, that acute sense of emptiness around her, left his senses tingling uncomfortably.

It left him feeling so desperately lonely, and he had no idea why.

He didn't understand it, or how it could be possible, but at least now he figured that the reason Haru hadn't been able to tell that Pai was in the bathroom when he went to look for her yesterday was because of this. This emptiness surrounding her was a black hole, a vacuum around her. It left him oddly hollow as he followed behind her a few paces away, watching her.