Izuna

The late-afternoon sun slanted low through the tall western windows of Schale's main office, pouring across the floorboards in long honeyed bars that caught every drifting mote of dust and turned them to flecks of gold. The air was warm with the smell of cedar polish, old paper, and the faint grassy green of the cold barley tea cooling in its glass pitcher on the sideboard. Outside, the cicadas were winding down into the long dusk shift, their rasping song softened by distance, mingling with the far-off clang of a trolley bell somewhere down the hill past the academy gates. It was the kind of hour when the building itself seemed to exhale — the paperwork of the day settling, the ceiling fans turning in slow, unhurried loops, the clock on the wall ticking out seconds that felt three times as long as they were.

Sensei's desk sat in the middle of all that golden stillness, a fortress of neatly stacked folders and half-reviewed club budget requests. The nameplate — 先生 / Advisor, Federal Investigation Club Schale — glinted under the slanted light. A chipped mug of coffee, long since gone cold, sat forgotten at his elbow beside an open file from the Hyakkiyako liaison office. Today was simply his day. Simply, routinely, blissfully his day. Which, in the particular ecosystem of this office, meant exactly one thing.

Today was Izuna-chan's turn on the duty roster.

The weekly rotation that someone — no one quite remembered who — had drawn up months ago, assigning one student per weekday to come by Schale and help with filing, tea-brewing, errand-running, and generally "assisting Sensei with administrative duties." A perfectly reasonable system, on paper. In practice, every single student in that rotation treated it as the sacred privilege it was, and one particular first-year treated it as something closer to a national holiday.

The grandfather clock in the corner cleared its throat with its usual asthmatic ker-chunk and began striking four.

Bong.

Somewhere, far below, a door slammed open with the particular velocity of a door that had been kicked.

Bong.

The faint, distant patter of running feet. Small feet. Fast feet. Terrifyingly, impossibly, Olympically fast feet, taking the main staircase four steps at a time in a drumroll of impacts that climbed each floor in less time than it took to inhale.

Bong.

Closer now. The patter had become a gallop, resolving into the unmistakable rhythm of a small body sprinting at speeds the building's engineers had never factored into their load calculations. A faint, rhythmic rin-rin, rin-rin of tiny bells could be heard underneath it, growing louder with each heartbeat.

Bong.

The patter hit the corridor outside the office. There was a brief, catastrophic skid as somebody tried and failed to brake on polished floorboards in rubber-soled loafers, followed by the muffled fwump of a small body ricocheting lightly off the wall opposite the door, followed by a breathless, delighted little "awawa—!" and the frantic scramble of someone correcting course.

The office door was flung open with such enthusiasm that the frosted glass pane rattled in its frame and the little bell above it chimed in protest, swinging drunkenly on its hook.

And there, framed in the doorway with the hallway light haloing her from behind, was the smallest, fluffiest, pinkest-cheeked, most vibrating package of pure undiluted joy currently in operation anywhere on the Kivotos subcontinent.

Her black bob was slightly tousled from the sprint, the side-tail bound in red kumihimo cord whipped over her shoulder and still swinging, the two tiny brass fox-bells at its end chiming in bright happy aftershocks (rin-rin♪ rin-rin♪). The spring-pastel haori was flung open over her white serafuku, the magenta scarf-tie slightly crooked, the pleated grey miniskirt riding up just enough from the run to show the top band of her fishnet mesh thigh-highs and that scandalous, blameless hand's-breadth of pure untouched zettai-ryōiki above them. Her enormous jet-black tail — nearly as long as she was tall, thick as a feather boa made of pure midnight — had puffed out to roughly twice its normal volume from excitement and was currently sweeping back and forth behind her with such amplitude that it was audibly displacing air. The tall fox ears atop her head stood bolt upright, perked so hard they looked ready to pick up radio signals, each one trembling with its own private tremor of anticipation. The pink-peach halo of crossed shuriken cradled in sakura petals floated above the crown of her head, glowing noticeably brighter than its baseline — the little barometer of her mood swinging straight into bliss territory.

Her huge round golden-amber eyes locked onto the man behind the desk, and the moment they did, every single rule of ninjutsu she had ever studied, trained for, bled for, and sworn her life to simply dissolved out of her head like sugar in hot water. Stealth. Concealment. Presence erasure. The art of entering a room unseen. Four years of brutal self-imposed training in the shadow arts, reduced to ash in a single heartbeat the instant she saw him.

"ARUJI-DONOOOO——!!"

The shout came out at a volume that genuinely rattled the pencils in the pencil cup on the desk. Three sparrows that had been minding their own business on the windowsill outside departed the premises in a startled whir of wings. Somewhere two floors down, a secretary pressed a hand to her chest and sighed fondly without quite knowing why.

And then she was moving.

Not running. Not even sprinting. Launching. Her small body crossed the fifteen feet of office floor between the doorway and the desk in what could only be described as a controlled projectile motion — a low, fox-swift blur of white sailor top and swirling pastel haori and streaming black side-tail, loafers barely kissing the floorboards, the two bells at her hair-tie rin-rin-rin-rin-rin-rin-rin in a continuous bright trill. She dodged a filing cabinet without looking at it. She vaulted the low ottoman by the couch in a single bounding leap. She hit the back of Sensei's reading chair, used it as a springboard, became briefly airborne over the corner of the desk itself, and dove in a tucked, trusting, utterly unarmored full-body cannonball straight at the center of her master's chest.

THUMP.

The impact was substantial but somehow soft, the way a very enthusiastic cat landing in a lap is substantial but soft — a warm compact bundle of forty-three kilograms of ninja girl burying her face directly into the hollow between Sensei's collarbones with the full and unreserved commitment of a creature that has absolutely zero reservations about where it belongs. Her small arms wound themselves tight around his neck. Her knees ended up folded on either side of his hips, her weight settling onto his lap in a crumple of pastel haori and pleated grey skirt that rode up another incriminating inch over her mesh-sheathed thighs. Her huge tail swept forward around his waist and curled possessively over his far hip in a gesture of pure mine, the fluff of it bunching between them like the world's most luxurious lap blanket.

She didn't speak for a full four seconds. She just inhaled. A deep, luxurious, embarrassingly audible breath pulled right out of the fabric of his collar — the little involuntary scent-recognition tic that fox-lineage demihumans weren't supposed to do in polite company and that she had absolutely never been able to suppress around him. Her tall ears, pressed up near his jaw, flicked twice in deep satisfaction and then flattened softly backward in the puppy-content position. The halo above her head pulsed one shade brighter.

"Haaaaaa~♡" she sighed out into the crook of his neck, the long contented exhale of a woman who has walked through a desert and finally reached the oasis. Her cheek rubbed, once, twice, warmly against the side of his throat — suri-suri~ — the fluff of her bob tickling his jaw. "Smells like Aruji-dono... Izuna's whole brain feels fixed now, nano desu..."

Then, as if remembering that there were formalities to observe, she pulled back approximately two centimeters — just enough to tilt her face up and beam at him from a range of roughly a nose-length away, cheeks flushed a hot peach-pink that ran all the way to the tips of her twitching ears, right canine fang peeping over her lower lip in that signature yaeba smile, round amber eyes so bright they looked lit from inside.

"Nin-nin♪" Both small hands came off his neck and flashed up into the double fox-paw sign beside her face, thumbs and pinkies extended, middle fingers curled, perfectly symmetrical. "Kuda Izuna of the Ninjutsu Research Club, reporting for Schale clerical duty, desu~! Izuna has arrived precisely on time — four o'clock exactly, as the honorable grandfather clock confirms, nin!" One of her fox ears swiveled toward the still-tolling clock as if calling it as a witness. "No tardiness! No deviation! The perfect shinobi report, de gozaimasu~!"

The Schale office at four-forty in the afternoon smelled like old paper, convenience-store coffee gone cold in its paper sleeve, and — somewhere underneath all of that, faint but unmistakable to a certain nose with certain specifications — the lingering trace of Sensei's aftershave from this morning, now mostly worn off and replaced by the warmer, saltier register of his actual skin.

Late-autumn sun poured through the tall western windows in long honey-colored bars, catching dust motes mid-float and painting the stacked requisition forms on the desk the color of dried persimmon. Outside the glass, Kivotos was doing its usual soft-golden hour: a magpie yelling at nothing from the roof opposite, a Trinity bell somewhere faint and brass, the muffled thump of Millennium's engineering club blowing something up — tastefully, hopefully — three blocks over. Normal Thursday.

Normal, except for the extremely small, extremely warm, extremely settled weight currently occupying the lap of the office chair.

Kuda Izuna had, approximately eleven minutes ago, been standing properly at attention three paces from the desk, delivering her Daily Reconnaissance Report with crisp posture, fox-paw salute, the works. Approximately ten minutes and forty-seven seconds ago, Sensei had reached up to pat her head mid-report, as a reward for the thoroughness of said report.

Everything after that was, in Izuna's private strategic assessment, his fault.

Because now she was folded sideways across his lap in a loose, sloppy yokozuwari, one cheek smushed against the breast pocket of his dress shirt, both small hands fisted in the fabric at his collar like a child refusing to be put down for a nap, her enormous black tail draped possessively across both his thighs and the armrest, swishing in slow luxurious arcs — fwump… fwump… fwump… — brushing the edge of the desk and knocking a pen loose with every third beat. Her ears were tipped back and down in the pose of complete relaxation, the bells in her side-tail giving the occasional lazy rin- against his collarbone whenever she shifted.

The haori had slid half off one shoulder somewhere around minute six. She had not fixed it.

"Mnnn~……" A long, boneless sigh, warm against his collarbone through the shirt. The twin fangs at the corner of her mouth caught the light as her lips moved. "……Aruji-dono's lap is unfair, nano desu."

She said this with the gravity of a shinobi reporting a critical tactical vulnerability.

"Izuna came in here to deliver her report, de gozaimasu. A proper report. Posture-correct. Voice-projected. The whole …… the whole thing." Her nose scrunched up, fox-ears giving a single betrayed little twitch. "And then Aruji-dono did the …… you know. The thing. With the hand." A pause. One golden eye cracked open to peer accusingly up at him through dark lashes. "The patting thing, desu. Izuna's shinobi willpower is well-trained but it is not …… that well-trained, yet."

Her tail gave a particularly emphatic FWUMP against the armrest. A paperclip pinged off onto the carpet.

A beat of quiet. Just the clock. The magpie. Her own breathing, which had gone a touch quicker than it had any business being for a girl who was merely resting, if one were listening carefully enough to notice, which Izuna fervently hoped Sensei was not.

Then, because the silence was giving her brain altogether too much room to notice how firm his thigh was under her bottom, she wriggled upright a few degrees with a sudden brightening of expression — the specific brightening that preceded all of her most ill-advised ideas — and planted both palms flat on his chest.

"Ah! Aruji-dono! Aruji-dono, Izuna has just thought of something very important, desu."

The ears were up now. Pointed forward. Alert as little radar dishes.

"Izuna," she announced, with the solemnity of a scroll being unsealed, "has been reading. Research reading. For missions, desu. Serious scrolls on the arts of the kunoichi." Her cheeks were already starting their first warning-flush of pink, high on the cheekbones, but the mouth kept going, undeterred, propelled by pure forward momentum and the dangerous proximity of her master's throat. "And it is written — written very clearly, in multiple scrolls, Izuna has cross-referenced — that a true kunoichi must be a master of all shinobi arts. All of them, nano desu. Including the …… the …… honeypot arts. The seduction techniques. The bijinkyoku."

She said bijinkyoku like a kindergartener reciting a vocabulary word she had just learned, with great care and completely incorrect emphasis.

"And so!" One finger shot up, trembling very slightly. "Izuna has concluded that for proper professional development, Izuna must practice. But a kunoichi cannot practice her honeypot arts on just anyone, de gozaimasu! That would be scandalous. Deeply inappropriate. Imagine the gossip, nano desu." A horrified little shiver. The tail puffed out one full size at the mere thought. "……So the only honorable solution — the only one, Izuna thought about it very hard — is to practice exclusively on her sworn and lawful master!"

Her face was now the color of a maple leaf in its very best week. The tips of her ears had gone fully crimson. She was still looking him dead in the eye, chin tilted up, with the fierce courage of a very small animal defending a very important position.

"May look like this, but — but Izuna is a ninja, nano desu! The honeypot techniques, Izuna has confidence! Toward Aruji-dono — as much as you like! Entirely!"

The dormitory wing was quiet in the way only Hyakkiyako could manage after midnight — that hush of old wood settling, the distant chirr-chirr of autumn cicadas rubbing their last songs against the walls of the courtyard, the faint papery rustle of a fūrin someone had forgotten to take down swaying in the chill breeze beyond the shoji. Somewhere down the hall, a tap dripped. Somewhere else, a floorboard creaked under the weight of a prefect doing her rounds. Somewhere further still, the Onmyōbu's small inari-shrine clicked its wooden door against the wind, over and over, the way old shrines always do when nobody is looking.

But in one small single-occupancy room in the Ninjutsu Research Club's wing, the quiet was being very loudly, very enthusiastically, violated.

Suri suri suri—

Fomp fomp fomp fomp.

A thick, luxurious jet-black tail — easily as long as its owner was tall, so densely furred that the futon beneath it had become more "tail-shaped mound of fluff with a girl inside" than "futon with a girl on top" — was thwapping with metronomic violence against the tatami. The impact was soft, muffled, but relentless. Fomp. Fomp. Fomp-fomp-fomp. Little clouds of displaced tail-fluff drifted upward in the amber lamplight like dandelion seeds in slow-motion snowfall, catching the glow and spiraling lazily down to settle on the shoulders of a girl who did not notice them at all because that girl was presently too happy to notice air.

Kuda Izuna, first-year of Hyakkiyako Alliance Academy, elite Ninjutsu Research Club shinobi, personal self-appointed sworn-sword to one Sensei of Schale, was lying face-down on her futon in her oversized sleep-shirt (one of the big grey ones with a chibi fox-paw print on the chest that she'd bought three sizes too large on purpose because big-sleeve-flop was comfy nano desu), small bare feet kicking up behind her in alternating pendulum rhythm, cheeks propped on both small fists, and her phone — screen-brightness jacked down to its lowest night-setting so it wouldn't hurt her fox-sensitive eyes — glowed up at her face from the pillow in a soft blue-white halo.

MomoTalk. The chat window with "Aruji-dono ♡" (listed thus in her contacts, after no fewer than four nights of frantic deliberation over whether four hearts was too forward and zero hearts was disrespectful, finally settling on one as "the perfect balance of restraint and devotion, de gozaru!") was open.

A single new message, received thirty-seven minutes and twelve seconds ago. (She had checked the timestamp. Repeatedly. The number was burned into her soul.)

"Izuna. Don't forget — tomorrow 09:00, Hyakkiyako Festival escort duty. Dress warm. Looking forward to working with you."

That was it. Three sentences. Twenty-three words in English, if you were counting (and she was, she had counted, she had counted twice, and then once more in her head to be sure).

And she had been staring at these twenty-three words for the better part of forty minutes.

"Nn—n…n…♪"

A sound escaped her that was not quite a hum, not quite a squeak, not quite a giggle, but some unholy fused creature of all three. Her shoulders drew up toward her ears in a full-body happiness-shiver. Her tall black fox ears, which had been standing straight up alert like twin radar dishes, flattened sideways in the specific pleased-and-overwhelmed configuration that fox-lineage demihumans produce when they can no longer contain the joy within the structural integrity of their skulls.

"Aruji-dono…♡"

The whisper was barely a breath. It did not need to be louder. Nobody was listening but the walls and the drifting tail-fluff and the small plush fox doll propped against the pillow who had, over the course of many lonely nights, become Izuna's primary confidant for matters too embarrassing to tell even Michiru-buchou. She rolled — flomp — onto her back, phone held above her face with both hands like a sacred relic, and read the message for what was objectively the seventy-first time.

Don't forget.

(As if. As IF. As if Izuna could ever forget. Izuna had set six separate alarms, nano desu. Izuna had laid out her haori on the chair with the obi already pre-folded. Izuna had cleaned, oiled, and loaded her Type100/40 Super Ninja Tool — currently affectionately wall-mounted beneath its hand-sewn fox cover — and even wrapped a fresh red tassel around the stock because the old one had gotten a tiny bit frayed on the last mission and that was NOT acceptable for a mission in Aruji-dono's presence. Izuna had bathed twice. Izuna had brushed her tail for an hour and forty minutes with the good boar-bristle brush and the fox-fur conditioner, which was almost twice the normal nightly ritual. Izuna had even — and this was the embarrassing part, the part she would not even tell the plush fox — sprayed the faintest, faintest spritz of the cherry-blossom body-mist Tsukuyo had given her for her birthday on the inside of her collar. Just a little. Just in case Aruji-dono happened to lean close.)

Dress warm.

"Nnn—!!"

Her feet kicked. The futon muffled it, but her feet absolutely kicked, both of them, small heels drumming into the mattress in a brief and uncontrollable spasm of what-can-only-be-described-as-glee. He had told her to dress warm. He was worried about her catching cold. He had thought about her. Aruji-dono had, at some point during his busy evening of administrative work and burdens-of-command and all the many weighty things Aruji-dono dealt with, taken a moment — a specific, dedicated, Izuna-shaped moment — to think the thought "I hope Izuna doesn't get cold tomorrow" and then put that thought into words and sent them to her.

That was. That was so much.

Her small chest felt genuinely, physically tight with it. Like someone had reached in and squeezed her ribcage with a warm hand. She pressed the phone flat against her sternum and squeezed her eyes shut and let the small helpless noise bubble up out of her throat — "fnnnghh—♡" — and her tail went into overdrive, no longer thwapping in rhythm but just straight-up vibrating against the tatami in a continuous low brrrrrr like a cat's purr if the cat weighed forty kilos and had a propeller for a tail.

Looking forward to working with you.

That one. That one was the dangerous one. That one she had read fifty of the seventy-one times.

Looking. Forward. To working. With her.

Not with the Ninjutsu Research Club. Not with "Schale's assigned Hyakkiyako asset." Not with "the escort detail." With her. With Izuna. Kuda Izuna specifically. By name. The exact seven letters of her name sitting in a sentence that also contained the words "looking forward" because Aruji-dono was looking forward to spending the entirety of tomorrow's festival at her side, with her as his personal designated kunoichi.

A high, thin, barely-audible whine escaped her — the kind of sound a very small dog makes when it sees its owner coming home from a long trip — and she rolled over again, this time onto her side, drawing her knees up toward her chest and curling the phone into the hollow between her sternum and her thighs like it was a chick that might fly away if she didn't hold it close. Her tail curled around her ankles. Her fox ears flicked, flicked again, pinned backward, perked forward, pinned backward once more in rapid uncertain succession as her limbic system failed in real-time to decide what emotion to display and simply defaulted to all of them, simultaneously, forever.

"Mmm… tomorrow…" she whispered into the fox-doll's embroidered black-thread smile. "Tomorrow is the Hyakuyako Autumn Festival, de gozaru. The whole school will be decorated. The lanterns, nano desu. The red ones. All strung up along the main approach. And the shrine stalls — the takoyaki stall, and the ringo-ame stall, and the goldfish-scooping, and the katanuki booths…"

Her voice was dreamy. Her amber eyes had gone soft and slightly unfocused in the lamp-glow, pupils dilated wide the way fox pupils go when they are watching something very important far away.

"And Aruji-dono will come. In the morning. At nine o'clock. Through the main gate, de gozaru. Izuna will be waiting. In her haori, with her hair done properly. And Aruji-dono will see Izuna standing there and Izuna will…" her tongue tipped out between her lips in concentration, the small white yaeba fang on the right catching the lamplight, "...Izuna will not shout 'Aruji-dono' and run at him this time, desu. Izuna will bow. Properly. Like a proper shinobi retainer. 'This humble kunoichi reports for duty, de gozaimasu.' That is what Izuna will say. In a dignified voice. Not a squeaky voice. A dignified—"

She rolled over again.

"— oh who is Izuna kidding, Izuna is TOTALLY going to shout and run at him."

She buried her burning face in the fox-doll. Her ears were flat against her skull. The tips of them had gone scarlet.

fomp fomp fomp fomp fomp

The tail had resumed thwapping.

Idly — entirely without conscious intent, the way a person taps a pencil while thinking — the index finger of her right hand had begun to trace a pattern on the futon beside her hip. Over and over. The same pattern. Her nail dragged lightly through the weave of the sheet, drawing invisible lines against the cotton.

An angled roof. Two names, side by side underneath it, separated by a line.

Aiaigasa.

The umbrella-of-togetherness mark, the one middle-schoolers scribble on their eraser-cases and the backs of their notebooks, the one every culture seems to invent some version of because every culture contains fifteen-year-olds whose hearts are too large for their bodies.

Her finger traced it slowly, deliberately. The umbrella's peak. The two straight walls coming down. The horizontal bar beneath. On the left side of the bar — slowly, carefully, in a looping cursive her finger could not actually render but her mind supplied vividly — she "wrote" Sensei. On the right side of the bar, in smaller, prouder, more carefully formed letters — Izuna.

She stared at the invisible mark on her sheet.

Her ears flattened.

"...Izuna is being a weird girl," she whispered to the fox-doll, mortified. Her face was now so red that in the amber lamplight it looked almost purple. "Izuna is being a VERY weird girl, nano desu. A kunoichi does not — a proper kunoichi does not — scribble aiaigasa on her bedsheets like a — like a — like some ordinary first-year girl with a crush, desu, that is NOT in the shinobi code, Izuna checked, Izuna checked the whole scroll—"

Her finger traced the aiaigasa again.

She did not even notice.

"— and besides, Izuna's feelings for Aruji-dono are not a crush, nano desu, they are loyal retainer devotion, which is a COMPLETELY different and much more DIGNIFIED emotion, the two things are not comparable at ALL—"

Trace. Trace. The aiaigasa took shape under her nail for the fourth time. Sensei on the left. Izuna on the right. Her tail curled contentedly around her hip.

"— even if, hypothetically, Izuna did think about Aruji-dono's smile when Izuna is trying to fall asleep, that would be a — a — a TACTICAL exercise in reinforcing retainer loyalty through positive emotional association, de gozaru, nano desu, which is a very normal and very SHINOBI thing to do—"

Trace.

fomp fomp fomp fomp fomp fomp fomp.

The tail was going again.

She rolled over onto her stomach, phone cradled against her cheek, and let her eyes slide half-closed. The lamp buzzed softly beside the futon. Outside, the autumn wind pushed another handful of dried maple leaves scraping across the dormitory courtyard — kasa, kasa, kasa — and somewhere far away a temple bell gave a single late dong that she felt more than heard, a low vibration through the floorboards.

Nine hours. Tomorrow. From nine in the morning. Aruji-dono, at her side. Her, at Aruji-dono's side. The whole festival. The red lanterns and the sweet smell of mitarashi syrup burning on grills and the paper-folding stalls and the kingyo-sukui and the shrine's late-evening kagura dance performance that she had been secretly practicing a few steps of herself in case Aruji-dono wanted to watch and might turn and ask her "Izuna, do you know this dance?" and she could say "Yes, Aruji-dono, this humble kunoichi has studied it, would Aruji-dono care for a private demonstration later?" and then — and then —

Her mind trailed off into blissful fuzzy static. Something warm pooled in her lower belly that she did not have the vocabulary to name and dismissed as "the happy-feeling nano desu." Her thighs pressed together under the sleep-shirt. Her tail curled possessively around her own ankle like a question-mark.

"...tomorrow…" she breathed into the pillow.

The phone screen dimmed, auto-sleeping, dropping the message out of view. Her finger moved immediately, instinctively, tapping it back to life. The three sentences bloomed back onto the glass. She read them for the seventy-second time. The small smile on her face widened helplessly into a full grin — the kind that scrunched her eyes shut and bared the small white yaeba fang and made her whole face into one bright crumpled sunbeam of a thing — and her ears flattened all the way back against her skull in pure dumb puppyish rapture.

"Izuna will do her best, Aruji-dono," she whispered to the glowing screen, to the empty room, to the autumn-cicada quiet, to the drifting tail-fluff suspended in the lamp-glow, to the plush fox and the invisible aiaigasa already fading from the sheet beneath her hand. "Izuna will do her very, very best. Izuna promises. Izuna will protect Aruji-dono through the whole festival. Izuna will not let a single bad thing happen. Not one, nano desu."

Her tail gave one final satisfied FOMP against the futon.

"...and if Aruji-dono wants to share a taiyaki with Izuna, Izuna will not even make a weird face about it. Izuna will be so cool, de gozaru. Izuna will be the coolest kunoichi. Aruji-dono will see."

She rolled onto her back one more time. She held the phone above her face with both hands. She smiled at the ceiling with the whole of her small, bright, overflowing heart.

The lamp buzzed. The leaves scraped. The fūrin tinkled somewhere far away in the dark. And Kuda Izuna, fifteen years old, elite self-taught shinobi of Hyakkiyako, lay in her futon and kicked her feet and waited for tomorrow to come.

It could not possibly come fast enough.

"Nin-nin♪"

The late-October sun hung fat and orange over the Hyakkiyako merchant quarter, pouring thick honey-light down between the vermillion torii gates that marched in staggered rows along the festival's main thoroughfare. The air was dense with it — the smell of charcoal smoke curling from a hundred yakitori grills, the sweet-greasy perfume of taiyaki batter crisping on cast iron, the heady spice-note of hot sake being ladled into little wooden masu cups at the stall three paces to the left, and underneath it all the faint, dry papery scent of a thousand paper lanterns swaying from their red cords overhead, each one painted with a different kanji or hand-brushed fox-mask that glowed softly from within as the sky began to deepen toward dusk.

Hyakkaryōran. The Festival of a Hundred Flowers in Riotous Bloom. Once a year the entire merchant district of Hyakkiyako Alliance Academy was closed to normal traffic and transformed, from the arched south gate all the way up the hill to the great shrine at the top, into one serpentine riverway of stalls and lantern-light and bustling kimono-clad students pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, bells chiming at every wrist and ankle, geta-sandals clopping on cobblestone, the distant doro-doro-doro-doro of a taiko drum rolling down from somewhere up the hill where the main stage had been set.

And at the very center of all of it — a very small kitsune girl was vibrating.

"Aruji-dono, Aruji-dono, Aruji-dono~!!"

She was practically bouncing on the balls of her feet, both of her small fists clenched up near her chin in a double fox-paw pose, her enormous jet-black tail whipping back and forth behind her with such enthusiastic violence that it was literally kicking up small clouds of dust from the cobblestones and causing the hems of two startled upperclassmen's kimonos to flutter as they passed. The two tiny brass bells tied into her side-tail rang out rin-rin-rin-rin! in a continuous chime that matched the frantic swish of her hips. Her magenta scarf fluttered. Her haori — all those spring-pink cherry blossoms and autumn-orange maple leaves and summer-bright chrysanthemums — rippled around her small frame as she practically bounced on the balls of her feet.

"Please please please look over there, nano desu! That stall! That one!!" She was pointing — her whole arm fully extended, index finger trembling with the gravity of the discovery — toward a dango vendor perhaps ten paces down the lane. "The sign says—it says tri-color seasonal special, limited to the festival only, nano desu!! Three-color dango! Pink and white and green!! Izuna has read about these in Kunoichi's Monthly Volume 47, de gozaru — the tri-color festival dango is said to be a legendary treat that only appears once a year at autumn festivals, and Izuna has been training very hard for the chance to acquire one, nin-nin!!"

Her fox ears — tall, alert, their inner-fur a soft pale cream against the dense black outer — were pricked so far forward and so perfectly upright that they seemed to be reaching toward the dango stall of their own accord. One of them twitched twice in rapid succession, then the other. Her golden-amber eyes had gone perfectly round, pupils enormous, and had taken on the particular sparkling, luminous quality that they only ever took on when she was looking at (a) Aruji-dono or (b) food.

She caught herself.

The small yaeba fang on her upper right side peeked out as she bit her lower lip. Her ears went visibly, mortifyingly flat against her skull. The tip of her tail curled around her own ankle in sudden abashment. The whole small structure of her face collapsed inward about half an inch — cheeks going a sudden hot peach-pink that spread all the way to the tips of those pointed ears.

"...Awawa. A-Aruji-dono, p-please forget what Izuna just said, de gozaimasu," she stammered, both small fists coming up to press against her burning cheeks. "It is unbecoming of a shinobi on official escort duty to—to beg her lord for snacks, nano desu. T-today Izuna's assigned Schale mission is the honored protection of Aruji-dono's precious person during the Hyakkaryōran Festival, and Izuna shall accomplish this duty with the utmost professional vigor, nin-nin! No snacks! Zero snacks! Izuna is on duty!"

She nodded firmly to herself. The side-tail bells chimed in agreement. Rin-rin.

Then—without consciously noticing she was doing it—her enormous black tail very slowly began to drift sideways through the air until the tip of it was pointing, like a compass needle finding true north, directly at the dango stall. Her stomach made a small, extremely audible kyuru~♪ noise. Her ears flattened further. The blush deepened.

"...Nin-nin..." she mumbled, in a very small voice, staring very hard at her own brown school loafers.

Then, abruptly, she snapped back upright — chin coming up, chest coming forward, ears pricking skyward with a comical pikoon! — and spun on her heel to face him fully, planting her feet in a serious shinobi stance, both hands coming up in the formal fox-paw greeting gesture.

"Kon-kon♪ Report, Aruji-dono!" she chirped, voice clear and bright, projecting with all the professional crispness of a kunoichi delivering a mission briefing to her commanding officer. "Perimeter scan complete! The festival grounds within a radius of two hundred meters contain forty-three food vendors, twelve game stalls, seven souvenir stands, three fortune-telling booths, two shrine-maiden performances scheduled for the hour of the rooster, one very suspicious takoyaki vendor whose knife-work suggests former yakuza affiliation—" she paused, nose wrinkling, giving the air a quick sniff-sniff "—also, Buchou Michiru and Tsukuyo-chan are approximately four hundred meters to the northeast and closing, de gozaru. They have not yet detected us, but Izuna estimates intercept in nine minutes, nin."

She tilted her head sharply, the sleek black bob swaying with the motion, that single index finger coming up to press against her lower lip in her signature thinking-pose.

"...Hmmmm. If Buchou catches us before we have ascended to the shrine at the hilltop, there will almost certainly be an incident, de gozaru. Buchou tends to..." her ears gave an uncertain little swivel-twitch, searching for the diplomatic phrasing, "...lead with great enthusiasm, which Izuna respects deeply as her senior, but which has in the past resulted in fireworks being set off in enclosed shrine antechambers, nin-nin. Izuna believes a strategic withdrawal via the eastern path is the shinobi-wise course of action, de gozaru!"

She was already shuffling closer to him as she said it—the small, unconscious drift of a very loyal fox-pup orbiting her person-of-primary-attachment. Her shoulder bumped lightly against his arm. She didn't notice. Her tail, now, had abandoned all pretense of operational discipline and was wagging in slow, happy, luxurious sweeps that fwap-fwap-fwapped audibly against the fabric of her haori and (occasionally, when the swing was wide enough) against the back of his trousers.

Then—without warning, without permission, without even seeming to realize she was doing it—she reached up with both small hands and very carefully took hold of the hem of his sleeve. Not his hand. She would never be so bold as to take his hand in public. Just the hem of his sleeve. Pinched delicately between her thumb and index finger, like a child in a crowded market making absolutely certain she would not become separated from the one adult she trusted in the whole world.

Her gaze, when she looked up at him, had gone soft and shining. The sharp operational focus had slid out of her eyes, replaced by something much warmer and much more exposed — the look of a very small creature who had been granted the single thing she wanted most in the universe, which was to spend an entire afternoon walking beside her master through a place that smelled wonderful and looked beautiful, with the paper lanterns lighting up one by one overhead as the sky deepened to indigo.

"...Aruji-dono." Her voice had dropped to a soft, breathy register — the one she used only when she was speaking to him and no one else could overhear. The yaeba fang peeked out again as she bit at the corner of her lip. The tips of her ears were still pink. "...Th-thank you for permitting Izuna to accompany you today, de gozaimasu. Even though it is Izuna's assigned mission, and even though Izuna is only performing her shinobi duty... Izuna is... Izuna is very happy, nano desu."

She broke eye contact immediately, ears flattening, tail puffing a little in embarrassment at her own confession.

"T-this does not compromise Izuna's operational effectiveness! Izuna remains at one hundred and ten percent combat readiness, de gozaimasu! Any threat to Aruji-dono's person will be neutralized with lethal prejudice before it comes within three meters! Nin-nin!" She stamped her small foot once, as if to make the point to herself. The bells chimed. Her tail, utterly unconvinced by her own protests, continued its happy fwap-fwap-fwap against the back of his leg.

The bell above the café door gave a soft, cheery chrrring~ as it swung inward, and the warm, golden-hour light of a Kivotos autumn afternoon spilled in behind two very mismatched silhouettes — one, a tall-ish adult shape in a long dark coat; the other, a small, bouncing bundle of black-and-pink energy with two tall fox ears that scraped the top of the doorframe and had to duck.

"Nin-nin~! Suh-hooo…!"

Izuna inhaled deeply through her nose the instant she crossed the threshold, nostrils flaring in a decidedly non-human way, her tall black ears pivoting independently like twin radar dishes to catalog every sound in the shop — the hiss of the espresso machine, the clink of ceramic saucers, the low murmur of a couple two tables down, the tink-tink of a spoon stirring something sweet. Her enormous jet-black tail, nearly as long as she was tall, gave three slow, ponderous sweeps behind her — fuwa, fuwa, fuwa~ — brushing the little bell on the door a second time entirely by accident and setting off another cheerful chrrring. The two tiny brass kitsune-bells woven into her side-tail with the red kumihimo cord chimed softly in sympathy. Rin, rin~♪

"Aruji-dono, Aruji-dono! The scent in this establishment is most splendid, de gozaimasu…! Butter and vanilla and — sniff sniff — oh! Oh! Roasted chestnut! The seasonal menu they advertised outside — it must be the maron parfait, nano desu! Izuna's hunter-nose does not deceive!"

She was practically vibrating in place, hands clasped up near her sternum in little fox-paws, bouncing lightly on the balls of her brown-loafered feet so that her pleated dark-grey miniskirt gave the barest flouf of movement and her magenta scarf fluttered against her collarbones. The cherry-blossom-and-maple-leaf haori layered over her white sailor top was still slightly askew from the brisk walk over — she had, as always, been not walking so much as patrolling-while-walking, taking the long way around via three rooftops and a drainage pipe before remembering, red-faced, that she was supposed to be a civilian on an outing today and sheepishly climbing back down to Aruji-dono's side.

The pink-peach halo above the crown of her head — the one shaped like crossed shuriken cradled in sakura petals — was glowing noticeably brighter than it had been thirty seconds ago. This happened whenever she was emotionally elevated. It was, at the moment, glowing very brightly indeed.

Because this was, by Izuna's personal and extremely private reckoning, a date.

She had not said this out loud. She would sooner swallow a live tanuki than say it out loud. But Aruji-dono had asked her, specifically her, not Michiru-buchou and not Tsukuyo but her, if she wanted to come try the new seasonal menu at the little café in the Hyakkiyako shopping district. He had asked while she was perched upside-down from a ceiling beam in his office doing her evening report, and she had very nearly fallen directly onto his desk from pure vascular surprise. Me? Just Izuna? Alone with Aruji-dono? Outside of a mission? To eat sweet things…? She had, upon returning to her dorm room that night, performed exactly one hundred and eight additional sit-ups because the pent-up energy was going to make her brain explode otherwise, and then she had opened her small shrine shelf, lit a stick of incense, and prayed to Inari-sama for the clear weather and good conduct that would be required of her tomorrow.

She had also, under her haori and against her better shinobi judgment, put on her second-nicest sarashi. The one with the barely-visible embroidered chrysanthemum pattern at the hem. For a mission, this would have been frivolous. For this, it felt barely adequate.

"Ara, irasshaimase~ ♪ Welcome, welcome! Oh my, what a lovely couple!"

The waitress — a pretty older girl, maybe Trinity by the look of her prim white blouse and the small cross pendant at her throat, working the Saturday shift with the easy warmth of someone who had been doing this for a while — glided out from behind the counter with two leather-bound menus pressed to her chest. Her eyes crinkled up in that practiced customer-service smile that nevertheless carried a glint of genuine, slightly mischievous warmth as she took them both in: the tall adult man in the dark coat and the tiny, bright-eyed, fox-eared girl bouncing at his elbow with her tail wagging so energetically it was mildly disturbing the napkin stand on the nearest table.

"A booth seat for two, yes? Right this way, please~ We have a lovely window spot that just opened up. Perfect for enjoying the autumn leaves together♪"

She turned with a graceful little pivot and began leading them deeper into the café, past a tall standing poster on an easel that Izuna's amber eyes caught in passing. It was done up in cheerful handwritten brushstrokes, hearts drawn in the corners, and a cartoon illustration of two chibi figures sharing a parfait with two spoons:

『Autumn Couple Promotion~♡ 20% off all seasonal sets for couples! Make a sweet memory together this fall! ♪』

Izuna's steps slowed.

Her ears, which had been perked and swiveling with contented curiosity, went very suddenly pin-straight upward — piiiin! — and then, half a second later, pivoted forward as if to confirm the poster's text with a second sensory pass.

Couple. カ. ップ. ル. The three syllables rang in her ninja-trained skull like a struck bronze bell. She was literate, she had read the characters correctly, there had been no mistake. There was no shinobi-art of mikiri ("seeing through") required here. It just said what it said.

Something hot and complicated climbed her throat from the vicinity of her sternum.

"H-Hyawa…"

The waitress had not noticed Izuna lagging. She was already at the window booth, setting the menus down with another cheerful flourish, and she turned back toward them with that same sly, dimpled smile — the smile of a girl who had been reading the room for the last ninety seconds and had drawn her own conclusions, and who was clearly enjoying those conclusions very much.

"Here we are~! Would the two of you like to take advantage of our couples' promotion today? ♪ It's such a lovely afternoon for it, and you make such a sweet pair — the height difference is really adorable, isn't it? Fufu~"

Her head tilted, a stray chestnut curl falling across one eye, and then she looked directly down at Izuna with that particular look that older girls sometimes gave her — the kind that said oh, aren't you just a little snack.

"Are you two a couple, then?"

The world stopped.

Not metaphorically. For Izuna, specifically, honestly, in a measurable neurological sense, the world stopped. The ambient café sounds — the espresso hiss, the ceramic clink, the murmured conversation two tables down — all of it compressed into a single high ringing silence in her ears. Her amber eyes went very, very round. Her pupils dilated so suddenly they appeared almost black. Her tall black ears executed a complete, synchronized emotional broadcast in the span of a single heartbeat: up (surprise), forward (processing), then flattening sideways against her skull in a visible wave of pure overwhelmed-fox-child fluster.

A couple. She asked. If. Aruji-dono. And Izuna. Are a couple.

The pink halo above her head flickered, dimmed, then flared noticeably brighter, as if a small overworked lightbulb had just received an unexpected voltage surge.

"A-A-A-Awawa…! AWAWAWAWA—!"

The ninja-trained poise that could carry her across water for five full strides evaporated like morning dew. Her small hands flew up in front of her chest in a flapping, defensive little gesture, patting the air as if she could physically push the question back toward the waitress. Heat flooded her face in a visible pink wave — up the apples of her cheeks, across the bridge of her small straight nose, all the way to the very tips of her fox ears, which went a rosy translucent-coral color at their fine points. A single small white yaeba fang peeked out over her lower lip where her mouth had fallen open in a soundless little o.

"Th-th-that is to say! Th-that is to say, honored shop-person-dono, Izuna is — Izuna is merely — this one is — nin! nin! — Izuna is on a — a reconnaissance operation of the local sweets establishments with — with Aruji-dono — I mean! I mean! N-not Aruji-dono, that is to say, I mean Sensei, that is Izuna's — Izuna's supervising instructor from Schale — a-and we are strictly on a — a — ehm — a — strictly a — "

Her hands were drawing increasingly complex abstract shapes in the air now, as if she could gesture her way to a word that did not exist. Her tail, meanwhile, was giving her away catastrophically; it had started wagging the instant the waitress said "couple" and had not stopped. It was, in fact, wagging harder. The thick black mass of it swept back and forth behind her in great eager arcs — fuwa fuwa fuwa fuwa — stirring the leaves of a small potted bamboo and knocking a drink menu off a neighboring table entirely. Her ears, flattened sideways in flustered denial, kept twitching upward in little involuntary spikes of delight that she was fighting very hard to suppress and failing visibly.

"— s-s-strictly! Strictly a — a — a shinobi-and-her-honored-master outing! That is all! Nothing more, desu, truly! Nothing at all more! Izuna would never presume — Izuna could never dream — Izuna is only Aruji-dono's humble sword, and Aruji-dono is Izuna's revered mast— AWAWA! — th-that is not what Izuna meant either, forget that part, please excise it from the record, nin!"

She was listing slightly to the right as she spoke, her small body unconsciously drifting closer and closer to the warm shape of Sensei beside her until the back of her haori sleeve was just brushing against his coat. Her tail, having completed another furious arc, swept around her own hip and — of its own accord, with absolutely no conscious direction from its owner — settled with the lightest, most tentative, most hopeful possible touch over the top of Sensei's shoe, like a small cat testing whether a lap was welcome.

The waitress, bless her, had covered her mouth with the back of one hand and was clearly trying very hard not to laugh out loud. The sly, dimpled smile had widened into something that was now openly affectionate.

"Fufufu~ My, my. I see, I see. So sorry for the mistake, dear~"

She did not sound sorry at all. She sounded like a woman who had been handed a small adorable gift and was savoring every second of it. She leaned down, bringing herself to Izuna's eye level, and the small cross at her throat swung forward.

"Though… you know, little kitsune-chan~ Couples don't have to say they're couples to use the promotion. It's a 20% discount, after all. And it comes with the special two-spoon maron parfait today. ♪ The one with the double scoop of hojicha ice cream and the candied chestnuts. ♡ So if you'd like the promotion — just as a coincidence, of course, because of the parfait, nothing more — I would be more than happy to put it through for you two. No questions asked~"

She straightened up, and her glance flicked up over Izuna's head to the man standing patient and quiet beside her, and the smile she gave him was the conspiratorial smile of one adult silently handing another adult a loaded dice.

"What do you think, Onii-san~? Shall I bring it out?"

Izuna's halo flickered again.

Her small hands, which had been flapping, had somehow come to rest clutched together over her sternum, white-knuckled around a fistful of her own magenta scarf. Her ears, still flushed coral-pink at the tips, had slowly tipped forward again — abandoning the flattened-sideways denial posture in favor of listening with every atom of their being for whatever Aruji-dono was about to say. Her amber eyes, enormous and glassy and impossibly round, flicked up sideways toward him through the fringe of her inky-black bob. Her lips were parted slightly. She had, somewhere in the last six seconds, entirely forgotten to breathe.

The small kitsune-bells in her side-tail gave one last tiny rin~♪, perfectly timed with the first, hopeful thump of her tail against the floor beside Sensei's foot.

A single, barely-audible, entirely involuntary little sound escaped her:

"…nano desu……?"

The late-afternoon sun had turned the Schale office windows into panels of molten amber, and the dust motes drifting through those slanted bars of light moved with the lazy, suspended quality of things trapped in honey. Outside, somewhere beyond the Hyakkiyako quarter's tiled rooftops, a temple bell was ringing the hour — a long, bronze note that unspooled over the city and faded into the hush of the paulownia trees swaying in the courtyard. Inside the office, the air smelled faintly of old paper, of the green tea cooling in the clay pot on the desk, and — unmistakably, if one had the nose for it — of warm fox-fur sun-baked through the window.

The source of that last scent was currently a lapful of trembling, puffed-up grievance.

Kuda Izuna was curled sideways across Sensei's thighs in a tight, defensive ball, her face buried in the fabric of his jacket at the ribs, her small fists knotted so tightly in the hem that her knuckles had gone white. Her enormous black tail — all three-and-a-half feet of it, puffed to nearly twice its normal volume in high dudgeon — had wrapped itself around her own waist like a defensive bulwark and was lashing in slow, aggrieved sweeps against the arm of the chair. Fwump. Fwump. Fwump. Each thump sent a faint cloud of dislodged fur drifting into the slanted sunlight. Her fox ears, usually alert and swiveling with such precision, had folded themselves flat against her skull in two black commas of pure sulk, and the small brass bells tied into her side-tail chimed every time she shifted — rin, rin — a small bright protest-sound that only seemed to make her burrow deeper into Sensei's side.

"……Izuna is not pouting, nano desu."

The voice was muffled against the lining of his jacket, pitched into the slightly nasal, slightly thickened register of a girl whose throat had gotten tight. The ears betrayed her — one twitched, caught itself, then flattened harder, as if to compensate.

"……Izuna is simply… maintaining tactical silence, desu. Th-this is a very important shinobi discipline, nano desu. Breath-control meditation. Breath-control-meditation. …Nin."

Another fwump of the tail against the chair-arm. Another small shower of fur.

The whole catastrophe had begun — as these catastrophes always began — with something trivial. President Michiru had, in that offhand way she had of saying things that detonated three hours later, mentioned over lunch that Sensei had been seen walking back from the Trinity district yesterday evening with Wakamo from the... unidentified? Just walking. Just a perfectly ordinary thing, carrying a bag of what Michiru thought might have been dumplings, having what Michiru thought had looked like a very pleasant conversation, Wakamo had been smiling, Sensei had been smiling, you know how it is, Izuna-chan, pass the pickles please.

Izuna had passed the pickles.

Izuna had chewed her rice.

Izuna had smiled very brightly and said "Nin-nin!" in exactly the correct tone of voice.

And then Izuna had spent the entire afternoon training session throwing her shuriken approximately four centimeters wide of every single target, which — for a girl who could normally pin a mosquito to a wall at twenty paces — was a diagnostic sign on the order of a four-alarm fire. Tsukuyo had quietly collected the misfired shuriken without comment. Michiru had, with the dawning horror of a woman recognizing her own fingerprints on a crime scene, pretended to remember an urgent errand and fled.

Which had left Izuna, by the time the sun began its descent, with precisely one place her small legs could carry her, and precisely one lap she could crawl into, and precisely one person whose jacket she could burrow her burning red face against while her tail puffed up and her ears flattened and the whole structural edifice of her shinobi dignity collapsed into something resembling a very offended housecat.

"……Dumplings, desu."

The word emerged, muffled, aggrieved, delivered into his ribs.

"Dumplings. With Wakamoanother fox. Nano desu."

Her tail gave an especially emphatic THUMP against the chair.

"Izuna is not — Izuna is not — this is not about the dumplings, nano desu! A shinobi does not concern herself with… with such frivolous matters as… as who Aruji-dono chooses to purchase steamed foodstuffs with, desu! Th-this would be entirely beneath Izuna's station!"

She finally lifted her face from his jacket — just enough for one golden-amber eye to peek up at him from beneath the disheveled curtain of her black bangs. The eye was enormous, glossy with the suspicious shimmer of a girl who was absolutely not about to cry (she was absolutely about to cry), and the small white point of her right canine was caught worryingly on her lower lip. Her cheeks were two hot peach-pink circles that had spread all the way to the tips of her ears, which — the moment that single eye met his — twitched upward exactly one centimeter in traitorous hope before slamming flat again.

"…But."

The voice had gone very small. The fist in his jacket-hem tightened.

"……But Aruji-dono did not tell Izuna about the dumplings, nano desu. And Izuna…… Izuna had been saving up her allowance, de gozaimasu. For a very long time. To take Aruji-dono to the dumpling-stall. The new one. In Hyakkiyako. The one that…… the one that has the three-color dango that Aruji-dono mentioned once. In passing. Six weeks ago. On a Tuesday. At approximately 2:47 in the afternoon."

A pause.

"…Not that Izuna was keeping track, de gozaimasu. Th-that would be weird. A shinobi simply has very good memory, nano desu. It is a professional skill. Nin."

The tail wrapped tighter around her waist. The ears pressed flatter.

"……Izuna had even practiced, In the mirror. The way she would offer to buy them. 'Aruji-dono, would you perhaps care to accompany your humble shinobi for a modest refreshment?' Izuna said it… many times. Many, many times, nano desu. Until Tsukuyo asked if Izuna was feeling unwell. …And Izuna lied, de gozaimasu. Izuna said it was breathing exercises. A shinobi should not lie to her comrades, nano desu, but… but Izuna…"

Her face burrowed back into his jacket. Her shoulders had begun to shake — not with sobbing, not quite, but with the small helpless tremors of a creature trying very hard to be dignified about something that had punched a hole clean through her small chest.

"…Izuna is being very unseemly, de gozaru," came the muffled, miserable confession. "A loyal retainer should not… should not demand so much of her lord's attention, nano desu. Aruji-dono has many important duties. Aruji-dono has an entire academy of students who require guidance. Aruji-dono is permitted — Aruji-dono is entirely permitted — to purchase dumplings with whomever Aruji-dono wishes. This is… this is logical, Izuna understands this logically, nano desu. Izuna's brain understands this perfectly."

The small fist in his jacket twisted, white-knuckled.

"But Izuna's… Izuna's chest, nano desu. Izuna's chest is being… very disobedient. It feels…… tight. And hot. And like something small and sharp is scratching at the inside of it, de gozaru. And when Michiru-buchou said 'dumplings,' Izuna's chest did a… a flipping motion. Nano desu. Like a tanuki in a trap. And now Izuna cannot… cannot make it stop, de gozaru."

She peeked up again. One eye. Hot and glassy and enormous.

"……Aruji-dono. Is Izuna…… is Izuna being a bad shinobi, nano desu? For feeling this way? Please tell Izuna honestly, de gozaimasu. If Izuna is being a bad shinobi, Izuna will…… Izuna will do five hundred extra squats tonight as penance, nano desu. And lick clean the dojo floor with her tongue. And meditate under the waterfall until dawn. Whatever Aruji-dono deems appropriate, desu. Izuna will accept any discipline. Only…"

The ears twitched. Flattened. Twitched again.

The smallest, most pathetic sound in the known universe emerged from her throat.

"……Only please do not say Izuna is… is troublesome, nano desu. Izuna could not bear it, If Aruji-dono were to find Izuna troublesome… Izuna would have to commit seppuku on the spot, nano desu. With her own kunai. Right here. On the carpet. And Izuna has just had this carpet cleaned, so it would be very inconvenient for everyone, nin."

Her tail, which had been thumping its aggrieved rhythm against the chair, suddenly — without her permission, without her conscious awareness, in direct defiance of her entire campaign of tactical silence — uncoiled from around her waist and flopped itself, heavy and warm and ridiculously fluffy, directly across Sensei's lap. It settled there with the finality of a cat choosing its territory. The tip gave one small, hopeful twitch.

Izuna, her face buried back in his jacket, pretended with every fiber of her being that she had not noticed her own tail doing this.

"……Izuna is still maintaining tactical silence, de gozaru," she mumbled, voice thick and small and absolutely betrayed by the slow, hopeful thump… thump… that had started up at the tip of the tail now spread across his thighs. "Th-this is still breath-control meditation, nano desu. Please disregard the tail. The tail is… the tail is conducting its own independent reconnaissance operation, It is not… affiliated with Izuna's official position on this matter. Nin."

A pause. A very small sniffle.

"……Aruji-dono smells like the good green tea today, nano desu. The one from the shop near the station. …Izuna is simply noting this. For the mission report. De gozaimasu."

The bells in her side-tail chimed, soft and bright, as she pressed closer.

The Schale office was quiet in that particular way late afternoons tended to be — the kind of quiet that smelled faintly of lukewarm coffee and the papery dust of case files Sensei never quite got around to filing. Autumn light slanted in through the blinds in long amber bars, catching motes that drifted lazily above the desk, and somewhere down the corridor the vending machine made its periodic ka-chunk as it rotated its stock. The clock on the wall ticked over to four-seventeen in the afternoon. Sensei's chair was empty. His jacket was draped over the backrest. His coffee mug was half-full and gone cold.

And the duty roster on the corkboard — the one Michiru-buchou had squinted at that morning before dispatching her — had, in Hyakkiyako's elegantly brushed calligraphy, assigned today's Schale office-duty to one Kuda Izuna, First-Year, Ninjutsu Research Club.

"...Nin-nin?"

The small voice came from directly beneath the office doorway. Izuna's head poked around the frame first — fox ears pricked tall and swiveling like twin radar dishes, golden eyes sweeping the room in that quick practiced sector-check she did on reflex before entering any space. Nothing moved. No Sensei at the desk. No Sensei at the kitchenette. No Sensei in the little reading nook by the window where he sometimes napped with a book over his face.

Her shoulders drooped by exactly two centimeters. Her tail, which had been held high in anticipation, lowered to a resigned horizontal.

"...Aruji-dono isn't here, nano desu..."

She slipped the rest of the way inside, loafers whispering on the office tile with the near-soundless gait of a girl who had spent her formative years learning to walk on rice-paper without tearing it. The door clicked shut behind her with a courteous softness. She padded to the center of the room, bells at her side-tail chiming faintly — rin, rin — and gave the empty office a slow, almost mournful 360-degree inspection.

"...Mu. Izuna arrived at precisely the appointed hour, de gozaru. Four PM sharp. On the dot. Aruji-dono must have been... called out suddenly, perhaps..."

She addressed this to the empty desk chair, which did not respond. Her ears flattened a smidgen.

"...Un. A shinobi waits patiently for her lord. That is the Way!"

She straightened her small spine, puffed out her small chest, and — having thus performatively steeled herself — proceeded to wander the office aimlessly for the next three minutes, running her fingertips along the edge of the bookshelf, examining the paperweight on Sensei's desk (a small ceramic Shiba Inu that she privately found deeply unserious), peering into the empty coffee mug, and generally failing to settle. The problem was that the office was full of him. The scent of him. Sensei had a particular smell — warm, slightly woody from whatever soap he used, the faintest underlay of coffee and that specific paper-and-ink smell of a man who handled documents all day, and beneath it all the baseline male musk that Izuna's fox-lineage olfactory system registered on a frequency entirely separate from her conscious mind. It was everywhere. The office was practically marinated in it. Her nostrils twitched. Her ears flicked. Her tail, treacherously, began a slow metronomic sway.

"...Suu~..."

A small, involuntary inhale through her nose. Then another, slightly deeper.

"...Haa... (sniff)... Aruji-dono's scent is... quite rich today, de gozaimasu..."

She wandered — just casually, you understand, with absolutely no particular destination in mind, this was simply the natural trajectory of a dignified shinobi conducting a security sweep of her lord's workplace — closer to the desk. Her toes stopped at precisely the point where the desk's shadow fell across the floor tile. She looked at the chair. She looked at the jacket draped over it. She looked, with widening amber eyes, at what lay neatly folded on the corner of the desk itself.

A white dress shirt. His. Clearly his. Freshly off his body — the fabric still had that soft rumpled shape clothing takes on when it's been worn and then removed only recently, the collar faintly creased from the pressure of a tie that had been loosened and shed. He must have changed into something lighter after lunch — he did that sometimes when the afternoon heat built up in the office — and left the dress shirt here on the desk, meaning to put it in the laundry bag later and simply forgetting, because Sensei was Sensei and he forgot things like that constantly, which Izuna had long ago rationalized as proof that he needed her.

She stared at the shirt.

The shirt did not stare back, being a shirt.

"...A-Aruji-dono's shirt, de gozaru...!" she whispered, as though announcing a tactical finding to an invisible teammate. Her ears pricked straight up. Her tail stiffened and then began to wag — a slow, uncertain, this-might-be-bad-but-oh-no-it-might-be-good kind of wag. "...W-why has it been left out so carelessly, nano desu...? Izuna should... should fold it properly for Aruji-dono. Yes. That is the duty of a loyal retainer. To... to tend to her lord's garments."

She reached for it with the solemn two-handed care of a shrine maiden handling a sacred relic. Her small fingers closed on the collar. The cotton was warm — not from body heat, that had faded hours ago, but from the sun that had been baking the desk's surface all afternoon — and soft, worn soft by many washings, the kind of soft that only came from a garment that had been pressed against someone's skin again and again until the fibers surrendered their stiffness entirely.

She lifted it. It was heavier than she expected — a man's dress shirt, broad in the shoulders, long in the sleeves. It unfolded as she raised it and the full length of it draped from her hands almost to the floor. It was enormous. It could have fit two of her inside it with room to spare.

Her ears flattened. Her tail went still. Her breath caught in her throat for a reason she couldn't quite name.

"...It's so... big, nano desu..."

The scent hit her then. Not the ambient drift of the office — the concentrated source. The place his neck had rested against the collar. The place his chest had pressed against the buttons. The place beneath the arms where he had sweated faintly through the long morning of paperwork. All of it, bottled in cotton, waiting for her nose to find it.

Her small body swayed. Her fox ears made a complicated noise, somewhere between a twitch and a shiver. Her resolve — which had been holding at a fairly ninja-like level up until this exact moment — fractured all at once with an almost audible crack.

"...Just... just a little, de gozaru," she whispered to no one, already lifting the shirt to her face. "Just for... scent reconnaissance... yes. Yes. A loyal retainer must memorize her lord's scent. For tracking purposes, nano desu. In case of... of abduction scenarios. Yes."

She buried her face in the collar.

"...hnnnnnnh~♡"

The sound that escaped her was not one she had authorized. It was small and high and embarrassingly feminine, a muffled little whimper into the cotton, and her knees locked instantly in reflexive mortification. Her tail puffed out to twice its normal diameter. Her ears flipped forward, then back, then forward again in a panic-flutter. The blush that bloomed across her cheeks spread with alarming speed up to the tips of her fox ears, which turned a bright peachy pink from the inside out.

But she did not lower the shirt. She could not lower the shirt. Her small hands had locked around the collar with the quiet, iron-fisted stubbornness of a shinobi who had decided on a mission and would see it through unto death.

(Sniff.)

(Sniffsniffsniff.)

"————Hwa……♡"

Her knees gave a little.

"...Aruji-dono..." she breathed into the fabric, voice gone soft and liquid and about half an octave higher than her normal register. "Aruji-dono's smell... Aruji-dono's... mn... so warm, nano desu... so... so Aruji-dono-ish, desu...♡"

Her small body moved on its own. She drifted — the only word for it, because her feet were no longer in meaningful contact with her brain — around the side of the desk, until the backs of her thighs bumped the edge of Sensei's chair. She sank into it without conscious decision. The chair was still faintly dented in the shape of his weight. The seat cushion gave beneath her weight with a soft sigh of leather, and she sank so small into it that her loafers no longer touched the floor; her legs dangled, her black fishnet-sheathed thighs pressed demurely together, her enormous fox tail curled up around her hip and over her lap like a protective fluffy barrier against the outside world. The haori she wore slipped a little off one shoulder in the motion. The scarf-tie at her collar loosened. She did not notice. Her entire sensory bandwidth was occupied by the shirt pressed to her face.

"...A-Aruji-dono... Izuna is... Izuna is sitting in Aruji-dono's chair, nano desu... t-this is terribly disrespectful..." she murmured, directly into the collar, her words muffled by the fabric. "Izuna will... Izuna will accept any punishment... any punishment at all... (sniff)... as long as... as long as Izuna can..."

Her small fingers trembled. Her tail thumped once, dully, against the arm of the chair.

The shirt was so large and it smelled so much like him and the office was so empty and the sun was so warm across the back of her neck and before Izuna had quite understood what her own hands were doing they had slipped the shirt over her shoulders.

The sleeves swallowed her arms entirely. Her small hands disappeared somewhere halfway down the forearm, and the cuffs flopped empty past her fingertips in two forlorn white tubes. The hem fell to her mid-thigh, concealing her miniskirt entirely, leaving only her fishnet-wrapped thighs visible beneath it. The collar, unbuttoned, gaped open across her small frame, exposing most of one small pale shoulder and the delicate line of her collarbone and the top of her chest-sarashi binding beneath. The whole shirt enveloped her like a shroud, like a tent, like a man's embrace rendered in cotton — and that was the thought that broke her completely.

"...nn... hyau...~♡"

Her small body curled in on itself in the chair. She drew her knees up, hugged them against her chest, and wrapped the oversized shirt around herself like a cocoon, pulling the collar up over her nose, burying both hands inside the opposite sleeves. Her tail curled forward and up over her shoulder and she buried the side of her face into its fluff on one side while pressing the shirt's collar to the other. She was now, functionally, a very small embarrassed ball of fox-girl, shirt, and tail-fluff, nested in her master's chair, and her fox ears were twitching in the small continuous flutters of a girl whose nervous system was being gently cooked from the inside.

"...Aruji-dono is... hugging Izuna, nano desu..." she whispered to herself, eyes squeezed tight shut, her voice gone small and dreamy and so embarrassingly happy she would have died of shame to hear a recording of it. "Aruji-dono came back from his duties and he found Izuna waiting for him and he said... he said good work, Izuna and he sat down and he pulled Izuna into his lap and he wrapped his arms around Izuna and he said... he said... you are my precious shinobi, Izuna... and Izuna said n-nin-nin, desu... and Aruji-dono laughed and he patted Izuna's head and he... he..."

Her small voice trailed off into an incoherent happy humming noise. Her tail thumped the chair arm rhythmically. One of her fox ears twitched in time with the beat. She was, by any objective measure, the single most compromised ninja in the greater Kivotos metropolitan area. If an assassin had crept up behind her at this precise moment and raised a blade over her neck, she would have thanked him for the gentle breeze.

"...Aruji-dono... (sniff)... Aruji-dono... Izuna is... Izuna is the happiest shinobi in the whole wide world, nano desu..."

She rubbed her flushed cheek against the inside of the collar, a slow luxuriant suri-suri motion, scent-marking herself with him and him with her in a mutual exchange that no human would have recognized as significant and that her fox hindbrain was treating as functionally equivalent to a wedding ceremony. Her tail wagged more vigorously. Her ears flipped forward in bliss. A small line of drool was forming at the corner of her mouth. She did not notice. She could not notice. She was in heaven, and heaven smelled like Sensei.

She was so deep inside this heaven, in fact, that she did not hear the office door open.

She did not hear the footsteps in the hallway outside.

She did not hear the small click of the latch.

She did not, in point of actual fact, register anything happening in the external physical universe until the shadow of a familiar human shape fell across the warm amber bar of sunlight on the desk in front of her chair, and a certain pair of very familiar brown loafers stopped at the edge of her peripheral vision, and the quiet in the office took on an entirely new quality — the specific, charged quiet of a room containing exactly one girl in a very large shirt and exactly one man who had just walked in to find her.

Izuna's fox ears pricked up by exactly one millimeter.

Then by one more.

Then they shot bolt upright with an almost audible piiiiin! of pure animal alarm, and her small amber eyes flew open above the collar she was still clutching to her nose, and the pupils in them shrank to pinpricks, and her entire body went absolutely, catastrophically still.

She did not move.

She did not breathe.

She stared, over the top of Sensei's dress shirt, at Sensei.

Sensei stared back.

A single bead of sweat rolled down the side of Izuna's temple with the unhurried grace of a condemned prisoner walking to the gallows.

"...n..."

Her small voice emerged as a tiny, strangled, squeak.

"...n-n-nin......... nin-nin...............?"

Her tail, which had been wagging so happily three seconds ago, dropped stone-dead over the arm of the chair with a soft, mortified flump. The oversized cuffs of the shirt flopped empty where her hands had retreated back inside the sleeves, hiding her burning face behind cotton as if the shirt itself could grant her the invisibility jutsu she had, in this moment, failed utterly to execute. The fox-bells at her side-tail gave one single, traitorous rin as her whole small body began to tremble — somewhere between pure mortification, dawning horror, and the small, awful, unignorable realization that this was absolutely one hundred percent not going to be something her Aruji-dono would ever, ever let her live down.

"...A-A-A-Aruji-dono......?"

Her voice cracked on the second syllable. Her fox ears flattened against her skull in utter, catastrophic surrender.

"...I-Izuna can explain, de gozaimasu...!!!"

(She could not explain.)

The pre-dawn gloom pressed against the paper screen of Izuna's dormitory window — that specific slate-blue hour that is neither night nor morning, when Hyakkiyako's temple-grounds lie wrapped in a quilt of dew-wet silence broken only by the distant, lonely bonging of the five-o'clock bell at the Inari shrine down the hill. The air inside the small single-room was cold, the kerosene heater long since clicked off, and the futon on the tatami was a nest of dishevelled bedding from which only a single tuft of inky black fur-tail and the drooping tip of one twitching fox ear emerged.

Ponkyu. Ponkyu-ponkyu-pon.

That was the sound Izuna's enormous tail was making — a soft, rhythmic thump against the floorboards beneath the covers — in time with whatever was unfolding behind her tightly-screwed-shut eyelids.

"Nnnh… Aru… ji…do…no…"

The whisper leaked from beneath the quilted hem in a breath so small it fogged, pinkly, in the cold air. Her lips were slightly parted. The tiny white fang of her right canine peeked over her lower lip. A tendril of black hair had escaped the sleep-braid she'd put it in last night and lay plastered damply across one feverish cheek.

In the dream — oh, in the dream — Aruji-dono had asked her for her report.

That was all.

He had been sitting at his desk in the Schale office, pen tapping thoughtfully against his jaw, the late-afternoon sun slanting gold through the blinds, and he had looked up at her — up at Izuna, who was kneeling very properly in seiza beside his chair as she always did — and he had said, in that low, quiet, impossibly-kind voice of his,

"Good work today, Izuna. Come here."

And then he had patted his lap.

His lap.

Just that. Just a pat. Just the broad warm hand of her master, gesturing in invitation to the span of his thighs where his dress-slacks pulled taut across sturdy muscle, and Izuna in the dream had — without hesitation, without question, with the thought-free obedience of a well-trained hound receiving a command long-rehearsed — climbed up and settled herself across his thighs on her stomach, chin on her folded forearms, tail curled contentedly over her own backside, and then—

Then Aruji-dono had begun to stroke her hair.

Then he had slid his hand down.

Down the sleek plane of her back, over the small arch of her waist, down to where her tail met her spine, and he had — oh, oh, oh — he had buried his fingers in the thick dense ruff of fur right at the root of her tail and he had scratched, slow and deep and firm, the way nobody had ever, ever been permitted to touch her there before, and the dream-Izuna had made a sound she had never in her waking life made, a shuddering liquid keen that broke in her chest and poured out of her throat as her hips bucked forward against the hard length of his thigh beneath her belly—

Ponkyu-ponkyu-ponKYU.

The tail-thump accelerated. Beneath the covers, two small clenched fists wound tight into the futon-cover. Her thighs — bare beneath the oversized nightshirt that was all she wore to bed — clenched together, un-clenched, clenched again, the smooth insides of them sliding wet-slick against each other in a way that her unconscious mind registered as strange and hot and absolutely-not-stopping.

"Hau… Aru-ji… do… no… moh… tto… please… more…"

In the dream, his other hand had slid under her chin, tipped her face up toward his, and the dream had done the thing dreams do where logic bends and suddenly there was no desk anymore and no office, only the two of them in a tangle of white sheets, and his face was very close, and his breath was warm on her mouth, and his thumb was pressing — gentle, insistent — against her lower lip, parting it, and Izuna had opened her mouth for him the way a hungry baby bird opens for its parent, and—

And in the real world, in the cold pre-dawn silence of her dormitory room, fifteen-year-old Kuda Izuna, elite kunoichi of Hyakkiyako Alliance Academy's Ninjutsu Research Club, defender of Kivotos, personal self-appointed sword and shield of Sensei of Federal Investigation Club Schale, slowly, instinctively, with absolutely no conscious awareness of what she was doing — slipped her own small thumb between her own parted lips and began to suckle on it.

chu… chuu… chu-chu…

The soft, wet, infantile sound of a mouth working at nothing, filling the quiet room. Her fox ears, flattened sideways against the pillow, twitched in dreaming rhythm. Her tail ponkyu-ponkyu-ponkyu'd against the floor. A thin, glossy string of saliva slipped from the corner of her mouth around the knuckle of her thumb and traced a shining line down to the pillowcase, where it bloomed into a small dark circle of damp. Her hips rolled, once, twice — a slow, searching, grinding motion, the kind her waking body had never performed and would not have known how to perform — pressing her clenched thighs together and dragging the hem of the nightshirt up by friction alone until the fabric bunched at her waist and the cold air of the room kissed the bare, scandalously-exposed skin of her hip and the small, almost-nothing white triangle of her low-slung sleeping fundoshi.

The front of the fundoshi was dark.

A spreading teardrop-shaped patch of damp, warm, embarrassingly-fragrant honey had bled through the thin cotton and was wicking slowly outward, inching up toward the hem of the shirt, inching down toward the join of her thighs.

She did not know this.

She could not know this.

In the dream, Aruji-dono's thumb was still at her lip, and now his other hand — the one that had been at her tail — was sliding, sliding, sliding around to the front of her, inside the loose yukata-cord of some dream-garment she was wearing, down her bare stomach, down past her navel, down to where everything was hot and strange and empty-feeling-in-a-way-she-had-no-vocabulary-for, and the dream was about to touch her there, right there, the place that had been throbbing in sympathy with her heartbeat for the last four and a half minutes of REM sleep, and dream-Izuna arched her small back and parted her thighs wider in offering and whispered—

"Aruji-dono… please… Izuna's… Izuna's good spot… touch Izuna's good spot… please please please—"

rin.

A single, tiny, crystalline chime.

The brass kitsune-bell on her side-tail — displaced by the restless tossing — knocked against the wooden frame of the futon-base.

rin.

Izuna's eyes flew open.

For one suspended, dreadful heartbeat her brain did not understand what had happened. The dream was there, right there, Aruji-dono's hand had been right there, the pleasure had been building in her low belly like a kettle about to whistle, and now—

Now there was the ceiling of her dorm room.

Now there was the thin blue pre-dawn light.

Now there was her own thumb in her own mouth, slick with her own spit.

Now there was the thick wet heat soaked into the fabric between her thighs, and the twisted-up hem of her nightshirt, and the chill air on her bare hip, and the raw, pulsing, humiliating ache at the place dream-Aruji-dono's fingers had almost, almost, touched—

Her thumb dropped out of her mouth with a small wet plip.

"…H…"

Her fox ears, flat an instant ago, shot straight up — piiiin!

Her tail puffed to twice its normal volume — bofu!

Her face bloomed red, red, red, the color flooding up her throat and across her cheeks and all the way to the delicate pink interiors of her upright ears, a tide of mortification so complete it reached the very tips of her toes beneath the covers.

"H— H— HYAWAAAA!?"

She scrambled upright in a flailing panic of blankets and limbs, got her foot tangled in the futon-cover, pitched sideways, caught herself with a kunoichi's reflex on one hand against the tatami, and promptly froze there in a crouch — half-draped in bedding, nightshirt rucked up around her waist, fundoshi obviously, visibly, catastrophically damp — staring down at the small dark circle of drool on her pillow and the twisted damp cotton between her trembling thighs with the horror of a child who has just discovered she has done something she suspects is Very Wrong without knowing why it is wrong or what it is she has even done.

"W— wawawa— w-what… what is this, nano desu…"

Her small voice came out in a cracked whisper. Her hands fluttered uselessly — one to her mouth, one down toward her lap, then both to her burning cheeks, then down again, as if she could not decide which emergency to address first.

"I-Izuna… Izuna was… Izuna was dreaming of… of A-A-Aruji-dono… and A-Aruji-dono was… was… p-petting Izuna… and Izuna was…"

She squeezed her eyes shut. The dream was still vivid behind her eyelids. Aruji-dono's warm hand. Aruji-dono's low voice. Aruji-dono's thumb on her lip. The feeling of her own hips rolling. The keening sound she had made.

"…m-making noises like a… l-like a wanton Mesu-inu…" she whispered to herself, scandalized, having picked up the word Mesu-inu once from an overheard conversation between upperclassmen Shizuko and Kaede and having filed it away without ever quite understanding its full connotations until, perhaps, this exact moment. "I-Izuna is a shinobi! A shinobi of discipline a-and chastity and— and proper comportment, nano desu! A shinobi d-does not — does not do— does not make— does not dream of her master l-like— like th-th-that—!!"

Her ears flattened all the way back against her skull in shame.

Her tail wrapped itself protectively around her own waist as if to physically hide the evidence of the damp patch between her legs.

The damp patch, undeterred, spread another millimeter.

A fresh wave of warmth pulsed between her thighs — a traitorous, ignorant little throb of her body still finishing the dream her mind had rudely interrupted — and Izuna made a small strangled squeak and clamped her thighs together with such force her toes curled.

"Hyau—! N-no, body! Bad body! Shinobi body!!"

The body did not listen. The body, in fact, had been waiting for this; Izuna had just turned fifteen three months ago, her small frame was alight with first-blooming hormones she had been too busy running up walls and throwing shuriken to notice, and the dam her obliviousness had been holding had, this pre-dawn hour, in the sacred and private darkness of her own futon, catastrophically given way. Her little nipples ached, hard enough beneath her nightshirt to tent the thin fabric into two unmistakable points. Her thighs would not stop wanting to clench. The place between them throbbed with every heartbeat, in time with her ears, in time with her tail, in time with the distant five-o'clock temple bell.

She pressed both palms flat against her cheeks. They burned her skin.

"…A-Aruji-dono…"

The whisper slipped out before she could stop it. Soft. Reverent. Guilty. The one name that was simultaneously the cause of the problem and the only comfort she had ever known.

She saw his face behind her eyes again — not the dream-face, now, but the real face, the real quiet kind face that had looked at her the day they met and said That's incredible work, Izuna — and her small chest hurt with a feeling so enormous and sweet and shameful she could not sort it into any of the emotion-categories she had names for.

Her tail thumped, once, against the tatami. Ponkyu.

Traitor. Even her tail was happy about this.

"…nin… nin…" she whispered to herself, a kind of soothing self-mantra, the way a smaller child whispers it's okay, it's okay. She climbed, carefully, out of the futon's wreckage, cold air kissing the places where the nightshirt had ridden up. She hobbled, bowlegged with her thighs still unwilling to fully part, over to the small shrine shelf. She clapped twice. Bowed twice. Clapped once more.

"I-Inari-sama. Izuna has… had a troubling dream, nano desu. P-please grant Izuna the strength to… to not think about it anymore. A-and please forgive Izuna for… for the n-noises, nano desu. A-and please— please w-watch over Aruji-dono today, and keep him safe, and— and— and please don't tell him Izuna had a dream like that about him, p-please please please please—"

She bowed again, deeply, forehead almost touching the small wooden shelf.

Her tail ponkyu'd against her own calves.

The damp patch on her fundoshi, in the slowly brightening blue dawn, was now undeniably visible even to her own downcast averted eyes as she straightened up.

Izuna stared at it.

Izuna's lower lip trembled.

Izuna's fox ears drooped sideways in utter, pathetic, five-years-old defeat.

"…Izuna needs to do laundry, nano desu…"

The small declaration, whispered to the empty cold room with the quavering dignity of a kunoichi facing her gravest mission yet, hung in the pre-dawn silence for one long moment. Outside the paper screen, the first sparrow of morning began, cheerfully, to sing.

The dormitory room of Schale's advisor was a quiet black box at this hour, swallowed whole by that peculiar three-in-the-morning silence that belongs to no one. Moonlight — the fat, bruised yellow of a late-autumn hunter's moon — spilled through the half-drawn curtains in a single pale slash, cutting across the foot of the bed and pooling on the floorboards like spilled milk. Somewhere beyond the window a cicada was making its last confused song of the season, uncertain whether to die now or wait for sunrise. A clock on the desk ticked. The radiator hummed its low mechanical lullaby. On the pillow, Sensei's breathing moved in the slow, deep rhythm of a man drowned several fathoms into REM sleep, one arm flung carelessly above his head, the collar of his sleep shirt pulled slightly askew to expose the hollow of his throat.

He did not hear the window latch click.

He did not hear it because the latch did not, strictly speaking, click — it was persuaded open by a wire-thin instrument slipped between frame and sill, lifted by hands that had practiced this exact motion against this exact window for three hundred and seventeen nights, counting (she kept a tally in a small notebook, with little fox-paw stamps for the successful entries and sad-face stamps for the two nights she had been thwarted by a strong gust of wind).

A breath of cold air. The curtain stirred once, apologetically, as though embarrassed to have been disturbed. Then nothing.

Then, inside the room, on the ceiling directly above the bed, a shadow that had not been there before.

She hung from the exposed cedar beam by the backs of her knees and the balls of her feet, her small body folded into the tight dark seam where the ceiling met the wall, breath so controlled that the little brass bells at the end of her side-tail did not even think about chiming. From this upside-down vantage her sleek bob of inky hair hung down in a glossy curtain and her enormous black tail drifted lazily behind her like a fat exclamation mark written in fur. Twin points of golden-amber light burned in the dark of her face — pupils dilated huge and round, fixed on the sleeping shape below with the devoted, unblinking stillness of a fox watching a moon-silvered pond for the ripple of a koi.

Her fox ears, swiveled forward, catalogued every sound in the room. The pulse at the hollow of Sensei's throat. Thirty-eight beats a minute. Deep sleep. Confirmed, de gozaimasu. The faint rasp of his breath. The soft shift of cotton against skin as his chest rose and fell. The whisper of the heater. The clock. Her own heartbeat, which was going considerably faster than his — she registered this with mild clinical annoyance, as though her heart were a subordinate who had failed to maintain operational discipline.

Hold steady, Izuna, she scolded herself, upside down, forty centimeters above the sleeping face of the most important person in the world. A kunoichi who cannot master her own pulse is not fit to be anyone's shadow, nano desu.

The pulse did not slow. The pulse, in point of fact, got slightly faster.

She let herself down.

It was done the way a drop of water forms at the tip of a leaf — the slow accumulation of inevitability, then the silent surrender to gravity. One moment she was pressed to the ceiling; the next she was descending in a controlled unfurling, hands first, body following, legs last, every joint moving through pre-calculated angles that distributed her weight so smoothly that even the dust motes drifting through the moonbeam did not notice a new predator in the room. Her bare feet touched the hardwood with less sound than a cat's whisker brushing a curtain. She crouched there a moment, a small compact shape in the dark, listening.

The breathing on the bed never changed.

Infiltration — success, desu. A tiny, soundless pump of her small fist against her thigh. Nin-nin!

Only then, in the privacy of her own skull, did she permit the giddy wave of adrenaline and something else to crash over her — a hot, embarrassed, fizzing effervescence that climbed from the pit of her stomach up through her sternum and bloomed red-hot across her cheeks and all the way out to the tips of her black fox ears. She pressed one hand over her own mouth before any sound could escape. Her tail, traitorous appendage that it was, began to wag — slow, dreamy, voluminous arcs through the moonlight.

She was in Sensei's room.

She was in Sensei's room at night.

She was in Sensei's room at night while he slept, and she had come here, deliberately, to do this.

The this in question had been the subject of six weeks of agonized private deliberation, three abandoned scroll-drafts (burned in the dormitory garden incinerator, their ashes stirred into the dirt lest any fragment survive to incriminate her), one furtive consultation with a dog-eared paperback titled "The Loyal Retainer's Handbook: Night-Duties of the Devoted Shinobi (Unabridged Edition)" which she had purchased from a dubious used bookstore in Kaizaki-cho with her face pulled up inside her scarf and the brim of a borrowed hat pulled down to her nose, and approximately four thousand repetitions of a certain mantra whispered into her pillow at three in the morning while her tail twitched helplessly between her thighs:

A ninja serves her lord. In all things. At all hours.

That was the doctrine. That was the catechism. That was the shining pure north-star of ninja-hood as she understood it. And if that service happened to take the form of — of a yobai — of the sacred traditional nighttime attendance that loyal retainers of ages past had performed for their lords in the hour of the ox, when the world was still and no one could see and the lord's needs were — were — were —

Her ears were on fire. Her tail wagged harder.

Th-this is a mission, nano desu! she insisted internally, scandalized by her own train of thought. A reconnaissance. An observation. A — a strategic reconnaissance observation of Aruji-dono's — of his — of his evening defensive posture!! Yes!! That is what this is, desu!!

Nobody in the room believed her. Not the moonlight, not the clock, and certainly not her tail.

She crept forward.

The bed was a low Western-style thing, mattress and box spring and a thick down comforter folded back from Sensei's chest. She approached from the foot of it, moving on the balls of her feet in a soundless shinobi-glide that let her weight transfer so smoothly her shadow did not even bob. At the edge of the mattress she paused. Looked. Really looked, in the way she had never let herself look in daylight.

He was so big lying down. That was the first dumb thought that filled her head. In the office, hunched over his desk with his glasses pushed up into his hair and a pen between his teeth, Sensei read as compact, overworked, slightly tired — a familiar shape she could pat on the knee without ceremony. Here, stretched out under the moonlight with one arm slung above his head, he was long. The line of his throat was long. The curve of his collarbone where his shirt had slipped was long. The breadth of his ribcage expanding slowly, slowly, slowly under the cotton was broad in a way that made her small chest feel suddenly, inexplicably hollow. His parted lips. The soft tangle of his black hair against the pillow. The faint shadow where the stubble was coming in along his jaw.

Her stomach did a slow somersault that she did not have the vocabulary to describe. Her mouth, without her permission, filled with saliva. She swallowed, and the sound was outrageously loud in the quiet room.

Suuu…

She leaned in, just a fraction, and inhaled through her nose. Deep. Slow. Fox-silent.

Oh.

Oh no.

He smelled good.

He smelled like clean cotton and the sandalwood soap he kept in the office bathroom and the faint lingering ghost of coffee and, beneath all of that, warm from sleep and skin, the particular low-tide musk of a sleeping male body — a scent that struck somewhere in her lineage-brain older than language and set every follicle at the base of her tail standing on end. Her ears, which had been politely swiveled forward, drooped sideways in a boneless slow-motion collapse of helpless feminine delight. Her knees wobbled.

Nn — nnnnn — n-no, Izuna! Mission focus! Mission! Focus!!

She climbed onto the bed.

She did it with the same precision she had used to come down from the ceiling — one knee set gently to the mattress at the foot-corner, weight distributed, listening for any catch in his breathing. None. She brought up the other knee. Settled her weight. The old mattress gave a soft, forgiving sigh beneath her, and she froze, holding breath, counting seconds in her head like detonator fuses — one, two, three, four, five — until she was certain that neither the shift nor the sigh had reached him.

Then, slowly, with the hieratic care of a shrine maiden lifting an offering, she took the edge of the comforter in her small hands and lifted it.

A pocket of warm air rolled out from underneath, scented with him, thick and intimate, and it hit her in the face like a physical thing.

Her brain whited out for a full second.

When it came back online her tail was wagging so hard that the tip was slapping arrhythmically against the comforter — fwump, fwump, fwump — and she had to physically reach back with one hand and grab the base of it, strangling the traitor into stillness. Her face felt like a stove-element. Her sarashi felt too tight. The thin cotton of her white mokko fundoshi, between her thighs, felt alarmingly, embarrassingly damp — a warm sticky slickness that had, she realized with mortified clarity, been building steadily since the moment she had latched onto the ceiling beam.

Aa — aa — awawa — Izuna, concentrate! You are a shinobi!! A shinobi on a mission of — of — of utmost ninja importance!!

She slipped under the comforter.

Head first, serpentine, boneless, her small body easing through the opening with the particular eel-smooth grace of a girl who had spent entire training afternoons practicing crawling through fifteen-centimeter gaps. The comforter settled back down over her and she was in there, in the dark warm cave of his bedding, with his scent all around her and his body heat radiating from every direction and her ears pressed flat to her skull in a kind of overwhelmed sensory ecstasy and her tail — which she had reluctantly released — curling and uncurling against her own calf like a living thing with its own private opinions.

She moved up along his body on her forearms and knees, agonizingly slow, each centimeter a tactical calculation. Past his bare feet (she had to bite the inside of her cheek very hard to stop herself from pressing a devotional kiss to the arch of one of them). Past the long warm shape of his calves beneath the thin pajama fabric. Past his knees. Past —

She stopped.

She had reached his thighs. And just above his thighs, the low rise and fall of his belly beneath the shirt, and —

And —

And lower, under the soft dark fabric of his pajama pants, there was a shape.

A warm, soft, substantial, weighted shape lying across his hip, curled at ease in the way of a sleeping man. Even through the fabric, even in the dim diffused dark under the comforter, her shinobi-sharpened night-vision resolved its outline with cruel clarity. The gentle swell. The heavy, pendulous curve beneath it. The whole quiet architecture of a man at rest.

Her mind went completely, perfectly, absolutely blank.

…

…

Th — th — th — thaaaaaat issss…!!!

She clapped both hands over her own mouth. Her ears shot pin-straight up and promptly collided with the underside of the comforter, which deflected them into a floppy sideways droop. Her tail, hopeless beyond redemption now, began to beat a slow heavy rhythm against her own back — fwump… fwump… fwump… — like the tail-thumps of a dog receiving the specific brand of attention it had wanted its entire life.

She was so close. Her face was perhaps a hand's-breadth away from — from — from Aruji-dono's — his —

His splendid treasure, she thought reverently, and then nearly bit through her lower lip in horrified embarrassment at having thought it.

The yobai manual (unabridged edition) had been, in retrospect, infuriatingly vague on this exact tactical juncture. There had been many illustrations. There had been many florid passages about "the devoted maidservant lays herself gently at the lord's thigh and awaits his gracious notice." There had been precisely zero concrete guidance on how a fifteen-year-old apprentice ninja with a wildly overactive tail and a face hot enough to boil water was supposed to actually initiate the gracious-notice-awaiting portion of the proceedings.

She stared at the shape for what felt like a geological epoch.

She breathed through her nose, very carefully, and her breath came out shaky.

Okay. She closed her eyes. Okay okay okay. A ninja improvises. A ninja adapts to the terrain. The terrain is — the terrain is Aruji-dono. The mission is to — to serve. To be useful. To — to make Aruji-dono know that Izuna is here, and that Izuna came, and that Izuna wants to — her brain stuttered and refused to complete the sentence — to do her duty, nano desu.

She shifted, slow as sediment settling, until she was straddling his thighs just below the hip. Her small weight settled on him with less pressure than a stray cat finding a sunbeam. He did not stir. His breath remained deep. The pulse in his throat continued its slow confident thirty-eight-beats-a-minute.

She lifted one small hand — it was trembling faintly, and she scowled at it in the dark, mortified by its disobedience — and lowered it, with the agonized ceremony of a tea-master setting down a priceless bowl, onto the warm shape beneath the fabric.

The weight of it filled her palm. The warmth of it radiated up through the cotton into her skin.

Her breath hitched.

For a long moment she did not move. She simply held, fingers splayed, cataloging the quiet reality of her own small hand resting upon him. Then, with great care — with the particular tender care she used when brushing out the long silk of her own tail at night — she began, very softly, to stroke.

Up. Along the warm sleeping curve, through the thin fabric, feather-light. Down again. Up. The motion of a girl smoothing a wrinkle from a precious scroll. Her other hand came to join the first, cupping with devotional gentleness beneath, where the softer heavier weight lay in its own quiet nest, and this she did not stroke so much as support, as though it were an injured chick she had found and was carrying home.

Beneath the fabric, beneath her hands, a slow unmistakable change began to answer her.

Her ears, which had drooped flat, snapped straight up again. Her eyes went perfectly round in the dark. Her mouth fell open in a tiny silent oh of wonder.

It — it's — it's getting — ohhh — ohhhh my — ohhh Inari-sama, Izuna is — Izuna is really — Aruji-dono's — Aruji-dono's Splendid Treasure is really — because of Izuna's hands it is really — —

Her brain gave up on sentences. Her hands did not. They kept stroking, dreamily now, with the mesmerized rhythm of a girl who had discovered a very important discovery and was documenting it with her palms. Her tail began to wag in slow luxurious sweeps that pushed the comforter up and down above her like a slow bellows. A tiny high-pitched hum had started somewhere in the back of her throat without her permission, barely a thread of sound, pure helpless feminine delight filtered through tightly closed lips.

Then she felt his breathing change.

Not much. Just a small catch — the softest hitch, as a sleeper surfaces from the deepest layer of sleep toward something shallower. His pulse under her ear-attention ticked up two beats, then four.

She froze.

Oh.

Oh no.

She had not — she had not actually planned past this. The plan had been get in, serve devotedly, somehow this works out. The plan had not accounted for the specific moment when Aruji-dono would begin to wake up and find a Kuda Izuna straddling his thighs under his comforter with both of her small hands wrapped lovingly around his —

Her face went so hot she was briefly concerned she had set her bangs on fire.

She should flee. The honorable move was to flee. To execute tonzura no jutsu, to vanish out the window the way she had come, to spend the next six months rebuilding her shattered dignity through austere mountain training —

She did not flee.

Instead, with a courage that surprised even her, she drew in a tiny shaky breath and leaned forward, and up, so that her small face came up level with his beneath the comforter in the warm dark, and her soft hair brushed his cheek, and her mouth hovered a hair's-breadth from the shell of his ear, and in the smallest, most trembling, most devotion-drenched whisper her vocal cords could produce, she breathed —

"…A… Aruji-dono…"

The bells at the end of her side-tail chimed, one soft helpless rin, as her tail wagged once against the comforter.

"…please forgive this one's… this one's rudeness,… b-but… Izuna has come…" Her small hands, down below, gave the smallest, bashful, worshipful squeeze. Her voice cracked into something barely more than a wisp of warm air against his ear. "…Izuna has come… to attend to Aruji-dono tonight, nano desu…"

A single traitorous bead of sweat — or something else, she refused to investigate — rolled down the inside of her thigh and vanished into the dark cotton of her fundoshi.

Her round golden eyes, enormous in the moonlit dim, locked onto his lashes and waited, with the trembling full-bodied devotion of a loyal fox-familiar awaiting her master's first word, for him to open his eyes.