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He finds it by accident. Tanuma and him are sitting in his bedroom, the water of the koi pond reflected on the ceiling. Natsume can hear the gentle swaying of the water, even if Tanuma can’t, there’s peace in the knowledge that it exists for both of them.
They’re looking for an old board game, something lots of kids have played at a young age that Natsume missed out on. Tanuma eagerly agrees to play a round and they search his room for the game together.
Natsume isn’t sure what he’s looking for, he’s been crawling around on the hard floor for a few minutes now, but his hands come upon some old wood under Tanuma’s western styled bed. He pulls it out and opens it, noting the odd creak and dust accumulation. Inside, he feels his excitement tip into something else as he glances upon a photograph.
“Sorry,” he says automatically as he closes the lid. “I didn’t mean— I looked into this.”
Tanuma comes over and stares at the box for a moment before recognition lights his expression.
“Oh, you saw my mom’s picture. It’s okay.” He pauses and smiles. “I wasn’t hiding it or anything.”
He opens it again and pulls it out for them both to look at. It reminds him when he shared his own photo, when he lost it on the search for the soda spring.
The picture is of a young woman, her eyes and the set of her mouth look a little like Tanuma’s. Her hair is long, and her smile is very wide in a way that’s unlike both Tanuma and his father. Her aura is a bit more wild than the both of them.
“Do you remember her?”
“Not much,” Tanuma says in his usual voice, but Natsume can tell there’s pain there.
“You miss her,” he states plainly.
He knows better than anyone that you can miss someone you don’t fully remember.
“I—yeah I do.” He sighs heavily, and for Tanuma it speaks volumes. They both mask their feelings enough to recognize it. “It feels weird to talk to my dad about her, like I’m hurting him or something. He has so many memories of her, but I feel like I just miss his memories of her if that makes sense? Maybe I just miss the idea of having my mom.”
It does, it reminds him of how he sometimes feels like he misses his grandmother, just from seeing the youkai’s memories of her. He’d have loved to meet her.
And his parents… he’s very familiar with missing the idea of someone.
“I’m grateful to have my dad, but sometimes I can’t help but think about what kind of relationship me and my mom would’ve had, if things were different.”
When all is quiet at night, when that picture lingers on his mind. He sometimes thinks he can hear his dad talk about the garden his mom never got to finish, in that house he forgot. A home that would never be.
“I get that,” Natsume says.
Tanuma smiles and his eyes stay a little sad. He looks to where Natsume fidgets his hands, trying to control his emotion in the conversation. “I shouldn’t complain.”
“You’re not complaining,” he assures his friend. The woman in the picture seems happy. “Your mom looks really happy in this picture.”
The picture is gently placed back in the box. “My dad mentioned once how funny she was. It’s hard sometimes to picture him with someone like that. He’s not unhappy, but he doesn’t smile like this. Maybe he used to.”
Tanuma’s mouth sets into a hard line. Natsume places a comforting hand on his shoulder. Natsume used to think of it all the time, the absence of his parents before he blocked it all out.
He regrets that, maybe more than anything else, how he blocked out what little remnant of his parents he had in his memories. Maybe he would’ve forgotten anyway.
“You can ask him, if you want. Even if it feels weird, he would… probably like to talk about her, or even about that time in his life,” Natsume says. He feels uncertain, and he doesn’t know Tanuma-san well. But he knows he wished someone would ask. Especially when Tanuma clearly wants to know more. “I think talking about them, it’s easier to remember. Even if it hurts, it’ll someday be less painful that way, and the memory stays alive.”
He thinks of his dad, maybe if someone had ever wanted to hear about them… maybe he wouldn’t have forgotten as much as he did.
Tanuma seems to understand as his expression settles into a soft, sad smile. “Do you remember anything about your parents, Natsume?”
He breathes deep and his exhale trembles. “I think I have one memory. I remember… my dad is talking about a memory of my mom. She had a garden in front of our old house. He sounded… like he loved her. That’s all I have of them. I used to call for my dad a lot. There was a long time I didn’t remember anything about them.”
The warm press of a shoulder against his is enough to ease the stinging behind his eyes. He smiles into the feeling, neither him nor Tanuma are tactile with others, but it’s nice when someone reaches out.
There’s a heavy pause between them as Natsume tries to control his emotions. “Thank you.”
Tanuma’s voice cracks when he replies, “Anytime.” He takes a moment to breathe too, stabilizing the emotion in his voice. “Talk to me about them anytime, if you want.”
“You do the same. I don’t always need to be talking about youkai,” Natsume says, watching as he deposits the box back under his bed.
Tanuma huffs a laugh at that. “You could always talk about that, I know there’s still stories about them you haven’t told me.”
He tries to keep the scarier ones to a minimum, but they’ve been slowly bubbling up as time has passed. Natsume can’t remember a time like this, a moment where he didn’t feel so alienated from everyone. It’s only since coming here that he’s come to know this comforting sense of belonging, even when he’s still so different.
The last time was probably on that porch, seated in his father’s lap as he talked about his mother.
He wonders if Tanuma felt that too, and he thinks he knows the answer without asking.
There was a reason Tanuma’s dad moved them here, and an even bigger reason why Tanuma’s first instinct was to approach the boy he heard strange rumors about.
“I’ll tell you all of them, if you want.”
Tanuma’s smile is wider than his usual ones. Natsume wonders if he could take a picture of this. He’d recognize where he got that smile from.
“I’d like that.”