(no subject)

[icemountain_dad]

[Kiyoteru's a little worried about his daughter.

She's safe and sound, thank goodness. And she doesn't show any signs of serious trauma, beyond the broken leg - and the doctor's taken good care of that. Already Yuki is hobbling around on her crutches almost as quickly as on both legs, and her heavy plaster cast bears a number of scribbled well-wishes from her friends at school. Honestly, it seems like there's little to really worry about.

But he still can't work out exactly how she made it home on that broken leg, from such a distance away as she reports. She keeps insisting she was brought home by a mononoke... a forest spirit. "Mononoke-san", she calls him. She's drawn several pictures of him.

Very likely it's just a child's imagination at work. But the mononoke in her pictures doesn't look like any traditional mononoke Kiyoteru has ever heard of... crawling on all fours like an animal, but stitched together like-- well, like Frankenstein's monster. Artificial.

He doesn't know why that bothers him. It shouldn't. Yuki loves stories, all sorts of them. And the thing in her drawings looks friendly.

The odd feeling remains.

A drip from the faucet brings him back to reality. Shaking his head, he gets back to washing the dishes from dinner.]

(no subject)

[was_no_mononoke]

[He hurts.

He had just wanted to catch a bird. But when he leapt out to grab it one of the branches of the bush he had been hiding under had scraped across his back and caught, and now there's a painful deep itch running all down one side of his back and his arm and leg on that side aren't moving right.

He didn't even get it.

And now he's alone, too far away from his den to make it before sun-up in the state he's in, and barely able to supress the whimpers that will tell all of the toothed things that stay awake at night that he's their food now. He doesn't want to be food. He doesn't want to be alone.

Without meaning to, he thinks of the girl. She hadn't wanted to be alone, either.

...Do people eat broken things? He doesn't think so. They fixed her.

He's closer to her nest than to his own, anyway. He'll go there, and even if his breath stops he won't be food, and he won't be alone when it does.]