•Tomoe x Reader: Book 2•

1. Crowd

"Stick close to me," Tomoe hissed. "As we all have warned, this is not the place for a lowly-..."

You glared at him, before an idea occurred, and you intertwined your fingers with his, smiling.
"This close enough?"

You and Tomoe had been in the underworld for only about an hour, but Tomoe had been on edge the whole time, though he had previously kept it concealed behind his irritated facade his anxieties had been slipping out.

There had been barely any activity down here, just a dusty road and dead trees, but you'd finally entered what seemed to be a village infested with yokai and every other sort of fanged thing.
Some type of festival was going on, a savage one at that, and there was odd pieces of meat hanging from booths and many other suspicious items being sold to the creatures that roamed here.

You'd been given a fox-shaped mask to put over your face, along with an odd purple kimono. The article of clothing has been folded over the wrong way, Japanese tradition specified this way should only be worn by the dead, so the idea here was that you were disguised as some... dead thing.

Tomoe scoffed, but did not break the contact, and you could have sworn you caught the hint of pink dusting his cheeks.

Damn, that was smooth.
You high-fived yourself mentally.
His claws were kind of weird to have brushing against the back of your hand, but other than that, the white-haired male's skin was surprisingly warm, and soft.

They were like woman's hands.

You snickered to yourself, imagining Tomoe as a woman, and how few changes would have to be made.

"Now what?"

"Nothing, nothing."

The slits in the wooden mask were big enough to see, but Tomoe was in a blind spot at the moment, though it was easy to imagine his expression.

A sudden dangerous aura caused you to halt, Tomoe was attached to you by the hand so of course he had to stop as well.

"What, woman?"

"Something ahead."

Tomoe looked up ahead, there was a cloaked figure slinking towards the both of you.

Tomoe seemed annoyed.
"We have things like those all the time. Spirits of assassins, executioners, dumb humans who somehow managed to get evil enough to sink down here after their deaths."
His eyes closed. "Annoying, for the most part. Like rats."

The figure had stopped a few feet from you, it was now apparent they wanted something, standing silent.

Tomoe was now suspicious.

"Is there a reason for your rude stopping in front of us?" He inquired.

The figure said nothing, but eventually a low grumble came from it.

"Is it for sale?"

Tomoe's ear twitched. "Is what for-..."

"The fresh mea-..."
The cloaked thing erupted in blue flames, Tomoe continued, dragging you past the screaming spirit as it burned.

His tail flicked.
"Apparently the disguise isn't enough... I'm not sure how he recognized you as human, but we need to move on."

You had gone quiet, looking back at the scene Tomoe had created, but nodded, trying your best to keep up as he lead you by the hand.

"...Mhn. If the old geezer was right, we have more important things than cloaked bois."