Fujiwara no Mokou blew the smoke from her kiseru into the night air, watching the cloud fade into nothingness. A fire crackled in front of her, kept alive from the wood she harvested from the stump she was sitting on. She could have also just used pyrokinesis, but that meant concentrating on keeping the flame alive, which was a problem when all she wanted at the moment was to space out and think of nothing.

Mokou leaned back with a huff, staring at the darkened skies. It was probably pretty cloudy, since she couldn't see any stars.

She continued to recline until her head hit the grass, then leaned a little lower, feeling her cheek wet against the greenery. She let her hands flop at her sides, one still holding the smoking pipe, and she felt her muscles slacken. Her back and neck were both bent at awkward angles, and it was decidedly very uncomfortable. Mokou decided she liked this position.

Mokou continued to blankly gaze skyward. After a minute, she realized she couldn't see any moonlight either. Good. She let out a raspy chuckle, made strenuous from the way her torso was stretched backwards, and she took another sip from her pipe, adjusting its position so as to accommodate for her face being partially buried in the grass. She decided to hold her breath this time, trapping the dirty air in her lungs.

Mokou closed her eyes, letting her kiseru fall out of her mouth and spill tobacco all over the ground. The charred air filled her lungs, but she barely felt anything.

"Smoking's bad for you, you know."

Now, were she caught in this position a few centuries ago, she probably would have shot up fast enough to break the sound barrier while violently coughing the smoke from her lungs, and would maybe turn the trespasser into a smear on the ground.

But now?

Mokou lazily exhaled the smoke through her nostrils, not bothering to dignify the voice with a response.

She could hear the shuffling of clothes and the scraping of rubber against the ground, so she assumed that meant the invader made themselves comfortable by the fire. Were she young enough to still give a damn, she probably would have put it out just to spite them, assuming they weren't already turned into charcoal.

"Apparently," the voice sounded irritatingly chipper and Mokou was beginning to seriously consider putting the flames out anyway, "it can cause lung cancer, which is when the stuff in your lungs start growing out of control, and then it gets so hard to breathe that you end up dying of asphyxiation, or something along those lines."

After trying and failing to come up with a witty retort, the immortal only grumbled.

"Good," she instead muttered, and she would have taken another huff from her kiseru to prove her point, but it lay in a cold heap against the grass. Idly, she wondered if this "cancer" thing would be her ticket to a true death. She doubted it, but it wouldn't hurt to try. Too bad her pipe was useless at the moment.

Mokou heard the grass shift again, and she was beginning to hope that whoever invaded her personal space got bored and left her.

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She listened half-heartedly for any more movement indicating the intruder had walked away, but she only heard the crackling of a fire she couldn't see. Her back dug into the edge of the stump and her neck started to ache, but she didn't care enough to move.

Well, as long as she didn't have to talk, she guessed it was fine.

And so, Mokou sat under the starless sky, silently wishing her kiseru was in her mouth but not doing anything about it.

"...Almost sounds like you want to die..." the voice finally broke the silence, and something in her ticked.

"Do you?" She shot back, a spike of irritation hitting her.

"Hell no!" Was the intruder's exaggerated response, and Mokou immediately knew she'd never get along with this guy.

"Dying hurts, you know! I try to avoid it if I can help it!"

That made Mokou pause. The voice was loud and annoying to listen to, but the connotations were not lost on her. Mokou had to relate, she didn't like dying all that much either. The aches that came after were always a bitch to deal with.

She tried to shift the pipe in her mouth, only to remember it was on the ground. She instead licked her teeth.

"Not what I meant," she began, testing the waters.

"Do you want to die and stay dead, is what I mean."

For the first time in probably a century since she gave up going on a three-hundred-year rampage, Mokou's boredom was replaced with some other emotion that felt almost completely foreign to her. She remembered feeling something similar, a long, long time ago. Right before she got her mits on that elixer, when she was young and stupid and had no idea what she was getting herself into, she felt something similar.

The stranger never answered her. Maybe she could get along with this guy.

Mokou, on a whim, finally sat up, and the blood rushed from her head and she suddenly felt a little dizzy. When she shook her head clear of its weariness, she finally got a good look at whoever decided to invade her personal space.

Sitting cross-legged before the fire was a raven-haired man adorned in a long, black cloak that draped against the grass he sat on. His cheek rested on his fist, with a tattered green sleeve wrapped around his arm. A dirty orange scarf covered his neck, and Mokou noticed a whip holstered at the hip.

The man craned his neck over, and Mokou was a little taken aback by the sight. Staring into her own were the eyes of a rotting corpse. They were that of someone who had seen death far more times than either of them could care to count, and Mokou briefly wondered if this was really the same overbearing, obnoxious intruder that wormed into her privacy only a minute ago.

It felt like looking into a mirror.

"You're like me," she blurted out, and only realized she even said anything after she processed her own words. It took another few seconds for her to realize the man had said the same thing she did.

The stranger widened his eyes a fraction, blinked in apparent surprise, then chuckled and shook his head. It was almost eerie how animated his actions were in comparison to what lay behind those dead eyes.

Then, unexpectedly, the stranger shot up from his position, looking at her with a cocky smile that looked completely out of place on that face of his.

He jutted his hips out, placed a hand on his side, and pointed skyward in an incredibly stupid-looking pose. Mokou had to blink and rub her eyes to make sure her boredom didn't get so bad that she started hallucinating.

"Natsuki Subaru, at your service! I'm homeless, clueless, broke beyond compare, and completely and utterly lost at the moment! Nice to meet you!"

Mokou, bewildered, only noticed the newly named Natsuki Subaru's outstretched hand after she let go of it.

"M-mouko," she stuttered out, entirely caught off guard by the genuine warmth in the man's grin. How he was even capable of such a feat was lost on her.

And so, for the first time in... probably her entire life, now that she thought about it, Fujiwara no Mokou had made a friend.