“Hey.”

Nothing.

“Hey…”

Rei’s eyebrows knit together, as his gaze sharpens on the words in his book.

“Hey!” 

Finally his eyelids flutter as he looks around. It’s not like he heard it, really, but something did break him out of his focus. 

“Hey, hey, you! Yeah, you!” The voice calls him again, now louder, sharper. 

“What…” he mutters, looking around. His room is just as it was when he entered, or so it seems to a first glance. 

Man, he really needs a break right now. He stands up, stretching his arms out, and his mouth opens wide as he yawns.

“You seem tired,” the voice notices, quietly, but all Rei hears is a faint buzz in his ear. He looks around, scratching his head. 

I must be a lot more tired than I think, he tells himself, and goes off to get something to snack on. His belly does seem to protest, as he thinks about it. 

“Hey!”

He sighs, again breaking out of his focus. 

“HEY!” 

He finally sits up straight, looking around all shaken. The voice did get louder and it rings in his ear from how unexpected it was. 

I’m definitely losing my marbles here. 

“You heard me?” The voice says, and now finally it seems he can hear it.

“What the…” 

He looks around again. Everything in his room seems to look the same, except… except for an entire child plopped over his bed, seemingly not weighing on it but still appearing to be… that. A boy. Hair that seem to be made out of the sun’s rays, cheeks glowing with light, and a faint bright color all over, even surrounding him like an aura. 

“What the heck?!” Rei screeches, eyes growing wide and insanity shooting to the roof, or so it seems. Wait, I must be dreaming. Yeah, I brobably dozed off while studying and I didn’t even realize it. 

He blinks his eyes a few times, muttering to himself “wake up”, while the boy that just seemingly appeared out of nowhere glowing in his room tilts his head looking over at him with amusement. And after he’s done, the boy is still there. 

“You done?” He asks, with his voice sounding like bells in some kind of way. 

Rei just looks over at him, with his eyes just as wide as before, but then his shoulders slump as his eyes seem to lose most of their shocked expression. 

It’s a dream for sure, so might as well just let it play out and then wake up. 

“Who are you?” He asks, because yeah, he might be in a dream but there are still rules even the oniric world should abide to. As in, nobody should enter someone else’s house uninvited. 

“I’ve had many names,” the boy says, with a sing-song, cheerful voice that still sounds like little soft bells ringing. “I like Nagisa, though.”

Rei frows a bit, confused. 

“So you’re a girl?” 

The boy grimaces a little. 

“I really don’t care, I’m not even human anyway so it doesn’t matter.”

“You have a girly name,” Rei insists. 

“So do you, right?” Nagisa replies, with a few more dumb blinks of his eyes. 

And Rei’s lips shut, as effectively he would not be able to come up with something to retort with. 

“So what do you want?” He asks instead, already forgetting about the fact he’s supposed to have his nose buried through pages of a school book. 

The boy grins, and then gives his shoulders a shrug. 

“Nothing!” He chirps, and then gives out a flurry of giggles, as his shoulders bounce joyfully. 

Rei looks at him with eyes reflecting confusion, and then a scowl, and then a long, baffled silence. 

He never had younger brothers, and his older brother took off and built his own life a while ago and he isn’t really his cousins’ cousin in the common way - which is to say, basically, he doesn’t really see them as cousins, they’re but acquaintances at best. 

He never talks to very small people. Not that Nagisa is that tiny, but he definitely feels like a very young child. Probably around the age of ten, more or less. 

So, basically, he never got used to talking to children, and he’s not going to start now.

“Fine. Well, I’ll go back to studying if it’s okay with you,” he says, and turns around again to the book he’s dreaming about studying. 

“It’s not okay with me,” Nagisa peeps, now sounding a lot closer. Rei throws a look over his shoulder, and the child is now floating merely inches away, eyes flashing in pink with a certain unsettling darkness dirtying it. “I want you to look at me.”

Rei’s eyebrows knit together even more, and he stands up. 

“What are you, a child? If you’ve been quiet the whole time since I existed, why couldn’t you just stay quiet?”

“I get bored too! I’ve been here for months now, and now I want to do something!” Nagisa protests, the dark gaze all but gone, replaced by a childish pout. 

“Well,” Rei sighs, crossing his arms. “Then what do you want to do? What are you even supposed to be? Yurei?”

Nagisa purses his lips, then shakes his head. 

“Nah. Although I’m friends with a bunch of those. No, I’m… what do humans call us…? Zashiki warashi?”

“This room is not a zashiki,” Rei objects, his eyebrow shooting up. Those are supposed to be spirits who bring good fortune, but Rei always thought himself too rational to believe in fortune or any of those things. Then again, he thought yokai are nothing but the products of superstitions and nothing else, and yet one is… floating? in front of him right now. In a dream, of course, but still.

“Yeah, well, I thought this room was cozy. Also you keep food here, isn’t it?” Nagisa says, his eyes lighting up. 

“We keep food in the pantry too,” Rei says. 

“Well, I just like it here!” Nagisa blurts, sitting back on the bed. “And now I want you to play with me.” 

Rei, already defeated - probably too tired for a debate with a poltergeist or whatever - eventually just rubs his eyes, defeated. 

“Fine,” he replies, finally. The child doesn’t even seem to be one of those dangerous trickster yokai Rei’s heard about. He seems to mostly just be a bit annoying, even though he’s already warmed up to the air of joy surrounding the spirit. “What do you want to play?”

“You hide something you love, and if I manage finding it I will possess it,” Nagisa hums, tapping his finger on his chin. “And then hopefully it’ll become a tsukumogami.” 

Rei frowns even more now. “That sounds extremely inconvenient for me, can’t you just hide somewhere and wait for me to find you and that’s it?” 

“But that’s boring, what are the stakes there?” Nagisa complains, immaterially bouncing on the bed. 

“Well, if you’re going to possess something forever and possibly turn it into a danger, then it stops being a game.”

Nagisa puffs air out, he finally rolls his eyes and nods. 

“Okaaay, as you say. Who should hide first?” He says, smiling his brightest again. 

So that’s how the rest of the afternoon goes. His book lays open and untouched on the desk the whole day, as Rei and the yokai spend hours running and floating around the house, looking through it nook and cranny. Until, as he looks for Nagisa under the bed- he really could be occupying the small space under it, Rei learns quite early on - he spots a rupture between the floorboards, and instantly remembers. He used to hide tiny little things in that crack - candy, tiny messages, collectible cards, money… 

He puts the hunt on hold for a little bit, digging up whatever is in there, and finally a smile draws itself on his face. There are so many little things he forgot about. The edibles are, well, gone at this point, and he grimaces while handling the sticky sugar, but the messages he would exchange with other kids in school are still readable (but he avoids that, they surely are filled up with all sorts of grammatical mistakes he cannot deal with right now), the very few yen he could hide away seemed like such a big treasure back then… he spends a few minutes with his head shoved under the bed, looking at them. 

They’re small things, but there is so much unseen value in them. 

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Nagisa pretty much yells in his ear, and Rei almost slams his head against the bottom of the bed. Nagisa looks down at the small pieces of paper and the coins, with a raised eyebrow. “What are those?”

Rei looks at him, barely thinking about how fast he got used to a spirit’s presence next to him, in his personal space. 

“Memories,” he hums. “I’d forgotten they were here. That’s probably because they’re not important, but…”

“They’re very important!” Nagisa retorts, shaking his head. “If I was alive, I would be treasuring memories. I’m nothing without them.” 

Rei looks at him, wondering about that. What kind of memories does a spirit have? Of their time among the living? Of just their existence as spirits? 

“Yes, you’re right,” he says, mostly to cut it out. He’s not going to debate such a small thing with something that doesn’t even exist - because they’re in a dream. “I’ll take better care of them.”

Maybe Nagisa really is a spirit bringing good fortune, after all Rei found his little treasure while playing with him...

And Nagisa seems to be satisfied with the answer - he lies back down on the bed, and Rei notices how the objects in his room seem to be affected by the space he occupies. Which is really interesting - do spirits and yurei have mass? Weigh? Do they actually exist physically? And yet he tried touching Nagisa - to no avail. 

His thoughts are interrupted by the sound of his mother getting back home, of grocery bags and the sound of her voice calling for him. He looks over to the clock in his room: time for dinner. Without really looking at Nagisa he rushes back to the kitchen, helping her out with the groceries and dinner while she chatters away. As usual, he’s quiet and doesn’t talk much, but he wishes he could introduce the topic of a good fortune yokai haunting his bedroom. How would he even do that? 

And is it even worth talking about? Maybe tomorrow Nagisa will be gone. Well, he will surely be gone. Spirits don’t exist, do they? He just played around with him because it was a dream, a fantasy, but fantasies can’t be measured, and by the way they’re just superstitions, the product of forefathers missing the units of measure. It sure is a weird dream unlike any other he’s ever had before, but the brain is a wonderful, mysterious machine, isn’t it?

So he keeps it for himself, content about hearing his mother’s and father’s day, and with a slight sense of surprise, once he gets back in his room there is nothing. No spirits, no voices, no weird glow around anything. But, well, that’s probably for the better. Maybe he was daydreaming really hard before and he didn’t even realize he had gotten out of that state. Because for sure, he did eat - he can feel it in his stomach. 

The next morning, the same thing happens as he stretches out in the bed and takes a few minutes to properly wake up, do a few exercises and finally get up, looking around: nothing. So that’s how he thought. It was a dream, for sure. Or at least the weird parts of the day before must have been a dream. 

He eats breakfast, prepares his school bag - still nothing. After he prepares to go to school, before exiting his room and starting another day, he looks around the room again to find it looking as it usually does, but still he does bother to grab a few little snacks from his drawer under the desk, leaving them on it, as an offering or treat of sorts.

He doesn’t believe in spirits to bring good luck - he doesn’t even believe in luck… but one never knows, right?