View source for A Fine Mess (Seishi Tamashige)

{{Cutscene Header
|Date of Scene=2015/08/03
|Location=The Tamashige Residence
|Synopsis=After a grueling battle with Riventon, Seishi's gone home with her hard-won prize: the grief seed left behind by the witch that appeared in Mitakihara. The question is, what's she supposed to do with it now?
|Cast of Characters=71
}}
"What do you mean, 'get rid of it'?"

Closing his ember eyes, O-Yasu flumps down onto the foot of Seishi's bed. "You heard me," the baku answers, "you're not deaf. That thing is dangerous. Get rid of it."

With no apparent regard for basic physics, the grief seed stands balanced on its point on the coverlet, an ominous little sliver of the supernatural out of place in the tidy normalcy of her bedroom. "I ''know'' it's dangerous." Seishi pushes her fingers distractedly through hair still wet from the shower, standing by the side of her own bed and staring at the seed in exasperation. "Why do you think I went to all the trouble of bringing it back?"

Unmoved, O-Yasu tucks his tiger-striped paws underneath him, settling his head down onto the comforter until he looks like nothing so much as an oddly-designed and particularly grumpy stuffed animal. "What am I supposed to do with it?" he wants to know. "It's not a nightmare fragment. I don't know what it is, but I'm not eating it."

The breath goes out of Seishi in a strangled, inarticulate sound of pure frustration. With no better idea of what to do, she flops down sideways across the bed, hitting the mattress hard enough to bounce and in the process remind her just what kind of shape she's in right now. Bruised, scraped and scratched... she aches all over from the night's battle, inside and out. And for what?

With a groan, she rolls onto her side to look at the grief seed where it's rotating gently on its point, undisturbed by all of the jostling.

"What are you going to do?" O-Yasu asks from the other end of the bed.

Good question.

She lies there for a while, thinking, trying not to remember the motionless bodies lying in the street or the look on her father's face when she'd finally limped home, late and exhausted and splattered wildly with paint. She'd had no good explanation to give him for where she'd been, could only murmur some lame excuse about her club meeting getting out of hand. Just remembering it makes her face burn with shame at the lie. 

He can't possibly have believed her, she's certain, but all he'd said was a terse, "Go clean yourself up." No telling what he's thinking now. He'd disappeared into his bedroom by the time Seishi came out of the shower. 

There'd been a plate of dinner waiting for her in the microwave. That was something, at least.

At last, sighing, she pushes herself back up and reaches for the grief seed, gingerly picking it up off of the coverlet. "I don't know," she tells O-Yasu. "I'll have to figure something out." After a moment of indecision, she takes it to her desk, makes a little space for it in the drawer among the notebooks and pens and pencils and shuts it away out of sight. Then she stands there for a moment, looking at the rose in the slim vase where it stands at the back corner of the desktop.

She can't just keep it here, she thinks. She'll have to find someone who knows what to do with it.

Turning from the desk, she looks back over at O-Yasu where he's settled down on the foot of her bed. "Just... keep an eye on it for a little while," she tells him. "All right?"

He makes a grumbling sound by way of reluctant agreement.