[Gift] Danger Glitter

The rituals Fù Nàxià performs for the new year are her own. She cleans every inch of her home and her shop, pushing out even the smallest specks of dust, taking every knickknack off every shelf and scrubbing the surfaces to perfection before her treasured baubles are arranged inch-perfect to their proper places, just as she likes. Each night she stays up far too late, fueled by tea saved for special occasions, so that the moon rises to exactly the perfect spot and spreads out her cards under its silver light. She makes mochi that she considers a step or two above passable, and improves the recipe every year, snacking on some and respectfully leaving out the rest.

While she’s up late throwing bones into the spreading moonlight, the sounds of hooting and cheering keep her from finding complete peace. These sorts of parties are traditional as the Mochi Moon approaches; buns feasting and drinking and staying up late enough into the night that they run right into their limits and pass out on the floor. It all sounds like too much. Too many people, too much to do. Fù Nàxià has her own vices to indulge in, of course, so the strangeness of her absence from all the revelry doesn’t stick against the rest of her oddity. But these days aren’t for those vices. There is a sacredness to all of this, if anything: a demon granting visions, the knowledge of the cosmos, the way she puts it together into how to read futures into objects that seem so small to so many. This is one of so few things Fù Nàxià feels the weight of.

It’s why this year, three days before the Mochi Moon itself, she starts in place for the first time when her doorbell rings at six PM precisely. She’s sweeping for the umpteenth time, all her furniture piled on top of itself and rearranged, in no state for guests at all, so she audibly ughs as she realizes what she’s done. The latest episode of Pretty Power Devil Shine releases tonight, as it does every week. She has a watch party.

“Luciano,” she says as she opens the door, and she’s a little more flustered than she usually likes to be but the sight of him always makes her smile in a way that’s warm instead of her usual state of tight-lipped and unsettling. He wears more jewelry than usual, all in sparkling gold, and has Phe, his gargowl, perched on his shoulder; Fù Nàxià gives the creature a respectful nod. “I’m so sorry, I got wrapped up in Mochi Moon preparation and completely forgot that…” A beat. “You’re early.”

“Yeah!” Luciano says, chipper as anything, and settles in a little as he asks, “I-is that okay?”

“Of course,” Fù Nàxià says immediately. “I just need a moment to return the television to where it belongs…”

“Oh, well, actually,” Luciano says, “I was thinking, you know…” He gestures for a moment, vaguely, and then says, “I have a surprise for you!”

Fù Nàxià tilts her head, just so, expression unchanging.

“And we can go somewhere else for it—um, I mean, we should go somewhere else for it—so you don’t have to worry about all that, the furniture and stuff, yet,” he says, speaking just a little too fast, one hand gently scratching into the feathers of Phe’s chest. “When we’re done, because it won’t take that long, we can come back and watch the new episode?”

Fù Nàxià rolls this thought over in her head, quiet and placid in a way that anyone else might think of as unsettling. She says, “All right.”

“Good! Yay!” Luciano says. “Um, you’ll want a coat, we have to go outside. And,” he adds, eyes brightening, “Your guyst! I think Xīsìguǐ will like this, too!”

Countless spirits follow Fù Nàxià, forms and names changing by the day. Only Luciano has ever so precisely remembered who stays.

Fù Nàxià takes an oversized purple cardigan off a coat hook and buttons it up in the front. While she’s grabbing her keys, Xīsìguǐ hovers over to her from goodness knows where, summoned by some uncertain, silent call. The rest of the spirits perpetually swirling around Fù Nàxià offer him their attention, swirling about him in circles. His tail flicks and flickers behind him, spreading out from the orange of his body into a color that matches the little puffs of cloud that follow him wherever he goes. He bobs and spins around Phe, once Fù Nàxià has hissed her spirits away from him, and trills happily at every little coo Phe makes once they’ve left the house and let Luciano lead them away.

The sounds of other buns’ pre-Mochi partying get softer and softer as they go. Already, Fù Nàxià doesn’t live too close to the city—but not too far; she has to get to her shop and get business somehow. Luciano brings her farther, though, and she follows without question. Here and there, he meets a crossroads and double checks the map on his phone; once, he sends them halfway down one road and turns them right back around with a, “Sorry, sorry, I should have gone this way!”

“It’s all right,” Fù Nàxià says, easy and even, and Luciano settles.

“I think Peregrine is probably going to get her magical transformation form this episode,” Luciano is saying as they cross a field where the only path is a line of dirt where grass was worn down from years of buns deciding that this was the best place to walk through. “She has to be the one to save Naomi, right?”

“I think,” Fù Nàxià muses, “it’s just as likely that Naomi saves herself. Dependency has been a strong theme in her story, hasn’t it? She hasn’t earned her independence yet.”

“I think she’s got to learn to rely on other people,” Luciano says, “’cause she hasn’t for so long, you know? Oh! Let’s go up here!”

Fù Nàxià pulls up her long skirts and follows him up a hill; the path dies before they reach it, and they trudge through the grass. Phe dismounts from Luciano’s shoulder and flies on ahead, settling on a tree branch nearby; Xīsìguǐ looks to Fù Nàxià for permission, and, when he receives it in the form of a nod and a hum, coos as he follows right behind.

The hill stands tall enough that it takes the buns a couple of minutes to make it to the top. Luciano is all out of breath by the time they make it, wheezing, “That was steeper than it looked!”

“Do you need to sit?” Fù Nàxià asks.

“No, I think I’m okay,” he says, panting. He’s rummaging through the bag he brought—Fù Nàxià had offered to let him leave it behind, but he insisted he needed it, and so she asked no more questions before they left her house. “They’re right… Here!”

When he pulls out the cardboard package with a grand flourish, Xīsìguǐ gives a delighted coo and flies right back over, leaving Phe behind. He swirls and circles Luciano, coming back again and again to the package, long and thin, while Luciano beams and laughs and makes soft little cooing noises back at Xīsìguǐ. They’re far enough from the city now that the darkness keeps Fù Nàxià from recognizing the item right away. The moonlight shines straight down; the moon keeps a perfect crescent shape on its waning way into nothing. It isn’t quite enough until Luciano opens the top of the package and pulls out one long, thin stick.

“Sparklers!” he declares. Fù Nàxià’s expression stays even. She tilts her head, just so. Even so, one hand extends to slowly take the offered sparkler. Luciano goes on, “I know you said you don’t usually do the partying, you know, and I know you’ve been up to a bunch of important stuff, but I thought—you know, this is kind of the best part of the Mochi Moon.” He grins. “I don’t really like being around so many people like that either, usually, it gets to be a bit much, but… I really like sparklers.” He rifles through his bag as he speaks, eventually finding a matchbook. “So I thought, even if we didn’t go to a whole party, maybe we could still celebrate together?”

Fù Nàxià’s slight smile remains unchanging. She says, “Maybe we could.”

It takes some fumbling, and eventually Fù Nàxià ends up holding both of their sparklers while Luciano strikes the match. He smiles as bright as the flame as he lights the tip of them, then hurriedly blows the match and drops it and stomps it out while reaching to grab one of the sparklers before it lights.

Only in the moment does Fù Nàxià realize that she’s seen sparklers, certainly, but never held one. Why bother? She’s not going to light fires alone in her house, let them jump all over her books and furniture and cards. She’s not going to be anywhere that would excuse the flame.

Now, the tip of her sparkler, held like a magic wand, glitters and then starts to pop. It crackles and bursts into gold turning hotter, turning blue, and bursts out of the sparkler and into the night air. She can feel the way her expression shifts, eyes going a little wider, smile dropping into surprise; Luciano must see, because he laughs as he holds out his own sparkler, popping and glowing into the night. Phe doesn’t leave their tree but Xīsìguǐ bounces so close to the fires that Luciano has to pull his sparkler away, wave it up and down, keep it out of Fù Nàxià ’s way. Testing, curious, Fù Nàxià waves the sparkler in an arc over her head in the air, and watches in wonder at the way the light trails after it.

They both point the sparklers out in front of them, near enough that the sparks from one reach the other. Fù Nàxià marvels in the way they glitter. She watches the twirl and twitch of Luciano’s sparkler as he spins it into shapes. She flicks her own towards Xīsìguǐ, who makes a noise that might be a laugh. Luciano holds his steady in front of him.

For a moment, he’s quiet, and Fù Nàxià doesn’t speak, either. She should be pulling her house apart right now, getting ready to put it back together for her own sake before anyone else’s. It’s the same every year. There’s a weight to that, an importance. This is different. It’s new.

Luciano says quietly, “It wasn’t very long after the last Mochi Moon that we met.” He stares down at his sparkler.

Fù Nàxià has to do the math in her head. She tracks memories back to dates. Ah, how time moves on, despite it all. She says, voice soft, “Almost a year now.”

“Yeah.” Luciano says. They’re quiet for a long few moments, and the sparklers rage on still. Luciano lifts his a little higher in the air, his face shrinking back from the bright blue embers. He says, so softly that Fù Nàxià hardly hears, “It’s been a good year.”

Fù Nàxià looks away from her sparkler and over to him. How the glitter of the sparkler’s flames bounces light off his jewelry. How the moon lights the way his expression furrows, thoughtful, desperate.

She says, “It has,” in her matter-of-fact sort of way.

Luciano’s expression settles, and he smiles, and he turns to look at her.

“I think,” Fù Nàxià says, without consulting her cards, without tossing bones onto a table, without squinting into a cup of moist tea leaves, “the next year will be good, too.”

The sparkler in her hand fades first, but Luciano’s doesn’t last much longer. The popping and crackling go quiet, and the lights stop launching from the tips of them, and they are left illuminated only by slivers of the silver crescent moon.

“Do you want to light another?” asks Luciano, and he’s already rummaging through his bag. Fù Nàxià holds out a hand, and takes the sparkler he offers.

“That sounds nice,” she says, and strikes another match.