Chapter Text
The human who owned this house was a lonely one, it seemed. Which was potentially a problem for any hypothetical borrower who wanted to settle in.
Reigen peered cautiously from under the fridge, watching a pair of giant slippered feet pass by. It was pretty awful down here—all the dust and stale crumbs—but he hadn’t established a proper base with proper lookout points and proper hiding spaces, so. Oh well. At least he had a mask (a scrap of lens cloth that had been annoying to cut).
It was morning, which meant breakfast, which meant the human would take her food upstairs and start talking; loud enough for Reigen to hear, but too far for him to make out the words. She probably wasn’t talking on a phone—if she was, it’d make more sense to use the one in the kitchen after making breakfast. And the past few days Reigen had been here, he’d seen nobody else, meaning she lived alone. So…she must be talking to herself.
“I mean, there’s no other reason to talk to yourself besides loneliness, right?” Reigen muttered to himself.
Lonely humans were risky. They either kept their house well maintained or let it fall to infestations. This one seemed to be the former (dusty fridge not withstanding), which meant even if she dropped any food, she picked up after herself. The other problem with lonely humans was, they didn’t have other humans distracting them. Making it more likely for a poor borrower to get noticed. (Thirteen centimeters was small, but it wasn’t that small.)
That was probably why Reigen hadn’t seen any sign of other borrowers here— nobody would ever think this house was worth the trouble.
But Reigen was confident he could make this work.
(Also, his rations were running low and he really didn’t want to make another tedious journey to any more houses.)
See, after a few days of observation, he was pretty sure he had a handle on her schedule. Wake up, breakfast upstairs, go to work, come back, dinner upstairs, household busywork and/or recreation, sleep. It was the breakfast-to-work pipeline that was key—after eating, she would scrape leftovers in a box and drop the plates in the sink before rushing out the door. Leaving behind leftovers of her leftovers. It was a moment of predictable carelessness that Reigen could capitalize on. And, bonus, the plates were right next to a source of water! So, all he had to do was build a home relatively near the kitchen sink, and he’d be all set. There was no way this could go wrong.
A month later, something went wrong.
“Oh dear,” the human murmured, frowning at the sink, and Reigen, watching from the ceiling, cursed his own carelessness. What sort of idiot would leave behind footprints?
Him, it turned out.
“Don’t tell me we have mice.” She sighed, running the plates under the faucet.
“Who’re you calling a mouse,” Reigen snapped bitterly, drowned out by the water rushing through the pipes.
After that incident, she regularly gave the plates a quick rinse in the mornings before leaving the house. And it didn’t take her long to find the holes Reigen had dug into the back of her sink cabinet. The poisoned bait she laid out was insultingly obvious.
“Aagh, what do I do?!” Reigen wailed, flopping on the insulation under the floorboards. This was just. So unfair! He’d finally found a chair (abandoned eraser elevated by thumbtacks)! He’d just installed a lamp (cannibalized penlight)! He’d recently upgraded his bed (empty tin filled with dried rice covered by a piece of ziploc bag)! (Surprisingly comfortable.) Was all of that going to waste?! Aaaaargh!!!!
Alright. Tantrum over.
Face-down in the insulation, Reigen considered his options. He still had an easy source of water, and he had some food stockpiled…but he couldn’t just wait and hope she would slip into old habits. Not to mention, it wasn’t a permanent solution; this could happen again, only she might resort to something worse than just setting out traps. He’d have to move to another house. Except, he didn’t know how far away the next one was—the safest thing to do was go back the way he came, back to his parents, and that would be absolutely humiliating, but he needed to eat—
Reigen blinked.
The human ate her meals upstairs. And she didn’t necessarily have the time to clean up immediately after. Maybe he could scavenge some scraps there?
But…he hadn’t really mapped out the house beyond the kitchen. He didn’t know how long the journey would take. He did know it would take a lot of effort (climbing usually did). And if he did make the effort, only to find nothing…
“Fuck it,” he muttered, starting to pack.
Navigating to the stairs was simple enough. He just had to walk with her, hidden under the floorboards. (Sort of. Obviously, she easily outpaced him, so it was more like lagging behind her.) The stairs were much closer than expected too, so he managed to reach them in a little under two hours. He probably could have gotten there even sooner, but frankly, there was no rush. He’d have to wait a day to make the climb anyways. It was the weekend.
The thing was, walking under the floors was easy. Floors (and ceilings, for that matter) were quite spacious. Meanwhile, walls were cramped and divided into narrow rectangles with beams you couldn’t squeeze around, meaning you could only go straight up or down. Why would that be a problem if he wanted to go up anyways? Well, because normally he’d set up pulley systems or ladders or anything that wasn’t just free climbing like an idiot. But Reigen didn’t have the resources. He had packed light—rations, basic first aid kit, sword, knife, a coil of earphones—because dragging a full bag up however many centimeters would be a pain.
Of course, since he couldn’t go up inside the wall, that meant. Climbing up the actual stairs. Out in the open.
It’s fine! This was why he was waiting until tomorrow, when the human went to work and the house was empty! He just had to climb an indeterminate number of steps in the eight hours she was gone!
“But Reigen,” (said a hypothetical critic he made up just now,) “if you’re waiting until tomorrow and it doesn’t actually take long to travel to the stairs, why not just walk back and get some construction materials to climb the walls instead?”
Because that sounded annoying and he was already here, (was how he’d respond to said hypothetical critic).
“I can do this,” Reigen told himself as he tried to sleep.
“I can do this,” Reigen continued to assert as he crawled out an electrical socket the next day.
“Why am I doing this,” Reigen said, glaring balefully at the first step, which stood above him with annoying stoicism. He tried jumping—his hand barely caught the edge, but not enough for him to get a good grip, and he fell back to the floor.
After a moment of well-deserved petulance, Reigen backed up a few steps and took a running jump this time. He clung on, his legs pinwheeling against the side of the step, before he managed to pull himself up far enough to throw one arm over the ledge, then the other, and finally haul himself the rest of the way onto the step, whereupon he flopped onto his side and took another moment of petulance with a groan.
He did this five more times.
“There has to be a better way,” Reigen panted as he dragged himself onto the first landing. It had only been ten minutes—probably less—and he was already tired of this. His knees hurt from knocking against the stairs so much. His back hurt from bumping against the bag with every jump. His arms hurt for very obvious reasons.
Reigen eyed the side of the staircase—a raised slope, interrupted at regular intervals by the banister posts. He could climb onto it easily, but the slope looked too smooth and steep to just walk. Though maybe…
Reigen balanced himself on the slope—bracing a foot against the post—and unshouldered his earphones. It took a couple of throws, but he managed to get the wire to loop around the next post securely, allowing him to pull himself up, gather the earphones, and repeat the process.
It was definitely slower. There were a lot more posts than steps and it usually took a few tries before he could make the throw. Gathering the earbuds also took up extra time. But it was better than jumping! (Instead of his entire body being sore, now only his arms were sore.) And besides, that’s why he gave himself eight hours to do this.
Overall, between the climbing and the generous hydration breaks, Reigen bested the stairs in—well, okay, he had no clue. He didn’t have a clock to reference. But it couldn’t have been more than two hours.
Right. So, where did the food go?
It wasn’t hard to figure out. Off to the right, several craggy crumbs broke the flat horizon of the hallway, leading to a towering door. He scooped a couple of them up on his way over (some rice and a bit of egg?) and, after a tight squeeze (a really tight squeeze) through the gap under the door, Reigen was free to explore the second room of the house that he’d ever seen.
The first thing that hit him was the mess.
“Yikes,” Reigen said, hiking past empty snack bags and overturned plastic cups. “Is this her room?” It was dark—the curtains were drawn—but that didn’t hide the piles of trash and stacks of boxes littering every available surface, from the floor to the table to the TV stand to the bookshelf. He paused by a herd of disparate wrappers and contemplated his bedding options. “At least there’s plenty of stuff to borrow.”
The second thing that hit him was large, warm, calloused. It came from behind, wrapped around him so suddenly that he didn’t even process what had happened until his feet had already left the floor. Reigen kicked and squirmed desperately as he was brought higher, higher, much too high, but froze as the world seemed to rotate, forcing him to confront a giant disheveled face. Reigen’s heart pounded in his ears as he watched a drowsy eye start to focus on him.
It turned out, the human had not been living alone.