Archive of Our Own

“Shigeo, sweetheart, I need you to hide,” his mother tells him. Her voice has taken on the kind of strangled desperation that tells him she’s doing her best not to panic as she grabs him by the shoulder and crowds him toward a ground-level cabinet where she’s already squirreled his brother away. Outside, he can hear the muffled sound of an intense argument, his father’s calm voice cut off by the loud shouts of whatever angry people have come to bother them this time.

And Shigeo goes without a word, clambering into the cramped space on all fours, because this isn’t the first time he’s been made to hide. He’s nine years old and he has seen the cramped darkness of the cabinets more times than he can count on his fingers, fingers tipped with sharp talons that humans recoil from when they see them. He’s nine years old and he knows what human hatred feels like.

Ritsu is waiting for him when he crawls into the back corner, his tiny arms wrapped around his quivering legs and his pitch-black wings wrapped around those, and he stares up at Shigeo with wide, dark eyes filled with anxious tears. “Shige,” he manages with a quavering voice, but Shigeo just holds a finger to his lips.

“We have to be quiet, remember?” he says in the calmest voice he can muster, doing his best to squash down his own inhibitions as he fits himself into the corner next to Ritsu. He stretches out a single black wing and lays it over his trembling brother’s back like a blanket, tugging him against his side until he can wrap him up in a comforting embrace. Ritsu hides his face in Shigeo’s shirt, tiny fingers holding on too tightly, too fearfully, and Shigeo can only hold him back and wait with baited breath while his parents handle things outside.

It’s hard to hear what’s going outside with the sound muffled through the walls, but Shigeo can hear the shouting, the fighting, and worst of all, the screaming. He claps his hands over Ritsu’s ears instinctively, his young mind desiring nothing more than to spare his younger brother the pain of listening, but that leaves him with nothing to block the sound out for himself. He curls around Ritsu protectively, lifting his dark, mottled wings around them like a shield, but it does nothing to dull the noise. He feels it in his blood, in every beat of his racing heart, and the screams echo in his mind long after everything goes quiet outside.

He doesn’t let go of Ritsu, doesn’t dare to move a feather. His mother’s instructions play out in his mind--“Don’t come out until I come for you, no matter what,”--and so he presses himself firmly into the corner of the cabinet under the kitchen counter, hugs his brother close to his chest, and listens for any sign of someone approaching.

The door to their quaint little house cracks open, and Shigeo’s ears are filled with unfamiliar voices.

“You sure they had kids?” One of them says, speaking in a tongue that Shigeo is only slightly familiar with. It’s the language of the humans from the nearby village, so different from his own native tongue, and while he understands what the intruders are saying, his brain is nearly too foggy to make sense of it. He wants to know where his parents are, begs for the time when his mother’s smiling face will appear in front of him to let him know that it’s okay now, he can come out, they’re safe, and the people who had dared to try to harm them are long gone now.

Instead, he just hears a second voice bark back to the first, “Yeah, I’m sure. The female hid ‘em somewhere, I’m sure of it. We can’t let ‘em get away, or they might come back for revenge.” The words that reach Shigeo’s ears are thick and cruel, holding no hint of reason or remorse, and Shigeo is hit with the sudden, sinking realization that his parents won’t be coming for him after all.

There’s a numbness in his blood that starts in the pit of his stomach, and he has to clap a hand over his mouth to stifle the distraught sob that catches in his throat. His other arm holds tight to Ritsu, so tight that he can feel his own pulse in the tips of his fingers. He feels tears in his eyes, sliding down his cheeks and dripping between his fingers, but he’s frozen in place, every muscle in his body tensed tightly so as not to give away his location. No matter what’s going on outside, he knows that he can’t let them get to Ritsu, not ever. He’ll die before he lets them harm a single hair on his brother’s head.

The footsteps shuffle around wordlessly for a little while, and Shigeo hears the occasional scratch of furniture being shoved aside and upturned, the noise of doors being opened and slammed thoughtlessly shut again. He listens as they grow closer and closer to where he and Ritsu are hiding, louder and more bold. “I think they’re over here,” one of the men yells to his companion. They’re directly outside his cabinet now, and he can see their shadows through the cracks in the door.

In his arms, Ritsu lets out a quiet, terrified whine against his will, and the sound of it sends a surge of protectiveness through him. The feathers on his wings fluff up threateningly, held around the two of them like a dome to protect them from harm, and he feels a familiar tingling in his chest. It’s a surge of power, present and roughly tamed, the result of his meager attempts to garner control over his magical abilities. He reaches for that power now, searching for something, anything, that can save their lives.

The cabinet door swings open, and Shigeo is grabbed by a rough, calloused hand that fists itself in his hair and pulls, hard. He shrieks, less of a human noise and more of an animalistic warning cry, a noise built to startle away animals that would encroach on his territory. Ritsu is torn from his grip, pried out of his fingers roughly and against his will, and he screams again, high-pitched and filled with rage.

“Shut up, you brat!” The man holding him hisses, pushing his head into the ground and stepping on his back with one booted foot. Shigeo gasps, the breath knocked out of him and a stabbing pain digging into his skull where it connects roughly with the wooden floor. “Troublesome monsters, you disgust me,” his assailant continues ruthlessly, and the cold steel of a blade presses against the side of his neck, so sharp that it tears through the first few layers of skin with hardly any force at all. The smell of blood reaches Shigeo’s nose, sending a fresh thrill of fear down his spine. He can feel his meager control over his magic wavering, searching desperately for an outlet.

Across the room, Ritsu screams, and Shigeo hears a resounding crash. He tries to move his head, to see what they’re doing to his brother, but the hand in his hair is firm and unwavering, and keeps his face pressed hard against the wooden floor. Shigeo reaches up with one hand, blindly scrambling for a hold on the man, to throw him off, to scratch him, to do anything at all. He knows he isn’t strong enough to do any real damage to a fully grown human man, but surely there must be something!

His fingers close around the man’s bare arm, sharp talons digging into his skin without mercy, and like a storm brewing just below the surface, static prickles at his skin and surges down his arm. It’s a rush of unrestrained, unstable power, barely contained from outright exploding by the fact that it’s centered on the man currently holding him down. All he can think is that he doesn’t have the time to fight, Ritsu will die if he waits too long. He wants to terrify this man the way he’s been terrified, and then terrify him even further, until he can’t even move from the potency of the fear he feels.

Something clicks, and immediately the hand on his head and the foot on his back disappear. The blade at his throat clatters to the ground, and Shigeo snatches it up before it can be reclaimed, clasping it tightly in both hands as he stumbles to his feet and whirls around to face his attacker.

But the man isn’t facing him. He’s scrambling toward the wide-open door, nearly tripping over his own feet in his rush to escape a perceived terror, and Shigeo realizes that his spell has worked. Clutching the stolen dagger in one hand, he immediately turns toward the crash he’d heard earlier and sees his brother, doubled over on the floor, blood dripping from his nose and mouth and onto the floor beneath his crumpled form. There’s a red stain spreading on the front of his shirt, and Shigeo sees that the fabric of it has been sliced clean through to the skin below. Ritsu’s attacker is coiled over him like a venomous snake preparing to deliver the killing bite, the dagger in his hand dripping Ritsu’s blood onto the clean wooden floors of the house. His other hand is fisted in one of Ritsu’s wings, holding it at a deliberate angle with tightly clenched fingers even as Shigeo sees Ritsu struggle to pull it free. He flips his blade in his hand, holding it up in preparation to bring it down on the juncture between wing and shoulder.

Shigeo feels like he’s going to explode, a ball of tension coiling in the center of his chest and erupting. He drops the stolen dagger and lunges for Ritsu, putting himself between his brother’s prone form and the blade that swiftly comes down on him. He grits his teeth and throws out his hands to catch it before it can find its mark, uncaring if it puts him in harm's way as well. One of his hands closes around the man’s wrist, talons digging unabashedly into his grimy flesh, and the other intercepts the blade. He feels the sharpness of it dig into his bare hand, cutting a painful line across his palm, but he doesn’t dare flinch or recoil lest the blade find his neck instead. He can already feel blood slicking his palm where the dagger has cut it, but he refuses to relinquish his hold even as the man instinctively attempts to pull away. With his talons deep-set in the man’s offending arm, he lets loose another surge of magic, this time on purpose, willing his feelings of fear to take hold and multiply.

He releases the man when he starts to struggle, and watches as he, too, erupts into panicked cries and scrambles to get away from him, his face distorted into a potent, intense fear. The sight of it makes Shigeo flinch; he had caused that fear, he was the reason two grown men were so eager to get away from him. He lets loose a shaky sob that’s been caught in his throat, staring down at his quivering hands. The palm that had stopped the blade from grounding Ritsu drips blood down his arm, and now that the fight has been won he can feel is stinging terribly. He curls in on himself, clutching the wound close to his chest and feeling tears sting his eyes, tears of pain and grief and overwhelming fear. Behind him, Ritsu stirs, a whimper of pain escaping him as he curls around the blood that seeps from his abdomen.

That sound alone is enough to snap Shigeo out of his trance, and he falls to his knees at Ritsu’s side with a shaky gasp. “Ritsu?” he stammers, his voice quavering almost too much to speak, and he gathers Ritsu into his arms in a panic. He tucks Ritsu’s head against his shoulder and lets his torso lay across his lap, his legs splayed out uncomfortably in front of him without the strength to move them himself. He holds Ritsu against him with one arm around his shoulders, clinging tightly, and with his free hand he pushes Ritsu’s bangs away from his face, smearing a bit of blood from his split lip across his cheek as he does. Then he reaches down and presses his palm against the wound under his brother’s shirt, crimson seeping between his fingers and staining his tanned skin. “It’s okay, Ritsu, we’re safe, it’s okay,” he sobs, and his tears drip onto Ritsu’s face and mingle with his blood, running in rivulets down his face and neck and soaking into the collar of his shirt.

Shigeo holds his hand against Ritsu’s wound until the bleeding stops and his brother gives in to unconsciousness, and he doesn’t stop crying, Ritsu’s head cradled against his chest and his blood leaving dark stains on the floor beneath them.

---

There aren’t even bodies left over to bury. All that’s left of their parents is scattered feathers and bloodied grass, but Shigeo knows there’s not a chance that they’d survived. It doesn’t stop him from searching, just to know that he’s tried, but in the end, he and Ritsu are alone. The scars on his neck and palm throb, and he knows that Ritsu’s hurt even worse.

---

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Shigeo asks, wringing his hands in front of him. He looks up at Ritsu in apprehension, his dark red eyes doubtful.

Ritsu gives a firm nod, kneeling down in the grass, and he motions for Shigeo to join him. “The spell will keep us safe,” he promises, reaching out to take his brother’s hands in his. “You’re going to lend me you power, but I’m the one who’s going to cast the spell. ” He gives Shigeo’s hands a squeeze and offers him a small smile. “If you’re not ready, we can wait.”

Shigeo shakes his head. “No, it’s fine. I guess I’m just a little nervous… I’ve never used my power the way you want me too, and I’ve definitely never given it to another person,” he admits, swallowing thickly. “This was your idea, and I’m going to give you the power to cast, but it’s going to be our trap, a combination of our magic. It’s going to be strong, and I’m not sure what my magic might do in someone else’s control.” He grimaces, glancing down at their joined hands. “Still, I won’t let it hurt you,” he assures, and his words overflow with an uncharacteristic sense of confidence in his skill. He’s thought this over countless times, and he knows that if it’s Ritsu, he can control himself. Even if his magic sometimes proves more volatile than he’s able to handle.

Ritsu takes a steadying breath, and nods. “Okay, let’s do this,” he breathes, and the spell begins.

It doesn’t take much. Shigeo reaches inside himself for the reservoir of power that resides there, opens the levy just enough to let a trickle of his power flow in Ritsu’s direction, and keeps his mind carefully blank. The tie his power has to his emotions is potent, and if he isn’t careful, he might affect Ritsu’s mental state and concentration, so he keeps his heart carefully empty in a way he’s practiced many times before. The power flows like a weak stream out of him and into Ritsu, who gathers it up like yarn into a ball and channels it into his spell. Ritsu murmurs under his breath, words in their native language, carefully weaving together a net that will keep potential threats away from their cobbled-together home. Shigeo listens and can’t help but admire the skillful, deliberate way Ritsu builds his illusions, rarely practiced but coming to him with the ease of a natural prodigy. When Ritsu tugs on his hands he increases the power that flows between them, the effort rather miniscule on his part. When Ritsu falls quiet and opens his eyes, Shigeo boards up that door once more, cutting off the stream at its source.

A second passes, and then Ritsu doubles over, head in his hands, and lets out a grunt of pain.

“Ritsu! Are you okay?” Shigeo exclaims, reaching out and taking his brother by his shoulders to keep him from falling over entirely.

Ritsu winces, shielding his eyes with one hand. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” he assures through clenched teeth. “It’s just an-- augh --a killer headache. I guess my body isn’t really equipped to take in so much power, huh?”

Shigeo frowns, Ritsu’s crude sense of humor not quite landing, and gives him a quick once-over. “Did… did it work?” he dares to ask, casting a trepidatious glance at the woods not twenty feet away from them.

Ritsu follows his gaze, letting out a deep, shaky breath. “I think so,” he replies uncertainly, squinting at the treeline as though it will help him better deduce if his plan had been successful. He stands up and tugs his shoulders free from Shigeo’s grip, crossing the small stretch of grass to stand at the edge of the woods. He lifts a hand and cautiously presses his palm against the trunk of the tree for a few moments, smoothing his hand over its rough bark, and then he turns on his heel and fixes Shigeo with a bright, excited grin. “It worked.”

Shigeo pushes himself to his feet and goes to stand at his brother’s side, confused, but when he reaches out himself and brushes his fingertips against the very edge of the forest, the magic of the place shoots up his arm and down his spine like a static shock. He jumps, surprised, and takes a step back. “It’s strong,” he marvels, and the feeling of it is undoubtedly familiar. It feels like himself, like his own magic, with a hint of Ritsu’s illusory aura clinging to it like a second skin.

“Of course it is, it’s built with your power,” Ritsu laughs, amused at Shigeo’s alarmed response. “Breaking a spell like this would take ages, I don’t think I’m even powerful enough to do it myself. There’s no way any humans are getting through here alive.”

Shigeo drops his hands to his sides. “I hope you’re right,” he murmurs, but the wording of it rubs him the wrong way, just slightly. He stares into the darkness of the shrouded woods, the trees too thick to see very far, and wonders what it might feel like to find himself endlessly trapped within its depths.

---

He doesn’t have to wonder for long. Three days after he and Ritsu lay their spell, he feels it: like a pressure headache building at the back of his skull, something pokes at his mind, and he winces, a little noise of annoyance escaping his mouth. Across the table from him, Ritsu also lets out a grunt, his hand moving up from where it had rested on the table to clutch at his forehead. “Ow, what the heck?” he groans, dropping his dinner fork with a clatter.

Shigeo meets his gaze, confusion creasing his brow. Something about the headache feels wrong, like it’s not entirely natural, and it fades quickly once it’s hit him. In its place, an image flashes across his mind, like a memory, but he knows it’s not an image he’s ever seen before. A woman crosses an invisible line and walks into a grove of trees, a basket nestled in the crook of her elbow. Her long skirts brush the grass, and she fiddles with her hair with her free hand, twisting it into a tight bun with expert fingers. Her face is unfamiliar, but at once he feels like he knows her. She’s peaceful, happy even, determined to scavenge what she can from the woods to sell once she gets home. It’s as though her very thoughts become apparent to him as the image stamps itself against the back of his eyes and sears itself into his brain.

“What is this?” he demands, voice wavering as his apprehension and dread seep into his words. He stares into Ritsu’s dark gray eyes and knows that he’s seen it, too.

Ritsu leans forward, threading his fingers into his bangs and pushing them away from his forehead with a shaky breath of disbelief. “That’s our forest,” he says quietly, his eyes darting back and forth along the edges of the table. Shigeo can see his mind whirling, every cog of it turning at once as he struggles to unravel the puzzle they’ve found themselves suddenly thrust into. “Is this…?”

Shigeo’s blood runs cold. “It’s our spell,” he realizes at the same time Ritsu does, tripping over his own tongue as he voices his epiphany. “It has to be, but it’s not possible. It’s just an illusion, it shouldn’t be able to show us anything--”

“Unless it’s feeding off of you,” Ritsu interrupts, voice low and eyes wide. He stares, his face a mix of abject horror and awe. “This is-It’s not what we planned, but it-I think our magics may have mixed.”

It’s a side effect. Ritsu’s illusory magic mixing with Shigeo’s empathy and pasted onto the whole of the woods has created a link, an invisible thread tying them both to the trap. Shigeo can feel it at the back of his mind constantly, the sensation that someone has found themselves within the walls of their spell, like a psychic link that lets him peer just barely behind the curtain of their thoughts and emotions. “What does this mean?” he manages, struggling to form a coherent thought in the face of this unexpected development.

Ritsu swallows thickly. “I don’t know,” he admits, and doesn’t say another word. Neither of them speaks for a long time after that.

---

Shigeo decides that he hates the spell.

Notwithstanding the now-frequent headaches he gets whenever someone new decides to enter the forest, there’s now a sense of impending doom that comes with the arrival of each new visitor, a realization that each time someone wanders too far into the trees, they’ve reached the scene of their inevitable demise. It’s the point of the trap, after all; hunters who would enter the forest in an attempt to find and kill them are cursed to wander the woods until they starve to death and are eaten by wild animals. It’s an illusion that makes them walk in endless circles for days on end, a lush, green wasteland devoid of edible plants or water of any kind. They can’t change the forest itself, but the illusion is powerful and lifelike with Shigeo’s endless fountain of magic powering it. It’s so powerful, in fact, that Shigeo begins to doubt if even he can break it, should he ever decide that he needs to.

No matter how much he thinks, Shigeo can’t find out how Ritsu isn’t affected by it. His brother goes on with his life like normal, barring the occasional pause to wince at a new headache, and for a few days, they don't think about it.

But the feeling is palpable, it claws at the inside of Shigeo's mind and demands to be heard even as listening to it tears him up from the inside. He feels the horror of a woman trapped, her calm disposition turned to frightened thoughts and anxious wandering, searching endlessly for an end to the woods that will never come. Her basket is empty and the land around her is dark and barren, the trees too thick to see through. He hates that he can feel how scared she is, her desperation to find an exit that isn’t there and that never will be. It kills him inside, knowing that the only way she’s going to leave the forest is by dying there.

He doesn’t know if his connection with the forest is stronger than Ritsu’s or if his brother is just really good at isolating and ignoring that feeling, but he doesn’t seem nearly as affected by it as Shigeo is. Still, he can tell that Ritsu feels for him, that he wants to take that burden away, to destroy it somehow, but there isn’t anything he can do. Instead, he just sits on his bed with Shigeo, propped into the corner, and holds his brother tight as he cries into his shirt. His wings, now even bigger than Shigeo’s are, fold over him like a blanket and pull him close as Shigeo feels the presence of the woman disappear from his mind, powerless to do anything to save her.

It’s the hardest night of his life, he thinks, the night he becomes implicit in the death of an innocent young woman.

Not everyone who comes into the forest after that is innocent. Shigeo feels them all, feels the pain in his head that signals their entry every time. Once the stories start to spread, that anyone who enters the forest will never make it home, the people daring to venture past the treeline become fewer and far between. Those who do always have a grand goal in mind: for many, that goal is to slay the beast that slumbers in the woods, feeding on any who dare to encroach on its territory. Monster hunters, town heroes, foolhardy young men desperate to make a name for themselves; one by one they enter the forest, and none of them ever come out.

Shigeo wonders, sometimes, if the spell is worth the baggage that comes with it, the deep despair he feels whenever he senses that someone has died because of his and Ritsu’s magic. He’s never wanted to hurt anyone, and he knows Ritsu never has, either, but anytime he tries to convince his brother that maybe it had been a bad idea to cast the spell in the first place, he gets the same response.

“That spell is the only thing keeping the hunters from coming to kill us, we can’t afford to take it down,” he insists, the way he always does.

“But Ritsu-”

“I know you think it was a bad idea, Shige, but aren’t you tired of running?” Ritsu demands, turning to face his brother head-on. “Sure, it’s not perfect, and it didn’t work exactly like we hoped it would, but it’s getting the job done. I know you don’t like it, I don’t like it either, but I’m tired of hiding in the cupboard, waiting for someone to come murder me. It’s about time the humans had a taste of that fear.”

The vengeance in his brother's eyes frightens him to see, the burning anger that he’d only ever witnessed on the faces of humans before now. His brother’s eyes are dark and cold, and he feels any argument he might want to make die in his lungs. He has to stop himself from physically flinching.

Something like recognition dawns on Ritsu’s face, and then a flash of regret so strong that Shigeo feels it in his blood, like his empathy is screaming at him that something is wrong. Then, all too quickly, it’s gone, replaced with a careful somberness. “This is for the best, Shige, I know it is,” he says softly, and turns to walk out the front door with a broom clutched tightly in his hands.

Shigeo hates the spell. He hates that it kills people, he hates the fear it creates, he hates that it’s caused a sliver of doubt in his brother to worm its way into his head and nest there, like a parasite. He wants to trust Ritsu, but his words cut deep, and Shigeo finds he can’t get them out of his head.

---

Shigeo approaches the forest. It’s midday, but he’s already exhausted. There are dark bags under his eyes, bruises that result from the lack of sleep he’d gotten the previous night. There had been another casualty, another person lost to the ravenous woods. Shigeo can’t even remember why they’d come in the first place, he only remembers their fear and regret, potent and overwhelming, chasing him under the covers of his bed but refusing to let him rest. He feels terrible.

He pauses at the edge of the woods, lifting a hand to press it against the trunk of one of the trees there. Beneath his fingers, he feels his own magic thrum, overlaid by Ritsu’s illusory influence. He lets out a shaky breath, trailing his fingers over the bark and letting its edges dig into his fingers. It feels good, to let something hurt him for a change.

He presses his forehead against the unforgiving wood, uncaring if he gets splinters or cuts his face accidentally. It would be just a sliver of payback, he thinks, for everything his trap has done to others. The bark against his head is uncomfortable and unyielding, but he refuses to move, stubbornly clinging to that sensation as though it can offer some form of retribution to him.

He doesn’t move an inch until he feels it, the stabbing in the back of his head that tells him someone new has entered the woods. Like a conditioned response, he feels the dread fall over him, weighing down his shoulders and constricting his chest. The images in his mind are incessant, taunting, teasing him for being powerless to do anything but wait and watch from afar.

It’s a boy this time, he realizes, and the vision of the boy in his mind is young. In fact, Shigeo thinks, he can’t be much older than he is. His shoulders are still slim, not quite broadened like an adult man’s would be, and his face carries a sort of youthful roundness to it that suggest he’s somewhere in his late teens. He doesn’t look very happy, his mouth set in a hostile scowl, and the blade at his hip and the bow on his back give him away: another hunter, come to search for him. He looks ready for a brawl, his straw-blond hair pulled back into as much of a ponytail as he can muster, though strands of it still escape in places and frame his face where they’re just too short to reach. His dark blue eyes dart back and forth through the trees, searching for any sign of movement.

Shigeo takes a step back, removing his forehead from the tree, but his hand lingers. I should go home, he thinks to himself, shoulders slumped forward in defeat. There’s nothing I can do. Ritsu is right, this is for the best… Still, a part of his mind questions that notion. Is Ritsu right? Shigeo had always found his brother to be unshakeably smart and incredibly level-headed, at least when it comes to situations like these, but the last few weeks since raising this trap had proven that Ritsu’s judgement could still be clouded under a certain amount of emotional strain. Shigeo wants so badly to see the carnage ended, but he cannot go behind his brother’s back like that.

There’s still a chance for this stranger, though, he thinks with a flicker of hope. A chance to go back home, to forget his quest and save himself. Shigeo may not be able to alter the trap, not like Ritsu can, but his presence can shatter it in the mind of their visitor, if he plays his cards right. It’s dangerous, and he knows this--the boy is a hunter, come to kill him, he’s sure--but he can’t help but take that chance, to place his bets on the possibility that maybe some humans can be reasoned with. He knows not all humans are bad, he’s felt it himself in the hearts of those who dared to enter the woods, he just needs one example to prove him right.

He swallows down his apprehension. Ritsu will be so angry, he thinks, but the rebelliousness of the idea only fuels his sudden giddiness, the surge of hope he feels that maybe, this could really work. He removes his hand from the tree and takes a deep, steadying breath, and then he crosses through the invisible barrier that separates himself from the forest.

He’ll have to be fast. As soon as he crosses the threshold, he knows that Ritsu will be alerted to his presence in the forest and come running after him, so he knows he doesn’t have a lot of time. He sets a brisk pace, reaching out in his mind for the hunters presence and clinging to it. It burns, his blind hatred and fury a contagious force that Shigeo finds himself battling against constantly as he walks. He folds his wings close to his back, ignoring the way tree branches snag on his iridescent feathers and pluck them from his bones in anger. He shouldn’t be here, but he can’t turn back now, he’s already taken the first step.

The forest isn’t large, despite what Ritsu’s illusion would have him believe. Just being aware of the trap and its magic is enough to keep it from affecting Shigeo, and he banishes it from his mind with a simple thought the moment it tries to take him over. He knows the boy is close, can practically see the gold of his hair already, and just to be safe, he lets the magic at his core spread throughout his body and thrum at the tips of his fingers. He doesn’t want to fight, but he’s not naive enough to think it will be so easy to change a hunter’s mind. His defences are strong, and he’s confident in his ability to defend himself, even if he’s not so confident in his ability to fight back.

As he nears the boy’s location in his mind, he slows, his footsteps coming quieter and more deliberate. His lightweight body, built for flying, makes hardly a dent in the forest floor as he creeps stealthily forward, poised to react to anything that may jump out and try to attack him. He feels the anxiousness now, setting his nerves to frazzled ends, and his eyes dart back and forth to every shadow in his path, watching, waiting. He doesn’t have to wait long.

He hears the boy’s annoyed grumbles before he lays eyes on him, catching flashes of yellow hair through the trees. Shigeo tenses as the boy rounds the corner, hunkering down just a little in between two trees and folding his dark wings close against his back. They’re too large to hide fully, and he can’t use illusory magic like Ritsu to make them disappear, but he can at least lower the impact they’ll make.

It doesn’t do much to stifle the reaction. The boy rounds the corner, shining gold hair a beacon in the shadowy woods, and freezes the minute he lays eyes on Shigeo. He can see it in the boy’s eyes: his surprise, recognition, and then his anger. “You,” he spits, gripping the short blade in his hand tighter. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“I know,” Shigeo replies, and tries not to let his nervousness creep into his voice, “and I know what you’re here for, too.”

The boy jolts, taking a step back in a clear recoil. “It speaks,” he gasps, shock written all over his face.

Shigeo has to keep himself from bristling in response, fighting the instinctively twitch of his wings. They fluff up in the face of danger, an instinctive response to ward of predators, but it won’t work against a hunter like this. Instead he attempts to make himself harmless, holding out his hands placatingly. “I just want to talk, please,” he reasons, attempting to make himself small and non-threatening. The last thing he wants right now is to provoke any sort of fight. He hasn’t even brought a weapon with him. He’d considered, before he left, taking the human blade with him, the one that had given him the scar at the edge of his throat, but he’d left it behind in the end, certain that he wouldn’t use it even if it becomes necessary.

“I have nothing to say to you, monster,” the boy spits, brandishing his blade in front of him with one hand and dropping into what is clearly a fighting stance. “I am Hanazawa Teruki, the greatest hunter of my generation, and I’m not going to let you kill anyone else!”

“I’ve never killed anyone,” Shigeo tries to say, but Teruki is already advancing on him with careful, calculated steps, searching for the right way to approach. Shigeo shrinks back, away from him, and his hands twitch in front of him, magic on the tips of his fingers. 

This only seems to anger Teruki, who surges forward with a yell and jabs his blade at Shigeo’s torso. It bounces off a wall of force, a translucent shield that ripples in hues of purple and pink before dispersing with a flash of light. Teruki seems unfazed by its appearance, feinting to the side before striking again. “Liar! No one who walks into this forest ever comes out, and yet you’re here! You must have cursed this place, that’s the only explanation!”

Shigeo flinches back as the sword bounces off his shield again, the little barriers only big enough to repel the attack and nothing more. If he wanted to, he could raise a dome around himself, a bubble that the boy would never be able to break through, but he can’t help but feel like that would do nothing but threaten Teruki even further. “Please, I don’t want to hurt you,” he begs, taking a step back for every step Teruki takes forward. His heel catches on a tree root at he does, Teruki’s blade catching him on the shoulder and slicing through his skin where it’s bared by his thin shirt. He cries out, more in surprise than pain, though the shallow wound definitely stings. He slaps a hand against it instinctively as he stumbles to regain his footing. The feathers at his wrists and shoulders stand straight up, as though reacting to his fear, and he quickly forces them flat again the way a cat might smooth its bristling fur.

Teruki has given up on speaking, eyes narrow and cold as he devotes himself whole-heartedly to the chase. Even as Shigeo stumbles, he doesn’t let up, reaching out with his hand and grabbing hold of the end of his wing to tether him in place. His blade comes down, aimed at the junction between wing and shoulder, and Shigeo’s breathing stalls in his throat.

He feels the panic before he realizes it’s there, eyes blowing wide open. He feels Teruki’s fingers grab a fistful of his feathers and pull, the sensation halting whatever words attempt to crawl up his throat and out his open mouth, and he chokes on a fearful scream, because the way Teruki is moving, he’s in position to sever his wing from his body entirely.

He’s not sure what he does, but he hears his own strangled cry echo in his head as he raises his hands to his face as though to protect himself from Teruki’s incoming attack. His hair is whipped away from his face by a sudden wind, and he hears the sound of trees creaking all around him. In front of him, Teruki yelps, stumbling backward, and a few of Shigeo’s feathers go with him, ripped from his skin with a painful tearing sensation. Shigeo is still shielding his face, curled in on himself defensively, the shallow cut on his shoulder dripping blood down his arm. After a moment, he cracks his eyes open slowly, reluctantly, and feels the dread already pooling in his stomach. He claps a hand over his mouth in horror.

He’s lost control again, the fear in his mind seizing hold and lashing out in his defense the way it always does when he finds himself in danger. He claps a hand over his mouth. All around him, in a twenty foot circle, the undergrowth has been ripped from the ground and scattered, and though the trees have somehow survived, Teruki hasn’t come out unscathed.

Physically, at least, he looks okay, just a bit scraped up and dumbfounded. He’d stumbled back a few feet before he’d managed to find his footing again, but the blade in his hand is gone. A moment later, Shigeo spots it, stuck into the trunk of a tree over Teruki’s shoulder in two pieces. It’s been broken clean in half, leaving the human unarmed.

Shigeo draws a shuddering breath through his fingers. “I didn’t mean to,” he starts, but Teruki cuts him off.

“I knew it,” he snarls, clenching both of his hands into fists. “I may not be able to see it, but I can tell that you’ve cursed this place, it’s obvious! That magic… this place is just a huge trap that you set!” He points a finger at Shigeo, speaking through clenched teeth.

Shigeo’s heart drops into his stomach, because if Teruki recognizes he’s trapped, the spell won’t work on him anymore. Regret seeps into his bones; he’s messed up, and now he’s going to pay the price. There are tears in his eyes, stinging his skin and clouding his vision. “Please, just go home,” he manages around his shaking voice, backing up a step and wrapping his arms around himself.

There’s a dull throbbing in his head, the kind of headache he always gets after a rush of uncontrolled magic like the force he’d nearly unleashed on Teruki, but as he speaks, the headache suddenly triples in intensity, a fierce, stabbing pain at the back of his skull that Shigeo is now familiar with. Ritsu is coming.

He doubles over, head in his hands, fighting a pained grunt, and that’s when Teruki seizes his opportunity. He lunges forward before Shigeo can recover from the flash of images and emotion he finds himself sorting through, and his fingers curl around Shigeo’s throat and squeeze.

Shigeo gasps, the force of Teruki’s desperation causing him to fall backwards. He loses his footing, his legs swept out from under him by the force of Teruki’s collision with him, and he hits the ground roughly, wings and shoulders scraping against the hard earth below. He chokes on a cry, Teruki’s fingers crushing his windpipe and cutting off the breath he desperately wants to take. His hands snap to Teruki’s arms, talons digging into his skin as he tries to wrestle the boy off him, brain running on instinct now in the face of a life-or-death situation. His thoughts are frantic, thoughts that this boy is going to kill him, that he’s messed up, that Ritsu is going to walk in on a killer standing over his lifeless corpse, and then what? Would his brother die too, or would he kill to protect himself?

Tears fall from Shigeo’s eyes, tears of pain and sorrow, and in his mind, the image of his parents, bloodied and lifeless on the grass outside his family home, flashes in his mind. He’d never actually laid eyes on their corpses, but he can imagine it now, and that fresh feeling of fear and sorrow and confused anger comes flowing back to him full-swing.

Teruki kneels over Shigeo’s torso, boxing him in as his fingers press dark bruises into the skin of Shigeo’s throat. His teeth are tightly clenched, and his arms tremble; Shigeo can’t tell if it’s fear, remorse, excitement, or just plain adrenaline that fuels it, but he can feel the quivering against the skin of his neck as he tries desperate to pry those hands away. His talons draw blood, but Teruki does not move. I’m going to die, he thinks to himself with a flash of terror, and squeezes his eyes shut.

As a last-ditch effort, he sends a surge of power down his arms and through the tips of his talons, urges it to spread through Teru’s body to his brain. He doesn’t know what he’s trying to make Teruki feel, the message he’s trying to convey, but it’s the fear and remorse that surges through his hands on instinct, the feelings of loneliness following his parents’ deaths and his Ritsu’s bloody form in his lap. He transfers his own debilitating grief over them, over all the people who had died trying to cross the forest, over his estranged relationship with his brother, over the divide that grows ever-wider between them as the days go on and on. He sends them all to Teruki in a flash of purple light, and fights the fuzz that prods at the corners of his vision.

Teruki lets out a gasp, deep and horrified, and at once the weight on his torso and the fingers at his throat disappear. Shigeo can’t even see where Teruki has gone through the static in his vision. He rolls onto his hands and knees, sucking in deep, loud, gasping breaths and then hacking them back out in choked coughs. He clutches at his stomach with one hand, tears and drool dripping onto the dirt beneath him. Only once he’s managed to regain control over his breathing long enough that he no longer worries about passing out does he look to see where Teruki has gone.

He’s fallen backward and scrambled a few feet away, and now he’s staring at Shigeo with wide, fearful eyes. Shigeo is certain now that the quivering of his arms is fueled by terror, terror at him . “What did you do to me?” Teruki demands, pushing himself shakily to his feet. “What is this, a curse? An illusion, like this forest? I don’t want to see these things!” The pitch of his voice grows by the second, confusion and frustration fighting for dominance over his ever-changing expression.

Shigeo opens his mouth to speak, to apologize, to say he’d had no other option, but he can’t find the breath to speak just yet. He breaks off into another coughing fit, scrubbing the spit from his chin with one arm.

He hears voices, someone calling out, but the sound doesn’t quite reach his ears. All he can hear is ringing, and his brain has gone quiet, shut down in the face of his near-death experience. Behind him, Teruki lets out a long string of curses, and Shigeo turns around enough to see him flee back into the trees, out of sight.

A warm hand finds its way between his shoulders, and he flinches away from it before he realizes that it’s Ritsu, who’s come to crouch in front of him with dark, panicked eyes and a steadying hand on his back. “Shige?” he asks shakily, the first word that reaches Shigeo’s brain through the fog and the ringing. “Shige, say something, are you alright? Oh my god, what happened? Why did you come out here?”

Shigeo looks up at his brother through blearly eyes, still breathing heavily. “I’m sorry,” he manages, voice hoarse and scratchy. “Ritsu, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.”

“Shigeo, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ritsu sighs, helpless, and grasps his brother by the arm. He helps him to his feet, eyes filled with unwithheld concern as he looks his brother over. He sighs softly, deliberating for a moment before he lays an arm around Shigeo’s shoulders and starts to tug him back in the direction of their house. “Let’s just… get you cleaned up, okay? Then we can talk,” he decides.

Shigeo wraps his arms around himself, shoulders hunched up around his ears in shame as he lets his brother lead him back home. He doesn’t say another word, not even as Teruki’s emotional presence fades from his mind and the connection is lost.

The walk back home is quiet and tense, and Ritsu sits Shigeo down in one of the kitchen chairs immediately and crouches down to pull a bin of medical supplies they’ve stocked up on from the cabinets beneath the wooden countertop. The box takes up the space that used to be reserved for hiding, that dark back corner where he and Ritsu would stash themselves away in hopes of avoiding detection by angry humans. Ritsu straightens up, the box in his hands, and stares into it with downcast eyes. He lets out a quiet sigh, shoulders slumping, then turns resolutely back to the table, pulling out a chair so he can sit across from Shigeo on the same side of the table. “Let me see your arm,” he murmurs, but he refuses to meet Shigeo’s gaze, just stretches a hand out expectantly.

Shigeo gives it to him, peeling his hand away from the bloody wound on his arm so that Ritsu can get a better look at it. He winces as Ritsu turns his arm this way and that, careful not to scratch him with his talons as he prods at his cut with a wet rag. There’s blood on his wing, too, from where Teruki had forcefully ripped the feathers from his skin, but he’d missed the flight feathers, thankfully. It would be a pain if he’d gotten himself grounded in his impulsiveness.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, after a long, uninterrupted stretch of silence. “I don’t know what I was thinking.” It’s a lie, he does know, he knows exactly why he’d done what he’d done, and despite everything, he can’t bring himself to feel remorse, aside from a little guilt that he’s making Ritsu take care of him. “I guess I’m just sick of watching them die.”

They’re sitting close enough together that their knees almost brush, and Ritsu leans close to reach the wound on his arm, but the distance between them has never felt greater to Shigeo. He feels stiff as Ritsu covers the scratch with a clean white bandage and moves to get the blood out of his feathers as much as he can.

“I know you are, but that was just… so incredibly stupid of you!” Ritsu scolds in response, carefully picking through Shigeo’s dark feathers and dabbing away the redness that stains them. “Out of everyone, you had to pick a hunter? You know better than this, Shige, we both do. He could have killed you.”

Shigeo doesn’t answer, just slides down a bit father in his seat and hangs his head. There’s nothing he can do to defend himself. He’d gone in knowing the dangers and what was likely to happen, and things had gone exactly as he’d predicted. It isn’t enough just to blindly hope, he thinks to himself bitterly. He falls quiet for another few moments, words on the tip of his tongue that he isn’t sure he should speak. I hate this… the tiptoeing, the hiding. He clenches his hands together, and lifts his head. “I want to take down the trap,” he says finally. He starts out firm, but his voice cracks partway through his statement, a bit of his trepidation at even proposing the idea creeping through.

Across from him, Ritsu goes stock-still, his hand still holding the end of Shigeo’s wing. He looks shocked for a fleeting moment, and then his face goes stone-cold the way it always does when he’s trying not to show his fear, his nervousness. “You know why we can’t do that, Shige--”

“Why can’t we?” Shigeo interrupts in a rare burst of genuine annoyance. He’s tired of the two of them always dancing around the issue, always choosing not to argue when it’s so clear that they need to. He raises a hand to his chest. “I can break the spell if I try, I know I can, and then no one would have to die anymore.” Again, his voice cracks, wavering with the hard-to-control emotions that he usually keeps tightly guarded, the kind that become fuel for his wild magic. He curls his fingers into his shirt, gripping the fabric like a lifeline. He can feel tears stinging his eyes. “I can’t take it anymore, Ritsu, it’s killing me, and I know it’s killing you, too. Please, we can come up with another way.” His eyes flick back and forth between Ritsu’s, searching for sympathy, for agreement, for anything to show that his hunch is right.

Instead, Ritsu drops the wing he’s holding in his lap, letting the end of it fall to the floor before Shigeo instinctively pulls it to rest against his back. He stands up abruptly, the wooden legs of his chair screeching against the ground. 

“Ritsu?” Shigeo calls tentatively, his voice quieting in the face of his brother’s impregnable silence. “Let’s talk,” he pleads, reaching for his brother’s hand, limp at his side, with one of his own. More than anything, Ritsu’s silence is the thing killing him now, the uncertainty of it stabbing into his chest and festering there, like a poison.

Ritsu shies away from his reaching fingers, drawing his hand up to his chest, and Shigeo gets a good look at his face; disbelief, astonishment, and finally anger. “What’s there to talk about?” he snaps, clenching his hands into fists at his sides. “You know exactly what will happen if we break the spell, Shige! They’ll kill us both without a second thought, just like they killed Mom and Dad! Is that what you want?”

“No!” Shigeo says immediately, but his thoughts become muddied and frantic under his brother’s spiteful words, words that hold behind them the anger of years spent quietly simmering, a hatred beyond anything Shigeo has ever experienced, and one that only builds the farther they get from their parents’ death-day. He presses back into the chair, trying to make himself as small as possible. He has no reason to be afraid of Ritsu, his baby brother, his best friend, and yet he feels it now, irrationally, a thought that worms its way into his heart. He looks down at his lap. “Ritsu, do you… does it make you happy, that the humans are dying?”

Ritsu sucks in a breath, anger melting immediately into an intense shock, and then he spins on his heels, turning his back to Shigeo. For a moment, he’s quiet, and then Shigeo hears his sharp inhale before he says, “I’m going for a walk.” With that said, he quickly walks to the house’s front door, pulling it quietly shut behind him.

Shigeo is left behind, fingers outstretched in front of him, and then he lets his head fall into his hands with a shaky sob.