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When the sun breaches the horizon to break the night into tiny shards of black and white, Hana finds herself already awake, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Daybreak has not yet roused the respective slumbers of Yuki and Ame, but with a lazy Saturday morning approaching at a snail’s pace, she doesn’t attempt to wake them before they do themselves. Though, the sausage and eggs sizzling away on the stove may have somewhat played a part, leaving Hana giggling into her hand when Yuki follows her suspiciously wolflike nose into the kitchen and stands on her tiptoes to get a glimpse of the breakfast so grand as to have broken her spell.
Ame is not far behind, trudging in half wolf half boy, with his tail dragging on the floor behind him and sleep still crusting the corners of his eyes. “Wha’s for brea’fast?” He manages to murmur out through a yawn. Before Hana can answer and give the sausages a rustle to make sure they’re cooking evenly, Yuki cuts in, “Eggs and sausage, dummy, what’s it smell like?” Ame glowers at her, and Hana tsks at Yuki’s name-calling. “Be nice.” She says, clicking her tongue.
Yuki sticks out her tongue at Ame’s sour expression, to which her brother mirrors the action. Hana sighs inwardly-- to come between sibling banter, though she’d never grown up with any herself, seemed rather pointless, as it would start up again the moment she took her eyes off them. So instead of fighting a battle she would never win, Hana turns the burner off and scoots a sunny-side-up egg onto each of their plates, along with three links of sausage and a serving of cubed potatoes she’d boiled then pan-fried that morning, as well. The two children are all but salivating when she manages to balance all three plates in her hands and on her forearms and bring them to their small kitchen table, barely big enough for them to set their places before a meal without their napkins and chopsticks intercepting one another. They must’ve had an especially good and long night’s sleep, because both Ame and Yuki can only wait a split-second after thanking those above for their food before digging in. Though Hana’s sure they aren’t eating because it’s the best food in the world, instead simply because they’re hungry, she still feels a sense of pride well up in her when Yuki finishes her plate moments before Ame and asks for seconds.
The trio’s weekends are rather stagnant for a family so unusual-- Saturday is laundry day, so Hana gathers together all of the garments strewn across Ame’s and Yuki’s respective rooms along with those that actually made it to the decently sized baskets she attempts to use as hampers and dumps them all into a tub filled with hot-bordering-warm soapy water, and gets to work scrubbing out the grass stains on the knees of Ame’s pants, and the spots littered around the collars of Yuki’s uniforms from eating messily at lunchtime. It’s during this time that Ame goes from half and half to a full blown wolf and runs from Yuki, also transformed, around the outside of the house in the glimmering sunlight. After what must’ve been an hour or more of play, they retreat inside for iced tea and lemonade, just as Hana is hanging the last of the laundry on clips on the clotheslines dangling from wooden beams in the back of the house.
Grandpa Nirasaki stops by that particular Saturday, just to check in on how Hana’s farming is coming along. She’s grateful for his guidance, even when it seems like there’s nothing to really check in on; today, he just pokes at the soil, and glances up at the sun a handful of times from under his floppy straw hat. Said hat was probably stiff and new at some point, but it’s been a long time since.
“Your radishes are doing well.” He mentions later, once he’s about to leave. Hana ducks her head to hide her grin, and politely answers, “Thank you for your help.” The older man huffs a breath out through his nose instead of giving her a proper you’re welcome, but Hana knows the ins and outs of Nirasaki’s personality by now. A small sound like that translates to something along the lines of no problem, something like anytime.
Yuki pokes her head out the back door, Ame hot on her heels and peering out below her. Though it’s been months, Grandpa Nirasaki is still a bit intimidating to her wolf children, and it’s likely not even because they’re worried about him finding them out. No, their irrational fear of him stems from their being young, and it’s not like Hana can ask them to get over something so characteristic of kids still in the single digits. So she just waits, inviting Nirasaki over for a meal when she has extra curry from dinnertime leftover, and smiling ear to ear when he does his own roundabout praise of her vegetable garden. Hana wonders sometimes what would’ve happened had he not taken her under his wing. She shivers; the thought of going hungry and the expressions on her kids’ faces when she’d break the news were too painful to imagine.
Later that night, when Yuki has procrastinated on her homework long enough and Ame has scared all the birds away from Hana’s crops, she puts them to bed. Tucking in Ame is an easy enough task, even though sometimes it’s for naught as she finds him curled up as a wolf in the center of his mattress, but Yuki is another story entirely. “I have stuff to do!” She protests, stamping her foot on the ground. “I got homework!”
On some days, Hana will sigh and give her ten more minutes to doodle in the margins of her notebook while pretending to study her notes, then tuck her in with slightly less complaining and whining that she’s “not a baby anymore”. Today, however, is one of the days in which Hana has other ways to tire her out-- “Do you want to do more homework?” She asks with a smile amidst her lips, and before Yuki can answer, she says, “Or do you want to stay up with Mom?”
Yuki’s eyes sparkle at the idea, like they do every time, but for Hana it never gets old. “I wanna stay up!” She squeals, bursting with excitement at getting to stay up past bedtime for once-- in reality, this is the third time this week, and the eighth this month, and it’s only the second week of August. But of course, like every time before, she’s overflowing with energy for the first ten minutes of following Hana around the house cleaning up odds and ends like she usually does before bed, yet nearly minutes after 8:15 she’s already running into things in her haze of half-sleep. Hana hides a smile behind her hand then, and leads her by the hand back to her and Ame’s room, where she climbs into bed without a complaint this time.
Hana doesn’t usually get up to much when Yuki and Ame are safely tucked in and fast asleep, but tonight she feels she deserves a treat for, well, managing, really. It would be difficult enough to raise two human children on her own, but no; she had to go and fall in love with the most handsome wolfman known to mankind. Or wolfkind? Either way-- Hana just seemed to grab the short end of the stick often times. That doesn’t mean she’d ever go back and change a thing, though, except for maybe asking the townspeople for help with her garden earlier on rather than holding onto the last of her pride like a frayed thread. And grilling her husband a bit more on how he was raised, too.
Still, she’s persevered, at least to this point. So Hana does what she’s been craving all this time, between doctor-veterinarian visits and parent-teacher conferences; she sits down and she reads. Not just any book, but actually one she’d started back when she’d met the wolfman himself, and just… never really gotten around to finishing. Life got in the way, you could say. It’s not like she minds that though, no, she does enjoy being busy. Just, it was still nice to take some time, even just a minute or two, for herself sometimes, to get back to her roots, to why she attended her fateful college classes in the first place.
Of course she’d had a major back then, too. She studied her languages, her sciences and mathematics, sure, and though it had been a pipe dream back then and still was even now, Hana had craved writing for a living. For now, living off the land was wonderful, and getting a job at the sanctuary outside of town allowed for a small wage to keep her family afloat, but her passion still lied in leather-bound manuscripts, in the moment when ink meets paper. Her husband had known this, and she’d known that he felt guilty for stealing it away with his family life, but honestly, Hana had felt she didn’t really mind. It wasn’t like she didn’t want to start a family of her own, anyway, she just had figured it would be a little later down the line.
Which, it wasn’t, but that was alright too. Hana was nothing if not patient.
So in this time she steals out of the day to use for her own dreams, she does one of two things: enhances her vocabulary via the greats (Tanizaki, Akutagawa, etc.) or the more modern folk (Murakami, Yoshimoto, etc.), or puts pen to paper and writes whatever comes to mind. Even if it’s word vomit, she figures, it’s improvement worth documenting, and anything that happens to flow out of her via ballpoint is something worth cherishing-- she gave it life from her own mind, and that has to mean something, she thinks.
Tonight is a night for the former, she finds. The next time she checks the clock on the wall she finds an hour and a half have already passed, bringing her to the edge of ten o’clock. It’s just seconds before the clock quietly chimes ten times to signal official nighttime that she slips into bed, still in her day clothes, and drops headfirst into slumber the moment her head hits the pillow.
Her dreams are abstract more often than not, but it feels as if there’s something nagging at the back of her mind even during sleep tonight. She feels as if she’s in a movie theater, watching images flash by on a screen surrounded by darkness, with discombobulated sounds piping up at all the wrong times.
He’s running faster than he’s ever seem to run before, and his legs are feeling the stress. Still-- he doesn’t have time to take a break, to slow down or to stop altogether-- this is the hunt, after all, and a proper inhabitant of the forest sees the hunt out to the end.
Reddish-orange fur streaks past him in a flash, and suddenly, the rabbit he’d been chasing is grasped in the jaws of his teacher, a fox that’d lived longer than he could conceive in his young mind. He watches the fox with dilated, trusting eyes, who watches him with a speculative gaze, as if searching for something behind his pupils and irises and tucked into the corners of his mind. He doesn’t dare look away for two reasons-- one, out of respect for the animal that’s taught him the way the life cycle works out here, the ins and outs of the ecosystem he’s come to cherish. He wants to protect it, just as his teacher does.
Two, out of fear that if he does look away, the rabbit will be discarded in favor of his own scruff.
The rabbit drops unceremoniously from the fox’s teeth, and red stains its tawny brown fur like ink on paper. He manages to keep himself from looking away-- to show mercy, in this forest, is to show weakness. There is a time and a place for everything, and it was this rabbit’s time to go, he knows. He can practically hear the fox’s voice echoing in his ears, regardless of the fact that this fox teacher of his does not make noise sans those a normal fox would, out in the wild like this. There is a time and place for everything, and it is not your time yet. You merely borrowed time from this rabbit.
With his ears drooped in reverence, he sniffs at the dead animal, lying still deposited before him. It smells tantalizing, and his stomach groans excitedly at the scent of fresh food. Wordlessly, he begins to eat. Blood and rabbit fur mix and coat his mouth and teeth, and drip to the ground as if marking this spot as someplace as not quite the same as everywhere else. The fox watches him with an expression somewhere between pride and stony-facedness. He does not eat, not even when the wolf nudges a rabbit leg over to him. He simply watches, eyes transfixed on the image of his wolf student digging ravenously into this small animal, so small that it seems like this amount of blood is unimaginable. He watches, as if searing the image onto the backs of his eyelids, so that when he blinks the dead rabbit’s empty gaze is all he sees.
When the wolf turns, she recognizes his face, even with rabbit fur and bright red coating his mouth. Ame looks back at her solemnly, and even as a wolf, she can see the melancholy in his eyes. It’s all she can do to keep from crying out, from disturbing the bond between trusted student and esteemed teacher. It’s all she can do to keep from reaching out to him, and mouth words he can’t possibly understand.
He’s a wolf, after all.
Hana wakes with a start. She clutches a hand to her chest, haphazardly attempting to steady her breathing back to a resting state. A bead of sweat snakes down her temple and onto her neck, but she’s so preoccupied with calming herself down that she doesn’t bother to wipe it away. Her breath evens out, slowly, but not before the sunlight manages to peek in through the cracks between her doorway and the floor. It drips through the wood like honey, seeping into the cup of tea she’s bound to shakily drink later that morning.
It’s not unusual for her to worry about Ame. It’s his life, his choice, but a part of her, as his mother, desperately hopes he’ll assimilate to the extent Yuki is. She hopes he’ll grow up and be truly happy, whether he has his own love story just like his mother or not. It’s just concerning to her is all, when Ame’s eyes look more and more animal by every day that passes ever so slowly, while Yuki’s round out even more, until the time comes that you couldn’t even compare them to each other. It scares her, just a little bit; the idea of not recognizing her own son as even half of her anymore, that is. She promises herself that she doesn’t mind if he chooses his nature as a wolf over that of a human, just-- it puts her out of her mind with anxiety, not knowing where to find him, not knowing how to see him when she wants to, not knowing how he’s doing. Perhaps it’s just maternal anxiety. Maybe all parents feel this way about their children growing up, too, regardless of if they’re half-wolves or not.
However, she doesn’t really have time to be worrying herself to death right now-- she’s got hungry kids to feed. So she pushes her worries to the side for now, and swings her legs over the side of her bed, yawning into her hand and heading wearily into the kitchen to prepare breakfast. Yuki and Ame are quick to wake as soon as they smell pancakes sizzling away in pats of butter on a worn cast iron skillet, and just their presence calms Hana’s nerves slightly. They dig in oblivious to her mind going a million miles a minute, and it’s somewhat comforting; just having her small family gathered here, in their own little world safe from anything that may go on beyond their house is the only reassurance she needs after a dream like that.
The sun is strong outside today, bearing down on Hana’s head when she goes to feel the temperature outside like a hot towel. If it were her choice alone, she’d stay inside and read or write to escape the humidity of the beginnings of summer, but alas, she has a garden to tend to, and more importantly, she has kids eager to explore, even after doing it time and time again almost every weekend. She supposes she can’t really discredit it though-- it’s much more open here than it was in Tokyo, and there’s always new things to discover. To her it might feel like the same refreshing landscape over and over, as contradictory as that sounds, but to Yuki and Ame it was still an adventure, and there were still new and exciting things to be found.
She herds the two into their room to get them out of their bedclothes and dressed properly for the day before she hears something out of the ordinary with Yuki and Ame both where she can see them (so she knows they aren’t making this particular sound)-- a scratching at the front door. It’s likely an animal pawing against the wood, she knows, but usually it’s Yuki or Ame, who think it takes too much effort to turn human just to open the door; after a solid twenty seconds, however, by which time Ame has pulled a shirt on but not pants and Yuki is still fighting a valiant battle against the buttons on her skirt, the scratching sound hasn’t stopped. Confused, Hana tells the two to wait for her at the back porch while she “grabs something from the kitchen” (a white lie to keep them out of harm’s way, just in case).
On her doorstep, sitting perfectly straight with one paw extended towards the door that drops when she opens it, is a full-grown fox.
Hana nearly trips over her own feet when she stumbles backwards in surprise, her initial fear as a human being that it was looking for its next meal and just happened to pick its seat on her porch with a patient stomach. However, when it doesn’t pounce within one second, then two, then five, she feels her terror fade and relaxes her stiffened posture, if only a little to begin with. She opens her mouth to speak, only to realize that she can’t really talk to a fox , and though Japanese she doubts it speaks any language other than fox.
They just stand there, staring at each other for a couple moments, until the fox sniffs the air and takes a step inside, glancing around with its small brown eyes as if searching for quick and/or possible exits in the worst case scenario. When Hana just watches it with wide eyes instead of making a move to stop it from entering, it trots inside past her and into the hallway, making a beeline for Yuki and Ame’s room.
That is enough to get her to throw on the panic switch in her head. She hastily runs after it just as it pauses to stand in the open doorway, skidding to a stop and barely keeping from knocking the fox over like a bowling pin. “No.” She says, louder than she means to while not meaning to say anything at all to begin with. The fox doesn’t seem to hear her and surveys the room, only to acknowledge her a second later by turning its head and looking at her inquisitively. Hana takes its moment of silent inquiry as a chance to gather her thoughts, and think of how to proceed in this situation.
“What are you here for?” Is the answer she comes up with for what to ask it, even if she has a nagging feeling that it can’t understand a word she says. The fox doesn’t answer, obviously, and sniffs the air instead, its snout turning to point in the direction of the back porch. It sniffs once more, still pointing, then returns its tame gaze to Hana, looking at her with eyes that feel a bit too knowing for them to be that of a fox and not a human. She puts two and two together fairly quickly, suddenly recalling Ame’s mention of his teacher from the forest over breakfast vividly. “Ame?” She asks the fox, kneeling down to look it in the eyes properly. The fox says nothing once again, but she feels like its posture turns just the slightest bit lax when she says her son’s name, and its pupils dilate in confirmation. She bites her lip, hard.
As if on cue, Yuki pushes open the door to the hallway and calls out, “Mom! Are you done?”, startling Hana and the fox both. Ame nudges past her with rather insistent movements, and all but somersaults into his wolf form when he sees his fox teacher and his mother, both looking in his direction with concern in their eyes (though what kind is unclear). He dashes over, moving as fast as his paws will take him, and slams on the brakes just before he runs straight into Hana. She smiles a tiny smile at his rushing-- Ame has never been quite this enthusiastic about anything other than play and spending time in the forest. Though, considering this fox seems to be exactly the reason he goes there in the first place, she thinks she can understand.
The two nudge each other with their noses for a moment, and the fox makes a quiet yet high-pitched noise, which makes Ame’s tail stand up straight in the air. Hana raises her eyebrows, alarmed at his body language, but he makes a similar, more wolflike noise back before letting it fall back into a slight wag. It’s at that moment that he transforms back halfway to a wolf-boy, turning to her with such an unusual frantic look that she nearly starts out of pure surprise. “The forest,” he says quickly, then pauses as if unsure how to explain what he’s about to say and continues just as fast, “the forest is sick. It needs my help.”
Hana kneels there for a split-second, going through a flash of pained emotion so quickly that neither Ame nor the fox nor the onlooking Yuki realizes it. Your son is growing up , an oddly masculine and familiar voice in her head murmurs, sounding somewhat as sad as she feels in that short moment. Our son, she thinks instinctively, and when left without a response, she nearly furrows her brow in confusion at whose voice that was, echoing in her mind like a love past but not dimmed.
She makes up her mind in the next moment, when only a quick beat of silence has spread across the room, thin enough for her to smash through it as fast as she can. “Please, Ame.” She says in a hushed tone, bringing him in for a crushing hug as if trying to channel her emotions through that one touch. “Be safe.”
When she pulls back, Ame’s expression hurriedly morphs from the verge of tears to that of a strengthened resolve, and he nods so assuredly that Hana trusts him instantly without the telltale beginnings of worry in the back of her mind. He turns back into a wolf, sprinting out the door hot on the now-running fox’s heels as soon as he does.
And just like that, they are gone.
Hana stands and runs towards the back porch doorway, Yuki following her rushed movements with a quivering lower lip. They manage to get out the door and get a glimpse of the fox and Ame right before they dash straight into the forest snaking around the base of the mountain, the two hidden from view by the dense foliage and their shade. Hana runs out into the back garden as if to follow, Yuki mirroring her actions, until she stops and realizes what she’s doing. “Mom,” Yuki asks with a wavering voice once the fox and Ame have long gone from their sight, “is the forest gonna be okay? Is Ame gonna be okay?”
Hana looks down at her daughter then, who’s clearly sharing the same scared feelings and worries piling into the pit of her stomach, yet still encapsulated by the sun’s bright rays, dripping across her eyes like paint as if they weren’t also glistening with tears of frustration and fear of the worst. She gazes down at Yuki, who is still completely human amidst all this, yet it still looks as if she has her tail between her legs. Hana has to look away, back to the forest, before she breaks down into the tears the other is barely holding in. In that moment, that shard of time before she reassures Yuki that Ame will be alright and so will the forest so they don’t have to worry, she thinks of the sunlight shining through the treetops and casting light on everything it can reach, even the ants on the forest floor. She wonders if that same light is watching Ame, even when she cannot.
She looks back down at Yuki, still trembling and waiting for an answer. “It’s alright.” She hears herself say, in a tone so sure she doesn’t dare question it. “Ame will be alright, and so will the forest. Everyone gets sick once in a while. Even me.”
Yuki blinks away the waterworks again, though they seem to be already subsiding at her words. “Even you?” She asks, her voice sounding like she already knows the answer, but also like she won’t be able to hold herself together if she doesn’t hear it aloud from Hana. Her mother nods, and a small, warm smile makes its way onto her lips as she threads her hand through Yuki’s hair, gently ruffling the top as she looks up at the sky, the sunlight painting her features so vividly as if she were a work of art. “Yes.” She confirms, quietly and assuredly. “Even me.”
Somewhere on the mountainside, she swears she hears the howl of a wolf.