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There once was a girl who lived in the woods.
Nene Yashiro is her name.
In the morning she laces her boots up tight and knots her red hood the same. Because today is the day she heads through the woods to deliver her basket of sweets, of donuts and candy and sugary delights much more than one girl can eat. So she’ll travel to Aoi’s to share her bounty through brook and bramble and tree.
Because wolves only prowl at the edges of twilight, and really, how bad can it be?
It’s dawn when she leaves for her perilous quest with her head held high to the clouds that fester and swirl to harbingers of doom, but she blows them away with her doubts. She knows these woods better than any creature, any wolf, any rabbit, or mouse.
“Just stick to the path,” her mother always said, “be good and you’ll reach the house.”
There once was a girl who lived in the woods.
Every tree looks the same. Every branch, every notch. Every patch of dirt leads to leaves and shadows and every trail circles back to her own worn set of footprints.
Nene isn’t sure when she strayed from the path. There’d been fireflies, she remembers, and tufts of lavender cuffing the edge of obscurity. There’d been brambles. A shout. A slip sending her round ankles swinging up over her head and the rest of her body tumbling down a cliff.
Now there’s silence, framed neatly by the elegy of crickets and crows.
And howling.
And wolves.
It’s getting dark, and her thin-worn cloak does little to break the snaps of the wind.
Stupid, stupid, stupid! Just stay on the path! That was all she had to do! Just one simple thing she couldn’t even get right! And now look at her- hopelessly lost to the whim of the woods. Probably being circled by wolves this very instant, ready to string her guts like Christmas lights.
Dead meat.
Nene wants to cry, wants to dissolve into a puddle of sobs and sorrow. A good cry session is certainly long overdue, starting with her bad date with Fuji-kun and compounding all the way up to her demise at the hands of wild animals. How typical. Just call her Nene Yashiro, queen of bad luck. If there were any way for her to go out, it was just like fate to make it messy.
But she doesn’t. She holds it together, tucks her sobs and weeps behind a lopsided pout and claps her face back into the submission of rationale. No, stop this Nene! She has to be strong! She can’t cry now- that would just lead to a million questions at Aoi’s sweet and sinister hands when she finally arrived. And she would be arriving safely, in one piece.
And she really doesn’t want to talk about Fuji-kun again.
So she gathers up her courage, her skirts, her basket, and pushes herself to her feet. Head held high, spirits higher.
It only takes one glance upwards for the world to be ripped out from under her with a sharp crunch as her bottom meets leaves.
Because in front of her stands a boy. At least that’s what she thinks. A small boy, a child, draped in shadows and alabaster. He smiles ear to ear, tooth to tooth, the kind that scrunches his eyes into amber moons as it battles for the largest feature on his face. She’d call him cartoonish if he wasn’t very much living and breathing down the fuzziness of her awareness.
“Are you lost?” he asks in a voice much higher, much sweeter than she expected. His mouth remains tacked in place even as he speaks, never faltering once from that cheshire grin. A ghost, she thinks, that’s what he must be. A ghost that died smiling so wide that it froze to his face.
“W-who are you?”
A laugh- “A traveler, a guide for the right price”- and a bounce with mischief barely contained in his small frame. He’s not much older than herself, she reckons, or even perhaps a bit younger as he stands a walking anachronism of clothes stitched two centuries too late.
How odd.
“You are lost aren’t you though?” he echoes again, “I can show you the way- if that is, you’re willing to pay.”
“You know the way out?!” she shouts, and he chuckles wryly.
“Of course, of course! What good would I be if I lost my way?”
And it’s with his tease that she realizes just how helpless she stands in the shadow of night. Alone. Unarmed. Lost hopelessly beyond repair all of her own accord. Enough to make a girl cry if her fear didn’t keep her propped upright onto shaky ankles.
“This price,” Nene manages in a low but firm voice, “what would it happen to be?”
And he hums, clicks his teeth, and frowns into a thought so deep it could give him wrinkles. Takes a swaying step closer into the dull shimmer of dusk. He’s wearing a hood much like her own, she realizes now- except black, and clasped with gold.
“Perhaps I’ll take………”
He steps closer. Too close. She can feel his breath on her face, hot and humid. And in the instant she recognizes the precarious situation, his hand snatches to her side, to her wrist, to her-
Basket?
The shock of his quickness leaves her frozen as he drags the wicker up between their faces.
“How about this?” he chirps, nearly knocking her to her bottom once more in shock and confusion melding quickly into annoyance at his glee.
“The basket? It’s just sweets,” she explains in a protest, “and they’re for my friend.”
“Well now, your friend won’t be getting them if you don’t make it out, will they?”
Damn him.
She could smack the smug straight off of his face that instant. That might relieve some of the built up self-inflicted stress. But she doesn’t.
Instead, she holds out her basket.
“Fine. Take ONE.”
That’s all he needs to hear.
Because it’s with those magic words that he snatches a plain donut from the batch and gobbles it whole like a ravenous animal. A beast. A child. Quite disgustingly. Didn’t his parents teach him manners?
And as he scarfs down the snack, she lets her shoulders relax a bit as the tension fizzles into dust.
“My name is Nene. Nene Yashiro,” she announces with little necessity and a lot of foolishness. But she doesn’t really care. Giving her name to a strange forest boy with a penchant for sugar seems the least of her worries.
And he knows this.
Because he grins, licks his lips clean of crumbs and peels that grin back into place.
“Well Yashiro, you can call me Hanako-kun.”
And she thinks that she will. She certainly will.
There once was a girl who lived in the woods, who followed a boy astray. Because Nene foolishly ambled from the path and lost the light of day. So she wanders her hand close to his side and keeps her tongue in place as he tells her the tale of forest beasts and the monster that stole his face.
“How rude!” he says with a laugh and a kick, “That creature to take my spot. What did I ever do to deserve a second rate wandering lot?”
And she laughs with him, at a joke so foreign she can’t seem to pick it out. But it’s fine, she thinks, because he knows the way beyond a shadow of a doubt. He’s Hanako-kun, for goodness sake, the guide of the darkened woods. And really, how bad could he be, she reasons, with a payment of sugar baked goods.
So he leads her across every moonlit stream, every bramble, creak, and field. He shows her the skies speckled with fireflies and bushes with blue blossom yields. And Nene thinks how, when she arrives, she’ll snuggle up next to the fire and give thanks for a boy in a black silken cloak who averted her trip from the dire.
But her journey continues as the night wears on and Nene can feel a chill. She grips at the hand of her travel companion as they amble their way through the hills. Because now is the time when wolves will prowl in search of a meal by the moon, and she can hear howling and snarling and growling in the distance to catch them soon.
“Fear not,” he says with that jack-o-lantern grin, “for the wolf cannot do you harm should you hold your breath and count to seven. I promise, it works like a charm.”
“To seven?” she counters, her ruby eyes wide, “why seven? Not six, or eight?”
“Because seven is the number of the beast of this place, to which it is bound by fate. For a wolf cannot hunt without the consent from the cowards who let him in.” There is no jest in the tone of his voice, and his mouth is taut and grim. And quietly, she nods, and lowers her head as the night air clips her voice. Because the wolves are howling much closer now.
And really, does she have a choice?
There once was a girl who lived in the woods.
She stands silent. Still. Forces herself upright despite her quaking knees mourning her feeble choice. Instinct pulls at every hair on her scalp to run, sprint, get away from whatever crunches through the underbrush just out of sight.
Lurking.
Waiting.
Hunting.
Hanako is nowhere in sight. One minute, he was there, the next….gone. Just gone. Like a wandering spirit. She doesn’t know when she lost his hand, but now she stands alone with the crisp autumn air and the weight of her own anxiety.
The night is growing colder. Darker. Settling into her bones with a centuries old frost best taken in small doses.
A cold she could slip comfortably into and fall to an endless slumber.
Cold as the dead.
She hears a footstep.
A voice.
“There once was a girl who lived in the woods.”
A voice that’s…..familiar somehow. A voice that she’s certain she knows.
“Where has she gone, I wonder?”
“Hanako-kun?”
It’s Hanako. It has to be, she knows that voice! Her heart soars into relief as she rushes to meet the song laced between the trees.
“Hanako-kun!” she cries, much louder than she intended and drenched in a desperation she’s certain she’d be embarrassed of had her situation been any different. But she doesn’t care about her anguish bleeding through. She’s much too dizzy from the brunt of her own solace.
“For friend or foe? She’s yet to know-”
“Hanako-kun! Where are you?”
“That there’s a wolf prowling under.”
It’s a stray branch that sends her tumbling to her face, snapping her breath from her lips. And it’s her own yelp in surprise that brings the footsteps to a grinding halt to drench the forest in somber, sickly silence.
Deadly.
Dead.
And it’s that moment that she sees him. A boy, about her age, with wide amber eyes jutting from the hollow of his face and a smile pressed cleaner than a sunday suit.
“Hanako…..kun…………”
But not really.
Not quite.
He doesn’t catch her gaze from her position among the mud and leaves- a fact she thanks the heavens for as he prowls past, eyes flicking wildly between the trees. Searching for something, but she’s not sure what.
Hunting.
“Where is this girl from the woods Amane? I want to play with her too.”
The girl from the woods.
Her heart drops to her stomach.
She needs to leave. She needs to push herself up and run, shout for help. She needs to flee from whoever this boy is that causes every instinct to shriek, but fear knots her body into the ground and leaves her frozen in place.
She needs to run.
She needs to run.
She needs to run.
Run.
Nene pushes her hand to the ground.
There’s a crack, so soft, barely above a whisper, but just enough to snap his head to her own.
“Found you.”
That’s all it takes.
The fear snaps in an instant, and she’s running. Sprinting. Tearing through every muscle in her body as her lungs scream in pain and fear, as air fills her chest and threatens to drown her and swallow her whole in an instant.
There once was a girl who lived in the woods.
The boy’s on her heels. Panting. Huffing.
Snarling.
Snapping.
Not a boy, not anymore. A beast. A monster of the forest.
And her, a rabbit. A fool.
A meal.
There once was a girl who lived in the woods.
He’s close. He’s upon her now. Just but a hair from her hood that flaps in the wind at his jaws. Her mind has blanked except for one thought, that this is the place that she dies.
Silly Nene Yashiro, who couldn’t stay on the path.
There once was a girl.
No. Keep running.
There once was a girl.
No. No. Faster. Keep running -
A girl.
Nonononono-
A crack rings out.
And suddenly she’s sliding into the trunk of a tree as the wolf is sent barreling past in a flurry of fur and yelps.
Her eyes spin through her skull and ears circle through the ring of pitch as her one moment of chance drags her into the bushes out of sight. Because two breaths later, the wolf is stalking back. Eyes wide. Lips curled. Paws twitching.
“Where is the girl who lives in the woods? I promise I just want to play.”
Her heart lodges itself between her teeth as she frantically tries to recall those words. Damnit what had he said? Hold your breath can count to…..count to……….
“I’ll be sure to be gentle and fun as can be. I’ll make this a great final day!”
Five? Ten? Fourteen? No, not those not those it was- it was-
“Come out, come out, Amane can share~”
Seven! That was it! Hold your breath and count to seven!
So she does-
Presses her hands over her mouth as tightly as possible and squeezes her eyes shut.
“Where aaaaaare you-”
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Six.
“Goodness, you couldn’t do that from the start?”
Her eyes snap open just as a pair of fingers jab to her forehead.
………Seven.
There once was a girl who lived in the woods, who awoke in the arms of a boy.
With wide amber eyes and a cat-curled smile, whose face sparked to life and to joy.
“You’re awake!” he exclaims, laughing just a bit, “I was starting to think you were gone.” And she lifted her eyes to a treeless sky and the clouds kissed in pink by the dawn.
I’ve made it , she thinks nearly ready to weep with relief that flushes her face red like the cape that’s now tattered and torn from her trek as it tumbles from the crown of her head. And when he allows her to stand on her feet, she rushes her way to the town, to the cottage she knows means safter and shelter from monsters born after sundown.
And Hanako stands and watches her go, till she turns with a sunshine grin. “Please come in,” she offers, “you saved me after all. And my thanks I can’t even begin.”
“Are you certain?” he asks just barely a whisper, “Are you sure you wish to repay me? You set yourself free from the wolf’s sharpened grasp, I only offered the chance to go free.”
“Nonsense!” Nene shouts, and pulls him inside, “your warning is what saved my skin. Had I not known to count but to seven….well those thoughts I don’t wish to begin.”
So Hanako enters as she peels off her cloak, singing away in her joy. Because what wondrous luck dear Nene did have to find such a kindhearted boy.
“.......You forgot.”
She stops.
“I forgot what?”
“The end of my warning, my dear. That wolves cannot hunt but through the consent of those fools who will let him near.”
And he locks the door closed.
Pulls back his hood.
Twitches his ears made for beasts.
Flexes his smile into a wide snarl of sharpened and ravenous teeth.
There once was a girl who lived in the woods.
But the paths have not seen her in months.
Because the girl must be lucky again and again-
But the wolf need be lucky but once .