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The village Tanjiro grows up in is small and homey. Tanjiro knows because Nezuko tells him sometimes, a sigh on her voice as she recounts tales passed to her from the people who stop by the inn. In the capital, she says, the roads are all paved, the homes built up to the sky. There are enough restaurants that she could spend a lifetime trying all of them and still never find an end to them. When the weather is nice, sometimes you can see the royalty travelling the streets in their carriages, and if you’re especially lucky they might even wave to you.
“It sure would be nice to go,” Nezuko never says, but he can tell that she wants to. The village is too small for her, the monotony of daily life making her feel claustrophobic at times.
Tanjiro feels differently.
Every day, he wakes up with the sun, goes into the forest with his father, and cuts down lumber for the townsfolk. It’s hard, meager work, but it’s all he’s known, and he finds peace in carving his living from the sweat of his own back. And it’s not as if the countryside doesn’t have its own mysteries to be solved.
In a town as small as his, rumor passes from one mouth to another like social currency, the villagers bartering one’s gossip for another’s hearsay. For the last year, the name on all of their lips has been a man they call Blue—for the color of his hair and clothes, and for lack of any other name by which to call him. Everything down to his gender is hotly debated, as they say his face is beautiful and fair enough to match even Nezuko’s. (Tanjiro doubts this.)
Nezuko herself says that she believes that Blue is a man, although even she can’t claim to be entirely certain.
“I’ve never heard him speak,” she admits as she’s brushing her hair one morning. “Whenever he wants something, he gestures at it.”
The rumor mill says that he’s a mute. That he’s a noble from a neighboring country. That he’s a phantom buying goods with the riches that he never got a chance to spend, having died so tragically, so young.
Tanjiro knows not to put too much stock into what people say. For a while, all anyone could talk about was the three-headed serpent that someone’s husband had seen. As it turns out, he’d been on his way back from the pub, and the serpent was actually a cluster of vines along the side of his neighbor’s house.
The fact of the matter is that, whoever or whatever Blue is, he only comes to the village once a month, and only in the mornings, when Tanjiro is working in the forest with his father. He doubts that they will ever meet.
Until they do.
Tanjiro catches an unfamiliar scent on the air one day as his father’s negotiating with the carpenter’s son, who is notorious for being stubborn where business is concerned. The scent is floral and dainty, like someone’s bathed themselves in roses and wildflowers, standing out like a sore thumb against the burning fireplaces and ripe animal smells he’s come to associate with village life. It’s clean and proper. Foreign. He gets his father’s permission in the form of a nod and a wave before going off on his own to follow it.
The trail winds through the village, across the little brook by the neighbor’s farm and all the way through the town square, past the town crier and a bit further still, until Tanjiro finds himself in front of the bakery, straining with his nose to the air. For how close the scent is now, it’s dwarfed by the rich, buttery aroma of freshly-baked bread.
Tanjiro’s thinking about how he hasn’t had lunch yet when the door opens.
The person who walks out is dressed in a vested suit of royal blue and gold fabric that glitters in the sunlight, lacy at the cuffs and puffed out over his chest, where a frilly white tie is pinned in place by an emerald brooch that matches the color of his eyes. His body is unmistakably masculine, clothes not quite nice enough to mask the thickness of his muscles, but Tanjiro understands all of the confusion when his eyes meet the man’s face.
Ethereal isn’t a word he’s ever thought of, but it drifts to mind now. Tanjiro thinks he looks like a character from one of the stories that his mother used to read to him, back when he was too young to know better than to beg her to.
His hair is long and pure black except for the ends. He has it tied up behind his head, but a single lock has escaped and hangs down beside his face, the blue tips blending into the blue of his vest.
That’s why they call him Blue.
Tanjiro realizes he has to say something. He’s been rudely staring for long enough that the man has noticed and is glaring at him through narrowed eyes and shockingly long, dark lashes. It makes Tanjiro uncomfortably aware of his own clothes, dirty and left hanging open after spending all morning working the forest. Tanjiro hurries to button his shirt together as he takes a step forward.
“Hi, I’m Tanjiro,” is what comes out when he forces his mouth open. “What’s your name?”
He’s glancing between his shirt and the man, so he doesn’t quite see how it happens. Blue lets out a deep, animalistic cry, and Tanjiro looks up just in time to see him tear his vest open. Golden buttons fly off in all directions, one of them hitting Tanjiro square in the forehead before dropping down to roll across the ground at his feet.
“Um.” Tanjiro’s smile falters as he attempts to find a proper response. Blue smirks at him, raising a brow in challenge. Exactly what the challenge is meant to be, Tanjiro is unsure, and he doesn’t have time to find out when Blue’s hands move back to his clothes.
Before his ivory buttons can follow after his gold ones, Tanjiro dives forward, grabbing at Blue’s wrists.
“Stop!” he says, then startles as the man reacts by struggling violently, trying to wrench his arms away. Tanjiro holds tight, grunting out, “You’re making trouble for the person who mends your shirts!”
This makes Blue pause. He looks down at his vest and opens his mouth, stopping just short of a response. His gaze flashes back up to Tanjiro, who scrambles to put together an encouraging smile. Speak , Tanjiro urges silently, because it’s clear the man can speak, but is choosing not to.
Tanjiro doesn’t know what he wants him to say, only that he wishes more than anything to have his words.
Blue snatches his arms back and holds them at his sides, fists clenched. He opens his mouth again, as if to say something, but hesitates, gritting his teeth in a snarl. The expression twists his beauty, transforming the elegance into something wilder that makes Tanjiro’s heart stir anew in his chest—and then Blue turns on his heel and runs, sprinting off like he’s being chased. Tanjiro stares at his fluttering coattails, at his back getting smaller. He watches him go until he can’t anymore, his form vanishing into the distance.
It isn’t until the following day, as he’s running a finger over one of the golden buttons he gathered from the road, that he realizes he should’ve followed.
Tanjiro keeps the buttons with him wherever he goes, tucked away in an embroidered handkerchief that Hanako gave him for his birthday. He does it so he can return them when he sees Blue again, he tells himself, but the truth is different. If he only wished to return the buttons, then the fastest solution would have been to hand them to Nezuko, who has far more opportunity to meet the man. But he doesn’t. He keeps them in his pocket so he can feel them at his side throughout the day. Sometimes, he sticks his hand in to feel the weight of them against his palm, just to make sure they haven’t disappeared. The scent of them covers his fingers afterward, and he finds excuses to bring his hands up to his face to indulge in it.
He does it frequently enough that he’s memorized the smell by the time he next catches it on the wind. Roses and wildflowers, fresh rainwater and the faint musk of a man underneath it all. Tanjiro’s nose shoots up into the air, making his father startle beside him.
“Smell something good?” he asks, but Tanjiro’s already gone off, following after it, so he calls after him. “Be careful that you get home soon! I don’t like the look of those clouds.”
Tanjiro doesn’t have to look up to know. He saw them when they left the house: dark, gray, and roiling. It will be fine. He’ll be back as soon as he returns the buttons.
The scent leads him off to the east, deep into a part of the forest that Tanjiro’s only entered a handful of times. Apparently all of the trees on the mountain are owned by a nobleman who does not permit them to be cut, so they stake their earnings further south. Hunting is the only thing that ever brings them to this section of the woods, and they never stay long. Another rumor that the men of his village are rather fond of concerns a beast that lives near the mountain, half-boar and half-man. He’s said to attack on sight and chase hunters from their bounties, although Tanjiro thinks it's somewhat more likely that the tale has been invented to excuse their failed hunts. He makes a note to move quickly regardless.
Eventually, he reaches the foot of the mountain, where the trees part. He’s never gone in this far, and so when he’s met with a massive, spired caste, he slows to a stop, staring in awe. In the past, when they were both a bit younger, Nezuko had been enthralled with castles, and she’d always come to show him whenever she found a picture in one of her books.
The castle he sees now reminds him of some of the more fanciful ones she’d show him, often from fairytales or an artist’s imagining. It’s tall and vibrant, constructed of white stone and red-tiled roofs, towers shooting into the sky as if to pierce the sun.
Smoke drifts lazily from a chimney. Far away in the courtyard, laundry dries in the open air.
Tanjiro does not see a single person.
Tanjiro gets as far as the drying laundry. There’s been a scent growing as he approaches the castle: sweat and fur, all the greens and browns of the forest. He doesn’t think much about it until it shifts, moving overhead in an arc, straight for him.
He doesn’t even have time to look up. Tanjiro leaps backward, falling sprawled on the pathway, and narrowly avoids the swing of two long, whip-like laundry poles. They clash to the ground between his legs, followed by the sound of his attacker landing heavily in front of him.
As Tanjiro’s scrambling to make distance between them, a rough voice demands, “What do you think you’re doing in my manure?”
“Your man…” Tanjiro pauses, cringing as he looks down and is relieved to find only stone under him. “Your manor, you mean?”
And then Tanjiro looks up at the man who attacked him and realizes the rumors of a half-boar man were true.
He’s heard of beastmen from Nezuko’s books, of a fur-covered people with teeth like daggers and claws capable of tearing a person apart. They’re illustrated as hulking, drooling things whose humanity is retained only in their two-legged physique, in the small glimmer of intelligence that remains in their eyes. They are monsters. Something to be feared.
The beastman in front of him is not that. He is half-boar, but not in the way that Tanjiro would have imagined. Everything about him is human: his scent and his voice, the bareness of his chest, smooth and muscular, the soft curve of his nails as his human hands clench the laundry poles like two swords. He wears only a single piece of clothing: a pair of pants that are frayed and torn at the seams, well-cut and fitted of the most expensive fabrics but stained with all the colors Tanjiro had ever seen. Everything human about him is contrasted by the boar head atop his shoulders, entirely at odds with the rest of his body, making the simple act of looking at him dizzying for how it confuses Tanjiro’s senses.
His eyes trail along the long, angry tusks and follow the fur covering his thick animal neck, and he wonders if the laundry pole struck him, after all. Maybe he’s dreaming.
The beastman gestures out to the forest.
“Get out!” he shouts, snapping Tanjiro out of his daze.
“Wait,” he says as he digs around in his pocket. His unoccupied hand goes up in a gesture of peaceful surrender. “My name’s Tanjiro. I live in the village west of here. I have something that I think belongs to the master of this estate…”
“The old man’s gone, so I’m the master now.”
“You?!”
It leaves Tanjiro’s mouth before he can think better of it. The boar-man only snorts in response. He doesn’t seem to be lying. The scent that he’d memorized from the buttons is definitely the same that’s coming from the laundry beside them, though. Blue has to be living in the castle somewhere. If Tanjiro trusts anything, he trusts his nose.
Then again, his nose is also telling him that he’s speaking to a human, so there’s a good chance at least one of his senses has turned traitor.
A large part of him wonders if it wouldn’t be smarter to flee like the beastman bid him, but he seems to be somewhat willing to talk, so Tanjiro gives one more push.
“Then maybe an employee,” he says. “See, we met in town the other day, and he left a few things behind in his… rush to leave.”
The laundry poles that had been threatening him just a second ago are replaced with an outstretched hand.
“Give it.”
Tanjiro takes the opportunity to push himself up to his feet, his grip tightening around the bundle of buttons. He doesn’t want to give them up. The intensity of the feeling surprises him, and he has to remind himself to smile, the expression feeling awkward on his face.
“I’d prefer to deliver them in person, if that’s okay. If he’s not here now, I can come back another time. I’d like to greet him, too.”
Without withdrawing his hand, the beastman asks, “Why?”
It’s such a good question that it stumps him. Tanjiro asks himself, Why?
He’s concerned, of course. Aside from a poor temper, Tanjiro hasn’t found any reason to believe that the beastman is untrustworthy, but he still won’t feel satisfied until he sees the buttons safely in the right hands. Even if they were left in the middle of the road, they seem expensive. But that’s not the entire truth.
The real thing driving Tanjiro is that every time he tries to recall the afternoon he met Blue, their meeting feels more surreal. With every passing day, it gets easier to doubt his own memory, even with the buttons serving as constant, undeniable proof that the meeting did happen in some form.
Plus, he never got his name. It feels rude to keep thinking of him as a color instead of a person.
Before Tanjiro can string his thoughts together into a proper answer, they’re interrupted by the castle doors groaning on their hinges. A young woman walks out of them, her hair done up on either side of her head and a sour look on her face.
“Master Inosuke!”
Her voice is sharp enough that even Tanjiro flinches at the sound of it, and the beastman drops the laundry poles entirely.
“Are you still not finished taking in the laundry? Stop playing around and…” Her eyes find Tanjiro, softening with surprise. “We have a guest!”
“He’s not a guest, he’s a delivery man.” Inosuke looks back at Tanjiro, sticking his hand out for the buttons again. “Give it.”
“I’m a woodcutter, actually!” Tanjiro eyes the hand before looking over at the laundry, then at the clouds above them, so heavy now that they’re nearly black. “It could rain at any moment. Let me help you take that inside.”
“I don’t need your help.”
As if to demonstrate this, Inosuke goes over to the sheets fluttering in the breeze and rips them off, making the pins go flying. He puffs out his chest, and it’s hard to tell through the eyes of a boar, but Tanjiro feels as if he’s being challenged to something. He just isn’t sure what. Watching him feels like deja vu, like Tanjiro’s seen this scene play out before.
The woman cuts through the moment like glass.
“If you tear the linens, you’re having salad for dinner,” she warns, making Inosuke freeze over.
“I don’t care!” he shoots back after a second, but he reaches for the pins first from then on, carefully inclipping the sheets before taking them down.
She gives a weary sigh before looking over at Tanjiro, fighting her expression into something more hospitable.
“If you wouldn’t mind helping us, we’d be appreciative. I’m afraid that we’re a bit short-handed at the moment…”
“Not at all.”
Her smile turns relieved, much more natural. It’s the same smile that his mother gives him when he volunteers to take care of his brothers and sisters while she’s cooking. “Thank you.”
“I said I don’t need your help,” Inosuke insists as he walks over to the laundry, but Tanjiro only grins.
“Maybe, but it’ll be faster if we work together.”
Inosuke seems to consider this for a moment, his hands slowing. He never quite responds, but he doesn’t try to stop Tanjiro anymore, either. And it’s a good thing he doesn’t, because the two of them are just bringing in the last of the clothes when they feel the first few droplets of rain sprinkle against their cheeks in warning. Moments later, it’s grown into a deluge, thundering onto the ground so hard that Tanjiro can hear it all the way through the castle’s thick stone walls.
“You’ll catch your death if you try to go out in that,” the woman, who has introduced herself as Aoi, Inosuke’s caretaker, tells him. “And that’s only if you can find your way back in this storm.”
If he goes now, while there’s still light in the sky, Tanjiro knows he’d make it back home safely. It’s true that he’d likely catch a cold along the way, though. He’d hate to pass it to someone in his family.
“I don’t want to impose,” he says, mostly because that’s what you have to say in these situations.
Aoi shakes her head. “You’re hardly imposing. If anything, we could use the company. Isn’t that right, Master Inosuke?”
He stands a bit straighter as Aoi and Tanjiro turn to him, crossing his arms in front of his chest, still bare and damp where he’s neglected to wipe the rain from himself.
“If Murasaki says it’s okay, then I don’t care,” he says, looking away. “Just do whatever you want.”
The way he pouts reminds Tanjiro of Takeo back when the twins were born, when he had to give up so much of his time and things to help their parents take care of them. He’d always insist he didn’t care, with that same petulant tone of voice, like he was hoping that someone might realize how much he actually did mind and change theirs. Even having been attacked himself, it’s hard for Tanjiro to believe that this is the same monster that the people in his town have been spreading rumors about.
“Thank you, Inosuke,” he says, and he only smiles brighter when Inosuke snorts in response, hunching up his shoulders.
As Aoi moves on to questions about what he can and can’t eat and whether he has any allergies, the smile never leaves his face for a second. The rain doesn’t seem like the type to be over by the time they’ve finished dinner, not so close to the mountain. Most likely, he’ll have to stay overnight, and he can tell that Aoi has already considered this as well, judging by her muttering about fixing up a room for him. Perhaps he should be more concerned, but Tanjiro’s hand moves into his pocket, wrapping around the bundle of buttons inside of it.
A night should be plenty of time to unravel the mystery of the beauty and the beast.