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Inosuke doesn’t like the way the kid with the yellow hair is watching him. His face is ugly with all its bruises—bruises Inosuke gave him. And his eyes are darting at him again and again and again. It makes his skin itch. It makes his muscles tense. His shoulders rise. Why is he looking? Why won’t he stop??
“What the hell are you looking at!” The words rip from him in a shout that startles the birds in the trees and sends them flapping away in a chaotic frenzy.
The yellow-haired kid’s face pales and his hands come up in front of him protectively.
“That,” he yells back, his voice annoying. It’s full of trembling and cowardice. Inosuke hates his voice as much as he hates his face. “That thing you wear, why do you have it?”
His mask?
That’s what this is all about??
Inosuke tilts his head. Through the gaps in his mask, his gaze narrows on his unpleasant traveling companion.
“How else would I honor her?” he snaps, pointing with both hands at the mask. Isn’t that obvious? Stupid idiot.
The yellow-haired kid gapes, mouth opening and closing like a fish out of its pond. He shakes his head aggressively, yellow hair whipping around.
“That’s so—”
“Zenitsu, don’t,” the other one says, red hair, red eyes, scar on the head that’s more like a boulder than skin and muscle and skull and brain. His voice is quiet but firm.
Zenitsu (an annoying name to match how annoying he is) looks like he’ll drop it.
Cowardice.
Inosuke isn’t letting him off that easily. He wants to know just what he was going to say. “It’s what?”
Yellow-hair, Zenitsu, sucks in a breath. There’s a warning in the tone of the other one’s voice as he says “Guys, don’t argue—” but Zenitsu ignores it.
“It’s disgusting! And terrifying!” he bursts out, waving a hand. “You know he almost gave us a heart attack in that demon’s house?” He directs this at the red-haired boy. “No one should go around wearing a dead animal on their head like it’s a normal thing to do.”
Silence descends on the trio in the wake of the outburst.
Inosuke’s chest hurts. His heart is too fast. He is torn by indecision. He wants to lunge across the circle where they’re sitting eating their food and tackle him to the ground and put his fists into his face until he apologizes for what he said, but for some reason he can’t. He feels frozen, and something is heavy in the dark places in his head. Something is pressing on him, bending him, like dry wood, cracks running along the surface, and if he doesn’t do something, do something, then something will break, he will break—
“You’re fucking stupid!” Inosuke snarls at Zenitsu, leaping to his feet. The coward flinches back, but Inosuke doesn’t attack him, stalking off into the trees.
“Inosuke wait!”
Inosuke doesn’t. He walks. And then he runs. Faster. Harder. Brush and tree limbs snapping against his skin. Runs so fast and for so long that his breath starts to burn in his lungs like wildfire, and his legs begin to shake.
Finally he stops and drops to the forest floor in a crouch.
The familiar smell of decaying leaf litter and pine resin and cool earth fill his nose. He breathes it in, deep into his lungs.
He sits there for a long time before he sighs with resignation and realizes that he shouldn’t have run. Running is a coward’s way out. He should have faced whatever the hell those feelings that came up were and beat them into submission.
Slowly, he pulls the boar mask from his head. His fingers bury in the coarse gray fur as he turns it to face him, the features of his long-dead boar mother looking back at him, so familiar and comforting.
All except for the eyes.
His boar mother’s eyes had been brown, almost black.
He’s not sure why he didn’t choose brown when he looked for glass eyes to replace the ones that he’d dug out and thrown away. He could have. It was easy to find them in brown. Very few in other colors though.
He had finally settled with blue.
The color he’d really wanted was green…
Inosuke closes his eyes, and for just a moment he sees green, like it is above him, as though he is gazing up, green like summer grass and new growth on trees in early spring. Green in a field of pale cream and framed by the night sky. A voice somewhere in the dark of where he can’t remember whispers his name.
He screws his eyes shut, fighting back against the lingering traces of something long forgotten and clenches his fingers in the fur of his mask, pressing it to his forehead, feeling the texture of it against his skin.
His chest is still aching. Now his eyes are aching too.
He misses his boar mother.
He clings to that feeling. The feeling of being cared for and loved—as much as a boar can love or care for a human child.
But, even though his chest and his eyes hurt with the feeling, it isn’t a bad feeling, beneath the missing her. It feels almost nice, he thinks. Knowing that once upon a time, something did care. Something knew him by sight and scent and touch and he was loved.
He works at the fur of the mask idly, plucks leaves and twigs and debris as he picks through the tangles. Once it's perfect again, he places it back on his head, firmly in place, and he feels himself settled again, the argument with the guy with yellow hair put behind him.
How could that stupid kid ever understand?
How could anyone.