Archive of Our Own

"On a night when the moon

shines as brightly as this,

the unspoken thoughts

of even the most discreet heart 

might be seen."

- Izumi Shikibu

Summer. 

🀧 

Though they were months away from entering the twenty-first century, it had been, in the past, a renowned custom that members of the ōkami forest pack, living atop the pine-covered hill of the coastal village of Moriyama, were to be introduced to society by the age of twenty-one and mated by the following spring under the sheer glow of the moon’s gown.

Shigeta Harua, who had lived past twenty-one years of his life as a city boy and only willingly took the ferry for a season, had never cared for the archaic traditions of a world inhabited by howling gods, preferring one where the incident of his birth would barely matter. Handsome, clever, and rich, endowed with a facetiously-edged sense of humour, he seemed to gather some of the better qualities found in the young people who had left Moriyama’s shores, and had lived a life sheltered from woodwork and the imposing rhythm of night hunts.

Still, his existence remained stranded between the city and that morsel of Hokkaido Island battered by northern winds, refusing to loosen its grip on nature and beasts alike. If it weren’t for his family left at the Moriyama shrine all year long, Harua would certainly not have stepped another foot in the place that had slowly seen its werewolf population vanish and his own mother returned to the mud before he was of the age to remember her face or her scent. 

Harua had once listed the island’s worst attributes he could think of; oh, how he disliked its cold, humid air, disliked its dense forests and its standoffish people with little coin to fend for themselves. 

Though it felt good to know his family was well respected, and the devout villagers paying their homage to the ones who had ensured their safety for centuries, Harua remained a city boy; one who would dress in the American-imported fashion styles which had overrun the main island, cigarettes and artificially-flavoured gums in his jeans’ pockets when he wasn’t required to wear one of his cousins’ yukata. 

In the realm of blue endless nights and golden winged pheasants, Harua hid in tall grass to avoid manual labour, and found himself taken by his hard-covered novels. He was, after all, a beggar for those silly romances costing him but ¥700; an expert in love’s tell-tale signs. 

Given so little to challenge his views, he had grown certain that should love find him, it would be far from Moriyama’s voracious fog, for there was nothing his heart would ever beat for on that island.

🀧 

As a young boy, Harua had found that the river which stretched in the clearing behind the shrine was a refuge for his cluttered thoughts. And thoughts, there were many. Harua had been plagued by a kind of restlessness that even his wolf couldn't shake, to Bāchan’s dismay. 

As he lay, floating naked on his back in the meandering stream, Harua thought about returning to university for the spring semester, now that his dearest friend Rei had found herself taken by an officer and spoke of marrying him before the school year began. Though he would never admit aloud the grief that new entanglement caused him, Harua knew it was envy sitting so heavily on his chest. And how foolish he felt to have introduced these two! 

He was startled out of his reverie by the sudden eruption of a stranger in the water like a spirit who had sprinted out of thin air; a valley-shaped ghost.

Harua opened his eyes with a piercing scream. The stranger answered with a scream of his own, as if he wasn’t the one intruding on Harua’s isolated bathing.

“Who are you?” Harua asked, and though his voice slightly wavered, he refused to take a further step back in the river’s muddy soil, hands propped to cover his nudity.

The stranger, as he stammered over an explanation, looked to be closer to Harua’s age than originally suspected, dressed in black. “Forgive me, I—you were lying still as a corpse, and I thought—”

Harua’s mouth opened, irritation slicing through composure. “You thought I needed resuscitation?”

The idea was ludicrous. To have formulated it aloud seemed to finally enlighten the stranger on how foolish he sounded. 

He scowled, like he held Harua responsible for the deceit somehow. “Why else would I approach but to help?”

“You are on sacred lands,” Harua declared, and he could feel that stranger's gaze on the smooth expanse of his abdomen, the pattern of his ribs, claws caging his trembling heart. 

“On sacred lands?”

Harua was saved from further explanation by a sudden growl.

The wolf that surged forward was of a medium size, with a dense coat of brown and grey, but Harua was most familiar with the yellow glint of its eyes.

The intruder raised his hands, suddenly brought to quiet by a palpable fear, water to his knees. 

Harua, because he wasn’t in the habit of offering much clemency, awaited the man’s telling tremor before he walked out of the water and instructed the wolf with an appeasing hand, “It’s alright, bug.”

The stranger looked between the two, human and beast, like he didn't quite comprehend how the two could communicate. A foreigner, indeed. And one that, save for his bitten-red lips, could have just as easily backtracked into the forest and morphed with his surroundings as wolf-like as he appeared, with a mane of raven hair brushing his shoulders. 

Harua’s order to him was barely audible, “Leave.”

The man obeyed, walking back to shore, and slowly bypassing the wolf as if he feared getting bitten somehow. It was only when he’d retreated far enough into the forest that they could no longer perceive the sound of his shoes on crushed leaves and his ragged breath that Harua turned to the wolf and was faced by a row of fangs as it opened its mouth wide to yawn.

“My hero,” Harua mused with a head pat.  

Some emotions worked more effectively than others, and Taki had always been sensitive to praise. He straightened up from his crouched posture, bare and hairless; humane again. 

“Weren’t you supposed to keep watch?” Harua asked his cousin. 

“I was. But I saw a squirrel and got distracted,” Taki admitted, shaking his damp hair in place of his wolf getting rid of water trapped in his fur. “When I heard your scream, I ran back here immediately, though.”

“Naturally,” Harua retorted, grabbing his sleeveless shirt and his pleated pants on the bulbous, wind-shaped conifer trunk. “That man was presented with enough time to gut me with a blade.”

“He didn’t look like the type to gut anyone or anything. He must have mistaken you for a river spirit.”

Shrugging on his linen loose jacket, Taki wiggled his eyebrows suggestively like he, too, had been slowly acquainted with the many fictitious romantic encounters Harua spared him the retelling. 

Taki was what most people regarded as loveliness in the most harmless form. Far from Yudai’s intimidating stature and the aggression of other young barking hounds, he had led Harua by the hand since they were pups bickering in mud, and neither years of chasing each other’s growth nor a twice-broken clavicle could ever tarnish their bond. 

“I could’ve torn him from limb to limb if he dared lay his hands on you,” Taki said as he escorted back his cousin to their grandmother’s den, as if his aversion to aggression hadn’t made a terrible hunter out of him. 

“Indeed you would have,” Harua responded absentmindedly. “Why would a stranger venture this far from the town?” He thought aloud. 

“I would’ve bit his head off,” Taki maintained. 

“Indeed you would have,” Harua repeated teasingly. And, with fondness peeking through at Taki’s grimace, he added, “My sworn protector.”

As the golden hues of sundown peeked through the dancing tree leaves, and the trail bordered by moss-covered lanterns carved in stone fleshed out a path through the forest, the gate of the temple complex appeared in the near quiet of the fast-approaching night. 

Their family shrine had stood the test of time since the Age of Warring States. 

Under the torii archway, Harua’s eyes grazed over the two wolf statues meant to ward off evil spirits. It was true that beliefs varied from region to region, and with the rapid industrialisation of the country, most people had turned their backs on ōkami ancient families, chased them at gunpoint, viewing the forbidding nature of predators rather than the divine messengers they were once regarded as. 

Moriyama, where time had seemingly stopped, and Harua struggled to find traces of the 90s in the preserved samurai district and deserted streets at nightfall, remained one of the last towns where his family continued to be revered as crop protectors and luck-bringers centuries past their pinnacle. 

Coming back to the shrine after bathing in the river’s arms always felt like being forced back into a role Harua had never quite fit into. 

It was incredible to see how Taki was able to unwind in the oppressive air that surrounded that ashy, fertile earth. He barrelled down towards Yudai; a child again in his brother’s vicinity, shaking off his head dripping with water and disrupting Yudai as he tended to his garden with the utmost care. Yudai’s face scrunched as he briefly tolerated his youngest brother’s attempt to rile him up, and his resolve to act annoyed quickly faltered when his youngest brother buried himself in his arms instead of stepping away. 

Harua had never seen Yudai's irritation last fewer than mere seconds when Taki was involved; he had never witnessed a squabble that didn’t result in ostentatious displays of affection. 

As Taki nuzzled at all the body parts left at his disposal, Harua spared a glance for Jo, observing his brothers’ distant bickering, seated behind his easel. Suspending his paintbrush to observe the newcomers, his face settled into a tranquil smile. 

Quiet as he was, the second man of the house would have sooner appeared a shivering, doe-eyed prey than a bloody-teethed beast. 

“We did not spot the blue flowers again,” Harua told him with a contrite grin. 

It had been Jo’s most recent obsession, to find the blue bell-shaped blossoms foaming near water. 

“Perhaps they are not in season anymore,” Jo replied quietly, his disappointment masked behind a smile. 

Taki was next in his arms, wetting his brother’s cheek with his locks. “Paint me, instead.”

Jo was far more patient than Yudai; Harua didn’t doubt that Taki would soon inherit another portrait in ink wash. When he looked towards the house, the imposing structure adorned with the family crests on the cylindrical surface of the blue roof tiles, it was to find their grandmother scrutinizing each of them.

Bāchan was a woman of close to a century, sturdier than older trees. She possessed vein-stripped hands trembling around mahjong tiles, and the wooden heart of a ruthless hunter. She smelled faintly of camellia and the rain-drenched earth, the Kao Attack laundry detergent she now agreed to soak her tunics and embroidered robes in out of convenience, and the deep horizon of blue. She had a way of looking silently at her surroundings with thinly veiled reprobation, and for Harua, whose entire existence seemed to displease her, it was a gaze he learned to evade. 

Harua went on to sit on the house’s stairs leading to the sunken dry garden, a step below his grandmother so that he could lean on her calf as he did as a child, and let her bury her hands in his hair. 

When he had first come for his mandatory summer visit, she had taken one disapproving look at his hair, cropped short and dyed a fiery kind of red, and turned her back without so much as a salutation. 

“I love it,” Taki had whispered to Harua, bumping his shoulder against his, and all the slightest hint of culpability Harua had felt quickly dissipated. 

Harua had always been her most unruly grandchild, the one she constantly worried about because the city had taught him to act without restraints, and mellowed his temperament into what she described as idleness. She seemed to read in him the profound shame of his situation; that he was a city boy confined to a small village for a few months, a wolf who wished to be human above all else. 

Bāchan had wanted to raise Harua herself when he was a pup, still clinging to the forest because it was the only place left for his mother to reside. His father had refused. It had seemed for a while as if Bāchan had only been able to recognise his father's traits on Harua's face, and that resemblance only served to feed her resentment. 

With Taki returning in time to sprint into the kitchen to assist the shrine maidens, and dinner announced soon after, Harua stood up and instructed his grandmother to take his hand. She ignored him, in favour of tugging on Taki’s sleeve instead. 

Harua thought it fitting that Taki’s existence would always take precedence over his. There were mere hours between their births, but one of them had come into the world an orphan. And though jealousy and animosity could've bloomed in their formative years, Harua had, instead, formed a fierce attachment to his cousin, one that their grandmother’s indifference towards him couldn't taint. 

Inside the residence, Harua had always found it easier to breathe, despite the persistent heat that rattling electric fans couldn't solve, and the rain that would seep under the roof, waking the inhabitants at regular intervals so that they could find buckets before the water stained the floors. There were scents in that labyrinth of sliding screens that evoked something far more intimate than the forest ever could; the deep cleavage of blushed peonies, the earthy scent of rice straw tatami floors, the incense burning on a shelf. From the scabbed layers of familiar claw marks on lacquered wood cabinets to the cypress-made coffered ceilings and the hand-painted frescoes of wolves courting the moon god on fusuma doors, it was a place his mind could never truly depart from. Even drowned out by the city’s fast lanes. 

Food had always rendered Taki prone to rambling, but despite Harua’s warning glare, Taki still found himself recounting the earlier encounter as he sat down on his cushion.

“A stranger stumbled upon Haru-chan as he bathed in the river today.”

“A stranger?” Bāchan repeated.

“In our forest?” Yudai probed. 

To Yudai, Taki smiled, oblivious to the incident he caused. “He couldn’t have been older than you. Handsome, too.”

“A stranger?” Bāchan asked once more.

“He fled when he saw my wolf,” said Taki. 

“Why did you not alert us?” Yudai asked. And he looked directly at Harua as the question filled the room. 

“Dark hair, darker eyes even,” Taki recounted to Jo, who smiled despite the circumstances. 

Harua shrugged, unaffected. “He fled rather quickly.”

“A stranger.”

“This is not how we’ve agreed on dealing with breaches,” said Yudai, looking directly at Taki this time, promptly interrupting his retelling of the scene to Jo.

“He seemed lost,” Harua justified. 

“And quite harmless,” Taki insisted. “I scared him with a single growl.”

“It has been years since a stranger visited Moriyama.” Bāchan contemplated aloud.

Yudai’s expression was anything but playful, and he deterred Taki from opening his mouth to rave about the intruder’s appearance once more with a single glance. Taki closed his mouth obediently and turned his attention back to his plate. 

“Stranger or not, it would perhaps do some good to remind the townspeople of the price of our oversight and benevolence.”

“What is one incident to do with the town as a whole?” Jo asked. 

“This is a sacred property. Visitors and parishioners cannot simply enter it when they wish to. Must we remind them we are territorial animals above all?”

“Above all? Really, that hasn’t been the case for generations now,” Bāchan told Yudai. “My own grandmother was already a werewolf tamed by the humans’ heart. Tell me, what is so wild and territorial about you that you bathe in the warmest streams and burn the most flowery-scented incense sticks in any room of your choosing?” She challenged her oldest grandson. 

Taki mercifully avoided Harua’s stare, but the corner of his lips trembled nonetheless. 

To the rest of the table, Bāchan said, “Should you mate with humans, you will have to reconcile your two natures. The most gentle, and the wildest.” 

“And if we do not wish to be domesticated?” Yudai asked, with a proud tilt of the chin. 

Harua rolled his eyes and was prevented from weighing in on the discussion by Jo’s hand appearing on his sleeve.

“You speak from a bruised pride,” Bāchan said like she knew how to smooth out the unnerved expression on Yudai’s face, “It will heal.” 

Far from putting out the flames, it seemed their grandmother’s words were gasoline, and Yudai stood up, away from the table, away from them. 

“I’ll fetch us some more wood.”

They were in no need of wood. They were in no need to rush away from a Taki-made meal. And yet—

In the wake of Yudai’s disappearance, Bāchan only looked at her small, wrinkled hands, her mouth twisted in displeasure. “If not for Yudai’s stubborn refusal of Murata-san’s proposal, our shrine wouldn't lie in ruins.”

“Harua will save us from financial ruin,” Taki declared, his eyes sparkling with a teasing glint. "Securing a marriage to a wealthy city man.”

In the past, Harua had been blind to the many ways he influenced his cousin; how each of his words should be measured, dipped in poison but coated in sugar before they were regurgitated at the dining table. 

“A simple marriage won't suffice," Bāchan disagreed. "We have a duty, first and foremost, to bring further people into this pack, lest we let it die with the last of us.”

“What duty is worth living in such conditions?” Harua murmured into his udon bowl. 

He believed himself discreet, but according to the glare his grandmother leveled at him, he had spoken far too loudly, and not even Taki's stifled giggles could drown out the searing shame of her blatant disapproval. 

“Is she terribly mad?” Harua asked Taki when he appeared by his bedside. 

“She’ll have forgotten it tomorrow,” Taki assured with a smile lingering on his lips, “She’ll see you and comment on your hair, instead.”

With a single glance, they dissolved into yet another fit of laughter.  

“Is it true Yudai-kun received a proposal?”

Taki’s expression reverted to a solemn mask. 

“Five winters ago. He never told any of us,” he said, “but a few weeks ago, under the guise of cleaning, Bāchan went into his study, and she uncovered all the letters he’d gotten throughout the years, some never opened. Love letters.”

Harua could sense where all of this was going, and still he waited, observing the glimmer of Taki’s eyes by the candlelight.

“I stole one away.” 

Harua gasped in relief and anticipation. It was rather difficult to imagine someone as high-strung as Yudai, swept up by a winter romance, willingly letting it shape his existence.  

The paper materialised in Taki’s hand, scented with dried Hamanasu roses, inked with vertical writing. 

“Dearest Yudai-kun, I ignore what has pushed you to open your heart to me in our shared youth and then discard mine so easily, but know that there is hardly a day when I do not go to sleep with your name on my tongue, your memory haunting me. Should you ever allow yourself happiness, know that I will wait on the farthest coasts from where I first saw you.”

Taki stopped his reading and folded back the paper. In the ensuing quiet, Harua chuckled, a squeaky, uneasy sound that suddenly escaped his throat, the feeling that he should've prevented Taki from reading such secrets aloud. 

“Can you believe it?” Taki asked, a repressed smile of his own. “That Yudai inspired such poetry in a man’s heart?”

“Have you met him, Murata-san?”

“A handsome man,” Taki nodded, “son of a local merchant.”  

Harua tried to picture him. Books had made a habit of spending pages on a love interest's appearance. He found his mind drifting back to the river’s intruder, wondering if he had dreamed the stranger’s coal eyes. 

“In truth,” Taki continued, “I couldn’t have refused his proposal, no matter his humble background. It would’ve felt like stabbing that poor man.”

“You should not simply agree to uproot your life to save someone the embarrassment of rejection. Pity could make a very sad man out of you.” Harua chastised, “If Yudai-kun refused Murata-san’s advances, it must simply be because he didn’t love him.”

“Then why keep the letters?” Taki asked. 

“Vanity?” Harua suggested. 

It successfully elicited a snicker out of Taki, but his smile quickly faded as he sat on the futon, slipped out of his robes.   

“I have missed you,” Taki sighed as he sank into the comfort of their shared bed, as he extended a hand towards Harua; reached for his warmth with cold fingers. “The island comes to life when you visit.” 

“I have missed you, too.”

Harua had once listed the island’s worst attributes he could think of; oh, how he disliked its cold, humid air, disliked its dense forests and its standoffish people with little coin to fend for themselves. But he loved his family, he loved the euphoric, fragmented nature of summertime reunions, and he loved the persistent warmth of Taki’s nearness. 

🀧 

With the first rays of sunlight pouring out of a cloudless sky and the eruption of a rooster’s song, Moriyama awoke between mountains and sea in the gods’ playground. Nestled in the still forest, the wolves could barely decipher the sound of the fishing harbour, but it had never prevented them from listening intently to the town’s distant grumble. 

The shrine came to life after the slumber of sleep; too many tasks at once. Chickens to feed, crops to water, statues to polish, futon mattresses to be rolled up and hung in direct sunlight. Their breakfast half consumed, Yuma and Taki left the shrine to venture through Moriyama’s streets, earning respectful deep bows wherever they went.  It was on the docks that they learned that the once-vacant feudal domain had acquired new owners from abroad. 

The estate had once belonged to feudal lords whilst the village was still under samurai governance, and it had survived air raids and forest fires. In a lush, verdant stroll garden, the main house had been left vacant since the aristocratic family had been stripped of their titles at the end of the war. To think it now in the hands of foreigners would cause a disturbance, Harua was sure. 

“And he comes from the United States, I’ve heard,” said the shoemaker. 

“And he’s accompanied by a wealthier friend, even,” added the blacksmith.  

Nakakita Yuma, almost slumped over the counter of his father’s shop with a skinny unlit cigarette between his lips, offered Taki far more details, as Harua looked on warily.  It wasn’t so much Nakakita Yuma’s posture that Harua abhorred, though he was stunned by the casualness oozing from his stance, but the wide-eyed expression on Taki’s face as he listened intently. 

It had become increasingly evident in the past two summers that Taki delighted in Nakakita Yuma's presence. There was no reason for skilled hunters to make a detour by the butcher shop every time they came to town; but Taki always resorted to excuses to stop by. Harua, no matter how disciplined he wished to be, could barely resist the enticing call of gossip, never knowing how they all gathered on the Nakakitas’ doorstep. 

“I have seen them,” Yuma told Taki. “Tall and handsome and young, too. The tailoring of their clothes doesn’t make much sense, but it suits them.” 

“Are they a couple, then?” Taki asked with a growing smile.

“Good friends, I was told,” Yuma answered, and Harua dissimulated a snort behind a cough. “They speak English to each other, and what sounds like Korean at times.” 

“Fascinating,” Taki breathed out. 

Harua looked at the butcher's son's face; fondness peeking through the mask. He decided he had seen enough and grabbed Taki’s arm to signal it was time for them to go home. 

“Goodbye, Yuu-kun,” Taki said with a bow far lower than the situation warranted.

“Goodbye, bug,” Yuma answered with his sharp canines on display. 

There had always been something animalistic in the Moriyama’s people, even those who didn’t howl at the moon, and Harua had wondered how he differed from them, if he even did.   

“Since when have you allowed him to call you bug?” He asked Taki, once they had collected far enough supplies to earn a favourable response from their grandmother. 

Taki shrugged, “I didn't think it mattered. He asked for my small name…” 

“And you simply gave it to him?” 

“I didn't think it was such a precious secret.”

“It is improper,” Harua said. 

It was certainly with the villagers’ parochial views in mind that Harua wished better for his cousin than the company of a boy who would rot behind the counter of a family-run shop selling regional meats.  

“Is it, now? I have no recollection of you holding such boundaries with Maki-kun,” Taki argued cheekily. 

“When we were boys and not at the age to form a serious, lasting engagement,” Harua added in precision. 

Taki rolled his eyes. “It's troubling how much you sound exactly like her.”

They had survived the brunt of an argument three summers prior when Taki had told Harua that he barely understood how Harua wasn't Bāchan's favourite when he sounded exactly like her. Harua’s wolf had bitten Taki’s until he tasted blood. 

In truth, Harua had been doubly hurt: that Taki would vocalise such truths, and how it sounded like a jab directly borrowed from Harua’s mind.

“All I'm saying is that one is trouble,” Harua insisted.  

“He's nice,” Taki responded.  

“Of course, he's nice; how would he get the attention of a ōkami otherwise?” 

“I like him.” 

“You like everyone,” Harua deflected dismissively. “Come, before Yudai-kun sends Jo on our trails.” 

It was purely by chance that they nearly collided with Hirota Riki, as they rounded the corner of an alleyway thick with the smell of the harbour’s catch. 

Hirota Riki was the closest thing to love Harua had ever encountered, and he believed, as many around the town once did, that, left with lesser options, he would have agreed to mate with Hirota Riki and wither on the island. Indeed, Hirota Riki was an excellent prospect for a town such as Moriyama; an imposing physique and a kind disposition had put him in an ideal spot. He had newly acquired his family’s funeral home and had just buried his father last winter. He bore his mother’s last name and was set to inherit her fortune as well, as the only grandchild of the Japanese branch of his family tree. 

When he saw them, Hirota Riki’s face transformed from mild irritation to pure joy. He took Harua in his arms without care for the imposed distance between the ōkami clan and mere commoners.  

“Maki-kun,” Harua said into the suffocating embrace. We are not children anymore, he thought, but refrained from commenting on it aloud, oddly pleased by the younger man’s spontaneity. 

Taki was far less graceful; squealing into the embrace as if it somehow hurt. 

Once pleasantries were exchanged, Harua felt the need to bend in a deep, remorseful bow. “I heard of your father’s passing. I had hoped to pay my respects to your mother and you, but—please, forgive me.” 

In truth, Harua had dreaded coming back to Moriyama for the memorial service, though he knew his cousins had been present on the seventh day. He knew that his grandmother had left her forest to assist the cremation. 

Harua had no excuses but an assigned report to complete, and it had taken precedence over a friend’s grief. Harua found that he disliked the potential disappointment his actions could cause, rather than simply acting disappointingly. 

Because Hirota Riki was a selfless individual, he brushed Harua’s worries away with a smile and made Harua promise to visit him before the season came to an end. 

What were they but children together? There had been adoration once, the slow exploration of their bodies, together, in the forest’s vibrant moss. But Maki was an island-made man, and Harua was always on the verge of leaving it for good. 

“I had hoped,” Taki admitted to Harua as they hurried back home, “That you would become Maki’s betrothed. It would’ve kept you here.” 

It was said so sincerely, so honestly, that Harua swallowed back the bitter reply that gnawed at his heart; it wouldn’t have made him dislike this place any less.

🀧 

At night, the wolves gathered under Yudai’s battle cry. Hunting in the summer had always put them at an advantage: to bite their prey, to exhaust them required much less stamina than when snow hindered their steps. 

They had heard, as pups, tales of the great successful hunts carried by their grandmother. Bāchan had been a feared alpha, and before handing over the reins to her eldest grandson, in the absence of any daughters to train, she had come across as cold and calculating. A mastermind in the art of ambushes, running at herds of moose and mountain goats to try to flush out the weak or the slow, gathering her pack scattered in the forest with a single howl.

Affection was an afterthought. It came with bloodstained teeth, and a deer’s ribcage licked clean.  

In times of hunger, their family became a military operation, and Bāchan did not allow herself to give in to sentiment. Her grandsons became her subordinates, and her wolf would show teeth to keep them in line.

Yudai was a different kind of leader. One that rarely growled. One that Harua would have willingly followed through a starless night.

At dawn, as they returned from a night hunt, drenched in sweat, steeped in blood and dust, they took back their human appearances under the sun goddess’ accusing glare. 

In early daylight, the shrine was transformed into a quiet haven, but it had, to Harua’s limited knowledge, never reeked of the entrails of a bird, save for those their wolves had captured mid-flight. 

“What is that?” Harua demanded as he approached the house’s veranda.

A crow lay there, its silvery plumage motionless and its eyes wide open. Its ruby throat stained with warm blood. 

Bāchan sat on her knees, only a short distance apart from it, drinking her cup of steamed green tea with her eyes closed. Harua wondered what she had seen or heard.

“I suppose these are courting gifts,” Jo replied idly. He took the bird in his hand with a kind of troubling expertise and walked the last steps into the house. 

“For whom?” Harua asked, in his wake. 

Taki grimaced, his hair still rippling with sweat, stubborn specks of blood on his jaw that Harua had tried to smudge. 

“Jo-kun, I suppose.” Under Harua’s questioning gaze, he added, “It started weeks before you arrived. Woodland decaying on the shrine’s doorstep. All sorts of animals; rabbits, squirrels, those long-tailed birds Jo-kun likes to paint. Some of us believed it to be threats, but Obāchan knew. She’s been excited ever since.”

Indeed, their grandmother’s mouth had settled into one of her all-knowing smiles. 

“Does he care?” Harua asked, angling his chin towards the house.

He didn’t know his cousin to be particularly enthused about the prospect of finding a mate. Jo had always had his wooden palette and the forest for company. 

“You know how he is,” Taki said. “He’d rather receive flower bouquets than those grotesque cadavers. Me, on the contrary?”

Harua rolled his eyes at the absurd expression crossing Taki’s face. 

“Nakakita Yuma would probably deem it romantic to throw cured ham on our doorstep.”

“How thoughtful that would be…” Taki sighed dreamily. Harua resisted the urge to smack some sense into him. 

“Who is this cured ham lover?” Yudai inquired as he approached, dragging the deer carcass by its antlers. Taki offered his help, but was promptly ignored. 

“The butcher’s son,” Harua replied. 

“Oh.”

Yudai was hard to read at times. Harua reckoned it must have something to do with the fact that they were so often forced to uphold a certain hierarchy within their clan. But Harua also knew all too well how his oldest cousin sometimes stiffened like prey sensing it was observed beyond a camouflage of leaves. 

Taki observed his brother and asked, “Do you have some opinion, too?”

“Only that he seems so…” Yudai looked up briefly, as if in need of a divine nudge. “Instigating.”

“Ah,” Bāchan exclaimed, her eyes remaining closed. “It might put our bug on the right track.”

“I find him funny,” Jo declared as he reappeared in the space between sliding doors left ajar.

“Really?” Harua frowned.

“Yes, and he speaks to Taki kindly…”

“See?” Taki said, washing his face in a basin the shrine maidens left at their disposal. Harua realised that he was bound to lose such an argument if Jo had been swayed. 

“Well, if he speaks to you kindly, you must surely marry him,” he grumbled. 

“Perhaps I will,” Taki antagonised him.

It worked. Harua was so distraught by that revolting suggestion that he turned his back around and stomped into town under the pretext of needing some air. Taki’s bubbling laugh followed him to the forest’s clearing.  

🀧 

It was only a matter of time before news of the foreign pair who had acquired the abandoned villa reached Bāchan's ears. Harua had never cared for mahjong and other games where Bāchan kept emerging with a winning hand. He would read, on the periphery, and await the moment Taki’s tongue unravelled with tales from the distant town. 

When she learned of them, Bāchan asked Yudai to deliver an invite to dinner, and on that same day, sent her two youngest grandsons on multiple errands around town to prepare a feast.  

The following night saw two men appearing on the shrine grounds. They were indeed dressed strangely for Moriyama’s tighter silhouettes and ancient taste, but Harua had seen similar loose suits worn around the capital city’s financial districts, and found something elegant in the absence of constriction. Though they could have stepped off the ferry that instant, they both wore the unmistakable drape of Japanese masters, which indicated a certain affiliation to the country. When they both spoke, it was with the faintest accent.  

Harua recognised the man who had stumbled upon him bathing naked in the river days earlier. And as he did, he realised that so would Taki, and gripped his cousin’s arm so tightly, he was sure to leave a bruise. 

“Guji-sama,” the tallest of the two, the one who had introduced himself as Byun Euijoo, saluted. 

The river’s intruder followed belatedly, his eyes attached to Harua. 

It would have been incredibly difficult not to notice Byun Euijoo’s many charms; he was tall and lithe, his youthful face adorned by a permanent smile, his eyes looking at all the details of their residence with open curiosity.  

In contrast, Wang Yixiang, who shadowed him, bore an expression so enigmatic that Harua was surged by the perplexing thought that the fear the man had demonstrated when seeing Taki’s wolf was the only emotion his body could resort to. 

“Thank you for welcoming us,” Byun Euijoo said. 

“Be welcomed.” Bāchan declared. “This village hadn't received new visitors in over two decades. You are our most esteemed guests.” 

Following his grandmother’s example, Harua bowed deeply. He had expected Wang Yixiang to have turned his gaze on someone else, but he found his dark eyes still trained on his face. 

Dinner was a costly affair. Plum liquor accompanied silky tofu and sliced sea bites served in decades-old hand-crafted dinnerware. The bluefin tuna Taki carefully filleted had a smooth, buttery texture, and the seasonal fruits were carved by his knife’s indentations. 

“How long have you two known each other?” Bāchan asked, for she was the only one who wasn’t engrossed by the endless transitions of courses brought to their table.  

“Almost since birth, I would say,” Byun Euijoo said, “we were both sent to study at the same university in the United States. Our families have worked together for a long time.”

“What do your families do?” Bāchan asked. 

Harua barely listened to the response, but he made an effort to appear as if he did. Wang Yixiang’s eyes kept darting in his direction, and Harua wondered, at some point, if his ennui was so visible. 

“I was raised to contribute to the family empire,” Byun Euijoo added at some point. “I had dreamed of designing buildings instead of simply owning them, but—” He interrupted himself, realising how inelegant the course of that conversation had become. He raised his eyeline to the farthest wall of the living room, and declared, “That is a wonderful painting, by the way. I haven’t stopped looking at it since we entered.”

“It was made by Jo-kun,” Taki declared with a bright smile and a small tap on his brother’s shoulder.

“Truly?” Byun Euijoo turned to Jo, and Harua could see matching red colouring their cheeks. “It is marvelous.”

The painting had simply paid homage to the house; its columns and exposed wooden beams, its swept roof structure, and daylight seeping through its rice-paper windows. But it was so exquisitely well-done that many people had believed it was a photograph at first sight. 

“My technique has greatly improved since then,” Jo said softly, not in false modesty but simply because it was true. 

Byun Euijoo smiled at him like he was unable to look away. “I’ll be eager to see.”

Harua looked between the two of them, and found that he wasn’t the only one to have spotted the way the two shyly held each other’s gazes. Wang Yixiang observed his friend’s profile like he was on the verge of teasing him. 

When Juria, who had been a priestess-in-training under Bāchan’s protection for over a decade, approached them with a seven-piece set and the intention to make them tea, Harua couldn’t have imagined that Jo’s presence would be so distracting that it would almost lead to a grave incident when Byun Euijoo registered the shrine maiden’s presence belatedly. 

It would have been presumptuous to declare there and then that he wished for his cousin and that newcomer to grow incandescently in love and knew just the right way to feed their flames; and yet, Harua felt the inkling of a new chapter unravelling in the history of his clan.

When the frothy matcha cups had been emptied, shards of the broken porcelain bowl dutifully picked up, and the guests sat, fully satiated, Harua decided he wanted to know more of Byun Euijoo and the way his face would light up every time Jo offered a slight contribution to their conversation. 

He turned himself into a wolf to follow their guests as they returned to town, lurking in the shadows, his ear pricked up to catch the rustling of their footsteps on the damp earth, their companionable silence stretching while the evening cicadas sang. 

“A charming family,” Euijoo commented at last in Korean. 

“So long as they do not hunt you,” Yixiang added. “Not that I can complain, you know me…”

Wang Yixiang laughed, and it was unlike what Harua had ever heard. In fact, it sounded so unrestrainedly loud that Harua’s wolf almost startled. 

“You are outrageous!” Euijoo told him.

Their silhouettes looked quite comely from afar. Harua would have never admitted it aloud, but he had never yet seen someone as effortlessly stylish as Wang Yixiang; someone with the means to express his individuality through clothing without fearing ridicule.  

“Oh, but I wasn't the one so taken by a pretty face that I almost burned myself,” Yixiang teased. “Since when has this new appetite for the arts developed, I wonder?” 

Byun Euijoo shoved his friend away, and successfully pulled another obnoxiously loud kind of laugh out of him. 

🀧 

When the warm, humid air became charged with electricity, yet the rain, the only respite from the storm-laden sky, did not fall until night, Yudai had grown accustomed to fleeing northwards to desolate lands where other wolves survived. 

In his absence, Harua savoured his light-hearted readings and his well-earned instants of solitude. Harua had always loved going for walks; those moments of calm and tranquillity that weren’t disrupted by Taki bursting in, or by Yudai coming round looking for company. 

The problem arose when it became clear that one of the heirs of the Moriyama estate was just as prone to strolling around. 

On a sunny afternoon, under a birdless sky, it was Taki who waved Wang Yixiang closer as they bypassed him.

“We are heading to the stream,” Taki said. “Would you like to join us?”

“I would have loved to, but we have been invited to the Nakakita household for supper, and I should hurry back home,” Yixiang responded. 

“Perhaps another time,” Jo suggested sweetly.

"Certainly," Yixiang agreed, “though I doubt Euijoo will join us.”

“Oh?” Jo perked up innocently. “Is he afraid of wild streams?”

“Afraid of water, altogether.” 

Taki chuckled, and Harua nudged him painfully. 

“I’m serious,” Yixiang insisted with a teasing glint in his eyes that directly contradicted his tone. “He is deathly afraid of drowning.”

“Then I will stay on shore with him,” Jo proposed benevolently. “I am not too fond of water myself.”

“He’ll be pleased to have you for company,” Yixiang said. 

Having said their goodbyes, and set off along the stony path towards the emerald river, Harua’s cousins started bickering before Wang Yixiang was even out of sight. 

“Jo-kun, that was a blatant lie!” Taki said.

“Only half of a lie,” Jo defended with an unaffected shrug. Red coloured the top of his ears.  “I did not wish for Byun-sama to feel excluded.”

“Oh, and of course, it meant keeping him warm and safe away from the river’s tempestuous current,” Taki insisted.  

“Harua! Will you tell him to leave me be?” Jo whined. 

But Harua had stopped in his tracks to observe Wang Yixiang's silhouette as he disappeared amongst the trees, and only refereed the dispute half-heartedly. 

On the following day, Byun Euijoo and Wang Yixiang came to await them by the bridge nearing the shrine in their summer bathing clothes, immaculate cotton on flushed skin, and towels wrapped around their necks.

Harua bowed his head in acknowledgment to them both, and received bows as wordless responses. Byun Euijoo, when he finally turned to face Jo’s hesitant smile, lost his composure so suddenly that he was unable to return the addressed salutation for several seconds. When he finally did, it was with such stuttering words that Bāchan declared they shall hurry before they lost daylight to save the man from further humiliation.  

Harua observed it all with a knowing smile, and half an idea already formed in his mind.  

Taki, always rambunctious in his approach, found no issue walking by Jo’s side and interjecting at times when Byun Euijoo held his end of the conversation rather difficultly. 

Walking behind them, Harua found endearing the way Byun Euijoo’s nape would redden suddenly when Jo uttered his name. 

Wang Yixiang’s constant snickering only served as a reminder of his looming presence. 

“Perhaps it is time for me to make amends,” Yixiang said suddenly, “I was unaware that the river was on your family's land.”

His piercing eyes forced Harua to a halt on the delicate climb. His interlocutor had that impassive expression that stirred something deeply uncomfortable in Harua’s chest, like the irremediable sensation of disappearing into a creek. 

 “I come from a land where humans cannot possess either forest nor the sea,” Yixiang continued. 

Harua’s answer was a single propped eyebrow. “But we are not humans.”

“That, too, I have now understood,” Yixiang admitted with a contrite smile. 

When he held out his hand for Harua to hold as they passed a fallen tree, Harua consciously ignored him to grab onto Taki’s hand instead. 

“I have seen Taki’s wolf, but I haven’t seen yours.”

“And why would you?” Harua asked him with a proud tilt of the chin. 

The corners of Wang Yixiang's mouth trembled slightly.

🀧 

In the coming July days, the dance between the newcomer and the forest clan's second son persisted.  

Byun Euijoo no longer wore his bathing clothes to meet in the shade of the cedar tree, and neither did Jo. They sat on the same winded trunk, bare feet in the emerald water, and they talked and talked endlessly, peeling the mandarins Jo had carefully wrapped in a linen cloth. They parted in hushed whispers, and with reddened cheeks, teetering on the edge of something still untitled.

Nothing in their stance seemed improper at first glance, but Harua knew the distinct path love took into the most discreet hearts, and he could see Jo looking back to observe Byun Euijoo’s retreating back at sundown. 

Anyone with a touch of suspicion would have known how such careful pursuits ended, and Harua felt his heart easing into a steadier rhythm the longer these two stayed in each other’s company as the days stretched out. Harua even began to dread nighttime, when all things, even the sun, returned to the sea. 

The flowers arrived soon after. Blue carnations that Jo had spent a season painting dropped carefully on the wooden engawa veranda by the entryway. Jo would collect the bouquets at first light, redder than the bruised flesh of spoilt stone fruits. 

At dawn, Harua observed, then, through the haze of sleep, as Jo would cut down the stems, place them in cylindrical glass vases atop the Tansu cabinet, and begin the day with a softly hummed tune. Harua congratulated himself extensively then on having orchestrated such a perfect match, though it was only fate at play. 

When Yudai returned from his trip north, he found that his radishes had died and one of his younger brothers only had a foreign name on his mind. 

“I do not understand how all this panned out in merely two weeks,” Yudai declared, with more confusion than ire. 

He had again seen his demand to be accompanied to the fish market brushed away by Jo who sat on their house's narrow porch to paint what would be Byun Euijoo's upcoming birthday present. 

No one had been allowed a peek at the monumental canvas, and even Taki who usually succeeded in obtaining all he wanted, had been left with nothing but specks of painting on Jo's apron and wild spikes of hair behind an easel. 

Bāchan, while mending the straps of Taki’s pants, just grunted in response to Yudai’s complaint. “Byun-sama is a wealthy man.”

“And kind,” said Taki.

“And charming,” insisted Harua. 

“Should he start seeing a potential mate in our Jo,” Bāchan said, “I do not want you to meddle in their courtship."

Of course, it displeased Yudai, deprived him of the authority he exercised on the household. Harua agreed to accompany Yudai to the market in Jo’s stead, only to appease his bruised ego. 

It was perhaps by sheer coincidence that they stumbled upon Wang Yixiang and Byun Euijoo walking beside one another down the channel. 

“You remember my cousin,” Harua started, extending a hand towards Yudai once the salutations were exchanged.

“Of course, Yudai-san. Pleasure to see you again,” Euijoo said quickly. “How was your journey North?”

“Apparently long enough to welcome some changes.” 

“I,” Euijoo’s mouth remained suspended. Wang Yixiang looked prompt to intervene, but Harua chose to interrupt the tense exchange before Yudai’s wolf could bare his teeth. 

“Forgive my cousin, he's only upset that we didn't tend to his root crops as well as he would have.”

“You didn’t tend to the garden at all,” Yudai grumbled. 

“How is your grandmother?” Euijoo asked, seemingly recovering from Yudai’s insistent stare. 

“Better,” Harua responded. “Taki-kun and Jo-kun are also in perfect condition.”

“Oh, thank you,” Euijoo said with a nod that left little to guess  which part of that news delighted him most. 

Harua looked at Wang Yixiang and found that Moriyama's cold sun had barely left an imprint on its pale skin. When Yixiang caught his gaze, his smile stretched into a lazy grin and he winked at Harua as if they shared a secret. Harua found that his entire body rebelled against that idea, heat gaining his cheeks and forcing him to avert his gaze. He bid the two men goodbye. 

Two long strides in their opposite direction allowed him to say, “Byun-sama is truly a great prospect.”

Yudai’s face was a careful mask, but his jaw still contracted. 

“I only fear what we do not know of this man,” he said. “But I suppose you must not think of what it means to be persuaded by a handsome stranger.” 

“We should invite him for dinner again, then!” Harua suggested.  

“What for?”

“To persuade you,” Harua said, planting a kiss on Yudai’s cheek and scurrying away. 

🀧 

When he rolled onto his back to show his stomach for Harua’s caresses, Taki’s wolf resembled a domesticated pet. And when he sat up, in his human form, with viscous blood dripping from his chin and dirt under his nails, he was a magnificent beast. 

Harua had licked blood off his fur, tugged on his ear, battled him so roughly that they ended up half gasping for air in the river’s hold. He loved nothing more than those moments, those hours spent under the open, cloudless starry sky, losing himself in the mingling of soft fur and tearable human flesh, shifting in a cluster of limbs. 

“What is he like? Byun-sama?” Taki asked, his head resting on Harua’s stomach. “What do you two talk about? What do you do?”

Taki had never fully understood the concept of privacy. And how could he? When so often he had been punished for those breaches by bouts of affection. Wearing clothes, when he shifted back to his human form, instead of walking around naked, seemed to be the only rule Bāchan had successfully implemented in his mind. 

“We—” Jo flushed, and Harua refrained from pointing at his obvious discomfort. "We share our aspirations.”

“Aspirations?” Taki repeated. 

“He had hoped for a long time to return to Korea once he had graduated. But he is in conflict with his father, and he fears that distance is the only thing keeping their relationship from deteriorating.” 

“So you talk of his father?” 

“Taki,” Harua scolded.

“I'm only asking! It doesn't sound that exciting.”

Yudai laughed as he agreed with Taki’s assessment. Jo threw a helpless glance in Harua’s direction, and found laughter in his cousin’s gaze. 

“What do you talk about with Yuma-san?” Jo directed his question at Taki.

Taki’s smile was immediate. “Secrets.”

“That is hardly more exciting,” Harua commented, and Taki contorted to lightly tap his chest. 

“I mean,” Taki clarified, “we talk about secrets. About the town, about the people in it. We speculate on who might fall in love next.”  

“Next?” Jo choked out.

“And who could that be?” Harua asked. 

Sensing three pairs of eyes on him, Yudai sat up with a strangled kind of laugh.

His wolf had grumbled earlier when Taki’s had disrupted his right to eat first. He had, by all accounts, made the most efforts; lunching at the red fox’s neck that had begun roaming around the shrine and exhausting their resources by killing sika deer and destroying villagers’ crops. Harua’s wolf didn't care for fox meat, but Taki’s had always been particularly brazen within their pack. 

“Tell us what kind of mate you wish for,” Taki insisted.

“I do not know,” Yudai denied.

“You must know,” Harua said.

Yudai sighed, “I only know what I knew when I was your age. I wish for a wolf; I wish for someone willing to lead this pack by my side.” 

Taki looked at Harua like he, too, had letters on his mind. For all his devotion, Murata Fuma had never stood a chance. 

As the night grew thick behind a misty fog, Harua let the forest soil gather him into a soundless sleep. When he pricked up his ears to perceive their bellies growling, the forest's eerie quiet had already swallowed him whole. 

🀧 

It was no surprise that Jo’s health issues worsened after a night spent outside. 

When he was born, it was believed that Jo would not survive winter. And yet, he had, growing impossibly taller than his peers, quickly attaining Yudai’s height in his teenage years and his wolf’s running speed.  

Still, Bāchan attributed those small miracles to the gods’ will, and hoped for the better.

The night had slowly begun on the shrine grounds when they were alerted that the headlights of a car had appeared on the other side of the bridge leading to the residence, two yellow eyes piercing the darkness. Bāchan requested that Taki and Harua lead the visitors away, and so, they stepped into the near-blinding night to do so.    

Byun Euijoo, when he saw them, waved his hand excitedly. A gesture Taki responded to, until Harua put his arm down. 

“Is everything alright?” Yixiang asked when the pair had stepped within talking distance. 

“Jo-kun is sick.”

Byun Euijoo’s face transformed with worry. “Can I see him?”

“Oh, he would hate for you to see him in that way,” Taki commented, chuckling nervously. 

“Then at least allow me to send for my doctor,” Euijoo said.

“We wouldn't want to bother you,” Harua played coy, for he was curious to know the extent of Byun Euijoo’s distress.

“Our wolves have gone to the woods to find natural medicine,” Taki admitted at the same time. 

The herbs found on the edge of the clearing only soothed the occasional fever, and the kelp broth kept Jo anchored to the world of the living. Bāchan usually remained at the shrine to address her vows of gratitude to the spirits, and only performed the purifying rituals on her grandson once she was well-rested. 

Yixiang, who had so far looked fairly amused by every sentence that spurted out of Taki’s mouth, grabbed his friend by the elbow to whisper to him. 

“Do not insist on seeing him, think of what people might say…”

It was said so quietly that no humans would have registered the gravity of his tone. But neither Taki nor Harua were mere humans.  

“Do you not think he is of greater worth than mere gossip?” Euijoo asked back. 

“I fear you are falling headfirst into something you do not know.” 

There was something in Wang Yixiang’s tone deeply reminiscent of Yudai’s worries, and yet Harua didn’t view his counsel with the same fondness. In Yixiang’s mouth, it sounded far more hostile. 

“Forgive our intrusion,” Euijoo finally said, though it seemed the words left his lips without much volition. “We will be on our way.”

“I do know that wolves are far more robust than the common man.” Euijoo commented, “But please, send word if you believe he is in need of medical assistance.”

Taki and Harua promised and bowed as the two men headed to the strikingly midnight-blue Toyota Century parked on the other side of the bridge. Byun Euijoo held the door open for his friend to climb into the rear seats. But instead of joining Wang Yixiang in the car, he closed the door and turned back on his trail.  

As they watched him approach the shrine’s gate again, Taki and Harua exchanged a confused stare. 

“I do not know what you may have heard of our discussion, but please do not misinterpret Yixiang's intention. He can be quite territorial,” Euijoo apologised. 

Harua could read it all on the man's face: the willingness to let himself fall headfirst.

“His attitude is no fault of yours, Byun-sama,” Harua replied. “He reminds me of a wolf in all but his nature.”

“Consider him harmless as a housecat,” Euijoo smiled. 

It prompted Taki to suddenly laugh. But while Euijoo bowed and, again, left the sacred premises, Harua vowed not to approach Wang Yixiang unless under the obligation to do so.  

It was easier said than done when Wang Yixiang had taken upon himself to win the favours of Bāchan, by beating her at mahjong under the wrath of the afternoon sun. It was easier said than done when it became increasingly evident that he sought out Harua’s company at every turn, and only received a glare in return. 

“May I ask how I have offended you?” Yixiang asked one day, after he had seen his previous demand completely ignored. 

Harua, who had been walking back to the shrine with a book in hand, turned towards him like a predator on high alert. 

“Did you know that our werewolf nature grants us an acute sense of hearing?” Harua asked, looking into the intruder’s eyes. 

Wang Yixiang hung his head down with a sheepish smile. 

“So, you have heard my concerns. I apologise.”  

Concerns, Harua knew, only took Byun Euijoo’s reputation into consideration, and certainly not his cousin’s sickness.

“We have known each other for only a few weeks, but you have already made a habit of apologising at every turn.”

“Do you never apologise?” Asked Yixiang. 

“I try to minimise the damage I can cause by simply thinking before opening my mouth.”

He had rarely seen someone so easily amused by his self-important act.

“Very well,” Yixiang admitted with a chuckle, walking by his side. “it seems that I deserve that criticism. How is your cousin?”

Jo had been able to leave his bed a few days after he was left motionless in it. The news that Byun Euijoo had visited him and inquired daily about his health, had left him utterly flushed. 

“Better. The medicinal plants seem to have worked. He's been known to dally with your friend on forest promenades these days. But I'm sure Byun-sama hasn't spared you those details,” Harua said.

His interlocutor grimaced at the acerbic tone of his reply. “It is not fault of your cousin, but—”

“But you do not wish for your friend to be bewitched by a forest beast,” Harua guessed.

“These are your words, not mine.”

“I distinctly remember you arguing against Byun-sama’s involvement in staying by Jo’s bedside.”

“It would’ve been improper.”

Improper. That was once Harua’s sole argument. 

“And why is that?” Harua asked. “Are you one of those people who are wary of love?” 

“I am not wary of love. I, myself, have loved a few times,” Yixiang said.  

“You have,” Harua said. A question dressed as an affirmation. “And would you not have stayed by your beloved's bedside?”

“It was never about love,” Yixiang admitted at last. 

Harua let him accompany him back to the shrine, if only as a truce, and the sole proof that he was capable of forgiving even the harshest assumptions. 

🀧 

Byun Euijoo’s birthday celebration was a display of extravagance Harua hadn’t thought possible. The renovated villa’s gardens, which had served as a resting temporary lodge for many shoguns, had become the scene of a grand feast orchestrated in his honour. With each turn of the winding path there was a new scene of beauty to appreciate. Harua’s father had taught him to appreciate getting multiple viewing points across a garden, and Harua had delighted in navigating some, but never imagined following the looped circuits and trails around the central pond of such an immense stroll garden. 

No matter how much he wished to explore on his own, Harua had made a habit of looking after Taki, and so he found himself a bystander to Taki's every conversation, from the most mundane to the most uncomfortable.

Wang Yixiang seemed surprised to learn that Taki had been given Riki as a birth name.

"Taki is my small name; you may use it, if you wish," Taki told him. He had let Harua fuss over the suspicious-looking stain on the sleeve of the rigid vest worn over his kimono. And Harua had realised it wouldn’t fade easily, he had simply sat back on the flat boulder used as a stone bench. 

"And 'bug'?" Yixiang asked Taki. "I've heard your family call you that."

"That's the way my mother called me before she could ever name me."

Understanding that he had perhaps stepped too far, Yixiang grimaced. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to probe."

"It's alright, her memory doesn't hurt me. You can't miss what you've never known. But my brothers—" Taki looked at the comings and goings of guests in and out of the mansion; a curious sort of party. "Yudai was seven when she died. Jo, only four." 

The silence was stifling for a moment. Harua didn’t need to look past his cousin to guess the look on Wang Yixiang’s face.  

“I, too, lost my mother quite young, and my father soon after,” Yixiang said with a strange kind of sympathetic smile. 

“Did you have a family to lean on?” Taki inquired.

“Not one as big as yours, unfortunately. My sister all but raised me. I am grateful to her, but I wish at times she had allowed herself to be a companion rather than a parent.”

“Is your relationship strained, then?” Taki asked, and this time, Harua intervened.

“Taki,” he tempered.

Yixiang looked at Harua as if he had forgotten that another member of the forest clan had stayed willingly mute on the periphery of their conversation. “It's fine.” 

To Taki, Yixiang added, “We are, on the contrary, very close. She got married two summers ago, and I have missed her ever since.”

“What prevents her from visiting you?” Taki asked, and again, Harua hissed his name; a useless endeavour, for Taki had just spotted Hirota Riki discussing with Nakakita Yuma in the shielded area of the gazebo and dashed in their direction, crossing the bridge in hurried steps, and leaving his stemmed glass in Wang Yixiang’s hand. 

“Please forgive his eagerness,” Harua sighed when his cousin was already a few too many steps away, “he is not often in polite company.”

Yixiang turned his attention to him, amusement evident in his gaze.

“So, you are capable of apologising. But only on behalf of others…” he said, “Do not worry about your cousin; it's quite refreshing to meet someone so candid.”

Across from them, on the other side of the koi carp-filled pond, Taki’s unbridled laughter heralded his presence. 

“He is the better part of me,” Harua thought aloud. And because he refused to launch into the depth of their bond, he added, “How are you finding Moriyama?”

If he was disturbed by the abrupt change of conversation, Yixiang didn’t show it. 

“I don't know if I can say that I’ve seen everything this island has to offer. I believe there are still many corners to discover, many people to encounter.”

“You’ll tire of it quickly.”

“It’s funny,” Yixiang said, “for all I’ve heard the townspeople speak of you, I would’ve never imagined you so—”

“So?” Harua asked in a faint voice. 

“So prone to flee a party to hide in the gardens,” he finished. 

Harua blinked, for it was far from what he had thought would escape Yixiang’s mouth. “Human interactions exhaust me rapidly,” he admitted. 

He couldn’t say that he had been trained into a people-facing role from birth, but still struggled far more than anyone, with the great exception of Jo.

“I see,” Yixiang hummed. “And nature soothes you?”

Harua nodded as he took in his surroundings. Borrowing a distant view of the forest stretching far beyond the residence’s gates, the garden appeared as a green carpet of moss growing thick around the roots of cedars, and the dry planes of strangely shaped rocks. Lying dormant for centuries, the moss had slowly devoured most paths, and only been kept off the swooping patterns on white gravel. Its untamed beauty evoked old myths painted on scrolls; monks shifting into carps, maidens changed into wolves. 

“Come Autumn, you will need to employ people to sweep the gardens daily,” Harua revealed, and he saw his interlocutor’s attention shifting towards him. “Moss requires rainwater to grow, leaves can hinder that growth. That daily, patient task is necessary to maintain that illusory beauty. It is not solely nature’s work.” 

“Where have you learned all of this?”

“Books,” Harua replied evenly. “Did you expect me to only read about romance?”

Yixiang denied it vehemently, but he bore his unmistakable smirk. “I do not know what I expected…”

And so they remained, motionless in the silence of a stroll garden lit by lanterns, sheltered from conversation and gossip, and yet at the centre of many a discussion, for the island had never seen such a well-matched pair. 

🀧 

As the days grew colder, so did Yudai. Harder to extract a response from, and harder to tease. He bore on his shoulders the responsibility of an impossible pact with the only other remaining wolfpack on Hokkaido. Of course, Harua understood the importance of securing a match with a far larger clan, but the argument rested solely on survival, and Harua wasn’t sure he wished the mere notion of survival on anyone.

At the shrine, Taki had started disappearing too. Not into the forest where Jo joined Byun Euijoo frequently, trailing after one another in the tall grass glistening with morning dew. But in the town’s direction, and, if Harua guessed, in the direction of the Nakakitas’ butcher shop. It had left Harua restless, to be kept in the dark of Taki’s secrets, to know there were thoughts he wasn’t privy to. 

It was on the rare occasion that Taki agreed to a waterfront promenade on the narrow quays of the town’s harbour that they stumbled upon a phantom of the past. 

As Taki stopped in his tracks, Harua asked, “What is it?”

“He is back,” Taki gasped, looking directly at a man emerging from the ferry-disembarking crowd and crossing the street. 

“Who is?” Harua asked, and he followed Taki’s line of sight. “Who is this man?”

He seemed tall from afar, as tall as one could look next to Yudai’s significant height. The cut of his blouse silhouetted an impressive build and his long locks of hair covered his nape. 

“Murata-san,” Taki said. “He is back.”

It would have been quite unfair to minimise Murata Fuma’s presence, for he was strikingly handsome. And as his gaze travelled along his surroundings, Harua was reminded of his penmanship; that maddening sort of love he so aptly described. Yudai was once the recipient of his tortured heart, collecting countless letters but never attempting a response. 

It seemed fitting, perhaps, in the end, that Murata Fuma would appear back on the island with the intent to free himself from Yudai's snare. 

Autumn. 

🀨

As Autumn slowly turned the forest into a wildfire and the swallows migrated south, Yudai remained confined to the shrine for ten days, only stepping out to tend to his garden or for the occasional hunt. He no longer commented on Jo’s abrupt disappearances nor Taki’s obsessive ramblings about Nakakita Yuma, though Harua bristled at every mention. Yudai would eat little and cut wood until his arms ached. 

“I do not understand what is so bad about Murata-san’s reappearance," Harua admitted one morning as he observed Yudai’s silhouette framed by a pale sunlight through the translucent white paper of the sliding doors. He resembled the wallowing trees bordering the river, the ones forced to deep reverences by thunder.  

“Well, he fled Moriyama after his proposal was rejected,” Jo admitted. 

He had gathered flowers against his chest, oblivious that their pollen had stained the pristine white of his sleeping robes. 

Harua frowned, “Surely his ego wasn’t that bruised.”

“No,” Jo replied, “He was devastated. He kept writing to Yudai-kun those letters, and then, the letters stopped.” Harua thought of ink smudged by tears and dried petals, as Jo pursued, “We thought he’d gotten married, left the island for good.”

Taki emerged from his room, inoffensively soft with slowed blinks and hands itching for warmth. 

“Why would he be back, then?” Harua asked Jo, as he felt the weight of Taki sagging into his side. “To gloat now that he’s married and Yudai is not?” 

“That doesn’t sound like Murata-san, at all,” Jo affirmed. 

“I shall ask Yuma,” Taki murmured into Harua’s shoulder. 

Nakakita Yuma’s name had sat heavily on Taki’s tongue for many seasons, and still Harua scowled in displeasure every time. 

“What would he know about it?”

Jo looked at both of them, strangely entangled. He raised both eyebrows at Harua’s tone, las if he still failed to understand the reason for such animosity, and went on to place his courting gift in a vase. 

“Their families were once close,” Taki answered around a yawn. 

Yudai’s silhouette morphed into his wolf as it slowly vanished into the gaping mouth of the forest. How many secrets were left to uncover, Harua wondered, about this island of ghosts and the people who strangely always returned to it. 

With Jo now entirely taken by the tentative steps of a teething love, it seemed that Wang Yixiang had taken permanent residence in the forest surrounding the shrine; a harmless breed of guard dog refusing to leave Byun Euijoo out of his sight. Harua was left with no choice but to acknowledge him when all he did was appear, his camera in hand to capture what no one had ever thought to observe minutely in the surrounding forest. 

The shrine came to life after the slumber of sleep; too many tasks at once. Chickens to feed, crops to water, statues to polish, futon mattresses to be rolled up and hung in direct sunlight. And Wang Yixiang's figure framed by the shoji screens pushed aside for Harua to gawk at, in the haze of sleep. 

Seated with his eyeline on the seamless wall of trees, Harua had, foolishly, grabbed the first book at his disposal when he had caught wind of Yixiang’s arrival. He sat upright on his heels and faked interest in the blurred pages until the man's shadow grew smaller; until he had the certitude that the foreigner had seen him mimicking a state of deep concentration and retreated for fear of disturbing his reading.

Harua found Wang Yixiang’s mere presence particularly bothersome, and he had started to relinquish his nights to the obsessing thought that the man might appear abruptly in some of his dreams. Of course such nightmarish scenarios weren’t meant to leave the confines of his sleepy mind, but on a soundless night when Harua should have been lulled to sleep by the comforting snores Taki breathed to his ear, he found himself instead walking through the house’s corridors in search of a glass of water.  

“Oh,” Harua exclaimed as Yixiang stood there, on the last step leading to the house’s porch, his silhouette contoured by the moonlight,  his hands tied around a bouquet of blue flowers. 

“I am sorry,” Yixiang apologised sheepishly. “I did not mean to scare you.” And then, looking at Harua fully, he added, “You're wearing glasses.”

“I always wear glasses,” Harua retorted, bristling under the sudden attention. “If you see me without those, then I am certainly not seeing you back.” 

Yixiang laughed, a damning kind of sound. 

“Have you delivered those flowers all this time?” Harua asked, and he willed his voice not to tremble. 

Of course, he knew Jo would feel particularly disappointed to learn that Byun Euijoo hadn’t personally delivered any bouquets, but there was another creeping fear; one Harua believed himself immune to. 

“Oh, spirits, no,” Yixiang shook his head. “Euijoo’s aunt is visiting, and he preferred not to alert her with his escapades before dawn.”

“Ah,” Harua breathed out in relief. It elicited another smile from Yixiang. 

“I simply am a messenger.”

Harua had never taken the time to observe his hands, entirely preoccupied by his eyes, the hair obstructing his gaze, the defined square of his jaw, the taunting stretch of his lips. Foolish, foolish thoughts. 

“You cannot leave the flowers here, though,” Harua stated. 

“Oh, but I thought—”

“The one delivering the courting gift should never be spotted. Therefore, you have failed at carrying out that mission,” Harua informed him. “I’m sure Byun-sama knew that, since we never saw so much as his silhouette.” 

Yixiang frowned and recoiled. “So is it like… A game?”

“It’s tradition.” A part of Harua, one that hadn't been groomed into polite compliance, itched to ask Yixiang if he was in the habit of looking down on those unfamiliar to him. 

“I was raised in a place where courtship is straightforward, it’s not hide-and-seek.” 

That explained, Harua thought, Wang Yixiang’s utter lack of romanticism. Seeing his brooding response, Yixiang hurried to explain, “That was an unfortunate choice of words, I’ll admit.”

“You’ve made your disdain for our ways very clear before…”

“Disdain?”

“Yes, your condescending tone for our shrine, your obvious disapproval of Jo.” 

Disdain, Harua believed, summarised it all quite well.

“You are attributing intentions to me that I have not entertained,” Yixiang defended himself. “This world is new to me, I can not possibly know everything about it. I would love to learn more about it.”

“You would?” Harua asked. 

“Yes, I can not say with certainty that I would understand it all, but I’m growing quite fond of this place.”

Harua blinked twice. Then admitted, “I have little knowledge of Moriyama compared to my cousins.”

“A little knowledge should suffice,” Yixiang responded. He bowed and started retreating back down the wooden stairs. 

“Wang-sama,” Harua called him, watched him turn around, and revealed,  “You can leave the flowers this time.”

The sensible thing would have been to admit out loud that he was doing it simply to maintain the illusion of courtship for Jo’s sake, and not just to see the look of delight passing through Wang Yixiang’s face. 

🀨

Without surprise, Wang Yixiang’s first lesson ought to revolve around courting ōkami traditions. He had inquired about the Moon god before, about how devoted the entire pack was to Him. He had asked about the pack welcoming humans before; humans such as Harua’s father, whom he spoke of with much pride and affection.  

“Why such secrecy around courting gifts?” He asked at last.

“I believe it originated from an old tale of a commoner courting a princess, leaving gifts at night for her to find at daylight,” Harua recounted. “One night, though, as he placed a basket of fruits on her residence’s doorstep, he spotted two yellow eyes observing him in the night. On the edge of the forest, a wolf stood immobile. The commoner feared those cruel beasts, so he shot the wolf with an arrow and, fearing the spirits’ response, threw the wolf’s body off a cliff.” 

“The wolf was the princess,” Yixiang guessed.

“Yes, the princess was the wolf.” Harua nodded. “Days passed, the basket of fruits rotted on the doorstep, untouched. And the commoner, thinking his love was now unwanted, drowned himself in the river.”  

“That is why courting gifts must be left at nighttime, without witnesses,” Yixiang realised out loud. “How has Euijoo learned that?”

“Perhaps Jo-kun shared the story with him.” Harua said, “Just like he told him about the blue flowers.”

With a pensive kind of silence settling between them, Harua expected a sudden turn of conversation, but the man, sitting beside him with his untouched cup of tea, surprised him again.

“Would you like flowers? As a courting gift…”

“I would prefer books.” Harua responded, briefly averting his eyes to the ceramic teaware.  “Would you like flowers?”

“Fire lilies,” Yixiang said. “It would be easy to court me, though, I do not wake before midday.”

Harua found himself giggling despite himself.

As the kaki harvesting season approached, so did Yudai’s birthday. It coincided with the Autumn festival, which brought the town’s streets to life and fuelled the long-standing grudges of the craftsmen’s shops trapped in the adjacent, unlit alleyways. 

When informally invited to the street festival, Byun Euijoo and Wang Yixiang had both inquired about a time to meet on the main square. Bāchan had scoffed, affronted. 

These days, she had been mainly preoccupied by the retellings of various sightings of one of her grandchildren across town. She had missioned Harua to tail Taki, no matter how much Nakakita Yuma’s presence greatly irritated him. It was only a matter of a few circumstances that led Wang Yixiang to join the escapade along a long stretch of the forest overlooking rugged cliffs. 

“They seem close,” Yixiang commented as the pair walked ahead, with their hands similarly held behind their backs.  

“Only because Taki often mistakes genteel ways for affection,” Harua responded.

His interlocutor had a way to express everything, and Harua observed each reaction before he masked it all behind a blank face. Raised eyebrows, a twitch of the lips. Nearly a smile. 

“Does he?” Yixiang asked. “And you, I suppose, would know better, since you fancy yourself a matchmaker?”

It wasn’t said accusatorily, and yet, hearing himself so nakedly described, Harua looked down at his hands sullenly. 

“What is so bad about arranging people's happiness?” Harua admitted quietly. 

“Are they in dire need of your help?”

“Drowning people can scarcely ask for a lifevest,” Harua said.

“Ah,” Yixiang answered without offering further comment.

Harua was familiar with such a game; he had lured many whilst at social events by feigning indifference. The secret lay in maintaining a gracious smile.  

“Are you in search of happiness?” Harua asked, starved for information. 

Yixiang paused as if he had never quite thought about it before. “Certainly not. I have loved, and at the time it seemed like I would get consumed by that all-burning passion, mainly because of how unreciprocated my feelings were.”

“What did you do?” Harua asked, and he detested how curious and eager he sounded. 

Yixiang looked at him, a fleeting smile passing by. 

“What can we make of an unrequited flame but let it slowly die?”

Taki’s shriek of delight reached them. A sudden eruption above the waves’ cry. It was difficult, at times, to witness how freely someone could exist, Harua thought. But he was also sustained by Taki’s joy; the sole reason to make that chaperone mission tolerable. Nakakita Yuma’s laugh echoed in response. 

Under the canopy of sunset-hued foliage, Wang Yixiang bore a pensive expression as he looked at the two picking strangely shaped rocks to throw into the sea. "May I ask what you find so terrible about Nakakita Yuma?"

Harua hadn’t expected that question. He had thought his distaste was so well disguised behind courteous manners. 

"He is a butcher's son," Harua responded, plucking petals from a cluster of snow daisies he had earlier uprooted from the rain-drenched soil. 

"And so?"

"Taki likes dainty, delicate things he will undoubtedly suffer with such a match.”

"I thought you believed in love…" Yixiang dragged out each word teasingly, and Harua felt prey again to the man’s toying instincts. It was irritating to know the older man took amusement in seeing his flustered attempts at keeping a conversation level between them. 

"What is love without comfort but a senseless pursuit?!" Harua declared. He noted his interlocutor’s silence and added quietly, “You must surely think me cruel for being so stinting with my affection.”

“I only wonder if your affection is reserved for those city men's wallets,” Yixiang responded.

Harua laughed, more surprised than charmed. 

Far ahead of them, so did Taki. Yuma replied with one of those distinct smiles that seemed to spell the most concealed desires. 

“Is it outrageous to think he is too good for this island?” Harua asked in the ensuing silence. 

He had nursed Taki’s desire for adventure from their youngest age; the day when, after reaching maturity, he would drag Taki to the main island to learn how the men unburdened by responsibilities had lived.

“Well, you mentioned being an artisan of happiness. His or yours, that remains unclear,” Yixiang admitted.

“I think of him first,” Harua defended. “I always think of him.”

“Then how is it possible for you to know him better than he knows himself?” 

It hurt. It hurt so acutely that Harua interrupted his walk. 

When he saw that Harua was no longer by his side, Yixiang retreated on his steps, “I only ask because it is evident that you are deeply attached to him.”

That could not be contested, Harua thought. 

“We were born hours apart,” Harua admitted, and the words spilled out, unguarded. “I have not known a world without him. They said that, as pups, our eyes opened on the same day, and we always gazed at each other first, ever since.”

Yixiang smiled softly. It was a beautiful smile, Harua thought briefly. “It is a beautiful bond to share, it would be a shame to lose it.”

“We could never lose it.” Harua frowned, and he began walking again. “It has survived far worse than a mild infatuation.” 

🀨

Drowned out by the sound of flutes and taiko drums, and the sizzling of grilled and broiled meats on the food stalls lining up the main street, Harua let go of Taki’s hand to scream into his ear that he was not allowed to stray away from them to simply wander with one Nakakita Yuma. Harua had then taken a look at Jo and wiped the grease on his chin, wondering distantly if Yudai’s distracted mind had led his younger brothers to regress somehow. 

On the crowded main square, Harua tried not to look too interested in the unrecognisable faces he stared at.

“Why are you acting so on edge?” Yudai asked Harua at some point, a question which could have been directed back at him.  

“Is it that Wang-sama isn’t nearby to take you on a stroll from this crowd?” Taki teased, pushing his shoulder against Harua’s. Harua, who was far stronger than Taki despite his smaller build, returned the gesture with more aggression than humour. 

Yudai stood very still like he enjoyed the spectacle. When they were younger, he had taken his role as default referee quite seriously, but as they grew he had enjoyed sitting back and no longer being required to carry one of them away by the scruff of the neck. 

“I am not expecting Wang-sama.”

“Can you at least acknowledge that he played a role in your recent happiness?” Taki tilted his head to the side.

“And what role would that be?”

“A confidant,” Taki said. “A friend.”

“I can not let you say that we are friends,” Harua corrected. 

“And yet, is it not his approval you so desperately seek when you look at him first to gauge the sensibility of what you say? When you laugh only as he does, and find yourself reading wherever he goes…” 

“I love reading!”

“Perhaps a lot more now…”

Harua gasped, utterly shocked that Taki would resort to such a sly remark. 

Harua agreed he could be many things; but desperate, he certainly was not. He responded so, but catching Jo’s furtive glance towards Yudai, realised that he had been unmasked. 

“I am sure he is just as besotted. I have never seen someone laugh so…” Jo searched for a word that wouldn't make Harua shudder in embarrassment. “Freely.”

“I do not wish to speak of him any longer,” Harua told them dismissively. With his eyes on the parishioners’ faces lit by paper lanterns, he suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, look, Murata-san!”

Though most people would have taken that exclamation at face value, Harua's cousins first started laughing, persuaded that Harua had searched to create a clumsy diversion, like a magician preparing for a hat trick. Murata Fuma’s sudden appearance in three long strides felled any remnants of mockery left in Yudai’s eyes. 

“Good evening,” Fuma said to the four of them with a rehearsed deep bow. His eyes were solely focused on Yudai as he straightened up. 

“Fuma-kun, welcome home,” Yudai said, sounding far less confident than what Harua was used to. He sounded, in fact, so unnaturally frail that Harua wondered if his older cousin still harboured some guilt for having rejected a childhood friend’s proposal.

“It’s good to be home,” Fuma smiled, and it transformed his face handsomely. 

Yudai, though he was in the habit of expressing himself warmly no matter his audience, bore a strained smile as he nodded.

Though he had maintained that he did not care for Wang Yixiang, Harua awaited his arrival with a trepidation that filled him with equal parts shame and excitement. He had spent so many years crafting a persona and making sure that his poised manners never let the nebulous vastness of his mind transpire, but there was this foreigner, with dark hair and even darker eyes. One Harua had chosen to entrust with his matchmaking plans.  

“Expecting someone?” Yixiang’s voice startled him out of the distant observation of Nakakita Yuma rounding around Taki.

Turning to face Yixiang’s smile, Harua glared. “You are late.”

“Fashionably,” Yixiang responded in English. Seeing Harua’s bewildered reaction, he added with a smile. “It’s an expression.”

“Surely it isn’t well-regarded to show up this late at a celebration,” Harua told him, making his way through the dense crowd. 

“You never indicated an hour. Only nighttime,” Yixiang retorted, following him with expert dexterity. “To be honest, Euijoo had to change thrice.”

When Harua turned to him with a dubious look in his eyes, suspecting that he may be just as responsible for the lateness, Yixiang simply shrugged at him. 

He was wearing a yukata as were most of the festival-goers, and he looked so frustratingly handsome that Harua could simply huff in response. 

“Young love,” Yixiang insisted, knowing it would force a smile on Harua's face. 

Indeed, Byun Euijoo had successfully walked amongst a current of people heading in the opposite direction until he found himself near Jo. They wore mirroring timid smiles as they saluted one another.

“I think tonight might be the night,” Harua revealed out loud.

Yixiang stared at him, mouth agape. “I beg your pardon.” 

“The night Jo chooses to show Byun-sama his wolf,” Harua added in precision with a pointed glare. “And certainly not the perverse ideas you imagined.”

“You could’ve just said so from the beginning,” Yixiang grumbled, flushing a delicate shade of pink. 

“Has he told you anything about my cousin?” Harua asked him before his sulking resulted in guilt creeping in. “What it would mean to him to see Jo shift into a wolf…”

“Euijoo is…” Yixiang looked at his friend, his expression softening. “I doubt he cares about such things.”

Something lurched in Harua’s chest. 

“What does that mean?”

“He’s a lovesick man; he would be entranced by your cousin shifting into a rock, a dragon, or a moldy shoe.” 

It was said with a teasing tone, but Harua found that humour didn't ease his discomfort. 

“This is far from reassuring,” Harua said, after a calculated pause. “Jo could suffer a heart attack with how loud his heart is beating right now…”

“Forgive me,” Yixiang addressed him with a rueful smile. “I only meant to say that Euijoo, when he mentions your cousin, speaks of him with the reverence you speak of the Moon.”  

Harua had never struggled in holding a grudge. He found that power delectable; with Wang Yixiang squirming in apologies in the face of his quietness. He thought that he would not formulate a response, but Yixiang's eyes were insistent as Harua kept his gaze ostensibly directed at the parade as small-scale wooden floats were carried through the streets. 

Yes, Harua had never struggled in holding a grudge, but he felt the phantom touch of fingers grazing the hem of his yukata sleeve and knew he would soon forfeit. 

🀨

In the days following the Autumn festival, the household dived into speculations for there had been no other bouquets carried at dawn, no letters offered in secret. In fact, the silence from the villa's inhabitants was so deafening that it slowly became worrying. 

They gathered in hushed whispers as dusk bled into the pink sky, and the raindrops sang. 

“Perhaps he has scared him,” Taki suggested.

“Byun-sama has known Jo’s nature since they first met,” Harua refuted. 

“There is a difference between knowing and witnessing that change,” Yudai astutely pointed out. “Some people get scared when they see a wolf. It does not matter that this wolf would never attack them.”

“And the courting gifts have stopped altogether!” Bāchan lamented. 

Jo had revealed his wolf, and in doing so, admitted the severity of his health condition. 

It was decided, through a process of elimination, that Harua would be the one commissioned to investigate the issue further, by entering Jo’s quiet room to deliver supper. 

As soon as the sliding partition door closed behind him, Harua understood that he had minimised the impact Byun Euijoo’s silence had on Jo’s demeanour. Jo, who sat cross-legged in the middle of his room, had around a dozen papers spread around him; sketches of Byun Euijoo, his sparkling eyes, the upturned corners of his mouth when it smiled, expressions of open adoration and glee drawn in charcoal. Sketches of his naked body, too; the arch of his back, the delicate slenderness of his waist, the elegant turn of a calf and his own fingers digging inside— 

Harua looked away, his cheeks scorched red.  

"Have you received a word from him?" Jo asked without turning around to assess the newcomer. 

His voice sounded on the verge of extinction, and Harua wondered if he had cried. He didn’t remember Jo crying past his tenth birthday; out of frustration and out of joy, out of compassion for others, for a twisted ankle or a pair of mourning doves to bury. 

"No," Harua admitted.

"Perhaps he's grown tired of this interminable pursuit. I'm far from a good prospect," Jo said.

"Jo," Harua said, “If you are not a good prospect, then who is?”

"Haru-chan. I'll die young, I know it," Jo said, "and most of the few years I'll get will be spent in misery, in bed, painting in a recluse room. Who would take care of a sick animal?"

Someone who loves you, Harua wished to scream at him, to shake him out of that dangerous trance. 

He left the room to the sound of Jo tearing the drawings apart. 

It was a short walk to the town. Shorter even than in Harua’s souvenirs, but perhaps it was shortest because of how many things weighed heavily on his mind. 

Harua refused to acknowledge Wang Yixiang or the stirring in his chest when he pictured his gaze, the mocking lilt of his full lips. He focused his interior tirade solely on Byun Euijoo.

Incomprehension had led to frustration, frustration to fury. His anger had slowly faded when he found himself in front of the imposing gate. 

As he was escorted inside the property, and saw two men sweeping the moss-covered gardens, Harua was even tempted to smile. But the distraction was short-lived. 

"I wish to speak with Byun-sama,” Harua had declared to the gatekeeper.  

He was led inside, to the sunken entryway of the mansion without a response, and then into the three-story atrium living room, left standing near the traditional sunken hearth. Covering the majority of the living room wall, Jo's painting had become the focal point that caught every visitor's eye; in it, a forest and the shadows of the birds that inhabited it.

Harua heard their voices from behind partition doors before he could see any of them. He recognised the steady rhythm of Wang Yixiang’s heartbeat. 

The voices spoke in Korean, and Harua found himself understanding it all. 

"Is this house to be now constantly infested by wolves of the forest clan?" A woman inquired.

"The forest clan is well-respected in these parts," Yixiang responded, "we are the guests on their land."

 And then he appeared as the doors parted. Just as immaculately dressed as he had always been, his hair half tied up in a bun and the longest locks flowing down to brush his shoulders. 

Harua waited for recognition to light up his gaze, the soft smile he was only ever privy to. But Wang Yixiang bore an expression unlike ever before, as he entered the room, preceded by an elderly woman who could only be Byun Euijoo’s aunt. What the gods had spared from her, giving her a short stature, was heavily compensated by worldly possessions. She was childless and had regarded her brother's son as the sole heir of her fortune.

"Harua-san," Yixiang said. 

He had never been called this way before, Harua realised. He bowed his head belatedly and looked only at Yixiang as he inquired about Byun Euijoo’s whereabouts. 

“Euijoo is gone.”

"Gone?” Harua asked. "How? When?" 

"He left. Two mornings ago he took the ferry back to the main island. Urgent matters await him home."

"Urgent matters," Harua repeated. "He didn’t send word for Jo-kun."

Harua had been naive not to realise the possibility that Byun Euijoo’s aunt was well-versed in Japanese; she turned to Yixiang with a sour expression on her face. 

"Is Jo the human-wolf, then?"

Yixiang inclined his head, "yes." as Harua looked between the two of them, trying to make sense of the news of Byun Euijoo’s abrupt departure. He was about to inquire about the reasons behind it when Yixiang opened his mouth once more. 

“I am afraid,” said Yixiang, “that Euijoo can no longer entertain your cousin’s advances.”

“Entertain,” Harua choked, “do you mean the season-long courtship that Byun-sama himself carried out?”

“Euijoo hasn’t courted anyone here,” his aunt interrupted in a baffling demonstration of self-assurance.

Harua looked at Yixiang helplessly, but he no longer returned his gaze. 

“I assure you, Madam, that I do not intend to discredit your nephew, but my cousin sits heartbroken atop the hill after spending many months in Byun-sama’s company.” 

“Was he promised anything?”

“He was offered courting gifts!”     

She shook her head with a disbelieving laugh, and Harua understood he wasn’t well-equipped to battle her. 

"I cannot believe that to be true; Euijoo has been engaged since birth,” she said.

The news fell abruptly. Harua tried to recall some initial clues about Byun Euijoo’s unavailability, and he came up empty-handed. 

“To think him foolish enough,” his aunt continued,  “to fall for a countryman’s ruse."

“A ruse?” Harua asked, “Forgive me, I do not understand the nature of your accusations.”

"No spiritual blessing is worth a sick ōkami." 

Harua’s mouth released a sound, akin to a gasp. 

"Jo's illness is—" 

"Unfortunate. But a pretty face will not suffice to erase the deficiency of his birth."

"Please," Yixiang intervened, a quick flex of his jaw and furrowed eyebrows. "Let’s not speak of this further." 

But the old woman was far more stubborn than anyone involved. Far crueler, too. 

“There are far better prospects found in this debauched philandering town alone,” she added with her face settling into a smile. “I am sure your grandmother may agree. She came for tea not too long ago, did you know?”

“Harua—” A voice called. Yixiang’s, certainly. Though Harua failed to concentrate on that foreign heart, knowing his own had seemingly stopped beating. 

"I believe you have insulted me enough, I will now take my leave," Harua declared, and bowing his head, without further comment, he turned his back on them both. 

The men draped in blue were still tending to the gardens as Harua walked along the paved paths leading to the gates. 

"Harua-san!" Yixiang called. "Harua!"

In truth, Harua had expected Yixiang to run after him. But to grab his sleeve so carelessly, to force him to perform in front of an audience was far more enraging. 

"And so this is what you’ve been up to?" Harua turned to him, venom dripping through. "Discrediting my family? Mocking us?"

"Of course not!”

“Byun-sama is engaged, and you knew it!”

“Yes,” Yixiang, for all his flaws, looked remorseful. 

“You discouraged his pursuit of Jo because you knew he was destined for another,” Harua continued.

“Yes.”

“And you never told me,” Harua insisted. 

“No.”

Harua tried to turn away once more, but was held back by Yixiang’s hand. 

“Please,” he begged. “Please, know this; Euijoo has never met his betrothed, he has never intended to fill the expectations placed on him from birth. He’s gone now to arrange a family dispute, not to flee Jo!  But—”

"But?" Harua repeated. 

"He wasn't made aware of Jo's sickness. Neither was I."

Harua recoiled with a step backwards, feeling the aggravating urge to roll his eyes.

"And why should you? You did not intend to choose him as your ōkami anyway." 

"I only mean that your family hasn’t been upfront about many things. We believed him bedridden with a mere cold, not a lasting affliction,” Yixiang commented.

“You sure like to place the blame on others when it comes to your own secretive plots,” Harua declared. 

His interlocutor squinted his eyes like he was deliberately trying to press on a sore spot. “These things may appear frivolous to you, but most fortunate families will not look at your cousin's situation favourably,” Yixiang said. "There is truth in what Euijoo’s aunt tried to convey, with that unfortunate contempt of hers. To hide Jo's health decline was treacherous.”

“And what would you call it, to cajole a man who has never known love, to smother him with gifts and affection,” Harua snarled, “to sleep with him while betrothed to another if not treachery?”

As the words registered, Yixiang’s face paled suddenly. And he spared a glance at the gardeners to make sure they hadn't halted their work. 

“Oh, he didn’t tell you what those forest escapades entailed,” Harua added with a raised eyebrow, “Jo’s sketchbooks are filled with his body. I shall share them with his aunt if she so deeply cares about her nephew’s integrity…” 

The silence persisted, and it slowly dawned on Harua that his vision had started to blur.

Looking up at Yixiang was akin to torture. “And now you have nothing to say. Nothing to defend anymore!”

"Rua—"

"How dare you speak of my family that way," Harua whispered. "Treachery! When it is only love he has desperately sought!"

"And a man with means.”

“You confuse my intentions with my cousin’s,” Harua said coldly. “I may not have loved as you have, but I have only been motivated by the prospect of my cousins’ happiness.”

"If it is love you wish for them, then why haven't you let Nakakita Yuma court your darling bug?" Yixiang asked. "You regard people and place value on them similarly to how Euijoo’s aunt does.”  

Harua’s mouth opened, yet no sound came out. 

“You do not use her words, but you think similarly that some people are too good for others. It doesn't matter how good-hearted your intentions are… Do you truly not see how ill-suited you are to advise anyone on matters of the heart?” Yixiang continued. 

“And what of you?” Harua defended himself weakly. “You who listened to my lectures, faked interest in my family's history? Why do all that if you find me so aggravating?”

“Because for all of those awful habits you possess, there are many others I feel drawn to.”

It had become slowly suffocating that the distance which separated them had grown increasingly smaller. 

“I came here with the intent to leave shortly,” Yixiang sighed, hair wind-whipped against his face. “Certain of the path I wished to take. But I met you.”

If there had once been cruel words spoken, Harua would never know. He recoiled with another step.

"You are the wind that blew me off course,” Yixiang declared at last, with frightening certainty. 

Harua trembled under his gaze. He felt, again, like his wolf whimpered for a buried heart to claw at, like he had finally understood how hatred spoiled the burgeoning feelings he kept secret, and left him with a rotten core.

“Perhaps it is time for you too to go home,” Harua said coldly. 

Yixiang frowned, “You do not seem to understand.” 

He spoke like it was a trivial matter of a language gap.

“I understand infatuation, Wang-sama. I understand it well now. You and I belong to worlds that could never reconcile. And were I still so foolish as to overlook our many differences, I could not, in good conscience, think of ever growing close to the very source of my cousin’s chagrin.”

Looking at his eyes, Harua delivered his final words carefully. "I will never forget the treachery you took part in, and I will never forgive it." 

🀨

Jo was composed as he learned the news, stoic in the most worrying way. He must have known, Harua thought, he must have felt it somehow, that impending doom, that growing fracture, and who was there to be blamed but that treacherous heart of his? 

Jo was composed as he learned the news, nodding along as he barely registered the spreading poison in his chest; that woeful acceptance that wouldn’t desert him for many moons.

That composure faltered at night,  when the darkness creeped on the shrine grounds and the day could no longer drown out his wolf's wailing cry. 

Winter. 

🀩

For those who hadn't known the privilege of encountering Jo before, there were now fewer occasions to see him around town, for he took on the shape of a ghost in the aftermath of Byun Euijoo's departure. Though Juria and other shrine maidens had taken on their wolf forms to search for the blue flowers once brought to him, it now seemed as if the entire island had been rid of the blossoms. And Harua, who was expected to leave for the main island, couldn’t imagine doing so as his cousin lay in anguish. 

Wang Yixiang had tried, on two occasions, to approach Harua when he visited downtown; as the land started to freeze and the wind had blown the leaves from the trees, it had become easier to flee his meagre attempts at conversation. When he looked at the people who had brought so much misery into their home, Harua thought, strangely, all roads led back to him.

He was on the trail back home, under a sky where rainbows hid for a season, when Juria’s wolf came forth with flowers between her teeth.  

Yudai cut off the stems, Taki filled the vase with water, and Bāchan placed it on the trunk closest to Jo’s bed. Harua waited for a miracle; a brief joy he knew wouldn’t come easily. Lying on his side in a troubling torpor, Jo never once looked at the flowers. And the forget-me-nots wilted in a room where the sun no longer travelled through. 

🀩

There didn’t seem to be a remedy for a broken heart. Not one medicine that could be quickly ingested to clear one’s mind, to dull the ache. Harua had read all the books he could find on that issue, and still, love would always prevail in the end. 

“Haru-kun?”

These days, Harua found that he wandered aimlessly, sent on errands that seemed to be fruitless, and tasked with gathering more information about Byun Euijoo’s absence, though no one knew that he wouldn’t ever approach that house again. 

“Oh, Maki,” Harua started as he turned towards the voice. “Good day,” he said, though it wasn’t. 

“Are you alright?” Maki asked.

That, too, was hard to accept; Jo had been burned in any potential suitor’s mind, because the news that Byun Euijoo had courted him and left him had travelled sooner than the news that Harua would not leave the island for another week.

“Where are your glasses?” Maki inquired, in the absence of a response. 

“Believe it or not, I broke them,” Harua smiled sheepishly. 

In truth, Taki had sat on them, but it was entirely Harua’s fault in the end.

“Are you leaving, then?” Maki asked. 

“Yes, but I will come back soon enough.” 

“Summer is months away.”

It was, but looking at the sunny sky, Harua felt it closer than the autumn that had come to a sudden end. Harua looked at Maki, truly looked at him, and saw nothing of the boy he had once thought himself willing to marry.

“You never courted me,” Harua said suddenly, “Yet everyone expected it.”

Anyone else would have been shocked at the brazen words, but Maki was of the few who understood Harua’s nature, who had seen it beyond the contrived public settings. 

“You are a migratory bird, Harua-kun,” Maki said. “There was no point in courting you, knowing you weren’t meant to stay.” 

Harua thought of the swallows’ nest once clutched into a tree’s arms and crushed on the forest’s ground. His thoughts went back to Yixiang, as he had crouched to the ground to take a photograph. 

“I am sorry, I was careless with my affections. Selfish with my needs to be acknowledged, and—”

“Loved?” Maki asked.  “I am sorry, too. I was not entirely blameless in this situation. I only ever was interested in catching glimpses of her.”

“Her?”

“Juria-chan,” Maki admitted. “I mustered up the courage to court her since last spring. Didn’t you know?”  

Harua thought of the crow with its chest open. He thought of Taki telling him about the courting gifts left weeks before his arrival. 

“I didn’t know it was you,” Harua gasped. “I thought someone was courting Jo!”

“With animals?” Maki frowned. “I wish I had the time to tell you. In fact, I meant to…”

There had been a promise, months ago, Harua realised. One he had made with pursed lips and the feeling that he would be able to fulfill it, if he spared it some time. He hadn’t spared it any time.  

“Please forgive me, Maki-kun,” Harua said, “I never visited you. That was cruel of me.”

“You are not cruel,” Maki shook his head. “You lack the willfulness to inflict pain on others. Clumsy, you may be, but cruel, you are not.” Quietly, he added, “You are my friend.”

“I have been a terrible, neglectful friend,” Harua concluded, “But please, allow me to make amends.”

Maki looked at him. He nodded in the direction of a narrow street leading to his family’s funeral home. “Would you like to come in?” He asked.

🀩

The weeks that followed Harua's return to the main island were populated by a strange kind of restlessness. Not even the announcement of Rei’s engagement could dispel the sorrow Harua felt when he thought of the shrine he had left behind, and he found no solace in the concrete plains he walked through, the horizon crisscrossed by overhead power lines.  

Harua thought he had gone mad with desire when he saw him for the first time in months. Wang Yixiang. Right in the middle of a train station, with his eyes fixed on the signal boards. The world fell silent as Harua debated walking in the opposite direction, fleeing because it seemed to be a safer option than to get entrapped in his gaze once more. 

“Harua-san,” Yixiang called.

He didn’t give him time to escape, crossing the distance rapidly. 

“Your hair is black,” Yixiang said, once he was closer, his mouth half open in awe.

“Yes, I ran out of dye.”

It successfully earned a chuckle out of Yixiang, and Harua felt that helpless pull.

Yixiang looked at him like a creature made for longing. “You were standing still as a ghost and I thought—” 

“You thought I was in need of resuscitation?” Harua asked.

“Not quite,” Yixiang smiled again. “I only thought you didn't recognise me.” 

“How could I not?” Harua asked, and anger appeared again, destructive as a forest fire. You haunt me every night, he ought to say. You linger on my every thought. 

They were interrupted by a woman pushing her way through the crowd and snuggling up against Yixiang.

“Weno, look what I found!” She exclaimed, presenting a plushie as one would share the most trivial detail. When she finally registered Harua’s presence, her face settled into a polite smile, and she spoke in flawless Japanese. “Oh, forgive me. Hello.”

“Hello,” Harua bowed. 

“Is this a friend of yours?” The woman asked Yixiang in the language they shared.

“Shigeta Harua,” Harua introduced himself stiffly.

The woman’s face transformed, glee overtaking her features. 

“The boy named after a season, it is you!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Yixiang spoke of you often,” she added. “Oh, forgive my eagerness, I am Mei.”

“My sister,” Yixiang added with a soft smile.

Harua breathed in relief. It was now much more understandable why Yixiang had been so visibly fond of Taki’s antics, if it reminded him of his most cherished person. 

Harua felt silly, thinking back to Moriyama, to the anger that used to sustain him in the void left by Yixiang’s disappearance. 

A boy named after a season, that was all he was. 

“I must leave,” Harua told them both. “I have a ferry to take.”

“Are you going back to the island, then?” Yixiang asked. 

“Yes,” Harua nodded. “I am only going back for the holidays.”  

To Yixiang’s sister, he said, “It was a pleasure to meet you.” 

“Harua-san,” Yixiang called again, as Harua attempted to leave. “Please, tell me. How is your cousin?”

“How do you think he is?” Harua snarled, “He no longer sings, he no longer paints, he no longer smiles. All because of your friend! All because he has poisoned his mind and cannibalised his every thought. You saw a scheme, a ruse where there was none. Jo-kun has always had a weak disposition, and ever since he came into this world, my grandmother has held onto the belief that he may leave this world before she will. Still, Jo has lived. And he has wished for someone to love him, albeit briefly.” 

Harua registered, distantly, Mei’s face scrunched in worry, but the words continued to spill out helplessly, and the world refused to quiet. 

“You must understand,” He told Yixiang, “that we are the ones who have felt duped, for we had thought him capable of loving Jo that way.” 

"Euijoo has broken the engagement," Yixiang admitted, at last. 

"What?"

"I believe he intends to rectify his mistake," Yixiang added. And because his sister tugged on his sleeve; something about the imminent arrival of their train, Yixiang added with a contrite smile, "I was glad to see you."

And then, as he often did at dawn, Yixiang vanished from Harua's sight.

🀩

Harua had been surprised to see the winter illuminations on Moriyama's naked trees, but the greatest gift of all had been to find Jo at the harbour, standing next to Taki, wearing a smile Harua feared he would never see again. No words had come from Byun Euijoo, and the villa sat unoccupied as Wang Yixiang visited his family. All the discourse surrounding Jo's failed engagement had died down, replaced by something Nakakita Yuma had, apparently, shared with far too many clients. 

Because heartache still clung to their every wall, Harua found that Yudai had grown more prone to wither indoors.  

“Murata-san inquires after you,” Taki said after supper was cleared and Jo had escorted Bāchan to her bed. 

Yudai barely moved, barely giving any indication that he had heard his brother at all.

“That is kind of him.”

“He has said before that, should you wish for his help collecting wood, he’ll gladly—”

“I do not need his help,” Yudai interrupted. 

“It’s only that—”

“Bug,” Yudai plunged his hands into the washbasin. He scrubbed so hard that Harua momentarily feared for the lacquerware. “That is quite enough.”

Taki left the room abruptly. Harua was beginning to think that Murata Fuma was merely a pretext to be used, and the lingering tension in the air was caused by some other poor, unsuspecting inhabitant.

“Murata-san,” Harua started once it became apparent that Taki would not return.

“Oh please, not you too.” Yudai groaned. 

“You rejected him once; why would he persist so much?!” Harua wondered aloud. “That is not the picture of gentility anyone portrays him as… Where is his mindfulness, his respect for your refusal?” 

Yudai looked pained. “It is my fault.”

“How?” 

Yudai did not respond. His hands disappeared in the filthy dishwater as if it would suffice to quieten Harua’s suspicions of a past version of himself driving reason away. Harua looked only at his cousin’s profile; the quiver of his lips and realisation struck him. The careful avoidance, the mountains of letters stacked in a drawer. 

Oh, what a fool he had been, to fail in seeing the anguish plain on Yudai’s face, to neglect how it had been tied to Murata’s exuberant return. 

“You love him,” Harua said.

Yudai froze, and it was admission enough. 

“You loved him then, and you love him still,” Harua continued. 

"I couldn't afford to leave the village," Yudai admitted, his hands now pruned and hanging uselessly by his sides.

"So you chose to be miserable instead?" Harua scratched at the old scab, watching it bleed. 

"I chose my duty as the oldest son and the leader of this pack. I knew I couldn't let love derail me from this path."

"What path?"

“The one you have so often denied,” Yudai retorted. “The one that begins and ends here, on this very island. I used to imagine a future far from here, but there would be dire consequences to what I’ve toyed with. Who could lead this family in my absence? Certainly not you.”

“And why not?”

“Because you despise this place, you do!” Yudai said, and he trembled. "Do you think it is so easy to live life as you do? A hefty inheritance, a city's education. I do not begrudge you. I am content to shoulder this burden if it means that you get the life you deserve."

"And what of you?" Harua asked. "You deserve to love and be loved."

“This island is all I know. This land is all I have to offer.”

🀩

New Year's was always the busiest time of the year, between the house's deep cleaning required in preparation and the abundance of food to serve to household members and worshippers alike. The inhabitants all arrived at the shrine, intending to offer their first prayers during the first three days of Shōgatsu. The New Year festival then spread onto the streets, and Harua witnessed it all with quiet excitement. 

“Murata-san,” Harua called and watched the man startle out of his reverie.

Murata Fuma had appeared at the shrine daily, but he had also vanished easily. To see him observing the giant torches carried down the temple's steps amongst deafening drums was surprising, for he seemed to scarcely enjoy the thunderous atmosphere.  

“Oh, you surprised me,” Fuma said, and he gave him a stiff smile. 

“I was wondering if you intended to stay this time,” Harua told him without preamble.

“It depends.”

“Of him, right?”  

They looked in the same direction. Yudai had knelt down to be eye-level with a child, and placed a comforting hand on the toddler's back. 

“I must apologise,” Harua declared suddenly.

“What for?”

Harua returned his gaze to his cousin.

“He will never accept any shred of happiness if he believes he must continue to look after us.”

“I have understood that,” Fuma replied evenly. “You are his priority. It is admirable how he hasn't changed in all these years.”

“No, he hasn't,” Harua agreed. And because he still interfered with matters of the heart, he added, “He has kept all the letters you ever sent him.” 

Watching Murata Fuma’s heartbreak from up close was paralysing, and Harua briefly wondered if he had successfully nudged Murata Fuma in Yudai's direction. There wasn't much time to wonder, Murata Fuma walked towards Yudai, but bypassed him swiftly and disappeared down the hill. 

Harua thought, foolishly, that Murata Fuma would walk back on his steps, but the man never reappeared. And as Harua took a step back, he collided with Nakakita Yuma. 

“Oh, forgive me,” he said, inclining his head politely. Yuma returned the gesture without a word, and Harua thought again that he had never met someone so quick to raise his blood pressure. Except perhaps Wang Yixiang.

“I am surprised you are not stuck to Taki-kun,” Harua said. 

Yuma frowned. “Are you trying to provoke me?”

"Excuse me?” Harua recoiled, affronted. “If it is about Taki leaving for the main island, we have planned on it for a longer time than whatever game you have been engaged in."

"A game?" Yuma repeated. "It is funny that you think Taki had much choice in the matter..." 

“I do not order Taki around," Harua said, "I have only advised him on accompanying me.”

Yuma laughed, but his anger was palpable.

“Your arrogance is staggering. He admires you, of course he will follow your advice! He thinks you only have his best interests at heart.” 

“I do have his best interests at heart,” Harua retorted. It was sordid to have to explain himself to Nakakita Yuma of all people.  

“Then how do you fail to recognise how unhappy he is?” Yuma asked.

Standing on the margin of the celebration in the muted colours of his formal silk kimono, Taki wore a small pensive smile; one that, even the pressure of Yudai kneading his cheek, couldn't dissolve into a carefree laugh. 

“You think you would make him happy?” Harua questioned. 

“Yes,” Yuma replied. 

“You do not even love him.”

“Of course I love him. I have loved him since I was ten.”

Harua stilled. “You have?”

“Yes, back when you advised him against hanging around town folks. That, too, with his best interest at heart. Lest he befriends a poor guy, or worse, falls for one...” Yuma said. “Can you say truthfully that you value him for who he is and not who you wish him to be?”

Harua found that he had no response to offer. 

“I love Taki," Yuma repeated, "And should he want me, I will be his. It is not for you to decide if I deserve him or not. If I work tirelessly for his happiness, I know I will be worthy of him.”

“Yuma-san,” Harua whispered, “I did not know of your feelings for him.” 

“Would it have changed anything?”

And because it seemed he was able to read Harua's response on his face, Yuma just shook his head with a sad chuckle. 

"Here," he handed Harua a brand-new portable audio player he had kept in his jacket's pocket the entire evening, "Give him this for me."

"Will you not tell him goodbye?" Harua asked as Yuma started walking away, "One you claim to love so much?"

Yuma looked at him with a cruel smile. "If I were to tell him goodbye, I would beg him to stay. I would ask him to choose between you and me, and I believe neither of us would want that..." 

He would never choose you, Harua knew, he would never choose you over me. And for the second time that evening, Harua watched someone leave with a piece of his cousins' hearts. 

At night, Harua battled invisible threats. It was said that New Year's dreams could be particularly propitious, but Harua's nights had only ever been haunted by Wang Yixiang's eyes, no matter how much he wished to be spared from worldly desires. 

🀩

The sun had long bled out in a vermillion sky when Harua found Taki on the bridge of the boat, looking out across the sea to the outlines of a landscape he knew by heart, though he had never looked at it from such a distance. He looked out of place on the ferry, swollen by his large woolen stole layered above his kimono, with Yuma’s digital Walkman clasped in his palm.

"Taki?" Harua called. 

When he realised he had lost his cousin to the world of pop music, Harua simply dislodged one earphone from Taki’s ear and placed it on his own. 

"I promise you will love it there.” 

“Have you ever heard of Hikaru Utada?” Taki asked. 

Harua ran a hand through his mane and thought the first stop they ought to make was to a hairdresser. 

“I have, yes.” Harua laughed wetly and dropped his head on Taki’s shoulder.

Please let him be happy, he prayed in the secrets of his heart. 

Spring. 

🀦

The letter, when it arrived at the shrine, was a far more interesting subject than Harua’s seasonal return had been. They all sat on Jo’s bed, with the intention of reading it at once, and found that they were now far too big to occupy a single futon. Harua nudged Taki with his foot and received a friendly ankle bite in retaliation.

As many had predicted, Taki grew tired of the city fairly quickly, and it was only two weeks after his arrival on the main island that he began to miss the forest.  

“I can't leave,” He had told Harua, trembling with a kind of feverish homesickness, “You would hate it.”

Harua had taken his head between his hands, kissed his brow and assured him, “It's true I would hate to see you go. But I could never hate you.”

He had led his cousin and watched him embark on the ferry, not yet knowing that he, too, would join Moriyama in the coming weeks, under the guise of needing some respite after graduating. His father had looked at him as if he knew, as if he understood somehow that wolves weren't meant to be alone.  

The letter, when it arrived at the shrine, was shrouded in perfume, sealed by the Byuns’ family crest. Harua had wanted to burn it, but he was learning to accommodate others’ happiness, and Jo’s had always been a priority.

“He says," Jo read rapidly, " that he is deeply ashamed of the accusations his aunt levelled at our family, and for leaving so suddenly. He says that his father was on his deathbed, and he thought only of respecting his wishes. He says he now regrets it, regrets the pain he inflicted."

"I do hope that he writes better than you read," Taki interrupted, and earned three consecutive slaps. 

"He says," Jo continued, "that he- that he loves me."

Harua looked at Yudai and saw what he believed to be his own smile reflected on his cousin's face.

"He says that he loves me," Jo repeated, looking at the tear-stained paper, "and that he wants to laugh and cry with me, to dance and wither by my side until the spirits call for me.” 

Taki gasped and kicked his feet until Yudai begged him to stop. 

"He says he will soon be here to tell me in person the depth of his feelings," Jo folded back the paper with a brilliant smile. 

🀦

When Harua inquired about Wang Yixiang, he found that he perhaps looked far too eager to warrant mockery. It was strange to recognise his cousins' pity, his grandmother's knowing stares.  

“Wang-sama returned earlier this year,” Juria offered gently. “In fact, it coincided with Taki's return. In a matter of days, he was at the shrine, willing to help us repair the roof.”

Harua had seen that the roof was no longer leaking, and he had attributed that small improvement to Yudai's foresight. 

“A very kind gesture,” he whispered in a strangled voice.

“Very kind, indeed,” Juria said. “He seems to have worked tirelessly to allow Taki-kun to express his feelings.” 

“His feelings,” Harua repeated faintly, “for Wang-sama?” 

They would make for a solid pairing; Harua thought. One so well-balanced, few would wonder how they had not drawn a parallel earlier. Taki would be happy with Yixiang as a mate, Harua ruminated, who wouldn't be? And he was wealthy; surely that meant that even Harua couldn't oppose such a union. He wouldn't, he decided quickly. For if Wang Yixiang was the cause of Taki's happiness, then Harua was simply a fool to have ever thought himself able to rivalise. 

“Spirits, no,” Juria responded, putting a halt to Harua’s quiet ramblings. “His feelings for Nakakita Yuma. The ones he has refused to name for so long.”

Relief was, at once, galvanizing and terrifying. 

The shrine maiden lay a hand on Harua's knee. “Haru-kun, why do you cry?”

If he closed his eyes, he could hear the river and the wind amongst tree leaves; he could hear the deer brawling for mating season and the small twitter of swallows returning from their wintering grounds. If he closed his eyes, he could understand why anyone would prefer this to Tokyo's sounds.  

“It's only that I realise now how terribly mistaken I have been,” he told Juria with a small smile. 

“There is always a chance to make amends. Don't you think?” 

It was a short walk to the town's butcher shop. Shorter even than in Harua’s souvenirs, but perhaps it was the shortest because of how many things weighed heavily on his mind. 

Nakakita Yuma was placing the closing sign on the shop's window when Harua walked in. 

“I wish to speak to you,” Harua declared.

The condescending look he received in edgewise would have been reason to vacate the shop a mere season ago, but Harua was beginning to understand that he earned Nakakita Yuma’s ire. 

“Then, speak,” Yuma said.

“I was wrong,” Harua breathed out. “About you. About Taki.”

“How so? Be precise.”

Harua had never been used to grovelling. Perhaps because of his stature, certainly because of his pride. He thought of Taki, and the anger subsided. 

“You love him. You respect him. You value his person, and you delight in his nature. You'll cherish him, and that is all I have ever wanted, for him to be truly cherished. Though I’ll admit, I have also wanted selfishly to keep him to myself.”  

There was a sudden, heavy silence. 

Harua found that he was not above lowering himself into a deep kneeling bow. “I am terribly sorry to have consistently tried to steer him away from you when I now see that he has never loved anyone but you.”

Harua felt tears prickling at his eyes, the price of his earnest plea. 

“You must not be in the habit of apologising," Yuma commented, "You look quite terrible.”

“Thank you,” Harua sniffed. “It seems my body isn't quite used to making amends.”

“You may be the most insufferable person I have ever met,” Yuma grunted, but his mouth split into a grin. 

🀦

Somehow Harua had always known that his matchmaking skills could never win over Yudai's stubbornness. It all came down to a man willing to be changed into a wolf.

Murata Fuma had presented himself humbly at dusk as the house emptied of its inhabitants, shifting at the hour when the moon god chased after the outline of the sun.

Yudai had stopped on the last step, watching his brothers' wolves scenting Fuma's hands. Harua had observed the way he had carried himself until he stood in front of Fuma.

“I stand before you a man without many riches," Fuma declared, "And not much has changed since you saw me last. I have loved you in my youth, and I love you still. I do not simply wish to be with you; I wish to help you, and protect you, and remain with you."

Harua looked at his cousin and wondered how this proposal differed from the last. If it even did.  

“One word from you and I will forever disappear,” Fuma added.

“Don’t,” Yudai begged softly. “Don’t disappear.”

It had been close to six years, and yet they still stood impossibly close, but afraid to touch. Yudai had always been the type who would break under the softest touch. 

“I thought you wanted to be free,” Yudai told him.

“I have tried to live free. But there is no freedom away from you. Not for me,” Fuma responded. 

“If you mate me,” Yudai started.

“I will become a werewolf like you, I know it,” Fuma said. “I want to be part of your family; I've always wanted to be part of your family. Please, let me."

Yudai approached timidly, closer to tears than to a joyous outburst, but he went willingly, pliant in Fuma's arms, melting into the kiss. He only stepped out of Fuma's embrace to laugh at the wolves gathering in a choral howl. 

🀦

Taki and Harua had never had the chance to celebrate their birthday together. Yet it wasn’t for lack of ferries. Turning twenty-two came with its own set of expectations, but Harua had realised lately that they mattered little.

It had been easy to see Taki's metamorphosis since his return. Anyone lucky enough to watch him waltz from one group to another in a garden that had been redesigned for the occasion could not help but imitate the candour of his smile.  

Harua had sat on the fringes of the party, briefly joined by Jo, before he, too, found the company of his beloved. Harua had thought he was used to solitude, but he still found himself relieved when Yixiang appeared by his side in his formal silk kimono.

“Should I attribute Taki’s happiness to you, then?”  Yixiang asked. “He hasn't laughed openly in so long.”

“You know, as well as I do, that all the merit should fall upon him,” Harua designated Yuma from the jut of his chin.

Indeed, Yuma stood with his hands in his pockets, an unmistakable adoring stare solely aimed at Taki. 

“All the merit?” Yixiang asked.

It was easy to sense the mocking edge of his sentence. Harua found that he didn't care about it. 

“You were right; I was ill-suited to manage others’ happiness.” 

“If it is only matchmaking we speak of, I agree your success rate was skewed,” Yixiang said. “But you must know, as we all do, that this island comes to life with you.” 

Something in Harua revolted against that idea, remembering Taki’s words coated in sheer innocence. 

“That is very kind,” he said simply.

Yixiang frowned as he looked down into his eyes. “What has happened to your confidence?”

“A momentary revaluation,” Harua shrugged with a semblance of a smile. “I have been unwise and unkind, and have found myself eager to be redeemed as of late.” 

Is that not what he had wished for, Harua wondered.

“Do not be too harsh on yourself,” Yixiang said, shaking his head.

“It is curious that you would say so, after being so harsh on me.” 

“And you on me.”

They kept quiet for a moment, but they both bore conspiring smiles. 

“You should try to aim for your own happiness,” Yixiang said finally. 

Harua thought of the things, the people, and the places bringing him happiness, but failed to see much correlation between each. 

“I am scared to learn what it entails…” Harua admitted. 

“Oh, but aren't you a bit envious of theirs?” Yixiang inclined his head in the direction of the people gathered in the gardens. “It would not be unwise to think so.”

“I have been envious my entire life of things I doubted I deserved.”

“You deserve happiness,” Yixiang said. “You do.”

🀦

Now stranger things had happened in Moriyama. Monks turned into fish, maidens turned into wolves. And one city boy who had vowed not to meddle with others' happiness had found himself stranded on the island, in search of his own. When walking along the streets, it sometimes happened that a foreign man who had fallen for that morsel of Hokkaido would look just as eager to meet him. Upon recognising Harua, Yixiang smiled widely. And Harua, though he fought to maintain a semblance of composure, found himself smiling in return. 

🀦

At dawn, the gradient palette of the morning sky had been an arresting sight, and Harua's wolf had sat up in a sleepy haze, licked at the stubborn strip of Taki’s fur coated in a squirrel’s blood, and gone to the river.

He entered the water a wolf, and emerged from it a man. 

He let his thoughts wander to Yixiang; the very details his heart had refused to silence. He thought, again, that it was bravery he lacked, above all else, not to follow the canal and stumble down Moriyama’s cobbled streets, not to bang on the house's gates and admit aloud what he had known in the secrets of his soul for more than a season; that Yixiang was a man crafted from a novel’s page, one Harua would love if he allowed himself that folly.  

There were tears in Harua’s eyes, and he couldn’t quite gather them all at once in the rugged cold of his palms. 

Oh, would that terrible heartache ever cease? He wasn’t certain he wished it. 

Harua walked back to the shrine with hardly enough pretense to conceal his aching heart, and found himself stopping at the bottom of its piloti platform. There were books on the entryway stacked in a neat row with a fire lily hanging from one of them as a vivid bookmark. 

Harua approached to caress it fearfully, knowing what it meant but refusing to let hope bloom so suddenly in his chest. 

“Did you see who left those, Obāchan?” Harua asked his grandmother, who sat still on her tatami mat with her cup of tea, bathed in the sun god's warmth. 

“If I did, the courting gifts shouldn't be here, should they?” His grandmother answered. 

Harua bit his lip. He looked at the books once more. 

“If you know who these are from, then I advise you to just follow your heart for once,” Bāchan added. 

It was perhaps the last impulse needed for Harua to gather a book under his arm and leave the shrine behind. 

He couldn't run, lest his wolf awaken and he stumbled on Yixiang’s doorstep naked. But he walked so quickly he might have flown. 

The house's gates were opened; an unlikely sight for one property that had been for so long kept away from the commoners'eye. In the sweeping view of the garden, Harua spotted him immediately. 

Yixiang lay on his back on the sponge-like moss of the garden with his eyes closed as Harua approached him, finding each moment spent gazing at him from afar and each step in his direction excruciatingly long.

“Yixiang,” Harua called, and the man opened his eyes and raised his gaze to look at him.

His hair was fanned around him, his dishevelled blouse almost completely undone, and Harua stared at the stubborn button holding little of Yixiang’s virtue together. 

“You are here,” Yixiang exhaled as he looked right at him. He stood up rapidly to tower over Harua. “This is not a dream.”

“Are you still half-asleep because you went to leave a courting gift on our porch before dawn?” Harua asked, humour fighting bravely to keep his trembling voice even. 

“It doesn’t have to be a courting gift,” Yixiang said with a brief glance towards the book, and Harua felt his heart capsize. “It can simply be something you bring back to the city with you. Something to remember me by.”

“Remember you?” Harua repeated. He held out the book. “With this?”

Yixiang nodded, and Harua found him foolish and beautiful. So distractingly beautiful, in fact, that his foolishness was rendered endearing. 

“Do you truly think,” Harua asked, “that this will suffice to appease the fire you ignited into my world?”  

“I—”

“Books? And will I not think of your eyes when I read them, and will I be deafened to the echoes of your laugh when I lie awake at night awaiting summer, dreaming of a river that remembers you by name?”

If Yixiang had looked pained and confused a mere moment ago, his mouth now trembled with the beginning of a relieved smile.

“I thought I would be glad to leave Moriyama behind,” Harua continued, “especially now that I am assured of my cousins’ happiness, and yet— my heart aches for the future I had envisioned far away from here. One that seems so dull now that I know you.” 

“Say the word, and I'll follow,” Yixiang whispered, inching ever closer. “I'll follow you to the city, so you may simply see my eyes when you wish to look into them, hear my laugh when you wish to hear it. I'll follow you to the forest because it is your family's den, and I wish to be a part of it. I'll follow you to the river because it is sacred, and so are you.” 

Oh, Harua, thought of that silly, brazen laugh. “I cannot ask this of you when you have already done so much for my family. For me.”

“You can ask anything of me,” Yixiang declared. And he took Harua’s hand in his, slowly intertwining each finger with his. “This heart despises the idea of being parted from you. And I have reasoned it, oh so many times, but it won't listen.” 

Harua tightened the grip, watched a stray tear land on their joined hands. 

“Since the moment we first met,” Yixiang insisted. “I have only ever wished to be closer to you. And all I have ever done has been to reach that goal. Now say the word and free us both.”

Harua smiled and leaned so close that his words sounded like a whispered kiss. “Yes. Come with me.” 

When their lips met, there was a moment of secret contemplation; a gentle hesitation before they gave in to temptation, parted their lips slightly and let themselves be swept away in a feverish kiss. 

“I cannot believe you are truly here,” Yixiang sighed, his hands refusing to detach from Harua’s waist, his forehead still pressed against his. 

“I must show you something,” Harua declared, taking a step back. When Yixiang tried unconsciously to follow his retreat, he held up his hand. “You cannot hold my hand through this…”

“What is it?”

“Do not be scared; it is only me,” Harua said, and he dropped his clothes on the garden's soil.

Summer. 

🀧

Juria made for a formidable bride in her pure white shiromuku adorned with patterns of pine trees to reflect the house she had grown up in. Under the hood of her wataboshi, her red-painted lips stretched in a wide smile, one that almost moved Maki to tears. 

Harua observed the couple’s procession to the altar in a solemn quiet, and realised he had still not gotten used to it.

Moriyama had seen four prominent wedding ceremonies in the span of a summer. Each one was held at the shrine, with Bāchan resorting to the same joke during the succeeding banquet receptions that she would stubbornly refuse to die until all of the island had exchanged vows in front of her.    

Following his betrothed’s advice, Harua had stopped mingling with matters of the heart, and delegated the referee role to brotherly disputes to Fuma, who took his role at the head of the pack quite seriously. 

Though Jo had dreamed of a quiet life in the forest, he seemed to appreciate painting in the estate’s gardens, and remained close in distance from his youngest brother who had opened a small izakaya near the port; so near in fact, that anyone stepping outside the ferry would catch a glimpse of Taki’s restaurant’s sign, installed upstairs of his husband’s butcher shop. 

Yudai had welcomed new apprentices to help maintain the shrine while he embarked on a honeymoon trip, and Bāchan remained on the porch at first light with her fuming tea, wary of the courting gifts that would, in no time, abound. 

It had been, in the past, a renowned custom that members of the ōkami forest pack, living atop the pine-covered hill of the coastal village of Moriyama, were to be introduced to society by the age of twenty-one and mated by the following spring under the sheer glow of the moon’s night gown.

Harua would be another exception. These days, he found himself less preoccupied by his pending wedding than by the construction site Yixiang oversaw daily; mounting walls of Moriyama’s first library.

With Bāchan’s final instructions and their vows sealed with sake, the newlyweds looked ready to take on the forest on their first joint night hunt. 

Yixiang’s hand in his, Harua sighed contentedly, “Young love.” 

Fin.