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mania-sama · 3 months

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rule #22 - if trees could talk

Rule #22 - If Trees Could Talk - Fish in a Birdcage

Bungou Stray Dogs Pairing - Akutagawa Ryuunosuke/Nakajima Atsushi Additional Character - Beast Beneath the Moonlight (Byakko) Tags - ambiguous relationships, human sacrifice, japanese mythology & folklore, no ability users au, historical au, bittersweet, angst, blood, temporary character death Summary - Every ten years, a young boy no older than a day over thirteen must be sacrificed to Byakko, the deity that protects the small settlement called "The Village of the White Tiger". Akutagawa Ryuunosuke is a boy born out of luck, and he knows that one day he will be sacrificed to keep the compact made a thousand years ago between the villagers and the tiger. When he is laid to die at the feet at the White Tiger's shrine, he finds himself enraptured in the strange presence of a young boy instead of the guardian deity he's supposed to be eaten by. Word Count - 2,945 Cross-posted from Archive of Our Own Whumptober 2023 - Day 12: Sacrifice | Character Death See my full Whumptober 2023 Challenge on Tumblr or Ao3

A small village resides at the bottom of a valley. A gushing, torrential river marks its western boundary, and an expansive forest on the north and south border keeps the villagers tucked safely inside. A winding dirt path in the northside wilderness is the only safe way for people to come in and out of the village.

There is no way through the village, at least not by a carved trail. On the south side, a short, stone-paved path will only bring travelers to a massive, well-kept shrine. The tall white walls glimmer only in the moonlight, making the painted wood appear striped and alive. At night, the villagers can hear the call of a tiger as it roams it stalks the wilderness, hunting down prey and watching the villagers as they sleep.

Byakko protects the Village of the White Tiger. Not once has it ever fallen to outside forces, and its people never jeopardized to the steel of a blade nor the crack of a whip. The natural boundaries of the village are a shield of sorts, designating where the harmful world ends and the sanctuary of the White Tiger begins.

Long ago, a band of wandering travelers wanted to finally settle down and start their families. They found the perfect area — a clearing with enough space to build houses and fires, expansive wilderness to hunt live game, a river for washing and fishing, and a mountain to shield them from the worst of the wind currents. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to them, then, that the area was already occupied.

On a bright full moon, these travelers struck a deal with the White Tiger. If he would share his land and offer his protection, they would feed him in turn. Once every ten years, when the moon is yellow and his constellation prowls the sky, a boy not a day over thirteen will be sacrificed. They will bind him by his hands and feet, and they will leave him in a gleaming white shrine.

He will taste like the Heaven and the Earth, and he will be enough to satiate the White Tiger’s hunger until the next decade.

Byakko agreed to these terms, and every decade since then the village has sacrificed a young boy without fail. The boy has never come back, never escaped his bonds, and the village, in turn, has never been harmed by outside forces.

Akutagawa Ryuunosuke is a twelve-year-old orphan boy born with an incurable cough and parents who died at his birth.

He is a boy born to die.

Murderer is attached to his name before he can let out his second scream as a newborn baby. He roams the dirt paths of the streets and steals where he won’t be caught, works where he is allowed, and sleeps where the dogs can’t sniff out his urchin stench. His sister drew the luckier end of the deal; being born mere minutes before him, she kept her babe hands clean of blood and death. Gin was adopted into a family unable to conceive a child of their own.

She doesn’t abandon him, though. When she can, she waits in his favorite hideout spot; a small cove on the side of the mountain. Made of stone, he can fit little bits of carefully packaged food that can be eaten on a day when his poor health doesn’t allow him to be out for long. It lets in enough air to be ventilated while also enclosed to trap a comfortable amount of heat. The only downside is its vulnerability to flooding, so he has to wait days after a storm for the water to recede before he can return to it once more.

Gin will sometimes bring food, other times entertainment that he can’t find elsewhere. She teaches him how to knit, mend his clothes, and read his own name. It’s the best part of his week, usually, to see her in his cove. She’s the only person who has ever greeted him with a genuine smile on her face, and a gentle hug to cure the scrapes and bruises of a cursed life.

But he knows they run on burrowed time. It’s his fate; he’s reminded every time he works an odd job, when he looks to the sky and sees the White Tiger prowl for his unfortunate prey when he side-steps the jaws of a snapping hound. He was born to be a sacrifice, and nothing will change that.

For some reason, when he steps into his cove in the middle of the day after a particularly bad coughing fit left him crippled and heaving, he’s still stupefied to be greeted with tears streaming down Gin’s face.

Her hug is as gentle as ever, and she whispers broken apologies in his ear like it’s somehow her fault. She warns him that they will seize him the next time he’s in the village, but that they still don’t know where he returns to sleep at night.

“You still have time,” she says, shaking against his weak body, “you could still run.”

His cove floods in a storm that afternoon, and the villagers find him hidden away and asleep under a shop’s overhang to escape the cold. Ryuunosuke wonders if Gin would be disappointed in the fight that follows — if it can even be called that. It more consists of desperate thrashing of punches and kicks until one man grabs his arms, and another his legs, and they pin him to the ground after just thirty seconds of resistance.

He’s stretched on the ground like yarn being woven to cloth, and a third man binds his legs and arms with two segments of horse-hair rope that rubs the skin of his ankles and wrists raw. He is taken away without fanfare or allowing him to say goodbye to his sister. The wind whips through the darkness of the night, making his hair stick to his mouth. The white tips turn red as he coughs onto them.

One man carries him on his shoulder down the stone-paved path, and the other two hold flickering torches to light the way. The moon provides nearly enough light by itself, but he supposes they don’t want to risk losing their sacrifice. They don’t know what will happen if Ryuunosuke doesn’t make it to the shrine in time. Even he is not keen to find out.

The shrine doors open easily under the push of the leading man, and they set Ryuunosuke at the base of the statue of the White Tiger. It’s made of marble, and the way the moon shines through the open window slots brings it to life more than the walls ever could. Ryuunosuke only ever took a peak once, when stars aligned to allow Byakko to hunt the sky, and he’ll never forget the way the shrine seemed to leap out at him. The ornaments dangling off the overhang made it look like the jaws of a roaring beast.

Now, he sits in front of the white marble statue, closer than he ever was before to the deity destined to devour him. His bound hands rest in his lap, and his back presses uncomfortably against the hard edges of the base of the tiger. The men have long left, and with them, they took the heat of the torches. There is nothing to protect him from the cold wind rustling the rags he wore for clothes and the straggling strands of hair that hang from his head.

It’s quiet. Much quieter than he expected it to be. He closes his eyes and wills his heartbeat to slow down. Perhaps he doesn’t want to see the jaws of the real beast close over his head.

“It’s been ten years already?”

Ryuunosuke’s eyes snap open. It doesn’t take him long to find the source of the voice, for a boy stands in front of him. In his deathly tight grip is a broom, and he looks as though he’s just seen a ghost. The only response Ryuunosuke can give him initially is a fit of coughs that he can’t muffle in his arm. It sprays blood all over his lap and the ground in front of the marble statue.

The boy makes an odd, startled noise. “You shouldn’t be here. You’re sick!”

“That’s exactly why I’m here,” Ryuunosuke replies, licking his lips of any blood he can stuff back into his body. It’s best he saves the most he can for the White Tiger to consume. “Who are you, and why are you here? You’re not the sacrifice.”

A clattering sound resonates in the near-empty shrine, and the boy rushes over to crouch in front of Ryuunosuke. Up close, he can see clearly what he thought he might have been imagining before: the glow emitting from his eyes. The upper halves are colored purple, but the one that truly shines through is the yellow lower half. His black pupils are narrow despite the darkness shrouding them, and Akutagawa wonders who this boy really is.

Despite the shrine’s persistent cleanliness, no villager actually attends the shrine. There have been many legends passed on to explain the phenomena, but no one truly stuck with Ryuunosuke. He’d blamed it in part on his lack of parentage. Now, he sees the truth with his own eyes; a truth that will stick with him until the White Tiger takes its meal.

The person who upkeeps the shrine is just a boy.

“My name is Atsushi. I clean up around here,” he says, and he reaches out to touch Akutagawa’s unkempt hair. His sharp fingernails tug at the knots. “What’s your name?”

“Ryuunosuke,” he introduces, albeit hesitantly. He’s gotten into the habit of introducing himself by his first name in order to avoid affiliation with his sister. He does it for her sake, not his. The fewer foreign travelers spread the word of the Akutagawa family name, the easier it would be for her if she were to ever want to marry outside of the village.

A single strip of hair indicates that Atsushi once had bangs, but for some reason cut them into the hideous part he has now. A black streak cuts the monotony of his white hair.

Ryuunosuke narrows his eyes, and a coiling snake constricts his gut. “The White Tiger is meant to eat me,” he says, pulling away from Atsushi’s fingernail-claws ever so slightly. It’s enough to get him to retract his hand, and the boy has the audacity to turn pink in bashfulness.

“I don’t know about that. Byakko is…” Atsushi sits down fully on the ground, drawing his legs up to his chest and resting his chin on top of his knees. His skin is pale in the moonlight, illuminated in a way not so dissimilar to the marble statue. He doesn’t finish his statement. Instead, he focuses his glowing yellow eyes up at the statue, regarding it with a thoughtful gaze.

Ryuunosuke asks, for the second time in the few minutes they’ve spoken to each other: “Who are you?”

Atsushi returns his gaze back to him, and his lips stretch into something that’s supposed to be a smile but doesn’t quite hit the mark. “I was the first boy ‘sacrificed’ to Byakko.”

It makes sense. Ryuunsouke recalls the first thing the boy said to him. It's been ten years already? Only someone who has seen a hundred boys be torn apart can really say something like that.

“Are you alive?”

“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe not. It depends on what you would call alive.”

Ryuunosuke doesn’t know what to make of that answer. From the outside, Atsushi looks as alive as any of the other villagers do. His breaths crystallize in the cold air, his hair moves with the wind flowing from the open windows, and the fingers that carded through Ryuunosuke’s hair feel real.

Yet Atsushi has been present for a hundred meals, making him a thousand years old. No human has ever been recorded as living that long. Only deities and powerful kitsunes — who may as well be deities themselves — can dream of having such a long life. Though, if every day is spent cleaning a shrine for a tiger that ate them is that life, Ryuunosuke can’t imagine it as much of a dream rather than a nightmare.

“Is it hard,” Ryuunosuke starts after an awkward silence, “to watch boys die every ten years?”

Atsushi seems to struggle with that answer. His gaze flits left and right, he bites his lip, and he pulls his legs to be under him rather than in front. He sits on top of his calves now, and he scratches at his arms with his long fingernail-claws.

When he finally meets Ryuunosuke’s gaze again, he sighs. “I don’t know how to answer that. Nobody has ever asked me before and I…I’ve never seen one die.”

“What do you mean?”

Before he can try to hold stifle it, his next coughing fight wracks his body. It’s the worst he’s had all week, and it leaves him breathless even from where he’s sitting. Clotted blood dots on the floor, and they land all over Atsushi’s skin since he moved in to support Ryuunosuke’s collapsing body. However, they don’t quite stain his white shirt or black pants.

Once Ryuunosuke recovers, albeit slowly, from the attack, Atsushi answers his question. “I’ve talked to the boys before, but they’ve all been too scared to hold a conversation with me. And then I’ll close my eyes for only a second, and they’ll be gone.”

“Then don’t close your eyes,” Ryuunosuke responds without thinking. His entire village is on the line. What will happen if Atsushi doesn’t allow the White Tiger to eat him?

Atsushi stares at him owlishly, and Ryuunosuke realizes the boy hasn’t once blinked. Has that been what he’s trying to do all this time? Is that millisecond of time enough for the White Tiger to silently take away the boy Atsushi talks to?

Ryuunosuke doesn’t know what to make of the situation. He doesn’t know what to make of Atsushi, who blurs the line between the living and the dead, the human and the deity. All he knows for certain is what he did before a boy is sent to the shrine every ten years to be eaten by the White Tiger that protects the wilderness.

But so far, all Ryuunosuke has been met with is a boy who has lived for longer than he should’ve. He wonders just how true that ancient legend of the founding of the Village of the White Tiger is. Nobody currently living in the village had been alive back then, and no boy had ever returned to the village to tell the story of Atsushi and the cared-for shrine.

Then the wind whistles a dreadful tune, and a white tiger phases through the closed doors of the shrine.

Byakko is huge. His head nearly knocks against the high ceiling, and just one paw takes up the same amount of space as Atsushi does while sitting. The enormous size of the shrine clicks to Ryuunosuke in a way that it hasn’t before. A deity this big needed a large place to rest and eat its human meals.

And a deity he is. His white fur is lined with a glow that can only be described as otherworldly, like the night sky itself has attached itself to outline his body. His black stripes stick out against the pure white, and it reminds Ryuunosuke of the single strand of black hair in Atsushi’s bang. Byakko inclines his head down, and he does not look at Ryuunosuke.

His piercing yellow gaze is on the boy now standing in front of him, his back turned and his arms out to hold the cheeks of the White Tiger.

Suddenly, the world narrows around Akutagawa, and he gets it. Atsushi, Byakko, and the shrine. They are all different, but they are all one and the same. They operate together to protect the villagers, even if it means sacrificing a boy every ten years.

Even if it's the same boy that has been sacrificed for a thousand years, a hundred times over. Even if it’s just to protect one life.

Somewhere in between Byakko’s arrival and the gaping jaws leaning in to devour the white-haired boy, Atsushi had cut the rope in two. It has to have been his fingernails that weren’t really nails at all, but claws he’d gained after a thousand years of being devoured. His eyes weren’t narrow from being acclimated to cleaning the shrine in the dark, and they didn’t glow from simply being the most colorful being in the room.

Ryuunosuke escapes through an open window, and he feels the hands of a hundred boys before him climbing out of the same sill. They don’t return to the village. They run around the sacred forest and find their way to the dirt path, and they leave using the only safe path available. They don’t look back, and they don’t ever return.

And Ryuunosuke gets it. He preserves Atsushi’s sacrifice just as the boys from a thousand years before him. He feels their hearts pounding just as his beats, and their feet walk on the same roots he trips over now.

Byakko protects the people in the village, following the promise he made with the travelers long ago. He protects the old and the young, the weak and the strong, and the boys outcast from the village — the ones born to die. Ryuunosuke understands that now. He and the boys before him understand it better than anyone in the village ever will.

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