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Ancient things beyond mortal reckoning reside within the woods beyond the village, child, the village elders have always warned, and their wicked appetites burn most bright in the moonless dark, when the radiant waters of the sky river have stilled and the canvas of gleaming stars cannot be seen for the impenetrable shroud of the tree canopy above.
Since long before Ochako had language to grasp the wisdom of the elders’ grim portents, she has been cautioned to never leave the safety of the ring of torch-borne firelight encircling the village, which flicker always with flame no matter the violence of the wind and snow and ward against the intrusion of unwelcome spirits from the woods bordering the northern edge of the boundary or, less frequently, from the distant mountain range along the northwestern horizon.
People do leave, of course, not to stand down the promised horrors of the woods, but to fish and draw water from the winding river to the east, and to forage for vital supplies and hunt larger game beyond that, where the river empties into the sea. Most such expeditions are undertaken under full sunlight and can even include children who have reached at least their tenth year – so long as traveling parties conclude their endeavors well before the sun begins to dip below the horizon to ensure they are back within the village boundary by dusk. More rarely, in times of great need, far-flung expeditions lasting days or weeks ensue, but traveling parties in these instances consist only of the village’s most powerful or magically proficient denizens and elders. Even then, not all expeditioners return.
None leave the boundary, however, when the sun slips behind the horizon for the final time of the season and the polar night falls. During that long stretch of days and weeks utterly absent the warmth or light of day, the elders have always said that, unless the aurora glimmers in the sky to bolster the village’s warding magicks, spirits and fiends from the wood frequently venture forth to test the boundary’s sturdiness.
Hence, the polar night is the period when the village elders are seen the least, as they are compelled to spend their every waking moment holed up together in the council lodge, sleeping, eating, and reinforcing the firelight boundary, pushing back against the dangerous and incomprehensible denizens of the wood.
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At the outset of polar night on Ochako’s nineteenth year, on a day of biting winds and blustering snow, the boundary is breached.
As the only person in their modest dwelling tied in any way to the magicks that safeguard their village, Ochako’s mother is the first in their household to know of it, and instructs both her father and her to gather the tools of their trade at once.
“We travel light,” she says, bundling her unguents and enough jerky to last them a handful of days and tucking the pack into Ochako’s fishing basket.
The world beyond their doorway is chaos, carnage, devastation. The snowstorm rages, stinging the exposed skin of Ochako’s face and making it difficult to keep her eyes open, to behold the waking nightmare into which she has unwittingly stepped. Impossibly, in spite of the relentless, buffeting shower of snow, the elder’s lodge is aflame, engulfed in a burst of ghoulish blue fire. And there are bodies –and the copper stink of blood—everywhere. The snowfall is too heavy, too thick to make out who has fallen, but there are dozens within Ochako’s immediate view, and dozens more fleeing at the edges of her vision, their urgent voices and terrified screams borne away by the tempestuous wind.
Ochako, thus far motivated forward only by the persistent tug of her parents’ hands gripped fast around each of hers, freezes as one of the boundary torches comes into view, its ever-burning, brilliant red-and-gold flame extinguished. The once-stalwart sentinel stands bereft of its powerful, glowing magicks, and the ceremonial carvings etched over long centuries into its wooden façade are cracked, splintered in a hundred-hundred places. There is ice in Ochako’s veins as she realizes with sudden, horrified clarity that the boundary has not merely been breached, but altogether broken.
They can flee and perhaps find somewhere near the river to hunker down and wait out the worst of the attack, but with the boundary broken, there is no safety, no refuge to which they can return. And if all of the elders are within that burning lodge, then their refuge cannot be restored and they are lost.
“Ochako!” comes the deep, desperate hail from directly beside her and a thousand leagues away. It’s her father’s voice, her father’s hands on either side of her aching, frozen face. He’s kneeling before her, gloves forsaken in the snow for the benefit of human touch, connection, warmth. It takes Ochako a disoriented, grasping moment to realize she’s in a crumpled heap on the ground, an epiphany which only comes when it strikes her that she’s no longer young enough or small enough for her father to be at eye level while kneeling.
“Papa?” she cries, uncertain she can even be heard over the deafening winds. As her awareness gradually expands, Ochako discovers her mother is no longer beside her. “Mama?” she calls out, head swiveling out of her father’s grasp to seek out her missing parent.
Ochako hears herself scream when she sees her mother, several meters back, hunched over a wounded child Ochako recognizes as Aizawa’s youngest protégé, Eri; chanting words Ochako cannot hear; her hands softly alight with familiar healing magicks. And directly behind them, approaching her mother with quiet, unknowable savagery, is the monstrous thing that has infiltrated her home.
The thing is a senseless, terrifying jumble of disparate animal parts: here the torso of a polar bear; there the bulbous, misshapen head of a walrus with a pair of meters-long, spiraled narwhal tusks jutting from its forehead. Its limbs are an incongruous blend of wolf and caribou and bear and human, and there are too many legs –Ochako counts at least six in just the brief moment she’s had to take the creature in. And the rest of its body is covered in useless, vestigial wings and extruding, snapping shark maws and exposed teeth and patchy fur and bleeding, broken bones.
Ochako knows this creature, this ancient thing, from among the many stories the elders have told her about the malevolent, eldritch beasts within the wood. She knows that its murderous frenzy is inexhaustible, that its thirst for blood is unquenchable. She knows it will kill her mother, the helpless child in her care, and then her father and herself and everyone else in the village, that it will not, cannot stop until all that remains of her village is inert flesh and cold hearths and perfect, impenetrable silence.
Ochako knows, too, the price of provoking its ire. She knows that it will stalk her, hunt her, tirelessly wear her down, and then kill her outright –if she’s lucky, that is. If her fate is more tragic still, it will curse her with kin-slaying madness or a fatal, debilitating sickness. Such is the nature of the spirit of Vengeance: unforviging, unflagging, undying.
Ochako feels herself growing cold, this time not with fear and despair but instead with icy determination. If she is to die today, so be it. But she will choose it rather than surrender to it, and she will not squander the life her parents have given her.
Hardening her resolve, Ochako spins to standing and, in the same fluid movement, draws her fishing spear from her back, steadies her aim, and looses the weapon she has only ever used for fishing. It’s a flimsy thing, so she isn’t certain when she throws it that it will even pierce the grotesquely mismatched hides of the beast. Yet to her surprise, delight, and horror, her aim strikes true, and her spear, dwarfed by the beast’s own tusks, sinks into the flesh just beyond the most prominent of the beast’s gaping, bloody maws.
The creature stops dead in its tracks, its wild, unblinking eyes trained to her. Ochako gulps back her dread and, making sure to meet the beast’s eyes, she sucks in a deep breath and pours all of herself into a scream that can be heard over the whipping, vociferous winds. The challenge is undeniable.
All at once, as the blizzard stills and the previously muffled sounds of panic and pain and desperation fill the air, Ochako beholds the beast’s world narrowing to a singular point focused on her and her alone.
Sparing her father one last, frantic glance, Ochako reaches toward him, pulls his fishing spear from his back, and veers off at a sharp angle toward the woods beyond the village to spare her parents and Eri the violence of the beast charging toward her on its warpath. She hears her father calling after her, but his words are too faint and indistinct to make out. Her mother’s voice in her mind, however, is as clear and soothing as the river in summer: “My brave, beautiful child: be fleet, be strong, be clever – survive!”
The witch words carry pretty, if hollow, hopes Ochako will cherish in the remaining moments or hours of her short life. There is no eluding Vengeance, no escaping death.
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The wolf stalks the tree line, lured by the odd, localized snowstorm, the ghostly wails of the Hunted, and the sinister radiance of a massive body of pale blue flame.
The wolf watches, impassive, as the denizens of the Eternal Village, ever-guarded by their surprisingly robust human magicks, are torn down by a spirit well-known to the wolf and its kin, yet seldom seen by any. Blood and smoke permeate the endless night, and primal instincts stir to life, causing the wolf to salivate. It has been many, many days since the wolf’s last real meal, and though it is beneath the dignity of so noble a creature to scavenge, the wolf cannot deny the appetizing aromas of the Hunted, of so much fresh meat, which the invading spirit will simply leave to rot where it lies.
The temptation to feast when the spirit leaves will be great.
The wolf settles into a watchful repose at the edge of the wood, considering his options. There are handfuls of humans here and there who successfully flee the now-ruined boundary, though none of them transgress the tree line, choosing instead to flee for the river or the sea. The wolf may choose to pick off a member or two of the river-bound parties, but for now, he waits to see if any among these Eternal Villagers will chance a venture into the forest, which is the wolf’s preferred hunting ground.
After several minutes, it becomes clear that the humans are decisively avoiding the woods at absolutely all costs. The wolf, wearying of waiting and growing hungrier by the second, stretches and stands, resolving to make the long trek to the river to lie in wait for his supper.
The most curious thing happens, though, right as the wolf begins loping off into the darkness.
There, some distance beyond the village boundary, an incredible tableau unfolds. A human, frozen in terror, destined to die a coward’s death on its knees, instead rises to its feet, deploys its meager, miserable weapon at a spirit well beyond its capacity to defeat, let alone truly harm. The wolf finds himself intrigued as the human’s little stick miraculously punctures the spirit’s flesh, gore weeping from the wound as the polearm flails about on the spirit’s face like a broken limb in the lashing winds.
Then, the wolf’s hackles raise in pure exhilaration as the human issues a screaming, furious challenge to the spirit that will be its death, disarms its companion, and bolts for the woods.
Now fully captivated, the wolf does not try to –cannot—stop himself from taking off toward the doomed little human that has somehow managed to injure an invincible spirit. Even if it means dinner must be postponed yet again, the wolf senses this will be a show worth watching.
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Spurred on by her mother’s encouragements, Ochako moves with single-minded swiftness toward the trees, which still seem impossible leagues away. She can hear the beast barreling after her, shaking the earth as it comes, but she dares not turn to gauge the distance between them, fearing that she will lose precious time and possibly also her nerve if she glimpses it closing in on her.
Instead, she ducks her head and leans into the gentled, flurrying snow to compel herself forward even faster, ignoring the burn of her lungs and legs and focusing solely on the first of many, increasingly hopeless goals this night: reach the tree line.
Even without having ever stepped foot into the forest, she can see it’s dense with thick, towering trees. This will afford her some cover, and more importantly some clearance and maneuverability the beast simply will not have. No matter how fast it is, surely its hulking, lopsided form will prevent it from moving freely through these mighty, old giants.
She still doesn’t turn, but she knows the beast is gaining on her all the same, because the ground tremors are nearer than ever, and so pronounced now that it’s all she can do not to trip, stumble, and fall. Any lost momentum now would certainly be the end of her.
Tears streaming down her face, Ochako releases a cry of agonized frustration as she drives herself toward the forest with every last bit of strength and speed she can muster, praying to her ancestors, the spirits of the wilderness, the obscured moon and heavy, gray snow clouds in the sky –to anyone who might be listening and willing to lend a helping hand to a doomed girl on this black and dreary polar night: please, please, just let me make it to the forest!
No interventions, divine and miraculous or otherwise, deliver Ochako safely into the dark embrace of the wood. Nevertheless, by the skin of her teeth, she clears the threshold of the first sentinels some torturous eternity of seconds later, unable to pause to celebrate or breathe even the most anguished sigh of relief at clearing this first hurdle, as there are countless challenges yet left to overcome before this night is done.
The first embers of a plan smolder in Ochako’s mind as she cuts deeper into the forest at a slightly less intense pace. A plan flickers and alights as she hews a winding, roughly easterly path toward the river.
Ochako has made the leagues-long trek to the river to trap and fish with her father every day of the spring and summer months since she was ten, so she knows which way to go. Without ever trespassing into the forest itself, she and her father have always followed the meandering path of the tree line to the river, where several small boats are tied up for swift travel to different fishing weirs and the multitude of traps prepared days or weeks prior along the riverbanks. The boats are not made for sea travel, but if the sea is calm tonight, she could still row out through the estuary and a ways out onto the open ocean to sit and wait out her fate a while, making a meal of the dried jerky and fish her mother had packed into the basket on her back and savoring the peaceful quiet of one more night on this earth before the sea churns and takes her, or she is forced to return to shore to meet her waiting fate.
That is, if she can make it to the boats, which is a couple of hours away on foot in the full light of a summer’s day. And even if she somehow makes it to the boats, she has no idea if the beast can swim. The size and composition of it suggests to her that it should not be able to, but this is no mundane creature. This is a spirit, forged of all the myriad native beasts of her world, and she does not truly know the limits of its abilities. For all she knows, she may not be delaying her death so much as changing its venue.
Still, she has to try. At the very least, she will be putting more distance between the beast and her people, and maybe, just maybe, if she gives it a good enough chase, whatever aimless, powerful vengeance awakened it will be slaked and it will retire into the forest to rest until it is stirred anew.
Ochako has been running at a dead sprint for what feels like several minutes before she realizes the tremors underfoot have ceased in their entirety and the forest has stilled, quieted save for her own harsh, ragged breaths and the loud crunch-creak of her feet in the hard-packed snow.
Railing against her instincts, which exhort her to continue running without looking back, Ochako stops to catch her breath and examine her surroundings. Initially, all she sees is darkness. She is hemmed in by it: the dense canopy, the crowding tree trunks, the clouded, moonless sky. But as her eyes adjust to what sparse light is reflecting off of the pristine white snow on the ground, Ochako begins to make out the shapes of bushes and saplings and riven trunks and downed, evergreen boughs.
Spinning about once more to confirm that the beast is still fortuitously not within sight, Ochako scrambles for the boughs. Dislodging a relatively light yet formidably sized branch with plenty of brush at the tips of its sprawling tree fingers, Ochako makes short work of securing it with seal-skin twine to the belt at her back. She doesn’t know if the beast is following her scent or her tracks or both, but she can at least obscure her tracks with the trailing brush and hope that the softly falling snow will take care of any remaining traces.
Then she sets off again, walking quickly but not running. As she resumes her quick pace, she becomes aware of the damage done to her throat by the icy cold and the intense exertion. Swallowing burns like fire, and each breath seems to steal all the moisture from her mouth, making it difficult not to collapse into a fit of coughing. Angrily but without slowing, Ochako produces still more twine, pinches the trim of her parka’s hood until it creases over her mouth, and secures the fabric in place, as much to forestall any further strain on her throat as to mask her icy breath from the beast.
As she continues, Ochako summons to mind every piece of wisdom from years spent in the company of expert trappers like her father and implements what she can. She moves swiftly yet stealthily as the foxes do by rolling gently from the outside of her foot to her toes and ensures as little of the environment around her is disturbed as she passes through. She lifts her brush skirt and lays false trails, then doubles back along the same path and lowers the brush again to shroud her steps. She throws rocks in random directions and knocks over split or dying young trees to create dead-end noise diversions for the beast to follow and investigate in the hopes of buying herself more time and distance. And most of all, as she dares, she sets quick, rudimentary traps to snare or trip or ignite.
Ochako proceeds in this manner for a half hour, an hour, catching neither hide nor hair of her pursuer. The all-encompassing silence of the forest, far from being comforting or fortifying, is eerie and terrifying. She entertains no delusions that the beast might have stopped hunting her for reasons unknown. She knows it’s still coming, that it has not stopped coming since she ostensibly lost it upon her entry into the woods. She now suspects, however, that the beast must be drawing upon powers more strange and terrible than the elders had known to tell, because how else is she to explain its sudden and mysterious disappearance at the edge of the forest? Why has she been allowed to come so far unmolested?
Her imagination whirls with terrifying possibilities: can it perhaps travel from one point to another instantaneously, without needing to physically traverse the distance? Since she captured its attentions, does it now have some sort of indelible impression of her which enables it to always know where she is? If so, had the beast perhaps deliberately stopped following her when she had crossed into the wood, knowing her flight is in vain? Is it now just biding its time, perhaps allowing a long enough reprieve for her to begin cultivating hope that she might escape just so that, once she inevitably tires and has to stop to rest, it can simply manifest before her and dispatch her when she is least able to flee or defend herself and most likely to surrender to her despair? Or is it, like one or two other ancient things the elders had warned her about, capable of obscuring itself entirely from sight? Is it approaching her slowly yet surely, even now, utterly beyond her ability to perceive?
The unbelievable, calculated cruelty of these possibilities fills her with indescribable dread.
In the midst of her frightened contemplation –there, just at edges of Ochako’s vision, a fleeting shadow moves with such subtle fluidity she almost mistakes it for a trick of the senses. Ochako pivots to reassess her surroundings –just in time to observe a ribbon of inky, roiling darkness slithering through the trees straight toward her. As she beholds it, tendrils wrought of gore and twisted flesh and thick, steaming, black ichor erupt outward in every conceivable direction, skewering trees and earth and foliage –and Ochako herself, she realizes belatedly, grasping that her left shoulder and hip have been cleanly run through with the sluggish bewilderment of one roused prematurely from a deep sleep.
The pain is lancing and white-hot, but Ochako, once again gripped by a fright so stark and so chilling that she can’t even seem to remember how to breathe, feels nothing for one perfect, blissful moment. In this floaty, untethered space, it occurs to her to wonder if this is what death’s embrace feels like: perfect, blissful nothingness.
As the beast becomes corporeal again before her very eyes, however, coalescing once more into the warped and hideous mélange of bloated, broken, and bleeding body parts from a host of local wildlife, Ochako is galvanized into action. She bolts like a loosed arrow, ignoring the throb of her new injuries. The beast, still several meters away in its primary form, snags on an ignition trap she’d laid only moments prior, causing the monster to roar and rage behind her. She doubts seriously the beast has come to any actual harm, however, as her traps are sound and fury diversions, meant for spooking or smoking out arctic foxes and winter hares and shepherding them with a series of similar incendiaries to decidedly more permanent snare traps. Confronted now with a spirit of such immense proportions, the best Ochako can hope for is that the jarring pop of flame and caustic puff of choking smoke provides enough of a distraction for Ochako to get a clean head start.
Ochako swipes at panicked tears with the back of her gloved hands as she pumps her legs as fast as they’ll go, grasping desperately for a gambit that will win her just a little more time now that she knows the beast is capable of taking a form enabling it to pass seamlessly and in utter silence through the closely packed trees. But nothing comes because there is nothing so small and powerless a being as she can do to truly escape or stand against the might of so formidable and unrelenting a foe as Vengeance made flesh.
Ochako’s heart is heavy as a stone in her chest as the torn muscles of her shoulder and hip begin to ache with a rapidly intensifying sharpness. She knows there’s no making it to the river anymore, to the little safety of a boat and a final meal under the quiet, cloudy vault of the sky, not with injuries as movement-encumbering as these. Yet still she presses on, determined to keep going, to cling with her whole being to the sacred sadness and triumph of trapping and killing the game that feeds her family and her people; the flustered exhilaration of her first love, Izuku, and the devastating heartbreak of learning he loved another; the invigorated delight and terror of sitting at Elder Aizawa’s knee as he regaled her and her peers in tired, exasperated tones with tales of great evil and greater feats of heroism; the wry curve of her father’s smile; her mother’s softly glowing, healing hands and the bright, sweet sound of her laughter—
The ground quakes beneath her and a renewed blizzard rages all around her as the beast resumes its pursuit, and Ochako learns that it need not have even assumed its shadow form to hunt her down, because it begins cleaving through trees like a boat carving through water as it tears toward her.
Ochako is so focused on pushing herself past the intensifying ache of her injuries and to the absolute limits of her endurance that she doesn’t even realize how close the beast has gotten until it whips its head in a tremendous, powerful arc almost directly behind her and slams her sideways into a tree with a bone-shattering swipe of one of its rock-solid, overlong narwhal tusks. As she impacts the ground and the beast unhurriedly closes on her, she is unable to do much more than lie in a twisted heap, gasping for air.
Time is like a dense fog as she stares her death in its cold, sinister eyes. She can’t say for certain how long she lies sprawled there, only that the beast does not immediately move to end her, and in fact appears to be content to simply watch her struggle to breathe. As she takes in her first full lungful of air, however, the beast lifts its immense bear leg to crush her.
Acting on pure instinct, Ochako rolls hard and fast away from the base of the tree, grabbing the small bone knife at her hip and heaving it as hard as she can into the meat of the beast’s opposite foreleg, which is currently shaped like the limb of a gigantic caribou. A gout of black ichor issues forth as the beast screams, and Ochako abandons the knife to frenziedly drag herself away.
Her vision swims as she gains her feet and staggers on a stumbling, slantwise path to the beast’s flank, grabbing deliriously for her father’s spear at her back. She successfully closes her hand around the weapon on her third try, still wheezing from breathlessness and exertion and blinding pain, and pulls it forth. It, too, she discovers, has been snapped and broken, such that only the spear tip and another arm’s length worth of shaft remains. Ochako doesn’t have the time or energy to lament the loss of reach and reels forward, again leveraging as much of her weight and strength into the last-ditch spear thrust as she can. The spear enters at the beast’s seal-flesh-and-caribou-furred shoulder, and Ochako screams for all she’s worth as she jumps up and wrenches down in an attempt to rip open and tear through as much of the beast’s hide as possible.
The beast bellows its wrathful anguish and lumbers sideways at an odd angle, moving with what seems clearly to Ochako to be equal parts intention and shocked, involuntary lurching. Ochako doesn’t try to dodge, only pulls for all she’s worth at the spear shaft in an attempt to dislodge it for another stab. She pitches to-and-fro in a violent, drunken dance with the beast, ultimately pulling her spear free yet losing the opportunity to use it again when the beast gains enough clearance to slam into her once more, this time with one of its enormous, malformed moose antlers.
Darkness spiders at the edges of Ochako’s vision when her head hits the trunk of another tree, and though she miraculously retains the ability to breathe this time, she discovers the impact has left her too stunned to move.
The beast now approaches at a much less relaxed pace, and Ochako is suddenly keenly aware that there is no more forestalling the inevitable. She is about to die.
She sends up a short, silent plea that her death will slake the beast’s bloodlust for whatever slight has provoked its fury and set it upon her village.
The beast lowers its head toward her, its two great narwhal tusks aimed straight at her torso, and bears down upon her. Vaguely, Ochako realizes she’s still got one hand clutched around her father’s broken spear, and with a sense of resigned yet defiant calm, she weakly brandishes it at the beast, heedless of the futility.
Ochako breathes deep and savors the scent of the deep woods beyond the bitter blizzard ice and the befouling stench of rot and blood. Then, bracing herself for death, she closes her eyes and surrenders to the feverish conjurations of her mind’s eye, which mercifully evokes the simple, soothing warmth of her family’s hearth fire and the heartening rise and fall of their hushed, gentle voices, beckoning her nearer.
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Beyond the awareness of the spirit and the human –the girl—alike, the wolf beholds the deadly dance of the predator and prey. The girl has her wits about her, moving with quiet and caution, laying clever if useless traps, expertly concealing her trail as she goes. She doesn’t yet know that all of her cunning efforts are for naught, but she will learn. She doesn’t know that the spirit lingers always nearby as formless vapor, maliciously lying in wait for the human to make the mistake of burning out and collapsing, or the even greater mistake of thinking herself safe. The wolf knows, though, that the spirit is methodically choosing its moment to strike, for the spirit craves the savor of hopelessness far more than death.
The spirit finally reveals itself to the girl just as it seems she’s begun to wonder where it’s gone and how she’s managed to evade it for so long. Predictably, once the spirit appears, things progress quickly. The girl is impaled by the spirit’s shadow form, which shocks her into a brief stupor. She recovers fast, though, and flees again, winning herself the span of a precious few seconds as the spirit’s main body resolves directly on top of a feeble fire trap that more upsets than injures it.
The spirit is upon her a short handful of seconds later, knocking her about with enough force to break things within her. The girl struggles to draw breath where she lands, mouth gaping like a dying fish as she lies pitifully inert on the ground, unable or unwilling to dig deep enough to avoid the spirit’s dawdling deathblow.
The wolf is about to turn away in aggravated disappointment at the anticlimax of it all, until the human unexpectedly propels herself sideways and stabs at the spirit’s opposite leg –and again, manages to pierce its impregnable hide. The spirit bleeds black and thunders its agony for the whole damn forest to hear. The girl, meanwhile, scrabbles for separation and then for her final remaining weapon – a broken spear the wolf recognizes as the one she had stolen from her companion beyond the borders of the Eternal Village.
While the spirit still reels, the human sets to work, stabbing and slicing at the spirit’s shoulder whilst being pitched about like a ragdoll. She is terrified; the noxious stink of her fear hangs in a heavy miasma among the trees, seeping into the earth. And yet she does not, will not submit to the immortal spirit. Her brave assault is meaningless; she cannot defeat this adversary, and she knows it. She knows her death is assured, and nigh. Yet she continues to fight, unyielding. The determination on her face shines like the moon in its fullest phase, like the shimmering aurora in the sky on the darkest of polar nights, and the wolf is moved.
This human’s tenacity and courage has spared her people further tragedy, given her village shamans time to fortify their defenses and perhaps even repair the Unbreakable Boundary, and enabled her to harm an ageless, invulnerable spirit. Her peerless ferocity in the face of certain death quickens the wolf’s blood.
Worthy, the wolf deems her, sprinting soundlessly across the snow toward the battlefield. Worthy of life, worthy of saving.
The wolf, too, is a spirit of this forest, and as such has every ability and right to intervene on this human’s behalf. The battle will not be easily won, but the wolf is swift and strong and motivated to bring this spirit to heel, and thus is confident of his victory. The spirit will reawaken again someday, roused by a punishing taboo or powerful magicks or even more powerful spite, but on this night, it will take no further Vengeance upon humankind. The wolf will see to that.
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The last thing Ochako sees before darkness takes her and she slumps into unconsciousness is a dire wolf with winter-wheat fur and glowing red eyes, emerging from the forest and colliding with the beast in a tangle of primordial savagery.
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Ochako wakes to the dreamy warmth of soft, thick blankets and the tantalizing smell of herbs and roasting meat. The crackle of a fire sounds nearby, along with the gentle pad of bare feet against a wooden floor.
Groggy beyond belief yet lucid enough to recall that the last time she’d been conscious she had been seconds away from a violent death, Ochako cracks her eyes open, furtively peeking in case watchful eyes are upon her. Her gaze lights onto the back of a lone, broad-shouldered figure sitting in a hunched position over a recessed firepit, cooking what smells like rabbit. She licks her cracked and dry lips in spite of herself, feeling sharp pangs of hunger.
Seeing no evidence that anyone else is here, Ochako cautiously cranes her neck to take in her surroundings. She’s in a large, sparsely decorated, unfamiliar lodge, tucked away in a corner atop a luxurious bed of furs. There’s a small scrap of fabric on the floor beside her, upon which rests several items she had taken from home: a few crushed pieces of jerky and dried fish, a selection of likewise damaged trap-making components, the smashed remains of her fish basket, and…her bone knife and the tip of her father’s spear, both coated in thick, black ichor.
Astonished, Ochako tilts her gaze back to the figure at the center of the lodge. What had happened out there after she lost consciousness? Had the beast fallen to the dire wolf? If so, why had the dire wolf not claimed her death for itself? Had it been gravely wounded, or perhaps also fallen? And even if the beast and the dire wolf had destroyed one another, how on earth had she come to be here? No sane person would have willingly trespassed into the forbidden forest, alone or otherwise, and even if they had, surely it’s impossible that they would have happened upon her in such a vast expanse precisely when she needed them?
Grateful to be alive after such an ordeal yet suspicious of her whereabouts and the intentions of this stranger who has seemingly borne her to safety, Ochako slowly reaches for the knife at her bedside. The movement is painful beyond belief, as the shoulder she shifts is the same one the beast had pierced, but she manages to stifle the agonized noise that wants to come screaming out of her.
More prepared now for the stinging ache, Ochako braces herself and wraps her hand around the hilt, beginning to shift beneath the heavy furs to a sitting position. Her eyes are fixed to the back of the figure silhouetted by the fire, vigilantly watching for any sign that the person knows she’s awake and moving. She’s so focused on keeping the mysterious figure in her sights, in fact, that she doesn’t realize at first why, when she draws the furs gently aside to accommodate her sitting upright, she’s immediately so, so cold.
This time, Ochako does not manage to stifle her horrified shriek when she looks down and realizes that, save for the modest wrappings secured around her shoulder and hips and the mottle of several serious bruises along the length of her torso and arms, she is completely, utterly naked.
Instantly, the figure at the center of the room whirls around to behold her, and Ochako sees that it’s a boy. A solidly built, half-naked boy, roughly her age, with hair the color of winter wheat and burning, blood-red eyes. Unbidden, Ochako’s mind flashes back to the blurry, split-second impression of a giant, red-eyed wolf, leaping out of the darkness to clash with the beast seeking her end.
The boy before her stands to his full, towering height, on high alert and looking immensely irritated. He’s human-shaped, but she’s no longer convinced that he’s actually human. For half a second, Ochako gapes dumbly up at him, terrified by her nakedness and in an unimaginable amount of pain and torn between feeling furious and incredulous at the thought that she has been spared one dreadful death only to find herself squarely in the jaws of another.
Then, deciding that acting first and asking questions later is the better part of valor, Ochako stuffs down every last one of her misgivings, clenches her fist firmly around the knife, and rushes the boy.
/-/
Katsuki is delighted that the first thing the girl does upon waking is plot to kill him, as it demonstrates that her excellent survival instincts are still perfectly intact, all the more so because he can see the intuitive recognition on her part that he is far more dangerous than his current form suggests.
Instead of easily evading or disarming her, Katsuki lets her tackle him and crashes with her to the ground, eager to see what she’s made of. The blade of her knife rips a lurid gash along his exposed pectoral muscle as they fall, widening Katsuki’s eyes in thrilled fascination. She is not holding back.
As she fumblingly rears back on top of him, angling for a finishing stab, Katsuki catches her forearm with one hand and twists the knife free with the other, all the while fending off her increasingly desperate and savage attempts to gouge out one of his eyes with her free thumb. She immediately makes a grab for the knife as it clatters to the floor beside his head, but he intercepts her by clasping both of her wrists in an unbreakable grip and rolling her bodily away from it.
She struggles with renewed intensity when he flips her over and pins her to the floor, going positively fucking feral as she thrashes and kicks and bites and screams at him. Katsuki seats himself on her thighs, lowering his weight atop her to keep her knees and legs from inflicting too much damage, marveling that she still has so much fight left in such a wounded state.
“Oi,” he rumbles, speaking for the first time with his human voice in who-even-knows how long.
“Let me go, let me go!” she cries, bucking up against him with a truly surprising amount of force. Equally surprising is his reaction to the fleeting, sinuous pressure of her body against his own.
Swallowing hard against the sudden dark, hungry sharpness of his enthusiasm for this scuffle, Katsuki tries again, tone edged with unintended urgency, “Oi, stop fucking struggling!”
The girl promptly spits in his face, and it’s all Katsuki can do not to react to this blatant refusal to submit as the wolf within him demands, with curled lips and bared teeth and a low, warning growl. She’s human, he reminds himself. She wouldn’t understand the diplomatic reprimand or the attempted pacification; she would see only the threat of further violence.
Echoing through his mind from years long past, Katsuki’s old man gently reminds him to use his words.
So, instead of seeing this brawl through to its natural conclusion (which seems unwise and dangerous for him specifically, considering the strange effect her misplaced hostility and writhing body are having on him), Katsuki decisively ends it by releasing her left arm, sitting back against her knees, and wrenching her forcefully up to a sitting position by her injured right arm. As the motion jars her at the shoulder, she screams, then sways and sags forward like she’s about to be sick or pass out or both. While she’s reeling, Katsuki leaps off of and circles around her until the firepit is interposed between them.
“You got real fuckin’ lucky I was in the forest when I was, moon face; be a shame to squander such good fortune by throwing your life away now.” He watches the human’s face disappear behind the matted, sweaty fall of her hair as she curls slowly in on herself, her good arm wrapping her legs while her shoulders begin to softly quake.
Katsuki can smell her fear, the bitter salt-tang of her despair even with his infinitely duller human senses. It brings him neither pride nor satisfaction to see so fierce a creature brought low on his account.
Lip curling in discomfiture, Katsuki pads on loud human feet to the bed he’d once called his own and retrieves the topmost fur, draping it loosely in over his bare arms as he returns to the brave girl cowering on the floor of his childhood home.
/-/
Ochako near startles out of her skin when the sudden, hefty weight drops against her back and uninjured shoulder. When she looks up, the boy is already crossing the lodge to a wooden table set against the wall opposite her bed. The path he’s on directly passes where she’d been forced to drop her knife, but he makes no move to collect it. He doesn’t seem particularly concerned she’ll try to collect it, either, or try to attack him again.
Not placated but admittedly somewhat disarmed by the wordlessly offered fur, the general lack of harm he appears to mean her after she had tried in earnest to kill him, and the odd sense of calm yet irritated forbearance he exudes, Ochako draws the blanket more fully around her body. She’s careful not to bump or jostle her wounded shoulder, which is actively bleeding and soaking through the neatly wrapped bandages, but it hurts all the same. Unwilling to show further weakness to the boy-stranger if she can avoid it, Ochako bites her lip to keep herself from whimpering in pain. Then, once she’s huddled protectively into the fur, she uses it to wipe at her eyes and cheeks, clearing away as much evidence of the tears she’d shed as she can while she tries to decide what to do next.
In the meantime, after scooping a handful of items off the table, the boy begins making his way back to her, arms laden with what Ochako instantly recognizes as the tools of a healer: cloth, clay, a poultice pot, and fresh bandages. Ochako’s fingers clench in the plush fur as he comes nearer, eyes darting toward her abandoned knife as she considers diving for it. The boy, clearly seeing where she’s looking, rolls his eyes and curves slightly off-path toward the knife…which he then proceeds to gently heel-kick toward her.
Ochako doesn’t know what he’s expecting her to do, but she doesn’t hesitate to snap the weapon up and hold it aloft between them like a warning.
“If it’s a fight you want, moon face, I’m happy to oblige,” he says, approaching with measured slowness, “but I didn’t work so hard to save your ungrateful ass just so I could put you down myself.”
Ochako’s eyes widen to hear him say outright what he’d alluded to moments before when he had mentioned how ‘lucky’ she is that he’d been in the forest when she was being hunted by the beast.
“It was you,” she whispers to herself in disbelief, arm drifting unconsciously toward the floor while she comes to terms with the fact that the boy is indeed not human, exactly as she had suspected. “You were the wolf.”
“I am the wolf,” he corrects. “This form is purely for your sake, to put you at ease and make you less likely to come at me with a knife,” he jibes with a wry upturn of his mouth. Remembering suddenly that she has the knife, Ochako white-knuckles it in her grip yet forgoes lifting it again, even when he casually enters her space and kneels at her feet.
As he arranges the objects in his hands on the floor before her, looking for all the world as though he means to clean and rebandage her wound, Ochako finds herself at a tired, terrified loss.
“What”—she swallows hard, fearing but needing to know the answer—“what do you want with me?”
“I don’t want shit from you,” he tells her plainly, nothing in his tone or body language giving her reason to doubt his sincerity. “Other than for you to give it a couple more days ‘til you’re fed and rested and travel-ready, at least. After that, we’ll leave for your village first time there’s an aurora, ‘cause I ain’t interested in slugging it out with all the assholes in these woods who’d come for your head if we leave during the full dark of polar night. Only reason you weren’t immediately killed or enchanted by one of a dozen other spirits who call this neck of the woods home is none of ‘em wanted to fuck with the one who’d already marked you.” Ochako shudders when his words clue her in to the fact that she’s still in the forest. She sets that aside for the moment, though, because a more pressing question bears asking.
“Why, then? Why save me?” He looks her dead-on with that red, red gaze and points to her only visible hand, still clenched around the knife.
“Because in the face of certain death, you chose to stand and fight.” Ochako’s breath hitches and her eyes fill with fresh tears. He had witnessed her make the choice to barter her life, then watched her claw and scrape to keep it, and something in what he had seen had incited him to intercede on her behalf. The swell of gratitude and heady pride she feels nearly overwhelms her, nearly compels her to cast aside her pain, her modesty, and all her deeply rooted caution and throw her arms wide to draw the boy into a joyful, weeping embrace.
“Oi,” the boy growls, irritated, which snaps her out of her floaty reverie, “you gonna let me fix you up, or what?” He’s asking permission, she realizes after a beat. He’s made no brash encroachments into her space, not taking her assent for granted. Ultimately, this is the gesture that convinces her to trust him.
Even still, she has questions.
Fist clenching in the fur where she’s holding it closed, “Can I ask…where my clothes are?” The boy chucks a thumb over his shoulder, motioning for the firepit now at his back. Ochako sends her gaze over the ridge of his shoulder, where a crumpled bundle of fabric lies abandoned. She had completely overlooked it in all the commotion. Atop the bundle is a hastily discarded sewing needle, beside which is a spool of brown thread. Had he been…repairing her clothes? She shudders to think the state they must have been in after her battle with the beast.
“Cleaned ‘em as best as I could, but a lot of the blood had already dried by the time I got you back here, so you’ll have to make do with what you’ve got ‘til you get home. I still need time to finish sewing before you can have any of it back, though, ‘cause your shit was shredded and I just started working on it a couple hours ago. Took me longer to recover from the fight than I was expecting, and then I had to go find something for you to eat when you came to, so I’m a couple days behind schedule.” Ochako gleans two things from this explanation. First, that he seems to have an awful lot of human skills that take days, weeks, maybe even months to cultivate: cooking, tending wounds, and sewing. This suggests to her that he’s spent more time in this human form than he claims. Second, since he’s only wearing a pair of loose-fitting hide trousers, she can see that whatever injuries he supposedly sustained in combat with the beast have completely vanished over the course of only a few days, meaning that he must be in possession of some serious regenerative abilities given the state she’s in.
“How long have I been unconscious?” Ochako asks as she takes in all of this information. The boy shrugs.
“Better part of four days, give or take. Made sure you had some water and broth to keep you going, but you’re gonna need solid food, and soon.” She nods numbly, astonished. “So, unless you want burnt rabbit for your first real meal in days, give me your damn shoulder so I can patch you up and get back to roasting.”
“Oh, right, sorry,” she mutters, drawing the knife back within the concealment of the fur and setting it on the floor at her hip for easy access, just in case. Then, she carefully arranges the blanket so that it drapes across the front of her body and tucks snugly under her arms.
For several moments, nothing is said between them. He works in efficient silence, and Ochako’s attention is split between the agony of her shoulder and the striking, hearth-fire heat of him. She had been so focused on attacking him before that she hadn’t noticed, but there’s no ignoring it now while he’s laboring so close and for so long. She’s huddled without clothing under a single fur on the icy, wooden floor, yet sweat beads at her temple and trickles down the back of her neck from the nearness of him. The touch of his hand scalds when it curls gently around her upper arm to brace her, but not unpleasantly. The brush of his fingers against her wound warms the fresh layer of poultice he applies, easing the sting somewhat. He’s like a smoldering flame in deep winter, drawing Ochako irrepressibly toward him.
As if in a daze, she reaches for him, skimming the tips of her fingers near the puckered, bleeding edges of the flesh she’d sundered.
Vaguely, as she presses her hand gently flat against his chest and marvels at the lulling, dozy heat of him, it occurs to her to wonder how she had managed to harm him at all, considering he’d emerged triumphant against the gargantuan spirit that had ravaged her village and marked her for death. Unless…had he let her land a blow, on purpose? Ochako feels oddly upset at the notion.
Frowning, Ochako shoves down her bizarre and irrational resentment and redirects, “I’m sorry I hurt you.”
It takes her several long, slow seconds to register that not only has the boy not replied, but he’s also gone unaccountably still. Confused, Ochako peeks up at him to understand why he’s fallen so silent–and finds herself pinned to the spot by the sheer intensity of his burning gaze.
/-/
Katsuki’s teeth clench and his whole body tautens when, out of absolutely fucking nowhere, the remarkable girl from the Eternal Village touches him, her fingers tentatively dancing and then boldly sprawling against his skin.
His eyebrows knit together pensively as he attempts to comprehend her purpose without relying overmuch on scent cues, because frankly, his nose in this form is for shit. He might delude himself that he can discern something carnal, something animal in the recklessness of her incursion, but the only tempers he can reliably identify by smell in human guise are grief, fury, and fear. And actually, there are notes of fear in her when their eyes meet, except that where usually these notes stink of bitter earth and curdled milk they now instead savor of some mulled winter beverage.
A muscle works in Katsuki’s jaw as he regards her with incisive attentiveness, watching as drowsy bewilderment gives way to slow-creeping awareness. Then, all at once, her dark pupils blow wide, near fully eclipsing the amber brown of her eyes; and the steady rhythm of her breath falters and hastens; and the sunrise pink of her cheeks deepens to a ruddy flush; and the pulse in her throat visibly thrums; and his senses are so, so dulled and yet her face is as moon-bright as he remembers through the eyes of the wolf; and she is vital and vibrant and luminous and he has no clue when he’d dipped closer, but suddenly he’s breathing her air and the hand he’d been using to administer the poultice is curled intimately around the back of her neck, enticing her ever nearer.
Fascinatingly, she lets herself be led. The suddenness of her desire is every bit as incomprehensible and overpowering as his own, struck like sparks from flint and swiftly kindling. Her eyes are half-lidded, fluttering closed, and the noise of soft surrender she makes as he closes the final distance between them has him curving a self-satisfied grin against her mouth.
She comes alive when he presses the kiss, parting her lips to deepen it without hesitation and surging forward even as the hand upon his chest drifts gently to his waist to compel him forward, as well. Everywhere she touches lights with sensation, and he wastes no time indulging her unspoken bid for further closeness. They meet in the middle, where Katsuki scoops her onto his lap with great care so as not to touch or jar any of her several, serious injuries or dislodge the fur she had so fastidiously arranged around herself.
Emboldened by her lack of objection, Katsuki braces one hand at the base of her spine, the other between her shoulder blades, and presses her flush against him. She, meanwhile, leverages her new position, resting her injured arm along the ridge of his shoulder and burying the opposite hand in the hair at the nape of his neck. When the angle of attack proves too awkward to sustain, the audacious girl briefly fists her hand in his hair and pulls sharply down to grant herself better access to his mouth. The unexpected violence of this maneuver, paired with his forced new vantage point both physically and symbolically beneath her, shakes him to the core of his being.
The kissing thereafter is frenzied, raw, hungry. and Katsuki’s all fire and nerves and stunned euphoria because even though she’s battered and bruised and weakened from her ordeal and ultimately just human, she feels and smells and tastes so good. Dangerously, disastrously good.
Unbidden, an image of his father flashes through his mind’s eye, isolated here in this lodge while his mother freely roamed the wilds. His ever-smiling, wise, enduringly kind, just human old man, who had been shunned by the elders of the Eternal Village following their discovery that he was consorting with the wolf who would become Katsuki’s mother; who raised Katsuki and taught him the skills of the humans dwelling beyond the forest until Katsuki came of age to travel with his mother’s pack and learn the ways of the wolf; who died alone while Katsuki and his mother were away on a weeks-long hunt—and had nothing to show for his life save the dust-covered contents of a lodge Katsuki had abandoned and allowed to fall into disrepair.
It’s no life for a mortal being. Humans belong amongst their kin, just as wolves do. And heroic sacrifice or no, she risks losing what remains of her community carrying on like this, as it was his father himself who taught Katsuki that there are few taboos greater than allowing oneself to be beguiled by a spirit. Age-old superstitions would sooner have her village banish and mourn her as dead than invite the return of anyone they suspect of fraternization with ancient denizens of the wood.
So, even though things are getting better and better and the absolute last thing on his mind is fucking stopping, he does, wrenching back with a loud curse and the barely restrained impulse to wolf out, fuck off into the forest, and rip whatever first crosses his path to fucking shreds.
The girl blinks at him in bafflement when he disengages and sets to carefully sliding her off of his lap and back onto the floor beside her discarded knife.
Katsuki is frustrated beyond belief and livid with himself for starting something he couldn’t have finished regardless of the superstitious attitudes of her village, on account of she’s still healing, freshly reinjured, and probably famished, besides. As he wordlessly fumes, he reenters her space, pointedly avoiding looking anywhere near her mouth or eyes or endearingly rosy cheeks. Then, he picks up where he left off, reapplying a smear of poultice with now shaking hands and beginning to wrap her shoulder with quiet, skillful detachment.
Following an interminable moment of almost unbearably awkward silence, “It was a good cut,” Katsuki responds at last her apology for hurting him, which now seems as though it had been spoken a lifetime ago. “Sloppy, but good. And I wouldn’t sweat it; it’ll be healed over in a few hours.”
“Oh,” she says, still sounding somewhat breathless. Then, “Do…do you have many more powers at your disposal?”
“Why,” Katsuki deadpans, instantly suspicious of this question. Peripherally, he spies her features settling into an expression of calculated nonchalance.
“Y-you just seem to have such fascinating abilities: to shapeshift, to heal quickly…I was just curious if you have other extraordinary gifts. Perhaps powers of…enchantment, or temptation…?”
Indignant at the implication that anything other than pure animal magnetism catalyzed their collision, “You came onto me, moon face,” he reminds her, lip curling as he finally turns back to regard her with narrowed eyes. She pouts prettily back at him, forcing him to avert his gaze again because damn it all if he doesn’t find her preternaturally tempting.
“S-sorry if I overstepped,” she sulks. “And for accusing you. I just…I honestly have no idea what came over me! I’ve never…and with a complete stranger! I don’t—” The girl holds an astonished hand to her mouth as something shocking occurs to her. “I don’t even know your name,” she whispers, scandalized. Katsuki snorts out a laugh as he finishes tying off her fresh bandages, then rises to his feet before her.
“Katsuki,” he smirks down at her, holding out a hand by way of both helping her up and introducing himself. “Though you might be more familiar with the name ‘Bakugou’ if any of my old man’s family still lives.” He can see the flash of recognition in her eyes and knows she’s fitting together the scattered pieces of his origin story.
He can also see that she has a thousand questions, but in the end, she doesn’t ask even one. She chooses instead to respect that the story is his to tell or not to tell, and wordlessly accepts his offered hand. Katsuki’s esteem for her grows further still.
“Bakugou,” she repeats, her voice heavy with inscrutable significance, “my name is Uraraka Ochako.” The name itself means nothing to him, yet he commits it instantly to memory and knows that, even as the seasons turn and countless ages pass, he’ll never forget it.
Disturbed by this insight, Katsuki falls back into familiar rhythms and goads, “I like ‘moon face’ better.” Uraraka levers herself up to a standing position using his hand –which she then refuses to release. Katsuki stares down at their joined hands with a sense of escalating disquiet. Uraraka’s answering smile cuts like the knife she has yet again abandoned on the floor.
“‘Uraraka’ works just fine, thanks.” Sensing a challenge in the tightness of her tone, Katsuki edges closer, invading her space yet again without sparing a thought for the consequences. Uraraka’s hand, clutched around his own, tenses. As he expects, however, she neither shrinks nor steps back. Confusingly, though, following a charged moment of silence he’s certain is destined to culminate in further ill-advised fraternization, Uraraka’s smile softens, and she aims an expression up at him that’s so reverential and openly affectionate it makes his knees briefly wobble and knock together. “Thank you, Bakugou,” she begins, squeezing his hand again, this time with intention, “for saving my life. I won’t waste it, and if you’ll let me, I’ll spend whatever’s left of it trying to balance the scales.” All the air in Katsuki’s body whooshes up out of him, because that sounds an awful fucking lot like she’s just invited herself into his life on a lasting –or even permanent—basis.
Before he can scream and run or furiously demand an explanation at the outrageous presumptuousness of it all, she lets go of his hand and weakly steps around him toward the fire. Katsuki instinctively reaches out to steady her as she stumbles and nearly falls, gripping her on either side of her waist and making sure to hold the fur fast to her form while she recovers her balance. He guides her to the firepit, where she signals she wants to sit beside his abandoned sewing project.
Once she’s settled, she silently picks up the needle and thread and begins restitching her shredded parka. Thrown by this whiplash turn from fearful and homicidal to inexplicably amorous to relaxed and cozy-as-you-fucking-please, Katsuki warily returns to his spitted rabbit (which is blackened along one edge, but not unsalvageable) and gives it a half-spin.
Katsuki glowers at the dead animal roasting on the spit before him and grapples with the increasing certitude that, in making the decision to rescue a worthy mortal, he has somehow yoked his fate to hers. Already the prospect of guiding her back through these woods and watching her walk away from him forever is maddening, intolerable.
And just what the shit is he supposed to do with that?
/-/
Over the next few days, Ochako falls into a comfortable rhythm with the gruff boy-wolf named Bakugou, who saved her life, graciously tolerated her misguided attempt to kill him, and then just as graciously reciprocated her unplanned, impulsive, and insane romantic advances.
As she continues to heal, Ochako helps him mend her clothing and begins cooking his kills herself, producing a sachet of herbs and spices (which had miraculously survived her combat with the beast) from within her parka to enhance the flavors. Bakugou’s wide-eyed expression following his first bite makes her decision to dip into her dwindling seasoning stash so, so worth it.
By the third day, she’s feeling well enough to tidy the lodge here and there. As she’s cleaning, she discovers a cache of scrap materials perfect for trap-making. Some of the materials are too old and deteriorated to use, but there are plenty of pieces that have stood the test of time. Bakugou joins her after he returns from hunting, curious as to what she’s doing. Excited to show off her skills, she shimmies closer in her freshly sewn parka and pants and offers to show him some rudimentary trap-making and setting techniques. She finds him a captivated audience and a quick study and secretly delights that he seems to find her craft so fascinating. When she explains how she’s modified a small game snare, Bakugou casually yet meaningfully remarks on the cleverness of it, and Ochako spends the rest of the day giddy with pride.
As day lapses seamlessly into night, the winds beyond the safety of the lodge whip about with such force that the walls and rafters rattle and shake. The bitter cold seeps in through the aging wood and various holes cracked into the roof and door and chills Ochako to the bone. No matter how deeply she buries herself in the furs on her makeshift bed, she cannot keep the cold out. As she debates dragging the bed closer to the firepit (something her parents had always cautioned her against), Bakugou appears before her and tells her to, “Move the fuck over.”
She does so without hesitation, covetously remembering the prodigious warmth of his body. It’s only as he kicks aside the furs atop her that she remembers the powerful effect his prodigiously warm body had had on her only a few days prior.
Bakugou’s intentions turn out to be entirely pure, however, which he makes clear when, in a puff of coiling, sinuous smoke, he becomes the dire wolf before her eyes and curls up beside her. The heat of him in this guise is even greater and more delicious than it had been when he was in human form, and she doesn’t even try to stop herself from fully ensconcing herself within the curve of his enormous body. He burns so hot, in fact, that Ochako never moves to retrieve the cast-aside blankets. He renders them utterly superfluous. At last, nestled as close into Bakugou’s surprisingly plush, silky pelt as she is able, Ochako relaxes and drifts gratefully off to sleep.
She wakes the next morning to the boy, not the wolf, folded around her. She successfully fights back her body’s startled reaction and takes the opportunity to observe him up close. His features are peaceful, soft, beautiful. Even asleep, though, his brow is still ever-so-slightly furrowed. Amused by this, she reaches out unthinkingly to smooth the crease with her thumb—and freezes when Bakugou’s red eyes flash open.
He stares at her with quiet, unrelenting intensity.
Ochako has been raised to mistrust the spirits of the wood, and she has never questioned this wisdom. Yet in the tranquil stillness of this morning, she finds herself calmly certain that she has never trusted anyone more than the beautiful spirit sharing her bed. As a result, when her instincts compel to sweep her hand from his brow to his cheek and then nudge forward to kiss him again, she listens. Bakugou eagerly responds in kind, and while he remains careful of her still-healing injuries, he does not mysteriously pull away this time, instead content to pass the morning with her in bed, languidly feeling the warmth of one another’s bodies.
The following evening, the swirling rivers of the aurora unfurl, covering the entire sky with flowing ribbons of green and blue light and signaling that the time has come to make the journey home.
As she dithers about gathering her things, Bakugou crossly tells her she can never speak to anyone of their time together, lest she risk banishment. Then, unprompted, Bakugou shares what is clearly a heavily abridged version of the story of his father and mother. Ochako learns that his father had been exiled from her village when the elders had learned of his father’s bond with his mother, a shapeshifting dire wolf, just like Bakugou himself. Ochako had already put this much together based on what she knows of Bakugou’s grandparents, who live as ghosts along the very edge of the village boundary. The tale of their son, Masaru, had been a cautionary tale in her youth. Truth be told, though, she had never paid the story much mind, certain that it could not be true and that the couple must have broken some other terrible taboo to be forced to live as outcasts.
Ochako considers the matter thoughtfully, ultimately resolving first and foremost to make an overture of friendship to Bakugou’s grandparents as soon as she returns. That is, if they had not tragically perished the night the beast attacked. She concedes that Bakugou is probably right, that pleading her case may indeed be difficult. However, she emphatically asserts her confidence that times and attitudes have changed and that the current generation of elders, who have guided and doted on and watched her grow, would not expel her. And even if they do, she assures him, her friends and family will simply break ties with the village and travel with her to settle elsewhere; somewhere Bakugou could enter and depart freely. Either way, she declares, she will not hide from the truth and risk never seeing him again. In response to this declaration, Bakugou makes an expression caught adorably between embarrassed, furious, and hunted.
And then he tells her something she could not have known: that all of her elders are likely still alive, and that the ball of blue flame that had enveloped the elders’ lodge as she fled was almost certainly a protective spell the elders had cast upon their council lodge while they gathered the strength to fight the beast she had lured away before they even had the chance to dispel it. He says this last bit with a level of impressed smugness that makes her heady and warm with gratification.
The prospect of Bakugou, a fearless and powerful spirit of the forbidden wood, coming to share her hearth whenever he happens to be passing through the area, fills her with sparking elation.
Days before, she made a spur-of-the-moment decision to sacrifice herself to save her family and village and thought herself at the precipice of death. Now, instead, the path of her future stretches endlessly before her, abounding with life and love and adventure.
/-/
Katsuki believes it when Uraraka tells him she will convince her village to accept their bond or take half the fucking village with her after she’s banished.
As she begins excitedly rattling off the names of friends she’s certain he’ll ‘love’ (including someone named ‘Izuku,’ who is apparently fascinated with spirits and magic, and who sounds unbelievably annoying), he muses over her responses to his misgivings and reaffirms that he has chosen correctly: someone strong, kind, brave, and willing to fight, body and soul, for what she believes is right—which in this case is her right to fraternize with the spirit of her choosing. With him.
Thus, with the understanding that he is guiding her back to the Eternal Village not to separate forever but to await word of when and where they will be reunited, Katsuki leads off on the long road to return his mate home.