Concept: I write a fucked up fic
Title: Out Of The Forest I Come
Fandom(s): Bangtan
Pairing(s): Suga centric, J Hope/Suga, Jin/Suga
Rating: R
Warnings: Bloody and violent situations, character death
Word count: 3,704
Summary: Yoongi has the eyes and the ears, he must find his teeth (Little Red Riding Hood retelling)
Also on AO3
The axe falls heavy in Seokjin’s hands, singing sweet death songs to the pines that shadow this end of the path. It lands a little harder with each swing, till the dull knock of iron on wood gives way to creaking timber, and a crash that can be heard as far away as the village.
Yoongi shudders as the trees fall, nothing that big is built to die. “If you’re lost in the forest…” he starts.
Seokjin stops him with soft eyes and a knowing smile, “I never get lost.”
Chop, chop, chop. Creak. Crash. Yoongi tips his head skywards and watches the sun emerge from beneath the fallen branches. The sky is cool and clear, a crisp blue canvas waiting for the autumn rains to paint storms upon it. It lights up the path to his left and to his right, till is vanishes round a corner or is sucked into the dark of the matted foliage that Seokjin has yet to clear.
The woodcutter notices him looking. Seokjin notices everything, he has eyes big enough for the whole forest.
“Don’t think because I know my way out here, people don’t get lost. The forest wants something from you, Yoongi, it wants something from everyone.”
“What does it want from you?” Yoongi asks. Because his mother’s stories never made the forest sound half as scary as Seokjin’s smile when he’s keeping secrets.
The corners of Seokjin’s mouth turn up, the axe falls. Yoongi imagines he can hear the tree crying out for mercy, and lets his stomach curl with sick satisfaction knowing none will be forthcoming.
The shadows lengthen all in a rush, in the time it takes to blink the trees are shifting to catch the golden glint of late afternoon sun. Seokjin slings his axe over his shoulder and passes his pack to Yoongi, a small price to pay for a day out of town, “let’s get you home.”
They take the path that loses itself round a corner, because Seokjin knows just how many corners it will need to feign stolen before they can leave the forest entirely. Yoongi hesitates to follow him, staring into the shadowed path they are leaving behind. There are lilies, white and ghostly, barely visible in the gloom. So late in the season for flowers, his hand itches to pick them, a vague notion that he might give them to some pretty boy or girl that night.
“Yoongi!” Seokjin snaps. But the spell is only half broken.
The woodcutter walks tall, the boy with hurried steps, folded in on himself against the cold. Seokjin laughs when he sees Yoongi shivering, “that ridiculous red coat is good for nothing but attracting the wrong kind of attention.”
“What’s the wrong kind of attention?” Yoongi asks from between chattering teeth.
Seokjin smiles, and says nothing. As they step out of the woods, a chorus of wolves start their howling deep within, their low groans filling children’s nightmares as they set out on the hunt. Yoongi looks over his shoulder, and swears he sees something moving in amongst the brush.
“Just because you have eyes big enough to see, doesn’t mean you should look,” Seokjin chides.
Yoongi doesn’t listen, “there’s something in the forest.”
“That there is,” Seokjin replies, “and don’t you go thinking that it’s lost.”
Yoongi’s hair grows pale green, like the winter cabbages in his mother’s garden. It’s still too early in the year for a harvest, but he helps her weed the beds and water the plants, picking through dense leaves to find squash hidden closer to the ground than any of the other vegetables.
The wind picks up and rattles the chimes hanging from their porch, knocks the last dead leaves from the apples trees. It steals Yoongi’s breath and blows soil up into his eyes, till he’s blinking back the filth in an attempt to keep his eyesight.
“That coat of yours is filthy,” his mother hums, reaching for the hem of his sleeve, more brown than red. It’s too late to wash it now though, Yoongi should have thought of that in summer time, when the winter chill was still far off and seemingly unimportant.
The forest sways as one in the wind, its evergreen branches wafting together like the wings of a great bird readying itself for flight. They watch it, off in the distance, and neither of them asks the other why Seokjin did not come for Yoongi that morning, because they already know that neither of them has the answer.
“Do you hear that?” Yoongi starts, when the creaking thud of a falling tree echoes across the village.
His mother laughs without mirth, “I have ears, don’t I?”
The trees keep falling, too far in to see, and every time Yoongi jumps. The woodcutter is supposed to remove the trees at risk of falling, but how can anyone cut on a day like today? For a moment he feels a frightening certainty that Seokjin is out amongst the writhing forest, working the wind around his axe to fell the very largest pines hiding out in the centre.
Then the thought it gone, lost amongst the low-lying bushes and the bracken, and the lilies that still bloom in early winter.
Hoseok hunts in the shallow grave of trees sparsely scattered before the forest proper looms. He hides in the grass, out of sight and out of mind until a rabbit, a deer, a pheasant crosses his path and he snatches it between the teeth of his arrows and his knife. By late afternoon he will have wound his way back into the village with meat to spare, knocking on doors and offering food with a smile.
His smile is not scary, not like Seokjin’s. Yoongi likes Hoseok, with his easy-going cackle, the knowing wink he offers in place of an answer when anyone asks him about the forest.
“I know you’re not supposed to say anything, but I need answers,” Yoongi mutters, out of earshot of his mother.
Hoseok grins wide enough that all his teeth can be seen at once, shiny and clean in the sun striking Yoongii’s front doorstep, “Ah, I wish I could. He’ll be fine though, don’t you worry.” And Hoseok’s hand is suddenly teasing the hem of Yoongi’s coat, muttering about the colour, and the filth, and how brilliantly it stands out.
“My mother made it for me, I liked the colour,” Yoongi shrugs.
“All the better to see you with,” Hoseok winks. Something that feels entirely too much like trust settles in Yoongi’s gut.
Yoongi watches the road carefully, as birds land in flurries on the even frost. The kitchen table rumbles beneath the rhythm of his fingers as he slurps tea for want of anything better to do. His mother is a long way off waking, and the silence in this little house of wood and stone is absolute.
“Have you seen him this morning?” Yoongi asks, breathless against the cold as he stands in the road, trying to decide if it’s strange that Hoseok should be smiling so early.
“You assume I see him,” Hoseok winks. Yoongi is reminded of the lilies hiding in the dark of the forest, which he could have given to anyone.
“You have the eyes for it.”
The forest bows and twists in winds Yoongi cannot feel. Dread sweeps across the back of his neck, like the trees are calling for a reckoning.
Hoseok sees him shiver, “I’ll be here tomorrow at first light. If neither of us has seen him by then, we’ll go looking for him. You know the way, right?”
“Of course I do, Seokjin taught me,” Yoongi lies. Seokjin taught him nothing, but he has eyes enough to look.
He hasn’t the teeth to fight, of course. But never fear, they will not step into the dark.
“There’s something strange about that boy with the bow,” Yoongi’s mother mutters darkly over dinner, “I don’t trust him.”
Yoongi swallows his retorts about how his mother trusts nothing she doesn’t understand, and she will never understand the pull of the forest. Let alone how a life can be eked out stealing heartbeats from other living creatures. He lets them fester though, that sharp, reactionary anger that he knows to be illogical even as he gives it the air to breathe.
In the morning Seokjin will still be gone, in the afternoon Hoseok will still smile as he hands over a brace of ducks. The choice will seem so obvious that Yoongi will forget he has eyes to see it any other way.
“I’m sure of it,” Yoongi says through a wall of false confidence as he takes the left fork in the path. Hoseok hangs on his every word, unfamiliar with the forest beyond the looming wall of green rising up out of shallow bracken on the very outskirts of town.
That morning, as Yoongi had stood outside his garden gate, his coat practically glowing in the half-light before dawn, Hoseok had taken his hand and told him he was brave and bold and smart. When Yoongi opened his mouth to voice his doubts about the wisdom of running off into the woods he had smiled and shaken his head, “You have the ears to hear me, listen when I say we will be fine.”
The sun rises over the treetops, winking in and out of sight as they turn corners and head deeper in. Deeper, deeper, ever deeper… and without an axe to take to the bones of this living maze Yoongi feels it closing in on him, like it means to suck the air from his lungs before the day is through.
“Everything alright?” Hoseok smiles the same smile he uses to deliver the meat.
Yoongi remembers that his mother doesn’t trust Hoseok and his never changing smile, for a moment he thinks she’s right. Then his anger at the very suggestion returns full force, to rage against himself as well as the woman who by now will know that he left the house that day without bidding her goodbye.
“It’s fine,” Yoongi smiles weakly, following the path round to the right. He doesn’t remember a bend in the trail from before, but bites his tongue against his own self-doubt. Hoseok didn’t step out into the woods with doubt in his heart and Yoongi refuses to plant it there, he deserves better than that.
“You keep looking between the trees,” Hoseok says.
And it’s true, Yoongi finds his eyes caught by flashes of white in the undergrowth. The lilies, smiling back at him with those bright teeth. He points them out as best he can, but when he’s still it’s hard to see them so clearly, and Hoseok’s smile widens.
“You could pick one for me, it would only take a moment”
The forest wants something from Yoongi, it wants something from everyone. The path is cleared by the woodcutter because he knows where is safe to step. To stray from the path is to put your life in the hands of the forest. Hoseok smiles like he knows this and believes that just this once, everything will be ok.
Everything will be ok.
“But if I got lost-“ Yoongi starts.
“Lost?” Hoseok laughs, “With a jacket like that, how could I lose you?”
The darkness closes in thick around him, shutting out sound and light all at once. Yoongi feels pine needles below his feet, crackling and crumbling like fire. The lilies shine at his peripheral vision, just around a tree trunk, always out of reach.
Yoongi steps in further, his mind flooded with images of pretty boys and pretty girls who might like a winter bloom. He picks up speed, stepping around trees and ducking under branches and reaching, reaching, reaching…
The image of Hoseok’s smile burns hot on the back of his eyelids, all those teeth shining happily back at him. The flowers begin to come closer but never fall within his reach, they surround him, laughing derisively every time his fingers close over the dark of the forest instead of their stems. Yoongi laughs with them, high and manic and all the better to be heard. He feels light swelling around him, within him, making the black feel blacker and casting the lilies in an ever brighter glare.
He doesn’t stop till he falls. A momentary misplacement of feet, an unexpected twig on the ground; whatever it is, Yoongi is thrown forward by his own momentum and lands face down in the dirt. By the time he gets to his feet, the lilies are gone.
The light stays, however, firm and fast through the dark. Yoongi looks down and sees his coat glow around him, a blazing red untainted by the grime and the filth that tangles in its vibrant threads. His mother made him this coat, he wears it most every day in the winter - nothing like a bit of every day magic to light our paths.
A single, solitary lily winks into life in front of him, it has sharp little teeth that glow in the dark, ready to bite and to tear. Somewhere, not too far off, a wolf howls, and then the flower is gone.
The teeth remain.
Yoongi awakes in the light and the cold, his eyes screaming against sunshine reflecting off a thousand eyes all around him.
His breath catches before he can scream. The wolves stand shoulder to shoulder, drool dripping from the tips of their sharp, glistening teeth. As one, he feels them sniff the air, the combined force enough to leave him breathless.
The forest wants something from you, they seem to say, their slavering jaws hanging open in anticipation. We mean to take it.
The pack is unearthly huge, sprawling and shifting, never the same number of wolves twice. Yoongi tries to focus on a single animal but finds his eyes slipping to the next before he even realises what he’s doing. They fade in and out of view, now howling in the distance, now growling in his face. He would tell himself they were not real, only he’s seen these animals flitting between the trees at the border of the forest, he recognises their hideous grins.
“I know you,” Yoongi mutters.
“Not well enough,” the wolves reply.
This time when he runs, the wolves do not stay out of his way. They follow, nipping at his heels and at the dirty hems of the sleeves of his coat. Yoongi feels teeth sinking into his calves and lower back, warm breath on the back of his neck as time and time again the beasts threaten him with the killing blow. The smell of blood fills his nostrils, like these animals have eaten, and he is only the toy they will play with before they sleep the day away with a full belly.
Yoongi cannot fight back, you need teeth to fight back. His feet begin to fail, threatening to trip or turn him round, he could dive straight between those gaping jaws.
The trees look back at him, and down at him. All a tree ever did was creak and crash, and as Yoongi catches their eye he can’t help the burning resentment that floods him, drawing on those hidden reserves of anger and burning hot under his skin. A set of teeth drag what’s left of his coat from his back and he can’t bring himself to feel the cold. The trees dare to watch him run but they will not intervene.
The forest may want something from him, but the forest is more than the trees.
This time when Yoongi trips, he doesn’t flinch. He’s ready for the fall and his hands come out to support him, then to scurry through the dead pine needles looking for the thing that felled him.
Yoongi’s fingers close over something cold and sharp, he feels the skin break and the blood break free when he grips it, dragging it from the undergrowth to weird above his head in triumph. It is heavy, it is dependable, it already knows all the death songs.
He takes the handle of Seokjin’s axe firmly in both hands, and drives it into the nearest tree trunk. It hits home with a resonant thump, and bark chippings scatter. They hit the wolves in their eyes, blinding them temporarily and causing them to howl in pain. Louder and louder, for when one wolf gives voice to its suffering the rest must follow. Yoongi raises the axe and strikes again, feeling it slipping through his fingers as the blood runs down the handle and across the blade.
Teeth close over Yoongi’s right arm, digging deep. He screams and drops the axe, thrashing against the wolf and trying to dislodge it, but once one has a good hold the rest will surely follow. They pile onto him at all angles, licking at the blood already spilled and searching for more veins to open, screaming with joy and grinning down at him, their hapless prey.
“Everything will be ok,” they hiss into his ear as they lick his wounds, only to tear with more vigour at Yoongi’s ruined flesh. They will not stop, and he will not die; the agony refuses to end.
They will eat him piece by piece, first his feet, then his hands, then his heart. Perhaps by the time they are done there will not be enough left of him to crawl out of here. “What big eyes you have,” they shriek, as claws begin to tear at his cheeks.
And then the light changes, and for one dazzling moment Yoongi can see the wolves as they are, he sees the singular figure raking their nails across his body and beaming as bright as the sun. He sees a hunter waiting in the sparse few trees of the forest outskirts, and he knows what to do.
“All the better to see you with,” Yoongi spits. He pulls the wolves forward and bites down hard on their jugular, till his maladapted human teeth tear through fur and skin and sinew and he tastes blood that is not his own cascading through his open jaws. He chews and gnaws and gnashes his teeth until the beasts begin to whine and tremble, peeling off him in waves as they scatter back into the forest.
Yoongi hears them still, howling and dying all around him. They will wait for the moment his back is turned and they will strike again, will not stop coming until they have taken everything they need from him.
But Yoongi will not be here, there will be nothing to take. He pulls himself upright, snarling like the injured wolves as he drags himself across the forest floor on the bleeding stumps of his legs. He reaches out to where the axe fell and has to grip it hard enough to feel splinters digging under his nails to keep a hold of it, as blood runs thick and hot over his hands.
His blood and not his blood.
He raises the axe high and brings it down upon the tree, he does it again, and again. Clunk, clunk, cluck. Creak.
Crash.
The shadows across the path are not long enough to hide the travelers that rest upon it. Night falls with progressive certainty, yet the woodcutter and his companion do not move. When they hear the howling of the wolf, they do not flinch, though the man with green hair passes back the axe as if he fears he may use it.
“How did you know it was me?” Seokjn asks.
“Who else would they hide inside a tree?” Yoongi shrugs, “it was just a matter of finding an axe.” There’s blood on his chin and down the front of his clothes. His face is run criss-cross with scratches and his clothes are torn; right down to the red coat sitting in tatters at his feet.
In between the two of them, Hoseok lies dead. The mangled flesh of his neck like some hideous flower blooming in the fettered half dark. He is still smiling, even now, teeth shining eerily bright for the time of day.
“Did you know he was the wolves?” Yoongi asks Seokjin, and as always, Seokjin smiles and doesn’t answer.
“There will be other wolves you know. These ones were only here to take something from you for the forest.”
And he stopped them. He opened up his jaws and bled them dry, did he not? Whatever there was in him to be taken is locked away where he last left it.
Seokjin stares at him calmly, like he expects Yoongi to work this out for himself. Wind winds down the path, disturbing the stray fragments of that red red coat now discarded at Yoongi’s feet. He doesn’t need to be told what he learned, but he will be an old man before he knows what was taken.
“You have eyes enough to see that which is before you, you have ears enough to hear what is behind you,” Seokjin says, shifting the weight of his axe in his hands as he gets to his feet and offers Yoongi a hand up.
Yoongi still has feet to walk upon, the wolves couldn’t take them from him for long, any more than they could have plucked out his heart. He puts them firm along the path, following Seokjin back to the village, one step at a time. Hoseok lies bloody in the far distance, waiting for more wolves to come and tear his remnant body apart, to take it back to the forest and for the forest.
The few threads of the coat will be left where they lie, the wolves have taken enough from Yoongi for now.
“Their teeth were like lilies,” Yoongi starts, but he doesn’t know how to finish. Though he knows Seokjin would understand, his tongue forbids him from putting words to the impossibilities he suffered in the dark. It’s easier, he supposes, to smile and let imagination do the talking.
“Their teeth are just teeth. Your teeth though,” Seokjin raises up the axe and his eyes gleam as he sizes up the blade, “what big teeth you have.”
A/N: SO the pacing in this isn't great and I'm not sure how much sense the forest makes to anyone that's not me... OH WELL inspired by Yoongi's most recent teaser pictures
The title is taken from Litte Red Cap by Carol Ann Duffy (which is one of my favourite poems and definitely an inspiration for this fic)
This work also takes some inspiration from The Vorrh by Brian Catling
Fandom(s): Bangtan
Pairing(s): Suga centric, J Hope/Suga, Jin/Suga
Rating: R
Warnings: Bloody and violent situations, character death
Word count: 3,704
Summary: Yoongi has the eyes and the ears, he must find his teeth (Little Red Riding Hood retelling)
Also on AO3
The axe falls heavy in Seokjin’s hands, singing sweet death songs to the pines that shadow this end of the path. It lands a little harder with each swing, till the dull knock of iron on wood gives way to creaking timber, and a crash that can be heard as far away as the village.
Yoongi shudders as the trees fall, nothing that big is built to die. “If you’re lost in the forest…” he starts.
Seokjin stops him with soft eyes and a knowing smile, “I never get lost.”
Chop, chop, chop. Creak. Crash. Yoongi tips his head skywards and watches the sun emerge from beneath the fallen branches. The sky is cool and clear, a crisp blue canvas waiting for the autumn rains to paint storms upon it. It lights up the path to his left and to his right, till is vanishes round a corner or is sucked into the dark of the matted foliage that Seokjin has yet to clear.
The woodcutter notices him looking. Seokjin notices everything, he has eyes big enough for the whole forest.
“Don’t think because I know my way out here, people don’t get lost. The forest wants something from you, Yoongi, it wants something from everyone.”
“What does it want from you?” Yoongi asks. Because his mother’s stories never made the forest sound half as scary as Seokjin’s smile when he’s keeping secrets.
The corners of Seokjin’s mouth turn up, the axe falls. Yoongi imagines he can hear the tree crying out for mercy, and lets his stomach curl with sick satisfaction knowing none will be forthcoming.
The shadows lengthen all in a rush, in the time it takes to blink the trees are shifting to catch the golden glint of late afternoon sun. Seokjin slings his axe over his shoulder and passes his pack to Yoongi, a small price to pay for a day out of town, “let’s get you home.”
They take the path that loses itself round a corner, because Seokjin knows just how many corners it will need to feign stolen before they can leave the forest entirely. Yoongi hesitates to follow him, staring into the shadowed path they are leaving behind. There are lilies, white and ghostly, barely visible in the gloom. So late in the season for flowers, his hand itches to pick them, a vague notion that he might give them to some pretty boy or girl that night.
“Yoongi!” Seokjin snaps. But the spell is only half broken.
The woodcutter walks tall, the boy with hurried steps, folded in on himself against the cold. Seokjin laughs when he sees Yoongi shivering, “that ridiculous red coat is good for nothing but attracting the wrong kind of attention.”
“What’s the wrong kind of attention?” Yoongi asks from between chattering teeth.
Seokjin smiles, and says nothing. As they step out of the woods, a chorus of wolves start their howling deep within, their low groans filling children’s nightmares as they set out on the hunt. Yoongi looks over his shoulder, and swears he sees something moving in amongst the brush.
“Just because you have eyes big enough to see, doesn’t mean you should look,” Seokjin chides.
Yoongi doesn’t listen, “there’s something in the forest.”
“That there is,” Seokjin replies, “and don’t you go thinking that it’s lost.”
Yoongi’s hair grows pale green, like the winter cabbages in his mother’s garden. It’s still too early in the year for a harvest, but he helps her weed the beds and water the plants, picking through dense leaves to find squash hidden closer to the ground than any of the other vegetables.
The wind picks up and rattles the chimes hanging from their porch, knocks the last dead leaves from the apples trees. It steals Yoongi’s breath and blows soil up into his eyes, till he’s blinking back the filth in an attempt to keep his eyesight.
“That coat of yours is filthy,” his mother hums, reaching for the hem of his sleeve, more brown than red. It’s too late to wash it now though, Yoongi should have thought of that in summer time, when the winter chill was still far off and seemingly unimportant.
The forest sways as one in the wind, its evergreen branches wafting together like the wings of a great bird readying itself for flight. They watch it, off in the distance, and neither of them asks the other why Seokjin did not come for Yoongi that morning, because they already know that neither of them has the answer.
“Do you hear that?” Yoongi starts, when the creaking thud of a falling tree echoes across the village.
His mother laughs without mirth, “I have ears, don’t I?”
The trees keep falling, too far in to see, and every time Yoongi jumps. The woodcutter is supposed to remove the trees at risk of falling, but how can anyone cut on a day like today? For a moment he feels a frightening certainty that Seokjin is out amongst the writhing forest, working the wind around his axe to fell the very largest pines hiding out in the centre.
Then the thought it gone, lost amongst the low-lying bushes and the bracken, and the lilies that still bloom in early winter.
Hoseok hunts in the shallow grave of trees sparsely scattered before the forest proper looms. He hides in the grass, out of sight and out of mind until a rabbit, a deer, a pheasant crosses his path and he snatches it between the teeth of his arrows and his knife. By late afternoon he will have wound his way back into the village with meat to spare, knocking on doors and offering food with a smile.
His smile is not scary, not like Seokjin’s. Yoongi likes Hoseok, with his easy-going cackle, the knowing wink he offers in place of an answer when anyone asks him about the forest.
“I know you’re not supposed to say anything, but I need answers,” Yoongi mutters, out of earshot of his mother.
Hoseok grins wide enough that all his teeth can be seen at once, shiny and clean in the sun striking Yoongii’s front doorstep, “Ah, I wish I could. He’ll be fine though, don’t you worry.” And Hoseok’s hand is suddenly teasing the hem of Yoongi’s coat, muttering about the colour, and the filth, and how brilliantly it stands out.
“My mother made it for me, I liked the colour,” Yoongi shrugs.
“All the better to see you with,” Hoseok winks. Something that feels entirely too much like trust settles in Yoongi’s gut.
Yoongi watches the road carefully, as birds land in flurries on the even frost. The kitchen table rumbles beneath the rhythm of his fingers as he slurps tea for want of anything better to do. His mother is a long way off waking, and the silence in this little house of wood and stone is absolute.
“Have you seen him this morning?” Yoongi asks, breathless against the cold as he stands in the road, trying to decide if it’s strange that Hoseok should be smiling so early.
“You assume I see him,” Hoseok winks. Yoongi is reminded of the lilies hiding in the dark of the forest, which he could have given to anyone.
“You have the eyes for it.”
The forest bows and twists in winds Yoongi cannot feel. Dread sweeps across the back of his neck, like the trees are calling for a reckoning.
Hoseok sees him shiver, “I’ll be here tomorrow at first light. If neither of us has seen him by then, we’ll go looking for him. You know the way, right?”
“Of course I do, Seokjin taught me,” Yoongi lies. Seokjin taught him nothing, but he has eyes enough to look.
He hasn’t the teeth to fight, of course. But never fear, they will not step into the dark.
“There’s something strange about that boy with the bow,” Yoongi’s mother mutters darkly over dinner, “I don’t trust him.”
Yoongi swallows his retorts about how his mother trusts nothing she doesn’t understand, and she will never understand the pull of the forest. Let alone how a life can be eked out stealing heartbeats from other living creatures. He lets them fester though, that sharp, reactionary anger that he knows to be illogical even as he gives it the air to breathe.
In the morning Seokjin will still be gone, in the afternoon Hoseok will still smile as he hands over a brace of ducks. The choice will seem so obvious that Yoongi will forget he has eyes to see it any other way.
“I’m sure of it,” Yoongi says through a wall of false confidence as he takes the left fork in the path. Hoseok hangs on his every word, unfamiliar with the forest beyond the looming wall of green rising up out of shallow bracken on the very outskirts of town.
That morning, as Yoongi had stood outside his garden gate, his coat practically glowing in the half-light before dawn, Hoseok had taken his hand and told him he was brave and bold and smart. When Yoongi opened his mouth to voice his doubts about the wisdom of running off into the woods he had smiled and shaken his head, “You have the ears to hear me, listen when I say we will be fine.”
The sun rises over the treetops, winking in and out of sight as they turn corners and head deeper in. Deeper, deeper, ever deeper… and without an axe to take to the bones of this living maze Yoongi feels it closing in on him, like it means to suck the air from his lungs before the day is through.
“Everything alright?” Hoseok smiles the same smile he uses to deliver the meat.
Yoongi remembers that his mother doesn’t trust Hoseok and his never changing smile, for a moment he thinks she’s right. Then his anger at the very suggestion returns full force, to rage against himself as well as the woman who by now will know that he left the house that day without bidding her goodbye.
“It’s fine,” Yoongi smiles weakly, following the path round to the right. He doesn’t remember a bend in the trail from before, but bites his tongue against his own self-doubt. Hoseok didn’t step out into the woods with doubt in his heart and Yoongi refuses to plant it there, he deserves better than that.
“You keep looking between the trees,” Hoseok says.
And it’s true, Yoongi finds his eyes caught by flashes of white in the undergrowth. The lilies, smiling back at him with those bright teeth. He points them out as best he can, but when he’s still it’s hard to see them so clearly, and Hoseok’s smile widens.
“You could pick one for me, it would only take a moment”
The forest wants something from Yoongi, it wants something from everyone. The path is cleared by the woodcutter because he knows where is safe to step. To stray from the path is to put your life in the hands of the forest. Hoseok smiles like he knows this and believes that just this once, everything will be ok.
Everything will be ok.
“But if I got lost-“ Yoongi starts.
“Lost?” Hoseok laughs, “With a jacket like that, how could I lose you?”
The darkness closes in thick around him, shutting out sound and light all at once. Yoongi feels pine needles below his feet, crackling and crumbling like fire. The lilies shine at his peripheral vision, just around a tree trunk, always out of reach.
Yoongi steps in further, his mind flooded with images of pretty boys and pretty girls who might like a winter bloom. He picks up speed, stepping around trees and ducking under branches and reaching, reaching, reaching…
The image of Hoseok’s smile burns hot on the back of his eyelids, all those teeth shining happily back at him. The flowers begin to come closer but never fall within his reach, they surround him, laughing derisively every time his fingers close over the dark of the forest instead of their stems. Yoongi laughs with them, high and manic and all the better to be heard. He feels light swelling around him, within him, making the black feel blacker and casting the lilies in an ever brighter glare.
He doesn’t stop till he falls. A momentary misplacement of feet, an unexpected twig on the ground; whatever it is, Yoongi is thrown forward by his own momentum and lands face down in the dirt. By the time he gets to his feet, the lilies are gone.
The light stays, however, firm and fast through the dark. Yoongi looks down and sees his coat glow around him, a blazing red untainted by the grime and the filth that tangles in its vibrant threads. His mother made him this coat, he wears it most every day in the winter - nothing like a bit of every day magic to light our paths.
A single, solitary lily winks into life in front of him, it has sharp little teeth that glow in the dark, ready to bite and to tear. Somewhere, not too far off, a wolf howls, and then the flower is gone.
The teeth remain.
Yoongi awakes in the light and the cold, his eyes screaming against sunshine reflecting off a thousand eyes all around him.
His breath catches before he can scream. The wolves stand shoulder to shoulder, drool dripping from the tips of their sharp, glistening teeth. As one, he feels them sniff the air, the combined force enough to leave him breathless.
The forest wants something from you, they seem to say, their slavering jaws hanging open in anticipation. We mean to take it.
The pack is unearthly huge, sprawling and shifting, never the same number of wolves twice. Yoongi tries to focus on a single animal but finds his eyes slipping to the next before he even realises what he’s doing. They fade in and out of view, now howling in the distance, now growling in his face. He would tell himself they were not real, only he’s seen these animals flitting between the trees at the border of the forest, he recognises their hideous grins.
“I know you,” Yoongi mutters.
“Not well enough,” the wolves reply.
This time when he runs, the wolves do not stay out of his way. They follow, nipping at his heels and at the dirty hems of the sleeves of his coat. Yoongi feels teeth sinking into his calves and lower back, warm breath on the back of his neck as time and time again the beasts threaten him with the killing blow. The smell of blood fills his nostrils, like these animals have eaten, and he is only the toy they will play with before they sleep the day away with a full belly.
Yoongi cannot fight back, you need teeth to fight back. His feet begin to fail, threatening to trip or turn him round, he could dive straight between those gaping jaws.
The trees look back at him, and down at him. All a tree ever did was creak and crash, and as Yoongi catches their eye he can’t help the burning resentment that floods him, drawing on those hidden reserves of anger and burning hot under his skin. A set of teeth drag what’s left of his coat from his back and he can’t bring himself to feel the cold. The trees dare to watch him run but they will not intervene.
The forest may want something from him, but the forest is more than the trees.
This time when Yoongi trips, he doesn’t flinch. He’s ready for the fall and his hands come out to support him, then to scurry through the dead pine needles looking for the thing that felled him.
Yoongi’s fingers close over something cold and sharp, he feels the skin break and the blood break free when he grips it, dragging it from the undergrowth to weird above his head in triumph. It is heavy, it is dependable, it already knows all the death songs.
He takes the handle of Seokjin’s axe firmly in both hands, and drives it into the nearest tree trunk. It hits home with a resonant thump, and bark chippings scatter. They hit the wolves in their eyes, blinding them temporarily and causing them to howl in pain. Louder and louder, for when one wolf gives voice to its suffering the rest must follow. Yoongi raises the axe and strikes again, feeling it slipping through his fingers as the blood runs down the handle and across the blade.
Teeth close over Yoongi’s right arm, digging deep. He screams and drops the axe, thrashing against the wolf and trying to dislodge it, but once one has a good hold the rest will surely follow. They pile onto him at all angles, licking at the blood already spilled and searching for more veins to open, screaming with joy and grinning down at him, their hapless prey.
“Everything will be ok,” they hiss into his ear as they lick his wounds, only to tear with more vigour at Yoongi’s ruined flesh. They will not stop, and he will not die; the agony refuses to end.
They will eat him piece by piece, first his feet, then his hands, then his heart. Perhaps by the time they are done there will not be enough left of him to crawl out of here. “What big eyes you have,” they shriek, as claws begin to tear at his cheeks.
And then the light changes, and for one dazzling moment Yoongi can see the wolves as they are, he sees the singular figure raking their nails across his body and beaming as bright as the sun. He sees a hunter waiting in the sparse few trees of the forest outskirts, and he knows what to do.
“All the better to see you with,” Yoongi spits. He pulls the wolves forward and bites down hard on their jugular, till his maladapted human teeth tear through fur and skin and sinew and he tastes blood that is not his own cascading through his open jaws. He chews and gnaws and gnashes his teeth until the beasts begin to whine and tremble, peeling off him in waves as they scatter back into the forest.
Yoongi hears them still, howling and dying all around him. They will wait for the moment his back is turned and they will strike again, will not stop coming until they have taken everything they need from him.
But Yoongi will not be here, there will be nothing to take. He pulls himself upright, snarling like the injured wolves as he drags himself across the forest floor on the bleeding stumps of his legs. He reaches out to where the axe fell and has to grip it hard enough to feel splinters digging under his nails to keep a hold of it, as blood runs thick and hot over his hands.
His blood and not his blood.
He raises the axe high and brings it down upon the tree, he does it again, and again. Clunk, clunk, cluck. Creak.
Crash.
The shadows across the path are not long enough to hide the travelers that rest upon it. Night falls with progressive certainty, yet the woodcutter and his companion do not move. When they hear the howling of the wolf, they do not flinch, though the man with green hair passes back the axe as if he fears he may use it.
“How did you know it was me?” Seokjn asks.
“Who else would they hide inside a tree?” Yoongi shrugs, “it was just a matter of finding an axe.” There’s blood on his chin and down the front of his clothes. His face is run criss-cross with scratches and his clothes are torn; right down to the red coat sitting in tatters at his feet.
In between the two of them, Hoseok lies dead. The mangled flesh of his neck like some hideous flower blooming in the fettered half dark. He is still smiling, even now, teeth shining eerily bright for the time of day.
“Did you know he was the wolves?” Yoongi asks Seokjin, and as always, Seokjin smiles and doesn’t answer.
“There will be other wolves you know. These ones were only here to take something from you for the forest.”
And he stopped them. He opened up his jaws and bled them dry, did he not? Whatever there was in him to be taken is locked away where he last left it.
Seokjin stares at him calmly, like he expects Yoongi to work this out for himself. Wind winds down the path, disturbing the stray fragments of that red red coat now discarded at Yoongi’s feet. He doesn’t need to be told what he learned, but he will be an old man before he knows what was taken.
“You have eyes enough to see that which is before you, you have ears enough to hear what is behind you,” Seokjin says, shifting the weight of his axe in his hands as he gets to his feet and offers Yoongi a hand up.
Yoongi still has feet to walk upon, the wolves couldn’t take them from him for long, any more than they could have plucked out his heart. He puts them firm along the path, following Seokjin back to the village, one step at a time. Hoseok lies bloody in the far distance, waiting for more wolves to come and tear his remnant body apart, to take it back to the forest and for the forest.
The few threads of the coat will be left where they lie, the wolves have taken enough from Yoongi for now.
“Their teeth were like lilies,” Yoongi starts, but he doesn’t know how to finish. Though he knows Seokjin would understand, his tongue forbids him from putting words to the impossibilities he suffered in the dark. It’s easier, he supposes, to smile and let imagination do the talking.
“Their teeth are just teeth. Your teeth though,” Seokjin raises up the axe and his eyes gleam as he sizes up the blade, “what big teeth you have.”
A/N: SO the pacing in this isn't great and I'm not sure how much sense the forest makes to anyone that's not me... OH WELL inspired by Yoongi's most recent teaser pictures
The title is taken from Litte Red Cap by Carol Ann Duffy (which is one of my favourite poems and definitely an inspiration for this fic)
This work also takes some inspiration from The Vorrh by Brian Catling