Chapter Text
10 years before…
The thundering of boulders slowly echoed into silence.
Noises began again, this time in the form of children’s wails emanating from a battered school bus that stood wearily in the center of the road. The bus was trapped by a cage of rubble, the remains of a highway tunnel that had caved in. Small fists beat on the windows and tiny voices wavered as they pleaded for help. But no one was around to hear.
No human, that is.
A black tongue slid nastily along snouted lips. “Dinner looks good tonight, doesn’t it?” a voice hissed through terrifyingly sharp teeth.
A second voice burbled agreement.
“Good work on the rockslide,” the first voice added with condescending approval. “You’ve earned your part of the take, for once.”
The speaker didn’t wait for a reply, slinking out of the rocky shadows to size up their prey. The infernal tongue moved again. Children tall enough to peer out of the windows set off another series of wails at the sight of the two yokai.
The second monster shivered with joy. “Their fear tastes good,” it slurred, hulking body growing slightly as it closed its single eye in appreciation.
The first yokai inhaled hungrily through its nose but then frowned. “Where is the Jeon brat? I don’t smell him. You said this was his bus!”
The second yokai slowly blinked its enormous eyeball, a caricature of confusion. “It should be. I watched him get on every day this week.”
The first yokai gritted his long row of teeth. “At least we will feed well tonight. The Jeon brat can wait for another day.” It reached a long arm toward the bus to slide a stained claw down a window. It was hard to tell whether that sound or the children’s shrieks were more piercing.
Behind the score in the glass, brown eyes widened. While other children gibbered with terror, one boy was frozen. Not a brown hair on his head moved as he stared at the ghastly sight beyond his window.
The one-eyed yokai trundled around the bus. “I know these boxes open somehow,” it muttered.
The first yokai raised its claws again to aim at the crack in the glass. “I will make a way in.” Another round of screams sounded as he drew back the hand to strike.
But the smashing of glass never came.
Instead, a new voice rang out. “Cease what you are doing!”
The two yokai slowly turned toward the new arrival. The thin yokai sneered as it looked up and down the boy who approached them. A boy in size and face, but his magenta hair tied up in a long ponytail and eyes as steel gray as the sword in his hands gave him away as yokai.
“In Jeon territory, you are forbidden to injure and kill humans,” the boy continued.
“And what’s it to you, child?” the sharp yokai asked.
It now became apparent that there were two more figures behind the boy-yokai. “Now he’s really done for,” observed a short girl with cascading gray hair, a dusting of freckles, and a bored expression.
A gangly man beside her with black curls tumbling out from below the brim of his straw hat guffawed. “No surer way to annoy the young master than to not take him seriously.”
The boy ignored his accomplices, choosing instead to glare somewhat childishly at the yokai looming over him. “I am the Jeon heir,” he snapped, flecks of magenta shining in his eyes, “so I care what happens on my territory.”
The larger of the two malintentioned yokai scratched its bald head. “Everyone knows the young master can’t enter his yokai form.”
But the other yokai - sharper both in claw and mind - had by now taken in the characteristic glint of the blade in front of them. It gulped down a retort and cut the other from making the boy in front of them angrier. “Young master,” it said with a toothy smile, “surely some prey every now and again will satisfy our appetites and whet our skills?” He waved vaguely at the bus behind him. “What value are a few human offspring compared to the might of the Jeon clan?”
The boy’s hands clenched and his brow darkened. “Those are my friends,” he responded quietly. “And they have family who are waiting for this bus to bring them home safely.”
“What a human,” the larger yokai rumbled. “Even If you are the young master, and I’ve never seen him in that shape, your soft heart certainly stinks like a human’s.”
“He is three-quarters human, after all,” the first yokai said disdainfully.
The brown-eyed boy on the bus stared in awe as someone only his own size approached the yokai. He wished he could hear him, but the conversation was muffled by the walls of the bus and the sniffling of children inside. The rockslide, the dark, the terrifying and wonderful yokai...it seemed like he was floating through a strange story in which he was not personally involved.
Ghostly light shone from the tip of the blade as the mystery boy raised his sword. “Leave now and I will ask my father to spare your life,” he intoned seriously.
The two yokai looked and each other and laughed. “Are we supposed to be worried by that?”
The first yokai‘s wiry arms snaked out to grab at the boy-yokai. But the arm was shortened with a slice, the yokai left howling as it bled out onto the crumbled remains of the road.
Its companion roared and lumbered over, seemingly about to flatten the grey-eyed boy. But the blade whispered through the air again, leaving a large corpse in its wake.
In the moment of silence that followed, every human child holding their breath, blood could be heard dripping from the sword. The gruesome scene in front of him didn’t match the childish frown on the boy-yokai’s face as he scrubbed the blade clean on a corner of the defeated yokai’s mismatched clothing.
So fixated that his nose was pressed to the glass, the child on the bus was rewarded by the savior glancing at him for a moment, hand raised in a small wave. Then the mystery boy turned on his heel, fuschia hair flipping over his shoulder as he melted into the shadows with the strange duo behind him.
As the tale from that day morphed and warped in the telling from twenty small mouths, one boy never forgot what he had really seen.
Present day...
A hysterical screeching rang through the air.
It would have made a normal man shiver and vow to stop by the first shrine on his way home, but it didn’t bother Jeon Jungkook, heir of the Jeon yokai clan.
Well, it bothered him a little.
He groaned and stuffed his pillow over his ears. His human classmates complained about their tinny alarm clocks, but he couldn’t imagine anything worse than the daily ritual of Karasu tengu waking up the household with his outraged screams over something-or-other.
The pillow didn’t help much. Just when Jungkook gave up and threw the useless object across the room, his door opened to let someone slip in.
“Morning, Yoonji,” Jungkook yawned. “Do I want to know what happened today?”
The girl wafted over the ground to Jungkook’s bed, movements hidden by a kimono as white as snow and soft as clouds. She pushed Jungkook aside to claim the warm spot he had made on the mattress. “Tell Jin I’m sorry I tried to taste the miso shiru before it was served.”
Jungkook rolled his eyes and edged out of bed as the temperature dropped like lead. “I can’t believe a yuki onna could love hot things.”
Footsteps pounded past the room. “Yoonji! You froze breakfast solid for the third day in a row! I’m going to boil you alive, if you like the heat that much!”
Yoonji just snickered and ducked her ice-gray hair under the blanket. “You have to get ready for school,” she instructed Jungkook from under the thick fabric.
Jungkook sighed. “It’s not fair that you can sleep all day.”
“Then stop with this silly human charade and take your place as the heir to the Jeon night parade of 100 yokai ,” Yoonji retorted. “Party all night, sleep all day.”
“I said I’m not doing that,” Jungkook snapped, not ready to have this argument again first thing in the morning.
“I know,” Yoonji murmured. “So take your time, and wake me up when you’ve decided to be one of us.”
Jungkook smiled at the lump of blankets on his bed as he left the room. “Thanks, Yoonji.” Her icy exterior belied a warm heart.
Trotting down the stairs, Jungkook had to dodge a small creature with a straw-wrapped head, a flying broom, and a wailing 3-stringed instrument. All par for the course in a house full of yokai .
He plopped himself down at a low table in a tatami -floored room, mouth already watering at the spread over the table. Avoiding the Yoonji-chilled soup, he accepted a steaming bowl of rice from a man with glossy black hair and a permanent look of long-suffering.
“Good morning, young master,” the man said with a slight bow.
Jungkook mumbled a reply through a mouthful of grilled fish.
The man wiped his hands on the pink apron tied over spotless traditional robes, and rubbed the smooth skin of his forehead. “Manners, please, young master,” he pleaded. “Gosh, this household is going to make me lose all my feathers before my time.”
“You should worry less, Jin,” a man with wild black curls said sympathetically.
Jin turned to pierce him with a beady stare. “If other people did their jobs, Hoseok, I would.”
Before they get into a scuffle over ruffled feathers and crossed hairs, a commanding voice cut soothingly over the scene. “Now, now, Karasu tengu and Kurotabo , no fighting over breakfast.”
Everyone in the room other than Jungkook hurried over themselves to bow deeply to the wizened man standing in the doorway. “Great leader,” Jin greeted formally.
Jeon Jungil ignored his kowtowing subjects and settled into the seat beside Jungkook. “Good morning. What are your plans for the day? They say it’s a good day for fishing red phoenix fish.”
“School, grandad,” Jungkook replied with a roll of his eyes.
The old man laughed creakily and tucked his long beard into his robe. (Jungkook he been dismayed to learn that his family’s luxuriously long yokai hair was eventually replaced by baldness and a beard that resisted all attempts at a trim.) “And what rubbish are they teaching you these days?”
As Jungkook dutifully described his lessons in mathematics (“The only number that really matters is counting to 100 yokai ,” his grandfather opined) and human history (Their lives are so fleeting!”), breakfast slowly disappeared off the table.
“Where does it all go?” Jin asked, poking Hoseok’s slender waist beneath his voluminous black robes. “The cooks have to prepare double for you, you know.”
The monk laughed. “The dance of the black weapons takes energy, you know.” He wiggled his fingers and waltzed gracefully out of the room.
With a sigh, Jin picked at the remaining food on the serving plates. “At school do they teach you how to feed an army of yokai and run a household? That would be useful to the Jeon heir to know.” The pointed look he shot at Jungil, who was calmly munching away at pickled eggplant and ignoring the bickering of his servants, made it clear that the current Jeon leader did none of those tasks.
“I’ll let you know when I graduate,” Jungkook promised politely as he stood up from the table. He bowed to his grandfather and ran across the house to get ready for school.
Back in his room, Yoonji’s faint snores buzzing under the comforter, Jeon Jungkook traded his traditional cotton robe for a slightly wrinkled school uniform. “Maybe I need a new one this year,” he mused to himself at the sight of how the buttons strained across his front. Maybe I’m finally growing taller.
He stood on his tiptoes to imagine his taller self, the one hiding in a quarter of his soul. Yoonji and Hoseok swore they’d seen his other form on that night so many years ago, but Jungkook couldn’t remember a thing, much less figure out how to transform again.
Is there really a yokai prince in there? Jungkook asked his reflection. Right now all I see is a normal boy.