Chapter 3
Over the next few days, Iruka clung onto the hope (the lie) that he would be able to escape. He pressed Tenzou for information on himself, which Tenzou gave willingly: that he was a tree that gained sentience, that he required water and sunlight to survive, and nutrients to grow. That the best nutrients were flesh and blood, and that they tasted best, too.
“What happens if lightning strikes that first tree,” Iruka posited in a blunt attempt to discover whether incinerating the original tree out of which Tenzou emerged was sufficient to end all this. “If it strikes you?”
“Then that part of me would burn but I will survive,” Tenzou answered matter-of-factly. “I am more than one tree. I have lost a few to the lightning storms, and more to disease. But I remain.”
A hundred years, and more. Iruka could not imagine living that long. But he had not imagined a plant monster, either.
“Are there others like you,” he asked in another conversation. "Other trees and plants that gained sentience.”
Tenzou shrugged. “Perhaps,” he allowed. “I haven’t met them.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t leave the boundaries of my forest,” Tenzou said openly. The sole piece of good news, even if Iruka figured that it would be so. Otherwise Tenzou would have let him escape past that wall of brambles, only to cruelly drag Iruka back from what he thought was safety. “I can only go so far as my roots reach.”
“What about other monsters?” What else lived for a hundred years? “Animals? Rivers? Rocks?"
“A couple, maybe more.” Tenzou's eyes seemed darker, even in the brightness of day. “Monsters, humans, animals - I’ve hunted them all. Everything makes good nutrients, in the end.”
“Even me,” Iruka asserted, meeting Tenzou’s gaze.
“Even you.” Tenzou curled his hand around Iruka’s palm - it had been easier to let him hold it, rather than repeatedly yank it out of his grasp. Easier to let him sleep next to Iruka - even when Iruka rolled away in the middle of the night, Tenzou would be next to him in the morning. Lying down next to him, or combing gentle fingers through his hair. He would have thought Tenzou attracted to him, but he hadn’t tried that awful kiss again, nor had he declared anything of the sort.
Did plants even feel attraction?
“You’re the first I’ve wanted to keep around,” Tenzou admitted easily. As though Iruka should be honoured by this dubious privilege.
Iruka scoffed. “I’m not very nutritious alive, am I?"
“No.” An answering hum. “But I’ll be fine with just you ripening.”
Ripening, again. It was the sole subject that Tenzou was truly evasive about, with the only answer Iruka received being a cryptic ‘you’ll see’.
"Maybe there'll be other humans you'll be interested in keeping around.” Iruka eventually suggested, even if half-heartedly. It would be fortunate if Tenzou focused his… attention on someone else, but Iruka was more likely to end up dead instead of being allowed to leave with a pleasant goodbye. Can’t waste nutrients and all. "You won't know unless you stop eating them."
"I've talked to some of them. They scream most of the time."
"Trying to kill them might make for a terrible conversation partner,” Iruka pointed out dryly.
Tenzou’s face twitched towards a scowl.
"I approached them the same way I approached you,” he said mulishly. A sore reminder that Iruka really should have been more suspicious of a civilian wandering around a forest. “If I killed them immediately it wouldn’t be interesting.”
Interesting - “Killing isn’t meant to be interesting!” Iruka snapped, entirely forgetting himself in front of a murderous plant monster.
“Why not?” Tenzou tilted his head. “What is it supposed to be then?”
Necessary. Out of self-defence and out of service. Something swift and immediate, painless if possible - not the drawn out torture Tenzou was subjecting his prey to if this entire forest was any indication.
“It’s supposed to be a last resort,” Iruka bit out. “It’s for a purpose.”
“But I need to grow.” The stillness of Tenzou’s form then, the lack of the rise and fall of his chest, really drove home how other Tenzou truly was. “Isn’t that enough of a purpose?”
“Of course not.” If Tenzou did not have compassion, then Iruka doubted he would understand morality. So instead, he asked, “why do you need to grow?”
There was the flicker of uncertainty behind the blankness of Tenzou’s eyes - no. Iruka really had to stop putting emotions to a being that barely had any beyond hunger and want, emotions he himself wanted to see in them. He’d only end up disappointed in the end.
So he looked stoically on at Tenzou’s still form. He remembered how his students fidgeted in class as their attention wandered, how in the lull of activity during his mission desk shifts there was always someone shifting, someone scratching, someone sighing, never silent. How even the stillest of guards blinked, every once in a while.
There was none of that in Tenzou, as frozen as he was when he was lost in thought. A statue carved out of polished wood.
“I need to grow so I can acquire more sustenance,” Tenzou answered slowly.
"But you have to acquire more so that you can grow." Iruka finished. "Isn't... isn't your size enough?"
"Enough?"
"Yeah, enough." Iruka gestured at the trees surrounding them - at Tenzou, technically. "You're not a small forest."
"No, I am not," Tenzou agreed. If it had been anyone else, Iruka would have taken it as a point of pride rather than the statement of fact it was.
So he barrelled on, "you only really need, what, sunlight and rain? You don't actually need to kill to thrive, do you?"
"I don't," Tenzou agreed again. "But neither do you."
Iruka blinked. "I don't - "
"You don't kill for things you don't need?" He parroted back to Iruka,"you only need, what, plants and water? You don't actually need to kill to thrive, do you?"
Iruka wasn't so foolish to think humans any better than the animals he ate, at least in Tenzou's eyes. And he wasn't so blinded by the brightness of the Will of Fire to claim that his leaders were ever flawless, to ignore how it could be used to scour the face of the earth and leave nothing but desolation behind.
"No, I don't," he bit out.
The worst part of it was that Tenzou didn't even look smug about his concession.
"But you... you don't kill easily," he mused instead. "Why do you kill, when you do?"
It was the first time Tenzou asked him a question, after the deception had been revealed. Iruka had expected it sooner, for all the questions he peppered the monster with - it was inevitable that Tenzou would have questions of his own.
But whether to answer them...
Rapports go two ways, Umino, Tobitake's voice echoed, tinny and distant. Be careful when you build one.
(The only way out is through.)
"To protect my village," he finally said. What better reason could there be? "To protect the people important to me."
"To protect your own," Tenzou echoed. "I'm protecting my own, too. Some humans have told me that they'd have cut me down for kindling to sell." His smile was dark, and Iruka had no doubt who had been cut down first. "So tell me, why am I any different?"
"Because we don't go chasing intruders in our territory and call it fun," Iruka snapped. At least he himself had never done so - he could not speak for the more violent of his peers, those who would look at another person not from their village and see them as lesser. There were such people, he knew. "We don't draw it out just for our own amusement."
Before Tenzou could lead him round in another circle, much like how he led Iruka around his forest, dizzying and confounding his senses, Iruka pressed on.
"Necessity means doing it quickly. Getting the job done." He met Tenzou's eyes squarely, those fathomless black depths. "Not playing with your food."
In that split-second after his declaration, Iruka imagined Tenzou's reaction. Another attempt to twist Iruka's words, or perhaps a nonchalant observation on how a drawn-out chase was beneficial to a forest monster. Or perhaps the insistence on how the chase was fun, like a child finding entertainment in plucking the wings off flies.
But he could not have predicted that Tenzou would lean in, and place a hand on his face. Tenzou's fingers splayed wide over his cheekbone, the hollow space of his cheek, nudging up against the side of his nose. As though he just wanted to touch, to press his palm against skin, to look for something in Iruka's face.
For a being made out of wood, Tenzou was surprisingly warm.
"You're more than food to me," he finally murmured.
Iruka jerked backwards, instinctive. Tenzou let him, his hand retreating back to his body - the approximation of a human body, Iruka valiantly attempted to remind himself. That whatever was talking to him right now only took a form that was familiar to him, that was false.
"One day," Iruka accused, across his own unsteady breathing. "That's all I will be."
"One day," Tenzou agreed placidly. "Though not yet."
After all, Iruka had yet to ripen.
Iruka dreamt.
He dreamt of Tenzou stepping towards him, of him placing his hand on Iruka’s face. His touch was feverish, burning hot; Iruka shivered.
Tenzou leant in, placing his mouth against the shell of Iruka's ear.
"You've ripened," he said, audibly pleased.
His hand slid away from Iruka's face and around his neck, pulling Iruka into an embrace. His grip, as light as it was, did not yield as Iruka pulled away from him, as Iruka began thrashing against him. With every desperate blow Iruka attempted to land on him, the skin beneath cracked like porcelain - the facade, revealed.
Iruka's efforts renewed, energised by the idea of a weakness, a vulnerability, the possibility of freedom -
No. Not like porcelain.
Like the rough bark of a tree.
And that was what Tenzou had become, a tree twisted around Iruka in a parody of an embrace, now encasing him on all sides, rendering him immobile. His feet sank down, into the warmth of the loamy soil; something sliced at their soles.
And then there was the pull of something intent, something hungrier. Something that once had the form of Tenzou. It pulled, through his lacerated feet from the very ends of his hair - and Iruka could only watch as his skin took on that same grainy texture, as his fingers refused to bend. As his vocal cords refused to flex even as air passed through them.
As he could no longer distinguish between the tree that trapped him and himself.
Iruka did not wake up screaming, but he woke up all the same.