nealuchi | keep her (safe)

Title: keep her (safe)
Fandom: The Forest of Drizzling Rain
Character(s): Suga
Pairing(s): Suga/Shiori
Genre: Angst
Word Count: 443
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Referenced non-con, spoilers
Summary: Suga's thoughts on Ogami-san, after learning the truth.
Notes:

After Shiori leaves, the first thing Suga does is go through the museum and destroy every mention of Ogami-san.

He grew up on stories of Ogami-san, the protector of the village who left behind a way to keep their children safe from the Kotori Obake. He wanted to be that person someday. Thinking on it now makes bile rise to the back of his throat.

There isn't anything he can do about the years of suffering the Kotori Obake endured while she was still a human, or any other woman that was subjected to the 'authority of the village' for the crimes of their husbands. He can't go back and shake himself for every time he called her a monster. But he can change the way her captor is remembered, how he made himself a hero instead of a fiend.

Part of him knows that it's not his obligation to empathize with her. For all her sympathetic roots, the Kotori Obake that he knew was a raging spirit that took her anger out on people entirely unrelated to her suffering, that killed child after child and trapped them with her. He is still her victim, along with countless others.

He can't help it. He has never been good at wishing suffering on his tormentors, whether they were childhood bullies or village officials. He's learned to be angry, because angry works better than sad and afraid to keep people out of the forest, but never hateful.

And Suga knows better than anyone how little it takes for this village to turn on one of their own. That practice may have ended generations ago, but the people haven't changed. Anyone they hate, or anyone who disagrees with their judgment, deserves what they get: they just don't say it out loud.

The voices of the children reach his ears, no matter how hard he tries to shut them out.

That stone, that hateful stone

That stone has never saved anyone

Scary, scary

You're just as scary as that man

For the girl who isn't yours

You'd kill so many of us

You want us gone so you can keep her, don't you?

You want to leave so you can keep her, don't you?

Aren't you just the same as him?

He can't leave. That would be as good as abandoning the village to die. His place is here, like it's always been.

But if for one moment, he thought about going with her, of putting the village out of his mind so he could still see her smiling face, that nothing else mattered if he could be with her-

Aren't you just the same as him?