Work Text:
Here's a gift-fic/drabble for Tea_Girl0w0 to go along with her January submission to #YearoftheAnt over on the Merukomu Discord:
“At least you don’t need to worry about being the ugliest girl in the village: he’s not going to care.”
Komugi twisted her fingers in her lap. The dress was lighter than she ever could have expected: long and flowing. The fabric pooled in front and poofed around her shoulders. Not only that, but they had set a heavy necklace around her neck, and pierced her ears for matching earrings. Best of all were the tiny slippers that exactly fit her feet.
Any one of these things would have been the nicest thing she had ever worn, but all she could feel was the lump in her throat and the shaking in her hands.
“Don’t listen to mom, Komugi,” said Kibi, her youngest sister. “Just get him to play gungi with you! Of any of us, you actually have a chance at impressing him!”
They were doing something with her hair. Smoothing it flat and teasing it into something like matching buns. Usually, no one bothered to do anything with her matted locks, and Komugi let the sting excuse the way her eyes welled.
The king of the ants had agreed to spare their village– in exchange for a bride. But didn’t they know that sending him a blind idiot would be a terrible insult?
The game had occurred to the king in the first village where he landed.
A tended field with two farmers. A mated pair.
Unpalatable.
Their terrified child with its delicate brain was better, but not by much.
A little further on, he had come upon a wedding procession. A line of humans, some making music and singing, surrounded a palanquin with a lavishly dressed female inside. Her layer of paints and silks tasted strange, but for the first time since being born– he’d found something worth eating.
She was, unmistakably, not a rare. And yet . . .
One of the old women, tough as jerky, had the temerity to address him. She was screaming a range of epithets, demanding to know who he was, what right had he and what reason.
She was clutching what remained of– he supposed it was her daughter– and he watched as she gathered the bloody remains, calling the brainless corpse by name. She kept repeating: “It was supposed to be the happiest day of your life . . .”
Humans weren’t especially bright. Couldn’t she tell the girl was dead?
But what was it he had tasted?
Something about this day, then? The happiest day of her life?
It was a few villages later when the town elders approached his guard first, rather than waiting to be attacked, prostrating themselves and begging to be told what they needed to do in order to save their lives.
Fine.
Let them keep their meaningless existences.
He had only one demand.
“And, for God’s sake, clean up her face!”
Komugi’s sister Awa was the prettiest girl in town, but no one even thought of offering her. The lot fell to Komugi, because, after all, it had been her idea to have the elders go confront the ants who were sweeping the countryside.
Because you couldn’t simply keep watching losses. Sometimes you had to take risks if you were going to have any chance of winning at all.
She just . . . hadn’t expected the ant king to want anything like this.
The king felt a kind of begrudging respect for the effort the town put into his wedding day. They really were putting on a nuptial charade as if their lives depended on it.
The whole central square was beribboned and shimmering with candlelight, until it looked like a sunset captured in a jar.
Candelabras stood at every corner. Lanterns floated into the sky. Crystal goblets appeared from somewhere, flowing with a frothy liquid that the humans, at least, seemed to enjoy.
Music from a dozen stringed instruments. Children with tiny sparklers. A shower of coins from somewhere. A long table set with roasted animals and grains.
And in the center of it all, the plaza had become a dance floor, with even squares like a game board.
He lifted the veil to find his bride was a pale creature with hair like moonlight. The way she held her eyes meant that she did not see well, if at all. Her chin trembled when he slid the ring onto her finger, and she sniffed when he added a gold ribbon for her neck to match.
He wasn’t sure if this was exactly what he’d wanted, though he saw no reason to fault their efforts.
He led his new wife onto the dance floor.
The villagers seemed to sense his disenchantment, because they ringed the square looking guarded, tense and wary. Only one of his bride’s sisters looked sad. The rest of her family’s faces were blank and closed and calculating.
He saw it, then.
That if he ate her now, there would be no mother to rush screaming at him, or try to speak a name back onto ragged remains.
She missed a step, foundered. He caught her in a way that made it look effortless and elegant.
And . . . there it was. He could feel the atmosphere change. The sudden burst of happiness inside her.
She turned her blind face towards him. He could hear it in the frantic tumble of her pulse, in the way her breath caught.
He did not need to be told that no one had ever shown her even this much kindness before.
It was the happiest moment of her life.
But he had no desire to take it from her.
None at all.