Didi lost himself completely when the Saiyan arrived. Two powerful fighters standing before him forced the spell's tendrils further into his mind. He slumped over, arms dangling like Christmas lights as he lifted from the ground. Silence followed. It lingered in the air like an eerie cloud.

Anticipation. What was Didi planning? Was he taking their advice to flee? Would he attack?

The answers came with a blood-curdling screech. Didi's head snapped forward with supernatural speed. A jester's mad smile stretched across his rubber face. "GROOOH!" in the blank of an eye, the Majin was gone. A trail of smoke and colorful cubes left behind as he moved.

Her lips tremble as she tries to speak, “Just. . .” she looks up for the first time, “Don’t leave me.” Tears stain her face, this time painting over an expression of terror instead of sadness. She’s afraid. “Okay?” The last word pleading for his company - the fear of being alone in this overshadowing the danger they would face.

This quiet riot is her sanctuary, her shrine everlasting. A final plea disembodied in the very refuge she seeks at the shrivelling cusp of this joyless eve. Like the rippling of the sea, star-speckled skirts that bedeck the milk and rose of her visage part and fall with each lulling sway—each precarious jerk of her body, as she struggles to remain upright. Goblet in hand, the night's perpetrator sloshes faintly within the silver vessel; the rubied liquid promising both the escape and the cage for her pounding thoughts.

Her cloak rippled behind her, the subtle satin whispering sweetly to the plentiful swatches of vibrant pigments and rich patterns slashed throughout sea of sable. Quill's lips quirked into a faint smile, eyes alight with humor from his perch behind an ornate desk in his study. The large window allowed the archivist a clear sight of the grounds of his estate, a plain view of the wraith's cloak winking at him before departing entirely.

The inner circle never greeted her with a homey sensation or bid her farewell when she opted for the familiarity of the outer wall. Vela existed as the coalescence of the Enlightened and the Coarse, the fusion of refined and crude plaguing the streets of Nionda.

"Well, what do people normally talk about on dates, huh? Like hey, my name is whatever and I'm in accounting." Then an idea came to mind, and he put his finger up to signify the light bulb that flashed in his brain.

"That's it!" Of course it wasn't like the other could read his mind, right? Still, Maddix played with his hair a little, seeming to straighten it and smooth it down as much as possible. He slid off his hoodie and tied it around his shoulders a bit, trying to become as feminine looking as possible. He even fashioned a fake accent to go with his new persona. "Well hi there, I'm Fantasia, and I just got off work as a waitress at one of the bars downtown, I'm hoping for a good time, what about you sir?" He tried to keep himself form laughing as he held his hand out to be taken.

Sin to correct sin is a pretty price to pay for justice.

Catharsis is never as beautiful as scripture describes. In truth, it is raw and ugly; like fingernails dug in the dirt, spitting up blood, or like how the sea gives up her dead. With every truth she pronounces, she carves open the cavity of her chest with her bare hands. Slow, deliberate—shedding her burdens like aged skin. Her doubts, her sorrows; an excavation most profound—an unearthing of all she clings to still.

"I was afraid," she whispers, "I was afraid of you. By wanting me, you hold a knife to my throat. In loving you, I show exactly where to cut. We were two against the world, yet I could not trust your hand in mine. This was all new, and I was terrified."

The words scraped at his insides with the claws of demons set deep in the recesses of his core. They tore his throat raw, causing his breath to catch in the moment he tried to inhale. Then with a bolt, she struck him down with each jab that followed. Being the size he was, having built himself up from nothing— it had been years since he had felt so small.

How his words could freeze over her like winter but at the same time, fill her with summer— she hated it. If only she could do the same in return, she’d torture him.

Her heart aches and screams – a force that will not be ignored. But this time… its different. It doesn’t beat with the same jagged, unsteady ache of a heart crumbling to pieces, only held together by the suffocating squeeze of loneliness and dread. Anguish does not power this hurt. It’s different. It’s a burn – one that started small cinder, in a local dessert shop. It warms her face when he smiles at her, and flushes her cheeks the first time her called her Keiko. It grew threw late night texts, and boring pictures of the garden she made at home, burning brighter, and louder with every ounce of confidence he unintentionally fostered in her.



It was an inferno presently. An aching yearn for the opposite of what consumed her moments prior. For the very thing right in front of her.

Kyou caught up rather quickly, but just looked at the two of them for a moment. If ever there was a doubt that Kyou was a hellion at heart, it was entirely erased with the devilish grin that came across his face. 'It's them, Ranmaru.' And he was certain of it. The haze over what had been Haruki's memory was washed away once he laid his eyes on those two agents, and Kyou was absolutely positive that these were the ones that they had been looking for. Part of him would have seen some kind of irony in the fact that an ethereal presence had led them both to this point, like some weird twist of fate, but in that exact moment, Kyou didn't care. All he cared about was the fiery burning hatred that built up within the samurai. All he cared about was exacting his revenge on these two unlucky dogs. 'Kill them.'

She calls him over, her glee still tickling at her words. He nods, trudging through the sand over to the shore. The cool water washes over his feet, causing his skin to prickle. His golden eyes stare at his mother in a languid wonder of all the fleeting questions he had for her.

"They're weak, that's why," he says, his tone softer than even the salty foam that bubbled at his feet. But there was little remorse in it.

When he looked at Hideyoshi, a thought crossed his mind in wonder if his younger brother would inherit what he had not. It made him want to hate the young child. Even his mother who had conceived him into this fate. But it never grips his heart as firmly as it did his disdain for himself.

Her lips purse, throughout Iain's speech. An easy dismantling of most of the arguments she'd built up, despite everything. She recognizes the flaws to the system she'd set in place for herself; an ideology that demands more than it gives, an entirely separated kind of path that never makes for easy welcoming. And yet here they are, and a reality rarely spoken of confirmed in the space of a breath, and though Cecilia can't bring herself to waver, she does blink at the admission. Someone brought out of orbit, the equation temporarily upended, for someone who'd built an entire life out of depending on the systemic and the predicted.

( He always did seem to have that certain effect on her. )

"That I'm doing something significant," is the response that comes to mind, her head raised to meet his gaze; a flash of gunpowder, defiance against the world at large. Because it's true and because she's spent all her life chasing after that kind of proof, damn anything else. A matriarch had said she was not a hero; she's right, to some degree. Cecilia had never really been grasping for a title, or the claim. A moral compass and the refusal to take inaction made for a certain kind of belief system, much more when hers had been the affecting party. ( It hadn't been so much as saving someone, as it had been not letting bygones be bygones. )

She does not apologize for it. Cecilia doesn't think she knows how to exist without that drive. ( It's all she's really known. ) "That regardless of whatever danger, I'm the one in control." That anything that becomes of her had been on her terms and hers alone. She's not willing to have anyone else decide that, history or otherwise. ( She's not willing to have her entire existence shaped for someone else's narrative—an unimportant, arbitrary legacy that's not hers at all.

Dad always did say she'd have to fight tooth, claw, and nail to be seen as she is.

He wasn't wrong. )