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Yosano Akiko sits on a bench under a dim streetlight, alone, a few hours past midnight and exhausted. The silence surrounding her was unbroken. Not even the sound of a nocturnal animal or the breeze caressing the trees could be heard beneath the silver half-moon that was in the sky, lighting up the area around her with a pearly glow.
Simply put, she does not quite blend in with her beautiful, solace surroundings.
Soaked into the side of the hair on her head, as well as into her shirt, tie and skirt, was thick, gruesome drying blood, bright red and shameless. Blood splatter coats her clothing like tiny stars in the night sky, and some blood trickles out of a small cut in the bottom of her moistened lips.
She’s recently just finished “investigating” an active case nearby- now she’s sat here irritably typing away on her phone to try and tell Ranpo the case was closed, she’s sorted it, and that she needed a ride home.
However, the screen was frozen, nothing was happening, and nothing was working.
She could walk home, but she had the common sense to know that walking around streets covered in blood at this time of night may cause her to get some weird looks, and she didn’t have the temper or time to have the police called on her at this time of night.
Her patience is wearing thin, and she starts to get irritated, cholerically tapping at the screen and pressing the buttons on the side, trying to turn it off and reset it or just send a simple text message, but nothing is happening.
Eventually, she gives up, putting the phone beside her on the bench with a loud thud.
She leans back in the chair, stretching out her legs, and she looks up at the stars on this quiet night. Her hair falls back out of her face, and her neck is stretched out long and delicately, her soft skin on full display and vulnerable when she zones out and tries to ease her temper.
She takes a deep breath in, then a long breath out.
Ah, she’d been so distracted by the fight earlier and the tension of such a dangerous case that she’d not noticed how lovely of a night it was-
Oh, the sky is completely clear of any clouds. The stars sit in the sky like tiny silver coins that she could reach out and take. There’s a small plane in the sky; she squints to look closer and recognises it as a regular commercial aeroplane.
That reminds her- she needs a break. Ah, she needs to go on a well-deserved holiday abroad soon to take her mind off everything. She can’t even remember if her passport is even still in-date, it’s been that long since she went very far. She’s suddenly sitting there with her eyes closed, enjoying the silence of the empty park, fantasising about sitting on a lovely warm beach in the sun, away from people and any responsibilities…
“You left a lot of blood and bodies scattered around my territory, you know. Like, a lot of people just laying there for me to clean up. It’s gross.”
The sudden sound of a man’s voice makes her jump, and she sits up where she’s sat, suddenly wide awake and frozen in position.
Emerging from the darkness in front of her and becoming more visible under the dull lamplight and the moonshine was a certain petite red-haired mafioso she knows as Nakahara Chuuya. They’d met a few times but never really like this-
They’d spoken, but it was never pleasant.
She doesn’t like this man. Not one bit.
She reaches into the pocket of her coat and grabs hold of the handle to a small pocket knife that was sat in there discreetly, and she flips it open but still keeps it hidden inside.
She does not say a word as the man continues to walk closer until he is merely a metre or two away from her, looking down smugly, his hands also tucked in his pockets like usual.
He raises an eyebrow. “Not very pleasant, are you? With the way you killed those people, I could tell you were enjoying it.”
“Who do you think you are-”
“Whether you think they were in the right or wrong, it’s a bit sick to get off on that sort of stuff, isn’t it? Is it difficult to try and convince yourself that you’re any better than they are, or do you blindly go around being a sadist, thinking you’re a god guy?”
“Ha?!” Yosano reaches out to point the blade outwards towards the redhead, who doesn’t even flinch. She clenches her jaw at that. Why didn’t he flinch? Was he really not that intimidated by her? She glares at him, some hair falling over her face to cover har glare, and her eyebrows are furrowed. “You don’t know a thing about me.”
“You call me a bad guy when-” he walks even closer, so now he’s stood right in front of her, the blade now directing pointing towards his chin, “-you’re the one who laughs hysterically while you chainsaw a man in half over and over again. That’s a bit sickening, don’t you think?”
“Watch your mouth, tiny man, or I’ll do exactly what I did to those people to you if you’re not careful.” She spits, but that only makes Chuuya shake his head and chuckle.
He steps even closer, and Yosano flinches, standing up, so now she was looking down at Chuuya while holding a knife to his throat.
The redhead looks up to her with his eyebrows raised and a cocky lopsided smirk on his face. The sharpened metal rests on his neck just above his Adam’s apple, and he still shows no sign of fear. In fact, he seems pretty amused.
Their faces are centimetres apart, and for a while, nobody speaks.
Chuuya stands up onto the tip of his toes, so they’re now at equal height, and their eyes are at the same level.
He watches her face for a while, inspecting it, and he looks as if to be enjoying it. He’s making a hobby out of tracing his eyes over each of her beauty spots, the freckles on her nose, and down the cut on her lip, which makes him snigger.
Yosano grits her teeth together, unsure of what to say or do. She squints at the mafioso, and her breath shakes. She’s being watched very closely. The redhead stares at her with appetite, down at her neck and up at her soft hair, which is now blowing in a slight breeze.
She can’t help but look at him too. His sharp jawline, his dark blue eyes with his wide pupils… his collarbones that are on display because the top few buttons are not done-up on his shirt… oh, and his choker which hugs his long, thin neck… and his angular eyebrows and long eyelashes… his plump, silky lips… nauseating.
She can feel his warm breath on her lips, and she feels her heart going a million miles an hour, making her want to keel over in embarrassment and dissipate.
Her toes curl in her shoes.
Eventually, Chuuya speaks, his voice soft and hushed, as if they were having a friendly conversation.
“You’re not much taller than me yourself.”
What a pathetic response. This only angers her even more, so she slots two fingers- her index finger and her middle finger- under Chuuya’s choker, pulling his face closer to hers.
She presses the flat of the blade against his neckwith some pressure as a final warning. This probably won’t cut him. No, not yet. It wouldn’t hurt him as long as he doesn’t try and move.
Luckily, it’s enough to make him finally show some kind of fright. His eyes open up wide for a second, and he almost chokes on some air. He holds his breath to keep his movements to a minimum.
“I could kill you right now and get given the bonus of the century for killing one of Japan’s most wanted and dangerous ability users. I could watch you bleed to death and not care. And, if I really wanted, I could do it over and over again, getting the satisfaction of a lifetime… All I need to do is move this a centimetre to the left, right into your jugular vein-”
“My ability can stop that from happening,” he interrupts her with that stupid grin back on his face. Idiotically, he begins to lean into the knife while still smiling pathetically at her, his eyes glancing down to her lips for her moment, then back up to her eyes with an eyebrow raised as if he’s just proved a point.
She tenses up, her stomach churning, and her eyes go wide at the sudden sight of some blood starting to seep out of his neck onto the blade, trailing down his neck and soaking into the white collar of his shirt. Her hands begin to tremble ever so slightly at the unexpected gesture.
What the fuck is he doing? This isn’t how it was supposed to happen.
“...but I don’t need to worry about even activating it. You wouldn’t kill me.”
“You don’t know that,” she mutters, glazing down at the ground beside them. She feels her cheeks begin to heat up post-haste, and she can hear and feel her heartbeat in her head. She has to gulp, her throat suddenly feeling parched. “I could, easily. Gladly.”
“Go on then.”
Yosano keeps the blade still for a few moments, not pressing in any deeper or pulling away. She eventually looks up to watch the blood still spilling from his neck, and soon, it starts trickling out onto her fingers too.
She can’t keep her eyes off it. She feels a shiver up her spine, and her legs go weak. It wasn’t a fatal amount of blood (yet), but it was somehow enough to make her cringe, and she feels as if she can’t breathe. Her body is stone cold frozen, but part of her doesn’t want it to stop.
Chuuya was right about one thing. She is enjoying it. This is a whole different type of fever to what she gets while she’s chopping criminals in half, granted, but this is making her blush nevertheless… and he’s smiling too, which makes it suddenly seem a million times more salacious than she was originally intending.
She wants to… taste? The blood? Maybe? And she wants to… do more.
Wide-eyed and agitated, she looks back up, so her eyes meet Chuuya’s, and once again, she feels her insides seethe before she pulls the knife away and removes her fingers from his choker. She quickly looks down at the ground and turns away, utterly ashamed of herself.
Chuuya breaks into a coughing fit and catches his breath for a moment before using the back of his gloved hand to soak up some of the blood from his neck, which had to begin dripping down onto the white collar of his shirt and down his pale chest, staining them with crimson.
He looks at the wet patch on his glove that had appeared, groaning. Nevertheless, he quietly puts his hand back to his neck to stop any more blood from ruining his shirt.
For a while, it’s silent. Yosano has her back turned, and Chuuya is… staring at her? Gazing into the distance? She isn’t sure, and she doesn’t particularly care. If anything, she just wants him to go away so she can go home and pretend this never happens.
“We’re not that different, you know.” Chuuya begins to speak again out of the blue. The eldest almost jumps from the sudden sound. She looks behind her shoulder, glaring at the man who is looking at her with no great deal of emotion.
“We couldn’t be more different.” She mutters, putting the knife back in her pocket, turning on her heels, so she’s back to face him, this time stood metres away. She tenses her jaw, tilting her head to the side, awaiting a response.
He raises an eyebrow, shrugging. “Arent you bored?”
“What?”
“Aren’t you bored of how weak people are compared to you? Doesn’t it make you cringe how easily they break, both physically and mentally? While those who do have power and are strong are a fucking waste of space and talent. They could use their potential to do something big but all they do is sit back and fuck around as if everything’s fine.”
Yosano’s breath shakes, and she freezes before arching her eyebrows and squinting. “Lots of people get annoyed by that. Lots of people wish that something in this world would actually change, but it never does. Just because we’re both the same on that basis, it barely means anything. It’s a tiny coincidence.”
Again, Chuuya smiles. “You’re right. Many people agree with us.” he steps closer, taking his hands out of his pockets, turning his hand and raising his elbow slightly, so his palm is facing the sky. “But most people don’t have the power to revolt about that. But we do.”
“Huh?”
“We have the power,” Chuuya begins to speak, “We, together, have the power to make something happen. Something new. Something actually useful.”
“...” Yosano, still standing tall and still, doesn’t move when Chuuya approaches her to raise his hand and almost cup her face; he feels his fingertips dance over her skin ever so slightly, but he does not fully touch her.
“What about the way they, the people in charge, allowed us to be treated when we were helpless children and could do no different. When we were young, weak, people just took advantage of us while those in charge just sat back and watched as if they had nothing better to do, like there was absolutely no way that they should or could intervene to fucking help some children-” he cuts himself off, trying not to get too heated. He clears his throat, his eyes glancing up to hers, and he tilts his head to the side ever so slightly.
“If we collaborated,” he begins to speak once more. In the dim light, his eyes look dark, darker than usual, and some hair falls over his face, and his cheekbones are accentuated from the shadow cast over him. “We could do whatever we like, whenever we like.” He leans forward, his head tilted up towards hers, “and as you said, there’d be people who agree with us. And with our abilities, we would be unstoppable. The same people who hurt us and allowed us to get tortured don’t have to be in charge, but they are. They’re still out there doing the same things that they did to us, to other people. You realise that, right? Or are you just going to sit back and pretend nothing is happening just like they do?”
She gulps before standing harshly on his foot, so he jumps away from her, groaning, lifting up his food. “Hey! Ouch! That was a good idea- you didn’t even let me finish.” he doesn’t get a response, so he sighs, folding his arms, and continues talking. Ugh. “Don’t you get sick of a purposeless-”
“-My job isn’t purposeless.”
“It basically is,” Chuuya scoffs. “On a larger scale, it really is. You think you’re doing a lot and saving the world when there are plenty of other ability users who can just do that without the effort but just choose not to. You’re just the convenient person in the convenient place, and because the higherups know that you care so much and that you’ll do it for little in return, you’re their little donkey. You are serving the exact same people who caused so much pain.”
She tries to shake her head, but she can not move. She doesn’t want to think about it. She doesn’t want to believe it. There was no way she would allow herself to think deeper into that.
“Things are the wrong way around- the people working the hardest at the bottom get scraps, while the people who sit back and relax, tormenting people, are the ones who get the credit and are in charge. The people in charge can’t relate to the people they are ordering around. The people that tell you what do to have more in common with the criminals you pursue than they do with you. They’re the real criminals, the lot of them.”
“You’re a criminal.”
“Putting it lightly, yes.” he chuckles, shrugging it off. “But so are they, and so are you. You’ve seen what they do, you’ve seen what they allow to happen, you know what their real priorities are. You were there, weren’t you? You remember what they made you do. They allowed that to happen, you know. And they’d do it again. We’re just a number to them. All of us.” his eyes narrow. “And after I’ve reminded you of that, you hate to admit that every crime I’ve done combined isn’t as bad as even half of the things you’ve seen them do.”
“So what’re you suggesting? That we just both give up on the people we work with- some of which are actually great people- and-”
“- and start our own side, yes. The side that any person with any common sense will join.”
“... why me?”
“You’re-” he pauses, thinking. “If anyone is entitled and deserving and strong enough to do so, it’s you. And I know just the place to start.”
Yosano raises an eyebrow. “-Where?”
“You know Mori Ogai, don’t you?”
It’s been a long time since she’s heard that name. Most people avoided saying it around her for her own comfort… but, now that she’s reminded of it, she feels as if she’s just woken from a nightmare she didn’t even know she was in. She clenches her fists, biting her tongue in her mouth.
“...?”
“The asshole.”
“I-... I do. Yes.”
“He trusts me entirety, and I have sworn to do anything he says. But I would do anything to get back at those who took everything I love away from me. He has plenty of resources-”
“-You want to kill him and take over the mafia for yourself?”
“For ourselves. Oh, you have the lust to kill him, don’t you?”
I do. is the first thought that comes to mind.
Yeah, she does. But how badly?
rhymbic Sat 16 Oct 2021 12:31PM UTC
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Nakajima Sun 17 Oct 2021 09:22PM UTC
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rhymbic Mon 18 Oct 2021 04:34AM UTC
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