notes: this is quite possibly the greatest manga/anime i have ever laid eyes upon. i gush.

notes2: technically this didn't happen. but, i digress.

x

it goes off, we start again

ii.

Atsushi takes a rebar pole to the stomach, and Akutagawa feels his breath catch for a split second.

The scream on her breath doesn't even make it out of her. Instead, her eyes flutter and she collapses, stopped dead in her tracks.

Goddamn.

Time around then seems to slow.

It shouldn't matter, he scoffs at himself as Rashoumon takes out another insignificant Guild member. The fool of a weretiger will be fine because she possesses this absurd healing ability that keeps her from dying. Or she could just go on and die, which would in turn make his state of living just a teensy bit happier. He does loathe her and everything she stands for, after all.

But yet he can't bring himself to look away, because there she is, fallen to her knees and gasping for air that will never come. Her eyes are wide and stricken with pain and she's choking on her own blood. Her fingers are spasming and her entire body is trembling. She looks so very small and fragile in that moment, then, and something sleeping deep within him stirs.

It's a tiny drop of panic from a well he thought was dry. A tiny drop of despair. He's always known despair, but this is different. It's despair for another, it's a show of weakness that he can not afford. He doesn't have time to pity others.

"Are you finally going to die?" he sneers at her, tone full of malice and spite. He wants her to know that he hates her—that he does not care about her existence even a little. "Begone from this world already, you useless leech."

Something sparks within her eyes then, and he is there to witness it. Atsushi grips the piece of bloody rebar and wrenches it from her body. A scream of agony rips from her lips, and her entire body gives a great and terrible shudder. Akutagawa thinks that she might very well die right then and there, the imbecile.

But she doesn't.

She never does what he wants her to.

The weretiger of the Armed Detective Agency stumbles to her feet, and though she sways a bit, her stance steadies. There is a fierceness in her eyes that wasn't there before, and her teeth are grit into a snarl. That is the thing about her—no matter how many times she's knocked down, no matter how many times she's near death, or up against an opponent thought superior to her—she always gets back up.

She's drenched in her own blood and her eyes are hungry.

It's at the moment that he knows the battle has been decided. She will conquer, teeth bared in a warcry never heard and gaping hollow in her stomach, and the enemy will fall. She's a damn armed detective, after all. As soon as the words beast beneath the moonlight leave her lips, it'll all be over.

Akutagawa turns away from her, then, and back toward the Guild scum crawling around them. He slips back into the familiar comfort of slaughter and repeat, and tries to cram the sprout of worry for that girl back into the black and dead depths of his heart.

(The only problem is, his heart is not dead and it is not at all as black as he thinks.)

He is sure to single out the man who'd put a shard of wrought metal through her, and he does not give him an expedient death.

tbc