[ There is no part of him that wants to kill, or even to hurt. Person, monster, shadow that he hasn't witnessed yet. None of them deserve pain, especially not at his hand.
Prior to the events in the labyrinth, he would have said – in total honesty, with every ounce of conviction burning in his heart – that he would rather die than ever harm another creature.
Things change. Maybe he wasn't committed quite so completely to those words.
If you don't commit, we both die.
It's easy to think you'll lay down and accept defeat until the possibility is presented to you for the first time. You can't possibly know what other reserves of strength and viciousness you can draw from until they're revealed to you by force. ]
Yes. I'm ready.
[ Maruki hesitates only for half a moment more, just long enough to send a thought of forgiveness into the primordial chaos of the universe in the hopes that it will one day be returned to him, and then he closes in to slash at the creature's gouged neck.
Two problems with this immediately become apparent:
The dagger is short. He has to move in close. Very close.
And for all the rebellion coursing through his body from its origin point in that cavernous space at the back of his mind, he lacks the finesse of actual skill.
The blade makes contact. Painful contact, by the way the creature shrieks and convulses, the fresh blood that spurts out – but it's not deadly contact at all. And it pisses the thing off.
He jerks away from its snapping jaw as it flails in blind pain, practically trips over his own feet as he does, and so puts himself right in the path of the danger he doesn't see.
Its arm suffered the brunt of one of Robin Hood's attacks, then took the weight of its collapse. It's burnt, skin and muscle tattered, a massive bone piercing through sickly scaled flesh, but the creature has involuntary survival instincts too. It tries to bring the arm down with its usual force, enough for claws to shred through steel with ease. It can't. It's dying. It's weak.
But weak doesn't mean harmless. A claw catches Maruki's right shoulder on the downswing, gouges into it and partway down his back, rips an inhuman sound from somewhere deep in his soul, the likes of which he's only ever heard once, and it wasn't from his own mouth–
He's never felt such pain in his life, never thought it possible. Beyond all senses. It burns so bright-hot that it goes dark and dead almost instantly, like his body wasn't meant to process that much pain at once and simply shuts that part of his mind down. He must be bleeding. His shirt must be shredded. He can't feel any of it. He can't move that arm. He can't move at all, stunlocked by his own shock.
And he's furious.
To be so useless in a fight that he couldn't even follow the patterns he'd been observing for days– to have powers that he didn't even know he could use ripped from him before he could ever learn to defend himself or anyone else– to have been out of the house when the robbers came– to have been too late returning to be any help at all– to know that even if he had been present, he would have been overpowered, maimed alongside Rumi or killed alongside her parents like the pathetic nobody that he was– to be here, now, in this bullshit reality within a reality, so far from everything he knows, every scrap of control he managed to learn and seize with his own two hands–
His left hand grabs the dagger from his useless right and plunges it, inelegant and unskilled and backed by nothing but outrage to live, directly into the creature's exposed veins.
It all happens quickly. Nearly instantaneously. The original hit, the injury, the kill. A suspended moment in time he'll never forget, and over before he's even realized that it's happened to him at all.
Maruki rips the dagger out, drops it, staggers back. Grabs his shoulder. Feels blood beneath his palm, between his fingers. Stares wild and silent at Akechi, changed. ]
CW VIOLENCE CW GRAPHIC INJURY CW MEMORIES OF MURDER BABY LET'S GO
Prior to the events in the labyrinth, he would have said – in total honesty, with every ounce of conviction burning in his heart – that he would rather die than ever harm another creature.
Things change. Maybe he wasn't committed quite so completely to those words.
If you don't commit, we both die.
It's easy to think you'll lay down and accept defeat until the possibility is presented to you for the first time. You can't possibly know what other reserves of strength and viciousness you can draw from until they're revealed to you by force. ]
Yes. I'm ready.
[ Maruki hesitates only for half a moment more, just long enough to send a thought of forgiveness into the primordial chaos of the universe in the hopes that it will one day be returned to him, and then he closes in to slash at the creature's gouged neck.
Two problems with this immediately become apparent:
The dagger is short. He has to move in close. Very close.
And for all the rebellion coursing through his body from its origin point in that cavernous space at the back of his mind, he lacks the finesse of actual skill.
The blade makes contact. Painful contact, by the way the creature shrieks and convulses, the fresh blood that spurts out – but it's not deadly contact at all. And it pisses the thing off.
He jerks away from its snapping jaw as it flails in blind pain, practically trips over his own feet as he does, and so puts himself right in the path of the danger he doesn't see.
Its arm suffered the brunt of one of Robin Hood's attacks, then took the weight of its collapse. It's burnt, skin and muscle tattered, a massive bone piercing through sickly scaled flesh, but the creature has involuntary survival instincts too. It tries to bring the arm down with its usual force, enough for claws to shred through steel with ease. It can't. It's dying. It's weak.
But weak doesn't mean harmless. A claw catches Maruki's right shoulder on the downswing, gouges into it and partway down his back, rips an inhuman sound from somewhere deep in his soul, the likes of which he's only ever heard once, and it wasn't from his own mouth–
He's never felt such pain in his life, never thought it possible. Beyond all senses. It burns so bright-hot that it goes dark and dead almost instantly, like his body wasn't meant to process that much pain at once and simply shuts that part of his mind down. He must be bleeding. His shirt must be shredded. He can't feel any of it. He can't move that arm. He can't move at all, stunlocked by his own shock.
And he's furious.
To be so useless in a fight that he couldn't even follow the patterns he'd been observing for days– to have powers that he didn't even know he could use ripped from him before he could ever learn to defend himself or anyone else– to have been out of the house when the robbers came– to have been too late returning to be any help at all– to know that even if he had been present, he would have been overpowered, maimed alongside Rumi or killed alongside her parents like the pathetic nobody that he was– to be here, now, in this bullshit reality within a reality, so far from everything he knows, every scrap of control he managed to learn and seize with his own two hands–
His left hand grabs the dagger from his useless right and plunges it, inelegant and unskilled and backed by nothing but outrage to live, directly into the creature's exposed veins.
It all happens quickly. Nearly instantaneously. The original hit, the injury, the kill. A suspended moment in time he'll never forget, and over before he's even realized that it's happened to him at all.
Maruki rips the dagger out, drops it, staggers back. Grabs his shoulder. Feels blood beneath his palm, between his fingers. Stares wild and silent at Akechi, changed. ]