!Now available on ao3! Same name, same author!
boketto (Japanese)
- the act of gazing vacantly into the distance without thinking.
*~-~*
In which young Y/n is shown there's more to life than fulfilling a duty.
And a young Tanjiro learns that first...
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'Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.'
E.M. Forster
I grabbed the kunai in my pocket, gripping the handle between my thumb and forefinger, and managed to impale it into the demon Tika's eye as she was distracted with defending my fake sword act.
She took a stuttered breath of surprise, but I wasted no time in making distance and leaping backward and away from her. I held the hilt of my sword with both hands, strong on my feet and not yet pulling out my sword, but carefully waiting.
There was a beat of silence where Tika just stood in the middle of the room. Her one good eye was blown wide and she slowly began raising her hands towards her face. With each movement, her once calm aura grew to become a ferocious river. With beating tides strong enough to drown someone.
Her chest rose, brow furrowing before she let out an enraged yell, and crimson blood flowed from the kunai that was still lodged in her left eye.
"What the hell!" She shouted, stomping her foot like a child, but it held enough force to make the lanterns sway and the small toys bounce on the ground. Without a moment of hesitation, she reached upward and grabbed onto the small blade, ripping it from her eye socket and causing blood to spray onto the ground. But she seemed barely bothered. More inconvenienced than anything, but at least there was some distance between us now.
Every ounce of gentleness from our previous games was gone, and she shouted with a newfound ferocity, "You stupid little runt! I'll make you pay for that!"
With no hesitation, I drew my sword just as she moved, using my own kunai and trying to throw it back in my direction but I managed to block it and send it away with my blade. Tika sniffed and wiped at her eye. It began healing swiftly, with the original teal returning without any trace of the wound being there at all.
"If you want him so bad," She sneered out, jewelry dangling as she threw her arm out to the side, "Then I'll kill you both right now!"
There was a swish in the air beside me, and I barely registered the presence of another aura before it was hitting me and taking me along with it. Thankfully, I had enough sensibility to recognize it as human, gathering them in my arms and using my own body to shield them as the force of the hit made my back slammed into the cave wall.
The air was immediately knocked from my chest and black crawled into my vision. A cough escaped me as I felt my ribs practically rattle in my chest, but I held onto the smaller human and tried my best to be aware of where Tika was.
Beside where I had just been standing, a swirling opening of some sort had manifested in thin air. I had no idea how something like that was possible, but I assumed it was both Tika's blood demon art and where the human child in my arms came from. I just assumed it was Oya; I had no time to confirm.
