#compassneedle

Surprise giftart sketch for @compassneedle / @rabbitprose of Upper Moon Three Akaza from the anime/manga Demon Slayer! 🩸

Hope you all enjoy this first time drawing of the character and stay wonderful my friend! ;0; Shall outline this and color soon! Sorry if anatomy looks weird, I struggle with drawing limbs. ;u;

hinako growls. "i have no choice!" she really doesn't; shiori insists on 'protecting' her like this, by giving hinako her flesh to make her stronger. she swears she can hear that demon's voice in her head.

@compassneedle ❀ unprompted!

& it's with a heavy heart that they bear witness the scene laid before them, that smile of theirs sunken & dripping with something visceral & heavy. they saunter over to a crumbled building & to the body of a desperate young woman who had tried just to escape the collapsed structure, still somehow clinging to life at one point. but it was all in vain.

❝ . . . do you find preying on the weak to be commendable ? ❞ they finally speak after a burdening, stifling silence. head was sulked low, the tears wanted to come freely, but dante would keep them beneath the surface. ❝ knowing that these people didn't even stand a chance, & you killed them all anyway. does that alone constitute the right to run your mouth ? ❞ the tail end of their sentence was bitten with a foreign malice, a slip up on their part.

Kohaku watched as the other’s anger was rising, his eyes remained the same as he watched them getting in his face as he replies.

“You’re right but Akaza, didn’t you say to me before that I was nothing but fuel for the demons? Why are you acting this way towards me? What, are you telling me to suddenly live?! To fight for my life?!”

He asked as he looked straight into their eyes, his own not showing fear. He was talking to an upper moon, yes, it seemed idiotic for him to raise his voice but he didn’t care.

He wanted to know.

“I understand Akaza, you don’t want kindness as you already lost it long ago right? I also understand that you’re not made of fluffy clouds, we all carry hate as well as sorrow inside ourselves.

You say that this frustrates me but actually, I understand your pain as you see, not everyone is pure or innocent. We all carry within us many emotions and sometimes, those emotions we don’t want to show will in time reveal themselves no matter how much we keep them away. I’m not here to argue with you, just speaking is all.”

Kohaku replied as he bowed his head to the other, showing that he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind.

as he growls and barks, kokushibō wonders: did he know? did he know her influence upon dōma guaranteed his demotion rather than his death? a selfishness of her own, for even as dōma vied for her attentions, tried to draw her focus away from akaza--she never lost sight of him.

and so he still stands before her, snarling and vicious. perhaps she deserved it, too. it were well enough, for kokushibō knows she would never bring herself to let go of akaza either, in the end.

and so she buries the twinge that tugs her heartstrings, that flutter in her very soul that threatens to waver: buried beneath a customarily impassive expression as instead:

"i hope you do."

she isn't alive. would it be so bad to end this charade?

perhaps it were a failing of hers, some leftover dredge of michikatsu: a terrible habit of not considering herself and her own safety as she should. what did it matter of her safety if she were already dead? it were all a bit redundant.

but akaza isn't dead. but akaza is someone worthy of protection, of the devotion she has grown comfortable showing him in their time together.

and so when the sun's rays draw near him as clouds move away and sun climbs in the sky, filtering through dilapidated awnings of abandoned shrine, kokushibō acts without thought: her skin burns as she closes the distance to pull him to safety, sickening sizzle as smoke rises, and yet--

safely in the shadows once more, purple skin healing, the sun's light has given her away: firework patterns have appeared upon her skin in each place the light has touched her, preserved even as flesh heals.

kokushibō pays her fireworks little mind, however: she's too busy looking over akaza, as if she hadn't properly registered that she were the only one scorched.