It would have been a bloodbath, had Naraku not displayed an uncharacteristic amount of restraint. He held a sanguine blade up to the boy, yet made no motion to cut through the tender flesh of his throat. A warning, not to him, but to the spring hashira that stood before him.
"And Ena. I have something to say to you." His voice lowered to something soft, yet somehow sharper than any blade. " I don't know what's going on in that head of yours, but it will only bring you disappointment if you hope to have a life like theirs."
ena's heart pounds. the blade, her junior, the poor girl half-conscious and barely able to beat her adolescent fists against upper two's grip on her. her head spins through countless strategies, countless scenarios and in all of them, she doesn't close the gap in time. even exerting her high speed to go higher, she knows that her father is faster. the spring hashira is at the mercy of his words, and worse, his gaze, which gouges where the blade of his tongue won't cut.
each word is like a sucker punch, taking the wind out of her lungs with each strike. ena thinks about her position in the corps, how going home with her brothers meant moving into a world of secrecy, of shame in herself. though her family would never abandon her, though their oddities bring them together in ways that no one can match, the corps doesn't care about any of that.
it could mean anything, but she knows what he means. she can never be human. she can never live as a human. she can never be one with her comrades and will always be a distant thundercloud haunting them. her bonds will never matter, because to a human, she is something disgusting and incomprehensible. these are all things that ena knows, has known, from the moment she trained to become a demon slayer โ but hearing the man she looked up to most growing up, the man she called papa say it only hammers the fact in deeper.
her lips flatten. the junior's blood that splashed onto him sharpens, and like chakrams, cleave the wrists from his arms. the junior is caught as ena darts forward and catches her. time moves slowly, almost, as she passes him, as she casts a hardened (yet still, there is sorrow there, isn't there, like a child scorned?) glare sidelong at naraku.
and then she's gone, darting through the woods with the now-unconscious junior in her arms.
