#pyrakanthaa

the first rule of fight club | @pyrakanthaa // a study of me having no self-control.

“Anko—” Her name comes as a harsh whisper of shock, a breath punched out of his gut.

Gai goes completely still, his heart hammering in his chest.

He looks at her, wide eyes searching, pleading. Her face is contorted and wild, and she’s not saying anything either, but Gai thinks—thinks—there’s a touch of doubt in her eyes. Thinks he knows her better than she might expect.

“Anko,” Gai says, an appeal.

Click. She cocks the hammer, her hands terrifyingly still.

He sucks in a breath.

A hard glimmer sets in his eyes. Then, carefully and dead slow, Gai lifts a hand, his gaze fixed on hers unrelentingly. His fingers wrap around the barrel, and he gently tugs the gun closer to his face.

“Anko,” Gai breathes, a warning.

He pulls, lifts his chin, and lodges the gun against the skin of his throat, goosebumps rising at the touch of the cold metal. His throat bobs as he swallows, the sound audible and wet in the dead quiet of the room, the gun and their hands moving against it.

“Go ahead,” He whispers, “If your loyalty to him and his cause is really that true. If I’ve mistaken who you are, then I’ll die here in your hands and drowned in the depths of my stupid ideals. But,” Gai grips the barrel tighter and pushes it harder against his throat, dark eyes drilling into hers, “I hope you won’t regret this, Mitarashi Anko.”

He can’t turn back his honesty, which was what got him here in the first place.

So if he dies today, he’ll die honest and wrong, taking his bet against Anko’s resolve: “Because I felt something. And I think you did too.”

And if she knows him too, she’ll know he isn’t saying this just to beg for his life.

At no point in her life had Polka ever regretted its trajectory. Time and time again had others commented on its outcome, positing ideas that she was some thrall to a cause when she, quite simply, didn't wish to see the entirety of existence ending before its time. The mortal layman would see it as the labor of Sisyphus, but the one who had endured eons upon eons would understand its necessity. And so, in the pages of the Exomyth where the simulations of Amphoreus' survivors would slowly await rebirth, while posed as "Sophia" the Nodist did she discover Phainon in the midst of his contemplations--the hallmark of any scholar.

xoxo, tartaglia

"I could save her," Sasori confessed to Kuri, sitting at the edge of her windowsill. The moonlight was a blanket behind him; the wind brushing back his hair.

A boy of no more than fifteen.

A creature more than a century old.

"Not the way I was turned," Sasori reassured her. Well, maybe a little like how he was turned--- for the companionship amidst a long stretch of eternity. She did not flinch when he stops by in the evenings when she is alone. Her husband has not the capacity to care for her and the children.

And the doctors can only do so much for a failing heart.

"But I could," he said it for a final time. Testing the waters. If this is something she would approve... or talk him out of. What happens to the babe after the transformation, Sasori was not entirely sure. There hasn't been any that was younger than him, after all.

"For what's to come? ...I can't say I entirely blame you."

Seated along the water's edge, Dan Heng and Castorice watched the baby seals as they leaped in the splashes generated by his tail, some clamping on to the bony spines that protruded from the tough scales. Beal (or, the Bandaged Seal) hung on particularly well as he undulated his tail like a gentle wave, a few more of the competitive ones trying to crowd the appendage that supported the pudgy little seals manfully. Amused by the display, he continued to let them play their little game, one he had come to start in first in the thousand years spent in Terravox's Memory Zone. Meanwhile, one of the more placid pups happily snuggled in Castorice's arms, lulled to sleep by her gentle caresses until it uttered soft, soporous snores.

He doubted any of them were prepared for the cosmos that would inevitably crowd the newly forming planet, some forces far more predatory than others. It sickened him to think of how many would try and exploit Amphoreus, but could only pray that it wouldn't come to pass.

"Ugggggghhhhhhhhhh." There it is. He can only ignore her for so long before she takes the necessary steps to become his personal problem. Gai's off on a mission, anyway, so his bright eyed savior isn't here to talk either of them out of their shenanigans. "What did you do to get on Ibiki's shit list, anyway? I've never left, but I thought you were his golden boy. Trouble in paradise?"

Kakashi is fairly certain he has a concussion, which is why he thinks if he holds very, very still with his head down on the table, Anko will leave him the fuck alone. Think possum thoughts. Think dead thoughts. Still. Silent.

No, it isn't working. Dear gods, he's going to have to lift his head up to talk to her. The effort feels monumental. He manages to settle his chin on his forearm, blinking a lone dark eye at her blearily, and the ice pack Tenzo had magnanimously settled on the back of his head plops wetly onto the table, melted. Perhaps he'd been sitting at the table longer than he thought.

"Mmmhh?" Eloquent. He squints at her, looking overall like a slightly battered and irritated puppy. "Ibiki likes me?"

News to him. He's never bothered to care either way, but he always thought they were distantly professional, and little more. Perhaps that's why Ibiki likes him. He'd point it out to Anko if he thought she'd heed his advice.

"Probably pissed I shattered his prisoner's jaw and zygomatic bone," he mutters to himself, turning his face back into his arm. Said prisoner had kicked him into the wall so hard when he'd slipped his cuffs that Kakashi could swear he'd heart something in his skull crack. But hey, it could have been something nice in his back, too. Kakashi had hit him that hard to discontinue his escape with extreme kinetic prejudice. A little fucking gratitude should be in order, maybe.

Whatever. Whining won't change it. "Why's he mad at you this time?"

He'd admittedly never seen this woman before, her outfit alone was pretty memorable. But that's what Wriothesley got when he so infrequently ventured aboveground to Fontaine's shops even when he was getting low on tea (read: below five boxes left to go through). The merchants all knew him as one of their best customers who always bought in bulk for himself, as well as having some sent to the Palais Marmonia for Neuvillette to take home himself.

But another customer asking him for his opinion on what to buy wasn't something that happened particularly often either, Wriothesley always had the unintentionally intimidating look just from his size alone. But why refuse to help this woman when he of all people was pretty qualified to give advice on good tea to purchase.