#river-muse

commission for the lovely @river-muse of her DMC OC!

As you probably guessed from the WIP title, it's a Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress fanfiction, and “Ikoma Left Behind” is sooo self-indulgent. I recently finished the first draft after kicking around the idea with some false starts, and renamed it “A Phoenix From the Ashes.” 

I started with the idea, “what if Ikoma hadn't gotten onto the Koutetsujou and managed to survive in Aragane Station, Robinson Crusoe-ing it up and stubbornly clearing the whole thing out of kabane?” Ikoma does just that—he doesn't have Mumei to tell him what a kabaneri is so he finds out everything the hard way. Especially his newfound need for blood. He teams up with a very old kotif oc of mine, Tomoyo, who is an average human and here becomes a blood supplier for Ikoma. (That’s the self-indulgent part—it's the first fic I wrote that both prominently includes an oc and directly contradicts canon. Every other oc I've made for fandoms has been able to conceivably fit into canon without disrupting it. But I had the urge to develop Tomoyo after five years, finish off this story, and ignore all my preconceptions about contradictory oc inserts, so I got this out of it!)

It's primarily an exploration of some kabaneri abilities and Ikoma's feelings about it—in canon, he wouldn't have gotten back onboard the Koutetsujou if Mumei and Takumi hadn't grabbed him. He fully believed himself to be turning into a kabane and had finally lost hope. my fanfiction picks up there, and details Ikoma's struggle to come to terms with himself without any support except Tomoyo (who, being human, can't share his experience), and he can't stop fighting even when he believes himself lost.

G OD that's brutal as heck!! Poor Sahari didn't deserve a death that was THAT bad.

I keep referring to manga Kurusu in my head as "Hot Topic Kurusu."

Yeah, you know, once his hair changed after the first chapter... I can see it.

Yeowch. Stitches and a shitty human? Uugghhh