Just a little exercise to keep my hand in, since all my other projects are long and taking forever. Written on a challenge: K, first impressions, now with daemons! God, I haven't posted properly in ages.
I own neither K nor the concept of daemons, human souls taking external form as animals; that belongs to Philip Pullman. Pre-series, obviously.
bad blood
The moment they're in privacy, Tenrou refuses to settle any longer. Her feathers flare and snarl as she takes abruptly into flight. Reishi sits at the edge of his bed, hands folded, and she hurtles from him in a long curve around the room, contempt in the outstretched arch of her wings. Her shadow cuts the light slanting between the curtains, and forth and back she goes in rounds.
He waits, and waits. His knuckles tighten.
A cage, he thinks, but there's no grace to be earned in allowing SCEPTER 4 to see this: the foremost symbol of their king's mind all hunt and ruffled pride, and over such a minor incident. A good leader learns discipline first, masters control second, and allows no intimation of effort to slide from beneath his movement all the while. This is the tradition—so it must always have been. It is the duty of a king, after all, to lead.
Five minutes lapse.
Fifteen.
Mildly he says, "You'll have the rest of the clan in terror, if you continue these fits."
She doesn't turn her head, but only rounds the coatrack again, stirring up the sleeves of his hanging jacket. Insolence, Reishi thinks, and a deliberate gesture of it. Tenrou is in a petty mood. "Better me than you," she retorts, sharp of word and beak; the glint to her pearled eye turns like a star.
He allows himself a little sigh: the scarcest self-indulgence. They're alone together, so there are no illusions to keep up. Even these, however, must be limited—it wouldn't do to cultivate a habit of sloppiness. Those who claim that duty and free time can be easily separated lead indifferent lives at best. "It can't see you now," Reishi says, partly because it's true, and partly because Tenrou's simmering temper breaks faster if it's needled. "You won't find relief hunting dust-motes."
"Ha!" Tenrou's harsh tones ring high. "He isn't, either."
The room is dark; the room is quiet. Reishi's voice rises no more than it must to be heard. "I don't see how that's relevant," he says.
She comes to circle above his head; in the stillness, it costs little more than a wingbeat to carry her momentum. SCEPTER 4's rooms suit her little more than a cage does—but they'll both claw the eyes out of anybody who tries to steal the assignment from them. It isn't worth the trouble to change their arrangements for a little more space.
Tenrou says, "What a terrible liar I've got for a body."
"And what a spoiled pet I have for a soul."
He extends an arm, and after a final swoop she curves over to settle in his reach. Her claws catch his sleeve, but only lightly: pinpricks, not snarls. It's how he knows that he's been forgiven after all. Without particular thought or intent, he strokes a few of her feathers down; she allows that too, a rare little gift between them. They've never much sought each other's touch; comfort is unnecessary if assurance is in place. In all their years together he's never felt her shake, and so it's only become all the more important to hold his own. If he can't bear the weight of his own heart, how can he be trusted with a crown?
"It's a small mess," Reishi remarks, almost absently, and hears her silence like another bird's cry. "He's no more than a small nuisance. The HOMRA gang has previously operated in narrow territory, with few dramatic incidents. There's no need to think of him."
She's quiet for a stretch. Then she rouses, wings flashing up; he can feel her amusement furl, ironic and disdainful and just a little bit dramatic. "Liar, liar."
He stares in deep bemusement at the new rows of curling feathers that her brief tantrum's stirred. "Ah," he sighs, and feels the twinge in his arm as she shifts her weight deliberately. "You're more of a mess than he is."
"Well, you're even more of one than I am, aren't you?" Tenrou says. He blinks. "Ha! You liked him."
"I believe you've forgotten the meaning of the word like. I suppose it's not a word for daemons."
But Tenrou cocks her head, bird-wild. Reflected light floods her eyes; they burn through the drawn shade. "You remember him," she presses—and Reishi laughs, for lack of a better sound. What an absurd thought to cling to, of all the things to think of about the afternoon. Who'd forget so soon? They're still only hours out of the mission, out of the dull little metropolitan police report which had mentioned a disturbance downtown, a minor brawl with potential supe interference. Civilians cleared and zero fatalities noted. A sky blue alert. He'd even smoothed down his coat as they stepped out from the van, expecting little to come in the afternoon which might muss it.
Until they'd arrived on scene.
Streets deserted, stores dim against a harder light, an alleyway shining black with scorch, punks and loiterers knocked in heaps—
And a shadow rising out of their midst.
Like smoke, a ghost turned solid—something ran too sharp about his outline, the tilt of his body, his head tipped up in a bloody shock, unreal in decimation. A heartbeat lasted, nevertheless, where a stranger seemed to wear his own skin and angles like a star clinging to bones, a flame scarcely holding to a shape. Poetry's the only thing which might suit, because poetry makes no damned sense any more than that figure had. An ill disguise, and one barely making the effort. An instant where the man standing in the wreckage had looked like nothing human.
"Aaah," it had breathed—and straightened slowly. Pressure shivered into the ash-stale air, for all that it hadn't even glanced over, not yet. But the figure seemed to catch sight of something in the shadows, then, for the sling of his shoulders eased in moments.
He did turn, then. From further within the alley, a lion came slinking into sight. Its mane caught light like snow, pale as the sliver of light at a flame's core. Reishi remembers, ridiculously, the SCEPTER 4 squad standing at his back, awaiting orders—all while he watched the absurd cat curve its body against the man, and how, with hardly a thought or hesitation, he'd wound his fingers into its fur, his rough hold stark against all that great paleness.
The contrast of them had been the first shock. Reishi remembered, above all, the wrenching in that sight, felt whorls and calluses and heat bright as stars as if the touch had sunk into his own skin.
Somewhere in the midst, the man caught his eye. "You're the new one, huh," he said.
Words rose from his gorge and were ground down between his teeth. Reishi exhaled like a curse.
The red king's slow grin widened.
"Sorry about the mess," he'd said, and—
In the stillness of their confined room, the words ring anew to both their ears. No evidence, no complaints willingly pressed. No charges to make, except perhaps disturbing evidence, and a king's hardly worth detaining on such scant grounds. Yet.
"Of all the pointless exits," Reishi says at last into the quiet.
Tenrou preens a feather into place. "He was a pointless sort of man," she shrills. Only the light iron underneath the words suggests that she's not being entirely agreeable about it.
It isn't like her to dwell on petty fools, petty criminals—but harder still to think of what could have made such an impression on Tenrou, who loves so few people, and likes fewer among them. Her mind strains out of his; the intrigue eludes him. Reishi thinks of bare arms, fingers hooked like claws. The way he'd thrown back his head and laughed as they'd first set foot on the scene—as the last shock of flame had swelled through the alley: a mad coiling disease, an infestation of light against which his shadow stood like a monster. His bright cracked-coal glance when he'd looked at Reishi at last, and a smile that might as well have been pried from his daemon's jaws.
A storm's worth of attention trained, for a heartbeat, on a single life.
"Suoh Mikoto," says Munakata Reishi. His mouth knots. "What an unpleasant name for a king."
On his arm, Tenrou's claws rake his skin. Sting and pressure and malice in her molten falcon's eyes.
"Liar," she calls again, low and sweet.