Heads or Tails
kingfishers' game
Chapter 5: IMMORTALITY
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Notes: For this week, the prompt is "IMMORTALITY". This also seems to be the chapter of stream-of-consciousness-style run-on sentences. Enjoy!
For a long time, Kagura is the closest thing to immortal Sougo has ever seen up close. The way she heals is like magic—a bullet wound? A sliced-up muscle? A minor concussion? Wave a wand, and poof! It's fixed! Minus the wand, of course. A broken arm that would keep Sougo out of commission for months requires barely a night's rest to heal for Kagura. In his mind, he firmly believes that nothing short of amputation can keep her off her feet.
Of course, in the past few years he's met others of her race, some of whom are some stronger than her; as well as an actual, real-live immortal, in the form of a megalomaniac bent on world destruction: downright monsters who have revised his opinion of where Kagura sits on the immortality spectrum. But most of the time, the Umibouzu and the Seventh Division and Utsuro are all very far away from the patch of time and space called 'Edo', making it easy to forget about them (or at least move them to the infinitely-expanding pile of things titled 'Not Sougo's Problem')—whereas Kagura is very present, and in fact seems to exert her presence aggressively whenever she comes into contact with Sougo.
Thus, when he thinks of sheer brute strength he thinks of her; when he thinks of indestructibility he thinks of her; and, yeah, when he thinks of immortality, it's her stupid grin that pops into his head. After the first time he witnessed what a human would have considered a fairly serious head injury (he hadn't meant to cut her so deeply, really, but she was so fucking fast it would be a death sentence to try to hold back) close up before his eyes, like a time-lapse film, leaving only a nasty smear of drying blood, he'd pretty much forgotten that she wasn't immortal.
She was Amanto, and not the nice, friendly kind of Amanto that they did specials about on the TV; no, she was a Yato, daughter of a rare warrior clan about which little was known save that they killed like they ate, like they breathed, by instinct. She was a 14 year old girl who could fight him (him!) to a draw over and over and over, and that made her a foreign quantity. In this patch of time and space (provided the other foreign quantities, those that were Not Sougo's Problem, stayed far away) she was as good as immortal.
But really, that was just how Sougo saw her. Subconsciously. Because she wasn't immortal. Otherwise, she wouldn't be in a hospital bed with a respirator strapped over her mouth and needles poking into her her skinny white arms and her eyes all wide and bloodshot and Jesus Christ, if there was one thing Sougo could never do again it was watch someone die like this.
Notes: Remember in canon when Kagura got a summer cold but then because no one knew how to treat Yato everyone thought she was going to die, so they put her in the hospital and arranged a funeral for her? This fic is set when Sougo and Soyo come to see her, before Sougo realizes she's faking. Maybe this is why he reacted like such a dick?
Next time, Chapter 6: HAPPIEST