He was an admirable figure, she had thought, rising above her comfort, with writhing shadows beneath his feet and smoke billowing from his skin. A smoldering bonfire beneath how many nerves.
(She admired him, but not In That Way, of course. She admired him how a chickling only could to the mighty wings above the skies, or, more simply, how a Thing like her (transparent flesh and grey-dead skin, though her heart still beats and she still Lived, though sometimes not) could only look up in awe at Something More.)
Reiko admired him from a distance— just like Kuroiro did.
(Kuroiro thinks about the upperclassman just like the way Reiko did, too, though he admired the way that inky blackness seemed to flow from his feathers like black airborne tides. Or how his head could drown itself in tar and cover his face in a blink of an eye, those temporary scorch(?) marks left behind by his footsteps, or how his darkness just spreads and growsgrowsgrows—)
(Both their bodies weren't the same as the rest of their classmates were. Mutant or otherwise. Their bodies and quirks were different in the way it Shifted and Coiled, Moved and Be Obscured. They were both different, so they see (and feel) some things that just aren't meant for other people.)
Reiko and Kuroiro sees him from a distance, in those rare days when the schedules of under and upperclassmen somehow overlap, a faint body of a living smoke trailing behind him. He doesn't have a shadow, not this day, but his face—
It's covered in black. Unreflected (wrong) by light.
Actually, both of them didn't just admire him— they were awed by him and feared him. He was in ways that were like them but almost—
Kew word: Almost.
(So he isn't really the same.)
(They aren't wrong.)
He was in ways that seemed leagues away from them— Tokoyami Fumikage always seemed to be More. In those kinds where he isn't just someone who isn't really There (but what kind, anyway? Is it a kind where he just doesn't seem to belong, like a ghost in a picture, or is it like a burning corpse amidst a flower field?), and yet he still treads the world like he spited it enough to even land his hand on iron and metal and skin and veins—
But,
He was an admirable figure, they think, with writhing shadows frosty rooted veins spreading beneath his feet and smoke screaming things billowing from his skin mouth(s?). A smoldering bonfire beneath how many nerves— a dark hellfire that went beyond his body and infecting everything around him, gripping them like a deadly vice that rent and tore.
(That's why they didn't come near him.)
(After all, if his presence alone shifted the entirety of everything around him and seeped down below the nether— what would their bodies, unskilled and young and fragile, would become?)
(Ripped away and torn by fangs and claws. Eaten whole and alive, a nice meal for a sleeping beast—)
His faceless face, dipped in molten shadows, and even if his back was turned to them they could feel too many things seeing and clawing, all in those spaces even they couldn't pinpoint where.
Tokoyami Fumikage was, and still is, so much.
Do they admire him? Yes, they Do. In all it's absolution. But is it such a sin to be terrified and scared, of someone that has his metaphysical wings above them— like he could suddenly drop them low and then watch as they descend to nothing?
(Yes) No.
Reiko is a living being, even if she sometimes crosses the line between living and not. Blood still course through her veins and her flesh is still alive and moving. Iron would still pour from wounds and she can still suffer, because pain is a must for everything that lived and breathed. It would be the same with Kuroiro, too, even if his skin is darkness and his body could blend itself within the shadows— he could still feel and be hurt, because he only wears the darkness as a cloak. He is not It, and therefore he only, even barely, touches It's extensions.
In most stories, old beings sleep (always sleeping, dead or dying), but here in this school, this academy— his space, where his darkness seeped into tree roots and made the weeds grow stronger, where the red smoke that billows from his mouth, creeping from his fangs, taint the blue sky— of things that never died and lived again to do another bidding— he will always wait.
(And he did wait, even as weeks passed by, and he waited until there's two kids he only looked at in passing stood upon his dorm room door.)
(They held their chins high, but still he Towers, like mountains among hills, until he hears "Please take us under your wing!" forcing it's way from their mouths as they bowed low before him.)
(Crackling bones, a million too much with a thousand joints, of fanged feathers and a claw made from blood and shattered fragments. His eyes are many, his limbs much like Asura, Shoji from 1-A would say, but the two of them are scared and stubborn teenagers— so they marched their way to the Something's (of Greater Things) dorm building either way. Even with shaking legs and trembling bodies (they thought their eyes bled and their skin scratched but they're not sure), and so they did.)
And Tokoyami Fumikage would take one look at them and grin. But not in ways that he would tear them apart, and more in ways of disturbing amusement.
Then he'd say they were too little (of what?), that were not Meant to, and until they Reach enough and Run for the rising sun— but still, if only if. He would. And
Well,
Who are they to seek guidance from, their words, a horrific something, when they themselves are only little things?