They were only enemies because he wanted a fight.
He didn't care why he fought, or why these were the ones to kill. He didn't care who they were, if they were the good guys, or if he was on the side of right.
He lived for destruction, to tear out throats and leave bleeding bodies in his wake. The thrill of the hunt and the adrenaline of the fight. To rip and tear and smash and kill.
That was what he was made for, and that is what he would do.
He didn't care who.
If you were in his way, you were deemed an enemy.
And he always killed his enemies.
Until one.
Until the boy with the orange hair.
An enemy to kill, just like the rest. Of no importance to him, a nameless enemy to die like the ones before him.
But he didn't die. He fought back, stronger and fiercer than he'd ever expected, scarring him forever, prey leaving his mark on the predator that he could never, would never escape.
And through humiliation and demotion and pain, that mark became his obsession.
He became a reason to fight, the orange haired boy. He was the prey of the king, now. Vision narrowed to one, the predator's drive for destruction focused on a single figure in black.
No one else mattered, he would fight no one else. All he wanted was to destroy that boy, those brown eyes that looked at him filled with something so familiar and so painful he wanted to rip them out of the shinigami's face.
And he was stopped by a grinning devil in a mask, the second time, and that just made him more intent, more obsessed.
It taunted him, that mask of the shinigami's, that deaths-head grin. He couldn't think about anything else but ripping that mask off his face, gouging out those horrible familiar eyes, ripping him to pieces for a slight he barely even remembered at this point. It was a terrible obsession.
He breathed and lived now for that final fight against his enemy. His one sole enemy that had come to define him. His aspect, the king of destruction, had been refined by those battles into a predator with only one prey, one thing to destroy – the shinigami with the orange hair.
And finally, the fight came.
He had his battle, his destruction, his prey, his obsession. The boy with the grinning mask and those damnable terrible eyes.
He was destroyed instead, beaten down and defeated, and both knew this was the end of it, even if the king refused to admit it. Refused to let him look at him with those eyes anymore. He couldn't take that feeling of familiarity and shame and pain that twisted his empty soul every time brown met blue.
Maybe things would have ended different had it not gone the way things did. Maybe he would have still been a predator with one target, one enemy.
But instead, king became prey, ally became murderer, and prey became protector.
He lay in his own blood, staring up at his enemy, his prey, and he heard and he saw and through the pain and the fog and the helpless fury, it happened.
He stopped being an enemy. He became something the king had no word for, no understanding of, no way to know. He didn't know what he was anymore, the boy with those eyes.
But he wasn't an enemy anymore.
He had no enemies. He never did. Just reasons to kill.
And now there were none.