Salvation

Chapter 6: Kirin

Nataku lasted as my second in command for three hundred and sixty-seven years. That was the longest that any of my seconds ever lasted since.

He did not last for longer because his ambitiousness and smart mouth caught up with him.

I could feel the dreaded day coming, and I was on edge, doing my best to avoid everything and everyone. I could take my feelings of rage and helplessness out on others as I had often did in the past, but this year I was tired. I only wished to be alone, to try to salvage in my mind some way to get over the hurtle of pain. With whatever shreds of hope and will I had left, I tried.

It was as futile as squeezing one's eyes shut and willing a fatal wound away. Praying for salvation did not make it so. I only ever felt some amount of freedom in my violence.

On this birthday, Nataku reminded me of that.

"We didn't have to lose so many. If you had been out there, with us, we'd have more soldiers to send to the battle at Chimera swamp!" he growled at me.

He knew not to speak to me like that. After all this time, he knew how uncontrollable I was. Nataku was always careful about when and how to approach me when he sensed my moods, as over time he had learned to do.

Either he had grown too comfortable or he was blinded by his own greed.

I stood from my seat, teetering precariously on my anguish and wrath, salvaging whatever shreds of decency could possibly be left within me for this man I had known so long.

But it was pointless. His face moved but maybe an inch—just enough that he was perhaps going to speak again—and I realized that I could take it no longer.

I could not have him near me anymore. I could not have his greed and anger bearing down on me, haunting me.

I had to destroy him. I had no other choice.

-.-.-

When Yomi rose to power, I was on my twenty-first second in command.

Yomi himself was almost hilarious to me. Yet another rival spouting sugar-coated bullshit and reaching out with greedy hands just like everyone else. I didn't honestly expect him to last so long.

After a hundred years, when it became clear that he was not going anywhere, Yomi was no longer funny to me.

I wanted him dethroned, dead, ripped apart. I hated him more than I was sure I had hated anything in a long time. It was because Yomi was, in fact, the essence of everything I truly despised—a big fat lie wrapped in beautiful packaging.

Just more pain masquerading as pleasure.

I couldn't stand to see him parading around as if he knew the secret to life—all he was doing was smearing his love of stupidity in order to grasp at more power.

At this point, I believed I had the world figured out. It was only pain and more pain, pointlessness, life, death, eating and shitting and pissing and fighting with each other. Continuous chaos that some people tried to make seem like it was actually worth something—like it all had some deeper meaning. Like Yomi tried to play it off. But I laughed at them because I knew the truth. Because it was easier to laugh than to cry at how empty it all was.

I felt like I knew too much. That I knew the world and people and their infinite repeats, and the only times I felt remotely happy were the times that I made myself ignorant of how truly hopeless things were.

Every time I had grasped at happiness, it was ripped away from me. Eri, Shun, Raizen, Ayano. What was the point of continuing the struggle?

So when I made Kirin my twenty-second, he was hopeless to try to sway me.

-.-.-

I hated when he looked at me like that.

He looked at me so strangely, unlike what anyone had ever done before, and he always did it when we were talking alone.

He looked at me as if he was searching for something—something long dead and buried beneath too many layers of misery—but that damn glimmer in his eyes seemed to actually believe otherwise.

He could also tell that it angered me, and he began to lower his head when he spoke to me.

But then, once that look was gone, I felt bitter over it. I did not, could not, admit it to myself, but I missed that look. I missed the thought that someone might have any faint hope in the terrible beast that I had become.

So when we spoke, I turned away from him, so then I would not know if he looked at me and maybe . . . he would no longer look away.

-.-.-

"They presented me with this, for you."

When he had come into the room, he seemed airier—more light-hearted—than I had ever seen him before.

He held it out to me as if he was proposing.

I wanted to turn away, but something in the beauty of the thing shimmering in his palm struck a chord in me that I had thought to be long ago exhausted.

It was beautiful. And it was a thing, not a person. Perhaps it could be allowed to be beautiful, with no treachery behind it. Perhaps, maybe just perhaps, it could be mine, and I could have something truly lovely in a world forged in ugliness.

The moment I took it from his hand was the moment I realized how completely stupid that entire idea was, and I paused for only a moment to regard its flawless surface before I stuck the thing in my mouth and swallowed it, hoping maybe it was treacherous and poisoned me and ended my suffering once and for all.

-.-.-

One day, I asked Kirin what he thought of me.

I can't be sure why I did. I could blame the tear gem for its opening my heart—I could blame my loneliness—I could blame my search for a purpose—I could blame simple boredom, even.

But the surprise in his eyes at my question, his reaction in its entirety, would always be a much better reason. Just to see him ponder me—him, someone who did not hate me.

"I respect you so much, my lor—"

"Why?"

He faltered a moment. "You are powerful. But . . . more than that. You . . . are honest. More honest than anyone I have known."

I was honest. I did not hide my emotions, because my emotions had been the only things that got me here. I was honest because I was tired of lies penetrating my skin. I was honest because there was no point in trying to hide what I was.

Honesty. My only virtue.

But it was a virtue, and somehow, I possessed it. And somehow, he saw it in me.

-.-.-

There was a time in which I stopped lying completely to Kirin.

He was wrong in what he said to me. I wasn't fully honest. I hid myself from the world, fearing and hating their gaze upon me for what I was. It was easier for them to never know, and thus I lied to them.

This day I was tired of lying to myself and I began to remove my all-important wrappings, freeing my face of its constant cocoon.

It was then that he entered.

"I'm sorry my lord," he muttered so fast that I barely understood him, and he began to shut the door, but I stopped him.

"Kirin," I said. He paused at the door with, I expect, fear at what was to come. Then he entered, head bowed, avoiding looking at me at all costs. He said nothing.

"Kirin," I repeated. "Look at me."

He stopped moving—maybe even stopped breathing—for a long time.

"You're not in trouble. Look at me. I want you to look at me."

When I said this, he finally raised his head, and I wasn't sure what I expected to find there. Of all things I could find, what I expected was disdain, confusion, anger, even disappointment. I expected that this revelation at what I was would change everything between us.

I did not expect him to gaze at me so intensely, as if he had actually discovered something good, something he was delighted to find—and, I suppose, at the knowledge that I shared it with him.

"Now you've seen me. Now I've been completely honest with you. What does it change?"

And he said, "As for my loyalties—nothing, my lord."

I thought about asking him what it did change, then, but I decided I would rather not know.

-.-.-

I began to speak to Kirin, which was really more than I had offered anyone in longer than I cared to remember. My thoughts and my past were parts of me that could not be taken from me, and could only be willingly shared, and so I shared them sparingly.

I did not believe I could find happiness from speaking with him. I did not want to look at him in such a way, because it was too painful to fathom. But speaking to him did give me some comfort, in a blindly selfish way, and as if he knew this, he rarely spoke himself. He simply listened to me, not saying a word in all my pauses as I thought of what next I should share.

Though he said nothing and did nothing, it relaxed me. His unchanging nature was a welcome constant, and it opened me up in a way that few things had ever done for me.

I spoke sometimes of my anger, and, eventually, of my pain. I did not tell him everything; I could not—I did not trust him or myself enough to try. But once, as I told him of this pain, and all the anger my pain had brought me, he did speak.

He told me, "You are not the only one."

At first when he said this I became angry and made him leave, but the more I thought on it, the more curious I felt. There had to be someone out there who had suffered as I had—someone who fought with their own nature as well as the nature of others. Someone who despised this world, but even more than that—wished they could belong in it.

Author's Note: Of course Kirin gets his own chapter! I'm not that cruel! I also love delving into Kirin's personality, truly. I've been an avid Himuku supporter for quite some time but I do ask myself what could have been with Kirin and Mukuro - it is quite a fluffy thought. Maybe I'll explore this soon. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed~!