You reflect.
It’s what you do.
Noise you don’t want to hear, fists thrown, bullets fired—all of it bounces back and strikes your attacker with the slightest bit of your attention, or even less.
Last Order wouldn’t stop staring at him.
“That’s creepy,” Accelerator told her, shoving her off the end of the couch with one arm.
“‘Don’t be mean!’ Misaka Misaka protests, flailing her arms for balance,” Last Order squawked indignantly. She shot back upright and glared.
He eyed her from the corner of his eye, but she just huffed and clambered back up beside him.
“Misaka thinks that you look happy, Misaka Misaka notes with satisfaction.” Last Order grinned. “Misaka thinks that you should stay here with her forever.”
“Happy, huh?” he murmured and closed his eyes.
Such an odd feeling. Happy.
“I found my lost child,” she said, a small quiet familiar voice reaching through the maelstrom of Accelerator’s blackened heart and the black, black wings sprouting from his back and his own scream wailing into the sky.
They weren’t people, they’d told him over and over. They were windup dolls. They didn’t live.
Accelerator wasn’t supposed to defeat them. He was supposed to kill them, or none of this would actually work.
It made him be creative. He had to find something to enjoy in all this, solving a problem differently, in a new way, with a new application of his power. He hurt people who deserved it to find some taste for the damage he was going to inflict, leaned into the adrenaline rush each time.
He spoke to them before each experiment, tested the theory again, and time and again, they failed to respond because they weren’t people.
So this wasn’t cold-blooded murder.
The gun is in his mouth, and there’s something about the glint in Chuuya’s eye that makes Dazai react by smiling around the barrel (more…)
1. Damage the enemy. If you can’t bring the power, don’t bother showing up. If you can’t hurt your enemies, then stay home and out of the way. Villains do damage.
2. Be ruthless about those who get in your way. If you can’t be heartless and hard-hearted, then go be a hero instead. Villains get the job done, no matter what, no matter who they have to hurt.
3. Commit to your goals. If you’re going to cause mass destruction, destroy it all. Be powerful enough to leave the rest unhurt. If your goal just happens to be that no one lays a finger on your sister… Well.
“I’ll show you a real villain aesthetic!” He throws back his head and laughs.
“You’re too loud,” Accelerator grumbled at the unwanted intruder in his bed.
“‘Don’t be so mean!’ says Misaka Misaka, glaring at you.” Last Order was indeed glaring, but she only managed to look pouty and not at all intimidating from where she’d sprawled against his side over the blanket, her frog strangled in her arms.
“You should be in your own bed.” He didn’t bother to prod her away.
She burrowed in closer. “‘It’s nicer here,’ says Misaka Misaka, stifling a yawn.” It didn’t stay stifled.
Accelerator watched her yawn, head dropping, eyes closing… and sighed.
Last Order was asleep.
Proof that Yata loves Saruhiko: he’s making pudding without any fruit or vegetables for the third time in a row, while muttering about immature picky eaters.
“Oh?” Saruhiko asks, with his most annoying, sideways smile and glittering eyes. “I’m the immature one?”
Yata just glares at him. “You can’t go shopping right now because you did in your leg,” he reminds Saruhiko, pointing with the stirring spoon.
Saruhiko scowls.
“Because you were reckless. And that’s the only reason I’m cooking for you.” Yata huffs.
Lying. He’d cook for Saruhiko anyway, does cook for him. He just adds fruits and vegetables.
“Of course, I went to Chuuya!” Dazai beamed—right before he was slammed off the barstool by a furious small redhead with his hand pressed hard enough over Dazai’s mouth, he tasted blood.
He might have been someone important, might have been loved by a mother, a father, embraced by family before he became the human body wrapped around the power of catastrophe and destruction. ____ didn’t feel anything about that, or about the seal between self and the world, or about the seal between that vessel and the world, where people moved in the distant light beyond this blue grey glass.
She hated that face. It wasn’t her own face.
Gray prepared herself each day without availing herself of a mirror. She could do up her hair without looking, clean even her face simply by feel, hide herself beneath a hood from shishou, from herself.
Her mother used to smile at her lovingly. The smiles had changed once she’d acquired this alien face. Everyone had been so happy—everyone but Gray.
And now…
“Shishou?”
“Ah, Gray.” He looked at her without looking at her, without wanting her to house someone else’s spirit, without wanting her to be anyone but Gray.
Gray smiled.
Attolia raised his eyes to hers, and for a moment, Eugenides was staring at her, not her earrings. She did not change expression, she willed him to see, and then he did, frozen.
“Do you know what’s going to happen to you?”
It was everything spoken without words, an offer made and rejected under duress, accepted now for reasons that somehow no longer seemed purely political. But Eugenides had never needed her words to understand, had never needed words to make himself understood.
Even so, he found them, closed his eyes a moment, then stared into her eyes anew. “Yes.”
She looked into those ugly eyes—all the pain and anger and fear that had built up in Kyo over years and years of knowing the truth about his own self—and saw him.
Not just the beautiful moments they’d managed to share. Not just his humanity lying over the top of this cat spirit. Not just the person and form that people loved, but the one they hated, the one that smelled and looked disgusting, even in the eyes of those who swore they loved him.
He saw it in her eyes that she saw him truly.
And stayed.
He had beautiful eyes.
From the first moment Violet saw the Major, she saw something she’d never seen before in the eyes that looked at her. She couldn’t name the feeling there, nor the feeling it struck within her own breast, only that when he reached for her, held her, she didn’t feel compelled to bite or hurt him. She didn’t feel threatened by his touch.
From the moment she looked in his eyes, they calmed and reassured her in a way nothing else had or could. She held onto her broach now and looked into that beautiful color—remembering.
Scepter 4 was responsible for all kinds of supernatural activities and cleanup. It was perhaps forgivable that in the course of one of these cleanups, Fushimi Saruhiko packed up into the van a particular bundle of odd-looking feathers and scales that reeked of magic, noted it on his report, and thought little more about it. (more…)
“The thing is, Chuuya himself couldn’t spell out a numbered list of his reasons for leaving. He didn’t weigh up the good and the bad and make a logical choice. He saw an opportunity, received an offer from Fukuzawa, and he took it because it felt right.” — Find I’m Between Love And Anguish by geckoholic
Dazai thinks he knows why Chuuya joined the Port Mafia, and because he thinks he knows that, he also thinks he understands why Chuuya left it for the Armed Detective Agency.