Ink Stained With Blood (Yokai!Ichimatsu x Reader)

Chapter 12

Ichimatsu couldn't move, the snow falling onto his face as he lay motionless in the endless field of white. His heart yearned for him to get and look for (y/n), to find her and keep her safe from both of his older brothers that still stalked the area, but his body refused to respond.

The fight with Osomatsu had completely drained him, eventually falling to the raw brutality of the oni's strength before being launched out of the rotting house and into the snowstorm that had been brewing throughout the night. When he landed, Ichimatsu couldn't attempt to stand up as his stomach begged for food, something that he had been willfully ignoring for the past week. As a yokai, he wouldn't die of starvation, but the lack of food had clearly impacted his strength much more than he thought it would.

He was forced to shed his larger kitsune form when he couldn't stay awake any longer, waking up hours later when the sun was starting to rise from the horizon as the snow drifted down much slower than the storm in the night hours.

"(Y/n)..." His throat was parched, rough from the howling and yelling last night. Weakly rolling from his back onto his stomach, Ichimatsu managed to get his legs and arms underneath him before attempting to stand up in the snow. His clothes were completely stained with blood, the wounds slowly healing throughout the night as he rested, but they clearly marked where he had landed and slid to a stop in the pure white snow.

Right now, (y/n) needed him to be with her...she was just a human that couldn't hold her own against the yokai that were hunting her down.

Ichimatsu staggered forward, one foot hesitantly moving in front of the other, as he followed the faint scent of his fiancée deeper into the woods.

The trail bobbed and weaved through the trees until it met a road carved right through the forest, the snow pressed down by several feet and carts that had passed by during the night. (Y/n)'s scent was harder to detect under the more recent smells but it suddenly veered back off the path, drawing Ichimatsu's curiosity as he cautiously moved back into the forest. As his fiancée's scent weaved through the trees haphazardly, an familiar old scent followed right behind hers as Ichimatsu's heart began to pulse with anger.

Karamatsu had found her.

Ichimatsu hurried onward as the scent grew thicker, fear and anger fighting with each other in his heart as he hobbled. The scents led him to a scene of ruin.

Trees were ripped up from their roots, fresh dirt exposed deep in the earthen wounds as large claw marks scratched at the trees and long gouges in the ground that resembled something taking a bite out of the dirt. Blood was sprayed in almost every direction around Ichimatsu as he moved towards the center of the battleground, his icy blue eyes taking in as much information as they could. An amalgamation of scents hit his nose, the most pronounced one was (y/n)'s fear.

If Karamatsu was drinking in that fear, then it was possible for him to overpower whatever had challenged him here. The question was, though, who had enough courage to challenge an ao-andon while it was feeding?

Ichimatsu's stomach sounded its protest, making him double over in pain as he fell to his knees on the ruined ground. Gritting his teeth and shutting his eyes tightly, he tried to mentally shove the pain to the back of his mind before he could feel his other self start to take over, his teeth growing sharper as his fingernails extended into wicked looking claws.

A certain scent caught the other's attention, surging forward as Ichimatsu's control of his own body was wrenched away from his grip, mentally yelling at the other to stop as his body shifted further into the full form of an enlarged kitsune.

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My body felt sore as a warmth softly caressed my skin from underneath a heavy weight pressing me down into the ground. I cautiously opened my eyes to see a rock wall that extended past my vision, the dirt pressing up against it as I lay on the ground with something black and fuzzy resting near my face. Gingerly lifting my hands up, I felt the rough fur of a bearskin draped over my body, a rush of heat hitting my face as I quickly looked up to where the heat had come from.