Something There - Akaza x Reader

Wrapped in Lantern Light

The forest had fallen into a peaceful silence when Akaza began to trek down paths familiar to him despite their unmarked existence.

His footsteps were quiet as they traversed the foliage around the cluster of cedars though he walked briskly with the unconscious woman in his arms. His bright golden gaze remained fixated ahead of him, trying to focus solely on the environment and the beings in the forest around them, but try as he might, he couldn't dedicate his full attention on where he was going. There were subtle things about the girl in his arms which continued to cause his attention to stumble upon her repetitively, wordlessly beckoning those otherworldly hues of his onto her being.

The gentle, almost ticklish sensation of her hair brushing against his arm with every move he made when she'd sway just the slightest bit though he tried to maintain as stable a grip on her as possible; the rhythmic warmth of her constant, quiet breath blanketing the skin of his bare chest, causing gooseflesh to come to life along the length of his arms every so often; the occasional tear which slowly dripped and trailed from her cheeks to wet his flesh and soak into his open haori; the odd scent of her, so feminine and delicately mixed with the natural essence of the woods, something so foreign to him, it kept him wondering how long it had been since he had smelled something similar from this close.

In a word, the human woman was completely and utterly distracting.

He was normally much more focused and attentive when it came to his objectives, but this entire scenario with the Slayer in his arms was totally off-script from what he was accustomed to. It left him baffled with himself, almost at a complete loss on what he should be doing. He had some course of action to take for the time being, but whether that was the right move for him to make or not was still incredibly unclear to him.

As he pondered the thought, his walking slowed, and subconsciously, his gaze lowered upon the nameless woman swaying lightly in his arms. He didn't really need to look where he was going. He had walked through the spaces in between the densely packed cedars so many times, he practically had every single seedling, adolescent, adult and fallen tree perfectly mapped out in his head. Effortlessly, he could sense the weaker beings which inhabited the forest alongside him, but he didn't really care about their presences. Unlike the humans, he didn't need to worry about the other demons. It truly had to be a mindless creature freshly born of rage and desolation with nary an idea on how the world around them works for one of them to charge at him like the weakling from earlier.

That in mind, he presumed he could devote a moment or two to observe the woman in his arms.

He found himself staring aimlessly at first, the sound of the breeze encouraging the leaves of the cedars to dance to the sound of the orchestrating crickets filling the space of existence around him.

Even asleep, she looked incredibly...sad. Somber. Distraught. Her brow was furrowed lightly, creasing her delicate skin on her forehead. Her lips, plush and softly reflecting the distant glow of the moon whenever the canopy allowed, were pulled downwards. A few of her tears had left their streaming trails on her skin alongside the corners of those lips of hers before they had dripped and disappeared beneath her chin.

He supposed it was only natural that she looked that way after what happened. He assumed most humans would be fairly distressed or troubled to have a confrontation with a couple of demons in the woods – but then again, she wasn't just any ordinary human and he already knew he couldn't have been the cause for her original strife.

Mimicking the expression on her face, Akaza's brow had furrowed, perplexed once again by the thoughts running through his mind.

What a strange human, He thought to himself. Coming to me on her own like that. She must be out of her mind. If I had been any of the others, she would've been a pile of bones by now.