Mãi bên cạnh Người (Always by your side)

1. Arrogant

Summary:

How do the ones who're obsessed with power express their feelings?

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"I'm back, Tachi."

Aoi greets her partner, yet the hands gently pushes the inn's door while peering in to take a quick look at everything both inside and outside the room, before slowly entering in absolute silence. Sure enough, it's so weird that even being a real ninja, she still senselessly calls out targets' names before sneakily doing suspicious stuff to them just like that. But considering the fact that this girl once have had a period of living alone in her childhood, and now saying that word (1) has become an inherent habit, it could at least still be a reasonable lie for this suspicious action, in the rare case that he was still awake and knew what her true intentions were.

Though if that "rarity" came true one day, maybe there would be no excuse or lie at all. I'll definitely just rip him to pieces. Then, kill myself after that.

Aoi frowns in annoyance, blushes slightly at the humiliating vision in her mind right now. Shaking her head slightly to shake off unnecessary thoughts, she then lowers her center of gravity like a four-legged predator, straightens out the tail behind her back for balance, then moves slowly and steadily toward the misty shadow at the corner of the room. Hiding and making a slow approach like this has never been a challenge for a skilled one like her, and it's not the first time she's done this. But honestly, it still doesn't suit Aoi's style at all, since in almost every fights, "face-to-face combat" and "no retreat" are the only "strategies" she can think in the battlefield.

In the place where she's heading, there's a tall young man with long white hair covering half of his face, dressing like the Elite ninja of the Mist Island centuries ago, sitting cross-legged like meditation.

On his calm face, she can see the eyes sunken by dark circles from countless tears in the past. Those, as always, still closes, which make it hard to tell if he was still awake or asleep from the start.

Beside him, is a bizarre odachi (2) sealed in unusually large bone-dry demonic claws. The blade, though only partially exposes, still radiates a soft blue light in the darkness of the room, as dreamlike as the moonlight from outside the window. In contrast, the rebellious "living scabbard", which is tightening its grip around the blade all the way to the sword guard, are making the eerie crackling sounds like coming from the abyss.

...After a few minutes of moving so slowly as if she is standing still, until the distance between them shortens to nearly two-third of a meter, tense Aoi finally can be able to relax, temporarily believes that the person in front of her is already dead to the world at the moment.

Still in her lowered stance, she carefully brings her face to his. The blue eyes intently observes the silence surrounding his body and blade, to the point that she almost forgets to breathe. It seemed that neither of them had noticed Aoi's very close presence yet, maybe, since if that was the case, the air in this room would have already begun to coil into whirlwinds, and resounded in the air like a chorus, to the point as sharp as the howl of dragons and demons.

"Tachi doesn't eat or sleep, huh?" Aoi smirks and giggles in a tone just barely audible for her to hear. "Now look at you, being so careless that can't even realize I have come this close. Not so godlike as what the others have always exaggerated for hundreds of years, aren't you?"

Finally, as usual, from the day the two of them reaches Carano, after the sneaky step one she has to suppress all of her emotions in to complete, Aoi slowly sits right on her partner's legs underneath. She gently touches the face hidden after his long white hair, stroke his cold cheek and the dark circles around his eyes, cherishes them like a treasure that she doesn't want to lose at any cost...

"...Because the others don't truly know anything about you. Whether it's the old dragon geezer, Airi, or that po-faced whatever-walker (3), they're all the same." She whispers to him, but as if talking to herself. "Everyone has always seen you like something so far, so grand to reach. Only I can understand. Only me that you can rely on! Well, to think about it again, whatever..."

And then, putting on those parched lips, a light, meaningless kiss. Meaningless, just like the silly poems she's been bored to death to hear him mutter, since the day they knew each other.

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Notes:

(1): Aoi says "Tadaima". A word that Japanese use to inform that they are home. This word can be used even if they live alone.

(2): "Odachi" is a type of large curved Japanese blade. Tachi's weapon, Song of Fangs, is possibly this kind of blade.

(3): The way Aoi calls Hayate, depending on his nickname "Ghostwalker". :>