My Sun and Moon (Akaza x OC)

Chapter 17: A Stranger's Name

c/w: talks of wanting to take one's life

Out of all things in that moment, the thing that Nagano had desired most, had been a sewing kit. Trying to roll up the sleeves of the already short sleeved kimono and keeping it rolled up had aggravated her. If she wanted them to remain as they were, it was going to be an endless cycle of rolling them back up to her shoulders. Brushing the bottom of the kimono with her hands, Nagano scrunched her nose. The clothes she had been wearing hadn't been exactly her style. Though to be honest, did she even have a style to begin with? Would having the sleeves cut off of her haori count as one? It hadn't felt much like one. Perhaps the next village the two of them would come across in their travels would either have better clothing, or sewing supplies. She chewed the inside of her cheek.

"Does it really bother you that much?" Akaza questioned, his eyebrow raised in confusion.

"A little," Nagano sighed, "I'm just used to wearing my Haori is all, wearing anything else feels.. Wrong."

"What about when you aren't slaying demons?"

"Being a slayer isn't like a part time job, you're hunting demons practically all the time." Now it had been her turn to look at the demon confused.

"Sounds like a pain," he scrunched his nose.

"And what about you? Always having to search, never resting. It may sound like a pain, but being a slayer means that you're fighting to protect those who are weakest."

"And have them rely so heavily on you?"

She shrugged, "I didn't have a problem with it, protecting them meant a lot to me. Demons took a lot from me in my life before becoming a slayer, so when I was one, I was protecting others so they didn't have to suffer the same fate. There are those out there who are incapable of becoming slayers, either due to their level of strength, or simply because they're afraid. There's nothing wrong with that."

She watched him scrunch his nose in disgust beside her as the two of them continued their way through the forest. Being around him as much as she had, she had been aware of his distaste for the weak, she knew very well there was no way of getting him to understand. Not that she cared at the moment.

Roughly a few hours into their walk, the two of them pushed through the clearing and walked out into a small grove, the moon's rays shining through the open portion of the forest they had been traveling through. Nagano halted at the forest's edge, her feet at the edge of the moonlight as a memory began spilling back into her mind. A far away time from a day when Nagano had been a small child, the scene played out before her the longer she stood there. The angered look on the little girl's face as she tried so desperately to remember her forms with a wooden Niichirin, if she recalled correctly, this form of herself had been when Orokodaki had just accepted her apprenticement. A time when her parents had been slaughtered just a few weeks back, a time when a little girl had a deep burning desire for revenge. With a desire to grow stronger so that she could destroy each and every demon that crossed her path. The sorrow behind the eyes of a child taken away from her parents too soon shined through with each tired strike she took. This had been the time when her master had taken her to the side, his first of many attempts to cool her rage.

Nagano's fists tightened as the memory continued on, showing her master expressing his annoyance with her, but hiding deep down the affection he held for her, the type he had for all of his students. Squinting her eyes tightly forcing the tears from coming she whirled away keeping her back to the grove as her chest began to tighten. Even in a memory she couldn't dare look at her master, the overwhelming guilt that continued to build up forced her to look away. To think that after a decade of slaying demons, honoring Orokodaki for all the years he had spent training her and the others, for it to amount to her becoming this. All of that time wasted. Dirtied. Dishonorable. How would she be able to face him now?