「Anime x Reader One Shots」

In the Distance (Karma Akabane x Reader)

"There's a weird pleasure in loving someone who doesn't love you."

Karma would admire you from a distance.

He never dared to get too close nor was he keen on being too far away. He was hidden in plain sight from your watchful eyes. He was careful as to not make it clear to you what his true intentions were whenever you noticed him appearing in the same place as you and you never questioned his intentions.

In fact, you wouldn't have cared either way.

Even someone as kindhearted as you found it rather difficult to see the good side of the feared Karma Akabane. It was nearly impossible not to hear the rumors about him and his actions. You always prided yourself on believing that everyone had a little good in them, but you believed Karma was the only exception.

As much as you wanted to see the good in him, you couldn't. Not after every horrible deed of his you've heard of. You believed him to be a human devoid of any emotion - devoid of a heart. You couldn't see just how wrong you truly were.

On the contrary, Karma did have a heart bigger than most and he did have emotions that weighed down on him nearly every day. It was just the matter of expressing them that troubled him the most. He believed emotions to be the cause of all weaknesses; something he couldn't afford to have in a world as cruel as this one.

It wasn't until meeting you that he acknowledged these strange feelings that he would normally despise. It was someone as kind as you who made Karma thing that maybe, just maybe, not every person harbored ulterior motives. Perhaps some of them, like you, were generally just nice people.

You never hid your true feelings of despise from Karma, but that never seemed to bother him much. The matter of you liking him back wasn't one that mattered much to him, he didn't care about mutual feelings. He'd be content with continuing to admire you from a distance knowing full well that you might not ever reciprocate the same feelings as him.

After all, he found some sort of weird pleasure in knowing you didn't love him back.