Completed Only a Massage

What else was left?

She continued to toy with him, even in the face of her own demise. That lingering feeling of something sinister. She had no intention of telling him what he wanted to know. She made that very clear. This was so strange. Perhaps the strangest encounter he'd ever had. He was not one to leave a threat to him and his allies alive, however.

A deep and sympathetic sigh came from his lips followed by a closing of his eyes.

"Perhaps in your next life you may live and die simpler. It is all we can hope for, no?"

He pulled the blade away from her neck, and then swung back at it with all his might.
 
  • Devil
Reactions: VigiloConfido
Anima's smile remained unbroken.

Her tender words: "You are loved."

And she made no attempt to dodge or shield herself, only stared deeply into Jirou's eyes. The sword sliced cleanly into her neck and through her flesh and through her bone and came out effortlessly on the other side, simply allowing it to happen. She stood for a moment, tiny twitches of her fingers from her hands down at her sides, still an ephemeral spark of life in her eyes as blood ran down in flowing red sheets around her neck and then--in the passing of that moment--her body dropped unceremoniously to the ground and her severed head fell after it and everything that Anima, daughter of the sorceress Khorvayne and the incubus she had summoned and let shrivel to death upon Arethil, came spilling out in pulsating waves from her neck. A spurt of blood and there the innocent girl whom Kylesia had tried to save in Elbion; a spurt of blood and there that same girl giving in at long last to her Mother's wishes and the dark nestled within her heart and committing her first murder; a spurt of blood and there the woman fleeing across the span of the world in abject horror of the Great Divine who Watched her; a spurt of blood and there the woman who had become the Amalgamation with Mother's help and came so close to transcendent bliss.

The heart that had beat intimately with Jirou's own slowed. Stopped. Her head lay on the floor and tiny crackles of dark sorcery rippled intermittently around her jaw and her chin and her brow and Hannah's face--a thin mask of flesh--slid off of Anima's own. Her hair turned black and her eyes gray and her skin some few tones darker and the shape of her skull adjusted: the Masquerade had ended.

Stillness. Her body did not move, and the blood pulsing from her neck ceased and the pool on the floor reached its extent. Her eyes remained open, frozen forward, as if still staring at Jirou even if they were truly oriented to the floor and the wall.

There were many forms of intimacy. Weren't there.

There was a boy once. Named Jirou. A boy who had never killed anyone, good or evil--much like Anima.

And that boy was dead. Dead long before he had come here.

Yet the last piece of conscious awareness: the taste of cherries.

A love, sincerely felt, that Anima had helped further him along on his path toward the dark. That she was now a permanent scar on his soul. He would carry her with him, as she had carried others.

A delightful.

Embracing.

Jirou
 
  • Thoughtful
Reactions: Jirou
Effortless, and unsatisfactory.
He watched as Anima died before he could think twice. It shouldn't have mattered. He killed so many murderers before her. This felt as if he'd killed several people in one, though. Some who deserved it and some who should have had better.

He swung his shikomizue behind him, the blood escaping the blade in an ugly yet graceful line of crimson against the ground. She accepted her death so easily. Someone who'd been prepared for it and even seemed to want it. And it left such a weight on Jirou's chest.

He sheathed his blade. He put his tunic back on. He felt so much worse for wear. He stared for what seemed like an eternity. Down at her head. Which had now changed to it's natural form. He remembered her clearly now. The person he saw beneath the Amalgamation. He had felt it was her the whole time, but now he saw it. Why did he feel...

Fear?

Why did he feel...

Empty?

Who was this woman? What had she been playing at? And why, oh why...

Did this feel so far from over?
 
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