Snippet #1879799

Old familiarity eased an ancient man’s hand onto a thin woman’s shoulder; camaraderie earned her the light rebuke. Hold there, pup, too much of this and you’ll go soft. Don’t forget me, I’m the man who holds you all in place with his fucking gravity, ponderous and inescapable. The spoken word was almost irrelevant, really.

Dominance stared him down, but the Tengu, brash and foolish as he was, just folded his arms into his sleeves and stared right back. Knowledge flared his nostrils, like an old hound dog on the scent, braying and bawling till his prey was up a tree and doomed to dinner. Tsubasa felt his vision sharpen in response, and knew his eyes had flashed, no longer so human. But then, Humanity was the recessive trait here, wasn’t it?

Tamping down on the tell, he considered the words, chewing over his answer as though it would weigh more in the space between than he did, standing in the rain. “It seems a little bit… kitsch.” He drawled by way of reply, scratching the back of his neck with idle concentration. His look moved askance, old jokes he didn’t understand ran over his answers to rhetorical questions, but he didn’t mind.

No, no, if the shit-eating grin that spread over his face was anything to go by, this was just damn perfect indeed. The air was changing, the mood was shifting, and he was catching on. The tingle of anticipation shot down his spine with all the force of a suicidal pigeon barreling headfirst into a shiny plexiglass window, and even less caution. Square-tipped fingers flexed, bringing vigor to rain-chilled limbs, and the world came alive before his eyes.

He couldn’t have been more happy to comply when that old hound barked his orders, never mind that he wasn’t in the habit of following without proper incentive anymore. The roaring in his blood, the electricity of anticipation that ran in the empathetic undercurrent of the crowd, that was incentive enough. A mottled tongue, half-transformed without his knowledge, darted out and over pointed teeth, and he answered the woman’s unspoken apology with a dark chuckle. Make no mistake, the former monk was no manslayer, but he’d be the first to catch the fight-instinct and run with it.

His thoughts were punctuated only by the measured clack, clack, clack of his unusual footwear against the pavement. He’d always been taught that no matter how fast and how hard you ran, fate would find you in the end.

Right now, in the miserable rain, beside two total strangers, and walking into a helluva lot of unknown, well… that felt quite a bit like fate.