Chapter Text
She stares at him.
You're just my type! she had chirped, just before she sliced through him. Her smile as she said it, the way her eyes lit up-
It wasn't a terrible way to die, making one more fan happy before he went. It didn't hurt that it was that Hunter either, the one so easily charmed and charming in turn. It was a better end than he deserved.
Yet it wasn't the end. It had been dark, then it was bright. He found himself on the other side of the Honmoon, and like a stray dog, he followed the first familiar scent he could trace.
There was a whisper at the back of his mind, but Gwi-Ma's voice was a flickering ember where it once roared, just remnants now. It was easy enough to ignore the demands to reap, to collect, to fetch souls for such a ashen, dying master.
The scent was hers. That bright Hunter, with a sweet voice and sweeter smile. She hummed as her head bobbed from side to side, sitting upon a large stone before a cliff.
He knew how to sing, but less how to speak. People liked him better silent. Perhaps he should have tried to though, so he wouldn't have startled her when she did turn around at the sound of a twig crunching underfoot.
The Hunter turns, and she stares.
She'd thought him pretty, but that was with glamour veiling him, leaving his skin fresh, his lips rosy, his teeth blunt. Without the illusion, he's no Mystery Saja, no idol-
Under the daylight, in his tattered, singed robes, he's a thing with claws instead of painted nails and tusks sprouting from his black, cracked lips.
She scrambles up, her voice going "What the-wait-what-what-how the-what-how-" like a chittering songbird. She doesn't take flight, though her arms flail for balance and her knives glimmer like iridescent feathers between her fingers. Her body tips as her foot slips-
She whirls around the moment he has his fangs in her hood, pulling her to solid ground. She uses him as leverage, twisting herself free and hopping off his back as he now topples over the edge towards a pond a few feet below-
"Oh gosh oh no oh nonono-!"
Something tugs him back and he lies on his back, and the earth is blue and sitting back upon the grassy sky is the Hunter. She blinks at him. A scrap of his black coat is in her hand. She quickly lets go and stands, the glowing daggers on the ground reappearing in her hands as she brandishes them at him.
"Y-You're-?"
He rolls over so he can stand too, but she barks out a "Stay!"
He stops trying to stand. He stays. Sits, even. She looks at him strangely, so he shifts to sit how humans do, with the knees and legs on the ground and their hands in their lap instead of the crouch he'd been in with his hands planted between them.
She blinks at him. He tilts his head. Her eyes lower, and his own try to follow, but they don't dip below his chest. They don't even reach his chest.
"Your throat," she mutters.
His throat? He raises a hand and its claws to it. Her clothes were light. It would make sense if she didn't want to get dirty. He didn't know if he could do it as cleanly as she could, but dying hadn't been so bad.
He looks at her for confirmation, but there's something else in her eyes then.
No? Wrong? He was bad at telling what people wanted. It had made dancing and singing and posing easy, because those orders were clear, and when he was unsure, he could follow one of the others.
He moves to lower his hand, to try and read her face for a reaction, because then he might be able to tell what she wants from him, if he guessed right at all about her wanting him to slit his throat. He pauses at the strange feeling beneath his fingers.
Across his throat, where her feathers had torn through him, raised flesh tells of a scar.
"Stay," the Hunter says. She looks at him as she steps back.
He stays rooted to his spot.
"Stay," she says again, as if to make sure. "Don't run away, don't go around eating anyone's souls, got it? If you do-"
She raises her blades. She looks like a Hunter again, certainty in her eyes.
He stays, just as he's been doing.
The Hunter's expression cracks. Confusion? Pity? She breathes. She finally turns her back to him, shouting, "MIRA! RUMI!"
He stays. He watches her go, her scent fading.
Mira. Rumi. Zoey. Huntrix. Zoey's name curved with strange letters, two of them alike the one his leader gave him.
Zoey. Something of it was soft, curling, but it zipped like an arrow too, like her daggers. It suited her.
Zoey, he tries to say, but pain pricks his throat when he attempts utter it even softly.
With or without Gwi-Ma then, the voice she liked was gone now too.