/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>44996253
(1/4)
The echoing of thunder woke me from a dreamless sleep.
Quiet rain pitter-pattered outside the hospital room with the only other sound being the sleeping Amanojaku I shared a room with and the beeping machine beside her.
I got up from the bed and lurched over to her. Eirin told me her sleep was medically induced and that she’d awake sometime soon.
She looked so peaceful like this, almost like a corpse if it wasn’t for the slow rising and falling of her chest, so unlike the spirited individual who bashed me around, almost to death, lecturing me about this or that.
I reached over and slid my hand into her robe, felt her right breast and searched, no luck. Trying the left breast, I press and search again, finding a tiny heartbeat. You’d think an Amanojaku wouldn’t have a heart or at the very least the position would be flipped.
For a while I stayed like that, measuring her heartbeat, feeling it fall in synch with my own. All the while in my left hand, the one she inverted, I held a scalpel, taken from a medical cart when the Inaba were distracted with something or another.
Legends mention all sorts of ways Youkai can only be dispatched with specific tools or chants, but I believe it’s all to do with effort and belief. A method must be suitably difficult to accomplish so one believes it’ll slay the Youkai and a human must be the one to complete the effort.
I knew she would die if I plunged this knife into her weakened heart.
Maybe only good things would happen. Seija attacked humans, how many had she killed up to this point? And it wasn’t just humans, Youkai hated her just as much and perhaps some had even disappeared because of her efforts. Meanwhile, not a few feet from her I sleep, knowing she very well might rise from her bed and finish the job, I could wake up with my body completely inverted as a disgusting bone portrait of a human with her cackling in my ear.
But instead, I decide to put the knife down. I wasn’t that short sighted. Someone would just fill the Seija-shaped hole in the world and who’s to say that I, the perpetrator, wouldn’t inherit her title?
I broker deals to get what I want. Murder just reduced the number of future clients.
This little act was just a flight of fancy, but I think it’s important to let yourself become your enemy every once in a while. It reaffirms who you are.
I think this while holding Seija’s heart in my hand.