She was weeping, but not from the pain that had embedded itself into her torso like knives.

Blood spilled from the wound, with her own kagune stuck in her flesh like shards of glass, and the tears tumbling down from her eyes as the thick blood splattered against the black, stony walls. Her chest heaved, and with every breath another mass of blood splattered against the wet ground, staining her feet an inky dark crimson.

She coughed out another quantity of blood, sputtering it out like trapped words, and collapsed to her knees. With her remaining strength, she tugged the four legs out from her body, a sickening squelch sounding from the gruesome extraction, and flopped on the floor in front of the man, her massive tail falling limp to the side with a thud before slowly slinking back into her lower back, slithering like a snake.

There was a moment of silence, the seconds ticking by painfully, excruciatingly, like a knife being stabbed and yanked out of your body over and over and over again.

Then, like the song of angelic voices from the heavens, he broke the spellbound silence.

"Etsuko-chan!" he cried, fumbling towards her on his hands and knees. He heaved up her body and cradled her in his lap, lifting her head so she could look up at the face that was drenched in blood, sweat, and tears. "Oh God, please no!"

She struggled with her throat, but managed to only squeeze out grunted whimpers.

"Don't speak," he pleaded, his eyes flashing around frantically, desperately for anything that could stop the bleeding. He stripped his body from his t-shirt, which clung to him with the blood and grime that smeared against its surface. He huffed. "Don't talk, you hear me? And don't you dare close your eyes!"

His desperation stuck her like an unanticipated strike of a hammer; she was confused. She was a ghoul, and he hated ghouls. He should hate her right now, spit at her and yell at her for deceiving him. She wanted him to kick her, treat her like the scum she was, and throw her in the dumpster to wither and die and rot for the rest of eternity.

It didn't make sense. He hated ghouls.

"Why...?" she whispered, her voice scraping against the bloody walls of her throat.

His breath hitched; was he really sobbing?

"I'm gonna get you out of here," he said, his voice shaky with anxiety, fear. "You're gonna be okay, Etsuko-chan."

Etsuko blinked, feeling the warm liquid from her torn torso trickle and plop onto the blood-soaked ground, the ooze still flowing from the gaping wounds that ripped open her flesh. He took his t-shirt and ripped it down the middle, creating a massive sheet and folding it in on itself multiple times. Taking the rather useless makeshift bandage, Ichijou began wrapping it tightly around Etsuko's waist, closing the holes and tightening the fabric even more as if it could though it could somehow plug up the bleeding. He tugged and grunted, the sweat beading down the side of his face as he fell totally immersed into saving her. Stop the bleeding. Stop the bleeding.

She tried putting the pieces together, staring blankly up at the night sky with her blurring vision, completely starless and void, and attempted to somehow arrange the facts so they could explain the phenomenon that was unraveling before her now.

It didn't make any sense.

"You...hate me..." Etsuko huffed, her chest heaving from the massive effort that it took just to breathe. "Why...?"

"How many times do I have to tell you?" Ichijou insisted upon at her with desperation, his brows furrowed so deeply it seemed as though his fragile face would shatter like glass. "I'm not leaving you. I love you, Etsuko-chan, and nothing in the world could ever change that."

The words pierced her heart harder than her own kagune had, splitting her open and extracting out her soul like a ruthless demon. She felt herself ascending-she didn't know where-but for a brief moment, for some odd reason, she felt like she was transcending.

She was free.

She started to lift up a bloody hand, quivering and trembling and white a bone, with her tears the only source of warmth that radiated throughout the miles and miles of desolate wasteland that was her very soul.

Release. She felt release.

Her palm reached his cheek, cradling it weakly as the blood smeared against his stubbly skin, the panic still etched deeply into his anguished features. For some reason, the sight of him in this state, with her in this state, soothed her to the core.

It was a bizarre type of peace that filled her chest to the brim with a throbbing ache. With another blink, staring up at him in an empty shock, her expression melted away into that of a slightly hurried pressure. Her face darkened, and the sudden need for flesh sent her instincts into a swirling frenzy; her extremely miniscule superego did everything in its incoherent power to fight off the id, the inner voice of her unconscious that chanted its burning desire for immediate pleasure-for flesh. Blood. Humans.

Oh god. No. She couldn't eat him. She couldn't possibly have the nerve to eat him.

The man who loved her.

"Ichijou..." she moaned softly, almost begging. "The ghouls..."

Ichijou stared at her for a moment, incomprehensive, but then gaped at her in alarm as she swept a pink tongue slowly over her chapped lips; the shock rippled through him as though a bolt of lightning had struck his body.

"As in...to eat?" he whispered, despair lacing his every breath.

Etsuko only swallowed, struggling but succeeding somewhat to nod her head once.

"Need...to heal..." she gritted through clenched teeth, her breath hissing. "Don't want...eat...you..."

Ichijou sat there, staring down at the woman with his darkened eyes wide with fear. He turned his head to the side, glaring at the bodies that littered the alley around them, and then turned back to her. He nodded stiffly.

"Understood. I'll get you one."

He lifted her gently from his lap and set her softly on the ground, getting up from his seat to make his way over to the nearest ghoul: the black-haired female. Upon reaching the ghoul, he bent down and grabbed her arm, dragging the body over to Etsuko, whose swirling crimson eyes sparkled and flickered with an edgy rage and hunger. And though the insanely intoxicating lust for human flesh overrode all of her rationality, luckily, she could not for the life of her move anymore.

She gulped.

Ichijou tossed the body next to Etsuko, his breathing heaving but not from the effort that it took him to drag the body closer to the ghoul. Etsuko, who struggled immensely for every additional breath she took into her crushed lungs, drew out two, painful words.

"Feed...me..."

The man's eyes grew incredibly round, filled with horror and a skeptical apprehension.

"Feed...you?" he regurgitated the words back, his mouth barely moving as he spoke. "You want me to feed you...?"

Etsuko wheezed, coughing out a splatter of blood as a sort of morbid confirmation. And Ichijou, being the compassionate and devoted man that he was, had long been hindered from denying this woman from anything she stipulated.

He clenched his hands into tight fists.

"All right. Just give me a moment."

Etsuko swallowed, letting her head fall to the side in order to catch the man's gaze; her goldenrod eyes, receding and slowly withering, thanked him with all the sincerity her blighted being could muster.

Ichijou went and crouched by the dead creature's side, patting her clothing down before identifying the sheath hidden beneath her form-fitted black shirt. He ripped the holster from the belt and unsheathed the knife, twisting it in his grasp to regain the sensation of using it again. He examined the blade, turning it around and around to fully inspect the weapon. His brow furrowed, and allowed his hand to fall slack to let the blade slip past his fingers and down tip-first into the ghoul.

Much to his relief, the edge sunk cleanly into the ghoul's bizarre flesh-a stolen quinque, as he had presumed. Metallic silver in hue, it looked no different than an ordinary dagger, though tiny specs of a dazzling teal green could be identified inside the metal if a person could live long enough to study it so closely. From the looks of it, it was a prototype of some sort, one of many that was mass-produced. He raised an eyebrow.

However, without any further hesitation, Ichijou crouched down and began saw off chunks of flesh from the female's torso, starting to butcher the body by bringing the edge of the knife down the middle of the abdomen, severing the belly from the main body and cracking down on the exposed ribcage, splitting open the ribs and tearing them apart with his bare, bloody hands. He continued gutting the ghoul, neatly setting each piece aside but working quickly as he heard a weak moan escape Etsuko's mouth-possibly to tell him to hurry the hell up already.

He hopped over the body and took a seat next to Etsuko, crossing his legs and wasting no time in taking a large chunk of meat into his lap; he fought off the instinctive shiver that threatened to shake his spine. He sawed off a corner, which was still covered in the supple, pale skin of the ghoul, and slowly inserted the chunk into Etsuko's wanton mouth.

She chewed it, swallowing it only shortly after three slow bites, and then opened her mouth for more. The man gulped, fighting to keep his head level as he sliced off another sliver of meat, placing it in her mouth again, repeating the process until the head-sized chunk was completely gone; and still, she demanded more.

He fed her-in pieces-the back, the shoulders, the thighs and calves, and slowly, after an hour of rest and substance, regained enough strength to at least grab and eat the entrails by herself. Ichijou eased back, relieved that he didn't have to carve any more meat for her, and just remained immobile in his spot as she continued to devour the organs, ravenous, rambunctious, frenzied beyond repair.

He watched in a terrified awe, watching her tear the bloodied tissues to pieces, chomping the shreds and swallowing them just as quickly, only to rip into the next ghoulish morsel.

Eventually, everything was consumed, the bones properly and gruesomely gnawed clean and the brain emptied from the smashed cranium; Etsuko gently hooked two fingered behind the eyeballs, curling them against the sockets, and tugged the spheres out from the skull. She brought the pair of eyes up to her own, gazing at them with a sad disgust, scoffing as she swallowed the bitter and overbearing taste of acridness that punched the back of her throat. With one last breath, she plopped the eyes into her mouth, and chewed them until they became nothing but sour mush against her writhing tongue. She swallowed hard.

"Are you not going to eat the kagune?" Ichijou asked her softly, his arms, encrusted in black blood, wrapped tightly around his knees. His expression was painfully blank.

Etsuko blinked at him, the bewilderment still straining her mind. She cleared her throat.

"I've eaten enough of those in my lifetime," she murmured back lightly. "Besides, they're weak. It'd be a waste of time for me to suck up their mediocrity."

Her cruel and blunt words dissipated every letter he had prepared for next, and in turn, he just sat there enveloped in his silence. It was still between them for a while before she spoke again.

"You never told me why you hated ghouls so much, my love," she articulated, leaning against the wall as she grunted, bringing a hand to cover the blood-soaked t-shirt that wrapped firmly around her waist; the bleeding had, for the most part, stopped.

Ichijou just let out a nervous laugh, scoffing as he tilted his forehead down to rub against the fabric of his pants. He remained that way for a while, hiding his horrified face from the ghoul that gazed lovingly at him from a close distance. A few minutes had passed before he regained his ability to speak.

"There was a ghoul I was infatuated with in high school," he whispered in despair, "named Kamishiro Rize."

Etsuko's face fell, her eyes growing wide as she stared at the man with his head dipped down still. She sucked in a breath.

"Rize?" she hissed faintly. She added quietly to herself, "the Binge Eater?"

Ichijou nodded slowly.

"I found her in the library eating a fourth year girl. She escaped before I even had the chance to say her name."

Etsuko gaped at the man, her breathing ragged and disconnected.

"My dear, I'm so sorry to hear that," Etsuko murmured, feeling her heart tug for him. She stared at the blood-soaked ground, feeling herself being pulled further down into a bottomless void of remorse. "That must have been terrible."

Ichijou just shrugged, dull.

"It left a mark on me-the encounter, I mean. I vowed to destroy every last one of them so they wouldn't hurt anyone anymore."

Etsuko flinched, unconsciously letting out a horrified peep as she pressed herself a bit harder against the wall. She was frightened, and all she wanted to do then was just die already.

It would have been better for everyone that way, anyhow.

"Are you going to destroy me?" she whispered, her voice laced in despair.

Ichijou lifted up his face suddenly, soaked with tears that reddened his now swollen eyes, with his eyebrows knitted together in fury. Etsuko winced, the terror spiking through her body like knives.

"Don't you dare say that," he growled darkly, glaring at her through narrowed, vicious eyes. The expression startled her; he had never shown any sort of hostility towards her until right then. "Don't say that. Of course I'm not, Etsuko-chan. I love you. I love you so much, Etsuko."

He had crawled his way over to her, leaning himself against the wall next to her, and wove his bare arm around her shoulders to bring her closer to his body. The sweat and dirt had smeared against his skin, with her pale legs draped across his lap as they just sat there, entangled in each other's tortured embrace. Etsuko gazed at him with tearful eyes, her body shaking with fear; her bottom lip quivered.

"You shouldn't," she murmured, now beginning to cry again. "You shouldn't love me. You should have never met me. You should hate me," she sobbed.

"But I don't," Ichijou insisted frantically, pressing his palm against her cheek as he stared longingly into her hollow eyes; he began to cry too. "I don't hate you, Etsuko-chan, I love you! God, I love you so much I don't know what to do with myself. I don't care if you're a ghoul for Christ's sake, I've known since the whole Mad Temptress thing had started back up again."

The shock and horror spread across her face like a wildfire, her eyes broadening and her mouth hanging slack as she gaped at the man who held her in his arms as though she would fall apart at any moment. And perhaps that part was right.

"You...you knew?" she whispered dreadfully. "You knew I was a ghoul?"

Ichijou sucked in a breath, as if to stabilize himself, and then nodded once.

"It started the first time we made love," the man confessed gravely. "You have tattoos-on both of your hipbones-of a scorpion and a lizard. They represent the ghouls, right? Scorpion and Lizard."

Upon hearing his alias, she felt something inside her snap, and she started to cry.

His eyes fluttered, alarmed, and tightened his arms around Etsuko's petite frame.

"Sweetheart, what's wrong?" he asked her, shaken.

At that moment, Etsuko began to weep.

"His name was Takashi," she whispered, disclosing the matter softly, gently, as though the memory of it would shatter if she spoke too loudly.

She buried her face into Ichijou's bare chest, her shoulders wrecked with sobs as she cried and cried, unable to stop as she felt the remorse and regret shooting through her like bullets. She couldn't stop herself, and the only source of ease she felt was when she finally, finally, spilled everything to him.

"He was everything to me. He saved me when I was trapped, when it had been almost a year since I had run away from my parents."

There was a brief silence, nothing but the faint strokes of his hand across her crimson-splotched hair filling the void. Ichijou tightened his lips into a thin line.

"He took me in," Etsuko went on, her voice now soft whines. "He was kind-the kindest person I had ever encountered, and he took me in as his little sister. I grew to love him, and he grew to love me."

The man remained there, though there was strain in his darkened eyes, with his lips now pressed gently on the top of her head. He listened.

She told him her tale, how her destruction began when she was born to two eccentrics, even among the ghoulish race. She told him of their experiments, and how she vaguely remembered those times where they would beat her and drug her in order to dissect her body; she was a hybrid, and that fascinated them to no end.

The two scientists continued the mistreatment of their subject, of whom they rarely called "daughter," and conducted so many cruel and unusual trials that she questioned why she was still even remotely sane; the traumatizing events eventually turned her hair to a stark, ghostly white.

It wasn't until one day when the tar-haired woman suggested cannibalism that they began their final experiment, which would ultimately lead to their own incredible demise.

After their deaths, she rampaged through Tokyo relentlessly, and the CCG, who began to violently hunt her down, decided to label the new SSS rank as the notorious "Scorpion." She told him about Takashi, how she rescued him, and how he had died in her arms.

And then she told him about her grudge against humanity.

"I didn't mean for this to happen," she cried. "I didn't want to fall in love with you. I told myself I would hate humans for the rest of my life. I wanted to make you suffer, because you looked so much like him. I wanted to punish you for looking so much like him-and you were a Dove, out of all things! I wanted to hurt you, but every time I tried, he would appear as if to stop me! I couldn't do it. I couldn't hurt him. I couldn't hurt you."

Ichijou still remained stiff as a board, sitting up with his back straight against the brick wall as he embraced the woman still, his face staring straight into the next wall in front of him, and his dark pools of eyes deep with all of the deception in the world.

Her heart sank.

"So you kept this from me," he murmured finally, his voice grave.

Etsuko broke, her voice snapping as she pressed herself tighter against his body, as though she wanted to meld into him to eliminate any chance of him leaving her.

She sobbed.

"I'm sorry," she wept profusely. "I wanted to live a normal life-with you! I wanted to see what it was like being human, to blend into the human society like what Oniisan had taught me when he was still alive. He taught me that we weren't so different from humans, and that with a little effort from both sides, we could all live together happily like two parts of a whole. He showed me that we were more than just beasts hungry for chaos and flesh, and he taught me the importance of relationships and how to enjoy them, as well as the gift of life! I had lost that mentality the moment he died, but the second you came..."

Etsuko wept harder into his body, sucking in a wheezing breath before breaking down into another round of shoulder-wrecking sobs.

"You gave me my life again," Etsuko sniveled. "You've loved me and cared for me more than anyone could have, and in return I lied to you. I'm sorry Ichijou-kun, I really am, please forgive me..."

Etsuko sobbed harder than she had ever cried in her entire life. She sobbed harder than the time Takashi had been stolen from her. She sobbed harder than she did when he had died in her arms. She sobbed, because she had failed; failed Takashi, for blaming the humans for his death, even though he told her not to; failed Ichijou, because she had loved and lied to him for so long; failed herself, because she had allowed herself to succumb to the darkness Takashi had tried so hard to dig her out of. She had betrayed herself, and she couldn't for all of the chaos in the world forgive herself for that sin.

Then, without any given warning, like the warm touch of a fire in the middle of a white blizzard, she felt his embrace tighten around her icy form. The hot tears spilled from her eyes, which were red and irritated from all the saline that dripped down her cheeks. She felt one hand snake up to tangle their fingers in her silvery hair, the other dropping down to wrap protectively around her waist. She buried her face into the crook of his neck, wrapping her own slender arms around his shoulders as they held each other, pulling tighter against each other's bodies as though the entire world would fall apart if they had let go. They clasped at each other firmly, yearning intensely to meld their tormented bodies into one. They said nothing, but the silence rang inside their ears louder than a thousand screams.

"I don't want you to apologize," Ichijou murmured tenderly into her ear. "I don't want you to cry anymore, Etsuko-chan."

Etsuko sniffled, hiccupping as the weeps still assailed her in waves; she sucked in a desperate breath, desperate to level out her breathing.

"Etsuko-chan," Ichijou whispered lovingly, his voice filled with ardor and immense affection. "Etsuko-chan..."

"W-what i-is it, Ichijou-k-kun?" Etsuko sputtered.

Ichijou closed his eyes and broke the embrace, just slightly, so he could lean his forehead against hers. He breathed, taking in a deep inhale, as if to steady himself, and then spoke again gently.

"I don't want you to feel lonely anymore, Etsuko-chan," he susurrated. "I don't want you to hurt anymore. All I want you to do is marry me."

And thus, those last nine words were her final undoing. Etsuko, crumbling down into a pile of finely crushed ash, spread her face out into a fearsome wail. She locked her arms around his shoulders once more and dug her body into his, her own white shoulders wrecked with sobs as the immense sorrow and euphoria clashed each other in a boundless battle of dominance. She could not muster any strength to even form words out of her open mouth, and instead only nodded vigorously. Ichijou, satisfied, allowed a crack of a smile to spread across his dirt-smeared face, and brought his beloved into a warm, heart-melting kiss.

They felt secure, locked onto each other as they always felt when holding one another, but their hearts aching as though they had been wandering for a long, long time.

~~~✿~~~

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