For Nobara

The rain comes too heavily, pelting on the gray city of the Hidden Rain like the clouds feel it too, how her black obsidian eyes are embedded with such intensity he feels it—in the gravity of her gaze as his fingers clench through strands of her black hair. This devil from Koori, the reason why they infiltrated its grounds just to obtain the likes of such a monster.

And yet she is only a child, an idea he will never fully grasp. This monster with sleep in her gentle eyes and pale hands intertwining with his blood-tainted fingers.

"Kaku..."

His room is a mess of books, of flickering candles and dead men's faces crossed with red ink along their canvases. But she is the only distinct naivety in this room that he pulls away from her cold hands, and something else he does not quite understand about her.

And the murderer in him recedes back—recedes back from something beneath her gaze.

She has their eyes, he realizes. Ashen, dark, and cold.

Even though she looks at him like this.

Childlike.

"My name is Kakuzu," he grunts distantly, pulling himself away from the tangled futon and books, from her. "And as much as I am against it... it seems we have been made partners, so at least remember my name."

He would have never tolerated it, but something about her unsettles him too that he pauses to take everything about her in. Her gaze pulls at him in a way he cannot explain, until he notices her hand on his cloak, a handful of it as she begins to cling onto him in a way he would have never allowed anyone else to.

"Ka... Kakuzu."

And just a bit, his expression seems to change.

Her eyes—they are wide awake and endless. It makes him falter at the uncertainty about her, that he feels the urge to reach out his fingers to brush the strands of stray hair away from her forehead. Yet as he sees the way she cowers in his touch like he meant to hurt her, he questions whether this is the fruit of the stories in her eyes.

But soon the thought disappears, because no more than a moment later she finally begins to sink into him. And her gaze softens when she realizes his touch is gentle, when his calloused hand roughened by time is nothing like the hands that once touched her.

And he watches her savor it, like it has been years, like she has been starved of gentleness for years.

"Warm," she says. "Kakuzu is very warm..."

And yet Kakuzu isn't warm, that much he knows. He is too cold-blooded, too cruel for stealing lives of too many people over the years of his miserable existence. And yet even then, something about her paper white skin seems far colder than he will ever be. And her eyes, quiet as they are... they are full of violence.