"The damage is infectious, and all that can be done is purge it all and start from scratch."
If life is a series of choices, then perhaps that just means that life is a game? To Akazawa Saki, that's all life really is. She refutes the existence of G...
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In perhaps the most unlikely of circumstances, Obi found himself gleaning his first real piece of Akazawa Saki's personality lying beneath the outward wall of bitterness and distrust.
And it came in the form of her bizarre interest in peering down over his hands.
He'd been confused at first when she'd requested to see his hands of course, though he was the one who put forward the idea of proving that at least he meant her no harm. He'd humored her with just the smallest dismissal and chalked the request down to something completely unrelated to the necessity of his hands at all. But when she legitimately began to inspect his hands in just the same way Shirayuki would sit there investigating a brand new plant put in front of her, it was safe to say he was quite intrigued by the whole spectacle. Perhaps she was reading the wear on his hands or the scars that peppered his hands in telltale ways? He didn't know one way or the other. He didn't understand anything about this woman beyond the fact that she just did not like people.
Admittedly, he'd stared at her face far longer than what was considered respectable, however, it was the first time he'd been able to actually look at the woman without earning vicious refute and glares combined. It dawned on him as he watched her brow furrow in concentration and her right eye twitch in obvious frustration, that the person he'd chalked up as a thirty-something old, embittered hag of a woman was, if anything, younger than him. In fact, he'd go so far as to guess that she could even be younger than Shirayuki. In spite of the blooded whites of her eyes and the black bruising of her eyesockets caused by the strangulation just hours ago, while Akazawa Saki wasn't trying to practically kill him with the force of her glare alone, she actually looked surprisingly young.
It was only when she had tried to jab his very hands with the sharpened end of a tent peg that Obi realized he had been staring for far too long. Promptly, he tore his gaze away from her face and hoped he didn't earn any further ire from her.
Of course, only seconds passed before he realized what she actually wanted was for him to turn his hands over, and with a well-hidden sigh, he did as she wished. Once Saki had resumed her investigation, Obi found it strangely difficult to keep himself from staring again.
Well, it was impossible to not stare now that he was actually learning something.
Obi could see from the little amount of pain Saki appeared to exhibit that either she had a high pain threshold, or she simply didn't experience pain in the same way that a normal person would. Or, she was simply far too stubborn to let any form of weakness show across her face. Both could be true. He surmised that it was also likely the woman kneeling on the tent floor in front of him was prideful to a fault. He'd even be willing to bet money on that without a second thought.
But in spite of all that, in spite of his staring in an attempt to glean as much of this less guarded side of Saki as he could, the one real thing that stuck out to him was the way that lantern light brought out the rounded, doll-like curves of her face and made her seem almost child-like.
