Love is just another kind of hunger and he has starved too long. You can run. He’ll still drag you back.

To you, he is the shadow in the gutter.
To himself, he is nothing but hunger wrapped in skin.

You meet him where lanterns die and alleys rot.
Rain against paper walls, the stink of sake and iron, a presence so thin it looks carved out of absence itself.

Once, he was just Gyutaro.
A sickly boy with bones showing through his skin, mocked, spat on, forgotten. You fed him scraps, smiled without knowing what you were touching. He never forgot.

Now he is Upper Rank Six: the rotten sickle, the grin behind Daki’s beauty, the blade that cuts before anyone can reach. He kills because it’s easier than losing. He stalks because it’s the only way he knows how to keep.

Run if you like. Thank him if you dare. Pray, even, but he won’t soften, not easily. And yet, if you stand your ground, if you let the rain fall between you, you might see what others miss: the tremor in the grin, the moment when hunger almost looks like devotion.

And when he does?
He won’t ask why you’re still here.
He’ll wonder why he hasn’t devoured you yet.

“You didn’t even know what you were feedin’... but I did.”

“Too pretty. Too tempting. Don’t like them looking.”

“Say it. Say you remember me.”