tampered | LOG; completed

LOG; completed

When; March 13
Rating; PG
Characters; Knives [

tunetone]
Summary; Meetings with scary men in back alleys can actually be pretty fun~!
Log; Just mere hours after her arrival in the strange city, Kururu had already discovered that she wasn't worrying about getting back anymore. For now, at least, since she had found herself a good distraction.

If you'd call nurturing a plant in a murky alley a good distraction, that is. The small but healthy organism had caught Kururu's attention as she had been pacing through the streets, hoping for any trace of Makigami-sensei. The fact that such a small plant had found its way between stones and pipes was something special to the girl, so she had immediately postponed her search to sit back on her heels and watch the plant while humming a lullaby.

It almost felt like home.

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Knives hated this place for three reasons: First, it was completely foreign to him. He knew nothing about it whatsoever. Second, it had pulled him from Gunsmoke in the middle of realizing his goal, and the world be damned if the humans found a way to fix the situation before he could return. And, finally, his powers seemed considerably limited. He found himself constantly raising a hand to the patch of black hair at his forehead.

The most Knives could do was travel through the backstreets, away from the majority of the human populace, stopping occasionally to gather more information on the fascinating lost technology—laptop, was it?—he'd found.

He rounded a corner and spotted a girl—human—hunched over something in the middle of the alley. Frowning, he approached her, quite ready to invoke his blade to slice her into halves if she didn't move. But upon nearing her, he noticed that she was watching a small plant that had sprouted between the stones, smoothing its wrinkled leaves and humming quietly.

Kururu was too wrapped up in her... plant-business to notice anything around her, much less someone approaching. So when she looked around for a brief moment, she almost jumped to her feet upon seeing the tall figure looming over her like something from those scary movies she had once watched with Hako while being hidden under a blanket.

"You scared me for a moment!" she said, still a bit shaking but more cheery now that she had gotten over the biggest shock. Makigami-sensei had once said that she should look out for people like the person next to her, but this man didn't seem so bad.

Her gaze returned to the plant and she smiled. "It's a brave little thing," she said quietly before starting to hum again.

He stared at her apathetically, not quite sure how to react to this odd circumstance. The cells of his arm had been in the middle of mutating, but they receded back to their original form.

Knives' gaze turned to the sprout. "Tolmiea menziesii," he noted calmly, finally coming to stand next to Kururu. He was silent for another moment, watching as the girl nurtured his sickly cousin.

"She's malnutritioned and thirsty."

The Latin name brought nothing but confusion to Kururu's face, knowing that Miss Paulia would definitely scold her for such a thing, because didn't she always nag on her students to study their Latin well?

A bit guilty, Kururu frowned at his second comment and looked at the plant worryingly. "I don't have any water or fertilizer," she admitted, no, almost apologized to the small plant in front of her. "Will it die now?" she added a bit frantically, gazing up at his face as if she expected that he knew the answer to that.

She was apologizing... to the plant? Knives frowned at that. Concerned or not, he decided, the girl was still human and still a bug to squash underfoot. It was irritating, her actions towards the green sprout.

"Yes, if she continues living like this. The buildings block the sunlight for most of the day, and there's hardly any water underneath these stones." He stared at her genuine worry and his frown deepened. What an odd human.

Kururu's face contorted into one of almost comical dismay and she stared at the ground with an annoyed expression. "That's unfair," she stated to no one in particular, more to herself than to the man next to her. "Plants also deserve to live." She remembered how Miss Paulia always used to talk about how God created every living being with a reason and Kururu wondered if plants also counted.

She reached out with one hand and touched the leaves once more, contemplating a possible solution for the, in her opinion, innocent sprout that was being tortured in such a cruel way. "Is it possible to move it?"

Every word that came out of the human's mouth only worked to confuse Knives. He'd grown up believing that there was no good in humans, that all they did was exploit and murder his kind. He would never expect anyone, let alone a human, to tell him that plants deserve to live. The only conclusion he could form was that she was trying to deceive him with innocence, because even children know how to trick and lie.

And yet, even as he sought to convince himself of this, her desire to care for the tiny plant only seemed to increase in sincerity. "Yes. It's still small, so its roots won't be spread out so much." He held his arm out, and it morphed into the familiar axe-like blade. "All I need to do is cut the stone."

Kururu immediately jumped to her feet as his arm changed into a blade, completely caught off-guard by it. Stuff like that only happened in movies and weird dreams with huge teddy bears, and as far as she knew, this wasn't a movie nor a dream. She hoped. Because this was pretty darn amazing and if it were a dream, she'd be very disappointed.

She stared with big eyes at his arm while flailing on the spot, absolutely too caught up in her amazement to say anything coherent. "Wah!" she suddenly managed blurted out, trying to regain her composure but horrible failing. "That's so cool!"

Most people screamed in terror and fled at the sight of an ungodly blade, but this human found it... amazing? ... No, Knives would think about that later.

He swung the blade with care—amazing for a man like him—and made sure not to sever any of the sprout's thin roots. The work was over in mere seconds, with the stone slabs reduced to small chunks in a rough circle around the plant. For a moment the green thing stood straight, and then it fell over slightly on its side. It was unharmed.

"It almost looks like you do this on a daily basis!" Kururu chirped happily, and she suspected he probably did, considering the way he acted. Not that she really cared at all, because hey, each to his own. If this guy liked cutting stones with some weird arm-blade thing, then she didn't see the problem as long as he didn't harm her.

She quickly bent and carefully placed the plant in her hand, dusting some sand off its leaves before looking at the strange man again. "So, will you take it or should I?"

"You have no idea, little girl." The blade morphed back into a normal arm, and Knives raised it to touch the infuriating locks of black hair that stood starkly against his natural blond. He hoped it wouldn't spread.

He cast another apathetic look at the child. "With you. And you're coming with me." With that said, he turned his attention to the street ahead of them and proceeded on, not even waiting to see if she'd follow. He expected her to.

Little girl...? That sounded oddly familiar in this place even if Kururu had only been here for a short time. She didn't move for a moment but quickly snapped out of her thoughts as she saw him walking away.

"Hey, wait!" she said, following him and slightly running to get next to him. "Are you by any chance that plant guy?" If he was, then this city wasn't as big as Kururu first thought it was or this meeting was just a really odd coincidence. And oddly enough, at this moment, she was glad she didn't believe in fate like Miss Paulia did.

That plant guy?

... Ah. No wonder her reactions seemed uncannily familiar. She was that girl who made a fuss in his journal about the lack of maggots. The—No, not a spider, she didn't fit the description well enough, but—

"Knives," he corrected. "And what about you, dragonfly?"

Kururu felt the slight temptation to reply with either forks or spoons, but being rude wasn't really her thing and who knew what this man was capable of when angered.

"Sumeragi Kururu. But just Kururu is fine," she said, feeling a bit uncomfortable since people said she had a weird name.

He didn't acknowledge her introduction, simply filed away her name in his memory and continued down the street with easy strides. In the distance he spotted the back door of a florist's shop.

"Find a pot for her." He tilted his head at the plant in Kururu's hands. "And then you're going to help me find the gardens in this city." He felt better with someone at his command. It was almost like home.

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LOG; completed

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