parisiansulfur:

I fucking love this.

Yuusuke starts to feel the distance between him and Raizen as he gets older. Starts realizing there was so much he could have asked him, so much he wishes he knew. He’s the King of this whole, like, country thing now, and yeah, he’s got Hokushin, but… Hokushin isn’t mazoku. Yuusuke has a whole people to take care of. And what about all the shit he doesn’t know? What about Tourin’s history? Did it have a separate language? What was it like, back then, when Raizen wasn’t the last of the mazoku?

‘Cause the only thing he knows for certain about his father’s race is that they used to eat people. Humans.

Not people. Humans.

Which are also people! Of course they are. They’re just not, like, the only people. Mazoku are people! Humans are people too.

Right.

But like, what was it like, in Tourin, before? Raizen was always complaining about, like, rocks, and dust, and how everything was shot to shit, but why? What happened to Tourin? Why was it like this? And what was it like before? The idea of all the fighting that must have happened makes his mazoku blood sing, but then he’s thinking about festivals, holidays, the ones he misses in Japan, all the little rites and rituals that felt lame and contrived but that now sit under a fine sheen of nostalgia. 

What did the mazoku eat for their festivals? He remembers going to holidays at the temples when he was just a punk ass kid, the little stands lining the streets outside: the glass candy stand, the goldfish, the kara-age—

He wonders if there’s a mazoku version of kara-age. Fuck, that’s gotta be delicious! Everything in Makai tastes better, brighter, stronger, but maybe that’s just his demon blood playing up on him. Everything feels so much more than it did before.

But now he’s hungry, thinking about a mazoku kara-age. God, that’s gotta be—

Oh, right. People. Which is terrible!

But…

But now he’s a little hungry, he realizes. And just thinking about all that food, the stuff when he was a kid, and all the food he’s imagining belonging at a mazoku festival, is all dancing in his head: meat bright and dripping with fat, that rich smell of sear and the crackle as it roasts…