I'll

Kyouya glances away for half a second at the whisper of wind in the other room. When he looks back the open window is now the comfortable perch of a pitch-dark crow with black button eyes - shiny but empty. Its wings spread for a brief moment as it shuffles a bit on the window sill, and the light is sucked away into the feathers. Wisps for dark shadow trail the motion as the wings fold once more.

"What are you?" Kyouya straight out demands.

Dino left not an hour ago, so Kyouya presumes that the creature was watching and waiting for the best time to approach Kyouya.

The beaks parts and deep, smooth laughter escapes, somehow more attractive for the mocking edge. The crow bows forward and crumbles into black dust that swirls and reforms again, this time a snake with jutting scales but still those buttons for eyes.

"Don't look so worried," the snake murmurs, slithering across the table and deathly silent despite scales brushing across wood. "Just a minor supernatural being, nothing special."

Kyouya huffs but does take a hold of his tonfas. "You favour the faces of omens. Are you some sort of shifter that foretells death?"

The snake coils and leaps from the desk, changing form mid-air to land on the table as a sleek black cat. The cat hums as it gracefully pads over to the human. "Well if you want to get technical, I am an actual omen." It gives a cruel little smirk. "I'm often the last thing people see before dying rather unfortunate deaths."

The cat comes to a stop in front of Kyouya and sits with all the flourish of a king taking his throne. The tail flicks out behind it and swings like a pendulum. "I've heard good things about you."

Kyouya narrows his eyes, his grip tightening on cool metal. "If we're going to fight, I have to request that you turn human."

The cat makes a sound like a purr, if a purr could be condescending. "What's wrong, do you not like cats? How about something more like this?"

The creature disperses to dust once more, swirls like a black hole, and takes the form of the fluffiest, most adorable thing Kyouya has ever seen. It's puffball tail wiggles cutely, attached to a fluffy bottom, and long ears flop down to frame a small face. The buttons are still there, but the innocent blinking makes it more sweet than nightmarish.

Kyouya knows it's dangerous, the creature was hardly subtle, but that is a tiny bunny who is still shaking its little pompom tail. Kyouya lasts an admirable three seconds before literally face planting into the bunny.

...

"I want a penguin next," Kyouya demands. He sounds forceful despite being sprawled in the middle of the queen-sized bed, clutching a bunny to his chest and petting it gently.

"I can only shift into figures of death," the bunny says with a little twitch of its ears.

Kyouya raises his head and stares because he's certain that bunnies have no business with ending lives.

The animal smirks, its cute nose crinkling up. "Have you ever seen Monty Python?"

At Kyouya's continued stare, completely unamused, the bunny explains seriously.

"Death may be the end, but it's a transient thing in the mind of many." The being shrugs as best it can in this flesh. "Different people have different imaginations and I pick which one I want to wear."

Kyouya lets his head fall back onto the pillow. "So someone out there sees a rabbit."

"Daniel does," is offered up. "A six year old boy who loved his pet and cried for a week straight when it died. Whenever he thinks of death, he sees this form."

Kyouya sends a brief mental thank you to Daniel and scratches between the bunny's ears. "What would you turn into for me?"

A heavy weight pushes the air out of his lungs and suddenly another Kyouya is staring down at him, chains of runes in gold and black tearing across his face and pouring into his eyes, he's being ripped apart by the two opposing forces, there are cracks now and he's bleeding and it's redredred-

Kyouya flings the being from him but it just twists mid-air, condensing back into that little black bunny and landing lightly on the carpet instead of being thrown through the seventh storey window of the hotel. Kyouya is standing in the next second, tonfas out and his eyes narrowed.

It chuckles wickedly, those shiny button eyes amused. "Perhaps you shouldn't ask questions when you don't want to know the answers."

Despite the plainly derisive words, it hops across the room and sits its fluffy bottom on Kyouya's foot before it nuzzles into his leg sweetly like it's trying to comfort him.

"Do that again, and you won't leave here except in pieces," Kyouya threatens, not as angry as he probably should be. If Kyouya's guess is correct, then he should have expected that kind of thing, from this creature especially.

"Oh, please don't hurt me," the being mocks. "I'm just a little omen."

"Stop that," Kyouya deadpans in irritation. He reaches down and snags the creature by the back of the neck. "You may be cute, but I would still bite you to death if I wanted to," Kyouya mutters, carrying the creature back to the bed.

Kyouya decides that the laughter is an agreement.

...

"How do you not know the rune for light?" the man asks, his face blurring in and out of focus, dust brushing across his lashes and changing his skin yet again.

"I just never had the chance to learn," Kyouya says defensively.

The man -now woman- hums. "I'll teach you. What do you want to know?"

Kyouya shrugs. "Something… impossible."

The woman laughs. "I shouldn't have to tell you of all people that there are no limits."

"You can't heal with demon power," Kyouya says. "Everyone knows that. Are you saying that you can somehow create a rune chain for something that cannot be defined by demonic runes in the first place?"

"You are thinking far too narrow." The woman -now man again- presses a finger to the hotel's table and drags it along in quick, sharp strokes, burning the surface of the desk. "The first rune is to rip, to unmake. The second is elongation. The third defines the second, elongate by a factor of time. The fourth is to transfer suffering, to take away with the intent to give."

The man taps the table, activating the runes, and the burned symbols disappear, the table returning to its undamaged state.

"The chain means 'unmake time continuously until all the suffering has been take away'. Or, in a less direct translation, it means to erase the wound." The creature leans back in his chair with a smirk. "Who taught you demons can't heal? How simple minded they must be."

"Fon told me," Kyouya says. It's a subtle push for more information; does this being know Fon? How well do they know Kyouya's brother? But truthfully, Kyouya is more intent on the clean table than the conversation. There are so many things he doesn't know.

The being huffs. "Yes, well, Fon is hardly the best example of the elite. Sure, he can throw a punch, but he's awful at using his head for anything greater than a headbutt."

"Teach me more," Kyouya demands, now absolutely certain about this creature's identity. "Teach me everything."

...

Dino returns to the hotel after a week of sneaking around the auction centers. It took far longer than he thought but he doesn't regret it. Seeing the alpha kitsune's… work first hand was definitely a good motivator to regain the power Dino lost from all those centuries of sleeping.

Dino pushes open the door to the hotel room and pauses. The room looks like… like Kyouya was alone inside and got bored.

The furniture is upturned when it's not in pieces and several new make-shift doorways have been aggressively installed into various walls. A window is smashed and a tonfa is lodged into a table, plus the large rug is ripped up and angel runes have been cut into the floor in what looks to be a rush. The dragon doesn't know much about runes but he knows a cage when he sees one.

Dino doesn't hesitate as he charges right into the destruction, worried that Kyouya might have been attacked and gotten hurt. Although the more likely reason for this is that someone attacked and Kyouya took his payment in blood and bone.

Dino finds Kyouya sitting in the middle of a trashed bed, the teenager looking manic. He has a long black feather clutched tightly, dissolving even as the teen tries to trap the escaping dust in between his cupped hands.

"Where did you get that?" Dino asks cautiously.

"I ripped it from him when he tried to leave," Kyouya says with a manic glint in his eyes.

"Who is 'he'?" Dino presses. That has demon energies, and not just a low level one. "Wait, sorry, they're not dead?!"

"He's so fast," Kyouya murmurs as if he didn't hear the dragon. "I caught him off guard when he was drinking espresso, but the rune work couldn't hold him."

"Uh," the dragon drags out. "Okay, I don't know what happened, but I'm kind of routing for the demon now."

"We need to find him," Kyouya decides, still remembering that soft fur and the arrogant drawl and those quick fingers as they scrawl impossible rune chains that can force time itself to bow.

Then he's shoving past Dino into the main room and snatching up the unicorn dagger only to scrawl some angel magic into the wall. A tracker, something common enough that even Kyouya knows with his limited education.

It's specifically meant to locate the Arcobaleno (who are all arrogant enough to allow it), made popular like a trinket, often used when an angel is feeling particularly paranoid or by little children who try to scare each other.

Eight dots of light appear as cracks bleed across the wall to indicate some sort of land mark. Kyouya immediately locks onto a dot still in the human world, but scowls when the light disappears completely.

Everyone knows about the slip space between dimensions, but very rarely is someone powerful enough to dig their way into one. The runes certainly can't go that far.

The demon never gave his name, and probably never showed his real appearance even when in human form, so Kyouya is technically guessing. But really, who else could Kyouya's little bunny be except for the creature who makes sinning an art form?

Reborn will not escape a second time.

Dino has rather mixed feelings.

On one hand, the poor demon managed to escape, and Dino is whole-heartedly behind that because Kyouya is terrifying and the creature was probably so scared. On the other hand, the demon managed to escape without shedding any blood whatsoever and that's after leading a merry chase around the hotel room, so it has to be far worse than Kyouya.

Except what's worse than Kyouya?

The teen curb stomped the Varia back to Hell, probably ate Mukuro, then pimp slapped Byakuran across the face hard enough that the Vindice were unfortunate enough to be caught up in the shockwave, plus Dino is honestly still reeling that his scales got stabbed through.

Besides, that's only what Dino has heard from rumours, who knows what other kinds of horrors the teenager has done?

So… what kind of monster is Kyouya chasing?