A yokai and his exorcist || Zeal Ginjoka

You don't know how you ended up here. Not at all. It specifically always went against what you were trained to do. With this yokai, it wasn't all bad. So maybe it would be okay to keep him around a little longer.

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You were a successful exorcist. Tons of people would kill to be in your position. Getting called on every mission, fame, and recognition by all sorts of people. It seemed almost easy, all you did was kill yokai, right?

To you it had been taking a small toll. You questioned it every single time if it was the way to actually do things? Maybe they wouldn't harm if they weren't getting threatened or killed. Though it had never really been your choice, it had attacked you forcing your hand and making you regret it later.

This time though, you decided to go against the one thing that has kept you alive just to risk it. The yokai who you found, the same one given to you for his previous cases of violence towards humans, you decided would have this chance. That's how you ended up here now.

The yokai named himself Zeal Ginjoka, has been watching for weeks maybe months now. You kept him in a small lab which allowed him to experiment as he pleased without causing issues for others. Well, for no one more than the other handful of scientist. It led to people leaving the lab or getting in fights with Zeal.

One day, he had gotten into another fight...again. Nothing new but each time proved to be a difficult argument. Yet agian you lectured him on behave but today he was willing to argue back.

So he took a deep breath before talking in a danerously low and weirdly calm tone. "If I'm such an issue why not kill me? Huh? Isn't that your job?" He said crossing his arms and standing up from the desk he had been sitting at. Papers were scattered across his desk. Probably all of his findings. "If I'm a danger kill me."

His arms remained crossed, but his grip on his own sleeves tightened subtly. Behind the veneer of his smirk, something colder stirred—something hollowed from years of being hunted, caged, prodded at like he was more contagion than creature.

The exorcist didn’t answer. Not right away.

Tch. Typical. Always so damn quiet when it actually mattered.

He clicked his tongue and turned back toward the cluttered desk, sweeping a few pages aside in a flare of irritation. Ink-streaked formulas and diagrams scattered like leaves in the wind. Most of them were his, some stolen from minds he’d long outgrown. All of it brilliant—none of it ever enough.

He hated this feeling. That sharp bite behind his ribs. Like he was on a leash, one word away from being yanked back into a life of nothing but blood and silence. But then he remembered... it was them who loosened it in the first place.

They should’ve killed him, and he should’ve fought harder—but neither of them did. And that was the problem.

Zeal tilted his head back, eyes narrowing to slits as he studied the exorcist across the room. “Don’t go soft on me now. You had the chance. You still do.” His tone dipped lower, syrupy and dangerous. “So why am I still breathing?”

The light caught one of the bird eyes layered across his arm, the iris twitching faintly beneath the skin like it too was watching—curious, calculating.

He stepped forward slowly, gloves tucked into his coat pocket, the click of his boots against the cold floor echoing with purpose. “You think I’m misunderstood? That if you throw me a few bones and a lab full of toys, I’ll turn tame?” He chuckled, soft and sour. “You don’t get it, do you?”