Chapter Text
It’s 3:48 in the morning when Ryuji decides to call Akira.
He’s been tossing and turning throughout the night, unable to settle and intermittently getting up to pace around his room, a near-constant thrum bubbling in his body. He ate about three cups of instant ramen since he came home, played video games until his eyes were about to fall out of his head, and stared at the piles of homework he’d already accrued as if he had the energy to do anything but try and be normal. He’s out of distractions and counting sheep and he can’t fall asleep to music because that just makes his brain go haywire so…!
He needs something else. He needs to hear someone who gets it. He needs to hear something that feels vaguely right or he’s going to snap.
He stares at his phone screen and guilt curdles in his stomach, because they both have to get up in a couple hours for school, and he doubts either of them are sleeping well. Then a bone-deep hunger pang ripples through his body, strong enough to make him curl into a ball, and he decides any distraction is better than this.
The phone rings once, twice, three times. Ryuji knew there was a chance Akira wouldn’t pick up, but suddenly he’s almost overwhelmed with the sudden urge to back out and hang up, pretend he never called or maybe even pass it off as a mid-sleep thing. Before he can, however, the line clicks to life and he hears a very sleepy voice through the speaker, “Mmmhello?”
“Hey,” Ryuji says eloquently, trying to not chew the inside of his cheek, especially since he can’t quite seem to make his teeth stay comfortably normal (and thinking about how they’re not normal anymore sends him into a mild panic every time. “Sorry I’m calling, it’s just…”
“Can’t sleep?” Akira guesses. “Last night was awful for me. You really should’ve taken Morgana with you, if only for the first night.”
“I’m not an emotional support animal…” Ryuji faintly hears Morgana meow sleepily on the other end of the line.
“I know but, as much as he says he’s not a cat, he’s got the fur and my ma’s allergic.” That, plus Ryuji knows their lease doesn’t allow pets. If his mom broke out in hives that would definitely be enough to tip their jackass landlord off, and the last thing he wants to do is worry her more than necessary. “How’d bringing Morgana home go down with your folks? Or, wait, you transferred, so uh… your aunt? Uncle?”
“Guardian. He’s not related to me or anything, friend of my mom’s friend or something like that,” Akira says, nonchalant. Ryuji tries to imagine his mom shipping him off to another city—hell, another prefecture of Tokyo—and can’t even imagine a scenario where she wouldn’t insist on coming with him. He’d have to argue that she should stay with her job and her apartment while Ryuji dealt with… whatever would’ve forced him to move. “I tried to sneak Morgana past him, but he found us out. Thankfully, he seems to like cats, so Morgana gets to stay.”
“Really? No offense, I didn't think it’d be that easy.”
“Might’ve been because I panicked a bit when he first found us. Or maybe he could just tell Morgana’s a good influence on me,” Akira chuckles. “He couldn’t be more right about that. He helps a lot with… all of it.” Ryuji hears shuffling on the other end of the line, maybe Akira sitting up. “You sure you don’t want me to get Morgana over to you? I know what it’s like, alone with nothing but your own thoughts.”
“There’s no way the trains are running this late, man.”
“I could try flying. Those wings on my back aren’t just for show.”
“Don’t joke about that bro.” Ryuji says, ignoring how he’s gnawing on the inside of his cheek and can taste his own blood in his mouth. He doesn’t even know if he can trust himself to fall asleep. What if mom comes home and that other part of him freaks out? Makes him change, tries to hurt her, succeeds in hurting her? He’s not risking voicing his concerns to Akira, though. That would make it all too real, too possible. Besides, calling him at the ass-crack of night is already too much. “I’m… okay. I can make it.”
“We can meet up before school tomorrow. Morgana can give you a morning pep purr, just in case,” Akira jokes. “Do you take the Ginza line?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to wake up early enough to meetcha at the station. Maybe at the gate?”
“Works fine for me.” There’s a lull in the conversation. Ryuji’s more beastial urges fixate on Akira’s slow, even breathing, barely audible through the phone speakers. For a moment his thoughts drift, his gaze unfocusing as he wonders if Akira’s blood tastes more like iron, or if it’s similar to the indescribable buzz the horses tasted like. Would his flesh be warm, or would it contain the same, lovecraftian chill that permeates his body? Would that make him taste sweet, or foul? It doesn’t matter. So long as it satisfied his hunger, even for a second, Ryuji choke down every last bit—
Ryuji feels his teeth change again, gums aching as they stretch and sharpen. Desperate for anything to ground himself, Ryuji forces the words out around his malformed jaw, “You wanna know somethin’ funny?”
“Sure.”
“Ever since I… since we left, my leg doesn’t hurt.” Ryuji rolls onto his back and stares up at his ceiling. He lifts his leg up until it’s perpendicular to the rest of his body, stretching out his foot and then curling it close to his chest. He rotates it to the right, then over his hips and to the left. Not a single ache or pulse of pain. His physical therapist would be proud, if Ryuji hadn’t been avoiding going to physical therapy since their bills are a bit tight the past few months. The simple calisthenics, however, are enough to bring him back to his normal, human-shaped body. “And like… that feels like the most unbelievable thing that’s happened. If I told my ma about all the monsters and Kamoshida and the students… well, she wouldn’t believe that either, but the idea of me not being in pain? She’d probably think the world turned upside down or something.”
“Was it really that bad?”
“Dude, it sucks. Or, sucked? Since it’s not happening any more?” Ryuji shrugs, as if Akira could see him. “After we heard the damage, we knew pain management was going to be a life-long thing on top of physical therapy. Forget becoming a track star, we were worried I wasn’t going to be able to walk at all.”
A sudden growl comes over the phone, enough to make Ryuji’s hackles raise. He barely restrains his own angry sound when Akira says, “I hate that he did that. Scumbag.”
“Yeah, he really is a piece of shit,” Ryuji’s chuckling turns sad. “Have you… thought about what you want to do?”
“Well… we have to go back there.” To eat.
“I know we do,” And he’s not looking forward to it. He gets how Akira felt now, standing in front of that castle. Ryuji wants to space out just laying on his bed, the never-ending hunger lancing through his body in waves. If it somehow became more intense in the blink of an eye, Ryuji would lose it. “But I mean about Kamoshida in general. We know he’s abusing the volleyball team at the very least. If I had to guess, he’s probably got some hand in leaking your record. We can’t just let that go.”
“Not to mention what he did to you already,” Akira agrees. “I… hate him, I think.”
“You ‘think?’”
“No, I know I do. It’s just—” There’s a pause, Ryuji hears Akira let out a tired sigh. “I haven’t been able to feel much of anything lately. Before the castle, I was focused on making it through each day as it came. There wasn’t time to think about hating or loving or how I felt about things, because I couldn’t change anything. My future was already ruined, so why think past the present? But now… now we have to think about it, now I have to feel something about it, because if I don’t, someone will get hurt. It’s just a matter of whether it’s us or someone else.”
Ryuji thinks back to the first day he bleached his hair. Days spent laying in bed blurring together, the hell of limbo culminating in a split-second decision when he went to his local pharmacy to pick up his meds. A pair of vinyl gloves barely clung to his hands as he scrubbed the bleach in thoroughly. It hurt—the chemical scent assaulting his nose and eyes, the hunch in his back as he washed it out, the stinging in his scalp and the ache in his leg as he curled over the sink. Ryuji looked up at his reflection and didn’t recognize himself, a full head of black had been replaced with corn-on-the-cob yellow before his eyes. For a moment he didn’t think about what others thought of him, or how his mom would react, or what this meant for him. All he could think was I did something, I did something.
“I get that, honestly,” Ryuji says “But I think we gotta think about this more than just having a place to… ‘let loose.’ We know what Kamoshida’s doing, and maybe… maybe we could change things.”
“I want to do something,” Akira agrees. “I just don’t know what we can do, outside of going against his Shadow.”
“What if that’s enough?” Ryuji asks. “Morgana said that the King and Kamoshida are linked, maybe we could get more blackmail, or spook the shit out of the King. He’s already run from us twice after we changed.”
“Maybe.” Akira agrees. In the lull there’s a slight rustling and an annoyed mew. Ryuji can almost picture him petting Morgana’s back. “Let’s try a more normal method for now. If we can get enough students to turn on him, then that could start something.”
“That might work. I got a good enough look at the student’s faces in the dungeon, we can start there. And if it doesn’t…” Ryuji trails off. He’s more than okay with fighting, now that he has the power backing him, but… there’s definitely the fear that they could go too far. Not that Ryuji wouldn’t be against kicking Kamoshida’s ass seven ways to Sunday, but one wrong move, one tiny slip in what has to be ironclad control, and that could be the permanent end of Kamoshida. It’s hard enough grappling with his new diet, he doesn’t want to deal with the emotional weight of actually murdering someone. Even if the thing coursing through his body doesn’t care about silly things like guilt , and if there was anyone Ryuji could see himself slaughtering, it’d be Kamoshida, Ryuji has to hold onto some moral anchor, else he’ll snap before the hunger gets to him. “We’ll figure it out from there.”
Akira lets out a sleepy hum. Then, quietly, as though he’s scared to ask, “Do you know what its name is?”
Ryuji’s hand rubs over his right thigh. He saw it when he got home, striping off his sweat-covered uniform in a frantic rush to shower and get the lingering stench of blood and viscera off him. The mark covers the surgical scar on his thigh, a pitch black skull and crossbones. Ryuji traced the shape and felt like he was touching an exposed wire. He peeks under his bare thread blanket to look at it again. The empty eyes stare up at him, as if daring him to keep believing everything will be okay, that there isn’t a voice in the back of his mind hissing and laughing at his distress, that he didn’t stare at the other subway passengers and thought about which ones would taste the most savory on his tongue, that he didn’t sit in his shower and curl into a ball and found himself wishing the pain would return.
If he told himself even a week ago he’d be wishing for his leg to ache so bad he’d think about cutting it off, he would’ve laughed until he was blue in the face. Now look at him, laying in bed and not a thing wrong with him, wishing for agony, a foreign name bubbling up within him like something dredged from the abyss.
“Kidd,” Ryuji eventually says. “Captain Kidd.”
“Cool name,” Akira purrs, an otherworldly quality backing his voice, dual approval. “Definitely better than Blondie.”