The Boy Who Was Not Like Them, I Promise, He Is Different

He gathers all his courage, every last bit, and sits next to his beautiful girl. “Hey there,” he says. He’s loved her for so long, and she likes him, he knows that. “How are you?”

But she likes where he loves. She’s friend where he’s obsession, and he needs more. He needs it all.

She is looking into the distance, out the window. He’s used to it. He keeps talking. “Can’t believe you’re single again. What is it with you and the guys? I mean of course none of them deserve you, only the best man does. Someone who’s close to you. Who’s honourable and good and treats you well, and I suppose that last guy didn’t do that – “

Her hand touches his shoulder. “Please don’t,” she says quietly. Her eyes are so dark, oh, he wants to drown. “Don’t ask me out. I cannot reject you forever.”

“Then don’t.” There it is. His chance. “All your boyfriends, they only stay with you for a week and then I never hear of them again. I’m not like them, I promise. I’m different, I’ll treat you like a queen. You can be mine, baby. Sweet baby.”

Maybe, if he’d been paying attention, he would have noticed. How the other boys (and a few girls, too) shy away from her as soon as their hands get sweaty and their eyes dreamy around her. They sense it. He doesn’t. “Please. Go out with me.”

She’s silent for a long time. Her fingers are long and oh they’d feel so good on him, he thinks and tries not to lick his lips, he could kiss her with it. He’ll do it, soon, when they’re a couple. Finally, she sees him as he is.

“Come home with me after class, then.”

He’s never heard sweeter words. And during class, he stares only at her, hoping, imagining how it’ll be in a few hours.

They walk home. She takes his hand, and he almost cries out. It’s cold as ice. How strange, that he only notices now, but then again he’s never touched her skin before. Weird, that he hasn’t realised that before. Something feels different.

Her flat is on the ground floor. The door is white. Her hand is tight around his now, and his knuckles start to hurt. “Wow, you’re strong,” he jokes, or tries. His tongue is thick in his mouth, filling it like a swollen wound.

“Come on in.” It sounds like an offer. It’s not. She pulls him in like he’s a child, a jolt of pain rushes through his wrist. “Ow, what the hell!” His resistance is late, but he pushes his heels into the ground, cries out once, they’re in the bedroom.

He screams.

The bones on her bed are white as pearls. She has sorted them, by type first and then by size, and the skulls sit on the headboard in an arch of hollow ivory. His girl, his beautiful girl, puts her soft mouth on his hurting wrist.

“You could have been a friend,” she tells him softly. “I loved you so dearly, my friend. But you couldn’t. You wouldn’t love me as I was, free and kind and by your side. We could have been so good, my friend. We could have been companions, hadn’t you looked at me like I was meat for your tongue to lick into and eat up and tear apart.”

“Please.” His vision blurs when he starts crying. “Oh God, please.” The fear is coming just now, as he drinks it all in, his mind roaring – piles of boy clothes, a container with red liquid, and the gorgeous darkness of her eyes as she leans down to rip off his hand with her teeth.

While he wails until his throat goes hoarse, she sits on his legs, turning him from one into many parts, and says: “Now you’ll be torn apart by the queen.”

They’re washing blood off their space suits when Keith rips off his helmet, thrashes it against the wall and puts his forehead to the mirror.

“I’m not okay,” he says.

Lance rubs at a spot that’s so stained it looks black. The species has red blood like them. Had. He shifts from one foot to the other. Keith twitches. His fists clench, loosen. The bathroom carries all their quiet motions into terrible sound with its echo. Keith’s face reflects from the mirror, and Lance watches his wide eyes for a moment. Black pupils, iris drowned out. Keith is waiting. Something, anything.

“I know,” Lance replies then. He wipes off the last stain from his wrist.

“Sorry.”

“Why?”

Keith turns his head away. There’s only black hair in the mirror now. “I’m supposed to be fine.”

It’s stupid, but Lance still laughs. “Not really, no. Look, just.” He reaches, taps Keith’s shoulder as gently as he can, barely a touch, but Keith yields and swirls around to him, stands chest to chest and his fingers cup around Lance’s jaw.

“None of us is. Sometimes we may be okay, but not in general. Don’t think anybody could be with how things are. We’re alive though, right?” Lance closes his eyes, humming when Keith’s breath falls over his cheeks, warm fingers so nervous against his collarbone. They’re both still new to this and Lance has been a bit better at faking confidence until now when his heart is really thundering a thousand miles a minute.

Keith’s kiss is a tiny, whole thing, and his voice isn’t shivering anymore when he grabs Lances’s hand to pull him out of the after-mission bathroom.
“Yes, we are. Good enough for me.”

The Black Lion’s Scar

“We’ll cut a new pair of lips into your skull,” the aliens had told him. “A bit deeper each day. A bit more each night. After every fight, boy, until we can see your neurons trembling behind that pathetic human flesh.”

They had kept their promise. For each night in the arena, another press of steel against his skin, a bit of blood smearing across his nose for his gladiator kills. When he escapes, he can still feel the metal scrape against bone for the first time in the night before.

One day, when they’re molten together as Voltron and flying home from a mission, he tells them through the connection. Shiro says it like this: that for each life they made him take and thus for each time he survived, they put a cut to his nose, widened the wound. The team is quiet after that. Shiro hears their hesitation, begs in his mind that they won’t ask.

“I’ll be more careful,” Keith finally says. “I won’t wave my sword around anymore when – I mean, it could remind you of – cause it’s just a bigger knife, right?”

Shiro doesn’t correct him.

How could he possibly tell them that the aliens hadn’t used a knife, because it would have been through Shiro’s skull in days?

They had taken a sharp wire, and they had touched it against the bridge of his nose in brutal softness until the skin just reddened, until the flesh deepened a millimeter, the tiniest brush of steel against him.

A wire had been their instrument and Shiro the bow to play it with, because one cut for every kill had to be done, and there were countless, endless, a myriad of lost lives that could only be painted on him with something as thin as that.

Lance has no idea how Keith’s parents died.

Keith doesn’t talk about it, the team doesn’t ask, and it’s one of the few unspoken taboos in the sarcastic quickfire that Keith and he ricochet between each other on the ground, in space, between training sessions and unmentioned touches of shoulders.

It’s a routine mission, and the last thing Lance hears before his lion is taken down and the pretty aggressive allies of Voltron’s arch enemy drag him into their base is a static-garbled wail of his own name. It becomes the only thing he clings to, that skewed echo of his five letters in Keith’s voice, as the aliens bore things into his skin and brain and try to reach his mind.

Two days later, he’s in Shiro’s grip on the floor of the castle, Pidge screaming and Hunk crying and Keith, eyes blown into liquid darkness with angry tears smeared on his cheeks. There’s a cracking burst of noise every other moment – oh, that’s Allura, firing at the aliens who’d tried to hold a paladin and didn’t think about the consequences.

Lance stares at the ceiling of the castle. Someone (softtinyhandsPidge?) touches his wounds, rubs wetness against them, a sting of antiseptic in his nose. Keith is there. Keith, Lance tries to say, ends up spitting blood.

“No. No, no,” Keith shakes his head, cradles Lance’s face with nails digging into his jaw like a painful thread to reality, and Lance is awake, can’t die, won’t.
“Not you too. Promise, you fucking – you have to, I’ll make you – please. Tell me they didn’t break you. Not you too. Not you. You’re not them, you hear me, you’re not breaking.”

That’s how Lance learns how Keith’s parents went.

It’s the same day that he swears his first oath.

He swears, with Pidge’s fingers patching him up, Hunk stuffing a blanket under his head, Shiro gripping him like he could vanish, and with Keith’s trembling forehead by his shoulder, that he’s not going to become another broken bond.

Kenma’s eyes are gone. Dark, hollow caves swallow the light where they used to be. His contours are shifting, bones cracking in his body. Kuroo can’t run. His leg is broken where Kenma’s claws have rammed into it, and the pain is so intense that his mouth tastes white and searing and his vision is smoky.

“Three questions,” Kenma sing-songs. His mouth is tiny and red. He’s licked some of Kuroo’s blood from his claws. The gym is empty. Kuroo is against a wall, crying, silent and pathetic because he can’t wrap his mind around this.

“Wh…” Blood is in his mouth. Kuroo chokes, whimpers. “Why?”

Kenma takes a step. “A person has to eat.”

“You’re not a person.”

Kenma smiles, soft, almost fond. “I was, for you, for the years I was weak and grew in this body. But no, I’m not. I’ll count that as a question, so you have one more left.”

The gym is quiet. Nobody knows he’s here. He wants to know many things. Kenma takes a step. His naked toes touch Kuroo’s, trace his sneakers.

He can’t close his eyes, not even when Kenma’s jaw makes a terrible crack, when it unhinges and reveals a maw that’s so red and wet it’s almost pretty.

Kuroo lets his head fall against the wall. The thump is a dull echo in his skull.

“Was Kenma ever in there, or was it only just you?”

The hollow caves of Kenma’s, no, the thing’s eyes seem to grow. Black envisions Kuroo. Something wet touches his skin, and he feels numbness spread throughout his – oh. Poison. He can’t feel anymore, then.

A whisper reaches his ears.

“Help me.”

A slow grin spreads on Kuroo’s lips. “Hey there, kitten.” He rips his eyes open, fingers shooting forward, and before the thing can so much as snarl, Kuroo’s hands go up in flames, shoving down its throat with a burst of sparks.

The thing roars. Black goo spurts from its tongue, spills over Kuroo’s arms, but he just grins, grins, fingers twisting and the tips pressing deep into the thing’s esophagus.

“You know,” Kuroo says, tilting his head as his fire takes the monster apart, its agonizing screams almost drowning out Kuroo’s voice, “that’s the thing with you monsters. First off, you think you know humans, but you don’t. We lie, and some of us are pretty good actors. We also know when someone’s lying, just like you did before about all those years. Bullshit. And second, we really don’t appreciate it when you engulf the gorgeous boys that we’re bonded to into your disgusting bodies, and especially not when it’s on their anniversary. So.” He takes a deep breath, plants both feet on the ground, and his smile vanishes.

“Either you give me back my boyfriend, or I fry you from the inside like a goddamn chicken nugget. Or – oh well. Too late. Guess my magic reached him.”

Kuroo takes a step back and pulls his hands out of the thing’s throat. It’s a trembling lump of black goo now, all the outer shell of Kenma’s imitation melted away. The gym is silent for a few seconds. Then, an angry hum fills the air.

“Too bad. You could have had this quick, mostly pain-free, but you pissed him off.” Kuroo sits down, crosses his legs, waiting with a smile. The thing makes a hurt noise somewhere in its body, and then the entire gym begins to shake.

“’s not really a good idea to mess with a mage and their dragon.”

“We have to get out of here.” Bokuto’s voice cracks like glass. The metal bar that he’s shoved through the door’s handles is creaking with every impact from the outside.

Kenma doesn’t hear him.

“Fuck, fuck, come on – don’t touch him!”

Kenma reaches, careful, and his fingers tremble when he brushes a bloody strand of hair from Kuroo’s forehead.

Bokuto’s scream pitches into a sob. “He’s fucking turning, Kenma, we can’t help him, we can’t, we can’t, we have to get outta here!”

No. His vision is black and crimson. Kuroo’s eyes are wide and dead and then they’re alive again, and his body starts to seize. The white of his eyes, the soft brown of his iris that Kenma loves more than himself is flooded by darkness.

“Please, please.” Bokuto’s knees hit the ground by his side. “Kenma. They bit him. Kenma, Kenma.” They can’t help, the camp with the cure is far away, but Kenma can’t just watch and do nothing, not after how Akaashi –

The door behind them howls with another impact. Bokuto falls silent. His fingers dig into Kenma’s shoulder, all nails and force, but when Kenma finally goes pliant and yields, it’s too late.

Kuroo, or what he used to be, surges. There’s no time to scream, because Bokuto’s rifle knocks against the top of his head, so wild and desperate that it would have killed anything that’s still alive. But Kuroo’s teeth are already sinking into Kenma’s hand, through bone and muscle, something snapping between his jaws.

Kenma doesn’t know how it ends. Screams echo through his dreams, a wave of other voices, their group having found them. When he wakes, something feels like it’s missing. A look down his body, past filthy clothes and blood all over himself, tells him that he’s back in the camp.

His wrist is empty. There’s a bandage around the stump.

And across the room is the cage, the one where they’d done terrible things to not-anymore-humans to find a cure, and Kuroo’s in it with eyes that flicker between black and brown. A needle is still stuck in his arm. The timer on the cage stands at 30:57, counting down from sixty minutes. So there’s half an hour left to know if they got the cure into his veins in time.

Kenma lies back down, holding his empty wrist, and waits.

“Are you hurt?” is the first thing that Tooru says to him when he finds Hajime sitting in the palace garden, hidden underneath a bush with his bloody knee and twisted ankle, the crimson-purple flowers he’s tried to steal for his mother’s birthday carefully wrapped in a linen cloth next to him. But Hajime just shakes his head, and doesn’t flinch away when the other child touches his knee. “I’ll help you,” the boy says, and Hajime later learns that his name is Tooru and that he’s the crown prince or something boring.

Tooru asks him to come back. And so Hajime does, the next day, and the one after that.

“I never want you to leave,” is what Tooru says when he arrives at their secret meeting spot behind the water fountain with hands that are raw from training with a sword and eyes that are tired from hours of studying. Hajime promises that he won’t. Tooru hugs him for the first time and cries a bit. Soon, they lie on their backs and watch the sun set. Hajime goes to talk to that old man in town the next day, the one about whom his mother says that he used to be a guardian of a mighty ruler, that he knows the art of killing and fighting.

It turns out that she is right. And Hajime begins to learn.

“Kiss me,” is what Tooru whispers when they are seventeen and it’s a night that gleams from millions of stars, and Hajime has earned his place in the palace guard yesterday by taking down four of the King’s best men, one after another.

Hajime closes his eyes and breathes, slow. Tooru’s lips are soft that night, and every night after that.

“No!” and years later, Tooru’s voice echoes through the throne hall when Hajime stands before him, his sword drawn, the dagger of a man buried between his ribs and blood dripping onto Tooru’s lap. That is when Hajime turns around as the guards take that traitorous nobleman down. He smiles, his blood falling.

“Are you hurt, my love?” He says, quiet, and only Tooru hears it through the roaring crowd. Hajime closes his eyes. He hopes that he will wake up again.

“Kill prince Tooru. I don’t care how. Slit his throat, poison him. But don’t leave traces. You get the other half after you succeed.”

A pouch was slid over the table, the hand pushing it scarred and fat. A few gold coins spilled out of it, pouring over the tabletop. The assassin gently pushed all of the money back inside and stood. “He will be dead by morning.”

The hours until night went by swiftly. The assassin had been watching the palace closely, and as the last night inside the prince’s chambers died down, they moved to action. There had been rumours about guards patrolling around the castle – strangely, the assassin couldn’t find any, no matter how hard their eyes searched. Their senses were alert, burning, red with fire to kill. The trees before the prince’s chambers made it easy to swing over to the windowsill, and a sharp knife helped to open the lock. It was a wonder the prince was still alive.

They slipped inside, feet soundless on the soft carpet. The prince was sleeping unguarded, curled underneath soft blankets, his face innocent. He could barely be a man yet. The assassin didn’t hesitate. Their dagger glinted, and –

“You wouldn’t be the first to try that. Good evening, murderer.”

The pain came after the blood. A man had appeared besides the assassin, clothed in black and smiling softly. But his eyes gleamed raw and wild as the night’s sky, and his sword was quick. The dagger fell, and so did the young assassin’s hand. A horrifying scream rose in their throat, eyes widening, because what monster would be able to approach them unnoticed, who could be so powerful –

“Do you know why there are no guards, hm? There’s no need for them. If someone sends you here, they want you dead. It always works.”

A hand clasped over their mouth and made them choke on their own scream. The blood drowned in the carpet, droplets glistening red and soft in the moonlight. “Be quiet, you will wake him,” the gentle voice told them. The terrifying man had a hand over their jaw, crushing, and oh he’d kill them now –

“Mhm… Hajime?” A sleepy voice came from the bed, and the monster holding the assassin stilled. “Yes, my prince?”

“Another one?” – “I’m afraid so. I will take them out of the way.”
The assassin could see the prince blink drowsily, warm brown eyes blinking before something hard and cold flashed through them. “Go ahead. I don’t want to disturbed any further.”

And the monster, the man who had risen like a shadow besides the young assassin, smiled. “Of course, Tooru. I will get rid of any dirt that bothers you.”

part I here.

“I won’t leave him behind.”

“Tooru,” Daichi says, soft. His hand brushes Tooru’s shoulder, fingers then clenching tight, rough. “He’s dead. We can’t – “

“Don’t touch him.” And Tooru’s eyes are liquid fire when he stares back at Daichi, arms trembling around that beloved body, blood from the cut throat spilling over his skin. “I’ll carry him,” Tooru whispers. He licks his lips, looks down at Hajime, smiling as he brushes hair off his cheek.

“We can find a cure. I’ll carry him. You don’t have to do anything. Don’t have to get in contact with his – his b-blood. I’ll do it alone.”

When night falls five hours later and they finally find a hideout, Tooru pulls the cold shape of Hajime between his arms and legs. Daichi and Suga watch him sleep, face buried against Hajime’s slit neck, mouth breathing quietly. Hajime’s blood has dried and crumbles from his skin. It’s black as ink, rotting, dying.

“He’s gonna turn into one of those things.” Suga’s knuckles are white around the gun he’s hiding in his belt.
“I know,” Daichi says, and closes his eyes. “And he knows, too.”

Tooru is seven and holds his mother’s hand tightly. He remembers that it’s an innocent summer day as they walk home from school when the old woman from the house next to theirs hisses “yakuza” as Tooru passes by. He doesn’t know the word. A week later, a new, young woman has moved into the house, and she smiles and gives Tooru candy when his mother takes him home from school. He doesn’t see the old woman again. His father says it was an accident.

Tooru is seventeen and he smiles a lot. He loves volleyball, his grades are good, and his Sunday are spent in front of Hajime’s tv with video games and playful wrestling matches on his soft bed. One day, Tooru wants to kiss him. One day, he’ll be brave. But he always just goes home without anything more than a hug. Tooru doesn’t invite him over. He doesn’t talk about Hajime, but he dreams.

He’s worried when he comes home from school today – Hajime’s been sick, has missed practice. And as he enters, he can already hear the faint buzz of voices, the deep authorative growl of his father’s speech. Tooru takes a deep breath. He closes the front door, quiet, slips out of his jacket and shoes. One of his father’s men bows and takes him to the living room. “Your father is waiting, Oikawa-san.”

“There you are,” his father says when Tooru comes in. “Good. I need you to help me decide. Iwaizumi-san refuses to show his gratitude for the favours we’ve been doing his company, so his children are on vacation with us now.”

Tooru cannot breathe. His throat roars. He swallows. The world halts, hisses.

He doesn’t know the girl that’s tied to a chair, but he would know the boy’s dark brown eyes in blindness and death. Hajime stares, rigid, and the fear shimmering in the blood dripping from his gagged mouth has Tooru jolt. He’s tied, too, on the ground, a bruise on his cheek. No. God, no. Not him.

Tooru’s father nods to one of his men. The guy takes out a knife. “I think a present will convince Iwaizumi-san to express his gratitude most generously. But which present… I’d say a finger or two. From the girl or boy, Tooru?”

“The girl.” He doesn’t hesitate. Hajime’s eyes widen, and he screams against the gag. Tooru flinches when one of the men knocks the end of his gun into his head, and Hajime goes silent.

Tooru’s father pats his shoulder when he passes by, stalking towards the girl who has started to sob into the cloth between her lips. “Take care of the son, will you? And – good choice. I’m certain that Iwaizumi-san will cooperate now.”

“Yes, father.” Tooru steps forward, kneels by Hajime’s side. It’s only when the girl starts to scream that Tooru leans in to brush his shaking fingers over Hajime’s forehead. He stays like this until the girl doesn’t cry anymore and his father tucks a small, bloody thing into a plastic bag.

Then, he whispers: “Forgive me.”