Chapter Text
"Today marks the seventh month period of extraordinary superstar Japanese forward Itoshi Rin, who was last seen leaving a division in Tokyo. Japanese and worldwide fans have gathered at the hometown of the stars' origin, Kamakura, as not long ago, the search was classified frozen. Mourning Itoshi Rin's disappearance, they have decided to pay their respects to the prodigal striker at a Kamakura temple, where his famously ace brother is rumored to currently reside."
"Oh, the brother," a news anchor commented. "Consistently fighting with the younger on the field blithely to the media, but sure, the moment he disappears, Itoshi Sae emerges with a heart."
His partner gave a short laugh. "The last we have seen of the Japanese ace was during his last game with Re Al against Munich, conveniently the day after Itoshi Rin's vanishing. Regardless of the midfielder's secrecy, we shouldn't bash the player for his connection to the striker."
The second broadcaster sighed. "I suppose so. Itoshi Rin was famous for his complicated personality."
Some rolled their eyes behind the screen of the aired news. It wasn't an aggressive insult or dig at the star, merely true, but it remained inappropriate regarding the day's event.
"Well," his co-star replied. "Speaking perniciously of a suspected deceased person would cause misfortune, wouldn't it?"
The man dug without an end. A crater on the ground, below a nameless tombstone, deepened and narrowed with every pile of carved out dirt, flying senseless. Saying Rin enjoyed the pitiful sight of a servant groveling for his victim was apathetic. He didn't enjoy any of the rituals and practices practiced over the blank, abandoned tombstone decorated in limbs and intestines; he loathed the custom.
Ritually, every week, a "platter" of human corpses, still warm, appeared at the same resting place with the same man. He would kneel over whatever body interested him enough to deem as deserving and began to articulately fracture the remaining joints that hadn't been feasted by him prior. Without the protection of maintaining the connection of the bones, he would tear through the muscles until the organs would reveal themselves.
Location wasn't a means of necessity, but it served as the man's intent to torment him. The man-creature could mutilate people surgically and violently wherever, regardless of site or country. Standing fact alone, he continued to choose the boundless forest secluded from the city where the famous, now declared dead forward, Itoshi Rin had died. At the end of the week, the afflicted distress of the deceased souls cried to Rin.
They died for Itoshi Rin to his tormentor. Not a fan, but to his captor, kidnapper, and murderer was currently roaming around Japan, claiming bodies in Rin's name. Or so he claims —Rin knows the bullshit he was told was only a cover story to have the man peacefully hunt without Rin escaping him.
However, the guilt-tripping technique didn't work. Rin only stayed with the man because he valued what was stolen from him. Rin lived with the person who mourned and pleased him— the person responsible for his disappearance and murder, a filthy vampire. Shitty Isagi Yoichi.
Itoshi Rin was missing, but he sure wasn't dead.
According to the creature, not that Rin took anything he spewed as believable in the slightest, Rin wasn't dead yet. His body was a walking corpse with an incomplete heart, functioning normally enough. He still bled, thought, slept, but he wasn't complete.
Not without his heart being chained and kept under Isagi’s accord.
The broadcasters were somewhat true. Rin had died, but not entirely. He was the closest relevant thing to a zombie if you will, who played prisoner to the person who had reduced him to his stale condition after kidnapping him mid-step in the streets of Tokyo. Beaten in strength and agility from emerging hands from behind, he remembered his neck snapping, later defying the law of death by awakening in a foreign forest, and being devoured from the inside out by his killer.
It didn’t feel like anything at all, surprisingly. The experience was like waking up from the anesthesia in the middle of an organ transplant while lying in a hospital bed, minus the extravagant lighting and the professionals cutting into your skin to remove your necessities. In Rin's insight to being cannibalized, he awoke sprawled on dirt and grass in the middle of the woods somehow, with an animal resembling a human spreading his skin apart with claws to consume the remains of his chest.
He recognized weight on his waist, constantly shifting around impatiently. What Rin found odd was the lack of warmth. Body heat was replaced with an icy touch.
Stuck in nausea, he was conscious enough to realize his stomach was gone. As discomforting as it was, the winds of the forest curled into his empty stomach caused frost on the exposure and restrained Rin from losing sentient. Three of his ribs were beside his head like repulsive obstacles that kept whatever depraved animal from relishing in the real meal.
Twenty-four cartilages were scattered and cluttered onto the gunk stuck in Rin's hair. Hearing the fourth rib snap in half from his spine, he lurched forward enough to confirm his responsiveness. Blood specked into the hair of his devourer as the smell of his organs caused whiplash, resulting to an unwanted vomiting.
The shadows looming over his corpse-like body made whatever waste disgorging from his mouth appear like tar. His clothes were tattered, black in blood due to his earlier suffocation, and the animal responsible continued to eat without falter. "Disgusting," Rin groaned. His ankles were broken, calves snapped similarly like Rin's ribs to avoid resistance. "Annoying....fucking disgusting!"
A red hand grabbed his ravaged neck and pushed him back into the dirt and grass. As quickly as the hand forced him down, it immobilized Rin's ability to react to the fifth fractured rib. Impatient fingers captured an undefended heart and greedily stripped the organ from its valves, arteries, and vessels.
Sensing the emptiness, Rin should have been dead. Still, he remained alive, conscious, awake, and watched as the man suddenly regained proper decency to reveal his face. Only fragments of a clean skin were visible due to his own sprayed blood protecting the identity of an organ robber, but the youth behind the red was unmistakable. A guy, somewhere around Rin's age, with rapturous gleaming blue eyes. Veiled like glass, Rin noticed.
Remaining Rin ignored, the royal dark eyes treasured what they had been scavenging for in Rin's body in his cupped palms. The eyes wavered in anticipation as the sweet scent settled in his senses until he abruptly ended the trance state. Widening his mouth, canines began to grow.
As if Rin's neck, legs, and intestines weren't enough to fulfill or satisfy, he ruthlessly sank his... fangs into the heart and moaned into it, eliciting the warm blood he pooled in his mouth to spill down his chin and over Rin's... emptiness. "It's healthy," he swooned. Biting and chewing and biting again, he stared down in ecstasy at the revolted teal eyes, vigilant to the voracious consumption of his humanity. "So damn good. You were delicious through it all, so damn complicit."
Rin's ears rang somehow at the received jeering. Undoubtedly, his words were true— he allowed everything of his murder to occur. Watching led to the expected outcome of bleeding out and dying in a forest he wasn't familiar with because of a goddamn cannibalistic... vampire. He was Itoshi fucking Rin — dying this way was an undiscovered low his ego and pride would never recover from.
Sae would never allow him to live it down. Rin was to die on the field, not to a damn vampire. Possession by spirits would be far more momentous to die to compared to the average teenage fantasy of the 2010's. "Fuck all. Fuck movies. Fuck the 2010's."
Less than half of his heart lingered in the vampire's hands. Stalling was the only source of regaining whatever leftover scraps there were, but Rin knew better. Taunting would work best. "Break my ribs more," Rin muttered huskily to his devourer. Speaking of anything regarding his current malnourished state was astonishing if it weren't for the adrenaline. The heart was being eaten in front of him, yet there was still a familiar sensation beating within his exposed ribs. "You did it for the shit of it anyway," he sputtered quietly, challenging. "Finish the rest."
"Okay." Rin felt fingers rummage through the mess of his ribs and concentrated on one, maintaining the sternum in place, and pulled. Immediately, Rin jolted forward and gasped, eyes blown wide.
He had a clear image of the red-drenched vampires' irises. Facial features remained hidden in his own blood, but sitting up, Rin loathed the eyes at first sight. Vibrant blue eyes met his teals and stared in a similar shock with more composure. "...Alive?"
"Yeah." Rin forced his arm to move, resisting the distress his anatomical body was beginning to rupture under, and reclaimed the excess from the vampire. The desire to gag was lost in the turbulent attempt to keep the heart away from the man's hand using strength alone. Rin's weakness had reached its extent due to the gluttonous vampire, leading to his impulsive choice to shove his heart into his mouth.
Rin began to chew it torridly. His jaw clicked, and there was no possible situation where he could digest it, but he continued to eat. The squish, remaining blood and malodor triggered Rin to gag.
Sae had always told him he could consume anything. Rin had only ever eaten past his capabilities to inconvenience Sae, and he still unwittingly prevailed his statement accurate. He had already swallowed the organ before gagging. Only saliva was vomited out of his mouth.
The jackass crouched on him and laughed. He may as well howled at Rin's confident act of eating an organ— his own organ and slammed his hand on Rin's shoulder, as if they were customary with another. “You’re… disgusting. Huh.”
He took Rin's hand into his clutch and smelled his scent for a moment. From what Rin could presume, the smell was foul due to his open split body— except the vampire continued to relish his nose deep into Rin's palm. Rin wanted to slap him. "Isagi," he suddenly heard mumbled incoherently into his hand, before letting it fall. "And you're Itoshi Rin."
Rin wanted to vomit in his face. He wanted to gouge out the human-like eyes admiring him without sense and coughed on him instead. Isagi braced himself for the coughing blood fit Rin was going to unleash on him until Isagi placed his hands on his cheeks. Covered in his blood, they were warm and discouraging.
Similar to his face drenched in his pivoting red, Rin's face dirtied when Isagi kissed him. Nothing about it was miraculous or curing, but it aroused the accumulating rage of the murdered. Instinctively grabbing a discarded rib near him, he grabbed Isagi's head and jammed the bone into the side of his skull.
"Give it back to me," he growled, naturally reaching for a second rib to stab into Isagi's eye socket. "The heart. Give it."
The stabbed "dagger" at the side of his temple wasn't frivolous enough to fake a reaction. Immediately, Isagi grinned widely and dislocated his arm from his elbow before Rin had the chance for the second injury. A gasp or a scream would have been appropriate, yet Rin still felt nothing. "Motherfucker."
A hand pierced into the remaining muscles left in Rin's back and took hold of a vertebra. "You're disturbing and repulsive," he awed, tugging the imprisoned connected vertebra to lift. Isagi bit his lip hard enough to cause an unnatural current of blood and began to reserve what he could into his mouth as he leaned close to Rin. "I'll heal you, but I'm stripping you of your spine." By the third lift, Rin could feel his skeleton slip outwards to Isagi's demand. "And," he continued to relentlessly tease, oblivious to Rin's demise. "I'm not hitting on you."
Isagi kissed him again, contrary to his clear-up. Rin's initial thought was to begin eating Isagi from the lips, until a tongue shoved itself into his mouth with a horrid taste of blood. Teal eyes sorrowed in disgust of the taste and grew wide as Isagi pulled out his spine immediately, inducing him to his insensate.
Rin can’t remember how having his spine mutilated led to his companionship with Isagi for the following months. Ridiculous enough as it is, Isagi got him an illegal phone, originally to taunt him, but after two days he learned quickly Rin wasn't interested in calls. Contacting anyone that wasn't Isagi was impractical because of the second trapped heart in Isagi's body; Rin couldn't run without the damn thing.
He would live within Isagi's regime as he currently did until he could retrieve his heart. After, he would run— the fact would and will continue to prevail authentic, no matter his time with Isagi. Rin rarely prayed until his kidnapping, but occasionally, he would beg silently to the mangled corpses that Isagi would go to hell already. Nothing Isagi could do would ever soften him.
The unreciprocated acceptance of the meal he would always give Rin every week was evidence. Rejection was a concept Isagi refused to acknowledge, and he continued with the practice, no matter the daily refutation. "I know you're watching me Rin; come out," Isagi called out to the night. “I got food.”
Anything Isagi did for him felt demeaning. If anything, it felt as if Isagi was taming him by doing gestures in supposed favor of Rin. The dug grave he gifted Rin after his birthday passed three months ago was another one of Isagi's tactics, and as much as Rin hated to admit, it was comfortable to lie in. He had repulsively accepted the present equivalent to a promise ring by Isagi's standards. God, Rin hated Isagi's being.
Standing inside was possible due to the depth, but it wasn't preferable. Rin always laid in there during the ritualistic serving of Isagi's meals, simply hearing and judging Isagi for eating his secondhand dinners. Today was different — Isagi called out to him before he had already finished everything. He couldn't actually see Isagi while he previously gazed at the stars quietly inside his grave, but it amused Isagi, nonetheless.
Rin's hand reached out of his potential burial site and clawed onto dirt. Pulling himself up, he paused and sensed Isagi looking down at him cynically. "I'm not your dog," Rin muttered, trudging out of the DIY open casket and dusting himself off.
"You act like a mutt anyway," he smugly shrugged.
Rin scoffed distastefully. The deranged vampire speaking about rabidness, how ironic. "Give me what I want instead of your scraps."
"You're not getting my eye," Isagi repeated flatly. "Quit acting feral and actually eat with me, I brought you a lot." He extended a handout for Rin to take and lifted a finger to brush Rin's lashes, resulting in an expected swat at his hand. "Petty." Rin could see the shit-eating grin Isagi was holding horridly back.
Walking past Isagi, Rin stood in front of a headstone and leaned on the marble across the bodies.
Indifferent teal eyes roamed over the offering of his so-called grace. Nothing was cut properly or carefully. It looked like Isagi went out of his way to worsen his food by ripping the bodies he encountered gruesomely with his teeth— fangs, right, his fangs. In short, it was trash. Nothing was salvageable. "I'm not hungry."
Isagi rolled his eyes painfully slow, ridiculing Rin. "It's been months, figured you would have dropped the act by now. Just say you're picky and tell me what you want."
"And again, for the millionth time, I'm not lying," he gritted, clenching his jaw, prepared to waste another night arguing with Isagi. Since the night of his devouring, witnessing his small intestine spilling gunk over Isagi's jaw as he chewed it, pancreas slipping out of one hand, liver sliding off the other, Rin's appetite never returned. It wasn't so disturbing that it left a permanent scar, but he sincerely wasn't able to experience hunger anymore. That's the only field Rin has a definite advantage over Isagi: the vampire relies on his own hunger. Rin doesn't have that.
Of course, in denial, Isagi doesn't believe his dominant trait is real. He stared longer at Rin with dead blue eyes, emitting a void-like abyss that could easily drive anyone up the walls, and raised his brows. "You're mad?"
When isn't he? "Why are you asking if you already know the answer?"
Isagi huffed audaciously at him. He took a glance at the limbs and organs Rin was sneering at, much to his dismay, and took a clump of matter into his palms. Inspecting it lazily, he began to squeeze the disfiguration until the leftover blood seeped through his fingers. “There. I cleaned a lung for you to scrounge.”
A small, humorous part of Rin thanked Isagi for taking away his gag reflex. Becoming desensitized to immoral acts wasn’t preferable, but it maintained the leftover scraps of sanity intact. “I don't want your offerings.”
Instead of another rapid reply of bullshit to be one who gets the last word, Isagi stared at him quietly.
If Isagi were a dog, his ears would be perked up. Sniffing too if you will, until he suddenly remained grimly still, attentive to Rin's eyes. Strangely enough, the locked eyes on him reminded him that Isagi wasn't any sort of animal; he was a beast, raw and rapturous without a care for his prey. They lingered in their black orb-like appearance, tarnishing the ocean blue irises with midnight depths. Isagi's pupils dilated double the amount before, making Rin click his tongue in realization and refrain from throwing the closest headstone at him for emphasizes on his repellency. The bastard wasn't staying silent to read him. Isagi was feeling.
Feeling and sensing the god-awful rhythm of Rin's heartbeat.
Wherever or however Isagi's inner anatomical structure was aligned in, somewhere in there, in an empty vampiric body, he stored Rin's heart. The leftovers, anyway, yet it remained influential with or without completion. "Stop," Rin growled, fingers clawing at the stone beneath his palms. The tone in his order caused the mighty black pupils to fall and return sovereignty to the blues, helping Isagi's appearance into normalcy.
Isagi's mouth was gaped, and his eyes were squinted in what Rin figured was irritancy, before it was quickly replaced with a knowing grin. "Really," he began, treacherously rising from a knee and taking two steps closer, leaving not enough distance for Rin to comfortably breathe. A shove could save him easily, but Rin was familiar with the high Isagi was beginning to evoke. He would never hear the end of it if he did. "You're adorable when you show your disturbance."
The weakest thing in Rin's body was under the clutches of a deranged, insane creature who cannot tell the difference between love and obsession to save his own apathetic life. Isagi's lips twitched upwards before he burst out laughing, lending Rin a hand for clarification. "You remembered I have your heart!" he exclaimed, forcibly taking Rin's wrist into his grasp after the refused proposition.
"Don't make me feel it," Rin groaned, instinctively repulsed as his hand was slammed on Isagi's chest. His muscle was underneath Rin's fingertips, and just as easily as he was forced to feel, a beat pulsed where his hand lay. A rapid pace, almost nervous.
"I told you lying is useless. Your heart gives everything away."
Rin pulled his hand away the moment Isagi lessened its grip. "Stop altering it."
A grin. "I can't do that, Rin. I don't think anyone can, only the owner of the heart."
“Bullshit.”
Rin wished everything about Isagi was bullshit straight out of a plagiarized romantic gothic novel of some sort that didn't involve him. A football player didn’t have a purpose to play as a pawn unless it was on the field. Regarding positions, Rin being an embodiment of a desirable strong forward meant that the pawn was never his designated role.
Inconveniences like these were for the typical to fret and distress over, not him, and that was exactly what he was served. He was stuck in an irregular spell cast on the incarcerator rather than the one in confinement that notably furthered his stay with Isagi.
What a lousy curse. Compared to the other vampire curses he used to read when he was a teenager, the one he found himself caught in was the most horribly unoriginal, cliché calamity. Worse of all, it wasn't even a curse. Isagi was simply glutinous with his cravings and kept Rin prisoner for entertainment. He was just a corpse that walked around with a vampire in order to retain his heart once more- there were no silly curses fallen on either.
That was how it was supposed to be anyway. No curse or emotional attachments, until the vampire had to be Isagi Yoichi of all things. Isagi twistedly fell into a curse— fucking obsession with all things. After mauling Rin, Isagi fell in love. With what was beyond Rin.
The urge to shove Isagi was maddening. If Isagi began declaring his love for Rin again for a continuous six hours like last time, he would get a promotion from a shove to a throttle.
He figured his face must have been a dead giveaway of his desires. "Kinky," Isagi grinned, tilting his head slightly further than it already was to expose his neck invitingly, clean and without any proof of suffocation.
Rin raised a brow. "Don't sell that to me, I know you can't hear my thoughts. Lie better."
"Thanks for the advice.”
"I'm done listening to your shit."
Scoffing, Isagi took a step back, returning Rin’s breath. "You hardly do anyway." He stepped past an abandoned disfigured lung Rin was hoping he would slip on and kneeled to reach for a liver to nibble on.
It felt courteous to turn away whenever Isagi ate. The smell repelled Rin, no matter how recent the bodies were, and the twinge of annoyance crossed his mind every time. Jealousy or something of that spectrum constantly filled Rin as he closed his eyes and listened to Isagi devour to his needs. "I want to go out," he muttered, giving his back to Isagi and crossing his arms to prevent gagging.
Isagi choked on whatever organ he was ripping apart. That was a different reaction than what Rin was expecting, but... at least it wasn't an immediate no. "Are you asking me to a date?" Isagi replied, baffled.
Of course he interpreted that way. "No," Rin gritted, tensing as Isagi grabbed his shoulder and forcibly turned him. Curse him and his abnormal strength.
"You should have told me you wanted human gestures," Isagi continued. Locking his hand with Rin, he squeezed Rin's bones hard enough to turn pale. Against Isagi's red-stained hand, it was apparent Rin lost tonight. "So cute. You're so human."
Disgust filled Rin, but he didn't force Isagi off. "It's not a date," he enforced. "I don't want to go anywhere that supports your shitty implication. No restaurants, no hotels, none of that."
Fuck, he should have never mentioned hotels.
Isagi looked at him with an erratic grin. "Really, Rin? Hotels? It's like you want me to take you one."
"Stop talking; I don't want to see you either. Take me to a place where both of those desires are fulfilled."
"Hah." Releasing Rin, Isagi placed his hand on his hips and looked below, thinking. "...Those are your request, not mine; remember that."
At Rin's expense, he braced himself for the inflicted bite on his wrist. The venom of Isagi's fangs seared through his blood as they had always done whenever Isagi took him "out." Rin tried to resist fainting in the beginning, but after the second time, the venom seemed to revive his blood with heat. He willingly sought the poison.
His lack of resistance caused Isagi to laugh and raise a brow. "You stopped fighting after a while, don't think I haven't noticed."
Rin felt hazy. The fog in his mind, from the inducing warmth of Isagi's venom, was reducing his brain to stupidity. "I like it that way," he admitted woozily, blacking out into Isagi's waiting arms.