This chapter contains rape and foul language. Read at your own discretion.

Yoru liked to very little of his past, and Yahagi was not on that list.

He glanced at the badge Yahagi showed him in reply to his question and felt an immense hatred for God or Destiny or whatever it was that had decided life needed to be unfair. Because that unfair life had made a man like Yahagi a detective while he himself had become Yakuza, putting out of his reach the one man he would kill if he could.

Why now? It has taken him ten years of working and working and working some more and forcing the sleep from his eyes to teach himself not to think about that one day. So why did it have to come crashing before his mind's eye now, released by an interaction of a mere ten seconds?

Sixteen-year-old Kojima Yoru loved Tuesdays. School had ended, and his fellow club members were on the ground, leaving him by himself in the classroom. He was exempt from club activities on medical grounds.

It wasn't just because his melanin-lacking eyes couldn't tolerate bright sunlight. Everyone knew that. Even without any marks on his face, the recurring signs were obvious: a limp, a grotesquely swollen wrist, an inability to write or walk straight, blood seeping through his uniform, patches of hair torn out. His grades were dismal, he'd cry randomly and he often couldn't tell where he was or identify the people around him.

But nobody would help him. That was the downside of living in a small town where everybody knew everybody else. To them, Yoru was an object of pity, but not their problem. It wasn't their place to interfere in family affairs, they said. His classmates were only slightly better than the adults: occasionally, they’d feel so bad for his condition they’d make him a copy of their notes or leave packets of medicinal tea on his desk.

He could no longer differentiate reliably between reality and illusion, so he couldn't decide whether his classmates' actions were out of goodwill or some malicious hidden intent. That was why he liked the solitude of Tuesday afternoons.

It was hot. Yoru took off his sweater, revealing multicolored arms streaked with cuts, some of which had become septic. It was okay. He’d put his sweater back on when the bell rang so his classmates wouldn’t whisper.

The classroom door flew open just as Yoru was stretching himself lazily on his desk. Four boys came in - two from his own class who were clearly skipping, and two from the neighboring one. They stopped short upon noticing the figure in the back corner of the classroom.

“Hey, Kojima, at least have the decency to greet us!” One of them called.

“Shut up, Yahagi,” one of Yoru’s classmates, Yoshioka, said. “Leave him alone.”

“Why treat him like he’s made of glass?” Yahagi shot back, stepping closer to Yoru’s desk with each word. “He gets enough special treatment anyway - he’s exempt from cleaning duty, blackboard duty, club activities, everything.”

“He's not right in the head, Yahagi, just leave him be!"

"What, should I be scared of him?" Yahagi had reached Yoru's desk by now, and leaned down slowly, deliberately, to spite Yoshioka. Yoru caught a whiff of pheromones. An Alpha. Yahagi sniffed him too. "Why, that's one hell of a potent scent," he said.

Yoru flinched. He didn't like the slight inflection in Yahagi's tone, an indication that his scent had got to Yahagi's head. "Go away," he growled, shrinking into the wall.

"Take my dictionary and let's go," Yoshioka said. "You guys, say something!"

Nobody did, and Yahagi continued ignoring him. "Who do you think you're talking to?" Yahagi hissed, right in Yoru's ear. "A two-bit whore should know his-"

WHAM!

The water bottle connected with the side of Yahagi's head, driving him into the row of benches behind him. Yoru whirled the bottle in a circle to build up momentum and attacked again. This time, it connected with Yahagi's shoulder.

"Shit!" Yoru's other classmate swore, and fled.

This was why Yoshioka had been warning Yahagi off Yoru. Despite his limited strength and injured body, Yoru was easily triggered into unrestrained violence. He would fight with anything and everything he could get his hands on, unfazed by the damage to his own body, and wouldn't stop raging until he was sedated or lost consciousness.

Yahagi's classmate pulled Yoru back by his collar, buying Yahagi time to stand up. The manic fury building up within Yoru exploded and he released an ear-splitting scream. Fueled by nothing but pure rage, he twisted and turned, bit and scratched, his legs flailing in the air like those of an insect in its death throes. “Stop, stop, stop it!” Yoshioka shouted. “No, Yahagi! Don’t!”

Yahagi caught Yoru by the ankles and nodded at his friend, who let go and jumped back. Yoru’s whole body convulsed as he hit the floor hard. The next second, he was weightless, air whooshing in his ears - and then he slammed into someone’s desk. White-hot pain shot up the arm onto which his whole body weight fell. He crumpled onto the floor in a heap.

“You bastard, how dare you,” Yahagi snarled.

Yoru rose, staggering drunkenly, breathing like a dragon. His right arm hung nauseatingly low at his side, jolted out of its socket, its fingers still miraculously wrapped around the bottle.

Yahagi said something, but Yoru couldn’t hear it. Voices were screaming in his head. Destroy him! They screeched. You are weak! You are pathetic! Nobody will come for the worthless you, you are alone! If you want to get away, end him!

With a bestial screech, Yoru pounced on Yahagi. Yoshioka cowered by the door, terrified, as Yoru and Yahagi writhed on the floor. The smell of blood mixed with their scents. White and brown hair flew into the air. Yoru's shouts and the ripping of his clothes bounced off the walls.

It wasn't until Yahagi's friend joined the fray that Yoru could be subdued. He lay there on his front with Yahagi straddling him, exhausted and bleeding, snarling like a rabid dog. Yoshioka breathed a sigh of relief. "I'll call the nurse," he said. "Let go of Kojima, he won't-"

"Shut the door."

Yahagi's voice had suddenly deepened and become hoarse. "Why?" Yoshioka asked, just as Yoru became aware of something hard and warm pressing into the back of his neck.

Dread slammed into him harder than his father's fists. His heart, which had been thundering in his ears, stopped for a split second before pounding away twice as fast as before. Adrenaline replaced the blood in his veins. Summoning energy from where there wasn't any, his body contorted in a desperate struggle to free himself.

He was going to get raped. Yahagi had succumbed to his pheromones that had been oozing from his body because of his aggression, and he was going to get raped. As if in confirmation, he felt his trousers get pulled off.

"What are you doing!" Yoshioka shouted. "Stop, you madman - damn it! I don't want to be a part of this!"

Could Yoru actually hear Yoshioka's fading footsteps, or was his brain making it up as yet another of its cruel hallucinations? "NO!" Yoru screamed, trying to crawl away. "HELP ME! SOMEBODY HELP!"

His shirt - what remained of it - was pulled off, and air he had thought of as balmy mere minutes ago now felt icy as it brushed his skin. Strange patterns popped into his vision - bright, kaleidoscopic patterns that bounced all over the undulating classroom. His cries mixed with the shrieks in his mind until he couldn't recognize his own voice. In the middle of it all, with cruel, chilling clarity, he felt his legs being pried apart.

Yoru would, during the dark moments in the future when he allowed himself to think about today, wonder why nobody came to investigate all the noise. Searing, excruciating, bone-melting pain shot up from a point between his legs into his head. He couldn't pull himself free anymore, not with his arms twisted behind his back. The pain in his dislocated arm didn't even register. Helpless, ashamed, angry and afraid, he began to wail.

Why wouldn't the bell ring? If it did, these boys would have to go away. Yoru didn't even care that his classmates would come back to find him naked and battered on the floor. He just wanted his body to stop rocking back and forth. It was making him nauseous.

And then it stopped. Yoru stayed curled up on the floor, gasping for breath and trying to tell which way was up. Some clarity returned to his brain, and he blinked the psychedelic shapes away.

A hand closed around his hair and roughly pulled him upright. Now that his sensory input was comparatively lucid, anger quickly began to burn through the other emotions he felt. Even the pain evaporated. Yahagi's depraved, lecherous face came into view. Yoru felt hands forcing his mouth open, and he choked on the hot, rigid, slimy object forced into his mouth. And doing that was Yahagi's biggest mistake.

Yoru's lower teeth drove into his upper ones with an audible snap.

They found Yoru naked in the bathroom, lying in a pool of blood and vomit. He was taken to the hospital, cleaned, bandaged and sent home. The whole town was abuzz with talk. The deranged albino attacked poor Yahagi. It was bound to happen one day - one just had to see the look in Kojima's eyes. Like father, like son. The classroom looked like a murder scene. Nobody in the town had ever seen so much blood in one place.

The Yahagis, an affluent political family, paid the Kojimas an obscene amount of money to stay silent about the matter. Everybody involved in the incident - the other three boys, the teacher who found Yahagi, the student who found Yoru, the janitor who cleaned up the blood - were paid off and asked to sign non-disclosure agreements. The story given to the public was that Yoru had carelessly neglected taking his heat suppressors and Yahagi was helplessly drawn to him, prompting the threatened omega to attack. Yoru was carted off to a psychiatric facility, and the incident vanished into the unhallowed cesspool of human brutality.

Yoru wished he had been in heat. If he had, he would have brought everyone in that wing of the building to their knees and left with his dignity intact. Stigmatized, denigrated, deprived of a single word of sympathy or comfort, Yoru put himself back together alone. He despised the know-it-all expression of his doctors, but he worked with them for his own sake. In his worst moments, he drew comfort from the fact that he was out of his father's reach.

He thought he wouldn't, but he healed. His torn body put itself back together. His hair grew back thicker and whiter than ever. His psychosis faded away. He learnt to smile again.

When he was released four years later, his father had already fallen into debt and fled the town. Yoru came home to find that he was bound to work for a Yakuza boss as part of the repayment. Six years later, a man found within the used, damaged, worthless him a priceless, beautiful something that the abuse and rape and illness and prejudice had never been able to touch.

The very same Yahagi stood before Yoru now, asking if Yoru had been stalking him. Yoru's shoulder tingled. He felt like he wanted to scratch out his insides. "I have better things to do with my life," Yoru said in response to Yahagi's question, and sidestepped him.

"Hey!" Yahagi grabbed his arm right as he was about to push open the door to room 314: incidentally, the same arm Yoru had dislocated all those years ago. "Where do you think you're going?"

"Don't touch me."

"Answer me."

"The same thing anyone else who isn't a patient or employee does in a hospital, imbecile. Now, get your filthy mitts off me."

Yahagi bristled. He had spent ten years thinking his crime had been buried forever. Now that he was face-to-face with his unscrupulous past, his fear of being exposed was quickly transformed into defensive anger. "You better watch your mouth," he growled, squeezing Yoru's thin arm painfully. "I can bury you alive and nobody will question me."

"Let. Go. My scream won't fall on deaf ears this time." Yoru grabbed the door handle and tried to tug himself free.

"You can't go in there. The person inside is part of an ongoing police investigation." Yahagi cast a suspicious glance from Yoru to the door and back. Something went click in his brain. "You can service him after I get his sign-"

His head whipped sideways as Yoru landed a resounding slap on his cheek. "Do you think you broke me?" He hissed. "Do you think you took everything from me but a body to sell for a living?"

Yahagi tightened his grip on Yoru's arm further, forcing a small moan from the latter. "I think you are a fool for assaulting a police officer, for which I could have you thrown right back into the hole you crawled out from," he spat. "What other conclusion do I draw when I see you bouncing towards that man's room looking like it's Christmas? Do you even know that he's a yakuza boss?"

"Yes, I do. I happen to be that man's wife."

The smug, malicious smile on Yahagi's face vanished. His eyes widened and, as Yoru noted with belligerent satisfaction, all the blood drained from his face. "So you really should quit manhandling me," Yoru continued, casually pointing out the half dozen men closing in on Yahagi, their entire bodies carrying oozing with promise of brutal retribution. "Unless that arm is the next body part you want to lose."

Yahagi clenched his jaw in outrage, but let go. "That's better," Yoru crooned, and waved the men off. "It's alright, boys," he said, never taking his eyes off Yahagi. "You still have a shot at heaven if you don't touch this one."

"You will regret this," Yahagi promised.

"Regret what? Not taking you in my mouth all the way to the hilt? I've always regretted it. Now go, get your damn signature and get out."

Yahagi glared at Yoru for all he was worth as he stepped back into the room. That little shit would regret running his mouth. He knew he couldn't touch Yoru anymore, but if that omega's expression as he came to visit his husband was any indication, there was still a way for Yahagi to exact revenge.

The odds were in his favor. It was almost too easy.

Tsunoda Kei greeted Yahagi with a friendly smile as he entered. "Do I still have something I can tell you?" he asked. "Trust me, Yahagi-san, you'd extract less from me if this were an interrogation."

"No, you missed a signature," Yahagi said, holding out the papers to Kei. "In fact, I have something to tell you."

"Is that so?"

"I met your wife outside. Turns out we went to high school together." Yahagi rearranged his features into an Oscar-worthy expression of commiseration. "To say I was shocked to know he was married to you is an understatement."

"Why is it such a surprise?" Kei asked, confused.

"It's...oh, how difficult it is to say this...there is something you don't know about your wife, Tsunoda-san. Something so...it's the stuff of nightmares-"

The door opened so violently it slammed against the wall. "And what is it?" Yoru demanded. "That I was insane? Or that you have a pimple for a dick because I bit off the rest after you raped me?"