Work Text:
After Dracula's castle, home doesn't feel right.
Soma tries to make it work. He puts on his uniform and goes to school, like he's supposed to — but he can't focus in any of his classes, and his teachers have to tell him to pay attention. He plays with the switchblade in his pocket, the one he's not supposed to have. He keeps imagining his classmates with rotting flesh and leathery wings. He keeps thinking about what might happen if he just stabbed someone, if they'd bleed or burst into flames or do something else entirely —
He keeps wondering if he could claim a human soul.
Honestly, he wouldn't do it — it's not desire that's driving these fantasies — but for his safety, and for everyone else's, Soma stops going to class. He cracks jokes to cover up his anxieties; his texts are customarily irreverent. i'm a lot cooler now, he writes. too cool for school.
Mina knows better than to take him at face value. She tells their classmates that he's sick — then, when he's been gone too long to just be sick, that he has a family emergency. He figures they don't believe her. If he ever walks into the school building again, his reputation will be firmly cemented in place. He'll be the truant, the delinquent, the thug.
Not that it matters, really.
There's probably a name for whatever he has, like post-traumatic stress disorder or violent intrusive thoughts or honestly who gives a damn, but Soma tries not to think about it. Soma tries not to think about a lot of things. Like the way he can't stand being in bright light anymore, the way he swears he can hear seductive whispering every time he closes his eyes to sleep. The way he feels stressed out and aggressive at all hours of the day, because, shit, he hasn't even jerked one out in ages, he thinks of gory alura une and screeching succubi every time he sees a naked woman —
He spent an eternity in darkness.
The world expects him to worry about college entrance exams.
Nothing's really normal anymore, no matter how much he wants it to be. Since Soma doesn't trust himself to be around people, he spends his days locked in his apartment, paging through shallow entertainment on his phone at every godawful hour of the night. He sleeps with his knife sheathed beside his pillow; he eats only when he absolutely has to. Nothing works. Nothing takes his mind off the things he's seen, the things he's done, or the horrible, haunting feeling that he's being watched.
One evening — when he's wide awake at four in the morning for the third day in a row — Soma realizes that the last sensation isn't just his paranoia.
His apartment is empty. The digital clock on his bedside table reads 4:32AM. He's tried to sleep in his coat for the last hour and a half, because after everything he's been through with it, he finds it comforting to wear — but the buckles and studs have left strange imprints on his arms and face, and it's not great for napping in, not really. After another moment, Soma rolls over so that his cheek is pressed against the fur cowl. He closes his eyes, swallows on his dry throat.
He can feel something, when he focuses. Something dark and ominous, but strangely familiar — in the air around him, and in the breeze coming in through the cracks in his window.
Something lurks just outside the glass.
Soma rolls again, this time onto his back. He adjusts the waistband of his sweatpants. He throws his arm over his eyes.
"Arikado," he calls, to the empty room, to the ceiling. "I know you're there."
It doesn't surprise Soma, not in the least, that Genya Arikado simply steps out from the shadows at the darkest corner of Soma's room. Soma sees the gleam of polished leather before anything else — then the subtle curves of the man's dress shoe, melting into the straight lines of his pant leg. Black hair spills over the shoulders of his dark suit. Hands in his pockets. White shirt. White skin.
Mina's voice, from a lifetime ago: His face is just too beautiful.
Arikado doesn't say anything, which is just fine, by Soma's standards. The boy rolls once more onto his side; he lets his hair fall into his eyes. Soma doesn't look at Arikado — not at his sickeningly beautiful face, anyway — but he looks in Arikado's direction, at his waist and hands and hips. "How long have you been watching me?" he asks.
The man's voice is as he remembers it — cold and deep, impossibly smooth, like the undisturbed surface of a lake in winter. "Only for the last few hours. My colleagues conducted surveillance for the past two days."
His colleagues. The agency is involved. Soma closes his eyes again, this time out of exasperation. "Why?"
The special agent (federal agent? Soma can't remember) shifts his weight. "We were told that your recent behavior has been... erratic. Mina Hakuba expressed her concerns." Then Arikado does something Soma has never seen him do before: he tips his head, ever so slightly, to one side. "She tried to contact you."
Soma knows. He saw the text messages as they came in — he just never opened them, couldn't bring himself to. "I wasn't ignoring her," he claims, knowing full well how hollow it sounds. "I just... didn't want her to see me like this."
Arikado's neck has yet to right itself. "You don't look especially different," he offers, after a pause.
"That's not what I meant."
Soma lets out a breath he didn't realize he was holding. Arikado doesn't move. For a moment, they both remain relatively still — but then Soma realizes that the agent is looking around, which is somehow even more disturbing than the thought of Mina seeing him in his current state of dishevelment.
Soma sits up in complete alarm. His coat falls from his shoulders. "What are you staring at?" he demands.
Arikado's dark eyelashes seem to brush his cheeks when he blinks. He turns his gaze back to the boy on the bed. "Nothing in particular," he says. "Your apartment is... cleaner than expected."
The lack of personal pronouns (cleaner than expected, versus cleaner than I expected) makes Soma feel as though the cleanliness of his home is some kind of department in-joke at Arikado's agency. He bristles. "What do you mean, expected? I've basically been on my own since I was a kid. Of course it's clean. Besides, haven't you been in here before? Agency surveillance or some crap like that?"
The dark-haired agent remains unruffled. "I would not enter your home without invitation," he says, placidly.
Soma isn't entirely certain that calling Arikado's name in the dead of night really counts as an invitation, but he decides it's not worth arguing over.
Once again, he falls backwards onto his mattress; his head lands on his pillow. He is suddenly acutely aware of the fact that he's been shedding silver hairs all over his bed, like a cat. "So you're the only one here right now?" Soma asks, not entirely certain what he is asking. "I mean... do you have a partner?"
Arikado seems oddly perturbed. The question elicits a single arched brow from the man. "Pardon?"
"You know, a partner. In the agency you work for. Do you have one outside right now?" Soma jerks a thumb towards the window. The Hakuba shrine is a shadow in the distance. "You're always talking about your colleagues, so I figured you have a partner."
The agent's brow returns to its usual position. "I prefer to work alone," he says, after a pause.
"Don't you work with Yoko?"
"Yoko and Julius are not in Japan at present."
Arikado doesn't say anything more — which is fine, since Soma wasn't expecting anything more, anyway. They are quiet for a few more moments, the teenager in his bed and the man waiting a few feet away.
Soma's been through a lot of awkward silences in his life, but somehow, this one is the worst.
Genya Arikado is still standing in his room.
At length, Soma pushes himself from his mattress, rising to his feet. "Do you eat, Arikado?"
The man's reply sounds just the slightest bit amused. "What do you mean by that?"
"I mean, do you eat, like, normal food?" If Arikado's secretly been watching him for the past few hours, it doesn't really matter what Soma does at this point. With complete disregard for how he might look, he grabs a hairpin from his bedside table and haphazardly pins his bangs up — appearances be damned. "I'm going to see what I have in the kitchen. Do you want anything?"
Arikado's singular response suggests that he is only willing to answer one question at a time. "I can eat normal food, yes." No further explanation about what he might want to eat — but then, inexplicably, he adds: "I thought you already knew that."
Soma cannot help himself from losing his temper. He raps his knuckles against the wall as he walks — an unconscious effort to displace his anger. "Oh, I'm sorry," he snarls sarcastically, "did you just assume I already knew something, Arikado? That's rich, coming from the guy who only told me what I needed to know at any given point in time. Do you know how much easier it would have been if you had just laid everything out on the table from the start?"
The agent seems indifferent to Soma's past suffering. "When you first absorbed Dracula's powers, you said you understood everything."
"Yeah. I understood everything about being Dracula. Like, I knew what I was supposed to do as the dark lord, and how to control the castle, and — I don't know, I had weird feelings. Kept thinking that — that everything belonged to me, and that I needed to destroy humanity." The boy half-stomps into his kitchen; aggressively, he opens up his refrigerator, squints at the light inside, and then slams it shut again. "If there was anything else, I blocked it out. No point digging around inside the soul of a guy you don't want to be."
Arikado follows him, all hard heels against kitchen tile. "So," he observes, with the same clinical air that one might expect of a surgeon, "you know nothing."
"If I'm supposed to know something, just tell me, you prick." There is nothing in Soma's kitchen that does not require cooking. Resigned to his fate, he opens up a bottom cabinet, pulling out his household bag of rice. It's almost empty; he has to buy more. "No, I don't know anything about you. I mean, you're probably not human — but beyond that, I don't know, and I don't care. You're an asshole. Does anything else matter?"
Arikado does not respond immediately.
It's then that Soma suddenly realizes that the man's voice has been strangely quiet for some time.
Instinctively, Soma turns around, half-expecting to find Arikado leaning against the doorway, or perhaps even seated at the dining table. Instead, the man is standing beside him, as eternal and timeless as ever, somehow beyond mortal grasp —
— except for the fact that his hand is too close, for no apparent reason, and Soma's white hair is caught in his fingers.
Arikado's expression is completely neutral.
Soma doesn't know if he should feel violated or not.
The agent's perfect face shows nothing in the way of regret, or surprise. It displays nothing that might tell Soma that this is all some kind of mistake. His lips are set in their usual thin line. "As it should be," Arikado says in his rich voice, his words strange and vague, as though he speaks merely to fill the silence. "As it is."
Soma's pulse quickens. His mouth feels dry. He knows what fear is like — real fear, not the sort from watching horror movies, but real, implacable, inexorable fear. He felt it in his first hours in the haunted halls of Dracula's castle. He was hunted. He fell into demon traps. He bled, he broke, he mended, he pressed on. He knows what fear is like.
And yet, this — this, with Arikado, is not fear.
It is just uncomfortably similar to fear.
Anyway, it should be nothing, in Soma's mind, so he pushes his surge of emotions to the side. He wets his lips, then pulls away, so that his hair slides out from between Arikado's fingers. "Do you want food or not?" he asks. His voice comes out more hoarsely than he wants it to.
Arikado lets his hand fall. He slips it into his pocket again. "I'll cook. You should wash up."
Soma is certain that he misheard. "What?"
"I'll cook. You should wash up." Again, the tilt of Arikado's head, the one that doesn't seem quite right on him. "I imagine you haven't washed yourself in some time."
The accusation is accurate. Soma hasn't showered in a good long while — mostly because he thought he hadn't done anything that merited showering, but also because, irrationally, he kept imagining demons coming into his bathroom through the faucet. Reflexively, he lifts his shirt by its neckline and brings it to his nose, but he smells nothing besides laundry detergent, the scent of his bedsheets, and his usual musk. "Do I smell that bad?" he asks, slightly embarrassed.
"No." Arikado does not provide any further reassurances. "Just take a bath, Soma."
Soma is still for a moment. He tries vainly to decide whether the thought of Arikado cooking for him is more or less disturbing than the fact that Arikado can smell him from several paces away — but then the agent gives him a look, one that suggests more than just a hint of impatience, and Soma decides to comply with the man's demands before his pride can catch up and void the transaction.
Mechanically, Soma grabs a change of clothes from his dresser, then marches to the bathroom, and hides himself in the shower there.
Living in Japan has not trained him out of preferring quick showers to longer, more traditional baths. Soma does not even wait for the water to heat up before stepping beneath it. The spray hits his back — cold at first, and then mercifully lukewarm. Heat follows after, soothing previously unacknowledged aches and pains in Soma's stiff joints. The scent of his preferred brand of shampoo is comforting in its familiarity. Soap comes afterward, bracing and unfamiliar — a new bar, a gift from Mina he'd never had cause to use until now. Citrus and cedar fills his lungs alongside steam from the shower. Refreshing.
Soma leaves his hairpin on the bathroom counter, stuffs his old clothes into the laundry basket. When he comes out from the bathroom with a towel wrapped loosely around his neck to catch the water dripping from his bangs, Arikado is no longer in the kitchen. There is a pot simmering on the stove in his place.
Soma frowns at it for a moment, and then walks back to his bedroom.
Arikado is there, sitting cross-legged on the couch. He does not look up at Soma's entrance; he leafs through one of Soma's comic books with a kind of aristocratic ennui.
Soma decides not to ask if they share the same taste in manga — he doesn't want to hear the answer. "What are you making?" he asks, in a tellingly strained voice.
The agent is merciful enough to simply close the volume and set it aside. His eyes seem to trail over Soma's pajamas. "Rice porridge."
Soma hesitates a moment, and then takes a seat beside him. He does not look at Arikado's face. "Thought it'd be something fancier."
He is surprised when the agent shifts to the side to allow him a proper amount of space. "I assumed you would find a simpler meal more comforting." A drop of water clinging to Soma's hair falls onto the back of Arikado's hand. Apparently the man is capable of involuntary responses — his wrist twitches — but he calmly wipes the water on Soma's shirt. "You ought to dry your hair properly," is his toneless suggestion.
Soma shrugs, staring at his bookshelf, his computer, the familiar trappings of his daily life. Arikado's presence makes everything seem strangely out of place. "Does it matter? I always let it air dry."
He can feel Arikado looking in his direction, even though he himself refuses to meet the man's gaze. It is somehow unsettling. He wonders what Arikado wants, what he's even here for. What the entire purpose of his visit has been, if indeed it ever had a purpose at all.
Then Arikado reaches over, and Soma suddenly forgets everything — about Dracula, about demons, about darkness and death.
Panic is the first thing to set in. "What are you doing?" are the first words out of Soma's mouth, too high-pitched, almost squeaked — after that, he struggles to find others.
Arikado doesn't respond, at least not with words. He takes the towel from Soma's neck, turns it to a dry side; he rubs the towel back and forth against Soma's wet hair, engulfing his head and ears in a vague sense of infinite fluffiness.
Drying his hair.
Genya Arikado, government agent and probable otherworldly being, is drying Soma's hair.
For a moment, Soma considers pulling away — he considers running away — but beyond the towel, Arikado's hands seem firm, unyielding, somehow unquestionable. The motions of his towel-drying gently rock Soma's head back and forth. When Soma closes his eyes, he imagines himself young again, small, helpless to care for himself. "Arikado —"
Again, the same voice, cold enough to bring to mind howling gales and cracking ice. "Relax."
It's hard for Soma to relax after being told to relax (and in such a haughty tone, at that), but Arikado is the one with Soma's head between his hands, and Soma is acutely aware that he is powerless without his switchblade or his souls. Anyway, there's only his pride to consider. Once he ignores that, once he sets aside all thoughts of being old enough to deal with his own problems, it's actually... sort of soothing, to have someone else dry his hair for him.
Infinite fluffiness.
The gentle back-and-forth.
Arikado does not finish suddenly. He slows his movements gradually, easing Soma into stillness once more. When at last Arikado's hands come to a full stop, Soma cracks his eyes open, only dimly aware of something carding through his hair.
Arikado's fingers comb loosely through Soma's scalp, apparently checking to make sure that all of the boy's soft white hair is satisfactorily half-dry. The man is still sitting beside Soma, staring at him, impassive, expressionless — but then he shifts, and the lamplight casts fresh shadows at the corners of his mouth, and Soma thinks, for a moment, that he might be smiling.
Soma tries again. "Arikado..."
The agent, apparently, is having none of his protests. Suddenly, one of his hands slides to Soma's right ear; his fingers knead Soma's earlobe, unhesitating, strangely certain. Soma has to suppress a shudder at the contact — Arikado's hands are cool, and Soma's body is still warm from the shower — the other side too, now, Alucard's fingers kneading Soma's earlobes, the shell of his ear and back again, his empty piercings, strangely sensitive, he used to wear earrings more often —
Alucard?
Who is Alucard?
Soma's body feels strangely light. His eyelids flutter, then stay closed; he grasps for a sense of stability. "What are you doing?" he manages, through what seems like a thick haze.
Arikado's hands are gentle, guiding. Soma feels himself pulled by the shoulder, feels his cheek pressed against what seems at first like fine fabric but then feels somehow incorporeal, ethereal, like the endless night. Good, Soma thinks — nothing more or less than good. He lolls his head again, and is vaguely surprised to find a surface there. Arikado's chest, at least, is solid, even if his suit, apparently, is not.
"Relax," the man murmurs, once more — softer, albeit still a command.
Arikado's fingers rub small circles over the shell of Soma's ears again. His thumbs dip into the insides of Soma's ears, over folds and creases, producing pleasant friction, the sounds of skin on skin. His fingers pull Soma's ears ever so slightly taut, then let them relax again, over and over, soft kneading, hands warming slowly, from Soma's body heat perhaps, or something else — he taps on the shell of Soma's ears, gently, rubbing again, kneading — and with every movement of Arikado's fingers, a pleasant tingling courses over Soma's scalp, beneath it, inside his skull...
And at last it occurs to Soma, in his state of deep relaxation, that Genya Arikado cannot possibly be this man's real name — not that it was ever a question — why would a government agent present anything but an alias? — but Soma has seen it spelled out only once before, in a text message Mina sent him — it never mattered before then or even in the castle whether it was supposed to be written in kanji or katakana or something else entirely, but seeing it, seeing it written, it was such an improbable name — Genya Arikado, Arikado Genya, the phantasm with horns, what a simple name, what an straightforward name, but then perhaps for a simple and straightforward soul, perhaps for a man who once called himself Alucard, who was once called something else entirely, perhaps...
When Soma wakes, it's his fingers that twitch first. Consciousness of sensation spreads from his hands to his face, pressed against something cool and soft, and then to the rest of his body. His breaths quicken only marginally; his eyelids flutter open. He feels comfortable, though not exactly warm. He feels a weight on his shoulders.
When Soma wakes, he does not expect to still be resting against Arikado's chest.
More disturbing than that is the realization that Arikado's arm is looped loosely around his shoulders.
...Even more disturbing than that is the subsequent realization that Arikado is using that arm to continue reading one particular volume of manga that Soma tries to pretend he doesn't own.
By what can only be the intervention of some whimsical god, Arikado does not comment upon the content of Soma's collection of comics. "You're awake," he observes blithely, expressionless as ever.
Dimly, Soma recalls smugly curved lips, bow-shaped, alabaster — no. He pushes his memories aside. "Did I pass out?" he asks, squinting at the dim light outside his window. "How long was I asleep?"
"Only an hour, give or take. You slept soundly." The agent sets the book aside and rises from his seat. "Your porridge should be ready by now. Stay here."
Arikado exits the room, leaving Soma on the couch in his room, faintly disoriented, as though he has woken up in an entirely unfamiliar new home. But nothing has changed. His apartment is the same as ever. His coat is still resting on his mattress; his computer and phone seem untouched.
The clock on his bedside reads 6:21 AM.
Soma hears nothing from the kitchen, nothing like the opening of cabinets or rummaging for silverware — but Arikado returns soundlessly, with a small bottle of soy sauce in one hand and a bowl of thick white rice porridge in the other. He sets the bowl down on the table in front of Soma; in it rests the plain, unadorned spoon Soma secretly prefers over all his other spoons.
Arikado sits beside him, and says nothing.
Soma stares at the bowl of white porridge without moving. He rests his cheek upon his knees. The seconds feel strangely too long, as though he's stopped time. He remembers it — the power, the sensation of being able to stop time —
"Is something wrong?" Arikado asks.
Soma doesn't know how to answer. "It's just," he says, not entirely certain of the words that threaten to slip out of his mouth, "I don't remember the last time it was like this. The last time I — the last time anyone was around. I have Mina — but that's at school, going home... never here. I don't bring her — I mean, her dad won't let her — she doesn't come to my place." The details aren't important; the details don't matter. Soma struggles to place his emotions, the odd feeling rising to his throat. "I can't remember — I don't think I ever — sat down at home, like this, to a meal someone else made —"
If Arikado is listening, he doesn't act like he is. Halfway through Soma's stammering, he reaches out, grasps the spoon between his forefinger and thumb. He takes up a spoonful of rice porridge; he blows on it gracefully. And for a moment, in the middle of pivoting from one thought to another, Soma thinks that Arikado is going to taste it himself, perhaps to take pride in his handiwork — but instead, Arikado turns, puts the spoon in Soma's mouth, and — the taste of salt and rice and pork — and Yoko said, a long time ago, that Arikado was a decent guy —
"Eat, Soma," Arikado says. "There will be other meals, some other day."