Chapter Text
The scuffs on his knuckles stung.
Blue eyes stared back at him, the edges of his shoulders warped by flames he couldn’t feel. He traced the sleeve of his shirt with his palm, the fabric biting at the scrapes and scabs. His reflection followed. He felt nothing, but in the mirror, his hand was caught, consumed by the sparks that erupted into angry patches of cerulean wrongness.
They called him a demon .
There was a demon in the mirror, and it stared back as if equally as upset by Rin’s visage as he was by its own. It was caged by a long, black frame that contained the wrong world.
Warmth pressed his shoulders, solid almost as if weighed by mass. He was seconds away from breakdown—it's the flames, he thought, until he saw a hand reaching calmly through the fire, twisted and ambiguated by the flame. His father was looking down at him from the reflection.
Shiro met his gaze. He quickly looked him over, but there were no new injuries, and even so, none of the old ones were bad enough to cause Rin to panic like this.
“Dad?” Rin hiccups, young and fragile—how he got into so many fights, Shiro would never know. He crouched down by Rin’s side.
Rin looked down at his hands and saw nothing but pale skin and raw patches, irritated from their abuse. He searched them like they were foreign.
With a glance back at the mirror and back at his son, Shiro’s forehead pinched. Rin continued inspecting—hands, arms, feet, and all the while constantly touching his shoulder.
“Rin,” Shiro finally said, snatching his hands out of his line of sight with his larger, calloused ones. The boy met his eyes reluctantly. “What’s wrong?” he asked softly, belying the impatience and confusion beneath his tone.
He looked at the mirror. A demon stared back. His nose wrinkled, red building upon his cheeks. Shiro’s hands were clutched in his own until they turned white, and he screamed .
Shiro inspected the ceiling as he sat outside where the psychologist was evaluating his son. Occasionally they would ask him questions on his and Rin’s family history, much of which was unknown. They stopped asking about him once he told them Rin was adopted.
Yuri had been an orphan, raised by her family in the slums for a long while before they had all died or vanished.
What she had remembered of them she had been reluctant to share, typically prattling and babbling on in an easygoing manner.
He told them what she had told Shiro, which wasn’t much. But the man seemed to find it to be enough and had vanished back behind closed doors.
What was Rin seeing that Shiro wasn’t?
Yuri lifts her finger, lowering it to just beneath her bespectacled gaze as she cooed at the air. “Look!” she had said, showing him a particularly adorable wad of empty air. Shiro frowned and she only laughed good-naturedly, apparently seeing something he never had and never would.
Was Rin like her? Was he seeing what she was seeing?
She was a schizophrenic, not that she had ever agreed with the diagnosis, but had Rin inherited that?
He hadn’t even known it was something that could be passed on.
”I’m not crazy, you know. Obaba saw them too.”
”Obaba... the ‘crazy’ one?”
”Only as crazy as I am.”
He hadn’t seen past her strangeness, detesting her for it until the end. And now Rin might be like her.
But maybe not. She was peaceful. Whatever she dreamed of in her head, it was pleasant.
Rin? He could only remember the stark terror. It could be any number of problems or nothing at all—daydream gone wrong? Were they that vivid? Maybe a concussion from that fight, or God forbid, drugs. Or narcolepsy… that kid slept a lot during the day.
He wouldn’t know until he was told.
The man came back out, Rin in tow, looking miffed. Shiro looked at him, and he looked away just as quickly.
Rin and Shiro sat on plush ivory and grey chairs adjacent to the psychologist, who sat on a more simple swivel chair not far from a laptop on a false-stone countertop. Shiro couldn’t say what it was made of.
The walls were an almost pink off-white, and various posters of children’s characters (they were probably supposed to be calming, but missed the mark) lined the walls. Rin ignored them with a huff.
“We have an idea of what it is,” he said. The psychologist’s bald head shined, as if waxed and polished meticulously. The only hair he had was on his chin, a patch of thin scruff tracing his jaw, salt and pepper as if he were aging.
He had crow’s feet around his eye and a thin wrinkle on the left side of his mouth but was otherwise remarkably smoothed for a man his age. He seemed perhaps the same age as Shiro.
“Psychosis.” The side of his lip quirked firmly beneath a fold on his cheek, and he could see how he got that wrinkle there. But it wasn’t a smile, rather a tic of sorts.
Rin frowned, brow furrowed tightly. “I’m not a psycho.” Psychos weren’t far off from demons in his mind.
“That’s not what it means, Okumura-kun. Psychosis is many things, but it’s not psychopathy.” The doctor couldn’t find it within himself to scold a five-year-old on whatever preconceptions he had about psychopaths and serial killers, so he took out a packet from behind him. He glanced at it quickly to ensure it was the correct one before offering it to Shiro. Rin took it eagerly instead, if only out of curiosity.
He didn’t understand much of it, the majority having been written in excessively long words he was never taught. Not that he had retained much of what he had been taught, anyway.
Shiro took the paper from his hands gently, scanning the many paragraphs and explanations before thumbing through the rest of the pages intently.
“Like I said, we have an idea, but it’s not definitive,” he said, pulling the priest from his reading. “I have some questions.”
Shiro gave him a look that allowed him to continue, Rin kicking the soft plush chair with the backs of his feet.
“Has he experienced a drop in grades or performance at school?” He looked at Rin and
rephrased his words. “Has he had a more difficult time completing work and focusing?”
“He’s never done particularly well in school. He has a hard time reading, and he’s never focused well. But that’s just Rin.”
Rin shriveled in his seat like an old plum, kicking with yet more fervance. He looked off to the side, trying not to listen.
“Not necessarily… it’s frankly unsurprising with how young he is. The signs must’ve begun showing up along with his personality. Has there been any recent trauma? Physical or otherwise?” He eyed the purple-y green bruise in full bloom on the side of his face.
Rin traced the material of the fabric with the nail of his thumb.
“He got into a… fight,” he said, refusing after a moment to soften it into ‘scuffle’, “with a classmate.”
It had been one of the older kids. Rin had gotten into a fight with his little brother the prior week. He called in Rin’s most recent enemy. Rin had instigated the entire thing according to his teacher, which Shiro doubted. Rin was fiercely protective, but deep down, he wasn’t cruel. He did not seek out violence.
The doctor hummed, looking with narrowed eyes at the boy across from him. Instead of kicking, he was now pushing his heels as far under the cushion as his ankles would allow.
“With the symptoms he’s showing, it’s almost definitely psychosis. But the early onset and hallucinations are both strange. If it’s a part of another disorder, it would typically develop in young adulthood, maybe late high school years. It’s incredibly rare for it to begin at this age.”
The page he was holding—that Shiro had painstakingly filled out an hour prior—had a loosely scribbled ‘5’ where the blank for age was.
Almost 13 years before the earliest typical onset.
“Not only this,” he notes, “but psychosis is typically a symptom rather than an end-all diagnosis. With no other symptoms, I can't say if this is a bigger part of a whole or genetic, or both. Regardless, I will be scheduling him to return for another evaluation, likely in 3 months or so.”
He and the doctor exchanged goodbyes, and he returned to the monastery, Rin tucked against his side the whole time like a tired duck.
It was a typical Catholic monastery, though old, and not far from the Southern Cross slums. The part of town they had found themselves in wasn’t dangerous—no, not like the real slums where all manner of criminals existed, for lack of options. But they were nestled between that district and the more central, busy region of the city.
Yukio was on the steps with Maruta, nearly tripping in his attempt to get to his brother.
He was smaller than Rin, but his skin had a bit more color to it, Rin’s lost in a milky pallor that made him look far more delicate than he was. Shiro suspected that boy could lift as much as he could.
He had three moles: one beneath his eye, one on his cheek, and another on his chin. There were at least a dozen more scattered on his back, but nobody besides Rin and Shiro needed to know.
Maruta approached in a far more calm manner, face set grimly, and Shiro led them inside, sending the twins off to their rooms.
Rin collapsed face first onto his bunk—the top bunk, he wouldn’t have it any other way—and cocooned himself in the thick, fuzzy blanket he had gotten for his birthday and Christmas last year. Even through the cloth, fuzz, and walls, he could still hear the murmur of Dad and the clergy.
Yukio poked his head over the ladder, doe-eyed. “Did you go to the doctor?”
“I went to a psycho,” Rin murmured.
“Psychologist,” Yukio corrected tentatively. Rin grumbled and flipped over to face the wall, blanket following with him. With the silence, he followed up with, “What’d he say?”
“I have psychosis.” He said it right for the first time. “They dunno why.”
Yukio, for all the interest he had shown in the medical field, was about as poorly versed in it as any 5-year-old, and psychology was perhaps something he was even less proficient in.
“Oh,” he said. He didn’t add much else.
Rin glanced over his shoulder to look at his brother. “S’that bad?”
Yukio didn’t say anything, looking at his brother, who looked gloomier than he’d ever remembered seeing him. In the end, he could only shrug, which left Rin facing away from him again.
No amount of poking and prodding seemed to get his attention, so Yukio climbed down carefully, sitting at his desk. It had a chair with longer legs so he could reach the small book on top of it, a book Dad had technically gotten them both around a week ago. Rin didn’t like reading much, but Yukio had taken to it fast and had read the book a couple of times by himself now.
He opened it and began reading it once more, looking up towards the top bunk where Rin lay hidden.
Rin curled up more under his blanket. His scrapes burned, and he couldn’t think about the demon, focusing on the pain.
They said he was a demon, and the mirror told him too.
“Who’re you callin’ a demon?”
Rin spat blood onto the black pavement as the trio scrambled for purchase with their cheap shoes, fleeing the alley. The shadows of dusk had begun to crawl across the ground, leaving the remaining slivers of golden rays amongst the darkening streets of the Southern Cross slums.
He lifted his hand, bloody and abused, his fingerless gloves frayed. White wings flicker through the air, graceful and alive but… was this worth it?
He clenched his fist, causing it to sting viciously against the pressure of his fingers. “...what the hell am I doing?”
Rin didn’t like school much. He didn’t like the people at school much, either.
A can tumbled down the street with some rattling clanks, dented. You could just barely read “Yams” on it, brandless and generic. The colors were long faded.
He never really liked going — people said he was insane, or a demon. Of course, they didn’t know. They didn’t know the half of it. He tucked his battered hands deep into his pockets, ignoring the friction of raw skin against denim.
He didn’t live too far — it was this old, dumb monastery that was stuck right next to the dumps. They can't afford much better, but it means that nobody goes to the sermons except the homeless. Anyone else nearby is generally seedy. The only other people that come by are suckers seeking out his old man for “exorcism”---it’s just glorified counseling, and he knew Father Fujimoto didn’t believe in it either.
Shura was waiting for him when he returned—well, for him or a random guy. She’d been big on dating recently, for better or worse. It astounded him how Shiro hadn’t caught her with anyone. Well, she was 19, so it wasn’t like she could be stopped either way.
“Fighting again?” she asked. She had a strand of golden blonde hair wrapped around her index finger absently. Her whole head was covered with a shock of cheaply-dyed-looking red hair, with a somewhat brassy blonde ombre. Weirdly enough, it was natural—it had been like that since Rin could remember, and he doubted she wanted to (or could) pay to maintain it.
“He was shooting pigeons,” he justified instead of answering. “Asshole deserved it anyway.”
Shura raised an eyebrow but didn’t contradict him. “Sounds about right.”
Rin didn’t fight for no reason, he knew Shura knew that. It felt like she was one of the few people that did.
Shiro thought differently, mostly out of concern. Rin had a lot of things screwy in his head and the old man saw it as his job to straighten him out or something.
She hopped up from her spot on the porch, patting him on the shoulder with a grin. “You’ll be fine. Go get four eyes to fix your hand.” She squinted, face wrinkling. “And nose.”
Rin grumbled. “His name’s Yukio…” he said half-heartedly. He wasn’t one to stand for any name-calling for his brother, but Shura had been calling Yukio that since they were 7. And as soon as she turned 16 she started calling Rin just ‘kid’, like she wasn’t only 4 years older.
Shura shrugged. “Four-eyed chicken.” Rin opened his mouth, but Shura slapped her hand over his lips. “Get inside, kid. Old man’s waitin’.”
She looked at him somewhat mirthfully. “He’s gonna get sick of yer skippin’ curfew eventually, y’know,” she said, taking her hand away.
“Already has.” He wiped her cooties from his face. (In all honesty, she probably did have cooties.)
He dared venture inside, surprised and pleased to find nobody immediately pointed out his bloodied nose or the suspicious redness of his hands.
Or so he thought.
“Bad day?” Maruta, one of the clergymen, asked. It may as well have been rhetorical.
Rin shrugged, discarding his jacket and tossing it to the side. “Is dinner ready yet?”
“Well… yes, but you should wash your hands and face, Rin. Before Father Fujimoto sees you.”
Begrudgingly, he decided that would be for the best. The bathroom was small, and there were spots of mold on the ceiling that nobody had yet endeavored to clean. Above the sink was an open wall. Lines of ruddy rust trailed from each of the four holes in it.
There were no mirrors in the house, and the bathroom was no exception.
Plumes of blue tendrils, smooth and ethereal, danced in his mind’s eye.
Perhaps it would be an issue if he were a girl or liked make-up or something, but for Rin (especially for Rin) it wasn’t much of one.
He wished there were no mirrors at all.
“Curry again?”
“Curry is cheap and delicious!” Shiro declared. “And convenient.”
“Or you’re a cheap old fart. I could’ve cooked tonight!” He stabbed a chunk of potato, sticking it in his mouth. Besides curry, there was actually a wide spread to choose from. Tofu, omelettes, vegetables… The only thing that was missing was any selection of meat, which was too expensive at the moment.
As he chewed his potatoes, the taste of grilled steak flitted across his tongue. He had been craving it as of late.
“Rin, you were late home again. We eat at 6:00 each night.” The priest shook his head. “I heard tonight you took a trip to the job center. Well? How’d it go?”
“You can probably guess,” Rin admitted, kicking his feet once or twice under his seat. It creaked as his weight shifted.
Yukio looked at him knowingly, his eyes discerning. Whenever Yukio looked at him like that, Rin felt he might as well be standing beneath a laser. “You’re hurt. You get into another fight?”
Father Fujimoto hurled the pair of chopsticks at him, shouting, “ Rin ! Why are you so hot-headed!?”
“Think before you resort to violence!” he said. The chopsticks clocked the side of Rin’s face.
“Says you, old fart…” he muttered, tossing them to the floor.
Kinder hands from the other side of the table handed him a paper, mangled like it had spent a long day in a pocket. It had barebones information about a local restaurant on it, name, address, and an email.
The name in particular was scribbled so quickly he couldn’t make it out.
“A friend of mine needs help with his restaurant,” Shiro explained, softer despite how taut his face looked. “There’s an interview available.”
Rin scowled, chewing a piece of tofu. “You know I can’t take that. It’s too… respectable. I’ll lose it in days,” he grumped.
“With that attitude…” The priest heaved a weathered sigh. “Rin, you know it’s my responsibility to raise you to be a responsible member of society. And with your record, you can’t be picky. You’re gonna have to strike out on your own. I can’t do this forever—“
“I know!” Rin snarled, slamming his arm on the table.
The heater cracked , denting with unseen heat. The pot resting atop it clattered to the floor as flame nearly singed the back of Maruta’s collar. Scattered yelps echoed over the table as Rin flinched.
“You have a visitor!” one of the clergy announced from the doorway.
Shiro shook his head. “I’ll be there. Yukio, look after your brother.”
Always Yukio looking after him. When he was little, he had been so sure it would be the other way around, but now it was Yukio pulling his dead weight behind him. Yukio, the shining paragon who was gonna be a doctor.
Rin scowled and slumped into his chair.
He didn’t mind that part. Yukio deserved the world and worked super hard. Rin just wished he could work hard, too.
“I’m worried about him,” Shiro admitted. A cigarette dangled from his lips as he spoke, a comforting weight and a guilty taste.
Mephisto looked at him slyly with green eyes. Johann Faust—or rather, ‘Mephisto’, to those close to him—was an odd man. Firstly, he had his friends call him Mephisto. Then, it was easy to see a great many things that set him apart from typical members of society.
A pristine white top hat adorned his plum-purple head of hair. He claimed it was natural, but if that was true, well—Shiro would give up smoking, and for good this time. Then again, his daughter was the bearer of a real contest winner of the genetic lottery, boasting hair that would get her suspended from most respectable schools in Japan.
It has been a journey explaining to skeptical staff that yes, Shura really did have magenta and blonde hair. Most stayed skeptical, and Shiro didn’t blame them. Maybe everyone connected to him was doomed to be weird as all fuck.
He wouldn’t put it past himself.
“You could take up my offer,” Mephisto reminded, tapping his fingers on the back of his adjacent hand.
“I want him to learn on his own.” He sighed. He blew a plume of smoke from the side of his lips.
He was tired. Tired and scared.
“Rin-kun knows the lesson you want to teach him well,” Mephisto assured, leaning precariously upon his pink umbrella. Shiro rolled his eyes, but still considered his words. Mephisto curled his fingers on the gaudy handle. “Especially with his visions, wouldn’t you agree they make things quite… arduous?”
“Sure, sure. His life is hard already.” Mephisto really shouldn’t call them visions, they weren’t divine messages or witchcraft. They were hallucinations, plain and simple. “But eventually he’ll make it on his own. He has to.” He looked into his companion’s eerie jade eyes. “Without your help.”
“Hm, well, if you say so, pal.”
“Pal?” The priest looked at him bemusedly. Mephisto had put a strange stress on the word. He loved alluding to things only he seemed to be privy to. Johann Faust looked at him with a look, one that seemed to cage a thousand secrets. Where did he find these people?
“Now, I have a great many papers to sign! Did you know I’m building a new coaster at my theme park? You really should bring the boys sometime, hm?”
Shiro might consider it if they weren’t ludicrously expensive.
“Sure.”
They both knew he wouldn’t be going, but he turned and winked anyway, vanishing in a puff of pink fluff. How he did it so cleanly, Shiro may never learn.
He sighed and allowed himself to sit and enjoy the familiar taste of tobacco, like the smoke and cold air could take the stress from his shoulders. But he wore it like a coat over his cassock, and there was nowhere to hang it yet.
Not until there was a path forward for Rin, who seemed too stubborn to try and peer through the fog that surrounded him on all sides.
With one more puff, Shiro extinguished his cigarette and trailed inside.
Mephisto left an envelope on the weathered mahogany wood.