Chapter Text
There's nothing luxurious about Akutagawa Ryuunosuke's unassuming life. Each day he wakes with a slight scowl to his thin lips, neither pleased nor displeased with the gray-coated surroundings of his dimly-lit apartment.
With a little effort he could easily transform it all. He has the means and the money now. He could greet the day like the rest of the world seems to, with optimism and curiosity. He could so easily hang a painting or two, place a rug against the matted gray carpet. He could arrange his belongings artistically instead of utilitarian. He could let his sibling decorate like they have offered to do here and there for months. It would be so easy to let it all go, to let himself live as a civilized man surrounded by tasteful trinkets that merely exist as aesthetic exuberances. And yet.
Each day he dons another monochrome outfit and walks to his internship at the vet clinic. Each day he barely wonders even at how so much fur he inadvertently transports back and forth between the two.
He'd landed this job by chance. There aren't many in this city of mutants and miscreants who care much for animals, but the work isn't hard and the pay isn't bad. The head veterinarian is a man named Oda with a heart that's still four sizes too big to fit his towering height and lanky frame. Like Akutagawa, the veterinarian is a quiet man. Their auras are similarly dark and cold, perfect for an occupation that serves lowly creatures like cats and bears, and so they get along well. Quietly, morosely, and both with fast wit and faster reflexes they care for pets and strays alike.
But where Oda distinctly cares for the less fortunate, man and animal alike, Akutagawa merely holds emptiness in his soul. He's here because animals hold fewer prejudices and bitterness. He interns at the clinic because his fellow humans are too exhausting to bear. For Akutagawa is no more than a stray dog himself… at least metaphorically.
It's on one of these mundane, indistinguishable autumn days that Akutagawa's life changes forever:
In the lobby of his apartment complex there are a pair of Howlers confronting a girl. The scene unfolds too fast for Akutagawa to even think. There’s a bit of pushing and shoving until one of them brandishes a tungsten karambit. With the flick of a switch by the brawler’s thumb, the curved blade hums in a register that Akutagawa can barely hear. As the weapon slowly glows, the girl falls to her knees and screams. She’s clutching the sides of her head, where what were once perfectly normal human ears she now holds overly large floppy dachshund ears covered in a short buzz of dark fur.
Akutagawa startles when someone knocks him out of the way and continues up the staircase. The other resident doesn’t acknowledge Akutagawa otherwise, but the stranger spares a sharp glance at the scene unfolding in the lobby. The Howler with the karambit curves the sharp inner edge along the halfling’s throat, uncaring of his audience, and begins drawing pinpricks of violet blood against the hollow of the girl's throat.
Akutagawa's eyes meet the girl’s in that instant. She’s crying as the Howler’s weapon forces her transformation, pulling her nose and mouth grotesquely into a snout, shortening only a few of her fingers at a time into paws. Her street clothes tear where her torso broadens, and her spine bends backward despite her violent protests.
The tension in the air snaps. Akutagawa can feel it break like a last fraying thread holding the moment together. The desperate hope in her eyes disappears into the depths of her overblown, cartoonish pupils as the second Howler plunges his Reaper’s glove into her heart and ruthlessly extracts her soul.
He has watched her death, frozen in the entrance like a statue in midwinter and similarly as helpful. Akutagawa is no stranger to such violence, to the ruthless ways in which Hunters like these wield their specialized weapons. He hasn't seen an attack quite so gruesome in a year or so, to be sure, but he has long hardened his heart to these things. It's how life is in the city, how plenty of Cleaners and Hunters earn a living.
And yet this time, this girl, after so much time living this mundane and uneventful life, sends Akutagawa over the edge.
So he turns away, tripping over his own clumsy feet as he barely escapes into the street and down the first alley he happens upon. What might remain of his lunch ends up sprayed against the side of the dumpster as he heaves, blinded with panic at the sight of the halfling’s soul desperately reaching back for the deformed, lifeless chest of its broken, lifeless home.
The only sounds that comfort Akutagawa are the ghostly echoes of the girl's final scream, part childlike yell and part canine howl.
By the time he comes back to his senses he’s at the edge of a densely-wooded park. The clouds above his head threaten to storm, gray and heavy as they are, and the world smells of the petrichlor that normally precludes a heavy rain. The air is instead heavy with unease, as if reflecting the unsettled emotions toiling in Akutagawa’s heart.
With a conscious breath, he steps into the neighborhood park. The rain begins slowly, follows him like the random kindness of a complete stranger, solemn and fleeting before its insistence doubles beneath the trees. There’s a compact umbrella in the inner pocket of Akutagawa’s dark trench coat. It somehow strikes him as odd that he had watched the weather report earlier this morning and known, before his walk home, that the meteorologist had predicted an early autumn storm.
The morning seems so far away, impossibly so against the veil of blood and screams.
It takes him a few breaths to realize that he is staring at a line of blood droplets on the ground, that the dark red against the pale granite is not an afterimage from the girl in the lobby. He blinks quickly, desperate to rid the bright amethyst-purple from his line of sight, but the blood is stubborn and refuses to vanish merely because Akutagawa wills it.
For a moment he thinks to leave the trail alone. The rain has already begun to wash it away to a paler purple. In a matter of minutes the trail will no longer exist, and whatever lies at the other end will be none of Akutagawa’s concern. He will finish his walk in the park, and he will walk through the lobby of his apartment without looking to the spot where the girl had been slain. He will climb to his floor and turn the latch to his door. He’ll make something small to eat, all for the sustenance and none for the flavor, and he will sleep soundly on a plain bed in his minimalist apartment.
And in that moment, he realizes he can’t leave this alone. Whether it’s the lingering trauma of not saving the girl in the lobby or it’s some sort of unrealized hero complex deep within Akutagawa’s subconscious, he doesn’t know. He takes long strides across the underbrush, careful not to muddy his slacks as he weaves between the trees and wild bushes.
There are spots of blood on the bright green leaves that lead him to a small clearing. Most are a deep purple, but as Akutagawa follows further into the trees, the smears and drops turn to a bright, brilliant red. He hesitates at the edge of the clearing, unsure whether he’s following the same path that he had started, but only for a moment.
His gaze suddenly fixes on a hint of movement in the shadows. Behind the next tree he sees it, a young white tiger barely dragging itself silently through the tangled brush. There’s a coat of congealed red blood along its neckline, as if sliced around the throat in one long draw of a blade.
The amethyst blood trail drops to the back of Akutagawa’s mind as he carefully moves toward the tiger. His veterinarian training takes control of his body as he eases into a crouch. The tiger cub's bright eyes regard him warily as Akutagawa reaches, as nonthreatening as he can, toward the injured animal.
Oda will have an earful for him tomorrow, but for now Akutagawa is simply compelled to help.
