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The sky is dark, what few stars that still twinkle through the haze of city lights shine faintly against the wispy clouds passing by. Domino City lies both awake and asleep.
The city works, in places where workers stay slumped on their office chairs and type away. Where the shopping districts and corporate buildings reside, the air is filled with the rumbling of cars, the chattering of people rushing to get home, the buzzing laughter of alcohol that entices workers to stay awake for just one more cup, one more order, one more hour.
It also rests, where people slumber in their beds. In here, there is only the occasional stray cat prowling on the streets, houses are locked with the windows devoid of light, and in one school, like many other schools, the gates are closed and empty of students.
It is past midnight when this school, Domino High School, becomes a little less empty.
A boy opens the gates pulling out a ring of keys in his pocket and using one of them. He is not wearing a school uniform, he wears a long-sleeved gray shirt with black slacks, with a long coat over it. The cold night wind howls, pushing fallen leaves on his feet. He pulls on his coat tightly as he walks just outside the entrance of the school, looking around with a tired impatient glare.
Another boy enters the school minutes later. This one wears the school uniform, if a little more loosely; jacket unbuttoned, a black shirt with leather straps and buckles instead of the standard white collared blouse, all accented with a few accessories. Jewelry, gaudy and golden. A large pendant in the shape of a pyramid and ankh-shaped cufflinks.
The first boy, Tetsu Ushio, knows these are all against the dress code, he’s cracked down several students with that rule himself. It comes in handy when the days are slow with potential bodyguard targets. Often it’s a shirt untucked, shoes that don’t fit the uniform, and a jacket unbuttoned for male students. He has the girls of his committee do their own handling of the female students. From what he’s heard it’s often blouses that show too much, skirts that look too high, makeup and nail polish. Boys have to be proper, girls have to be chaste.
He looks at his latest target, Mutou Yugi. The underclassman screamed easy money when he saw him. Small and meek, having no friends besides that one classmate he saw, and filled with naive notions of friendship if his defense for the two classmates that bullied him were any indication.
Were it not for the fact that it was past school hours, he would have given this brat a very painful scolding on breaking the rules, perhaps adding some interest in the bodyguard fee. It would be something for later, maybe after Mutou forked over the initial pay like he promised.
He grins at that thought. “Gotta admit, I didn’t think you’d pay up so soon,” he says. He gives Mutou’s weird getup one final look and wrinkles his nose. “You better be paying money, Mutou. I don't do that pay with your body crap.”
Mutou blinks, staring at him for a few seconds, then has the gall to burst into chiming bright laughter. It’s only the promise of money that keeps Ushio from punching him.
“You think I’m pretty, Ushio-kun?” Mutou asks, sounding less frightened and more amused. His red violet eyes sparkling with delight as he smiles.
Ushio scoffs. “I think it’s fishy that you want to pay now when nobody’s looking and wearing a weird costume.”
“It’s after school hours, Ushio-kun. This could be my normal clothes,” Mutou points out, tilting his head. “And still you came, still you stay—your greed will kill you someday if you don’t control it.”
He growls this time. “Are you threatening me, Mutou?”
“Stating a fact,” Mutou replies. “Impatient as well. It’s no wonder you were given a penalty originally.”
Ushio’s starting to get pissed off. “You-!”
“I have your money, Ushio-kun,” Mutou cuts off, bringing out a stack of bills from his jacket. “In fact, I have double.”
He calls bullshit on that last statement. Two hundred thousand yen was already a big sum, which was why he demanded it, nobody would be stupid enough to double that. He demands to see and reaches out to grab the stack, growling when Mutou steps away and pulls the bills back.
“I have a proposition,” Mutou states, stepping back again, dancing away from his reaching hands. “You said that this money was for services rendered. What say we have an arrangement? You do something for me, and I pay you with money.” He waves the stack for emphasis. “Bit by bit until the four hundred thousand yen is all gone.”
There’s a lot of things that pisses Ushio off. One is having his rightful money blocked from him, another is dealing with people who don’t know their place, and lastly is having to get up at midnight to go to school when he could have been home sleeping on his warm soft bed.
This little brat has ticked off far too many boxes to let this go, four hundred thousand yen or not.
He cracks his knuckles and looms over Mutou, all pretenses of being the nice guy gone. “And what’s stopping me from grabbing the money and beating that shitty arrogance off your face, Mutou- kun? ”
Mutou keeps on smiling, and god he just wants to fucking punch it off. How full of it was this brat? Did he think he’d just bow over if he waved a bit more money? Please, Mutou's no Kaiba fucking Seto.
He raises a fist and brings it down.
“Greedy, impatient, and quick to violence,” Mutou hums, actually hums the words , and stares at him like he’s just a mild inconvenience, and not as the threat he should be. “You’re nothing but a big manchild, aren’t you? You’d be the minor villain of a manga with how pathetic you are.” He laughs again, that annoying chiming laugh. “In another world you are!”
He hears Mutou’s words loud and clear, too loud and clear.
It shouldn’t hurt. They were just words. They were literally just words. Yet Ushio hears them ringing in his ears so loudly, echoing and pounding insistently in his skull that he groans and clutches his head. He squeezes his eyes shut and presses his hands against his temple, hoping it would alleviate the migraine beginning to simmer.
“What the fuck?” he rasps. The words wouldn’t shut up, all of them said in Mutou’s irritatingly sing-song voice. Getting louder and louder that he feels it would make his bones shatter from sound alone. “What the-? What the fuck did you do?!”
This wasn’t normal. Shit, this wasn’t normal!
“Oh, down already?” he hears Mutou above—and when did he slump to the ground?—sounding surprised and disappointed. “I was holding back too. Ah, well, I suppose this is fine.”
What was fine? What was fine?! Ushio snarls and tries to open his eyes, only to squeeze it back shut as everything was so bright. The pavement a cold white, Mutou’s pants an obnoxious sky blue, the fallen leaves almost sparkling like glitter.
Did Mutou drug him? Was that his plan? To slip something into him, in the air maybe, and wait? Bide his time to get revenge?
He feels a finger tap under his chin and push, making him look up.
“I stopped, Ushio-kun,” Mutou says. “You can open your eyes now.”
Despite everything in his being protesting, he does.
And were it not for the still pounding headache he has, he would have screamed.
The shadows are peeling off like tape, being pulled to Mutou to create large ribbons of inky black behind him, thrashing and writhing wildly. Only he and Mutou look like they had volume and substance. The trees were eerily bright and flat. The ground looked smooth without the rough edges of concrete and dirt giving spots of darkness. At the corner of his eye, he sees the school looking more like a cardboard cutout than a set of buildings and rooms.
And Mutou-
Was this Mutou?
“I could have done a lot of things to you,” the thing comments, its finger still under his chin. “I know… I think I know how he did it, his penalty games. I could make you think every fallen leaf was a bill, I could make you dream you were eaten by a giant worm, I could just wave a hand and knock you out.”
His grandparents feared the spirits just as much as they respected them. They gave offerings to shrines, big and small, they passed. They visited temples. They told him stories of creatures that could lurk in his home. How he could get along with them, how he could avoid being their ire’s target.
“But it would be too much, wouldn’t it?” it muses, humming softly (and he has to hold back a flinch). “Letting in a bit of power in my words overwhelmed you, a full illusion will break your mind.”
Was he going to die?
The thing frowns. “Anything I do is risky," it concludes. "I don’t want to break you.”
He thought these things as fanciful stories old people had. His parents never followed them, but the stories and the firm reminders of respect and fear was instilled in him enough that he at least steered away from shrines and temples when he did his racketeering. And the whole family always visited a temple on New Year, more for the tradition of it than genuine belief.
As he stares at the blood red eyes of Mutou (was it Mutou’s?), its third eye shining golden on its forehead and staring down at him with burning rage. He thinks back on grandfather’s words long ago, when he still believed those stories with childlike wonder and feared angering a spirit in his bedroom and asked what he should do when nothing worked.
Unless you have cunning to entice Amaterasu herself out of her cave, or power that could rival a kami? Run perhaps. But not even grown men can outrun a spirit’s wrath, not for long.
“What do you want?” he croaks, keeping himself still.
It blinks its two red eyes, the third one still staring. “I had planned to just bribe you,” it admits. “To convince you to leave Yugi and the others alone-”
(Yugi, like it wasn’t Mutou. Like it was a spirit, maybe a kami, who decided on a doll to possess. Angry that it was vandalized and damaged. Fuck, did it do something to the other two? Was he going to suffer the same fate?)
“But now I’m thinking: Well, disciplining people is part of your duty here in school, isn’t it?” Mutou’s red eyes look at him contemplatively. “Why not extend it beyond that?”
Better you get in their good graces no matter what. Grovel if you have to.
“How about it, Ushio-kun?” it purrs, voice soft and smooth and terrifyingly alluring. Like some sultry busty lady in a fucking porno. He hates this. “I pay you to enact my penalties when everything else fails. You wouldn’t break people as badly as I would.”
He swallows. No would be so easy to spill out from his mouth. He should have ignored the call, he should have told Mutou to fuck off, it’s fucking midnight and hung up and went back to sleep.
But he didn’t, and there’s a monster with two red eyes and one golden that wears Mutou’s skin and makes his head burst with just words. A monster he angered.
“Fine,” he whispers, the word resigned and final. What else could he do? What else could he say?
What else could he have done?