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In this world there are people who chase monsters, and monsters who hunt people down.
Kento achieved an awful lot as a hunter, or so he had always been told, he didn’t really know, he hated hunting monsters with all his guts. It was the yapping what he hated the most, the squeaky sound puppies made whenever their skulls exploded under his boots.
Daiki, Daiki was a monster. He hunted things like a dog chasing cars, massive jaws and sharp fangs he used with wanton. Daiki wore his hunger proudly, wrapped it around his fingers like some would do with virtues.
They met at the corner of spring, purely by accident, when Kento lost his balance and accidentally stumbled into the wrong world. It was a day like any other, and any other, and any other.
He didn’t think much of the burrow, not at first, though the creature glancing up at him might had something to do about it. The most he could do was grit his teeth, slide a step back when the werewolf retracted her lips and bared her teeth. She was, well, she seemed human as human something can go. Nimble, dark skinned, a mass of black hair sticking out in every direction.
She stared at him speechlessly, and the surprise in her eyes probably matched Kento’s for a split moment. Her pack had last seen roaming the Forbidden Lands, the dens were supposed to be empty except for the pups left on their own as the parents went for foraging, that was the point.
It must’ve been the surprise, Kento always thought in the future, and the way she held on to her pup, squeezed its mouth shout so it couldn’t make a peep, looked at Kento wide-eyed through fright and dread and other things he’s now too ashamed to put a name on. Yeah, it must’ve been the surprise.
‘You a’ right down there?’ His father called from above, re-charged his shotgun with two more pellets.
He was not, but he tried to not make a sound anyway, and moved another stutter step back. The werewolf tilted her head to one side as she mimicked him, shuffling her feet on damp soil. Her nostrils flared wide as she picked on the scents in the air, five more pairs of leather boots, and the rotten eggs stench of gunpowder, and the other werewolves they had gunned down during the expedition, their carcasses lying limp on horseback. Kento’s back hit something wet and solid – the wall – the entrance hole so close sunlight pooled at his feet.
They measured each other carefully, none of them daring to make a move, because in this world there are people who chase monsters, and freaks who hunt folks down, and none of the two seemed to know yet which role they had to play.
‘ Don’t move, I’m coming!’
It wasn’t until his father slung the shotgun over his back and started climbing down at a hurried pace, that everything clicked in place again, tick tick tick, and they sprung, one jumping forward with a leap, and the other curling up against the wall.
‘That’s it’, Kento thought, and looked away from that thing, from all that devious stuck between her teeth, let out a ragged breath. He heard footfalls tiptoeing about, something gripping his arm tightly and yanking, harsh, antsy, but not hard enough to tear skin. And there was something, something in the way she’d whimpered that prompted Kento into glancing up, the absence of madness and how it seemed to have been replaced by something different, something rawer, deeper. Human.
She pried his arms open, shoved what she held in the dimple of the armpit, and there, there it was, Daiki. It couldn’t have been that much older than Kento by the look of it, a mass of damp fur pushing for ten at best. It kept wriggling, and Kento curled his fingers under its belly without much of a thought, cupped its tail with a shaky hand, and there he caught it again, that glimpse in her eyes.
Later, as he helped his father to drag her corpse on horseback, it gnawed at the corner of his brains, that idea. That maybe her death hadn’t been senseless as he’d been taught to think for a lifetime; that what she’d pulled might have been a tearful goodbye instead, the kind they used to talk big in movies, with promises to meet each other again and scenes softly hue saturated; and that, maybe, her turning and then going after his father, biting at his ankles until two pellets returned her the favor, hadn’t been a mindless act at all, but the only way to protect all those secrets she kept stored underground.
He tried to do that, keep her secret safe, visit the burrow on a daily basis. He never get the gist of it, what compelled him to walk three miles every day in the depths of the Forbidden Lands and, on the first month, he honestly questioned his sanity.
He would bring over a handful of baits and sit at the edge of the burrow, picking on his jeans absently till threads started to fall apart. The woods would stay awfully quiet, not even a peep to be heard, but on the next day the meat would be gone and the hole grown a bit wider. Kento had a pocket knife and he used it to poke at the carcass of a rabbit impaled onto a bush, the human footprints marked in the dirt going in different directions, indicating a round trip. It had been five months already, and his pup was all grown up now, brought Kento prettily wrapped gifts.
He stopped visiting the den after that, moved east with the rest of the hunters.
In the years that followed, a different idea started nibbling on his wit, stubborn as a leech, devious as one too. It came often to him, whenever the woods were damp with dusk and his boots soiled with blood, and Kento sat by the bonfire, patching up his wounds. The feeling of being watched, stalked like a clumsy lamb, huge pupils following every move he made and giving him goose bumps. It happened during the hunts too, for every shot he fired and purposely missed; for every time he spotted something lurking in the bushes and sent the hunters in the opposite direction, because that morning he’d found yet another dead rabbit shoved in one of his boots, and he didn’t know what else to do, felt like he’d leaped nineteen years back in time and got handed again a secret too heavy for his back to carry.
His father thought something must’ve happened to him, maybe the damage of a shotgun fired at close range, or all those days he’d spent holed up in dark burrows, hidden away from sunlight. Something was wrong with him just right, Kento had always known, just not in the way the man had hoped for.
His father had a ballpoint twirled between his fingers as he wrote down a deposition he didn’t want to hear. One of the lieutenants was sitting next to him, with an arm hanging from the neck, and only a stub left for a hand. ‘He saw that bloody thing jumping me and didn't even try to gun it down!’ ‘How can you say for sure?’ ‘He hollered at it, for Christ’s sake, called that motherfucker by name too!’ No one sentenced him, not without concrete proof, but Kento knew it was time for him to leave. Too many skinned dogs left at his doorsteps, too many stray bullets flying past him, apologies muttered with clenched teeth. The Forbidden Lands were cold and unforgiving, but so was mankind.
He left town on a full moon, irony all but amiss.
It finally happened nearly a month later. Kento must’ve fantasized about that moment a thousand of times already, just out of plain masochism. Daiki pulling him by the ankles, there, where tendons are thin and pliable, and throwing him up in the air, tossing him like a plaything before going for the soft under jaw. It made sense to him – the payback, the karma, a conclusion fit to how he’d always lived.
But Daiki took him by surprise when he jumped through his window on a moonless night, landing on the couch with a soft thump.
He made a pitiful dog, Kento dimly thought between hasty heartbeats, mangy and underweight, brown patches of fur sticking out in every direction. He didn’t leap for his ankles, but Kento still couldn’t stop his heart from thrumming like an engine when he arched his head upwards and stared at him, tiptoeing on his paws as he cut through the room. Daiki would’ve never torn him out of bitterness. There’s no malice when one can’t tell the difference between right and wrong, only hunger to draw boundaries, and Kento confirmed it when the werewolf unclenched his jaw, and a dead rabbit dropped boneless at his feet.
Because he was done chasing his monsters, Kento skinned the bunny whole, and let Daiki pick which part he wanted to bury out in the garden.
*
Daiki walked, acted, like a normal person when he had to, if it wasn’t for his longer stride and bolder arm movements, and the way hunger shone through his eyes whenever he was around people. It happened every time they traded with the merchants that travelled through the woods. Daiki would tilt his head to one side, on those occasions, raise and lower his brows in a single movement, and squint at the children, at the elderly, licking his upper lip like he was starving, and they were a king’s feast laid before his eyes. Short legs that couldn’t run fast enough, brittle bones impossibly easy to snap. Kento didn’t need to be a mind reader to know how that inner monologue probably went, hunger need want, a long and devious sutra with very few commas in between.
The odds worked in their favor either way, because Kento was quick to pick on those signs, and slipped his hand in Daiki’s welt pocket each time, and held on to him so he couldn’t lunge forward, all sublime poise and precision. Daiki gripped tightly till all the little bones ground painfully together, and Kento gulped back the tears and split his lips open as he indicated all the trinkets laid before them, now love, what shall we get?
And then there were times when silence filled the valley as packs moved through the woods, calling to one another with long howls that slightly rose and fell in pitch. Kento had installed electrified fences for a reason, but it wasn’t a secret the generators would always go faulty on those nights, the gates running more slowly and sticking open as Daiki paced the barn nervously. The werewolf whom had always been a bit useless as a pack animal, could barely howl at the same moon they shared, became something different on these night.
He greeted those companions with messy tail wags, adrenaline spiking his fur in every direction. The shadows projecting from the barn would be human-like though, same as the moans, and grunts and stifled cries that kept Kento awake as he lied on bed, ungodly thoughts undulating at the back of his mind and drawing ragged whines from his lips sometimes.
Daiki called it hunger, but to Kento it reminded of something darker than a need, felt more like a compulsion filling him – them – entirely, same as gas would.
So Kento crafted a lifestyle out of their odds, slow and carefully, because that hunger seemed to be bottomless, and it had this way of playing Daiki, twisting his sanity thinner than steel. He enjoyed that, strumming his chords mindlessly, hoarse sounds he breathed low in the throat as he hummed dissonant notes. Kento took his time trying to make sense of things, the un-ordinary vibes, the wit, the hunger, and how Daiki would turn large liquid eyes at him sometimes, put away the guitar crawled on his lap and spread barren legs a little, the line of his mouth hard and difficult to read. Summer had just sprung and the air was thick with heat, suffocating, suffocating heat.
‘What’s wrong?’ Kento asked him one day, and pinched his bottom lip, pressed a finger over the nose. The air was thick with smells – dirt, and musk, and the mold growing all over the walls – but Daiki’s smell was thicker, and as he leaned over and nosed Kento, there, right there in the dip of the shoulder, Kento felt something funny flutter under his veins.
‘Hunger’, he replied easily.
Of course, of course.
There was a certain amusement in his tone though, a certain pull, and it made Kento turn around to look at him. And it happened like a sequence in the movies, everything fast paced and uncanny, fiery and brightly saturated. Daiki’s hand flew to cradle his face and the edge of his smile was razor sharp, baring white canines and all the devious stuck between them, and Kento suddenly was afraid of what he could see there, the wit, the tease, the allure and the pull that had on him, always had, since the day he had cupped a flea-bitten tail with shaky hands.
‘You reek of it’, Daiki purred low in his throat, and he made no sense, and pushed hard on the balls of his feet before bracing over him and crashing their mouths together. It took Kento by surprise and knocked the wind out of him, a tad of wit too.
‘Reek’, Daiki breathed against his mouth, like saying it a second time made it more meaningful somehow, and Kento, his stomach swiveled, statics piling up like hot stones, and he found he was shaking with it, that hunger. Daiki had this sort of animal intuition, could read moods before they stacked up in rooms, and that, that was his knack.
His mouth was warm, fit in the dimple of his shoulder like it’d always belonged there, and when Kento wriggled under angular hips pinning him down, those lips moved up his throat, and ivory teeth sank in the under jaw with a spongy sound. Daiki snapped his fangs at him, but his expression was light and playful, and when he leaned over to kiss him again, his tongue felt soft as silk, velvet pooling into his mouth and leaving Kento breathless.
A dominance display.
Kento found himself drowning in his taste, in that pull turning his brains mush, and it was like he’d slipped way down in the hole all over again, only this time adrenaline was sweet and the fall was damning, and each growl poured in his tummy with a burst of colors.
Daiki hunched his back and tucked against Kento’s chest, finding a nip and pressing his lips over it. The fabric soaked quickly with spit, and Kento felt the rogue texture of the tongue, felt the sharpness of the canines and the most indescribable tease as Daiki pulled back and blew on wet cotton, and it made him flush darker with want. He threaded his fingers through a mass of black hair and tugged, wished he could pry those fangs open and be devoured whole, and when Daiki glanced up at him with spit sliding down his face and lips sparkling wet, he pulled his hand and guided it between his legs.
Daiki growled a low sound in the back of the throat as he gripped the belt and yanked, trying to unfasten the buckle. ‘Belts, why is it always belts’, he hissed between clenched teeth, and the frustration on his face looked so genuine, so human, it almost made Kento laugh.
Daiki gave up and tugged at the pants instead, slipped a hand under the sticky cotton of his trunks and pulled firmly, and Kento choked on that laughter.
He let out a ragged breath and bucked into Daiki’s hand, pushing into his fist with erratic movements, the friction so crisp he whined his way into a quick climax. He tugged at him slow and tight, let euphoria lift him on upward till colors slipped off his face and trickled translucent between them, and Kento finally shuddered limp. Daiki buried his head in his shoulder and nibbled at his lobe, kissed the tufts of hair behind his ear with whimpering noises that upset something in his stomach, had Kento’s toes curling and scraping.
He was still hard when Kento pressed his heels against the tailbone and pulled him closer, looped his arms all around him and kissed him languidly. That mouth, that mouth was made for this, devilish lips sucking on his tongue like they could pry something valuable from it, everything tangled and messy. Daiki climbed on top and lined up his hips, wriggled his way in the crease of the thigh where denim was rough and friction throbbed across his cock in tortuous waves, had him whimpering at every sling. His fangs were sharp and stung when he sank them in the column of the neck, pinned Kento down as he squirmed and writhed his way to release.
He came like that, loud and dirty, tugging Kento by the hair and crashing their mouths again as he kissed devoured kissed, and Kento needed to breathe, Christ how needed to, but Daiki’s tongue was in between his teeth, hips pressed close together and rolling into a gyre, a whorl, and that heat suffusing through him had Kento whimpering something raw and needy, and he, he was.
They looked at each other.
‘Hungry motherfucker’, Daiki hissed as he rolled Kento onto his stomach and pulled his thighs apart, preparing him for round two.
*
Small pox carved a deadly path across the Forbidden Lands. Kento’s hometown had been one of the first villages to get struck by the pandemic, entire crowds gone trapped behind mighty walls and falling without a peep. For a week Daiki talked about nothing else. ‘The whole place stinks like a dead hog’, he said, lacking of better wording to describe the idea of decomposition, the air surrounding the village thick with it, of decay and death and lumpy corpses piled on top of each other, unholy mountains high enough to challenge the gods.
Kento wanted to pay his respects, Daiki arched his head upwards and said, no, with a hissing voice. They camped somewhere near the town, close enough for Kento to make out the outlines of the walls, and far enough for Daiki to not feel nauseated by the deadly stench that polluted the air.
By and by, dusk fell and engulfed the walls, made them blurred and harder to pinpoint. Daiki sniffled loudly from one nostril and scratched his chin. He hadn’t spoken a word during the entire journey, tagging behind Kento quiet as a shadow since the moment he had reinforced his boots with rubber tips and hardened his heart for things he wasn’t ready to face yet.
‘Why you spared me? After you mauled John, I mean’, Kento asked some time during eternity. Survivor’s guilt, his father called it: when you take on a task as a team, and end up walking out a lonesome. ‘Inequality can drive a man crazy, you know, even when it comes to death’, he’d told him one day. His brother had just died, and he still believed he could’ve saved him, if only he had moved five inches to the left rather than seven to the right.
Roughly two-thousand corpses stood before Kento, and he didn’t know what he should feel guiltier for, if for not having died before them when he was supposed to, or for not feeling sorry at all.
Daiki arched a brow at the sudden question, tufts of hair swaying in the evening air. It had rained in the morning, and the ground was soaked with it. He’d refused to wear his shoes in the afternoon, and tucked his feet between Kento’s thighs for warmth.
He scratched his chin again. ‘It wasn’t enough’. He said after a little while, and rubbed his belly, a pensive look cutting his face a weird shape. ‘I wanted to keep you close, but here wouldn’t have been enough, too short’, he shrugged.
Kento was stunned: hidden between the lines of the familiar hunger now he could read something different, something eerier, and it must’ve been the death, he tried to rationalize, all those enticing fumes twisting Daiki mindless with need.
The idea was nonsensical and it made him laugh, harshly to hide his confusion and that shred of, of something twisting his guts like a hurricane. ‘My family spends entire generations hunting down your kind, and you decide you want to keep-’
‘We dug our way out the same burrow didn’t we?’ Daiki cut him short. ‘We never fit our holes right, you and I’, he shrugged again, and when Kento looked up at him, astounded, for a moment he seemed to be smiling through the bared canines, his eyes soft and alight.
He was standing under a gloomy sky, standing there with a razor sharp smile and blade grass tickling his feet. Kento rubbed his thighs together for warmth, and it reminded him of skinny arms looping all around him, holding him tight, so tight he just couldn’t breathe. And it reminded him of the damp stench of the burrow, and wide-eyed stares boring through his conscience, and bunnies shoved down his boots, and the stale summer smell and dissonant notes bouncing off moldy walls and hungry kisses stealing his breath away, and when Daiki tugged him to his feet and glanced up at the trail opening before them, there he saw it in their linked hands – the line of distinction disappear way down in the hole.
He swallowed convulsively, but it did little nothing to quench the fire that had spread through his chest. ‘… We've tried our best not to’.
‘Hmm’, Daiki hummed distractedly, looking in the distance with this sort of vacant stare – boredom, most likely. ‘Let’s go back?’ He asked, and Kento paid one last look at those mighty walls, at the societies that had collapsed within them way before illness had its fair game of chance.
He turned on his heels, and it was crazy how light his steps felt like. ‘Let’s go home’.
The folks crossing the forbidden lands had been cold and unforgiving till death claimed them even colder, so he tucked his hand in Daiki’s welt pocket for warmth, and threaded their fingers together. Daiki tightened back automatically.
Folks who chased and freaks who hunted. Kento was not a monster, and he had done being hunted by his own demons.