Work Text:
1;
The first time it happened, Sae had left for Spain just a few months prior.
Rin is sitting on the floor of his bedroom, knees to his chest as he practically cradles himself, trying to ignore the sticky, gooey feeling of loneliness that seems to seep through the pores in his skin. It’s these days without Sae, that Rin realises how alone he really is. When with Sae, at least he could hold off the thoughts that tried so desperately to get drilled in his head:
“You’re alone.”
“You’re nothing without him.”
“You deserve to feel this way.”
If Rin has learned anything, it’s most likely the fact that Sae has shielded Rin from as much evil as he can. After a few months of isolation, Rin realises how many kids at school don’t like him– how his teammates only talk to him on the field, and as soon as they’re off it’s almost like Rin becomes a ghost, a wisp in the air, being breathed in but never acknowledged.
Now, on the floor of his room Rin feels like he’s been breathed in by everyone around him. His parents, his team, his coach, but he’s not sure if they let him go fully, there seems to be pieces missing from him that stem deeper than Sae’s disappearance in his life.
Rin can feel himself tear up at the thought that maybe there’s something wrong inside of him that even Sae can’t protect him from. Something so inherently wrong– the same type of wrong that makes villains become villains, without ever meaning to.
Rin brings up the back of his hand, wiping against his eyes much harsher than the action called for, before sucking in a deep breath and grabbing his ipad.
Rin knows himself enough that horror movies make himself feel better, the concept that someone is living through a worse life, worse experiences make adrenaline rush through his veins, when his eyes scour the screen for each part of a ripped up body, the dehumanising, fucked up way that humans have the potential to act.
He stretches out his legs, letting his ipad rest on his thighs, curling up his posture to look down at the many movies he scrolls across.
Rin doesn’t even remember which one he chose back then, but there was a scene that stayed with him ever since, whether he realised it or not.
A girl, she had dark roots with blonde ends, sitting in a messed up bathroom under hospital-like lighting. Razor blade in her hand as she slices. One, twice, and she lets out a sigh of relief. Three, four, and her shoulders become less tense. Five, Six, and her arm is dripping out way too much blood to be safe.
Rin’s eyes widened.
Something in his head clicked, the excessive gore in this scene seemed to resonate with some instinct deep inside him, trying to claw itself out now after being awakened.
The rest of the day (which wasn’t much time left anyway,) the scene played over and over again in his head. Doing his meditation, he stretched his body to the limits, the ache in his arms and legs growing more and more as he imagined what it would be like to have the same sort of cuts along his arms.
Would he feel the same relief? Would it help him too?
So, he finds himself in his parent’s room just before dinner time. When he knows that his mother is almost finished with dinner and his father is waiting at the dining table for it. He walks into the bathroom, searching for his father’s razor. It sits on the sink counter, as if waiting, as if this was predetermined. Rin doesn’t think twice when he grabs it and runs back to his own room, quickly hiding the razor in his dressing table.
He does downstairs, he eats, his parents ask about soccer, Rin mutters something, and they send him back upstairs,
Rinse, repeat.
Rin, under the guise of taking a shower, slips the razor out of the dressing table and takes it in the bathroom with him. He locks the door behind and immediately starts to pick at the razor blade to try and get it out like she did, wincing every time he accidentally nicks his finger.
Eventually the razor blade falls back on the sink counter, along with a few blood drops stemming from Rin’s cut finger, and it hurts. For the first time in a long while, Rin’s chest bubbles up with fear, he asks himself: “what the hell am I doing?”
Yet, with shaky hands he still picks up the blade. Sucking in a few shallow breaths as it presses against the meat of his arm, still holding onto baby fat. He counts down, squeezes his eyes shut and slices.
He fights the urge to scream.
He drops the blade on the floor, coated in his own blood as he leans against the counter, his head spinning and the bathroom light too bright. He’s scared to look down at his arm, to realise what he’s done, what he’s started. But when a bigger drop of blood traces the side of his arm, he finds himself looking anyway.
It’s strange. He did this to himself. It hurts– it’s painful but that feeling of loneliness seems to be fleeting, it’s oddly addicting, the way Rin floats in and out of consciousness, not feeling fully alive as a new sort of adrenaline rushes through his veins.
He bends down to pick up the razor blade, almost falling over in the process. So he just sits down against the wall. His breathing starts to even out after a few minutes, so he sucks a deep breath in and brings the blade to skin once again.
2;
After Sae came back from Spain, the house has been quiet. There’s an air of disappointment that lays thick over every room, every conversation. Rin is sure that his parents thought Sae would live with them again, to go back to their dysfunctional normal.
Rin’s in the middle of trashing his room, so full of anger and hurt and regret as he slams his trophies on the ground and shatters photos against the wall. Sae was supposed to come back, he was supposed to fix Rin and make him feel better, shield him and hold him and whatever else he used to do as an older brother. Glass from the broken frames prick his finger, and almost like awakening a sleeper agent something in Rin’s demeanour changes.
It’s been four years, his arms are full of keloid scars, raised lumps of flesh that span all the way up to his shoulders. Rin by now knows it’s terrible, knows that this isn’t what's considered normal, that his arms would be disturbing to look at, disturbing to even know that, that’s what he’s hiding under his uniform.
Rin grabs a shard of glass, ignoring how it digs into his palm. He brings it up to his wrist and drags it along the veins visible in his skin. He hates Sae, he hates his parents for allowing Sae to go away.
He doesn’t know how long he stands there, chipping away at himself like a marble sculpture. But subconsciously he finds himself dragging his feet against the ground, picking out some clothes and making his way to the bathroom. He locks the bathroom door behind himself, dropping his clothes somewhere on the ground and stripping off the ones he already has on.
He enters the shower, turning up the dial to the hottest possible temperature. Rin wants to burn, he wants to feel the stinging on his skin, he wants to prolong the pain as much as he can, to keep that anger inside of him alive. It does sting. Terribly. It makes Rin want to tear his skin apart, to stay outside all night and kick soccer balls into goals until he hears his knee crack and fall off.
He rests the cut on his palm against the tiles, letting the blood seep out into the drain. It looks like that famous scene from ‘Psycho,’ Rin would know. The scalding temperature keeps a fire burning within Rin alive, it licks his face and consumes his body. It convinces Rin to lose his baby fat and replace it with muscle, to become the number one striker.
Rin hasn't noticed yet, but he’s already so tired.
3;
Rin is seething when he enters the Blue Lock bathrooms, slamming his fist down against the sink counter and ignoring the icy feeling of agony that trails up his spine, so cold it makes his breathing shallow.
In the U-20 arc he lost against Sae, again.
He lost, he kept losing and losing and losing and– Rin brought his hands up to his face, his nails digging into the skin above his eyebrows. He is so angry, he felt it when he stepped on that field the first time, and the last time as well. He kneels down, feeling under the bathroom counter for that razor blade he’s hidden, stuck with some tape he happened to find roaming around the halls.
Normally, he wouldn't be so drastic, so idiotic with this, but he’s not thinking straight. He rests the razor on the sink, pulling up his Blue Lock Pyjama pants as high as they can go. He drags the razor against his thigh, once, twice, thrice, and he curls his posture in pain, the hurt is the same as always, it’s good.
For Rin, every time is the first time, he doesn’t know whether it’s a good thing or not.
He hears the door slide behind him, and God knows he does not want to turn around, he shuts his eyes tightly, until he hears.
“What the fuck?”
And he immediately recognises the voice. Behind him, Ryusei stands, a smirk that he had walking in half off his face. Rin slowly pulls his pyjama leg back down, hiding the bleeding scars from view.
He turns to face Ryusei, schooling his face into nonchalance as quickly as he can, and he mumbles out.
“..what?”
Ryusei for the first time, looks almost out of his depth here, looking Rin up and down. He says, rubbing the back of his head with forced positivity (which he clearly struggled with at the time.)
“I didn’t mean to say that, sorry man!” He laughs, walking up to Rin and patting his shoulder.
“I don’t care, don’t mention this.” Rin growls, shrugging Ryusei’s hand off, and starting to storm out.
As Rin takes a step out of the door, Ryusei asks.
“Does Sae know about this?”
After a moment of stunned silence, Rin grumbles out.
“He wouldn’t care”
4;
If you asked Rin when the romance between him and Hiori started, he honestly couldn’t tell you. But somehow, some way, he finds himself sitting on the edge of Hiori’s bed in his dorm. Hiori laying down on his stomach and scrolling through a tablet.
He’s chatting about something, voice light and accent sweet as he describes a new game that he recently found. Rin wants to listen, but his mind keeps going elsewhere. He’s feeling restless as he picks at long sleeves of the Blue Lock pyjamas. He needs a high, he needs adrenaline rushing through his veins.
Hiori notices Rin’s discomfort, and he sits up, poking Rin’s side.
“Hey, ‘ya alright? Kinda out of it, are you?” Hiori giggles, bringing up his hand to wave it in front of Rin’s face. Rin weakly swats Hiori’s hand away, muttering.
“‘m fine. Just– it’s nothing.” The picking on his sleeve becomes quicker, more agitated as he figures out what to say.
Hiori nods along, and he says slightly quieter, “you know, if anythings’ happenin’ you can tell me.” He pats Rin’s thigh encouragingly, in a way that’s supposed to be reassuring. Rin doesn’t feel it, he feels worse knowing what’s underneath where Hiori’s touching.
It’s not that Hiori doesn’t know–a certain day during the forced time off that Blue Lock gave its players, Hiori ran his fingers down Rin’s scars in the quiet, dark comfort of Rin’s room, whispering the words:
“Everyones’ allowed to have their own vices, but it doesn’t mean they have to have ‘em forever.”
Rin didn’t cry that night, nor did he stop.
As Hiori sits beside him now, Rin decides it’s best to leave, he stands up and he says, half-whispering.
“I should go back to my stratum.” Hiori nods and Rin thinks that he said goodbye, maybe even ‘I love you,’ but he walked out before he got the chance to hear it.
Rin walks, and walks and somehow he ends up sitting on his bed alone, none of his other teammates in the dorm with him. This time his sleeves are pulled up, picking at his scars like no tomorrow to get that same high.
Somehow, the razor blade had disappeared overnight. (he’s not sure if it’s his own stupidity or Ryusei’s, maybe it could even be the cameras in the bathrooms.)
So he’s stuck for whoever knows how long in Blue Lock, without his only addiction and buzzing with destructive energy.
Out of everything he hates, Rin hates this the most, scratching at his skin like a crackhead on the side of the street. Trying to chase a high that is no worse than someone addicted to marijuana.
Rin knows how pathetic it is, and there’s a shame boiling under his skin that he just pulls his sleeve back down and rests on his bed, curled away from the door as if trying to become small enough to hide away, from the others, from Hiori, from Ryusei, from his parents.
He falls asleep before the rest of his team enters the room.
+1;
One day, Sae gets a video call from Shidou. He’s about to fall asleep, sitting on the bed in his apartment when the phone starts to ring. He lets out an annoyed ‘tsk’, moving to answer the phone anyway. He knows damn well that he can just decline and turn to lay down, but he can’t deny he can’t help and be curious on why he’s getting a call so late at night.
On the other side, Ryusei is setting his phone down in what looks like the bathroom, and he whisper-shouts. “There’s something wrong with your brother, man.”
Sae raises a brow, and he turns to lay down anyway, holding the camera up to his face as he says, “my brother? Whatever it is, it's probably stupid coming from you, I don’t care.” He declares, watching with slight amusement as Ryusei gasps.
Ryusei goes down to the camera and he says, trying to be quiet. “No, like I'm telling you, your brother is probably psychotic or something, it’s bad.”
Sae already knows that Rin has some.. tendencies, Jesus Christ he grew up with the boy. But for some reason he can feel his chest tighten. He sighs, and he says with feigned nonchalance. “Yeah, go on..?”
The following scene Ryusei describes makes him sick.
How could Rin be so idiotic? Cutting? Really? In public, private-Sae isn’t sure what Blue Lock is considered as–but all Sae’s mind can go back to is the complete and utter fact that Rin cuts.
He self harms, it’s objective now.
Ryusei carries on and he recalls, “Okay, and I asked him, like, ‘does Sae know?’ and he was like ‘he wouldn’t care’! I was gagged–” and as he continues, Sae cuts him off, parroting:
“He wouldn’t care?”
“Yeah, he said that about you.”
Sae tenses, and he feels the instinctual need to defend himself, to sit up and say ‘of course I would!’ But it doesn’t come to him. Sae just lays there on the bed, watching Ryusei’s elaborate hand movements as he explains what happened. They stay on call for a while, until someone yells at Ryusei over the cameras at Blue Lock and forces him to end the call. Sae shuts off his phone and throws it somewhere on the bed, staring off into space as he thinks.
‘He wouldn’t care.’
Sae can’t help the bubbling anxiety in his chest as he wonders if Ryusei thinks that too, if everyone that knows about Rin’s self harm thinks that Sae doesn’t care. Sae hides his face in his pillow when he feels increasing weight behind his eyes, he lets the weight drip down his face as he whispers.
“I do care.”