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The white suit is the final straw.
(It’s also the first, but just the sight of it on that first morning tips him over the edge, starts the inevitable fall, sets Rui on the path to ruin.)
Rui slides out from under the car, almost literally coated in grease – black grime up to the elbows, thick under his fingernails, flaking off where it has dried on his cheek – and he sees the devil himself standing there in his immaculate white suit.
It feels like he’s being mocked and it pisses him off.
“The hell do you want?” he bites out at the perfectly pressed, perfectly spotless trousers.
The devil grins. He’s startlingly out of place, a bleached and starched silhouette shocking against the general grime and clutter of the repair shop. He makes an exaggerated gesture to bring attention to the car keys he has looped around one of his fingers, and the jingling and the motion forces Rui to tear his glare away from the precise creases in his jacket. “Take a wild fucking guess,” he says, and Rui catches a glimpse of a red tongue behind his sharp, unnervingly polished smile.
(Later, he will have dreams about that suit. Later, he’ll imagine pressing himself up against it, his own black imprint rubbing off on the material – the shape of his hands branded on it forever, the kind of stain you can’t wash out.)
Rui’s never been one for guessing games, though, so he settles for a snarl and thinks about how much he wants to fuck that awful suit up, how much he’d enjoy getting it dirty.
…
Less than a week later the devil in the white suit saunters back into the garage, and he’s dressed so similarly to his first appearance that for a horrific moment Rui doubts that he’d even really left at all, instead, perhaps, having spent the time between lurking in a dark corner of the shop. He imagines him tucking himself carefully behind a workbench or hanging from an overhead shelf like a bat and then dismisses the fancy; he may be the devil but there’s no way his suit would have stayed spotless after spending any more than an hour in this place.
The devil makes eye contact with him and that dangerous smile slices across his face.
“Fucking mechanic,” he calls in greeting, and Rui remembers every single reason he has to hate him.
“There’s no way you managed to break your car again,” Rui hisses, because this is too much, too soon, completely undeserved.
The devil’s smile grows unnervingly broader.
Rui winds up prioritizing his job over every other assignment he’s been given to take care of that day and feels only relief when he can finally press the car keys and the receipt to give to the receptionist back into the devil’s hand and track him warily as he exits the garage through the door that takes him into the cramped waiting room, where he should have been sitting on one of the cracked plastic chairs and taking in the breeze from the fan that hums like an oversized wasp instead of lounging in the work area where the radio only works some of the time and Rui grumbles and tenses up whenever he feels his eyes on him.
Rui is glad to see him go. He hopes he won’t be seeing him again
...
“You’re that senator’s son,” the devil says, and under his car Rui nearly drops the bolts he has cupped in one hand onto his face.
“Get the hell out of my garage,” he says into the undercarriage, rather charitably, practically polite, because he’d punched the last guy who’d dared to make the connection.
“Shouldn’t you be in school somewhere?” the devil asks, but in that tone that makes it clear that he already knows all of Rui’s secrets and he’s just waiting for him to bite so he can turn it around and rattle him to the roots of his teeth, dazzle him with whatever information he and his pyramid of cronies have shaken out of people who know enough to be worth talking to.
“Shouldn’t you?” Rui says, deflecting the conversation away from the mire of his own personal life, and the devil’s smile widens.
“How old do you think I am, fucking mechanic?” He asks the question in a way that reminds Rui of the motion of sliding a knife carefully between someone’s ribs – fast enough to be satisfying but precisely enough to keep from hitting bone.
“Same as me,” Rui says, and oh, yeah, he knows this devil, has carried the memory of this devil like a chip on his shoulder, isn’t surprised at all that he doesn’t seem to remember Rui from before. “Your driver’s license might be a fake, but the age should be correct.” Rui retightens another bolt, no longer eager to watch for the devil’s reactions.
(If he does remember, Rui sure as hell didn’t leave him with anything resembling a good impression.)
“O-ho,” the devil chuckles, “you seem awfully confident about that.” There’s an edge to his laugh, like it’s been suppressed, carefully measured out and canned for an audience that Rui is pretty fucking sure he shouldn’t be considered part of.
“I’m not in college, but I’m not fucking stupid,” he mutters, fingers clumsy and slipping around the final fastener. He drops the wrench onto his eye instead, attention all taken up by his struggle to keep the bolts from sliding through his fingers.
The devil throws back his head and laughs. It’s loud and rough and cackling and Rui hates how he can tell that this one is genuine, that nothing about it puts him any more at ease than he was before.
…
Because here’s the thing: he is that senator’s son.
(He has been drowned and buried in the dead of night, but once upon a time he was the senator’s son and the team captain’s younger brother and he had thought that he, too, was full of good things. He had thought that he, too, could stand up and make people listen.)
He’s learned the hard way that ambition does not always come with a guarantee of success, but that it’s stupid to try to slough it off because it only grows back later, whispering promises of the things he might do and how he cannot fall nearly as far the second time, not since he’s taken care to rebuild himself so close to the ground.
His family name is Habashira and that is something he has not given up. He’s given up so many things, given up hard, given up often, let himself shed dignity and respect and pride like having those things stripped from him might reveal some newer, stronger version of himself underneath. He’s been desperate and he’s crawled in the dirt. He’s cut ties and communications and let relationships crumble into ash. He’s distanced himself from the senator, from the captain, from the shining dreams of victory and camaraderie, until all that was left was the engine that keeps him moving forward and his name.
He’s Rui, most of the time. He’s Rui and Rui is a mechanic, Rui stopped going to high school halfway through his final year, Rui has a network of ropey scars that ripple down one of his sides, Rui never washes thoroughly enough to get the grease stains from his fingers and just goes about life constantly grimy, perpetually smudged. Rui is still, after everything, stubbornly a Habashira, even though he’d strangle you for calling attention to it.
Rui is that senator’s son, the one the senator doesn’t talk about.
…
“Look,” Megu says, interrupting his lunch by sliding into the seat across from him like she owns the place (she almost does, in a way, because he’s working for her uncle and currently utilizing the break her uncle allows him to take during the slow part of the afternoon), “I didn’t want to have to be the one to tell you this.” Rui bristles, already sure that this isn’t going to be a fun conversation.
“The hell are you on about?” he snaps, not bothering to slap her hand away from his food but giving her the evil eye so she knows that he disapproves. (He hasn’t been able to properly refuse her anything since they were fifteen years old and still soft and unmarked, too enamored with the smell of gasoline and the illusion of control to recognize just how deep the hole they’d dug themselves was until they couldn’t see their way back out.)
“You have a boyfriend,” she says, expression unflinching as she reaches out to pull the entire plate closer to herself.
“Fucking what?”
“You’re dating that guy. The devil guy. The one with the hair and that weird laugh.” His stare remains incredulous and she remains unimpressed. “How many times have you eaten together this week?”
Rui grits his teeth. “Twice,” he says. “But only because he’s always busting in here at noon with dumbass questions about his shitty car, so what’s your point?”
“It’s only Wednesday and you see him more than you see me. It must be love."
Six months ago, that would have stung. It would have been like a slap to the face to hear her say that. (Like she was purposely squeezing the heart he’d dropped into her hands so many years ago.) He can tell that she’s saying it now as a way to test to waters, to see if he’s grown up, if he’s recovered the pieces of himself that he’d tried to give to her after all that time spent imagining a life together that never really worked out. Six months ago, he would have been too raw to bear it, but today he only stops to think about how it doesn’t hurt before responding.
“I hate that son of a bitch and his stupid, prissy suits. He’s our age, you remember? Where does he get off, prancing in here dressed like he owns the world and acting like I’m going to bend over backwards to accommodate all his stupid demands?"
Megu smiles. “Sounds like you’ve got a lot of feelings about him.”
Rui curses at random and slams a palm down onto the rickety card table, causing it to creak and sway.
“Nasty-ass college motherfucker and his fucking fake license,” he spits. “He wouldn’t be in here all the time if he just learned how to fucking drive the normal way. Fuck him.” Megu delicately picks the only good grapes out of the bunch from his lunch and eats them, not even raising an eyebrow when he storms out, back into the garage where he can work out his anger by doing something constructive, like getting a head start on the motorcycle job he’s been assigned, or even something stupid and pointless like kicking a stack of tires.
(He’s pretty sure he can hear her laughing from the break room when the tires he kicks tip over and he shouts at them, and he does not appreciate it.)
…
It’s a Tuesday and still somehow the third time he’s seen the devil that week. If he didn’t know any better, he’d accuse him of breaking his car on purpose just so he can come in to ruin his day. (Since he does know better – and he does know, he’s not naïve enough to think Hiruma is really that bad of a driver, but he also knows that calling him out will be playing right into his hands – he restrains himself, holding his tongue, holding them at a stalemate.) He has to make conversation, though, because the silence is stifling him and he hates not knowing where the devil is, always imagining that he’s slid up behind him on his unfair cat feet.
“Don’t have anywhere better to be, Hiruma?” he calls, just as the other man slides back into view, sidling around the edge of his car to lean on the passenger side door.
Hiruma smiles, soft and terrible. “It’s okay if you’d rather call me Youichi, fucking mechanic,” he says, words dripping from his teeth like honey.
“Fucking devil,” Rui hisses back at him, bristling, shoulders around his ears, lines and edges tense with wary pride.
“Rui,” the devil purrs back, and he hates everything about the sound of his name in that mouth.
“Just leave already,” Rui demands, grease-covered hands held out in front of himself like a threat. Those white suits can’t stay safe forever. Someday he’ll give in and absolutely ruin one.
Hiruma is unfazed by this entirely, like he always is, and he expertly dodges Rui’s swipes in a series of movements so casual it almost seems choreographed. Like they’re dancing together. He lets out that fake (fake, fake) tinkling laugh and Rui feels like screaming.
“You’d turn a paying customer out onto the street? That’s bad for business.” He says this with a cackle, like he says most things.
“You’re hardly a customer, you’re a freak with an obsession,” Rui accuses.
“I’m a freak who keeps your business running,” the devil says, baring his teeth in a mockery of a polite smile. “You wouldn’t want to exile your biggest patron, would you?”
“Spend your fucking money elsewhere for all I care,” Rui says, and god, he’s tired, he’s so tired of this. He’s tired of waiting for Hiruma to make his next move, he’s tired of looking at the problem and seeing the same precise handiwork at the heart of it, he’s tired of biting back the words that will get him the action he wants but leave him as the butt of whatever joke the devil has laid out so carefully for him.
“Can’t,” the devil laughs.
“There are at least three other garages on this street alone,” Rui sputters, gesturing wildly (and perhaps unwisely – his boss will have his head if he hears him saying this) at the door.
“I can’t go to any of them,” Hiruma says, eyelids lowering, smirking with his entire body because he’s finally maneuvered Rui into a corner, into a conversational trap he won’t be able to escape.
They’ve finally hit critical mass, every little snide comment and leaky transmission building up to this. Rui can feel it, can taste the potential of it like iron on his tongue, can suddenly feel every square centimeter of his skin that’s covered in grease and sweat and dirt. It’s like his vision has switched to improbably high definition and he would swear he can see the individual thread count on Hiruma’s jacket. It feels like the situation is spinning out of his control, but then the devil meets his eyes lazily and he realizes he never had a chance, he’d never been in the driver’s seat at all.
“Why the hell not?” he asks, because he’s tired, because Hiruma was always going to win anyways, because the sick fucking joke of Rui’s life is that no matter how hard he tries, he always comes out on the bottom. He drags himself from the gutter only to get promptly knocked right back on his ass, and then he claws his way up all over again because he never learned how to die quietly.
“Because,” the devil says, dancing closer, close enough that he can use his two extra centimeters to look down just slightly at Rui, close enough that Rui could finally resolve his desire to leave his fingerprints on his immaculate clothing, close enough that neither of them will be able to miss what he says next, “I don’t have a vested interest in any of the other mechanics at any of the other garages.”
“Fuck off,” Rui hisses.
“Habashira Rui,” the devil says, stepping even closer. “Do you still play football?”
“Fuck you,” Rui says, and something snaps in his chest, the wall he’d pretended to build to obscure his memories of high school crumbling, collapsing, the illusion the both of them had indulged for weeks of being strangers folding in on itself. The order of things, the way they’d arranged them during their stalemate, is slowly spinning onto its head, so he gives up one more time and stretches forward, fisting his fingers in Hiruma’s lapel. It’s a small victory, his first of the day, and he relishes the feeling of the pointlessly expensive fabric as it’s crushed in his hands – his hands with their chewed down nails and permanent veneer of grime, his hands that are suited for engines and tools and forming fists, his hands that have failed and fucked up and fumbled more times than he’d ever be able to count – unquestionably leaving behind a mark that will show everyone that he was there.
“Are you going to ask me nicely?” asks the devil, letting his voice - usually so grating, carefully exaggerated for shock value - drop to a murmur, but still easily heard in the scant distance between his mouth and Rui’s ear.
“You don’t like me because I’m nice.”
Hiruma tips back his head to laugh at that, and then tips his head forward, and then even further forward. Rui tightens his grip on the suit jacket and lets him.
…
“I’m sure I could get used to it eventually if you ever wanted to try being nice to me, fucking mechanic."
“Give me one good reason to do that and I’ll consider it.”
“…”
“…Fuck, give me another good reason.”
…
In another life, Habashira Rui does not fuck up high school so badly that he ends up more or less estranged from his family.
In another life, Habashira Rui does not leave the football field until he has to be carried off, physically removed for his own safety.
In another life, Habashira Rui is an entirely different type of self-made man and does the unthinkable: hooks his hope to a meteor flaming wildly through the atmosphere and follows the devil he knows to America in order to prove to anyone who will watch that he’s worth something, he can make it, his dreams are not unattainable.
In another life, Habashira Rui refuses to choose the easy way out and uses the damage he takes to harden himself into something better, someone who has let himself be broken down only to heal stronger than he had been at the start.
In this life, Habashira Rui knows a lot about motors and axles and all kinds of valves and walks carefully down certain streets because, even though he’s a free agent now, there are still people around who might remember his face and misdeeds from a time when he did his absolute best to live up to everyone’s worst expectations of him. He swears too much and takes more smoke breaks than he’s technically allowed and does not remember the feeling of a football in his hand well enough to miss it except on his lowest, most melancholy days. He sneers at the boy whose existence had frustrated him to tears in high school and doesn’t mean it, not really, not in the way he sometimes thinks he should.
…
It’s the height of summer in Tokyo and Hiruma Youichi steps into the only auto repair garage in the city he deems worth his time in a neatly ironed suit, but this time – in contrast to all the visits he’s paid them before, similarly attired if perhaps a fraction less obviously excited to be there – the usually bone white fabric is marred by an unusual set of stains on his lapel. Megu doesn’t ask why they’re shaped like hands or why he appears to have made his way entirely on foot to a business where the only service offered is vehicle repair. She hardly looks up from the magazine she’s not even pretending to hide behind the front desk where she’s been contracted to fill in for a missing employee for an afternoon, only lifting her gaze enough to take in the visitor and wave him in the direction of the backroom. He smiles at her, a horrible, promising grin, and she meets it coolly, making him pause in front of her for a second.
“Nice weather we’re having, isn’t it?” he snorts mockingly at his own attempt at small talk.
“He’s already gone five minutes over his lunch break,” she tells him, under no illusions about his intentions.
“Very charming, do you greet all your customers like that? By exposing the flaws of your coworkers?”
“You’re late,” she tells him.
“And now you’re criticizing me as well, how very fucking hospitable of you.” The devil leans towards her, smiling with tilt of his head and the exaggerated cheer in his voice. “It’s a good thing I’m not here because of the quality of your customer service.”
“We’re only paid to be polite to customers.”
He actually smiles at that one, teeth flashing in a perfect crescent.
“Hurry up,” she says, closing the conversation by gesturing pointedly at the backroom and then returning to her magazine.
“I wouldn’t want to keep anyone waiting,” he says, tossing his head back and rolling his shoulders, smoothing an imaginary wrinkle in his jacket before taking the last couple of steps across the tiny waiting room to reach the door she’d indicated to him.
From behind, she can see that there are more stains bunched squarely and suggestively on the back of his trousers. Like the others, they’re faded slightly, greyed out, clearly the lingering remnants of something he’d been unable (or unwilling) to fully wash out.