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Leo is bait. A dangling piece of meat waiting to be captured by the mouth of a fish—or in this case, a human-sized thing cobbled together by old televisions. The anomaly is less of a monster and more of a possessed amalgamation, created by a vengeful television host who despises the internet with his entire (dead) being. His murder targets, it appears, are social media influencers.
It’s a fairly simple mission; all the Vagastrom ghouls need to do is beat the shit out of the televisions until the ghost is sucked out and captured. That job is left to Sho and Alan, who are waiting in the shadows.
That leaves Leo to be, once again, bait. And might he say, he is perfect for the job. Who can resist a handsome, young influencer, filming a video in an alleyway in nighttime Akihabara, Tokyo? He’s even turned on a disgusting amount of flash, so his viral-worthy smile is a star of its own.
When the anomaly inevitably appears at the opening of the alley, it stands tall, a moving mass of wires and retro screens flickering in and out of light. Dials roll and flit through various channels like an old man spamming the remote: a weather report, a music show, a comedy sketch. Leo turns his phone camera to film the anomaly and cranks his irritability from 100 to 150. “Ah, boring. Look at those vintage televisions. They’re so 1990s. No one gives a fuck about that old shit anymore unless it’s for aesthetic.”
The pile of electronics seems to roar with indignation. It’s not enough for him. He continues talking to his imaginary audience, his voice drawling and lazy. “And the aesthetic sucks, too. They should just throw that trash into the garbage. It’ll find better use as a home for raccoons.”
Another angry roar booms from the speakers. The anomaly twitches, and its televisions sway precariously, erratically in its disorganized stack. It’s close to snapping. So, Leo does what he knows infuriates people the most—he ignores them. With a swiveling foot, he smoothly turns 180 degrees toward the dead end of the alleyway and doesn’t bother to look at the monster again. He stares at the concrete wall and waits.
It takes five seconds of silence. Then, a deafening grumble bellows like a roll of electric thunder—and the anomaly hurtles towards his back at full speed.
Leo doesn’t move. He waits for the familiar timbre of Sho’s voice, rising above the crashing metals: “Spurno!” and the attack is intercepted with a smooth, brutal blast to the monster’s side. The blow sends wind sweeping against the back of Leo’s neck. By now, the anomaly should be sprawled on the floor, for Alan to kill it for good.
But it’s not.
He turns just in time to see the anomaly, its mass partially destroyed—a broken mess of wires in the gaping hole that was its half. It lunges, grabbing the headphones laid on his neck and ripping him backwards.
Fuck.
By the time the anomaly is finally dead, the three Vagastrom ghouls are drenched in sweat, and Sho is exhausted. He thankfully remembered to wear gloves, but his rolled-up sleeves were a mistake, cuts from glass sending oozing red blood dripping down his arms. When he leans over to catch a breath, the residual pain makes him grimace. Ouch.
Through his white mop of hair, he spots Alan, leaning against the wall. He seems to have the same issue as Sho—his biceps are decorated with scratches galore—but the captain isn’t paying attention to his injuries in the slightest. His bluish-grey eyes are cast instead to the influencer.
Sho follows Alan’s gaze, landing on Leo, who is facing away from the other two. At first glance, there’s nothing wrong with him. But upon squinting, there is something very wrong.
Leo’s shoulders tremble and shake, wavering breaths of air leaving his lips. He’s holding something, too dark to see, but he’s not only holding it—he’s clutching the object in his arms like a lifeline. Like he’s careening towards a tipping point, and it’s the only thing that can save him. Like he’s not at all okay.
“Leo?” Sho whispers. His friend should hear him, but he doesn’t. It’s completely unlike anything Leo has ever been. He takes a tentative step forward, then two. He walks all the way up to Leo and turns him so he’s facing the moonlight.
The look in Leo’s expression is pure panic masked as infuriation. His yellow eyes are wide and unfocused, but they land on Sho as if he’s just now realized that the biker is there.
“Did you not hit hard enough?” Leo hisses out. It’s biting as usual, but there’s a raw layer exposed that hits Sho like a bucket of cold water. “Are you fucking dumb?”
“What are you—”
It’s like he’s not even listening. “The anomaly could've ripped out my throat. I could’ve died, and it would’ve been your fault.”
“Leo,” Alan steps forward. His voice is stern as always, but edged with concern. “Calm down.”
“Are you kidding me?” The influencer’s anger turns sharply onto the captain. There’s a tremor, a shakiness to every word Leo says. It unnerves the other two Vagastrom members. “What were you even doing then? Just standing there? Are you stupid too? I can’t believe I ever trusted—”
Sho interrupts him by grabbing both his shoulders. “Leo. You’re panicking.”
Leo freezes. His mouth twists into a pained grimace, as if he, of all people, is struggling to hear what Sho is saying. But that can’t be. He’s never struggled to hear anything at all.
In that moment, a drunken group of office workers stroll by, their laughter howling in the nighttime air. Sho has no doubt that they would be deafening up close, but they’re so distant he can barely hear them.
But Leo, strangely, winces in pain.
Why would he…? Sho thinks and watches as Leo winces again at a passing car. It seems that every noise makes him seize up. Oh.
“What is it?” Alan says, and Sho lifts a finger to his lips in response. The captain promptly shuts up.
The hand hovering in front of his face goes to Leo’s. Sho makes a peace sign, points to Leo’s two eyes, then back at his. Look at me.
“Where are your headphones?” Sho mouths when they finally make eye contact. Leo looks down at his hands, and Sho’s gaze follows. Clutched between his fingers are the broken pieces of his headphones, jagged white metal torn apart by the anomaly.
Sho envisions the moment that Leo was ripped backwards by the neck. How he audibly shrieked in panic. What happened afterwards was a blur of fists and television screens, but he must’ve realized that his headphones were broken sometime then.
He can’t remember the last time Leo was without his headphones. They sat on his shoulders at any given moment: in the middle school classroom, on the roof, in Shibuya on nights out together. Sho had always wondered how he’d gotten them. His clothes, especially before the whole influencer stunt, were cheap and second-hand—but his headphones were of the highest quality. Sleek white with gold accents, a statement piece of its own.
Now they’ve been snapped apart. Just like that.
The longer Leo stares at his headphones, the shorter, the more ragged his breath gets. Every brush of air, every distant sound from the street makes him shrink further into himself. It’s a side of Leo that Sho has never seen. It’s a side of Leo that he doubts anybody has ever seen. He’s scared, panicked, and vulnerable.
He needs Sho’s help.
The biker reaches up, cupping his hands around Leo’s ears in an effort to block the noise. On instinct, the influencer wrenches away—but Sho doesn’t let him. He grips the sides of his head tightly and holds on.
“Cap,” Sho whispers, just loud enough so Alan can hear him. “Go to the nearest tech store and buy the best quality headphones you can get.”
Alan pauses. He watches Leo with a quiet sort of concern, as if he doesn’t know what to do with the sight of his vice captain nearly driven to tears. But he nods and hurries off into the night streets of Akihabara.
Sho turns back to Leo, who is still shaking like a leaf, then looks around at the mess of an alleyway they’re in. They’ll need to call Darkwick to clean it all up later, but for now, their priority isn’t the mission.
Off to the side, he spots another alleyway that would undoubtably be quieter and further away from the streets. So Sho begins to awkwardly shuffle backwards—still covering Leo’s ears—moving them both away from the scene. Leo follows. His feet press shakily into the concrete, but he takes each step with Sho into the next alleyway.
The background noise muffles to a hushed, serene pitch. Sho has no doubt that Leo is probably hearing every sound at least 50 decibels higher, but it’s much, much better. The fogginess in the influencer’s eyes seems to fade with every step, leaving a deep, raw exhaustion behind. His breath begins to slow into less of a desperate gasp for air and more of a quiet, fatigued sigh.
They sit on the ground, propped up against the wall. Sho doesn’t remove his hands from Leo’s ears.
“Feeling better?” Sho mouths.
Leo opens his lips and whispers hoarsely. The relaxed, uncaring tone he carries is completely gone. “You can whisper.”
“Okay.” Sho says softly, barely louder than a breath of air. “Are you feeling better?”
“Yeah.” Leo purses his lips together before speaking. “Thanks, I guess. This is probably inconvenient.”
“It’s not.” Sho’s brows furrow in dislike at Leo’s language. “Your needs have never been inconvenient, you know that?”
Leo pauses. He doesn’t say anything. He only glances down at the broken mess in his hands, his grey bangs covering the look in his eyes. Sho suspects that it’s intentional, because the answer is likely no.
After a few moments, Sho quietly brings up the headphones. “You’ve had those headphones for a long time, right? I remember seeing you with them in middle school.” He almost expects an immediate dismissal because his words are so clearly a segue into an emotional conversation—the kind of thing Leo despises.
It takes a while before Leo talks again. But he still does. “I bought them with my lunch money. Saved up for months.”
“Is that why you only ate yakisoba buns and milk from the canteen?”
“Yeah.”
“So they meant a lot to you.” Sho says, and Leo shrugs.
“Not really,” he mumbles. “It was a stupid purchase at the time. I just wanted to feel rich, or at least richer than I was. They only started being more than an ornament when I got my stigma.”
“Wanna explain?” Sho gives him another segue. He, again, expects another dismissal.
But in the nth surprise of the day, Leo nods and slowly begins to explain.
Leo remembers the first time his stigma activated.
It was a day or two after he became a ghoul. He remembers walking through the streets without a care in the world, thumbing his phone as he gleefully checked his notifications. Back then, he had a habit of not looking where he was going—it ended up with him bumping into people on the street. That time, he happened to be especially unlucky.
When Leo was knocked to the ground, he looked up to see a man probably two times his size. He was small back then, a late grower, and it was even more evident by the way the stranger practically towered over him. Tattoos littered the man’s arms, and one especially stuck out to Leo: one indicating membership to the most notorious gangs in Tokyo.
Shit.
“Watch where you’re going, you fucking runt.” The man dragged Leo by the neck and lifted him up. As he dangled in the air, his legs kicked uselessly. He could feel his breath constricting in his lungs, the stranger’s fingers tightening around his throat, panic thrumming in his veins.
“—I’m sorry!” Leo croaked out, clawing at the hand that gripped so hard it would definitely bruise. “It was an accident—”
“You wanna die?” The stranger squeezed tighter. Spots began to appear in his vision, and the street blurred into a bunch of fuzzy dark shapes.
“No, please—” Oh god. I’m going to die, I can't breathe, I can't breathe—
Leo was roughly tossed back onto the concrete, gasping for breath. He gulped down oxygen like he was starving, but it wasn't enough; he coughed and wheezed, not feeling anything but panic. Every desperate intake seemed to further his terror—he could hear his heart thumping like an alarm, each ragged breath blaring in his ears. Suddenly, everything was loud, so loud, deafening—
“Watch yourself,” The man’s voice boomed into his head. He clutched his own ears to muffle the sound, but the words echoed in his skull. When the stranger was gone, he remained there on the ground, attempting to calm himself to no avail. The fingers around his throat remained like a vengeful ghost, the racket around him rising in a cacophony of a death choir. Every noise from about a block away or more poured into his eardrums all at once, sealing him in a sensory prison he could not escape.
It took a minute of writhing on the ground before he found enough consciousness to pull his headphones onto his head. He shakily pressed the button to activate noise-canceling—and the sound lessened instantly. The fog in his head, the screaming, the ache he received, quieted. It was still loud, but not unbearably so.
Leo got up on his trembling legs and stumbled, scrambled, into an empty alleyway. He must’ve tripped along the way, or perhaps the stranger threw him harder than he thought, because he had scratches all over his hands and knees. But still, he was alive. God, he was alive.
The thought calmed him down enough to breathe again. And when he finally removed his headphones, he was greeted with beautiful, wonderful silence.
“So your stigma activates whenever you’re panicked,” Sho notes. It’s the first time he’s talked in a minute or two, since he’s just been watching Leo explain a part of himself he’s never shown anybody. The influencer has been carefully, hesitantly speaking, as if every word’s been something he’s been giving away. And Sho knows that Leo needs someone not to judge, not to tell him what’s right or wrong, but to listen.
Leo nods. His eyes have remained trained on the broken headphones the whole time. “It happens more often than you think. But I just wear my headphones. Keeps me calm enough.”
It happens more often than you think, Sho ponders, and in his mind, he’s reminded of all the times Leo’s put on his headphones and shut off the rest of the world. He’s always thought that it was just him being lazy, or too bored to care about the rest of the people he called “NPCs”—but perhaps it’s a defense mechanism. His unbothered face is a mask that hides everything swirling underneath, and his headphones are a physical safety net.
Except now, that safety’s gone.
“I’m sorry I never noticed.” Sho says quietly, feeling like an asshole of a best friend. Then again, Leo himself is an asshole. He’s mean, judgmental, and unfiltered in his opinions of others, including Sho. He practically insults him every hour.
But Leo listens. Not just the things that Sho says out loud, but everything he wants Leo to hear that can’t be said with words. He realizes Sho is burnt out before he even realizes it himself, and drops off a box of sleep tea he got as a PR package. He gets it when Sho is tired of talking, when he’s frustrated out of his mind, when he’s so done with life that he needs a friend, a punching bag, or an escape. And Leo always provides it. He forces him to sit in his room and watch a movie together. He drags Sho down to the Pit, even though Leo hates being near the sweaty arena. He forges a fake permit so Sho can ride on his motorcycle for the afternoon, alone on the freeway. He listens. He notices. And Sho hasn’t been able to provide that in return.
Leo shrugs, as if none of it matters, as if Sho isn’t cradling Leo’s ears with his fingertips in the dark alleyway. “It’s fine. I act bitchy all the time. It’s what I want you to see.”
“Is it?”
“…Yeah.”
Silence.
In that moment, Sho is startled by fast footsteps approaching. His first thought is that it’s someone dangerous—but Leo shakes his head. “It’s Cap.”
Just like that, Alan appears around the corner. He’s breathless from running, but in his hands are two cold bottles of water and a plastic bag. He squats in front of them both like a parent.
Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he opens his mouth to speak, but he pauses, then starts to mouth his words instead. They’re so intelligible that Leo grumbles and whispers, “You can talk. It’s fine.”
“Oh.” Alan seems to register the calm in Leo’s eyes, even if shaky, and nods. “Okay. I…ran around Akihabara, but almost all the tech stores were closed. I found one though.” He hands both Sho and Leo a water bottle each before digging in the plastic bag. Inside is a sleek black case. He hands it to Leo.
The influencer slowly opens the zipper, and there’s a pair of headphones inside—shiny, black, good quality. Not as nice as his old headphones, but still. Better than nothing.
“They’re noise-cancelling,” Alan says quietly. “Just press the button.”
Leo is silent for a few moments, flitting between the new headphones and the old ones in his hands, as if he doesn’t know what to say. But then he looks at Sho.
“Can you remove your hands now? They’re sweaty as hell.”
There he is, Sho thinks with an unfiltered smile, and gently removes his hands. Leo sets the broken pieces down, puts on the headphones, presses the on-button, and waits. After a couple seconds, he audibly sighs of relief. “That’s better.”
Both Sho and Alan grin, and the captain joins the other two in a sitting position. None of them talk—they just let Leo breathe.
A few minutes pass. Sho is making plans in his mind to add a quiet room at the Vagastrom dorm when Leo stands. He slips the device off his head and stretches.
“What are we waiting for?” Leo says, his unbothered expression back like it never left. Except this time, his yellow eyes shine with a refreshed glow. “Let’s call Darkwick, clean up the mess, and head home. I’m tired.”
Sho and Alan eye each other with something like shared joy, then stand. “Let’s get out of here then.”
When they start moving again, Alan takes his place in front of the two—a natural scout for anything dangerous up ahead. Leo keeps his hands in his pockets and walks, his gaze somewhere far away. Sho observes him as the moonlight reflects off of his silver hair.
“Leo.”
“Hm?” Leo doesn’t turn to look at him.
“If something like this happens again, call me.” Sho is surprised by the weight in his own voice, but he really, truly means it. Call me. Don’t deal with this alone. Let me see you like this again.
He watches Leo’s breath hitch. His lips open and close, like he has nothing and everything to say. For a second, that vulnerable, raw side of him is back, his expression swimming with emotion impossible to hide.
“…Okay.”
Sho beams. He resists the urge to pump his fist in the air and turns his attention back to the street. If Leo is looking at him, he doesn’t say anything about it. Neither of them say anything more. They don’t need to.