Chapter Text
The university was loudest before eight in the morning.
Rin had learned that within the first month of moving into his apartment, although calling it a lesson implied that he had ever intended to remember it. There were too many people on the streets at that hour, too many bicycles cutting through the pedestrian paths with careless little bells, too many voices spilling from convenience stores and cafés and dormitory entrances, too many students walking in groups with half-buttoned coats and unfinished conversations following them into the cold. The campus seemed to wake all at once, buildings coming alive behind sheets of glass as lights clicked on across lecture halls and offices, automatic doors opening and closing, footsteps accumulating until the entire university sounded like something enormous shifting in its sleep.
There were other noises, too, ones Rin had learned to distinguish without consciously trying. The faint mechanical hum of the scent neutralizing systems installed throughout the main academic buildings. The occasional announcement reminding students that certain medical accommodations were available through the health centre. The discreet little signs outside designated rooms where students dealing with an Omega cycle, an Alpha rut, or a particularly unstable pheromone response could sit without worrying about filling an ordinary classroom with enough scent to distract half a lecture hall. Nobody treated those things as unusual. An Omega missing a morning seminar because of a cycle was no more shocking than someone missing it because of a fever, and the university had long ago learned that pretending secondary genders did not exist was far less practical than simply building around them.
Rin hated it.
Not the university itself. He would have considered that an unnecessarily dramatic conclusion. The university was fine. More than fine, in some respects. The football facilities were excellent, the training staff were competent, the medical department had equipment better than some professional clubs he had visited, the library was quiet enough when he needed somewhere to work, and most of the professors had the decency not to waste everyone’s time pretending attendance mattered more than actually understanding the material. The International Elite Football & Performance Program alone had attracted enough high level players from different countries to make the athletics section of campus feel more like a professional training centre than a university facility.
The problem was everything surrounding those things…
The noise. The crowds. The casual touching. The students who stopped in the middle of walkways as though the rest of the world had agreed to wait for them. The groups that gathered around tables and laughed loudly enough for people on the opposite side of the courtyard to hear. The occasional Alpha whose pheromones had clearly escaped whatever suppressant or blocker they were supposed to be using, leaving a faint pressure in the air that made Rin instinctively hold his breath before he remembered that there was nothing to react to. The Omega students who complained about the same thing. The Betas who made jokes about being grateful they could go through an entire semester without having to think about scent management at all.
People were always talking about something.
People were always touching someone.
People were always somewhere they did not need to be.
Rin preferred places where people had somewhere to be.
At seven forty-three, he stepped out of the convenience store with a paper bag tucked beneath one arm and his phone in his hand, already regretting having stopped at all.
His breakfast was inside the bag.
Technically.
There was a rice ball, a bottle of water, a small container of yoghurt and a protein bar he had bought because one of his teammates had spent the previous afternoon lecturing him about eating properly. Rin had no intention of eating the protein bar. It was dry, overly sweet and tasted like someone had compressed cardboard into the shape of food, but buying it had been easier than arguing.
The cashier had asked if he wanted the rice ball warmed.
Rin had said no.
The cashier had asked whether he needed a bag.
Rin had stared at him.
The cashier had understood.
That was one of the reasons Rin liked convenience stores.
His phone vibrated.
He glanced down.
Isagi: You coming to the lecture?
Rin stared at the message for a moment before typing.
Rin: Obviously.
Three dots appeared almost immediately.
Isagi: You say that like you weren’t late three times last week.
Rin stopped walking.
He looked at the screen with an expression of such profound irritation that a passing student glanced at him, noticed the look, and immediately looked away.
Rin: I wasn’t late.
The reply came before he could put his phone away.
Isagi: You walked in 27 minutes after it started.
Rin: The professor hadn’t started the important part.
Isagi: That’s not what late means.
Rin locked his phone.
He could already hear Isagi continuing the argument in his head, which was reason enough not to answer.
He started walking again.
The campus stretched ahead of him beneath the pale morning sky, broad and immaculate in the way only a university with an obscene amount of funding could manage. The oldest buildings were dark stone softened by years of weather, their windows tall and narrow, ivy creeping along sections of the outer walls where the administration had apparently decided that nature was decorative enough to be tolerated. The newer research and athletics complexes were the opposite -glass, steel and concrete, sharp-edged and bright, connected by covered walkways that kept students moving between buildings when the weather turned bad.
The football institute occupied an entire section of the eastern campus.
Three outdoor pitches sat beyond the main stadium, their grass maintained so carefully that Rin sometimes wondered whether the groundskeepers slept beside them. There was an indoor training hall large enough to host full tactical sessions without anyone having to worry about weather, a performance centre attached to the medical wing, rehabilitation pools, strength facilities, nutrition labs, biomechanics rooms, analysis suites and offices where sports scientists tracked everything from sprint mechanics to recovery patterns. There were even dedicated rooms for psychological performance work, although Rin had never had much interest in those.
It was excessive.
Rin liked it.
He had been recruited partly because of football and partly because the university had enough resources to support players who wanted an actual degree alongside elite competition. It meant there were students here who had come from entirely different worlds- international players, domestic prospects, scholarship athletes, ordinary students who had never touched a football outside of a compulsory school class,and somehow all of them were expected to share the same campus.
Rin’s name travelled faster than he did.
He noticed it sometimes.
A first year staring a second too long before whispering to a friend.
Someone in the athletics building saying his name while discussing a match.
A student recognizing him from a broadcast and then immediately pretending they hadn’t.
A football player from another faculty approaching him to ask whether he would be starting in the weekend fixture.
Someone else calling him arrogant.
Someone else calling him a genius.
Someone else calling him an alpha asshole.
Rin considered all three descriptions equally unimportant.
He crossed the courtyard without slowing, slipping around a cluster of first-years who had apparently decided the middle of the walkway was an appropriate place to hold a reunion. Someone called his name from behind.
“Rin!”
He kept walking.
“Rin, seriously.”
The footsteps caught up.
Niko fell into step beside him, adjusting the strap of his bag. His expression suggested that he had already accepted the fact that Rin would make this more difficult than necessary.
“You could at least acknowledge people when they talk to you.”
“I heard you.”
“That isn’t the same thing.”
“It is when I don’t want to talk.”
Niko gave him a flat look. “You know, sometimes I wonder why I bother.”
“Then stop.”
“I can’t.”
“Sounds like your problem.”
Niko laughed quietly.
Rin glanced at him despite himself.
That was the thing about people, apparently. Some of them simply continued appearing.
Niko was one of those people.
He wasn’t Rin’s best friend. Rin wasn’t even sure he would call Niko a close friend. They knew each other well enough to walk together, argue about football, exchange assignment information and occasionally eat at the same table without either of them finding it strange. Niko sometimes sent him messages about deadlines Rin had forgotten existed. Rin sometimes answered. Sometimes he didn’t. Neither of them seemed offended by the arrangement.
It was comfortable precisely because neither of them demanded anything from it.
“You’ve got training at four, right?” Niko asked.
“Five.”
“Coach moved it?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why did I hear you tell Karasu four yesterday?”
“Because Karasu wasn’t listening.”
Niko’s mouth twitched.
“Fair.”
They reached the faculty building. The doors opened automatically as they approached, releasing a wave of warm air that smelled faintly of coffee, paper and whatever cleaning product the university used on the polished floors.
Rin’s shoulders loosened by a fraction.
Inside was quieter.
Not quiet, exactly. Students talked in low voices near the stairwell, printers hummed somewhere behind the administrative offices, and a professor passed them carrying enough books to qualify as a structural hazard. But the noise had walls around it here. It stayed where it belonged.
A Beta student hurried past them with a coffee balanced dangerously in one hand, muttering about an assignment.
Two Omega students stood near a noticeboard reading the university’s updated cycle-accommodation schedule.
Someone farther down the hall complained to his friend that the scent-neutral room on the third floor was always occupied.
Nobody seemed particularly interested in any of it.
It was simply part of university life.
Niko checked the time.
“We have six minutes.”
“I know.”
“You’re not going to eat?”
Rin looked at the paper bag.
“I will.”
“When?”
“Later.”
“That means no.”
“It means later.”
“You’ve been saying that for three days.”
Rin stopped outside the lecture room and looked at him.
Niko raised both hands. “Okay. Fine. I’m done.”
“Good.”
“You’re impossible.”
“So you’ve said.”
Rin pushed open the door.
The lecture hall was already half full.
He took his usual seat near the side rather than the front, dropped his bag beside his foot and pulled out his notebook. His phone went face-down on the desk.
The paper bag remained unopened.
For the next ninety minutes, he managed to forget about it.
That was easier when he had something worth concentrating on.
Rin liked information when it was presented properly. He liked systems, patterns, things that could be broken apart and understood. He liked knowing what something was supposed to do and why it worked when it did. He was not one of those students who excelled simply because he was intelligent enough to memorize everything put in front of him. Give him a subject he had no interest in and his attention could disappear with impressive speed.
But give him something involving strategy, spatial reasoning, performance analysis or the mechanics behind a successful system, and he became difficult to beat.
Football was the obvious example.
The professor displayed a tactical model on the screen.
Rin’s eyes followed the movement almost automatically.
A defensive line shifted.
One player stepped forward.
Another hesitated.
A gap opened.
The professor asked the class what would happen if the attacking side recognized the opening two seconds earlier.
Several hands went up.
Rin didn’t raise his.
He already knew.
The answer was written across the diagram.
When the professor called on him anyway, Rin answered in three sentences.
The professor nodded, added one detail to the explanation and moved on.
Niko, seated two rows behind him, later leaned forward just enough to murmur, “Show off.”
Rin didn’t turn around.
“Learn faster.”
Niko snorted.
Rin returned to his notes.
Human beings were considerably less cooperative than systems.
They changed their minds. Contradicted themselves. Lied. Misunderstood one another. Expected everyone else to somehow recognize what they meant without being told. They could stand directly in front of an obvious opening and still fail to see it.
Football was simpler.
Not easy.
Never easy.
But simple.
A player moved. The field changed. Space opened or disappeared. Someone hesitated. Someone committed. Someone saw something too late. The difference between winning and losing could be less than a second.
Rin understood that language.
When the professor dismissed them, the room broke apart almost instantly. Chairs scraped against the floor. Conversations rose. Bags zipped. Students crowded toward the doors.
Rin closed his notebook and finally reached for the paper bag.
His phone buzzed.
This time, it was his mother.
He stared at the name.
For several seconds, he didn’t move.
Then he answered.
“Hello.”
“Rin?”
Her voice was warm in the careful way his parents’ voices often were, as if warmth had to be consciously placed there.
“Yeah.”
“Are you between classes?”
“Just finished.”
There was a brief pause, followed by the faint sound of paper moving on her end.
“Your medication arrived.”
Rin glanced toward the windows.
Outside, students were crossing the courtyard beneath the weak morning sun. A group of Alphas were arguing about a match near the fountain while a Beta student sat on the edge of the planter beside them, looking thoroughly unimpressed by the entire conversation.
“Okay.”
“I left the instructions in the package. Make sure you follow them exactly.”
“I know.”
“And check that you still have enough blockers.”
Rin’s jaw tightened.
“I do.”
“Good.”
Another pause.
“How is football?”
“Fine.”
“Are you still in the starting rotation?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good.”
Rin said nothing.
His mother seemed to accept the silence.
“Your appointment is still scheduled for next week,” she said after a moment. “Don’t forget it.”
“I won’t.”
“And, Rin?”
He waited.
“Make sure you tell the doctor if anything feels different after starting the new medication.”
His fingers tightened slightly around the phone.
“It won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know my body.”
There was a small silence.
His mother exhaled softly.
“I’m only telling you to be careful.”
“I know.”
“And your brother?”
Rin looked away from the window.
There it was.
There was always a way for the conversation to become about Sae.
“He’s fine.”
“Have you spoken to him?”
“No.”
His mother didn’t answer immediately.
Rin could almost hear her deciding whether to say something.
“Rin-”
“I have to go.”
“Rin.”
“I have training.”
A pause.
“Alright.”
He waited for her to say something else.
She didn’t.
“I’ll call later,” he said.
It was a lie.
They both knew it.
His mother said goodbye anyway.
Rin ended the call.
His throat tightened.
He hated conversations like this.
Not because his mother was shouting. She almost never shouted. Not because she was cruel. She wasn’t, not in the obvious ways. That would have been easier, in some respects. Cruelty could be fought. Anger could be returned. There was something far more difficult about being spoken to gently while feeling like the person talking to you was standing several rooms away.
His mother had always been careful with certain words.
Careful with his medication.
Careful with his blockers.
Careful with the idea that his secondary gender was something that needed to be managed properly.
When Rin had first presented at fifteen, his parents had made the entire process feel frighteningly simple. He was an Alpha. His pheromones were strong. Stronger than average, they had told him. He needed to regulate them. He needed to be responsible. He needed to make sure other people weren’t affected.
There had been no reason for him to question it.
Why would he?
His records said Alpha.
His doctor said Alpha.
His parents said Alpha.
Every prescription placed in his hands was explained as something an Alpha like him needed.
The only thing Rin had ever understood was that failure was unacceptable.
His mother said his name again.
Rin blinked.
“I’ll call later,” he said.
It was a lie.
They both knew it.
His mother said goodbye anyway.
Rin ended the call.
For a moment, he remained completely still.
The noise around him slowly returned.
A chair scraped.
Someone laughed.
A door shut.
A student nearby complained about an upcoming presentation.
Rin shoved his phone into his pocket and picked up his bag.
“Everything okay?”
He looked up.
Isagi stood near the door, watching him.
Rin’s expression closed automatically.
“Fine.”
Isagi studied him for a second longer, then nodded.
“Okay.”
That was all.
No interrogation. No pointless concern disguised as curiosity. No Are you sure? No attempt to pry the answer out of him.
Rin appreciated it more than he would ever admit.
They left together.
By noon, the campus had become louder again.
The dining hall was packed enough that the doors seemed to breathe people in and out. Trays clattered against counters. Someone had spilled a drink near one of the entrances and three students were carefully stepping around it while a staff member fetched a warning sign. Conversations overlapped until individual voices became difficult to separate.
Rin hated it.
He went outside.
There was a large seating area beneath an overhang near the athletic buildings, partially sheltered from the wind and far enough from the dining hall that the noise softened into background static. There were tables everywhere. Some were occupied by football players, some by students from medicine, engineering, business, literature. International students mixed with Japanese students. Alphas, Betas and Omegas sat together without anyone thinking it noteworthy, though the university’s scent neutralizing system worked harder here during lunch because of the sheer number of people gathered in one place.
Rin took an empty chair at one of the larger tables.
He didn’t choose it because he belonged there.
He chose it because there was an empty seat.
Niko joined him ten minutes later.
Isagi arrived after that.
Bachira came last, carrying a drink he had somehow acquired from another building and enough energy to compensate for everyone else at the table combined.
He dropped into the empty chair beside Rin.
“I’m starving.”
“You always say that.”
“Because I’m always hungry.”
Bachira immediately reached toward Rin’s plate.
Rin slapped his hand away.
“Don’t.”
“Awwwee , You weren’t eating it!!”
“I was.”
“You were staring at it.”
“I was eating it mentally.”
Bachira laughed.
Niko nearly choked on his drink.
Isagi covered his mouth, shoulders shaking.
Rin stared at all three of them with complete contempt.
“This is why I don’t eat with people.”
“You say that every time,” Isagi said.
“And yet you keep coming.”
“Because you’re bad at getting rid of us.”
Rin opened his mouth, then stopped.
He hated when Isagi did that.
Not the words themselves.
The casual certainty behind them.
As though their presence in his life had become something settled, something ordinary.
Rin looked down at his plate instead.
Around him, conversations continued without him needing to participate in all of them. Karasu was arguing with someone at the next table about a tactical decision from yesterday’s training. Chigiri passed by with two students from another faculty and paused long enough to say something sarcastic about Rin’s expression before continuing. A group of first years were discussing an upcoming match. Someone across the courtyard was complaining that an Alpha on their floor kept forgetting to use the scent-neutralizing spray in the shared kitchen.
Rin listened without listening.
That was usually how his social life worked.
People knew him.
People spoke to him.
Sometimes he joined them.
Sometimes they joined him.
Sometimes he would sit at a table with ten people and spend twenty minutes talking about football, assignments, food, some ridiculous professor, or absolutely nothing, and then stand up afterward and walk home alone without feeling as though anything had been missing.
There were people he liked.
There were people he disliked.
There were people who liked him.
There were people who thought he was arrogant, unpleasant, too competitive, too cold, too convinced that he was better than everyone else.
Some of them were probably right.
Some of them weren’t.
It didn’t matter much.
Rin had never been interested in collecting people.
Across the courtyard, a group of visiting players emerged from the International Athletics Centre.
Rin barely paid attention at first.
Then he saw lavender hair.
He knew who it was.
Everyone did.
Bunny Iglesias had been at the university often enough over the last several months that his presence no longer caused the same stir it had initially. He was one of those players whose name travelled ahead of him: FC Barcha, Spain, New Generation World XI, international competitions, elite forward. There was always another fact attached to him, another article someone had read, another story about a match.
And then there was Sae.
That connection followed him too.
Bunny was one of Sae’s longest standing rivals, which meant Rin had heard his name long before he had ever seen him in person.
Rin had never cared enough to form an opinion.
Bunny is just an Enigma
Bunny IS Bunny Iglesias.
Another elite player.
Another person people talked about too much.
Another name attached to Sae.
Rin looked away.
He didn’t notice that Bunny, walking several metres behind the others, had looked toward him.
Bunny had noticed Rin before.
Not properly. Not in the way people noticed someone they knew. More like the way you noticed a particular movement on a football pitch without consciously deciding to look for it.
Rin had a tendency to draw the eye when he played.
There was something severe about him, something almost physically concentrated in the way he moved. He never seemed to waste motion. Even his anger had direction.
Bunny had watched him from a distance several times.
He had also heard the comparisons.
Everyone compared Rin and Sae.
It was inevitable.
..The face. The football. The talent. The family name.
Bunny had known Sae long enough to understand why people made the comparison.
He had also watched Rin long enough to know it wasn’t quite right.
There was something different there.
He couldn’t have named it yet.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to.
A staff member beside Bunny said something about the next training block.
Bunny smiled faintly and turned his attention back to the conversation.
Rin never noticed.
By five in the afternoon, Rin was exhausted.
Training had gone badly.
Not disastrously. There had been no injury, no argument large enough to attract staff, no tactical failure worth discussing afterward. But he had been impatient, and impatience made him sloppy.
He missed a pass he should have read.
Lost possession once.
Took a shot too early twice.
Snapped at Karasu when Karasu pointed out a positional error.
The coach had stopped the drill and looked directly at him.
“Again.”
Rin reset.
The next sequence was better.
The one after that was almost perfect.
That was the frustrating part.
Rin wasn’t struggling because he couldn’t do it.
He was struggling because he knew exactly what he was capable of and could feel himself falling short of it.
The coaches knew it too.
They didn’t treat him like an ordinary player. Nobody in the performance program did. Rin was one of the university’s most dangerous attacking players, one of the names people expected to see when the strongest lineups were announced. His ability wasn’t a campus rumour. It was measurable. His match data was excellent. His tactical awareness was exceptional. His ability to read space and turn a tiny mistake into an opportunity had made professional scouts pay attention long before university.
That also meant mistakes followed him more closely.
A mediocre performance from someone else was a mediocre performance.
A mediocre performance from Rin became a conversation.
He hated that.
The final whistle sounded.
Rin walked off the pitch with his hair damp against his forehead and his shirt sticking uncomfortably to his back. The evening air felt colder than it had that morning. His body ached in the familiar, manageable way it always did after training, and he welcomed that pain because it was honest.
Muscles hurt for reasons he understood.
His phone contained fourteen notifications.
He ignored twelve.
One was from Niko about an assignment.
The other was from his mother.
Don’t forget the medication.
Rin stared at it.
He typed:
I won’t.
Then he put the phone away.
He showered, changed and left the athletics centre after most of the team had already gone.
The campus was quieter now.
The sun had disappeared behind the buildings, leaving the sky a darkening blue. Lights had come on along the paths. Students drifted toward dormitories, apartments and the train station, their voices softer than they had been earlier.
An Alpha student stood outside one of the residence buildings arguing with a friend about a missed cycle suppressant refill. Two Beta students walked past carrying takeout. Somewhere farther down the road, someone laughed so loudly that Rin could hear it through the trees.
The university was still alive.
Just less loudly.
Rin could have taken the direct route home.
He didn’t.
He turned down a narrower street instead.
He wasn’t in a hurry.
For once, there was nowhere he needed to be.
His apartment was only fifteen minutes away.
He walked with his hands in his pockets, shoulders slightly hunched against the cold, listening to the muted rhythm of traffic beyond the trees.
His phone buzzed.
He didn’t check it.
It buzzed again.
He sighed and pulled it out.
A message from Isagi.
Don’t forget we’re meeting before class tomorrow.
Rin typed:
I won’t.
Another message arrived.
You sure?
Rin stared at it.
Then:
Yes.
He locked the phone.
For several seconds, he simply walked.
There was nothing remarkable about the evening.
That was what he liked about it.
No shouting.
No training.
No professor asking questions.
No teammates.
No family.
No comparisons.
Just the cold air against his face and the sound of his own footsteps against the pavement.
He passed a small bakery closing for the night. A couple stood outside the convenience store arguing quietly over what to buy for dinner. A student in a university jacket hurried past him with a helmet under one arm. Somewhere above the buildings, an apartment window opened, and the faint scent of someone’s dinner drifted into the cold before disappearing again.
Rin breathed in.
Then out.
His apartment waited ahead.
There were people in his life.
He knew that.
People who would notice if he disappeared from class for a day. People who would complain if he played badly. People who would send him assignments, steal his food, argue with him about football, call his name across a courtyard, ask whether he was coming to lunch.
He wasn’t alone.
Not really.
But loneliness wasn’t always the same thing as being alone.
Sometimes it was simply the quiet realization that there were parts of yourself nobody else had ever been close enough to see.
Rin didn’t dwell on that thought.
He wasn’t good at dwelling.
He preferred facts.
Tomorrow would be another day.
Another lecture.
Another training session.
Another collection of things he already knew how to handle.
He adjusted the strap of his bag and kept walking beneath the streetlights, carrying a life that looked perfectly ordinary from the outside.
He did not know that there were parts of that life he had never been given the chance to understand.