In this world there are people who chase monsters, and monsters who hunt people down.
Kento had a good run being the first, or so his father had always told him, he didn’t really know, he hated chasing monsters with all his guts. It was the yapping what he couldn’t stand the most, the way puppies squeaked like rodents when he crashed their skulls with his boots. He was scrawny enough to squeeze inside their burrows with a little of effort, a lanky kid with limbs made of rubber, and that was enough to define him a good hunter.
Daiki, Daiki was a monster. He hunted things like a dog chasing cars, nagging growls and massive jaws, and sharp fangs he used with wanton. Daiki wore his hunger proudly, twisted it around his fingers like some would do with virtues.
They met completely by accident, crossing paths on a regular working day, as much as you can call a job crawling your way inside a werewolf’s nest and crashing the life out its offspring.
Mankind had spent decades thinking they’d picked the short end of the stick, civilizations regressing a century at a day as the virus spread, people growing mad with it, going wild, feral, kin fighting kin. It nested inside the brains, gnawed on the tender tissues there, switched something in the chemicals. By the time the person carried themselves on all four, they were no more. Some could still reverse in between kinds, mostly couldn’t and formed packs instead, chased civilizations at the edge of their territories. Hunted and bred like derailed dogs, mankind evolving on a whole new trajectory.
And there, right at the dawn of the fifth generation, finally a chance. Genetics and sheer karma mixing up again. There were laws of nature for a reason, and even werewolves seemed to have to abide to them. Their pups had to claw their chances through Darwinism one day at a time, as for any other species. They couldn’t turn the same way adults did. They couldn’t turn. And this had made Kento one formidable hunter.
He didn’t think much of the burrow, not at first, though the creature glancing up at him might have something to do about it. The most he could do was grit his teeth, slide a step back when the werewolf hissed from a corner, bared her fangs. She was, well, she seemed human as human can something go. Nimble, dark skinned, a mass of tangled hair sticking out in every direction. She was also naked, not that Kento thought much of it. Those things had made a point of tearing civilizations apart while letting everything hanging out.
She stared up at him, and the surprise in her eyes probably matched Kento’s for a moment there. Her pack had last seen hunting in the valley, burrows were supposed to be empty aside for the pups left behind, this was the whole point of the expedition.
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 with fear and panic and other things he is 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 the side as she mimicked him, and shuffled her feet on damp soil. Her nostrils were flaring wide as she picked on the scents in the air, gunpowder and baits and the other werewolves they’d put down on their way to the burrows, their carcasses lying limp on horseback. Kento hit a wall, the entrance hole so close sunlight pooled at his feet.
They measured each other. Nothing had happened so far but they didn't dare 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.
‘I’m coming down’.
It wasn’t until his father threw the shotgun and started climbing his way down that everything clicked into 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 the devious stuck in her teeth, let out a ragged breath. He heard footfalls, something gripping his arm and pulling, harsh, antsy, but not hard enough to tear. And there was something, something in the way she’d whimpered that prompted Kento into glancing up, the absence of madness and how it had been replaced by something different, stronger, deeper. Human.
She pried his arms open, shoved what she held in the depression 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 instinctively pushed a hand underneath the belly, cupped the hind legs, 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 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, pick on his jeans until threads started to fall apart. The woods would stay awfully quiet, not even a peep echoing from down below, 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 three months already, and his pup was all grown up now, brought Kento prettily wrapped gifts.
He stopped visiting the burrows 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 another dead rabbit shoved down in one of his boots, and he didn’t know what else to do, felt like he had leaped nineteen years back in time and get 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 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 be so 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 on hunting grounds, 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 instead, landed on the couch with a thump.
He made a pitiful dog, Kento realized in 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 looked up at him, tiptoeing on his paws as he cut through the room. Daiki would’ve never torn him out of bitterness alone. 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 talked, carried himself, like a normal person when he needed to, if it wasn’t for how he bounced on the balls of his feet and the way his eyes danced to the beat of something rawer, primal, whenever he was around people. It happened every time they traded with the merchants that trekked the valleys far and wide, visiting each town on a five weeks rotation. Daiki wouldn’t speak at all but tilt his head to the side, measuring the folks they travelled with, and he would 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.
The odds worked to their favor either way, because Kento was quick to pick on those signs, slipped his hand into Daiki’s pocket, and held on to him so he couldn’t lunge forward, all sublime poise and precision. Daiki gripped tightly until bones ground together painfully and Kento dressed a hiss as a laugh, smiled wider at the merchant as he pointed at some curtains with the hand he was not using, now love, where shall we hang them?
And then there were times when the valleys went quiet as packs crossed their borders, nasty howls riding the winds and melting with the shrills of terrified children miles and miles far away, crying from the safety of their homes. 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 slinging open with metal sounds as Daiki paced in the garden in large steps, tiptoeing on his paws. 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, just as the moans, and grunts and whimpers that kept Kento awake as he laid on his 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 spoke something darker and deeper than a need, felt more like a compulsion filling him – them - entirely, like gas would to a room.
So Kento crafted a lifestyle out their odds, slowly and carefully, because that hunger seemed to be bottomless, and it had this way of pulling Daiki, twisting him thoughtless like guitar strings. He enjoyed that, strumming his chords mindlessly, breathy sounds he made low in the throat as he hummed dissonant notes. Kento took his time trying to make sense of it all, the hunger, the wit, and how Daiki would turn large liquid eyes at him sometimes, put away the guitar crawled on his lap and spread naked 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, and pinched his bottom lip, pressed a finger to the nose. The air was thick with smells – dirt and musk and mold growing on the side of the walls – but Daiki’s smell was thicker, and as he’d bent over and nosed Kento, there, right there in the soft depression where shoulder and neck meet, Kento felt something funny fluttering beneath his veins.
‘Hunger’, he replied easily.
Of course, of course.
There was a certain amusement to his voice 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. Daiki’s hand flew to cradle his face and the edge of his smile was razor sharp, baring white canines and all the devious he’d attached to them, and Kento suddenly was afraid of what he could see there, the wit, the tease, and the allure and the pull it all had on him, always had, since the day he’d cupped hind legs with a shaky hand.
‘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 depression on his shoulder like it’d always belonged there, and when Kento wriggled underneath angular hips pining him down, those lips slid over his throat, and teeth sank in the soft under jaw at point pressure. Daiki snapped his fangs at him, but his expression was light and playful, and when he leaned over to kiss him again his tongue was soft, 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 suddenly it felt 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 pooled up in his tummy in slow and wide strokes.
Daiki hunched his back and tucked himself against Kento’s chest, finding a nip and pressing his lips against it. The fabric soaked quickly with spit, and Kento felt the curve of that mouth through the shirt, felt the sharpness of the canines and the most indescribable tease as he pulled away and blew on wet cotton, and it made him flush darker with want. He treaded his fingers through Daiki’s hair and tugged, wished almost 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 glistening wet, he pulled his hand and guided it between his legs.
Daiki growled something low in his throat as he gripped the belt and pulled, tried to unfasten the buckle. ‘Belts, why is it always belts’, he grunted 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 where material went baggier, and Kento bit his tongue with that laughter.
He let out a ragged breath and bucked into Daiki’s hand, pushing his hips into his fist with erratic movements, the friction so crisp and maddening he whined his way into a quick climax. He tugged at him tight and slow, kept him fleeting on orgasm edge until firecrackers popped behind closed eyelids, and Kento finally shuddered limp. Daiki buried his head in the crook of his shoulder as he 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, kissed him again. 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 Kento’s thigh where denim was rough and friction throbbed across his cock in tortous waves, had him whimpering at every sling. His fangs were sharp and stung when he sank them in the shoulder, held Kento in place as he squirmed and writhed his way to release with guttural moans.
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, ungodly mountains high enough to challenge the gods.
Kento wanted to pay his respects, Daiki sniffed at the winds blowing from east and shook his head, hissed at the stench. They stopped two miles away from the town, close enough for Kento to make out the outlines of the walls, and far enough for Daiki to not wince at every sharp intake of air he took.
Kento wrapped his arms around the knees, something stinging at the corner of his eyes as dusk settled in 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 whole journey but came regardless, tagging behind Kento since he’d unburied his backpack from the closet and reinforced with rubber the soles of the only pair of boots he owned.
‘Why you spared me? After you mauled John, I mean’, Kento asked. 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. His brother had just died, and the man still believed he could’ve saved him, if only he had moved five inches down to the left rather than seven to the right.
Roughly two-thousand corpses stood before Kento, and he didn’t know what he should felt guiltier for, if for not having died before them when he was supposed to, or for not feeling sorry at all.
Daiki turned around, perched a brow at the sudden question, tufts of hair swaying in the evening air. It had rained in the morning and the ground was still soaked with it. He’d refused to wear shoes again and tucked his feet in between Kento’s legs for warmth.
He scratched his chin again. ‘It wasn’t enough’, he said after a beat, and patted the pit of his stomach, an almost thoughtful expression framing his eyes 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 and insanity now he could read something different, rawer and scarier, and it must’ve been the death, he tried to rationalize, all those alluring fumes twisting Daiki mindless with need.
The idea was just nonsensical and it made him laugh, loud and harsh to mask his confusion and that shred of, of something twisting his guts all funny. ‘My family spends generations hunting 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 almost 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 grin and cold feet tucked in between gangly legs. Kento remembered rubbing his thighs together for warm, remembered skinny arms looping around his shoulders at night, pulling him closer as he was dozing off. He remembered the damp stench of the burrow too, wide eyes and bunnies shoved down his boots and stray bullets flying past his head, and when Daiki tugged him to his feet and glanced back at the trail opening before them, there he saw it – that line of distinction disappearing, gone devoured way down in the hole.
‘We tried our best not to’.
‘Hmm’, Daiki just hummed, looking in the distance with this sort of vacant stare – boredom, most likely. ‘Let’s go back?’ He asked, and Kento paid one final look at those mighty walls, at the societies that had collapsed within them long before illness had its fair game of chance.
He turned on his heels, and it was almost crazy how light his steps felt like, his shoulders and soul too. ‘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 into Daiki’s pocket for warmth, and threaded their fingers together. Daiki tightened back automatically.
Folks who chased and freaks who hunted. Kento was not a creeper, and he’d done being hunted by his own demons.