Chapter Text
The club was excruciatingly loud, and Rin wanted to get out as soon as possible. Crowds made him nervous, and he couldn't focus enough to keep an eye on every gyrating body. An enthusiastic DJ kept turning up the bass to the point where the windows were rattling.
He ran a hand through his hair, bringing at least an hour of hard work by a very dedicated butler to ruin. This was the first time he’d been in the human world by himself since he was an actual resident of Assiah, and excitement was draining out of him faster than he could order drinks. If he was old enough to order drinks, that is.
Truthfully, he probably wasn’t really alone - some overzealous lackey of his father’s was probably masquerading as a drunk teenager, grinding against an unsuspecting human. He scanned the crowd lazily. There really were too many demons here already; he wouldn't be able to find someone if he tried, even if it was someone he recognized. Rin fidgeted on the bar stool and turned his back to the mob of dancers.
According to the extensive briefing he’d reluctantly attended (and fallen asleep during), he was simply supposed to start with spreading minor demonic activity without alerting any exorcists of his presence. Under no circumstances should he be seen and recognized as Rin Okumura. In Rin’s opinion, it was a stupid and ultimately useless plan. Gehenna probably just wanted him out of its hair. Quasi-poltergeist attacks weren't going to be the catalyst that brought down True Cross. However, it gave him free reign in Assiah for extended periods of time, and Rin wasn’t going to protest against that.
The real problem would be finding something to do. Every place he had been already had its fair share of resident curses and minor demons. Rin also had found he made a terrible demon. That afternoon he had shown his tail to a kid in a park in hope of scaring him and maybe starting some rumors, but the boy had ended up being delighted. Rin had eventually forgotten his original purpose in the park and the boy and him had played a game of tag for almost an hour.
In any case, low-level demonic activity seemed too pointless, but even the most mundane mind-level stuff would have exorcists on his trail within a week, depending on how busy/competent the local True Cross chapter was. Considering this was Tokyo, Rin didn't want to risk it. He really didn’t want to be constantly on the run.
Rin glanced at the bar and, with a whispered spell, turned all the beer into barrels of black sludge. It wasn’t toxic, just smelly and disgusting, but Rin almost doubted that anyone here would notice a difference. However, black sludge was pretty much classic demon chic, and if any exorcists were around they’d certainly be alerted to something in the area. Time to leave, then. Even if it wasn't an exorcist suspecting him, local demons may not appreciate him encroaching on their turf and getting them exorcised. Being the son of Satan wouldn’t really earn him any brownie points here in Assiah; demons weren’t really known for being particularly law-abiding.
The outside air was bitterly cold, and Rin almost immediately found himself regretting leaving the relative comfort of the club. In hindsight, he really should have brought a scarf with him, or in the very least, a coat. All he had brought with him to Assiah were the clothes on his back and his sword. His boots left faint tracks as he dragged his feet in the snow that lightly dusted the sidewalk.
One of his brothers had provided him with an apartment somewhere in Shibuya, no doubt as a terrible prank. How he had managed to procure it was beyond Rin, and he didn’t care; there had to be two dozen nightclubs just in the few blocks between his apartment and the nearest convenience store. The noise was unbearable, and the demon to human ratio was less Assiah than Gehenna.
Someone screamed, and Rin started running towards the sound before he had time to think.
The source of the scream turned out to be a girl huddling against a wall in an alleyway between two, whad’ya know, particularly shady nightclubs. A group of three or four burly low-level yakuza types surrounded her.
"Hey!" Rin shouted. It was time to improvise. He waved his arms around wildly. "Over here!"
The thugs turned on him. “Who’s this kid?” one of them asked with a sleazy grin.
Rin took the opportunity to punch him in the jaw. The guy hit the ground with a resounding thud. Rin could hear the poor sucker’s head hit the paving stones.
Rin flexed out his hand experimentally. It had been a long time since he’d used anything but a sword in combat.
Recovering from their shock, the remaining three thugs charged at him, fists swinging. Rin ducked down, missing the majority of their wild hits. Someone grabbed the back of his shirt and hauled him up. Rin was shoved against a wall, bricks scraping roughly into his back.
He swore. Humans shouldn’t get the better of him for even an instant. His sword was in a cloth case swung around his back - not something easily accessible when you’re pinned against a wall. It wasn’t Kurikara, that sword was long gone, probably destroyed, but it was better than nothing.
Rin kicked and twisted out of the thugs' grip and rounded on them, somewhat unsteadily, only to be punched directly in the nose. He fell down, bouncing slightly off the pavement. Someone kicked him and laughed. Four against one had been a bad idea. He pulled the sword case over his head and off his back and lashed out, not bothering to take the sword out.
Apparently none of them had noticed he was carrying a weapon. Their surprise gave Rin the time he needed, and he heaved himself back upright, using his sword as support. He could feel his nose healing already, but blood was still trickling down from a cut in his forehead.
Rin smiled and looked at the group of thugs. “What do you guys think you’re doing, ganging up on a girl like that?” He flexed lazily and wiped the blood away from his eyes. One of the things he had learned over the years is that intimidation is key; if you act like you don’t care, people will assume it’s because you don’t have to.
He slid the sword out of the cloth casing and unsheathed it. Sumimata was no where near as impressive looking as Kurikara, but it was formidable in its own right. The blade itself was as black as spilled ink, but something unworldly and sepulchral seemed to be reflected in it. Rin gripped the hilt with two hands and assumed a fighting stance; feet solid, legs spread, knees bent. His tail had slipped out his pants sometime in the fight, and it whipped wildly around his legs.
The thugs looked confused. Rin didn't blame them.
He growled, and flame erupted from his body, cloaking in him in a haze of blue fire and licking down Sumimata's blade. The thugs leapt away from him, all hesitation gone in the overruling human instinct to get away from fire as fast as possible.
"Holy shit, it’s a demon!"
"Get away, fuck - we’re gonna -"
They scrambled out of the alley, tripping over the unconscious body of the one guy Rin had managed to knock out.
Rin extinguished the flames and fell back against the wall as soon as they were out of his sight. His head was pounding. He was glad they ran away without him actually having to fight. Fists were one thing, but his sword could hack through some thugs in a second, and his flames...well, they’d turn those guys into nothing. Even low-lifes like them deserved better than that. Rin focused on re-tucking his tail into his pants.
Their victim was picking herself up too. She didn’t take her eyes off him as she backed away, tottering awkwardly in broken heels.
Rin tried to smile at her. It probably turned out a little insane looking.
"D-dee-," she stuttered, pointing at him with a shaking finger. "Demon! You’re a demon!" She fumbled with her necklace, holding it out like a shield. Rin squinted at it. Dried blood was caking around his eyes, gluing them shut. It looked suspiciously like a crucifix.
Rin held up hands in surrender. “Hey, I just wanted to get those punks off you, okay?” He backed down the alley, only turning when he was close to the main sidewalk. “Sorry.” The girl’s shaking was turning into uncontrollable tremors that wracked her whole body. Her face was a mess of dried tears and runny mascara.
He began trying to peel the drying blood of his face as he walked, impatiently unsticking his eyelids from the gooey mess before giving up and shoving his hands deep in his pockets. This had turned into an altogether shitty day. Despite his father constantly pounding it into his head, Rin hadn’t ever truly been able to believe how reviled he would be in Assiah. What a joke.
He untucked his tail as he stepped into his apartment’s elevator. Screw those old demon geezers who lectured him about keeping the thing to himself; now that he was in Assiah, he’d do whatever he wanted. He’d read the latest issue of JUMP and then sleep for three days, who cared?
Rin’s nose and cuts had completely healed by the time he’d reached his floor. Maybe he’d take a long shower, though scrubbing off all the dried blood would be difficult and would probably be more pain than he was willing to deal with now. The back of his T-shirt was sticking to him too - evidently he had been pushed around harder than he thought. He searched for his key as he weighed the consequences of just going to sleep with blood all over him versus staying awake for another hour or so.
"How are we supposed to find a ghost if it won’t come out?" someone said, from inside his apartment. Rin froze.
"Shouldn’t we just wait here?"
"All night?"
Rin unsheathed Sumimata and held it, one-handed, by his side. Had the Order caught up with him already? That had to be impossible, he had only just gotten here. He slowly unlocked the door and turned the handle. Inside, a group of five or so kids were milling around, sitting on boxes of his unpacked stuff.
"Sensei wouldn’t send us on an impossible mission. There has to be ways to get ghosts to appear,” a bald kid with overlarge glasses said. “This is probably a test of something we learned in class.”
“I think I would remember something as important as that,” said another boy, this one with a mass of impeccably groomed hair that made him look like a chicken.
None of them had noticed him yet, which made Rin think the ghost they were talking about could be behind one of them and they still wouldn't see it. If they were exorcists, they were terrible ones. He carefully nudged the door shut with one foot.
Rin’s phone rang. All five of the intruders looked in his direction, weapons drawn. Rin stared back at them. His phone continued to ring.
“This isn’t the ghost, is it?” one of them asked.
“Ghosts don’t have phones, you idiot,” chicken-hair replied. He folded his hands together, and Rin could see a rosary entangled in his fingers. Almost definitely exorcists - Japanese Christians weren’t terribly infamous for breaking and entering.
Rin, not taking his eyes of them, rummaged around his pocket for his phone. Upon finding it, he flipped it open with one hand and put it to his ear. “What?” he rasped. There was a very small group of people who had his number, even smaller were the people who would bother to call him.
“Get out of there, Okumura,” the voice on the telephone said. Rin vaguely recognized it as one of the many nameless operators and menservants that went in and out of his life on a daily basis. “I don’t know what the fuck you did to be caught this quickly, but exorcists are on your ass already.”
Rin balanced the cell against his shoulder and gripped his sword with two hands, leveling it at the exorcists. “Yeah, I sorta got that.”
“What?” the demon screamed. Rin winced. The exorcists were staring at him, especially at his sword, but didn’t look like they were about to attack any time soon. Maybe they thought it would be rude to kill someone while they were on the phone.
“They’re standing in my apartment,” Rin clarified. “With me. Right now.”
The demon screeched and hung up. So much for that then. Rin let the phone drop to the floor, turning his attention back to the exorcists.
“Who are you?” he demanded. If they already knew who he was, and Rin couldn't think why they'd be in his apartment if they didn't, then this trip to Assiah had been completely pointless, and he probably could get away with killing them. However, he didn’t really want to. If they were just going to drag him in from of the Grigori, he’d probably let them until he found a better opportunity to escape. If he made a decisive move here, in this cramped apartment, he may end up destroying the city and most definitely end up seriously injuring one of these kids.
“Who are you?” chicken-hair asked, pointing an accusing finger at him.
Rin lowered his sword in shock. “Huh?”
A small, blonde girl pushed chicken-hair gently aside, fumbling with a bag hanging at her side. “My name is Shiemi Moriyama, and we’re ExWires, in training at True Cross Academy.” She pulled a badge out of her bag and held it out towards him. Rin noticed she was still about an arm’s length away from the point of Sumimata, but she smiled at him brightly. He lowered the sword even more and took the badge, pretending to examine it as she talked.
“The True Cross Order received a call a few weeks ago saying that this apartment was being haunted by some kind of ghost,” Moriyama said. “And we were sent out to get rid of it.”
Glasses-kid said, “We were told that no one lived here.” He squinted at Rin. “Or had for awhile. The tenant moved out shortly after he called us.”
Shit, Rin thought. He knew the apartment had been too good to true. He would kill whichever of his brothers had pulled this. That is, if he survived this.
Wait, screw that; if he was killed by exorcists, he’d stay here as a ghost, with his last wish being to enact revenge on the brother that told him to stay at this specific apartment, knowing that it had been reported as haunted and not even bothering to legally obtain it. Perhaps the brother had even set up the haunting; it would be child’s play for one of the Eight Kings to order a subordinate to haunt some apartment for a week.
“I just got here,” Rin muttered. He handed Moriyama’s badge back. It had looked legitimate enough. He cleared his voice and spoke up. “There aren’t any ghosts that I’m aware of.”
Moriyama looked back at the group of her fellow ExWires. “Are you sure?” she asked. “We hate to bother you, but couldn’t we stay here just one night?”
A boy with pink hair and a monk's staff laughed nervously. “Sensei will kill us if we just come back without having done anything. C'mon, please?"
Rin thought about this. He really, really did not want a bunch of young exorcists at his apartment (even if it wasn’t really his, apparently). But they really didn’t appear as if they knew who he was, and if he got rid of them and their teacher came back later, he’d probably have to deal with a much more skillful exorcist, and increase the risk of being recognized. Also, if he kicked them out, he wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on them.
Rin sighed and sheathed his sword. The group of ExWires visibly relaxed. “Just one night,” he warned. He’d just have to stay up all night to watch them, and then he could relocate to somewhere safer in the morning. "And I'm not going to feed you." He bent down to pick up his phone.
The chicken and pink-haired boys were on the second he leaned down, pinning his arms against his back and wrestling him to the ground. Moriyama threw herself over his legs, thoroughly pinning him down and preventing him from kicking out. Rin swore, straining against the ExWires.
Another girl - one he hadn’t noticed before - ran out from behind one of the boxes, carrying a large pail. Rin struggled harder, and managed to get one hand away from pink-hair just before the girl reached him. She dumped the contents of the pail on him.
Rin screamed. He could feel his skin sizzling and bubbling as the liquid washed over him. Holy water. Those dirty, cheating, lying bastards. He was going to get them for this, he-
Rin passed out, his head hitting the floor with a loud thud. The boys got off him hesitantly, then helped Shiemi up while Konekomaru found some rope to tie the teen up with.
Bon scratched the back of his head. “What the hell d’ya think this guy is?”