Chapter Text
When Rika died, it was all consuming.
Yuuta’s world crumpled like bone before the unforgiving yield of a bumper, shattered into broken glass on asphalt, grainy and coarse beneath the soles of his light-up tennis shoes. It was the crunch of gravel and metal beneath his feet that sent bile into his mouth. The smell of engine oil and smoking tar that poured his lunch onto the concrete.
His future was rendered into thick streaks of blood on the road, slowly trickling into the storm drains, disappearing down the pipes to mix with the waste beneath the streets.
“It’s a promise.” She had told him all those months ago, twining their pinkies together in the sandbox. The ring was four sizes too big, but so was his smile. There was no doubt between them that he would grow into it.
Sand still dusted his fingers, hung limp at his sides.
Neither of them had presented yet, but Yuuta knew deep in his heart that Rika would have been his alpha.
A stretcher careened through the streets, corralled by urgent shouts and commands he couldn’t discern, but it couldn’t be for her. There was nothing of Rika to put on it. Nothing more than a still, manicured hand a hair’s breadths out of reach. Lifeless, but still beckoning for his fingertips. A pair of thin legs scraped raw and red, still draped in a ruined navy skirt.
It had been only hours earlier when she was playfully nipping at the nape of his neck on the playground. The blunt point of milk teeth. He could still feel the phantom scrape of her tiny canines grazing over his underdeveloped scent glands as she enveloped him in her arms, her scent like fresh camellias warmed by the sun, sating his ever present nerves as he melted into her side like honey into tea.
But as he stared off somewhere beyond the wreckage. those same manicured fingers that had once caressed his hair, his face, his hands, latched onto his ankles. Wretched, ruined nails dug into the grey wool of his socks.
When Rika died, it tore a hole through his heart.
When she turned into a curse, he died with her.
The gentle touch that he once preened under turned hard and unyielding. It corroded his skin, raising goosebumps in the smoldering heat of the sun as it set too slowly behind the staggered skyline.
In his dreams he could still see her, silky chestnut hair brushed free of tangles, pale skin yet unmarred by asphalt. No ugly grime mixing between her red, ruddy guts crushed like worms into the ground.
He could feel her hands as they cupped around his face, palms innocently soft and warm against his cheeks. She was always so gentle with him. Her nails were always filed, blunted into neat white crescents that danced along his skin, tickling, but never hurting. Never a warning bite or bruise when he threw a fit or huffed in foolish, childish pettiness. So Yuuta didn’t know to flinch when her fingers twisted, bones breaking as her cuticles split around long, sharp talons that pricked his skin. He could only watch, impassive, as the seams of her face ripped apart to reveal smooth white flesh bubbling beneath layers of fat and muscle. Blubbery and cool to the touch.
Yuuta wasn’t afraid. Not when the sickle sharp claws wrapped around his arms, almost gently but never as gentle as they were in life. Not when needle sharp teeth closed around his nape in a wretched facsimile of a mating bite, cutting silkily through tendon and bone. Yuuta. Yuuta. She warbled, and Yuuta could never learn to hate her even as iron flooded his mouth, hot blood cauterizing his throat as her teeth stuck in his neck. This was still his Rika.
His first love.
His mate.
His alpha that he’d loved for so long.
Rika lashed out at other alphas when they approached him, overbearing and possessive of what was hers. But it was because she was protecting him, he told himself. And Yuuta was still hers. He would always be hers. She was his alpha. His soulmate. His other half.
When Yuuta presented as an omega, he hardly noticed.