Rating (Overall): Mature
Ship: Rin Itoshi x Isagi Yoichi
Characters: Isagi Yoichi, Rin Itoshi, Sae Itoshi, Hugo Vivian, Bunny Iglesias, Michael Kaiser, Alexis Ness (so far)
Excerpt:
Read more: Early Draft: Home | Rin x Isagi (Prologue)“You’re in love,” Bunny says, pulling his cap off and running his fingers through his hair, the scars on his forearms catching the light before his sleeves fall back, “with a boy in Paris who keeps setting a place for you at the table without ever saying sit down.”
Author’s Notes
I started revisiting the outline for this, but this chapter was actually written in August. Rin isn’t even here (so far) but I just wanted to play around with Bunny’s character before I become hostage to a building arc around him. I haven’t been reading the manga recently so I’m not sure if we’re finally exploring this boy and his traumas, but for now, let him be a projection of the things I believe he should embody.
I have a ship poll on my page on which ship I should write for next (like a proper story that’s not a rewrite, so you can go and visit that if you’d like to give your two cents.
BARCELONA | FRIDAY | 00:23
“You’re in love,” Bunny says, pulling his cap off and running his fingers through his hair, the scars on his forearms catching the light before his sleeves fall back, “with a boy in Paris who keeps setting a place for you at the table without ever saying sit down.”
Yoichi doesn’t lift his head. The water bottle is pressed to his forehead, condensation bleeding into his skin in a cold line from brow to temple, and he holds it there with both hands because the alternative is looking at Bunny and he’s too drunk for that, too drunk for the specific effort of rearranging his face into something that could pass as unbothered. The curb is hard beneath him, his tailbone gone numb, one shoe untied, his legs stretched into the gutter where a thin stream of water catches the streetlamp and turns it into a yellow smear.
“I’m not in love,” he says, and the words come out flattened against the plastic, half-absorbed. “It’s not like that.”
“No?” Bunny fits the cap back on with both hands, tugging the brim low so the black rabbit face grins out at the empty street, and settles his weight against the wall behind them, one shoulder blade finding the stone.
“No. It’s physical. We’re—” He pauses, rolls the bottle to a colder spot, the condensation trail slipping down the bridge of his nose. “It’s just our bodies. We get along that way. That’s it.”
Bunny stretches one leg out alongside Yoichi’s, close enough that the warmth of his calf registers through two layers of denim. He crosses his ankles, the sole of one muddy sneaker tapping the other once, idle.
“Just bodies,” he repeats. “I offered you mine and you said no. Four times.”
“You counted?”
“I count everything. Goals, assists, rejections.” He takes a sip of water, slow, the plastic crinkling under his grip, and sets the bottle between them on the curb where it tilts against Yoichi’s thigh and stays. “Keeps me sharp. Four is a new record, by the way. You should be proud.”
“I’m honored.”
“You should be. The last person to turn me down twice was a model from Lisbon and she apologized the next morning.” Bunny tilts his head back against the wall and the column of his throat catches the light, the scar on the left side of his neck a pale ridge that runs from jaw to collar, and he says it looking up at the sky with the easy cadence of someone telling a story he’s told before and enjoys more each time.
Yoichi snorts against the bottle, the sound muffled and graceless, the vibration traveling through the plastic and into his teeth. “Maybe your technique needs work.”
“My technique is flawless. I touched your neck outside the club and you forgot what language you were speaking.” Bunny turns his head, just enough that Yoichi can feel the shift of attention land on him, the particular weight of those red irises even without meeting them. His fingers drum a slow rhythm on his own knee, index to pinky, a habit Yoichi has noticed three times tonight and filed without meaning to.
“I was switching between three. That happens without you.”
“You switched to a fourth. That was me.”
Yoichi’s mouth twitches. He presses his forehead harder against the bottle to smother it, the cold plastic grounding him against the looseness the alcohol and the hour and Bunny’s persistence have opened up between his ribs. Barcelona is doing the thing it does at three in the morning where the noise thins without stopping, bass pulsing from a club somewhere behind them, the hiss of a cab on wet asphalt, someone laughing three streets over in a burst that rises and scatters.
“You’re not going to stop, are you,” he says.
“I stopped. I’m sitting. I brought you water.” Bunny lifts his hands, palms out, a gesture of innocence that involves his whole upper body, shoulders rising, head cocking, the scars on his forearms visible again for a second before he drops them back to his lap. “I haven’t made a move in at least twelve minutes.”
“Twelve.”
“You’re counting too.” His knee drifts sideways, bumps Yoichi’s once, a brief warm contact through the denim that arrives and leaves before Yoichi can decide what to do with it. “That’s interesting.”
“It’s not interesting.”
“It’s a little interesting.” Bunny picks up his water bottle and turns it between his fingers, slow, watching the liquid catch the streetlight through the plastic. “So. Paris. Twice a month.”
“It’s a short flight.”
“Munich to Paris is two hours. I looked it up.” He takes another sip, the bottle nearly empty now, and Yoichi hears him swallow, the click of it audible in the quiet street.
Yoichi lifts his head just enough to squint at him, forehead damp, the impression of the bottle cap still pressed into his skin above his left eyebrow. “Why would you look that up?”
“Because you mentioned it at the bar and I was curious. And because I was trying to figure out the math on how someone could have anyone in any city and still fly to the same one twice a month for someone who won’t even.” Bunny trails off, waves his hand in a loose circle that could mean anything, the gesture dissolving into the night air. He pulls one knee up and rests his forearm across it, chin tipping forward, the cap shadowing his eyes. “What does he do when you land? Does he pick you up?”
“No.”
“Does he call?”
“He texts. Sometimes.” Yoichi’s thumb finds the edge of the bottle’s label and picks at it, peeling a thin strip away from the plastic, the glue tacky against his nail.
“What does he say?”
The label tears halfway. Yoichi works at the ragged edge, rolling the torn strip between his finger and thumb into a small damp cylinder. “Door’s unlocked. Or there’s food.”
Bunny is quiet for a beat, and in the gap Yoichi hears the city breathing around them, the tick of a cooling engine somewhere down the street, the distant mechanical groan of a garbage truck making its rounds. A breeze moves through the narrow road and touches the sweat on Yoichi’s neck and he shivers once, brief, his shoulders drawing inward.
“That’s sweet,” Bunny says, and his tone is so perfectly balanced between sincerity and something else that Yoichi can’t tell which direction it falls. He reaches down and adjusts the cuff of his jeans where it’s ridden up, exposing a sliver of ankle, the motion casual, unhurried. “In a stray cat kind of way.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not being mean. Stray cats are independent. Mysterious. Low maintenance.” He tips his head back against the wall again, the stone scraping faintly against the fabric of his cap, and looks up at the sky where the light pollution has erased everything but the brightest stars. The scar across his nose catches the lamplight in a thin pale line. “They just happen to show up at the same door at the same time and eat what’s left out for them and leave before morning.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“You just told me he leaves food on the counter and texts you door’s unlocked.” Bunny’s fingers are still turning the water bottle, slow, the plastic crackling softly with each rotation, and he watches it with the distracted focus of someone whose real attention is elsewhere.
“It’s different in context.”
“What’s the context?”
Yoichi tears the label strip the rest of the way off and drops it between his feet, where it curls on the wet pavement. The moth is still circling the streetlamp across the road, tight frantic loops, its shadow flicking across the concrete in quick arcs. He watches it because it asks nothing of him.
“The context is it works for us,” he says. “We don’t need to make it something it’s not.”
“Right.” Bunny nods, slowly, and shifts his weight on the curb, his shoulder sliding an inch closer to Yoichi’s along the wall. “And what is it?”
“I already told you. It’s physical.”
“Physical,” Bunny says, tasting the word, letting it sit on his tongue. He uncrosses his legs and recrosses them the other way, the sole of his sneaker scuffing the pavement. “And the flight, that’s physical too. And the texts. And the food on the counter. And whatever your face is doing right now, that’s all just bodies.”
“My face isn’t doing anything.”
“Your face is doing a lot, actually. I just can’t see most of it because you’ve been hiding behind a water bottle for twenty minutes.” He reaches over and taps the bottom of the bottle Yoichi is still pressing to his forehead, a light flick of his fingers against the plastic, playful. “Which, if we’re keeping track, is also not something people do when they’re fine.”
Yoichi almost laughs. It catches in his chest and comes out as a breath through his nose, rough and short, and he drags his free hand down his face, feels the dampness from the bottle smear across his cheek and jawline. His eyes are stinging and it’s the alcohol, it’s the hour, it’s anything other than what Bunny is doing with that gentle persistent turning of Yoichi’s own words, showing him the underside of them one by one.
“You’re annoying,” Yoichi says, but there’s no heat in it.
Bunny hears that. His laugh is soft, just a breath reshaping itself in his throat, and his shoulder bumps Yoichi’s against the wall behind them, a contact that starts at the joint and rolls down through the arm, warm through both their jackets.
“I know. It’s part of my charm.” He lets the contact hold for a second, then settles back. “Look. I’m not trying to make you feel bad.” He turns the empty water bottle over in his hands, pressing the cap end against his palm, leaving a ring-shaped indent in the skin. “I’ve been flirting with you all night and you keep saying no like it costs you something, and that’s not how people say no to something they don’t care about. That’s how people say no when they’re already carrying something they can’t put down.”
Yoichi’s fingers tighten around his own bottle. The plastic buckles inward with a soft crack.
“Maybe I just have standards.”
“Your standards let you sit on a curb in Barcelona with an acquaintance who’s attempted to sleep with you four times, and won’t stop trying. Your standards are flexible.” Bunny smiles, and Yoichi catches it at the edge of his vision, the way it reshapes his face without reaching his eyes, the scars crinkling at the corners. “But they’re not flexible enough for tonight. And the reason they’re not is in Paris, and you can call it physical all you want, but physical doesn’t make people look the way you look right now.”
“How do I look right now?”
Bunny considers this, his thumb pressing slow circles into the cap-shaped indent on his palm. “Like someone who’s trying very hard not to miss someone while sitting next to someone else.”
The moth hits the lamp glass with a faint tick and wheels wider, its orbit loosening. Yoichi watches it spiral.
He should argue. He can feel the shape of a rebuttal somewhere in his chest, the scaffolding of it, but the alcohol has softened the joints and the words won’t hold together and Bunny is next to him on a curb in a city that doesn’t belong to either of them, smelling like cologne and damp stone and patience, his shoulder close enough that Yoichi can feel the warmth radiating off it without contact.
“I have a flight in six hours,” Yoichi says, because it’s the only sentence that doesn’t require him to mean anything.
“I know.” Bunny reaches over and eases the crushed bottle from his grip, gentle, his fingers curling around Yoichi’s to loosen them one by one, and replaces it with a full one from beside him, colder, heavier. His knuckles brush Yoichi’s in the exchange, warm and brief, and then he pulls his hand back to his own lap. “You keep saying that like it’s an answer.”
“It is an answer.”
Bunny stands, his knees popping faintly, and brushes off the seat of his jeans with both palms. He rolls his shoulders once, loosening them, and looks down at Yoichi with the cap shadowing half his face.
He offers his hand, open and easy. “Cab. Before your manager finds out their star forward spent the night on a Barcelona sidewalk with the enemy.”
Yoichi takes it. Bunny’s grip is warm and rough with calluses and he pulls Yoichi up in one smooth motion, and for a second their hands stay connected, Bunny’s fingers steady around his, close enough that Yoichi can see the freckle beneath his left eye he hadn’t noticed before. Then Bunny lets go, clean, and steps back.
The street tilts once when Yoichi stands. Levels out. Bunny positions himself at his shoulder without comment, close enough to catch him if the pavement shifts again.
They walk to the corner without speaking. Their footsteps fall in and out of sync on the wet pavement, Bunny’s stride longer, adjusting itself shorter every few steps to match. He flags the cab with one raised arm, loose and practiced, and when it pulls up he opens the door and leans his forearms on the frame, the sleeves of his jacket riding up, the scars on his wrists visible for a moment before the fabric falls.
Yoichi slides in. The seat is warm from the last passenger. He pulls the belt across his chest and looks up through the open window.
Bunny watches him, red irises steady beneath the cap, and taps the roof twice with his palm.
“Safe flight,” he says. And then, quieter, the smile thinning to something honest and tired, “Tell the boy in Paris he should learn to say sit down. Before someone else pulls out the chair.”
He steps back, hands finding his pockets. The cab pulls away.
Yoichi leans against the window and closes his eyes and feels Barcelona moving past him, warm air and distant noise and light sliding across his eyelids in bands of color. The seat vibrates faintly beneath him with the engine, and the belt presses across his chest at the wrong angle, cutting into his collarbone, and he doesn’t adjust it.
His phone buzzes in his pocket. He reaches for it before he can think about it, thumbs the screen on, and the glow finds his face in the dark backseat.
One new email. Same format. Same sender.
He stares at it until the screen dims.