[Arashi] Bloodshed

[neko_kirin3104]

Title: Bloodshed
Group/Pairing: Arashi/Model Pair (Jun/Aiba)
Prompt: 44 Cafe
Word Count: 4064
Rating: PG-13
Genre: AU-Werewolf/Thriller + Angst
Summary: His downfall begins with Masaki’s smile. His life will end with the same image lingering in his  heart.
Disclaimer: I own nobody. Purely fictional, of course. :3
Notes: Inspired by a prompt from je_prompts, and final installment to the Blood Red Series.

Note II: for jaricchi

Warnings: character death, graphic depictions of violence, language

Previous: Blood Red | Bloodlust | Blood Thirst | Blood Sacrifice



The wolf looks at the hunter before him and already feels the warmth of the man’s blood filling his mouth, dragging a sweet trail down his throat.

He sneers because he can already taste victory, and it’s more than what he has bargained for.

Not that bargaining has ever been his strongest point.

“I know what you’re up to,” the hunter, Kazunari Ninomiya, snarls at him, his face contorted in a vindictive frown, looking very much like his own kind of beast. Vicious and pathetic with tears streaming down his cheeks.

The wolf grunts with disdainful pleasure at the knowledge that his feast has seen what has become of his crew, of his hunting partner just a few feet away to their side, lying in a patch of his own blood underneath the deserter the wolf himself has killed before shedding off his filthy disguise.

The pleasure he feels from shooting Sho Sakurai, twice from behind like any traitor deserves, is indescribable. Ethereal doesn’t even begin to justify the sensations that overwhelmed him at the sight of the hateful bastard slumping over his dead lover.

It hardly compensates for what he has lost, but it’s a good enough prelude to what’s about to come.

The wolf’s revenge is only just beginning—



It was hardly a romantic first meeting, although it did have the potential for one.

Jun Matsumoto first saw the man he would soon swear his heart to at a fancy cafe in the town he would soon own.

Masaki Aiba had smiled at him, sat down at his table without even asking for his permission first, and began chatting up a storm like they had known each other all their lives.

“I’m sorry, were you waiting for somebody?” the man finally thought to ask after telling him about some family Jun could hardly be bothered with, buying a dog from some shop Jun could hardly even care about.

He merely shook his head and took a sip of his espresso, which hardly matched the last one he drank from his previous life—the fifth disguised persona he had had to leave behind—but nonetheless strong enough to kick-start his morning.

“It’s fine if I stay here, then?” The man’s smile had not faltered an inch. Jun frowned at the fact that he was even finding this remotely amusing. “I’m Masaki Aiba, by the way. I’m sorry if I’ve talked too much. I hope I’m not bothering you... Am I?”

“No,” he mumbled, by then unable to take his eyes away.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you around here before. Moving or just visiting?”

“I’m still thinking about it.” Jun could literally feel his gaze burning with more intensity as he took in the sight of the man before him.

Masaki Aiba, on the other hand, kept to his casual ways, totally unperturbed by Jun’s presence, occasionally sucking on the straw in his grande-sized cup of frothy diabetes mix while ticking out this town’s many good points, like he was already trying to convince Jun to stay.

The scatterbrain was already halfway down his mental list, and halfway through his drink, when he remembered to ask for Jun’s name.

And Jun didn’t even feel like lying about it, gamely blurting out his real name for the first time in years.

He felt the man’s hand tense up in the long overdue handshake. He frowned as the man’s eyes glazed over with apprehension, his pale lovely throat visibly trembling in a voiceless gulp.

Jun gripped the hand harder, only briefly noting how the man did not try struggling anymore after that first attempt to pull away. He was suddenly too aware of this Masaki Aiba’s scent, the one that’s hidden deep beneath his skin.

The one that told Jun how they were not much different. Monstrous creatures of the same fur.

He rubbed his thumb in concentric circles on the skin of Masaki’s hand, loving how the tension gradually melted away until the man’s hand was limp and subservient in his grip.

Masaki never once averted his gaze, no matter how obviously fearful he had looked at first. He eventually curled his fingers around Jun’s hand and even managed a “Yoroshiku!” with a genuinely friendly smile.

As though he had just read Jun Matsumoto for all that he was, and for everything else that he wasn’t, in those few moments their palms have connected.

And even though Jun hardly understood the strange feelings swirling in his gut then, he had allowed himself to smile freely, genuinely for the first time in a very long time...



He laughs in his head as the hunter aims his pathetic little gun at him. His throat trembles with his mocking snarls as Nino fires.

The hunter has good aim. But his bullet hardly tickles the wolf’s fur as he dodges and begins charging, his claws unsheathed and hungry for blood.

The hunter’s eyes widen briefly, but his reflexes are lightning-quick. He drops to his knees as the wolf reaches out a paw to grab his neck. He is already rolling toward the trees when the wolf recovers from his missed attack and growls in annoyance.

A second gunshot fires. The wolf only has a split-second to turn away, barely missing the bullet that nips at his arm. He doesn’t feel the pain, doesn’t care for it at all, as he runs to the trees in pursuit of his prey.

He can smell the hunter’s fear in the air, along with the scent of sweat and piss.

There’s also the reckless determination that usually comes from a man who is merely running on his last spurt of courage like he has nothing else to lose.

A worthy opponent, if he’s ever seen one.

The wolf howls in anticipation of his claws ripping through that valiant heart—



Being an Alpha had never once crossed Jun’s mind. Being part of a pack was a hassle he didn’t want to have to deal with.

But he just had to meet Masahiro Matsuoka, find out who he was and what he had been doing to Masaki, and his self-centered convictions shattered.

He wasn’t thinking of leading a bunch of pathetic wolves when he swiped the head off of Matsuoka’s arrogant neck.

He was only thinking of Masaki’s smile, how it comforted him every time, and the many ways he had seen Matsuoka wipe the happiness away from those eyes.

Those eyes that always looked beautiful, sparkling with almost child-like delight whenever Masaki was around humans, whenever he tended to and talked to his animal friends in the pet shop he had been running for seven years.

Those eyes that always lit up with unspoken relief and gratitude whenever Jun dropped by the Alpha’s house on an invitation to join them for lunch or dinner or whatever else Matsuoka could cook up to get to Jun’s good graces.

Those eyes... Those lovely eyes that looked heartbreakingly perfect even in tears.

He was only thinking of Masaki, and how the man had gradually become an irreplaceable presence in his otherwise dismal life.

He didn’t even have to shift to kill the abusive Alpha that one night he was at their house and Matsuoka drunk himself to a brazen ill-temper, hitting and kicking Masaki around like Jun wasn’t even there.

He hunted down Matsuoka’s posse, killing off all four men within the same week and scattering their body parts along dirt roads and highways miles away from his town. Taking care to leave their faces intact and recognizable enough for anyone who knew to take heed.

This was his first missive to his pack as the new Alpha.

It was him telling everyone who would dare to defy him that no one ever ran away from Jun Matsumoto and survived...



His claws rip through the hunter’s back, eliciting a pained scream that thrills the wolf’s heart.

Nino wilts to the ground, consequently falling flat on his face like he has eyes on the back of his head and has seen the wolf’s next attack.

The wolf’s arm swipes at air. He grunts as he reaches down again, trying to grab the nimble hunter who rolls on the ground a couple more times before finally leveraging himself back on his feet.

The sneaky hunter twists his torso just enough to fire a blind shot. The heat from the passing bullet ruffles the fur on the wolf’s neck, not really hitting him, but stunning him for the few seconds it takes for Nino to get a decent head start.

And they are running again, through seemingly endless paths between the trees, dappled in moonlight and madness.

The wolf howls a third time, the multiple scampering of paws beyond the trees—his pack, making their way back to the town to do their bidding—giving him a reason to sneer all through the chase.

He hears the hunter’s panting breaths and his sneer widens, more so when the hunter all but stumbles on his own feet. 

Nino begins cursing as the sounds of the wolf’s pack closing in become louder, paws clawing on the ground, hungry grunts filling the midnight air. He increases his speed as best he can, with the wolf right at his heels increasing his strides as well.

The wolf cannot begin to comprehend what the hunter is up to, where is it he hopes to go. To hide.

He figures it doesn’t matter anyway.

Nothing else matters.

It all ends here. Tonight—



He was pretty much a passive Alpha, who hardly cared for the rest of the pack. Not that there had ever been anything to get all worked up about anyway.

The wolves in this town were mostly harmless, which surprised Jun at first considering how violent the former Alpha had been.

He soon found out why.

Matsuoka may have been the Alpha, but it was really Masaki who had been running this town.

The man had all these activities and what-nots that helped him and his fellow wolves take better control of their urges and transformations, making it easier for them to relate with humans without ever thinking of biting their faces off.

“We can be friends with them, if we just stop seeing them as meals,” Masaki had told Jun the first time he joined them for lunch. “It’ll be hard at first, but you’ll get used to it. Mabo did.”

Masahiro Matsuoka did try his best to listen to Masaki. The man indulged his lover for as long as he could, until his natural savageness overwhelmed him and he was left with no other choice but to lash out.

At Masaki, who took it all without a fight.

Because if it meant the Alpha could keep himself in control anywhere else, the idiot would take anything in exchange for it.

Anything.

“I will never do that to you,” Jun found himself vowing one night, as he nuzzled his nose against Masaki’s cheek, wet from the tears he occasionally shed over the painful memories of his previous life with Mabo. “I could never hurt you, Masaki.”

“I know.” Masaki turned to him, brushed a hand through his cheek before pressing their foreheads together. “I know...”



The hunter almost trips on the headless, limbless corpse of one of his crews. He screams, “Goddamit, Nishikido!” like the man can still hear him.

He bends and grabs the discarded backpack on the ground and runs again.

The wolf keeps chase, his confidence starting to waver. He knows the hunter is up to something, and he knows enough about the man to get worried.

They both stop, frozen in their tracks as callous gunshots and anguished whines echo through the night.

The wolf howls in rage and charges at the hunter again, his whole body aching for the long overdue kill.

Nino throws the bag to the ground, turns and runs to meet the wolf head on, an arrogant smirk forming on his face as the discordant sounds of violence and death continue to shake the woods.

The wolf’s arm shoots out in a deadly swing as soon as the hunter comes within his reach.

The hunter drops to his knees again, but the wolf has anticipated this move this time, and quickly makes a counter swipe with his other arm that sends the stunned hunter hurtling to the side, his back hitting a tree with an unhealthy crack. He falls with a grunt to the ground, face down, his gun no longer in his hand.

And as though taking cue from the wolf’s triumph, a chorus of very human screams of pain and dying begin to vibrate through the night breeze.

Nino pulls himself up to his feet, swaying from his injuries. He presses a hand to the tree that may have broken a couple of his ribs, but is all he has now to keep him on his feet.

And then he starts laughing. Cockily, mockingly. Each sound gurgling through his throat, spurting out tiny sprays of blood from his mouth.

The wolf growls in annoyance and begins to charge again, too blinded with rage to notice the black device the hunter is clutching in one hand.

“Looks like I won’t be needing this anymore,” Nino says before pitching the object in the air.

The wolf reels back and whines at the splitting pain that suddenly hits his face.

“You must’ve been slacking off for Nishikido to even have the time to send a distress signal,” the hunter adds with a breathy chortle.

The wolf takes a couple of seconds to recover from the unexpected assault, rubbing a paw to the throbbing area between his eyes, where the blasted mobile phone has hit him.

He’s distracted long enough for Nino to regain his bearings and start moving again, rushing toward the gun he has discarded on the ground.

The wolf snarls and covers the distance between him and the gun in two quick strides, kicking it away a second before Nino makes a grab for it. He reflexively backhands the hunter’s face when the sneaky asshole tries to grab his leg instead.

Nino hurtles through the air again, his limbs flailing like a ragdoll’s.

The screams continue to paint the night in grimness.

And the wolf is sneering again at the sight of the stubborn hunter defying both gravity and nature on his visibly shaking legs.

The man is hardly able to keep up with his breath, but the fight still lingers sharply in his eyes.

“I’m not going to run anymore. Let’s finish this.”

The wolf is only too happy to oblige—



Masaki had refused to move in with him, their relationship hidden under the guise of two male friends and nothing more.

Masaki didn’t want people to talk, though they did anyway behind his back. He didn’t want the humans of this town to make the connections and thus suspect Jun of driving his lover away from this town.

The humans never did find out what really happened to Matsuoka, some even suspecting him of killing his own friends.

The wolves were just grateful to be rid of such a volatile leader.

But Jun indulged his lover anyway for the man’s own peace of mind.

This was the reason why he wasn’t around on the night when Masaki needed him the most...



The hunter has been running circles around him, trying to confuse him to no avail.

The wolf just marvels at how the man is still able to move this fast in the first place.

The hunter would alternately charge and back away. Run around and try charging again from behind, but the wolf is always ready to swing his claws out in a deadly strike.

It’s a supposedly dizzying cycle of movements, but the wolf is becoming more annoyed than nauseated.

It angers him, how this hunter is underestimating his strength, playing this childish game on him, mocking him with sporadic bursts of laughter and cocky words.

The strains of noises from behind the trees are also beginning to get distracting. It has become impossible to tell who’s taking the upper hand.

The hunter’s assaults are seemingly erratic, but the wolf manages to find a pattern to it and is finally able to anticipate the man’s next moves. Each time getting an inch closer and closer to grabbing Nino’s head and crashing it in his palm.

He senses the hunter behind him, quickly takes a huge step back and twists his torso around to the right while swinging his left arm in a huge arc that finally allows him to cup his clawed hand on top of the hunter’s head.

What the wolf does not anticipate, though, is that Nino has already managed to pick his gun up in the middle of all that seemingly aimless running.

The slug burns through the wolf’s left shoulder, forcing him to let go of his prey.

Another burst of pain hits his chest before he recovers enough of his senses to retaliate, swiping his uninjured arm and deftly grabbing the hunter’s shirt before the bastard could slip away.

The wolf pulls the man up by his collar and throws him away in rage.

His mind is starting to reel uncontrollably, from the pain, and the many random images from his life flashing rapidly through his memory.

And beneath it all, the sudden awareness of his end, lurking closer to him than it ever dared before—



It was fate’s cruelest mockery, how Masaki himself was the one who introduced him to the police officer, Sho Sakurai, newly arrived in town and supposedly the grandson of one of his lover’s many acquaintances, an old woman living all by herself in the house two blocks down from his own.

The killings began a week after Sho moved in.

And if Jun hadn’t smelled the man himself, he’d have suspected him and taken care of the problem right away.

If he hadn’t felt a certain affinity with the man, the moment he saw and felt the enduring guilt and sadness in his eyes, Jun would have been more careful of the cunning bastard.

He was ten when he first shifted and killed a hundred men. This was what everyone remembered.

This was what everyone had feared him for.

They had forgotten that that night was also the night Jun had lost the most precious people in his life.

This was the memory that endured in the Alpha’s heart, and gave him that touch of humanity that kept him from becoming like Matsuoka.

When the hunters, who had successfully integrated themselves into this town to avoid suspicion, began to attack their pack, Masaki had come to him, begging him to do something about it.

He had warned his lover not to do anything stupid and to just leave these matters in his hands.

It took him quite a while to find out who the hunters were.

And he could’ve killed them both in a split-second, but he didn’t.

He couldn’t.

Because the moment he looked one of them in the eye, he was instantly reminded of that woman who had cried and begged him to spare her life all those years ago: “For my son... My son... Please...”

The woman touched something in him, in that part of him that got buried in his unwanted transformation, gradually pulling his scattered senses back together.

The woman died anyway from the wound Jun had already inflicted on her before he shifted back.

He had watched the woman bleed to death, had looked straight into those eyes as they slowly glazed over.

He would never forget that moment. He could never forget that moment.

Kazunari Ninomiya had his mother’s eyes.

They would always secretly flash with hatred whenever Jun walked into the bakeshop with Masaki every morning.

They would always remind Jun of that night, of the guilt he had tried to bury deep within his heart.

This kept him from calling Sho out on his madness, because he could understand how the man felt.

This also kept him from doing right by his own pack.

Masaki gradually became restless, abandoning his own principles one night and talking about revenge plots that were so out of his character. Telling him how Matsuoka was so much better than him because the former Alpha would have definitely done something by now.

That stung him. But he kept his patience, and tried his best instead to calm his lover down because Masaki was all that mattered to him.

It was Masaki, only Masaki, that he felt he needed to protect.

But it was as though Masaki was just learning the ugly truth about humans for the very first time, and his lover was unraveling rapidly before it.

Humans feared monsters and killed them without prejudice. Without mercy.

They were wolves. They were monsters. It was just that.

Masaki’s complete undoing finally came one night.

And his death reminded Jun of the night he first broke bad.

The pain. The anger. The overwhelming urge to grab and rip through flesh.

Learning that his lover died in the hands of his own kind threw him off completely, right over the edge of his dwindling sense of humanity.

Fuck humanity!

Masaki was all the reason he had to live.

He was also all the reason he needed to kill.

He didn’t even have to talk to his pack.

They had had enough of these humans, too.

They didn’t need to know how he had kept himself from killing the wolf hunters.

They didn’t need to know how he was planning to kill Sho Sakurai that night.

They were angry enough to refuse any kind of explanation anyway.

All they could think about was how they were going to claim this town as their own tonight...



The hunter has managed to plant another bullet on the wolf’s leg.

The wolf himself has managed to open a dozen other wounds on the hunter’s body, broke a few more bones that would’ve made it impossible for the man to stay on his feet.

And yet, Nino just keeps rising up. On and on, with a wider sneer on his lips each time.

They are both panting for breath, grunting through the burning pain that each heave-ho brought to their nerves.

“I hope you remember killing my parents, at least,” Nino begins to say, his body crouched and ready to both attack and defend.

The wolf all but snarls, his memories of that night have completely slipped from his mind the moment he shifted and let the beast take over.

He has stopped feeling guilty over it the moment he saw Masaki’s lifeless body in that alley.

“I know you do,” Nino continues to mock him as they both take advantage of this brief respite. “For some reason it’s prevented you from killing me.”

The wolf just snarls again. He has nothing more to say to this man.

“But everything’s changed now, hasn’t it?” Nino begins to move toward him again, his gait unsteady, his stride dragging, his voice gaining momentum in turn. “What makes you think you can kill me now, huh?!”

The wolf growls and rushes forward, his right arm aimed for the kill.

And Kazunari Ninomiya charges right at him, and right through his claws as soon as he thrusts his arm forward.

Like it’s exactly what the bastard has been planning to do.

The sight of it, the sensation of his wrist brushing against a beating heart as half of his arm goes right through the hunter’s body stunned the wolf.

“You forget, asshole. I’m not afraid to die anymore.”

The sharply hissed words ring in the wolf’s ears, almost making him miss the feel of the gun’s muzzle under his chin.

Nino’s eyes begin to flutter through his dwindling life, as dark red blood gushed out thickly from his lips.

The wolf hears the hunter whisper out a name through his last breath before the gunshot vibrated through his head, giving the wolf a mere split-second of life to pull up the image of Masaki’s warm, gentle smile from his memories...

Both hunter and wolf—once again back in his human skin—fall to the ground, one on top of the other, each lifeless face frozen in a smile.

The gunshots keep echoing through the night, the howlings sharply dwindling as the hunters finally gain ground.

#####

***Been working on three long-ish yama pair projects (though I doubt they would still be long after editing xp) and I may have just driven Leader away... somewhere... T.T

//goes off in search of Leader