#its a crime that he's not gift wrapped and oiled up underneath the tree for me rn

[atlaswav]

DEVOUR ME ♢

INFO: 1741 words, itoshi rin x gn! reader SYNOPSIS: Rin had never known how to love, and what wouldn't serve him any purpose, he needed to devour - but how was he to devour a concept? Conversely, love may devour him. WARNINGS: uh kissing (LMAO), suggestion of alcohol consumption (reader literally holds a bottle of beer in her hand tf), gorey language and metaphors AUTHOR'S NOTE: uh yeah this is a product of 2(.5) insomniac nights and some delusions pls don't make fun of the emo monologue at the end I swear I tried. edit: rereading this I realised that the ending does not match the vibe of the start of the fic AT ALL but i'm too lazy to change it so good luck have fun be nice pls (likes and reblogs are so appreciated i will love u forever)

Love was a concept that eluded Rin’s realm of understanding. He never understood it, and likely never would. He’d seen it – the mimesis of it – all around him, but there was no telling the scorn that lay underneath each smile, each furtive glance, each word of affirmation that fluttered about aimlessly. 

Rin Itoshi is a cynic. He doesn’t believe, he never believes. He simply knows. He didn’t believe in love, not when it had betrayed him before, and he was a man that learned from his mistakes. He had no time to be wasted on salvaging the wreckage of his relationship with his brother, he knew that it was beyond his power. What had failed him, he would destroy – the world had no need for something as tepid and fallible as this – but how was he to destroy a concept? Intangible, yet looming and defiant, echoing throughout the world, entangling itself with rationality, parasitic in its own Sisyphean way.

Rin Itoshi wanted to devour love as he had the other obstacles obstructing his vengeful path. Yet unlike his conquests in vanquishing pests that shrouded his success, devouring love did not move him. It did not grant him the same satisfaction it did when he crushed his opponents and rivals, it would not crumble beneath him and succumb to his superiority. 

There was no way to best love, yet he found himself wanting to devour it more than he knew. The genius knew that it wasn’t within the realm of possibility, and yet he never thought that he’d wind up as the one love would feast upon. 

He would’ve never understood love if it weren’t for you. 

You, an impenetrable wall of reason and rationality to his egotistical mindset that simply wanted to take and take and take. He prided himself on his restraint and reason, yet when it came to you, he became a madman. 

Hence, you became his paradox. The being of all reason, yet the sole catalyst of his undoing. Your voice became the siren’s echo of his dreams, your whispering touch became the blessed curse that he wished upon himself. 

“Rin!” He barely had time to register your presence before you tackled him into a hug, smothering him in your arms. Your scent was hypnotic – clinging to your hair, your clothes – as he breathed you in, turning liquid in your hands. He shouldn’t be this malleable by anyone. This was his moment of weakness – you were his weakness, but he didn’t find himself objecting to this as he enveloped you with his arms in return. 

“I’m so proud of you.” And there it was, that swelling in his chest, that odd warmth flooding his senses. “You did so well.”

“I know that.” he deadpans. You should back off here, you should retreat, frown, ask him what’s wrong – but you don’t. This was his big game, after all, and if it wasn’t obvious enough, you’d follow him even over hot coals. 

You laugh, taking his face in your hands. “I love you, Rin.”

There it is. That word, love. The first time you used it – because it would’ve always been you to use it first, never him – he frowned. It was late December in Japan, his hometown, while you sat huddled beside him for warmth, the landscape of the sun setting over the sea golden as the paintings of rebirth. 

“Why?” 

“Why?” your turn to frown, as he met your eyes in question. “What do you mean?”

“Why use the word ‘love’?” It was already fatal that he allowed you to stay for this long, that he even kept you with him spoke volumes of his heart’s wishes. His icy facade seemed to falter at your hands, and you wanted to melt it away completely. A smile breaks across your face, and he finds himself wanting to drown in it forever. To drown in the depths of your mirth like a rich man and never face worries again. 

“Because I love you, stupid.”

“Huh.” but before he can question further, you press a kiss to his lips, and all his questions die on the tip of his tongue, his rationality surrendering to you. His undoing.

It took him even longer to understand love, even after you’d said it the first time on that cliffside, overlooking the vast, infinite ocean. The light had shone on the water like ambers – opalescent and gleaming – he felt as if he could pluck the light from the ocean and string it into a necklace for you, ordinarily divine. The second time you said it, it was “just because”. You lay against his chest, curled up on the couch. If you listened hard enough, you’d be able to hear his heart racing. 

“I love you.”

Instead of inquiring, this time, he simply planted a kiss to the crown of your head, watching the woman on the TV sob, dark tears streaming down her face like ink. Onyx. Rivulets of Onyx. He thought you’d look far better with your mascara running down your cheeks than this second rate, lukewarm actor. 

The third time, it was new year’s eve. The snow fell in a light sheen across the balcony of the apartment – one of his team mates was hosting a party. He wouldn't have gone if it weren't for your insistence, and so he stood with you, leaning on the railing in favour of the pandemonium behind. The view was a quiet, dark sort of beautiful. Not the majesty of a sunrise or the tragic beauty of rain, rather quiet, sequestered. The park below was still, yet the escapism from the sounds of the party made the air all the more intimate. 

“Any new year’s resolutions?” you’d asked, a half finished bottle of beer hanging loosely from your grip. 

“Become the best in the world.”

You smiled. “Never change.”

“What about you?”

You shrugged, gaze distant. If he looked closely, he could see the dim moonlight reflected in your eyes. He inched closer. 

“I don’t know.”

He scoffed at your answer. So indefinitive, so irrational. The moonlight reflected in your eyes like tiny stars. If he dared, he would claim them for his own. But you claimed his before he could even try. 

Your gaze was heavy. A blanket of heat to combat the penetrating cold, the film of snow that dusted your hair, catching in your lashes. 

“You have snow on your eyelashes.” You reach out, brushing your cold fingers gently across his eyes. Almost absentmindedly, you mutter “I hate that about you.”

“What?” The word comes as a thin breath, and he hardly registers anything but your touch, your gaze, your breath warming his skin. 

“You're absurdly pretty.” you murmur, almost to yourself. Shaking your head in disbelief, a clamour rises from indoors, where the cacophony of the new years celebration presses on, into the intimate night. 

“Shut up.” and he brings his lips to yours, closing the centimetres of space left between you. You let his arms wrap around your waist, reaching up to place your hands on his face, entangling your fingers into his hair, lightly tugging at it as you pull away. 

“Happy new year, Rin.”

“Fucking shut up and kiss me.” he moves to press his lips to yours, but you evade his movement by a hair’s breadth. 

“I love you.” you whisper against his mouth. The words are swallowed in the kiss, and he doesn’t question your love, anymore. Because if anyone would love him against all odds, it would be you, wouldn’t it? Because of course, you knew what love was, and you would teach him. You wanted to teach him the meaning of love, show him its meaning through precarious action, allow love to finally become a constant in the churning sea of his person. 

Yet you knew that for Rin Itoshi, love was another paradox. 

To love was to be devoured. 

To be consumed from the inside out, to desperately hold in the guts that threatened to spill out, to drown in the metallic sweetness of your own blood, to hear the sickly beating of your heart as a siren through your mind, and to allow – enable – this grotesque discordance to rip at your disposition. It’s ruthless in its ruination, it tears out flesh and admires the way the blood gleams like rubies on its severed, screaming surface. Like fruits of its own endeavour, the masochistic, self wrought destruction of sense admires lovers such as him. It admires the victims to its siren wails, the eradicating, breathless declarations of devotion that pale in the grand scheme of love’s insatiable appetite. 

To love was to be devoured. Love was the devourer, and lovers their prey. Love was rich in tragedy, all consuming and death defiant. Love was deceptively gentle, practising the art of elusion with a lover’s seduction, the maestro of sadism. 

To love was to be devoured wholly – from the thick rivulets of blood dripping down the maw of the beast, the drying, flaking stains of it crusting the mouth and the torn flesh lodged in the beast’s throat. 

If to love was to be devoured, you would be next. Foolishly naive, eyes on the stars instead of which beasts lay behind. 

If to love was to be devoured, you gladly asked it to devour you. You surrendered yourself to the beast, allowing your heart – still beating – to be ripped out of your chest and be feast upon. You let love take your lips in a siren’s kiss and drain your body dry of supplement, leaving a husk of what remained, and yet you still have more to give. You’d let love reduce you to nothing – impoverished, emaciated and forlorn – for a glimpse of the glories that were of legend. To follow him to the true end, the one promised by fabled lips.

If love was to be devoured, Rin decided that he would let it take, because what was love, if not devotion? Love was devotion, and you were devout. Pious, devout and reverent in the pursuit of sating it's abysmal appetite. 

You devoted yourself to love – loving him. You let yourself be devoured, let yourself be reduced to ashes in the blaze of love’s fury, just to experience the sweet nothing of its aftermath. Hollow, void, fruitless. 

So Rin takes the dagger, and points it to his own heart. The fruit of love is still ripe within him, and the beast means to be fed. 

written by @atlaswav , published 25th of December 2023