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Byakuya Togami has everything, knows everything, is everything. Or he was, at some point.
It wasn’t handed to him, wasn’t passed down, was taken, won, earned. He earned his money, he’d won his status, he’d taken his life from the course it was on, from the death at the hands of his wretched siblings that was all but laid out from him. He’s a phoenix, rising, victorious. He’s a god, reborn, unfaltering.
So, why does Makoto look at him like he’s just human?
“B-Byakuya,” the little shit mumbles, eyes wide as Byakuya stands over him in the bathhouse dressing room, cornered against the lockers. He looks right—good—where he belongs, where everyone belongs. Beneath him. “You’re hurting me.”
“Shut up,” Byakuya snaps, tightening the hand he has wrapped around Makoto’s wrist, even as Makoto pulls it closer to his chest. “I’m thinking.”
Thinking. Thinking, thinking, thinking, he’s always thinking. The other cretins at this school—this hell, this prison—use all of their brain capacity to do little more than take up space. They may as well be fauna at this point, though he wonders if Yasuhiro could even pull off photosynthesis.
But Makoto? He’s supposed to be no different. No name, no title—he only got in on some sick, twisted sense of luck. He’s frustrating, he’s too bright, he’s outstepped Byakuya easily in a class trial. He’s a problem.
“What’s your deal?” Makoto demands, trying to tug his arm out of Byakuya’s hold again. If this was anybody else, anyone else on the planet, they’d be trembling under the scrutiny of the Togami heir, desperately begging for freedom or forgiveness. But fucking Makoto just glares, gently—no backbone, no spine—and yelps as Byakuya slams him against the lockers again.
“My deal,” Byakuya laughs quietly, mouth curling into a seer. “My deal?” Another slam of Makoto’s back into the lockers. “Isn’t it obvious? It’s you.”
When Makoto is confused, his eyebrows pinch together, and his nose wrinkles, and he gets pink in the cheeks, like the idea of admitting to a lack of knowledge is embarrassing. Byakuya has seen the expression enough on his face that it feels second nature for him. Where Byakuya is power, cunning, intelligence, Makoto is a furrowed brow, a wrinkled nose.
He does it now, unsurprisingly, unmoored by Byakuya’s unreasonably personal sentiments. This isn’t like him, but it is like Makoto. Confusion is natural for him—it’s exactly what should be laid bare on his features, open, fit for consumption. He isn’t made for higher thought processes, he’s made for confusion, for being led, for frightened begging that Byakuya let him go please, please, please—and Byakuya needs that from him, and what he needs, what he wants, he takes.
“Do you think you’re better than me now?” he asks, quietly. There’s anger in his voice, quiet, and controlled, but it does make Makoto flinch, his stupid fucking crystalline gaze darting back to Byakuya’s face. It’s a cat chasing a mouse when he talks to Makoto, it’s desperately trying to keep his instincts in check. Byakuya’s gaze is steady; Makoto’s is flighty. Byakuya is a god. Makoto is the dirt beneath his feet.
Makoto’s voice is soft, controlled when he speaks. “Is this because of the trial?” He looks… sympathetic, open, like he’s trying to understand where Byakuya is coming from, where his head is at—
“Don’t try to pretend you know anything,” he snaps, fist slamming against one of the lockers. “You’re not on trial, Naegi. No one is going to praise you for getting the right answer.”
No one is going to praise you; no one is supposed to. Byakuya would know, he does everything right, he gets the perfect scores, he solves the perfect problems, and nobody has ever had to tell him for him to know how spectacular he is. Good job, means nothing when that is the bare minimum—if Byakuya solved world peace there’d be no surprise in his heart.
Makoto has no expectations. Nothing to fall back on, no lofty goals to live up to. At Hope’s peak, he is an outlier, an anomaly, he’s a fucking thorn in Byakuya’s side—
“That thing Kyoko said, a-about you not being able to understand relationships,” Makoto whispers, and goddamn it, Byakuya wants his hands around this little shit’s throat. “Is that why you’re mad?”
“I understand everything!” Byakuya shouts, and then flinches away, for a second.
When you dismiss people’s feelings, it’ll always come back to bite you in the end.
Fuck. Fuck!
“I understand everything,” he repeats, calmer. Makoto still looks frightened—good—but his hand goes out, trying to comfort, or some other nonsense, and Byakuya slaps it away without another thought. Makoto shrinks in on himself. Byakuya glowers.
“Do you know why you could see what I couldn’t?” he says lowly, taking a slow step forward. It pushes Makoto into the lockers, his back against the wall, cornered, frightened, helpless. Beneath him. “You’re irrational,” he says, and a hand goes out, wraps around Makoto’s neck. He can feel his pulse, the blood surging through his body, the way it speeds up when he squeezes a bit tighter. Does Makoto think he wouldn’t? Does Makoto know he would? “You’re helpless. Weak. Your sympathy lies with someone too strong willed to do anything but off herself in vain, and that’s where you’re lacking. I’m stronger than you.”
He’s lying.
Sakura said it was because she cared about them, about Hina, and he was too clouded by, what, pride to see it? It isn’t a weakness because he couldn’t possibly imagine something so foolish.
He’s stronger than everyone. He’s the prodigy, he’s an heir, he’s—
Six years old and laying on the ground, curled up and wondering why no one ever looks at him like they like him, why his siblings push and shove, why no one is fair, why everything is so hard—
Why he doesn’t have any friends, why nobody tells him what not to do because one day he’ll be the heir and he can do anything but it doesn’t stop him now, it doesn’t stop him from wondering what it would be like to crawl off the edge of a cliff and take a sharp dive to a short end—
Byakuya is a god. Byakuya is the protagonist of the world.
“Bya… kuya…” Makoto wheezes, his hands coming up to grip the one wrapped around his throat. There’s no struggle as Byakuya chokes him harder, nothing but the soft bite of his fingernails in Byakuya’s skin, his own wheezing breaths. Byakuya is panting, he’s not sure why, and Makoto opens his filthy, incessant mouth, like he’s ever had anything worthy to say.
And Byakuya wants, needs, takes. He kisses him.
It’s quick, fleeting, enough for him to forget to keep the pressure on Makoto’s throat, but he’s gasping and breathing, “Byakuya,” so Byakuya cuts him off with another kiss, and then another, again and again and again, and eventually his hands go to hold Makoto’s face so he can tilt his chin up, to kiss him breathless instead of infuriating.
Makoto is having trouble keeping up, kissing back clumsily but earnestly, gripping at Byakuya’s wrists now like he can’t bear to let go. Makoto’s hands go to his chest and then his shoulders, eyes squeezing tight when Byakuya presses forward harder, and urging him for more, always more, but Makoto’s skin is soft underneath his hands, and warm like sunlight—
It’s cold in a house that’s too big for one prodigy, in a dorm room he can’t recognize, in a life he knows how to get but has always been afraid he didn’t want, he’s all alone, and there’s no one to hold him, to tell him they—
“Byakuya.” It’s a gasp, a whispered thing against his lips. It’s close enough.
Makoto is annoying, and Makoto kisses him like it’s the last breath he’ll take. If Byakuya still had his hands around his throat, it might have been. Byakuya is a genius, and he kisses Makoto like a god taking sacrifice, like a gift at an altar. Makoto is to be devoured; Byakuya is hungry.
He pushes Makoto away to catch his breath, just barely, not far enough for either of them to be able to see each other fully. That’s a dangerous game, one Byakuya shouldn’t be willing to play. “I hate you,” he whispers against Makoto’s mouth, lips brushing and breath curling together conspiratorially. He thinks briefly about sliding his hand down Makoto’s thigh, picking him up and pushing him against the wall so he can kiss him fully, wholly, because Byakuya Togami does not do things halfway, but Makoto’s hands are on the underside of his jaw, pressing their noses together.
“Byakuya,” he breathes back, and its shiver inducing, toe curling, a siren dragging a sailor down to the depths with her beautiful voice. It’s the temptation of man to the heavens, it’s Prometheus spread on a stone and still blaspheming as he’s picks him apart bit by bit by bit.
Say it again, Byakuya thinks, thoughts turning and coiling around themselves, the angry thing in him that wants to own whatever he can get his hands on cocking it’s head like a predator. Pray to me.
When he kisses Makoto again, it’s harder, more insistent, trying to put to name something that can never be said. It’s a plea, a supplication, it’s the desire to be known when there is no one worth knowing. Byakuya presses his tongue between Makoto’s lips and feels his whine into his mouth, and he is Makoto Naegi, or else he is Byakuya Togami, and he is to consume wholly and fully. Byakuya or Makoto takes and takes and takes, and each mouth is warm, every hand and touch grounding, and Byakuya for once in his life wonders if perhaps he is just a teenager in a dressing room.
“We can’t stay,” Makoto says, when Byakuya’s hand fists in his hair and bares his neck, kisses going from mouth to jaw and closer to the laid marble of his body. There’s something nervous creeping back into his voice, something other than Byakuya’s name, something other than the feeling of his mouth and no, no, no, that won’t do, Byakuya needs— “Monokuma will notice.”
“Notice what?” he snaps, and realizes he sounds… desperate. He wants to tear the walls down. He wants his hands on Makoto’s body, or back around his throat, and he’s one wrong step away from being on the chopping block at a trial with Makoto’s X-ed out face. A body has been discovered, discovered, discovered, discovered— “We’re not breaking regulations. We’re using a facility.”
But he knows. He knows. Tell them, Naegi, tell the child in the shoes of an idol what he must already know.
Monokuma will find us like this, Monokuma will turn us into nothing but a spectacle. I am not yours and you are not mine, because we cannot own or be owned in a world that was made to destroy us. Destory you.
“Right,” Byakuya says shakily, removing himself from Makoto as cleanly as possible. He’d watched a man jump in front of a train when he was young. He’d seen his head get sliced right away from his body. That’s how it feels, letting go of Makoto.
“Are you—”
“Don’t talk to me,” he snaps, even though he’s a little dizzy looking at Makoto’s kissed red mouth, the shaky little inhales he’s sucking in like he doesn’t know how to breathe without Byakuya doing it for him. He doesn’t know anything without Byakuya doing it for him. Byakuya wants him on a leash, he wants Makoto’s hand in his hair, he wants blood, violence, he wants a hand on his cheek and a voice that says I’ve got you. “Don’t talk to me,” he rasps again, voice shaking.
When he leaves, it is quiet. Makoto does not try and follow him.
No one has ever tried to follow him. They don’t have to. Byakuya will lead anyway.