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Rudo is staring at the cleaners, and he’s instinctively brought his hands closer to his chest - a snarl working its way from his throat. His gaze flicks from person to person, then at the blood that trickled from their hands.
His cleaner uniform doesn’t allow for much skin to be shown. None at all, to be more precise. He can tell they’re getting more frustrated, the longer he stands frozen. His breath has stalled in his lungs, and he immediately looks at Enjin. The man must recognise something in Rudo’s eyes, because he tells the other cleaners to go ahead for a second.
Zanka and Riyo are the most unwilling to move, but something in the way Enjin looks - or maybe it’s in the way Rudo’s hackles have raised, like a beast that’s been cornered - that prompts them to finally walk ahead of them.
“Oi, kid, you’ve lost pints of blood in front of me before. What’s the issue now?”
Enjin takes the opportunity to drape an arm over Rudo’s shoulders, but nothing can make him relax. His muscles are drawn tight as a bowstring, and his breaths escape him in quick pants. His teeth grit together, and he bares them at Enjin in an attempt to distract himself from the cold feeling that has encased his entire body.
“Yikes, touchy,” Enjin laughs, and doesn’t move away.
He doesn’t move away. Those kids said that Rudo had the eyes of a killer, and he knows his face is messed up. Enjin doesn’t move away, doesn’t take his arm off of Rudo’s shoulders; he looks at Rudo, with his too-bright eyes, and a smirk painted on his face in broad strokes.
“I’m supposed to give you blood. From my hands,” Rudo bites out, and the words drip with anger - tainting the air like oil in water.
“It’s the easiest way, ‘specially for you. Considering your uniform,”
“I don’t want to, shithead,”
Rudo has never been good at reading people. He’d only ever regularly talked with Regto and Chiwa - a sour taste invades his mouth at the thought of his childhood friend - and they were both so open with him. So being here, where he now had to regularly interact with several people everyday? It got to be too much, very often.
So when Enjin goes silent for a moment, Rudo has no idea what to expect. He braces himself, but the arm over his shoulders still hasn’t moved.
“The chokers are the single most efficient way to communicate on the Ground. I know the gloves are your treasure, but you take them off to wash your hands and piss, don’t you? This isn’t any different,”
Rudo hates this, he hates it because he’s being dramatic. He’s just being a burden again, finding more and more things to complain about. What Enjin is saying should be easy for Rudo to do, if it were just about taking off the gloves.
“Enjin,” The name escapes him in a whisper.
“It’ll be quick, so don’t sweat it too much,”
“Enjin,”
“This is a safety procedure, basically. Just think of it like a run of the mill doctor’s check-up, ‘kay?”
“Enjin!” Rudo yells, finally pushing Enjin off of him. He ignores the spark of regret, looking at the shock decorating the man’s face.
Rudo’s throat sticks together, and he can’t find the words he wants to say.
He looks at Enjin, who is still calm despite Rudo’s unwilling attitude, and he knows he trusts Enjin. Still, his hands shake as he gently takes his gloves off.
The pain hits him immediately, forcing the air out of his lungs as his bandaged hands grip tightly onto his gloves. He still remembers a time before the gloves, when he couldn’t move; couldn’t feed himself.
He misses his dad. A whine escapes his teeth, and he’s mortified by the pitiful sound.
He still hasn’t unwrapped the bandages around his hands.
“Rudo-“ Enjin’s voice falters, and Rudo sees the man reaching out towards him. The bandages fall from his hands, landing in a pile at his feet. The original colour is sullied, his blood dirtying the clean white.
///
”No!”
Rudo screams, backing himself into a corner to try and get away from Regto. His dad is holding fresh bandages, and his face is contorted in worry.
”Get away! Get away from me!”
Rudo snaps at Regto, ignoring the way his hands tremble even in the gloves. The pain is overwhelming, but the idea of Regto touching them-
”Rudo, please I just want to help,”
Regto’s voice is soft, and he crouches down to be at Rudo’s eye level. His eyes betray the worry that wracks through his entire body, and Rudo hates that he’s doing this to his dad.
”You can’t touch me!”
”Why not, baby?”
Even though Rudo is spitting in his face, screaming at him like a rabid dog, Regto is still gentle. He’s still careful with him, like he’s something that deserves that kind of affection.
”It’s dirty! You can’t touch it!”
Rudo snapped his teeth at Regto again, wedging himself as far into the corner of the room as he could get. He watched Regto’s face fall, but he didn’t move away from Rudo - he didn’t flinch when Rudo tried to bite.
”Rudo, what’s dirty?”
”My blood! You can’t touch it!”
For as long as Rudo could remember, he’d been condemned as the son of a murderer. He shares the same blood as a monster, and his destiny has been etched into the walls of fate ever since he’d been born. The accursed child of a ruthless murderer. He’s not human, he doesn’t get to be a boy. He’s revolting, a beast wearing the skin of a child.
”Your blood isn’t dirty, I promise. I’ve done this several times, so don’t worry your old man, ok?”
”No! It’s bad, you’ll be hurt! I don’t want that, I don’t want you to hurt because of me!”
Tears and snot drip down Rudo’s face, sobs and screams bursting out of his chest so violently he doubled over from the pain. Suddenly, he was surrounded by a soft, warm feeling. Regto’s hand is carding through his hair, and the other is cradling the back of Rudo’s neck. All Rudo can do is shake and cry, finally letting his dad tuck his head underneath his chin.
”Those kids said something to you again, didn’t they?”
”It was-“ Rudo struggles to talk with how badly he’s crying. “He teaches the kids,”
”You’re a kid,” Regto whispers into Rudo’s hair.
”He said my- my blood was dist- diseased,” Rudo trips over the word, trying to force it from his mouth like a curse. He expects Regto to flinch back, then. To finally see Rudo for what he truly is.
That’s not what happens at all.
Instead, Regto holds him impossibly closer, burying his face in Rudo’s hair.
”He lied, baby. He’s a liar. You’re not diseased, you can’t hurt me. There’s nothing wrong with you, you’re just in pain. You’re so young, and suffering is all you’ve known,”
Regto rocks Rudo back and forth for a while, whispering apologies into his hair. Later, he’ll rewrap Rudo’s hands with a gentleness that Rudo still feels unworthy of, and he’ll continue to cradle Rudo until the dawn of a new day.
///
Rudo’s hands twitch, and each slight movement sends a shock of pain through his body. He still has yet to look up at Enjin, but he heard the quiet gasp when he’d finally unwrapped his bandages.
His eyes hesitantly lift off the ground to look up at Enjin. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting: horror, disgust, maybe. Pity.
Concern dances across Enjin’s face, and shock keeps Rudo rooted to the floor.
A particularly torturous spear of pain digs itself into Rudo, and he doubles over from the agony. Enjin is at his side immediately, keeping him from crashing face first into the ground.
The skin on his hands is mottled black, barely resembling horrific burn wounds. The scars wrap themselves all the way to his forearms, and Rudo can’t even fathom cutting the skin. The blood would burn a path into his scars, and his hands won’t stop shaking at the mere idea of it.
A horrible part of him pictures Enjin slicing the skin away, and instead of blood a black ooze will seep from his skin.
The final nail in the coffin to prove his inhumanity.
“-do, Rudo! Breathe, you’ve got to breathe, buddy,” Enjin's voice sounds distant, and it's tinged with panic. Rudo feels a hand thread through his hair, and he instinctively leans into the feeling.
When Rudo finally surfaces from the fog he’d been trapped in, Enjin is cradling his hands with a care that Rudo thought he’d lost when Regto died.
“Don’t- don’t cut them!”
Rudo tries to jerk his hands out of Enjin’s grip, but a shudder runs through his body and a small cry of pain escapes him. Enjin doesn’t tighten his grip, he doesn’t let Rudo drop.
“No, please believe me. I wouldn’t, I would never,” Enjin’s voice is strong and it cuts through the panic in Rudo’s head. Rudo can’t help but relax a little.
“Rudo,” Enjin whispers his name, and his voice wavers. “Where did you get these?”
He doesn’t ask ‘who did this to you’. He probably doesn’t want to entertain the thought that somebody had destroyed Rudo’s arms so viciously. He doesn’t yet realise that it’s something Rudo deserves.
“My shitstain of a father,” is the answer Rudo gives him. It never gets easier to admit that he’d gotten the scars from someone who was meant to protect him.
Enjin inhales sharply, and he cradles Rudo a little closer to himself. His hand curls itself around Rudo’s hands - the hold is tender, Rudo’s breath comes a little easier this time.
“I’m sorry, I thought it was the gloves. I need you to know that I’d never have considered something like that, had I known. We can work around it,”
Enjin shifts, leaving Rudo to kneel on the ground opposite him. He has yet to let go of Rudo’s hands, and Rudo has to fight the instinct to shove Enjin away. To not let his blood sully someone he cares about.
Enjin picks up the bandages that Rudo had let fall. He’s careful, when he rewraps Rudo’s hands. Tentative, without the years of experience Regto had, but gentle nonetheless.
“Do you mind if I call Zanka and Riyo back?”
That’s when it hits Rudo that his stupid hangups had been wasting time. Everyone’s been waiting on him, all because of this idiotic bullshit. He’s still useless, wasting everyone’s time on a mission he’d insisted on.
“Hey, I can actually hear you thinking. C’mon, don’t stress yourself out, kid.”
Enjin ruffles Rudo’s hair, and Rudo takes a deep breath.
“Yeah, you can call them,” he stares resolutely at his half wrapped hands, ignoring the short conversation Enjin has through his choker. “You don’t have to do this for me,”
The words come out unbidden, forced from his mouth in a last ditch attempt to-
To what? Prove that he shouldn’t be taken care of, or that after Regto’s death he feels he’s unworthy of being looked after. His blood dirties Enjin’s fingertips, and Rudo wants to yell at him to get away. Before Enjin can get hurt by caring for Rudo, before he suffers as Regto did.
“I care about you, Rudo. This isn’t something I have to do, it’s something I want to do. I’m doing this because seeing you in pain is- it’s horrible,”
They sit in silence for a few moments, with Enjin continuing to wrap up his scars. Zanka and Riyo had silently arrived at some point, but Rudo couldn't focus on them.
He watches Enjin tie off the last of the bandages, sliding Rudo’s gloves back on for him. He turns back to Riyo and Zanka, and this prompts Rudo to finally look up at them.
Riyo’s got a knowing look in her eye, since she’d already known about the scars. She’d probably forgotten - putting two and two together when Enjin stayed behind. Zanka’s got a frown pulling at his face, and Rudo must be imagining things because he thinks his mentor looks worried.
Rudo yanks at his hood, dragging his undershirt sleeve down to reveal his upper arm. He looks at Riyo, then at the pocket where she keeps The Ripper.
It’s a relatively quick affair, cutting open the skin on his arm to provide Enjin, Zanka and Riyo his blood for their chokers.
“I’ll just tell the others they can get your blood at a later date - it’s good enough for you to be able to communicate with the three of us,” Enjin slings an arm around Rudo’s shoulders, and they finally start walking to meet up with the others.
“Yeah! Like an exclusive for the Akuta Cleaners,” Riyo grins, easily slipping The Ripper back into its designated pouch.
“Just don’t annoy us too much, brat,” Zanka’s annoyed words are ultimately betrayed by the fondness that underlies his tone.
“Don’t be so cocky, shithead!” Rudo snarls at Zanka, and Riyo bursts into laughter.
There’s a small part of his heart that was taken when Regto died, and Rudo knows he’ll never get that part of himself back ever again. He also knows that he’s grown to care for the people he’s found on the Ground, even with how insane they are. Even when he’s still not sure of his worth, or his usefulness. This is enough for him, for now.