May hierarchy be damned!
The first lecture ended at half past ten and Ciel walked out of the hall, his chin up, his shoulder high like he owned the corridor.
He didn't, of course but the point was;
He needed to make sure nobody saw him for who he really was.
The campus was louder between lectures, students filing out of buildings, congregating on steps, the particular noise of a hundred conversations happening at once. Ciel moved through it with his bag on one shoulder and his mind already three steps ahead, cataloguing exits and routes the way his father had taught him;
'Know every room. Know every door. Never let a space surprise you.'
He was heading for the cafeteria. And underneath his composure, Ciel was conducting a low-grade internal assessment that he'd been running since he stepped onto this campus that morning.
The injection was holding. Probably. He'd administered it himself before dawn, same suppressant formula he'd been using for years and logically he knew it was holding.
But there were alphas everywhere on this campus. That was simply the reality of Vale University, where money attracted money and designation followed money with embarrassing predictability. He'd came across at least four of them in his first lecture alone. The particular weight in the air. The way certain people took up space without noticing they were doing it.
None of them had looked at him twice. So he was certain that the suppressant was working.
Still, his jaw tightened slightly as he rounded the corner toward the main building, somehow doubting if the dose wouldn't wear off before he finished the activities on campus.
"Stand still and hold." His father's voice surfaced firmly in his memory.
Ciel exhaled, rolled his shoulders once then kept walking.
"Fuck those alphas anyway," he thought, and almost smiled.
~~~~~
He heard it before he understood it.
A shift in the noise ahead: not silence exactly, but a thinning. Conversations dropping off, footsteps changing direction... the particular hush of a crowd that has collectively decided to be somewhere else without anyone announcing it.
Ciel slowed.
The cafeteria entrance was twenty metres ahead. Students were moving away from it sharply, eyes down, shoulders hung lowly with fear.
"Those darn alphas," Ciel mumbled under his breath as he realized what was happening.
Someone powerful was in the promises. He'd been warned, vaguely, by one guy while doing his registration that there were people here that you just didn't make eye contact with and he'd filed it under things that applied to other people.
Not him. So he kept walking.
The group came out of the cafeteria entrance just as Ciel reached it.
Four men. Then two more. Then a space around a single figure that told him, without any further information required, exactly where the centre of gravity was.
Ciel's eyes found that figure. And everything in his body stopped.
He knew that face.
He knew it the way you know a scar, not because you look at it often but because it is written somewhere beneath conscious thought, in the part of the brain that keeps the things that hurt you.
Two years and it was still precise- the way the man moved like he had never once in his life had to accommodate anyone else's presence.
Ryiot Vantrell...
"That son of a bitch!" The words formed in Ciel's head first and then, before he had made any decision about them, they were in his chest and rising.
And he did not stop walking.
One of the men clocked him first - big, broad, with the flat professional attention of someone paid to notice things. He stepped forward. Not aggressive, just final.
"Hey. Where do you think you're going?" The man, Jayden demanded.
Ciel looked at him blankly then said firmly;
"The cafeteria, obviously."
Something flickered in the man's expression. He had expected a different response; the dropped gaze, the half-step back, the instinctive deference. He got none of those things.
"You don't seem to understand who you're standing in front of." the man said, and there was something almost patient about it, like he was explaining something to someone very young, "
Ciel looked at the hand on his path, back on the man's face then past him at the figure who had stopped walking and was now, Ciel registered with coldness, looking directly at him.
He let out a dry chuckle which sounded just like a scoff then replied;
"No, I really don't care."
The silence that followed had texture. He felt it on his skin.
Then the Ryiot moved and just like the way his name was being pronounced, it seemed riot followed him.
He came forward with the unhurried certainty of someone who had never needed to hurry, who had, in all likelihood, never arrived anywhere and found it wasn't waiting for him.
The crowd that had already thinned thinned further. His men adjusted without instruction. And then he was close, closer than Ciel had braced for, and the full force of his presence landed like a change in air pressure.
Dark eyes, unreadable anf fixed entirely on Ciel's face.
"Who are you in the world of nobody?" The voice was quiet. That was the thing about it, quiet in the way that made the air hold still to catch every word.
Ciel felt his pulse kick once. He let it then he comported himself and looked directly in Ryiot's eyes even though he had to raise his head because of the height difference.
"Somebody, obviously. A human being. Same as you." He let a beat sit between them before adding;
"Well. Kind of different, actually. Since I'm not a pompous, self-important bastard who expects people to move out of his way like he's God's gift to the pavement."
The sharp intake of breath from somewhere in the vicinity of Jayden was satisfying to Ciel.
Ryiot went still.
Something moved through his expression. Rage, yes. But underneath it something more unsettled. The look of a person encountering a variable their system has no category for.
Jayden's hand came toward Ciel's arm, ready to rough handle him for being reckless bold but Ryiot stopped it.
He just raised up two fingers, No word and Jayden withdrew.
"Aren't you afraid of me?" Ryiot asked the 18-year-old defiant man before him.
The question was almost curious. Like the concept had presented itself to him for the first time and he was genuinely interested in the answer.
Ciel looked at him. Held the gaze of the man he had spent two years hating in every quiet moment he could not fill with something else. Every night studying by a lamp in a room that was too cold. Every time he had passed his father's chair, still in the corner of a storage unit somewhere, because he could not afford to keep it and could not bring himself to throw it away.
He looked at him and felt nothing break. That was the thing about carrying something for two years. Eventually it became something you could hold without bleeding.
"Why would I be afraid of you?" Ciel demanded, his nose scrunching up in disgust.
Ryiot's jaw tightened. The air between them changed- compressed, charged, the particular atmospheric shift of something about to happen that could not be taken back.
He didn't move yet.
Neither did Ciel.
They stood there, two metres apart, with half the campus watching from what it had collectively decided was a safe distance. Ciel could feel the weight of all that held breath.
He could also feel something emanating from Ryiot that he couldn't fully name, not just anger. Something rawer underneath the anger.
He didn't examine it. He just kept his chin up.
"Aren't you afraid of what I could do to you?" Ryiot finally spoke again and a laugh escaped Ciel's throat, sounding so mocking.
"What new thing can you do other than the terrible, evil ones you have been doing?" Ciel asked sharply.
When the question landed, it hit Ryiot like a challenge.
What new thing could he do?
Ryiot's eyes moved over him slowly in assessment. It was the gaze of a man solving a problem, working through variables, arriving at a conclusion with the same unhurried certainty he brought to everything else.
After a tensed, suffocating moment, Ryiot's lips curved into a smirk. He had gotten an idea of what he could do.
Something new... That would completely break this young man before him and bring him to his knees.
Something worse than any punishment.
Before Ciel could process what Ryiot was about to do, Ryiot's hand shot out and grabbed the back of Ciel's neck then Ryiot's head dipped...
And then the world came apart.
Sharp pain exploded at the side of Ciel neck where Ryiot's teeth were biting into and Ciel's eyes widened in horror.
Gasps erupted around them.
The scent of powerful pheromones flooded the air as the bond sealed and someone in the crowd whispered in horror;
"He just… claimed him?"
Ryiot stepped back and looked at Ciel with those flat, unreadable eyes, and his voice when it came was entirely even. It was the voice of a man who had corrected an imbalance and returned to equilibrium.
"Now, you'll respect me. Because I own you."
Ciel's hand went to the back of his neck, not wanting to believe what had just happened. He found the mark and his fingers shook against it and he hated himself for that.
He hated the shaking, hated the pull the bond was already creating toward the man standing two metres away.
He lifted his eyes.
"You---" His voice came out wrecked. He stopped. Breathed and pulled it back from wherever it had gone.
"You bastard, what the hell did you just do to me? How dare you?" He yelled breathlessly in Ryiot's face.
Ryiot held his gaze one moment longer. Then, with the finality of someone closing a file, he looked at Jayden.
"Put him in the car." He instructed and instantly and smoothly, Jayden stepped toward Ciel and lifted him up in a bridal style.