Author's Notes:
-Hello, and thanks for giving this odd little story of mine a chance. Now, I hate to have to do this, but there are a few concepts I'm going to have to explain for those who are fandom-blind.
-+-Beastars' setting is a world full of anthropomorphic animals. These animals, however, are designed to resemble humans much more closely than something like Zootopia. (Beastars gets compared to Zootopia a lot, just as a heads up, since they have a lot of similar themes.)
-+-The Black Market is a part of the city that serves as the backdrop for the story (it doesn't have a name, I checked) where animals, primarily carnivores, go to obtain meat and other illicit or taboo products. (Yes, some carnivores still eat meat in this society. Most of it comes from deceased herbivores, and I think you can draw your own conclusions about the rest.
-+-The Inarigumi are one of the Four Families, criminal gangs that control most of the black market and usually confine their members to a single species. With the Inarigumi, that species is foxes and most of them are female (hence, my main character selection).
-That's all. I hope you enjoy the story, and thanks for reading!
Night Vision
The albino fox had been assigned as an organic warning system, nothing more. Sure, her presence caused many of the weaker-willed animals who passed by to press against the other wall of the alleyway to avoid her, but in the event a rival gang emerged to break down the Inarigumi's door, she'd be nothing more than a bullet-strewn corpse on the filthy street, a testament to the violence that defined the Black Market.
She still treated her job as a badge of pride. She could contribute something. She meant something. And it beat sleeping in the street any day of the week.
The newest recruit of the Inarigumi, having been taken in but two short months ago, she'd spent most of her time until now training to meet the rigorous standards required of a member. Combat. Intelligence. Emotional awareness. She had pushed all of those and more to their limits time and time again, causing the terrified child she'd entered to blossom into a mature, combat-savvy adult at the tender age of sixteen. From this training, she'd gotten her first position upgrade, as well as the nickname 'The Mangle' for her viciousness in hand-to-hand combat. Whenever she wasn't fighting, though, everyone knew her as Mai.
The first two hours or so of her first-ever guard shift had gone by with no encroaching enemies other than boredom. While saying the Inarigumi had placed their headquarters in the middle of nowhere was an outlandish claim, its location was well off the Black Market's main drag, smack in the middle of a largely-desolate patch of land crammed with half-empty tenement buildings and languishing meat stalls, no one except those local to the area willing to grab a bite in this place. More true than ever at this time of night, sandwiched between the hours of the late-night crowd finally hitting the sack and the early risers preparing to start a new day. The area outside of the building might as well have been a tomb, and it provided little interest for her.
Mai rubbed her hand through the snow-white fur on her head, brushing it out of her eyes while taking care due to the wolverine claws she'd chosen as her weapon. Due to her poor sight, a condition stemming from her albinism, the Inarigumi hadn't trusted her with a gun yet, which worked out considering she didn't trust herself with one, either. Anything further than about fifty feet away, especially this time of night and with the polychromatic glare of the Black Market searing into her eyes, faded to nothing more than hazy blobs in the distance. Good luck trying to hit a target in that.
Her face newly cleared, she turned back in the direction she'd been walking and resumed patrol, slashing her claws through thin air on occasion to make sure she stayed focused. She completed several loops of her area this way, settling back into her routine.
Then came the noise. Animals had passed through the alley she patrolled from time to time, but the ones she'd seen moved at a pace that capped at a brisk stroll, even if some sped up to pass her by more quickly. This noise, however, was a rapid pitter-patter that got Mai's nerves on edge. Whenever someone had to run through this section of the Black Market, they either needed to escape the clutches of a desperate carnivore…
Or they were a rival gang member, or even a whole gang, about to attack the Inarigumi and all who represented them.
Mai's fingers twitched, their attached claws twitching with them. Then, she dropped into a crouch, prepared to spring at whoever arrived as soon as they entered her line of sight. The noise grew louder, louder, louder…
Until its cause burst into clarity, breathing hard and slowing to a dead stop right in front of her. The animal took the form of another fox, this one with grungy orange fur and a hint of madness hiding in his lone visible eye, the other socket obscured by a ratty eye patch that looked like it would fall off his head at any moment. Scars covered his face and cheeks, one even running over the stump where an ear used to be, the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle that would never be finished. Panic emanated from every visible feature he had, the creature shaking like he was being held at gunpoint.
Now, Mai didn't pounce. Instead, she started shaking, hard enough that one might wonder whether someone had dropped ice cubes down her shirt. She recognized this animal, and now was neither the time nor place for a family reunion.
"Frank," she hissed, "I'm working. Can this wait until morning?"
"No," he said. "This needs to be said now. You're being watched. We're all being watched."
Mai might have given that statement more thought if it had come from someone else, but Frank said things like this so often they'd lost any meaning for her. Despite his hardened exterior, Frank was still a twitchy, flighty creature, bound to take off running at the slightest provocation. While Mai had lived in the Black Market for as long as she could remember, Frank had left as soon as he was able and never looked back.
"Of course we are, we're in the Black Market," Mai said. "You need to leave. I don't want you to get hurt."
"I can run pretty fast, I'll be hard to WHAT THE—"
That last part came because the other two guards working with Mai had materialized from seemingly nowhere and were now holding guns to both their heads. Frank yelped, looking like he'd melt into a puddle at any second, but Mai kept as calm as possible even as her heart started to race faster than a bullet. Too bad the rest of her couldn't go with it.
One of the guards, a severe older fox with a chunk missing from the left side of her face named Miyako, began to speak, her voice monotone and haunting. "Give me a good reason why I shouldn't just shoot you both right now."
Frank looked like he wouldn't be helpful, so Mai took the initiative. "He's my brother. He just wanted to say hello."
"I'm not sure if you've recognized this by now, but any bonds but ours mean jack here," she said, pointing to her deformity. "One of my former best friends did this to me during a turf war. If I hadn't killed him, he'd have killed me first. For all I know, he could be an enemy informant."
Mai gestured to Frank, who looked about two seconds from passing out and with a noticeable stain on the crotch of his track pants. "Forgive me for asking, but does that look like the temperament an informant would have?"
"It's a farce," Miyako said. "He's acting. Too over the top. Let's get this over with."
Before either she or the other guard could pull the trigger, Frank shouted, "WAIT!"
Somehow, that seemed to work, if only for a short time. No shots fired whatsoever.
Miyako didn't take her finger off the trigger. "Why should I?"
Frank didn't look anywhere near composed, but he appeared to scrape together enough resolve that everything he'd wanted to tell his sister came tumbling out in a breathless frenzy. "You're being watched. I don't know by whom, but someone's been watching you for quite some time. If you don't shoot, I can show you right now."
What saved them was Mai's status as a new recruit. While Miyako didn't seem convinced, the other guard was another fairly new member of the Inarigumi named Kaori who'd just turned eighteen and been recruited mere weeks before Mai had. The bonding they'd gone through as they trained together, each learning from the other, gave Mai just enough sway over Kaori's opinion to delay their deaths. "Give them a chance, Miyako. This could be big."
Miyako didn't seem convinced and started proclaiming that it was nothing more than a cheap tactic to buy time for a potential escape, but then Frank pointed and everyone fell silent.
Mai's eyes followed her brother's outstretched arm, seeing nothing at first, but then she looked a bit higher, and a bit higher, and a bit higher, until she spotted something out of the corner of her eye that she swore had to be an illusion. She took a few more steps in an attempt to get a new perspective, and she got one when she found herself staring straight into the lens of some kind of security camera. A well-hidden security camera, placed expertly into a nook between a wall and an overhanging window sill and fading into the moss and brick, but one that had been no match for Frank's paranoia.
Miyako's face had contorted into an expression of 'does not compute,' and she lowered her gun. "What the… how long has that been there?"
"A month, at least," Frank said.
Miyako's voice became very strained. "And how, precisely, do you know that?"
"I wanted to get a look at where Mai lived, and maybe say hello and get a coffee with her or something in the process," Frank said, speaking in rapid-fire bursts. "I came from the same direction as this time, and that's when I noticed the camera. I knew it wasn't yours because first off, why only have the one, and second off, why would you point it towards your base instead of away from it? When I passed by a few more times and it was still there, that's when I knew this was serious."
Now Kaori had gotten invested. "Are there others?"
"This is the only one I know of, but there may very well be," Frank said. "I don't know why it's here; maybe it's the work of one of the other Families or maybe it's something unrelated. But either way, it's a threat I wanted to warn my sister about, but I guess now you all know it too."
Mai didn't know much about the inner workings of the other Families. Her first and only experience with any of them had been mere weeks ago during a separate turf war from the one that had disfigured Miyako, and even then she'd hung well back from Ten and the rest of the high-ranking foxes as they held the front lines. Cowardly, yes, but also practical, especially with her lack of training. And when a more aggressive upstart from the Madaragumi had tried to ambush her, she'd still proven her worth. The guy had been carried out of that brawl looking like he'd taken a chainsaw to himself, while she added a few new scars to her collection but walked away under her own power.
"I'll get Ten," Miyako said. "She'll want to know about this. You three, stay here."
As Miyako left to go find Ten, the others waited for her to return, none of them noticing that the camera had just been turned off.
Mai had been right about one thing, which was that most animals who went to the Black Market expected to be watched. In a place like that, it was nothing more than a rite of passage. However, those animals expected the ones doing the watching to be either members of one of the Four Families or desperate meat-craving carnivores, both of them deciding whether they were worth the risk of jumping.
Neither of those characteristics extended to the rabbit lit only by the glow of a computer screen, who had no gang affiliation whatsoever and had never eaten anything more substantial than chickpeas. Yet he watched over the Black Market anyway, scarred fingers flying across the keyboard as he hopped from location to location without ever taking a step, equally-scarred face stuck in something between a frown and a grimace.
Someone had discovered one of his cameras. While he'd taken it offline to lessen the odds of it being traced back to him (even if he'd determined technological know-how was not the Inarigumi's strong suit), it still opened the possibility of others being discovered and his entire operation crumbling down around him.
In his not-very-humble opinion, that operation had given him more power than any other animal, or even any other organization, in the Black Market. Via a small army of security cameras and almost six years' worth of work, he'd been able to create a profile of just about every animal, business, and racket centered there, which amounted to a truly staggering amount of information. Every horrific thing one of the Families had ever done, every juicy little secret he could squirrel away, the names and kinks and habits of every spook, freak, and skulk who thought themselves invisible to the public eye. If he'd wanted, he could have simply leaked everything to an online source and watched as the Black Market imploded under the weight of its innumerable sins, but that wasn't his style.
Thus, he kept it sequestered for the most part. He'd share bits and pieces given the right price, but so few knew about him that he didn't even qualify as an urban legend. He'd hoped to try and start expanding his influence a bit more now that he was fully comfortable with the sheer volume of information he'd collected, but now he had to put that on hiatus so he could handle this potential disaster.
The options he had were pretty simple: leave things alone and hope none of his other cameras got discovered, or take out the fox that had done the discovering and see if the Inarigumi took the hint. One could lead to a slow crumbling of everything he'd built up with every camera found, while the other could blow up spectacularly in his face if the Inarigumi decided to retaliate, or worse, ally with the other Families to try and find him. Ultimately, the decision was between potential doom and potential doom, so he just needed to figure out which one suited his tastes better and do it fast.
It only took him about fifteen seconds to make his choice.
Like most animals planning to do something nefarious, he had a burner phone he could easily dispose of when things got hot. Now, he slipped on a pair of disposable gloves and dialed a number he knew well. It belonged to his first-ever customer, a monolith of a brown bear working as a hitman whom he'd seen growing increasingly distressed that he couldn't find his target in the Black Market's labyrinthine layout.
Looking back on his method to contact the guy the first time, he suppressed a chuckle. Everything was so much easier now that he'd grown some roots here.
Sure, it was 4:30 in the morning, but he knew the guy kept strange hours, so the call being answered right away had been expected. Unfortunately, at the start the voice on the other end was so garbled it was impossible to decipher anything it said.
Not sure what to do with that, he just tried to get something through. "Uh, hello? Hello, hello? Hello? Can you hear me?"
"I can hear you fine, thank you," the hitman replied, his voice now clear save for the occasional burp of static. "Sorry, phone troubles on my end. What's with the call? There's nothing you can help me with; I'm in between jobs at the moment, if you know what I mean."
"Well, that works out perfectly, because I'm giving you one, and it starts right now if you accept," he said. "I just need you to tail a guy and find out where he lives. That's all I care about, I can handle the rest from there. I'll wire you your payment after the deed is done."
"Done," the hitman said without an instant of hesitation, which was strange since he hadn't even mentioned a price yet. "What's he look like?"
"Fox missing both an eye and an ear. He's outside in track pants and a gray shirt but the area he's in is too hot at the moment. Once he gets somewhere quieter, I'll start giving you directions on where to find him, so stay on the line."
"Seems easy enough. I presume you'll be watching those cameras of yours?"
He cracked a smile there. "Why wouldn't I be?"
He turned back to his monitor to do just that. Even though the most important area no longer was covered, everywhere around it was still on feed. There were only so many directions his target could leave the location from, and as long as he didn't do something mind-bogglingly stupid, he'd catch the target on his way out.
And catch the target on his way out he did. Maybe fifteen minutes later, the guy entered one of the feeds displayed on screen, running at a dead sprint for no clear reason.
"He's running north, headed for the center of the Black Market," he said. "Unless he takes a sharp turn, there's really only one plausible exit he's taking, you and I both know that. You think you can catch him there?"
A deep, somewhat unsettling laugh came from the other end of the line. "Of course I can. You're not doubting me, are you?"
"Don't worry, I know better than that. There's a reason I called you first." Considering his abilities and the nature of a hitman's work, he'd managed to forge bonds with several of them during his time in the Black Market. However, the first one he met had yet to be surpassed, and given that he'd only gotten better as time wore on, this one was unlikely to be dethroned.
"I should go. I'll call again once I've tracked him down."
"Works for me," he said, then ended the call.
Right then and there, a separate alarm went off on his laptop, indicating that he had ten minutes to leave if he wanted to get to his official job, a waiter for a family restaurant he couldn't be bothered to learn the name of, on time. Maybe he came off as a bit strange for that; few if any animals as invested as he in a criminal enterprise had a day job on the side, but it did wonders for diverting any suspicion aimed his way for that precise reason. The further he strayed from the archetypes of a typical crime boss, the fewer things people had to point to when accusing him of anything. While he couldn't say it had saved him yet, it was one of the numerous reasons no one had even come close to pinning him down until now.
And they weren't ever going to do so. Not on his watch. It didn't matter what lines he had to cross, or how much misery he created, or even if everything he knew got destroyed in the process.
Survival of his operation came first and foremost. Nothing else mattered.
Frank returned home to a pitch-dark apartment.
A little darkness was to be expected, considering the sun had set hours ago, but this went far beyond that; he could barely see his hand in front of his face. Fumbling around for a few seconds, he managed to make contact with one of the light switches by sheer luck, but when he pressed it, nothing happened.
"Of course the thing chose now to break," he said to himself, beginning to stagger across the apartment in search of the other light switch.
Before he could reach it, though, he heard the sharp noise of the door closing behind him, causing him to yelp and whip his head around. "What the heck was…"
He tailed off upon seeing the rabbit. He couldn't see much more than its face, considering it was lit by nothing but what appeared to be the glow of a pocket flashlight, but everything about it screamed danger; its filthy brown fur, the look of sheer determination in its eyes, the scars crisscrossing its hideous surface, the missing ear, the grin that did not belong on anything outside of a mental hospital. All that and more terrified Frank, but the cherry on top of that sundae came from the unmistakable glint of something sharp and metallic in the flashlight's beam, pointed straight at him.
"Oh," the rabbit said, his voice saccharine as liquid sugar and almost as pleasant. "Hello."
Frank began backing up toward the other end of the apartment, his brain screaming at him to run but his legs refusing to cooperate, even as the rabbit began advancing on him. "Hello?"
Then before he could even scream, the rabbit lunged and the world cut to black.
Mai had been preparing herself for her second-ever guard shift when Kaori burst into the room, clutching her smartphone so tightly it was a miracle it didn't break. Her face bore the kind of panic usually reserved for Frank, and she'd been doing some combination of crying and wiping her face, since her makeup, usually immaculate, was now a cluster of messy smears.
"Mai," she said in a soft voice. "I feel awful for you, but you have to know this."
She gave Kaori a confused look. "Know what?"
Kaori had several coughing fits in a row before shoving her smartphone in Mai's direction. "I'm so sorry, I can't tell you. Just look."
Mai looked. There she saw the last thing she'd remember that night.
The screen showed an article from an online newspaper, the name of which didn't register in her mind as she stared blankly. The picture it used to illustrate its latest breaking-news article lodged itself into her brain like an ice pick, though. It displayed a figure who'd been chopped into pieces, the police making an attempt to cover the gruesome display with a tarp but doing a rather poor job of it. That alone didn't horrify her, though; living in the Black Market for so long had desensitized her to violence like that.
What did terrify her, however, was the victim's face, frozen in a permanent state of terror. Deep, bloody gashes mingling with pre-existing scars, most of its teeth missing, fur ripped out to reveal the flayed, raw skin beneath...
And the remnants of an eye patch hanging off the side of his face, ripped to shreds and stained with blood.