Hollow Sacrifice

Name: Otsuka, Naoki
Age: 21
Birthdate: March 20th
True Name: Hollow
Position: Sacrifice
Partner(s) Name: Hayashi, Daisuke
Gender: Male
Dreams/Goals: He hasn't really thought that far ahead. (For now, he plans to leech off his parent's money in the form of the unit's apartment until the parents die.)

Appearance: Straight, black hair and blue eyes. Toned, but only slightly muscular, not exactly “buff”. Height: 5’11


Ears and Tail: Nonexistent. Formerly velvety, black cat ears.
Name Location: Vertically down the posterior left thigh

Blank. He can definitely come off as cold, but he doesn’t know any better. He tends to avoid large social interactions, if only because he doesn’t understand how to react to or interact with other people. Seemingly aloof, he is actually quite keen when it comes to what is happening around him. But he is always, always blank.

At least, until Daisuke touches him.

The moment his fighter lays a finger on him, Naoki comes to life. He smiles, laughs, and is openly happy. In all of the family pictures after Daisuke is taken in by them, the boys are holding hands and Nao is all but beaming. He can also show his unhappier emotions, because Dai is the only person who understands. He knows that they are both empty, despite what they say or how they act with each other and with others.



He wanted to go for a walk; his mother said perhaps, after dinner. He wanted to go for a walk; his father said it was getting too late. The sun was beginning to set behind the rows of houses on the hill overlooking the town.

An hour later, the boy found himself walking along in a part of town not that far from his own, but very unfamiliar all the same. There was no nervousness in him, no sense of danger. He didn’t know what that was; didn’t know what that felt like. But the air was thick around his face, making his throat scratch as he breathed it in. There was snow falling all around him, warm and papery, and it smeared into dust as it landed on his coat. It was unseasonably warm. Large, naive blue eyes were drawn upward by the sight of billowing smoke, columns of dark, angry grey reaching for the invisible god in the sky, glowing orange closer to the earth. He could hear screaming, shouts of “call for help” and “they’re still inside!”, but the faces were far enough away that he couldn’t make them out.

Then he turned the corner.

The smoke transformed into the wrath of a raging fire,  reaching for heaven from the pits of hell and doing so right through the heart of a home. The house itself was far from salvageable, nothing more than a funeral pyre for the family inside. What had it felt like, he wondered, to be the people trapped in there as their lives literally burned away? The heat from the flame was enough to send the boy on his way quickly, up the road and away from the chaos. It was the first tragedy that he had seen firsthand, and Naoki would hold it in his mind for years to come.

Not a block later (he could still hear the crackling of the flame, the noise of collapsing beams and water hoses trying to battle the rage), he paused on the sidewalk. There was a boy sitting on the steps of an old, abandoned looking house. He had his head in his hands, fluffy brown ears pressed flat against his head, and he was covered in dried blood and charred burns.. Was he crying? Was he dead? He didn’t seem to be moving… And Naoki approached. He had never known the apprehension of danger. He couldn’t fathom it. But the boy didn’t speak, only fixed him with a look that probably should have scared him away. If he knew what fright was, that is. And he could tell… the bloody child was just as hollow as he was.

“They say I’m empty… Are you empty, too?”

It changed the game. He found himself presenting the stranger to his parents with not even as much as a name.

His life changed forever after that night.

It took a few months to get the boy to speak, even longer to get him to speak when Naoki wasn’t present. They figured out who he was by the obituaries, Nao’s parents shooting each other furtive glances behind the pages of the paper. An adoption process was expensive, difficult, and so very much worth their effort. The child was born of a fighting pair, a Unit, and he needed protection that orphanages wouldn’t be able to offer. Plus, when he was around… Naoki smiled. He laughed openly, a beautiful, innocent sound that no one had heard before the Hayashi boy - Daisuke - had appeared.

The two grew up entranced by each other. Naoki had been six when he took his fateful walk, and Daisuke had been eight. They were inseparable until one got his true name at age eleven. Naoki. There had never been any promise that Daisuke would be part of their world. Still, everyone surrounding him was destined to join a unit, and so he was raised as though he was one and the same. And then Nao got his name - black letters boldly seared into the back of his left thigh - Hollow. He was a sacrifice, and Daisuke didn’t have a name. Certainly not the same one, at least. Fighting pairs always got their names at the same time… They were both devastated. Of course, to everyone besides the Otsuka family, it seemed as though Nao was just as unphased as ever, but behind closed doors, when Dai could hold his hand or touch his cheek at the impressionable age of thirteen, it was blatantly obvious just how strongly it affected the younger boy.

He was sent to Seven Moons, where he couldn’t be watched over by Dai… Where he couldn’t show or even feel emotions because the other half of his life wasn’t there to hold his hand. He got into fight after fight, got into trouble so many times… And he always came back. There was no reason not to. If Daisuke wasn’t his fighter, then they must be out there somewhere, right? Or would he be alone? Alone, and empty, with the one person he wished more than anything to be his fighter… just another human?

He wasn’t aware that Daisuke had gotten a name until they both stepped out of the car at Seven Moons one day. And when he asked the older boy, now fifteen, what his name was, he was almost surprised by the response that came. A clasp of hands, a quick, bright smile from a very handsome face (puberty was still hitting them both like bricks) and-

“They say I’m empty… Are you empty, too?”

His fighter had finally appeared, hindered by no one knew what reasons - why his name scrawled itself along his flesh years after Naoki’s is still unknown - and he was there to protect his sacrifice. No more fights, no more trouble. Hollow quickly developed a reputation. The empty boy and his much too kind fighter. The remorseful knight and his heartless king. No one knew the furtive smiles exchanged with touches of flesh - the laughter in the middle of the night. The unit’s relationship changed gradually with age, but on the outside, it always looked the same.

Hollow.

Upon graduating Seven Moons as a successful unit, the Otsuka parents bought their sons a most extravagant gift: an apartment of their own for the boys to live in while they decided what they wanted to do with their lives. A year later, at age 21, Naoki still doesn’t know what he wants to do “when he grows up”, but he’s content with swimming in the summer and working at the public library in the winter. It’s quiet and he can read, and for the most part, people leave him alone.

These are optional fields. If there are other fields not listed below, you may add them.
Dislikes: He doesn't necessarily “dislike” anything. His non-preferences are the color orange and broken kotatsus (heated tables).
Fears: None, really. Deep down, losing Dai is what he's afraid of.
Languages: Japanese and very broken English (from high school)
Likes: Nothing, really. He prefers the color blue and eating fish. Swimming, perhaps. But it's not really a “like”. Just a lot of blue shirts and the taste of oily fish. Summertime at the beach.
Loathes: Nothing, really.
Loves: Nothing, really. Daisuke, if he's asked outright.
Parents/Guardians/Family: Amaya and Hiroshi Otsuka, true name Faultless, are his mother and father, respectively.
Strengths/Weakness: He feels nothing. There are no emotions inside his mind and heart. The only thing to give him any feeling is Daisuke, and only when they are physically touching. Even something as simple as holding hands can bring him back to life. But is that a strength, or a weakness?