Work Text:
“My mother taught me not to talk to strangers,” says the boy, lying shamelessly through his teeth, because he doesn’t have a mother. He has the slums. The slums that birthed him, the slums that raise him, the slums that will put him to the grave.
He is, through and through, a product of gray concrete and brown snow and piss stained corners. This valley emerged after a natural disaster, and that natural disaster might’ve been god, or Lenin, thinking he could end homelessness barely after ending the monarchy, and yet now the only reason the benches don’t have spikes on them is that the government won’t spend a cent on anti-homeless architecture, because even if it’s hostile, it’s public, and public is a word long fallen out of their mouths like rotten teeth. These slums now stand an acidic explosion of color, as attention grabbing as a peacock because they don’t sit atop fields of some post-soviet scab, but rather are a bothersome spot on Yokohama’s maps, and so the natural disaster wasn’t really Lenin, and the slums look like that because the countries change but poverty doesn’t.
“Stupid child,” the voice responds, two beady eyes glistening like rhinestones in lethargic shadows. “I am not a stranger. I am a tiger.”
“And you are a strange one, stranger,” points out the boy, politeness not in his intentions but rather an occasional side effect of his flat affect. “Silver. If you are a tiger, why are you silver?”
Have the chemicals from the factories bleached you, tiger? Have they gotten even to you, majestic cat, has the smog discolored you to a pathetic stray? Size matters not as much as they think, here, because in the merciless wasteland of the slums, all cats are the same. All cats are dirty, and all cats are desperate, and all cats are tigers. I am a tiger too, you see. The boy is a feral animal inside, a huge beast that will devour you when you meet, be the circumstances right.
It’s pretty easy to admit that Akutagawa is attractive in Atsushi’s eyes, nowadays. Restless nights have turned to melancholy twilights, and the tiger became something of a nomad, in contrast to Akutagawa’s stubborn roots growing into his own floorboards. Sliding open a window to get inside never felt like Robin Hood, or even Romeo, but rather like a very casual home invasion. Which is what it is. Sometimes Akutagawa wakes up to his fridge raided, without as much of a note. Sometimes Akutagawa wakes up with a tiger looming over him, knees pressed to each hip, hands over wrists. Sometimes they fuck.
Atsushi runs his fingers over the sweat on Akutagawa’s neck, gingerly, purposelessly, because he hasn’t shed any of his black fur, yet, the overgrown dog hanging onto his skin stubbornly, even when his lip is split, even when there’s blood on his chin, even when his hair is disheveled. Maybe he’s even more attractive, this way, his vulnerability not gentle, and that helps the tiger accept his own claws.
Atsushi finds Akutagawa’s pulse, holds his hand there, counts the beats. Akutagawa is content with feeling Atsushi’s breath, instead, hovering somewhere above his collarbones. They barely know what they’re doing, but they know that they’ll do it slow, even if it kills them.
“Are you going to do anything?” Akutagawa rasps out, after he begins feeling less like a sexual partner and more like the latest casualty in the back of an ambulance, some poor nurse monitoring his heartbeat in the most intimate way imaginable because the hospital can’t afford new equipment.
“Are you going to take off your clothes?” Atsushi responds.
Akutagawa looks down at his own sleeves, the loose ruffles coming up almost to his knuckles.
“Do it for me,” he asks.
“No.”
And it’s always that simple. Akutagawa slides his coat off his shoulders, and he doesn’t know if Atsushi is simply less willing to have any kind of control on his hands, or he just gets off on watching. Either way, it’s not a show. Akutagawa droops his shoulders, scrunches in on himself as he takes off his shirt, and the moonlight can only reflect on a small patch of his right arm. Atsushi’s digits find themselves on his wrist, digging in.
“Are you scared I’m going to drop dead on you?” scoffs Akutagawa, without any mirth.
“No,” Atsushi responds again, and kisses Akutagawa into silence. He slides off a pair of boxers, and slides a finger inside, and so once again they can pretend they’re both cadavers, and there’s nothing meaningful to this, even though Atsushi’s right hand never gets off Akutagawa’s pulse.
Holes in clothes are never the result of sexy, lace, white lingerie, in this house. They’re always the result of the two men having money, but never acting as such.
“I wonder if we can make it big enough for your dick to fit,” says Atsushi, hooking two fingers into the tear in the fabric, brushing past Akutagawa’s sensitive flesh, only making the former frown, unclear if at the comment or the unsatisfying touch.
“That’s stupid,” he reprimands with a glare, but still doesn’t move, hands planted behind him, he is like a statue, a static toy for a spoilt prince, a holy maiden accepting of her role in the hands of god, a scarlet back realizing it’s too late to wash his hands of the party. He lets Atsushi pull the boxers down, still grabbing the hole, and the wound may grow, but Akutagawa lets it happen, still. It’s kind of pathetic, frankly.
“Well, we need to give this a purpose, don’t we,” Atsushi shrugs, and now Akutagawa’s dick is in full view, but Atsushi is still focused on that stupid hole in the fucking underwear. It’s like the aftermath of a supernova, a portal to the void, the slums in the heart (or, more accurately, something like the appendix) of Yokohama. It’s greatly distracting, and makes Akutagawa only more insulted, heat rising to his cheeks in tandem with anger and annoyance. “We need to give the hole a purpose, because otherwise, we’d need to throw this whole thing away, and it would be a real shame, right?”
The anger boils up to the surface before his brain can even process the fact that he agrees with the sentiment, because it’s said by Atsushi so surely it’s unbearable. Atsushi yelps as he hits the floorboards, and Akutagawa’s shins are still shackled by his boxers, and the hole is still the slums, but that doesn’t make Akutagawa’s snarl any less ferocious, and Atsushi doesn’t kiss first, he never does, but he wiggles like a worm to try to get Akutagawa as close to him as possible, and he cups Akutagawa’s jaw, and he probably moans. Akutagawa is too busy yanking off his underwear, jerking him off violently in the liminal space between their stomachs, and Atsushi moans more and fists his hand in Akutagawa’s hair, suddenly remembering he is, too, desperate, and intensity is a good antidote.
“Give this a purpose, prick,” Akutagawa hisses, hot breath hitting Atsushi’s throat, over and over, like a mantra, to the point where he forgets what the words mean, and they sound like abstract sounds to him, and he doesn’t know what he was even talking about. “Give this a fucking purpose.”
Akutagawa’s mother, the leaking hole in the roof, the non-existent electricity, the rabid dogs on the street, taught him that smoking kills, by killing him. He has never touched a cigarette in his life, yet one day he wakes up in the middle of the night and it smells like home, if only home had a little more disposable income.
Atsushi is a cruel, terrible, inconsiderate beast beneath the moonlight, because he either doesn’t know about secondhand smoking, or chooses to forget about death in Akutagawa’s lungs, or he doesn’t care about either, because the city is his ashtray and the night air is his filter.
“You smoke?” Akutagawa squints, coming up to the windowsill Atsushi is sitting on, staring at the sky.
“No,” he shrugs. “Kunikida confiscated this one from Dazai, I nicked it.”
“Dazai smokes?”
The response to that is a cloud of white, shot out and dispersed into the air like a train whistle, and Akutagawa watches it take the shape of a bomb, and he’s drowning in the smell, and he scrunches up his nose because he wonders if this is what Atsushi is going to smell like after he’s done.
“What are you even doing?” he asks. “Are you trying to be cool, heard somewhere that people smoke after sex, and well, if you do one you might as well do the other? Do you, once again, have no thoughts of your own, and figured that if Dazai does it, you should too?”
Atsushi doesn’t look at back inside the room, and it feels like he has the conversation with the cigarette more than he does with Akutagawa.
“Just wanted to try it,” he shrugs again. He’s staring at the moon, his silver sister, and wonders if that’s the reason he’s silver, too, because he wasn’t raised in the appendix of Yokohama, so he hasn’t considered that his coat has been chemically washed out of its natural color.
Akutagawa squeezes his eyes shut, and he doesn’t know if he’s frustrated or just can’t stop thinking about his childhood. His whole body feels fuzzy, like foam, and he’s getting dizzy, and he can’t tell if it’s the nicotine he’s being exposed to or if he’s the problem.
He props himself up on the windowsill, too, and he feels the years trickle off his lifespan in waves, a steady, freezing waterfall, something that both jolts him awake and pries away his consciousness. He feels like he’s bleeding from between his thighs, from his neck, from everywhere the tiger has ever touched him, and he feels a deep urge to hate him, right now, for doing this, his hands tickle to push Atsushi out of the window, even if he can’t fully process his sensation. But, he’s an adult, so he has to use his words.
“Hey,” he says, raspy and small, awkward pauses between the syllables as he pushes them out. “Can you… can you not do this in my house?”
Atsushi finally looks at him. There’s no malice in his pulsing, purple eyes. It makes Akutagawa want to die more.
“Why?”
Akutagawa doesn’t answer. He would ask for the cigarette to be put out on his bare skin, were he worse. He would’ve gotten off on it, made it part of their violent routine, would’ve looked in the mirror and called himself a masochist, would’ve rationalized it. But, he’s better, unfortunately. They’re both better, because setting boundaries means you think there’s a chance they’ll be followed, so they both have to be better. Akutagawa tastes shit on his tongue, and it’s not just the putrid air.
“Okay,” Atsushi says, squishing the lit tobacco into brick, before dropping it into the abyss. “Sorry.”
Next time Akutagawa finishes, he doesn’t come inside.
The white spills all over Atsushi’s thighs, some on his stomach, and he hasn’t even orgasmed himself.
“Why did you do that?” is the first thing he asks, looking up with lidded eyes, splayed out in the folds like some kind of renaissance painting, although in Akutagawa’s vision the figure quickly morphs into cubism, abstract shapes then quickly tamed into gruff, utilitarian realism.
Akutagawa exhales, runs his fingers through his hair, he’s so sick of explaining himself, he’s just sick.
“Can I just suck you off?” he offers, weakly.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Atsushi says, his savior head brandishing a halo, and he’s always like this, too, it’s not even basic human decency, it’s just his niceness, sparkling and shining through layers and layers of viciousness and teeth, teeth that cover his entire body, teeth he’s not even aware of.
“I know,” Akutagawa hisses. “And yet I’m offering. So?”
Atsushi squints.
“Sure,” he says after a pause, tired as well, and sits up, cradles Akutagawa’s head in his arm and kisses his temple, which is not the position one assumes to receive head, but Akutagawa cannot find it in him to protest.
He embraces the tiger in response, places kisses on his shoulders, right on top of bite marks, and he slowly descends down, trailing his face over bare skin, selfishly consuming the sensation, not caring for how it feels on the other side.
He takes Atsushi’s erection in his mouth, and it reminds him just how limp his own cock is. He licks up slow stripes, then he hollow out his cheeks and sucks, and he can hear Atsushi whimper, and he can feel his fist pull at his scalp, and Akutagawa cannot let go of the idea of cannibalism as he tastes Atsushi on his tongue, and it doesn’t turn him on at all, so he has to address that there’s more than lust, here, that there’s a reason he’s doing this, and it’s not obligation, and it’s not his own limp cock.
Atsushi cums with a painful tug to the skull. Akutagawa swallows.
“I think I like you,” Akutagawa says when he wipes his mouth. It sounds silly, tragically childish, dumb. “Or something about you, at least.”
“I think you like the fact that I’m a tiger,” Atsushi says, head thrown back, still reeling. “Since you bring it up so much.”
Akutagawa glares back, his eyes hissing. He’s shaking.
“You’re very, very stupid,” he whispers, and then collapses from what feels like blood loss.
Akutagawa moans into Atsushi’s ear less because he’s an agitator and more because he always follows his body’s urges and assesses his surroundings after the fact. It was always that way, since he was a child, his hands never grasped political action, but he’s deeply aware of the fact that political passivity is still political.
Atsushi keeps hammering the same spot, electric shocks sent down Akutagawa’s limbs, and he claws at the tiger’s bare back, squeezes his eyes shut, buries his lips in the shoulder presented for him, feels teeth dig into his neck, and all these sensations are too disconnected to form a singular experience, so he feels everything, at once, and struggles to hang onto the idea of Atsushi as a person, rather than a nebulous something.
It’s overwhelming, and for now it’s in a way that doesn’t bring any specific displeasure, the same way crying alone in a dark alleyway could be neutral, so he gives in, tries to imagine which one of them is God, and which one is the slums. Which one of them is God, and which one is his shitter. He tries to imagine which one of them is God.
A whimper slips out between Akutagawa’s molars like week old vomit, and he remembers the story about a boy with a beast trembling in his ribcage, and he remembers the time the boy met a tiger, and he remembers that the boy would devour the tiger, be the circumstances right.
But the circumstances are never right. There’s always something slightly askew, there’s always this deep feeling of discomfort, and whenever they try to grow their utopias, the soil is always somehow wrong, or the gardeners, or the people, or the universe itself just refuses you salvation. And when that happens, you look at the wasteland left behind, and ask yourself: do I even believe in the right circumstances anymore? Is this the price for our attempts at imagining a world where things are just a little bit fairer, or is the concept of price non-existent? Because if so, there’s hope. If so, the universe doesn’t have the commodity form built in. If so, the slums didn’t have to raise anyone, but they did. They did.
If so, Akutagawa can reach out, squirm through his orgasm, and bite Atsushi’s head off. Then, he can get up, and clean the cum first, because that’s more embarrassing, and then wipe off the blood, because that’s more understandable. He can find out if corpses can get boners. He can sit in the shower for hours, letting the cadaver rot away on his sheets, he can find out what true stillness is, he can lock all his relationships in an endless pause. He can realize that he’s really, really gross.
Atsushi reaches the end of his story first, pouring it all inside Akutagawa. Akutagawa’s clouded, tortured mind accepts this reality for a second, accepts being stuck in limbo while Atsushi thrives, and then he receives a few more thrusts, a palm wrapped around his erection, and gentle tugs beckoning him to his own conclusion.
Akutagawa comes into Atsushi’s hand with some sort of embarrassing noise, arching his back on the bed, and Atsushi pulls out. Akutagawa pants like he was just resurrected, and he concludes neither of them are God. But one is the slums. One will always be the slums.
Akutagawa knows why the tiger is silver: because he had a father who poured bleach over the beautiful orange sunset, who beat him until the bruises turned white, who thought ‘killing with kindness’ meant killing was kind. The tiger was a stranger, because his home was not designed for violence, but cultivated for it nonetheless.
“I think I like you,” Akutagawa whispers, and he can feel the memory in his veins: the black jacket over his shoulders, the two hands on top of it, the tears down his cheeks.
“You said that already,” nods Atsushi, stuck entirely with the cleaning job. Akutagawa can’t tell if he’s grumpy about this or not, he’s too busy staring at the ceiling.
“You don’t get it,” Akutagawa sighs. He’s taking his first steps, now, out into the moonlight, into the jaws of a bigger beast, one that’s terrible, one that will govern his life for the rest of time, but one that is at least comprehensible. One that is a person, one that may be a cycle, but one that is, at least, not a system. One that feels less like mother, as in mother nature, and one that feels more like mother, as in mom.
“What in the hell are you talking about?” Atsushi asks, and receives no answer.
Somewhere in the heart of Yokohama, a book is being written. Somewhere in the appendix, a child dies. Somewhere in the rear end of the backbone, on the very edge, a mom teaches a boy to kill strangers.
Somewhere in the nerve system, God knows where, a tiger without a mother meets a boy raised by two mothers.
“It’s too much,” the boy says, trying not to cry, because the roles are usually reversed, he wields explosive rage at his fingertips, and yet he is turned to mush.
“That’s my line,” the tiger says, confused.
“It’s too much,” the boy repeats, again, because time travel is real and he’s back at the point where he didn’t yet accept his own death, and he’s back at the point where fear was not yet abolished.
“We can stop,” the tiger says, cautiously.
“No, we can’t,” the boy hisses. “We never fucking could.”
The story doesn’t end, yet, but it will, one day, and it will not end at the same time for both leads, and Akutagawa never believed in things bigger than himself, so he feels something sticky on his stomach, and doesn’t move a muscle, because he knows he’s experiencing slow, deteriorating death, and the beast inside him was disease all along, and the tiger was never of the slums.
“I’m close,” Akutagawa whimpers, and lets Atsushi deal with the consequences.