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Yusuke became vaguely aware of something wet running down the side of his face. A flick of the wrist to wipe it away was met with a searing pain cascading down the entire length of his right arm. The musty scent wafting through the air paired with the strange, spongy ground beneath his body would suggest that he was still within the tunnels of Mementos.
Feeling as if his entire being had been forcibly tossed into a blender, Yusuke blinked, attempting to bring the blurry form crouched in front of him into focus.
“...Joker?”
“You lost a lot of blood.”
Even as Yusuke’s vision began to clear, the scowl that flashed over Akechi’s face was impossible to miss.
“What has happened?” Yusuke asked, his own voice sounding as if it were coming from someone far away.
“Shadows,” Akechi answered plainly, digging around for something in his bag as Yusuke began to struggle upright. “Hey, don’t try to get up. It’s not worth it, trust me.”
“I am well aware that this is the work of the shadows,” Yusuke sighed to the ceiling as he surrendered to the molten pain, falling still. If only he could just sink into the floor, becoming one with Mementos forever, an insect frozen in amber. Perhaps such a fate was more favorable than the situation he had found himself entangled in when making the choice to become involved with Akechi.
Finding what he had been searching for, Akechi held up a transparent pill bottle. Nearly empty, four or five pills rattled forlornly around the bottom. “They ambushed us, when we weren’t paying attention. I’m not sure what else you want me to say about it.”
“I just thought that you would be angrier, that’s all,” Yusuke commented. Akechi despised being caught off guard.
“I already took it out on them, don’t worry.” Akechi yanked open the bottle, tapping two pills onto his gloved palm. “Here, I bought a few of these from Joker’s back-alley doctor. They actually work, if you can believe it.”
Again, Yusuke made an effort to sit up, only this time, Akechi braced the back of Yusuke’s head, holding him steady.
“I said stay still,” Akechi warned, using his white sleeve to wipe some of the blood from Yusuke’s face. “Do you want me to think you’re some kind of masochist?”
Yusuke remained silent. Replying was far too much of an effort.
Almost tenderly, Akechi pressed one of the pills against Yusuke’s lips, and Yusuke could feel the smooth leather of a glove just barely breach his waiting mouth. “Can you swallow two at once? It would be kind of pathetic if you choked to death after surviving that hit.”
Yusuke nodded, parting his lips farther, allowing Akechi to press the pills onto his tongue. Holding a bottle of water to Yusuke’s lips, he helped him to drink it down.
“You’re no good to fight like this, we should head back.” Yusuke could hear the frustration in Akechi’s voice.
“Forgive me…” Yusuke mumbled, guiltily clasping hands with the pain as he joined in its terrible mocking dance. Although medication worked far quicker in the Metaverse than in the real world, he knew deep down that he was finished for the day. Even Takemi’s wonder drugs did little for the emotional exhaustion born of a concussion and broken arm. All things considered, however, he did regret the fact that Akechi would have to remove his hand from the back of Yusuke’s head, fingers currently entangled in his hair. Closing his eyes, he allowed himself to relish in the touch for a moment more.
Yusuke fell into bed, still fully clothed. It was nearly midnight, and judging by the single line he had smeared across the canvas in all of three hours, painting was to be crossed off his agenda for the day.
Experimentally, he raised his right arm as high as it would reach toward the ceiling, wriggling each of his fingers with all the wonder of a ghost who had only just then discovered how to possess a human body. There wasn’t a slightest hint of pain, as if it had never been broken at all. Which, maybe it hadn’t, if the things that happened to their bodies in the Metaverse were based solely on their own cognition. No matter how dire the injury, it simply vanished upon their return, like a stage actor washing off fake blood at the end of a performance.
As he lay there, Yusuke found his mind wandering through the overgrowth of his old life, that of just months before. If he had discovered the Metaverse while still living firmly beneath Madarame’s thumb, would he have used the Metaverse to push himself to the brink? Allowing the shadows to beat him within an inch of his life just to feel something? Just to make a choice that was his alone?
Yusuke slept deeply that night. If he dreamed, they had long evaporated before he awoke.
“A proposal?” Akechi repeated, swallowing a large bite of crepe. Strawberry, a flavor he had likely acquired a taste for from tagging around with Sumire during weekends when Yusuke was too absorbed in his current project to fully realize what day it was. “I know we’ve been seeing each other for a while now, but isn’t it too soon to think about marriage?”
Yusuke frowned. Whatever was on his mind, it left no room for the frivolous atmosphere Akechi attempted to curate whenever they were out together in the real world. “I meant as in a suggestion.”
“Is this about your art again?” Akechi’s stomach clenched whenever Yusuke took too long to reach his point, which was often. Not being able to predict a conversation’s path left him uneasy, unable to map his own verbal route in advance, led astray this way and that by the meandering causeway that was Yusuke Kitagawa.
“No. I do think about other topics on occasion, you know.” The ice cream melted off of Yusuke’s spoon dripping back into the dish as he spoke. Even when food was put right in front of him, he would forget to eat. Akechi wondered what would happen if he were to grab the spoon and force-feed him, right there in public. Maybe he would choke, coughing and sputtering as it ran down his chin.
“Such as?” Akechi leaned in, attempting to hide his nerves behind the ever-gauzy veil of flirtation.
“You.”
Maybe it was Akechi’s turn to choke to death right in the middle of a crowded cafe. The single word came forth more charged than any of Yusuke’s other typical soliloquies.
Akechi smiled cheerfully, taking a much smaller bite, immediately dry and sticky inside of his mouth. “ Me ? Surely I’m not all that exciting.”
“You are, in fact, quite fascinating, albeit somewhat insufferable at times. But that is neither here nor there. At the moment, I’d like to discuss the searing anger roiling unchecked within you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Akechi denied automatically, but even to his own ears sounding like little more than a petulant child. This, of course, did nothing to disprove Yusuke’s point.
Yusuke continued, “You hold it tightly, nurturing it, like a mother holding her child. This is something that I had chosen to accept as an intrinsic part of you when I made the decision to stand at your side. That said, I truly do wish to embrace all of you, as I have come to learn that those we love can contain many facets.”
Akechi’s heart wriggled uncomfortably, a worm gnawing at the apple’s rotten core. Having someone express their care for him so vocally continued to be an exceptionally challenging concept for him to fully grasp, slipping between his fingers like water.
“So what did you have in mind?”
“Are you sure about this?” Akechi asked one more time, staring Yusuke straight in the eyes through the holes in his mask. Casually, he adjusted one glove, as if such a simple motion would provide adequate distraction for either of them. It was little surprise that the tension between them remained fully rooted, its vines holding them firmly intertwined to the point of interrupted circulation deep within their veins.
Faces covered as they were during ventures in the Metaverse, Akechi had had to learn more than ever to glean Yusuke's moods through his dark and soulful eyes alone. Unlike Joker and his smirk full of childish bravado--a little boy playing cops and robbers in the schoolyard--Yusuke’s eternally verbose lips remained concealed beneath the narrow face of a fox. Akechi fought a fleeting urge to tear off the cheap-looking mask-- no more than a petty festival prize--and dash it to the pulsating floor of Mementos. To claim those lips as his own until they were bruised and breathless.
“You doubt my sincerity?” Yusuke tossed back mildly, as if they were settling on a place to eat for lunch.
Akechi smiled, and the ease with which it came so suddenly left him feeling as if his own face were fully naked, despite his mask still so firmly set in place.
“It takes a liar to know one,” he said, taking a step forward, gloved finger finding its way to Yusuke’s chin, lifting it so that the gleam of honesty deep within in his dark eyes caught the strange glow of the fluorescent lights. “You really do want this, huh?”
Grasping Akechi’s wrist, holding the simple touch in place, Yusuke replied, “I want this for your sake.”
Turning abruptly, Akechi made for the rusted escalator. “There’s a rest stop on the next floor.”
Yusuke’s hand fell limply to his side.
While he certainly wasn’t a stranger to keeping the truth just beyond arm’s reach, Akechi could at least privately admit that he had entertained thoughts about it at least once. His bare hands around Yusuke’s throat, watching that perfect face contort with fear.
….No, that wasn’t right. To imagine such a thing would be to imagine a different man entirely. The Yusuke that had managed to captivate Akechi would remain defiantly infuriating. And in the midst of these short-lived fantasies, Akechi held no weapon. Certainly no child’s light-up play-sword, but also absent was the heavy presence of cold, black steel within his hand. For reasons that he would rather not confront while red-faced and sticky with sweat beneath the sheets like the disgrace that he was, the visceral contact of skin-on-skin was of the utmost importance in these awful little scenarios.
“Perhaps I should ask the same of you?” Yusuke asked, looking quizzically up at him from his seat on the rest area bench.
“Eh?” Akechi tuned back in, sounding like an absolute idiot to his own ears.
“Is it you who would prefer not to go through with this? I told you that you may do whatever you please to me, because such an offer might prove to be therapeutic for you. Of course if that is proving not to be the case…”
“No!” Akechi insisted, perhaps too eager. God , he should just throw himself in front of the phantom train the next time it ran through. “Stand up,” he then ordered, collecting himself.
Yusuke obliged and Akechi wondered briefly what might happen if he were to push Yusuke into the train’s path. No more jumble of feelings threatening to bury him alive, no one holding him back from his final goal.
“You should stand against something,” Akechi said casually, nodding toward the plexiglas wall of the structure built over the rest area benches, presumably to keep them dry in the case of a rain that would never come. “You’ll want to brace yourself.”
“I am no stranger to pain while inside of the Metaverse,” Yusuke reminded him, leaning up against the wall like some sort of goddamn teen magazine model. Always completely and totally effortless, it never failed to piss Akechi off. Yusuke never had to try, his body and face so naturally dripping handsomeness, looking like everything that Akechi had to work so damn hard to try and be. Restricting his daily calories, the god-awful skincare crap he slathered on every night.
“I never said that I was going to hurt you,” Akechi muttered, sizing Yusuke up, while continuing to allow the jealousy and frustration to boil over him, a bath filled with scalding water that stung the skin, leaving it red and angry, head swimming from the rapidly rising blood.
“You didn’t need to,” Yusuke said, cocking his head as Akechi produced the knife from his pocket. “Is that new?”
Akechi smiled cheerfully, “I bought it especially for you, from that place in the alley Joker always talks about. I thought you deserved something nice for going through all of this trouble for me.”
In reality, he had owned the knife for quite some time, always taking it along whenever he had gone to the Metaverse alone, before Yusuke had become such a constant fixture at his side. In a world where any cut, no matter how deep, no matter how it would bleed, would simply fail to leave any scar on his photo-ready skin… Such a notion had been far too tempting for someone like Goro Akechi not to take advantage of. As someone who deserved to be less than whole, inside and out, watching his own blood bloom forth was a welcome release now and then.
“A lovely sentiment,” Yusuke said, deadpan. “Shall we get started then?”
It, of course, wasn’t as if Akechi hadn’t wounded anyone besides himself while in the Metaverse before, but those on Shido’s target list had always taken a bullet to the back. This was personal… intimate.
It had to be savored properly.
Without preamble, Akechi lunged forward, tearing the mask from Yusuke’s face, letting it fall to the cement with a clatter. “I’d prefer to see your face, if you don’t mind.”
Face now exposed to the whole of Tokyo’s collective consciousness, Yusuke reached forward, tenderly, long fingers caressing Akechi’s cheek as he removed the red mask in turn. “That being the case, please allow me to commit the rawness of soul I am surely about to witness to my memory. Surely it may prove useful for further artistic endeavors.”
Akechi wanted to vomit.
The softness of Yusuke’s touch, juxtaposed with the callousness of his words, the clinical plan to distill Akechi’s rage into yet another piece of incomprehensible artwork and nothing more.
Although Akechi hadn’t felt himself move, he did very much feel it as their lips crashed together. The contact strange as it was familiar, as though he’d never get used to it, the vulnerability, the loss of self within that of another, as if he were being absorbed and the venom within him being drawn and drained like that from a wound.
“Mmph!” Yusuke cried into his mouth, his wild gasp for air breaking the kiss. Gingerly, he pressed gloved fingertips to the blossoming gash just below the pale flesh of his collarbone, peeking, tantalizing, out from his costume just above that damned distracting zipper.
“You said that I could do anything I wished,” Akechi reminded him playfully, twirling the knife he had produced once more while Yusuke had been otherwise occupied. If he hadn’t been wearing gloves, the sweat welling in his palms would surely have caused the knife to clatter to the floor.
“Of… Of course…” Yusuke responded between measured breaths. “...Did you learn that from Joker, by the way?”
Akechi looked sharply down at his hand, instantly stilling the knife. Even now, even when they were like this, it was still difficult to discern if Yusuke were merely floating through his own little private stream of reality, or truly attempting to get a rise out of his partner.
Akechi smirked. “Joker wouldn’t do this for you, he’s too fucking soft.”
“‘ For me ’?” Yusuke repeated skeptically, the deep gash still oozing crimson all over his hand.
“You’re some kind of masochist, aren’t you?” Akechi teased again, lunging gleefully to drive the knife into the wall, just barely scraping the pale flesh of Yusuke’s cheek. If they were to do this in the real world, Akechi wondered, would he leave a scar on that perfect, pretty face? Leave his indelible mark on Yusuke forever? “Don’t think I haven’t noticed, the way you starve yourself and all that weird-ass self-denial bullshit.”
“Would this not be a case of the pot calling the kettle black?” Yusuke blinked mildly, a cat politely asking his owner for supper.
Akechi snorted a derisive laugh. “How so?”
Although his insides itched to get on with things, Yusuke’s blunt honesty never failed to pull him into another verbal sparring match. Utterly annoying how easy it was to fall into such a bizarre synergy with Yusuke, and even more frustrating still that he didn’t entirely dislike it, even if Yusuke did actual have a point more often than Akechi cared to admit.
Yusuke tilted his head. “Pushing people away as you do, holding so much anger toward the world inside of you. Would that not be a mark of emotional masochism?”
“I think that you really are enjoying this, otherwise you wouldn’t be drawing this out so much,” Akechi commented, pressing his fingers to the wound, eliciting a stifled cry from Yusuke.
“I could argue the same of you.” Yusuke never could let things go once he got started, although in this case Akechi assumed the obstinate attitude was simply a grasp at distraction from the pain. “You’ve only made one tiny laceration thus far. I’ve suffered far worse at the hands of Madarame after failing to complete a piece for him in the allotted time.”
Akechi knew Yusuke better than to assume that he was trying to make Akechi feel sorry for him; he was simply dealing out a fact to fall where it may.
“Quiet,” he hissed, touching the knife tip to Yusuke’s throat, drawing forth a bead of blood, a tiny red poker chip that Yusuke could stake his life on, adding it to the same pot he had begun to recklessly build when throwing his lot in with the enemy only weeks earlier.
Only days before, Akechi had been kissing that long, slender neck, that beckoning throat. And now, he was tasting the blood on the tip of his tongue as his lips savored that bitter flesh once again.
Wispy arms wrapped around Akechi’s back, that same teenage fumble Yusuke always fell into when searching for more contact, as if Akechi’s back were a map to his deepest desire, if only Yusuke could decipher by desperate touch.
He wouldn’t find it with Akechi.
Wresting himself free from Yusuke’s embrace--warm and tender and far too tempting to melt into its surrender--Akechi collected himself, scraping back up the shards of his anger that Yusuke’s touch had shattered asunder. Tiny bits of broken mirror, reflecting Akechi’s venom back at himself in glittering multitudes.
“I’m supposed to be relieving my anger,” he said softly, hating the sound of his own voice as he fumbled in putting the pieces back together.
“Do I make you angry?” Yusuke asked. There was no sadness to be found there, simply a question.
“ Yes .”
Despite everything, it was the absolute truth. Not merely in the way of petty matters, such as Yusuke staring at Akechi’s plate like an orphaned puppy until he slid the remaining dessert across the table, but in the way that being forced to let down his guard always tossed his brain straight onto a lit stove burner. Yusuke made him vulnerable, a distraction from the path of burning everything and anything standing before him into dust.
The blade’s tip kissed at the thin, flexible fabric of Yusuke’s costume, running alongside the zipper until a wide swath of skin spanning the length of his abdomen came exposed. The artist was clearly not a frequent practitioner of plein air, his skin ghostly pale. The lines of his ribs protruded severely from his chest as they always did, and Akechi remembered how he had lazily traced them the last time they were in bed.
“Studying the blank canvas beforehand is an essential precursor to the creation of art,” Yusuke mused, and for one stray and wild second, Akechi entertained a notion of dropping the knife and exiting the Metaverse only to pretend that none of this had ever happened.
“You really are more attractive with your mouth occupied,” Akechi muttered, letting Yusuke take the remark any way he’d so choose. And before Yusuke could attempt to speak again, the knife plunged into the emaciated dip of his stomach.
“Guh!” Yusuke sputtered, the pain searing through his nerves, mind exploding into a thousand shades of blinding color no human should ever comprehend.
Unyielding to their owner’s wishes, Yusuke’s knees failed him, buckling as he slid to the floor clutching at the weeping laceration. At last, Yusuke found himself at a loss for words as a thin string of blood and saliva trickled down his chin.
Although Akechi was quickly upon him to lick it away, Yusuke couldn’t help being distantly euphoric at the sensation of his boyfriend’s hot tongue running over lips, down his chin.
“Pervert,” Akechi teased in that dryly mocking way that Yusuke had come to take as something of praise coming from him. At the least, it meant that Akechi didn’t find him boring.
Yusuke registered vaguely that the knife had been withdrawn from his gut as quickly as it had penetrated, now glinting as Akechi began to draw a thin red line across the outline of his uppermost rib. Tracing it with all the care that Yusuke would trace from his art reference books as a young boy, slowly and deliberately, committing every line and motion to memory.
Another rib soon followed, weeping red. More maddening stinging, sticky blood dripping down his stomach as Akechi continued to straddle him, having followed him to the floor. Tangled together on the train platform, Yusuke began to wonder--parting the overgrown tangle filling his mind, formed of thorns of pain and loss of blood--if this were truly helpful for Akechi, cathartic as Yusuke had hoped it would be.
Eyes finally wandering from a blurry place somewhere beyond Akechi’s shoulder, Yusuke forced them back into focus on his partner’s hypnotically expressive face. Once perfect hair had fallen out of place, partially obscuring one eye and the unexpected emotion held within it. Rather than the rage that Akechi no longer bothered to conceal when he decimated Shadows, Yusuke was surprised to see his intense red eyes locked in complete focus--lips pressed, nose scrunched--in something akin to the almost comical expression he wore when engrossed in watching Featherman or playing darts. Despite his swimming head, or because of it, Yusuke couldn’t help but find the person before him nothing short of alluring. Weakly, he reached up to caress Akechi’s cheek.
There was of course beauty to be found in the ugly, in the filthy. In anger. All the human experience had to offer. And Yusuke, insides laid bare for the entirety of the collective unconsciousness, hoped that someday Akechi could see it as well. Perhaps it was a vain notion, but his mind felt like used cooking water, the lobster freshly removed from the roiling bubbles now burbbling down the drain in a maelstrom of conflicting sensations. Pain, confusion… something more. Maybe he was a pervert after all, Akira had also said as much after all. Painting the naked form in class had never been more than a clinical study to Yusuke, such as the numbness of the medical student leafing through Grey’s Anatomy for the umpteenth time.
Another cut, long and deep and agonizingly drawn out and Yusuke thought that he might have heard himself whimper like the child he once was, tossed inside of a dark closet and denied dinner.
The pain was electric, flooding every nerve in his body white hot. At some point he had shut his eyes, only to find them bursting open, greeted by the grotesque sight of his own viscera freed from the former confines that bodily organs were typically perfectly happy to make their moist and generally altogether squelchy home.
Consciousness beginning to wane once again, Yusuke realized his hands had fallen from the soft skin of Akechi’s cheeks, to grasp helplessly at his abdomen, a pathetic attempt at keeping his blood from escaping any further. Instead, it ran between his fingers, escaping him like an idea for a new painting granted by a dream, only to be stolen cruelly away by waking.
A second set of fingers ran red, sticky and dripping, those of a child playing finger paints. Akechi’s hand covered his own, not in an attempt to hold shut the wound, but lightly in touch, seemingly for the sole sake of closeness.
Yusuke wanted to speak--to say what, he didn’t know-- but nothing more than a wet cough gurgled from his mouth.
“I think…” Akechi said, sounding strangely small for a man who had just vivisected his lover. Yusuke could no longer see his face to discern an expression. “Maybe I understand what drives you now. Art, I mean. I thought… Shit . Never mind…”
It occurred to Yusuke that Akechi thought he was beyond hearing at this point. His eyes had fallen shut, resting as still as the rest of his body. Seconds later, an indistinct sensation of floating overtook Yusuke, something warm enveloping him.
The view of Akechi’s apartment ceiling was immediately recognisable, despite Yusuke’s last memory being of bleeding out on the Metaverse floor. Unlike the other times that Yusuke had woken up in that bed, he was fully dressed, and his partner was nowhere in sight. Gingerly, Yusuke pulled aside the plush quilt that had been placed over him in order to pull up the hem of his sweater. As expected, the pale skin was fully intact, as if the previous night had merely been a fever dream. With a shiver, he traced a finger along the line of a single rib.
Maybe he really was a pervert, he thought again.
Then what of Akechi?
Rolling out of bed, socks padding across the floor, the carpet felt suddenly foreign beneath his feet. Yusuke made for the desk where a single sheet of paper on the otherwise neatly kept surface had caught his eye.
Red marker had been scrawled haphazardly across the loose-leaf page, abstract, a childlike doodle. Yusuke ran his fingers over it, before noticing a small paper hidden beneath- a note.
‘Eat something. There’s 2,000 yen in the drawer.’