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Eito can’t think of any stories he’s read that begin with the kiss. This one probably shouldn’t either, even though that, of all the idiotic things he’s put himself through in these eighty-something days at the Academy, is the moment that shifts this foul dead world on its axis.
—
He gouges out his righteous eyes alone in his cage. It’s the deepest hour of night when he begins his work, his hand guided by the bright silvery slats of moonlight streaming through the bars, and of course, he doesn’t know what time it is when he finishes. The pain is transcendental, exhilarating; Eito thinks it must be the closest thing he’s ever felt to truly being alive.
A poem he read once about a blind man: I alone am in torment, and bawl. Inside me something interminably howls, and I do not know whether it is my heart that is howling, or my bowels.
Somehow, Eito feels no urge to scream. The only sounds in the silent courtyard are that of the scalpel sawing through his optic nerve—rubbery and thicker than he’d thought, difficult—and his blood pattering rainlike against the concrete floor.
But in the end, it’s done. Eito succeeds in blinding himself to the relentless ugliness of the world. The relief that floods over him is a wave so staggering that he can only fall backwards onto his cot and feel it. Feel everything. The rhythmic bodily throbbing of his hemoanima as it struggles to keep him alive. The weak warmth of the first rays of early morning sunlight against his face—
(That poem again: For you, every morning brings its new light warm through your open windows. And you’ve a sense of seeing eye to eye, and that tempts one to show mercy)
—and then his own sticky hand against his face, the skin warm and wet where he touches it. Tears or blood? Eito has no way to tell anymore.
His laughter rings through the courtyard in an endless echo.
—
I’m going to trust you one last time, Takumi tells Eito in the cafeteria. Residual horror pitches his grating voice strangely. Eito half-wonders what Takumi’s face had looked like in the moment Eito’d removed his dark glasses to reveal what he’d done; the other half of him wonders why he even cares. Expressions never meant anything to him even when he could see them. Senseless contortion of grotesque features. Anyway: what had struck Eito as strange was that, up until now, Takumi had never been especially subtle when it came to communicating the various ways that Eito repelled him—a thrillingly mutual feeling—but there was something else coloring his inflection now that Eito hadn’t ever heard from him before.
No. That’s wrong. He’d heard it plenty before. Just—it had never been directed at him.
Pity.
Eito thinks about it for a long time after he departs back to his cage to scrape the jellied remains of his own eyeballs out of the grooved soles of his sneakers. The next morning, too, the thought throbbing hotly behind his empty sockets along with all the pain the adrenaline and hemoanima had so far kept at bay. He doesn’t go to breakfast.
Pity. The more he thinks about it, the more it curdles. Eito bares his teeth at the ceiling of his cage. What a wretched thing, to be pitied by Takumi. His repulsion, at least, was something that Eito could feed from, could return. Eito knows now that his malformed heart, his diseased mind, it was all shaped intentionally around the absence of such humaneness. Pity tastes like ashes in his mouth. He doesn’t know what to do with it. There is no place inside himself for such things.
Takumi brings him his lunch.
“Aotsuki,” he starts, still sounding strange, anxious. “I think the others maybe just need some more time.”
Ah. Takumi thinks he’s in here because he’s pouting.
“Oh, I don’t care at all what they need,” Eito says brightly. The tray that lands in his hands is heavy, the steam rising off the food curling warm and damp against his face, but the only thing Eito can smell still is the charred remains of his own nasal mucosa. “I’m just happy to have your trust back, Takumi-kun. That’s all I was after. That’s the only thing that matters to me on this whole miserable planet.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Takumi mutters, but he at least sounds a little more like himself.
—
They venture out into the wasteland beyond the school, just the two of them. Hot sun, screaming wind. It carries the putrid carrion smell of Takumi’s perspiration. Eito breathes shallowly.
“You told me about how hard it was to look at me. Before, I mean. Last time. I guess I just didn’t really…I’m sorry, Aotsuki. I didn’t believe it could have been bad enough for you to do what you did.”
That wasn’t me, Eito wants to say. He doesn’t say it, because it was him. It’s still him.
“I guess I’m trying to say that I’m starting to get why you did this to yourself. Because I—before, I mean—I didn’t have any time to think about what living their whole life in a world like that would do to a person. To you.”
Eito stops walking.
“It must have been torture.”
The wind screams and screams and screams. Eito opens his mouth.
“I feel really bad for you.”
“Ah.” Eito closes his mouth. Granules of gritty dirt grind between his clenching teeth. Involuntarily, his hands curl into fists around the handle of his scythe. For a moment there, Takumi’s understanding had been so close Eito could have—he could have reached out for it. The nails pierce through the empty place in his palm where he could have—could have held it. “Thank you, Takumi-kun.”
—
The kiss—well. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
—
On the evening of their eighty-sixth day at Last Defense Academy, Eito gouges out his heart, too, in front of his classmates and before a campfire that he cannot see. He can only feel the gentle heat of it against his face, and from the far side of the fire pit, Takumi’s steady blue gaze between the wavering flames.
—
Two days later, Takumi steps into Eito’s path halfway down the deserted hall that leads to the library door.
“Hey,” he says. Anxious again, though Eito can’t imagine why. Then, after a beat and completely unnecessarily: “It’s Takumi.”
“Oh, hi, Takumi-kun.” Eito smiles. There is a momentary interruption in the empty air between them: Takumi’s arm extends into it, then retracts, like he’d been about to catch Eito by his sleeve and then abruptly thought better of it. “Are you on your way to the library too?”
“No, I—erm.” Takumi clears his throat. “I was hoping to catch you.”
“Oh? Am I going the wrong way?”
“No, it’s not that, it’s—” Takumi clears his throat a second time. Revulsion is a writhing worm deep within Eito’s empty stomach. He’s sick, Eito’s mind supplies, hissing like even the word burns. He’s disgusting and he’s sick and he’s going to get you sick— “You looked pretty pale in the cafeteria this morning. Um, and you didn’t eat anything so I thought maybe you weren’t feeling well, so I wanted to…”
He trails off with an odd strangled noise. Maybe he isn’t sick. Is Takumi…nervous?
Eito stares down into the approximate space where Takumi’s face should be. Takumi shifts on his feet restlessly, his clothing rustling like he can’t figure out where to put his hands.
“Just the stench,” Eito says lightly. “I guess I didn’t realize how much sharper my other senses would get once I—” He cuts himself off with a chuckle. “Lost one of them. Kind of interesting, though, hm? How my body tries to compensate even when my brain knows I’d be better off without any of it.”
“I guess,” Takumi mumbles. He still sounds cagey, like he’s about to jump out of his own skin. This is what’s actually interesting; Eito folds his arms across his chest, doesn’t avert his empty gaze, even though that’s almost certainly what’s making Takumi so uncomfortable. Rather fun.
“Anyway, I thought it might be that. So I made you this,” Takumi continues. “To help. With the, uh. Stench.”
Something is thrust at Eito’s chest. He loses the fight against his body’s immediate urge to recoil at the sensation of Takumi’s squirming appendages. Eito flinches away, his shoulder colliding dully with the doorframe behind him. Takumi hasn’t seemed to notice, has in fact stepped a little closer now, not quite caging him in but seemingly heedless of Eito’s mounting discomfort, his ratcheting heartbeat, so loud inside his own ears. The odor of him fills Eito’s head like pestilential smog, putrefied cadavers, excrement, ulcerating tumors, vomit, he’s going to vomit, he’s going to—
“I hope it helps,” Takumi continues blithely. “A little bit, at least.”
Eito swallows thickly, his throat burning sour with held-back bile, and laughs. “Takumi-kun, I can’t see what it is.”
“Oh! Right. Sorry. It’s just a face mask. Like the kind at the doctor’s office, you know? I found the materials for the Gift-o-Matic, so now you should be able to make lots of them.” He pauses for a thought. “Or I can help you. Since you, um, can’t see the buttons.”
Surprise strikes him through his stomach like a physical blow. Eito looks quickly—pointlessly—down at his outstretched hands to mask whatever the shock is doing to his carefully-controlled expression. The skin beneath his gloves prickles in the places where Takumi’s had brushed him. Eito is—he has to search inside himself for the word; it takes him a long time to find it—he’s touched. It’s a touching gift. It’s the only gift he’s ever received in his short, false life. His face is prickling unpleasantly now, too, heated with his embarrassment in a way that must be very obvious if Takumi is still staring at him. He is certainly still staring at him. Eito has to get out of here.
“I can help you put it on,” Takumi is saying, too close still. He doesn’t wait for an answer. He pulls the face mask out of Eito’s frozen, useless hands as quickly as he’d deposited it there in the first place.
I don’t need help, you blithering idiot, Eito tries to say, but Takumi is so close now that if Eito unclenches his stiff-smiling teeth even a millimeter he knows he will start to scream, and he doesn’t know if he will be able to stop. Don’t, Takumi. Don’t—
The mask presses flat across Eito’s face. Tooclosetooclosetooclose shrieks the panic that grips Eito like a cold fist, and he inhales a sharp shaking breath that seals the paper to his nose and mouth and he’s suffocating now can’t breathe and oh God help him the decaying flesh the stinking hideous monstrous stain of humanity leaching foul through the exposed skin Takumi’s touching with his fingertips can’t breathe can’t move oh he’s going to vomit he’s absolutely going to vomit and Takumi kisses him like that, his mouth meeting Eito’s firm and unyielding over the paper, the humid heat of his garbage breath, the disgusting moving shapes of his wormlike lips, and—
Eito doesn’t move away. He doesn’t move away.
—
He does force himself to vomit later, though. The feeling of his bare fingers against the spasming inside wall of his throat is awful, but not unfamiliar. Nothing about this ritual is unfamiliar, except that the panic is somehow worse now without his eyes. He hadn’t anticipated that. Not clean yet, Eito’s diseased mind tells him over and over and over again as he gags over the toilet bowl, and he can do nothing but give in to it. Again. Again and again. Not clean yet.
No relief comes when he finally forces the last of what little was inside his stomach back out. There’s time yet before Shouma escorts him back to his cage, so Eito shivers for a while on the bathroom floor beneath a sheen of cold sweat and with his mind whirling, still feeling filthy. It’s all filthy. He crawls the short way into the shower stall on his filthy hands and filthy knees, feeling blindly along the filthy floor with fingers still slimy with his own filthy saliva, and Eito scalds himself clean.
It all takes too long, leaves him exhausted, empty. He dresses and puts on his nicest smile, waits for Shouma at the edge of his bed that he is no longer permitted to use, tonguing the micro-wounds on his lips where he’d scrubbed them too hard. Clean iron. His mind is still whirling on and on, but with only one thought now, the one he couldn’t scrub away: Eito would put himself through that, all of that, all over again, to feel even just one more moment of the way the world shifted beneath his feet as Takumi held him close.
—
As far as Eito’s plans go, this is an extremely simple one, but then again, so is Takumi.
He punches an order into the Gift-o-Matic for five more masks. After a moment of consideration, Eito makes five more and shoves them into an inside pocket of his jacket. Before any of this, he spends a long time lingering in the hallway outside the rec room pretending to tie his shoelaces, wondering if he should abandon this plan for an even simpler one: taking Takumi up on his idiotic offer to help Eito operate the machine and confronting him then. He’s not sure exactly what stops him from doing so. Maybe it’s his penchant for overcomplicating things. Maybe it’s the anticipation building inside him, too novel a sensation to want to let it go just yet. Fluttery, bird-winged. Entirely new to him.
He holds it close to himself for the rest of the dull day, which he spends in his cage pretending to look busy, which is somehow more tiring than if he actually had been. Eito tidies the already-tidy piles of books stacked beneath his cot, even though he can no longer read their titles. He crouches near the tangle of plants that have started growing wild through the bars, trying to identify them by touch alone. He thinks, and thinks, and thinks, and then when he’s run out of everything else (which happens frighteningly quickly) he cannot help but think of Takumi. The squeak of his sneakers as he rose up onto his toes to meet Eito’s height, balancing himself with a fleshy claw light on Eito’s shoulder, warm even through all his protective layers. The eager, graceless way his misshapen mouth met Eito’s through the paper. The simple but devastating fact that he’d been thoughtful enough to put a barrier there between them in the first place. Devastating, because that meant that Takumi had planned for this, had thought it through. Had—wanted to—
He has to stop thinking about it. Eventually—of course he doesn’t know how much time has passed, but it’s perhaps close to dinnertime now, considering he can smell one of the twins’ foul kitchen concoctions burning from three hallways away—Eito slips out of his cage and makes his quiet way to the roof.
—
Takumi’s door is unlocked, because of course it is.
—
The door swings open into stillness. Across the room, the sharp sound of a body bolting upright, then frantic rustling. A blanket being flung away. Ah. It’s still free time, then. Takumi was napping.
“Aotsuki?!” Takumi’s voice creaks out of him, rough with residual sleep. The expansive fluttering feeling behind Eito’s navel narrows, twists into a new shape, just as unfamiliar to him. Something sharper, heated.
“Oh!” Eito feigns surprise. Even touches his glove to the open O of his mouth, for the theatre of it. “I’m so sorry, Takumi-kun.” He pauses his purposeful walk in the exact center of the room, which should be just about at the foot of Takumi’s bed. “I thought this was my room!”
“I—” Takumi coughs out an awkward little sound that scrapes the length of Eito’s spine. More rustling: he’s swinging his legs over the side of the bed, stretching luxuriously, rolling his head around on his neck. The unpleasant sound of crepitus wakes long swathes of gooseflesh down both of Eito’s arms. He crosses them tightly over his chest.
“It’s okay,” Takumi says. “Must’ve forgot to lock the door again.”
“Well, now I’m all turned around!” Eito laughs at himself helplessly. He forces himself to unfold one of his arms, touching the soap-scummed glass pane of Takumi’s bathroom door as though he’s searching for a knob. Everything inside him is burning with the urge to cringe away from it. His other hand, wedged safely against himself still, curls into a fist so tight his glove creaks. “Is this the—no, this can’t be the—gosh, I’m just so sorry, Takumi-kun, really. I’m useless. Can you show me where the front door is?”
Takumi must’ve been sleeping deeply; the typical apprehensive venom he seems to reserve solely for speaking to Eito is notably absent from his reply. If anything, he sounds rather…gentle. “Oh. Yeah, sure. No problem.”
Bare feet against concrete: Takumi steps close. Eito’s head fills again with the smell of him, full-frontal assault. The sweat and filth of unwashed hair and unclean flesh. The sickly bruised-fruit sweetness of a decaying human soul leaking out from the gaps between his unbrushed teeth. Shit and blood and rot and the concentrated perfume of humanity, hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of irredeemable evil. Foul, vile, ugly Takumi. Eito’s smile thins until the muscles of his cheeks start to twitch with the strain.
Takumi does the same thing he did in the hallway two days ago: he does not touch Eito, but he does think about it. Eito doesn’t need his eyes to know.
“This way,” Takumi says, near-whispering for some reason, even though they’re alone in here. “D’you need me to…” He trails off suddenly around a jaw-cracking yawn that seems to stretch on for minutes. Eito swallows a scream that tastes like stomach acid and pretends to stumble on one of Takumi’s stray sneakers. Oopsie, he’d exclaim if he wasn’t one wrong breath away from spewing. “Sorry, there’s a bunch of stuff on the floor, should’ve warned you…um, here, you can just—over here, Aotsuki—just grab my arm, if you need?”
“Thank you, Takumi-kun,” Eito simpers through his aching teeth. “How nice of you.”
Takumi helps him to the door like Eito is a little old lady crossing the street. Eito hadn’t anticipated being this overwhelmed by their closeness; the nausea had come up quicker than he’d thought. No time for him to collect himself. Feeling exposed, he swallows and swallows again, still smiling, still smiling. He snatches his fingers back from where they’re barely touching Takumi’s sleeve.
“It’s funny. You’re funny, Takumi-kun,” Eito says with an airiness he does not feel. “Gallantly offering your arm like that when you didn’t even ask before you kissed me yesterday.”
It has the desired effect: Takumi rears back like Eito’s hit him over the head with a blunt object.
“I—I—I just thought—with the mask, maybe—you’re right, Aotsuki, jeez, I’m really sor—”
“The mask did help,” Eito cuts in over his sputtering. “Pretty clever of you. I wasn’t complaining.”
“Oh.” A pause. “Well.” Another, longer. “Okay. Um, so…”
“I took your suggestion and made a few more for myself.”
Eito had nearly forgotten for a moment that Takumi is—stupid. It takes him nearly a minute to chew Eito’s words through, to understand what Eito’s asking for here, standing stiff and red-faced in the doorway of Takumi’s filthy hovel of a bedroom.
Finally, Takumi swallows it. “Huh? Aotsuki?”
The most insane thing of it all is that Eito, who isn’t nearly half as stupid, has thought about this—extensively—and has concluded that there really is some part of himself that really does want this. It’s a newer, headier twin force to the disgust that has always ruled him: he can only call it desire. And it’s not so much the kiss itself that had shaken it awake in Eito, but what the kiss meant. After all, in every story he’s ever read, the kiss is the pivotal moment: when emotion finally transcends language, when there’s nothing left to say. When it all falls into place. I love you, it says sometimes. I’m sorry, in others. I understand now.
Eito wants, more than he wants Takumi to do it again, for Takumi to tell him why he’d gone and done it in the first place. What had Takumi seen when he turned to Eito alone in the middle of that empty hallway and looked into the gaping holes that he had carved into himself? Eito has long since run out of places to hide, so he can only imagine that Takumi had seen it all. His malformed mind, his barren hateful heart, the way it all howls and howls through the lightless places inside him like that poem about the blind man, and yet. And yet, and yet, and yet, Takumi had looked at him and decided to kiss him anyway.
Does Takumi understand now?
The thought alone makes Eito’s head spin again, carves deeper that gnawing pit inside himself, strange hunger. He stares unseeing at the place before him where Takumi stands frozen and stuttering, and Eito knows without a doubt that Takumi is looking back, and—only a little, and only for that moment—Eito wishes that he could see Takumi’s face.
“I thought you really hated it,” Takumi says.
Eito has nothing to say to that.
“You ran away.”
Nothing to say to that, either.
“And now…”
“And now I’m here.” Eito tries his best to sound put-upon, doing all this thinking for Takumi. His heart pounds in his chest. “With another mask.”
“So you didn’t…” Takumi kind of sounds like he’s smiling. “You didn’t hate it.”
Pulling his own teeth out of his head would be more pleasant than this conversation. “I’m still deciding.”
“Is that why you waited until you were near the door to say anything?”
“Takumi-kun,” Eito sighs, “goodbye.”
“Wait! No!” Takumi certainly sounds more awake now. “I want to, I mean, obviously I want to, I’m the one who—yeah—um, okay, why don’t we sit on the bed. Because I just washed my sheets,” he rushes out before Eito can protest.
They move out of the doorway. Eito sits gingerly, his socked feet flat on the floor and his fists atop his thighs like he’s in the electric chair instead of at the edge of Takumi’s unmade bed. The heaps of blankets and pillows reek so powerfully of Takumi here that Eito’s beaten-back nausea rises again through him so quick and devastating that his spine starts to sweat beneath his shirt. He runs his dry tongue over his dry lips. Oh, he’s going to be sick. Oh, he’s been sick for such a long time.
Unceremoniously, Takumi flops down next to him. He sighs a little as he does it, a deflating noise, like some part of him’s considering just rolling over and returning to the nap Eito’d interrupted.
The relief comes as soon as Eito loops the face mask’s straps over his ears. His own antisepticized breaths come evenly, soft against his face. Familiar comforts. It doesn’t block out the smell entirely, but it’s at least enough to make the wave of nausea recede a safe distance down his throat again. He can feel Takumi’s eyes against the side of his face, the nervous energy rolling off him, static electric. It’s infectious. Eito scrubs his gloved palms over the tops of his thighs.
“You came into my room on purpose,” Takumi exclaims suddenly, finally putting the pieces together.
Eito can only huff a laugh into his mask that’d fog his lenses if he still had eyes behind them. “You really should lock your door!”
“Why’d you do it?”
“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”
They lapse into quiet again, locked in silent challenge. Oddly, it reminds Eito of his early days in the cage: of insulting Takumi to his deformed, hideous face just to watch his features scrunch and warp into a wounded scowl through the bars. Prodding him has always been one of the only enjoyable pastimes in this hellhole, but it feels a little different now, somehow. It’s better. It makes him feel closer to Takumi, knowing that this raw new wound called desire exists in the same place within the both of them. That they can both reach out and touch it in the other.
Then Takumi seizes Eito by the shoulders and slams their mouths together.
Is this your answer, Eito wants to ask him as Takumi’s mouth opens as wantingly against the paper as he images it would against Eito’s naked lips. There is no hesitation from him, no need for adjustment to the strangeness of the situation; Takumi simply acts. Stupid, thoughtless, so human it aches even inside Eito.
He wonders what this must be like without the howling, the agony, the bitter vomit at the back of his tongue. Does Takumi like the way that Eito is kissing him? Do Eito’s hands, tracing what he thinks must be a vaguely human shape guided by the seams of Takumi’s soft sweatshirt, feel good to him? He doesn’t know; he knows he can never ask without ruining everything by reminding Takumi of what he is. His own heartbeat, a hollow ache behind his empty sockets, reminds him that the hideousness of the world is no longer his burden to bear.
When Takumi pulls away, the paper between their lips clings, moist with their combined saliva. Eito can’t remember opening his mouth, but it’s still open behind the mask, gaping emptily like a fish. Eito’s hands are still tight against some narrow part of Takumi’s body—his waist, maybe, distending like a bony bellows with each of Takumi’s ragged breaths. He does not let go. He desperately wants to.
“Aotsuki,” Takumi breathes. “You’re so red.”
He knows. His cheeks sting awfully, hot with blood.
“I wanna see,” Takumi presses on. Eito knows he should turn away, should do anything—anything—to stop this, because he’s shaking all over now with the way his body flashes hot and cold, his mind screaming, spitting, begging him to give in to the fear, to shove Takumi to the floor and stomp his face into comforting viscera.
He doesn’t turn away. Takumi tugs Eito’s mask down past his chin. He’s excited now, fetid breaths coming in quick bursts against Eito’s bared face, and he’s so horribly near, the mattress beneath them shifting with the movement of his body, the fabric of Eito’s hopelessly contaminated shirt pulling taut beneath Takumi’s grasping fists. Takumi closes the distance; kisses Eito open-mouthed, nothing in between.
It’s too much. Oh, it’s too much it’s too much the bloated worm of his tongue slithering past Eito’s lips the blistering pustular flesh of his face oozing hot against Eito’s cheek filling his nose with rot with decay with the base disgusting stink of carnality it’s too much Takumi’s hands are moving up inside Eito’s shirt against his bare skin leaving in their wake long trails of filthy filthy filthy filthy filthy filthy—
“Stop,” Eito gasps, tight-throated, can’t breathe, choking on it, “stop—”
Takumi stops, but Eito’s body overrides his short-circuiting brain, moves before he even realizes he’s moving. He wrenches Takumi up by his skinny arms and throws him off bodily with a sound of such animal violence that Eito shocks even himself with it; he can only watch it happen as though it is someone else. Takumi’s back hits the mattress, knocking the air out of him with an audible whoosh. Eito feels cold all over.
It’s disgusting, he hears himself say, panting, gagging on every acid syllable as it tears up his throat, you’re disgusting, but his body is still moving somehow, crawling on his hands and knees up the bed until he’s hovering over Takumi, lying shellshocked and flat on his back.
“Don’t touch me,” Eito grinds out. “You can’t touch me.”
“Then you touch me,” Takumi snaps back, breathless, but somehow sounding undeterred.
Eito cannot tell him that he doesn’t know how.
—
Does Takumi understand now?
—
A while passes in silence.
Then, Takumi’s fingers brush against Eito’s wrist, circling around it, closing, lightly, lightly.
—
Does he understand now?
—
Takumi moves Eito’s hand for him. Everything inside him thrashes against it, but without his eyes to behold the monstrosity of flesh lying prone beneath him, it’s—surprisingly, it’s not—unbearable—he’s bearing it—
“That’s my neck,” Takumi mutters. Eito’s fingers press into warmth that permeates the nitrile of his gloves. The staccato of Takumi’s excited pulse. The rush of his blood. Eito’s own hemoanima lives there too, he knows. He wants—he doesn’t know what he wants—
“My…ear,” Takumi continues, haltingly, moving Eito’s hand again. Eito can feel the heat of his blush there.
His chin. His hair. The thin fragile skin at the corners of his eyes. This is Takumi, Eito tells himself, even as his gloves grow slippery with pus and gore, the boils squelching and bursting beneath the drag of his fingers. This is only Takumi. Eito smiles a little. Ugly Takumi, showing him the shape of a human.
Takumi says, “My mouth,” and it moves light against Eito’s fingers, a wet and sucking wound indiscernible from every other Eito’s felt along the various surfaces of his monstrous body, except that Eito knows that this one is not a wound at all. He’s kissed Takumi here, he thinks, a little awed. This is the place where Takumi has let him inside.
“Is it weird that this is kind of turning me on?” Takumi says around the tips of the few fingers Eito has allowed to slip past the edges of his lips. The ridges of his teeth press lightly against Eito’s knuckles as he speaks. It’s disgusting; it’s fascinating. Heat needles his gut. Eito withdraws his fingers, denying it before it can spread. “Like, the gloves.”
Eito laughs weakly. “Yeah. It is.”
“Are you sure I can’t touch you back? I really want to.”
“Very sure.” Eito isn’t sure what to do with his hands now, covered as they are in the muck of Takumi’s existence. He burrows them safely into the sheets on either side of Takumi’s head. “I’m barely keeping my lunch down as it is.”
“Is it really…that bad?”
“Did you think I was exaggerating?”
“N-no!” Takumi exclaims. “I just thought that…I dunno, that maybe it’d be…”
“What? That it would be different with you?”
Rustling from beneath him: Takumi’s wriggling around, turning his face away from Eito’s into the pillow. “I dunno,” he says again. “Shut up. Whatever.”
It’s like Eito’s whole chest is aglow. He knows he’s flushing again, knows he’s smiling too-wide, all teeth. He can’t seem to help himself. “You sure like me a lot, don’t you, Takumi-kun?”
More thrashing around. “You’re the one who came into my room!”
“You started it,” Eito crows. He feels so sick with glee he could burst.
—
“Do you remember where my mouth is?”
Eito shows him that he does.
—
It’s Takumi. It’s Takumi. There are no monsters here, only Takumi. Only Takumi, Eito tells himself over and over, allowing Takumi to pull him down, down, closer against the incomprehensible horror of his body until they’re flush, until Eito’s jacket sags heavily off his body where the slime of Takumi’s humanity leaches into the fabric, and he’s ruined he’s filthy it’s all filthy he wants so badly to cleanse himself but he can’t bring himself to stop this again, to push Takumi away again, because with every noise that Eito swallows out of Takumi’s mouth the burning new flame of his want climbs higher, higher than anything else inside him. This is Takumi.
Eito swelters in the thick protective layers of his clothes; his shirt clings to his back with sweat, running rivulets down his spine. He needs to move away, to wipe the beads from his brow where they threaten to drip onto Takumi’s face, but when Eito makes to move away Takumi’s body moves with him, arching against him, and then Takumi’s going rigid, gasping.
“Fuck,” he hisses, and something about his voice cleaves through Eito like a knife. “Aotsuki—”
Eito freezes, but Takumi is still moving. His hips twitch against Eito’s thigh and it pulls from him another frantic sound that turns the knife through and through Eito’s stomach. He can feel the heat between Takumi’s legs through every layer of both their clothing.
The image of their sex comes to him unbidden. When Takumi grinds against him again, Eito moves too, pressing his thigh forcefully against the apex of Takumi’s legs, imagines that he’s sinking inside Takumi instead. The way he’d bloom beneath Eito, his wanting sounds and grasping hands, so unashamed in this, in taking, in pleasure. Eito has never felt this—any of this—before; and so it must be arousal, all this pent-up something spilling in waves over the walls he’s spent his life building so carefully inside himself, and it reminds him, oddly, of the first time he’d stabbed himself with his infuser, the way it liquified everything inside him to boiling blood, narrowed his mind to something purely animal, instinctual.
“Shit,” Takumi’s cursing beneath him, “shit, oh, God, that feels so, so, so,” and oh, Eito wishes his own body could respond to anything so beautifully, so honestly, especially to Takumi. The riot of his brain will never let it. At least he can give him this.
Takumi’s moving faster now, fucking himself up and up against Eito’s thigh reckless and rhythmless, please God feels so good Aotsuki please and as the throb of desire rises and rises inside Eito so too does its twin, and he’s staring down at Takumi with the empty lurid evidence of his devotion and all he can think to say is
“Look at me.”
—
“I am,” Takumi sobs, and comes.
—
Another while passes; Eito cannot remember how, or for how long. Eventually, he stands up. His knees quake like he’s been running for miles.
“Huh?” Takumi’s voice drifts up from somewhere higher on the hopelessly rumpled bed. Dazed, syrupy, like he could drop off to sleep at any moment. “Where are you going?”
“Back to my room.” His spine is ice, is knives. The discomfort of his soiled clothing has become too much to bear, stiff with dried gore and reeking so powerfully of ugly Takumi that it’s making his ruined tear ducts itch with the urge to water. Water; a flash of Eito’s spitting, scalding showerhead.
“I—Eito,” Takumi says, and that is what makes Eito turn back to him.
The truth is so close to the inside of his teeth. Eito’s head is a riot again; whatever quiet had crept in as Takumi breathed slow and satisfied against him is pulling away quick and sure as a tide. He’s dizzy, disgusted with himself, unsteady on his feet. How could he allow this to happen? How will it ever come off, this sweat, this filth, the horror of what he’s just done?
When the hatred sweeps back in, he allows it to fill the cavernous empty space in his chest. Everything inside him turns red. This, at least is familiar. It’s almost a comfort to feel it burn away the other, more tender things.
Eito laughs, and it’s cruel, he knows. Takumi shuts his mouth, teeth clicking together audibly.
“I need to go throw up now.” He makes a show of passing the back of his glove roughly over his mouth. His sweaty skin slips uncomfortably beneath the nitrile. Disgusting. Filthy. Horrid.
“Eito,” Takumi says again. His voice is awful and grating, and quiet.
—
I understand now, it says, and that is why Eito has to leave.
—
Eito leaves and he closes Takumi’s door behind himself and still he doesn’t say anything. He purges himself over and over and over again until the words are gone along with everything else inside himself, and he scrubs and he scrapes and he grinds away the filth until his skin tears beneath his fingernails and the scalding water slips inside and mingles with his blood until that, too, is clean, and he crawls back to his cage like a dog with his pounding stinging empty sockets trained upon the night sky that he will not ever see again, and only then can Eito speak into the lonely silence.
—
I love you.