Midousuji Akira (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
discarding) wrote2023-02-28 07:32 pm
discarding) wrote2023-02-28 07:32 pm
“canon” aef spinoff - ishimi
When Ishigaki first arrived to Aefenglom, Midousuji felt no delight; his stomach, in a way so subtle it was almost imperceptible, had dropped; an empty coldness washed from his head to the tips of his fingers, hollowing his core in a way that made his mouth dry, his mind wiping into a blank static.
Typically, when people from their own worlds arrived to this place, people would express some “too bads” about it, but also palpable relief for a familiar face.
Not Midousuji.
He’d been dreading it—in this place, where his existence holds no purpose. No real way to race, no point to innovate and cultivate that sort of world… It wasn’t the world his mother died on, and it wasn’t the world where he could carry her honor on his saddle across the finish of Tour de France to give himself permission to drop dead. No way to go back, no way to die—no escape, no reason to live.
For months, Midousuji has carried on an empty, complicated existence. His home world, compared to most of the Mirrorbound, is simple—but even outside of its mundane context, its simplicity could not be overstated for the simple fact that it had a born-in formula. And that formula was his purpose. You get up, you eat, you train, you discipline and manipulate, you grow, you fight with all you have—to win. Being forced to exist without what’s kept him moving forward all this time is what indeed makes this place a complex, miserable hell; a complex nexus, but it’s felt like it was designed specifically to destroy Midousuji.
But then, he’d… began to grow; began to change. What else did he have? Without the ability to run away (not that he’d been running away from anything back home; of course not! He is legitimately convinced this is true, even now), and with the need to connect to other people for survival… What choice did he have?
Magic was interesting, in its own way—he did like it, once he wrangled a way not to resent this gift so completely. And to his surprise, once it made sense, it clicked fabulously—his new prodigal project. But his output, his bastardized, rerouted purpose, demanded energy and external symbiosis for balance. Bonds. Which he’d managed to keep business—he’d managed to wall himself away perhaps harder than ever, so afraid of people seeing his vulnerabilities. In a world that’s actually, truly, absolutely dangerous, the stakes are much higher than the asphalt roads he ruled with such domineering ease back in his natal, simple universe.
But somehow…even outside of bonds, he’d become…
Well, he doesn’t know how to describe it, but the truth is he’d become attached. Not to the space, but to his horror, to a person; a girl. A girl strange, and beautiful, carrying an equalizing darkness and wisdom, masqueraded as naive people pleasing. Complex, fascinating, unpredictable, and…shaping. She scared him, initially, because it became clear to him rather abruptly he was a threat to this safety he needed in being invulnerable. But once he gently sank into it, as with Onoda, back home, he began to feel a disturbing, slow-building…relief. Perhaps it was because he had nothing else to do. Maybe it’s obvious a paradigm shift could occur, in those circumstances.
This relief, in part, came with the realization that Ishigaki was right—that relying on other people is what can give people power, in the right contexts. In this world, it’s so literal; his magic flourishes, and so-to-therefor his power and safety, with Bonds. But the way his heart became a little lighter, in a way that nauseated him, made that day to day easier. Perhaps just a distraction. But that was more what Ishigaki meant, right?
The less literal interpretation of relying on someone.
All the same, in sum, Aefenglom is still a unique hell, designed specifically to twist Midousuji in every direction he doesn’t know how to bend in, and absolutely does not wish to. An unforgiving landscape to simple people. Never had Midousuji been forced to feel more simple, nor…completely isolated. Not lonely. But ironically, this place forces him to face his own smallness in that it’s absolutely rooted in his own simple humanity. He is human. He is more human than most people here—and he’d never felt that, back home.
And unlike half of the transplanted Mirrorbound, he’s had the small blessing that he gets to remain as human. A witch.
For months, since Ishigaki’s arrival, Midousuji had been taunting him—ever since he was handed the Coven’s diagnosis that he indeed was to become a Monster. But his anxiety, interestingly, spiked to an all time home. He channeled that into playful, antagonistic mania. When it became clear, based on process of elimination, where Ishigaki’s transformation would lie… Midousuji did not relent.
Until September.
Ishigaki found him, late at night. Midousuji was watching the fireflies, but had come there earlier, far before dusk, letting the sun warm his skin, listening to the thick thrum of cicadas (interesting, that even here, he couldn’t escape their song), staring into nothing; meditating by coincidence, paralyzed by his emptiness.
He didn’t react, when Ishigaki had sat to him. He had nothing cheeky to say, about how it’d be so hard for Ishigaki to feed himself even with the blood bank—how vampires were uniquely discriminated against for how nasty!! the native Aefenglom people found them, in their ignorance—how Ishigaki better get a parasol, or else he’d burn to a crisp, and die. Many times, he’d thought of riding with Ishigaki in the unforgiving heat; how Ishigaki’s complexion took the warmth of the sun in evidence; in proud display, the way Midousuji’s couldn’t; he’d thought of how Ishigaki detests nothing more than doing harm; he’d thought of how Ishigaki is so social, and will surely become isolated himself. Cast to the shadows—seen as a monster.
That night, he looked at Ishigaki, having not absorbed anything the fledgling vampire had said; he just stared, mouth agape, and thought about the time.
The time.
One more month, and it’d all be real. Even before his research mania, Midousuji had been here long enough to know that the average full turn-time for a monster Mirrorbound was approximately three months. October would be it, likely. And Midousuji had learned, the second he determined Ishigaki would likely become a vampire, what the grand finale was for vampiric transformation. Ishigaki knew too, but Midousuji didn’t want it to leave Ishigaki’s head—he didn’t want to give Ishigaki room for escapism, no matter how cruel that may have seemed. Reality was crucial for Ishigaki’s survival in this process. Midousuji’s jeering was a warning; a bracing. Ishigaki doesn’t know about all the research Midousuji has done about these changes; about the creature clan he was to be pulled unwillingly into the fold of; about the history of humans versus vampires.
Cutting him off, having heard nothing, Midousuji then plainly asserted they Bond. It wasn’t a request. Ishigaki was stunned, and Midousuji stared, unblinking. Ishigaki stammered some useless, polite refutes—but Midousuji, being from the same culture, and ostracized for it because of his forwardness, Ishigaki finally accepted his gift. Ishigaki had his own bonds, but Midousuji didn’t care about that.
His would be the one that mattered. In fact, Midousuji knew their connection was the only one that was really important, here in this horrible place, to Ishigaki. Midousuji had become aware of how big his presence was.
And more importantly, he knew what was coming for Ishigaki. They both did.
So too, for Ishigaki, the sun would soon be setting.
They went to the Coven the next day, and Midousuji said no vows—nor did Ishigaki (at Midousuji’s screeching follow-up order, the previous night, after giving Ishigaki a rough face-shake).
Going forward from there, Midousuji has just been waiting.
Weight’s been melting from Ishigaki’s frame, subtly, but it’s too obvious to dispute now. Blood doesn’t yet have its gourmet aromatics, and there is no craving—but food makes him sick. Ishigaki’s done his best to hide it, but he has no idea how sensitive Midousuji is to this kind of thing, even if he credits, and is aware of, Midousuji’s genius and powers of observation.
He’s become slower, weaker; his eye bags, while always distinct, and in their own strange way, handsome—a natural result of his skeletal structure and fat distribution, have become sickly in a more universally telling way. Then, Ishigaki’s visits became fewer; the last time Midousuji had forced himself entry to Ishigaki’s home, he’d spotted a cane. Ishigaki made some stupid little comment with some lame, apologetic laugh about it, but Midousuji could tell that Ishigaki knew, by Midousuji’s wide, stuck eyes, that Midousuji understood its true implication.
“You don’t have to hide that from me,” was all Midousuji said. “And you better not, going forward.”
Tonight, they’re at Ishigaki’s—usually, Ishigaki would come see Midousuji, affording him the option to be nonchalant. Midousuji doesn’t let himself examine his feelings, as they’re Bonded, unless he knows Ishigaki is asleep—but even then, he does his best to stay away from expounding or expanding them. He knows them, so there’s no reason to agitate them, or give them life. Ishigaki can’t read his mind, and that’s what’s important. All the same, now, Midousuji visits Ishigaki. And the change if scenario isn’t the only change there is; the frequency has ticked up. Ishigaki is probably aware Midousuji is being controlling, because Ishigaki isn’t being truthful. They both know why.
When Midousuji had come through the door, he’d noticed something off. It’s been bugging him, through their time together—the talk has been infrequent, as Midousuji remains untalkative as usual, burying his head in a book or practicing magics. But when Ishigaki gets up to get the hot water from the stove, as he’d offered tea earlier, he suddenly swoons, nearly collapsing—his elbow bolsters him against the wall, head heavy and neck loose. Midousuji springs from his spot on the floor, using his long leg span in huge strides to roughly grasp Ishigaki’s wrist, yanking him straight.
Ishigaki apologizes and laughs, saying he got up too fast, and Midousuji’s eyes widen as he stares into Ishigaki’s face.
Tonight, Midousuji realizes. It’s going to be tonight.
He recognizes this scent; he remembers how subtly—so subtly, he hadn’t noticed, that his mother’s scent began to change as she came closer to her death. In fact, Midousuji doesn’t realize that change of scent as a memory until this moment.
His vision almost shifts, like he’s going faint himself, though he feels none of those physical comorbid reactions. His brain feels suddenly slapped with realization, and his body goes rigid with tension; his teeth clench hard behind his closed lips, and his heart beats hard, slowly ramping its cadence.
Midousuji’s nails dent his skin, his jaw clenching, cords popping from his neck.
“Sit down,” he orders slow, firm, and low. “I said I would make it when it’s ready.”
Midousuji’s palms become clammy.
“I’m understood, aren’t I? Ishigaki-kuuuun.”
Typically, when people from their own worlds arrived to this place, people would express some “too bads” about it, but also palpable relief for a familiar face.
Not Midousuji.
He’d been dreading it—in this place, where his existence holds no purpose. No real way to race, no point to innovate and cultivate that sort of world… It wasn’t the world his mother died on, and it wasn’t the world where he could carry her honor on his saddle across the finish of Tour de France to give himself permission to drop dead. No way to go back, no way to die—no escape, no reason to live.
For months, Midousuji has carried on an empty, complicated existence. His home world, compared to most of the Mirrorbound, is simple—but even outside of its mundane context, its simplicity could not be overstated for the simple fact that it had a born-in formula. And that formula was his purpose. You get up, you eat, you train, you discipline and manipulate, you grow, you fight with all you have—to win. Being forced to exist without what’s kept him moving forward all this time is what indeed makes this place a complex, miserable hell; a complex nexus, but it’s felt like it was designed specifically to destroy Midousuji.
But then, he’d… began to grow; began to change. What else did he have? Without the ability to run away (not that he’d been running away from anything back home; of course not! He is legitimately convinced this is true, even now), and with the need to connect to other people for survival… What choice did he have?
Magic was interesting, in its own way—he did like it, once he wrangled a way not to resent this gift so completely. And to his surprise, once it made sense, it clicked fabulously—his new prodigal project. But his output, his bastardized, rerouted purpose, demanded energy and external symbiosis for balance. Bonds. Which he’d managed to keep business—he’d managed to wall himself away perhaps harder than ever, so afraid of people seeing his vulnerabilities. In a world that’s actually, truly, absolutely dangerous, the stakes are much higher than the asphalt roads he ruled with such domineering ease back in his natal, simple universe.
But somehow…even outside of bonds, he’d become…
Well, he doesn’t know how to describe it, but the truth is he’d become attached. Not to the space, but to his horror, to a person; a girl. A girl strange, and beautiful, carrying an equalizing darkness and wisdom, masqueraded as naive people pleasing. Complex, fascinating, unpredictable, and…shaping. She scared him, initially, because it became clear to him rather abruptly he was a threat to this safety he needed in being invulnerable. But once he gently sank into it, as with Onoda, back home, he began to feel a disturbing, slow-building…relief. Perhaps it was because he had nothing else to do. Maybe it’s obvious a paradigm shift could occur, in those circumstances.
This relief, in part, came with the realization that Ishigaki was right—that relying on other people is what can give people power, in the right contexts. In this world, it’s so literal; his magic flourishes, and so-to-therefor his power and safety, with Bonds. But the way his heart became a little lighter, in a way that nauseated him, made that day to day easier. Perhaps just a distraction. But that was more what Ishigaki meant, right?
The less literal interpretation of relying on someone.
All the same, in sum, Aefenglom is still a unique hell, designed specifically to twist Midousuji in every direction he doesn’t know how to bend in, and absolutely does not wish to. An unforgiving landscape to simple people. Never had Midousuji been forced to feel more simple, nor…completely isolated. Not lonely. But ironically, this place forces him to face his own smallness in that it’s absolutely rooted in his own simple humanity. He is human. He is more human than most people here—and he’d never felt that, back home.
And unlike half of the transplanted Mirrorbound, he’s had the small blessing that he gets to remain as human. A witch.
For months, since Ishigaki’s arrival, Midousuji had been taunting him—ever since he was handed the Coven’s diagnosis that he indeed was to become a Monster. But his anxiety, interestingly, spiked to an all time home. He channeled that into playful, antagonistic mania. When it became clear, based on process of elimination, where Ishigaki’s transformation would lie… Midousuji did not relent.
Until September.
Ishigaki found him, late at night. Midousuji was watching the fireflies, but had come there earlier, far before dusk, letting the sun warm his skin, listening to the thick thrum of cicadas (interesting, that even here, he couldn’t escape their song), staring into nothing; meditating by coincidence, paralyzed by his emptiness.
He didn’t react, when Ishigaki had sat to him. He had nothing cheeky to say, about how it’d be so hard for Ishigaki to feed himself even with the blood bank—how vampires were uniquely discriminated against for how nasty!! the native Aefenglom people found them, in their ignorance—how Ishigaki better get a parasol, or else he’d burn to a crisp, and die. Many times, he’d thought of riding with Ishigaki in the unforgiving heat; how Ishigaki’s complexion took the warmth of the sun in evidence; in proud display, the way Midousuji’s couldn’t; he’d thought of how Ishigaki detests nothing more than doing harm; he’d thought of how Ishigaki is so social, and will surely become isolated himself. Cast to the shadows—seen as a monster.
That night, he looked at Ishigaki, having not absorbed anything the fledgling vampire had said; he just stared, mouth agape, and thought about the time.
The time.
One more month, and it’d all be real. Even before his research mania, Midousuji had been here long enough to know that the average full turn-time for a monster Mirrorbound was approximately three months. October would be it, likely. And Midousuji had learned, the second he determined Ishigaki would likely become a vampire, what the grand finale was for vampiric transformation. Ishigaki knew too, but Midousuji didn’t want it to leave Ishigaki’s head—he didn’t want to give Ishigaki room for escapism, no matter how cruel that may have seemed. Reality was crucial for Ishigaki’s survival in this process. Midousuji’s jeering was a warning; a bracing. Ishigaki doesn’t know about all the research Midousuji has done about these changes; about the creature clan he was to be pulled unwillingly into the fold of; about the history of humans versus vampires.
Cutting him off, having heard nothing, Midousuji then plainly asserted they Bond. It wasn’t a request. Ishigaki was stunned, and Midousuji stared, unblinking. Ishigaki stammered some useless, polite refutes—but Midousuji, being from the same culture, and ostracized for it because of his forwardness, Ishigaki finally accepted his gift. Ishigaki had his own bonds, but Midousuji didn’t care about that.
His would be the one that mattered. In fact, Midousuji knew their connection was the only one that was really important, here in this horrible place, to Ishigaki. Midousuji had become aware of how big his presence was.
And more importantly, he knew what was coming for Ishigaki. They both did.
So too, for Ishigaki, the sun would soon be setting.
They went to the Coven the next day, and Midousuji said no vows—nor did Ishigaki (at Midousuji’s screeching follow-up order, the previous night, after giving Ishigaki a rough face-shake).
Going forward from there, Midousuji has just been waiting.
Weight’s been melting from Ishigaki’s frame, subtly, but it’s too obvious to dispute now. Blood doesn’t yet have its gourmet aromatics, and there is no craving—but food makes him sick. Ishigaki’s done his best to hide it, but he has no idea how sensitive Midousuji is to this kind of thing, even if he credits, and is aware of, Midousuji’s genius and powers of observation.
He’s become slower, weaker; his eye bags, while always distinct, and in their own strange way, handsome—a natural result of his skeletal structure and fat distribution, have become sickly in a more universally telling way. Then, Ishigaki’s visits became fewer; the last time Midousuji had forced himself entry to Ishigaki’s home, he’d spotted a cane. Ishigaki made some stupid little comment with some lame, apologetic laugh about it, but Midousuji could tell that Ishigaki knew, by Midousuji’s wide, stuck eyes, that Midousuji understood its true implication.
“You don’t have to hide that from me,” was all Midousuji said. “And you better not, going forward.”
Tonight, they’re at Ishigaki’s—usually, Ishigaki would come see Midousuji, affording him the option to be nonchalant. Midousuji doesn’t let himself examine his feelings, as they’re Bonded, unless he knows Ishigaki is asleep—but even then, he does his best to stay away from expounding or expanding them. He knows them, so there’s no reason to agitate them, or give them life. Ishigaki can’t read his mind, and that’s what’s important. All the same, now, Midousuji visits Ishigaki. And the change if scenario isn’t the only change there is; the frequency has ticked up. Ishigaki is probably aware Midousuji is being controlling, because Ishigaki isn’t being truthful. They both know why.
When Midousuji had come through the door, he’d noticed something off. It’s been bugging him, through their time together—the talk has been infrequent, as Midousuji remains untalkative as usual, burying his head in a book or practicing magics. But when Ishigaki gets up to get the hot water from the stove, as he’d offered tea earlier, he suddenly swoons, nearly collapsing—his elbow bolsters him against the wall, head heavy and neck loose. Midousuji springs from his spot on the floor, using his long leg span in huge strides to roughly grasp Ishigaki’s wrist, yanking him straight.
Ishigaki apologizes and laughs, saying he got up too fast, and Midousuji’s eyes widen as he stares into Ishigaki’s face.
Tonight, Midousuji realizes. It’s going to be tonight.
He recognizes this scent; he remembers how subtly—so subtly, he hadn’t noticed, that his mother’s scent began to change as she came closer to her death. In fact, Midousuji doesn’t realize that change of scent as a memory until this moment.
His vision almost shifts, like he’s going faint himself, though he feels none of those physical comorbid reactions. His brain feels suddenly slapped with realization, and his body goes rigid with tension; his teeth clench hard behind his closed lips, and his heart beats hard, slowly ramping its cadence.
Midousuji’s nails dent his skin, his jaw clenching, cords popping from his neck.
“Sit down,” he orders slow, firm, and low. “I said I would make it when it’s ready.”
Midousuji’s palms become clammy.
“I’m understood, aren’t I? Ishigaki-kuuuun.”
no subject
He’s more careful than usual with his clumsy, badly proxied gait; it feels like his every conventional failing is more easily challenged with the weight of a dying man on his shoulder. One he cares about, as loathe as even now, with all this context, he is to admit. But his ill-cope is smaller than this scenario, even if that same ill-cope has been what’s kept him alive until his time before Aefenglom. This place, in total, has been a forcible boot-camp to the bigger picture—and Midousuji has grappled daily, since before Ishigaki’s arrival, with the discerning as to whether or not that’s a positive or a negative.
He can’t stop thinking about Ishigaki’s finite heartbeat—not since they learned of his monstrous diagnosis.
Forcing Midousuji out of his shell.
His own special layer of hell—perhaps what he deserves, whether he’s cognizant of that concept or not.
Ishigaki thanks him, and eyes bluntly forward, Midousuji ignores it. He has things he wants to say, surely, about independence, but he cans it; it’s Midousuji’s own last bastion of independence to deny Ishigaki his own. The idea that either of them have free will in this scenario, for the most part, at least, is a joke.
That is to say, spun up as he is, neurodivergent as he’s been cast since his unfortunate birth, the joke does not land. Normally, in the face of discomfort, Midousuji has the brimming well of all uncomfortable, coping humor—but not now. Even outside of how this place has made him, Midousuji knows, in the face of death, there’s no place for posturing.
And so, Midousuji is silent and careful, both with his breath, and his steps, as he leads Ishigaki to his room; the light of the world, as a precaution, despite Midousuji being a diurnal being, has been long swallowed up as of months ago in favor of Ishigaki’s company. That, in and of itself, is an admission its own. Humiliatingly, it lays Midousuji’s priorities bare.
“You aren’t sick,” Midousuji corrects, but says nothing further; it’s too grim to do so, and too unproductively exact. As if it’s about independence. As if an illness is in one’s control, and this isn’t even an illness—it’s somehow something more dark, more twisted; it’s a sentence. So too was true of his own mother, one could argue—but her illness was more random than Ishigaki’s diagnosis. Midousuji has been anticipating this since three months ago, and somehow, he still doesn’t feel prepared. You’d think the death of his only and best friend, from native birth, would have been good priming. But it isn’t—wasn’t—at all. And that’s humiliating, too.
With the nanny comment, Midousuji squints his eyes, casting Ishigaki a barbed, iron stare, the corner of his scowling lips hooking the skin just a way to convey his silent resentment towards it.
“Stop,” is all Midousuji says, brief, rough, low and grousing.
He ignores the squeeze to his arm, to the best of his ability. It makes his heart hiccup with frustration and sorrow, but it’s familiar enough by pattern, through how he’s survived this long, to quash it.
Midousuji carefully assists Ishigaki into a sitting position on his bed, and there’s an odd hiccup in the way Ishigaki speaks next, when he says his demented, emotionally distorted, ego-based nonsense next. Midousuji’s gaze meets Ishigaki anyway through the utterance, his brows straight, rather than hiked in stress or excitement; his velvet, lightless eyes look a touch glassy, and Midoujsuji’s adam’s apple is momentarily trapped tight and high to his jaw, but is swallowed down. Nearly, his chin dimples.
“Shut up,” he breathes lowly, keeping his breath even, this time. “You’re just tired. Don’t speak with such embarrassing finality.”
Midousuji does not want to leave Ishigaki.
He agrees with this theory.
But Midousuji doesn’t want to spin Ishigaki out, nor himself, by facing it anymore head-on than he already has.
He doesn’t think he’ll die in thirty minutes, at least.
And so, heart racing, because while Midousuji knows it’s going to be hard for Ishigaki in ways Midousuji can’t comprehend (in ways he’s aware), Midousuji also knows he’ll be facing something insurmountable very soon—if either of them are right about the night’s trajectory.
And Midousuji—he’s been preparing for months, and he feels blind sided anyway. Maybe this is a fake out? He could only hope. If that were true, then maybe when it really, really happens, Midousuji will actually be prepared.
But…
If it’s really, really tonight, then…
“Let me get the tea.”
Even if he’s right, then maybe either of them could take advantage of the comfort of a well brewed cup of tea.
His whole life, Midousuji has not been talented with much at all. He’d never explain this to Ishigaki, though Ishigaki’s been surprised here and there with that reality—that Midousuji is nothing without the agro savant activation of the road. Without his special interest of cycling. That he can’t swim, that he can’t fish, that he can’t make eye-contact. Ishigaki recognizes him for the titan that he is, but also has been shocked for his infancy—all without changing his opinion, lowering his respect, or heightening his pity.
It’s familiar. In the way that it’s grim.
Midousuji swallows hard, and staggers, gracelessly, to the kitchen—he keeps himself straight on tripping ankles by bracing by his elbows, and in the kitchen, eyes wide, throat dry, Midousuji perches beside the stove. His palms brace his tall, strange body, the bow of his back grotesquely exaggerated as it fills and empties with silent, panicked breaths. The kettle whistles, and Midousuji shakily, blindly, still staring down to nothing, reaches for it.
Despite his shakes, Midousuji manages to pour two perfect cups of tea. Similar to something you would find in Kyoto. He even had the tea leaves soaking, cooling, in cool water—boiling water is best for black tea, the way Westerner’s like it. Aefenglom, by its natives, is largely in that ilk. In Kyoto, Midousuji would never do it this way. But in Aefenglom, his teeth are, subtly, chattering—and he only just notices it, despite how steady his hands are pouring the tea. His eyes sting in an unfamiliar, overwhelming way.
It’s like he’s up to the reaper’s scythe, and not Ishigaki.
Even though he knows Ishigaki will come right back. So what’s the big deal? What is this dread? Is it because of his mother? Is it because of coming to the task of being forced to answer for the fact he loves more than just his mother? Is it punishment? Has he been an ungrateful child?
Why is this so frightening?
He can’t understand it.
Gloved, dry hands carefully close around each cylindrical cup. Midousuji doesn’t rush himself too much, for fear of spilling the tea—for giving away his emotional desperation; his fear.
Once in the room, Midousuji carefully settles beside Ishigaki again. He doesn’t look at Ishigaki, and settles the tea on the nightstand nearest to his weakening friend.
Midousuji uselessly holds his own cup between his palms, pinched tightly between his knees.
He can’t let Ishigaki know he’s just as scared—he has to lean into the plausible deniability of everything.
Midousuji isn’t the one dying, after all.
“Ishigaki-kun…” Midousuji’s back bows inward. “Your tea,” Midousuji says quietly, staring in tremors to the corner of the room, furthest from Ishigaki. “Calm your nerves, and sleep.”
Maybe he is wrong, after all. Maybe they both are.
Midousuji hopes so, desperately.
But his gut hasn’t been wrong, since the day his mother died.
no subject
To this, Ishigaki would normally launch into a long, expansive monologue, but nothing comes up when he rakes his thoughts. Only a heavy feeling telling him there's a time and place for everything.
"Thank you," he says delayed with a forged brightness in his voice, taking the tea into his hands. Liquids are hard to keep down, but he manages not to gag if he sips slowly. The earthy taste doesn't do much for him anymore, and it almost burns in contrast to his cold hands, but he's grateful just the same.
He had thought about what he said in the time between then and now, and Midousuji is right. It's no good to think about that now, as much as he wants to. Sure, Midousuji wasn't the one who's painfully and gradually turning into a wireframe version of his original self, but the future doesn't exist yet, and the effort Midousuji puts in places his thoughts in the present, if only a little…
The curtains that hang from his window in front of them are dark and thickly threaded, with the setting sun hardly shining through. They're the very same in his living room, and in Midousuji's own, too. He had hung them up, unasked for Ishigaki, where they were gifted to him so haphazardly that he'd almost mistook it for Midousuji being shy. They had sat untouched for days that turned into a week- too weak and too bothered to hang them when hiding under the covers from the sun took less physical effort, before Midousuji had silently just done it himself.
Another way that Midousuji plans on Ishigaki to be a continuing part of his life, it seemed.
His back slides, though only a little, as his shoulder bump into Midousuji's without meaning to. Holding himself up is difficult, breathing is difficult, like if he stops focusing on it, he'll stop completely, and he's putting in the excess mental effort to keep his cup upright instead of spilling over in his lap. He thinks of moving away- he knows the close contact has an effect all of this does, but... Ishigaki wonders then, if sometimes people are just meant to be burdens.
He knows he is- or has been- a burden, and that's shown in the subtle way Midousuji's eyes shine wet. Ishigaki is self-serving in his own ways, and he's glad Midousuji had made him recognize that. Midousuji's accusations- that he's "playing senpai", of being patronizing and disgusting and so on- haven't been entirely wrong. His devotion is rooted in some sort of selfish infatuation, and that makes Midousuji uncomfortable, as much as he needs it. And maybe that's why all of this feels so utterly selfish.
Caring is a heavy burden. One that he's unwittingly placed on Midousuji to carry. But to use Midousuji to represent Ishigaki's own self-doubt and loathing would be an insult to the both of them.
And so Ishigaki doesn't move away. He doesn't turn to face him, or apologize, or let his tears spill over and curl down his cheek like he really wants to. His pensive gaze just slips somewhere far beyond the curtains.
"Say... Could you..." he begins, trying to pretend he isn't asking for more than what this really is. "Stay tonight? Until I fall asleep."
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He finds himself distantly revolted, and a stabbing, watery twinge of something else, when he notices he meditates, just slightly, on Ishigaki’s warmth.
It was hard, when his mother was dying. Mostly, as a child, he didn’t understand it—but the truth is that he didn’t understand completely. There was an anxious, scared part of him he suppressed—that he did not want to give power to—that worried he might lose her. Even now, even if it’s a little bit hazy in his recollection, Midousuji remembers the light and day of his own mother; the brightness and life to the melancholy, exhausted palor, dim and worn. How, like Ishigaki, she could no longer easily so much as stand or sit on her own. As a child, it didn’t quite register. It was odd, surely, seeing this sudden change—but it was easily buried, like something that was temporary, even if part of him, deep down, had the fear that it maybe wouldn’t be. It seemed impossible—silly, even!—to think she might die. That he might run out of days in the Summer to see her, and not because she’d be out of the hospital due to recovery, but due to death. He felt it, and the part of people that worry, sometimes, actually know—and part of him knew. But to look it in its face felt like some shinigami’s manifestation, so he didn’t—yet it happened anyway.
You can’t put a lot of onus on a nine year old, so realistically—reasonably—Midousuji could not be blamed. But the dark blight of death’s cloud tainted his name immediately; his face, living breath, and everything all the same in a way that was engulfing, erasing and ever-so polite. An ostracizing, morbid shame that enshrouded him like every other trait of his, all of them more innate than his mother’s death. His mother, who loved him for all his innate, off-color attributes and characteristics.
All the same, he ran from it. Ran with cyclical cadence, with emotional self mutilation, with living without living, his life left behind along in his mother’s pyre. And Midousuji didn’t realize it—that his strategy to honor her name, to succeed, to grow, to win (most importantly)—all involved running. Running away from it. Racing. Crumbling whenever it caught up to him, until he had no way to run.
Aefenglom rendered him in this way almost as an amputee. There had been nothing more rewarding nor as harrowing as true human connection, in his life; his mother was his first, and with the agony that followed, beyond mortal belief, he’d done everything he could to make it his last, and to build his decision to move forward as his shrine to when his life had meaning by “carrying on” her memory. But in Aefenglom, there was no Tour de France. There was no glory. It was a world his mother didn’t even know; there was no context for her spirit, and he didn’t even have a portrait or a grave to visit. This place had broken him down, beat him to bits, and forced him to grab hold of the face of his own shadow and to stare into its deepest, scariest parts. The parts that come so easily to other people, and most importantly, willingly; Midousuji hadn’t just avoided these things because of a fear of rejection, or meshing. He’d never wanted it, and his mother had been enough. But in this place, not even her memory could properly survive. And neither could Midousuji, without figuring it out—human connection. The strength in trust—how this place symbiotically enforced this kind of vulnerability, and the terror that came with it. Midousuji had often felt like he was the only person in this entire damn city who felt that it was worse than death.
But even before his arrival, Midousuji had remembered Ishigaki’s words, back home; they grew as a disturbing anchor, and the thing Midousuji knew he could no longer run from. He befriended Aerith, though he didn’t mean to. It made him remember Onoda; it made him remember his mother; it made him miss Ishigaki.
And so, yes, Midousuji was jarred from his thoughts when he felt Ishigaki’s slack, tired weight against his shoulder. But he didn’t tense up in a dramatic fashion as his instinct screamed in that dictation; instead, his eyes strain in a corner glance to observe him; his whitening grip now twists into fists in the sheets. He swallows, sobered of his reality as has been needed, again and again, his whole life. Ishigaki is going to die, and Midousuji can’t stop thinking about how this, while horrific, is a blaming redemption, in a way. Midousuji couldn’t accept his mother was dying, back then—and though staff likely wouldn’t have allowed an adult, even, much less a child, to be at her bedside, Midousuji can’t help but think this is an opportunity. He’s unsure if he’d have held his mother (in a world where that would somehow legally fly) to her dying breath, but he thinks he would have. Ishigaki’s weakening state rends Midousuji’s heart, because he can’t help but realize he wishes he got to sit here, just like this, in his mother’s last days. Since Ishigaki’s decline, Midousuji hasn’t been aimed to wonder, ceaselessly, if she felt any comfort when she died, surrounded by no one who loved her properly.
Missing her own son, who never even managed to figure out how to return her embraces from before she died.
Midousuji swallows dry, and slow.
It’s all this that’s made him really realize his feelings, about Ishigaki—even knowing Ishigaki will come back, it’s somehow no less harrowing. Which frankly feels a little pathetic, and disrespectful. But he can’t even visit his mother’s grave—Midousuji’s life has largely been structured around the rituals of death grief, so this just feels meant to be. Or maybe that’s wilted, defeated theory—that maybe everyone he loves will die. That he deserves it.
Either way, Midousuji carries a complex gradient of regrets, most of which only recently revealing themselves with this morbid, forced clarity. She’d never lived long enough for Midousuji to demonstrate how, exactly, it is that he loves; she didn’t live long enough for Midousuji to have the reward of being her caretaker. She died before he could even competently do chores around the home.
Making tea is but a small penance to his guilty heart.
Slowly, Midousuji’s eyes roll away, and he remains rigid—but does no motion to disturb Ishigaki’s position. He tries not to meditate on Ishigaki’s warmth—how he’ll soon lose it, just as when he listened to his mother’s weakening heartbeat.
“That was the idea,” he finally says, his mouth audibly dry. “Don’t be so obtuse… Not even I’m so cruel to just leave you in this kind of state so late, when you can’t even get your own cane. You irritate me, but I wouldn’t just let you piss your bed.”
Though his position, neck, head and all doesn’t shift, Midousuji’s eyes drop from the nothing ahead of him, just slightly.
“I’m not actually some monster. Not tooootally, anyway.”
Midousuji knows Ishigaki is well aware of that, and doesn’t truly need any sort of reminder—but when acting outside of how Ishigaki’s known him, with deliberate compassion being struggled out of his natural design, it bears some highlighting. In that vein, Midousuji feels he can’t even do what he feels is the right thing, nor is he tempted to betray his own nature, despite how monstrous it feels—that he can’t say something about how he couldn’t leave his friend in such a state, that he cares about Ishigaki, or…anything like that. For all his wit and taunting, Midousuji is cursed with actions only in this kind of intimacy; he just has to trust that the people he loves understand his language, and hope that they can handle the true breadth that is the burden of his love.
Acknowledging that love is indeed what’s put him through this—what’s killed him, kept him alive, and is now keeping his ass planted on Ishigaki’s bed—is what keeps Midousuji humble, finally acknowledging he’s still but a struggling pupil.
His eyes, then, slowly, roll back to Ishigaki, though the posture of his neck, head, and everything else, stonily, remains the same.
“You know,” he pivots, “I have some Ether.”
It’s suggestive, yes, but one nice thing about Ishigaki, for despite how much his morality makes him a fool, he is, ultimately, quite sharp. Probably the only reason they’ve managed to facilitate any kind of bond at all is that they can communicate without words; Ishigaki is no mastermind of Midousuji’s caliber, mostly due to his character, but he’s the only one who’s been able to so quickly see, and eventually, understand Midousuji.
Ether is not any kind of drug Midousuji himself has done—alcohol has been enough for him, and in general, aside from comedic schocastic circumstances, even those altered states have been few and far between. But Ether is made by witches, and by the Coven. Similar to mercury as a pain killer, but best used for a variety of other magically aspected purposes. Good for killing pain brought about by more magical ailments, basically.
That he has it all belies its purpose; Midousuji trusts that Ishigaki will likely understand he’s not the type to just walk around with vials of it, even in his (surprisingly passionate) wit holy studies. But Midousuji hopes for the slim chance he might be wrong, and it’ll go over Ishigaki’s head.
1 / 2
Midousuji's comment shifts the mood just enough, though, that Ishigaki manages to laughs quietly through his nose.
"Well, that's kind of you."
And he's right. He's not some monster. Not totally. Although there was a time he wished Midousuji was some monster, like everyone else agreed upon, because that would have been much easier to accept. But Ishigaki was not going to deny something grotesque just because he didn't want to look at it. Back then, he couldn't fully digest that he'd be tossed aside for no other reason than his own shortcomings, and he found something else within the bitterness of a sore loser. Sometimes he would see something in the other that he only knew as a happiness, where Ishigaki would privately vie for more, and Midousuji would show just how far he would have to go to see it again.
And it feels so cruel- as if it's now all effort wasted gone to a forlorn halt.
"Ether…?" It takes a moment to remind himself, but the word rings familiar.
That's what they would have given to him if he chose to pass in the hospital rather than at home, which was mentioned and insisted when given an official diagnoses. A convincing offer to ease and speed the process, but Ishigaki had declined. Accepting it meant being watched over and admitted thereafter, and that meant accepting another reality on top of one that hardly felt like one at all. He wasn't concerned at the time of the diagnoses, anyhow- his thoughts too riddled numb with the inconceivable world around him. He had only wanted to return to the closest thing he could call home, near the only person who, despite himself, made sense.
Ishigaki waits before answering, despite now being acutely aware of his pain to highlight how alluring of an offer it is. They both know this alone won't kill him, but just the same that repeated use over time wouldn't be any good, and that this was his last resort for comfort. For someone as straight-laced as Ishigaki, he can't grasp why someone with options would take it willingly.
"A sedative… Trying to get me to shut up, are you?" He says, finally, a playful tone that takes effort to push out. "I feel hardly cognitive without being drugged, you know. I can fall asleep just fine."
But taking it for Midousuji's sake wins him over the uncertainty. To let him help him, so they didn't both feel entirely helpless.
"Although I'm sure you've already caught on that the pain is… well," he starts, but stops. It's hard to admit, even when his illness has all been put so humbling into light.
"Hardly bearable." His voice is softer now, but he tries not to sound as pathetic as the words feel. "So… It… Wouldn't hurt to try."
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And then he draws in a breath and swallows, making a sour face as he does. It's gone in seconds, and he's quick to wash down its bitter taste with rest of his tea.
He slacks with a sigh, now staring at the bottom of his cup. He's glad it didn't sit at his bedside to go half-finished and cold like all the others he couldn't keep down. The tea never does taste like home, but it's grown comforting in its familiarity.
"It's… odd. How I've become so attached to this place," he starts, quietly, without looking up. In the back of his addled brain, a voice is telling him to stop, especially so when Midousuji had already shown struggle to not flinch himself away from vulnerability. But when death teeters so close, the words poor out without a second thought- too afraid of regretting not saying anything, as if there was a place to regret anything at all after nothing, or as if there would be nothing to wake up to anywise. Suddenly, he doesn't want to apologize for being soft. He just wants to be honest.
"When I leave, I…" He pauses, careful with his words.
"When I leave Aefenglom- when I go home- I know it's not possible, but I have this strange feeling that I'll… miss this."
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When Ishigaki jokes about Midousuji trying to get him to shut up, Midousuji’s head tilts to the side, his eyes rolling up to the ceiling; his bony shoulders lift, legs momentarily kicking outward, his tone sing-song, body language boyish. “I wish you would,” Midousuji half-jokes back. “Not even narcotics could do it.”
Not that ether’s a narcotic, but who is he without hyperbole?
To Ishigaki’s mention of the pain, Midousuji says nothing; he sits up a bit straighter, besides the hunch in his shoulders, and his head ever-so-slightly tilts so his chin pulls towards his collarbone; his gaze remains unfocused, but subtly downcast. Of course Midousuji’s aware of the pain. He doesn’t normally feel bad for people who become injured, even if he knows he’d probably wince and hide away from anything real-time gorey or anything like that. But the chronic suffering of it pulls something from deep inside him, or rather, it pulls him—puts its hands around his face and forces Midousuji to look back into the face of his captor. It’s the type of suffering he has no indifference for, or merits any satisfaction or amusement from. Midousuji sees Ishigaki down the medicine in his peripheral, his chest suddenly buzzing with a cold hollowness.
Finally, Midousuji lifts his head as Ishigaki continues (still clearly unable to shut the fuck up, but Midousuji doesn’t actually mind; when Ishigaki finally does shut up, Midousuji won’t be glad for the reason, and he knows this). His eyes bear wide at Ishigaki, finally looking him in the dimming gold of his gaze, and Midousuji’s eyes stare with the same depth as his silence blankets.
Midousuji reaches forward, slowly, and doesn’t look away, carefully taking the empty mug from Ishigaki.
“You won’t,” Midousuji says quietly.
“It’s impossible, Ishigaki-kun. Don’t be gross.”
Midousuji swallows, carefully, his voice low, and quiet. He continues.
“This is it. All there is. You’re saying that to cope. You’re simply grieving things prematurely.”
The terrible feeling in his chest is getting worse.
Midousuji would do anything to go back home. But everything he’s learned, everything he’s unlearned—is there worth, there? Aerith, Ishigaki, some of the other folks he’s met—there’s something he can’t bear to admit he likes—needs—that Aefenglom makes possible for him. Somewhere where he’s forced to let go. Leave pearls to their depths, away from the crushing, desperate grip of his lonely hands.
Midousuji knows they’re both soon going to endure something terrible… but there’s something that makes him sick, thinking about not having… this.
What does that mean?
What is “this”?
“This place… The Bonds… Every new face, every connection… It’s all as pointless as a dream… Except you can’t wake up, and it’s real.”
It’s real.
This is real.
no subject
The words aren't difficult to hear. He knows where Midousuji is coming from, and he's thought the very same. But he doesn't know how to dispute that just yet, either, despite all the time he's had to dwell on it.
"Can't you say the same for anything, then? That it's all pointless…" Ishigaki's voice falls quiet, wording his thoughts as they come. "When we return home, it's… just the same. We'll be there, and we'll grow old, and then we're gone in a moment."
Ishigaki is not religious, or spiritual, or anything of the like- or more, he's never thought of it more than he's had to before now. If he's being honest, he really doesn't believe there's anything at all after death. Maybe it had always been too difficult to face fully, quietly ignoring it like some passive protest against how painful the thought was. But to reject all he's cared for entirely, to really say that it's all for nothing… That may be true, but what has that done for anyone? So he hangs on to its uncomfortableness, hoping it means something.
"That's like saying anything between then and now is useless… That's just unfair."
Of course it's not fair. If road racing- if Midousuji, especially- taught him anything, it's that life is entirely unfair. In life Ishigaki had lost, and in his losses he had grieved. But in his grief, there was love. Love for the team he so thoroughly disappointed.
His eyelids weigh heavy, and so he flickers them open in forced blinks. But he doesn't process much of what he's seeing- he just knows the pale and black blob is Midousuji, with the whites of his eyes wide enough to know that they're looking at each other. He doesn't even notice how glued to the bed he is now; back laxed heavy into the pillows propped below him. The ether is creeping up on him faster than expected, and it makes sense. You don't have to digest magic.
"…The walks to your place. I liked those. There's a lot of myrtle trees on the way." He starts, not entirely sure why or where he's going with it yet. "I've never seen them like that. Reds and purples… I'm glad I got to see them bloom."
Ishigaki smiles without meaning to, while his eyes lack a glint of anything.
"And the bakery… you know, at the corner. That I'd stop by before visiting you sometimes, when I could… With those little pastries." He lifts his hand, motioning his fingers to mimic the size. The words grow difficult to bring out, now too laxed to hide his subtly shallow breathing. "…I liked those too."
Luckily, he doesn't have to bother with the extra effort to describe them, knowing Midousuji's eaten what he couldn't finish. He can't remember what it was called exactly now, just that it was one introduced to him here, with a funny name made by someone from a world both foreign to Aefenglom and his own. He just knows the dozen was gone too quick, and how it was dripping with honey that was worth the sticky fingers. A shame he'll never be able to enjoy another, but his appetite is too far gone for it to be too much of a pity.
He draws a breath and eases lower into the bed, facing the ceiling.
There's a lot he could list, all of it mundane in ways he's still not sure Midousuji could ever see the same way, because Midousuji is not a simple person. But he knows there's something keeping Midousuji here, where his savagely self-crafted existence holds no real purpose, with no proper way to race, to discipline himself, to win. No way to move forward in a way he's built himself to understands. And Aefenglom humbled him, even, by reminding him he's human by keeping him one. And humans are small, and they are simple, and sometimes they like flowers and pastries.
"And I've liked your company."
Finally, he closes his eyes.
"And… that's enough, I think. Whether I'll miss it or not."
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But Midousuji’s learned that there’s preciousness in mundanity, too. It took a long time. He thinks of standing silently beside his mother’s peaceful, resting frame, watching how the sun caught the edges of her eyebrows. Her cuticles, her hair. The dust in the room.
Pointless isn’t quite the same as useless, but Midousuji doesn’t dare say that out loud—he wouldn’t know how to articulate if he tried, in part, because he’s still learning this for himself. It’s recent.
Midousuji swallows again, and he notices, to his discomfort and mortification, that his throat is growing somewhat tight—he does not notice, however, the subtle way his chin momentarily, barely within perception, dimples; his knuckles white as they claw in a slow wrench against the stony ceramic, listening to Ishigaki’s weak, raw voice.
Midousuji’s eyes suddenly dart back up to Ishigaki, when he mentions the walks to his place. His gut twists again with a cold, foreboding dread. His hands feel cold, and his heart is racing subtly. Why is he overreacting like this? Why are the hairs on the back of his neck standing at attention with Ishigaki’s every word?
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“You’re so dramatic,” Midousuji says very quietly, his affectation flat, unable to muster the focus or wherewithal to inject his tone with derision or bullying scorn.
Ishigaki must be scared, Midousuji thinks. Of course he would be.
It was funny, back home, Midousuji never thought about anyone else ever dying—swearing his heart closed was partly why, but since learning of Ishigaki’s diagnosis, he thinks that even if it were someone he didn’t particularly care for back home who’d met some untimely, painful end, he’d be at least a little disquieted. Death is a scary thing.
How foolish—how ungrateful he was back home, treating his own body like a means to an end. The context of his mother’s words, years and years and years later, are finally almost in what their proper intended place was. Midousuji is his mother’s precious legacy; his body, and his life, mattered too. Maintaining himself like a machine, but not respecting his own limits, just as he had with the De Rosa… Like it didn’t matter if he lived or died. The fact that he’d actively wished for death even in this place.
Ishigaki here, in this condition, has utterly shifted his perspectives.
And it’s kind of—
horrible, yes… but so too, it’s…
Midousuji’s breath catches, stuck in his throat, ribs subtly expanding.
It’s amazing, really.
Is it that death really the only thing that can change Midousuji? At least, to great, bounding pace? He’d always managed smaller evolutions all the time—closer to what would get him his victory, but not…
Yes, there is something else.
Growing towards something else…
Some other meaning.
What is it?
“Whether I like it or not, somehow, I’ll probably always be burdened by your company.”
What Midousuji really wants to say is that Ishigaki isn’t going anywhere—but he can’t bring himself to allude to his impending death as directly as he normally would. Indeed, over the last weeks, the closer it’s gotten, the less referential Midousuji’s been. The sense for that kind of thing just doesn’t go away.
“Stupid,” Midousuji says so softly that it’s nearly in whisper. “Stupid, stupid, you’re so stupid, do you hear yourself? Ridiculous.
We’re right here,” he says almost rigidly. Though his voice is still quiet, his voice becomes increasingly terse. “So who cares, Ishigaki-kun? We’re right here. Now. We’re here. So who cares?”
His hands nearly slip in his fierce grip around the little ceramic mug.
“Like you won’t see a stupid myrtle tree ever again! Like you’ll never leave this place! Like we aren’t right here, right this second, together!”
Midousuji goes still, muscles locked, his heart pounding. It’s only ever gone so fast when he’s making a break for the finish—he hadn’t meant to say that that way. But he wasn’t saying anything all that intentionally. He feels like he’s losing his grip.
Together…
no subject
Ishigaki connects one sentence to the other, and he feels a churning inside him, resignation swimming in his eyes. He calls out his name, too hurried to hide how difficult it's been to keep his voice steady, and so it comes out of his throat in such a way that the only part that could surely reach out to Midousuji is a very soft "-suji."
Ishigaki extends out his arm, blindly and silently patting the sheets until, for the first time since he's came to Aefenglom, he indicates contact. It's not much, though- his arm lifts only for his fingertips to lightly brush the other, unsure of which part of him he's really touching, before sliding back onto the sheet without any friction to stay otherwise
He wishes he wasn't so delirious, on the edge of giving into his fatigue with his blurred vision a reminder of how useless it feels to keep his eyes open. It's as if his organs were shutting down, because that's what it feels like, internally, with the sedative dulling what would otherwise be agonizing pain, and his eyes being two of them- unfocused and stinging with pain at the little light they take in. But most of all, he wishes he could read Midousuji's face for better clarity. Ishigaki can tell by the subtle shift of his silhouette alone that he's as tense as the air between them.
It takes a great deal of self-control not to grimace when he sits up, and the room spins when he does. He reach out vaguely until he's touching Midousuji with meaning. His palm lands on his wrist, and the dampness of his own skin against his catches him off guard despite the way his bangs stick to his forehead. He's been sweating, so cold he hadn't taken any notice.
His grip is hardly one at all. Ishigaki still doesn't know if Midousuji likes to be touched- he's never dared to go through with trying, but Ishigaki needs him to look at him. Or maybe, Ishigaki needs to look at him. He can't see the details, but something crosses Midousuji's face that isn't just irritation, and it confirms Ishigaki's disbelief.
He’d never suspected anything like the root of his all his hostility to be… fear of any kind.
Midousuji is scared.
"Midousuji," he tries again, and it's not much stronger than the first try, but at least it comes out fully.
"When I look at you, when I'm here, I just can't help but think of all those things." He says, quietly, and this time he puts in the effort not to sound so pathetic. If his face tightens, he relies on it being written off as pain.
Ishigaki takes a forced breath in, then, suddenly aware how much talking he's been doing, and how taxing it is to do so. Karma, maybe, when Midousuji has already told him time and time again tonight to keep quiet. His chest feels tight, like there's something heavy pushing down on it.
But still he carries on, as if that might make it stop.
"It's a good thing… They're connected, I think." he goes on, his tone returning to the same genuine sincerity as before. He smiles, though he's unsure if his eyes are meeting inside Midousuji's like he thinks they are. "They're why I've liked being here, in Aefenglom. And why I like being here, right now… Together."
He blinks sluggishly, dizziness settling in and staying.
"It's just, if I don't think of those things, then I'm thinking about what's happening right now, and honestly... I'm a little nervous." His stare drifts somewhere else, unable to focus on anything. "And I'm in a lot of pain. And I…"
Somewhere between then and now, his head has lolled forward, and now he's involuntarily facing their hands.
"...Should lie back down."
no subject
However, the static clears up suddenly, and Midousuji’s iris’s twitch and contract, a clarity, though still anxious all the same, suddenly snags him somewhat; his eyes dagger to their corners, body and neck unmoved. The stroke of Ishigaki’s fingertips registers physically, but it’s off—there’s no warmth, no spirit, no organized purpose. But Midousuji keeps his attention on Ishigaki regardless, eager to hone on exaction.
Because that’s what this is about. That’s why Midousuji is here in the first place.
So when Ishigaki sits up, Midousuji’s eyes widen, sucking in a breath tensely through his anxiously clenched teeth, glued by his terse, nervy jaw. His blood runs cold when Ishigaki’s palm rests clumsily against his wrist, where the claminess is jarring to Midousuji—even when his mother was nearing her end, her skin didn’t feel quite like this. But, similarly, her hands were cold, and weak. Midousuji’s lightless, dark eyes bore hard on Ishigaki’s hand.
Ishigaki, always so full of vigor, conviction and brightness… is withered—withering, increasingly, right before his eyes. Wasting away. Talking nonsense. Sweating vigor. Wasting breath. Shivering away from the obnoxiously fortified model human Ishigaki has always been.
To behold, in all this tragedy, although expected—foreshadowed, even—is truly a disgusting reality to behold in its unwinding. So unbelievable, antithetical, and yet undeniably, nothing else but the present and bleak inescapable reality of this very repulsive situation.
When Ishigaki says that he’s nervous, it’s of course understandable—typically, this is something that Midousuji would utilize nefariously. Either put it in his pocket, or actively twist and shimmy a blade in someone’s vulnerable back. Someone showing their vulnerability so plain-hand is rife in the way that someone begs for a punishment after being foolish. In short: indeed, it is pathetic.
But it’s not normal pathetic.
It’s not debased. It’s not some nasty innate human trait, over-saturated, expected, and thus so worthy of rebellious derision—it is, only, simply human. In a way that makes Midousuji connected, despite how it makes his skin crawl, realize, he too, is also merely human.
“Don’t think about anything then,” Midousuji says tersely, but more quietly, less with the urgent jetting of air from anxious, huge lungs. Still without looking at Ishigaki, Midousuji sprawls his hand against Ishigaki’s chest—but gently (unusual for him), fingers widely fanned, using careful, light pressure to guide Ishigaki back again. Simultaneously, he swallows hard, adam’s apple bobbing innocuously. As if vicarious to Ishigaki’s sickly state, Midousuji’s own palms feel cool, and clammy.
Gently, gently, gently, Midousuji guides Ishigaki back down this way—from a very gentle, disquieted extension of his triceps, and tense fingers and knuckles.
“Don’t talk, either. You’re right. Just—” Midousuji’s breath catches so, so subtly, it may not be noticeable; awkwardly, he swallows around it, and clenches his jaw anew, with twice the pressure as before. “Just lay back down. Don’t waste your energy useless sentimentality.”
Midousuji’s heart thuds heavily in his chest-such that it’s as if it’s seeking to revolutionize against the very ribcage that protects it. His hand, flat against Ishigaki’s chest as it guides him back down to a more hospice ease, trembles coldly.
In this scenario, Midousuji has a far higher likelihood of coming out okay. So he has to shut it all out. Discard everything outside of guiding the present. Embrace static, and strengthen against the unknown.
“Reeeesttt, Ishigaki-kun—just…rest. Stop it; shut up.”
His ribs stiffly inhale, but Midousuji doesn’t quite get a full breath; he leans back awkwardly, trying not to look at Ishigaki, though his hand remains perched on his chest.
“There’s nothing certain of the present,” he lies. “Tomorrow, I’ll inconvenience myself with dragging your sorry body up for exercise, nutrition, whatever. For now…”
Midousuji’s lip stiffens again, and he glances shakily towards Ishigaki through the corner of his eyes, molars grinding. He slaps his free hand against his face, regulating the surge of incredible, large emotions welling in him. All so foreign; so disturbing.
“…Ishigaki-kun goes to sleep.”
And that could be true. He’s not psychic, after all! Fear can throw off prediction!! It can dissuade, mislead…
But somehow, deep in, Midousuji knows that’s not what this is. And he feels that Ishigaki knows just as well as Midousuji does. Even so, it’s free to wish for this to be untrue.
1 / 3
Ishigaki understands then, when he's fully returned to bed, why Midousuji had guided him to his room at the first sign of hopelessness. He wonders if this has been their unspoken understanding from the very beginning: that if they can't do this- can't make light of everything that's happening- as if Ishigaki surely will wake up tomorrow and their codependent nannying will continue- then it will be the end of Midousuji's sanity, the snap of the only thread of what's fully and wholly tied to his survival here. And it felt selfish, now, for Ishigaki not to assume he had an impact. As if Midousuji wasn't also in a human amount of pain. As if Ishigaki hadn't always been so desperately reminding him of the very same humanity. As if that wasn't the point of it all.
Ishigaki desperately wants to protest, to lighten the mood as if he wasn't the one who soured it, to apologize for dying at all, but it's clear the best thing to say is nothing at all. He just stares for a long moment, expression grown somber.
It's plenty convincing not to ramble on, anyhow, with Ishigaki's heavy eyelids struggling not to close despite something terrible twisting in his chest. He blinks forcefully a few times more before finally giving in, a barely audible sigh passing his lips when he does.
"Tomorrow," Ishigaki echoes on another exhale. He hums in agreement.
There's still the chance that the morning will bring Midousuji's diligence as usual. He'll be shoved awake and kept from sleeping until noon the way his body wants to, then hurried out of bed to at the very least comb his hair and get himself dressed in enough moderate decency not to be worth scolding for, all before he's sat down to peck at a breakfast he doesn't want to eat.
It's grown too familiar to not picture easily.
"Looking forward to it…" he says, voice grown quiet.
"Goodnight, Midousuji."
2 / 3
The first hour brings a sleep needed in a way he hadn't slept since before he had shown visible signs of changings. The kind that leaves his mouth open and exhaling nasally breaths, the kind that has him dreaming nonsense of his daily life, as if the days and weeks and months spent here felt more like home than not- a place tucked away from all else, Midousuji's scent melting into his own.
Successfully lulled, but the ether is to wear off sooner or later and his condition, inevitably, only worsens- the decline quick when it does.
Ishigaki has gone from comfortably tucked to a pathetic, crumbled up ball. Even in sleep he's smothered in pain, stuck somewhere between conscious and not, lucid enough not to dream but not aware enough to give focus to anything outside of the pain. Cocooned in his blanket, he pants, hand limply covering his face as if subconsciously he'd be able to hide away the pain he so desperately kept Midousuji from seeing all this time. If Midousuji is still nearby to hear his groans sour the air, he doesn't know.
And then, the noises stops. He doesn't groan or shiver or toss. His breathing shallows, each breath farther away from the other. Every organ aches, screaming their protests, and every cell in his body feels as if they've given up the fight and are loathe to support his restraint.
He had always thought the very end would be something pleasant, but Ishigaki isn't- hasn't ever been- lucky.
And maybe it would be, if his soul wasn't being dragged away, borrowed, chewed and spit back up by hell- turning him into something he isn't. It's the final act of becoming a wireframe version of himself, as if taking everything away from him- the melted weight off his frame, the golden light in his eyes, his independence- hadn't all been enough. There's no euphoria to coax him, no velvty warmth waiting for him on the other side. The aches felt before now seem like a dull, lazy torture. There's only a searing pain now, flash-burning with acid from the inside out, and he can see the flames when it comes.
3 / 3
Despite the continuous preparation put into this very moment, Ishigaki can't grasp onto what's happening. In some desperate act of terror, he instinctually calls out, but the words are choked by another spasm- a sucked in, dry gasp. His fists twist tight into the sheets below him, jaw clenched shut, teeth bared to the ceiling.
His heart, despite the panic swelling inside him, does not sprint in his chest like he feels it should, nor does the way his rapid, deep breathing do anything for him- it's only subconscious, as if it was some learned, social habit ingrained into him. All that's he's left with is an irritating sense of thirst, and a power he's too scared to give into. His hunger is the only thing that feels clear- bright and loud and at the forefront of his mind- everything else faded into the background, hazy, blurry, less important.
1/?
The decline of his health, certainly, is the most obvious. But it’s his own stress, too—Midousuji can tell. Of course he can—so could anyone. The niceties are so strained that they nauseate. They almost make Midousuji mad. He understands, because he understands Ishigaki, somehow, well enough—why Ishigaki is doing it. But that doesn’t mean Midousuji appreciates it. It doesn’t mean he agrees, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t almost make him angry. The polite prostrating even in this type of futility. But Midousuji’s at least empathetic despite his stunted to design there’s no right way—he doesn’t have some better suggestion.
In Ishigaki’s shoes, he probably would have just completely isolated, and go on some starved rampage thereafter. Midousuji’s way is not smarter, but none the less, he’s entitled to the irritated, queasy feeling in his stomach, the one that makes him swallow uncomfortably hard around the dry swell of his adam’s apple, beaded in the fresh dewing of sweat.
So Midousuji’s jaw is locked, terse-shut, glancing away hard and stubborn when Ishigaki weakly and politely whispers of tomorrow.
He sits, remaining tense, gargoyle still, even after Ishigaki falls asleep. And Midousuji realizes, when he comes out of it, that it’s maybe been a minute. A frozen five to ten minutes…without realizing it’s really been more like twenty minutes. If he was less stressed, and more present, he’d be able to realize this based on the way he has bright white crescents in his palm from where his nails were indented into the flesh. He stands, somewhat clumsily, and pauses to still, eyes wide to the dusty, somber and amber air around them. It’s dark, but not dark enough.
Midousuji carefully shambles about to check all corners for light, to smother it out. He gets a large bowl, from the kitchen, and puts it by the bed. He sits back by the bed, and from his sleeve, he gently shakes loose a knife—and keeps it in the loose, dry hold of his bony fingers. Finally, he looks back at Ishigaki.
And he doesn’t look away. Not for a long time. Careful, still, almost holding his breath, Midousuji slowly settles onto his side, wide-eyed to his resting …
…what is Ishigaki, exactly?
His resting…
Friend. That’s not quite it; his regular repulsion pushes against the idea instinctively, but he’s changed quite a bit in his time in Aefenglom. Even accepting he may indeed have a few friends here and there—even accepting the struggle that is accepting he has friends, that those bonds are worthy in some capacity, humiliating and debasing even at their base utilitarian capacity… that isn’t what this is. Nor is Ishigaki his mentor, his teacher—but upperclassman no longer applies, at their ages, in this world, and even back home, in the context of what things have become.
Midousuji finally exhales—slow, and steady.
Ishigaki is something else that he isn’t sure there are words for. Even for regular people. Even for regular circumstance.
This isn’t normal.
Midousuji’s knees draw up to his chest, slowly and quietly as his wide, restless eyes stare in full, nervy, wide-eyed anticipation and observation. His arms curl inward as well, but he still holds the knife, occasionally adjusting the hilt in his palm by rolling it in anxious flexing.
Time passes some more. Midousuji’s not sure of its passage exactly. It feels like years, on one hand, but realistically, it feels like thirty minutes. It’s about three hours.
Hours of quiet, hours of staring, hours of Midousuji’s mind being a snagged, buzzing static. He thinks about his mother, how he never got to say goodbye—but this isn’t that, either. Someone dying by your side isn’t the same as a goodbye when only one person is conscious during the passing—and also, Ishigaki’s going to come right back. So why is he so nervous? Why is he…
Much more, why is Midousuji so certain Ishigaki is dying tonight? What if this some neurotic misfiring? It’s due soon, for certain—but there’s been subtle tells all week that things have been escalating—and there’s just something to now.
Midousuji blinks, slowly, once—and his lip line tightens just slightly, his chin dimpling.
He rolls the knife in his palm again.
He’s coming right back, so why does it even matter?
His mother died almost 15 years ago, so why does it matter?
They aren’t the same. They aren’t the same thing. They aren’t the same people.
It’s hard to swallow. The exhale is tight, too. Midousuji blinks once again, this time, less slowly, but harder. His lip trembles, then straightens; his shoulders slack as the disassociation is forced in, and the skin of his face smooths out again.
He gazes forward.
It’s not the same.
It isn’t the same.
2/?
He doesn’t even notice that he’s thrust himself up so his narrow waist bends as he remains laid on his side, propped up with his elbow. His other hand rotates the knife once more, so tense he suddenly can’t breathe, eyes still empty, wide, and alert.
Ishigaki’s words are strangled, to where nothing really comes out much at all, and Midousuji’s gut twists in a way he’s never experienced. He’s experienced a smaller kind of it—when his mother was wheeled away from him, fast, so fast, almost faster than he could run… His heart races just like then, but with the pressure of being more aware. He watches Ishigaki struggle, his breath caught in frozen pause in his big lungs, tense and anticipating…
Then, Ishigaki finally settles again. Midousuji is frozen in his pose, which must look like someone who’s nervously chained to the promise of their assailant. But that isn’t why the knife glints in its fretting turns.
After another fifteen minutes, Midousuji finally settles, slowly, back down onto his side as he were… and again, he watches Ishigaki; now, his free hand curls nervously in front of his lips in a spidery, anxious cage, picking at his lips, or tapping their fingernails on his teeth.
Still, Midousuji barely breathes. He watches, and fights desperately within himself to say it’s his imagination that Ishigaki’s warmth rescinds.
That his breath stops, when he isn’t awake to do it on a whole adult lifespan of muscle memory… that he’s still, so still. A type of peaceful rest Midousuji’s never had the misfortune of seeing before, but is twistedly, deep down, in some part of himself, vindicated in seeing.
“Ishigaki-kun,” Midousuji chokes very quietly, and slowly, swallowing uncomfortably again, this time around his words. Minutes after, Midousuji carefully extends a hand, brushing his fingers across Ishigaki’s cold cheek—just the backs of his nails. Midousuji’s eyes briefly flit there, and back to Ishigaki, staring with abysmally dark eyes. Midousuji feels something inside himself empty in a way that’s beyond pain—an icy, searing coldness that hollows him out. His throat is so dry. Slowly, he fans out his hand, uncertain—and unsteadily, he flattens his palm and his fingertips against Ishigaki’s face.
His eyes feel weirdly…a bit…hot. His hand relaxes a bit, and Midousuji finds Ishigaki’s uncannily cool—cooling—flesh is soothing against the nervous heat of his palm. His thumb brushes across his face, between his cheek and his nose, and Midousuji’s chin buckles a bit again.
Ishigaki’s eyes will never be gold again. He’ll never be warm again. He’ll never have a living heartbeat.
This place, Aefenglom, is so terrible. And Ishigaki, so annoying.
But this is so far from anything Ishigaki’s ever deserved.
“I never…forced you,” he manages, tense and quiet, “to watch my back.”
He wants to rescind his arm, but finds, uncharacteristically, he can’t. He gently moves his thumb again, finding his voice increasingly hard to squeeze out from his breathless, tight lungs.
Midousuji never wanted to experience death again. He’d probably feel this frightened watching anyone die. And he’d probably do this, he’s accepted, for Sakamichi—even more surprising people in his life, to be frank.
But he wouldn’t be feeling like this. Gut rotten, and punished for someone getting into his heart again. And he knows he deserves the punishment, too. Tayoru…
In Aefenglom, it’s how you survive. But it’s different, with someone from back home. Someone who changed you. Who forced you without you realizing it that it needed to happen.
“I didn’t force you to change.”
Midousuji’s eyebrows pinch, subtly, in the center, feeling his chest well, his breath becoming a bit scattered in panic—but he keeps it quiet, keeps it repressed, and that only makes him feel all the more strangled.
“And I…hope you know…”
Midousuji’s fingers brush shakily across his sideburns, watching Ishigaki’s peaceful expression as his panic wells. “I…didn’t ask for you to change me, either.”
After some time, Midousuji finally withdraws his hand, curled up on his side again, and he waits patiently, trapped by his duty and his terror. The knife twists in his hand again, and Midousuji swallows stiffly once more, exhaling heavily from his nostrils.
It’s late, so late—but there isn’t any way his body can understand that. There’s no way he rests.
It feels so foolish.
Ishigaki will be back.
Soon, very soon—even if it’s never again warmly, with golden eyes and that grounding, rhythmic pulse.
In the last hour of Ishigaki’s rest, Midousuji, in latent remorse for not having absorbed it sooner, Midousuji grips Ishigaki’s cold, lifeless wrist.
He stares, waiting.
ok change of plans
Ishigaki can recognize that he feels awful, still left frail and malnourished, but his head spins as an onslaught of newfound sensations flood his body. A primal instinct thrums inside of him, bursting with excessive energy and vitality.
His skin burns in pinpricks as his heart, now beating leisurely in pulse, circulates back into itself. The numbness in his body eventually lifts enough that he takes notice of the hand, now uncomfortably warm against his cold skin, gripped at his wrist by the rhythmic pulsing underneath it- and when he does, his eyes flash in its direction.
Ishigaki bolts upright. Only his subconcious has taken in the metalic shine of his knife, clasping the wrist that holds it above their heads. His face is only a few inches away, and saliva pools into his mouth and involentary hangs open, as if already knowing what it wants before he does.
But he stops there, inhaling slowly and deeply- a thick taste at the back of his throat. It's what he can't yet recognize as the usual scent of something he isn't- something he wouldn't notice so deeply if he was- of testosterone and a fleck of sweat, but it's familar, his heighten scent bringing out reminisce of riding in the summer heat. And there's an aroma of something else entirely, uniquely warm and strangly sweet over powering that. Ishigaki's eyelids, which had grown relaxed in his moment of something close to intoxication, open fully.
He stares bewildered, trying to piece together the fragments of his memories. The eyes before him were, just hardly, hooded and tired. The corner of them blotched pink, the eyes themselves bloodshot from exhaustion. Worry worms itself in, and it's only then does his name return to him.
Midousuji's words flash through his mind, his once muddy silhouette now clear as day before him, “So who cares, Ishigaki-kun? We’re right here. Now. We’re here. So who cares?”
Ishigaki sucks in a breath. Whatever primal instinct he has, falters. Though bloodlust still ultimately at the forefront of his mind, his eyebrows twitch, pinching together into something less savage and more pitiful, bared teeth now closed over with a chin dimpled frown.
"Midousuji," he rasps, his voice hardly recognizable.
His eyes slowly roll to his hand, noticing the way his nails leave red crescents into Midousuji's skin. He's still lost the ability to form much of a coherent thought, and he can't seem to quite let go, but he can notice how his nails, just barely, weren't pressing down hard enough to break skin. That if he were to put any more force, they certainly would, and he would easily snap Midousuji's wrist if it went much passed that. That it hardly felt like he was gripping at all.
He looks foward at him, terrified. What's keeping him sat still is surely the result of Ishigaki's years worth of persistent self endurance. He wouldn't be able to tell if his care for Midousuji is in addition to that, or if it's what's beckoning him to sink his teeth in. But Midousuji suddenly undergoing a shift- suddenly seeming so much more present, more human, more like he wants to make a space for Ishigaki in his life… That’s really not something Ishigaki's heart has been able to take. He wants Midousuj near him, he wants to keep Midousuji safe and well just as he's done with him, and now, he wants to eat him.
Ishigaki recognizes the stinging in the corner of his eyes. The bottled feelings of last night, of their time in Aefenglom, of everything, want to come forward, but he just continues to stare, unblinking, without letting the tears fall- eyes wide and wet as he leans back and shakes his head.
While Ishigaki silently wrestles with an insatiable desire for a temporary high, his grip losens, hand weak and trembling. His eyes have grown unfocused, not really looking at Midousuji now. As hard as it was to reconcile with the disgust he felt with himself, it was easy to be mesmerized, listening intently at Midousuji's thrumming pulse.
"Midousuji, " Ishigaki breathes, voice quiet and broken, and he's not sure which he's begging for. "Midousuji. Please..."
no subject
Coming and going, his eyes sting, but no tears well, though his eyes gloss just slightly, so briefly, here and there. Invariably, he thinks of his mother. Morbidly, wonders about her corpse—something he’d never done before, something he’d never allowed. Always, Midousuji compartmentalized truly processing it, or letting in any of his dark, heavy grief. But now, he’s being made to literally lay with it. To lay with death, to sit with his grief.
Even this death is unnatural, which keeps Midousuji tethered. Rigor mortis doesn’t ever quite set in, though he’s sure it should have. Ishigaki did indeed have that horrific death rattle in his final breath, hours ago, and it plays in a loop in Midousuji’s head, surely to haunt him for all his sleeps to come. But that’s about the only typical thing, as far as he knows.
When Ishigaki’s finger twitches, Midousuji’s heart immediately accelerates, his pupils shrinking pinprick as they immediately zip with a sharpness to the movement. It’s happening.
Then Ishigaki lurches up, making Midousuji jump; it’s more than just startle or excitement now—fear is in the mix as well. Especially when Ishigaki grasps his arm so roughly, causing Midousuji to force himself up, despite how stiff his arm and side are, trying to leverage against it to where it almost looks like the start of a grapple. The strength in that grip is undeniable, and Midousuji’s eyes stick there with fear, his jaw dropping soundlessly, just slightly, his breath caught. Ishigaki’s nails nearly break the skin, sharp like talons.
But…they don’t. Of course they don’t. Even like this, Ishigaki has such restraint, resilience, and…gross. Compassion, yeah.
Midousuji forces himself to lock eyes with Ishigaki, his adam’s apple drawn tight and high, his stomach feeling like it’s squishing up against his battering heart. But he isn’t afraid like that. He has resolve. He’s ready, more than anything. He…wants this, and won’t let something as silly as primal fear get in his way.
It feels—wrong. Demented, even, to be this excited. Or maybe that’s not the right word. Is it panic? It’s like when the phase of a plan is triggered—the programmed rush of the next execution. But, definitely fear, too.
Midousuji’s eyes widen slowly, and when finally the frenetic riling in Ishigaki seems to simmer a bit (which—how? How is that possible?), Midousuji, after great deliberation, decides it’s safe to move. It’s then that Ishigakai’s voice comes out weak as all, feeble and needy. He pries Ishigaki’s hand off his arm—it leaves excited welts where his claws rake his skin, and Midousuji exchanges the hands the hold the little blade. The arm Ishigaki’s just been holding takes firm grasp of it, and Midousuji’s other arm extends.
Thin, pale fingers extend forward—then hesitate, as Midousuji briefly glances at Ishigaki’s face again, unused to such proximity. He continues, fingers trembling, and he skirts them along Ishigaki’s face. His palm rests against the side of his face, gently at first, then with a more deliberate, full pressure; a bit clumsily, his cold, clammy palm (which feels warm against Ishigaki’s ice-cold skin) caresses slowly downward. He holds his hand there for a moment, holding Ishigaki’s gaze now.
“Do not beg me like a dog,” Midousuji finally manages, voice low, rough and dry from strain and fatigue.
He extends his other hand, and without breaking eye contact, he makes a clean, deep cut across his wrist. He doesn’t delay, because he knows Ishigaki will frenzy; in fact, he’s surprised he hasn’t already. Midousuji’s fingers shift so that they rest along his cheekbone, and he presses his bleeding wrist against Ishigaki’s mouth, leaning forward with a severe, blank expression.
He’d practiced this motion many times, the movement and the pressure of the blade, while the blade had its guard. Over and over, alone, rehearsing as some macabre coping ritual.
And here he is now—pushing his weight into Ishigaki, his breath tense and heavy, but almost restricted; his adrenaline is still going wild, so his blood wells healthily against Ishigaki’s lips.
“Open your mouth,” he demands, almost breathless, but with enough tension for it to sound almost spat. “If you don’t, you’ll kill me.”
Midousuji doesn’t make it mean to sound as if he’s doing this out of self preservation. He doesn’t have to be here at all, after all. If Ishigaki thinks that, though, it might save Midousuji some of the humiliation.
He’s here against his fear, not because of it; he isn’t feeding Ishigaki to save himself, but because he wants to be the one to do it.
They’re Bonded, after all, aren’t they?
The toll would be too great on Ishigaki to do this to someone he doesn’t know exactly as well, wouldn’t it?
Midousuji relies on Ishigaki to siphon away his excess magic and keep him from the madness, and Ishigaki relies on Midousuji to keep him from becoming a mindless beast. They rely on each other, and Midousuji’s proving, for once, on purpose, that it isn’t just incidental that Ishigaki can rely on him.
He’s realized that this is what he’d always wanted, and never got, before his mother was taken from him.
To nourish.
How disgusting, to realize that’s what’s the deepest thing inside of him. As his wrist stings, surging thick goads of blood, Midousuji thinks of the logo of his Del Rosa; how this is the sum of his heart’s deepest, darkest desire, pushed right out from his veins for the purpose of…this.
It feels crazy, really, and he knows it’s delusion—a technicality. But it feels like cheating death—it feels like a chance to be grown and strong enough to bring someone from the brink, and keep them from it. A chance to take all those feelings back, and bend them to a new way.
He knows once Ishigaki begins to feed in earnest, it will hurt much, much more. But Midousuji’s not even sure how much he’ll really feel it. How convenient adrenaline is. His fingers rest in Ishigaki’s hairline, hand naturally repositioned from pressing his wrist to Ishigaki’s mouth, and Midousuji tries to ignore how his fingertip brushes the edge of his slightly pointed ear.
It repeats in his head, almost fanatically, me, me alone…
Feed on me.
no subject
Their eyes are locked, and Midousuji is touching him, hand warm, holding him in place as he spoke. Midousuji wasn’t one to be gentle- his hands were heavy, his fingers rough- but this time his touch is suspiciously kind, painfully gentle when he trembles the way he does. And there's fear, true fear, in Midousuji's eyes, but Ishigaki has known Midousuji long enough to recognize something else deeper inside them. It's the look Midousuji gives when he wants something. When he has a goal.
The words manage to click, and Ishigaki shakes his head in disbelief, somehow feeling as both seen and misunderstood entirely.
"Stop," he hisses at the first moment's realization, but Midousuji extends his hand with a skillful stride, elaborating his intent.
"Don't--"
Skin splits, the metallic tang of iron immediate, and Ishigaki's pupils blow fully dilated. It's ultimately useless, impossible to deny- he already knows- but he thinks to grit his teeth before his mind slips away from him. And there's a flash of betrayal before it does- teardrops threatening to spill over his eyelashes from Midousuji's complete disregard of his own safety, of Ishigaki's own feelings, before the little humanity he has left slips from his eyes.
His entire body trembles, the veins in his neck and temples bulged beneath his skin- a poor and stubborn last ditch effort of self-control. But a snarl rolls out anyway, raw and deep, his eyes rolling to the ceiling as he steadily convulses. Midousuji is saying something, pushing his bleeding wrist into him, but Ishigaki doesn't know what it is. It all quickly becomes white noise, everything else fading away until its singled out by one word.
There's something drawing him forward. And it isn't just bloodlust.
His eyes unroll, staring straight into Midousuji's.
He can only assume, with his mind overcrowded and enamored by want, that what's echoing in his head and doubling back into itself hypnotically, is a manifestation of the word…
Mine.
A harsh snarl gives voice to the sudden spike of aggression, mixing bloodlust with passion, hunger with desire. Before he realizes it, he's already launched forward and wrapped himself tight around Midousuji, fangs deep into his wrist- the combined cut and bite gushing blood healthily into his mouth. And it tastes good. It tastes really good.
It triggers a frenzy of primal instincts, and he's swallowing thickly, the months of malnutrition quick to remind itself. And there they lie intwined in his bed, Midousuji pinned underneath, where Ishigaki holds Midousuji's wrist between his head and theirs by the grip of his teeth. He can feel Midousuji's warmth at his chest, can hear the steady beat of his heart, and Ishigaki digs his nails, sharp and possessive, into his shoulders.
There's a string of sounds, half-swallowed growls in the back of his throat between one swallow and the other. It was exhilarating- euphoric, even- to sink into his own want- to think of nothing else but that want, because anything else is waning away with each second, sinking under the smothering heat of Midousuji’s presence. As if anything before had all just been a long and arduous journey, filled with sacrifices and self-imposed restrictions. That it was all, inevitably, leading up to a moment much like this. As Ishigaki's sucks hungrily, all his needs coalesce. Everything tangles and knots together, pouring out of him at the same time, impossible to identify. There is no, perseverance, no dignity, no patience. There is only the pleasure he gets from the stolen intimacy of a parasitic act.
Mine, Ishigaki thinks. Mine...
no subject
Midousuji isn’t entirely unaware of their tension, nor his own feelings, though he still can’t pull any trigger in any type of decisive declaration for what either of those things are. He remembers, distantly, back home, he always thought this kind of thing was stupid; the eroticized romanticism of vampires, prey and predator, etc… Sure, he likened himself to a predator to a bunch of mindless prey in racing, but it wasn’t the same kind of allegory. There’s nothing heightening or erotic about this, at least not right now—it’s debasing, and worse, entirely voluntary. A deliberate act of compassionate submission.
But that doesn’t mean he isn’t an animal without instincts or clarity—he pushes his wrist against Ishigaki’s hungry mouth, even for how it twists his tendons and makes him wince an eye, hissing through his teeth as his pin-prick pupils bore intensely on Ishigaki, jaw terse. He presses his wrist against Ishigaki as if to keep him on task with his feeding site, in Midousuji’s self preservation.
Twistedly, as also anticipated, Midousuji still derives a satisfaction from this. Sure, they were bonded, but that felt a lot more voluntary than this. It had to be Midousuji. Ishigaki, though a beast rending Midousuji for nutrients now, is still, and will still, be Ishigaki. A man tenacious only for the strength of his heart’s futile compassion. But Midousuji is also acutely aware of how important nutrition is for recovery in all of its forms. Ishigaki would be too guilty to even go to a blood bank.
And anyway, Midousuji wouldn’t want Ishigaki to do that even if he had the capacity. He is a being propelled by his near demonic need for control, versus Ishigaki’s compassion. In this complex woven spell, here they are—and Midousuji pushes terse, tense breaths through his teeth in rapid succession as he struggles to situate as is most safe beneath his starving companion.
Midousuji’s other hand raises in tense, awkward clawing forward, seeming unsure—and his sharp elbow hooks just as pointedly to take a tense fistful of Ishigaki’s hair. His eyes tremble along with his breath, gradually rolling back as he endures the pain, his molars grinding.
Ishigaki may go on further than he needs—how one eats to bloat when starving, the hunger cues satiated too late. But Midousuji knows that right now isn’t quite the time to interrupt, though he’s trying to keep his wits about him enough to know when to get Ishigaki to stop. And more importantly, how to exert this boundary. Which…
Maybe he didn’t think that one through as much. He was too overcome by everything else preceding this.
Death isn’t real, in a place like this. But they’ll be set too far back if Midousuji fails Ishigaki in advocating for his own survival, however he can. But he’s a weak man, in comparison to Ishigaki.
For now, all he can do is hazily, in a panic, try to find his neck steps once he’s several more ounces depleted.
“I-…Ishigaki-kun,” he grits out tersely, briefly blinking both of his eyes shut hard. His skin is in a clammy cold sweat, from panic and adrenaline both. “You aren’t an animal. Y-you aren’t…a baby. Okay? Don’t choke.”
A couple more strangled breaths, as Midousuji squirms. His fingernails dig into his scalp.
“Easy, easy, eeeeeasssyyyyy,” he almost growls, but it comes out as a half snarl, half sputter, one of his legs idly lifting to better accommodate Ishigaki’s position. “I’m not going anywhere, and neither is my blood! Don’t kill me; don’t kill me! You need me!”
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But Midousuji is persistent, and this time the adrenaline isn't enough to mask the pain with the way he claws his back once more, nails digging deep enough into an already bloodied intersection of scratches that Ishigaki feels the skin rip when he does.
Ishigaki responds with a reflexive groan that bubbles the blood in the back of his throat, and Midousuji's efforts are rewarded. He pulls away, a thread of saliva and blood connecting his lips to Midousuji's wrist when he does.
But Ishigaki doesn't stop out of any sense of sympathy. Nothing Midousuji said had been processed. There's only the sense of urgency that amplifies every minor annoyance, and a delayed recognition. Ishigaki picks up, instictually- just as instinctually as Midousuji had clawed and drawn blood and faught for his escape- the sounds of primal terror. He's putting up more of a fight than it's worth.
Ishigaki sits up fully, roughly pinning Midousuji to the bed by his shoulders. And there he stares blankly, mouth hung open, teeth stained red. Midousuji's expression is twisted into something that can only be described as the face of someone who's realized that they have, undeniably, fucked up.
Misled by his own vanity into thinking that the laws of nature- if that what it was, here in Aefenglom- don’t apply to him. And now he lies before Ishigaki, pupils shrunken down to pinpoints, skin damp, trembling. It’s only Midousuji who would have that sort of conviction.
Ishigaki decides that it's not a good look on him.
Despite leaving Midousuji a noticable shade whiter, the fullness hasn't hit Ishigaki's stomach yet. There's an urgency gnawing at him, still undeniably unsatisfied. He's had only enough to be able to pull back, to assure himself that if Midousuji were to run away now, it wouldn't be very far, or long enough to matter.
He places his hands firmly to the side of Midousuji's face now, pulling him upward and inches away from his own. Running on pure instinct, thoughts a single cord of want, he stares expectantly into Midousuji's eyes.
And he waits.
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Involuntarily movement and sound…
The mere idea of that sort of lack of control years ago, and even now, was enough alone to make Midousuji’s skin crawl. He’d centered all his strength and solitude around control; deliberately amplifying his off-putting traits, and pushing people too far to so much as touch him. The idea of this kind of vulnerability has always been nightmarish, and Midousuji has had barely the blink of an eye to develop any sort of callous of deliberately stripping away his power like this.
The first time Midousuji had ever loved, it was a center to amplify his power—this is a first, sacrificing himself with enough confidence in himself all the same to care for another person. The way he wished he could fold the laundry while his mom was sick before she went to hospital, or done the dishes without clumsily breaking them.
Midousuji gasps breathlessly, as if he’d been held underwater, when Ishigaki’s bloody mouth finally leaves the sacrificial wound on his wrist. His eyes dart sharp, wide and anxious to Ishigaki’s palms when he pins Midousuji down like that.
Did he miscalculate? Truly, was he going to die? Death didn’t mean much in a place like this, but the humiliating misery of dying now when he was so confident he could go against his own nature to be selfless proving how pointless kindness to this extent is truly so foolish is foolish enough to incite his panic. Midousuji’s already broad ribs flare in nearly triple the average rate per breath; he’s so literally drained that he’s surprised his heart can still beat so frantically.
Then his eyes widen just a bit more in tense, surprised flinching as Ishigaki’s hands cup around his face, almost lifting Midousuji’s head.
And Ishigaki’s hands are so…cold. His mother’s hands were so warm, so loving; something he’d subconsciously melt towards, rather than arch away from—as Midousuji does from Ishigaki.
His breath falls in tandem to the silence as Ishigaki stares at him. The calm diminishes Midousuji’s instinct to palm Ishigaki in the orbital socket (which would have ultimately killed Midousuji in the long run, with Ishigaki’s current state).
“I-Ishigaki-kun,” Midousuji clumsily chokes out, swallowing dryly after. His hands close weakly around Ishigaki’s wrists. Midousuji can’t say the things he’d think would be the most effective in these scenarios, typically; soft, warm-hearted and earnest, personal things… That type of vulnerability is more difficult than the type he feels as helpless prey. How karmic.
But it doesn't even really matter—Midousuji finds that he can't quite understand why he was even thinking of that. Effective how? Ishigaki's eyes, rid of their honey gold, bear down on him in piercing carmine. For months, knowing this was coming, Midousuji thought, though he didn't admit it or phrase it to himself this way precisely as it's too honest, that he'd miss that color. That the coldness of Ishigaki's tongue and touch would disturb him—and it had, moments ago.
His head swims in a groggy, sticky warmth; his cooling, frailing body starts to feel it too. It's thrall, which Midousuji didn't anticipate that Ishigaki might use so early—he hadn't accounted for it because most vampires he'd met weren't able to use it, much less so powerfully, in the freshest moments of their turning. And since Midousuji is under the thrall, he isn't even realizing this—thrall doesn't cross his mind at all.
His fear turns to a sort of bittersweet fondness. This was a long time coming, and Midousuji had made his decision for a reason; he wants Ishigaki's health. He wants Ishigaki to move forward without fear, self hatred or guilt in that health, too. Never admitted, but true since they'd discerned Ishigaki's determined path by this world.
Dying isn't permanent. Right. Maybe Ishigaki will stop himself, and Midousuji will survive. Midousuji is too addled in this intoxication to consider that he also went into this with the goal of protecting Ishigaki from the trauma of murdering the person who's effectively been his care aid. But right now, Midousuji feels passive to the idea of utter sacrifice. Peaceful, even.
So with his hand trembling more out of nauseous nerves than terror, nor anemia, Midousuji just…partially mirrors Ishigaki. He rests his hand against Ishigaki’s cheek. His eyes lid partially.
“…It's probably not enough, isn't that right?"
His hand, still against Ishigaki's face, strokes more towards the center—his thumb brushes Ishigaki's bloody lip, smearing it away from the corner of his mouth. His eyes stick there, where the blood pinkens beneath his thumbnail. His other wrist gently comes to rest atop his own stomach, where the blood lets into his shirt lazily, but steadily; similar to a mosquito, a vampire's bite has anti-coagulant properties, and unlike mosquitos, it leaves a powerful, warm numbness rather than itching. There's no more pain. Midousuji doesn't even notice his wound, even though his tendons had nearly been crushed.
His hand lifts slowly away from Ishigaki's face, resting instead against the back of his neck—and in a gesture probably closest to an embrace Midousuji's ever executed willingly, he pushes against Ishigaki's neck, where it meets his skull. He rolls his head sideways, making eyecontact with Ishigaki once more as he extends his long neck, guiding him towards it.
"Maybe you've had enough that giving you my neck won't kill me."
Midousuji entered this plan trying to do everything to avoid getting his neck bit—for the intimacy of it, and the fear. Ishigaki isn't practiced in feeding; instinct may lead him to a productive bite site, guided by pulse, but that doesn't mean it's impossible (though it is unlikely) that he may do enough damage that would bleed Midousuji out even if it weren't for his blood being thinned.
"But who knows... You're greedy, gross... like a child. But go on, have your fill; this time, I'll allow myself to surrender my body for your health."