( He works tirelessly, unambitiously, frivolously. Light show and sibilance. Parlor tricks. Briefly, over the fire and brimstone of magic efficiently cast, Seishirou holds his gaze — and looks away first. No cigarettes. The lack of a considerate, strategic prop is taxing. )
Not particularly. ( A beat. ) You worked more stiffly back then. ( The cost of immaturity, veneer of lacquered formality on the brittle foundation a bird-boned boy still ticking his grandmother's checklist.
Behind him, Seishirou lingers in the proprietary way one hovers by but never intervenes with the progress of an electrician, a plumber. 'Blue-collar work' is that onmyoudo?
Sumeragi Subaru has beautiful hands now. Always did.
...and is it age? Seishirou's reminiscing. Or death? All the spirits they attended, submerged self-indulgently in the well of their living grief. Heads under. He can't breathe. Ghost wound nearly puncturing his lungs, and he can't fucking breathe. )
Why are you here? ( Bets, that strange rib-jutting yearning. Not to see a job through. The corporate theatre of kindness: the Sumeragi are kind enough to help their archrival. Is that it? ...no. ) Really.
[ Motes of dust and consequence cleave to his cutting, apocalyptic pallor rupturing in wet, tonal facets. No water, no knife. Just hands, adorned. Hands, remembering. He places an ofuda at the point he's cast and it sets as if laid neatly against glass. Its energy is different, the cadence of its whispers uttering threats just barely assuaged.
Subaru feels it in his throat, though maybe not so much as the winged pulse of Seishirou's reminiscence. It rises from its ribcage atrium in what might be tenderness, taloned.
He's mistaken it before, but finds the impulse he's cultivated to do so weakened. ]
You invited me.
[ A second line drawn northward. Set, talisman, release. Really... ]
...and even if you were to go back on it, I knew if I at least saw you, then I could believe in what's been done.
[ Do we wake up? he'd asked. Not to another dream, not in the ambient, soot-smudged meridian of the Murmur's emotional cremation, but here, standing, flesh and — blood. ]
Can Seishirou blame him? He invited his own disaster in his house, this house of new, where Sumeragi Subaru shines bright like a bastion of tenebrous, dust-sodden occult exuberance. His hands dance shapes alive, clip penitent and bashful, as if he has been taught his life whole that to excel is to humble his elders, his seniors, his formal betters — because Sumeragi Subaru's solid performance would have been a polite foregone conclusion, but his brilliance reeks of political complication.
Now and then, thrum of magic he can no longer sense but for his skin's prickling, Seishirou entertain the notion of mutely murmuring along the incantation. He knows the words. The disadvantage of a house as public, as legitimate, as established as the Sumeragi is that their practices have become a matter of public record and documented pride. He has not bruised his own family's dignity enough to speak the spells.
Besides — and his hands sink carefully into his pockets — the better man is here to do the better job. How dutiful.
And how inevitable when Seishirou briefly excuses himself only to retrieve an already packaged bag of questionable goodies, offered out to Subaru like every other bribe the Sumeragi have timorously declined twice before taking with hawkish hands. Caelus' sunglasses, Aventurine's candy, the Forsaken's green sweater. A world of material bandages for an age-old wound of the heart.
He's caught in the fever of the honed instinct to pick at someone else's scab. )
I don't know about happy wife, happy life. But if they're right that gifts pave the way for good understanding, I'm thrilled not to become a mariticide statistic.
[ Subaru doesn't malign touch. But it does briefly slake with the silvered mirror-pool of his hesitance. Everything he knows about it has been ruthlessly changed by the alchemical reaction whose single-syllabled incantation he hasn't dared speak himself. A gaping wound in light, then in shadow.
His touch has seen many things off. Never has it made anything stay.
The last spell sets at the northmost point of the chimeric pentagram. It glows, permeates, transmutes the horrific energies of the moon's cataclysm by way of a slow, grueling sieve. It's not the magic of his family, not truly, but Subaru doesn't care to dredge it enough to find the differences in the viscera. It behaves as blood and bone always do, richness in the scaffolding rather than the glamor of its skin. For now, its complicity is enough. Much in the same way that Seishirou's movement is complicit to this refashioned bet, holy light cut by his hawk's wing shadow. Handsome, circling.
As for the other behaviors...
Subaru valiantly tries to keep a frown off of his face. He fails, standing accused at the end of Seishirou's curated thoughtfulness. Tacked, artfully, like a butterfly wing. ]
Isn't it understanding enough to know that you don't need to bribe me for that? [ He says, even has he takes the bag in the same manner as someone who's mid-conversation accepts whatever's offered to them. Ceremoniously human, unbefitting of his house. ] ...it's heavy.
( Is this it, then? The sparkling moment when he graduates from jaded husk to carefree and easily demoralized romantic? When Sumeragi Subaru's politely manicured refusal leaves him behind the debris of Seishirou's stunned gaping mouth and unblinking consternation?
No, it's art. The fiction of mimicked heartbreak. He is not assailed by the casual ingratitude of his murderer dismissing Seishirou's gift of creature comforts. His face could never be so slapped. A heavy bag, after all. )
...only trinkets. ( Scavenged little morsels of commoditized commiseration. Petty relief by any other name. ) Neglect them, if you like.
( Dance the kagura on the black cockles of his newly discovered heart, why won't you, you cheap excuse of a philandering exorcist. )
There's no fine print. I've learned your bones can't abide my hunger. ( A small mouthful of a man, is Sumeragi Subaru. )
[ Made perpetrator of these romantic follies by carefully crafted exhibition, Subaru can only empty his lungs of their wintry incandescence. He inhales to refill them with the humid, slumbering rot not yet siphoned by magic — two percolations at once.
Almost a sigh. ]
You went through the trouble.
[ The only thing to come to his hands that he hasn't taken care of is himself. By choice, at any rate; he understands that tokens of survival, gifts, are difficult to come by. Subaru shifts the bag one arm, deftly reaches back into his opposite coat pocket. Aventurine's onmyoudo-analogous care package has to last him the duration of his runemaster training, and these five ofuda around them already commanded use of most of the ink. So what he produces is —
...a sticky note. It houses the most powerful protection he knows, scrawled in the late autumn scratch of bare-branched pen.
Subaru half expects him to deny it, so he reaches out and sticks it to his shirt.
His fine print, in exchange. ]
This might be more useful to you than bones, in that case.
( A... sticky note. Bereaving his shirt with the residual shine of cheap glue, barely perched on his chest, unambiguously ill fitting Seishirou's sartorial aesthetic and magical self-sufficiency. For a moment, his nails tease the crushed paper pulp with intent to tear, tickling the edges, creeping and crawling and pondering the destruction of a gift rooted in alms and the misplaced pity of an enemy.
There is no taxonomy that can succinctly capture a gift of unwitting condescension, dressed in the allure of 'needs must.' Survival suits the fittest; as he stands, defanged and grudgingly arrested in the face of an armed opponent only hubris would still advertise as his equal — Seishirou finds himself entirely closer to shaking the hand of a fellow Australopithecus.
No. He will wear Sumeragi Subaru's sympathy-turned-raccoon-stationery as a badge of honour. In fact, he only looks up with a limpid smile, assuming a step back: )
Subaru-kun... ( And he puffs out his chest to brandish the post-it to his captive audience of one: ) Do I look sexy now?
[ Fingertips built by the bloodwork of the cosmos for killing dance across the pastels of the affixed note. Subaru senses the conflagration in them, the slow simmer of scorn. It doesn't matter if he sees it as pity. What matters is that he's exacted his will in a rare light show of defiance. Even if —
Subaru's expression flattens at the display, though it's not entirely certain which way the corners of his mouth are going to flick.
There is always a price. ]
It suits you. [ Whatever that means. He steps aside, not interested in further mariticide today. ] I'll renew the wards once they're depleted.
( Brisk, brittle. This is no offer, no exercise of convenience. Sumeragi Subaru is bullying him with presence he's aware Seishirou can neither deflect nor exorcise. How distasteful men are, when they are no longer amiably available targets. Homocide should be the natural and acceptable resolution recourses of most social conflicts.
Alas, to be Sakurazuka Seishirou, confined to surviving the glimmer and shine of his apparent beloved's newly crystallized spine. Who might have known Monou Fuuma could grow such a creature?
Subaru means to ebb back, fluidly. By all means, Seishirou clears his way, only recalling fleetingly, patiently, with scholarly intent to hold out his hand, signaling for his twin's star with transparent expectation. Come now. Their little rite of sorts. )
[ Elbow bends, palm going aloft. His path only briefly halts the moment his brain so valiantly attempts to eclipse the full-moon hush of his heart. Every memory of this interaction glows cratered and unkind in some way. ]
Ask me then.
[ Subaru lowers his hand to Seishirou's in the same way a coffin sinks into its grave. His fingers are cool to the touch. ]
( That hand, his hand, their fingertips binding. Sumeragi Subaru making bounty of himself on Lord Taizan's altar and under the saccharine of Seishirou's perusing mouth, knuckle to knuckle, finger to joint. There is no heat to the gesture, less of the proprietary welcome. One oral addiction rapidly exchanged for the next. )
Why don't you stay here? ( In the friendly carcass of Manhattan's despoiled civility turned fictive lovers' nook. ) You were always good at playing house.
( Trailing after Hokuto's skirts like a depleted, fumbling puppy. Artlessly accepting captivity in Seishirou's chaotic ambulance-driving schedule. Eating, wearing, agreeing with whatever was put before him.
Seishirou's mouth lingers over the same fingers, cunning. )
Would it be so unreasonable? I'd make your breakfast every morning. You could restore your wards by midday and gouge my chest in the afternoon. Think about it.
[ Subaru flinches in a way he'd long sought to suppress. His knuckles bloom with a likewise heatless tension; memories release into the ambient hum of the Murmur. Native to him, invasive to it. Seishirou doesn't need the ornamental pall of illusion for it, for his clasped fist to overturn its handful of petals in a slow, salient dance downward. Catching light, submerged, sinking. Only he can leave him drowning in calm and crystal waters, able to break the froth but not the surface tension guilt inflicts. Of all his capabilities, forcing hurt from his heart has never been one of them.
Ask. And he did. Look, and he does. ]
I was... never as good at pretending as you were.
[ Only too slow, always one clattering footstep behind. In the way of living, and loving, and killing too. Until there was only stillness left. His words lack the bite of his actions. ]
So you understand, of course. Why I have to decline.
( But he isn't startled or aggrieved past the ripening bruise that his ego refuses to ingest for its malignity. Shame, shame. A nine-year-old Sumeragi Subaru was beautiful, baptised in another's ruin, he was beautiful in blood. Atheism could only strike men who've never peered such elusive dawns-swaddled divinity.
And he's such a vicious, small-toothed, petty creature now. A cautious refusal to a crude invitation, and it was a waste, this domestic interlude all a waste, not a single truth shared. The boy — and he is her little infantile monster now — speaks with his grandmother's mouth. Fleetingly, Seishirou thinks to break it.
Instead, he frisks the breast pocket of a suit coat that's seen increasingly tamer days for a tobacco reserves that never materialise. Old habits, futuristic deaths. Time is a construct. )
You'll change your mind, of course. But I won't be available then. ( Like all the love songs say. Subaru should know. They've exorcised the hauntings of so many pop sirens. ) Your problem, Subaru-kun, has always been time. You never know when you're running out.
( His hands come back clean, ruse played out. He watches Subaru with the impotent pride of a man only fate could ever impoverish. )
The exit is to the left. ( But Sumeragi Subaru knows that. )
[ An aggregate sum: nine years' worth of warm steel and pettiness is the kintsugi of Subaru's heart. Any memory or mistaken identity could have crippled him of his newly minted ethic, no longer distracted by playing house. He is no master of the pieces, but he has kept them all in spite of the dereliction. A smile politely cultivated, ripped down like untacked wallpaper, the embracing bend of arms over his shoulders now sunken with self-prescribed rot. And all the advice of the world turning did Sakurazuka Seishirou have — the polished gleam of hatred for the city they slept in.
He wonders how it feels to have made him this way, to twist his magic until strength drips thick from the wring of its corners, but he finds the instinct to ask divested from him. He thought he would be better at holding the words of a dead man up to the light of his life, but maybe he had it wrong. Maybe it's that it doesn't feel any particular way at all.
A worse answer than the parting threat, in truth. One he might've also carried straight down into Tokyo Bay, were he allowed it.
Gifts exchanged, he leaves this altar of light shapes and imprinted shadows. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Not particularly. ( A beat. ) You worked more stiffly back then. ( The cost of immaturity, veneer of lacquered formality on the brittle foundation a bird-boned boy still ticking his grandmother's checklist.
Behind him, Seishirou lingers in the proprietary way one hovers by but never intervenes with the progress of an electrician, a plumber. 'Blue-collar work' is that onmyoudo?
Sumeragi Subaru has beautiful hands now. Always did.
...and is it age? Seishirou's reminiscing. Or death? All the spirits they attended, submerged self-indulgently in the well of their living grief. Heads under. He can't breathe. Ghost wound nearly puncturing his lungs, and he can't fucking breathe. )
Why are you here? ( Bets, that strange rib-jutting yearning. Not to see a job through. The corporate theatre of kindness: the Sumeragi are kind enough to help their archrival. Is that it? ...no. ) Really.
( Why did Seishirou let him in? Really. )
no subject
Subaru feels it in his throat, though maybe not so much as the winged pulse of Seishirou's reminiscence. It rises from its ribcage atrium in what might be tenderness, taloned.
He's mistaken it before, but finds the impulse he's cultivated to do so weakened. ]
You invited me.
[ A second line drawn northward. Set, talisman, release. Really... ]
...and even if you were to go back on it, I knew if I at least saw you, then I could believe in what's been done.
[ Do we wake up? he'd asked. Not to another dream, not in the ambient, soot-smudged meridian of the Murmur's emotional cremation, but here, standing, flesh and — blood. ]
no subject
( Look, but don't touch.
Can Seishirou blame him? He invited his own disaster in his house, this house of new, where Sumeragi Subaru shines bright like a bastion of tenebrous, dust-sodden occult exuberance. His hands dance shapes alive, clip penitent and bashful, as if he has been taught his life whole that to excel is to humble his elders, his seniors, his formal betters — because Sumeragi Subaru's solid performance would have been a polite foregone conclusion, but his brilliance reeks of political complication.
Now and then, thrum of magic he can no longer sense but for his skin's prickling, Seishirou entertain the notion of mutely murmuring along the incantation. He knows the words. The disadvantage of a house as public, as legitimate, as established as the Sumeragi is that their practices have become a matter of public record and documented pride. He has not bruised his own family's dignity enough to speak the spells.
Besides — and his hands sink carefully into his pockets — the better man is here to do the better job. How dutiful.
And how inevitable when Seishirou briefly excuses himself only to retrieve an already packaged bag of questionable goodies, offered out to Subaru like every other bribe the Sumeragi have timorously declined twice before taking with hawkish hands. Caelus' sunglasses, Aventurine's candy, the Forsaken's green sweater. A world of material bandages for an age-old wound of the heart.
He's caught in the fever of the honed instinct to pick at someone else's scab. )
I don't know about happy wife, happy life. But if they're right that gifts pave the way for good understanding, I'm thrilled not to become a mariticide statistic.
no subject
His touch has seen many things off. Never has it made anything stay.
The last spell sets at the northmost point of the chimeric pentagram. It glows, permeates, transmutes the horrific energies of the moon's cataclysm by way of a slow, grueling sieve. It's not the magic of his family, not truly, but Subaru doesn't care to dredge it enough to find the differences in the viscera. It behaves as blood and bone always do, richness in the scaffolding rather than the glamor of its skin. For now, its complicity is enough. Much in the same way that Seishirou's movement is complicit to this refashioned bet, holy light cut by his hawk's wing shadow. Handsome, circling.
As for the other behaviors...
Subaru valiantly tries to keep a frown off of his face. He fails, standing accused at the end of Seishirou's curated thoughtfulness. Tacked, artfully, like a butterfly wing. ]
Isn't it understanding enough to know that you don't need to bribe me for that? [ He says, even has he takes the bag in the same manner as someone who's mid-conversation accepts whatever's offered to them. Ceremoniously human, unbefitting of his house. ] ...it's heavy.
[ How much candy is in here, exactly. ]
no subject
No, it's art. The fiction of mimicked heartbreak. He is not assailed by the casual ingratitude of his murderer dismissing Seishirou's gift of creature comforts. His face could never be so slapped. A heavy bag, after all. )
...only trinkets. ( Scavenged little morsels of commoditized commiseration. Petty relief by any other name. ) Neglect them, if you like.
( Dance the kagura on the black cockles of his newly discovered heart, why won't you, you cheap excuse of a philandering exorcist. )
There's no fine print. I've learned your bones can't abide my hunger. ( A small mouthful of a man, is Sumeragi Subaru. )
no subject
Almost a sigh. ]
You went through the trouble.
[ The only thing to come to his hands that he hasn't taken care of is himself. By choice, at any rate; he understands that tokens of survival, gifts, are difficult to come by. Subaru shifts the bag one arm, deftly reaches back into his opposite coat pocket. Aventurine's onmyoudo-analogous care package has to last him the duration of his runemaster training, and these five ofuda around them already commanded use of most of the ink. So what he produces is —
...a sticky note. It houses the most powerful protection he knows, scrawled in the late autumn scratch of bare-branched pen.
Subaru half expects him to deny it, so he reaches out and sticks it to his shirt.
His fine print, in exchange. ]
This might be more useful to you than bones, in that case.
no subject
There is no taxonomy that can succinctly capture a gift of unwitting condescension, dressed in the allure of 'needs must.' Survival suits the fittest; as he stands, defanged and grudgingly arrested in the face of an armed opponent only hubris would still advertise as his equal — Seishirou finds himself entirely closer to shaking the hand of a fellow Australopithecus.
No. He will wear Sumeragi Subaru's sympathy-turned-raccoon-stationery as a badge of honour. In fact, he only looks up with a limpid smile, assuming a step back: )
Subaru-kun... ( And he puffs out his chest to brandish the post-it to his captive audience of one: ) Do I look sexy now?
no subject
Subaru's expression flattens at the display, though it's not entirely certain which way the corners of his mouth are going to flick.
There is always a price. ]
It suits you. [ Whatever that means. He steps aside, not interested in further mariticide today. ] I'll renew the wards once they're depleted.
no subject
( Brisk, brittle. This is no offer, no exercise of convenience. Sumeragi Subaru is bullying him with presence he's aware Seishirou can neither deflect nor exorcise. How distasteful men are, when they are no longer amiably available targets. Homocide should be the natural and acceptable resolution recourses of most social conflicts.
Alas, to be Sakurazuka Seishirou, confined to surviving the glimmer and shine of his apparent beloved's newly crystallized spine. Who might have known Monou Fuuma could grow such a creature?
Subaru means to ebb back, fluidly. By all means, Seishirou clears his way, only recalling fleetingly, patiently, with scholarly intent to hold out his hand, signaling for his twin's star with transparent expectation. Come now. Their little rite of sorts. )
Don't take so many liberties.
no subject
Ask me then.
[ Subaru lowers his hand to Seishirou's in the same way a coffin sinks into its grave. His fingers are cool to the touch. ]
So I won't have to.
no subject
Why don't you stay here? ( In the friendly carcass of Manhattan's despoiled civility turned fictive lovers' nook. ) You were always good at playing house.
( Trailing after Hokuto's skirts like a depleted, fumbling puppy. Artlessly accepting captivity in Seishirou's chaotic ambulance-driving schedule. Eating, wearing, agreeing with whatever was put before him.
Seishirou's mouth lingers over the same fingers, cunning. )
Would it be so unreasonable? I'd make your breakfast every morning. You could restore your wards by midday and gouge my chest in the afternoon. Think about it.
no subject
Ask. And he did. Look, and he does. ]
I was... never as good at pretending as you were.
[ Only too slow, always one clattering footstep behind. In the way of living, and loving, and killing too. Until there was only stillness left. His words lack the bite of his actions. ]
So you understand, of course. Why I have to decline.
no subject
( But he isn't startled or aggrieved past the ripening bruise that his ego refuses to ingest for its malignity. Shame, shame. A nine-year-old Sumeragi Subaru was beautiful, baptised in another's ruin, he was beautiful in blood. Atheism could only strike men who've never peered such elusive dawns-swaddled divinity.
And he's such a vicious, small-toothed, petty creature now. A cautious refusal to a crude invitation, and it was a waste, this domestic interlude all a waste, not a single truth shared. The boy — and he is her little infantile monster now — speaks with his grandmother's mouth. Fleetingly, Seishirou thinks to break it.
Instead, he frisks the breast pocket of a suit coat that's seen increasingly tamer days for a tobacco reserves that never materialise. Old habits, futuristic deaths. Time is a construct. )
You'll change your mind, of course. But I won't be available then. ( Like all the love songs say. Subaru should know. They've exorcised the hauntings of so many pop sirens. ) Your problem, Subaru-kun, has always been time. You never know when you're running out.
( His hands come back clean, ruse played out. He watches Subaru with the impotent pride of a man only fate could ever impoverish. )
The exit is to the left. ( But Sumeragi Subaru knows that. )
no subject
He wonders how it feels to have made him this way, to twist his magic until strength drips thick from the wring of its corners, but he finds the instinct to ask divested from him. He thought he would be better at holding the words of a dead man up to the light of his life, but maybe he had it wrong. Maybe it's that it doesn't feel any particular way at all.
A worse answer than the parting threat, in truth. One he might've also carried straight down into Tokyo Bay, were he allowed it.
Gifts exchanged, he leaves this altar of light shapes and imprinted shadows. ]
I hope you sleep well tonight, Seishirou-san.
[ He exits, to the left. ]