As for my small favour, I'm afraid it comes with limitations: look, but don't touch.
( For whatever curse sleeps on it to consume two would be — )
After all, our happy little family isn't at the point of sharing assets. But I'm not so crude: bearing in mind I'm but a humble veterinarian incapable of shouldering the Sumeragi fees, what might I owe you?
[ A silent sensation, not as accurate as a tether but still commanded through the Murmur's intrusion all the same: a building in Chelsea, its arched doorway red as a torii gate. ]
( Ah, but to learn the rundown location of the Sumeragi scion in his tatters is a greater intimacy than to enter the boudoir of a sophisticated courtesan in her lovely prime. He makes no mistake of it, no delay. There is distance, there is the red-hot noose of his fatigue, there is the high call of white birds drifting over sun-drenched soil oozing between cement teeth.
Manhattan is a lark like this. Sakurazuka Seishirou, battered, bruised, one arm regaled with the bandage fittings shielding a somnolent stab wound, the flickers of his flitting gaze quarry-like, diffuse. He doesn't knock — sends the tacit invitation of a pulse through their strange trinket of a bond — but waits outside, like every stray on the porch, legs mutinously kicked out over slitted stepping stones. Gravel swims in his stillness.
Cold at midday. Colder still at night. He stirs from exhaustion when the door creaks. )
[ He is a sensation before he is a sight, and Subaru doesn't look gratified in the interstice of the red doorway to find that both of these things align.
Even if — it sings truth. He couldn't promise him without lying. ]
If it were any other celebration.
[ Maybe he would have accepted it as tiding. As it is, he pulls the door open wide in its own scrape of ceremony, standing aside for him to enter. Knowing tempers the green-glinting trouble of his study, any urgency that would have flourished beneath it. To help yourself to another's offering is an exercise in withstanding. ]
( What fool walks into the lion's den willing? One increasingly old, starting to grey and resolutely unwilling to accept the permanence of encroaching wrinkles. He is — himself reduced, yes, bootleg and dusting and frailed, but his roots sing the sakura tree's promise. He will stand, he will hold, he will persevere. This storm will not be what brings him down.
Wind at his back, a groaning door, dust travelled in gravel beneath his dragging footsteps. Wallpaper flayed in stiff, thick peels at waterlogged edges where green peers between electric fittings. Dead LED and predatory fern, cottagecore chic.
For once, along stairs and throttled corridors, he does not offer to remove his shoes. )
Should I really be here unchaperoned? The new generation is quite forward. ( After all, how can Sumeragi Subaru resist his debilitated and impoverished charms? The dark circles attached to the dark circles, that's what modern men crave. ) Tell me you have a cigarette.
[ Subaru does look at him in the humid candlelit breath of his new dwelling's interior, scraped, as if meat from bone.
Bereft of a kettle proper, a pot boils water in the slender hollow of a kitchen behind him, dutifully stacked with all manner of pilfered tea and non-perishables more suited to Hokuto's stylish eye than his own. Subaru has hosted more blustering, starlit intrusion here than he ever did in his last nine years of existence. ]
I do. [ A lie, halved. ] But not your brand.
[ He remembers the scent of it, the coat it over sugar, blossom, antiseptic. Only nostalgia has given him any trace of it, much like nostalgia crushes the reconstituted shape of his worry beneath its heel. Another half, the chosen half. ]
Do you want to persevere with it, or against it?
[ The disrespect of his worry is swapped for the disrespect of his knowing. ]
( Sickness and misfortune come uninvited. Even corporate death calls for an open door — but waits no further for his seat, half descending, half collapsing on the first three wobbly-legged availability in a painstaking exercise to race the chair to a molten end.
He feels indiscreet in his lassitude, thoughts mothballed, gestures sugared and slow. The hand that holds his temple, pulsing dark, nearly slips off the table. He catches it — himself — with an amused startle, the balm of Subaru's persuasion a difficult exorcism. )
Mmmmmmmm...? But I'm such a devoted man. ( To his cigarettes, if nothing else. Support the government's triumphs, buy local. Mild Seven or bust. His fingers drum a beat lost at sea. ) I'll start one for you. It won't count.
( Cigarettes have their ritual, start to finish. Not every quick anonymous puff in the dark is love affair. )
Charming place. ( Perfectly idyllic — and his gaze rains down over the tragedy of porcelain geometries stacked in a gravity-defying heap in the sink. Cup count: three. ) A nice place to entertain.
[ Subaru is well-acquainted with devotion and its shadow, the temptation to pass off curated taste for a wide net of relief, palate dulled. He finds surprise briefly cording that it's taken him this long to find and accept a loophole.
And here they are. Here he is, complicit.
An ashtray joins the table by way of slender fingertips; cheap, plastic, the mainstay of an apocalypse that delights in shattering more refined glassware. Then a pack of cigarettes already picked open, tobacco old, brand long faded off its paper insert. Taken from an international shop in Times Square, one that had long been rendered inaccessible by Charlotte's stage, suddenly reopened by her defeat. Subaru offers him that but keeps the lighter, thumb tracing its sparkwheel in a brief weft of thought. ]
It's more a place of study.
[ — is what he settles on. There was a small library once, its most boring books misshapen by the pages torn from them as a means of kindling or talisman. And in contrast to the emblematic sterility of his Shinjuku apartment, there is dust, ink, scrap, cup rings half-formed. Languages all around him, like Sleep's runes ruptured, Japanese failing, the tabletop stove burning through its meager propane reserves as the water churns toward blessed volatility.
You find yourself studying human nature often, over tea?
( After all, the twelfth head didn't raise her successor on coffee.
Ashtrays, cigarettes, the accoutrements of a bad idea delivered with the sobriety of a crime scene. Sumeragi Subaru only ever belongs in black-and-white cinema, a leading product of romanticized doom and gravitas.
One of them must attempt against the convalescing health of Seishirou's lungs. In the way of his people, the Sumeragi dithers. So, then: Seishirou captures the cigarette pack, turns it each way and over. Logo conveniently stripped, but the forget-me-not blue of the packaging betrays the French staple of Gauloises and Seishirou's venerable age in tandem. One cigarette, on the cusp of crumbing at the tip.
He drags it to his mouth, lets himself enjoy the pallid weight there, the minute discrepancies from the memory of Mild Sevens. Then, he sinuously leans in towards dearest Subaru-kun, tacitly inviting his lighter fire like every high-end courtesan committed to making the month's rent at a jazz bar. )
[ He's been relearning the spells for fire, some of his scraps bearing scorches, singing, but his thumb still presses down on the lighter with the ease of an unearned normalcy. It flicks, flinty-soft against a burnt wick, and he exercises his ability to near the Sakurazukamori's face with an ostensible threat. He offers it out over the tabletop. ]
When it visits me, yes.
[ Which is more often than he expects but never refuses, still. ]
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[ He doesn't intend to stop. ]
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( For whatever curse sleeps on it to consume two would be — )
After all, our happy little family isn't at the point of sharing assets. But I'm not so crude: bearing in mind I'm but a humble veterinarian incapable of shouldering the Sumeragi fees, what might I owe you?
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His blood wasn't meant for you. I expect the cost will already run steep.
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Do you want to know? If you have the blood of a dead god on your hands?
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( Already hopelessly compromised. )
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Bring the blood to me.
[ In one piece. ]
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Manhattan is a lark like this. Sakurazuka Seishirou, battered, bruised, one arm regaled with the bandage fittings shielding a somnolent stab wound, the flickers of his flitting gaze quarry-like, diffuse. He doesn't knock — sends the tacit invitation of a pulse through their strange trinket of a bond — but waits outside, like every stray on the porch, legs mutinously kicked out over slitted stepping stones. Gravel swims in his stillness.
Cold at midday. Colder still at night. He stirs from exhaustion when the door creaks. )
I should have brought a house-warming gift.
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Even if — it sings truth. He couldn't promise him without lying. ]
If it were any other celebration.
[ Maybe he would have accepted it as tiding. As it is, he pulls the door open wide in its own scrape of ceremony, standing aside for him to enter. Knowing tempers the green-glinting trouble of his study, any urgency that would have flourished beneath it. To help yourself to another's offering is an exercise in withstanding. ]
Come in, anyway.
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Wind at his back, a groaning door, dust travelled in gravel beneath his dragging footsteps. Wallpaper flayed in stiff, thick peels at waterlogged edges where green peers between electric fittings. Dead LED and predatory fern, cottagecore chic.
For once, along stairs and throttled corridors, he does not offer to remove his shoes. )
Should I really be here unchaperoned? The new generation is quite forward. ( After all, how can Sumeragi Subaru resist his debilitated and impoverished charms? The dark circles attached to the dark circles, that's what modern men crave. ) Tell me you have a cigarette.
( Look at him. Lie. )
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Bereft of a kettle proper, a pot boils water in the slender hollow of a kitchen behind him, dutifully stacked with all manner of pilfered tea and non-perishables more suited to Hokuto's stylish eye than his own. Subaru has hosted more blustering, starlit intrusion here than he ever did in his last nine years of existence. ]
I do. [ A lie, halved. ] But not your brand.
[ He remembers the scent of it, the coat it over sugar, blossom, antiseptic. Only nostalgia has given him any trace of it, much like nostalgia crushes the reconstituted shape of his worry beneath its heel. Another half, the chosen half. ]
Do you want to persevere with it, or against it?
[ The disrespect of his worry is swapped for the disrespect of his knowing. ]
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He feels indiscreet in his lassitude, thoughts mothballed, gestures sugared and slow. The hand that holds his temple, pulsing dark, nearly slips off the table. He catches it — himself — with an amused startle, the balm of Subaru's persuasion a difficult exorcism. )
Mmmmmmmm...? But I'm such a devoted man. ( To his cigarettes, if nothing else. Support the government's triumphs, buy local. Mild Seven or bust. His fingers drum a beat lost at sea. ) I'll start one for you. It won't count.
( Cigarettes have their ritual, start to finish. Not every quick anonymous puff in the dark is love affair. )
Charming place. ( Perfectly idyllic — and his gaze rains down over the tragedy of porcelain geometries stacked in a gravity-defying heap in the sink. Cup count: three. ) A nice place to entertain.
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And here they are. Here he is, complicit.
An ashtray joins the table by way of slender fingertips; cheap, plastic, the mainstay of an apocalypse that delights in shattering more refined glassware. Then a pack of cigarettes already picked open, tobacco old, brand long faded off its paper insert. Taken from an international shop in Times Square, one that had long been rendered inaccessible by Charlotte's stage, suddenly reopened by her defeat. Subaru offers him that but keeps the lighter, thumb tracing its sparkwheel in a brief weft of thought. ]
It's more a place of study.
[ — is what he settles on. There was a small library once, its most boring books misshapen by the pages torn from them as a means of kindling or talisman. And in contrast to the emblematic sterility of his Shinjuku apartment, there is dust, ink, scrap, cup rings half-formed. Languages all around him, like Sleep's runes ruptured, Japanese failing, the tabletop stove burning through its meager propane reserves as the water churns toward blessed volatility.
Subaru doesn't sit yet. ]
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( After all, the twelfth head didn't raise her successor on coffee.
Ashtrays, cigarettes, the accoutrements of a bad idea delivered with the sobriety of a crime scene. Sumeragi Subaru only ever belongs in black-and-white cinema, a leading product of romanticized doom and gravitas.
One of them must attempt against the convalescing health of Seishirou's lungs. In the way of his people, the Sumeragi dithers. So, then: Seishirou captures the cigarette pack, turns it each way and over. Logo conveniently stripped, but the forget-me-not blue of the packaging betrays the French staple of Gauloises and Seishirou's venerable age in tandem. One cigarette, on the cusp of crumbing at the tip.
He drags it to his mouth, lets himself enjoy the pallid weight there, the minute discrepancies from the memory of Mild Sevens. Then, he sinuously leans in towards dearest Subaru-kun, tacitly inviting his lighter fire like every high-end courtesan committed to making the month's rent at a jazz bar. )
Don't tease.
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When it visits me, yes.
[ Which is more often than he expects but never refuses, still. ]
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