[ 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. ]
( Fire licks shadow over his cheek, blooms short spells of warmth, leaves empty promises: who was the beautiful lingerie-clad slip of pyromancy-prone nothing on the Seals' side? ...Kasumi. Kasumi Karen. What work she'd make of him. For a woman so fair, he might even deign to burn.
In the hands of an ancestral enemy, every threat is insincere. Deliver death or don't. There is no suspense, no crescendo. Near his face, Subaru's hand is complacent. Near his heart —
He nods his thanks, dips in, holds his cigarette stiffly in the line of fire with one hand, shields the nascent flame with his other palm from invisible gusts. Old habits of stalking and prowling in the great outdoors die hard. Then, he leans back and — breathes in, the staggered, muted squalor of stale tobbacco blossoming pleasure his lungs have gone so many weeks without, their lining is surely by now practically virginal. His eyelids sweep shut.
A second inhalation. Get the cigarette started, he said. He allows himself the indiscretion of a third with a knowing, ingratiating smile at the joke of his person, shared between them; there's hardly enough ash to shed, but he sanitizes the tip on the ashtray, only to prolong the familiar weight of the cigarette in his hand.
The fourth puff is for the road. Someone's road. The fifth, only because four is unlucky. And that's enough.
Cruel fate. Damned stubbornness and pride. He turns the stick so the flame faces him, trapped between his thumb and pointing finger, and offers it to Subaru. )
Fushiguro Megumi likes to walk around. ( But he's one morsel between many mouths, and Seishirou suspects, not so unique in retaining the auspices of Sumeragi Subaru's undivided attention. ) Who else?
[ Between four and five, the thirteenth almost thinks to let him keep it. Visible proof of his breathing, even in pursuit of reinstated addiction, feels a miracle. If he busies himself with something else, surely the abandonment can just be chalked up to mistimed steeping for an equally cheap tea. He was never the one doing the brewing, after all...
...but neither is he one to sow a lie where there isn't one. The one time is silty now, sedimentary.
Another in a long list of unforgettable transgressions.
Subaru places the lighter on the table and takes the cigarette instead, promise and pride metamorphosed. Fingers touch where flame hadn't and he lifts it away to whet his less discerning taste in liaisons. Perching it between his lips, his inhale curls with him when he turns and paces the few steps back into the kitchen. ]
Agent Choi. His trade is similar to ours. [ An exorcist in theory, a civil servant in name. He's knowledgeable, though Sleep has made his bones malleable instead of his magic. An Offering, not a Token. One cup extracted from the pile and then rinsed, placed beside a new one. What teas he's been given are mostly plain and black — no sugar, no spice, no mint leaf or milk. People certainly had their first pick of preferences at the world's end. ] Caelus.
[ This place is already a hunting ground, but their numbers are few enough that he names them without pretense. ]
( Fushiguro Megumi. Agent Choi. Caelus. An ever-growing constellation of haphazard people and meddlesome things. He wonders, hand reaching for a cigarette his mouth no longer carries in phantom yearning, if Subaru volunteers the names of people he privately wants subjected to a paltry degree of petty horrors. That's about the level of the Sakurazukamori's current expertise: a staggering, bleeding, idiocy-suffering purveyor of inconveniences.
But no. Sumeragi Subaru is incapable of more than auctioning the interminable reserves of his patience and civility to the widest smiling bidder. He has never met a desperate cause or tragic child he would turn away. Whatever her sins, whatever her bedside manner, his grandmother well called the sickness of his overly sympathetic heart.
He smokes well, for all of it. This isn't a nostalgic game entertained to embezzle the first and last dregs of Seishirou's absenteeing pity. Subaru-kun holds his cigarette proud, his mouth pursed, his gaze diffused; he inhales without care or consequence. What a fantastically sophisticated pedigree pet.
At leisure, Seishirou introduces the stretch of cotton from his breast pocket, a handkerchief thinned by obsesive buffing, drenched in every colour and texture of ichor. Dread and despair, mounted on Sumeragi Subaru's kitchen table. Standard fare in a long day's work. )
[ Water, trickling boiled thick. Blood, so alive that its signature curls over the back of his neck the moment Seishirou exposes it.
Subaru glimpses back, the mundanity of his task arrested. Alarm rings keen over the adult topography of his expression, peeling back the lines of age, the unkind narcosis of the years. There isn't much that the Sumeragi head hasn't touched by now. There is no mystery in the mire of a pallid corporate exorcism. There is no mystery in the dog's head he pulls up from the shallow earth, the yuurei so mistreated even in death that its contagion becomes onryou. Contractual, obligate. Safe.
This, though...
The need to know flares through him. ]
...what did you think of it, [ Subaru ventures, bringing the teacups to the table. He sets one down at each place; his own will soon be forgotten. His attention dilates and suddenly he's handing the cigarette back to Seishirou to clear his hands, to — look. Not touch. ] the ritual that lead up to this?
[ Not a mantra but a hymn before all the world went dark. ]
( There: the consummate predator, an onmyouji out for literal blood, curiosity metastasising into tenebrous fascination, the downcast drip of Sumeragi Subaru's gaping mouth. He's curious. Worse, he's eager, a hunting hound, belly to ground.
The cigarette's peace hangs in the dubious balance of Sakurazuka Seishirou's unwavering hand. He pretends for a moment diluted to taut pulled-honey string that he will neglect it past its decorative advantage. A mere accessory to the crime of his ethical anomie.
Then, statue livened, he lets his hand drift the cigarette close to his mouth in the inevitable evolution of guttural, snapped puffs. )
It felt — ( And what a word they've been reduced to, the intimate animal comprehension of an intellectual phenomenon. ) Primitive. Unpractised. Throwing whatever's on hand at a wall to see if it sticks.
( One's blood, evidenced in Seishirou's souvenir, certainly did. )
These aren't sophisticated actors. At a first glance, I'd assume the work amateurish. Or tribal.
[ His hearing lies rapt with Seishirou's professional opinion, likewise felt in its genealogical cadence. And his gift of sight remains on his omiyage. Across the table lies the taxonomy of promise and signature: lung-humid smoke, domesticated steam politely curled. And then the blood, its intrusion like a wild wolf at the breakfast table.
One arm braced in front of him, Subaru hovers his opposite palm over the handkerchief, a slight inhalation of energy calling it upwards to unfurl. One incantation tacks its corners taut on the invisible barrier of his magic's interest.
Looking, but not touching, conditions upheld. ]
The people here are fond of him. One.
[ One, whose bloodletting desecrated a whole city block and its church. ]
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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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In the hands of an ancestral enemy, every threat is insincere. Deliver death or don't. There is no suspense, no crescendo. Near his face, Subaru's hand is complacent. Near his heart —
He nods his thanks, dips in, holds his cigarette stiffly in the line of fire with one hand, shields the nascent flame with his other palm from invisible gusts. Old habits of stalking and prowling in the great outdoors die hard. Then, he leans back and — breathes in, the staggered, muted squalor of stale tobbacco blossoming pleasure his lungs have gone so many weeks without, their lining is surely by now practically virginal. His eyelids sweep shut.
A second inhalation. Get the cigarette started, he said. He allows himself the indiscretion of a third with a knowing, ingratiating smile at the joke of his person, shared between them; there's hardly enough ash to shed, but he sanitizes the tip on the ashtray, only to prolong the familiar weight of the cigarette in his hand.
The fourth puff is for the road. Someone's road. The fifth, only because four is unlucky. And that's enough.
Cruel fate. Damned stubbornness and pride. He turns the stick so the flame faces him, trapped between his thumb and pointing finger, and offers it to Subaru. )
Fushiguro Megumi likes to walk around. ( But he's one morsel between many mouths, and Seishirou suspects, not so unique in retaining the auspices of Sumeragi Subaru's undivided attention. ) Who else?
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...but neither is he one to sow a lie where there isn't one. The one time is silty now, sedimentary.
Another in a long list of unforgettable transgressions.
Subaru places the lighter on the table and takes the cigarette instead, promise and pride metamorphosed. Fingers touch where flame hadn't and he lifts it away to whet his less discerning taste in liaisons. Perching it between his lips, his inhale curls with him when he turns and paces the few steps back into the kitchen. ]
Agent Choi. His trade is similar to ours. [ An exorcist in theory, a civil servant in name. He's knowledgeable, though Sleep has made his bones malleable instead of his magic. An Offering, not a Token. One cup extracted from the pile and then rinsed, placed beside a new one. What teas he's been given are mostly plain and black — no sugar, no spice, no mint leaf or milk. People certainly had their first pick of preferences at the world's end. ] Caelus.
[ This place is already a hunting ground, but their numbers are few enough that he names them without pretense. ]
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But no. Sumeragi Subaru is incapable of more than auctioning the interminable reserves of his patience and civility to the widest smiling bidder. He has never met a desperate cause or tragic child he would turn away. Whatever her sins, whatever her bedside manner, his grandmother well called the sickness of his overly sympathetic heart.
He smokes well, for all of it. This isn't a nostalgic game entertained to embezzle the first and last dregs of Seishirou's absenteeing pity. Subaru-kun holds his cigarette proud, his mouth pursed, his gaze diffused; he inhales without care or consequence. What a fantastically sophisticated pedigree pet.
At leisure, Seishirou introduces the stretch of cotton from his breast pocket, a handkerchief thinned by obsesive buffing, drenched in every colour and texture of ichor. Dread and despair, mounted on Sumeragi Subaru's kitchen table. Standard fare in a long day's work. )
You're not the only one keeping busy.
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Subaru glimpses back, the mundanity of his task arrested. Alarm rings keen over the adult topography of his expression, peeling back the lines of age, the unkind narcosis of the years. There isn't much that the Sumeragi head hasn't touched by now. There is no mystery in the mire of a pallid corporate exorcism. There is no mystery in the dog's head he pulls up from the shallow earth, the yuurei so mistreated even in death that its contagion becomes onryou. Contractual, obligate. Safe.
This, though...
The need to know flares through him. ]
...what did you think of it, [ Subaru ventures, bringing the teacups to the table. He sets one down at each place; his own will soon be forgotten. His attention dilates and suddenly he's handing the cigarette back to Seishirou to clear his hands, to — look. Not touch. ] the ritual that lead up to this?
[ Not a mantra but a hymn before all the world went dark. ]
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The cigarette's peace hangs in the dubious balance of Sakurazuka Seishirou's unwavering hand. He pretends for a moment diluted to taut pulled-honey string that he will neglect it past its decorative advantage. A mere accessory to the crime of his ethical anomie.
Then, statue livened, he lets his hand drift the cigarette close to his mouth in the inevitable evolution of guttural, snapped puffs. )
It felt — ( And what a word they've been reduced to, the intimate animal comprehension of an intellectual phenomenon. ) Primitive. Unpractised. Throwing whatever's on hand at a wall to see if it sticks.
( One's blood, evidenced in Seishirou's souvenir, certainly did. )
These aren't sophisticated actors. At a first glance, I'd assume the work amateurish. Or tribal.
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One arm braced in front of him, Subaru hovers his opposite palm over the handkerchief, a slight inhalation of energy calling it upwards to unfurl. One incantation tacks its corners taut on the invisible barrier of his magic's interest.
Looking, but not touching, conditions upheld. ]
The people here are fond of him. One.
[ One, whose bloodletting desecrated a whole city block and its church. ]
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