[ 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. ]
( Cat kissing the cream, beware of the lick, clumsy, clumsy. He's only so fastidious, so painstakingly prim and proper for his audience, must be. Even dearest Subaru-kun can't cast his spells with such innate, unsupervised, perfectly disciplined formality, as if a base divination pentagram can seed the next great thunderous boom of a nascent world.
Only, it's Sumeragi Subaru, superlative scion, blood of some or other emperor or Fujiwara, jade bead among his grandmother's tightly clutched pearls. Of course he's naturally flawless in execution, the invisible but prickling flow of his magic only drawn imperfectly taut when his gaze snags on Seishirou. Ah. He's flesh and bone, after all.
Seishirou's smile is a gift contingent on every next instance of human fallacy. Choose your miracles wisely. )
Are you surprised? They're saviours infatuated with a martyr. It's a love match for the ages. ( Has anyone ever seen finer? And isn't Seishirou grand, conversational, patient in the long wait for Subaru's decryption of whatever tacit code One's blood enshrined in parting generosity?
A forlorn pang, the tapestry of his — Subaru's cigarette woven a new slate line. He sighs, takes another puff. Then, he looks at the smoking stick with something like incredulous betrayal. Oh no. Now he's done it. )
I'm not giving this back to you, am I? Damn your eyes. ( Mmmm. The thoughtful, laissez-faire hum. ) Eye.
[ Lightning quick, supple-spined instinct, unspecified between the cigarette's betrayal and the eye's betrayal. Against the sloped architecture of his palm delivering a potent dose of magic inquiry, the cloth hums in protest of his perusal. It quakes against the ward he's pinned it to, transmuting from polite butterfly-winged souvenir to a snapping animal, leg trapped in the jaws of a winter-hidden bear trap.
His fingers bleed first with the inky reservoirs of his new magic. Then they bleed in actuality, skin flaying in soft, papery cuts. He bears it because he knows the price. He's not tracing his runes in Japanese, in Chinese or Sanskrit. He's tracing in the broken, smeary glyphs he'd seen in the church, puzzling out the invocation One pledged to Sleep. ]
...It's not surprise, necessarily. [ Subaru returns to the notion even as the table shakes and his blood flutters, plastic and porcelain rattling. ] But there is a notion many are carrying about why he did this.
[ Bliss, fire, endurance, sacrifice. Harmony, suffering, strength, battle. Each line traces elegant, blunt, parsing. ]
Drawing her eye wasn't for any of our sakes. [ Divinity. Divine will — the blood glares back at him. ] She promised him something.
( Takes a steeled stomach, watching in wait while blood seeps out like an oil spill and it's fresh, breathe it, fresh and metallic and raw like a blunt butcher's cut, feel it, wet and corrosive and thickly coagulated, taste it, ghost of it hard and prickling on the tongue, when Seishirou swallows, dry.
Sumeragi Subaru's viscous signature hangs like a noble web of drippings, and the cloth hungers for me, like open maws. It's the trouble of things: grant an object sentience, it grows its own appetites, its own lures. Blood now tasted will forever be craved.
This time, Seishirou palms the handkerchief, first claim clean and fleeting, the second scrunching cotton, violating stuttered gasps of lace. And conversationally, as if a petty rite of spiritual dissection didn't accelerate between them: )
She's a child. All children know how to do is seed ruin or die. ( And she's ill tempered and impatient and strong, too strong by far, big of bones and small of virtues. She's a Sumeragi hurricane in fallen New York's tea cup, absent the discipline of restriction.
There's a wound weeping on this Sumeragi's hand, where the price was paid and truth born. He has no means to mitigate it past the banal. And so, he nods carefully: )
Thank you. ( A professional sacrifice still calls for some recognition. ) Now. Did you see god?
[ Over the quieted table, the downward drift of scrap — cloth and blood, condensation, magic, Subaru's fingers curl and recede. Blood scrying is ruinous work. It begets too many mouths, too many teeth. Unlike the elements, it pulses alive. Capillary to root nerve... should this child not forgive his curiosity, he suspects he'll bear witness to them in time. Even if only in the way a predator tests the landscape of its consciousness: by bite. ]
No. It has power, [ that word weighs on his tongue like it has a taste. ] but not divinity.
[ Because there is a difference between a god ordained by its heavenly birth and a god made so by another's will. One is knowable. One is — knowable. ]
He may be like a god from where we stand. But it also might be that his power was given to him.
( A god old, a god new, a god borrowed, a god too good to be true. Sleep's emissaries, her martyrs, her chosen. Something doesn't add up — likely because this is an operation of petty funerary subtractions.
There's more here than meets whichever eye. Between Sumeragi Subaru's distracting magical talent and enviable pulse and Seishirou's alert cunning and practical impulses, between the two serviceable pillars of their sight, they make, together, one wholly functional person. Twin star, or simply star-crossed?
The shadow of Seishirou's fingertips splinters in an ichor-refracted kaleidoscope, floating over Subaru's hand, wakey-waking the furnace of his marks. Deeper than new-found sakanagi, is that claim. Deeper than hurt. And it greets its master in tacit convulsions.
He finds himself sinking his palm down over Subaru's, shepherding both away from the handkerchief, flat out on the table. His cigarette sleeps the tremors of its last sleep in the ashtray. )
You can't keep it. ( For sake-keeping or further study or whatever linguistic perversion might excuse Sumeragi Subaru's misplaced enthusiasm for occult eeriness.
In a wasteland so far from home, sweet and forever home, his head droops onto his other hand, cushioned on Subaru's kitchen table — and he spies the pallid, hiccupped start of nascent constellations peering on the midday sky, ready for the night hour of winter drawing her skirts. He can't stay here in the evening hour. For now, his suitors have abandoned him, but appetites are fickle, and men strange.
Still, a moment. Feline, half-wakeful respite, drunkenly jittery. He is tired, feverishly tired, can't afford sleep. )
Tell me... tell me about your latest cases.
( Talk emptily, bonelessly, without meaning or purpose, just as Subaru might have when he was still a fresh-faced novelty morsel at the head of a shambles clan, and Seishirou infiltrated his sister's dinner table. Bad habit. Too nostalgic. He's never —
[ Possibility turns over in the spying glass of his mind. Not the kind that sows hope in the wound's edge of the apocalypse, unscarred by their arrival, but the kind that looms its precipice. And the human condition that begs him to look over it, to see what exists beneath. He doesn't have to say it; Sakurazuka Seishirou is always one step ahead of him. He'll know the concern dredged by the silver spoon of the Sumeragi's notice. They, all of them, were also given Sleep's magic. In the animal maw of her calling and the sacrifice made by One exists the possibility of a mirror image. To cultivate it past its infancy may lead to similar bonds, similar ends...
— his fingers twitch, the jewel-facet inlay of his marks sitting prettily in the gallery and bridge of Seishirou's hand. There is little resistance in his wrist when guided aside and away from the handkerchief. (Look, only look.) So little that he doesn't think to remove it even when the journey ends with both settled on the table.
There are still things he wants to ask. But the last tang of a dying cigarette's nostalgia bids higher.
Don't touch, or he ends up like this: half-asleep in the sworn enemy's unimpressive kitchen. ]
Alright. [ Subaru retrieves his blood-splattered teacup. Its tepid contents wet the height of his heartbeat; it'd escaped his attention, crawled secretively, destructively high in his throat. ] My last formalized contract was this...
[ And he goes on to recount the remaining days as the head of the Sumeragi, among the bellowing of dragons as they cracked Tokyo's ribs raw, teeth trailing the human belly of its innards over the land that would serve as their apocalypse. Beacons of humanity that would make anyone welcome the end, were they to look too long: a resurrected husband to be returned to ash at a desirous mother's behest; a week's worth of exorcisms at a demolished soapland condensed down into a single Sumeragi ceremony; a rash of murder at the hands of a woman believing herself to be the host of kitsune tsuki, an arbiter of slaughter for petty slights...
On and on, never as emptily as he might prefer. His schedule was as busy as a Dragon of Heaven as it was when he was clumsily thundering around his apartment trying to redress after two-hours worth of sleep. A bad habit, too nostalgic — You can, is what he thinks in the case of sleep and affordability. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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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Only, it's Sumeragi Subaru, superlative scion, blood of some or other emperor or Fujiwara, jade bead among his grandmother's tightly clutched pearls. Of course he's naturally flawless in execution, the invisible but prickling flow of his magic only drawn imperfectly taut when his gaze snags on Seishirou. Ah. He's flesh and bone, after all.
Seishirou's smile is a gift contingent on every next instance of human fallacy. Choose your miracles wisely. )
Are you surprised? They're saviours infatuated with a martyr. It's a love match for the ages. ( Has anyone ever seen finer? And isn't Seishirou grand, conversational, patient in the long wait for Subaru's decryption of whatever tacit code One's blood enshrined in parting generosity?
A forlorn pang, the tapestry of his — Subaru's cigarette woven a new slate line. He sighs, takes another puff. Then, he looks at the smoking stick with something like incredulous betrayal. Oh no. Now he's done it. )
I'm not giving this back to you, am I? Damn your eyes. ( Mmmm. The thoughtful, laissez-faire hum. ) Eye.
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[ Lightning quick, supple-spined instinct, unspecified between the cigarette's betrayal and the eye's betrayal. Against the sloped architecture of his palm delivering a potent dose of magic inquiry, the cloth hums in protest of his perusal. It quakes against the ward he's pinned it to, transmuting from polite butterfly-winged souvenir to a snapping animal, leg trapped in the jaws of a winter-hidden bear trap.
His fingers bleed first with the inky reservoirs of his new magic. Then they bleed in actuality, skin flaying in soft, papery cuts. He bears it because he knows the price. He's not tracing his runes in Japanese, in Chinese or Sanskrit. He's tracing in the broken, smeary glyphs he'd seen in the church, puzzling out the invocation One pledged to Sleep. ]
...It's not surprise, necessarily. [ Subaru returns to the notion even as the table shakes and his blood flutters, plastic and porcelain rattling. ] But there is a notion many are carrying about why he did this.
[ Bliss, fire, endurance, sacrifice. Harmony, suffering, strength, battle. Each line traces elegant, blunt, parsing. ]
Drawing her eye wasn't for any of our sakes. [ Divinity. Divine will — the blood glares back at him. ] She promised him something.
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Sumeragi Subaru's viscous signature hangs like a noble web of drippings, and the cloth hungers for me, like open maws. It's the trouble of things: grant an object sentience, it grows its own appetites, its own lures. Blood now tasted will forever be craved.
This time, Seishirou palms the handkerchief, first claim clean and fleeting, the second scrunching cotton, violating stuttered gasps of lace. And conversationally, as if a petty rite of spiritual dissection didn't accelerate between them: )
She's a child. All children know how to do is seed ruin or die. ( And she's ill tempered and impatient and strong, too strong by far, big of bones and small of virtues. She's a Sumeragi hurricane in fallen New York's tea cup, absent the discipline of restriction.
There's a wound weeping on this Sumeragi's hand, where the price was paid and truth born. He has no means to mitigate it past the banal. And so, he nods carefully: )
Thank you. ( A professional sacrifice still calls for some recognition. ) Now. Did you see god?
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No. It has power, [ that word weighs on his tongue like it has a taste. ] but not divinity.
[ Because there is a difference between a god ordained by its heavenly birth and a god made so by another's will. One is knowable. One is — knowable. ]
He may be like a god from where we stand. But it also might be that his power was given to him.
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( A god old, a god new, a god borrowed, a god too good to be true. Sleep's emissaries, her martyrs, her chosen. Something doesn't add up — likely because this is an operation of petty funerary subtractions.
There's more here than meets whichever eye. Between Sumeragi Subaru's distracting magical talent and enviable pulse and Seishirou's alert cunning and practical impulses, between the two serviceable pillars of their sight, they make, together, one wholly functional person. Twin star, or simply star-crossed?
The shadow of Seishirou's fingertips splinters in an ichor-refracted kaleidoscope, floating over Subaru's hand, wakey-waking the furnace of his marks. Deeper than new-found sakanagi, is that claim. Deeper than hurt. And it greets its master in tacit convulsions.
He finds himself sinking his palm down over Subaru's, shepherding both away from the handkerchief, flat out on the table. His cigarette sleeps the tremors of its last sleep in the ashtray. )
You can't keep it. ( For sake-keeping or further study or whatever linguistic perversion might excuse Sumeragi Subaru's misplaced enthusiasm for occult eeriness.
In a wasteland so far from home, sweet and forever home, his head droops onto his other hand, cushioned on Subaru's kitchen table — and he spies the pallid, hiccupped start of nascent constellations peering on the midday sky, ready for the night hour of winter drawing her skirts. He can't stay here in the evening hour. For now, his suitors have abandoned him, but appetites are fickle, and men strange.
Still, a moment. Feline, half-wakeful respite, drunkenly jittery. He is tired, feverishly tired, can't afford sleep. )
Tell me... tell me about your latest cases.
( Talk emptily, bonelessly, without meaning or purpose, just as Subaru might have when he was still a fresh-faced novelty morsel at the head of a shambles clan, and Seishirou infiltrated his sister's dinner table. Bad habit. Too nostalgic. He's never —
His eyelids tremble, so close to shut. )
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— his fingers twitch, the jewel-facet inlay of his marks sitting prettily in the gallery and bridge of Seishirou's hand. There is little resistance in his wrist when guided aside and away from the handkerchief. (Look, only look.) So little that he doesn't think to remove it even when the journey ends with both settled on the table.
There are still things he wants to ask. But the last tang of a dying cigarette's nostalgia bids higher.
Don't touch, or he ends up like this: half-asleep in the sworn enemy's unimpressive kitchen. ]
Alright. [ Subaru retrieves his blood-splattered teacup. Its tepid contents wet the height of his heartbeat; it'd escaped his attention, crawled secretively, destructively high in his throat. ] My last formalized contract was this...
[ And he goes on to recount the remaining days as the head of the Sumeragi, among the bellowing of dragons as they cracked Tokyo's ribs raw, teeth trailing the human belly of its innards over the land that would serve as their apocalypse. Beacons of humanity that would make anyone welcome the end, were they to look too long: a resurrected husband to be returned to ash at a desirous mother's behest; a week's worth of exorcisms at a demolished soapland condensed down into a single Sumeragi ceremony; a rash of murder at the hands of a woman believing herself to be the host of kitsune tsuki, an arbiter of slaughter for petty slights...
On and on, never as emptily as he might prefer. His schedule was as busy as a Dragon of Heaven as it was when he was clumsily thundering around his apartment trying to redress after two-hours worth of sleep. A bad habit, too nostalgic — You can, is what he thinks in the case of sleep and affordability. ]