Title: Am I Who I Am?
Characters/Pairing: Hibari/Mukuro 1869
Rating: M for implied, non-explicit sex
Summary: Two hearts, two minds, two bodies, but how to separate them?
Prompt: KHRFest Round 5, VII-1 TYLHibari/TYLMukuro - madness; "you bring out the darkness in me"
A/N: To anonymous 'sleepy' (and others who may read this) - it was intentionally 'messy'. It is not meant to be clear who is who. Hence the TITLE. Please, use a little brainwork. Questions to keep in mind are: Who starts off the story? Who do the animals represent? And is the person who starts out really who you think it is?
His splayed fingers smooth over the dry, fibrous surface, easing out creases, folds and curls with tapered ends as rough as the paper over which they glide across. They whisper for quiet while heavy weights secure the mauled corners, baring the contents: bold black strokes, greyed with age since its writing, sunk into the wizened sheet.
He traces those delicate lines as they curve seamlessly from one to the next. Horizontal, vertical, sometimes a precise tear-drop, sometimes deviating sharply - thickening then thinning at the skillful hand of their creator within an invisible box. Ink on paper with no meaning until seen as part of the greater whole.
There is a slim brush set to one side. His fingers stretch towards it, take it up, hold the pale wooden length comfortably. The end bulges where soft hairs protrude and narrow to a point, pure white, unmarred. It hovers over the page and contemplates the character-marked surface.
Then it dips into a well of dark ink and begins to trace out its story.
A stranger came upon a horse one day, frolicking in its wooden-fenced meadow. A beauty with a glossy black coat that shone like quicksilver picked its heels up, flicked its tail and cantered joyously across a lush, green spread dotted with wildflowers. It was pure ebony from the tips of its alert ears to the rim of its oiled hooves. A fine, well-bred and spirited beast. The stranger stopped to behold it.
With much snorting and whinnying, the horse made a circuit of the field before coming to an abrupt halt upon sighting the stranger. Its ears were angled forward - a sign of curiosity - and it pawed at the earth before trotting up to the fence. The stranger's hand reached towards the outstretched nose.
"Don't touch her."
The stranger started and looked around at the speaker, hand still outstretched.
"I apologise. Is she yours?" The horse snuffled, confused as to why the human hadn't come forward.
The youth who had interrupted tilted his head back so the wide brim of his hat no longer hid his face from view. Steely eyes bored into the stranger's own. His pale shirt with its long, loose sleeves was blinding in the face of the sun, casting the youth's more defining features into shadow.
"Don't put your filthy hands on someone else's property," he spat, before stalking past. You would mar its beauty. He left tiny whirlwinds of fury in his wake.
The stranger stood staring after the youngster, baffled, while the ebony horse affectionately nosed his hand.
It always had to go wrong, didn't it? He let the last body topple into the canal with a splash and cast apathetic eyes over himself: the suit would have to go; his weapon would need meticulous cleaning; his hands needed to be rinsed of their residual maroon. That he had any blood on him was a sign this operation had been a fucking mess.
"Are you done?" he asked over his shoulder. Receiving no reply, he frowned and turned. "Well?"
"In a minute." This an absent answer given as his partner kept a frighteningly strong grip while the man in his hands convulsed and contorted grotesquely.
He snorted and strode over, grasping their upper arm and shaking it. "Stop playing."
They blinked. The victim shuddered and went still. Dead. His partner, once out of his reverie, seemed pleased with his work.
"Died of fright, April 2011," he eulogised before kicking their body into the murky water where it began drifting out to the Mediterranean Sea. "Shall we celebrate?"
"How like you to toast an utter failure." There was nothing left to do but walk away from the scene. Like no-one had just been massacred. Like blood did not clot the stones beneath their feet. As if murder was a common past-time for citizens.
"It is not a failure if the target is dead, as requested." An arm curled around his shoulders: two companionable men out for a stroll was all they were. "Sawada will make some noise but it is nothing that cannot be dealt with."
"Hmm." Noncommittal agreement. The arm was permitted to remain where it was as they rejoined the tourist-crammed piazza. There, he shook off the limb and split away from his partner.
"Tonight?" his partner called after him. Hopeful.
He only nodded in response.
...
He was not the type that you would have expected to be a heavy drinker. Too slim, too light, unable to hold his alcohol. Nevertheless, he was a drinker, but he never drank simply for the sake of drinking: there was always a reason, a methodology to his actions that dictated his day to day life. It wasn't predictable but neither was it random.
Today, however, he glutted himself on liquor. Between calls of, "Ancora!", he slumped over a table with his cheek against the worn wooden surface. It wasn't even an hour past noon and already he was stone cold drunk. Plenty of disapproving looks were received, of course. All went ignored.
A tinkling bell above the door heralded a new arrival. The drunk man was in a position to view them as they arrived but saw only the glass of foaming beer before him. He knocked it back in two gulps, set the glass down then returned to resting his head on a table which tilted wildly until held down by the weight of his sodden brain.
A splash of liquid woke him up with a splutter. Alcohol stung his eyes and they watered, distorting the image of the one who had seen fit to be so rude. He threw an off-kilter punch at his assailant, only for the momentum to somehow topple him backwards off of his stool to the laughter of the bar patrons around him.
Cursing and yelling back less than complimentary phrases in rough Italian at them, the drunk staggered to his feet and roared his protest when another face full of liquid - this time, water - was tossed at him. He charged in the general direction of where the liquid had come from and was sent sprawling by a foot stuck into his path. This time the drunk gave up and decided to remain on the floor; at least nothing was lurching there.
Someone gripped his arm and dragged his light frame out and through the door where he complained loudly about the roughness of the street until a kick to the stomach silenced him.
"You are an embarrassment," someone - a familiar voice - hissed. There were chuckles and laughter from passers-by.
He wasn't quite sure what he said but it was plenty slurred and just about unintelligible. Rather than decipher their meaning, the one pulling him mercilessly across the ground hauled him up and slammed him into a wall. He could almost swear he saw stars as his head connected with the harsh stucco.
"Why were you drinking?" that same voice demanded.
"Why does anyone drink?" he mumbled. At least that's what he thought he mumbled. Through bleary eyes, he was aware of the proximity of the other's face. He could feel and smell their breath: a hint of garlic and other herbs. They'd clearly just eaten; some kind of pasta, or maybe pizza.
"If I wanted someone to play the drunken fool I would have asked Yamamoto Takeshi." A tone like whiplash, sharp, harsh, unforgiving. For a moment he really thought he had been whipped, from the sting in his cheek. "Wake. Up."
He sighed heavily and - whoops! - stumbled forward in his attempt to stand on his own, causing their lips to meet for the briefest moment. Another stinging slap.
"This is not how you bring a drunk man out of his stupor," he groused, earning himself a punch to the stomach right where the previous kick had been. He doubled over and retched, thankfully not on the person holding him up.
"Deal with it," they replied shortly.
...
His is a history stained with blood, soaked in thick, coagulating crimson sinking deeper and deeper, its warmth caressing, its coldness binding. Ties of blood stretching far back, ties whose ends he has long lost sight of; they link him to the deaths of hundreds upon thousands and not only his hands but his entire being is drenched with bitter crimson.
He doesn't remember their faces but they haunt him every night. He will always wake sweating and short of breath, running from the faceless dead who cry their unearthly cries for the death of the one who took their lives away. Why should they trouble him so? He feels no guilt and no remorse; they cry empty pleas.
He kills to forget. The more faces he sees, the harder it should be to remember each one. Their numbers may swell and the nightmares continue but without individuality he can't allow himself to care. The little boy who cries for his mother when she left him with a promise to return and never did; the youth slain when a stray bullet found his heart; the man in his prime poisoned by a trusted friend - they are all dead by his hand; they were all robbed of their life by his actions.
He envies the one who can be troubled by death. He envies the one who is untroubled by death. There is no middle ground but there he stands on the smudged boundary guarding him from morality. Or keeping him out.
Perhaps that's why he spends so much time with him. Perhaps if he can understand his thinking, his mind-set, how he is so coolly unaffected by the carnage surrounding him, maybe he can find peace for himself and be freed from the ghosts. Maybe they might forgive him. Maybe he might be able to forgive himself.
...
The next day is spent passed out in the other's bed. He can feel every time their eyes are clapped on his pathetic self: disgust, repugnance, detestation, how weak-willed he must be. He dirtied his own bed almost as soon as he came upon it, bringing up all the food he never knew he had eaten just hours before. The smell had been revolting but he hadn't cared. The other man certainly had though and with a tsk of annoyance had whisked him to their bed instead.
The thoughts of the shallow-minded would revolve around how they should have drunk less but for him, it was the only time he could think on the past, agonise over the present and wonder about the future. Past the cold exterior of a killer lay something incredibly, unimaginably human. He could be nothing else given the body that he had.
The other person was deaf to his nonsensical rambles about life and death and everything in-between and patiently (in his own way) counselled him on these philosophical matters. The past could not be changed, live in the present, and worry not about the future for death comes to everyone with time. It wasn't caring on their part so much as indifference. When life was black and white and limited shades of grey, there was very little else required to understand it.
But it was not only such monotonous shades, he would argue. Stormy, spiteful scarlet of hate and all extreme emotion; mellow, lukewarm amber which invoked desire for harmony; bright, overbearing yellow which excited and dazzled; sharp, striking emerald that inspired envy for Nature's given gifts; calm and melancholy blue which wrapped all in loving embrace; royal violet: aloof and apart at the opposing end of the spectrum, proud in its isolation; and finally indigo, as indistinguishable from the last as mist amongst cloud.
They could scoff and shake their head all they liked. They would see: past the filter, black and white were only another variation that coloured the wider world.
...
By now he should know that trying to simplify life is only a means of complicating it further. Challenges to how he views the world seem so easy to box in, trample down and squash out of existence like measly insects. Humans try so hard to rationalise what they see, what they hear, that it is not difficult to fall into such patterns himself, try as he might to rise above them. For he is also human, and prone to their weaknesses of the body and mind.
Yet despite that, his soul is housed in unshatterable stone. Unable to break free of his past, he rearranges the world to his liking until it is not he who is the outsider, but everyone else. The other's metaphor does not resonate within his unforgiving heart, too far gone as he is for the beauty of life to mystify and inspire wonder in him. The rainbow mocks him from above, where Heaven resides: unattainable, unreachable and a cruel, cruel thread of hope. Rainbows are not arches which touch Earth - they are endless halos that circle it as long as moisture and light permit.
Slim fingers press his shoulders into the sheets. He knows what to expect for they have been through this more than once in the past. Nails dig into his skin and the delightful friction of another body has him arching to meet them. There is nothing on Earth that does not repeat. Copulation to carry on the human race is but one such cycle that the world depends on to continue spinning. Like the rise and fall of the moon and sun, all things come around given time.
His companion will keep drinking, he knows. As he tastes the flavour of alcohol and bile in their kiss, he knows also that it is entirely selfish and greedy of him to want that to continue happening. He despises liquor but he will allow its consumption if it means a particularly heated night. Like humans, there are times when he wants to forget it all too - his methods simply don't involve the imbibing of alcoholic substances.
...
How very little it would take to crush their throat, he thinks, as his teeth sink into pale flesh and they hiss and writhe beneath him. But what is death to someone who does not fear it? Nothing. Better to let them live and suffer the agony that plagues the living too. As much as he likes to deliver death, there is some novelty in denying those who desire it, are fearless of it, death. He has known for a while now that is what the other wants. A death that is absolute, that will offer no possibility of rebirth, of a return to life. But he will not be the one to deliver death unto he who rightly deserves to die for all the humiliation and pain and suffering he has caused. That right has not been given to him.
"Spread," he says harshly, a hand sliding down one slender thigh.
He won't remember this night the next morning though his partner will. It's what keeps them coming back and draws them together when they would otherwise have kept apart. With all the sins they commit every time a heart stops beating, what is one more upon the ledger of Saint Peter?
In some ways he hates them for this. But no less could be expected from someone who is a direct product of Hell. He could bring out everything that he would rather have kept hidden, every little emotion he tried to tamp down. They brought out the darkness in him with one smug little smirk. And though he had the other beneath him now, at his mercy, after the throes of passion were over and done with those eyes would turn to his again, oceanic blue and cold, steel grey meeting over lax, sweaty bodies, and they would smile a smile that tempted him to crush that unbendable pride and rip it to pieces in a fit of destructive anger.
For their fingers drew white fire and their lips traced cold ice. Their mouth suckled like a babe and their teeth bit as if already weaned. He couldn't understand why a man of such contradictions did not see the world as he did. Or was it because he was these contradictions that the distinction was made clearer?
Black and white. Dark and light. The polar opposites came together and fused into one within them. And with sudden clarity he understood: there was no intermediary, only the transition. The shift from one side to the other had no pause. It couldn't be allowed pause.
Because to pause is to doubt, and to doubt is to lack surety. And he knows that the other's world - the fake, imagined world they have built for themselves fashioned after the one in which they reside with laws that they believe they understand - allows no room for doubt to fall on his views of the people who inhabit this plane of existence. He sees only himself and what he allows himself to see.
...
The irony of it all was that he was neither one thing nor the other, yet what he thought and what he believed was split so cleanly in two and held apart.
"Join with me," he would whisper into their ear. The melding of body and soul could not be more complete than if they were two parts of one whole. To not only taste his skin but to feel the draw of his tongue along it was an addicting experience made all the more intoxicating by the allowance of such an act by his partner. In all fairness, they could hardly resist when he painted for them such a vivid world of fantasy. He coaxed them from the high pedestal of sanity to the tumbling depths of madness - an easy feat with the influence of alcohol in their blood. Worlds where the stars and the sky were the platform upon which they traversed and fire rained down from Hell above, and places where the trees were bent not by the wind's whim but by spikes of immense gravity. The boundary between the real and the not real collapsed the longer he toyed and the longer they stayed wandering the realms until the other became convinced they were their reality.
Next he tapped into what they wanted more than anything: the unlimited potential to become stronger, to fight opponents that could give him a match worth fighting. The cold reason with which they had once viewed the world was so easily changed to encompass this new reality. Now a veil had dropped over his sight: hazy red which blotted out everything besides the carnage and destruction he wished to see. Madness cavorted and laughed at him while beating its drum of insanity.
Ba-dump...ba-dump...ba-dump...
It sounded like his heart.
Synchronising his attacks to each strike. Speed increasing; pulse racing. Whirl and punch; twist and kick. Metal crunched bone and skin split over muscle. Ligaments tore and tendons snapped. Screams, shrieks and howls all...
It was the most beautiful orchestra he had ever heard.
On assignment in the jungle, a researcher was startled by the sighing rustle of foliage which ringed his tiny campsite. The flickering glow from his lamp threw all into inconsistent shadow and even his sharp eyes could not immediately pick out the two pinpricks of reflected light that belonged to a muscled beast about thigh-height.
A low growl alerted him and he swivelled, all muscles tense, towards the source. His eyes widened but he said not a word as the animal padded towards him, revealing itself in the inconsistent light to be a magnificent panther, sleek fur melding into night.
Human and beast stared eye to eye as the wind around them stilled to silence. Human and beast transfixed by one another's gaze in this serendipitous encounter. The human, who had trespassed on the land of the beast took an unconscious step back as if to flee. Likewise the beast, with grudging respect of the superiority of the human, made to retreat and the two halted, caught in the act of simultaneous movement.
It was the human who bowed first, acknowledging the power of the beast and allowing it to retreat to the safety of its jungle unharmed and with its pride intact. The last to disappear were its yellow eyes, ever watchful, until they too turned towards darkness and loped away.
The human could relax now, knowing that he would be left well enough alone as long as he did not remain in the panther's territory come morning. Such was the curious, spontaneous relationship that formed from the first meeting between man and animal.
The brush glides to a halt, lifting up to leave an elegant stroke behind, a movement executed without flaw. It is laid to one side while the ink dries on soft bristles. Black upon white.
Pages upon pages are filled with neat characters in neat columns spidering down like ancient text. The last word to be written gleams wetly and the page is carefully placed near the stack of those already dried and wrinkled. Some voice in him objects to their unevenness. Slim hands arrange the paper to their owner's liking - neatly, meticulously - until that voice is silenced.
Another set of hands captures his, holds them with rough digits interlacing. Dry and soft, theirs are only slightly larger than his own but no less gentle. With their warmth at his back, arms encircling him, he tilts his chin up and their lips meet.
'Come to bed', they murmur. Low syllables and husky utterances pull him to his knees then to his feet and the short distance where downy blankets and a soft quilt await, their descent to them marked with the union of their physical forms.
There are none of the soft curves and ample flesh of a woman's body; instead a man's - all bone and muscle, angles and harsh planes - move in unison with his. Thighs clench his waist as they couple, hands, lips, teeth leaving a plethora of marks in the height of their passion. And as their movement quickens in pace, white, white, white blinds him.
The rush of blood.
The giddiness of release.
Oblivion.
Their bodies relax, his partner spread atop him as the exhaustion of their coupling renders him immobile for a time. Damp palms brush dark hair from his face and their breath begins to feel warm again on his cooling skin. He waits for them to wake and soon enough their eyes flicker open. A flash of red; steely-blue.
"Good boy," he whispers.