"I thought you liked caramel."
The statement was uttered with such soft, simple contempt, such cool malice, that one would feel immediately absurd for having shown any distaste for the flavour. Seimei was a dark, warmly dressed edifice across the café table, long fingered, laced about the outskirts of a plastic coffee cup. Underneath, the lips of his sole tapped casually against Soubi's ankle, demanding some immediate effect.
Without hesitation the fairest one brought his own cup to his mouth—squinted a bit at scalding liquid on a tender pink tongue. Seimei made some exasperated show of air through his nose.
"What did that prove?"
"I do like it," came the answer quite gently, though to Seimei's ears far more in tune to Soubi's subtle disposition, it was a fast appeal of submission and an irritating desire to profess one's opinions without having any but that of another's fancy.
"Oh." Then, "Well I don't."
This meant the end of conversation, the abrupt severing of any forthcoming connection between the two as they sat and watched the sidewalk through the window and drank from warm, artificial mugs. Soubi would linger with the same look every time: the grim, pale, and otherwise unreadable expression of a soul bent in half by its own unsightliness. If only he would erase that brainless train of thought, dismiss and discard the past, then Seimei would be able to move on as well. He hated Soubi for his ability to cling to bad moments and perpetuate them until they were unbearably thick.
"Knock it off."
Turning to him with genuine bewilderment, but already searching within himself for some fault, Soubi was as simple and predictable as a long-studied specimen. The man—boy, really, in so many ways—was as fragile and obvious as a white feather. Seimei allowed his eyes to drain themselves of light, and his lids to tighten about the blinding monotony that was Agatsuma Soubi.
It annoyed Seimei when Soubi came visibly to the right conclusion: that Seimei was as predictable as the other had proven himself, except that for it Soubi loved him. There was something vaguely charming about Soubi's admiration for all that was reliable, including the sarcasm and arrogance that so berated him. The slightest whisper of a smile pervaded all of Soubi's forbidding constructions of what was right and what was obedient, and that small and telling gesture made him suddenly as rebellious and insubordinate as a criminal. Seimei seethed. He squeezed the coffee between his palms until they ached and the drink rolled within its confines. Even when Soubi's grin fled from the light of his cheeks, his eyes darting warily to his master's lips, ears, iris, it made only a dent in Seimei's budding anger.
"What is it about you, today?" Seimei's voice was as divergent from his dark stare as it was from the milky, lash rimmed frames. Almost conversationally he approached Soubi, knowing feigned tranquility as his weapon, and that the query itself possessed a very strong, confrontational significance. There would be no hope for Soubi's reply, whether or not he chose to be honest. Upon the other's stuttering, Seimei took the opportunity to go easy on him. To let him know directly the fault. "You're acting as if I'm a stranger."
A stranger. How could he respond? With the affirmation of strangeness between them, that persistent realization that Soubi was a slave, a soul-bound creature made to use? Or could he disagree, even with all evidence against him, and then condemn himself to a confession of treating Seimei as a familiar, as someone with whom he could share himself with as a friend? And then if to avoid this answer, he would be further convicting himself to the reality that he was hiding his soul, his heart, his passions from the one person who could and must understand it all in great wholeness in order to be the Sacrifice.
Somehow, Soubi always managed to circumvent Seimei's traps when most of the day was yet to come. It was only at night that Soubi failed. And so, "Your eyes are tired. I should bring you home with me."
No. Inexcusable. Soubi's voice so very quiet and firm, rolling with the deep fluency of sincerity, the persuasiveness of truth and loyalty. The aching longing to please Seimei, to press him warm between the sheets of his unmade, remarkable bed while taking up the floor in relinquishment. Curled up like a puppy at his side. Breathing carefully like he was now. Visible beneath the open collar of his dress shirt. Seimei grunted and turned his cheek.
Soubi stood, understanding the reluctance as acquiescence. The bottom half of his trenchcoat ruffled, wavered, and raked the scent of the Fighter past Seimei's senses. He looked up at him from the slight curve of his torso, marveling at how even a domineering Soubi could behave so peacefully, so absolutely vulnerable with every important organ a knife's length from Seimei's mood. He cut him open with his eyes. The other man did not wince. When Seimei finally rose from the wooden chair, exited the café, he seemed to pull the scant shadows of the room behind him until they all coalesced into his floor-bound image. The building heaved a sigh of relief as they passed, wafting in through the open doorway in a crisp rush.
The air was thin and cold, and their breaths appeared before them, spectre like. Soubi exhaled pale butterflies, wispy as tissue paper, while Seimei fought to reacquire the snow dragons that escaped, hid, escaped again between his lips.
"You're shivering…"
Soubi had a way of stating the obvious, but over time Seimei had learned it to be a kind of warning, a cautionary statement before a physical repercussion. On cue, Soubi's long and willowy limb drifted around his back and smoothed away the moderate trembling of his shoulder. The warmth was fast and true. Soubi, for all the coldness of his appearance, was as deep and glowing as the persistent embers of cooling magma. Each of his fingers were as soporific as heating strips, curling over the muscles of his arm and wiping the chilly bitterness away, replacing it with warm milk and spongy mattress.
"Will you dress for Halloween, Seimei?"
The sidewalk was hard and stark, and seemed to reflect the slow energy of the air, support the snappish patter of children's feet and autumn leaves. Soubi never seemed to say the right thing, always twisting around a topic so that he might please himself. Under the guise of talking about the holiday, he sought to satisfy his own budding curiosity about Seimei with the pervasive etiquette of a five year old. Sometimes, Seimei thought there was no hope for the wholeness of his counterpart. Not when his pleasure was little more than a simple derivative. A hand-me-down pair of shoes that, being Seimei's, he could never hope to fill.
"Maybe you would play the part of an angel well."
A whip flashed and sprang from Seimei's mouth with his retort. "Right, and you can be a giant Hyacinth bush."
Soubi smiled a secret smile, sending a familiar fever up and into Seimei's cheeks. Anger, most likely. There was very little Soubi could obtain that Seimei had not already made his and discarded. All other things Soubi had no permission to seek out. There were loopholes, however. Loopholes like these, where Soubi did not move outside his unspoken realm of authorization and yet somehow managed to find humor in something that Seimei could not immediately comprehend. He would invent indifference, but there was always something throbbing furiously in the hollow of his chest. Soubi had not betrayed his permission, but perhaps by coining the proper term as consent, he could find fault with his actions. Seimei had not consented to his sarcastic words to be transformed into something they were not—funny. But Soubi explained himself suddenly, hardly afraid that his secrets were gone now. He had enjoyed them enough.
"The Hyacinth does not grow on a bush, but on a simple stem."
"That's it?"
"Sometimes, they are associated with rebirth."
Now, fully educated, Seimei allowed his Fighter the most intimate of stares between them while they walked. Soubi's eyes were as pale and sweet as candy colored sugar, and then changed: a reflective wading pool with an incorrigible maelstrom at its center. When Seimei chose to glare in response, those eyes transformed again. Now they were crystal quartz, hammered through the center with a pickaxe. Seimei was the axe. He was satisfied.
"I'll be taking my brother out, that night."
"Ritsuka?"
Seimei could hit him for uttering the name so obliviously, so tenderly, as if he had some familiar right. And yet there was no other way one would dare articulate the boy's name in his presence, lest they risk the use of their senses at Seimei's hand. There was a squall bound within the depths of Seimei's temper, triggered by the condition of his young sibling. There were far worse individuals who could gurgle Ritsuka's name without the compassion and sensitivity that Soubi would always be sure to use.
"Why are you trying me today Soubi? It's irritating."
He knew that Soubi would fold up like a fan, disguising the bit of personality that seeped through his face behind a porcelain veneer. There was something haughty and unacceptable about Soubi this afternoon, the scent of it different somehow, teasing his nostrils like October spice and leaves.
By now, Soubi's warmth had become centralized, caramelizing hs arm and a strip across his back, but leaving all peripherals to absorb the cold like a parched sponge. The well insulated safety of Soubi's house was his only solace.
And so with wide eyes he looked upon the sudden landscape—a grassy knoll far beyond the street they were scheduled to turn down. Here were littered the numerous bodies of autumn melons, orange, yellow, and some pale and ghostly green.
There were no words that could recite the surprise and turmoil of Seimei's patience. With a quickness of movement that seemed unlikely in the state of his power reserve, Seimei bent away from Soubi enough to grab the arm that held him and squeeze, wring with the physical vivacity of a small child and yet the force of a metal beast. Soubi grimaced, slightly, assuredly at his own mistake rather than the hurt.
Soubi became very still for some time, intrepid enough to watch Seimei with the serenity of some solitary water lily.
"Seimei," Soubi began, and though the nature of this verbal eruption was nothing but apologetic, it was clear that what words followed would only add to the insubordination, would force Seimei to do what he hadn't planned. Soubi would bleed.
"Why are we here?" This is what I get for… for what? For moving within a daze, forgetting where the world ends and man begins. For nurturing a dependence on Soubi's sense of direction and judgment. For allowing the cold and the safety of expectation to dull his senses, Seimei had wound up at the whims of another, however innocent. It was enough to cause a trembling in him. The cold was his ally now, masking the panic, and just as he worried that Soubi would see through it all the other man started detangling himself from the vice-like punishment and heading out into the field.
From a distance like this, Soubi was a swan. Long and graceful, with blonde lashes that faded into the cream of his face. His jacket seemed a long cape of white chocolate, and then chalk, as he knelt beside various pumpkins and left his mark with a touch from his clever fingers. Seimei stood rooted to the spot, a dark and poison seed among so many healthy fruiting bodies. He masked his disgust behind his curls, but the severe slash of a mouth gave him away.
Soubi was kneeling in the grass, pressing his hands around a very round, ready-to-burst pumpkin with the warm color of a sweet potato. He was smiling. It must have been one of those things that artists claimed to understand better than others, something about shape or mass or light, things he used to the lengths of necessity and then tossed aside as incidental. Yet there was always something incontrovertibly appealing about art when Soubi caused him to notice it. A unintentional translator, perhaps, between the natural beauty of the pumpkin's flesh and Seimei's hardened eyes. None of the other visitors to the patch gave him the sense of aesthetics that Soubi did now. Certainly the children brushed the gourds' faces, removing an invisible buildup of neglect, and took them into their embrace. But Seimei knew that their affection was imagined through Soubi's presence. The Fighter simply gave some meaning to the meaningless by mingling with it.
There was nothing Seimei desired to brush or embrace here. The very earth was a soiled patchwork quilt, and what came from it was assuredly spoiled with it all. The added mess of kids' fingerprints and insect footprints left Seimei's skin crawling. There was nothing tempting about a defaced pumpkin caked in dirt clay. He went to Soubi to tell him just that.
When he emerged from his solitude to join Soubi, he found him already standing and dumping the smallest, most colorful collection of gourds into his chest. On impulse Seimei threw his hands up and clutched, shouting his dog's name in surprise and disdain. Dry and brittle dirt broke between his fingers and all over the pressed clean black of his sweater. The warty surfaces of the pumpkins seemed to pop and ooze before his eyes.
Soubi plucked the most offensively shaped, yellowed monster from the bunch. With his other hand he steadied the quivering of Seimei's elbow. Embarrassed and paralyzed by resentment, Seimei could compile little more than a fierceness of attention that would call the blood up into Soubi's cheeks. When the fighter knelt again, Seimei seemed to regain enough self-possession to drop the load on his head, and though the avalanche knocked the yellow pumpkin from Soubi's grasp he did not startle nor flinch. Seimei was moved.
He stooped down in the dirty razorblade grass beside Soubi the way he would a child. No, Seimei would never lower himself to a knee and show interest in any young and positively monstrous creature like a child. But for Ritsuka, Seimei would bend and ground himself for a smile, his little love's chill and bitter fingertips and unrestrained ecstasy at the sturdiness of a pumpkin stem.
Soubi's hands were not tiny, were not the quick and clumsy digits of his brother, but there was some innocent speculation about their slender grasp that made him pause before pushing, think before squeezing. Though they absorbed the cold and became like buttermilk popsicles, Soubi's fingers elicited somehow the remembrance of icy pokes from the snow decorated indexes of his true heart's desire. Seimei could not recognize the feeling for what it was, a feeling of contentment and friendship and emotional connection between him and another. He would always project, blame others for his progress as well as his shortcomings. There must have been some small but poignant link between Soubi and Ritsuka—for Seimei would never love anything that was from the start an element entirely of Soubi's possession. Were there even such things?
"You like that one?"
Soubi was referring to a small, leaf-green pumpkin Seimei had somehow taken up between his hands. With a startled and somewhat reluctant, bewildered tone, he answered: "Yes, I do."
Soubi smiled.