Break
Love doesn't know me, Asuka thinks. He knows this because he lets these strong and forceful hands roam over his body, and he enjoys it when they clasp tightly around his throat, threatening this time could be the last time but it never is. They break him, bend him, hurt him, pleasure him. He opens himself up as wide as he will go and then he closes around the thing that he loves, that he pretends to love until the eyes are gone, and he can be alone again. He relishes in that he is alone.
Love can't help me, Asuka cries as he nurses the red marks on his face and the splits in his lip. The lover's bites that purple his neck and thighs and the deep craters that make up every tiny bone in his neck and shoulders, shaking but relieved because he knows that sometimes they break and sometimes they've been broken, and sometimes he'll break with them, but like the wounds that he has someday he'll mend himself. When that day comes he'll be only stitches, only bandages, only pleasure, only pain. Always. Always pain. And that, at least, will never leave him.
Love can't save me, Asuka prays as he writhes and he flails underneath the body that crushes his, and from the inside he is pounded by some foreign length and being torn apart. He knows now that no matter how many times he buries himself inside another person, their skin cannot fill up the places where he is empty without his soul. He knows he will not find his absolution. It is enough that he can close his eyes and know he is alone, alone inside his rent and broken body although a stranger still invades it, and tries to take it from him.
When it is all over, he drags himself up the flights of stairs to Ryuhou's one-bedroom apartment and collapses by the door. Through the static and dangerous sliding of his vision, he can see the man who is now standing at the door, looking as frightened as maybe he would have felt, back when he was alive. When his not-so-empty boy soul was still there, fluttering inside his chest. When he meets that man's red eyes, he smiles a weak and placid smile, queasy as it breaks over his lips and he promises maybe to him and maybe to himself and to no one,
"I don't believe in love."
And maybe if he still were whole, he'd know that he was lying.