Disclaimer: These characters are not mine; I'm only borrowing them for my own pleasure.
Distorting Mirrors
Akihiko once visited a hall of mirrors at a fairground, because every kid should, once. True, he had been twenty-two at the time and had nagged Hiroki for days until he agreed to go, but still. Once, he visited a hall of mirrors, watching distorted images of himself.
This is frighteningly like it.
The tall man in front of him is wearing glasses and an obviously expensive but ridiculously ugly suit, white whereas Akihiko's is black, both of them with a cigarette glued to their lower lip. The man is leaning against his shiny red sportscar and Akihiko squeezes the key to his own in his palm, disturbed. The look that sweeps over Akihiko suggests that even their thoughts are mirroring each other.
Twisted.
"What do you do for a living?" the man who has introduced himself as Ogata asks a little later over a beer in a nearby bar.
"I'm a writer," Akihiko replies with faint disdain. And a well-known one at that, he thinks. Doesn't this bloke read papers? "You?"
Ogata gives him a look that sends a shiver of apprehension down Akihiko's back under the tailored shirt. Is he my shadow? My ghost twin from another world? Are our brains somehow connected?
"I'm a professional Go player," Ogata replies and washes his words down with a mouthful of beer.
"Go?" Akihiko is interested now against his will, against his better judgement. "An ancient game. Beautiful, poetic, and fierce."
An answering gleam of interest is visible for a second behind Ogata's glasses. "So you know it."
"I think I have seen your picture somewhere, not too long ago. Are you a title holder?"
"Jyudan, Gosei. I may have seen yours somewhere recently. An award, I think? Prestigious?"
"Naomori."
They are eying each other again, hostility and interest intermingled.
An hour or so later, their red cars are parked side by side outside Ogata's house and Akihiko's eyes are wandering over glass tanks with silent, bulge-eyed inmates.
We are tragic human beings, Akihiko thinks. Both brilliant, both unhappy; one of us trying to create a childhood that never existed and the other wanting company that never talks back.
"I want marimo tanks," he says meaninglessly as Ogata's front is warm against his own back, erection pressed into his buttock, a hand coming round him to unbutton his shirt.
When he turns around their eyes are level and their thoughts are still mirroring each other, making every kiss an aggressive fight and the entire act a battle, where Akihiko finds himself surrendering in the end.
Not used to being taken, he still gives himself up unresistingly to his twisted image, hoping to gain something in the process besides the pain and the pleasure, the exquisit, panting pleasure. An understanding, perhaps, of his nighttime and daylight selves. How they merge. Who he could have been and what he is.
When Ogata smiles and licks his thumb clean from Akihiko's semen, an image flashes through Akihiko's mind, a memory of something that has not yet happened, of something that is to come and that will heal him.
One childish thing he did do as a boy was smearing paint on one half of a sheet of paper and then folding it over to create a mirror image on the blank half. Getting out of Ogata's apartment and driving away is like peeling the folded paper open, separating the images, inspecting the result.
For years to come, Akihiko will wonder if this was all a bad dream, a drunken hallucination, one of his fantasies fed by exhaustion and an excess of nicotine and caffeine.
The image of Misaki will be superimposed on the distorted mirror image and eventually obliterate it, but that is still in the future, a blessing yet to come.