Rapture
Miya's Note: This one was for Lumcheng and Silvia (xizarx), who held a kink-related fanfic contest on livejournal. It's a lot different to most of what I write, though there's definitely my style in here. It's really dark, and really controversial, and does have some adult content. It's not for the faint of heart and stomach, that's for sure. I scored third, and I'm happy with that. :D
I had a lot of fun with this, as it was largely experimental. I hope you guys enjoy reading as much as I did writing it. Much love, guys. *digital hugs*
Do you know what the Rapture feels like? I do.
I've experienced it, you know.
The first thing I thought when I woke up, the last day I did, and I looked into his eyes, was a memory of seeing him look down upon me the first time I ever felt it.
We were only children, then, too young, still to have any real understanding of consequence or real meaning to our actions. All I knew, that first time, was that it felt good…it felt really fucking good, after the pain subsided.
Matt had always been my best friend, or at the least it seemed like it had been forever, by that time. I trusted him with anything. Even looking past him at my rosary tacked up to the wall, with Jesus lashed and nailed to the cross like I was being held, spread-armed to the bed…even when he thrust into me that first time without proper preparation and I thought that he was ripping me apart, I trusted him.
Matt was glowing, that day. Compared to him, the Lord seemed tarnished, dull. I looked at Jesus, and he sickened me, just like I knew I sickened him.
I, the heathen…
It was a little funny, actually. They had almost the same expression, you know. Do you know what the Rapture looks like? I do. It looks like pain, and ecstasy, and beauty, and despair all at once. I was judged there, on the bed beneath them both. I was taken from the world to Heaven's gate and I was reborn, and then it was over, and I came crashing back to Earth, dead in his arms as he lay panting on top of me, spent.
I told Jesus to go fuck himself.
Matt was my best friend, and at the age of thirteen, he was already my lover, too.
Matt was my world.
Above me now, as I regain consciousness from the rope around my neck that got too tight, he still is. I'm bleeding a little, I can feel, from the knife where he cut the rope from me because he couldn't untie it in time. He's apologizing to me, crying because he thinks I'm not going to trust him anymore. I run my hand along the cut on my throat, and I hold the blood on my fingertips to his mouth with a smile. He understands, and I don't have to say a word.
His eyes close, and he licks my fingertips clean, exactly the way he usually laps the precum from my cock.
When I stare at him--the unspoken plea in my eyes--he knows, and he starts drawing the knife along my skin in surprisingly delicate patterns--In crosses and in words; in messages of love, and the passages I recite through strained breath and the tears in my eyes that mirror the ones running down his face. Matt has always been a lover of games, and even now, he plays me with even more precise care than he does any digital toy.
When he's satisfied with the patterns on my chest and across my throat, I feel his hands graze down the sensitized flesh, stinging in the repentance they give me. He knows exactly what to do to make me shiver, the bloody patterns smearing together into even more, larger crosses.
Moaning his name is my only prayer, now.
I'm going mad, he knows. I have been, for a while. Ever since Kira barged into our lives as unexpectedly as a shot through the air, I've been losing myself to it. I lost L, I lost the only home I'd ever known…for a while, even, I'd lost Matt. When I say his name into the air the last time before the final thrust and the white bliss that comes after--"Matt" turned to "Mail Jeevas" in a whisper and a sigh--I see the fear in his eyes and I know he's losing himself, too.
We're lost together here, without identity, without purpose. Supposed to be L, but made into nothing when we couldn't be the First. All that's left is fighting.
We both know that, and in a flash of quick movement and muffled sounds, the bliss of the afterglow shatters into the red fear connected with feral cries and thrashing limbs. We tear into each other like beasts, for no reason other than a sudden whim and a need to damage another living thing--we can't rip into Kira, so we take each other, instead--and it's never possible to tell who's winning, and we know that there would be no victory, save in the loser's death.
But to us, death would mean killing…would mean losing each other, and when the realization dawns again that it's just me, baby, and animals or monsters become apologetic lovers again, the fear grips us like ice, turning even more threatening than before.
Do you know what the rapture tastes like? I do. It tastes of his kiss, tainted with my blood, or his blood, or both. It's the sweet communion of our flesh.
My mouth seems almost permanently attached to his, lips crashing together, tongues still battling even after the rest of the scuffle's died away. I relish in the taste of Matt, Matt, Matt, and the way his licks and sucks and bites mirror my own give me a trace of fleeting hope before I'm falling again, and that persistent nudging in my mind that says "It'll all be over soon, Mihael. You've never won the fight before, so don't expect to win this one, either. Don't expect to live," quiets for just long enough for me to think I may forget it.
But when he pulls away, I'm breathing air again, not him.
The persistent pounding in my chest reminds, with another cruel pang of fear, that I'm alive, and thus could die. His hot breath against my lips tells the same about him, and I think of losing him, and sink (although, for a glorious split-second, the carbon dioxide from his lungs takes mine over, makes me dizzy, and I soar, forgetting for just one more moment).
Sometimes I wish I had the freedom that Matt did. Unlike me, relying on lucky instances to stave off the madness creeping in, the more my mind overgrows its tangled mock-Eden--vines, snake-like, coiling through the garden's gates--Matt has found the strength or weakness or whatever you'd call it to leave himself in the pills. He takes one, and I don't even know what it is or dare to ask, and I watch his eyes go calm and his body relax. He's not sleeping, but he's dreaming awake, and I envy him for it.
I could never bring myself to do it. I could never give up the control.
I've gotten to the point where that feels more another loss than a victory.
I'm not sure how to describe how I feel, anymore. Am I numb? Am I overwhelmed? It seems more like I'm stuck, paradoxically, in a state of both at once. The fear's so ingrained into my system that I've gained an almost-perfect immunity to it, although the thought of being without it seems like it would make me feel nothing at all but empty.
I watch the clock out of having nothing better to do. The plans are already set. There's nothing left to do but wait, and the ticks of the time echo through me, resonant drums in my skull.
I'm getting desperate again, and I clutch at him, pleading with my body, not my words. He's lying on the bed beside me, calm and floating in space, and he just nods. He gets up, drifting along the floor even as I lie here watching, jerky and twitching in my fix of fear, and he picks up a bottle. He brings it over, undoes the cap, waves it under my nose, and then I'm gone.
I've snapped is the first thing that comes to mind when the blackness registers. I can't see. I've finally done it. I've finally gone mad.
I don't know where I am. All I can feel is the pressure on my arms, digging into my wrists. Gravity's pulling my body downward, and it's set to rip my arms from the sockets. I can hear someone pacing around wherever I am, and then I feel the touch on my naked thigh.
I'm too disoriented to rationalize that it's probably him. I'm too far gone inside my own head to recognize his touch. What I see in ghostly lights in the shade over my eyes are the sneering faces of random Mafia men, and then his lips are around my cock, and the faces' mouths are open, sucking out my soul back to the darkest confines of my past.
Before my brain catches up to the fact that Matt's chloroformed me and tied me up, my body is thrashing against the ties, and I scream. It's the Mafia sucking me, it's the Japanese Police. It's Kira. Somewhere in the midst of the ghosts, L is pulling me so close, so very close to release, but never, ever letting me have it. Never letting me finish. Never letting me win.
Do you know what the Rapture sounds like? I do. When it all comes crashing back to me is when I hear his voice, assuring me that it's alright. When his voice chases the phantoms away is when I finally come. I feel him lick me clean, and then his voice is humming against the most sensitive of flesh.
"You're a martyr now, Mello. You've been crucified."
When I tighten my arms and it lifts my entire body upwards for a split-second, before my shoulders give out and I slump back down, I'm making the cross in the air, and I relish in it. I relish, but it's the realization that it brings, more starkly known than ever before, that I can't shake this time.
Yes, I'm going to die. He's tried to save me, but I'm going to die, and him with me; my only hope for salvation, gone.
Smell is the last of the senses, and the Rapture has that, too. The alarm goes off on our bedside table, and he cuts me down from my elevated place suspended off the rafters. I come crashing down from the closest I've ever come to God, and the smell sinks in, sickening and petulant: The bitter bite of dread.
The last time I kissed him, I was still blindfolded, and I tasted him, felt him, breathed him in again and heard the sweet siren's call of his moans. For the first time that I could really remember, I truly felt. When he took the shade from my eyes, I saw his face more clearly than I ever remembered it. Beautiful. Mine.
And then we left, and set the plan into motion.
It only seemed like seconds.
When I saw him on the screen, bleeding from wounds too bloody and random for stigmata and too beautiful for me to believe at first it could be death, that was when my life ended, not when my heart stopped for real only moments ago, and I lay here, panting on this steering wheel, clinging against my will to stubborn life. When he died, the Rapture ended.
But I had been reborn a thousand times before, and I remembered the experience like it were happening then, and for a moment, I believed it, and it was true.
I can feel the Rapture, Matt.
Can you?