He has been here before. Nothing but black broken by silver mist that clings to his skin. Holding his shoulders high and proud, he curls a corded arm through the fog and watches it whirl away with detached curiosity. His shoulder blades cut down his back like wings of glass, shattered to shards by thousands of scattered scars. Thin and silver on his dark skin, they scintillate in the night's non-light.
Ban~
Ko~
Tsu~
His name is an itch in the back of his throat, a siren sound from a song he can't remember. Narrowing his eyes, Bankotsu flexes his fists, feels the tension mainlined straight down to his toes. When he takes a step, spine straight and footing sure, the darkness falls away to a forest. It bleeds out from the wound of his footprint, wet tender new leaves dripping dew. Bamboo stalks crowd the black with veins of jade. The air thickens, breathes against his flesh like the sigh of a woman.
And a woman sighs.
The sound sends a twitch right through his cock. Familiar; the sort of noise you could curl around at night to keep warm. Bankotsu turns to look for her, his ears caught between the sound of her song and an empty memory of her name. It's even farther away than his own now, but he thinks he knew it once.
Her body is closer than her name, curled in the clearing center and naked as the sunlight in her hair. Where Bankotsu is hard lines and dark angles, she is a sensual whisper of soft curves and alabaster. Hair fine as moonlight sweeps over the swell of her breasts and offers an obliging glimpse of one bare shoulder as she turns.
She might have as many scars as him, but he has never seen such green eyes.
"Bankotsu…" She says his name like a prayer, and gods, does he want to fall on his knees and pray right back to her.
With a murmur that might be a name, the mercenary curls his toes in the grass. He grins, shifts his foot forward. "Shi—"
"—it!"
Bankotsu lands on the pads of his feet and fingers and spits a curse at the tree in which he fell asleep. Dozing in its shade, Jakotsu opens one eye and smiles faintly.
"You know," he says, "they say that waking up to the sensation of falling means a spirit had sex with you."
The younger man snorts and rubs out the tension in his neck. His groin still aches for the sight of her, his head spinning with the perfume of jasmine and rain and woodsmoke, but hard as he tries, Bankotsu cannot conjure her face again. With a sigh, he heaves himself to his feet and cracks his back.
"Yeah…I can believe it."
He's going to dream of smoke-scented angels until the day he dies again, he just knows it.
So I got a little nostalgic and a little self conscious, and the result was the deletion of an old account, the last two chapters of a no-longer-existent-seventy-plus-chapter atrocity from my past, and this little drabble. I'm not even going to pretend there's any plot in this. It's just my way of reconciling the past, and kudos to anyone who knows the name Bankotsu doesn't.