So. I lied.
The Jiroh/Ryoma is coming though. I have it half written already.
Warnings: Torture. Sex but the rape kind.
Note: I doubt that Fuji would have exactly been executed because he didn't exactly murder. But Fuji would have killed himself, anyway. He loathed himself.
I own the poem below.
"Close my eyes/ I still see you behind my lids/ tears run down/ you drip out/ tasting like perfume/ you make me sick cause you want me to hurt/ if I die I'll be buried in dirt/ but if I live I'll be buried in you."
-Crawling Under (Darkness)
I Love You could be spelled a hundred different ways. I Love You could be goodbye. I Love You could be a slash on the wrist, an internal bruise. It could be dying inside someone's soul so life could be breathed into it. It could be a contradiction. Nothing. Everything.
Ryoma didn't know how long it had been. Hours of litany's. Days of cold walls and warm floors. Months of breaking and taking. Shaking off years- years of beginnings.
"One day, I'm going to set you free."
It was what his captor liked to say when his body was twisted torture under the covers. There was sweat that tasted like blood and blood that felt like tears between his fingers. Sex was just possession. A frame admired by company. It was not I Love You, but I Own You. He screamed into kisses whenever he felt particularly monstrous.
And Fuji would smile. That gracious, forgiving, smile. He was an angel, and the rest of the world devils that needed purging.
"What do you think about the world, Ryo?"
He shivered. His throat was a desert that rarely saw rain. But he shed some of his skin for this fallen angel. "The world? The world is rotten."
Fuji laughed. So proud. He was so proud of the answer that was the engraved script of his soul. Everything was tainted by self-obsessed minds and uncontrolled bodies. Ryoma knew the lecture by heart. Found it ironic that all of the tributes could be tied back to his captor. "You're so lovely. I'll miss you."
Suddenly, his captor was still. He stroked the wall and left the room. But he could still hear it. Tiny and strong.
"I miss all of you."
The nights that he hated the most were the one's that were kind. His hair was worshipped with fingers that he could never forget pushing painfully inside him. His captor didn't talk. But the kisses laid on his neck were a crossword. Ryoma was always too exhausted to figure it out.
"Look at me."
It was a question, not a command. He could choose not to look. But he did. The voice was a feather on his pillow, poking into his skin. He had to see.
He hated the blue of Fuji's eyes. They were never the same. If you saw them at night they were shadows. If you saw them in the day, they were blinding. Though, right then, they were the fragmented middle, the grey area. The Wednesday of a week; close to something good but just as near to bad.
When did people who were destined for high school goings and laughing children become men of gravel and sand? When did your future die?
There was low sound and he realized he was crying. He was past being ashamed of anything, but he had been so proud before. Ryoma was still a man. A puzzle piece of one, but one, nonetheless.
And, Fuji said, "I think it's time for you to go, bird. I was never meant to keep you."
"Why?" –did you decide to ruin me? To put me into a coffin before my heart stopped beating?
"Because," His captor kissed him and gave him the rest of the words for safe-keeping. Drowning. Was he always going to be drowning? "You didn't know. Now you do."
In the morning he was thrown out like the trash. Ryoma stood on the porch unsteadily. He was mal-nourished, sleep-deprived and some of his wounds had never fully healed. He was free. For some reason, he just stared. The house was old and barely still upright. There was a large field with dozens of trees. There were flowers.
He saw.
And then he ran.
"In today's news, 19 year-old Echizen Ryoma was found on the side of the road in the outer ring of Tokyo. He was held and tortured for almost 9 months by the infamous mad man Fuji Syusuke. The police were sent to the location directed, but found only an abandoned house. There is no word on how Echizen is doing now."
His friends cried over him. They said, "That's awful." And the way they stared at him was pitying but so innocent. He knew in their mind they were thinking, Thank God it wasn't me. Ryoma wanted to laugh. Because it hadn't been.
It'd been him.
There were questions. Basic things from the police. Who? What? Where? When? His family didn't press him. They had him back and they were happy with that. It came to their attention that he hated any form of contact and blue, any sign of it, sent him into a state of oblivion for hours.
When one of his friends, Eiji, came to visit he chattered on without thought about University and his boyfriend. Ryoma didn't know why he was so angry at everything. It shredded his intestines into paper. "Eiji-senpai, stop."
His friend paused; looking confused, and then flushed. "Sorry, Ochibi, I'm just rambling."
"No, you're not. You're trying to fill space." That nickname didn't send him into the same state of indignation as it always had. He felt strangely empty about all of it.
Eiji blinked slowly like a child. There was shame and then there was something he didn't understand- warmth. "You've always been so blunt."
He didn't have anything to say to that so he sagged in his seat.
"Ryoma?"
"What?"
"What was he like?"
There was no hesitation in his friend's voice. Just curiosity. Sincerity. He wanted to know and he wanted to be told. The problem was, Ryoma didn't know if he wanted to do the telling. In the end he just stated, "A person."
"Then, maybe in another world, he's your friend." Eiji whispered and he wanted to ask how he ever could have known that was what he sowed in the stitches of his dreams? He pressed his lips into something that was not a smile or a frown and his friend grinned and continued on.
He dug around.
It hurt him to find out that Fuji used to have a family. A younger brother, an older sister. A mother, a father. They were all murdered by robbers that cleaned the entire house out and left the bodies for the middle son to find. Fuji had been nine. The age of sports and pranks. The age of transitioning. Too young, the man had been too young.
It was true. The world was rotten. They'd left it to spoil.
Ryoma cried in the sprinkle of rain as his family watched the execution of his captor, Fuji Syusuke, the man responsible for more then a hundred kidnappings and endless torture of young men all over the world.
He cried and he understood. I Love You was why he was alive.
My friends can attest to the fact that I can rant for days about how people like Fuji are made into monsters then they become them. Because, if the whole world already knows that your unworthy, then why wouldn't you become that?
So yeah. Hello.
