chapter eleven
They often fuck with their phones in another room or simply in do-not-disturb mode. The boss' dad senses have a way of knowing exactly when something completely inappropriate is happening. His death threats are growing more intense and graphic, and his memory of Sougo's name is getting more and more inaccurate.
Sometimes Sougo is too—busy—to reply to all of his texts immediately, and the boss' (not baseless) paranoia rises to (not so) ridiculous heights. To add fuel to the fire, this coincides with China being unable to answer the boss' calls.
The problem lies in how easily they turn each other on. How easily they find it to maintain a state of turned-on-ness.
Things that turn them on:
Pointless fights. The sound of the shower running. Loneliness. The emptiness of the dining table, it was made for eating so they eat. Silence. The way the couch sinks under their weight of them. Porn. The murmur of the television. Sadness. Knowing she is here, he is here, and the condoms are here.
Sougo does her like he understands nothing and everything about her. She is all the strangers he has slept with and none of them. When her face is buried in his pillows, ass in the air and hands bound, she is all body and hair and begging harder, which she will be embarrassed about afterward but will probably do again next time.
This is how they fuck:
With hunger, first and foremost of all, and his China girl has a grand appetite. She wants him pressing her against the bed the floor the couch the table the kitchen counter the bathroom wall. She wants herself paper-thin and moon-hollow and his cock will stretch her and fill her while she grabs him and he grabs back. When she is sated, she is real once again. And he, always the one to indulge himself, takes her as he wants as she wants, no matter where they are.
With violence, of course. It is his way, after all. Gentleness is for quiet moments. But this—her writhing and wriggling under his tongue, her body an arch, her hair forming rivers on the sheets—well, he has to seize all that red in his fist, slam his hips against hers hard fast just like she prefers it, bite where she is softest, leave traces of him on her, rake his nails down where she bleeds easiest, lap it all up, eat all of her up because he, too, wants her inside him in some way.
All the landmarks of his apartment, witnesses to every lecherous thing the boss has accused them of doing.
This is how they change the terrain of familiar rooms.
One day Sougo walks past the street-level windows and realizes he hasn't really looked through them for days now. It's like all that fucking has changed the topography of the apartment so drastically he has forgotten what it's like to be alone.
The thought makes him stop and stare at the windows.
He remembers what started the habit. After the terrorist attack that halved three buildings, nearly levelled off a university garden, killed three of the Tokushu Butai's best snipers, and resulted in several injuries and one civilian casualty, Sougo's mind began to replay every critical moment of the operation over and over, moments that could have gone some other way. The images were particularly strong when he closed his eyes or stared blankly into space. Looking out the street-level windows kept his mind disengaged, but still able to take in the details of what he was watching.
Now he blinks at those windows and wonders when he gave up on pretending that nothing beyond the people's shoes and the people's trash rolling on the sidewalk was real. He tries to pinpoint the moment when he stopped convincing himself that his nightmares, his guilt, his self-loathing, his terror meant something else, that the death of Okita Mitsuba was not real.
When he exhales it fills the entire apartment. It doesn't sound like the exhale of a normal human being. More like the first note an engine sings as it starts.
Sougo turns his back on the windows and plods toward China's bedroom. He stops at her doorway and sees her sprawled on the bed, playing a game on her phone while nibbling on a strip of sukonbu. Several boxes of the snack lie beside her.
He watches her for a moment. "China girl."
She frowns and lowers her phone, giving him an intent look. "What happened to you, stupid sadist?"
How easily she reads him. "I'm going out for a bit."
She swallows her sukonbu, sits up and says, "This early?"
He shrugs. "Why not?"
She flops back down on the bed. "Hmph."
He lingers. Then he enters the room, approaches the bed, yanks her toward him by the ankle (she yelps and drops her phone on her face), flicks her phone away, and kisses her.
When he pulls back, he notes how flushed her cheeks are and pinches them. "I'll just be at the steps."
"Like I care, moron! Just go away! You are disturbing me, yes?"
He kisses her again before he leaves.
The air is cool and the front steps even colder under his ass. At this hour, people are going to work, going to school, going home in the same clothes they wore yesterday. From where he sits he sees countless legs moving, hands and purses and briefcases swinging, obscuring the rest of the city.
Perhaps a month or two ago all these people still read or watched the news about the incident. They gossiped and murmured about how horrible it all must have been. But in the end it would always be just another tragic story to them.
Sougo doesn't have a problem with this. He knows he is separate from the city he has sworn to protect. He is at the age where he should've been one of these people, going to university, but he is too good at killing to be comfortable in an environment other than the one he has known his entire life. And he wanted this. He wanted to be useful. He still does, no matter what may have happened. This work is his gravity. This work gives him purpose. His personal hell being just another report is part of the price.
A pair of legs stop in front of him. Crisp black suit, black shoes with nary a single speck of dust. The smell of smoke and mayonnaise.
Sougo looks up at him and squints. "So this explains the evil aura I sensed a while ago."
"What are you doing out here?" Hijikata-san asks.
Sougo leans back on his palms. "Haa? This is our building. What are you doing here?"
Hijikata-san shoves his hands into his pockets. "You know why I'm here, Sougo."
He does. Hijikata-san is a creature of habit. He believes in the power of repetition. Routine. Practice. If you do something often enough, you will eventually be perfect at it. Small, typical errors born from people's inherently flawed judgment are forgivable to him only when others commit them, but completely intolerable if he himself makes them. Which is why Hijikata-san does things over and over, determined to get them right.
Except there are no do-overs in things already done. There is nothing to practice. Nothing to repeat.
Sougo watches him. "How long did it take you to be able to talk about it, Hijikata-san?"
Nothing in his eyes. Nothing on his face. "I wrote the report on it, didn't I?"
Sougo wonders how you write in an official report that your fiancée died in an operation you were in charge of.
"Right." Sougo nods to no one. "Right." Hijikata-san just stands there. "Get out of the way, Hijibaka, you're blocking the view."
Hijikata-san glances over his shoulder. "What view?"
Sougo nudges him aside with his foot. He keeps his voice as light as he can. "That day. When we went outside. There was a sea of people like this one." Just beyond the barricades. Hands cameras mouths agape yelling sir could you tell us what's happening here sir is it true there's a civilian in there police officers trying to keep the peace it's not safe ma'am sir stay away. "Only they weren't moving."
"I know," Hijikata-san says, and Sougo knows he knows. "That was the first panic attack."
It wasn't the crowd that did it. It was just that among all those people, none of them was his sister. He looked and looked and she was nowhere because she will never be anywhere again. And for Okita Sougo, life without Mitsuba in it was evil and terrifying and no weapon would save him from it.
Sometimes he still feels like her dying is the end of the fucking world. That surely the universe has to restart, has to do everything all over again until Mitsuba is alive again and everything is as it should be.
Hijikata-san inches forward. "When was your most recent panic attack?"
Sougo feels the words coming from his stomach, feels them rake burning lines up his chest, his throat, his mouth. The city sounds muffled from where he's sitting, and he finds himself gripping his hair so hard he feels like his scalp will tear.
"35 days ago."
"Why did you have a panic attack?"
His heart seizes itself. Folds itself smaller in his chest, it's so small it hurts. "Because I tried to shoot a sniper rifle." His lungs shrink and he can't take any air in, it won't fit, so there is nothing to exhale either. He stares at his feet, his slippers. The concrete underneath. "And it reminded me that I shot my sister and killed her."
"Alright," Hijikata-san says, his voice impossibly soft. "Alright, then."
Sougo keeps his head down, trying to breathe quietly, but he keeps wheezing. There's a big hand on his head and a practiced litany of easy now, breathe, breathe, sougo, i'm sorry, it had to be said, breathe i'm proud of you breathe, breathe in his ear.
He can still hear everything moving around them, the world not pausing for anyone or anything, not for him or Hijikata-san, not for his sister, not even for dramatic exposition. Maybe some of the people passing by will glance, but this is rush hour. In the end they are all bound by their own reasons, their own gravities pulling them to their destinations.
"Let's go inside, alright?" Hijikata-san says, helping him up. "Let's get you back to your wife."
Sougo regains enough breath to sound indignant even while whispering: "Who are you calling my wife, dammit?"
"Life is too short to waste it on being a tsundere, Sougo." The door opening, everything resuming. Their footsteps on the carpet. "Can you imagine an alternate universe where I reject your sister, pretend I don't give a shit about her, and she dies without me ever telling her I love her?"
"Even you couldn't be that dumb, Hijikata-san."
"Exactly."
The lights on the ceiling of the foyer are turned off. The early morning sun bleeds through the windows and between the blue curtains. The corridor past the foyer has walls painted white with teal borders, interrupted by closed door after closed door after closed door. There could be no one behind those doors. There could be anyone.
Somewhere along the way, Sougo straightens and manages to walk on his own.
#
A/N: For the nth time I feel the need to whine that feelings. are. so. hard. And I've always been a fan of understating dramatic scenes, so that it doesn't feel like anything dramatic is actually happening, but at the same time I also need to get the rawness of the emotions across, you know? Not sure if I succeeded lol it's such a pain. Next chapter will have more details regarding the incident ~