Criminal Damage
Restless, he would shift between dreams with indecision; crafting visions with slumbering sighs. Nightmares, he found, were soon forgotten but for the pinprick of anxiety that lingered long afterwards, and black eyebrows would frown away bad clouds. His mind was not so disposed to the order he boxed his life within, and at night, it was at its most chaotic; an impish child seeking freedom and anarchy. The back of one arm would cover his face, he'd stir, twist; moving and searching and seeking. A soft exhalation would fall as the image rolled into place, spilling into familiar corners of his brain like a long lost enemy. Familiar feeling would turn the lock, slipping through the dark corridors of emotion, of lust, of uninhibited thinking. Nightmares, he found, were all too easily disposed for different visions entirely - clouds carved out of red smoke and flickering fires, centres repression-hot. Mizuki Hajime, to be fair, had more than his share of things to repress.
Always he would wake up with red on his cheeks and blood on the sheets; white blood, signs of wet guilt, a crime committed in the dead of the night when he wasn't there to stop himself. Would he stop himself? Were his dreams daydreams rather than nightly torments, of that question he couldn't be sure. Sometimes, his mind would caress the lingering memory all day, a fond stroke and a shiver through his bones at the thought of the visions the night had left him. Wasn't that a sign of true guilt? Did he even care, anyway? Unlikely - his mind coarse with hot velvet. Not clinical, not cold, not predictable. Heat and stirring, wings shuddering, clouds rolling. Dreams and freedom and flying, flying in bodies that clung to each other more than they did the sky. And he wanted to fly. Every time he stepped onto the court and saw Yuuta, - the Yuuta who kept away from him rather than kissing him, who flipped him off behind his back rather than fucking him -, he wished he had the wings and he wished he had the words. Most of all, he wished he had the morals.
Yuuta didn't set too much stock by morals, it was true. What he did demand was respect, and Mizuki had given him buckets of falsehood where that was concerned. He had always respected him as a tennis player, as a pawn to play for St. Rudolph's future. He'd admired the future that lay in a heart so angry and bitter, so determined to make himself known as something other than a younger brother. Yuuta had potential. Much of it was based on hellfire, but that didn't matter to Mizuki. Ambition was ambition, and Yuuta was clay that could be moulded. Delicate hands set to work and ignored aesthetics, disregarded biological form, risked a shoulder for a trophy and a career for a brief moment of glory.
Would Yuuta have agreed to it, he often wondered? Had they talked about Mizuki's plans, would he have gone along with it? He'd have spat in his face first, probably, but after a night's thought, would sheepish eyes have sought him out and spoken in soft chocolate tones. I'll do what you say. You want what's best for me, right? It'll be for me, won't it? You'll make me into something, won't you? Don't condemn me to his name anymore, Mizuki-san. Make me into something else. I don't care what, just...not me. Not him.
Tezuka had done so, had he not? Sat down at the table and thrown in his shoulder with his chips; played the costliest game of his life for the highest stakes. Lost, in the end. A career with its dying lights, pain taken to foreign territory, leaving behind only superiority and guilt. It wasn't so truly crazy, he figured. To throw caution against the wind and injury against luck. Push a little harder now, you can do it.
Mizuki would have made Yuuta into anything he wanted. He just hadn't known it at the time. He'd respected him as a player only and not looked beyond his sums, his plans, his goals. Feelings hadn't even come into it. Not once had he considered that Yuuta's nature was exactly, enticingly, at odds with his own. There was none of Fuji's coolness in Yuuta, nor his maturity or shrewd intelligence. Yuuta had a sparky wit and smartness bent around experience; grubby knees and scrapes and lessons learnt the hard way. Fuji had polished his brain where Yuuta had pulled his own through thorn bushes and fields, working it around a world that constantly bemused him. Mizuki was more like Fuji - knowledge found him easily. He absorbed the minute details of life, dabbled in any interest that took his fancy and catalogued it, somewhere in the library of his mind. Yuuta was unpredictable. Yuuta was, at times, a little bit crazy. He was impulsive and sometimes, he would grab Mizuki's racket and fire a tennis ball so hard into the wire fence that his swinging arm would whoosh in the air. His jaw would set on edge and a snarl would crawl out just as the impact rang true. He defied any data that Mizuki might have thought to take and he made learning...tricky. Mizuki, being competitive, loved a challenge.
In the years they'd known each other, he had never truly understood Yuuta for Yuuta. He'd brought out his individuality in his play, his confidence in his own skill and his uninhibited boyishness. Likely it was that he was also responsible for the sarcasm and the grouchy wit that often had the team circling bouts of sniggering. He had brought Yuuta out of his shell but he had defined him as a tennis player. The new shell he had created him was just a hollow ball; Yuuta would step out when needed and then return to recharge tennis batteries. Mizuki had never considered other shells. Yuuta in his everyday wear; kicking a skateboard down the street. Yuuta at school, chewing an inky pen as he scowled over his maths problems. Yuuta in his dorm room, his headphones on and his eyes closed, licking black from the corner of his mouth absently as silent lyrics fell over his open lips.
Yuuta at night, with the sheets kicked away and his hair pillow-ruffled.
Not naked. Mizuki's dreams were not so crass in their presentation as that. Adorned in black, perhaps, or maroon. A t-shirt far too big. Sliding over the taut angle of one hip; a body all angles and mismatched frames, growing into itself. Gorgeous in imperfection. Long back, stretching, cricking. One arm around his middle, fingers curling. The other hanging over the bedside, fingers wiggling. Never static, Yuuta. Curled up on one side in a shirt too big for his slight form and a body too big for all the ambition that he held inside him. Cotton on angles. Soft and sharp. Hem on thighs and neck pushed aside to reveal one shoulder; the curve of collarbone jutting as though proudly presenting himself. Yuuta's bones had a habit of looking that way. Yuuta himself had a habit of looking that way. He never looked at the ground anymore. He'd never hide in the blankets. Naked but for cotton and angles, he'd be, tied up in a cocoon of moonlit sheets.
He hadn't thought of it before. Hardly surprising, he supposed. Yuuta was, first and foremost, his star player. Not his star fuck. Not his prey to look upon in the night; not his to gorge on, to absorb, to study and to become infected by. It was not his right to think, "screw this," and with a hefty pull, bring hips toward him and Yuuta's sleeping lips to his own vibrant, hungry ones. It was not his right to forfeit his own calculation on Yuuta's slumbering, sex-addled form. Only in dreams could the privilege ever be his; a few treasured seconds of implausibility captured in a mind that photographed details. Memories as Polaroids; Yuuta's body writhing up, his lips parting as his head came back; hair scraping across the pillow with a satisfying scratching sound. A t-shirt stuck over long limbs, arms uncoordinated by sleep shaking clothing off, needing and black with lust. Not red. Lust was not red in Mizuki's mind.
Not after what he'd done. Lust would always be black. The black of eyes, the smudge of hands, the stain of lips against lips and neck, and throat, and bitten nipples turning rosepink. Only Yuuta's t-shirt would be red but it would be thrown down to lie under the bed and so everything would be dark, fumes of sex choking them both, turning kisses to gasps and cries. Mizuki's hair would fit so nicely into those hands; those rough hands, hands not polished nor particularly cared for but masculine hands and hands that knew where to reach and feel and cling. Nails that knew just where to embed themselves as teeth homed in on their resting places. Everything would coil and eyes would meet, frantic, communicating, lost in a haze of too much and too soon - urgency knawing at their bones and teasing at their muscles. Mizuki would want to fuck the bed through Yuuta; fuck himself into everything that didn't exist, absorbed into a body so far that he would be able to stay, and Yuuta wouldn't be able to reject him anymore. His thighs would ache and his arms would shudder with the weight of uplifted torso but it wouldn't matter yet; nothing would, not until that final throaty protest came and Yuuta would succumb to it with wet muscles, senses drenched, sated with rain and thunderclouds.
Handprints on those angular hips. There for good; territorial, knowing, secrets. Mizuki wanted to possess him still.
It was not safe to think on it. Yet it crossed his mind from time to time, the dreams he had of events that would never occur, of visions that could never come true. Of fingerprints that could never be left at the scene of the crime he most wanted to commit. Somebody else's felony, he imagined. Yuuta would find some other form of criminal damage to engage in, and Mizuki would be all but a distant memory. The one who'd taught him not to trust, the one who'd taught him to bring up shields and retaliate with sharpened wit.
The one who'd given the coal to those innocent, smouldering eyes.
In the worst nightmare he'd ever had, Mizuki had gone to jail. He'd stolen sweets from a local speciality store near his home and his four year-old self had been imprisoned in a small, dirty cell. Left to rot for eternity. In the worst nightmare he'd ever had, Mizuki had been punished for his crimes.
The worst nightmare Mizuki had now was just a dream. A dream of impossible temptation. A dream of madness and sex.
He thought he'd give anything for the old one back.