People are familiar with the concept that Akito is regarded as a god, but in this fic I have actually made him one...or at least capable of becoming one. I've given him strange, rather dark abilities (making Kiro's eye bleed, keeping him alive, etc, plus some others that will appear later in this chapter) so he can't be thought of as a Messianic figure. (As if). :D
I've just realised that Kiro's sole purpose for being in this fic is to be Akito's, well, 'stress-ball.' Or punching bag. Something to take your anger out on anyway. I'm feeling a little guilty about it. As this is fic is finished (but we have one more chapter to go!) I can say that, er, things don't come to a happy ending for him. Not really anyway. Yup. Feeling guilty now.
Akito watched Hatori's sleeping back for a long time.
Then he slipped from the sheets, pulled on his yukata and padded silently out into the corridor. The shadows followed him, snuffling and rubbing against his ankles. Akito walked wraith-like through the corridors until he found the Ox's room. The moon shone whitely through the window, it was under the moon he felt his blood tingle. The door opened on its hinges and the god slipped inside.
On the floor was a figure, a halo of black blood surrounding his head.
Akito knelt, and swiped his finger along the man's left cheek. He sucked the warm blood off with every sign of enjoyment.
"Hello, Minekura. You've been a very good Ox. Very silent and patient. You didn't try and yell when you heard him come in, did you? No? Good." The god absently wiped the last few specks of blood on Kiro's shirt.
"He came back to me. As I knew he would. I called him, from here." He made a white fist over his heart. "He felt me, right here. I'm in present in every fibre of his being. His blood, his breath…they are all mine. I give him his life.
"He was mine before he was yours, Minekura. His loyalty and subservience to me are deeper and more ingrained in him then your pathetic friendship. That's why he's sleeping peacefully in my bed right now instead of wondering where you are." He watched Kiro's eyes widen. "That's what you wanted, isn't it? Hatori's happiness? He's happy right now: asleep and satisfied."
Kiro saw, through a red veil, a darkness lapping at the god's young ankles, a night that flowed around and through him, the same colour as Akito's eyes. He twitched.
Akito shook his head. "You can't move. You're still immobilised. But," he cried, as if giving out a special treat, "I've also stopped the blood seeping from your eye. Isn't that wonderful? You were starting to disgust me anyway: your unhygienic bloody bandages, that ever-present stench of blood." He rocked back and forth on his heels.
"I bet you hate me now, Kiro Minekura. I bet you're wishing you never got involved with the Sohmas. That you never met Hatori. Or that you never met me."
Akito took a fistful of dark matted hair and yanked upwards. "Say it."
Kiro looked at him, uncomprehending.
"Say it. Say you hate me." Akito's voice grew lower and darker. "Hate me like all the others. Say that I ruined your life. Say you hate me."
The Ox merely stared at him, one eye dulled.
"Say it!" Akito backhanded Kiro, hissing as pain thundered down his knuckles. "Say it, or I'll do things to you that will make your little haemorrhage seem like a spa treatment."
"I don't hate you."
That voice, that broken, exhausted, lowing voice made the god pause.
"What?"
"I…don't…hate you." Kiro's voice was going. He had wasted it screaming raw earlier on, when Akito was having his fun, before the asthma attack. There was blood in his throat. There was blood everywhere.
"Well, you will." Akito looked away. "They all hate me, in the end. Even Hatori will hate me…but his devotion outweighs that." He leaned down and whispered hotly into Kiro's ear. "You're really mine now. I've marked you permanently. Did you look at your back?" He let out a young giggle.
Kiro felt something inside him shrivel. No, he hadn't looked at his back. He didn't want to. No doubt the mad god had inscribed something twisted – because he could remember every calculated scratch of the knife. He was still sticky, under his bandages.
Akito got up and stretched, cat-like. "Well, Minekura, now that Hatori is back to care for me, you're no longer needed. All in all, I'll give you a glowing reference: your medical attention to me was professional and you really helped keep away my boredom." He giggled again. "You can get up, if you want…oh, you can't move, can you?"
Akito knelt and placed his spidery fingers on Kiro's temples. He whispered something. The doctor jerked as something raced through his joints, then died.
"There." The boy stood, breathing a little harder. "You're free to try and walk out, or crawl out, as you wish." His eyes glinted cruelly. "But you probably won't get far. You tell no one of what happened to you…no one would believe you anyway. Because I have ways of finding people. You might think I can't do much, locked up in this pestilential house," Akito spat, "but I have ways of finding people. Remember that."
He paused in the doorway. "I wonder what Hatori's face will look like, when he sees your own? Certainly a spectacle not to be missed."
And he left the prone Ox, his small feet carrying him away, small back receding. The night followed, curling at his ankles. Kiro lay very still.
His back began to sting…
---
Flashback
7.30 a.m., the same day
He sits propped upright on his pillows, asleep, hands placed straight at his sides. Akito. He lifts one eyelid and glares at me as I take his thin wrist and remove the bandage to replace it. Akito. The boy who is not a boy, at all.
"Surely it's too early to do that," he snaps. He's angry because I woke him. "You can do that later – let me sleep. You're always banging on about how I should rest, so let me sleep."
"Vitamins," I remind him, and he scratches me with his little claws out of pique. He really can be a child. "Vitamins and medication."
Another poisonous look, he snatches the little pills and chewy tablets from my hand, makes a little hollow in his blanket, and dumps them in. It's his little ritual. He hoards them, then takes them, to show he doesn't need my help.
I give him a glass of water. He grasps it with his healthy left fist, sets it down, pops a couple of pills expertly in his mouth. He washes them down, gags a little. Akito saves the chewy tablets for last – they're dry, hard, and require more concentration and water. I watch him crunch them up, make a face for my benefit, and swallow. He coughs a little, little white waxy face crinkling.
"Disgusting," he pronounces, then flops back, already weak.
I should have been more careful.
I should have known.
But it never crossed my mind as I looked at him at that moment that such a sickly-looking boy could do what he did to me, that morning. My throbbing eye hadn't taught me anything.
I change his bandage – the bone is almost completely healed. I cup his warm throat and neck, looking for swollen glands (only one), listen to his chest (phlegmy), his ears (ok), and his eyes. As I gently hold his eyelid up, examining the gloss and red muscle, I can feel him concentrating towards me rays of spectral hate.
"You should examine your own eye," he says, cuttingly, "I mean; it's not supposed to bleed like that, is it?" I ignore his falsely innocent tone.
He tilts his head back. "You stink of blood, Minekura." That pink tongue darts out and licks his upper lip. I stand back. A tinge of dizziness hits me and I blink.
"I'm done with your check-up, Akito-sama. You may go back to bed now."
He's watching me. Staring at me intently. I try and look away from that liquid gaze.
"You should drink lots of fluids…and…" A buzzing, a buzzing in my head. The floor reels below me, before I know it, I'm on my knees. My stethoscope falls with a clatter.
Akito leans over, arms folded, watching me with interest. I notice distantly that his eyes are hot and glowing.
"Keep still, Minekura. Now this is where my real fun begins."
My limbs become watery reflections of themselves. Ice shoots through my joints and nerve-endings, I'm freezing up-
-I can see someone's foot. It's small, shapely, covered in ivory skin. It pokes out from the hem of a yukata. Its twin nestles next to it.
I try and move. Nothing.
I try and shout. My voice comes, in its natural basso profundo, but it's swallowed up by the presence standing in front of me. As if it was a vacuum for sound.
"Be still and quiet, Minekura."
Akito. Out of bed. Walking around me, almost floating. He is different, different from how I always saw him – sickly, white, bony, coughing. He is not that now. He is luminous, slim and sleek. He smells like gods should smell: of nectar and lotus-blossoms. A subtle energy radiates from his core, his ivory feet touch and lift with the uttermost grace and beauty.
This is Akito, the Zodiac God. I gape at the transformation.
The god kneels. I'm so busy staring into his large, liquid eyes, at the shining black hair framing his face that I don't notice the glinting thing in his right hand.
He holds it in front of me. Light siphons off its surface, spiralling into my right eye.
It's a scalpel.
Akito smiles, showing his small white teeth. It lights up his face. "This is yours, by the way. I found it in your medical bag. My, what things doctors are allowed to carry…" He pings it.
Mad god or not, I have to try and reason with him. This is many times worse then when he smashed a vase against my face. "Akito. Put the scalpel down."
He shakes his head. He clutches it like some precious, precious toy. "No. I don't think I will."
"Akito –"
He silences me with one gesture. My voice goes.
And then I realise something…he's holding the scalpel in his right hand…
He sees it on my face. "I don't hurt when I'm like this." He gestures at himself, he doesn't need to. Akito stands, a miniature Greek god.
"I can only invoke…myself, I should say, my godlike essence…what you're looking at right now…with the right amount of effort and concentration. I tend to use it VERY sparingly, it takes A LOT out of me and I'm sure I'll pay for it later. I always do. That's the price of power. Live in Hell to have a few minutes of Heaven.
"I want all of my strength focused when I use this on you." He twirls the scalpel. "Sooner or later, everything comes down to blood." He starts walking around me again. My blood-beat is loud in my ears, I can feel my eye start to bleed again, pulsing.
"I know you've bled. But whatever you've lost, it will never be enough. And I want something that other people can SEE, and know without doubt, that you are marked by the Zodiac."
He says a lot of other things, raving things, mad things; I'm not listening but following the scalpel as he moves it through the air like a maestro. Already my skin is beginning to prick.
He's behind me now. I feel violent motions behind me, and suddenly cool air flowing across my back. Akito has sliced my shirt off. I never even felt the blade.
"You ARE strong." He nudges me with his foot. "I can see every one of your muscles – now let's put something pretty on them."
It is rape.
It feels like rape. He straddles me, one hand gripping my shoulder, as he carves whatever madness has infected him into my flesh. I can do nothing. I couldn't move even if I was able to – the god holds me with supernatural strength.
It is rape.
The blade is slow, is fast, cutting, penetrating into me with a surgeon's precision. Cutting deep. The blade is inorganic, cold and indifferent to my microscopic thrashings, my yells, my pleas, my threats, my blood. Akito gets more and more excited, starts to move against me lecherously. I try and buck him off. Impossible.
It is rape.
I scream and scream. All noise is swallowed into the cold vacuum of his being. I scream until my throat is red-raw and I spit blood onto the floor. After that I just croak. Oh God, this pain, this white-hot agony…
At one point I lose so much blood that I'm a few dark stirrings away from complete unconsciousness, but I can still hear his young laughter, feel that coldness, feel his weight on me. He won't let me pass out. Every now and then he lifts my head and breathes life down my throat, my head clears and I know I'll be awake for a little while longer.
I am terrified of the Zodiac God.
It's all over now. He's finished. I feel sticky, used, bruised, filthy. We've both sweated, the air above us is cloy with it. I have never felt so disgusting in my entire life.
Akito stands. He looks like he escaped from a slaughterhouse. He looks like a heathen god fresh from a ritual sacrifice, red swirls painting his face, hands, yukata. On him, the blood looks beautiful.
He runs his pink little kitten tongue down the blade. He laps at the redness like milk. He grins.
"Your final punishment is complete, Minekura."
He slips the scalpel in some secreted pocket. I lie helpless in front of this godlike child, stained with my own life, and tremble.
Akito sighs: the magic is leaving him. As I watch, his luminous skin fades, his eyes lose some of their lustre, his posture slumps. His power is gone. He is simply Akito Sohma, breathing asthmatically, bony chest rising and falling.
He sits on some floor not stained by me, then reaches out and strokes my face like a lover. We are practically lovers, now. His touch is cold, acrid. The boy examines my injured eye with his thumb.
"Very pretty."
He pokes it. I make an animal sound.
The god laughs, starts coughing. When that stops, his face is pale and drawn. He places his fingers on my temples and removes whatever has been holding me. I feel the stiffness leave my bones.
Akito tugs at a strand of hair. "You're going to be stiff for a while. Now…" He slides his heartless eyes over me, "I'm going to call Hatori pretty soon, and he will return. I don't want you to intercept him. I don't want you to shout for help. You're bleeding, but you'll live. I gave you some of my life. You're practically a Juunishi." He chuckles, it turns into a sour cough.
He keeps on coughing. Pretty soon he's gasping for air, his chest pitching forward. I watch him numbly, unable to grasp it, I'm a third person witnessing this from somewhere outside.
"M-Minekura!"
That pathetic, hoarse little voice stirs the doctor in me. In one second I'm on my feet, by the second, scooping that slim little body into my arms, by the third, out of the room (my own room, I realise), and into Akito's hot sickroom.
He's already feverish. I open up his airways, but it's not enough. Only when I fix the oxygen mask on him does he breathe. He passes out, I slump.
I come to my senses. Wash Akito off – he's covered in my tangy blood. I change his yukata, throw the other one away. But before I do, I slip the scalpel out.
I stare at it for a long time.
There's no way I can use this thing again. Not when it's been baptised in my own blood, I could never use it on another patient. I'll be cutting myself open.
I throw it away too.
Akito's half-conscious now, eyes just open. He watches me. I mutter something about getting some rest and stagger from the room. My spine is all sticky, little flames of pain are crawling along it. I don't want to know what he carved.
I go back to my room. Instead of changing and tending to myself like I should, I throw myself into a frenzy of cleaning all the spilt blood on the floor. I don't want Hari to see this. It's more then I can stand.
I do what I can, but the linoleum will always have some strange, brown patches here and there. Then I shuck off my trousers and dump them in hamper. I avoid the mirror as I walk into the bathroom, and turn the shower on.
Soon the water around my feet is red. The hot water is like acid on my back but I don't care. I don't care about anything anymore. I just want to wash the smell of blood away.
I'm out, I'm in clean clothes, my back is bandaged. I have to stand ramrod-straight or it aches.
Tentatively, I start to feel safe. I stuffed Akito full of morphine – not only will it makes his chest stop hurting but he won't be in any mood to play with me, as is his want.
I'm so, so stupid.
You can't outwit a god.
Just as I reach for a new bandage, his hoarse little voice whispers in my ear: "I'm not letting you go anywhere yet, Minekura. I want you to stay perfectly still –"
My joints lock together, there's that freezing sensation again. I crash to the floor, completely paralyzed. He doesn't want me running away. That little monster!
"- and stay there until I come in later. Remember, Hatori will be coming. Don't interfere."
His voice dies away. My eye begins to seep, from my panicked heartbeats.
"You're a monster!" I scream, my control finally breaking. "You're a monster, you hear me? Not a god, A MONSTER!"
I scream other things, pausing to spit blood. The sound is sucked up.
It's no use. My rage passes, leaving behind nothing but eerie placidity. I lay my head on the rough floor.
I don't hate him. Even after what he did, after what I yelled, I can't bring myself to hate him. Because all I remember are those long, black nights when he begged me to stay, to keep him warm, to keep him company. Little fingers clutching at my shirt. Oh God.
Hours later, I hear Hari's familiar, sombre footsteps. They walk past my door. I keep my cries locked behind my teeth. I don't want to face any more of Akito's wrath.
End flashback
---
Kiro picked himself off the floor, wincing. The left side of his face was one long black smear. There was no way he could leave in this condition. He glanced at himself in the mirror: blood-caked, a haunted eye, a face that had once been handsome. He looked like a criminal. Kiro laughed hollowly.
Akito never intended for him to leave.
He was waiting for a special moment: when Kiro came face-to-face with Hatori. That was the point of his punishment, to see Hatori recoil.
There was nothing he could do. The yoked Ox wiped at his face with a towel, and sat on the bed, waiting for the morning.
---
Hatori woke, yawned, and stretched. For a moment, his arm landed on something warm beside him. He blinked as Akito raised his dazed dark-tousled head from the sheets and looked at him. The boy's eyes were sheened with sleep.
"Good morning, Hatori." He gave a small yawn.
The doctor held his breath, wondering what he was doing in Akito's bed. Then the adolescent flopped by his side with a small noise and he remembered last night. He leaned down and kissed Akito on the head.
"Don't." Akito withdrew under the covers. "I'm not in the mood for that this early in the morning."
Hatori laughed. He felt so refreshed.
As he threw back the sheets, he noticed a spot of red.
"Akito?" He turned to his young lover, who was scrabbling for the covers in annoyance, "Akito, what's this?"
The boy focused on the light stain. "Oh, that?" He licked his lips. "That was from a few days ago. I had a nosebleed. Now, are you going to let me freeze to death?" With that, he snatched the blankets and re-made his little nest.
The Dragon wasn't offended. He knew Akito too well. He left the god to his rest and went to his room, and put on clean clothes. As he combed his hair, he caught himself whistling.
Hatori padded along the halls of the Main House, familiarising himself again with their dark silences, hushed servants, woolly floors.
There was a nagging feeling in the base of his spine. Something important he'd forgotten, something that had faded to a background buzzing in his mind, overshadowed by Akito. Something…some voice…some person…
I want you to get better
Hatori, I'm warning you every day you're gone
Ha-san listen to me ok
I'm warning you
don't come back because you have to…whatever you may hear
every day you're gone
Please…just do it ok
the more someone else will suffer because of it
the more
someone else
will suffer
Hatori stopped dead.
He grasped his face. He couldn't believe how selfish he had been. How he had quietly, guiltily ignored Akito's warning. "No…shit, no…"
The Dragon looked over his shoulder, half-expecting Akito to be looking at him, smirking. The power Akito held over him was immense. He shivered: I was completely under his spell…
I still am.
The doctor began walking rapidly towards the guest rooms. Where is he? I haven't seen him…I barely thought about him…
He remembered which room was Kiro's. He eyed the solid door, then knocked. Nothing. If he pressed his ear to it, he could hear water running. Perhaps Kiro was taking a shower? Maybe. Hatori was about to turn away, but something made him pause.
There were brown finger-prints on the doorknob. He stared.
No…not brown. A sort of darkish-red, becoming brown.
Hatori straightened, pulse quickening, and rapped on the door.
"…Who is it?"
The Dragon jerked his head in shock. When had his friend's lowing voice sounded so tired, so cracked, so frightened?
"Ki-san? It's me. Hatori."
He was treated to one of the longest, deepest silences he could remember.
"Kiro?" He knocked again. "Can I come in?"
The sound of running water stopped. "No. I really don't think that's a good idea, Ha-san."
"Why not?" Hatori pressed his ear to the door. "I want to see you. Let me in, Kiro."
"No." Kiro's voice was taking on a panicked edge.
The doctor took a breath. "Let me ask you something: why is there dried blood on the doorknob, Kiro? Are you hurt?"
He heard a sharp inhalation. The Ox didn't respond.
"I'm coming in." The knob yielded beneath his fingers. He came into the room.
Next chapter we will see what Hatori will do about Kiro and what Akito thinks of all this…
ACHTUNG! As a special favour to SunMoonAndSpoon, fellow FB authoress, for pimping out this fic, I shall pimp out hers! Ok, now everyone MUST read 'Everybody Wants Her,' because it is delicious and nutritious. Also it's very well written and has a smattering of Akito/Hatori. And it's hilarious and gross and disturbing and what more reasons do you need really? Oh yes: it's full of Aki-kun! GO READ IT NOW! AND REVIEW IT…AND THIS CHAPTER!