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In the sensation of drowning, Takumi wonders why he ever tried to swim.
The cage really is comfortable – an odd thing to note in his position, straddled-and-pinned against the floor, knees framing his chest a second smaller prison. The fountain in the distance flows unceasingly, pitter-pattering water a soothing background to this – whatever this is – and the world does not stop merely because Eito Aotsuki’s hands wrap around his throat.
No, it does not so much as stutter.
Outside of his body, breaths coming harshly but hardly stopped, he looks at purple eyes that could belong to anyone who would offer him quiet salvation. Karua, Nozomi, Eito, full-moon-rising, and he follows it like a tide. Dim light and fading oxygen blur the figure before him further.
He hears his own ragged inhales, the body’s instinct to survive when the mind cannot match it. He feels leather against his skin, thumbs moving to press down against his pulse, a little sharpness that signifies something dangerous. Freefall, and he wakes up, adrenaline the only thing that reminds him where his body is.
“Takumi,” his name breaks the silence – or he’s pretty sure it’s his name, anyway, but there’s darkness encroaching the edges of his mind, and if he’s not even sure who he is then he really is empty, isn’t he?
“ Takumi.”
More insistent, and then the pressure stops. With it his heartbeat slows, and if it’s not jackhammer-fast, it might as well stop. With it he blinks, confused, unaware, too-aware.
“Honestly,” his merciful executioner huffs, sitting back on his heels. “Here I am, offering you so much, and you won't even pretend to be paying attention. Are you really so vapid that you can’t even manage that anymore?”
His own face is reflected in the shine of Eito’s lenses. Red-blue eyes, over-and-over-and-over.
“Then get off of me,” Takumi huffs, or, well, tries to.
But his voice is raw. There’s no bite to his tone, not when he’d folded himself willingly into Eito’s hands, strung himself up on the other’s strings. It’s a coin sat upon its side, a half-finished game of chess, a surrender midway through the story that spoils the whole plot.
“I’m serious.”
(He’s not. Eito knows he’s not. He knows Eito knows.)
Above him, Eito exhales out of his nose. When Takumi forces himself back into his body, adjusting his vision, he realizes the other is fixing his gloves. It’s such a mundane action, a simple thing to happen here, and the absurdity of it all makes him snort.
Eito’s eyes narrow. Takumi turns his head to the side. Cold metal meets his cheek.
“Look at me,” Eito commands, echoing in his head, I hated, loathed, and despised you so much. “You noisome little creature.”
A hand grips his jaw, prying it from the grounding comfort of the cage floor. Forced to turn his head, forced to look up, forced to meet Eito’s gaze. He blinks. Eito does not.
“Was that really so hard?”
Mocking condescension, the type of tone that should make Takumi angry. It makes him feel tired, instead, tired and uncomfortably tight in his pants. Repeatedly, Eito makes him feel the wrong things.
Here, he shows trust, presses the knife into the righteous arbiter’s hands and asks him to cast judgement. Here, there is a hint of something like obsession, something like I have to stop him turned into him, him, him , an unending unbroken loop. Here, he floats beyond his body, but his face is red and his heart is pounding.
Eito’s eyes narrow.
“You’re beautiful,” Takumi blurts out, thoughtlessly, because it’s true.
(True even when he sees silhouettes of faded girls in Eito’s profile, in the fall of pale hair or glimmer of violet eyes.)
“I don’t want to hear that from you .”
He speaks nonchalantly, but the sharpness is anything but. Punctuation is not where his sentence ends, but rather, it continues further into the feeling of leather on Takumi’s neck, the press of thumbs against his windpipe. It’s gentle, almost curious, certainly deceptive.
Eito tilts his head and blinks, just once, waiting.
“Please?” Takumi guesses, because he has a hundred more days of understanding than Eito can ever understand.
The click of Eito’s tongue on the roof of his mouth leads in his sentence, as low lights shine across his glasses, obscuring his eyes – “You really are desperate. What a pathetic mutt.”
Oh. Oh. The static between Takumi’s ears shifts and sharpens, honing in at two points – the pulse in his throat, and the throbbing between his legs. He’s painfully hard – has been hard the whole time – and there’s something about the cadence of Eito’s voice that makes it ever worse. This war broke something in his brain, he thinks, distantly.
Fear and longing crossed over, rewired, plugged in backwards. Finding pleasure in the things he can’t ignore.
Eito moves positions, the cage of his long-limbed radiance shifting. His hands don’t leave Takumi’s neck – the line between a noose and an anchor is a fine one, which is to say, he’s grateful for it – but his legs no longer straddle Takumi’s chest. Instead, one knee slots between his legs, and he shifts to allow it far-too-easily. Emptiness needs something to define its shape.
For a stretch of silence, Eito stares. He stares as if he expects to see some sort of secret spilled if he tightens and untightens his hands at the right time. His eyes pin Takumi down, on display like an insect upon a board. Wide-open and exposed, in a false courtyard that loops mocking memories of outdoor sounds from a long-destroyed Earth.
“Here,” Eito finally, finally, says. Before Takumi can offer anything, meager false-protest or hopeless honest-surrender –
Thumbs finally, blessedly, dig into his windpipe. Gloved hands drag him under, and he gasps, rutting his hips up desperately as his back arches. He finds friction against Eito’s knee, finds stars as his head lolls back to stare outside the cage, finds blood-adrenaline rushing to his head dizzying and warm.
It’s a slow drag. Life does not leave him easily, nor does Eito make it swift. Darkness swims at the edge of his vision, edging tantalizingly closer without ever dragging him under. He struggles to breathe, but his lungs still draw in the smallest bits of air. It pools in his gut, unbearable liquid gold, and his eyes long flutter shut and drink in the agonizing pleasure.
He fights the urge. One eye stays open, and swimming red-blue shimmers violet under the right light or the wrong pair of hands.
Eito could kill him. The pressure isn't deadly right now, but it wouldn’t be hard to make it so. A yank of his neck to the side, a harsher press against his windpipe, and he’d find himself in his bed as a byproduct of the Revive-o-Matic.
He’s not sure he would mind.
Eito pushes his knee further up, the pressure nearly painful. He tries to whimper, make some pathetic desperate plea, but the snare around his neck tightens faster than he can speak. Eito's grip intensifies, and Takumi's breath fades away in waves.
He can't breathe. It hurts. He can't breathe. His heart beats, hard and loud. He can't breathe. He grinds on Eito's knee. He can't breathe.
He can't feel his fingers. Spots swim in his vision, taunting him with oblivion. He can't make his eyes focus, can't make himself look at the killer he's handed himself over to. He chases pleasure, instead, selfishly.
Detached, he notices — Eito is talking. His lips are moving. Of course they are. Eito adores the sound of his own voice. He can’t hear it. He exists at points of contact, defined by where his throat is touched, where Eito’s knee offers precious release. He needs, needs, needs –
Needs what?
Please, please, please, he wants to beg, whether it be for less air or more purchase. Blood flows from his chest, catches in his throat, makes his heart stutter, makes his cock harder. The fight or flight he should feel has been reduced to this . Want, need, and oh god does he want and need, and maybe Eito is right about humans being selfish and disgusting creatures, but he can hardly care right now.
His eyes flutter, roll back. The hands on his throat press hard, and stinging sharp sensation sings through him. Watercolor white-gray-purple streaks between visions of dead-girls and complex ceilings. With the strength he has, he raises one numb hand, pushing under Eito’s sleeve.
Fingertips press against Eito’s wrist, his own ragged fingernails against perfect porcelain. Skin-on-skin, he feels the pulse of this ghost, hemoanima singing at the connection. His ghost, the one he killed, the one he carried, the one he sentenced. Crimes only he remembers. A serpent that consumes its own tail – he read about that once, right?
The lack of oxygen must be getting to him. None of these thoughts make sense, disjointed, puzzle pieces forced in wrong.
It must be, because he swears, for a second, Eito’s face flickers something like sorrow instead of sickness.
Takumi cannot save Eito. He squeezes Eito’s wrist, and Eito squeezes his throat, and he chases hate that chases him. Eito cannot save Takumi.
There’s no more air in his lungs, and his thoughts grow dizzy and light. The cage floor is warm. The dark courtyard is bright. The hands around his throat tremble and tighten and tighten and tremble, and his eyelids are too heavy to look at anything. He imagines Nozomi’s hands around his throat, Karua’s pulse in his hands, but it’s still Eito’s knee between his legs.
It’s still Eito who kills him. It’s still Eito who brings him to orgasm.
He’s died before, an invader’s claws through his stomach, a commander’s weapon through his ribcage. This death is like none of those – intimate and sensational, distant and heavy, slow and a rush. Too-much-not-enough, but the world slips dark, dark, darker, spinning like a carousel until he feels pleasure shake his form as the world flashes from black to white.
(The next day, Takumi wakes up in his bed, as he always does.
He checks the mirror.
There are, of course, no bruises on his neck.
He is, of course, still himself, despite everything. And so every day is like the day before.)