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Naoya crouches in the garden, yukata brushing the trim path that winds through the greenery with the delicate bend of knee and calf, hands outstretched and wrapped about an object unseen. The garden is sparse, but by design, reflecting a simplicity and cleanliness that only comes across to Toji as bereft, lifeless and muted, especially against the tangled verdance of the outside world, of the parallel stack concrete and the rambling streets. It only catches his eye for the vibrant flash of blond and flutter of cyan that crouches at its center, the light lancing off the object set at the boy's side.
Ah, the kid of the head?
He is made awkward, suspended in the liminal of a brutalized repression and a fierce, innate defiance, by the gangliness of limb, the slow fingers of youth dragging muscle between the crevices of his ribs and underarms as he fills out. He is made clumsy, too, the flicker of warmth at the base of his tongue yet to be smothered by the mouthfuls of ash the Zen'in family will impose on him, and so he stands, slinking fluidly against a column like the night's shadow. Even as his heart thrums a steady pulse in his throat, his body is precise.
Younger than Toji, but already laden with a primitive form of the projection sorcery technique, eye undiscerning and hands slow enough to warrant its complete uselessness. He's promising, though, and made rotten for it, a fruit ripened and made malleable under forceful hand rather than the grace of the sun. Like a distant flare of some stranded battlement, a thought burns and flickers in Toji's chest, sunburst orange: I could probably kill him like this.
Naoya kneels with arms outstretched, a wide porcelain dish balanced in the splay of his palms. Toji's body is always faster than he is: "What are you doing?"
Liquid splashes just barely over the rim as the muscle of Naoya’s thighs give an imperceptible jump, his arms jerking in their pose of offering. His eyes flicker up, unassumingly vulpine and touched with a childish, nonthreatening irritation. "I'm catching butterflies," he says, voice too rounded with youth to be anything but a gentle rush of air, despite his petulant matter-of-factness.
“You’re not--” Toji stills his tongue, twists it to press it between the hard lines of his mouth, and Naoya is looking up at him, the narrow set to his eyes widening further and further, picking for Toji’s shape in the dark.
It’s the middle of the night. When have you ever seen a butterfly out here? What? You’re not going to find any, brat.
“Alright,” Toji says, lifting a leg over the railing and dropping into the garden, “let’s see.” Naoya’s face contorts briefly, before smoothing, shining with a childish glee, some stirring of eagerness for companionship that Toji had only barely managed to beat back by the time he'd been of a similar age and failed to manifest a technique. Though, he wonders vaguely, if that's what he's here for, too, crouching beside the boy to inspect the items set at his sides: he barks a quiet laugh as he kneels.
The shimmer in Naoya's face broadens with the noise, curls soft over the gentle swell of his cheek and the sweet narrow of his eyes, lambent and warm. The little monster. "It's sugar water," Naoya whispers, redistributing his weight to sway on his hips, avoiding Toji's hands as he grasps for the miniature net--carmine plastic, designed for catching goldfish, Toji can envision the sly grin as Naoya slips the instrument into his sleeve--and mason jar nestling in the grass. There are no holes in the lid, overstuffed with twigs and grass in a show of basic conceit.
He weighs the two in his hands appraisingly before setting them down once again. He turns to dip a pinky into the dish, sucking it into his mouth and quirking a grin when Naoya gasps: full mouthed, eyebrows lifting and lashes blinking frantically, the sort of expression only seen in those untrained in the schooling of the face, and it makes Toji feel incredibly snide. Sugar blooms on his tongue, a grain of it resting abrasively in the gap between nail and finger.
"It's yummy. I'm sure they'll really like it." Toji says, and Naoya's demeanor immediately settles, smile setting once again with a prideful huff, the first kick of a delighted laughter burbling from his stomach. His arms quiver with effort to keep the dish raised, a motion caught by Toji's careful eye despite draping sleeves.
"Why don't you put that down?" Toji offers, making a vague gesture in the dark that draws his own sleeve up the knob of his wrist, skin full pale in the moonlight. Naoya sucks his cheeks in, shakes his head.
"I want to hold them." Naoya says, voice still low enough to come out peaky and grating. Toji hums. The kid is more invested in this than he'd figured, the more pampered ones typically flighty and shallow, even in his brief experience with them. This one, seemingly, has fangs, curved to hook and to hold. The bud of fascination is easy enough to dismiss, but he doesn't know what to do with the feeling nestling in his organs, a sudden compulsion to keep him from being disappointed. A sort of fondness and consideration he's felt discarded, made untouchable by the wooden-rod distance enforced with each steadily deepening welt at his back. He purses his lips.
"Hey, check this out," Toji says, and runs his fingers through the grass, tittering and slow, feeling the rustle of each blade beneath his fingers.
On cue, a dozen fireflies rise, flickering in their sickly chartreuse hues, so unlike the warm glow of organics. Toji has never had a taste for them, smearing impossibly easily against his fingers with a filmy viscosity, but the kid is entranced, hands scrabbling at the edges of the porcelain in his excitement. His eyes are wide, wet-looking in the dim light, and the curiously dark undersides of his fringe seemi to pull in the light in a way that makes the astonished part of his mouth clear, the glow reflecting on each tooth. It catches in the folds of his outstretched sleeves, tracing a glowing seam along the detailing of his yukata, yellow light and cerulean shadow.
This is, perhaps, one of the most mundane, uneventful possible luxuries the likely Zen'in heir is ever to be granted, and yet he kneels, heaven-turned, with a wonder loosening every muscle of his face, with his arms shaking and thighs shifting in a barely restrained glee.
"It's like you've never seen fireflies," he mutters, pressing his lips into a pleased line, only allowing the gentle slope at one end to betray his satisfaction.
Naoya's gaze turns to face Toji at that, round cheeks dimming and brightening in time with the insects, and he narrows his eyes again: warm, awed, quiet. Toji takes a deep breath through his nose, averts his eyes, the recognition having snaked somewhere under his skin where it will fester, glowing like a subcutaneous coal, flesh wrinkling and decaying in the white heat.
They sit like that for some time: watching the ambling path each light takes in the sky in competition with the stars, watching each other as they watch, recursive and winding, forever and into infinity. Between them, something crystallizes, each twitching insect caught in the amber of youth. Toji, wordlessly, reaches to cup one in the jar, considering its eventual suffocation over the course of the night a worthwhile trade. Naoya seems enthralled with the ease, the fluidity of the motion.
“You’re Toji, right?” The hush of his voice takes on a different note, reverence rather than the derision he's so accustomed to, the distant dismissal, and Toji holds that breath he’s taken, feels it scratching at the tender flesh of his trachea, “They say some of the worst stuff about you.” Spoken like a broken rule, his face lifting the instant the words snap free from his throat, tension loosed. Like the dirty, forbidden words are still on his tongue, resting at his tonsils and snaking free with his admission, and he’s torn between delight and revulsion for all their vacuous powers.
Higher, higher, watching the light of the fireflies crossing Toji’s sunken face, too gaunt for a boy his age. Fixated on the predator’s glint of Toji’s eyes, already enamored with the emerald tone, “I don’t think you’re so bad.” His smile is loose, happy, enough to make him lower the dish to his lap, shift to lay his head on Toji’s shoulder.
His wrists are so small, so narrow, the lip of porcelain in his lap large enough to edge past the bulk of his folded thighs. His neck is nearly spindly, the brush of his ears against Toji’s shoulder slight, like the flutter of insect wings. Toji’s almost certain he could kill him now.
“Let’s play tomorrow? I won’t listen to any of them.” He hums, blinking blearily, and Toji reaches forward to catch the vessel before it can slide, splattering sticky water against his folded thighs, a motion that only makes Naoya’s teeth glint, too sleepy to hide his instinctive excitement. “You’re nothing like the rest of them...”
“I’m not carrying you inside. I’ll leave you here in the garden, kid.” Toji nudges crudely against him, lifting his upper lip in distaste. He can’t remember the last time he’d been in contact with another warm body like this, with such enduring warmth. It’s almost uncomfortable--the feeling itself, and the crumple of his ribs, the rotting wood of his torso collapsing with a feeble want to surrender to it.
“Maybe there’ll be butterflies when I wake up… they don’t come out this time of night, anyway.” He nods off, lips still curled, almost vicious.
Oh. The brat. Maybe all Zen’ins are defective, even if not the exact way Toji is. With a sigh, he brings the sugar water to his lips, takes a gulp, dizzies himself with the thick of it as the moon shelters behind a roaming cloud. A dead fly that had been swimming in the syrup snags on his lower lip, drawn inward with the rush of his empty body.
Naoya wakes, supine on the hinoki walkway, sun warmed with arms splayed and yukata loose. He feels the vestiges of a pleasant dream still tugging at the corners of his mind, and he frowns deeply when he opens his eyes to the knit brows and fussing hands of some of the Zen’in attendants. None of them have the sly twist of Toji’s grin, the controlled, coarse flutter of his palms and the bejeweled set of his narrow eyes. Their obnoxious aid, tugging at his biceps and dragging him to his feet, are nothing like the narrow brushes of butterfly feet.
When Toji’s morning comes, he finds himself hovering at Naoya’s back, a plastic cup upturned in his palm. Frantic against his skin: a single white butterfly, beating against the curves and ridges in the flesh, feet skittering. Naoya laughs, rushes down the hall without a word. Without a turn.
The tentative dove, mid-air, catches a bullet in the wing. It plummets.