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“We’re getting tattoos,” Ainosuke declares one evening, as certain and nonchalant as one might say ‘it’s raining.’
It is, that night, and they’re holed up under a bridge, waiting for it to pass just because they know it’s a right enough excuse to miss curfew. Sorry, Kaoru will say, to his exacting mother, I didn’t want to catch a cold.
So they have time, leaned up against the concrete, to think. Which is never a particularly good thing, when it comes to Ainosuke. His brainchildren are strange, bastard things. Punk kids, like the three of them.
Kojiro wants, as he often does, to tell him that he’s crazy. But he never gets the words out, and he won’t start now.
Not when Kaoru--Kaoru, with his candyfloss head in Ainosuke’s lap--lights up the way he does. Brilliantly, shining like the streetlamps off his piercings.
Kojiro reminds himself, with teeth deep in his lip, that Kaoru is not supposed to be beautiful.
“I’ll do it,” Kaoru says, and the deal is struck, and they are getting tattoos.
It’s another week until they’ve got the opportunity. They pile into Kaoru’s tiny bedroom, lock the door against his flit-hovering mother. The suspicion on her face withered as they barreled up the stairs, but these three boys are weeds, too hardy to be stopped.
They can feel the anxious heat, scent the adrenalin coming off each other as Kaoru gathers up his implements. He’s got them all at hand--inks for calligraphy practice, needles for piercings. Hand sanitizer, because germs make him itch.
A lighter, because sometimes the world is simply too unfair and he must set things on fire about it.
All the while he sucks on his lip ring, the way he does before a test. Not in anxiety, Kaoru makes excellent grades no matter how he shirks his studies, but in stark determination. In the way he does when he rises bruised and bleeding from the asphalt, ready to give the trick one more try.
Ainosuke goes first, because of course he does. Rolls up the hem of his uniform trousers, bares his ankle. Hisses, when the needle first pierces his skin.
It’s not a hiss of pain, not really. It’s the kind of sound that one might make sinking into a hot bath, perhaps a little too hot.
“Oh, Cherry...” The words drip from him like blood from a split lip, and Kaoru grins. Wide, sickle-sharp, joyful.
“I have you,” he says, low, and Kojiro feels that well-worn wobbly offness, like he shouldn’t be watching.
Like Kaoru shouldn’t be beautiful, with his brow furrowed in focus, with his tongue between his lips.
He is, though. And Kojiro is watching, watching every deft stroke of his fingers.
Watching, until Kaoru is done, until Ainosuke’s ankle is adorned with a tiny, tiny triangle.
Three points, three sides. Three of them, all together.
It’s what made Kojiro agree, kept him from making some excuse. He won’t be left behind.
Ainosuke and Kaoru are on each other, then, the needle still pinched in Kaoru’s slender fingers. They crush together at the mouths, the thighs. It looks, Kojiro thinks, as if it hurts.
In the dark, when he’s alone, he often finds himself with fingers to his lips. Finds himself wondering if it should.
And then they break apart, lips slick and pink, obscene. Kaoru turns, and Kojiro’s fingers twitch in his lap--they ache to fix his hair. Smooth it back into its place, just the right kind of dishabille. He knows how long Kaoru spends on it, in the morning.
Maybe he likes it better like this.
“Your turn,” Ainosuke lilts, and Kojiro can’t think on it anymore. Can only watch as Kaoru pulls out a clean needle, sterilizes it slow.
Smiles wolfish at him, says “oh, come on.” The way he always does, and if he’s steered him wrong thus far, Kojiro has always forgiven him for it.
He sits obediently on the floor, does not shake. Rolls up his cuff and thinks of his last flu shot, which was fine. He was fine.
And this is Kaoru, and Kaoru has seen him through worse. Has scraped him off the pavement after wicked slips, worse grades.
Kojiro’s heart kicks hard behind his binder, and there’s no telling if it’s the fear or just the proximity of him, the way Kaoru’s knelt down at his side.
He thinks he’d let Kaoru do anything to him, and he thinks that he should not think that. His eyes flick to Ainosuke, as they often do in his guilt, to check for jealousy.
Ainosuke’s only admiring his cherry blossom’s handiwork, though the call is too close for Kojiro’s liking.
“Looking away?” Kaoru teases. “Must be scared,” so Kojiro looks back, meets his glinting honeyed eyes. Sets his jaw against him, conjuring a smirk.
“You wish,” he says. “I was just checking to see if your boyfriend survived the operation.”
“Yeah, because you were scared.”
“Fuck off,” Kojiro dares him, “bring it.” Because they could volley it back and forth all night. Because he is a man and he wants to look like one, wants Kaoru to know that’s what he is.
Kaoru nods, dips his needle in the ink, gets to work.
Before he makes the first mark, he still asks him if he’s ready.
It comes to Kojiro that all his teasing was to check, to give him outs. And perhaps he ought to have taken them.
But he is a man, and he wants to look like one. And when Kaoru lays the ink-slicked needle on his skin, when he presses gently inward--it is not so bad.
It stings, but not the same way as a scrape. It twinges, but not like a menstrual cramp. But like both of those things it is tolerable, if he grits his teeth against it.
Still, halfway through, he winces. There’s no telling why--perhaps Kaoru’s pricked a nerve. Perhaps it’s just the look of utter focus on his face, the way he looks when everything of him has boiled all the way down. It’s pure, unadulterated grit, defiance.
Kaoru looks, with that needle between his fingers, like the world is his.
And then he doesn’t--as quickly as it comes on it breaks, and he’s meeting Kojiro’s eye, lips parted.
The concern in him is real, even as his mouth quirks in a sneer.
“Something wrong?” It’s meant to sound goading, but it’s so--gossamer, translucent. Kojiro knows what he means.
He near about whimpers again, with how lovely Kaoru is. Ainosuke is watching, though, appraising like a lucky cat, and Kojiro smothers it. Says he’s fine, of course he’s fine.
“Sure you are,” says Kaoru, flat and unconvinced. “Here, you jackass--I’m halfway done, I can’t stop now, so if you’re gonna be a baby--”
--And Kaoru holds out his hand. Flat-palmed, like he’s giving a gift.
Ainosuke croons, sick puppy that he is. “Oh, Cherry, aren’t you sweet?” Is there accusation in it? Kojiro’s hands are bolted to his sides.
Kaoru slings aside a glare, chastening. “I’ll look like an idiot if I let him walk around with half a tattoo. We can’t all be masochists.”
A laugh, theatrical and firecracker-bright. Whatever Ainosuke’s deal is, he wears it like a crest of honor. After that his attention flits away, and he’s back to tracing one fingertip over his new acquisition, reverent and wrong like he’s touching a museum piece.
Kaoru does not lower his hand.
Kojiro does not take it. Grits his teeth instead, curls his fingers at his sides. He is a man, and he wants to look like one.
He summons in his mind the way that Kaoru’s hands have felt, before. Helping him to his feet after a bail, ruffling his hair. Cracking him swift and jocular across the face, between the shoulder blades. Kojiro thinks of the thinness of his skin, the blue veins underneath. Precise hands, with pinpoint fingers.
It is enough to imagine that palm against his own. To feel those fingertips, the heel of that hand against his ankle. Brushing him, balming the sting.
It’s only a matter of minutes before Kaoru is done. Before he’s smiling, the way he does when he nails a trick, when he sets something on fire. Before he’s clapping Kojiro on the shoulder, congratulatory.
“There you have it,” he boasts, “a Cherry original. You’d better thank me.”
He does, and tries not to sound too breathless. Tries not to say you’re beautiful, because he is, oh how he is.
He is not supposed to be.
Kojiro shifts, leans against the cool comfort of the wallboard. Ushers his breaths, his heart back into line. Goes home early, once Kaoru’s done his own tattoo okay, once he’s certain everything is fine.
Ainosuke is there with him, besides, up in his locked bedroom. He wouldn’t want to overstay his welcome.
He’s sure he won’t be missed, even if he is one point, one leg of their triangle.
It starts to bleed, after a few months, to fade into his skin. Into bitter teenage memory. Ainosuke makes his exit scant weeks after.
Kaoru is still so damnably, lawlessly beautiful.