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There are days Inumaki feels, more than sees, the burning red handprints ghosting on his skin.
All different shapes and sizes, texture and strokes; they had, all of them, imprinted on him one way or another in every passing visit. No matter it had been a young boy of no more than five, gazing up at him with fluttering lashes and excited eyes—joyous, young, full of life in a way he could never be—before quickly being snatched away by any lingering parentage who thought themselves too far above admiring scraps of marble.
“It’s hero worship,” Gojo from over on Colossal told him one night, when the steel gates had closed and the pillared walls glistened from the dimmed lights. There was a small crack in his chipped armour. “They grow out of it eventually.”
So Inumaki looked on, amidst the sea of people in what seemed like a never-ending cycle, observing the anthropological hands of the creator weave his way through the crowds. The faces had been fresh, at first glance and his first display, all jagged lines coming together to meet in soft edges: humans were, if anything, a most peculiar kind.
They linger. They back away. They reach out, stop themselves, and look from side to side as if caught in a lie ensnared by their own web—and then nothing.
The night janitor is a friendly face and a welcome presence.
Gojo took to him instantly, nearly nicking himself in the process of trying to get out of his gilded cage whenever the sound of jiggling keys pierced through the ghastly night silence. The museum looks entirely different at night, the shadows dancing against each other make for lovely little silhouettes.
“Getou!” he would perk up, standing upright suddenly after having spent nearly eight hours in a slumped position, a hand to his chin in what the director fashioned as ‘The Thinker’ position. “What took you so long?”
The man, Inumaki guessed was somewhere around his late 20s, comes up to the Colossal portion of the gallery. Inumaki himself had been carved out of Hellenistic fibre, and stood precedent to his own more modern markings.
It was a testament to this hypermodern world they had been shipped off to, then, when this mundane shell of a man didn’t even bat an eye once the figures in the display started moving on his first night on the job.
If anything, Getou even asked them to do it again.
Blocking off the sound of Gojo peppering him with a thousand and one questions about humanity, Inumaki sat down. He stretched his legs before him against the cold marbled floor, the stone carvings against the fixture a grating sound.
The lights illuminate Getou’s chiselled face and easy smile against the glass panels and not for the first time, they look. The euphemism of the fleeting youth against their immortalized statues so brazen, like marble against granite, is nothing short of breathtaking each time.
There is a boy who, sometimes, looks a little closer than the rest.
Inumaki had been touched plenty, of course, either by juvenile children running around the gallery or voyeuristic teenagers who just couldn’t help but break code and tempt jailbait. The fingers then had been transient against his skin, more a curious prodding of steeled frame than actual marvel at the glorious work of sculpture.
Their touches were odd, sometimes almost vice-like in their grip as if coming to flesh with divine-imagined stone would bleed over some of their holiness unto mortal hands.
But not this one.
This boy—no, man—had a brown leather bag draped over his shoulder and a sketchbook propped against his arm when he came. There is dirt underneath his fingernails, this Inumaki noted with some grimace when he inched closer. He skims the rims over quickly, discreetly, along with the tapping of a pencil against corduroy trousers.
An artist then.
The stranger is dark hair and darker eyes. His gaze was steady, transfixed at a point between his collarbone and neck and muscles and legs; more a perfunctory observance of faux anatomy than anything else really—and yet, and yet, and yet: Inumaki had never felt so naked.
The first time he came Inumaki was fresh off the mold.
The lily white of his carvings had been more mother of pearl under the skylight, novel and marvel and new.
Gojo had been down at the shop, again, because his armour chipped for the nth time and they had half the mind to call in for a permanent replacement were it not for an anonymous caller who seemed overtly fond of the jaded Hellen grandeur.
The stranger came in, a pen wedged between the crook of his ear, with a small smile on his face. He walked on, slowly, as if committing image to memory with all the patience in the world. His cream linen tunic came undone slightly at the top button, small flashes of pale skin moving with him as he skipped from each display to the other.
Until, blessedly, it landed on Inumaki.
There had been no playful light in his eyes then, Inumaki remembered so vividly, only this: a small hitch in his breath, the infinitesimal widening of his eyes, and the stagger in his steps when he stopped directly against the nameplate.
Unmoving and unyielding and ever immortal in his stillness, Inumaki struggled to root himself in the place of something that had seemed to transcend the very planes of life altogether—because then, then, then—the touches came quickly after.
The stranger didn’t touch like he looked, with the same mechanical hovering of the gaze nor the almost bored observing of the craftsmanship. The fingertips came first, almost edging just slightly from the velvet ropes meant to separate human from humane—until it didn’t matter which was what, who was who.
No, what he had done to Inumaki then, had been something that transcended the divine.
Maybe it really was hero worship, after all.