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"You don’t want me dead. You want her alive.” He slurs, sliding back onto sweaty palms, elbows trembling.
He’s wrong. Tsukishima doesn’t know to aim so high. He wants his father dead.
As Tsukishima crosses the room, he raises his hands: shield, incredulous surrender. He opens his mouth to speak. There’s a wet twinkle in his eye that Tsukishima easily attributes to the bleary moisture of drunkenness.
When he closes his eyes, Tsukishima sees the executioner, and he has his superior officer’s smiling face and fondly twitching hands, white like doves, wings crooked for each makeshift splint, wings broken and reset and true all the same. He cannot look anymore. He sits on the floor and he keeps his eyes from the window, instead watches his own hands.
There’s sweat pooling in his palms, and he cannot help but press their sides together to lay them flat. Love. Life. Marriage. Alien words stuttering in his head, burning film spooled in his ears and hissing painful heat down his jaw. In the tableau of his hands, perhaps someone can see prayer. Sweat dries like saltwater. Perhaps they’d be right.
He’d nearly expected to lash out, anger wound tight into his being. The coil of it has rusted with his father’s blood, it cannot spring. It collapses, and there is nothing but vacuum, a space once occupied, once life, now bereft. Somehow, without tension, the barbs of his fury nestle closer, tighter than ever, not bound by the tension of will but instead crushed against each other by plain gravity, the force of the emptiness above too great. Instead, he slips into the tendency of the trained, his self surrenders, his self never began the fight. Was never there, maybe, beyond the steel-tension punch of brilliant anger, beyond the coral flush of ▇▇▇▇▇’s fingers pressing his palms together, sidelong. Love. Life. Marriage.
His head hurts, not badly, but enough to take notice of. Drumming. He wonders when they’ll hang him; wonders if it will be soon. He looks to the window again.
His lieutenant visits him on occasion--if it can be considered that. He passes through the slats of Tsukishima’s window, peering between the bars with quirked brows, the pristine pale of his forehead furrowed in perplexion, contemplation. There is no pleasure in it, and each time he passes, Tsukishima misses the stripes of sunlight that had brushed against his folded calves. He comes in one day, silent, and there is a rope in his hand.
“Are you worried, Hajime?” He says, and he startles to hear his name. His insides are scored with the fevered rustling of that broken coil, smearing ruddy, copper stains against the pink of his intestine, but it does not stir him to action. He renegotiates his hands in his lap.
"It's my sentence, sir." Despite the raspy drag of his voice, speaking is like breathing, is like eating is like the pump of his heart and the static hum of his brain. He is helpless to it. His hands, again, unstuttering on the smooth track of the automaton.
Tsukishima could--would--make better conversation, better serve his dues, if not for the distinct intuition that his superior is not truly meant--by whomever, the powers that be, the ones that will hang him and decide how soon--to be here. The response only solidifies this: His lieutenant only hums. The crease of his brow is familiar by now.
"Let me try to ease some of this for you, good soldier." He says, and Tsukishima doesn't understand what he means, cannot twist the words from the twining sensibilities. He looks at the window again, and this time his little parallel rectangles of doubled light are falling on the white cloth between his superior's shoulder blades.
He raises his hands, and the loop of rope is coarse and dark where his skin is smooth and white. Tsukishima's mouth goes dry, and another headache taps precipitation on the dome of his skull. He doesn't notice his automaton fingers trembling.
Tsurumi presses the cord into his palms, and he feels its grain, the fray of each thread and the scratch of it against his skin. His exhale comes slow and long, filtered carefully through the meager part of his lips. He stares down: at his own hands, at the rope.
Tsurumi twines their fingers until the impulse of his tendon is Tsukishima's own, and he is trembling as he, they, he, like breathing like eating, tie a noose. Loop, twist, tuck. The texture is abrasive, incessant, particularly when he feels compelled to move so slowly, so methodically, so intimately, and the creases of his hands flush coral. His stomach tightens, nausea so potent, so consuming it feels like arousal. His thigh twitches.
Tsurumi's thumb presses a shallow divot into his throat as he works the noose over his head. He suppresses a whine and looks to the window, and the light is not there, only a vague shape that snickers and whistles lowly. He looks back to his hands, and they are white-knuckled around the cord of the noose, held away from his throat as if the device were collar and lead.
His superior's hands wrap around his own. His heart staggers, trips over its own muddied soles until it bloodies its knees, and it fills him with blood that feels hot and vulgar as it seeps into the vacuum of his stomach. His lips are quirking, flattening, quirking, downturning, flattening, indecisive. He wonders when they'll hang him.
Wonders if it will be soon.
When he looks up, he is startled once more: his lieutenant is not smiling. He pets the back of Tsukishima's knuckles until his stiff fists unball. Gingerly, he slips the noose from his head, reversing the path it has travelled.
He leaves as he came, mostly, but instead of silence, he mutters to himself. This won't do at all . He's smiling, though, when he turns back to look through the bars in his cell window. Tsukishima can tell it by his brow. Tsukishima cannot understand what it means.
His fingers sting, and there is a ruddy impression of the rope running across the hills and valleys at the base of his fingers. He does not know what to do with the relentless churn of blood in his ears.
He wonders when they'll hang him.
He wonders if it will be soon.
The next time his lieutenant arrives, he is less shifty-eyed, less perplexed and more intentful. Something is different, and all of Tsukishima's wondering as stoked by Tsurumi's display has made him, too, more sensible, longing--however abstract or grotesque--quintessential to humanity itself.
Most importantly, Tsurumi smells of saltwater. Blood again. Rust. Love. Life. Marriage.
You don’t want me dead. You want her alive.
"Have you heard of--?"