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“No one’s going to hire you if you look like this,” Shi-woo takes his cigarette between the joints of index and pointer, gives it a half-hearted wave as he gives the Zen’in a once-over. The world of Jujutsu is no less occupied by fallible men than any other, and so walk-ins--if they can be called that, some requisite cleverness or skill in detangling the blood-sticky skein of underworld relations to reach someone as reputable and reliable as Shi-woo--are common enough, but rich blood like this is rare enough to pique Shi-woo’s interest. It must have something to do with the unkemptness, that starved-dog look in his eyes beneath the overlong curtain of his bangs, the thin, violent slit of his mouth, looking as if it was made to be smeared red. Despite this, he feels no trepidation, no nerves.
“Oh, trust me,” the Zen’in says, and his grin is limp, half-dead in his mouth for all the way it gleams, “they will.” Shi-woo laughs in a way that engages only the left half of his face, one scrunching nostril and a lopsided slant through which a huff of amusement passes, the first of many, and the Zen’in’s brows lift in challenge.
Turns out Zen’in was right. Bastard. Here he stands, freshly paid, grinning and wiping bloody palms luxuriously over his hips before reaching petulantly to pull at Shi-woo’s shoulders, snatching the cigarette from between his lips with a waggle of the brows.
“You’re too old to be acting like this,” Shi-woo shakes his head, allowing the motion--could not stop it by force, anyway--instead, fixes his gaze on the ruddy stains, the smudged imprint of each hand stark on the white cloth at his waist.
“You’re jealous,” Toji purrs, flashing those teeth, the film of saliva over his canines glassy like the eye of a corpse. Shi-woo sighs again. Toji is always in a cheery mood after a job, but in the first month or so of his employment, he’d hobble off into the night, a restless gaiety stirring under his skin to--Shi-woo learns, after watching him slip into a bar he knows he will not be drinking in--fuck it out with someone with adequately deep pockets; Recently, though, he’s been trailing Shi-woo, plying him for recommendations and spare time.
“Of what, you brute?” Shi-woo huffs a laugh, and Toji throws a casual arm around his shoulders, brute speak for let’s get some food.
With that strange warmth in the crease of his elbow, heat emanating from a man dead-dull and dying still, and a little turn of the wrist that speaks consideration when he keeps his bloodied palm from the starched white of Shi-woo’s collar, the man obliges.
He notices again when they’re eating--it’s too late at night to find anywhere proper, and instead they find themselves tucked against the flapping tarp of a noodle stall.
“You know, your hair is pretty long.” He gestures with his wrist, still chewing his way around a mouthful of fried starch, too relaxed to be embarrassed.
“Is it? Cut it, then.” Toji doesn’t miss a beat, tipping his bowl back to shovel more food into his mouth. Shi-woo absently wonders how he keeps his body running with such inhuman sureness when he eats whatever he pleases--perhaps it’s a remnant of that Zen’in discipline, seeping so deeply into his disposition that it’s indistinguishable from his own tastes. With the way he eats, the way he works, he’s veritably ascetic, for all his vices. Still, too, this may simply be a feature of the jujutsu system that’s slipped Shi-woo, and is really none of his concern.
“What? Go to a barber.” Shi-woo snorts at the tease, similarly refusing to back down. Toji takes a long sip from his glass of ice water, drawing the cubes into his mouth and chewing them as Shi-woo winces, warming the floor of his mouth with a draught of his beer. The plastic cup crinkles between his fingers, whitening in the bends.
“Why spend the money and end up passing on a chance to get treated by my favorite middleman?” Toji smiles, sly and slow-spreading across his face, and it is then that Shi-woo realizes he is completely, one hundred percent serious.
“You’re a child,” Shi-woo huffs, but he cannot find it in him to scorn that childishness, the veritable ascetic Toji is. Toji chews his ice, eyes sliding shut in satisfaction.
It’s a hotel room they end up in, a bare few weeks later, one he paid for, despite knowing the way each milliliter of drained blood translates to its weight in gold for the recently dubbed “sorcerer killer”. Initially, Shi-woo had thought of taking him to his apartment, but he doesn’t know what to do with the urge in his forearms that begs him to lay Toji against the bed he sleeps in, night-after-night, and have his mangy hair splay against his pillow, to crawl over him and cover him with his body--and so he settles, tucking his comb and an electric razor in the side pocket of his satchel, prepared for the next time he catches the man after a job.
“It’s hard to cut hair by artificial light,” Shi-woo muses, his thumb and index stroking at his chin as he kicks his shoes off. Toji’s eyebrows quirk, turning from the station he’d taken on the hotel bed, his shirt already discarded.
“Oh, we weren’t gonna fuck? You got me worked up for nothing.” Ah. So he wasn’t the only one, noticing this--something, between them, this thing that made Toji grabby and touchy and oddly whiny for his attention in a way Shi-woo rarely permits, not even with his women.
Shi-woo groans, slapping his forehead. “No, dumbass, you’re the one who asked for the haircut. I should’ve figured it out when you were so easy to lead here.” Shi-woo crosses the room, his satchel at his hip, grabbing unabashedly at Toji’s crown to tug his hair, tipping his throat back. So white. Looks easy to bruise. He dismisses the thought, keeps dragging him until he’s hauled off the bed, “Come on, mutt, time for grooming.”
Something dim passes through Toji’s eyes at that, a play of the light over the stiff face of a cadaver, and Shi-woo catalogues the memory, however hopelessly he wishes that he wouldn’t, knowing he’ll turn it over later. Still, Toji follows to the bathroom, head giving a few perfunctory twists of resistance, if only to give an excessive reminder of how truly outmatched Shi-woo is, as if he could ever forget. He fumbles for the switch, illuminating the space; it feels too white, too clean for such a low-end hotel bathroom, and he’s struck with tandem, paradoxical urges of both non-belonging and ruination. Toji’s hands will leave sanguine stains. What place does he have? What sort of pollutant weighs his human limbs?
“Wet your head,” He holds back another insult, still processing that previous memory, feeling the texture of the strange, spectral void of Toji’s iris against the calloused pads of his fingers. He slips back into the room to grab a chair when he hears the shower begin to run, Toji having stood tubside and simply leaning into the spray. His hair falls across his head, the very tip of his nose just barely peeking through as it cascades down his face, sleek and dark, black water flooding him to the sternum.
Toji is sitting on the toilet when he’s back, rivulets of water trailing down his bare chest, catching in the shadow of his jugular, making him shine even where it’s dark, and Shi-woo’s throat feels tight, dry, desperate for the sting of tobacco and the rush of nicotine. The bathroom is horribly wet, the round edges of newly formed puddles splashed all across the nauseating white, and it only intensifies that sterile sensation Shi-woo is overwhelmed with, building pressure behind his temples, Wordlessly, he urges him to sit in the chair he’d propped before the mirror, facing away from the vanity. He fishes through the bag--no, just the shears, he has no use for the electric clipper here, he doesn’t know what he was thinking.
Still silent, Toji spreads his legs, but his mouth is smile-stained, darkened with mirth. We weren’t gonna fuck? Shi-woo flushes, but he takes his place between them, even going so far as to kneel--once more, refusing to back down. He reads the minute twitch of Toji’s fingers as they lay against his thighs to be a fluster, and he takes the win with a cool glide of the closed blades of the shears against Toji’s marble jaw. It tightens under the pass of metal, sinew shifting beneath the skin, but he does not flinch, does not shelter. Water drips onto the blades, and he can see himself through the fisheye lens of the tiny beads of moisture, unrecognizable. He slides them past his cheekbone, gliding them into where the hair lays flat against his skull, the very start of his sideburns, and the droplets of water burst.
Toji looks straight forward, and on first appearance, seems to be looking at Shi-woo; on re-examination, he peers right through, or maybe doesn’t peer at all, pupils dilated, unanchored, everything before him indistinguishable static. Still, though, he notices Shi-woo watching him, and in an instant his predator gaze snaps to his eyes, which makes him shiver, hands wavering--oddly, to his mouth, too, following the thin arch of his cupid’s bow, to the corner where the skin is just dry enough to pinken. Perhaps this is why he does not look, cannot afford to leave so many smoldering holes in the lining of reality with the intensity of his stare. Toji offers him the shadow of a smile.
Stilling his hands, Shi-woo cards through his hair, swiveling the shears so the blade now rests between the creases of his palms. He feels through the damp locks, degreased for the flush of clean water, but still oily at the root, and he gives a slow, intimate scratch there, attempting to disperse the oil through the length of each strand. Toji’s throat rumbles around a pleasured hum, unashamed of the impulse of his body.
“Barber’s not nearly as nice as you are.” Toji purrs absently, and Shi-woo flips his bangs back over his head, thwacking wetly against his face. Toji laughs, water following the line of his nose, the creases beneath his eyes, and it makes his visible smile look young, pliant, innocent if not for the warped texturing of the scar that twists his lip. Something about this--it’s not so different, from taking him home, from laying him down in his bed and seeing him bare.
Shi-woo swallows hard, taking his bangs between index and middle finger to gauge a straight cut, and slips the shears beneath his hand so that the blade glances his palms. He begins to snip, and, in the privacy of the dark beneath his bangs, brow and temple sheltered by the flesh brunt of Shi-woo’s palm, the steel edge of his shears, Toji’s face only lightens, his smile sweetening.
He stands him before the mirror, posed vaguely like a child and their parent on a picture day, with his hands placed gingerly on Toji’s shoulders, dusting coarse hair clippings from his skin. They itch beneath his palms, but he ignores it to cast an appraising glance over Toji’s ridiculously broad silhouette. It’s just a trim, but it sharpens Toji, somehow, as if he’s been slipped from his sheath, the hamon edge visible through around the gap in below the handle, in the cut of Toji’s jaw and the bareness of his temples.
“It looks good.” Toji chirps, and then he turns around, gripping Shi-woo’s hips with enough of a fraction of his strength that he feels the capillaries burst beneath the prints of his hands. And then he kisses him soundly--long, slow, not quite wet but not exactly dry. Shi-woo’s hands fall with the suddenness of the motion, slapping painfully to the counter where they scramble for a few moments before dragging across the musculature of his back. Back up to his nape, scattering clippings across the white ridges of his knuckles, willfully scratching his palms.
(Toji has not had his hair cut since he was twelve, not if that time he had snagged his head in a chainlink fence and had to saw himself loose doesn't count. His mother and her conditionally patient hands, roaming his scalp as if a neat trim and a new yukata would bring him a cursed technique, ignoring the dead, suctioning hollow from his gangly bones that repulsed every sorcerer for the foreignness of it. She’s on the cusp, of acknowledging what she has done, birthed some alien, her pristine Zen’in womb overtaken impossibly by this--this parasite, and soon she will slit her belly for the offense, and make him watch with the same conditional tenderness she exhibits here. But she’s not there yet, and so she cleans him, and grooms him, and the animal thing beneath his breastbone wants to howl for it, preening at the exquisite pain of it all.)
(It does not hurt, here--nor does it make his body fill with syrupy ink, clotting his throat and lungs and eyes--to be touched by Shi-woo, to have him care for the functional monument of his body in a way no one had before. )
“You can fuck me, now, if you’re down.” Toji hums, hardly receding, mouth trailing from the corner of his lip--the dry one, the pink one--to the corner of his jaw, moistly dragging against the skin as if he can’t stand to be farther, “Thanks.”
Shi-woo gives a sigh, and the expansion of his chest pushes into where Toji is pressed flush against him, just the bit of resistance stopping the pull of his diaphragm that makes him feel just barely lightheaded. He doesn’t mix business and pleasure, he really doesn’t, he abides by that, but-- What’s the worst that can happen?
“Alright. Since we’re here anyway.”