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After the battle, he finds Susanoo watching the fields from the edges of a peat, his golden armor shoes stained red and brown.
Not far from where Susanoo stands, birds and small animals are tearing at the flesh of fallen monsters.
One large bird tugs at a monster’s face, then raises its head up to the sky, and in one single motion swallows a chunk of bloodied flesh, spilling blood and matter.
Susabi watches the way its long, featherless neck bobs up and down and finds himself swallowing too.
That’s when Susanoo notices him.
“Susabi!” he says when he turns, full smile on his face.
It travels down Susabi’s throat like flesh does the bird’s.
But then Susanoo comes over and pats Susabi on the top of his head, just to remind Susabi of his height. Of his place. The skin on Susabi’s face catches fire and the only way to cool it down is to frown and clench his jaw.
He won’t give Susanoo the satisfaction of thinking about his smile, or the way his mouth moves when he says Susabi. He moves away, out of reach, back to watching the fields that sprawl out from the peat, far and wide, clinging to the sides of the mountains in the distance.
He won’t give Susanoo the satisfaction, so he thinks about the Moon Sea, the way the waves formed plateaus, plains, and stretched farther than anyone could see, like the fields do here.
Susanoo catches up to him anyway. He always does.
That’s the cruelest thing about him, Susabi thinks. The cruelest thing about this tyrannical, cruel Executioner is the way he catches up to Susabi and bumps his shoulder against Susabi’s and pouts, asking:
“Why can’t I pat your head? I survived again. Don’t I get a reward?”
“You can’t get one every time.”
“Only the first hundred?” Susanoo crosses his arms, careful to bump against Susabi in the motion. As if he did it on purpose. Almost as if he wanted to touch him too.
“It hasn’t been that many. I haven’t made that many prophecies.”
“But you agree patting your head can be my reward?”
“Of course not,” Susabi hears his own voice rising too high, matching his fists as they clench, trying to soothe the heat scorching his face.
Then he hears Susanoo’s laughter.
“The divine soldiers have set up a bonfire near the camp.”
“They always do.”
After battle, the divine army usually retreats back to the campsite they’ve built expressly for the night, hoping there’ll be no ambush, and light up a bonfire where they burn whatever they can get their hands on while they sit facing the fire.
They’ve done so since Susabi first came to aid Susanoo.
“So you knew,” Susanoo says like he’s caught Susabi out on some kind of lie. “Why don’t you ever join?”
“I don’t like crowds.”
Susanoo doesn’t say anything to that but he makes sure to guide the two of them back to camp and then straight to where the God Generals are sitting around their large bonfire.
Farther away, their tents flap in the wind while the wounded soldiers receive medical attention. Farther back still the mounds where the bodies are buried are still in view.
By the bonfire, the atmosphere is so lively it’s like they’re trying to escape the war, to build a place where it can’t touch them. Here, by the bonfire, the divine soldiers are sharing drinks and food and swapping stories.
When they see their commander, they go quiet for a second before they’re calling out to him, noisy and lively, as if there had been no losses, as if they hadn’t seen countless of soldiers, just like themselves, have their heads ripped out of their bodies by monsters too strong for even themselves, have their hands crushed under gigantic feet. As if here the war couldn’t touch them.
Susabi used to watch them with no understanding, before. The way they followed Susanoo, the way they trusted him, despite hearing Susabi’s prophecies, despite seeing the damage those monsters and the Evil Gods can do.
That was before.
“He chose me,” one of them told Susabi once. They’d both been injured during battle and Susanoo had forced Susabi and the divine soldier to rest. Susabi had thought that might have been his fate, being chosen. But then the soldier said, “But I also chose him.”
Now he understands.
This bonfire too is their choice. The way human soldiers celebrate after battle.
Susanoo finds the two of them a place by the bonfire. Not too close. Not too far. When he sits, he pats the ground on his side. Susabi sees the gold of his armor is still stained. His own armor is stained from battle too. If he sits next to Susanoo they’ll be close to each other that way too. Not the same, but close enough. So he does.
He looks away when Susanoo smiles at him.
The bonfire’s glow is so much dimmer.
A couple of divine soldiers carrying food on a platter come closer to them. They bring food for their commander. Like humans placing offerings at a shrine. In return for their faith, they get Susanoo’s smile.
Susabi has to look away from the scene and clench his fist and his jaw and pretend to not know why he does.
Once they leave, Susanoo offers the platter up to Susabi.
“It’s a human ritual, to bond using food,” he explains.
He likes to explain human customs, not just because he loves them. It’s because Susabi grew up in Takamagahara. He thinks Susabi knows next to nothing of what lies beyond.
“I know.”
“Do you?” he says.
With his long fingers, he grabs one of the rice balls wrapped in seaweed. Susabi watches.
He likes to watch Susanoo put the food in his mouth and then smile at the taste. Even though to Susabi the food itself is bland, he swallows Susanoo’s smile like the birds he saw earlier swallowed flesh.
This time Susanoo puts the food in Susabi’s mouth.
“You opened your mouth before I even told you to,” Susanoo laughs.
Susabi wants to push him away. He doesn’t even know why he felt compelled, when he saw Susanoo’s hand approaching, to open his mouth in expectation.
He wants to push him away but he also wants to know what Susanoo’s fingers taste like, what they would feel like in his mouth.
He does both.
Sliding his tongue on Susanoo’s finger he gets his taste, and then he’s turning away, looking to the bonfire again, cooling himself down with a frown, with the blandness of the food.
“It’s like the ones I used to eat,” Susanoo says, with his own mouth now full of rice.
Susabi only vaguely thinks about how he’d licked Susanoo’s fingers, right before Susanoo put them in his mouth. He only vaguely feels lightheaded and out of breath at the thought.
“When I was a child.”
Susanoo takes another rice ball.
“Not even that much younger than you are now,” he says, in that tone Susabi’s learned not to fall for. “Open wide,” he drawls and despite himself Susabi does, only to watch Susanoo stick the rice ball into his own mouth.
“I’m not a child,” Susabi defends himself.
Susanoo nods but Susabi knows he’s still being mocked.
“One day you’ll grow as tall as I am.”
“I’ll be taller than you.”
The fire crackles in the silence of the night. It’s like the soft roaring silence of the Moon Sea. A hum that expands in the distance, like the fields stretch into the horizon.
Susabi’s concerned with that, the fire, the crackling, the wind on the plains and the fact that he’s not a child, that he’ll show Susanoo, one day, soon, how much he isn’t a child, so he doesn’t notice what Susanoo’s up to until after the fact.
Susanoo speaks at the same time he lies down. He speaks at the same time he lays his head on Susabi’s lap and Susabi flinches, not knowing where to put his hands, displaced from where they rested on his lap, not knowing how best to react.
“I lived among humans, you know?” he speaks as he lays his head, his soft golden hair, his dazzling lightning hair, on Susabi’s lap.
Susabi decides not to react.
His right hand stays suspended in the air, hovering above Susanoo’s body, as his left hovers over Susanoo’s hair, that’s been down for some time now.
Despite himself, he thinks about when he used to lay his head on his Master’s lap. About the way his Master would stroke his hair.
It would take so little to stroke Susanoo’s hair. Maybe even his cheek. Maybe even his lips. Maybe even run his finger over Susanoo’s lips. Maybe even put his fingers into Susanoo’s mouth, the way Susanoo’s were in his mouth just moments ago. Just an infinity ago.
“I used to live among them, when I was a child,” Susanoo’s words fit perfectly within his thoughts, the way his head fits perfectly on his lap. He almost wishes he could tell Susanoo all this. All of this. Down to his last thought. “I had friends, human children, that I would play with.”
Susabi did not know this.
Before meeting Susanoo, all he’d heard about the Executioner of Takamagahara was that he was cruel and moody.
He couldn’t imagine that god living among human children, playing their games, speaking their language. But he can imagine this Susanoo, the one laying his head on Susabi’s lap, the one who keeps on surviving and coming to Susabi for his reward.
“Did you live in this world?”
Susanoo makes a noise Susabi’s learned to recognize as happiness. Sort of the way his smile sounds.
“I did.”
Then he pauses.
Sometimes, Susanoo pauses when he speaks and it’s not unlike the way humans would pause when Susabi, on Bestowing Day, prophecized great disaster or mass death. A pause as if to appreciate the frailty of their lives, the fleeting nature of their own selves, before they carried on, aware of something more, heavy with the same melancholy they always carry.
“Sometimes, when I look at the fields after they’ve been burned, the way they extend all the way out to the mountains in the horizon, I think of my childhood home.”
“Was it near here?” Susabi can’t imagine a worse place to build a home in but he’s seen human settlements in more desolate landscapes thriving against all odds.
“No, not in this world.”
Susabi’s initially confused. He wants to ask what he means.
He knows there’s no place in Takamagahara that looks like the fields Susanoo was staring at earlier. Other than the Moon Sea. And he knows, he just learned, Susanoo spent his childhood in this world.
He’s about to ask when Susanoo speaks again.
He’s about to ask when just before speaking Susanoo places his fingers on Susabi’s knee and starts drawing—or writing—and the gentleness of the touch makes Susabi’s throat dry.
“After I lived in this world, I mean. I lived somewhere else.”
“It,” Susabi starts saying but his voice is so thick, as if heavy with something, warm and thick. He ends up only clearing his throat.
He clears it again after he hears Susanoo make that noise that’s like his smile. Or like he’s laughing at Susabi.
“Can you see in your prophecies if I’ll ever tell you where it is?”
“Of course not,” Susabi says, irritated at the question, at the obvious mockery behind it. “And even if I did, it wouldn’t be certain. You know that,” he toys with the idea of pulling Susanoo’s hair. “I’ve learned. You don’t need to bring it up every time.”
He feels he should say more. Or pull his hair. At least tell Susanoo he’s not a child, he’s grown so much since he first came to join the divine army. He settles with just awkwardly placing the palm of his hand on Susanoo’s head. Susanoo hums.
Susabi thinks about the way Susanoo’s fingers tasted. The way his fingers felt in Susabi’s mouth. The way his mouth might feel. The way his mouth might feel in Susabi’s mouth. His skin on Susabi’s skin. His lips on his skin. His hands on his. His fingers deep in his mouth almost touching his throat his tongue deep in his mouth the wet heat of their lips and their tongues and their breaths and their skin against skin and hand against hand and breathing in the warmth the heat the desperate need to touch him whenever he wants to touch him and his mouth in his mouth and his lips on his skin.
He pulls himself out of his thoughts by staring at the dying bonfire. The burning wood almost down to cinder visible beneath the flames.
“Maybe I will one day.”
Susanoo’s voice is softer, mellower. The movement of the tips of his fingers against Susabi’s knee is slowing down.
“After,” he says, in words drowning in sleep.
Susabi nods.
He understands.
After the battle.
After he’s survived.
After they’ve won.
He runs his fingers through Susanoo’s hair when he’s sure Susanoo’s fallen asleep.
He thinks to himself he’ll tell him too. All of this. Down to his last thought.
After.
When they’ve won.