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This dream again. This memory. It goes like this:
Hikaru on Yoshiki’s bed, Yoshiki on an old futon right beside it. They might have been able to both sleep on the bed with some space between them last year, before they started middle school, but they were too old to be doing that kind of thing.
“It’s true,” Hikaru said, laying on his side and looking down at Yoshiki as he spoke animatedly, “That Maki kid showed me this magazine sayin’ the way to take off a girl’s bra is to reach around while you’re kissin’ and do it quick by pinchin’ and slidin’ your fingers like this.”
Yoshiki scoffed, rolling his eyes away from Hikaru’s demonstration. He felt uncomfortable when talk turned to girls and sexy stuff. “That ain’t worth worrying about.”
Hikaru grinned down at him, a mischievous glint in his eyes. “Nah, girls are gonna be all over us by the time we get to high school. I bet you’re late to class every day ‘cuz they won’t leave you alone. You’re gonna have to dodge ‘em jumpin’ outta the bushes to confess their love!”
“That’s enough outta you,” Yoshiki grumbled, trying to leverage all the authority that his months of seniority afforded him.
Mussing up Hikaru’s hair usually worked to cut off his nonsense, but that time Hikaru dodged him. He reached his arms out into the open air to pantomime wrapping them around some poor girl—and moving his hands animatedly up and down the back of her abnormally long torso, from the looks of it—as he puckered his lips and chirped out a falsetto, “Oh, Yoshiki, yer sooo mature!”
And in the midst of the laughing and the wild gesticulations and evading Yoshiki’s annoyed swatting-away of his hands, Hikaru over-reached.
It’s a short fall, so at least neither of them wound up hurt.
Yoshiki froze like a pinned insect under the weight of Hikaru on top of him. Like this, pressed chest to chest, he could really feel every percussive pulse of Hikaru’s laughter.
The pressure of another body against his—of Hikaru’s body against his. Legs over legs and heart over heart and his hot breath on Yoshiki’s neck and all of him alive and hot and loud and squirming and heavy and—
“Get the hell offa me, I’m gonna suffocate,” Yoshiki snapped as he finally wriggled an arm free and pushed Hikaru’s face directly upward, palm to chin.
Hikaru lifted himself up, beaming down with a shit-eating grin. “It’s cuz my muscles are gettin’ so big!”
“Just get offa me,” Yoshiki repeated, louder than he really needed to. Maybe it had to do with feeling trapped like this, but he felt like he might not be able to stop shouting if he got started. He took a deep breath and forced his voice down to a normal volume. “It’s too late to be rough-housin’. I don’t wanna get in trouble if we wake up Kaoru again.”
Hikaru agreed and rolled himself off of Yoshiki with no further complaints. “Yer right,” he said as he crawled back onto the bed, and punctuated it with a massive yawn. “But it was fun last time, playin’ little kid games with her up past her bed time.”
They hardly said another word after that, due in no small part to Yoshiki laying stone-still and forcing himself to take inconspicuously even breaths as he thought himself in absolute circles. Blissfully ignorant, Hikaru fell asleep like turning off a lightswitch—same as always—open-mouthed and snoring peacefully just out of sight but so terribly close.
I never felt this way before.
Yoshiki returned to that thought as he puzzled through the live-wire nerves that kept him awake. He fixated on replaying the fleeting moments of Hikaru falling and landing on him, and he couldn’t sort out why. It was unexpected, sure, but they’d done enough tussling growing up that there was a precedent for close contact. Not lately, and not like that, but still. They had history.
I never felt this way before.
Laying still, eyes open but unfocused, he could still feel Hikaru’s body against his own. He imagined it, over and over, until it was seared into his muscle memory: The fear and anticipation and the moment of impact, a frisson of something frightening and magnetic coursing down his whole body like an electric shock. Hikaru laughing, voice vibrating so close he could feel it in his own chest.
I never felt this way before.
He wanted to feel it again with an intensity that meant he could never, never let that happen. The way that he longed for it without even knowing what it was he wanted or why was unprecedented and terrifying. He couldn’t just accept it as animal instinct, people needed to have reasons for wanting.
I never felt right before.
The thought hit like a bell that can’t be unrung.
Yoshiki stared up at the dark of his ceiling and silently began the slow and solitary task of reshaping what he knew about himself—which began with this sleepless night where he tried to consider the possibility that he got it all wrong even though he knew that wasn’t the case.
It felt right.
Years go by and in that memory, or the dream of the memory, he never feels any less certain than he did that night.
“Since when?” Yoshiki asks, alarmed to hear Hikaru reacting to pain.
“Since I split myself,” Hikaru admits with an apologetic smile before he returns to plucking the larger bits of debris out from the scrape in his knee, hissing when he touches the exposed flesh.
“You shoulda said something,” Yoshiki says. He means to sound more scolding, but doesn’t quite get there when his thoughts have already turned to how this is his own fault—for Hikaru splitting, not for the way he can’t take a turn at a reasonable speed.
Hikaru rolls the leg of his pants up past the newly-torn hole in the knee on one leg. Satisfied that his bike wasn’t damaged in the fall, they resume their commute back to Kubitachi where Yoshiki’s manga awaits.
“I ain’t gonna break!” Hikaru grouses the second time Yoshiki makes a turn with over-abundant caution. “It only stings a little bit!”
“It hurtin’ at all is the problem,” Yoshiki replies, stubbornly maintaining a slower pace. “Yer lucky your momma is used to mending holes in your clothes.”
And now I’m used to cleanin’ yer blood offa them, he thinks humorlessly.
Yoshiki looks sidelong at the narrow trail of blood down the side of Hikaru’s calf, bright red against his pale skin. He would’ve healed it before anything could’ve welled up out of him before he’d gone and weakened himself for the sake of appeasing Yoshiki’s fear. It’s not his fault that Hikaru slipped on the turn, but it sure as hell feels like his fault that he’s injured.
Given enough time, Yoshiki can take on the responsibility for anything from attempted murder to a skinned knee.
The streak of blood dries along the shallow dip between Hikaru’s shin and well-defined calf muscle.
Yoshiki sets his eyes firmly back on the road.
“Hey,” Hikaru calls out, “it’d be bad to rinse it with pocari, right?”
“‘Course it would!”
“These make me look like a little kid,” Hikaru whines. The way he kicks his legs to demonstrate, the cuffs of the pants flapping loose around his feet, does nothing to disprove that point.
There was no way in hell Yoshiki was going to allow Hikaru on his bed with all that dirt on his clothes even after he’d cleaned up his leg.
“That’s ‘cause you are a kid,” Yoshiki replies, scrolling absentmindedly on his phone. Lots of decent clips of spiderwebs on his feed so far today.
Hikaru’s uniform will be out of the wash soon, but the indignity of confronting the ten centimeters Yoshiki has on him merits some performative complaining. “You always gotta hold the fact that you’re taller over me!”
“Well where the hell else am I supposed to hold it?” Yoshiki stays where he’s at, lying on his side on the floor and facing away from the bed, so Hikaru can’t see his smirk. He hesitates a moment, then asks, “How come you didn’t say anything about feelin’ hurt before?”
“Hm? Well… It didn’t really come up,” Hikaru says slowly, letting his voice trail off as he pauses before adding, “and I didn’t want you to think it’s yer fault or anythin’.”
“‘Course it is,” Yoshiki mutters, wincing. They’re close enough that even without all of his past memories it makes sense that Hikaru would be able to predict his reaction, but it still feels awkward to be so known. He sighs and turns his phone off, placing it facedown on the floor as he glances back over his shoulder. “Any other changes you oughtta tell me about?”
“Don’t think so…” Hikaru says, pursing his lips as he considers the question. He mirrors Yoshiki, laying his manga down with the pages spread to save his place. “Nothin’ else I’ve noticed yet, anyway.”
“Seems like a bad deal for you,” he laughs humorlessly.
“How d’you mean?”
Yoshiki rolls over so that he’s propped up on his elbows now, tired of twisting his neck. He’s not wondering anything strange, but he feels pressured to word his answer carefully. “I thought it might be somethin’ like… yer body feelin’ everything stronger. Good stuff too.”
It’s not that he wants Hikaru to feel more like a human. He just wants to not feel like he made the worst choice for everyone. It’s selfish, really, but maybe the guilt Yoshiki feels gnawing at him from all sides would be less intense if halving himself had also made Hikaru able to enjoy the things he liked even more.
He’s not sure how to reconcile feeling like he’s damaged Hikaru in some irreparable way with the fact that some wretched part of himself does feel more safe knowing he’ll have a harder time hurting someone else—intentionally or otherwise. In spite of his best intentions, all he’s done is taint Hikaru after all.
“I’m still enjoyin’ things the same,” Hikaru says, giving it his full consideration, “I don’t think bein’ weaker would change that. I guess I gotta be more careful I don’t burn myself on hot food now, though. Wait,” he gasps, “were you thinkin’ somethin’ pervy?”
“Dumbass,” Yoshiki snaps, reaching up to ruffle his hand hard through Hikaru’s hair.
Hikaru laughs through it, grinning brightly once he’s able to raise his head again. “Yer lucky that doesn’t feel better! What wouldja do if I started moanin’ an’ stuff cuz you pet my head?”
Even as he narrows his eyes sternly, Yoshiki can feel his face getting hot. “I’d stop lettin’ ya read my manga and you’d never find out who wins the tournament in that one.”
It’s a realistic threat, so Hikaru sobers and scoots the volume back on the bed so that it’s further out of Yoshiki’s reach. “It feels the same,” he reasserts hastily, “the good stuff feels the same. ”
“Okay then,” Yoshiki says.
It feels awkward now. He shouldn’t have asked. He returns to his phone, laying on his back and scrolling back through an endless parade of time lapses of beetle larvae hatching and maturing. Hikaru’s reading again. The moment has passed and the time for questions is over. If he had wanted to know something specific, he should’ve just come out and said so.
And yet, he’s still thinking about it. There’s a lingering curiosity that he can’t shake. He can ignore it and push it down—he’s good at that—but it’ll still be there. Maybe it’s something he ought to know—for the next time it happens anyway.
They should probably know, right? It’s important that they know what to expect, right?
This isn’t just him tricking himself into believing his disgusting thoughts are rational, right?
“Hey, Hikaru,” he asks. Careful. Disinterested. Casual. His thumb still flicking through the feed on his phone. His body too still. His heart is picking up its pace.
“Mm?”
“Do your insides feel the same?”
Hikaru hums and sets the book back down, rolling onto his side on the edge of the bed again so he can look down at Yoshiki—who is resolutely not making eye contact—as he considers it. “Nothin’s changed that I noticed, but I try to keep ‘em in. I dunno if it’d feel different or not if you touched ‘em.”
The unasked question hangs heavy in the air between them.
Yoshiki’s face is hot and his hands are cold and he doesn’t know how to walk this back or move it forward and he doesn’t know which of those two things he wants so he is trapped, pinned down by Hikaru’s eyes, and he can’t even look back at him.
“Do you wanna try it out?” Hikaru asks quietly, vulnerably, gracious enough to cover for Yoshiki’s cowardice.
“Just to find out,” Yoshiki says, relieved and terrified. He sets his phone down again and clenches his fist to try to mask the way he’s shaking.
They’re just doing their due diligence. Just figuring out if they need a contingency plan for those volatile moments when Hikaru can’t hold himself together. They gotta be careful about mixing, and this is a way of making sure they know how to not do that.
It’s responsible. Clinical. Yoshiki’s the one who’s messed up for reacting to it this way—for reacting in any way. Fear would be excusable, but not… not anticipation. Certainly not excitement.
He knows how it is going to feel. Yoshiki knows how disastrously close touching Hikaru has felt akin to confronting truths about himself in the presence of another person—in front of the other person—and he’s setting himself up for it anyway for his own sick self-gratification.
When he wants something like this, he’s supposed to take that as a sign to avoid it at all costs. This kind of want is a creature with beautiful bright coloration—beautiful and poisonous. He’s supposed to know better.
At least this time Hikaru doesn’t say anything to tease him. He just lifts the hem of his shirt—Yoshiki’s shirt—up to bare the soft skin from his stomach to his collar.
There are a lot of things Yoshiki can’t help but notice in his periphery despite his best efforts: His pants on Hikaru’s waist are a little large, a little loose, but not enough to need a belt. Laying on his side like this, his weight settles just a little more toward the mattress and emphasizes the lines of his ribs on top. The shirt is loose too, and the way Hikaru pushed it up straight down the center leaves it modestly draped over his nipples.
All the things he’s not supposed to notice.
And then there’s the one thing he can’t help but focus on—that surreal split down the center of Hikaru’s body. It’s just as unsettling to look at it now even though he’s seen it before, like Hikaru’s body has been sliced open for an autopsy while he’s still living and breathing.
He shudders away from thinking about why that is not an apt comparison.
No longer able to conceal the trembling of his hand, Yoshiki turns his body at the waist as he reaches up and over to Hikaru. He hesitates once he’s a few inches away, steels himself, and tries to wince minimally as he edges just the tips of his fingers into the fathomless darkness beyond the seam.
“That ain’t—“
“I know,” Yoshiki interrupts, teeth gritted. “Just… lemme adjust.”
There’s no wave of nausea yet, and no instinctive repulsion. He just needs to psych himself up for how uncanny it’s going to feel.
Hikaru looks down at Yoshiki’s hand barely breaching his body, his head casually propped up on his hand. “Well, it ain’t really somethin’ I can feel yet.”
“Okay,” Yoshiki says, and chants it a few more times to psych himself up.
It feels strange coming at Hikaru from the side like this—the texture is the same as always, but it’s a new angle. His hand slides in effortlessly without the sides of it stretching the seam open wider and his fingers curve down over the flat plane of Hikaru’s chest from the inside. The unnaturally cool temperature does nothing to ease the tremble in his hand, but at least those shakes are only due to his nerves. There’s nothing external mixing into him, making him feel any strange way about this.
Not that he doesn’t already feel some strange way about it, but at least he comes by that through his own intrinsic abnormality.
Softly, he brushes the pad of his thumb against Hikaru’s skin to test whether or not he can feel the gentle pressure of his fingers pushing out from the inside. He manages not to recoil after confirming that he can, but it’s a near thing.
“Okay,” he says again, taking several deep breaths before stretching his hand up further into Hikaru’s center and away from the safe harbor of his flesh.
Still cold. Still segmented and slick and slightly viscous. So even though Hikaru has half his strength, his body still feels the same to Yoshiki. Now that he knows what to expect it’s no longer viscerally shocking, but it’s still so contrary to what any living thing ought to feel like that he’s a little lightheaded from the deep and fast breaths he’s sucking in.
“Anythin’?” Yoshiki asks, trying not to let his voice come out too strained.
“Yer not really in enough to tell,” Hikaru says slowly, contemplatively. His gaze is softer now but he’s been staring at Yoshiki’s hand this entire time, almost like he’s waiting for some visual cue. “Can you…”
He reaches toward Yoshiki’s wrist slowly, telegraphing his movements obviously enough for Yoshiki to tell him to cut it out if he wants to.
And he should. Of course he should. So of course he doesn’t.
What he does is let Hikaru grab his wrist—nearly matching up with the handprint bruise on his skin—and nudge it up and in a little further. He’s looking out the corner of his eyes now, searching by feel and not sight. Finally, he scoots himself forward on the bed slightly so that Yoshiki’s fingers reach a little deeper. He sighs as his eyes flutter shut and his grip loosens and his face slackens.
“There,” Hikaru says, a redundant echo of what his body language has already communicated.
It all feels the same to Yoshiki. Wherever he is inside of Hikaru, he is completely adrift without any tangible indication of why this point in space is any different than the previous one.
He chases the thought away as best he can—
(The thought that he wants to know how to find the place inside of Hikaru where he most likes to be touched, the places that make him look and sound and feel like this)
—and focuses on trying to contextualize what he feels. He moves his hand tentatively, checking whether he can hold onto any of the segments inside of Hikaru. He tries to close his grip blindly around some sinewy tendril and it slides through his fingers as effortlessly as water. The best he can do is cup some of the matter gently enough that it doesn’t immediately flow over the side of his hand.
For his part, Hikaru does seem to be trying hard to temper his reactions. His eyes are shut tight now, his lips pressed into a flat line. His head slides off his hand, hanging loosely against the bed as he meters out a long exhalation.
“Hard to tell,” Hikaru says in a near-whisper. “If it’s different. It already felt so good.” He opens one of his eyes, focusing hazily on Yoshiki’s hand, and grits out, “You can stop.”
Yoshiki is surprised to hear that from him. It twists something inside of him, hearing that kind of self-control—self-denial—coming from Hikaru. Hikaru, who has been respectful as he’s able to of Yoshiki’s boundaries but who pushes right up against them. It’s gotta be his fault again, right? Making Hikaru feel complicit in his own sick human shame.
It ain’t a good look on him, Yoshiki thinks.
He twists his wrist, trailing his fingertips loosely before splaying them wide.
Hikaru jolts, both eyes open wide as his body jumps up too far forward, tipping over the edge of the mattress and falling ragdoll-limbed onto Yoshiki, who had just barely managed to pull his hand back in time to avoid finding out what, if anything, it would feel like to hit the back of Hikaru’s body from the inside.
It’s difficult to stay as still as Yoshiki is now. He wants to shove Hikaru away, to scramble out from under him and remove himself from the recreation of this dreaded and longed-for tableau. He wants to shout something sharper than he feels because if he can make Hikaru think he hates this enough then he’ll avoid it on his own and Yoshiki won’t be at the mercy of his own restraint.
But Hikaru has been volatile in situations like this one, where they’re so treacherously close to mixing. Try as he might not to fear the inhuman parts of him, Yoshiki has not yet been able to shake the instinctive terror that those undulating tendrils evoke whenever they unfurl from Hikaru’s body. Those gasoline rainbow colors and those sublime tessellations that unsettle themselves too swiftly for his brain to trick itself into a comfortable pareidolia are the true Hikaru, and they will bury themselves between every cell in his body if he provokes them.
The pigmentation of Hikaru’s iris must already be bleeding outside of its boundaries, running like watercolors.
“You okay?” Yoshiki asks in a strained voice, mouth muffled against Hikaru’s collar. He’s still bearing all that dead weight on top of him.
Hikaru doesn’t respond verbally, just nods—nods? it didn’t seem like a shake—his head. It takes another moment before he moves at all, and another small eternity before he lifts his body enough to alleviate the crushing pressure against Yoshiki’s lungs.
His eyes are a little wild. Not… not dripping, but not entirely composed in that human facade that he works so hard to hold together. Looking up into his eyes reminds Yoshiki of how many animals in the world you’re not supposed to turn your back to, and all of the stupid people out there who delude themselves into thinking they have managed to tame one.
The seconds pile up and Hikaru is still unable to compose himself. His body is rigid with tension, Yoshiki can feel it in the legs atop his own and Hikaru’s arms bracketing him, pinning one of his own arms up useless over his head and limiting the range of motion in the other, the hand that had been carelessly strumming through the most volatile parts of Hikaru now laying still at his side.
Yoshiki can feel his heart pounding in his chest. There’s hardly any space between them even with Hikaru supporting more of his own weight, and he finds himself wondering if they’re close enough that Hikaru can feel that panicked rhythm through the centimeters of hot air between them.
“Help,” Hikaru hisses out through gritted teeth, shaking with the effort of keeping himself together after moving the bellows of his body’s lungs and throat and tongue to operate the machinery of his voice. “Please.”
Yoshiki’s shirt hangs loose off Hikaru’s body so he can’t even see whether or not anything’s coming out of it. Maybe if he moved he could peek down the collar of it but theidea feels repulsively opportunistic. Of course he’d think of that when Hikaru is pleading for his help and his own life may be on the line.
Tentatively, without taking the time to consider his options, Yoshiki moves his free hand to slot it into the space between their bodies once more. The backs of his knuckles feel clammy as they brush against the hot skin of Hikaru’s stomach. He tries not to flinch when his fingertips brush against the tendrils of ichor leaking out from the center of Hikaru’s body even though self-preservation demands he pull his hand away—that he turn tail and run from the tiger.
The only way they’re getting through this together is if Yoshiki can resist the urge to flee. Instead, he will take a deep breath in and let it out slowly and he will continue every moment to trust that Hikaru will not harm him—will not harm him irreparably—will not harm him intentionally.
And he amends this because he knows that Hikaru will harm him, and that some of that harm will be irreparable. Because he accepts that his vulnerability and Hikaru’s fallibility are bound to keep colliding even if he tries his hardest not to get hurt and Hikaru tries his hardest not to hurt him. Because if that’s what it takes to stay by Hikaru’s side, he accepts it.
With determination, he’s able to steady the shaking of his body enough not to feel like he is also going to come apart. Carefully, Yoshiki tries nudging some of the undulating mass back up into Hikaru’s body. Being unable to see it through the drape of his shirt feels like a boon allowing him to maintain the thinnest possible veil of deniability about what he is doing.
Hikaru shudders above him with the effort of trying to help recompose himself, to pull himself together again under circumstances where, before, he has always reached out.
Slowly, starting from the bottom of the split at his stomach, Yoshiki traces his fingertips up the seam of Hikaru’s body, guiding the flesh to knit itself together again in his wake. He lets his own eyes fall shut, focusing on feeling for any loose strands of Hikaru that he may be struggling to respool into himself. His pace is—it’s not gratuitously slow, it’s thorough. It has to be. He has to do this right.
All he can feel is burning hot flesh on either side of a line of cold as unfathomable as the vacuum of space as he drags his fingertip all the way up to where the xyphoid process of his sternum ought to be. And then it’s still just Hikaru’s skin against his skin and nothing left hanging outside of him but—but from the inside, so quick and soft he might’ve imagined it, some part of Hikaru brushes against him and then disappears.
He stills his hand against Hikaru’s chest. It’s not… the part that touched him didn’t go inside of him like the other times Hikaru reached out. They didn’t mix. So it’s not a problem, right? As long as Hikaru stays inside of Hikaru, then that ought to be safe.
With his eyes closed and a layer of fabric between them regardless, Yoshiki continues the slow drag of his fingers along the outside of the seam. And, so quick and light that he could pass it off as just an involuntary tremor in his shaking hand, he presses his fingertip past the threshold of Hikaru’s flesh once more, skimming against the slick cool mass inside to mirror the glancing touch he’d felt.
It takes less than the space of a heartbeat—an infinitesimal increment of time with Yoshiki’s own pulse as the metric—for Hikaru to reach back. He’s still gentle. Controlled. It shouldn’t come as such a relief, but it allows Yoshiki to release the fear of his imminent demise and focus on the familiar horror of navigating a situation in which any action he takes will haunt him. And in the wake of mortal terror, that feels like ecstasy.
If he restrains himself, he will hate the way his idle thoughts linger on the what ifs that haunt him even in his sleep. And if he doesn’t? It is just more evidence of his aberrance.
Yoshiki is already here. Back in the same position he has spent so long trying not to rechoreograph. He’s already crossed the line he drew for himself years ago lying in this very spot. And the way Hikaru whines above him when Yoshiki pushes the pad of his fingertip inside again, all high and tight in his throat like he’s still trying to hold it in, is absolution for allowing himself to act in this moment.
Had he even meant it when he’d justified all of this under the guise of checking whether it felt any different to Hikaru now that he was halved, or had that just been a lie that he had convinced himself of to meet his own desires?
And does it matter, does any of the guilt and terror and self-loathing to come matter, when the soft insides of Hikaru are pressing back against his fingertip? He moves his hand upward and Hikaru mirrors, as if they are working in tandem to zipper him back up. Did it still count as something that would corrupt them in equal measure if they only met at the knife’s edge of the boundary between their worlds without quite crossing?
His hand can only move so far up with their bodies this close together. Yoshiki’s at the limit of his reach with his middle finger stretched into the hollow of Hikaru’s throat, that cold mass inside of him still pressing back, unwilling to part from his touch. He can feel the strain in Hikaru’s muscles where they’re still in contact, the arms bracketing his body and legs against his. If he pulls his hand away, Hikaru still might not have the strength to seal himself up the rest of the way alone.
Without allowing himself to think it through, Yoshiki dips his head and stretches to meet the point of contact that he shares with Hikaru, replacing his fingertip with his outstretched tongue.
There’s too little surface area shared for him to taste, but he feels the cold and the uncanny movement of it more acutely. It actually feels—he thinks, irrationally, how would he know?—like another tongue against his own for the way that it slides and quivers with the hesitant potential of motion. He’s lightheaded, hardly able to focus on anything other than the deafening gallop of his heartbeat and the fact that Hikaru could twitch forward and flow into him just as easily as he could—he wouldn’t—lick up into Hikaru.
Without trying to, he tastes the tangy salt-sweat of flesh along either side of his tongue as Hikaru’s flesh reknits itself in his wake. He can feel Hikaru’s relieved sigh reverberate from the column of his throat through his own tongue and into his teeth.
At the underside of Hikaru’s chin, a small swell of ichor spills over just atop the broad flat of his tongue, leaving a bloom of atmospheric cold and poison-sweetbitter that give way to an acidic tang in its wake. Yoshiki stretches forward, tucking the viscous remnants back inside of Hikaru’s body with a couple tentative kitten licks until, at last, the flesh has fully mended itself at the point of his chin.
Hikaru is kind enough to angle his body away to one side when at last he allows himself to collapse again, no longer holding himself back from bursting through his seams by sheer determination.
“That was close!” he exclaims, carding his fingers through his hair and panting through his relief. “I didn’t know I could hold myself in like that!”
Yoshiki collapses right back onto the ground, staring straight at the ceiling. This should probably be a moment of relief, he thinks, because they were able to deescalate without mixing. Nothing irreparable happened. Neither of them is damaged. Hikaru fell on top of him and the world did not end.
Their legs are still overlapped. His heartbeat is still thundering. He can still taste Hikaru, his flesh and his aether.
“Yoshiki,” Hikaru says, waving a hand too close in front of Yoshiki’s face, “you really helped me out.”
“It was my fault in the first place,” Yoshiki murmurs, still resisting the urge to look at Hikaru when he knows already that his face is split in a brilliant smile only inches away.
“You know, I don’t think it felt any different after all,” Hikaru says, “but it still feels really good.”
“Oh…”
Hikaru props himself up on one arm again, leaning into Yoshiki’s space so that he can no longer avoid looking at him. “I know what’s inside me is no good. You don’t gotta touch it again.”
The polite reflex almost kicks in, almost has Yoshiki reassuring him that he’s not gross and he doesn’t mind touching him and that everything is fine and that he likes it, honest. But it’s not really true, and even if it was it’s too close to something viscerally raw and intimate that he can’t fathom exposing to the open air.
So he takes the coward’s way out of it. He ruffles Hikaru’s hair gently and gives him the most honest smile he can muster. And he buries the bright longing in his limbs to feel the press of the body beside him once more after years of starving for the kind of easy closeness he no longer allowed himself. “It’s alright. We’re alright.”