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There is a dream a mountain forest sees when it sleeps. It's not a peaceful dream - nor should it be. That would be false and the mountain doesn't do falsity. Void and sacrifice and deprivation - a life's tumescence, sloshing and marinating. Not a primordial soup - not anymore - but it is viscous and green and invidious. It takes and it takes and it takes.
And, so - the dream. In it, the selfsame reality unfolds - rustling and primordial. Things that aren't old - because time doesn't stretch like it should. Instead, it is honed to a point. A singular awareness of no awareness. A snail on the slope, with moisture its only guide. A dissolution of form but not function. A stick insect, consumed by dark and fractal forms.
Pain has no imprint and no value outside of itself - and why should it? Why would it? What would such cruelty bring the forest? Who could possibly choose to take another's pain? There's plenty to go around and there will be even more when things dwindle and die and rust. The ending is known.
And so, the pain isn't shared - it evaporates and floats. Places don't remember the dead, but they would be grateful if they could be. If the forest could be. In a dream, amid the fear and the chase and the death, sometimes it is.
Sometimes, there is an echo, groping in the dark. A form without function, a bolus of meat and angles and imposition of order. They come and they come and they take and they give. Often when they do, they give of themselves. The same, again and again. A dissolution. It's hard for the forest to puzzle that one out. There's nothing to puzzle out with. If it could, maybe it would think that it's penance - for all the deaths wrought. Sometimes, it dreams of a procession - upright, hairless apes marching over the hill, towards the dawn. Towards the yawning dark and the murky shapes in it.
The forest knows fear, though. Or, rather, it knows its smell and taste. Doesn't have to dream it, though it does just the same. If it had hubris, it would imagine itself to be the source. The progenitor. It would be wrong, for it's merely a vessel. Everything is a vessel, but some things are also the whole. The groping hands in the dark.
The forest dreams of those hands sometimes, rustling and thumbing through its trees like ribs. Sees them reach for holes and crevices, sees the digits root for life and for meaning. Tasting and learning - finding the light. Sometimes, it dreams of looking, too - feeling beyond the color and the shape and the smell of fear. Of hunger. A thought forms, lonesome and adrift - what would it feel like to be afraid? Alive? Dead? If it could wake, it would wake with a start before the relief would set in. But the forest doesn't know relief.
Sometimes, it dreams of its hands caressing the dead. The solemnity of carrion. The purple and crimson lattice reformed and rearranged by a hand that does not know what it does not know. If there would be thought behind it, then it would be experimentation.
As it is, it's only a dream of itself in itself. It should be a closed loop, and, in the end, it is. Drawing inwards and weaving the tapestry of form and only form. It would be admirable if there was anything that could admire it. Instead, it just floats - a circling gyre, ever incorporating what it can and cannot. An appetite without hunger. If only it could see itself - but it sees only light, and so it is blind.
Still, one time and one time only, the dream changes, and it's enough.
In it, a hand clasps a hand, thoughtless and ravenous, but the lattice does not yield itself to the touch. Instead, it opens its yawning maw and the forest - finally and truly - learns what fear is. The tyranny of a synapse, of forced data transfer. It learns what lying is and it knows the lies it has told itself. It learns what it means to not belong and, in the dream, the wind starts to howl. It can't help but learn the words for so many things and - worst of all - it learns the pain. It learns what a heart is and the difference between the lies of the heart and the lies of the mind. It learns of yearning and of skin and the difference between a friend and a friend and a friend.
It knows how to deny itself, how to hate itself and it applies that lesson in full when it sees its hand in the hand of the cruel tyrant, covered in red and dead and dying and his eyes becoming its grey eyes, now red too but also painfully alive. Itself looking at itself looking at itself. A feeling of a feeling. A cascade of light, cold and pale and alive.
It's all it can do but sever the hand, the synapse, the dream.
And when the forest wakes, it forgets quickly - the words and the words and the names and the moles and the hair and the boy and... The yearning? No such thing. Only a form. Only a function.
Since then and once in a while, the forest dreams of a different hand. A hand of light, warm and giving. Without greed or pain, it thumbs through its trees and crevasses with love and joy and discovery. The opposite of pain and fear and hunger.
But then, it goes away, and the forest dreams of the words and the yearning and the boy with the black hair. It wants to wake and forget, but cruelty is the point.
And so, the forest dreams. Of the snail, of the hands, of the hurting. Maybe someday, it will find its way back - to the words, to the pain, to the tyrant. Bring him back - bring the boy with him, too. Share its pain, share its form and its function.
But, for now, it dreams.
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That's how he wakes, sometimes, these days - a feeling of a dull, hollow ache as the hand of his mind gropes for the link and finds nothing, finds less than nothing. An absence of space where there was nothing before - no thing. A big hole where everything was - and nothing to fill it.
He scowls to himself - it's not the right thought. Doesn't suit him, doesn't suit the one who took him. Is this what Yoshiki called ironic? A thought, a himself, stolen and taken. Snatched up.
He liked the way that sounded in the box inside his mind. Snatched up. Words feeling right. The shape and the texture and the feeling.
He didn't even know it was there, until a few days ago, Yoshiki asked him if he can... What was it? Rotate an apple in his mind? What a joke. For a second, he didn't even know what he meant by an apple - but the helpful hand inside the mind box showed him, and there it went - spinning and spinning and smooth. Was funny enough to make his laugh startle Yoshiki, and it also made him sad somehow - but that's normal, apparently, or so the hand has shown him.
He was scared for a while there, because he had felt Yoshiki before. A familiar light on the mountain. Maybe he knew something? But instead, Yoshiki accepted him like everyone else, and so his new life began. Another, new light, made for him. Guided to him by the hand in his mind.
“This is it. The brightness and the shape. Give it home. Give it space and make it not-one” said the hand-voice.
There were more words there, but by then, it was too late and the voice became the hand that had no more words for him to understand. Only shapes and images. A smile, a head. A guilt. He knew guilt well, and the hand wasn't the first one to bring guilt to him, but this was different. This felt right. Made him feel things, think thoughts. Chew through their shapes, be himself.
He liked these thoughts and things in his "mind" - at least, much more than the rigid numbers. The algebra. Not a good thought - thorny, like the ones and the sevens. And when the letters are mixed with numbers? That's even worse - and, worst of all, the hand in the mind box doesn't help, doesn't show much at all, so he's left to just sit there and feel dumb.
Nobody around him is surprised when that happens though, so he shouldn't mind it, but he does. He wants to know and to see. To taste and feel and find. Who knows when he has to go back to the mountain? Who knows when this ends and he can no longer fulfill his promise?
A part of him - the guilty part that knows so well what guilt is - wants to just take Yoshiki and leave. After all, wouldn't the best protection be inside himself? But he doesn't know and doesn't suspect - and he himself is afraid of rejection, no matter how much the hand in the box shows him that it would be okay, that Yoshiki is different. Maybe he doesn't want him to be different - maybe that's the scariest thing of all.
Maybe the thorny algebra is his punishment - and this thought brings something back, an awareness of the hands and of the trees and the smell of damp soil.
"Hey. Hikaru. What's wrong?"
It's Yoshiki's whispering voice, crashing through the smell and the fog and bringing him back - to the awareness of the pencil and the lacquered wood and the empty page before him. Surrounded by people in a square room, in a square block, in a place where trees and animals go to die.
"Hikaru!" Yoshiki is almost hissing and the concern in his voice does something to the thread in his heart of hearts. Another soft pull on the spool of yearning that's not his but is his and has always been his and only his.
"There's like five minutes left for this quiz - what are you doing?" He's not even mad - just exasperated, like he often is.
"Hah, well - I guess I'm screwed then, aren't I? Dontcha worry though, it's gonna be fine, you'll see." Him whispering like this doesn't sound as good as when Yoshiki does it and it would be okay, but something's wrong. He's smiling with his eyes like he knows he's supposed to when it's time to be like this, but something in Yoshiki's eyes tells him that he missed a beat. Fell out of some unseen rhythm once again.
Just like that, the cold yanking feeling is back in his heart and he feels alone again - just like he did back in the forest where he found togetherness and loneliness, hate and love. Where form found function found heart and brain and the spooling black became red and flowing and not exactly his. But he can't panic, not here and not now or everything will be over.
And so, he takes Yoshiki and he spins him in his mind's box, letting his hand and Hikaru's hand hold him. Cup him. Feel his form and skin and fragility. Breathing life into him and from him and taking... something. He doesn't know. He's run out of words.
But the moment has passed and Yoshiki is back to scrawling on his paper while he's biting his lip so hard it feels like it's going to draw out the red, even though it never does. Maybe it should. Maybe he wants it to. Maybe both of them do.
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Words are still awkward and difficult. Much more so than thoughts. To him, thoughts are just light trapped in a bubble, spinning and spinning only for him - for where the we ends and us begins. But words are different - leaves torn and released into the wind, with only hopes and a wish for connection to carry them. They flounder and flounder and he - Hikaru. Hikaru can only watch. Form lost and function forgotten in distraught eyes.
He has to remind himself of who he now is, of where the grasp can't reach. Who he is there for. And there's no more “mind box”. Stupid, he thinks. There were a lot of stupid thoughts back then.
How could he possibly think that he had fooled his Yoshiki? Yoshiki who sees so much, who is so smart and bright. When this began, Hikaru was scared of having to go back up the mountain. Of breaking the promise because of the promise. Now, he's afraid of so much more. Afraid for Yoshiki and of Yoshiki and of what he can do for Yoshiki. What he wants to do to Yoshiki. And, worst of all, they're all his thoughts and fears and wants. The more he is, the more he is alone. A function beyond form.
He feels the tug and the pull of the old trees and stones and wind inside him. The shapes forming the ridges and valleys. The vessel which his insides and he himself fill. They long for the light, for its texture, for its slick warmth. The digits running through, counting the ribs and crevasses and the crevices and the thumb pulling the skin down and the thoughts groping for dark moles. Memories that are only his even though he'd never even had the urge to jerk off - much less tried it.
Between the times they've mixed and the impurities and the fear of being discovered, it all almost feels like too much. Like his world is losing its shape, like he's losing himself and Yoshiki to everyone else. Scared and confused. That's when he feels it the most - the call to take Yoshiki. To bring him to the mountain. To take the light and gorge himself on it. If just his hand inside him felt so good and so right and so pure, what would the sun feel like?
Maybe he'd disappear - and Yoshiki certainly would. Or maybe they'd be one, going back - now together - to being the thing on the mountain. One becoming two becoming one. A form with a function, free from awareness of hunger and loneliness and fear. Yoshiki for him and him for Yoshiki.
He hates that this is what he always ends up thinking of after he's crying. It's the feeling of not having a home, not having a light. And then, he hates himself even more, because it's clear that he's weak and Yoshiki needs him and he's endured so much and he must have endured this too. And Hikaru can lie and pretend that the box doesn't have anything to show anymore, that he doesn't know what death is and what he's done, but he's always known.
Ever since the box showed him Crowley, he'd known. The solemnity of carrion and loss. And Yoshiki bears it, with pain and honesty, while he, himself, lies and pretends that death is no loss. Fucking coward, he's always been one - a liar and a coward, always getting in trouble and…
Would Yoshiki ever really want to be with him? And what if all he does is bind Yoshiki to himself? It's supposed to be him for Yoshiki, not the other way around. Instead, it's just guilt and sin and sickness and the curse. That's what he gets for being an Indou.
And that's how it happens often these days - the thought’s absurdity pierces through the fog and he remembers with a rueful laugh that that's not true, not how it is. And it hurts even more.
But, still - he promised, and Yoshiki has made promises too. And so, he'll bear the sin, bear the form. Until the function breaks him and he has to go back. To the trees and to the stone and to the carrion. To where things will grow beside the dead.