Work Text:
my blood burns
to give you one night
in the shelter of heightened dreams
god, do not look down on me
who passes through springAkiko Yosano
Above you, the ceiling fan spins in slow listless circles; its blades like aimless wings that can’t reach for the sky.
The world falls back into obscurity in dusk and you almost feel as if you can fade in him; another layer to his skin, numb and petrified in his arms like a skeleton embedded in the earth. This earth becomes a grave. The solace of warmth once, and now, the ghost of it. The haunting.
You run your fingers on linen, fibers like soft sinew, searching for the feeling that has disappeared from your fingertips. Then you turn to his side of the bed, cradled by these cold sheets that you bury closely to your face, breathing in them.
A memory brings out a wistful kind of soreness in you: the sheen of sweat glistens from the hairline. Strands of moonlight. White, like the light leaving his eyes. Your hand curls on his hair at the back of his head. The last string of a gasp, yours and his.
Where are you?
In this moment alone, you don't mind baring this weakness when Kibutsuji can’t see it and you can smother it in another day and cast it aside as if you haven't mulled over it at all. It leaves its own bruises, made dark and tender over recollection, but it aches with reprehension and anything that aches, is still aching, endures more than a mere memory. There are certain things he can't take away from you.
Perhaps, not in the way solitude does.
It echoes everywhere. This state of decay. Mold and melancholia make the wood brittle, like browning bones. The paint cracks with veins.
Inside the silence of a room for two.
Tokyo used to be a place full of the vibrant agitations of life. You never have the same grievances as he has for all its complicated innovations and raucousness. The traffic, the hum of electric wires, the upheavals of modernity in a crowded city.
The Fujiwara’s house there is nice and small, wedged within a street brimming of them; all common in appearance, but with their own separate autonomy and uniqueness.
Here, somewhere in the rural coastline of the Naha-Itoman border, everything is asleep.
An idyllic quiet. Dreamlike in its subtle restlessness, like the distant chirping of insects and the languid whispers of tides that embrace the shore. The noise is fragile and muted and so, so private within a secluded town, made only detached by this old house resting upon the hill.
You can see why Kibutsuji likes it so much. Like the ancient fortress in Kyoto, there is so much history in this one’s structure, built around traditional interiors and tall wooden beams and sliding doors – once, encrusted with mildew, but now lacquered anew with rice paper. Some screens from other rooms come alive from painted sceneries of ethereal gardens with minimal fixtures and little to no illumination. He always values his aesthetics.
The beauty of each painting touched by sunglow is lost to him, much less by the sheer brightness of fluorescent lights. Kibutsuji doesn’t seek for those when he settles for candlelight, made more luminous in the night, where the shadows dance madly and limbs are strewn against the tatami . . .
The eyes of celestial beasts from the paintings watch and pant for the corporeality they can’t have for their own.
Kibutsuji likes that kind of audience. Disembodied spirits, misfortunate souls, murmurs of broken heirlooms.
“You’re depraved,” you whisper, remembering the shortness of your breath until it rolls out of you slow and hoarse. The night is long, and there is no semblance of passion here. Only books, pens, notes, and studies of plants; some fleshed-out in watercolor, others half-finished. His table is always neat and spotless. You’re tempted to spill ink on its surface. “You’re tedious.”
There are several sketches of flowers. Sometimes, his old desires bleed through them and are preserved in pictures of hatchings, shapes, lines—of a curving petal, sprigs of lilies, and then the elegance of hands. Long gracile arms. The outline of a woman’s back. No face, unfortunately.
That’s not something he needs to preserve in paper, much less reminisce about in his pastime.
As the morning arrives, mistily radiant and speckled with an accumulation of dust, it's almost an amusing thought that you are the darkness that lurks inside these walls.
Patina ravages the sheen of brass. Too much exposure from oxygen, from bitter rain, from age. It reemerges with the colors of antiquity and corruption.
Like the flashes of indignation resurfacing, and it comes with a smarting within the sheets creasing around your thighs, where lay all the unsolicited motions that roll out in waves, like a roiling sea under the breakout of a storm, or rather, a storm harbored inside by the stroke of a finger.
You blame your predicament on the deprivation of many things; sleep, peace of mind, sanity. The bed feels incomplete, and you resent the thought of Kibutsuji. The space he leaves behind, his scent, his touch closely resembling your hand. Even when you're touching yourself, all you feel is him.
You attempt to recall other faces, but you are only met with the blankness of the wall.
You heave out a breath. You hold onto that defiance, though the longer it drags, the more it surrenders to the shadow of a man that runs a hand on the curve of your leg, then your ribs, slipping under your shirt to caress your breast, as if writing on your skin, think of me.
You retaliate when your nails bite there, but then you realize that this is something he will also do. Carve you up a little. Tease you. Fondle you some more. What hasn't he done to you that you haven't known already?
You stare at a garment groping on your body. Your finger idly traces on the strap curling out of the neckline of your shirt and delves beneath it, streeling on flowery fields atop the swells of your chest.
Kibutsuji has never bought you any article of clothing that has made you appear undignified and obscene. Your lingerie is even modestly cut and generous enough to fit comfortably, made charming with intricate lace. He likes that. How you wear lace on your body. How he can tear it off you through teeth and claws and fervor.
Lilies uprooted, the body uprooted. Then like a hot knife to a wound, something leaks out of you. Spit, salt, semen; all excrement, dripping from the aching space between your legs.
You sigh, stopping at some point.
You don't want this to end with his name on your mouth. The dissatisfaction can run dry from your thighs, though you've been embittered for so long and while hopeless, even in his prolonged absence, the small victories do matter, but never without grief.
“Isn’t your husband home yet?” asks the old shopkeeper, handing you your change from the counter.
You roll the bills inside your coin purse. “He’s not m—”
You forget, sometimes. The joyless roles you have to play. All for a peaceful life. All for this.
You smile, but it’s empty. “He isn’t.”
You open a box of assorted Okinawan manju and pluck out one without the slightest regard as to what flavor you will come across. You tear off the plastic wrapper and take a tentative bite.
Chocolate. You chew, thinking it's sweeter than red bean and peanut butter manju. It tastes artificial. A lot of the processed food in this time do, either tasting as if it has been deeply saturated with preservatives or . . . has gotten so stale from chemicals, like menthol candy. It's harder to appreciate them, but Kibutsuji insists you continue in this pursuit until you can find something you might like, be it confectionaries or baked bread.
Kibutsuji has been doing that as of late, making you question why he keeps pushing you over such things when you should be questioning yourself for your complacency in indulging him.
The chocolate manju is tolerable, and you decide you might like it better than the others. Only because it tastes convoluted and you don't understand why it has always tasted like that. Sweet. Artificial.
You think of more authentic flavors. Mandarin oranges. Flower teas. Raw meat. You think if it still matters. You think of blood, and blood only tastes like blood. You think how the dullest thing in the world can make you voracious, drinking without desire. You think of his blood, spilt by your ardent lips. You think of poison.
You starve.
Sleep eludes you for days. You attempt to find consolation in the droning of the television or the radio, though nothing seems to captivate you anymore. Every meaning of a song is senseless, and the words are warbled and confusing, like how one gawks at the long paragraphs of a book.
Like how your morning strolls have lost their purpose, weaving in and out of town, of the coastline, of your mindscape. You overhear the local people chatter about the most mundane things, but it doesn’t escape you that there is a disconnect of some sort.
The farther you tread about, the farther you realize your steps have become more desperate and arduous in all the roads and pathways until you realize belatedly that you only find yourself coming back to the house upon the hill.
The door smiles from your return.
When you see his shoes by the door, you are startled by your numbness.
A moment of paralysis where the shock lingers from your toes and the air around you stagnates, until it is interrupted by footfalls, pulses of the wooden floorboards. They are all yours when your legs have found the will to move, one slow step at a time, passing through a narrow vein of corridors, empty rooms, and then towards the open threshold of the veranda that beckons you to come into the garden.
Kibutsuji always keeps small gods in jars and earthenware; their siblings tucked in like growing children beneath a rolling bed of moss and shrubbery that he religiously oft tends in the dark hours before the dawn. The wisteria loom above him in thick flourishing braids of dark purples and blues, perched on what used to be a oak tree; gracefully bent and strangled by its woody vines. It almost appears to be humbled from his presence. Still, you wonder to yourself, staring at the great wistful creature that lulls your blood to sleep.
Why a wisteria, Kibutsuji?
"It's almost morning."
His silence only draws you closer to his side. As if Kibutsuji hasn't heard you, he pores his attention in grafting a discolored twig onto a rootstock of the wisteria, strung together with twine that almost appears like a long sinewy artery beneath the flesh of green bark. Something dark and tar-like seeps out from its skin, made more unnatural by the glow of the morning moon.
Then your hand reaches for the cusp of his shoulder, hesitant at first, but it eases there a second longer when his warmth calls out to you, radiating from the skin beneath his woolen shirt. It doesn't occur to you that your fingers run through his hair, longer and curling along the nape of his neck. At first, you think it’s only a subtle sheen of the light, though as you look closer, you notice a few strands have grown pale as if he . . .
“Kibutsuji.”
"Were you concerned," starts Kibutsuji, bringing your hand to his lips, and you repress a shiver when he speaks with the slightest graze of his teeth, "when I left?"
"No," you shudder out a sigh when the kiss to your palm digs deeper, piercing the swell of flesh there, invigorating him, until it trickles down your fingers. "You always come back."
This time, Kibutsuji turns back and stares at you, mouth pressed to your skin. Something wakes inside you when you feel his warm tongue curl against the pad of your thumb.
"Then welcome me back."
"Welcome back."
It's halfhearted. No more but a lifeless echo of his words. When Kibutsuji gives you a withering glare because of it, you decide to appease him by the hook of your thumb under his chin, angling down his face to yours, lips sealed. He doesn't seem upset though there is something hotblooded in the way he kisses you, vying to rob you of breath as if to keep a part of you inside him after your mouths part from each other. Then he sighs, placing a kiss to your jaw.
"Is something on your mind?" you ask, not unkindly.
"You," Kibutsuji presses your name on the crook of your neck, wrapping his arms around your waist. "I was gone for months."
"You were gone longer than that before," your voice tapers off somewhere along the dark crevices of a memory of endless years, a closed room, the scent of wisteria . . .
"Before," he repeats, more casual and guiltless of his tone, though his hold on you tightens. "You look withdrawn."
"Am I not always?" you tell him, your fingers brushing along his throat, and then the collar of his shirt, undoing the first two buttons. You lean into his skin there; your mouth melting into his heat, the quiescence of his pulse. All of it, all of him. It drives you mad. "I'll ruin this for you. You don't mind?"
"What haven’t you ruined?” Kibutsuji yields to your teeth, unfazed of how much his blood is spilt and drunken by you. It darkly stains the side of his shirt, and you almost tear it back from your thoughtless hunger. You wrench for his shoulders, bruising, shattering bones. Something beneath his skin groans. Makes the ancient darkness in you growl, makes you more insatiable. And he only curls his hand on your hair while the other is pressed on your hip, then the waistband of your pants, “what haven’t you taken for yourself?” and slides down further to grab your rear.
You gasp. When your back arches from his touch, you forcibly push yourself back from him and reach for his wrist, grappled by the vice-grip of your fingers. "You should've have stopped me," you chide, strained and short-winded, as you wipe the blood off your face with the back of your hand. “You should’ve—"
"You wanted more. I don't mind you losing control," Kibutsuji drinks in the sight of you; how starved you are, how unhinged, trembling within his arms.
"Indulge in carelessness again; I might tear you apart one day."
His smile grows more twisted and telling. So reminiscent of another time, flesh shorn and scattered, blood on the earth.
"It’s unbearable, isn’t it? Without me. I know that hunger all too well. I don't mean to leave you by yourself. The journey took longer than it should,” Kibutsuji pulls you into his stride, drawn by him like a tether, as he leads you back inside the house. Then he whispers your name lowly against your ear. “Let me make up for lost time.”
By the aching grasp of his hand, you don’t doubt him.
The kitchen is alive around him. “You’ll make our house into a hovel with that outlook.”
“It’s an old groaning thing,” you say, watching him pour hot water on dried flowers inside an iron teapot. “Something that should be abandoned, forgotten.”
“Nothing is ever forgotten. Ghosts don’t forget.”
“Ghosts don’t care about cleanliness. Or any virtue of perfection you impose on the house.”
“And I don’t give a damn about its imperfections. Clutter is clutter. Memories are rot and they make the floorboards rank. Best be done with them for I'm its master now. It should abide to what I will it to be.”
As Kibutsuji busies himself preparing the tea, you smile and lean back from your chair. “You poison me with all sorts of flowers.”
“Poison is medicine, too. It helps you sleep, doesn't it? If the sun can't kill you, tinctures won't be enough to harm you.”
Sometimes, you find yourself wishing that he put a tree's worth of wisteria on the tea, hoping you can drown and die from a cup.
Then you stare at him in his reserved anticipation when you finally lift the cup to your lips for a sip. You always recount their names – mandragora, artnica montana, brugmansia – as you remember their enmity on your tongue; the grudge of fallen gods, the death of a hundred years, disgraced and culled out of their roots. “Ah, belladonna?”
Sitting down next to you, Kibutsuji smiles amusedly. “Close. It's scopolia carniolica, a cousin.”
The taste is different, more baneful. “It's more potent.”
“Isn’t it? I've read that medieval doctors believed that it had different properties; some for anesthesia, ecstasy, sleeping drought, and others for witchcraft and . . . aphrodisiac,” Kibutsuji stops to contemplate about it, but this doesn’t deter you from taking another drink. “Of course, it proved to be fatal. Most of these claims have no basis of science. It's only a strong poison. Drops can only turn it into medicine of some sort.”
His hand rests over yours from the table, brushing an idle thumb on your knuckles. “Scopolia carniolica . . . would you believe me if the ones I found have grown from Hell itself?”
“Perhaps . . .” your gaze lingers on your joined hands for a second before it returns to meet his eyes. “It doesn’t seem that unlikely of you to venture there.”
“Your sense of humor has gotten dry.”
“Don’t berate me when you don’t have any at all,” you retort, hearing a wisp of a laugh escape from his lips, though you sense that this isn’t from your jab. “Hm, so you have?”
Kibutsuji nods, threading his fingers with yours. “There are all sorts of curious places here, old places.”
“How—”
Then it all blurs; your entwined hands, his face, the kitchen.
You draw in a breath, though it shrivels into a sudden shortness, as your mouth hangs open to swallow air and to spit it out between your lips. A drip, and then another, burning and viscous from your nose, like a line of fire trickling down your chin, unspooling on your fingers and his. Your blood stains the crevices there like an angry jagged scar.
Before you can make sense of the world around you, you feel a handkerchief wrapped over half of your face.
“Chin up. Good. Now, hold it like that,” instructs Kibutsuji, guiding your fingers to apply pressure on the bridge of your nose. He presses a careful hand on your throat; hot and damp with sweat. “You already have a fever. The poison was quicker than I anticipated.”
This’ll be nothing.
“I’d like to lie down on the bed,” you say, nauseous but insouciant of your state, as you shakily attempt to rise from the chair. “Kibutsuji . . . if you will help me there?”
However, the slight twinge of your joints and another bout of vertigo startles you again when you stand up and stumble towards him. When you crumple against his chest, Kibutsuji takes it upon himself to lift you up and carry you to the bedroom himself. “I can walk.”
“Your legs will be useless. It won’t be long for you to undergo a paralysis like before.” It’s a dismissal, his tone and judgement, when Kibutsuji uses his words to overturn you and enforce upon the wretched subtlety that lies beneath all his concern. “Don’t resist. Let me do the rest.”
As Kibutsuji does, you realize how much he always occupies all these unsolicited spaces; always taking residency in them, always taking up the lining of the walls. The doors creak open for him. The dark chambers widen to greet him inside. And in your sickness and temporal atrophy, you succumb to him for countless times. You only wither at the sentiment, wishing to fade into dust.
“Then don’t be so uptight,” you tell him, as Kibutsuji carefully lays you on the bed, taking back his handkerchief from your face when the bleeding has stopped. “You know my body will only learn to heal.”
His eyes tell you everything. They always do. Kibutsuji curiously runs a thumb on your collar first, and then proceeds to lift up your sweater—or is this his? You recall that it’s something you only picked up from the bed earlier ago and haphazardly put on yourself without regarding to whom it belongs to.
Perhaps, it’s his. There’s blood on its cuff and you know how it’ll badly stain there, much to his displeasure. You want to laugh though it only winds out of you as a hoarse sigh; both from the thought and the feel of his hands on your naked shoulders. “How long do you think I'll be like this?”
Kibutsuji dresses you into one of your shirts, guiding your arms into its sleeves. “When you don't want to feel mortal anymore.”
You chuckle somberly. “Is this mortality?”
“Perhaps not. But like this, you look like you are,” his fingers tuck an unruly strand of hair behind your ear, knuckles brushing your cheek. “Isn't that what you want?”
Should Kibutsuji sprawl you into a thousand arteries and bare bones, you will let him only to strip out the flesh of immortality from this body that isn't even yours, these aching breasts that aren't even yours, and these poison-stained lips that are his, his, his.
Yet to be destroyed to be reborn human again is a beautiful thought, fleeting but promising, from the brief kisses of this powerlessness, of this fragility you have once scorned but now implore to a flower, like he has once to another.
“I had hoped it would be fatal. The flowers you give me, the poisons I drink . . .”
“Foolish. You shouldn't hope for such things.”
“Yet you would collect flowers from Hell itself only to feed this foolish hope of mine.”
“You can’t be placated.”
“You can’t, either.”
Then you feel his weight dip from the bed.
The promise of the poison and the absence of months sinks in, eroding stubbornness from the back of your mind when the pliancy of your embrace curls around him. Kibutsuji welcomes it with the same fervor, resting his chin on the top of your head. “So I will kill you slowly, and then I will revive you. I will give you what you want, if only for a moment, though you will return to me; stronger, deathless. Grateful to me.”
“And if I'm not grateful? If I refuse to return . . .” you mutter despondently to his chest when there is no place in this world to return to but here.
“Wherever you are, I will find you and drag you back to me. Heaven nor Hell shan’t have you when you’re mine.”
“Arrogant,” you scold him through the darkness of the fever; close ventures to sleep, tantalizing death from the cold caress of your fingertips on his cheek. This speaks to him with fondness and so he gives in to your palm. “My arrogant fool, will you stay with me?”
Perhaps, Kibutsuji doesn’t realize that where the both of you are is in damnation, confined within the solitude of each other’s arms.
Kibutsuji kisses your forehead, an old promise. “I won’t leave your side until you wake.”
Exposition Corner:
Hell: Jigoku is the Japanese Buddhist word for the hell that has roots to both afterlife beliefs of Eastern mythology; a similar although slightly varied term for this will be Naraka, the traditional Indian Buddhist term for hell, as they both depict hell more as a “hell realm” or a “purgatory”.
Unlike the hell of Christianity, the difference is that while it does hold intense suffering on many levels, it isn’t eternal. Even though it takes ages for a being to dwell there, the beings of Jigoku will eventually emerge and slowly climb their way out of this realm, reflecting the cyclical nature of salvation in Buddhism.
This is just to give everyone some context what kind of hell they are referring to. I’d like to think the themes of limbo and damnation suits the false peacefulness of Perdition more while Absolution is about salvation in the aftermath of suffering.