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MAY THOSE OF US WHO KNOW, KNOW
YOU ARE NOT ALONE
thien-my
muta kokichi knows. there is nothing more to say than that. (aside) he knows; do you? KOKICHI knows the solemn of the sickbed, what it means to be cast away like waste, to waste away, despite the despicable desperation (with never enough measure of appreciation) to make up for the isolation of the sick.
rot and wick; muta kokichi knows the isolation of the sick. do you, though. do You? that’s why he does what he does for a wish. he snuffs out the wicks of lives, of sacrifices by feeding information to mahito, as he does now. scuffing mechamaru’s mechanical boot on the imperfect blades of grass which grant him no touch through the armored mech.
“my, now, aren’t we getting impatient?” mahito laughs, a ticklish, chiming sound.
kokichi wonders if there are such things as ghosts in this world of curses, or if the living so abhor the dead there is nothing left of the past to come back. in the abandoned lot full of bald dirt patches, ants marching in hills, and tall, dry, grass, kokichi breathes a sigh in his medicinal bath. the taste of the air no longer as stale or astringent as it once was.
“my turn is due,” kokichi says.
“and you’ll have it,” mahito laughs. “take me to where your body is, and you’ll have it all.”
kokichi thinks of blue hair and badly cut bangs and a smile like a siren flare. mechamaru nods and draws the enemy in to his desolate chamber of cinadine cin. soon, i’ll be able to walk with you all. my classmates, if not my friends. my classmates, who are more important than ‘friends.’ i’ll be able to stand beside you.
with a wry twist of his lips as mahito and mechamaru step into the hall belying the dark of his den, kokichi says to himself, “whole and incomplete. missing the certain inclination…for such an unheavenly thing. ” it makes sense for himself, as an unalive thing, to have no imagining of the mechanics for procreation, and to know himself, and to know himself as a child of decay, to remember the unheavenly way of the 天与呪縛, TENYO JUBAKU, the way that heaven swayed…and cast him into this.
but kokichi remembers what he shouldn’t.
he remembers a conversation, not with the maker, but with one operator of heaven.
she had said, “ do you want to touch? i’ll give you touch. i’ll give you all of it, child. do you want to touch…? ”
and he woke up without legs, and nothing was ever enough to compensate him for what had been done in that space of heaven’s matrix. even moonlight shan’t touch his skin, when you play against god, you never win, but mahito is not a god. just a curseling.
and kokichi…has dealt with heaven’s wicked dealings.
mahito approaches the tub, humming, sliding his hands on the pipes and the filth of kokichi’s surroundings, the dark, the den, and the deep. mahito laughs, tickling, a ‘he’ of a thing insofar and insomuch as kokichi himself is a ‘he’ of a thing, kokichi looks at mahito, androgynous, and himself, unamused, and knows they are two cards of a kind.
“why, now, you don’t look so bad; see, your HEART is fine! after all, the heart is–”
“nothing more than a mechanism for the soul,” kokichi rasps, his voice barely above a whisper that could disturb dust, unused to being audible, having an audience, unused to being parsed, and seen . in the sour, acidic milk of the medical bath, mahito splashes his hand in the water, and kokichi, now twenty, knows where his hand is reaching.
kokichi may not have legs, but he has that , for all it’s nonresponsive. but response means different things to different people, you should know that, ko-chan.
WHAT KOKICHI MAY
NEVER FIND OUT!
is that such things as curses
have a such thing as TURNABOUT.
and there are such things as ghosts among the living. (or objects like himself, unalive despite every one of his own denials. that he is alive. that he is not an animated corpse of a thing.
but such predilections are not shared…
amongst too many.
BUT THE UNHEAVENLY…
yes.)
kokichi shivers, not accepting, but not rejecting mahito’s touch on his thigh as it skates across his bandages which tingle with bursts of static, lightning, undesignated fire (desire, desire). and he closes his eyes, breath shallow, as he waits for mahito to take , but then mahito takes his hand away.
“i have too many to choose from to pick an unwilling partner, kokichi. though, perhaps…you are not as unwilling as you might seem?”
“i–just.” kokichi can’t get it past his teeth. that he wants it, and he wants it not to matter what he wants, he just wants it done. he writhes in the bathwater, hard and unable to help it, trembling and so full of rotted want it sickens his stomach. “just do it. i–ah!” (mahito touches the head of his cock, transmuting his flesh into ordinary skin starting from that point and undoing him. “i consent, i consent.”)
when it’s over, kokichi has a whole new body, a whole body, with every. single. functioning. part. and enough shame in himself to fill a village. to kill a village. not because i killed all those people, with my hands or not, but… the guilt fills him, not for the amount of candles whose light he snuffed with whispered words and unsacred intel…
BUT THAT HE FELL SO LOW! HE FELL!
to letting mahito touch him.
and liking it.
it’s that , kokichi thinks, which turns the tide of battle. the moment kokichi’s body is whole, he surges out of the bathwater and the ick, hooks his thumb into the curse’s mouth and lip, and smashes his head into the ground, over, and over, and over, and over and over and over , mahito laughing through it, manically, delighted with this new form of pulp and play.
but kokichi does not have the 天与呪縛 TENYO JUBAKU for nothing. and heaven rewards him, with the one in a lifetime conviction to rot an immortal soul. which was his right, his once in a lifetime right to change the tide of fate, as some operator in heaven once changed his tide.
HEAVEN’S WILL flushes through his veins like morphine down an IV drip, after the moon burned his skin so horribly he felt as though he could see the bones within himself. it flushes through him like the stain of a dye for an imaging machine that starts in the vein and goes all the way down, down, down, with heat, flushing between his hips and traveling through his feet.
and with that, with his hands holding mahito’s pulverized head still as he smashes the back of mahito’s skull into the cold, basement cement, red splattering, bone splattering, he reaches into a fissure, grabbing skull-organ meat, and reels in the heart of a curse.
it feels like air, at first.
it feels like nothing. and then, a pearl.
which he bites down on, wishing his jaw would shatter on such an unsacred thing, but the pearl breaks, and dissipates, and the preying hawk loses her wings. mahito’s shape deflates until it melts into a liquid, and down the basement drain on the slightly inclined floor, milky and gooping in globs like his very own cum.
muta kokichi feels like what transpired here is a secret he will tell no-one.
he leaves the basement, for one of the few times in his life, as himself, the first time as himself on two legs, the first time as himself, whole…and resolute in the knowledge he will never accomplish such a feat again.
killing someone with one of the powers of the king of heaven.
he finds a way to bathe himself, he gets clean in a love hotel, the scents and smells of sex and the scum of soap and everything clinging to his head. he changes into mechamaru’s uniform, sized to fit him, in an ideal land, and he is now…
muta kokichi is now, at once, for the first time, MUTA KOKICHI, but he is also unalive, and the things that which he knows keep him unalive, and he may never truly leave the basement with its dead water pipes and the scent of rust in the air, and he may never leave that basement where he lost his virginity (twice? for the second time? the first, long ago … in a history that may have never existed, in the matrix of heaven … the unheavenly net, the web , the metric lace and measure of heaven…)
he wants to see kasumi. he wants to see his classmates.
so he goes. and goes.
but he knows, too. he may never escape his own rape. whether or not that began in a life long ago, to designate him here, and bind him for what he gave away, a trick a trick! a candle wick burnt out. blown…away.
when he sees kasumi, he knows he looks too intently. at her waiting at the gate, holding her katana in her suit, blinking confusedly at him, recognizing the uniform but not the practitioner.
“i don’t recognize you, are you from the tokyo school?” kasumi says, puffing up, falsely resolute.
“you gave me batteries for valentine’s day,” kokichi blurts, and then finds his whole face blushing red in humiliation, how the FUCK could he ever think he could communicate with her. she’s so…
kasumi wrinkles her eyebrows and laughs. “excuse me? i only did that to…MECHAMARU?”
“my name is muta kokichi.”
“kasumi miwa. oh. but…you…already knew that, because you’re mechamaru…I PROMISE I’M NOT THIS STUPID ALL THE TIME, I’M NOT STUPID AT ALL REALLY, just a little gullible, but you know, it happens to the best of us, though, maybe not you, oh, i didn’t know you’d be so handsome ah, fuck. just. don’t look at me. i fucked this up.”
kokichi CAN’T not look at her, but he also CAN’T look at her, he’s so embarrassed he feels for the first time that he’ll DIE of it, but he can’t because he’s survived so much just for her, for his classmates too, but especially her…
kokichi grabs her hand and brings it to his scarred cheek, where the fissure burnt by moonlight once lay, after his skin split. kokichi can’t meet her eyes so he looks slightly left of her pierced earlobe, the collar of her suit, and says…
“i, uh, i. i want to. i want to have a proper valentine’s day. with you. and other days. i. i don’t. i mean. i’m asking–do you? do you know what i’m asking? fuck, it’s. fuck…”
kokichi’s hands are sweating and he rubs his cheek into the one of kasumi’s palms he’s holding to his face and shuts his eyes out of humiliation, she’s going to say NO , of COURSE not and then he’ll have to pine away until he dies of yearning or some such shit like that. he would do so gladly , but he’s so fucking embarrassed! he doesn’t know what to do with himself.
“YES i mean, i, uh, i really…you’re so different, muta-kun. i mean, mechamaru was so, so COOL all the time, cool and aloof and like, high and mighty, but a little distant, too, right? and i know that you’re like, well, i just met you, but you’re SO…you look at me, and see me, you look at me, and really LOOK, and you see more than just, one of those people you’re supposed to look away from, a servant that serves, blends into the background and affirms propriety and looks cool or whatever, mostly just furniture, i’m not really…”
kasumi takes a breath, fingers trembling.
“i’m not really, no one ever really LOOKS at me, and i didn’t…i didn’t know you had been looking, muta-kun? until. just. i. we have to, i don’t even know how you…I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW YOU, ARE HERE! and maybe that’s a secret kind of jujutsu that none of us were ever meant to understand, with your jubaku…”
kasumi laughs shakily, blustering, face dusted red. “i’m so stupid. i promise i’m not this stupid. i’m trusting and i’m stupid and i know that, but i think i have a good instinct for people, and i know…your eyes are so kind, muta-kun. you look at me, intensely, and intensely kind, 優しいんですよ！(yasashiin desu yo.) and you know…”
“you might already know, but i have a, um, way, of crushing on people, instantly, and for a, um, but it’s, you know it’s not like a celebrity crush, it’s just like, you’re REAL but you’re also a little like a celebrity? because no one ever saw you before, and you’re SO, you’re so…”
muta kokichi takes this flustered girl into his arms in a sudden, too-tight hug, crushing her ribs into his. she grabs his shoulders and pulls two handfuls of his uniform. mechamaru’s uniform.
“you’re so amazing, muta-kun. i’m glad…i’m truly glad we could meet.”
kokichi does not hide that he cries, he doesn’t know how to, he’s never had to hide it, and he doesn’t know how to. he feels conflicted as though he should be ashamed of himself, but there’s so much shame filling every orifice of his body that he doesn’t know, there’s no more room left for that. when it means he’s happy.
“let’s…let’s be together, kokichi-kun. i hope that’s not too presumptuous of me,” she murmurs, clinging to him, still adrenaline rushed and hesitant but clumsy and affectionate.
“i want to see everyone. do you think…they’ll be happy to see me?” (DO YOU THINK THEY’LL PROTECT ME.)
“yes!” kasumi jumps up in his arms, separating, but putting a firm hand on her katana. “and if they don’t, i’ll fight them! i’ll duel! i’ll throw down!”
and then, embarrassed, kasumi laughs and flicks her bangs. “of course, it won’t come to that, because everyone needed you as mechamaru, and everyone needs you as you, too! maybe they’ll be scared…at what you did to get here.”
kokichi nods grimly.
“but i think it was worth it. for us to meet!”
kokichi takes her hand and looks at her uneven, bitten nails, her sword callouses from the weight of her katana. he entangles his fingers with hers.
“i think some things are fated under heaven,” he says, “and those which are not can be undone and refastened. i may have exhausted my heavenly jubaku, the binding, the restriction…which granted me this strength. but there is more still left for me. there is more i can do.”
kasumi squeezes his hand.
“there’s a life left for me here. with you. and everyone. i want to walk on my own two feet now, free from heaven’s designs on me. BUT PLEASE DON’T ASK…DON’T ASK OF ME what got me here.”
kokichi’s vision floods with water.
“that is a secret between heaven and me.”
“what matters is that you lived, kokichi-kun. i think that’s the only thing that matters. what matters is that you survived yourself, and you walked here on your own two feet. and now we can be together, and i think…nothing could be more important than that. whatever you’ve done. whatever you may still do.”
kasumi looks at him intently, holding his hands firmly. “whatever you have done, whatever you may yet do. that you survived yourself is the greatest miracle in all of heaven. but now the worst of it can be over. we are together, and the worst is over, and everyone will come see you, and everyone will be here, everyone.”
the once in a lifetime conviction …i have known it, and i have no further use of it.
kokichi collapses into kasumi miwa’s arms, listening as she soothes him until unconsciousness takes him over, and the soul of the dead thing he was ( mechamaru) gets laid to rest.
to be under a tenyo jubaku,
it’s to be one of heaven’s best.
but someday, even the dead
need to be laid to rest.